Whatever happens on my browser is client side, which is hardware and software I own. I can make what I own do what I want. It's a right.
It's like Google saying that I can't skim a magazine in my home, and that I must read the ads. Google can do what they want server-side, and I'll do what I want client-side.
They're not saying you can't have an adblocker. They're saying their software will try not to serve you their data if you do, or at least make it inconvenient.
You have a right to your computer. You do not have a right to their service.
That's exactly what I said, yeah
Me after reading the 1st comment: "OK. True. Fair."
Me after reading the 2nd comment: "OK. True. Fair."
Me after reading the 3rd comment: "OK. Also true. Also fair."
Me reading you:
Fourth gosh darn level of agree
I’ll never disable my PiHole or turn off ublock tho
Fair.
I wish PiHole wasn’t so absolute dogshit about DNS requests from outside the local subnet, might use it then
Permit all origins, allow all destinations. In the settings.
Tried that, it just reverts back after a few weeks :/
Open an issue on the forums if it hasn’t already been fixed.
Mine doesn’t revert.
What OS/computer?
Tried it bare metal on a Pi 4 and as a VM. I have my LAN using the 10.0.0.0/8 space and I couldn’t have DNS breaking all the time
And it would set itself back?
Yep. Default is to not reply to DNS outside the subnet it's in, and it would randomly flip back to that
I'm going to try ad guard today... That way I can keep my DHCP
Update: adguard does not block YouTube ads.
You can use PiHole without their DHCP.
Oh yeah? I didn't know. I thought I read on the pihole website that if you use pihole on a system on your network, you have to use static ips and cannot use DHCP.
Nope. You can use whatever DHCP server you’d like; you just have to set the pihole as your DNS server in DHCP.
There was a rabbi arbitrating a dispute between neighbours. One of them complained that the other one gathers apples that fall off his apple tree and into the other neighbour's garden.
"Those are my apples grown on my tree. He's stealing them!"
"You're right," says the rabbi. But the other neighbour counters.
"But the branches of the tree are above my property. If he doesn't want them to fall on my garden, he can cut off the branch. But he lets them fall into my garden making them my apples."
"You're right," says the rabbi and adjourns the diapute to be able to think about it. He's at his wit's end and tells the whole story to his wife when he gets home.
"That doesn't make sense. They can't both be right."
No, you don't have a right to it. If they want to they can put the entire site being a subscriber paywall. That's their call. But until they do that i will continue to access the site with my adblocked browser.
You do have a right to your computer. After content is delivered to you, you have downloaded data, and your own hardware and software acts to consume said downloaded data. After it is downloaded, even if it is in a browser in a cache, it is considered offline content. This also applies to streaming media chunks, too: once it's downloaded, you have acquired it locally.
They don't have the right to disregard my right to privacy either, yet here we are.
Well.... They do because it's their tos, no?
But their software is just blocking based on browser. Their message to you is not "don't use an ad blocker". It's "use chrome and you won't have this problem". Theyre literally just hoping to abuse their position as a monopoly in video to try and strengthen their monopoly on browsers.
Is that why I haven't had any problems? I thought it was either Google A/B testing again or my ad blocker updating often enough to keep up, but I do have a user-agent changer installed in Firefox that's configured to tell YouTube I'm on Chrome...
And as a service provider, they can choose to degrade your experience. It goes both ways.
Except they want to send you videos. The power is with you, the viewer. Without you, advertisers will have no reason for buying ads. Google can't collect your data either. Realise that you have this power. Youtube is not like electricity or clean water. We can live without it if push comes to the shove.
To be fair, what they want is to make money off of you, be it through metadata or through advertising. It's just that sending you videos happens to be the model which they use to get the metadata or advertising income.
If they wanted to make money off of me then they should have kept the Pixel Pass as a thing so I'd have a reason to have YT premium
Or make YT premium worth it
But nah, they'd rather ruin the product I was paying for, so now they get nothing. At least then I'm not paying for it to get worse
They don't want to send us videos, they want to serve us ads and annoy us into buying Youtube Premium, which someone using adblocker won't see, or need.
From their point of view they would win either way - if they successfully block adblockers it either converts us into ad watchers, premium subscribers, or we fuck off and stop using their bandwidth.
It's funny because I pay for premium and have noticed a worse experience since this was revealed. They don't seem to check if a user has adblock and pays.
They don't seem to check if a user has adblock and pays.
They definitely seem to have checks in place for it. I have Family Premium and so far no issues at all.
Edit: to clarify, not a fan of any of this. Just saying it does work for me
Weird. It's not happening to me today. Maybe it was something else.
Well, I don't pay for premium, and I use an adblocker, and I haven't had any problems. Not having a problem doesn't prove anything if they're only targeting a subset of their users...
The article says that this isn't happening for all users, which indicates that they're still experimenting with it and haven't fully rolled it out yet.
I do have the issue when I'm logged out
You have no value to advertisers if they can't serve you ads. By not doing so, they'll also cut down on bandwidth costs, so it's a double positive for them.
You have no value to advertisers if they can’t serve you ads. By not doing so, they’ll also cut down on bandwidth costs, so it’s a double positive for them.
When you take your comment to its logical end though your comment makes no sense, as hence there's now no one to watch the videos and earn money from them doing so.
You can't force someone to consume your content, and if you earn money by people consuming your content, then the power is ultimately with them.
Plus, all this discussion, we're assuming that serving ads is the only way that Google can make money off you when watching the videos, which is not true. They can do the same kind of things they do with Gmail and make money from that.
this assumption is only correct if EVERYBODY is using as blockers. They aren't - so it makes sense to cut off the proverbial leeches
Technically 400s would be more appropriate here. :)
Response codes only matter to good-faith actors
If the service degrades to far due to using ad blockers then I'll just stop watching anything on YouTube. Easy.
Okay then. That was always allowed.
Umm, ok. You were not making them any money before, when you were blocking their ads, why would they care if you left?
Because the big channels will get a significant drop in views which lowers their sponsor pay and willingness to work with them.
I think you're overestimating how many people care enough about this.
Remember when killing password sharing was gonna be the death of Netflix, and then they saw a significant increase in subscriptions and profits?
A possible answer is because the creators that have their own sponsors in their videos want the view even if you don't see the Google ads, so Google on one hand want you to watch their ads while on the other hand cannot afford to really lose you since that would reflects on the creators and then if a creator leave for another platform (a big if, I agree) Google lose all the traffic generated by said creator, both who use an adblocker and who don't use an adblocker.
You forgot to mention it's also coming to all Chromium based browsers (i.e. Chrome, Edge, Brave, etc) as well in the form of ManifestV3
Manifest V3 doesn't really have the real client side DRM. It just has the ad-blocker breaking API changes. The real DRM will be whatever comes of the abandoned Web Environment Integrity API. (It's not really abandoned just shifted over to only Android WebView.)
Couldn’t they fork Brave and have both a current and a ManifestV3 version?
Usually Brave already strips away invasive/unfavolrable stuff from Google before releasing. OTOH, browsers with inbuilt adblockers won't be affected by MV3, as the latter only applyes to extensions. Inbuilt adblockers are part of the browser itself and aren't constrained by whatever rule Google may want to put in place.
That’s ok. Us nerds have been defeating DRM in its many forms for decades. This will be no different.
Not really true for video games. Plenty of popular games still with uncracked denuvo...
You can, but as a part of doing what they want serverside they can ask for some kind of proof you don't have an adblocker on the server-side, you can reverse engineer that and spoof the checks and it becomes an arms race just like we have now... You're effectively just saying the status quo is a-ok with you
I don't personally enjoy the status quo, but they're not obligated to serve me any videos if they don't want to. However, if they have given me media to consume on my devices, it's up to me to decide how I consume the media that was already delivered.
Let's just hope they don't start injecting their ads into the video stream itself
Remember when every billionaire apologist was telling us how no one would do shit like this when net neutrality was being gutted?
This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Google is not an ISP. With or without net neutrality, Google could fuck with YouTube users.
Technically false. Google is an ISP. But they aren't using their position as an ISP to slow down traffic or fast track other traffic in this instance so no it has nothing to do with net neutrality.
Only if we narrow our scope to the commonly thought of types of net neutrality. I think if we had foreseen intentionally treating browsers differently, this type of thing would have 100% been rolled into that original conversation about net neutrality. It's the same idea: artificially modifying a web experience for capitalist gain.
I personally wish it could be illegal for them to do this, but I do think it would be really hard to enforce such a law.
Illegal to do...what? Not offer high-res videos? To have any delay before streaming videos? To refuse to serve you videos, even if doing so caused them to lose money? How would you enforce that on Google, much less on smaller startups? Would it apply to PeerTube instances?
Google sucks for doing this. It'll drive people to competitors--hopefully even federated competitors. But laws to 'fix' the problem would be nearly impossible to craft--and would be counterproductive in the long term, because they'd cement the status quo. Let Google suck, so that people switch away from it.
Discriminate against browsers.
And I did write that it would be too hard to enforce. I'm a software developer so I understand that it's more complicated than it sounds.
I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying, but they aren’t really discriminating against browsers at all. As far as I understand it, they pretty much have an
if (!adPageElement.isLoaded)
{
showStupidPopup();
}
in there somewhere. It doesn’t rely on any nefarious browser implementation-specific extensions; everyone gets that same code and runs it. As for the 5 seconds thing, IIRC some FF configurations were triggering false positives, but I think it was patched. It does seem awfully convenient, and maybe they only patched it because they got caught, but they also must have been morons to think something that obvious wouldn’t be noticed immediately.
I think they claimed they're not discriminating against browsers, they're just better at identifying adblockers on Firefox or something.
Google is literally an ISP. They provide my internet service.
Well, fair. But even in that case, they have every right to degrade your YouTube experience, as owners of YouTube. As ISP (I mean, assuming NN was still a thing) they couldn't selectively degrade traffic, but YouTube has no obligation to you under net neutrality.
