Shareholders. Devs are just trying to not get fired
It seems like a lot of this perception originates in the gaming industry where in some cases the devs actually do have quite a bit of control over user experience. In the rest of the software world, this stuff is driven by product management / marketing / whatever title they give to the people who define requirements.
Well yeah if we’re applying that to atrocities and murder it wouldn’t be a valid argument. But these are workers that don’t have a union that are sometimes living paycheck to paycheck. They’re just trying to not be homeless.
I don’t work at YouTube but speaking as a tired, underpaid dev who works for a company he hates, I am just trying to get by. I don’t even have PTO right now. I do plan to form a union in my area though.
I’ve worked a number of tech jobs and quit all of the ones that involved me directly contributing to or outright directly performing an immoral act.
I have no respect… pity, sure, but no respect for anyone that knowingly contributes to making the world worse for other people.
You are trying to form a union, that is commendable, an actual step toward positive change.
Most people?
They knowingly contribute to systems that make the vast majority of people worse off, and then bitch about other people doing the same thing in another field.
Or they don’t know or care about any harm their work causes, but still bitch about everyone else doing the same thing.
First, do no harm is apparently too difficult to apply to one’s own life.
If we all keep acting as cogs in the machine that makes everything worse… everything will obviously get worse.
In the long run, its not that different.
We’ve already seen how the mass proliferation of targeted advertisements on corporate social media platforms promulgates mis/disinformation, radicalizes and stupifies and enrages society … to the point that all they understand is pathos, and then they vote for a fascist.
there’s a difference between making a bad UI and orchestrating a genocide, yknow
Yes sacrifice your livelihood so that someone else can implement the feature anyway.
Just use an ad blocker.
Yes sacrifice your livelihood so that someone else can implement the feature anyway.
Yes, that’s called having a backbone, aligning your actions with your own moral code.
This is the same logic as ‘well if I had quit my executioner job, someone else would have done it, therefore I am a morally blameless and non hypocritical executioner who is against the death penalty.’
Just use an ad blocker.
Obviously this is the easy solution for yourself personally. Costs you nothing, benefits yourself, allows the systemic bad practice to continue.
The actually accurate analogue would be to contribute toward actually creating or maintaining a free and widely usable adblocker, an alternate platform, to do something that helps other people overcome the problem.
“Why isn’t one of the most expensive to operate websites free?!”
There’s a reason there are zero actual competitors in this space (maybe TikTok but it’s full of its own problems). Only a company as big as Google can afford to run at this scale. Feel free to add your business plan on how to make YouTube free without ads and without it shutting down in 3 months.
Ads and subscription aside, any time there is a feature I like on YouTube, they remove it or change it. More often than not when they add a new feature, it makes the experience worse for me.
I understand they need to make money. I’m willing to sit through ads or pay a subscription for that. But the ads are constantly getting worse. Mid-roll ad breaks that are auto-generated into the video (for older videos, content creators would have to go through their library to manually change them, from what I understand). A push for censoring content to avoid demonetisation, even content not intended for children.
Yes, part of it is that I got used to YouTube in its early days when it was operating at a loss. When it was a wild west of content creation. But it just feels like it has become so unfriendly to users and content creators alike. It has become corporate and sterile, while trying to squeeze in revenue everywhere it can. (Likely to barely break even, sure, but they don’t have to make it crap to use to do that.)
I’ve been stewing on making an “unpopular opinion” post about how neckbeards ruined the internet by demanding everything be “free” (meaning ad-supported) and then using ad blockers (meaning the normies had to pick up the slack).
Well you say that, but I feel entitled to free shit. - Common take on lemmy
Not a business plan because business=money, but how about creators host their own videos and share them through BitTorrent. No need to deliver real time video, users just download what they want to watch then watch them as they become available. Funding occurs through Kofi or Patreon etc. They’ll need to publish the magnet links somewhere but that’s a whole load cheaper than publishing RT video.
The vast majority of what YouTube does on a technical level is ingesting a ton of uploaded user video, encoding it in dozens of combinations of resolution, framerate, quality, and codec, then seamlessly choosing which version to serve to requesting clients to balance bandwidth, perceived quality, power efficiency in the data center, power efficiency on client devices, and hardware support for the client. There’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, and there’s a reason why the user experience is much more seamless on YouTube on a shitty data connection than, say, Plex on a good data connection.
No, it doesn’t need to be realtime, but people with metered or throttled bandwidth might benefit from downloading just in time video at optimized settings.
I really don’t think it’s the devs driving these decisions…
Option 1: lose money
Option 2: more money
Google: chooses option 2
Internet: surprisedpikachu.png
Why would they release a product for free that costs massive amounts to run
