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.
Not to be rude, but I’m struggling to believe half the comments in this thread are legit. Do you really mean to tell me that Lemmy, a platform notoriously populated almost exclusively by anti-corporate tech people that really value FOSS and privacy –hence the reason why all of us are here instead of Reddit– has this many users thinking it is a remotely acceptable idea to pay for a Premium service for one of the most invasive companies online?
I think most of us understand the many underhanded techniques used by Google to achieve an almost monopolistic control of some aspects of the internet, but when talking about YouTube, suddenly all the logic is reduced to “if you use a service, pay for it, or else let them show you ads”?? what??? Also, what’s with comparing adblocking to stealing???
My own answer to the topic of this thread is that no, I won’t be paying for YouTube Premium anytime soon, possibly ever. Google has betrayed my trust many times in the past, and on top of that I don’t consider adverts as a legitimate source of income, so I will block any and all ads everywhere without paying an extra cent.
“But if you keep using their service, so you need to give them some form of revenue! Otherwise you just want free stuff!” I only keep using their service because Google has spent many years dumping on other platforms so that YouTube is –almost– the only platform that still exists where all the good creators are, so I will begrudgingly watch them on YouTube because there aren’t any options. But I will resist Google’s many insidious attempts to monetize me to the best of my ability while doing so.
That said, it’s really dishonest to claim that people who block ads on YouTube just want free stuff and don’t understand that services have a cost. Personally, I pay for Nebula because I do support the project and the creators involved. But YouTube won’t see a cent from me, not with my consent at least.
For me it’s a matter of practicality. I wouldn’t pay if I didn’t feel I had to. It’s easy to block ads on PC, sure. Other devices, less so. I could get a Pihole or similar but then iirc you have to basically be playing cat and mouse with Google ad domains and that just sounds like a headache.
Not everyone is on Lemmy because they’re anti-corporate, FOSS enthusiasts. For example, I came here because Reddit became a dumpster fire of unreasonable policies and very restrictive accessibility to the site. I simply will not install their app. Everything I’ve seen and heard about it is revolting. I’m certain I will hate it and I’m not going to bother trying at this point. Since a nontrivial amount of my time on Reddit was via an app, and that app no longer works, I’m just not going to use the service.
I like FOSS, and I support FOSS whenever I can, but I’m hardly anti corporate. The big G has tried and failed at getting monopoly status for most things. Arguably their most successful services are search, mail and YouTube.
Me, personally, I pay for Google’s services and share those benefits with my family. We have extra Google drive storage, YouTube music/YouTube premium, and all the benefits that come with that (I don’t recall all of them right now). One payment takes care of my entire household. So for less than $20/month we all enjoy all the benefits of those subscriptions. It comes out to less than $5/person/month.
I don’t blame anyone for not wanting those services. I certainly don’t hold that against them. I completely understand the viewpoint. YouTube is very aggressive about everyone having premium. I see ads on YouTube when I’m using it on my work PC for music or to look something up on there; because my personal Google account is not and will never be associated to my work PC. I see what it’s like “on the other side” so to speak. I can see how aggro their efforts are to get people to subscribe to premium. How invasive the ads have become, and how annoying it is to deal with all that. I get it.
I also don’t really hate Google for it. They want people to buy their premium service and they have taken steps to try to encourage that. I understand, but I don’t necessarily agree with their choices.
In my mind they’re not the most egregious offender for being anti consumer in their methodology. Good examples of anti-consumer behaviour is Netflix trying to put an end to account sharing, or Reddit’s API changes that basically kicked out a nontrivial number of its users for seemingly no good reason. There’s plenty more anti consumer actions from other companies that I can point to that are far worse than what YouTube is doing.
In my mind, Google has supported FOSS more than most big tech companies. Android, at it’s core is FOSS, built on Linux. Chrome is based on chromium, which is FOSS as well. There’s numerous other examples of Google supporting FOSS. Sure, they have their own versions of that integrate Google services into the products and provide extra features on top of what the FOSS versions do. But I can’t think of any company that even comes close to the support of FOSS that Google has. In my mind they’re simply not the worst offender. They’re not innocent, but not the worst.
That’s my opinion though and it’s just one of many possible opinions. Far be it for me to impose my opinion on anyone else. If you want to distrust Google and use FOSS things instead, that’s fine. It’s your choice. If you agree but still don’t want to pay them for premium, that’s okay too. Or if you want to drink the Kool-aid and pay for all of their services, that’s also your choice.
I started using nebula which costs $30/year (discounted price, easy to get). It has some of the YouTube creators, shares revenue with them, has no ads, and isn’t google.
Sure it has a fraction of the YouTube content, but there’s more new stuff there every day than I could watch. And it isn’t toxic like YouTube.
See my other comment. I also noted a lot of the accounts that promote YouTube premium, are less than a week old. So there is suspicion of trolling or astroturfing
I’ve been riding an old “premium” subscription from the introduction of Google Play Music (or whatever it was called) years ago when it was introduced, for like $3/month. Seemed like a reasonable deal to me.
They did just (finally) jack the price up on me, though, so as soon as i get some free time i’m canceling.
"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!!! "
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
You say that as if it’s the only option while being on a platform that explicitly isn’t a single organization hosting the entire thing. There’s no way this is a serious comment.
Lemmy has 50 thousand users and hosts mostly text and static images. YouTube has 2.7 billion users and hosts mostly high quality video. Pretending it’s even remotely the same is pointless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They should include sponsorblock with youtube premium, I won’t pay 12€ per month to watch more ads than on free tv. Youtube doesn’t even make their own content. 5€ max for youtube would be okay with no ads.
YouTube cannot do that. YouTube’s content legal system does not allow this.
That said, I use SponsorBlock and love it to the degree of finding it necessary depending on what type of content I am watching.
Why do people hate YouTube Premium anyway? I don’t quite get it. I have had it since it was available in my country, and I love it.
Also, I have to say I use the YouTube Vanced app with SponsorBlock and custom layout (no shorts, no uploads, no etc.) and YouTube Premium subscription. I don’t like the default YouTube app.
So, I don’t know if I like YouTube or just the model and content/creators behind it.
What makes it so that you think you should be able to get creators and their content, server capacity, and storage for free? Who should be paying for it in your mind? Who should eat the cost? The creators, the platform, or the user? or all of them to a degree? And who should be able to profit?
I think it’s pretty clear that the end-user will carry most of the cost in the end.
But the software on it has been completely re-done to enhance it’s privacy and functionality.
I’m running LineageOSforMicroG,
with Magisk/LSPosed,
to run things like AdAway/XPrivacyLua/Blocker.
Additionally I replace everything I can with FOSS from F-Droid,
and scan all apps from Aurora (Play Store) with ClassyShark3xodus, against well known trackers, to either look for better alternatives, or to block the spy-ware in them with Blocker.
Further, a premium no-log VPN, which has been vetted (servers confiscated in the past, though 0 logs retrieved), configured as always-on + block connections without.
Yep, that might actually do it lol. Not even being sarcastic here 😅
But to be fair, I don’t think most people are tech-literate enough to set up and use all of that properly. I think it would help if someone compiled a one-install package of all of that, but lots of people just don’t like change.
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