Hacker News Reader

Comment by cameldrv | Hacker News Reader

I know lots of people that pay for YT premium. Lots of people pay for Spotify too. I even pay for Kagi.

Kagi has a little over 50k paying users.

Hacker news has 5 million monthly unique users [1].

Given how hacker news constantly complain about google’s decline and the constant virtue signaling on the need to pay for software, you would expect a sizable chunk of the users (the vocal ones, at least) here pay for Kagi. And yet we are here. GP is absolutely right about it being all-talk.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140

In general, 95% of users in any site are passive lurkers. So that leaves Hacker News with 250k active monthly users that comment and engage (which is likely still a massive overestimate). Of those, in the wide variety of comments and discussions, complaints about search and google in particular are again about 5% at most (being generous with numbers once more). That leaves us with 12500 people on HN who should potentially pay for Kagi. Seems like four times that many are doing it by your numbers.

Spotify I get because the Spotify free experience is HORRID.

Youtube is also moving into that direction.

I think a good amount of people pay for Youtube just to be able to listen to audio with the screen off, which is a completely artificial restriction they added to the free version.

Such a strange business model, making the free version below acceptable.

> Such a strange business model, making the free version below acceptable.

That's because the core product is not anywhere near worth what they charge for it. The youtube interface is a nightmare for users and creators alike. I have very little controls over what I do and don't see, how I can filter or search for content, or how I can search for new content. History of both videos and comments are effectively non existent and impossible to reasonably search or archive.

It's not a service so much as it is a copyright clearinghouse.

If they had an actual experience with worthwhile features to offer then they wouldn't have to artificially degrade the free experience to convince you.

I feel the exact opposite. YouTube is the only streaming service I pay for, and it's well worth it. I have no trouble finding things I want to watch and there's a huge amount of it. Other services don't have nearly as much good stuff, and it's too hard to find among the crap.

Managing subscriptions and blocking (or unblocking) channels are subpar. Watch history, search history and comment history are all afterthoughts and it shows. Managing playlists and watching through playlists are unusual and glitchy. Search filters are weak. The audio only experience is just a gaping hole in the video player.

Youtube music is fine-ish. Search is pretty weak and prefers recommendations over results. The controls for playlist Play, Play with Shuffle, and Play with Autoadd are fairly confusing especially between the app and the desktop version. Creating and managing multiple playlists is a frustrating experience and not thought out at all. It constantly feeling the need to change the album art on my playlists.

You pay to not be annoyed. You're not paying for a "premium" product in any way.

And? Yeah, I’m paying to get rid of ads. Of course I am. I like watching the stuff, I hate ads, and it’s well worth the price to get rid of them.

It makes sense because YouTube's income is from being paid to deliver video ads. They can't fulfill that if the screen is off.

I believe they are rolling out audio ads.

It's unclear to me how the paid Spotify experience compares with free, but you still get ads with the paid one. Also, you need to curate heavily because Spotify's algorithm will push certain types of content. If you listen to a podcast once, it is hard to get rid of it, as it will keep popping into your feed, or whatever they call their interface.

Omg I literally puke with Shopify ads in podcasts.

Whats the point of paid, premium service like Spotify if I keep being served those stupid, dishonest and bordeline illegally deceiving Shopify ads every 15 minutes.

Because the ad has literally nothing to do with Spotify? Podcasters can say or sell whatever.

Spotify has enough power to say that podcasters should have ad free feed for premium subscribers or get deplatfromed. Obviously I would expect Spotify to pay podcasters.

The idea of paid, premium service with ads is ridiculous.

> Obviously I would expect Spotify to pay podcasters.

Are you willing to pay more for your subscription so that Spotify can also pay podcasters? Because that's what you are asking, it won't ever be able to dilute even more the royalties pot, you'd need to pay more for your subscription so that podcasters can also be paid.

If I can avoid retarded Shopify ads, I would seriously consider. It would be nice change from bunch of individual Patreon subscriptions.

I rage quit my Spotify subscription after my first "sponsored" in the mobile app. Some people may tolerate ads in their paid subscriptions but many of us won't.

Just to clarify for those who might've been as confused as I was upon reading that, this seems to be a thing with podcasts on Spotify. I only ever used it for music, so I genuinely had no idea (as I am yet to encounter a single ad while listening to music in around a decade of subbed usage)

Getting my work to pay for Kagi was an easy conversation compared to how I’d imagine me asking them to pay for YouTube or Spotify would go.

I pay for Kagi and Fastmail. I used to have YT Premium, but given that Google and Meta are both abusive monopolies that shouldn't exist in the first place, I don't see any ethical problems with circumventing their paywalls where possible, and if it it incurs measurable economic damage to them, so much the better.

I'm honestly pretty damn pissed that even though I pay for the top tier of Spotify I still now get ads in podcasts on the platform. Yes, I can skip them for now, but when you're driving that's not always easy, and I have no doubt the "you can't skip them" is coming.

Absolute bullshit.

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