Comment by keepamovin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keepamovin | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I released a browserbox variant many years ago that could ensure background playback on YouTube. Despite multiple posts here and on PH, it never gained any traction. It seemed people were simply not interested in overcoming no background playback for free on every platform (including mobile).

Same time, one can appreciate the YouTube business: once you give something away for free, people absolutely loose their fucking minds if you make it paid. Once you set the bar to zero for payment, people will murder in the streets and despise you if you reasonably charge for what could have been a paid product all along. So there's a psychological blocker to switching on payment that people are ready to go to war for. It's the same blocker that cripples "open source" sustainability. People quickly develop an entitlement-callous, and feel cheated if you require payment instead of just continuing to surrender value to them.

It reminds of how a group of primates will kill a handler who gives cake to one, but not the group. This "free / paid" tension triggers some kind of deep-rooted human fairness wiring that is really tricky to extinguish once activated. That's why you should never open source your code and never give stuff away for free, if you plan to posslby make money from it somehow or make it paid in future. Because if you ever withhold the siphon of value related to ads or other 'you as a product' models, they will launch a jihad against you.

I think it's interesting how the human fairness reflex, often correct, breaks down in the context of "provider / consumer" dynamics. Even if the provider is not some "evil mega corp" but simply a solo software creator, people will still feel you are attempting to rob them of all dignity and debase their honor if you require payment for what was previously gratis.

Oh well. Live and learn, YouTube.

The issue isn't with the payment, it's that you've burnt a ton of money to extinguish all competition (by giving away stuff for free) and then, when you're a monopoly because of network effects, you lock it in and charge whatever you want.

If YouTube allowed syndication with other websites, for example, so I could watch videos on whatever website I wanted (with an appropriate portion of the revenue going to YouTube), I would have no problems with them changing their monetization model.

That's a good point I hadn't considered it. So YouTube loss-lead with free for all videos -- then became a monopoly and people are reaction badly not because of any inbuilt fairness wiring trigger, but because, actually the price is merely too high?

Hmmm, possible. How to test? Hard, given their monopoly status. Tho does Rumble offer paid subscriptions?

A small but perhaps weak counter to your thesis is that if people were really unwilling to negotiate with YouTube over cost/experience, why would they then so vehemently attempt to eradicate ads, rather that accepting them as a lesser cost than the subscription fee?

But I guess what you're really saying is that none of the costs YT deigns to levy is felt as fair by those complaining. Not the ads. Not the USD9 (?) / mo subscription, however localized. Thus it's not free-then-paid, it's "bad pricing" that's arming the militia? Were the pricing simply "fair" people would be happy to pay it. But what rational expectation could they have for a fair price? Unless I'm mistaking Disney+, Netflix, HBO, are all more expensive, but IMO provide less range. I'm less convinced "fair price" is it the more I think about it, but there could be something there. How else would you expand that?

Good, self contained point overall. Tho I'm going to side with the psychological factor as I've experienced that in other domains where the monopoly is not a factor. And the "merely a fair price" argument hinges on a sense of rationality which appears conspicuously absent from the reactions. Emotional and ape logic, yes, but objective and economic rationality + empathy logic? No.

For me personally, the ads are too high a cost for me to pay. When my ad-free way of watching breaks and I get an ad, I simply close the tab. I find ads really annoying these days, and I pay to avoid them where I find the price fair, otherwise I don't use the thing.

This is what I appreciate about paywalls, subscription modals, etc: there's a clear definition of the "deal", and I can just nope out. "Please enable ads or don't view our content" is also perfect.

I don't wanna trick anyone into showing me ad-free content, I just want a chance to choose.

I don't like the ads, which is why I switched to Premium. I like it. I also listen to white noise variants at night, so I can't tolerate ads there obviously. I know a little of your situation I think from reading your previous posts here, so I'm sure you are able to "afford" the premium fee. What makes you not pay it?

Small strange nuance for me is when I switch to my corp account, and see an ad, sometimes I really enjoy the ad, because it's novel and creative. Sounds funny to say, and I probably wouldn't fele like that if I saw ads all the time. But some of the YT ads do seem pretty high quality.

I watch maybe an hour of YouTube a month, so it's not worth it for me.

> Unless I'm mistaking Disney+, Netflix, HBO, are all more expensive

Disney, Netflix, and HBO all fund the creation of and own the content they provide to users. Youtube does not. Youtube inserts itself as a middle-man taxing regular people sharing videos with other regular people. There is obviously a non-zero cost to infrastructure but their attempts to extract revenue go far, far beyond that, hence people feeling their prices are too high, whether the price is paid in ads or subscription fees.

OK, again a good point. There is YouTube Originals (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqVDpXKLmKeBU_yyt_QkItQ) not sure the model vs the others (also want to ad I enjoy the classic films that YT provides for free [tho I think I need to be on a US VPN to get that if traveling], plus of which you need to buy/rent), but I'm also not sure any of us has the inside track on YT's costs/revenue, so I guess we're all speculating.

When you say "their attempts to extract revenue go far beyond that"(A) I feel I can't accept that on good faith, I'd need to see numbers. Also I doubt this kind of data is the thing most people reacting with "prices are unfair" or "payment is bad", are drawing on, instinctively or not. So it's hard for me to accept this thesis as the source of ills. Tho, maybe it is. Maybe people's innate sense of fairness really does cover this, somehow.

