K, I’m still not using Google search engine anymore. And once I find a replacement for any other Google services and devices I have, it’s out with those as well.
Android is opensource. You can get phones that support ROMs like LineageOS (would recommend a FairPhone) or /e/ (godawful name, good ROM) for example - you can buy the Murena phone for this.
Linux phones are about 5 years away from mainstream usability, IMO.
I’m really looking forward to Linux phones. Have been for years. It’s sad that Mozilla and Canonicals ventures didn’t pan out because both had really fun ideas. Hell I say they had the right ideas, it just wasn’t the right time.
I have 3 banking apps installed right now through Aurora Store (FLOSS access to Google Store). They work fine. The only bank that didn’t like my degoogled phone, I dropped.
I’ve tried running Replicant and degoogled Lineage OS on an old Samsung phone many years ago. The experience was a bit rough, but tolerable as long as you’re a tech enthusiast and willing to make some sacrifices. Back then it wasn’t quite acceptable to me, because my bank app didn’t work. Then they announced that they were going to phase out the old code paper, so authentication through a mobile app was seen as the only acceptable method going forward.
What games do you play that aren’t compatible? I don’t play many of the really mainstream games. I think the last game I played that wasn’t compatible at the time was genshin impact.
I still worry that leaving Reddit is going to make it tilt to the right. I spent a decade posting there in the hopes that it would nudge people towards sanity.
The right use it and all other social media sites for coordinated disinformation. No matter how much you try to combat it you’re going up against people/ideas with deep pockets and a lot of resources meaning your voice is just a drop in the bucket.
Sure, but there are a lot more of us, and we make more sense.
It’s important to present people with the contrasting view when they’re presented with disinformation. It’s natural to believe the first thing you read if it’s just a narrative with no dissent.
I use piped/newpipe etc. and simply support creators i watch via patreon/direct donations/merch. Less money for shitty ad company more money for creatives.
There’s are some OpenStreetMap-based apps that are worth checking out. Some of them are made for specific purposes, while other are for general navigation. I’ve tried some of them through the time with various success, though I’ve still haven’t found a favorite to stick with for good. But I believe making the switch is definitely possible and probably worth it!
You can install all the mentioned apps through F-Droid:
GraphHopper Maps
OsmAnd+
Organic Maps (hike/bike)
Alpi Maps (hike/bike)
SeaMapDroid (nautical)
Additionally, use Transportr for public transport navigation almost anywhere in the world, and GMaps WV, a restricted WebView wrapper for accessing the web version of Google Maps. Intended for use when OpenStreetMap isn’t enough.
The hard part is the cost difference (I haven’t looked terribly deeply yet) Family Proton (3TB) is 395 AUD (when you sign up for 2 years)
2 TB, 125 AUD per year for google drive, and it’s per year.
Pro-rata that’s literally twice as expensive, and you have to sign up for 2 years to get that rate, which makes moving my stuff a hard pill to swallow :(
Is there a plug and play service that’s as good as proton without the hefty premium?
(The single plans are even more steep, 24 months, 158 AUD per year for only 500 GB…)
Compare what your router reports as ip and compare what your public ip is. If its not the same then that means you are behind a nat(?)(or something else) and you can’t port forward now.
My concern is saving my email and photos before my account is randomly banned one day with no customer service and no recourse. God only knows what data they already harvested from when I used to back up my photos with their service.
Just grab a copy using Google Takeout, then after that use Syncrify, FolderSync, Resilio Sync or something else to automatically copy your phone media to your computer.
Definitely the first step is to get more SSDs. I was traveling a lot and barely used a desktop or even a laptop for 6-7 years. I’ll check out those sync systems, thanks.
Honestly. Off the back of this debacle I switched to Firefox and duckduckgo. Previously I used to use the shit out of incognito because I hated that when I searched for something once that I then get that thing popping up everywhere else in ads etc. Since the switch I no longer get the feeling of being stalked.
NoScript helps a lot, too. I suppose other extensions also. It’s horrifying how many sites embed Google and Facebook tracking, including ones that really shouldn’t like medical sites and banks.
On the topic of this, what is the best alternative out there? A few years ago I’ve tried a couple options, out of curiosity, but the search quality was super poor for anything that’s not in English, and the accuracy of found content wasn’t always there
This is something I wrote in another thread earlier but it’s relevant here too
A security guy popular in the internet, Ollam, recently left Delta’s program because they are changing it to be more pay to play vs miles traveled or something. Delta walked it back but he’s sticking to his guns. In his rant, he said something poignant. Something to the effect of “if your significant other raises their hand like they’re gonna hit you, but they don’t? The time to leave is now.” (Video)
I’m on Kagi but I did the one time payment and am unsure about whether I’ll extend. Results are good but 10 dollars a month isn’t insignificant (cheap plan is orders of magnitude less than what I need in searches)
I tried kagi and wasn’t impressed. For all but one or two queries the results were exactly the same as ddg. Not to mention they had that stupid metric stating 78%+ unique kagi results for every search, even though that was blatantly untrue. They seem pretty dishonest as a company.
I used Ecosia for a long time (almost 5 years) but the search results are pretty bad. Often I had to use another search engine to actually find what I was looking for. DuckDuckGo is pretty good, Brave Search is OK as well but SearXNG is my personal favorite.
I use SearXNG. Google’s search results aren’t even good anymore so there’s really no excuse not to switch at this point. For awhile I couldn’t break the habit but recently Google has gotten considerably worse.
I adjusted my entire digital life so I can do everything without ever connecting to Google services. I block them in my self-hosted Pi-Hole, on NextDNS and in my OPNsense Firewall.
I refuse to use services that force me to surrender to Google. Why don’t people use hCaptcha, it’s not perfect, but it’s far better than this Google garbage…
That’s much easier said than done. Right now I’m dealing with a late payment on a website because first I couldn’t access the website via VPN (blocked by Cloudflare), then even after allowing the IP to bypass the VPN I couldn’t pass the hidden captcha. After completely disabling the VPN + Google blocker my real IP was blacklisted due to forgetting to clear cookies between the two. Now my credit is being impacted.
Just use a proper ad-blocker like uBlock Origin in combination with a browser like Firefox or LibreWolf that supports proper ad-blocking extension. Fuck this Chromium garbage that deprecated MV2 because Google is scared of adblockers. Don’t support Google’s monopoly on browser rendering engines and use Firefox or something even better like LibreWolf.
Did you read what the addon is about? It’s not an adblocker but is to be used in conjunction with one. All it does is circumventing the adblockerblocker. It specifically recommends being used together with uBlock.
Btw, I use FF with uBlock. But I am not everyone, so when I stumbled across this, I thought it might be helpful for some people.
And I found it ironic, that Googles own extension store contains an extension that circumvents the YouTube adblockerblocker.
I know, but uBlock has built in circumvention features, and you can add custom blocking rules or filterlists to uBO without having to install an additional extension. If the addon becomes outdated, it might start interfering with uBlock Origin. It’s best not to combine uBO with any other ad-blocking addons and just use the existing mechanisms like custom rules and filterlists to extend uBO if needed. The uBO team is constantly working on ensuring that the built in circumvention mechanism works, most of the time, the only thing a user needs to do is clear the cache and update the filterlists.
And I found it ironic, that Googles own extension store contains an extension that circumvents the YouTube adblockerblocker.
ReVanced doesn’t use the YouTube app/website, it modifies the YouTube apk into a completely different thing. The only thing that can break ReVanced is server side changes from YouTube.
Lol no, ReVanced also depends on app side changes, they could harden the YouTube app and make it more difficult to modify. The only upside is that it would take several months for those changes to actually start affecting users, when the old versions of YouTube are phased out.
OR, they could just block ReVanced on the server side and ban everyone that uses it, if they wanted to
Don’t be naive and think that Google can’t easily block ReVanced. They just haven’t tried to yet. They’re one of the biggest companies in the world, if they gave a shit it would be gone overnight, just like Vanced was.
