Hacker News Reader

Comment by godzillabrennus | Hacker News Reader

I pay for YouTube to support the platform and creators. If you don't pay for a service, you aren't the customer you are the product. Google may need to shut down the free viewership of most YouTube videos unless the creator pays for them to be hosted or the viewers sign up for a subscription. The ad model is clearly failing.

View on HN

You give money and your personal information to an advertising company. The advertising company then does god knows what with your personal information and gives some of that money to some of the 'creators' that you watch, in a way that isn't transparent to you. Who is getting how much money? Do the 'creators' you value get most of that money, or does it go to some clickbait crap you click on in a moment of weakness? You don't know.

What you should do: starve the advertising company (you shouldn't be donating money to support "the platform" which is a trillion dollar for-profit corporation!) and donate directly to the people who ask for it and deserve it.

Just because you are paying for a service doesn't mean that companies won't double dip or triple dip by either showing you ads or selling your data.

Yeah, movie theaters figured that out 30 years or so ago when they realized besides trailers (which okay, are ads of a sort), they could subject viewers who paid for a ticket to 20 minutes of ads for things like M&Ms and Coke before even the trailers begin. It's gotten to the point that you might as well show up 30 minutes after a movie is scheduled to begin as the movie itself won't have started yet.

Then there is product placement like in ET or back to the future!

Who didn't want to eat Reese's pieces, drink a Pepsi free or tab, or buy a Toyota or pair of Nikes.

True, but that has a long history. It used to be even more blatant in fact, with characters commenting on how smooth the taste of Lucky Strike cigarettes were in the 1950s.

I both pay for YouTube Premium (let's call it what it is: a hope that content creators get paid) and also use uBlock Origin religiously. Nothing's stopping people from doing both.

But Youtube DOESN'T support creators unless you are one of the mega-influencers targeting 12 year olds with daily "Wowie zowie" uploads. Ask every medium sized channel how helpful youtube is. Ask any channel with a million subscribers if the changes youtube makes improves their lives or business. Multiple of these groups of channels have banded together to make youtube alternatives explicitly to escape the damn algorithm treadmill.

Youtube doesn't support creators, it milks them dry for content.

> I pay for YouTube to support the platform and creators.

Paying Google to support creators pushes them to play to The Algorithm(tm) - which means they will adapt the presentation of their content to maximise profitability. And thereby stop making the content you're enjoying now.

As such, I think paying Google to support creators is one of the worst ways to support them. Buy their merch, support them directly on Patreon (or similar), or support a site where they ostensibly have more control (eg, Nebula). Don't coax them into a style of creating dictated by Google's algorithms.

Let's get on with it then

Reply on news.ycombinator.com