Edit: are you psychos actually pulling up YouTube on your browser?
Edit edit: Listen, I’m about convenience on this matter. I want to click a link and just have it open up. I’m also not as militant as most of you about making sure YouTube doesn’t make any money off of me because…that doesn’t make any sense. Yeah I’m going to block ads where I can but I’m not going to inconvenience myself in the process. Everyone keeps recommending revanced which admittedly I haven’t tried, but vanced worked like donkey dick. I said it.
Edit edit edit: ok assholes I got revanced set up. I am not an idiot but that was far from “5s of effort”. Thanks for the recommendation.
Yes, on an Android tablet, using the PocketTube app (which manages my YT subscriptions into groups), to forward a group playlist to YT in Firefox with uBo installed, without being logged into YT in FF.
I don’t have to rely on other 3rd party servers and services working properly, I don’t get ads, and YT gets little to nothing on me as an anonymous user beyond PocketTube just pulling the latest videos from my subscriptions.
I’ve been reading all these posts about blocker warnings being displayed and having to update the uBo filters, and I haven’t seen one of those yet, without doing any of that.
My revanced setup literally shows as “Youtube” and functions identically, with sponsorblocking and adblocking. It let me disable shorts entirely and use the click-bait thumbnail circumventer. Took me 5 minutes to setup. I see a video on any app and click on it and it opens up in revanced no problem.
People act like 5 seconds of effort is worth what, 120$/year? After googling, closer to 160$/year? Lmao I wish that amount of money was inconsequential to me
Setting aside the conflation of “5 minutes” to “5 seconds” for a bit just to say: setting up ReVanced is a gigantic pain in the ass. I’ve only ever been on the android platform. I’ve sideloaded apps. Also been in the technology industry for almost 3 decades. The documentation is dog shit. The official user forum r/revanced, (iirc) is a fucking circlejerk. Their own faq and top pinned “definitive install guide” post is out of date and just plain wrong. Down thread, whenever someone has questions (inevitably, because the documentation is fucked (see previous)), some smarmy asshat has the audacity to direct the confused newb to the same flawed docs.
I swear, fanatics are their own worst enemies. Now, I’m not saying you’re a fanatic. But sideloading that app in 5 mins (or seconds, depending on which sentence you’re relying on)? Yeah, bullshit.
I dont even have root. You download the apk for the recommended version of YouTube, which the revanced manager app tells you, select it - it auto picks all the patches - hit apply, wait - then hit install. Takes maybe 2 minutes to install. Then you’re done. Never once had any difficulty beyond that. One time I used a different youtube version than what was recommended, worked fine just didn’t have all the patches.
I dunno why you were trying to sideload it. That’s not necessary. You can do all this in, I’ll be generous and say 15-20 minutes. I’ve done it a few times now and done it for others too, so it usually only takes me 5 to 10. Depends on how fast their phone is to patch the apk.
Throw in another minute to fully disable the official YouTube app and route all YouTube links to open with revanced and you’re set.
Revanced is quite the pain to set up, in my opinion, and the Revanced forums aren’t super helpful. The developer refuses to publish a useable guide.
I switched to NewPipe x Sponsorblock, and that one was maybe 20 seconds of downloading and installing, not counting tweaking the settings to my liking. It’s been much more stable for me. Revanced always crashed for me at exactly 3 hours of continuous use, which was a problem since I use those 8-hour ambient sound videos to help me sleep.
There’s also LibreTube, but that one can be a lot more finicky, and you have to manually switch the instance, which becomes a pain in the ass after a while.
Revanced forums are straight-up toxic. Any setup questions are smugly redirected at the unusable documentation, as you pointed out. For some reason, there’s an elitist attitude in that group.
Can't use uBO from most of the devices I actually watch YouTube on.
For me, it's much easier to just pay for Premium. No ads on my phone, Playstation, Chromecast, or locked-down work laptop that I can't install extensions on.
And the creators whose content I consume still get paid for my views. Honestly, it's worth it for both my use-case and my morals.