Remember people start logging out for these services. Any day they could decided to start terminating accounts if this whole anti Adblocking campaign doesn’t get subscriber numbers up
I am aware of this option, but sideloading on iOS currently kinda sucks. You have to use AltStore which sometimes goes unmaintained for a few months, even when it’s maintained it’s kinda buggy and the Windows version almost never works for me. It’s also not available for Linux. And you have to connect your phone to a computer running AltStore every 7 days, otherwise the app will stop functioning. It’s just not a great solution and especially bad for less tech-savvy users.
I’m definitely not gonna pay Apple money to use my device that I already paid way too much money for the way I want to. But I just switched to Android (GrapheneOS to be percise) and now I don’t have to deal with any of this BS anymore.
Oh yeah, because historically, whenever a large internet platform starts losing money, things definitely get better for everyone. Nevermind Reddit and Twitter and Meta and Netflix and Hulu having to nickle and dime users for basic functionality of their platforms, things are definitely better. I love all those raised prices and lowered quality of service.
I don’t think the prices in Europe are increasing (yet). My plan is still 12 euros / month.
And regardless… It’s been 12 euros since it was launched in Europe in 2018.
If the price were to go up to 14 euros in 2023, that would pretty much be in line with inflation.
I've got €6/m ad free but without premium features. YT tries to make me upgrade but this is enough for me. I wouldn't pay €12/m but I'd rather go looking for adblockers and third party apps should it come to it.
I remember looking into it at the time and deciding against downgrading. I’m not entirely sure why.
I think it was because of the lack of background playback in the mobile app? 🤔
(Bit expensive for such a tiny feature, but I digress…)
It’s not bad if you max out the family subscription (5 members) and use YouTube music.
Still, I’m a hypocrite because I absolutely hate their habit of hiding features behind the paywall, and making ads more obnoxious to irritate users into paying for premium.
Ah ok, certainly makes sense for ur usecase. I didn’t meet anyone who was YouTube music yet. Does it have high quality audio or is it just YouTube quality?
That hasn’t stopped me from using other Google services like Gmail, Docs, or Drive either.
If I ever decide I want to opt out of Google’s ecosystem I’ll just serve them a GDPR data deletion request.
That’s what I did when I deleted my Twitter account as well.
Imo it should be a choice whether we are tracked for monetary gains or not, and not a necessary evil. But with most basic services/devices you are not even presented with that choice. E.g. when buying a phone.
And if you do have a choice, sometimes accessibility is restricted so much that you can’t participate in our networked society.
I think we have to find ways to provide access to the most basic services with a minimum of tracking. Anything else should still be an option of course.
How to achieve this? I don’t know. But EU regulations certainly wouldn’t hurt for now.
I agree it should be a choice. But at the moment now, it’s not. And there’s content and entertainment I get out of it that I can’t replace with other options.
I pay for it as well. The AdBlocking options I use on my other devices aren’t as easy to implement in others (like SmartTVs or in YouTubes own app), and YouTube ads are worse than websites page ads in a lot of cases, so it’s worth it at the moment.
Since I’m already neck deep in their services for Gmail, drive, etc at the moment, there’s no benefit from distancing myself from YouTube. I’m working on transitioning to either self hosted (which is fine for a calendar or a shared drive, I don’t care if they’re down for maintenance/failure) or privacy focused alternatives, like ProtonMail, I’m currently testing it to see if I like it before I debate if it’s worth the coin.
You’re objectively wrong. You can have a fully free and open source android rom without any spyware (not even from google) and be free, and I also use Piped for watching youtube because I don’t have a google account. Check out privacy communities on lemmy.
Edit: And about getting rid of all tech, of course you can’t be 100% independent and have 100% privacy, but you can mitigate most of it if you know what you’re doing.
No, sorry but you’re wrong. Your phone will still ping towers it’s near, those pings are logged. You’re being tracked as long as you carry a smartphone.
Many years ago I tried that, and found out that privacy is possible, but the cost is incredibly high.
By using pi-hole I was able to find out if my mobile phone was communicating with Google. As long as I had GAPPS on LineageOS, there was plenty of traffic. When I removed GAPPS, the traffic went quiet, but my phone became severely crippled.
Sure, I still had some smart apps on my smartphone, but I was also cut off from my bank, so basically living without money in todays society. Not really a viable option. Also, updating apps from fdroid was incredibly inconvenient, but I hope that issue has been fixed now.
Tracking != taking all of your data and selling it for profit. That’s what Google does with YouTube, even if you pay for premium. So I see no reason to pay for it.
Not to mention a premium sub costs more than most streaming services out there, including double the price of lots of Plex shares that have thousands of movies and shows to watch.
I see your point, but it assumes I want other streaming services or content. I have YouTube Premium to avoid ads. The content I watch is almost exclusively YouTube creators.
That and paying for other services isn’t free of tracking either.
I guess I’m resigned to being the product in some instances.
I don’t understand the Google selling data argument. I thought Google was an ad broker. Someone goes to Google and says I want to play ads on YouTube for my awesome baking book, play it for people who are into baking. YouTube has the watch history of people and is able to tell who watches a lot of baking content. That’s not selling data to someone in my books as the advertiser does not receive any personal details about the people where the ad is played. He is just buying impressions. Or am I missing something?
That fits the textbook definition of targeted ads, which is the use of personally identifying data to select who to deliver specific ads to. Google is selling not data directly, but rather the promise to advertisers that they can deliver that baking ad to the right audience (bakers who watch youtube). It’s a disguised form of indirectly selling your identity.
imagine someone paying for your dinner but you keep complaining about the restaurant as you continue eating and ordering more foods.
him paying premium covers the cost of us adblock users. do you really think YouTube will still be free if everyone blocked ads and nobody pays for the service?
On your watch-time? I mean then it’s cool, cause you don’t even have to do anything. On the other hand I would probably have to log out to watch content I don’t want to support financially.
Basically a percentage of your premium is divvied out based on watch time. When I signed up it was half of my payment went to creators, I don’t know the current split though
For me its solely because of a ad free experience on my TV, since its the primary device I’m using it on. And i got it relatively cheap from turkey so it’s not that big of a deal. I might reevaluate if the price increases though.
Thanks for the info. I played around with my parents old TV and managed to get it adfree with blockada and another YouTube app. But it’s definitely a pain to set up and many people probably prefer the official app.
Not sure how well it works on YouTube since YouTube ads might not come from third parties, but I set dns.adguard-dns.com as my DNS provider, and now Flow Free and other games don’t have ads.
I got premium because I have ADHS and need to listen to something when I want to sleep or do chores. With premium I can turn my phone screen off of let it run in the background.
I’m technically still sharing a Netflix account with my parents, though I rarely use it at this point.
Whenever I want to watch a movie, and I check Netflix, they don’t have it. (It’s worth pointing out that I’m not in the US)
In contrast, YouTube Premium gives me pretty much exactly what I seek from it. Videos from channels that I follow, but now without ads.
I would dump Netflix before cancelling YT Premium. Everything on Netflix I can stream for free from pirate sites to my TV. YouTube actually has tons of informational and educational content and a premium subscription lets me support it without the ads. I probably watch YouTube twice as much as all my other vid subs combined.
Yeah I do… family plan so split the cost with the fam. I find it worth it. But the price increases are certainly concerning. If it keeps going up I’ll drop it.
OP here. I do in fact confess that I share a YT Premium subscription with a friend, though I myself eschew the bog-standard YT apps with those patched using Revanced Extended just because of long-standing QoL issues on said regular apps.
Yes, a family plan makes it cheaper. You won’t see any ads on your devices, from your TV to your PC, and you can listen to YouTube videos even when your phone is locked. It also includes YouTube Music. It’s a great deal, and I’m not sure why some people don’t see it that way. Sure, you could get a different YouTube client for your phone, install an ad blocker on your PC, block ads on your router to get rid them on your smart TV, and listen to music on Spotify for free. But the value of a good service is that you pay a reasonable amount of money and get all these features without any additional work on your part.
