"Muso, a research firm that studies piracy, concluded that the high prices of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing people back towards illegal downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music. Instead of coughing up $132 a year, more consumers are using websites that rip audio straight out of YouTube videos, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav files.
Roughly 40% of the music piracy Muso tracked was from these “YouTube-to-MP3” sites. The original YouTube-to-MP3 site died from a record label lawsuit, but other copycats do the same thing. A simple Google search yields dozens of blue links to these sites, and they’re, by far, the largest form of audio piracy on the internet."
The problem isn’t price. People just don’t want to pay for a bad experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: “people want to own their music.” Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun. Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is “no longer in your library.” Screw that.
If y’all got kids, don’t forget to teach them how MP3’s and actual media files work, I see many young people nowadays don’t even realize you can locally store your own music in a portable device-agnostic format. They’re beginning to get used to the idea of not owning anything.
First you’re gonna have to teach them how file systems work since they’ve spent a life saving everything to Google Drive or OneDrive and using a search term to find their files.
I’m continually astonished how I thought grunt-work IT jobs would fade away as my generation and younger aged into the workforce becoming ever more technologically literate. Then the iPhone my rich friends bought in highschool became the new standard for interfaces.
Now I’m helping people several years younger and much older than me navigate the machines they use for their jobs.
Yeah funny, right? I thought the same thing. It’d just be the older people and the younger would be more technically literate. But companies started abstracting a lot of things now and it’s both the older and younger that struggle with IT literacy.
I think thin clients with VDIs will be the future and both make this stuff even more abstracted for users and also bring in the age of subscribing to workstations. At work, it’ll start by just plopping stuff in your documents folder or personal folder or whatever and/or the desktop. They’ll live on a network share and the VDIs will revert to snapshots to be ‘fresh’ every time but the users won’t really know that. Their stuff will be plopped down like it is local every time and ‘follow’ them from VDI to VDI.
Then I think this will push to the home market and instead of spending a lot of money up front, you just get a cheap thin client, probably eventually a small little box with USB ports and mini-DP or whatever. You’ll then pay for the tiers you want. Want just a workstation to check mail on and do ‘web apps’ type stuff? $5 with a whole 5GB of personal space or whatever. Then there’ll be “productivity tiers” with pretty much the same stuff but more CPU, RAM and a small amount of vGPU allocated and you can install programs with something like 500 GB of personal space. There’ll be a “pro” version with more of everything and a “gamer” version with a lot of everything probably costing something like $30/$40 a month starting out per device.
And of course eventually, you’ll be getting ads to “keep the prices increases down” and then that won’t matter anymore and you’ll be given the option to pay for ad-free add-ons, time on the workstation and so-on. Prices will raise nearly every year. Thin clients will turn into all-in-ones and be basically tablets where you buy based on screen sizes and probably able to wireless connect more displays.
Technology in computing will become more abstracted and IT’s specialists will shrink once again because actual tech literacy will decrease.
I think the only reason it hasn’t started yet is due to Internet throughput availability but that’s quickly changing.
A boring dystopia indeed.
your post made me shudder, how bout we stop this?
lets burn things, at least make it an interesting dystopia
The main issue to solve is kids not having access to a computer at home, whether it be lack of incentive or money. Most people don’t even own a laptop anymore, so the only computer time they get is in a school setting.
Once the majority of schools have a system in place for most homework to be done on a PC, then there may be some creative ways to incentivise more PC adoption… again. It’s like we’ve gone back to the early 90s again where only kids who were really interested in computing knew anything about it.
I think the solutions comes not from adopting older tech, but making newer tech fairer and freer. As in not locking down phones and tablets as much as they do.
Because eventually the form factor of mobiles will replace say laptops and PCs, but they are essentially just regular computers but limited on purpose to be dumber and less open. Android is Linux ffs!
What do they have if not a laptop? How would they even do homework? What about coursework at uni? Applying for jobs?
iPad / tablet, and applying for jobs can easily be done on a phone. My wife works at a high school - half the kids can’t even use a mouse properly,and don’t understand minimizing a window etc.
She had to teach someone what the enter button did yesterday… They were using space bar to get to a new line. I shit you not.
