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Comment by ydant | Hacker News Reader

(not the person you asked)

It allows me to pay for a service that I use and I know costs money to run - for a reasonable fee (although it just went up in price and is less reasonable now), given how many hours our family watches per month on YouTube.

Creators still get paid from YouTube premium views, and some creators see better revenue from that than from YouTube ads. I like supporting the creators I watch. I refuse to participate in regular ads. Sponsored segments are (barely) tolerable and skippable.

I run an ad blocker and try to provide compensation to the sources I consume regularly. Patreon, news subscriptions, YouTube premium, etc. So just blocking ads through Newspipe or similar but still consuming a lot of video - doesn't feel right to me.

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Appreciated, and I'm not immune to the payment situation for Creators and for Youtube itself; my claim isn't that the content should be free or that the Ads are inherently evil, it's about the Youtube app/platform in general.

As a user of a piece of software, it's very difficult to even use the darn thing :) Finding new channels is really tough even when logged in and letting the algorithm work for awhile. So for me it fails to bring me new stuff to check out, it fails as an application in terms of usability and features, and for the few channels I am willing to follow, I'm a lot more comfortable just contributing on Patreon.

That basically leaves Youtube with the server costs, and yeah, that's not something to scoff at and it's not something I expect Alphabet to pony up for.

But for me, the terms and conditions for all that isn't worth paying a subscription to Youtube for; the app barely keeps feature parity with contemporary apps, Youtube itself is pretty poor at getting me new stuff to watch, etc. I'd really rather just go back to smaller, multiple platforms and iTunes like purchasing.

Understood and I agree with most of what you said here. Thank you for clarifying.

I've just personally crossed a threshold where I can't avoid the fact I use enough of it that I should be paying for it. I'd like to think I'd just boycott it entirely if I decided it was too expensive. Not sure if that'd be true in practice. I'd definitely boycott the official app, though - the experience is pretty bad.

Historically, I've avoided using a non-official app due to some questionable distribution methods for some of them, and due to not wanting to anger Google into shutting my account off for non-supported access. The latter is why I no longer use Google search nor Gmail anymore.

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