There was a point in the past where video platforms were competing, and by no means was it clear that YouTube would end up dominating this area to the point of being close to a monopoly.

When YouTube won that race, they won it with a given set of parameters, including the kind and amount of ads they show. Society at large has, at that point in the past, basically decided that YouTube's offering is the best, and given this market domineering position.

YouTube is increasingly moving away from the parameters of this implicit agreement, in minor ways at first, more now. Had they "competed" in the video platform race with current policies, maybe everyone'd be using Vimeo now.

And here's the crux. YouTube can only do this because their old policies allowed them to establish this domineering position, and by doing so are breaking the implicit "deal" that actually allowed them to get into this position.

To me, there's currently no alternative to going onto YouTube. And no, I won't pay for YouTube Premium — because that wasn't part of the deal either. The platform won the race as a free platform. So, until Google can figure out how to serve a reasonable amount of safe ads — adblocker it is.

I do wonder if it could be argued (maybe even in the current monopoly case against google) whether youtube engaged in predatory or below-cost pricing in order to drive out all of its competitors, establish a monopoly, and now use that monopoly in order to "raise prices" i.e. increase the amount of ads on its service in order to maximize its profit margins.

Although this does seem to be the business plan of basically every startup out there. Get VC funding, run at a loss and burn through money but gain a monopoly market share, and once you've done that you can raise your prices and have a profit margin that far exceeds what should be normal.

But this seems to be the play book for all VC funded web apps. Facebook and MySpace did the same. In fact, you can argue that moving towards profitability too soon and too fast is what killed MySpace. But that argument only works if you are willing to see the growth phase as something other than predatory pricing.

I think your comment is a sobering input to the whole startup discussion.

"Venture capital itself is not a hack. The hack is when unprofitable companies use VC funding to ignore the dynamics of the market economy. We don’t want some central planner to decide which businesses should remain operational and which should close down. But this is exactly what happens when venture capital firms become involved. The injection of VC money means that companies don’t need to compete with each other in the traditional manner, or worry about the normal laws of supply and demand. They can do what would normally be crazy things—give away their products, pay extravagant salaries, sustain enormous financial losses, provide a service that actually harms people—because of that external funding source. It’s basically central planning by elite investors, something that would be called communism if the government did it."

It feels about right... it's almost the same thing. Except there are multiple competing "central authorities" with money, so the ones who fuck up do get burned a lot harder than they would if they were part of the very big government.

This doesn't mean there's no place for VC funding, there's lots of legitimate uses for it (i.e. handling mismatched cost/revenue flows from expansion where there are a lot of upfront costs and cash flows come over the following years). Just that it's usually more profitable to be a monopolist/oligopolist and so that has been where the money has been flowing, at great detriment to society.

Left unchanged, the market can have new entrants that undercut the major player. In this case, any new video playform that has fewer ads could steal market share from youtube. Rumble has entered the market to do just that.

Network effects do make this challenging, but that is for the market to decide. The more creators that dual upload and then see number shifts over to a YouTube competitor, the better,as it will force YouTube back into competition.

The market will solve this.

Just look at Twitter, it completely spit in everyone's faces and even still people cannot get out of its grips on them.

The only platforms that have even remotely survived are platforms that also own an ad network, or some other secondary source of income (like Kick and their Crypto gambling site or Twitch with their ad stock) as a way to shovel users into that fire. The market cannot solve this and has no incentive to do so. Again, it's a complete fantasy that has not once proven true.

People can get out of them. People refuse to get out of them. Likely this is because YouTube and Twitter are still the most efficient platforms regardless of their regressions.

I used to have FB. Now I don't. I used to have Twitter. Now I don't. I used to have Android. Now I have Grapheneos. I used to use gmail. Now I use Fastmail, Mailcow, and shared hosting. I used to have Instagram. Now I don't.

You can decide to not be a user of a service. You can build your own! Or more easily, you can migrate to a competitor.

All of this clamoring for more regulation is nonsense. We have a market that can solve these problems. But markets work by votes. The path is harder if you take the road less traveled.

It's not fantasy. This is how markets work; how economies work.

Let's look at something like FB. At one point they were absolutely the social company. But other competitors have entered the market. In some instances, new markets were created, like Tiktok. Those new products took users away from FB. In some instances, the users will never return. This has happened precisely because someone somewhere decided to make something and challenge the existing market.

