this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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DeGoogle Yourself
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I will never tolerate ads. I will give up YouTube before I watch ads.
Every time I see a youtuber cross post to peertube it makese happy.
I can tolerate ads as long as it's helping the creators and isn't used to make the platform worse. The first condition is only sometimes satisfied and the 2nd is being straight up violated.
If they can fix how garbage search is and put the dislike count back, I'll happily pay for premium as a thank you for making a great platform. But nope, they just focus on making the UI even worse.
No Google product will ever see my money. I will, however, donate to good content providers, and I do every now and then.
What is your suggestion for financing the YouTube infrastructure and development?
I don't fucking care.
This is a good discussion point, rather than an arms race discussion of ads vs adblockers.
Some key points to make are that Google is making a crap ton of money from ads, they are keeping most of it so creators must resort to sponsorships and patreon. Google additionally makes money by selling your profile data.
It's not like I have a true answer to your question, but a "workable" system should consist of: Google makes money Creators make money Customers are reasonably private The concept of making money isn't about making the entire system worse, just so you pay for it not to be
My problem with Google is they don't really care. They'll burn it all if it makes them money until it's dead.
There could be some key features that get implemented on a paid tier, but paying is just ads vs no ads.
An equally valid question would be, what can YT do to incentivize you to pay? They could ad features only available to subscribers, but they really don't.
I would make it a semi walled garden, with free and premium content. Subscription tiers would be for customers and creators alike. Vimeo has a good system (though not perfect) with feature sets only available certain tiers. There's incentive to upgrade if you want those features.
Here's a big differentiator though. YT has this magic algorithm that feeds you what it wants to. Creators have no say in that (nor do customers). But if I post a video you like, I want you to watch more of my videos, not videos from somebody else similar to me. YT takes full control, and sends people away just as fast as sending them in. Why would I pay for that?
Platforms like Vimeo don't do that (I'm not advocating vimeo, they're just the example I think is most comparable). Wouldn't having some level of control over that as a viewing customer and content creator have value? No, let's just slap ads on it.
I can also argue that this goes against my final criterea point, that YT just made things worse with their algorithm and this is just paying to remove it. There was a day where subscribing to a channel meant you got to see their videos. No bell ringing needed.
And I'm sorry I just vomited my brain into these thoughts and wall of text. If you made it this far, bless you.
But this is why I don't use YT directly. I was with vanced but ended up with newpipe, because its a simple scraper. That fact not only removes ads, but it gives me control of what I watch with my time (which has value). That is the lesson YT forgot, and the root of why any of this is an issue.
I was considering paying for premium at one point because i recognize the costs of YouTube and whether people like it or not, it's run better than a lot of other sites.
The thing that pushed me to go back to ad blocking was actually Google pushing their web environment integrity and now android webview media integrity nonsense. That alone was enough for me to start degoogling everything i could. I now see it as my moral obligation to do everything in my power not to support them.
I get that. I am mostly there too, but people go where the people are. I've tried Rumble and Odysee but there needs to be an exodus from YT by creators. I thought that would happen, but people stick with what they know (fear of the unknown).
Hell, it took me a long time to jump to Lemmy. But the Reddit train went too far so I'm gone. But even now the #1 sub I was in is not represented in the fediverse so I'm SOL. Kind of a tangent, but you get what I mean.
As far as I'm aware, the majority of money that YouTubers make comes from youtube ads.
Youtube is also way better than pretty much every other social media (or similar) for paying their content creators.
I don't know that to be true based on what I've heard. But assuming it is, it's still clearly not enough for a creator to survive. So a "fair" payment is still required.
I don't really have a plan for this since I won't be giving money to far-right propagandists and their spiral of rage attention algorithm.
If blocking ads means they lose out, then i'm fine with them losing out
That's fine. It just reads to me sometimes as if people in the comment sections are angry at YouTube for trying to uphold a stream of revenue, when it's the only thing that makes the platform possible. Personally I think YouTube has been a huge boon, I've learned so much from people who post on the platform and I don't want to see it go away (which is not to say that it doesn't have huge issues). So I'm fine with paying in some manner, at least until a better alternative comes up. If you don't think it's worth it, great for you, go and do whatever you think brings value to your life. But I don't understand the vitriol or sense of entitlement to getting a costly service free of charge.
