The problem is that they actually don’t mean that. And truthfully I don’t mind the idea of paying for video hosting, that shit’s expensive, but YouTube is going about it in the worst way possible.
Do you mean the actual video buffer or the page’s loading time? Because they made it take 5~ seconds longer to load on Firefox when they started going after adblockers and my filter that replaced it with 0.0001 (or whatever) seconds hasn’t been working for a little bit.
This idea that nobody on the internet is willing to pay for anything is outdated. Most people know that if it’s not money, they’re paying in data, time and/or attention. I much prefer paying with money, as do most people that use Proton, Kagi and other paid alternatives to free Google products.
Right. Some people get stuck up about getting things for free that they think they should get for free.* But a lot of the problem is the obnoxious ways companies go about control and profit.
*There are important arguments to be had about freedom, still.
"They do want to pay for premium! They just don’t understand what a great value it is! SHOW THEM THE AD AGAIN! SHOW THEM ON EVERY VIDEO SO THEY WILL UNDERSTAND!!! "
I pay for YouTube Premium. I didn’t really want that, I just wanted YouTube Music, but it didn’t make sense to just pay for YT Music. I don’t want Spotify and Amazon Music kinda sucks so YT music worked best.
I actually used to pay for the Premium account in Google Play Music, but disliked YouTube Music so much when they migrated accounts over that I canceled my subscription. Have they improved the radio/music discovery parts at all?
In the same boat. GPM was so much better than Spotify in terms of UI and basic features. People hype-up Spotify’s recommendations, but since moving there after GPM shut down, I don’t think I’ve ever had good music in my Spotify recommendations. Lack of basic features like being able to dislike specific songs, which they keep removing it with A/B testing, is so fucking infuriating!
I couldn’t justify $14 a month for YT Premium especially when YT Music sucks so much. And it’s very likely just going to get more expensive.
If they could stop bundling them both together and give me an option to just get rid of ads, I’d probably go back to paying. But for now, NewPipe is a way better experience.
I read everyone bitching about the ads but I don’t get them, and I have access to an awesome music streaming service too… you know, cause I have premium…
Why is it your responsibility to pay the creators? Google is a trillion dollar company and makes billions off of what people post on youtube. Shouldn’t they be paying them instead and not you?
Besides, it’s only a matter of time before Google takes more and more of the cut that you think you’re paying them.
Your logic doesn’t make any sense. They make money off of people paying for a service or watching ads. If you’re blocking ads then you’re costing Google money and no creators are getting paid. If you’re paying for the service then you don’t get ads, and you pay the creators, and you pay for Google to keep running the service.
Doesn’t change anything I’ve literally NI’d every single post of that matter and THEY KEEP SHOWING UP. I’ll even DRC to channels that post that content primarily and they’ll start show up half a year later. I’ve had it up to here with youtube’s fucking algorithm deciding what I want.
Do you pay for premium? From what I’ve seen the algorithm is much more hostile to people who don’t pay. I literally _never _ have these problems about YouTube recommending stuff I don’t care about.
And it’s leeching into lemmy via obvious astroturfing too. Ah yes an account less than a week old that does nothing but bring up how they pay for YouTube premium mmkay
Yikes!? Though never fail to underestimate the stupidity of… yeah okay I see your username, you already know that:-P.
It’s like why didn’t peasants rise up and overthrow their royalty long so, as those in the USA & France eventually did? Bc there was always a tiny handful of people who benefited from the status quo, and were willing to defend it with their very lives.
Or bc it’s Lemmy, it could also just be a pure Troll:-P.
Haha yea, shame on them for trying to transition to a business model that’s actually a great value for the customer compared to other music and video playforms, no longer relies on datamining customers to maximize ad-effectiveness, and brings in more income for creators than ads ever did…
It’s a totally stupid idea, YT should just eat the costs and be subsidized by Google search revenue forever.
Why can’t we just keep taking from the platform while its expenses are covered by some shrinking group of shmucks who don’t know about ad-blockers yet, drowning in commercials?
/S
I don’t understand this outlook. Like, sure, you can use adblock. One person stealing a mars bar isn’t gonna hurt Walmart… But if literally everyone just took their shopping cart home, never once paying, Walmart would just… Cease to exist.
What makes people think that math is any different for online services?
By all means, defect when warranted, but if a bad company changing course doesn’t net rewards, why would corps ever do anything other than the worst possible, taking as many users down with them as they can snare?
