56 points

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.

permalink
report
reply
33 points

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.

Have a great day.

permalink
report
parent
reply
16 points
*

I’m only here 'cause it was the first lemmy instance I joined after the reddit bullshit.

I pay for YT Premium.

I’m also back on reddit arguing with people.

So, yeah… I’m everything this place hates.

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

I don’t hate you. I’m sure there are plenty more that feel similarly.

I also feel like there is a nontrivial number of people who could not possibly care less; and as always, a silent majority of people who are simply lurking, who express their voice through voting only. (Special shout out to all the lurkers. You’re awesome)

It’s all personal choice and the opinion expressed in the OP is just that, an opinion. Same as me. I can only express my opinion. If that upsets people, then I’m sorry for that. I’m not going to change my opinion to gratify someone else in their opinion or position. If anyone wishes to have a discussion about why they think my position is not properly informed or wrong in their eyes, then that’s fine. I can engage in conversation about it, but at the end of the day, I make my choices, you make yours, and everyone else makes theirs. My decision to pay for YT premium doesn’t really affect anyone but me, and Google.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

We don’t hate here. Except capitalism. We hate that.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

No one hates you, some people just think youre an idiot for still using reddit after leaving it

permalink
report
parent
reply
13 points

Shoutout to Nebula! I might pay for it but it’s like old YouTube without the bullshit. Worth it in my opinion.

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points

Absolutely agree with the youtube subscription part. I am not giving them money if i can.

So what do I do? Patreon. I watch ad free, and i give 1 dollar a month instead on patreon. Win-win.

P.S. However, this way only a select few get money from me, but it is what it is.

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

I’m only here because Reddit pissed me off. I toss money toward my instance and I’d be fine tossing a few bucks per month to YouTube if it meant no ads.

permalink
report
parent
reply
-1 points

You have it all wrong. Giving money to FOSS is okay, giving money to YouTube is bad.

permalink
report
parent
reply

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

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

Half the community came from reddit during 3rd party app purge it’s no surprise they wouldn’t be too concerned or know anything about privacy

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
45 points

Reasons not to buy premium:

  • 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. https://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.
permalink
report
reply
26 points

Your utub link seems to contain a tracking Id.

permalink
report
parent
reply
9 points

Not particularly surprising. It was copied from the YouTube iOS app…

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

Meta-evil

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

Google having a history of all the videos you watch via your account.

They already do this anyway. They also do it whether you have an account or not.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

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

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

I would be very interested to know how good they are at tracking a user across brand new browser sessions

It’s called fingerprinting

permalink
report
parent
reply

Fyi all the removed features of the YouTube app they want you to pay for? Work fine on Firefox

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply

That’s weird. On Android I just take the “notification” and can press play and it’ll work just fine.

iOS always has been finnicky

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/PRQVzPEyldc?si=5-wFn2SqPZLdOlqa

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

What about the reasons to buy premium? Pretty much none right?

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

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

permalink
report
parent
reply
40 points

Im not holding my breath for someone to start hosting petabytes of videos for free. I don’t like ads, so I’m just going to pay.

permalink
report
reply
7 points

imagine paying to remove ads

permalink
report
parent
reply
14 points

They started the war, never forget, never forgive.

permalink
report
parent
reply
10 points

Used to be ads on the side of videos, and they were still scams like “Hit the target to win a FREE ipad!” At least they didn’t block the actual content. No one should ever feel bad about blocking ads lmao.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

It’s also cool that YouTube Premium pays a bigger cut to creators when compared against regular YouTube ads.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

I do like that.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

How much? I doubt it’s more than just enough to make people think that, “oh that’s nice”, while doing some absurd minimum…

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

If you want to support Youtubers, then buy their merch or something like that.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
*

The cost of supporting every YouTuber I watch with merch greatly outpaces the cost of a few years of premium

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
15 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

Of course, and that’s why something like PeerTube works differently.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Then give us a fair price. YouTube is not making any content, so I just wish to pay for the hosting privileges. That shouldn’t cost me 15€/month. Give me simple prenium that removes ads for 6-7€, and I will jump in. It’s all about what I feel I’m getting.

For instance, I fucking bought a 1300€ pixel 8 pro ROFL.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Counterpoint. There used to be far less ads

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

Counterpoint. Still not making profits.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Counterpoint to the counterpoint: Youtube made $28 billion in revenue in 2021. Bandwidth and storage space are expensive but i can’t believe they’re that expensive. If they’re not profitable then i have to assume that’s a decision they’re making.

permalink
report
parent
reply
31 points

1 Ad - Fine. 2 Ads - Ok. 3 Ads - Closed YouTube.

permalink
report
reply

4 Ads - uBlock Origin installed on Firefox

permalink
report
parent
reply
11 points

Should have been from the beginning

permalink
report
parent
reply
29 points
*

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.

permalink
report
reply
17 points
*

Absolutely. 5$,sponsor block, no ads and no music premium bullshit. I don’t want it.

Edit: I forgot! Give me the fucking downvote count back so I can quickly know which videos are bullshit you assholes!

permalink
report
parent
reply
13 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
0 points

I just refuse to pay to watch youtube videos which is why I dont like youtube premium

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

Yeah, I know that, XD but why?

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points
*

No they need to add DVR so i can save all my favorite videos abd dont have to watch them live /s

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

How is it relevant that youtube does little in house production. The revenue is passed to the creators anyway(by watchtime)

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Oh yes you are right, thank you.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Memes

!memes@lemmy.ml

Create post

Rules:

  1. Be civil and nice.
  2. Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

Community stats

  • 9.3K

    Monthly active users

  • 12K

    Posts

  • 269K

    Comments