I have YouTube Premium but I have to use ReVanced to block shorts because it's terrible for my ADHD. My mental health has improved ever since I ripped that fucker out of my life.
I want to control what I see, and this isn't even about them being paid anymore, it's just about forcing me to see what I don't want to see.
As far as what you get when you go Premium, you won't see any more ads within the app or the videos that you're watching. Plus, you'll gain access to background play, along with being able to download videos on the go. And perhaps what makes this plan even more worthwhile is that you get access to YouTube Music, which features over 100 million commercial free songs. Now, the one drawback is that these features don't come for free, with a subscription costing $13.99 per month in the US.
Video is nearly impossible to host in a sustainable way. The bandwidth usage is among the most expensive things you can host. The only way you’re getting something better than YouTube is if it’s tax funded somehow.
We'd need a quantum leap in storage and bandwidth first - orders of magnitude better, if we want competing to be financially sane 😮💨
Maybe when Google is (hopefully eventually) shattered into a million pieces by some US judge, YouTube could be splintered into several smaller companies, each with some portion of the infrastructure and channels/videos - thus forcing competition. Vaguely similar to the Bell divestiture.
If they hadn't gotten so obnoxious with ads that it was impossible to use YouTube without blocking them, I wouldn't have used the vanced/revanced stuff in the first place.
They find a way to prevent using those, I'm out totally, including on the few devices I didn't care about playing the ads because it was just background noise.
I even had Youtube premium for a bit. Revanced is nice just to dial back some of the bells and whistles that isn't relevant to the video platform. The official app feels clunky.