If you already have a paid spotify/apple music subscription, and already have a buttload of streaming apps subscription (netflix, apple tv, etc), suddenly the prospect of adding $13.99 youtube subscription into your list of monthly subscriptions seems a lot less appealing.
Yes, and you could even switch from Spotify/Apple to YouTube, because it essentially offers a similar service, but with added benefits. That’s their proposition. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to accept it or not. However, I find it hard to agree with the common online sentiment that YouTube Premium is worthless.
It’s not that easy to migrate from Spotify premium to Youtube Music, especially with how Spotify somehow got more and more podcasts into exclusive contract. I also use spotify premium on various 3rd party clients as well, not sure if youtube music support that use case. But yeah, from pricing alone, youtube premium which includes youtube music sounds like a good deal if you’re ok with switching away from spotify/apple music.
I’d argue YT Music is worthless, but that’s just me. I hate that you’re required to bundle it because I have 0 intent to ever move away from Spotify and I’m being forced into paying for a service I don’t need to not have ads on my tv, where I watch the majority of my YT.
But you don’t have to have all those subscriptions. You get YouTube Music included so you don’t need a separate music subscription. You also don’t have to worry about working out the latest app/add-on/plugin/site that lets you play YouTube without ads. It’s pretty good value actually. I get more from it than I do my Netflix subscription. I rotate my other subscriptions based on the shows I’m watching. I always have a YouTube subscription and don’t foresee stopping it just coz I can’t go back to ads haha.
I wonder if most of the complaints of ads on YouTube are coming from people who subscribe to something like Netflix, but spend just as much (or more) time streaming YouTube.
I wonder if most of the complaints of ads on YouTube are coming from people who subscribe to something like Netflix, but spend just as much (or more) time streaming YouTube.
Actually I don’t watch YouTube that much, probably just one video per week or even less. But everytime I tried to watch a video in YouTube app, I got bombarded with ads. So what should happen to people like me who don’t watch YouTube that much but don’t want to see ads? Clearly paying the full subscription price is not worth it in this case, especially when I already have a Spotify family subscription.
I’m not sure I see the problem. Is there a reason you expect to be able to use the service for free and even ad free?
I might only listen to a few songs a week. Is it fair that I have to sit through ads when I try to listen to them on Spotify? I don’t really want to pay for a subscription, especially because I already pay for YouTube. Clearly paying the full subscription cost for Spotify isn’t worth it in my case.
Edit: Don’t mean to sound like a smart ass. But as you can see, you can basically swap Spotify for YouTube in your argument. Spotify is just more valuable to you, which is fine. That doesn’t mean you should get the other thing free. Just like I shouldn’t expect to get Spotify ad free.
That’s where I disagree. YouTube got this big because it’s been free for so long, it practically squeezed out all of its competitors. Now that it no longer have competitors, YouTube started charging subscription, even raising the price now.
Also, you can’t exactly compare YouTube subscription with Spotify subscription, because Spotify got its content mostly by paying records companies. YouTube on the other hand got majority of its contents for free from their users, just like Reddit and Twitter. Even if you subscribe to YouTube premium, the majority of those video owners will never get any money from YouTube.
YouTube Music is more comparable to Spotify, but why bundle it with YouTube premium and raised the subscription price instead of offering it as a separate product and keep the base YouTube subscription cheap so it’ll make more sense for most people.
But YouTube still is free. This article isn’t about YouTube not being free, they’ve just increased the price of their subscription (like Netflix and Spotify do routinely). You just expect to get it for free and without ads. I’m confused at who you think is paying to store and stream all those videos if it was entirely free?
Going down the rabbit hole of YouTube getting it’s content for free is a slippery slope. I see what you’re saying, but YouTube is hosting and streaming that content for those content creators. That isn’t cheap. It’s a double edged sword. Because you likely wouldn’t know or have access to those content creators if they weren’t able to upload those videos to YouTube and not have to pay to provide that service themselves. Is it perfect, no. But name another completely free streaming service.
And I’d argue it’s not entirely comparable to Reddit and Twitter. Both in cost incurred to store and stream that data, and they pay those content creators who generate a lot of views. Again, another rabbit hole in terms of what payment is fair etc. But it’s not a fair comparison to put YouTube in the Twitter and Reddit bucket. It probably sits somewhere in between Spotify and those social platforms.
Edit: I forgot to point out the biggest issue with your comparison to Reddit and Twitter. You seem to forget that those platforms also have ads.
Now i haven’t been subscribed to spotify since at least 2015 so things may have changed but when i’m controlling someone elses phone with spotify i pretty much always prefer it to youtube music which has been my main player pretty much since it launched (i wont change for as long as i have yt premium though :p).
I use Youtube music and I think it is inferior to Spotify. Offline music is much more seamless, music quality is superior, shuffling a playlist is easier, recommended music is better, dedicated desktop app, and more. The only reason I use YouTube music is because there is more selection.
I’m not sure about Apple music though since I never had an iPhone.
Is it better than Google Music was? Cause I had that for years and swapped to Spotify when they first announced they were axing Google Music to combine it into YouTube Premium.
It is absolutely not better than Google play music in any way, shape, or form. It has improved a lot since launch though. I’m still bitter about that switchover.
I moved to YouTube Music from Spotify and I really miss being able to move the songs around in a playlist on the mobile app. I used to spend a lot of time curating playlists where order mattered (I might avoid having two songs back to back that are the same tempo/vibe, or I might tell a story with the progression of songs in the playlist).
I’m also annoyed by the fact that sometimes YouTube Music will hang forever on a blank loading screen instead of accepting that there’s no connection and sending me to my downloaded songs. I don’t know if Spotify does better about this because I never had Spotify Premium.
However, one good thing about YouTube Music is that you can find covers and unofficially released songs much more easily. I search for covers often, to see how others might interpret a song I like.
out of all the subscriptions, it’s probably the best one. you can get youtube for free but either you’re gonna get ads or you’ll block them, and the creators you like will start seeking other forms of revenue that are just as/more annoying, or just quit.
yt-premium makes youtube an actually nice experience and keeps money flowing to creators. There’s a limit to how much that nice-experience is worth but it’s better than paying for netflix, and a bunch of netflix execs get paid, and the creators don’t. then the show you like is cancelled and removed anyway.
Yea I’ve been kinda watching youtube through this whole social media moment, suspicious that they’ve successfully taken a middle road here that will probably last. Ads and profiteering? You bet … but it seems that there’s a monetisation model for “creators” that kinda works (though I’m not sure at all about that). And so, for anyone that actually wants to make any sort of living doing the creative stuff that the rest of us lurkers want to consume, the inevitable question of how do you live within capitalism seems to have an answer of some sort in youtube while all the other platforms perhaps don’t have healthy or appealing answers.
As for the fediverse, I think there’s a massive opportunity for donations and crowd funding to become a much more central and normal aspect here so that making some sort of living by contributing to and being a part of this space is actually viable. Even some sort of subscription model for platfroms that are essentially non-profit creator-driven would make a lot of sense here.
That’s a problem that goes beyond any single platform though, and at the moment, cross-platform or fediverse-wide work seems to be lacking behind a little bit.
As is apparently the misplaced opinion your bullshit is worth reading or responding to in full. People use yt-premium to block ads. Creators are going to survive or not on the platform not because someone uses an ad blocker.
I fee like premium is really the only way to make youtube more sustainable for content creators and the platform alike. However, youtube has currently deemed that demonetized videos should lose all youtube premium revenue. That’s incredibly stupid.
Imagine if premium revenue went to creators you watched, regardless of monetization status. Premium subscribers would be highly sought after for content creators, since it’s a more reliable revenue source that gives them the freedom to make what they want. It’s good for YouTube/google too because thats less reliance on advertisers.
It could use some adjustments, maybe taking some inspiration from patreon.
I fee like premium is really the only way to make youtube more sustainable for content creators and the platform alike.
