Short form content platforms aren’t going anywhere, Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts are just a carbon copy of tiktok. No problems with them, of course, because they’re American.

Currently in Tokyo from UK, paid for an Airalo esim before I arrived, and I was pretty impressed with how cheap and easy it’s been- and that’s with 20gbs data, which I’ve barely used.

My service provider O2 would have charged me £7 a day with their O2 travel bolt-on, but would have still been my usual contract of unlimited calls, texts and data, just that the data would have been throttled a fair bit. This is a lot more reasonable than it used to be, but still would have amounted in a large bill compared to the one off $18 esim.

Sure, those are good examples of negatives, but that is just the way of it. This happens all the time when new technology emerges. Just think about the audio industry, all of a sudden people could produce music from their spare bedrooms- jobs weren’t needed anymore. But the music industry is now far more saturated than ever as a result, as it is so much more accessible to people, without the need for specialist equipment and stacks of cash.

Not OP, But, Stephen Hawking could have kept his voice, as an example.There are probably lots of beneficial uses of this technology. Automatic TTS voice messages would be another 🤷‍♂️

You’re not a musician, are you?

Because what you just described is just the classic: “Oh, we’re not going to pay you for this gig. You’re getting paid in exposure. Sorry kid, just business.”

Can do all of those things without premium if you have the right apps.

But besides that, absolutely not. I remember when YouTube was free with no ads, I remember when the adverts first started appearing, and that’s when it became obvious that they were trying to annoy you into a pay model. It took a little longer than expected, but sure enough, they ramped up the ads until “YOUTUBE PREMIUM! PAY FOR NO ADVERTS!”

Fuck that, I had no adverts before and they took that away. But the worst part is that they harvest my private data and make money from me already. As far as I’m concerned, that’s my subscription to their shit, in their perverse data selling.

No fucking way I’m going to also pay them for the privilege to have my private data sold.

Music Producer input here. It’s sort of been a general rule of etiquette in production that piracy is fine if you intend to buy the product.

A lot of the better plugins can be very expensive and prior to subscription models, were limited in free trials. It can take some time to know if a particular plugin works with your workflow and gives you the results you like over multiple different projects.

I’ve always stuck with this. If I see something I like the look of, I’ll pirate it, use it over a bunch of projects and if I find myself relying on it then I’ll save up to buy it legitimately. Of course, there’s a fair bit of trust involved there, and a lot of people will be happy enough to keep the pirated version and try to find a new crack every time the DAW or plugin requires an update,

No chance I would have been able to afford half of the software I use in my workflow when I first started out, nobody can. But I eventually found my flow then caught up and paid it back.

I consider that ethical piracy. Or maybe I’m just justifying it to myself. But that’s how it was implied when I first started out in college and it’s a good system where you can still eventually support the small companies that make quality products that work for you.

Yep, that’s confirmed my suspicions then. Thank you!

For everyone suggesting Revanced, I used it for a while and found it to be incredibly slow and breaking up videos to buffer all the time. Was I using a dodgy version or was I missing something? I had it from the app store if I remember right. (Might be thinking of Vanced??)

Edit: Sorry folks, I wasn’t bashing revanced, I was just pretty sure I had a fake app and wanted to make sure. Thanks for the replies putting me on the right track!