Thank you
Not just YouTube. Now I have to say I'm not a robot when searching from my phone because I dare use a VPN that's not theirs.
I still remember Ajit Pai's dumbass teeth as he smugly insisted that you'll still be able to "'gram' your food" before covering a Chipotle bowl in a mountain of flaming hot Cheetos and an ocean of Sriracha. And that was one of the least irritating moments of that video. That whole fucking video was basically "you can still waste time with your bread, circuses, and creature comforts, you fucking peasants, now shut up and let the corporations do their thing" while ignoring every legitimate criticism of the decision to gut NN.
This is a good time to make aware about an amazing privacy-centric & user-friendly alternative - Peertube. It is not a big network as of now but the benefits it provides over YouTube are large - it is a part of the fediverse. Of course, only through increasing participation will the network become bigger.
If you still wish to use YouTube, you can try third party front ends like Invidious or Piped on the browser; NewPipe(Also is a front end for Soundcloud, media.ccc.de, Peertube & Bandcamp) or LibreTube on Android.
If you only browse YT Music, you can try HyperPipe in the browser. There are many apps for it available on F-Droid, an alternative app store for Android. My personal pick is ViMusic.
Peertube is a great platform. And it has its uses. But it will never compete with YouTube - YouTube's business model actively incentivises and pays people to post media to their platform.
Peertube is more likely to be to be the opposite - donation run, and given videos are exponentially more expensive to host, it's highly unlikely that creators will receive any compensation for their work. In fact it's more likely theyl be in the list of people donating to the platform (or they'll own the platform outright)
While this might be fine if a creator makes the majority of its money elsewhere, via patreon or sponsors or whatever, it's not going to work out for any aspiring or up and coming YouTube who has yet to become big enough to start diversifying their income base.
I feel like people mistake YouTube for a video hosting solution.
But that's not the point.
YouTube a huge archive of content that accumulated over the past 17 years.
YouTube is a content suggestion machine. Discoverability is a key aspect.
YouTube sets an incentive by allowing people to monetize their content.
...
So, if the only thing you're looking for is a video hosting solution, then, yes, PeerTube might be an alternative. In the same way uploading videos to your own webspace would be, and Vimeo also still exists.
But for all the other stuff, YT is, unfortunately, unmatched, and probably will be for a while ...
You're right. It also got people and ai flagging illegal content. That takes much more money then even hosting videos does. Though if the .world owners want to make a peertube insurance, I'm all for subscripting.
Once again, I want to agree that it's a massive undertaking that's more than software and bandwidth.
Cool thing about LibreTube is that it uses Piped and you can make an account on a Piped instance, log in with that in LibreTube and your subscriptions and playlist will be synced
I'm thinking of just skipping ahead a bunch of steps and start the global resistance movement so it's up and warm and running for when the rest of you guys start popping in after the GlobuCorpedorate attacks
Well that's only fair.
It already made it worse for non-adblock users.
You had me in the first half. Ngl
I'm 3 hours late to make this same joke
Sadly it's not a joke.
However bad they may make it, it can't possibly be worse than it is for non-adblock users.
But hey, if they want to torpedo their own services, have at it. It's not like they have a reputation for it or anything....
i am more worried about the old videos wipe thats coming soon
Sooo many peoples uploaded memories and documentaries are going to becone lost forever
Wait, what?
I wonder why they would kill old videos instead of just removing those 10-hour plus loops of the same song over and over again that nobody watches. You'd think those giant loop videos would be taking up far more space.
You’d think those giant loop videos would be taking up far more space
Someone above posted an article saying they aren't actually.
But you'd be surprised at how little space those 10 hour videos can actually take. They're highly compressible since they're just the same still image and the same audio on repeat. A good compression algorithm (which Google certainly is using) would basically compress it into one instance of the song and how many times to repeat it (more complex than that, but that's the idea)
Sometimes they are, if it's just audio and a static image. Some of them definitely are not that though. The ones with visualizers or full music videos or the like are not nearly as compressible.
10-hour plus loops of the same song over and over again that nobody watches.
I tend to fall asleep to one of those videos of being on the beach with ocean sounds, so /shrug.
Not the same as 10hr nyan cat or bacon pancakes
10-hour plus loops of the same song over and over again that nobody watches.
I tend to fall asleep to one of those videos of being on the beach with ocean sounds, so /shrug.
Not the same as 10hr nyan cat or bacon pancakes
Definately not the same. Also, what "nobody watches" is in the eye of the beholder.
So to combat use cases like this, why not just add a repeat option? There would be no break if it cached the beginning again.
Also just download the audio you want and loop it yourself. It would take roughly 2 minutes and use way less bandwidth.
So to combat use cases like this, why not just add a repeat option? There would be no break if it cached the beginning again.
The first two minutes are an ad, and having a loud voice talking to you all of a sudden in your bedroom while you are asleep tends to wake you up.
Also just download the audio you want and loop it yourself. It would take roughly 2 minutes and use way less bandwidth.
With compression techniques being as they are today, I truly don't even worry about the bandwidth.
But manually looping any part of it inside the video which you can do past the first 2 minutes would still not be an ad. Also, who doesn't use an ad blocker on YouTube?
All of those problems that you listed have incredibly easy solutions that you can execute with zero training.
And realistically if they are looking for profit (and they absolutely are) I still see no reason why they would keep these up. The benefits are absolutely minimal at best and the drawbacks are quite large.
But manually looping any part of it inside the video which you can do past the first 2 minutes would still not be an ad. Also, who doesn’t use an ad blocker on YouTube?
My YouTube app on my phone, which doesn't have an ad blocker. And as far as I know, there's no way to restart a video at a certain timestamp, it just restarts from the very beginning. I'd be glad to hear otherwise though?
Ah! A few ways to do things:
Go into the YouTube "three dots" options and you can "Create Clip" which will allow you to shave out or repeat any length of video you want. If you shave it out, you can make it private and just repeat the single video.
and / or
Use any YouTube download site (say like this one) and just get the MP3 or video which you can play over and over using any media player.
and / or
If you're on a phone, use a third-party YouTube app like GrayJay and it'll block ads.
Google’s going to delete inactive google accounts. So if you see a channel whose last upload was six years ago, there’s a good chance it’s about to be deleted
Thanks. I looked it up and read that Google decided according to the latest news they're not deleting YouTube accounts with video uploads. We'll see.
Oh I suppose my diseased father's small channel with a few of his live music performances will be deleted. Lovely.
By the look of it they won't be but I would make an offline copy just to be safe. Maybe re-upload it on a newer account/website.
Goddamnit, I didn't even think about this when I saw they were doing the mass delete. Here's to hoping that they'll at least keep the videos up. Waaaay too much stuff on YT to lose it all. Anyone know if archive.org is backing them up?
Anyone know if archive.org is backing them up?
At this point you got to imagine that archives hardware infrastructure has to be as big or bigger than Google's.
Man this stuff should not be left to the hands of random corporations.
I was just speaking towards server hardware and infrastructure, and their costs, and not making a value judgement on corps vs. not-corps.
About a week ago YouTube rolled out a new interface for ads. I cannot skip 90% of ads now. Many are around a minute in length. Always 2 ads at the beginning of every video, even if it's only 10 seconds in length. Always 2 ads at the end of every video.
I'm not getting that many ads. Could I see the new interface?
I don't know why they think this change is going to get anyone to switch.
5 seconds of nothing is still way better than a minute-long ad
They want to sell their Premium subscription. They want you to compare 5 seconds of nothing versus "0" seconds of nothing. That being said, I think uBlock Origin with up-to-date filter lists completely eliminated this delay for me.
At work, we can't log into personal accounts. And my job isn't going to buy YouTube premium. So now any video tutorials on YouTube is getting impossible to watch.
This has now triggered a bunch of lazy developers into action in my entire company. Even our internal newsletters are explaining how to use adblock.
I haven't seen any issues or ads on Youtube across all devices, except my LG tv. I don't doubt they're being scummy but the workarounds are working.
I use https://github.com/webosbrew/youtube-webos on my LG TV, to watch without ads. I have to sideload it via the CLI tools, but it works. Sometimes I have to reinstall it (I suppose some TV update screws up), but for my partner watching without ads is worth the random sporadic breakage.
I am so worried about breaking it, how would you rate it in terms of ease?
The procedure to install is very easy, you can also always uninstall it and reinstall the official one, I don't think it's irreversible in any way. Note that I am talking about side loading using developer mode. Rooting the TV via an exploit can brick your TV instead.
I realize I said very simple, but I guess it depends on your familiarity with tech and command line tools.
I have no problem trying it, I just didn't want to brick it is all. I am tech literate but it wouldn't be in my hobbies so I don't have much in the way of skillset. Anything I've done has been with step by step and tools 😂
Oh no, I get it, I was quite scared the first time I messed with it, and I cursed LG plenty for not letting me install safely what I want on my own TV. I found this technique to be quite safe though. You basically uninstall the official YouTube app, then do the loading and you can always remove the app and reinstall the official one.
I hope I didn't sound condescending, I just realized that I had been a bit too quick labeling something easy, while I understand that for some other person reading, using a CLI tool is in itself a new thing. Good luck :)
Not at all you've been very helpful, thank you 👍
uBlock Origin
I still worry that google is going to declare ad blockers against their TOS and shut down my gdrive and 20 year old gmail. I'm trying to move away from alphabet shit but it's not so easy with such a long history. To that end I haven't even once used yt except not logged in on a FF private window with ublock since they started pulling this shit.
I recently created another google account for youtube just in case. Was a huge pain to transfer over all my subscriptions but worth it for not having to worry.
Changing mail providers isn't easy when you use their domain endings as you'll probably have to update a bunch of accounts to use a new mail address. For the future, use email providers that allow to use your own domain(s), switching providers is a lot easier then. You can export mails from Gmail with ease though, as long as they provide IMAP you can simply sync your complete mailbox and you could even upload all of it to your new email provider.
And Google Drive...simply transfer all your files to somewhere else and done.
are people that impatient
Most people? Absolutely.
people ._.
