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Comment by akoboldfrying | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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