> Really?? And these content creators willingly post their content on the site so that Youtube can steal from them?
Many no longer do because of this. YouTube "demonetizing" videos they don't like, while continuing to show ads on that exact video and keeping 100% of the reward for themselves is certainly not fully in the right here.
> Please tell me how Youtube is supposed to stay in business without using ads, without having premium services...
As I said, I would be more than happy to pay for a service that actually treated me as a customer rather than an inconvenience. Stop forcing creators to do dumb things like "Shorts" to keep their recommendations up. Stop forcing creators to make videos of a certain length so you can drop ads in. Stop hiding incredibly useful features like the downvote just so you can force me to view content I'm probably going to hate. Just show me the content I want and provide actually useful recommendations next to that, and I'd absolutely be willing to pay money.
I think the real problem is they can't because of the mixed model. They need those dark patterns and anti-features for the ad-supported half of the userbase. Maybe if they were building two entirely separate applications?
Or maybe I'm entirely wrong and Premium actually does what I'm asking for. But I've never seen anybody claim it does, so I haven't even given it a shot.