There was a brief point in YouTube’s history where there were little-to-no ads, and creators weren’t expecting to make a living off the videos they made. Somewhere down the line, it feels like the wrong turn was taken from a content consumers perspective.

Yes, hosting is expensive between the infrastructure and bandwidth requirements, but there already was a model in traditional web hosting where the hosting provider charges for the hosting infrastructure, as well as storage and bandwidth costs. While we’re all so accustomed to accessing sites for free and fast, I think that there should’ve been a “free” tier for uploads which could’ve been kept at 10 mins or w/e and rate limited, while offering paid tiers for longer, higher quality/fidelity content , and larger bandwidth buckets before rate limiting which could help offset YTs costs, as well as temper expectations of what it means to create and watch.

Heck, there could even be a paid tier for viewers that could even allow viewers to watch “free” uploads without being limited, and the viewer would be supporting as well.

Yes, that means that large scale, Mr. Beast style productions would be a lot less feasible, but I feel like it’s not just the platform that being enshittified, but also the amount of aspiring creators who’ve also come out of the woodwork copying or re-uploading other creators content in hopes of getting blessed by the algorithm for a free payout.

I know these are 2 separate issues, and the ship has sailed long ago, but I can’t help but feel like this whole business model is being done wrong from a sustainability perspective.

Nope, it’s still legal to spank children in Canada. As long as the force used does not exceed what is considered reasonable under the circumstances. Linked article

Personal anecdote: when I was in 3rd grade in the early 2000s, there was a student in class that had major behavioural issues and would act out all the time. I had witnessed an incident in class which the student was acting out in front of the teacher, which eventually escalated to the point where he started throwing his desk around and threw his chair at her. After the teacher returned to class a few days later, she had disclosed to the whole class that she had a signed permission form by the student’s parents authorizing her to use force on the student.