I'm torn. I'm not a huge fan of Google and I don't have a lot of respect for the YouTube selection algorithm. However this culture of expecting Google to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.
There is an unwritten social contract here. Google is willing to host and organise a vast number of videos because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeloaders resisting the ads then Google won't host the videos, and on the path to that the freeloaders are really just leeching off a system in an entitled way (unless their goal is to destroy YouTube in which case good on them for consistency and for picking a worthy target).
If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system. But strategically if Google's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use YouTube - they'd just be feeding the beast. They should go make PeerTube work or investigate the long list of alternative video platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_video_platforms .
Google just hosting the data is exactly what I want. Making them a monolith gives them too much leverage.
All we need is hosted APIs and frontend frameworks to wrap content as the user desires.
Charge API users for their bandwidth.
I don’t want Google also deciding what to boost to help them gobble up more human agency.
Reduce redundancy by making HR its own thing.
At the end of the day Google’s core engineering competency is load balancing date center use. The rest is biased attention seeking gamification of our agency
As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: just charge me a fee to host my videos. I'd pay $100/month, possibly more, to run a YouTube channel without.
Why is running ads the _only_ choice? Why can't a creator opt to pay to host videos on their channel with limitations? $10/month? That's 30 videos in HD max. $100? 300 videos in 4K... etc. ... or whatever.
As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: I use Freetube. Please use it until abusive adverts and practices aren't a thing anymore.
In fairness to Google, costs to host video would scale with viewers. Unless creators are willing to pay increasingly excessive costs as their viewerbass grows (which I doubt) some kind of per-viewer cost (like ads) needs to be charged.
There's no guarantee creators can collect as much income without Google either. Google has proven they can get way more income from ads than pretty much everyone else, and even bug channels with sponsorships still derive a very large income portion from Google ads (based on what I've heard from LinusTechTips videos)
In this scenario you’d also have to pay for bandwidth since that’s the variable cost here. The more views you get, the more you pay. And obviously you wouldn’t get any money from YouTube for views since they aren’t making money from your videos.
You'd need to pay based on traffic too not just video total. And have a system in place to add payment if your videos became hits. Would really curtail amateur uploads.
Conceivably an option for professionals with business models but hard to see it being a default for a service that wants traction.
I noticed my very old Youtube videos have degraded in quality. I'd rather pay monthly then be surprised to find out important videos I trusted to Google have been effectively destroyed.
Then you'd have to pay for viewer acquisition part and no way in hell you're getting that kind of a platform with creators paying for development/hosting without advertising.
>this culture of expecting Google to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly
it's not ugly at all: parasites deserve their place in the ecosystem right alongside carnivores.
What I don't like is people like this who broadcast and evangelize as if google will allow it to keep happening. I'd rather it survived longer hiding under the radar.
"hey everybody I discovered a secret hack to get a free donut with your coffee!!!"... how about just keep doing it yourself, donuts for life?
That definitely seems like the least ethical response to finding a free donut loophole? Unless it's not a loophole at all, but just a marketing tactic deployed by the coffeemaker.
That level of analysis is on par with arguing for robbing someone's house because they believe that social welfare is a good idea. To influence the world in a positive way (for yourself or others) it is necessary to look a little deeper into how to make situations sustainable.
I had a lot more sympathy for this argument a few years ago, but lately Google does enough short-term thinking all by itself that it seems fine to just take what you can get for as long as it does something that happens to be useful to you, amidst all the stuff it does that is useful only to itself.
Just be prepared for the good times to end at any moment.
But there is more content than there are people who can watch it. What do you think happens when the production curve grows way past the consumption curve?
Hey, you want a monopoly on information while at the same time operating the largest ad network in the world?
Then don't complain if people block your stupid ads and count yourself lucky that the government didn't split your megacorp into several tiny companies
The only morally wrong thing here is NOT blocking Google's ads
Why doesn't the government split the megacorp into several tiny companies? All this collusion between these otherwise unrelated companies is only good for Google.
