Zagorath

It’s really unfortunate that Lemmy handles deleted posts in this way. It’s one of very few genuine advantages of the Reddit platform. Over there, if the OP deleted the post, the text they wrote would no longer be visible, but all the comments under it still would be. And people could continue to have that discussion, so long as they had the link.

I’d rather just spend a fraction of the money on a Nebula subscription.

Oh damn yeah. I was comparing YouTube Premium in countries like Australia (US$11.07/month), US ($13.99), and UK ($16.41). If you’re somewhere that it costs a tenth of that, it definitely changes the calculus.

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.

I’m really glad to see that text transcriptions of image posts are much more common here than on other sites, but clearly still not common enough.

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.

This seems to include all forms of VPNs, including corporate ones.

Eh, I doubt it. If the exit point is in Italy it would be going through an Italian ISP, and that ISP should be responsible for enforcing the filter, the same as it would be for a retail customer.

Disagree. I use a paid streaming service that’s every bit as convenient as Netflix, but has a library consisting of almost anything you could possibly think of. No need to hope somebody’s seeding it, or go searching through dozens of different sites. It’s one super easy go-to source that not only has the content, but remembers where you left off, allows user profiles, etc. That convenience is worth paying for.