this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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OK, can I be real about this for a second?
I'm torn about Youtube ad stuff. Genuinely.
On the one hand the ads suck, we have a good way to bypass them and I certainly don't want to watch Youtube videos if the ads are unskippable.
On the other hand, if I'm being honest I watch more Youtube than Netflix or Amazon Prime and I sure give those guys money for a subscription. If I counted the cost per watched minute, Youtube Premium would make way more sense than a bunch of subs I do pay.
But I also don't want to watch a Youtube that is a paid service. That was never the point. The reason I engage with it so much is it's supposed to be UGC, not TV.
So yeah, torn. Youtube is very weird and the relationship we all have with it is super dysfunctional, creators and viewers alike. We made a very strange future and now we have to deal with it.
I pay for YouTube Premium. I get a lot of value from it, and streaming video isn’t cheap. I don’t think it’s reasonable for anyone to think they should provide it for free.
I don't give a shit if it's reasonable anymore.
Google has done enough terrible things over the years, ruined enough services, some of them paid services, continually harmed content creators with their trash algorithm, refused to defend them from bogus copyright strikes, refused to provide meaningful support to anybody but advertisers, all the while hosting hate on their platform, for profit. So I don't give a damn what's fair to them.
They won't get a penny from me ever again. I'll continue to find every way of accessing any content on that platform that I choose, without ads, and without paying them, and it has absolutely nothing to do with ethics or reason. It is entirely, 100%, because fuck Google.
Fuck their ad network, fuck manifest 3, fuck their "integrity" checking, fuck all of this. I'd rather see it all burn to the ground than help them turn the internet into cable tv.
And if this attitude spreads, which arguably it should, the service will simply be shut down. Unfortunately I think this may end up being a great loss for humanity as a whole if that happens. Elsewhere in this thread I compared it to the Library of Alexandria for its sheer content of 20-odd years worth of nearly all of humanity's culture, news, and technical information.
I don't know what to do with this. The dragon must be slain but the hoard must be preserved, and I'm not sure how we accomplish that. The contents of YouTube should be backed up and made available to a public data store outside of Google's grasp, ideally as a public utility probably maintained by tax money, and youtube can remain as a front-end to that service. But actually getting that done in the modern day seems..... we'll say, slim. For one thing the total youtube data package is about a fucktillion gigabytes and the only people able to host it are the ones who already have it. For another, Google will argue in court that videos uploaded to their service are their property, and they'll win that argument.
So we can start again anew, but we must mourn what we lose, because it may be significant. Like it or not, YouTube is a significant percentage of the recorded data output of the human race. Just pray, once we kill the beast, that you never have to replace any parts on a car model year 2004-2018 - because you won't find good repair manuals anywhere and all the good tutorials are buried in the belly of YouTube.