I actually didn't care when there was an ad in the beginning of the video or what not. It was when I had to start watching multiple ads in the middle of a 10 minute video as well. Like come on, not even broadcast TV is that annoying.
Shorts are such a stupidly blatant way to start showing more ads than content, and they make navigating channels impossible. Hell you can't even get away from ads in search results with premium.
Shorts are just a TikTok clone...
Which is just a Vine clone.
Which is funny because Vine failed to sufficiently monetize and shut down...
In any case the point is shorts weren't designed from the ground up as some way for YouTube to squeeze more ads in out of some "diabolical laboratory of Google." Shorts were designed to compete with an existing product.
Noaw I understand why so many people hate shorts! I never use the official app or browser to watch, so I don't see the advertisements.
SponsorBlock addon
The holy trinity: ublock origin, sponsorblock and dearrow. Using all of them makes YT great again.
haven't heard of dearrow, what does that do?
You know those videos with a crazy thumbnail and title? You know, some stupid idiot BS clickbait nonsense like guy wrestling with a crocodile, but in reality that frame doesn’t even exist anywhere in the video. Oh, and then there’s the big red arrow and a wild title like: A CROCODILE BIT MY HEAD OFF!!!!111!!!!
Well, dearrow can fix all that. Users can select are more representative frame for the thumbnail and write a better title such as: “collection of random cat videos stolen from other people”. People get to vote on which thumbnail and which title text should be there, while dearrow shows that to the next person. If you care about cat videos, you might click that one. If you’re more interested in crocodile wrestling, you won’t be deceived to click something you don’t want to watch.
Adding an insane amount of ads is a dark pattern to convince you into joining Youtube Premium.
Which is crazy expensive by the way, 13,99 $/month
Premium will eventually show ads too.
Absolutely. Infinite growth demands more and more. Always. Fuck the customer, increase shareholder value this quarter!
"Tired of ads? Upgrade to YouTube Premium PLUS to get rid of all ads!"
Honestly I bought YouTube premium through a VPN to turkey for that price for the entire year. Seems worth it.
Same here. I was listening to a beautiful violin piece being played by a soloist and an ad interrupted it. I would be fine with watching the ad before. I immediately went and watched it elsewhere.
Later, I came back to YouTube for something unrelated and had a message/popup that said 'tired of being interrupted? Upgrade to premium here!'
They know exactly what they are doing, trying to make it unbearable to use anything other than premium. They can get fucked.
If I understand correctly, there's nothing about Firefox that makes ad blockers any harder to detect. What can Firefox and uBlock do to stop Google from blocking adblock users on the site?
That said, I use Firefox and uBlock myself, and I've yet to see YouTube stop me from using the site.
They don’t care about Firefox. Chrome is the browser market, they have weakened extensions, they implemented DRM, and here we are.
Coming to you later… “Your browser violates YouTube’s Terms of Service.”
This would become an Anti trust suit I would imagine.
They can just phrase it a little differently and argue semantics in front of a bunch of 70 year olds who don't know what a browser is in a hearing or two. Maybe a couple campaign contributions through completely legal channels and that's that. Anti trust enforcement has been falling in the US for decades.
I am cautiously optimistic of that new gal heading the FTC, she's preparing suits I to Amazon and Google, so we'll see how that goes
It doesn't matter if YouTube can detect uBlock. The great thing about uBlock is you can just block the anti-adblock script. Since Javascript is executed on the user's computer, it's trivial to just tell your computer to ignore it. And moving it to server side would cost them too much money in processing power.
That's why they want everyone to adopt their DRM, so they don't have to worry about it.
This logic is so flawed lol. It's also completely trivial for them to detect when their anti-adblock script has been blocked. If it gets blocked, then they can just stop serving you videos.
There are websites that already do this; it's not theoretical. The website just doesn't work if it detects an adblocker.
Whether or not it's trivial to detect depends on the method used to block it. It already is an arms race, and said race will continue.
Ok but do they know we know they know we know they know?!
Those sites aren't popular enough for people to actively develop custom scripts to get around them.
Didn't Spotify do this a while back, they made threats of account bans as well. In the end it was bypassed and you can still use Adblock in the browser or adfree clients on desktop (or just block ads across device with Adguard or Portmaster), though honestly Spotify kind of sucks in my opinion (usually doesn't have the music I want and has UI unresponsiveness).
The only one that kind of worked was Twitch, and the Alternative Player plugin for Firefox still bypasses the ads, you just have to wait while Twitch thinks the ad is playing because they inject it into the stream directly and you can't access the stream without waiting out the timer.
Firefox currently enjoys protection from being "relatively niche" in the browser market (aka not Chromium based trash).
But if I had to place a bet on which browser would put effort in to protecting your privacy, including which extensions are installed, my bet would be on Firefox over Chrome.
i think it's mainly the list maintainers staying on-the-ball with changes to sites. they can move quicker than a giant corporation can develop, test, and roll-out potentially site-breaking changes that could adversely affect 'billions' of users.
It has always been my understanding that uBlock and uBlock Origin were two totally different extensions for ad blocking. Is this not correct? Back several year ago when ad blockers were new, I recall seeing two different Firefox listings for them, and people would caution users to get uBlock Origin and not the other truncated named one
Ublock fucked the creator who made ublock origin
I am assuming that is metaphorical?
Yes, it is metamorphical lol. Gorhill is the creator of both uBlock and uBlock Origin. However, he gave the uBlock github repo to another dev, who sold it to adblock plus. Do not download uBlock.
However, he did fork uBlock and continued to develop his own version, now named uBlock Origin. Do download uBlock Origin.
PSA: ublock.org is not related to uBlock Origin.
The difference is Firefox is not a chromium based browser and thus not subject to googles fucking bullshit, esp when we come to things like web drm
What can Firefox and uBlock do to stop Google from blocking adblock users on the site
Not sure if you question is serious ... but just in case, Mozilla is one of the few non-profit orgs that is fighting for an open web
Except WEI is going to make it so the website can detect and block you if you don't allow the ads, regardless of your browser and extensions
At the moment WEI has been rejected by mozilla, so it wont be implemented into firefox. if google decides to add it into chrome and to their services, they will effectively lock out all firefox users. - A very anarchistic part of me actually would like to see how that would play out ... but at the moment i am unsure if google would actually dare doing this, but i guess, it will only be a matter of time and we'll find out.
Not sure if this move would actually damage the open web ... since basically google would single itself out as the enemy ... and i dont see many users appreciating such a move.
But if the worst happens and the whole web follows googles example, i guess we can just call this iteration of a "open web" a failure and start over with something much simpler ... maybe something like the gemini protocol as its base, which isnt polluted with clientside javascript garbage and bloated CSS/XHTML parsers and rendering engines .
I fully expect that without a change of current course, Google will ensure yt will just stop working on Firefox at some point.
I guarantee there will be a workaround. It's not magic it's just code. And once that code is on your machine there's not much they can do about it.
Firefox + uBlock Origin user here. I started getting those popups a few days ago.
Purge and update your filter cache, check to make sure you have Anti-adblock filters enabled. If that doesn't work do some troubleshooting with the extensions, one user found that other extensions were interfering and after disabling the problematic extension it worked.
People who choose not to watch ads are far more likely to not spend money based on ads. I know that when I see the same crappy ads over and over, yeah, I remember the name of the product, and I remind myself every time never to buy it. I'm more likely to buy from that seller if I don't see their ads.
100% agree, but they charge for eyeballs, not clicks.
That's because the average person is influenced by seeing the same shit over and over again, and it improves sales. Not every single person, just most of them.
Not most. Just enough to make it worth the money they spend.
Everyone thinks ads only work on other people, that's why ads haven't been banned yet.
Yeah. I'm completely allergic to ads. If this goes through I'm simply not going to use YT anymore.
I operate this way too. There must be literally dozens of us.
In all seriousness, I do find it somewhat surprising that some of these companies think saturating everything with ads is a good idea. As a simple matter of brand recognition, I get that the power of suggestion is a helluva drug. But all that stuff does eventually glom together in my head as general advertising nonsense -- as a result I see companies that advertise less / not at all and rely on a quality product and word of mouth as a better buy.
They don't just think it's a good idea, marketers have convinced themselves they're doing you a favor by pummeling you with advertisements day and night.
How else could you learn about their valuable product if not for constant, unending advertisement?
I work in Google Ads every day.
It's more likely that they're incompetent and haven't checked/manually set up their video / display ads, and have let Google decide how often to show their ads. Google then decides to show their ads as often as possible because it gets clicks (even if they're accidental) and nets them more money each time.
The best trick Google ever pulled was telling advertiser's to trust them with their money and "leave it up to the algorithm".
Fuck no, you set it up so Google doesn't abuse their platform and spam your ads everywhere, ignoring everything Google tell you to do.
The shit I've seen in people's accounts because Google told them to do it...
