53 karma · joined April 7, 2024
The problem here is that we're already only having this debate because people refuse to pay, even when what they're paying with is functionally intangible (i.e. their letting an ad play on their PC for 30 seconds.
So any model which relies on people physically paying real actual money* is doomed to fail to begin with because you're not solving the issue.
Source: I have Premium and have adblock disabled on YouTube - no ads.
e.g. Linus Tech Tips posted up their share of revenue from AdSense in 2024; YT Premium made up 37% of their revenue despite being 29% of their views.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeCP-0nuziE
Whether that makes a given creator more money versus Patreon depends on how much you watch them, frankly.
You seem to ignore that you would probably have no audience - or have a significantly smaller audience - were it not for YouTube hosting your content. They are providing you a service, but you seem to think that nobody - not you, not your viewers - should have to trade anything for that service, despite the hosting and streaming of video being one of the most expensive possible tech services in the world (bar perhaps running genAI models.)
I dunno it's just very annoying how a lot of people have memed themselves into this train of thought where the big tech companies aren't actually providing them anything of value, when if they decided to suddenly stop providing their services they would be up a creek without a paddle.
Principally - the latter actually affects the compensation given to the creator of whatever video you're watching. The former does not.
If it's that easy, why has nobody done it?
(Hint: governments don't want to run YouTube, probably shouldn't run YouTube, and nobody else wants or can afford the immense costs that come with running YouTube.)
The most common throughline of all pro-piracy discourse is that there's a lot of people who feel completely entitled to free entertainment, and they will come up with all sorts of bizarre mental gymnastics to justify that as something other than "I want free entertainment and don't want to see ads."
I don't think anyone could articulate a coherent logical argument as to why they feel they should get YouTube's services, and the entertainment produced by the creators who are on YouTube, while not paying either of them through any means, other than pure selfishness.
This. The app I built has maybe 50 downloads despite me trying quite hard to promote it. It's very difficult work, even with the app being completely free of charge (save for a donation button).
That's so exceptionally unlikely as to be something you can discount as a possibility, providing you don't actually commit crimes.
NOPE. Nightmares. Horrible film. Important film, but horrible.
Not everything has to be perfectly rational.
Some people just really seem to object to the idea that anyone could ever experience an emotion and have it not be based on some kind of cold rationality.
The idea of feeling something in your gut, something visceral, is anathema to them.
Jobs' death is truly tragic in the context that Apple - and by extension, the rest of the tech world - could have gone in a very different direction if he were still around. He would probably be screaming his head off at the idea of generative AI.
I like your point, but to be fair, Apple is one of the absolute last companies I would accuse of having an incoherent system design philosophy.
That sort of experience is why I don't begrudge people paying "extra" for Apple products (and do so myself). Apple put the legwork in to actually try and document their products in a friendly way, and provide support to users who need it.
Figuring out features of Google products seems to require random web searches and YouTube videos, because they don't appear to care about their customers' outcomes more than a second after they've handed over their money. Apple just... has how to guides on their website. The end.
Google seem to scarcely understand their own products, let alone know how to put across their functionality in a coherent way.
Turns out that that isn't acceptable to the EU either, because as far as they're concerned the issue is not whether data targeting is consensual, it's "fuck Meta".
(Relatedly, if you're an app developer for some shop or other, and you ask for notification permissions "so we can keep you up to date on your orders!", and then the app spams me with marketing push notifications, it should mean that you and anyone else responsible gets a thousand years in the lake of fire when you're gone. Fair's fair.)
Everything else I don't miss really. My years of giving a toss about tweaking everything to be just-so are pretty much gone, just give me a sensible default that I can work with and I'm happy.
But we don't. And while we don't, users have a reasonable expectation that they can send an email and the other person can read it.