> I don't trust YouTube Premium enough to even try it.
These two statements seem to be mutually incompatible unless you're trying to argue that a premium tier doesn't really exist unless you can write the terms of service and audit the company providing it. It's also somewhat hard to follow the logic here: if you don't trust YouTube, why are you watching them at all? It's not like Google tracks you less that way and if you're under the impression that your ad blocker is helping there you can certainly subscribe to Premium while leaving the same blocker enabled.
How are they incompatible?
This also doesn't make any sense from the negative way you're describing it: you're eating at Cockroach Joe's every day so clearly you don't really believe the food is bad. If you're using YouTube now, any negative which you can possibly imagine is already happening: they're tracking what you watch and where you watch it from, they're telling advertisers what kind of devices you use as a proxy for your likely spending habits, etc. There's a 0% chance they do that less when it's their only option to make money to cover your usage costs!
It's an imperfect analogy. But point remains. Some places can offer bad and good experiences side by side, and have a long reputation of shitting up a few good products over time.
> eating at Cockroach Joe's every day so clearly you don't really believe the food is bad.
No. I know some X is bad, and some Y is good. It doesn't mean I hate X, I hate X that such and such makes.
It's like that scene in Spaceballs. Don't order the menu special.
People bet into slot machines. Put an entry fee into a room full of slot machines and see for yourself how many people come to play.
The only way for a casino to make sure people pay to play a slot machines is to keep a free entry option that is gets annoying quickly. It is creation of a problem to justify a paid solution. Ad blockers solve that problem for free and have to be blocked.
And people who are addicted to slot machines have their own favorite games that they play all day long. They might pay at a chance to play. Youtube doesn't actually want to have a competitor at the same time.
To torture the analogy. This isn't sneaking in the free buffet. It's the option of only free buffet in casino offering stuff you aren't allergic to. But then forcing you to play some strip poker to get in. Sure you can pay to get in, but what guarantees I have they won't force gambling on paying customers or further deterioration of the free experience?
Talk about the "lengths" people go to defend their addiction. This is my general impression of the lot here on HN. You guys are so deep into cult of bullshitting that normal argument feels like an attack and invites downvotes.
But YT premium on itself is bad value. I can replicate most of its value with... An ad blocker.
Why should I pay Google to solve problems it creates for me? That's just incentives them making more problems. Maybe they will add a solve a captcha every 5 min if not on Premium.
And lastly YT isn't above ruining it as well (see premium ads). History (see cable) teaches us, ads on premium is a matter of time.
- It is not $60 steak equivalent. More like it is the price of McDonalds burger itself.
- It is not an untested product. You are getting an option to pay for the burger and eat it, rather than watch a 30 min ad to eat it for free.
People will hate Google/FB ad model and at the same time also not pay for a paid tier that removes the ads.
If you're getting served McDonalds at the world's largest buffet, it's because that is what you enjoy.
It's really a strange concept that we're somehow cheating someone for not looking at an ad. And yet somehow it wouldn't be cheating if we poured over every ad but never bought anything in them.
It's not handed to you for free, there's an implicit condition that you watch the content and the ads that are served with it. Too many people don't do that and that's why YouTube is now testing blocking ad-blockers. You reap what you sow.
No, there isn't. The web was designed from the beginning to allow the end user to have control over what content is and is not displayed. It isn't television, radio or magazines, the platform owner doesn't have complete control over the layout and display of the content they serve. There is no condition, implicit or otherwise, that the end user will pretend they're consuming an old media product just because web platforms can't move beyond old media models of revenue.
None of which require viewing, reading or listening to the ads, either. Ads have always been a gentleman's agreement.
>Too many people don't do that and that's why YouTube is now testing blocking ad-blockers. You reap what you sow.
No, Youtube is going to reap what it sowed, because no one is going to turn off their ad blockers. If their platform was worth paying for, everyone would have moved to the paid tier by now. Google bought a free video service and tried and failed to monetize it to the point of nearly ruining it for content creators with their puritanical rules, arbitrary demonitization, opaque to nonexistent support and restrictive algorithm, but no matter how much they squeeze the turnip, it won't bleed enough for them.
That's not our problem. We'll gladly support content creators directly through Patreon or other means, but Google can get fucked.
