This has real demand, I ended up in the Gitlab secondary youtube channel one day, ordering by most views, and I found a video [0] of a seemingly normal uninteresting meeting with millions of views. Turns out people were using this as an excuse for looking like they were busy. They disabled comments now but I saved some of them because I thought it was hilarious:
I play this when I need my family to leave me alone - so helpful
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I play this when I pretend to be busy. This meeting is literally about anything you want it to be about lol
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I love that we all arrived at this video for the same reason
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Every now and then I'll pause it at a good point in between them talking to make my own voice heard contributing to the "meeting" lol. Gets the full effect in! And the beautiful thing is their conversation just flows with it like they heard me lol.
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I was one of those people skeptical that ad-free YouTube was worth the high price, but now firmly a convert.
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One of the best products ever created, and they deserve the dough for serving me all the gigabytes. Fast, reliable, and one product not headed for KilledByGoogle. (Did I jinx it? “We’re transitioning to a vertical-video only platform to meet our billion users where they are…”)
Or, you know, you could just pay for a service that you enjoy. I watch a lot more YouTube and see a bigger need to keep it alive than Netflix, HBO and co for which I am paying good money already, why should YouTube be exempt from that?
Also if Netflix goes away tomorrow, you’ll find their content on torrents easily, but if YouTube goes away, we will lose decades of videos that no one has backups of. Expecting them to offer this service for free and without ads is crazy.
Had they done that from day 1 you woulf have a point but it sounds like extorsion to me given youtube got rid of most of its competition and established its casi monopolistic position being adfree.
If you can. A lot of subscription TV channels have ads even though you have to pay to get them. Does paying for youtube block all ads, and if so will it continue to, or will they change as so many others have and just make your payment remove some ads? I'm not even counting sponsored content in a lot of videos as ads, but they are annoying too.
Smarttube on Android TV's works exceptionally well, too. I've seen people recommend Tizentube over it because it's nearly indistinguishable from the standard YouTube app, but with adblocking--but I actually prefer the more minimalist UI of Smarttube.
I don't block ads because stealing ad revenue from companies is unethical. These companies have workers who have families that they need to feed. They provide a service for free, so it's the least I can do. I watch every ad in full.
My cousin, however, stopped blocking ads on YouTube when the YouTube warnings showed up. She is scared that at some point Google would ban Gmail accounts for doing it, and she's had hers for 10 years and really relies on it. She also says YouTube videos are really easy to download so anything she really wants from YouTube she tends to have a local copy of.
It isn’t unethical to block ads; the norm on the internet has always been that senders send any not-actively-malicious bits we want and the recipient renders them however they want (including not).
That said I’m also worried about getting banned for blocking too many YouTube ads (Google doesn’t have any obligation to send me emails after all) so I… just don’t go there.
The mafia is also made of hard working people with families to feed. Sometimes industries deserve to die. Even if the people working in them don't deserve to lose their jobs. That's life in a free market.
There's nothing more "free market" than ads. Ads literally cost you no money (free), and you don't even have to buy the product they're advertising (freedom from market if desired). If I know I'm not going to buy the product in question, I use the time to meditate, or take a moment to enjoy a cool, crisp sip of Kool-Aid. It's delicious when prepared according to the instructions. Oh Yeah!
This was very much a "fire drill all the time" kind of place (vs "slow and steady"). The team came to me and said:
"Alex, we keep getting bombarded by meeting requests and have no focus time."
My solution was to create a weekly "team meeting" from 8am to 11am every Friday and invite all of them to it.
They loved it!
I mentioned to them that making a meeting like this was something they could have done themselves but they responded:
"It carries more weight coming from you. Plus, if someone tries to schedule over it, they are more likely to think twice and/or I can say 'Hey, you have to talk to Alex.' "
The scripts are hilarious, yet not inaccurate. I can't stop chuckling.
'Are you happy with that?'
'Happy is a strong word'
'OK' moves on to the next topic
Reminds me of the "boss mode" / "boss key" in old games, like MS-DOS days, which would switch the screen to some spreadsheet mockup or suchlike, updated for the current century.
Do people in offices typically just blast meetings out of their computer speakers? Everyone I work with uses headphones so we're not disturbing other people in the office...
Unless you have good ANC headphones, or find something like pink noise that fits you, you're still dealing with all the talking to microphone of your colleagues.
