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.

Ill immediately cancel and goto pure piracy if they do this to me. I'm getting so tired of this shit 🥲

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.

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.

I pay nothing for YouTube and don't get ads. YMMV

same here, I use invidious!

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.

Meanwhile I installed the User Agent Switcher extension for firefox to change my user agent every 30 seconds to something random to avoid tracking. A few websites don’t accept it. I just quit those websites and find a non-billionaire-owned alternative like Kagi or Fastmail. So far it’s working out well.

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.

That likely makes you easier to track. User agents don't really matter all that much if an advanced tracking script is used. When your IP address is the same, your browser engine is the same, your canvas data stays the same, your window size stays the same, your operating system stays the same, then they will just know that you also use an extension that makes your user agent not reflect your system and track you based on that too.

Use Mullvad Browser without changing anything important (change the default search engine at most) and preferably use a proper VPN to actually avoid tracking during regular internet usage. Or use LibreWolf to at least fool naive scripts.

I would suggest reading this too:
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/3.3-Overrides-[To-RFP-or-Not]

YT forces me to login if I am using a VPN these days, if I use Firefox or Safari. Brave avoids this. I will have to try Mullvad.

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.