What exactly are you criticizing about linux? That it got (too) successful? That it is run in its current form by Linus Torvalds at the top as a sort of benevolent dictator? That it is taking money from sponsors?

Genuinely curious, this is a first time I’ve seen such criticism. More often I see linux people in endless flamewars about DEs, wayland vs X, package managers or whatever they feel strongly about and I’m not interested in those.

Thanks for the reminder. I’ve been wanting to try it out.

I’ve seen the same. I wonder if the older you get, the more you value your time.

I remember seeing lots of ad breaks on TV when I was a kid and it didn’t stop me from watching a show. Now if an ad break happens, I am reminded why I don’t own a TV and turn it off.

I am sure other platforms / personal hosting will continue to exist in the future. They simply won’t be relevant in terms of video streaming market share.

The network effect of youtube is massive. They have a huge amount of content creators and audience. That means the audience will stick around for the creators and the creators go for the biggest audience and hence the most views.

Being google, they have data centers all over the globe, provide a fast app / browser access for any OS, can cast to a TV with one click - all these equal convenience which cannot easily be beat by any individual website.

Some huge youtube brands like linus media group are trying with floatplane as their own paid video hosting service, but I’m sure their view numbers are insignificant compared to youtube even though they are the biggest players.

I doubt it, unfortunately.

Like many other online services they’ve saturated the market so the only way to increase profits is to extract more money from individual users.

They are also a quasi-monopoly for a reason - hosting and streaming video is resource-intensive, so I wouldn’t hold my breath for a free alternative that would scale. AFAIK, piped and such are only frontends to youtube which will be killed off by ToS or through technical means.

Maybe there are free video sites that also host their videos, but as I said, since it quickly becomes very expensive, I don’t see anyone being able to do that for free for long.

Unfortunately, if anyone is going to “disrupt” youtube, it is going to come from a silicon valley startup and like youtube they will only burn investor capital for a limited time - until they have saturated the market (or failed). Then they’ll have to monetize as well.

My only hope is something like a torrent approach where everyone who streams also hosts. But since that is technically difficult to perfect, needs a huge user base to succeed while not promising any commercial gain for the initiating party, nobody will throw a ton of money at the problem, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.

My prediction is that people will either pay for premium or see ads in the mid- to long-term.

Thank you. 42k pre-tax for a teacher is abysmal.

Are these numbers before or after taxes?