From 86de9926cda806f376a0c06adc0bf63933c61415 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Ari Archer Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2024 22:37:11 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] update @ Sat Dec 14 22:37:11 EET 2024 Signed-off-by: Ari Archer --- blog.json | 6 +++--- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/blog.json b/blog.json index 2892585..91e8ded 100644 --- a/blog.json +++ b/blog.json @@ -164,7 +164,7 @@ "behavioural-sink-todays-world-utopia": { "title": "behavioural sink in today's world \"utopia\"?", "description": "In this post, I delve into the current global political climate, exploring the rise of extreme ideologies and their impact on democracy and human rights, since the United States presidential elections and recent European politics have ticked me off. I discuss the potential dangers of populist and nationalist movements, such as the dawn of Nemunas (Nemuno ausra) and Project 2025, as well as drawing on historical lessons and sociopolitical research, I emphasize the significance of informed decision-making and the crucial role individuals play in standing against extremism and promoting empathy and understanding. Ultimately, I warn of the risk of a behavioural sink, reflecting on the societal decay that could result from ignoring the lessons of history and forsaking our responsibility to protect human dignity and global cooperation. Stay aware, ethical, and human - don't be Homo Sovieticus, be Homo Sapiens - a thinking human.", - "content": "Welcome back everyone.\n\nFirstly, I would like to begin with an apology. I'm generally a pretty busy person with an organised schedule and I don't really have the time or energy usually to write here since it requires time and thought to express my ideas publicly, although, this doesn't mean I have abandoned this blog fully, I still like to archive my thoughts and all that over time.\n\nToday I had a neuron activation moment after the United States of America (abbr. U.S.A., USA, US) presidential elections where Trump kind of, uh, won, well, is winning I guess since it's on going although even now it's 226:292 Kamala v. Trump[^1]. This upsets me, and made me think about other politics as well as social side of everyone. In this blog post, I will try to explore some of political events as well as current ongoing social and democratic issues from my perspective trying to avoid extreme language and trying to stay calm. Later on, I will tie this back to the concept of a [behavioural sink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink).\n\nThough, before I start, for legal purposes, consider this **legal disclaimer**: The thoughts and opinions you\u2019re about to read are all mine - just me sharing my perspective. They don\u2019t represent any official stance or organization. While I strive to share accurate information, remember that this is just my take on things. So, if you find yourself agreeing with me or shaking your head in disagreement, that's okay! Just know that any reliance on what I say is at your own risk. I'm not responsible for any consequences that come from reading this post. Everything claimed here is **alleged** and **may not be accurate** even though I tried my best to keep it accurate, I am not a politician or anything of sort, so I may get some things wrong or use a bad source or misinterpret the source or something of sort. Don't treat this post as advice but rather as a criticism excessing my right to free speech.\n\nNow, let\u2019s dive in! Feel free to tweak any part of it to better match your voice!\n\n## Part one: The United States of America presidential elections\n\nLet's begin with the can of worms which even got me into this - the US elections. About the whole day I've been following the presidential elections hoping Kamala Harris would win, since Donald Trump has pretty, err, weird goals, mainly relating to project 2025[^2]. Albeit they do claim that this is not a plan by Trump, but rather the Heritage foundation[^3] it is still a conservative and right-wing set of policies which aim to reform the USA under the condition that Donald Trump will win the 2024 presidential election.\n\nSadly, Trump is clearly going into the win since at the time of writing this 53/56 states have fully reported and the ratio between Trump's and Kamala's results is clearly in the republican favour. This is very scary to me, even to a person who is Living in Lithuania.\n\nFor context, Lithuania is a fairly right-leaning country which means, being a part of the European Union, actions made in the US by republican politicians, will most likely be copied over by the Lithuanian government as well. This always happens from my personal experience - one thing happens in the US lead by republicans, and the whole of EU seems to copy that action, at least partially.\n\nAs an example, we can take Rimigijus' \u017demaitaitis views on supporting Ukraine. Pol. Remigijus is known for being a right-wing politician in Lithuania known for this antisemitic comments[^5], and he, more specifically his new party \"The dawn of Nemunas\" (Lithuanian: \"Nemuno au\u0161ra\"), endorses the position of US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, advocating that assistance to Ukraine should be structured as loans rather than grants[^6].\n\nThis position, in my opinion is cruel and very unfair, because it shifts the burden of supporting a nation under siege onto the very people who are suffering from the consequences of gruesome attack by Russia. By proposing that aid to Ukraine be provided in the form of loans instead of grants, \u017demaitaitis and his party effectively impose a financial burden on a nation already facing significant difficulties. This strategy not only diminishes the critical need for humanitarian support but also threatens to exacerbate Ukraine's economic troubles, in long run impeding its recovery and long-term stability as a sovereign country. This same logic applies to Trump's goals since it is quite literally the same logic.\n\nThis whole American politics affecting the world politics since it is a global superpower situation is very stupid, I personally don't believe that we won't have any more major conflict until year 2026 by the direction the world is heading in. The European union in general is going into a far-right direction with parties like AfD (German: Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland), the dawn of Nemunas, National party of France, the polish PiS, and Hungary's Fidesz[^7]. Clearly the people of the EU are not happy, even clearly demonstrated by recent outrage on EC's Mastodon Fediverse instance after congratulating Donald Trump in (in my opinion) a very non-democratic way[^8] (\"warmly\" my ass).\n\nGod forbid Americans vote for a female president, rather watch millions get their rights stripped from them, am I right :D (sarcasm)\n\n## Part two: More about European politics\n\nEuropean politics are also not doing too great as I already mentioned transitioning to this section. I mainly want to address 3 main issues relating to current harsh European political climate. These issues include the far-right radicalism problem of EU[^9], local politics of Lithuania (which I have already mentioned), and how the US is affecting politics are affecting seemingly \"opposite\" Europe.\n\nLet's begin with the far-right problem of Europe, well, I personally believe it to be a problem considering how extreme the policies tend to be. I believe that the rise of such parties, which, personally, I consider wannabe Nazi, is out of paranoid protectionism[^10] of culture, tradition, and sovereignty, as well as economic instability[^9] and [\"owning the libs\"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owning_the_libs) essentially.\n\nThis has been a problem before, when in the past historically. Remember the bad party ruled by the guy who hated the Jews? You know, the Nazi party? The history of how it came to rule is a really similar tale.[^11]\n\nIn short, National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), more commonly referred Nazi party, used to be a small party which would only get only about 3% of votes before the onset of Great Depression. During the Great Depression[^11], Germany was at the rock bottom with a terrible economic, political, and social climate. Millions of people unemployed. Their grim situation was further worsened by the defeat in the World War I experiencing a great political turmoil as well as sovereignty problems when the whole world turned their backs against Germany. Consequently, the Nazis took advantage of this, they promised Germany a world with economic and political stability, and if they give them power - Germany will be a great country with their \"superior\" Aryan race being accepted as only greatest race. Germans fell for this strategy, and the rest is history, which you can read about in [the Holocaust encyclopedia](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/).\n\nSounds familiar doesn't it? Right-ring politicians like the aforementioned Remigijus \u017demaitaitis and Donald Trump, as well as parties and projects like \"Dawn of Nemunas\"[^12] and \"Project 2025\"[^2] respectively promising a better world in the current worsening sociopolitical climate, capitalising on uneducated voters who are blinded by their mirage of a better world, filtering the educated ones by stating outright crazy statements.\n\nWe're now at the start of something really bad, and I believe we should collectively stop this before it is too late. Like Albert Einstein once said:\n\n> I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.\n\nConsidering this, let's take an example of dawn of Nemunas which is very relevant to me since I live in Lithuania, but it also serves as a living ever-developing example of idiocracy in Lithuania and how the EU is going downhill.\n\nThe dawn of Nemunas, also known as Nemuno au\u0161ra in Lithuanian, is, at least to my knowledge, a right-wing nationalist and populist right-wing party[^15] founded by Remigijus \u017demaitaitis in November 11th, 2023 and officially registered in January 16th, 2024. It formed as a result of Pol. Remigijus posting various antisemitic comments on Facebook stating that \"the Jews and Russians\" oppressed Lithuanians in World War II and they they were responsible of the 1944 massacre in Pir\u010diupiai[^5]. The comments were bombed with harsh criticism by Lithuanian citizens and politicians and other important figures, finally, in May 19th of 2023, getting his membership at the Freedom and Justice party of Lithuania terminated. One thing led to another, and then he announced his new party, the Dawn of Nemunas, in November 11th of 2023[^16].\n\nDawn of Nemunas describes itself as centre-left, classic liberal[^19], christian[^12] political party, although by Deutsche Welle[^17] the party is described as a right-wing nationalist party, which I tend to agree with. The party is also doing aggressive advertisement by billboards and posters around Lithuania, I've noticed they put their posters wherever they can just highlighting their extreme strategy - business buildings, apartment buildings, billboards, political boards, everywhere. You cannot go a day without seeing the faces of the pigs that in purely my opinion are trying to be wannabe Nazis. From my experience, most people with at least one (1) braincell are very dissatisfied with them and consider them a joke, although I tend to treat them more like a danger since they elected 3nd[^18] in the election of 2024, this is call for awareness and education, since if this party is elected - Lithuania, as we know it, is fucked.\n\nTheir goals, from my personal research and understanding, are not only stupid, but can also be harmful. Here's a few of them[^20]:\n\n1. Supports establishing a state-owned bank.\n2. Taking state control of state-owned energy company Ignitis.\n3. Rejecting EU's \"green\" agricultural programmes.\n4. Supports concessions for small and medium-sized businesses.\n5. Supports halting reforms in education for 4 years.\n6. They believe that Lithuania\u2019s foreign politics should first serve Lithuanias's own security and interests of its citizens.\n7. Supports suspending sanctions on Russia.\n8. Advocates that assistance to Ukraine should be structured as loans rather than grants.\n\nThis could sound okay at first, but I only see holes and issues in this extremist system:\n\n1. Establishing a state-owned bank could lead to inefficient resource allocation and interference in the financial sector.\n2. Taking state control of Ignitis may reduce operational efficiency and deter private investment in the energy sector.