Porn has done it for dozens of years at this point, and it has just become not only an expectation, but just a thing that gets picked up.

Because most people have their own idea of what is morally right in the world, and they want to cling onto that regardless of what other perspectives may exist. Both sides do this.

Also, in some cases, speaking the truth about something leads to them losing their jobs or livelihoods.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

Honestly, I have no real clue.

Twitch isn’t quite completely impervious to adblockers, with proxy extensions allowing us to skip ads still for now, but YouTube could do the exact same thing tomorrow if they wished. uBlock Origin wouldn’t save you, SponsorBlock wouldn’t save you, the only thing that could be done would be a black screen whenever an ad pops up.

Maybe YouTube doesn’t want to fall into the hole Twitch is in, with the proxy loophole, and they view fighting adblockers as a better choice than having to spend a massive amount of encoding expense to have the silver bullet in every country.

The age of people willing to go through the effort to start and maintain their own website has LONG since passed.

A nice utopia… but one that won’t ever be real, sadly.

They didn’t behead babies!

They only use their own citizens as human shields and parade tourists around like war spoils before killing them. Such shining examples of humanity Hamas is.

Do I pirate? Yes.

My philosophy? I don’t wanna pay for it.

Honestly, with the exception of abandonware that can’t legally be bought anywhere, piracy can’t be legitimately excused. If you do it, you do it because you want something that you should pay for, but don’t wanna. Which is a choice you can make, I won’t hate you for it, but own that instead of pretending that you have a logical moral argument to getting it.

Honestly, the main problem for popularity’s sake is the un-diverse userbase.

It’s a bunch of techy redditors, the same way that many other services that splinter off from reddit are. Almost all the communities are literal clones of reddit ones. So for someone who wants a similar style of place and doesn’t have a hatred of reddit corporate built-in, why would they not go to reddit, which has the same kind of userbase but with 100x the users?

Honestly, other than “Open Source Master Race!!!111!!!111”, there isn’t any reason, especially not one that the average person will care about.

Another one, and I fucking HATE saying this, not enough zoomers dragging their friends along. This place feels like a place for the 30-something instead of the 20-something. Which isn’t bad, of course, but in terms of network effect power it is, because peer pressure is huge for social media.

But, separate from all that, do we actually want it to be that kind of popular? Maybe we should stay under the radar for the most part. Keep it from becoming stale and condescending like lots of Redditors can be. Keep the advertisers from sinking claws in. Maybe that’ll be better for the site as a whole than needing ads to support a service 100x the size.

This “everything is worse” feeling is not something that has any link to any political party.

If life is percieved to get worse under any party’s reign, whether to Tories as is the case now, Labour if they were elected, or SNP or whatever, they will blame whoever is in charge at the moment.

It’s happening now, it’s happening with the Democrats in the US, with Liberals in Canada, and to a lesser extent, the ruling coalition in Germany with AfD getting a surge thanks to people just generally discontent with life.

How much of that is their fault is something up for debate. It’s not 100% their fault, and it also isn’t 100% not their fault either. The same reactionary thoughts that are coming now from this here are giving the Conservative party in Canada a resurgence. I have a feeling most of you don’t like that, but it’s the truth.

When people are thinking life is getting worse, they will vote in whoever is not part of the current leadership.

It is bad for the consumer… but the alternative is instant cracks, as seen with a lot of games on r/Crackwatch that don’t have the DRM.

Denuvo is the first software in a long time that has been able to successfully stop the supposedly inevitable march to cracking. It’s a miracle that more AAA devs don’t use it, since it works so well. (EMPRESS aside)

You can hate me all you want for saying this, but the war against piracy, for the most part, has been won.