Annnnnd it’s gone!
Oh no!
I will continue not paying a dime for any media I see ever, unless I really support the creators, as I have been doing for … 20 years now?
What was the advantage again, except for seeing a few less ads if you are to stupid to install an adblocker?
YouTube music is pretty good. And a good deal of you already pay for another service like Spotify that you can drop
Ehhhhhhhh, like most Google services and products, it’s okay if you’re the narrow focus user group that its designed around.
I, for one, don’t want my YouTube likes and playlists all the same list as my music likes and playlists.
Google Play music felt cheaper, but was better almost all around. And Spotify, if you ignore them promoting ice and platforming and paying people like joe rogan and none of their musical artists and a bunch of other borderline evil things, actually had the best design and service… I say had, because most of the service they really offer is the algorithm and databases, which a few years ago got really really shitty for some reason. Spotify has always flirted with having and not having incredible algorithms for suggesting music… for whatever reason, 2016 was peak, and it’s had some pretty radical falls since then, to now, where it’s the most intelligence-insultingly bad algo I’ve ever seen, besides YouTube proper.
Okay, fine, I am ready to come out of the closet: I’ve been a YouTube Premium subscriber for two years. Lynch me if you like. I thought it hypocritical to crucify YouTube and have a Spotify or Netflix or Hulu subscription, and I found the cost acceptable.
Three price increases and a worsening of service later, I cancelled my subscription as soon as I received the email about a price increase.
Incidentally, I think that’s the thing to do: you get a price increase, there is no tangible benefit to the increase, you immediately drop the service. None of that “Whatchagonnado?” stuff. The only thing these services react to is an instant drop of revenue. You can live for a month without Spotify (or YouTube Premium), they can’t live for a quarter without subscribers.
We always have to remember that the short-term focus of modern capitalism is their weakness: a stupid mistake, a sudden drop in revenue, and the CEOs are flying out the window faster than Putin’s generals.
Why not just drop Spotify instead since YouTube music is included in premium
That was a nobrainer for me at least.
That’s how it all started for me: I had Netflix and Spotify from ages before, and then Netflix did their, “ads or double the price” thing and Spotify gave me more and more corporate music instead of what I wanted, so I dropped them both and switched to YouTube Premium for both music and video content.
People don’t know how to vote with wallet anymore.
It’s the reason these services get away with nickel and diming. Look at food delivery. For whatever reason people keep using it even though the fees add up to more than the meal itself. Let alone the markup the restaurant does to cover the costs.
Uber Eats motto should be “For when you want to pay $80 for a $5 meal”
Same thing with like Starbucks. People paying $17 for burnt coffee that needs 45 cups of milk and sugar to salvage.
The services will never change because consumers are lazy. It’s easy to just give their money away. People mock the “stop buying avocado toast” saying. But I think they just misunderstood it. I think the deeper meaning of it was meant to convey to vote with your wallet. You can buy avocados and bread at the grocery store and make an avocado toast yourself for under $1. But instead people go and buy it at a fancy pop-up and pay $18 plus tip for some mustachioed hipster with an artisan apron to make it for them.
/rant
The problem is, YouTube has no real competition. No one has the same thing they do. And the same applies to a lot of things today.
Another issue is, subscription services can just raise the price and then start charging people more without those people doing anything, or possibly even noticing, which differs from individual purchases where you had to make a judgement about the price each time. Now, people have to make an actively cancel in order to not agree to new prices (or EULA changes for that matter). It should really be the other way around, so that if a service raises their price, people have to actively agree to the new price in order for the service to keep charging them.
Can’t speak for Uber Eats or Starbucks though.
My boss claims it has “no effect” to choose where to spend your money.
I remind him, voting with our wallets is literally the only mechanism Capitalism provides for consumer ethics.
It’s Prisoner’s dilemma. When we think 5m people are going to take the action either way, we don’t think our singular efforts matter. But as there are 5m of us taking the action, there are 5m singular efforts that DO matter. If people just don’t give up on the idea.
Says the guy who still has an Amazon account :/
In some cases it doesn’t have an effect. Some things are just so big and have so many revenue streams that avoiding the products means removing approximately 4 cents from their revenue stream per person. Millions of people would have to do it all at the same time and that is difficult to organize and maintain.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t stick to your guns and not support things you have objections to. Something something integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking something something.
Says the guy who still has an Amazon account :/
I mean, I still have an Amazon account. I even used it, less than two weeks ago. But that was the first time I actually used it to buy anything for nearly a decade.
People shouldn’t hold themselves too strictly to any sort of puritanism. Avoid the worst options as much as you can, but when it becomes infeasible for you, make an exception. That’s much better than just always going with the bad option.
I think the key here is to get used to react immediately, because the immediate reaction causes a reversal of the action. We don’t have to live with the increased cost and decreased service forever, because an immediate negative reaction means the service is restored to what it was before, with any luck. So everybody skips a downgrade or price increase at the same time, and until CEOs figure out the trick, it’s bye bye enshittification.
The services will never change because consumers are lazy.
That is not true!
The services get more expensive and the quality goes down.
