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.
i think you mean “overestimated”
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere.
👍
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.
they’ve got to make money somehow
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.
they make money from harvesting your data then showing you ads based on that data
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.
Google probably makes more like $50 per user per year on average
I highly doubt the number is that low.
Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I use DuckDuck Go and uBlock
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
After YouTube started filling their search results with mostly shorts, I stopped using it for new stuff. It’s terrible now.
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
Most of my browser addons are aimed at making YouTube usable. Hiding shorts is priority one
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
- Three or four videos that are actually from your search.
- Some recommended playlists.
- The shorts tray that vaguely has some content related to your search.
- Maybe two or three more videos from the actual search.
- “People also watch” recommendations.
- “Shorts for you” recommendations.
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
for real the discovery is terrible. it’s all junk and it’s a waste of my time.
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.
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.
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.
Didn’t know about SponsorBlock until all this started. So many just found out ad blocking is possible.
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).
I discovered SponsorBlock after installing Smart Tube Next on a FireTV.
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.
You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom’s Auto Care if you could.
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.
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.
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?
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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 ;-;
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
And they increased the fucking price for YouTube premium.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not going to happen with self hosted stuff. People really have no idea how much storage or bandwidth YouTube uses.
Thanks for the newpipe suggestion!
piped for desktop and libretube for mobile also a great option
And my work profile on my phone tells me to get fucked :(
Dammit
…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
I had uBlock Origin installed since forever, are people just finding out about it?
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
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
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.
That’s what Youtube is trying. Either pay or at least stop using it, so you don’t cost them money.
there will be New Solutions.
you’re an overflowing toilet of optimism
This is the way.
Just this morning all the posts (here on Lemmy) were about how everyone was uninstalling their adblockers.
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
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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
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.
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.
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!
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!
And that didn’t mention ublock origion, the blocker that still works…
It did at the very very bottom. I almost missed it.
Stupid Wired article was stupid.
It’s like war propaganda, both sides are eager to claim they’re winning lol
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDsJJRNXjYI
But it should not be done by LTT, but by Google.