I really don’t see how, unfortunately. You give Youtube the money and they decide what to do with it and they won’t do it in a remotely fair way because they want profits for themselves. There are many better ways to support content creators directly than over whatever Youtube decides to pay them at any given moment. Most content creators know that of course and are already linking to other services that you can use to help them out. At least for as long as Youtube allows it…
When I signed up for premium half of my bill went to creators based on my watch time. I don’t know the current split, but I do know LTT has said quite a few times that premium actually pays out a lot to channels.
YouTube could claw that back at any point, obviously, but right now it seems fair
Personally I become a member of the channels I’d like to support or join their Patreon if they have them and then use AdBlock+SponsorBlock and uYou+ on mobile.
If you pay for premium Google is still collecting all of your data and using it for their own gain. Why support them at all?
someone’s gotta do the hosting part, honestly that’s pretty difficult and I can’t see anyone else being able to make a youtube other than google. The platform itself does have value. I don’t think that value is 45% of the money but it’s not a case of they shouldn’t make any money.
Their yearly revenue has increased by $20B over the last 5 years alone, let’s not pretend YouTube is hurting for money here.
And other video platforms do exist and are successful. I think more people would consider premium, myself included if three things were different.
The price. Over $10 a month for no ads is insane. If it were $4.99 a month I probably would have it and not care. I hardly even remember that I pay for Plex pass each month. I don’t want or need YT Music, make a separate plan.
Paywalling old features like being able to watch videos with your screen off on mobile. Most videos where it’s just a person taking and there’s no on screen content worth watching is perfect for that. But they removed it as a free feature locking it behind premium. That and being able to throw the app into the background and have the playback continue. I mean come on…
Screwing over the creators. YouTube, much like Reddit, has taken the thing that made the platform what it is today, that being the content and those who generate it, for granted. The whole adpocalypse and constant demonetization of videos for stupid reasons is getting old. Things might be a bit better now? But I support most of my favorite creators off platform through Patreon or whatever so they get what they deserve and aren’t shafted by Google being full of greedy fucks.
So yeah, really it’s YouTube shooting themselves in the foot. It’d be very easy to get tons of people to sign up for premium but they’re choosing profits over people. We all know how that works out.
Google can go fuck itself. Ever since they removed the “don’t be evil” slogan they’ve been doing a great job of being shit.
Just to be super clear. There are other video platforms, and they are not successful, and not one of them could scale to youtube scale. And any that did would likely act similarly.
There is value in the content delivery platform we call youtube, value for consumers and creators. As I said originally There is a limit to how much value there is, which might not match what they currently take.
But to say vimeo? Could serve as a youtube replacement. It’s just silly.
that argument of ‘they have money’ doesn’t make fucking sense lol. them having money has zero to do with them asking for payment in exchange for a service like every other company out there. the fuck does their bank account have to do with the costs of hosting millions of videos for millions of viewers? bupkus - that’s what.
Yes, the whole family watches YouTube on the TV, on the iPad/mobile phone apps, that it’s worth it not to see the ads there, plus background play of audio, plus the whole family can stream their music from YouTube Music so no need for an aditional Spotify subscription.
Anyway, I just wish they’d remove the sponsor stuff on the apps like SponsorBlock does on the desktop for me.
I strongly dislike ads, but want to support good platforms and content creators. I eagerly waited for it to become available in the Netherlands back when it was still called YouTube Red. I subscribed the day it became available.
Ethical ad free YouTube: you support creators and the platform that hosts them, much better than through ads.
Too bad most videos now feature sponsored segments so creators are effectively double dipping in my premium support and advertiser money. That is honestly more annoying. I have more respect for creators who have Patreon and don’t feature sponsored content.
I couldnt agree more. The money has to come from somewhere and i’m not watching any ads so it’s the obvious solution. I frankly just use sponsorblock so it autoskips the sponsor spots. But the whole thing is just absurd tbh.
I actually dropped my other subs (Netflix, Deezer) in favor of the YouTube family plan. My kids watch a ton of Minecraft vids and I don’t really care to have them digesting all those ads. My wife also uses it a lot and I get a music service that just works with all my casting devices flawlessly.
I also love the ad free experience when I use a how to video etc.
Yeah, got YouTube music after they shut down Google play music. All my friends dog on me for not having Spotify but not having ads on iOS is so nice. I tried it once without youtube premium subscription and idk how people can sit through advertisment hell for every video.
Also having the creators I watch get a larger share of the YouTube money pie cause I watch them as a YouTube premium sub is a nice feeling too.
That being said though, I’m on a family plan and not this specific plan that got its price raised (although I’m pretty sure the family plan prices have also gone up recently if I remember right).
Yep, Family Plan here as well. It’s 4+1 of us, we all watch YT pretty much continuously at different age levels (two adults, one teenager and one preschooler), and since there was one extra seat left grandma also got ad free experience on her mobile. All 5 of us are also into different kinds of music so having access to YT music is also huge plus. The only other subscription I don’t mind paying for is Amazon Prime, for obvious reasons. Netflix, D+, Apple TV+ and such got the boot long time ago, with no plans to resubscribe any time soon.
Subscriber here. I use YouTube pretty much all day long. I usually have it playing something for background noise while I'm working. I've got a family plan with 4 other people on it, who all also get the benefits of ad-free viewing.
I also use YouTube on several devices of my own. TV, PS5, phone, tablet, three laptops... Trying to manage adblockers on all of those is such a pain in the ass. I'll never go back to troubleshooting Pi-holes and adblockers and adblocker-blocker-blockers. It's an objectively worse experience having to manage all sorts of goofy tools that keep getting circumvented by Google every week.
Also, the content creators I watch get paid for my views. I spend hours watching these people's content, so making sure they're getting paid means something to me.
I do! Would probably give up my Netflix subscription before YouTube to be honest. As a family, we spend more time using YouTube than most other streaming services.
Out of all the streaming services I pay for I get by far the most value out of yt premium, I probably spend 10x longer watching yt vids compared to movies and TV shows, and it has a dedicated music app that links nicely with my android auto.
I subscribed to Google Play Music All Access from day 1, because (at the time) it was like Spotify but also allowed me to upload my own music. I added a family plan when that became available for my friends/family who wanted it as well, and was grandfathered into that price when GPMAA eventually turned into YouTube Music, which was also bundled with YouTube Premium. Ad-free YouTube isn’t something I specifically sought out but it was bundled into a service that I was using as a perk.
I kept that subscription going at the grandfathered rate until I got an email from Google one day informing me that they were increasing the price, which was last October, and would only allow me to keep the grandfathered cost for an additional 6 months before hiking me up to the new price. That would bring me from $14.99/mo to $23.99/mo, so I said “fuck that” and canceled. The service only got worse after they killed GPM anyways.
People with overpaid white collar jobs do that plenty and there are plenty of them who will pay probably up to $50 a month or more. Youtube is already testing predatory measures to make chrome users ditch adblockers by giving out warnings to people who use them. Many more will go Youtube Premium in the near future because of such measures and Youtube will keep ramping up prices of course.
So you are pissed off that people are actually willing to pay for service? Youtube hosts millions if not billions of videos and streams them to billions of users, dozens of times a day and they do all this essentially lag free. That infrastructure is not cheap.
Additionally youtube actually shares their premium revenue with content creators allowing people to actually make a successful living with their creative pursuits and you control how that revenue is shared by which videos you watch.
I want to but the price is to high for what they’re asking for. I could have gotten myself a subscription for crunchy roll or Netflix with the money they’re asking
I do, and YouTube is my primary Media consumption for both video and music.
That said, I have the family plan which went from $15-23 back a few months ago and it was difficult to keep. I actually cancelled it and used Spotify and some of the available ad-blocking apps, but ultimately didn’t like Spotify, so I came back.
If it were to go up again anytime remotely soon I’d be gone.
I used to when I used have it when subscribed to Google Music—which was amazing but then they tried to replace it with YouTube Music and yet another big amazing Google product died—and there was no point anymore.
I’ve considered it to stop ads on the TV app, but always thought it wasn’t worth it. I can’t even be bothered ad-blocking the network to include the TV, so raising cost of Premium now may as well make the product cease to exist in my mind.
