It’s called Premium Family, not Premium Household for fuck’s sake.
I’m willing to bet my left nut that they will rename it as such in the future.
Ahh classic, punishing paying costumers while pirates don’t have to deal with any of this shit. I guess the beatings will continue until profits increase!
punishing paying costumers
Time to dress up as a pirate I guess.
Gotta give it to them. They are extremely innovative in coming up with ways of enshitifying stuff.
For those select few that have an iPhone
You have a few options:
- be EU citizen and sideload a cracked YouTube (similar to vanced, but you need certificates on iOS which sucks)
- pay for a dev account and sideload regardless of above
- buy two apps: vinegar and AdGuard. AdGuard speaks for itself, vinegar is a tool that forces YouTube to use the html 5 player inside of safari and thus forcing it to your will
I know iPhones are hated here, but I saw the android will stop sideloading coming from a mile away. At least here in the eu apple can suck one and I can still sideload whatever I want
I just use Brave on iOS. It works fine for YouTube.
you need certificates on iOS which suck
I can still sideload whatever I want
??
ergo, there are extra steps, which is a pita, but not insurmountable.
I got certificates
You can sideload up to three apps without a paid dev account, they just expire in 7 days. Use something like AltStore (or better yet SideStore) and you have an easy way to install and re-sign two other apps. They also have the ability to essentially “offload” apps so you can have more than two other sideloaded apps, but only two can be active at a time (other than the signing app)
Yeah or services as Signulous could take a bit of strain away if you don’t want to be limited by the 7 days and 3 apps limit
Vinegar seems awesome. Thanks! Also, the dev’s other apps are pretty amazing too!
Thanks! Will look into the other apps too!
“There aren’t enough seeds for these AI training data torrents we’ve been downloading. Anybody got any ideas?”
Amazon is doing the exact same thing. Just got an email today that they’re shutting down the family Prime sharing thing. Had that for ten years now.
I really think corporations are starting to overplay their hands here. People don’t need Prime as much as Amazon thinks they do, people don’t need YouTube as much as Google thinks they do, and so on. Especially in the case of YT, yeah, turns out it’s easy to compete when your service is free. But once it gets freemium enough, things like Peertube start to take a place on the optimal frontier. Right now Peertube only competes with YouTube if you’re sensitive to the dimension of a service being centralized or not, most people don’t give a shit about that. But the dimension of cost and ads? Enshittify YouTube too much and suddenly Peertube has its place for anyone who cares about money or time (i.e everyone).
And Prime? Don’t think people won’t start just going to stores again, or buying directly from producers. At least if I go to an actual website to buy my stuff I don’t need to worry about getting ripped off by some drop-ship fake brand garbage.
People love their little conveniences and will try to hang on to them, sure…but I think this could really start to backfire if they push it much further.
Shipping is still free if orders are over $35. Add to cart, order when you have enough. Their 2 day shipping has become bs these days anyhow. “It’s 2 days from when the order is processed.” I bought the shit, money came out of my account, it’s processed. I have made a legal exchange with the expectation that your mutli billion company can place an order and box shit near immediately from 50+ warehouses. I order in the morning, and you’re telling me it took you 2 days to get that order with a preprinted label onto a truck?
This depends heavily where you are. In urban areas the one day and overnight options have expanded quite a bit, but seemingly at the expense of rural two day options.
I think it’s important to keep expectations realistic though…
in the case of Youtube there are very few groups/companies/whatever that could keep up with that kind of bandwidth. Federation helps here but it’s still a pretty niche thing for 99% of people who don’t know/care and just want their social media/forum/video site to work.
Yeah no denying YouTube is particularly hard to replace, hence why there’s been nary a competitor even after all this time. I think paying for server upkeep could be a model that ekes out a victory…it would be drastically cheaper to users, and would come without ads or any of that other annoying junk. Ultimately someone needs to pay the bills, so it’s not like I even blame YouTube for making you choose between ads or subscriptions. It’s just when they push it further than that, always further, forever further and further…
I’ve been using Nebula, and I dig it. It’s owned by the creators and there’s no algorithm. Only sucks you can’t really share since it’s all paywalled. They have a guest pass but the person has to sign up so I doubt people would bother.
