“Ireland does not give preferential tax treatment to any companies or taxpayers,” stated a spokesperson from the Irish Ministry of Finances.

I wish the media would eviscerate these people like they used to.

If this man doesn’t have a need for an input matrix, I don’t know who would.

Seems to me a bulk of your standpoint is not wanting greedy people to suck up profits from the people doing the actual work. I agree. Where we disagree, I think, is how this could be accomplished. A non profit makes sense. There is a method (pdf warning) for the board to convert to for profit while retaining assets, which would be a sad move. Not so sure it would turn scandalous, given everything else that goes on these days, but I’m sure the creators on the platform would have something to say about such a move. If it ever happened, I would hope they would abandon ship so to speak.

Though like you say, when the service turns that direction, subscriptions could be cancelled and we could subscribe to another one. This raises a question that I hadn’t considered until now. You mention this isn’t some idealistic option, that it’s something that’s already been done. So what’s it called? I’ve never heard of a registered non profit YouTube competitor that does what we’re talking about, let alone a few of these organizations to allow people the possibility of bouncing between them.

If I can’t go subscribe to these services right now, because they don’t exist, then surely we are talking about an idealistic scenario. If they do exist, I would love to subscribe to them instead of talking about them in the abstract. I’m sure it’s no surprise that I like Nebula, but I’ll check out alternatives.

You’ve made me realise something about Nebulas proportional cut. While it is based on watch time, I’d thought it was cut on a user to user basis. For example (let’s ignore the operating costs for ease), if you only watched one creator in a month, that creator would get the entire $2.50 share of your subscription. Or, if you watched an hour of video from two creators, each would get $1.25.

After looking at the info on their site again, I’m not sure why I thought this. They only say that it’s based on view time. Which could mean they look at site wide view times instead of per user, and divvy up the money that way. Off the top of my head, I’m not sure this would make much of a difference, but it feels like it would. I’ll do a bit of math later to see.

I believe your point was that non profits are superior. My counter was simply that, yes, they are superior to a public company, however they are not infallible to fact that people run them, and people are corruptable.

Forgive me but I’m not sure what to say about the second bit there. Nebula being created and owned by people that needed something like it in the first place is not ideal? Or not because of the people specifically, but because of its closed sourced design and profit sharing ratio? Maybe I’m misunderstanding you.

At the end of the day, I would prefer each creator host their own content on their own site, with it being sort of subscribable through an RSS feed or similar so people can use whatever front end they want. Like how podcasts work. Have a feed for sponsorships available for free, and a paid feed with no sponsorships and maybe bonus content.

I’d not heard of Ko-fi, but it looks interesting. On the face of it, it’s pretty close to what I described above without the creatives themselves having to fuss about with the technical details of hosting all their content. I’ll look into it more another day, thanks.

Not to be rude, but unless you’re an Alphabet executive, what do you know. Same as me - not much.

My guess is they aren’t losing money on YouTube these days, but feel free to look at the 2023 10-K and let me know if you find something in there that no one else has.

I understand it’s expensive to facilitate streaming, though between the 15 billion from Premium subscribers to the 30 billion in ad revenue, it’s not hard to imagine they make a few billion after costs. I’m not trying to say it’s half of Alphabet’s income or anything.

Unfortunately, it’s not something anyone outside of the executive suite can say with a single degree of certainty since Alphabet doesn’t make it known one way or the other.

Ultimately, people do have to be trusted. Even the best non profit in the land can find itself a board of directors that decide to convert the organisation to a for profit model, then in turn go public.

As far as supporting individual creators, Nebula was created by a group of YouTube creators. They got it off the ground by keeping the opportunity cost as low as they could, and by enticing people with the 50:50 split profit from the subscriptions.

What’s more than this though, is that everyone making content on Nebula has an ownership stake. This is discussed in this video at 11:00, but the highlight is this: if the platform is ever sold, the creators get half the money from the sale.

Non profit is one thing, but the platform being employee owned I think provides greater motivation to grow.

I just wrote a rather long comment to that person and now I’ve realized they are being purposefully obtuse.

You playing the content on YouTube is entirely justified. Lots of people put the news on a television instead of a radio while doing things around the house, because occasionally something visual is referenced or something is said that seems interesting enough to look over at the screen.