> I didn't even mention regulation

My bad. I was getting this thread confused with the one about AI regulation.

People refuse to get out of them is the market. That is the point of their growth and dominance model.

People refuse to get out of them because they are still the most efficient providers. Regardless of the user experience degradation, YouTube still offers the best product. For example, Rumble doesnt let me start looking for ve events from the beginning. YouTube does. Better experience.

My hypothesis: if YouTube only worked on Web Integrity browsers and forced a four hour ad before content was played, people woulf move elsewhere. They havent yet because YT is still the best.

Private capitalists controlling the economy is practically the definition of capitalism. And it's bad for society indeed.

That is not the definition of capitalism. The definition of capitalism is a system in which owners of capital control their capital in accord with their interests, which translates into competition because everyone else is also controlling their own capital and labor for their own interests. The natural outcome of this system is monopoly, which does closely resemble all the harms and dead weight loss of communism but, unlike under communism, the government is supposed to be there to stop total control, bust up the monopolies, and restore competition. It did a passable job of this until the Rehnquist supreme court in the 70s and it's time to start back in that pre-rehnquist direction. It's never time for communism.

Plus the early days of google (before youtube acquisition), i dont think their video search was as good as the text search anyway (but i might be misremembering of course...).

The video results for most of my queries are like 90% SEO garbage without a video even being present on the linked page.

It's abject failure.

It _should_ be illegal, but since it's the current status quo, it won't change anytime soon.

Slightly off topic, but the business plan of most startups seems to be "get VC funding, and exit". What you wrote may be the business plan of VCs.

I don't understand the valuation of many startups these days (even in the hypothetical case where they capture 100% of their potential market one day).

The crypto dynamics have shifted the expectations so far to cheap, quick moment they most VCs, especially the a16z kind are more about “Can I juice this business and it’s metrics enough to sell it to someone to hold the bag”.

Ironically I think the large numbers involved are basically part of that PR game - they act as proof that the business is worth it and attract attention and bagholder interest.

The crypto economy worked like that too - the NFT wash trading, the signal metrics used to sell the idea that there is value where there is none.

Probably something something wework too.

This strategy existed long before "crypto"

I do feel bad for the creators, but I would rather donate to their Patreons than buy YT premium.

I ended up subscribing to both Nebula and Dropout.tv, especially after noticing that a good portion of my favourite YT channels are in fact on Nebula. Sadly, this is primarly larger ones, and I do feel bad about smaller creators being kinda stuck on YT… especially when it's the odd one-time well-made video that really doesn't warrant e.g. Patreon.

But yeah, the real moral quandry is with the creators. They're more or less under the same monopoly pressure; in most cases you just can't ignore the YT audience :(

Where do creators go if not YouTube!? Ideally they could self host videos which could be expensive AND not bring any revenue, neither do they are they discoverable - this is where the internet is broken these days.

And maybe this is where micro transactions would have a proper use case, i.e. if you had a browser extension where you add $5 and then you can dish out 1ct or 10ct for some content...

It won't happen of course.

I recently had ads show up before videos on YouTube (audio only, so uBlock Origin was blocking part of it), and the only thing I felt was disgust and a mental note never to buy insurance from InShared (a Dutch insurance company) simply for repeating the same stupid jingle for each video.

I have no idea how well it worked out - I am still contented with the ad-filled YouTube

Youtube is great because of the wide availability of videos, recommendations and (maybe not great because of this) the comments.

I know the comments are not that well liked, but it means the videos are not in a vacuum. They are in a social context. And comments are pretty good, maybe because negative ones are heavily suppressed, that's at least what it looks like.

Nebula feels empty because of those missing parts. It doesn't draw you in to new channels. I don't like half the recommendations youtube gives, but some of them I do.

I think in an ideal world the recommendation engine and video host would be separated. You could be recommended videos on all platforms (including single-creator websites).

If you want "free-market" you should deal with its basic premise that consumer pays as little as they can and seller tries to milk the consumer as much as they can. That's quite literally how it's supposed to work.

I'm very much in favor of bringing some morality to the economic system, but it shouldn't be one sided.

