I wasn’t saying that I thought that, I didn’t give my take at all, I was trying to be helpful in explaining what the other commenter meant. But since you’re calling me crazy…
To give my take on it, you’re right, there’s all sorts of ways that the lifestyles aren’t at all comparable, many things haven’t had the insane inflation that real estate has, so a person making 250k can obviously take a lot more vacations, go out to dinner more, buy more tech, etc than a middle class person from a few decades ago. But when it comes to buying homes, it gets a lot more comparable. Homes where I grew up have increased 4-5x in price over the last 25 years, so a family with a household income of 60k-ish (which is solidly middle class) buying a house that’s 3x their annual income would have been pretty typical in the early 2000’s. Now, if those same houses are being bought by households making 250k, it would be basically the same ratio of 3-4x their income.
So in home purchasing power (and that area only) low 6 figures is absolutely middle class, and anyone making under 6 figures has the home purchasing power of what used to be lower class
Youtube ads don’t just pay creators though, they also pay for video hosting, discovery, and streaming, which aren’t cheap. A lemmy for video streaming would be great, but there’s a reason it hasn’t really happened yet, you’d need a much larger portion of viewers to pay than what it takes lemmy to run, and you’d need a bigger community of developers to build it, which is why most youtube alternatives are strictly paid products. None of that is criticism of the idea, I think it would be great if we could wrench away some of youtube’s monopoly, but at the same time we need to understand why it’s a challenging concept