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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Genuine question, what does anyone else think of Nebula? It’s very high quality but it doesn’t have random videos that you would turn off your mind and just watch.
It is a different concept compared to YT. It is more oriented towards professional content creators, not like the original idea of YT that „YOU“ tube (share) something random.
Also there are examples where Nebula stops collaborating with creators due to weird guidelines, so basically indirect censoring. Checkout out the YT channel „Second Thought“. And I mean if YT still allows that content but Nebula doesn’t…
I forgot about Second Thought. I googled about being him kicked out from Nebula and many people accuse him of having become a full on tankie.
I don’t really want to get invested in the drama but I’m not surprised. Last time I watched Second Thought, he had been more radicalised but I didn’t expect him to become a tankie.
Not privacy friendly in the least
I don’t like the fact that it isn’t open source, it isn’t decentralised, it runs for profit like every other corporation, the money from the subscriptions don’t go exclusively to the creators (or considering there are running costs for the platform, the only money deducted from the creators being these running costs), but instead 50/50.
If a decentralised video platform is too hard to achieve, then I’d want nothing less than a open source, non-profit company, being open about their running costs and how much from the subscriptions they require to cover them, for me to give them my money.
I like it. The workers made a quality competitor by taking ownership of their own means of production and dissemination. I Also really liked that they explicitly allow video downloads.
A non profit company isn’t a company
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 understand this, but the problem is that every popular platform starts off not making money and showing a good face. The problem is that there is nothing telling me it won’t make Reddit’s turn when it decided to go public. That’s how corporations work, and the promise of the owners will never be enough when it comes to being fair to the creators and subscribers. It’s true that it’s unquestionably better than a YouTube monopoly, but I personally will only support individual creators until a platform that is truly non-profit emerges - I just don’t see how Nebula is a step in the right direction, it follows the same old model. I understand the problems of decentralisation and that’s why I was talking about a non profit - just like the Proton Foundation is.
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.
No I certainly do not think that people with money and power should be trusted. That’s why I want it to be non-profit, the day this changes by its board of directors like you say, this hypothetical company loses my subscription and goes to the same list as Nebula. I don’t get how this is a counterargument.
I don’t see how the owners being a group of youtube creators is an argument. I don’t care about just any creators, I care about the creators I like and respect. A 50:50 split is of course better than yt, but it’s not just the running costs. Why wouldn’t I subscribe to the creators I like through ko-fi for example, where they take 95-100% of the money?
Creators having a stake in a company is of course good but it’s just not what I look for.
That could indeed be the case, I can’t know for sure, but supposing it motivates creators and encourages more creators and audience to join, it for one takes away from Google which is always a good thing but when it’s not open source and when the owners are profiting off of a big percentage of my money for doing nothing, I cannot get behind it. I’d rather support individual creators, it’s simply closer to my ideal scenario.
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.
My point in the first bit is that a non-profit is legally binding, at least in paper, to direct the maximum amount of subscription money to the creators. That could be the subject of corruption by people obviously, but it’s an important guarantee that it won’t happen. If it happens it’s a scandal. If Nebula amasses profits it’s not a scandal, it’s an expected behaviour by a private company. Do you see the difference? In the first case there is a legal safety valve, a guarantee.
And if anything changes like I’ve said I cancel my subscription and support it only for as long as it is truly non profit. So the hypothetical scenario you mentioned before is outside the topic. I am talking about a non profit, when they decide to change this, it’s a different company and a different discussion.
Oh and another important thing that I forgot to mention here is that, as I don’t care about any creators, I don’t want my subscription money to be shared proportionately to the size of the creators in the platform. I don’t care about the big ones, I only care about mine, so that’s a really important detail I don’t like about it as well.
In the second part is the not ideal part is the fact that there are owners that are not all creators. There is a 50% of the money that is directed to the creators and another 50% that goes to the people that own Nebula. That’s profit I don’t want to give to them. I think I was pretty clear. Yes 50% of the profit goes to the creators and 50% of the company will be sold to them if they ever decide to do so, but the other 50% is profit for the owners. The owners have profit for doing nothing, for being the owners, that’s bad and really far away from what I could get behind.
I’m not talking about ideal scenarios here, I’m talking about something that has been done already and it’s perfectly within legal and technical capabilities. A simple non-profit that is transparent about their earnings and their code.
I think we’ve overanalyzed it though.
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.
YouTube is not making Billions in net income. It is very expensive to host video
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.
They spend a ton on overhead costs. They are barely making a profit
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.
You are right, costs are not listed.
Nebula is more complex since creators own stake in the company. It is very much creator-operated, and to the best of my knowledge, the way it’s structured and monetized allows many of the creators to do projects that are otherwise impossible.