i don't see why you wouldn't just get premium? it's probably one of the better streaming service platforms since i watch youtube and twitch more than i watch anything on peacock, paramount, etc plus it comes with youtube music
Just like "they" were free to harvest personal data unless the user was able to block it, I'm going to freely watch YouTube unless they're able to block me. Of course I'm going to feel bad if they manage to block me and that's going to incentivize me to find a different way of accessing YouTube until there's no paths left and then I'll simply stop using the platform.
If Google is a monopoly (it's not), it's only a monopoly because they've cornered the market through previously good service. Now they're using this power to inflict larger and larger amounts of time theft, brainwashing, etc. It is actually good to block this trash and "evil" to profit from it.
"Time theft" is very questionable and more a topic for society as a whole but...
Okay? Then don't watch youtube. Rather than allow them to engage in "time theft" but calling yourself smart because you don't watch ads.
Also: As has been pointed out repeatedly in this thread, the scale of Youtube (and Twitch) is massive and truly hard to comprehend. The only companies that even have a snowball's chance of running that are Google, Amazon, and MS because they ALSO have giant "cloud" services. And... it is pretty clear none of them really know how to run a site like that (hence why MS just gave up entirely).
In fact the ads are not really a big problem for me (if they're not too much present) but the trackers behind are much more, so what is the point of paying to have the same amount of trackers, most of the time I watch my YouTube creators on privacy focused solution or going to peertube for the rest
Dude, I have YouTube music and I literally am not able to change or upgrade to YouTube premium. They don't let me, it links me to a useless empty page with no options. I don't even know what the price is like. This whole subscription thing is a mess.
I solved it by using YouTube revanced and have all premium functions and more. On desktop I wrote my own player. It's so much better because their website is a mess. At this point do I really want to pay for features I know I won't use?
It's an unpopular opinion but I do agree with this. Google deserves to get a lot of shit for a lot of things, but even after how far downhill YouTube has gone it's still the best hosting/streaming service out there.
Between podcasts at work and normal videos at home I probably watch more than 8hrs of YouTube a day with no issues. I may as well pay for it like I would Netflix, considering I get, like, 20x more out of it in comparison.
If there was a non-enshittified alternative, though, I'd gladly pay for it.
As much as it pains me to say it, I agree and am annoyed at the amount of "no, fuck Google" in response. I agree, fuck Google, but not because they're charging for a service so good that we all use it, fuck Google for its heavy user tracking of paying users. I understand it costs immensely to host the sheer amount of data that they do, and they still allow creators to have a portion of what's made from each video. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about sticking to the man and all that, but to want a website that provides the same service without any costs involved is unreasonable. Peertube is the closest solution we see, and there are still costs involved for anyone hosting a server.
I hate that YouTube is our only real option and I'd love something different, but they already have all of our content, and ultimately, they're fairly reasonable with their demands (pay for our service or watch our ads). The amount of user tracking they do is what's unacceptable to me, but that's across all of their products, and I would love to see some enforcement of minimum required data.
Most importantly because I don't want to support that wholly unethical company that google is, and I think nobody else should. They already have plenty of money, which would be enough, if they wouldn't be a publicly traded company with endless thirst for more and more and more and more.