• Venia Silente@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    As per usual, it’s a matter of content.

    I can’t (and shouldn’t have to) carry the entire weight of a fandom on my shoulders. Until there’s more activity here on those subjects, I have to at least keep an eye on Reddit.

    What I always do when I can however, is I try to do POSEO to raise awareness: by which I mean, I post my opinions or ideas or stories in my own site (or in my Masto main) first, and only crosslink on Reddit. I was thinking of doing the same with reply comments as well, but dunno how much would that promote interaction.

    • Polar@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      It’s also the toxic community.

      I was called a racist and holocaust denier because I asked someone how they expect YouTube servers to be paid for if you refuse to pay for premium, and don’t want to watch ads.

      My comments were downvoted like crazy, and the person who called me a racist holocaust denier was upvoted…

      Again, all because I asked a question about how servers should be paid for. What the actual fuck? Reddit is insanely toxic, but Lemmy takes the cake.

      • starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        https://ibb.co/pvk0HWv https://ibb.co/bsPRfyZ https://ibb.co/0Mxd8rr You were being a smartass and then got one-guyed. The community on lemmy seems generally positive with a few crazies, just like everywhere.

        Look in that thread and there are plenty of people who ask “how will youtube keep the servers up without ads though?” with reasonable responses such as: torrent-esque video sharing people donating to creators and youtube taking a cut or reasonable issues like: ads cause me a lot of stress and I am not wealthy, does this mean I can never watch a video again? Or read an article or see any online content? Not wanting to support billion dollar megacorps

        Getting responded to in kind by 1 guy is not a toxic community, everywhere I’ve seen people ask a question in a normal way 99% of the time they get normal responses

        • Polar@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Yes, because calling me a racist Holocaust denier, and having those comments upvoted is very non toxic.

          It takes other users to upvote those comments.

      • ursakhiin@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        :note: I know this isn’t the point of your comment but I wanted you to be able to have a non-insulting conversation on the topic.

        Premium is more than it should be and ads on YouTube arent handled very well i.e. Obnoxious

        I watch adless on my phone, but still use the default app to stream to my TV and generally let the ads play through.

        23 dollars a month for 2 people on a family plan is just nuts, though. If they had a 2 person option that was like 17-18 then I’d probably get it.

        • Polar@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          I agree that the pricing doesn’t make sense unless you can split it, which is what I do.

          Premium is $25 in Canada. You can add 5 people to your plan. That makes it $5 per month for each of us.

          Personally I don’t buy cable or satellite TV, so I get most of my enjoyment from YouTube. So to me $5 per month is nothing, especially if you have something like Spotify which you can cancel and use YouTube Music, which is included in that $5.

          If you have no friends and you’re the only one footing the bill, I agree that the pricing is a lot. At that point you just have to deal with the annoying ads.

          I hate ads as much as anyone, but my question still remains for anyone who demands on blocking all ads and refusing to pay for premium, how do you expect servers and creators to be paid?

          I know Google can technically afford it, but that’s not how businesses are run. You can’t take profits from one department to make up for the losses in another department, and as we know bandwidth is extremely expensive, and Google hosts an unbelievable amount of data, and free, too.

          Like I’ve mentioned in the past, I have a bunch of videos uploaded to YouTube to share with family, and they are all private. Therefore Google is paying to store my videos, while making $0 from them, as they are not public and making any ad revenue.

          I also know that Google is bad. Corporations suck. All that jazz. I just don’t understand why most of Lemmy users think everything should be free, but when asked about how these things are supposed to get funded, they go silent.

          Lemmy itself won’t be around long if users refuse to donate to their instance, and refuse to view ads. Even if someone is hosting an instance in their basement, the cost of internet, replacement drives, maintenance, and electricity all add up.

          • whatwhatwutyut@midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            As someone who rarely ever uses YouTube, $25 would be fucking bonkers to pay monthly for no ads. Imo a decent idea to explore would be x amount of minutes that are ad free per month, then after you hit that limit you get given ads. You’d have to be signed into an account, any instances with no account logged in get ads by default.

            Another idea is to add lower tiers to the available plans. 5 people can sign in on the current option? Is there a cheaper plan that only allows linking 1 account? This could even tie in with the previous idea and have certain plans that give you x minutes of watching adless per month.