I still have uBlock turned off on a few sites, though that list is becoming vanishingly smaller. 4Chan, funnily enough, has the best ads, where it's just old school banner ads on the top of the page and the very bottom of the page. No click hijacking, no embedded ads made to mimic organic content, no fucking audio and flashing lights ads. The only type of targeting those ads have is that the general audience that goes on 4Chan is into anime and Japan, both of which I don't care about. If the internet still had these kind of ads, I think adblockers would be much less of a "problem", but since 99% of them are invasive garbage, whoever is pushing them and whoever argues it's "immoral" to block them can go fuck themselves.

ads aren't inherently bad, irregardless of much data do they track. What really bad is how this ads is targeted and how much ads is delivered. I would LOVE to see relevant to my interested and situation ads. I like fpv drones and often see interested ads on instagram and led to a purchase. The problem after that I can't just edit the vector of my interests for ads targeting and keep bombarded with something not relevant to my situation anymore, and boy so much of it I see.

I really don't know why big ads network didn't move forward with user controlled ads mechanics - because we all humans buy something anyway, it's okay of being aware of the options on the market. It's not okay to mentally torture users with irrelevant, annoying and overwhelming amount of ads.

[Edit] can't reply to below, but since I am not violating any law, I don't see how I need to admit to anything. I'll admit to using my user agent as intended.

The Roman Empire is moving away from the parameters of their implicit win, including the kind and amount of victories they score. Had they "competed" in world domination with the current policies, maybe everybody would speak Persian by now.

No, I won't be subject to the Byzantine Empire - because that was not part of the deal either. The empire was build on Rome. So until the Byzantines can figure out how to win _reasonable_ amount of _military victories_ - I won't pay taxes.

Do you realize how shallow your argument sounds ? :)) Of course Youtube is turning the screws now that they have the lock-in. Ethics have nothing to do with it. And they will turn the screws until you either pay up or stop going there all together.

Internet speeds are maturing, and maybe it is time to try again a self-hosted or distributed model. The hard part is to put ads in it, because ad-supported is traditionally the best medium for videos. However most video creators are already having sponsorship deals

I came across whole episodes of British TV on there this very week that were uploaded 12 years ago. I know they have a strict "no humans involved, ever" system going, but the programme name was in the title and the video was one of those ones inset into a fake background and the audio was original. I find it amazing that no one (or rather nothing) with a ban button has noticed that for so long.

If they actually cared even a microgram and they couldn't even get an intern to do a days' work searching for TV show titles, there'd be enough failed Reddit moderators out there who they could recruit who would gleefully do the job for free. Not that I would want them to - it's bad enough when only bring reactive to often-spurious complaints - but it's such a completely perfect lack of interest that it must be very deliberate.

General principle of the internet seems to be people can host what they like till someone who has legal ownership of it tells them to take it down at that point they're expected to take it down and keep it off their service unless added by the owner.

That's what google is sticking to because frankly any other method would be a nightmare.

The old tv episodes might have muddy/unclear ownership and so things continue to coast along until someone exercises their right of ownership.

Then again I guess YouTube makes money from ads on these videos being up, so that does explain the sphinx-like impassivity.

But the thing is: copyright law specifies that mechanical royalties are compulsory. Artists don't get to stop you from covering songs, as long as your distributor pays the legal n% to their distributor. But even if you pay LANDR or whoever to administer those royalties, so you can release your cover to Spotify and whatever, YouTube will still smack your channel for uploading the cover. At worst, content strike, at best you still lose all monetization.

As it turns out, "sync licenses" (the right to pair music with visual media) are not compulsory and that's what YouTube primarily cares about. Even if it's just a "video" of your album art with the music playing, you can still be arbitrarily penalized on the most popular platform for music discovery, because it's technically video and record labels can do whatever they want within the opaque framework YouTube has created.

Distributed, maybe.

Self-hosted? Not a chance. Sure, if you just want to share a video with some friends and family, that's fine. But if I reached the popularity of even a moderately successful YouTube channel (Say, 100K subscribers?), even the lucky few with gigabit internet at home could not handle the load.

What about a distributed model, but with a distributed ad network which pays people and/or the project?

Would it be enough to cover internet service provider costs of average folks?

My biggest issue with running a service like this would be the possibility that I'm all of a sudden serving CP from my house because the distributed model doesn't have a good moderation scheme.

