Technology

I pay for YouTube Family. I consume a lot of YouTube and I want to support the creators I watch. At its current price point, YouTube Family is reasonable. Several households in my family get ad-free YouTube for what is a reasonably low price point for each household.

If the price goes up much (eg if I were paying the single price of $11 per household), the creators I really enjoy continue to get pushed out or change content because of shitty ad rules, or they pull the whole “must be in the same household” bullshit I would drop it in a heartbeat just like I’ve dropped most streaming providers. Streaming has become cable and YouTube has been shooting itself in the foot by forcibly changing content for advertisers. I come to the platform for content, not advertisers.

There's no winning a perpetual game of whack-a-mole, especially when having no moles (=viewers) left also means that you lose.

I'm getting Playback failed from time to time on reVanced. Maybe after 5mins of every 3rd video. I just go to my watch history, open the video again and it continues. Mildly annoying, but good trade-off for not having ads.

They successfully broke almost every Piped instance.

They kept trying to ruin my experience so I've switched to Invidious and Odysee.

Invidious only for the content creators that don't crosspost to Odysee yet.

Meanwhile Odysee goes ads free...

I hope one day we will find a method to finance websites operating costs without ads. Meanwhile I will be using blockers and hope someone else’s does the ad clicking.

It’s my little internet piracy you could say, if I am already doing it with every movie and tv show and most games it would be out of character. I am obsessed about saving money and so if I can get away with it I will do almost anything.
Same with the health insurance I have 1/5 of the real cost for full package because of various gray area tax optimisations. Then double dipping on real estate rent+appreciation. Most efficient used car purchase. 25 year old fridge and washing machine because new ones break down too fast and can’t be repaired. Manual renovation between tenants to save on labour cost. Lack of addictions. Relatively cheap hobbies. 4 milion in assets, zero debt.

No, this can’t be. They took all of our personal information so they could use AI to tailor ads to exactly what we wanted at any given moment.

/s