this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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Look this is different than pirating a game or bypassing a newspaper paywall. Watching content on YouTube simply costs money to YouTube. It's not like torrenting a game or movie, where while you haven't paid for the content, it didn't cost anything to the owner other than theoretical revenue. And it's not like bypassing a newspaper paywall, either, where the cost to the newspaper to serve you the story is practically negligible and the real costs are fixed and not related to how many people actually read the story.
Hosting video costs money and nobody can replace YouTube's massive library or realistically replicate their business model. I mean just look at image/gif hosting sites, they constantly go bust like Photobucket because storing everyone's pictures forever and for free isn't not a real business model.
YouTube needs to be paid for its gonna go the way of Photobucket.
Everything has to be free; I won't pay a dime. If anyone tries to make money (aka any business), they are evil.
Google has billions. YouTube pirates (can we call ourselves that yet?) are not going to bankrupt Google. In fact, Alphabet is spending more on their crackdown for sake of principle.
But Google is beholden to its shareholders, whose interests are diametrically opposed to that of the general public, so any gain by Google is a loss to the rest of us.
So any profit we can deny the Google machine remains instead in the economy, rather than vaulted in offshore accounts or used to further lock down the empires of the shareholders.
The day I can't watch YouTube sans commercials is the day I quit watching YouTube. And then it will get absolute-zero engagement from me.
So bring it. I do not need YouTube, and it needs viewers like me.
Let it die. Creators will go elsewhere. We need to shake up the ancien regime a bit
Go where? The only companies that can afford to do unlimited video forever for everyone are the likes of Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Meta tried to steal VOD watchers from YouTube years ago, they failed. Amazon tried to get into VOD via Twitch, they gave up. Microsoft tried to come after Twitch with Mixer, they failed. Moreover, a lot of the things we hate about youtube like poor content moderation, the copyright system, demonetization, etc arent youtubes fault. The broken copyright system is just a result of what copyright law is, it'd probably be worse on a different site since they wouldn't have the special agreement YouTube has with major copyright holders to serve as an intermediary. Instead of content strikes, or an ad revenue claim, that youtube has the special power to do, you'd just default to DMCA takedowns for everything immediately. And yeah content moderation and demonetization is bad but Youtube never wanted to do this right? They were happily showing ads on ISIS videos, its advertisers that forced them, which is how we ended up with a system that randomly pulls ads from videos if there is a hint of something an ad agency would object too. I mean it's either this or advertisers don't advertise at all, which fucks everyone, instead of a few people.
If you love watching ads so much go watch them. That’s the same boomer mentality that keeps cable alive to this day. I don’t care, I will never watch ads
So uhhh where will content creators go, you still haven't answered the question.
Im not a content creator, why don’t you ask one?
You said creators will go elsewhere, which implies you know there are alternatives. Just wondering if you had anything in mind, or if you just kinda kicked that can down the road.
PeerTube, since if creators are large, then their videos being watched by so many people, cause lots of peers to load balance the video and not destroy the server.
I love peertube as a technology, I'm not 100% sure it will be a replacement for YouTube - in addition to volunteer content moderating, this comment captures my worries about attracting content creators - basically it seems difficult to get paid.
EDIT: and for folks who think a donation button will suffice, you have people like this who give me serious doubt.
And are you going to pay to host the petabytes of 4K content? Or are you going to expect other people to pay that when these creators jump ship?