[kadendogthing]

>Here's why YouTube can go fuck itself

I stopped reading. YouTube is a completely free platform. It will even pay you to host your content there if it's popular enough. You're free to go else where.

TiKTok does not pay you. Your subscribers are just a number, and you have no evidence that most of them are even real and you offer no evidence in your post that any of it matters.

[rjf72]

This defense of "free" platforms is reminiscent to feudalism. In feudalism you of course did not pay rent. You simply took care of the land and in exchange your lord would provide you a small share of the produced food, a place to live, protection from attacks, and a [heavily biased] conflict resolution system. All for "free." But of course it wasn't free. The lords were utilizing the labors of the peasant to generate mass surpluses which were in turn used to greatly empower themselves.

In today's times human attention is arguably the most valuable 'commodity' there is. And YouTube is using their peasants to produce it in unprecedented quantities. In exchange they return a small share of the returns produced, a free place to host, protection from attacks, and a [heavily biased] conflict resolution system.

It's of course technically correct that it's free, but the connotation is entirely wrong. Few would idealize for the "free housing" of feudalism, and I think in the future we'll have few that would idealize the "free hosting" of today. In the present? People are simply greatly undervaluing their own worth, much as the peasants did. It took the black death emphasizing their relevance for them to finally understand they were the ones running the show all along.