My school has a program where they lend students laptops free of charge, along with 13gb of data to use with. The generosity is kind of abused at times, but it’s still really nice to have.
Thats the exact reason I just donated my old pc to my sisters kids as a “practice computer”, encouraging them to go rummaging around.
What woke me up was all these 20-somethings in our uni having trouble using computers. Damn, how can you get through our secondary education in our country and not know how to use a normal Windows pc?
I’m convinced primary education as a system is engineered to teach you how to be a patriotic, service-consuming, rentable employee first and foremost. (Humans As A Service?) Secondary education just levels that up so you require more expensive proprietary tool licenses for the potential privilege of doing more complicated jobs. (Funny how all the critical-thinking specialties are derided for not making tons and tons of money.)
Thank God for the good teachers that inspired us in spite of all the odds against us (and them).
It also blows my mind how much schools and universities are struggling for funding, but take the bait and use hyper-proprietary black-box commercial software for everything from OSs to coursework. Professors outside of CompSci will be shocked and confused to see a student using Linux, and courses love to use stupid niche features of Microsoft Office so your LibreOffice work won’t be good enough.
Do everything on a tablet (that might even be provided by the school)
That brief, magical moment in time of about 2 decades in the “home computer revolution” of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, where you had to be an actual geek to be able to effectively use a computer are gone. That’s how we all got trained. By being forced to learn if we wanted to do anything. Now, it’s one-button instant gratification.
The eternal September.
I think the same thing happened with cars too. Certain generation knows how to fix stuff, but they’re completely lost with modern cars where you can’t do anything without a computer plugged in.
Partially yeah, but atleast Google Drive and Onedrive still have folders to sort and share more than one file, which sometimes gets the kids to actually use those features.
What also killed the basic understanding of PCs, is the way in which everything is now done “in-Browser”. No longer do you need to open Word to edit a document, nor do you need to open Photoshop. It’s all done in the browser, and if you want to simply “save” a document, well, just don’t close the tab and you’re golden.
My RAM is screaming.
Just download more.
you wouldn’t download a RAM
What about a EWE?
Of course!
smacks forehead
Take a guess on why people still complain about RAM in the current days of 16Gb being one of the cheapest options
I mean I have 64 GB but I’m not wasting it on browser tabs. I’ve got people at work who never close anything, they’ll have 15 tabs, 28 PDFs and 7 Excel spreadsheets open 24/7 because it takes them an hour to remember where they saved them otherwise.
Literally me when I hear them complain about their slow computer:
We open the two Excel “programs” that are the basic tools we need to do our job and RAM usage is at 10gb already.
Our laptops have 16gb of RAM and we need to open even more excel tools and web pages and pdfs…
Unused RAM is wasted RAM, though. Your computer will know when to free it up for more important stuff.
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Yeah the real takeaway is it’s not necessarily the kids fault that they don’t know these systems deeply as much as it is the fault of OS and app developers taking the path of least resistance and building everything around the stupidest users and their mistakes. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for the growth and development of Power Users when everything is locked down and obfuscated to protect the user from themselves.
When I was a kid there was an air of “anyone can do this” and I had friends who were only 15 were getting hired to build whole websites for $20 an hour when minimum wage was $5.15 an hour. Now there’s an air of “only professionals who are trained can do this” which doesn’t exactly make kids feel like they can just jump in feet first.
That’s overly charitable. The developers aren’t doing it just to cater to idiots; they’re doing it because taking away users’ power and turning it into a platform strictly to consume content instead of creating things for themselves gives big tech companies more opportunities to extract money from them.
This is exactly why I’d shut down any of that ridiculous “Kids just know computers these days” crap.
“No, Phyllis, just because 6-year-old-Timmy can crust up your iPad with boogers to consume endless dopamine-pumping content doesn’t mean he has any idea what is happening behind that screen. At all.”
The biggest crime is in my opinion that Android as an OS was made without allowing the user root access unless they jump through a bunch of hoops. Even if it comes at the cost of a bricked phone, kids should be allowed to experiment with their devices.
Also, from my experience basic graphic design is the newest version of this. The amount of praise I get for understanding basic color theory, as well as not to use JPGs, or Comic Sans for everything is wild.
