I totally forgot how terrible a non-ad-free YouTube experience is

So I’ve been using youtube ad blockers since pretty much when ad blocker extensions were first available. Lately though I’ve been getting hit more and more with these messages that YT was sending out every 5 or so videos telling me that adblockers aren’t allowed. No problem, just gotta wait 5 seconds to x it out and then close my video. The straw that broke the camel’s back though was when instead of a close-able pop-up, they just posted it in front of a video and wouldn’t let me watch anything until I disabled my adblocker.

So I disabled it and… wow. It’s just so, so, trash. 2 ads before a video plus midrolls and every video ever. I tried listening to a playlist of songs and was getting a midroll ad every single time. Imagine trying to just listen to music for 3 minutes and getting interrupted by a commercial for a chevy silverado! Half the ads were for youtube premium and they specifically mentioned that it would get rid of all the ads. It just felt so damn predatory. I couldn’t enjoy anything that wasn’t already demonetized.

And you know I’m fine with ads I guess. I could live with an ad before every video, but the fact that I was getting upwards of 5 ads in a 10 minute video was just plain absurd. I also hate that youtube got rid of the yellow markers to show you when an ad was coming up, so now it’s just out of nowhere and always interrupts a key part of the video.

E: I’ve been on Firefox for over a year.

sederx,

yeah that shit was never sustainable not sure how people deal with it,adblock forever

pseudo, (edited )
@pseudo@jlai.lu avatar

Not long ago, I was watching 5 skipable ads after 10 minutes of video on Viki. It was a time when they were distributing Korean and Chinese Drama at a pace no independent subtitle team would keep up. The shows were culturally interesting, they were a community spirit you could feel even when not participating in subtitling. The video player was good with nice features like learning mode and timestamped comment. It was an acceptable tradeoff. Today’s Viki and YouTube quality is barely sufficient for not favoring pirated website which have in the mean time greatly improved their user experience.

emma,
@emma@beehaw.org avatar

Use Piped as a front end for y–t—. It’s open source & non-tracking, but views still count. The creator is active on the fedi too.

Individual servers sometimes go off line or lose quality when they’re rate limited. Just try a different server when that happens. If the one you’re using at the time shows ads and there are too many, check preferences to turn them off.

(My addiction is Thai. Also watch some c- and k- too.)

pseudo,
@pseudo@jlai.lu avatar

I haven’t find enough asian-drama fans on the fediverse yet. Japan is everywhere but it’s like it Asia only country.

emma,
@emma@beehaw.org avatar

i’ve only found k-drama communities on lemmy and it seems like they’re all abandoned. i know several k-fanatics on mastodon, some hardcore c-drama folk and 3 other thai fans. i don’t know if lemmy plays well with the more twitter-like parts of the fediverse but i can introduce you there if you have an account. i think we can DM on here?

janguv, (edited )

For me, what works perfectly is this setup:

Desktop – Adguard

Android – YouTube ReVanced

Never get adverts ever. The day I’m forced is the day I stop using it altogether.

somegadgetguy,

And YouTube beat expectations on profits the quarter they raised prices again. The worst part of this is knowing YouTube is turning screws on the audience AND on advertisers. We know Google keeps more data on us than any other company, but they’re miserable at pairing relevant ads to my interests. So these brands advertising on YT aren’t reaching a potential customer, they’re only being used as a pain point to make free YT worse, and to neg viewers into buying premium. In a weird way, we might be saving brands from paying for useless ad clicks. Like, even looking at late stage capitalism and enshittification, this is totally bonkers.

princessnorah,
@princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Fuck the advertisers. I care way more about them turning screws on the creators.

AceFuzzLord,

I haven’t had to deal with video ads for years simply because I don’t use the website and use patched APKs to block ads. I’m thinking it was/is the right choice due to gøøgl€’s ongoing war against ad blocking in general. Don’t know a solution to the browser problem outside of using alternative frontends like libretube or invidious or whatever if you don’t mind not logging in.

locuester,

Another option is paying a couple bucks and not having to worry about it. Might even make you feel good knowing you’re supporting the platform.

