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| ▲ | Workaccount2 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It's worse than creators not making content, they move their content to be lower rung click bait garbage to maximize ad-views. If "smart" people use ad-block, then all the content gravitates towards those who don't. | | |
| ▲ | ndriscoll 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The videos for smart people are things like: * University lectures * Conference talks * Random clips of homeowners doing some DIY repair i.e. things that were being done anyway, and someone decided to post it online because it's free and they wanted to be helpful. "Content creators" are already almost never making videos with high value information. The entire idea of "creating content" rather than "sharing information" is a bad framing to start from. When we recognize that "sharing information" is the high-value action, we're better able to see that it not only can be done by someone who isn't a full-time "creator", but may actually be done better by people who aren't devoted to it since their occupation is to be a practitioner of the field they're sharing information about. i.e. they are better informed. | | |
| ▲ | pseudalopex 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Smart people enjoy many different things. | | |
| ▲ | ndriscoll 5 days ago | parent [-] | | What I listed encompasses many things. You can find lectures on philosophy, biology, anatomy, psychology, physics, Russian literature, religion, history, or whatever topic you're interested in. It's more about depth of information and level of expertise of the presenter vs. "lower rung click bait garbage". Information that demands your full attention for an extended period of time and expects you'll put in effort to engage with it instead of just throwing gimmicks at you to hold a piece of your attention before you click away. Or if you want to enjoy some slop, then apparently we'll all get plenty of that if the smart people block malware, so no problem. Generally speaking, something with wide appeal is going to be trash anyway because most people aren't going to want to (or will be unable to) engage with any given topic at more than a superficial level. e.g. compare Andrew Ng's Coursera MOOC to problem sets you can find from his real class at Stanford. It is obvious that he watered down the information hard for Coursera. Almost every class on those MOOC sites is of the "X for non-X majors" variety at best (and that's for people who are motivated enough to self-learn!), which IMO is why it could never truly be disruptive. The "creators" people are talking about are generally this except even more targeted at mass audiences. Even for people who are interested in "smart" stuff, 100x more people will watch some 10 minute video of surface level discussion with doodles about algebraic geometry[0] and then move onto another 10 minute video vs. putting in the work to engage with 15+ hours of lectures on the subject from a Fields Medalist[1]. World-class researchers provide graduate level educational materials for free (which is awesome), but they could never succeed as "content creators" because any given video will only get ~1k views after years of being up. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MflpyJwhMhQ [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8yHsr3EFj53j51FG6wCb... |
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| ▲ | kentm 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > It's worse than creators not making content, they move their content to be lower rung click bait garbage to maximize ad-views. They will do this whether or not people use ad-blockers. We've seen this happen before; someone will claim that they are an ethical ad company and don't do shady things, people allow-list in ad blockers, then they start ramping up. I remember back in the day where Google was a "good advertiser" because they had simple textual ads and didn't do shady things. IIRC plenty of ad blockers just allow-listed Google at that time. And then they acquired Doubleclick. |
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| ▲ | romanovcode 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > creators not making enough money leads to creators not making content. As a consumer this does not concern me in the slightest. The big creators who are focusing on revenue are so sterile they are barely watchable at this point. | |
| ▲ | mbirth 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I remember a time where people actually had to pay money to publish their videos (on their own server, using their own storage). And they still did it if they wanted to get something out into the world. |
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| ▲ | autoexec 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Ad blocking and using the service only sends the message that the service with ads is bad, but the service without ads is acceptable. Often this means "the way you've implemented ads is terrible enough that I went out of my way to block them" and sometimes it means "any and all ads are terrible and I don't want them" There's nothing at all wrong with ad blocking. Someone who puts their content on the public internet has zero right to require me to view that content, or to control how much of it I see or how I choose to view it. If I want to block ads, or only watch the last 20 seconds, or watch the whole thing played backwards that's my business. This is equally true for websites where I'm free to decide what to download and how to display it in my browser. | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No more than going to the bathroom or getting a drink during a TV commercial break is leeching. Watching ads is not and has never been obligatory for the viewer. | | |
| ▲ | Workaccount2 5 days ago | parent [-] | | You are free to go to the bathroom or get a drink when a youtube ad is playing. | | |
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| ▲ | baseballdork 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Correct by what metric? Why do I care if I send the message that I'm leeching? | |
| ▲ | mhuffman 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It seems to be sending the same message either way, no? Either not watching them or the ad-blocking reducing their count seems to be the same in the end. | | |
