YouTube is running an experiment asking some users to disable their ad blockers or pay for a premium subscription, or they will not be allowed to watch videos.
  • confusedwiseman@beehaw.orgEnglish
    74·
    2 years ago

    It seems like we’ve all lost the plot. We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring. Try browsing for a day on a plain-no-extension browser. If you use other web enhancement tools kill those too. Straight-up internet is cancer, especially on mobile.

    It’s impossible to read a 250-word article without being interrupted 5-7 times. Two of those interruptions are likely a full page overlay with give me your email, and are you sure you don’t want to subscribe, just give me your credit card number.

    Then there are auto-play videos on the side, some with audio on by default. I mean I came here to read something, so of course we have things flashing and moving and making noise, it’s the most conducive environment for thought, right?

    Ad blockers and script blocking are essentially a hazmat suit that allows us to withstand a hostile environment. Remember when we said myspace pages with audio and [marching-ants] borders was a bad UX? At least we didn’t have overlays back then.

    Go back to basics and consider what makes a good vs bad internet experience. The reality sounds like someone with a minor case of severe brain damage. I think we’ve just become unashamed of greed as a society. It’s clearly all just about money.

    Those annoying customers/users generate content and we have to put up with them so we can monetize it. *Sadly, It’s unclear if I’m talking about youtube, reddit, or nearly any other site.

    Le sigh.

  • dog@yiffit.netEnglish
    70·
    2 years ago

    oh look, another web service who wants to strangle its users for money and ad views :D when’s a peertube instance going to get some big creators on it supported by viewers? that’ll do it, i bet

    • poop@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      33·
      2 years ago

      Seems unlikely that a creator would jump ship from a platform that pays them to a platform that doesn’t. That being said, lots of creators also constantly complain about demonetization, so maybe they’ll start to get fed up and move to purely in-video sponsorship things. Seems most likely from a creator that’s already on a platform like nebula

      • SmugBedBug@lemmy.iswhereits.atEnglish
        7·
        2 years ago

        Most big youtubers have in-video ads now anyways. I’m not sure what the ratio of their revenue comes from youtube ads vs in-video ads, but youtube seems pretty trigger happy about demonetizing videos. Sometimes entire channels. If someone gets the majority of their revenue from other sources than youtube ads, I could see them migrating to something like peertube.

        • Wintermute@lemmy.villa-straylight.socialEnglish
          12·
          2 years ago

          Even with in-video ads, those must be paid based on historical (or actual?) view counts right? No matter how big you are, there’s no way you’re going to maintain view counts when switching away from YouTube.

          • poop@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            You’re allowed to upload the same .mp4 file to multiple websites. There’s absolutely no reason why a creator that isn’t getting YouTube ad money couldn’t upload to YouTube and PeerTube at the same time. Presumably if they’re getting YouTube monetization, they have some kind of exclusivity agreement.

      • dog@yiffit.netEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        you’re definitely right on most points. but, to your point, if a creator was on a federated instance of peertube then they don’t have to worry about the wishy-washy, everchanging rules of youtube :3

        • poop@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          if it’s not free what’s the benefit of using PeerTube? You’re basically describing nebula

    • Osayidan@social.vmdk.caEnglish
      16·
      2 years ago

      Hopefully once the issue of the ridiculous amount of resources needed for such a service is resolved. This is why we don’t have any viable youtube alternative yet, especially one that isn’t a corporate pile of junk. Once you get to a certain size if you don’t rake in the cash you shut down. So hopefully peer to peer saves the day.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
        13·
        2 years ago

        yup, even youtube isn’t profitable. Video remains one of the largest sinks of resources. A 4K movie is stored on a disc of about 66GB, so about 30GB per hour of 4k video. Even with peertube it’d take the best hobbyists to run even a modest server for a few streamers. We’re talking people with PB level of storage capacities now with fiber lines to their house to truly host peertube alternatives, and if we’re talking cloud we’re talking thousands per month.

