• LinkOpensChest.wav
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    20311 months ago

    My “favorite” lecture from young people is the one in which they berate me for “stealing content” by not watching ads on YouTube.

    I have a vivid memory of YouTube being a platform where normal people could share videos of their kids and pets or other fun random low quality but entertaining things

    • Beefy-Tootz
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      8511 months ago

      I don’t understand why they think we care if we’re stealing content regardless. I pirate movies and TV shows, but they don’t whine about that, in fact, most will approve of it. Why draw the line at YouTubers?

      • @rtxn@lemmy.world
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        5911 months ago

        They often say that we’re screwing the person who runs the channel. In reality, I’m willing to bet my left nutsack that they make a fuckton more from the occasional donations than from ads, once Google, MCNs, and the government take their share.

      • Tippon
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        3011 months ago

        Because they think that they’ll be YouTube superstars one day, and we’re stopping them

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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      11 months ago

      YouTube has increased the amount of ads that used to be standard by about 1000%. You used to get about 22-26 minutes of actual content per 30 minutes of viewing. On YouTube it’s about 2 minutes of advertising per 0.5-3 minutes of viewing. The majority of the things I watch on YouTube are short 30 second videos to see specific things, but Google seems to think it’s okay to show me 2-3 minute long commercials before letting me see the 30 second blurb telling me the foot pounds per square inch I need to apply to my brake calipers before I can finish my brake change job. This is even more annoying now that Google doesn’t surface this type of information on regular websites, where I can just quickly read the spec.

      TLDR: fuck Google and fuck ads

    • @son_named_bort@lemmy.world
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      2811 months ago

      It feels like YouTube has become the new Hollywood with production companies and YouTubers becoming celebrities and whatnot. Such a far cry from it’s beginnings as a place where people would upload random family videos that nobody watched.

      • LinkOpensChest.wav
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        1911 months ago

        Literally the first video posted was one of the creators in a selfie video at the zoo. That’s the YouTube I want back. That’s what it was meant to be.

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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        811 months ago

        The family members watched them, which was good enough for the person uploading it. Not everything needs to be about money and exposure. Ugghh! K.k kill me.

    • @Pogbom@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I have an honest question and I feel like Lemmy is a good place to have a real discussion on this. To preface this, I use adblock too so I’m kinda calling myself a hypocrite with this question :P

      Why do we expect any free service not to have ads? If a paid service like Netflix introduced ads I’d be pissed, and same goes for cable TV these days. But why would something free like Youtube not have ads? How can we be bothered by ads on a service we’re getting for free?

      Someone help me reconcile this for my own well-being haha.

      • @grue@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Why do we expect any free service not to have ads?

        Youtube has the right to serve ads along with the content, but it does not have the right to dictate what I can or can’t do with the data once it hits my machine. It has no more right to hijack my property to force them upon me than it does to strap me to a chair and force my eyes open, A Clockwork Orange style.

        If Youtube doesn’t like that arrangement, its recourse is to serve a 403: forbidden instead of the video data.

        There’s also a deeper discussion to be had whether corporations have any sort of right to exist in their current form in the first place, but I’ll leave that for another time.

        • @CurlyMoustache@lemmy.world
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          1111 months ago

          Is is like muting during a commercial break, or going out of the room to do something else. What happens in my home, is under my control. You want to stop me from doing that? Refuse to serve me content. I’m fine with that

          • @paintbucketholder@lemmy.world
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            1211 months ago

            It’s like flipping over the ad pages in a magazine. It’s like taking the advertisement brochures out of a newspaper and throwing them into the trash. It’s like leaving the room during halftime break. It’s like taping a show without the commercial breaks. It’s like walking past a poster without reading it. It’s like getting your letters from the mailbox and throwing away the advertising mailers. It’s like going to the cinema and talking during the ads that are playing before the movie. It’s like walking down the sidewalk and ignoring the people trying to sell you merchandise. It’s like switching channels when commercials come on.

            But for some reason, people are trying to tell me that I’m ethically and morally in the wrong for blocking fucking YouTube ads.

      • @DavLemmyHav@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        2011 months ago

        Ads arent inherently the problem. The problem is that the user experience often gets ruined because, for example, on certain news sites every paragraph of text you read, you get a full page ad. Imo when its like this its fully acceptable to not let them have limited revenue from you.

      • LinkOpensChest.wav
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        1811 months ago

        You’re asking someone who’d spent a good chunk of my life creating Skyrim mods for free and volunteering for services in my community with no recompense or desire for money how I expect people to contribute things they presumably enjoy without getting paid? To be clear, you’re asking me this from a server on a federated platform that is held together with community love and free-will donations?

