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Comment by eqvinox | Hacker News Reader

> I do feel bad for the creators, but I would rather donate to their Patreons than buy YT premium.

I ended up subscribing to both Nebula and Dropout.tv, especially after noticing that a good portion of my favourite YT channels are in fact on Nebula. Sadly, this is primarly larger ones, and I do feel bad about smaller creators being kinda stuck on YT… especially when it's the odd one-time well-made video that really doesn't warrant e.g. Patreon.

But yeah, the real moral quandry is with the creators. They're more or less under the same monopoly pressure; in most cases you just can't ignore the YT audience :(

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Totally agree this is the real problem.

Where do creators go if not YouTube!? Ideally they could self host videos which could be expensive AND not bring any revenue, neither do they are they discoverable - this is where the internet is broken these days.

And maybe this is where micro transactions would have a proper use case, i.e. if you had a browser extension where you add $5 and then you can dish out 1ct or 10ct for some content...

I'm still in favour of a fixed subscription one pays for a service like YouTube in the range of €5/month, with 95% of the proceeds going to creators. If you do nothing, the money will be doled out equally based on some set of fair (and frequently scrutinized) parameters. If the subscriber wants to, they can allocate a portion of this fee to specific creators, and also remove it from creators the you do not want to support (this might help with clickbait and empty fluff created to work well with specific searches).

It won't happen of course.

I recently had ads show up before videos on YouTube (audio only, so uBlock Origin was blocking part of it), and the only thing I felt was disgust and a mental note never to buy insurance from InShared (a Dutch insurance company) simply for repeating the same stupid jingle for each video.

Nebula was created by a few creator, trying to solve this problem.

I have no idea how well it worked out - I am still contented with the ad-filled YouTube

No it actually wasn’t. Nebula isn’t sustainable. It’s co financed by curiositystream.

Do you know if Rumble is sustainable? Just curious

No way in hell, it's currently just a vanity project financed by untrustworthy billionaires (the main financier is literally a snitch for the FBI https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-fbi-informant-ch...).

Thx.. Almost didn't want to know. One step closer to wearing a tin hat now

Ps. Now I am curious why you are getting downvoted. Are people here in favor of this type of thing? I wouldn't be surprised either at this point

haha, you think the fact that Peter Thiel talks to the FBI is the worst thing about Peter Thiel? :)

I signed up for nebula too, but it's clear that nebula is not a competitive platform. Nebula does the basics, it has channels and it shows videos, that part is great.

Youtube is great because of the wide availability of videos, recommendations and (maybe not great because of this) the comments.

I know the comments are not that well liked, but it means the videos are not in a vacuum. They are in a social context. And comments are pretty good, maybe because negative ones are heavily suppressed, that's at least what it looks like.

Nebula feels empty because of those missing parts. It doesn't draw you in to new channels. I don't like half the recommendations youtube gives, but some of them I do.

This doesn't actually bother me. I find video recommendations on social media and via other channels I follow. I think the big downside here is that without any sort of free tier less people recommend Nebula channels because most people can't watch the content. Most often it is a YouTube recommendation that I then see is on Nebula.

I think in an ideal world the recommendation engine and video host would be separated. You could be recommended videos on all platforms (including single-creator websites).

Grayjay does that but it is currently limited to a few platforms

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