YouTube is running an experiment asking some users to disable their ad blockers or pay for a premium subscription, or they will not be allowed to watch videos.
I just don’t think content should be behind a paywall. I want to live in a socialist utopia where content and knowledge is free to share, copyright is a relic of the past, and art and science blossom. Blocking ads takes me 0.0001% closer to that, so I’ll take it. I don’t want to pay, because I don’t want money to exist, it’s deeper than experience vs how much it is worth.
I do think that publicly-owned and publicly-funded alternatives to platforms like YouTube and Twitch could make the internet a far better place. I’d be surprised if, at least here in the EU, where there is an ongoing attempt to actually regulate tech companies, we didn’t see this happening sooner or later.
For the time being, though, I know that the creators whose content I enjoy so much couldn’t keep doing what they do without compensation, and the YouTube servers their content are hosted on would be taken down if they could not be paid for. So I pay for premium, content enough to know that I’m doing my fair part in keeping the videos I enjoy available and enabling the people who create them to keep creating more, even if the system under which all this occurs is much less than ideal.
To be honest I pay for premium as well, not because of any moral thing, but just because there were ads in tv/mobile and I could not setup adblock easily enough (it was cheaper for my time to actually pay).
But yeah, finding a way to pay creators would be good. I’m from Argentina, and USD are way too pricey, so most patron contribution pages I find are out of my budget. The youtube premium subscription is the equivalent of 1.45USD here, if I could pay double that to “all creators that I see” automatically, I’d do it in a heartbeat, but paying 1usd to each of the hundreds of youtubers I might see a video from once in a while would be crazy.
I do think that publicly-owned and publicly-funded alternatives to platforms like YouTube and Twitch could make the internet a far better place. I’d be surprised if, at least here in the EU, where there is an ongoing attempt to actually regulate tech companies, we didn’t see this happening sooner or later.
For the time being, though, I know that the creators whose content I enjoy so much couldn’t keep doing what they do without compensation, and the YouTube servers their content are hosted on would be taken down if they could not be paid for. So I pay for premium, content enough to know that I’m doing my fair part in keeping the videos I enjoy available and enabling the people who create them to keep creating more, even if the system under which all this occurs is much less than ideal.
To be honest I pay for premium as well, not because of any moral thing, but just because there were ads in tv/mobile and I could not setup adblock easily enough (it was cheaper for my time to actually pay).
But yeah, finding a way to pay creators would be good. I’m from Argentina, and USD are way too pricey, so most patron contribution pages I find are out of my budget. The youtube premium subscription is the equivalent of 1.45USD here, if I could pay double that to “all creators that I see” automatically, I’d do it in a heartbeat, but paying 1usd to each of the hundreds of youtubers I might see a video from once in a while would be crazy.