        I know we’ve been conditioned by capitalism to reduce everything to its monetary worth, but I feel like we should know better here.

        • @limelight79@lemm.ee
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          811 months ago

          Fair point, but the instance I use doesn’t allow image uploads because of the disk space issue. Videos take way more space than that. And, of course, you can’t just slap in a single drive, you need RAID or something so when a drive fails, you don’t lose stuff.

          Add in bandwidth concerns, and it’s a legitimate question. Hosting a general video site can’t be cheap, and people generally won’t pay for it.

          If we did want a community run video hosting site ala Lemmy, how would that work? What would it cost the hosters?

          • @thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee
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            611 months ago

            That’s PeerTube. Idk what it’s costing the hosts exactly, but my server is apparently bringing in enough in donations to be viable.

          • LinkOpensChest.wav
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            311 months ago

            Idk I don’t really care that much about video content, so I’ll leave that up to someone else to parse. If someone provides an entirely free, ad-free way to share videos, then great. If not, then oh well.

      • Anony Moose
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        811 months ago

        To add on to what the others have said, there should always be competition between free and paid services. Free services should provide only what they are capable of with the limitations they operate under due to a donation model, while paid services can use all the advantages they can get with advertising, big budgets for hosting, etc. Free and open-source often still won under these conditions. Think Encarta against Wikipedia. If paid wins, that’s fine, people can still have a reasonably good alternative with the free option.

        The problem arises when a corporation builds on the back of a free resource, and then starts charging users once the network effects kick in. With YouTube, Google was able to leaverage 20 years worth of videos that people lovingly uploaded (although 10 of those years were in the post-ad plagued world) and then start forcing people to bend to their monetization rules. Most of those people didn’t upload to YouTube because they wanted to make money off their videos, they just wanted to share a funny video. If given the choice, they would have chosen free instead of ad-driven. We have no choice since all that content is now locked behind YouTube’s ad walls.

      • This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥
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        11 months ago

        The ads themselves are not a problem. The problems are

        1. It can be security risk. Even Google has ads that redirect to malicious domain
        2. Ads that are getting in the way of accessing information. That includes popups, automatically playing videos etc. Hell, one of the major reason why I started using adblock was to block those annoying flash banners.
        3. The frequency is just way too much. This leave no money on table mentality makes me not give a shit.
    • @KrummsHairyBalls@lemmy.ca
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      1311 months ago

      Not really going to get into it with you, because you clearly have your mind made up, but you pretty much nailed why at the end.

      I have a vivid memory of YouTube being a platform where normal people could share videos of their kids and pets or other fun random low quality but entertaining things

      People spend a lot of time and money making videos these days. They aren’t just random low quality things. They have teams of sometimes hundreds, use cameras worth half a million dollars, and may take a week or month to record said video while paying those hundreds of employees.

      Again, not going to change your mind, Lemmy is very open about not giving a shit about others when it comes to money, but it’s not 2006 anymore, and people need to make their money back AND pay their employees.

      Personally I’m fine watching a few ads to support the content I clearly want to watch. Seems weird you’d be interested enough in what someone has to show you, but refuse to help them in any way, but whatever.

      Remember guys, don’t forget to hit the downvote button if you haven’t already. How dare I say anything positive that isn’t just “fuck ads, fuck YouTube, fuck everyone!”

        • @KrummsHairyBalls@lemmy.ca
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          511 months ago

          Don’t worry, you didn’t need it.

          Lemmy losers click downvote the millisecond anyone says something positive about anything non-FOSS, or a bigger corporation. You already clicked that button, just like you’ve already downvoted this one.

          • LinkOpensChest.wav
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            611 months ago

            Not me though. Lemmy.one disables downvotes, so your comments look upvoted to me.

            But yeah, fuck corporations, I’m onboard with that.

      • @commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1711 months ago

        people need to make their money back AND pay their employees.

        that’s very much a “them” problem. if i don’t want to watch ads, you won’t guilt me into it.

      • LinkOpensChest.wav
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        1411 months ago

        Tell me how to filter all that highly polished crap from my feed and searches, because I don’t want it. I hate all that shit being shoved at me. If I wanted to watch someone spouting bad takes with a highly polished commercial-friendly veneer, I’d watch cable. I hate all those monetized channels, and they can all go under for all I care, along with that entire hellsite. Then more people would support actually good non-monetized projects like peertube.

        Even if what I’m doing is stealing, it’s a good thing. Can’t wait for YouTube’s demise. It’s not a fun site to use anymore because all the good non-monetized content gets buried in favor of these soul-sucking assholes.