They can try selling me their Premium subscription again when they start suggesting more than one or two videos (if that) on their homepage that actually interest me.
Not that I'll ever pay for it, anyway. But get me something that I'll actually click on to get served ads before trying to sell me something to get rid of them.
5 seconds of nothing
It's an eternity of nothing for me now so yeah I switched. To invidious.
deleted
still not as bad as Chrome
deleted
even in the event that it does get worse I can just downgrade or even fork it myself
Fuck Google and YouTube, but the title is misleading, and it's an article from three weeks ago. I'm quite surprised that this post is so upvoted, and nobody else flagged this before.
I just read the article and I don't see how it's misleading. Google introduced a delay before video starts for adblock users
But the register wasn't able to reproduce it, and goes on to suggest it might be testing the capability with a random subset of users.
Genuine question (because I'm looking too): without YouTube, where would you go to watch all the diverse videos they host? It's a really difficult business model. Look at how expensive Floatplane is to the user. Luke and Linus have talked about how difficult it is to run on WAN Show, too: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1mZrsunukUA
A fediverse platform would almost definitely be a worse experience in terms of speed and video quality because residential internet (at least in the majority of the US) just doesn't have the upload to support multiple HD video streams. Therefore, it's not really possible to host at home; a basic server at Hetzner could probably do a dozen or two direct streams with no conversion, but storage is kind of expensive just because there's so much content, and then there's the need for moderation, high uptime, security, "good" UX design...
Then of course on top of all that when you don't have creators getting paid by ad revenue, fewer will be able to spend the time on production quality because they'll be doing it after work, so the length and/or quality suffers.
I dunno dude, I really hope someone smarter than me has figured this out, but it's a tough problem.
You are correct. Fundamentally, it's the hosting and storage issue that's the crux of all this.
And the only choices available are another corporation hosting and paying/passing on the cost, or all of us hosting on a peer-to-peer network, which will be slow, but doable.
Having said that, the peer hosting method would work though, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. We just shouldn't expect the same level of service we do from YouTube or any corporation hosting videos.
I mean torrenting works but i'll be damned if I'd need to wait for the buffer to fill up every 30sec for the 1440p video.
You'd need multiple versions pre-encoded to reduce network transfer and serverside transcoding.
I mean torrenting works but i’ll be damned if I’d need to wait for the buffer to fill up every 30sec for the 1440p video.
You’d need multiple versions pre-encoded to reduce network transfer and serverside transcoding.
It would definately be a slog to watch, vs a service that can just deliver the video to you in real time on demand.
My only point is that you would be able to watch the video, after the slog, so that avenue should not be discounted as an option. Its not a great option, but still, an option.
Interesting, it came up in news feeds on other sites. I'll check more in the future, that's the first time I've had that happen.
I wonder if there are bot farms for Lemmy/Fediverse... There must be
Why would someone do it?
Someone who wants to push an agenda by trying to make a certain stance look popular. Downvote those who have an opposing opinion to try to hide the submission from people's eyeballs.
Some people might believe a Lemmy account is worth something if they add value to it, just like what people believe with Reddit accounts.
By doing that you're wasting bandwidth on all the CDNs that hosts ALL your filter lists. Updating the Quick fixes list should be enough. (Which updates every 5 hours automatically on uBO 1.54).
How to manually update Quick Fixes (Manual updates push back automatic updates.)
Click 🛡️ uBO's icon
the ⚙ Dashboard button
the Filter lists pane
the 🕘 clock icon next to the uBlock filters – Quick fixes list
Something I didn't even realize I wanted was to not have some eyeball-pulling algorithm recommending things to me. It's lovely.
Yep. Personally use Piped, but it's the same idea. It basically saves me hours of watching useless videos everyday.
Now if only Piped wouldn't error out and be unusable for 10 minutes at a time every couple hours...
It doesn't for me, though.
I have been trying to figure out why since I started using it... searches spin forever, videos spin forever, some videos just spit "Error 1003" immediately, and then they become accessible 10 minutes later. I even tried filing an issue to no avail. I may end up looking for other alternatives.
Have you tried changing the instances? Some instances simply perform better than others.
I have, but the ones I tried weren't much better. I looked again and there's a few new ones, so I'll try those and update if they work faster/more consistently.
That's why I've been using YouTube without logging in and if using in browser, I have the cookies autodelete after I close the page to start new each time.
It never really recommended me what I wanted anyway. I guess the algorithm doesn't work on me.
Most of the channels I watch with inline sponsor roll from the creator, they do a good job, and I am entertained by it.
You have the option to disable sponsorblock in freetube.
Obtrusive ads are frustrating.
Perfectly integrated, entertaining, on-brand ads from creators I appreciate? No problem.
I don't care. I was giving you the opportunity to inform others about something you think is cool. You blew it.
Weren't adblocker-blockers judged going against gdpr?
Yes
Could you provide more info? On what grounds?
IIRC it was one lower court case in Germany... That's so many asterisk attached as to be meaningless, even if that judgement isn't struck down or amended (unlikely), that still only applies to Germany (or was it one state within Germany?).
The way the EU works is that it mandates each sovereign country to implement the mandate into their national laws, so jurisprudence in Germany doesn't mean anything at all anywhere else.
Also, courts in Europe can't make laws like in the US. Their rulings aren't considered to be law.
It's a bit more nuanced than that...
Civil Law (used almost everywhere in the world outside the Commonwealth) still has Case Law, but it is held subordinate to legislation (itself usually built on top of Roman and Napoleonic law), whereas historically common law is built out of nothing but case law (because English kings had better things to do than concern themselves with the squabbles of peasants).
Still, when presented with a novel case that isn't specifically legislated for, judges in Civil Law countries can still make a ruling, and subsequent trials will have to take that ruling into acount.
How is that relevant? Just because some foreign entity has different laws doesn't mean you cannot have yours. We shouldn't always repeat us policy as gospel. Just look at their social policy nightmare.
To discern if an add blocker is in use you are processing information not essential to your service.
You could, eg. Not start the stream until the add is over if it wasn't blocked without violating this. In the end whether or not the user uses an add blocker is not relevant to your ability to stream a video.
It was some low effort attempt talking about "code that I do not like running on my PC" or something like that, words like "malware" were thrown around. Basically if detecting adblocks is illegal so should be any JavaScript code.
I mean they've also consistently been making YouTube worse for everyone not using Adblock, so it's only fair.
Sounds like its beginning to reach the point someone may decide to code an add-on or extension that adds a "F*** YouTube" button to a Youtube Video page where if you click that button, it would take you over to the equivalent YewTu.be page of the video currently being viewed.
Great, I'll use it less if that's the case 🤷
I moved over to new pipe. No more algorithm on regular basis. I have the 20 or so people that I want to see. If one of my existing 20 people recommend somebody else, I'll go check them out.
Between getting rid of reddit algorithm and YouTube's algorithm I'm clawing back huge swaths of time.
That’s not a bad outcome for them
If everybody with adblockers quit youtube and used alternative platforms, I agree, that would be great.
Saves them money because they aren’t delivering content for free
And the remaining population won’t raise the issue when they add more
By the looks of these default recommended videos, Youtube is great for bigots and authright traitors.
We'll still figure out ways to get around ads. So suck it Google.
As a premium subscriber, it's definitely gotten worse for me over the last month. Whatever they're doing on the back end, it's pretty terrible.
I'm not sure what the hell is going on at YouTube but I've noticed a significant drop in decent videos being recommended, and a huge uptick in videos I've already seen showing up at the front of the feed. Probs gonna drop it when the price picks up and just go to nebula.
Why are you paying your abuser
Honestly: I'd rather pay for YT and pirate Netflix.
The amount of Entertainment I get from YT exceeds the scale of Netflix and I use it daily at 2-3h per day.
And while yes, it's free, I can also support the creators with a better click price than a regular click.
Is it a better solution then the respective patreon/whatever? Nope
Do I want to pay 5€/month or video each time? Fuck no. I am not king Midas.
Yup, that's how I see it too. I don't like seeing ads, the creators do at least get more money, and the actual value I get out of YouTube is pretty high
Not to mention not every creator will have a patreon anyway so this covers that scenario as well.
There's a ton of educational content only on YT and so it's a part of our homeschool curriculum. My kids were getting a lot of super inappropriate ads a while back, so I got premium to avoid all ads.
What homeschool curriculum provider are you using?
Acton and we participate in a state program and several private programs depending on the kids' interest.
Long time family premium user (household of parents and kids). Anything Youtube do to preserve their revenue within reason doesn't bother me too much as long as they don't reduce the split with quality creators. If they were successful with all this bullshit perhaps they wouldn't have needed to notify me that subs are almost doubling next year. My guess is all they are doing is fucking things up for everyone. It is only going to get worse if their premium subscription base reduces. They should be pricing premium as an alternative to ad-blockers but instead they are pushing people including premium subscribers towards ad-blockers.
I already have ad-blockers and apps for circumventing youtube ads. Not using them in favour of a fairly priced (to me) subscription was a choice but sadly one Google seems to be discouraging.
I've also felt like YouTube Premium was a pretty good deal, given the sheer amount of YouTube content I consume and how much I detest ads.
That said, I also feel like most of what I really value from YouTube is on Nebula, to which I am also subscribed. I constantly wonder if it would be worth it to drop YouTube altogether, to save some money but also a huge amount of time.
The only other thing really keeping me on YouTube Premium is the included YouTube music. Not like Spotify is much cheaper, and I'm not much into manually managing libraries of my own music files like I did in the days of my 2nd Gen iPod (it had a touch wheel!).
WHAT?! I didn't believe it for a second when the whole planet immediately noticed at the same time!
But then again, they DID admit it. Which means they have nothing to hide! And that's transparent, and bold. We should reward companies for doing the right thing. Not only criticize them when they didn't do wrong!
*Laughs with RSS feeds, Invidious redirects, Newpipe and Sponsorblock.
