Odysee, a decentralised YouTube alternative focused on free speech, is officially ending the serving of ads on the platform, starting today.
The post:
"Dear friends of Odysee,
Starting today, we're removing all ads.
We don't need ads to make money as a platform and we are confident in the development of our own new monetisation programs that will help creators earn a living and at the same time keep Odysee alive.
Ultimately, sacrificing the overall user experience to make a few bucks isn't worth it to us and nor is it even sustainable for a platform that wishes to make something truly open and creatively free.
As we take this decision, one thing is certain to us, media platforms (even ones that market themselves as 'free-speech') typically devolve into advertising companies and end up becoming beholden to their paymasters. It's been that way for centuries and is never going to change.
As we see YouTube become more aggressive with their ad deployment and 'Free Speech' platforms try to build their own ad businesses it's apparent to us that we're building a model for Odysee that will keep it sustainable not only financially, but in its ability to provide an incorruptible user experience.
Our approach may be considered niche or unconventional, that's fine by us. Odysee will be used by the world on terms that are agreeable to its users, and we know our users don't like ads.
When I see that used multiple times by a platform operator it invariably means they’re right-wing wingnuts and/or the platform will devolve into right wing drivel while silencing dissent.
Yup. And on descriptive grounds, the whole thing falls into a false dichotomy: treating free speech as an all-or-nothing matter, instead treating freedom of speech as a scale. And that giving someone complete freedom of speech always means restricting the freedom of speech of someone else.
(I typically exemplify this through a guy with a megaphone in an offline plaza. Telling him to drop off the megaphone reduces his ability to reach willing listeners, thus his freedom of speech; but if you leave him alone nobody else can be heard, so their freedom of speech is lowered.)
Thank you, you put it better than I could. It’s not binary, it’s not all or nothing. You can have some freedom of speech and yet still not really have freedom of speech if you’re silenced by those who disagree.
Yes, your megaphone example is a special case of the paradox of tolerance. In this instance, tolerance of loud voices means quiet voices are drowned out.
This isn’t even a true statement. Mods are human and can silence views they don’t like.
Go post some progressive and democratic views or criticize authoritarian support over on the grad.ml side. See how long it is before you’re shut down, blocked or even banned. There’s no free speech rule just because the platform is decentralized.
The only mitigating factors are that you can have a platform for opposing views, but even that isn't a guarantee here because the instance can be defederated and effectively silenced.
You think Lemmy has free speech? Some major mods here are quite liberal in controlling exactly what speech and ideas they allow their uses to be exposed to, and that is how it will always be by those desiring power over others.
Looks like you care zilch for free speech. If you and others with this opinion cared for free speech, you would promote your own alternative ideas on those platforms to even things out, instead of whining that there's more opposing views to yours on the platform than not.
Freedom goes both ways. I hate nazis, but it's better to have their bullshit out in the open to be criticized, than have them group up on shady underground places that would only make it worse.
If anyone does want to support them, even by a small amount, and don't have much money, I personally recommend subscribing for a month or two to the Premium+ subsciption, which is only $2.99/month. It's all I can afford atm personally, so that's what I'm going to be doing. They deserve support just for this action alone.
To be honest, I've been using the website and I notice nothing of this. I can click a few links and get to said content, yes, but my feed and some of the categories I check are on par with YouTube. The only big difference I experience is that there's much more content of smaller content creators.
I ain't a fascist, Neo-Nazi, far-rightist, or any of the things Odysee is falsely marked by people as being, and I fit in just fine with my fellow Odysee users. Stop attacking one of the only companies who are truly trying to be the change they want to see in the world.
Far right content is more common than on YouTube because of the guidelines, but in my experience the largest parts are crypto, privacy and similar, also a decent amount is gaming (at least that’s what I upload)
I've noticed that the Linux and open-source community is pretty big there, too; with a lot of them being part of the privacy community. I'm a part of this community on Odysee.
I mirror my stuff from youtube over there and I do not fall into these categories. To be fair, I have the tiniest of audiences anyway, so... doesn't really matter either way.
Haven't checked in on Odyssee for a while though. Not sure if the auto mirror thing still works.
I mirror my stuff from youtube over there and I do not fall into these categories
Same.
And I've noticed that there seems to be a very small user base there.
My videos and most in my niche only get 10s of views on Odysee.
