YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers
(www.androidauthority.com)
from ijeff@lemdro.id to technology@lemmy.world on 04 Nov 2023 02:08
https://lemdro.id/post/2883137
from ijeff@lemdro.id to technology@lemmy.world on 04 Nov 2023 02:08
https://lemdro.id/post/2883137
cross-posted from: lemdro.id/post/2883134 (!android@lemdro.id)
threaded - newest
Just this morning all the posts (here on Lemmy) were about how everyone was uninstalling their adblockers.
And that didn't mention ublock origion, the blocker that still works...
It did at the very very bottom. I almost missed it.
IDK why anyone uses anything else. It has street cred, it improves response times, it is ideologically just about blocking ads
I use tracker blockers and containers too, but every machine that has been in my hands for more than 10 minutes has it installed
Because they’re still on Chrome based browsers. It’s not really about the ad blocker, it’s about the browser. You’re not going to beat Google at their own game using the tools that they gave you.
Why the fuck would anyone uninstall their ad blocker just because one site demands it? Whitelists exist for a reason.
I’ll stop using Internet before I even consider whitelisting YouTube.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8e0ac98b-3df5-419c-8cca-24d92ab250e2.jpeg">
Right? I’ve used ad blockers as soon as they popped on the Internet scene. I hate advertisements, commercials and any kind of marketing. I don’t watch TV, and when I do or it’s on nearby, I get up and walk away during the commercials. When sponsored stuff interrupts a video I’m watching, I skip forward until the video returns. If I have to use a browser with no ad block, I straight up abandon most sites. It’s untenable!
In general, I treat life and products/services I want like a business doing a Request For Purchase (RFP). If I want something, I’ll look up companies that provide that product or service and rely heavily on the recommendations of friends, family, and community when making a purchase decision. Those who aggressively solicit me will almost never get my money or be considered.
Fuck capitalism.
To install another one that works!
lemmy.world/comment/5041080
People should be uninstalling Chrome instead.
Adblocking still works fine on Firefox. Just update your UBO filters.
I literally have un-installed chrome. I had to use it on an office machine today and it felt weird.
proud of you
I’m so happy I can freely use Firefox at work. 😅
The default browser at my work is Firefox lol, only our testing team and a few others use Chrome. It’s a pretty welcome change 👍
I find it a little funny when we get Chrome-specific bug reports though
Aside from Firefox, are there any decent non-Chromium-based browsers left?
Nope
…m.wikipedia.org/…/Comparison_of_browser_engines
Thanks.
For anyone else interested, as of November 2023:
Web browsers using Gecko (Firefox’s engine): GNU IceCat, Waterfox, K-Meleon, Lunascape, Portable Firefox, Conkeror, Classilla, TenFourFox.
Web browsers using the Goanna engine (which is a fork of Gecko): Pale Moon, Basilisk.
Flow is a web browser with its own proprietary browser engine.
The other active engines listed are: WebKit (Apple’s engine), and Blink (Google’s engine, which they forked off of WebKit, and which is used for Chrome, Chromium, and countless other browsers).
There are many. They’re just not as popular.
That article was full of such blatantly misleading crap. Headline talks about record number of adblocker uninstalls, but the actual data says it was an uptick in both installs and uninstalls. In other words it was people cycling through different adblockers trying to find one that still worked.
I actually removed a lot of ad blockers from all my devices once I found that uBO could do it all. That could be what they are seeing from others as well, perhaps!
Stupid Wired article was stupid.
It’s like war propaganda, both sides are eager to claim they’re winning lol
I’m guessing this isn’t what YouTube had in mind when they started this campaign.
To quote The Joker, “It’ll be funny if it weren’t so pathetic…oh, what the heck, I’ll laugh anyways!” 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
These tech companies have underestimated their utility. They are mostly providing mindless time wasters. If you try to charge money or create inconvenience, people will look for something else to do.
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere. The VC grow-at-all-costs business model is fundamentally flawed. It doesn’t scale when profitability becomes a priority.
Youtube produces almost none of their own content, instead they rely on other humans to create that content.
Use your ad blocker if you want, but stop treating youtubers as google employees (they’re not, they often have a much more frustrating relationship than you do) and start supporting them through other means.
To you, those people are just helping you waste your time. if that’s your real argument here, stop wasting your fucking time and do something else more worth your precious time, or start supporting content producers directly through non-youtube methods. Or just stop fucking watching.
Those people aren’t on youtube because they’re buying into corporate google dick-wrangling, they want to produce videos and have them get watched, and youtube is a place that hosts their videos for free AND gives them ad revenue share for hosting youtube ads.
You aren’t some hero for adblocking youtube but still watching it. google won’t notice your small dip in their revenue, but the youtuber who made it will.
Wanna support the people who entertain you (or, i guess, “waste your time”, if that’s what you consider entertainment to be — if all you want is to waste your time, don’t ads do the same thing for you?). Pay them directly for their content. Want to take a fake stand that supports nobody but yourself and your own inconveniences, install an ad blocker and boast on the internet about how you’re totally fucking over google and the people who create youtube content by doing so. But don’t treat yourself like some hero for doing so.
Who are you gonna defend next, the landlords?
I was never defending google or youtube.
I was defending the people who produce content on youtube, and who do not enjoy the benefits of google’s wealth and market position, and are just trying to create their content.
adblock youtube if you want, but unless you’re also supporting the creators of your content outside of google, i have never paid google a dime either. don’t pretend this is about a big corporation. you just think you deserve to be entertained for free, regardless of who put in the effort to create it.
If you’re REALLY anti-google/youtube, STOP USING THEM. If you watch them with adblock, google can still spin your usage statistics into something that will appeal to investors, but youtube creators will be wondering why their numbers dwindle, because they don’t have investors to (lie to / spin numbers at). You’re still helping youtube, even with an adblocker.
On the other hand, if you support content creators outside of youtube? you are supporting them directly, without youtube’s involvement and without google even getting a cut. I do this for several youtubers, and support even more through merch and etc.
But sure keep telling me i’m defending the landlords because i’m getting mad at you for mistreating the staff and pretending you’re sticking it to the landlords.
To your point about watching YouTube with adblockers still helping Google due to viewership numbers. That’s exactly why after I stopped supporting blizzard (at first due to the blutzchung controversy, then everything else that happened) I immediately stopped playing hearthstone, yes, I was playing it free, I never spent any money on it, but I didn’t want to even indirectly help by giving them usage statistics, or by giving paying people even a little bit of a quicker matchmaking.
Same reason why I’ve never played a Halo game, even via piracy.
You could’ve stopped after the second paragraph.
Lol what an unhinged rant.
If content creators provide 90% or even 60% of value to YouTube, why is Google a trillion dollar company while major content creators are fighting for scraps that fall from their table? Why are content creators who aren’t in the top tier compensated so little for what they bring to the table?
YouTube is nothing without content. Unionize. Stand together and get paid what you’re worth.
where do i find the 10-40% percent of youtube-produced content on youtube you’re talking about?
Google is a trillion dollar company because they do far more than youtube, and make the majority of their money from taking a percentage of ad revenue. This does include youtube, and youtube is only profitable to google because they can sell ads on top of it, because video hosting on the internet is fucking expensive.
i pay google nothing, just like you. i do, however, support my favorite youtubers outside of google revenue streams with my own money, either through direct support or merchandise.
Both installing an adblocker and not even going to youtube will cost google money. I don’t care which you do. But if you do watch specific youtubers regularly, support them directly, even if you do use an ad blocker.
You’re not a hero for adblocking google. You’re a hero if you support content creators outside of google, whether or not you watch them on youtube using an adblocker.
Unionize and get paid what you’re worth. Shilling for the billionaires has no future.
oh yes, unionize af. not much of an option in my career and i kept glossing over that point, but 100% unionize i agree.
Thank you me for using Adblock. You are welcome me. Couldn’t have done it without me. I am my hero. Thanks me.
The modern Internet community has an interestingly illogical take on free services. Either use them or pay for an alternative. But the average user has grown up on free services and will happily insist on having their cake and eating it too
.
i think you mean “overestimated”
👍
My attention is all the currency YouTube will ever get from me - and it should be enough. If I post videos to YouTube (for nothing in return) and I talk to people about videos I saw on YouTube or link them to videos - then I am a net gain for Google and they should treat me as such. If anything, they should be working (nicely) to try to get me to want to pay (or view ads) and just be thankful I’m there if I don’t pay (or view ads). Instead they’ve chosen to work at ensuring everyone is so goddamn pissed off at their bullshit that they’d rather make it their full-time job to never give them another dime. Good job, Google! Smart!
Edit: Oh look, half a dozen lectures about how Google has to make money somehow. Hi there YouTube shills, I thought I would see you here.
Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you. Attention is all the currency they’ll ever get from you, that’s totally cool, absolutely. I’m totally that way too. But they’ve got to make money somehow, so if you’re not the paying customer, someone else has to be.
I’m not saying it has to be ad sales either, but if we want a world in which we can use services for free without ads, we need to come up with an alternative way for them to make money. It has to come from somewhere, and by the bucketload.
If every user thinks like you, then it doesn’t matter how many people you talk to or share links with, you’re not a net gain on their service, you bring nothing to it.
Why should they, or anybody, be thankful that you honour them with your presence, if you contribute nothing of value? What makes you so entitled to use somebody’s product for free with no strings attached?
Ads suck, I’m eager for us to move past them once we figure out an alternative that keeps products in business and us receiving things for free. But we can’t deny the reality we live in right now either. Even huge companies like Google (who yes, do suck) have to make money to survive.
I think generally you will find that people of this opinion hold that it is unreasonable that we have privatized basically all of the internet infrastructure. These people tend to be in favor of expecting the consumer spends more on hardware for hosting, and enthusiasts, hobbyists, non-profits, and occasionally companies develop the software necessary to make the internet function, rather than companies just paying for tons and tons of warehouses of servers, and then just forcing the software to all become fucked up walled gardens while the actual utilities everyone rests upon is left to rot.
Huh, I wonder why people holding that opinion would be on Lemmy…
Surely a coincidence.
I understand the message about needing to fund services to exist, but that stance I feel doesn’t always really work too well. Since if other users were like them then it’d also mean there might be a lot of stuff that doesn’t exist anymore which could be a pro like microtransactions ceasing to exist and move to subscription model failing.
And for YouTube might be completely different where depending on their taste maybe click baits turned people away if the person hated them, so those don’t exist. And long winded videos attempting to take advantage of the algorithm failed if they were someone who didn’t like videos that wasted their time, and everyone is like them.
Reddit might still support third party apps if everyone was like them, and lemmy bigger. That’s why if everyone was like them argument is just a weird one, since it turns minority actions into a majority and changes way too many things to focus on one singular thing.
But they have been, and for years. All the years I’ve run a smartphone Google has harvested and profited from my data. From Gmail to Chrome (before I switched) to Maps, etc - they have profited from people’s data at scale. So the argument that they need to make money somehow falls flat for me.