Service high bitrate video is not cheap and YouTube is notoriously breaking even at best. Any alternative is going to be even less efficient and more expensive due to the lack of economies of scale that Google has. If that's what you want so long as it doesn't have Google's name in the corner, so be it, that's understandable.
>If their platform was worth paying for, everyone would have moved to the paid tier by now.
I disagree. I think people are inherently cheap and will exhaust other options of getting the same content for free first. We shall see I guess.
Yes, it's an arms race, always has been. But it's more expensive for them to break the ad blockers than it will be for the ad blockers to inevitably update, so if it's a war of attrition, they will still inevitably lose.
The problem isn't that people aren't watching the ads, the problem is Google's business model doesn't work, not for Google, not for the consumer and certainly not for content creators, and the only solution they can come up with is trying to force people to watch ads - which never works.
>Any alternative is going to be even less efficient and more expensive due to the lack of economies of scale that Google has.
I mean, plenty of alternatives already exist, and content creators are starting to lead viewers to those alternatives, because of Youtube's arbitrary censorship and demonetization. Every social media platform hosts video now. There are decentralized platforms like Peertube. We're way past the point where "streaming video" is a hard problem that only Google-scale infrastructure can solve.
They're going to have to innovate or die like any other company, and disabuse themselves of the illusion that the web is a gravy train where the rules of supply and demand don't apply. This isn't innovation, this is desperation.
If I can't watch it without ads, I simply won't watch it. And I certainly won't pay for it if it still includes ads.
Yes, you would be holding up your end of the agreement.
>If I can't watch it without ads, I simply won't watch it. And I certainly won't pay for it if it still includes ads.
Buy YouTube Premium and you won't get any ads and the content creators you watch will get more money than if an ad had played instead. Win-win.
But it's interesting that you'd have no problem with me never buying anything in the ads. What's the purpose of them again?
it's a whole economy unto itself. money changing hands, jobs, all of it. almost no one buys something because they saw an ad for it.
I pay for the content that I think it is worth supporting, and that's it. I do not think youtube is worth supporting, and if quite often the only reason I watch things there instead of somewhere else is due to laziness. Same for many creators I follow probably. If they set adblock restrictions I will just stop watching and that's it.
There is only one viable alternative to Youtube that I'm aware of. I use it whenever I can, but that doesn't change the fact that Youtube holds a monopoly.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-...
https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US
> Parties with whom information may be disclosed: Service providers, trusted businesses or persons that process information on Google’s behalf
You tell me, I was responding to your hypothetical question: "If you were actually worried about YouTube stealing your data, why do you keep giving it to them by using their service?"
>An ad blocker prevents you from seeing ads but it doesn't do anything to prevent resale of the data you volunteer
True. That's why I still volunteer as little data as possible.
fixed it for you.
Fixed.
It's really that simple. I can no longer trust PayPal, and Patreon doesn't accept my local credit card so that goes down the drain too.
They already harvest my data. I refuse to pay them money to exploit me further.
So, if I really do want to support the creator, other external systems are better.
The nice thing about YT Premium is that you have a single subscription to manage, and it then helps support a wide number of creators, even ones who you only see a single video of. It'll go to helping way more people in total than you would ever get around to signing up for individual Patreon subscriptions for.
Either pay up or admit (to yourself, us, whatever) that you’re not willing to pay for services you can get in an ad-supported format instead.
Is that really so hard?
I only started getting a proper income recently. How exactly was I supposed to pay when my YT Premium used to be 5% of my income?
I already pay for Spotify and Amazon Prime. I literally don't have more disposable income. (Unless I throw in the emergency cash reserve or investments) I still have to pay for dental surgery and an optometrist.
What is it with people like you telling us to "admit" some deep seated desire? Is it so hard to not assume things about my life and create your own fantasy?
I don't necessarily trust Google, but creators are vetting that Google is holding up their end of the bargain. So why shouldn't I?
"The reason you shouldn't trust them is simple: it is the CEO and board's fiduciary duty to the shareholders to make the most of any company's immense market power. The legal requirements governing their behaviour are such that they have to ensure that of all the participants in a transaction, they win biggest and most often."
Grain pools for farmers, state electricity, education structured to reach all, etc.
It's a hybrid economy with elected representatives expected to represent those that elected them - and hasn't quite broken with scale yet.
We've also pooled a lot of the CDN mirrors that serve an isolated state with enough local oversight to be sure many internet services ride over any disconnects from cables being ripped up.
