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Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

  > Personally, this sort of arms race is only going to cause me to not use YouTube

This is by design. They’ll either get you to pay or leave.

I personally pay for YouTube because I get a lot of value out of it.

But I feel you. I abandoned both Reddit and Twitter pretty abruptly after their shenanigans. I was a heavy user of both until that point.

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I'd pay Youtube if they would stop tracking me in return, but I simply cannot believe it will happen at any point

If anything, it's more data to track if you're paying. Plus, you can't use it in a private browsing window, since it's tied to your account.

That and make the like/dislike ratio visible again. They really have no reason to make you sit through a scam video long enough to be served an ad when you’re paying.

There are extensions to bring back dislike button, makes a world of a difference

If they stopped tracking you, they wouldn't be able to show you targeted ads, which would make the ad revenue go way down. In other words, it's not gonna happen.

But you’re not getting ads when being subscribed to premium, right?

True, but you still get ads in search and other places, so tracking your viewing preferences on youtube is very valueable.

As they say, if you ain't paying, you are the product. And if you are paying, you are a premium product.

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