These tech companies have underestimated their utility. They are mostly providing mindless time wasters. If you try to charge money or create inconvenience, people will look for something else to do.
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere. The VC grow-at-all-costs business model is fundamentally flawed. It doesn’t scale when profitability becomes a priority.
Youtube produces almost none of their own content, instead they rely on other humans to create that content.
Use your ad blocker if you want, but stop treating youtubers as google employees (they’re not, they often have a much more frustrating relationship than you do) and start supporting them through other means.
To you, those people are just helping you waste your time. if that’s your real argument here, stop wasting your fucking time and do something else more worth your precious time, or start supporting content producers directly through non-youtube methods. Or just stop fucking watching.
Those people aren’t on youtube because they’re buying into corporate google dick-wrangling, they want to produce videos and have them get watched, and youtube is a place that hosts their videos for free AND gives them ad revenue share for hosting youtube ads.
You aren’t some hero for adblocking youtube but still watching it. google won’t notice your small dip in their revenue, but the youtuber who made it will.
Wanna support the people who entertain you (or, i guess, “waste your time”, if that’s what you consider entertainment to be — if all you want is to waste your time, don’t ads do the same thing for you?). Pay them directly for their content. Want to take a fake stand that supports nobody but yourself and your own inconveniences, install an ad blocker and boast on the internet about how you’re totally fucking over google and the people who create youtube content by doing so. But don’t treat yourself like some hero for doing so.
I was defending the people who produce content on youtube, and who do not enjoy the benefits of google’s wealth and market position, and are just trying to create their content.
adblock youtube if you want, but unless you’re also supporting the creators of your content outside of google, i have never paid google a dime either. don’t pretend this is about a big corporation. you just think you deserve to be entertained for free, regardless of who put in the effort to create it.
If you’re REALLY anti-google/youtube, STOP USING THEM. If you watch them with adblock, google can still spin your usage statistics into something that will appeal to investors, but youtube creators will be wondering why their numbers dwindle, because they don’t have investors to (lie to / spin numbers at). You’re still helping youtube, even with an adblocker.
On the other hand, if you support content creators outside of youtube? you are supporting them directly, without youtube’s involvement and without google even getting a cut. I do this for several youtubers, and support even more through merch and etc.
But sure keep telling me i’m defending the landlords because i’m getting mad at you for mistreating the staff and pretending you’re sticking it to the landlords.
To your point about watching YouTube with adblockers still helping Google due to viewership numbers. That’s exactly why after I stopped supporting blizzard (at first due to the blutzchung controversy, then everything else that happened) I immediately stopped playing hearthstone, yes, I was playing it free, I never spent any money on it, but I didn’t want to even indirectly help by giving them usage statistics, or by giving paying people even a little bit of a quicker matchmaking.
If content creators provide 90% or even 60% of value to YouTube, why is Google a trillion dollar company while major content creators are fighting for scraps that fall from their table? Why are content creators who aren’t in the top tier compensated so little for what they bring to the table?
YouTube is nothing without content. Unionize. Stand together and get paid what you’re worth.
where do i find the 10-40% percent of youtube-produced content on youtube you’re talking about?
Google is a trillion dollar company because they do far more than youtube, and make the majority of their money from taking a percentage of ad revenue. This does include youtube, and youtube is only profitable to google because they can sell ads on top of it, because video hosting on the internet is fucking expensive.
i pay google nothing, just like you. i do, however, support my favorite youtubers outside of google revenue streams with my own money, either through direct support or merchandise.
Both installing an adblocker and not even going to youtube will cost google money. I don’t care which you do. But if you do watch specific youtubers regularly, support them directly, even if you do use an ad blocker.
You’re not a hero for adblocking google. You’re a hero if you support content creators outside of google, whether or not you watch them on youtube using an adblocker.
The modern Internet community has an interestingly illogical take on free services. Either use them or pay for an alternative. But the average user has grown up on free services and will happily insist on having their cake and eating it too
Oh please. Youtubers make their money from direct sponsors they themselves advertise in their videos, from viewer sponsor platforms like patreon and from advertising their own product or services such as merchandise etc.
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere.
👍
My attention is all the currency YouTube will ever get from me - and it should be enough. If I post videos to YouTube (for nothing in return) and I talk to people about videos I saw on YouTube or link them to videos - then I am a net gain for Google and they should treat me as such. If anything, they should be working (nicely) to try to get me to want to pay (or view ads) and just be thankful I’m there if I don’t pay (or view ads). Instead they’ve chosen to work at ensuring everyone is so goddamn pissed off at their bullshit that they’d rather make it their full-time job to never give them another dime. Good job, Google! Smart!
Edit: Oh look, half a dozen lectures about how Google has to make money somehow. Hi there YouTube shills, I thought I would see you here.
Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you. Attention is all the currency they’ll ever get from you, that’s totally cool, absolutely. I’m totally that way too. But they’ve got to make money somehow, so if you’re not the paying customer, someone else has to be.
I’m not saying it has to be ad sales either, but if we want a world in which we can use services for free without ads, we need to come up with an alternative way for them to make money. It has to come from somewhere, and by the bucketload.
If every user thinks like you, then it doesn’t matter how many people you talk to or share links with, you’re not a net gain on their service, you bring nothing to it.
Why should they, or anybody, be thankful that you honour them with your presence, if you contribute nothing of value? What makes you so entitled to use somebody’s product for free with no strings attached?
Ads suck, I’m eager for us to move past them once we figure out an alternative that keeps products in business and us receiving things for free. But we can’t deny the reality we live in right now either. Even huge companies like Google (who yes, do suck) have to make money to survive.
