[keiferski]

No, I signed up for premium a few months ago and happily pay the $20/month. YouTube has literally millions of hours of high-quality interviews, lectures, courses, etc. and paying is worth every penny.

If you find yourself watching low-quality videos, that’s a problem with your selection of content, not the platform itself.

[effingwewt]

Ah yes, it's the consumer's fault for no longer being able to use the up/down ratio to tell if a video is clickbait or low quality.

Not because google took it away to protect that sweet advertising money.

The amount of ppl shamelessly stanning for companies has just gotten ridiculous.

[keiferski]

I don’t particularly like Google and have been slowly trying to move my accounts away from them.

Paying a small fee for a superior service is common sense and has nothing to with “stanning” for companies.

I also don’t even pay attention to upvotes 99% of the time, as it’s pretty unlikely that an old lecture about Hegel hosted on a philosophy channel is going to be clickbait. The clickbait stuff is almost always immediately obvious just from the title and thumbnail image alone.

[Wurdan]

People have different strategies for discovering new content, I guess. It’s rare for me to watch stuff from creators I don’t know, so I’m not usually surprised by the quality of them.

But if any kind of sponsorship of a video counts as “shameless stanning” to you then yeah the whole concept of YT is just not going to be your jam.

[somenameforme]

The overwhelming majority of the stuff you mentioned was put up for free with 0 monetization intent. Is Google also putting ads into non-monetized content as well?

[keiferski]

It’s been awhile, so I don’t remember exactly, but I’m fairly certain that an ad is played in front of every video, even the obscure philosophy lecture ones. There are definitely ads for Masterclass, etc. in front of the more modern educational podcasts and shows.

I assume it isn’t free to stream a four hour lecture to my device, so I don’t have an issue paying a small fee to do so. $20/month is nothing compared to the value I get from it.

[nickthegreek]

Pretty sure it’s only monitized content unless it has copyright issue (music). Then ad is shown to pay artist. Demonetized videos might also still have ads I think.

[phito]

Bandwidth and storage aren't free.

[JCharante]

Same here, I think my YT usage is actually increasing