Next logical step is to modify the uploaded video itself to contain ads around the video frame or on automatically detected clear surfaces in the video.
I didn’t have ublock installed on my machines. I’d removed it a year ago because it was breaking sites and my pihole does a pretty good job, but I kept getting pop ups from sites about “turning off my adblocker”. I didn’t have an adblocker running. I was using vanilla firefox. I got so irritated, I looked up how to get rid of those messages and everything pointed me to ublock.
So, shout out to thinkgeek for reminding me what its like to browse the web without a ton of ads. If it wasn’t for your annoying popup about my non-existent adblocker, I would never have installed an adblocker.
Oh, and I hadn’t realized how awful youtube became over the last year or so with the ads. I was just dealing with it like an asshole. When I put ublock back on, my enjoyment of youtube shot up!
I was considering paying for premium too because I want to normalize paying for content and supporting things I like on the web. But I was struggling with the decision because usually you either pay with your data or pay with money. In this case I know I’d be doing both since Google will gladly take my money and also hoover up my data. Then they jacked the rates up to $14 a month…and now I have ublock installed again.
Its still a problem with the apps on my phone and appletv’s though. If they made it $4.99/mo I’d probably fork it over but $14 is more than my other streaming services and they create their own content. Youtube just hosts content.
Edit: how-to geek not thinkgeek. I think they went out of business.
you said you weren’t using an Ad Blocker but getting pop-ups saying you were. it’s because the pi-hole is blocking ads at a DNS level so the site detects that and sends that message instead.
Oh, and I hadn’t realized how awful youtube became over the last year or so with the ads. I was just dealing with it like an asshole. When I put ublock back on, my enjoyment of youtube shot up!
Try getting some kind of sponsorblock, too. I didn’t realize how annoying those little messages were until I didn’t have to manually speed through them.
God, how far Thinkgeek has fallen. Why would a retail site even need ads? You already there to do shopping. I don’t think I’ve bought anything since they got bought out.
They should fucking do an experiment - 2€/$ a month for an ad-free subscription and 3€/$ a month for higher video quality+no ads subscription. I would fucking pour my money into it.
Oh wait, that would not solve lack of sponsorblock. I guess I am not interested then…
Not a penny to those bastards. Should YouTube and Google along with it rot to hell, I don’t care. Maybe we’d finally get better alternatives running at full capacity.
For now our best chance for free platform is Odysee/Lbry - at least crypto bros can keep tue platform running for the sake of it. Or PeerTube, but less likepy since it’s more enthusiasm-driven, and enthusiasm only gets you so far.
Also, Nebula, CuriosityStream and other similar subscription services are good - and people pay for them.
I pay for Youtube, but I’m clearly in the minority. Look at all the pitchforks in this thread not willing to pay one cent or watch one ad but demanding the content…
There is a difference, though, and I know why those pitchforks are raised. YouTube is a video service behemoth, and it is owned by Google, a Big Tech company that has little respect for its users. It is one of the last things most Lemmy users (known on average for their hate of Big Tech, hence why we don’t have this discussion on Reddit) would want to support.
Many of them would, and some do, support alternatives. But there is just nothing to the scale of YouTube, which exacerbates the problem as users often have nowhere else to go. And so they will do their best to use YouTube in a way that gives 0 benefits to Google, and will only be happy to see this giant fall and replaced by something more user-centric, free from corporate control, and privacy-friendly.
I appreciate that, but I don’t think the vast majority support alternatives. It’s just “I want it free and I want it now”.
Also, if you don’t support Google you most probably don’t support the creators, very few of them have patreon or similar and just rely on ad revenue/sponsors.
I am not bothered by Google at all, at least in the EU you have pretty good control about the data they collect and I feel it’s used well. I get pretty good recommendations on YouTube and the ads I get on other sites are at least somewhat relevant.
I see the chances of a competitor replacing it and being more privacy-friendly close to none. Maybe TikTok will replace YouTube over as GenZ takes over, and I see that as a solid negative.
They literally had that experiment with Premium Light. €6 for ad free watching, it was all I needed. But they literally sent out a mail they were stopping this tier right before they started implementing more anti-ad blocking measures.