They don’t even need to do that, since the ads come from the same domain as the app’s content. Some apps use their own DNS resolver but a lot of the time it’s for other reasons, like preventing DNS hijacking by ensuring DNSSEC records are validated.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted, paying for services you use shouldn’t be looked down upon. It’s way easier then trying to always be ahead of the ad block blockers. I do block all ads on websites though
I can afford it and use it all the time. It’s completely unreasonable to expect a company to provide a service for you for free without any way for them to monetize you. Hosting videos isn’t free so why should they pay for you to have access to their service
I can afford it and refuse to pay on principle. I actually would be glad if Google went out of business (although extremely unlikely). Monopolistic Companies like them use every opportunity to cheat and modify laws to give them advantage and remove any chance of a new innovative competitor taking over. Then they expect us to act honorable and play by the rules that they set up.
They are the cancer and we need to restore old antitrust laws that supposed to prevent them from ever getting so big.
I started Premium as Google Play Music back when. Made sense as an alternative to Spotify. In my book, it still does. Ad-free YouTube is just a bonus for a music streaming service.
Because LemmyWorld is full of immature users who think that anybody who pays money for a thing they get extensive use out of is a shill. They think that using adblockers is somehow sticking it to The Man.
I'm starting to understand why LW has the reputation it does now.
By being seen as the de facto "hub" for Lemmy, they've attracted a large chunk of Redditors who haven't left their Redditor attitudes behind them. As LW continues to grow, I've been noticing a lot more immaturity on the platform as of late. It's honestly a little disappointing to see.
How else do you expect a globally-accessible video hosting service that requires no upfront costs for users to upload millions of video files at the cost of several petabytes of data transfers every day to function?
The users generating the content people actually want to watch wouldn't be able to do so without the monetization that's in place, though. They can't make content for free, and shouldn't be expected to. And not all creators can rely on sponsorships to subsidize themselves, either, so most creators rely pretty heavily on ad revenue in order to stay afloat on the platform and keep the lights on.
If the creators can't afford to keep creating, then that also degrades YouTube's service as a whole, as well.
Really? I’m pretty sure people can make youtube content, and maintain a job. If youtube can’t stay afloat without invasive ads happening every 5 minutes then youtube deserves to go the way of MySpace and every other dead platform before them. Simple as that. Youtube isn’t a necessity.
“the price is what the market will bear” or whatever. I used to pay for ytp (red)/gpm. Paused for a month, went to resub, was like +$4 more a month. I don’t value yt at ~$16, not even at ~$12 really but hey, they wouldn’t fuck billions of users over in the pursing of profits, right? If yt/Google was a scrappy little startup, or a creator that I valued, sure, here’s $5 a month through patreon. But they aren’t, they bought a platform with no clear avenue to monetization/breaking even, and sat on it for 10 years, and then they want to be like ‘please we are the victim here, it’s the evil ad blockers that are forcing us into the streets!’.
G has, metrically speaking, fuck-tons of money. And if they so desperately need to clear their books, they can always close yt, anytime they want. Or they could let the customers pay what they think the service is worth. Hell, they could even shift the costs to the creators, which isn’t the worst idea in the world - it’d at least stop kids from uploading their fortnite clips with them screaming into their mics. Not everybody should be allowed in front of a webcam.
But as long as it’s [number higher than I value yt as] or [shitty experience], I will take option 3 and tell g to gag on my balls, and I shall enjoy my $5 and my ad-free experience.
Lots of options, but nah “fuck the users” came out on top. Acting like the users are the reason why they bought and operated a money pit for 15 years is just hilarious.
Storage isn’t the only cost, or even the major cost, it’s bandwidth to serve them
I don’t see a better way for YouTube to be managed in the current environment, but I do agree it’s not the best possible way; it’s just the ideal way is limited to an ideal world, which we don’t have.
That can be a shared expense, but bandwidth is variable and storage space isn’t, so I imagine yt would charge by the MB for uploads but do a simplified floating split cost for bandwidth. Again, not everyone should be able to blast the internet with their (tbh) shitty unboxing, multiplayer raging, prank/harassment, 8 second meme, etc videos.
Everyone knew - or should have known - that yt was a money pit. I was happy that the og devs got bought out, but the writing was on the wall back then. The fact that g let it sit for so long before trying to recoup some funds for it is one reason why everyone is so pissy about the whole paying vs ads debate - it was free and non-intrusive for so long, the fuck do they need to fix it now?
So yeah, my idea is shitty for the people who aren’t able to bankroll their video startup career, but if you just open yt and take in what kind of ‘content’ is being created and shoveled… The fact that they haven’t at least pitched the idea is an active disservice to the internet as a whole. I don’t think it would be so bad, short-term pain for long-term (theoretical) sustainability.