I don’t fault you for tinkering and finding ways around it - that’s fun. But in the end, you’re leeching off a service you enjoy.

janguv, (edited )

in the end, you’re leeching off a service you enjoy.

I don’t think that’s a fair or true statement.

For one thing, the “service” here has risen to a point of ubiquity that it’s a de facto public space. Everything is on YouTube – legacy media channels, individual enthusiasts, alternative media outlets, the worlds of tech, fashion, politics, sports – you name it. If you were deprived of all access to it, you would have a qualitatively poorer access of what is going on in society. So it’s not equivalent to a traditional service like a trade.

For another, blocking ads is not merely refusal to pay a fee of some kind. Advertisements are cognitively intrusive, designed to affect your willpower and decision-making, used to track and control your behaviour, compromise your digital safety, and turn you into a product for companies to whom you do not give your consent for the opportunity to be exploited. Blocking that system of “payment” is not simply prudent but right, and the choice between paying a monetary fee or being so exploited is not a fair choice at all.

locuester,

So mediums with advertising should not be allowed to seek monetary payment? Only mediums without advertising should do so?

I’m not understanding your logic here.

For me it’s pretty simple. There is a product - would you like to pay for it?

I feel that all the scary words you can add to a paragraph about advertising based revenue for digital mediums is just your tool to justify your behavior of sticking it to the man.

janguv,

So mediums with advertising should not be allowed to seek monetary payment? Only mediums without advertising should do so?

Not quite sure how you got to the point you did there. There are different ways to advertise – billboards and TV/radio adverts, e.g., while often odious, are something you can more easily divert your attention from and which are not tracking devices or the product of turning you personally into an item for sale. I dislike them and would prefer a world without them but I don’t think their being attached to organisations in and of itself ought to deprive those organisations of income.

I’m not understanding your logic here.

That is apparent.

For me it’s pretty simple. There is a product - would you like to pay for it?

This is called “begging the question” as a response to me – I’ve called into question exactly both your premise and conclusion, for reasons you’ve not actually engaged with, and then you’ve re-asserted them. You have assumed what you’ve set out to prove.

(1) it is not simply a product (or service – you’ve changed tune there), for the reasons I’ve already outlined. Its use and availability is not analogous to something you can pick off the shelf or pay a tradesperson to do for you. (2) therefore, the question of paying for it (and how) demands different kinds of answer. In the country I’m from, e.g., healthcare is a right and not paid for, neither is early-years education up to 18, and so on. Both are “products” or “services” in some sense of the term, but to speak of payment here is complex and the answer doesn’t simply carry over from thinking about normal products/services.

I feel that all the scary words you can add to a paragraph about advertising based revenue for digital mediums is just your tool to justify your behavior of sticking it to the man.

This can only be a disingenuous response, surely? Rather than engage with the criticism of the nature of modern internet advertising and how corporations use it to affect people, you’ll just summarise it as “scary words”.

locuester,

I’m being completely serious and I’m interested to understand more about what you mean. You are saying that YouTube is not merely a service and then you’re equating it to something like healthcare and education. Now I must ask are you the one that is being serious?

janguv,

I’m being completely serious and I’m interested to understand more about what you mean.

It doesn’t strike me that way when you also write things like this:

you’re equating it to something like healthcare and education.

“equating” sets up a straw man. Such a tactic gives me the impression you think of this as some sort of battle that you want to win rather than a good-faith discussion.

What I had written was not an equating – and I think you should have or indeed did see that – only a comparison to show that something’s being describable as a product or service “in some sense” does not mean it is the sort of thing we pay for in a traditional way. This contradicts the central inference of your argument.

The answer to how I would actually characterise the “service” of YouTube is already in the first comment, so I’ll just quote it again:

For one thing, the “service” here has risen to a point of ubiquity that it’s a de facto public space. Everything is on YouTube – legacy media channels, individual enthusiasts, alternative media outlets, the worlds of tech, fashion, politics, sports – you name it. If you were deprived of all access to it, you would have a qualitatively poorer access [to] what is going on in society. So it’s not equivalent to a traditional service like a trade.