Also, if they charged like $2 a year to block ads, plenty of people would buy it. But like most things lately, the enshitification of our user experience continues. It’s not enough for companies like Google to “make money” - it’s never enough and their greed has no boundaries.
That’s why you see people like us pushing back - enough is enough.
Google doesn’t make money directly from harvesting your data, they make money from harvesting your data then showing you ads based on that data. So if you’re running an ad blocker then they aren’t making money from you (unless you pay them for stuff like subscriptions and apps). As ad blocking becomes more common they are definitely going to get more draconian to try to claw back that money (growth is infinite, profits must go up /s).
Also BTW Google probably makes more like $50 per user per year on average (looking at revenue and internet population) so they would never offer a $2/year ad block unless forced to by regulation.
That’s part of it, yes. But they can also sell ad companies demographic data - males aged 25-44 clicked on this or looked at that for example.
I highly doubt the number is that low.
To answer your questions - users such as this bring something more valuable than ad money. They bring data. Google harvests data and metrics on users in a million ways, packages this up, and sells it for considerably more than they make on ads. In free services such as this, YOU are the product.
Ads suck, nobody wants to watch them, and they simply represent google maximizing shareholder value at every opportunity, as they are legally bound to do under American capitalism. YouTube ads are not a critical revenue stream that will make or break them.
Copy-pasting this from a comment I made a few days ago. I’m so tired of this misconception. Google’s business model literally disincentivizes selling personal data. The business model is built on selling targeted advertisements. Google wants to keep this data to itself because it gives them a competitive advantage in the ad space.
Selling your data would give competitors power in the marketplace. So yes, Google collects data and uses it, but no, Google does not sell your data. It sells targeting BASED on your data.
Very different, regardless of if it is any better.
Not all interested buyers are in the ad business, and governments can make payments in a way that is difficult to audit from a third party perspective, definitely not in any currency or a change in the balance sheet. I wish things where different but seems to me that paying won’t protect me from them harvesting every bit they can.
YouTube creates no content and it’s reliant on people volunteering their time and talent to them. Fuck the idea that we need to pay google to access content they only host and don’t pay fairly for.
I will quite happily pay a reasonable price for the privilege of avoiding ads.
I understand why people block ads, even though they are a a free tier, even if I don’t agree with it.
The fact that the cost of YouTube Premium almost doubled overnight is making me rethink my ethics, when my current subscription is up for renewal, I will be reassessing whether to cease watching YouTube, watch YouTube with ads or determine another way of supporting content creators.
I won’t if the money goes to Google.
this.
i will happily support creators, but wont give money for google to continue their anti-internet quest.
You sound like you’d pay someone “with exposure” for their work.
I pay for Premium now since it includes music streaming which is convenient to use. If they raise the price too much, I’ll absolutely just go back to mp3s and deal with the ads on YouTube and just watch less content on there. $15 is about my cap before I do that.
Didn’t know about SponsorBlock until all this started. So many just found out ad blocking is possible.
Sponsor block is a different beast. Should we really be doing that to our content creators? No, definitely not. Is it them or the advertising company that suffers?
Edit: Actually really surprised about this. Couple weeks ago people are sticking up for YT premium prices. Now, you are against helping the creators you watch.
The company, because the creator gets paid either way
Agree. SponserBlock is just doing the clicking for me. I did the same thing manually for a long time as my regular youtoobers got sponsored. Good for them, but I don’t need to see it and they still got sponsored.
If you weren’t planning on paying for the product, the creator won’t take any hit from you using sponsorblock. In fact, the advertiser won’t either. Nobody will be hurt by it, because it was a massive waste of your time to start with.
Fair enough but you can’t plan on paying for a product before you have seen what it was.
Well, the blocker doesn’t stop me from seeing the ad, it stops me from wasting my time manually skipping the ad. I still don’t see how that’s going to change my mind about anything.
Also, if you were thinking of getting anything from a youtube ad: they are almost exclusively bad products. If you need something, just do a tiny bit of research instead of going with the first thing a content creator agreed to shill for.
Huh, Sponsorblock is basically muting TV ads like in the old days.
Why should I be forced to watch a sponsor almost always totally unrelated to the content I seek to watch, and that the YouTuber decided to upload?
It’s always some VPN making wild bullshit claims about what it can do for your privacy. I respect Tom Scott for refusing a VPN sponsorship because they wanted to make him lie.
Bingo. Buy a VPN for privacy just means, give us your data instead of your ISP.
Now, a VPN provider may very well be more trustworthy than your ISP! But then again, maybe not… That depends on your circumstances and risk profile.
He did eventually take one later on, which I can imagine must’ve been a bit of a painful decision ;-;
He declined the first one, because they wanted him to lie.
He accepted the other, because they were fine with just facts.
A VPN doesn’t protect your privacy. It only helps on websites without working https, which is ridiculously rare these days. Yes, it also hides your IP address, but that is really really irrelevant. If you wanted to stay truly anonymous you’d not log in anywhere and use Tor. The only actual use case is circumventing geo blocking.
You can also circumvent geo blocking with a proxy, some of them are free, do not send any sensitive info on the free proxies however, not that a paid one is intrinsicaly safer, just like vpns.
Because the creator gets paid by them to provide you with a free product. If that fails to be the case you get nothing.
My favorite aspect of sponsorblock is blocking the incredibly repetitive ubiquitous script that every single channel copies of like, subscribe, ring the notification bell.
This is actually why i don’t like it. Most of my subs do this kinda thing rarely but occasionally. Sponsorblock creates a gap in the video that is more jarring then the 1 second self promotion, wish there was an option to only block self promotions more then 4 seconds long.
I really can’t stand requests for likes, subscribes, notification bell at all. I actually hate it more than ads, and have backed out of many a video that didn’t happen to have the segment flagged at the beginning.
I’m not at my computer to check, but I’m like 70% sure you can set a minimum segment length for skipping.
You can still use sponsorblock and configure it to not skipping sponsor segments if you want, and still enjoying the benefits of automatically skipping useless segments such as intro, outro, subscription reminders, self promotion, recaps, etc.
I used to let some creators through, but it seems like ad sponsors are locking down on creators to fit their message, so I’ve started blocking everything since it’s just useless mush.
Whatever, either i have to manually switch forward or sponsorblock does it for me. Second option is less annoying.
You’re absolutely right. Sponsorblock directly harms the average people making content, it has nothing to do with Google.
It’s gross and reveals how much of the complaining about ads has absolutely nothing to do with privacy or malware or corporate profiteering or anything like that. These people are just nakedly selfish.
Wear those downvotes with pride. They mean you have a conscience and feel empathy.
Sponsors don't pay the creator less if you skip the sponsor segment. That's not tracked, at least not in a way that google will share with the creator or anyone else. If that changes someday, sure, you have a point. For now skipping the sponsor segment is as harmless as skipping through the commercials on TV.
Keyword here is for now. Just pushing them to be more intrusive. Yes they may incrementally become more intrusive in the future but it’s a decent trade-off for free content.
Cheers. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a response to a normal ethical take. We complain about wanting free and open source products but by the looks of it nobody is able to sit through a 20 second sponsor.
If we had everything on a free open source platform people would still skip the sponsored segment.
I feel if the sponsor blocks keep up we’ll start to see the creators or sponsors combat it in ways we really don’t like.
I watch YT about once a week and usually an hour or less. Premium isn’t worth it for that low of use. Sponsors, I skipped, always. I’ve never once purchased from a sponsor. I also skipped subscribe crap manually (I’m not logged in, I can’t).
SponsorBlock just does it for me, kinda nice. The creator gets paid by viewership so I have helped when I watch.
Lemmy isn’t seen by 98% of the public so my mentioning it hardly spreads further awareness. What did spread it was YT themselves cracking down. It made news headlines and my own mother asked I come over and install one.
YT Streisand Effected themselves. They demanded we not use them and got more people using them because of it.
Now, my mom won’t see Google ads anywhere, not just YT. What a smart move because I know there’s probably a million new UBlock users.
The content creators get paid the exact same whether I skip the sponsor segment or not. YouTube doesn't track that, or not in a way they share with anyone else at any rate. Sponsors aren't going to pay the content creators less due to skips since they literally cannot see who skips the segment.
In other words, it doesn't hurt the content creator in the slightest.
The other person’s been downvoted pretty heavily so I’ll volunteer to accept some.
Sponsorblock is a shitty tool for extremely selfish people that only hurts small-time content creators. You can’t argue about your data privacy, malware, corporate profits, or Google. Sponsorships are literally the least invasive and most direct form of financial support the average person can get for their content without you paying them directly. YouTubers do it because Google is already fucking them over. There’s absolutely no higher justification for it beyond annoyance at an extremely minor inconvenience and a sense of entitlement to the work of others.
You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom’s Auto Care if you could. Not every attempt at making money is evil.
If someone came out and shoved the banner in my face and didn’t let me watch the game until several seconds had elapsed, yes, I’d tear the banner down too. Because it’s unacceptable.
But no one does that. The banner sits there in the outfield on the wall being unobtrusive and not interrupting the game or the flow of the game. That’s acceptable.
Make the ads unobtrusive and not interrupt the flow of the video and I don’t care. The problem is YT / YTers don’t do that. That’s why Sponser Block exists.
The creator isn’t losing money. They get paid to do the sponsorship. Skipping the segment has no effect on how much money they get because they already got it.
I discovered SponsorBlock after installing Smart Tube Next on a FireTV.
I only heard about AdNauseum because of this whole debacle. It blocks ads, hasn’t temporarily broken (as far as I have seen), and I set it to “click” 80% of all ads it sees.
I have probably screwed whatever profile they built on me, cost the ad buyers money bc clicks, hurt the conversion rate for purchases to cost google money, and even possibly made money for my favorite creators and sites (depending on how they’re paid).
Though someone lmk if I am misunderstanding something about it.
Holy crap, now that is causing massive damage to advertisers. I didn’t know this existed either. If everyone used it, the entire internet would collapse because most of it is for-profit now, unlike 30 years ago (when I made my first site in notepad).
Meanwhile, Youtube engineers and uBlock Origin volunteers are in a war of attrition, updating both the website (youtube, to block ublock) and uBlock Origin (the ad blocker, to unblock the ublock blocker) multiple times a day every day
Yep, it's going to be a constant game of cat-and-mouse from now on. Google isn't going to relent on this.
Oh, of course not. But uBlock Origin and pihole aren’t going anywhere. Hell, they’d probably have to get legislation to slow it down, but good luck fighting that battle. Hollywood’s war against piracy is a good comparison.
something something offer a better service than the pirates
Exactly. We’ve come a long way from $6/m netflix. I would rather give up youtube than pay them $10/m. I GLADLY paid $1/m to a twitch adblocker the other day. Ill pay, but not fucking $10/m when I can avoid it with some complications for free.
I’m scared that that’s the endgame here. By educating people about ad blockers, they might be purposely tanking their business model so they can cry to the government to ban ad blockers to save them.