\n3. Rejecting EU green agricultural programmes could majorly hinder Lithuania's progress towards sustainable farming practices and environmental protection.\n4. Excessive concessions for small and medium-sized businesses might create an uneven playing field and potentially reduce overall economic competitiveness.\n5. Halting education reforms for 4 years could impact the development of Lithuania's education system for the worst, potentially leaving students ill-prepared for future challenges, as well as keeping stagnant on an already messy and garbage system.\n6. Prioritizing Lithuania's interests in foreign policy at the expense of broader international cooperation could isolate the country diplomatically.\n7. Suspending sanctions on Russia might undermine Lithuania's security and its solidarity with Ukraine and other European partners.\n8. Restructuring assistance to Ukraine as loans rather than grants could strain Ukraine's future economic recovery and weaken Lithuania's support for its ally. (which I already explained in more detail above).\n\nAnd, you know, after all of this, we have also now deal with the straight up stupid things the US is doing. Trump winning will, as it has before in 2016[^22], further accelerate the surge of extremist far-right parties and movements. As I explained above - this is terrible for everyone. Project 2025 will not only impact the US but also EU as well as most trumpies, i.e. a lot of right-wing politicians, will most likely try follow Trump's steps[^21]. This will be detrimental to the overall worldwide economy, political climate, and, as mentioned before, will be a breeding ground for dictators and Neonazis. I am not happy with this, in fact, I feel terrible about this, and I wish I had the ability to make a huge change to stop this.\n\nConcluding, the current political landscape in Europe is fraught with challenges that threaten the stability and democratic values of the region. I beg for understanding, education, and for you to vote, and make **_the right choice_**, for fucks sake, please, make the right choice. Don't praise or elect wannabe dictators, Nazis, Fascists, or anything of sort. Be human, don't fall for empty claims, stay aware.\n\n## Part three: Behavioural sink\n\nWell, where does this lead us? Behavioural sink.\n\n\"Behavioural sink is a term invented by an American ethologist and behavioral researcher John Bumpass Calhoun, which describes the decline in ethical behaviour with overpopulation and an \"easy living\" lifestyle. This term was invented after conducting an experiment on rats over 4 years when enclosures called \"rat utopias\" filled with essentially unlimited space, food, and water were created to enable an unlimited environment for population growth[^23]. His findings showed that such environment showed maternal neglect, aggression and violence, social withdrawal, and cannibalism - generally finding that moral behaviours have diminished.\n\nThis is very synonymous with today's world and sociopolitical landscape. Today's world is filled with ease when it comes to food, water, and other physical needs. We no longer have to live in families of 50, no longer do we have to socialise with everyone, we don't hunt, we are quite literally the rats that are in this big cage. We kill one another out of boredom seemingly, wars, and whatever the fuck today is. Project 2025 is quite literally a consequence of overpopulation, it is an ever-growing issue which is becoming more and more of a danger - one day, nature will do its thing and we will end up killing ourselves.\n\nPeople need to learn, sadly, even in the blog post from 7 months ago [\"history repeats\"](https://blog.ari.lt/b/history-repeats/) it seems that no-one will ever learn from mistakes, findings, and research. Academia seems like a status thing at this point, a social marker to get higher up the sociological ladder to gain power, control, and most importantly to them - money.\n\nMoral of the story is that, living a simpler life, being human, moral, ethical, and understanding is key. Don't let materialistic things corrupt you, understand your fellow human, don't support Nazis, and think. You are Homo Sapiens, don't become [Homo Sovieticus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus). I know I sound very demanding right now but I truly believe that the education system is doing nothing but making these people dumb so they vote for whatever. You are stronger and smarter than some old white man telling you that he's going to change and reform the world - remember history, remember Hitler, remember Mussolini. Remember history once again, learn from the old mistakes so you don't have to fall victim to them. Don't fall into the dystopia of 1984 or Animal Farm by George Orwell.\n\n## Concluding\n\nConclusion is simple. The current global political climate is rife with extremism and challenges which post significant threats to democratic values and human rights. The rise of far right-ideologies, as seen in recent US presidential elections and rise of nationalist and populist parties in the EU, is signal towards a more dire fate. These developments underscore the importance of staying informed, engaging in meaningful dialogue, and making educated decisions when voting while you can vote, before you elect a dictator. It\u2019s important that we, as Homo Sapiens, learn from history and remain vigilant against mistakes of the past, working collectively to prevent the societal decay, or, in other words, a behavioural sink. By prioritizing empathy, understanding, and ethical behaviour, we can strive towards a more just and inclusive world, but we can also prevent total and utter destruction. It's crucial to resist the allure of simplistic promises and instead focus on building a future that respects human dignity and global cooperation. Remember, your individual actions and choices have the power to contribute to a larger movement towards positive change, stay mindful.\n\nGood luck. I wish all of you the best and to make the right choice.\n\n## Footnotes\n\n[^1]: \n\n[^2]: \n\n[^3]: \n\n[^4]: \n\n[^5]: \n\n[^6]: \n\n[^7]: \n\n[^8]: \n\n[^9]: \n\n[^10]: \n\n[^11]: \n\n[^12]: \n\n[^13]: \n\n[^14]: \n\n[^15]: [^13] [^14] [^17]\n\n[^16]: \n\n[^17]: \n\n[^18]: \n\n[^19]: \n\n[^20]: \n\n[^21]: \n\n[^22]: \n\n[^23]: ", + "content": "Welcome back everyone.\n\nFirstly, I would like to begin with an apology. I'm generally a pretty busy person with an organised schedule and I don't really have the time or energy usually to write here since it requires time and thought to express my ideas publicly, although, this doesn't mean I have abandoned this blog fully, I still like to archive my thoughts and all that over time.\n\nToday I had a neuron activation moment after the United States of America (abbr. U.S.A., USA, US) presidential elections where Trump kind of, uh, won, well, is winning I guess since it's on going although even now it's 226:292 Kamala v. Trump[^1]. This upsets me, and made me think about other politics as well as social side of everyone. In this blog post, I will try to explore some of political events as well as current ongoing social and democratic issues from my perspective trying to avoid extreme language and trying to stay calm. Later on, I will tie this back to the concept of a [behavioural sink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink).\n\nThough, before I start, for legal purposes, consider this:\n\n## Legal disclaimer\n\nThe thoughts and opinions you\u2019re about to read are all mine - just me sharing my perspective. They don\u2019t represent any official stance or organization. While I strive to share accurate information, remember that this is just my take on things. So, if you find yourself agreeing with me or shaking your head in disagreement, that's okay! Just know that any reliance on what I say is at your own risk. I'm not responsible for any consequences that come from reading this post. Everything claimed here is **alleged** and **may not be accurate** even though I tried my best to keep it accurate, I am not a politician or anything of sort, so I may get some things wrong or use a bad source or misinterpret the source or something of sort. Don't treat this post as advice but rather as a criticism excessing my right to free speech.\n\nFeel free to correct me by sending me an email or any other sort of notification listed on this page or if you notice inaccuracies or have questions.\n\nNow, let\u2019s dive in! :)\n\n## Part one: The United States of America presidential elections\n\nLet's begin with the can of worms which even got me into this - the US elections. About the whole day I've been following the presidential elections hoping Kamala Harris would win, since Donald Trump has pretty, err, weird goals, mainly relating to project 2025[^2]. Albeit they do claim that this is not a plan by Trump, but rather the Heritage foundation[^3] it is still a conservative and right-wing set of policies which aim to reform the USA under the condition that Donald Trump will win the 2024 presidential election.\n\nSadly, Trump is clearly going into the win since at the time of writing this 53/56 states have fully reported and the ratio between Trump's and Kamala's results is clearly in the republican favour. This is very scary to me, even to a person who is Living in Lithuania.\n\nFor context, Lithuania is a fairly right-leaning country which means, being a part of the European Union, actions made in the US by republican politicians, will most likely be copied over by the Lithuanian government as well. This always happens from my personal experience - one thing happens in the US lead by republicans, and the whole of EU seems to copy that action, at least partially.\n\nAs an example, we can take Rimigijus' \u017demaitaitis views on supporting Ukraine. Pol. Remigijus is known for being a right-wing politician in Lithuania known for this antisemitic comments[^5], and he, more specifically his new party \"The dawn of Nemunas\" (Lithuanian: \"Nemuno au\u0161ra\"), endorses the position of US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, advocating that assistance to Ukraine should be structured as loans rather than grants[^6].\n\nThis position, in my opinion is cruel and very unfair, because it shifts the burden of supporting a nation under siege onto the very people who are suffering from the consequences of gruesome attack by Russia. By proposing that aid to Ukraine be provided in the form of loans instead of grants, \u017demaitaitis and his party effectively impose a financial burden on a nation already facing significant difficulties. This strategy not only diminishes the critical need for humanitarian support but also threatens to exacerbate Ukraine's economic troubles, in long run impeding its recovery and long-term stability as a sovereign country. This same logic applies to Trump's goals since it is quite literally the same logic.\n\nThis whole American politics affecting the world politics since it is a global superpower situation is very stupid, I personally don't believe that we won't have any more major conflict until year 2026 by the direction the world is heading in. The European union in general is going into a far-right direction with parties like AfD (German: Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland), the dawn of Nemunas, National party of France, the polish PiS, and Hungary's Fidesz[^7]. Clearly the people of the EU are not happy, even clearly demonstrated by recent outrage on EC's Mastodon Fediverse instance after congratulating Donald Trump in (in my opinion) a very non-democratic way[^8] (\"warmly\" my ass).\n\nGod forbid Americans vote for a female president, rather watch millions get their rights stripped from them, am I right :D (sarcasm)\n\n## Part two: More about European politics\n\nEuropean politics are also not doing too great as I already mentioned transitioning to this section. I mainly want to address 3 main issues relating to current harsh European political climate. These issues include the far-right radicalism problem of EU[^9], local politics of Lithuania (which I have already mentioned), and how the US is affecting politics are affecting seemingly \"opposite\" Europe.\n\nLet's begin with the far-right problem of Europe, well, I personally believe it to be a problem considering how extreme the policies tend to be. I believe that the rise of such parties, which, personally, I consider wannabe Nazi, is out of paranoid protectionism[^10] of culture, tradition, and sovereignty, as well as economic instability[^9] and [\"owning the libs\"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owning_the_libs) essentially.