• chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Yeah. I’m actually okay with paying for a service I use daily. Google does a bunch of evil shit to drive its advertising business, but the reality is that nothing is free and somebody has to pay somewhere.

    We can pay with money or we can pay with ads and personal data.

    What I would like to see is a law banning data collection for paid accounts. Because right now Google datarapes you even when you pay.

    • amorangi@lemmy.nz
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      4 months ago

      but the reality is that nothing is free and somebody has to pay somewhere.

      Youtube gained its market share and stopped any competitors arising by offering a free video platform. Now that there isn’t much hope for competition they have enshitified, plastering ads and demanding money. They endured massive loses for years just to kill competition. So boo fucking hoo when I continue using a monopolists products on the terms they originally offered.

    • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      A privacy law that only works for paying customers? I think we can do far better than that.

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        The economic reality is not everything can be free for everyone. Privacy is the price people pay to have “free” access to services.

        But right now, even those who pay to skip ads or have additional features on a service are still being mined for data.

        • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          I deny your economic reality. There is no reason social media needs to charge. It can be run purely on volunteers and donations. It may not be able to be as big as FB but that is okay. We don’t need giant multimedia companies running social media anyways.

          We need strong privacy protections for everyone, not just paying customers. It is time to put an end to targeted advertising.

          • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            We’re talking about video hosting here. For a hosting site like YouTube that’s several petabytes of new storage added every day assuming no duplicates or backups of anything, plus the bandwidth, overhead, staffing, and more.

            A project of that scale can’t be done by volunteer hobbyists with no money. What you’re asking for is for other people to work and spend billions annually without any expectation of compensation for just your entertainment, and you aren’t entitled to that.

            • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Your inability to see the Internet as a distributed resource is astounding considering it’s purpose. I will repeat what I said before there is no reason social media can’t be done without the corporations controlling everything.

              You can easily host your own videos, if everyone did and we used advanced sharing protocols the load can be distributed. The more people watching the more bandwidth.

              You have become brainwashed into believing only YouTube can exist. You have bought into it so bad you think someone who wants your rights and privacy protected is a free loader.

              We can do at all without them. There is something wrong and perverse about a single entity controlling that much of our culture. Too big to fail you say, I say too big to care about what really matters.

              • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                Okay, let’s go with your idea that everybody has the knowledge and hardware retired to self-host.

                What happens when Grandma’s cute video she uploaded goes viral and 11 million people try to watch it in a 24hr period? Would we rather it simply didn’t work, or does grandma get an unexpected $7,000 bill?

                • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  I setup a Plex server to stream media to my mobile phone anywhere in the world. It took me ten minutes of mostly pointing and clicking to setup. Please tell me how hard Internets are…

                  There is so much wrong with how you think. First of all why does Grandma want 11 million views!? I mean really do you even listen to yourself.

                  The answer to your question would be a protocol like BitTorrent. The more people who watch a clip the more distributed bandwidth would be available.

                  We have already passed the tipping point where creators are now paying more for their media to be consumed than they are getting paid. Where do you think this is heading? Do you want a future of YouTube enshitification!?

                  • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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                    4 months ago

                    You have a plex server. Okay.

                    I have a couple circular saws. That doesn’t make my garage a replacement for a lumber mill.

      • VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        Good loving people pay for it because they want it to be available to everyone in the world and it’s running costs are pretty low.

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Wikipedia isn’t video hosting. The angles of nenual hosting cost for Wikipedia is around 3 million a year. YouTube probably costs nearly as much per hour to keep running.

        500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s gonna be like 60 terrabytes every hour just in storage space increases.

        If you were to try and host that on a cloud server like AWS the cost would increase millions of dollars every day. Google self-hosted, but it’s still unfathomingly expensive. There’s still questions over whether YouTube profitable even with all the ads and the subscriptions.

    • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Selling personal data at all should just be banned. It says personal right in the name… Giving away free services with forced adds is exploitation in my opinion. The first step to solving the issue is to require everything have a paid option that gets rid of adds and doesn’t sell personal data for additional profit. The hard part with that is preventing them from just setting the price unreasonably high.

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I’d imagine there’s a point where the money from subscriptions is greater than the money from advertising and data hoarding.

        The “unreasonably high” prices should be self-solving in that context, because the company won’t make more money by selling ads for less than the price of a subscription.

        In fact, in order to justify raising the prices too much they’d have to change more for the ads, which in turn would hurt the ad industry by reducing the ROI in marketing.