Oddly enough, the “lite” subscription was introduced in some other countries during the time they shut it off in the launch countries.
I wonder if they’re testing willingness to spend using the cheaper sub, then pulling it if it turns out people are likely to buy the pricier plan once the lower tier isn’t available anymore?
I had the light subscription for over a year, not planning on paying for useless stuff like the music stuff though. Had it through a family plan years before and it was laughably bad compared to Spotify.
Options are of course great. What makes YT music a better option than Spotify Premium for you if I might ask? I found when I was trying it years ago it didn’t seem to have an all encompassing music library. (It not having 10 years of playlists and recommendations that I do actually enjoy for new music is something I missed but couldn’t count against it as a product ofcourse)
I much prefer the UI and it (used to?) allow uploading my own music where the offering was lacking. Notably, Spotify also didn’t have these songs, so having them in one library is great. The recommendations are also spot on for me, but like you said that could be attributed to having used it for a long while (used Play Music pretty much from its inception).
Considering I’d want to pay to get rid of ads on YouTube too having the music service bundled is a bonus. I used to pay for the music service standalone before that.
I bet that Spotify will do just fine now, although last time I tried (some time last year) I didn’t immediately like the UI, and the shuffle seemed to work oddly in large playlists. What it does have over YT Music for sure is integrations with other parties, I wish YT was better in that regard.
Thanks for the feedback, my most recent car does have a native YT music app so if I can keep a decent music library along with no ads it would be worth considering.
And Spotify shuffle in large playlist was plain broken for years indeed. I could have 1000+ songs in a list and shuffle would loop 20 of them.
I actually do subscribe but only because I get a deal through my mobile network that, long story short, cuts the price by two thirds.
I can’t understand their pricing policy at all. And they’re doing a terrible job at explaining their cost basis if it’s actually what it costs to serve video to us (highly doubt it).
Meh I had nebula a couple years ago and it had some missing features and fairly poor depth of content. The same few bits constantly being pushed. I’m hopeful it improves but I wasn’t using it.
Nebula is pretty awesome and the type of content is great. I miss some light entertainment content though, so the network effect is at work. Still, nebula is the only streaming platform I’d consider subscribing as their policy is great and they do provide good value.
I’m not really certain what value nebula provides other than some creators uploading occasional content exclusively on nebula. Without nebula they’d just… Upload it to YouTube, which is free, so I’m not sure what the difference is
Nebula can only afford to do that because basically nobody who subs to nebula actually watches the videos on it. They did a video about their revenue model and people treat it as a way to support the creators, not to actually watch content
Could Nebula work as a Patreon-competitor. Patreon as a company is totally fucked iirc - the investors are treating the company like a piggy bank, which is a shame because it is easily a profitable and viable company.
They’d absolutely 100% be losing money with a $2 ad free tier. Ads make significantly more than that per user per month. Same with your “”“solution”“” for higher res video. Bandwidth is goddamn expensive.
I agree, but they’d get a large number of users to subscribe.
And then maybe they wouldn’t complain when they raised the price to $3. And a few months later maybe $3.50. Then $5.
A few years ago, people wouldn’t have paid over $15 for a standard Netflix tier without 4K. But the way to boil a frog is to make them nice and comfy in lukewarm water, then keep increasing the temperature slowly… So even if they lose money, maybe a low price for the ad-free YouTube could make sense, from a business perspective.
Every time Netflix rises prices it makes it to the news (let alone all the drama on twitter/reddit/etc), I don’t know what frog boiling you’re talking about.
Yet they keep posting more and more profits. Subscriber count has only increased despite the content being lower quality and prices being higher. The fact that we don’t like them increasing the prices doesn’t mean it isn’t working for them.
I’m not arguing it will work forever, but for now, it’s been a viable strategy.
Plus, no way would it ever stay at that price. Nothing ever does. The only service I pay for now is spotting, and that’s just to have ad-free music on my half-hour drive to work.
In video ads = no relevant ads based on the user. Less relevant ads = less revenue generated for people paying YouTube for hosting those ads. Thus, people would pay less to YouTube to host ads. Thus, less profits for YouTube.