You can and should limit the amount of times your adverts are shown per day to someone. There's a not-so-fine line between brand awareness and pissing off potential customers.
I can list a ton of products I by principle will never use. Athelic greens, casper mattresses, simplisafe, express/nordVPN, Honey ... Some people may see a pattern there.
Ironically I might actually buy your product even if you spam annoying ads as long as you do it on a platform I block ads on.
You know why it's called revanced? Because youtube came after vanced. They wont ignore it forever, unfortunately.
YouTube Vanced was shut down because they tried to monetise it by releasing their own crypto NFTs, sparking Google to shut it down. I think for now Revanced is safe.
Every great project always seems to have that one dude who is like, "But what if crypto?". Really hoping we are moving past that phase.
The thing is that Revanced follows a new distribution model. Rather than distributing a modified app, they instead distribute patches for the normal YouTube APK so that the user modifies the app on their own device. Thus, ReVanced never distributes any of Google's IP. It's kinda like game modding. ReVanced will be a lot harder for Google to kill.
The one downside for ReVanced is that it's harder for ordinary users to install, so that will limit its popularity.
I know if I'm not wrong vanced got in trouble for using YouTube logo and reverse engineering the YouTube app. Revanced technically not breaking any law as it not directly modifying YouTube like vanced.
Yeah, but YT can change the terms, and now blocking ads, its clear they are stepping up the aggression in chasing profitability.
What are they gonna do? Revanced is just a patcher, unlike the previous version that fully distributes modified YouTube apk. There is a separate repo that has patched YouTube apk, but if that repo got taken down, the revanced manager still live on.
I don't remember which creator said it but basically by donating them even one dollar they're profiting more than if you sit thru hours and hours of ads. I guess objectively one can claim the moral high ground by watching ads but that really is like tossing bread crumbs to a beggar.
I'd really like platform like YouTube to come up with a subscribtion model that you pay like $10/month of which 20% goes to YouTube and the rest is split between the creators of which videos you have been watching. Even better if there's a way to prioritize the ones that you really want to give your support to.
You've just described YouTube Premium. Except it's $14/month now. And I don't know the numbers for how much of that goes to creators.
You can also "join" a channel, assuming that channel has it enabled.
Imagine believing you get paid to make videos on a video sharing platform. Who do those people think they are?
/s
I don't think I've ever seen the word "allowlisted". Did someone forget "whitelisted" is a thing, or is that term finally cancelled?
Whitelist and blacklist were indeed cancelled despite having no racial origin.
Two days ago I noticed when watching through the app on my phone that I could no longer just skip ads, and the trick of reporting them to skip didn't work anymore either. I effectively had to just sit and wait.
That same day I got NewPipe, imported my subscriptions, and honestly even if this is just a phased trial or something, I won't be going back to the standard YT app.
Creators make pennies from ad revenue. If I want to support them, I'll make a donation or subscribe to their Patreon or something.
I won't just sit and suffer a slew of ads while my data is harvested under the false pretense that it's all to support the creators.
You can also try out ReVanced if you wish to access YouTube with your account
The problem is that YouTube infrastructure is ridiculously expensive. Streaming 4K videos is not a joke. Creators won't create crap without YouTube. Sadly all other platforms have died. Again, because running such service is ridicolously expensive.
They'd still be trying to pull this shit if all streaming was limited to 144p.
So, alphabet can rip off the creators but we can't? What a crappy double standard.
Of all the streaming platforms, YouTube treats its creators the best.
Really because I subscribe to hundreds of channels and 90% of them have quit posting to youtube. Most seem to focus on Twitch or focus on their Patreon community.
I'm unironically considering ditching any online interaction(s) on the internet and use my PC solely for offline content (write documentaries, texts, play retro games). Because I really don't want to use the internet with that level of intrusion in my pc.
Take any cybersecurity class and you'll want to burn your tech in a dumpster. In most cases it's security by obscurity from sheer numbers that hackers/sites don't give a crap about you alone.
Additionally, every site you have ever visited tracks your browser, IP, OS, location, and more. This AdBlock tracker is just observing that you have a plugin for ad blocking. That's the least intrusion that YouTube does.
In summary, there's no need to be paranoid, but only because everything that can be stolen or observed already has been.
Also to add to what you said, switch away from (Google) Chrome everyone!!
Imagine this message, but on every website, and it literally cannot be prevented, as the browser itself will sooner than later just straight up tell the sites "yo, your content has been modified, maybe block the user from viewing", snitching on you.
Come to think of it now, I wonder if this will affect poorly implemented sites using that feature to accidentally (or intentionally…) disable dark mode/reader extensions.
And then, due to Chrome's market share, if left unchanged, web developers/companies will at some point just not bother anymore. Imagine "this works best in Google Chrome, download now" you see for some web apps today, but even with the most basic text based site that can't prevent you from using your Adblocker in e.g. Firefox or Safari.
every site you have ever visited tracks your browser, IP, OS, location, and more.
This is wrong to a degree of paranoia. That's simply not true. Every site can observe it, some might even log it, but that's a far cry for tracking it.
In most cases it's security by obscurity from sheer numbers that hackers/sites don't give a crap about you alone.
Also no, maybe in the 90s, but modern systems are (increasingly) designed to be secure by default.
There's a great way I figured out to differentiate quickly between Cybersec Fud and legitimate discussions related to security.
The usual main difference is that they are meant exclusively to sound scary there's no room for constructive criticism, discussion about it, or finding solutions to the problems presented, and I've found that if you try to steer these discussions in said direction the person will usually try to shoot you down.
Someone might say there are no solutions but see, here's the thing, there are always solutions, you're just not looking in the right places. After all lack of source code and sparse dubious documentation didn't stop people from studying and disabling IntelME, and believe it or not while security Vulnerabilities are usually bad, some can be your best friend and the key to the solution. (Not saying it's easy, I'm saying it's possible, contrary to what most open source advocates say).
Honestly if someone wants to have one of these discussions with me and they don't want to discuss it constructively or think about possible solutions I don't want to hear it because it's not meant to promote intelligent discussion. It's more like scary campfire stories but it's portrayed in a way that seems constructive and intelligent. It's also usually very patronizing since many times (not necessarily this specific commenter) the people making the statements tend to inadvertently talk down to you, this was my experience from hearing similar ones from colleagues.
I’ve had the same thought before but then I don’t want to become one of those older out of touch people. I think each generation feels like the world was in better shape when they were younger. But the truth is that many of the young kids today will look back on 2023 with the same fondness and nostalgia as I do when I think about the 1990s. Back in the day older people would warn us that video games and television would rot our brains. Now we warn our kids that TikTok will do the same. Everything is always getting faster and faster but young people are adaptable and I think they’ll find their way.
Aw that's so cute, they think they'll be able to stop adblockers from working for more than a few days. Just like everyone else before them. Good luck with that guys.
YouTube is in an advantaged position relative to other sites because they directly serve the ads from the same servers that serve the content. That's why DNS blocking doesn't work.
It would take more effort than they currently put in but they could track each user-session closely enough to require that the ad stream complete before the content stream is served.
If that happens, I think the next step in ad blocking would be to accept the ad stream but hide it from the user. Let it play silently in the background if necessary.
That'd mean accepting the extra data transfer but still avoiding the psychic damage.
TV : SmartTube
Mobile : NewPipe / LibreTube
Desktop : Piped / YouTube with a bunch of browser extensions
This my YouTube Premium
Don't forget ReVanced for Android
Isn't Piped in a bit of limbo atm due to Google ip banning proxy servers?
Desktop replacements: FreeTube and Piped. I personally prefer FreeTube; the UI is way better than Piped.
Android: LibreTube (it also works with Piped but I just imported my youtube subscription list instead). There is also NewPipe too!
If you'd rather dump YouTube entirely, there is Odysee and PeerTube. Though for most people they're just not viable, total replacements. Only you can decide for yourself on that matter.
Enjoy!
Edit: If you want to export your YouTube subs and playlists you'll have to do Google Takeout; but after that it's super easy to import/export them from Freetube and Piped whenever ya want.
You might like NewPipe for android. Same flexibility with importing subs, but cleaner and less errors, in my experience, but as long as you're not using the YT app...
Vinegar is a Safari extension for iOS that turns the YouTube media player into a generic iOS one, completely bypassing all of these restrictions. I’m not savvy enough to know if it’s something Google can kill or not, but it’s working great for me right now. Even lets you do PiP and background play.
I have YouTube ReVanced on my phone. If YouTube ever defeats uBlock Origin on my desktop, I just won't watch YouTube on desktop anymore. I refuse to watch or view ads.
Back in the day my grandma would literally mute TV ads and look away while setting a timer to indicate when to look back. So I come from a long line of people refusing to watch ads and not about to start now.
Fuck this shit with the force of a billion adblockers.