Moderation tends to be the bottleneck with distributed services right now. The infrastructure is there.

There's also the ridiculous fact it is literally impossible to pay to remove the ads without also getting the horrible Youtube Music service.

Sounds anticompetitive as hell, and a government that actually cares about functioning markets should eviscerate them for it.

We (through a convoluted, but in the end democratic process that is supposed to represent the will of the people) decided that piracy is illegal not because there is some divine right of authors to get compensated, but because we believe that by making piracy too common we would kill the incentive for the future authors to create.

Similary, we will need to decide on the laws around ad blocking. If we decide to keep it accessable, then the downside is that both the infrastructure work done by Google (or its competitors) and the creative work done by authors will become less profitable and thus the quality will decline. If we don't envision this happening, we should definetly get ad blockers without a second thought.

Creators have the final decision on the ads shown. I have a YouTube channel, and I always disable monetization on all my videos, so no ads are ever shown on my channel.

If you see an ad, it's because the creator decided to include one. YouTube is simply the platform that enables this choice.

They will be improving ads on the platform by removing the creator's control over them.

> optimizing creator revenue and taking the guesswork out of which ad formats to use by removing individual ad controls for pre-roll, post-roll, skippable, and non-skippable ads on newly uploaded videos.

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/233723152/simplify...

Anyway, at present it's possible to disable them if you have reached the monetization requirements on the channel, like 1000 subscribers and some amount of hours viewed.

But after the channel satisfy such requirements, like 1000 subscribers, the creator gets control of the monetization and they can choose.

For any major channel you watch, it's the creator decision that you see ads or not.

One of the videos was hit with an automated DMCA takedown, one was hit with a "mature content" takedown, and the remaining 3 have ads on them now.

Unless they qualify their definition with something like “you may still see in-video sponsored content”, ad-free should 100% ad-free, and it is irritating that that (perhaps) through some nuanced definition of “ads” that they allow this. IMO this needs to be investigated by the FCC.

If you look at the advertising literature for Premium, it simply says “Enjoy ad-free videos…” with no asterisk or fine print that has any exclusions. Perhaps there is something deeply buried in one of the “terms and conditions” documents that allows for this, but I haven’t taken the time to look. My point is, YT and the content creators benefit from these ads on a supposed no-ad plan. Imagine if other streaming services like Netflix started doing this.

This happens because Youtube doesn't pay content makers a flat rate, unless they're a whale.

No, it does not. There is no discussion to be had.

Don't forget the flipside, the "morality" of interfering with a user's freedom to selectively ignore certain content.

Give a dollar(unprofitable and unsustainable service) for a pennies by burning the money of the investors to capture a market then switch to high profit margin business practices and milk out the captured market thereafter.

Sure, it can be framed as spend money when developing a product then make profit of it when released but the winners are determined by keeping alive the developed product longer than everyone else ane when everyone else is gone, then monetise.

People who spent billions of dollars to run YouTube at loss for years were not philanthropists, they rightfully expect to make that money back and make much more on top of it.

Also: part of the problem is the quality of the ads. Could you actually get "better quality" ads for a competitor video platform? Do such ads even exist in sufficient number at this point? (I vaguely remember a significant portion of larger companies reducing their internet ad budgets because they simply weren't seeing good returns…)

It's the largest video platform in China[0]. However, it keeps losing money since forever, including in last year, and is expected to keep losing more in 2023.

[0]: Youtube is blocked in China and you need a VPN to access it there.

If Youtube wants to control their content and users - they should create their own protocols or at least closed network using web protocols, write their own client software and distribute it.

Vimeo, Rumble, DailyMotion, Facebook Video and self-hosting all still exist you know. There are plenty of alternatives.

Because I say so with my AdBlock. This is the reason why small guy should have power.

> It’s one thing to play cat and mouse with YouTube. It’s quite another to deal with a wave of angry users.

> And then one of the moderators actually deleted their Reddit account. “The ID in the post wasn’t updated because my mother was hospitalized,” they said. It’s sad to see them leave because of some drive-by comments — new users who sign up for Reddit, leave their comments,

I have seen this becoming more and more common on open source projects and totally free services, where people act as if they are entitled to something as if it is their god given right. The people doing public services like uBlock origin can only take so much from the mob.

