I have to hand it to them, they are really good at finding new, innovative ways to make the platform worse.
Deactivated Premium recently. I used their music app when driving – expecting some ads now - nope, it just doesn’t allow running in the background anymore.
Seems like such a hostile thing - I’d like to think running ads would be a positive net income for them. (Now that I think of it - maybe they don’t have it built out into their music service.)
Revanced
This you can even use YouTube Music with it.
Makes me long for the days of google music. It just worked. Streamed stuff and even allowed you to stream your own library that you had stored in drive. I would use that in the car. Then they ditched it for YouTube music, which was a worse experience and lacked the features.
That old days when Google was cool and not evil.
If you pay, the platform remains great. I get a discounted YouTube premium membership through my mobile phone company. I think YouTube is great, I never see ads, lots of features.
Just to offer an alternative view.
“If you just give them your wallet right away, the mugging isn’t so bad, really. They didn’t even kick my teeth in!” 🤓
It’s a product. You can buy it or not. If you don’t think it’s worth it, stay away, or stay on the free tier. You’re acting as if you’ve got some kind of right to use a service that’s provided by a commercial entity.
and it’s a multi-billion dollar corporation, that already makes more money than you or I will ever see in our lifetimes, that actively strives to make the user experience worse for people who don’t pay, when they’ve got a practical monopoly in the “free video sharing platform” market. And you’re whiteknighting for them. 🤡
more money than you or I will ever see in our lifetimes
I mean, I feel like you need to expand your comparison a little as the amount that you’ll see in your lifetime is such a minute grain of sand on a beech compared to corporate profits. The money they made today, hell, in the last hour… minute… will dwarf the amount that you will likely see.
actively strives to make the user experience worse for people who don’t pay
And evidently those who do! My parents live in a different country. What are they, not my family? What’s the family plan for? (Rhetorical question)
With Vanced I have so many more options to customize my experience. I can hide shorts I never watch, set a fixed resolution for data and wifi, return the stupid dislike ratio they removed… And if I’m using Vanced anyway to fix all the issues they introduce, why on earth would I additionally pay for their service?
I want to pay for their shit, especially to support content creators, but I can’t support a platform whose singular mission it is to make everything worse for everyone constantly. Feels like every month I have to get a new extension to undo some horrible design decision.
Vanced
I hope you mean ReVanced, otherwise… bBoy, I’ve got some news for you.
Yeah, sorry, I do. Just never moved on from calling it Vanced haha
I agree that it would make more sense if they called it a “household” plan. That’s clearly what it is.
I only simp for Steam.
Gabe and his 300 yachts thanks you.
You won’t find many people on this platform not lining his pockets.
By Darwin you see a lot. I was merely stating that I think YouTube premium is worth the price I pay for it.
Is there no product you are satisfied with? Your life must be pretty bleak.
whiteknighting
was a weak-ass criticism when it was on 4chan being leveled at anyone who said anything not derogatory about a woman, and it’s weak-ass now. Oh no, someone on the internet has an at-least-partially positive opinion of a company, how awful, we’d better stereotype and body-shame them for it.
If you had your way, the only comments about YouTube - or any other product from a large company - that would be allowed would be negative ones. How the fuck does that make sense?
Well said.
I’ll join you in the downvotes. There’s many reasons to hate YouTube. Asking them to pay for video content to everyone for free is a bit silly.
I’m also not saying you shouldn’t use alternatives or run an ad-blocker. Those are cool. I just find it funny how someone is saying: “I get some benefit in paying for this service” results in such backlash, lol.
I know. I thought we were upvoting respectful debate, not having a popularity contest. But apparently not…
It’s a “product” that profits billions off other people’s - often stolen - works.
YouTube steals other people’s work?
I tend to watch content creators who willingly put their content on YouTube. Am I missing something here…?
You are missing something. Multiple things actually.
- most content isn’t uploaded by the copyright holder (e.g. TV excerpts)
- demonetized videos will still have ads (at least for people without ad blockers)
- videos are used for machine learning without credit to authors or financial compensation (especially without consent when it’s not the copyright holder uploading them)
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I’m willing to sacrifice some of my valuable internet points here and be down voted to low hell.
I was going to make a comment along those lines.
They are, at the core, an ad company. Their motivation is to make money, and we are free to pay or not pay for their services.
The idea that we have a right to a non essential product for free is entitlement. They make a shit load of money, but also pay money to most content creators. Could they provide a service where they essentially just pay for costs? Sure, but no for profit Corp is going to do that, it has to make money somehow. While I’m all for peer tube, I really don’t know if it’s sustainable.