That's did news. Perhaps after mastodon grow massive thanks to Elon, and Lemmy grow thanks to reddit, we see peertube get his time to shine thanks to Google... #fuckupyourcompanyFAST
Text is fine but you can't really expect the Fediverse to serve heavy media at a large scale
That, and content creators that aren’t hobbyists need to be paid. Some of my favorite channels rely on ad revenue. Sure, things like patreon exist, but the system won’t work without a fair way to compensate content creators. Obviously blasting people with insane ads, especially ads that are often political, isn’t the way forward.
Media that’s meant to be free, e.g. uploading videos with no expectation of revenue, should stay that way, with community support to keep the platform alive. But content that is professionally produced as someone’s livelihood also needs a way to survive.
Unfortunately a lot of people think “fuck all that, I’ll watch what I want, I shouldn’t have to pay, it should all be free.” I’d rather pay specifically for the content I like and support those creators than the blanket “put ads on everything” YouTube has adopted.
I'd love to see PeerTube grow just like these platforms, but I think it's a lot more complicated to get people to use it than mastodon/lemmy.
Twitter/Reddit weren't used as a major income source like YouTube and Instagram (I am saying this based on famous people in my country, I don't know how it goes on other places), and so are easier to replace. The people posting and discussing topics don't do that for the money, they do because they like it.
YT and its monetization system made possible for people to make a living from the content they produce, and many wouldn't like or simply couldn't sacrifice this income source just to go to a more ethical and private platform like PeerTube.
Another thing to add to that, computer text is amazingly dense. An audio file of me saying just the first word takes up more bytes than this whole comment. Each english ascii charicter is a byte, each non-english char is 1 to 34 bytes.
Audio can and usually is compressed quite well. When it's just human voice, you can be very aggressive with losing specific parts of data.
Videos however aren't as simple - unless you go with very short ones, which YouTube doesn't.
Right, and as much as some proclaim “the blockchain” as some magical solve, having media live on a constantly redundant computationally expensive system helps nobody, except maybe those shilling tokens for those platforms before they bow out and pauses convert their magical tokens into real currency to buy other shit.
For example it’s amazing how Ethereum was meant to be this “world computer” where applications could live, computation and revenue were shared, etc. but every application that lives on Ethereum is basically about moving cryptocurrency around for more profit or shilling NFTs.
Computation is expensive. Storage is expensive. Something like the fediverse is great because it decentralizes those things. But it doesn’t change the fact that hard drives cost money, bandwidth costs money, computation costs money. We should all support ad blocking. But we should also all support the financial obligations of the fediverse where we can help.
They can still ask me to join their Patreon using PeerTube.
YouTube has also started showing me a blank "home" screen since I turned off my watch and search activity history on privacy settings.
Joke's on them, all I want is to see my subscriptions anyway
I just spent about 2 hours trying to figure out how to turn off google assistant always listening and turning off the driving mode for maps. Still can't solve the maps thing. Looking for an alternative, this is getting so shitty.
I bought a pixel because I couldn't stand the bloatware that came from Samsung devices, now I can't uninstall chrome or any google apps, fuck this.
Sucks but on the flipside it means that I’ll have more time for myself.
I already spend less time on social media because R/all sucks balls and lemmy doesn’t have too much content. I don’t have any other social media.
I also don’t have cable or pay for streaming services, so I found a replacement in the form of YouTube and Spotify (podcasts). I’m ok if these options go away.
There are a lot of hobbies that I want to do and the less distracted I am, the higher chance that I’ll choose to do them instead of dicking around.
Tldr: brings it on!
Yeah I used to be on reddit everyday before everything went to hell and now I'm only on it like once a week and lemmy only a few days in between usage.
Life is more.. enjoyable now? Lol
For me, I wouldn't say it's more enjoyable per se. I miss looking into interesting topics. However, I do find myself focusing on my business more which I guess is a bonus. But outside of that, it's very disappointing the enshitification of the Internet that's occurring.
Firefox + Ublock Origin
Or
Youtube Revanced (their only official site is their github) (android only)
The worry is they will go the twitch way. Ublock origins struggles with Twitchs anti adblock fight
The ads are not the true problem. The tracking and profiling is. They keep the rhetoric about the ads while forcing both. I'd be kinda okay with just untargeted ads. Maybe not fully okay but I'd be far more willing to tolerate them. This privacy violating thing the modern Internet made a norm? Hell no!
It's weird because there's lots of studies showing that tracking users' interests isn't even that much more effective than targeting based on the page content.
That’s interesting. Got a source?
Efficacy man not always translate to ad sales.
When you're selling your product and school and society have told you that you need to know your demographic, when you get to that ad manager page, you want to see your ad only being paid for on that demographic.
Unfortunately from their perspective that isn't apples to apples. They can charge higher rates for targeted ads.
I just canceled my youtube premium account after about 7 years of constant membership.
The recent price increase was crap. The service I receive hasn't improved - actually with their shitty compression even on "4k" videos my enjoyment has really decreased.
But, the big driver were ads. With premium I didn't see ads, instead I was increasingly bombarded with "words from our sponsor" all over videos.
Anyway, I recommend freetube. For now at least, it actually blocks all ads including sponsor blocks.
I won't pay a monthly fee to be google's advertising product.
I just changed my country to India, and subscribed.
Would never pay $10/month or whatever the cost is, but at my $1.30/month rate, it's worth it.
Start downloading and archiving videos you like. Especially educational content, share it with others, keep the information free and accessible for all.
If this has the same effect as reddit/lemmy.. wow peer tube is about to get so good
sounds expensive
(Creators should start backing up their content and get ready to shift to new platforms)
"well now you can go to nebula the site by creators for creators"
... Who will unironically post the exact same content from their YouTube channel, adread and all
I only watch 2 channels from youtube that are on nebula and as far as I've seen they've taken out the ad reads. I'd be pretty annoyed with a channel if they still did the ad read on a paid site.
It's been a loooong time since I looked at nebula but at the time that seemed to be true for the few I looked at. Maybe it's gotten better, that would be nice. I'll have to check it out again
I don't see the problem with that. The difference is you pay instead of being served YouTube pre-roll ads. And they get a bigger cut than it would off of YouTube premium.
As many hours as it takes to make a video It's kind of amazing some people upload different versions on each platform, they don't really have to.
I don't think I've noticed any adreads or sponsorship stuff on any of the content ive watched there actually, though of course that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, I may have just been lucky with my subscribe list.
Won't matter. As soon as those alternatives get big enough, they'll either sell out or look for more ways to maximize profits. The Internet is wholely infected by corporations now. Just need better ways to beat them back somehow.
I have yet to see this running ublock origin on firefox
Same. And the instant I do I will stop using youtube.
YouTube has gotten nice guy aggressive with fucking ads, especially on here ... Instead of the video you see instant ad. I will not watch the ad so I click back and instead of taking me back to my app YouTube shrinks the ad then keeps it there I have to press back another two times to get the fuck away from YouTube so I can copy the link and open it in Firefox with ublock origin. I love new pipe.
I personally am ok with sponsors. They directly support the creators, and are easy enough to skip. Much better than unskippable targeted ads to "support" a multi-billion-dollar company...
If they really force me to subscribe, I will... to Nebula.
You should do this anyway - it funds great original educational content, and is quite good value.
Not with the same clickbait YT content there.
What Nebula really needs is some content that isn't just people talking about stuff. I can appreciate a video essay now and then, but it's the
whole platform. I have a subscription right now, really only because of Philosophytube, but I can't really find anything I'm that interested in watching.
It really needs some like sketch comedy, tech reviews, dumb little videos of people out doing stuff, or like, cats sitting on roombas. Cater to something other than wanting to listen to people blather their opinions all day.
Until earlier this year I just watched the ads because in some small way it supports creators and I could deal with it. Then they increased the number of ads per watch-time to egregious levels.
I certainly wasn't going to reward a company for making the existing service worse by subscribing. Started using the apps people mention immediately and also setup pihole to block more ads.
Egregious is the perfect word, I can only add that the adds are offensively stupid as well, and loud.
I've been clicking back and forth until the content comes on but now it's three times at least.
I'll install one of these ad blockers now but the real problem still isn't solved.
I'd love to leave the platform altogether but don't know of an alternative. I tried PeerTube at one point but that was a dumpster fire , at least at the time I peeked in.
The other thing I hate about YT is the obvious click baiting the platform does, over the creators wishes.
If I'm not clicking on any of the videos, the thumbnail images get weirder and crazier until I just leave the whole mess.
Anyone else noticed this? It's like they are convinced this will gain more engagement and maybe it does but I hate it and feel manipulated and degraded by it.
AFAIK the changing thumbnails are not made by YouTube. The creator uploads a number of options for thumbnails and video titles, then YouTube randomly? shows those options to users and provides statistics to the creator so they can apply the best performing (in terms of click through and watch time) option to improve video performance.
It's all of course linked to how the algorithm works, so is indirectly influenced by YouTube.
