No. Youtube is an enormous data pool sitting on an even more enormous CDN, with all free content. Users have the choice to pay up or get served ads.

(Misread sorry)

I believe you critically misunderstood the point the person you replied to was making.

You’re all in violent agreement. Maybe drop the ad hominem.

He's making 3 statements and people are agreeing/disagreeing with each separately:

1. Am I the only one that is a little turned off

2. how everyone feels

3. they deserve everything for free?

It's complicated the fact that some of these are negating statements where agreement is expressed by a "no."

I'm more than happy to be served ads, I'll just make sure my user-agent hides them from me like it hides all kinds of other spam.

no... you are not... without some sort of revenue, youtube would go away and then what?

Something else less greedy would surely take its place.

Hard disk storage isn't getting cheaper at the same pace as earlier(before the Thailand floods 10 to 15 years ago IIRC). Bandwidth is also expensive, especially across the world. Microsoft threw in the towel in a related space(live streaming) with Mixer. Twitch wasn't really profitable for a long time IIRC, if it now is(even after adding a lot of unskippable ads and adblocker blocking). Kick is bankrolled by online casino gambling profits and is probably a huge money sink.

If something was feasible, surely the people who hang out on HN would be all over it trying to build something. Even if something does get built, it will go the same route eventually.

Am I the only one that is a little turned off by how everything nice on Earth needs to be monetized to death? It's not like Youtube isn't profitable already.

I don't think its a good argument to say "because x is profitable they should not do y". Sure I can dream of a world where actors do not try to extract profit where possible but its not realstic.

Whats the alternative?

State funded services. By now it's clear that platforms like YouTube and Twitter are integral parts of our lives, even used by institutions to release official statements and by media to publish news.

Why then should we leave such important services in the hands of a handful of investors who's only interest is increasing the profit margins?

I've used state run websites. They generally do not work. Incentives matter, if you want good products you need to incentivize making them.

Some countries/cities manage to have excellent public transportation infrastructure. Why shouldn't they be able to build an excellent public digital infrastructure?

> Incentives matter, if you want good products you need to incentivize making them.

Speaking about incentives, for-profit products have the worst ones. Would you rather use a twitter-like product built by people earning the more time you spend on it, or by people who keep their jobs if they manage to achieve a positive societal effect?

No, I don't think incentives are the issue here.

One issue is probably the slowness of public institutions in embracing change, which is also a good thing in some cases, but doesn't help when the goal is to build new tech products that enable societal change. It seems that private initiative works best when it's about inventing stuff, but not when it's time to implement it in a society. Although that could be changed, if governments weren't so hellbent on delegating so much to private initiative.

> Am I the only one that is a little turned off by how everything nice on Earth needs to be monetized to death?

Do you have an idea about how much does it cost to run a website like YouTube?

Yes, and those costs are covered already. We're talking about squeezing additional profits out of the product in order to make the shareholders happier.

How is Google already paying for YouTube?

I presume you like to get paid to do your job. I'm a bit miffed at that.

I'm a bit miffed at you thinking additional profits would go to employees, rather than in the pockets of a handful of shareholders.

The tech industry did this to themselves by giving everything away for free for a decade.

I always thought it was suspicious that all these tech companies survived for decades without being profitable. Now that ZIRP is over and they have to actually be profitable, it all makes sense.

Turned off, yes. ...but at the same time, I am violently against greed and psychologically manipulative processes to acquire wealth. YT is insidiously screwing with peoples minds for profit. They can Fuck Off.