Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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  • 67 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I love the idea of the app, but I think some greater coordination with the BDS movement would help. Instead of a simple “yes/no”, tell the user of the app which category the product/company is listed in by BDS and let them make up their own mind.

    For example, currently products in the “pressure targets” are displayed exactly the same as “consumer boycott target”. As BDS says, boycotts are most effective when they’re more highly targetted. So there’s no problem with boycotting the pressure targets, but there is if someone uses the fact that they’re boycotting a pressure target as an excuse to feel good and not boycott a boycott target. Being clearer could only help.

    Relevant BDS page.


  • I uploaded what I think was the first tutorial on how to use Photoshop’s then-new “Content-Aware Fill” to help create panoramas, and also a tutorial about…something, I forget what, to do with the music engraving software Sibelius. They were things I was doing all the time, but there didn’t seem to be any guide on how to do it, so I thought I’d help out. And I got rewarded with a little cash and a few tens of thousands of views. Felt good.

    There are much better, higher-polish videos that deal with those subjects now, I’m sure. But still, it didn’t feel good getting that ripped out from under me, and being told I was no longer welcome.


  • You know what, I actually agree with YouTube’s argument. Ad blocking is piracy. In fact, no, it’s worse than piracy. If I pirate a movie, Disney makes no money, but it costs them nothing at all. If I watch YouTube without an ad blocker, I’m depriving YouTube of its revenue source and I’m costing them money. Morally, ad blocking sits somewhere between piracy and actual theft.

    The thing is? I don’t care. I ad block YouTube all the time and feel not a lick of guilt. The reason: Google brought this on themselves. I used to happily pay for YouTube Red. But they have continuously, both before and after that point, been actively hostile to the people actually producing the content they make. Their willingness to bow down to copyright trolls and complete inability to properly apply fair use. They extremely harsh policies on acceptable content, stopping people talking about sex education or mediaeval weaponry being able to reliably makes money.

    And the straw that broke this camel’s back was when they changed the requirements to be in the Partner Program, locking out all the smaller creators from ever being able to make money on YouTube. I never considered myself a “creator”, but over the 5 years prior to that I occasionally uploaded stuff I was doing anyway. I had amassed almost $100 over those 5 years. Not an impressive amount, for sure, but having that taken away from me made me feel unwelcome. I don’t think I’ve uploaded anything public since, and I’ve been blocking ads on the site since then.

    Even worse, not long after this change, they decided to start showing ads even on videos from non-partnered videos, so you can get ads on my videos even though I don’t see a single cent.

    So fuck YouTube. Ad blocking is worse than piracy, and I say good.





  • Another platform that I haven’t yet signed up for, but probably will before too long, is Dropout. Created by the former head of the YouTube channel CollegeHumor after the old owners collapsed at the hands of a private equity firm, it now hosts a whole range of comedy content, from game shows (Um, Actually is mostly available on YouTube, and is excellent), to sketch comedy (clips from Game Changer and Make Some Noise are available as YT Shorts—I’ve seen them called a spiritual successor to Who’s Line Is It Anyway, especially after Wayne Grady guest starred in an episode), and their D&D show Dimension 20. It’s entirely in that “misc entertainment” category, and all from one single studio, but it’s shockingly good for that.




  • So Jason just puts out his videos about 4 days early on Nebula. He’s done a small number of Nebula bonus content videos, but not very many. If you like his videos, you might also like CityNerd, Stewart Hicks, City Beautiful, RMTransit, and Hoog which all also cover urbanism.

    The HAI crew also operate the Wendover YouTube channel, and under that brand have released a bunch of really good documentaries, including the incredibly moving “Final Years of Majuro”. There’s also the channel “Extremities” from them, which “brings you the stories of how and why the world’s most remote settlements exist”. They have their game show, Jet Lag, which is really good, but I think that’s on YouTube on a delay; they’ve recently also announced an upcoming series called “The Getaway”, but other than the name and being from that crew, no more is known about it. Completely unrelated to them, there’s the channel “neo”, which I find satisfies much the same itch as HAI.

    For tech news, there’s The Friday Checkout, OzTalksHW, and TechAltar, but I watch none of those so can’t comment precisely on their content.

    No explicit privacy advocacy I’m afraid.

    For science, there’s Minute Physics, The Science Asylum, and Real Science which are their ones most similar to the ones you listed, but there are also a whole heap that do science from a different angle, like Atlas Pro, which uses real paper atlases as a framing device for talking about world geography; Tibees, who talks through scientific papers; Tier Zoo, who teaches about animals through the lens of video game logic; and Simon Clark, who is primarily focused on climate change through the lens of what science and technology we can use to help prevent it. I still watch and love Stand Up Maths and Steve Mould on YT though.

    Not sure I’d ever say Lemmy has a “liberal” bias. More explicitly anti-liberal, tbh. But still, Nebula has TLDR, who do an impeccable job of producing a BBC or ABC-style news show with an explicit goal of leaving their own personal biases at the door and creating a show that avoids bias as much as humanly possible. Their semi-regular “The Editorial” is excellent, with them going over the mistakes they made and issuing corrections. There’s also J.J. McCullough, who I don’t watch, but have been lead to believe is a right-wing (but not far-right—more the sort of traditional conservative you might have typically expected before the 2000s) creator who seems to cover things in current affairs. And just recently they’ve added a new channel called Morning Brew, which I’m still trying to get a read on, but seems to be news primarily with a business focus. They’ve also recently announced a new news division, but we don’t know exactly what form that’s going to take yet or what sort of content will be coming out of it.