| ▲ | Workaccount2 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If you had a lemonade stand, and I came and drank one, told you it was bad and didn't pay, that's one thing. I'd probably not come back. If I kept coming everyday, multiple times a day, and never paid "because its bad", it's extremely unlikely that I don't like the lemonade, and extremely likely that I just like that it's free as long as I complain. | | |
| ▲ | mhuffman 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I am not sure that this example really works. Youtube is happy to give you all the "free lemonade" you want (from videos that aren't really monetizable) but the ones that are, they make onerous to use. I get 20+ ads per day right now from an Internet service that I already use, and get untold ads from products that I would never use. Some of the ads are up to 1 hour in duration. Granted, they mercifully offer a skip button, but it seems to me that the ad is being forced on you, not offered to you. That is the big difference. A funny, engaging ad is not a problem for nearly anyone. | | |
| ▲ | Workaccount2 5 days ago | parent [-] | | No, the ad is not being forced on you. It's your choice to go to youtube and watch the video. No one is forcing that on you. Youtube is a service that is offered. If you don't like youtube or the ads, you can not use the service. Just like no one is forcing you to go to the lemonade stand. | | |
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| ▲ | autoexec 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's more like a lemonade stand which advertises a free glass of lemonade to anyone who asks for one, but every time someone comes up and asks for a glass the guy handing out cups gives a long-winded highly insulting sermon about how the person drinking should live their life. Then the lemonade stand guy feels entitled to bitch about it when more and more people start showing up wearing headphones because they don't want to hear his bullshit even though literally nobody came for his abuse, what they came for was just the free lemonade. The people still show up though because clearly people like the lemonade, they just hate the annoying guy who won't shut up about his rude opinions nobody asked for. | | |
| ▲ | Workaccount2 5 days ago | parent [-] | | If you go to the side table of the stand, you can purchase a lemonade, no hassle, no sermon. But people are incredibly opposed to this because they genuinely believe that they are entitled to this lemonade at no cost. | | |
| ▲ | autoexec 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > If you go to the side table of the stand, you can purchase a lemonade, no hassle, no sermon. But people are incredibly opposed to this because they genuinely believe that they are entitled to this lemonade at no cost. How dare people genuinely believe they are entitled to this lemonade at no cost, when it's got a huge sign that says "FREE LEMONADE"! Youtube has every right to take down the free lemonade sign and paywall off their service, but they wont because they know they make far more money luring in the people who come for the free videos, sucking up their personal data, and then increasingly abusing them until some number of suckers cave and start paying into their protection racket scheme. A racket is exactly what youtube premium is too. Never pay someone for protection against the very harms they're causing you. There's nothing to stop them from demanding increasing amounts of protection money whenever they feel like it, which is exactly what Google has done. Repeatedly. Most recently sticking their oldest suckers with a 62% hike in protection fees. (https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1jqzu4g/et_tu_yout...) Don't encourage or try to justify that kind of shit. Just put on a pair a headphones and enjoy the sweet lemonade Google chooses to offer for "free". Don't forget that even with those headphones, Google is still collecting every scrap of data they can get from you and your device while you're using their service and that they'll happily leverage all of that data against you in any way they can think of, any time they feel it might benefit them. That price is itself high enough, but for me still worth what I'm getting from the content I view. | | |
| ▲ | Workaccount2 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't see where YouTube has a sign saying its free. It's openly ad supported. It's also an optional website/app. No need to get heated, you can use another service. |
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| ▲ | Telaneo 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | If I drink your lemonade, you no longer have it. If I watch your video, you still have it. | | |
| ▲ | Workaccount2 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The cost to youtube is the overhead. Youtube doesn't even pay for the videos, but the infrastructure, delivery network, and service is very expensive. It's a very naive view to think that serving videos is a zero-cost endeavor because the video isn't consumed. | | |
| ▲ | Telaneo 5 days ago | parent [-] | | If they don't want people to watch without paying, they can put up a paywall. |
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| ▲ | whatevertrevor 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ah yes the infinitely reproducible digital content fallacy. If you watch a movie at the cinema, they still have the movie, do you expect that to be free too? Products have more than just marginal production costs, especially true for digital ones. | | |
| ▲ | Telaneo 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > do you expect that to be free too? The seating and good screen and audio? No. The digital file? I don't expect Disney to provide that free of charge, or at all for that matter, but I do believe it should be free. Copyright has gone way too far of one end of the scale, and I'd like to pull it as far as possible to the other side, then hopefully we can meet in the middle in a position we can both respect. The current position taken by Society™ is one I don't respect. | | |
| ▲ | whatevertrevor 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I agree copyright goes too far, but that doesn't mean we should just delete everything. Creative content producers still need food to eat. We still need mechanisms to pay them for it, the more direct the better. The value of digital content comes from more than just the final sequence of bytes. | | |
