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Comment by gradus_ad | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Premium is the best $10 I spend per month. Nowhere else can I consistently find the sort of niche content that interests me.

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YouTube Premium is the best ~~$11.99~~ ~~$13.00~~ $15.17 I spend per month...

I actually don't care that much about YouTube content and it's not a place I go and hang out, but I'll pay just about anything to avoid seeing ads. Yes, I know ad blockers exist, but getting them to work on laptop, phone, Apple TV directly, Apple TV via casting, etc is not easy or even possible in some cases. If I had to guess I watch ~1hr of YouTube a week, if I watch more than that I'm watching longer-form content, but mostly it's because everyone hosts their videos there so the 3-7min here and there add up to ~1hr (tutorials, product launch, help/documentation video, etc). As much as it pains me to fork over $15+/mo for that, I hate being interrupted by ads more.

Firefox + uBlock Origin on smartphone and desktop = no ads (though I personally prefer Vivaldi on desktop, but for simplicity just recommend Firefox)

SmartTube on Android TV has no ads and skip sponsors

so all you need to remember are two apps FF (+uBO) and SmartTune on TV, you install it once and don't care anymore, comparably difficult with payment for YT

More channels are fighting for attention though, so finding more channels are "creating buzz" or "news" based on mediocre information ie. taking things out of context and making unwarranted conclusions or blowing things out of proportions for clickbait titles.

"This changes everything!!"

Getting youtube fatigue.

I heavily use the "Not interested" and the "Do not recommend this channel" options a lot and don't click on clickbait, and use the DeArrow extension, and this way my front page looks quite good.

At this point you’re doing almost as much work as if you handpicked a few channels and put them in your RSS reader.

Algorithms are sold as “curation is hard, the algorithm does it for you” but getting the algorithm to do a good job is actually a lot of work

No, I often get nice recommendations from the long tail, like interesting academic talks or tinkerer channels, videos sometimes with only a few hundred views or even fewer.

That’s not an argument against the comment you responded to.

If I just took any random 20 creators I’m subscribed to on YouTube, the premium membership fee, which includes YT Music, is more valuable than any of the other streaming services.

The only other streaming service I’ve been a paying member even longer than YouTube is di.fm

I also occasionally pay for a few months or bassdrive.com and or soma.fm

For movies / series, I’m back to sharing.

Disabled recommendations. Disabled comments (firefox plugin). Use subscriptions page as the homepage (firefox plugin). Only subscribe to channels that interest me (and aren't annoying like that).

The browser extension "DeArrow" is well worth a look.

I've started putting together a curated directory of (subjectively) good YouTube channels and videos [1]. It's literally the 3rd day, so not many entries yet, but I plan to continue growing it like I did with Minifeed [2].

1. https://skyshelf.app/

2. https://minifeed.net/

I paid for Youtube Premium. I was still shown ads on embedded youtube videos, and it was changed so that the ads pop up so quick I can click initially and go to the youtube site (where I won't be shown the ads) before the ad starts. I switched to an ad blocker because that was so adversarial on youtube's part in order bypass the 'feature' I paid for.

Which sites were you viewing the embeds on?

$30 USD/mo for YouTube Premium Family ):

They totally made the free experience miserable as shit like airlines do for coach class.

Fully agree. There is so much good content and being ad-free is just a really great experience.

I prefer newpipe for $0/mo

I prefer Tubular with Sponsorblock

Do you know how it compares to LibreTube[1]? For the SponsorBlock integration; it works well for me, but I kinda miss the newpipe interface.

[1]: https://github.com/libre-tube/LibreTube

I've never tried LibreTube. I am used to the new pipe interface and had all my subscriptions managed their so the move to Tubular was easy.

nowhere near comparable experience if you want to seamlessly use your YT account across a TV + phone + computer

i'd rather pay the $10 than pay with my time by being an ad-block whack-a-mole diagnostician

> ad-block whack-a-mole diagnostician that is being done as open source community efforts now: NewPipe for mobile, SmartTube for smart TVs etc. All you have to do is update them once in a while

For those of us who are too cheap to pay the subscription:

On my iPhone I almost never see YTube ads. I don’t use the YTube app and instead I install Chrome and watch YT that way. I lose notifications—which is perfect for me, since I don’t want many notifications on my phone anyway.

This might also work in Safari but I haven’t tested it.

On Android, Firefox with sponsorblock. I do pay for Premium though. In since YouTube Red.

