I can pay for Netflix to be entertained for days at a time if I want to by original and classic shows and movies that I can't watch anywhere else, or I can pay for YouTube to show me a bunch of kowtowing brow beaten "creators" try to skirt their ever changing draconian rules long enough to make something that barely counts as entertainment anymore WHICH I could also already watch for free with ads.
For me it boils down to these points: 1. It's a service that has always been free. 2. The product the service delivers has become considerably worse over the last few years due to non stop ads, censorship, rampant misinformation, and an ever expanding list of impossible rules designed to sabotage their own users. 3. Once it objectively became worse than it's ever been they have the nerve to ask me for money literally every time I watch it.
I am offended by this, and I'm not giving them any of my money. If there's a creator I really want to support then I'll buy their products direct, or I'll join their Patreon so I know they're actually getting any of the money I spent
...but how do you argue point 2 and still buy netflix? Netflix has also gotten considerably worse over the last few years, just in different ways. And they not only charge for it but increased the price several times.
Yeah, the price hikes suck, but to me personally the product that Netflix delivers is still worth the price that I pay for it. If the quality drops too much, or the price becomes too high for my liking then I will choose to stop paying for at that time
I've never seen the actors on a show on Netflix stop mid show to tell me that they can't show me the real content they wanted to because it would get demonetized
I understand your first point, that its frustrating for something thats always been free with limited to no ads to change its model.
The thing I want to know though is, YouTube costs a shit ton in terms of infrastructure and development hours, do you have a suggestion on how they can host the public and private content they host and deliver hundreds of petabytes a day while turning a profit? Do you stop user uploads, delete channels that have been inactive for a decade, delete private videos of non-subscribers?
Inb4 well they shouldnt exist because thats not how they formed tired argument ive seen, then my question is, ok so lets say we're thinking up a YouTube replacement. How do we model it so the company makes money, people arent the product, i can upload what I want, watch it for free without ads, people who draw others to the platform make money too, ect... What gets cut?
Edit: Because I don't have a suggestion and I dont think its possible to get anything like the old YouTube we all loved without making major consessions, otherwise I think we'd have more than a handful of compeitors.
Sadly I don't have a great solution to make YouTube into anything as good as what it used to be. It's grown too big and expensive to run without offering anything to increase it's real value to consumers. As corporate greed increases it will probably eventually become an exclusively paid service, at which point I'll probably just stop watching it altogether.
You could replace Netflix with literally any other paid streaming service and the argument would be exactly the same. I just used Netflix because that was the example OP gave in the post. Ultimately the real point is that YouTube wants people to start paying for their service without really offering anything more than what I could already watch for free.
YouTube is way more than content creators. Just last night I watched an hour long episode of PBS news hour, an hour long EDM concert that was live in Europe a few days ago and then fell asleep to a bunch of clips from late night comedy shows. These aren't struggling content creators, these are all from huge content providers that I'd have to track down separately if they weren't on YouTube. Anything on Netflix I just pirate because tv shows and movies are easy to get.