Not even, they’ve already tried to make the case of Anti-adblock bypass violating DMCA and it hasn’t gone anywhere. Unlike piracy where it can and is claimed as a violation of copyright law.
Shoutout to /r/PiHole
Is that how this works over here?
I think its c/Pihole
but I haven’t figured it our yet
/c/PiHole ?
Edit: that doesn’t work as a one tap link.
Reminds me of the IM wars back in the latter 90s / early 00s. At one point, briefly, AIM and Trillian were pushing updates to negate each other every few hours.
I feel like uBlock Origin has been coming out ahead more often than not. I haven’t had to manually refresh my lists for the last few days.
.
Lmao
Cry more, google
but i saw another article saying that adblocker usage dropped by like … meh i dunno 80% or some awful figure that I didn’t want to believe.
i’d rather live in the version of the world where this one is true, that nobody is installing adblockers, but i know better (sometimes) than to simply succumb to confirmation bias…
if youtube were smart though, it’d make ads less shitty, intrusive, and obnoxious.
If you read the article (or the comments), you’d know the title is misleading. People are uninstalling ad blockers because they’re installing better ones.
ahhhhh there it is.
so the other article was akin to youtube celebrating that the car that ran them over stopped, without acknowledging that it only did so to shift into reverse and back over them again. heh.
More like this
<img alt="" src="https://www.memesportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/3n5odv.jpg">
I saw that one from Wired but didn’t post it because the body itself referenced increased installations of some adblockers. The title seemed like a strange conclusion to draw from it all.
I commented elsewhere, but the headline was referencing an 80% rise in uninstalls during the month, but the article itself revealed that there was a matching rise in installs during that same month. In other words it was people uninstalling their old adblockers and installing a new one, cycling through them to find one that worked.
I really like freetube on desktop, since I have liked the move towards less dependency on accounts. And freetube let’s me have a custom feed without needing an account.
And I love the built in sponsorblock and channel blocking feature too.
+1 for FreeTube. It’s so customizable. Besides the ad blocking and sponsor blocking by default, there are SO MANY features and interface improvements. Never going back.
The only problem I have with it is I can’t like videos. As much as people push it, I still want to do it for the people I watch.
But that’s not worth dealing with Youtube’s BS
I’ll be honest I didn’t even know you could log in to YouTube with it. I assumed most people would be using it to actively not participate. By using it you’re already taking ad revenue away and skipping sponsored segments.
I was looking at freetube as a potential solution, as at a quick glance, it seems to do most of the things I want. But honestly, I doubt it will be long before they start implementing systems to block such apps from being able to access YouTube content.
After YouTube started filling their search results with mostly shorts, I stopped using it for new stuff. It’s terrible now.
I found an extension that gets rid of the shorts, thank god
Also if you have enhancer it has an option to turn off the shorts bar and convert shorts to real videos.
I started blocking those from appearing when they first showed up. There are a number of ways to do it. The Blocktube extension is one.
Thank you for this
if you click ublock, select the settings cog, then in the tab that opens select ‘my filters’, you can enter the following to do the same thing:
www.youtube.com##.ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scopePersonally I avoid installing too many extentions as they are quite literally apps that auto open whenever you just want to browse the web (regardless of if you’re going to youtube, you’re computer runs a youtube specific adblock)
Yeah youtubes attempt at being tiktok is just awful and they don’t even have options to not have shorts show up in the feed. On top of shorts just being inferior versions of regular videos without functional controls
This is what gets me. Wanna show me shorts? Ok. But why the fuck am I not allowed to rewind a couple of seconds if I want to? It’s an artificial, completely useless limitation that had no place in 2023.
So, no thanks.
They’re not even doing a good job at cloning TT. You’ve been able to seek in TT videos for a long time now lol
For what it’s worth you can replace the “short” in the url with “watch” to get the old interface back.
There are obviously also extensions/userscripts that do that for you and convert all shorts into regular videos.
Truly thou art a diety
Most of my browser addons are aimed at making YouTube usable. Hiding shorts is priority one
I switched to FreeTube and now all the shorts are on a separate page I can switch over to if I feel like watching them. It’s also got SponsorBlock built in. Now I can enjoy youtube with a clean, faster interface and google isn’t tracking a damn thing. All because google got greedy and made their user experience shit.
Google didn’t get greedy, it’s doing what it’s been doing for years. Before resorting to plunging us into Matrix-like pods, they’re trying to squeeze some more data out of users.
I only wish PiP worked the way it does in Firefox, not in Edge/Chromium. I like to have my browser next to full height video on my ultrawide, but PiP will not go beyond 1080 pixels tall.
First thing I did when the shorts spam apocalypse started, was create custom ublock filters to strip them out of youtube as much as I could. Too bad I didn’t back them up before my system decided to go poof.
I just copied them over from here. Works for me.
letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts
Thanks for the hint! I mostly just ignored the shorts, but I just added that filter list to uBlock in firefox on android and it is much more pleasant when they’re not there in the first place.
for real the discovery is terrible. it’s all junk and it’s a waste of my time.
Yeah, I hate how crappy search now is.
It’ll show me a couple of videos, then shorts, then some kind of recommendation list. If I actually want to do a complete search for the thing, and only the thing, I’m looking for, I have to go to advanced options and specify I’m looking for videos. JUST videos.
I don’t even care about the shorts showing up in search results. What really irks me is that you get like 3 videos related to search results, then some random unrelated shit, 3 relevant videos, more unrelated garbage, and then the rest of the actually relevant videos. I am specifically searching for something, just show me the damn thing.
.
Yes. The way the default search now works is that, when you search you get:
If you want to get just your search results, cutting away shorts, playlists, and the recommendations that take up the majority of the search page, you’ll have to open up the filters and click on “videos” on the cl tent type list. Then you actually get to see the search results.
Thanks for the tip, I’ll try that next time. Even though it’s infuriating that it’s necessary in the first place
the shorts tend to be so bad and pointless. occasionally there is someone who makes an effort, but the number of low effort and garbage ones made me stop looking at shorts ever.
Send email to your fav. Youtubers to start a channel on Odyssey. Hope we get a comparable alternative. Odyssey is pretty good. Load time is less and video quality is great. Just need content creators. Does anyone know if Odyssey pays its content creators?
Odyssey, kick , rumble etc all need apps on motr devices
Thanks. Now I know kick and rumble exist. Can you share the link please
Well, the content is more focused on the Right rather than center-left to left-wing.
Good reason to invite some of the Left, too!
I’m not sure it’s a platform that should be promoted. It is incredibly laden with alt right content, even worse than the stuff YouTube frequently attempts to drive me toward. It’s also just another publicly traded company. It’s affiliated with that Truth Social stuff as well.
Because those were set up under the idea of ‘free peach’, not under the idea of ‘this neoliberal demonic brood is sucking us dry’… The others just think that YouTube is leaving money laying around by kicking nazis off. I suggest leaving them alone in their safe space.
Odyssey
Kick
Rumble
Cheers bro
Edit: what the hell?
Sorry, they’re the first results on Google if you search “rumble” and “kick” so I figured you’d have already found them 😅.
It’s just rumble.com and kick.com. Rumble is packed with alt right content though. I always knew it as RT’s favourite platform.
.
The Grayjay app supports these sites already (Android only)
Screenshot spoiler
<img alt="" src="https://images2.imgbox.com/17/f4/Glkw2m9M_o.png">
Grayjay is incredible, honestly.
Yes but what platforms is gray Jay on
Odysee is based on Lbry, so content creators can get crypto that is openly tradeable for regular money. So yes.
Anything that get even near crypto might make a lot of content creators think twice before moving. I know I would.
Which is really unfortunate because there are some actually useful, neat projects
I believe it, but crypto's reputation is forever stained by the shitshow that happened, and it won't change in the near future.
Which shitshow? Imo that’s like saying the internet is forever stained by whatever “shitshow” there was. It’s just a technology, there are good and bad applications
The GPU market being wrecked by motherfuckers that wanted to build crypto farms, the cryptocurrency scams, the NFTs, etc.
And the greatest problem of all with crypto is that it is a solution for a non-existing problem. The web worked fine without it and it proved to be way more stable than crypto ever could.
It’s not a non-existing problem.
For example, I live in Russia, and the only way for me to support creators I like is sending them crypto. All traditional channels were blocked by sanctions; crypto can’t be. Besides, it’s irreplaceable for political activists and many other people who can be cut off funding on a whim.
I’m not a crypto maximalist saying Bitcoin should replace national currencies, but I understand the value and power of crypto. It does have its place in the world.
As for mining, primary reason for GPU market shitstorm (which affected me personally as a non-miner and gamer) was mining Ethereum, which has now changed its validation model and does not need any GPUs anymore.
Cryptocurrency scams and NFT bubbles are real, and I urge people to he aware of them. But it doesn’t mean crypto should die.
Oh sure I’m not a huge fan of the GPU shortages, though very few crypto things need them anymore
Depends entirely on where you live and if you trust your government, but yes the USA and most Europen countries are fine in general. I personally just prefer anything that can be decentralized. That’s why I’m on Lemmy, after all, haha
So no.
Depending on how you look at it. It’s not perfect, but it is something, and it allows creators profits to scale up with the platform. I’d like if they’d get a choice between that and traditional payouts, though, and recognize Odysee/Lbry is not the final holy grail for hosting video content.
Like a week ago, the company behind Odyssey lost a lawsuit and will be shutting down. As of now, no one knows what happens to Odyssey in the future. Maybe some other company buys it and continues to run it. Maybe it changes into something totally different. Maybe it just shuts down.
Tried it. The front page is nothing but conspiracy and crypto bullshit. So no, thanks.
Hah. Eat shit and die youtube.
There are no better adblockers, uBlock Origin is all you need and is already updated to bypass it.
Unlock origin is the adblocker that people are installing. There are a lot of people with shitty adblockers out there, I guess they are switching.
I bet all those people with shitty adblockers are also probably googling better ad/YT compatible blockers lmaoo
I searched “YouTube adblocker” on both google and DDG. The first mention of ublock origin was in the 1st page of Google (just at the bottom, under “recommended adblockers for Firefox”, the 2nd option). There was no mention of it on DDG, even though I clicked “more results” once (so searched the equivalent of 2 pages). The problem with Google search is not google, it’s SEO, that affects all search engines.
To be fair someone that uses DDG most likely already has ublock origin.
Can confirm. I use DuckDuck Go and uBlock.
Thing is, searching with DDG takes time to get used to, as it doesn’t work the same way as Google. Google uses a lot of convenient algorithms that are also a double edged sword.
uBlock or uBlock Origin?
Eh… Um… Know what? Probably should’ve guessed that there would be a uBlock Not-The-Origin if there is a uBlock Origin.
Yeah, I meant uBlock Origin.
I just tried it and there’s plenty of results to Reddit references to U block origin on Firefox.
You’re clearly making an assumption here
You missed the joke, completely
I just made my own extension to get rid of ads. I didn’t want to wait for other blockers to figure it out so I found a way that worked for me.
