I have mixed feelings about this.

We as the west point to Russia and China frequently, lamenting the closed-off nature of their Internet.

Now we are publicly pushing towards further fragmentation of the Internet.

I find it hard to see major differences between blocking TikTok here and China blocking Facebook over there. I assume, the process here is a little more publicly discussed whereas in Russia or China, things are quietly blocked by government agencies, but I might even be wrong about that.

Thanks for the reminder. I’ve been wanting to try it out.

I’ve seen the same. I wonder if the older you get, the more you value your time.

I remember seeing lots of ad breaks on TV when I was a kid and it didn’t stop me from watching a show. Now if an ad break happens, I am reminded why I don’t own a TV and turn it off.

I am sure other platforms / personal hosting will continue to exist in the future. They simply won’t be relevant in terms of video streaming market share.

The network effect of youtube is massive. They have a huge amount of content creators and audience. That means the audience will stick around for the creators and the creators go for the biggest audience and hence the most views.

Being google, they have data centers all over the globe, provide a fast app / browser access for any OS, can cast to a TV with one click - all these equal convenience which cannot easily be beat by any individual website.

Some huge youtube brands like linus media group are trying with floatplane as their own paid video hosting service, but I’m sure their view numbers are insignificant compared to youtube even though they are the biggest players.

I doubt it, unfortunately.

Like many other online services they’ve saturated the market so the only way to increase profits is to extract more money from individual users.

They are also a quasi-monopoly for a reason - hosting and streaming video is resource-intensive, so I wouldn’t hold my breath for a free alternative that would scale. AFAIK, piped and such are only frontends to youtube which will be killed off by ToS or through technical means.

Maybe there are free video sites that also host their videos, but as I said, since it quickly becomes very expensive, I don’t see anyone being able to do that for free for long.

Unfortunately, if anyone is going to “disrupt” youtube, it is going to come from a silicon valley startup and like youtube they will only burn investor capital for a limited time - until they have saturated the market (or failed). Then they’ll have to monetize as well.

My only hope is something like a torrent approach where everyone who streams also hosts. But since that is technically difficult to perfect, needs a huge user base to succeed while not promising any commercial gain for the initiating party, nobody will throw a ton of money at the problem, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.

My prediction is that people will either pay for premium or see ads in the mid- to long-term.

Thank you. 42k pre-tax for a teacher is abysmal.

Are these numbers before or after taxes?

This links has led me to one the sneakiest cookie consent forms I’ve seen in a long while.

This is a good suggestion.

I’d like to emphasize that a quiet grinder really is worth a little premium. I have a eureka mignon crono and that thing likes to scream with its lack of sound proofing.

When using a friend’s mignon silenzio I was surprised by how much nicer it felt to be able to make a quiet cup in the morning.

Long story short, I’m now looking into applying sound proofing to my grinder and I wish I’d just spent a little more to get a much better experience out of the box.

No, it stops you from burning a religious symbol in public. Secularity means that state and church are separate, which is a different matter. A lack of secularity would mean you can go on trial for not following the word of some god e.g. for loving someone from the same sex.

These are terrible and should be fought.

Bu this particular law is stopping assholes from being assholes.

Book-burnings also had a severely terrible history in the 3rd reich and are nothing but demonstrations of power, hate and close-mindedness.

Democracy means letting people with other world views exist in peace.

Please consider how you want to be treated by this world and how you can make your own positive impact on humans around you.

I am an atheist myself and will vehemently defend secularism but your comment boils down to hate and demanding others have the exact same beliefs as you do.

This is simply false. In Germany, the swastika may be used in the context of education, art and some other places.

You are simply not allowed to march up and down the street with a swastika flag, which seems very reasonable.