[wvenable]

> they'll get zero page views even after spending all of that money because nobody can find them.

You might not be cheap anymore, now you're just lazy. It used to be that if you had something important to say you might actually have to climb out of the basement, walk to the church, and post your words to the door.

The expectation that others should both host and promote your crazy ideas for free is the problem.

[AnthonyMouse]

> It used to be that if you had something important to say you might actually have to climb out of the basement, walk to the church, and post your words to the door.

It's not 1950. Church attendance has been on the decline for decades. It's an audience of maybe a thousand in a country of over three hundred million. There is no lack of laziness that can scale in-person communication to compete with the internet.

But it's even more ridiculous to suggest going to meatspace meeting places to discuss a pandemic which is keeping everybody out of places like that.

> The expectation that others should both host and promote your crazy ideas for free is the problem.

The expectation exists because it's what they do for other ideas. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

If they want to charge money to all YouTube creators equally or shut down YouTube entirely and let it all drain out into other platforms then nobody's stopping them, but a duty of impartiality has to come with being that big.

[wvenable]

> It's not 1950

I was referring to 1517, actually.

> There is no lack of laziness that can scale in-person communication to compete with the internet.

That's the problem. Ideas used to require effort to spread. You'd have to be the President of the United States to get an audience big enough to drink bleach but now you can get kids to eat Tide pods without any effort at all. All ideas are not equal and free has distorted the entirety of human discourse.

> Duty of impartiality

There is no way to be impartial. YouTube censors probably millions of videos every day for outright illegal content, for copyright infringement, for inappropiateness. It's what they have to do to keep the site alive. It may appear to be mostly uncurated but that's not true -- any uncurated site eventually falls apart.

Anyway, most people seem to making the other argument lately -- that sites like Facebook, and Twitter, and YouTube are so big that they have duty to stop the spread of propaganda, fake news, libel, and harmful material. What would you say to that?