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Comment by greybox | Hacker News Reader

Whatever I think about Google, I have a softspot for youtube. Youtube is an amazing resource for society, the amount of knowledge that humanity has stored on their servers is mind boggling. You can learn anything there from DIY Flooring installation to programming to Japanese. I've started entire years long side projects based on being inspired by something I've seen on youtube.

I'm alright watching adds to see that resource remain free. I'm even alright with them not showing me videos if they detect I have my ad blocker on. That seems fair to me.

I use firefox and have ublock origin turned on everywhere else on the web.

I do think though that they should be separated from Google.

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Seek ways to support the creators, not the platform.

Videos that take a shitton of time and resources to make and are actually useful information-dense content don’t usually get enough viewers to pay for themselves with ads — their audience is way too small by definition — but some stupid low-effort viral shit that gets viewed by billions does.

Yess! I totally agree. My favorite creator has a patreon and I contribute that way.

But the platform does have their costs to cover, they contribute to discoverability & host all the videos. But yes, creating good quality videos is a full time job that isn't compensated simply by relying on ad money.

> Seek ways to support the creators, not the platform.

And where exactly will these creators publish their content if not on a platform? YouTube solves their techology problem, delivery problem, storage problem, costs problem for all the previous things and gets them access to advertisers that pay for their content and handles payments across the world for them. (Patreon is a platform too, which also works on handling a subset of those problems).

I don't see those creators rushing to cover 6-7 figure AWS bandwidth, transcoding and software development costs themselves for their self hosted videos. They seem to be happy double dipping into YT ad paid service costs and adding sponsorships and patreons on top of that. I haven't seen a single one move to their own AWS hosted machines and paying 5-7 figures in badwidth and CPU costs to get their content delivered to people who want everything for free.

I agree, however AWS bandwidth fees are the biggest corporate scam of the decade

Sadly, even when self hosting a large video delivery platform, it doesn't get that much cheaper. Once you get past X GB per month the ISPs will hit you badly and you start needing CDNs across the world to keep costs manageable.

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