December vibes. More places should just take the month off. Surely the data shows how unproductive most are. Now’s the time to get cozy and rest.

Even in death they’d be causing sea levels to rise.

Side note: the game “Baba is you” was named after this effect, and features a character named kiki.

From my research, Patreon takes a smaller cut than YouTube Premium. Comparing YouTube Premium to its own ad model is a “Worst Negates the Bad” fallacy. From what I gathered (not easy to find and has changed over time) YT takes 30% from the former and 45% from latter. Seems insanely high. More than taxes. May be why so many creators need sponsors and hawk merch.

YouTube never supporting 3rd party apps seems like a negative.

Lots of suitable alternatives to youtube: read a book, listen to music, go for a walk, hang with friends, play games, etc, but to your point, sounds like a monopoly. Their search was once great, then ubiquitous, now terrible. YouTube Premium is just in the “entice users and creators” phase of its inevitable enshittification.

Don’t mean to dump on something you like, just disagree with the reasoning. If you’re not fine with Premium and hate giving money to google, sounds like you’ll eventually seek out alternatives when they go into profit maximization mode. Hopefully enough resources will have been invested in viable alternatives by that time.

[edit: break wall of text]

downvotes? I’m guessing you may have offended some folks by badmouthing their favorite toy.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. My only source of income for more than a decade has been creating media that people stream or watch in theaters, so I must disagree. Under the current capitalist system, people do get paid, but I’m with you that it’s exploitative. People commonly burnout and run themselves ragged trying to make ends meet. I know I did.

I’m skeptical that piracy hurts CEOs and shareholders as much as you think it does. Piracy is nothing new-- CEO wages and capitalism doesn’t seem to care. Those with power can increase prices on paying customers, decrease employee wages or headcounts, and/or start legally pursue pirates. The latter being least relevant to my point, but with digital steganography, watermarking, intrusive tracking, and corporate-friendly laws (see post)-- it’s worth making clear that CEOs and shareholders have plenty of tools already in place to make themselves whole. Heck, pirate from Prime Video and Bezos can increase AWS rates and extract it back from most folks via services they (or their families) do pay for.

Not to say it’s hopeless. I’d like to shine a gigantic spotlight on your last sentence:

indy games/music/etc bought directly from the creators

That’s the way forward. Heck, toss it on a jellyfin server and share it with a few close friends and family. The knowledge gap to do that is shrinking. When many folks know someone who knows how to host, they can start pooling their resources.

The false dichotomy of stream vs pirate mentioned in my first reply could be rephrased as: spending money and attention on media giants vs spending just attention on them. Why not spend neither money nor attention on media giants? Save it for individuals and small teams making cool things. That creates a market and draws in more people to make more cool things and does more damage than piracy. Personally, I don’t see anything on Disney+ (or prime, netflix, etc) worth prolonging the current state of media, so I don’t waste any time on it. I’ve come across a lot of good books, music, and inexpensive hobbies to fill the void in the meantime.

TL;DR: Current state of media sucks, but pays more than pirates. More pirates not paying is not as effective as retraining money and attention. If a pirate occasionally goes through the extra steps to pay someone instead of finding a torrent link, they’re still dedicating significant time engaging with the winners of the current capitalist system instead of seeking out and boosting better, lesser known options. It drags out the current state instead of nurturing existing solutions.

I agree with (and experience) the problems surrounding access to media that you described, but I would also describe myself as pretty anti-piracy. You can be anti-middleman and anti-rent-seeking without being pro-piracy. While piracy circumvents the problems you mentioned, the question it leaves unanswered is how the creator of the pirated media will afford basic necessities like food and shelter. Alternatives to streaming are scarce, but they do exist-- especially DRM-free music and books. These are not static systems. The market will follow the money, so if folks buy into the false dichotomy of stream vs pirate, industry will continue to invest in DRM and anti-piracy measures and creators will continue to submit to streaming services / media silos. I’d prefer a system with as few layers as possible between creator and consumer. Piracy only offers a solution for the latter.