Source: a video I watched a while ago but I don't even remember who made the video, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Well they need ads to pay for streaming all of those conspiracy videos, aliens crap, repackaged copies of other videos, ai generated crap, shitty "click and subscribe!" videos, etc...
Been an avid Youtube viewer since the very beginning. Now, I'm paying for the site and using a bunch of extensions just to get a worse experience than I was getting on youtube 5 - 10 years ago. After seeing all of my favorite content become unprofitable and die off, I am so ready to jump ship. I think in the immediate future, Patreon and Nebula are providing the alternative that will get creators paid reliably.
I have been using Nebula for a while now and can very much recommend it. I barely use YouTube now at all.
Ublock Origin users: purge cache and update. A fix has been deployed.
purge cache and update
Music to my ears.
Maybe one day all of the mega corporations on the internet will finally drive me from the internet itself and I'll finally do something useful with my time.
We need an AdBlock for adblockers now. Hopefully this will get bypassed.
From what I've gathered, it already has, though fair warning if you use YouTube Enhancer, it breaks the bypass so you have to disable the adblocking within Enhancer (as this one person on the uBO subreddit learned).
Also just a fair warning, it should be obvious at this point but it's almost certainly not going to work on chrome because it's Google's browser.
It already is in the uBlock origin annoyances filters I think
The ads make Youtube unwatchable so if necessary I'll figure out how to sideload Piped onto the house TV, or, failing that, just plug my laptop in and watch shit through Piped.
There used to be a trick where you can skip ads in youtube app by pretending to report it. i’ve used that to skip the 2x30s unskippable ads over the years, but that was patched recently.
So instead of occasionally watching ads while scrolling through comments, I’ve now opt to watch youtube in browser with UblockOrigin. And good luck to google for playing catch-22 with adblockers.
Shame that I used to have youtube in my adblock whitelist
Playing Catch up not catch 22 lol
Yeah, the unskippable ads are just maddening. Within the first 5 seconds I should either know what the product is, and my interest is established or not, or I'm hooked enough to watch the full ad. When I see the ad marked as unskippable, I'm automatically less receptive to the ad, it's demanding more than it's fair time for my consideration, so I don't want to even think about it.
One particularly maddening one was an ad that was 30 seconds, unskippable, and the theme was "our ad is so short, you don't even miss the ability to skip it!" If it didn't piss me off before, that really pushed me over the edge.
They were able to build a business and be profitable for over a decade but now all of the sudden ad block is destroying YouTube? 🤔
They were never profitable
I specifically remember them announcing quarterly profits from YouTube in alphabets breakdown a few years back, they are almost definitely profitable, I'm okay with being proven otherwise but as far as I know YouTube is profitable now.
Not just that. I have always turned of history and analytics since 2020. I use you tube to check news about happening events in my region(politics and stuff), so I can open the video on invidious or newpipe. But yesterday, as I opened you tube, it threw me this message... So, now I feel better, but seems, they have never stopped tracking what I search and watch, even when I opted to keep it off. Also maybe it is due to new feature where we can see the full video in hover mode, without clicking it to watch. But whatever, I wanted to let lemmy people to know that something like this happened yesterday to me.
Watch history is an absolutely essential metric for Youtube - I can understand how you've been led to believe that turning this option off is opting out from that data collection, but no. What this setting is asking is if you want the data collected to be represented to you as recommendations for other videos to watch. It absolutely doesn't change what data is collected, just whether the videos you've watched should be accounted for when the algorithm is finding new videos to recommend.
Also happened to me, it's very annoying
They can absolutely go fuck themselves. I've already weened myself off of nearly every social media, stopped paying for YT premium because they keep doing bullshit I don't like. I'm so ready for an alternative.
Lol, I've seen that but still just use the adblocker and it plays as normal.
I think it's meant to scare non tech savvy people. I don't see how they can stop us using adblockers....
PeerTube looks quite promising with its decentralised model. Surely it will never be perfect. But decentralisation is essencial. Also because the types of videos I like to see in YouTube either are monetised by themselfs in some way. Or are not monetised at all. YouTube does not seem necessary for those creators.
Been using PeerTube on and off for about a year now, been planning on starting a maths education channel on Trom. It's definitely got potential, but I don't see the average Youtube user migrating over to it any time soon. The main issue really is that children/young teens are a large portion of the target audience for a lot of big creators these days and the mobile apps for peertube are heavily lacking still. Not helped of course by the fact that one of the better android apps, NewPipe, which allows both YouTube and PeerTube in one place is not on the Play Store
I guess, like everything youtube will be replaced with other things
Haha! Forced ads = no watchie-watchie. I have played this game with YouTube before, and the adblockers always win.
I don't think corpos ever win in the digital world. as long as there is paid content, people will find a way to get it for frwe
I'm with the group that refuses to ever watch YT ads, but I guess it does help reduce bandwidth if they kick everyone off that's using an adblocker.
fuck that
YouTube is so horrible now I hope it’s reaching the tipping point where even non tech people may get sick of it and look elsewhere. There is no reason to have ONE giant main fucking video site and that’s it for most of the English speaking world. I need to look up how to do grout…or open this smoke detector…or beat this video game…no reason that all these videos cannot be hosted via other websites or just self hosted with the affordability of bandwidth. I’ve loved most of what google has done for a long time and they won the browser wars, crushed Mapquest, destroyed hotmail and yahoo mail…now everything is turning to shit. Google search all but refuses to find what you’re searching for. 15 second video…30 second ad. No.
I don’t know if federation is the answer but YouTube being ubiquitous for internet video has got to go.
There's no shot youtube will be dethroned any time too. Hosting that amount of video is absurdly expensive.
I definitely recommend people check out Youtube Premium if you hate ads and use YT a lot on smart TVs and mobile where ad-blocking is more difficult.
The majority of my video watching time is YT and I primarily do it on my phone or TV, so it is worth it for me. I wish I could cut out YT Music and save some money while using a music streaming service I prefer though.
I’ll upvote you back up to 0 at least.
I’ve had YT Premium (formerly Red) for years. It’s actually a good service, but I’m not too happy it sounds like prices are going up soon.
I already pay for it and will continue to do so. I have no issues spending money for a product I enjoy.
It's never enough, soon they're going to show ads even to you, a paying customer. It's happening to some streaming providers already, it's coming to YouTube too, mark my words.
Online streaming is turning into cable.
I pay the content creators I enjoy. Youtube can make due with the data they harvest and sell.
Woah there! Radical opinion you have, spending money? Like dollars? On stuff you use and enjoy that costs money to make happen? Crazy talk.
I used to keep it off on sites I wanted to have revenue but everyone uses them to annoy the user into subscriptions anymore so it's not worth turning it off.
Could disabling Javascript get rid of this message? Javascript I think assists video playback, so maybe not.
YouTube premium is the one subscription I will gladly pay for, I use it so much daily and you also get YouTube music which is a superior app to Spotify/Others, the family plan value is unmatched.
I agree, and subscribe to Premium. I can't help but feel, though, thag voting with my wallet towards creators Patreons might actually keep Youtube's little temper tantrum from hurting me.
Patreon is another platform, but its harm reduction. Less problematic.
I’m the same way. I really like Premium. I would rather watch YouTube most times over Hollywood stuff.
I actually didn't care when there was an ad in the beginning of the video or what not. It was when I had to start watching multiple ads in the middle of a 10 minute video as well. Like come on, not even broadcast TV is that annoying.
Shorts are such a stupidly blatant way to start showing more ads than content, and they make navigating channels impossible. Hell you can't even get away from ads in search results with premium.
Shorts are just a TikTok clone...
Which is just a Vine clone.
Which is funny because Vine failed to sufficiently monetize and shut down...
In any case the point is shorts weren't designed from the ground up as some way for YouTube to squeeze more ads in out of some "diabolical laboratory of Google." Shorts were designed to compete with an existing product.
Noaw I understand why so many people hate shorts! I never use the official app or browser to watch, so I don't see the advertisements.
SponsorBlock addon
The holy trinity: ublock origin, sponsorblock and dearrow. Using all of them makes YT great again.
haven't heard of dearrow, what does that do?
You know those videos with a crazy thumbnail and title? You know, some stupid idiot BS clickbait nonsense like guy wrestling with a crocodile, but in reality that frame doesn’t even exist anywhere in the video. Oh, and then there’s the big red arrow and a wild title like: A CROCODILE BIT MY HEAD OFF!!!!111!!!!
Well, dearrow can fix all that. Users can select are more representative frame for the thumbnail and write a better title such as: “collection of random cat videos stolen from other people”. People get to vote on which thumbnail and which title text should be there, while dearrow shows that to the next person. If you care about cat videos, you might click that one. If you’re more interested in crocodile wrestling, you won’t be deceived to click something you don’t want to watch.
Adding an insane amount of ads is a dark pattern to convince you into joining Youtube Premium. Which is crazy expensive by the way, 13,99 $/month
Premium will eventually show ads too.
