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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • I feel like a lot people on Lemmy, and people in left-leaning spaces in general, kind of have a blind spot on this one. People get that buying local is good, but not buying American.

    It matters where your money goes. People complain about the soullessness of modern American life, and how hard it is to find a good job, and how democracies are backsliding around the globe, and then they buy things from China that are cheaply made and, at most, slightly better value in the long run.

    This isn’t me trying to be nationalist or xenophobic but whenever anyone (including me because there’s no way to completely avoid it nowadays) buys Chinese goods you are supporting a government that is aggressively un-democratic, that actively supports Russia, and also has basically zero labor laws and an absolutely enormous wealth gap between the ruling class and the working class.

    And yeah I get a lot of Americans are hurting right now due to inflation but the solution isn’t to send money overseas. The best thing you can do for your neighbor is buy union and buy American.





  • It’s a fair point. The honest answer might be that with current technology there is simply no way to make Youtube profitable. If Google can’t pull this off I don’t think anyone can. In which case we will see a slow, but profitable death for Youtube as they make increasingly user-hostile moves, like raising prices, increasing ads, and eventually becoming increasing aggressive about deleting rarely watched videos. This will kill their user base over time of course, but they are still sitting on a massive treasure trove of content. The one thing in their favor is that storing and transmitting data gets cheaper every year. Maybe that’s what they’re holding out for.


  • I know that for many years in the 2000s and early 2010s- what many consider to be the golden age of Youtube- they were losing money. That’s what I think a lot or people don’t get when they claim “enshittification”- the services they are complaining about are unsustainable in their current form. That’s what it takes to establish a digital product- grow your base first while bleeding money, then figure out a way to monetize it later. As capital tightens up, the clock is running out for brands like Netflix, Discord, Youtube etc to start making money. That’s the part that sucks as a consumer but idk what else YouTube can do if it wants to be profitable. They offer a premium version for people that don’t want to watch ads.