Ad is inserted into stream. Either one of two things happens depending upon the way it is implemented:
The length of the video stream increases as the ad is inserted suddenly. The ad blocker can simply calculate the difference and skip the difference worth of time, thus skipping the ad.
The length of the video doesn’t increase to prevent this. Thus, you get the ad stream overlapping in front of the actual video stream. This would thus kinda be on the frontend, which could easily be blocked.
The ad is inserted in the beginning itself at some random time in the video. Hence, the length of the video doesn’t change suddenly like in scenario one. However, remember that regulations require you to visually indicate that a given piece of media is an ad or not. This is why YouTube ads have “Ad” in a yellow box. This could thus very easily be detected by an adblocker that analyses every frame that the box is present in, and skips that frame. This however, would be a little heavier for the user using the adblocker.
Trust me lol. There is literally no way you can prevent ad blockers.
if the platform decides which and where the ads will run during the video on page load, not during video pIay then I dont see how this could be blocked.
Anither thing they can do is enforce policy and start deleting/banning accounts blocking ads. I have some stuff on google account. Wouldn’t be fun to have it deleted.
Look at point 3. I explained this could still be skipped due to them having to visually indicate that it was an ad. This visual indication could easily be skipped by the local user.
As for them deleting accounts that blocked ads, how would they identify if someone blocked ads? Generate a secret key for every ad, that would be returned every time a user watched ads? This could easily be overcome, as an adblocker could simply extract this key and send it back to the server.
Trust me… If there was a way to block ad blockers, the greedy capitalists would’ve done so a loooong time ago.
Ok so this is how I think it works behind the scenes: the actual devs at Google don’t give af whether ppl use adblockers or not. I think it’s probably just the execs who come across stuff like this and tell the devs to “fix the problem”. Look at how Vanced was there for a long time. Only when it started becoming too popular (especially when they released an NFT), did YouTube crack down on it.
The reason why ublock origin is still in the Chrome store is because the execs prolly don’t know about it much. Maybe they are afraid that ppl would immediately hop onto Firefox if they did anything stupid like that? I dunno… However, I’m pretty confident that they’re going to do something stupid like banning ad blockers from the Chrome store quite soon. It would be quite hilarious to see the aftermath of that!
Since their pop-up already mentioned using AdBlock violating their TOS, I’ve started using a different Browserprofile with a dedicated Google account which I’ll exclusively use for YouTube.
If there will be a slow weekend coming up, I’ll set up a self hosted piped instance
I think it wouldn’t be that dificult to figure out what is interesting for people watching the video since channels themselves already usually have a target audience. If I am watching a video from a dude who focus on video games or tech odds are I’d be more interested in tech adds. But if Google REALLY wants to know what we need/want then yeah maybe you’re right. Shit it happened so many times me just saying the word pizza would set off a pizza ad later in my phone. These mfers want to inject ads in our souls.
I don’t get targeted ads anymore but it took a lot of work to get here and I don’t have a lot of the conveniences as other folks who use google play, oauth, etc.
Not rlly. Your point would be relevant for niche YouTube videos. What about generic videos tho? Say something like music videos. Kinda everyone watches them. In fact, music videos get the highest amount of views. Ads inserted in such videos based purely on the content of these videos would be too generic, thus of lower average relevancy to the viewer, thus ultimately translating to less revenue.
That IS how YouTube works. Let’s say you are watching a YT video. What your YouTube app/ website does, is that it downloads a certain portion of the video from the server. This small part is called a “buffer”. That’s where the word “buffering” comes from. Now, for the ad to be displayed within the video stream itself, it would need to be downloaded in this buffer somehow. Therefore, while there is a buffer in place, all of my above points would apply.
Completely eliminate the buffer you say (ie., stream the video bit by bit by reducing the buffering size dramatically) ? Well, then you would need an ultra stable internet connection to YouTube’s servers, without any ping difference. Good luck with that. Especially, good luck with doing that in developing countries, whose populations make up the majority of the world.
If that is true, then how is it possible for software to determine the difference between a commercial and content? They are streamed from a different source. I’m suggesting that YouTube could encode the commercial in the same stream as content, and as far as the player is concerned, there would be no difference.
