Consider that Meta’s Marketplace is the largest competitor. Immediately after they launched, they quickly capitalized on their Identity Verification natural monopoly on online social networking. This was ‘pivoted’ into “Identity Verification Assurance” for your average Playstore and iPhone users.
Marketplace wasn’t even easier to use than Craigslist, 99% of the arguments for using it were “it’s safer because it’s less scams”.
I wouldn’t put it beneath Zuck and his bootlickers to pay a few bitcoins to maintain an artifically inflated number of scams on Craigslist.
It reinforces the mistaken belief that scams are driven by anonymity (instead of the truth that you can have all their data and the justice department will look the other way… that’s why they keep doing it until they scam Grant Hudson of McLean, VA).
Anyway, the faster CL dies the sooner Meta consolidates a monopoly on electronic flea marketing or whatever it’s called.
The guy that runs Craigslist is a real one. He could be charging for the whole site, but he isn’t. He could put ads on it, but he isn’t. He makes enough money for himself and his employees to live comfortably and keeps the website the same on principle. It really pisses me off that people abandoned it in favor the evil that is Facebook. Support the good ones, like Craigslist and Arizona ice tea, reject the evil ones. It’s simple.
If anyone is interested in learning more:
https://youtu.be/N0wK_yXf7wo?is=9rKWd52rY87on9nY
I swear there’s a fat electrician video for every single one of these companies that are mysteriously not evil.
(… then proceeds with a Youtube, a Google’s platform, link)
I mean, please don’t get me wrong, I definitely agree with everything you said. It’s just… we should also be doing a similar thing (supporting the good ones) when it comes to video platforms.
PeerTube, for example, is part of the Fediverse we’re currently on. It really pisses me off whenever I see a Youtube link being shared through the Fediverse (and especially in a Lemmy community whose name is Privacy), given we do have alternatives.
It’s been a little more than two years since I stopped using Youtube altogether (I don’t even use the alternative front-ends). My boycott against Youtube isn’t enough, because Youtube links keep popping up in Lemmy threads oftentimes. And because Lemmy would go a step further and try to embed the Youtube player in place of the hyperlink (therefore phoning Google automatically) when it’s a thread (not your case, yours appears as a hyperlink because it’s a comment), I had to manually add youtube.com and youtu.be iframe domains to my uBO network filtering.
Goes without saying, I don’t have a Facebook, either.
!privacy@lemmy.ml
So sorry I’m new still, I’ll keep the links of YouTube off Lemmy from now on. Same guy posts to pepperbox under fat electrician, I can update the link later when I get on my computer. You’re totally right, YouTube is part of the axis of evil and I shouldn’t be using it. I’ll check peertube out. It would suck to stop following my favorite creators but it’s worth it if there are decent alternatives.
Oh… I’m the one who must beg pardon, upon re-reading our exchange I noticed I sounded harsh, I truly didn’t mean to. It was intended as an advice, not just to you but to everyone reading as well. Please take the time you need, migration across platforms is never easy, and like I’m going to say in the following paragraphs, it’s definitely not a 1:1 migration.
Yeah… that’s unfortunately a problem 🙁
I used to watch hundreds of channels, including but not limited to ElectroBoom, Veritassium, Technology Connections, Practical Engineering, and similar STEM channels. I also used to produce some content myself (mostly technical experiments with steganography and novel ciphers, but also some esoteric content), even though my channel was very small and with the content often using Creative Commons licensing.
As I was faced by increasing enshittification from Youtube, including but not limited to stumbling upon advertisement pitches verging the dangerous (malware, scam/bets, etc), I took this decision that was far from easy, especially due to how I used to enjoy the aforementioned channels.
But then, it’s partly on those science communicators to keep themselves and their audiences captive of a monopolistic platform. If people migrated to something else en masse, similarly to how it happened regarding Twitter (people mostly migrated to Bluesky; not the perfect choice, considering there’s Mastodon right at the corner of the street, but at least people went from a monopoly on microblogging, to something “less monopolistic”).
I, the one viewer less in their daily numbers, am mere dust in the wind, but if other people started doing the same, then it’d be a phenomenon that couldn’t be ignored; content creators often are where the audience is, and when (if) the audience makes this hard decision of going somewhere less monopolistic, either they follow their audience to the new place, or they’d be left with the “audience” from Google Gemini. Hence my active campaign to advise people to start boycotting Youtube, even though most of the valuable content is still kept hostage within Youtube hosting; content creators would likely follow if this exodus happened in a significant number.
!privacy@lemmy.ml
I’ll stick to nebula I think :)