        I don’t even click people’s links anymore, because it’s always some rich bearded white male with the most painful content.

      • @CrowAirbrush@lemm.ee
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        1011 months ago

        If they use all that stuff to shoot the video, it means they already made it or they spent money they shouldn’t have.

        I didn’t mind getting a handful of ads an hour, i do mind that i now get like 20 minutes to watch some youtube because adulting sucks and Youtube is like: swallow these 7 ads bitch, guess what bitch we forgot we showed you 7 have some more cunt and now my 20 minutes is fucked, so i say: time for Youtube to get bent.

        If what i hear is right, they are and have been operating in the red for a long time. Half of their creators are better business people than they are.

        • @KrummsHairyBalls@lemmy.ca
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          211 months ago

          If they use all that stuff to shoot the video, it means they already made it or they spent money they shouldn’t have.

          Pretty clear you’ve never owned a business. You have to invest money to start it.

      • Lev_Astov
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        311 months ago

        If you feel that way, you should really be paying for YouTube premium, since that actually gives more money to the creators you watch than ads would. That’s the one thing that sold me on it.

        • @LemmysMum@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          I agree with your thought process but supporting YouTube by paying for it after they intentionally enshitified it to the point where you want to is the entire problem.

          Use an adblocker and donate directly to creators. If someone needs to steal my time to afford to run their business, then they can’t afford to run their business.

          • Lev_Astov
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            111 months ago

            Again, it’s about supporting the creators without the absurdly high cost of several dozen Patreon subs, not about avoiding the ads. If I could pay $15/mo to Patreon and have it distribute a portion of that to 60 different people based upon how much of their content I viewed that month, that’d certainly be the way to go.

            • @LemmysMum@lemmy.world
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              111 months ago

              You don’t have to support every creator. If they’re making money they’re fine, if their financial position is greater than yours, they don’t need your financial support.

    • Queen HawlSera
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      1011 months ago

      Now it’s so commercialized that I’m not posting anything on YouTube anymore, simply because I know that I’m going to get so many emails about how my video of me building a Lego set or whatever, violated some new social taboo that was invented 5 minutes ago, and how they are going to send the YouTube police after me to send me to the shadow Realm

      • @Agrivar@lemmy.world
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        311 months ago

        Really? I still randomly upload videos of me gaming, sometimes with background music, but no titles or voice-overs and I never get any comments or emails. I must not be offending people correctly.

    • @Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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      711 months ago

      Lol, I’ve got a friend that likes to tell me how his YouTube Red subscription pays for his favorite streamers’ bills.

      Like… Just give those people the money directly. Why pay Google the lions share? I guess some people just enjoy the taste of boot. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

      • Mario_Dies.wav
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        311 months ago

        I miss that time so much. I feel like Tik Tok wouldn’t have become so popular if YouTube hadn’t become the monetized abomination it is now.

    • @SCB@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I have a vivid memory of YouTube being a platform where normal people could share videos of their kids and pets or other fun random low quality but entertaining things

      this is now TikTok. YouTube hasn’t been that platform for a long time, since at least Vine.

    • iAmTheTot
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      211 months ago

      I’m not sure what those two paragraphs have to do with each other.

    • @mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      211 months ago

      I’ve adopted a razor:

      I don’t care about your business model.

      No website can make me give half a shit what they do for money. Is it free? Then I’m taking it. I will not render your pages exactly as you expect. I will not load all content just because you want me to. Suck a dick if you don’t like me being there. You can rate-limit me… or you can try. But I’m not playing games and I’m not suffering corporate propaganda.

  • @unmagical@lemmy.ml
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    13011 months ago

    Honestly it doesn’t seem to take very long at all. I watched live as the insurrectionists attempt to overturn democracy in the US during their failed auto-coup on January 6th less than 3 years ago.

    Though there was some “it’s not real” talk in the immediate aftermath the idea that it was a false flag, antifa, not an insurrection, not a big deal, just tourists having an afternoon scroll, etc. seems to be growing.

    I wonder why the “left wing radical Democrat antifa operatives engaging in a false flag attack to make Trump look bad” marched under banners with Trump’s name, admitted they were doing it for Trump, in some cases ran for office on the Republican ticket, and are actively being protected by Republican politicians.

