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I've paid for YouTube premium pretty much since it started being a thing and had to drop it recently for financial reasons. Simply existing these days feels like I'm drowning. The bombardment of ads and frequent notifications to come back are making me want to ditch YouTube entirely. I've been using YouTube in Firefox with desktop site requested to play my videos in the background and I try to use odysee as much as possible now. Their price hikes along with no recognition of how long I've been a paying member has really gotten to me.
You see, if you are unable to cough up the money for one reason or another, you are not important to them anymore. It's better for YouTube if you don't watch than if you watch without premium, so they bully you until you leave. There is no "grace period" just because you supported them for years. Corporations are not your friends and the only thing that matters to them is infinite growth.
Best thing to do is find a few friends to split it with. The family plan gives you 6 accounts I think.
I disagree.
Once upon a time, streaming services were free, or gave you a generous amount of content for a small price.
Now, not only does everybody and their mom want to make you subscribe to something, they're also constantly and unapologetically raising prices whilst removing features or extracting useful/necessary features and placing them in new, expensive premium tiers.
Sure, get a family plan and split, and watch them slowly raise prices to "match inflation" or some other bs excuse!
There are definitely solutions out there, and I'm sure someone will come up with a way to spoof YouTube premium or something and the war will continue.
I won't say 'pirate everything', because you shouldn't; there are definitely services out there that are worth your money. But if they're going to play using scummy tactics then I don't see why we can't as well!
The amount of bootlicking YouTube premium users in these threads astonish me. Wonder how they'd feel when it's $150+ per year and the value proposition completely ceases to exist.
Already there: it's 11.99€/mo. in Germany. Per year, that's 143.88€ and converted to USD that would be $151.63/year.
If you are an Apple fanboy, YT charges the Apple Store fee on-top and your YouTube Premium will cost 15.99€/mo. or, converted, $202.25/year. But no sympathy for Apple fanboys, so I couldn't care less about that.
Subscription services are so scummy that I wonder why they are even allowed. They removed YT Premium Lite and now FORCE you to also subscribe to YT Music even if you don't want or need it. That's predatory and exploitative and the only reason for not giving customers the option to just pay for ad-free videos is greed. In reality it went like this: they set up an infrastructure for a music streaming service and invested money to do so. People are not interested at all in their music streaming service, so they are not recouping the cost. Easy corporate solution is to bundle the shit nobody wants with the shit everybody needs to justify an insane price hike. Ta-da!
You know that it's totally okay for people to decide what they think is worth $150 of their own money, right?
You don't want to use it, don't. Or steal it if you're cool with that. Otherwise STFU
Same sort of logic for why people cross picket lines. Sure everyone is entitled to do what they want, but it hurts the rest of us.