Did youtube give in already?
I use youtube across different devices with the same account. sometimes, i even use it in multiple browser profiles or apps on the same device (with the account logged in).
the ad reminder got me. it actually stopped serving any youtube video on my laptop. so i made a new profile in firefox, logged in, and it was fine. for a couple days.
so i made a new profile, logged in, and... was foiled. but not to be deterred, i did what any reasonable person would do: i sought out one of the DOZENS of alternative frontends and used youtube's recommendation algorithm on the main site to pull videos from the alternative frontend.
for one day.
today, on my laptop, with my old profile, never changing logins or browser settings, youtube started working again.
did we win?
I know that the pop up showing for some of my friends made me cancel my premium subscription. Everything else I don't know. If they stop i will think about getting it back, but newpipe has been working pretty nice. It has the same benefits as premium and I don't use youtube music. We'll see, thanks to youtube for making me go looking for alternatives i guess lol.
Out of curiosity, did they have an exit questionnaire or something where anyone doing that can let them know why they cancelled?
Yeah, they show you a survey where you can pick some general reason and then there's a comment box at the end. I seriously doubt someone real goes through that but maybe they have a bot collecting keywords or something lol.
Same, I wouldn't have discovered FreeTube had they not fucked with my user experience. And since I can't comment/upvote or as far as they know, subscribe to anything they've lost all my engagement in addition to all the meta data they were collecting on me. How many seconds did I hover over each element before clicking something google? You don't fucking know now do you ya!?
Trueee, FreeTube in pc, NewPipe in android and you get the same experience as premium. Even more so, with FreetTube you even get sponsor block that i have no idea with what kind of black programming magic its done but it's a plus over premium. I sound like an ad but i didn't know that shit like that existed until I cancelled premium lol.
What if I told you there's a fork called NewPipe+SponsorBlock on GitHub that does exactly what it sounds like?