I'm in favour of locally robust networks - internet, food, reources, etc.
> The legal requirements governing their behaviour are such that they have to ensure that of all the participants in a transaction, they win biggest and most often.
This always makes me laugh. They may be the minority, but public companies like Costco and Target who prioritize employees and company longevity do exist.
I spent a few years working at Target and a few at a Walmart. I'd take the Walmart every day of the week, though of course some of this is the particular people in charge at the store level, etc. I found Target to treat its employees pretty terribly in comparison.
There are an uncountable number of variables which could have resulted in your experience that have nothing to do with Target's (or Walmart's) high level corporate strategies.
That said, I am sorry that it was your experience. Working for bad bosses sucks big time.
Heck, just yesterday, the Delaware courts ruled that it was okay for Jack Dorsey to spend $306MM of shareholder money so he could drink with Jay-Z. (It was to buy Tidal, but Tidal was obviously a bad purchase).
Do business lie for money? Sure. But fiduciary duties don't compel that behavior.
> A fiduciary is someone who has undertaken to act for and on behalf of another in a particular matter in circumstances which give rise to a relationship of trust and confidence.
Are you sure about that? Because it sure sounds like you prefer stealing from content creators instead of paying for products.
I have no desire to steal from /content creators/, which is why I support them via other means. (Patreon etc)
YouTube on the other hand, is an untrustworthy middleman who's going to to their level best to profit off of me and not pass the money on to the content creators. It's YouTube that's stealing from the content creators. If YouTube was a utility that would deliver me the bits that I wanted from the content creators I wanted I'd be happy to pay some sort of volume pricing for the resources they use to do it, however I have no problem "stealing" from them by using an adblocker considering all the user-hostile crap they do to both viewers and creators.
> It's YouTube that's stealing from the content creators
Really?? And these content creators willingly post their content on the site so that Youtube can steal from them? Do you really think that Youtube does not provide any service here? It is really a parasite? My God, try setting up a video hosting platform for a week and see how that goes. It's amazing people can think this way, the ad-based "free for all" internet have ruined multiple generations conception of basic common sense.
Please tell me how Youtube is supposed to stay in business without using ads, without having premium services, without selling your information and all that? Please share with me this secret business strategy that no one bothered to explain how.
The only reasonable alternative that I can think of is making Youtube non-profit ala Wikimedia. But even then, people STILL hate on them because....they have so much money??? Why the fuck not, do people not realize how valuable Wikipedia is?
Many no longer do because of this. YouTube "demonetizing" videos they don't like, while continuing to show ads on that exact video and keeping 100% of the reward for themselves is certainly not fully in the right here.
> Please tell me how Youtube is supposed to stay in business without using ads, without having premium services...
As I said, I would be more than happy to pay for a service that actually treated me as a customer rather than an inconvenience. Stop forcing creators to do dumb things like "Shorts" to keep their recommendations up. Stop forcing creators to make videos of a certain length so you can drop ads in. Stop hiding incredibly useful features like the downvote just so you can force me to view content I'm probably going to hate. Just show me the content I want and provide actually useful recommendations next to that, and I'd absolutely be willing to pay money.
I think the real problem is they can't because of the mixed model. They need those dark patterns and anti-features for the ad-supported half of the userbase. Maybe if they were building two entirely separate applications?
Or maybe I'm entirely wrong and Premium actually does what I'm asking for. But I've never seen anybody claim it does, so I haven't even given it a shot.
If they are no longer using Youtube then it is not longer their problem innit? Good for them.
> dark pattern
This I agree with. I think we as a society need to accept that we are apes. This is what libertarians and free thinkers refuse to accepts. There are certain things that we just don't want to fuck with. You can't actually just say "lol just don't watch it" or "the free market decides what they want!". Guess what, people don't know what's good or bad for them (sometimes).
I wouldn't object to a full ban on short videos like TikTok or Shorts. inb4 "but I can control my desires!" . Okay good for you. Some people are immune to drug addiction too but that doesn't mean it should be legal.
I'm fine paying for things when I say "I like this, I want more of it." YouTube itself is the worst part of the experience, it's the part I want less of. YT would have to have way fewer dark patterns and bad behaviors for me to even consider paying for YouTube Premium.
It might not be so ethical but it's not illegal, which is what stealing is.
