Unthinkable is signing up in the first place

Was about to say the same. Unthinkable, I never even thought of subscribing in the first place!

Maybe watching ads is the unthinkable. It sure is for me, but I block them instead of paying.

Inconceivable!

forcing many users to consider the unthinkable "Do I really need 300 subscriptions?"

Not aiding capitalism by canceling a subscription = suicide

Lol, piracy, the logical solution.

And the unthinkable is as blockers. Wow

Arrrrr

Prostitution

Woah.. Morbid much?

The answer is obvious. Going outside.

Avada Kedavra!

I only see ads when I go to a friends house and they have that on the tv app blasting 1min ads every 5minutes.

And revanced for my phone

They think delay before every video and "'experiencing interruptions? Find out why" banners are going to make me turn off my ubo. Good luck with that.

Probably bots trying to trick people into thinking it's absurd and bad and all that.

There is an assumption these people are making that I am not sure they are aware they are making. They are assuming the cost of running YouTube is increasing so the cost of YouTube premium needs to increase. Every public company is driven by maximizing share holder value, the goal is to extract as much money as possible from the user.

I like nebula but I kinda miss having comments under the video. The negative comments can be overwhelming but I like seeing if other commenters noticed the same things I did and if the creator has responded to them.

Those days were brief if they ever existed. It’s actually pretty common to offer new users even sweeter deals for joining, and zero promotions to get loyal users to stay.

I scrape from the command line, Google doesn't even tough a web browser, leech the webm/webp/whatever content and transcode it into mkv/mp3 to watch locally, offline, with no ads or tracking.

I imagine costs have increased (more expensive server components due to ai shortages, more users to stream to, ever-increasing storage for the unthinkable amount of video that gets uploaded to YouTube nonstop). I imagine Google going all in on ai (infinite negative money glitch) costs a lot and they're trying to cover the costs elsewhere so the investor report doesn't look so bad and spook stockholders into selling. I'd keep an eye on other Google services to see if their prices also go up over the coming months.

Not defending Google, but how many employees do they have? Did they all get raises this year? I bet license deals from the music industry probably went up too. (No proof but assuming)

But I agree 100%, they are without a doubt no longer following "don't be evil". But it's disingenuous to believe they're annual costs are not increasing along with literally everything else.

Because its a covering instead of saying underhanded or sneaky or tricking users.

"I didn't steal, I was just quietly sneaking money from their wallet!"

Announcing price hikes is bad marketing

I would like to add an honourable mention to your list here: Kodi YouTube add-on. Somehow this is working for me again after being broken for ages. It's not the same (you need to use a Google account and API set-up) but no ads, auto play, recommend videos..

Funny, I'm a Gen X - and I have everything locally stored and with over 400 gb of music commercial free. -I could just put the whole thing on shuffle for the next few years. Still sometimes listen to ad supported Spotify tho as am used to radio.