Shutting down the letsblock.it project and its official instance

Such a weird comment. Are you trying to debate them back into working on the project?

Being "against" something is a valid goal in life, but then you really have to be very strategic about it. Being "for something" and pouring your energy into making something that people want or need seems more productive.

From the announcement:

but I'd rather spend my energy on making the non-commercial web more attractive.

The author pretty explicitly states that they want to shift from an "against something" mentality (against disruptive content in proprietary apps, against the intended user-experience of those apps) to a "for something" mentality (building and supporting non-commercial services).

I genuinely do not see the complaint.

With only 800 active users, letsblock.it obviously didn't have any measurable effect.

Unless the author was planning on never making a popular project, I don't think this is a good way of evaluating direction or effort. In either case, putting in a huge amount of effort to support 800 active users who might otherwise (at least partially) shift their attention to better services seems reasonable to question. If we take it that there is any value in improving experiences for a small number of people, then there is equal value in making it more pleasant for those people to use Libre services.

And of course that's even before asking about the opportunity cost. If an author can take the same amount of time they were devoting to this and instead build tools that make a Libre/Community service more attractive for 800 people, that's arguably a much higher impact activity on the health and growth of that service than wasting that effort trying to make proprietary platforms palatable.

But again, if your point here is to focus in on a mission, starting with "nothing I build will have any impact on any of this" is just not really helpful at all.

Supporting the "non-commercial web" seems too vague in my opinion.

A general mission statement/direction is often the first step towards narrowing down product ideas. I think making a decision in a direction (ie, pivoting from doing free UX enhancements for commercial companies towards saying, "I want to benefit services that don't feel exploitative") is a good place to start. Of course over time the author will probably narrow that focus, but this at least lays out a category that they can start looking into.

800 people might not fix the whole tech ecosystem (it is impossibly broken which so I can see why the author would like to just go work on something else). But if you got 800 people in a room to say thanks, I bet it would feel pretty cool.

(This isn’t intended as a full counter argument against your broader point, which I’m still not really sure either way about, I just wanted to note that sometimes we have small effects and that’s OK. We’re only individuals after all, it wouldn’t make sense to expect every person to change the world in some sense, it would be chaos).

Why would you? The shittier the platform, the shittier the content.

Paradoxically that's the way some people find salvation. They have to hit the bottom. Instead of making their experience of digital abuse more palatable what they need is more YouTube, more Facebook, more Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. Until something inside snaps and their soul pukes.

I'd totally get it if the author realised they were just prolonging users' misery. As Nietzsche said; "What is shaky, push it!"

The last line resonates with me as the discord I hang out in is my only source of good recommendations anymore. Almost all of the good stuff I've seen in the past years comes from there. My algorithmic feeds by comparison are all high-viewcount trash for idiots. That onion article from years ago about the lowest common denominator dropping at an alarming rate has only gotten more true over time.

Yeah, perfectly. That's why I suggested it. It sounds like he was super interested in one thing, 2 years passed, and now he isn't interested in that one thing and wants to do something else. Bored. There's nothing wrong with that.

Being bored isn't a bad thing.

It's not just the length that's frustrating, it's the near total lack of control. Miss the first few seconds because your sound was off/low? Gotta watch the whole fucking thing to the end and then let it replay because there's no slider or restart/rewind button.

All because either they purposefully wanted to force us to do that (view count boosting I guess, or it's more likely to be remembered?) or some google exec got Shorts barely done enough to show off at a board meeting and say "done, made something that competes against reels!" and then ran off to work on something else to try and boost their stature in the company.

Does Premium provide this?

Funnily enough, the code responsible for hiding shorts in that is just under 20 lines long :P

https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions/b...

I use New Pipe for this. Also no ads.

Although I hope something similar will exist, I do believe the push towards promoting bullshit and shallow content is too strong

+1

Also wish YouTube would copy X/Twitter where you get two toggle options:

1) For you (algo recommendations)

2) Directly following

You would ideally use directly following on the days where you’re time crunched.

I have a similar issue with some YouTube channels that despite liking their content I cannot subscribe to their channel because they publish dozens of shorts every week. So I just have a memory list of channels I visit every so often to see if they published anything. The shorts practically broke the subscription system for me.

I suggest relaxing, lest your comment become funny, because it describes itself better than the mind it is trying to read.

Want an "asshole" version? i.e. the honest version? (note, I'm not the guy you're diagnosing and mind-reading, just want to highlight how absurd your conception of OP is)

That was one of the strangest deprecation announcements I've ever seen, foaming at the mouth, blaming massive external factors (companies...pursuing money? is an odd thing to be surprised by), way overly dramatic lies about ex. Google "content-blocking extensions with MV3 under false security claims and planning to lock down the OS and browser with DRM."

I have no love for Google, but as soon as someone starts saying "MV3 [makes] false security claims", I remember MV3 is just Safari's more private content blocking from years ago.

When I see "planning to lock down the OS and browser with DRM.", I'm like "wait...he can't be describing...", click through, and see he's describing the one-off public announcement of beginning a prototype of a browser API that a user is human (transparent!), that was cancelled, publicly, extremely shortly after, because of reactions like this. (thankfully!)

Much like the constructive version of this comment, I bet they'd be able to keep going if they didn't see their project in such epic terms, given they framed giving up in terms of companies continuing to pursue money and Google.

I've been toying with the idea of using headless firefox with UBO as a filtering proxy, but nothing has come of it so far.

I'm actually focused more on writing a quality search engine that ranks pages based on the amount of anti-user behavior, dark patterns, etc. a site has. Have a really crappy site with tons of ads, popup modals, and trackers? No clicks for you! So I'm doing something similar to what the author is doing I guess.