In fact Google and all other big tech themselves do similar things too. They funnel all their proceeds through tax havens so they avoid paying corporate tax in the countries they turn over in.
Yet it's fully legal, because tax avoidance is not evasion and loopholes are loopholes. And thus they're not stealing from the countries they're depriving of their tax revenue.
When they do it it's totally fine. When I avoid paying it's not?
You're confusing your moral sense with the law. Sure it's unethical, depending on your views immoral but it's not illegal.
I'm glad you agree it's unethical though. Keep that in mind when you see companies do unethical things because they think just like you. Everyone wants something for nothing.
In any case, this is why they're testing blocking ad-blockers. It's cost effective.
It's questionable how enforceable a ToS is though that is only clicked with a button and in some cases (eg NewPipe) not shown at all. But either way it's civil law not criminal.
YouTube is totally within their rights to block adblocking viewers though. Which is a fine solution for this problem IMO. No need to get the law involved.
More and more sites are doing this now though on most of them it's easily bypassed (on the site I use the most I can just turn off JavaScript :) )
YouTube is living counterfactually. I can live counterfactually, too. If YouTube were never free, then I would have never used it. They're trying to have it both ways, and so am I.
Nope, turns out it doesn't actually share that much in common with theft, it's a simple EULA breach at most.
I'm sure it feels righteous to point the finger and yell thief but it's such a sloppy argument. I'm not sure why anyone's still dying on this hill, people were unsuccessfully arguing this on IRC in 2004 with regards to DMCA, it's still not convincing decades down the line.
If I ski at a resort without a ticket, did the resort lose money? If I jump over a turnstile to get on the subway, did the city lose money? If I sneak into a music festival, did the artist lose money? They're all theft of services.
If everyone stops riding the subway, the city will lose the same amount of money and the subway will be underfunded. If everyone stops skiing and instead decides to build snowpeople in their back yard, the resort will go out of business. If no one shows up for the music festival, the artist will make zero dollars. So is that theft?
Generally most people would say no. None of those things are theft of service.
Deprivation of revenue on its own is not theft. That's not to say there's no moral implications behind watching public content without paying for it -- there is a moral implication -- but "morally problematic" is not the same as "theft". And a definition of theft that boils down to "loss of potential revenue" is not a definition that stands up to any serious scrutiny.
So there will be no more subway, no more ski resort, no more music, and in this case, no more YouTube. Is that what you want?
It's theft because you're not paying your fair share of the usage of the service. If the system remains in balance, you're either stealing from all other users (because they have to pay more for the recipients to earn the same amount), or stealing from YouTube/content creators (because they make less per view but the costs are higher).
It would be unequivocally good for the Internet if Google didn't have a monopoly on independent online video hosting.
> If the system remains in balance, you're either stealing from all other users (because they have to pay more for the recipients to earn the same amount), or stealing from YouTube/content creators (because they make less per view but the costs are higher).
This is incoherent. By this logic if I take a car into the city I am stealing from the railroad. I'm either stealing from all of the riders (because the railroad will need to increase fares so that fewer riders cover the same service) or stealing from the service (since they'll have reduced revenue from running the same number of trains).
Heck, by that logic if I build a competing product to another company and its users switch to my product, then I've stolen money from the other company. It's nonsense.
"I could have made more money if you didn't do that" does not work as a definition of stealing.
There are in fact ethical considerations around watching content for free -- even in instances where a creator might be giving explicit permission to watch that content for free, and certainly in instances where they want/need compensation. There's a reason why we try to fund Open Source projects even though they have licenses giving content away for free. There's a reason why we try to fund creators and give them steady revenue streams even in the instances where we know we won't be watching many of their videos for a month. People do have a moral duty to (when possible) support creators that are building things they care about.
Those ethical considerations are real, but they are orthogonal to theft. Theft is not merely deprivation of revenue.
But no, they're not going to close down Youtube. Even operating at a loss, Youtube cements a lot of power and influence for Google that they're not going to give up.
I do hope you're right though.
I could very well be wrong about their internal calculations about that, it depends on whether Youtube sees an actual risk of users going elsewhere (and whether there are enough people blocking ads in the first place for them to care one way or another). It'll be interesting to see what Youtube ultimately does.
> except reduced costs.
