I used to pay for Premium. Then they kept making the service worse and worse. Eventually I decided that they don't deserve my money.
- YouTube Music is trash. I was an inside early adopter and all of my feedback was ignored. I originally subscribed for Google Play Music (which was pretty good) but I switched back to my own collecting.
- They removed email subscription notices.
- YouTube Originals were awful. They took some of my favourite creators to make slightly better content that I can no longer share with my friends. Not to mention that you were never notified of these videos because they were completely different from normal videos in all of the YouTube UIs. (Thankfully went back on this, but I had left by that point).
- Videos always play at 360p on my 4k monitor. I need to manually up the quality at least 90% of the time. My internet is fantastic and I never see a stutter after raising the quality.
- The recommendations are always awful. I don't use them often but when I do it is all things that I have already watched.
- They keep trying to turn auto-play back on. (Although to be fair this isn't new).
- It still has ads! They just promote the Premium content (that I don't want) instead of other ads. Sure, less obtrusive but still annoying. Just let me use the damn service I have been paying for for years.
I understand the argument that I shouldn't be using the service if I'm not paying for it. In fact I don't use an adblocker on most sites because of this belief (I just back out of obnoxious sites). However 1. I've paid enough that I consider it fair for years of future viewing and 2. costing YouTube money is actually beneficial to me, because if it were to fold the content would move somewhere better.
To me YouTube is a great example of the cost of forever quadratic growth. They had a good product, it was profitable with ads or profitable if people payed for Premium. But they need to keep sucking more value from users otherwise their shareholders get angry. But I've been sucked dry and I'm quitting.
Yeah, the constant ad creep is my justification for ad blockers as well: since the service provider doesn't respect me or my privacy, they'll never be content to serve a few simple ads on the side of a video based on the content of that video to pay the server bills. Instead, they'll build a giant Rube Goldberg machine to target ads, hoover up user data, and shove more and more ads in my face. Even when I pay, I still get "original content" shown in my face because it's cheaper for them to serve than content sourced from other providers.
At the end of the day, you just have to put in the legwork to make things optimal for your use case, because they'll never care about you anyway.
- YouTube Music is trash. I was an inside early adopter and all of my feedback was ignored. I originally subscribed for Google Play Music (which was pretty good) but I switched back to my own collecting.
- They removed email subscription notices.
- YouTube Originals were awful. They took some of my favourite creators to make slightly better content that I can no longer share with my friends. Not to mention that you were never notified of these videos because they were completely different from normal videos in all of the YouTube UIs. (Thankfully went back on this, but I had left by that point).
- Videos always play at 360p on my 4k monitor. I need to manually up the quality at least 90% of the time. My internet is fantastic and I never see a stutter after raising the quality.
- The recommendations are always awful. I don't use them often but when I do it is all things that I have already watched.
- They keep trying to turn auto-play back on. (Although to be fair this isn't new).
- It still has ads! They just promote the Premium content (that I don't want) instead of other ads. Sure, less obtrusive but still annoying. Just let me use the damn service I have been paying for for years.
I understand the argument that I shouldn't be using the service if I'm not paying for it. In fact I don't use an adblocker on most sites because of this belief (I just back out of obnoxious sites). However 1. I've paid enough that I consider it fair for years of future viewing and 2. costing YouTube money is actually beneficial to me, because if it were to fold the content would move somewhere better.
To me YouTube is a great example of the cost of forever quadratic growth. They had a good product, it was profitable with ads or profitable if people payed for Premium. But they need to keep sucking more value from users otherwise their shareholders get angry. But I've been sucked dry and I'm quitting.