When I go browsing around outside of my niche, I tend to find quite a bit of right wing conspiracy stuff. Not really who I want to be associated with, but it's not nearly as bad as some of the other (now failed) "free speech " video platforms that came before it.
Pretty much, unfortunately. And the people who run Odysee have repeatedly, time and time again, defended Nazis, white supremacists, far-right conspiracies, videos calling for genocide, etc.
Although in fairness, to my knowledge they haven't done what Musk has done for example and said "free speech [Unless you disagree with dear leader, then it's an account ban]!" Left-wing content is left alone (not that there's much of it on Odysee)
There may be content generators on there you can label that way, but that doesn't make the platform neo-nazi.
You take all of the stuff excluded from a big platform and put it on a small platform, and it'll swamp every other topic out. If as a platform runner you feel that you should not censor others, then this can happen.
On the flip side, there's nothing stopping other with less controversial opinions to post there as well. Nobody is going to be told their channel about supercars isnt racist enough, or their politics channel is too-left communist.
Strongly disagree with you. If you have a bar that tolerates Nazis, you’ll find that bar becomes a Nazi bar over time. To commingle with Nazis is to accept them and their ideology.
I’d have a very hard time sending people to my videos if they sit next to a white replacement theory video.
You sometimes see that stuff on Odysee because they don't censor it, unless it promotes violence or hatred to individuals. They do have community guidelines after all, since they can't legally host... illegal content. In that sense there is censorship because they can't not censor things to some extent; but the free speech and large lack of censorship is their goal regardless. As an Odysee user for over 2 years, this is the minority of content on the platform. Where you do see that content that breaks the rules... that's what the report button is for.
My understanding was that Odysee served the purpose to upload videos that could no longer be uploaded on YouTube due to YouTube’s community guidelines. The time I checked out that website the front page was full of manosphere types and the Evropa documentary and anti vax crap
Well I never happened to see anything related to these topics on Odysee. I mostly used to follow tech stuff as my other hobbies like cars and basketball aren’t really present on the platform.
If you have some favourite YouTube channels from the cars and basketball world, you should try contacting them personally and asking them to sync their channel with Odysee. Even if they choose not to; at least they've heard of it now, know at least some of their audience may want them to, and may consider it in the future 🙂.
It might not work asking in YouTube comments though, but it's worth a try. The reason I say this is I've personally tried it multiple times over the past year, and strangely I've been noticing that YouTube appear to be switching between banning the word "Odysee" spelled specifically that way, and not banning it. I would comment something with the word Odysee, and no matter what happens, it would immediately disappear the moment I refresh the page -- commenting anything else would work fine. A few months later, I tried it again and it worked. Some time after that, it stopped working again, and it was like that for quite a while. Fast forward a month or two, and I again checked it a few days ago, and it seems to be currently working again; and all my previous comments from the past about Odysee have reappeared in my comment history, when they previously would not appear in my comment history. So now could be a good time to comment. It wasn't a glitch with my account, because I tried it with two separate ones.
I used to like Odysee until I saw them clearly promote conspiracy theories and far-right, almost Nazi rhetoric on the homepage.
Guys, just because the backbone of your site is decentralized doesn't mean your centralized frontend can't be modified by you.
They never even made a single attempt to help others develop alternative frontends too, so the decentralization there was more akin to decentralization theater.
You would think there'd be some decentralized video hosting thing popular with us Fediverse types but in practice they're all the low spots in the gutter in which the densest shit gathers. Most of the audience is on Youtube, and you only migrate to an alternative site if you've been banned from Youtube, and the folks who haven't been banned from Youtube don't tend to want to go stand next to the people who have so it's difficult for legitimate content creators to adopt those alternative platforms.
Dailymotion still exists and I think you can still upload there but I know of no "dailymotioners." Vimeo seems to have gone in a b2b direction, Twitch is mainly for live streaming, Tiktok succeeded where Vine failed, Nebula was some Youtubers starting their own Netflix with blackjack and hookers, Floatplane was LMG starting their own Netflix with blackjack and hookers, then you've got the several porn sites of varying dubiousness, and then down in the sump you've got the likes of LBRY and Odysee.
Guys, just because the backbone of your site is decentralized doesn’t mean your centralized frontend can’t be modified by you.