This in particular is funny though. I would not hold my breath that Youtube premium is going to get cheaper. That's not going to be a thing :)
Youtube premium is not priced around the cost that it takes to keep Youtube running. It's priced around what the market will bear, just like every product is. The only thing that's ever going to make Youtube's pricing or payout model change is competition. That is the only thing that ever makes price go down.
If Twitch starts offering better hosting options than it currently does, or Nebula somehow manages to take off, or there's some completely random mass-migration to Peertube (unlikely), then maybe you'll see prices go down.
So true. It should never have been permitted to get to this point.
The answer to all of these questions is a solid "no", I don't know if this is the point you're intending to make.
Have I stolen the baker's services when I smell the baked bread on the way to work without buying anything? It's an incoherent idea of theft at best, in which you must falsely represent the exchange as zero-sum to demonize.
If you're hoping that Google will decrease the cost of premium in response to getting more ads on screens, I have a bunch of wonderful bridges to sell you.
It’s the same reason I eventually got rid of my Pixel — it felt like a box just for Google to push ads at me, even though it was a premium product at a premium price.
And that's super annoying even then.
Advertisers use their dollars to influence and make statements, also forcing stupid age restrictions just because someone swears.
It's 1984 in 2023.
What makes you think it's right to be entitled to a free service?
You don't want to pay.
You don't want ads.
So ... then what?
This way, you wouldn't have to pay (which is what the parent comment wants). But you would still have an incentive to pay, because if not enough people did, the content you liked might might not get made.
People posted out of passion, because there was no money. It was an intrinsic filtering to weed out profit seeking.
I don't like the idea of creators getting paid, generally speaking. Information should be free.
I don't see any difference between rent seeking and YT click bait regurgitating existing knowledge that's easily accessible
Something has to pay for the infra costs.
Either tax money, ads or subscription fees. Choose one
It's not in the legal sense, you do get a "product" for it. But it didn't take me long to realize that even paying for Youtube Premium, I was better off not logging into my account and just using NewPipe.
I really think the only reason to pay for Premium is if you want to donate money to Youtube.
It saves me money for actual physical goods.
So... Which do YOU want to pay? I'll choose to escalate the ad-adblocker-block adblocker war. Winning so far.
There are always people in the comments taking the side of the company with arguments like "they need to make money" - sure, i'm all for capitalism, free markets and profits, but I use my right to whine when a company changes the status quo for the worse (from my POV). Public outcry is a way to pressure them to either keep the current situation, or think of something else.
For companies, it's Marketing 101 that if you can't or don't want to sell what people want, you can always brainwash or beat[0] people into "wanting" the thing you want to sell. But we do not have to take such treatment silently, or without a fight. By resisting, we raise the costs of anti-consumer moves ever so slightly. Maybe, sometimes, just enough to make the company - or the next one to follow - rethink if the change is really worth doing after all.
--
[0] - Metaphorically, of course. But when a company cancels the very product people like the most, in order to force them to use an inferior product, and knowing full well none of the competitors will come up with a replacement (because they're all in lock step, what isn't profitable for one won't be for another, etc.) - being on a receiving end of that does feel like being beaten into submission.
So you don't want to watch ads and don't want to pay for premium. What do you propose Youtube should do to make money to run the platform?
Google is rich. Their products have stagnated. They have no user support to reconcile mistaken flags or strikes.
It's anti user, the platform should be pro user. I'd like to see dark patterns pay their price and become deincentivized.
Love:
* Most of my favorite creators are there
* Ahh, that's it.
Hate:
* Seems to have no actual humans working there, or no way to reach them in the event of disputes. If someone posting to HN about their business locked out of their account is the best way to get support, there's a problem.
* Keeps getting better and better at..... pushing extremist content and crypto scams.
* Removes tools (like dislike counts) that helped users spot bad content.
* Charges $23/mo for premium which bundles a bunch of stuff I don't give a rat's ass about (youtube music? no thank you!), in addition to just removing ads. (That's only $2 less than I pay for my cable modem, like, seriously ridiculous territory.)
* Doesn't disclose how much of that subscription actually ends up in creators' pockets.
If they solved those last two issues, would I sign up? Ahh, no. They're still a net negative.
I'd much rather try to drag my favorite creators into posting elsewhere. I've signed up for Nebula and I support roughly two dozen creators on Patreon and similar tipjar/support systems. I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is, because IMO YouTube is circling the drain and getting desperate, and the sooner we develop viable alternatives, the better.
