@dec23k I can understand how that might feel weird. I will say, though, that I don't generally have a problem with curation, and I honestly kind of yearn for it at this point. I'm interested in how they picked their content creators...but so far I like the results of it.

Of course, there should be totally open platforms too! But it's kind of a relief for a human being to decide what I'm looking at instead of an algorithm, with all that that entails.

@neverbeaten

@tsrono @dec23k at this point, for me, it's really not about privacy or mental health anymore. I'm doing this despite wanting to see YT videos because I don't want to give money to fascists anymore.

I'm definitely not trying to judge people still using it by saying that...I guess I've just reached that point in my personal timeline and understanding of things.

@inpc @alisynthesis
Cryptpad is a good alternative for collaborative documents.

There are many instances out there; https://cryptpad.cz/ is hosted by the @nolog collective, on their own bare metal servers located in Prague.

@tsrono @alisynthesis
One of my top channels is In Depth Music, run by a DJ who digs out the most amazing stuff from around the world. Latest upload is a wonderfully weird 1980 Art Punk album by a band from Dusseldorf.

Getting yt-dlp working properly was time well spent; now it extracts audio, saves in the upload format, and splits albums into tracks, with titles if available.

I'm definitely getting diminishing returns, but there is plenty of great music (Bonk and not-Bonk) surfacing on Fedi.

@alisynthesis @tsrono
There's definitely signs of a more adversarial approach being taken to the audience with ads on YT now.
I will never pay for Premium.
So, I reject playback a few times until I get either a short pre-roll or none, and if that doesn't work I just skip to the next video that I might want to watch.
Mid-roll ads show up now in almost every video that exceeds 8 minutes, sometimes less than 1 minute in. There are some long-form creators whose videos I just had to stop watching.

@alisynthesis @neverbeaten
I'm not against curation; I do it myself!
And wide-open platforms can have their problems.
But the Nebula approach seems to be "don't call us, we'll call you", so I was idly wondering how does their talent spotting work. How do they surface creators worth signing? Maybe they notice the most successful niche channels on YT (and maybe other platforms) by seeing Number Go Up, then cherry-pick those who haven't mentioned Curiosity Stream (or other commercial platforms).

@dec23k yeah, I've had a couple of people in the comments section of my YouTube channel talk about how frustrating the ads are now. I haven't seen them in so long that I didn't realize how bad it was getting.

But I'm officially not willing to pay for a premium anymore, either. I also think I can find everything i need in other places, and of course I can still watch YouTube videos in a variety of ways when I absolutely have to (eg home improvement how tos, etc.).

@tsrono

@dec23k @neverbeaten that's a great question, and I'm super curious about that as well.

@alisynthesis @neverbeaten
It also kind of raises further questions about YT apparently spending years sleep-walking their way into the situation we're in now, with VPN and ready-meal sponsors in so many regular videos, and tech creators like Fran Blanche literally singing "Down In The Patreon" at the end of every one of her videos. YT seems to not care enough about creators, in so many ways.

@dec23k @alisynthesis
I spend most of my professional days working on content for maybe one of the largest unmonitized YT channels. I’ve wondered if they demote our content because they aren’t directly profiting from it.

@neverbeaten @dec23k oh wow, interesting.

@neverbeaten @alisynthesis
I don't actively seek out any "how YT works" info, but sometimes a creator that I watch regularly has an aside about something that happened, and then someone else does the same, and I might see a trend.
Channels like FranLab and EEVblog sometimes take the lid off what it's like for them, looking at their YT Studio graphs and offering analysis, usually about viewer churn and how new videos get promoted (or not) to new viewers.
And, less often, they talk monetisation.