\n\nThis has been a problem before, when in the past historically. Remember the bad party ruled by the guy who hated the Jews? You know, the Nazi party? The history of how it came to rule is a really similar tale.[^11]\n\nIn short, National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), more commonly referred Nazi party, used to be a small party which would only get only about 3% of votes before the onset of Great Depression. During the Great Depression[^11], Germany was at the rock bottom with a terrible economic, political, and social climate. Millions of people unemployed. Their grim situation was further worsened by the defeat in the World War I experiencing a great political turmoil as well as sovereignty problems when the whole world turned their backs against Germany. Consequently, the Nazis took advantage of this, they promised Germany a world with economic and political stability, and if they give them power - Germany will be a great country with their \"superior\" Aryan race being accepted as only greatest race. Germans fell for this strategy, and the rest is history, which you can read about in [the Holocaust encyclopedia](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/).\n\nSounds familiar doesn't it? Right-ring politicians like the aforementioned Remigijus \u017demaitaitis and Donald Trump, as well as parties and projects like \"Dawn of Nemunas\"[^12] and \"Project 2025\"[^2] respectively promising a better world in the current worsening sociopolitical climate, capitalising on uneducated voters who are blinded by their mirage of a better world, filtering the educated ones by stating outright crazy statements.\n\nWe're now at the start of something really bad, and I believe we should collectively stop this before it is too late. Like Albert Einstein once said:\n\n> I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.\n\nConsidering this, let's take an example of dawn of Nemunas which is very relevant to me since I live in Lithuania, but it also serves as a living ever-developing example of idiocracy in Lithuania and how the EU is going downhill.\n\nThe dawn of Nemunas, also known as Nemuno au\u0161ra in Lithuanian, is, at least to my knowledge, a right-wing nationalist and populist right-wing party[^15] founded by Remigijus \u017demaitaitis in November 11th, 2023 and officially registered in January 16th, 2024. It formed as a result of Pol. Remigijus posting various antisemitic comments on Facebook stating that \"the Jews and Russians\" oppressed Lithuanians in World War II and they they were responsible of the 1944 massacre in Pir\u010diupiai[^5]. The comments were bombed with harsh criticism by Lithuanian citizens and politicians and other important figures, finally, in May 19th of 2023, getting his membership at the Freedom and Justice party of Lithuania terminated. One thing led to another, and then he announced his new party, the Dawn of Nemunas, in November 11th of 2023[^16].\n\nDawn of Nemunas describes itself as centre-left, classic liberal[^19], christian[^12] political party, although by Deutsche Welle[^17] the party is described as a right-wing nationalist party, which I tend to agree with. The party is also doing aggressive advertisement by billboards and posters around Lithuania, I've noticed they put their posters wherever they can just highlighting their extreme strategy - business buildings, apartment buildings, billboards, political boards, everywhere. You cannot go a day without seeing the faces of the pigs that in purely my opinion are trying to be wannabe Nazis. From my experience, most people with at least one (1) braincell are very dissatisfied with them and consider them a joke, although I tend to treat them more like a danger since they elected 3nd[^18] in the election of 2024, this is call for awareness and education, since if this party is elected - Lithuania, as we know it, is fucked.\n\nTheir goals, from my personal research and understanding, are not only stupid, but can also be harmful. Here's a few of them[^20]:\n\n1. Supports establishing a state-owned bank.\n2. Taking state control of state-owned energy company Ignitis.\n3. Rejecting EU's \"green\" agricultural programmes.\n4. Supports concessions for small and medium-sized businesses.\n5. Supports halting reforms in education for 4 years.\n6. They believe that Lithuania\u2019s foreign politics should first serve Lithuanias's own security and interests of its citizens.\n7. Supports suspending sanctions on Russia.\n8. Advocates that assistance to Ukraine should be structured as loans rather than grants.\n\nThis could sound okay at first, but I only see holes and issues in this extremist system:\n\n1. Establishing a state-owned bank could lead to inefficient resource allocation and interference in the financial sector.\n2. Taking state control of Ignitis may reduce operational efficiency and deter private investment in the energy sector.\n3. Rejecting EU green agricultural programmes could majorly hinder Lithuania's progress towards sustainable farming practices and environmental protection.\n4. Excessive concessions for small and medium-sized businesses might create an uneven playing field and potentially reduce overall economic competitiveness.\n5. Halting education reforms for 4 years could impact the development of Lithuania's education system for the worst, potentially leaving students ill-prepared for future challenges, as well as keeping stagnant on an already messy and garbage system.\n6. Prioritizing Lithuania's interests in foreign policy at the expense of broader international cooperation could isolate the country diplomatically.\n7. Suspending sanctions on Russia might undermine Lithuania's security and its solidarity with Ukraine and other European partners.\n8. Restructuring assistance to Ukraine as loans rather than grants could strain Ukraine's future economic recovery and weaken Lithuania's support for its ally. (which I already explained in more detail above).\n\nAnd, you know, after all of this, we have also now deal with the straight up stupid things the US is doing. Trump winning will, as it has before in 2016[^22], further accelerate the surge of extremist far-right parties and movements. As I explained above - this is terrible for everyone. Project 2025 will not only impact the US but also EU as well as most trumpies, i.e. a lot of right-wing politicians, will most likely try follow Trump's steps[^21]. This will be detrimental to the overall worldwide economy, political climate, and, as mentioned before, will be a breeding ground for dictators and Neonazis. I am not happy with this, in fact, I feel terrible about this, and I wish I had the ability to make a huge change to stop this.\n\nConcluding, the current political landscape in Europe is fraught with challenges that threaten the stability and democratic values of the region. I beg for understanding, education, and for you to vote, and make **_the right choice_**, for fucks sake, please, make the right choice. Don't praise or elect wannabe dictators, Nazis, Fascists, or anything of sort. Be human, don't fall for empty claims, stay aware.\n\n## Part three: Behavioural sink\n\nWell, where does this lead us? Behavioural sink.\n\n\"Behavioural sink is a term invented by an American ethologist and behavioral researcher John Bumpass Calhoun, which describes the decline in ethical behaviour with overpopulation and an \"easy living\" lifestyle. This term was invented after conducting an experiment on rats over 4 years when enclosures called \"rat utopias\" filled with essentially unlimited space, food, and water were created to enable an unlimited environment for population growth[^23]. His findings showed that such environment showed maternal neglect, aggression and violence, social withdrawal, and cannibalism - generally finding that moral behaviours have diminished.\n\nThis is very synonymous with today's world and sociopolitical landscape. Today's world is filled with ease when it comes to food, water, and other physical needs. We no longer have to live in families of 50, no longer do we have to socialise with everyone, we don't hunt, we are quite literally the rats that are in this big cage. We kill one another out of boredom seemingly, wars, and whatever the fuck today is. Project 2025 is quite literally a consequence of overpopulation, it is an ever-growing issue which is becoming more and more of a danger - one day, nature will do its thing and we will end up killing ourselves.\n\nPeople need to learn, sadly, even in the blog post from 7 months ago [\"history repeats\"](https://blog.ari.lt/b/history-repeats/) it seems that no-one will ever learn from mistakes, findings, and research. Academia seems like a status thing at this point, a social marker to get higher up the sociological ladder to gain power, control, and most importantly to them - money.\n\nMoral of the story is that, living a simpler life, being human, moral, ethical, and understanding is key. Don't let materialistic things corrupt you, understand your fellow human, don't support Nazis, and think. You are Homo Sapiens, don't become [Homo Sovieticus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus). I know I sound very demanding right now but I truly believe that the education system is doing nothing but making these people dumb so they vote for whatever. You are stronger and smarter than some old white man telling you that he's going to change and reform the world - remember history, remember Hitler, remember Mussolini. Remember history once again, learn from the old mistakes so you don't have to fall victim to them. Don't fall into the dystopia of 1984 or Animal Farm by George Orwell.\n\n## Concluding\n\nConclusion is simple. The current global political climate is rife with extremism and challenges which post significant threats to democratic values and human rights. The rise of far right-ideologies, as seen in recent US presidential elections and rise of nationalist and populist parties in the EU, is signal towards a more dire fate. These developments underscore the importance of staying informed, engaging in meaningful dialogue, and making educated decisions when voting while you can vote, before you elect a dictator. It\u2019s important that we, as Homo Sapiens, learn from history and remain vigilant against mistakes of the past, working collectively to prevent the societal decay, or, in other words, a behavioural sink. By prioritizing empathy, understanding, and ethical behaviour, we can strive towards a more just and inclusive world, but we can also prevent total and utter destruction. It's crucial to resist the allure of simplistic promises and instead focus on building a future that respects human dignity and global cooperation. Remember, your individual actions and choices have the power to contribute to a larger movement towards positive change, stay mindful.\n\nGood luck. I wish all of you the best and to make the right choice.\n\n## Footnotes\n\n[^1]: \n\n[^2]: \n\n[^3]: \n\n[^4]: \n\n[^5]: \n\n[^6]: \n\n[^7]: \n\n[^8]: \n\n[^9]: \n\n[^10]: \n\n[^11]: \n\n[^12]: \n\n[^13]: \n\n[^14]: \n\n[^15]: [^13] [^14] [^17]\n\n[^16]: \n\n[^17]: \n\n[^18]: \n\n[^19]: \n\n[^20]: \n\n[^21]: \n\n[^22]: \n\n[^23]: ", "keywords": [ "emphathy", "europe", @@ -309,7 +309,7 @@ "an-honest-review-contabo-gmbh-cheap-german-hosting-provider": { "title": "an honest (subjective) review of Contabo GmbH - a cheap German hosting provider", "description": "My review of Contabo GmbH cloud VPS services (S(1), M(2), L(3)) after 8 months of using Contabo. Providing tips, experience, and a genuine review of how it was (and still is by the time of writing this!) for me as a customer of Contabo. There's many negative things floating around like \"Is Contabo a scam?\" and \"Contabo has terrible uptime\" in relation to it, a lot of horror stories - so I am here to share my own experience.", - "content": "Hello, World,\n\nLet's get the boring stuff out of the way before the introduction:\nThis blog post constitutes an independent review and is not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated with Contabo GmbH in any official or unofficial capacity.\nNo endorsement, partnership, or any form of affiliation with Contabo GmbH is implied or should be inferred from the content presented herein.\nThe author disclaims all liability for any errors or omissions in this information and for its availability. **TL;DR** This is my honest opinion, experience, and research: not fact. Your experience may differ from mine.