So this is some bollocks. Guess I'll be cancelling our plan since it's only used by two of us.
Current price $17.99/month, new price $32.99/month.
If they boiled the frog better I would probably have accepted a $5/month price rise, and then another later... But close to doubling in one go is a no from me dawg.
Thank you for being a loyal member throughout our journey. We created YouTube Premium so that you could enjoy all the videos and music you love without interruptions.
To continue delivering great service and features, we are increasing the YouTube Premium family plan price to A$32.99/month. We don't make these decisions lightly, and this update will allow us to continue to improve YouTube Premium and support the creators and artists you watch on YouTube. This is the first ever price increase for your subscription.
Links to cancellation etc: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/12400348?sjid=6028684095030617608-AP
In this industry the “means of production” = “hosting and distribution platform and servers”. If you’ve got no way of hosting your content and putting it in front of people, your content may as well not exist. In much the same way an actor needs a theatre.
So as per any capitalist industry, those that own the means of production (I.e. google with YouTube) exploit its workers (content creators) to generate profit in the same way a steel mill owner gets to keep the profits from his steel mill despite the fact that the owner never creates any steel ingots themselves.
Yeah people don't notice that the Internet used to be like going over to a friend's house who had the cool stuff which over time became niche shops.
Rules, regulations and restrictions, slowly put up more and more stops for simple small people to enter the space and left only large companies in it's place. Some of this by consumers own demand for more.
So here we are, the Internet just the next space for capitalism and having every last scrap of revenue squeezed from it while those with capital complain they need the next big invention to exploit as they run out of space and room to grow and things to consume. Each day pushing more towards their pockets and less towards the rest of us.
I just want small curators back. Small groups filling niches instead of massive "creators" who simply consume as much as possible to regurgitate it back at their audience.
I think you're mostly correct, but I slightly disagree on this part:
I think the reality is that convenience simply trumped out. As much as we can see now that allowing the internet to coalesce into a handful of silos, or often only 1-2 silos as is the case with Youtube, years ago the major value they provided was that you could simply go there and find the content. Reddit's demise reminded me of this more than anything else. I was a daily visitor for quite an array of topics for over a decade. When they decided to fully fuck up the site and I left, I found myself having to think about which of those content sources I wanted to replace and what I'd want to replace them with, and as much as it would be cool for that all to just be "lemmy" the reality is that I now am looking at far more RSS feeds, discord servers, mastodon servers, etc.
I also think that there is a phenomenon that is a bit more insidious at play, and that's that most of these services are funded by VC or these massive companies and don't make money for years or even a decade or more until they've consolidated the market to basically just them and they can charge whatever they feel like. Youtube follows this pattern. Even after Google's acquisition, it was quite a while before YouTube became even break-even as they gobbled up the market for this type of thing. VC/Google can sink billions into infrastructure without turning a profit until the market is basically just Youtube, and then all of a sudden we get Adblock crackdowns and near doubling of Premium rates. The only place that might compete with Youtube at this point is probably Apple or Amazon mostly because they're the only companies that can say "we're going to lose hundreds of millions or billions for at least a decade."
Ultimately, I think this is going to be the major lesson from about 2000-2020. As consumers, we should be extremely mistrusting of businesses where we can't understand how they make money, because usually that just means that the way they make money is to basically monopolize the market and then really fuck us.
I fully agree and still think that regulations to a degree do impact the ability for others to join in spaces. The world is full of nuance and as always it's a bit of A & B and C through fucking Z as well in small amounts.
Convenience has let people grow complacent to companies doing whatever which gives us now when the reaper has come to collect and wants more money since they have nothing else to focus on.
But think of it also as making a hotdog. There are rules that are super necessary and helpful. You want it made with good ingredients and not rodent and in a kitchen that is clean and inspected every so often. But imagine if they made a requirement for size and shape, stated that each hotdog must be measured by an IR camera and nuked by gamma radiation to be sold. Suddenly the only people that can sell hotdogs retail are ones that can afford plutonium and very expensive equipment.
Not a huge issue cause those hotdogs last longer and are reliable but there was literally a law saying all platforms must be responsible for every single comment on their platform and several of them said they would turn off comments.
With server costs, bandwidth costs, registration and more eventually the people that can afford to meet those minimum requirements are the ones who already have the money to do so. The walls get built and those inside make sure they stay safe of others impact.
They can only do that while people have no interest in leaving the walled garden, and they assist in building them. It seems to just be how people interact with their world. Ignorant. And I say that without prejudice cause it lets them be happy but the horrors will come out of nowhere to them.
Fair, I also didn't realize that I was replying in an Aussie specific community, so this part:
makes it make more sense to me why you said that in your original comment. Over here (US) there is very little regulation of these platforms. Basically, they can't knowingly host CSAM, and they have to respond to DMCA requests. The DCMA is basically just "take down copyrighted material when a right's holder complains." We have a carve out called section 230 that really lets companies not have much responsibility for the content they host. So in the US's case when it comes to these things going back to the hot dog analogy, our tech companies only responsibility is along the lines of not explicitly encouraging employees to allow rodents, or even to police for rodents, it's basically just if the right people report rodents they have to do something about it.
So in the case of YouTube, for example, I and most other people who know how to build websites can make a site that hosts video fairly easily. Because regs here are so lax, all I really need to do is explicitly state that CSAM/copyright materials aren't allowed, do a shockingly small amount of work to automatically take it down when reported. Laws over here aren't really the barrier.
Most creators worth watching will be making their work available beyond Youtube, and if they aren't then it's worth contacting them.