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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
I pay for plenty of other media (music, games, sports, comedy, books) and even do some Patreon for a few podcasts and YT channels, but I refuse to directly support a publishing monopoly that has had an actively user-hostile interface for over a decade.
Yes I know that Google just reported YouTube’s revenue is larger than Netflix’s. But I really don’t find anything interesting on YouTube. Every time I try to find an interesting tutorial on for me AWS, if it isn’t produced by AWS itself, it’s usually subpar and I end up just paying for it on Udemy or using my company paid Pluralsight.
I find plenty of interesting videos, but I needed to slowly craft my following list.
I started with some CS lectures, and conference talks and it was alright, but something I reached for out of necessity.
Once I started watching videos out of curiosity I slowly ended up finding channels around my hobbies that filled my feed with pretty interesting stuff. There's good content out there beyond dense lectures, but also a lot of crap. I built my curated list of channels making videos worth watching and rarely watch something outside of those.
Similarly to music discovery, once you find what you like keep an eye on neighboring artists. I stay curious, but I'm quick to reject.
Also HN commenters: “I don’t want to pay for goods and services”
People became used to getting a thing for free then it slowly enshittified over time into the current blend of grift and bait. They also strongly promote via shorts the very things they discouraged because sex sells. Now they are promoting AI generated bait. As such they deserve any and all vitriol in my opinion. I personally would never pay for that hot mess.
I watch a few popular channels because I can but probably not much longer. Eventually I will just watch the videos people copy over to Rumble until that platform follows the grift patterns of YT. It won't be long.
With the change in culture here, especially in the last 2-3 years, HN might as well be called Reddit News now. So it's not surprising that most people aren't consistent with their principles.
Was HN known for consistency of principles before? I don’t remember that.
Whenever an online community is anthropomorphized as an individual, it looks hypocritical. The only groups that don’t look hypocritical are monocultural backwaters of groupthink, permabans, and self-editing.
Also HN commenters: “I don’t want to pay for goods and services”