\n\nI've been using [Contabo](https://contabo.com/) and their services (more specifically, their [Cloud VPS services](https://contabo.com/en/vps/))\nfor over 8 months now as of originally writing this, in which period I've upgraded VPS plans 3 times. What I've noticed when considering\nusing Contabo as my hosting provider before fully committing to Contabo is that there's no good and concrete\ninformation about Contabo experiences besides a few negative experiences which don't help that much as they seem\nlike extraordinary cases. My goal with this blog post is to provide a detailed report of my experience,\nshare knowledge, tips, and whether or not _you_ should go for Contabo or not when deciding to host your\napps on their servers.\n\nEven though the majority of this blog post is my own personal experience, I've taken a few bits from sites\nlike LowEndTalk and Reddit, from experiences that do seem to be legit - this found knowledge was mainly\napplied in the <#:Tips> section of the post. I will do my best to clarify which bits where from online experiences\nand I'll try to link the source where it is feasible to.\n\nThat aside, let's begin!\n\n(Note: Before setting up a VPS at least read the <#:Tips> section of this post!)\n\n**Edit 2024-08-01**: In 10 days, I am switching to [HostHatch](https://hosthatch.com/) - I cannot with Contabo for another month, personally. I will no longer be making any major changes to this blog post unless needed so this may be out of date by the time you're reading this.\n\n**Edit 2024-08-22**: About 10 days after leaving Contabo, I got a [50 euro coupon: NVYT8PHP](https://ak.ari.lt/notice/AlDiFWfkYTWy5agmKO) valid for a week. Feel free to take that Contabo discount because I'm not going to be the one taking it. Speaking of money, they said I should be refunded in around a week after leaving Contabo:\n\n> We have successfully marked the server for cancellation and no further action is needed. Your remaining positive account balance should be refunded to you automatically after that cancellation process. Kindly note that it may take up to 7 days to be refunded.\n\nYeah, honestly, I don't think I'm getting this refund. At least I got a coupon I could share with everyone. While the refund seems to either be late, or I'm not getting it - who knows honestly lol.\n\n## Support\n\nMy experience with Contabo's support was always slow, they take their time to respond. Though generally, Contabo does not seem to rush and takes its time.\nAlbeit slow, their team is understanding and helpful as well as respecting boundaries you might have while talking to support.\nI've reached out to them quite a few times as I've had many questions about their service and of course - had problems with it.\nHere's a few tickets I've opened in the past and what happened:\n\n- Pricing questions: being new and used to Linode's pricing model, I was confused about some parts of how Contabo handles it all. Turns out they're pretty sane and barebones - they don't really keep anything behind any paywalls, you pay monthly, and if you don't pay they suspend your VPS and give you a week to pay up, and if you don't - they delete it. Contabo support handled these questions in a pretty detailed manner and it's been fine.\n- Billing balance questions: With Contabo expect things to move slow, including billing. Once you top up your balance, it'll take some time for it to show up in your account, so don't be worried. Of course this depends on the billing method - PayPal is almost instant, but I've decided to move onto direct bank transfers, which take up to a week even. As any other billing question - they handled this type of question very well as well.\n- Upgrading problems issues (main culprit of large downtime): Contabo's upgrading system, from my experience, is terrible, slow, and full of problems. This is the only thing I truly hate about Contabo. I don't understand how upgrading a VPS could take 12, or even 60 hours. I can upgrade my Qemu VM as fast as just changing a couple of parameters - what are they doing that takes _this_ long? Shouldn't they have an automated system? It's (probably) literally a VM which is clear by what the OS reports and the VMM steal.\n - First upgrade (VPS S (1) SSD => VPS M (2) SSD): 16 or so hours of downtime (unlike their promised \"15 minutes of downtime\" at the time with the \"Live Upgrade\" option), they messed up my network configuration (if I remember correctly), and they did not make it clear that I'll need to expand the storage space myself before the upgrade nor in the upgrade notification. Thankfully, after contacting their support, they fixed the networking and clarified that I need to expand the storage myself while the VPS was live (which, in my opinion, is dangerous and should be handled by Contabo, but I respect that they give full control to the owner). They linked to this article: (at least keep the `utm_source` GET parameter so it doesn't render the article weird).\n - Second upgrade (VPS M (2) SSD => VPS L (3) SSD): This upgrade is pretty recent and it caused about 60 hours of downtime if not more, and not only that - it took me FIVE (5) TRIES TO CONTACT THEIR SUPPORT just to get an automated response. After the automated response I got \"we don't see your upgrade request\" and a few minutes later \"yep, never mind! It's done - we're working on finalizing it.\" I was so close to leaving Contabo at that point, it wouldn't be the first nor the last time I considered leaving it.\n- DDoS protection (very recent attack on ari.lt): Recently the server has been attacked by a DDoS attack, or `\"Unfortunately, it is impossible to resolve this problem by regular means. We will do anything possible to protect your server from attacks. However, this attack is a massive one, which requires a lot of resources. <...> In this case, there is only one last resort: Not to block the attacking IP addresses (of which there might be myriad) but to block the attacked IP address. As already mentioned, this is the last thing we would ever do, but the stability of our network for other customers must be maintained by all means, and our hands are tied in this matter: We had to take action, and had to suspend access to your server.\"` according to Contabo. They limited my VPS over and over (I think around 10 times) again which caused me bad anxiety, purely out of my own inability to be patient and control my emotions. Their support was super slow to respond, so much so I thought they were ignoring me on purpose. At one point my anxiety, paranoia, and exhaustion got so bad I was having extremely painful panic attacks and was basically begging them to give me all the data on the VPS to me so I could move to other hosting providers. Once I got in touch with the support properly, they were understanding despite all my anxiety and handled the ticket fine. They made a decision to move my VPS to another location (If I remember correctly, Frankfurt to D\u00fcsseldorf) and ever since then it's been fine. I didn't track how much downtime this caused, but it was definitely an unreasonable amount of spotty uptime. This incident greatly impacted my mental health at the time (which isn't due to Contabo directly per say, but mainly their slowness to respond in combination with my inability to control such feelings).\n- **Edit 2024-08-01** - Networking issues: My VPS was throttled to 10 Mbit/s for no reason [despite them claiming always 100 Mbit/s availability](https://contabo.com/blog/vps-100-mbits-limit-throttling/). The experience was terrible: Firstly, I got requested login information into the server, after they did, I gave them access, though backtracked once I realised that there could be unexpected charges related to it in the future. They then just moved my VPS to a different location giving me more downtime. This was my last straw - I am tired of downtime.\n\nDespite these negative experiences which might make Contabo seem terrible in retrospect due to these isolated incidents, I don't plan of switching away from Contabo,\nat least not at the moment. I like them for the most part, but god forbid you need urgent support from their side - it's absolutely terrible.\nEspecially when it's people like me who have various problems with control of anxiety and paranoia (this is not Contabo's fault of course). Understandable that\nthey need to sacrifice on support though - they're cheap, and how are you going to make the ends meet if you don't compromise something?\n\nConsider this if you oftentimes need urgent support and plan to run anything enterprise. Support on Contabo is\nslow, and it's just fact. Sometimes you might get a fast response, but expect them to respond in 2-4 working days\nif you're contacting them.\n\nAlso, even though I'm not a support representative of Contabo, if you have any questions about Contabo or anything to me as a Contabo\ncustomer, even the technical ones, you're free to contact me. But please, for the love of god, **don't send me any personal information**\nabout yourself, your server, or just in general. I can help with like system administration questions, setup questions, tips, experience questions,\netc. though I really cannot help with things that are truly confirmed to be on Contabo's end, I can help you theorise, but I can't\nreplace Contabo's support. Contact me through contacts listed on my website at or at :)\n\n(By the way, I've heard that phone support is useless. At least I can't even reach them, but I've heard it's bad in general (A few experiences list this, for example ))\n\n## VPS performance\n\nThis section might not be universal amongst all products of Contabo, including VPS plans (or even same plans!).\nI'm talking from my experience in using Contabo's Europe (Germany) location with the first 3 tiers Contabo provides with the SSD option:\n\n1. VPS S (1) SSD (hosted at Frankfurt, if I remember correctly)\n2. VPS M (2) SSD (hosted at Frankfurt, if I remember correctly)\n3. VPS L (3) SSD (hosted at D\u00fcsseldorf)\n\nAnd, in my opinion, the performance of Contabo VPSes is fine. Network performance is lacking sometimes, but even that I don't really\nhave a big issue with. If Contabo upgraded their network infrastructure, it'd honestly be really good when it comes to performance.\n\nThough, I think they oversell due to CPU steal. I mean, I don't really care, the steal is only like 1% on average, and the prices are crazy\ncheap so it's like _fine_, though I don't think they make it clear enough that you will experience up to 15% (maximum I've ever\nobserved) VMM steal if you use their Cloud VPS services. You can check the CPU steal like this:\n\n sar 1 | grep \"Average\" | awk '{print $7}'\n\nWhere `` is the time period it checks. `sar` is a command from [the sysstat package](https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=sysstat).\n\nSo, unless you need very good performance network-wise, I think Contabo is an okay choice, especially considering how cheap their products\nare - truly a steal.\n\n### Hardware\n\nCurrently, on my VPS L (3) SSD (hosted at D\u00fcsseldorf) I pay for this hardware:\n\n- Host: KVM/QEMU (Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996) pc-i440fx-7.2)\n- CPU: AMD EPYC 7282 (8) @ 2.794 GHz\n- Memory: 24031 MiB\n- Network: 450-600 Mbit/s download, 450-600 MBit/s upload\n- SSD: 1.2 TB\n - Read\n - Bandwidth: 50.1 MiB/s\n - Read operations per second: 12800\n - Latency: 76.92 microseconds\n - Write\n - Bandwidth: 5229 KiB/s\n - Write operations per second: 1307\n - Latency: 762.80 microseconds\n - Note that they are known to cap the disk speed (according to ), it's been fine for me, but if it's not for you, contact their support whether by the Contabo UI or email `support[at]contabo.com` and ask for the cap to be lifted. I've heard so at least - don't quote me on that.\n\n## Downtime\n\nI haven't experienced any downtime of the VPS itself randomly due to fault of Contabo personally.\nI don't understand these internet bad experiences where they say they have downtime every week or so -\nthat's false, well, in my case it is.\n\nMost downtime I've experienced was from the DDoS and upgrades. Though, I've also had issues with their DNS recently.\n\nContabo DNS (the one they ship by default in `/etc/resolv.conf`) has been going down a lot recently for me,\ncausing networking on my VPS to malfunction. I've switched to [Quad9 DNS](https://quad9.net/) by adding these lines to the top\nof `/etc/resolv.conf`:\n\n nameserver 9.9.9.9\n nameserver 149.112.112.112\n\nAs in, before all the Contabo DNS stuff:\n\n nameserver 9.9.9.9\n nameserver 149.112.112.112\n domain ...contabo...\n search ...contabo...\n nameserver ...contabo...\n nameserver ...contabo...