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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

Taking the YouTube example, and many others like it, I only use it because it is free.

If YouTube was subscription only, hypothetically, I would just not use it, and my life would be same as it is now.

There are a great many services that are nice to have, but very few I would bother paying for out of my wallet. Given the choice of paying for them or not using them, I would just walk away from most of them.

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On the flip side, I’ll pay $10/month for 10 streaming services I never use (and have forgotten about), but on a Saturday night if a movie isn’t available and I have to pay $3.99 to rent it I never pay that. Instead I’ll drive to the corner store and spend $20 on snacks, and come home and watch YouTube with ads.

People are curious creatures indeed.

I paid like $2 to rent a movie about three years ago and didn't watched it entirely and boy it still hurts.

The biggest problem with paid services is that they are often not satisfied with just being paid. Why not add small ads for your own services - you're just letting users know what's available to them. Then why not an ad when you're not actively watching. Then it's constant obtrusive ads. Then it's a pay even fucking more to remove ads. Then it's ads even on the no ads tier.

It's more money. Why would they refuse more money? It's so fucking frustrating too.

This would be fine if you also don't use Adblock. You can't say I use the bakery for free as long as I have the backdoor access key and therefore "free".

Let's imagine if there was a free bakery though. But being free they were always struggling and sometimes the bread was a bit late. Then BigBakeryCo moves into town and also provides free bread as long as you also take one of their magazines and promise to read it. Not most people will go to BigBakeryCo because their funds from selling magazine space means they can provide a more professional service. Now there is almost no one going to the original free bakery so the owner decides to close shop. Suddenly your only option for free bread is BigBakeryCo. Now BigBakeryCo complains that people are throwing their magazines into the trash without reading them and people like you call out those people for taking advantage of poor BigBakeryCo.

The truth is that Youtube is a parasite. They don't create free content, they have inserted themselves between regular people creating free videos and you and are demanding that you pay them for access to what would have existed without them.

Only if you consider hosting the entire infrastructure for concurrent video streaming to millions of users as 'inserting themselves'. Before Youtube there was no way to distribute your home video to a large audience beyond sending the entire physical video file (too large to email, for starters) and the recipients having to deal with whatever mostly proprietary formats it had to be made in.

From the viewers' side, there was no place to go and browse videos, you were limited to short embedded clips or had to download the entire file first.

Youtube was a game changer when it first appeared and Google hadn't yet acquired it.

What would you replace YouTube with? To my its educational value is unmatched. I owe so much of my learning to it.

What did you learn thanks to it?

How to open my computer

I did learn how to diagnose car problems and how to fix them. these were relatively minor tasks - replace the spark plugs and replace light bulbs. Also Subaru Forester has a problem if the battery gets disconnected too long-I found out about that and what to do about it on YouTube. I also learned how to cook some foods.

That being said, lately YT has way too many ads for my liking; thus I am using Reddit more and more for these things.

I don't know what I would replace YouTube with, because YouTube is free so I have never needed to consider alternatives.

But for the most part - probably nothing. For everything else, it'd just be either some other free option, or like going back to the internet of the early 2000s, which would be good and bad in its own ways.

Can you elaborate on your learning journey? How did you separate out the worthless content from quality education programs? Very few Unis post lectures anymore, so it’s all hit or miss for me.

I have completely disabled the history feature, so when I navigate to the homepage there's no "recommended" content. I rely on search exclusively to find what I need. Also I don't have the YouTube app installed, if I need it I just use the browser. This helps minimising the distractions a lot.

As for content, it depends what you're looking for. For me, I'm mostly into maths and physics and there are so many channels and lecture series that were immensely helpful. For example, I recently went through this playlist on Lie Groups [0].

[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN_4R2IuNuuRgJb00X2J53Iq9...

IMO if youtube was an actual paid service, I would also expect a lot of the advertiser driven demonitization actions to go away when your in paid mode, but it isn't so I still miss out on a lot of potentially interesting topics or things that could be talked about, but are not, due to the chilling effects of the demonitization & deboosting police.

> it isn't

It is though. Videos with "limited ads" (as it's technically called in YouTube Studio) applied to them still get paid out of Premium views.

Creators avoid making their videos tagged as such because it significantly reduces their reach and promotion by the algorithm. So it doesn't matter if you still get paid by premium views, the chilling effect still exists.

YouTube's educational value can be unmatched, but it doesn't follow that 99% of time spent on YouTube is educational or even useful.

I'd bet the ratio of time I have spent legit learning something useful vs just using it as distraction/entertainment ("educational" channels are often just entertainment for nerds like us)/background, it has to be something like 1000 to 1. I wouldn't need to replace the 999 at all. I guess I would read books a bit more, probably get a lot more done on personal projects, go out a bit more etc.

Not clear at all my life would be worse off except in that pinch where I need to know how to disassemble & fix the thing, right now.

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