

You know, I don’t know if that’s what “a Western audience” wants. I know that Youtube has made its service steadily worse over time, and also much more resource intensive. Checking Firefox’s Process Manager, it currently lists four Youtube tabs loaded in memory that total up to 1.4GB. And I know a lot of that isn’t the video: when I load a new Youtube tab, it shows the “placeholder” content, gray lines where text will go, for several seconds before anything really displays.
I mean, Bilibili sucks too? I get popups before videos I watch with anime characters, whee. There’s also the whole currently-is-in-Chinese thing, kind of a drawback for an English-speaker, But it does seem to load a bit faster.



The way I see it is, for many things on the internet, the raw number of people using them has stayed steady or even gone up slightly, but there are so many more people who wouldn’t have used the old internet online now, and much of the money and energy goes to catering to them, which means Facebook, Instagram, Reddit etc. The people who know what they’re doing still use the old internet. We should be extending our arms to the people stuck on social media, who think that is the whole thing.