People always say this but what is the practical way this would come into effect? Unless the intention is to simply kill either YouTube or Google, or both, how do you separate out YouTube in a way that is meaningfully "breaking up" with Google but that the separate entity could afford?
The social contract was to show ads. Gathering people's data even on websites they don't even own was not the social contract. Google broke the contract and to suggest otherwise is gaslightling. Google can either start blindly showing context-relevant ads with no tracking or they can eat the loss from those willing to use free services.
Exactly. But I would like to take it a step further -- anytime you visit a page anywhere on the internet, there is an unwritten social contract that you will not block ads or trackers. For this reason, adblock in itself is unethical and basically equivalent to piracy. Additionally, actors like Mozilla who build tracker-blocking tech into their browsers should be held accountable for encouraging this disgusting behavior.
Don't like the ads? Don't visit the site then. Simple as that.
When I started visiting resources on the internet there was an oft-written social contract that the internet was not to be used for advertising at all. I personally never agreed for those terms to change so I'll continue to configure my enduser clients as I wish. (I do sometimes consume ads--sometimes they're good content.)
That argument MAYBE worked 25 years ago when ads genuinely paid for hosting costs and nothing else.
But now it's intellectually dishonest at best. We're not serving static images with hyperlinks anymore, either, but full-blown malware that tracks people against their will.
So who's really being unethical here? The amoral ***** who write this malware "because it's their job", or the people who are simply trying to protect their privacy from being raped?
> But now it's intellectually dishonest at best. We're not serving static images with hyperlinks anymore, either, but full-blown malware that tracks people against their will.
> So who's really being unethical here? The amoral *** who write this malware "because it's their job", or the people who are simply trying to protect themselves?
No one is forcing you to visit sites with "malware", you are equally as free to visit an alternative site that doesn't have ads or trackers. And call it what you will, that "malware" is essential for the web as we know it to survive. How else will Google be able to maintain the monopoly on video hosting if they can't harvest and profit off the data off freeloading users?
Also, for YouTube there is a simple solution: it's called YouTube Premium. You see no ads and you get great perks to boot. And Google promises to respect your privacy so long as you use YouTube Premium.
Or if you don’t want to see ads you could pay for it instead. Like an adult. Works great.
They present a perfectly valid choice to you, and it works great. It’s a reasonable enough price (not great but reasonable), but it supports the creators you watch with part of your subscription money.
Plus it has other benefits if you care, like free TV shows and movies and YouTube music. I don’t use that stuff but it is there.
The problem is that I don't care. I've had it with everyone wanting "just" $9.99/mo. I watch a few random two-minute videos a day, that's not worth as much as Netflix to me. I don't want the TV shows, I don't want the music channels, I just want to watch my little videos without ads. How much are you making from me on ads? Just charge me that and remove them.
And it you don’t want to pay, and can’t handle ads, don’t use the service. I don’t understand why people think they are entitled to any content they want, when they want it, for free.
In the age of LLM's, I with there was some way to automatically pull videos about particular topic, extract the information out of the transcript (skip the clickbait as well) and deduplicate. I spend so much time watching videos just to conclude "ah right, it's actually based on the same info previous 3 videos"
this is my dream for AI to help with. "I read all the news you showed me yesterday; from now on, just show me anything that I didn't already read [referring to content, not sourcing]"
Let's try it. 20 seconds to first start on a M2 mac mini, not amazing. Search takes about 3-5 seconds. Navigate to video another 3-5 seconds. No 4k. No casting. Can't change the playback speed. Can't jump on timeline with 0-9 keys. Doesn't sync to my other devices. Doesn't know about my membership perks, of course.
After a few minutes I would say this is easily the worst way to watch YouTube short of printing the videos out.
There is an unwritten social contract here. Google is willing to host and organise a vast number of videos because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeloaders resisting the ads then Google won't host the videos, and on the path to that the freeloaders are really just leeching off a system in an entitled way (unless their goal is to destroy YouTube in which case good on them for consistency and for picking a worthy target).
If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system. But strategically if Google's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use YouTube - they'd just be feeding the beast. They should go make PeerTube work or investigate the long list of alternative video platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_video_platforms .
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