YouTube is asking me to pay for the ability to seek through videos now. Are people really paying for this shit?

@jackemled i got free premium for 3 months for some reason...

edit: that has nothing to do with what you said. sorry for your loss of video watching time...

@novafox3c YouTube & Google are very weird. I don't know if the "fuck you, pay me" thing is broken or if it's because I'm using YouTube ReVanced, but after dismissing that I was able to seek again fine.

If it eventually gets so bad that YouTube ReVanced doesn't even work, it won't matter because it's extremely easy to set up a cron job or systemd timer on any computer to automatically download videos using yt-dlp, which I'm pretty sure even has SponsorBlock integration now, then I can just watch them with VLC in perfect 16k120 or whatever with no buffering or ads for free. Google is never getting any money from me, at least not until they pay me for the data they mined me for first.

@jackemled that's actually really smart. i have specific watching patterns, and i know what i want to watch next, so using yt-dlp isn't a bad idea. i shoud build an app that lets you browse and then download using yt-dlp. you could even stream from your own cloud storage or make your own algorithm/feed! thanks for the idea :3
@novafox3c It should be very easy to "subscribe" to channels simply by creating a new subdirectory with a certain name, which your cronjob then simply uses to fill in the URL for the channel & check its RSS feed (or skip using RSS feeds if you want the whole channel instead of only recent videos), then move downloaded videos into those directories once complete. I have a similar script for SoundCloud, but I don't really use it since I never listen to music. After that it would be easy to add the whole directory to your media server, or create a new one using symlinks with nicer names since some channels still have randomly generated strings for a URL instead of a custom URL.