I think generally you will find that people of this opinion hold that it is unreasonable that we have privatized basically all of the internet infrastructure. These people tend to be in favor of expecting the consumer spends more on hardware for hosting, and enthusiasts, hobbyists, non-profits, and occasionally companies develop the software necessary to make the internet function, rather than companies just paying for tons and tons of warehouses of servers, and then just forcing the software to all become fucked up walled gardens while the actual utilities everyone rests upon is left to rot.
Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you.
I understand the message about needing to fund services to exist, but that stance I feel doesn’t always really work too well. Since if other users were like them then it’d also mean there might be a lot of stuff that doesn’t exist anymore which could be a pro like microtransactions ceasing to exist and move to subscription model failing.
And for YouTube might be completely different where depending on their taste maybe click baits turned people away if the person hated them, so those don’t exist. And long winded videos attempting to take advantage of the algorithm failed if they were someone who didn’t like videos that wasted their time, and everyone is like them.
Reddit might still support third party apps if everyone was like them, and lemmy bigger. That’s why if everyone was like them argument is just a weird one, since it turns minority actions into a majority and changes way too many things to focus on one singular thing.
But they have been, and for years. All the years I’ve run a smartphone Google has harvested and profited from my data. From Gmail to Chrome (before I switched) to Maps, etc - they have profited from people’s data at scale. So the argument that they need to make money somehow falls flat for me.
Also, if they charged like $2 a year to block ads, plenty of people would buy it. But like most things lately, the enshitification of our user experience continues. It’s not enough for companies like Google to “make money” - it’s never enough and their greed has no boundaries.
That’s why you see people like us pushing back - enough is enough.
Google doesn’t make money directly from harvesting your data, they make money from harvesting your data then showing you ads based on that data. So if you’re running an ad blocker then they aren’t making money from you (unless you pay them for stuff like subscriptions and apps). As ad blocking becomes more common they are definitely going to get more draconian to try to claw back that money (growth is infinite, profits must go up /s).
Also BTW Google probably makes more like $50 per user per year on average (looking at revenue and internet population) so they would never offer a $2/year ad block unless forced to by regulation.
To answer your questions - users such as this bring something more valuable than ad money. They bring data. Google harvests data and metrics on users in a million ways, packages this up, and sells it for considerably more than they make on ads. In free services such as this, YOU are the product.
Ads suck, nobody wants to watch them, and they simply represent google maximizing shareholder value at every opportunity, as they are legally bound to do under American capitalism. YouTube ads are not a critical revenue stream that will make or break them.
Copy-pasting this from a comment I made a few days ago. I’m so tired of this misconception. Google’s business model literally disincentivizes selling personal data. The business model is built on selling targeted advertisements. Google wants to keep this data to itself because it gives them a competitive advantage in the ad space.
Selling your data would give competitors power in the marketplace. So yes, Google collects data and uses it, but no, Google does not sell your data. It sells targeting BASED on your data.
Very different, regardless of if it is any better.
Not all interested buyers are in the ad business, and governments can make payments in a way that is difficult to audit from a third party perspective, definitely not in any currency or a change in the balance sheet. I wish things where different but seems to me that paying won’t protect me from them harvesting every bit they can.
YouTube creates no content and it’s reliant on people volunteering their time and talent to them. Fuck the idea that we need to pay google to access content they only host and don’t pay fairly for.
I will quite happily pay a reasonable price for the privilege of avoiding ads.
I understand why people block ads, even though they are a a free tier, even if I don’t agree with it.
The fact that the cost of YouTube Premium almost doubled overnight is making me rethink my ethics, when my current subscription is up for renewal, I will be reassessing whether to cease watching YouTube, watch YouTube with ads or determine another way of supporting content creators.
I pay for Premium now since it includes music streaming which is convenient to use. If they raise the price too much, I’ll absolutely just go back to mp3s and deal with the ads on YouTube and just watch less content on there. $15 is about my cap before I do that.
The post can, yeah. The predictability with which all posts or comments containing the word "Google" will have several responses underneath evangelizing Firefox almost certainly will not, after it exceeds a point it very clearly routinely exceeds.
Not because you guys are wrong, (you're not), but because you're annoying, which is almost as bad. There is something in psychology called reactance theory, and it's the reason why, when you're just about to do the dishes and then someone else tells you to do them, it's suddenly the last thing on earth you want to do.
It is a choice so small it isn't worth arguing over, but it's no longer your choice born out of your own free will, and now you feel cheated and resentful and you are not doing it, both out of spite and more truthfully to regain your sense of choice.
This is the same reason everyone hates vegans so much. They're not wrong. They're annoying. Firefox has vegan PR.
I held off listening to Hamilton for three years for no other reason than nobody else I met would shut the goddamn fuck up about Hamilton. Same with the TV version of Good Omens, whatever stupid cartoon jester thing has been in a third of the memes lately, and a hundred other things.
I am very likely to switch over to Firefox myself in the ever-nearing future. That ice is breaking. But it will not be because a bunch of strangers whined at me over my own choices for over a decade. It will be because the cons of whatever Google, Windows, etc. have done finally outweigh the pros of not having to exert effort to maintain my experience.
It bears consideration that in the meantime, Firefox users have a tendency not to even read the several duplicate comments before they start jacking off into them, not uncommonly in a way that's loudly judgemental towards their own target audience.
The resultant spam cements a mental association between Firefox, the brand and the feeling of being annoyed and insulted. Don't be those vegans. If I had to think, be like the art community treats Adobe. Fuck Adobe, but I'm not just gonna overload someone with aggressive pompousity who's only using the industry default.
I think the main issue is the people here suggesting and evangelising Firefox not really listening to those who aren’t, which frustrates the other person. I think I fell into this with the fediverse, in the early days of Elon fucking up Twitter. There are perfectly valid reasons to not use Firefox right now. Maybe one browser or other works better for them, or has that one killer feature they can’t live without. Firefox has that for some of us, too. Or Firefox has some weird quirk or bug that other browsers don’t.
