Look, my time is valuable. I decide what media to play based on my preferences. If I don't want to see ads, why would I instruct my browser to play them?
If giving out free videos isn't a sustainable business model, change your business model.
No amount of shame will ever be effective in getting me to turn off my adblocker. Sorry if this offends you.
For being such a bunch of stingy capitalists, it's always surprising to see people defend businesses without viable models.
If hosting content online for free isn't working for you, maybe that's not a commercial space worth occupying. Not everything deserves to be paid for, "selfish" or not. Users, aka "the market," will decide if your product is usable despite the income generating parts.
Marginally related, if your business isn't profitable enough to pay your employees a livable wage, then maybe your business isn't actually profitable enough to, well, be "in business."
Dunno, what doesn't seem "viable" is serving ads that can be trivially blocked.
We haven't even reached the real arms race yet, and people are already talking like adblockers won.
Let's pick this convo back up at least when ad networks like Adsense let you proxy through your server, ending an entire class of adblocking at once. And that's not the end of the low-hanging fruit.
Are they giving out free videos? The content creator gets to choose how to monetize, right? The platform does allow for free, and the creator chose to get paid.
Clearly your time isn't valuable, as you spend it watching content you value at $0.
If the content you watched and hence the time you spent watching it actually held value to you, you would be happy to pay the meagre $10/mo subscription fee.
> I assume you spend most of your income of water, right? After all, it's the most indispensable element of out lives.
Water is a commodity, it doesn't require you to contribute for it to be available, it's ubiquitous and cheap. I pay less than I value it at, yes, as a price has been set and there's no method or reason to pay more for it.
YouTube content however is not a commodity and the amount of money that goes into it affects the quality and quantity of content available. Throw $10m at water, you get nothing meaningfully better. Throw $10m at YouTube creators, you get a new major original series or a few small ones.
> Also, as it was pointed out in this thread, less than 10% of the world population has access to those subscriptions.
And they can pay for it with ads.
The price for the content has been set. You can choose to pay for it or you can choose to essentially steal it.
Finland. You can get a cheap flat from the municipality(at least in the city of Espoo), then rent assistance from the state, and then you visit the welfare office (Kela) sometimes and tell that you are out of money, and they'll give you some. Id guess you have like 300e to spend per month for food, and you live in the outskirts of the city in a 20square meter flat, but hey, at least you can play your games as much as you want. Not the life id want, but some of my old friends with whom I still occasionally play games online have chosen that path. I've read that the number of young adults (mainly males) who are living outside the normal society is already as high as 30,000 in Finland, but I don't know for fact if they are all as extreme as some of the people I know.
Yes, let's all keep believing that. If companies realized that all programmers can actually work decentralized, we might not be able to command a decent salary as it becomes a global race to the bottom...
As a developer, I've specifically pushed to maintain a co-located team, precisely because the type of work my team does works far better when co-located.
I do decentralized development regularly, and for some kinds of work it works fine. For other kinds of work, it makes simple tasks take an order of magnitude longer.
The Linux kernel does distributed development quite successfully, and scales extremely well. However, it does so partly by sacrificing some forms of coordination between developers; for instance, kernel maintainers don't consider duplicated effort to solve the same issue a problem, because the overall process still scales even if some individual developers end up wasting their time.
On the other hand, the development of any one individual patch series to implement one feature typically occurs either by one developer, or by a set of co-located developers in one organization, not by geographically distributed developers. And some other kinds of work, such as backporting or rebasing a series of patches, doesn't work well when geographically distributed.
You can work decentralized but it's not particularly great, especially because remote communication isn't a solved problem. You communicate a ton of stuff in an actual face to face conversation through a variety of different ways and even video calls don't really capture that.
Supposedly this has already happened with offshore development, and yet, here we still are, paying top salaries for US developers in the midst of a tech shortage.
I worked at a 100% telecommute shop local to Chicago for 10 years. We also used offshore development firms on some projects, and I can tell you, if anyone ever seriously had the idea of replacing us with them, they were quickly dissuaded by the experience of working with these firms.
Most programming is work that can be done in a decentralized fashion. Some can't be. In either case the salary commanded is influenced by a number of factors other than supply (quality of the supply, for example). So I'm not sure a "global race to the bottom" of the apocalyptic kind you imply would result in such a realization.
I agree with the entirety of your post, but I'm unsure what can be done practically. Can you recommend an organization that is pushing for your positions? It may take a long time, but similar to marijuana legalization, it's gotta start somewhere.
Possibly, if it were large enough scale to truly impact the supply of labor at a sufficiently lower price point to matter.
There are a variety of remote work arrangements: 1) local employees who have employers with liberal work-from-home policies (they're "remote" when they don't commute in), 2) employees who are always remote, but still in-state (located in the same state as the employer), 3) employees who are always remote but still domestic (located in the US), 4) employees who are always remote and located internationally.
