Goodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish

mvilain@infosec.pub to Technology@lemmy.world – 1798 points –

Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don't get much from my choices. It still did a pretty good job of showing me stuff I was interested in watching.

Then on Oct 1, they threw up a "You're using an Ad Blocker" overlay on videos. I'd use my trusty Overlay Remover plugin to remove the annoying javascript graphic and watch what I wanted. I didn't have to click the X to dismiss the obnoxious page.

Last week, they started placing a timer with the X so you had to wait 5 seconds for the X to appear so you could dismiss blocking graphic.

Today, there was a new graphic. It allowed you to view three videos before you had to turn off your Ad Blocker. I viewed a video 3 times just to see what happens.

Now all I see is this.

Google has out and out made it a violation of their ToS to have an ad blocker to view Youtube. Or you can pay them $$$.

I ban such sites from my systems by replacing their DNS name in my hosts file routed to 127.0.0.1 which means I can't view the site. I have quite a few banned sites now.

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But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don't get much from my choices.

Implying that deleting them from your view actually deleted them.

My man thought he was permanently erasing it from history.

Next you’ll tell me cognito mode isn’t keeping my browsing completely private! /s

How can my workplace admin block Pornhub even when I'm using private mode? He shouldn't even be allowed to see what I do privately!

I mean, this is mostly borne from a fundamental misunderstanding of what "Private Browsing" mode is and was meant to be.

When you open an incognito tab on Chrome, it literally says "Now you can browse privately, and other people who use this device won’t see your activity."

It also says

Your activity might still be visible to:

  • Websites that you visit
  • Your employer or school
  • Your Internet service provider

Fuck using Chrome and I'm not defending Google at all here, but they never once claimed Incognito was anything more than it was.

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I think op meant he requests google to delete the history through the account settings, which they are required to comply with.

Surely they'll actually comply, not be caught in an audit years down the line and given a friendly "Now now, we talked about this: don't get caught breaking the law again!" slap on the wrist for failing to delete and instead further monetising that data?

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doesn't even matter. what matters is the meta data. if the data from the list say you like science videos with emphasis on electrical engineering, star wars podcasts and mmorpg let's plays - does that data go away apon history deletion. what about meta-meta data. if the meta data puts you on group X that receive content Y, does that go away apon history deletion. and what kind of integration does that get with the rest of the google knowledge about you...

I doubt turning off history truly does what it says either though. I think it was more about avoiding the shitty algo recc's that try to turn everyone's dad and uncle into a far right extremist.

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All the morons defending a mindless corporation in this thread forgot that Google has far overstepped it's boundaries in general. It got to where it is from harvesting free data from users. And now is initiating a web DRM that will far overstep any boundary seen. If a website decides to adopt it, everyone is screwed.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/

It really is quite something seeing people so concerned on behalf Google's revenue streams, and dedicating such passionate advocacy for them.

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"Duck player" in duckduckgo browser gets around it 👍

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“You can go ad free with YouTube premium!”

Buys premium

youtube shows ad for paramount plus under my video

Cancels YouTube premium.

So anywho there’s a thing called freetube. Just saying. Idk that it’s a perfect alternative, but it’s at least one step further from googles prying eyes and grubby hands.

Never seen that before, I've had premium for years now

Threw in a response on the thread above, don’t wanna just copy past spam haha.

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Tbh, I block ads when I can but have a hard time getting angry about this. YouTube is both incredibly useful and incredibly expensive to operate -- seriously, what other service lets you upload hours of HD video which anyone in the world can access instantly, indefinitely, for free, and at the same scale YT does? It's a peerless engineering marvel and it would be a tragedy if it were to shut down. If seeing some short skippable ads is what it takes to keep that resource viable, that's honestly pretty fair.

I just pay for YouTube Premium. It gets me YouTube Music, so for slightly more than the cost of Spotify I get music streaming and ad-free YouTube, and the channels I watch on YouTube get more value out of my streaming than if I watched with ads. And far more than if I watched with an adblocker.

Google Play Music was so much better than YouTube Music, unfortunately, but YouTube Music is still usable.

I understand that everyone hates ads. I hate ads, too. But video streaming and content creation aren’t free. I want to support the platform and support the creators whose content I enjoy, and I don’t want ads. So YouTube Premium seems like the easy option.

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I would have more sympathy for Youtube if 1. it wasn't the de-facto standard where essentially all video media gets uploaded to (which Youtube itself has done everything in its power to make happen) and 2. the company that owned it didn't also own the most popular phone OS, most popular search engine, most popular email provider, most popular ad network, most popular maps, most popular online office suite, most popular airline booking, 2nd most popular cloud hosting... The list goes on

Until a federated solution like peertube gains more traction I have no problem paying content creators directly via patreon, and do everything in my power to not pay Google a dime. Trust me, they can afford it just fine.

The tragedy is that the centralized, profit-driven, socially-damaging platform keeps so much value under ransom because the parent company can operate it for so long at a loss.

I get that the platform is a marvel, it's just disappointing that its purpose is tailored to keep eyes watching more ads rather than contribute to society as a whole.

I only looked into blocking ads sometime around like 2014-2016? I was perfectly fine with them for a very long time, they got more and more invasive and poor quality to the point I looked into blocking them. Haven't gone without an ad blocker ever since. No way in hell am I dealing with the current state of YouTube ads which are drastically worse than what pushed me to start blocking them to begin with.

