how do those youtube clients work? i thought YouTube was very closed source

Or downloading videos to watch later? Does Plex recognize YouTube videos?

I have ublock origin on firefox and it’s really bad for me currently. This has traditionally been the good combo I believe.

Not just slowing down, but stopping, then restarting after skipping a few seconds that you cannot access no matter what.

For now the best solution I’ve found is to copy the video url, open potplayer and just hit the paste command and the video runs flawlessly.

So they’ll have to close that loophole eventually, which means enshittifying the video streaming protocol for everything that isn’t the native web viewer, which will inconvenience more people who were used to something working, leading to another workaround, leading to…

Youtube is gradually accelerating their enshittification. I’m looking forward to when it comes to a real head. Too many serious interested parties rely on it. I don’t know if peertube will be the first fallback, but I’m sure it’ll get a big bump.

YouTube revanced has also been working for me

Youtube is my reminder on new browser installs to install Ublock Origin. And I saw this newest effort to block it once. Updated Ublock, restarted the browser and it was gone again.

I don’t understand how anyone can put up with youtube without premium

piped.video

A couple of five second ads doesn’t bother me at all.

I’m from a generation that had no pause or fast forward on the TV before the internet. Every fifteen minutes or so you’d have near enough five minutes of ads. YouTube ads are nothing by comparison.

$10 a month isn’t a huge amount, but it’s $120 saved by the end of the year that I’d rather spend on something else.

I’d happily pay for premium as I use YouTube religiously. But it’s Google so fuck them, they already process my information in order to show me ads and profit off of my data. I think that’s payment enough, so I’ll just find any free way possible to watch YouTube without ads.

Or just use an adblocker and save the $$

If I started waving little billboards in front of your face, how much would you pay me to go away?

Easy: Just use the right browser and adblocker, and you basically have premium, but without the ads they still throw at you.

I was a day 1 subscriber of Google Play Music All Access, which I converted into a family plan when that was available, and was told that the rate I was paying would be grandfathered in. I didn’t like the switch to YouTube Music, but it did the job and came with ad-free YouTube, so I was okay with it.

But then they told me that they were changing the $14.99/mo I was paying to $22.99/mo despite being grandfathered in, a more than 50% increase, and I said fuck that. Unsubbed, swapped to Spotify, and never looked back.

Would I pay for just ad-free YouTube? Maybe. But not for almost $300 each year. I’m keeping Spotify, so if Google made a plan for no ads for like …$1 or $2 per month?, maybe then I’d consider going back.

The end result now though is that I just use YouTube less.

.

Is your “you people” targeted at the ones using Adblock?

If so, here’s another approach; If YouTube actually had a decent ‘premium’ without all the unnecessary “features” in it and the price wasn’t so unreasonable high. People might have paid for it.

In my country YouTube Premium costs €12/monthly which is €144/yearly and for what? Unnecessary features and to block advertisements while still having in-video advertisements (sponsors). No thank you.

I will go with uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock.

Please tell google then, if we allow ads, then dont shoot at us 10 unskippable ads.

1 ad per video < 10 minutes. 2 ads per video > 10 < 20. 4 ads per video > 20 +2 ads per extra 10 minutes

Ads maximum length of 30 seconds. Ads should be monitored for anything illegal or harmfull for the viewer ( Scams, Malicious websites … )

If google chose to do this instead of every minutes 2 unskippable ads ( or soon 5 ) i would think, there would be less adblock users on youtube. And with that you support more your favorite creator ( if you want to really support him, just give him some bucks on patreon or so ). Or just suggest him to go to any other video hosting website ( like peertube ) then users will have 0 ads and you can get support over donations.

And yet they were perfectly okay with providing the service for free while they were still busy starving off the competition. No tears for Google shall be shed here.

If google stops strip mining my data when I pay for their service, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’m not going to pay to be someone’s product.

Thank you for your concern, but I have other ways of avoiding YouTube’s ads and associated punishments.

Google is already making millions by profiling its users and stealing their data. All these YT changes are not caused by them losing money, but by them not growing enough to please their (multi-millionaires) investors.

(1) I’m not shedding any tears for a corporation that’s big enough to have more money that I’ll ever see in ten lifetimes.