I personally use Firefox and Vivaldi. Vivaldi has tab tiling which is great for when I’m in the zone adding music to MusicBrainz or RYM, and it’s not too clunky either. Tile Tabs WE doesn’t cut it for me. For casual browsing, vertical tabs is nice and I use Firefox + Sidebery for that, which is better than Vivaldi’s vertical tab implementation.
I think the main issue is the people here suggesting and evangelising Firefox not really listening to those who aren’t
That’s exactly it. A few months ago I saw a conversation on Lemmy where someone was listing the features they were missing in Firefox, and someone literally replied “There is no way you need any of this shit”.
And even when they say tab hibernation does exist, they’re calling OP a dumbass. If I did that to my friends who want to try Linux, they’d be back on Windows in a heartbeat.
I’ve also been shouted at here for telling a user asking about Vivaldi that the culture here does not like Chromium-based browsers like it and they likely won’t get their answer here. It’s like they wanted me to shut up and not criticise their behaviour.
Sure, they just need to fix their annoying bugs on Android.
Everytime I leave a tab open and switch to another app, it’s a 50/50 whether I return to a black screen and am forced to restart it or it just works fine.
I thought it was a problem with my phone since I’m using a custom ROM and it did not happen before. When I open Firefox and it has been in the background for a while, it shows a black screen where the web content should be and often crashes if you try to open another tab or do something else. Also happens if I open a link from another app. The only solution is to close Firefox and swipe it off the recent apps and reopen it. Is this the same problem you have?
I have never had an issue either. We’re all just tiny anecdotes in a sea of users. I mean, people that don’t have issues won’t generally post about it on forums, so of course people will generally only see others posting about similar issues unless they are some magical unique unicorn.
Yup that’s been a long running issue with Firefox on android. Thought it was just me at first then saw forums where tons of people have the issue and the only suggestion is to reinstall it
I love Firefox, but we need more variety in browsers and Chromium is just making it worse! There has to be a way to make building browsers simpler without everyone ending up relying on the product that was designed to ruin the free internet.
Yeah, the biggest problem with Firefox is that its engine is so hard to embed. Chrome has endless clones because it’s just so damn easy to embed. And Firefox just has some weak forks like Librewolf.
I’d really rather see Mozilla focus on this rather than all their other stupid endeavors…
Wish this got upvoted more tbh. The devs of Pulse Browser are trying to make an environment where making a Firefox fork would be easier, but it’s not like Chromium where the engine could be easily embedded. I’ve also heard Second Life had to move to Chromium for their embedded browser after using Gecko and having problems with it.
What we actually need is more variety in rendering engines. There were never that many, and two or three (Presto, Trident, and Spartan if you count it) have been killed off within the past ten years. All that’s left are two lineages: Google’s Blink and its barely-threre parent WebKit (in Apple’s Safari), and Mozilla’s Gecko and its barely-there child Goanna (in Pale Moon).
Unfortunately, the rendering engine is probably the largest single chunk of code in a browser, and writing a new one (or even forking an existing one) is non-trivial.
Possibly, though for now, they’ve worked with the ad blocker devs and kept everything working WITH v3 in FireFox. Google will not do it in Chrome because defeating the ad blockees is the point.
Apple still links services like device bricking to the Find My network. If your iphone is stolen, and you don’t want someone to reset it to use or sell, you HAVE to submit your location data to be a part of the tracker network. Disabling that, Apple sends users a scary nag email that their device is no longer protected.
I love how you took the time to write the years and title of the event… 😁😆😊🤍
Wish there was a website or a wiki that document all this, these companies are basically using philosophical fallacies as a marketing strategy at this point
100%. Most business is just advanced sophistry at this point. Marketing and advertising serves a useful purpose for new products, when the market isn't aware that it exists.
But by quantity and cost, most advertising is just social manipulation and is effectively an extra drain on the economy.
Not exactly true. If you enable “Advanced Data Protection” not even apple can look at your data (with the exception of data which has to be interoperable like calendars and mail)
I’m sure the Google is also encrypting the data with the exception of the interoperable data. So there’s no difference. Why point fingers when Apple do the same?
Apple also know your browsing history. They also know your app usage. They also store your contacts, calendar, photos - just like Google. I don’t see the difference.
I searched “YouTube adblocker” on both google and DDG. The first mention of ublock origin was in the 1st page of Google (just at the bottom, under “recommended adblockers for Firefox”, the 2nd option). There was no mention of it on DDG, even though I clicked “more results” once (so searched the equivalent of 2 pages). The problem with Google search is not google, it’s SEO, that affects all search engines.
Thing is, searching with DDG takes time to get used to, as it doesn’t work the same way as Google. Google uses a lot of convenient algorithms that are also a double edged sword.
if you click ublock, select the settings cog, then in the tab that opens select ‘my filters’, you can enter the following to do the same thing: www.youtube.com##.ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scope
Personally I avoid installing too many extentions as they are quite literally apps that auto open whenever you just want to browse the web (regardless of if you’re going to youtube, you’re computer runs a youtube specific adblock)
Yeah youtubes attempt at being tiktok is just awful and they don’t even have options to not have shorts show up in the feed. On top of shorts just being inferior versions of regular videos without functional controls
This is what gets me. Wanna show me shorts? Ok. But why the fuck am I not allowed to rewind a couple of seconds if I want to? It’s an artificial, completely useless limitation that had no place in 2023.
I switched to FreeTube and now all the shorts are on a separate page I can switch over to if I feel like watching them. It’s also got SponsorBlock built in. Now I can enjoy youtube with a clean, faster interface and google isn’t tracking a damn thing. All because google got greedy and made their user experience shit.
Google didn’t get greedy, it’s doing what it’s been doing for years. Before resorting to plunging us into Matrix-like pods, they’re trying to squeeze some more data out of users.
