conorab

conorab , 5 months ago

Reasons not to buy premium:

• Google having a history of all the videos you watch via your account.
• Even if Google provided an option to opt out of tracking there would be no reason to trust then since they have lied about not tracking people in the past.
• YouTube seems to redirect any Premium profits intended to creators to the entity which made a copyright claim on a video. This would be sensible if YouTube’s copyright claim system wasn’t so vulnerable to abuse. Normal (yellow) demonetisation will pay out from Premium though. https://youtu.be/PRQVzPEyldc?si=5-wFn2SqPZLdOlqa
• Features are removed from YouTube to incentivise Premium such as playing videos while your phone screen is locked.
• Similar to above, Google have been increasing the amount of ads particularly on phones where ad blockers are harder to use. I.E. pushing users to Premium not by making the service better, but by making non-Premium worse.

conorab , 5 months ago

Not particularly surprising. It was copied from the YouTube iOS app...

conorab , 5 months ago

I mean, fair. The two big reasons are that your views are worth much more than normal viewers to creators, so it does mean you're helping support the content you watch. Further, the more people who pay for content the less influence advertisers have. All this said, I would assume that $5 a month to your favorite creators (Patreon, Paypal, Librepay, etc) would be worth more to them than a share of your YouTube Premium subscription fee.

conorab , 5 months ago

I would be very interested to know how good they are at tracking a user across brand new browser sessions. I have mine set to delete cookies, cache and history (minus a few trusted domains) on close but I'd imagine it would be easy to differentiate between me and others in my household by browser fingerprints alone. The only question then is whether those guesses are reliable enough for Google to essentially treat those sessions as 1 person, or throw it away since there are bound to be quite a lot of cases where 10s or 100s of people on the same IP have very similar browsing habits and configurations and trying to figure out who is who would be incredibly difficult (think offices where everybody could have exactly the same laptop and share similar browsing habits due to working for the same company). That's my cope anyway. The alternative is Youtube over Tor for which would be painful.

Points 4 and 5 on my end are essentially two sides to of the same coin. I should clarify, I don't have a problem with YouTube introducing a new feature and making that Premium-only.

conorab , 5 months ago

I'm very curious about why YouTube allow users to upload what seems like unlimited footage in 4K HDR and keep it around indefinitely. Only guess is they don't want to miss out on the next big YouTuber. I upload a lot of video for very few views. There is no way in hell that Google make money from my account.