this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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It's not even just the Internet. Marketing fucks up every aspect of our civilization. We can't even handle having a professional election anymore without trashy ads and people acting like children. You can't even watch legitimate news anymore. ...nevermind mind whack kids pranking people on YouTube being used and turning into assholes for YouTube monetization.
Honestly I'm starting to wonder if the reason why we got ourselves into a ad filled hell hole is because we expect soo much to be free and those things have to make money somehow and server space and the electricity they run on aren't free and the only people willing to spend money are whales and advertisers and from what I've been told YouTube was never profitable on it's own for Google and the only reason they've been keeping the site on is because it brings attention to other Google services while also preventing competition so I greatly think we'd all benefit from being open to paying for sites that are like YouTube so YouTube and advertisers have some real competitors I don't know how a my theoreticall site would profit without ads but it's still sad that sites like YouTube are expensive and unprofitable making it so Google is the only option solely because they can afford the loses making yt premium even more greedy
IF you want to get down the rabbit hole of expectations. I lose 34% off my pay. Like that. Poof. Taxes. I lose another 50% of what’s left to rent and groceries (not eating out). That doesn’t cover internet or utilities. Then transportation. And that’s just essentially living. My place isn’t all that.
And now you want me to pay for every website I visit. Or every service I use? Or I don’t use them and just go back to “essentially being alive.”
And I’m in the top 20% of income earners according to recent stats, which is insane because I’m not making fuck you money.
I think the real issue is greed. There’s no need for Disney+ to cost $20 a month. There’s no need for me to pony up another $1.5 a month to get 50GB of storage instead of the 5GB they know you’ll outgrow in a week. There’s zero need to pay $18 a month for a blue checkmark. They tell you it’s because it costs lots and lots of money to operate and the ads just barely cover our costs. Sure.
It’s just greed. It’s all just amoral, unethical, greed. Right on up from the rent/mortgage to all the shit you buy or “consume.”
We saw this surge with COVID, GME, crypto, NFT, absolutely wild, insidious, and morally bankrupt schemes exposing just how much wealth is pooled away from working class (they actually call them ‘dark pools’, where money goes and disappears). Something clicked. And it became a feeding frenzy where everyone is just steadily driving up prices, but not a single company is unprofitable. All the lay offs? None of those tech companies were in trouble. In fact, most made record profits!
No, because they add advertisements to services you pay for.
See: television, streaming services, fucking books even.
It's just unregulated capitalism doing what unregulated capitalism does - gobble up as much revenue as possible, at the expense of everything else.