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Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

"If you're looking alternatives, extensions like uBlock Origin still work when used on Firefox.

There's also the option of biting the bullet and paying for YouTube Premium."

Let's see. (a) Use Firefox when watching YouTube or (b) pay money to the company that is the source of the problem, in order to keep using a browser they designed to support surveilance advertising services, where the terms allow the company to keep collecting data about you. Difficult choice.

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(c) pay money to the company that spends extraordinary amounts of money to host and serve you these videos while simultaneously paying creators, carrying the creator economy, helping companies advertise their products and recommending you videos you may like, while giving you the ability to watch these video from any browser of your choice.

(d) pay for Nebula, which is run by creators for creators, and get ad-free content (including sponsorships removed from the videos) while simultaneously supporting the development of smaller YouTube alternatives rather than feeding the beast.

I signed up for a one year Nebula subscription after one of my favorite YouTubers posted a discount link. I wanted to support him, and I found the price to be fair. In the few months I’ve been subscribed, I’ve found that the library is much much smaller than I’ve expected. I knew it wouldn’t be YouTube, but I did expect a bit more. The other big pinchpoint I’ve found with Nebula is the lack of comments. Yes, certain parts of YouTube have been known in the past to have a pretty toxic comment section, but the content I watch tends to have valuable, constructive comments that I look forward to reading. Nebula does not support comments at all, and I think that’s by design. Even if they supported comments, I doubt it has enough momentum to have valuable discussions at this point.

If you care enough about someone's videos to have discussions about them, something like Discord seems like a much better platform for those discussions than a video's comments section. The value of YouTube comments is the ability to easily link to specific mm:ss timestamps, and that could be had with a chat service that creates a thread for each video and auto-links text of the form mm:ss (as well as a "copy video link with timestamp" option on the video host).

I don't know. Saying Discord, a chronological text service, is a good replacement for YouTube comments is like saying Matrix would replace Hacker News.

The main advantage of YouTube comments is being able to gauge the temperature of a video. If the top comment's bad, the video probably isn't great. Combine that with dislikes and you have a semi-decent QC system.

(re: dislikes, Return YouTube Dislikes is a great extension.)

If the top comment is bad, the video author probably doesn't delete comments.

What is your point? They didn't say the video is good if the top comment is good.

I had a similar experience with their small library. I honestly had no need to subscribe for a second month because there was nothing left to watch.

I pay people who make videos (and various other creative folks) directly. I don't want to help companies advertise their products, and "recommendations" are garbage that I literally never want. Just show me my subscribed channels in chronological order and nothing else.

I agree with you. And as a webmaster, am amazed at what YouTube must spend on bandwidth. But just yesterday the CEO and Founder of Cloudflare commented on HN: “At scale, bandwidth is effectively free.”

He’s no dummy. Which is it?

Same as renting vs owning. Eventually you become the company laying the undersea cables and incremental increase in bandwidth utilisation effectively costs zero but you still have to pay to own and maintain all this infra.

The cost isn't just bandwidth, but also:

- infrastructure (memory, CPU, disks...): all of which must deal with the huge amounts of data they manage (500+ hours of video uploaded every minute).

- personnel cost (developers, SREs...) (almost) all of whom have substantial salaries that support the gigantic scale (1 billion+ hours of content viewed every day)

It's astonishing to me how seldom this point is acknowledged by people who I otherwise judge to be intelligent and well-informed.

The company, which has never hid that it is a commercial enterprise and not a charity, offers two options for users to pay to view its content: with their cash, or with their attention. The result? Endless bitterness for not providing said content completely free.

Ironically the most tremulous bitterness comes from people who go to work each day at companies just like this company, and who expect to be compensated for the value they provide.

Yep.

Then instead of a boycott or avoiding YT - a herculean amount of time and effort is spent trying to find ways to still use YT.

"They're bad. They're evil. Ads are unethical.", followed by /me plays next video

If someone objected to the way electricity is generated, would you demand they live without electricity to prove their sincerity?

YT worked hard to become a monopoly, so they should accept the limitations and pushback that comes with being a monopoly. (IOW, as a monopoly they shouldn't be allowed to say: these are our terms, take it or leave it.)

you will never fight the libertarian mindset on hacker news, you argue about monopolies and they just hear "winners"

People would have to agree they were monopolies first to even argue about that.

Please explain to me how YouTube is the sole supplier of a good or service and how they use high barriers of entry to prevent potential competitors from joining? How do Vimeo, Dailymotion, TikTok, Twitch, Rumble, etc continue to exist?

It's a monopoly to the users, when a source of crucial information (say, a politicians' declaration) is only made available on Youtube.

It may not be to the market, because the politicians could have hosted that declaration video elsewhere but that's not the users' concern. They could ask owners to post their videos elsewhere, but that's not the users' choice.

How is that YouTubes fault?

The politicians are putting the information in the wrong place. Why not fix that?

Is YouTube a monopoly?

I must disagree.

In antitrust terms, a company doesn't have to be the only one that exists to be a monopoly.

Microsoft was ruled a monopoly in United States v. Microsoft Corp despite the existence of Linux, BSD, Solaris, and other alternatives.

The FTC is currently accusing Amazon of being an unlawful monopoly despite the existence of thousands of small competitors.

Meh. Argument about company rights to be asshole works only until this company becomes monopoly.

What part of charging for content makes them an "asshole"?

I also think you're using the term "monopoly" incredibly loosely. I could host a video on my laptop right now, if I could be bothered setting up dynamic DNS and didn't expect much traffic. I could probably host it on my phone (certainly after jailbreaking it).

You deliberatily twisted my comment, which means that you understanded my point, but don't want to discuss it and just want to attack it.

Please express you dissatisfaction in a more constructive way. Please take part in discussion and be civil.

>You deliberatily twisted my comment

I genuinely have no idea how you could come to this conclusion. What part of your original comment do you feel I "twisted"?

>Please take part in discussion and be civil.

What part of my comment was uncivil?

No part of charging for content makes someone an asshole.

The part where your service is de facto the globally monopolistic video delivery and discovery platform, with nearly every creator being, more likely than not, present exclusively on your service (short of influencer mills like TikTok/Instagram), is the part that makes you an asshole if your enforce ads.

I think there's a legitimate debate to be had about whether YouTube is a monopoly (I don't consider it to be), but how can you claim that it "enforces" ads when they provide the option of buying YouTube Premium instead?

Assuming for the moment that it is a monopoly, to claim that YouTube is behaving badly, I think you would have to claim that both of its options (viewing with ads, viewing without ads and paying for YouTube Premium) were unfair, e.g., because the price of Premium is too high. But that is an argument that I never see being made. Is that the argument you are making?

They spent extraordinary amounts of money to capture the market and drive competitors out of business. It's called predatory pricing and it should be punished, not rewarded.

What the hell is a "creator economy".

A website full of so-called content that the website operator did not produce, which for the website operator, a trillion dollar advertising company, serves one purpose: as bait for ad targets.

Would this be an example of YouTube "creators"

https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-obituary-pirates/

Pay money to a surveillance capitalism company to segment yourself into the "has disposable income and is willing to spend it" category of the market, driving the value of your attention even higher!

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