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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

There are problems with YouTube and the library is free.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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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