I don't see any mention of the YouTube adblock trick, so from the vid:
Copy YouTube URL. Paste it in Bing and search. Scroll passed Bing's sponsored bullshit and click on the thumbnail for the video you searched. It will then play, still in Bing, with no ads.
So if you're on a work or government or w/e computer that doesn't allow installing adblock extensions, there ya go. No downloads or anything, just YouTube and Bing.
...this is the first time I've ever had any interest in using Bing, lol.
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.
Isn't he the same person who calls adblocking piracy?
He's also got a generally nuanced opinion of piracy, in that it's justifiable in some situations. If you call it piracy and you're okay with piracy then it's not really a contradiction.
Being willing to talk about it despite working against your interests isn't always bad depending on context.
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.
Isn't that essentially what it is? Getting something for free through certain means you wouldn't get for free otherwise? Which means no money goes to whoever owns the service you're using?
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.
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.
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.
Well it is compareable to piracy just like piracy is effectively stealing. I still partake in both but unlike much of my peers, I'm not lying to myself about what I'm doing.
He's already way past caring about anything other than money. He just gets the script and lends his known face for the video... regardless of anything else.
Can't entirely blame the guy though, cuz when he gets going you quickly see what an asshat he actually is, but he did have passion for the content a few years ago.
I just wish LTT would fade into irrelevancy already, it's just shallow clickbaity content that hardly provides any value. I'm also just waiting for their next workplace abuse accusations... the place is known to be abusive for years.
Yeah, I got tired of his videos half-assing the work and the failed reviews hurting small manufacturers while Linus doubled down after GN documented their failures.
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".
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.
I’ll be that guy. I don’t understand why LTT gets so much crap from people constantly, they seem to have a very toxic community even without the scandals. 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.
As far as the sexual harassment stuff goes I can see that as a legitimate reason to stop watching. At the same time though, how should we feel with such limited and one sided information? And especially how should I feel if the problems aren’t inherent to the company and if they don’t reoccur?
Maybe someone can help clear this up for me because I’m not that informed and I’m still giving them a chance but maybe I shouldn’t be.
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.
Friendly reminder that pirates didn't usually stole gold. Piracy was stealing shipping goods, then selling them for profit at some port. Digital piracy is thus defined as acquiring, and then distributing for profit, media that you don't own the copyrights of. Ad blocking is categorically not piracy.
Also, "piracy" or "copyright infringement" isn't theft in any sense.
A key element of theft is that you deprive the rightful owner of something. You now have it and they no longer do. What makes it wrong is that the person who should have it no longer does. It's not that you have it. That's why the punishment for "mischief" where someone completely destroys something belonging to someone else is similar to the punishment for the theft of that same object.
Copyright infringement is breaking the rule that the state imposed giving someone the exclusive right to control the copying of something. You're not depriving anyone of anything tangible when you infringe a copyright. They still have the original, they still have any copies they made, any copies they gave out or sold are still where they were. The only thing you're doing is violating the rule that gave them exclusive control. If you're depriving someone of anything, it's depriving them of the opportunity they might have had to make money from selling a copy.
If anything, copyright infringement is more similar to trespassing than to theft. Just like copyright infringement, trespassing involves not allowing someone to control who accesses their property. If you sneak onto someone's campground property and have a bonfire party, the person loses the opportunity to rent out the campground for the bonfire, and any money they might have received for doing that. But, if you sneak in and sneak out and leave no trace, you could argue that nobody is harmed.
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.
It doesn't have to be for profit, but it does require distribution of content you don't have the rights to redistribute. I think it's also fine to lump in acquiring content that you don't have the rights to (i.e. it doesn't matter which end of the transaction you're part of).
Blocking ads is merely a TOS violation, and it only applies if you actually agree to the TOS. If you don't consent to the TOS and the platform doesn't make any attempt to prevent you from using the service, then I think you have an argument that the TOS doesn't apply. I use YouTube w/o a YouTube account, so I don't consent to their TOS, but they still happily serve up content. So in my understanding, I'm not even violating any TOS because I haven't agreed to any, I'm just using their website with an add-on that blocks certain URLs. If YouTube decides to prevent me from accessing their content w/o agreeing to their TOS, then I'll probably stop watching YouTube, or maybe I'll decide to accept their TOS, idk, because it hasn't happened yet.
That said, I do feel bad for creators not making money from me blocking YouTube's ads, so I tend to donate or buy merch on occasion, and that eases my conscience. Regardless, I'm quite sure that if YouTube tried to argue that blacking ads was somehow a copyright violation, that they'd lose.
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?
All of their thumbnails are unfortunately click-baity. They spoke about ut in an older video. Apparently, the click-baity images drive too much traffic for them to justify something more subtle.
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.
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.
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.
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?
He did, and I disagree with that point. Piracy is copyright violation, ad-blocking is TOS violation. They're entirely different things.
That said, he said he understands why people do it and didn't condemn it, and in this video shows how you can do it. I think that's laudable, I just disagree with his assertion that blocking ads is in some way piracy.
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.
There would be less talking over each other due to word definitions if the music industry had not convicted people that murder and stealing on boats was good way to describe unauthorized copying.
German has the term raubkopieren for piracy which translated literally means theft-copying. I kind of find that term funny because somehow it makes it sound even worse than just piracy, since with pirates we at least have the pop fiction image of the pirate, and because it has a paradoxical sound to it ("how can you steal something by copying?").
How to "block" ads: Refresh the video multiple times. They will show a few different ads and then give up. It even works on console YT apps which have more ads.
I guess it affects impressions? I figured they would have fixed that, but this still works so whatever.
It's a user retention thing: if a user is reloading a video repeatedly while they're trying to serve an ad, there's (probably) something wrong with the ad server, so the best business move is to send them to the content they came to see, unmonetized, so that they will continue to use the platform in the future where you can monetize their future visits.
Ironically, watching this video on Osysee results in me consuming more ads that help LTT than usual, because I don't have SponsorBlock set up for that.
YouTube creators can see the view rate for each section of the video, I'd be surprised if sponsors didn't ask for that data (if just to know the viewer retention for sponsor segments at the beginning vs end of the video)
I heard the legends of the Chinese anthem being at PornHub and took a look a while ago. It turns out that they've removed all videos from unverified users and blocked them from uploading.
Its against YouTube's TOS to download content, and to block advertisements. Another lesser known, and less enforced part of the TOS also covers content instructing how to download content and block ads. I'm pretty sure that's the reason YouTube took it down at least.
On another note, huge props to Linus for teaching how to block ads on channel and company, with a hundred mouths to feed, majorly funded by advertisments. I know he caught a lot of shit before with gamer nexus, but they deserve props for this.