I’ve been using it for a year or two now, and here are my notes on it.

• There are a lot of pretty good creators on there (real engineering, hacksmith, berm peak, and real life lore, for example.) .

• Though Nebula has a lot of good creators, the vast majority of youtubers are not on it, so you will really only be switching for the ones that are.

• It has pretty much every feature (user-facing, anyway) that youtube does except for likes/dislikes, comments, and live streaming.

• It is paid with no free-with-ads option, but it is cheap (currently $36 a year) and provides a comparable experience.

• It handles podcasts well, but there aren’t that many good ones (imo) and a lot of them seem discontinued.

• It has really good discoverability, but it does not match content to the user (i.e., no personalized home page).

• It’s homepage is made up of various categories like a normal streaming service, including continue watching.

• It is not a pay-creator-directly kind of service. you pay nebula and they give 50% of the subscription fees to creators based on view count. It is more like a streaming service version of youtube, in a good way.

Overall, I really like it. It does a lot of stuff right and I feel that my money was well-spent. I would like for there to be more of the people I watch on it (Dankpods, for example). Nebula’s pay scheme seems like a fair deal to me given the type of platform it is.

I originally dropped Nebula due to them allowing the channel “Second Thought” on the service.

While this particular creator may have been good in the beginning, over the years they have devolved into a source of tankie propaganda. The first video I saw from their channel was titled “Alternatives to capitalism”, which I had hoped would go through a few alternatives and list out pros, cons, and history. Instead, the video was summed up as “Amerikkka bad and therefore capitalism bad”, with 0 mention of any actual alternatives to capitalism as an economic system. Going through more videos showed that this was par for the course.

I was disappointed that Nebula would allow this creator on their platform, as they advertise themselves as a hub of educational video content. Thankfully, Second Thought had a very angry falling out with Nebula over Second Thought’s celebration of Hamas’s attacks on Israel. To clarify, they were supporting Hamas, not Palestine.

Recently I’ve started other Youtubers that have joined the platform. Combining that with Second Thought leaving is making me seriously consider signing up again.