Besides, it’s not like the person that went through the effort of putting together a ten hour long essay is going to publish just the audio as a podcast or something.

That person’s an egg head, you enjoy your essays.

I did read your comment a few times, looking for a different tone, to see a meaning perhaps I misunderstood, but I can’t find it.

For what it’s worth, Harry Potter isn’t relevant to any of this besides being used as the example. They could have said Star Wars, pottery, landscaping, or astrology. Their point was moreso, ‘I watch long form content that isn’t found anywhere but on YouTube, and Harry Potter is an example of this content.’

You go on to mention the content in every line of your initial comment, and mentioned the platform only once. They enjoy a thing, you don’t understand how they can enjoy that thing.

Whether intentional or not, I can’t see what you’ve written as anything but a critique.

Criticizing what someone gets enjoyment from to make an argument isn’t a stance that’ll hold up. Undoubtedly you have something in your life that you find enjoyable which others don’t.

Beauty isn’t the only thing in the eye of the beholder.

As well as being able to move between the quality settings more or less imperceptibly if the bandwidth changes. Similar to Netflix and Prime.

Grayjay is pretty good, but isn’t exactly an alternative to YouTube since it just pulls from YouTube and strips the junk.

Grayjay is to videos what Lemmy is to news, an aggregator, not a generator.

Open sourced and decentralized is what we should be striving for, but Nebula honestly seems to be a perfect bridge to get people away from YouTube.

The difficulty with decentralizing video is primarily hosting. Video is kinda big, and no one wants to wait even a few minutes to queue up what you want to watch. So streaming it has to be. Streaming, even when the bitrate is adjusted dynamically to your connection with the host server, still requires a significant amount of bandwidth.

Nebula covers all the costs of the infrastructure and development and what have you off the subscriptions. Then they can also afford to pay the creators more per view compared to the YouTube ad split. My understanding of YouTube is that for the first ten or so years it didn’t really make any money. At least not the billions in profit it does now. Hopefully Nebula can continue to leapfrog that hurdle.

They did make a video explaining, from their perspective of course, how they managed to build a nine figure YouTube competitor in a few years time. Probably to be taken with a grain of salt, but it seems like they’re doing things right as far as paying the creators and using their side of the split to make the service better goes.

Either way, it’s not something to purposefully avoid paying for out of the desire for it to be open sourced. Jumping from YouTube straight to a solution like what you’re describing isn’t a one step transition. We’d need Nebula or something like it to scrape away YouTube’s creator base until there’s enough people using an alternative platform to change the tides.

Even Peertube themselves says they aren’t in it to replace YouTube. It’s just another stepping stone.

I wrote elsewhere about the infrastructure problem, but I’ll sum up a couple things. There’s around 200,000 gas stations in the United States. If there were an equivalent number of chargers around, having a small battery would be fine. Eventually this will be the case, but you highlight an important factor: closed ecosystems. All these chargers should work for any make of EV car.

As it stands with now, the need for a subscription or specific car or unique payment method is ludicrous. All these chargers should be required to have card readers the same way you can pay at the pump in a gas station. Beyond this, they’d all need to adopt the same charging method so people don’t need a bunch of adapters in their trunk.

That said, there could be regulations established to require newly built housing, apartment buildings included, to have electric vehicle charging infrastructure - and more than just a few plugs. Grants could be made available for retrofitting existing buildings. If these things came to fruition, we wouldn’t need two hundred thousand charging stations all over the place. It’s not out of the question to install an overnight charging spot for every person that has an electric car - it just costs money.

Basically every argument I’ve seen against low range electric cars is founded in a charging infrastructure problem. Going to a bigger battery in a larger vehicle has significant and more costly ramifications on other infrastructure. It’s better to aim for smaller, lighter vehicles with infrastructure in mind.

That obviously isn’t their position. They don’t own the building they live in nor the business they work for.

The used market is different for EVs than a combustion vehicle. I looked for a BMW i3 a while back and was only finding them halfway across the continent. Maybe that’s because people keep them for longer? Not sure that market has developed enough to know one way or another.

