this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Yeah. I'm actually okay with paying for a service I use daily. Google does a bunch of evil shit to drive its advertising business, but the reality is that nothing is free and somebody has to pay somewhere.

We can pay with money or we can pay with ads and personal data.

What I would like to see is a law banning data collection for paid accounts. Because right now Google datarapes you even when you pay.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago

but the reality is that nothing is free and somebody has to pay somewhere.

Youtube gained its market share and stopped any competitors arising by offering a free video platform. Now that there isn't much hope for competition they have enshitified, plastering ads and demanding money. They endured massive loses for years just to kill competition. So boo fucking hoo when I continue using a monopolists products on the terms they originally offered.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

A privacy law that only works for paying customers? I think we can do far better than that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The economic reality is not everything can be free for everyone. Privacy is the price people pay to have "free" access to services.

But right now, even those who pay to skip ads or have additional features on a service are still being mined for data.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I deny your economic reality. There is no reason social media needs to charge. It can be run purely on volunteers and donations. It may not be able to be as big as FB but that is okay. We don't need giant multimedia companies running social media anyways.

We need strong privacy protections for everyone, not just paying customers. It is time to put an end to targeted advertising.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

We're talking about video hosting here. For a hosting site like YouTube that's several petabytes of new storage added every day assuming no duplicates or backups of anything, plus the bandwidth, overhead, staffing, and more.

A project of that scale can't be done by volunteer hobbyists with no money. What you're asking for is for other people to work and spend billions annually without any expectation of compensation for just your entertainment, and you aren't entitled to that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Your inability to see the Internet as a distributed resource is astounding considering it's purpose. I will repeat what I said before there is no reason social media can't be done without the corporations controlling everything.

You can easily host your own videos, if everyone did and we used advanced sharing protocols the load can be distributed. The more people watching the more bandwidth.

You have become brainwashed into believing only YouTube can exist. You have bought into it so bad you think someone who wants your rights and privacy protected is a free loader.

We can do at all without them. There is something wrong and perverse about a single entity controlling that much of our culture. Too big to fail you say, I say too big to care about what really matters.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Okay, let's go with your idea that everybody has the knowledge and hardware retired to self-host.

What happens when Grandma's cute video she uploaded goes viral and 11 million people try to watch it in a 24hr period? Would we rather it simply didn't work, or does grandma get an unexpected $7,000 bill?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I setup a Plex server to stream media to my mobile phone anywhere in the world. It took me ten minutes of mostly pointing and clicking to setup. Please tell me how hard Internets are....

There is so much wrong with how you think. First of all why does Grandma want 11 million views!? I mean really do you even listen to yourself.

The answer to your question would be a protocol like BitTorrent. The more people who watch a clip the more distributed bandwidth would be available.

We have already passed the tipping point where creators are now paying more for their media to be consumed than they are getting paid. Where do you think this is heading? Do you want a future of YouTube enshitification!?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

You have a plex server. Okay.

I have a couple circular saws. That doesn't make my garage a replacement for a lumber mill.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I live in Alaska and have a friend with a mill that's just a few circular saws and a chainsaw. He makes great rough cut lumber.

You really need to start thinking for yourself and stop believing all the garbage you have been fed.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That's good to hear. Go ahead and tell him that I need 2500 board-feet for my house, that it needs to be free, and I need it by tomorrow. Also, there's another 1.5 million houses being built right now he needs to support, so he may want to ask a few neighbors to help out.

Or would that require a commercial-scale operation involving millions of acres of maintained forests, logging operations, mills, and distribution that costs billions of dollars and employs thousands of people?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Man you have a hard on for corporations. It's like you believe life can only exist if it sucks corporate cock. At the beginning of last century 90% of Americans were self-employed. What you say about everyone working together to produce lumber is not even far fetched. It actually happened.

Technology has been heading towards micronization for awhile now. 3d printing of not only houses but also drugs. We have the technology already to move away from the too big to fail strategy life has become. Small design labs producing the products people need without the enormous waste and pollution.

Your large scale production mindset is not sustainable nor is it the future.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm 1900, life expectancy was 47, children worked instead of going to school, and the global literacy rate was 20%.

We should definitely go back to that.

What moved us from picking berries and killing animals with pointy sticks is specialization of labor.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

That did not address or refute any of my points. Have a good day sir.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (3 children)

How do you explain wikipedia ?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Good loving people pay for it because they want it to be available to everyone in the world and it's running costs are pretty low.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Wikipedia isn't video hosting. The angles of nenual hosting cost for Wikipedia is around 3 million a year. YouTube probably costs nearly as much per hour to keep running.

500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That's gonna be like 60 terrabytes every hour just in storage space increases.

If you were to try and host that on a cloud server like AWS the cost would increase millions of dollars every day. Google self-hosted, but it's still unfathomingly expensive. There's still questions over whether YouTube profitable even with all the ads and the subscriptions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Maybe we could switch to something like peertube ?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Selling personal data at all should just be banned. It says personal right in the name... Giving away free services with forced adds is exploitation in my opinion. The first step to solving the issue is to require everything have a paid option that gets rid of adds and doesn't sell personal data for additional profit. The hard part with that is preventing them from just setting the price unreasonably high.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'd imagine there's a point where the money from subscriptions is greater than the money from advertising and data hoarding.

The "unreasonably high" prices should be self-solving in that context, because the company won't make more money by selling ads for less than the price of a subscription.

In fact, in order to justify raising the prices too much they'd have to change more for the ads, which in turn would hurt the ad industry by reducing the ROI in marketing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Yeah I never understood why ads make so much money. Seems like some kind of gift is going on.