you can make a custom filter with ublock. I’m not seeing anything with the words trump, biden, us, texas, etc, including us politics related acronyms I have no idea about and that kept popping up 😅

malicious compliance: getting your team to wear this and stay as still as possible at the office

I keep hearing people repeat this idea that “they” destroyed the free internet. but isn’t the internet still free and wild? can’t I just create a website by myself and be as creative as I want just like the olden days?

to me, the biggest shift has been in the people, who let themselves simmer in the capitalist pan frog-style as companies took over. we stopped looking at the internet as a place to roam and explore and now expect content to be spoon-fed to us like we didn’t have a choice… we just turned from brave explorers into lazy customers (and products) by our own will (though whether free will even exists is a whole other conversation hehe)

another interesting aspect here is the capitalist mindset that things are not worth if they aren’t productive. in the internet this translates as reach and engagement. there have been absurdly long debates here about the “success” of lemmy/fediverse based solely on quantitative metrics. there’s still internet beyond big techs and content aggregators but we simply don’t think of them as relevant

I agree with you. Google is a company and so will do as much as they can to provide as little and to profit as much as possible.

if one wants to use their products, they have to play their game. by either paying (with money and or data, regardless if it’s overpriced) or “cheating” around that - as we do with literally everything else in the free market system, to many other monopolistic shady companies

what’s interesting to see around here is this sense of self entitlement, as if Google owed them anything, and of naivety, as if a company would ever provide a service (which is very costly) for absolutely free. video streaming is not an essential service and didn’t exist until very recently

it may come as a shock, but you don’t need to use any service such as YouTube to survive and you only do because you want to and find value in it (whether to learn new skills or watch people reacting to cats)

the underlying problem here which all of you are actually mad about is the system where technology and knowledge belongs to giant hoarding dragons instead of the people who made it. that’s where we all should be focusing our energy on.

in the meantime, we just keep cheating… and if the cheats fail, we move on to other things