\n\nYou should too if you don't want weird DNS downtime sometimes. Everything else, though, has been fine for the most part.\nIt's weird how they don't report such downtimes properly at , at least I don't see it, might be blind though.\n\nI've also had issues with IPv6, it's _extremely_ slow for me, so I'm just avoiding it on my server.\nIf you choose to enable IPv6, do so by running the alias Contabo provides by default in `/root/.bashrc`:\n\n alias enable_ipv6='sed -i \"/net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6.*/d\" /etc/sysctl.conf && sysctl -q -p && echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/disable_ipv6'\n\nI.e just run `enable_ipv6` (though you _might_ need to reboot). After you enable IPv6, of course, update `/etc/resolv.conf` to use Quad9 on IPv6 as well:\n\n nameserver 9.9.9.9\n nameserver 149.112.112.112\n nameserver 2620:fe::fe\n nameserver 2620:fe::9\n\n## Skill level\n\nIf you're going into Contabo, you need to have skills in systems administration - they barely provide anything through UI.\nSome people, such as I, like that. But if you're looking for something more 'high-level' and through UI go for something else.\nContabo gives you bare bones, and I genuinely like that. I respect that they're sticking to bare minimum as I really do like\nminimalism like this.\n\nIt'd be nice if they provided out-of-the-box UI-configurable firewalls, but it's fine, I guess. Install UFW or\nsomething and it'll be enough for the most part I think.\n\nTheir DDoS protection is close to useless as well so you might want to also set up Cloudflare,\nthough there's other reasons to why to not use Cloudflare - there's many reasons why you shouldn't man-in-the-middle\nyourself with a free service a corporate entity provides, especially if you care about privacy, though this isn't a Cloudflare post,\nso guess find your own reasons and draw your own conclusions.\n(for starters, even though I don't agree with all the Stallman's words, this gives valid reasons - )\n\nJust be warned that you're basically on your own, with a helping hand of slow support and an outdated dashboard.\n\n## Should I use Contabo?\n\nIf you're considering Contabo, you're probably looking for something cheap, and Contabo sure is\ncheap, but you get what you pay for. In my opinion: yes, but no. If there are other reasons why\nyou wouldn't use any other competing hosting provider such as Netcup (The internet highlights their aggressive billing policy,\nKYC process, etc.), Hetzner (The internet highlights their aggressive KYC, shutting VPSes down randomly), or\nHostHatch (From what I see, low storage and whatnot) - Contabo is an okay choice, wouldn't be my first one,\nbut it's the best choice on the market if you feel restricted over other hosting providers.\n\nThough consider long-run of Contabo. These are factors you should consider in my opinion:\n\n- Are you okay possibly having 3 days of downtime due to some action you took on the VPS such as upgrading?\n- Are you okay with suboptimal performance?\n- Are you skilled enough to manage a raw system basically on your own? (though I'm sure you can do it if you managed a server before)\n- Are you okay with slow support?\n- Are you okay with an outdated panel with basic functionality?\n\nAnd consider that when setting up a Contabo VPS you will be forced to pay a setup fee. If you just get\na 1 month contract you will have to pay double the price of the VPS for the first month as the setup fee is\nthe price of the VPS. I find this concept funny though - it takes _nothing_ to set a VM up besides run a\nsingle command through Qemu or more realistically Proxmox. Goofy.\n\nOne thing to also consider is long-term commitment. Would I recommend Contabo long-term? No. Hard no.\n\nBut before setting up a VPS read the <#:Tips> section of this post!\n\n## What's good about Contabo?\n\nPretty much really good prices for resources you get with okay performance. I don't think any hosting provider\nwill ever beat the prices and production of Contabo. They also run on green energy as stated in the\n[sustainability page at contabo.com](https://contabo.com/en/sustainability/) which is a huge positive and more hosting providers should take\nContabo as an example in this case. I also like that they provide a bare bones VPS, even though features like\ngood DDoS protection and a firewall would be nice, I believe Contabo is respectable in this sector.\n\n## What's bad about Contabo?\n\nI found support to be slow, I felt and found experiences online that describe some of their billing methods as \"unexpected costs\"\n(or as people usually seem to describe it online - \"hidden fees\", even though it's not an accurate label),\nsome of them discussed in the <#:Tips> section (some stuff I found online through research online), the network performance is suboptimal,\nand the stability of it could be questionable at times. There's really not much particularly bad or good about Contabo - it's really bare bones. It being\nbare-bones also means there's a lack of community resources and shared experiences\n(including discussion of the contract, exactly why the \"unexpected costs\" mentioned in this post aren't well-known) and whatnot.\n\nAlso, be prepared for stress if you choose Contabo. Contabo's slow nature has caused immense stress for me\na couple of times. It sucks, but it's over for now. Hey, at least I get a cheap way to host all of ari.lt for\na good price without going broke.\n\n## Tips\n\nI've gained some knowledge when using Contabo and doing research about it online, here's how to mitigate its weirdness from my and online people's experience:\n\n- Avoid Contabo if you can find another hosting provider that fits your needs and abilities. I've done extensive research and Contabo was the only one that really sold me.\n- Use the European locations if you can, the latency seems the best there and other locations cost extra. Of course, they support more locations .\n- Based on various online sources: be wary of other \"unexpected costs\". They are costs that I feel like aren't as well discussed online and could be considered unexpected by me and other people online (who usually refer to it as \"hidden fee\" but I feel like that's not fully accurate due to Contabo not trying to intentionally hide them) which might apply to you, such as described below. I've mainly been able to find them from online people's experiences as Contabo resources are pretty hard to navigate for me, based on not that old user experiences:\n - Extra IP address cost: 3.5 euro a month (as seen on their billing page), which could be considered pretty expensive ().\n - Late response fee for abuse emails: 15 euro ()\n - Reactivation fee (for example if they suspend your VPS and you want to reactivate it after you've paid for it): 15 (or 30 euro? I'm unsure, I've seen both talked about online, worst case scenario is talked about in , exact amount does not seem to be listed in [Contabo's terms and conditions document](https://contabo.com/en/legal/terms-and-conditions/) clause 4 (\"Payment terms\"))\n - Remote-hand support, which might be relevant when support wants to connect to the server, possibly? I don't know. Ask them if this happens. The fee is: 27.5 euro/15 minutes ()\n - Setup & location fees, but those aren't really unexpected nor hidden as they're pretty clearly defined and sane on the billing page.\n- Make sure to stay up to date with \"Clause 4: Payment terms\" and other terms and conditions of Contabo at .\n- Use a firewall and a DDoS protection script if possible as Contabo doesn't seem to have any firewall and their DDoS protection is pretty useless.\n- Maybe don't use Contabo's DNS that's shipped by default as you might face issues with it. Instead try to use Quad9, Cloudflare, Google's, or any other DNS provider in priority just in case.\n- Avoid non-Linux operating systems - don't make your life harder than it has to be, especially at Contabo. Choose to install the latest version of Debian or something.\n - Stay up to date with security of course, no firewall will make you more vulnerable. On Debian prioritize the `debian-security` repository.\n - Also set up SSH and other access in a way where it enhances the security, use just SSH keys and whatnot. is a helpful resource.\n- Avoid enabling IPv6 due to extremely degraded performance (in my experience). You can of course try, maybe it's been fixed, but when I tried it a few months ago, it was bad.\n- Before contacting Contabo support diagnose the issue as good as possible, provide as much information as possible and you're comfortable with sending over over an unencrypted channel in relation to that topic, and try to resolve the issue yourself. This is all pretty obvious, but this especially is the case in case of Contabo. Reminder that the response times are even worse during holidays and weekends, so if you're facing any issue try to move as quick as possible. Also join tech support communities and ask people who are willing to answer (like me) for resolution help.\n- When upgrading your VPS, expect a bunch of downtime - that's normal for Contabo. After upgrading, you will have to extend the main partition yourself live so stop all services running on your server after upgrading and use cfdisk or something (such as ) to extend your storage you pay for. Then reboot after you're done.\n- Prefer to contact Contabo support through the UI rather than email, their email stuff seems to sometimes have weird issues (such as not acknowledging you as being you?) so using UI will help to ensure there's no room for error. Use the link after logging into the Contabo panel to make a new ticket if you already have an account, else just use their support email.\n- For some weird reason, Contabo enables VNC by default. You might be interested in disabling that even though it's on a different IP, on a random port, and protected by a password.\n- Don't lose your 2FA or access to your account - be extremely cautious. I've heard online that they ask to pay up if you lose access to your account. Backup as much as possible! (based on , not personal experience)\n - Maybe also keep the Contabo API token with you as well found in the Contabo control panel UI.\n- Live migration does cost extra in certain cases where applicable (33 euro + VAT to be more specific). This is almost like an unexpected cost I've felt like as it was confusing to even find this out, never experienced it personally though as I never moved locations. This fee only applies if your VPS is moved to a different location, which in case of you upgrading the VPS and keeping it in the same location (as in you're in the Europe data centre - keep the Europe location) shouldn't be applied. ()\n- Always check your notifications from Contabo, don't assign the email you use for your Contabo account to an email server that is hosted on a server that's under that account as what it goes down?\n- Be _really_ patient. Contabo never seems to rush anywhere, so if you've contacted them, only contact them again if they haven't responded in 2 days. Try to stay calm and collected.\n- Contabo does not have off-site backups. You might want to do incremental backups on the VPS and then download them locally slowly. Of course, also make on-site backups - though don't go over the backup limit of your plan.\n- Contabo only has a 95% uptime guarantee, that's 19 days of possible contractual downtime. It's worthless asking for a refund if you haven't passed this threshold in downtime.\n - My downtime in those 8+ months has probably been like 4-5 days. It's not good, but guess also not the worst it could be.\n- Share your experiences online! We, the Contabo community, are lacking shared resources, and sharing your personal subjective experience online could help others - contribute to helping others :D\n\nIf you have any questions, contact me as mentioned earlier in this post ( or at ) or contact Contabo support at or their email `support[at]contabo.com`.\n\nGood luck if you choose Contabo as your hosting provider! My overall rating for Contabo would be 6/10 and I don't think much could sway this rating unless Contabo makes changes to their transparency\n(though it's fine for the most part, improvements could be made in making fees and performance more transparent), support (faster response times), and uptime reliability\n(having a better uptime guarantee and generally having better uptime throughout upgrades and general functioning).\n\nFinally, for good measure: **THIS IS PURELY MY OPINION, FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, FEELINGS, AND RESEARCH ONLINE.