Youtube has been a fantastic demonstration of how valuable it can be to enable democratized, low-barrier-to-entry content publishing. Think of how much treasure there is on the service, with millions upon millions of hours of educational, informative, or archival content, all published and viewable for free, with incredible reliability and availability. Of course this is also fantastically expensive to build and maintain; I believe that we have been fortunate that Google's ad business was willing to subsidize it for us for so long with so little required in return. Unfortunately it appears that possibly the screws are getting turned, and there is less appetite for the subsidy.
In a better, more utopian timeline I imagine an equivalent service supported by taxpayers or nonprofit means. Just how the 1900s gave us the public library system, imagine if the 2000s give us a video platform without for-profit encumbrances - what a world it would be!
In a better, more utopian timeline I imagine an equivalent service supported by taxpayers or nonprofit means. Just how the 1900s gave us the public library system, imagine if the 2000s give us a video platform without for-profit encumbrances - what a world it would be!