I might be alone here but I still have Winamp on my Windows computers. From my 100 MHz pentium 1 to my bazillion core Ryzen, the only constant has been Winamp. Whether it was playing back mp3s, internet radio or ripping discs, it worked. I like the familiarity. Foobar and Clementine just feel so alien, I could never get used to them. Maybe it’s the compact, floaty UI, which first hog the entire screen.
I’ve since switched to mainly macOS but iTunes feels awful and sluggish in comparison, especially with Apple Music, I hate even starting it.
I'm using Winamp on my Surface Pro 6, switched from foobar2000 for the Media Library feature. (I've been also using Winamp in my teens starting with the first versions up until last ones, then stopped listening to local music files).
It's an amazing low resource player. The YouTube playlists I'm listening to in Firefox consume 1.6GB of RAM and significant CPU, the downloaded opus files with Winamp take up a few megs of RAM (and bunch of disk space on my SD card).
I tried WACUP but it doesn't work well for me. Very complicated UI, too many settings, it also corrupted my real Winamp library.
Regarding the leak - perhaps the founders aren't happy with the direction of the app in the upcoming release (we can notice the ugly website update) so they may have leaked the code. Great news.
This is the only platform I frequent where I read more than I comment and I learn a lot from people, too. I always come here to find interesting takes on things and I'm very rarely disappointed. A lot of times I delete my comments instead of posting because I worry ot might not be a good enough contribution and that I might sound dumb. That's very humbling.
The point being exactly that since we're now entering a time where open source TV firmware is a thing, profit motives don't necessarily trump everything else anymore.
Making a firmware that does "nothing" is probably less work than making one that does a lot of things. So even in the new currency (developer time) it might be cheap and make some people happy.
I mean if the goal was to hide bad reviews they could've done so already like they did when Robinhood pissed its users off. There has to be more to this than just wanting to improve the score of a built in app.
I always use handbrake to optimize video for embeds, whether it’s to remove audio, reduce size or simply resize, it works well. I’m so grateful to have discovered it years ago.
I don't mean to jinx myself here but I really hope this is part of the beginning of an industry-wide trend (after-all, Microsoft already talked about making their gear more repair-friendly) and if it is, then I'm really happy. I'm thankful for all the people who poured tons of money and countless hours of their lives into activism to make progress happen because the state of things is rather depressing when it comes to actual ownership of products.
As an example, in my country all Apple repair is done by certified 3rd parties and in 2/2 cases the repair work I got back was less than satisfactory. My 2017 MBP arrived with broken speakers after a keyboard repair (obviously) and the iPhone X I sent in for a battery swap started to bulge at the top after less than a month.
If I have the choice to order the components myself I'd rather lose my warranty when I'm close to losing it anyway and just bring it to a person whom I trust with doing a good job.
I grew up very poor and I always get this awful feeling when something costly I own breaks - and that's consistently been my experience with Apple and Beats wireless headphones and earbuds. The batteries simply went from good to barely holding a charge or not even charging within a year on four pairs so this a major negative to me. I've had better luck with my Sony 1000XM2, which is still fine, thankfully.
The other downside is the volume, I like to be able to crank it up and listen to music louder sometimes.
Apart from that it always felt to me like it mostly depended on the situation, at home when I can lay in my bean bag and listen to some vinyl I'll always prefer my wired Sennheiser through my Schiit amp. When I do some yard work I go for the Sony and when I'm on foot taking care of business in the city I'll go for the AirPods because they're good enough and convenient.
And a side note: A really cool audio discovery to me was the existence of Chinese hi-fi brands like TIN Audio. Their wired IEMs are pretty nice. I'm looking into getting one of those MMCX bluetooth DAC AMPs to give me the option to use them wirelessly, too, when I want.
This is part of a wider trend in the corporate internet of getting rid of visible user interaction to stop publicising user opinion. News publications have slowly gotten rid of comments sections, Google itself (an entity quite close to the USG) is following suit. Of course I suspect that the idea here is less about creator choice, since they can already hide and filter user interaction to their hearts content and more about some high profile channels of some importance being able to save face since manually disabling interactions looks worse for them.
I’ve seen some interesting projects in the past that were browser based and made the entire Internet be equipped with comments sections, including YouTube. I wonder if something like that would be viable, maybe with the addition of a like dislike bar.
Do you mean like Youtube's own Youtube Rewind 2018, which it became the most disliked video surpassing even Justin Bieber's Baby? To add extra irony, it was subtitled "Youtube Rewind 2018 - Everyone Controls Rewind". It seems that everyone controlling the dislike button was not appreciated, and while I find this downvote session brilliant I've been waiting since then for Youtube to remove the downvote button.
Isn't that a perfect example of Dislike button being used mostly as a meme or to bully / pile-on? Or do you truly believe that video was somehow literally the worst video on Youtube?
In most other websites and contexts anyway, like/dislike is used to share your taste with the algorithm or to the author, and neither of those are disrupted here. The only thing that is disrupted is the tribal action using the dislike button as a way of publicly and anonymously showing hatred towards content.
> Or do you truly believe that video was somehow literally the worst video on Youtube?
It was "EA pride and accomplishment" bad. A brainless self glorifying marketing piece that didn't spend a second to even acknowledge all the issues many channels suffered under.
> Or do you truly believe that video was somehow literally the worst video on YouTube?
The worst video on YouTube probably doesn't get actively promoted by Google or carry the weight of being made by Google.
It's funny you refer to Reddit because that's also historically well known for pile-on behavior. Why do you think features such as "hiding vote count for the first few hours" exist? It's been shown that the very first few votes you get can result in the same comment either being downvoted to hell or upvoted.