You don’t have to always be ahead. I’ve been using revanced for years now without problems. Before that Vanced. My computer has had ublock origin with 0 issues for years prior to the recent changes. To resolve those I literally had to click 2 buttons in the UI. Bam no ads. Have had no problems since. The time I’ve invested in configuring adblocking since I started watching YouTube, sometime around 2008-9, has probably amounted to 20 minutes of time.
It could just have something to do with the fact that many people think ads are not only annoying but also highly manipulative, creating artificial needs in people, a tool to make already successful and rich companies even richer, … and the surrounding technology to power them is unethical, hoarding tons of information, building profiles of people, tracking which websites they visit, what search terms they use, …
When people talk about blocking ads, being frustrated about them showing up, it’s just kind of disrespectful to be like “well you could just pay for the service, you know?”. Besides, who knows how much actually ends up in the creators’ pockets.
how much actually ends up in the creators’ pockets
For most, very little. For the big ones, millions of dollars, and I always resent people lecturing me about “morals” because I’m not willing to subsidize a rich person’s hobby.
Regular perople aren’t making anything from YouTube, only the ones who had the capital to invest in their channels upfront. I don’t feel compelled to pay for any of that, and I’d just as soon have their content filtered from my feed if it’s immoral not to want to see ads.
The channel I use most often is Audible Anarchist, and I really don’t think they give a fuck if I use an adblocker or even Piped to watch their videos.
Never forget that youtube filters us towards those creators, too. New creators saying a new message? They aren’t gonna get any attention. Youtube de-prioritized LGBT and BIPOC content tags for years.
Yep, I never let YouTube recommend me content, because it’s all highly-polished monetized garbage. They’ve made it purposely difficult to find videos uploaded by normal people. I used to watch this random lady with a pet squirrel who made videos with her phone, it was so fun to watch. Once it all became monetized, that got buried. It’s to the point that most of what you see on the front page, you could just as well be watching cable TV. It’s so bad.
I feel like an old man saying this, but it seems there are a lot of younger users who got sucked into the YouTube algorithm and see this all as normal or even good. That’s why you get weird accusations of “stealing” content or not supporting “creators,” as if it’s my job to subsidize some rich person’s hobby. The entire reason I liked YouTube is it was a free forum where users could share random videos with each other. If it’s not that anymore, then it can die for all I care – I don’t want it.
Paying Google doesn’t feel like the correct thing to do when they keep making Youtube worse while increasing the price. Morally I think it’s wrong to reward their shitty decisions against other users. Personally I’m still mad about they removed the dislike counter.
I’d rather watch non-monetized channels using an adblocker. The entire attraction of YouTube for me was that it was a platform where regular people could share random videos for free. If that’s not what it is, then I’m not interested.
If YouTube had an option to filter all monetized channels from my feed, then that would be the most moral course of action, since I could simply not watch those – quite bluntly, awful – videos.
You could just, you know, send those creators money directly. Nearly all of them have methods set up for that already, and I’m guessing anyone who doesn’t would set something up in a hurry if you asked to donate to them.
It’s a win / win. You get to sit on your moral high ground, the creators get paid, Google can fuck off.
My subscription list is 100+. As much as I would love to support all of those creators directly, it's not a financially viable option for me. At least with my Premium subscription, they're getting something from my viewership, which is more than they'd get from me if I was adblocking their videos.
Hold on, Premium subscription where Google gets the cut and doesn’t have to provide you with any report on your money spent is “a financially viable option”?
As opposed to paying even $1/mo per channel I subscribe to, yes. Many creators have come out and said that their earnings reports show that higher-valued views come from Premium users, even though those viewers are not being served ads. It benefits them more than if I were to sit through every ad on their channel.
At the end of the day, Google's paying them more for my views than if I were an ad-viewing user. So for ~$20/mo (for family plan), that's much more financially viable for me than if I were to pay $1/mo to all 100+ creators I watch.
At the end of the day, Google’s paying them more for my views than if I were an ad-viewing user. So for ~$20/mo (for family plan), that’s much more financially viable for me than if I were to pay $1/mo to all 100+ creators I watch.
Are you trolling? It feels like you are. At no point in this thread is anyone saying you need to start paying more. If you’re paying $20/mo for premium, and you’re using an arbitrary amount of $1 as the donation minimum per creator, then why not just donate $1 to 20 different creators for each month? Then the next month, donate to the next 20 creators, then the next 20, and so on. Believe it or not, all of those creators still get paid more by your direct donations – even measured over several months – compared to the tiny fraction they’d get from that same money via your premium subscription.
