YouTube’s argument is the same as Linus’ from LTT: if you watch a video without ads, you’re failing to comply with your side of the transaction, thus essentially pirating that content and stealing the revenue source.
Regardless if we agree or not with that statement, I’ll absolutely side with adblockers always for a deeper issue: it’s my screen, so I get the ultimate say on what content gets rendered. Quite literally. It’s my network, my cable, my screen, my graphics card, my web browser running JavaScript on my CPU - you do not, ever, get to overreach and decide what pixels show up or not. If I don’t want your obnoxious ad for an AI girlfriend to show up, there’s no moral argument to be had here.
EDIT: I think some of you are missing the point of this comment. There’s no reason to reply to me countering the argument in the first paragraph, as it is not my comment, in fact, I specifically mentioned how it’s YouTube (and Linus’) argument.
I was happy with an ad at the side of the video. Then they started popping up over my video, then they started appearing before my video, then they started appearing throughout my video. Companies shot themselves in the foot with online advertising, banner ads and such weren’t much of a problem, but once ads start disrupting the content we visit a site for, then we look to block them ads. More people blocking ads is less revenue, so they make the ads more aggressive… and the cycle continues.
And on a side note, Linus can fuck off.
That and the large ad networks even on sites like YouTube and Facebook literally are advertising scams. Every time I browse shorts on either I get ads that are obvious scams of the “There’s a new $6400 monthly health credit see if you qualify.” variety. On one of Meta’s apps I got an ad that was for male enhancement that was straight up clips of uncensored hardcore porn. Not just nudity but full on PIV sex. If they can’t even do the work to properly screen their ads they can get fucked, I’m blocking all of it that I can.
Yeah I don’t mind ads if they’re relevant - I scroll through insta reels from time to time, and am always getting ads about concerts I’m interested in, restaurants I haven’t tried and sales at shops I go to.
I honestly don’t mind so much, and if it’s not relevant to me I can scroll past without having to watch.
In order to get relevant ads you have to opt in to give them your data. Do you do that?
In order to use the platform in the EU, you either opt into personalised ads or pay a monthly subscription. So yes, I’m aware they’re using my data for the ads.
Google does as well, but they don’t seem to be able to offer me even relatively relevant ads based on my interests.
Non disruptive ads were meant to advertise.
Slightly annoying ads were meant to be seen more, since people just ignored banners by default.
Hidden ads (like an ad in an article which you really could tell it was an ad) were meant to increase the image of a company.
Disruptive ads like in YouTube or Spotify aren’t meant for advertising. They don’t really care about the advertising money, they want to force you to buy premium. The more annoying the ad is the higher the chances you pay 20€ a month for them to go away.
These days maybe, but disruptive ads started way before subscriptions became a thing.
Yeah, the pre-ads (unstoppable) and the massively increased loading times of the basic Youtube page makes it impossible to successfully Rickroll people
By that logic using a VCR to record television and fast-forwarding adverts is piracy.
And you see digital tv providers trying to implement fast forward blockers without chasing away their customers too much
Any time I fast forward and have to wait for a commercial that interrupted my fast forwarding, it’s an immediate cancelation of the service and I’m on the phone with customer support to try and get my couple of bucks for that month back.
Fuck your shitty service, I’m grabbing my hat and sword.
That argument was in fact made when VCRs first came out. I don’t remember how exactly it played out but in the end the courts here in the US said that VCRs were fine.
At least a few TV service DVRs stop you from skipping ads.
Some even from forwarding at all through the actual content…
The agreement isn’t that you watch the ad, but that you allow the ad to play on your device. That’s it. Whether or not you see it or hear it doesn’t matter; the “cost” for this type of content is a few moment of your device’s time, not your attention.
TBH I’m just so fucking tired of ads overstepping, back in the day there’s be a little banner on the side of a page advertising a truck or whatever, I’m sick of seeing like, enormous length ads.
One day I had a 3 hour minecraft let’s play uploaded as an ad, you think I should have to watch all of that youtube?
And the frequency is getting crazy.
What’s worse is you have no idea how bad we’ve been propagandized to think that there is any amount of ads that is “normal.”
The first time you are traveling through a European countryside and you don’t see any billboards on the side of roads, as Americans we are flabbergasted.
It’s something that’s become so normalized here in the US that being somewhere without them feels almost like time-traveling now.
Europeans don’t even realize how crazy it is here.
You can be driving to the middle of fucking east Texas and you’ll see LITERALLY hundreds of billboards along just a 50 mile stretch, advertising everything from truck-driving scam schools to religious propaganda condemning you for presumptively not believing how God‘s going to smite you for thinking women should have a say in how to be in control of their bodies or some shit.
I will never be convinced that any amount of ad blocking, pi-hole installation, DNS sanitizing, VPN protection, 3rd party app that taps quietly into shittier ad-riddled 1st party app content layers to siphon out only what I want to see, etc. are not me just merely using my very limited ability to fight back against an insane amount of their overreach.
I fucking hate billboards man. Get them OUT.
First off, I couldn’t care less about ad blocking and I’m not here to moralise what anyone else does.
I do however think your point is somewhat undermined by the fact YouTube have an ad free option. You can legitimately make the ads disappear and YouTube have no issue with it.