            I’m sure there are plenty of other options out there. In fact I wouldn’t be bothered having to watch an ad before a video (or a midroll in a longer video) but the experiences I’ve had with using YouTube frequently involve me pulling up a certain scene within a movie or something and getting 2-3 ads that are a minute long each, unskippable, and potentially midrolls in there if the video is over 5 minutes. It just makes me close the video and think “yeah fuck that, I don’t need to watch that scene anymore”.

            Overall point: the ads would be fine if they weren’t so excessive and intrusive

            • ursakhiin@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              There is a cheaper option for just a single account. 13.99 in the US. I think that’s a reasonable price and would pay it if it was just me. I just wish there was an option between 1 person and a whole family.

          • Arcka@midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            as we know bandwidth is extremely expensive

            No. You very obviously don’t know how bandwidth is handled for large providers. They don’t pay per gb, and instead have peering agreements with other networks. Google generally doesn’t have to pay these other networks, as Google has the web applications that the other networks’ customers expect to be able to use.

            • eltimablo@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Peering agreements are in no way free no matter what company you work for, what the hell are you on about?

            • Polar@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              Sorry I meant storage, which was apparent by my following sentence “and Google hosts an unbelievable amount of data”

          • Venia Silente@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            I hate ads as much as anyone, but my question still remains for anyone who demands on blocking all ads and refusing to pay for premium, how do you expect servers and creators to be paid?

            I’m pretty sure it’s 2023 and this has already been discussed and solved ad nauseam, so I’m also sure all I’m going to say here is just repeated from elsewhere, but:

            First of all, “creators” (not artists! There’s a semantic difference) are not going to get paid better just because you pay for YT Premium. Premium pays Youtube, not the creators pleading not to be demonetized. If you’re asking how are creators going to be paid, the answer is simple: directly. If you set up a service without intermediaries, for example a direct wire transfer, or at least something close to it like a Patreon, you get all of the coins and people who want to pay you-but-not-Youtube (or whatever platform) face a better incentive.

            Second, stuff like gift cards.

            Third, and this is something I’ve never seen any naysayer deal with properly: the same methods that have existed before can still work now. I don’t remember ever paying rent for Usenet, or IRC, or BBSes, yet those things were literally plentiful, if I so much as lifted a rock in a cropped 8-bit-color grayscale PNG, the tranparency layer had a link to a BBS. And part of the issue is that there’s a “attention deficit oooh shiny syndrome” going on where instead of using vintage-timer, battle-tested, lightweight, low dependency, cheap payment, low maintenance protocols and services for ensuring persistence and continuation of communities, we are for some weird reason insisting that whatever community launches next is a Perfect Imitation fo Youtube, or else. Such is the case of Matrix: for all its promises, IRC and XMPP are much better battle-tested and for the monthly price (and monthly annoyance) of 1 Matrix server you can run about 25 XMPP servers, or likely over 300 IRC servers.

            And the key here is that it’s the devs who have to take the turn return towards simpler, better tech. Devs gotta lead by example. Users (masses of) are obviously not going to be the ones to do it.

            • Polar@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              Creators can see how much they make from premium subscribers vs ad views. They do make more from people who pay for premium.

              Why do you say they don’t? Like I’m curious where you got that from, when it’s blatantly wrong?

      • XiELEd@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Wow they sound like they came straight out of Twitter. Though one reason why I use FOSS and barely donate is because our currency isn’t that powerful. I see it in the way people say that self-hosted is cheap (probably from Europe or America) but it’s actually crazy expensive for me (Philippines). Our average monthly income is around 400$. Even if I were to donate a substantial part of it, anyone in the first world would barely gain anything and I would have lots to lose. Unless if they’re from another developing country.

        • PurplePropagule@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Even if you barely donate, you’re donating more than most users. Everyone should help in whatever capacity they can and there isn’t any shame in not being able to contribute as much as others. I’d love to see how many donations some of the FOSS purists here make haha. I bet a lot of the real toxic FOSS bros don’t contribute anything.

    • Junesong@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Fandoms have trouble here as well. Take something like baseball. There are so many communities to follow across instances that even if a Fandom has a following, it’s fragmented across multiple sites.