    • @Rolder@reddthat.com
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      5411 months ago

      Pretty astonishing when the whole thing was basically live streamed. I member watching it as it happened

      • @Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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        3811 months ago

        Watching terrorist Ashli Babbitt get shot from multiple angles, then seeing comments from Trumpers like:

        1. She’s a hero
        2. She’s a false flag
        3. She’s not actually dead
        4. She didn’t do anything wrong

        And this is barely two years. Going to bet a decade from now, the misinformation will be worse.

        • @Rolder@reddthat.com
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          711 months ago

          Fun to consider, if these were BLM protestors doing the exact same thing, they would be cheering the loudest.

          • @Zink@programming.dev
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            411 months ago

            I bet what would be even louder would be their criticism of Capitol Police for not doing their job. It was such an important proceeding in the very Capitol of God’s chosen country, so they had more than enough justification to gun down all the darkies.

      • @jeremyparker@programming.dev
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        411 months ago

        A recent Behind the Bastards on Alex Jones (part 1) has recordings of Info Wars from January 6 - before Jones had had a chance to call in and tell them to shut the fuck up before they got noticed as being complicit

        It’s funny (and scary) hearing them being like, “It’s all happening! The second American Revolution is underway! The Patriots have control of the Capitol!”

        Jones quickly learned that he needs his listeners to be “panic-adjacent” rather than actually in panic mode. Panicking people don’t buy brain pills.

    • The Picard ManeuverOP
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      3111 months ago

      It was a near immediate campaign to convince people not to believe their lying eyes and ears. I think deep down, the spin doctors know that they’re lying though.

      • Hyperreality
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        2511 months ago

        Oh, is it time for that Sartre quote again?

        “Never believe that [they] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. [They] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

      • @Soulg@lemmy.world
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        1411 months ago

        It’s not that deep. They want power and will lie cheat and steal the entire country to achieve it.

      • @SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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        1211 months ago

        Conspiracy people swing from “I only believe my own eyes and ears” to “I don’t believe even what I see”. Essentially the only reality is the construct in their minds and it will be defended at all costs to protect their ego.

    • @Powerpoint@lemmy.ca
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      2311 months ago

      Same thing in Canada with the fucker convoy in Ottawa. Traitors tried to overthrow a democratically elected government, literal fascists were present and Ottawa was held captive by these morons. Conservatives attempt to frame it as fake and a party. Fuck them.

      • @Sagifurius@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        The hell? None of what you just said happened. There were a lot of attempts to make that seem so. Remember the rash of police chiefs resigning and that bullshit with the stolen semi full of guns from a cop shop? The only literal fascists there were the fucking cops you clown.

        • @canuckkat@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          The facists and racists have existed before Canada was a country but people just keep conveniently forgetting. Except back then they were the ones in power.

          Of course, literal records of Parliament don’t.

    • @eltrain123@lemmy.world
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      2111 months ago

      I was sitting in a control room at work while it was happening and all the conservative coworkers I had were saying “Look at all those Antifa’s pretending to be Trump supporters!”

      I’m glad I left that job…

      • @SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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        2111 months ago

        Probably the same people who go “The government is incapable of running anything” and the next thing out of their mouth is how the government is running some perfectly secret massive plot. Somehow it is top secret but people like them know about it.

    • @winterayars@sh.itjust.works
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      711 months ago

      Yeah they fucking broadcast that whole thing at much as they could. They thought they were the heroes sweeping in to save the day and they would be vindicated.

    • amio
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      311 months ago

      Well, see, the mistake was expecting any of this to make sense. They gave up on even pretending to make sense a long time ago, it is all Gish galloping away now - because, as long as you say the Magic Keywords that make people’s brains make with the angry chemicals, it doesn’t actually necessarily matter what else you say.

  • @Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works
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    11611 months ago

    I find the opposite more annoying. If your memory of those events is accurate there’s plenty of things to point to to back it up.

    But then you have older people like my father who…I don’t know, something has completely rewritten their memories of significant events to the point where he claims many things happened differently than verifiable recorded history. It’s impossible to argue with that because of him seeing me pointing out that’s not true as an attack and accusing him of lying.

    • @skyspydude1@lemmy.world
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      5711 months ago

      My favorite was arguing with a much older (late 70s) friend of my dad’s about how Obama ruined the economy and stock market, and when I told him that was objectively not true and the GFC was in full swing well before Obama was even elected, he was like “I know because I owned stocks and stuff, how would you even know?” Even when I pulled up a graph of the S&P 500 and showed the days he was elected and sworn in, he just said “Oh, that can’t be right, the graph must be wrong”. Showing the DOW and other composites from multiple sources did nothing to convince him. He was absolutely positive his retirement fund was doing great up until Obama was elected.