Absolutely. Infinite growth demands more and more. Always. Fuck the customer, increase shareholder value this quarter!
"Tired of ads? Upgrade to YouTube Premium PLUS to get rid of all ads!"
Honestly I bought YouTube premium through a VPN to turkey for that price for the entire year. Seems worth it.
Same here. I was listening to a beautiful violin piece being played by a soloist and an ad interrupted it. I would be fine with watching the ad before. I immediately went and watched it elsewhere.
Later, I came back to YouTube for something unrelated and had a message/popup that said 'tired of being interrupted? Upgrade to premium here!'
They know exactly what they are doing, trying to make it unbearable to use anything other than premium. They can get fucked.
laughs in firefox + uBlock Origin
If I understand correctly, there's nothing about Firefox that makes ad blockers any harder to detect. What can Firefox and uBlock do to stop Google from blocking adblock users on the site?
That said, I use Firefox and uBlock myself, and I've yet to see YouTube stop me from using the site.
They don’t care about Firefox. Chrome is the browser market, they have weakened extensions, they implemented DRM, and here we are.
Coming to you later… “Your browser violates YouTube’s Terms of Service.”
This would become an Anti trust suit I would imagine.
They can just phrase it a little differently and argue semantics in front of a bunch of 70 year olds who don't know what a browser is in a hearing or two. Maybe a couple campaign contributions through completely legal channels and that's that. Anti trust enforcement has been falling in the US for decades.
I am cautiously optimistic of that new gal heading the FTC, she's preparing suits I to Amazon and Google, so we'll see how that goes
You could use an extension that changes your user agent but I'm not sure how well that'd work
They have control of Chrome, so they could always implement some kind of API into Chrome to check.
C-C-C-C-Conflict of interest!
Laughs in useragent switch
It doesn't matter if YouTube can detect uBlock. The great thing about uBlock is you can just block the anti-adblock script. Since Javascript is executed on the user's computer, it's trivial to just tell your computer to ignore it. And moving it to server side would cost them too much money in processing power.
That's why they want everyone to adopt their DRM, so they don't have to worry about it.
This logic is so flawed lol. It's also completely trivial for them to detect when their anti-adblock script has been blocked. If it gets blocked, then they can just stop serving you videos.
There are websites that already do this; it's not theoretical. The website just doesn't work if it detects an adblocker.
Whether or not it's trivial to detect depends on the method used to block it. It already is an arms race, and said race will continue.
Ok but do they know we know they know we know they know?!
Those sites aren't popular enough for people to actively develop custom scripts to get around them.
Didn't Spotify do this a while back, they made threats of account bans as well. In the end it was bypassed and you can still use Adblock in the browser or adfree clients on desktop (or just block ads across device with Adguard or Portmaster), though honestly Spotify kind of sucks in my opinion (usually doesn't have the music I want and has UI unresponsiveness).
The only one that kind of worked was Twitch, and the Alternative Player plugin for Firefox still bypasses the ads, you just have to wait while Twitch thinks the ad is playing because they inject it into the stream directly and you can't access the stream without waiting out the timer.
Firefox currently enjoys protection from being "relatively niche" in the browser market (aka not Chromium based trash).
But if I had to place a bet on which browser would put effort in to protecting your privacy, including which extensions are installed, my bet would be on Firefox over Chrome.
i think it's mainly the list maintainers staying on-the-ball with changes to sites. they can move quicker than a giant corporation can develop, test, and roll-out potentially site-breaking changes that could adversely affect 'billions' of users.
It has always been my understanding that uBlock and uBlock Origin were two totally different extensions for ad blocking. Is this not correct? Back several year ago when ad blockers were new, I recall seeing two different Firefox listings for them, and people would caution users to get uBlock Origin and not the other truncated named one
Ublock fucked the creator who made ublock origin
I am assuming that is metaphorical?
Yes, it is metamorphical lol. Gorhill is the creator of both uBlock and uBlock Origin. However, he gave the uBlock github repo to another dev, who sold it to adblock plus. Do not download uBlock.
However, he did fork uBlock and continued to develop his own version, now named uBlock Origin. Do download uBlock Origin.
PSA: ublock.org is not related to uBlock Origin.
The difference is Firefox is not a chromium based browser and thus not subject to googles fucking bullshit, esp when we come to things like web drm
Not sure if you question is serious ... but just in case, Mozilla is one of the few non-profit orgs that is fighting for an open web
and uBlock Origin can literally work its magic because firefox provides the necessary APIs that allows it to work. (old ref. but AFAIK still relevant: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox)
Except WEI is going to make it so the website can detect and block you if you don't allow the ads, regardless of your browser and extensions
At the moment WEI has been rejected by mozilla, so it wont be implemented into firefox. if google decides to add it into chrome and to their services, they will effectively lock out all firefox users. - A very anarchistic part of me actually would like to see how that would play out ... but at the moment i am unsure if google would actually dare doing this, but i guess, it will only be a matter of time and we'll find out.
Not sure if this move would actually damage the open web ... since basically google would single itself out as the enemy ... and i dont see many users appreciating such a move.
But if the worst happens and the whole web follows googles example, i guess we can just call this iteration of a "open web" a failure and start over with something much simpler ... maybe something like the gemini protocol as its base, which isnt polluted with clientside javascript garbage and bloated CSS/XHTML parsers and rendering engines .
I fully expect that without a change of current course, Google will ensure yt will just stop working on Firefox at some point.
I guarantee there will be a workaround. It's not magic it's just code. And once that code is on your machine there's not much they can do about it.
Firefox + uBlock Origin user here. I started getting those popups a few days ago.
Purge and update your filter cache, check to make sure you have Anti-adblock filters enabled. If that doesn't work do some troubleshooting with the extensions, one user found that other extensions were interfering and after disabling the problematic extension it worked.
I'll try this. Thank you very much!
People who choose not to watch ads are far more likely to not spend money based on ads. I know that when I see the same crappy ads over and over, yeah, I remember the name of the product, and I remind myself every time never to buy it. I'm more likely to buy from that seller if I don't see their ads.
100% agree, but they charge for eyeballs, not clicks.
That's because the average person is influenced by seeing the same shit over and over again, and it improves sales. Not every single person, just most of them.
Not most. Just enough to make it worth the money they spend.
Clicks are the core part of how ads work… Cost-per-Click, Click-Through-Rate, etc.
Everyone thinks ads only work on other people, that's why ads haven't been banned yet.
Yeah. I'm completely allergic to ads. If this goes through I'm simply not going to use YT anymore.
I operate this way too. There must be literally dozens of us.
In all seriousness, I do find it somewhat surprising that some of these companies think saturating everything with ads is a good idea. As a simple matter of brand recognition, I get that the power of suggestion is a helluva drug. But all that stuff does eventually glom together in my head as general advertising nonsense -- as a result I see companies that advertise less / not at all and rely on a quality product and word of mouth as a better buy.
They don't just think it's a good idea, marketers have convinced themselves they're doing you a favor by pummeling you with advertisements day and night.
How else could you learn about their valuable product if not for constant, unending advertisement?
I work in Google Ads every day.
It's more likely that they're incompetent and haven't checked/manually set up their video / display ads, and have let Google decide how often to show their ads. Google then decides to show their ads as often as possible because it gets clicks (even if they're accidental) and nets them more money each time.
The best trick Google ever pulled was telling advertiser's to trust them with their money and "leave it up to the algorithm".
Fuck no, you set it up so Google doesn't abuse their platform and spam your ads everywhere, ignoring everything Google tell you to do.
The shit I've seen in people's accounts because Google told them to do it...
You can and should limit the amount of times your adverts are shown per day to someone. There's a not-so-fine line between brand awareness and pissing off potential customers.
I can list a ton of products I by principle will never use. Athelic greens, casper mattresses, simplisafe, express/nordVPN, Honey ... Some people may see a pattern there.
Ironically I might actually buy your product even if you spam annoying ads as long as you do it on a platform I block ads on.
Lamo this will introduce more people to revanced
You know why it's called revanced? Because youtube came after vanced. They wont ignore it forever, unfortunately.
YouTube Vanced was shut down because they tried to monetise it by releasing their own crypto NFTs, sparking Google to shut it down. I think for now Revanced is safe.
Every great project always seems to have that one dude who is like, "But what if crypto?". Really hoping we are moving past that phase.
But what if AI?
The thing is that Revanced follows a new distribution model. Rather than distributing a modified app, they instead distribute patches for the normal YouTube APK so that the user modifies the app on their own device. Thus, ReVanced never distributes any of Google's IP. It's kinda like game modding. ReVanced will be a lot harder for Google to kill.
The one downside for ReVanced is that it's harder for ordinary users to install, so that will limit its popularity.
Rerevanced will be popular
Oof, one day soon, we'll all be watching torrented rips of youtube videos, like we already do TV shows.