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What angers me is the capital deciding to control everything. Enshittifying ads, pushing narratives, censoring valuable content. If it were a worse service but with better owners, I'd pay more.

Norway, Sweden, Austria, Hungary, Luxembourg, and others have it as part of law that Works Councils get 33% of the seats on the board of directors, and employees are elected to take up those roles. In Slovenia, Germany, and Slovakia, it is as high as 50%. That's the kind of ownership we should demand and then some, where average people get to have a say in what's going on at YouTube. Then maybe we'd get more ethical business decisions and choices we'd be more on board with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_representation_on_corporate_boards_of_directors

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The issue is that ads on YouTube used to be fairly innocuous. Now I get batshit conspiracies pushed, non-stop Aussie gambling ads and so on.

Where I was once happy to sit through some food ads, or some tourism ads to support the platform. I'm not happy being blasted with non-stop, low-quality propoganda.

Granted the $22 family plan for me and my wife has worked well. We both use youtube music extensively as well. It's the only streaming service I pay for, the only other subscription I have is for a VPN.

If google cant afford youtube, they could sell it. But they easily can, so Im not losing sleep over the $2 a week they lose from me.

Or, alternatively, if the ads were reasonable, next to no one would feel any real obligation to block them. But they arent, so why should I be concerned about the sites funding?

Like, google isnt some poor struggling indie dev who cant make ends meet. Im not exactly overflowing with sympathy for their business decisions. Theyre the reason adblock is required for modern internet use.

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YouTube is greedy. They make plenty of money without stuffing in more ads and pulling crap like this. I don’t use an ad blocker, but I’ve considered it (or just dumping YouTube completely) because they have really ramped up the ad interruptions. I’d subscribe if they had a cheap YouTube-only plan. But they don’t. You either have to pay for bundled music or TV and I don’t want or need either.

Yes, there are business costs, but they don’t produce the content they air, and their payout to those who do produce the content is a relative pittance. Their infrastructure is shared among other Google products, so it’s not like they’re having to pay for all their server racks out of a single budget. And I’m sure Google is trying to figure out how to train AI on all the content that’s posted there. Not to mention all the pirated content posted to YouTube that Google is making money from, without compensating the creators or copyright holders.

If was running a competing business like Facebook, or Amazon, I would seriously consider ramping up a competing product.

I share the same sentiment but I can see why someone might want to not support Youtube in any way because they don't want to support Google's stranglehold on the internet. Unfortunately the correct way to address that problem is sensible regulation. Call me skeptical, but that's not gonna happen anytime soon.

The problem is that YouTube went from "short skippable ads" to almost all ads. It also is a major invader of privacy.

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  1. The amount of ads on YouTube only seems to get more and more invasive over time. And I'd have less of a problem with them if they didn't keep showing me the same ads over and over and over again.

  2. Even with all that, I would pay (subscription wise, not like I haven't rented/bought movies from them) if I actually knew where the money was going. YouTube is surely expensive to operate, but we don't know how much money it costs to actually run it vs how much money is extracted via executives and shareholders.

If you read around you'll find (perhaps surprisingly to you) that YouTube operates at a loss. So in response to your points:

  1. You can pay to get the ads removed. They make less money off of you when they can't serve you ads, and I'm sure they're trying to operate at less of a loss.

  2. Alphabet is a public company, and it must release certain information about YouTube. Anyways, I'm pretty sure they aren't using the money to directly line the shareholder profits. The reality of it is that it's probably just another arm that Alphabet uses as part of its monopolistic tech deathgrip, so it's not gonna be a straightforward computation. Maybe Disney could be used as a metaphor here?

If you don't wanna pay to support that, I don't exactly blame you. But practically, I don't really agree/expect that YouTube should serve you content (or even more so, people with aggressive adblockers) without you giving something in return. Either you eat ads, you pay for a subscription, or you become the product (unfortunately this last point might be true irregardless).

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Just like a few of the other posts, I honestly don't get it. If they can't sell your data and can't serve you ads, then why would they want to spend money serving you for free? There's so many people complaining how YouTube has a monopoly and how it's not even that hard to run, but I seriously doubt these people. Transcoding video and distributing it worldwide while having automated moderation is not easy or cheap. If there were serious contenders in the space people would have moved on, and I don't think it's just the network effect that keeps YouTube as a dominant player here.

People despise ads, but then they want content for free. They use adblockers to bypass a primary revenue source for a website, then go all surprised Pikachu face when that website doesn't welcome them. And then they get upset that they don't want to be the product despite not willing to be a source of ad revenue. I'm willing to pay for YouTube premium (and other subscription models to get rid of ads), but a lot of people aren't. And honestly, I really would rather those people simply leave the site. It would lower operating costs for YouTube (I don't expect my subscription fees to go down but maybe their engineers will have more free time to work on features besides adblocker-blocking), and more people on different sites would lead to more competition.

If you aren't willing to eat ads, and you aren't willing to be the product, and you aren't willing to pay a subscription, then why do you think you're entitled to content?

People despise ads, but then they want content for free.

You have it perfectly backwards: YouTube wants content for free, and to not have to share any but the most pitiful fractions of ad income with the ACTUAL content creators.

