Dear YouTube, if anyone there ever reads this.
I tried not to block ads, I would let the preroll go and usually not skip it.
I started skipping ads when they started getting long. I recall some were several minutes long at times.
I started leaving videos part way through when there were mid-roll ads, and those got long enough that I'd often forget what I was even watching.
I started blocking the ads outright when I would be watching a relaxing video, and a very loud mid-roll ad would blow out my goddamn eardrums.
Fuck you YouTube. You abused your users, you chased off good content creators, and now you're offering people no carrot and all stick. How about you offer to match the volume of the ads to the videos, limit the length of ads to something reasonable, and nicely tell viewers that you are making ads less annoying and that unblocking the ads helps pay the content creators.
I used to make animations for YouTube, which weren't monetized because I hate ads, and one day they copyright struck me for some very provably public domain music, but the way they did it was to insert ads into my video without my consent so they could monetize them to send the money to the scammer who flagged me. So I just deleted my entire account, fuck them.
if they're anything like cable ads, they actually make the ads louder than the regular programming on purpose to try to make sure you hear it if you tune out or just walk away. no relaxed, unfocused watching for you!
Lmao "you purposely made your stuff shit. Now, if you offered a basic service without all the shit, I might pay for that."
Bruh, you don't pay for something because it's not shit, you pay for something because it's good. By paying for a basic service simply because it's not shit, you are incentivising them to enshittify their service and offer a premium "not shit" version, instead of actually improving their service.
It's just like the people who buy the new iPhone because it actually has a headphone jack this time.
NewPipr
They get away with this because people don’t use the alternatives. Odysee and Rumble are actually good alternatives. No, they’re not as good as YouTube, but they’re good enough. We just need creators to also upload to those platforms. Since YouTube keeps banning and demobilising them, this problem might solve itself.
If you’re using uBlock Origin. Go to “Filter Lists” and Purge All Caches. That may help.
I imagine they'll eventually find a way to prevent us from blocking ads. Twitch TV for example has found some ways to make adblock useless.
It's a shame, and it's really just a side effect of google racing to the bottom of the adspace game. If ads weren't as cheap as they are today, they wouldn't be trying to maximize the amount of users who are forced to see advertisements.
You can block twitch ads. I literally never see them. Use https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions/blob/master/vaft/vaft.user.js with Tampermonkey.
Will to be fair, Google is an ad company. We should have seen this coming.
I just did the zap element thing on that warning. So far so good, except you can't scroll down.
I see this as an absolute win, since that means you don't have to read YouTube comments.
Lmao
Can we pin this?
I occasionally see ads on Youtube. I'm not sure if this is related.
...temporarily it might help
to people saying YouTube is a moneysink for google:
yes it is, if you just look at direct expenses of running it. but you're overlooking the fact that it has enabled google to amass so much data(we're taking about 500 hours worth of videos being uploaded per minute) that they can train anything with it.
it's a service that's too big to fail. even whole governments, courts, and other institutions depend on it. so, I refuse to believe that YouTube will be non-existant because a sliver of users refuse to be profiled by invasive advertisements.
it's a service that's too big to fail.
I used to believe that.
Then Elon Musk showed us that nothing is too big to fail.
Too big to fail is a lie told by bankers who don't want to pay their losses.
fair point. but twitter isn't as big as YouTube. YouTube is the second largest search engine.
So, YouTube going down would be a much bigger deal than twitter. I suppose governments won't even allow YouTube to get acquired by some musk.
If youtube is such a burden, donate it to
Cash-4-Clunker_Companies.com
A new charity that takes your failing social media company off your hands (and your ledger!) and donates it to the United States Postal Service to administer and, after government streamlining, channel all profits into funding summer camp and spring break for our underprivilaged senators, congresspeople, and justices of federal rank or higher.
This is where I am a bit curious. In a world where we didn't have user tracking and just did ads the old fashioned way like television via over the air signals and used content as proxy for viewer interest, would folks still use ad blockers or accept having ads as part of the viewing experience? Is there a happy medium where users are willing to watch some ads, and advertisers don't track everything but still get some measurement that there shit is being viewed by real people and not bots. IDK. Is there a minutes per hour of ads per content that makes sense for video?
We just muted the TV during the ads and did something else until the show came back on. Ad breaks for regular shows like dramas were a predictable length of time, so you could time your bathroom or fridge run pretty well.
I don't mind ads if they're solely keyword-based, and one per 30 mins or so. but I do mind the tracking by ad companies(most notably google and meta).
but nowadays I'm so deep into privacy hole that I steer clear of anything that's not FOSS, unless it's absolutely necessary(e.g.: degoogled android). So naturally, ublock origin stays on all the time.
for sure. I listen to a number of podcasts that instead of having dynamically inserted ads, still have the hosts do an ad read. I don't mind that at all
to people saying YouTube is a moneysink for google:
Who says that today? This was true about YouTube many years ago, before Google took it over, I doubt that's still true.
it’s a service that’s too big to fail.