I just use yt-dl to download anything from youtube. It cuts the commercial out during download
I know if I'm not wrong vanced got in trouble for using YouTube logo and reverse engineering the YouTube app. Revanced technically not breaking any law as it not directly modifying YouTube like vanced.
Yeah, but YT can change the terms, and now blocking ads, its clear they are stepping up the aggression in chasing profitability.
What are they gonna do? Revanced is just a patcher, unlike the previous version that fully distributes modified YouTube apk. There is a separate repo that has patched YouTube apk, but if that repo got taken down, the revanced manager still live on.
Bailamos.
Oh my, the creators get paid?!?
https://influencermarketinghub.com/youtube-money-calculator/
Oh... So no, not really...
Sounds like they're lying to me!
I don't remember which creator said it but basically by donating them even one dollar they're profiting more than if you sit thru hours and hours of ads. I guess objectively one can claim the moral high ground by watching ads but that really is like tossing bread crumbs to a beggar.
I'd really like platform like YouTube to come up with a subscribtion model that you pay like $10/month of which 20% goes to YouTube and the rest is split between the creators of which videos you have been watching. Even better if there's a way to prioritize the ones that you really want to give your support to.
You've just described YouTube Premium. Except it's $14/month now. And I don't know the numbers for how much of that goes to creators.
You can also "join" a channel, assuming that channel has it enabled.
Imagine believing you get paid to make videos on a video sharing platform. Who do those people think they are?
/s
I don't think I've ever seen the word "allowlisted". Did someone forget "whitelisted" is a thing, or is that term finally cancelled?
Whitelist and blacklist were indeed cancelled despite having no racial origin.
It's common since quite a few years. And blocklist as counterpart
Blocklist and allowlist are much more intuitive, so if we ignore all the cultural baggage, these changes are rather sensical.
Cultural baggage? Neither term has any roots in racism, blacklist came from a play and whitelist came about as the opposite of blacklist
It comes from the act of voting using a black or white ball. Black was a no vote, white was yes. It goes back to ancient Greece.
Even the FBI recommends you use an adblocker, for your personal safety. Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/the-fbi-now-recommends-using-an-ad-blocker-heres-why
Remember when YouTube was just a video of a guy at the zoo? Pepperidge farm remembers...
Those suckers sold it to google for a billion dollars. They got screwed.
I heard they were barely able to contain the site at the end as the growth began and expense of maintaining it skyrocketed.
Wish Jawed Karim never sold YouTube to Google. But alas.....
If he didn't sold it to Google I don't think he have enough budget to maintain the site
Yeah, they had the better technology (Google Video was very bad) and Google had the money.
Two days ago I noticed when watching through the app on my phone that I could no longer just skip ads, and the trick of reporting them to skip didn't work anymore either. I effectively had to just sit and wait.
That same day I got NewPipe, imported my subscriptions, and honestly even if this is just a phased trial or something, I won't be going back to the standard YT app.
Creators make pennies from ad revenue. If I want to support them, I'll make a donation or subscribe to their Patreon or something.
I won't just sit and suffer a slew of ads while my data is harvested under the false pretense that it's all to support the creators.
You can also try out ReVanced if you wish to access YouTube with your account
https://github.com/ReVanced
Thanks for the tip! Will give it a go.
The problem is that YouTube infrastructure is ridiculously expensive. Streaming 4K videos is not a joke. Creators won't create crap without YouTube. Sadly all other platforms have died. Again, because running such service is ridicolously expensive.
They'd still be trying to pull this shit if all streaming was limited to 144p.
So, alphabet can rip off the creators but we can't? What a crappy double standard.
Of all the streaming platforms, YouTube treats its creators the best.
Really because I subscribe to hundreds of channels and 90% of them have quit posting to youtube. Most seem to focus on Twitch or focus on their Patreon community.
I'm unironically considering ditching any online interaction(s) on the internet and use my PC solely for offline content (write documentaries, texts, play retro games). Because I really don't want to use the internet with that level of intrusion in my pc.
Take any cybersecurity class and you'll want to burn your tech in a dumpster. In most cases it's security by obscurity from sheer numbers that hackers/sites don't give a crap about you alone.
Additionally, every site you have ever visited tracks your browser, IP, OS, location, and more. This AdBlock tracker is just observing that you have a plugin for ad blocking. That's the least intrusion that YouTube does.
In summary, there's no need to be paranoid, but only because everything that can be stolen or observed already has been.
Also to add to what you said, switch away from (Google) Chrome everyone!!
Imagine this message, but on every website, and it literally cannot be prevented, as the browser itself will sooner than later just straight up tell the sites "yo, your content has been modified, maybe block the user from viewing", snitching on you.
Come to think of it now, I wonder if this will affect poorly implemented sites using that feature to accidentally (or intentionally…) disable dark mode/reader extensions.
And then, due to Chrome's market share, if left unchanged, web developers/companies will at some point just not bother anymore. Imagine "this works best in Google Chrome, download now" you see for some web apps today, but even with the most basic text based site that can't prevent you from using your Adblocker in e.g. Firefox or Safari.
This is wrong to a degree of paranoia. That's simply not true. Every site can observe it, some might even log it, but that's a far cry for tracking it.
Also no, maybe in the 90s, but modern systems are (increasingly) designed to be secure by default.
There's a great way I figured out to differentiate quickly between Cybersec Fud and legitimate discussions related to security. The usual main difference is that they are meant exclusively to sound scary there's no room for constructive criticism, discussion about it, or finding solutions to the problems presented, and I've found that if you try to steer these discussions in said direction the person will usually try to shoot you down.
Someone might say there are no solutions but see, here's the thing, there are always solutions, you're just not looking in the right places. After all lack of source code and sparse dubious documentation didn't stop people from studying and disabling IntelME, and believe it or not while security Vulnerabilities are usually bad, some can be your best friend and the key to the solution. (Not saying it's easy, I'm saying it's possible, contrary to what most open source advocates say).
Honestly if someone wants to have one of these discussions with me and they don't want to discuss it constructively or think about possible solutions I don't want to hear it because it's not meant to promote intelligent discussion. It's more like scary campfire stories but it's portrayed in a way that seems constructive and intelligent. It's also usually very patronizing since many times (not necessarily this specific commenter) the people making the statements tend to inadvertently talk down to you, this was my experience from hearing similar ones from colleagues.
I’ve had the same thought before but then I don’t want to become one of those older out of touch people. I think each generation feels like the world was in better shape when they were younger. But the truth is that many of the young kids today will look back on 2023 with the same fondness and nostalgia as I do when I think about the 1990s. Back in the day older people would warn us that video games and television would rot our brains. Now we warn our kids that TikTok will do the same. Everything is always getting faster and faster but young people are adaptable and I think they’ll find their way.
Aw that's so cute, they think they'll be able to stop adblockers from working for more than a few days. Just like everyone else before them. Good luck with that guys.
YouTube is in an advantaged position relative to other sites because they directly serve the ads from the same servers that serve the content. That's why DNS blocking doesn't work.
It would take more effort than they currently put in but they could track each user-session closely enough to require that the ad stream complete before the content stream is served.
If that happens, I think the next step in ad blocking would be to accept the ad stream but hide it from the user. Let it play silently in the background if necessary.
That'd mean accepting the extra data transfer but still avoiding the psychic damage.
This my YouTube Premium
Don't forget ReVanced for Android
Isn't Piped in a bit of limbo atm due to Google ip banning proxy servers?
The streaming crash has only just begun.
A new dark age is dawning.
Desktop replacements: FreeTube and Piped. I personally prefer FreeTube; the UI is way better than Piped.
Android: LibreTube (it also works with Piped but I just imported my youtube subscription list instead). There is also NewPipe too!
If you'd rather dump YouTube entirely, there is Odysee and PeerTube. Though for most people they're just not viable, total replacements. Only you can decide for yourself on that matter.
Enjoy!
Edit: If you want to export your YouTube subs and playlists you'll have to do Google Takeout; but after that it's super easy to import/export them from Freetube and Piped whenever ya want.
You might like NewPipe for android. Same flexibility with importing subs, but cleaner and less errors, in my experience, but as long as you're not using the YT app...
Odysee has an extension that redirects youtube videos to odysee if its available
https://github.com/kodxana/Watch-on-Odysee
Vinegar is a Safari extension for iOS that turns the YouTube media player into a generic iOS one, completely bypassing all of these restrictions. I’m not savvy enough to know if it’s something Google can kill or not, but it’s working great for me right now. Even lets you do PiP and background play.
Let's not forget: https://github.com/revanced
I have YouTube ReVanced on my phone. If YouTube ever defeats uBlock Origin on my desktop, I just won't watch YouTube on desktop anymore. I refuse to watch or view ads.
Back in the day my grandma would literally mute TV ads and look away while setting a timer to indicate when to look back. So I come from a long line of people refusing to watch ads and not about to start now.
