YouTube lived off venture capital, search sponsorships, and content hosting. Venture capital is long dried up. Search sponsorships are just advertisements but clogging your searches. Content hosting isn’t really needed anymore since every large media company has their own streaming platform. Lot has changed since 2006.
How long back did you use Nord? Their Lynx protocol works very well and never had issues. I’m planning to switch to Proton mainly due to cost saving. Cancelled my subscription to Nord and it’s just a button on the website. Feels the Nord hate is overblown. Would I recommend it to someone doing serious stuff where a leaked ip could mean literal death? No way. But would I trust any VPN out there with my life? Not a chance.
I’ll take YouTube over any other streaming service. With how much I consume of Youtube, only felt right to pay. Practically my cable at this point.
https://youtu.be/5QH8Dj6g_Nk Might be what OP watched too. I was surprised they’ve gotten so cheap.
I get a horrible flicker issue with wefwef. Requires me to close and reopen a few times to get it working right. Still using Jerboa mostly since it’s basic and functions enough.
It will get better when people get past the idea of a subreddit needing to exist on lemmy. I’m looking forward to more of the official creator type communities popping up. Those will be more “official” unlike android where anyone can make one and it doesn’t matter much.
I am running a patched version of Jerboa right now, think it was a fork on the github project. Unfortunately lemmyworld is having problems getting the update in place. Very alpha experience right now but I imagine things will start ramping up.
YouTube has already been helpful to a degree. Sometimes I’ll open their AI summarize and it will give all the details along with timestamps. There are videos where I saw the summary and passed on watching because the video was mostly filler material.