So if the EA accident was your reasoning for why having dislikes is a good idea, then you really just proved my point, as that too was mostly a meme and perfect proof of pile-on behavior.
Apparently you seem to be in agreement with the group piling on that the contents of the post were bad, otherwise why call it an accident?
> as that too was mostly a meme and perfect proof of pile-on behavior.
So you are saying if it hadn't been a meme most gamers would have up voted a post saying they should feel good from having to spend more on an already full price game?
> It was "EA pride and accomplishment" bad. A brainless self glorifying marketing piece that didn't spend a second to even acknowledge all the issues many channels suffered under.
What made the 2018 Rewind any worse than the Rewinds of previous years?
* 2018 constant commentary, including mentions on how good youtube/they are and how many good things they did with some music in between. Lead by non other than the man who made it all possible, Mr. Youtube himself: Will Smith.
That last part was sarcasm. There are breakdowns by people more into youtube culture that can point out in detail which inclusions didn't make sense, why music videos from 2016 seem misplaced in a 2018 rewind and how many high profile content creators youtube passed over in order to create the specific public image it wanted to present.
If I use a dislike button on a platform, it is typically because I want to warn other users away from that content, because its irrelevant, misleading, uninteresting etc. If likes and dislikes are primarily tools for personalising the algorithm to your taste then the platform may as well hide likes from public view as well.
And instead of trying to understand the reason that video had so many dislikes they decided the users and the dislike button are the problem, not anything related to the way they're running Youtube. And that reaction just reinforces the beliefs of people that dislike how Youtube is being run.
It might not be the worst video ever, but it was definitely among the most universally disliked. It's like downvotes here, you might disagree but it's meaningful signal.
It was an effective form of harmless electronic civil disobedience, a simple and albeit entertaining but still meaningful message of solidarity from the masses to a corporate entity.
I feel that the issue with the dislike button is its ambiguity, similar to star ratings. A Uber driver or Ebay seller with a many of 4-star ratings is clearly fine, but one with a moderate number of 1-star ratings is not, despite having the same average ranking. In the case of Uber/Ebay, the better question is a simple "Would you do business with this individual again?" For YouTube, the public dislike would be better replaced with something like "report content," followed by a choice of "clickbait/inaccurate content/hate speech."
> Or do you truly believe that video was somehow literally the worst video on Youtube?
It has the most downvotes but it definitely doesn't have the worst ratio. The many likes and many dislikes don't suggest "worst video", and it's not the worst video, so all's good there.
If you want to remove tribalism by hiding a counter, they will pile up in the comments, upvoting one of those that says “disliked it, who same?” to the top. Fighting with it is just naive. It’s all real people, so love them as they are.
Yes, Gab made their own browser called Dissenter that added a comment section to every page of the Internet. Interestingly, I can find very little when Googling for it now. I'm sure other projects have tried this too.
Yep. Corporations are working hard to turn the internet into broadcast TV, back when the broadcaster had all the power and you took what they gave you and you liked it because you didn't have a choice.
What is the average person going to do now that they have a dopamine response addiction to instant feedback and immediate knowledge at their fingertips? Read a book? Go for a walk where they're not constantly scouting for a situation where they can take a picture and receive happy brain chemicals from thousands of people?
> I’ve seen some interesting projects in the past that were browser based and made the entire Internet be equipped with comments sections, including YouTube.
Reddit is a comment section filled with insufferable morons who allowed their website to become a way of repackaging fun parts of the internet with astroturfing.
> I’ve seen some interesting projects in the past that were browser based and made the entire Internet be equipped with comments sections, including YouTube. I wonder if something like that would be viable, maybe with the addition of a like dislike bar.
If something like that ever took off, it would devastate independent publishers and a huge part of Internet culture by draining interactions out of websites. Google tried it before, and fortunately it failed. I think it's one of the worst possible things that could happen to the Web.
To be fair, comments _must_ be moderated or they turn into a cesspool in short order. A like-dislike count does not have that problem, though. And YouTube isn't removing the comments (yet).
Not every site is the same. News sites in the US turn off their comments because it's too difficult to moderate in the current political environment.
Hacker News isn't a content site, but is mainly created for commenting. It is less political than the news sites which removed comments. It can also handle the moderation more easily than news sites partly because it has a very strong ugliness and usability filter.
My experience is that in many scenarios, comments were an attempt to create sticky relationships when the comments themselves add very little.
Take a news site, an article about, say, Trump becomming President. Comments are likely to range from "I can't satnd the guy" though to "I'm so happy he got in". They aren't going to add much of any value to the conversation.
I am seeing more attempts now of people attempting to be "clever" in their comments and start dropping 'facts' taken from various places. Again, interesting at best but at worst it doesn't add anything.
Votes are perhaps less contentious but what are they really saying? I like the article because it is factually correct or I dislike the article because Trump is President?
Then again YouTube comments can be pretty funny and interesting these days. They're a nice way to interact with the content creators, and with other followers.
> They are only really doing this to hide political dissent against the current administration and provide some cover. Both the president and vp are polling at historic low approval ratings right now.
I disagree that this is the only reason; there are other reasons that make sense as well - for example, every political movement benefits from making their movement appear larger and more inclusive than it really is.
It's easier to stifle dissent by saying "If you don't agree with us you're in the minority" and then hide the actual headcount of your movement.
It's all very 1984-esque, TBH. You cannot form an opposition if you think you're the only one who opposes.
It's interesting that the Internet took the YouTube Rewind dislike thing as a win, meanwhile YouTube themselves took it as an opportunity to learn about the negative side effects of their users' free will.
I’ve since switched to mainly macOS but iTunes feels awful and sluggish in comparison, especially with Apple Music, I hate even starting it.