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I want Google to store an exabyte of storage, and send me videos at speeds that allow me to watch them at 4K @60hz for free tho?
They chose to store an exabyte of storage without a business model people find acceptable.
They also decided they didn't care about moderation and became a cesspit of far-right and conspiracy trash.
They can fuck off.
I dunno. I pay for premium. The price feels justified given how much I use YouTube pretty much every day.
But if others feel differently, that's fine.
The far right shit is bad, there's a lot bad in general, but I still get a lot of value from lefty politics to atheism content to video game essays to music videos.
I see why you might make that decision.
Myself, I never use YouTube on purpose. I sometimes go there for music videos, short clips (like a Simpsons gag), and video game walkthroughs. Honestly, none of that really needs a mega global behemoth company to back it. The price they charge for premium is too much for me, and the ads are intrusive.
So, I don't want to pay what they're charging. But I get why some people might.
My bigger complaint is that there isn't another choice. It is Google's choice to spend that much money, and it should be the consumer's choice to use the better product if they make a bad experience with ads... Antitrust Google to fuck so competition can make sure there's a better choice
I think the consolidation of smaller websites in favor of everything being on a handful of private platforms (eg: facebook, google) is a big loss.
Like, if you're a small band you should be able to host your handful of music videos on your own site. But then you don't get all the network effects and discoverability, I guess. Federation might be a solution.
Maybe also breaking google up would help, but left unattended things would merge back into a monopoly eventually.
Those services aren’t free, I get that, and I wouldn’t mind paying a bit. Alas, paying will result in less ads, not none; plus there might be no visible ads but hoo boy, you’ll still get tracked like the piece of click cattle that you are. It is also still funky expensive, and even then: Google is in full enshittification mode, expect a new, expensive Premium subscription soon - and yours to be riddled with ads again, as it is the basic variant.
It's not our fault silicon valley decided to run with the "every service is free and we'll figure the rest out later" model. Unbeknownst to them I can configure my computer to not accept data transmitted from ad domains.
In their defense, they could loan money for free for 30 years. Needing to be profitable is a recent requirement