But yeah, get fucked YouTube.
So what was the way to ultimately crush YouTube ads?
Oh I definitely don’t have a better plan than ublock origin folks, they are still the best. But there’s also a way to programmatically exploit the skipable ads to instantly skip without any countdown shenanigans. It’s not blocking the ads but I never see them. And it was a good stopgap for when the shit first hit the fan.
Great work and a little creativity :)
Respect for that!
NewPipe in my mobile and FreeTube in my desktop. Fuck you Google
it’s only a matter of time before those don’t work anymore
True, but there will be New Solutions. Or no YT for me at least. I am not willing to watch a single stupid add. Not one.
you’re an overflowing toilet of optimism
That’s what Youtube is trying. Either pay or at least stop using it, so you don’t cost them money.
Been using these apps for years, when YT does their crap the community gets it fixed and rolled out within a few days (worst has been two weeks).
Lots of thankless devs and contributors dedicated to preventing YouTube from screwing us over!
client validation will kill these forever
It will always be a technology race. And it’s one that so far the content platforms have lost.
Especially given they always abuse the upper hand when they have it, motivating the coding community to solve that problem right quick.
it’s a race that they will win easily with something like this github.com/RupertBenWiser/…/explainer.md#goals
go ahead and downvote me it will help you make your point
I’ll do my part in helping you make your point, sir!
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9ef88b39-a103-4c45-a9e1-21202cf570f2.webm">
While it’s unlikely that they won’t attempt to get something similar to WEI onto the internet at some point, they have recently given up on this iteration of the concept.
true statements
I agree with you that such efforts are always a threat, and I’m reminded both of the V-Chip and the current efforts in the UK to keep blokes from watching their porn (anonymously, that is, without ending up on a registry of porn watchers), what may end up adding the right to porn access as a specific chartered right in our universal charters (and some national / state charters). Here in California, the right to produce porn is explicitly established in state law, which is embarrassing to some, a point of pride to others.
The MPAA and RIAA also tried to get all the ISPs to agree to shut down (or throttle) service after twelve strikes by an anti-piracy board, who would track the IP addies of torrents. This fueled the development of magnet links (now the standard). And meant that Xfinity and AT&T had to be extra shitty to customers due to causes they don’t care about, while folks are already desperate to disconnect from them in favor of an alternative. So they haven’t really be enforcing it.
And yes, Google is retreating on the WEI thing for now (if only they could get the federal government to pass a law) but the blowback on an eventual universal DRM is going to be severe, including revealing to the world that TPMs don’t do what they are supposed to do as explained to the end-user, making them hostile architecture. It’ll also potentially send increased traffic (and increased business) into the EU, or out of the US into less traceable regions, and get the determined end-user interested in the dark net, because watching a cat video without ads now requires the same savvy as getting access to CSAM, active revolutionary news and restricted chemistry configurations.
What will be more interesting to me are the consequences I haven’t imagined. To quote a favorite princess, The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
Anyway, the go ahead and downvote me line is creepy, and brushes against poisoning the well I don’t downvote dissenting opinions, (and can’t, anyway from my Lemmy instance).
This is the way.
Try LibreTube on mobile.
It crashes every time I try to open a video
Check which version you’re on. If it’s not 0.19.0 you need to update. F-Droid now has the newest version.
Ok fixed thanks
I went the route of accepting their 2-month trial of Premium, and immediately disabled it from continuing after the 2 months. Hopefully that’s enough time to come up with an acceptable solution that works the way I want it to. Honestly, if Premium was like $5/month, they’d get my money. But for almost triple that? Fuck no, never happening.
Triple for now. After a while they will quadruple it. People will be a paying 100$+ on subscription fees
There was a post yesterday saying that the price of YT Premium Family in Australia is almost literally doubling next month (+88% IIRC). People from a few other regions reported similar. Completely insane.
They should fucking do an experiment - 2€/$ a month for an ad-free subscription and 3€/$ a month for higher video quality+no ads subscription. I would fucking pour my money into it.
Oh wait, that would not solve lack of sponsorblock. I guess I am not interested then…
Not a penny to those bastards. Should YouTube and Google along with it rot to hell, I don’t care. Maybe we’d finally get better alternatives running at full capacity.
And who will pay for those?
People valuing the content and the platform.
For now our best chance for free platform is Odysee/Lbry - at least crypto bros can keep tue platform running for the sake of it. Or PeerTube, but less likepy since it’s more enthusiasm-driven, and enthusiasm only gets you so far.
Also, Nebula, CuriosityStream and other similar subscription services are good - and people pay for them.
I pay for Youtube, but I’m clearly in the minority. Look at all the pitchforks in this thread not willing to pay one cent or watch one ad but demanding the content…
There is a difference, though, and I know why those pitchforks are raised. YouTube is a video service behemoth, and it is owned by Google, a Big Tech company that has little respect for its users. It is one of the last things most Lemmy users (known on average for their hate of Big Tech, hence why we don’t have this discussion on Reddit) would want to support.
Many of them would, and some do, support alternatives. But there is just nothing to the scale of YouTube, which exacerbates the problem as users often have nowhere else to go. And so they will do their best to use YouTube in a way that gives 0 benefits to Google, and will only be happy to see this giant fall and replaced by something more user-centric, free from corporate control, and privacy-friendly.
I appreciate that, but I don’t think the vast majority support alternatives. It’s just “I want it free and I want it now”.
Also, if you don’t support Google you most probably don’t support the creators, very few of them have patreon or similar and just rely on ad revenue/sponsors.
I am not bothered by Google at all, at least in the EU you have pretty good control about the data they collect and I feel it’s used well. I get pretty good recommendations on YouTube and the ads I get on other sites are at least somewhat relevant.
I see the chances of a competitor replacing it and being more privacy-friendly close to none. Maybe TikTok will replace YouTube over as GenZ takes over, and I see that as a solid negative.
They literally had that experiment with Premium Light. €6 for ad free watching, it was all I needed. But they literally sent out a mail they were stopping this tier right before they started implementing more anti-ad blocking measures.
Oddly enough, the “lite” subscription was introduced in some other countries during the time they shut it off in the launch countries.
I wonder if they’re testing willingness to spend using the cheaper sub, then pulling it if it turns out people are likely to buy the pricier plan once the lower tier isn’t available anymore?
I had the light subscription for over a year, not planning on paying for useless stuff like the music stuff though. Had it through a family plan years before and it was laughably bad compared to Spotify.
I’m personally a fan of YT Music, glad we’ve got some options though!
Options are of course great. What makes YT music a better option than Spotify Premium for you if I might ask? I found when I was trying it years ago it didn’t seem to have an all encompassing music library. (It not having 10 years of playlists and recommendations that I do actually enjoy for new music is something I missed but couldn’t count against it as a product ofcourse)
I much prefer the UI and it (used to?) allow uploading my own music where the offering was lacking. Notably, Spotify also didn’t have these songs, so having them in one library is great. The recommendations are also spot on for me, but like you said that could be attributed to having used it for a long while (used Play Music pretty much from its inception).
Considering I’d want to pay to get rid of ads on YouTube too having the music service bundled is a bonus. I used to pay for the music service standalone before that.
I bet that Spotify will do just fine now, although last time I tried (some time last year) I didn’t immediately like the UI, and the shuffle seemed to work oddly in large playlists. What it does have over YT Music for sure is integrations with other parties, I wish YT was better in that regard.
Thanks for the feedback, my most recent car does have a native YT music app so if I can keep a decent music library along with no ads it would be worth considering.
And Spotify shuffle in large playlist was plain broken for years indeed. I could have 1000+ songs in a list and shuffle would loop 20 of them.
I completely agree the price is far too high.
I actually do subscribe but only because I get a deal through my mobile network that, long story short, cuts the price by two thirds.
I can’t understand their pricing policy at all. And they’re doing a terrible job at explaining their cost basis if it’s actually what it costs to serve video to us (highly doubt it).
Linus Tech Tips did a nice video on that: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDsJJRNXjYI
But it should not be done by LTT, but by Google.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=MDsJJRNXjYI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This is basically Nebula lol, minus the video quality tiering
Meh I had nebula a couple years ago and it had some missing features and fairly poor depth of content. The same few bits constantly being pushed. I’m hopeful it improves but I wasn’t using it.
Nebula is pretty awesome and the type of content is great. I miss some light entertainment content though, so the network effect is at work. Still, nebula is the only streaming platform I’d consider subscribing as their policy is great and they do provide good value.
I’m not really certain what value nebula provides other than some creators uploading occasional content exclusively on nebula. Without nebula they’d just… Upload it to YouTube, which is free, so I’m not sure what the difference is
Nebula can only afford to do that because basically nobody who subs to nebula actually watches the videos on it. They did a video about their revenue model and people treat it as a way to support the creators, not to actually watch content
Could Nebula work as a Patreon-competitor. Patreon as a company is totally fucked iirc - the investors are treating the company like a piggy bank, which is a shame because it is easily a profitable and viable company.
They’d absolutely 100% be losing money with a $2 ad free tier. Ads make significantly more than that per user per month. Same with your “”“solution”“” for higher res video. Bandwidth is goddamn expensive.
I agree, but they’d get a large number of users to subscribe.
And then maybe they wouldn’t complain when they raised the price to $3. And a few months later maybe $3.50. Then $5.
A few years ago, people wouldn’t have paid over $15 for a standard Netflix tier without 4K. But the way to boil a frog is to make them nice and comfy in lukewarm water, then keep increasing the temperature slowly… So even if they lose money, maybe a low price for the ad-free YouTube could make sense, from a business perspective.
Every time Netflix rises prices it makes it to the news (let alone all the drama on twitter/reddit/etc), I don’t know what frog boiling you’re talking about.
Yet they keep posting more and more profits. Subscriber count has only increased despite the content being lower quality and prices being higher. The fact that we don’t like them increasing the prices doesn’t mean it isn’t working for them.
I’m not arguing it will work forever, but for now, it’s been a viable strategy.
Plus, no way would it ever stay at that price. Nothing ever does. The only service I pay for now is spotting, and that’s just to have ad-free music on my half-hour drive to work.
No. Never. I’d rather stop using YT at all than giving in to coerced user-tracking.
For desktop install and use “FreeTube”.
Alternatively for your android phone you can use “GrayJay”
Never. Pay. For. YouTube. Premium
I assume you need to be rooted for Gray Jay?
I really hope not
You don’t need root because this is its own app unlike the apps like revance which patch your existing YouTube app.
You don’t need root for ReVanced. It can patch an APK from storage.
No, it works fine for me. It’s just an apk.
grayjay.app
NewPipe still works well for me on Android.
I mean, I might have considered paying for YT premium if I thought it offered some value (other than disabling ads) but I won’t sure as hell pay for anything that any company is trying to blackmail me into.
I mean you didn’t buy it before so why would you now? You don’t need excuses. You just don’t want to pay for it. Own it.