(2) I’m not paying for a “Premium” experience to allow them to keep profiling me (and thus gain more money). They are already gaining money off me, they don’t need my premium subscription.

(3) You should stop arguing in favour of exploitative big corporations that don’t even know you and are probably actively exploiting you in this very moment.

They had premium light which gave you just a no ad experience and nothing else for about $7/mo. Totally reasonable, I was happy to pay it. Then right at the same time they started going nuclear on ad blocking, they killed that plan and forced everyone to move to a plan that costs about 70% more and added a bunch of stuff I didn't ask for and will never use. They had those added services available already prior to that change. If I had wanted them I'd already be subscribing. This was just a greedy cash grab.

They'll just keep jacking the price up and decreasing the quality of service and mining your data and annoying you with ads and algorithmic bullshit just up until they can't anymore and it stops being optimally profitable. A lot of people will just put up with it, but they lost me as a customer.

Yes. You people just cost money. Pay, or find a new service. I’m not so sure what’s confusing about this.

I already pay, with my data. They stop to harvest data, I pay the service.

Google isn’t going to let you use the service for free anymore.

And I am not going to pay to be the product.

I agree with you. Google is a company and so will do as much as they can to provide as little and to profit as much as possible.

if one wants to use their products, they have to play their game. by either paying (with money and or data, regardless if it’s overpriced) or “cheating” around that - as we do with literally everything else in the free market system, to many other monopolistic shady companies

what’s interesting to see around here is this sense of self entitlement, as if Google owed them anything, and of naivety, as if a company would ever provide a service (which is very costly) for absolutely free. video streaming is not an essential service and didn’t exist until very recently

it may come as a shock, but you don’t need to use any service such as YouTube to survive and you only do because you want to and find value in it (whether to learn new skills or watch people reacting to cats)

the underlying problem here which all of you are actually mad about is the system where technology and knowledge belongs to giant hoarding dragons instead of the people who made it. that’s where we all should be focusing our energy on.

in the meantime, we just keep cheating… and if the cheats fail, we move on to other things

Stop perpetuating this nonsense that YouTube is free. Google is a for profit company. It was never free. You always paid with your data. And even when you subscribe they continue to profit from your data.

Google makes a healthy profit, with or without your subscription money. They just want more. And more. And more. To satisfy the insatiable greed of shareholders.

Hopefully your passion to pay for ‘free’ services extends to your Lemmy (and other Federated services) instances. Not just monopolies like Google.

Well, yeah! Google controls Chrome

Also I’d rather wait without ads than wait with ads, like what’s the point?

I’ll never understand why they spend so much effort pushing ads into people’s faces

money

Also, disappointingly, most people don’t care about the ad all that much.

A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads

That’s what grinds my gears. I understand ads pay bills, but showing multiple ads before a trailer for a video game or movie is excessive.

Too be honest I was fine with seeing an ad every few videos. But at some point it became unskippable ads before , during and after a video.

I never had an issue with YT’s 1-2 skipable ads at the beginning, or even the banner ad. But they got greedy.

The midrolls and the unskipable ads was the trigger point for me.

Like for real, you have all the money in the world and you know what I like and don’t, so why don’t tailor the ads to not annoy the fuck out of me?

There is potentially a world in which you want to see ads because ads themselves do technically provide a service. You do want to know about things you care about and would want to buy… you just don’t want it obnoxiously shoved into your face all of the time in psychologically manipulative ways.

.

Because that has been tried so many times over the decades.

The good sites put effort in to curate their ads and make sure they are things their audiences would enjoy. Lots of webcomics STILL have blog posts about doing this. Same with one of the more popular “steam deck” websites.

The problem is that this doesn’t work. Because people don’t permitlist those sites. They just block everything for the exact same reasons “I pirate it and if I like it I’ll buy it” was always a blatant lie for the vast majority of people (and no, I don’t care who consider themselves exceptions to that).

So when curated and “good” ads have almost zero benefit over shitty and obnoxious ones? The focus stops being “let’s serve good ads and trust our users to have our backs” and more “What can we do to actually get ANY ad revenue out of this so that we can keep the lights on?”