It seems like you’re trying to argue some moral high ground of funding content you enjoy on youtube. That’s fine. But it takes about 10 seconds of critical thinking to find ways to do it where you pay the same, the creators get paid more, and google gets paid nothing.
Because realistically, that's more work than I'm willing to put into it. I wouldn't maintain that long-term. Especially because then I'd have to also sit through ads (99% of my YouTube use is from my TV via my PS5, so adblock isn't an option there), which would turn me off from using the platform, at all.
Premium is what works with the compromises I'm personally willing to make. And, this may come as a shock, but I don't want Google to get nothing, either. They need to be able to maintain their platform, which I get hours upon hours of use of every single day. I don't take issue with them making money in order to keep the lights on.
As much as I would love to support all of those creators directly, it’s not a financially viable option for me.
No one’s suggesting you pay more than what you’re paying now. I simply suggested you pay them directly. Take whatever you’re paying per month/year to google directly, then divide that up and contribute directly to the creators of your choosing.
which is more than they’d get from me if I was adblocking their videos
Now you’re moving the goalposts. No one is arguing against the fact that content creators get some amount of money from ads and subscriptions. The argument was that donating to them directly is better / more revenue for the creators, since google doesn’t get a cut. You spend the same amount, the creators get paid more, google gets paid nothing.
It’s bizarre how you are such an apologist for google.
I'm not moving the goalposts. I'm explaining my opinions on the matter and the choices I made. I'm not sure why you, who are not in any way impacted by my video consumption habits, take issue with any of that.
Once upon a time it was worth it for me too. But since every service is running up the rates, I had to decide which, if any, deserved my money. Google didn’t make the cut. I have a feeling nobody will by the end of year
If you paid the content creators directly they’d receive tens of thousands of times more than any of your views gave them.
I used to work with a partner account, and I can tell you they make NOTHING for views compared to what Google makes.
So hey, you do you, but don’t try to convince us or yourself that this is for the content creators. That’s like saying you order Uber eats to support the drivers, but you never tip them.
This is about the compromises and concessions I'm personally willing and financially able to make. Obviously it's not the perfect solution, but we don't live in a perfect world.
And an ad blocker should be part of everyone’s personal and organisational security model regardless, so you’d have to install ublock and specifically turn it off for YouTube.
But of course, the reason people block ads is most of the Google ads were straight malware at one point.
uBlock origin works, but you must disable all other blockers or browser plugins doing something with youtube, as they might interfere with the adblocking capability.
For the fire stick, simply install smarttubenext. Adfree and with sponsorblock included.
uBlock should work, if it doesn’t make sure you are using latest version, you have custom filters disabled and disable all extension. If that fixes it then you can start enabling other extension tracking which one caused issue.
With adblock detection filtering too much can cause to trigger the detection.
Also, you might have to go into filter lists in the uBO dashboard and make sure you’ve checkmarked everything.
I’m not sure what can be done about a fire stick. I’m lucky because I have a mini PC connected to my main TV that runs Linux so I can use that to stream whatever I want. It’s one of the best setups I’ve ever had for entertainment. I just got one of those cheap wireless keyboards with a trackpad for $10 from newegg, and Linux Mint has a setting to make the UI more usable from a distance.
I do use a Roku sometimes when I travel for work, and I just deal with the ads, so if there’s a way to make something like a fire stick or roku work with a custom OS, that would be nice, but I’m not aware of anything.
Edit: Just noticed u/[email protected] has information about smarttubenext. Might look into that.
Then you rewind to a part needing review and end up seeing the damn ads again. Same irrelevant ads that I cannot figure out why they insist on me seeing.
A couple five second ads I can handle. What I can’t handle are two unskippable 15-30 second ads at the beginning of every video and at 2-3 random points throughout each video without warning; especially after over a decade of pretty much never watching ads for anything.
Yes, a premium view is more valuable to YouTube’s ad impressions. I struggle to believe any of that value actually makes it into the content creators pocket.
I much prefer subscribing to a content creator’s personal patreon (or equivalent) as opposed to lining Google’s pockets.
$3/month really means nothing to me, considering I already $18.99/month for a YouTube music family plan.
My issue is them purposely attempting to make my experience worse and then selling what they have arbitrarily taken away back to me.
