Have you tried Youtube premium? We always say companies should move out of the ad revenue model and start charging for the services instead of pushing more ads. For me, paying Youtube premium has been a great decision.
Here’s the problem - if you don’t already watch a lot of YouTube the non pay version is such a bad experience that you avoid watching on it so you’d be unlikely to want to pay for it.
Seconding this comment. I grumbled at first about paying for it but frankly after more than a year I’ve come to realize it’s money well spent considering how much use my family gets out of it.
>>When in the history of mankind have the censors ever been the good guys?
I mean.....removing pedo or gore content from Youtube is still censorship. Just the kind that we probably all agree with. The way you view censorship(and censors) mostly depends on whether they remove content you want removed or not, and that line can massively vary even in western societies(for instance I love the fact that in Germany any nazi-related content is actually criminal, but many Americans gasp at the very concept - however the line is there even in America, but it's just placed in at a different point).
> When in the history of mankind have the censors ever been the good guys?
It's not called censorship when it is the right and reasonable thing to do. In many cases, it is simply decision making done collectively by society. For example, we don't tend to allow blatantly religious proselytizing in public schools by teachers. Is that censorship? Maybe? Is it controversial? Not really.
Education is actually a good example -- as decisions are constantly made in terms of what is and is not made available to students. It's easy to find decisions that are blatantly wrong -- for example, banning "A Big Mooncake for Little Star," which is a book about a little kid eating a cake. (But there are other choices that are obviously correct, such as banning books in school libraries that are blatantly misleading.
Whether something is considered censorship is often a matter of perspective.
It doesn’t feel that great to help a company that’s dominating video hosting to help them muscle into the music streaming business through a bundle offer. But otherwise, yes: we might all be better off if Google made more from subscriptions and less from ads.
I agree with you 100%. I've had it for quite a while. When I see Youtube without being logged in, I really can't imagine using the at all with the current level of ads - it's gotten way worse in the past few years.
I also like having access to YouTube music but like so many things with streaming, you're not certain to get continued access to stuff you like. I've started buying MP3's of songs that I like again so that I don't have to worry that Google will stop carrying the music any more or raise prices on YouTube Premium to a level I don't like.
I have less and less trust for the big companies that provide these services so I'm focusing more on self-hosting and some form of ownership. It's not just MP3's. I'm also making sure that I'm using FOSS for my note taking (Joplin), backups (duplicati) and other such things. Some of this stuff is too valuable to me to risk losing access to.
I'd buy YouTube premium if YouTube was still an independent company. Even if paid YouTube doesn't serve you ads, they are still collecting analytics you and building out your Google profile. No thanks.
Honestly I’ve been interrupted by relentless pleas so many times for YouTube premium that I just don’t consider it a “positive” thing. I could cancel my Patreon payments to the content creators and redirect that money to Google, who would then give a small fraction of it to the creators. That doesn’t seem like I’m dealing with an ethical hosting service.
I’ll probably look through the Patreon pages in a few weeks, see who I still care about, and see if they have alternative video feeds that aren’t so ad littered. Those can remain, the rest I’ll cancel.
I know the creators get at least some of it. I have no idea if it's more or less than they would get with ads. I also pay for premium, and I'm fine with Google getting some of it. After all, it's not free to host and stream millions of petabytes of data. I really enjoy YouTube without the ads. It might actually be one of the last videos streaming services I'd get rid of.