The CEO said shareholders needs to be appeased by making new sacrifice
Fuck YouTube
Are they making it worse than ads make it?
Not yet!
My biggest problem with the ads is that it's louder than the thing I'm watching, oftentimes a lot.
They are sometimes an hour long and I gotta press the skip ad button with my nose cause it'll take me ten minutes or more to clean up.
I have no love for the automatic gadgets where you can speak your commands. They get suggested by my coworkers quite a bit.
They want too much for what is ultimately hours of people playing chess.
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Theyre also blatant scams. Whenever I accidentally open youtube on my phone when clicking a link the ad is literally claims of free money using ai voices of celebrities, “cures” for blindness that are selling watered down bleach, and other scams
Yeah any time I scroll through YT Shorts (Revanced doesn't block those ads rn) 99+% of the ads are just the "This new government program gives everyone $6400/month trust this bad AI voice of Steve Harvey." scams.
Despite their wasted efforts, it just doesn’t matter. Circumventing all this is still too easy. Only the impatient are doomed.
It doesn't seem to be working for me. I've never been blocked for using ad blockers. It's still the same speed it's always been. I have all these work arounds just waiting to be used that I haven't even had to actually try.
Are they only doing this shit to like 12 people who write articles about it? Why wouldn't it be globally done all at once for everyone?
Yes, they are rolling these changes out in stages to make it harder for the internet to collectively address the issue.
Still using Vivaldi with only the built-in ad blocking, still noticing no ads, still noticing zero performance issues.
I use Vivaldi. I've been getting the ads mostly. I have to open YouTube in a private window and view from there. Do you have Unblock with scripts? My scripts only worked for awhile. The built in adblocking is just not working for me.
It's just a regular install with "block trackers and ads" enabled. The only YouTube related plugins/extensions I have are tube buddy and dearrow to remove clickbait thumbnails. I don't use unlock, ad block, or anything like that.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google has admitted its efforts to discourage the use of ad blockers now includes delaying the start of videos – a deliberate "suboptimal viewing" experience, as the corporation put it.
Earlier this year, YouTube began interrupting videos for those using advert blockers with a pop-up encouraging them to either disable the offending extension or filter, or pay for YT's ad-free premium tier.
In a statement to The Register, Google admitted it was intentionally making its content less binge-able for users unwilling to turn off offending extensions, though this wasn't linked to any one browser.
To be clear, Google's business model revolves around advertising, and ad blockers are specifically called out as being in violation of its terms of service.
Google told us users who have uninstalled their ad blockers may continue to experience temporary delays loading videos, though the issue should resolve itself after "refreshing their browser."
As we reported earlier this month, the search giant will be pushing ahead with a planned API change in June that will render legacy Chrome extensions – including ad blockers – useless unless they are overhauled.
The original article contains 468 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 61%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
As a Premium user who still had uBlock installed, I was noticing the other day a loading problem when I had it activated until I deactivated and reloaded. Still, Google is entirely within it's right to target people even according to one of its greatest critics: https://youtu.be/KMLMQRS3Krk?t=175
Still, Google is entirely within it’s right to target people even according to one of its greatest critics:
[Citation required.]
Could you give us a timestamp of when he says that?
It starts at 2:55, when I linked it, but it's a long argument. You can forward into 3:20 for the first short conclusion, 4:57 for his rebuttal of a common counterargument, and you can forward into 5:40 for his own experience with freeloaders. You can fast forward to 12:40, to 13:15, to 13:46, and to 14:16 as well, but he's pretty based throughout the whole video and the point remains consistent throughout.
It starts at 2:55, when I linked it, but it’s a long argument. You can forward into 3:20 for the first short conclusion, 4:57 for his rebuttal of a common counterargument, and you can forward into 5:40 for his own experience with freeloaders. You can fast forward to 12:40, to 13:15, to 13:46, and to 14:16 as well, but he’s pretty based throughout the whole video and the point remains consistent throughout.
Thanks for the timestamps. I think just starting at 13:53 would be more than enough to make your point of "Google is entirely within it’s right to target people".
Having said that, generally speaking I would also strongly suggest people listening to the next point directly after that at 14:25 as well, and especially what he says starting at 15:43.
Yeah, but the point beginning on 14:25 is really for the business to determine, not something to demand or not demand from a consumer side. YT has had over a decade to determine what works for it and to see what's working for its competitors, and it may really be a last hail mary to save their business model with the collapse of easy investor money from silicon valley banks and stricter data privacy laws. As to 15:43, that's what I do already, I just pay for YT Premium even with uBlock Origin installed and data collection disabled as much as I can.
It just doesn't play on my Firefox anymore.
I got no issues whatsoever. Are you using any browser addons besides uBlock origin? I've been using ghostery for quite some time (which also has an ad-suppression engine) and that cocked up with youtube. Removed it and now I can use it as always. Firefox 120.0.1.
Privacy Badger is better than Ghostery anyway.
Instead of using a commercial server, it build its own anti-tracking list over time.
Made by a non-profit digital rights group.
And it works fine on Youtube.
Good information. I will remove it.
Interesting
Curious
Peculiar
Weird
Most unusual
YES, QUITE!
Open your videos in Incognito mode, the block is cookie-based. I open YT on my browser in normal mode to see all my subscriptions, then open the videos in incognito with adblock enabled.
They are a business that makes money off of ads. Nothing to see here.
I have LIbreWolf with uBlock Origin and NoScript (and Redirector I can turn on to redirect me from watching videos on YouTube.com to YewTu.be on a moments notice of something funky going on with YouTube), and so far, I have not noticed any ads or anything for a long time. I'm probably at the point of beginning to wonder what a YouTube Ad is.
This is not new. They started doing this when the adblock detection was ramping up too
Still not going to give them a dollar ever.
Why can't people just stop using google? Genuinely curious
Because most alternatives aren't nearly as functional due to them dominating the market.
Yes alternate platforms with good level of UX exists. But without content its no good.
YouTube - Peertube
Google maps - Organic maps & OSMAnd (open street maps)
Reddit - Lemmy (bigger is better)
Google Maps actually sucks for things like hiking and trails, there's a lot of better alternatives like Maps.me.
For the others, maybe. But YouTube? It's strength is in the sheer amount of content. It's going to take a lot of time and resources to create and host that content on the fediverse.
It is frightfully expensive to host video content. YouTube would cost Billions per year to run.
I always wonder about this. I pay only a few bucks per month for Nebula. I highly suspect Nebula is running at a loss.
Not necessarily. Nebula operates at a far, far smaller scope, with an emphasis on quality of videos over quantity, and every user is a paid user. If every user of YouTube was paying a couple bucks per month, they'd be making in the high tens of billions of dollars of revenue per year, several times more than they do with ads. Plus YouTube has a ridiculously huge amount of essentially worthless videos because literally anyone can upload a 10 hour video, so surely their hosting costs are higher per user than Nebula.
Oh right, I somehow forgot about that.
Subscriptions are really lucrative. Iirc most ads pay like 0.1-0.5 cents per view, so you'd need to watch an insane amount of videos to equal the cost of a $2 subscription. I could probably make a site that brings in money if I had 5 $2 subscribers and a half 100 medium quality vids. Start scaling that up and it can be really profitable while offering subscribers a fair shake.
By and large, that's where the content is.
There's no alternative to youtube that isn't complete garbage
So what is equal or better alternative than Google Maps, Youtube and Google Search?
I've been using duckduckgo for half a year already they've became quite good compared to Google search, Google maps alternative is any popular maps app just try what'll fit your tastes, but YouTube is certainly don't have alternatives YET just because libre alternatives though exist but not yet in shape enough (basically we need datahoarders who'll hoard and host whole youtube to libre alternatives such as framatube and others) for now we can only rely to custom frontends such as clipious, piped and others and custom apps of course
OpenStreetMap instead of Google Maps (OSM would be even better if more people used and actively contributed mapping data to it), no real youtube alternative yet (but see Piped/Invidious, Peertube, and Odysee), and there's plenty of alternative search engines like Duckduckgo, Brave search (has its own index), etc
I started ditching google apps last spring and my “alternatives” are: bing/apple maps, invidious, and SearXNG. I self-host the last two to keep even more control of my data.
there is no such "better" alternative. how could we compare a company that has been digging up their user data and built something with it, vs some community or even a solo developer who build something out of nowhere without collecting or selling data?
but, what are the alternative?
Google Maps
OpenStreetMap, is not as complete as Google Map, the amount of places won't be the same. but it's enough to help you navigating from a district to another district, and use much lower resource too
YouTube
Odysee, couldn't explain, think of it like YouTube
Rumble, couldn't explain, think of it like YouTube
PeerTube, a fediverse software where you can upload videos and do livestream, you own your data
Piped, NewPipe, PipePipe, Invidious are just alternative frontend for YouTube, its good if you are watching an exclusive content from their platform. But why do we keep letting YouTube has our data?
Google Search
wow, really?
DuckDuckGo, controversial, but enough
Brave Search, controversial, honestly aint using it
Searx, host it yourself, you own your data
and hey, why didn't you mention about the browser, mails, and many more?
There is firefox, tuta, and much more.
Revealed preferences. As much as people won't admit it, these services do provide legitimate value, and they also cost a lot of money to operate.
Sure if you consider captcha to be a punishment. Poor baby.
I use VPNs but I'm not going to be a slave or a fanboy to avoiding facts and reality.
if you get adguard for desktop and load it with userscripts from greasyfork to block youtube's bullshit it's still okay, I barely ever have any hiccups since I loaded 5 different userscripts to block youtube's anti-adblock bullshit. I sometimes get an error telling me the video couldn't be played, but I almost never see their bullshit telling me to turn my adblocker off.
There's also "FreeTube" which is an app for several desktop operating systems. there's also the many instances of invidious you can check out and access from almost any device with a web-browser.
I'm running uBlock Origin and a pi Hole and I haven't seen shit change for months. Not sure what voodoo I have going on judging by other experiences.
recent updates to ublock for firefox have made its adblocking way more powerful.