**\n\nCya!", + "content": "Hello, World,\n\nLet's get the boring stuff out of the way before the introduction:\nThis blog post constitutes an independent review and is not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated with Contabo GmbH in any official or unofficial capacity.\nNo endorsement, partnership, or any form of affiliation with Contabo GmbH is implied or should be inferred from the content presented herein.\nThe author disclaims all liability for any errors or omissions in this information and for its availability. **TL;DR** This is my honest opinion, experience, and research: not fact. Your experience may differ from mine.\n\nI've been using [Contabo](https://contabo.com/) and their services (more specifically, their [Cloud VPS services](https://contabo.com/en/vps/))\nfor over 8 months now as of originally writing this, in which period I've upgraded VPS plans 3 times. What I've noticed when considering\nusing Contabo as my hosting provider before fully committing to Contabo is that there's no good and concrete\ninformation about Contabo experiences besides a few negative experiences which don't help that much as they seem\nlike extraordinary cases. My goal with this blog post is to provide a detailed report of my experience,\nshare knowledge, tips, and whether or not _you_ should go for Contabo or not when deciding to host your\napps on their servers.\n\nEven though the majority of this blog post is my own personal experience, I've taken a few bits from sites\nlike LowEndTalk and Reddit, from experiences that do seem to be legit - this found knowledge was mainly\napplied in the <#:Tips> section of the post. I will do my best to clarify which bits where from online experiences\nand I'll try to link the source where it is feasible to.\n\nThat aside, let's begin!\n\n(Note: Before setting up a VPS at least read the <#:Tips> section of this post!)\n\n**Edit 2024-08-01**: In 10 days, I am switching to [HostHatch](https://hosthatch.com/) - I cannot with Contabo for another month, personally. I will no longer be making any major changes to this blog post unless needed so this may be out of date by the time you're reading this.\n\n**Edit 2024-08-22**: About 10 days after leaving Contabo, I got a [50 euro coupon: NVYT8PHP](https://ak.ari.lt/notice/AlDiFWfkYTWy5agmKO) valid for a week. Feel free to take that Contabo discount because I'm not going to be the one taking it. Speaking of money, they said I should be refunded in around a week after leaving Contabo:\n\n> We have successfully marked the server for cancellation and no further action is needed. Your remaining positive account balance should be refunded to you automatically after that cancellation process. Kindly note that it may take up to 7 days to be refunded.\n\nYeah, honestly, I don't think I'm getting this refund. At least I got a coupon I could share with everyone. While the refund seems to either be late, or I'm not getting it - who knows honestly lol.\n\n## Support\n\nMy experience with Contabo's support was always slow, they take their time to respond. Though generally, Contabo does not seem to rush and takes its time.\nAlbeit slow, their team is understanding and helpful as well as respecting boundaries you might have while talking to support.\nI've reached out to them quite a few times as I've had many questions about their service and of course - had problems with it.\nHere's a few tickets I've opened in the past and what happened:\n\n- Pricing questions: being new and used to Linode's pricing model, I was confused about some parts of how Contabo handles it all. Turns out they're pretty sane and barebones - they don't really keep anything behind any paywalls, you pay monthly, and if you don't pay they suspend your VPS and give you a week to pay up, and if you don't - they delete it. Contabo support handled these questions in a pretty detailed manner and it's been fine.\n- Billing balance questions: With Contabo expect things to move slow, including billing. Once you top up your balance, it'll take some time for it to show up in your account, so don't be worried. Of course this depends on the billing method - PayPal is almost instant, but I've decided to move onto direct bank transfers, which take up to a week even. As any other billing question - they handled this type of question very well as well.\n- Upgrading problems issues (main culprit of large downtime): Contabo's upgrading system, from my experience, is terrible, slow, and full of problems. This is the only thing I truly hate about Contabo. I don't understand how upgrading a VPS could take 12, or even 60 hours. I can upgrade my Qemu VM as fast as just changing a couple of parameters - what are they doing that takes _this_ long? Shouldn't they have an automated system? It's (probably) literally a VM which is clear by what the OS reports and the VMM steal.\n - First upgrade (VPS S (1) SSD => VPS M (2) SSD): 16 or so hours of downtime (unlike their promised \"15 minutes of downtime\" at the time with the \"Live Upgrade\" option), they messed up my network configuration (if I remember correctly), and they did not make it clear that I'll need to expand the storage space myself before the upgrade nor in the upgrade notification. Thankfully, after contacting their support, they fixed the networking and clarified that I need to expand the storage myself while the VPS was live (which, in my opinion, is dangerous and should be handled by Contabo, but I respect that they give full control to the owner). They linked to this article: (at least keep the `utm_source` GET parameter so it doesn't render the article weird).\n - Second upgrade (VPS M (2) SSD => VPS L (3) SSD): This upgrade is pretty recent and it caused about 60 hours of downtime if not more, and not only that - it took me FIVE (5) TRIES TO CONTACT THEIR SUPPORT just to get an automated response. After the automated response I got \"we don't see your upgrade request\" and a few minutes later \"yep, never mind! It's done - we're working on finalizing it.\" I was so close to leaving Contabo at that point, it wouldn't be the first nor the last time I considered leaving it.\n- DDoS protection (very recent attack on ari.lt): Recently the server has been attacked by a DDoS attack, or `\"Unfortunately, it is impossible to resolve this problem by regular means. We will do anything possible to protect your server from attacks. However, this attack is a massive one, which requires a lot of resources. <...> In this case, there is only one last resort: Not to block the attacking IP addresses (of which there might be myriad) but to block the attacked IP address. As already mentioned, this is the last thing we would ever do, but the stability of our network for other customers must be maintained by all means, and our hands are tied in this matter: We had to take action, and had to suspend access to your server.\"` according to Contabo. They limited my VPS over and over (I think around 10 times) again which caused me bad anxiety, purely out of my own inability to be patient and control my emotions. Their support was super slow to respond, so much so I thought they were ignoring me on purpose. At one point my anxiety, paranoia, and exhaustion got so bad I was having extremely painful panic attacks and was basically begging them to give me all the data on the VPS to me so I could move to other hosting providers. Once I got in touch with the support properly, they were understanding despite all my anxiety and handled the ticket fine. They made a decision to move my VPS to another location (If I remember correctly, Frankfurt to D\u00fcsseldorf) and ever since then it's been fine. I didn't track how much downtime this caused, but it was definitely an unreasonable amount of spotty uptime. This incident greatly impacted my mental health at the time (which isn't due to Contabo directly per say, but mainly their slowness to respond in combination with my inability to control such feelings).\n- **Edit 2024-08-01** - Networking issues: My VPS was throttled to 10 Mbit/s for no reason [despite them claiming always 100 Mbit/s availability](https://contabo.com/blog/vps-100-mbits-limit-throttling/). The experience was terrible: Firstly, I got requested login information into the server, after they did, I gave them access, though backtracked once I realised that there could be unexpected charges related to it in the future. They then just moved my VPS to a different location giving me more downtime. This was my last straw - I am tired of downtime.\n\nDespite these negative experiences which might make Contabo seem terrible in retrospect due to these isolated incidents, I don't plan of switching away from Contabo,\nat least not at the moment. I like them for the most part, but god forbid you need urgent support from their side - it's absolutely terrible.\nEspecially when it's people like me who have various problems with control of anxiety and paranoia (this is not Contabo's fault of course). Understandable that\nthey need to sacrifice on support though - they're cheap, and how are you going to make the ends meet if you don't compromise something?\n\nConsider this if you oftentimes need urgent support and plan to run anything enterprise. Support on Contabo is\nslow, and it's just fact. Sometimes you might get a fast response, but expect them to respond in 2-4 working days\nif you're contacting them.\n\nAlso, even though I'm not a support representative of Contabo, if you have any questions about Contabo or anything to me as a Contabo\ncustomer, even the technical ones, you're free to contact me. But please, for the love of god, **don't send me any personal information**\nabout yourself, your server, or just in general. I can help with like system administration questions, setup questions, tips, experience questions,\netc. though I really cannot help with things that are truly confirmed to be on Contabo's end, I can help you theorise, but I can't\nreplace Contabo's support. Contact me through contacts listed on my website at or at :)\n\n(By the way, I've heard that phone support is useless. At least I can't even reach them, but I've heard it's bad in general (A few experiences list this, for example ))\n\n## VPS performance\n\nThis section might not be universal amongst all products of Contabo, including VPS plans (or even same plans!).\nI'm talking from my experience in using Contabo's Europe (Germany) location with the first 3 tiers Contabo provides with the SSD option:\n\n1. VPS S (1) SSD (hosted at Frankfurt, if I remember correctly)\n2. VPS M (2) SSD (hosted at Frankfurt, if I remember correctly)\n3. VPS L (3) SSD (hosted at D\u00fcsseldorf)\n\nAnd, in my opinion, the performance of Contabo VPSes is fine. Network performance is lacking sometimes, but even that I don't really\nhave a big issue with. If Contabo upgraded their network infrastructure, it'd honestly be really good when it comes to performance.\n\nThough, I think they oversell due to CPU steal. I mean, I don't really care, the steal is only like 1% on average, and the prices are crazy\ncheap so it's like _fine_, though I don't think they make it clear enough that you will experience up to 15% (maximum I've ever\nobserved) VMM steal if you use their Cloud VPS services. You can check the CPU steal like this:\n\n sar 1 | grep \"Average\" | awk '{print $7}'\n\nWhere `` is the time period it checks. `sar` is a command from [the sysstat package](https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=sysstat).\n\nSo, unless you need very good performance network-wise, I think Contabo is an okay choice, especially considering how cheap their products\nare - truly a steal.\n\n### Hardware\n\nCurrently, on my VPS L (3) SSD (hosted at D\u00fcsseldorf) I pay for this hardware:\n\n- Host: KVM/QEMU (Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996) pc-i440fx-7.2)\n- CPU: AMD EPYC 7282 (8) @ 2.794 GHz\n- Memory: 24031 MiB\n- Network: 450-600 Mbit/s download, 450-600 MBit/s upload\n- SSD: 1.2 TB\n - Read\n - Bandwidth: 50.1 MiB/s\n - Read operations per second: 12800\n - Latency: 76.92 microseconds\n - Write\n - Bandwidth: 5229 KiB/s\n - Write operations per second: 1307\n - Latency: 762.80 microseconds\n - Note that they are known to cap the disk speed (according to ), it's been fine for me, but if it's not for you, contact their support whether by the Contabo UI or email `support[at]contabo.com` and ask for the cap to be lifted. I've heard so at least - don't quote me on that.\n\n## Downtime\n\nI haven't experienced any downtime of the VPS itself randomly due to fault of Contabo personally.\nI don't understand these internet bad experiences where they say they have downtime every week or so -\nthat's false, well, in my case it is.