YouTube does not produce content, others do. YouTube has gone out of its way to dick the vast majority of them, especially the smaller ones, to the point that as such, unless you have a Patreon, a website or store of your own, corporate sponsors, merch, or some other side hustle in addition to making YouTube content, you're literally making content for a fraction of a penny per view, and entirely at your own cost.

And even then, you're subject to an algorithm over which you have no control and which can just as fickly ban your content to oblivion as it can raise your content to the multi-million views club. By skipping YouTube ads and finding other ways to support the content creators I enjoy, I help give my creators a financial buffer from the unpredictable vagaries of the algorithm and also withhold reward from YouTube as well.

When YouTube shared ad revenue with content creators in a much more equal fashion, I did not have a problem with their ads. But several years ago -- I want to say six or seven, but it's been going on for at least ten -- YouTube got greedy with the ads AND with becoming incredibly unstable and unreliable for creators in all manner of ways AND decreasing payouts to creators all along the way, at which point it became clear that me watching an ad or not no longer affects the content creators I enjoy at all. And they are the only reason I am on YouTube to begin with.

(And don't get me started on all the copyright/demonetization scams there are on YouTube now: I have a friend who got a copyright strike for playing a C scale on a piano because some asshole claimed it and YouTube lets them do it: even when a creator gets views, they can get demonetized at a drop of a hat even for obviously ridiculous claims, and then that revenue goes to the person making the copyright claim. Win/win for everyone except the person who actually made the content.)

Over the years, YouTube has never failed to excel at two things: server space, and fucking its golden geese, the creators of the actual content, without which no one would be making any money there at all. So get back to us when YouTube recognizes the creators of the gold mine they have in the content hosted there, and once again finds a way to respect for the amount of time and effort and cost that goes into creating that content by sharing revenue with content creators in a more equitable manner.

TL;DR: Why should I watch ANY YouTube ads at all when I can support content creators via Patreon or a creator's website and know that a much more equitable amount of that revenue will go straight to the creator of that content, where it belongs?

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I honestly don't get it. If they can't sell your data and can't serve you ads, then why would they want to spend money serving you for free?

They shouldn't. If they can't figure out how to make money with it they should close it down. If they insist on thinking about it as a product and it doesn't make money, it's a product that doesn't make sense and should not exist. If the only way you can make people use your product is by giving it away, what does that tell you about it?

They could lock down the platform behind paywall but they don't want to do that. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want all the free videos being uploaded but they don't like all the free viewers. Unfortunately they go hand in hand.

[...] you aren't willing to pay a subscription, then why do you think you're entitled to content?

You CANNOT pay for your content there, even if you want to.

Has it never occurred to you that YouTube gets all their content FOR FREE?

You can only pay to make Google even richer. That's all your money can do there. Nothing else.

Perhaps YouTube gets all their content for free, but it certainly isn't free to transcode video, host it reliably, and distribute it while moderating it (given how bad Twitter is right now I'm sure they have a decent number of measures in place, even if they aren't even "good" at it). And if it was remotely easy, believe me, there would be a lot of competition in this space.

Yes, I make Alphabet x dollars richer (or really, I make YouTube operate at a slightly lesser cost) every month by paying a subscription. And actually, I'm okay with it. A tiny cut of it goes to content creators and I get a nice piece of tech. And I support the branch of Alphabet that has technology that I think is incredibly useful and beneficial. If there's a content creator that I like especially then I'll support them directly.

The reality of it is that things cannot be free. Or at least it seems that way, because we have not been able to provide a free video hosting service that doesn't take advantage of its content creators or consumers.

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No ofence but if thats your pov on the situation (a very valid one btw) you would be better of subscribing to youtube premium. You suport them directly, and dont really get the short end of the stick on mobile like evryone else that isnt paying or isnt a power user. They still colect your data incluiding browsing and watching habits, but you wont get bombarded with terrible ads and get some nice perks as a plus.

Agreed. I'll fuck around with the workarounds for as long as they work but once YouTube truly manages to make adblocking a complete headache I'll just switch to a Indian ip-address and buy a cheap premium. I've been watching tens of thousands of hours of ad-free content on that site for as long as it has existed. I can't, with a straight face, complain about the fact that they would like to make some money from it too.

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So, stop using Chrome ffs, ublock and Firefox have zero issues

Swapped over about 3 months ago, it's good to be back in the FF ecosystem. Swapped to chrome long ago after FF became super fat on the resources, now it's the other way around.

FF + pihole is awesome.

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I got stopped yesterday with FF+UB. redirect.invidious.io time.

Not anymore, they're rolling this out in separate swaths. so if you haven't seen it, it just means you'll get to wait a little longer.

> >no longer works > FF+UB does work with the instructions you can find on reddit.com/r/ublockorigin < no longer works <

Edit: Freetube works on pc, and F-droid and NewPipe works on Android

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If you're on PC use Firefox with uBlock Origin.

For Android, Im personally using Libretube but using mobile Firefox with uBlock Origin also works.

On android you should try to go with youtube revanced, its a little tedious and time consuming to install but it is worth every single second.

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PSA:Firefox + ublock origin combo works on android as well. If you don't want to install revanced.

