Unthinkable is signing up in the first place

Was about to say the same. Unthinkable, I never even thought of subscribing in the first place!

Maybe watching ads is the unthinkable. It sure is for me, but I block them instead of paying.

Inconceivable!

They’re ’Muricans. You gotta give them some slack. Thinking doesn’t come naturally to them.

I only see ads when I go to a friends house and they have that on the tv app blasting 1min ads every 5minutes.

And revanced for my phone

They think delay before every video and "'experiencing interruptions? Find out why" banners are going to make me turn off my ubo. Good luck with that.

Last time I saw a youtube ad (on my devices) was when it was a small picture ad on the right side of the video.

Lol, piracy, the logical solution.

And the unthinkable is as blockers. Wow

Arrrrr

forcing many users to consider the unthinkable "Do I really need 300 subscriptions?"

Haha yeah. It’s unthinkable that YouTube doesn’t make ANOTHER billion dollars.

Not aiding capitalism by canceling a subscription = suicide

Prostitution

Woah.. Morbid much?

The answer is obvious. Going outside.

Avada Kedavra!

They finally lost me completely when I loaded a music video marked "adult" for language and it demanded I upload ID on an account that was legally an adult.

I made that account in 1999, it's not even from this millennium, and they still derp out on it. I'm getting close to 50, at this point, and the only thing ads, age verification, and extreme right wing content on top of state sponsored disinformation campaigns will get you is a blacklist.

We should have seen it coming, I mean they used to have the "Don't be evil" motto, removing that was a declaration of intent.

I have like 8 or 9 plugins for Firefox and just to make YouTube remotely usable. That doesn't account for the 8 or 9 more on top of that to make the internet remote usable.

Get Revanced and you can also block shorts from the UI completely, on top of no ads

Morphe fixes most of that.

in-video ads

They do actually have an in-built skip for this. It's not as good as sponsor block though

You can get rid of the actually relevant issues with premium and giving negative reactions to unwanted content. I barely get shown AI stuff.

Soooo true. What service are you even paying for, they change their business focus and now you get shorts. The best way to viee youtube is with an ad free frontend.

Probably bots trying to trick people into thinking it's absurd and bad and all that.

There is an assumption these people are making that I am not sure they are aware they are making. They are assuming the cost of running YouTube is increasing so the cost of YouTube premium needs to increase. Every public company is driven by maximizing share holder value, the goal is to extract as much money as possible from the user.

I like nebula but I kinda miss having comments under the video. The negative comments can be overwhelming but I like seeing if other commenters noticed the same things I did and if the creator has responded to them.

Those days were brief if they ever existed. It’s actually pretty common to offer new users even sweeter deals for joining, and zero promotions to get loyal users to stay.

You have to frequently do some shenanigans to get things working because shit keeps breaking. I still do it, but it's honestly annoying AF that i need to tinker with my apps like that all the time.

Because its a covering instead of saying underhanded or sneaky or tricking users.

"I didn't steal, I was just quietly sneaking money from their wallet!"

Announcing price hikes is bad marketing

I scrape from the command line, Google doesn't even tough a web browser, leech the webm/webp/whatever content and transcode it into mkv/mp3 to watch locally, offline, with no ads or tracking.

I would like to add an honourable mention to your list here: Kodi YouTube add-on. Somehow this is working for me again after being broken for ages. It's not the same (you need to use a Google account and API set-up) but no ads, auto play, recommend videos..

I imagine costs have increased (more expensive server components due to ai shortages, more users to stream to, ever-increasing storage for the unthinkable amount of video that gets uploaded to YouTube nonstop). I imagine Google going all in on ai (infinite negative money glitch) costs a lot and they're trying to cover the costs elsewhere so the investor report doesn't look so bad and spook stockholders into selling. I'd keep an eye on other Google services to see if their prices also go up over the coming months.

Not defending Google, but how many employees do they have? Did they all get raises this year? I bet license deals from the music industry probably went up too. (No proof but assuming)

But I agree 100%, they are without a doubt no longer following "don't be evil". But it's disingenuous to believe they're annual costs are not increasing along with literally everything else.

Funny, I'm a Gen X - and I have everything locally stored and with over 400 gb of music commercial free. -I could just put the whole thing on shuffle for the next few years. Still sometimes listen to ad supported Spotify tho as am used to radio.

It's even worse than that. They increase the price right after they increase the ad length. As in "well, now that ads are longer, this subscription has more value. Therefore we should increase the price".

Makes sense. Never pay through Apple if there's any other option. Can't fault Google for that.

But even then, $16 per month for Youtube!? An adblocker is cheaper.

Thats because apple adds 30% if you buy through the ios app.

They believe creator should be paid. That's about it.

Theoretically it lets you skip the occasions when Noutube/[insert youtube front end]/uBlock origin has issues blocking youtube ads, but that's rare nowadays.

Are there any real advantages?

1. No 5 seconds forced delay when using ad blockers

2. Higher bitrates available

3. Ad blockers don't work on Chromecast, other solutions don't offer easy casting from the phone app

4. Better value than audio only services like Spotify

Also to note are regional pricing differences. Let's for example compare US and Ukraine pricing:

Though I don't know how much that would seem over there.
But anyway, I pay $1.99 for DNS (NextDNS), so $2.28 for streaming high quality video without ads? Sure, would seem fine.

I wonder how much cost difference there is on the Google side between the regions.

I thought revanced died?

I like the app spotube. It uses the Spotify api to index music and then pulls the data from youtube ad free. It's foss and on Fdroid

Tidal is quite good for music. The selection is missing stuff at times, but that usually doesn't last long since I'm pretty sure that only happens when there's some kind of contract renegotiation or something.

You might want to check out Morphe.

I think the days of Revanced are numbered....

Install downloader, then download and install SmartTube.

Many people use it on TVs or phones and tablets, not computers. Which makes ad blocking harder or impossible.

I do! One of my friends added me to his plan last year to watch football, and the only benefit I can see is the higher bitrates offered. The plain 1080p option without a plan looks like ass.

Not defending the cost of youtube premium (I don't even buy it, myself). It's just a little extra thing I've noticed after the use of ublock.

However, I think I have seen a Firefox extension to help with bitrates, recently...

yes, ublock

but i watch youtube through invidious anyway

https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube

If you're asking more generally there's pihole but YouTube delivers ads the same way as videos so it won't work for that.

And if you don’t want spyware on your machine you use AdGuardHome or PiHole

If you watch for hours a day no ads is a big thing. Otherwise you get at least one ad per video if not more. Plus you get yt music with premium. Plus you can skip ahead over sponsor stuff in videos too.

Being able to download both videos and music is a big one, it saves me a lot of mobile data.