This disgusting review was sitting at the top of the review page for Search by Image on the Chrome Web Store: https://i.imgur.com/P1QU176.png

This person has edited their review a couple of times in the past year which pushed it to the top, and also emailed me with a similar demeaning message. I've reported it to Google staff, and they thought that the review did not break their content policy, so they did not remove it.

So yeah, it hurts when you're offering so much of your free time for so little benefits, or none at all, and a couple of entitled jerks still manage to poison the well for everyone.

With each abusive message the thought of no longer offering up your time and the results of your work for free grows stronger and stronger. It's no surprise that people either quit, sell their open source projects, or stop offering it for free.

Interrupting someone's browsing experience to ask for donations is both providing a poor user experience and is in poor taste. I think it's fine to solicit donations in the browserAction popup, the settings page or even the initial installation window, but doing so elsewhere would deservedly be criticized.

That's what this person was complaining about, that they've seen a donation prompt once when they've initiated an image search with the extension.

There is no winning with some of these people, they want your time and the results of your work, they want it for free, and they want it to be neatly packaged and presented exactly the way that is most convenient for them. If you deviate even a little bit from their unreasonable expectations, you'll be promptly attacked.

Once your projects grow past a certain size, threats of physical violence also become a regular occurrence, here's a milder email I have received last year: https://i.imgur.com/LKJQq1p.png

This kind of harassment is happening every 1-2 weeks on different channels, we keep these private messages because everything has to be documented in case law enforcement needs to be involved.

You're making a pretty big leap from "users prefer these things" to "users expect these things".

Are you going to pretend you don't want things to be free, neatly packaged, and convenient? Who wouldn't want this?

And the idea that a four star review which starts with "A good extension." is an "attack" is absurd. Given it appears you expect your users not to express any preferences that aren't exactly what you've implemented, perhaps it's you who has unreasonable expectations?

That's not a threat of physical violence at all.

I suggest that these people express their criticism by not using the software in question. I doubt the typical purveyor of free-as-in-* software who's stuck between a rock and a hard place re: monetization particularly cares what somebody who doesn't understand the personal specifics of their dilemma thinks about their chosen solution to it.

Do you also suggest that when an application is ad-ridden or potentially malware-ridden to also just not use the app? Naturally that's an option, but the review is to warn other users of their experience.

I don't think death threats or calling people slurs is appropriate, but the review being complained about it is pretty mundane.

Is a restaurant owner pissed off about a one star review by somebody who didn't like the decor in the bathroom implicitly suggesting that people who receive food poisoning at a restaurant have no right to communicate that experience to other potential customers? Is a homeowner who puts out ant traps in her kitchen tacitly endorsing genocide?

I think there is such a vast gulf between displaying a mildly annoying message asking for donations and tricking someone into installing malware on their computer that anybody with a moderately intact sense of proportionality should have no trouble seeing it. So, no, I don't suggest that.

That is, in fact, exactly what reviews are for.

You really think it's more important for me to air my grievances about a free software's occasional donation nag messages than to tell other potential users it's a front for malware? That's honestly really strange, and I categorically disagree.

Reviews are much more useful for applications that stick around on the app store, or chrome web store, or whatever else, because well, they're still there.

Anyway, this isn't going anywhere productive, so I'm out.

As with most "love it or leave it" arguments, this is a transparent attempt to silence critics without actually bothering to engage with criticism, even if it's constructive.

Anything you put in front of a significant number of people will be criticized, and rightly so, because it's not perfect. Admitting things aren't perfect is the first step to making things better.

This argument is particularly disigenuous in the context of a discussion about YouTube, because YouTube is effectively a monopoly in a number of ways--it's effectively an argument that once a product reaches monopoly status, it can do whatever it wants and nobody can criticize.

Adults learn to accept, integrate, and throttle their intake of criticism. If you haven't, you have some growing up to do.

the implied assumption being made here with this train of thought is that it is the author's imperative duty to make things better.

It is not. The author has zero obligation to make it better for anyone; they do it at their leisure and at their convenience.

Yes, and it's people's prerogative to write reviews criticizing the software that is published, regardless of whether it's paid or not.

Do you think that review was respectful, now that you know that the donation prompt was not obtrusive nor randomly shown (see my other comments, it has been explained in detail)? Don't you feel that the way this person expressed themselves was rather demeaning, and perhaps somewhat unjust?