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Another option on Android is NewPipe. Doesn't look as nice as Libretube imo, but it goes to Youtube directly for content which is useful since public piped instances can be a bit unreliable or slow from time to time. (Also on Libretube you have to sign up and re-import your subscriptions whenever you switch instances which can be tedious)

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YouTube: starts putting 2, sometimes even 3 ads that are often unskippable before and in the middle of 10 minute videos

Also YouTube: Why are people using adblockers?

They want the non paid experience to be as awful and painful as possible, because they want people to pay.

It's the classic business manager 1st quarter profit push, damn the consequences or damage to reputation.

They could offer a sensible 5$ plan and sensible ads, but now, infinite growth demands maximum fuckery.

Not to mention WHAT they are advertising.

Like, blatant bigotry and propaganda disguising itself as actual shows.

Some of them being multiple hours long.

Which isnt a problem on PC running an adblocker, but if you have it running on a device like roku/game console/etc, then you are gonna be stuck with hours of right wing lies until you notice and manually skip the ad.

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Ublock Origin literally works fine for youtube. If you ever receive a warning like this just clear your cache and refresh your filters.

you can also use the element zapper on the popup and never have to worry about it again

I use the element zapper but it still pauses every video couple seconds in and breaks scrolling completely

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PC: Install Firefox. Then install these extensions: Sponsorblock for YouTube, Enhancer for YouTube, uBlock Origins with all the filters turned on except the language filters (you can use them if you wish) and Return YouTube Dislike. Keep uBlock Filters updated by checking for filter updates once a day.

Android: There's Revanced. I use pre-built apks along with Vanced MicroG from RVX Lite in Telegram.

Android TV: Install SmartTubeNext.

Enjoy.

Another tip: For security reasons, always install the absolute minimum number of browser extensions you can get by with. And only from devs you trust.

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Just to let you know, if you use uBlock you can expect it to adapt to this new shenanigan pretty quickly. Also I think €120/year are ridiciously overpriced. Ask me about €30/year and I might consider it for a second.

To be honest, I wouldn't mind ads on Youtube if they were less per hour and less obnoxious. But no, every 12 second video now has an ad leading to it.

Not to mention, if I would pay for every single Video service the usual 8-15€ I would pay like €1000 per year and THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

Give me "pretty much everything" for €100 per year and we can talk. My offer stands.

Cable TV chopped one of my favorite movies up into about 24 parts once so it could shove commercials in between those parts. I don't do ads anymore, and will auto-kill them or auto-quit whatever 'service' or site tries.

Funny thing happened to Cable-TV didn't it?

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You don't have a choice.

Also Ublock Origin on Firefox already bypass this.

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When they take out uBlock Origin, they take me out as well.

If only peertube had the same culture as Lemmy and Mastodon.

But it feels like, imo, Peertube has fallen to the same pitfalls as other YouTube alternatives. 99% of vids I see on Peertube instances are far-right conspiracy theory videos among other obviously abhorrent content that would otherwise be banned on youtube.

Nebula.tv has lots of excellent videos, a healthy community of creators, a sustainable business model, a lot of good communication between subscribers and management, and I believe is not in financial trouble so far. It's not free, but it's affordable.

As a former Nebula subscriber, here's my hot take: it also has no real community and no chance for exposure to the up-and-comer (IE no way to breakout since it seems invite only?)

I've found so many great YouTube channels filled with deep experience and expertise before they "catch on" (and some never "catch on"). The ability to find the small, powerful voice who's just trying to share knowledge...

I'm not defending YouTube/Alphabet here (as a company they're no better than any other), I just think Nebula isn't a great alternative and unless things change, can never be. It's a walled garden in too many ways (paywall/creator invitations).

In the year I subscribed to Nebula, I mostly watched the same videos on YouTube. If they were technical enough there was valuable discussion attached to the video; on Nebula that's not the case and not possible. Even if it was possible I can't imagine people fragmenting their discussion spaces between YouTube and a closed ecosystem like Nebula.

Don't even get me started with their (Nebula) inability to build a video queue -> wasting time and space on a poorly thought-out implementation of Autoplay was a terrible decision that further pushed me off the platform.

It's sad, I really wanted to like it. But I voted with my dollars and left.

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Video Just has fundamentally different hosting cost for processing and bandwidth. Amongst the big streaming providers only Netflix makes a profit. Twitch is not profitable, either.

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Newpipe is still working great, I haven't used an official interface in like 3 years.

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Lmfao, no one is dropping YouTube. You'll be back one way or another.

Many are on lemmy because they dropped Reddit. Myself included. I was an active user on Reddit for well over a decade. This guy seems pretty serious

But replacing Youtube is sadly much harder.

I bet we'll just get better ad blockers.

An eternal arms race: Ads vs. Adblockers. Just like malware vs anti-malware protections. System penetration vs. system hardening. It iust entered another stage of technological development, but that doesn't mean it's over or that we need to throw the towel.

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Use Piped and Invidious. Newpipe with SponsorBlock on my android. LibreTube is also good.

You're right, I haven't dropped Youtube - but I've added Nebula. It's not gonna be long now before either my last youtube-only creator moves to Nebula or I find some way to get an ad-free provider to play on my TV. Then I can finally unsubscribe from YT.

I've quit watching videos on Youtube hundreds of times!

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They're begging for a direct competitor.

I feel like with the storage space and bandwidth needed for something like that that anyone with the money to start a true competitor would probably just be another mammoth tech company we all hate just as much :(

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Anyone who's considered it has gotten their start by hosting content that YouTube won't, and as a consequence devolve into right wing nightmare scapes pretty quickly.

