I wouldn't even mind paying for YouTube in return for an acceptable ad-free experience. But it requires creating a Google account, which automagically siphons off inordinate amounts of my personal data, on top of that, it requires providing a company I don't trust with my phone number *and* my payment details.
I am much more worried about the huge trove of culturally and historically significant content being locked in an ad infested garden than I am about today's content creators.
Maybe we shouldn't have entrusted that trove of culturally and historically significant content to a big faceless advertising company. Somehow we always end up doing that because they lure us in with free goodies before changing the deal.
For that they'd need to improve their UX. I pay for it (on top of YT Premium) for the principle, and try to use it as much as possible, but it's often a forced experience. For instance some videos refuse to load, downloads sometimes don't work, notifications are unreliable, there are no playlists so creators create whole new channels for a special series which is hard to keep track of, etc.
Except for the fact they the UX of Nebula is strictly worse compared to YouTube Premium. The YouTube algorithm actually keeps my homepage fairly relevant. Nebula on the other hand has no way to customise the homepage which invariably has the kind of content I specifically want to avoid. And that's not even going into the aweful CDN. I can stream YouTube at 4K without a hitch but Nebula can't even manage HD without getting stuck.
> which automagically siphons off inordinate amounts of my personal data
What personal data? If you only use that Google Account to watch YouTube, there's only your viewing habits plus all the information you provide when creating the account (name, address, phone, payment, all of which can be obscured to an extent)..
In life, people often say unjustified things about people they don't know, and I fear this branch of the discussion is only noise.
But I choose to believe GP is serious, and you might consider that if your best retort is a variation of "but if you got what you wanted, you'd move the goalposts", you might be replying to a valid point.
Not quite sure what you're on about. I pay for plenty of services, online and offline. But as time goes on, I find that paying for stuff on the internet is becoming more of a pain, rather than less. Especially when dealing with megacorps like Google or MS.
None of my phone numbers are public. I don't know about where you live, but where I live it's perfectly possible to keep your phone number private. The only ones who are able to look up my phone number are public services like 911 equivalents and a few others.
Its public in the sense that it's not a secret. You give out your phone number to friends and family. They may download apps that request them to share all contacts. You may give your number to businesses to contact you, or to enable 2FA. The "privacy" of your phone number depends on many 100s of individual contacts and businesses to maintain some sort of privacy as well, which as we know is near impossible.
Your number is out there no matter how careful you are with it. I don't think it really matters which country you live in at this point.
Technically that could be, but in practice there's a huge difference. In addition to several private phones I also have a work phone, and that number isn't set private. On that one I receive scam calls, ads, phishing, questionnaires every single day. My auto-blocking app stops a lot of it fortunately.
On my own phones I never receive a single one of these. Not one.
Technically yes. Practically, thanks to FB scraping, we have public phone numbers for around 20% of Czech citizens. Check your country, I think scraping and leaks was and will be everywhere.
1. My phone number is not public information. It's PII and protected, among other things, by GDPR. Phone numbers are also a huge pain to change, and (in my neck of the woods) it's become extremely difficult (and not entirely legal) to obtain burner SIMs.
2. Payment details, depending on the exact payment method, expire in the order of years. Someone as big as Google can easily correlate payments across a wide variety of services. Whether they are allowed to, and whether they do, is a different matter.
That's just not going to happen.