One could argue that we’re paying for it without our consent, given the fact that Google doesn’t pay anything in taxes. That’s a cool four billion a year (at least) that they get from the American taxpayer for free.
One could argue that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. That doesn’t make it remotely true.
Uh. Google pays a shitload in taxes. There hasn’t been a single year that they HAVEN’T paid taxes. They paid 11 billion in income taxes alone in 2022.
But that’s the wrong way around. They don’t want you to pay, they make their money through advertising. They make far more money from advertiser’s paying to put up ads than they ever make from people paying for premium.
Same as with Facebook now bringing in an ad-free version (in the EU anyway) - they charge higher than is reasonable so that people will opt for the ad-supported free version instead.
It’s not that you are blackmailed into paying premium, it’s that you’re encouraged not to as a way of explicitly consenting to ads.
Basically, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
That makes a lot of sense.
lmao you’re so wrong on ads being more profitable than premium, especially on a per-user basis
According to this you can expect to make around $18/1000 views. That’s with 55% going to the creator and 45% to Google. Which means that Google makes around $14.5 per 1000 views.
Coincidentally, that’s also rougly the price of YouTube Premium. Are you telling me that you watch a thousand videos per month?
I use it because YouTube music is included and it’s great while driving, it allows background play even with the screen off (I’m talking about mobile).
There’s something more, but nothing that a pro user cannot already do with third tools.
I find it funny how sometimes apps “create value” by taking something away which is included by default in similar products and goes without saying.
In this context: YouTube is the only app I know which is denying to work when put into background or with the screen off.
Or take some car manufacturers who start asking for a fee just to use basic functionality.
Abandoning YouTube is seriously more difficult than abandoning other “non-fediverse” general social media platforms, since it’s got so much useful content that gets straight up ruined by the company that owns the website.
I doubt PeerTube is anything better than Vimeo, at least for now, things can improve after all.
At this point, I don’t even care about the user tracking. I just don’t want to sit through unskippable ads anymore. Especially when it’s the same ad over and over again.
Well then you’re in luck, you have a lot of options for removing ads before giving money to YouTube.
Idk if others are unaware, but there is a simple way to just google a video and not get ads. That is all i will say.
I love that all the centralized social media networks are scrambling to become shitty for profits right around the time users are realizing that they don’t need centralized servers to host their user-generated content. Users can take their content wherever they want and let these platforms die.
It’s like we’re reverting to the days you would go to homestarrunner.com, illwillpress, etc to see content from people you actually wanted to see content from. Honestly looking forward to it
Great Jorb!
I said you did a great jeeeeaaaeeeeoooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrb!
This 100%. Look at forums. Back in the early days, there were lots of little independent forums. Sites like Reddit took over because you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page. We gained convenience, but didn’t think too hard about what we were losing or who we were losing it to. Then along came enshittification and we are collectively realizing what we lost. Federation is of course the solution. As I see it, the only missing piece is monetization. Platforms like YouTube make it easy to monetize page views, Twitter / X is doing the same. That’s much harder in the fediverse.
Patreon for monification?
Ads suck. And honestly, if we had less content creators, they’d be fine. There are a lot of absolutely degenerates out there. Let’s cull the herd a bit and let us speak individually with our wallets.
That’s a fair point. Patreon, or whatever comes next, needs to drastically reduce friction. That by the way is why Amazon is so successful, reducing purchase friction. Right now if you have something that a million people will take for free, and you start to charge just one penny for it, your audience of a million will drop to like 12. Not because people don’t want to spend a penny, but because they don’t want to fill out a form and put in their name address credit card number expiration date security code phone number email address etc. If there was a button they could click that was like ‘instant donate 5 cents’ most people would click that a lot.
The closest thing I’ve heard to that was a crypto called basic attention token, which aimed to do just that. They are making a big mistake though in that they are only integrating with Brave browser rather than making a universal plug-in. So the idea of a universal solution is still a ways off I guess. But I think to make it zero friction it will have to be crypto based in some way.
RSS feeds have provided this experience for years. The problem is that a lot of sites stopped serving RSS feeds for their content. But sites like rss.app and openrss can be used to get RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them.
RSS is great for content consumption. It’s a shame that many sites stopped serving it- same thing with podcasts, now everyone wants you to listen on this or that platform instead of just publishing a normal RSS feed full of MP3 files.
That said though, RSS doesn’t help for participation, it’s a one-way tech.
I guess if you have forums that put out RSS feeds you could aggregate them together for post titles, but that’s still clumsy. Lemmy does it much more elegantly.
My understanding of RSS is that it’s basically a list of metadata and links for content… Its always seemed to me to be a great way to aggregate the content you want to see. He did specifically mention keeping an Identity across multiple forums and I’m not aware of any RSS implementation that provides that functionality though… are you? That’s a huge feature to miss if we’re talking about social link aggregators like Reddit and Lemmy.
Yeah, sorry I was specifically replying to part about seeing the content from communities (or everything on the internet, really) in one view. Keeping your identity across multiple forums is platform-specific and would be solved by Lemmy directly. RSS feeds would just give you the updates and the links directly to the content. But once you click through to go to each website, you’d just be using your already-logged-in state on the platform.
One of the main advantages of RSS is that it doesn’t track you or require an account for it to work. As you said it’s only a XML or JSON file wth the latest items posted on the website.
I’m not sure if we manage to do the same for video though; hosting these costs a lot more.
Maybe we don’t need 4K 60FPS video to show Mr. Beast giving away more crap. Just because we can up the quality, doesn’t mean we should. Or maybe client-side real-time AI upscaling will make this a non-issue.
Call me old fashioned but I’d rather see high native quality available for when it is relevant. If I’m watching gameplay footage (as one example) I would look at the render quality.
With more and more video games already trying to use frame generation and upscaling within the engine, at what point is too much data loss? Depending on upscaling again during playback means that you video experience might depend on which vendor you have - for example, an Nvidia computer may upscale differently from an Intel laptop with no DGPU vs an Android running on 15% battery.
That would become even more prominent if you’re evaluating how different upscaling technologies look in a given video game, perhaps with an intent to buy different hardware. I check in on how different hardware encoders keep up with each other with a similar research method. That’s a problem that native high resolution video doesn’t have.
I recognize this is one example and that there is content where quality isn’t paramount and frame gen and upscaling are relevant - but I’m not ready to throw out an entire sector of media for this kind of gain on some media. Not to mention that not everyone is going to have access to the kind of hardware required to cleanly upscale, and adding upscaling to everything (for everyone who’s not using their PS5/Xbox/PC as a set top media player) is just going to drive up the cost of already very expensive consumer electronics and add yet another point of failure to a TV that didn’t need to be smart to begin with.
The quality is something that depends on the content. If the video is just someone talking, 4K is overkill. And not every gameplay has to be recorded forever. Only the good ones. And even the videos can be rescaled after some time if nobody sees them.
I mean, didn’t Vine fail even with mostly low-quality videos? I’m assuming even 720p could be a challenge for a decentralized site.EDIT: Apparently I was misremembering
It didn’t fail, twitter shut it down
I distinctly remember reading that on somewhere reputable but it seems you’re right. Thanks for the fact check.
Is there some reason you can’t start up a decentralized content hosting platform. Just let anyone with a spare hd and a spare pc at home join up?
Like I guess I don’t really want anything illegal on my PC… Maybe this plan is awful.
This exists. For example, for general decentralized storage, there’s storj.io, and there’s PeerTube. But I guess there’s a reason it’s not more widespread. I’d happily be proven wrong, though.
Umm no, NewPipe is not a website. That would be invidious/piped.
What happened to the idea of small, non-intrusive banner ads? Of course it’s not realistic to expect those on YouTube and they bring much less revenue compared to in-your-face video interstitials per impression, but I’m much more likely to whitelist those.
You answered your own question:
And shortsighted profit driven thinking - can make a load more money now even if some users are pissed off, don’t worry about long term user retention. Oh what!?! The usersbase is pissed and leaving/blocking things, better double down to keep them profits high in the mean time…
Can’t believe I’m actually missing the days of the “you’re the 1000th visitor” banner ads.
They don’t make any money.
I quit YouTube because the ads were overwhelming, and quality content is so rare.
There is a ton of quality content, I watch 3 hours a day and can’t make a dent on my “watch later” queue.
News, popular science, hobbies, humor, tech…
How do you find it, all I seem to get is trash and if I have to hear the phrase “like and subscribe” one more time I’ll scream?
Ironically that is how you get better content. If you don’t engage and let the algorithm find you content, you’re going to get generic crap. Unfortunately. You can use logged-in Youtube to find stuff and NewPipe to watch it.
I have to agree with this. As much as we all hate the algorithm because it’s what brings us those thumbnails and annoying begging from creators it actually works. It just takes time to find some good people. Though I wouldn’t mind a post on lemmy with everyone sharing their favorites.
Brain
Steve Mould, Smarter Every Day, Real Engineering, Vsauce, NightHawkInLight, NileRed, How to Make Everything
Food
Joshua Weissman, Guga Foods, Sous Vide Everything, Andy Cooks, Uncle Haji’s Kitchen, Tasting History with Max Miller, Babish Culinary Universe, Yueng Man Cooking
Chill
Serpa Design, MD Fish Tanks, Ben’s Worx, NileBlue, ClickSpring, The Samurai Carpenter, Kris Harbour, Just Alex, Ly Thi Ca, Hoàng Huong, Primitive Skills (these last 3 are silent channels from Vietnam. I’ve linked them since these are hard to search for in a sea of that type of content)
Entertainment
mrnigelng, Will Stelter, Thack Ironworks, shurap, Frog Leap Studios, Andrew Huang, Rob Scallon, look mum no computer
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Ly Thi Ca
Hoàng Huong
Primitive Skills
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Well I for one love Both Hank and John Green, Smarter Everyday, Lock Picking Lawyer, Nilered, Jdraper, Kyle Hill, Electroboom, Project Farm, Dr Gloucomflecken, Casual Geographic, Villain Support, Tested, Tom Scott, Frog Leap Studios, Natural Habitat Shorts, Oxventure, Kerzgeszagt, and Glen and Friends Cooking to name a few.
Not sure why people are downvoting you, fuck them. I love several of those channels. Especially “in a nutshell”.
I said something somewhere that pissed off someone who’s probably got more than one account. No worries.
Friendlyjordies (main and podcast), Hello Future Me, Louis Rossman, Tom Nicholas, Abroad in Japan, Crunchycat, James Tullos, stephen tries, sidemen, rachel and jun, jun’s kitchen, healthygamergg are a bunch off my watch later list.
Use sponsorblock and you won’t get any of that like and subscribe shit.
what are you interested in? everytime I dip my toe into a new interest I’m always blown away by the sheer volume and quality available on YouTube. right now I’m using it to supplement duolingo to help learn a new language, something I never tried before
There’s been like 3 Spiritbox music videos released this week alone!
Watching YouTube 3 hours a day seems really unhealthy. Not judging, just pointing out.
