skulblaka , 4 hours ago

I have really, really mixed feelings about this. On one hand I understand that YouTube is a business and Google needs it to at least approach profitability. If nobody watches ads and nobody pays for premium, there’s no profit. No profit means the adpocalypse gets worse to make up costs, or else the service gets shut down.

On the other hand YouTube is such trash compared to what it was even just a couple years ago that I also use an alternate front-end.

I don’t want it to disappear because I really don’t think anyone else has the resources to do what Google has done with YouTube. If we lose YouTube, especially if we lose it and aren’t left with access to the data store of existing videos, we’ve lost an incredible amount of information. Millions of hours of tutorials and good information will be taken away from the world, not to even mention the billions of hours of entertainment. I don’t want to lose YouTube and what it means for international informational accessibility. But I’m also not going to sit through twice as many ads as I have video.

I foresee YouTube going to a cable-TV-like subscription only model in the future. I don’t like it. But I don’t see how else they actually lift themselves out of this hole they’ve dug.