Is this the new “Honey Badger Don’t Care” meme?

And warm:-).

Exactly, yeah like I’m not trying to remove myself entirely from “society” - the physical law of entropy means that people need to put in EFFORT to make things happen, and that deserves to be recognized, plus the dev should have a proper means of support to be able to buy food, shelter, etc.

I even tip at restaurants wherever I go. I don’t know if I’ll be okay in the future - I don’t own a home or know my retirement plans, but I don’t think a few dollars will make the difference, but it can boost someone else’s day and that’s really something:-).

I really like Netflix’s player, their CC options, and the quality of their streaming service. It’s just too bad about the content going all over the place, and THAT part is actually not their fault.

Though I just could not do that for Google Music, when they pay the original artists so extremely little:-(.

One of the questions asked (“Why do I have to give 200€ more to get the s24+ just to get these simple features?”) was comparing S24 to S24+. While I have not looked it up, traditionally those versions range from SXY (small) to SXY+ (medium) and SXY Ultra (large), but are otherwise the same phone, so I would be surprised to hear if e.g. the S24 was foldable but the S24+ was not?

As for whether it gets more expensive to make something foldable vs. to make something more compact, I suspect the devil is in the details, so ymmv and you just kinda take each option as it comes. Other factors may help mitigate those costs e.g. a younger company trying to break into the big leagues might try to give phones away for virtually no profits in exchange for their increased market penetration (e.g. OnePlus used to be somewhat this way, now they are in the big leagues, more or less).

But your other point, about more materials: no, I believe that it’s more complex than that b/c it’s the effort of fitting things into tighter spaces that is more constraining. Imagine packing for a long vacation and/or a job interview at a far-away place and you get the idea - if you can fit everything into one suitcase that’s good, but a tiny backpack is much harder to accomplish, and to take nothing and just live with what you can carry on your body alone is REALLY tough! (especially if you want all the normal features like not smelling bad) i.e. the materials costs, while not negligible, have not been the driving/limiting force for many years. At least according to everything that I have read, but I am no phone manufacturer!:-)

Well for one thing, it costs more to make a smaller phone than a larger phone. There are other engineering concerns as well such as heat dissipation. But mostly, any company makes things for profit reasons, not what would work best for you:-(. Hence, if they can extort a higher amount of money out of you, then that is what they will aim to do.

They are a company - their obligations to their customers begin and end with extraction of funds to disburse to their shareholders:-(.

Back in the early days when they were trying to ingratiate themselves to the public, they put on a good face - “don’t be evil” and all, but the mask is off now. Even now, they still really truly are more ethical (or at least might be, maybe?) than some others, e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/11951288? (but that is not saying very much at all, to compare an evil corporation like Google to a full-on fairly criminal-like corporation that steals artists & other people’s content against their will; and I only say “criminal-like” b/c the aging geriatrics in various governments around the world barely use computers much less understand its terminology such as “mobile device”, so the existing legal structures remain mired half a century behind what is going on in today’s actual world).

Also, I am weird - I will do things like pay for Netflix even though I haven’t watched it in months, preferring the high seas that has more content that is no longer there:-P, b/c I want to support continued development of new content (though TV & movies are becoming a dated art form nowadays). That said, YouTube is a VERY different situation, b/c while they do have server costs and what-not, they also are one of the lowest (not THE lowest, but among them… iirc?) contributors back to the artists who actually make the stuff. So a better way would be to find artists that you like, and send them money directly where they would get 100% of the revenue.

Anyway, I like your post that shows that there is more than one reason to support such apps - not just b/c of the content but also more than that too.

“Can’t compete” => won’t, ftfy :-P

Google got their money, so they are simply “done”, unlike software made by people who genuinely care about stuff, and donate their time for free to improve it.

Lol, well *I* thought it was funny:-P. You might get fewer fake internet point reductions if you threw in a /s.

I would consider going to https://www.cc.com/shows/the-daily-show when Jon Stewart returns (that man has such grace and class, nobody since comes close), if they offer full-episode videos within a week of airing whereas YouTube does not. My point here is that there needs to be a REASON to go somewhere. YouTube combined both the “video hosting” and also “content aggregation” components, so even if we replace the former - and yes, some of us really WOULD choose to go to 8 different websites, for 8 different pieces of content that are worthwhile - it would get that much harder for someone to even know that the videos on the other places exist.

On top of that, when you just happen to be on YouTube, it suggests something that you might want to watch - a related video, e.g. George Carlin perhaps - and you can enjoy watching that. Whereas 8 different websites are going to have at most 1/8th of the content, and probably several orders of magnitude less than that realistically. So as long as the ads are not TOO burdensome - let’s say limited to 5s each and at most 2 of them - they will “win”.

Also, I really do want Jon Stewart to get credit for my having watched one of his videos, yet watching the identical video from like Vanced or Piped or something deprives him of those tracking metrics, which are worth a lot more than mere money (which at this point he’d likely just donate to charity or some such).

YouTube wormed their way into our hearts, like an abusive spouse, and now just dares us to divorce them - they push the edge as far as they possibly can, knowing that we hate them now yet not caring one bit, unless enough of us will ACTUALLY go. At which point they’ll lawyer or buy out the other place that we would go to, in an effort to drag us back in, kicking and screaming. It’s a horribly abusive model for a “relationship”, where our consent really doesn’t matter at all, only what they can get away with, by any means necessary. And the sad fact is that many of us have greatly reduced the amount that we watch such videos entirely, but that makes next to no impact on them at all. So long as they can sell US as the product to advertising companies by being “THE” place to put their ads, they will continue their parasitic chokehold on our society.

