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Comment by polygamous_bat | Hacker News Reader

Surprise: you can like the content on YouTube (which is not their property in the first place) without liking YouTube. YouTube is practically holding an incredible amount of knowledge and information hostage to feed Google’s insatiable desire for profits.

You can like the content while hating the delivery mechanism and trying to fix it up to the best of your ability.

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But you’re not fixing it up at all: only ripping off the people who made the content you like. Google still gets all of your data and they can share it however they want at that point.

Go watch my videos on YouTube. I won’t get a dime. I have no idea what you are talking about. Maybe, if I get enough subscribers, Google will bless me with some portion of the money they get.

Why did you put them on YouTube? If it’s for free hosting, ease of use, or ease of discovery, well, that’s what they’re giving you even if you don’t generate enough activity to get a direct payment. Nobody is compelled to put content on YouTube, they’re doing it because they get something out of the deal – and that’s paid for by ads. You don’t have to like it but if you don’t, stop using it and start supporting creators elsewhere so you’re not reinforcing the idea that everything has to be on YouTube.

That’s kind of not the point. They ate the competition by offering free hosting, that was their entire point of existing. Now they are realizing why everyone else was charging for hosting… but charging the wrong person.

In reality, I once had monetized videos until one day they changed the rules to “number of subscribers” and none of my videos mentioned “subscribe” so I didn’t have enough. Oh well.

Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. Most people will never see a dime of the money made from their videos. One-hit-wonders on YouTube are now pointless.

None of that sounds like a reason for you to spend your time reinforcing their market share, though. If you keep telling creators you’ll only watch them on YouTube you’re helping Google get closer to a real monopoly.

> YouTube is practically holding an incredible amount of knowledge and information hostage to feed Google’s insatiable desire for profits.

Free storage of data uploaded by willing users = hosting the data hostage?

Yes, because YouTube is changing their stance between when a large part of the data was uploaded and now. If they chose to compete fairly from the beginning instead of using their search ad revenue to kill off all the competitors we might have had something resembling a remotely free market instead of the unthinking, unfeeling monolith we have right now.

> Yes, because YouTube is changing their stance between when a large part of the data was uploaded and now.

This is untrue. As there was significantly less users on Youtube early on, it's highly likely that most of their total content consists of recently uploaded videos. This becomes more and more true as time goes on.

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