The other problem is people treating small/medium content creators like they’re some corporate entity fucking people over when they’re not. The entitlement and sheer hypocrisy on this site is incredible to see. I’m specifically talking about people blocking sponsorships here.

FOSS has created this childish expectation that other people should spend their time creating shit for lemmy-type nerds for free, but that is not sustainable in a capitalist economy. Software only gets away with it because software devs make a comfortable living with enough free time to work on FOSS, or they actually get paid to work on it by some corp.

People applying the same expectation to creatives disgust me. A lot of smaller channels are not rolling in money, they’re making enough for a decent living or some side cash. And they earned that. There’s a huge difference between that and some giant media corporation ripping people off for content. Blocking sponsorships is immoral and downright criminal imo, and it disgusts me to see so many people trying to normalize stealing from other workers. Especially in our modern gig economy where many of these people turned to YouTube because they got fucked over by a recession or COVID.

Ads are annoying but I’ll deal with being annoyed if it means someone gets compensated for work that I enjoyed. The sheer narcissism of believing you’re entitled to free content from creators is enraging to be.