I understand what you mean about the average person getting it, and while that is important, I think the primary issue is the limited selection of small EVs on the market. As you point out, if foreign vehicles could be acquired without the steep cost, more people would drive them. As it stands, domestic automakers don’t want to make anything but twenty foot long SUVs because of the huge profit margins on them.

As far as ebikes go, I am definitely on that boat. Don’t have one myself - call me a traditionalist - but I wish more people would consider them. I agree that in higher temperatures, or humidity which I find worse, it’s uncomfortable. Though the benefit of (maybe idealistically) not having a car payment and associated insurance go a long way to making that discomfort palatable.

Personally, I’ve got a trailer for my bike that I’ve been using to ride 10-15 minutes to the grocery stores and do errands. A time or two I have even gotten some lumber with it from the hardware store. I thought about a specific cargo bike a while back but decided not to have an entire bicycle for that sort of thing. The trailer is smaller anyway.

The safety factor of riding opposed to driving is the most important factor in my mind. It’s dangerous to ride along the side of a multi lane road. Paint doesn’t stop drivers from crossing into a ‘bike lane’. Even a curb or those plastic bollards are insufficient in my mind. I ride nearly primarily on trails or the type of streets that are small enough not to have any painted lines. For busier routes I use the sidewalk or even the boulevard if there is one.

The more people getting on the ebike wagon could cause better riding options to be developed in the area. That’s political though. Even if it doesn’t, it’s one more person taking a trip not in a car, making it a tiny bit safer.

Don’t get me wrong, obviously people like yourself make these long ish trips regularly and you’d benefit either from more range or better infrastructure. If, like gas stations, there were two hundred thousand charging stations sprinkled through the country, less range in the car would be less of a concern.

I know someone from my college days that hung a 100’ cord out her third story window to plug in her little EV. Nissan Leaf or something of that class. Worked like a charm for puttering around town.

I’m sure the data isn’t perfect, but as far as the averages go, it’s accurate for my driving patterns. Those trips you’re taking nearly double your yearly mileage, so that would certainly change your average. Without them though, you wouldn’t be too far off based on what you’ve described. I’m fortunate that I live near a train line for my regular trips out of town. Not an option for the vast majority unfortunately.

Another option a couple I know took was a hybrid. Most of the time they don’t use the engine, but when they go see family or what have you, they’ve got the range they need without having to find a charger. Pretty convenient if you ask me.

Eventually we’ll have charging stations all over, or maybe light rail, and going hundreds of miles in a day without a thought to battery depletion, but I doubt I’ll be around to see it.

A 300 Mi charge would mean if you can’t charge daily, you would be able to go a couple of days without having to do so.

Given most trips are less than 3 miles, if you had a 300 mile range vehicle, that’s about three months of average driving, not a couple of days. My point was that people don’t go on long drives the vast majority of time and don’t more than fifty or so miles of range.

I’ll use Tesla as the example here only because it’s the prominent electric car brand. Directly from them:

A 120 volt outlet will supply 2 to 3 miles of range per hour of charge. If you charge overnight and drive less than 30 to 40 miles per day, this option should meet your typical charging needs.

They go one to say you can get a 10x improvement on the miles per hour when charging from a 240v outlet. Even accounting for installation of a new outlet to the garage or side of the house, this would be far cheaper than buying a vehicle with hundreds of miles of range and using a supercharger every other week.

Sodium could easily replace lithium in EV applications if people would acknowledge that only 2% of trips are more than 50 miles. Though it’s probably moreso the auto industry’s fault that people have this assumption they need to prepare for a three hundred mile journey on a moments notice.

If manufacturers were putting out cars that had four figure price tags with double digit ranges, they would become the best selling vehicles within a decade and no one would care if it was sodium, lithium, or sawdust. Of course, there is less profit to be made from smaller vehicles and so the corporations won’t bother.

When 52% of all trips made are less than 3 miles and less than 2% are over fifty miles, I don’t think battery swapping is something any individual needs on a regular basis.

I could get on board if manufacturers were making $10,000 sub 50 mile vehicles that were compatible with a swap station so you could switch to a larger battery for the weekend. This would have to be a standard adopted by all however, and even before that, they’d have to make small cars. Which they won’t, because we all know they are too busy making trucks and SUVs.