No it's not, most content of value will have back ups and can be uploaded to other services.
I haven’t watched live tv in almost 20 years because I refuse to sit through ads, and I definitely won’t sit through them on YouTube. If it was a banner or some thing on the page or the side of video that would be more acceptable, but sitting through ads to watch a YouTube video….there’s just no way.
You could subscribe
I basically don't subscribe to any streaming services, but we got the family plan years ago and share it with a few friends and family that chip in a couple bucks each.
It's so affordable and the content on YouTube is second to none.
I'm so happy to help content creators earn a living content I genuinely care about rather than studios led by c-suite committees.
If YouTube premium was $4.99 a month it'd be worth a consideration. But then again adblocking is free and privacy respecting
If you really want to support the creators without getting your data exploited, this ist the place to go: https://nebula.tv/
Exactly. Premium is basically twice what I'm willing to pay. I've considered going premium multiple times, and have multiple times suffered sticker shock and backed away.
I actually think YouTube premium is worth its price. Spotify is the same price, but you get less.
I want ad free YouTube but don't want YouTube music. I don't want to pay for extra shit that I won't be using.
I use Spotify way more than I use YouTube. Spotify does one thing and it does it extremely well.
If Spotify added unlimited free Uber eats delivery tomorrow and bumped up the price to $20 a month, then sure, it'd be a good deal but I wouldn't want any of that.
Yeah I could care less about people saying they'd watch ads of they were less intrusive. I'm not, I don't give a fuck about YouTube's sustainability who happened to still have major growth while I ran an AdBlock this entire time.
Maybe I'd consider paying if YouTube was the actual product I was paying for. Instead I get privacy invasive spying and my data being harvested, while am paying to do so. The product I'd want to pay for would have zero privacy invasive stuff involved. Which that isn't going to exist, so I'm never going to pay.
Premium is priced so uncompetitively my family can subscribe to all of Netflix, AppleTV+ and Amazon Prime Video for less than a YouTube subscription.
I don't really know how people can even use YouTube without ad blockers. Sitting through minutes of advertisement is not going to make me want to buy your product if I start mentally associating your product with frustration and annoyance. If these video ads are going to be repetitive and annoying, at least make them funny.
It seems like there is nowhere on the Internet to get away from ads currently, even here, where you thought you are safe, you are now reading an ad for my newest movie (you know the one), now also available on streaming!
Youtube is getting on cable tv levels of bad. On a regular ~10min video you will first deal with a few preroll ads and at least one is unskippable, then the creator will have a 2+ minute sponsor segment (I don't mind those since they are usually well presented). There will also be multiple midroll ad spots.
Depending on video length, it's gonna soon be literally more ad than video. They are still stealing and selling your data though, and also making the web worse for everyone with DRM shit.
Fuck. Google.
I had already migrated to Invidious since last year because I degoogled everything. Seems like now its time to look for real youtube alternatives.
Youtube is getting on cable tv levels of bad. On a regular ~10min video you will first deal with a few preroll ads and at least one is unskippable, then the creator will have a 2+ minute sponsor segment (I don’t mind those since they are usually well presented). There will also be multiple midroll ad spots.
That would only be accurate if Google quintupled the price of YouTube Premium and forced these ads upon actual paying customers.
I really don't like it when pro-piracy advocates whine about being served ads or not having everything on a single unified service costing just $9.99 a month, or a fraction of how much Cable used to cost.
Now this may be a bitter pill for the Lemmy World community to swallow, but ads being annoying doesn't grant you a God given right to freeload off of other people's products and services, and this rings especially true for YouTube. The only reason I don't compare ad-blockers to piracy is due to their downright necessity in tackling malvertising, which is unfortunately all-too-common.
YouTube is the only big player in the video sharing market for a reason, and that's because hosting videos is prohibitively expensive unless you have the resources of Alphabet Inc and the existing following that YouTube already has. Many competitors have come and gone. Heck, the only competitors in this space are Dailymotion (a French platform that has been enshittified Digg v4 style) and Rumble (an extreme pro-free speech platform that's being bankrolled by alt-righters.)
You forget that many simply don't care, like me. I stopped using anything google for a reason. Their services are usually lower quality than alternatives, might get shut down tomorrow, paying them doesn't stop your data from being milked, and they continually look for ways to make the internet worse. You're supporting the biggest ads company here...
I pay for 3+ streaming services, and all of them offer me a better deal than yt. It's not about paying for me. It's simply not worth it for my low use of the platform. I only ever look at my 20 subscriptions and my watch later playlist. Until that goes away I will block ads.
I'm just waiting for the next platform to pop up, it's gonna happen sooner or later and hopefully isn't cancer...
