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Comment by TechSquidTV | Hacker News Reader

Please just buy YouTube Premium and support content creators on the only platform that gives a fair deal.

Even with premium, the official YouTube app has a much worse UX than NewPipe (and is proprietary).

I'd gladly pay for Premium (I'm already paying for YT Music, the price difference is minimal) if they allow turning off shorts. But they won't. They see time spent in app goes up when they hypnotize the users. They're too Goodhart'ed to realize that quite a lot of users don't enjoy being hypnotized.

I do this and I am still considering going third party if I can’t turn off shorts soon

The problem with this is that views from third-party clients don't seem to be counted correctly. Lots of creators now have ads in their videos, in addition to YT ads, so presumably, the lower view counts also hurt their own ad sales.

I don't really want to use the official YT client, or give Google any money, so I just buy some merch from my favorite creators once in a while, or support them on Patreon.

This is the way. If a user does not have YT Premium, watching 500 hours earns the creator from $0.5 to $5. Patreon/merch is way more effective in supporting your favorite authors.

No this is just an excuse. Not all content creators are full time or have audiences. Sometimes people just make valuable content, and deserve to be paid under the agreement that they give you free content, you watch an ad. If you don't like the service, do not use the service.

I'd feel very ripped off because it gives a directly worse experience than free tools. Not only does it not turn off Shorts, as previous commenters mentioned, but the most offensive scam in my eyes are downloads. I'd need to use yt-dlp for them anyway, as the paid downloads are directly inferior - DRMed and expire without online checks. Worthless for archival that I'm currently doing a lot.

Fuck Google. Knowingly providing a platform for scammers and flooding the recommendations with absolute garbage should not be rewarded. If valuable channels don't have a way to support them outside of Youtube, then so be it.

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