Google already owns so much server and bandwidth infrastructure the marginal cost is likely very low
That's conjecture, and so is my view, but I disagree. They've even developed specialized hardware just to deal with all the transcoding they have to do, specialized for YouTube. There's a lot of effort that goes into maintaining things that are unique to this particular service. But in the end, what matters is if they could make more money by spending their resources elsewhere.
Google already gains so much money from their data-mining, privacy-violating spree on almost every person on the Earth. For me, they can burn to the ground, and I'll very happily take their service free of charge.
For me, it's not just getting something for free, it is rather a who am I giving this money away?. I'll happily give Lichess, a Lemmy stance, community projects, FOSS projects, etc. my support, financial or not, but Google, a company I completely view as unmoral, can happily go fuck itself.
View it this way: The Coca-Cola Company killed a bunch of workers in my country (Coca-Cola killings) because they were demanding better working conditions, so I'll do as much as possible to prevent giving them money, and making them lose money would be quite nice.
In capitalist hellworld perhaps, but in any decent society such a service would be maintained by the state as a public utility.
The problem is not having to pay. The problem is that, even while paying, they always find a way to fuck it up by sticking another stupid factor to fuck users over. Look at Amazon Prime video for example: "prices will not increase (already paying), but we'll slap ads unless you pay even more".
They all function exactly the same way. Just adding costs for the users, and never value.
Fuck their revenue stream, techbro; I do not care about the wellbeing of robber baron thieves
I only pay capitalists what is absolutely necessary. I will pirate and steal until they go out of business and something that isn't profit driven comes along.
I doubt that will ever happen on a big enough scale. Running a video platform is hard and very expensive and making videos is hard and expensive for the creators.
I'm happy to pay for creator-owned sites like Nebula, but Google, Facebook etc won't see a single penny from me
Sure I also use an adblocker everywhere but you should be aware that you are harming creators and not just the big companies.
I use an adblocker and sponsorblock on YouTube. I also pay for Nebula and various Patreon subscriptions/KoFi donations. In the end, I'm confident creators got more out of me than many regular users, and I'm not giving money to Google all the while.
Depends on if you donate to all the creators to watch or just a few.
It should be publicly-funded, like infrastructure. Having a video sharing platform is clearly very important, but I don't think there are any companies that are both capable of running it and trustworthy enough to do so.
I wasnt aware that Adblock was causing Google to go bankrupt. But even if that was the case, I still wouldnt watch ads lmao.
Of course not, Google is a huge company that could probably just live off of patents for the next 100 years. But they're not going to keep on running a service that just costs them money. Google is in fact notorious for killing off products.
dont threaten me with a good time
Spend their money that they hoard?
Art should not be produced for profit, because it stops being art. Ideally we would subsidize artists, or better yet provide for everyone's needs and let them make art in their free time. Forcing us to watch corporate propaganda about fucking dishwasher detergent ain't it.
So call the shareholders and ask them to pay back the dividends that they've received over the years, to fund the YouTube infrastructure? That begs the question, what do we do when that money runs out?
I imagine society will collapse from climate change before Google runs out of cash.
Society will not collapse from climate change if all the businesses start giving away their money.
Well then great... But also that's nonsensical.
They can continue burning money the way they always did; you can't honestly expect me to give the first fuckin shit for the 21st century robber baron capitalists while they're actively and provably stealing out of our pockets. You are smoking crack if you genuinely expect that. If they're not gonna pay me for every millibyte of data, every smallest measurable iota they've stolen from me to train their AI models, then they can continue self-subsidizing Youtube without trying to raid my pockets again.
It's actually cheaper to stream videos without ads, less traffic less diskspace ;)
It just got pushed too far. Like Google search itself. Most people are fine with a short ad once in a while, while paying with their invaluable personal data, but they push it too far and make it unwatchable, like Google search itself became garbage because of all the Google pushed SEO bs.
You're never going to get an honest answer to this question, but props for asking it anyway.
Maybe you can run the servers and pay the engineers with good vibes or praxis?
The honest answer was in the post they were originally replying to.
Youtube isn't an existential need.
Ad's or bust isn't a real dichotomy.
Here's another honest suggestion, drop ~~free~~ ad supported Youtube as a product and go full premium.
It'd significantly reduce infrastructure costs and they'd be able to fund it with subscription monies.
edit: used the wrong quote at the start