Technology
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Weird to see this downvoted. Youtube is actually a good service that also isn't cheap to run, and it also pays good(?) money to the people producing popular content on the platform so why not pay for using it? Or, you know, live with the ad infestation. Businesses need money to run, and if you don't pay for the content, then either it's the ads or eventually the whole platform needs to be shut down.
It is a separate discussion if Premium pricing is appropriate etc. But it's quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be "free" even though at the same time everyone is complaining about privacy violation and ads being everywhere all the time.
More things used to be free on internet 10-20 years ago.
Also the rich used to be less rich, and the poor less poor.
So clearly paying overpriced services for everything is not making anything better.
It’s a good thing they offer a non-premium version then
Maybe the businesses shouldn't have created the expectation that everything was "free" then.
YouTube used to be 1 skippable ad at the start of the video. Now it's multiple unskippable ads throughout the video. If the 1 skippable ad wasn't a viable business model then they shouldn't have been pretending it was and then changing things later once people have gotten used to the "free" system.
I timed it today on an hour video. It's an ad every 3 minutes I got. This is fucking mental. 20 ads for an hour long video.
I rarely watch YouTube on chromecast, I will be watching less going forward
I was checking out Archer for streaming the other day and noticed the episodes were 22 minutes long, which means 8 minutes of commercials in that half-hour TV time slot, or 26.666% of the total time.
That's why I stopped watching TV in the first place, they're essentially offering to "pay" you 22 minutes of entertainment for every 8 minutes of ads you'll watch and that's just completely not worth it to me. Would you pay $2 to watch an hour-long show? If so, to watch ads instead, you'd pay them 16 minutes of your time, and your labor would be paid at a tad less than 8 dollars an hour in entertainment as currency. If you'd only pay a dollar, halve that.
I play games so that my entire 30 minutes is fun and I'll pay for it with the money I make at my job rather than paying the TV industry in minutes of my time..the thing I have the least of. It's this really weird setup that's just become accepted where they pay us out in entertainment at near minimum-wage rates for time spent trying to program us.
(Archer aside....on shit that ain't even that entertaining)
The whole fuckin thing isn't worth it.
So you would like a plan that uses the same amount of bandwidth and power as they used back then, with one skippable ad, for free?
Yup.
YouTube could easily avoid AdBlockers by simply having ad part of the video itself. Not pulling it from a different server, not hijacking your video player to prevent user controls, just part of the video like any other part of the video and AdBlockers would not be able to detect it. They're not going to do that though, because then users won't be forced to watch an ad they have no interest in.
Do you realize how low quality your stuff would be?
Then people would bitch that they can’t get the high quality version for free
YouTube makes $30 billion a year. They'll be fine.
Reducing the max resolution for people who aren't on YouTube Red will come next once they stop focusing on AdBlockers.
"Service quality will continue to decrease until profits improve!"
That is exactly the issue, but you are placing quite a bit too much of your disapproval on the audience.
Google (and others) have built business models off of data mining because so many people didn't give a shit for so long about it. They have monetized their users for the entire time they have owned the platform. They have trained their own users to feel like the product was free while using those people for advertising dollars.
People have always hated ads, but you had generations of folks who were born before the internet who mostly just accepted the ads were going to be there, and also have never given a single thought to privacy. That slice of the pie is getting smaller, for various reasons.
Now Google have decided since they can't reliably exploit enough of their users, it's time to start charging them directly. They are fighting against their own inertia. It is they who have trained users with "we aren't asking you for $$, so don't worry about how we're paying for all this, trust me bro."
The modern audience is increasingly made up of people with both the will and capability to set up ad blocking and/or privacy protecting measures. Sorry Google, we aren't going down quietly.
I have the impression ad block literacy has declined a lot. 10-15 years ago I'ld be surprised if someone of friends, peers, same age group people didn't have ad blocking. Now... I'm often surprised if they do, because it became less common to "put in the effort" of using ff with ublock.
You are absolutely right! Part of the horribleness is exactly companies like Google who were the ones teaching people that everything should be "free" as in usable without explicit money transaction, and now they are the ones who are (thanks to EU I guess) trying to revert that and make the business model viable through subscription.
So I do get why the problem exists and I feel no empathy for the companies that are to blame for that. But, I do worry that we have a whole generation of people who think that stuff should just exist and have no monetary value like it just materialized out of thin air without anyone working on it before and neither having to keep it running. That is not a healthy mental model and it will contribute to predatory companies being able to harvest data out of these people in the future meanwhile privacy-first companies can't get them as customers because they have to actually ask for money for their services.
I see where you are coming from there, and I don't disagree with your opinion, but I do still think that while that may objectively be a mindset that is potentially harmful, I feel the net impact in this context is more likely to be increased contribution to and support of things that really are Free (gratis and libre), nudging reality closer to a place where a lot of those sorts of services are free or donation-supported, and less likely to be in corporate hands unless those corporations improve their behavior.
A hard to summarize version of that sort of path and mindset is what initially pushed me away from Windows, but over more than a decade I've developed lots more reasons than cost for why I'd never go back, and for why I've become a Free Software enthusiast and advocate.
Stuff should be free. We live in an age where every one of us could be living a life of comfort and reasonable luxury with a modicum of work. In the meantime those of us who aren't being showered by the excesses of capitalism are fully entitled to stand in the splashes.
Well I mean stuff always has some costs assigned to it. Even if we are talking about Google or software in general, there are still people needed to create and maintain the software itself for the products, who in part also need to put some food on the table and get a roof above their heads. Then there are the infrastructure costs which are enormous on a global video streaming service like Youtube. Now, I do acknowledge that Google engineers are usually insanely well-paid, but that's the way life is when you absolutely need the people working for you. Other companies might choose to cut features while searching for cheaper developers but it is what it is. In the end, nothing is free and you always end up paying for services in a way or another. And I'm not sure if I would like to continue on the "free" services path that we saw in the last 15 years.
Is it downvoted? I’m on kbin so I can’t see anything but kbin votes and I have nothing but upvotes. lol
Edit: downloaded to downvoted
It is, it has -9 points right now. While unpopular opinion, I agree with it if you like the content.
I use it, but I am trying to move to podcast and other platforms as much as possible.
Podcasts have their place in my routine.