• 0 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

help-circle
  • Money. Lots and lots of it.

    Hosting video on a significant scale is very expensive. Stupendously expensive.

    Convincing people to join is also going to cost a lot of money. Consumers are on YT because creators are there, and they are already used to the platform. Creators are there because the consumers are there. And there is a robust infrastructure to make a living from content creation.

    Financing is especially difficult for such a project, because companies are willing to pay way more for targeted ads. For which you need some data about your users. The more data you collect, the better the and targeting can be, the more companies are willing to pay.
    Assuming there are enough users for companies to pay for advertising at all.











  • But that’s the thing. When that Video was made, almost all of the advertising was focused on the same BS the article is disagreeing with.

    I remember lots of NordVPN ads by uninformed nontechnical creators just reading the provided script. Saying that Balaklava wearing hackers will steal your credit card data just by being in the same cafe as you, and only an expensive VPN subscription can protect you from that. Or that only using a VPN will protect you from malware.

    This sort of advertising is what Tom Scott critizied back then. IIRC he even said that there are real use cases, but that you shouldn’t believe the fearmongering. Same as the article.

    The fearmongering advertising was the problem, not advertising the service itself.






  • No JavaScript or ads. (…) Prevents Wikipedia getting your IP address.

    Wikipedia is light on JavaScript and has never had ads. You prevent Wikipedia from getting your IP address but instead reveal it to some random third party, combined with letting them know everything you look up.

    What the hell is the point of this. All this does it confuse people and decrease privacy.