        It’s not impossible, I don’t want to get people down, but that’s the major hurdle

        • AK1@lemmy.oneEnglish
          4·
          2 years ago

          Every video maker should host his own peertube instance with only 1 user.

          • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
            3·
            2 years ago

            yeah but then we get a youtube esque site of nerds who love hoarding hard drives and setting up selfhosted services. Which is great, I did that, but the vast majority of youtubers don’t have the knowledge/don’t want to set that up

        • Xuerian@beehaw.orgEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          Which makes me wonder - was the push for 60fps across the platform a move to make competition harder?

          I’m not aware of anyone that was using it as a leg up on them.

        • pootriarch@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          this is true. having said that - i follow a peertube-based french outfit called blast (can’t speak french, just look at the pictures). if i go to a different site (peertube.stream, liberta.vip) and look at a video, the streams are coming off video.blast-info.fr.

          there’s no question video is a huge resource suck, and that nobody would want to host a lot of other people’s videos. i just wonder, if the model is federated indexes but owner-hosted video, i wonder if there’s a use case that can work at scale.

          • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            I do like the idea of having individuals host their own channels, but the bar for entry needs to become incredibly simple. Granted kids can spin up minecraft servers now, so at least that easy for online hosting. Self hosting is a bit more arduous for sure, but if people can host their own plex servers then I’d expect most video creators to be able to run peer tube - when it gets that easy.

      • dog@yiffit.netEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        hopefully 💙 video codecs have gotten pretty good, and maybe they’ll get even better to where, like you’re saying, we don’t have to shovel so many resources into hosting something like a peertube. crossing fingers 🤞

    • withersailor@aussie.zoneEnglish
      15·
      2 years ago

      Unfortunately most people post to YouTube. They might not know about Peertube. So Peertube just doesn’t have the content.

          • notfromhere@lemmy.oneEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            From the documentation:

            A PeerTube instance can mirror other PeerTube videos to improve bandwidth use.

            The instance administrator can choose between multiple redundancy strategies (cache trending videos or recently uploaded videos etc.), set their maximum size and the minimum duplication lifetime. Then, they choose the instances they want to cache in Manage follows -> Following admin table.

            Videos are kept in the cache for at least min_lifetime, and then evicted when the cache is full.

    • tj111@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
      10·
      2 years ago

      I subscribe to nebula for this reason, directly support creators and it’s very reasonably priced.

      • mustyOrange@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Did they ever get around to implementing playlists and autoplay of some sort? I really wanted to get into that service, but the absence of those two things just killed it for me

      • pbkoden@midwest.socialEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        I’ve found Nebula to be great for a few creators I follow, but the amount of content isn’t high enough to wean me off of YouTube completely.

    • Marud@lemmy.marud.frEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      Peertube will unfortunately never be an answer because of the lack of way for creators to get paid for watchtime

    • loops@beehaw.orgEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      I’ve had good experiences with Odysee. Not as much content yet, and it’s missing DIY videos, but I don’t see problems yet.

    • wade@fedia.io
      3·
      2 years ago

      I’m confused about this take. YouTube clearly has hosting costs and also pays creators. That money has to come from somewhere. They offer two options, ads or subscription. You could argue that the number of ads is too many or the cost of the subscription is too high, but demanding a service be free just because it’s technologically possible to block ads seems weird.

    • SmugBedBug@lemmy.iswhereits.atEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      How is peertube in terms of hosting costs? I would assume much higher than lemmy or mastodon considering it’s all video content.

      • dog@yiffit.netEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        hosting cost for peertube would probably be astronomical since you’re likely hosting the videos yourself :/ unless there is some sort of federation that kind of works like bittorrent. that would be awesome

        • patatahooligan@beehaw.orgEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Peertube is federated. It seems to work similarly to Lemmy. I went on a random instance and clicked “discover” and noticed that I see videos from other instances. So at least the hosting cost is distributed across instances.

