I pay for YouTube to support the platform and creators. If you don't pay for a service, you aren't the customer you are the product. Google may need to shut down the free viewership of most YouTube videos unless the creator pays for them to be hosted or the viewers sign up for a subscription. The ad model is clearly failing.

Just because you are paying for a service doesn't mean that companies won't double dip or triple dip by either showing you ads or selling your data.

Yeah, movie theaters figured that out 30 years or so ago when they realized besides trailers (which okay, are ads of a sort), they could subject viewers who paid for a ticket to 20 minutes of ads for things like M&Ms and Coke before even the trailers begin. It's gotten to the point that you might as well show up 30 minutes after a movie is scheduled to begin as the movie itself won't have started yet.

Then there is product placement like in ET or back to the future!

Who didn't want to eat Reese's pieces, drink a Pepsi free or tab, or buy a Toyota or pair of Nikes.

True, but that has a long history. It used to be even more blatant in fact, with characters commenting on how smooth the taste of Lucky Strike cigarettes were in the 1950s.

I both pay for YouTube Premium (let's call it what it is: a hope that content creators get paid) and also use uBlock Origin religiously. Nothing's stopping people from doing both.

You give money and your personal information to an advertising company. The advertising company then does god knows what with your personal information and gives some of that money to some of the 'creators' that you watch, in a way that isn't transparent to you. Who is getting how much money? Do the 'creators' you value get most of that money, or does it go to some clickbait crap you click on in a moment of weakness? You don't know.

What you should do: starve the advertising company (you shouldn't be donating money to support "the platform" which is a trillion dollar for-profit corporation!) and donate directly to the people who ask for it and deserve it.

Let's get on with it then

But Youtube DOESN'T support creators unless you are one of the mega-influencers targeting 12 year olds with daily "Wowie zowie" uploads. Ask every medium sized channel how helpful youtube is. Ask any channel with a million subscribers if the changes youtube makes improves their lives or business. Multiple of these groups of channels have banded together to make youtube alternatives explicitly to escape the damn algorithm treadmill.

Youtube doesn't support creators, it milks them dry for content.

> I pay for YouTube to support the platform and creators.

Paying Google to support creators pushes them to play to The Algorithm(tm) - which means they will adapt the presentation of their content to maximise profitability. And thereby stop making the content you're enjoying now.

As such, I think paying Google to support creators is one of the worst ways to support them. Buy their merch, support them directly on Patreon (or similar), or support a site where they ostensibly have more control (eg, Nebula). Don't coax them into a style of creating dictated by Google's algorithms.

And yet still they're the most popular sites, why hasn't everyone moved to an objectively better solution?

Inertia, convenience.

Network effects.

Network effects are good for the creators who make it big.

Is there a way to build a recommendation engine with a distributed system? Or a search engine?

Because it comes configured on your phone or browser, and learning to use new tools implies will and effort.

Your non phone computer comes with Edge/Safari, yet most people use Chrome

Because Google pester you constantly to install it.

Youtube is a great website with Ublock (or premium, I assume). It's borderline unusable without, which is why people are so reluctant to shell out for premium - the ads feel less like a reasonable attempt to monetize, and more like an attempt to push people to premium.

> you all just have to figure out new life with it.

then they'll put the whole site behind a paywall, which could have mixed results. Everyone is focusing on paying the creators, but advertisers are also paying for moderation. voat showed us what an unmoderated reddit is like, and bitchute shows us what unmoderated youtube is like: trying to find DIY birdfeeder videos against the tide of holocaust denial and Podcast #598 of "How the Lizard Illuminati are vaxxing us with every toxic metal on the periodic table but Big Pharma Deep State maintains the elaborate coverup"

>and bitchute shows us what unmoderated youtube is like

Have you actually read any YouTube comments lately? YouTube doesn't have any moderation at all.

I reported some neonazi content just the other day and YouTube booted it off.