Technology

Good. Enshittify some more so more people will be driven towards adblocking frontends such as NewPipe and FreeTube. Eat big tech's bandwidth, but starve them of any revenue.

Youtube already makes more money than Disney, right? So of course they ramp up prices. It‘s a successful product after all and the line must go up. The more money it makes the more expensive it‘ll get.

That‘s why you should never give them anything in the first place and use an Adblocker instead.

I would also recommend Sponsorblock because most Youtube sponsorships are overpriced garbage or complete scams. It honestly seems too good to be true but it‘s open source and apparently can cover operational costs on just donations. What I really like about Sponsorblock is how you can curate your experience to a T. It lets you skip all sort of content that you may not like such as self-promotions, credits, previews/flashbacks, intros, and more. It comes really close to the internet highways concept I have long only dreamed about where you‘re served exactly what you want and you don‘t need a silly AI agent to do any of it.

DeArrow is another useful extension for Youtube, created to remove clickbait from your feed. It removes thumbnails and changes video titles based on user suggestions similar to Sponsorblock.

Youtube „Premium“ could never give you this experience for all the money in the world.

Gonna catch a lot of "get with the times" but an ad blocker and watching YouTube in browser on my phone - I've never seen the value of needing Premium to do adblocking or a whole ass app like Vanced. Maybe sponsorblock for more but like overall, my impression has always been YouTube Premium is a joke of a service that can never offer anything more than adblocking/sponsor block already just does from a browser on my phone.

I ended my Premium subscription about six months ago and instead got a VPN set to Albania. Ads? Gone. I live fucking with the google's data harvesting operations

Newpipe is free. You can donate to support if you'd like. No account required, so no tracking. Subs and history are stored locally. And with an internet condom (VPN) no IP exposure.

Youtube what? Ohhh, that annoying popup I always decline. Apparently the price only matters if you buy it.

... people pay for youtube?

... you know you can just block the ads, right?

... and you don't need a propietary app to get youtube on a tv?

Who in their right mind actually pays for YouTube?

I've been having a few problems with playback on ReVanced recently; it tends to buffer for a minute and the quality seems to be stuck on 480p. Any workarounds mentioned didn't work for long.

Desktop with uBlock has been fine though.

If you actually want to support artists, don’t. YouTube Music’s royalty payout is far from stable and transparent, not to mention low to others which is already hard to beat really. Tidal comes closest (from what I found to having functionality and paying artists a more fair rate. Qobuz is there too, Deezer pioneers detecting AI garbage that people think makes them artists now. Spotify got most features ofc but they’re unethical as shit

Laughs in ad block

The more they charge, the fewer will pay.

It's $3/month more than Spotify, and you get both music and videos. That doesn't seem that bad to me? Tidal is probably a better deal though, since it's cheaper and all plans come with lossless (FLAC).

I've been using a Plex server with my own ripped CDs for a while. Jellyfin is good too. If you listen to the same music a lot of the time, why pay a monthly fee when you can just buy the album once, rip it to your server, and listen to it forever?

I pretty much only use it for music, and most of the extensions have still gotten me by. At least long enough to rip the song to my hard drive for offline use. Fuck $16 a month. That's ridiculous. For $16 I could get an album or two every month and not have to worry about some buffering bullshit. After a year, not only would I be supporting the artists directly and avoiding paying paying a scummy company, I'd actually have some discographies built up to permanently show for it. They're just inadvertently trying to support people sailing the high seas. So irritating..

Neotube for music and revanced for videos are atill working the same.

amazon wanted a subscription for more video skips. mute still free

The library is still free, and probably has access to a lot of streaming. If your local one doesn’t, a lot of large libraries will let you sign up for a card even if you don’t live nearby if you just show up in person to sign up. Although some don’t even require that anymore due to COVID precautions.

Morphe