Youtube doesnt make money with the youtuber reviewing the product.

A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads. Every Youtuber holding a product into the camera is an ad. And people want to watch that. They want to know what new products are out there. It just has to presented appropriately.

I doubt so - Sponsorblock exists. I guess some don’t mind it because it supports the creators they like directly.

Yeah the last ad I remember seeing was for a movie, that actually looked interesting. But rather than tell me the name in the first 10 or 20 seconds they wanted me to watch to the end before revealing. So I skipped straight out of that.

A 15min video from a Youtuber reviewing a product in detail is way more effective than any regular ad I have ever seen, yet there are almost no ads in that style.

True. But probably that money does not go to Google but to the Youtuber directly, so for Google this is still a cost.

I was wondering if this was coming. I don’t use YouTube in-browser much if at all, so I don’t see this. But I am not surprised. The fact that they’re slowing down people who pay for premium is kind of an act of war. It shouldn’t be a thing, and the fact that it’s happening at all is a misstep on Google’s part. Not that the whole slowing down people who use ad blockers isn’t. But this will detrimentally affect adoption of premium subscribers which I thought was the last thing they’d want. Because they obviously don’t make enough off ad revenue to support the platform. That’s part of why they push premium so hard. They need more premium subscribers. This is idiocy.

Ha! Serves you right

After getting premium I just switched the adblocker off for YouTube. Premium would be far too expensive if it didn’t also include YouTube Music :-/

I have YouTube premium

Wow, so you pay them and they still screw you? Glad that’s a product I’ll never buy then!

I have premium, uBlock Origin, and Mullvad VPN. In Firefox the other day, the stream was dying every 10-30 seconds. Like it would just stop and give me a spinner. I would have to “Copy URL at current time”, open a new tab, and paste it in to get it to go any further. I do have bad internet, but this was nuts. And then I gave up and used Duck, and it played flawlessly in their embedded player.

Good job, Google.

If it happens again, I’ll try disabling uBlock Origin on YouTube and see if it improves.

I wish Mozilla would add the ability to set User-Agent for the different containers they offer in Firefox with their addon. Would be sweet to set it to Chrome in my YouTube container only.

So does Invidious

Problem is, it shows the internet that there id a higher share of chromium browsers.
Which is bad.

And Google. And Corporations.

Monetizing one is much easier than the other.

Pornhub owns most of those alternatives.

People dont really care where their content comes from, so long as it loads properly. But content creators dont want to migrate from the platforms they have all their followers on. If i have a decent YouTube channel that is large enough to be my primary income, I’m locked in because there is no real way to migrate all those followers over to a new platform. Nebula is the closest i think we have to a true YouTube competitor, but it’s a tiny fraction of the user base and most Nebula videos are available on YouTube for free.

People will pirate porn, they don’t care to pirate COD montages

I’m actually really surprised pornhub hasn’t moved into the YouTube like space. They have the infrastructure and expertise. Why not branch into that ? Especially if YouTube keeps pissing off users.

Ssdd?

If you run mpv https://url it will stream it from youtube and play it in mpv, without having to wait for the whole video to download first.

I’d consider paying a few bucks a month, but not $10 or more

Get rid of shitty YouTube music and give me a tier that’s no ads only

Revanced Extended ftw!

What is freetube? (Sorry for the stupid question)

Alternative front ends are a god send.

One of the few uYou+ users on iOS.

That’s what they want. Get all the users they aren’t able to monetize off the platform to lower their costs.

Good news: you can have the best of both by watching everything for free through piped video!

Way ahead of you. Recently got Nebula, which has dramatically reduced the amount of time I spend on YT. Besides, this way I can help also the people who make the videos. They don’t need to be so dependent on the whimsical and unpredictable nature of the algorithm and the ever changing landscape of what is or isn’t advertiser friendly on the platform.

If YT feels like further cranking up the enshittification dial, I say, bring it on. I’m ready to drop my watch time even lower than it currently is.

Yarr harr, it’s the pirate life for us!

Time and time again we can only conclude: Piracy is justified!

Might as well just stop paying for premium then if they’re going to ding you anyway.

