It's just annoying a) not having control over how I want to consume my content, b) the fact that I spent all this time cleaning up my Google account history just for them to potentially throw water on my efforts, and c) I'm paying them for them to do this to me.
To start off, I already lost two of my favourite ways to consume content this year: Flamingo for Twitter and Sync for Reddit (the latter thankfully resurrected as a Lemmy app).
I do use the Subscriptions tab, but that's for existing channels I found via YT's recommendations. I can't add more if I can't find more. My current YT setup has been working perfectly fine for me to discover cool stuff.
!yt is only as useful as the results YT provides, which they've recently messed with as well. If I search for "pizza" I'm provided with results that have absolutely nothing to do with pizza. https://i.imgur.com/gxhNViW.png I checked the transcripts of both Architectural Digest videos - not once was "pizza" mentioned. The "Fresh Guacamole" film has no dialogue, and is also not about pizza. It's about guacamole.
I think it's general consensus that Google's consumer products have been on a decline. Just 2 days ago "Google Maps has become an eyesore" was at the top of HN with 764 points [1]. If I search "Google Search" on HN, the top post that shows up is "Google Search Is Dying" with 3636 points [2]. And we're all familiar with the infamous Google Graveyard [3].
I enjoy not seeing ads and being able to support the creators I watch (Premium viewers apparently earn creators more money than ad-supported viewers [4]). I just think it's reasonable to want some control over what and how I feed them information about myself, if I'm paying $14 a month.
I understand that costs for a lot of other things have gone up, it's still annoying to be affected by it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37030044
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Google+search
[3] https://killedbygoogle.com/
[4] https://youtu.be/Rh5hL47z2us?t=154