So, no, there's nothing YouTube (and their parent corporation DoubleClick wearing a Google mask) can do at this point would make me cut them a check. I'm working as hard as I reasonably can to make them obsolete.
>Doesn't disclose how much of that subscription actually ends up in creators' pockets.
Enough for your favorite creators to be there.
>Charges $23/mo for premium
It's $23/mo because people like you block ads. The ad blocker-blockers can't roll out soon enough. Fingers crossed.
They already exist. But some will be inconvenienced. Us pierats won't be :D
Where are you all getting $23 from?
I use yt-dlp for videos I want to keep a copy of, which are few and far between, and I use YT premium's download feature to queue up stuff I want to watch on my phone later when I know I'm going to a poor coverage area.
there's room for both solutions in my world.
But YouTube Premium, ad free, is wonderful. I bought it for my parents because they watch a lot of niche stuff. But now that I have it, it's worth even the crazy price increase (to like, $22/mo or something).
I like it better than Netflix/ Disney+/ HBO Max, as it's half entertainment, half educational (whereas the other streaming services are more entertainment and often doesn't keep me interested in spite of their catalogues).
Why do you get ads? I don't understand how there are people on Hacker News that don't use content blockers. Is is because of principle?
[1]: https://newpipe.net/ [2]: https://invidious.io/ [3]: https://ublockorigin.com/
If your business model only depends on ads you are putting yourself in a dangerous situation either way. For me ads always been a form of compensation, but nothing I was actively trying to milk most of it.
Today I run my own small niche ad platform. No tracking, no cookies, just jpeg or gif banners. In my opinion a completely ethical form of ads. And big surprise. That works too.
I paid for Youtube Premium for a pretty long while, and the only reason to pay for it is because you want to support Youtube. The official app for Android was awful the last time I used it, I've never been tempted to go back to it from NewPipe. You'd download videos and sometimes Youtube would just decide, "no, that's not downloaded anymore." It was way more battery hungry than NewPipe. I had less control over mobile data. It was glitchier and I couldn't turn off distracting features like comments or recommendations.
There was also this weird problem where signing in on both desktop and mobile would occasionally mess with playback and Google would tell me that I needed to only have a video on one device at a time. NewPipe doesn't have that problem.
And there's the privacy angle: Youtube Premium necessarily requires you to be logged in and to have your videos tracked, that's part of how the funds get distributed to creators.
---
So for a while I just gave Youtube money and literally didn't use the service at all, because adblocking was better in every way. But I gave them money because I wanted to pay for the service. And eventually I realized I couldn't figure out what I was paying for. I wasn't paying for content, because I wasn't logged in, so the people I was watching weren't getting subscription revenue from me. I was giving Google money, but it wasn't clear to me that giving them money was proving anything or making Youtube better or encouraging them to do anything -- whenever I looked at Youtube Premium it seemed like the service was actively getting worse and that a lot of the annoyances I was supposedly paying to avoid were creeping back into the service.
And I eventually realized that Youtube does provide Google value even if I'm not paying for it. It allows them to effectively hold a near-monopoly on independent video hosting online. And so I stopped paying for it because the only reason to pay for it was for an idealistic reason, and I realized that I'm actually be fine with Youtube failing and more independent sites popping up, and I don't actually want to encourage Youtube and if anything I'm happy for it to be a loss-leader for Google. For the creators themselves, direct donations turn out to be a lot more valuable, and I try to do that now when I can.
But every once and a while it comes up as an example of "people won't pay for anything" and like... I just don't think that's true. The reality is you are paying for less than nothing when you use Youtube Premium. You are paying for a worse experience than you would get from an adblocker, and in some cases you're paying for even more annoyance when Google starts getting snippy about how you use your accounts between computers. Idealism is one thing, but is it actually surprising to anyone that people don't feel motivated to donate money to Google?
Because that's what Youtube Premium is. There is no reason to use it unless you want to donate money to Google. The price isn't even the main issue -- even if Youtube Premium was free, I wouldn't use it. It's a worse experience than 3rd-party clients and adblockers. It exists so that Google can try to tie it into existing services or make a case to the public that they need ads, but this is not a serious effort by a company that actually wants to offer a real service for money.
Or, and stick with me here, you want to support the creators. Because the creators get most of the money from premium subscriptions.