See Bit Chute for an example. Probably best known for Reddit blocking the entire domain when they refused to take down the video of the Christchurch shooting and the Facebook video that the shooter claimed inspired him (one posted by Otago Muslim Association titled "Very interesting video. Only for Muslims. Please do not redistribute.").

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If they can't make money with almost a monopoly and Google adsense why would a competitor do any better? Maybe if a competitor would just charge a hosting fee to the content creator and let them worry about making money. Some hobbyists wouldn't mind be paying for things while dipshit "Personalities" get a wakeup call, win/win

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I enjoy watching YouTube with no ads so I bought premium. I actually bought the family one and share it with 4 others. Personally, I find it to be a great deal.

I also pay for extra storage (even tho I have a nas) because it’s convenient to have.

I’m a pirate at heart, have a 3k movie library on Plex and use nefarious to queue download, and I’m a long time crypto nut so I understand privacy and sticking it to the man.

But I also find great quality of life improvements by simply paying fair prices for good content 🤷‍♂️

It’s a fun hobby to try and dodge ads and steal and stick it to these companies. But really can be time consuming and gets old (it did at least for me when I got old).

Same. I watch YouTube every single day for multiple hours a day. Whether in the background or actively watching. I see the value in paying for a service that I am constantly using. I'm not some YouTube shill. I just personally find it worth the money.

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I hate ads as much as anyone and have been blocking them for almost as long as ad blockers have existed. I still acknowledge the fact that ads are the primary revenue source for a lot of things on the Internet, and I selectively enable them for content I want to pay for.

How do you think Youtube is supposed to survive without ads or subscriptions? When they puts ads on their site, the unsaid agreement is that you exchange your ad views for their service.

Yeah, I feel real bad for them. Google made $13.9B last quarter. Perhaps if the greed wasn't absolutely bottomless I'd be willing to pay a small fee. But wait, aren't they selling all my private information? I thought that's how it works. If you don't pay for a product, you are the product. No?

A lot of creators are already beginning to work based off donations (AKA patron and other sites). Thats one model that could work. Kinda like lemmy.world.

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They had a system in place that put more ads on users depending on how many used an ad blocker. When the users got used to it, YouTube realized they could push it on everyone and make more money. They'd survive as a business even if that wasn't the case anyway, Google owns them.

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Firefox + ublock origin is the way forward.

However, as a teacher, my school IT system default browser is chrome, and adverts on YT videos when you're trying to teach a lesson can really suck all the momentum and attention from the class.

Chrome allows you to save javascript as a bookmark URL called bookmarklets. I'm not so clued up on java, but I found this code that zips through the adverts super quickly. Someone can probably improve on this;

javascript: var v = document.querySelector('video'); var t = 16; v.playbackRate = parseFloat(t)

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Ohhhh how I wish my favorite youtubers would create their own Peertube instances...
They'd have complete control of their own content, and any donations could go directly to them.

I know it's kind of a pipe dream, but let me dream dammit.

One of my favourite youtubers recently quite his job to go full time on his channel. He's been growing his audience and patreon backers and for a long time using the income from those videos to invest in his equipment and the gear he reviews. Eventually he grew the channel enough to go full independent.

It'd be really hard to do that outside of YT's monetisation model tbh. I think most YTbers start of making videos for shits and giggles and any money they get is like passive income. Then they catch a viral video of find and audience and start the consider the channel more seriously, and explore other monetisation models and opportunities. I get the hate towards Google and YT but a lot of the oddballs I love on YT might not have a platform otherwise.

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I haven't seen so many shills in one place since the Russian special military operation began.

Route to 0.0.0.0 instead, localhost gives a delay while zero just fails.

The new word for "whitelisted" is "allowlisted"?

Yes. In the same way that "Master" and "Slave" have been replaced for racist engineering terminology, "Whitelist" and "Blacklist" are replaced with "Allowlist" and "Blocklist".

Do these terms actually come from racist backgrounds, or did they come up as a coincidence?
It just feels weird someone would think of a way to degrade black people then decide to use blacklist for things they don't want, then engineers decide to use master and slave to piss off black people whatever. Is that literally the history behind it?

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I've been out of it. What do we call "Master" and "Slave " drives now?

From Wikipedia:

Various replacement terms for 'master' or 'slave' have been proposed and implemented. In 2020, GitHub replaced the default 'master' git branch with 'main'.[18] Other replacement names include 'default', 'primary', 'controller', 'root', 'initiator', 'leader', 'director', 'manager'; and for 'slave': 'performer', 'worker', 'peripheral', 'responder', 'device', 'replica', 'satellite', and 'secondary'.[18][6][21][22][23] Python switched to 'main', 'parent', and 'server'; and 'worker', 'child', and 'helper', depending on context.[7][24] The Linux kernel has adopted a similar policy to use more specific terms in new code or documentation.[22] Other projects and standards have used alternative terms since their inception.

I'm sorry but the idea of changing Master/Slave to Manager/Worker is so funny to me.

Privileged drives and economilcally-and-socially-disadvanted-due-to-historical-injustices drives. The last ones a bit of a mouthful, so you can use EASDDTHJ drives.

