How is utilizing free services ever not freeloading?

Oh no, don't get me wrong, I'm not _rationalising_ freeloader behaviour.

I'm saying Google _deserves_ to have freeloaders milking them for every bit they can. So does Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Amazon...

And it's just a convenient consequence of doing the "morally right" thing, that you happen to get your content for free? And content creators be damned?

No, I just happened to always have it for free. They are the ones that decided that it was a good deal in exchange for tracking me throughout the internet, stalking me. They are the ones that decided to make my watching experience miserable by putting unskippable ads. They are the ones that decided to make the videos I watch crap, because if they're not 10 minutes long with a perfectly engineered cover image, they won't pay out the creators and they won't show their content. They are the ones allowing literal hour-long ads. They are the ones that decided to make my home page """algorithmic""", which is really "oh you watched a video game ? Others like <literal nazi>, you should watch it". They are the ones hiding, destroying, trying to piss me off by removing features one by one and putting them into Youtube Premium. Play in background ? High quality videos ? Not stopping autoplay every 30 minutes to ask me if I'm still here ? Picture-in-picture ? Adding to queue ? These are all features that they proudly displayed in blog posts saying how awesome they are, and that it'll always be free. Now, they blast me with popups telling me to get Youtube Premium. One per person in my household by the way, account sharing is bad and they must extract as much money as possible.

The content creators I support get their money on Patreon or whatever fundraising platforms they use. Same things for my favorite journals. The others ? Well, I don't care enough about them to think that I would pay for them. Maybe others will. And if they don't, well, they'll stop.

So you are vehemently anti-youtube, yet it still sounds like you get tons of content from it.

Why not get your content from ad-free platforms?

To quote another comment I made:

It would be, if Google didn't have a chokehold on most of the internet. Sure, Nebula exists, I can watch three creators there, woohoo. Let me go on Dailymotion too for those sweet 2005 videos.

Google did everything in their power to force themselves into every aspect of our lives and leaving no alternatives, or destroying them, or buying them. Now they get to deal with the consequences

The content creators could post anywhere, there is no reason they can't cross-post their videos to other platforms. Most publishers who are on Patreon post all their videos ad-free on there so you don't even need to go to YouTube.

The reason most publishers post on YouTube is because they depend on the revenue from the YouTube network.

If you don't want to watch ads, fine, but you are expressly violating the wishes of the people who are creating the content and then rationalizing it to yourself. The fact that you still rationalize not buying the ad-free premium offering is the kicker.

Ads are emphatically not a valid monetization tactic. Holding up a corner store at gunpoint is unethical; getting up to go to the bathroom during a commercial break is not. There has never, ever, ever, ever been any moral or ethical imperative to view ads, in any context. By asserting otherwise you're simply being dishonest.

None of the content I'm interested in is available elsewhere. I've checked for exactly this reason. I don't want to be freeloading off of google, ideally I'd not use their platform at all, just like how I replaced gmail with self hosting, googlemaps with openstreetmap, googlesearch with duckduckgo, etc.

It costs creators literally nothing to upload an mp4 file to a second website and it would create market forces where youtube now has to compete for views with those alternate platforms (even if it's fragmented). But they're not doing it. Okay, so then I need to use youtube, doesn't mean I need to give google my payment information to pay a fraction of that money onto creators and mainly further their adtech

I'll stop freeloading when mega corps start paying back even a fraction of what they take from society. Governments have a setup for this, it's called taxation.

Google uses their primary business (surveillance and propaganda) to subsidize their other endeavors, engaging in unfair business practices by providing services below cost to destroy any competition. Taking them up on their offer while protecting yourself from their primary operation is no more freeloading than buying only the loss leaders from one store while going elsewhere to get the rest of what you need. They're a business, not a public service.