I don't like advertising economy same as the next person, but... Would it still be stupidly cheap to host stuff now, without advertising economy? Because many people want to do a buck on advertising economy, there are lots and lots of pages and services that would not be there so economics of scale would operate on smaller scale.

It costs a couple of 2017 dollars per month to host a basic site. If you get hammered by many GB of bandwidth you could get into tens of dollars (around $0.10/GB on a few sites I checked for non-bulk tiers, and it only gets cheaper from there).

That's stupidly cheap, and much more easily available than trying to get your content online in the 90s without being at a university or corporation that could act as a patron of your online activity.

But continuing on from the patronage angle, Amazon etc are already doing massive things even without external compute customers, so their economies of scale for providing servers & bandwidth are already in place.

Oh, yeah, I remember how much free video was available on the internet before YT.

Great times!

Because all this free video is just so great right? A world full of nobodies blathering on about themselves?

...

There was a lots of video on the web before YT. Video was better before YT, you actually had to put some effort into it. Now YT is cheap, shitty, my-first-VFX projects as far as the eye can see.

Pre-monetized YT was even noticeably better. The my-first-VFX videos aren't even the problem, it's the mountain of outright clickbait burying everything else, and rampant padding of what ought to be 20-30s videos to several minutes for what I assume are monetization reasons, usually starting with a minute of updates about the person's other videos and how much they loved the comments on their last video and blah blah blah, then some recap of stuff you definitely already know if you've sought out this video, and so on.

My wife sometimes watches a video then leaves the "next video" running in the background while she does other stuff. Often it's people talking about movies in clickbait-titled videos. Their primary skill seems to be talking for several minutes without actually saying anything, and avoiding the video title's topic for as long as possible. It's kind of impressive, but does nothing to enrich anyone's life and drowns out better content with worse SEO.

The only thing I remember about pre-monetized YouTube was it was mostly pirated TV shows.

I'm pretty happy with the content on YouTube - lots of fun tech stuff like EEVBlog, Techmoan, bigclive, the 8-bit guy etc that would never happen on regular TV. A lot of them seem to make half their living from Patreon though.

> Because all this free video is just so great right? A world full of nobodies blathering on about themselves?

Just because that doesn't appeal to your taste doesn't mean that it is bad. Stop judging what other people like to watch.

You argument is essentially "people who make videos that I don't like should be pushed out".

Before entertainment was so easy to make, there certain bars of quality one had to meet in order to get access to publishing. There is no such metric now, no hurdle of quality or notoriety to jump, and you would argue that nothing has changed?

How does taste render the observations of an individual invalid? Are you so genius that you can make such ...judgments... yourself? But I can't judge because I have tastes???

> How does taste render the observations of an individual invalid? Are you so genius that you can make such ...judgments... yourself? But I can't judge because I have tastes???

Here's the difference: I'm not judging. I don't believe in a "quality bar". I'm not judging which content should be created, sponsored or paid for.

Let people create and publish content, and let people vote with their clicks, eyes and wallets.

But you, no, you think that only content that passes your quality bar should be funded.

Don't like content or ads? Don't watch/view them. Nobody is forcing you to. But you want to force others not to view them.

I hate ads, but they pay for a lot of the content and services I use, and I'd rather view them than pay for them.

Don't like them? Don't use those services and content. Your call.

>You argument is essentially "people who make videos that I don't like should be pushed out".

You keep putting words in people's mouths all over this thread. It doesn't make for interesting conversation.

This is clearly a sensitive subject for you, but please engage people in an honest manner.

Youtube existed for several years prior to becoming the massively monetized behemoth it is now. Furthermore, numerous alternative video providers exist or have existed, everywhere on the scale from amateur to enterprise.

No-one’s saying you can’t advertise. There was advertising in the world long before persistent stalking of users was a thing. They advertised based on the content, rather than the user.