And forget about the absolute goldmine YouTube is for Google. It's is among the most important information repositories in history and profits massively from it. There is a reason they run it at a loss. Google uses that data to categorize everything thing about you and uses it to exploit your psychology to sell whatever bullshit their advertisers are peddling this week. It then double dips by selling off that data. And I'm supposed to pay for this? Nah. Fuck Google. I'd rather see YouTube get shit canned than pay a single dime to Google.
I almost got it until I saw it cost 15 a month and they need to fix their copyright troll problem.
We need to block ads so that ads die. Anti-angiogenesis for advertising. Get a less annoying business model.
That said, I have YouTube premium at that I don't see ads.
Invidious is having trouble to work these days. I fear google will also pull the plug on third party front ends once they get popular enough.
Does anyone else remember back in the days of VCR, the networks wanted to push a technology that disallows you from fast-forwarding through ad breaks on the stuff you recorded?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Does that last sentence make this comment an advertisement?
I didn't read it.
Holy crap
Piped is about to get another user
If you're using UBlock Origin do the following:
Go to settings. Go to Filter Lists. Click purge all caches. Click update now.
That's it, this message should disappear entirely.
What youtube is trying to achieve is technically impossible, unless they merge the advertisements into the videos.
It worked for me but minutes later it started appearing again
The UBO guys have recommended turning off other plugins (obviously, start by turning off everything, then turn stuff on slowly until you find what is conflicting).
Oh, and make sure you're on Firefox, not any chromium based browser (Edge, Chrome, Opera, Brave etc).
I've also seen suggestions that you should try removing any custom filters (can't remember if that's direct from the UBO guys or not)
If you’re using UBlock Origin do the following:
UBlock should just add code that automatically does that every time you start the browser, or daily.
If you’re using UBlock Origin do the following:
Go to settings. Go to Filter Lists. Click purge all caches. Click update now.
That’s it, this message should disappear entirely.
I think there is going to be a time when ublock alone cannot simply program their way out of this, they will need help eventually from a completely different approach like anti ablock killers or some other app that hide the blocker itself from detection
https://openuserjs.org/scripts/reek/Anti-Adblock_Killer_Reek
How did manipulation to make you buy specific shit become so accepted?
Because that's the goal of capitalism
That's deep.
Capitalism is driven by the idea of a free market, where competition and the law of supply and demand determine prices, production, and distribution. Manipulating you to buy stuff you don't need is the result of human greed, not capitalism. That's such a monothink way of seeing the world.
Imagine living in a small town in the middle ages. You're growing corn, your neighbour has a chicken farm, then there's also a bakery, blacksmith etc. Say you now need nails. Where do you go? To the blacksmith obviously. Does he just give them to you? No, he wants something in return. Well you offer corn because that's what you have plenty of but what if he doesn't want corn but wants eggs instead? Well you can go to your neighbour and ask if he would like to trade some eggs for corn which you could then further trade for nails. Maybe that works, maybe it doesn't, but that's still a bit of an hassle. That's why people came up with money. You can just sell your corn, get cash, buy those nails with said cash and the blacksmith can then go buy eggs with that. That's capitalism.
This is not what is happening. Google offers you a tier with advertising for free. If you'd prefer to not have the ads, you can pay a small fee, get no ads and also steam every song ever. I truly don't see the controversy.
It's literally cheaper than a beer for a full month of this service, but people would rather spend hours of their time tinkering with settings instead. Personally, I don't have that kind of time.
You are missing my point. Advertisment became an elaborate manipulation, targeted with questionably obtained personal information.
And for me personally the content YouTube is selling is not worth the money they are asking. I just do something else.
Where do you live that a beer is $15?
If I'm not mistaken, the "tinkering" necessary in uBlock Origin would take much less than the time you took to type out your comment. And no, it doesn't cost less than a beer.
You have a point, but the problem goes far beyond ads vs. no ads. There is definitely a lot of controversy, and you simplify choose not to see it, but don't try to act like everyone else is just too dumb or too poor to see things your way when neither of those are true.
Google kind of sucks.
What was their last big success? Google maps? Pretty much everything they do lately is some combination of shitty or prematurely killed.
Google more than just kind of sucks. Like you said they haven’t done shit in a long time outside of making the internet more hostile with shit like this and their planned chrome-based anti adblock (a LOT of browsers run on chromium which would bring the same shit, Mozilla4lyfe)
Also, the google graveyard is just pathetic at this point. They truly can’t do shit outside of anti-user bullshit
UP FIREYFOX!
Android? Google Photo? Google Pixel? Google Pay? Google Apps? Chrome? Chromebook? Google Drive? Chromecast? Android Auto?
They launched a ton of successful stuff since Maps came out in 2005
You got me! Android came after maps in 2008. So that's not a great argument for recent development. Is pixel meaningfully different than Nexus? That would put it in 2010, or 2016 if you insist pixel is a big innovation.
Chromebooks are also a 2010 project.
