Can do all of those things without premium if you have the right apps.

But besides that, absolutely not. I remember when YouTube was free with no ads, I remember when the adverts first started appearing, and that’s when it became obvious that they were trying to annoy you into a pay model. It took a little longer than expected, but sure enough, they ramped up the ads until “YOUTUBE PREMIUM! PAY FOR NO ADVERTS!”

Fuck that, I had no adverts before and they took that away. But the worst part is that they harvest my private data and make money from me already. As far as I’m concerned, that’s my subscription to their shit, in their perverse data selling.

No fucking way I’m going to also pay them for the privilege to have my private data sold.

A little. Though it’s more when you become hypersensitive for short periods. I sometimes find in restaurants or situations where I’m feeling a little anxious that everything will be so much louder and over stimulating as my senses sort of go into overdrive with my surroundings. I usually chuck in ear plugs or nip outside for 5 minutes. But this usually goes away after 10-20 minutes or so.

Music Producer input here. It’s sort of been a general rule of etiquette in production that piracy is fine if you intend to buy the product.

A lot of the better plugins can be very expensive and prior to subscription models, were limited in free trials. It can take some time to know if a particular plugin works with your workflow and gives you the results you like over multiple different projects.

I’ve always stuck with this. If I see something I like the look of, I’ll pirate it, use it over a bunch of projects and if I find myself relying on it then I’ll save up to buy it legitimately. Of course, there’s a fair bit of trust involved there, and a lot of people will be happy enough to keep the pirated version and try to find a new crack every time the DAW or plugin requires an update,

No chance I would have been able to afford half of the software I use in my workflow when I first started out, nobody can. But I eventually found my flow then caught up and paid it back.

I consider that ethical piracy. Or maybe I’m just justifying it to myself. But that’s how it was implied when I first started out in college and it’s a good system where you can still eventually support the small companies that make quality products that work for you.

Yep, that’s confirmed my suspicions then. Thank you!

For everyone suggesting Revanced, I used it for a while and found it to be incredibly slow and breaking up videos to buffer all the time. Was I using a dodgy version or was I missing something? I had it from the app store if I remember right. (Might be thinking of Vanced??)

Edit: Sorry folks, I wasn’t bashing revanced, I was just pretty sure I had a fake app and wanted to make sure. Thanks for the replies putting me on the right track!

Nah, can’t do it on principle. I know they already make money from me for selling my data, I’m not going to also pay them to do that.