I have to hand it to them, they are really good at finding new, innovative ways to make the platform worse.
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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YouTube is now flagging accounts on Premium family plans that aren't in the same household
(www.androidpolice.com)
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.)
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 manipulation
PeerTube 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.
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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
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Meanwhile on Steam my "family" consists of 3 adults with different addresses, last names, and credit cards, who have had accounts for decades and never lived at the same place.
We have full access to each other's library.
Gabe Newell is 62 years old. Gonna enjoy this gravy train while we can...
Man I hope he lives to a 100 at least, why am I always late to the party, I learn about Limewire and it dies the next year, I get access to my sister's Netflix account and Netflix goes to shit, I'm finally able to afford a gaming laptop and buy Steam games and now I'm too busy and tired from work to play them and Gabe is getting older. I wish I could go back in time and do things differently
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While steam has historically been "good", doesn't mean it'll stay that way...
Sure, the 2 constants in the universe are Entropy and Enshitification. When Steam turns to shit I'll go back to Piracy just like I did when Netflix went to shit.
My point is that companies don't have to be shit about account sharing and family plans, and people don't have to accept it.
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Google really seems to want to disincentivize people paying for YouTube Premium rather than just downloading an ad blocker.
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As someone with divorced parents this invalidates what I call a "family". Same to you... Netflix
So is it YouTube family or YouTube household?
Either way, probably need to setup site to site VPN and route YouTube traffic through a central location, if you can block geolocation.
Why pay for premium anyway? Let alone a family plan. You still get ads. They can be skipped too — SponsorBlock will do it for free. Google could use this but chooses not to.
They want YouTube to be like cable TV. You pay for it. You watch ads. You pay more for premium channels.
I pay for it. No ads. Background playing on mobile, and YouTube music included.
Background playing on mobile
The fact that they put this behind a paywall is enough for me to never pay them a dime.
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I pay for it, also no ads except the sponsor plugs, which are pretty easy to skip. Overall a better experience than the non premium. I don't live in the USA so my cost is like $5/month.
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YouTube is my only subscription.
I use it for Music and Video. I definitely get my money's worth, they're streaming to me at least 8 hours a day.
If it's not background music, it's videos. I can't even fathom how many hours of ads I have avoided.
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You don't get ads. You pay less than double what two premiums cost and your household can share.
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Youtube can suck a peener. I will pirate whole channels if they keep fuckin' up.
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And this still won’t be enough to stop people from using it.
it's because Youtube is a content monopoly. TikTok is a platform for short content...on youtube it's a feature with shorts. Twitch is a platform for live streaming content...on youtube it's a feature with, other than discoverability, the same features. Any music streaming service? again...it's a feature on youtube. The fact I could export my playlists from any music streaming platform and import it to Youtube and listen to it ad free via an ad blocker? come on. So as opposed to using multiple platforms, with youtube you have it all in one place. So no, this will not get people to stop using it.
Premium you don't need if you're even the slightest bit tech savvy. but no one is ever going to stop using youtube, there's no point. I mean I use peertube as much as possible but every now and then I'm back on youtube because of all those features in one place and some things I just can't find on peertube.
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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!
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This will be like Netflix pushing against shared accounts, sure it will work and their revenue will go up, but I will stop being a paying customer and will only watch videos from my notebook with adblocks.
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There are people actually paying for this crap?
I have a hot take. I pretty much exclusively watch YouTube as my form of TV entertainment. On most days, I watch many hours between putting something on to go to sleep or actually watching stuff in the day such as training courses or whatever. Sure, I could easily set up my TVs and devices to work around it, but I think it's actually worth it to just pay for Premium and not have the hassle. I feel I get more than my fair share out of it.
What I'm not ok with YouTube premium :
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The price is too high for a subscription. For that price I could get thousands of movies on a competing service like Netflix.
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Even if you take YouTube premium they are still farming your data and selling it to third parties.
So even if I watch a ton of YT I refuse to pay to sell my data.
If I pay for YT they have to not track me and not sell my data (at least data coming from YT).
So yeah taking YT is hassle free but is quite the scam if you think about it. Before paying you were the product. After paying you are still the product but on top of that you give them money.
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I absolutely hate this stuff. My family doesn't live in the same house, but it doesn't mean we are not a family. My mother-in-law and sister-in-law just message us for the passwords when they want to stream something. None of us pay for youtube premium and it looks like I won't be.
So nice of them. They help me cut the strings to the last google service I was not quite committed to drop
Ill immediately cancel and goto pure piracy if they do this to me. I'm getting so tired of this shit 🥲
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I use a VPN so yeah that's not going to work.
I suspect Google won't care if they "accidentally" lock VPN users out of YouTube Premium.
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Fuck em. We try to pay even tho we know how to get it for free. Go back to ad blockers.
Not a perfect experience but it’s better than putting up with that corporate bullshit.
I guess we going back to blocking ads
i never stopped, fuck these vultures - idc how many fake ass american dream-pilled carrots they wave in our faces. always fuck them.
GTK. I think they flagged my account since I share it with my spouse and some of my basic features disappeared recently like mini-player in the browser. I might need to unsubscribe and just rely on Firefox with an ad blocker. Nebula and Patreon are good alternatives as well.
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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
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People buy a pile of rotting shit and then wonder why it stinks.
I finally gave up when they started blanking out my home page as I turned off history... I don't even miss it
I just got a notification that Amazon Prime is doing the same with grandafathered accounts allowed across households.
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