Fuck this shit with the force of a billion adblockers.
That's did news. Perhaps after mastodon grow massive thanks to Elon, and Lemmy grow thanks to reddit, we see peertube get his time to shine thanks to Google... #fuckupyourcompanyFAST
Text is fine but you can't really expect the Fediverse to serve heavy media at a large scale
That, and content creators that aren’t hobbyists need to be paid. Some of my favorite channels rely on ad revenue. Sure, things like patreon exist, but the system won’t work without a fair way to compensate content creators. Obviously blasting people with insane ads, especially ads that are often political, isn’t the way forward.
Media that’s meant to be free, e.g. uploading videos with no expectation of revenue, should stay that way, with community support to keep the platform alive. But content that is professionally produced as someone’s livelihood also needs a way to survive.
Unfortunately a lot of people think “fuck all that, I’ll watch what I want, I shouldn’t have to pay, it should all be free.” I’d rather pay specifically for the content I like and support those creators than the blanket “put ads on everything” YouTube has adopted.
I'd love to see PeerTube grow just like these platforms, but I think it's a lot more complicated to get people to use it than mastodon/lemmy.
Twitter/Reddit weren't used as a major income source like YouTube and Instagram (I am saying this based on famous people in my country, I don't know how it goes on other places), and so are easier to replace. The people posting and discussing topics don't do that for the money, they do because they like it.
YT and its monetization system made possible for people to make a living from the content they produce, and many wouldn't like or simply couldn't sacrifice this income source just to go to a more ethical and private platform like PeerTube.
Another thing to add to that, computer text is amazingly dense. An audio file of me saying just the first word takes up more bytes than this whole comment. Each english ascii charicter is a byte, each non-english char is 1 to
34 bytes."another" as wav file
Audio can and usually is compressed quite well. When it's just human voice, you can be very aggressive with losing specific parts of data.
Videos however aren't as simple - unless you go with very short ones, which YouTube doesn't.
Right, and as much as some proclaim “the blockchain” as some magical solve, having media live on a constantly redundant computationally expensive system helps nobody, except maybe those shilling tokens for those platforms before they bow out and pauses convert their magical tokens into real currency to buy other shit.
For example it’s amazing how Ethereum was meant to be this “world computer” where applications could live, computation and revenue were shared, etc. but every application that lives on Ethereum is basically about moving cryptocurrency around for more profit or shilling NFTs.
Computation is expensive. Storage is expensive. Something like the fediverse is great because it decentralizes those things. But it doesn’t change the fact that hard drives cost money, bandwidth costs money, computation costs money. We should all support ad blocking. But we should also all support the financial obligations of the fediverse where we can help.
They can still ask me to join their Patreon using PeerTube.
YouTube has also started showing me a blank "home" screen since I turned off my watch and search activity history on privacy settings.
Joke's on them, all I want is to see my subscriptions anyway
I just spent about 2 hours trying to figure out how to turn off google assistant always listening and turning off the driving mode for maps. Still can't solve the maps thing. Looking for an alternative, this is getting so shitty.
I bought a pixel because I couldn't stand the bloatware that came from Samsung devices, now I can't uninstall chrome or any google apps, fuck this.
They also started to fight piped and invidous, nevertheless it won't make me buy their subscription, I'll just ditch the platform.
Sucks but on the flipside it means that I’ll have more time for myself.
I already spend less time on social media because R/all sucks balls and lemmy doesn’t have too much content. I don’t have any other social media.
I also don’t have cable or pay for streaming services, so I found a replacement in the form of YouTube and Spotify (podcasts). I’m ok if these options go away.
There are a lot of hobbies that I want to do and the less distracted I am, the higher chance that I’ll choose to do them instead of dicking around.
Tldr: brings it on!
Yeah I used to be on reddit everyday before everything went to hell and now I'm only on it like once a week and lemmy only a few days in between usage.
Life is more.. enjoyable now? Lol
For me, I wouldn't say it's more enjoyable per se. I miss looking into interesting topics. However, I do find myself focusing on my business more which I guess is a bonus. But outside of that, it's very disappointing the enshitification of the Internet that's occurring.
Firefox + Ublock Origin Or Youtube Revanced (their only official site is their github) (android only)
The worry is they will go the twitch way. Ublock origins struggles with Twitchs anti adblock fight
The ads are not the true problem. The tracking and profiling is. They keep the rhetoric about the ads while forcing both. I'd be kinda okay with just untargeted ads. Maybe not fully okay but I'd be far more willing to tolerate them. This privacy violating thing the modern Internet made a norm? Hell no!
It's weird because there's lots of studies showing that tracking users' interests isn't even that much more effective than targeting based on the page content.
That’s interesting. Got a source?
Efficacy man not always translate to ad sales.
When you're selling your product and school and society have told you that you need to know your demographic, when you get to that ad manager page, you want to see your ad only being paid for on that demographic.
Unfortunately from their perspective that isn't apples to apples. They can charge higher rates for targeted ads.
I just canceled my youtube premium account after about 7 years of constant membership.
The recent price increase was crap. The service I receive hasn't improved - actually with their shitty compression even on "4k" videos my enjoyment has really decreased.
But, the big driver were ads. With premium I didn't see ads, instead I was increasingly bombarded with "words from our sponsor" all over videos.
Anyway, I recommend freetube. For now at least, it actually blocks all ads including sponsor blocks.
I won't pay a monthly fee to be google's advertising product.
I just changed my country to India, and subscribed.
Would never pay $10/month or whatever the cost is, but at my $1.30/month rate, it's worth it.
Start downloading and archiving videos you like. Especially educational content, share it with others, keep the information free and accessible for all.
If this has the same effect as reddit/lemmy.. wow peer tube is about to get so good
sounds expensive
(Creators should start backing up their content and get ready to shift to new platforms)
"well now you can go to nebula the site by creators for creators"
... Who will unironically post the exact same content from their YouTube channel, adread and all
I only watch 2 channels from youtube that are on nebula and as far as I've seen they've taken out the ad reads. I'd be pretty annoyed with a channel if they still did the ad read on a paid site.
It's been a loooong time since I looked at nebula but at the time that seemed to be true for the few I looked at. Maybe it's gotten better, that would be nice. I'll have to check it out again
I don't see the problem with that. The difference is you pay instead of being served YouTube pre-roll ads. And they get a bigger cut than it would off of YouTube premium.
As many hours as it takes to make a video It's kind of amazing some people upload different versions on each platform, they don't really have to.
I don't think I've noticed any adreads or sponsorship stuff on any of the content ive watched there actually, though of course that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, I may have just been lucky with my subscribe list.
Won't matter. As soon as those alternatives get big enough, they'll either sell out or look for more ways to maximize profits. The Internet is wholely infected by corporations now. Just need better ways to beat them back somehow.
Like where? There's really no direct competition to YouTube, and probably won't be for a very long time.
I have yet to see this running ublock origin on firefox
Same. And the instant I do I will stop using youtube.
YouTube has gotten nice guy aggressive with fucking ads, especially on here ... Instead of the video you see instant ad. I will not watch the ad so I click back and instead of taking me back to my app YouTube shrinks the ad then keeps it there I have to press back another two times to get the fuck away from YouTube so I can copy the link and open it in Firefox with ublock origin. I love new pipe.
And sponsorblock for the in-video ads
I personally am ok with sponsors. They directly support the creators, and are easy enough to skip. Much better than unskippable targeted ads to "support" a multi-billion-dollar company...
It is being tested on select viewers before rollout.
If they really force me to subscribe, I will... to Nebula.
You should do this anyway - it funds great original educational content, and is quite good value.
Not with the same clickbait YT content there.
What Nebula really needs is some content that isn't just people talking about stuff. I can appreciate a video essay now and then, but it's the whole platform. I have a subscription right now, really only because of Philosophytube, but I can't really find anything I'm that interested in watching.
It really needs some like sketch comedy, tech reviews, dumb little videos of people out doing stuff, or like, cats sitting on roombas. Cater to something other than wanting to listen to people blather their opinions all day.
Until earlier this year I just watched the ads because in some small way it supports creators and I could deal with it. Then they increased the number of ads per watch-time to egregious levels.
I certainly wasn't going to reward a company for making the existing service worse by subscribing. Started using the apps people mention immediately and also setup pihole to block more ads.
Egregious is the perfect word, I can only add that the adds are offensively stupid as well, and loud. I've been clicking back and forth until the content comes on but now it's three times at least. I'll install one of these ad blockers now but the real problem still isn't solved. I'd love to leave the platform altogether but don't know of an alternative. I tried PeerTube at one point but that was a dumpster fire , at least at the time I peeked in.
The other thing I hate about YT is the obvious click baiting the platform does, over the creators wishes. If I'm not clicking on any of the videos, the thumbnail images get weirder and crazier until I just leave the whole mess. Anyone else noticed this? It's like they are convinced this will gain more engagement and maybe it does but I hate it and feel manipulated and degraded by it.