I wonder how many of the people who demand free access to services donate to FOSS Development.
Maybe some form of consumer co-op, where users essentially pay for operating costs, could be an option.
Wow, shilling for YouTube premium and anti-net-neutrality (the “discount through your phone company” part) in one comment.
I don’t think that has anything to do with net neutrality
Not allowing ISPs to pick and choose winners among web services is absolutely what Net Neutrality is about. Bundling or discounting subscriptions isn’t technically the same thing as zero-rating, but the end result of making a particular ISP-preferred service cheaper than alternatives is the same.
You’re just trying to piggyback on a vaguely-related concept that your audience already likely hates. Call things what they are, not what would be convenient to you if they were.
Is recommending a product that you’re satisfied with “shilling”?
Is there a product in this world that you think is worth the price? Does that make you a shill?
Do you have a means of removing sponsors on the mobile app though? Revanced has sponsorblock and adblock in the app.
You mean removing sponsor led segments inside a video? Sort of. The jump ahead feature, which I think is a premium feature, allows you to jump in the video based on where everywhere else is jumping in the video. So when a sponsored segment starts and you skip forward 30s (double tap on mobile, ‘k’ on PC) you are offered to jump ahead. You click that and you get to the end of the sponsored segment.
I’m OK with your opinion and I appreciate hearing an alternate view to offset the echo chamber effect.
But for a lot of us, or at least me, its far deeper than just cost and ads.
It’s the fact that steps keep being taken to make the platform worse. They don’t want the platform usable unless you pay, and in this case they’re even taking a stab at the people who pay…you don’t pay enough in their mind.
If they had balls, they would just make it a closed platform. Pay to access, and restrict that per account IP. But they’d rather gaslight everybody and slowly turn up he heat so the frogs don’t jump out of the pot. This way they maximize their profits for longer. Point of all of that is, they don’t care about he platform or service at all.
For me, its not even about that. Their algorithm was so jacked up I was sick of being fed videos I didn’t want to see over and over, and videos I’ve already watched over and over. That’s why they added the subscription bell…because you would subscribe to things you wanted to watch and they never showed it to you. It wasn’t “you” tube it was “their” tube.
I bailed on them years ago. I still watch some content on there because there really isn’t a viable alternative. I use a scraper that gives me a feed of just what I want and without ads. I watch what I like and move on with my day. I’m back in control of my video viewing.
Weird number of downvotes here – I thought they were meant for low-effort or non contributive comments, not an “I disagree” button. This person is giving a unique perspective as a subscriber (in this thread, anyway) and should be met with curiosity, I think. It is helpful to know that there are people who enjoy paying for it, so thanks for giving your opinion here.
I disagree because they have a dominant position for reasons other than having a good product – they squash competition trying to make the space better while themselves actively making it worse. Subscribing means supporting that style of inhibiting innovation, not to mention the other user-hostile practices they embrace (extend, extinguish). They are an ad company and obligated to make a profit, I get that, but I refuse to abide this style of using investor money to operate at a loss for years while deceptively capturing the market before raising prices. If your product is good, it shouldn’t need to be artificially propped up.
Do you pay them or did they pay you?
Fuck GOOG for normalizing surveillance capitalism
Fuck YouTube in particular for making it basically impossible to usefully host an Invidious proxy any more and for their algorithmic manipulationPeerTube is the Way
A big problem with peertube is monetization. There should be some sort of mechanism that’d do that automatically. Otherwise there won’t be much content ever. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really happy that it exists but just don’t see it replacing even few % of YouTube as it is.
If you want monetization and scalability, you’re gonna have to get ads. Ad-free subscription services that actually benefit the creators are exceedingly rare. Very few people (less than 0.1%) are “making it” on Patreon and the like. The bitter truth is that most users can’t afford to financially support their favorite creators, and damn near zero creators could get the level of exposure needed to be sustainable without an ad-based platform backing them.
Video hosting is expensive af. Ultimately, small-time content creation is completely dependent on corporate benefactors. This is why every video platform that’s tried to compete against YouTube has failed. Nebula is trying, but that’s only useful to creators who fit within its specific niche.
I’m not saying this as a vote of support for the current system. Just an observation of how the market has played out so far.
Ad-free subscription services that actually benefit the creators are exceedingly rare.
Believe it or not, YouTube Premium is one of them. A Premium view is worth more than an ad-supported view to a creator.
(Obviously Patreon is better, as they can’t make a living off of only Premium views because it’s a smaller group; the population of ad-supported users is much much larger. But YouTube Premium does benefit the creators more than ad-supported YouTube does.)
you’re gonna have to get ads
I don’t think that necessarily follows.