      Yes Jerry, I’m sure that the entire stock market was just wrong, and it’s not the fact you consume nothing but FOX News and will only refer to the 44th president as “The N*gger” potentially causing a bit of bias.

      • @Surreal@programming.dev
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        4511 months ago

        What would you think if your parents say it’s time to put you up for adoption every time you get into an argument? What a fucking weird thing to get upset over and think of throwing your parents away just because of an argument

        • @SchizoDenji@lemm.ee
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          811 months ago

          Fr it adult homes make sense for people without children or problematic families, but how can you take a person who has raised you and showered you with love and stick him in a glorified hospital?

          • @jasondj@ttrpg.network
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            11 months ago

            but how can you take a person who has raised you and showered you with love and stick him in a glorified hospital?

            Because they didnt.

            I have no interest in so much as talking to my parents. They did the bare minimum to get me to 18 and that was it. Everything else was for them. So fuck you if I don’t want to give them the same goddamn treatment so I can break the cycle and focus on my own damn family.

          • @Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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            1011 months ago

            Because they need more living space and socialization with their peers than you have in your home? Have you ever lived in an apartment or condo instead of a single family home out in the country? Was it horrible to live with lots of people your own age instead of with your parents?

            My mother in law is busy constantly hosting dinner parties in her condo at the retirement center where she lives. Retirement centers vary based on amount of care needed.

        • @funktion@lemm.ee
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          711 months ago

          What a weirdly aggressive comment, calm down. It’s a comment section on the internet, don’t get so emotional.

        • @maniclucky@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Educating a child and arguing about things is one of the most normal things in the world. Dealing with an adult who refuses to acknowledge objective reality is a sign of mental decline. These two things are not the same.

          Also, my parents threatened to sell me to gypsies (oof, that does not age well) throughout my childhood so…

          • @Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works
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            211 months ago

            Sadly, when a significant percentage of the country’s population refuses to acknowledge objective reality, it’s no longer really a sign of individual mental decline.

            Like, maybe 30% of the population should be in the looney bin, but that’s in no way practical.

    • @Sagifurius@lemm.ee
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      611 months ago

      Or maybe someone rewrote the books. I’ve long had a suspicion a lot of the Mandela effect is just people with long memories who missed the propaganda rewrite.

      • @AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world
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        4311 months ago

        I find it strange that people somehow mistrust all of the news and history of today but think the very same news sources and historians of the past were somehow accurate.

        The news is written in a hurry. History is written with perspective. Both are drawing upon the same sources in the modern era except the history has more time to cross reference them. It is only natural that we get a better, clearer version of history as time and research is allowed to work on it.

        • @KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2411 months ago

          I’m convinced humans have some kind of natural inherent fetishization of “old knowledge”.

          If it happened outside of living memory they somehow knew more or had special magical knowledge we just don’t understand or can’t interpret from our perspective. The older, the more true people can be convinced that it is.

          As if there is some kind of “platonic ideal” of thoughts or ideas from which all others are derived from, where the further back something back it is, it MUST be more true

          • @DarthBueller@lemmy.world
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            111 months ago

            The Romans did this very thing. One of the reasons the Jews got special treatment (pre-Jewish war and exhile) from sacrificing to the Roman Gods was because their at-that-time monotheistic religion was considered ancient and the Romans respected ancient. A huge part of early Christianity involved the Christians trying to convince the Romans that they were the new Israel and therefore deserving of toleration despite refusing to honor the Roman and local Gods (instead of the Jews).

            The moment the Christians had real power, they went from begging for tolerance, to crushing paganism and persecuting Jews (who had the gall to challenge the validity of their cooption of Judaism).

          • @UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT@sh.itjust.works
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            111 months ago

            No doubt, I’m sure if we pulled up some 2k yo racist screed against Picts or whatever, we’d be like ahhh ancient wisdom we must treasure it, whereas now I just block people lol

      • @buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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        1711 months ago

        I really hope this is just missing the /s at the end.

        But in case it isn’t…

        Which is more likely? That all the media outlets have gone through all of their records and replaced them with different records and all the books out there have been trashed and replaced with new books saying different things and the internet has been scrubbed of all of the real stories and photos and replaced with fake ones? Or that a few misguided people, who weren’t paying very close attention in the first place, misremembered an event?

    • @WaxedWookie@lemmy.world
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      211 months ago

      something has completely rewritten their memories of significant events to the point where he claims many things happened differently than verifiable recorded history.

      That’s what they want you to think.

      Sadly, “they” has shifted from “the gubment” to “the Jews”.