Google makes literal hundreds of billions of dollars every year. You really think I give a shit that they supposedly operate YouTube at a “loss?” - Something I might add I hugely suspect is bullshit book-cooking the likes of which we usually more often associate with Hollywood production companies looking to steal from the creatives on every project they greenlight.
I mean - I have a fucking cheap ass media server that delivers up a customized collection of videos anywhere I want at a quality higher than every other streaming platform that exists for less money per YEAR for even the cost of one of these “services” does… per MONTH.
I find the idea that any of these shit platforms should be costing anybody $170 goddamn dollars a year per service to be completely absurd.
I find it even more absurd, however, that there are actually people here of all platforms - not Facebook, not the shit stain that once was Twitter, not even the once hallowed “front page of the internet” Reddit, but the fediverse - whom will gleefully defend these stupid companies who could afford to let you watch everything they host for free just with the amount of ad revenue they rake in - let alone the data troves on me, you, your mom, your children and everyone else you know whether they use the platform or not that they gladly offer every shitmongering swindler.
What’s next?
You gonna tell me people are “thieves” for sneaking in an apple from their backyard tree, or hell, just a $0.10 bag of candy they bought from the local drugstore on the way to the theater instead of for $14.99 they are asked to fork over to the poor kid getting paid minimum wage to sweep up cumstains off the chairs at the top back row of the IMAX screen room after someone fucked their limited edition Dune 2 worm popcorn bucket?
Give me a fucking break.
Can’t believe you actually think these companies are sacrificing anything even remotely worth even considering let alone scolding others for mentioning their perfectly warranted distaste.
When YouTube Red first dropped they were putting hour-long pilot episodes of their shows as pre-roll ads. Now I notice ads on shorts are full of obvious scams related to “new monthly health credits”. Still better than getting an ad on Facebook reels that was uncensored hardcore porn.
I’m almost thinking of breaking down and buying YT premium because god, I watch a lot of youtube (I’d go so far as to say it’s my primary entertainment stream at times) but I’m already paying so fucking much for cable that I don’t even want.
Cable’s 80, Internet’s 80, somehow extra fees bring it up to nearly 200, and I can’t convince other members of my household (who watch a grand total of four fucking channels, MSNBC, Weather channel, sports, etc) that we should ditch cable, absolutely miserable.
Nvidia Sheild pro + smartTube Next. I see 0 ads. The app also bypasses the self promotion/hit the like and subscribe button crap as well.
You can put custom apps on the Shield pro? neat.
For Android on phones and tablets look up Revanced. You have to download the YouTube .apk from somewhere like apkmirror, then use the Revanced manager to apply patches to block ads and change functionality. Then you log into your account with their own version of MicroG/gmscore. It was briefly affected by the issue in the main post but was working again in a few hours.
For Android-based smart TVs and streaming devices there’s SmartTube (SmartTubeNext). Not sure how well they’ll do if YouTube goes cat and mouse though.
And for a wider variety of devices (including Apple TV and now WebOS) there’s also Kodi which has a YouTube addon although logging in with it is kind of a pain as you need to get API keys, etc.
& finally on a desktop browser uBlock Origin alone handles all the ads pretty well, and you can optionally add Sponsorblock.
Oh. And check out some of the over the top TV services and see if there are any cheap ones that might meet your needs to replace cable. Though the way the cable companies do their bundling even that might not save you much as the net might jump up to more than $80 standalone.
You know what, I actually agree with YouTube’s argument. Ad blocking is piracy. In fact, no, it’s worse than piracy. If I pirate a movie, Disney makes no money, but it costs them nothing at all. If I watch YouTube without an ad blocker, I’m depriving YouTube of its revenue source and I’m costing them money. Morally, ad blocking sits somewhere between piracy and actual theft.
The thing is? I don’t care. I ad block YouTube all the time and feel not a lick of guilt. The reason: Google brought this on themselves. I used to happily pay for YouTube Red. But they have continuously, both before and after that point, been actively hostile to the people actually producing the content they make. Their willingness to bow down to copyright trolls and complete inability to properly apply fair use. They extremely harsh policies on acceptable content, stopping people talking about sex education or mediaeval weaponry being able to reliably makes money.
And the straw that broke this camel’s back was when they changed the requirements to be in the Partner Program, locking out all the smaller creators from ever being able to make money on YouTube. I never considered myself a “creator”, but over the 5 years prior to that I occasionally uploaded stuff I was doing anyway. I had amassed almost $100 over those 5 years. Not an impressive amount, for sure, but having that taken away from me made me feel unwelcome. I don’t think I’ve uploaded anything public since, and I’ve been blocking ads on the site since then.
Even worse, not long after this change, they decided to start showing ads even on videos from non-partnered videos, so you can get ads on my videos even though I don’t see a single cent.
So fuck YouTube. Ad blocking is worse than piracy, and I say good.
Google: You’re pirating our content!
Us: Yeah, so what?
Google: You’re pirating our content!
Us: AND THE BEATINGS SHALL CONTINUE UNTIL YOU LEARN YOUR FUCKING LESSON.
