I mean, I'm a happy, paying subscriber to Nebula. Any content where I have a choice to watch it there, I do. It's stupidly cheap, too. Usually you can find a promo to get it for under $20/yr.

But I am also not pretending that Google owes me free & ad-free YouTube on my terms. They don't. Nor do the creators owe me uploading their videos to my platform of choice. I'd prefer both these things to be true, but I at least can understand that it is not reasonable. YouTube, frankly, is probably the ONLY killer product I couldn't do without made by Google, other than some open source software.

People should pirate all they want. I don't really give a fuck. I don't consider it some great moral evil. But pirating from YouTube is not some symbolic, ethical stand for your values. If you really think what they're doing is bad, stop using the service and pressure the YouTubers to upload elsewhere (which they pretty much ALL could do without consequences from Google). The entire platform only exists because of advertising. Period. If you hate ads as much as I do, pay for the ad-free versions.