People watching TV is also un healthy. Going outside your home is also unhealthy XD
If you watch the news and one movie you also reach 3 hours.
I watch 30 min in the morning while getting ready (usually late night shows from the previous day - mostly listening), 30 minutes to an hour during lunch (LTT, MKBHD, other tech channels or maybe a car review) and a longer session in the evening when the kids are in bed (documentaries or chess tutorials, or programming content, or something longer/more in depth where I can dedicate my full attention).
I don’t find it really unhealthy, works for me.
There’s tons of old movies and TV shows on YouTube. That alone is hours of content worth watching if you can block the ads.
And they increased the fucking price for YouTube premium.
I don’t think they did a proper cost-benefit analysis for this one. Feels like the new CEO learned of ad blockers and put down a diktat.
No, I think the advertisers learned of ad blockers and started putting pressure on the new CEO. “Why am I paying you $X,000,000 for an ad buy that people can just block? And you’re not doing anything about it?!”
So they put some development resources behind it, make some noise, get the internet in a tizzy, so the advertisers feel like they’re being heard and listened to and some progress is being made. Then later they can say, “hey look, less than 1% of ads are being blocked on our platform but views have gone up by 6%, so we’ll only increase the ad cost by 5% this year and call it even.”
Boom, everyone wins and they can drop it, at the cost of just a little bit of their dignity and self-respect.
I’m pretty sure advertisers aren’t paying for ads that get blocked.
It doesn’t matter whether they do or not, it’s about whether they think they do or not.
The advertisers are only paying for seen ads, not ads that are blocked.
And people that block ads weren’t likely to click on any to begin with, which benefits advertisers because they get a higher clickthrough rate.
Google doesn’t want to be providing a good service to anyone though, they want money. Low clickthrough with high views makes Google more money (and costs the advertisers more money and the viewers more time).
It doesn’t matter whether they do or not, it’s about what they think.
They reduced the price!
And forcibly added a YouTube music sub to the price…
The music subscription service is older than YouTube Premium. It started as Google Play Music, then YouTube Premium was rolled in, then they replaced Google Play Music with YouTube Music.
The ol’ switcheroo-to-boost-youtube-premium-subscribers-to-make-it-look-good-to-shareholders trick.
I had a google play music subscription. They bundled it into YouTube, dumped the play music app, and it’s equivalent on the YouTube platform is garbage, never understanding that hey, sometimes people don’t have a data connection and failing to load even the songs in my phone.
I considered dropping it then and going over to Spotify then, this price hike might be what finally does it.
The race is on. Bitch.
I don’t know what the whole fuzz was / is about, it’s years now that I unwillingly watched ads, anywhere. So easy, piehole, newpipe, avoid any Microsoft shit, you just have to be ready to learn a bit, it’s not rocket science. Ok, rocket science helped, but that’s not the point…
I have to learn??!! Fuck it where do I sign up for you’re pro or whatever
/$
im sorry but thats not reasonable for the average person. sponsorblock and ublock sure, but when you get to pihole there are a lot of barriers.
Firefox with ublock / Libretube / Libretube with Sponsorblock / Newpipe / Piped website if not on mobile.
EDIT: I currently use Firefox with uBlock on desktop and Libretube with Sponsorblock (integrated) on android.
Does any of those support YouTube shorts?
Firefox with ublock without any problems, and on my smart tv with smarttubenext I see them as well.
Newpipe on android doesn’t seem to show them, but I haven’t really looked for it either, maybe I’m just missing a setting somewhere.
Yes / yes / yes / no / yes
God, I hope not
What a lame comment.
Is it? I don’t like shorts and I don’t like them cluttering up my feed. On desktop I can simply turn them off with an extension. On mobile, I’ll constantly get bombarded by content I don’t care for with no way to turn it off. So yeah, i hope not
What does that have to do with the person’s question though? They asked if it includes shorts and you just responded with an ice cold take.
I have an extension that hides shorts from my feed. the other day I used my account on the ps4/TV and oh my… shorts everywhere.
I need a way to block specific channels too (or mute them) without unsubscribing as there’s one in particular I want to remain subbed too (it’s a community thing) but over his bullshit 6 videos a day spam
Shorts are basically YouTube videos forced into a custom UI. There are still ways to force Shorts to load in the default UI.
It’s the UI that makes it my heroin.
Controversial take but:
As for myself personally, I watched YouTube with ads for the last 2 or 3 years, and more recently I decided to start paying for YouTube Premium.
YouTube Premium made sense for me because:
Before all of that, I used to use YouTube Vanced (RIP) and NewPipe, both great though not entirely legit ways of bypassing ads and downloading videos. I still use the latter to archive the really good content I come across.
If you’re ok to pay for YouTube, but it’s too expensive for the value you get out of it, there are alternative approaches. You can spoof your location and buy YouTube Premium in another country, like Turkey or India, and get it for as low as $2 a month. Google doesn’t crack down on this much at the time of writing.
I can understand your point of view. I was grandfathered in at $16 a month for the family plan for years since I was around from the beginning. Then I got an email telling me it’s going up to $22 a month. I used premium for music and ad free only. I don’t care about movies or anything else. I would still happily be paying for premium today at the understandable $16 dollars but they got greedy so now I use Revanced and pay nothing. I am also trying out Grayjay since it combines a lot of platforms.
Oh wow that really is expensive. Americans do make more money on average than Europeans, but goddamn does your stuff cost a lot of money sometimes.
I think it’s €15 here?
EDIT:
Ah, for the family plan. Just reread. Not sure what that is here.
They’re absolutely within their rights to try and block ad-blockers. And users are fully within their rights to circumvent the blocks in order to protect their privacy and the security of their machines and the data on them, as Google has proven repeatedly to be either uncaring or incompetent when it comes to ensuring the ads they serve aren’t spreading malware.
This is factually false (depending on your country).
From a quick Google search (ironic) the following seems to be true:
Blocking is not, in itself, illegal. However, circumventing restrictions on content, like what YouTube has added recently, is.
See this article: blockadblock.com/…/adblockers-dont-break-the-law-…
Not quite, unfortunately. You can pay by watching ads in addition to being surveiled, or by paying for premium and being surveiled potentially even harder (because you have to have an account with personal and payment information). Google does not stop tracking you and selling your profile just because you pay for Premium, so it’s not an option for me.
I hadn’t thought of it from a privacy perspective.
I couldn’t imagine using YouTube not signed in because of the dogs**t recommendations you get then. I imagine if you’re signed in the privacy loss is not significantly less than if you paid for Premium too.
I also use GMail so I’m already f***ed from that. I’ve basically given up on privacy at any other time than when I want to do private things, and I use a VPN and private browser.
I honestly have more than enough content on Youtube to watch without having to rely on recommendations, and I intentionally do not use Google accounts in any other capacity either. So yeah, for me Youtube Premium is just not an option even though I would be open to pay for the content. Hell, I even do donate to some individual creators through other platforms already. If Google wants my money they shouldn’t have killed the separate Youtube account and shouldn’t have forced everything into their surveillance-ad business.
Ublock Origin works
Brave is ass
Good, fuck those greedy bastards. yt-dlp + mpv with sponsorblock FTW, bonus points for stopping using a YouTube account altogether and using RSS feeds for your subscriptions instead.
Bro… How to setup RSS feed for YouTube subscriptions…
Just replace CHANNEL_ID with the ID of the channel you want to get the RSS feed from (to my knowledge it’s only limited to the last 15 items) : www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANN…
Or using curl and sed : curl -s youtube_channel_url | sed -n ‘s/.*title=“RSS"\s+href=”([^"]+).*/\1/p’
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
How?
Look under Sponsorblock Options github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
In your mpv.conf you can just add ytdl-raw-options sponsorblock remove all
Don’t watch it. I mean they have to make money. I block ads I don’t care and I’m not making up bs to justify it. I don’t cause I want to and I can.
I’m more than happy to support my favourite content creators by other means, be it simple donation or merch. I will never subject myself to stupid ads, no matter the reason.
I dont even mind ads when its like one minute for 20 minutes of footage. Pluto TV is free to use and has commercial breaks but they never really bother me because they aren’t that annoying and i get a lot of MST3K before I watch them. Youtube ad are cancer in comparison.
that’s the funny part. i also didn’t mind ads once in a while, but when i started looking for a YT solution i not only found one but i also found sponsorblock. i didn’t know of it before the YT bs. now i just don’t see ads at all. thanks YT!
Seriously, I wouldn’t even bother futzing with adblockers on my Android TV if it was reasonable, but fucking 45 seconds of ads for every 5 minutes of content is just ridiculous. I almost wonder if it was all an experiment to see how much they could get away with…
They probably expiremented an answer to that question and came to find it was: “not enough”. So now they become desperate to get out of the reds.
Same the normal ads aren’t much of an issue for me, especially since some are skippabke. But about a year or so ago, I was getting 30 minute ads. They were skippable, but if I was just playing the shows in the living room while making dinner in the kitchen or whatever, I had to constantly go hit the button on the remote or be stuck watching 30 minute infomercial for a product I’d never even consider buying. Are they still allowing these long ads?
Somehow, I’m not even able to see ads on my system. I have firefox with ublock, sync on my three systems macOS, linux and windows. Not a single ad in years. I’ve tried to disable ublock, just to see the mess, and it still wont play ads. Lol. Anyway, I will stop watching youtube before watching ads. I always watch the sponsor thing tho.
Does your browser block ads by default? Some browsers come with their own adblocker.
I have a ton of extensions installed on firefox. Mostly pivacy stuff so I guess I have some kind of other adblocker active.
With sponsor block on I dont think the internet makes a cent off of me. I am probably just leeching resources. Which is good.
Based, fuck YouTube
I agree sadly most of the content is there already
On windows, Firefox + uBlock Origin. On Mac and iOS, Safari + Adguard.
why not firefox + ublock on mac? safari’s so obnoxious to use
Or use Orion, which is Safari but better
I switched to this a few days ago, and it was working great till last night. Now youtube just comes up to the Ad Blocker Detected message and nothing plays. Edit Nevermind. I just discovered that Firefox had also installed AdBlock for some reason without my knowledge. I removed AdBlock and it works again.
Plus Pi-hole on just about any device (just to be sure).
But it does not help against YouTube ads trough
Seriously just use invidious. Ad-free + doesn’t hard consume your resources
reminds me of how bugs develop into superbugs after building resistance to antibiotics
That’s a good example of unintended consequences. Another is alcohol becoming really dangerous on the black market once Prohibition happened in the US.
Drugs going through that now. I took some stuff in college. No way would I touch it today. Fentinyl in everything.
So today I’ve seen this article saying YouTube failed and another saying they’ve succeeded because of record uninstalls of adblockers.
inb4 those uninstalls were just because they were installing better adblockers. /j
Considering that, after Netflix enabled anti account sharing, they got an increase in subscriptions, I’ve lost faith in humanity, and believe YouTube will succeed in the same way
But that’s because most people watch Netflix through smart TVs and those TVs are closed systems that don’t have apps, or very limited ones. Trying to get people who barely understand how to operate their remote to stream from their computer or other device, isn’t going to happen.
