I am very privacy minded and I detest advertisements and the arguments in this thread seem ridiculous even to me. I was not expecting to see a full 1984 passage that quickly!

Let’s just face the reality: the jig is up. I just really really hope the paid experience is completely ad-free.

Absolutely.

Note that the debate is now framed around the degree of advertising or the degree of tracking that comes with their paid subscription, and the entire conversation is about whether a service is reasonable in their fee and business practices.

The entire landscape of conversation has been profoundly shifted from whether we should even allow this kind of tracking in the first place to how and what degree of tracking are we allowing.

There is absolutely no reason a copyrighted entertainment system has to become streaming or come with truly VAST troves of data collection that gets sold en mass to every third party imaginable with no transparency. The technologies exist to do this in so many other ways.

Yet, that point is rarely discussed anymore — the entire debate has been quietly reframed to a question of degrees.

Now, to suggest that such a system isn’t necessary or even good elicits nothing but “it’s not a problem if you pay for an account,” and “it’s not like any other services are better about it.” The entire landscape has moved.

There is a notable shift from individual consumption through direct ownership and the general assumption of the rights of ownership to individual leasing with intensive surveillance by proxy for the exchange or consumption of what I can only refer to as “entertainment commodities.”

It’s rather insidious.

Remember Winston’s lesson: The large mass of common people do not find in themselves the need to think independently, to question or to investigate what they have been taught.

And then consider that the most powerful tool in the arsenal of power to influence humanity has convinced everyone that in order for them to be entertained they need to submit to constant surveillance and tracking in their living rooms and on their mobile devices everywhere they go. Social and streaming are the coin that is offered for this contract.

It’s very literally big brother. And the debate has been reduced to what you will pay for the privilege of watching the latest Game of Thrones episode or whatever.

It’s just becoming so conditioned that it’s becoming invisible to people.

Frankly this is unhinged. YouTube is a company providing a video streaming service. The fact that you think this is comparable to a totalitarian regime shows how divorced you are from reality.

You basically want to extract value from YouTube and content creators without offering anything in return.

If the terms of YouTube are unacceptable to you, simply stop using it. That's rather different from 1984.