My god… are you… me? Same exact shit. Created my YT account 14 years ago. Made some vids… some got some views… eventually I got a few dollars deposited like for 3 years. Probably totaled the same $100 you mentioned then boom. Shut down.
I’d agree with that logic if YouTube kept up their end of the bargain and actually vetted their ad buyers. Instead they show ads for fake stimulus scams, fake news, and blatant malware.
I manage a large network and ads are blocked at the edge of the network. Not using an adblocker is a security risk that is not acceptable for my company. I pay for YouTube premium because it’s in my means and I get value from the subscription but I don’t blame anyone who takes the same approach
I manage a large network and ads are blocked at the edge of the network.
You must MITM all traffic and do some magic with stripping/injecting JavaScript then? Because every time I’ve tried with pihole, its just threads and threads of people saying its not possible with DNS blocking because the ads are served from the video servers.
We also deploy a browser extension via GPO/Intune to catch those and protect endpoints when they are off net.
I actually wasn’t in favor of that but the rest of team was so after risk assessing it, we determined that trusting a vendor with the permission to rewrite webpages was less of a risk than drive-by malware or phishing/redirection from a malicious ad
They said they pay for YouTube premium so they might not have to block YouTube ads
TL;DR: my property rights trump Youtube’s business model.
The problem is that there is that ad networks and ad placements are just bad actors in the consumer space. Not only has malware been passed time and time again with ads but also false ads to malware. When that happens suddenly the content creator/website/whatever ‘isn’t responsible’ for it. Then there’s the issue of ads being placed everywhere slowing down websites but even worse, getting in the way with auto play audio and video, videos autoscrolling over the content you’re trying to read or whatever, etc.
As a consumer, I should not and ethically do not need to worry about another’s business model. If the business model fails simply because I don’t allow something that model depends on to traverse my network then it is on them to figure it out. If the ads get in the way of the content, then I just want consume the content anyway.
Some news websites use Ad Admiral or whatever it is called and I haven’t bothered trying to bypass the adblock wall for them. I just simply consume the content elsewhere.
If ads were ever responsibly used or perhaps could be argued that there is compromise where consumers wouldn’t mind, then there’d probably be a lot less ad blocker usage. It’s like anything else. When it takes less effort to install an adblocker to have an OK experience, then ad blockers will be popular.
I was around before ad blockers were very popular and even before pop-up blockers were around. Ads kept getting worse which is why ad blockers became more popular and more sophisticated. The Internet had ads for years before ad blockers were the norm.
Yeah I wasn’t using an Adblock on YouTube when this all started. Then the ads got so intrusive it was seriously hindering content. These days I don’t watch much YouTube, but it’s with Adblock
I mean, the argument falls short when YT (or LTT) spew literal garbage. I might have a hint of sympathy if it wasn’t a dumpster fire of decaying babies.
The few people I sub do and do yt as a monitory source, I support elsewhere. Fuck YouTube acting as a sleezy middle-man and simultaneously playing the victim.
I mean, the argument falls short when YT (or LTT) spew literal garbage.
The fact that you don’t like the product doesn’t really change that their expected transaction is “watch an ad to receive it”. Every argument against the idea of not watching the ads being piracy seems to be, essentially, either “the product isn’t good” or “the price is too high”, neither of which is relevant to the fact that they’ve put a “price” on it and you’re skipping the part where you “pay”.
Quality of the videos is irrelevant. Intrusiveness of the ads is irrelevant. The ads are the price, the videos are the product. You’re getting the videos without seeing the ads.
I agree that the “price” is too high, the ads are awful, and the videos are frequently bad. I will continue to block those ads as long as I am able, but I’m not going to delude myself into thinking that I’m not skipping out on the cheque, as it were, when I do so.
I might have a hint of sympathy if it wasn’t a dumpster fire of decaying babies.
Literally no one is asking you to have any sympathy. Why get so defensive when it’s pointed out that skipping ads is skipping on your side of the transaction when using an ad supported service?
I liked the service up until ~2016 and was a yt red family subscriber. Then they upped the prices, then they started pushing more ads + more frequently, then they got butthurt about third-party apps, then they raised prices again…
My “expected transaction” is to host decent-or-better content (not shovel clickbait disinformation nonsense) in a fashion that is palatable to me, and they are failing miserably on the first and are fighting to fail miserably on the second. If you go to a restaurant expecting decent food but are served actual shit, are you going to be like ‘thank you sir may I have some more’? We have been the frog in the pot of boiling water for the last 15+ years of bullshit like this, where a company makes a compelling product, then makes it shit but incrementally so ‘it’s not so bad compared to the last update’ but compared to a few years ago it’s completely garbage. And they want more money for a worse experience? Are for fucking shitting me?
Quality of the content is relevant. I guarantee you aren’t going to the movies to watch something that scored a 4% on RT. Everyone wants to be like’ poor yt/alphabet, they only got 63 billion this quarter 'but if it was a real issue they’d be doing stuff like charging fees to upload content (goodbye 9 year-olds screaming about fortnite skins) or something else to curb the amount of content they host. Google knew what they were getting into when they bought yt - at least they sure as fuck should. Nobody has ever made a profitable video service afaik. There’s what, yt, vimeo, and… liveleak is dead, uh… crickets.
