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Comment by dandare | Hacker News Reader

> I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber

The saying goes that if you don't paid for it then you are the product. So I subscribed to YouTube Music family plan, thinking I won't be the product. But my wife's account will always return an error saying that she is in a different country or something. I tried to reach the support for help but never got any reply. In the end I cancelled the subscription. Google is simply too big to care about individual users.

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yeah thats the tricky thing. Google makes $256/user per year domestically in ad revenue. That's $21/month.

https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...

it's really hard not to be the product.

And users who pay for things are more valuable to advertise to.

I've been thinking the same thing lately. When YouTube released "YouTube Red" and later YouTube Premium, there was kind of a glimmer of hope. Like finally, we can just pay and not "be the product" anymore!

But then stuff like this happens. You get just as little support as when you were ad food.

Definitely makes one want to try and find non-big-tech solutions to things.

it turns out they'll happily accept money from the product.

None of Google's shared plans work cross-country - YouTube, Google Play, Stadia, Google One. All of them error, sometimes cryptically ( e.g. "Can't access payment methods"). It should be clearer what the issue is, with clear, concise error messages, but IMHO it's not a bug per se. Different country legislations, copyright, tax codes, prices, etc. etc. make that a complex matter and i see how they wouldn't want to deal with it.

#BitcoinFixesThis

No it doesn't, you'd still need to declare and pay local taxes, and abide by local legislations.

Sorry if that was not clear, my wife and I live on the same address in the same country. Her billing address is same as mine. I checked the net and Google product forums for possible solutions, checked the billing address, Play store settings, nothing helped.

Ah. In the Play store there's a main country which can be changed once a year[1], then there are payment methods ( you can't share Stadia, for instance, with anyone who has any payment method in a different country). The billing address changes nothing in this regard.

1 https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7431675?hl=en&c...

I have the same problem with Youtube TV. My wife cannot use youtube TV on her devices because of some country related issue. My guess is she made the grave mistake of logging into her gmail while traveling.

Speaking of not being able to use Google services, if my wife plays any music on our Google Nest at home, I cannot stream music in my car because "My Account is being used in another location". Seriously?

> The saying goes that if you don't paid for it then you are the product.

So true. This is why I switched from free Linux to paid Mac, and why I've started replacing open-source apps with commercial ones.

I don't think this saying applies to the situation you are in. Perhaps more apt is "you get what you pay for".

For myself, I've switched to paying for Linux and open source software. I believe open source needs to be sustainable for consumers and expecting devs to work for free is insane.

Since I didn't pay for my previous Linux, it means that I didn't get much for it, right?

it's just an analogy

That saying is meant for commercialized products obviously. But it's still kind of true if you stretch it to FOSS software, the allegory would be that you pay for it with your time (by fixing/bringing attention to bugs) rather than directly profiting the devs.

I pay for my mobile phone service. They still sell my location data.

I pay for my TV. It still spies on me.

And so on...

You are always the product, paying customer or not.

You are sometimes the product when you buy something, but it's not a necessary part of that model.

You are always the product in "free" services like FB, YouTube. It is a fundamental part of that model.

There are plenty of shitty companies in both buckets (and seemingly more as time goes by) but let's not pretend there's never a difference.

I'd be happy to see such a counter example. If something can phone home, it will. I've yet to see a purchasing site (= I am the customer) which does not share data with third parties, for example.

How about Fastmail or Posthaven?

A better phrasing would be "you don't get what you don't pay for". The mere fact that you've paid does not guarantee that you receive anything of comparable value in return.

When it comes to open source and other community-based projects, it's true that you shouldn't expect much in the way of personalized service or attention to your particular needs or issues if you're not paying for it. Fortunately, just making a copy of some software (even really good software) doesn't cost much at all, so it's not unreasonable that you're getting that much for free. Improving the software requires an investment from someone, though, one way or another.

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