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Comment by mkaic | Hacker News Reader

I wish YouTube Premium (and honestly, Spotify too!) had a feature where I could voluntarily commit X additional dollars per month to be directly distributed to the creators I watch according to their share of my total watchtime, with some kind of manual opt-out button for individual videos/creators that I explicitly do not want to support. I am already a member of several Patreons but wish I could cast a bit of a wider support net for the people I watch enough-to-want-to-support-them-but-not-enough-to-join-their-Patreon, yknow?

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>I could voluntarily commit X additional dollars per month to be directly distributed to the creators I watch according to their share of my total watchtime, with some kind of manual opt-out button for individual videos/creators that I explicitly do not want to support.

They halfway do this. The numbers are opaque but part of your premium is given to creators you watch, and that cut is based on your watch time, among other factors.

ofc I dobut we'd ever get that granular a control on CC's. As said in another reply, memberships are sort of that solution.

Is that not just youtube "memberships" though? The creator can choose the cost and have multiple "tiers" - I don't think there's anything stopping them having a $1 "tip jar" tier.

Sure, it's not quite the same, but at some point of similar-enough the number of people who actually use each feature becomes vanishingly small and/or the cost of managing the extra option outpaces the income, and it's just not worth it.

Even then I've heard of some channels uploading ad-free versions of their videos for certain membership tiers.

This somewhat reminds me on the discussions around the Web Monetization API [1] a few years ago.

I still wish for a service that gives me access to all paywalled sites or a way to sending all websites I visit a little money in exchange for them not serving ads.

[1]: https://webmonetization.org/

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