To add to this, at least Android being open source allows for alternative versions that can be used on some hardware that truly don’t track and can be consistently supported long term. With Apple’s devices, that’s not a practical option.
Google’s relationship with Apple is particularly significant given its unilateral access to iPhone customers. Internal Google notes of a meeting between Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook released Monday by the DOJ give an interesting insight into that relationship. The meeting, which began as a discussion of the regulatory environment in D.C. eventually turned toward the question of Google’s place as the default search engine on Apple products.
Cook, according to the notes, told Pichai he believes the two companies were “deep partners; deeply connected where our services end and yours begin.” In another note from the meeting, Pichai reportedly said, “Our vision is that we work as if we are one company.” Pichai tried to distance himself from that line during this testimony on Monday.
Yes. LineageOS and GrapheneOS among other forks are some obvious counterexamples to the narrative that Android isn’t open source. Then there are the countless vendors that use it in China without Google software. I know it’s cool to hate on Google and I do partake but that’s simply a fact.
You can build a version of Android, but not the version that is installed on the device you buy in the store.
There are dozens of forks of Android so I don’t know how you can NOT call it OSS.
Because even those forks ship closed source binary blobs. You simply cannot build an Android phone with 100% open source. The phones you can actually buy in the store? A huge part of those is closed source.
Yes. I would like to see a DIY selfhosted replacement for play services that is a direct swap in, in the sense that as an end user I couldn’t tell the difference (notifications primarily)
Edit: wow! Didn’t realize selfhosting replacements for Google services is so controversial!
No kettle here, just a couple of pots. The kettle is shiny and reflective. The pot is seeing its own reflection in the kettle. Hence there’s no kettle in this scenario.
Maybe if android 14 was guaranteed to have 70% adoption in one week developers would actually care. There’s no point developing features for 5% of users
Google never should have opened it up for hardware manufacturers. They should have just made the OS and licensed it out like windows. Then hardware manufacturers wouldn’t be able to release crappy forks that never get updated.
They didn’t really have a choice. They were building on open-source software and Linux and Arm are somewhat bad at abstracting the hardware. So this means that the manufacturers must homebrew their own distro for their hardware, instead of just publishing drivers like windows hardware does.
They’ve been working on fixing this, but fundamentally they built their castle on sand. And if they hadn’t, they probably never would’ve gotten anywhere at all and we’d all be on Blackberry or WebOS or WinPhone or whatever.
You guys really just said that Linux and open source licenses are "a castle on sand" and they should "have done it like Windows"?
If you start running before anybody notice you may be able to make it. Go. Just. Go.
But no, seriously, that's why I prefer Android. I have versions of it customized to handheld consoles, single board computers and a bunch of other stuff. I don't want to be out there buying licenses for my platforms from Google.
Samsung is the biggest phone manufacturer in the world, Sony is a massive corporation.
If people want to sell phones the least they can do is have the software staff to back it up by doing maintenance. If I wanted an iPhone I'd buy an iPhone.
Look I love open-source but the whole lack of a separate binary driver layer is dumb and is why Windows can support a machine for over a decade while Android has terrible device-specific support windows and you don’t just get your new OS version from Android Update, you have to get it from your vendor.
Imagine if you owned a Dell and couldn’t run Windows Update, but had to use Dell Update instead?
Also, I'm not an OS engineer, but that wouldn't require a closed source, privately licensed OS, would it? Just to not build it as a Linux offshoot, I suppose.
Windows Phone and webOS were amazing. Not just for their time, but even today. Major advancements in mobile OS’ came from WebOS like multi window task managing and my favorite feature of all came from Windows Phone. The most perfect on screen keyboard man has ever made. Specifically with audio. It had click sounds that were specific to a region of the keyboard and it was a low tone that was audibly pleasing. I wish we still had the same levels of competition that we did back in the day. Link to a video about the pleasing typing sounds on windows phone
Metro UI was and still is a sexy AF interface. The widget tiles had a motion to them that was delicate and beautiful. It was just such a beautiful OS. I’ve kept most of the phones I’ve ever owned because I like them and of the 10 or so I’ve done through over the last 13 years especially my two favorites are my windows phones an HTC 8x and a Nokia Lumia 1020.
Also the tiles were so useful because they didn’t take too much space and gave you necessary information at a glance. Another thing I liked was the app drawer where you just click on some letter and it pulled up a grid of letters (I don’t know what is the term used for this feature, it’s also there in windows pc) and we can just click on the letter of the app we want to access. I found this very convenient because I am very lazy about actually typing the name of the app I want or even scroll down for it. In fact I now use a third party launcher called launcher 10 on my android. It’s very similar to the windows phone launcher. I still have my old windows phone which I had purchased in 2014.
This assumes that Android would have anywhere near the reach it does now because of it’s openness.
Google actually is enabling hardware manufacturers to control the end to end experience by allowing them this level of control over their own ecosystem.
The difference is … they’re not Apple. No Android manufacturer operates at the scale Apple does. Licensed Android won’t change that any more than it will change all of the Windows 7 and 10 licenses that still live on in the real world.
It would also put the onus on Google to produce all the device drivers and compatibility layers needed to support the breadth of hardware currently available. This would slow the entire market down.
Hardware manufacturers on average do a shitty job keeping their fragmented operating systems up to date. My iPhone has gone through many major version updates. If hardware manufacturers don’t want to quickly, or ever, update they should have just shipped their phones with stock Android, and allowed us to update it to whatever is the latest.
Sorry, I thought it would be obvious that hardware drivers would be provided by the hardware manufacturer, and then on a fresh install the OS would just… ya know… get them from the manufacturer. 😉
This is a gross misunderstanding of AOSP and OEM compatibility software and kernel driver integration, that comes from a very naive interpretation of how Android device vendors build AOSP for their hardware.
You should probably learn more about it before embarrassing yourself with this kind of arrogance. I have experience in both but, as it’s not my job to educate you, you’ll have to do so yourself.
I disagree. If google hadn’t opened up, manufacturers wouldn’t have bothered. We also have great UIs like oneui with useful quality of life features not found in stock android. Not to mention a longer update cycle than even Google the developer of android.
That’s kind of a moot point seeing how it will be adopted by 100% of phones at one point (except for phones which are out of support, but those won’t get used at all after a certain point)
I’ve got one! …but it’s only connected to a computer. All of our screens have computers connected. Computers that can install adblocking software and play videos are insanely cheap. I’m astounded anyone uses smart TVs’ rubbish software or a stick of any sort.
Also you can use a browser (I usually recommend Brave but I think the tide of opinion on them recently has turned?) that has adblocking built into it, navigate to youtube, and use that to cast to TV.
There’s catt which can be installed in termux on Android or directly on your PC easily enough. AFAIK there’s also a few (T)UIs for it out there. I personally have set up a bash script in termux as a share target and send the links from the revanced app to catt for casting. But yeah, it’s definitely more work and needs more expertise setting it up than hitting the cast button in the app, fully agreed.
You can screen mirror pretty much any windows, iOS/macOS, or android machine through your network or Bluetooth for FREE
You can pick up casting stick USBs for the price of ONE month of youtube premium
You can just hook up a dinky little raspberry pie or something to your TV and not even need to cast. Lord knows all these Lemmy computer geeks have some tiny computer or laptop lying around
You can pick up some jailbroken smart TV device like a Roku and watch a LOT more than ad-free clickbait videos for the cost of two months of premium
You can place a PiHole or equivalent somewhere in your network
It’s actually braindead easy to just never see an ad from online content on your Tv
You can also use Apple TV which is hands down best streaming box, use ATV remote on your couch without faffing with computers and pay for good service that YouTube and content creators on YouTube provide.
It’s easy to avoid paying but the experience is just worse.
And if you’re really short on cash, subscribe from Argentina or India and pay ~$2.
But, only way I have found I can get casting + sponsorblock without messing with any third party apps on TVs or casting devices has been just using Safari + sponsorblock and using air play.