Where do you go to get pi hole? is that the one that requires docker?
Pi-hole.net
You can install a container or you can install it as a package on debian or Red Hat based distros.
I tried to do that, I looked it up right after I typed my comment. I wasn't able to get docker to work on my system. Does it have anything to do with core isolation being enabled? I don't have anything installed on my system that should be blocking it.
Adguard for desktop is working for now. I don't need it to work right this second.
Whatever happens on my browser is client side, which is hardware and software I own. I can make what I own do what I want. It's a right.
It's like Google saying that I can't skim a magazine in my home, and that I must read the ads. Google can do what they want server-side, and I'll do what I want client-side.
They're not saying you can't have an adblocker. They're saying their software will try not to serve you their data if you do, or at least make it inconvenient.
You have a right to your computer. You do not have a right to their service.
That's exactly what I said, yeah
Me after reading the 1st comment: "OK. True. Fair." Me after reading the 2nd comment: "OK. True. Fair." Me after reading the 3rd comment: "OK. Also true. Also fair."
Me reading you:
Fourth gosh darn level of agree
I’ll never disable my PiHole or turn off ublock tho
Fair.
I wish PiHole wasn’t so absolute dogshit about DNS requests from outside the local subnet, might use it then
Permit all origins, allow all destinations. In the settings.
Tried that, it just reverts back after a few weeks :/
Open an issue on the forums if it hasn’t already been fixed.
Mine doesn’t revert.
What OS/computer?
Tried it bare metal on a Pi 4 and as a VM. I have my LAN using the 10.0.0.0/8 space and I couldn’t have DNS breaking all the time
And it would set itself back?
Yep. Default is to not reply to DNS outside the subnet it's in, and it would randomly flip back to that
I'm going to try ad guard today... That way I can keep my DHCP
Update: adguard does not block YouTube ads.
You can use PiHole without their DHCP.
Oh yeah? I didn't know. I thought I read on the pihole website that if you use pihole on a system on your network, you have to use static ips and cannot use DHCP.
Nope. You can use whatever DHCP server you’d like; you just have to set the pihole as your DNS server in DHCP.
I'll relook at it, thanks.
There was a rabbi arbitrating a dispute between neighbours. One of them complained that the other one gathers apples that fall off his apple tree and into the other neighbour's garden. "Those are my apples grown on my tree. He's stealing them!"
"You're right," says the rabbi. But the other neighbour counters.
"But the branches of the tree are above my property. If he doesn't want them to fall on my garden, he can cut off the branch. But he lets them fall into my garden making them my apples."
"You're right," says the rabbi and adjourns the diapute to be able to think about it. He's at his wit's end and tells the whole story to his wife when he gets home.
"That doesn't make sense. They can't both be right."
"You're right."
No, you don't have a right to it. If they want to they can put the entire site being a subscriber paywall. That's their call. But until they do that i will continue to access the site with my adblocked browser.
You do have a right to your computer. After content is delivered to you, you have downloaded data, and your own hardware and software acts to consume said downloaded data. After it is downloaded, even if it is in a browser in a cache, it is considered offline content. This also applies to streaming media chunks, too: once it's downloaded, you have acquired it locally.
They don't have the right to disregard my right to privacy either, yet here we are.
Well.... They do because it's their tos, no?
But their software is just blocking based on browser. Their message to you is not "don't use an ad blocker". It's "use chrome and you won't have this problem". Theyre literally just hoping to abuse their position as a monopoly in video to try and strengthen their monopoly on browsers.
Is that why I haven't had any problems? I thought it was either Google A/B testing again or my ad blocker updating often enough to keep up, but I do have a user-agent changer installed in Firefox that's configured to tell YouTube I'm on Chrome...
And as a service provider, they can choose to degrade your experience. It goes both ways.
Except they want to send you videos. The power is with you, the viewer. Without you, advertisers will have no reason for buying ads. Google can't collect your data either. Realise that you have this power. Youtube is not like electricity or clean water. We can live without it if push comes to the shove.
To be fair, what they want is to make money off of you, be it through metadata or through advertising. It's just that sending you videos happens to be the model which they use to get the metadata or advertising income.
If they wanted to make money off of me then they should have kept the Pixel Pass as a thing so I'd have a reason to have YT premium
Or make YT premium worth it
But nah, they'd rather ruin the product I was paying for, so now they get nothing. At least then I'm not paying for it to get worse
They don't want to send us videos, they want to serve us ads and annoy us into buying Youtube Premium, which someone using adblocker won't see, or need. From their point of view they would win either way - if they successfully block adblockers it either converts us into ad watchers, premium subscribers, or we fuck off and stop using their bandwidth.
It's funny because I pay for premium and have noticed a worse experience since this was revealed. They don't seem to check if a user has adblock and pays.
They definitely seem to have checks in place for it. I have Family Premium and so far no issues at all.
Edit: to clarify, not a fan of any of this. Just saying it does work for me
Weird. It's not happening to me today. Maybe it was something else.
Well, I don't pay for premium, and I use an adblocker, and I haven't had any problems. Not having a problem doesn't prove anything if they're only targeting a subset of their users...
The article says that this isn't happening for all users, which indicates that they're still experimenting with it and haven't fully rolled it out yet.
I do have the issue when I'm logged out
You have no value to advertisers if they can't serve you ads. By not doing so, they'll also cut down on bandwidth costs, so it's a double positive for them.
When you take your comment to its logical end though your comment makes no sense, as hence there's now no one to watch the videos and earn money from them doing so.
You can't force someone to consume your content, and if you earn money by people consuming your content, then the power is ultimately with them.
Plus, all this discussion, we're assuming that serving ads is the only way that Google can make money off you when watching the videos, which is not true. They can do the same kind of things they do with Gmail and make money from that.
this assumption is only correct if EVERYBODY is using as blockers. They aren't - so it makes sense to cut off the proverbial leeches
Yep, they can send me 500s if they want to, too
Technically 400s would be more appropriate here. :)
Response codes only matter to good-faith actors
If the service degrades to far due to using ad blockers then I'll just stop watching anything on YouTube. Easy.
Okay then. That was always allowed.
Umm, ok. You were not making them any money before, when you were blocking their ads, why would they care if you left?
Because the big channels will get a significant drop in views which lowers their sponsor pay and willingness to work with them.
I think you're overestimating how many people care enough about this.
Remember when killing password sharing was gonna be the death of Netflix, and then they saw a significant increase in subscriptions and profits?
A possible answer is because the creators that have their own sponsors in their videos want the view even if you don't see the Google ads, so Google on one hand want you to watch their ads while on the other hand cannot afford to really lose you since that would reflects on the creators and then if a creator leave for another platform (a big if, I agree) Google lose all the traffic generated by said creator, both who use an adblocker and who don't use an adblocker.
deleted by creator
Sure, like not sending you videos. 🤔
Client side DRM is coming.
They’re mostly there on Android already.
You forgot to mention it's also coming to all Chromium based browsers (i.e. Chrome, Edge, Brave, etc) as well in the form of ManifestV3
Manifest V3 doesn't really have the real client side DRM. It just has the ad-blocker breaking API changes. The real DRM will be whatever comes of the abandoned Web Environment Integrity API. (It's not really abandoned just shifted over to only Android WebView.)
Couldn’t they fork Brave and have both a current and a ManifestV3 version?
Usually Brave already strips away invasive/unfavolrable stuff from Google before releasing. OTOH, browsers with inbuilt adblockers won't be affected by MV3, as the latter only applyes to extensions. Inbuilt adblockers are part of the browser itself and aren't constrained by whatever rule Google may want to put in place.
That’s ok. Us nerds have been defeating DRM in its many forms for decades. This will be no different.
Not really true for video games. Plenty of popular games still with uncracked denuvo...
You can, but as a part of doing what they want serverside they can ask for some kind of proof you don't have an adblocker on the server-side, you can reverse engineer that and spoof the checks and it becomes an arms race just like we have now... You're effectively just saying the status quo is a-ok with you
I don't personally enjoy the status quo, but they're not obligated to serve me any videos if they don't want to. However, if they have given me media to consume on my devices, it's up to me to decide how I consume the media that was already delivered.
Let's just hope they don't start injecting their ads into the video stream itself
Remember when every billionaire apologist was telling us how no one would do shit like this when net neutrality was being gutted?
This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Google is not an ISP. With or without net neutrality, Google could fuck with YouTube users.
Technically false. Google is an ISP. But they aren't using their position as an ISP to slow down traffic or fast track other traffic in this instance so no it has nothing to do with net neutrality.
Only if we narrow our scope to the commonly thought of types of net neutrality. I think if we had foreseen intentionally treating browsers differently, this type of thing would have 100% been rolled into that original conversation about net neutrality. It's the same idea: artificially modifying a web experience for capitalist gain.
I personally wish it could be illegal for them to do this, but I do think it would be really hard to enforce such a law.
Illegal to do...what? Not offer high-res videos? To have any delay before streaming videos? To refuse to serve you videos, even if doing so caused them to lose money? How would you enforce that on Google, much less on smaller startups? Would it apply to PeerTube instances?
Google sucks for doing this. It'll drive people to competitors--hopefully even federated competitors. But laws to 'fix' the problem would be nearly impossible to craft--and would be counterproductive in the long term, because they'd cement the status quo. Let Google suck, so that people switch away from it.
Discriminate against browsers.
And I did write that it would be too hard to enforce. I'm a software developer so I understand that it's more complicated than it sounds.
I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying, but they aren’t really discriminating against browsers at all. As far as I understand it, they pretty much have an
in there somewhere. It doesn’t rely on any nefarious browser implementation-specific extensions; everyone gets that same code and runs it. As for the 5 seconds thing, IIRC some FF configurations were triggering false positives, but I think it was patched. It does seem awfully convenient, and maybe they only patched it because they got caught, but they also must have been morons to think something that obvious wouldn’t be noticed immediately.
I think they claimed they're not discriminating against browsers, they're just better at identifying adblockers on Firefox or something.
