Damn I didn’t even know. That’s pretty dumb on their part as they could have been a bigger competitor. I’m sure they made the decision before Spotify took off as hard as it did.

Everyone always gave me shit for sticking with Pandora. It can basically do all the shit that Spotify can these days albeit a little different. You can even make your own playlists and listen offline if you have premium. It has a more limited library but it’s barely noticeable except maybe once or twice a year I can’t find a song I wanna listen to. It’s simpler and cheaper than Spotify with most of the same features. My favorite part is that I can literally pick any song I want and it will just continue playing after it’s over with similar songs. I’ve discovered so much music I would have never tried if it hadn’t shown up. And so far it hasn’t been overrun by AI slop like Spotify. Sure they pay artists less compared to competitors but at least they aren’t just straight up trying to replace them.

I’m not saying Pandora is objectively better. I’m just saying Spotify is falling into the world of enshittification and there are many alternatives out there. You could even just buy music and support artists directly like we used to.

I never trusted Honey to begin with but this goes far deeper than I ever expected. I always wondered “yeah, but where do they get their money?” I always figured it was just a way to take people’s data and sell it to data brokers (which they probably also do, let’s be honest) but this is just blatant fraud. Stealing affiliate money from links and having companies pay them to purposefully give out worse coupon codes is just devious through and through. It’s basically free money and everybody else, whether influencer or consumer, get fucked over in the process.

I don’t upload YouTube videos so I’m unsure about the logistics of settings for videos. Do you get these options on videos already uploaded or is this only an option when first uploaded? Is this for the whole channel or video specific? Just curious how it works. Regardless if they ever decide to turn it on by default that would mean YouTubers would have to go through hundreds of videos and turn it off individually unless it’s a channel wide setting kinda thing.

Edit: Just noticed it’s under channel settings so I guess that’s a good thing. If it was video specific that would be just plain evil. I guess I shouldn’t give them ideas…