Linus Tech Tips uploaded a video showing how to block ads on Youtube. Which was removed by Youtube for community guidelines violations.

I run a local instance of invidious and it is…chefs kiss

are the instances always flaky and laggy just for me?

I wonder if those are less likely to be blocked on networks.

But you’re not forced to actually wait through them like on YT - you can just scroll past.

It does indeed.

Makes sense, it's basically just a Bing wrapper.

It isn't. But there are situations where that isn't an option, like being on a work or government computer where downloading firefox or installing an extension will get you fired. When that's the case, YouTube+Bing is a "good enough"/"better than nothing" option.

Breaking news, people on the Internet have no concept of nuance.

I had the vague recollection of him having a small-business-owner-brain moment and going on about how it's theft, and it's taking money out of his pockets, or something along those lines.

Looks like I may have been either thinking of someone else, or misinterpreted a snippet of video of him ranting about something.

I will admit to not watching his stuff for a good number of years now, and could be totally conflating things.

He directly called it bad because it hurt his revenue stream. He is ok with ad blocking as long as it isn't being done to him. That's pretty bold if you ask me. A double standard, quite the opposite of nuance. He equated it with entering a cirque due soleil show without paying a ticket, which is a false equivalence. He thinks that he is entitled to have his ads seen as a price of admittance to watching his videos. No one is entitled to have their ads watched.

Say you walk up to some person giving out free samples of food. As a condition of taking this free sample, you also must take a pamphlet of advertisements from the people who are giving you the free sample. You take your free sample, and then walk away while dropping the pamphlet in the nearest trash can. That's essentially what ad blocking is. You're simply preventing certain parts of a web page from being downloaded to your device. That's why people have issues with the "piracy" label, because nothing is being "stolen". You're just refusing to take all of it.

Exactly. Getting media without paying (either in currency or in data for ads). Which they also address and talk about plex and jellyfin to consume the newly "liberated" media. I find his opinion on this quite fair.

Yeah, ever since all that stuff came out just before the new CEO took over, including the video/audio of the sexual harassment meeting which was treated as a total joke, I unsubscribed and stopped viewing their content. I couldn't reconcile their fun and approachable/friendly image with how they're treating staff. Moved on to watching more from other creators like Jayztwocents. Unfortunate that people keep turning out to be shitty left and right.

He’s a driven-but-not-that-smart type of person from the videos I’ve seen.

I find what happened, and their response to everything, completely unacceptable.

But even if you forget that entirely, i decided to see if anything has changed after a year, and the quality of videos is genuinely shocking. A production studio of such scale makes videos, that your typical 14 year old would find embarrassing. The attitude towards everything, and the overwhelming fake energy, are both very repulsive

I put the local football game on my tv over antenna. Oh a commercial, I guess I'll walk away to take a piss now. The swat team busts down my door. I run for my scabbard to resist but with one peg leg I'm not quick enough. The seas are rough sailing for pirates willing to skip ads mateys.

It's really not. YouTube doesn't get to decide what I play on my browser, I do. I just choose to not load the ads, and I choose to skip over sponsor segments manually. I don't use sponsor block or anything automated like that, I just use a content blocker and the fast-forward buttons YouTube provides.

At what point did I pirate anything? I asked YouTube for content, and it gave it to me. I didn't ask it for the ads, and it didn't give it to me. I fail to see where the piracy occurred.

I'm certainly breaking their TOS, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm pirating their content.

If I find value in a platform, I'll pay. I pay for Nebula, for example, because I've gotten a lot of value from a number of their creators and prefer to watch their content there than on YouTube. I'll occasionally buy merch from a YouTuber, and sometimes donate. But YouTube actively tracks me in ways I'm not comfortable with, so I block their trackers and their ads.

Let's go to the early days of "piracy"

You are claiming that fast forwarding the opening trailers and adverts on a rented VHS is piracy.

Is it piracy if I skip the ads on the DVD I bought?

I've literally voted for the "Pirate Party" in my country

It's really not. Piracy is sharing content you can't get legally. Blocking ads is just picking and choosing which content I allow to load on my computer. It's certainly against their TOS, but AFAIK there's nothing illegal about it, therefore not piracy.

just like piracy is effectively stealing.

IRL piracy, sure. Digital... not so much.

Doubled down? After being called out they slowed the upload cadence, are taking more time to make sure mistakes don't get through, and changed their production process. They also formed a volunteer team of "beta tester" viewers who see each video pre-release to catch any mistakes they didn't internally. I think they handled it well. Of course it would be better if they didn't have a problem in the first place, but I'd never call it "doubling down".

Probably the sexual harassment one that's when I left. The billet labs stuff was bad too though.

For those curious https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/linus-tech-tips-youtube-controversy-1.6940087

Even Luke, who I always agreed with the most and seemed the most level-headed has talked about their hiring process and said that, if you don't have personal projects, it's highly unlikely that you'll be considered for a position in LTT.

Supposedly it's because that shows a "lack of passion". Personally, I find that rather toxic. Like, dude, I do this for work and I also have a life. I literally do not have enough time to exercise, take care of my loved ones and also maintain personal projects.

Check the other comment thread from the parent, there's a discussion which goes into it.

I don’t understand why LTT gets so much crap from people

Because their clowns. Literally. Their content is pure tech entertainment with constant immature humour and little substance. The way they present themselves is like a group of teenagers messing around.

Then there's their "expertise". They don't know tech beyond a Windows "power user".