| ▲ | Telaneo 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > but that doesn't mean we should just delete everything. Where did this come from? This has nothing to do with anything. > We still need mechanisms to pay them for it, the more direct the better. Patreon is a good option, although I wish we had better ones. It's not like Youtube's paying any significant amount to any content creator other than maybe the top 0.01%. Anyone who's tried that has discovered that Youtube's payout is some extra pocket change rather than anything you can actually sustain a business with; hence why everybody who's on Youtube and does it as a business also has a Patreon or does sponsorships, or something else, as that's the only way to make ends meet. > The value of digital content comes from more than just the final sequence of bytes. I fail to see what else I would derive value from. I just want the damn file in most cases, with minimal interference., but Youtube seems to always want plop their schlong inbetween the content creator and their audience, to everyone's displeasure. | | |
| ▲ | Workaccount2 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | YouTube gives creators 55% of ad revenue once they get over 1k subscribers, it's pretty generous. | | |
| ▲ | Telaneo 4 days ago | parent [-] | | 55% of basically nothing is still basically nothing. It's something stupid low like 0.001 cents per ad viewed, all depending on audience. Hence the need to not be reliant on youtube. If you donate $1 to any given creator, you've given them more than Youtube will probably ever give them for all your views ever. | | |
| ▲ | Workaccount2 4 days ago | parent [-] | | The numbers are readily available, you don't need to make them up other than to prop up a bad argument. Youtube pays $5-$15 per 1000 views. Youtube premium gives a 55% cut of the monthly fee to creators. It's split among them based on who you watch and how long you watch them. If you watch one creator only, they will get the full 55% of your subscription cost. Creators readily acknowledge that yt premium viewers are by far the most valuable. Generally less than 5% of viewers ever donate, and less than 1% ever give more then $5. It's not a viable income method. I suggest following pitchfork mobs less, they are usually blind with rage and detached from reality, with a few kernels of truth in the middle. | | |
| ▲ | Telaneo 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Given the reality of number of channels who prop up their Paterons and merch stores, and the slim to zero number of channels at any actual scale relying on Youtube, as well as and the constant cuts in ad revenue (how many Adpocalypses are we at now?), not to mention Youtube's hostility towards me as a user, I have no intention to throw Youtube even the smallest bone until they walk back most of the hostile changes they've made over the years. If Youtube was a platform that clearly cared about its creators, than a 55% split would be pretty fair. Youtube doesn't give a shit about most of them, and if they're just going to be a stupid bytepipe to the viewer, a hostile one at that, then them taking 45% is absurd. |
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| ▲ | whatevertrevor 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > > but that doesn't mean we should just delete everything. > Where did this come from? This has nothing to do with anything. Poor wording on my part, because I was typing on my phone. "Everything" refers to everything related to copyright law. Your original comment implied that we should just burn it all down (going "as far as possible to the other side"), and I don't agree with that. Copyright has been weaponized of course, but there are considerations worth keeping in mind about why it exists in the first place. The intent is to create mechanisms that incentivize creation of art, and allow creatives to distribute said art without other people getting automatic ownership of the fruits of their labor, just by virtue of having the file. In a world where distribution of media is (relatively) cheap and easy, we need to think more about how we incentivize the creative process, instead of making it a wild west where anyone is allowed to distribute if they have the bits on them. In a world where everyone pirates, very little worth pirating remains. EDIT: Forgot to respond to the rest. I agree about patreon, but also: > Youtube's paying any significant amount to any content creator other than maybe the top 0.01%. That's not accurate. Of course if you have a couple hundred subscribers you get nothing from youtube, but neither does a random busker on the subway. Arts are just brutally competitive, and there's way more art being produced than people want to consume. Youtube's partner programs are quite generous as other people have pointed out in sister comments. In addition, a good chunk of your premium subscription goes directly to the creators you're subscribed to. > I fail to see what else I would derive value from. I just want the damn file in most cases, with minimal interference., but Youtube seems to always want plop their schlong inbetween the content creator and their audience, to everyone's displeasure. This misses my point, but illustrates the weird thought process people go through when assigning value to digital media. When trying to value a desk we're willing to go through the whole shebang: cost of materials, quality of materials, quality of the craftsmanship and how much labour it would have required, the estimated cost of all the manufacturing processes involved, finishing labor costs etc. But when the conversation is about paying for digital content we only focus on the direct value it provides to us, the consumer. The entire conversation about input value just gets lost. Now input value is not always perfectly correlated with the output value (it's shaped differently for each customer), but the fact that the conversation simply shifts away as if creators and people building the platforms don't exist outside of the stream of bytes feels disingenuous. | | |