Have you heard of self-hosted Patreon-similar Ghost ?
No, and neither has anybody else. Not saying that to be rude or dismissive, but just using their own numbers on the front page to paint a picture. They have ~3,000 paying members as of right now. Patreon has over 10,000,000 paying members, and even then only a tiny, tiny fraction of their creators are actually sustainable.
Paid subscription services like this are a great idea, in theory; I’d love to get away from ad-supported platforms. But the truth is that they just don’t work for all but a few lucky people.
YT also has a “tiny, tiny fraction” of creators that make a living there. There are many, but there are also gargantuan numbers of people never going beyond a handfull views because they can’t reach their audience without paying or LUCK. No saying you’re wrong though.
That’s 100% true, but YT also foots the bill that creators would otherwise be responsible for when it comes to just the basics. Free hosting/distribution of high res full-length videos, globally accessible, with a player app that is actively developed and maintained, a recommendation algorithm to put your content in front of viewers’ eyes… That, alone, has tremendous value for a creator that they really can’t get anywhere else without paying out of pocket. All of those things would have to otherwise be paid for/maintained by the creators. While it’s not a direct payment, YT relieves a huge burden for creators.
It sucks because it keeps creators’ success dependent on corporate oligarchs. But at the same time, it’s also great because it gives them a fighting chance to get started.
True, yes. But there’s also vimeo and the federated services like (forgot the name because I rarely consume any video anywhere). It’s not just YouTube. People just use it because they don’t know the others or just want to be famous (for reasons beyond me but that’s besides the point)
That is correct. Though I guess that there aren’t more than 0.1% on yt that are “making it”. You just don’t see the vids that got 5 views since 2004 or the millions of ppl that so dread to be someone yet never gain traction.
And you know when exactly YouTube went total ape-shit? The moment people could earn some meager bucks. Then shitty content flooded the whole platform until it was full of crap and actual good content got harder and harder to find in that pile of “you might wanna see this” Nowadays i see the frontpage, sigh in disgust and close the page. And I haven’t even seen an ad there yet. This would be the cherry on top
The front page is a direct reflection of the content you engage with.
Not in my case. I watch one vid per year or so, and I block everything google. They don’t know jack.
And props to the dedicated folks still running Invidious instances like https://yewtu.be
Shallow content comes from trying to manipulate the recommendations algorithm and “go viral”. Without a recommendations algorithm, the incentive disappears.
Monetization itself is the problem.
Where would the money come from?
I’d be perfectly fine with some sort of subscription. That gets distributed to authors I watch. But I can see technical challenges to it.
Or bit-torrent swarms for video sharing?
*available on all platforms and browsers (including iOS/iPadOS)
uBlock Origin is also available on iOS/iPadOS but only through the Orion browser. It would be nice if other browsers figured out how to allow Firefox extensions too but so far it looks to just be Orion.
First of all: The extension doesn’t seem to be blocking any connection on Orion, only websites.
Second of all: Here’s a link to the uBlock Origin Light app on the AppStore
That app doesn’t work with the current version of safari. This is what I see when trying to enable:
“uBO Lite” is not supported by this version of Safari.
I’ve been using Orion with uBlock and have been satisfied the last few months.
Requires just about the latest iOS (18.6)
Also - Apple seems to be hiding it from search results on the App Store even though I found it a week ago!
That was my reminder to update my system. Thanks!
I’ll test out Safari + uBO for a bit and see if I prefer it. Do you have any sites you can check for how good your adblocker is? I used to use one but that was ages ago, I don’t remember the name anymore.
:)
Top web search results for “adblock test”—the top two, both, are usually good to both run (though I’ve never been too scientific about it)! One tries to show ads for your review, the other gives a % blocked.
Meanwhile on Steam my “family” consists of 3 adults with different addresses, last names, and credit cards, who have had accounts for decades and never lived at the same place.
We have full access to each other’s library.
Gabe Newell is 62 years old. Gonna enjoy this gravy train while we can…
Man I hope he lives to a 100 at least, why am I always late to the party, I learn about Limewire and it dies the next year, I get access to my sister’s Netflix account and Netflix goes to shit, I’m finally able to afford a gaming laptop and buy Steam games and now I’m too busy and tired from work to play them and Gabe is getting older. I wish I could go back in time and do things differently
Instead of wishing it was the past, imagine its the future and you want to go back to now to tell yourself something. What would that be?
