Whelp, here we go again
Mmmm, gotta love that enshittification strategy every big tech company is working on right now.
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And what are the consequences of “strikes”? Will you delete my Google account, including my email, and also screw up my Android phone and my kids Chromebook?
It’s scary to realize that Google has me by the balls here. They can screw me in so many ways, and screw my family members as well. I’d rather have my bank credentials stolen than my email credentials, at least I can get real customer service from the bank, I can even go to a physical location and speak face-to-face with someone who can help me. Google wont give me customer support, and my email account is the closest thing to an identity I have for most businesses I interact with.
It takes a lot of work to avoid Google. Yes, there are alternatives, but in D&D terms, avoiding Google is like a -2 to all stats for your entire life, and not something we can expect the general population to do.
All this shows the need for anti-trust enforcement. The same company is controlling too much. Bust 'em up!
Article suggests you simply get blocked from watching additional videos. But there’s no info on how that works- is it account based? IP based? Can I wipe my YouTube cookies to bypass a block?
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Moral of the story: create separate account for YouTube that has no high value services or data on it.
I’ve seen enough horror stories to know that’s not going to help. They can, and do, associate multiple accounts to same users. Be it by cookies, IP addresses, or dark magic, the end result is the same - they can upend your entire digital life if they want to. r/degoogle better hurry up and migrate to Lemmy.
I’d argue the bigger moral is that you should always own your online identity. You should buy your own domain (
@yourname.xyzor something like that) and make your email on that. So if Google bans you, you just switch email providers and keep your address.I’ve been using @fixnum.org and since a few years the alias @wim.land to do exactly this, but that’s just email.
My app purchases, photo storage, and YouTube account are all entangled in this. I could decouple from Google, but it would be very painful.
Spend a weekend degoogling your stuff. There are alternatives for everything now. No regrets
Another executive-driven decision by people who clearly don’t use their own product (kinda impressive really when it’s YT).
I can’t help wonder if they saw an uptick in adblocking as a result of their absurd increases in ad-time recently and somehow thought this was a reasonable solution.
8-10 unskippable ads before a video? Holy shit. That’s ludicrous.
It really is hard to fathom how that got through any internal discussion.
Its not that hard to fathom when you have worked with these types of people.
All it was was a numbers meeting, no User Experience folks in the room. They said how much revenue they would increase quarter over quarter, and how much engagement it would drive. Everyone claps, the meeting ends they move forward with the next terrible design decision. Companies no longer take focus group testing seriously for anything.
Focus groups and qualitative data are so last season. It’s all Business “Intelligence” -driven bullshit nominally based on poorly defined and even more poorly understood metrics (excuse me, “KPIs”)
I rarely use YouTube, but my nephew (he’s two) was over the other day and we put on some cartoons for him that were in YouTube since my wife and I don’t have Disney plus. I couldn’t BELIEVE how many ads it showed. One five-minute merry melodies cartoon had FOUR SEPARATE ad breaks, the third and fourth of which were both 3+ minutes long if you weren’t paying attention to skip.
Wtf?! Not even shit ass normal broadcast television has that many commercials.
Feels like every year corporations rely on the naivety of youth in an attempt to push more and more egregious shit.
Exactly right they’re normalizing ads in everything. They’re indoctrinating the youth, who don’t know any better or differently, into just accepting/expecting that all content in all forms comes with ads, and you can’t watch any of it without signing in so they can track you and sell your data.
Time to use an adblock blocker blocker extension.
I think that would be NoScript.
NoScript would sadly leave you with NoVideo.
Twitch couldn’t beat my adblocking, it just taught me how to find and use custom scripts. Shoot your shot YT, I haven’t installed a script for your website yet but now Im gonna have too. Congrats the number of ads im gonna see from you is about to go down.
Cat and mouse game. May get me to watch a couple, but I’ll someone will have a way around it within a week.
What’s your Twitch solution? Blocking Twitch is considerably more difficult than YouTube, every solution I’ve found breaks after a month or so. Best I can get is have it display a blank screen while ads play, but I still have to wait it out, which isn’t ideal.
pixeltris on github, a search for pixeltris should get you there first result. Everything you need is on that page, including how to instal the script to ublock, im using the vid swap script and TTLOL pro. It’s not perfect but the ads are gone.
