Comment on Me watching someone on Lemmy getting cooked for having the same opinion as me:
Tja@programming.dev 2 weeks agoAdblockers are a pain in the ass for many reasons. Small websites can’t realistically fund themselves with other sources, big players like newspapers end up putting paywalls limit access to quality journalism or selling themselves to billionaires who can run them at a loss in exchange of influence on the reporting. You end up with billionaires controlling all media and no way for small shops to compete with them.
YouTube premium: YouTube ads are fucking annoying, adblocking on TVs is unreliable at best, impossible at worst, I want to support the people who create the content I enjoy and the price for a whole family, for a whole month… is one third of the price of going to the movies once.
antonim@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You can donate to most content creators directly, without the semi-parasitic intermediary that is Google.
Tja@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
Google provides tooling, hosting, bandwidth, processing, security, metrics, payment processing, support, filtering, legal protection, captioning, apps for every platform imaginable, etc. Hardly a parasitic intermediary. Plus donating to 50+ creators would be more money in payment fees alone than what I pay for YouTube.
ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Nobody denies Youtube provides value. It’s the most used video platform in the world. Hence why they called them semi-parastic.
But the tooling gets neglected. The legal protection at times screws over the very creators you say you stand by. Some premium features are literal scams (eg. downloading videos). Some ads they allow on their platform promote literal scams. They censor comments, videos, and dislikes, often in deceitful ways like pretending nothing is being blocked to the poster. I could go on.
For a multi-billion dollar company, they provide ample enough reasons to cut them out of the equation as a form of economic protest, and their disloyalty to their creators in many of their decisions is a forever stain on their trust relationship with the public and creators. Which is why Youtube creators routinely try to detach themselves, like streaming on other sites, and why many of them ask you donate directly instead, so that if Youtube should screw them over (which they have done many times), they can still afford to pay rent.
Look, nobody is saying that it’s bad to have Youtube Premium. I used to have it for years, until I found out they were scamming me on a feature I found important. If none of those things are a concern to you, then go ahead. Premium is a convenient option for sure, but it’s not the greatest option either.
Tja@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
Yes, Youtube makes mistakes, has bugs and the moderation is not perfect. But it gets you 95% there, which would take years and literal millions to do yourself. The only premium feature I care about is the ads. For downloading things long term I use yt-dlp.
Of course creators want to diversify, even if YouTube was perfect they don’t want to be dependent on one revenue stream.
About payments: Square charges 30c fixed fee per payment (+%). PayPal charges 49c. Stripe 30c. Ayden 37c. Klarna 30c. Please enlighten me how flat fees are not a thing.