Not particularly, but I also wouldn't really describe it as particularly disgusting or demeaning, either. It could have been worded better, but I'm not going to read too deeply into what random people on the internet say about me personally.

I find anything that's trying to interrupt what I'm doing like popup advertisements, cookie modals, and other things of the sort irritating because it forces me out of my workflow and requires action to continue what I was doing. It doesn't really matter how frequent it is. When i'm actively installing extensions I expect there to be a popup that is giving me information about the application. Dark Reader has a donation button featured on their popup from their action. I don't find this to be invasive even though it's there literally any time I interact with the extension. I ended up paying for the extension on safari because I liked it so much.

That's just my opinion, though. There's a lot of things that I find distasteful that would make me uninstall an application that seemingly don't bother the majority of people, and ultimately, you have a right to make your application how you see fit, but I don't think there's anything wrong with criticizing it for what that user clearly views as distasteful.

The fact that the donation prompt was shown on startup doesn't undermine the reviewer's preference for not seeing a donation prompt at all. They're factually incorrect on a minor detail, but that doesn't change the larger point.

The rudest part of the review was them referring to the prompt as "panhandling", which is actually inaccurate, and if I were writing the review I would have used a milder, more accurate word there (maybe "soliciting"?). But in receiving any communication from anyone, it's unreasonable to expect people to communicate perfectly, and I try to understand people rather than criticize how they communicate their ideas. I certainly would not describe that as "disgusting" or "appalling".

And again, I'm not saying you should remove the donation prompt. In fact, if you made it show up every time until a user donated, I'd have no objections. Users wouldn't like this, but you're not obligated to fulfill users' every wish. Just as users aren't obligated to fawn over everything you do when it doesn't do what they want it to do.

Believe it or not, users can want things, and you can ignore what they want, and those are both okay!

> Adults learn to accept, integrate, and throttle their intake of criticism. If you haven't, you have some growing up to do.

Normally I would respond to this kind of thing in a different way, but the (apparently) lone HN moderator has previously informed me that stooping to the level of such attacks is just as bad in HN's eyes as being the one to make them in the first place. Accordingly, I place my rhetorical fate in the hands of the mod[s], and I look forward to seeing your rule-breaking comment removed.

If you want to say something, say it, if you don't, don't--why would I care? I've said my opinion and posturing that you're better than the discussion doesn't persuade anyone that you're right. It hasn't been my experience that when people self-censor, they later reveal they had some brilliant counterargument that we were all missing out on.

Install Signal on your phone and start using it, in a couple of months you will be shown a donation popup a single time when you open the app. At this point uninstall the app and contact Signal's development team to send them an invoice for your invested time that has now been ruined when that donation prompt has interrupted your messaging experience.

Also call them beggars and panhandlers, after all that's perfectly reasonable, and even respectable.

Either we should accept software with hidden misfeatures without complaining, in which case the user must receive compensation for their time, or we should complain and inform others of the misfeature.

Uninstalling the software in silence is an invitation for more spyware and trojaned software.

> This person has edited their review a couple of times in the past year which pushed it to the top, and also emailed me with a similar demeaning message. I've reported it to Google staff, and they thought that the review did not break their content policy, so they did not remove it.

So? What's the point you're making? Users aren't allowed to have preferences about software they get for free? User experience doesn't matter for free software? Who did you release this software for if not for users?

It's a 4 star review, ffs. Do you think every review that isn't glowing is disgusting? Why on earth would you expect Google staff to remove a review which merely expresses a preference?

It really feels like a significant portion of Hacker News just doesn't really grok the whole "doing nice things for other people" thing. If you only did this for money or glowing praise for how generous you are, you'd have been better off choosing one of those and pursuing it singlemindedly instead of trying for both money and being perceived as generous, and then being surprised when people notice you aren't doing either perfectly. And sure, you're not obligated to just do it out of the kindness of your heart, and you have every right to choose how nice you want to be. But if you aren't doing it for purely prosocial reasons, then maybe don't expect people to fawn over how purely prosocial you are.

You don't speak for most people, nor do I believe you know much about most people. If you've got access to any evidence I am not aware of, feel free to share, but until that point, I can only assume this is just your opinion, which you are trying to present as most people's opinion.