As per the creators, who see how much they get for premium views and ad views (they already know how much they’re getting from everyone else).
I already brought this up above. The creators won't get money unless you sign into Youtube Premium and watch videos using that account, and that is a straightforwardly, almost universally worse experience than just using NewPipe and uBlock Origin anonymously.
Youtube Premium is more valuable to creators than ads, but part of the reason for that is because ads pay basically nothing to creators. The payout structure for Youtube Premium is weird and not really healthy for an ecosystem (since it works off of view percentages which discourages more professional projects in favor of spam). It's still not a lot of money, and it's ultimately a kind of bad system for funding creators. If you do want to support creators (and you should), donate to them directly when possible.
It doesn't make sense to purposefully make your viewing experience worse so that creators can get a fraction of that subscription revenue. You're supporting Youtube with Premium; but you'll help actual creators much more by using Patreon, Twitch subscriptions/donations, buying merchandise, or just donating directly if they support it.
Even if Youtube Premium was giving a comparable payout to direct support (which it's not), most creators on Youtube don't want to be reliant on Youtube for their revenue. Direct donations allow them to have more agency over the stuff they make, and subscriptions/purchases outside of Youtube allow them to stress out less about the fact that Google controls their entire livelihood.
I still disagree with your conclusion, since it’s a self imposed restriction that results in creators not being compensated. That’s on you, not YouTube.
I make a point to donate to creators I watch. I'm not compensating Youtube (although I did pay for Premium for quite a while), but I am compensating creators.
And yeah, that's easy for me rationalize, because I'm honestly not particularly happy with Youtube as it exists today, I think it has close to a monopoly on indie video online, and I think it would be good for other services to pop up around it. If it was possible for me to avoid Youtube entirely, I would, but... see the monopoly bit again. I don't think anyone saying "just walk away from Youtube" is making a serious suggestion.
But even given the above situation, if I thought paying for Youtube Premium would encourage Google in a positive direction, I would do it. I did do it. I just don't believe it will anymore. My experience with Youtube Premium was that it got weirder and weirder the longer I used it, and I didn't see any evidence it was helping Youtube as a platform.
If I can get out of that relationship while still supporting creators, I'm happy to do so.
When the "how to replace the thermal cutout in a Kenmore dryer" video helped me (and did so with a minimum of fluff), I bought the parts from the company that posted the video. (A whole set of spares, because why not? Pay shipping once, put 'em on the shelf, and have a zero-minute response time next time something fails.)
When I realize I'm 3 videos deep into someone's channel and I'm wishing the clock wasn't staring at me so judgmentally, I head for their Patreon straight away. Or their merch store. Or whatever lets me tuck some money directly from my pocket into theirs.
The next step is to find hosting elsewhere. I should make another attempt with PeerTube or something, or see if someone's building a video frontend for IPFS or whatever. And then start pestering my favorite creators into double-posting their content. Yes it's more work, and they won't do it unless there's a base of users who likewise feel good about paying creators. But I can be the start of that.
I haven't looked around recently to see if there's managed hosting somewhere that I can link to my own domain, but I'd be very tempted to sign up for a service like that. I like the idea of Peertube quite a bit, particularly around how it manages bandwidth -- I think that's very clever. I just realized that I don't take an active enough IT role in my infrastructure to handle setting it up myself and to trust myself to keep it patched and secure.
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But yeah, aside from hosting direct donations/purchases are the way to go. Sometimes that can be very difficult to do. Patreon has a lot of problems but has honestly been huge for enabling easier payments. We're in desperate need of better private micropayment systems for the web. Cryptocurrency was a disaster, and not everyone is always on sites like Patreon, which I get because it's work to maintain a presence on those sites.
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There's also a factor of quality and trust. I don't trust YouTube Premium enough to even try it. This is mostly colored by their constant, invasive disruption of my YouTube experience (particularly apparent on mobile) with YT Premium ads. Yes, I know it exist. No, I don't want it - the more you try to trick me into activating the trial, the less I want it.
> So what is the alternative? (Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops).
Proper ad blocker on the desktop. yt-dlp for archiving/off-line playing. NewPipe or some other alternative YouTube players for mobile.
Yes, I know you meant a non-free-riding alternative, but hey - I have no problem paying for services, even for premium tiers when free tier is available. But I'm not getting bullied into subscribing.