It’s possible for choices and actions to be both ethical and unethical at the same time. Some people (like you, I’m supposing by your comment) fool themselves into thinking that what they are doing is totally ethical because some part of it is.
That’s kind of half the picture though. Adblocking and piracy are not done in a vacuum. You typically block ads in response to the unethical practice of hostile design and the abuse of human psychology to be conditioned positively to something through exposure rather than just making a good product. Piracy is often in response to unethical business practices as well.
If none of those unethical forces existed, you can be sure there would be a lot less pirates and adblockers. But in our current world piracy and adblocking are often straight up ethical in relative terms.
Adblockers are a pain in the ass for many reasons. Small websites can’t realistically fund themselves with other sources, big players like newspapers end up putting paywalls limit access to quality journalism or selling themselves to billionaires who can run them at a loss in exchange of influence on the reporting. You end up with billionaires controlling all media and no way for small shops to compete with them.
YouTube premium: YouTube ads are fucking annoying, adblocking on TVs is unreliable at best, impossible at worst, I want to support the people who create the content I enjoy and the price for a whole family, for a whole month… is one third of the price of going to the movies once.
Google provides tooling, hosting, bandwidth, processing, security, metrics, payment processing, support, filtering, legal protection, captioning, apps for every platform imaginable, etc. Hardly a parasitic intermediary. Plus donating to 50+ creators would be more money in payment fees alone than what I pay for YouTube.
Nobody denies Youtube provides value. It’s the most used video platform in the world. Hence why they called them semi-parastic.
But the tooling gets neglected. The legal protection at times screws over the very creators you say you stand by. Some premium features are literal scams (eg. downloading videos). Some ads they allow on their platform promote literal scams. They censor comments, videos, and dislikes, often in deceitful ways like pretending nothing is being blocked to the poster. I could go on.
For a multi-billion dollar company, they provide ample enough reasons to cut them out of the equation as a form of economic protest, and their disloyalty to their creators in many of their decisions is a forever stain on their trust relationship with the public and creators. Which is why Youtube creators routinely try to detach themselves, like streaming on other sites, and why many of them ask you to donate directly instead, so that if Youtube should screw them over (which they have done many times), they can still afford to pay rent.
Plus donating to 50+ creators would be more money in payment fees alone than what I pay for YouTube.
That’s just wrong. Flat fees aren’t really a thing anymore. Different donation systems have different fees and most charge a percentage of 5% to 12% compared to the 45% of Youtube. But donating to 50 people would be hard on it’s own. Hence why most of us just donate bigger or more frequently to specific creators we want to support more, and over a large amount of people, that somewhat evens out across creators.
Look, nobody is saying that it’s bad to have Youtube Premium, but it’s not exactly good either. I used to have it for years, until I found out they were scamming me on a feature I found important. If none of those things are a concern to you, then go ahead. Just don’t deny the rest of us our grievances.
Yes, Youtube makes mistakes, has bugs and the moderation is not perfect. But it gets you 95% there, which would take years and literal millions to do yourself. The only premium feature I care about is the ads. For downloading things long term I use yt-dlp.
Of course creators want to diversify, even if YouTube was perfect they don’t want to be dependent on one revenue stream.
About payments: Square charges 30c fixed fee per payment (+%). PayPal charges 49c. Stripe 30c. Ayden 37c. Klarna 30c. Please enlighten me how flat fees are not a thing.
I mean, if you use yt-dlp, you kinda get why the premium ‘feature’ is a bit of a scam, right? Since yt-dlp actually gives you the video file, not a locked down version you can only play on the app or website (and only when you connected to the internet recently). So if youtube shut yt-dlp down, would you be happy paying for that ‘feature’ now that you can’t bypass it?
Because yt-dlp is also just as against Youtube’s ToS as adblocking is, since you also avoid watching ads and Youtube’s DRM on the video. And they try plenty to shut yt-dlp down.
