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> Three strikes" and... what? Red alert! Let me drop everything and read the damn article right now, because it could be "three strikes and you lose your Google account", which is kinda big fucking deal.

This is an interesting point. Like, they're not doing it today, but ... yeah, I might checkout the alternative streaming services again when I get a moment. Because you know if this initiative doesn't make a chart start to go upwards, then sooner or later somebody in a board room is going to suggest it. Better to just get off of youtube now.

> (Also no joke on brain poison. The way kids react to an ad that occasionally slips by us is a perfect measure of how fucked up advertising is.)

My kids absolutely freak out whenever they see an ad. "What's happening? Is the TV broken?" I feel like their reaction is proof that I've done at least one thing right as a parent.

Yeah, Google has me by the balls because they have my Gmail account. Time to write to my representatives telling them that Google is too big and I support anti-trust enforcement.

Or migrate to Fastmail. It's painful but doable if you have a gmail address (redirect all mail to your new address with an out-of-office automatic reply about the change). While you're at it, get your own domain (through Fastmail or others) so this never happens again (https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753394-Cus...). I was lucky enough to start out on Gmail with my own domain back when that was free, and it meant that I could migrate to Fastmail without anyone even noticing.

No affiliation with them, just very happy I made the switch.

Honest question: if you and your kids use YouTube to the degree you describe, why not pay for the ad free experience? Why go through so many hoops? Is it the amount of money, is it the principle, or something else?

> YouTube + AdBlock is the easiest way to play our 4yo and 2yo music, without exposing them to the brain poison of modern advertising at this early age.

How is this easier than paying a subscription? You get ad-free YouTube and YouTube music.

I’ve listened to 1000s of hours of YouTube since I started my premium subscription with 0 advertisements. We paid a few dollars more for a family plan and now my father and grandfather no longer watch ads either.

> I’ve listened to 1000s of hours of YouTube since I started my premium subscription with 0 advertisements.

If most people choose to do this, your premium subscription will start to have a few premium, curated ads, and you'll have to buy the next tier up to get ad-free again. Four years later, you'll have to by the next tier up just to get the premium, curated ads back.

Not to mention you basically can't skip the in-video sponsors that content creators need to survive. I pay for premium and watch it on the TV (no SponsoBlock there), so it's getting to a point where I'm holding the fucking remote/phone to skip ads on every freaking video.

I absolutely hate this.

Do the creators need sponsorships to survive? I have no idea about how YouTuber revenue works.

Yes. It's in line with the social media industry: the top ~0.1% gets ridiculous amounts of money from sponsors and ads, while everyone else can barely scrape by.

> your premium subscription will start to have a few premium, curated ads, and you'll have to buy the next tier up to get ad-free again.

This has never happened to me even once with any service that I pay for. Hulu is the closest, but they replaced a free tier with a cheap-with-ads tier. Their expensive tier at least once had "some ads that were contractually required" but i never saw them.

And I think if "most people" paid for YTP they'd be drowning in revenue so I doubt that they'd be desperate to screw that up by repositioning YTP as something other than "ad-free."

I might get flamed for this, but while I see the reason to hate and adblock mainstream sites that have awful ads and have no paid ad-free option (see most newspapers and TV stations, especially local ones, everything that has those idiotic bottom-feeding ads at the bottom of an article, Yahoo, AOL, Newsweek, Gizmodo etc.) ... in contrast, YTP is there, it's twelve bucks a month, I don't see why anyone wouldn't pay for it instead of trying to cheat. Not saying it's a crime or even immoral, but they don't owe you video content and trying to subvert the conditions they place on access seems like basically cheating. Kind of like not paying your water bill (when you could afford it) and just using the public restroom next door 10 times a day. Not illegal, but... seems like a bad plan.

> How is this easier than paying a subscription? You get ad-free YouTube and YouTube music.

