Memes

I’ve been slowly whittling down my subscriptions over time. At one point I think I had like 12-14 subs to various services, be it streaming, games, etc. But I was also up to my eyeballs in credit card debt and I had extremely poor personal finance skills and practices. When I met my wife, who was the exact opposite of me (extremely responsible with her finances, knew where every single one of her dollars was going), I knew I had to cut back significantly.

Right now I have the following 5 subs per month;

Apple 50gb data (1/month) YouTube Premium Family (22/month) Crunchyroll (8/month) Prime (15/month) ChatGPT (20/month)

Basically 66/month in hard earned dollars.

Prior to this I had the equivalent of an overblown cable package with all the bells and whistles, spending easily 350+ per month.

I don’t judge anyone who decides to save their money, because we’re getting nickel and dimed to death. And by decentralizing the cost of subs to the point where it makes an Applebees menu look small, it makes it incredibly hard to figure out where your dollars are going, and hard to cancel as you need to contact a laundry list of independent service providers.

My wife and I use YouTube and Crunchyroll as our primary entertainment sources, so we can justify those expenses. But all other sources (Netflix, HBO, Disney, Paramount, Hulu, etc) are so infrequent that we only sub for a single month if there is something we absolutely want to watch, and even then, we wait until the season is wrapping up so we can binge it in a week and then cancel the sub immediately.

Just my perspective on it, and if we didn’t watch YouTube almost every night, we’d probably just figure out a way to hack the AppleTV to circumvent ads.

On YouTube is so much knowledge, so much educational content, it's no longer sufficient to administer it on a private level imo.

Lol if you think the adblock community represents a boulder that large. Remake this meme with a peasant throwing a pebble at a M1A2 abrams

I just saw something similar on DuckDuckGo, and Firefox too - it's f-ing everywhere.:-(

[even bigger rock] "No, Youtube, I don't want to watch TF2 content. Stop recommending it to me"

It's like why even have an algorithm if it's just going to show you what it wants you to see rather than what you want to see.

yep, and there's more problems:

• we really gotta think what we do with our time. Spending in on youtube tends to have lower value nowadays.

• most stuff on youtube is crap. It's there to make you addicted, to make you watch ads, to make you miserable. Long story short: "influencers" are a drug on society comparable in effects to Crystal Meth. It gives you a short high, but leaves you exhausted.

• most "content creators" really just practice, how to manipulate many people into listening to them. There's a lot of makeup, but not much really to say. Best thing is to not listen to them.

• "content creators" are waaaaay to often just people trying to make money. They're not trying to tell you something of importance. They're jus trying to squeeze money out of you.

Problems on Youtube's side:

• it's a centralized system with platform lock-in. "Related videos" never takes you to other platforms. Search query is intransparent. They ask for waaaay too much money for what it costs them to maintain and develop their systems. I see nothing at all honorable at trying to squeeze money from users.

Youtube has grown into yet another one corpo-speak garbage companies. They used to be respectable, making interesting recommendations, with a clear mission to make knowledge accessible to everyone. Nowadays, they just try to make money.