There is no option to sign in on NewPipe.
NewPipe works perfectly for me for years now. I even use the Sponsorblock Fork to skip the sponsored segments from the Video Creators
YouTube Premium is the only media subscription I pay for because it's the only one I consider worth it. I watch an unhealthy amount of YT, listen to tons of music, and even use YT as a kind of cloud storage for thousands of hours of recorded video.
I’d probably be paying for YouTube, if it were run by a normal media company instead of the world’s largest spy network and personal data broker. There’s no way in hell I’m giving them my credit card information.
Yeah I don't really care about value when it comes to giving money to the guys who work with the NSA and CIA to find ways to more thoroughly spy on every user 24/7, and turned every search into "You asked for x, here's a dozen pages of what the State Department thinks you should have searched for instead"
Sorry for the down votes, you're 100% valid. YouTube Premium benefits me and the content creators I watch. Sure, it's more complicated than that, but everything is, and sometimes you just have to make choices that make your life a little easier.
Personally, considering I can get it for free, and that Google bad, $22 is a bad deal for me. I'd rather donate $20 to the groups helping us get around it, and spend the other $2 on jawbreakers!
Ads aside, what's been infuriating me lately is that YouTube seems to have degraded the quality of existing videos and locked the previously available quality behind the "1080p Enhanced Bitrate"; I have no way of confirming this since I obviously don't have Premium, but I'm fairly sure that the regular 1080p of old videos that I rewatch from time to time (uploaded 2-3 years ago or earlier) is now worse than it was. If it was about new uploads with something previously unavailable, it would've been somewhat understandable. Something also tells me that the paid tier is also going to get ads eventually.
Could be, I don't know. I doubt that video creators would go through all of these old videos just to update them to a slightly higher bitrate; the other possibility is that YouTube kept the original uploads or higher bitrate variants without previously showing them (and only showed them now), but that seems like a huge waste of storage, so it seems unlikely to me. Again, we're talking about old uploads (2-3 or up to 10 years ago), not new ones.
The one thing I've seen that makes sense is updating old videos that were previously available at up to 480p and bringing them up to 720p or 1080p (with the idea of keeping the original published video with the views, comments and so on instead of uploading a new one).
I'm guessing they're going to use the classic method of increasing the subscription price and then later creating a new lite subscription that does have some ads.