AFAIK the changing thumbnails are not made by YouTube. The creator uploads a number of options for thumbnails and video titles, then YouTube randomly? shows those options to users and provides statistics to the creator so they can apply the best performing (in terms of click through and watch time) option to improve video performance. It's all of course linked to how the algorithm works, so is indirectly influenced by YouTube.
Source: a video I watched a while ago but I don't even remember who made the video, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Well they need ads to pay for streaming all of those conspiracy videos, aliens crap, repackaged copies of other videos, ai generated crap, shitty "click and subscribe!" videos, etc...
Been an avid Youtube viewer since the very beginning. Now, I'm paying for the site and using a bunch of extensions just to get a worse experience than I was getting on youtube 5 - 10 years ago. After seeing all of my favorite content become unprofitable and die off, I am so ready to jump ship. I think in the immediate future, Patreon and Nebula are providing the alternative that will get creators paid reliably.
I have been using Nebula for a while now and can very much recommend it. I barely use YouTube now at all.
I like New pipe. Hopefully doesn't affect it.
There was a post today saying NewPipe was affected wasn't it? I think Google is fucking around with it's API
I haven't been having any issues so far
I haven't tried today, but I hope it's alright.
I haven't looked too hard. Hope not.
It's just a matter of time before they go the Reddit route and restrict the APIs.
Fuck em. I'll just stop watching if it comes down to it. Hell, even without an alternative.
cool. don't need YouTube and the constant "OMG you won't believe what happens next" crap littered in the feed
Ublock Origin users: purge cache and update. A fix has been deployed.
Music to my ears.
Maybe one day all of the mega corporations on the internet will finally drive me from the internet itself and I'll finally do something useful with my time.
Until that day...
Like play video games
BATTLEPASS MICROTRANSACTIONS DLC DLC DLC FOMO ROTATING DAILIES ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION PTW
…I think I’ll go with indie games.
Can't wait, i should quit YouTube anyways
YouTube can, in the strongest possible terms, absolutely go fuck itself lol
I miss the good old days on YouTube.
I remember when there were no ads. Ugh.
We need an AdBlock for adblockers now. Hopefully this will get bypassed.
From what I've gathered, it already has, though fair warning if you use YouTube Enhancer, it breaks the bypass so you have to disable the adblocking within Enhancer (as this one person on the uBO subreddit learned).
Also just a fair warning, it should be obvious at this point but it's almost certainly not going to work on chrome because it's Google's browser.
Nah, it's going to be bypassed soon.
It already is in the uBlock origin annoyances filters I think
The ads make Youtube unwatchable so if necessary I'll figure out how to sideload Piped onto the house TV, or, failing that, just plug my laptop in and watch shit through Piped.
There used to be a trick where you can skip ads in youtube app by pretending to report it. i’ve used that to skip the 2x30s unskippable ads over the years, but that was patched recently.
So instead of occasionally watching ads while scrolling through comments, I’ve now opt to watch youtube in browser with UblockOrigin. And good luck to google for playing catch-22 with adblockers.
Shame that I used to have youtube in my adblock whitelist
Playing Catch up not catch 22 lol
Yeah, the unskippable ads are just maddening. Within the first 5 seconds I should either know what the product is, and my interest is established or not, or I'm hooked enough to watch the full ad. When I see the ad marked as unskippable, I'm automatically less receptive to the ad, it's demanding more than it's fair time for my consideration, so I don't want to even think about it.
One particularly maddening one was an ad that was 30 seconds, unskippable, and the theme was "our ad is so short, you don't even miss the ability to skip it!" If it didn't piss me off before, that really pushed me over the edge.
They were able to build a business and be profitable for over a decade but now all of the sudden ad block is destroying YouTube? 🤔
They were never profitable
I specifically remember them announcing quarterly profits from YouTube in alphabets breakdown a few years back, they are almost definitely profitable, I'm okay with being proven otherwise but as far as I know YouTube is profitable now.
Not just that. I have always turned of history and analytics since 2020. I use you tube to check news about happening events in my region(politics and stuff), so I can open the video on invidious or newpipe. But yesterday, as I opened you tube, it threw me this message... So, now I feel better, but seems, they have never stopped tracking what I search and watch, even when I opted to keep it off. Also maybe it is due to new feature where we can see the full video in hover mode, without clicking it to watch. But whatever, I wanted to let lemmy people to know that something like this happened yesterday to me.
Watch history is an absolutely essential metric for Youtube - I can understand how you've been led to believe that turning this option off is opting out from that data collection, but no. What this setting is asking is if you want the data collected to be represented to you as recommendations for other videos to watch. It absolutely doesn't change what data is collected, just whether the videos you've watched should be accounted for when the algorithm is finding new videos to recommend.
Also happened to me, it's very annoying
They can absolutely go fuck themselves. I've already weened myself off of nearly every social media, stopped paying for YT premium because they keep doing bullshit I don't like. I'm so ready for an alternative.
Lol, I've seen that but still just use the adblocker and it plays as normal.
I think it's meant to scare non tech savvy people. I don't see how they can stop us using adblockers....
PeerTube looks quite promising with its decentralised model. Surely it will never be perfect. But decentralisation is essencial. Also because the types of videos I like to see in YouTube either are monetised by themselfs in some way. Or are not monetised at all. YouTube does not seem necessary for those creators.
Been using PeerTube on and off for about a year now, been planning on starting a maths education channel on Trom. It's definitely got potential, but I don't see the average Youtube user migrating over to it any time soon. The main issue really is that children/young teens are a large portion of the target audience for a lot of big creators these days and the mobile apps for peertube are heavily lacking still. Not helped of course by the fact that one of the better android apps, NewPipe, which allows both YouTube and PeerTube in one place is not on the Play Store
I guess, like everything youtube will be replaced with other things
Haha! Forced ads = no watchie-watchie. I have played this game with YouTube before, and the adblockers always win.
I don't think corpos ever win in the digital world. as long as there is paid content, people will find a way to get it for frwe
I have yet to see one of those messages. Proud uBlock user.
Im honestly considering getting a flip phone at this point it's kind of ridiculous.
Is it possible to add a kind of "Terms of Service" to one's GET request? My TOS would then be not to deliver content if they object ad blocking.
I'm with the group that refuses to ever watch YT ads, but I guess it does help reduce bandwidth if they kick everyone off that's using an adblocker.
fuck that
YouTube is so horrible now I hope it’s reaching the tipping point where even non tech people may get sick of it and look elsewhere. There is no reason to have ONE giant main fucking video site and that’s it for most of the English speaking world. I need to look up how to do grout…or open this smoke detector…or beat this video game…no reason that all these videos cannot be hosted via other websites or just self hosted with the affordability of bandwidth. I’ve loved most of what google has done for a long time and they won the browser wars, crushed Mapquest, destroyed hotmail and yahoo mail…now everything is turning to shit. Google search all but refuses to find what you’re searching for. 15 second video…30 second ad. No.
I don’t know if federation is the answer but YouTube being ubiquitous for internet video has got to go.
There's no shot youtube will be dethroned any time too. Hosting that amount of video is absurdly expensive.
Does this mean anything for pipe? Still don’t now how that actually works
I definitely recommend people check out Youtube Premium if you hate ads and use YT a lot on smart TVs and mobile where ad-blocking is more difficult.
The majority of my video watching time is YT and I primarily do it on my phone or TV, so it is worth it for me. I wish I could cut out YT Music and save some money while using a music streaming service I prefer though.
I’ll upvote you back up to 0 at least.
I’ve had YT Premium (formerly Red) for years. It’s actually a good service, but I’m not too happy it sounds like prices are going up soon.
Yeah, yeah, it's all about the creators' well being.
I already pay for it and will continue to do so. I have no issues spending money for a product I enjoy.
It's never enough, soon they're going to show ads even to you, a paying customer. It's happening to some streaming providers already, it's coming to YouTube too, mark my words. Online streaming is turning into cable.
I pay the content creators I enjoy. Youtube can make due with the data they harvest and sell.
Woah there! Radical opinion you have, spending money? Like dollars? On stuff you use and enjoy that costs money to make happen? Crazy talk.
I used to keep it off on sites I wanted to have revenue but everyone uses them to annoy the user into subscriptions anymore so it's not worth turning it off.
Could disabling Javascript get rid of this message? Javascript I think assists video playback, so maybe not.
YouTube premium is the one subscription I will gladly pay for, I use it so much daily and you also get YouTube music which is a superior app to Spotify/Others, the family plan value is unmatched.
I agree, and subscribe to Premium. I can't help but feel, though, thag voting with my wallet towards creators Patreons might actually keep Youtube's little temper tantrum from hurting me. Patreon is another platform, but its harm reduction. Less problematic.
I’m the same way. I really like Premium. I would rather watch YouTube most times over Hollywood stuff.