zeraholladay

ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I am in a similar situation as you, but in a lot of ways you're asking more sophisticated questions than me. FWIW, I've been building a little toy lisp-scheme like scripting language as a learning tool: https://github.com/zeraholladay/lispm/tree/main. It's been a lot of fun and I've really enjoyed exploring parts of CS that my career hasn't really taken me to.

zeraholladay

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

It's (the original comment) a pretty myopic comment because the same point can be made about the institutions that perpetuate $FOO.

zeraholladay

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I think a lot of developers naively rely on "software design" principles. They often can't state their reasons for adopting these principles and assume these principles are self-evident. This can be a problem when these principles conflict with external priorities, or when a complex "principled" design is used instead of an obvious, intuitive design. There's also a certain amount of trendiness to software design, so trends can be applied haphazardly.

That being said, I've also seen plenty of "scientific code" that's totally incomprehensible even to the point where the scientist who wrote the code can't debug it. So there's an extreme in the other direction.

zeraholladay

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

but the time and effort cost of the people producing the videos. Hackers seem to conveniently always forget about these people.

FWIW, I tend to find the opposite. Maybe the people I know are just more vocal about things that make them look good to others.

A pure consumer is not worth anything to YouTube or any other platform if they're not paying or can't be advertised to. They're just a cost with no benefit.

I disagree but I understand what you're getting at. In the case of YouTube, you may be correct (or more correct than me). I'm thinking of platforms like Strava or dating apps where an active user population is part of the attraction to upsell features to paying customers.

zeraholladay

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I think with ISPs there's an obvious upfront material cost for building infrastructure. In that sense I'm very much the consumer. Obviously, there's substantial infra cost too with social media platforms like YouTube. However, the consumer-producer dichotomy isn't as clear with social media platforms since the user base is the product. That is, the value of a social media platform comes first from the masses of people using it and second the design, the infrastructure, etc. This is why I think reciprocity (in the psychological sense) is so important for social media companies because the product can just walk out the door.

My understanding is that content creators see very little or next to none of the ad revenue. The content creators are the reason people are using YouTube. So I prefer to support them through Patreon. Second, I've heard that the vast, vast majority of content creators make next to nothing through YouTube -- these content creators are paying the opportunity cost to "make it big" or simply enjoy making content or using YouTube as a promotional vehicle for other services. I'm not trying to define a moral equivalence of why it's right to directly support content creators but not YouTube (Google is making enough money off me so that I have a clear conscience), but for the price of their ad free service I'd like to see a more equitable distribution.

zeraholladay

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Think we agree that blocking ad blockers is in YouTube's immediate, short-term interest. However, I'm not sure it's in their long-term interest because it goes against the principle of reciprocation.

Regarding reciprocation, a lot of platforms offer a free tier and then offer additional features for paid subscribers. There's the principle of reciprocation at play: they give me something for free and that then makes me more likely to pay for additional features. But I'm only willing to pay for features, not to have an annoyance, like ads, removed. The conditions I'd have to agree to feel coerced ... like making an agreement with Darth Vader: "pray YouTube doesn't alter the deal further by now only blocking 50% of ads for a paid subscriber." What do I, as an end user, get out of this other than feeling hostile towards YouTube?

It's my computational device and my internet connection. I think there's a very complex argument to be made but this isn't the forum for it.

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