Well, it would be bad to admit that it was a failure.
That’s how you know it’s bullshit, because every major ad blocker allows you to disable per site. There’s no need to uninstall. The claim that they’re being uninstalled was written by uneducated propagandists.
yeah like who has a few days of youtube ad blocking not work then goes "that’s it im uninstalling this ad blocker and going back to ALL THE ADS EVERYWHERE
You vastly overestimate the average user. Probably installed an ad locker cause heard from a friend or coworker. Then stops letting them watch YouTube so they uninstall. Go to a non techie and browse the web it’s insane.
I know someone who is non-technical who asked how to remove the ad blocker they had when YouTube displayed the message, as they didn’t know you could turn it off per site, so anecdotally that is something that does happen.
Spread the word to install firefox based browser, use different frontends to block youtube ads in browser, Invidious and use piped youtube apps on android to block youtbe ads: Newpipe
Thanks for the newpipe suggestion!
…or you can install firefox on android with uBlock origin and many other extensions, and use mobile youtube website
I’m using Firefox and ublock on Android and it’s great but YouTube via mobile browser is definitely the worst experience after the official youtube app. LibreTube, NewPipe, PipePipe are all better options. Revanced is probably the best in theory but takes more work to get running. These are just the ones I’ve tried but there are even more options. I’m currently using PipePipe and it’s great.
I have recently stumbled upon Grayjay and it has instantly replaced NewPipe on my phone
piped for desktop and libretube for mobile also a great option
is there a way to simply install a addon in firefox to redirect all youtube links to piped links?
Anything that can be done to destroy youtubes monopoly is a good thing.
Personally I just use Redirector because all the add-ons specific for invidious are either broken or set to instances that are dead!
Not going to happen with self hosted stuff. People really have no idea how much storage or bandwidth YouTube uses.
addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/…/libredirect/
And my work profile on my phone tells me to get fucked :(
Dammit
How did YouTube become the monopoly it is? Seems they were always riding Vimeo’s coattails and have been rewarded handsomely for it.
For some reason, I’d never heard of vimeo until YouTube was already the default video powerhouse.
Back then Google was “do no evil”, and they had the infrastructure and the finances to support an endeavor like YouTube.
Storage, YouTube has way more data (crap) uploaded to it than vimeo.
Google was willing to lose money for awhile.
indeed, this is this unfair advantage to these silicon valley behemots.
Vimeo is not for the same purpose. It’s more B2B. I read somewhere that after a certain threshold they start billing you for views.
From my perspective it was ease of use. I remember back in the day ( ~2009 ) that youtube became the defacto standard because its ui was simple, it loaded quickly, it was straight to the point, free, didnt require login and you could upload content straight from your android phone after recording it. So sharing was pretty much instant.
After that they came up with policies to help people create actual content ( reward content that had thought put into it, reward creators etc ) which helped with the rise of quality content and make youtube in the youtube it was today.
uBlock Origin FTW!
I love that, in a competition between a corporation worth hundreds of billions of dollars and a FOSS project, all Google managed to do was annoy uBlock Origin users for like a week. I just had to manually update the extension and restart my browser a few times.
I have been lucky, no ads, no message. Probably my region gets the updates so late uBlock has already compensated.
If the numbers ghostery and that are posting is true then overall it’s working out as intended.
Youtube is a perfect example of why ad blockers exist. They use ridiculous ad volumes and spy on their users for data to sell.
ive had ads longer than the video i watch and then ads when that video ends
YouTube doesn’t sell user data, the data is for targeting ads.
.
.
Sure and Google is not a data broker. Look at how good uses your data they are transparent about it. And your link talks about apps selling data.
.
the linked article doesn’t describe getting data from Google, but getting data from grindr and other apps. Grindr is notorious for this kind of thing and makes it easy to locate users…in fact its the main feature of the app so its impossible to fix.
There are different levels of privacy. Many of the issues with Google are theoretical or philosophical, but location broadcasting apps like grindr are clear and present dangers to your privacy.
.
You realize Google owns YouTube, right? 😆
Google owns YouTube and the AdSense advertising network. They don’t need to sell the data to advertisers because they are the advertiser. It’s more valuable for them to just hoard that for forever and use it for ad targeting.
ADGUARD FOR DESKTOP! LOAD IT WITH ANTI-ADBLOCK KILLER!
ADNAUSEAM!
Sorry. I have Tourette’s syndrome. I can’t help but scream the names of random software.
YOUTUBE SEARCH! COBRA EFFECT ADBLOCKERS!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIHi9yH6UB0
My ad blocker was working so well I didn’t even realize I had it installed and blocking ads on YouTube. I don’t mind watching a few ads as long as it doesn’t get out of hand.
I actually used to have all ad blockers turned off for YouTube because I wanted to support all my favorite creators on there. But then YouTube took away the daily suggestions because I don’t let it track my history. So I said “fuck it” and turned all the adblockers back on.
Now I just support the creators I care to via Nebula and their various Patreons.
the funny thing is, if you go to a non logged in session, the suggestion page works fine. It was such an arbitratry grab for the user to consent to them collecting your data. I just bookmarked the subscriptions page and only go there now
I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll have to try it. It gets boring just looking at my subscriptions.
Same I had no idea what anyone was talking about.
who could have seen this coming
i have yet to see a single anti-adblock pop-up on youtube lmao
Me neither. I’ve tested Brave, Firefox and LibreWolf+uBlock Origin on desktop. Nothing. Firefox, Iceraven, Brave and NewPipe on Android. Still nothing.
What gives?
Well, besides YouTube giving us videos without ads…
I’ve switched to Opera One and haven’t seen any personally. Been pretty great.
I was getting them on chrome starting a couple of weeks ago. They have gotten more aggressive over time. I switched to Firefox with ublock and I have not received a single message
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.sambands.net/pictrs/image/c3ab1a84-dace-4db7-8eda-4d67c153f926.png">
Welcome to the gang
I got them on Firefox with Ublock Origin but only with my VPN on US or Canadian servers. Then a few days later, even on those servers they disappeared. Haven’t seen one since those first few.
Yeah you heard them - Firefox.
Vivaldi’s stock built in ad blocking has still been working for me, have yet to see an ad.
I will never submit.
YouTube is like a time killing drug. I’m trying to get rid of it. Any advice?
NewPipe, just see what you want to see
Books aren’t feeding as much off of the FOMO angle of stuff
Don’t install an ad blocker. You’ll be looking for something else in no time.
If you’re looking for advice for a less-addictive video service, and you want to support creators, Nebula.
New Pipe is also a great little YT client, less addictive in that there’s no suggestion algorithm, so you need to know what you want to watch.
They think they can do whatever they want but companies have been shown wrong time and time again.
As a read yesterday “we have learnt from history that we don’t learnt from history”.
Someone please add a vivaldi-like tab tiling feature in Firefox so I can switch to it and leave the chromium cancer away.
Hey using Firefox here too, but why Chromium is so bad?
Chromium means Google gets to decide what internet standards get implemented. The existance of alternative engines (like the one Firefox uses) means that there is still some democratic control. If you care about the internet, don’t use a chromium-based browser.
Makes sense. Even if they are forks of chrome it is try that they are heavily influenced by Google right?
Tab tiling?
Being able to show multiple webpages at once in the same window
Not everybody is.
That’s the thing, even if 95% of users currently using ad blockers block ads anyway or leave the service, YouTube still wins big.
They aren’t worried at all about alienating users from which they can’t extract ad revenue. Those on the margin that turn off ad blockers or subscribe to a paid plan are the target, not everyone else.
This doesn’t make sense because they have the monopoly on video now. By monetizing a bit they are creating a a huge demand for a competitor, risking their monopoly.
I want to believe that you are right - but don’t think you are. I wanted to switch over to rumble. But, except two, none of the creators i regularly watch are there. Fine, let’s try Odysee: geoblocking my location atm.
The only reason, why i use other platforms is Grayjay. It aggregates content from wherever you want and creates one feed. If it wasn’t for this app, i’d probably only use YT with better adblocks.
That is the extent of their monopoly right now.
I know it has a lot less content but you could try PeerTube.
Same problem, except it is even more niche. Does not really make sense as a YT stand-in. Tied into a collected feed it makes sense, which luckily is enabled by apps like Grayjay.
Having a monopoly is why it makes sense.
Who else is gonna spend billions building up a legitimate competitor in a extraordinarily expensive business where almost everyone loses money?
Part of the value of a service is the size of it’s user base, not just the size of the monetized user base. Right now, Youtube is just about the only game in town, but if half their users just Leave, even if it was the half that used effective ad blockers, the value of the site as a whole, for creators and advertisers both, is diminished.
That’s true to all extent, but the more present online folks do end up driving behaviors about regular users as well. There was a tube when even having an ad blocker at all was a “power user” thing, now everyone does it. If they fail to accommodate the people that will put energy into circumventing ads then they will just find and normalize a new work around.
It’s similar to content piracy. You will never get rid of piracy altogether, but if you make content accessible and affordable you can mitigate how common it is.
For YouTube, they need to balance how intrusive the ads are against how easy it is to get around them.
That’s exactly what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to make it harder to get around them while maintaining them more intrusive.
What prevents them from going in video adds? Technically difficult? Or what?
Sponsorblock basically already bypasses this.
In video ads = no relevant ads based on the user. Less relevant ads = less revenue generated for people paying YouTube for hosting those ads. Thus, people would pay less to YouTube to host ads. Thus, less profits for YouTube.
Plus as another dude said: Sponsorblock.
There’s no reason they can’t mix relevant ads in the video stream itself. It’s just technically more expensive and complex.
U could still easily evade this. Here’s why:
Ad is inserted into stream. Either one of two things happens depending upon the way it is implemented:
The length of the video stream increases as the ad is inserted suddenly. The ad blocker can simply calculate the difference and skip the difference worth of time, thus skipping the ad.
The length of the video doesn’t increase to prevent this. Thus, you get the ad stream overlapping in front of the actual video stream. This would thus kinda be on the frontend, which could easily be blocked.
The ad is inserted in the beginning itself at some random time in the video. Hence, the length of the video doesn’t change suddenly like in scenario one. However, remember that regulations require you to visually indicate that a given piece of media is an ad or not. This is why YouTube ads have “Ad” in a yellow box. This could thus very easily be detected by an adblocker that analyses every frame that the box is present in, and skips that frame. This however, would be a little heavier for the user using the adblocker.
Trust me lol. There is literally no way you can prevent ad blockers.
if the platform decides which and where the ads will run during the video on page load, not during video pIay then I dont see how this could be blocked.
Anither thing they can do is enforce policy and start deleting/banning accounts blocking ads. I have some stuff on google account. Wouldn’t be fun to have it deleted.
Google hates this one trick
Look at point 3. I explained this could still be skipped due to them having to visually indicate that it was an ad. This visual indication could easily be skipped by the local user.
