As I've been talking a lot about the hangups in captioning on YouTube lately, it's deeply unfortunate that they've decided to drop this (flawed) feature rather than improving it.
The main reason they're discontinuing is "low use". The issues with the community captions system which contribute to that low use are that it's vulnerable to abuse and it's largely invisible to channel owners.
The alerts system has been broken for ages, now. Either you get a notification with every single subscription (i.e. potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions) or you get none.
I spent a lot of the day thinking more about apocalypse fetishists who like to compare themselves to wolves and other predators, but the funny thing is that they know so little about how predators actually behave.
First of all, most predators are actually pretty bad hunters on paper, failing the vast majority of their hunts.
But there's a very good reason for that: they're well aware the odds aren't in their favour.
If you're a megafauna carnivore (i.e. eat things like deer or elk and that don't just pick on things 1/20th your size) your ability to eat is directly tied to your ability to win fights, and injuries of any kind have an outsized impact on your ability to win fights.
Spoilers: it's not a better idea because it means-tests based on "lost your job due to coronovirus-related reasons" which fails to encompass literally the entire self-employed gig economy who will never formally lose their jobs, because they don't technically have jobs.
It also doesn't encompass people who aren't fired but aren't getting hours or salary and people who weren't working but have had their support network collapse.
Worrying about rich people accidentally getting some extra cash is a waste of time and effort. The number of people who really have no use for an extra $1000 a month is dwarfed by the number of people it would literally save.
I'm becoming mildly obsessed with trying to describe exactly what's going on with The Witcher 2's interface, the sheer number of different compartments for commands, and then things are just put randomly 2-3 layers deeper in any given compartment.
So you want to drink a potion?
Open the Quick Action Wheel and select meditate.
Now select "Alchemy and Potions"
Now select "Drink Potions"
Drink any potions, being mindful of your maximum Toxicity rating.
Escape out of the menus, then press space to stop meditating.
Geralt starts with eight spells, but the initial way you have to interact with them is only by their short fantasy names like "Ahm" with no indication what any of them do barring the orange "Flam" which is probably the one that lights things on fire (and is).
At that YouTube workshop I went to a month back, we actually spent a lot of time talking about subscriber purges, and the room was really split on the subject.
The older channels were concerned about the optics of having 2-3m subs but only getting 50-60k views per video, while the newer channels were more concerned about the optics of slipping below a milestone.
It was actually really informative in that the YouTube folks got into some detail about which dashboard metrics influence discovery and which are purely informational.
At the risk of being Old Man Yells At Clouds, it's 2019, The Future™, and somehow our music-listening technology has gotten broadly worse.
I was listening to old albums today, stuff from the 90s that I've heard 100 times, and all the song transitions were ruined. Opening beats were clipped, fades that carry between tracks were missing.
Music does it. The last version of iTunes does it. YouTube Music is trash. Don't even get me started on the wrecking ball that is Spotify.
I haven't talked much about COPPA on Twitter because it is *wicked* complicated.
Obviously for my own channel it's a non-issue. From vocabulary to subject matter to presentation there's nothing remotely child-facing, and in actual practice under-13 viewers make up 0.1% of my audience, which is margin of error.
A lot of channels that are basically kids ""reviewing"" toys or kids ""playing"" with toys that are asserting that they'll have to shut down their channels as though they weren't the FTC's explicit target because they're skeevy AF and ought to go the way of the Reply Girls.
It's always hilarious when cryptocurrency evangelists act like you're the weirdo for being "fixated" on things like "being able to buy food".
"Hey, use our PissTube service and we'll pay you in PissKoin! We empower creators!"
"Uh, okay, what can I spend PissKoin on?"
"You can spend PissKoins at any retailer that accepts PissKoin!"
"Sure, like who?"
"God, why are you so obsessed with spending?"
The BitTube dev team found me this morning and got super frothy over my lack of faith in their scam, but apparently there's one only-mostly-shady website where you can actually spend TUBEs and it is, of course, an online CBD dispensary.
Apparently Death Stranding is clumsy, tedious, bizarre art trash and I'm suddenly excited.
