People also have different ideas of what "hard" is. I've never tried setting up a mail server so I'm talking out of my ass a bit, but after reading the article it sounds like you'd need to do a bit of googling/trial and error changes to get things set up, probably one of those projects that would take up most of a saturday or at least a saturday afternoon and might run into some hiccups every few months that requires more googling/tweaking.
Even if I'm way off base about the mail server set up being this way, some people still consider this type of "saturday afternoon" project hard compared to something that just works out of the box without any fiddling and can be set up in 20 minutes. I'm not trying to be elitist by suggesting these people are dumb or lazy, just that the semantics of what "hard" is varies for people, especially with little projects that require fiddling/tweaking/looking for outside help.
This completely. I've never used TikTok, but my understanding is that it is more akin to SnapChat for lipsyncing. I'm sure there are a lot of people who use YouTube for that type of content and have been pulled to TikTok for it, but it does not seem like an alternative to me as someone who almost exclusively goes to YouTube for content that is at least 10 minutes or longer and more like a replacement for television.
I have done no research into this at all, so maybe I'm just an asshole repeating hearsay, but I've heard YouTube is not even remotely profitable for Google. Owning the huge site definitely benefits them in a lot of ways beyond just ad revenue/profit, so I'm assuming from Google's point of view, until some other site can actually challege YouTube's dominance, it's totally worth it to have this stream of publicity gaffes to lose a tiny amount of viewer revenue than to throw even more money down the hole trying to fix the site's issue. It's like a wooden row boat that keeps springing leaks, as long as YouTube has free fingers to plug them, that's what they're gonna do rather than actually fix them.
Hopefully it will balance out the crazy optimism so many other posters are having over this announcement because they think they'll make money off of it.
Agree with everything you're saying, I really am surprised at how overwhelmingly positive the response has been for the most part on hacker news. I really don't see 99% of OSS project contributors making money from this, let alone enough money to make a living, but it's hard for me to interpret the response as much less than delusion.
People are probably going to get jealous/upset if they find out other contributors are getting more donations than them, especially if they feel their project/contributions are inferior to their own. A lot of people are suggesting they change things to make it so you donate to projects instead of individuals, but I feel this would be even worse. The politics of open source projects can already be big head aches, but throw money into the mix and it will get even worse, as someone will have to decide how to divide things up, and then we might get into a situation where people refuse to even contribute to a project unless they're guaranteed some sort of payment for their contribution.
It's obviously still a little early to be completely shitting on the idea, none of us really know what's going to happen, I just think everyone needs to temper the excitement a bit and take a moment for a reality check.
Even if I'm way off base about the mail server set up being this way, some people still consider this type of "saturday afternoon" project hard compared to something that just works out of the box without any fiddling and can be set up in 20 minutes. I'm not trying to be elitist by suggesting these people are dumb or lazy, just that the semantics of what "hard" is varies for people, especially with little projects that require fiddling/tweaking/looking for outside help.