• Okay but I don’t understand. Isn’t paying to remove ads a fair deal? I don’t know, I pay for YouTube Premium and I’m kinda happy about it. The price seems fair; you get no ads, you get to download stuff, enables picture-in-picture and background playback. YouTube has been my main source of entertainment for the last couple of years so it’s the only subscription I have alongside Spotify.

      • The problem isn’t so much that there are ads. The problem is also what kind of ads they’re playing. YouTube has been known to play inappropriate ads without vetting them - think of those awful mobile game ads with a heavy sexual tone.

        This stuff also seems to explicitly target videos that kids might watch.

      • Isn’t paying to remove ads a fair deal?

        If the price were reasonable, community practices especially regarding monetization and moderation were acceptable, telemetry-tracking javascript minimal, etc. then sure.

        But… we’re not there.

      • Absolutely, you are free to make every kind of contract if you like. Personally, I am not very invested in youTube, I don’t watch any streamers or youTubers, it’s just a video hosting platform for me. I am boycotting Google wherever I can, it is a privacy desaster and dystopia-like enterprise. NewPipe has all the ‘features’ as well, if it breaks I just let YouTube go…