[learingsci]

Drug dealers invented this business model, they would give heroin to young children for free and then once hooked hike the prices or force them to turn tricks to pay for their habit. It’s effective but not very admirable to say the least.

[stavros]

I've also seen this done for cheese, do you find that equally reprehensible? Or is the argument just rhetorical sleight of hand, where "drug dealers do X, so therefore X must be bad"? Drug dealers also consume food, and you know who else consumes food? You.

[sellmesoap]

Cheese isn't so far off drugs after all: https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2015/study-reveals... plus you have to make baby animals to get the milk for the cheese, so some exploitation is going on. I like cheese and youtube, but maybe they're both bad.

[learingsci]

Cheesemongers have a bit less impact on society than drug dealers or Google. If Google were raking in hundreds of billions giving kids free cheese then charging them full price for parmigiana some might complain and I would not find fault in that. Scale matters.

[stavros]

It's not that we got hooked on YouTube (that would maybe be ok in a free market), it's that YouTube used "free" to make itself a monopoly. That's what the issue is, that you have no other options now.

[learingsci]

Yes, the monopolistic aspect and scale are the parts I’m most bothered by. I think we all agree dangerous chemicals should be regulated, but we lack this sensibility when it comes to many tech products. So far at least. Eventually we’ll catch up. Will there be the lingering legacy, the tech equivalent of super fund sites? Maybe.

[stavros]

I don't disagree that some of these apps might need to be regulated, because they're basically attention crack, but to me that's more TikTok and Instagram rather than YouTube.

[learingsci]

I hear TikTok is on the decline, and arguably the forced change of ownership is a sort of regulation. Instagram is owned by meta who has an interest in not letting it overtake Facebook in terms of popularity I imagine. It seems like a sort of hedge against other platforms mostly, but I really don’t know much about any of these platforms tbh. I use YouTube very heavily, but have only used twitter, Reddit and tinder in the distant past. I’ve never been on Facebook, TikTok, snap, etc… To me, irc and usenet were greatly superior and I’m waiting for people to return to their senses.