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Comment by zelphirkalt | Hacker News Reader

YouTube sucks in terms of usability. It only survives, because it is at no cost except for ads viewing and not even that, when using uBlock Origin properly and because of most of the content being there. Other than that is has become so enshittified, it is one of the worst sites I visit.

Gmail and Docs are children's toys for people, who don't know much about e-mail and proper documents. Those are the majority of people on the Internet these days though, so Gmail and Docs are going nowhere any time soon.

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What's funny about this comment is that YouTube is absolutely usable if you pay for YouTube Premium, but most won't. Goes to show, while everyone whines about how bad an ad based business model is, noone has any alternate strategy that works at scale, - especially one that's not exclusionary to people from the developing world who can't afford to pay for every single thing on the internet.

It's crazy that people will watch hours of YouTube content every day, streaming HD video with almost zero buffering, features like auto-generated subtitles that can then be automatically translated into other languages, essentially unlimited storage so the videos they like are around forever (copyright claims and the like are a separate issue), you can embed the videos onto your own site for free, you can use them to livestream... all this and you'll never see a single advert if you pay for YouTube Premium. It's fantastic, but most people are so entitled that they seem offended that YouTube would ask for money to provide this service. I know premium does nothing about the insane amount of sponsorship slop every creator stuffs into their videos now, but maybe if people stopped using every possible tool they can find to block YouTube adverts and paid for premium, YouTube would pay their creators more and they wouldn't need to constantly lie about drinking AG1 every day and the quality of raycon headphones.

YouTube is a modern engineering miracle, and yet it's so accessible.

People complain so much and don't appreciate what they have.

I got YouTube Premium Family and it's so great.

Plus, I am supporting content creators better while avoiding ads.

No, youtube survives because it’s the only platform with a reasonable split between youtube itself and it’s creators. It was obvious long ago that people will go where the content is, usability issues be damned.

> proper documents

If by that you are talking about anything that doesn't have built-in version control and simultaneous editing, good riddance to it and the v4-edited-copy-FINAL-edited it rode in on. But there are a few actual competitors to Google Docs that have built-in versioning and simultaneous editing.

It's amazingly usable when you stop trying to circumvent things.

I watch a great deal of YouTube, probably more than any other streaming service now. It's very usable with Premium.

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