• @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    [even bigger rock] “No, Youtube, I don’t want to watch TF2 content. Stop recommending it to me”

    It’s like why even have an algorithm if it’s just going to show you what it wants you to see rather than what you want to see.

    • snowe
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      21 year ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        Their algorithm is constantly trying to groom its viewers to the far right. They aren’t getting a cent from me.

        • snowe
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          11 year ago

          Like I said, none of that happens to me and I’ve been using YouTube since 2006. It really does seem like a difference between paid and unpaid amounts.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        I would get that but valve isn’t paying them to push that shit, they’re doing it out of their own volition.

    • Ann Archy
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      31 year ago

      Vivaldi + tampermonkey + GitHub scripts. And ublock, obv.

      I noticed Mullvad’s new DNS features seem to block a ton of ads by itself, so much that I can listen to Spotify Free for hours without any commercials!

  • @[email protected]
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    321 year ago

    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…

      • @[email protected]
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        121 year ago

        You don’t get access to youtube music with unlock origin. If you pay for a music streaming service anyway then going with youtube music and paying the few extra bucks to get yet premium is a nobrainer.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 year ago

          You can listen to music on YouTube without YouTube music…

          You can download the music easily with yt-dlp…

          It’s probably a good idea for me to not try out YouTube music, so they can’t show me what I’m “missing” and won’t pay for that…

        • @[email protected]
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          31 year ago

          My issue is that Spotify has sort of locked me in by knowing my tastes pretty well. My discover weekly and release radar as essential listening every week and I’m not convinced I’ll be able to transfer my fingerprint in a satisfactory way.

        • TheEntity
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          61 year ago

          Youtube Music worked just fine with uBO the last time I checked, and not a single ad either.

        • @[email protected]
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          91 year ago

          You don’t need to pay for any music streaming service separately? YouTube is full of music without any paywalls

    • sar1n
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      131 year ago

      Why would you admit to making poor financial decisions?

      • @[email protected]
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        211 year ago

        Why is it a bad decision? It’s the same cost as Spotify, but I get ad free videos. I don’t get this line of thinking…

        • @[email protected]
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          221 year ago

          It also supports the creators of the video as well. If I had the money I would choose premium over an adblocker just because of that.

          • @[email protected]
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            31 year ago

            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.

            • @[email protected]
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              91 year ago

              Lmao… Amazing logic.

              YouTube makes enough money to pay creators so you don’t have to.

              Ok, how do you think YouTube makes money?

              Error. Division by zero detected

            • snowe
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              101 year ago

              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.

  • Sagrotan
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    71 year ago

    On YouTube is so much knowledge, so much educational content, it’s no longer sufficient to administer it on a private level imo.

  • @[email protected]
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    61 year ago

    I’ve been slowly whittling down my subscriptions over time. At one point I think I had like 12-14 subs to various services, be it streaming, games, etc. But I was also up to my eyeballs in credit card debt and I had extremely poor personal finance skills and practices. When I met my wife, who was the exact opposite of me (extremely responsible with her finances, knew where every single one of her dollars was going), I knew I had to cut back significantly.

    Right now I have the following 5 subs per month;

    Apple 50gb data (1/month) YouTube Premium Family (22/month) Crunchyroll (8/month) Prime (15/month) ChatGPT (20/month)

    Basically 66/month in hard earned dollars.

    Prior to this I had the equivalent of an overblown cable package with all the bells and whistles, spending easily 350+ per month.

    I don’t judge anyone who decides to save their money, because we’re getting nickel and dimed to death. And by decentralizing the cost of subs to the point where it makes an Applebees menu look small, it makes it incredibly hard to figure out where your dollars are going, and hard to cancel as you need to contact a laundry list of independent service providers.

    My wife and I use YouTube and Crunchyroll as our primary entertainment sources, so we can justify those expenses. But all other sources (Netflix, HBO, Disney, Paramount, Hulu, etc) are so infrequent that we only sub for a single month if there is something we absolutely want to watch, and even then, we wait until the season is wrapping up so we can binge it in a week and then cancel the sub immediately.

    Just my perspective on it, and if we didn’t watch YouTube almost every night, we’d probably just figure out a way to hack the AppleTV to circumvent ads.

  • @[email protected]
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    271 year ago

    YouTube premium has millions of users and it makes them literally billions of dollars. There is no boulder.

