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David Muccigrosso's avatar

Intellectual property rights are worthless without distribution. No creator is owed distribution, any more than jackass right-wingers are entitled to not be banned from social media for spreading hate and lies.

Google owns the distribution. Or at least some chunk of it. I find it notable that plenty of content creators upload with zero hope of ever monetizing, just because they want to — and I suspect that’s because they find “distribution for my copyright” to be a fair trade.

Influencers were never a sustainable or socially positive business sector anyways. It was vapid and clogged our society with a tidal wave of bullshit, and as you mention, has distracted our youth with a mirage of “easy” money for an absolutely pointless and absurd “career”. I’m not shedding a tear for that business model being eaten by its own distributor. People with successful influencer careers will get hurt, sure, but this looks less like an “ass-raping” to me than the snake eating itself from its own tail.

Everyone else, meanwhile, will probably just keep using YouTube to upload the same hobby content they always have, except perhaps a little more responsibly and warily, and they might have to use a new generation of spam filters to ignore the slop. La plus ça change…

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Kenneth's avatar

Yet another reason for me to feel no guilt for blocking ads on YouTube and using a VPN to opt out of their superfluous tracking cookies and other ad-related bullshit.

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