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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Not very universal, if you ask me.

Universal in terms of people being able to access it for free, not that they can access it in any way they'd want to. You might disagree which how they used the word but that's what they mean.

But you can’t access them for free, you have to give up your privacy. And if you don’t have a device powerful enough to display YouTube’s bloated website, you can’t access them at all.

99.9% of people on the planet don't care about your first point, as being monetarily free is free enough, to them. Only in techie HN circles does anyone actually care about online privacy (which, for something like YouTube, is inconsequential, really; it's not like they have your government or criminal data or anything like that).

For your second point, most people who have phones can access YouTube, devices are not as weak as you think.

You really don't get what privacy is about.

Oh I get it, I and most people simply don't care.

I'm a shameless pirate but YouTube is not a charity

Name a thing that's free. Usually, you have to give up something to access it. In the simplest case, attention.

With enough mental gymnastics, you can remove the word free from vocabularies.

Exactly! Everyone clearly understands that "free" means free of charge.

If you went to a lemonade stand that said "Free Lemonade" and they had a guy standing next to it who drew a picture of you picking up a lemonade, that wouldn't make the lemonade not free. If you decided that lemonade was not free because someone drew a picture of you, then sure, but you can walk that all the way to having no things that are free.

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