And yet consumers will still use the services; this was my point. They are too lazy to stop using the service and just go buy food in person. So even if the quality goes down and the prices go up, they will simply pay to continue being lazy and get food delivered.
AAA gaming has in fact been suffering its customers voting with their wallets from what I understand.
So there is hope for the greater, more ignorant population at large.
I thought it hypocritical to crucify YouTube and have a Spotify or Netflix or Hulu subscription
Revanced. Or YouTube with an ad blocker. While supporting creators by directly buying albums/merch.
But I don’t think it hypocritical, necessarily. People can inherently only care about so much. For a long time I stopped shopping at Coles and went to Woolworths instead, because I was pissed more at Coles than at Woolworths over a couple of specific things. Then more recently Woolworths did even more to piss me off, so now I mostly shop at Aldi. At no point in this was it not accurate to say that both Coles and Woolworths are horrible duopolists that screw over their suppliers. But one had at least not been so blatant about its gross hypercapitalism bullshit by marketing the idea of brand loyalty and consumerism explicitly to children. So while both were always bad, one seemed the slightly less bad option. Until it didn’t.
Bro youre a capitalist drone stop writing as if you have anything to teach anybody else about anything and go pay for the next subscription you see
Cool. Just canceled my sub. Back to Freetube it is.
Revanced is free
Newpipe, grayjay and many others too
I used to run YouTube Vanced on my phone for years until Google killed it a few years ago. Since I was already paying a monthly sub for YouTube Music (been using that since the Google Play Music days and had my whole iTunes uploaded there) I decided to spend the extra 1-2 bucks a month for the Youtube Music + YouTube Premium combination, since that seemed like less effort than keeping up with ReVanced builds constantly.
Last month I tried getting a student discount for my subscription, but after a day I got an email telling me Google was canceling my sub for an unspecified reason. I decided not to renew it, and instead downloaded ReVanced, and spent a few days redownloading all the albums I only had on streaming, and integrating those along with my old iTunes folder into my Jellyfin I already had set up for movies.
Now I’m saving 15 bucks a month, and have regained full control over my music library. Feels pretty nice, and the Symfonium music app on Android looks 10x better than the ever-changing UIs of YTM ever did.
Also feels great not to give a single cent to an accomplice to Israel’s genocidal mania across the middle east anymore. I had already severed ties with Google’s mail, photo storage and search a year or two ago. Get fucked Google.
Google killed it ? I’m still using it.
Vanced or ReVanced? I seem to remember Vanced being broken by an update some time after Google C&D’d the project, leading to the creation of ReVanced a while later But maybe I’m misremembering, as its been a few years.
Oh wow! Getting rid of the mail is a little hard. I was trying to do immich for pictures but I’m having a hard time with opening folders to docker. I’m a beginner with docker so I’m on my 4th install try
Keep up with revanced patches ? You need to update maybe once every few years
Youtube is also sending notifications about a coachella live stream, even if the notification settings/preferences are turned off.
Even if you have Revanced.
Luckily it has not happened, yet. Either older version or they’re rolling it out in waves once again.
But fucking hell, if any app sends me an irrelevant notification without my permission. It loses it’s permit to exist on my phone.
I mean… it’s quite literally happened already. I’m not the only one who got the notification so they are definitely doing something. Maybe not with all accounts but 1 is too many.
Sry. It hasn’t happened for me yet or anyone near me. So they must be doing it in waves, which is usually done based on location.
I do agree that even 1 is too many, just that it’s not as widespread as of now.
Ah, got it.
I wonder if its a location thing. I’m in northern Europe, if anyone got the same notification, let me know where you at
Haven’t heard about Revanced before. I’m pying for YT Premium but since I use Spotify for music YT Music isn’t helping their case if their raising the price.
According to this reddit thread it also happened to people with Premium https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1sic32k/getting_coachella_notifications/
Since you haven’t heard of Revanced, ignore that and check this one out instead: https://morphe.software/
There was some drama in the Revanced team, a bunch of the devs left and started Morphe. Revanced is on life support right now.
Wait, what’s the drama? I’ve just installed Revanced on a new device in the past month and it seemed fine?
It works fine. For now.
The dev team had disagreements, a bunch left, made their own thing, Morphe. Thats all I know/remember. There was a reddit thread explaining the shenanigans, you should be able to find that fairly easily.
I had not heard of the drama, thanks for the link.
I’ve sort of skimmed a few posts talking about the drama. I don’t have specifics but from what I’ve read the main guy at Revanced is a bit of a ego and doesn’t know how to code (very well). The people who know how to code tried to work with him, got fed up and left.
Reminds me of…a lot of stuff. But especially Retroarch.
Oh no whats going on with retroarch. Please dont tell me that they are having a fight, I just managed to get a bunch of roms downloaded and was ready to start converting my xbox into a retro machine
It’s been a fight the whole dang time. The lead dev is a shite programmer with a gigantic ego and a control freak. He was infamously awful on the emulation subreddit. Deeply disrespectful to the actual emulator devs. MAME team especially have a long lived hatred of Retroarch.