> I think you should also take a second look at your own performance in this thread, and maybe ask a friend for an opinion about your comments, because that behavior is not normal either.

Asked my girlfriend. Her statements: 1. "Why are you arguing with people on the internet?" (Answer: I was bored.) 2. "That guy [you] is overreacting."

You've already checked your opinions with the Google staff, and been told they don't agree with you. Why would you think one of my friends is going to agree with you more? How many outside opinions are you willing to ignore to maintain your delusion that your opinion is universally agreed upon? I'm pretty sure none of the people who are agreeing with you in this thread have actually read the mild, polite 4/5 star review you're describing as "disgusting".

In a larger sense, you've not engaged with anything that the review said or that I said. You're just calling opinions disgusting, appalling, demeaning, etc., without actually bothering to disprove the concrete claims being made.

I asked questions in my previous post, and they aren't just rhetorical. You might consider answering them:

"What's the point you're making? Users aren't allowed to have preferences about software they get for free? User experience doesn't matter for free software? Who did you release this software for if not for users?"

One could almost call it a super power.

The fundamental issue at play here is trying to manipulate language by using the word disgusting to evoke a stronger reaction than is warranted.

At some point you're going to need a stronger word than disgusting because you've watered it down so much. Where do you go?

It is our collective duty to make sure individuals providing a service to society are treated with respect. If we can't do that then we simply don't deserve their time and effort.

Nah, people need to be brought out of the protecting bubble.

You give money to them, so they have a tangible evidence that their work means something. Not just stars and patting in the back. Time to stop the open source beggar movement.

Again, we are not entitled to their services and assholes can and will ruin nice things for all of us.

I never said we are entitled for anything. I don't like that oss developers get paid nothing and have to - seemingly - beg for sponsorhip/money. But the open source model was ugly from the get go. You build something up, decide to abandon it, and people fork it, expropriate it, and the original dev is forgotten. They get nothing. The actual guy, who maintains it might get something in the future, but who created the foundation - since he left the project - gets nothing. Ridiculous.

The open source movement/idea is flawed and needs to be changed, that's all.

I like to take a moment to publicly thank them whenever the opportunity to do so arises. Thank you so much!

Do you count YouTube as a "free service" (with ads) in this case?

I wonder if there is an overlap with people that expect free stuff and people that use uBO on YouTube. YT does offer most users YT premium, which gives users an ad free experience.

Disclosure: I worked at YT in the past, but still pay for premium because I don't want the ads.

Partly this is by design, where it seems to decide that a creator having a "merch" ad integration doesn't count as an ad. Which might be understandable (but still not what I want) if merch meant creator's face on a mug, but it also includes products where a home fix it channel will have an overlay of products from Home Depot which is literally just an ad with no caveats (an overlay that obscures the video on Chromecast, it's part of YT UI not embedded in the video).

Though I guess I'm also unclear how often I see that because Premium is buggy and how often it's intentional. Ever since they made YT on Chromecast an "app" it's been a disaster of account state bugs where it also keeps trying to enforce safe mode (which blocks half of everything, including practically any music video) because it says it's not logged in even though I'm trying to cast from a phone that is logged in.

this is why you also install sponsorblock (https://sponsor.ajay.app/). Only whitelist the channels you want to "support", if you really want to make sure to eyeball the sponsorship (which doesn't really help unless it happens to be a product you actually are interested in buying).

Google pays out about 50% of ad revenue to content creators, that isn't "almost free" that is many billions of dollars.

The fact is, Google takes on no risk and does none of the work of creating content, and takes a 45% cut for distribution, and is free to continue changing their terms to make things worse for content creators.

> In the end, YouTube takes a 45% cut of a creator’s Premium earnings, just as it does for ad-generated revenue.

https://vidiq.com/blog/post/youtube-premium-creator-revenue/

There is no "entitlement" to videos. They are free. YouTube sends them to us for free. They do so hoping we're gonna look at the ads. We're under exactly zero obligation to actually do that though. It is not at all our responsibility to make their business model work.

Abusing open source developers is the true entitlement.

Sure. Let's see them return HTTP 402 Payment Required instead of a free video stream then. I'm actually okay with that.

