I pay for YouTube and use FreeTube and NewPipe. I try to pay for whatever services I use. I think this is the way, either pay or let the ads play. I do this because the YouTube app is trash for many reasons mostly having to do with trying to funnel me to the money making bits.

There are greedy corporations making the user experience worse and doing everything they can to wring every penny they can. Ultimately, I attribute this to the wall street investor model. A company can be making money and still be losing because their revenues shrank from the prior quarter. That is a broken system that will only eat itself. That being said, people gotta eat and that includes the janitors, etc.. at Google.

Point is, its a mixed bag. There are people on the other end making the product you are using, AND there is a soul sucking company making it worse for both their customers and their workers/creators. To be clear, there is something to be said about how poorly Google supports their creators. In many ways, they are taking advantage of the creators that use their platform. How is it that Google is making so much money in ads, but creators have to open Patreons?

I still don't think we should just expect stuff for free.

Tangentially, I need to be better about helping support the open source projects I use, especially the smaller maintainers, to be honest, but I do send to a few and I encourage everyone to do so as well as much as they can.

edit: Grammar

There is no such thing as a free service.

But there is such a thing as a monopoly.

Where are the youtube competitors that keep prices competitive?