Subscribing to YT premium is also an evil act

YT premium is a good value for me and my family. Guess I'm evil.

Literally Satan.
Same. I watch more YouTube than probably any other streaming service. Plus I got the family plan and I sell the extra seats to my extended family and friends. Works out to be pretty cheap in the end.

I do the same for Spotify, Disney plus. Formally Netflix but they cut down on password sharing
I wish I could be as pleased with it. I don't want to pay for a service and have that service still collect data on me to push ads elsewhere.
- Unfortunately that's everything. Netflix, buying groceries with a credit card, even driving your new car.
- Mate, you can't use basically anything today then. Your car probably collects data on you. I'm not saying I love it, but life's too short for me to cut everything trying to collect my data out of my life. Gotta pick and choose my battles.
- If you block ads everywhere else then it doesn’t really matter. Pi.hole, AdGuard, proton vpn, Firefox will all block ads for you on pretty much every other site on the planet.
My 3 kids all use iPhone and we have a bunch of chrome casts. The only practical way to avoid the ads in YTP.
- YouTube Poop?
Newpipe
- I don't mind paying for good services, personally.
- Yeah until it gets shot by A/B testing again lol. I love newpipe, but for somebody with a family it's hard to justify, especially bc the non-techies of the fam are gonna want something that 'just works'.
get a good adblocker and donate that money to them instead.

thatd probably be the best value.
- I do use an adblocker, and I'll keep spending my money how I please, thanks.
- You subscribe to every single channel you watch on Patreon? That’s remarkable!

Paying for services?

Absolute evil.

Literally Hitler
"Absolute evil" is a bit of a stretch, but it's YouTube/Google's fault (by closing off and centralizing their video platform) that it is impossible to go elsewhere for videos.
- Google just made it really hard for creators to go anywhere else and created a monopoly of sorts.
  
  Literally every corporation does or attempts to do the same thing. What we would need is to revive the politicians that broke up rockefellers empire and tell them to do the same with apple, microsoft, google, meta, amazon and every tech „giant”.
  
  No more providing every imaginable service under one company.
- I don’t really understand how that’s YouTube’s fault. They created a good product so people used it and there were no alternatives when it got shit. There’s no lock in. They don’t force you off the platform if you post elsewhere (like twitch did). You can literally post the same video to as many platforms as you want. Sites like Instagram and GitHub have more lock in than YouTube does.
- I mean this is every ecosystem though right? YouTube, Apple, Steam, everyone tries their best to do it because they want you locked in.
Don't be disingenuous. We are already paying for that service, in our data and attention.

It would be an entirely different story if paying for Youtube Premium immediately opted you out of participating in Google's data-mining and data-selling, and if paying for Youtube Premium removed not just the overt ads but the algorithmically-manipulated advertising content as well (what is the effective difference between a Pepsi ad and a Good Mythical Morning video titled "trying every new Pepsi flavor"?), but it since it DOESN'T do those then we aren't talking about paying for a service - we are talking about a company asking for every penny in our wallet for a service which we are already paying for.

🙄

If paying for a service you use is the worst thing you can imagine, you really need to read the news at least once a decade.

Another happy customer of YouTube premium here. I canceled Netflix, never had Spotify. The only subscription I pay, worth it. The family plan works to 5 or 6 euros per person per month.

Same. I still feel the individual is worth it for me as YouTube is the bulk of content I watch. People also tend to forget that a portion of every subscription goes to the creators that you actually watch.
Yea YTP individual isn't worth it, but the family plan is (if you can fill the slots)
- Filling slots is how you make the family

Of all the current media subscription services, this is the one I have no issue paying for. The service I get for the money I pay is appropriate. I've taken my own measures to limit the amount of PII that Google can vacuum up from my life as well. I'm fine with them knowing what I like to watch and providing algorithmic recommendations for new content. I police said algorithm aggressively to ensure its always on topic and never trying to show me ragebait or shit I don't want to see.

When the day comes that the cost outweighs the return I'll stop paying for it and use Grayjay or Newpipe or whatever other option there is. If its a full on dystopia by then, well y'know what? I don't need Youtube to survive. I'll be fine without it.

Do I hate giving money to Google? Yes. Do I watch 6+ hours of Youtube a day? Also yes. I almost always have something playing in the background throughout my day, so it's the one service I'm ok paying for and I don't have to worry about it breaking like I would with other frontends.

Yeah, but it's not Youtube making the content I guess is my problem. Everyone is mostly here because of all the Reddit crap, doing the EXACT same thing google did to videos with youtube. No one here is completely fine with a "Reddit Premium Account!"^tm I patron a few creators so I help with what I can, I will not join the youtube "member" additional fee. I also have been trying to branch out to creators that upload to multiple sites, it can be a little bit of a pain like figuring out Lemmy and how everything works but obviously it's better than sticking with a company gouging and controlling content on their platform for profit.
- Patreon takes a cut of your money and gives the rest to the creator. Youtube does the same thing with Premium, plus creators receive a higher rpm from Premium viewers than they do from ads. And people left Reddit because they stopped supporting 3rd party apps. Youtube never supported 3rd party apps, plus there's no suitable alternative to leave Youtube for.
  
  Also, I'm not completely fine with Youtube Premium, but the pros outweigh the cons enough for me to justify paying for it.
- The channels you‘re watching get a noticeable chunk out of your YT Premium subscription though. I‘ve heard multiple YT creators say, that they get a lot more money from a premium view than an ad supported one (and nothing when you use adblock). And I definitely watch too many different creators to support each and every one individually on patreon/nebula/floatplane/whatever.
- Yeah, but it's not Youtube making the content I guess is my problem.
  
  They might not be making the content, but providing a platform for video is not cheap.
  