They never, ever stated the content on Odysee can't be removed; this is a misunderstanding spread by both people who don't use the platform, and even a lot who do use the platform but haven't properly done their research about how the platform works. They can't not have content removed since they are still legally required to remove illegal content, such as that which breaks copyright law, for example, pirates uploading full-length movies. Than when people find out that content can in fact be removed, they call Odysee a lair for something they never claimed.
They never even made a single attempt to help others develop alternative frontends too, so the decentralization there was more akin to decentralization theater.
As if Youtube didn't promote conspiracy theories and almost Nazi rhetorics that serve the country it's based in. They do, which they don't call as such. Everything else they'll call conspiracy theories and propaganda.
I have no idea why you're being downvoted since you're 100% correct. I watch one video about gaming and YouTube's recommendations are all alt-right anti-feminist stuff with Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.
Google surely knows enough about me to know I lean far-left but the algorithm is determined to feed me that slop.
I have no idea from a technical perspective if Odysee's algorithm is independent from or worse than YouTube's, but the criticism of YouTube is completely valid.
The difference between Odysee and YouTube is that YouTube doesn't claim to be a free speech platform that allows any possible statements on, and does often take down a lot of the harmful content. You only see the remainder, not the whole.
Odysee is quite small, and as such, could relatively easily moderate much more of the content on its platform, if they actually cared about doing so.
Guys, just because the backbone of your site is decentralized doesn't mean your centralized frontend can't be modified by you.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Did you mean can be modified? Or what does this have to do with Nazi rhetoric? Maybe you have a different idea about the word "frontend"?
Odysee is the platform, the site, the frontend, and the company.
LBRY was the backend, the blockchain-based system that actually stored the videos themselves.
Odysee was the main interface to interact with the videos stored on LBRY, to essentially act like YouTube, but the videos were technically available to anyone.
Odysee then used the justification that the backend was decentralized to say that they had to remain entirely neutral to any content on Odysee, because a decentralized system inherently cannot have its content censored by one party.
This ignored the fact that they could choose to modify which videos their frontend would show to users. They acted as if this was not possible, even though it was.
Thus, a decent YouTube alternative with some good creators on it refused to censor any nazi content that started making its way there because YouTube rightfully deplatformed its supporters, and let it infect the platform without doing anything to stop it, pretending as if they had no choice, while in reality, it just brought them more revenue.
I think that Chandra has a point - media platforms do often devolve into ad companies, once they rely on advertisement money to survive. Because once someone is paying for a platform's continued existence, they can dictate the terms, by simply threatening to stop paying for it.
And, granted, Odysee is a Nazi and crypto bro haven, but the point still stands - let us not be fools saying "Hitler ate bread so bread bad", and ignore a message that also applies to environments that [correctly] tell the Nazi to fuck off.
Nobody here is saying that ads are good. We're saying this disingenuous fascist is only saying these things because he can't make any money from ads. If he was making ad money he'd be saying exactly the opposite of all this. Fascists don't have any morals but power for power's sake. That's what fascism IS.
Regardless of why he's saying that ads fuck up media platforms, the reasoning itself is sensible. And, while nobody in this thread is saying "ads good", plenty people across Lemmy see advertisement as some sort of necessary evil when it comes to supporting online platforms, and they're willing to compromise, even if that would be a bloody mistake.
If he was making ad money he’d be saying exactly the opposite of all this.
Then he would be saying something idiotic. (It wouldn't be noteworthy.)
Fascists don’t have any morals but power for power’s sake. That’s what fascism IS.
It's actually worse than simple lack of morals: they have fucked up moral premises, that are immoral for anyone with a shred of dignity.
And even a broken clock is right twice a day. In this case, since Chandra got no financial support from ads, he stumbled upon a decent reasoning, regardless of doing so for moral or immoral reasons.
As a youtube premium member i wish youtube could cut out all ads for everyone and just keep the premium advantages for members. But i'm sure it's not that easy to keep the boat afloat. Hopefully they can get to a healthy balance of income for watch time and reduce ads for free viewers. But we all know they just want to see the line go up for the greed and would never reduce ads if people still watch with as many ads as possible.
I completely understand not wanting to see that there, and you don't have to see it, and besides, I see that all over YouTube too when I'm not signed in receiving good recommendations based on what I like.
I suggest reading my comment response to YTG123 (which is the other person who just replied to you), since you probably weren't notified of it. Sorry to not reply directly, but I understandably don't want to write another few hundred words, and the comment is relevant to you.