I'm not aware of those numbers, so it doesn't seem that way to me, but maybe I'm just not across it. Can you give examples of your claim (A)?

Youtube's direct expenses are not published by Google, but there are a couple of ways we could measure it. One is the fact that Google is among the richest companies in the world, if not the richest at any given time. This definitionally indicates that the margins on their main revenue-generating services, among which Youtube is one, are extremely high, with revenue far, far, above expenses.

Another way we could measure it is by the value of an ad-view relative to the price of the subscription they offer. Ad views are auctioned and go for different prices based on category, demographics of viewers, etc., and aggregate statistics are not provided, but an ad-view typically tends to be in the range of US$0.01 per ad view. A subscription fee of US$9* to avoid ads, then, would require viewing 900 ads to justify the cost. I suspect in reality most people don't see more than 100 ads in a month, so Youtube is likely generating an 8x profit margin over costs of not showing ads to Premium users, give or take depending on how you work out the napkin math. If people had an option to buy an ad-free subscription with none of the other premium features for $1/mo, I suspect the uptake would be significantly higher and feel fair to the general population.

*After looking it up, Youtube Premium apparently actually costs US$14.

Anecdotally, I used to spend, I believe, ¥480 per month for a Niconico subscription (Niconico is the Japanese domestic equivalent to Youtube). I was content paying this subscription fee for years, until they increased the price up by 50% to ¥720, and about two years ago the price further increased to ¥990. I cancelled my subscription and stopped using the website. I am not opposed to paying subscription fees to platforms, but when it feels extortionate, I won't. The same is likely true for many or most people.

OK, some anecdotal data in support of the fair pricing hypothesis. Thank you. I guess in the case you state, it's connected with inflation? Wage stagnation / living cost increases? A general trend of digital services? Idk. Have living costs generally been going up against wages in Japan in the period you describe?

It’s called “opportunity cost.”

If you marry somebody and they suddenly become a totally different person and try to extort you a common reaction is to feel deceived and unhappy. They have cheated you in a sense of the opportunity cost of being able to marry someone else.

That people might not understand that tells you something about them.

Yeah, that marriage situation can be totally tough. If you're going through that, I feel for you. I can relate, but then who of us has ever really picked the "right" person to marry the first time around? Sure, some get lucky. But often our wapred childhoood expecdtatiosn contaminate the idea of a perfect match with something that feels familiar but is actually wrong for us, or worse, just abusive.

Anyway, in this case I think the analogy is a little overblown because the stakes are so different, but is revealing. You can way more easily divest of a software product than a marriage (presumably, tho that may differ locally). But, as in marriage, there's a interesting nuance: the stories we tell ourselves about what went wrong are so often one-sided, which lacks empathy for how the other person is probably just doing their best. A similar empahty mismatch with the entitlement of consumers who don't comprehend that the value they expect a person to provide them for free, should actually be compensated. As in, a free exchange.

That someone might confuse those could tell you 'something about them.' Or it could just be an honest mistake, on their part. That we're all likely to make.

Still the trigger to ape-brained fairness-wiring seems similar, and embodies that same one way empathy. Free and fair exchange, in commerce and relationships, should be based on more of a mutual empahty.

Thanks for bringing it up!

I’ve read about this concept the Indians have called “izzat” which probably explains why they have arranged marriages. You can imagine the deceitful games that might be played on unsuspecting brides and bridegrooms if one doesn’t find deceitful games out of bounds morally; arranged marriages address that.

Arranged marriages are unpopular because we value choice. For the same reason we, westerners, abhor monopolies that transform society, wreck age old institutions, remove choice and limit access to what once was free.

Free doesn't emerge from the quantum vacuum of spacetime in the realm of digital products however. It's not a innate natural right, but a choice, of a provider at a given point in time. It might change. Cost might be levied. Cost should be expecdted in free exchange. Especially as a westerner!

Aside from that - what age old institutions are wrecked by monopolies, or which ones are you talking about it? Genuinely curious.

From a software standpoint, the ones I think of are Tinder, Facebook, X, YouTube. Each has dramatically altered how we do things like how we stay connected with friends and family, court potential romantic partners, participate in public dialogue and learn. Arguably, rather than supplementing cultural institutions, they’ve to a large extent replaced what was with something more addictive or convenient. Fine. But I’d argue they’ve done it with measurable deleterious effects.

Yeah, I agree with the reading that these kind of large information pipelines are essentially some kind of institutions almost like public railways or water and electricity because they’ve become essential. I mean there’s a little bit more nuance because not everybody wants nor needs a Facebook or whatever but if you make the bucket big enough, it seems almost everybody uses something inside of it.

I see your point now about monopoly. It’s more sort of monopoly in the digital age and it’s pretty coherent what you’re saying, From the narrow point of view that you’re meaning here, and it is a significant point. I think the only solution in that case is you have to treat them as institutions and they have to be run for the public benefit - but saying that sounds ridiculous and I don’t think it could ever work so I guess our societies have to come up with some other solutions. But the problem, your point is referencing, is very real.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com