Occasionally he’ll rewrite code that was working fine and break something that previously worked. Like…NETCODE. For example. Broke it and refused to take the L. So the guy who wrote the netcode backend quit out of frustration. That’s just one of a billion examples.
His ego is rivaled by the likes of stenzek (Duckstation emulator, and front end wizard for Dolphin and PCSX2) the guy behind Simple64, and TeknoParrot. Except those guys are actually good programmers, just insufferable.
Cool. I stopped paying for it back when it was still called “YouTube Red”, during one of their many crackdowns on creators’ freedom in the name of benefitting advertisers. I dumped it and installed an adblocker, and eventually YouTube Vanced and its successor Revanced.
Yet the FOSS alts are still free. Hot damn.
I’ve never paid a subscription for YouTube. It’s been, what, like $10/mo for ten years? Can buy a lot of media drm free for that $1200.
You can get a lot for free too if you know what you’re doing.
I would pay a lot for YouTube Premium if it actually blocked all the ads. Unfortunately, it does not. The video itself is allowed to contain ads inside the video, which YouTube does not block. I have heard that if the creator declares it, it can be skipped, but SponsorBlock (aims to) skip all of them by default, and for free.
I have an iPhone — the second worst device for consuming YouTube on, tied with the iPad for the same reason. On my old Android phone, I have Firefox with uBlock Origin. Same with my Macs, and my work PC (which is at work). The worst device for consuming YouTube on, I also own — the Apple TV streaming box (which is ironically the best streaming box due to it not having ads in the OS — I’m dead serious, even if you’re Android all the way, you should get one).
On my iPhone, I’ve deleted the YouTube app. Instead, I have a shortcut to YouTube on my home screen that opens in Safari. I have a Safari plugin called Wipr 2 that I paid $5 for, one time, to a solo developer who uses the Fediverse (Mastodon) and is a woman (this shouldn’t matter, but I do enjoy minority representation, and seeing girls win). I occasionally see ads on YouTube, but it’s rare, and typically, refreshing Wipr (updating its block lists) fixes the issue.
That’s on an iPhone. Wipr2 is not available for tvOS. So mostly, I consume YouTube content on my MacBook, which I can mirror to my TV. Ironically, the TV itself (which runs Android TV) is better at mirroring my MacBook (which is between 1 and 2 metres away) than the Apple TV box, at the same distance. (Make that make sense.) (So, you often hear about Apple and Google being rivals around iOS and Android, respectively, but Apple actually licenses AirPlay to Google for inclusion in Android TV. That is actually a thing, and it works great.) I can also run a Thunderbolt/USB-C to HDMI cable and make my TV a monitor for my MacBook, and just drag a Firefox window up to the TV. But it’s a MacBook Air, I still have to keep the lid open, and the screen on (I turn the brightness all the way down though).
The best TV box would not spy on you, so not Apple.
You… do know why Android exists, right?
I do. What about it?
So you’re okay with Google scraping your data, but not Apple. Open with that next time, you save everyone the time of reading through your subterfuge.
You don’t care about privacy, you’re just tribal.
That’s quite an assumption and also inaccurate. All I said was that Apple is not a good TV box due to it spying on you (in response to the OP saying it is the best streaming box). I never suggested anything about Google
For consumer boxes, it’s basically Shield (Google), Apple TV, Roku, Fire (de-Googled Android), or some bargain bin shitbox.
The best streaming box on the market is arguably the Apple TV because it’s a bunch of icons, no ads. You say it spies on you, I’ve seen or heard no proof of this. The only “proof” is that it’s closed source and you don’t know what it’s doing. But not knowing what it does does not necessarily mean you get to assume the worst and tout it as fact. It just looks like you have an agenda — or a stake in the competition. The best set-top box on the market for gaming (if we specify that) becomes the Shield, due to more options on Android, though the Apple TV can run RetroArch now, so it’s closer.
The best option is probably to get an old corporate junker, put Linux on it, find some 10’/3m interface, and get a wireless keyboard/trackpad deal like the K400, then you can do what you want with it. But, most people aren’t gonna go that far. Maybe more people should. Curious now what you’re running with. I’ll tell you mine — 2nd gen (2021) Apple TV 4K. Good for everything but YouTube. I mostly use it for Plex (streaming from my Mac). I could use Infuse (Apple-only streaming thing like Plex) but I don’t care for it.
Why not get either a DIY Raspberry Pi type media player/server or if you need other streaming subscriptions a licensed Android TV box.
I just remove the adfull google tv launcher and replace it with Projectivity. I then use Stremio and Smarttube, neither of which can work on tvOS.
Unwatched on iPhone is pretty good, give it a look if you want a native app that isn’t the official one. Although I also vouch for Wipr2 as well. Stumbled on both as recommendations on here over the past 6 or so months.
I used to pay less than the single plan for a family plan, split between 5 people. Back when ad-free YouTube was an afterthought and my primary reason for using it was Google Play Music’s unlimited music storage and streaming.
The amount they just increased the cost of YouTube is about how much I’d be willing to pay total for no ads. Until then, they’re competing against zero ads (but no casting) for free.