If you product is so valuable the only way a conpany can sell it is to attack your user’s experience so you pay them to stop it really starts drawing too many similarities to a mob protection racket.
EDIT: In order to be fully transparent, apparently inflation made a fool of me, the YouTube premium family plan has increased to $22.99/month so the difference would be $4 per month, not $3.
I use YouTube more than any streaming service and it was nice to get those perks. I am just waiting for the perks to be revoked and sold back to me one chunk at a time.
Offline and Background video play are the two main ones they tout. Which have also either been part of youtube previously or easily done for free by third party apps.
If you’re already paying for the Music subscription, it only costs that much more to have the whole family on premium music and video.
It’s actually a pretty fair price for all of that for the amount my family uses it.
I put myself, my gf, and my parents as users on the plan years ago and we all get unlimited, ad-free-ish (still have channel sponsored segments for anyone not using Vanced), streaming for less than 4 bucks a month per person.
It’s easily the paid service that gets the most use per dollar for my family.
I still wish it was GPM instead of YTMusic, because YT music still doesn’t have feature parity with GPM years after they killed it.
I was also a GPM user though I will admit everything I used has finally made its way to YTM. So I can’t complain about this anymore and it still a superior offering to the yo-ho alternatives.
The price is not the issue. $3/month is incredibly reasonable, especially given how much I use YouTube. The issue is how they are bullying people into paying it, at that point it doesn’t matter how good the deal was.
Just double checked this. Currently I am paying for a family plan which gives me 5 users and it costs $18.99 CAD. The family plan with 5 users is $22.99
I believe this recently increased because I kinda ticked off when they launched Stadia and sent all the YT premium customers free Stadias that came with Chromecast Ultras and I recall feeling like an idiot for not having the right plan and Google not being willing to switch me over and give me the free hardware.
Well not really though. Youtube in mobile browser is one of the few less cluncky websites. Native app might be better but youtube website is pretty good in mobile
Yeah, I’m not constantly on yt but nothing ever annoyed me with yt on Fennec, perfect basically (tho I kinda always prefer ‘normal’ UIs over apps with big buttons).
I also use the autoHD add-on bcs I’m not signed in ever.
It was on Fdroid for me? What app store are you looking on? Also, libretube is another frontend on Fdroid. A little more buggy than newpipe, but it proxies YouTube requests if you don’t/can’t use a VPN.
Generally a supported of the company google, but when they hindered my adblocker, I tried to watch the ads. But they are too frequent, and occur without warning, arbitrarily in the middle of content. Kills medium like standup comedy.
And the last time I had a video on without my adblocker, an ad came on that was literally a person acting like they were a content creator. It was over 3 minutes long. I was only half paying attention (I was driving and just listening to the video) and when I realized it was wrong I thought I had bumped the phone and changed videos. It was so disorienting.
All the ads are lies or propaganda. I hate them. I actively avoid products that find a way to force their ads in front of my face.
I don’t care what it costs to run YouTube. All I hear from the creators is “Support us on Patreon because YouTube doesn’t pay” and they sure ain’t asking us to buy YouTube premium.
I have literally seen 2 creators ever bring up youtube red, saying that yes subscribers do make up a more significant percentage of their revenue and did help a little bit when videos got demonetized. Every creator is saying some sort of the “I don’t want all my eggs in one basket, I can’t trust these platforms” argument.
Honestly, I agree with you with that. YouTube pays creators a lot, technically we shouldn’t be removed about the presence ads, because it’s how they stay afloat, that’s just how it works. My main issue is the sheer amount of them nowadays. I used to gladly watch the ads, but it went from one or two before and after each video, to heaps of midrolls every couple minutes. It’s not the ads that annoy me, it’s the amount of them, which is the reason I use an ad blocker (which tbh applies to most of the Internet nowadays)
Even if YT gave all the money to the creators, ads are so cheap nowadays that it would need them approx 20.000 ad views just to pay a month of premium (and that’s assuming every cent goes to them) big creators and publishers sure make money out of ads, in the end they get millions of views. But a smaller creator thst works hours upon hours on a video is making probs less than minimum wage through ads. Ergo If they want to make money they need to rely on generous people.
Well the creators I like don’t see it as a good relationship. They keep leaving for Twitch, Patreon, Nebula, or quitting on content creation. If I’m a fan of them, I need to listen to their concerns about how YouTube is constantly threatening their livelihood.
