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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • It already reduced the services severely. The included Amazon Music sucks if you don’t pay extra. The included Amazon Video has ads now. And Prime gaming has reduced the offers.

    While YouTube premium gives you full access to YouTube music and 1080p Enhanced Bitrate video quality. I only got it for the music, no ads on TVs is a bonus (Already had an adblocker for phone/PC).


  • Amazon has around 310 million active users. Amazon has 230 million Prime subscribers, even though it costs up to $15 a month. Yes, those include cheaper student subscriptions of course, but still.

    Of course 30% is optimistic, but the average people I know happily watch those fucking ads. And don’t even complain about unskipable double ads. They don’t like them, they’re still too lazy to install an ad blocker as long as they get their content. Each one of them would absolutely shell out 5 bucks to continue watching (it’s less than a single beer when you go out).


  • You underestimate how addicted people are to YouTube. There is no alternative to it.

    Twitch is streaming focused, the vods absolutely suck. Kick? Same.

    What else is there? TikTok? Instagram? Neither of which provide long high quality videos.

    After all we are talking about YouTube literally blocking everyone and putting up a banner: $5 a month or you’re out of luck. If someone already happily pays $18 a month for Netflix, what is 5 bucks?


  • It would be a huge gamble, but it could pay off. Seriously, how many people are watching YouTube every day? Hours of their favorite content creators.

    Imagine a rug pull, YouTube is now a pay only service. No ads, but everyone has to pay $5 a month to access. I’d bet with you that a surprising amount of people would just pay that to continue using it.

    How many? Nobody knows, but it would certainly be 30% or higher. Now imagine 30% of users paying just $5 a month how much money that would be.

    It can be done, YouTube just doesn’t do it right now as they still earn plenty with ads. If suddenly everyone started to use an ad blocker then things would change very quickly.



  • Just the way I described, I’m a software developer, it would be easy as hell.

    Your browser requests the video, YouTube decides you have to watch an ad. The ad has 15 seconds unskipable. So the easiest thing they could do is not send you video data for 14 seconds (add a spare second for buffering to not piss off users who do watch ads).

    Doesn’t matter if you call some endpoint, load the ad data, whatever. You’re not receiving any video for a while, which would piss people off enough to leave.


  • I still hold the opinion that they could absolutely block you out. I use uBlock Origin and there was actually a time where I got blocked/warnings every day. Even with upgrading my plugin / refreshing all block lists.

    At some point I finally gave in and grabbed YouTube Premium, not because of the ads (I’d rather stop watching than watch with ads), but because I needed their music service (Used Amazon Music before, the app sucked. Music quality was the highest out there though. Also cancelled Prime for a double whammy).

    For example the moment an ad gets triggered they could just refuse to send you video data. And if the ad is an unskipable 15 seconds, block playback for 15 seconds. Done. Even if you block this, you get 15 seconds of nothing and will soon be pissed off enough to either start watching ads, buy Premium or leave (no longer costing them bandwidth).



  • That’s a weird way to look at it, obviously you’re watching the content.

    I’d rather see it like this:

    • Free tier with ads

    • Subscription without ads (and better quality)

    You are currently on the free tier. Yes, you can block ads (just like you can pirate movies), but that’s not the deal you were offered. I’m using an ad blocker myself, but I can understand the corporate side too.

    They absolutely could add a hard paywall, but why should they if there are plenty of users who want to watch for free by paying with ads?





  • But that’s not how model training works, it doesn’t simply copy and paste entire songs into its training data. It more or less “listens” to it, analyzes it and when you ask to create a rock song for example it just has an algorithm behind it what a song like that would sound like.

    But you can’t just ask it to generate Bohemian Rhapsody from its data, it would probably get very close depending on the training, but it would never be 100% the same (except the model was only trained on this one song).

    Just like you can listen to rock songs and then make your own, that’s totally valid. The problem here is of course automation and scale, but saying it’s not fair use is dubious.




  • Is there? The casino is on a cheap $250 a month plan they don’t belong on and they broke ToS with the domains. While also costing Cloudflare money each month (as the casino admits themselves, their traffic alone is worth up to $2000 a month).

    It’s absolutely in the right of Cloudflare to drop a customer that’s bothersome. Casinos usually are (regulations, going around country restrictions), them costing them money on top is a massive issue.

    120k a year is a big slap of course, but it’s probably the amount Cloudflare would want to keep them on as a customer. If they leave, so be it.

    I’ve seen it several times before at companies I worked at. They cheaped out and went with a tiny service plan to coast by. Or even broke ToS because it would be cheaper. That usually got stopped by plans getting dropped (GitLab Bronze for example), cheap plans getting limited, or the sales team sending a ‘friendly’ message that we’re abusing their plan and how we’re going to fix it. If you don’t play along at that point you’re going to get the hammer dropped on you.

    It also wasn’t 24h as the title says, the first communication happened in April. At that point they should have started to scramble, either upgrading to a bigger tier immediately or switching providers. And it’s totally normal to go to the sales team when you break the ToS of your plan or you abuse a smaller plan. They’re going to discuss terms, it’s not a technical issue.

    Edit: And I should also say, the whole “paying for a whole year is extortion” is bullshit too. Their CFO or CEO told Cloudflare they are looking at switching providers (as they looked at Fastly). So of fucking course Cloudflare is going to demand a full year upfront. Otherwise the casino could pay for a single month and during that month they switch away to another provider. So Cloudflare would still be thousands in the red with that ex-customer after they used so much traffic the last few years.