>How did we end up here? [...] systematic censorship and endless puritanical moral panic? The reason is advertising money is what funds Youtube. Ultimately, t

>How did we end up here? [...] systematic censorship and endless puritanical moral panic? The reason is advertising money is what funds Youtube. Ultimately, this means Google has to make sure their videos are mostly "advertiser-friendly"[0]. This unavoidable editorial tension is what the prior boycott incident (Adpocalypse[1]) was all about. >We badly need some new blood guiding tech development. It's not just a new programming team with different ideals. You need a new funding model. The obvious alternative is to create a video site that doesn't depend on advertisers. With no ad sponsorships as a revenue constraint, what options does that leave us? (a) paid subscription or donation websites. But most viewers don't have money to pay for a youtube-clone with non-ad-friendly videos. Even if they did have discretionary income, they wouldn't pay for it anyway. (Example of users overwhelmingly preferring ads over paying an insignificant 8 cents per month.[2]) (b) volunteer self-funded decentralized video service like Peertube Both those options have massive economic and technical disadvantages. Storing petabytes of videos is expensive and so far, nobody else has figured out a non-advertising model to pay for the hosting costs to serve them to millions. Keep in mind that the other video websites that some people do pay for such as Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu, etc are also not bastions of free speech that allow extreme political views. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#Advertiser-friendly_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#Advertise... [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Adpocalypse+advertisers+boycott https://www.google.com/search?q=Adpocalypse+advertisers+boyc... [2] https://www.tune.com/blog/mobile-ads-70-of-smartphone-owners-wont-pay-even-1-to-avoid-ads/ https://www.tune.com/blog/mobile-ads-70-of-smartphone-owners...