\n\nMost downtime I've experienced was from the DDoS and upgrades. Though, I've also had issues with their DNS recently.\n\nContabo DNS (the one they ship by default in `/etc/resolv.conf`) has been going down a lot recently for me,\ncausing networking on my VPS to malfunction. I've switched to [Quad9 DNS](https://quad9.net/) by adding these lines to the top\nof `/etc/resolv.conf`:\n\n nameserver 9.9.9.9\n nameserver 149.112.112.112\n\nAs in, before all the Contabo DNS stuff:\n\n nameserver 9.9.9.9\n nameserver 149.112.112.112\n domain ...contabo...\n search ...contabo...\n nameserver ...contabo...\n nameserver ...contabo...\n\nYou should too if you don't want weird DNS downtime sometimes. Everything else, though, has been fine for the most part.\nIt's weird how they don't report such downtimes properly at , at least I don't see it, might be blind though.\n\nI've also had issues with IPv6, it's _extremely_ slow for me, so I'm just avoiding it on my server.\nIf you choose to enable IPv6, do so by running the alias Contabo provides by default in `/root/.bashrc`:\n\n alias enable_ipv6='sed -i \"/net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6.*/d\" /etc/sysctl.conf && sysctl -q -p && echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/disable_ipv6'\n\nI.e just run `enable_ipv6` (though you _might_ need to reboot). After you enable IPv6, of course, update `/etc/resolv.conf` to use Quad9 on IPv6 as well:\n\n nameserver 9.9.9.9\n nameserver 149.112.112.112\n nameserver 2620:fe::fe\n nameserver 2620:fe::9\n\n## Skill level\n\nIf you're going into Contabo, you need to have skills in systems administration - they barely provide anything through UI.\nSome people, such as I, like that. But if you're looking for something more 'high-level' and through UI go for something else.\nContabo gives you bare bones, and I genuinely like that. I respect that they're sticking to bare minimum as I really do like\nminimalism like this.\n\nIt'd be nice if they provided out-of-the-box UI-configurable firewalls, but it's fine, I guess. Install UFW or\nsomething and it'll be enough for the most part I think.\n\nTheir DDoS protection is close to useless as well so you might want to also set up Cloudflare,\nthough there's other reasons to why to not use Cloudflare - there's many reasons why you shouldn't man-in-the-middle\nyourself with a free service a corporate entity provides, especially if you care about privacy, though this isn't a Cloudflare post,\nso guess find your own reasons and draw your own conclusions.\n(for starters, even though I don't agree with all the Stallman's words, this gives valid reasons - )\n\nJust be warned that you're basically on your own, with a helping hand of slow support and an outdated dashboard.\n\n## Should I use Contabo?\n\nIf you're considering Contabo, you're probably looking for something cheap, and Contabo sure is\ncheap, but you get what you pay for. In my opinion: yes, but no. If there are other reasons why\nyou wouldn't use any other competing hosting provider such as Netcup (The internet highlights their aggressive billing policy,\nKYC process, etc.), Hetzner (The internet highlights their aggressive KYC, shutting VPSes down randomly), or\nHostHatch (From what I see, low storage and whatnot) - Contabo is an okay choice, wouldn't be my first one,\nbut it's the best choice on the market if you feel restricted over other hosting providers.\n\nThough consider long-run of Contabo. These are factors you should consider in my opinion:\n\n- Are you okay possibly having 3 days of downtime due to some action you took on the VPS such as upgrading?\n- Are you okay with suboptimal performance?\n- Are you skilled enough to manage a raw system basically on your own? (though I'm sure you can do it if you managed a server before)\n- Are you okay with slow support?\n- Are you okay with an outdated panel with basic functionality?\n\nAnd consider that when setting up a Contabo VPS you will be forced to pay a setup fee. If you just get\na 1 month contract you will have to pay double the price of the VPS for the first month as the setup fee is\nthe price of the VPS. I find this concept funny though - it takes _nothing_ to set a VM up besides run a\nsingle command through Qemu or more realistically Proxmox. Goofy.\n\nOne thing to also consider is long-term commitment. Would I recommend Contabo long-term? No. Hard no.\n\nBut before setting up a VPS read the <#:Tips> section of this post!\n\n## What's good about Contabo?\n\nPretty much really good prices for resources you get with okay performance. I don't think any hosting provider\nwill ever beat the prices and production of Contabo. They also run on green energy as stated in the\n[sustainability page at contabo.com](https://contabo.com/en/sustainability/) which is a huge positive and more hosting providers should take\nContabo as an example in this case. I also like that they provide a bare bones VPS, even though features like\ngood DDoS protection and a firewall would be nice, I believe Contabo is respectable in this sector.\n\n## What's bad about Contabo?\n\nI found support to be slow, I felt and found experiences online that describe some of their billing methods as \"unexpected costs\"\n(or as people usually seem to describe it online - \"hidden fees\", even though it's not an accurate label),\nsome of them discussed in the <#:Tips> section (some stuff I found online through research online), the network performance is suboptimal,\nand the stability of it could be questionable at times. There's really not much particularly bad or good about Contabo - it's really bare bones. It being\nbare-bones also means there's a lack of community resources and shared experiences\n(including discussion of the contract, exactly why the \"unexpected costs\" mentioned in this post aren't well-known) and whatnot.\n\nAlso, be prepared for stress if you choose Contabo. Contabo's slow nature has caused immense stress for me\na couple of times. It sucks, but it's over for now. Hey, at least I get a cheap way to host all of ari.lt for\na good price without going broke.\n\n## Tips\n\nI've gained some knowledge when using Contabo and doing research about it online, here's how to mitigate its weirdness from my and online people's experience:\n\n- Avoid Contabo if you can find another hosting provider that fits your needs and abilities. I've done extensive research and Contabo was the only one that really sold me.\n- Use the European locations if you can, the latency seems the best there and other locations cost extra. Of course, they support more locations .\n- Based on various online sources: be wary of other \"unexpected costs\". They are costs that I feel like aren't as well discussed online and could be considered unexpected by me and other people online (who usually refer to it as \"hidden fee\" but I feel like that's not fully accurate due to Contabo not trying to intentionally hide them) which might apply to you, such as described below. I've mainly been able to find them from online people's experiences as Contabo resources are pretty hard to navigate for me, based on not that old user experiences:\n - Extra IP address cost: 3.5 euro a month (as seen on their billing page), which could be considered pretty expensive ().\n - Late response fee for abuse emails: 15 euro ()\n - Reactivation fee (for example if they suspend your VPS and you want to reactivate it after you've paid for it): 15 (or 30 euro? I'm unsure, I've seen both talked about online, worst case scenario is talked about in , exact amount does not seem to be listed in [Contabo's terms and conditions document](https://contabo.com/en/legal/terms-and-conditions/) clause 4 (\"Payment terms\"))\n - Remote-hand support, which might be relevant when support wants to connect to the server, possibly? I don't know. Ask them if this happens. The fee is: 27.5 euro/15 minutes ()\n - Setup & location fees, but those aren't really unexpected nor hidden as they're pretty clearly defined and sane on the billing page.\n- Make sure to stay up to date with \"Clause 4: Payment terms\" and other terms and conditions of Contabo at .\n- Use a firewall and a DDoS protection script if possible as Contabo doesn't seem to have any firewall and their DDoS protection is pretty useless.\n- Maybe don't use Contabo's DNS that's shipped by default as you might face issues with it. Instead try to use Quad9, Cloudflare, Google's, or any other DNS provider in priority just in case.\n- Avoid non-Linux operating systems - don't make your life harder than it has to be, especially at Contabo. Choose to install the latest version of Debian or something.\n - Stay up to date with security of course, no firewall will make you more vulnerable. On Debian prioritize the `debian-security` repository.\n - Also set up SSH and other access in a way where it enhances the security, use just SSH keys and whatnot. is a helpful resource.\n- Avoid enabling IPv6 due to extremely degraded performance (in my experience). You can of course try, maybe it's been fixed, but when I tried it a few months ago, it was bad.\n- Before contacting Contabo support diagnose the issue as good as possible, provide as much information as possible and you're comfortable with sending over over an unencrypted channel in relation to that topic, and try to resolve the issue yourself. This is all pretty obvious, but this especially is the case in case of Contabo. Reminder that the response times are even worse during holidays and weekends, so if you're facing any issue try to move as quick as possible. Also join tech support communities and ask people who are willing to answer (like me) for resolution help.\n- When upgrading your VPS, expect a bunch of downtime - that's normal for Contabo. After upgrading, you will have to extend the main partition yourself live so stop all services running on your server after upgrading and use cfdisk or something (such as ) to extend your storage you pay for. Then reboot after you're done.\n- Prefer to contact Contabo support through the UI rather than email, their email stuff seems to sometimes have weird issues (such as not acknowledging you as being you?) so using UI will help to ensure there's no room for error. Use the link after logging into the Contabo panel to make a new ticket if you already have an account, else just use their support email.\n- For some weird reason, Contabo enables VNC by default. You might be interested in disabling that even though it's on a different IP, on a random port, and protected by a password.\n- Don't lose your 2FA or access to your account - be extremely cautious. I've heard online that they ask to pay up if you lose access to your account. Backup as much as possible! (based on , not personal experience)\n - Maybe also keep the Contabo API token with you as well found in the Contabo control panel UI.\n- Live migration does cost extra in certain cases where applicable (33 euro + VAT to be more specific). This is almost like an unexpected cost I've felt like as it was confusing to even find this out, never experienced it personally though as I never moved locations. This fee only applies if your VPS is moved to a different location, which in case of you upgrading the VPS and keeping it in the same location (as in you're in the Europe data centre - keep the Europe location) shouldn't be applied. ()\n- Always check your notifications from Contabo, don't assign the email you use for your Contabo account to an email server that is hosted on a server that's under that account as what it goes down?\n- Be _really_ patient. Contabo never seems to rush anywhere, so if you've contacted them, only contact them again if they haven't responded in 2 days. Try to stay calm and collected.\n- Contabo does not have off-site backups. You might want to do incremental backups on the VPS and then download them locally slowly. Of course, also make on-site backups - though don't go over the backup limit of your plan.\n- Contabo only has a 95% uptime guarantee, that's 19 days of possible contractual downtime. It's worthless asking for a refund if you haven't passed this threshold in downtime.\n - My downtime in those 8+ months has probably been like 4-5 days. It's not good, but guess also not the worst it could be.\n- Share your experiences online! We, the Contabo community, are lacking shared resources, and sharing your personal subjective experience online could help others - contribute to helping others :D\n\nIf you have any questions, contact me as mentioned earlier in this post ( or at ) or contact Contabo support at or their email `support[at]contabo.com`.