  Providing a platform that allows anyone to upload a ridiculous 10 hours in a single video in whatever crazy resolution they want, for free, really is not cheap. Then the bandwidth to deliver that 10 hour video at 4K, not to mention infrastructure to handle millions upon millions of people around the world is really really really not cheap.
  
  So its not like they're not contributing anything. Reddit OTOH handled mostly text, which is cheap. Most of everything else like images and videos were just links to other hosts that did the heavy lifting like imgur or YT
- And Spotify does make it contents? They even stopped curating playlists
You have already been paying Google for that 6+ hours before even a penny came out of your account - you're just been paying in data. We have to stop pretending Google is some good guy that left an open platform in the world and just said "if you use it we'll show you some ads."

Ads aren't even the main revenue stream for Youtube, data is. All of these points about "paying for a service" become moot the moment we acknowledge the value of the data Google is farming from our interactions. This is how we're paying for Youtube. If you choose to buy Youtube Premium, understand that you're paying to not have ad interruption. You aren't paying for Youtube, because that was already happening, you're just paying for the convenience of avoid ads.
Honestly, is this true? How do you keep on top of content you actually wanna watch? I'm not sure since when but youtube recommendations have gone so downhill and a lot of the content creators I used to like don't release as much as they used to so even when I wanna browse YouTube there isn't anything I wanna see.
- Over time I've curated the list of creators I watch, so my recommendations are pretty good at feeding me what I like, though I do usually have to scroll through a lot of junk. And when the recommendations aren't doing it, I'll just manually go to a channel I like and find something and the algorithm will quickly adjust.

Remember when the big selling point of cable TV was no advertising? And then it became 99% ads?

Yeah.

ummm I was born ~90 and I've always seen commercials. don't take it the wrong way, but when were you born???
- Before the 90s. I think the best time for cable TV was between 1982 and 88. MTV wasn't crap. The History Channel had actual history shows and the Discovery Channel always had top notch science shows. We also had "Night Flight" on "USA's Up All Night." They would run back to back episodes, starting at 9pm on Saturday nights and ending around 4-5am Sunday.
  
  Anyone who remembers 80s cable TV should feel incredibly ripped off by what they're showing today.

I am displeased with premium these days. My use of premium was to remove ads and give creators a little more money. The issue today is every single video will have a sponsor spot that is an ad. So here I am paying extra to get rid of ads and the creator just made their own. Using sponsor block has become a requirement to get past the wall of ads.

I don't mind in video sponsor spots because at least the creators are being paid directly for those. Personally, I just skip em or if it's a creator that makes them funny, I may just listen anyway.
- Those sponsor spots absolutely blow my mind. They're there, forever in the video no matter how times it's viewed. That's a lot of trust to have in an advertising relationship, both the creator (who is basically tattooing a person in a portrait they're painting with an ad) and company have to determine if it's enough compensation based on..... feels I guess lol. I'm pretty sure there is some after data but how do you know which videos take off or not? Then if there's any controversy, whole things a mess and I hope they get a lot for it.
- I don't like these segments because they are either unavailable in my region or they are a promotion of a shitty product like Op**a **, that later will get called out for being from a terrible company.
They're adding skipping those to premium, too
They're testing a function where it quickly skips to a point most people skip to effectively skipping sponsors. At least I got that experiment.

YouTube premium comes for free with my Google music subscription. Or the other way around. Idk

Thank, finally i can be evil without doing the genocide.

Wheres the fun in that?
- C'mon, we all wish to be evil at least once in our lives! 😋

Newpipe

I kinda got grandfathered into Youtube Music by using (and enjoying) Google Music, and since YT Premium was only like $2 more, I got it. I primarily use it for the music. The no-ads is just a bonus for me, I guess.

I did the exact same. Google Play Music was actually a good service back in the day. I hated it when they turned it into YouTube Music. I complained about all the broken stuff, so they gave me a home speaker for free and upgraded me to YT Premium for a year. After that year I stuck with YT Premium, since it was less than $2 extra. They also fixed a lot of stuff I complained about. Not everything, but a lot of it. I think YT Music was released a bit before it was ready. Now it still has some issues, but is mostly fine.

Usually I watch 1 or 2 YouTube videos a day and without Premium I would most definitely not. I opened a YouTube video on a computer I wasn't signed in the other day and it started with a 2 minute unskipable ad about crypto stuff (an obvious scam). So I closed it real fast, no video is worth sitting through that. Even with Premium I still need SponsorBlock. But with that combination watching videos is actually fun.

Still listen to YouTube Music all day at work, so that's a good value for money for me.
- I think that's why a lot of people dislike youtube premium, because it seems they made the free youtube intentionally very annoying to use without it. Similar to spotify where if you use the free version there's a ton of ads and half of them are from spotify themselves asking if you're tired of the ads
I wonder what happened to me then? I had Google music for $7.99 a month, then when they changed to YouTube music they gave me YouTube Red at the time as part of my subscription. Years later I'm still paying $7.99 (+ tax) and it's changed from Red to Premium.
- Same here. My monthly is $8.42. It's kinda hard to beat that deal, but man, i sure wish Google would fix a lot of stuff that's making YouTube / Music a really crappy experience.

Then God created newpipe

Smarttube for your android based tv things like firesticks

I have begun to see that YT is being hostile to adblocker users - and this worries me. I assume YT is already probing the clients to see which are circumveting the ads.

I had an (let's say unconventional) idea at one point: an add-on which only purpose is to show the YT ads in the background which uBO blocked. All of the blocked ads would be played (eventually) - except that the user can just ignore this happening in background and wouldn't be actually seeing the ads. I.e. the browser would just move playing the ads into a background container not visible to the user.