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Comment by odux | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. The very existence of these apps and websites is based on such “user hostile” behavior. Same with the cat and mouse game between YouTube ads and ad blockers and third party YouTube apps. If the side wanting to completely stop Youtube ads becomes successful, YouTube will cease to exist (as a free app).

I am not arguing for this model, my feed is getting more useless every day, but the only other model is subscription based like you say. And for Facebook, Meta and the like, I don’t think the subscription revenue will be anywhere close due to economies of scale on the free model.

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YouTube offers an ad-free subscription called YouTube premium. It's reasonably priced and includes access to YouTube Music.

I like the hybrid approach of being able to be ad-supported or paid with no ads. I would like to see more of it.

What I don't like is a paid service like Amazon Prime that also includes ads. They include ads in their search results and they include tons of ads in their video library.

FWIW: Hulu offers paid access to content with ads but offers an upgrade to get rid of most of the ads, so there seems to be a whole lot of testing what works in this area going on right now, which I see as a good thing, I just hope that once everything settles the predominant model will be fair and respect user privacy.

> It's reasonably priced and includes access to YouTube Music.

The “price” includes giving your data to the data vampires and is thereby incredibly unreasonable.

YouTube is a good example here, because at least in the EU, you can disable any tracking. You then don't get front-page recommendations, which would normally use that tracking information, but otherwise you can use YouTube just fine.

You are ignoring that people give away things for free all them time if the cost to them is small enough. But currently those genuinely free options have to compete with ad-funded services for attention and getting that attention requires more effort than just providing the service so this happens less than it otherwise would.

Or to put it another way, most of the content on the internet is already unpaid with the creator not receiving any compensation. What's left is the hosting/distribution and we can find many different ways to (collectively) pay for that besides ads and user subscriptions.

tbf facebook is the only (mainstream) social media i know that offers a subscription in the first place

actually i forgot about youtube

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