To be fair to the basic graphic design point: When I was in high school they were busy killing art programs, and that was in the 90’s. It’s kind of hard to know that kind of stuff when it straight isn’t being taught. Honestly, very similar to the computer stuff, so much of it just isn’t taught anymore, and it’s leaving a lot of kids with degraded knowledge of the subjects they’re pursuing.
Man, I searched desperately for formal art training in school. The best they had was some “how to draw” book that at least kept me on track practicing every day. The colleges accessible to me have had “art” programs that are more the stuffy turtleneck gallery sort of stuff, and not anything practical, so I’m sad higher-ed didn’t work out either.
I’m proud none of this stopped me so far, but dang I wonder if those kids who got to take art classes and have mentoring art teachers around art peers know just how dang lucky they’ve had it…
Dang now I wanna watch “Blue Period” again…
I remember my kids crying the first time they lost their school assignments using Microsoft Office at home. They’d only ever used Google docs and no one taught them to save. They also had no idea what the save icon is or represented (floppy disk).
> my kids
> no one taught them
That was kind of your job m8
I prefer the school of hard knocks. Do you think they know what a save button is now?
This comment made me cackle with evil glee.
I worked for a public library and one of the worst things was, despite CONSTANTLY reminding people that when their computer time ran out, the machine would delete EVERYTHING and restart itself, I’d always get some dope who would gasp in horror at closing time when the script ran.
“What happened!? It’s just…g…gone?!”
“Did you bring a USB? Email it to yourself? Send it to the print queue yet?”
“No, I was just about to finish it!”
“…There is literally nothing I can do about this.”
“But it was 6 pages and due tomorrow and–”
One dude literally asked me: “Can’t you…hack it or something!?”
It’s physically painful.
As a cultured collector of memes, one of the most annoying things ever is downloading images to my phone from the internet with filenames like “124fdgklhhr24.jpeg” and if I don’t separately navigate to it, hold down to rename it, move it manually to where I want it for later, it just falls into the endless “Download” folder.
I think this behavior is encouraged precisely so people don’t understand directories, fill up their phones with random nonsense, and then happily subscribe to “cloud storage” when it’s constantly pushed at them.
I don’t normally use a phone to search for memes, but have a similar situation with game screenshots. But I solve it by just occasionally going through folders and sorting them instead of doing so on the spot. Adding metadata to MP3s, however, happens just like what you described, just because I don’t like leaving tracks without album art.
I made a concerted effort one evening to go into my downloads folder on my PC, rename all the nameless garbage filenames, and then actually move and sort them into my pictures/documents/etc folders.
Was a huge pain in the ass, but it saved me so much effort looking for stuff later on down the line. Also, changing Firefox’s default download setting to prompt me for a name and location every time certainly helped.
We start with Tanenbaum’s Modern Operating Systems. 🥲
This sort of thing is why my kids are getting Raspberry Pis as their first computers.
Indeed! I introduced my kids to this through the example of our in-house Plex server, and it worked really well.
First they “get it” because Plex works like the streaming services they’re used to and they think “oh neat mom can do that too.”
Then they like it more because I show them how its streaming we can control ourselves - streaming home movies and pics really impresses this upon them.
And then they see that there’s no magic to where the content comes from – it’s a digital file on Plex just as it is on Netflix.
Voila. Free thinkers for life.
If I ever do have children, this is one of the things I want to teach them.
Hopefully, it turns into an important memory for them.
Learning about technology from their parents’ and how it isn’t magic.
This makes me sad. I had so much fun growing up learning about compression and encoding, ripping, tagging, spectral analysis. Listening to 24/96 vinyl FLACs on my parents old stereo with my pinky up. Hanging out with a bunch of 40-year olds on IRC. Good times, man
Heh, now we’re the 40-olds on IRC.
I am Gen Z, and my whole social life is on IRC. So weird to be around so many people who were online since before my parents even had a computer…
A/s/l?
TimeSquirrel slaps gila around a bit with a large trout.
I do all those things except I have my own stereo, not my parents
Get your kids a real computer. Show them how to move files around. Show your 7 year old how to manually install a Minecraft skin. Show your teens how to turn an mp3 into a ringtone. Show them the actual practical uses for understanding how a computer works, and what a “file” actually is. You’re giving them tools to save money, make better decisions, and actually control their experience.
