Why?
Serious question, too. You can sideload clients that give you every single feature of YouTube Premium for free. Unless you're expressly lazy, like being taken advantage of or enjoy watching advertisements, there's really no excuse. YouTube Premium is the "I'm trapped in this place and you people have finally gotten me" fee - you can circument it all together by just, not using YouTube's software. Newpipe is must-have on Android, I'm certain something similar exists for iOS. I run SmartTube on my dirt-cheap Amazon FireTV and don't get a single ad when browsing. Subtotal is $0.00 for the installation and usage of Open Source software.
I use YouTube a lot, but between uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock (which I set-and-forget like 4 years ago) I don't have a single gripe with the experience. I hear people contemplate paying YouTube for a worse experience and it gives me hives. The content is on a server; you are making yourself miserable by acquiescing to a harmful client. Paying for YouTube Premium is your eternal reward for submission to the Walled Garden.
It's about 2 things
1. the principle. You get something, you pay for it.
2. the practicality. Youtube cannot run on fumes. It needs to generate funds from somewhere
If everyone decides to not take premium, it only incentivises youtube to harvest your data for a profit (yes, they're already doing it but that's not the point). Premium immediately pays for the product, and provides Youtube with the cash to run it's servers and pay it's content creators.
Not to mention, premium is pretty darned good, provides almost all the features and functionality that are available through other clients.
That was it and I side loaded STN. I feel bad for content creators, but I let my favorite ones know about it.
>I feel bad for content creators, but I let my favorite ones know about it.
Same. Sometimes I try to support my fav ones with a nominal patreon subscription whenever I discontinue my premium.
The answer is the same to all these questions: because I’d rather not live in a world where everyone is a taker.
I see a lot of people say this, where they despise YouTube and it's advertisement scheme but somehow mentally justify it to themselves that Google deserves their $10/month. Before any of you ask "What's wrong with the world these days!?" again, reflect on what you're paying for and how these companies sucker you into buying it. The free market can pound sand, Google has you right where they want you.
You could choose something better by consuming media from sources that don't engage in the malpractices you're complaining about. There's plenty of media available for purchase without advertisements or subscriptions attached. There's also plenty of media on offer for free from the people who created it.
I'm not even anti-piracy, but your rationalization is just ridiculous. No, you're not sticking it to the man; you're being subsidized by people that are willing to pay for content they consume.
I've pirated a ton of content/software in my lifetime and I use adblockers. Countless mp3s, video games, applications, movies, tv shows, and articles online consumed by me without paying for it. Sometimes it was impossible for me to pay for it because of regional licensing, but a whole lot more of it was simply because I didn't want to pay for it or I couldn't afford it.
Now I pay for music and other media streaming services, including Youtube Premium. I pay for the games I play and I pay for a lot of software that I use. Does that balance things out? Maybe, maybe not. But I'm definitely not someone that is pretending I'm on some moral crusade against advertisements by circumventing them.
I will proceed to live my life paying companies and creators that provide me value and you can continue feeling like a victim where every action you have the option to take is exploitation
This feels like a "you participate in society" argument. Yes, it'd be better if all intrusive ads were banned or heavily regulated. But that's not reality and I can't simply withdraw from the internet in protest.
>If you consider advertising bad enough to pay money to get rid of it, why would you pay that money to the business putting up ads?
it's a calculus of "energy spent" from fighting vs value gained from "giving in". There's fortuntaely more value than "remove ads" so that's how I justify it.
>Because you refuse to leave their client?
because I can't leave the client. I've been de-googling for the past year or so and I realize the main two things I can't leave are
1. Youtube, because it basically has a monopoly on video content.
2. gmail, mostly because there'd be a huge burden ediing almost 20 years of accounts all through the web to leave. From random sites I visit once in a blue moon to my banks and bills. I'd have gmail haunting me for years even if I dropped it today.
If there's one thing that has a reckoning coming, it's Youtube.
>Because you don't want to acknowledge the scary world of choosing something better?
I do it all the time. There is always friction so I think it's a bit dishonest to phrase it as "choosing something better". Firefox still has quirks with translation and the occasional weird interaction with factors like video calls, even after days of researching tweaking settings and installing extensions. Picking up PC gaming still has tons of configuration issues and hardware considerations compared to popping in a disc into a console. There's simply a lot of intersting information I miss out on from not browsing reddit, things that the other 3 forum social media (including HN) just don't catch. It's never objectively better.
>reflect on what you're paying for and how these companies sucker you into buying it.
I suppose you can criticism any bill with that logic. Water is a natural resource, why am I paying for plumbing? video games are just code, all code should be free, why pay for video games? Why am I paying $100 for this art commission when someone in Venezuela would do it for a dime (disclaimer: this is probably a very wrong conversion)?
Some of these are societal (we're never going to escape taxes, some of these should hopefully be so you can support other workers instead of exploiting them. It's your call either way, but I won't fault someone (especially someone decently off) for choosing convinience of entertainment over some grand stand against "the free market".
Yes, that’s me. I sometimes even pay other people to prepare meals and manufacture clothing for me!
I have YT Premium and it works perfectly on every device I have and I have never had to configure anything nor research anything to not see an ad. I only vaguely understand some of the phrases or words you are using (have no clue what a newpipe is, but kind of understand what sideloading) is. I do not care to ever fiddle with my devices, there are more important or at least gratifying things in this world then futzing around with and tweaking devices.
> Paying for YouTube Premium is your eternal reward for submission to the Walled Garden.
If this is the great battle you have chosen to wage with your precious, fleeting time on earth, by all means, go with God -- but a lot of people really don't give a damn about Walled Gardens.
I owe so much to YouTube. The price I pay is small for what I get in return and I only see the service getting better over the years.
I'm not asking you to agree with me. But I hope you find this perspective useful in seeing how other people view it.