I’m not even pretending to skip out on the bill. I’m screaming from my table “this is fucking terrible and you should all feel awful about it” before proudly walking out.
Also I’m not asking for sympathy? I’m saying “this service has turned to shit”. Also none of my above comment, or this, is defensive; it’s being pissed off that a company is fucking people on both sides of the transaction and still complaining that they don’t get enough of a cut, while actively making their service worse for their customers and doing nothing to save it themselves. They are a sinking ship complaining that they need more help chucking buckets of water overboard, while they simultaneously poke additional holes in it.
I don’t really disagree with any of that, and it’s all a great argument in favour of just not using YouTube. Hell, it might even be a good argument in favour of using it as much as possible while blocking ads just to consume bandwidth on their dime while denying them ad revenue.
None of it really counters the idea that using it without viewing ads is skipping out on “paying” for that usage, which is the entire “argument” being presented, which you claimed falls short. The content being bad doesn’t change the fact that they expect you to view ads (or pay) to see that content, and we’re not paying.
Fuck YouTube acting as a sleezy middle-man
A sleezy middleman that happens to foot the YT infrastructure bill.
They’re hurting real bad lemme tell ya. If only you understood what they’re freely extracting from you.
Nobody is forcing YT to exist, so…
if a content creator doesnt want people to be able to skip the ads/demonetize the content, then they should post on a platform that makes ads mandatory.
problem is that no one will watch crap on that sort of platform
Linus Short Sebastian is an asshole. I like his channel and even bought a water bottle, but he is an asshole nontheless. His opinions are always 5 years outdated. He used to hate reddit but now liked Reddit. Probably a contrarian too.
Cool, let’s body shame people.
Another argument proving that Linus Media Group is a bunch of morons
I don’t care.
The social contract of this country was tossed out the window a long time ago, so I will try to get away with any personal victory against the overreach of billion dollar companies any way I easily and legally can.
If I lived in a country where representation was actually democratic, if my tax dollars went towards public healthcare rather than paying for pharmacy billionaire’s 15th yacht, and providing actual better schools for kids rather than bulletproof windows because politicians won’t pass gun reform, and public transportation that was more bullet trains and less 25 mph rickety AmTraks covered in piss and graffiti, perhaps I would feel like I should be concerned with figuring out how to best provide for those that create in the marketplace within the hostile business environments they are forced to work within the constraints of… but there is far too much more important bullshit I have to worry about to concern myself with “pirating via skipping or blocking intrusive and constant ads” when they now will pour out of every possible layer of the media experience we have available to us as consumers.
Telling me to concern myself with that puts too much responsibility on me as a consumer when we really have relatively very little power.
I will pay for anything I think is of good value and pay directly to those who make the things I love and see work put into, but I will not suffer endless ads on behalf of anyone, nor will I force anyone in my home to suffer watching endless commercials for things like kids toy products like I was thanks to the Reagan era deregulation of kids’ TV programming.
The same Linus who can’t be arsed to spend $500 of various people’s time to properly test a product is now telling us what to do?
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I don’t see how that’s relevant. If you want to engage in the paid YouTube subscription, go for it, it’s an entirely different thing though.
My computer requests from YouTube’s server a video, the server gives me a stream of data - I didn’t steal it, I didn’t hack it, the server provided me this because it wanted to - and this stream contains an ad and a video. What I do with this stream is only my concern, you can’t force me to watch the ad. That would be like walking in the street and somebody says you’re unethical because you didn’t look at an outdoor advertisement banner, and that you will be forced to either pay a fee or look at the ad.
deleted by creator
I have no social contract with YouTube. The whole “if you access this site, you agree with this ToS” isn’t even legally valid here.
“because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership”
not like Youtube rewards creators for viewership either (and then lying to the advertisers as well)
I think YouTubers make fractional pennies from Ads, and mostly only if its fully watched and sometimes clicked to go to the website. So if you get a 15 second ad, and skip to the content, you didn’t give the creators any money.
Also, shout out to those ads being horrible. My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign, that had body horror. 15 year old me didn’t want to smoke, nor wanted to after, but it was so disturbing that I learned how to avoid them.
Not even going into the disturbing or weird ads. One time I got an ad for a “Ching Chong Fing Fong shirt company” as a way of mocking Chinese people because their government sucks. Another time, I got a full 12 hour video by a Vietnamese couple just grilling in their backyard. No subtitles, not even sure if they were aware they enabled their videos to do that, or didn’t fully understand the process of uploading videos.
Anytime I see actual ads on the internet, not just YouTube, it just makes me go “I am perfectly justified in not seeing these weird ads.” I don’t give them any money no matter what I do, so why not have my eyes saved from bright flashing colors and scam artists?
If I recall correctly, ever since videos could be called up as ads you can just pay for any video to be an ad, as long as it’s on YouTube, and it doesn’t have to be yours. I don’t know if this has changed, but an essays channel figured out that that’s the fastests way someone could target a competitor’s channel. Paying to have someone else’s video as an ad tanks that video ad revenue and discoverability instantly. Ad views count as views to the video and skipping an ad counts as a skip on the video which signals the algorithm to think that nobody wants or likes to see that video. Do it to enough new videos and you can entirely kill a previously profitable channel in a couple of months.
