this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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Unless you're also throwing money at YouTube premium (etc), isn't this by definition unsustainable to do? So it's not really a viable long-term strategy either.
Like don't get me wrong, I don't want all the tracking and stuff either, but somebody has to pay those server bills. If it's not happening through straight cash then it's going to be through increasingly aggressive monetization and cost-cutting strategies.
Oh, Reality-Norgur is well aware of that. Yet, I decided to let fantasy-Norgur take over for a bit ;)
I'm often in conflict about ads. On one hand they are an absolute blight on society, being harmful at best and a nuisance at worst. On the other hand, what the fuck is going to pay for all this shit? We should just nationalize YouTube.
I'm not sure what the ideal solution would look like, but I imagine that we're going to be seeing a lot more of this across the board for all "free" platforms.
Ads suck. They're a privacy/security risk in many cases. A lot of them are straight-up fraudulent, and there's little that the ad servers will do to correct these issues. But also, a vast majority of users will never pay for these services. And video platforms are prohibitively expensive for any other company to maintain.
PeerTube is great, in theory, but for the use-case that most people have in mind when they consider a video platform, it's not exactly filling in the voids that YouTube would leave if they were to close down or otherwise restrict access to their platform.
For me, there's a lot of creators that I watch who would not be able to continue producing the content that I enjoy if not for YouTube and their ad revenue systems. They could move to paid platforms, but would likely end up losing tons of money in the process, and would possibly have to discontinue content creation altogether as it would no longer be sustainable.
I pay for YT Premium so that I can have an ad-free experience while still supporting the channels I watch, which already makes me an outlier. But there is no way that I'd be able to afford to support even a quarter of the creators whose content I love if they were all to move to other platforms. This is a tough situation for everybody involved, and there's no clear better solution than "let the ad mongers continue mongering ads".