Until this very moment google has considered the wisest move to be trying to keep all potential users on their platform, and it's arguably part of why they have maintained such dominance. It has always depended on network effects and the nearly uncompensated efforts of creators.
They have been getting greedier and greedier under the relentless quarter over quarter pressure to grow. Now we have mandatory ads on all videos, including non-monetized ones, and creaters who made the mistake of trusting youtube are systemtically defrauded through arbitrary demonetization.
I certainly feel no obligation to pay tithes to google.
Paying for what you use isn’t tithing. It’s straight up capitalism – if you don’t like it, don’t take the deal. It’s completely optional and you’ll probably be better off for it given how many people describe their YouTube usage as an addiction.
That’s what’s happening: YouTube offers things people want which cost money to produce and host, while users pay for those costs either directly (Premium) or by selling their attention and activity data to a middleman (Google).
Understanding that is key to understanding why ad blocker users complaining about being blocked is unreasonable. If you don’t like the terms of a deal, you can ethically walk away from it but not decide you don’t want to pay. If you prefer to mooch, sure, it’s not a huge crime but you don’t have any standing to complain, either.
Here’s another line of thought: YT could have straddled P2P tech and hosting directly (premium 4K offerings etc.). But Google wants all the content and all the control. The world’s video library is controlled by one corporation. They could farm the cost to peer tech but they won’t. So fuck them, I’ll circumnavigate my way into the library to watch some guy in his shed work on his hobby who isn’t begging for likes and subs.
And if I did pay? Google will still be logging my data. So fuck them once again.
Sure, nobody says you have to like them any more than you have to like every restaurant in town. The solution in both cases is not to give them your business – not complain when they refuse to give you freebies.
It's not even capitalism. Socialism definitely involves paying for services rendered. Exchanging something for something else is a basic building block of human society.
It's important to remember that piracy and theft are also capitalist practices. Companies routinely break the law and do unethical things, and consider it a sucess as long as money was made overall. Yet there is somehow this sense that individual consumers MUST play by the unfair rules often set up by these monopolies themselves. The incredible asymmetry in how copyright law is abused is an example. These companies deserve the same level of contempt they show their users.
They have been getting greedier and greedier under the relentless quarter over quarter pressure to grow. Now we have mandatory ads on all videos, including non-monetized ones, and creaters who made the mistake of trusting youtube are systemtically defrauded through arbitrary demonetization.
I certainly feel no obligation to pay tithes to google.