Google is literally an ISP. They provide my internet service.
Well, fair. But even in that case, they have every right to degrade your YouTube experience, as owners of YouTube. As ISP (I mean, assuming NN was still a thing) they couldn't selectively degrade traffic, but YouTube has no obligation to you under net neutrality.
Thank you
Not just YouTube. Now I have to say I'm not a robot when searching from my phone because I dare use a VPN that's not theirs.
I still remember Ajit Pai's dumbass teeth as he smugly insisted that you'll still be able to "'gram' your food" before covering a Chipotle bowl in a mountain of flaming hot Cheetos and an ocean of Sriracha. And that was one of the least irritating moments of that video. That whole fucking video was basically "you can still waste time with your bread, circuses, and creature comforts, you fucking peasants, now shut up and let the corporations do their thing" while ignoring every legitimate criticism of the decision to gut NN.
This is a good time to make aware about an amazing privacy-centric & user-friendly alternative - Peertube. It is not a big network as of now but the benefits it provides over YouTube are large - it is a part of the fediverse. Of course, only through increasing participation will the network become bigger.
If you still wish to use YouTube, you can try third party front ends like Invidious or Piped on the browser; NewPipe(Also is a front end for Soundcloud, media.ccc.de, Peertube & Bandcamp) or LibreTube on Android.
If you only browse YT Music, you can try HyperPipe in the browser. There are many apps for it available on F-Droid, an alternative app store for Android. My personal pick is ViMusic.
Peertube is a great platform. And it has its uses. But it will never compete with YouTube - YouTube's business model actively incentivises and pays people to post media to their platform.
Peertube is more likely to be to be the opposite - donation run, and given videos are exponentially more expensive to host, it's highly unlikely that creators will receive any compensation for their work. In fact it's more likely theyl be in the list of people donating to the platform (or they'll own the platform outright)
While this might be fine if a creator makes the majority of its money elsewhere, via patreon or sponsors or whatever, it's not going to work out for any aspiring or up and coming YouTube who has yet to become big enough to start diversifying their income base.
I feel like people mistake YouTube for a video hosting solution.
But that's not the point.
So, if the only thing you're looking for is a video hosting solution, then, yes, PeerTube might be an alternative. In the same way uploading videos to your own webspace would be, and Vimeo also still exists.
But for all the other stuff, YT is, unfortunately, unmatched, and probably will be for a while ...
You're right. It also got people and ai flagging illegal content. That takes much more money then even hosting videos does. Though if the .world owners want to make a peertube insurance, I'm all for subscripting.
Once again, I want to agree that it's a massive undertaking that's more than software and bandwidth.
Cool thing about LibreTube is that it uses Piped and you can make an account on a Piped instance, log in with that in LibreTube and your subscriptions and playlist will be synced
I'm thinking of just skipping ahead a bunch of steps and start the global resistance movement so it's up and warm and running for when the rest of you guys start popping in after the GlobuCorpedorate attacks
Well that's only fair.
It already made it worse for non-adblock users.
You had me in the first half. Ngl
I'm 3 hours late to make this same joke
Sadly it's not a joke.
However bad they may make it, it can't possibly be worse than it is for non-adblock users.
But hey, if they want to torpedo their own services, have at it. It's not like they have a reputation for it or anything....
i am more worried about the old videos wipe thats coming soon
Sooo many peoples uploaded memories and documentaries are going to becone lost forever
Wait, what?
I wonder why they would kill old videos instead of just removing those 10-hour plus loops of the same song over and over again that nobody watches. You'd think those giant loop videos would be taking up far more space.
Someone above posted an article saying they aren't actually. But you'd be surprised at how little space those 10 hour videos can actually take. They're highly compressible since they're just the same still image and the same audio on repeat. A good compression algorithm (which Google certainly is using) would basically compress it into one instance of the song and how many times to repeat it (more complex than that, but that's the idea)
Sometimes they are, if it's just audio and a static image. Some of them definitely are not that though. The ones with visualizers or full music videos or the like are not nearly as compressible.
I tend to fall asleep to one of those videos of being on the beach with ocean sounds, so /shrug.
Not the same as 10hr nyan cat or bacon pancakes
Definately not the same. Also, what "nobody watches" is in the eye of the beholder.
So to combat use cases like this, why not just add a repeat option? There would be no break if it cached the beginning again.
Also just download the audio you want and loop it yourself. It would take roughly 2 minutes and use way less bandwidth.
The first two minutes are an ad, and having a loud voice talking to you all of a sudden in your bedroom while you are asleep tends to wake you up.
With compression techniques being as they are today, I truly don't even worry about the bandwidth.
But manually looping any part of it inside the video which you can do past the first 2 minutes would still not be an ad. Also, who doesn't use an ad blocker on YouTube? All of those problems that you listed have incredibly easy solutions that you can execute with zero training.
And realistically if they are looking for profit (and they absolutely are) I still see no reason why they would keep these up. The benefits are absolutely minimal at best and the drawbacks are quite large.
My YouTube app on my phone, which doesn't have an ad blocker. And as far as I know, there's no way to restart a video at a certain timestamp, it just restarts from the very beginning. I'd be glad to hear otherwise though?
Ah! A few ways to do things:
If you have questions, ask away!
Thanks for the info, much appreciated!
They aren't wiping videos.
From a literal 5 second Google search: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/is-youtube-deleting-old-videos-1234737099/
Wait what?
Who's going to wipe the old videos?
Google’s going to delete inactive google accounts. So if you see a channel whose last upload was six years ago, there’s a good chance it’s about to be deleted
Thanks. I looked it up and read that Google decided according to the latest news they're not deleting YouTube accounts with video uploads. We'll see.
Oh I suppose my diseased father's small channel with a few of his live music performances will be deleted. Lovely.
By the look of it they won't be but I would make an offline copy just to be safe. Maybe re-upload it on a newer account/website.
Grab those vids.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube-dl
Save it bro to your cloud
Goddamnit, I didn't even think about this when I saw they were doing the mass delete. Here's to hoping that they'll at least keep the videos up. Waaaay too much stuff on YT to lose it all. Anyone know if archive.org is backing them up?
At this point you got to imagine that archives hardware infrastructure has to be as big or bigger than Google's.
Man this stuff should not be left to the hands of random corporations.
I was just speaking towards server hardware and infrastructure, and their costs, and not making a value judgement on corps vs. not-corps.
About a week ago YouTube rolled out a new interface for ads. I cannot skip 90% of ads now. Many are around a minute in length. Always 2 ads at the beginning of every video, even if it's only 10 seconds in length. Always 2 ads at the end of every video.
I'm not getting that many ads. Could I see the new interface?
I don't know why they think this change is going to get anyone to switch.
5 seconds of nothing is still way better than a minute-long ad
They want to sell their Premium subscription. They want you to compare 5 seconds of nothing versus "0" seconds of nothing. That being said, I think uBlock Origin with up-to-date filter lists completely eliminated this delay for me.
At work, we can't log into personal accounts. And my job isn't going to buy YouTube premium. So now any video tutorials on YouTube is getting impossible to watch.
This has now triggered a bunch of lazy developers into action in my entire company. Even our internal newsletters are explaining how to use adblock.
I haven't seen any issues or ads on Youtube across all devices, except my LG tv. I don't doubt they're being scummy but the workarounds are working.
I use https://github.com/webosbrew/youtube-webos on my LG TV, to watch without ads. I have to sideload it via the CLI tools, but it works. Sometimes I have to reinstall it (I suppose some TV update screws up), but for my partner watching without ads is worth the random sporadic breakage.
I am so worried about breaking it, how would you rate it in terms of ease?
The procedure to install is very easy, you can also always uninstall it and reinstall the official one, I don't think it's irreversible in any way. Note that I am talking about side loading using developer mode. Rooting the TV via an exploit can brick your TV instead.
Edit: The procedure is basically described in https://webostv.developer.lge.com/develop/getting-started/developer-mode-app.
I realize I said very simple, but I guess it depends on your familiarity with tech and command line tools.
I have no problem trying it, I just didn't want to brick it is all. I am tech literate but it wouldn't be in my hobbies so I don't have much in the way of skillset. Anything I've done has been with step by step and tools 😂
Oh no, I get it, I was quite scared the first time I messed with it, and I cursed LG plenty for not letting me install safely what I want on my own TV. I found this technique to be quite safe though. You basically uninstall the official YouTube app, then do the loading and you can always remove the app and reinstall the official one.
I hope I didn't sound condescending, I just realized that I had been a bit too quick labeling something easy, while I understand that for some other person reading, using a CLI tool is in itself a new thing. Good luck :)
Not at all you've been very helpful, thank you 👍
I still worry that google is going to declare ad blockers against their TOS and shut down my gdrive and 20 year old gmail. I'm trying to move away from alphabet shit but it's not so easy with such a long history. To that end I haven't even once used yt except not logged in on a FF private window with ublock since they started pulling this shit.
I recently created another google account for youtube just in case. Was a huge pain to transfer over all my subscriptions but worth it for not having to worry.
Changing mail providers isn't easy when you use their domain endings as you'll probably have to update a bunch of accounts to use a new mail address. For the future, use email providers that allow to use your own domain(s), switching providers is a lot easier then. You can export mails from Gmail with ease though, as long as they provide IMAP you can simply sync your complete mailbox and you could even upload all of it to your new email provider.
And Google Drive...simply transfer all your files to somewhere else and done.
are people that impatient
Most people? Absolutely.
people ._.
They can try selling me their Premium subscription again when they start suggesting more than one or two videos (if that) on their homepage that actually interest me.
Not that I'll ever pay for it, anyway. But get me something that I'll actually click on to get served ads before trying to sell me something to get rid of them.
It's an eternity of nothing for me now so yeah I switched. To invidious.
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still not as bad as Chrome
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even in the event that it does get worse I can just downgrade or even fork it myself
one of the many benefits of open-source software
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Chromium is to Chrome what Darwin is to macOS.