I haven’t used YouTube logged in since they force merged YouTube accounts with Google accounts. This make me a bit harder to track and my data slightly less valuable. I don’t like that my data will still being used to create an advertising profile even if I pay. If one of the features of YouTube premium was they would never sell any of my data across all Google services then I would be willing to pay for it.
The bully part comes in when YouTube music is rolled into the cost. I would pay for youtube premium if all I got was a premium YouTube (and therefore the price was substantially lower). But what they’re doing is leveraging the popularity of YouTube to try and force the bolstering of YouTube music subscribers. Furthermore, they are currently increasing the price for premium in several markets. So the already too high cost is temporary at best and nearly guaranteed to go up even further with absolutely no increase in benefits. Paying to remove ads seems fine, but what they are attempting to do goes beyond that simple quid pro quo. They are being coercive and indirect to a degree I find unethical. Thus, bully.
Google ran Youtube at a loss for years to draw everyone in and now that there’s no real competition (yet), are tightening the screws. Very similar to how Walmart will sell stuff at a loss to bankrupt locally owned stores and then raise their prices.
Exploitive megacorporation can pound sand. It wasn’t a bad experience back when it was a single short ad before every video. Now I’ve had a wonderful ad free experience for years because of ad blockers. Why would I downgrade the experience and pay for it?
Google is attempting to remove the freedom of viewing HTML the way I want to view it from my own devices. While they’re free to run their website the way they want to, the principle of attempting to remove your freedom of choice is not only a bad look, but violating.
These two things are different, and one does not negate the validity of the other.
I am sorry but that argument simply doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to me. Unless I am missing a facet, you are saying that your autonomy outstrips their rights? If we were to make an analogue version of that argument would your autonomy to use your hands how you see fit, allow for you to walk into a shop and take something without paying? It seems like, unless I’ve missed something, that’s the analogy.
Commerce and indeed society has always been a balance of personal autonomy and rules, with YouTube you’re going to a website and circumventing their chosen rules. I might not agree with YouTube’s methods, but I don’t think I can get behind the argument they are impinging on your technical rights any more than Tesco does if you try to half-inch a chocolate bar.
For my first point, paying, let’s say you subscribe to a newspaper. You pay a monthly fee, and the newspaper comes to your house. Nothing special.
For the second point, let’s say you have a free, ad-supported magazine. Once you obtain the magazine, how you read it and what you do with it is up to you. If you want to go as far as to cut the ads out before you read it, you can do that. And you should be able to do that if you want to, because the magazine is in the privacy of your home.
Ad-supported websites are no different whatsoever. The web server gives you HTML, JavaScript, some media, and together, it suggests a way for your browser to render the page. When you download the assets, you’ve acquired the “free magazine,” and your personal browser, in the privacy of your home on your own machine, decides how it should be displayed.
Imagine if there was a way for the ad-supported magazine to attempt to force you into spending 10 seconds on each page with ads. This sounds silly, but this is what Google is attempting to do. HTTP responses are nothing but simple chunks of data. You can use telnet to retrieve it without a browser, if you wanted. It’s simply a virtual analog to pages in a magazine.
That’s a great analogy and helps me understand your argument much better. There is something I think you’ve missed though, which is that advertisers pay to be in the publication, and they pay at the point the print occurs. Rendering in your browser is the analog to hitting the print button, not putting it on a server to be pulled down. In your analogy, the advertiser has paid already before you consume the magazine; but for YouTube the advertisers don’t pay as their adverts are never compiled into the magazine. If you want to write a browser that still calls the ads api and plays the video in the background so YouTube gets the ad revenue but you have “cut it out” then I don’t imagine google would care half as much.
for YouTube the advertisers don’t pay as their adverts are never compiled into the magazine
This is true. It does still line up with the freedom of consuming content the way you want on your personal browser, however.
Imagine playing a browser yourself. You use telnet to download the HTML for a video. You inspect it, and find that there is a JavaScript asset in the HTML. You make a GET request to fetch it. A dozen requests later, there is a link to an ad.
What do you do now? Are you obligated to submit a GET request to it? Do you not have a right to choose to skip it? Earlier, in telnet, you skipped downloading thumbnails that you didn’t care about, so how is this any different? Shouldn’t you be able to choose this? Say you didn’t have freedom, and you actually were obligated to type out a GET request to fetch the ad. After the ad has been downloaded, you are technically consuming the content offline in a cache. Now what?
