This reminds me of my early shopping days using EBay, where it wasn’t uncommon for sellers to under-price their products so they show up near the top of the price (cheapest-most expensive) sort pile, and then charge an outrageous amount in shipping.

I’ve found that almost always (at the time), that the seller offering free or low cost shipping was usually cheaper.

Thats a pretty thorough reply which gives some further insight into the issues we’re facing. While the ideas certainly makes sense in a vacuum (especially with governments and markets staying in their lane), there is a major issue in that the very politicians managing the government would have a pretty big conflict of interest which would prevent the sort of reforms necessary, as most politicians would fall under one or more of the following:

• They own/run businesses from prior to running for a political position- there’s always going to be a subconscious bias towards playing favours especially as they can go back to said business if they don’t last a term
• They have a stake in the businesses that are in the free market
• They could be receiving gifts and/or contributions from businesses that have a vested interest in having a politician that aligns with the business’ political agenda, including having a position for a politician if they lose a re-election bid

It’s really difficult to see how the government can be separated from the free market if the politicians are closely involved with the businesses, which can later be deemed as “too big to fail”.

Microsoft Teams is sorta like the all grown up version of MSN, with the colour drained from it and “fun” features out of the box feeling dead on the inside

Usually the systems that need to be modernized are working, so nobody wants to invest in a new system that may require retraining the people that may be impacted. Then there’s some systems with integrations that may also require replacing so the integrations can continue to work.

Even then, there’s always a good possibility that the automation fails, especially in the first few iterations of trying to sort out the kinks, and third party automation tools aren’t perfect either. That’s another tool to have to update and maintain once all is said and done.

I’m not trying to rail too hard against the changes, but the impact is especially felt by the people managing the systems, who’s most likely getting more work tacked on to their workload of putting out fires behind the scenes.

Just to add, Vista’s biggest change broke compatibility with so many applications with the implementation of User Access Control (UAC).

While it was a long-overdue feature for security, lots of older applications would either fail to install or not work properly because it expected to have full system access with no roadblocks. While there was compatibility mode, the results were still very much hit or miss.

Then there was the massive headache around the original implementation of UAC which would constantly go off, usually multiple times during a software installation and again when starting some applications. Most people would’ve turned off UAC because of how annoying it was.

It’s sorta like multinational corporations can get away with their shenanigans since they don’t have to strictly abide by a nations set of rules.

There was a brief point in YouTube’s history where there were little-to-no ads, and creators weren’t expecting to make a living off the videos they made. Somewhere down the line, it feels like the wrong turn was taken from a content consumers perspective.

Yes, hosting is expensive between the infrastructure and bandwidth requirements, but there already was a model in traditional web hosting where the hosting provider charges for the hosting infrastructure, as well as storage and bandwidth costs. While we’re all so accustomed to accessing sites for free and fast, I think that there should’ve been a “free” tier for uploads which could’ve been kept at 10 mins or w/e and rate limited, while offering paid tiers for longer, higher quality/fidelity content , and larger bandwidth buckets before rate limiting which could help offset YTs costs, as well as temper expectations of what it means to create and watch.

Heck, there could even be a paid tier for viewers that could even allow viewers to watch “free” uploads without being limited, and the viewer would be supporting as well.

Yes, that means that large scale, Mr. Beast style productions would be a lot less feasible, but I feel like it’s not just the platform that being enshittified, but also the amount of aspiring creators who’ve also come out of the woodwork copying or re-uploading other creators content in hopes of getting blessed by the algorithm for a free payout.

I know these are 2 separate issues, and the ship has sailed long ago, but I can’t help but feel like this whole business model is being done wrong from a sustainability perspective.

Depending on the jurisdiction, always have a baseball and potentially gloves with you as well. Having only a baseball bat can be considered as either possession of a weapon or having an intent to cause harm I think, which can really backfire when authorities get involved.

IANAL, and anyone reading should consult their local laws surrounding self-defence before carrying items for the express purpose of self-defence