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I'll be that guy and say this isn't crappy design and shouldn't be in this community. We've already got posts filling top of all we don't need more where they don't belong.
yeah, this is a policy OP doesn't like, not bad design
Ads are crappy by design. I think the spirit of the community is upheld with this post.
Well yes, nobody likes ads. But think of it this way - ads are "democratic" in a way, because it means everybody can "afford" or access that which is financed by the ads. Most websites are expensive to run and have to make money somehow to pay for itself - as much as I dislike ads, I'm not sure what the alternative would be? Should we have to pay to access each and every website? I don't know what the best solution would be, to be hones.
Ads have nothing to do with democracy; they are forced upon us and serve no other purpose than to manipulate you into buying a product. That's text-book capitalism for you.
Personally, as an open-source developer, I use crowd-funding to cover the expenses for the websites and software I provide. You will find no ads or tracking on my pages, and the same can be said for the majority of open-source projects.
The problem is rarely tied to cost; usually, it's about greed and the never-ending chase for higher profit margins.
Mind you, I'm just a single individual with a single experience, but if I can find a way to get paid for my work without forcing people to watch the visual diarrhea, so can the giants like Google.
YouTube only barely breaks even as it is. What profit margins are you talking about?
In Q3 of 2022 alone, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, recorded a profit (not revenue!) of 13.9 billion USD. Their financial position is more than secure.
https://abc.xyz/assets/investor/static/pdf/2022Q3_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf?cache=4156e7f
That's well and good for the parent company. The reality of how these megacorps work is that if a specific branch of the company (YouTube) doesn't turn a profit (which it historically has broken even at best during the best of times before Tiktok took a gigantic chunk of their market share), eventually venture capital will run out and the service will get either sold or shuttered entirely.
Which is why the website "Killed By Google" exists. This is also why Mixer was killed by Microsoft. This is why LG shuttered their entire phones division.
Companies record these massive profits by killing the departments that don't make record profits.
Even excusing the policy, the design is actually pretty shit though. We're all just used to it so it feels default and normal.
That's fair. I agree, it's mediocre at best.
While this is a policy I don't like, it's also something that is purposely destroying the usability of the Internet. Which I think constitutes a bad design.
I would argue that pop-ups like this are an intentionally crappy design meant to be frustrating and get in the way. But, I understand what your saying, this is perhaps not the best suited community for this post.
I think the difference here is I view "crappy design" as something badly made or poorly executed. What you describe I would consider to be "asshole design": perfectly well-made, but with bad intentions. I can see why you would have the different definition though, and considering the Reddit subs had a lot of these same definition issues it's not surprising they continue here.
How dare you inconvinience me for using your stuff for free r/choosingbeggars
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Barfing for getting reminded stuff cost money LMFAOOOO
King's behaviour is typical of the lefty democrat who never had a job in his life. So eager to betray America to the democrats technocrat overlords. Disgusting.
Yeah the guy reminding you stuff costs money is the jobless one, stop projecting in my inbox bro, cringe. google bad videos free.
Note how the lefty is incapable of constructive dialogue.
You mean the guy who's trying to watch videos for free and finger points his political beliefs if you disagree with him instead of replying with arguments? I agree with you.
Did you get your mother to write that for you?
Yeah she still speaks to me unlike yours
Unsolicited ads are implicitly anti-user, especially when they impede or interrupt access to content.
So you buy youtube premium instead? Or are you an entitled freeloading POS who shamelessly asks for uninterrupted free content? 😂
The internet used to be free before corporations got here.
It was never free. It was paid for and used by universities and research institutions. There was no world wide web, just gopher, ftp, usenet, chat, telnet. Any kind of advertising was really frowned upon, it was basically treated like a library. But, there wasn't a lot to do there.
How are they supposed to pay for the infrastructure that you're using to watch it. Do you even have a clue what it costs to run YouTube for a month? The ads keep the servers up. BTW it's in the tens of millions a month if not more to run YouTube.
No one has a clue what it 'costs' because YT isn't honest about revenue, and being a subsidiary its P&L statements can be adjusted to spread any narrative around profitability it considers useful. In the context of Alphabet its operating cost is probably negligible.
You're already paying them data tribute through daily interaction with much of the corporate web.
I literally don't have a job and host a website with 249971 requests served april-october. This shit isn't expensive, google makes it expensive. Before YouTube we just had other websites with videos.
e: I got it wrong, it's 525154 (valid) requests april-october with 85340 unique IPs after filtering my own.
Requests cost nothing, data storage and bandwidth usage do.
People upload over 500 hours of videos every minute, that's 256.320.000hours each year. Let's say that most of it is lower quality instead of 4K, so each hour takes 0.5GB of storage. That's 128PB every year. Youtube overall size probably reached Exabytes in the last few years.