Google pay I don't think is a success? Didn't they like relaunch it recently and shit it up by tying it to phone numbers instead of your Google account? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/google-pays-disastrous-year-continues-promised-bank-account-feature-is-dead/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-pay-hopes-to-recover-from-brutal-2021-with-new-leadership/ . Also the original release is 2011. Quite some time ago. But technically newer than maps!
Drive is 2012. Dang, got me. But that's still more than 10 years old, so my actual point seems to stand.
Chromecast is 2013, so maybe within this decade.
Auto is 2015 but I know nothing about it.
I guess I should've said "in the past 7 years" instead of exaggerating and saying since maps!
Most of their innovation has been for developers it seems.
Edit for clarification: since Google maps
Ignoring everything after Google maps is ignorant as hell. I mean Google Photos is literally used by a massive percentage of iPhone users as well, because it's so good.
You seem to be unfamiliar with hyperbole, or maybe just didn't recognize it here.
Also they kind of enshittified Google photos by walking back the unlimited storage promise. Probably not the best project to point to for "Google doesn't suck" arguments.
if only ads arent annoying and loud, i have no problems unblocking them. but damn, they're unbearable atleast in my region.
Getting so many NSFW dating/straight up p##n ads. I shit you not they have even had CP ads I have seen. Disgusting and completely illegal.
Usually most of my YouTube ads are for bullshit training programs (and I do mean bullshit, like pseudosciencey shit) or gambling.
Both are just at the edge of legality (I am pretty sure some cross it).
Except since last month, because now almost all are for that Scorsese movie. I mean, I don't mind being advertised that, but I've seen these ads so much that all they managed to do is make me hate it despite barely knowing anything about it.
Also, unskippable ads keep being longer. Now it's reached two 20-second ads interrupting even short-ish videos every 5 minutes or so.
So yeah, people, that's what YouTube looks like without an ad blocker now. Gee, I wonder why so many block them.
I get the piano fraud guy shouting about how only he can teach you mastery of the piano in three days, or something like that. It's a scam but I can't get rid of his obnoxious ads.
In my region (Philippines), this Shopee ads (eq. of Amazon in US) are too cutesy, annoying, and louder than my video I suppose to watch. With or without Google account, this particular ad is everywhere on YouTube. Don't get me on gambling ads.
The temu and tiktok ads that seem to be intentionally engineered to provoke extreme negative emotions such as discomfort and irritation, that force your attention on the screen by overloading your ears with so much noise that you feel compelled to take in some amount of visual information to ease the shock, and then tacking on hashtag slogans at the end; like "oddly satisfying" after a video of a fucking butcher knife cutting through colorful play sand or "shop like a billionaire" after yelling at me about cheap Chinese goods, both of which only serving as reminders of the current state of society at large and pushing me ever so closer to a state of blind rage; are what finally pushed me to install vanced on my android.
It's psychological torture and it should be against international human rights law.
YouTube is the cable tv of 2023
Advertisement is brainwashing and should be against human rights.
not totally true, targeted spammed ads are brainwashing, suggesting a thing isn't. it's always the dose
People should be able to choose if they want to see ads or not. When I need a product and start product hunting than that's the perfect time to open yourself for "suggesting a thing" as you call it. Now if I am just browsing a page like reddit or whatever and see an ad that I really don't want to see, don't need etc etc. THAT is brainwashing because it stays unconsciouslly on your mind if you see it enough times which increases the chances that you'll act on it, buy, think about it. This is basic stuff.
Many many years from now IF humanity has not wiped out itself and actually evoved, this statement:
"Advertisement is brainwashing and should be against human rights."
Will be 100% absolutely true.
Unpopular Opinion: I don’t like ads as much as anyone, I’d rather YouTube monetises 1440p and 4k content instead of forcing people to watch ads. YouTube is an extremely expensive business to run, so it being free forever is completely unsustainable.
Google doesn't pay taxes. They save something like 3-4 billion a year not paying taxes.
It's entirely sustainable.
What did they charge the government for selling out to the surveilance agencies?
so it being free forever is completely unsustainable.
Well they own a lot of the infrastructure that makes youtube possible, which means they are keeping their own costs a lot lower than people think. I believe a lot of the 'its unsustainable!!', or 'it makes no money!!' rhetoric we are hearing is come straight from the google PR dept.
I doubt that is remotely enough to keep YouTube from being a moneysink for google
It's not a money sink. They are using the data they collect to rake in cash. Don't let the fact the money is made by a different business unit fool you into thinking Google is struggling.
It doubt its as big of a money sink as we are being told.. sounds like google PR working overtime there to me
https://github.com/gilbsgilbs/NewPipeSponsorBlock
Spread the word for non IT folks too! Fck up google! Google is evil!
See also, another attack from google: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
Thank you!