What’s with every big tech company trying to destroy their userbase this year?
Interest rates hikes stopped the free money, so companies need profit.
I’d argue they don’t need $500 million when they already make $400 million, but I’m just a lowly peasant.
tl;dr: capitalism
they think they have us sufficiently cornered on centralized sites, they may be right.
Especially with video. Reddit was easy-ish to leave – I haven’t left entirely – since it’s just a link aggregator and glorified forums. That’s nothing new to the Internet. And Twitter was easy to replace with Mastodon.
But hosting video? That’s a tough one to replicate. I know there are some other platforms out there, but I can’t imagine any could really take on YouTube, due to space and bandwidth considerations.
So yeah, I think YouTube has us all by the balls. And they know it.
I’m reasonably certain it’s because venture capitalists are tightening their grip and demanding to see return on their investments now that interest rates are up. That’s why it’s all at the same time, because the same VCs invested in all of the big tech companies, and are demaninding all of them at once pay up.
The problem is that the way our economy works is fundamentally incompatible with the way most people want the internet to work. Most people want the internet to be full of free websites they can access whenever they want, with minimal advertisement.
But our economy requires companies make money. The people who own and work at those companies need money to pay their bills. And the easiest way for companies in the late 2000s and early 2010s to get the money they needed to run long-term was to get money given to them by venture capitalists. It was either that, or change to a subscription model, and they rightly assumed that most of their users wouldn’t be willing to pay for Facebook, or Twitter, or Google. So they took loans from venture capitalists, and the VCs were happy to give them out with the promise of future returns.
Interest rates were low for the last decade, so it was easy for these big tech companies to pay their VC daddies and also make enough money to keep the lights on and make a little profit. But the pandemic caused interest rates to finally increase (they should have a long time ago) and now those VC daddies need more money to stay happy, and all of these companies at once need to produce it. Suddenly, the fact that none of them are actually profitable is a serious issue.
Online services like YouTube or Reddit basically have 3 ways to make money. They can charge a subscription, they can have advertisers pay them for space, and they can sell user data. Right now there is an insane glut of user data, so option 3 makes the least money because there’s too much supply. These services do offer subscriptions, but they have been free for over a decade- they know that users will leave en masse if they demand they all subscribe for monthly payments. Companies like Netflix and Hulu started as subscription services, so increasing their prices stings less than implementing them in the first place.
For reddit and YouTube, that really leaves advertisement as the main revenue stream, and that requires a LOT of advertisement. Advertisers used to get 2-4 minute ad breaks on cable television that they could strictly control- they want to be able to control where their ads appear now, too, and also want longer slots. But users are used to short ads. Immediately adding 2 minute ad breaks for every 8-10 minutes of content will also make users leave in droves. So they have to maximize advertisement revenue without increasing the length or frequency of ads too dramatically.
Tl;Dr venture capitalist daddies are demanding to get paid and none of these companies are actually profitable enough to do it.
They will never win. They will only lose.
So there are YouTube front ends for browser experience, but has anyone tried freetube from this guide?
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/frontends/
I’ve really liked the newpipe x Sponsorblock experience on my Android phone with having a subscription list, saves, playlists all locally with no YouTube account and ability to export and import the data of Playlists etc.
Freetube sounds like newpipe for desktop and has sponsorblock as an option too. Anyone use it or used it and have an thoughts on it?
I exclusively use Freetube for my Youtube needs. It is great when it works. Sometimes you have to find the right Invidious instance for it to work properly. A few times videos play at 720p. I have also noticed search failing for specific terms sometimes - for example “machine learning”. I don’t know if it is a bug or blacklisted words/phrases.
These are a few reality checks highlighting it isn’t a perfect experience all the time, but I will be damned if go back to a vanilla Youtube interface after having gotten used to Invidious and then Peertube.
The upsides are less fluff that is recommended, you control your own feed with the videos from the channels you subscribe to, no ads, sponsorblock, and I guess more privacy.
Ad blocker detection is not new, and other publishers regularly ask viewers to disable ad blockers
“everyone else is treating their customers like garbage, so they don’y hold it against us”.
Yes, we can.
