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.

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.

Downvotes are disabled on Beehaw, we don’t see them even on communities on other instances. I find it makes it a much more pleasant experience.

I’m surprised at that, from my experience I think it’s still more normal than not to have analogue clocks at home, and I would always prefer an analogue watch.

I was mildly interested until I saw “designed for creators”. Seems like a meaningless marketing term that gets added to everything these days.

Can’t even vote without a Google account.

I had one of those printers in the 90s.

Not within Lemmy, but if you were on, for example, a federated Mastodon instance it’s perfectly possible to boost that comment that would appear like a retweet to Mastodon users.

They’re not making an argument for the filter bubble though.

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.

They’ve always been pretty transparent about that kind of thing though haven’t they?

I don’t think they’re denying the filter bubble exists, just giving a different theory on why things have turned bad.

It’s probably the same kind of culture clash that the original video talks about. I’ve got to admit it is something that can rile me up probably more than it rationally deserves to, if I let it (and I’m sure others too).

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.

I get that, I live in the south of my country too, but only the US feels entitled enough to say “the south” and expect the whole world to know where they are.

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.

Even if there’s no good remote out there (I’ve not looked into it either) I would argue that the drawbacks of not having a remote are vastly less serious than the drawbacks of using one of these “smart” devices.

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.

The point is that YouTubers pay for that with their own reputation, if I followed a YouTuber that promoted exploitative companies I would stop following that YouTuber - why would you want to watch their content anyway?

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.

I don’t think you can be sure they’re not profiling you for advertising on other sites just because they’re not showing ads on YouTube. The purpose of uBO is security. Plus I wouldn’t give money to a shady company like Google anyway.

When they first announced it I wondered why they were using such low-budget CGI concept art to promote it.

Jes

I haven’t yet but I presume that’s because I don’t have an account - which according to the article they’re targeting people by account.

This is what I’m banking on - I suspect it’ll be like all the other times the UK government tried to break the internet, nothing will actually happen.

I don’t think that’s even a conspiracy theory, I think it’s obvious that’s what they’re doing.

Even for what they offer now; if you already have your payment details registered with “X”, then it’s a much easier decision to make about paying for a blue tick or editing rights or whatever else.

The irony is if they did have non-targeted ads I’d have more good-will towards them and I would be more likely to pay their subscription. But spying on users and being sneaky about it makes me hostile and want to double-down against what they want.

I use FreeTube, it’s excellent. Alternatively download everything with yt-dlp.

It’s not the advertising that’s the problem, it’s the tracking and surveillance that comes with it. Until they get rid of that, uBlock Origin is a necessary security measure.

I thought you just reply with the letter “J” that’s the convention, right?

Supposing you’re right, do you think all Palestinians should suffer due to failures of their government? I’m pretty sure they’re not a hive mind.

There’s always been a weird market for “luxury” tech that’s a gold-plated version of what everyone else has. I remember gold-plated pre-smartphone phones that went for ridiculous amounts of money; of course it becomes obsolete, it’s targeting those with money but no foresight.