  • @[email protected]
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    551 year ago

    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.
    • Balthazar
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      71 year ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        61 year ago

        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.

        • Balthazar
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          31 year ago

          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

      • @[email protected]
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        31 year ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          41 year ago

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

          It’s called fingerprinting

    • @[email protected]
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      71 year ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        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.

    • stebo
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      51 year ago

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

      • @[email protected]
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        81 year ago

        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.

        • stebo
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          41 year ago

          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

  • Karu 🐲
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    701 year ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      71 year ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      371 year ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        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.

            • @[email protected]
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              21 year ago

              Im not gonna lie, if raw content is all you want reddit is, like, option number 50 in terms of both volume and quality.

              Is it really content count? Or just habit?

              • @[email protected]
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                11 year ago

                I like the layout of reddit/lemmy. If there’s something like that but has the activity of reddit I’m all ears.

        • @[email protected]
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          81 year ago

          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.

    • @[email protected]
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      101 year ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      51 year ago

      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

    • @[email protected]
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      121 year ago

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

    • @[email protected]
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      71 year ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      41 year ago

      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.

  • MentalEdge
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • IHeartBadCode
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      81 year ago

      You’re not wrong, but that doesn’t mean YouTube’s model is correct. The basic understanding we all need to have is pay people for their bread. Don’t ever get more from someone that you aren’t willing to pay back in some kind. 20% tip for waiting staff might suck for a person, but do not “NOT TIP”. We tip till workers get fair wages or we don’t go eat out, but don’t go eat out and not tip. Same here. Don’t head over to your creators on YouTube and deny them their fair share be it premium or ads.

      YouTube takes a 45% cut on subscriptions. That’s not fair share and they don’t provide a means for creators to strike a balance. You can be angry at that. But don’t ever be angry at that and not give some fair share to the creators. Additionally, with the whole Channel Membership, makes the whole YouTube Premium questionable. Why am I paying $14/mo for Premium and then $5/mo/channel I’m a member for? Why can YouTube not see that I’ve spent x% time here at so-and-so’s channel and take x% of that Premium and send it to that creator (minus some off the top for infrastructure for themselves)?

      This is ultimately what I dislike about YouTube Premium and what I like most about Patreon. In fact, the majority of what I once watched on YouTube has largely shifted there to Patreon. The things is, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask folks to be FAIR about what YouTube is giving, so you’re right. But YouTube is a crap distribution platform that routinely robs creators of power over their media, exposure, and revenue and does so with impunity.

      People shouldn’t rob from YouTube to make a point. People should just leave to make a point. That’s the fair thing to do. And if you do enjoy content from your favorite creators, always make sure you tell them so by putting money in their pocket. If we want fair wages for one, we need to remember we need to want fair wages for everyone. And more importantly, the folks running the show need to be more affable to listening to the folks tending to the fields. Be it employers need to listen to their waiters and pay them based on that or YouTube needs to listen to it’s creators and address the various issues they bring up.

      We’re in an era where there’s a whole lot of “I know better” in the workplace and really I think we just need more partnership between all involved. I think if we had more of that, we’d have a lot more of the other issues solved by proxy. That’s ultimately what I have issues with YouTube, but just because I have issues doesn’t mean I go stealing things from them. You are absolutely correct in that folks should play fair if they’re heading to YouTube. We’re all in this together folks, don’t rob from each other even if you don’t like the means by which they get the money.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      Google doesn’t deserve your money.
      You don’t pay a bully so that they bully you a little bit less

    • @[email protected]
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      191 year ago

      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.

      • MentalEdge
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        141 year ago

        Then I hope YT gets legally enshrined and archived in some way.

        Like it or not, it is the sole complete repository of a lot of video and audio records for recent human history.

        It’s become something that should not be under corporate control. Something which should be treated with care and reverence.

        Yet it is, and isn’t.

    • @[email protected]
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      171 year ago

      no longer relies on data mining customers to maximize ad effectiveness

      You’re an idiot if you believe they won’t do that anyway.

      • MentalEdge
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        1 year ago

        You don’t say. Everyone does it.

        But it’s a shit source of income that nets mere cents per user, and should be made illegal as soon as political will allows.

        Hence, a good service should not rely on collecting user data as a sole revenue source.