I had recently heard about that service for the first time and I do think it’s a good step forward. But like you said, being properly walled off is a big miss w.r.t the ideal vision of Internet culture. I think that’s why I like the idea of server bill crowdfunding (same model that Lemmy instances use basically). Some people need to step up and pay for it, and once a threshold is reached, the content is publicly available for all. But it’s not like the people who pay are martyrs, since of course if nobody pays then the thing is lost entirely.
For a video hosting service, I feel like paywalling features is a good compromise, too. Once the bills are covered, everyone gets to enjoy ad-free, unsponsored videos… something along those lines would be preferable, at least to me since I feel like the openness of the internet is a great component to what makes it such a special place. Not that I mind private internet spaces either. I think both are important. So I think Nebula has a place in my personal utopian internet landscape too lol
No they are keeping the family plan but shutting down the non household sharing. Now it is “one additional adult and four kids.”
What?!
Yeah, sucks. Give this a read.
I’m on my brother’s premium. I told myself if my brother stopped wanting to pay for it I’d pay for it myself because I hate ads that much.
On the other hand, if Youtube itself takes it away from me I’m going to just stop watching Youtube.
Revance if you’re on android man. I mean I pay for premium but I still use it to patch the app at least.
I’m using Grayjay on android, I wonder how the feature set compares to Revanced? I like that Grayjay has sponsorblock built in.
On desktop, check out VacuumTube which is app that acts as a wrapper for YouTube Leanback (tv/console version) and has ad blocking built in.
Netflix trend
God forbid you have a parent who’s living away from home for work purposes who’s using that subscription
Yeah and you are also already paying for a set number of people that can use the account so why would it make a difference where they live? My brother is still my family even if we don’t live in the same state. They didn’t call it a household plan
They don’t care about whether they live with you or not. It’s about providing less service than what you’re paying for. Like how mobile carriers say, “unlimited data*” – *after 25GB, we [may] slow your connection speed to 256kbps. So this way, it’s “5 accounts*” – *they must physically live with you. So now you’re paying for 5 accounts, where 3 or 4 of them technically are unusable.
Why? Money. Those other people who you would have shared with now need to get their own account(s). Suddenly, “profits are through the roof!” – until the next big squeeze. At this point, Google is squeezing its customers like a dry tube of toothpaste.
Go on vacation? Believe it or not, banned.
Living in a dormitory? Belive it or not, also banned.
My entire extended family shares a single household and a single Internet connection. /s
Sure, it takes a bit of effort. But if you replace your routers with ones that have open-source firmware or actual workstations acting as gateway routers and running business-class open-source software, you can create a personal VPN between everyone involved that shows only one exit point to world+dog.
The trick is with ensuring that all YouTube stuff gets properly and comprehensively funnelled through this exit node - VPNs can easily leak data if not configured properly, and sometimes do so despite good configs - and implementing this even on other devices that require individual VPN connectivity (roaming, like phones).
Plus, having a mobile device’s VPN auto-recognize when it’s connected to a known good network, and have it automatically disable itself in favour of the VPN on that network, is not something that’s easy to do.
Finally, doing so without a high-quality, high-speed ISP plan can easily lead to an unusably slow VPN. The “mothership” exit node, in particular, would have to be gigabit or better - and symmetrical as well, so fibre and not cable - because it has both the node and connections to other homes and devices. If everyone started suckling the YouTube teat at the same time, things would likely slow down pretty fast on anything significantly less than a symmetrical gigabit connection.
I have been using (re)vanced for many years, it’s free and takes a lot less effort.
Seems there is a market for spoofing specific IP addresses out there. What if they don’t know you are not at home? I ha e no clue how any of this works…
You just install tailscale on a home computer, tell it it’s an exit node. Install tailscale on your phone and your laptop and whatever other computers you have.
Boom, VPN home and use your home IP.
I have to hand it to them, they are really good at finding new, innovative ways to make the platform worse.
Deactivated Premium recently. I used their music app when driving – expecting some ads now - nope, it just doesn’t allow running in the background anymore.
Seems like such a hostile thing - I’d like to think running ads would be a positive net income for them. (Now that I think of it - maybe they don’t have it built out into their music service.)
