Most of the services Google kills are also because they “fizzled out”. If you scroll through the Killed by Google site, a lot of the stuff listed there were test apps or small-scale experiments that most people never heard about or cared to try, like all the apps under Area 120. There are a few high-profile examples (Reader, Stadia, etc) but they’re definitely not the majority, same as Mozilla.

Apple discontinued its own Apple Pay Later service in favor of just integrating third-party payment services, like Affirm: https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/17/apple-pay-later-united-states-ending/

Even if official support isn’t possible past a certain point (Google and Samsung are pushing 7+ years, fwiw), all phones need to have a bootloader unlock mechanism for unofficial support past that point. LineageOS or mobile Linux with some broken functionality is still better than nothing.

Good news, there is a subscription service to prevent that and also still pays the creators.

The email signup and user management panel needs JavaScript, yeah.

I don’t like ads either, but they are the only functioning way of paying creators outside of direct payments, especially with economic inflation and competition from streaming services eating away at people’s budget for media. No one else has a solution that works under capitalism.

The two options for compensating a creator for their work online are advertisements or direct payments. There are no other functional alternatives. In a better world, more countries would have grants or universal basic income, but that’s not the world that exists right now.

Right, that’s why ads exist.

Because it’s an additional source of revenue, and they can provide rewards outside of YouTube.

If you don’t like Google keeping a cut, then sign up for all the Patreons for everyone you watch.

Maybe just pay for YouTube Premium at at that point? It pays the video creators, and you don’t have to have a janky playback setup.

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I don’t think I’ve had issues with reddit, as long as you use the link to the reddit comment thread, not one of the shortlinks or the video link or something else.

If you want to beat inflation, dump the money in a high-yield savings account, or a 401k, or a stock index, or any of the other options that have something resembling banking protection/regulation. There are so many better options than a speculative investment that you lose entirely with a social engineering attack or a SIM swap.

Bitcoin’s value is significantly more volatile than the US Dollar.

Firefox is faster than Chromium in many benchmarks, depending on the OS: https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60

I agree that advertising companies take too much off the top and a lack of competition has probably made that worse. That’s also an issue with a lot of publishers, many of them make buckets of money but still pay writers/editors/other staff poorly. That’s just normal capitalism stuff that won’t be fixed until there’s a major global economic shift.

In fact prior to the Internet there was no third party advertising middle man between say newspapers and the actual advertisers paying for ads.

Right, because there were very few newspapers, and all of them were well-known enough that finding advertisers was not difficult. Independent creators and smaller publishers don’t have the brand recognition or massive initial audience to make that happen. You can see this in action with a lot of YouTube channels; most of them only have access to YouTube’s own ad system and offers for in-video ads from shady companies and mobile games (Better Help, Raid Shadow Legends, Opera, etc).

PPA is potentially something that other browsers could adopt if it works and advertisers are reasonably happy. Maybe it won’t come to Chrome/Chromium, but I could definitely see Apple being interested and adding it to Safari.

Google worked on Privacy Sandbox/Topics API/FLoC for at least five years, and it couldn’t get something that advertisers, regulators, and users could all agree on, so it’s just falling back to the thing that worked (but has next to zero privacy protections). Sigh.

That’s a whole lot of link rot about to happen.