Maybe because they don't want to reward Google for continuously running Youtube into the ground while still being worse than the free alternatives. Not to mention that they already watering down permium with premium lite, I give it two tears before you need to get premium+ to not see ads.
Then don't use the service? Use one of the 'better' free alternatives. Let's see how long they remain free once (if) they actually see a meaningful amount of traffic. Complaining about advertising while using a service for which you pay nothing is immature and unreasonable. I hate advertising and have done everything I can to remove it from my life. That means paying for services that I enjoy using. I would rather provide value to the business via money than ad attention.
>Then don't use the service? Use one of the 'better' free alternatives
you can use alternatives but those do not have the actual content that is the reason anybody watches youtube (its in the name).
im also talking about free alternatives to premium being better for example offline videos still having DRM unlike every free yt downloader ever. the only way they have made premium better is by actively making the experience worse for everybody else is by pay walling the old default bitrate.
>Let's see how long they remain free once (if) they actually see a meaningful amount of traffic
there continues effort towards making the platform worse with every decision does not have anything to do with funding
Yes, The amount of traffic that youtube can sustain is really wild.
But yea one of the smallest nitpicks I have with them is the algorithm since its a hit or miss. Sure you can remove the algorithm completely but I would really wish if I could ask something like their SOTA AI models (Gemini) to make my algorithm for me right within youtube and I can say things like No clickbait etc.