Revanced
This you can even use YouTube Music with it.
Makes me long for the days of google music. It just worked. Streamed stuff and even allowed you to stream your own library that you had stored in drive. I would use that in the car. Then they ditched it for YouTube music, which was a worse experience and lacked the features.
That old days when Google was cool and not evil.
If you pay, the platform remains great. I get a discounted YouTube premium membership through my mobile phone company. I think YouTube is great, I never see ads, lots of features.
Just to offer an alternative view.
Weird number of downvotes here – I thought they were meant for low-effort or non contributive comments, not an “I disagree” button. This person is giving a unique perspective as a subscriber (in this thread, anyway) and should be met with curiosity, I think. It is helpful to know that there are people who enjoy paying for it, so thanks for giving your opinion here.
I disagree because they have a dominant position for reasons other than having a good product – they squash competition trying to make the space better while themselves actively making it worse. Subscribing means supporting that style of inhibiting innovation, not to mention the other user-hostile practices they embrace (extend, extinguish). They are an ad company and obligated to make a profit, I get that, but I refuse to abide this style of using investor money to operate at a loss for years while deceptively capturing the market before raising prices. If your product is good, it shouldn’t need to be artificially propped up.
but I refuse to abide this style of using investor money to operate at a loss for years while deceptively capturing the market before raising prices.
Indeed, no company should be praised or rewarded for emulating the moves that made companies like Walmart and Amazon big.
This capitalist hellscape would be slightly more tolerable if there was ample competition in every space. Companies need to be motivated to make their profit in ways that please the consumer, but also in ways that are increasingly more ethical.
But truly, as they say, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Modern slavery and third-world exploitation…even literal child slavery are rampant in our supply chains and offshore manufacturing.
Even Google indirectly uses child slavery. The court threw the case raised against them (and other giants) out last year because these companies simply purchase “unspecified amounts” of cobalt through “global supply chains” - never mind how it came to be on the global supply chain to begin with and how much obscene profit these companies make off these resources.
I’m OK with your opinion and I appreciate hearing an alternate view to offset the echo chamber effect.
But for a lot of us, or at least me, its far deeper than just cost and ads.
It’s the fact that steps keep being taken to make the platform worse. They don’t want the platform usable unless you pay, and in this case they’re even taking a stab at the people who pay…you don’t pay enough in their mind.
If they had balls, they would just make it a closed platform. Pay to access, and restrict that per account IP. But they’d rather gaslight everybody and slowly turn up he heat so the frogs don’t jump out of the pot. This way they maximize their profits for longer. Point of all of that is, they don’t care about he platform or service at all.
For me, its not even about that. Their algorithm was so jacked up I was sick of being fed videos I didn’t want to see over and over, and videos I’ve already watched over and over. That’s why they added the subscription bell…because you would subscribe to things you wanted to watch and they never showed it to you. It wasn’t “you” tube it was “their” tube.
I bailed on them years ago. I still watch some content on there because there really isn’t a viable alternative. I use a scraper that gives me a feed of just what I want and without ads. I watch what I like and move on with my day. I’m back in control of my video viewing.
I pay nothing for YouTube and don’t get ads. YMMV
same here, I use invidious!
yewtu.be FTW!
I get no ads, and I’m not logged in for them to track me and sell my data.
“If you just give them your wallet right away, the mugging isn’t so bad, really. They didn’t even kick my teeth in!” 🤓
It’s a product. You can buy it or not. If you don’t think it’s worth it, stay away, or stay on the free tier. You’re acting as if you’ve got some kind of right to use a service that’s provided by a commercial entity.
I’m willing to sacrifice some of my valuable internet points here and be down voted to low hell.
I was going to make a comment along those lines.
They are, at the core, an ad company. Their motivation is to make money, and we are free to pay or not pay for their services.
The idea that we have a right to a non essential product for free is entitlement. They make a shit load of money, but also pay money to most content creators. Could they provide a service where they essentially just pay for costs? Sure, but no for profit Corp is going to do that, it has to make money somehow. While I’m all for peer tube, I really don’t know if it’s sustainable.
I wonder how many of the people who demand free access to services donate to FOSS Development.