          The other issue then is the bandwidth. Peertube uses p2p among viewers, so if there are many viewers at the same time they can take a significant load off from the server. Instances can also cache each other’s videos to split the bandwidth cost between them.

          I think these design decisions means that it is possibly viable, though it is definitely way more expensive than non-video federated communities.

  • jamesravey@lemmy.nopro.beEnglish
    55·
    2 years ago

    Wow the enshittification is at full throttle across silicon valley! Guess those investors gotta get those returns now that interest rates are spiking!

    • pizzaboi@lemm.eeEnglish
      13·
      2 years ago

      I have to imagine many of these investors also have money in areas whose prices have skyrocketed due to “inflation.” They’ve seen the profits other industries are getting away with and now big tech feels the need to do the same. These companies are supposed to be the future, after all… How will it look if big oil is more profitable than mainstream digital platforms? To investors, it looks bad.

      Sadly, when your ability to generate profit relies on using your users (or the developers and mods that run your platform cough Reddit) like cheap labor, rather than providing better product at reasonable prices, digital platforms suffer in usability or features. It’s kind of a lose lose for anyone that actually cares, because so far the market hasn’t self-corrected.

  • Grizzzlay@beehaw.orgEnglish
    45·
    2 years ago

    I imagine folks wouldn’t have a problem with this if the ads weren’t already so aggressive. Numerous ads before and during the content break it up too much. And if the content is extremely short form, it completely ruins the experience.

    The number of ads and their length should be proportional to the length of the video. And any creator doing built-in ads should also not be able to inject a bunch of other ads. Burying content is an easy way to get avoided.

    Print media had limits for advertisements, heck, in magazines they were premium real estate for the finest graphic designers to put together incredible imagery to get your attention. This level of care (not necessarily images or what have you) has yet to translate to the web.

    • Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.orgEnglish
      12·
      2 years ago

      Unrelated, online ads seem to go out of their way to insist that there’s nothing to be learned from print ad stacks. Which is a shame, because I’ve personally placed an irregular shape ad in the middle of a broadsheet page and placed stories around it in the manner least like to confuse readers. Guess what the verdict was back then?

    • Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.orgEnglish
      7·
      2 years ago

      Are you saying your threshold for ads and empty foreshadowing hype is somehow under 99%? I sure do love me an ad-blocked, sponsor-blocked video that still somehow manages to waste 10 minutes to learn “no” or “I don’t know, either.”

      • GhostMagician@beehaw.orgEnglish
        9·
        2 years ago

        That’s when the skip to highlight option comes in handy. And if a video doesn’t have it I end up contributing so next person can save time.

    • lixus98@beehaw.orgEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      It makes the servive inconvenient and annoying to use. I just want to watch the video, not watch a 60s ad that us totally irrelevant to me.

  • axtualdave@lemmy.worldEnglish
    38·
    2 years ago

    I have had this in my ublock origin filters for quite some time. Seems to do the trick:

    !www.youtube.com
##.ytp-ce-element
    • dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de
      1·
      1 year ago

      Doesn’t work anymore. Youtube now replaces the whole video player with the following message:

      Ad blockers violate YouTube’s Terms of Service

      • It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Video playback is blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled.
      • Ads allow YouTube to be used by billions worldwide.
      • You can go ad-free with YouTube Premium, and creators can still get paid from your subscription.
    • PhatInferno@midwest.socialEnglish
      7·
      2 years ago

      Suggestions?