    As far a misc entertainment, it’s a very personal thing that’s hard to give recommendations for. NileRed is listed under the science category, but his videos are often so bizarre that I’d say they’re more like light entertainment. There is a huge amount of stuff covering media criticism, some with very serious tones, some much more casual; some looking at the art through specific lenses (there are a couple of queer creators in particular), others who take more of a film production bent, and ones who view it through the lens of pop culture. The film and media categories are probably the strongest part of Nebula. There’s edutainment like Extra History. I have never had an interest in professional tennis, but have found CULT TENNIS to be a shockingly interesting channel (one of the ones I discovered through Nebula). A whole bunch of music channels like 12tone, Mary Spender, and Polyphonic; personally, I find them all far too focused on modern music for my tastes as a classical fan. Also technically listed under the “music” category is Tantacrul, though really I’d say many of his videos should be must-watch for anyone doing any sort of software UX design, even though he’s specifically focussing on music notation/composition software. LegalEagle is weirdly categorised under “news”, which I guess makes sense because a lot of his videos do cover current events, but fundamentally I personally view him as an entertainment channel who talks about the law. If you’re a gamer at all, Razbuten is excellent, especially his “…For Someone Who Doesn’t Really Play Games” series, where he introduces his wife, who is a non-gamer, to various different genres of games.

    Personally, I couldn’t ever replace YouTube entirely with Nebula. There’s just way too much stuff on YT, and their discovery algorithm has gotten so good. They’re really good in some niches, and much weaker in others. Some of the niches they’re weak in, they’re pretty obviously never going to enter. Live-streaming gaming, for example. But others they’re expanding into all the time. When I first joined, they didn’t have a single urbanism channel, and now they have most of the big urbanists on YouTube. These days Nebula is big enough that I have to check a couple of times per day to be sure that, if I look at the “latest videos” section of the front page, I don’t miss anything entirely. (Though there’s always the dedicated latest videos page if I did miss something from the front page.) Latest Videos has been a great way that I’ve come across entirely new channels and even niches that I wouldn’t have thought to be interested in before. It’s big, and varied, and growing a lot. I think it’d be hard not for someone to get their money’s worth from it.


  • I’ve never actually used Grayjay. Just heard about it for the first time a few hours ago. To be honest I thought it did support playlists. It sounded like if you sign in, you get access to all your YouTube features like playlists and comments. Shame to see that’s not the case. My Watch Later playlist is so essential to my YouTube viewing, I guess I’ll stick with Revanced for now.


  • I’m a big fan of Nebula, though the calculus is a bit different because there a re probably upwards of 20 creators that I already watched from YouTube on there (even higher if you count the channels rather than the creators), plus a few more that I rediscovered, plus a fair few that I discovered for the first time on Nebula.

    The biggest draw is probably the Nebula exclusives. Lindsay Ellis has put out 6 excellent videos since she withdrew from YouTube for good. Many other creators do bonus content for their regular videos, as well as a growing library of exclusive standalone productions. If you tell me which of their creators interest you, I could check and let you know how much bonus content you’d get from them.

    But honestly, for me, the best thing is that it’s sort of like a Super-Patreon. Sure, I could sign up to all of those creators’ Patreons, and that would support them the most, but then I’d be paying well over $100 per month. Instead, with Nebula’s annual plan, it’s just $30 per year, and still supports them significantly more than a YouTube view, even one on Premium (which is itself significantly better than an ad view).





  • You can get effectively the same thing via “Scan & Go” technology. Here in Australia, one of our two main supermarkets has it. You download their app, and when you enter one of the stores that supports it, you click the “Scan & Go” button in the app, and then scan the barcode of things you want to buy (or scan the digital scales after weighing your fresh produce), and then when you leave, you click pay, scan your phone, and walk out. It sounds way worse when I explain it like that than it really is. In reality, it’s enormously convenient and I will now go out of my way to go to one of these stores rather than the competitors which don’t support it. It’s only been here for about a year now, but according to this video something similar (using a specific hand scanner, rather than a phone app) has been around in the Netherlands for at least 5 years.

    And if I’m reading the article correctly, even these Amazon stores already support the same kind of thing.

    So as cool as it would be for convenience if this really worked purely through technology, that technology is not needed to reduce the labour required in supermarkets.


  • You can see from the screenshot you posted that it was only posted one other time in this community. And that was by me, posting many hours after this one. So you blaming @Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world is very unfair.

    As for why I posted it, simple: federation problems. I looked and didn’t see it already posted, because for whatever reason, on my instance when viewing this community, it didn’t appear. Only when someone else posted it and linked to this post on their instance did I ever become aware of it. If you look at this post on my instance you’ll note only two comments show up, and that’s because they’re the comments I forced to show up by manually searching for them using a different instance’s URL. (Not sure why, but even when trying to search for it, I can’t get your post with the actual screenshot to show up on my instance, hence my reply to this comment instead.)