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it is not racist however. words get their meaning by their context. asking if you can bum a fag gets very different responses in the uk and outside

in this case master 2a/d or 5 and I couldnt find any non people slavery related definition so maybe that should get changed after all

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ublock origin + Firefox still works. try open ublock origin dashboard > Filter lists then click the purge all cachess button

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I'll play devil's advocate here... Ads pay revenue. Revenue pays for the service. The service pays content creators. I'm not saying Youtube is perfect, but adblocking, or using alternate front ends, hurts the content creators first. Youtube Premium gets rid of the ads, pays the content creators more, and gets you a spotify-type music streaming service as well. I'm not trying to shill, but the deal is pretty fair, it's only $3 more than spotify, and you get 0 ads on youtube as a bonus. If you really don't want to see and you don't want to pay for it, then please, don't use the service. Youtube still gets data from you, even if you block ads. You want to hurt them, then do it the right way. Blocking ads hurts the creators more than anyone else.

Edit: Every day I am reminded of how many people believe they are owed everything for free.

I'll start giving a shit about youtubes bottom line when youtube starts caring about the creators bottom lines. Youtube fucks creators so god damn hard.

Just look at this for example' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-QtwGfILTo

Jesus Christ, man. I said Youtube isn't perfect. It's a fucking corp. They should burn the board of directors at the stake. HOWEVER, creators still rely on payment from them.

And???????? Nobody owes anybody a fucking ad view. If you like the channel there are many ways to support most if not all.

Patreon, other donation venues, shit even fucking memberships on or off YT. You say you aren’t shilling yet you desperately want their ad campaigns to continue pushing forward?

You don’t have to give YT any data, look at Piped and other alts

And the creators know how Google could pull the rug at any moment. This is why they also have sponsorships, which is a more stable revenue stream not dictated by Google's greedy whims.

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hurts the content creators first

Ehhhh I’m not so sure. Adblockers don’t stop on-air reads, for starters. I’m not saying you’re entirely wrong but I’m also not sure it’s impacting the creators as much as it impacts YouTube’s vacuuming our telemetry data.

Adblockers don’t stop on-air reads, for starters.

And you know what? I watch on-air reads, when they're good. Simon Whistler does a great job, so does Aging Wheels, and Jay Foreman, and a bunch of others. You want me to watch an ad, all you have to do is make it entertaining. That's clearly possible, because some people do it.

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I liked youtube more back when it was random personally created videos, not 'creators' making commercial content pretending to be run out of someone's basement.

Yeah, my favorite YouTube content has been the type that are just random uploads from people who don't even post frequently or ever again, and just sharing something because they thought it was cool along the vein of reddit and lemmy. So doesn't have that whole artificial production vibe and intentionally lengthened videos with begs for likes and so on, since there was no monetization motive to begin with.

Crappy thing is that those type of videos are suppressed and hidden by the algorithm that pushes the big channels to the top in searches. YouTube really pushes the personality/influencer driven content for obvious reasons, but it's why I haven't really fallen into the YouTube hole of endlessly watching it.

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I would say that ads like YT's are the kind that pushed adblockers into being popular. Well, that and redundant/audio/popups ads that are annoying. Sometimes I turn off the adblocker and generally it's an immediate mistake.


I know it wouldn't be a large portion of content (though having control over the final look could widen the appeal), but I think Google could've gotten vector content supported in HTML5 spec (in collaboration with software, and maybe some kind of automated conversion to hybrid video) and thus supported on YT. It can be significantly less data for high-fidelity visuals, and unlike rendered video it's the same data for 720p as it'd be for someone with a 16K monitor or whatever in 20+ years from now.

Actually reducing costs in this manner would probably be too generous to competitors, just as Flash being killed off was good for YT. AV1 does help, but is still likely a big resource cost to store/serve at 4K+ (or just in general) not to mention re-encoding hardware and knowledge needed.

Kinda just like how WEBGL tech didn't actually include a container format (the reason why so much Flash content was easily archived by normal people) as it does not benefit content hosts to allow downloads (even if it'd lower cost of repeat viewings particularly by users who don't actually provide the host with revenue).

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Ad blockers are an existential threat to Google. They are - at the core - an ad company.

RIP

And nothing was lost...

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uBlock Origin is quite apt in not showing any of that. I am thankful for the creator's attentiveness.

Script blocking > Ad Blocking. Block all of the tracking scripts, all of the ad-aware stuff, disable redirects and scripts embedded in the ad frames, bypass script-based paywalls, etc. It is a pain in the ass to go to a new site and have to figure out who the 20 domains are that are trying to load scripts, but finding those tracking fuckers and hitting "distrust" is so satisfying. I swear that any ads I do see are so all over the map because nobody knows who the hell I am and I like it that way.

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NewPipe on Android works to block that shit just fine. As for Firefox, adblockers still work just fine. Once again, good luck Google lol

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Hear me out: Google makes money by selling ads. People who buy from those ads don't have an adblocker installed. People who are intelligent enough to block ads wouldn't buy from them anyway. If Google allows it to be too easy to block ads then their model collapses. I'm ok with jumping through a couple hoops to continue to block and Google doesn't lose anything while I get to still watch the content I like without wasting anyone's time. It's to Google's benefit to serve videos to only people who will actually buy that crap anyway. If Google or anyone wants to sell to me, they simply have to make a great product. If they do, I'll see it in use for it's intended purpose and buy it. For example, I didn't have to watch any ads to buy a Nintendo Switch years ago...

