The simple fact is that the ad ecosystem YouTube directs has produced lots of low effort "content" farming, enterprises focused on raw output at the expense of quality, truth, and frequently the intellectual property of others.
No it isn't. It's a horrible method of funding media because as you correctly realized it ends up lowering the quality of that media. This isn't just a problem with YouTube's implementation, it is an inherent aspect of ad-based funding.
What other avenue is there to pay for stuff you consume ?
The argument that it's your machine and you choose what to run on it no longer holds when YouTube clearly no longer wants people with ad blockers as visitors.
So watch ads, pay up, or go somewhere else.
I always get downvoted for stating the obvious, but YouTube's monopoly was helped by adblockers, because alternatives, like Vimeo, couldn't differentiate themselves by being ads-free.
I suppose you were also fine with Unity's change of toś and pricing, but many others weren't. We sent a strong enough message to the company so that their CEO resigned and hit them hard in the wallet and now they know better. As should you.
What happened here is they cornered the market (a monopoly), and now are rising prices and making it impossible to use their product without giving them both your data AND money. The same thing can happen to your water, electricity and phone bills, if the governments didn't mandate anticompetitive practices in law. That is the same reason Verizon in the US is so expensive yet so bad in terms of value for money.
Stop pushing your 'accept it or move on' mentality on others. There is lot to be done here with collective action and government support, not every country is 'everybody on their own' and 'Big Corp rule' like the US. So stop it.
We don't want to go somewhere else unless we can help it, and are willing to fight for a better internet.
When a company is that big and that impactful (despite being a for-profit company), it is in interest to the general public that there are some checks and balances in place.
For me, the best scenarios is governments involve themselves as they involve themselves in other areas of business:
- telecommunications and utilities (Verizon)
- transport (Uber has different treaties/operating models in different countries)
- online marketplaces (Google)
Only through treating these behemoths as providers of "public goods/utilities" via our governments, can we have them not regressing to what any monopoly would naturally regress to: arrogant hands-twisting thugs, not afraid to exploit their users for every penny.
Keep in mind that governments already DO involve themselves in the business (mal)practices of these tech giants. For example, Tesla's new cybergarbage is unlikely to pass a scruitiny in the EU due to pedestrian safety/impact concerns. Google/Facebook/Instagram all have to respect the GDPR and its US cousin the CCPA, etc, etc. If it wasn't for measures like this, you'd not have "do-not-track" options in your browser, nor would you have adblockers in the Google play store...
I simply want MORE, quicker and better government involvement into anticompetitive practices that (mostly) US tech giants use.
- go to it's pre-aggressive-ablocking-removal state
- pay the content creators better
- moderate better so people like Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, etc don't get a platform
- Organized action in all Nordics vs Tesla, where Musk thought he can simply do whatever he wants to the workers and their wages and not negotiate with the unions: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/05/danish-union-j...
- FTC finally chasing telecoms for the insane prices of broadband in America https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/12/the-telecom-industry-is-...
As you can see, both organized worker action and government oversight work very well to curb greedy companies. So please, when you see people outraged and trying to organize, if you don't want to join, don't, but don't try to tell people to 'just accept it', because we won't. We are angry and have had it up to here with corporate greed.
Organized action and government regulation work!
I think if you are above 500k yearly income, the taxation rate should be something around 80-90% on every cent above that threshold.
If I was earning more, I would not mind sharing an ever increasing percentage of that in terms of taxes. I don't need 20 houses and 20 cars, and my own rocket, no individual person needs that. People like that should not be allowed to exist by the government.