| ▲ | Telaneo 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > In a world where distribution of media is (relatively) cheap and easy, we need to think more about how we incentivize the creative process, instead of making it a wild west where anyone is allowed to distribute if they have the bits on them. In a world where everyone pirates, very little worth pirating remains. China seems to be doing that just fine when it comes to manufacturing. Everybody who's doing engineering or design work on products are talking to each other to figure out what works and does when making stuff, and nobody cares about keeping secrets about these things, since it isn't properly enforced anyway, and if you keep one secret and sit on it, without going out there to continue improving, you'll be outclassed by everybody else in a month or a year. Meanwhile, American companies are sitting on 80 years of IP and are unwilling to even consider sharing their hoard even if half of it is functionally useless, just because it might have some value. People are creative by nature. Nowadays they have a whole internet to take inspiration from, but most of it is locked behind bars for no good reason. If we want to incentivise creative work, then copyright is wholly counter-productive in a world where information can freely and rapidly flow. I'd rather see it burn and see what comes from the ashes than let it rot into nothingness. > That's not accurate. Of course if you have a couple hundred subscribers you get nothing from youtube, but neither does a random busker on the subway. Arts are just brutally competitive, and there's way more art being produced than people want to consume. Go ask anyone between 100k and 10m subs. I'm not talking about people who have anything less than that. > Youtube's partner programs are quite generous as other people have pointed out in sister comments. In addition, a good chunk of your premium subscription goes directly to the creators you're subscribed to. And I'd have to give more money to a platform that's hostile to me as a user. No thanks. > This misses my point, but illustrates the weird thought process people go through when assigning value to digital media. When trying to value a desk we're willing to go through the whole shebang: cost of materials, quality of materials, quality of the craftsmanship and how much labour it would have required, the estimated cost of all the manufacturing processes involved, finishing labor costs etc. When if you hollow out a tree to make a boat, it's value goes up. If you then add a hole to it, it's value goes down again. Work or value you put into a product is not directly correlated with the final value on the other side. I couldn't give a shit about how much money a video takes to make. That sounds like a them problem, not a me problem. If you're spending too much money to make something than you can make back on it, then don't do that. Do something else. |
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| ▲ | philipallstar 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not about sending a message. It's about making sure you use a service in the way it's being offered, or not using it at all. | | |
| ▲ | mhuffman 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Well that is not a law, and even bringing it up on a site called "Hacker News" makes me almost think you are making a joke that is going over my head. | |
| ▲ | nemomarx 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | YouTube is free to only serve videos to paying users if they don't like ad blockers. it would destroy the site, but they're technically able to do it. | | |
| ▲ | whatevertrevor 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It would be really tough. I do think YouTube provides a lot of value by making its videos accessible to everyone. Plenty of closed ecosystem streaming services exist and they continue to be niche things where creators who had no audience before YouTube are trying to keep going. I'm not sure how long the likes of Nebula and Floatplane are going to last honestly, because they have fundamental discovery issues in both directions: The creators need a constant influx of new viewers to replace people growing out of their content, and the viewers need a platform where they can experiment with new content without a big paywall upfront. | |
| ▲ | philipallstar 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > YouTube is free to only serve videos to paying users if they don't like ad blockers. it would destroy the site, but they're technically able to do it. This is why enshittification exists. |
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| ▲ | paxys 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | YouTube and every other site on the internet can trivially block all users with an ad blocker but choose not to. Why is that? | | |
| ▲ | whatevertrevor 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Well they want you to pay obviously, they don't want you to disappear. Setting an expectation that things should be free on the internet is what killed the internet. We all want good things until we have to pay up. | | |
| ▲ | paxys 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > Setting an expectation that things should be free on the internet is what killed the internet You must be very young if you actually think that. In reality the internet was infinitely better when there was no commercialization at all. | | |
| ▲ | Workaccount2 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The Internet was infinitely more fun but also infinitely less useful. I have the rosey glasses too. The reality is that it was just a bunch of edgy kids messing around with no adults in the room. | |
| ▲ | barnabee 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’d love to go back to a completely non-commercial internet that only contains things people put there with no expectation or possibility of profit. | |
| ▲ | whatevertrevor 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I may or may not be younger than you, that is of no relevance other than a vague appeal to defer to your experience about it. I find plenty of valuable things on the current internet that wouldn't exist without commercialization, the possibility of a career as an individual YouTuber or streamer, for example. And I'd like to see them continue and be actually paid for their efforts in a sustainable way instead of pining for a return to "all content is just passion side projects". Because absolutely nothing about the current internet stops people from posting passionately as a side project. |
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