Fairly sure GPU drivers do the same thing where they include a ton of per game tweaks to make them run faster. It does feel like a fragile way of doing things where an external component that should be agnostic to the software running ends up including a handful of junk trying to fix stuff that should have been fixed by the consumer of the driver.
Youtube seems to regularly suggest old videos to me so I think it's less a problem with evergreen content and more that youtube pays for minutes watched so someone who does cheap reaction content can produce more minutes to watch than someone who spends a long time on one video.
Ads create a terribly perverse incentive to increase users viewing time on platforms. It's the whole reason most of the internet has become so horrible. My email provider doesn't try to drive up my engagement because they have no incentive for me to use the product more than I naturally want to. I'd also be willing to bet that the current ad funded system ends up costing the average person more than just paying for services when they get influenced to buy the things in the ads. That's the whole point of advertising after all.
We have already long since had a solution for low income people getting access to paid content, libraries provided access to paid books and newspapers for free. People with higher income would still buy copies themselves for convenience but there was a free option. We also have public funded news orgs providing ad free news and reporting.
The free option with libraries was somewhat limited because libraries rarely had more than a small number of copies of a given book or newspaper.
Saying people with higher income bought for convenience is understating the situation. If you needed timely access to books or newspapers that were in high demand you often had to buy out of necessity.
I'm not sure how a similar thing would work the internet. How do you limit the number of people that can use the free version? If you don't the people who could pay largely won't.
The only idea I've heard that might work is to just make it free for everyone, but put a tax on something that correlates somewhat with use, and divvy up that tax to the sites based on their traffic.
That then raises questions like what to tax and how to divvy it up since simply dividing it proportionally to traffic probably would not work well (Richard Stallman has suggesed such a system, with the split based on the cube root of popularity).
Next you'll tell me that doing something at cost as a public service is somehow better than getting the same thing but with a 20% margin tacked on for the shareholders.
The problem is everyone else’s kids is on social media. As a teenager I never had a Facebook account, but every other kid did and every event was organised and invites sent on Facebook.
It could have been done over sms, email, or any other private messaging, but because everyone was on Facebook, if you weren’t too, you weren’t invited.
World leaders pay attention to the world. Australia implemented the law and it went smoothly. So naturally other world leaders are going to see that as a green light that the general public is on board and the tech companies complied.
I don't think it has to do with optimism has faded. Eternal September means Younger generation new to HN, It is highly likely if we were to do a poll, people under 40, lower age group would increasingly support Anti-Free Internet. This mentality also aligns well with majority of their political believe.
My problem with youtube is they mix everything in the same bucket. Kids watching educational content on the platform is obviously fine, but watching shorts for 3 hours isn't. Or worse, uploading shorts of their own.
They need to break shorts off in to it's own app and create a kids mode account that disables commenting and uploading.
I feel like this was all part of the plan, put the laws in knowing the weak tech will be bypassed, and then slowly improve the tech to the point it's too much of a pain to bypass and most teens just don't bother and instead use platforms they can still access like IMs/group chats rather than instagram.
reply