TheSpiffingBrit did video on that.
My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign
Those ads made me want to take up smoking out of spite.
Ouch. Cutting off the nose to spite the face.
That was the purpose. You see, Big Tobacco actually sponsors the anti-smoking campaigns, which does give them some creative input. They tell the writers to make them as annoying as possible.
They started messing with me on YT. When Piped began giving me errors last week, YT suddenly started behaving, but nagging me to try YT again. Google is truly evil, and dasterdly to boot .
If it hadn’t been for ublock origin, I’d not be on YT this long
They could probably retain users simply by running ads every 10 minutes, rather than every 3 minutes.
Oh but they don’t care about anything but short form content. If they could ditch supporting long form content today they would.
Nah they want lots of short form and also like 10 hour long videos that can play 200 ads in it that you forget is on in the background. They want tiktok and broadcast TV.
They really just want to show you ads.
The cold, hard steel of the sword of truth.
Such a fantastic series :) (the books, not any of the garbage adaptations)
This reply makes me so happy. The books are always better.
Money/s is the more used metric. Retention is secondary or even tertiary to money/s. Behold the algorithm, great and terrible, sheathed in robes of black and grasping sickle white.
Ah, but you’re one layer off. Projected/potential money/s (in the next 1-2 quarters mainly) is what is truly king.
It doesn’t have to be a good idea, it can be a terrible one - but good sounding words in the board room are what matter
“Hey, so we’ve decided to see if we can run 10 unskippable ads back to back. Simultaneously, we’ve launched a war on ad blockers. This time it will surely work because we found out you can ignore your customers - Elon Musk has shown us the way, he only lost bots with all his innovation. We expect people to get over it in 3 months and estimate we’ll lose 4 users. Between 10x more ads and half our users off ad blockers, we project 20x ad revenue next quarter!”
-Words of a future CEO, probably
At this point id rather see youtube die than watch ads
I was watching a long video on chromecast today and I had ads every three minutes or so. That’s a two hours video. The amount of ads is disgusting.
YouTube is unwatchable without an ad blocker.
My kid would watch his videos with ads and I offered to set him up with an alternative with no ads. He said no, I like the ads. I said ok then. That was two years ago. Last week he was losing his shit because of all the ads that made it unwatchable. I set him up with the ad free alternative and I get thanked every day for it.
Youtube is tanking their own platform.
This is why I pay for YT Premium. No way in hell am I watching ads, but I do want to be able to use the platform, and the money has to come from somewhere. So far it’s been pretty good value, although SponsorBlock is of course still required.
I would like to pay for YT Premium, but I think the service is bad. The product is good, and the service is bad.
If I say I don’t want to see this video, I don’t want to see this fucking video again, youtube. I said don’t recommend this channel, and you said I won’t see it again, but I just refreshed, and there it is. I am not dutch, I don’t speak dutch, I’ve never even been to the Netherlands. I shouldn’t be seeing videos in dutch.
Routinely, I have to go through my home page and try to train the algorithm but I’ve just given up. I got an extension now that just permanently removes channels and videos I don’t want to see.
The thing is… the product is the videos, and youtube doesn’t do the videos. Youtube does the service, and the service is bad. I understand that the ads pay the youtubers but the truth is I don’t care. That pay is trash, and if they want my premium money, youtubers should unionize and force youtube to improve the service.
Edit: I watch the youtuber’s sponsor spot and I buy merch.
Hell YEAH they should unionize!!! YouTube has m effectively NO system in place for recourse when their shitty system fucks up and decides to nuke someone’s channel - Such as, when “supporting subject a” is against YouTube policy, a channel may make a video criticizing others who support “subject a”, YouTube’s stupid algorithm will punish them FOR AGREEING WITH YOUTUBE and never actually manually review their shit when it fucks up. A union can grab YouTube by the nuts and FORCE THEM TO LISTEN and that is painfully needed. Unions force power structures to listen to democracy and I like democracy. MORE UNIONS! the people DOING the fucking work need to be heard!
Yes - AND I like that being a premium subscriber compensates creators I watch EVEN WHEN they are otherwise “demonetized” - like, if they cover news and the news contains upsetting information, YouTube will reduce their ad exposure. But my views still award them as much credit as ever, and count for, like, dozens of ad-supported views under normal circumstances.
Nope bankrupt youtube and rebuild from the ashes
I haven’t seen an anti adblocker popup on youtube for a couple months now, I though they gave up. It looks like the uBlock developers and block list maintainers are just doing an excellent job staying ahead of whatever youtube is doing.
Revanced update fixed it on their end about two weeks ago also.
Bless the Revanced guys. They made my mobile youtube binge watches as smooth as my desktop firefox + ublock setup.
Personally, I don’t think a service is in the wrong for trying to protect against ad block, especially when their revenue comes from ads. However I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with adblockers continuing to innovate to circumvent that. I’m rooting for Ublock Origin lol
they also fucked themselves over with the ad skill issues they’ve had over the years. Advertisers now find it to be more worthwhile to advertise directly with creators, though that also means they make a lot more money, so.