Why pay when you can watch it for free without ads through piped video! Pirate everything, live for free!!

there is no way the 5 second sleep before loading isnt anti competitive, because last i heard, unless they changed it, it only checks for the firefox user agent.

Actually insane that someone would willingly implement that.

Pirate everything, it’s the only way to show greedy corporations the content should be free.

My worry with all this is that they might say fuck it and put DRM for all YouTube videos which would block attempts to download the videos. Not make it impossible as seen with streaming services but not as trivial as now…

It would be really cool to be able to download YouTube videos withour the sponsorship segments, I wonder if there is a way to do his already?

yt-dlp https://youtube... --sponsorblock-remove all

I bought a chromecast with google TV specifically for this purpose, with it you can download “SmartTube” and watch youtube completely ad-free

.

Changing your router DNS to something that blocks ads (or a pihole at home) and you’ll never have to watch ads ever again, YouTube or elsewhere

.

If you had an android device you’d be allowed to install an alternative YouTube app.

Just install smart tube

Same but with my PS5. But I don’t think there’s any way of getting an ad block on there

50% of congress wants to know how the computer mouse stays alive without food.

Or it’s just straight up hostile UI. They started camouflaging ads to blend in really well with random search results now! Infuriating.

I’ve noticed the same. Particularly tonight.

Sorry to burst your little bubble but the UN charter specifically states it is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and serve as a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations.

As much as some may want to believe the UN is some sort of «Global Supreme Court», it is not. It mainly functions by consensus of all other nation (including those who explicitly chooses to abstain). Therefore, by making the UN somehow responsible for the “backend”, as you have said, or as the custodian of the entire repository/library of videos uploaded to YouTube, every member nations would then have their own priorities on what to “keep” and what to “remove” from the repository/library. Since the UN works principaly by consensus only a very small subset of all the videos will be kept as being universally non-controversial. Hence, the majority of videos will be irrecoverably erased.

Perhaps you meant a NGO (non-governmental organization) or a non-profit organization such as the Internet Archive. However, storage and maintenance for such a vast collection of large media (videos) is non-trivial and expensive that very few non-profit could administer.

Alternatively, with a fediverse-like protocol, everyone will be responsible to host their own videos and also videos they consider important/valuable to archive and/or help distribute. Thus, no single point of control and no need to “nationalize” YouTube. Of course it is hard and complex, nevertheless it is only the first step toward a more resilient and a more equitable video sharing/distribution infrastructure.

Curiously, that would mean a peer-tube network of server instances for which YouTube becomes a frontend.

These are some very pretty words that express ideas without much self-reflection on why the ideas might be bad.

I mean, I suppose you did say it yourself that you can’t trust the US government… but why would you trust ANY government? You know why I trust Google more than any government? I understand Google’s motivations ($$$). Put something into the hands of government and suddenly that thing is burdened by the desires of every politician and their special interest financiers.

“Place it in the hands of something like the UN” would mean some international body I assume. Comprised of and led by whom exactly? And also, who would fund the thing? You suggest nationalization, so… taxpayers? Sure, here’s your $99/year Degooglebase access fee tax I guess? And beyond just making sure there’s enough money to keep the lights on, we need to make sure there’s enough money to pay creators. After all, YouTube isn’t just a library. It’s an economy larger than some countries and there would be consequences to destabilizing that economy. People aren’t just posting content for the love of the shared experience.

Please don’t take what I’m saying here to be a defense of Google. Google is a shitty company for so many reasons. But advocating for nationalization of YouTube is just a horrifically bad idea in such manner as it was presented.

But - all is not lost. First: for the creators you enjoy - find ways to support them other than Google. Make it possible for them to continue when YouTube stops being lucrative enough.

Second: find, use, and advocate for the use of alternative services. There is no single site that is going to be able to replace YouTube. It simply isn’t going to happen unless PornHub wants to step up to the game and create their own SFW site YouTube-killer. They have the infrastructure and capacity to host and share absolutely massive amounts of video and have the business capabilities to accept income and pass it on to creators on a large scale. But that’s an entirely different discussion.

Best to look at things differently. Like the Fediverse and the internet itself, it might be better off if the platform were distributed.