I’d tell myself to start investing my money and hit the gym, but I’m unemployed right now and I know once I’m employed again finding the time in this rat race is gonna be difficult but I’m gonna start valuing my time more seriously, I’ve uninstalled doom scroll apps like Instagram and I’m working on time blocking my tasks, hopefully that pays off
Good for you! I hope you find a good job soon.
In the meantime, I recommend doing some exercise because that’s something you can completely control your progress on. If you don’t have a gym membership, body weight workouts are absolutely a thing you should check out.
My understanding is that gaben has already put an action plan in place for when the company moves on from his leadership.
From what I’ve heard of it, the people in line behind Gabe will be upholding the same values.
We should have at least another ~40 years or more of this before sometimes entitled brat inherits the company and sells it off to a foreign interest.
With all that being said: long live gaben.
With all that being said: long live gaben.
I like Steam, I like that they aren’t being dicks and treat users well. That said: billionaires are not your friend.
There is no such thing as an ethical billionaire.I didn’t say there was.
I just want this specific billionaire to continue to live because, unlike most billionaires, he’s not making my life more difficult.
He’s basically refused to let steam become enshittified. Other billionaires would have long ago succumb to the one that they serve, the almighty dollar, and done whatever they can to extract the most value from their user base. Enshittifying the platform in the process, and actively making my life worse.
So as far as I’m concerned, when it comes to billionaires, gaben is far from the worst.
I have a short list of billionaires that kinda fit into the category of: I don’t mind that they exist.
There’s a much longer list of billionaires that I’d like to see pushing up the daisies.
Not that I can, or would, do anything to make that happen. I just, wouldn’t hate it if it happened.
Fair enough. It isn’t that they’re better, it’s just that they’re less worse.
I would say, they’re not necessarily good, just less bad.
Same idea though.
Gaben is gonna be the first person to digitally upload their consciousness.
While steam has historically been “good”, doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way…
Sure, the 2 constants in the universe are Entropy and Enshitification. When Steam turns to shit I’ll go back to Piracy just like I did when Netflix went to shit.
My point is that companies don’t have to be shit about account sharing and family plans, and people don’t have to accept it.
Didn’t know steam even had a family option, it’s good to know
It’s pretty fantastic! In the past, you could share a library, and playing any game from that library would lock the entire library so others couldn’t use it at the same time. Today, that is loosened up and is much nicer to use.
How do you add new people? I tried and a prompt told me that we don’t seem to share a household.
Login on their PC or let them login on yours
That’s the old way of handling it. (And I think it still works.) They have a new implementation that’s just the family group admin sending an invite and the recipient accepting.
Which only works If you were in the same Network atleast for me
After I made my comment I saw someone else make a comment about getting a message saying that. I never did. Mine just worked. Weird.
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If one changes their password afterwards, will the share persist? Old Steam family sharing broke after changing the passwords.
Should still work. Not 100% sure tbh
The whole internet has gone to shit
Not here though. This is the good stuff
Google really seems to want to disincentivize people paying for YouTube Premium rather than just downloading an ad blocker.
Yea. I mean, I pay for it right now because it’s easy and works on all my stuff but frankly they’re really making me weigh how much convenience really matters. This kinda behaviour’s pretty garbo.
Firefox + ublock origin still works to block all YouTube ads
Invidious is a frontend for YouTube that blocks all their trackers and ads
PeerTube is an alternative community ran platform to replace YouTube in the future
ff+ubo+privacy badger (ff on my distro suggested privacy badger, can’t remember exact number but when ubo blocks over ~1k privacy badger has like 2 - 4 on it, surprising me a little there are not more trackers) on pc, my phone has no adblocking atm and I know their info on me is wrong because all I do see are gambling ads and I have never gone to a gambling site, I don’t even get the scam game ads my gf does on her phone. One day I may try out one of the “delete my dam info” places just to see how much they really have on me
Just use Firefox Mobile to watch YouTube.
Ad blocking through uBO and can enable playing with locked screen.
Running personalDNSFilter (whole phone, non-root adblocker) blocks ads just fine for me in the official unmodified Youtube app.
Just use Firefox Mobile
to watch YouTube.There we go, fixed it for you
Chrome + Ublock Origin Lite also still works, fyi.
I really wanted to like and use Peertube more, but it’s so devoid of any content aside from political podcasts, as far as I can tell. I can’t tell if the search function is bad, or I’m using it wrong, or there really is just that little content. Any recommendations for Peertube content?
Invidious sadly doesn’t allow for an account and subscriptions, at least not without running your own server which appears… complex.
That part is working now
I can load in my subscriptions.csv file from youtube into my subscriptions list on my Invidious account.