Read point 3 again. Regulations require companies to visually distinguish between ads and non-ads. That’s why u get the yellow box with “ad” written in it, which indicates that the video that u r watching currently is an ad.
Software could thus use this factor very easily by scanning the stream for such an indicator. The moment it finds something like this, it skips to a frame where this indicator isn’t present.
In video ads, even those by the content creators themselves, can generally be dealt with using SponsorBlock. This is community driven, users mark the segment of the video that’s just sponsor filler or credits or whatever.
You can even get a NewPipe fork that includes SponsorBlock.
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.
Technology circumvention and copyright infringement are just about the only power consumers have against the near monopolies and cartel like behavior from the tech/media industry since our government regulators have been neutered.
I am grandfathered into a family Premium plan from the old Youtube Red days. The price is close to doubling come April. In the absence of competition or government intervention to punish anti-compeitive, anti-consumer behaviour I will be relying on ad-blocking and other circumvention measures next year. I am willing to pay a fair price but costs of living have gone up a lot while incomes for regular people are stagnant. The executives running these companies are completely disconnected from reality.
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).
No, I prefer to communicate with people able to understand sarcasm in light of the context. The best I can offer is for you to block me to avoid being exposed to my ultra-high level, military grade sarcasm.
You prefer to communicate with people who assume you’re being sarcastic? That’s kinda weird. I prefer to communicate with people who take my words at face value. You’re not worth blocking.
Telling that you think being blocked is a good thing. You’re not harassing me, you’re not trying to dox me, you’re just being annoying and bad at sarcasm. Hence, you’re not worth blocking. But you’re certainly also not worth talking to.
Not really making fun of it, just genuinely curious. Are people still installing Adblock Plus? It has had an Acceptable Ads Committee for over a decade now. What were people using if not that?
I stopped using that when it stopped working. Is there a working version? I thought they got kiked off the app store for “interfering with internet data” or something.
More like most people don’t have the patience to learn the difference between uBlock and UBlock Origin. Also, a lot of people just install Ad Block because they you tell them to install a ad blocker, they just install the one called AdBlock.
Adblock plus was the standard for so long until maybe 5 or so years ago when they were bought out or something and they were hinting at letting some ads in. I think only the very online people switched to uBlock Origin before Adblock Plus tanked itself. That is all from hazy memory but it wouldn’t surprise me that normies got recommended Adblock Plus and used it until it didn’t work right only to seek out better options now that youtube is serving them so many ads.
The article mentions people moving from Chrome to Edge to try and get around this. With how ubiquitous Chromium is as an engine behind a wide range of browsers, it seems most people won’t actually move away from a browser that Google has some control over.
Ironically that is how you get better content. If you don’t engage and let the algorithm find you content, you’re going to get generic crap. Unfortunately. You can use logged-in Youtube to find stuff and NewPipe to watch it.
I have to agree with this. As much as we all hate the algorithm because it’s what brings us those thumbnails and annoying begging from creators it actually works. It just takes time to find some good people. Though I wouldn’t mind a post on lemmy with everyone sharing their favorites.
Steve Mould, Smarter Every Day, Real Engineering, Vsauce, NightHawkInLight, NileRed, How to Make Everything
Food
Joshua Weissman, Guga Foods, Sous Vide Everything, Andy Cooks, Uncle Haji’s Kitchen, Tasting History with Max Miller, Babish Culinary Universe, Yueng Man Cooking
Chill
Serpa Design, MD Fish Tanks, Ben’s Worx, NileBlue, ClickSpring, The Samurai Carpenter, Kris Harbour, Just Alex, Ly Thi Ca, Hoàng Huong, Primitive Skills (these last 3 are silent channels from Vietnam. I’ve linked them since these are hard to search for in a sea of that type of content)
Entertainment
mrnigelng, Will Stelter, Thack Ironworks, shurap, Frog Leap Studios, Andrew Huang, Rob Scallon, look mum no computer
Well I for one love Both Hank and John Green, Smarter Everyday, Lock Picking Lawyer, Nilered, Jdraper, Kyle Hill, Electroboom, Project Farm, Dr Gloucomflecken, Casual Geographic, Villain Support, Tested, Tom Scott, Frog Leap Studios, Natural Habitat Shorts, Oxventure, Kerzgeszagt, and Glen and Friends Cooking to name a few.