Fuck Google and YouTube, but the title is misleading, and it's an article from three weeks ago. I'm quite surprised that this post is so upvoted, and nobody else flagged this before.
I just read the article and I don't see how it's misleading. Google introduced a delay before video starts for adblock users
But the register wasn't able to reproduce it, and goes on to suggest it might be testing the capability with a random subset of users.
Genuine question (because I'm looking too): without YouTube, where would you go to watch all the diverse videos they host? It's a really difficult business model. Look at how expensive Floatplane is to the user. Luke and Linus have talked about how difficult it is to run on WAN Show, too: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1mZrsunukUA
A fediverse platform would almost definitely be a worse experience in terms of speed and video quality because residential internet (at least in the majority of the US) just doesn't have the upload to support multiple HD video streams. Therefore, it's not really possible to host at home; a basic server at Hetzner could probably do a dozen or two direct streams with no conversion, but storage is kind of expensive just because there's so much content, and then there's the need for moderation, high uptime, security, "good" UX design...
Then of course on top of all that when you don't have creators getting paid by ad revenue, fewer will be able to spend the time on production quality because they'll be doing it after work, so the length and/or quality suffers.
I dunno dude, I really hope someone smarter than me has figured this out, but it's a tough problem.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=1mZrsunukUA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Good bot ❤️
You are correct. Fundamentally, it's the hosting and storage issue that's the crux of all this.
And the only choices available are another corporation hosting and paying/passing on the cost, or all of us hosting on a peer-to-peer network, which will be slow, but doable.
Having said that, the peer hosting method would work though, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. We just shouldn't expect the same level of service we do from YouTube or any corporation hosting videos.
I mean torrenting works but i'll be damned if I'd need to wait for the buffer to fill up every 30sec for the 1440p video.
You'd need multiple versions pre-encoded to reduce network transfer and serverside transcoding.
It would definately be a slog to watch, vs a service that can just deliver the video to you in real time on demand.
My only point is that you would be able to watch the video, after the slog, so that avenue should not be discounted as an option. Its not a great option, but still, an option.
Interesting, it came up in news feeds on other sites. I'll check more in the future, that's the first time I've had that happen.
I wonder if there are bot farms for Lemmy/Fediverse... There must be
Why would someone do it?
Someone who wants to push an agenda by trying to make a certain stance look popular. Downvote those who have an opposing opinion to try to hide the submission from people's eyeballs.
Some people might believe a Lemmy account is worth something if they add value to it, just like what people believe with Reddit accounts.
By doing that you're wasting bandwidth on all the CDNs that hosts ALL your filter lists. Updating the Quick fixes list should be enough. (Which updates every 5 hours automatically on uBO 1.54).
How to manually update Quick Fixes (Manual updates push back automatic updates.)
And freetube is making it so much better.
Something I didn't even realize I wanted was to not have some eyeball-pulling algorithm recommending things to me. It's lovely.
Yep. Personally use Piped, but it's the same idea. It basically saves me hours of watching useless videos everyday.
Now if only Piped wouldn't error out and be unusable for 10 minutes at a time every couple hours...
It doesn't for me, though.
I have been trying to figure out why since I started using it... searches spin forever, videos spin forever, some videos just spit "Error 1003" immediately, and then they become accessible 10 minutes later. I even tried filing an issue to no avail. I may end up looking for other alternatives.
Have you tried changing the instances? Some instances simply perform better than others.
I have, but the ones I tried weren't much better. I looked again and there's a few new ones, so I'll try those and update if they work faster/more consistently.
That's why I've been using YouTube without logging in and if using in browser, I have the cookies autodelete after I close the page to start new each time.
It never really recommended me what I wanted anyway. I guess the algorithm doesn't work on me.
What freetube?
Google it and join us in video paradise
What about sponsor block?
Freetube has Sponsorblock built-in.
Most of the channels I watch with inline sponsor roll from the creator, they do a good job, and I am entertained by it.
You have the option to disable sponsorblock in freetube.
Obtrusive ads are frustrating.
Perfectly integrated, entertaining, on-brand ads from creators I appreciate? No problem.
I don't care. I was giving you the opportunity to inform others about something you think is cool. You blew it.
Weren't adblocker-blockers judged going against gdpr?
Yes
Could you provide more info? On what grounds?
IIRC it was one lower court case in Germany... That's so many asterisk attached as to be meaningless, even if that judgement isn't struck down or amended (unlikely), that still only applies to Germany (or was it one state within Germany?).
The way the EU works is that it mandates each sovereign country to implement the mandate into their national laws, so jurisprudence in Germany doesn't mean anything at all anywhere else.
Also, courts in Europe can't make laws like in the US. Their rulings aren't considered to be law.
It's a bit more nuanced than that...
Civil Law (used almost everywhere in the world outside the Commonwealth) still has Case Law, but it is held subordinate to legislation (itself usually built on top of Roman and Napoleonic law), whereas historically common law is built out of nothing but case law (because English kings had better things to do than concern themselves with the squabbles of peasants).
Still, when presented with a novel case that isn't specifically legislated for, judges in Civil Law countries can still make a ruling, and subsequent trials will have to take that ruling into acount.
How is that relevant? Just because some foreign entity has different laws doesn't mean you cannot have yours. We shouldn't always repeat us policy as gospel. Just look at their social policy nightmare.
To discern if an add blocker is in use you are processing information not essential to your service.
You could, eg. Not start the stream until the add is over if it wasn't blocked without violating this. In the end whether or not the user uses an add blocker is not relevant to your ability to stream a video.
It was some low effort attempt talking about "code that I do not like running on my PC" or something like that, words like "malware" were thrown around. Basically if detecting adblocks is illegal so should be any JavaScript code.
I mean they've also consistently been making YouTube worse for everyone not using Adblock, so it's only fair.
Sounds like its beginning to reach the point someone may decide to code an add-on or extension that adds a "F*** YouTube" button to a Youtube Video page where if you click that button, it would take you over to the equivalent YewTu.be page of the video currently being viewed.
Great, I'll use it less if that's the case 🤷
I moved over to new pipe. No more algorithm on regular basis. I have the 20 or so people that I want to see. If one of my existing 20 people recommend somebody else, I'll go check them out.
Between getting rid of reddit algorithm and YouTube's algorithm I'm clawing back huge swaths of time.
That’s not a bad outcome for them
If everybody with adblockers quit youtube and used alternative platforms, I agree, that would be great.
Saves them money because they aren’t delivering content for free
And the remaining population won’t raise the issue when they add more
By the looks of these default recommended videos, Youtube is great for bigots and authright traitors.
We'll still figure out ways to get around ads. So suck it Google.
As a premium subscriber, it's definitely gotten worse for me over the last month. Whatever they're doing on the back end, it's pretty terrible.
I'm not sure what the hell is going on at YouTube but I've noticed a significant drop in decent videos being recommended, and a huge uptick in videos I've already seen showing up at the front of the feed. Probs gonna drop it when the price picks up and just go to nebula.
Why are you paying your abuser
Honestly: I'd rather pay for YT and pirate Netflix.
The amount of Entertainment I get from YT exceeds the scale of Netflix and I use it daily at 2-3h per day.
And while yes, it's free, I can also support the creators with a better click price than a regular click.
Is it a better solution then the respective patreon/whatever? Nope
Do I want to pay 5€/month or video each time? Fuck no. I am not king Midas.
Yup, that's how I see it too. I don't like seeing ads, the creators do at least get more money, and the actual value I get out of YouTube is pretty high
Not to mention not every creator will have a patreon anyway so this covers that scenario as well.
There's a ton of educational content only on YT and so it's a part of our homeschool curriculum. My kids were getting a lot of super inappropriate ads a while back, so I got premium to avoid all ads.
What homeschool curriculum provider are you using?
Acton and we participate in a state program and several private programs depending on the kids' interest.
Long time family premium user (household of parents and kids). Anything Youtube do to preserve their revenue within reason doesn't bother me too much as long as they don't reduce the split with quality creators. If they were successful with all this bullshit perhaps they wouldn't have needed to notify me that subs are almost doubling next year. My guess is all they are doing is fucking things up for everyone. It is only going to get worse if their premium subscription base reduces. They should be pricing premium as an alternative to ad-blockers but instead they are pushing people including premium subscribers towards ad-blockers.
I already have ad-blockers and apps for circumventing youtube ads. Not using them in favour of a fairly priced (to me) subscription was a choice but sadly one Google seems to be discouraging.
I've also felt like YouTube Premium was a pretty good deal, given the sheer amount of YouTube content I consume and how much I detest ads.
That said, I also feel like most of what I really value from YouTube is on Nebula, to which I am also subscribed. I constantly wonder if it would be worth it to drop YouTube altogether, to save some money but also a huge amount of time.
The only other thing really keeping me on YouTube Premium is the included YouTube music. Not like Spotify is much cheaper, and I'm not much into manually managing libraries of my own music files like I did in the days of my 2nd Gen iPod (it had a touch wheel!).
WHAT?! I didn't believe it for a second when the whole planet immediately noticed at the same time!
But then again, they DID admit it. Which means they have nothing to hide! And that's transparent, and bold. We should reward companies for doing the right thing. Not only criticize them when they didn't do wrong!
Tinkle Fingerent!
Youtube should add a tip Google button.
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YouTube premium exists
*Laughs with RSS feeds, Invidious redirects, Newpipe and Sponsorblock.
The CEO said shareholders needs to be appeased by making new sacrifice
Fuck YouTube
Are they making it worse than ads make it?
Not yet!
My biggest problem with the ads is that it's louder than the thing I'm watching, oftentimes a lot.
They are sometimes an hour long and I gotta press the skip ad button with my nose cause it'll take me ten minutes or more to clean up.
I have no love for the automatic gadgets where you can speak your commands. They get suggested by my coworkers quite a bit.
They want too much for what is ultimately hours of people playing chess.
