No justification necessary. No creator ever charged me for products or service. They did it for free. They assumed I was gonna look at the ads. Unfortunately for them that assumption just isn't going to hold.
> I wouldn't believe you if you told me you're subscribed to every Patreon of every content creator you consume the content of.
Everyone’s YouTube consumption is different. I’m not the person you directed the comment at but I realistically follow less than a handful of creators on YouTube. Subscribing to all their Patreons (not sure if all of them have it) would be quite doable.
If the platform operators want to offer a service that's free for the user, there are more ethical business models they could use. e.g. implement p2p video distribution (conveniently, they also make the most popular browser, and could bake p2p in, e.g. support for IPFS), and let the uploader pay for the platform to act as a seed box (or just let the uploader seed). For users that don't want to run a p2p client (phones, etc.) offer paid gateway services. Provide other creator support services like patreon.
Note that the above architecture is modular in a way where other businesses could compete within individual components. E.g. a seed box provider, or a gateway provider, or creator services. Obviously, this is not as good for them (they'd like to force their vertical integration), but better for everyone else.
Or they could stop giving their service away for free, but we all know they benefit from network effects and mindshare, so they want to keep everyone there.
As long as they provide a free service that's bundled with malware, people will accept the service and just remove the malware. When you do something unethical to start, you can't be surprised that people don't play along as planned.
Point is, they chose to corner the market and be a vertically integrated platform with all the costs involved. They didn't have to. They do bad things to maintain that position. No need to shed any tears for their decision.
In hindsight I agree, but I'm confused why only the comments on "one side" (which all seem to be equally substantive) are being flagged, and not all the participants in general.
That's either randomness (every random sequence has long strings of all-heads or all-tails) or cognitive bias (it always feels like the other side is getting treated better) or some combo of the two.
I don't mean to be glib or dismissive I'm just writing this rather hastily! and this is a pretty well-established finding, at least in my own head, having gone over I don't know how many thousands of these cases...
Edit: but if you want to link to specific cases where you feel like there was an asymmetry, I'd be happy to take a look.
