Technology

Well there are a few things to say about your comment. First, YouTube DOES pay content providers. However, most earn money from multiple sources like YouTube, Patreon, sponsors and merchandise sales. Out of those sources youtube is probably the most fickle. Their rules about canceling a channel or removing monetization are arbitrarily enforced and difficult or impossible to appeal.

The same can be said for the way viewers are treated. YouTube is a "free" service. They decided to operate this way, not us. Instead of, for instance, offering the streaming service as a paid subscription, they chose to essentially destroy the product and then ask for payment to fix it ( the so called poison pill). And don't forget the notion that if you are not paying for the product, you ARE the product. I'm pretty sure that YouTube is collecting our information and profiting from it. And if they aren't the parent company absolutely is. When you couple this with the thought that "suggested" content is designed to profit youtube, its easy to make the argument that it wasn't actually free to begin with.

So bottom line is, I think people are fed up with relentless marketing and the form of marketing YouTube has chosen is the worst possible kind of marketing. This leaves those who have been users for a while and want to continue, with the choice of fighting this invasive advertising with ad blockers or paying for the service. The latter of which feels a lot like a reward for reprehensible behavior on the part of youtube.

In short, I think the chief complaint here is HOW youtube has gone about this. Anyway, that's the way I see it. I use a lot of "free" services and youtube is by far the worst type of cost. Pandora, plays ads I have to listen to as the cost for that service but they aren't nearly as bad about it and they never do it in the middle of a song, for instance. I use Wikipedia and they don't market at all, just ask for a donation every now and then. I gave up and just paid for youtube premium. But I have to say it feels a bit like I was extorted, because I feel like I have seen enough ads for one lifetime. If at any point youtube starts showing ads with their paid service I will absolutely drop them like a hot potato, which would be a shame since, like you, I enjoy a lot of the content.

If youtube didnt consistently fuck over creators, and didnt have draconian and immutable copyright takedown and ad stealing policies, maybe Id consider it

But theyre too hostile to feel good giving money to. They dont work with creators or viewers, they try and undermine them. So Im not interested in doing as they ask.

That's a good analogy. The internet's kind of like a gen-Xer, super into anti-establishment punk and grunge music, wearing nothing but Nirvana t-shirts well into its twenties, who woke up one day to find itself a NIMBY-esque middle-manager who votes every election for either corporate democrats or your mildly less homophobic Republican candidates and who cares about no issue beyond getting his taxes lowered. And the sad thing is, that's the internet people wanted. We/they wanted it banal, tame, sanitized, and, ultimately, lifeless. All the porn is sequestered into its own little corner of things, where it used to just be everywhere (you couldn't go to the front page of reddit without just seeing a ton of T and A) and all the media is hyper-sanitized because corporate sponsors want everything family friendly so they can feed the same advertising to kids that they do adults. And instead of interesting, new websites cropping up every other week that you find with Stumbleupon, it's just screenshots of comments from 4 social media websites reposted ad-nauseam on each other and the same mundane youtube videos you've been watching on repeat the past 6 years. And now corporations like Google and Reddit are starting to go the extra mile and box people out of even quietly bypassing the web of bullshit they've put around the content they host, dictating not just what kind of content is available, but how you interact with it.

It kind of reminds me of this passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where Hunter S. Thompson is talking about the sixties. You can read it here. He talks about strange memories, about this feeling like you were a part of an important time that meant something. The internet of the early 2010s was a special place. Alive and vibrant and strange and perfect for weirdo loners who couldn't figure out how to interact with people in real life. I don't think I'll ever be able to fully quantify or describe how much of that time shaped me into who I am, or about what ideas and thoughts and beliefs that live within me that all those moments, aimlessly frittered away in some little corner of cyberspace gave rise to. Maybe I would have been better off if I never was an "internet person." I know the changing of the time and the end of this era would hurt less. I know I wouldn't feel so old seeing the internet, which was once something that felt like a good friend, dying of cancer-like greed and the pathological centralization of all its myriad services.

Perhaps this is the story of all history: of how new frontiers, like the "Wild West," always become settled, and how we remember the best parts of what we experienced and try to forget all the bad parts of it, or forgive those flaws because they didn't really affect us. I know the new internet is certainly kinder to women, LGBT persons, and people of color today than it was back then. And that's good. And I know that the myths of history, of the Wild West, or the Gold Rush, or the early internet, or any other period of rapid settlement and development is never as neat and clean or as kind or even as "real" as we care to remember. And for the people who come afterwards, the way things are now will be all they know. They'll never even think to wish the internet was different or better, because they weren't there and they didn't experience the internet with all its raw potential before it became a digital stripmall. And for all our lamenting, nothing will really change. There might be holdout places, small corners where nostalgia lives on. Virtual retirement homes for the internet's senior citizens. And maybe that's fine. Because nothing lasts forever. Things, people, places, ideas, they all die, and you just have to appreciate the time you had with them. And even the internet as it is now will die and give way to something new, even if it takes decades or centuries to happen.

But even with all that said, you just can't help but wish the thing it became, in this moment, held more of the dreams of the people who actually helped make it.

Someone will create an extension to mute the ad and overlay it with suitably timed bite sized cat videos.