First of all, isn't YouTube Music dead? Didn't it die twice already? Secondly, I don't know. I didn't look into YouTube Premium precisely because they're pushing it way too hard. I don't trust Google, I don't trust them handling ads and child-related content on YouTube right, after various YouTube Kids fiascoes. I don't trust people who are pushing their products/services this hard - so far, I was never wrong. Whatever curiosity I had about YouTube Premium, they burned it by the third time in a day I got interrupted by a full-screen "activate a trial" ad, optimized to have distracted people subscribe by mistake.

Not to mention, the way YouTube Premium story evolves, this really feels like extortion. It technically isn't, and they're in their rights, but perception matters - and because of that, I'm willing to spend a lot of effort, and even a lot of money with someone else, just to not have to deal with YouTube Premium, YouTube ads and other YouTube bullshit, while retaining easy access on the relatively infrequent occasion I want to play something from their catalogue.

YouTube Music replaced Google Play Music, which is what Google shut down. I use YouTube Music all the time.

Good points. Just to answer, Google is dying. Search and YouTube are legacy technology. It looks like they hit a runaway economic train where they must enshittify their product worse to keep the balance shit, which drives more people away, which requires further enshittification. Google is in major trouble.

> First of all, isn't YouTube Music dead? Didn't it die twice already?

Nope. Never died. I've been using it for at least a year.

Jeez it's like HN just learnt a new word. Would love to never read enshittification again. Someone uses it on every other submission. This is what happens when cheap money ends and businesses actually need some profitability.

Enshittification, Immiseration, Impoverishment

The words likely to sum up this decade.

Disenfranchisement was one of those for the prior decade.

It's not gone

I hate this word, but it seems to have caught on, so I don't feel like quibbling over the label we use to name the problem - it kind of distracts from the problem itself. Specifically, I gave up after I discovered this term was either coined or popularized by Cory Doctorow - if he's pushing it, I may just as well accept it.

I hope the word becomes more pervasive. I would like to see people start calling tech CEOs "Chief Enshittification Officers". The more the word enters the lexicon, the more the enshittifiers will begin to feel at least some resistance -- similar to the way "second-hand smoke" helped to trigger the decline in cigarette use in the west.

The era of free money may be over, but that doesn't mean we're required to present our gaping maws willingly as receptacles for the enshittifiers' effluent.

No totally. But it was fun while it lasted and if you don't want to help them make some money that's fair enough. No point being too disappointed though. C'est la vie

It’s proof the enshittification of HN has begun.

I think it's because it's happening everywhere, even outside of less profitable businesses. I flew United the other week and they played me 4 min of ads blasted through the cabin and on my screen after the safety video, even after I paid for my flight and in my mind, the "United premium". They are a heavily profitable company, making $11 billion Q4 '22, and yet, they consciously decided to make my experience flying United worse for a small profit. To me, that's the difference between "enshittification" and trying to make a viable business.

As for YouTube, what should they do? I see 3 options but maybe I'm missing some:

1. Make everyone pay

2. Make everyone either watch ads or pay, user's choice

3. Eliminate all ads. Since there would be little reason to sign up for YTP once ads are eliminated, they're going to have to have "Pledge drives" where they try to beg you to pay just out of generosity, to support a public service for all. Somehow this seems like it'll never not lose huge amounts of money.

4. (sort of the status quo up till now) Nerds get to block ads, and are subsidized by Premium subscribers and suckers.

Admittedly option 3 sounds stupid, I just can't think of any other options for YouTube where it doesn't cease to exist.

Option 2. is unstable - if you split users into two camps, "watching ads" and "paying", it so happens that it's the second camp that the advertisers want the most to reach: people with disposable income and willingness to spend it. You can expect significant pressure from the business side to somehow advertise to that second group.

This is, in fact, a point raised by many commenters in the thread - it's very likely that Premium will stop being ad-free once it gains a large enough user base. See also: cable TV, or any other paid-for medium whose initial value proposition was... "we charge you for it, but there are no ads!".