I only wish PiP worked the way it does in Firefox, not in Edge/Chromium. I like to have my browser next to full height video on my ultrawide, but PiP will not go beyond 1080 pixels tall.
First thing I did when the shorts spam apocalypse started, was create custom ublock filters to strip them out of youtube as much as I could. Too bad I didn’t back them up before my system decided to go poof.
Thanks for the hint! I mostly just ignored the shorts, but I just added that filter list to uBlock in firefox on android and it is much more pleasant when they’re not there in the first place.
It’ll show me a couple of videos, then shorts, then some kind of recommendation list. If I actually want to do a complete search for the thing, and only the thing, I’m looking for, I have to go to advanced options and specify I’m looking for videos. JUST videos.
I don’t even care about the shorts showing up in search results. What really irks me is that you get like 3 videos related to search results, then some random unrelated shit, 3 relevant videos, more unrelated garbage, and then the rest of the actually relevant videos. I am specifically searching for something, just show me the damn thing.
Yes. The way the default search now works is that, when you search you get:
Three or four videos that are actually from your search.
Some recommended playlists.
The shorts tray that vaguely has some content related to your search.
Maybe two or three more videos from the actual search.
“People also watch” recommendations.
“Shorts for you” recommendations.
If you want to get just your search results, cutting away shorts, playlists, and the recommendations that take up the majority of the search page, you’ll have to open up the filters and click on “videos” on the cl tent type list. Then you actually get to see the search results.
the shorts tend to be so bad and pointless. occasionally there is someone who makes an effort, but the number of low effort and garbage ones made me stop looking at shorts ever.
Some modern phones still have removable batteries, like my Motorola e5 play, its quite useful if the phone locks up bad, I can pop the battery out to restart it.
Just kidding, I use Samsung myself. It’s crazy how easy it is to brainwash Americans into worshiping their corporate gods. Couple of good ads and they will die for their brand or choice.
People get so hostile over such things. I have an iPhone for business. I have a Pixel for my personal use. They’re alright. It depends on what you need. Still a smartphone enthusiast.
Ugh, sounds like some of my coworkers and MacBooks. Then you discover that MacBooks are seriously crippled compared to the Linux machine you were using and you get told one of:
“What do you mean by $feature? I’ve never heard of that.”
"Why would you want to do that?"
Run a badly performing Linux VM in a janky hypervisor to do that
Pay $10 for this little 3rd party app to fix the problem
Throw in some serious RSI pain from that tire fire of a keyboard and yeah, I have no idea why I switched.
Edit: Work machine. No way I’d pay for Apple with my own money.
I’m stuck working on a MacBook too and it’s horrendous. I plug it into a monitor and use a good keyboard, but it’ll never be useful as a portable computer with that garbage keyboard
Using more than one monitor was the first “Why would you want to do that?” moment. Window management on Macs is awful but adding screens makes it way worse. Coming from i3 and sway, with rich hotkeys and fast, straightforward window manipulation, it felt like someone forgot to finish writing the OS. It seems most people use only the laptop screen or have a single external monitor as an auxiliary? They just genuinely didn’t know why or how you use multiple monitors.
Tiling in macOS can be polyfilled with apps but there are tons of edge cases where it fails and the app’s hotkeys don’t flow well from the a handful of native keys, so it feels disjoint and bodged together. Also, if you “bump” a window, it’ll stay dislodged because it’s a poor mimicry of the real thing.
What are these edge cases you are talking about? I been using Rectangle for many years and have no issues with multi-monitor setup. My company with over 2000+ devs use this app without any issues.
Amethyst. Focusing on empty workspaces makes everything stop working. Certain window types (dialog popups, arguably that app shouldn’t be using popups) are “invisible” to it. System preferences is untouchable (fair) and shows up under all other active windows.
It’s rough in the US. Most iPhone users will insist that iMessage is better and refuse to use anything else, and then whine when an android user is in a group chat and none of the features work.
I have several group chats with both android & iPhone users. No one complains. The only place I hear about people complaining is the Internet, never anyone in the wild.
The statement about a massive majority of iPhones in the Nordics is factually incorrect.
iPhone has a slight lead at one of the biggest vendors Komplett, but that is without counting the remaining 10 % which is almost exclusively Android units.
For clarity: Komplett operates in all the Nordic countries, but I would assume these numbers are for Norway, the richest of the bunch.
It’s the same story at work where I am the responsible party for company phones: Pretty evenly distributed where some of the iPhones are chosen due to MLM solutions for those wishing certain solutions.
I can only speak for my own age group in my personal life, but I would say Android has a quite big lead with young adults.
Kids/teens might be a completely different story though.
Nobody can even state that it’s actually happening “for competitive browsers” as even Chrome users are reporting an unexplained lag/slowdown. At this point, it’s just wild speculation and bandwagoning.
There’s been multiple posts pointing to some possibly “wait for ads to finish loading” type code. It’s quite possible that it’s just bugged in Firefox etc since browsers are horrendously inconsistent etc.
But that doesn’t make a cool headline so instead the “it’s Google being evil” story is the popular one.
I’ve read a lot on this and never saw any conclusive claim here.
There were claims many years ago by Mozilla about this, and it had to do with slow APIs in Mozilla that YouTube was using…
There’s also been many known performance issues in a lot of the APIs/libraries Google/YouTube use on Mozilla for many years. And Mozilla just hasn’t been able to keep up.
I don’t see anything about this in recent history, because everything is just floods of people complaining about this round, with still no conclusive evidence that this is happening intentionally. YouTube is currently on a ad-block-blocker crusade and their code keeps changing and there’s nothing to conclusively indicate that this is malice and not just a bug in the way Mozilla performs.
