5 ms·

Why should companies be required to offer content to people for free?

amatecha 3y ago
Welll... to be fair, that's literally the only reason the platform got as big as it did, and became "the" ubiquitous video hosting platform. They fronted the cost to capture a massive audience, and now they gradually extract more and more value out of the user base they lured in.
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  And the irony is, of course, that YouTube got off the ground based off of blatant and widespread copyright infringement.
  - chung8123 3y ago
    People forget that when Google was buying them there were a bunch of copyright lawsuits again them and most of the major tech companies were scared to pay too much for them. Once the deals with the record labels worked out they found their footing.
krapp 3y ago
Because they do offer content to people for free, and have for years. And people might actually be willing to put up with ads if they weren't so invasive and obnoxious - static ad banners, for instance, would probably be fine. But interrupting a video every few seconds for several minutes of ads is just ridiculous. Also because the ability for the end user to have complete control over the content the server sends them has been baked into the web since the beginning. You can send your content for free and hope that I choose to view your ads (which I probably wont,) or you can put your content behind a paywall, and hope it's worth paying for (it probably isn't.) What you can't do is send your content for free and just expect me to view your ads, as if the internet were old media like radio or television, where even then, you could skip ads with DVR or just change the channel. It's not our problem corporations thought the web was going to be a gravy train where the rules didn't matter, and they poisoned the well and ruined everything in the process. To hell with all of them, let them burn. We'll go back to sharing videos on torrent or something.
- dayjaby 3y ago
  A torrent based youtube replacement sounds fun.
  - krapp 3y ago
    Isn't that basically PeerTube?

Welll... to be fair, that's literally the only reason the platform got as big as it did, and became "the" ubiquitous video hosting platform. They fronted the cost to capture a massive audience, and now they gradually extract more and more value out of the user base they lured in.

heavyset_go 3y ago
And the irony is, of course, that YouTube got off the ground based off of blatant and widespread copyright infringement.
- chung8123 3y ago
  People forget that when Google was buying them there were a bunch of copyright lawsuits again them and most of the major tech companies were scared to pay too much for them. Once the deals with the record labels worked out they found their footing.

krapp 3y ago

Because they do offer content to people for free, and have for years. And people might actually be willing to put up with ads if they weren't so invasive and obnoxious - static ad banners, for instance, would probably be fine. But interrupting a video every few seconds for several minutes of ads is just ridiculous. Also because the ability for the end user to have complete control over the content the server sends them has been baked into the web since the beginning. You can send your content for free and hope that I choose to view your ads (which I probably wont,) or you can put your content behind a paywall, and hope it's worth paying for (it probably isn't.) What you can't do is send your content for free and just expect me to view your ads, as if the internet were old media like radio or television, where even then, you could skip ads with DVR or just change the channel. It's not our problem corporations thought the web was going to be a gravy train where the rules didn't matter, and they poisoned the well and ruined everything in the process. To hell with all of them, let them burn. We'll go back to sharing videos on torrent or something.

dayjaby 3y ago
A torrent based youtube replacement sounds fun.
- krapp 3y ago
  Isn't that basically PeerTube?