It is 15 years old, but the “retro” is more about running apps and games from as old as 2001 natively.

Because PCs are worse for living room/controller gameplay, you have to deal with Windows or Linux, and many other factors?

The exact same services? Did YouTube exist in the 1980s?

The Mozilla FUD where I said I like Firefox and pointed out how many of the projects continued in some form after Mozilla ended them?

Most of the services Google kills are also because they “fizzled out”. If you scroll through the Killed by Google site, a lot of the stuff listed there were test apps or small-scale experiments that most people never heard about or cared to try, like all the apps under Area 120. There are a few high-profile examples (Reader, Stadia, etc) but they’re definitely not the majority, same as Mozilla.

Apple discontinued its own Apple Pay Later service in favor of just integrating third-party payment services, like Affirm: https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/17/apple-pay-later-united-states-ending/

Modern consoles are pretty great about backwards compatibility. There’s room to improve for sure, but an Xbox Series X/S can play all Xbox One/Series games, plus hundreds of 360 and original Xbox games. PS5 is a bit worse with only PS4 backwards compat. The Switch is in the roughest shape, because PowerPC emulator or hardware compatibility wasn’t practical with the design or hardware of the original Switch.

They still have the benefit of being a fixed hardware platform with guaranteed compatibility for the games built for them.

Even if official support isn’t possible past a certain point (Google and Samsung are pushing 7+ years, fwiw), all phones need to have a bootloader unlock mechanism for unofficial support past that point. LineageOS or mobile Linux with some broken functionality is still better than nothing.

Good news, there is a subscription service to prevent that and also still pays the creators.

The email signup and user management panel needs JavaScript, yeah.

I don’t like ads either, but they are the only functioning way of paying creators outside of direct payments, especially with economic inflation and competition from streaming services eating away at people’s budget for media. No one else has a solution that works under capitalism.

The two options for compensating a creator for their work online are advertisements or direct payments. There are no other functional alternatives. In a better world, more countries would have grants or universal basic income, but that’s not the world that exists right now.

Right, that’s why ads exist.

Because it’s an additional source of revenue, and they can provide rewards outside of YouTube.

If you don’t like Google keeping a cut, then sign up for all the Patreons for everyone you watch.

Maybe just pay for YouTube Premium at at that point? It pays the video creators, and you don’t have to have a janky playback setup.

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I don’t think I’ve had issues with reddit, as long as you use the link to the reddit comment thread, not one of the shortlinks or the video link or something else.

The entire 2001: A Space Odyssey series should be a TV show.