So as much as everyone seems happy to burn the witch because of poor performance, I’m not ready to jump to that conclusion until there’s actually evidence of this being intentional. Especially when this smells a lot like a long standing different problem. “Someone said they are” is not going to convince me. Especially if you can’t even point to that someone saying that thing.
You absolutely can tell what's happening by reading the source code. They are using a listener and a delay for when ontimeupdate promise is not met, which timeouts the entire connection for 5 full seconds.
They don’t need to put incriminating “if Firefox” statements in their code – the initial page request would have included the user agent and it would be trivial to serve different JavaScript based on what it said.
The video in the linked article does just that. The page takes 5 seconds to load the video, the user changes the UA, they refresh the page and suddenly the video loads instantly. I would have liked to see them change the UA back to Firefox to prove it’s not some weird caching issue though
It’s not wild speculation as there is compelling, if incomplete, evidence. And to describe everyone’s reaction as “bandwagoning” is ridiculous. Firefox and Mullvad are my daily drivers. This directly impacts me. The fediverse is going to have a disproportionate number of non-chrome users.
I’ve duplicated it on 4 machines across 3 OS’s (windows 11, macOS, steamOS). Glad you got lucky. I’m sure you’re also familiar with A/B testing but if not I’m happy to explain it.
It is absolutely possible there is a reasonable explanation but for you to say 1) nothing is happening and 2) it’s “bandwagoning” is, again, ridiculous. Especially if your evidence is “well mine is fine,” which is not acceptable troubleshooting procedure.
Not all regions are served with the same scripts. That’s why the ad-block pop-up was shown for some users but not for others or at a later time for others. This also affected the update cycle of those anti-adblock scripts.
The reason for that is quite simple. New stuff is rolled out to only some users at first as some sort of beta testing procedure. If many people complain about functionality issues and all of those have the new version of the script, Google knows there is something wrong with it.
“It happens all the time” and “they always do *” is also comically unhelpful and useless. I’m getting a pot/kettle vibe from those that seem to take offense at my comment.
I mean you’re saying you want proof, don’t read the article, then say you don’t care because it works for you. Do you not understand why that’s a little perplexing? Anyway, I’ve said my piece. I don’t imagine it will be a very productive discussion. Have a good week.
Don’t worry, there isn’t proof in the article either. There’s a snippet of code out of context, and a video that, while it shows a loading delay, doesn’t show the code being executed.
is the developer the most used browser (chrome) and its open source skeleton (chromium) on which most of all of the other browsers are based on (edge, brave etc)
has the most used video platform online, with no close second (unless you count porn, but i’d still argue its not close)
has the biggest share of devices relying on its platform worldwide (android)
has the most used search engine worldwide.
Alphabet has to be split up. Alphabet alone is deciding what shape internet will take in the future.
is the developer the most used browser (chrome) and its open source skeleton (chromium) on which most of all of the other browsers are based on (edge, brave etc)
Which was branched from Apple’s open Webkit base, but let’s all also forget about that.
They take the IP of others, spin it a bit and then block everyone. Burn them down.
They totally do though. You can ONLY use webkit on any iOS device. Chrome, Firefox, etc. they all are forced to use webkit on iOS. Neither Google or Apple are treating the web nicely, but at least you have a choice to use a different browser. Apple makes that effectively impossible.
Also you can’t really use Apple TV properly without an Apple device. Same with iCloud. Actually really any service they make only works properly with their full stack.
They didn’t do anything of the sort. We don’t need to endlessly recite the history of everything developed. If you want to call attention to it go right ahead but they didn’t give Apple a pass.
The inevitable fate of any useful software that’s not GPL.
When will people learn???
Edit: Ironically, KHTML was originally LGPL. So modifications to KHTML were required to be open source by the license, but Chrome itself isn’t required to be open source (at least as far as I understand it, I am not an expert here). Nevertheless, if it were stronger GPL, then it probably wouldn’t have been impossible to write features like DRM in chrome. So I would have been a bit of an idiot to say that KHTML isn’t GPL (because LGPL is a weaker version of GPL), but in effect, the outcome is the same - all because of that big fat L at the beginning.
Apple is 100% correct. It’s the entire reason Android exists.
Then again, Apple also does a fair bit of data collection. I hate that Apple has been able to market themselves as some kind of bastion of privacy. They aren’t.
Apple is 100% correct. It’s the entire reason Android exists.
Then again, Apple also does a fair bit of data collection. I hate that Apple has been able to market themselves as some kind of bastion of privacy. They aren’t.
So Apple is not 100% correct. They are 50% correct because the second half of their claim is that Apple is somehow different and not tracking its users…
I believe the reason Google acquired Android was to make sure that Apple didn’t dominate the mobile device landscape, which would be a threat to their ad business. The data collection was just a nice side-effect, from their perspective.
I think you underestimate how early Google acquired Android. In 2005, Apple wasn’t even in the mobile device market. Nokia were the dominant handset in those days.
All cell phones are tracking devices. Unless you faraday cage them. But yes, both apple and Android phones give out way more information than just that. And I definitely would not say that I would trust Apple more with data that I would Google.
Genuine question: in what ways do Apple track iOS users (that cannot be turned off)?
I’m of the viewpoint that most tracking can be rather easily be turned off, and that android plays in a totally other ballpark here. But I might very well be wrong.
They both track you fairly closely. There are no winners if you are primarily concerned about privacy. Google is simply more open about it, and provides more access to that data to you (like timeline and takeout).
Actually, the reason Android exists isn’t so one-dimensional.
The company Android was initially concerned more with Microsoft dominating phones like they did computers at the time, before being bought by Google
They created two prototype chains initially, one touch, one that was more akin to BlackBerry
iPhone came out, they ditched the BlackBerry-esque one and focused on what became now Android
Google was mostly just doing what all tech companies were doing at the time, trying to compete in a mobile arms race for dominance. The data tracking was just a bonus. Appeasing shareholders is paramount. Look at how Apple created an Alexa speaker just because they had to as another example of this type of behavior.
