zlacker

I really love the way it connects people, but...

Doesn't anyone question that youtube is basically run by an ad service? If you really want to connect to people then why does "company x" wants to know and keep tabs?

Why is there a thumbs up or down in the first place? Or even, why doesn't the number of views matter to you in this case. "company x" had a great search engine but now it seems crippled by the fact you can't say: "exclude the top x percent popular results"

I'm writing this because when I searched for something obscure, I go to page 8 of the "company x" results and got slapped multiple times with "suspicious behaviour" notifications and had to wait or solve a captcha.

>>noctur+(OP)
Not just an ad service. Google is a content publisher, as revealed recently in the leak of the "ML Fairness" documents. And this website loads over "http" for maximum cookieage. Enjoy a 5MB+ "GO" button? No thanks. You?

>>noctur+(OP)
Agreed. The especially weird thing for me is that when I suggest ads are perhaps not great, I get energetic replies along the lines of "why do you hate newspapers/TV/video and want to kill them!1!"

I think of the ad ecosystem as like a tree that has grown so tall and dense that little can grow beneath it. If that tree weren't there I don't think we'd have nothing. I think we'd have a richer ecosystem with many more things growing.

>>noctur+(OP)
Lets at least try to be fair here though: hosting the amount of content YouTube hosts, and delivering it to viewers, is not inexpensive.

What alternative funding model do you propose?

>>AnIdio+0k
You're right, it's expensive and needs to be funded.

Suppose I had an alternate funding model. Also suppose I wanted youtube to change it (note: I never said that). How does that invalidate the bad things I pointed out with the current model?

You never said whether or not you agreed with my original points.

>>noctur+QA1
It definitely doesn't invalidate the problems with the current model, I'm just saying that for all our talk of how bad YouTube is, no one has yet come up with a way to fund an alternative that keeps the good qualities without the bad ones.

So the question really just becomes: is the good of YouTube worth the bad?