Part of what happened is schools stopped teaching the muggle kids basic computer skills, assuming “they’re young so they must innately know this,” and went all-in on locked down Chromebooks for everything. The average household doesn’t own a computer, just uses phones, and schools took away the only opportunity for them to have exposure to real computers.
All of the money from subscriptions and advertisements is put into a big pool (minus a cut for Spotify), and every month it is divided up between each rightsholder based on the proportion of plays. So if you have a big chunk of track plays that are just generated noise playing over and over for hours, that’s a big chunk of that pool going to unoriginal/easily reproducible uploads instead of actual musicians. It’s basically a scam gaming the way the system works.
It’s also costly for Spotify. Even if the streams were in the form of, say, podcasts that were not allowed any sort of monetization, it’s still hours upon hours (per user) of data that has to be streamed…and it doesn’t compress efficiently. Compression algorithms seek to avoid noise, and deliberately generated noise will not compress well. So the amount of data being streamed is much higher per second than with music or speech.
Meanwhile, you can make an app that plays white/pink/whatever noise trivially. No waste of resources necessary.
And English speakers are only a fraction of the user base. Current events in the US social media bubble barely penetrate the general public in the US, let alone across international and language barriers.
It’s probably the largest social media platform in Japan, for example.
Yes, though technically they started out as reverse engineered clones. There were tons of incompatible microcomputer brands before the IBM PC. Then companies like Compaq put out “PC compatible” clones based on specs that came from reverse engineering of the IBM PC. Over time, things evolved toward deliberate standardization.
Imagine the dumpster fire of legal action, which courts would likely side with, if someone put out hardware that was 1:1 compatible with the iPhone and iOS would run on it. That’s basically what happened, though MS DOS was produced by an additional party instead of IBM.
There’s a world of difference between witnessing something in public and following someone around, making note of everything they say and do “in public.” We call the latter “stalking” when an individual does it.