Paying for YouTube doesn’t solve the issue of me wanting to avoid being exposed to segments of people begging me to like and subscribe etc. Those I actually find way more annoying than ads.
That part is annoying but I generally don’t subscribe to channels that overdo it. My remote has a button to skip 10s forward so I keep pressing it until I see sponsored segment is over.
I’d love to be able to use sponsorblock on ATV but I don’t see how it could be reasoned that it makes morally ok to not pay Google and content creators for the service they provide (with cash, ad views or otherwise). Video hosting ain’t cheap.
But, I don’t have to press any remote at all. I don’t even need sponsor block installed on any ATV or Android device. It’s been as simple as just air playing a video from safari. Such a polished experience.
Whoa, this looks awesome and I do have always on server for Usenet/Plex and Homebridge.
Thanks!
[edit] Installed and working great but I had to change os.exit() to sys.exit() in one of the files, looks like it’s not compatible with recent Python versions out of the box. Converted into system.d daemon, now working 24/7.
Yes. I am one of those who pays for premium. I primarily watch on my tv and probably watch more youtube than anything else. Also still on the old $10 plan but we will see how long that lasts.
You can use a secondary google account, sign up for premium family plan using a vpn to Turkey and pay like $10 per year, while adding your main google account as a family member to save a bundle of cash. I haven’t bothered since I’m happy with STN on android tv, but knowing that there’s a working sponsorblock solution for appletv now I might have to make the switch lol
Huh? You can Airplay those. Not sure what do you want to stream there that would be a better experience than downloading it outright from Usenet or torrents.
Chromecast is fine for what it is and a very good value but it does not compete with Apple TV or Nvidia Shield.
All of these options are unreasonable when you are talking a whole household and catering to a family that is not tech savvy. I have a pihole and it does not block ads from the YouTube TV app.
I have a plex going with content enough for the adults, but the kids consume so much media there is no reasonable way to get enough and fast enough and to meet their current interests. Youtube is the only streaming subscription we have left in the house because nothing even comes close for kids. Even Disney+ completely fumbles when it comes to appealing to what used to be its target market.
Best solution is PiHole. If you can find RaspberryPi, but any replacement will work. Essentially local DNS which ignores requests to ad servers. There are also some other DNS servers which filter ads. But I’ve had less success with them.
The only solution I’ve found on mobile without installing security certificates and stuff is to use You tube’s website on Firefox with ublock installed there too.
Pihole won’t keep you from watching ads,for what I know its because google uses the same servers to serve the content and the ads.Pihole is great to browse the web though… I have it at home. For me what gets the job done is newpipe for my android phone and Smartube on my Android TV.
If u have an old Laptop colleting dust you can always install a light weight Linux on it and use it for YouTube or even pirated Films or series on your TV
So pay them directly or through other platform. Why would you pay them through Youtube rather than Patreon when using Youtube Premium is going to make them get a lower share of what you paid?
My resources are limited. I'd love to support them all in more direct ways. And a few of them, I do support outside of YouTube from time to time, as well. But I only have so much money to give, and there's so many creators whose works I've benefited from. It's the most conscientious use of my limited expendable income.
Because the platform does actually deserver a share, too?
We’d be living in a very different world if we hadn’t grown entitled to free shit because ads, and were actually paying for services that, you know, cost money to provide. The “ad supported” business model is utterly broken, dead, and gone, and was only ever able to support low-cost services like email and social media… But video streaming? By all accounts, it makes no sense.
And on top of that, YouTube’s revenue share is by far the most generous in the industry. There’s a reason creators ditch twitch, tiktok, etc. for it, even without the sign-on bonuses that other platforms have to resort to.
Ah, yes, I can see the poor company is suffering, nevermind, I prefer my money to go to shareholders who have their life solved rather than towards creators who are making amazing content yet aren’t making a living yet /s
So you just… never buy anything? Do you shoplift your candy bars, too, since they are probably made by a company that makes more than enough already?
YouTube is trying to move away from a shit business model, to a much more fair one. One that’s more fair for the platform, more fair for the creator, and more fair for the user. Because guess what, taking shit for free, was never fair. I’m not paying to support google. I’m paying to support common sense.
Ads are shit. They are shit for the platform running them, they are shit for the creator, and they are especially shit for the user. Fuck em. Actual subscriptions net so much more for all involved. As long as YT doesn’t try to double dip like twitch, hulu, and now netflix, I will continue to support a move away from them.
The size of a business doesn’t come into that. A mom and pop car service shop that scams their customers with technobabble, would be just as deserving of bankruptcy as facebook is.
And paying for premium isn’t mutually exclusive with donations, or supporting through patreon (which guess what, also takes a cut), when you find creators who you think deserve it. But you can’t claim to be righteous if you pay for the food a farmer grew, while the truck driver who actually brought it to you is standing right there, unpaid. No, his cut should not be large, but he should get one.
The concept of fairness for Youtube gets out of the equation at the very moment we’re talking about a natural monopoly with the capacities to accumulate immense wealth, for the mere virtue of having the lead, and bend the knees of anyone who thinks their policies are not fair, but cannot find a viable alternative.
Yeah I’m not a fan of their lead either, but until peertube or something else, like floatplane or nebula, lets me interact with the type and amount of content youtube hosts…
I will vote for the least evil path I can find. And yes, I think paying youtube to remove the fourth party in the transaction, advertisers, is that option.
They started blocking users with advanced adblockers completely in some places. It’s expected they’ll roll out that policy in most countries. Prepare to either ditch Youtube completely, watch dozens of ads as well as sponsored segments every couple of minutes (because why would Google pay content creators who make them a huge pile of money by providing content for free adequately, right?) or pay hundreds of dollars a year. Even then they might start showing you some ads because why the hell not? Big tech stole the internet from us and now they’re banking in on it big time. Needlesly to say this is not a sustainable business model, but since when did that ever bother mega corporations?
Firefox is pretty much the only browser Google doesn’t own directly. I’m afraid all of the other browsers will soon malfunction on that front so we’ll have to see.
This right here. Crazy to me that people would pay for what ublock origin does for free. Especially people defending the need to shell out for the service to “support” a trillion dollar company like Google.
The amount of downvotes on comments trying to help people not get price gouged and comments supporting these subscription price increases shows me just how many corporate shills are actually out there. No wonder these corps keep getting away with this bullshit.
Edit: Wow so many people took personal offense to this…almost like it they know it’s true but are afraid to admit it. Everyone is hurting financially right now, some more than others. Yet year over year, the prices keep going up even with record inflation and record profits. Keep shilling folks, enjoy emptying your wallets for the millionaires while you struggle.
Do you actually know that? I would bet that the cost of hosting the damn near infinite amount of content on YouTube would probably actually outweigh the amount they make on ads. At least if every other platform is to go off of.
It absolutely costs a lot. Google also has a borderline monopoly for online advertising.
That’s on top of absolutely harvesting your data and selling it as well. You’re acting like Google is a non-profit or some shit. They’re a giant corporation that doesnt give a shit about you.
I say this as someone with a google phone and generally likes Google products. But you’ve got to take a step back and realize what they are.
You’re getting down voted to hell, but I totally agree. Using someones else’s YT account or using it at work is so jarring because I am used to a 100% ad-free experience. It’s a good value to me, I’m not going to cry about paying $15 a month for a service I literally use multiple hours a day.
Ya how dare people actually pay for a platform that hosts billions of videos and streams to billions of users essentially lag free and is actually decent and shares revenue with it’s content creators. /s
Things cost money. You don’t have to be a corporate shill to not expect everything to be free, you just have to be an adult.
Ok? And? They aren’t a charity and don’t owe you free video hosting services.
EDIT: I find it hilarious that point out the fact that you aren’t entitled to free hosting services is getting down voted. Lmao how old are the people here?
Whether you think that service is worth it or not is up to you.
But don’t act like you have some moral high ground here and that people who are actually paying for a service that you are stealing from and a service that actually shares revenue with it’s content creators and encourages independent creators are just corporate shills.
