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Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

*Allocating man-hours towards making sure that users actually pay for the service they're using, either via youtube subscription or ads

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Google is the richest company literally on the entire planet, you really don't need to go to bat for monopolistic practices.

If they wanted users to pay for the service they're using they should never have made YouTube free in the first place.

They made it free just like any other startup makes a free tier to obtain market share.

Drug dealers invented this business model, they would give heroin to young children for free and then once hooked hike the prices or force them to turn tricks to pay for their habit. It’s effective but not very admirable to say the least.

I've also seen this done for cheese, do you find that equally reprehensible? Or is the argument just rhetorical sleight of hand, where "drug dealers do X, so therefore X must be bad"? Drug dealers also consume food, and you know who else consumes food? You.

Cheesemongers have a bit less impact on society than drug dealers or Google. If Google were raking in hundreds of billions giving kids free cheese then charging them full price for parmigiana some might complain and I would not find fault in that. Scale matters.

It's not that we got hooked on YouTube (that would maybe be ok in a free market), it's that YouTube used "free" to make itself a monopoly. That's what the issue is, that you have no other options now.

Yes, the monopolistic aspect and scale are the parts I’m most bothered by. I think we all agree dangerous chemicals should be regulated, but we lack this sensibility when it comes to many tech products. So far at least. Eventually we’ll catch up. Will there be the lingering legacy, the tech equivalent of super fund sites? Maybe.

I don't disagree that some of these apps might need to be regulated, because they're basically attention crack, but to me that's more TikTok and Instagram rather than YouTube.

I hear TikTok is on the decline, and arguably the forced change of ownership is a sort of regulation. Instagram is owned by meta who has an interest in not letting it overtake Facebook in terms of popularity I imagine. It seems like a sort of hedge against other platforms mostly, but I really don’t know much about any of these platforms tbh. I use YouTube very heavily, but have only used twitter, Reddit and tinder in the distant past. I’ve never been on Facebook, TikTok, snap, etc… To me, irc and usenet were greatly superior and I’m waiting for people to return to their senses.

Cheese isn't so far off drugs after all: https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2015/study-reveals... plus you have to make baby animals to get the milk for the cheese, so some exploitation is going on. I like cheese and youtube, but maybe they're both bad.

YouTube got to where it is by making intentional moves to be the only game in town. They aren’t the most user-hostile platform by any means, but they have been coasting on the network effects of backlogged content for close to a decade now. Even if a competitor could deal with network and storage costs, and somehow manage to attract a network of uploaders, the platform would be 20 years behind, and there’s certain content (e.g. older content) that you simply wouldn’t ever be able to find there in any appreciable quantity.

I'm sure the US government will be appreciative of a Chinese car manufacturer selling free cars in the US to obtain market share, and there definitely won't be calls of "dumping", no siree.

Monetizing a basic OS feature is not a good look.

the only time ive tried to use a feature like that, is when im in the car listening to a podcast or something.

juggling the phone to not only skip ads, but also forcing the phone screen to be active, is a hazard.

In my case this loophole being closed, wouldn't make me pay for premium... but it would make a younger version of me certainly more dangerous on the road.

Do you ever watch videos on a computer? If so, do you ever switch away to a different tab, or to a different app entirely, and keep the video playing in your browser tab? YouTube artificially prevents that exact same action on tablets and phones unless you pay them.

Multitasking is a basic OS feature, no matter what kind of device you’re using. Gating it behind a paywall is user-hostile behavior at its finest.

Maybe if the Youtube subscription wasn't 10x what they earn from a single user with ads, that would be more believable option.

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