The sentiment around buying European/Canadian alternatives to American products and services is a great one, and I can get behind the movement, but there is more to it.
Not all products and services have alternatives that are viable. You can’t get your workplaces to move to libreoffice or get your mom to start using signal messege. Moreover, even when using Europa products and services you still perpetuate the culture of uncontrolled capitalism and enriching tech billionaires. Open Source Alternatives, Piracy, and Ad Blocking are all equally viable.
Keeping this in mind, remember that piracy and ad blocking are great ways to keep using American services without contributing to their bottom line.
There are ad free versions of YouTube, reddit, Instagram and Facebook apps. They’re all patched with revanced and are available on github.
Additionally, pirate media as much as you can and be unapologetic about it. Facebook is doing it, so can you. Pirate music, movies, books they’re all available. Torrents community has never been safer and better organised.
Consume without paying and that does more damage to their bottomlines.
Piracy and Adblock shouldn’t be the default because ultimately you need to evaluate how much money is being shared with people working on media you’re consuming. Some American YouTuber isn’t really someone you want to punish when it’s the elites that you have to be concerned about. YouTube in general seems okay for most of the creators compensation-wise compared to alternatives. Maybe pay for that YouTube Premium and watch European channels so that get more funds for their operations?
I’ll add an important distinction before I’m eaten alive. If you can’t afford it, pirate it, no questions asked. Obviously there’s also a matter of convenience and big media companies have been fighting relentless war against it for the last couple of years. I tried to pay for everything I consume but had to fall back to my Usenet setup for downloads so often that I just stopped trying for things like shows and movies.
Adblock should always be the default because ads are often literally malware.
It’s like tipping. It’s a shitty system and nobody likes ads and tips and it needs to go away.
And your favourite content creator will sell his integrity to any corporation that will put a value on their content. Look at what Linus has become, it’s just entertainment and clickbait. No PC builder is learning to make PCs from Linus anymore, he’s busy getting clicks on 40,000$ PC that can barely play cyberpunk or potato PC that can play CS Go. Look at the honey scam, even tech expert youtubers promoted scams. I am sure this is just a few examples. Youtubers are just media companies selling ads. You can choose to bypass ads and pay a creator if you like it. But ad & sponsor blocking by default is a morally and ethically valid position and needs to be normalised.
Yeah, tipping is an alternative.
LTT decline is another topic entirely, I unsubscribed and marked all channels as „don’t recommend” after they stole engineering sample from some small company (which was after they „reviewed” it with incomparable hardware).