I feel like I'm summoning a roko's basilisk here, but here we go:

Google should entice people to watch the ads. They should slip in random "free YouTube premium for a month just for you!" ads or quick time events or whatever that you only get when you don't block ads.

"Thanks for watching the ad! Here's an extra 10GB of storage, or points to our store, or whatever!"

Giving out free whatever premiums to your gigantic ass ecosystem to some tiny ass percent of your users will EASILY increase eyeballs faaaaaar more than this blocking shit.

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Odd, I have uBlock Origin and it’s blocking the ads without any pop ups or angry messages

Same here. UBlock origin has been the gold standard for so long I'm surprised not everyone uses it.

They are doing it randomly for now. Not all users are getting the message.

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I got this notification today for the first time. I cleared the catche on my filter lists and it seems to have solved the issue - for now.

I just tried it out, watched three videos (one was 49 minutes) and nothing. I use Firefox with NoScript and U-Block (also Enhancer for Youtube, but I doubt that's relevant). I wouldn't have know this was happening if no one posted about it.

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Or you can pay them $$$

I use it between half an hour and two hours every day. And I can afford it. So this is what I do. It’s worth far more than Netflix to me.

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I see a lot of people saying X and Y are safe. Eventually nothing will be safe. All they have to do is require login to view content. Make login require CC or SMS then enforce a ratio of content played over time.

Price wise, they're just insane. It's all B-Rate content for more then the price of any other streaming service.

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Try using FreeTube

Revanced

LibreTube

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You don't know how to use ublock origin so you're abandoning the most useful and entertaining platform on the entire internet?

You’re right for now, but OP is right that Google has been actively making YouTube worse and worse. Imagine if they used their resources to make YouTube premium better instead of this bs.

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What country are you from? I use Ublock Origin + Malwarebytes on MS Edge and haven't seen any warning like that

I either pay to use the app or I get ads that pay for the platform to continue being used but I don't want to see the ads so my ad blocker blocks the ads.

A company is going to continue making revenue. I don't know why anyone is shocked by a company that makes ads changing a site to ask you to view more ads. Genuinely baffled that users waste their time complaining about something a big trillion dollar company owns and actively runs changing their platform to continue making them trillions of dollars then getting on here and going, "take that Google I am fed up."

Meanwhile, I have just been paying for YouTube premium with no ads supporting the content creators I love and moving on with my life.

EDIT: These comments are why Lemmy isn't growing.

I don't know why anyone is shocked that people don't want to be brainwashed by advertising on internet services so staple they should be considered utilities.

*supporting the shareholders who care not for you, the company, nor the content creators.

I contribute to the content creators I like directly through Patreon. They benefit more from that.

Google doesn't really do anything deserving of my money, so I use adblockers on yt. Simple as that.

The big problem is it also (accedentially or not) harms interoperability. (Nothing is as safe as saving a video to your local storage media. Because they beleave access to youtube is earned not owed, even if you paid them real money for access. Soo many fairly and unfairly deleted yt videos.) There are many tools for youtube that scrape the site for metadata or the video/audio itself but because their 3rd parties too small to even pay atention to, they have not been blessed by Alphabet inc. (discord music bot, yt-dlp, the wayback machine equivlant for youtube videos, DIY TV streaming boxes like Kodi, nicer FOSS android apps like Newpipe, socialblade, etc...) I fear these could be broken by a change like this. Its secretly just the twitter/reddit API debate again.

You can support creators without supporting a horrible corp but go off I guess

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I use YouTube for tutorials, education, and entertainment all the time. And YouTube music is how I listen to all my music.

I've been paying for the YouTube premium version for my family since day one.

Recently they took away my grandfathered-in pricing. It really costs me a ton of money.

But I remember that I'm keeping ads off my screens, my parents' screens, and my kids screens... And we all use YouTube music all the time.... So...

Yeah, a lot of money, but honestly, probably the best subscription I have.

I could never go back to ads.

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It should be "So long YouTube and thanks for all the fish." Goddammit!

If you're going to borrow from Douglas Adams, at least get it right.

The enshitification of youtube is complete. Nothing stopping them from just upping the rate and duration of ads to the stratosphere.

I dual boot and in Windows they are blocking me now. In Linux, I am not seeing the message. So it's not IP based. I run Firefox in both instances.

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Sometimes I forget people like watch YouTube on purpose. I pretty much exclusively use it for music that's not on Bandcamp, short clips of old shows, and the occasional guide for something that's too visual to be described well in words.

Old man out of the loop, yells at clouds.

Youtube is effectively the only form of streaming my wife and I use. We have access to others through family members accounts but probably 19 times out of 20 we go straight for YouTube.

Name another streaming service where I can watch a 171 video saga spanning six years covering every single nut, bolt, plank, and brass fitting of a historic sailing ship restoration.

I have lost count but I think we are up to something like 130 subscriptions.

Im on YouTube more than any other media. Video podcasts, educational videos, news, product reviews and comparisons. how to's from fixing your dryer to 3d modeling and printing and coding examples.

I find it more entertaining and educational that most moder tv shows and marvel movies.

