> Get a YT Premium account if you can, sending a very small message that you vote against ads and all the algorithmic baggage that comes with them.
YT premium users are still presented with the same recommendations as normal users, are they not? That's kinda my problem with the service. Sure you don't actually see the ads, but you're still using an advertising-based platform with all the user-hostile design that model encourages.
Oh absolutely, I'm recommending this because of the second part of my sentence above. I believe the ad model is bad for both consumers and companies, in ways that are not immediately obvious. Ad models tend to generate perverse incentives in my opinion. I also think it's important to signal a willingness to be a reasonable consumer, and to me it's also about ethics: I watch a lot of Youtube, I can afford to pay for YT Premium, and I run an adblocker.
I watch a lot of YouTube content that's outright demonetized, and demonetization consistently correlates with recommendations and views plummeting as well. Yet this same content still shows up in my recommendations. My theory is that for free users, YouTube prefers to recommend videos that are monetized, because obviously they have a vested interest in doing so. For premium users, YouTube doesn't care about ad revenue--in fact, they may even have a slight incentive to recommend demonetized videos because then they don't have to pay a share of my premium subscription revenue to the creator. Instead, they're optimizing for keeping me interested enough to maintain my subscription.
I see this even with Netflix: the movies look like they are designed for optimizing for the longest view time instead of also taking account people who are older, willing to pay for shorter view time, but well written and produced content and storyline. The last example was Brave New World where my girlfriend also read the book, and even she wasn't able to explain me the series, because it just didn't make sense (although the visuals were beautiful).
YT premium users are still presented with the same recommendations as normal users, are they not? That's kinda my problem with the service. Sure you don't actually see the ads, but you're still using an advertising-based platform with all the user-hostile design that model encourages.