They kinda dug their own grave, to be honest.
What made me and I imagine a large chunk of other people convert to revanced/similar apps is the super aggressive advertising, it’s impossible to use youtube when you get a double ad before and after every 5 second video and get 30 second midrolls every like 3 minutes. You can’t skip through a video to find the part you want to see because you’ll just get an ad. It’s extremely infuriating and time-consuming, it used to be where I was willing to deal with it but they fucked it up. Now I can never go back to ad-riddled YouTube, even if it has a “reasonable” amount of advertising (I am now in the belief that no amount of advertising is reasonable anymore though).
Yup. I was willing to watch one or two short ads before I watch a video, but the mid rolls and unskippable 30+second ads just made me say “well that’s enough of that”. Now I haven’t seen a YouTube ad in a long time.
Exactly. They lost their minds and went too far. Now I’ll never go back either.
Yes. Same. I was OK with banner ads. I was OK with intro ads. Started to get pissed off and annoyed at mid way ads, double ads, and unskippable ads. This is my nightmare. I hate this world and ads are a part of my pyramid of hell.
Aaand now we have also sponsorblock to barely ever see ads in videos
oopsies.
Not only monetization but also the whole sorting/ranking algorithms. Youtube is a bit better than Facebook reels and instagram due to the thumbs down button, but some people go out of their way to make nonsensical garbage because viewers will then comment, and there’s no way to tell if a video is good or bad based solely on engagement. Those videos where people have some DIY hack to clean a toilet bowl and they just pour random condiments in the toilet for 3 minutes and cut the video before any conclusion, those types of videos
they don’t have dislikes anymore, god forbid you dont like something.
This is what Louis Rossman said. Youtube is completely in their right to kick people off for blocking ads. At the same time, it’s also not a pissing match that’s worth getting heavily invested in, because ultimately Youtube is going to lose unless they can start coercing people into installing proprietary apps which they already have for mobile devices.
This is what Louis Rossman said. Youtube is completely in their right to kick people off for blocking ads. At the same time, it’s also not a pissing match that’s worth getting heavily invested in, because ultimately Youtube is going to lose unless they can start coercing people into installing proprietary apps which they already have for mobile devices.
I refuse to use the official youtube app. Its so trash… I use newpipe and its amazing to just have all my favorite videos bookmarked locally in different lists.
If they take that away from me i will just stop using youtube.
Better start preparing for the coming exodus. Try Odysee, Peertube and Nebula and see what works for you. Once the enshittification hits critical mass, you’ll be ready to let go of that sinking ship.
Odysee
ewwwwww… 99% far right garbage, zero moderation there last time I took a look.
Yeah, there’s garbage too, but I don’t subscribe to any of that. Just watch Linux and electronics tinkering videos instead.
Try Tubular, newpipe + sponsor block combo!
I’ve never tried that one. Can you share a safe link please? Thanks!
Great! Thanks so much!
Since the initial push, I have not even had to reset my ublock… stop using Chrome
New pipe and inner tune still work fine.
For now
exactly, it would be trivial to have a whitelist server side and now only ad friendly apps can access the videos. they only still work because it’s worth keeping those viewers in the system for the time being.
Technically NewPipe simply parses the website and is seen as a web browser from YouTube’s point of view.
That how they bypass the API’s TOS, they don’t use it.
Trivial? What information does this whitelist hold that can’t be spoofed? It’s not like apps have to tell the truth about what they are.
People do that? Just have their code go on the internet and tell lies?! This is a Christian internet!
(yes it’s /s)
This is what current implementations like Revanced do. The endgame will be fullblown DRM. Until then, it will be a cat and mouse game.
Same with revanced right now.
If they ever manage to kill it I’ll simply quit YouTube and be better for it.
I’ll be very sad to quit it but I will too.
I can’t live without sponsorblock
It would pain me to scrub through a sponsor without being to submit it to the database.
The web should have had a Terms of Usage from start. Something like
“If you broadcast content on the internet, expect people to download it.”
This. I always say this exact thing.
If you provide content for free, expect people to take it for free.
Even if you don’t intend to provide it for free, if it’s possible to, expect it. No different from Walmart complaining about increased theft after replacing cashiers with self checkout - tiny violins.
Somewhere out there a CEO thought this was a good idea. All it seems to be doing is pushing people to other platforms (the younger gen moving over to tiktok and the older gens moving 3rd party or just offline).
While I agree, the amount of people who’d do this is negligibly small, compared to their total userbase. Obviously a bunch of people use ad blockers, but only a tiny amount of them have modified apps, followed by an even tinier amount of those people with fully custom frontends. For YT it might work out as a net positive, because the annoying blocks and reminders will just pressure people into paying for Premium.
At the end of the day, I could just stop watching youtube entirely, if this trend continues. I have nothing to gain there
I guess what there really winning is all those non tech-savvy people who currently have an adblocker installed because their friend helped.
Yes, been thinking I’ve just been substituting YT for * TV, and while the consumption can still be customized, it’s still a habit that can be kicked. I bet I’ll get more sleep and productivity.
