There's a lot of empirical claims surrounding this topic, and I'm unaware who really has good evidence for them. The Substack guy e.g. is claiming that banning or demonetising would not "solve the problem" – how do we really know? At the very least, you'd think that demonetising helps to some extent, because if it's not profitable to spread certain racist ideas, that's simply less of an incentive. On the other hand, plenty of people on this thread are suggesting it does help address the problem, pointing to Reddit and other cases – but I don't think anyone really has a grip on the empirical relationship between banning/demonetising, shifting ideologues to darker corners of the internet and what impact their ideas ultimately have. And you'd think the relationship wouldn't be straightforward either – there might be some general patterns but it could vary according to so many contingent and contextual factors.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that this is literally only a problem in the United States. Everywhere else in the world, folks are totally fine using messaging apps. WhatsApp is pretty popular worldwide, and there are regional favorites too. But, the point is, it’s only in the States that people seem to be against this idea. The answer for why is very much up for debate, but the conversation is, at this point, just getting exhausting.

Can confirm, as a Brit. We probably would have a sardonic explanation for why only people in the States are against using other messengers too...

True by the letter but not really by practice. PC is synonymous with a computer running Windows, or Linux at a push. I don't know whether that's because of Microsoft's early market dominance or because Apple enjoys marketing itself as a totally different entity, or some combination of the two. But yeah, usage determines meaning more than what the individual words mean in a more literal sense.

Not the method of a narcissist or manipulator at all, that.

Considering they said almost all, that's not the gotcha you think it is.

in the end, you’re leeching off a service you enjoy.

I don't think that's a fair or true statement.

For one thing, the "service" here has risen to a point of ubiquity that it's a de facto public space. Everything is on YouTube – legacy media channels, individual enthusiasts, alternative media outlets, the worlds of tech, fashion, politics, sports – you name it. If you were deprived of all access to it, you would have a qualitatively poorer access of what is going on in society. So it's not equivalent to a traditional service like a trade.

For another, blocking ads is not merely refusal to pay a fee of some kind. Advertisements are cognitively intrusive, designed to affect your willpower and decision-making, used to track and control your behaviour, compromise your digital safety, and turn you into a product for companies to whom you do not give your consent for the opportunity to be exploited. Blocking that system of "payment" is not simply prudent but right, and the choice between paying a monetary fee or being so exploited is not a fair choice at all.

For me, what works perfectly is this setup:

Desktop – Adguard

Android – YouTube ReVanced

Never get adverts ever. The day I'm forced is the day I stop using it altogether.

+1 for MiX. ~~It's FOSS~~ and has everything you could want in a file explorer, functionality wise.

Edit: scratch that. God knows how long I thought it was FOSS for!

So do people in the US chiefly send messages via SMS rather than WhatsApp and others like it? That's so bizarre to me haha.

Are we allowed FOSS alternatives to common FOSS apps lol? In which case, I'm saying NeoStore > F-Droid.

Also, separately, Zotero > all commercial reference manages and increasingly over PDF readers too.

Yeah it is pretty solid. I used to use KeepassX, which while also a very cool project, was a bit more tinkering than needed. I hosted the database on a mainstream cloud provider though, and figured at that point, you might as well use the cloud storage of a company with a great security reputation instead and just bundle all together. And so BitWarden.

Basically: American teenagers/kids think Android is backwards and uncool, even though this is false; Android historically and presently more capable than iOS etc. But big problem for Google in this market. Partly driven by fact that most popular Android phones are cheap and full of bloatware. Some optimism in the Pixel sales and Google should push their own hardware more to address the problem /end