this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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This is not what is happening. Google offers you a tier with advertising for free. If you'd prefer to not have the ads, you can pay a small fee, get no ads and also steam every song ever. I truly don't see the controversy.
It's literally cheaper than a beer for a full month of this service, but people would rather spend hours of their time tinkering with settings instead. Personally, I don't have that kind of time.
If I'm not mistaken, the "tinkering" necessary in uBlock Origin would take much less than the time you took to type out your comment. And no, it doesn't cost less than a beer.
You have a point, but the problem goes far beyond ads vs. no ads. There is definitely a lot of controversy, and you simplify choose not to see it, but don't try to act like everyone else is just too dumb or too poor to see things your way when neither of those are true.
I did not say that applying today's partiucar fix would take hours. For however long this fix works works. I said "people would rather spend hours of their time tinkering with settings instead." Of course I use ublock myself, the web is appalling without it.
As to the price of beer, that may be an Australian thing. But if you manage to get a schooner (425ml/15 oz) at a public bar here for less than $10, you're probably drinking something crap.
I see what people are complaining about. They're acting like they are being forced to visit the website. A website that sits behind one of the largest and most responsive network/web clusters on the planet. A website that is somehow referencing over an Exabyte of storage, geographically redundant and presumabely being backed up. I work in this industry, on a network with over 1,000 servers and my mind boggles at how much infrastructure that takes. I couldn't begin to estimate what is behind that simple YouTube web front page.
Somehow, the controversy is that Google has the gall to want to recoup some of these costs. It costs a fortune for just the hardware. Then add the bandwidth. Then somehow they're paying content creators to put popular videos on the platform. And they offer it all to you for free in return for watching some ads. Or alternatively, you pay $10 to not watch ads.
I see what you mean on that last point, but I think their profits are just insanely above what the average company's looking at, which is probably why it seems like so much at face value.
Just the data alone that they're complaining on almost everyone out there would more than make up for what they spend. It's most likely why Facebook and others are also free.
As far as being forced to visit, there really aren't many alternatives on the same level to where you can really say someone can easily do without. It's what they wanted in the first place, so it's not like this wasn't something they weren't planning for ahead of time.
It's a tough situation, I don't know that I wouldn't do the same thing in youtube's place, but I don't think simply accept what the big Corp tells us is the best path either.