i’ve been thinking a lot about how much modern websites generally suck today
and I think that if I were instructed to fuck up a perfectly good piece of website functionality that I, as a developer, had spent weeks or months perfecting, in order to implement something worse for the sake of Engagement and Click-Through Rates, then I would offer to buy lunch for my coworkers, load them all up into my car, and drive straight into an abutment at 130 mph
really the funny thing is, I posted that as I was installing the new plugin and tinkering with the ones I already have… on my desktop, where I basically can’t watch Youtube videos due to, fucking apparently, the impacts of spread-spectrum clock generation on my sound card
my goal is to install so many browser plugins to strip out ads, sponsor breaks, and general shitty parts of Youtube's functionality that the site's staff email me personally to beg for mercy
Any recommendations for such plugins?
these are all for Firefox. if you use Chrome, I would encourage you to not do that
uBlock Origin obviously.
SponsorBlock is the other one I’ve used for ages and it is great. It depends on user-sourced info, so it won’t always have anything for you, especially for smaller channels, but it lets you skip over things as specific as ‘don’t show me the non-music bits of music videos.’ But also, mostly, sponsors, and other advertising-y things that are part of the video itself.
I was introduced to Youtube Search Fixer just today and it is promising for things like 'don’t force me to watch shorts in this shitty Tiktok-wannabe UI’ or just 'fuck shorts entirely, actually.’
Enhancer for Youtube isn’t so much doing things that would make the devs cry as just adding lots of customization options and–this is important–it lets you disable autoplay.
some of these add-ons have overlapping functionality and you probably don’t wanna enable the same stuff for all of them, lest they Tussle
my goal is to install so many browser plugins to strip out ads, sponsor breaks, and general shitty parts of Youtube’s functionality that the site’s staff email me personally to beg for mercy
Ugh, all these amateurs doing Major-General’s Song parodies about millennials with inexact rhymes!!! This is how you do it:
MILLENNIAL:
I am the very model of a modern, gay millennial,
I’ve information useless and anxiety perennial,
I’m treated with suspicion when I’m not outright infantilized
And miffed at how the internet is ever more mercantilized.
I fret about the dangers of calamity climatical,
And get my hands on media in manner most piratical,
I’m practiced in the art of homosexual effrontery—
Effrontery, effrontery, let’s see…yes!
And often made ecstatic by an older woman’s cuntery!
CHORUS:
And often made ecstatic by an older woman’s cuntery,
And often made ecstatic by an older woman’s cuntery!
And often made ecstatic by an older woman’s cunter-unter-y!
MILLENNIAL:
Then I can write a catalogue of epithets Homerical,
And have a handsome person get me nakedly hysterical—
I likely won’t survive to see the U.S. tricentennial,
For I’m the very model of a modern, gay millennial!
CHORUS:
There’s very little chance he’ll see the U.S. tricentennial,
The country won’t last long enough, and he’s a gay millennial!
i like what this site has done to my perception of breaking bad like i don't think this show was ever on amc it was on cartoon network and it had an episode where walter had to build a shrinking submarine to get a taki out of jesse's windpipe
Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?
They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.
Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?
So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.
And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn't compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn't sell.
And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at... putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.
If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn't have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that's what they did.
I don't know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.