[ben_w]

Similar, but less emotively. I'm disappointed in them but I'm not a hater.

> 90% of Youtube is useless crap

That is the way of all things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

But the best of YouTube, people are clearly willing to pay for that.

[9dev]

The point, though, is the 90% are having a disastrous impact on the environment, despite being fundamentally irrelevant and thus wasteful.

[ben_w]

That claim of environmental impact is just incorrect when it comes to the junk content.

The bad ones are barely watched; sitting on a hard drive after getting transcoded isn't an environmental disaster.

You could try to argue that popular culture is fundamentally bad; people have been saying that about TV when I was a kid, dance music before that, novels in the 1800s, Christmas in Puritan New England, and the Olympics in ancient Rome.

The people tend to disagree.

[9dev]

That isn’t true, even just accounting for people expecting the same speed and quality for fringe videos, delivered to mobile devices in any corner of the world, requires mountains of technology.

It’s not that popular culture is bad, it’s that a wasteful way of living isn’t sustainable, and it’s beginning to erode the foundations of our lives.

[ben_w]

Sounds like you're shifting the goalposts from "youtube is bad" to "the internet is bad" in the first paragraph, and then in the second paragraph to "everything after the start of the first industrial revolution is also sus".

[usr1106]

I would be willing to pay based on usage. But my usage is so low that the current price feels horrendous per hour.

[andsoitis]

> But my usage is so low that the current price feels horrendous per hour.

I don’t know how you can decry video streaming and advertising as destroying the planet and thus hating one of the companies that provide these services YET you use it.

[tuwtuwtuwtuw]

Google is a monopoly. Of course you can complain over such a company even if you use their products.

[aikinai]

Google is not even close to that kind of monopoly. Every one of their products has viable alternative, and plenty of anti-Google people get by without using them.

[denkmoon]

That certainly isn't true of youtube. It, exclusively, holds a lot of videos. It's not like I can just watch random youtuber on vimeo or some kind of gnutube.

[ben_w]

FWIW, about a third of the high-quality creators I subscribed to on YouTube initially, also maintain a presence on Nebula.

It's not enough to fully switch, but at the very least I get their stuff without mis-gendered advertising — as seen the other day on YouTube, where I was presented with an unskippable ad for sanitary pads.

[tuwtuwtuwtuw]

No idea what you mean by "that kind of monopoly". Google is a company which performs illegal acts to preserve its monopoly. Of course that will limit the viability of competitive products and services. That's why it's illega.

[aikinai]

“That kind of monopoly” meaning the traditional definition where customers have no choice but to use their services.

Their “monopoly” is one of quality, habit, and convenience, not lack of consumer choice.

[rglullis]

They do not have a monopoly on video streaming, and if they did piracy would be the morally acceptable option.

[usr1106]

I use well below 1 hour of YouTube per month, many months zero. And I never click any ads (nor are the products they advertise relevant for me, they cannot track me and I am far from the average consumer) So if it were only users like me Google would have been long out of business. Obviously I have an ecological footprint, I try to keep it small, but without being a collector and hunter living in a cave.

[CuriouslyC]

If youtube creators posted torrets of their videos I would almost never go to youtube.