FreeTube wasn't loading a video, so I tried opening it in the YouTube website instead. Rather than being able to watch a 13 second video (here it is in case anyone wants to know), I managed to capture is one of the most dystopian screenshots I've personally seen. Every single element of this image is truly astounding if you look close enough and think about it for a moment.
13 seconds of your life now costs you even more time to prove you're not trying to scrape a video from a hundred billion dollar corporation with nearly infinite resources, advertisements and clickbait grabbing at your attention, every interaction logged and sold to thousands of data brokers, and you can't even show your appreciation without selling more information by creating an account. How did we get here?
It isn't like it's a niche secret that YouTube siphons people's privacy and sells their personal information. Creators being ignorant about that might have been a excuse a decade ago, but not now. I don't think we should be excusing content creators who collaborate with and benefit from the machinery of viewer-exploitative content distribution that is YouTube.
Edit: also, you're here in a privacy community defending the violation of privacy that you yourself originally described as dystopian. I'm not trying to be confrontational with you, here. I genuinely do not understand how you can think that content creators bear no responsibility for the dystopian situation you've encountered. Certainly they don't bear all the responsibility for what YouTube does, but they chose to support YouTube by uploading monetized content there.
I'm not saying they should be canceled for that, but appreciated for it? Let's not.
I appreciate their content, not their choices.