Whelp, here we go again
Another executive-driven decision by people who clearly don’t use their own product (kinda impressive really when it’s YT).
I can’t help wonder if they saw an uptick in adblocking as a result of their absurd increases in ad-time recently and somehow thought this was a reasonable solution.
I rarely use YouTube, but my nephew (he’s two) was over the other day and we put on some cartoons for him that were in YouTube since my wife and I don’t have Disney plus. I couldn’t BELIEVE how many ads it showed. One five-minute merry melodies cartoon had FOUR SEPARATE ad breaks, the third and fourth of which were both 3+ minutes long if you weren’t paying attention to skip.
Wtf?! Not even shit ass normal broadcast television has that many commercials.
Feels like every year corporations rely on the naivety of youth in an attempt to push more and more egregious shit.
Exactly right they’re normalizing ads in everything. They’re indoctrinating the youth, who don’t know any better or differently, into just accepting/expecting that all content in all forms comes with ads, and you can’t watch any of it without signing in so they can track you and sell your data.
8-10 unskippable ads before a video? Holy shit. That’s ludicrous.
It really is hard to fathom how that got through any internal discussion.
Its not that hard to fathom when you have worked with these types of people.
All it was was a numbers meeting, no User Experience folks in the room. They said how much revenue they would increase quarter over quarter, and how much engagement it would drive. Everyone claps, the meeting ends they move forward with the next terrible design decision. Companies no longer take focus group testing seriously for anything.
Focus groups and qualitative data are so last season. It’s all Business “Intelligence” -driven bullshit nominally based on poorly defined and even more poorly understood metrics (excuse me, “KPIs”)
Executives don’t have to watch ads! They’re rich! I wouldn’t be surprised if they all had YT Premium or whatever it is.
Time to use an adblock blocker blocker extension.
I think that would be NoScript.
Mmmm, gotta love that enshittification strategy every big tech company is working on right now.
Free money ended, they are trying to squeeze
Twitch couldn’t beat my adblocking, it just taught me how to find and use custom scripts. Shoot your shot YT, I haven’t installed a script for your website yet but now Im gonna have too. Congrats the number of ads im gonna see from you is about to go down.
What’s your Twitch solution? Blocking Twitch is considerably more difficult than YouTube, every solution I’ve found breaks after a month or so. Best I can get is have it display a blank screen while ads play, but I still have to wait it out, which isn’t ideal.
pixeltris on github, a search for pixeltris should get you there first result. Everything you need is on that page, including how to instal the script to ublock, im using the vid swap script and TTLOL pro. It’s not perfect but the ads are gone.
They will never win. They will only lose.
Hot take: this sucks, but YouTube premium is legit. I wish more platforms offered a paid, ad-free way to interact. I don’t feel like figuring out a way around ads but I’m not about to start watching them. So I pay a few bucks a month.
I don’t mind paying for services I use to avoid my data being the payment (like Kagi or Protonmail).
But I don’t like the idea of paying Google AND having my data farmed.
Same. I hate google, but YouTube pays content creators better than any other platform. And I am 100% on board with any service where I pay a monthly cost instead of being inundated with ads.
Screw YouTube and Google. They aren’t getting a dime from me.
It’s simply a more honest model - you get content, they get money.
I would love to be able to pay for an ad-free experience for the various websites and services that I browse and use in a straightforward way instead of being leeched for ad-revenue
I wouldn’t doubt paying a hundred per month to have an ad-free life.
no ads on tv or sports, no billboards, no ads on buses. it would be awesome
Also the student version is so cheap and there is so much more content than anything really. YouTube music is awesome too.
I don’t have any philosophical objection for paying to use a platform I enjoy, but in the case of youtube, they have been so deliberately detrimental to society in terms of platforming fascists that I feel bad about the prospect of paying them, even if much of the money is going to creators I do like who I’m actually watching
I’d be more willing to pay if it wasn’t $10/mo (annual cost) for a bunch of stuff I don’t care about. If they had a cheaper option that was just ad-free (maybe $5/mo?), I’d be down for that.
I also like what Kagi does with their duo plan for 2 users. Some kind of duo plan for YT premium would be nice as well, since I (and many others, I’m sure) don’t have a family of 6 people.
YouTube without an adblocker is such a mess. I wish alternatives like https://odysee.com had more of the content I watch and less Nazi bullshit though. YouTube really needs some strong competition since they have an effective monopoly on long-form videos on the internet. :(
I made an account there once and immediately got racist and homophobic results, so I quit using it.
Yeah, I’m glad at least a few YouTubers are starting to mirror content on sites like Odysee though (Such as Louis Rossman). I think that, like Lemmy, it just needs to reach a critical mass of users before it’s viable
So there are YouTube front ends for browser experience, but has anyone tried freetube from this guide?
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/frontends/
I’ve really liked the newpipe x Sponsorblock experience on my Android phone with having a subscription list, saves, playlists all locally with no YouTube account and ability to export and import the data of Playlists etc.