      • @idiomaddict@feddit.de
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        311 months ago

        It was weird to read about protests that I attended that were completely different from my experience. That was the first time I realized that no one in the media necessarily eventually gets the story right.

        • @WaxedWookie@lemmy.world
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          211 months ago

          Sadly, even the supposedly left-aligned media in the 5-eyes countries tends to strongly favour the status quo, motivating them to paint leftists protestors in a bad light as the right wing dishonestly media backs Nazi-aligned shitheels.

  • @niktemadur@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I still remember the so-called Greatest Generation and Silent Generation falling in love with Reagan, combined with Baby Boomer hedonistic indifference, resultng in liberal Democrats getting ripped to shreds at the ballot box. As an adapt-or-die reaction to Bernie-style Democrats getting electorally decimated in the 80s and 90s, the Democratic Party shifted to the center… and republicans got batshit insane with AM radio and 24-hour propaganda television.

    Recent history has showed me in real time how it takes several elections to smash something down… or build something up. Yet there are too many people who seem to believe that one single election is a magic wand that can cure every goddamned evil in politics and society. And if they don’t get what they want, they don’t vote again, or they tune out entirely - “there were elections? I didn’t notice” - constantly putting Democrats in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.

    Case in point of Democrats getting bold: LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act into law, and the country got Nixon twice. Democrats lost the entire south electorally for generations, to this day and beyond.

    Also, Democrats have to deal with hysterical and/or opportunistic right wing shitheads who abuse their power to sabotage every policy proposal, or even the normal functioning of the government at every level, pointless government shutdowns that paralyze the entire apparatus, including day-to-day essentials like teachers and park rangers.
    Fascist bastards who enjoy flirting with visions of dictatorship… as long as they’re the dictator. Who are constantly looking for ways to subvert democracy. Nixon, Cheney, the orange intestinal parasite.

    This is the math Democrat politicians have to work with whenever making a far-reaching decision.

    Complicating the hellish job even further, there’s all those fickle, cherry-picking oh-so-pure voters who demand being catered to instantly and get their “knowledge” from twitter, a noisy drag on the equation.

    Since the 90s, the right wing bastards have perfected the dark art of exploiting 24-hour mass media to keep people rabidly ignorant, to divide and conquer with a “politics for idiots” mantra that bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe.

    I saw it all happen in real time.

    • @Alexstarfire@lemmy.world
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      2611 months ago

      LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act into law, and the country got Nixon twice. Democrats lost the entire south electorally for generations, to this day and beyond.

      Does Georgia mean nothing to you? 😭 We trying.

      • @buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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        411 months ago

        I think things will change for the better when all the people who breathed lead for a large portion of their early lives are all dead.

          • @DarthBueller@lemmy.world
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            311 months ago

            For years I’ve been telling myself it’ll be better when the old guard dies, but (1) fricking Henry Kissinger lived till 100, (2) new younger shittheels keep popping up and they they’re media literate and experts at feeding white male anger, and (3) legal precedent is fucked for a generation thanks to the current balance of the SCOTUS.

    • @whofearsthenight@lemm.ee
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      311 months ago

      I get this every time someone says “both sides are the same!” Like, I’ve watched who’s started basically every major military conflict in my life, who keeps cutting taxes for the rich and who keeps gutting social programs that would benefit the poor, who keeps trying to remove rights and prevent others from getting the rights they’re owed, who’s tanked the deficit and brought this country to near financial collapse multiple times, etc.

      It’s like accelerated around politics in general though. People will still foam at the mouth about how all of the accusations against Trump are just a psyop to bring down their one true god. Meanwhile, he’s standing there holding a selfie cam like “what’s up my true believers, I totally did every single thing they said and I’d do it again twice with your mother and Jesus himself watching.” People out there still saying Trump isn’t a rapist after not only a court of law found him to be one, and -literally everyone has heard a tape of him telling you exactly how to do sex crimes.- But it’s like that for everything. Republicans are just straight up saying shit right into the microphone, and then 30 seconds later pretending like it’s never happened.

  • Buelldozer
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    11 months ago

    As an early GenX whose been online since the BBS days this happens all the time but honestly the historical revisionism isn’t main problems, it’s the loss of context around the history.

        • @distractionfactory@lemmy.world
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          2211 months ago

          Well, traditional news sources have lowered the bar enough that social media isn’t really much worse in a lot of cases. Especially considering how many “news” there is about social media content; it makes it seem that something like Twitter is the “source” that the news is citing. The lines have been blurred, seemingly intentionally so it’s hard to blame people for not having a good barometer who grew up in an ecosystem of generalized enshitification.