If google goes down someone else will fill the void. And I don’t give a shit about their numbers, if it’s not financially feasible to host everything without running a loss for years to extinguish competition and then to hike up the price, they should have thought of that before.
Aside from that, any Corp that goes down is a victory in my book.
I will pay for premium when it means they will not sell my data and will allow me control over my algorithm to prevent it from playing to my vulerabilities. Since they won’t change, I won’t pay.
I will never pay for premium. Yewtu.be and all the similar front end ad killers are always there when ublock Origin gets half a step behind in the never ending cat and mouse it seems to have with YT. Fuck tech companies. Fuck YouTube. Fuck Reddit. Fuck em all.
Google doesn’t sell your data, they’re one of the few that don’t. That doesn’t mean they aren’t misusing your data though. They’re more the dragon hoarder than the thief selling off stolen goods. They want all your data so they can learn everything about you. Selling your data to others makes it worth way less. It’s a difference in strategy. Google retains the data to enhance their products, Facebook sells your data because they have no products that would be improved by keeping it.
Sorry if I miscommunicated. No, they’re not selling your home address. But the idea that they aren’t monetizing your personal data aggressively is laughably wrong and heavily documented.
I don’t know who started this trend of “showing ads is the same thing as selling data” but it’s fucking irritating to see so many people confidently wrong about something they could figure out themselves if they thought about Google’s business model for 30 seconds.
Showing ads is not the same as selling data, but it’s also not really what google is doing. Google spies on you and uses that data to sell access to you to any company that wants to exploit you. They’ve also been known to give (not sell) data on you to law enforcement based solely on your location data or things you looked up.
Since we’re all dummies and you know the answers, please go ahead and explain how Google goes about selling heavily targeted ads to uniquely identifiable groups, but that they also are not “selling data”.
Are we being massively pedantic and saying that it’s not actual user data, but rather leveraging said data to sell ads to the anonymized targeted groups, who are actively tracked by Google around the internet so ads can be served up at opportune times in their browsing?
Because that dumb argument is like saying Oxford Dictionary doesn’t sell words, they sell definitions; or that McDonalds doesn’t sell beef, they sell hamburgers.
They sell ads, but data. If you can’t see the difference I can’t help you. It’s not “pedantic”, it’s being factual. Sorry you apparently think facts don’t matter.
when it means they will not sell my data and will allow me control over my algorithm to prevent it from playing to my vulerabilities
The problem is that this will never happen. That boat has sailed - companies will never give up on their existing revenue streams. They may say that paying today will exempt you from the ads, but it’s only a matter of time before they ramp up the cost and start showing ads anyway. That’s how cable television started, and it’s how internet streaming will end as well. And as for the not selling data/controlling the algorithm, well you have no way of proving that they don’t do that so they’ll do it no matter what they say.
There’s no reason for google to do this whatsoever. They have their business model - any new revenue streams will 100% definitely not reduce the other ones at all. It’s just gonna be another giant dump into the pile of enshittification.
I would pay if it were more a more affordable price.
I haven’t browsed apps in ages so idk if it’s still common, but I remember lots of apps having a lite version and a paid version. Lite version has ads and a sometimes couple less features. Full version ad-free and potential extra features.
I liked that. Let me decide if I enjoyed the app enough to pay for the better version.
Before Reddit went down in a fire, I paid premium even though I already had adblocker and no need for the premium features. And I would do the same for YouTube now, if it wasn’t so high priced.
I am consciously learning now what I think I subconsciously already knew. If I value something enough, pay for it. And I DO value YouTube’s videos. The current cost is just a bit uncomfortably steep for a monthly subscription fee.
People are out to lunch on this whole situation. Try running a service that hosts somewhere between 2 and 3 billion Gigabytes of data. Where basically anyone on the planet can upload gigs of video and YouTube will still make it available 10 years later. You are never going to crowd source that, ever. I also pay for premium and I get at least 5x the value of any other streaming service. Just on home renovations, it’s probably saved me 10k+ being able to watch tutorials about every kind of repair.
I’m very curious about why YouTube allow users to upload what seems like unlimited footage in 4K HDR and keep it around indefinitely. Only guess is they don’t want to miss out on the next big YouTuber. I upload a lot of video for very few views. There is no way in hell that Google make money from my account.