Exactly! I started surfin’ da information highway in the 90’s. I remember watching an image unveil itself slowly as a morning sunrise.

Next step is guaranteed to be limiting the number of views without being logged in.

I know it’s a pain, but what’s to stop us from using download-clis? In theory I could “collect” the urls that are recommended to me from my home page, call the clis, click all the videos to update my recommendations then close the browser.

The no competition in the market, is the issue. Hope the situation improves in near future. With it innovations will gradually increase & the demand within the markets will point the directions.

Thank you for reminding me to get myself an invidious instance set up. It isn’t a huge pain or anything, right?

I wish I could do the same thing with my 2008 VAIO laptop :/

There is competition when it comes to technology stack. People just don’t want to use alternatives because the amount of content/users is less on others.

Be the pioneer and help others move across.

Unless you inform those customers with some kind of UI that they’re being throttled because of ad-block how does Google expect them to uninstall it?

I genuinely believe they are trying to push adblock users off the platform completely

At this point I’m convinced they’re trying to drive people away to shrink the overhead on bandwidth and servers, but it doesn’t work like that. Not after you got them hooked on videos of cats after years of a steady drip of memes.

The problem is that only conglomerates can eat the cost of running such a platform. Ads will be the end of free interne, that’s for sure.

I’m not so sure – YouTube is much larger than you might think. It’s not the video platform you grew up with anymore. No one in this world can match the backlog and content density/diversity of YouTube, not even all streaming services combined. People complaining that YouTube is dying because a few YouTubers “retire” from their main gig or that it’s not the same anymore don’t understand how YouTube works. They might not comprehend that the time of their “bubble” has come to an end. When this happens, there are already five new bubbles/niches that are even bigger, and you might not have heard of them, but they are more successful than their “predecessor.” The old bubble is still there to consume in the backlog. Someday in the future, AI will have a field day with the data accumulated via YouTube.

It is transforming, for sure, but I don’t think it will destroy itself completely. In a sense, you can say it will destroy whatever view you had of YouTube as a platform because it is not what it once was.

To my knowledge, YouTube will hit the billion-user milestone this year (Netflix currently at ~250 million paid users). If we look at other data trends from streaming services, it suggests that YouTube will grow more over the coming years. I don’t know how anyone can match YouTube as a whole. In certain niches, sure, but as a whole, it would be like fighting windmills. There’s a reason no one tries to tackle YouTube as a platform and only goes for certain niches.

And if it would be federated, there would be no cycle.

People dont use Peertube because that guy over there doesn’t use Peertube. Or that other guy. Other that person who makes content. I think you get the picture.

How do you pay for it? If I try to use a visa cc for an acct outside the US they demand I have a bank acct in that country and verify a deposit AMT.

I had one in Argentina for ages, until they pulled this trick

Doesn’t that idea fall apart when you get to the payment method? The payment service knows in which country your bank account or PayPal account is registered that isn’t IP dependent right?

because of People like you, the Services in these kinds of Countries gets more expensive for the People that actually live there.

github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp allows you to download them and watch them on your leisure

On Android, there’s Newpipe which doesn’t run ads, and Newpipe x Sponsorblock which clips ads out from the video. On desktop there is FreeTube which also has SponsorBlock you can turn on.

Last I checked, you can just download a youtube video. There are plenty of websites and some apps for that. No need to play it in the bacground.

You can get this same functionality with Youtube Revanced! Free on android! No Ads! Sponsorblock built in! Background playback! And more!

I mean this wholeheartedly and by no means do I mean to be rude or snarky. I’m glad that works for you but unfortunately there is a ton of us who have to use it for a huge list of things. I personally use it to learn how to fix or make things because for me I need a video for it. I use a bunch of work arounds and such but eventually this will become a bigger issue. Soon embedded videos will stop working for news websites and such at this rate.

You tube is a central repository for hundreds of thousands of hours of learning. So while you might know everything is a great equalizer for those who are still learning

Not at all a solution, but worth mentioning that in a YouTube URL you can replace /shorts/ with /v/ and get the normal player for the same video.

They are going to be fine, we said the same thing when Netflix banned password sharing. People who still use YouTube don’t care.