Maybe some form of consumer co-op, where users essentially pay for operating costs, could be an option.
and it’s a multi-billion dollar corporation, that already makes more money than you or I will ever see in our lifetimes, that actively strives to make the user experience worse for people who don’t pay, when they’ve got a practical monopoly in the “free video sharing platform” market. And you’re whiteknighting for them. 🤡
more money than you or I will ever see in our lifetimes
I mean, I feel like you need to expand your comparison a little as the amount that you’ll see in your lifetime is such a minute grain of sand on a beech compared to corporate profits. The money they made today, hell, in the last hour… minute… will dwarf the amount that you will likely see.
actively strives to make the user experience worse for people who don’t pay
And evidently those who do! My parents live in a different country. What are they, not my family? What’s the family plan for? (Rhetorical question)
With Vanced I have so many more options to customize my experience. I can hide shorts I never watch, set a fixed resolution for data and wifi, return the stupid dislike ratio they removed… And if I’m using Vanced anyway to fix all the issues they introduce, why on earth would I additionally pay for their service?
I want to pay for their shit, especially to support content creators, but I can’t support a platform whose singular mission it is to make everything worse for everyone constantly. Feels like every month I have to get a new extension to undo some horrible design decision.
Vanced
I hope you mean ReVanced, otherwise… bBoy, I’ve got some news for you.
Yeah, sorry, I do. Just never moved on from calling it Vanced haha
I agree that it would make more sense if they called it a “household” plan. That’s clearly what it is.
I only simp for Steam.
Gabe and his 300 yachts thanks you.
You won’t find many people on this platform not lining his pockets.
whiteknighting
was a weak-ass criticism when it was on 4chan being leveled at anyone who said anything not derogatory about a woman, and it’s weak-ass now. Oh no, someone on the internet has an at-least-partially positive opinion of a company, how awful, we’d better stereotype and body-shame them for it.
If you had your way, the only comments about YouTube - or any other product from a large company - that would be allowed would be negative ones. How the fuck does that make sense?
Well said.
By Darwin you see a lot. I was merely stating that I think YouTube premium is worth the price I pay for it.
Is there no product you are satisfied with? Your life must be pretty bleak.
I’ll join you in the downvotes. There’s many reasons to hate YouTube. Asking them to pay for video content to everyone for free is a bit silly.
I’m also not saying you shouldn’t use alternatives or run an ad-blocker. Those are cool. I just find it funny how someone is saying: “I get some benefit in paying for this service” results in such backlash, lol.
I know. I thought we were upvoting respectful debate, not having a popularity contest. But apparently not…
It’s a “product” that profits billions off other people’s - often stolen - works.
YouTube steals other people’s work?
I tend to watch content creators who willingly put their content on YouTube. Am I missing something here…?
You are missing something. Multiple things actually.
- most content isn’t uploaded by the copyright holder (e.g. TV excerpts)
- demonetized videos will still have ads (at least for people without ad blockers)
- videos are used for machine learning without credit to authors or financial compensation (especially without consent when it’s not the copyright holder uploading them)
deleted by creator
Wow, shilling for YouTube premium and anti-net-neutrality (the “discount through your phone company” part) in one comment.
I don’t think that has anything to do with net neutrality
Not allowing ISPs to pick and choose winners among web services is absolutely what Net Neutrality is about. Bundling or discounting subscriptions isn’t technically the same thing as zero-rating, but the end result of making a particular ISP-preferred service cheaper than alternatives is the same.
You’re just trying to piggyback on a vaguely-related concept that your audience already likely hates. Call things what they are, not what would be convenient to you if they were.
Is recommending a product that you’re satisfied with “shilling”?
Is there a product in this world that you think is worth the price? Does that make you a shill?
I get the same with firefox and an ad blocker for free
Do you have a means of removing sponsors on the mobile app though? Revanced has sponsorblock and adblock in the app.
Sponsorblock works perfectly fine on Firefox Mobile
You mean removing sponsor led segments inside a video? Sort of. The jump ahead feature, which I think is a premium feature, allows you to jump in the video based on where everywhere else is jumping in the video. So when a sponsored segment starts and you skip forward 30s (double tap on mobile, ‘k’ on PC) you are offered to jump ahead. You click that and you get to the end of the sponsored segment.