Of course creators want to diversify, even if YouTube was perfect they don’t want to be dependent on one revenue stream.
Yes, but there is a distinct difference between diversifying and cutting off an unreliable partner. One is built on entrepreneurship, the other on broken trust. And for smaller creators, those often are much more tied to Youtube and have no real reason to diversify yet at their growth. Yet they still pretty much have to do it, since they cannot rely on Youtube to help them if things go south. Something that would not happen if Youtube was a ‘good’ host.
About payments: Square charges 30c fixed fee per payment (+%). PayPal charges 49c. Stripe 30c. Ayden 37c. Klarna 30c. Please enlighten me how flat fees are not a thing.
These are payment processors, not the donation platforms people use (which would be the stand in for Youtube’s 45% cut), like Ko-fi.
If that’s what you meant, fair enough, yes for those flat fees still exist without any exception afaik, and indeed if you use the wrong one the fees might be too much for a monthly payment. But that’s hardly the case everywhere. Where I live, the payment processor takes much, much less than Stripe and Paypal, max a cent or two.
But even with that cut, that doesn’t change a lot though, it’s just a matter of making payments efficiently. Like paying yearly or making a large single donation.
Premium might be less payment to processors overall, but 45% is such a large cut that it’s hard to overcome that.
And youtube being an unreliable partner, there is also an invisible cut on every payment that makes you less able to detach from them.
With yearly donations, the math still doesn’t really cut it:
spoiler
Lets say premium costs 14 dollars, and you watch 50 creators and every transaction costs 30c flat cut + 3%.
168 dollar a year paid yearly -> 162.66 dollar sent to Youtube for cut -> 89.46 dollar to creators after 45% cut
50 creators -> 1.79 dollar per creator per year
vs
168 dollar a year -> 3.36 dollar per creator per year
50 payments of 3.36 dollars with 30c flat cut + 3% -> 2.96 dollar sent to donation platform for cut -> 5% donation platform cut -> 2.81 dollar per creator per year
But more realistically, you might send 30 dollars to your top 5 creators for a year, which is 150 dollars a year, and at those amounts the % cut overtakes the flat cut by a long shot.
I have been labeled a troll many a time, for:
Arguing against adblocker and for YouTube premium is the most center of the bell curve IQ meme take I’ve ever heard.
I use adblockers and pirate stuff, but I don’t try to fool myself into thinking that it’s an ethically sound thing to do.
Controlling what content is shown on my screen is unethical? Wow.
It’s possible for choices and actions to be both ethical and unethical at the same time. Some people (like you, I’m supposing by your comment) fool themselves into thinking that what they are doing is totally ethical because some part of it is.
That’s kind of half the picture though. Adblocking and piracy are not done in a vacuum. You typically block ads in response to the unethical practice of hostile design and the abuse of human psychology to be conditioned positively to something through exposure rather than just making a good product. Piracy is often in response to unethical business practices as well.
If none of those unethical forces existed, you can be sure there would be a lot less pirates and adblockers. But in our current world piracy and adblocking are often straight up ethical in relative terms.
Adblockers are a pain in the ass for many reasons. Small websites can’t realistically fund themselves with other sources, big players like newspapers end up putting paywalls limit access to quality journalism or selling themselves to billionaires who can run them at a loss in exchange of influence on the reporting. You end up with billionaires controlling all media and no way for small shops to compete with them.
YouTube premium: YouTube ads are fucking annoying, adblocking on TVs is unreliable at best, impossible at worst, I want to support the people who create the content I enjoy and the price for a whole family, for a whole month… is one third of the price of going to the movies once.
You can donate to most content creators directly, without the semi-parasitic intermediary that is Google.
Google provides tooling, hosting, bandwidth, processing, security, metrics, payment processing, support, filtering, legal protection, captioning, apps for every platform imaginable, etc. Hardly a parasitic intermediary. Plus donating to 50+ creators would be more money in payment fees alone than what I pay for YouTube.