Also, Apple actually has a long history of tracking user behavior that predates both Android and the iPhone.
Apple apps since some time shortly after the inception of OS X would (and likely still do) phone home to configuration.apple.com to send apple metrics on usage. Earlier variations of LittleSnitch could actually block this collection behavior.
Apple has since reconfigured the network stack to guarantee that direct encrypted connections to Apple are always possible above any VPN, or other type of network filter connection. So there’s no way to prevent communication with Apple on an Apple product at all now short of keeping it off the Internet or blocking DNS to 17.* IP addresses, which would only work on a network one has control over.
I mean, I might have considered paying for YT premium if I thought it offered some value (other than disabling ads) but I won’t sure as hell pay for anything that any company is trying to blackmail me into.
One could argue that we’re paying for it without our consent, given the fact that Google doesn’t pay anything in taxes. That’s a cool four billion a year (at least) that they get from the American taxpayer for free.
But that’s the wrong way around. They don’t want you to pay, they make their money through advertising. They make far more money from advertiser’s paying to put up ads than they ever make from people paying for premium.
Same as with Facebook now bringing in an ad-free version (in the EU anyway) - they charge higher than is reasonable so that people will opt for the ad-supported free version instead.
It’s not that you are blackmailed into paying premium, it’s that you’re encouraged not to as a way of explicitly consenting to ads.
Basically, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
lmao you’re so wrong on ads being more profitable than premium, especially on a per-user basis
According to this you can expect to make around $18/1000 views. That’s with 55% going to the creator and 45% to Google. Which means that Google makes around $14.5 per 1000 views.
Coincidentally, that’s also rougly the price of YouTube Premium. Are you telling me that you watch a thousand videos per month?
I use it because YouTube music is included and it’s great while driving, it allows background play even with the screen off (I’m talking about mobile).
There’s something more, but nothing that a pro user cannot already do with third tools.
Abandoning YouTube is seriously more difficult than abandoning other “non-fediverse” general social media platforms, since it’s got so much useful content that gets straight up ruined by the company that owns the website.
I doubt PeerTube is anything better than Vimeo, at least for now, things can improve after all.
At this point, I don’t even care about the user tracking. I just don’t want to sit through unskippable ads anymore. Especially when it’s the same ad over and over again.
Well I’ve gone from being entirely indifferent to strongly disliking Google. I am actively and somewhat successfully in the process of de-googling. I encourage my friends to do the same, with some success. I think the writing is on the wall. Google seems to have no desire to maintain any sort of goodwill or positive feeling amongst the general public, whom it clearly views as a naturally occurring resource rather than a customer base. Nobody can predict the future but I don’t have a good feeling about the future of the company. Perhaps they will be able to diversify, but their recent actions show both that they deeply misunderstand their product and also that they lack good ideas about how to progress and evolve as an organisation. Fuck Google. All my homies hate Google.
The hardest part of ‘de-googling’ is the stranglehold it has on email. Between them and microsoft, I’ve only seen a few companies (small to medium size) that don’t use one of those two as the email. It’s mind-boggling. If either of them ever got testy, they could bring entire sectors down just by using the information stored in emails on.
Sponsor block is a different beast. Should we really be doing that to our content creators? No, definitely not. Is it them or the advertising company that suffers?
Edit: Actually really surprised about this. Couple weeks ago people are sticking up for YT premium prices. Now, you are against helping the creators you watch.
Agree. SponserBlock is just doing the clicking for me. I did the same thing manually for a long time as my regular youtoobers got sponsored. Good for them, but I don’t need to see it and they still got sponsored.
If you weren’t planning on paying for the product, the creator won’t take any hit from you using sponsorblock. In fact, the advertiser won’t either. Nobody will be hurt by it, because it was a massive waste of your time to start with.
Well, the blocker doesn’t stop me from seeing the ad, it stops me from wasting my time manually skipping the ad. I still don’t see how that’s going to change my mind about anything.
Also, if you were thinking of getting anything from a youtube ad: they are almost exclusively bad products. If you need something, just do a tiny bit of research instead of going with the first thing a content creator agreed to shill for.
It’s always some VPN making wild bullshit claims about what it can do for your privacy. I respect Tom Scott for refusing a VPN sponsorship because they wanted to make him lie.
He declined the first one, because they wanted him to lie.
He accepted the other, because they were fine with just facts.
A VPN doesn’t protect your privacy. It only helps on websites without working https, which is ridiculously rare these days. Yes, it also hides your IP address, but that is really really irrelevant. If you wanted to stay truly anonymous you’d not log in anywhere and use Tor. The only actual use case is circumventing geo blocking.
You can also circumvent geo blocking with a proxy, some of them are free, do not send any sensitive info on the free proxies however, not that a paid one is intrinsicaly safer, just like vpns.
My favorite aspect of sponsorblock is blocking the incredibly repetitive ubiquitous script that every single channel copies of like, subscribe, ring the notification bell.
This is actually why i don’t like it. Most of my subs do this kinda thing rarely but occasionally. Sponsorblock creates a gap in the video that is more jarring then the 1 second self promotion, wish there was an option to only block self promotions more then 4 seconds long.
I really can’t stand requests for likes, subscribes, notification bell at all. I actually hate it more than ads, and have backed out of many a video that didn’t happen to have the segment flagged at the beginning.
You can still use sponsorblock and configure it to not skipping sponsor segments if you want, and still enjoying the benefits of automatically skipping useless segments such as intro, outro, subscription reminders, self promotion, recaps, etc.
I used to let some creators through, but it seems like ad sponsors are locking down on creators to fit their message, so I’ve started blocking everything since it’s just useless mush.