! Fck up google! Google is evil!
but... they specifically told me they were not evil
Google recently announced that it's podcast service is shutting down and moving to YouTube music, I don't want or need YouTube music so I've already moved to Podcast Republic, it has a few ads but they can be removed with a small one off payment. Google just wants to shove all it's users into YouTube and YouTube music for maximum ads and data harvesting.
Heads up as more and more people seem to not know this lately: the overwhelming majority of podcasts are officially and legally available without having to pay for them. Traditionally a podcast was just an mp3 or video file someone posted up on their blog that could be subscribed to via a basic RSS feed.
Anyway, on Android Antenna Pod is a great free and open source app for managong podcasts and youe subscriptions to them. Can get it off F-Droid.
The way I see it, if a podcast isn't available through RSS it ain't a podcast.
Spotify exclusives: Not podcasts. Audible exclusives: Not podcasts.
If I can't listen to it on my phone with Overcast, then I won't listen to it. The only exception for me is stuff on BBC Sounds, but much of that isn't offered as podcast anyway.
Pocketcasts. You’re welcome.
I'm another satisfied pocketcast user.
AntennaPod is available on F-Droid.
Podcast Republic is great, one of the few apps I've kept for years on my phone. I removed the ads ages ago, and I've even sent them an extra tip once in a while.
- 2025: Search removed. Spend a decade crippling the function, then claim the usage data support getting rid of it!
- 2027: Expiring updates. Juice those watch numbers with a new artificial scarcity measure. Marvel Bullshit 49 Theatrical Trailer, available for seven days only! Featuring AI Robin Williams and a Mr B_ast guest ad!
- 2028: Web Environment Integrity inserted. Hand warmer sales crater as mobile viewers relish their new handset functionality.
Even if I have to sit through 30 seconds of silence, is there a way to redirect the ad to a ghost browser so I don't have to listen to something like grubhubs stupid video?
Not exactly what you have described but better https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
Stop using YouTube, go for new pipe/piped/invidious instead. Same content without the fucking bullshit.
Example: http://yt.whateveritworks.org
Freetube is another valid option
Definitely agree, but your link is protected by cloudflare (yet another centralized service destroying the internet) and therefore I'm unable to get through because I have
privacy.resistFingerprintingenabled on my browser so cloudflare is unable to determine I'm human I suppose.I despire youtube and it's monopoly, and I think it get's an appropriate amount of hate on here and HN, but what confuses me to no end are the people who complain about youtube turn right around and constantly recommend cloudflare. Can someone explain what I am missing?
Fuck youtube
Yeah. This is becoming a problem with Google. Whatever they have created they just want to make it shit. Like everybody can't just pay and the amount of ads just makes it unwatchable.
On my firefox this rarely shows up though. I use the privacy extensions uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes.
"allowlisted" topkek
Lmao, time for anti anti-adblock! 🤣 https://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/
A good ad blocker would be one that will still load the page as intended but not display the ads. There would be no way for the site to know you can't see them. Blocking their activation just signals the site that you are using an adblocker.
Edit: I was thinking more of a VM sandbox like another comment said
More PeerTube please!
Been getting that lately after successfully avoiding it for a bit. Just not gonna use it directly anymore.
I will happily either find an alternative frontend, or just stop watching youtube all together. It's done nothing good to my life either way
For a while, I've been quietly preparing for the day when YT becomes unusable. I've been using Odysee and Peertube to see if they are viable options. To some limited extent they already are, but there are still lots of room for improvement. Just like Mastodon feels like the early days of Twitter, Lemmy feels like the early days of Reddit, Odysee is a bit like YT once was a very long time ago.
in recent years, YT has been working hard to kick out certain types of channels, so nowadays you can find that sort of content in some of the other platforms. It depends on what you're looking for, so the experience can be anything between awful and great.
Is this fake? I thought the term is whitelisted not allowlisted
In recent years there's been a shift from "white/black list" to "allow/block list" in an effort to avoid the stereotypes associated with those terms. I wouldn't say it's the new norm yet, but it's slowly becoming more popular.
This is why we use Frontends... NewPipe, FreeTube, Invidious, Piped, etc c: Otherwise the nuclear option; "mpv https://youtu.be/url"
Originally there was an X. Now I have to wait a few seconds before I can click the X. This pause gives me time to think if I really need to watch this video, which more and more often is turning into a "not really".
Fortunately I haven't gotten any warnings but my dad did last night. I cleared ublock's cache and updated the lists. Hopefully it works.
[Edit] Nope my dad is still getting warnings about ublock origin.
Google is updating their code every few hours to adjust to ublock code. Just keep updating it daily.
I did this because a version of this pop-up started showing up in every video for me this week. Didn't help. I'm thinking about using piped, though I really don't like the UI, it's not polished enough.
My dad is still getting the ad blocker warning. :-/
Yeah. This is becoming a problem with Google. Whatever they have created they just want to make it shit. Like everybody can't just pay and the amount of ads just makes it unwatchable.