Are you obligated to view it? It’s a stream of data. You could inspect the content in a hex editor as a way of viewing it, but it’s that enough? Did you actually consume it? Are you forced to use a functional media player on your personal device to play the ad? How much of the ad are you forced to watch? What difference does it make at this point, since you’ve obtained the data, and you’re left to your own devices? Shouldn’t you have the freedom to do what you want?
If YouTube does some ad payout stuff behind the scenes, server-side, then that’s server-side, and it isn’t any of your business. It’s the same as their data collection, sharing with third parties, building a profile on you, tracking hit counters, etc. In fact, they spend a lot of effort ensuring that it doesn’t become anyone’s business but their own. Just because the asset is an ad versus a JavaScript asset you also didn’t care about doesn’t matter. You have the freedom to consume the content that’s given to you in the privacy of your own home.
You could liken ads to free physical mailing list forms in the free magazine. Just because you obtained the magazine and the publisher makes money off you signing up for junk mail doesn’t mean you’re obligated to do it. You are given the option to request more media, and you are not forced to make any effort to cut it out of the magazine, fill it out, and mail it in. You’re also not obligated to read any amount of the junk mail that you receive as a result of the form. This is your choice, and you should be able to flip to the next page instead, which is equal to not being obligated to type GET requests by hand in a telnet console, which is equal to choosing not to make the requests in your browser.
I understand that they need the money to host the videos, but I won’t directly pay them considering how they treat viewers and creators. I’m pretty sure they would be $100+ richer from me if they didn’t remove the dislike count.
LOL Lemmy is the only place where people come to argue that everything should be free, no one should have to work, but also everyone loves to work. People around here are completely delusional.
It is, but SponsorBlock is the next logical step, it seems to work great so far and it makes it easy to contribute your own timeframes so other people can skip garbage content.
Brave has still worked fine throughout all this. I’ve been using it for a while and I wouldn’t have even known about the message if it wasn’t for news articles and Lemmy posts.
Nicer UI. Not exactly sure how the whole thing works, I think you are somehow able to enable/disable certain add-ons and from what I can gather extendes has a few more. Tl;dr: It’s better, consider giving it a try.
Whilst I am sure the article might be low quality ultimately, I still wish to see what other options they are advocating. This is clearly just a screenshot and only the first option for blocking ads.
Use a mental block
Close your eyes for 8s - 25 min, and pretend not to hear anything
What? I can’t hear you!
Why play one ad when you can play a dozen. Open multiple YouTube tabs at once and let the ads roll at the same time. A few minutes of noise for a whole few minutes of ad-free play
Use AdBlock Premium Plus
Of course, the best block is not loading the ads. Using the discount code AFFILIATEWHORE you can get a one year Pro plan for AdBlock Premium with six months free for just $169,- per year and enjoy the ad-free experience you deserve.
The last can’t easily be sarcasm. In app adblockers like Adguard do have a premium subscription option(I had one for a year back in the day, yes, stupid me) and I won’t be surprised if in the future some adblocker comes with such an option(should Raymond Hill stop working on uBlock Origin for whatever reason and the community couldn’t pick the development up that good).
I unironically use the 3rd option to support creators. I still use adblock if the creator isn’t monetized or it’s content that probably shouldn’t be getting monetized (eg. rips of game OSTs not by the game dev)
This is the actual “mildly infuriating” part of this post for me. Criticizing YouTube for pushing subscriptions on its users is 100% justified, but posting rage-baity screenshots of low-quality websites without any sources or context is probably not the way to do that.
The time for YouTube to ask for more money was before they made hundreds of unpopular decisions and drove away literally hundreds of creators that I liked.
Where are they now? On Nebula? I stopped watching much YouTube since couple of years, though I had a decent feed back in the day.
Ironically, I still do use YouTube Music despite it’s failings when compared to Spotify(no third party app support or shitty search results even now) but Atleast it worked for me when Amazon Prime Music refused to play in any web browser on Linux for me.
Most of the creators I liked are on Twitch now or have quit. A very small amount made the pivot to Patreon. Nebula creators are often very successful youtubers who are smart enough to make a new business, though some are academics who don’t do so well on youtube. I use youtube music too! And pay for it… And I’m invested, I want alternatives. I was about ready to download all of my YouTube music stuff and go hop onto band camp, despite that it would be many times more expensive. I just wanna be treated right.