Nobody denies Youtube provides value. It’s the most used video platform in the world. Hence why they called them semi-parastic.
But the tooling gets neglected. The legal protection at times screws over the very creators you say you stand by. Some premium features are literal scams (eg. downloading videos). Some ads they allow on their platform promote literal scams. They censor comments, videos, and dislikes, often in deceitful ways like pretending nothing is being blocked to the poster. I could go on.
For a multi-billion dollar company, they provide ample enough reasons to cut them out of the equation as a form of economic protest, and their disloyalty to their creators in many of their decisions is a forever stain on their trust relationship with the public and creators. Which is why Youtube creators routinely try to detach themselves, like streaming on other sites, and why many of them ask you to donate directly instead, so that if Youtube should screw them over (which they have done many times), they can still afford to pay rent.
That’s just wrong. Flat fees aren’t really a thing anymore. Different donation systems have different fees and most charge a percentage of 5% to 12% compared to the 45% of Youtube. But donating to 50 people would be hard on it’s own. Hence why most of us just donate bigger or more frequently to specific creators we want to support more, and over a large amount of people, that somewhat evens out across creators.
Look, nobody is saying that it’s bad to have Youtube Premium, but it’s not exactly good either. I used to have it for years, until I found out they were scamming me on a feature I found important. If none of those things are a concern to you, then go ahead. Just don’t deny the rest of us our grievances.
Yes, Youtube makes mistakes, has bugs and the moderation is not perfect. But it gets you 95% there, which would take years and literal millions to do yourself. The only premium feature I care about is the ads. For downloading things long term I use yt-dlp.
Of course creators want to diversify, even if YouTube was perfect they don’t want to be dependent on one revenue stream.
About payments: Square charges 30c fixed fee per payment (+%). PayPal charges 49c. Stripe 30c. Ayden 37c. Klarna 30c. Please enlighten me how flat fees are not a thing.
I mean, if you use yt-dlp, you kinda get why the premium ‘feature’ is a bit of a scam, right? Since yt-dlp actually gives you the video file, not a locked down version you can only play on the app or website (and only when you connected to the internet recently). So if youtube shut yt-dlp down, would you be happy paying for that ‘feature’ now that you can’t bypass it? Because yt-dlp is also just as against Youtube’s ToS as adblocking is, since you also avoid watching ads and Youtube’s DRM on the video. And they try plenty to shut yt-dlp down.
Yes, but there is a distinct difference between diversifying and cutting off an unreliable partner. One is built on entrepreneurship, the other on broken trust. And for smaller creators, those often are much more tied to Youtube and have no real reason to diversify yet at their growth. Yet they still pretty much have to do it, since they cannot rely on Youtube to help them if things go south. Something that would not happen if Youtube was a ‘good’ host.
These are payment processors, not the donation platforms people use (which would be the stand in for Youtube’s 45% cut), like Ko-fi. If that’s what you meant, fair enough, yes for those flat fees still exist without any exception afaik, and indeed if you use the wrong one the fees might be too much for a monthly payment. But that’s hardly the case everywhere. Where I live, the payment processor takes much, much less than Stripe and Paypal, max a cent or two.
But even with that cut, that doesn’t change a lot though, it’s just a matter of making payments efficiently. Like paying yearly or making a large single donation. Premium might be less payment to processors overall, but 45% is such a large cut that it’s hard to overcome that. And youtube being an unreliable partner, there is also an invisible cut on every payment that makes you less able to detach from them.
With yearly donations, the math still doesn’t really cut it:
spoiler
Lets say premium costs 14 dollars, and you watch 50 creators and every transaction costs 30c flat cut + 3%.
vs
But more realistically, you might send 30 dollars to your top 5 creators for a year, which is 150 dollars a year, and at those amounts the % cut overtakes the flat cut by a long shot.