Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Nebula is US$50 per year if you go straight to the website, but $30 per year if you click through any one of the creators’ own referal URLs. No region-specific pricing as far as I know (but YouTube does have region-specific pricing, which is slightly cheaper in Australia than America using current currency exchange rates, which is why Nebula is more expensive here than in America, in YT-months).

    The vast majority of Nebula content is available on YouTube, albeit with sponsors/ad reads removed, and sometimes a week or so early.

    There’s a fair amount of Nebula “Plus” content. Extra or supplementary material to videos that are otherwise available on YouTube, or an extra video in a series where most of the series is on YouTube but this episode is not.

    There are also Nebula Originals, where Nebula themselves helped fund the project and the video is exclusive to Nebula. There are quite a few of these, but they’re less common than the other categories.

    The entire library is available to browse for free without an account if you go to their website and hit Explore so you can see for yourself. Look for the Nebula logo star for Originals, the + sign for Plus content, and the lightning bolt for Nebula First. You can also use the filters near the top to see only those, if you want. To give a rough sense of the relative abundance, my tablet displays up to 9 thumbnails per screen, and when sorting by most recent, the oldest I see without scrolling is 20 March for Originals, 30 April for Plus, just 9 May for First, and when unfiltered it only goes as far back as 19 hours ago, including 2 Nebula First videos.

    some companies just convert dollar values to local currencies

    This is what Dropout does I think. It displayed some weird numbers like $91.74, but didn’t actually say anywhere that this was AUD until I read the fine print, so I almost started out comparing it to the US YT price. I assume the US price is a more round number.

    Nebula just displays US prices and charges US prices regardless, I think. It’s been a while since I actually looked at how they do it.


  • YouTube Premium costs as much for just two months as Nebula does for an entire year (if you sign up through a creator’s code—US prices. Australian prices it’s about 2.6 months) Highly recommend, probably the best bang for your buck option.

    Dropout is quite a bit more expensive than Nebula, and narrower in range of content (basically comedy panel shows, sketch comedy, and D&D), but it’s still only 5.4 months’ worth of YouTube Premium in cost (for your second & subsequent year—4.3 months for the first year discount), and you’re directly supporting the creators. Still a very good deal.

    If you’ve got both of those, that’s 8 months of YouTube Premium’s cost, leaving 4 months worth that can be spent directly on individual creators’ Patreons, Kofis, one-off donations, or on their merch.



  • It really depends on how much people want to get around it. I grew up in Vietnam, where when I was in about year 10 of high school, the government decided to start blocking Facebook. Their block was only DNS, so word quickly spread around the school that you could still access Facebook if you changed your DNS. This was before quad 9 or even Google’s quad 8 (the latter came around shortly after, which was a big improvement to how easy this became), so the DNS we ended up using was a difficult specific number to remember and communicate, but even despite that, by the end of the month pretty much everyone in school—from students to teachers—had learnt how to change their DNS to bypass the block.

    People always say that piracy is more popular when it’s easier than the legal means. And obviously adding a DNS block to pirating is going to increase its difficulty, and increase the relative convenience of legal means. But if the legal means continues getting worse and worse, at some point piracy is going to look more appealing again, and people will figure out how to bypass the DNS block.



  • As far as I’m aware the most widely-accepted standard for responsible disclosure is 90 days. This is a little different, since that’s normally between businesses and includes the time needed to develop a solution; it’s not typically aimed at federated or self-hosted applications rolling out an already-created patch. On the one hand, granting them that extra time to upgrade seems reasonable. On the other, wouldn’t anyone wanting to exploit a vulnerability be able to reverse-engineer it pretty easily by reading the git history?

    I dunno where I land on this, tbh.



  • I think there may be an issue with your instance, because my comment is now showing up on starktrek.website, lemmy.world, etc.

    Shortly after my instance upgraded, things seemed not to be federating correctly, but now, everything seems to be working. I suspect that was because the wokers were going through a big backlog of posts & comments that had accumulated in the lengthy time federation was not working. But now, everything seems to be working as expected between my instance and the other larger instances.



  • Man I hate this new dynamic and insertion bs. For 15 years all the podcasts I listened to had host-read ads. And in most cases, I had enormous trust in the podcaster to choose companies that he was willing to stand behind. I’ve used products I first heard about on a host-read podcast as before, and never regretted it.

    But in the last 12 months I’ve been getting dynamically inserted ads a lot more. Partly because those older podcasts are using them to supplement income as advertisers are less willing to buy host-read ads than they once were (a lack of data and targeting when buying a podcast ad spot is the biggest factor, but also laziness on the part of marketing managers because host-read ads need to be negotiated and bought individually, rather than making single big buys in automated insertion systems), but mostly because I’ve started listening to a few newer podcasts that weren’t around in the heyday of podcasting.

    And it really sucks. More and more it’s feeling like the podcasting industry is being enshittified, not even because of the desires of podcasters themselves, but thanks to advertisers hating the idea that podcast ads were more like TV ads than internet banner ads/YouTube preroll video ads, and thanks to big businesses like Spotify coming into the audio content market. (N.B., it’s very important to remember that what Spotify does is not podcasting. By definition if it’s delivered via a proprietary service rather than the open RSS standard, it is not podcasting.)