they either:

a) don't care

b) were desperate enough at the time, then, like that damn videogame, it sucked him in

it's too easy to get carried away by sheer technical complexity of optimization tasks, even if you are optimizing for bad.

They may have been extremely competent at this, but if they decided to spend years of their relatively short ephemeral life on such a useless project, perhaps they weren’t the best at the time. Perhaps they needed money and were focusing on family life, I don’t know. Who I am to judge? I’m judging though.

That is really sad.

If a company wants to offer its service as a loss-leader to outlast its competitors who offered their services at a cost its users were willing to pay, then that company has no room to complain if people don't want to pay the last-game-in-town's jacked-up rates!

There is no moral high-ground for YouTube to take here.

They're removing functionality that you already heave built into your browser in order to force you to pay to get that functionality back.

That's not monetization that's exploitation.

Would you feel the same if your phone suddenly updated so that your camera records in half quality unless you start paying monthly? It's their product, they can monetize it how they like.

>If you don't like free services, stop using them

Problem is, there's no real alternative for YouTube. It's a monopoly.

> If you don't like free services, stop using them

If they don't like users using their service how they deem improper, ban them? they know what accounts are doing it... There is a reason for this cat and mouse, and its not ending with youtube banning people.

A lot of the current issues i see with it, is that it is treated like the go to service for video hosting...

Just consider image hosting... If i see an image in a thread and click it (much like people will do with youtube urls), and block the ad that was on the hosted site, is there this much uproar about it? That image hosting site might charge 5$ to do what an adblocker already does... If they wanna lock that up? actually lock it up, and remove the "service" portion of the business, otherwise I don't see any legs to stand on here.

Service in my eyes here, is a public service. This is a company posing as a public service, and occasionally deciding it hates how a % of the public is using their service. So they hand them a 10$ a month ticket that they pretend is required, but they will never take action on users who dont pay that ticket.

> including things which were originally free

Oh, I despise this tactic so much. It means the company has known from the start that they can't offer it for free in the long term, but decided to subsidize it in order to gain a dominant position and get rid of competition. This breaks the conditions needed for a free market dynamics to work. In other words, they win market share for reasons other than efficiency, quality, or innovation. That's why some forms of government subsidies are prohibited under certain agreements, for example. Some multinational corporations have annual revenues larger than the GDP of many countries and can easily subsidize negative pricing for years to undercut competitors, consolidate market share, and ultimately gain monopoly power.

Also, the company has hinted false promises to the customer, as it signals that they have developed a business model where they can offer something for free. For example a two-sided marketplace where one side gets something for free to attract users and the other side pays (as it profits form these users). Users can't know something isn't sustainable unless the company explicitly states it in some way (e.g. this is a limited time offer).

So from the user's perspective, this is a bait-and-switch tactic, where the company has used a free offer in order to manipulate the market.

As soon as the laws on the books get enforced and they get broken up, sure. Until then, absolutely not.

I don't think it's fine for large companies to intentionally lose money to drive smaller competitors out of business. In fact, I think this practice should be illegal and that all who participated should be in jail.

Is this product or hampering the way the web works with video? Go to any other site with a <video> tag and you won't face similar issues.

and my answer is Firefox! (maybe also Ladybird and Servo in distant future)

GP did not say that just because you work at a massive company you are brilliant. Nor did they say just working at Google makes you brilliant.

The irony of your comment of accusing them of using fallacious rhetoric, is that your reply uses one of the most common fallacies of all: strawman fallacy

Whataboutism is just fascinating. How myopic must your world view be that when you see one bad thing, you immediately try to justify it by pointing out another bad thing?

Google is the richest company literally on the entire planet, you really don't need to go to bat for monopolistic practices.

Monetizing a basic OS feature is not a good look.

If they wanted users to pay for the service they're using they should never have made YouTube free in the first place.

Maybe if the Youtube subscription wasn't 10x what they earn from a single user with ads, that would be more believable option.