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this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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Reasons not to buy premium:
Your utub link seems to contain a tracking Id.
Not particularly surprising. It was copied from the YouTube iOS app...
Meta-evil
They already do this anyway. They also do it whether you have an account or not.
Point one: I'm pretty certain they already track that. With or without account. And you're on the internet, without a VPN there is no privacy. You are also able to remove that history any moment you want. Is it Ideal? No. But you should've acted 10-15 years prior if you wanted to stop this. It's still not ideal though.
Point two: I agree. There does need to be space for them to repent, but they aren't actively trying to, so don't trust them (see the next point as an example of that).
Point three That's a shame. They really need to fix that, though with how corpos do things nowadays, not sure that'll happen.
Point four: That's normal, expected and a reasonable business decision. Most of these features they likely added after premium, and they're meant as incentives. Why else would you want to but their premium, if not for the added features?
Point five: This is shitty and mostly inexcusable behaviour. It's god awful, and they really shouldn't do it. I do have to play devil's advocate a little. They are fully, 100% in their right to do this. If you don't like it, vote with your wallet (and time). If we stop using their services, they'll stop making it worse. They are still A-holes for doing it though.
I mean sure, they could try combining the user agents my unofficial apps provide with my carrier's NAT IP to build a profile on me, but it would be highly inefficient and imprecise to the point where it's almost useless for them. With a Youtube Premium account they have an identity tied to an email address, full name, and payment info that they can relate every click in their apps and websites to. If I also use their other services with the same account, I would be paying them to spy on everything I do and sell my data, so other companies can sell me crap.
If you've already got that much of a set-up to guarantee privacy, it's a very good point. Most people aren't that dedicated to privacy (I think), but it's still a very valid point in your case
I would be very interested to know how good they are at tracking a user across brand new browser sessions. I have mine set to delete cookies, cache and history (minus a few trusted domains) on close but I'd imagine it would be easy to differentiate between me and others in my household by browser fingerprints alone. The only question then is whether those guesses are reliable enough for Google to essentially treat those sessions as 1 person, or throw it away since there are bound to be quite a lot of cases where 10s or 100s of people on the same IP have very similar browsing habits and configurations and trying to figure out who is who would be incredibly difficult (think offices where everybody could have exactly the same laptop and share similar browsing habits due to working for the same company). That's my cope anyway. The alternative is Youtube over Tor for which would be painful.
Points 4 and 5 on my end are essentially two sides to of the same coin. I should clarify, I don't have a problem with YouTube introducing a new feature and making that Premium-only.
It's called fingerprinting
What about the reasons to buy premium? Pretty much none right?
I mean, fair. The two big reasons are that your views are worth much more than normal viewers to creators, so it does mean you're helping support the content you watch. Further, the more people who pay for content the less influence advertisers have. All this said, I would assume that $5 a month to your favorite creators (Patreon, Paypal, Librepay, etc) would be worth more to them than a share of your YouTube Premium subscription fee.
That's what I'm thinking. The day I have a job I would much rather support my favourite creators directly than pay YouTube and hope for some trickle down effect
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/PRQVzPEyldc?si=5-wFn2SqPZLdOlqa
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Fyi all the removed features of the YouTube app they want you to pay for? Work fine on Firefox
Playing while locked doesn’t seem to work unfortunately in Firefox for iOS. You can do the trick where you start PIP and then immediately lock the phone to play in the background, but that only works if you don’t unlock your phone again.
That's weird. On Android I just take the "notification" and can press play and it'll work just fine.
iOS always has been finnicky