If ads weren't riddled with malware or absolutely obnoxious...
Browsing without an ad blocker is cancerHey, remember when you could see more than a single line of text of an article on mobile? Me neither.
Hey motherfucker, did you know you can go AD FREE with YouTube™ premium? Look, it's P R E M I U M. and it will only cost you $9.99 a month (plus any data we choose to siphon from you, aaaaaaand you have to be subjected to our shit-ass suggestions that you will almost certainly not be interested in, because fuck you in your stupid content sucking mouth)
I'll be that guy and say this isn't crappy design and shouldn't be in this community. We've already got posts filling top of all we don't need more where they don't belong.
yeah, this is a policy OP doesn't like, not bad design
While this is a policy I don't like, it's also something that is purposely destroying the usability of the Internet. Which I think constitutes a bad design.
I would argue that pop-ups like this are an intentionally crappy design meant to be frustrating and get in the way. But, I understand what your saying, this is perhaps not the best suited community for this post.
I think the difference here is I view "crappy design" as something badly made or poorly executed. What you describe I would consider to be "asshole design": perfectly well-made, but with bad intentions. I can see why you would have the different definition though, and considering the Reddit subs had a lot of these same definition issues it's not surprising they continue here.
I'd say it's an ok design to enforce a crappy business model
Thankfully it isn't hard to remove with ublock origin. Just enter Element picker mode and select the pop up to remove it. Then do the same for the greyed out background & it'll work normally.
Yeah, I got no issue with removing it, but it's still agrivating to see even once.
Don’t worry. Soon they will cover this loophole as well.
You’re right. They will. But then unlock origin will find a way around those.
Adblockers will win at the end of the day because I control what’s on my machine.
When I tried this the damn ad blocker message thing is unable to be closed and blacks out the whole video instead of being a pop-up. The only way to play is to disable ghostery and ublock. I'm super pissed.
I haven’t used Ghostery in ages as I had heard it was funded by ad agencies to harvest data.
But are you using Ublock Origin? They have instructions on how to fix this. Someone posted this in the Technology community I think?
Basically, update it. You might need to lose Ghostery, but load up Ublock Matrix if you want more script control. Not sure what that’ll do with YouBoob as I’ve not tried yet.
Also, there is yt-dlp. You can just download your videos. No ads from yt.
Edit: Here is the post
I've paid for YouTube premium pretty much since it started being a thing and had to drop it recently for financial reasons. Simply existing these days feels like I'm drowning. The bombardment of ads and frequent notifications to come back are making me want to ditch YouTube entirely. I've been using YouTube in Firefox with desktop site requested to play my videos in the background and I try to use odysee as much as possible now. Their price hikes along with no recognition of how long I've been a paying member has really gotten to me.
You see, if you are unable to cough up the money for one reason or another, you are not important to them anymore. It's better for YouTube if you don't watch than if you watch without premium, so they bully you until you leave. There is no "grace period" just because you supported them for years. Corporations are not your friends and the only thing that matters to them is infinite growth.
Best thing to do is find a few friends to split it with. The family plan gives you 6 accounts I think.
I disagree.
Once upon a time, streaming services were free, or gave you a generous amount of content for a small price.
Now, not only does everybody and their mom want to make you subscribe to something, they're also constantly and unapologetically raising prices whilst removing features or extracting useful/necessary features and placing them in new, expensive premium tiers.
Sure, get a family plan and split, and watch them slowly raise prices to "match inflation" or some other bs excuse!
There are definitely solutions out there, and I'm sure someone will come up with a way to spoof YouTube premium or something and the war will continue.
I won't say 'pirate everything', because you shouldn't; there are definitely services out there that are worth your money. But if they're going to play using scummy tactics then I don't see why we can't as well!
This is less "crappy design" and more "asshole design"
What's the reason why you think this is an asshole design? I can think of two:
-
Advertisements in of itself is a blight on humanity
-
They have a dominant market position and it's almost impossible to compete.
But, these two things aside?
I'm not the one you responded to, but I'll say why I think it's an asshole design:
- They have a dominant market position
- They have encouraged people to not just put fun videos on the platform, but to put critical life-saving videos there.
- Like videos on how to perform CPR
- Or videos on how to save someone who's choking
- At first, they had few ads, or ads that were always skippable
- Now that they have a near monopoly, they're adding more ads, and making more of them unskippable.
- To watch a lifesaving video, that was posted at a time when there were no real ads or all ads were skippable, you may have to watch a series of 30 second ads.
Then there's the fact that virtually every video requires ads before you view it, when you might only need to see 10s of the video to know that it's not relevant. Putting multiple ads before you're allowed to see those 10 seconds is an asshole move. Then there's the sheer quantity of ads. The last time I tried to watch a few music videos without an ad blocker I think it was at least 25% ad time.