Friendlyjordies (main and podcast), Hello Future Me, Louis Rossman, Tom Nicholas, Abroad in Japan, Crunchycat, James Tullos, stephen tries, sidemen, rachel and jun, jun’s kitchen, healthygamergg are a bunch off my watch later list.
what are you interested in? everytime I dip my toe into a new interest I’m always blown away by the sheer volume and quality available on YouTube. right now I’m using it to supplement duolingo to help learn a new language, something I never tried before
If you watch the news and one movie you also reach 3 hours.
I watch 30 min in the morning while getting ready (usually late night shows from the previous day - mostly listening), 30 minutes to an hour during lunch (LTT, MKBHD, other tech channels or maybe a car review) and a longer session in the evening when the kids are in bed (documentaries or chess tutorials, or programming content, or something longer/more in depth where I can dedicate my full attention).
Meanwhile, Youtube engineers and uBlock Origin volunteers are in a war of attrition, updating both the website (youtube, to block ublock) and uBlock Origin (the ad blocker, to unvlock the ublock blocker) multiple times a day every day
Oh, of course not. But uBlock Origin and pihole aren’t going anywhere. Hell, they’d probably have to get legislation to slow it down, but good luck fighting that battle. Hollywood’s war against piracy is a good comparison.
I’m scared that that’s the endgame here. By educating people about ad blockers, they might be purposely tanking their business model so they can cry to the government to ban ad blockers to save them.
Not even, they’ve already tried to make the case of Anti-adblock bypass violating DMCA and it hasn’t gone anywhere. Unlike piracy where it can and is claimed as a violation of copyright law.
Reminds me of the IM wars back in the latter 90s / early 00s. At one point, briefly, AIM and Trillian were pushing updates to negate each other every few hours.
My ad blocker was working so well I didn’t even realize I had it installed and blocking ads on YouTube. I don’t mind watching a few ads as long as it doesn’t get out of hand.
I actually used to have all ad blockers turned off for YouTube because I wanted to support all my favorite creators on there. But then YouTube took away the daily suggestions because I don’t let it track my history. So I said “fuck it” and turned all the adblockers back on.
Now I just support the creators I care to via Nebula and their various Patreons.
took away the daily suggestions because I don’t let it track my history
the funny thing is, if you go to a non logged in session, the suggestion page works fine. It was such an arbitratry grab for the user to consent to them collecting your data. I just bookmarked the subscriptions page and only go there now
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.
That’s the thing, even if 95% of users currently using ad blockers block ads anyway or leave the service, YouTube still wins big.
They aren’t worried at all about alienating users from which they can’t extract ad revenue. Those on the margin that turn off ad blockers or subscribe to a paid plan are the target, not everyone else.
This doesn’t make sense because they have the monopoly on video now. By monetizing a bit they are creating a a huge demand for a competitor, risking their monopoly.
I want to believe that you are right - but don’t think you are. I wanted to switch over to rumble. But, except two, none of the creators i regularly watch are there. Fine, let’s try Odysee: geoblocking my location atm.
The only reason, why i use other platforms is Grayjay. It aggregates content from wherever you want and creates one feed. If it wasn’t for this app, i’d probably only use YT with better adblocks.
Same problem, except it is even more niche. Does not really make sense as a YT stand-in. Tied into a collected feed it makes sense, which luckily is enabled by apps like Grayjay.
Part of the value of a service is the size of it’s user base, not just the size of the monetized user base. Right now, Youtube is just about the only game in town, but if half their users just Leave, even if it was the half that used effective ad blockers, the value of the site as a whole, for creators and advertisers both, is diminished.
That’s true to all extent, but the more present online folks do end up driving behaviors about regular users as well. There was a tube when even having an ad blocker at all was a “power user” thing, now everyone does it. If they fail to accommodate the people that will put energy into circumventing ads then they will just find and normalize a new work around.
It’s similar to content piracy. You will never get rid of piracy altogether, but if you make content accessible and affordable you can mitigate how common it is.
For YouTube, they need to balance how intrusive the ads are against how easy it is to get around them.
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