I got my subscription a few weeks ago. I’m kinda regretting going for a 1 year sub.
For one I thought both Kurzgesagt and CGP Grey where on here only to learn they both backed out of the project.
According to Wendovers video https://nebula.tv/videos/wendover-how-a-small-group-of-creators-built-a-150-million-business/. I get the sense this happened around the same time they sold a good chunk of the company to Discovery.
Seeing all the creators hang out on a yacht isn’t exactly a selling point for me as a subscriber who’s struggling to make rent.
I’m also pretty disappointed by the lack of some features. Many of the videos don’t even have captions and the ones that do are using a poor quality auto capture. I also really want comments. I know YouTube comments are known for being utterly terrible, but education is a conversation and with channels like these commenters can provide a lot of added educational value.
Also the history feature would be pretty handy. I go down rabbit holes then totally forget where I left off when logging back in.
And even shorts, creators use those. I hate the YouTube shorts but if I where to abandon YouTube I’ll lose out on that content. By using shorts the content creators are keeping me going to YouTube .
I’ve also noted a lot of content is still formatted to YouTube. They have the click boxes at the end for more videos wich isn’t a function in Nebula. It’s like the videos are ending with a broken UI.
Overall I’m seeing a lot of effort to make the platform appealing to creators. However, there’s much less effort in appealing to subscribers. Long term that seems like it’s going to cause the whole thing to fail.
If you can justify the cost so easily, why the regret? It’s not an ideal value proposition, but as you said, if you get more than 2 hours of entertainment value, then did you waste your money?
Ultimately, though, as you said, there’s better ways of directly supporting your favorite creators.
My regrets are more around supporting a project I no longer think is going to be sustainable after seeing that video. I still really like what the platform is trying to accomplish.
The world really needs a platform for educational content that’s not tied down by “the algorithm”. But I’m questioning if this one is going to accomplish that, or if it’s going to just fail like the others.
I’m also concerned as if content creators become dependent on the revenue from this thing and it flops, that’s going to be destructive to a lot of educational content.
As for my complaints. Well complaints are a sign of passion. I value this and want it to succeed. Folks are apprently equally as passionate about defending it as my post gets downvoted to hell.
Part of my job involves finding potential user complaints in applications. I can’t turn that off.
And we do get complaints at my job and we all groan and mumble about it. But it’s valuable feedback and appreciated. Complaints go a long way in determining the roadmap, as they make devopers more critical of their own work, and look at things from alternative perspectives. But perhaps they are not as appciated in this particular venue.
The downvotes here are mild compared to what you’ll get elsewhere.