If I may offer a new way to think about things - YouTube ads support creators by allowing them to make a living making their videos. It’s quite different than Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, where a company is just hosting and monetizing people discussing and sharing things with each other. If you want to see good content, YouTube decentralized alternatives will really only take off if there is some sort of crowd funding going to creators. Which would most likely take the form of a subscription. And…that is essentially YouTube premium anyway. And I might add that I’ve had YouTube premium for years and it’s my favorite subscription I have across the entire internet.

I created one of the “big subs” on Reddit, and have felt particularly frustrated that whether I protest or don’t, I will still get angry messages from both mods and users either way. Which makes the whole “you’re not even paid for this” hit much harder. But here I am on Lemmy with a username different than my Reddit account breathing fresh internet air where no anonymous strangers yell at me