I stand by that; YouTube has a near monopoly over that media form, and if you require access to information and essentially a key plank of the online public square, then you need to go through it. I regard it as a (positive rather than negative) right that we do all have – not to use YouTube specifically but for information, opinion, discourse, politics and more to be available to us all. As it happens, YouTube is a key platform for the arrangement of all these things. Twitter also is/was, which is why Musk’s buyout was in principle concerning, and then in practice very shit once he created a two tier system of access to and impact on that public space.

locuester,

I’m open to having this discussion but every single response from you begins with you telling me that I’m not interested in having this discussion. If you could just leave that part out so we can have the discussion, it would be much easier. I believe that’s referred to as ad hominem. If you don’t think it is - ok, it’s not. But please stop allowing that to distract from a discussion if you could.

These “near monopolistic public spaces” such as Twitter and YouTube have costs associated with them. How do you feel that we as users/consumers/citizens of the public space support it’s existence?

sederx,

yeah google really needs more money, poor guys

princessnorah,
@princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

beehaw.org/comment/1359450

UnrepententProcrastinator,

There’s probably a good workaround to program. I noticed that, when in “windowed” mode on a computer, you can just drag the cursor to the end of ads and it skips them.

victron,
@victron@programming.dev avatar

Serious question. Can a pihole stop this? I’ve been thinking about building one for my house.

numanair,

It won’t stop ads delivered by the same servers as the content.

princessnorah, (edited )
@princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Diversion, the ad blocker built into the Merlin fork of the Asus router firmware, is able to do this. It functions in the same way as a pihole. It’s not always perfect, but serviceable on devices that can’t use an adblocker like chromecasts.

limerod, (edited )

Pinhole works at the network level. You need browser extensions like ublock-origin to filter this on the client side.

Edit: You also have apps like adguard, which work like Pihole, and do cosmetic filtering like ublock-origin.

HipsterTenZero,
@HipsterTenZero@dormi.zone avatar

The best part is that it gets worse

Aetherion,
@Aetherion@feddit.de avatar

Show me something that gets better.

Malfeasant,

www.soundandvision.com/files/…/2172009173627.jpg

LimitedExpress,

Go away, I’m baitin’.

AceFuzzLord, (edited )

False. The screen doesn’t have 99% ad to 1% actual content. Not an accurate representation of the future.

Grrbrr,
@Grrbrr@sopuli.xyz avatar

That is actually how the Xbox user interface started to look like after a while. It went from “what you probably want functions” to 80% ad, whitespace and “suggestions” with a Play the game somewhere in there.

ParanoidFactoid, (edited )
@ParanoidFactoid@beehaw.org avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    AfterAll,

    correct

    isotope,

    Leaving my project Tubo in case someone finds it useful. Support for it just got merged on Libredirect

    OttoVonGoon,

    For people using smart TVs, consider hooking up an old laptop or desktop to your TV. You can use a wireless mouse/keyboard (or other input peripheral) and you’ve got a living room setup that allows you to use ad-blockers and your own browser and video player (I recommend PotPlayer), among other advantages.

    sederx,

    if it runs android they can jus run Smart tube, its basically perfect

    Plume, (edited )

    It sucks. What sucks even more for me is that, I understood the fact that a platform like YouTube costs an unimaginable amount. I get that. And I wanted to pay. As a matter of fact, I did pay, happily so, for quite while. For YouTube Prenium Lite. Until a week ago I think, where I got this wonderful email from Google titled: Kindly go fuck yourself… or at least that’s how I read it… telling me that YouTube Prenium Lite was going the way of the Google graveyard. Because of course it did. And now, it was paying for full Prenium or nothing.

    So I stopped paying. I’m not paying 13 bucks a month for no ads. Especially if you’re basically strong arming me in doing so, I’ll do without YouTube.