        • @CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
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          811 months ago

          Tbh if feels like 80% of modern news sources are just pulling trending headlines from social media and summarizing the top tweets about it anyway…

        • squiblet
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          211 months ago

          Pictures with text on them contain the most reliable facts

      • @Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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        311 months ago

        I think of it this way. Me, my father and my grandfather all read the newspaper the same way. We all went to the store with cash in our pockets. We all talked to bank clerks. Another thing is that there were a lot more historic dramas when we were coming up. Old style candle stick phones and telegraph operators were a common trope.

    • Entropywins
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      311 months ago

      You want some context around history…go listen to Dan Carlins Hardcore History.

      • @Pepper_OCheeny@lemm.ee
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        311 months ago

        I second this! I used to make day-long deliveries across the Kansas plains and listening to Dan Carlin wax eloquent about the rise and fall of the Persian Empire or the Rape of Nanking kept me engaged and entranced the entire time.

  • @brenstar@programming.dev
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    8011 months ago

    I was telling someone much younger than myself that airports didn’t always completely suck to go through. I explained how the TSA wasn’t a thing and the experience was closer to getting on a bus or a train pre 9/11.

    He had a hard time wrapping his head around it because he’s never experienced it.

    Made me feel very old.

    • @Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5411 months ago

      As a post 9/11 adult, moving to a place with really good and smooth flowing train infrastructure made me so frustrated with the stressful and unnecessary security theatre of airports worldwide

        • Queen HawlSera
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          1611 months ago

          I am legitimately surprised that the TSA has not been quietly disbanded by now

          • Lev_Astov
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            1311 months ago

            Too many opportunities for skimming off the top to let go.

          • Alien Nathan Edward
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            1011 months ago

            people won’t fly if they don’t go through the security theater beforehand. they wildly overestimate the likelihood of terrorism because the impact is very high, so if you don’t make them take their shoes off, throw out their water and do a little security dance they’ll assume they’re going to be murdered.

            • @Jtotheb@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              I have yet to meet someone saying thank you while being asked to walk through the metal detector a second time. I think it’s more along the lines of “this decision was never up to us.”

              • Alien Nathan Edward
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                311 months ago

                Eh, maybe you’re right. It’s been a while. Still, hard to overstate the raw terror in the first couple years, maybe now it’s just entrenched bureaucracy

            • @AnneBonny@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              311 months ago

              people won’t fly if they don’t go through the security theater beforehand

              I can’t speak for others, but I would.

      • @limelight79@lemm.ee
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        411 months ago

        I traveled via airline before and after 9/11, and taking trains still amazes me: I can just walk up to it with my bag and get on??? I don’t even have to go into the station if it’s not between the parking and the platform! (The station I usually use is like that.) Plus the comfortable seat with legroom…

    • @RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world
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      1011 months ago

      And then you tell them that baggage fees didn’t used to be a thing and you can see their train of thought go off the tracks.

    • @RebekahWSD@lemmy.world
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      311 months ago

      When I was very young, my mother took me and my twin to the airport, us wearing little backpacks.

      She then handed us to a flight attendant and left.

      The attendant took us to the air plane, sat us down, got us some juice. We sat and colored in books.

      The attendant removed us from the plane and walked us towards the exit.

      We then ran at grandmother and great grandmother. I’m fairly certain the attendant basically said “these yours?”, they said yes, and we left.

      This happened over several summers.

      The thought of that happening today is impossible

  • @m4xie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    4411 months ago

    On the other hand, there’s my dad defending Apartheid with the defence “you weren’t there”. The whole rest of the world from the time seemed to agreed with me, too, Dad.

  • @018118055@sopuli.xyz
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    3611 months ago

    I still regard post-9/11 as an aberration. It feels like if I accept it as the new normal I’ve failed some duty to humanity.

    • The Picard ManeuverOP
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      3011 months ago

      It made the world weird - especially politics. I still attribute the extreme polarization that we see today to the aftermath of 9/11.

      Don’t get me wrong, I know people had strong opinions before 2001, but it didn’t seem like political party was as significant a part of the average person’s identity like it is now.

      • @sbv@sh.itjust.works
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        711 months ago

        I think there’s a pretty strong case that the polarization started before 9/11 - Rush Limbaugh, talk radio conservatism, and the race for evangelicals had been making US conservatives more polarized since the 1980s. The attacks might have made it more apparent, but commentators were decrying polarization in the 1990s.

        • @postmateDumbass@lemmy.world
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          111 months ago

          Life in the USA has never been near as free, affordable, or relaxed since.

          And the leftover institutions and policies from the Patriot Act era are still running things.

