you can also open Youtube on a computer without an ad blocker (e.g. a stock Firefox or Chrome instance), or pay for premium if you don't want to watch ads
90% of the time they block me because I have an ad blocker that is _disabled for their website._ The other 10% they show me the video. This feels like a bug.
I'm not going to pay them because they have a bug, or if it's not a bug, pay them because they think they can tell me what addons I can run when viewing other websites. That would be like Stockholm syndrome.
YouTube is a highly optional part of my life, so if they are going to fuck around and be shitty, fuck em I'm out. Happy to instead do my small part in breaking the monopoly and just reduce my YouTube consumption, plus encourage other people to reduce it as well.
When subscription prices get too high and the service lackluster, I can understand. Every production company tried to build their own subpar streaming service, and value delivery just doesn't scale like that.
When every one of a million different news websites has its own individual subscription, I can also understand. Nobody has time for that, and the service offered is never worth the value.
But YouTube premium is dirt cheap. And you're paying for legions of engineers to make the service rock solid. And it has everything. I think it's the last service I'd ever cancel, and I don't even watch YouTube that often.
right now i'm visiting my in-laws for the new year, and they have netflix; i think they pay 8 dollars a month for it
it's ridiculous that we're even considering depending on those legions of engineers given that most of us have at least ten-megabit internet service at home, but decentralized alternatives like lbry/odysee and even bittorrent are getting lobbied out of existence, in large part because they are resistant to censorship
I would tape rented VHSes back in the day too.
At least Blockbuster charged me for the original. YouTube just makes me "watch" an ad before I get my copy [1]
[1] A computer watches the ad for me
Youtube was built based on work of a creator community -- much more so than Alphabet engineers -- who viewed this as a sort of open platform. Once there was network lock-in, the paywall hits, the mandatory obnoxious ads hit, and the user-hostile JavaScript hits.
Alphabet holds the legal contract, and the army of lawyers, but there was a social contract with a community which it simply broke.
It tried (with mixed success) to do the same with the free GSuite service (once they have all your email, bill you for seeing it). Remember how Alphabet originally won by using unintrusive adwords instead of flashing banner ads? All these things might be legal, but they ain't right.
I pay for subscription services, but yes, I'll go to great lengths to never, ever pay a penny for Youtube.
I’ve heard Google employees/engineers make jokes (not entirely sure how much is a joke and how much is real) about how YouTube might be the first website back online after WW3 assuming it didn’t destroy the internet (seeing as the internet originally was designed to survive such a thing it’s not entirely far fetched to imagine global chaos and heavily degraded services but still operating in some capacity)
the year youtube ceases to be profitable is the year it deletes 100% of its videos and you discover that your extrapolation of its reliability into the future was based on an incorrect understanding of the world
if you've been paying attention, though, you know that a substantial percentage of its videos have already been consigned to the memory hole, so its reliability as a repository of human culture is already observably poor