YouTube is terrible without an ad blocker. The current business model is: bait users with free entertaining content, insert reasonable level of ads, stockholders get mad there isn’t exponential growth, really annoy users until they subscribe. I get that companies need to make money, but this cycle seems to be faster than ever now.
The rule is ghat they need to make more money than the year before. A company that need to make money and does would not be an issue. But a company that needs to make more and more each year is the disease.
This whole idea of infinite growth is so fucking stupid because it’s just not possible.
Nothing grows infinitely. It’s a complete denial of reality, and because businesses refuse to accept the idea they cannot infinitely grow, we end with no plans for periods of no growth, which ends up in layoffs and the poorest getting fucked while the morons demanding infinite growth take all the money and try and do it again somewhere else.
YouTube is a great experience with a paid subscription. It’s the streaming service I use the most and I find the monthly cost to be worth the content I watch there. It’s also an even more effective way to fight the disruptive influence advertising has on our online communities and helps fund the creators on the platform that I enjoy.
Everyone should make their own choices, I’m just highlighting one of those choices that works well for me.
Thanks for contributing! What is the difference between your experience and mine (with an ad blocker)?
For me, it was about being able to watch yt on my tv and mobile devices which are not able to block ads as easily as a desktop browser. I have a pihole on my home network, but it hasn’t been able to block yt ads for a few years.
Not the person you replied to, but I use the queue feature a lot, the ability to just queue up 10 videos at night and fall asleep without having to worry about making a playlist is nice. I also use their experiments a lot, like for example they currently have an AI experiment active that let’s you ask questions that it will answer based off the video. someone post a video that looks super boring or bland or too long, but you wanna know what happens? just ask for a summery, you get something that looks like this.
honestly if the download offline functioned better that would be an amazing feature too, it’s just glitchy for me.
Currently the price is steep though, I’ve told myself if it raises again I’m jumping ship myself