Removing the ability to skip is also a major asshole move. The whole justification for skippable ads was that consumers wouldn't skip ads that were good and relevant. If the advertiser was doing their job and making good ads, and YouTube was doing a good job and finding the right audience for those ads, then in theory the ads wouldn't be skipped. If an advertiser was upset that users were skipping ads, YouTube could push back and say that either their ad sucked, or that they had mistargeted the ad. Now they seem to be admitting that their ad targeting is bullshit, or that they don't care if the ad isn't relevant to the user, the user has to watch it regardless.
But, most of this hinges on the enshittification happening once the platform has become a monopoly. If YouTube only had a 20% market share, asshole moves would push people to competitors. But, the key thing is that they lost money or barely broke even until all their competitors had folded, and then they started making things worse.
/r/assholedesign refers to user hostile design. Ads are generally unwanted and def unwanted if the person has an ad blocker. Putting a nag pop up is inherently user hostile.
Ads on YouTube--like everywhere else on the web--became so obtrusive that it's nearly impossible to view anything while still having all those ads. They're making their content unwatchable for anyone who can't pony up for a subscription.
-
I use Firefox and have uBlock Origin installed. I block ALL cookies from YouTube and Google and other Google sites. I am not signed into any Google properties and I have not seen an ad for over 10+years. I never use an app or mobile and use only a desktop on Linux.
Google will not win over products like uBlock Origin because, it's NOT an ad blocker, it's an element blocker. It allows the user to remove annoyances, and that sometimes includes ads.
The only way Google will get to force ads on people is if they REQUIRE you to sign in to it's services and force cookies on you. It will have to be a walled garden. Meta, Xitter, bluesky, reddit, will all eventually go to the walled garden because they are greedy. Users will leave and the Fediverse will grow.
People are fed up with ads and all the "improvements" that sites like YouTube make. Ambient mode, auto play, end cards, notations, all unnecessary. And we block it with element blockers.I don't think the Fediverse can really provide an alternative to YouTube. The infrastructure required for the amount of data constantly being served and processed is prohibitly expensive.
Maybe not today, and never at the scale that YouTube is right now (that's not a bad thing), but never say never.
5 years ago no one saw a psychopath buying and actively destroying Xitter.
Technology changes quickly. It won't be long until 10TB HDDs are standard fare, 8G is everywhere, electric cars are 40% of the market etc.
Anything is a possibility and humans get smarter and more innovative. I know this because humans can carry a small computer in their pockets.
That's where you're wrong. Firefox market share is dropping month on month for the last decade with no sign of turning around. Blink is forcing Manifestv3 soon which doesn't support many features uBlock Origin needs to work effectively. Sure, other Chromium forks claim they'll continue to support v2, but we'll see if that lasts after Google removes the code and they have to actually maintain Blink for the first time ever. None of the forks (except maybe Edge) have the engineering staff to keep up with rebasing against Blink.
ADs might become forced onto everyone with this:
That just sounds exhausting, to be honest.
It reads like copypasta to me lol
Reads like https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
I have yet to get this. Everybody's talking about it.
Am I the chosen one?
My friends mentioned getting it like 4-5hrs ago, while I was on YouTube myself. It wasn't appearing for me.
Then a couple hours ago, it finally popped-up for me. Right now, you can click through it or just reload the page and it goes away.
I think all of us are using uBlock Origin. And we're using various browsers.
Your time may yet come.
Narrator: And it did.
You probably keep your adblocker up to date automatically like I do.
No, you are unlike the rest of us who only update as soon as we see an ad. Okay, maybe it’s just me. Anyway, he finally got hit too.
I'm somewhat surprised it took so long after they took over YouTube.
Might cause some surprising competition hopefully
Who is going to be competing for the eyeballs of people who militantly refuse to watch ads? I'd love to see YouTube have competition, but I don't think the demographic here is particularly valuable to anyone.
Same with lemmy. Who cares about us? Seems to be working somewhat tho.
Issue with videohosting is filesizes, bandwiths, and the gigantic archive.
That's why I said surprising competition: no, it wouldn't be from a big typical tech company.
I think you're wrong on the value of the demographic: there are definitely ways, sectors etc where a small group of relatively tech savvy, ad-hating, very critical, neckbearded, moob carrying people is more valuable than a large mob of typical yay-saying consumers. I'ld even say it's the kind of niche demographic that made reddit big in the first place.
Yeah, I feel like this is all very cyclical.
The status quo is acceptable so people use it. It works well enough and it's practical enough that the majority of the user base sticks with a given standard, which creates momentum/inertia: the more accepted a given platform becomes the more content creators cater to it, which in turn draws and keeps more traffic.