Youtube can show ads and offers subscription without being this shitty though. Just look on how popular region-specific video services like niconico (japan) or bilibili (china) operate. They also have ads and subscription, but nowhere as crazy as google adding multiple video ads upon ads and pick a fight with ad blocker users (which used to be a minority when google haven’t aggressively pushed more and more ads. the current popularity of adblockers today is google’s own doing). This is only possible because google has killed off competitors in those market and now it’s time for cashing out.
The best part is: Youtube doesn’t even do any of that. It’s the creators that try to keep other streams off the web, because they wanna drive traffic to their own channel.
Google having a history of all the videos you watch via your account.
Even if Google provided an option to opt out of tracking there would be no reason to trust then since they have lied about not tracking people in the past.
YouTube seems to redirect any Premium profits intended to creators to the entity which made a copyright claim on a video. This would be sensible if YouTube’s copyright claim system wasn’t so vulnerable to abuse. Normal (yellow) demonetisation will pay out from Premium though. youtu.be/PRQVzPEyldc?si=5-wFn2SqPZLdOlqa
Features are removed from YouTube to incentivise Premium such as playing videos while your phone screen is locked.
Similar to above, Google have been increasing the amount of ads particularly on phones where ad blockers are harder to use. I.E. pushing users to Premium not by making the service better, but by making non-Premium worse.
Playing while locked doesn’t seem to work unfortunately in Firefox for iOS. You can do the trick where you start PIP and then immediately lock the phone to play in the background, but that only works if you don’t unlock your phone again.
Point one: I’m pretty certain they already track that. With or without account. And you’re on the internet, without a VPN there is no privacy. You are also able to remove that history any moment you want. Is it Ideal? No. But you should’ve acted 10-15 years prior if you wanted to stop this. It’s still not ideal though.
Point two: I agree. There does need to be space for them to repent, but they aren’t actively trying to, so don’t trust them (see the next point as an example of that).
Point three That’s a shame. They really need to fix that, though with how corpos do things nowadays, not sure that’ll happen.
Point four: That’s normal, expected and a reasonable business decision. Most of these features they likely added after premium, and they’re meant as incentives. Why else would you want to but their premium, if not for the added features?
Point five: This is shitty and mostly inexcusable behaviour. It’s god awful, and they really shouldn’t do it. I do have to play devil’s advocate a little. They are fully, 100% in their right to do this. If you don’t like it, vote with your wallet (and time). If we stop using their services, they’ll stop making it worse. They are still A-holes for doing it though.
Point one: I’m pretty certain they already track that. With or without account. And you’re on the internet, without a VPN there is no privacy. You are also able to remove that history any moment you want.
I mean sure, they could try combining the user agents my unofficial apps provide with my carrier’s NAT IP to build a profile on me, but it would be highly inefficient and imprecise to the point where it’s almost useless for them. With a Youtube Premium account they have an identity tied to an email address, full name, and payment info that they can relate every click in their apps and websites to. If I also use their other services with the same account, I would be paying them to spy on everything I do and sell my data, so other companies can sell me crap.
If you’ve already got that much of a set-up to guarantee privacy, it’s a very good point. Most people aren’t that dedicated to privacy (I think), but it’s still a very valid point in your case
I would be very interested to know how good they are at tracking a user across brand new browser sessions. I have mine set to delete cookies, cache and history (minus a few trusted domains) on close but I’d imagine it would be easy to differentiate between me and others in my household by browser fingerprints alone. The only question then is whether those guesses are reliable enough for Google to essentially treat those sessions as 1 person, or throw it away since there are bound to be quite a lot of cases where 10s or 100s of people on the same IP have very similar browsing habits and configurations and trying to figure out who is who would be incredibly difficult (think offices where everybody could have exactly the same laptop and share similar browsing habits due to working for the same company). That’s my cope anyway. The alternative is Youtube over Tor for which would be painful.
Points 4 and 5 on my end are essentially two sides to of the same coin. I should clarify, I don’t have a problem with YouTube introducing a new feature and making that Premium-only.
I mean, fair. The two big reasons are that your views are worth much more than normal viewers to creators, so it does mean you’re helping support the content you watch. Further, the more people who pay for content the less influence advertisers have. All this said, I would assume that $5 a month to your favorite creators (Patreon, Paypal, Librepay, etc) would be worth more to them than a share of your YouTube Premium subscription fee.
That’s what I’m thinking. The day I have a job I would much rather support my favourite creators directly than pay YouTube and hope for some trickle down effect
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