      My issue is that the content creators i watch probably arnt going to leave… and im sure ad blocks will find a way around it after a month or so

        • jojo@feddit.deEnglish
          5·
          2 years ago

          They already started to fight the project last week, Google legal contacted the project owners

          • fomo_erotic@wallstreets.betEnglish
            8·
            2 years ago

            I saw the reply they had. Interesting point about “We don’t use your API so we didn’t agree to the TOS of your API. Also there is no ‘we’, since we don’t host invictus; simply develop it as a product”

      • artaxadepressedhorse@lemmyngs.socialEnglish
        8·
        2 years ago

        PeerTube seems to be the federated (decentralized) option (similar to this). Content obv is entirely different, but maybe that’s actually a good thing. Think of it as a clean slate - a fresh canvas. tbh YouTube’s content has really sucked the past few years, and mother of bog do you see the stuff that trends nowadays when you’re signed out? It’s basically become cable tv. I started using youtube bc I hated cable tv.

      • petrescatraian@libranet.de
        6·
        2 years ago

        @PhatInferno There’s Peertube here in the fediverse. But yea, every platform will need creators which will not easily switch. Some even have youtube membership enabled on their channels, which makes it kinda impossible (without being deprived of revenue).

        @kool_newt

        • Bardak@lemmy.ca
          0·
          2 years ago

          Unfortunately I don’t know of any other platform that would pay creators like YouTube does which is half the reason the YouTube keeps creators.

          I hate the crypto bros as much as but I wonder if there is a way to set up a federated video sharing network that has a $5 monthly fee and distribute it over the creators you watcher over the month.

          • petrescatraian@libranet.de
            1·
            2 years ago

            @Bardak if you post a video on a topic that YouTube deems problematic then it doesn’t pay you either (i.e. the demonetize that video).

            Many youtubers are on platforms that accept donations tho (like Patreon), so for some, the monetization isn’t that much of an issue.

      • VirtualBriefcase@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        I usually follow creators through RSS, so I mix and match platforms avoiding YouTube for any creator that cross posts. A lot cross post to Odyssey though so if you wanted to have like one app in addition to YT that’d probably be the way to go, or at least worth checking out.

  • mog77a@beehaw.orgEnglish
    31·
    2 years ago

    Yep, got selected for this test and I thought my network went down.

    Had to do nearly 30 mins of debugging until I realized it was youtube actively withholding JUST the video. Took some effort but managed to get them to send the videos again after resetting a bunch of things.

    I refuse to view ads and will go to the ends of the earth to make that happen.

    Paying is most certainly an option, but only when that becomes the ONLY option.

    I’ve been using an adblocker since ads starting becoming more intrusive and the internet has progressed so much that it’s become generally unusable without one. I remember when a mobile ad popped up on my phone and it straight up startled me.

  • gigachad@feddit.deEnglish
    28·
    2 years ago

    We’ll find a way around it, if not go to hell YT. Apart from posters in the real world, I am living a 100% ad-free life and I’m super happy about it.

    • IronTwo@beehaw.orgEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      Okay but I don’t understand. Isn’t paying to remove ads a fair deal? I don’t know, I pay for YouTube Premium and I’m kinda happy about it. The price seems fair; you get no ads, you get to download stuff, enables picture-in-picture and background playback. YouTube has been my main source of entertainment for the last couple of years so it’s the only subscription I have alongside Spotify.

      • lemmein@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        2 years ago

        Yeah until they start showing ads for Premium as well. You know it’s going to happen eventually

      • jws_shadotak@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        2 years ago

        The problem isn’t so much that there are ads. The problem is also what kind of ads they’re playing. YouTube has been known to play inappropriate ads without vetting them - think of those awful mobile game ads with a heavy sexual tone.

        This stuff also seems to explicitly target videos that kids might watch.

      • Jeremy [Iowa]@midwest.socialEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        Isn’t paying to remove ads a fair deal?

        If the price were reasonable, community practices especially regarding monetization and moderation were acceptable, telemetry-tracking javascript minimal, etc. then sure.

        But… we’re not there.