Perhaps when things mature, I’ll give it another look. YouTube for me, when not signed in, does not have the sheer plethora of MAGA nonsense like this site does. Maybe it’s some regional algorithm, I don’t know, though I live in the south where MAGA idiocy runs rampant.
I take the path of least resistance when it comes to filtering out lies and garbage from my life. For now it’s simpler for me to just not browse the site than to weed out such content.
It definitely is, but it doesn't try to force recommendations on you like YouTube. You can mostly just subscribe to channels you like and view their content.
It doesn't force recommendations on you, and channels you don't like can be muted or blocked. I've only blocked a handful of channels (Most of them were synced from YT too). Than there are sections: if you only want to see content you like to see, use the respective sections. If you want to see technology content, you aren't going to click on the spirituality section.
Furthermore, recommendations aren't actually a free feature (yet), as it's still in early access and comes with Premium. 99.99% of the people who are upset about the "recommended content" being stuff they strongly dislike aren't actually even being recommended anything to begin with. The videos that appear on the side are "Related" videos. Their system for determining related videos isn't extremely comprehensive yet, so some other random content can slip through the cracks. For example, I was listening to a no-copyright music track called Icelanding Arpeggios, and I was shown a "Related" video along the side; a video synced from YouTube, which was of a man's voice reading aloud Psalm 4 of the Old Testament with Icelanding Arpeggios playing in the background. The reason it was classified as "Related" wasn't because some system was able to listen to the music in the video, but because the exact words "Icelanding Arpeggios" appeared in the description of said video about that Psalm. Here's an example of "Related" suggestions. In this case they are working well and as intended, showing more video's related to Solid-State batteries.
So the current unfortunate reality is that a video about, for example, how gravity works, occasionally may suggest "Related" content on the side about gravity not being real, that the earth is flat, and that the sun is 3,000 miles in the sky. Because, you know, it's about the sun and gravity. The video's are technically related in some way, but most people who are learning about the universe don't want to see that, because it has no real scientific basis, is not widely accepted, and gravity and the ball earth has already been proven to be true.
After all, Odysee is still being developed, and their system's for suggested "Related" content is still not fully matured.
It split from LBRY, which originally pushed a cryptocurrency system kind of like Brave's BAT. They're now trying to go decentralized, but it's with a blockchain system, so I guess we'll see where that goes (blockchain isn't a problem, provided they're not pushing a currency).
I'm interested to see where it goes, so I sub to a few channels I'd otherwise watch on YouTube. But I'm not giving them any of my money until they earn it. I'm currently paying for Nebula because a few of my favorite channels are there, and I'd be willing to pay for Odysee if there was a decent value proposition.
I would not recommend investing any time or money into the platform, as it will inevitably crash and burn as the owners walk away flush with cash while everyone else is left holding the bag.
Peertube is not ideal, but it is currently the only alternative that isn't tied to a shady crypto scheme.
That's kinda the issue for a platform like that, at least in the early stages. You'll get all the people who've been kicked off YouTube, and not the mainstream content.
Very true! Lemmy wasn't super like that, but then again, reddit allowed nearly anything (apparently including csam to a certain degree). Then the API debacle, and that crap came here. Yt is more strict on certain things, which pushes those scourges of society to these platforms that are in their early stages, giving them an abysmal reputation.
Continue your normal habits of watching YouTube but being redirected to odysee when creators have posted there.
hurt YouTube just a little bit.
I’m so sick of hearing that odysee is only a nazi crypto scam. That content exists on every platform but by shitting all over every option that comes out and then whining when YouTube does more anti user crap is just ridiculous.
You don't need to just use odysee. You can use YouTube for your recommendations then be redirected for the content. Eventually when recommendations are there it will be an easy transition for the majority of people but until then, at the very least don’t step on the face of a working competitor that has good intentions.
P.s.
You don’t need to use the token, it was mostly just given to viewers and creators for free.
Exactly. Another awesome thing the extension provides is the ability to migrate all your YouTube subscriptions over to Odysee. You also have two options with the Watch on Odysee extension. You can 1: Make YouTube links immediately redirect to Odysee (default option), or 2: Have a "Watch on Odysee" button appear to the left of the subscribe button on every YouTube video that also exists on Odysee (Example screenshot). Choosing the latter option means you don't need to disable the extension every time you want to comment on a YouTube video.
