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Comment by jedimastert | Hacker News Reader

That's why I'm on YouTube Premium. I definitely watch enough youtube to get $10 out of it.

I'm happy to support content creators with patreon when they offer a way to do so. _Especially_ when they offer a way to see their videos off YouTube. I'd never pay a dime for YT itself due to their policies and overall platform.

I mostly use YouTube to discover niche content, but only because I've been running an ad-blocker since forever. I cannot fathom how anyone could enjoy it in any other way currently. When I see how IT works at friend's houses I'm horrified.

If YT blocked access for browsers with ad-blockers (or make it inconvenient enough) I would essentially stop using it.

Being semi curious why creators aren't already using any of the other hosts, I poked around a bit.

OMG.

Whereas YouTube is a toxic cesspool, the others are blackhole hellmouths leading directly to eternal damnation. Meaning the wannabe's complete abrogation of their responsibilities show that YouTube's pathetic attempts at content moderation are better than nothing.

I now think there's an opportunity for white label video hosting.

I fully retract the implication that YouTube's doing a better job than the other video hosting sites.

I just saw an ad from "Epoch Times" (Scientologists?) about the COVID-19 hoax.

I'm gobsmacked. YouTube is pure unfiltered evil.

Moderation wise, I don't make any kind of distinction between content and ads.

I forgot that I turned off ad blocking. I guess I normally don't see this kind of shit.

> I'd never pay a dime for YT itself due to their policies and overall platform.

You're supporting them just by using them, whether they are showing you ads or tracking you or not. You're reducing demand on other platforms for this content because you're letting YouTube provide it for you. If you really want to stand against YouTube, don't use it. Otherwise, you're still supporting their platform, you've just decided to do so in a way that saves you time, money and convenience at the expense of YouTube and the content creators on YouTube.

If you're going to do it, you might as well own it.

You're absolutely right of course. But it's still a chicken-and-egg problem. YT is frequently the only platform where content creators publish because of network effects.

I guess it's too easy for me to continue using YT for discovery.

Yep, and it's those network effects which are strengthened through using YouTube even if they aren't making revenue from ads through you.

It's similar to disliking Walmart and Amazon but still using them because they are cheap, convenient, a known factor, etc, which many do (including me, in the case of Amazon). The first step is acknowledging the trade-off you're making and being aware of it. At least then people are making a conscious choice, so if they want to re-evaluate at some point, they can do so with better facts.

I think most people get enough benefit out of YouTube to warrant the fee. But advertisements allow the platform to be available to anyone with an internet connection. Fair trade off I’d say.

Except for all the entitled people in this very topic who demand this service to work for free, refuse to pay for subscription and still don't want ads either.

It's not simply about the consumers. Google is playing a balancing game between pushing ads on enough people to make the service sustainable, while still willingly allowing the people who want to block ads to do so.

With their resources and the nature of the service, they could easily win the cat-and-mouse game against ad-blocker devs if they wanted to.

The reason they don't, is because they actually want to keep those "entitled people" on their platform, in order to avoid giving competing platforms an opening to grow their own communities. They know there is a substantial part of their userbase who would simply not use their service if they had to either pay or endure the vanilla experience.

I agree with your statement but there are other sides too.

Regarding ads: Showing ads like "Girl Mobile Video Talk" with description "Girl Mobile Number Live Video Call" with "Install Link" in a youtube ads is unacceptable. And the worst thing is you cannot even turn off that ads without being turning on ads personalization.

Regarding Money: 10$ may be a cup of coffee for you but in other side of world people are earning 200$ of salary so they just can't afford it. So many people don't have privilege like average Americans have?

Regarding supporting creators. Sure ads pay creator but showing ads every 10minute , beginning of video and end of video is total BS. And even creator are already using their own ads like "This video is sponsored by Brilliant.org" so I don't mind blocking ads.

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