- Lol autocorrect
Several months ago, fresh off the high of following through on my resolution to leave Reddit forever, I made the same decision with YouTube. Once ublock stopped working, I’d try out peer tube, or maybe sail the seas
But ublock never stopped working. I watch more YouTube now than ever before, I got totally addicted as I binged in preparation to leave
At this point, I don’t know if it’d be good for me, or send me in a desperate arms race to get my fix
Good. Let their stranglehold die.
YouTube is bringing its ad blocker fight to mobile. In an update on Monday, YouTube writes that users accessing videos through a third-party ad blocking app may encounter buffering issues or see an error message that reads, “The following content is not available on this app.”
Yea, noticed that last week. Is already fixed again in latest revanced.
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Delete microG, revanced manager, and YouTube revanced
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Download and install the new gmscore, which replaces microG: https://github.com/ReVanced/GmsCore/releases/tag/v0.3.1.4.240913
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Download and install latest version of Revanced Manager: https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-manager/releases/tag/v1.20.1
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Download and install YouTube 19.09.37 from APKmirror: https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/youtube/youtube-19-09-37-release/youtube-19-09-37-android-apk-download/
Revanced will never die. Stand against the Goliath.
Vanced died. If revanced dies we’ll just get rerevanced. Ad infitum.
Vanced died because they tried to generate revenue from it and made themselves vulnerable.
Also, unlike Vanced, Revanced doesn’t distribute modded youtube apks themselves.
Oh this? It’s just a binary of assorted diffs and plugins to a yet unspecified target apk. Why yes, I will use the end product for personal, non-commercial use.
Kind of funny if you read it like that, and while it certainly doesn’t make them immortal, it at least may make them last a while longer i hope.
It kinda comes out of the experience. There’s an outstanding Github issue that notes that a specific version of YT Music is broken past a certain version. Most of the patches fail to apply and you just get the minor ones. You can use the version just before with no issues. How can you litigate against lines of code that don’t even work? This is similar to the vulnerability that Yuzu gave up since they offered Patreon-exclusive updates to support a leaked BOTW:TOTK .iso. Easy to prove your intent there.
Didn’t know about the update. Thanks, just did it.
yup, noticed that revanced wasn’t working a week ago.
went into revanced manager, patched the recommended version, installed gmscore, done.
suck it youtube, i’m not paying a subscription to watch low effort vtuber edits.
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Oh, I definitely have experienced “The following content is not available on this app.” Before, but I thought it was just a thing of my Revanced version outdated because I rarely update it… Which I’m gonna do just now 😁
I hope this doesn’t bring too many issues to Smart Tube, which is where I do 99% of my YT usage (and I have yet to be bothered with any bug).
Never had any outage in SmartTube either, unless they pushed a faulty release (I’m on the beta channel), but even then they have reacted super fast with fixes.
So far I’m using NewPipe x Sponsorblock on my phone - apparently it has been discontinued & archived, but still works just fine as well. Only the comment view is broken since a couple weeks, but I really don’t care about those to begin with.
Nowadays I’m using tubular which is newpipe with sponsor block and youtube dislike incorporated.
Oh good to know, I wasn’t looking for alternatives as long as it still works, but that’s going to be the future then. Thanks!
In Germany, there is a law that regulates the amount and intervals of advertising for private television broadcasters: 20% or 1/5 per broadcast day may be used for advertising. Programs that are shorter than 30 minutes may have a break, otherwise there must be 20 minutes between commercial breaks - 30 minutes in the evening. Unfortunately, there are still some loopholes.
Children’s programs are not allowed to have commercial breaks.
It’s a shame that this law still doesn’t apply to YouTube.
It’s a shame that this law still doesn’t apply to YouTube
If Germany is anything like Canada and other countries, applying public broadcast laws to YouTube would be a monkey’s paw deal. Sure you might get tighter control over advertising, but youtube would also be forced to do things like show you x% of content made in your country/language, resulting in state mandated control of the content you see online and potentially limiting/warping international audiences for content creators, and potentially other ramifications I’m not considering.
Now if they made a law specifically for youtube and other online video platforms that dealt with advertising in that context, that would be a different story.
Sure you might get tighter control over advertising, but youtube would also be forced to do things like show you x% of content made in your country/language, resulting in state mandated control of the content you see online and potentially limiting/warping international audiences for content creators, and potentially other ramifications I’m not considering.
This is false. You can create laws restricting advertising without creating other laws forcing companies to display domestic content. The point about the Canadian government wanting YouTube to promote domestic content is irrelevant.
Way to miss my entire point.
In this case, a law wouldn’t be created, youtube would just be integrated in already existing laws for public TV broadcasts, which is the wrong way to go about it because obviously youtube doesn’t work like TV.
Makes me miss a time where they couldn’t tell if ads were actually watched or not.
Sooner or later, ad blockers should just simulate the ad being played (in the background) with the real content going in the foreground to act as if the ad was watched.
Kind of like going to the bathroom during commercials.
Then again I wish we had a real alternative to YouTube. (Don’t point me to the fediverse video stuff … that’s not what I mean.) There is no real competition for a place to freely upload videos … or on the other side find all that content. No one wants to scale enough to compete. (Very few probably could considering the amount of new content per minute).
If only there was real competition, then YouTube would have to fight over our attention/usage by lowering ad count.