And that all works through a web browser
As someone with divorced parents this invalidates what I call a “family”. Same to you… Netflix
It’s called Premium Family, not Premium Household for fuck’s sake.
I’m willing to bet my left nut that they will rename it as such in the future.
Youtube can suck a peener. I will pirate whole channels if they keep fuckin’ up.
Why pay for premium anyway? Let alone a family plan. You still get ads. They can be skipped too — SponsorBlock will do it for free. Google could use this but chooses not to.
They want YouTube to be like cable TV. You pay for it. You watch ads. You pay more for premium channels.
I pay for it. No ads. Background playing on mobile, and YouTube music included.
I’m in a family plan, so when this change hits, going to have to find alternative methods.
I dont pay for it, use grayjay or firefox with ad block, I have no ads, background playing on mobile and I could care less about YouTube music.
NewPipe does this for free
I don’t have an android
I just pirate it
Pirate… what?
Videos from YouTube
How does one pirate free videos? Is there somebody uploading torrents of YouTube videos?
when all the videos get put behind login walls and drm, perhaps someone will.
How have you never heard of yt-dlp?
Yt-dlp doesn’t pirate YouTube videos… it downloads them directly from YouTube.
So you’re using SponsorBlock as well, or you’re watching videos without sponsors.
In-video sponsors are not even remotely the same thing as the ads YouTube puts on videos, but that being said no I’m not using SponsorBlock. YouTube premium has a button to skip in-video sponsors so I don’t need sponsor block.
I pay for it, also no ads except the sponsor plugs, which are pretty easy to skip. Overall a better experience than the non premium. I don’t live in the USA so my cost is like $5/month.
The three people who replied before you said they don’t get the sponsor plugs.
When I had YTP (I had a trial, it was like 3 months for $1), I got the sponsored segments. So either those other people are lying, or they don’t understand what I’m saying.
YouTube is my only subscription.
I use it for Music and Video. I definitely get my money’s worth, they’re streaming to me at least 8 hours a day.
If it’s not background music, it’s videos. I can’t even fathom how many hours of ads I have avoided.
same here, but even I’m looking to cancel both to avoid supporting a US company and because they’re making my experience worse by having a shitty user experience
I’ve never seen a single youtube ad with uBlock Origin. SponsorBlock takes care of most of the sponsored segments that a premium youtube account won’t get rid of.
You don’t get ads. You pay less than double what two premiums cost and your household can share.
I have YouTube premium and have not gotten any ads.
YouTube is fucking garbage.
I don’t care about the ads because it’s fucking garbage, and why would I watch garbage?
I pay for premium because currently it’s the easier option for getting no Ads on all my devices. Yes I could install a third party client on my TV, Phone & use uBlock on Desktop, but two of those require active upkeep.
- YouTube Music is included.
For sponsorships, YouTube Premium has the “Skip Ahead” feature which basically leeches off sponsorblock users where commonly skipped sections can be also skipped by you.
It’s just currently easier to pay than to pirate. I will say however, if it gets too shitty, I will resort back to pirating.
Ahh classic, punishing paying costumers while pirates don’t have to deal with any of this shit. I guess the beatings will continue until profits increase!
punishing paying costumers
Time to dress up as a pirate I guess.
And this still won’t be enough to stop people from using it.
it’s because Youtube is a content monopoly. TikTok is a platform for short content…on youtube it’s a feature with shorts. Twitch is a platform for live streaming content…on youtube it’s a feature with, other than discoverability, the same features. Any music streaming service? again…it’s a feature on youtube. The fact I could export my playlists from any music streaming platform and import it to Youtube and listen to it ad free via an ad blocker? come on. So as opposed to using multiple platforms, with youtube you have it all in one place. So no, this will not get people to stop using it.
Premium you don’t need if you’re even the slightest bit tech savvy. but no one is ever going to stop using youtube, there’s no point. I mean I use peertube as much as possible but every now and then I’m back on youtube because of all those features in one place and some things I just can’t find on peertube.
Or to start using it. I’m not sure I know anybody actually using it
So is it YouTube family or YouTube household?
Either way, probably need to setup site to site VPN and route YouTube traffic through a central location, if you can block geolocation.
This will be like Netflix pushing against shared accounts, sure it will work and their revenue will go up, but I will stop being a paying customer and will only watch videos from my notebook with adblocks.
I cancelled Netflix when they did the sharing bullshit and I cancelled prime when they wanted MORE money to not give me ads. Fuck that.
However, you and I seem to be in the minority since these mega corps push one bullshit after another and people just bend over and go “please use lube this time…”