On my firefox this rarely shows up though. I use the privacy extensions uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes.
Streisand effect
I just wanted to say that uBlock works in removing the annoying warning. But it doesn't prevent youtube from blocking your access to videos. I'm right now in the situation that I can't watch any video until tomorrow, despite uBlock and stuff.
EDIT: Screw you, Google, now I'm watching youtube videos on VLC.
I've been using Brave browser with no issues
It's rolling put regionally
I'll look forward to reading this yet again next week, alongside all the entitlement in the comments section that seem to think running YouTube is free and recommending trash alternatives which have less than 1% of YouTube's content and don't even work.
See you next week!
The childish, whiny entitlement around here is stunning. Don't like it? OK. Don't fucking use it.
I believe I know where the entitlement is coming from: Most people here are literal children who never worked or paid for anything in their life. The mental gymnastics going in here to justify consuming a commercial service for free is staggering.
I switched from reddit to lemmy to avoid the tiktok crowd that invaded reddit over the last few years, but it looks like this place has already gone to shit, too.
Every day same post complaining about this..
I normally complain about the same thing being reported over and over. But this one event is actually affecting a lot of people who use the fediverse.
You don't have to read them or comment on them
Look this is different than pirating a game or bypassing a newspaper paywall. Watching content on YouTube simply costs money to YouTube. It's not like torrenting a game or movie, where while you haven't paid for the content, it didn't cost anything to the owner other than theoretical revenue. And it's not like bypassing a newspaper paywall, either, where the cost to the newspaper to serve you the story is practically negligible and the real costs are fixed and not related to how many people actually read the story.
Hosting video costs money and nobody can replace YouTube's massive library or realistically replicate their business model. I mean just look at image/gif hosting sites, they constantly go bust like Photobucket because storing everyone's pictures forever and for free isn't not a real business model.
YouTube needs to be paid for its gonna go the way of Photobucket.
Google has billions. YouTube pirates (can we call ourselves that yet?) are not going to bankrupt Google. In fact, Alphabet is spending more on their crackdown for sake of principle.
But Google is beholden to its shareholders, whose interests are diametrically opposed to that of the general public, so any gain by Google is a loss to the rest of us.
So any profit we can deny the Google machine remains instead in the economy, rather than vaulted in offshore accounts or used to further lock down the empires of the shareholders.
The day I can't watch YouTube sans commercials is the day I quit watching YouTube. And then it will get absolute-zero engagement from me.
So bring it. I do not need YouTube, and it needs viewers like me.
Good luck trying to talk about this with any amount of reason.
I'm a pirate, I understand what I'm doing is defrauding the tos of a mega corporation. I UNDERSTAND that and IM DOING IT ON PURPOSE.
But it seems like most of the people here are just going to hurl insults at you and call you a shill because you laid it out as "this cost money and the business needs money to even do it". This is how "free" services have always worked. They aren't a fucking charity.
I don't like ads so I do everything in my power to not see ads. Once they kill ReVanced and they start banned Google accounts, I'll just stop using YouTube unless I have a specific tutorial need.
Corpo shill alert
YouTube doesn’t need to get paid (by the users watching their ads) they get paid through you, the actual product. What you watch what you click on what you search for, these are ALL monitizable. You think Google is protecting your data instead of selling it lmao
Furthermore how much is enough? They gonna keep adding more and more unskipable ads more pre/mid/post rolls, b-b-but the multi fucking billion dollar corpo needs to get pAiD!!!!
Grow up
Só your solution is instead of charging the viewer charge who? The person that puts videos up?
Do you really think your anonymized user data is worth the 20 bucks/user the YouTube premium costs?
In your mind YouTube can just sell the data for the 2 billion users they have and instantly make 40 billion dollars a month from that?
Does that boot taste good or something?
Everything has to be free; I won't pay a dime. If anyone tries to make money (aka any business), they are evil.
- Lemmy
Google would never give up on a project!
Youtube is squeezing one party really hard while pretending the other party doesn't owe shit to keep their monopoly. Start charging uploaders. If YouTube needs to up what they're earning because of things like bandwidth cost and what not make uploaders cover some of that cost. They're a business making money off of the platform so charge them.
This is the worst possible take I've heard this week, probably this year.
You would fuck over thousands of people, in addition to creating a bar of entry for anyone wanting to post a video or start a channel. Like I genuinely don't even know where to begin explaining how bad this take is.
But I don't want to pay and I want everything for free! Make somebody else pay for my enjoyment!
My statement was far too broad for it to be "setting a bar of entry". YouTube is trying to squeeze its viewers for every drop they can without having uploaders and im obviously not talking about the little guy here shoulder any of that cost. Who in your mind is responsible for the cost associated with lets say a Mr Beast video? Is it Mr Beast or is it the viewer? I think it's both.
They already are, by monetizing the content they didn’t create, and paying creators just a fraction of the revenue generated.
