Ads aside, what's been infuriating me lately is that YouTube seems to have degraded the quality of existing videos and locked the previously available quality behind the "1080p Enhanced Bitrate"; I have no way of confirming this since I obviously don't have Premium, but I'm fairly sure that the regular 1080p of old videos that I rewatch from time to time (uploaded 2-3 years ago or earlier) is now worse than it was. If it was about new uploads with something previously unavailable, it would've been somewhat understandable. Something also tells me that the paid tier is also going to get ads eventually.

[–] lastweakness@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

From everything I've read, it seems they didn't actually reduce quality and it's just placebo from the introduction of the premium bitrate option.

[–] kamen@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

Could be, I don't know. I doubt that video creators would go through all of these old videos just to update them to a slightly higher bitrate; the other possibility is that YouTube kept the original uploads or higher bitrate variants without previously showing them (and only showed them now), but that seems like a huge waste of storage, so it seems unlikely to me. Again, we're talking about old uploads (2-3 or up to 10 years ago), not new ones.

The one thing I've seen that makes sense is updating old videos that were previously available at up to 480p and bringing them up to 720p or 1080p (with the idea of keeping the original published video with the views, comments and so on instead of uploading a new one).

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I'm guessing they're going to use the classic method of increasing the subscription price and then later creating a new lite subscription that does have some ads.

[–] ChildeHarold@lemm.ee 2 points 4 days ago

these subscription models don't work. What these morons don't count on is that everyone actually hates the technology deep down. We don't want it! But it gives us a dopamine hit. And when they stack on subscription prices and lock up content and shove ads down our throat... well, the dopamine stops hitting and just get pissed. So we leave.

[–] ChildeHarold@lemm.ee 2 points 4 days ago

yes video quality has dropped, video suggestion algorithms have become a weird uroboric/echo chamber even if you have dozens of subscriptions, and the YouTube shorts reel refuses to be trained (no matter what I do, if I dislike every video I don't want to see and like all the ones I do want to see and log off if it suggests too many bad videos in a row, it still feeds me an endless loop of unwanted brain rot after 5 or 6 scrolls). I hate YouTube.

At the same time, they've found a good way around the ad block situation which is to promote ads as thumbnails on your "for you" video main page. I don't know why they didn't just do that in the first place, because honestly I don't mind that. It's when they constantly interrupt my videos ever freaking minute and a half that I start to get pissed.