[AlexandrB]

I pay for plenty of goods and services. Just not YouTube. As others have noted, YouTube premium makes ads go away, but none of the other engagement baiting and user disrespecting anti-patterns. As far as I'm concerned, Google is in adversarial relationship with its users, whether your paying or not.

[sam_bristow]

I currently pay for YouTube premium but I'm strongly considering stopping again. For me it's a combination of prices creeping up (small part) and the worsening UX and engagement-bait (big part). It's the same reason I dropped Spotify a few years ago.

[sidrag22]

i dropped spotify because i saw how terrible the non paid version of spotify is between payments, and was offended at how much i felt they used my library to hold me hostage.

Im not interested in being held hostage to pay a company xx$ a month for literally my entire life. At least when a netflix subscription is over, its not crafting up ways to torture its users into feeling obligated to resubscribe. Not that i like the streaming video services much either...

[raw_anon_1111]

I don’t know. But most of the time when I don’t like a service, I don’t use it. I know that’s a crazy idea. I find YouTube like everything Google does a piss poor user experience. I’m forced to only use it to watch official AWS videos and those don’t have ads.

[phero_cnstrcts]

Does it make the sponsor sections of the videos go away too?

[Nannooskeeska]

No, but SponsorBlock[0] is fantastic for that. I even have it setup on my home server[1] so it skips sponsor segments on my Apple TV, which is where we watch most of our YouTube.

[0] https://sponsor.ajay.app/ [1] https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV

[Gigachad]

It makes them less annoying. With premium if you hit the scrub forward button once it jumps directly to the end of the sponsor section