      • gigachad@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Absolutely, you are free to make every kind of contract if you like. Personally, I am not very invested in youTube, I don’t watch any streamers or youTubers, it’s just a video hosting platform for me. I am boycotting Google wherever I can, it is a privacy desaster and dystopia-like enterprise. NewPipe has all the ‘features’ as well, if it breaks I just let YouTube go…

  • chillybones@beehaw.orgEnglish
    28·
    2 years ago

    The comments in here are interesting to me. Ads and Premium are a way for your favorite content creators to get paid for the content that they produce. I’ve listened to a number of creators talk about the YouTube revenue sharing model and most of them (LTT and Hank Green) says that YouTube is actually really fair with how they share ad revenue and how Premium is actually a good alternative that meets the needs of the platform, users, and creators. And YouTube, the platform, DOES need to get paid as well otherwise your videos can’t get to you.

    I also hate ads, like a lot, and I do whatever I can to get them off of my screen because I think they are intrusive and we have proof of how they enable tracking across the internet at large. However, for those platforms that I find extreme value in (YouTube being the example here) I see how and why ads/Premium pump value into their system. If your favorite content creator isn’t getting paid for their content, they won’t be able to sustain it long term.

    One last thought about video streaming and the content we all love that is hosted by YouTube: if we were to say that we would rather our money go directly to our favorite content creators, we would end up with a very fragmented ecosystem akin to the Streaming Service MESS we are in with TV/Movies. I would LOVE to pay LTT directly through Floatplane, but then where would I be with being able to watch other content creators?

  • Mewio@beehaw.orgEnglish
    27·
    2 years ago

    I wouldn’t mind ads if,

    1. They didn’t repeat the same 3 ads every few minutes on high ad videos (No It, I will not take it >:c)
    2. Moderated and removed obvious scam ads
    3. Remove ads that are disgusting or clearly inappropriate (I have seen some stuff that could be categorized as porn in youtube ads and no I do not allow them to feed me ads based on my interests)
    4. If ads were still not being actively being used to spread malware/viruses (not sure if this happens on YouTube at all but I would rather be safe then sorry)
    • loops@beehaw.orgEnglish
      24·
      2 years ago

      The largest issue for me is that I’ve never watched an ad and thought “I need that”. It’s just a huge waste of time that I find disrespectful and distasteful.

      That being said I haven’t watched and ad in years. A bit less then a decade now, actually.

      • nhgeek@beehaw.orgEnglish
        8·
        2 years ago

        Advertising clearly does work on the whole or who would companies spend so much gold on it? Advertising shits in your head. It subtly influences consumers and advertisers have become quite sophisticated about it. There is a glut of advertising space available now so we see awful and ineffective ads but be assured a lot of the bigger players know what they are doing. This is why I block all ads. Well for that reason plus they are annoying as hell.

      • mobyduck648@beehaw.orgEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        To be fair the aim of ads generally isn’t to make you go ‘oh now I’ll go and buy that’, it’s more about unconsciously planting the idea that $product exists so when you actually do want to buy something you buy that brand. It’s why ‘show me as many as you like, ads don’t work on me’ is complete rubbish and the only real solution is blocking them entirely on a personal level and on a social level laws that restrict where and when they may be shown.

        A particularly egregious example of psychologically manipulative advertising would be ‘Joe Camel’ who was nominally just a fun mascot but in reality existed to advertise cigarettes to children so they’d buy Camels when they were old enough. Given the prevalence of really awful advertising in the present day Big Tech really does deserve the increasing comparisons with Big Tobacco I think.

      • mrcory@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        To be fair, even though ads didn’t make you want to buy anything, the tax write-off was the same.

    • nackmack@plesiosaur.net
      14·
      2 years ago

      @Mewio @talos This, and
      - do not show me ads for praegeru / hey you’re queer, you should stop being queer

      which was absolutely a thing that was happening to me before I was blocking ads on yt

    • raphael@lemmy.mira.pmEnglish
      9·
      2 years ago

      And it would be nice if ads would not be played with an insane volume. Every time one sneaks by my uBlock it blasts my ears out.