Owners of the platform see this and monetize. It's not bad at first but eventually greed gets the better of everyone, and they keep pushing and squeezing, usually both the base and the creators, for the privilege of playing in their playground, the defacto "place to be"... without consideration of the fact that their playground only holds that status because of the very people they're squeezing.
Eventually they push it too far, and people start to jump ship as the enshittification finally tips their scales away from the status quo and makes finding an alternative the more attractive choice, even if it means giving up the positive aspects of the established platform.
Sometimes it can take a while but eventually one or more new platforms emerge as the new "place to be" and the cycle begins again.
Unfortunately, rather than learning from past mistakes and simply being less greedy and understanding that they need to find ways of generating profit that doesn't alienate their creators and viewers, instead the lesson learned seems to be 'try to find ways to trap users in your system so they can't leave'...which never is going to work.
The ol Trust Thermocline.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/6089078
They explain how to make it work again with uBlock Origin
This is a long time coming. Who in their right mind thought that a service that allows pretty much anyone to upload gigabytes of videos would be free forever. I get that people don't like ads, but the amount of outrage is overkill.
It’s less about not liking ads and more that the ads are plagued with scams, spam and whatever else.
Don’t we think that they should be held accountable for the type of ads they run on there? Crypto scams, get rich quick, and mlms to name a few.
The same goes for the MSN homepage it’s fucking ridiculous.
Also, if they want to serve me ads, then stop selling my data too. If I sign up for premium they’ll still sell your data anyway.
I am not really in a place where I would want to defend billion dollar companies.
I can only speak for myself, but it’s less about the monetizing and more about the how.
The ads are intrusive and highly disrespectful of our time. Not to mention the bullcrap they’re allowed to advertise that would get videos demonetized. And the risk of malware from the ads.
I can understand things like premium. Heck if they wanted to lock HD behind premium I could understand. It costs a lot of money to run that crap so getting money for that service does make sense.
But by solving that with intrusive, annoying, possibly dangerous ads? I will block the ads. Find a better way because that ain’t it. I will sooner leave YouTube for other video sites satisfying my interests that are currently being advertised by creators on YouTube itself, than accept the crappy ads.
Google, apparently, when they bought YouTube. "let's host terabytes of data and stream it to users for nothing" and then do just that for over a decade before they realized "oh shit, that costs money I guess??"
Google fucked themselves. But it's not like they can't foot the bill either, based on their net profits. The fact that they are now telling people that the service they've used for nearly 20 years doesn't want to be free anymore is a valid reason for outrage.
It's like your partner of 20 years deciding that sex is now a per-month expense, when it wasn't up to that point. A bit "you fuckin wot m8" moment.
Everyone needs to sign out on desktop if you’re using Ublock origin bypass. This whole TOS thing could be grounds to start going after your account they don’t achieve the outcome they’re looking for
Then I'll just make another account . . . with blackjack and hookers.
All very well unless your account is also your mail email. I'm not draft enough for that to be the case, but many are.
If they manage to kill ReVanced I'm done with YouTube. I'll subscribe to Nebula or something.
Use Invidious! No ads, no username required, no reporting to YouTube, Sponsorblock can be used, and you still get unlimited access to YouTube's content. There are dozens of instances, but inv.tux pizza usually works for me.
I know that Nebula has exclusive infotainment, but sometimes I just want to watch people be bad at video games.
newpipe ftw
There's other alternatives to vanced as well. Not at many bells and whistles, but still better than Google.
NewPipe? I'm glad it exists but it's not really comparable to the experience I want. Great for downloading though.
This is when you're supposed to use the FOSS alternatives
Me personally because I don't have a Google account nor saw a real gain in getting one (for what I do in my day to day), I just switched to these for subscriptions.
arent thpse just frontends?
Yep, without the need of a Google acc. No shitty ads, more functionality, and they're typically more customizable :p
+to that. However I haven't found proper alternative yet.
- I got so used that dump algorithm that at least 40% of times recommends what I'm actually interested at, that it feels so hard to go back to watch unordered vids
- Newer content is still lacking on alternatives. Like coding tutorials or documentaries etc.
- On the other hand I found many old forgotten internet classics on these alternative sites like old ads and funny clips that we used to watch at 240p back in the day.
Point one hits home. It's nice that I can look through my feed but I also want to find new stuff and piped is not giving me that. I still use it in case my yt account gets banned lol
You should also start looking into libredirect, an extension to route your youtube traffic to invidious instances
I'll look into that ^^ thanks friendo
Me personally, I didn't mind ads back in the day when they weren't so annoying. But somehow YouTube + content creators made ads so annoying at some point that I started to use ad blocker and sponsor skipper.
My theory is that by becoming so aggressive with ads , YouTube income / video actuallly decreased due to people getting fed up with ads and getting ad blockers. Now they go even more aggressive so people will start to look for alternatives.
It'll be interesting to see following development.
That's when my family asked me to set up adblockers.
