I'm paying $12/mo for YouTube Premium because I consider it an exceptionally valuable service, but they only offer automated support. Google can afford to give high quality customer support, as we've seen with Project Fi, they just don't care about their users.

I think I'd phrase this a little differently. It's out that they don't care, it's that they practically deify software.

Their hyper-obsession of algorithmic trivia in hiring, I think, leads to a natural conclusion that there's an algorithm for every problem. And, indeed, every product they launch is extremely heavy on technical complexity with little reliance or consideration for customer value.

This is purely opinion with no real data, but it's what I've observed for about a decade now.

how come the revenue google makes in advertising on those videos can't be used to cover the cost of such support?

It should not cost money for a user to correct the mistake of a service provider. If the telephone company shutdown my number, i have the telecommunications onbudsman to call and get the problem fixed. Granted, youtube isn't as essential as a phone, a similar body should exist to ensure that online service providers are treating customers fairly.

> how come the revenue google makes in advertising on those videos can't be used to cover the cost of such support?

The first rule of making money is to not spend money.

> It should not cost money for a user to correct the mistake of a service provider.

You aren't paying for the service though, the people who buy ads are.

Actually, it's the users/consumers who are paying for it all, with their privacy and by buying products from companies with vast advertisement budgets.

Isn't taking this as an absolutist view kind of myopic? Sure, people don't pay anything to watch and each person's eyeballs aren't worth that much. But pretty much the entire value of the service is locked up in the crowd of these people, led by the minority who actually create things. Annoy enough of the creators (or lose the trust of those who see what happens to their peers) and they'll start to leave, taking your advert-viewing crowd with them. The network effect makes this really difficult and slow to begin with, but we're already seeing attempts by people like Wendover Productions with things like Nebula and CuriosityStream. I'm curious to see how this plays out over the next few years (and if it's similar to anything that's happened historically?).

> things like Nebula and CuriosityStream

i wish them success, but i doubt they will see the sort of revenue possible with youtube. These premium subscription services are more like netflix, where they need to provide value proposition to the payer. They don't scale tbh, as the majority of the internet is non-paying. I suppose with a large enough backlog, it can start to look attractive for viewers to pay to subscribe.

But then you have to see that every company wants their subscription. If you wanted to have access to each service, you'd end up paying 100's of dollars per month. So more likely to happen is that people see a specific series they want, and pay for just that month.

Youtube's business model is much more broad and does not depend on quality content, but on the existence of a large audience. I think creators go to where the audience is, not the other way around.

So a protection racket, only not by a third party but by the vendor?

Nice YouTube account you have there, it would be a shame if we accidentally destroyed it...

I'm more in favour of a) splitting out parts of Google until it becomes managable b) new regulations that protect persons and companies in extremely one sided relationships (man vs Google). We are already starting to get there with GDPR and I'm seriously hoping that we'll see it enforced more in near future.

you can't force them to provide a free service to you.

Not for now.

My idea here is that we need to formalize this relationship and regulate it.

YouTubers aren't Google employees but they are still extremely valuable to Google only in a very one sided relationship.

Youtube was net negative for a long time, it is a model which is very hard to get profitable. If they were forced to spend more likely they would just shut down the service or force you to pay fees.

If a service cannot be offered both responsibly and profitably, perhaps it shouldn't be allowed to exist?

Very good point.

But still, even if some other business lost money for years that doesn't give them a do-whatever-you-want card.

I think a lot could be done automatically to avoid a number of the dumbest automated account removals that we see here.

That should limit the workload quite a lot.