You’re absolutely right. Sponsorblock directly harms the average people making content, it has nothing to do with Google.
It’s gross and reveals how much of the complaining about ads has absolutely nothing to do with privacy or malware or corporate profiteering or anything like that. These people are just nakedly selfish.
Wear those downvotes with pride. They mean you have a conscience and feel empathy.
Sponsors don't pay the creator less if you skip the sponsor segment. That's not tracked, at least not in a way that google will share with the creator or anyone else. If that changes someday, sure, you have a point. For now skipping the sponsor segment is as harmless as skipping through the commercials on TV.
Keyword here is for now. Just pushing them to be more intrusive. Yes they may incrementally become more intrusive in the future but it’s a decent trade-off for free content.
Cheers. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a response to a normal ethical take. We complain about wanting free and open source products but by the looks of it nobody is able to sit through a 20 second sponsor.
If we had everything on a free open source platform people would still skip the sponsored segment.
I feel if the sponsor blocks keep up we’ll start to see the creators or sponsors combat it in ways we really don’t like.
I watch YT about once a week and usually an hour or less. Premium isn’t worth it for that low of use. Sponsors, I skipped, always. I’ve never once purchased from a sponsor. I also skipped subscribe crap manually (I’m not logged in, I can’t).
SponsorBlock just does it for me, kinda nice. The creator gets paid by viewership so I have helped when I watch.
Lemmy isn’t seen by 98% of the public so my mentioning it hardly spreads further awareness. What did spread it was YT themselves cracking down. It made news headlines and my own mother asked I come over and install one.
YT Streisand Effected themselves. They demanded we not use them and got more people using them because of it.
Now, my mom won’t see Google ads anywhere, not just YT. What a smart move because I know there’s probably a million new UBlock users.
The content creators get paid the exact same whether I skip the sponsor segment or not. YouTube doesn't track that, or not in a way they share with anyone else at any rate. Sponsors aren't going to pay the content creators less due to skips since they literally cannot see who skips the segment.
In other words, it doesn't hurt the content creator in the slightest.
The other person’s been downvoted pretty heavily so I’ll volunteer to accept some.
Sponsorblock is a shitty tool for extremely selfish people that only hurts small-time content creators. You can’t argue about your data privacy, malware, corporate profits, or Google. Sponsorships are literally the least invasive and most direct form of financial support the average person can get for their content without you paying them directly. YouTubers do it because Google is already fucking them over. There’s absolutely no higher justification for it beyond annoyance at an extremely minor inconvenience and a sense of entitlement to the work of others.
You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom’s Auto Care if you could. Not every attempt at making money is evil.
You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom’s Auto Care if you could.
If someone came out and shoved the banner in my face and didn’t let me watch the game until several seconds had elapsed, yes, I’d tear the banner down too. Because it’s unacceptable.
But no one does that. The banner sits there in the outfield on the wall being unobtrusive and not interrupting the game or the flow of the game. That’s acceptable.
Make the ads unobtrusive and not interrupt the flow of the video and I don’t care. The problem is YT / YTers don’t do that. That’s why Sponser Block exists.
The creator isn’t losing money. They get paid to do the sponsorship. Skipping the segment has no effect on how much money they get because they already got it.
I only heard about AdNauseum because of this whole debacle. It blocks ads, hasn’t temporarily broken (as far as I have seen), and I set it to “click” 80% of all ads it sees.
I have probably screwed whatever profile they built on me, cost the ad buyers money bc clicks, hurt the conversion rate for purchases to cost google money, and even possibly made money for my favorite creators and sites (depending on how they’re paid).
Though someone lmk if I am misunderstanding something about it.
Holy crap, now that is causing massive damage to advertisers. I didn’t know this existed either. If everyone used it, the entire internet would collapse because most of it is for-profit now, unlike 30 years ago (when I made my first site in notepad).
By vanilla I mean the most basic for consumers, not debloated factory default, which is what someone who roots their phone might want. The average customer is definitely not bothering with that,
ASUS annihilated the possibility I’d ever buy any ASUS product after the way they handled the 7800X3D/AM5 VoC issue. I had never really noticed, but a pretty big swathe of my tech came from them (laptop, monitor, and motherboard among others) but no more.
It’s a big company. Lots of people in lots of departments doing lots of different things. Do you swear off Samsung memory or flash because of their practices around their TV’s or refrigerators?
I love that all the centralized social media networks are scrambling to become shitty for profits right around the time users are realizing that they don’t need centralized servers to host their user-generated content. Users can take their content wherever they want and let these platforms die.
It’s like we’re reverting to the days you would go to homestarrunner.com, illwillpress, etc to see content from people you actually wanted to see content from. Honestly looking forward to it
This 100%. Look at forums. Back in the early days, there were lots of little independent forums. Sites like Reddit took over because you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page. We gained convenience, but didn’t think too hard about what we were losing or who we were losing it to. Then along came enshittification and we are collectively realizing what we lost. Federation is of course the solution. As I see it, the only missing piece is monetization. Platforms like YouTube make it easy to monetize page views, Twitter / X is doing the same. That’s much harder in the fediverse.
Ads suck. And honestly, if we had less content creators, they’d be fine. There are a lot of absolutely degenerates out there. Let’s cull the herd a bit and let us speak individually with our wallets.
That’s a fair point. Patreon, or whatever comes next, needs to drastically reduce friction. That by the way is why Amazon is so successful, reducing purchase friction. Right now if you have something that a million people will take for free, and you start to charge just one penny for it, your audience of a million will drop to like 12. Not because people don’t want to spend a penny, but because they don’t want to fill out a form and put in their name address credit card number expiration date security code phone number email address etc. If there was a button they could click that was like ‘instant donate 5 cents’ most people would click that a lot.
