Imagine valuing yourself and your money so little that you'd pay a company who is actively harassing you with unwanted attempts at manipulation to pretty please leave you alone and let you see the free content you want without interruption.
> Those people who care about that shouldn’t use YouTube or any Google services at all.
While it'd be wise to avoid Google for privacy reasons, I see no problem with people making a choice to use YouTube if they want to. People can decide for themselves how much risk they're willing to take for the content hosted there. I totally respect people's choice to avoid Google to whatever limited extent that is possible, but I also respect people's choice to engage with Google on their own terms. I'd just hope that that choice is a well informed one.
For me personally that means my use of youtube involves never logging into youtube, not using youtube to view the content hosted there (I either use NewPipe or yt-dlp to download videos and then use VLC to view them), avoiding searching for content I wouldn't want forever associated with my identity, blocking ads, blocking suggested videos, blocking comments, etc. it works pretty well for me.
It is not so simple, YouTube now hosts a lot of culturally relevant material. I stopped using Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and frankly I don’t keep in touch or visit in person with as many people anymore. Some of that is for the better, but a lot of it is strictly a negative for me.