ITT: People upset that free things don't last forever.
Imagine if a (physical paper) newspaper could block you from reading an article because you didn't spend enough time looking at the ads.
After the content gets delivered to my browser, it's up to me how I want to consume that content. Anything that happens beyond that point is client-side. If I choose to pay attention to ads on purpose, that's my choice. If I accept the webserver's response and choose to view only parts of what I got, then that's my choice, too.
Don't ..plenty of digital newspapers block you from reading the article if you don't pay up
Even traditional newspapers usually have an upfront fee you pay.
You could go to a library to view the newspapers, but you could also go to a library to check out DVDs instead of using YouTube.
Imagine if a newspaper could block you from reading an article because you didn't spend enough time looking at the ads.
They do that though. Most even require you to accept their cookies, pay or not be able to read the article at all.
Imagine if a newspaper could block you from reading an article because you didn't spend enough time looking at the ads.
I don't have to imagine. Many newspaper websites are exactly like that; or at least require an upfront payment in the form of a subscription to read. Just like a real newspaper.
Imagine if a newspaper could block you from reading an article because you didn’t spend enough time looking at the ads.
That's a bad comparison. Newspapers cost money, so you either buy one or you don't read the articles. Even in the case of free ones, they're littered with ads. You don't need to watch them, but they're still there.
I hate what youtube is doing just as much as the next guy, but I'm yet to hear a convincing argument as to why it should be free. Many of the people complaining about this are gladly paying for Spotify and Netflix. Why not demand those for free too?
Its free because they sell user data, I'm not gonna have them sell my data and pay them for doing that.
Could we stop saying they sell user data? That's not what's happening. They collect that data because it's useful. Their business model relies on not selling your data. The way it works is they collect and hoard your data and then use that data and their algorithms to target you with ads. Ad companies pay them to target demographics like women between the ages of 18-25 or men between the ages of 40-60 with ads based on things they watch on YouTube, emails they send or receive, other ads they've clicked on, and most importantly items they have searched for. In conjunction with data from the phones around you (other people you visit or live with etc).
This is about ad companies paying google to target you with ads. It absolutely is not about google selling your data. That data is valuable to them because of their business model. And they literally need to hoard it. Amazon and Apple and Microsoft do the same thing.
All these platforms like youtube, facebook, twitter don't make any sense from a financial standpoint. Their model was fucked from the start and only now are we seeing the consequences.
Pay?
Hello, you must be new here. We don't like to be held accountable for anything and simply vocalize all our problems in an echo chamber where we collectively agree that other people should be held accountable instead. I hope this offers some context for the downvotes.
Man y'all really expect high quality, extremely diverse, and robust video streaming platform for free?!
YouTube gotta pay it's bills somehow. Why y'all ok with paying Netflix/prime/hulu or whatever but not YouTube?!
YouTube don't owe nobody free services. Get over it.
It’s google. They’re paying their bills just fine
Awww, poor little YouTube/Google/Alphabet, helpless and basically living on the streets, barely able to make ends meet.
literally laughs my fucking ass off
If it is so dire for the poor conglomerate, it could shutdown YouTube to cut costs.
crickets
That's what I thought.
So they should just provide you a totally free service the costs them money because...? Are they still going to pay creators or do you want everyone to work for free to entertain you?
Petition the government to make a nationally owned and run video sharing site if that's what you want, don't be surprised when a capitalist company doesn't give you everything you want for free
I have YouTube Premium because I also use YouTube Music, so the subscription fee is worth it for me.
But if you don't use YouTube Music, it's far too expensive and tough to justify the cost for YouTube alone.
I am so tired of seeing this argument. I do not care about ads. That is not the problem. The problem is that YouTube thinks it is entitled to suck up every little bit of information about me and everyone within speaking distance of me just because I use their service. Do you want to run ads? Go for it. Do you want to get a little bit of basic information about your audience? Such as State or city? Honestly, that is fine. We need to establish a line, but I am not wholesale against any sort of information coming in. But that is not what they are doing. They give us these opaque TOS’s that allow them to take so much information and even sell it to third parties. It is out of control and we have no sense of what our data is worth or who is getting it. That is not OK.
If you want to do an on air read, I’m not going to skip it. If YouTube to run the occasional ad, I’ll watch it. But I will never, ever take down my VPN and ublock origin. I will never apologize for obfuscating my data a little bit. That is my right, and I will exercise it every time.
There is also one other very simple problem with this argument: you don’t have to run ads and steal all my data in order to make money. There are tons of other revenue models out there.
The ads are just out of control. Back when it was one, maybe two, ads that were 10-20s long combined, I was willing to sit through it. Now there are almost always multiple ads concurrent, ads in the middle of the video, ads at the end of the video if it plays all thr way through, then ads again before the next video plays.
Bring it back to a single ad at the beginning of the video and give me a variety of ads so it isn't the same 3 over and over, and I'll sit and watch it.
