> Maybe it's just that no one wants to pay their captors for golden ear-muffs and blinders when they themselves are the ones responsible for the poor user experience.

I vehemently refuse to pay for YouTube Premium for that exact reason. I get ads that amount to something like "You know how we just stuff ads down your eyeballs constantly? You know how it's really annoying? For just X.99 a month, we'll no longer do that!"

These enrage me to the core. Now that I have NewPipe and other methods of watching YouTube without ads and artificially freezing the stream when I switch away from the app, the official app is useless.

I don't understand this. Would it be better if YouTube "Free" didn't even exist? No one's forcing anyone to use youtube. How is this different from any subscription service that has a hobbled "lite" version?

YouTube doesn't provide the content, the people I watch do. I send them money. A youtube subscription to them, of which youtube takes a cut, doesn't disable ads -- only a second service, paid to youtube itself, does. Apparently $15/mo gets rid of ads, but $5.99 a month (less 20%, thanks youtube) actually creates the content I care about watching. Youtube has inserted themselves in the middle, and are extracting rent from both sides.

> youtube subscription to them, of which youtube takes a cut, doesn't disable ads

This is a really stupid oversight.. Twitch did subscriptions first and there they do disable ads on the channel you subscribe to (if it has them).

This isn't an oversight. YouTube allowed this from 2018-2020, but no longer allows creators to disable ads on their channel.

Precisely. I want to compensate content creators for their content, and YouTube for their bandwidth, discovery and video storage with some markup on top. YouTube wants too much for what they do.

It's the sheer aggression in their advertising that they introduced recently. There are memes that you have 2 ads every video, and that is closer to reality than parody these days.

My touchstone for excessive advertising is a Polish TV station called Polsat, which often had very good programming but also lots and lots of ads. We often joked that Polsat programming was "all ads, sometimes broken up by a few minutes of actual TV". It wasn't quite that bad, but it was true that you would get just under ~10 minutes of adverts per every 15-25 minutes of programming.

YouTube exceeds that ratio, these days. And when that happens, I'm almost positive it's time to start packing your toys and looking for a different source of entertainment.

I wouldn't know. I've been a premium subscriber for longer than that.

> No one's forcing anyone to use youtube.

No one's forcing YouTube to send me the videos either. If it gives me ads, they will be deleted before they even make it to my screen. If they don't like that, they are free to return 402 Payment Required instead of giving me stuff for free.

>> I think that's an inaccurate assessment of 'people who don't want to see ads'

They made a statement about people who are willing to PAY not to see ads. People don't want to pay for anything. Give me free content! And then when they don't like the ads - give me a free ad-blocker!

For me, I'm happy to pay a reasonable price for most things as long as I'm convinced I'll like it. But that's a problem with most content - uncertainty.

Plenty of people will pay nothing to block ads (I.e. use a free ad blocker). But when it's time to pay, different story!

Probably a very large overlap between people who would pay and people using adblockers