DAC_Protogen

Honestly… YouTube Premium is just wasted money. It’s a difficult situation. You can watch YouTube for free and without ads already, by simply using a decent browser like Firefox and installing the uBlock Origin addon to block the ads. (Google is fighting adblockers and anything based on Chrome, so 90% of browsers out there will limit their functionality in the future, btw. Use Firefox or something based on it to keep at least a bit of your privacy and freedom of choice.) And you can even automatically skip the sponsorship messages in videos with Sponsorblock. But if you think you would support the content creators with YouTube Premium, think again. You’re mostly paying Google for their servers / platform. A platform that treats its content creators pretty bad, finds all kinds of ways to not pay them / reasons to demonetize their videos to grab 100% of the ad income and has become more and more privacy invasive and aggressive with ads over the years towards its users. And in terms of music, YouTube doesn’t license every single song individually from the musician. They just pay a royalty towards huge labels and companies like Sony, which in turn keep the absolutely most part of that for themselves instead of paying the artists. Yes, by watching videos for free with adblockers, content creators and YouTube aren’t being paid and in a way you are part of a problem. But consider this: Any subscription based content service like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Premium starts by paying its content creators at least a bit of money, but uses bait & switch tactics to lower that payment per stream more and more over time. Once they have all the creators, music / content and viewers comfortably on board, they start grabbing the money for themselves. It’s a systemic issue with streaming platforms in general and always the short end of the stick for the very people who create the content that makes the platform successful and useful in the first place. And if you feel guilty for cutting off the often self-proclaimed “content creators”… YouTube has mechanisms in place to directly support them (while taking a cut for YouTube), like “super chats” and “super stickers” and most of them these days have a Patreon account for direct monetary support and sponsorships going on. But yes, only those content creators who actually offer quality content will benefit from these things, what about all the others, you may ask. Well, let’s be brutally honest. A whole lot of content offered on YouTube is bullshit. It’s either copying successful people’s video style, low-cost, low effort, low quality beginners stuff, clickbait, disinformation, mentally unhealthy nonsense, copyright infringing stuff, and these days even AI generated crap with no value. If all of that would stop being made because no money is to be made on the platform, we wouldn’t miss out on anything. True quality will always be supported directly by fans and sponsors. And as harsh as it sounds… the rest is obsolete and may fall victim to natural selection. Might even raise the quality of content on the platform overall. Feel free to pay for YouTube Premium, if it makes you feel better. But know that absolutely most of it will only benefit Google. Personally, I don’t have the money to pay like 130 bucks a year just to feel like a good person. And those aggressive ads are bad for mental health and sometimes are a vehicle for malware, aside from the technology behind them absolutely shredding your privacy. I’m having none of that. I’ll watch that stuff with adblockers as long as it works, and if that stops working some day, I’ll spend my time with something better, maybe going outside and touching grass or something.

I agree, the Doom 2016 OST has some great pieces! And let's not forget the absolute ingenious Doom 3 theme song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzI7DLR0DPU

It'll take me a while to listen to all these answers, but I can already say: Thank you for introducing me to Spor! <3

That's lovely, thanks!

Ha, that is a great example of what people would show me, but it fails to "grab" me, mostly because it is too noisy, abstract, lofi or monotonous for my ears. ;)

Nope, not yet :) Thanks for the link, that IS hitting hard! ^^

Thanks! I have replaced the link in the post with yours. 👍 Edit: (Lol, I just noticed it's a bot XD )

Thank you so much for sharing these! ❤️ Felt a little awkward to be a one-man-show!

About FreeBSD... I recently wanted to give FreeBSD a shot on my ThinkPad. But aside from the rough idea that BSD should have some more unified and better coding standards than Linux and a few less bugs, already the damn installer bugged out on me. I think that ZFS is a RAM hog, and wanted to try installing it with UFS. I got stuck in the selection between the different partitioning schemes and had to hard reset. I tried again, this time the installation seemed to run through, the system rebooted and no changes were written to the SSD at all, the previous OS I had on there just booted. It simply wasn't installed, despite showing the entire procedure and progress as if it was... o.O To me, FreeBSD is just as messy as Linux, but with fewer and worse drivers and less modern and comfortable. It doesn't seem to be any more secure than modern Linux either, so it's kinda pointless to me. I really wish it was different and it would offer better quality and security, but it seems it doesn't. At least OpenBSD seems to deliver a fairly more secure OS to make up for its shortcomings like the very limited selection of ported / available software.

After years of frustrated distro hopping on Linux, and with an increasingly risky internet thanks to half the world being in conflict with each other, I'm really close to give OpenBSD a shot on my desktop. I'd love to use it on my notebooks as well, but honestly, I can't be arsed to deal with the wifi over there. I tried it, it was incredibly slow for some reason and I just don't feel like fixing that or dealing with it. But on the PC, with ethernet, that is no issue. I'll still keep a linux distro in dual boot for gaming and some occasional shiny app that isn't available on OpenBSD though. I think since every OS has its shortcomings, the best approach is to use multiple OS's and machines to have all the benefits.

Niles? Such a gentleman name. <3