Is this mainly a US-centric take though? In the UK, yes we had AOL here and a fair number of people I knew had it, but it was never dominant as far as I could tell (I’d be happy to be corrected, I only came in around 1997). It was MSN messenger that became established as the dominant instant messenger here by about 2000, I don’t really remember too many people using AIM.
Very anecdotal but I’ve asked my normie friends about Threads and they think it was hardly ever a thing. It may be 100 million active users but that’s still a small percentage of the population it’s available to, and given it’s for profit that might not even be enough to sustain it. With Mastodon and Lemmy it’s quality over quantity, I’m happy to be smaller, just hope we can keep Threads out if they last long enough to get around to federating.
I remember being told off by a moderator in the 90s for not writing full-sentence replies. You can’t even imagine that today. Of course back then, as the video touches on, if you didn’t like the culture or policies of a forum you just moved to another one, there were no cries of “censorship” because you choose where you want to be.
But I think that makes a good point, in the past people could choose whether they wanted to go on a forum for serious discussion, or a different forum for more casual low-effort posting. These days all these different “posting cultures” are forced to be together and end up annoying each other.
Interesting video, makes a lot of sense. Just a couple of things to add:
In the old days of forums it’s worth remembering that people on the internet had more in common with each other than they do today - i.e. generally they were people who were in to computers.
What really gets me down these days is the extremely low-effort of posting everywhere you go. I think that partly comes from the impersonal nature of online communication. Nobody knows who anyone is any more.
I agree it would be better to go back to independent message boards but it’s a shame there’s no “call to action” - it would be nice but how do we get people to do it? This is a popular YouTube channel, it would be great if it started some kind of ball rolling.
You can’t simply use any data you find on the street and use it professionally in any field.
I kind of think you should be able to though, copyright laws are already much too strong and outdated with current technology, instead of strengthening them further I think we need to go back to first principles and consider why we need to have permission to record and relay what we see and hear.
he should definitely get paid for it.
Playing devil’s advocate a little bit here - are you saying a person’s voice is or should be copyrightable? Because it wouldn’t be his voice, it’s an imitation of his voice, it’s an impression.
I’m just not sure this is an area that copyright law needs to be extended in to. I can see a requirement to disclose that it’s AI generated being a good idea, but the idea that the likeness of somebody’s voice is proprietary I think opens up a much worse can of worms.
Blocking YouTube’s advertising is necessary for privacy, and it punishes YouTube for their bad business practices.
But sponsors aren’t underhanded like that and I feel like they’re the type of thing we should really be promoting as an alternative to privacy invading ads, and hopefully a way for creators to move off of YouTube eventually.
I am, as it happens, but I don’t feel under any obligation to.
Firstly, how they get paid is a private matter between them and YouTube, they signed their contracts, not me.
Secondly, YouTube could run privacy-respecting non-targeted ads. I’m not punishing YouTube for having ads, I’m punishing them for being spyware.
Yes, the differences are fascinating, I know Minitel was big in France. To my mind it was Freeserve that brought the internet to the masses in the UK (and spawned many dozens of similar ISPs in the late-90s), but seems to be a bit of a footnote now. My peers first started messaging through YIM (Yahoo! Instant Messenger) before MSN took over as the default. I remember AOL was perceived as an expensive ISP which limited the popularity of AIM.