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻Theyre also blatant scams. Whenever I accidentally open youtube on my phone when clicking a link the ad is literally claims of free money using ai voices of celebrities, “cures” for blindness that are selling watered down bleach, and other scams
Yeah any time I scroll through YT Shorts (Revanced doesn't block those ads rn) 99+% of the ads are just the "This new government program gives everyone $6400/month trust this bad AI voice of Steve Harvey." scams.
Despite their wasted efforts, it just doesn’t matter. Circumventing all this is still too easy. Only the impatient are doomed.
It doesn't seem to be working for me. I've never been blocked for using ad blockers. It's still the same speed it's always been. I have all these work arounds just waiting to be used that I haven't even had to actually try.
Are they only doing this shit to like 12 people who write articles about it? Why wouldn't it be globally done all at once for everyone?
Yes, they are rolling these changes out in stages to make it harder for the internet to collectively address the issue.
Trust me, you will get hit eventually.
Personally I don't watch it in the Browser instead I use the AndroidTV app.
Amd I am patient in that regard. Can't scare me with a 5sec delay.
Still using Vivaldi with only the built-in ad blocking, still noticing no ads, still noticing zero performance issues.
I use Vivaldi. I've been getting the ads mostly. I have to open YouTube in a private window and view from there. Do you have Unblock with scripts? My scripts only worked for awhile. The built in adblocking is just not working for me.
It's just a regular install with "block trackers and ads" enabled. The only YouTube related plugins/extensions I have are tube buddy and dearrow to remove clickbait thumbnails. I don't use unlock, ad block, or anything like that.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google has admitted its efforts to discourage the use of ad blockers now includes delaying the start of videos – a deliberate "suboptimal viewing" experience, as the corporation put it.
Earlier this year, YouTube began interrupting videos for those using advert blockers with a pop-up encouraging them to either disable the offending extension or filter, or pay for YT's ad-free premium tier.
In a statement to The Register, Google admitted it was intentionally making its content less binge-able for users unwilling to turn off offending extensions, though this wasn't linked to any one browser.
To be clear, Google's business model revolves around advertising, and ad blockers are specifically called out as being in violation of its terms of service.
Google told us users who have uninstalled their ad blockers may continue to experience temporary delays loading videos, though the issue should resolve itself after "refreshing their browser."
As we reported earlier this month, the search giant will be pushing ahead with a planned API change in June that will render legacy Chrome extensions – including ad blockers – useless unless they are overhauled.
The original article contains 468 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 61%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
As a Premium user who still had uBlock installed, I was noticing the other day a loading problem when I had it activated until I deactivated and reloaded. Still, Google is entirely within it's right to target people even according to one of its greatest critics: https://youtu.be/KMLMQRS3Krk?t=175
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/KMLMQRS3Krk?si=topYLrXiiYqpF1GE&t=175
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Piped doesn't respect the t time attribute.
[Citation required.]
Could you give us a timestamp of when he says that?
It starts at 2:55, when I linked it, but it's a long argument. You can forward into 3:20 for the first short conclusion, 4:57 for his rebuttal of a common counterargument, and you can forward into 5:40 for his own experience with freeloaders. You can fast forward to 12:40, to 13:15, to 13:46, and to 14:16 as well, but he's pretty based throughout the whole video and the point remains consistent throughout.
Thanks for the timestamps. I think just starting at 13:53 would be more than enough to make your point of "Google is entirely within it’s right to target people".
Having said that, generally speaking I would also strongly suggest people listening to the next point directly after that at 14:25 as well, and especially what he says starting at 15:43.
Yeah, but the point beginning on 14:25 is really for the business to determine, not something to demand or not demand from a consumer side. YT has had over a decade to determine what works for it and to see what's working for its competitors, and it may really be a last hail mary to save their business model with the collapse of easy investor money from silicon valley banks and stricter data privacy laws. As to 15:43, that's what I do already, I just pay for YT Premium even with uBlock Origin installed and data collection disabled as much as I can.
It just doesn't play on my Firefox anymore.
I got no issues whatsoever. Are you using any browser addons besides uBlock origin? I've been using ghostery for quite some time (which also has an ad-suppression engine) and that cocked up with youtube. Removed it and now I can use it as always. Firefox 120.0.1.
Privacy Badger is better than Ghostery anyway.
Instead of using a commercial server, it build its own anti-tracking list over time.
Made by a non-profit digital rights group.
And it works fine on Youtube.
Good information. I will remove it.
Interesting
Curious
Peculiar
Weird
Most unusual
YES, QUITE!
Open your videos in Incognito mode, the block is cookie-based. I open YT on my browser in normal mode to see all my subscriptions, then open the videos in incognito with adblock enabled.
They are a business that makes money off of ads. Nothing to see here.
I have LIbreWolf with uBlock Origin and NoScript (and Redirector I can turn on to redirect me from watching videos on YouTube.com to YewTu.be on a moments notice of something funky going on with YouTube), and so far, I have not noticed any ads or anything for a long time. I'm probably at the point of beginning to wonder what a YouTube Ad is.
This is not new. They started doing this when the adblock detection was ramping up too
Still not going to give them a dollar ever.
Why can't people just stop using google? Genuinely curious
Because most alternatives aren't nearly as functional due to them dominating the market.
Yes alternate platforms with good level of UX exists. But without content its no good. YouTube - Peertube Google maps - Organic maps & OSMAnd (open street maps) Reddit - Lemmy (bigger is better)
Google Maps actually sucks for things like hiking and trails, there's a lot of better alternatives like Maps.me.
For the others, maybe. But YouTube? It's strength is in the sheer amount of content. It's going to take a lot of time and resources to create and host that content on the fediverse.
It is frightfully expensive to host video content. YouTube would cost Billions per year to run.
I always wonder about this. I pay only a few bucks per month for Nebula. I highly suspect Nebula is running at a loss.
Not necessarily. Nebula operates at a far, far smaller scope, with an emphasis on quality of videos over quantity, and every user is a paid user. If every user of YouTube was paying a couple bucks per month, they'd be making in the high tens of billions of dollars of revenue per year, several times more than they do with ads. Plus YouTube has a ridiculously huge amount of essentially worthless videos because literally anyone can upload a 10 hour video, so surely their hosting costs are higher per user than Nebula.
Oh right, I somehow forgot about that.
Subscriptions are really lucrative. Iirc most ads pay like 0.1-0.5 cents per view, so you'd need to watch an insane amount of videos to equal the cost of a $2 subscription. I could probably make a site that brings in money if I had 5 $2 subscribers and a half 100 medium quality vids. Start scaling that up and it can be really profitable while offering subscribers a fair shake.
By and large, that's where the content is.
There's no alternative to youtube that isn't complete garbage
So what is equal or better alternative than Google Maps, Youtube and Google Search?
I've been using duckduckgo for half a year already they've became quite good compared to Google search, Google maps alternative is any popular maps app just try what'll fit your tastes, but YouTube is certainly don't have alternatives YET just because libre alternatives though exist but not yet in shape enough (basically we need datahoarders who'll hoard and host whole youtube to libre alternatives such as framatube and others) for now we can only rely to custom frontends such as clipious, piped and others and custom apps of course
OpenStreetMap instead of Google Maps (OSM would be even better if more people used and actively contributed mapping data to it), no real youtube alternative yet (but see Piped/Invidious, Peertube, and Odysee), and there's plenty of alternative search engines like Duckduckgo, Brave search (has its own index), etc
I started ditching google apps last spring and my “alternatives” are: bing/apple maps, invidious, and SearXNG. I self-host the last two to keep even more control of my data.
there is no such "better" alternative. how could we compare a company that has been digging up their user data and built something with it, vs some community or even a solo developer who build something out of nowhere without collecting or selling data?
but, what are the alternative?
Google Maps
YouTube
Odysee, couldn't explain, think of it like YouTube
Rumble, couldn't explain, think of it like YouTube
PeerTube, a fediverse software where you can upload videos and do livestream, you own your data
Piped, NewPipe, PipePipe, Invidious are just alternative frontend for YouTube, its good if you are watching an exclusive content from their platform. But why do we keep letting YouTube has our data?
Google Search
wow, really?
DuckDuckGo, controversial, but enough
Brave Search, controversial, honestly aint using it
Searx, host it yourself, you own your data
and hey, why didn't you mention about the browser, mails, and many more? There is firefox, tuta, and much more.
Revealed preferences. As much as people won't admit it, these services do provide legitimate value, and they also cost a lot of money to operate.
Sure if you consider captcha to be a punishment. Poor baby.
I use VPNs but I'm not going to be a slave or a fanboy to avoiding facts and reality.
if you get adguard for desktop and load it with userscripts from greasyfork to block youtube's bullshit it's still okay, I barely ever have any hiccups since I loaded 5 different userscripts to block youtube's anti-adblock bullshit. I sometimes get an error telling me the video couldn't be played, but I almost never see their bullshit telling me to turn my adblocker off.
There's also "FreeTube" which is an app for several desktop operating systems. there's also the many instances of invidious you can check out and access from almost any device with a web-browser.
I'm running uBlock Origin and a pi Hole and I haven't seen shit change for months. Not sure what voodoo I have going on judging by other experiences.
recent updates to ublock for firefox have made its adblocking way more powerful.
Where do you go to get pi hole? is that the one that requires docker?
Pi-hole.net
You can install a container or you can install it as a package on debian or Red Hat based distros.
I tried to do that, I looked it up right after I typed my comment. I wasn't able to get docker to work on my system. Does it have anything to do with core isolation being enabled? I don't have anything installed on my system that should be blocking it.
Adguard for desktop is working for now. I don't need it to work right this second.
Not sure I've been using this one to be exact
https://hub.docker.com/r/devzwf/pihole-dot-doh
I've got Adguard installed on my router (openwrt). 👍
Well, I'm disabled and can't work, unfortunately I can't afford a place of my own or my own router to install my VPN or adguard onto.
Being born German is a terrible affliction but I didn't realise it counted as a disability. My condolences on your Germanity.
The official YouTube app is slso terrible, so maybe it's their excuse for terrible products?