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Comment by Aken | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I'm in the minority that has zero problem paying for an ad-free experience. I get tremendous value out of YouTube in both professional and personal ways. I have a daughter who watches it often. Suppressing ads while supporting the service my family enjoys regularly seems like a no-brainer to me. And I never have to worry about them circumventing my ad blocker.

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I paid for Premium for years. But then I started asking myself if wanted to give money to a company that pushed things like FLoC, Manifest v3, and WEI.

And the answer was no. We used to pay them $284/year for our household services.

Now we pay them nothing. Maybe they'll have a change of heart someday, but until then, not a dime.

YouTube is the only Google service that I still use, and I've been paying for premium. But, mostly for the reasons you list, I'm cancelling that subscription and abandoning YouTube altogether.

So that's at least two of us.

I'll have to give Nebula another try. I hope their app is better now. Last time, it was so bad that I cancelled that subscription.

And don't forget Hoopla--your library might support it. I get 8 media rentals a month through mine.

I agree with all of that, and I sincerely was planning to become a paid subscriber. But I have some irrational resentment around being a statistic validating their increased pressure campaign. I don’t like feeling forced to spend the money! Which is weird because I get significantly more value from it than any streaming service.

Why does your mindset go to being "bullied", though? Aren't you the bully for circumventing their revenue model with the expectation that you should get it for free?

I did not say bullied. I would never have said bullied. I think my original post serves as a sufficient answer and I don’t feel the need to say anything more to disprove your framing.

Whoops, blurring different replies together and did not context thread properly.

I've posted this a few times recently, but I used to pay for youtube premium, but it started showing me ads while using chromecast. The third time it happened I cancelled and went back to using ublock. I don't use the chromecast much because the ads are unbearable but I see exactly 0 ads ever on my pc. In short, I block ads because not only is it free, it also actually works. My guess is as soon as(if?) they manage to totally stop ad blockers, they will pull a cable company move and start showing ads to paying users as well. They'll say it's to help creators or something or course.

Yeah, if I start seeing ads on anything while signed into my active Premium account, I'm going to start asking questions or considering other options as well. Hoping it doesn't come down to that.

I'm probably also in the minority, but I think Youtube having a near monopoly in this space is bad for consumers and would prefer to see some alternatives. If by merely executing control over my own hardware to see only what I want is enough to actively harm them then so be it.

I also have been subscribed to NebulaTV and Curiosity Stream for years.

I think the nature of the service lends itself to monopoly. The part that is bad for consumers is the profit/growth requirements that put consumers and producers second. The USPS is a prime example of a non profit-driven operation that leaves customers satisfied and operates self-sufficiently (ignoring the relatively recent laws enacted to kneecap the operation by requiring onerous pension funding requirements).

Same. And I support several of my favorite creators on Patreon and Ko-fi. And I try to watch their videos on Nebula. If I could find any of them on PeerTube I'd do that instead.

Unfortunately it feels like spitting into a hurricane. I can say I'm fighting the good fight, but am I making a difference? I doubt it, I doubt it very much.

Yeah but I have a problem with being bullied into paying them. It will just make me want to make their engineers life a pain by working on work-arounds.

We got some different definitions of being bullied. I run pi-hole, ublock, sponsorblock but also pay for yt premium.

I'm with nickthegreek: I hate ads, but YouTube saying you can't make use of our service without paying or seeing ads isn't bullying.

I have zero problem paying for ad-free... but what I do have a problem with is that I have no ad-free only option. You have no choice but to also pay for their music streaming service for $14 per month when other, subjectively better music services are only $11 per month. They should have an ad-free a la carte option for something like $6 per month.

> I feel like I'm in the minority that has zero problem paying for an ad-free experience.

this is fine until enough people pay

at which point they add ads for paying customers too

see: cable TV, netflix, disney plus, hulu, ...

Hear hear. I've been a Premium subscriber for awhile.

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