It's hard to describe how difficult it is to hear someone talking and then a second later hear then in your headphones. It really breaks my concentration. And it's a solvable technology problem - just use the local network for people in the same subnet. But every meeting provider wants _everything_ routed through their servers. There's no escaping they prying eyes.
Only the British audio works for me, though - if I try American or International, the relevant meetings are silent with a "Join Audio" button which doesn't appear to do anything. (Firefox on MacOS, if that's useful)
Yeah we need a dial to mix accents and dialects, and level of English fluency. I could want 50% English, maybe some Northern English, Welsh or Scottish, and mix in Indian accents, various American, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Scandinavian, the odd token Aussie. Etc.
That I could enable more South African, or Middle East accents in some meetings would be true to real life as well.
What are all the names for the category of such software... "Self-defense Software", "Busy Simulation Software", "Faux Work Software", "Fake Meeting Software"[0], "Virtual Meeting Simulator"[1], "Prank Screens"[2], ...? Are there many others?
Trying to access this site on my corporate Windows laptop and it was blocked "by your IT admin" (in Windows itself, not the browser/proxy). So it's already on some kind of list.
This is hilarious, but I think people should be addressing the real issue instead of this, maybe that work environment isn’t for you and it’s time to look somewhere if you need to pretend. Just say you’re busy or fill your calendar with whatever you are working on without a meeting, in fact, a lot of meetings is a sign of a wasted time so if I see someone (especially technical) is doing a lot of meeting I know they are wasting time or slacking.
Takes me back. I remember there was a version of the fake Windows 8 update sequence that had it infinitely loop between "Working on updates..." and the frowny-face :( BSOD
I am missing something about how this could hypothetically be useful. If I played this in the background it would be far too distracting to get any actual work done.
Simple solution for focus time. If it stops people from setting up an actual meeting for something that fits in an email, it is already doing critical infrastructure work.
I play this when I need my family to leave me alone - so helpful 4.5K I play this when I pretend to be busy. This meeting is literally about anything you want it to be about lol 1.5K I love that we all arrived at this video for the same reason 2.6K Every now and then I'll pause it at a good point in between them talking to make my own voice heard contributing to the "meeting" lol. Gets the full effect in! And the beautiful thing is their conversation just flows with it like they heard me lol. 562
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBVtvOpU80Q
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2. I like that it directly benefits the creators of the videos I watch
3. It gets everyone in my family ad free viewing for 0 effort across all devices (I primarily watch it from Apple TV app)
4. Gives you higher quality bitrate option sometimes
5. It gives me the moral and logical high ground when arguing with nerds about YouTube online
My cousin, however, stopped blocking ads on YouTube when the YouTube warnings showed up. She is scared that at some point Google would ban Gmail accounts for doing it, and she's had hers for 10 years and really relies on it. She also says YouTube videos are really easy to download so anything she really wants from YouTube she tends to have a local copy of.
That said I’m also worried about getting banned for blocking too many YouTube ads (Google doesn’t have any obligation to send me emails after all) so I… just don’t go there.
Sounds like something people low on the corporate ladder say
This was very much a "fire drill all the time" kind of place (vs "slow and steady"). The team came to me and said:
"Alex, we keep getting bombarded by meeting requests and have no focus time."
My solution was to create a weekly "team meeting" from 8am to 11am every Friday and invite all of them to it.
They loved it!
I mentioned to them that making a meeting like this was something they could have done themselves but they responded:
"It carries more weight coming from you. Plus, if someone tries to schedule over it, they are more likely to think twice and/or I can say 'Hey, you have to talk to Alex.' "
Only the British audio works for me, though - if I try American or International, the relevant meetings are silent with a "Join Audio" button which doesn't appear to do anything. (Firefox on MacOS, if that's useful)
That I could enable more South African, or Middle East accents in some meetings would be true to real life as well.
Not Finnish. The silence would not work :)
Sad, I wanted the international broken Zoom call
[0]: https://fakemeeting.app/
[1]: https://z.tools/t/fake-meeting
[2]: https://www.whitescreen.online/
I’ve used a few tts providers and although a technical marvel they are all still easily identifiable as ai. Humans are very good at spotting fakes.
This project might work better with mostly canned audio clips of real humans.
EDIT: seems like British audio does work