Some of us are adults and realize things cost money and not entitled children that expect everything for free.
Here, since you have difficulty following, let me copy where the original thread started.
The amount of downvotes on comments trying to help people not get price gouged and comments supporting these subscription price increases shows me just how many corporate shills are actually out there. No wonder these corps keep getting away with this bullshit.
I am not the one who started the moral superiority, I just disagreed at being called a “corporate shill” before a bunch of insecure assholes started losing their shit.
Maybe try having self awareness yourself before suggesting it to someone else.
No I just think it’s stupid to call people who would pay for a service a corporate shill. I have no issue with someone who doesn’t think a subscription is worth it. Maybe read the whole thread first next time.
Our definitions of “decent” are definitely different. But this is not just about what you choose to do, it’s about all the fingerwagging people do at people who don’t believe this is worth paying (even more) for.
Then you need to look better because you are down a thread pointing out how people are getting downvoted and ragged on for suggesting ad blocking options.
I find it hilarious that point out the fact that you aren’t entitled to free hosting services is getting down voted.
Actually nevermind. Just look at the mirror. You really are talking of Google like it’s a struggling charity.
Then you need to look better because you are down a thread pointing out how people are getting downvoted and ragged on for suggesting ad blocking options.
No I am a thread calling people corporate shills for disagreeing with people saying we should all be pirating.
Actually nevermind. Just look at the mirror. You really are talking of Google like it’s a struggling charity.
It doesn’t matter how rich google is, it doesn’t owe you video hosting services. It’s not a charity. You can disagree with their pricing and you can find another platform if you like. But services cost money and just because a company has money through other sources doesn’t mean they need to subsidize all their products.
Of course it does. Not only Google has plenty of money to keep it running, don’t even try to make a moral argument out of one of these companies stripmining everyone’s data
If you care so much about the costs of hosting, I hope you donate to the Lemmy.
Of course it does. Not only Google has plenty of money to keep it running, don’t even try to make a moral argument out of one of these companies stripmining everyone’s data
No it absolutely does not. It is a business, not a charity. They don’t owe anyone anything for free. That’s how the world works. Your personal data is a part of the fee you pay for the service. And again no one is forcing anyone to use that service. There are plenty of alternatives like Nebula that the content creators themselves have set up. You are free to just not use it if you don’t like it.
If you care so much about the costs of hosting, I hope you donate to the Lemmy.
I am new to Lemmy but I absolutely will just as I donate to wikipedia. If it is giving me value, then I am happy to support it financially up to the point where I think the finances are equal to the value I am receiving in return.
How the world works is that people get what they can get away with, and we who are on the bottom ought to keep that in mind instead of idealizing a model of fairness that only helps those who are already powerful get away with more.
Instead, if you do care about fairness, think more about those who need it.
Nebula is a fair suggestion though, because at least that directly helps the creators without constraining them to whatever advertisers want.
How the world works is that people get what they can get away with, and we who are on the bottom ought to keep that in mind instead of idealizing a model of fairness that only helps those who are already powerful get away with more.
It works that way because ultimately that’s what drives competition and innovation. I am open to a more fair alternative however I am aware of none that has actually been successful.
Instead, if you do care about fairness, think more about those who need it.
I said things have a cost and I think based on the market alternatives, what YT is charging is still fair. You may disagree and that is your right to. I did not imply however that the world itself is fair or even needs to be fair. It’s not and never has been and whether is should be is a much bigger philosophical debate outside of just YT pricing.
We are in Lemmy through rising enshittification of the internet and you still believe that Big Tech sucking up all data and charging more for worse services everyday is what drives innovation? That everyone gotta bend over and give up what they say they are owed? C’mon…
Do you even use the internet without ad blockers?
If you think that’s the right and proper way to go about it, feel free. I’ll still handle things my way.
We are in Lemmy through rising enshittification of the internet and you still believe that Big Tech sucking up all data and charging more for worse services everyday is what drives innovation? That everyone gotta bend over and give up what they say they are owed? C’mon…
Big tech getting greedy is how we got reddit in the first place. And reddit getting too greedy is what is leading to lemmy. So ya it is driving innovation. People either think it’s worth it or driven to develop an better or suitable alternative.
I am saying you pay for something as long as you think it’s worth it and as long as you think it’s working and improving and then support an alternative when you don’t. Things getting too expensive for their value has been a cornerstone to driving new innovation throughout history.
Would just like to interject; while I agree with what you’re saying, and yes, lots of people think an amazing service should be free, which is wrong… But YouTube/Google is now 100% beholden to their shareholders, and this, plus the last couple of price rises, is gouging to make some millionaires richer and is fucking despicable
That’s for consumers to decide. If people still pay for it and think it’s worth their money, then they aren’t really gouging, they were just under priced. If people don’t and start cancelling their subscriptions, they have over priced it and now need to bring the price back down. For me personally, Netflix is the one teetering on that point, YT isn’t there yet.
Dude they sell our data to advertisers and big data for profit. The least they can do is provide some services for us for the amount of analytics they collect from us on a daily basis.
As someone who’s actually worked in this industry, your data isn’t enough to pay for video hosting services to the scale youtube provides. Youtube makes up a significant chunk of all network traffic in the world. It costs money.
No i am not. But I am happy to support actual content creators and the platform that they host on and gets them the most views because I spend more time on YT than I do on any other streaming platform.
Dude, they ARE the advertiser. That’s Google’s main business. They have no incentive to export ANY of your account data to 3rd parties. Business tell them what groups of people to advertise to, and their systems handle the rest. They’re open about how it all works.
I get that, but the vast majority of content creators seem to make their money with sponsorships or their own ads, so most of what google is doing is content distribution, not creation. Which makes the amount of money they want for that seem ridiculous when pretty much every other streaming service that produces high profile and expensive shows themselves is way cheaper.
This feels like your supermarket requiring entrance fees in addition to you having to pay for stuff you actually buy.
Youtube spends more on revenue sharing than some big streaming services do on content creation. Content creators who also have sponsored segments are essentially double dipping but that’s on the content creator.
Also I don’t know how much it is in the US, but in Canada, YT is one of the cheapest streaming services if not the cheapest, and I get way more value out of youtube than I do from Netflix, Crave, Prime, or Disney+.
I don’t know about the revenue sharing. But in Germany, youtube premium is 12€, Amazon prime and Disney is 9€, Paramount is 8€ and Apple tv is 7€. Only Netflix is the same price for hd or more expensive with 18€ for 4k.
I can afford $13/month on my income and watch YT on a daily basis, much more than any other streaming service by a wide margain. Does that somehow make me an astroturfing troll?
I’m not going to defend the price increase, but a lot of comments in here are just aimless hatred of the idea of paying anything, ever.
Pound for pound, YouTube Premium has been a decent deal at $10. Has been. This is pushing it, but there’s a lot of comments that seem absolutely indignant at the idea of paying YouTube period (and by extension the content creators).
There’s got to be some room for nuance here. The internet is plagued by advertising and paywalls, yes, but it can also not exist without them, so we find some middle ground.
I’ve been using the internet for over 24 years. I can tell you that the internet can survive without ads or paywalls. Ads and paywalls are a product of greed. Ads are way more efficient these days but many used to take up so much memory. I remember when AdBlock or whatever it was called came out. It made browsing the internet smoother.
The only way the internet can survive without ads or paywalls is for the person/business hosting the content to pay for everything out of pocket.
A platform like YouTube could never exist without some form of revenue. I understand that there are small platforms out there, such as PeerTube, but they will never be comparable to the scale of YouTube without some form of revenue. Sure, people could grow PeerTube by spinning up their own instances, but then they need to provide their own hardware and storage. At which point you’re spending just as much, or likely more, than you would on a subscription service.
I think its possible it will just be slow and requires people to sacrifice a bit just like we are trying to do with lemmy. maybe find a different route for ads like how Brave the browser does it where it give the user the choice to see ads and give them and the content creator a cut if they agree to it, not that I trust that browser but its an interesting concept
I like how you can insult people by calling them a shill because they support youtube premium, but if I insult you, mods delete me comment. Nice double standards. You are a child who thinks they are entitled.