The first two kinds of remote employee don't incur (much) additional cost to the employer. The third kind can incur non-trivial additional costs in the management of payroll (state income taxes, labor/unemployment fund requirements, etc.), especially if done at any scale. Larger companies can do this because they are already established in multiple states, but smaller ones tend to impose restrictions on where remote workers can live and even whether they're permitted to move to a new state and still remain employed. The last kind is a whole other ball of wax--it has the same tax and payroll management problems of the third kind, but additional complexity I'm sure.
Then there is the additional overhead of managing remote teams. Having experienced being an "individual contributor" and coordinating with project management to manage remote teams I can assure you this is not a trivial thing and involves its own costs.
So all these factors influence how much lower the salaries have to dip before they are worth it. Personally, I doubt remote work will impact salaries in this area much anytime soon.
The last two in my experience are handled by treating the remote employees as effectively contractors. They'll incorporate as an independent company, and then bill themselves out for whatever salary they're on, taking on responsibility for their own taxes and other requirements.
Is that actually the case? As far as I'm aware in the UK at least its not that you're outright forbidden to work as a contractor under conditions that would otherwise be considered employment, you just have to pay tax on that basis rather than pretending you're really an independent company.
I would not expect housing prices to fall very much, but I suspect it would be harder for below-average developers to get jobs in the area, because companies would instead hire above-average remote workers, perhaps at lower salaries than the below-average local workers would demand.
I was thinking primarily of rent, but I'm not sure if house prices wouldn't fall pretty quickly too - people suddenly cant afford payments, supply goes up, a few short sales to lower expected prices, sellers who can't afford to wait for a better offer - bang.
The post is tagged "sexual assault" by the publisher, so I assume there was some sort of lewd messages. That would make it not ok.
It is really hard to tell from the article if there was criminal behavior by members of our community targeting an underage girl or if she got a bunch of followers that happened to be older men and freaked out.
I think that's an important distinction. We all know it's not ok to solicit underage people. I'm not sure if it's still ok for older people to talk to younger people.
There is no mention of "sexual assault" or even "sexual" in the submitted story, not sure where you get that from.
"unwanted attention" simply means (for me at least) that someone gave you attention, that you didn't expect. I would assume that people expect that to happen when you write in a public place and also submitting it to places like HN and elsewhere.
If this really is about "sexual harassment" and not saying "Hi, cool story" via Twitter, then I can understand the frustration and it's obviously not ok.
But the article doesn't make this clear and I don't want to make the assumption either...
The point and click scripting it does is pretty neat. Makes it easy to stub out responses if you happen to be a client developer blocked by your server developers.
Mitigation? Effectively none for end-users. You can always monitor your connection and if you go down to 2G, run. But no one does that. You can also test each and every app on your phone to ensure:
a) It's using HTTPS for every request / response which is rendered in the app &
b) It's validating the server public. This one's easier said than done and well beyond the capabilities of most pen-testers. They might think they have it covered but rarely test for all man in the middle conditions.
I've not looked at it in detail, but someone I know tried out Network Signal Info on Android claiming it could help detect a femtocell attack:
However, they didn't really know what the app was telling them and kept accusing me of running a femtocell so I wasn't impressed. As far as I'm concerned it's an interesting app to use in attempting to get a confession out of someone you are pretty sure is running a femtocell but likely if that person is running a femtocell they wouldn't "fall for it."
This would disable all images, but that's what you want, because you can never tell if a site you're going to has been compromised and what content they're going to serve up until you've already downloaded it.
This doesn't completely solve the problem though, you'd also need to make sure you don't have Flash or Java, and disable SVG and CSS now that I think about it... plus an encoded text of an illegal image is still probably illegal, even if it's text-encoded, so, uhh... I don't know, it depends how paranoid you want to be.
If someone wanted to force you to have illegal data on your machine, there's almost certainly a way to make it happen if you're connected to the internet in any way. Hell, even gmail shows embedded images by default... and even if you didn't open the email containing the illegal content, you still have it in your inbox, so there's that...
This advice tends to be akin to the advise to disable JavaScript. Basically at this point why are you even on the Internet? Also, as you mentioned Flash, Java, and especially SVG. The only real mitigation here is full drive encryption with a long passphrase which you'll never give up. Of course in the eyes of the courts and public that's a serious double-edged sword because you are assumed guilty at that point.
This is a good argument for Full disk encryption with a vpn and dns leak protection. You're right about people using encryption too. They have a whole playbook dedicated to targeting encryption(physical access is page one).
If giving out free videos isn't a sustainable business model, change your business model.
No amount of shame will ever be effective in getting me to turn off my adblocker. Sorry if this offends you.