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i've still never seen this message outside of a screenshot; ublock origin in firefox (including tor browser, just need to hit the new circuit button sometimes) still works fine as of today. and so does yt-dlp.

the fact that some ad blockers are seeing this is a bad sign though :(

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I use SmartTubeNext on a Fire TV and it works fine.

It even skips over in-video ads.

I use FreeTube on my desktop and Newpipe on my GrapheneOS Pixel 7, I don't see any ads or graphic overlays. The family uses AppleTV and the YouTube app is a horrible experience with the amount of ads, even for a 3 minute video. Future project is to look into Pihole or something to block ads at the router level.

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Is it enshittification, or how the Internet should work for commercial services? Youtube isn't publicly funded. You either pay for the product or become it in exchange for use.

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I will let you know but I haven't have issues with ad blocker on PC yet

As soon as I have to see ads, I'm gone. Not mad, I get the business need for them. It's just not worth it for me. Most of my actual subscriptions are through a rss reader, and that effectively blocks all but the sponsorblock ones. For which I have sponsorblock.

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Something I don't think anyone is talking about is that, if this is now considered a ToS violation, Google will probably decide at some point to start banning accounts over it. Oh, you use adblock? Now your email, Drive documents, and photos are gone.

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Here is my take on this.

First, I am with OP on this, but with mild counter points:

  • I block ads because they are intrusive, contain scam and viruses
  • I don't want to pay YT because I am already the product, and my trust is long gone about them saying they respect my privacy
  • "Hosting is expensive" is what we hear left and right but...
    • letting people upload many hours long is not what YT was supposed to be,
    • 4K vids and up are huge, so is HDR, do we really need such fat video files/streams? I don't...
    • for those who need 2000inch TV size quality, yeah, they want to charge those.
  • I would be OK to pay, but google will rise the price eventually and it feels like changing a contrcat I signed to begin with and I dan't agree with that. (price raising reason are the previous points above, I am not concerned by those and I don't see why I should pay that much)
  • I am a google pixel user, google already got some of my money anyway, which I am happy with.

In the same vein, I wait Netflix to raise their price again (I bit the bullet twice) but there won't be a third time.
Same for Spotify.

Those services should realize they are not essential, just bare useful, and should be priced as such.

Just my 2cts.

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Thank you for mentioning the overlay blocker. Never heard of it. I was just on YouTube today and haven't seen this. Are you in the US? I feared this day would come. Not sure what I'll do.

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just use frontends like invidious - for mobile there are tons of apps for these frontends, i recommend newpipe if you dont care about shitty recommendations

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Hasn't happened to me yet, but I know it will.

Sucks; but to be honest most of the YouTube things I watch have been moving off YouTube for awhile anyway.

First Reddit, now YouTube. This year is a year of change for my Internet habits.

The bullshit Reddit & Spez pulled is a lot worse than forcing ads on YT imo

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I finally bit the bullet and switched from Chrome to Firefox last night after they flagged my adblock for YouTube as malware and forcefully disabled it. Fuck that noise.

Use Invidious while it still exists as a project I'm a fan of the yewtu.be instance. Pretty reliable. The Piped project is good as well. Don't even use the YouTube domain at all, hate giving them analytics and site usage info nevermind ads

YouTube is straight up evil. We need an alternative solution.

Any alternative that hopes to last will need to be a paid service.

At which point, it's not really an alternative at all anymore.

Odysee is a good alternative. It takes a smaller cut of ad revenue than google, and you can donate to the users directly through their donation system.

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My Ublocker works fine, and I have never seen this message come up

Silly question if you don't mind me asking, when you got the pop up:

  • Which browser/adblocker where you using (also did you use any custom filters)?
  • What device are you watching youtube on when you saw the block (windows, macos, ios, android, linux)?
  • Where are you located? (like which country)

I never saw these popups just curious.

Also my setups using a web browser (no issues):

  • (Mac OS Soma) Firefox Stable with ublock origen stock filters
  • (iPadOS 17) with adguard safari content blocker stock filters

Setups with third part clients (no issues):

  • Revanced android
  • Smarttube (Fire TV)
  • YTLitePlus (iPadOS)

tbf i changed my mind recently as i paid for spotify but had yt vrevanced and st next. but after thinking about it, i switched the family subscription from spotify to youtube premium as it has both youtube and music while 5 out of 350 songs are missing for the same fucking price.

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I stopped using YouTube at least 3 years ago. When they changed discovery algorithm to show me the same videos.

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You have to build a sub list with FreeTube, but it's well worth it. There's an import from youtube feature, but I haven't been successful in making it work.

honestly at this point I don't even understand using the normal youtube front end anymore. I have been using piped as my youtube app on my phone for a while, and I think it's time I switch frontends. What sucks is video is one of the few things we don't have a decent way of federating right now just due to the sheer volume of disk space required.

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AdGuard with Firefox still works for me, I hope it stays that way.

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I’m still surprised what platforms make money WITH the content that USERS make , charge or restrict USERS view. It’s kinda crazy model that people accepted for so many years. For one side this is good because it will make users to reconsider what they do and how they corporations make money from it. Google money model has a date of death.

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Leaving my project Tubo in case someone finds it useful. Support for it just got merged on Libredirect

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So with this known…when do you think YouTube will start banning accounts or giving out account strikes?

They could always make actual relationships with advertisers and host ads on their own site. And make it not interfere with the content itself. Difficult concept, I know.