Ton

What is even more infuriating, I’m from one of the countries that had YouTube Premium Lite available. €6,99 for adfree YouTube with none of the ‘offline’ or YouTube Music nonsense that I wouldn’t be using anyway.

My wife and myself have been subscribed for about 6 months now, totally seeing the value of it. Literally one month after signing my mum also onto it, she gets an email telling her that her subscription will end in a month from now.

Fuck that shit.

YouTube Premium Lite was perfect, affordable and removed exactly the main issue with YouTube: ads. Endless stupid amounts of ads.

I’ll go back to Firefox with any amount of extensions that block ads and block the ad-block blockers. Google would have to burn the browser market to the ground before I’ll consider subscribing again.

It can be done optionally, right? I fully agree that creating an account, which (ironically) cannot be federated using one of the big IDPs, creates unnecessary friction.

Normies are used to be able to login via one of these.

Brave is awesome on iOS where it will block YT ads! However, for regular desktop usage I’ve been using Firefox for the better part of 2 decades. Never really weaned off it actually.

Especially with the sync option, they are the perfect alternative to Chrome or any of the other commercial initiatives.

The silver lining here might also be that the internet that we knew and loved 25 years ago might actually reappear. The ‘other’ stuff would just become background noise to the ones ‘in the know’.

That way doctors and hospitals will actually have to compete for our business, true free market, where the quality of service will increase while out of pocket costs decrease.

European chiming in here, which explains my totally communist/socialist viewpoint, I call bullshit. There is no healthcare ‘market’. When a person falls ill, they have no time/energy to seek out the highest quality/most cost-effective hospital or healthcare professionals. They turn to the one that is closest by and specialised in their ailment.

Just like there are no markets for housing, energy, water, public transport and all the other public services that just require deep public investments. These services do not need to make a profit, precisely because profit seeking takes away the investment capacity. This seems to be so hard to understand for folks in the US, I guess the decades long propaganda has taken its toll.

And yes, if one needs a lipo or a breast implant… For sure, that’s a market. As these are completely unnecessary, demand based services.