But in regards to the more recent scandal, I really think a lot of those things are fixable and I’ll be watching to see if they fix them.

Linus showed his true colours during the Billet Labs incident. He doubled down hard, and I'm convinced that even today Linus feels like he did nothing wrong. They have zero reputation to salvage, IMO.

Please kindly refer to vetting processes about what to post or not post on a community platform. Who said what?

Excuse me, I use Arch and Firefox with uBlock.

Ok linus.

If you sneak onto someone’s campground property and have a bonfire party

Ah, I would say that is worse than piracy, since you deprive them of the ground for a time. A better analogy would be sneaking into the party they are having and enjoying it with them without paying for an invitation. Or sneaking into a concert.

I'll spare you the troubles.

Of you didn't watch the full video, which is fair enough, it's a point Linus makes which the comment refers to. So Linus is either newborn or braindead? I mean ok maybe. 🗿

I'm downvoted for pointing out what Linus said in the video, why exactly?

Damn bro you really must love corpo boots.

Well if they did it faster, it did eventually get removed.

Unfortunately this is just the way it is on YT now. Post clickbait thumbnails, or miss out on hundreds of thousands of views. Because that's the way YT likes it. They don't want to positively weight long-term high-quality content, they want to promote clickbait.

As part of the mindless horde of sub-intellectual gremlins, i have to say that while i dont love thumbnails like that, i still click on the video because i know it'll be quality

And that's why I have Dearrow. Bye bye bait thumbnails and titles.

You have to understand shit like these thumbsnails arent made for people like you and me.

They are made for the mindless horde of sub-intellectual gremlins who are incapable of rational, independent thought. The kind that run out and put sandpaper on their windshield wipers and microwave their phones to "fast recharge" them because they saw a video that said to do that.

and the sad, terrifying reality, is these mentally stunted little goblins outnumber us by margins that are too terrifying to even think about.

Oh, no I totally get it. I'm well aware I'm in the tiny minority that are put off by them. It's just the kind of illusion that once it gets broken you can no longer unsee it.

It's the same with clickbait headlines. If it's a question, the answer is no.

"Is this the end of Russia?"

No.

keeps on scrolling

Why does this and maybe something to replace the title with just an accurate thesis statement kind of titlesounds so good to me!

They let Luke bleach it on the wan show.

He's never done it before, and took too long so some parts are ultra blonde and others are barely different.

This is correct, he both explained how ad blocking hurts creators, and how ultimately he doesn't mind because purchasing merch is way more beneficial to them then the adsense money.

All he was saying is do what you want to do but don't pretend your actions don't impact other people. Do it with open eyes if you're going to do it.

You’re bypassing payment (in the form of watching ads)

By this argument going to the bathroom during a commercial break is piracy.

This isnt "someone being offended when accused of piracy"

This is " People getting upset when an idiot tries to blame end users, instead of holding the people who created the problem accountable"

Cause adblock isnt a user problem.

Its an ad service problem. They created a hostile environment where people had to run adblockers to protect themselves against unmoderated and unpoliced content and malicious/infected advertising.

If you have issues, blame the people who caused it, not the end users trying to protect themselves.

Yeah, him calling it piracy or not doesn't matter, it's just a stupid semantic argument that doesn't matter at all to his overall point. And while I think it's a stupid take of him, it's also the reason people are still bringing up his opinion on the matter, so good job of him spreading his message I guess?

If they want payment, they can require registration, agreement to payment and authentication. Nothing's stopping them. If they put something on the open web and try to monetize it, nobody owes them a living. If I put a display in a shop window, and include wording that says that looking at the display means you're obligated to also hear a sales pitch, everyone will rightly tell me to fuck off.

Choosing not to load potential spyware, malware and bloatware while looking at free content is no more piracy than is crossing the street while shopping to avoid a tout.

It was in the streams with Luke. I dont remember the exact ones, I'm sorry. I can say that the last time I saw it was years ago, though, but thats because I stopped watching his content years ago.

edit

actually found a clip embedded in another site, i'm shocked.

https://youtu.be/a-PH2GUy_zM

It was on an episode of the WAN show a while back (I don't know which, I stopped watching a while ago). He said if you're not paying for the service or watching the Ads, it's the same as Piracy because your not paying what's owed.

He talks about it in this video (the video this thread is about)

No, because that isn’t Linus’s take.

I think he’s referencing a stream once upon a time where Linus discussed the arguments around streaming and it’s impact on creators, from a creator’s perspective .

But because he uttered something in favor of ads on his videos-which is how they got paid-he’s now considered ultra pro invasive ads by the user above, who professes to not actually watching Linus

I watched this video before it was taken down. At the start of the YouTube section he says something along the lines of "I think ad block is theft, but you're going to do it, so I have a responsibility to make sure you do it safely."

They are being paid by third parties to shove something in your face that you didn't come to see in the first place. They're not entitled to earn a cent from that, regardless of what bait they choose to place in the trap.

Who elected them and who consented to this manipulative, intrusive arrangement?

i don't know if this is serious or a joke

"Don't be evil"

Actually, it's not on their channel. I just checked again, its on a channel called "floresdorf gaming".

The TOS are your licence to watch the copyrighted material, be it by paying a subscription or consuming ads. So if you break the TOS you're committing piracy. It's very clearly piracy, although I don't condemn it.

No, I just find it strange coming this from him. Call it a collateral topic, these things happen in a discussion.

Because his video got removed for ad blocking and/or talking about third party clients

Pirating