733
Lemmy users when I mention I pay for Youtube Premium
(startrek.website)
Somehow paying for Netflix is fine but god forbid I want to watch a 10 hour loop of the DS9 intro without ads.
I can pay for Netflix to be entertained for days at a time if I want to by original and classic shows and movies that I can't watch anywhere else, or I can pay for YouTube to show me a bunch of kowtowing brow beaten "creators" try to skirt their ever changing draconian rules long enough to make something that barely counts as entertainment anymore WHICH I could also already watch for free with ads.
Why would I ever pay them for anything?
I mean, if you use creators without quotations, it gives them a bit more money and gives you no ads.
Vs having no ads and giving them no money.
Sure it's still not great, sure if you like the creators they deserve more, but it's not the worst thing in the world if you have the money to spare.
For me it boils down to these points: 1. It's a service that has always been free. 2. The product the service delivers has become considerably worse over the last few years due to non stop ads, censorship, rampant misinformation, and an ever expanding list of impossible rules designed to sabotage their own users. 3. Once it objectively became worse than it's ever been they have the nerve to ask me for money literally every time I watch it.
I am offended by this, and I'm not giving them any of my money. If there's a creator I really want to support then I'll buy their products direct, or I'll join their Patreon so I know they're actually getting any of the money I spent
I understand your first point, that its frustrating for something thats always been free with limited to no ads to change its model.
The thing I want to know though is, YouTube costs a shit ton in terms of infrastructure and development hours, do you have a suggestion on how they can host the public and private content they host and deliver hundreds of petabytes a day while turning a profit? Do you stop user uploads, delete channels that have been inactive for a decade, delete private videos of non-subscribers?
Inb4 well they shouldnt exist because thats not how they formed tired argument ive seen, then my question is, ok so lets say we're thinking up a YouTube replacement. How do we model it so the company makes money, people arent the product, i can upload what I want, watch it for free without ads, people who draw others to the platform make money too, ect... What gets cut?
Edit: Because I don't have a suggestion and I dont think its possible to get anything like the old YouTube we all loved without making major consessions, otherwise I think we'd have more than a handful of compeitors.
Sadly I don't have a great solution to make YouTube into anything as good as what it used to be. It's grown too big and expensive to run without offering anything to increase it's real value to consumers. As corporate greed increases it will probably eventually become an exclusively paid service, at which point I'll probably just stop watching it altogether.