Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by andsoitis 668 days ago
> 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.

3 comments

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

What portion of the low quality creators you subscribe to?
None? Though looking at my subs list, the low quality channels are mostly personal friends sharing stuff that won't have a broad reach, much like my own is now I'm not making indie games.

(They also post so infrequently that I forgot I'd subscribed to them).

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.
“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.

They do not have a monopoly on video streaming, and if they did piracy would be the morally acceptable option.
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.
If youtube creators posted torrets of their videos I would almost never go to youtube.