I like Lemmy too - it is not even trying to replicate other social media sites (well, it is but it cannot succeed, so we accept that about it), and while it has enormous technical hurdles, e.g. every single time I visit my instance in via a browser, whether desktop or mobile, I have to re-login again, and sometimes (rarely) even while browsing internally. That’s… not ideal, though it’s still a million times better than the toxic filth crowd that is Reddit (having more to do with culture than technology ofc, and yet the two are not entirely unconnected). Whereas other places, such as Mastodon, just seem doomed internally b/c by their very nature “everyone else” has to go there too or it just won’t work. Otherwise, you still need like a Xitter account to follow them, and a Facebook account to follow them, and so on (I actually do not have either, but I understand that some people will feel the need to).

Buying in brick-and-morter is facilitated by having a car, even in a city, otherwise it gets really rough trying to go without that, especially for even the smallest furniture items like a chair that you’d basically have to pay for delivery. It can be done, but does get difficult.

Back to YouTube though, yeah you go where you can find the goods. I haven’t used torrents for almost a decade, ever since getting a letter from my ISP about usage of those tracked ports. Fortunately streaming - yes I literally have a Netflix account, plus the occasional whatever - covers so very much ground, if not all, and for the tiniest fraction of the amount of effort involved in keeping up with things e.g. setting up and paying for a proxy. It’s literally as easy as searching for 1-2-3!:-P

Do you know any replacements for these btw?

Like Lemmy somewhat replaces “social media”, except I also used Facebook as a bit of a LinkedIn (b/c the latter was never good, it was instead always predatory), but people in general simply aren’t going to make an account on Lemmy, no matter how much you might wish that.

And Amazon, I basically don’t buy stuff anymore except from brick-and-morter stores these days - it’s like I’ve gone backwards two decades b/c you can’t trust anything online anymore! (maybe the online equivalent of the brick-and-morter I suppose)

For Google I use DuckDuckGo. Ironically AI is poised to somewhat clean up search results by putting those up top, except soon enough those will start to become monetized too, like you can have the “free” search results but if you want the AI-enhanced ones then you gotta poney up the dough, in a manner analogous to YouTube these days.

As for how all this happened, the story that I heard was that companies exploited legal loopholes wherein if they reinvested their profits into creating new ventures, they could effectively avoid paying a great deal of their taxes. Thus, like mushrooms beneath a forest, they grew and grew and grew and grew and now you cannot take one step without them lying underneath. Like how virtually the only competitor to iOS these days is Android, which at one point was an open-source project!!! They lay in wait, pretending to be a friend - maybe even thinking themselves that they were - until it was time to monetize, and then they pounced. Before YouTube, there were several other video hosting sites. But. Not. Anymore. They under-cut the competition, “donating” their profits from other enterprises into making them awesome, and now they own us, instead of the other way around. And now today, as you say, there are all these 10, 11, 12 minute videos (b/c there’s an incentivization to hit that “10” mark), out of something that would have worked far better as a 1-5 sentence text paragraph, so now you have to watch 10 minutes of unsearchable video to find the same information that 30 seconds of reading would have told you far better. Don’t get me wrong, SOME videos are freaking AMAZING! But most are total crap.

And… I do not know of a replacement for YouTube. Yes, I know of some other video hosting sites, some even grab YouTube videos directly, but nothing else comes even remotely close to allow a realistic comparion. e.g. Kursegat is AMAZING, and they put their videos onto YouTube, for their own monetization. I can bypass YouTube, but to watch what, not just go where?

And TV too as you said - there’s very little worth watching, see e.g. Stranger Things. Oh well, we all need to work our butts off anyway, to save up for the impending apocolypse or whatever.

At one point I literally walked away from a cushy job to try and help people (thankfully I got it back when that did not pan out), and do you know what I learned? That you cannot help people who refuse to be helped. Ignorance is trivially easy to cure (by comparison) - all it takes is knowledge. Whereas obstinancy… I do not know that there is a cure. MAYBE motivation, through personal pain unlocking a willingness to consider new possibilities that comfort previously made unnecessary? If so, then there is “hope” for us after all… b/c we are all about to suffer great pain as the internet, and in the wider view the enshittification of MANY areas of life, continue to get MUCH worse.

No matter who wins the next USA election. Though not equally.

I did not make it but I presume it is old yes, bc e.g. Amazon at one point used to have trustable reviews, but it’s been a minute since then!? I assume intent means production effort e.g. making things shared on Facebook takes seconds, whereas to shoot a porno takes at least minutes to hours. An alternate explanation could be to have intent be a surrogate for Web Traffic - although in that case, wouldn’t Facebook be much higher? Unless this is once again bc it is so old, prior to when it started taking over people’s lives e.g. games that stay-at-home mothers could play all throughout the day. Similarly, YouTube at one point looked poised to take over television itself back when the videos made were more of less simply using YouTube as another delivery vehicle, but they were funny as hell, or perhaps informative like a college class, etc. Now… I don’t know what happened, but TV sucks and YouTube sucks and we all merely look at memes, apparently.:-P

Anyway I liked how it shoved porn into only a single corner, as in it is high in one dimension but not all such, but for the rest of the details yeah it is too old to have any further relevance to modern society:-).

That is only one corner of it.

You had too much blood in your body anyway, let this cutie-pie “take care” of you:-).

You are obligated to fall into it regardless:-).

moonleay is already fairly cool - maybe use that!?:-P

I already ha… ah I mean yes.

NO, I MEANT TO SAY NO! :-P

A non-purrfect picture of a cat doesn’t exis… oh. :-P

Probably, and it was surely glorious (if you did it right)!:-P