That's the way greed creeps.
You could build a successful service that brought in $1 million a month from happy users treated ethically, but there will always be an insatiable psycopath whispering "if we sold our user data, we could make a extra $100k each month".
So one ad becomes two. Users are tracked and the information sold. Algorithms are created to make services as addictive as possible, because "one more video" turns into "4 more ads".
However many apologists may post about poor, destitute Google being unable to feed their children because people aren't watching enough ads, we're absolutely correct to oppose that endless creeping.
There is always another sleazy way to manipulate people out of money. Companies need to learn to accept that their tens of millions of dollars profit are enough.
they get all content for free though, unlike netflix etc.
I wouldn't object to paying if:
- Their pricing was more reasonable
- A fairer cut went to content creators
- They had something that actually qualified as a search function on their site
- They weren't trying to bully everyone into paying
This. I used to pay for ytp family plan, way back when now. I had to skip a month as money was that tight. When I went to resub, they wanted an extra ~$5 a month, or like 25%, for the same content and features. No advertised changes in revenue sharing amounts.
I just pay creators directly now, via patreon and ko-fi. I don't care about yt, I care about a few creators. A few have stated that $1 is more than they make from yt per user per month. The revenue split is wild.
I don't care about ytm. Cut the cost in half and give more to the people that are actually providing content. Right now yt in my eyes is greedy and their additional price hikes solidify that.
Cry us a river. I will find ways to block ads and tell people how to do it
Difference is those other networks actually make content thats arguably seen as worth paying for. YouTube recycles user content and barely pays those users for it. Yes you can say that they deserve your money for servers and whatnot, but you can’t compare YouTube with those other services you mentioned and expect people to cry big crocodile tears…
They're not recycling anything though. They're hosting it. For 90% of therm they're not even charging the person to host it.
That's only possible because of ads, because it's not out of the kindness of their hearts. If there was not just value but negative value in Youtube, they would just shut Youtube down. Yeah, they make a lot more money than they need to maintain youtube. But they'd probably prefer to put that money towards the things actually making them money.
And yeah, it would be nice if some site existed that wasn't corporate driven, but most of them either have no content, or are just siphoning off of Youtube's content anyway.
And yes, you can say Youtube's (users) content, and it virtually makes no difference in the grand scheme of things. Hosting the content is still required to do.
I dont use those particular other services to be fair. I do admittedly pay for Nebula, but to my understanding that is supposed to be more creator driven and is quite cheap anyway.
The thing about YouTube adblocking, at least for me, is that I dont think they owe me free and ad free content, or that they should be obligated to offer that for some reason. I fully understand that delivering video the way they do costs some amount of money even if not very much for an individual user, so blocking their monetization scheme means that using their website costs them money. However, I do not like or respect that company, I feel that their engagement algorithms have proven generally harmful to society as a whole by pushing people to more extreme content to improve retention, and I feel that their position as the primary place anyone thinks of to upload or view video not created by large scale studios is non-ideal. As such, when I do end up watching something there (content which, I might add, isnt even something that they create, just stuff independent creators are pretty much forced to upload there to be relevant as they are by far the largest game in town for their niche), I'm not bothered by blocking their ads, because I dont really care about Youtube's profit margin. If anything, if doing so actually harms them, in some tiny way, that is a bonus in my book.
They’re one of the largest companies in world: they are the bills
People out here are really dick riding YouTube lmao.
Most importantly they are simping for Google and acting as though YouTube is an independent company with its own separate stocks and unaffiliated under the Google monolith.
Poor Google. Such a small company struggling to get by.
Meh if YouTube died tomorrow there would be a competitor the next day. Google bought YouTube back in the day and there are already like platforms.
If Google wasn’t so blatantly malicious in their advertising practices then I would gladly pay for YouTube premium. However, their current business model of “take any and every bit of data on them to sell more product” is morally repugnant. Subsequently, I feel no shame in blocking ads and using invidious to avoid giving them even a cent of revenue.
YouTube is highly profitable already.
How much of their revenue is spent toward content generation?
I know but ... YouTube belongs to YouTube, and I'm sure google is already making tons of money selling/using the data of all their users so... I would not have a problem with one or two ads, but they often put three or more annoying ads per video.
Yes
😂 reading the replies to your comment is the fun part. Watching people lose their minds over a comment.
Yeah, you can tell by the replies how much this forum is filled with entitled children and hipster anarchists.
That and by how anytime Google is mentioned here in literally any context, the top comments are all about how much people hate Google. Could be an article about Google rescuing lost kittens, and people here will make up stories about how Google is doing it for some evil reason and it's a threat to the internet as we know it.
Anyone who tries to argue with me will be summarily blocked because I don't have the patience today. Thanks in advance for helping me populate my block list.
You and the other person's misrepresentation of the reason others are complaining about this are little more than complaining about other people complaining.
