cobysev

Take YouTube Shorts for instance. I’ve made it clear I hate these things, but they keep popping up on my homepage every other week.

🤔 What’s the deal with this endless pushing of features we hate? Are they just ignoring user feedback entirely, or is there some secret strategy I’m not seeing?

TikTok is insanely popular among the younger generations, so YouTube, also being a video hosting site, wanted to jump on that bandwagon and leech some of the revenue from that style of video. So they came up with YouTube Shorts, to mimic the popular short-form upright video style.

The problem is, YouTube is NOT TikTok. Most of their user base doesn’t go to YouTube for short-form videos. So getting their audience to engage with YouTube Shorts requires them to shove it in our faces until we just get used to it.

That’s the strategy; beat us with it until we give in. They know we’re not going to go away. People aren’t organized enough to properly protest against features in a way that will scare a company into fixing it. So they’re going to keep harassing us until we’re so used to seeing it, we just don’t care anymore. Or until their content attracts the TikTok generation and successfully feeds a whole new category of revenue for the company. That’s the enshittification process for you; as long as it’s profitable, it’s going to stay.

I forget how I did it, but I blocked YouTube Shorts from showing up in my feed. I use Firefox with uBlock Origin and that removes all ads on YouTube. I even blocked the YouTube app on my phone and redirected all YouTube links to Firefox.

I used to have another extension that blocked YouTube Shorts, but I don’t see it in my extensions anymore. But they still don’t show, so maybe uBlock Origin is doing it for me?

I also don’t allow YouTube to keep a history of my activity. Which makes my homepage just a blank screen. I’d been fighting them for years, trying to remove all suggested videos from my homepage, and now it’s so simple: I just don’t save my activity and they don’t recommend anything to me.

I have subscriptions that I follow and that’s it; I don’t let them suggest videos for me to watch. I don’t need to feed their algorithms or help them build a better profile on me. I’m very anti-advertisement already, and I do my best to not let companies influence my economic behavior.

Movies have actually been a huge influence on America’s view on sexuality, if not the largest influence.

There’s one organization, CARA (the Classification and Rating Administration) who provides ratings for movies and TV shows in the US, and they’ve heavily censored nudity in film for decades, giving films shockingly high ratings if even a breast is flashed on screen for a moment.

This has caused studios to limit nude scenes, or to be extremely creative about sex scenes, to avoid higher ratings. Because the higher the rating, the smaller the audience will be, and they want to appeal to a larger audience.

If you watch American films from the 70s and earlier, seeing casual nudity in a film was a pretty normal thing, whereas you have to buy a porno just to see any nudity today.

This had a nasty backfire effect, where our culture now associates nudity with sex. We don’t appreciate the natural human body unless it’s under the context of sexual desire or procreation.

The crazy thing is, nobody really knows who the members of CARA are. Their identity is kept secret. The heads of their organization are known; you can check them out on their official website (https://www.filmratings.com/About), but the organization as a whole keeps their members’ names secret. So we have no idea who these people are who are censoring nudity in American films.

This depends on a lot of factors. If you’re part of a targeted demographic due to race, gender, religion, etc., then it might be safer to flee before you draw attention to yourself.

If you’re not a targeted demographic, then it might be best to stick around and stand up for your fellow citizens. But this could also lump you in with the targeted demographic and might eventually lead to your own persecution, so it’s a risky choice.

Either way, I still advocate for standing up to any oppression or persecution going on in your home country. No one should ever lose their home to dictators and/or fascists.

This is actually how a lot of states get divided politically. People see a place as a “red state” or a “blue state” and decide to either avoid them or move away if their political ideology doesn’t line up. But that just further entrenches the area into a political leaning. By sticking around and advocating for human rights and better community and respect, you can help prevent the splitting of communities and stop divisive concepts like fascism from forming.

I mean, I am the source. This was my personal experience while serving in the military.

But if you want official reports to back up what I experienced, here’s you go:

Intelligence officials withheld sensitive information from Trump while he was in office because they feared the ‘damage’ he could do if he knew.

I was working in an Intelligence unit when Trump was president (not the one directly briefing him) and it’s all anyone talked about at the time. They had to be extremely careful what information they shared with him because he would just go and post details on his social media accounts.

My unit had to change a lot of their missions and coordination because Trump would expose our secrets online. It ruined a lot of ongoing missions we had planned, and we had to scrap and rebuild a lot of our programs after he blabbed about them.

Trump fires top US general in unprecedented Pentagon shakeup

This was more recent, after I retired. But he basically fired our top military leaders, then made his own suggestions for replacements, completing ignoring the official promotion system we have in place.

He didn’t want people with years of experience and exemplary service to lead our military, he just wants his own loyalists in charge so he can control the military. He nominated highly unqualified people for the positions, with the only seemingly common quality being that they were loyal to Trump.

He was also annoyed at how hard it was to replace key people and wanted to circumvent official processes so he can hire and fire people at will, like his old businesses.

I retired from the US military 3 years ago. Yes, they can refuse unlawful orders. If I was still serving, I’d be abusing the hell out of that regulation right now.

During Trump’s last presidency, our intelligence community actually held back a lot of details in his intelligence briefings because we knew he couldn’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut. He has a top secret clearance, not because he could be trusted with it, but because it was a requirement for his job. And he also reversed our decision to withhold clearances from sketchy members of our government, so a lot of untrustworthy people also got access to our sensitive data, and thanks to that, we had a lot of compromised missions during his first tenure as president.

But we also had a majority Democrat government, which kept him in check. This time around, he’s attempting to replace everyone he can with his “yes men” so he gets no push-back. He’s even been trying to replace military generals with his own loyalists. If he can control the military, he can basically stage a coup overnight and no one will be able to stop him.

Things are getting really dangerous right now, so that regulation about refusing unlawful orders is very important, and I hope our current military members are willing to exercise it as needed.

I’ve been paying for Proton VPN for a couple years now and I’ve never been blocked by YouTube.

I’m also using uBlock Origin and Firefox as a browser. YouTube takes like 5-10 seconds to load videos, thanks to their built-in delay timer when ads can’t play, but otherwise it works fine.

Honestly, I’d gladly wait 30 seconds staring at a black screen than watch a 10-second ad. So their delay timer is pointless.

These kind of anime shows are targeted at the folks who tend to be big anime fans. It’s escapism, showing a world where even they can land the best girl in the school. It’s not meant to be realistic.