As much as it pains me to say it, I agree and am annoyed at the amount of “no, fuck Google” in response. I agree, fuck Google, but not because they’re charging for a service so good that we all use it, fuck Google for its heavy user tracking of paying users. I understand it costs immensely to host the sheer amount of data that they do, and they still allow creators to have a portion of what’s made from each video. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about sticking to the man and all that, but to want a website that provides the same service without any costs involved is unreasonable. Peertube is the closest solution we see, and there are still costs involved for anyone hosting a server. I hate that YouTube is our only real option and I’d love something different, but they already have all of our content, and ultimately, they’re fairly reasonable with their demands (pay for our service or watch our ads). The amount of user tracking they do is what’s unacceptable to me, but that’s across all of their products, and I would love to see some enforcement of minimum required data.
Especially in a paid service, like why do I pay for these services if you’re still going to advertise, track, or datamine? I know the answer is greed, why profit off of one option when you can profit off of all of them, but I, the consumer, am fed up with the customer abuse.