Not OP. I did pay, for 10y. But the video quality kept slowly degrading (lower bitrate). And ads in the video content kept increasing.

YouTube also increased advertising some paying shows, YouTube shorts, and more. No way to say no, only "yes forever" or "no thanks not right now". And it comes back in a few weeks.

It also constantly sneakily lowers the video quality.

So I stopped paying. I combine ad block and sponsor block and I forget another one to cleanup the UI.

Often I download the video so that I can actually seek around without buffering (because YouTube buffers as little as possible to save cost, which I can understand).

Content nowadays is 30min instead of 5min. So you better be ready to skip and seek.

YT premium has higher bit rates and sponsor block built in, but they don't call it that or advertise that it even exists. Instead they say it allows you to "skip commonly skipped segments of video" but basically it is sponsor block.

It's the bitrate we used to have before they made it a premium plus all star plus+ feature and downgraded the rest.

Netflix did the same. In fact they even silently downgraded us from 4k HDR surround sound during a software update. And nothing can get us back the max quality anymore. I stopped paying all together.

So you know what doesn't buffer, has the absolute best quality (like 4x the bitrate etc), all the languages and what not? pirated content.

It's just stupid how much easier it is to obtain predictable quality without stutter by downloading rather than actually paying a streamer service.

Plus the ads and other UX dark patterns are through the roof.

I’m amazed people can get rid of shorts for a few weeks. For me, I tell it I don’t want to see them and it’s literally back as soon as I refresh the feed. It’s aggressively anti-UX.

Pay for a global monopoly that has always subsided its operation with infinite money from a near ad and search monopoly and private equity? Yeah, I will keep my uBlock Origin active, no thanks.

Watching things without having to log in is my use case. Not something that Google would want to ever cater for, so ad blocking it is.