Their daily bandwidth usage probably ranges way into Petabytes too, something you were orders of magnitude away over the whole life cycle of your site.
Literally everyone is not listening to what I'm saying so I'll just say it here again as clear as I can:
YouTube costs money because infrastructure costs are exponential. It doesn't have to be that way. Host your own shit, it's so unbelievably cheap.
I have my own live-streaming infrastructure. I have my own music streaming infrastructure. I have my own video sync infrastructure that so far has not even stuttered for people on the other side of the globe even with 30+ people watching at once. This costs jack shit to do. Spread it out. Host your own.
This is of course ignoring that corporate executive pay is insane and you could definitely cut that in half, but we don't. We pass the costs of the fifth execute yacht to the consumers, and here we have like 5 people defending that structure as if it just has to be that way. It doesn't. It wasn't like that before Google started owning everything.
And yes, for the record, I am not using YouTube. YouTube currently barely works on my browser so I just don't use it.
And if you were streaming the volume of videos they are, your costs would be astronomical too. Your argument is completely senseless.
What he's saying is there are alternative methods that cost less, theres a few youtube competitors that use p2p for instance, which'd cut down on hosting costs SIGNIFICANTLY
And you are still missing what I am saying. I don't care if it's P2P or not. If he is personally sending out TB's of data from his server everyday, being P2P means nothing. If TB's of data are leaving his server, then he will have an exponential cost growth to be able to send TB's of data. You're not making an apples to apples comparison. Sending TB's of data a month, let alone a day has an enormous cost to it. There is no avoiding that.
Do you know the enormous amount of data it takes to stream video? And how much infrastructure to have such seamless loading as youtube does, caching copies of popular videos all across the world?
There used to be a free youtube before google? Someone has to volunteer to pay for the site servers unless you pay them my ignorant bro. Youre always free to stop using the evil corporation sites but you want their stuff for free instead and complain about it. Get a grip
imagine licking the corporate boot this hard
Youre the one begging them for free content here, stuff costs money get a job bum
yeah sure let me just go to the job factory and pick one of the many jobs they have available..
It's nearly impossible to find a job when you've got a disability.
No youtube for you then, being disabled doesnt mean the universe owns you free videos and you can insult others for reminding you that stuff costs money
Edit money not even required just watch ads, the entitlement jesus
you sure seem like a pleasant person to be around
says the guy who insults me because he thinks universe owns him free videos for getting him disabled
Oof.
Yeah bro just wanted to hear it, u cant help it with some people. " aakshually i cant walk no job for me so give me youtube" then u get called unpleasant for not agreeing
I literally don't have a job and host a website with 249971 requests served april-october. This shit isn't expensive, google makes it expensive. Before YouTube we just had other websites with videos.
e: I got it wrong, it's 525154 (valid) requests april-october with 85340 unique IPs after filtering my own.
"Videos always existed on internet" People upload 500 hours of video to youtube per minute how simpleminded are you Jesus Christ
Because it's the video platform, King.
By your logic, my website shouldn't exist because it's too expensive. By your logic, videos didn't exist before YouTube. You are at odds with reality.
Where was this attitude when Netflix announced account sharing crackdowns? I buy premium to support the people I watch but still, what a wild comment.
What does netflix not want acc sharing have to do with youtube needing money to host their content and pay their creators? Dont like their new policy dont buy it are u looking for something to be mad about? Tf
Because they're both doing it for the exact same reason. Netflix doesn't want people using their service for free and neither does Youtube. Netflix didn't have ads so they cracked down on accounts. Youtube does, so they're cracking down on adblockers.
I was fine with Youtube locking their 4k+ resolutions behind premium but they're slowly tightening their hand more and more to make it 'profitable'. Hell, the queue feature is premium now. Using the app on your phone while it's 'locked' is a premium feature. Things that should be free are being stuffed into the 'premium' package but because that wasn't enough, they're trying to block adblockers. Making people pay for what they were getting for free, while it makes sense from a business perspective, never goes over well. Premium is really only worth it if you want the people you watch it get paid more, everything else can be done by third party players.
Although like Reddit, they might kill those off next.
"Should be free" ? You think only 4k videos cost them money? Bandwidth and storage for lower res is free? How naive jesus
Lol yes because people are already developing third party apps with those same features for free, ya duncecap.
Also if Youtube made their site "pay to access" we'd watch it die within the month.
Nice logic, movies can also be downloaded for free via "third party", does that mean studios should make them free because of that?
Can't download a movie theater which is where most of their money comes from. Streaming services definitely lose a lot of money and the only reason they can stay alive is in-house 'recommendations', high resolution/bandwidth streams, and compatibility with mobile devices. If third party sites/apps figure those three things out, will probably be tough to compete with.
What kind of moron watches ads willingly? That's some dumb shit right there I tell you what.
I'd say it's an ok design to enforce a crappy business model