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.
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
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.)
I must disagree.
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.
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 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.
The politicians are putting the information in the wrong place. Why not fix that?
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).
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.
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?
Please express you dissatisfaction in a more constructive way. Please take part in discussion and be civil.
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?
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.)
He’s no dummy. Which is it?
- 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)