Another thing people keep doing is acting like Odysee is a free speech absolutist platform, in that they allow you to say and post absolutely anything. This is not true, because they have community guidelines which do not allow hate speech and promotion of violence (two examples). It's just less strict and more fair in it's moderation practices than YouTube.
Edit: If you want the extension on Chrome, you can get it directly from GitHub. You may need to view a guide if you don't know how to install extensions manually.
Odysee is is one of the few alternative platforms with a decent left wing audience. The only other majority progressive platforms are Mastodon and Lemmy, though Lemmy has a lot of neo-progressive tankies and angry conservative tankies.
Honestly, after all the shit YouTube is pulling with their ad systems, I wouldn't mind those old tiny banner strip ads that used to occasionally pop up at the bottom of a video.
Compared to the current standard of 3 minutes of unskippable ads interrupting every other video, those little banners are downright unobtrusive.
You cannot say things "uncontrollably" as there is still a community guidelines set of rules that just aren't as strict as YouTube's, plus the ability to report is there too. Despite being a free speech platform, it is still legally required not to host illegal content, and so these community guidelines absolutely must be there. If the comments or videos directly promote violence or hatred (just two examples), they are grounds for removal by site moderators. They are usually only removed when people report them, though, since the moderation team likely isn't very large at this point in time.
In my 2 years with Odysee, I've found one person earlier this year directly promoting extreme violence in a comment section. That's one time too many; but it's still a long time. I reported them, and they were removed. I don't know how long it took for them to remove it though, because I only checked if the comment was still there after a couple of weeks; and it wasn't; so I can't speak for the swiftness of the moderators in their actions yet.
I'm going to try setting up an instance but one issue with it that I see is that instance owners will be the only permitted uploaders for most instances since storage and bandwidth is a huge issue when it comes to video hosting platforms.
It's more market anarchism than capitalism IMO. The factors of production here are controlled 100% by its users, not whoever last bought the whole thing.
I started digging into Odyssey some time ago when I found electro boom and big Clive were posting there. Immediately there was a lot of trash, like mostly trash. I went ahead and created an account where I could actually block content makers. I started off just blocking the wheel offensive ones anyone spouting libtards and woke. Moved into blocking clinate deniers and anti-vaxs, flat earthers. I just sit there and block 40 or 50 every time I logged in. Slowly, the content became less offensive overall. But you start running into the problem where they're all just videos from the same 30 preppers showing you how to make eggs in a $5,000 freeze dryer. I eventually started blocking the annoying and repetitive stuff. I haven't checked recently, but in its heyday the content just wasn't there even if you got rid of all the other crap you didn't want to see
Yeah, I find that since so many people watch such different content from each other, it means that whether or not the content on a smaller platform like Odysee is actually interesting to people, tends to be hit or miss. It still needs more growth fix that issue. I still watch a lot of YouTube though, and Odysee has their own official extension which allows you to choose to either redirect YouTube links to Odysee (if the same video officially exists there), or show a "Watch on Odysee" button right YouTube's "Subscribe" button.
I noticed there wasn't enough gameplay videos of the games that I like, and hardly any game soundtracks uploaded, so I started uploading my full game playthrough's and game OST's to a couple of channels for the people who also have my taste in videos. Oh yeah, fun fact: You can also have multiple channels on the same account and quickly switch between them. It's pretty cool. The extension even lets you transfer your subs over from YT.
It's depressing that bleating "free speech" has become a shibboleth, betraying the speaker's tedious far right contrarianism and a wish to express it without consequence. Racists, Nazis, x-phobes, bigots of all stripes; these are your target audience when your primary objective for your platform is supposedly "free speech", especially when it's in opposition to the censorship of your users' bigotry on other platforms. I wish it weren't so, but it fucking is, 100% of the time.
It's like on reddit, when you discover a splinter sub called r/FunSubReborn or something, where they post the same content as r/FunSub, but in this "reborn" sub you can also be an unmitigated cunt in the comments and make racist or phobic remarks without getting banned.
r/TrueUnpopularOpinion, r/TrueOffMyChest, r/GoodAnimemes (that sub was made after r/Animemes mods stated that "trap" was a slur, which made a bunch of manchildren angry who went to go make their own sub, so you can immediately guess how much of a misogynistic porn-oriented hellhole it is)
They officially announced they were switching to the Arweave protocol in a post a little under a month ago, but I'm not sure if it's happened yet; haven't looked further into it yet, and it was revealed by other sources a little while prior to that.