I didn’t block when you had 5 second ads. I didn’t block when you had 15 second ads. I started blocking when you’d play 2+ unskippable 15 second ads back-to-back. I didn’t mind sitting through an ad when I appreciate the service you offered. Now, you’re just being greedy, and I will go to great lengths to damage your bottom line as notably as I can.
Anyone hoping there will be a mass exodus from YouTube to other–maybe fediverse YouTube alternatives, reminiscent of the Reddit exodus?
Yes I hope, but I don’t see it happening. Creators will go where the masses are and where the money is.
Well, PeerTube exists, but IDK how good it actually is since basically no one uses it. I also think professional content creators aren’t going to like the Fediverse very much since there is significantly less money in it, but for hobbyists it could work. Of all the big social media platforms, video hosting/streaming is the hardest case to replace. It’ll be interesting though. I hear PeerTube works like torrents.
Video hosting is way too expensive and complex to be decentralised.
If they want me to stop blocking ads, they will need to get rid of ads like this. I get ads like this all the time and it’s completely inappropriate.
I don’t get ads like that too often, but the annoying thing for me is when the ad is 10x louder than the video itself.
There was this one add that had a gunshot sound then a really high pitched whistle.
They might have gotten in trouble as the whistle sound was eventually removed.
I´m sure the will be no false strikes at all. And even if, I´m sure they have a quick and easy appeal process in place, just like they have with copyright.
I’d be shocked if there was even one human on the other end of their appeal process.
Hot take: this sucks, but YouTube premium is legit. I wish more platforms offered a paid, ad-free way to interact. I don’t feel like figuring out a way around ads but I’m not about to start watching them. So I pay a few bucks a month.
Screw YouTube and Google. They aren’t getting a dime from me.
Why?
Feel free to peruse the plethora of reasons- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google
I don’t have any philosophical objection for paying to use a platform I enjoy, but in the case of youtube, they have been so deliberately detrimental to society in terms of platforming fascists that I feel bad about the prospect of paying them, even if much of the money is going to creators I do like who I’m actually watching
I don’t mind paying for services I use to avoid my data being the payment (like Kagi or Protonmail).
But I don’t like the idea of paying Google AND having my data farmed.
I’d be more willing to pay if it wasn’t $10/mo (annual cost) for a bunch of stuff I don’t care about. If they had a cheaper option that was just ad-free (maybe $5/mo?), I’d be down for that.
I also like what Kagi does with their duo plan for 2 users. Some kind of duo plan for YT premium would be nice as well, since I (and many others, I’m sure) don’t have a family of 6 people.
It’s simply a more honest model - you get content, they get money.
I would love to be able to pay for an ad-free experience for the various websites and services that I browse and use in a straightforward way instead of being leeched for ad-revenue
I wouldn’t doubt paying a hundred per month to have an ad-free life.
no ads on tv or sports, no billboards, no ads on buses. it would be awesome
But they still collect your data, so not that straight forward.
Also the student version is so cheap and there is so much more content than anything really. YouTube music is awesome too.
$12 a month is not a compelling price for the product. Especially when they’re still scraping every bit of data from your usage to try to sell you useless shit at every turn.
If it was closer to $3 a month - I may consider. But only as a way to support the creators I enjoy. I’d still have a juiced up ad blocker running to dodge their tracking though.
Someone in the Fediverse (I don’t know where and who) posted that you have to add the following filters into U-Block Origin. When done you shouldn’t see any anti-adblock-warnings :
youtube.com##+js(set,yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel,false) youtube.com##+js(set,Object.prototype.adBlocksFound,O) youtube.com##+js(set,ytplayer.config.aras.raw_player_response.adPlacements,[]) youtube.com##+js(set,Object.prototype.hasAllowedlnstreamAd,true)I might add that I haven’t experienced any anti-adblock-warnings yet, but I added these filters in advance. I might be worth a shot!
Nice! Im gonna throw these in. I havent had any warnings yet either but the experience of using the official YT site/app without some kind of blocker is horrendous.
Also or just use a front-end like as Piped (https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped) or Invidious (https://github.com/iv-org/invidious)
A handy externsion of FIrefox wil automatically redirects you, see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
I’ll stop blocked ads when I stop using their service. Not a minute sooner.