    • ursakhiin@beehaw.orgEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      I was late to the vanced game because I was very willing to put up with the ads for a long while. But yeah, the number of commercial breaks in a 10 minute video became insane.

      • mariom@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        2 years ago

        This, and this is why few years ago I didn’t care about yt ads on my TV. I had like 3-4 ads, 15 sec each for an hour of content, ads only between videos, not in the middle.

        However, suddenly there was 3-4 ads before each video, and many times the ads started to be longer than videos.It feels like they are trying to push me into subscribing to paid YouTube by making the free version unusable without an adblock. And now they are even trying to make me disable my adblock?

  • wpuckering@lm.williampuckering.comEnglish
    26·
    2 years ago

    I just stood up a selfhosted Invidious instance the other day, and I replaced YouTube ReVanced with Clipious (an Invidious client for Android) on my phone. No ads, SponsorBlock built-in, no need for a YouTube/Google account to create subscriptions, playlists, etc. And it’s highly performant since I run it behind a reverse proxy with some custom caching configuration for things like thumbnail images, static assets, etc.

    Clipious can also be installed on an Android TV (has an actual Android TV interface). I’m going to end up installing it on mine, but I’m also using SmartTubeNext at the moment, which does require a YouTube/Google account for subscriptions, playlists, etc, but does have no ads, built-in SponsorBlock, and a slew of other great features. I’ll be keeping both around, since I do sometimes like to cast to my TV, and SmartTubeNext allows for that (Clipious does not, at least at this time).

    Unless YouTube somehow starts dynamically splicing in ads as part of the actual video stream, there’s always going to be a way to block ads, unless they do something pretty elaborate. But that’s probably not worth the effort on their end to go that far, since the vast, vast majority of people won’t know what to do to get around that, nor will they probably care enough to try. But I think it’s clear that DNS blocking using services such as AdGuard Home, PiHole, etc, are going to become less effective over time.

      • wpuckering@lm.williampuckering.comEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        The main advantage to me is that I can work with Invidious as a backend, and whatever I configure there will reflect in Clipious as a client. So as I subscribe to new channels in Invidious, add or update playlists, etc, Clipious will reflect these changes accordingly. Advantages of selfhosting Invidious that indirectly benefit Clipious are of course built-in adblocking by virtue of how Invidious works, SponsorBlock support, and the ability to cache static assets, such as video thumbnails for faster load times, using a reverse proxy (Nginx is what I use). There’s a lot more we could dive into beyond this, such as no Google account requirement (for enhanced privacy).

        One area where the SmartTubeNext and YouTube ReVanced combo has the advantage is the convenience of being able to cast from your handheld device to your TV. Clipious/Invidious has no casting ability. But I can totally live without that.

    • upliftedduck@feddit.nlEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      undefined> ehind a reverse proxy with some custom caching configuration for things like thumbnail images, static assets, etc.

      Really curious what those nginx settings are, Clipious on my phone only shows broken thumbnails from my invidious instance

      • wpuckering@lm.williampuckering.comEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        I have all my Nginx files separated and using include statements for organization, so I can’t quickly and easily post an example, but a good place to start looking is at the various proxy_cache directives.

  • HisNoodlyServant@beehaw.orgEnglish
    25·
    2 years ago

    I would rather not watch Youtube again then be exposed to terrible ads. I accidentally went on Youtube on Chrome and one of the ads was a straight up scam. $7.54 Switch! Like maybe if they had humans vet ads like you used to do maybe I would have less of a problem with it.

    • timba@beehaw.orgEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      Lol I know exactly the company you’re talking about. I like their ads for $1 Lenovo headphones

    • VerPoilu@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      It’s funny when your first sentence is taken literally. You would rather stop watching YouTube and then, be exposed to terrible ads.

      it’s “than”, not “then”. To know which one to use, prononce it like if it rhymes with “ban” - instead of “hen” - in your head, you’ll know which one is correct