[_aavaa_]

A) for a long time most of them did not provide an option to pay to remove ads.

B) Many of these companies have such large content hosting fees because of the very nature they chose to set up under. For example: YouTube chose to centralize and host all of the videos itself, and it chose to continue pursuing that route rather than experiment with technologies that could distribute that load and make their server costs significantly decrease. Why? Because it gives them a choke point with which they can extract money and leverage over everyone else.

Further, just like I don’t have a right to tell Facebook how their computers should run, they don’t have a right to tell me what my computer has to display.

[convalescindrey]

> B) Many of these companies have such large content hosting fees because of the very nature they chose to set up under.

If an economically more viable alternative exists then you are welcome to create a competitor. The fact that there is no such thing is strong evidence that they've already hit the economical sweet spot.

> Further, just like I don’t have a right to tell Facebook how their computers should run, they don’t have a right to tell me what my computer has to display.

Correct. Nor do you have a right to tell them not to try to prevent you from avoiding that ads are being displayed on your computer.

[_aavaa_]

> The fact that there is no such thing is strong evidence that they've already hit the economical sweet spot.

This is a simplistic take. First of all, even if it’s true now it does not make it true for all time. Blockbuster hit a real sweet spot for video rental until the tech landscape changed under their feet.

Secondly, and more importantly. Economical optimal for what end? For extracting profits and creating a system where it’s difficult for either side of the network to go elsewhere? Cause it’s not optimized for providing most of the revenue to the people creating the content.

Further I’m willing to bet that most of these services would be significantly technically easier to run if all of the advertising and tracking aspects were stripped out. Which in turn means that it may be possible to architect them differently since you now have different requirements and constraints.

> Nor do you have a right to tell them not to try to prevent you from avoiding that ads are being displayed on your computer.

Correct. I never argued to the contrary.

The thing to keep in mind is that they need us more than we need them. The world existed and functioned before all of these companies and will continue to do so after they’re all gone.

[convalescindrey]

> This is a simplistic take. First of all, even if it’s true now it does not make it true for all time. Blockbuster hit a real sweet spot for video rental until the tech landscape changed under their feet.

True. I'd love to see a competitor someday whom I can just pay and then have a Facebook-equivalent and Youtube-equivalent that doesn't spam me with ads and does not collect my behavioural data to profile me.

I think people would just be shocked how much they would need to pay for their FB account if that would be an alternative offering. Back-of-the-envelope calculation: 2022 FB had a revenue of about $116bn. With about 3bn users. Let's say half of those are actually dead accounts that people almost never log into. (And that's very generous, this number is probably much higher.) That leaves 1.5bn users. To generate $116bn you'd need $77 from each of them. I know very few people who would pay that much money every year to see their aunts cooking results and their uncles Trump posts.

> Secondly, and more importantly. Economical optimal for what end? For extracting profits

Yes. That's what our market-based economies are optimizing for. Other economic models have not proven to be viable.

[_aavaa_]

I disagree with the framing of the back of the envelop calculation.

First of all, that’s revenue, not profit. Looking at revenue is meaningless since it’s easy to take in lots of money and still be in the red.

Secondly, a competitor to Facebook does not need to have facebook’s profitability in order for it to be a viable business model.

By your analysis we can look Twitter and gry get the amount of money that people would have to pay to Mastadon in order for Mastadon to be a competitor. Except that the analogy breaks down because because the underlying technology is different. I won’t be paying server fees to “Mastadon” I’d be paying to an instance.

Likewise, wow google drive for sending large files to people needs a lot of servers. Or, we set something up torrent style and then there is no separate server.

[Dylan16807]

> The fact that there is no such thing is strong evidence that they've already hit the economical sweet spot.

It would only be evidence for that if there were multiple strong competitors to youtube that use similar methods. The dearth of competition suggests that other forces are the cause.

[convalescindrey]

There are competitors, but they also use ads.

Consumers just don't want to pay for things they've gotten used to getting for free. You may not like it (I don't), but that's reality. Being angry at "big tech" for this is relieving the general population of their responsibility.

[Dylan16807]

What competitors do you have in mind there? Do any of them get even 5% as much traffic? 1%?

Vimeo wants hosting fees for significant use, there's a few decentralized platforms without ads, nebula charges and doesn't have ads. Dailymotion fits the mold but this ranking site says they get 0.4% as many visits and each visit is 1/4 as long.

I'm not saying that things should all be free, I'm saying that youtube's "economical sweet spot" is one that is basically competition-free and because of that we can't learn much about what other viable forms the market could take.

[bombolo]

> If an economically more viable alternative exists then you are welcome to create a competitor.

Yes, I'm sure google will be very happy to show videos on my platform rather than on their own first in the search results.