The closest thing I’ve heard to that was a crypto called basic attention token, which aimed to do just that. They are making a big mistake though in that they are only integrating with Brave browser rather than making a universal plug-in. So the idea of a universal solution is still a ways off I guess. But I think to make it zero friction it will have to be crypto based in some way.
you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page
RSS feeds have provided this experience for years. The problem is that a lot of sites stopped serving RSS feeds for their content. But sites like rss.app and openrss can be used to get RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them.
RSS is great for content consumption. It’s a shame that many sites stopped serving it- same thing with podcasts, now everyone wants you to listen on this or that platform instead of just publishing a normal RSS feed full of MP3 files.
That said though, RSS doesn’t help for participation, it’s a one-way tech.
I guess if you have forums that put out RSS feeds you could aggregate them together for post titles, but that’s still clumsy. Lemmy does it much more elegantly.
My understanding of RSS is that it’s basically a list of metadata and links for content… Its always seemed to me to be a great way to aggregate the content you want to see. He did specifically mention keeping an Identity across multiple forums and I’m not aware of any RSS implementation that provides that functionality though… are you? That’s a huge feature to miss if we’re talking about social link aggregators like Reddit and Lemmy.
Yeah, sorry I was specifically replying to part about seeing the content from communities (or everything on the internet, really) in one view. Keeping your identity across multiple forums is platform-specific and would be solved by Lemmy directly. RSS feeds would just give you the updates and the links directly to the content. But once you click through to go to each website, you’d just be using your already-logged-in state on the platform.
One of the main advantages of RSS is that it doesn’t track you or require an account for it to work. As you said it’s only a XML or JSON file wth the latest items posted on the website.
Maybe we don’t need 4K 60FPS video to show Mr. Beast giving away more crap. Just because we can up the quality, doesn’t mean we should. Or maybe client-side real-time AI upscaling will make this a non-issue.
Call me old fashioned but I’d rather see high native quality available for when it is relevant. If I’m watching gameplay footage (as one example) I would look at the render quality.
With more and more video games already trying to use frame generation and upscaling within the engine, at what point is too much data loss? Depending on upscaling again during playback means that you video experience might depend on which vendor you have - for example, an Nvidia computer may upscale differently from an Intel laptop with no DGPU vs an Android running on 15% battery.
That would become even more prominent if you’re evaluating how different upscaling technologies look in a given video game, perhaps with an intent to buy different hardware. I check in on how different hardware encoders keep up with each other with a similar research method. That’s a problem that native high resolution video doesn’t have.
I recognize this is one example and that there is content where quality isn’t paramount and frame gen and upscaling are relevant - but I’m not ready to throw out an entire sector of media for this kind of gain on some media. Not to mention that not everyone is going to have access to the kind of hardware required to cleanly upscale, and adding upscaling to everything (for everyone who’s not using their PS5/Xbox/PC as a set top media player) is just going to drive up the cost of already very expensive consumer electronics and add yet another point of failure to a TV that didn’t need to be smart to begin with.
The quality is something that depends on the content. If the video is just someone talking, 4K is overkill. And not every gameplay has to be recorded forever. Only the good ones. And even the videos can be rescaled after some time if nobody sees them.
This exists. For example, for general decentralized storage, there’s storj.io, and there’s PeerTube. But I guess there’s a reason it’s not more widespread. I’d happily be proven wrong, though.
I’ve been a YouTube premium subscriber since before it existed. Last night I installed ReVanced.
It is not better than the default experience with premium. But it is pretty close. I’m using a patched version of the YouTube client, after all. The default client is not 🇦🇺$17/month better by a long shot.
I am still undecided on whether to wear the price increase. I have until March to decide.
As plenty of other people have already said, if YouTube Premium went up by a pittance every month (boiling frog price increases) I would probably keep subscribing. The fact that they A) clamped down on AdBlockers and B) increased Premium rates is a major disappointment.
Add to this that Patreon are introducing invasive User Agreements and it is getting more difficult to support Independent content creators.
Platforms like Curiosity Stream are looking more and more appealing to those of us who want interesting content and don’t mind parting with a reasonable amount of cash to support creators.
Unfortunately nebula has started blacklisting creators they dont agree with, just cancelled my 2 year sub to them because they deleted second thoughts channels. Who was the sole reason I paid for that sub.
Unfortunately nebula has started blacklisting creators they dont agree with
Elaborate. Why were they banned? If it was kiddie creepers or nazi shit or “not fascists but #1 with fascists” shit like heated-gamer-moment I don’t blame them for that.
People are still subscribed to Netflix, even though the price keeps going up, even if they don’t watch it. People still have multiscreen subscriptions, even if only one person ever watches it. People still pay their monthly fee for a cable subscription.
I upgraded to a Family subscription so I could watch my YouTube without Ads and I could watch YouTube with my brother without Ads and it was only a few dollars more.
If Google increased the price gradually, a dollar at a time, I would probably not have noticed, like the mythical frog in the cookpot. The fact that they increased the price and clamped down on Ad Blockers at the same time bought media attention to the price rise.
When we are paying that same amount for Netflix and/or Disney+ and/or whatever other streaming service and all the content is shit, paying for YouTube Premium was pretty good value.
There is a market of niche video content that is not ever going to be fulfilled by the Mainstream streaming companies, content creators need to be able to fund their content creation and I fucking hate Ads.
If I can pay a small amount to avoid the Ads, don’t have to participate in the arms race of Ad Blockers and still know that the content creators are getting paid I will be happy to pay.
Unfortunately, Google has increased that pittance progressively over time and have now increased it dramatically. They have also introduced a payment platform to try and muscle out Patreon. This suggests that the money from my subscription is not getting the the creators.
I can’t pay a small amount to avoid ads any more. Content creators are not getting paid, and I am being forced to either not get the content any more or start investigating Ad Blockers.
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