Somehow I doubt they'll ever do that. They want that mass market appeal, don't they? I know it. You know it. Everyone knows it. Just like the "free" apps who do anything in the world to get themselves installed so they can start monetizing.

They need to either start charging everyone for access or stop complaining. I pay for access to a lot of things but I'm not paying money to avoid ads. I sure as hell am not gonna pay money to watch videos with hard coded ads.

Then don't. It's fine. However please don't complain about not being able to get access to the content on Youtube without paying or watching ads.

> I sure as hell am not gonna pay money to watch videos with hard coded ads.

That's up to the content creators, not Youtube. Very few of my subscribed channels use hard-coded apps and if they do they need to make up for it with worthwhile content.

I don't complain. If I see an ad I just close the tab. uBlock Origin and yt-dlp is the only reason I watch stuff on YouTube at all.

> That's up to the content creators, not Youtube.

Their business relationships are not my concern. I'm not paying to watch ads. Maybe YouTube should implement their own Sponsor Block system for the benefit of their paying customers.

What part of my comment, specifically, is this responding to?

> They need to either start charging everyone for access or stop complaining.

Why?

The notion that detecting our adblocker and actually charging for content are equivalent.

> Why?

Because if they send us ads we'll delete them and there is pretty much nothing they can do about it.

Well then maybe you meant to respond to somebody else, because that's not something I said at any point.

> Because if they send us ads we'll delete them and there is pretty much nothing they can do about it.

This entire HN thread and the linked article are about how they are literally doing something about it, and it's working.

The cat and mouse game is not instantaneous. Give it a little time.

They're relying on me doing work to run a browser that renders their ads, rather than providing a binary. They're not sending me a page of ads, they're sending me a couple files that I can choose how to show and what to put through a JavaScript interpreter

As GP said, maybe this is not your position, but it's a common enough one that their comment is not out of line (given that you are the one who replied to them).

If people don't, then YouTube will stop delivering videos for free. Your argument is pretty disingenuous.

uBO does work fine, and is easily one of the most valuable pieces of end user software there is. Raymond Hill is very generous and has made a very positive impact on the world.

Most of them I even delete outright, but I still have requests that were sent to me in 00s that I'm keeping just in case one day "I'm in the mood".

And yes, people request (demand!) crazy things, and have done so for decades. There are even "If you don't do it, then $threat" guys. And my area of software is generally industrial/professional....

All of that is mental tax. And it gets tiring, even if you're mostly ignoring the request. It's still tiring even when you're in the mood for it.

Just saying, it's a hard thing and I definitely sympathize for the way which open source / open project / volunteer collaborators get treated.

You mean it gets tiring to find the entertaining messages instead of the random trash? Because it doesn't matter how much effort the sender has put, or how intelligent his request/question/contribution/comment is. If I'm not in the mood, I will ignore it. I'm doing it for the fun, not to provide free support, so I will only read stuff that is fun to me. Obviously being an intelligent question is likely to add points, but it's not always the case.

It's not like this is race to see who is the least Torvalds-like of the bunch. It's 100% OK to just ignore everything. The people who complain "I had to moderate comments while my mother was in the hospital!" look like they have an addiction, or a runaway hobby.

I even have an online board for this sort of requests and generally I just read the subject lines. Fortunately for them, once your software is popular enough, a lot of people seem to like to reply to other people's questions, for some reason.

But I know I can't. I'm perfectly fine ignoring the buffoons. But I feel much anxiety over ignoring an insightful request or comment that would benefit both myself and the user if I were to engage.

If I'm passionate about a project (in whatever form of contribution), I definitely want to help people who are genuinely looking for help. The problem is the signal to noise is way out of line, heavy skewed the wrong direction.

For me it's a mental tax to wade through and find the good requests sorting them out from the bad ones. And it causes anxiety to miss the good ones.

This might be one of those very valid use-cases for an "A.I." / LLM to classify "hostile" messages into some sort of "junk bin" and maybe flag ones it's not entirely certain about for human review. Could fairly dramatically cut down on the garbage hopefully, leaving only the stuff worth reading.

no?

am I the only one with the super power of leaving a discussion and never going back?

I tend to go one step further than "ignore mode" (when I'm not bein' so utterly stupid as to get sucked in and actually respond) and actively block them any and every way that I can so that I never see that person's crap again.