If you pay, the platform remains great. I get a discounted YouTube premium membership through my mobile phone company. I think YouTube is great, I never see ads, lots of features.

Just to offer an alternative view.

And this still won’t be enough to stop people from using it.

It’s a product. You can buy it or not. If you don’t think it’s worth it, stay away, or stay on the free tier. You’re acting as if you’ve got some kind of right to use a service that’s provided by a commercial entity.

What I'm not ok with YouTube premium :

• The price is too high for a subscription. For that price I could get thousands of movies on a competing service like Netflix.

• Even if you take YouTube premium they are still farming your data and selling it to third parties.

So even if I watch a ton of YT I refuse to pay to sell my data.

If I pay for YT they have to not track me and not sell my data (at least data coming from YT).

So yeah taking YT is hassle free but is quite the scam if you think about it. Before paying you were the product. After paying you are still the product but on top of that you give them money.

actively strives to make the user experience worse for people who don't pay

And evidently those who do! My parents live in a different country. What are they, not my family? What's the family plan for? (Rhetorical question)

With Vanced I have so many more options to customize my experience. I can hide shorts I never watch, set a fixed resolution for data and wifi, return the stupid dislike ratio they removed... And if I'm using Vanced anyway to fix all the issues they introduce, why on earth would I additionally pay for their service?

I want to pay for their shit, especially to support content creators, but I can't support a platform whose singular mission it is to make everything worse for everyone constantly. Feels like every month I have to get a new extension to undo some horrible design decision.

Well fuck. It never crossed my mind that YouTube would do this since I don’t view it the same as other traditional streaming services. This will really suck for my friends who I’ve happily let mooch off my plan for years.

A big problem with peertube is monetization. There should be some sort of mechanism that'd do that automatically. Otherwise there won't be much content ever. Don't get me wrong, I'm really happy that it exists but just don't see it replacing even few % of YouTube as it is.

And this still won’t be enough to stop people from using it.

It’s a product. You can buy it or not. If you don’t think it’s worth it, stay away, or stay on the free tier. You’re acting as if you’ve got some kind of right to use a service that’s provided by a commercial entity.

If you pay, the platform remains great. I get a discounted YouTube premium membership through my mobile phone company. I think YouTube is great, I never see ads, lots of features.

Just to offer an alternative view.

and it's a multi-billion dollar corporation, that already makes more money than you or I will ever see in our lifetimes, that actively strives to make the user experience worse for people who don't pay, when they've got a practical monopoly in the "free video sharing platform" market. And you're whiteknighting for them.

Why pay for premium anyway? Let alone a family plan. You still get ads. They can be skipped too — SponsorBlock will do it for free. Google could use this but chooses not to.

They want YouTube to be like cable TV. You pay for it. You watch ads. You pay more for premium channels.

What I'm not ok with YouTube premium :

• The price is too high for a subscription. For that price I could get thousands of movies on a competing service like Netflix.

• Even if you take YouTube premium they are still farming your data and selling it to third parties.

So even if I watch a ton of YT I refuse to pay to sell my data.

If I pay for YT they have to not track me and not sell my data (at least data coming from YT).

So yeah taking YT is hassle free but is quite the scam if you think about it. Before paying you were the product. After paying you are still the product but on top of that you give them money.

Wow, shilling for YouTube premium and anti-net-neutrality (the "discount through your phone company" part) in one comment.

it's because Youtube is a content monopoly. TikTok is a platform for short content...on youtube it's a feature with shorts. Twitch is a platform for live streaming content...on youtube it's a feature with, other than discoverability, the same features. Any music streaming service? again...it's a feature on youtube. The fact I could export my playlists from any music streaming platform and import it to Youtube and listen to it ad free via an ad blocker? come on. So as opposed to using multiple platforms, with youtube you have it all in one place. So no, this will not get people to stop using it.

Premium you don't need if you're even the slightest bit tech savvy. but no one is ever going to stop using youtube, there's no point. I mean I use peertube as much as possible but every now and then I'm back on youtube because of all those features in one place and some things I just can't find on peertube.

Run a personal VPN server at the home address and have external users route through it. I'd think it'd work for any subscription service doing this crap. I'm surprised nobody has started selling a turnkey self-hosted VPN device that even a non-techie can get running in a few steps - all the end users would need is an app that does split tunneling for the media players.

I pay for it. No ads. Background playing on mobile, and YouTube music included.

I pay for it. No ads. Background playing on mobile, and YouTube music included.