I was a big fan of odysee but once LBRY lost to the SEC I figured it would die or change horribly. Im not sure who owns odysee now, how hosting works on it now that LBRY has been dissolved, or whos mining rigs are running the decentralized lbry blockchain that still presumably powers odysee. I need to know the details in clear detail before I trust it again on a technical level. I am more skeptical of crypto now and think a paid patreon membership peertube instance may be the best way to go. Peertubes biggest issue is scaling hosting cost as it gets bigger and donations can't keep up as well as lifetime of an instance. If I host my videos on your site and a year later it goes dark or they were deleted because the server maintainer just didn't want them taking up space, thats kind fustrating.
r they were deleted because the server maintainer just didn’t want them taking up space, thats kind frustrating.
Yeah, the onus is on us to keep the backups and perhaps reseed if necessary. The whole part where Youtube is a massive free unlimited hosting library is not sustainable eventually. Crypto has always been a grift with a variable lifespan, it just funds the services while it's in it's bubble.
Odysee was owned by LBRY before the LBRY company was dissolved. They were founded by the same team of people who created the LBRY company, and the LBRY network/protocol (the decentralised part), but are not themselves the same company. So the LBRY company going away was never going to dissolve Odysee also, which is why they still exist today. LBRY (the company) dissolving did not affect the content on Odysee because the LBRY network/protocol itself is open-source and decentralised; and LBRY being sued and dying does not somehow make the LBRY network/protocol illegal for Odysee (or anyone) to use. If Odysee had gone away, anyone else could have jumped in and made a new replacement frontend for the LBRY network/protocol (Odysee is a frontend for LBRY, after all).
About a month ago, Odysee announced that they would be moving away from the LBRY network over to the Arweave network. Now, I'm not sure when they are going to do this, but it appears that at the minute they are still using the LBRY network/protocol for content uploads. The reason I think they are still using LBRY at this very minute, is that when I uploaded a video to my Odysee channel yesterday, I noticed in my personal uploads page that it was still using the lbry:// at the beginning of it's address on the network.
I don't know if PeerTube has the option, but with Odysee, there's an option to automatically sync your existing YouTube channel with Odysee. It will bring over the video, the description, and will be uploaded in full quality; the comment section will be separate though, so the comments on Odysee are by Odysee users themselves.
They also earn money from the optional premium subscriptions, the 5% cut from channel donations, and 100% of the donations sent directly to them. The way the direct donations work is by going to a video, and just below it, clicking the "$ Support" button and making the donation either via cash or LBC. That's an option for all channels on the platform.
Otherwise, I don't know the ins-and-outs of how the decentralised blockchain system works, but they do not have to host all of the sites content themselves, as it is also voluntarily hosted by other users. I'm not sure how this works at the moment; it previously worked by being a user of the LBRY Desktop app, but after the LBRY company shut down, and the LBRY app went away, I'm not sure how other people host the pieces of that content anymore. They are moving away from the LBRY blockchain protocol, over to the Arweave protocol, so I imagine they will bring out an Arweave app that may replace the LBRY app which that was used previously.
Yes, but usually it's the videos that are synced to Odysee directly from YouTube which contain these sponsored segments. I've never seen an Odysee exclusive video before that has a sponsored segment, because the platform isn't big enough for advertisers to care.
I just synced my youtube channel with odysee... Yeah a bunch of alt right trash is floating around but the only way to change that is to drown it out with actual content. The more normal content uploaded the less breathing room for the outrageous bullshit in feeds. Hopefully my library helps.
I'm glad my reaching out has helped find people who've never heard of it. It's got quite a lot of users, but has been growing very slowly in user-base the last few years, simply due to not enough people talking about it and allowing natural growth of the platform.
The only trackers they use are onetrust geolocation cookie, which determines the country and state/city, but not exact location, based on your IP address. Than there's googletagmanager, which I agree they should remove just for being Google.