As for them deleting accounts that blocked ads, how would they identify if someone blocked ads? Generate a secret key for every ad, that would be returned every time a user watched ads? This could easily be overcome, as an adblocker could simply extract this key and send it back to the server.
Trust me… If there was a way to block ad blockers, the greedy capitalists would’ve done so a loooong time ago.
Ok I see. Why is Chrome store still having ublock origin there and others? I’d just remove it. But they let it be there for everyone to download.
Ok so this is how I think it works behind the scenes: the actual devs at Google don’t give af whether ppl use adblockers or not. I think it’s probably just the execs who come across stuff like this and tell the devs to “fix the problem”. Look at how Vanced was there for a long time. Only when it started becoming too popular (especially when they released an NFT), did YouTube crack down on it.
The reason why ublock origin is still in the Chrome store is because the execs prolly don’t know about it much. Maybe they are afraid that ppl would immediately hop onto Firefox if they did anything stupid like that? I dunno… However, I’m pretty confident that they’re going to do something stupid like banning ad blockers from the Chrome store quite soon. It would be quite hilarious to see the aftermath of that!
Since their pop-up already mentioned using AdBlock violating their TOS, I’ve started using a different Browserprofile with a dedicated Google account which I’ll exclusively use for YouTube.
If there will be a slow weekend coming up, I’ll set up a self hosted piped instance
I think it wouldn’t be that dificult to figure out what is interesting for people watching the video since channels themselves already usually have a target audience. If I am watching a video from a dude who focus on video games or tech odds are I’d be more interested in tech adds. But if Google REALLY wants to know what we need/want then yeah maybe you’re right. Shit it happened so many times me just saying the word pizza would set off a pizza ad later in my phone. These mfers want to inject ads in our souls.
I don’t get targeted ads anymore but it took a lot of work to get here and I don’t have a lot of the conveniences as other folks who use google play, oauth, etc.
Not rlly. Your point would be relevant for niche YouTube videos. What about generic videos tho? Say something like music videos. Kinda everyone watches them. In fact, music videos get the highest amount of views. Ads inserted in such videos based purely on the content of these videos would be too generic, thus of lower average relevancy to the viewer, thus ultimately translating to less revenue.
Why can’t YouTube just render the video on the fly with the relevant add?
Not sure if they have that kind of processing power. Also, couldn’t you modify the player to skip them?
That IS how YouTube works. Let’s say you are watching a YT video. What your YouTube app/ website does, is that it downloads a certain portion of the video from the server. This small part is called a “buffer”. That’s where the word “buffering” comes from. Now, for the ad to be displayed within the video stream itself, it would need to be downloaded in this buffer somehow. Therefore, while there is a buffer in place, all of my above points would apply.
Completely eliminate the buffer you say (ie., stream the video bit by bit by reducing the buffering size dramatically) ? Well, then you would need an ultra stable internet connection to YouTube’s servers, without any ping difference. Good luck with that. Especially, good luck with doing that in developing countries, whose populations make up the majority of the world.
If that is true, then how is it possible for software to determine the difference between a commercial and content? They are streamed from a different source. I’m suggesting that YouTube could encode the commercial in the same stream as content, and as far as the player is concerned, there would be no difference.
Read point 3 again. Regulations require companies to visually distinguish between ads and non-ads. That’s why u get the yellow box with “ad” written in it, which indicates that the video that u r watching currently is an ad.
Software could thus use this factor very easily by scanning the stream for such an indicator. The moment it finds something like this, it skips to a frame where this indicator isn’t present.
In video ads, even those by the content creators themselves, can generally be dealt with using SponsorBlock. This is community driven, users mark the segment of the video that’s just sponsor filler or credits or whatever.
You can even get a NewPipe fork that includes SponsorBlock.
jesus christ dude
I think doing that with programmatic ads would be difficult. Maybe hard coding a specific creative would be feasible.
Switched finally to ff. So I guess thank you google.
Make sure to turn off telemetry and adjust your browser’s DNS settings.
How and why?
Search how not hard. DNS to pick a provider you trust.
Care to share where to read up on DNS and what it does, not that tech savy when it comes to networks.
Dns is what translates urls (google.com, lemmy.world, etc) into ip addresses (207.94.56.21) which your computer can actually understand. Dns can be used to track you but a good dns can also very slightly speed up your Internet because it gets you the address to websites a bit faster. I use adguard and have Cloudflare DNS upstream from that
This is a good explanation.
Oh, cool thanks - did not know that, going to read up on it.
I’d like to elaborate a bit on why DNS can be used to track you.
Nearly all web traffic is encrypted (https), you can check by looking at the padlock next to the URL in your browser. But DNS requests aren’t encrypted by default. This means anyone, most likely your ISP our the admin of your home network, can see what domains you’re accessing. That means just google.com, lemmy.world, etc. and not lemmy.world/post/… This isn’t a huge amount of info, but it does tell anyone who’s looking approximately what you’re doing (googling something, looking at lemmy, etc.).
To fix that there are a few different ways to encrypt DNS requests, the most common of which (afaik) is DNS over HTTPS, which will encrypt DNS requests like any other web request your browser makes. I don’t know why this hasn’t been made the default yet. Firefox has a setting for DNS over HTTPS, it calls it secure DNS.
YouTube will win this battle.
About time. I’d believe they are losing when Chromium market share sees a dip
I had uBlock Origin installed since forever, are people just finding out about it?
xkcd.com/1053/
Haha look at these people who doesn’t know everything in the world from birth!
Tell me you misunderstood the comic without telling me.
Tell me you don’t understand sarcasm by telling me in writing.
If you want me to understand your sarcasm, maybe put a modicum of effort into communicating it :)
No, I prefer to communicate with people able to understand sarcasm in light of the context. The best I can offer is for you to block me to avoid being exposed to my ultra-high level, military grade sarcasm.
You prefer to communicate with people who assume you’re being sarcastic? That’s kinda weird. I prefer to communicate with people who take my words at face value. You’re not worth blocking.
No, I prefer to communicate with people able to detect when I am sarcastic. That’s why I wrote “Understand sarcasm”, something you seemingly don’t.
That’s not nice. I have no issue blocking not-nice people so we won’t communicate again. I wish you a life as pleasant as you.
Telling that you think being blocked is a good thing. You’re not harassing me, you’re not trying to dox me, you’re just being annoying and bad at sarcasm. Hence, you’re not worth blocking. But you’re certainly also not worth talking to.
Not really making fun of it, just genuinely curious. Are people still installing Adblock Plus? It has had an Acceptable Ads Committee for over a decade now. What were people using if not that?
I stopped using that when it stopped working. Is there a working version? I thought they got kiked off the app store for “interfering with internet data” or something.
You can’t be genuinely curious by asking a question answered in the source.
More like most people don’t have the patience to learn the difference between uBlock and UBlock Origin. Also, a lot of people just install Ad Block because they you tell them to install a ad blocker, they just install the one called AdBlock.
Adblock plus was the standard for so long until maybe 5 or so years ago when they were bought out or something and they were hinting at letting some ads in. I think only the very online people switched to uBlock Origin before Adblock Plus tanked itself. That is all from hazy memory but it wouldn’t surprise me that normies got recommended Adblock Plus and used it until it didn’t work right only to seek out better options now that youtube is serving them so many ads.
That has had an Acceptable Ads Committee for over a decade now. I’m surprised that YouTube Ads wouldn’t have been permitted on it.
Yup, as a normie can confirm
I just wonder how much of Chome’s browser share Google is willing to lose over this.
The article mentions people moving from Chrome to Edge to try and get around this. With how ubiquitous Chromium is as an engine behind a wide range of browsers, it seems most people won’t actually move away from a browser that Google has some control over.
IMO, one of the best Chromium based browsers is Vivaldi.
There’s more than this but these are the big names.
So the article.claims that Youtube’s plan backfired because uninstall rates on some AD blockers increased and a percentage of those users cited “YouTube” as the reason.
I don’t know if it’s just me but that’s a massive stretch. I would like to hear numbers from YouTube themselves before jumping to any conclusions. These companies operate on scale and usually have enough data to back these decisions. Can it go wrong, sure. Has it already backfired. Not sure.
Streisand effect
I didn’t have ublock installed on my machines. I’d removed it a year ago because it was breaking sites and my pihole does a pretty good job, but I kept getting pop ups from sites about “turning off my adblocker”. I didn’t have an adblocker running. I was using vanilla firefox. I got so irritated, I looked up how to get rid of those messages and everything pointed me to ublock.
So, shout out to thinkgeek for reminding me what its like to browse the web without a ton of ads. If it wasn’t for your annoying popup about my non-existent adblocker, I would never have installed an adblocker.
Oh, and I hadn’t realized how awful youtube became over the last year or so with the ads. I was just dealing with it like an asshole. When I put ublock back on, my enjoyment of youtube shot up!
I was considering paying for premium too because I want to normalize paying for content and supporting things I like on the web. But I was struggling with the decision because usually you either pay with your data or pay with money. In this case I know I’d be doing both since Google will gladly take my money and also hoover up my data. Then they jacked the rates up to $14 a month…and now I have ublock installed again.
Its still a problem with the apps on my phone and appletv’s though. If they made it $4.99/mo I’d probably fork it over but $14 is more than my other streaming services and they create their own content. Youtube just hosts content.
Edit: how-to geek not thinkgeek. I think they went out of business.
you said you weren’t using an Ad Blocker but getting pop-ups saying you were. it’s because the pi-hole is blocking ads at a DNS level so the site detects that and sends that message instead.
uBlock will block the whole visual element FTW.
Try getting some kind of sponsorblock, too. I didn’t realize how annoying those little messages were until I didn’t have to manually speed through them.
God, how far Thinkgeek has fallen. Why would a retail site even need ads? You already there to do shopping. I don’t think I’ve bought anything since they got bought out.
If you have an android phone you can look to NewPipe.
Technology circumvention and copyright infringement are just about the only power consumers have against the near monopolies and cartel like behavior from the tech/media industry since our government regulators have been neutered.
I am grandfathered into a family Premium plan from the old Youtube Red days. The price is close to doubling come April. In the absence of competition or government intervention to punish anti-compeitive, anti-consumer behaviour I will be relying on ad-blocking and other circumvention measures next year. I am willing to pay a fair price but costs of living have gone up a lot while incomes for regular people are stagnant. The executives running these companies are completely disconnected from reality.
Next logical step is to modify the uploaded video itself to contain ads around the video frame or on automatically detected clear surfaces in the video.
I guess it’s time to just move on with your life if it comes to this
Honestly, Google did this to themselves with not properly vetting the advertisers that they sell space to, and with oversaturation of ads.
If they’d have stopped granting ad space to scammers and malware spreaders, and if they’d have stopped adding advertisements at the line most people find tolerable (which seems to be a single ad between videos… not multiple at a time, and certainly no mid-rolls), they wouldn’t have triggered quite the level of ad blocking that they did.
I see this “problem” that they have as being entirely of their own making.