[aosaigh]

On a related note, I cannot believe how many ads YT are showing nowadays. I know the word “unuseable” is thrown around a lot but its really become that way for me. I got 5 ads in the first 3 minutes of a video yesterday. I know people say “just pay for it” but I don’t think that the alternative to not paying should be ads every minutes. My usage has gone way down recently as a result. I use an adblocker on desktop but can’t elsewhere.

[spoiler]

I am always a bit conflicted when I see posts like theses. On one hand I also like free stuff, but on the other hand I also know running services like these costs money (and I'm not only talking about digital/IT resources).

Everyone has an idea of what they'd do, but nobody can agree on one. So, I guess the easy defaults are ads+premium, or a completely walled garden?

[aosaigh]

Just for the record, I don’t mind that there’s ads and I agree that they need to collect money somehow. I pay for lots of services and understand that platforms (and creators) need to make money. The issue I have is that it seems that YT have aggressively increased the number of ads they show now. I think you’re right: how much is too much?

[rchaud]

I'm not conflicted because no amount of $10 subscriptions will be enough for them to survive independently without being docked to the Google mothership.

Proof: YT Premium costs $14/mo. now. Would anyone say there's been a 40% improvement in the quality of the product?

[Pigalowda]

No but there’s been significant erosion of $ purchasing power

[rchaud]

Youtube's single largest capital expense is going to be Google Cloud. They're not paying market rates for that, and in any case, GCP pricing hasn't gone up to a level where YT would need to increase pricing by 40%.

They simply do not what their profitability price point is. And they never will, as they're not independent of Google.

[_imnothere]

Imagine paying someone who doesn't even stop invading your privacy when you're paying.

[samstave]

It's even worse on long form pods, YT will stick in multiple ads, which themselves become long. YT is an actual joke these days, completely lame to use on Android.

If you have logged into Amazon prime recently you can see bars and bars and bars of "rent or buy or subscribe" content, to the point I hate even looking at the site.

I'm paying for Amazon prime, what happened to simply "free to me" listings based on the fact I'm paying for the subscription?

But YT is such fn garbage, I cant even put on a channel I subscribe to and have it just play the vids in that channel.

Instead it feeds me random shit not related to the channel or search.

I hate it.

It's garbage.

[Darmody]

On Android you have NewPipe for video and ViMusic/Blackhole for audio only.

You have to install the .apk manually or from f-droid, but they work like a charm.

[endorphine]

You also have regular Firefox + uBlock Origin that works great.

[Glome495]

ViMusic is abandoned

[Darmody]

I've been using it since Youtube Vanced died and it's working perfectly and I'll keep using it until it dies too.