YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years. The value I get is vastly greater than Netflix or any other streaming service. But if they ever start putting ads in the paid subscriptions (like many streaming services now with their basic tier) I’ll jump ship.

Yep, you were a test project. Will people pay for free content or punish them by leaving the platform. And will they start to pay if you increase number of ads. Now they moved to next stage.

Anyway, not there yet. Frog is boiled slowly, slow enough that people dont notice until it is to late.

First they need to kill ad blockers tier. Then you increase number of ads to unbearable (they are already doing that) and get as much people as possible to paid content. Also market must be ripe enough, so there will be no more ships to jump. Then you will get ads, different tiers to pay, segmentation of content etc.

Exactly, it's the enshittification trajectory as explained by Cory Doctorow. Without laws and regulations that stop companies from doing that, it's inevitable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#Examples

So what's your alternative if I don't want ads (content is not free to make), want the creators to be paid, and paying for premium is tempting YouTube to abuse pricing? (or so you say)

I hear you, but I can only live in the now and not whatifs. I refuse to watch ads and will pay to avoid them. If a service I use makes that impossible, then I’ll no longer use the service.

And there is more content in the world right now than any single person will ever be able to consume. I have zero concerns about dropping a service.

> I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years.

I struggle to see the difference between Youtube Premium and regular Youtube with the exception of ads.

It's the same shitty recommendation algorithm. It's the same "you will watch shorts or else". It's the same nerfed unusable search. It's the same "we randomly decided that your bandwidth isn't enough, here's a 480p version of the video you're currently watching".

Are they paid now? What are you fixing by paying, if nothing is broken (yet)?

But you don't need to drop a service. You can keep it as good as it is. You just don't reward google predatory tactics by paying, as you are literally making YT worse.

So if I don't pay and I don't want to watch ads then what? I'm not going to jump through mental gymnastics to not pay creators and Google for offering the service. If you truly don't want to reward Google, then don't use anything from Google.

Yes, it’s mostly just the ads. There are some nice-to-haves like video downloads and background audio on the iOS app. I almost never use search, recommendations, or shorts, but I’m sure you’re right to criticize those features.

Not sure what you mean. I was a test subject? The test still seems to be ongoing after 10 years. I fail to understand how any of these alleged experiments involve me.

Block the adverts, and pay the creators via Patreon. And join Nebula to build other alternatives.

How did it work until now? Anyway, we both know that care for "creators" is "think of the children" thing, but I will play along: pay them using patreon (or, I have bought this: https://theduranshop.com/the-duran-gold-eagle-premium-t-shir..., triple time overpriced but they deserve it).

For Google, don't worry. You have payed them, with your data, thousand times over. And if you stop providing today, your existing data will be exploitable for years to come.

On top of it, by paying, you create a direct trail from watched video (data) to your account, from there to your credit card and from credit card to physical person. So you are giving them even more data.

Anyway, if Google goes bankrupt, because of you, you can consider yourself a saint.

Someone who has really done something very good for the whole planet and human society.

I will lit a candle each day into your honor.

Can you download the videos to mp4 or is it some proprietary DRM thing that only plays on YouTube? If not that just sounds like a worse version of yt-dlp

YouTube sucks because it works for advertisers, not users.

If everyone just paid like you pay for anything else in life, YouTube would work for users, and be dramatically better.

Unsurprisingly, the people who consume resources while giving nothing back are the ones making it suck the most.

I've stopped recommending this (except for in-person to friends) because it's so valuable, and I'm seriously worried about it getting stomped by YouTube.

If he had used YouTube premium for a hundred years you would still say the same? Ten years is longer than world war two lasted.

> Noone goes there anymore, it's too crowded.

In theory, yes. In practice, Google's core business is selling ads, not selling access to movies.

But that is exactly the business they are trying to morph YouTube into. If we agree that being exposed to persuasion always has negative value, then ads are bad. Watching ads is the only behavior that causes them to persist. If everyone blocked them, YouTube would go out of business or switch entirely a paid model. If everyone paid, then they switched to a paid model already. The only choice the causes ads to persist and increase is to both refuse to pay, refuse to block, and still watch. So don't do that.

> But that is exactly the business they are trying to morph YouTube into.

They had so much time to do that, yet TFA is about ads getting more aggressive, not less.

They already discontinued the premium-only content (YouTube Originals, turned out the audience isn't fit for that).

> difference between Youtube Premium and regular Youtube with the exception of ads.

Yeah. That's the difference. That's literally it, the rest is window dressing. You are choosing the monetization strategy: ads or money. If you're not living paycheck-to-paycheck, and you watch a lot of YouTube, paying $13 or whatever is the sensible choice.

Yes, lots of things about the product suck, as you've described. But the content on it is good and the recommendation algorithm is pretty good, at least in its obvious goal of bringing me to new-to-me channels on a regular basis.

Definitely the latter. On the iOS app you choose videos to download, and I believe they only work for 30 days without Internet access. I use yt-dlp for videos I want to archive, but I use the YouTube app downloads for one-off stuff like loading up my iPad before a flight.