It's not comparable, it's superior! The youtube app stinks! And I don't care about "seamlessly" using it across my devices.

I use skipvids.com across phone and computer and xbox. I'm too cheap to pay $15.99 per month

I mean it’s just $10. People are making livelihoods based off from YouTube. I get not liking ads, but if you have the option to go ad free for a low cost, why not do it? Do you pay for any of Netflix, Paramount, AppleTV, etc.?

I refuse to give google any cent (and I also do not use youtube at all, so at least I’m consistent).

> Do you pay for any of Netflix, Paramount, AppleTV, etc.?

No.

Edit: I do pay $5/mo for PBS

I would prefer to pay that money to creators directly than to pay it to an adtech firm and trust that they'll dole it out fairly.

Isn’t it a hassle to pay everyone for each video you watch? Do you use the Super Thanks feature or do it some other way?

>if you have the option to go ad free for a low cost, why not do it?

It requires the use of a google account and there is no way to even request opting out of the accompanying data harvesting. Any "curation" or "recommendation" that would inevitably happen is also an anti-feature.

>Do you pay for any of Netflix, Paramount, AppleTV, etc.?

I find that all of Google’s ad products are under-moderated for malicious ads. It’s a choice on their part to not tightly control this—they certainly could, though it would harm their incredible profitability if they did more scrutiny on the ads they show. I personally don’t especially care to pay a premium not to see deepfakes of celebrities promoting crypto scams.

It's a 15 now.

And yes, thars the issue. I pretty much unsubscribed from Disney+, HBO, and Netflix becsuse I can't just have multiple 15 dollar subscriptions add up.

As of now, YouTube, Rider, and Google One are my only subs. And I should really shuffle around space so I can unsub from One.

uBlock origin + SponsorBlock has a much better price to performance ratio imo.

I'd pay that, but it's about $22 in my country...

i judge ppl who dont have youtube premium as a not curious ppl :D

Is there anything you can watch on premium that can’t watch on YouTube for free?

I think not, mostly just removes ads, and a few other features

its more about what you dont want to watch

I judge people who watch that much youtube as susceptible to disinformation.

is there a difference between youtube premium and youtube-with-adblocking?

It's harder to block ads on mobile.

That's why I pay.

On iPhone maybe, revanced works great on Android.

If you don't watch on mobile, is there anything that YouTube Premiums gives you that an ad-blocker doesn't?

YouTube music, higher quality video, and the ‘jump ahead’ feature to skip portions of a video that others usually skip.

Also, though not a benefit to you in particular, apparently any creator you watch with Premium gets a way bigger payout for your view. Only heard about this anecdotally but it seems to track.

You can do this manually on the free plan. Mouse over the playhead and you'll see a graph. You can click the highest point in the graph which is where most people clicked through to.

Sure, but it's more annoying.

its crazy lengths ppl will go to avoid paying few dollars a month. i dont belive ppl commenting on this website are that squeezed for money. kind of bizzare.

There are problems with YouTube and the library is free.

https://dataspace.princeton.edu/handle/88435/dsp01dz010t34x

I find YT to be very sloppy nowadays. Not so much AI content as content that is over-optimized for clicks and revenue. 80% filler and maybe 20% substance.

I should probably de-algoify my YT experience.

YT is huge, and there is plenty of good stuff. You just need to subscribe to good channels that are not so easy to find. And block the clickbait channels when they appear.

I wish we could collectively move over to some decentralized alternative. Even if we make sure to disable the bad parts, relying on these few actors that have such revenue optimized and enshitification-prone business models does not sit right.

Although decentralization by itself does probably not protect from this trap in the long run.

Nothing is really stopping us the consumer. But given that YouTube seems to be the only one in its "medium" (compared to Twitch and TikTok being different formats) that pays creators, it's hard to ask all of them to impact their potential livelihoods.

Nebula as a premium service seems to be the best in terms of paying creators and keeping non-perverse incentives. But Nebula is for very specific kinds of content.

Ask Mode is pretty great. Wish they’d just summarise all the video titles for me so I could avoid bait.

I judge ppl who are brainwashed enough to pay for youtube premium and watch videos based on their thumbnails.

That's your right; I consider myself a very curious person but I never watch YouTube (I have watched less than 10 minutes in 2026).

I prefer to read news and information. What little exposure to YouTube personalities and editing styles I've had annoys me to no end.

Video is a terrible learning format for most information. I actually judge people who learn primarily through video as having very low information parsing throughput.

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