"A train wreck of ham-handed themes stacked atop exhausting, banal gameplay and wrapped in authorial self-importance"
There's a scene in Dolemite Is My Name where Rudy Ray Moore & co. are headed to the premiere of Dolemite, and they're reading reviews in the paper. They're all negative, but one of them calls the movie "coarse, rude, crude, and vulgar" and Rudy says "that's a good one!"
I am actually a little shocked at YouTube's lack of foresight with this. How have they not learned by now how these things go?
Thread on verification, why this isn't a big deal, and why it will be treated like one b/c YouTube are bad communicators.
YouTube verification has historically been a fairly trivial flag, about on par with those "verify your email" messages you get when you sign up for a forum or something: it's there to slow down automated account spam.
And for years everyone has been fine with that.
But Twitter, who ruin everything, created an ecosystem where Verified User became a coveted status, a symbol of import, relevance, endorsement, &c.
I need to talk more about Angel Has Fallen, specifically how it comes from this super narrow Establishment Republican point of view and how that’s turned on hard-right political actors.
It’s the movie equivalent of Ted Cruze calling Richard Spencer a loser.
It’s the kind of movie that really hates Dick Cheney, but specifically because he approved PMC contracts instead of instituting a general draft.
Like, if you watched yesterday's stream, I did the absolute bare minimum of organization and wasted a lot of time clicking on clips trying to find the thing I was looking for, way more time than it would have taken to do proper labels, tags, or sub-clips.
Quick straw poll, if you're planning on checking out WoW Classic, which launches next Monday: do you have an active subscription already, or were you planning to do that just before/shortly after launch?
I actually don't think they have because there's a far bigger bugbear hanging over the whole thing that makes this a tricky situation to solve.
I estimated months and months ago that WoW Classic was probably going to stabilize around 125k players in the Americas/Oceanic region. Blizzard seems to agree with me because they've got 14 realms for the region which is enough space for a very comfy 8-12k players per realm.
One of the more interesting cultural discussions out there that I spend a lot of time thinking about in other contexts is the difference between deaf and Deaf.
For those not in the know, deaf, lower-case d, is used to discuss the physiological condition of hearing loss, while Deaf refers to the unique cultural existence and expression of people who are deaf, in short physically deaf vs. culturally Deaf.
So sign language is something that you learn, a cultural expression, it's not something you merely acquire by losing your hearing. Many elderly folk are deaf, but losing their hearing late in life have no foot in the cultural world of Deafness.
Hey remember when you dickheads forwarded my name, email address, and IP number to 8chan after we sent you a report about the child pornography ring they were hosting? You get no credit for doing the right thing five years late.
This wasn't an automated system, either. The leadership at Cloudflare made a conscious, human decision to forward the information. Brennan posted the bespoke "lol, these people tried to report you" email that he received from them.
So @eastdakota can eat my whole ass. He's not just some mealy-mouthed fence sitting bro. He likes 8chan. His company has gone above and beyond to defend them. I hope his IPO tanks like the Hindenburg.
Okay, I figured the Thermian video was making the rounds again, but this is A+. Apparently Teal Deer made a "reply" and got himself a community strike for hate speech 😂
I mean, honestly, this is the first I've heard of any of this. Between VidCon, recovering from con-plague, and being energized to work on new stuff, I only learned about TL;DR's video, well, a half hour ago.
That said I suspected something was up when I received this DM a few days ago.
The best tell is that the DM frames this like a discussion that's happening right now and not a sadsack cartoon avi "replying" to a four year old video.
Sex work is work in both the validating-it-as-legitimate sense and the it's-actually-a-job-and-can-be-very-mundane-and-even-boring sense.
I'm seeing that "if sex work is work then suddenly they'll be teaching it in college!" tweet making a second trip around the block and it's just like "yes, but a lot of those classes are going to be just as dry as any other program"
Even her "dark vision of the future" example of the Brazilian performer's online Porn University was, like, 3/4s seminars on taxes, identifying fraud producers, protecting yourself (identity, law, money, physical safety), managing a production, and promotion.
I was told that I should definitely watch Eragon before potentially playing the video game, and, well...
It looks like a giant candy and is also obviously a dragon egg and I'm really looking forward to everyone calling it a stone for another 20 minutes then being all "BWAAAAAAH? IT'S AN EGG?!"
Oh okay it's more like "oh cool a dragon egg that's interesting" and everyone just stops calling it a stone so people who knew it was an egg calling it a stone was pointless
