I'm biased since I work at Google, but, seriously, my YouTube Premium subscription is the most bang for the buck out of everything I subscribe to. My YouTube experience is delightful. I never see ads, and my feed is nothing but wonderfully enriching videos all tailored to my hobbies and interests.
Couldn't agree more. YouTube premium and Google Music for the one price? Works on all of my devices, no ads, and totally seamless. Such good value for money.
It's now youtube music, it's basically the same. Although you can watch videos in it, or just listen to videos as music? It's sort of odd and I half get it (lots of good audio content on youtube if you turn off the video).
So you still get music. But Google's branding strategy here is just odd and confusing. I don't really think they even known how this is going to shake up.
> my feed is nothing but wonderfully enriching videos all tailored to my hobbies and interests
The ad part I agree quite well with. However, I find that Youtube's recommendation algorithm is quite lacking. I mean this is also the case with Netflix and other social media I have used so not just Youtube's fault (only one that sticks out as better is TikTok).
For me, it tends to simply repeatedly recommend way too similar videos. If I somehow happen to watch a video about aa tech review, my feed will be tech reviews and that's it. Heaven forbid I make the mistake of clicking some random political video, and I am now in a hole where my feed is full of right-wing, anti-vaxxers, and conspiracy theorists and so on.
In general, it seems like Youtube's algo gets quite quickly to the local minimum/maximum but then struggles to look around or away from it. This leads to very a insular and locked-in-your-own-box experience.
I couldn't agree more. YouTube et al gave me what I can only describe as recommendation anxiety, where I opt not to engage with content solely because I don't want similar content recommended in the future.
> Heaven forbid I make the mistake of clicking some random political video, and I am now in a hole where my feed is full of right-wing, anti-vaxxers, and conspiracy theorists and so on.
Yeah, every time I click some SNL clip on Reddit, YouTube decides I want all SNL all the time. But I find simply right-clicking a couple and telling it to stop recommending them is very effective at undoing that.
> it seems like Youtube's algo gets quite quickly to the local minimum/maximum but then struggles to look around or away from it.
I've observed this too. Sometimes I feels like I have watched every single synthesizer video ever uploaded to YouTube. But I don't consider that an entirely bad thing. There's something to be said for a service with an engagement ceiling. If I find myself scrolling too far down to find an interesting video, that's a good signal that maybe I should get off YouTube and find something better to do.
Netflix and YT are hands down the best money I spend each month. I was a little annoyed they made me switch from play to yt music but that's grown on me now too.
church and state. separate separate separate. pure and simple. don't do personal anything on corporate anything. BYOD and use your mobile with your personal creds. i don't even connect my personal device to corp wifi.
Youtube Premium is nice but it's priced fairly high. More expensive than a music subscription, just to remove some Youtube ads (it doesn't remove in-video ads, you need to use Sponsorblock for that).
I'd pay for Premium if it didn't come bundled with a music subscription (and the price reflected that).
I choose not to log in on my work machine though, and the YouTube experience there leaves me with such a bad taste in my mouth.
Most recently, adds that don’t go away without user input. Ugh.
I’m not ready to cancel my personal Premium subscription, but it does have my considering how I can decouple myself from the platform moving forward.
And yes, Adblock, but not the point here.