That’s how one spends time with his kids!
No worries. They’ll reinvent the wheel eventually.
No, they’ll think the corporate dystopia they’ve grown up into is normal. They don’t know that corporations tried and failed to stop people from owning and using VCRs. They think it’s their duty to sit and watch ads from their favorite creators like passive cows.
This is a pretty bleak outlook on the intelligence of kids
It’s an outlook developed by watching the peers I grew up around and the things that they accepted and didn’t question because it was just “normal” by the time they were children.
For example, a lot of kids in my generation grew up with Cable Television, but by the time I was a kid, cable had lost it’s initial “we’re better than broadcast because we don’t have ads” and people just accepted the ads. Most people never knew there was a “time before” when there weren’t any ads, and because of their lack of knowledge of it ever being any different, they never had reason to question why cable television needed ads now when previously it had not.
Once things become a societal “norm,” the people who grow up around that norm tend not to question it simply because they have never known anything else. It’s not meant to be an indictment on the youth as much as the obvious “you can’t know what you don’t know.” If they don’t ever know it was ever any different, how can they expected to do anything but accept how things are? Especially when the adults around them don’t kick up a fuss and keep paying for Netflix when they keep getting screwed. They are learning that this is normal behavior and that it’s normal to get screwed by a company and just keep paying for it.
Wait, did the pitch for cable TV at one point really include that there were no ads?
Yes, it could be argued it was the pitch, much like Netflix originally was. It’s actually kind of wild how the streaming services are literally following the same path as cable television.
Here’s a New York Times article from 1981 about it:
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html
Also, I’ll just point out that people in here not knowing about this literally proves my point that if the changeover happened before you were born/early in your childhood, you’ll just accept the change as “the norm” because you never knew anything different and had no reasons to question it. It’s not about the intelligence of any generation of kids, it’s just an inherent part of not knowing what happened before you were born, which is something every human experiences. It takes dedicated effort to find out that “the norm” isn’t “the norm,” for anyone. Also, on the flip, we’re not particularly special for figuring out “the norm” isn’t “the norm.”
Wow, I had no idea. I didn’t even really know that cable was at one time the fancy premium version of TV.
One thing I think we can say though is that a big part of why Netflix was disruptive was the promise of watching uninterrupted-- No ads. So even though folks thought “of course cable has ads, that’s the norm,” they also flocked to services that provided ad-free alternatives.
I’m always surprised when I see someone just sit through a YouTube ad or something, instead of beating their chest and screaming “WHERE uBLOCK? HOW ADS?” which alarms the neighbors but they’re used to it at this point (which is what I do)… But it’s encouraging that people still voted with their feet by dropping cable as soon as a less extractive experience emerged. It gives me hope that the endgame of enshittification is irrelevance.
Have you ever seen cable TV abbreviated “CATV?” That’s because the original original pitch for it was as “Community Antenna TV,” wherein it would receive local over-the-air broadcasts and then send them over a wire to folks who couldn’t receive them properly because they lived behind a mountain or whatever.
The second pitch was getting original content on cable-only channels, but because your subscription was helping pay to license it (unlike the over-the-air channels, which they – at least initially – got for free), they would be ad-free.
Of course, nowadays cable companies have been made to pay retransmission fees to broadcast TV networks and cable-only channels are showing ads too, so both content sources are double-dipping revenue streams.
(Side note: that link is to a site trying to sell some kind of service, so ignore the last part of the page – the explanations at the beginning of it are quite good, though.)
Wow TIL. The double-dipping is pretty sketchy, but not at all surprising. It seems hubristic for Netflix to court the same concepts… I guess cable/network TV probably thought they were untouchable so they could squeeze the consumer, then Netflix happens… Now Netflix thinks it’s untouchable and it can squeeze the consumer. Hmm, seems familiar.
It is, but it’s also true. Kids in schools have problem saving files in correct format in the correct places. Almost like your average grandma. Most kids dont even have computer, they do everything on their phones.
I mean, I get it, why bother with PCs or laptops, these things are heavy and too complicated. You can take, edit and share pictures from your phone, browse web, listen to music, chat with friends.
But IT literacy goes to hell.
…and then they’re issued “chromebooks” and spied on by school staff. Ugh.