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Comment by john___matrix | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money.

Sometimes when I've forgotten to log in and see what it's like without, it's amazing anyone can watch videos on there. Like a lot of people I've generally been OK to watch ads in exchange for free content but it seems over the years instead of ads getting better and/or more relevant to my interests (even broadly), they're getting much worse.

I assume this is the result of companies just accepting ££ for anything rather than having more quality control?

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As the old saying goes, good ideas shouldn't require force. If they have a "no-brainer" offering, no need to strong-arm people into using it, right?

I get it that they are not a charity and can monetize or paywall their platforms as seen fit, but there's something just sad about the model where you build a customer-friendly and open platform, then progressively crapify it once you capture a niche and eliminate most alternatives, and then start penalizing users for trying to work around that.

Pretty much all big tech companies figured out this is the recipe for infinite money

Only Microsoft seems to be aware this causes Dutch Disease, min-maxing your monopolistic platform revenue is terrible long-term for you company

Google is pretty far from maximizing their monopolistic platform

What about selling your gmail data? Selling your search queries directly to third parties? Forcing your maps navigations to route near advertisers?

> To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money.

I cannot think of any subscription that offers literally no upside beside what a free browser extension that you install in 1 click already provides.

Youtube Premium is literally the worst value for money that I can think of, because I can get effortlessly the same for 0 cost.

In Google/YouTube's defense, this mentality is why we can't have nice things. You think it's cheap to host the content YouTube does? Paying for premium to remove ads is a way of saying "Thank you for providing me this service, instead of displaying me irrelevant ads, just take my money"

It's also worth noting that creators get paid more for YT Premium views than ad-based views. YouTube, for all its problems, has far better revenue-sharing than pretty much any other "user generate content" platform.

>You think it's cheap to host the content YouTube does?

These discussions always include bad-faith arguments about offsetting costs.

The purpose of ads on websites like YouTube is not just to offset costs, it is to maximize profits. The distinction is important; it means Google doesn't stop showing you ads once they've paid their bills, so please stop framing it this way. They will show you as many ads as they can before it starts to hurt their bottom line. They are not serving videos to be nice.

Also, don't expect Google to keep the "no ads" policy to YT Premium for long. They can still make people pay for "less ads", as twitter does.

Just remember cable TV on the old times.

This is what we want, though, right? The alternatives would be a paywall, or charge per view. (Or, I guess, pay to "own", like a Kindle ebook, but seems like a mismatch for most of their content.)

This strikes me as eating the commons.

you do get youtube music included which is a decent alternative to spotify.

By this logic, buying e-books from Amazon is the worst value I can think of, because I can get them effortlessly from libgen and other "sources", and a single book can cost as much as the whole year of YouTube premium.

Considering Amazon can literally just erase e-books that you supposedly "own", like they literally did with 1984[0], very much yes.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-ki...

If you truly believe this (which I don't agree with), at least you're consistent. But I feel "adblock good, piracy bad" is a double standard that many people hold.

Practically, I think adblocker is even slightly worse than piracy. At least when you download a cracked game via a torrent, you don't cost Steam any money.

You are comparing something perfectly legal with something absolutely illegal, this makes no sense.

Except ad-blocker is literally just stealing bandwidth. Just because it's legal (under the current law), it doesn't mean it's morally right. Why should Youtube or any hosting service serves a user when they refuses to view the ads? YouTube is not a public service.

Ah! Well guess what? Showing me ads that I did not request is stealing MY bandwidth. And much worse than that, it's stealing my time.

Yes, this is why YouTube should just refuse to serve you and other adblocker users. This way it can no longer steal your time, and it's the only fair solution.

It is morally right, not because it is legal, but because I was never asked to make a market transaction for the content. By your reasoning, it would be theft to close your eyes during a TV commercial. I completely reject your line of reasoning.

But it is.

uBlock Origin is literally free

The cost is you have to give another party total access to all of your data on all sites.

What? You download a blocklist. What gets sent back to ublock?

Except it's open source and anyone can audit the code any time.

If the developer's extension store account were compromised or sold, they'd push an update to you that stole your data before you could react.

You don't have to auto-update extensions.

how does it work on iPhone or on the TV?

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