    Because hey, I tried YouTube Music. It’s actually quite good in many aspects (horrendously flawed in many others too, of course, but that’s most Music Streaming services) but you know what? I know it’s been years, but I’m still not over Google Play Music and how they killed that off for what was an inferior product back then. Why the fuck would I invest my time and money in a Google product, nowadays? I’m sorry if you reading this were one of these people, but it’s like… to the people who were paying for Stadia and were shocked to learn that the service was shutting down… I’m sorry, but what the fuck is wrong with you? It was bound to happen, from the moment it was announced, the entire internet started joking about the fact that this thing will be dead in two years!

    I refuse to pay for a Google product nowadays. It’s like paying for a live service game at release, it’s rolling the dice and betting against the colossal odds that this thing will be dead in two years. So, unless it’s a Pixel, so I can slap something else than stock Android, Google can suck it. They won’t get a cent from me.

    It’s not like I paid for Prenium Lite because I loved YouTube. Hell, YouTube stopped being a good product a long time ago, I was paying for the content I was watching. Gotta support creators, you know? And also, because I watched a lot of YouTube on my TV, and you can’t slap Ublock on that. It was a reasonable enough price. But now? Fuck YouTube, I’m done with this. I’ve been hating this platform more and more for a while now, the algorithm is awful, it keeps recommanding me stuff I don’t want (why the hell does YouTube insist and recommanding me far right content, jesus christ, stop!). And even without ads, you still get them because monetization is so damn inconsistent creators can only depend on sponsors, I could go on and on.

    So now, it’s NewPipe on mobile, Piped on desktop and I guess I’ll just find something better to watch on TV. I’m paying for Nebula, it’s cheap, doesn’t have even a third of the people who I watched on YouTube, but at least it’s creator centric and it’s got a lot of good, interesting stuff on it. I’ve been watching lots of Twitch lately, and while yes, I agree, fuck Amazon, at least I can just pay for the people who I watch most to get no ads, it’s a reasonable price, support them and Twitch ads are not nerely as horrendous YouTube’s are in terms of frequency. So, yeah. I don’t miss it.

    Sleestak_Chaka,

    I use FreeTube on desktop and NewPipe on mobile. I’m still searching for a solution to the AppleTV.

    Plume,

    Same. Yattee has proven too cumbersome for me to setup. :/

    sederx,

    guess I’ll just find something better to watch on TV

    smarttube, you can even login

    Plume,

    Sadly, I use an Apple TV.

    sederx,

    chuck it in the bin and get a 29 bucks android tv device

    Amends1782,

    Use Invidious while it still exists as a project I’m a fan of the yewtu.be instance. Pretty reliable. The Piped project is good as well. Don’t even use the YouTube domain at all, hate giving them analytics and site usage info nevermind ads

    Zink,

    Ok so I’m not saying the correct solution to this is to just give Google the money they want, but for me YouTube premium is the best value for any streaming service my family subscribes to. (Unless you count the lifetime Plex pass I got on sale years ago, lol)

    Things like our smart TV or the kid’s iPad work flawlessly, including convenient downloads for trips. And since I watch a lot on my TV, it’s nice having higher bitrate available.

    YouTube music is a nice addon for music in the car, even though it doesn’t make or break the deal.

    And as I understand it, creators make significantly more money from premium views than ad-supported views. I like watching all kinds of niche scientific/tech/educational creators so I like to know they’re getting a bit more from me

    sunbeam60,

    You know what, I complete agree!! I realised I spend 10x the time on YouTube compared to Netflix.

    And then, at least in the U.K., there’s a mobile phone plan that includes a YouTube premium membership, so it works out at 2/5ths the price.

    Skadabucci,

    This is my sentiment too.

    limerod,

    Yeah, if not for Ytmusic, I wouldn’t have considered youtube premium. Seperate they don’t make much sense. Together, they add a lot of value. Plus, the bonus of not being bombarbed by multiple ads on each video is good.

    sederx,

    is the best value for any streaming service my family subscribes to.

    i mean that bar is pretty low

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