    • @Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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      311 months ago

      Nah, the Florida Recount and the SC giving Bush the presidency was the divergent point. More people need to learn about Brooks Brothers riot.

    • @ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      611 months ago

      It’s concerning that people still upvote regurgitated content here. It doesn’t bode well for the future of the website, since there is already so little content here compared to Reddit.

      • @otp@sh.itjust.works
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        1811 months ago

        Do you keep a mental database of every post you’ve ever read? Or do you scroll through an entire community until you reach the end?

        Because otherwise, reposts or recycled content seem fine, imo…

  • @AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee
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    3511 months ago

    To be fair, with time we can learn about what happened and understand it better than whatever the media at the time thought.

    • @LilB0kChoy@lemm.ee
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      1211 months ago

      While this is true in some cases I’m still waiting on concrete evidence the moon landing was fake.

      • MoxFcCloud
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        511 months ago

        Dude went on this long rant to me about the moon landing being fake and then goes “it’s not like I think the earth is flat or anything.”

        Last I heard he now thinks we live under a dome or something so that didn’t last long

    • @crypticthree@lemmy.world
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      611 months ago

      I spent the entire 9/11 era screaming at the television. I actually worked in television and got run off my job because of it

  • @ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    Memories are worse than research

    People are adamant that unpaid days off in the 90s meant people had to work without pay

    • @Dra@lemmy.zip
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      1011 months ago

      Meaningless sentence. Research is a loose definition, memories are loose definition. Research is written by people with memories. Memories are written by first hand research. Words are cheap. Nothing is real

      There is no spoon

  • @Ultraviolet@lemmy.world
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    3011 months ago

    It’s not quite a historical event, more of a bit of trivia, but it seems to be common knowledge that it’s possible to cheat at Duck Hunt by pointing the light gun at a light bulb, making it register a hit every time, often repeated as a sort of “look how far we’ve come, those silly game devs in the 80s missing such an obvious exploit.”

    Except it doesn’t work. The light gun checks for a frame of darkness followed by a frame of light. If it picks up light when it’s not supposed to, it counts it as a miss because it knows what you’re pointing at isn’t the screen at all. But people in all corners of the internet are absolutely convinced this trick was a thing for some reason.

    • @Viper_NZ@lemmy.nz
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      611 months ago

      Some recent cheap, pelt poorly regulated LED lights flicker on and off at high speeds.

      Would it work with these?

      • AItoothbrush
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        411 months ago

        Well actually pwm is used in everything except really expensive lights. Also if you timed it perfectly maybe?

        • @Viper_NZ@lemmy.nz
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          311 months ago

          Oh I mean awful lights like your get from AliExpress where they’ve essentially just rectified the circuit but not bothered with caps so it’s flickering at 50/60Hz.

          • AItoothbrush
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            211 months ago

            Ohh yeah. I think thats even better for cheating prob because the frequency is lower but i dont know how the game functions exactly so maybe its harder to cheat.

            • @Ultraviolet@lemmy.world
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              211 months ago

              At best, if it flickers at exactly the same as the framerate (60Hz NTSC or 50Hz PAL), you’ll have a 50% chance. Either you pull the trigger on a light “frame” or a dark one, and it’s followed by the opposite. You can do better than 50% playing normally.

    • @pascal@lemm.ee
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      411 months ago

      Because the Angry videogame nerd showed it works in one of his videos, that’s why

  • @flamehenry@lemmy.world
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    2711 months ago

    Reminds me of the time I got a quiz question wrong; who was the first Man on the Moon.

    I wasn’t born, but everything I’ve ever read said it was Neil Armstrong, so that’s what I answered.

    The idiot quiz master said it was Buzz Aldrin (the second man). In disbelief, I tried to educate them of their error, only for the rest of the room, mainly boomers, to tell me I was wrong. Including one guy in his 80s who said “It was definitely Buzz. I watched it when it happened. I remember it well”.

    I asked him “who said the famous ‘one small step for man’?”

    Him: “Ahh yes, Now that was Armstrong.”

    Me: “Surely Buzz would say those words if he was the first one out. I mean there is literally video of the event. You even watched it live”

    Him: “Yes, it’s Armstrong in the video. But Buzz was definitely first out. Who do you think was holding the camera?”

  • @Emerald@lemmy.world
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    2511 months ago

    Image Transcription: Twitter Post


    brittany wilson, @sameoldstory

    One disorientating thing about getting older that nobody tells you about is how weird it feels to get a really passionate, extremely wrong lecture from a much younger person about verifiable historical events you can personally remember pretty well