Calling them spyware for the tiny speck of data-collection they do is petty, when you're completely ignoring the things that prove they specifically care about privacy. For one, you can sign up completely anonymously; secondly, you can comment and post videos under the name "Anonymous"; thirdly, according to their Privacy Policy:
Third-party disclosure:
We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your Personally Identifiable Information unless we provide users with advance notice. This does not include website hosting partners and other parties who assist us in operating our website, conducting our business, or serving our users, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential...
Fourth: they are the only website I've ever known of to actually respect the "Do Not Track" setting that you can explicitly toggle in your browser settings. There is no standard way of managing "Do Not Track" signals in the industry, so 99% of websites have no systems in place to stop themselves collecting your data when this browser setting is enabled.
There's some tracking they were doing prior to their ads removal a few days ago in regards to what ads you were clicking on. But everything related to ads will likely be removed from the policy very soon, as the policy was last updated in 2021 when they were still serving ads. Example:
We, along with third-party vendors such as Google use first-party cookies (such as the Google Analytics cookies) and third-party cookies (such as the DoubleClick cookie) or other third-party identifiers together to compile data regarding user interactions with ad impressions and other ad service functions as they relate to our website.
Odysee is not spyware, and nor is it bloated. Even if you could argue it has some amount of bloat (which is usually subjective, so you probably can); it still wouldn't be anywhere near the 50x more bloat that YouTube, the very thing they are trying to be an alternative to, have themselves.
Nice! Yeah, I use LibreWolf too and never saw them. I started using the mobile app recently which didn't block ads though. I found them a bit annoying because the mobile app is very unoptimised atm, so the ads being there just made things worse.
The way they worked previously was that they would appear in the apps interface. They wouldn't play within the video's themselves, and a small advertisement would pop up at the bottom of the screen which you could cross-off manually.
It does. You can get it on the Google Play Store or F-Droid. F-Droid version is very outdated though. You can always officially get the latest version directly from apk.odysee.tv.
I only found out about that link to the latest version a few days ago, and I was previously using the F-Droid version to avoid using Google services. I don't know how much better the latest version is, but my experience with the very outdated F-Droid version was that the app was very slow and laggy. I heard that performance tends to be quite good or terrible depending on your phone; my phone is just a cheap android phone from a few years ago, so it makes sense it didn't run well for me. I haven't tested the latest version yet.
Iv been using odysee for a couple years and never had an ad on the ios or android app. Nor in the browser. (In video sponsors dont count). Odysee ftw i much prefer when creators i watch use youtube and a alternative platform like odysee
Yes, I just remembered that I'm pretty sure the F-Droid version of the app on Android doesn't contain ads, because F-Droid probably didn't allow it; while the Google Play version did contain ads. I'm not sure why they didn't appear on your iPhone though, I don't have one to test that.
How do creators generate income? Is it just Patreon type stuff? YouTube is probably one of the few services I actually don't hate using other than its terrible algorithm.
I've never cared to generate income on my own channel, so I'm not sure how all of it works. But the main way that I know of is through channel tips. There's a ($ Support) button below every channel and content upload, which lets you directly tip the creator. You can use Patreon or anything else if you want to, but the functionality is built in. Odysee gets a 5% cut of all the tips sent to channels. There may be other ways of making money, but I'm not aware of what they might be.
I stopped looking into Odysee after I heard LBRY was shutting down. There doesn't seem to be much transparency on what the future of the site is. Also echoing the concern that some have already raised, the complete lack of moderation is a double edged sword that seems to have fostered a home for right-wing extremists.
There is moderation, the ability to report content and comments, and community guidelines. Odysee having a complete lack of moderation is a myth, and I have personally had content removed by moderators before by reporting it.
Yeah, it's referring to the memberships you can begin as a monthly donation to specific creators, not the Premium subscription that directly supports Odysee.
Edit: I now know that this banner is not an ad for Odysee's premium subscriptions as it may seem to be. Memberships are separate to Premium entirely. Memberships are like the "Join" button you find on YouTube, where you pay a donation to that specific content creator and may get bonuses such as a badge next to your name in the comments, early access to videos, etc. depending on what benefits the creator chose themselves. Odysee only gets a 5% cut from this. This is completely justified as being the only thing that is arguably an ad on the site, as it is purely there to help creators thrive on the platform, and it can also be hidden permanently by clicking the X at the top-right of the banner; so they aren't even being forceful about it either. The ads being removed were mainly referring to the pop-up ads that third-parties could place on the website.