For those who don't want to fund youtube, Youtube Vanced is a hacked version of the official client that provides all the features for free (no root required), and there are also various open source clients available.
I absolutely agree with the paying for no ads model, as I really, really like that model. The premium subscription was totally worth it, and the app with ads can be truly unbearable in comparison (but not so unbearable that I'm going to start paying them again).
I am personally not comfortable with this and would rather have absolutely no business relationship with such a company. I’m using an Invidious (https://github.com/iv-org/invidious) instance instead.
I wonder if the VPPA applies to Youtube?
Google is an advertising company at its core and its bottom line relies on knowing as much about people as possible so that they can target better ads, thus I do not want to have any kind of business relationship with them. Their efforts to force users to opt into tracking (like dark patterns and the recent not-GDPR-compliant consent prompt) suggest me to steer well clear.
If they spin off YouTube as its own company, with its own account system (independent from Google) and ToS (that do not include anything regarding tracking - as it stands to sign up for YouTube Premium you do still need to agree to Google's ToS and privacy policy) I will definitely reconsider, but as it stands it is a hard no.
Vanced provides the YouTube I want, I'd pay it that was available.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-...
I would very much like to set up a pi-hole but the moment something goes wrong pitchforks will be pointed at me.