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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

Or paying for Premium. I do that to make sure the creators get something.

I have had premium on a family plan for almost as long as it has existed. It's great to add family members who use YouTube on their televisions giving them an ad-free experience without the shenanigans of setting up blockers at a network level.

I very much don't understand the opposition to paying for some of the services we use every day. I get not wanted to pay 15-20/month for something like Apple or Disney, if you only want to watch a single show/film. But people act like you are crazy for paying for YouTube or Twitch, meanwhile they lose countless hours experiencing the frustration of advertisements. It's common to find discussions online where people are both completely opposed to paying for YouTube, with no real justification for that position, and highly upset at having to watch ads. Same goes for Twitch, which is arguably worse as the ads interrupt live broadcasts.

I use adblock everywhere else, but I thoroughly enjoy not having to worry about it on the platforms I use the most. It's not a scam to pay for something you use and enjoy every day.

Why do you not see the issue with some of us not wanting to give fraudulent extorting thieves money? The previous comment was pretty clear and blatant in it's example of unethical immoral even illegal advertisement...and your only reply is why not pay to stop it!

What's next.... Pay this subscription or we will install malware?or break your windows?

The alternative is to not watch YouTube at all.

If you watch YouTube with an ad blocker, you are still watching YouTube and not supporting a more ethical alternative. Sure, you are not giving YouTube any money, but you are still supporting their dominant position.

It’s not creators’ fault the platform does this. YouTube just isn’t going away anytime soon, whether we like that or not, so it makes plenty of sense to spend a bit and give those creators a little bit more revenue from my view. It also feels maybe a bit more ethical that the revenue generated from my view comes from my pocket, rather than a scammer’s stolen funds. Or, well, just declaring for yourself that creators don’t need to be paid. (Yes, there are alternative ways of paying creators like Patreon that you should also consider using, but you also aren’t going to subscribe to the Patreon of every channel you watch.)

I don't even care about any of that. I simply don't want to log into youtube because the recommendations inevitably turn to shit and I don't want to be stuck with them. The only sane way to use youtube is to never log in and nuke the session every week or so.

YouTube recommendations have worked very well for me. I listen to a lot of talks and if it weren't for the recommendations I wouldn't have discovered some very interesting talks or even areas. The only time the recommendations derail is when I have guests over and they login into my account (because that's the one always logged in on my roku). But that is expected. And it's easy to get rid of, by deleting the history in a custom date range, or simply by continuing to watch the kind of stuff I was watching earlier.

I disagree. I use it every day for 4 years and the recommendations are great. I don't do any weird things like killing my session.

You can turn watch history off, and then you don’t get any recommendations at all - just the channels you subscribe to. YouTube doesn’t like it - and goes out of its way to make the apps feel a bit broken with out it, but I much prefer to curate my own list of channels without an algorithm trying to keep me watching longer than I mean to.

But you still do see ads even if you are paying. They are just included in the video by the creator. It's not like youtube activates sponsorblock.

TBH, right now that just feels like rewarding YouTube’s bad ad behavior. I’d rather just pay the creators via Patreon.

Right, I will reward youtube with my money when youtube creators don't feel like they are being chewed up by a machine for pennies and don't constantly have their businesses threatened from abhorrent things like "Showing footage from historical bad events" and "Saying fuck a few times".

I will pay youtube when they change the algorithm and system to not reward clickbait, not reward god awful thumbnails, not reward literal lies, not penalize a channel for a single poorly performing video, etc.

Look at how Disney, Prime, Netflix etc. are constantly jacking up their prices and introducing ads in paid tiers. There is zero reason why Google won't do the same.

Fair, but YouTube is imo one of those services that seems pretty fair about price increases. Disclaimer: pricing is regional, so I can only speak for the US pricing (as that’s what I personally dealt with).

It was $7.99 on launch in 2014 (as an early adopter price that they actually let people keep until 2024), $9.99 in 2016, to $11.99 in 2018 (for new subscribers only, you could still keep the old price if you were already paying), to $13.99 in 2024.

While the 2024 was rather steep, it imo doesn’t seem unreasonable (especially for the family plan that went from $17.99 to $22.99, which lets up to 5 people join with their own Goog accounts).

Sidenote: I personally don’t care in the slightest whether people decide to pay for this or just watch with ads or deal with adblockers (or other workarounds). But discussions of YT premium on HN have been a major eye opener for me, as they made me stop believing entirely in all the claims I see on HN in regards to “omg only if Facebook (or any other popular service that is free but makes money through ads) allowed a paid tier without ads, I would instantly pay, as this is an honest business model I support [followed by a large support of that opinion in replies]”. I always took them as genuine takes, but turns out that if even on HN that doesn’t end up holding true (given the discussion in this thread), it stands no chance among the general population.

As for me, I am glad that this option exists, simply because Youtube is one of those online services I peruse quite a lot, and not having to deal with their ads (or even thinking about them or being aware they exist) has been something I am glad to pay the amount they are asking for. Plus, I genuinely support the model of being able to pay a small amount instead of dealing with free-by-making-money-through-ads, especially for services that I spend a ton of time using.

Neither solutions are stopping what is an en-masse creation of fake AI auto-generated content that's impersonating famous celebrities. The example above was ads, but I'm seeing actual youtube videos that clearly mimick the name and likeness of famous people. With barely 2k views, yet they pop up on my feed.

E.g. names like: "Teylor Swift" or "Hilary Clinton". I.e. the difference between the name of the account and an actual real account name is literally 1 letter. You want to tell me that Youtube can auto-detect music playing in videos, and do advanced AI attribution of music to artists, etc... But it can't spawn a manual review process or flag if an account is created with 1 minor letter change?

I'd gladly pay for Premium if it didn't come bundled with a completely redundant music streaming subscription.

I won't. The ads are in fact a reminder to stop watching crap and go outside instead.

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