Freetube sounds like newpipe for desktop and has sponsorblock as an option too. Anyone use it or used it and have an thoughts on it?
I exclusively use Freetube for my Youtube needs. It is great when it works. Sometimes you have to find the right Invidious instance for it to work properly. A few times videos play at 720p. I have also noticed search failing for specific terms sometimes - for example “machine learning”. I don’t know if it is a bug or blacklisted words/phrases.
These are a few reality checks highlighting it isn’t a perfect experience all the time, but I will be damned if go back to a vanilla Youtube interface after having gotten used to Invidious and then Peertube.
The upsides are less fluff that is recommended, you control your own feed with the videos from the channels you subscribe to, no ads, sponsorblock, and I guess more privacy.
I tried it and it is pretty good. Just wish it had compatibility with newpipe playlists.
I´m sure the will be no false strikes at all. And even if, I´m sure they have a quick and easy appeal process in place, just like they have with copyright.
I’d be shocked if there was even one human on the other end of their appeal process.
Ad blocker detection is not new, and other publishers regularly ask viewers to disable ad blockers
“everyone else is treating their customers like garbage, so they don’y hold it against us”.
Yes, we can.
I didn’t block when you had 5 second ads. I didn’t block when you had 15 second ads. I started blocking when you’d play 2+ unskippable 15 second ads back-to-back. I didn’t mind sitting through an ad when I appreciate the service you offered. Now, you’re just being greedy, and I will go to great lengths to damage your bottom line as notably as I can.
And what are the consequences of “strikes”? Will you delete my Google account, including my email, and also screw up my Android phone and my kids Chromebook?
It’s scary to realize that Google has me by the balls here. They can screw me in so many ways, and screw my family members as well. I’d rather have my bank credentials stolen than my email credentials, at least I can get real customer service from the bank, I can even go to a physical location and speak face-to-face with someone who can help me. Google wont give me customer support, and my email account is the closest thing to an identity I have for most businesses I interact with.
It takes a lot of work to avoid Google. Yes, there are alternatives, but in D&D terms, avoiding Google is like a -2 to all stats for your entire life, and not something we can expect the general population to do.
All this shows the need for anti-trust enforcement. The same company is controlling too much. Bust 'em up!
Spend a weekend degoogling your stuff. There are alternatives for everything now. No regrets
Article suggests you simply get blocked from watching additional videos. But there’s no info on how that works- is it account based? IP based? Can I wipe my YouTube cookies to bypass a block?
That’s the reason I’m hesitant to use a VPN for yt Premium from a cheap country. The lingering thought of losing my Gmail and android access…
Moral of the story: create separate account for YouTube that has no high value services or data on it.
I’d argue the bigger moral is that you should always own your online identity. You should buy your own domain (
@yourname.xyzor something like that) and make your email on that. So if Google bans you, you just switch email providers and keep your address.I’ve been using @fixnum.org and since a few years the alias @wim.land to do exactly this, but that’s just email.
My app purchases, photo storage, and YouTube account are all entangled in this. I could decouple from Google, but it would be very painful.
I’ve seen enough horror stories to know that’s not going to help. They can, and do, associate multiple accounts to same users. Be it by cookies, IP addresses, or dark magic, the end result is the same - they can upend your entire digital life if they want to. r/degoogle better hurry up and migrate to Lemmy.
Looks like I’m installing Invidious tonight.
I was subscribed to Youtube Premium for a good while (1-2 years), and I actually liked it for the money I paid. It was/is actually a good deal.
However, the amount of cases where creators were getting wrongly copyright striked and could do nothing against it were getting to high. The creators were often against a faceless corporate system.
I don’t expect to view something on Youtube for free, however, I don’t want to support a company that is as faceless as them. They need to be more accommodating, open, communicate more.
In the end I had to cancel my subscription as I could not continue supporting those practices.
They want your money but they don’t want to actually provide any customer or creator services. They think they can automate everything but do a shit job at it.
Anyone hoping there will be a mass exodus from YouTube to other–maybe fediverse YouTube alternatives, reminiscent of the Reddit exodus?
fediverse YouTube alternatives
Yea, so who’s hosting the videos and providing the bandwidth?
Video hosting is way too expensive and complex to be decentralised.
Did all these tech companies just get together and decide to fuck us over around the same time? Seriously, what is going on with all these companies rolling out hugely unpopular new rules/changes all on one another’s heels?
The end of 0% interest means “business” no longer have access to free money. So now they want benefits, and growth but without the spending.
Also we skipped a tech bubble crash around 2008, so these corpos deaths are more than overdue.
The cicle as Doctorow says in his enshification tesis is:
1.- be good to your users, spending tons of that VC and 0% interest loan free money.
2.- be shit to your users, be good to your clients (add buyers, business that use your platform to do business)
3.- be shit to everyone. Squeeze the platform and get every last dime of value as profit.
Once you are in 3 there is no coming back. But these corporations have pulling the ladder behind them using an extra decade of dominant position to try to stop the cicle.