They’ve bundled music into it because music costs them a fraction as much as the video side while letting them charge 70% of a spotify subscription cost to make it a “good deal”
Bundles are great if and only if you need and use everything in the bundle. Businesses love bundles because they know you won’t use it all.
Non-personalized ads pay a fraction of the money targeted ads can get you.
Non intrusive ads are pretty much just amal banner ads on the side, they pay near to nothing.
Youtube barely makes any money as is, if you introduce even one of these changes they are far into the red again.
Now if we also remove any tracking, then Google has no reason at all to keep it going and will just shut it down.
I despise Google too, I avoid them like the plague, my phone is deggogled and all my apps come from third party storefronts. But YouTube simply is not a profitable business without personalised ads and tracking.
People’s relationship with YouTube is weird. I guess cause it used to be free the expectation is that it should always be free but back in the day the content wasn’t worth paying for.
Well I paid for the ad free subscription but they sent an email that that doesn’t exist anymore and my subscription will cancel itself this month. Guess it wasn’t profitable enough… And that stinky move is why I won’t pay anymore.
Take googles 60 billion profit and stop complaining. But unfortunately that’s not reality.
The growth of YouTube’s revenue has always been steadily climbing. But it’s far too slow to be a competitive investment. It’s only like a percentage or two per year, that’s not a rate that investors want to see. So yeh Google is putting like a couple of percent more ads on YouTube every year that is necessary to stay somewhat relevant in the market.
Of course there is a limit, at some point you can’t put more ads into your system. I think they feel they are at that limit, and they are, it’s getting insane with the ads. . They try to get some percentage of people to stop ad block or some percentage to subscribe.
But it’s just delaying the inevitable demise. At some point they are out of people to milk for money, so growth will stop. So investors will pull out and YouTube will stop existing. This is just how it works.
Stop feeling bad. Someone or something will take its place. It will start small and grow and grow until it also dies. They could have 60 billion profit ‘forever’ but that’s not how capitalism works. Capitalist are going to capitalist and there is nothing you can do about it. It doesn’t matter what business model, or user experience, or quality. No capitalist cares. You and I care, but you and I are just secondary, afterthoughts, inconveniences. They just want us to do as they say, play the game, and stop complaining…
But it’s already a business that is making money and turning a profit for Google. And when I say Google I mean Alphabet, but that’s just set up to obfuscate, so Idc.
The could make everything above 1080 quality subscription only, or charge uploaders for the storage. This would probably also cut down on the low quality spam Channels that only exists for ad revenue…
Make the ads less awful is one way. Figure out a better way to analyze the video so you can put the ads in reasonable places, or let the uploader specify ad breaks. Limit the length of ads. Prevent repetitive ads within a certain timespan. Let users block particular advertisers. If the ad experience wasn’t so terrible, I wouldn’t block them.
Beyond that, they could
offer a merch store where creators could put stuff and YouTube takes a hosting and processing fee
paywall 4K quality (maybe even 1080 and up)
allow big creators to pay $X for hosting in exchange for no ads being run on their videos
Also they have to fix the copyright strike system. They could even make money off of it by charging claimants for copyright claims and holding the money in escrow until the review is completed, with that money going to YouTube if the claim turns out to be fraudulent or being refunded if it’s legit.
I got a Chromecast tv 4k specifically because there wasn’t an LG WebOS version of SmartTube. I love it for other reasons mind but the increasing of ads on the tv app least year broke the camels back
I didn’t even want to block ads when I started using SmartTube years ago. I only started using it because the official app kept stopping to buffer every few seconds, even though every other app worked fine. Reminded me of RealPlayer, lol. SmartTube worked perfectly as a replacement. I like the clean UI, too.
Every now and then i accidentally open the stock YouTube app and the changes it’s had since I installed smart tube makes me very glad I did. The best part of smart tube is the customisability of small things like scaling of specific elements of the ui.
Personally I use revanced & pay for a subscription.
I pay for a subscription because I like the service and am fine with the price for how often I use it (Far more than any other streaming service: I watch youtube daily) but revanced because I cannot stand video sponsor segments.
same here! youtube premium is great but i also love having sponsorblock in so i can see segments and decide if i want to skip (mostly for critical role episodes during the breaks)
The way I’ve been using is to use the Vivaldi browser’s inbuilt adblocking. Comes with the added benefit of syncing to other devices and background audio playback so I can lock my phone and still have audio playing.
The mobile version of the website is also functionally identical to the app, sans advertising.
Add comment