Option 3. - nah, can't imagine it either.

Option 4. - that would be going back to the "good years". I don't think it's possible for YouTube - they'd have to somehow undo or reverse the pressures that got them to the situation today. See also: image hosting service cycle - they start bullshit-free, then they get progressively worse, but it's only when they go past the "nerds block ads, whales pay, suckers get ads" stage - when they disturb that balance - that they die.

> This is, in fact, a point raised by many commenters in the thread - it's very likely that Premium will stop being ad-free once it gains a large enough user base.

I mean... then you stop paying and download an ad blocker. Why not enjoy the utopia of paid commercial free video content while it lasts. It's not like you're locked in somehow.

Exactly, it’s month to month. I just pay and get something great.

HN readers massively overestimate the willingness of the average person to "fight the power" or whatever. When Netflix cracked down on password sharing, I was fully expecting people to realize how bad Netflix has become and to move on to other platforms. Everyone here thought they were shooting themselves in the foot. But no, the password sharing fix did exactly what they wanted it to do, and subscriptions actually increased. The truth is that no one but a couple of techies know or care what NewPipe or yt-dl are. This move by YouTube will work and there's not really anything we can do about it.

More than half of my non-techie friends have cancelled their Netflix subscriptions in the last few months because of the changes. They were already on the edge of having it anyway, so when Netflix said to pay twice as much they just left.

It's cause some people are so fucking stupid

> people to realize how bad Netflix has become and to move on to other platforms

What's supposed to be bad about it. I'm still using Netflix and never even shared my password the first time. I like it.

They were good while they were the first-mover with all the good distribution contracts signed. Now everyone and their dog runs their own streaming service, and keeps tight control of any IP they may have. Netflix catalogue was never that big - they were, and are, just very good at hiding it with UI dark patterns; now, it's even smaller. They're trying to back-fill it by funding... well, take your pick:

- Charitable view: a very broad selection of productions aimed at smaller, niche audiences, so that everyone can find something unique they like.

- Cynical view: B-rate shit, going for quantity over quality, and hoping something sticks.

Either way, at this point, many Netflix users have long ago watched everything remotely worth watching on the site, and keep the subscription out of habit (or to keep access to something they like to rewatch). It doesn't take much to lose those subscribers.

Netflix is fine for what it is, it's just there was a golden era where essentially everything was on Netflix for a reasonable monthly fee, and then content owners realized they could make their own streaming services for just their stuff and charge the same amount.

Sometimes there really are good old days.

I'll bet Netflix lost a lot of viewers who were not subscribers though. That might be okay for them, or it might not be. It depends on just how valuable all that mindshare and all those eyeballs are for them above and beyond the subscription costs.

> BTW. is it only me, or is 2023 the year of "enshittification" of SaaS shifting into high gear?

I think the West is escalating its war on user control of anything networkable, and content blocking is a security hole. Western governments prefer that everyone be using the same few monitorable, censorable, and compliant communication mediums in the same way, and is ignoring or supporting massive private media/tech businesses when needed in order to reach that goal.

They looked at China's Great Firewall and thought "great idea!" It's just now coming to fruition.

YouTube Premium reached 50 Million subscribers in 2021, so they're doing pretty well: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/50-million/

I wonder how many subscribers watch YouTube on a smart TV? That's solely the reason I subscribe myself as I can't install an ad blocker there and as far as I know things like pi-hole cant block ads in Smart TV streams either.

On Android TV there's SmartTubeNext, not sure about anything else, it's funny that Google's platform is the one that's easiest to block their ads on

> because it could be "three strikes and you lose your Google account", which is kinda big fraking deal.

Google accounts are fragile like people; they can suddenly cease operation, for no known reason.

I keep everything Google isolated. It's all in it's own browser or container. As for youtube, it ~only gets watched on a dedicated device attached to a TV.