Do you pay them or did they pay you?
Fuck GOOG for normalizing surveillance capitalism
Fuck YouTube in particular for making it basically impossible to usefully host an Invidious proxy any more and for their algorithmic manipulationPeerTube is the Way
A big problem with peertube is monetization. There should be some sort of mechanism that’d do that automatically. Otherwise there won’t be much content ever. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really happy that it exists but just don’t see it replacing even few % of YouTube as it is.
If you want monetization and scalability, you’re gonna have to get ads. Ad-free subscription services that actually benefit the creators are exceedingly rare. Very few people (less than 0.1%) are “making it” on Patreon and the like. The bitter truth is that most users can’t afford to financially support their favorite creators, and damn near zero creators could get the level of exposure needed to be sustainable without an ad-based platform backing them.
Video hosting is expensive af. Ultimately, small-time content creation is completely dependent on corporate benefactors. This is why every video platform that’s tried to compete against YouTube has failed. Nebula is trying, but that’s only useful to creators who fit within its specific niche.
I’m not saying this as a vote of support for the current system. Just an observation of how the market has played out so far.
Ad-free subscription services that actually benefit the creators are exceedingly rare.
Believe it or not, YouTube Premium is one of them. A Premium view is worth more than an ad-supported view to a creator.
(Obviously Patreon is better, as they can’t make a living off of only Premium views because it’s a smaller group; the population of ad-supported users is much much larger. But YouTube Premium does benefit the creators more than ad-supported YouTube does.)
That is correct. Though I guess that there aren’t more than 0.1% on yt that are “making it”. You just don’t see the vids that got 5 views since 2004 or the millions of ppl that so dread to be someone yet never gain traction.
you’re gonna have to get ads
I don’t think that necessarily follows.
Have you heard of self-hosted Patreon-similar Ghost ?
No, and neither has anybody else. Not saying that to be rude or dismissive, but just using their own numbers on the front page to paint a picture. They have ~3,000 paying members as of right now. Patreon has over 10,000,000 paying members, and even then only a tiny, tiny fraction of their creators are actually sustainable.
Paid subscription services like this are a great idea, in theory; I’d love to get away from ad-supported platforms. But the truth is that they just don’t work for all but a few lucky people.
YT also has a “tiny, tiny fraction” of creators that make a living there. There are many, but there are also gargantuan numbers of people never going beyond a handfull views because they can’t reach their audience without paying or LUCK. No saying you’re wrong though.
That’s 100% true, but YT also foots the bill that creators would otherwise be responsible for when it comes to just the basics. Free hosting/distribution of high res full-length videos, globally accessible, with a player app that is actively developed and maintained, a recommendation algorithm to put your content in front of viewers’ eyes… That, alone, has tremendous value for a creator that they really can’t get anywhere else without paying out of pocket. All of those things would have to otherwise be paid for/maintained by the creators. While it’s not a direct payment, YT relieves a huge burden for creators.
It sucks because it keeps creators’ success dependent on corporate oligarchs. But at the same time, it’s also great because it gives them a fighting chance to get started.
True, yes. But there’s also vimeo and the federated services like (forgot the name because I rarely consume any video anywhere). It’s not just YouTube. People just use it because they don’t know the others or just want to be famous (for reasons beyond me but that’s besides the point)
And you know when exactly YouTube went total ape-shit? The moment people could earn some meager bucks. Then shitty content flooded the whole platform until it was full of crap and actual good content got harder and harder to find in that pile of “you might wanna see this” Nowadays i see the frontpage, sigh in disgust and close the page. And I haven’t even seen an ad there yet. This would be the cherry on top
Shallow content comes from trying to manipulate the recommendations algorithm and “go viral”. Without a recommendations algorithm, the incentive disappears.
The front page is a direct reflection of the content you engage with.
Not in my case. I watch one vid per year or so, and I block everything google. They don’t know jack.
And props to the dedicated folks still running Invidious instances like https://yewtu.be/
Monetization itself is the problem.
Where would the money come from?
I’d be perfectly fine with some sort of subscription. That gets distributed to authors I watch. But I can see technical challenges to it.