It used to be a single 30 second ad but skippable.
It's now 2 ads skippable, then ads randomly injected into a video. A ten min video can have twelve ads. Defenders say "Oh the content maker sets those features."
Of which I say, "Bet. Gonna block them, find a new revenue stream because the next stage is pirating your shit."
Also i love how people act as if Ads aren't brainwashing bullshit lies. Marketing only exists to make you click buy, they don't care about any other effect. Misinformation? Who cares, unhealthy habits? All good. Oh my goodness your blocking lies? Sooo unethical
Exactly this. They made their bed, they can lay in it
Firefox + LibRedirect add-on + FreeTube
You know what annoys me the most about this?
I looked up the price of Premium. It's not great but not too bad either. I hate subscription services so I thought "I'll just buy the annual plan"
Google doesn't offer the Family Annual plan in my region. Only Individual Annual.
Fucks sake Google! If I'm trying to give you money, the least you could have done is make it easy!I saw this, hit the X to close that pop-up and continued on as usual. Just me?
The X works fine for me. Great design.
AFAIK they start counting strikes after a while. After 3 of them, you are banned off Youtube. Edit: I was wrong. It just disables video playback.
No, what happens is that a timer is added before you can click the X to close the pop-up. If you continue to close it, video playback will be locked until you disable your ad-block (or circumvent the detection).
That seems unlikely. I can see them blocking you as long as they detect ad block but not banning account / IP wise. It would lead to many non-tech people to be banned without understanding why and those are majority of their viewers who are easiest manipulated into watching ads.
Don't login then.
I'm digging NewPipe.
Freetube is pretty snazzy.
this is asshole design
Please explain.
Only ever watch YouTube via SmartTubeNext. Ad free for free. Fuck you Google.
I literally have not seen this, I use ublock origin
I use ublock origin on Firefox and I unfortunately saw it for the first time today
Pretty sure you just have to up update the custom filter lists
I was on YouTube today and didn’t see this. I have ublock origin, though
I need YouTube like I need another barium enema.
Does dragging and dropping links onto MPV still work with yt-dl? I haven't done it in a while.
I get that losing something you previously had access to is frustrating, but people here act like they should have the privilege to get YouTube for free. That's not how a company works.
Who here expected a company like this to pass up on making more money by allowing add blockers? You were cheating the system, and the system caught up. It sucks. Either find a new way to cheat the system or accept that they won.
i don't think anybody here is confused by how companies work. it's more that they understand how they work, and they find it frustrating.
Well I've seen a few comments calling it greed and saying Google already earns enough money.
YouTube has too many ads to begin with even before watching a video. I really don't mind if I have to watch an ad after watching 2 or more videos but imagine getting 2 ads for every video and an ad after a part of the video. Doesn't YouTube just want to milk money as much as it can from the non YouTube premium subscribers?
Yes, as is the right of the company as it's their service. People pretend it's unfair for Google to monetise YT and they should get access to YT unrestricted just because they found a way to use add blockers. Yt is free to try and monetise their service as good as they can, whether we like it or not
I still get ads on twitch from time to time but it's just a 20sec thing at the start and once an hour or so. YouTube tho is unusable. Friends and I tried to get through ONE video on the discord YouTube activity and it's horrible. Every 5 minutes the same annoying bullshit. If it does not drive you insane, there is something wrong with you.
Only other legal option would be premium but I don't want to
I'm not saying the ads on Yt are acceptable, there's no argument from me there. I'm saying a lot of people here are saying a company charging time or money for their services is wrong, and I disagree with that. It's fair for Google to charge or give ads, and it's fair for us to flock away because of it.
Google owes you nothing, and you don't owe Google anything either.
I dont know why you're downvoting cuz you are telling the truth. We can whine all we want but in the end there's always a workaround when you put some effort in it
Hey google give me your stuff for free or fuck you!!!! 🤬🖕
I figured there were enough dumbdumbs still watching ads that it didn't matter a whole lot if I didn't watch any. I'm still not getting ads so this change hasn't affected me yet. Still, fuck YouTube anyway.
Oh God, somebody wants to make money for providing service. Fuck them!
Yes, fuck them. This isn't some small independent company we talking about here. This Google, one of the richest companies on the planet. They have been getting by just fine, even with a bunch of their users having adblockers. This is merely an attempt by Google to greedily gobble up more money while destroying the privacy, security, and usability of the Internet.
But why do you expect the singular company that deals with ads to throw you a bone and allow you to block ads? Of course they are going to try to make more money.
Just use YouTube Premium, it's not that hard.
So that pay with my data and my money?
But then I can't whine about how entitled I am!
Exactly, if I enjoy using a service and there's a paid ad-free version, I'm gonna go that route. I support the creators and understand the idea of "no free lunch". All the whiners in this thread are freeloading moochers