You can say what you want to or about me, I honestly don’t care. I didn’t even see what you said or report it. Have fun emptying your wallet for your corpo overlords.
I think what you are seeing here so far is the organic result of those dumb enough to pay this kind of money for youtube being personally offended and defending their bad decisions.
We will get there but I’m not sure that this platform is large enough to be a major target for corpo bots just yet. Just dummies.
I don’t understand what shilling will earn for these people. The corps don’t care about you. They never will and never have. Do these shills think there’s some comfy bonus to be gained if they wave their flag around in support of greedy practices?
Righ, just like how three letter agencies definitely don’t have zero-day exploits into your devices (until they remeber about that one they definitely did put in)
It’s since been backtracked as cited from another article. I was unaware as I don’t use Apple products and only heard about the plans when they were originally announced. I will update my original comment to reflect the feature being backtracked
Australia’s Basic Online Safety Expectations made it required by law:
“If the service uses encryption, the provider of the service will take reasonable steps to develop and implement processes to detect and address material or activity on the service that is or may be unlawful or harmful”
Not to be dramatic but same. For me it was Now, Inbox, then Play Music; the last being the final straw. The replacements for those services being notably worse showed they don’t give two shits about the end user experience. And don’t get me started on the messaging debacle.
Yes, since Play Music went down I switched to Spotify. Not really happy either but the best alternative for the moment IMO. Also slowly migrating my email to proton.
Play Music was brilliant. Now we have that POS named YouTube Music that is impossible to manage your songs, because that turd mixes songs with regular YouTube videos and playlists that have nothing to do with music.
I have Tidal now, way better than anything else. Screw.you, Google.
Play Music pulled me away from my alternative sources of music. I used to keep a gigantic library of acquired music. I’m going back to old means now that YouTube music seems to be going down weird routes and adding functions that absolutely do not benefit me. Samples and comments? No thanks.
Only thing keeping me subscribed is YouTube premium. I watch a lot of YouTube content.
Now, Inbox, Reader and Play Music. Not that it was available in my country, but I think Google fibre was around the same time. I guess you could throw Google Chrome pulling internet standards forward rather than regressing them, into that box too.
Google was really on to a run of genuine winners at that point, weren’t they? It’s kinda a shame to see that all of the replacements really still are several steps behind what we had.
I know now that this trajectory almost seems inevitable for any big tech company now, but imagine where we would be now if Google had kept making genuinely good products and improvements.
I have a very similar story. I was the most Google centric person I know in 2014 and 2015. I grew disillusioned after they killed Inbox. I realized that tech doesn’t always get better with time. Sometimes the money motive leads to tech actively getting worse for users
There’s no money behind it, partially because there’s no real competition pushing them to provide a better experience. Plus, anything that saves time with email actually has a perverse financial disincentive. It means less time viewing the Promotions tab in Gmail. Inbox was the last gasp of innovation for its own sake at Google.
Having worked in corporate America for some time now, I would guess it was 95% internal politics. Whoever ran the inbox team didn’t play the game right.
Inbox was great, at least for my personal use. I’m not sure how much I would’ve liked at as a work email client, Gmail would probably have been better, but inbox seemed to ‘just work’ for my personal email needs. Felt so bad going back to Gmail. And Gmail still sucks just as bad several years later.
Was Google Now even usable outside the US? I remember it was pretty useless for my use case scenario back in the days… But I used the dumbed out version on iOS though.
What was the experience with Android phones outside the US?
This is literally going to be what they did for FLoC. Basically release it as topics.
Google absolutely cannot stop tracking everyone at this point. I'm pretty sure they've put the entire house on the bet to track people more and do everything to ensure that Google Chrome tracks every aspect of your web browsing experience.
So while WEI is dead, I think Google's boat is so far out to sea now that it's either try this again a bit more gently or watch the ship sink. Everyone said FLoC was dead and they absolutely put it into the web browser with Topics. Nothing convinces me this is any different, they are absolutely going to, and I dare say have an existential need to, put this shit in everyone's browser.
Obviously this is more of a strategic retreat and nothing else. It’s also a very common tactic to push for something crass, pull back, wait a bit and repeat. Most commonly resistance gets weaker each time, because people are people.
Now if anyone thinks they made money with a retreat and won’t try again, because it’s obviously much more lucrative, which stone exactly are you living under?
You are 100% correct. Nothing is won till you make it impossible for Google to push forward or destroy their motivation for trying again later.
Its a common practice to do exactly that. Just demand something very absurd and let people rage about it, then “step back” to “please the masses” while in reality your “step back” idea is the thing you actually wanted to do from the beginning on. But now people are happy about it.
Seriously. Fewer and fewer people are using Google as a search engine anyways. I know it’s miniscule, but people are aware of Duck Duck go, and aware of Google’s spy apparatus, hence why in any survey or poll they conduct they ask the user’s opinion on how well they think Google is doing with their private data. I always score them the lowest possible.
What we should be concerned with is how many websites and third party logins use Google.
Ya know, I’ve seen a lot of posts regarding Elon Musk spam in this community, and calls to “ban” them, yet every week we get gloom and doom posts like this when some new subset of the world starts seeing this shit. I’d really like to see a pinned message about the fix, which is…
Install Firefox or a derivative, and add the uBlock Origin extension.
If you visit YouTube and see the pop-up, the page isn’t loading the video content, or it just seems to be acting strange, do the following:
Click on the uBlock Origin brown shield in your extensions.
Click the three little gears icon to enter the settings.
Make sure you’re in the Filter lists section from the top and click the Purge all caches button below it.
Click the Update now button.
Wait until the filter update completes.
Refresh the tab(s) that YouTube is in.
Press play.
I literally have no other installed add-ons for ad blocking, anymore. Only uBlock Origin. Any time I see the message or YouTube starts acting up, I just repeat those 7 steps above for any YouTube tab that was already open, and viola, the video plays. It has simplified so many issues for me and reduced the number of adblock extensions I need to run.
I definitely plan on donating this holiday season to their team, probably the biggest share of the pie between the FOSS apps I enjoy and appreciate. Should uBlock Origin ever fail, I’ll just stop going to YouTube.
Weird. One way or another, they’re gonna get my money!! How dare they make a great tool for free, and accept nothing for their time and contributions!! The nerve of some devs, I tell ya! /s
The element picker and disable JS button are also a life saver. Gets around so many shitty things about the modern web. The one thing I agree with from Brave (Firefox all the way though) is including uBlock by default (I just wish they gave credit).
It’s not only with Black Friday. The Android tablets market is flooded with absolute expensive stinkers for devices. You will notice this in any physical electronic store.
Not to mention fakes. I bought and Android 12 tablet on Amazon as new not long ago, the version string said 12, but the actual API level was 24 (Android 7) and the UI wasn’t android 12.
If you don’t think that’s a big deal on a cheap tablet then you’re not considering what else could have been done to it that you can’t see. They’re already lying after all.
My sister bought a low-end Samsung tablet (some years ago admittedly), and it NEVER received a software update in the 3 years she owned it. Not a major update, not a security patch, nothing.
I'd hope they've gotten better about that, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Probably that was before Samsung offered 5 years of updates. And if the tablet was a bit outdated, it would have easily been outside of the software EOL date.
That’s why you should always go for phones/tablets that have been released this year and not take an outdated one. Not for the specs, but for the software support duration.
Over here there is a food discounter that also has a tiny electronics corner, where they have “great” deals. You can often get phones and tablets for less than half of the MSRP. The issue is, that all of them are either out of software support or close to it. A while ago they sold a cheap iPhone that had one month of software support left. And on iPhone, most apps only run on the currently newest iOS version. So a month after buying that iPhone, the user would lose access to most of their apps.
That’s honestly amazing for mobile software development. A stack of devices that can make great testing devices or compact servers if cheap enough. Or Clash of Clans/Pokemon GO alt accounts.
9to5google.com
Top