\n\nGood luck if you choose Contabo as your hosting provider! My overall rating for Contabo would be 6/10 and I don't think much could sway this rating unless Contabo makes changes to their transparency\n(though it's fine for the most part, improvements could be made in making fees and performance more transparent), support (faster response times), and uptime reliability\n(having a better uptime guarantee and generally having better uptime throughout upgrades and general functioning).\n\nFinally, for good measure: **THIS IS PURELY MY OPINION, FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, FEELINGS, AND RESEARCH ONLINE. YOUR EXPERIENCE MAY DIFFER FROM MINE.**\n\nCya!", "keywords": [ "contabo european vps", "contabo support", @@ -375,7 +375,7 @@ "youtube-their-idiotic-stunts-forced-ads": { "title": "youtube and their idiotic stunts : forced ads", "description": "Critique of recent Google experiments with ads: forcing them down your throat server-side so you \"couldn't\" block them!", - "content": "This blog post stems from the fediverse post from SponsorBlock located at :\n\n> YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection. This means that the ad is being added directly into the video stream.\n>\n> This breaks sponsorblock since now all timestamps are offset by the ad times.\n>\n> For now, I set up the server to detect when someone is submitting from a browser with this happening and rejecting the submission to prevent the database from getting filled with incorrect submissions.\n\n**Warning:** I'm no legal or economics expert. I'm a random teen with an opinion which you can agree or disagree with - it's my two cents on a (in my opinion) shitty situation \ud83d\udc4d.\n\nI have some things to say about this idiotic stunt of forcing advertisements down users' throats, because\nYouTube is a stupid big tech product created and ran by a terrible company, Google, which has been scolded\nnumerous times for its way of handling freedom, privacy, monopoly-like status, exploitation of creators, etc.\n\nThis situation is probably the last straw for me - the *only* reason why I even have a google account at this point\nis because I use YouTube to watch various creators, listen to music along with making use of the YouTube's\nrecommendation algorithm to help me discover new content. Now, as my rights to opting out of ads are being revoked, I have\nabsolutely no reason to stay on this piece of shit platform and continue being a milking cow for a shitty\ncooperation - self-hosting on my server is fine.\n\nMoreover, the mentioned approach to ads on YouTube's end has various flaws which will most likely worsen the overall experience\nof YouTube users, make some of them leave for good (such as I) on top of having a negative effect on the platform as well\nas the content creators who do YouTube as a job in the long-term.\n\nBut will YouTube listen? No. They never have - always avoiding all conflict and turning a blind eye to any controversy,\nbig or small on the condition that they can walk the thin edge of legality to optimize their profit and ignoring what the users,\ncreators, general community, etc. - consequently having people give up and forget. All of this sounds like a big monopoly\nscandal and it's wild how something like Google is legal in the first place.\n\n## Arguments\n\nThe aforementioned situation has many downsides and *maybe* one upside, and that's only for Google - revenue. But it's all short-term\nand it'll fade, hopefully.\n\nLet's take the argument that this approach \"ensures revenue for both YouTube and its creators\". Personally, I think that in the\nshort-term this argument does make sense, although, in the long term, whilst also considering how aggressive YouTube advertisement\ntactics are as well as taking the user experience into account - is that *truly* the long-term solution? It's truly not, and if\nanything it'll hurt experiences of users and make them leave YouTube, or develop more aggressive tactics to advertisement blocking.\nOne such blocking tactic that comes to mind, which might not be reliable, is to detect aggressive changes in video streams and\nskip the whole ad, or watch the connections and connection timings. Both consequently causing harm to both creators who do\nYouTube as a long-term job and YouTube themselves trying to rescue the platform 'til it eventually ends up on \nand gets forgotten in the Google graveyard.\n\nAdditionally, it raises an eyebrow to me as a person who values privacy and freedom, because YouTube is subtracting from user autonomy\nby taking away the control they had over their viewing experience. This lack of transparency and control can lead to frustration and\ndissatisfaction because the users are forced to consume content in a manner dictated purely by the platform, without any room for\npersonalization or choice.\n\nAnd that's not all! On top of all the things mentioned before, we have the one-size-fits-all idiocy going on here which is evident\nin many server-side ad injection approaches. It fails to account for different ways users, even the ones who do *tolerate* the\ncopious amount of ads on YouTube, engage with content and ads on YouTube. Similarly, this will most likely also impact accessibility\nof the whole app and generally impact the overall user interaction, feel and \"coziness\".\n\nNot to mention the *potential* legal phalanges of this - users might challenge the legality of forcing ads without an option to opt-out.\n\n## Solutions\n\nSo far I've done nothing but to point out flaws in YouTube's creepy and desperate marketing strategy: how many ads can we force users\nto watch before they get angry? - so let's propose some solutions.\n\nYouTube has a big problem with advertisement blocking, but instead of tackling the problem at hand, they choose to ignore it all\nand force even more advertisements onto people, which causes more sophisticated ad blocking technologies so the cycle spirals on.\nWhy not just make the advertisement policy less aggressive? Google already is taking huge risks by doing server-side injection which\nwill cause more resource usage on the server-side, a lot more anger and dissatisfaction from users, most likely backlash, etc etc etc.\nInstead of taking a risk that clearly will only result in a downfall, why not take an opportunity to redeem the ad policy and make it less\naggressive and more tolerable for users.\n\nAnd, of course, ***don't fucking force ads down people's throats***. Why doesn't Google it an option, or just make it client-side as before.\n\nThough, more realistically, Google will turn a blind-eye to all of this once again, ad blockers will advance, and the war between\nG\\*ogle and everyday people will continue.\n\n\\*\\*\\*\n\nThat's my two cents. Thanks for reading :)", + "content": "This blog post stems from the fediverse post from SponsorBlock located at :\n\n> YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection. This means that the ad is being added directly into the video stream.\n>\n> This breaks sponsorblock since now all timestamps are offset by the ad times.\n>\n> For now, I set up the server to detect when someone is submitting from a browser with this happening and rejecting the submission to prevent the database from getting filled with incorrect submissions.\n\n**Legal disclaimer:** I'm no legal or economics expert. I'm a random teen with an opinion which you can agree or disagree with - it's my two cents on a (in my opinion) shitty situation \ud83d\udc4d. All of this is alleged and just me sharing my own perspective on things.\n\nI have some things to say about this idiotic stunt of forcing advertisements down users' throats, because\nYouTube is a stupid big tech product created and ran by a terrible company, Google, which has been scolded\nnumerous times for its way of handling freedom, privacy, monopoly-like status, exploitation of creators, etc.\n\nThis situation is probably the last straw for me - the *only* reason why I even have a google account at this point\nis because I use YouTube to watch various creators, listen to music along with making use of the YouTube's\nrecommendation algorithm to help me discover new content. Now, as my rights to opting out of ads are being revoked, I have\nabsolutely no reason to stay on this piece of shit platform and continue being a milking cow for a shitty\ncooperation - self-hosting on my server is fine.\n\nMoreover, the mentioned approach to ads on YouTube's end has various flaws which will most likely worsen the overall experience\nof YouTube users, make some of them leave for good (such as I) on top of having a negative effect on the platform as well\nas the content creators who do YouTube as a job in the long-term.\n\nBut will YouTube listen? No. They never have - always avoiding all conflict and turning a blind eye to any controversy,\nbig or small on the condition that they can walk the thin edge of legality to optimize their profit and ignoring what the users,\ncreators, general community, etc. - consequently having people give up and forget. All of this sounds like a big monopoly\nscandal and it's wild how something like Google is legal in the first place.\n\n## Arguments\n\nThe aforementioned situation has many downsides and *maybe* one upside, and that's only for Google - revenue. But it's all short-term\nand it'll fade, hopefully.\n\nLet's take the argument that this approach \"ensures revenue for both YouTube and its creators\". Personally, I think that in the\nshort-term this argument does make sense, although, in the long term, whilst also considering how aggressive YouTube advertisement\ntactics are as well as taking the user experience into account - is that *truly* the long-term solution? It's truly not, and if\nanything it'll hurt experiences of users and make them leave YouTube, or develop more aggressive tactics to advertisement blocking.\nOne such blocking tactic that comes to mind, which might not be reliable, is to detect aggressive changes in video streams and\nskip the whole ad, or watch the connections and connection timings. Both consequently causing harm to both creators who do\nYouTube as a long-term job and YouTube themselves trying to rescue the platform 'til it eventually ends up on \nand gets forgotten in the Google graveyard.\n\nAdditionally, it raises an eyebrow to me as a person who values privacy and freedom, because YouTube is subtracting from user autonomy\nby taking away the control they had over their viewing experience. This lack of transparency and control can lead to frustration and\ndissatisfaction because the users are forced to consume content in a manner dictated purely by the platform, without any room for\npersonalization or choice.\n\nAnd that's not all! On top of all the things mentioned before, we have the one-size-fits-all idiocy going on here which is evident\nin many server-side ad injection approaches. It fails to account for different ways users, even the ones who do *tolerate* the\ncopious amount of ads on YouTube, engage with content and ads on YouTube. Similarly, this will most likely also impact accessibility\nof the whole app and generally impact the overall user interaction, feel and \"coziness\".\n\nNot to mention the *potential* legal phalanges of this - users might challenge the legality of forcing ads without an option to opt-out.\n\n## Solutions\n\nSo far I've done nothing but to point out flaws in YouTube's creepy and desperate marketing strategy: how many ads can we force users\nto watch before they get angry? - so let's propose some solutions.\n\nYouTube has a big problem with advertisement blocking, but instead of tackling the problem at hand, they choose to ignore it all\nand force even more advertisements onto people, which causes more sophisticated ad blocking technologies so the cycle spirals on.\nWhy not just make the advertisement policy less aggressive? Google already is taking huge risks by doing server-side injection which\nwill cause more resource usage on the server-side, a lot more anger and dissatisfaction from users, most likely backlash, etc etc etc.\nInstead of taking a risk that clearly will only result in a downfall, why not take an opportunity to redeem the ad policy and make it less\naggressive and more tolerable for users.\n\nAnd, of course, ***don't fucking force ads down people's throats***. Why doesn't Google it an option, or just make it client-side as before.\n\nThough, more realistically, Google will turn a blind-eye to all of this once again, ad blockers will advance, and the war between\nG\\*ogle and everyday people will continue.\n\n\\*\\*\\*\n\nThat's my two cents. Thanks for reading :)", "keywords": [ "user experience", "youtube",