Hacker News Reader

Comment by nerdsniper | Hacker News Reader

I just pay for YT Premium. I’m genuinely curious why that option is so controversial? Happy to get people’s thoughts.

So I never see any ads and I feel like I get enough value for what I pay. It even helps me skip in-content ads with a single click.

View on HN

I also pay for yt premium.

Most people do not seem to like pay to play, pay to “win”, etc and this falls either very close or in that category.

The long term economics seem questionable to me. Google can always turn up the heat a bit more with ads, charge more for the ads, play more of them, etc when they need to be more profitable. The only way they make more from premium subscribers is charging more and they will lose people each time they do. I guess technically they could make more if premium watchers viewed less content but there’s a pretty hard floor and I suspect the economics of it are much like soda fountains.

I’m afraid ultimately if premium becomes too large of a user base Google would need to turn it into an “ad-lite” experience to increase profits. Then we’re in an even worse place.

> I’m afraid ultimately if premium becomes too large of a user base Google would need to turn it into an “ad-lite” experience

I wouldn't hesitate to cancel my subscription and stop using the platform at that point. Life can go on without YouTube.

Or you could move on to the premium+ package, which costs more, but has no ads (yet).

Because Google does not build a platform that is beneficial to the creators who make actually good and productive and positive content.

I don't want give Google money for building a Mr Beast platform. I want the stuff Nebula does.

So I pay for Nebula.

Paying an advertising company to not show you ads doesn't make that company not an advertising company, and the problem is being an advertising company. It's corrosive to society and people.

I also pay for Nebula. I wish more content creators moved to that platform. It's so annoying to deal with YouTube's homepage to find the videos of the creators that are not in Nebula

I'd pay for YT premium in a heartbeat if they let me tune the platform to my needs: disable all recommends, disable all comments, allow only a whitelisted set of channels. That would be a "take my money" moment.

Where did you get the impression that it's controversial to pay for YT Premium? Most threads I've seen on this topic are composed of roughly half of the comments endorsing YT Premium, while the other half endorse adblocking from a privacy/autonomy perspective similar to the opening paragraph of the uBlock Origin manifesto [1].

What minor controversy I have seen is a small minority that argue either 1. You shouldn't pay for YT Premium because it enables user-hostile business practices or 2. You shouldn't use ad-block because it's effectively "stealing."

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/MANIFESTO.md

Many people I know are not technical enough to know about ad blockers, and refuse to admit to themselves how much YT they watch—eg that they would get value from either blocking ads or paying—when I mention the options

Quite a few of those threads have a sizable contingent of people who say they would pay for YT Premium if it removed all ads but since it only removes ads that YouTube puts in the videos they will still see any endorsements or promotions of sponsor's products that were put in by the content creator it doesn't really work.

Privacy rights. Google’s ad surveillance eventually feeds ICE and its ilk, so I’ll not willingly reward this behavior.

Seems like the opposite? You can choose to either have ads or a paid subscription service. If you don't choose premium then you are implicitly supporting the "ad surveillance"

How much do you use Google services on your daily life (Google search, Gmail, Google pay..)?

You might have unaware handed more your personal info them than you know

Zero. Email & calendars replaced with totally separate paid provider that doesn’t run ads at all. Search through Kagi. No domains or hosting. No docs/presentations, and only use meet when forced to.

>Google’s ad surveillance eventually feeds ICE and its ilk

Is this a prediction about what might happen or a claim about what's happening right now? Also, there's plenty of reasons to object to government/adtech surveillance, but "youtube ads are going to help ICE deport people" is probably the worse examples that I can think of.

DHS has been very upfront about the fact that they purchase pretty much all the data they can get, including from ad networks, in order to keeps records on and track people.

YT Premium is my favorite monthly subscription - probably the highest value software that I pay for.

It is very high value.

I would be happy to pay even more for an experience without AI slop masquerading as something else, and obviously fake or misleading news sources.

If Youtube or Meta spent a fraction of the effort identifying credibility as they do predicting user likes, they could do a passable job. I would especially like credible sources that express coherent viewpoints less correlated with mine.

Perhaps even a quality setting or settings so i could set my own thresholds of credible information and non-trivial entertainment.

Premium Quality Tier. Ad and Shit Free.

Like a beautiful statue in a simple block of marble, it is in there.

Try skipvids.com it removes most of the ai slop bs

Least delusional HN user/bot.

> So I never see any ads

> helps me skip in-content ads

So you get ads still! Whether or not they are from YouTube or the video creator is irrelevant. I thought paying was supposed to supplant needing to advertise to me during the actual video.

Alas, tubers feel the need to add sponsorships these days through either greed or reduced google revenue. Premiums "skip frequently skipped section" is about as easy as it can be to skip over them without blocking them entirely, short of using sponsorblock.

I'm not sure where the legality lies with them being able to skip it automatically if you're a premium user, I'd imagine their uploaders wouldn't be happy though.

You think explicitly highlighting that you're in the market segment that's happy to pay for online services will mean you will never see paid ads for online services again?

YouTube specifically? Yes.

YouTube does not respect its users, their preferences, or improving their platform. If it did, their website would function a lot like SmartTube, made by a solo dev. Instead, they're on a slow march of enshittification with shorts in every nook and cranny. Even just recently they made changes to the subscriptions page so it wasn't chronological for some users.

Not controversial per se but it’ll go the same way as Netflix - once it’s got adoption they’ll crank enshitification up to 11

It's a ransom.

I happily pay for YTP, but the monthly cost is actually getting a tad rich for me, and I'm honestly considering just not using yt any more.

The terrible UX, the constant pushing of shorts, the baked in shilling, even from my favourite creators, the absolute abortion that is yt music and their attempt to merge my music listening profile and my video watching profile (I don't want fucking music videos in my video feed ffs).

There are some creators that I really like, but I won't die without their content. Maybe I need to go to something like Floatplane or whatever, pay for the content I actually consume and start pirating music again.

Ragebait comment for sure, but not everyone lives in some bubble where $14/months is spare change and anyway the fact that even a philosophical wall of text on why paying for something so fundamental like not getting spammed with retarded unksippable ads on a 20 second video, (or even worse getting one in the middle of a concerto movement) would not convince, makes further engagement unworthy. It's pretty appalling to note that not a single comment so far brought up the affordability issue.

I pay for YT premium, but it’s less because of the ads, and more because of the stupid restriction of not being allowed background play if my phone is locked.

This used to work for free, they went out of their way to disable it so they could charge for it.

Once upon a time we paid for features, instead of paying to remove inbuilt annoyances.

(In a sense, this is getting too close to paying a bully to stop harassing you).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com