Sounds like trouble for Newpipe, Sponsorblock, etc…
That’s fine. It just reads to me sometimes as if people in the comment sections are angry at YouTube for trying to uphold a stream of revenue, when it’s the only thing that makes the platform possible. Personally I think YouTube has been a huge boon, I’ve learned so much from people who post on the platform and I don’t want to see it go away (which is not to say that it doesn’t have huge issues). So I’m fine with paying in some manner, at least until a better alternative comes up. If you don’t think it’s worth it, great for you, go and do whatever you think brings value to your life. But I don’t understand the vitriol or sense of entitlement to getting a costly service free of charge.
That’s conjecture, and so is my view, but I disagree. They’ve even developed specialized hardware just to deal with all the transcoding they have to do, specialized for YouTube. There’s a lot of effort that goes into maintaining things that are unique to this particular service. But in the end, what matters is if they could make more money by spending their resources elsewhere.
Google already gains so much money from their data-mining, privacy-violating spree on almost every person on the Earth. For me, they can burn to the ground, and I’ll very happily take their service free of charge.
For me, it’s not just getting something for free, it is rather a who am I giving this money away?. I’ll happily give Lichess, a Lemmy stance, community projects, FOSS projects, etc. my support, financial or not, but Google, a company I completely view as unmoral, can happily go fuck itself.
View it this way: The Coca-Cola Company killed a bunch of workers in my country (Coca-Cola killings) because they were demanding better working conditions, so I’ll do as much as possible to prevent giving them money, and making them lose money would be quite nice.
The problem is not having to pay. The problem is that, even while paying, they always find a way to fuck it up by sticking another stupid factor to fuck users over. Look at Amazon Prime video for example: “prices will not increase (already paying), but we’ll slap ads unless you pay even more”.
They all function exactly the same way. Just adding costs for the users, and never value.
