gabriel (2 inches taller)

I know the reasons for it and all that, but I do find it really funny how the article in question itself is gating most of its information behind a paywall.

As much as I would hate having to watch ads on youtube again, the reason why I would never switch off my adblocker, is because I use it to block most of Youtube's UI as well. Honestly, at this point I find the ability to block entire website elements almost more useful than the blocking ads part, since so much of how commercial websites operate is build around guiding your attention to very specific things, and the ability to just eliminate these patterns is invaluable, to having a somewhat healthy relationship with the Internet. At least for me, that is.

I've seen some people approach this with "Pay for Youtube Premium then! Show them that there is an eager customer base for non-ad-supported!"

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i dont understand how anyones response to youtube forcing ads on people is to give them and how that doesnt play exactly in youtube's hands

depending on how far youtube ends up going there's not a solution that's permanent probably, but for now i've used stuff like piped.video sometimes (anonymous youtube proxy, basically) as well as just keeping my ublock filters up to date / not logging in. i haven't had the anti-adblock prompt show up once

as far as actual fixes. i don't know. i know i don't think FOSS solutions or federated solutions or even cohost-type things can solve what's ultimately a societal problem (and economic problem). systems like youtube and twitter are ultimately something that needs to be a part of a shared commons of some sort or another. but that requires big shifts that aren't going to happen easily. i don't see a clear path

"Pay for Youtube Premium then! Show them that there is an eager customer base for non-ad-supported!"

Yeah, about that: https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-premium-global-price-increase-3381637/

coincidentally, a handful (I think eight?) of the big gun history/demo channels banded together recently and made their own Youtube because of how arbitraryYoutube is with demonetizing, taking down, and delisting their videos. Apparently they signed a two-year contract with Vimeo for hosting. I just saw the announcement today.

It certainly helps that Streamable deletes videos after 90 days unless you pay. 90 days is a lot easier to manage compared to 18 years of videos.

I often wonder about the economic model of Curiosity Stream/Nebula. Its about the only video streaming service that I use that does seem to be worth the premium price I pay for it.

I hope this is the case! Monopolies do tend to fall into inefficient decadence like you describe, until some external pressure forces them to tighten the belt (which is inevitably super disruptive to the businesses that have grown in their shade). If nothing else it'd be really nice to see someone "do the math" on a modest hosting operation and break it all the way down.

vimeo has (had?) this model, where you pay for the hosting, rather than to view, and it lost out culturally because of it. even creatives eventually abandoned vimeo when they realized how much more traffic they got on youtube. it’s bleak!

I think one of the Hard Truths of the internet is that Video is expensive to host, and there's relatively little consumer interest in paying for it. For HD video, you're looking at about 3 GB/hr, which costs about $0.25 in transfer fees (using AWS Cloudfront as an example). If a half-hour video gets 200k views, that costs somebody $25k, and ✨Content Creators✨ don't have that kind of cash lying around. They're trying to make money.

Would you be willing to pay $0.25 to watch that video? Probably! But if you want to pay per-video, PayPal wants $0.30 + 5%, so you're actually paying like $0.60, and half of that is just transaction fees. If you want to get ahead of that, you need to buy "VideoCredits" in like a batch of $10 at a time (non-refundable), and, whoops, we've reinvented centralized video - Netflix or Dropout or something. And are you really going to spend all of that time & mental effort moving money in between buckets, when you can just watch it on YouTube for free?