This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Happy Birthday Elon Twitter
We're almost at the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over
TwitterX. How have your predictions fared? I'll answer below.Too blackpilled, I thought the change of ownership wouldn't amount to anything tangible, but he is facing some of the pressures I predicted. The ADL led advertiser boycott happened, and though not perfect, he's holding on surprisingly well.
Some things I didn't predict, that stood out over the year:
Community Notes was a great idea, and for all the whining about misinformation from the powers that be, it actually does more to address the issue than anything I've seen from them.
Who would have thunk it, making tweets editable isn't actually rocket science.
Dropping, what was it, 80% of his workforce? Ballsy move, it's simultaneously crazy how well it worked out, and not surprising at all
Cutting off Substack was lame.
Sealing off access without a login was also lame. Reddit followed his steps by shutting off the APIs, and YouTube is trying to block the adblockers. Combined with the previous point it feels like it marks the beginning of the "cyberpunk" era of the internet. Open access is no longer a given.
I don't think the rebranding hurt the company, but I have no idea what was the point of that.
I hadn’t thought of the potential causation from Twitter wall to Reddit and YouTube walls.
Is there a reliable way to dodge the Youtube countermeasures yet? I switched to Firefox, thinking it wouldn’t make it quite so easy for Google. Not sure if it worked or if YouTube just boils the water slowly on “new” consumers or devices.
I imagine the Pihole solution is still valid, at least.
Update your ublock origin filters, it fixes the YouTube BS.
Youtube was never able to stop Newpipe, they can't force ads on you, just make it more difficult to avoid them and hope the average user gets dissuaded from adblocking. If you want to persevere you will be able to, come hell or high water.
Some dude on drama mentioned all this anti-ablock stuff isn't all that bad because 1) Some people's time is worth a lot more and they're more likely to be technically competent/get someone technically competent enough to jump through the new hurdles, so in terms of value damage the hit is a lot less than if you look at it in pure time terms 2) the kinds of people who're going to end up watching extra ads because of this are so base that the slop they want to watch probably isn't any better than the ads themselves, so it doesn't hurt them much at all to show them ads.
The fix isn't even that hard. I use Firefox, so all I got was a dialogue box saying that adblockers weren't allowed, and even that went away when I blocked the element, which took all of 30 seconds. Of course, they could always come up with a way around it, but it seems like a losing battle, since the adblockers will always find a way around the restrictions. Trying to stop ad blocking is like the music labels trying to stop illegal downloading online. Yeah, you can temporarily make it more annoying, but you'll never eliminate it entirely. Music figured out a way around it by giving customers everything they wanted at a reasonable price, but YouTube picked the exact wrong time to do this, as first, they don't have a representative amount of content that people are willing to pay for, and second, people are already burned out enough on needing twelve subscriptions that they aren't likely to spring for number 13 if they haven't already. The ads have also gotten so intrusive that YouTube is nearly unusable without blocking them. Playing an ad at the beginning of a video always made sense, but the constant interruptions of multiple ads at a time shoehorned into content that wasn't designed around ads is a nightmare. To make matters worse, they now made it so you can't turn off autoplay without third party apps, so now it's on all the time. It really sucks if, like me, you like to watch videos while falling asleep, only to have a bootleg of the 2009 Super Bowl permeate your dreams because you were watching a football video and the autoplay always tends towards videos that are three hours plus.
I was using chrome before. First it was the dialogue box. Then that box got a short timer before you could close it. Then I think the timer started getting longer. Then it stopped being closeable at all…
Obviously, blocking an element solves all these problems, unless they stop serving the video entirely. I went ahead and bailed for Firefox, assuming the water would continue to boil. That worked well for a day or two. Then it started with the dialogue box. At this point I assume it will progress through the previous series until it reaches Stage 4 and metastasizes.
I think it’s clear that YouTube does a slow boil on new or “new” users. As a result, it’s encouraging to hear that blocking the element remains effective.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link