No competition means worse for all.
Well, YT is literally getting petabytes uploaded to it. Every single day. Thats 1000 terabytes, and thats 1000000 gigabytes.
I bet you haven’t even seen a petabyte of storage in one place (assuming you didn’t go to a data center yourself). How is a small company, or even fediverse, gonna handle that? Thats absolutely insane amount of data and, without moderation or curation, it is not feasible.
It’s a giant waste of space and resources, to be honest. Most videos are seen once, and the rest is mostly spam or bad quality content.
Actually the cost issues wouldn’t be the storage it’s self. Storage is pretty cheap, it’s content delivery networks. YouTube is supported by being owned and run by one of the worlds larges content delivery networks. There’s virtually no latency, videos play immediately.
Having millions (potentially billions in YouTube’s case) of people accessing data at once is an immense challenge and YouTube perfected it pretty early on, that’s part of why there’s no competition.
Content delivery is not cheap, but not hard to do, either. I’d wager storage would be a bigger problem, because it just keeps rising. Sadly, YouTube is the one with money, and the monetization comes from people.
I can speak from experience that content delivery is harder than storage. Companies like YouTube tackle the storage issue by having tiered storage levels. Trending content is stored on SSDs, new and often viewed content is stored on harddrives with a caching system similar to optane and archived storage (essentially old videos that very rarely get views) goes on tape storage. It’s really cool, and it allows massive about of storage in a small space, it’s costs alot to implement but because of the tape storage they essentially have “infinite” (it’s not really infinite of course but it’s a problem for next decade not this decade).
Fair enough, but that’s YouTube, who can afford all of it. Of course, if you have tons of money, you don’t need to count pennies where counting them would just slow you down.
But take a competitor - how can a different service be viable if they lack money to have (virtually) infinite storage? Heavy moderation or monetization. Youtube kinda does the second one.
To reiterate, I am not saying you say things that are not correct.
I remember seeing a startup at one point that wanted to put mini-CDNs in people’s homes. Small black boxes that would automatically be a CDN not just for your home, but the whole area. Of course, sites would have to use their CDN network, etc.
I actually thought it was a really interesting idea. Almost like federated CDNs.
Imagine if every Xfinity router has a built-in 16TB CDN: it would be an interesting way to possibly change how bandwidth works and makes it back to the DCs. Most popular stuff would be closer, faster.
God could you imagine the security risks though, having a physical risk in a network, that would be fun. Limewire on steroids.
Well break it up “lemmy wise” or more? I mean nobody can replace youtube but it would be possible having your own fishing channel for example. If it gets wildly watched you probably have to figure out some sponsorship for sure.
BTW no I haven’tseen a PB storage, but I did write visualisation and computation software for treating and seing datastructures up to PB size with hdf5.
Sooner or later, ad blockers should just simulate the ad being played (in the background) with the real content going in the foreground to act as if the ad was watched.
I wish adblockers did this, open the ad in a little silenced sandbox window. I don’t see the ad, creator gets their pay
Even the advertisers don’t lose out because you wouldn’t have paid attention to the ad too. They might even win a little because now one doesn’t have to get annoyed by the ad and deliberately not buy the thing.
Exactly, I don’t overly mind the “paid advertisements” the creators do, the guys I watch that do this are extremely funny in how they do it so if I don’t manually skip I get a good laugh, like the “Adstronaut”
Adnaseum is a fork of unlock that fakes viewing ads. The thing is its banned from chromes app store because google is at its core an advertising company.
Hmm, I only use chrome for my YT chan control, not watching. Watching ANYTHING is done on FF+UBO, but if adnaseum is on FF I may switch. Poor google has YET to show an ad I would be interested in, hell the tv in the 80s showed me more of interest than ads today. Thanks for the suggestion,will check it out!
They do have a ff version
I know what I am checking out tonight
There’s a tool that does this. It speeds up the ad so it takes only a couple of seconds. The ad is “watched” but muted the whole time so you don’t actually have to deal with it.
Edit: The article isn’t great but the tool is sort of the same as what you mentioned. https://9to5google.com/2023/11/25/youtube-ads-speed-up-workaround/
I wonder about this. Youtube is made so that videos has to be long (10 minutes at least, or you won’t get exposure, right?) so we get all those dragged out videos with long summaries.
Also you are supposed to earn money with it, which combined makes videos, IMO, often not very interesting.
Sure, I get it, everyone can’t make videos all day long for free, but isn’t that something that we shouldn’t maybe want?
I prefer a genuine hobbyist making one video a year, than a sponsored person pushing one a day.
Which brings me to hosting and bandwidth needs, youtube needs a lot of that because of its business model, but say Lemmy communities could probably host quality videos without large hassle (especially if small servers wasn’t defederated all the time).
Thoughts?
The problem is the term quality would be used to block out certain creators. The definition would wind up being vague and/or arbitrary.
What one person thinks is quality may not be quality to someone else. In a way that’s a niceness of YouTube. We can each upload what we think is good… or bad.
Even then if a video goes big viral (which is arguably something a creator may want), the bandwidth costs could skyrocket.
Then it’s like: maybe we need CDNs and more storage and boom now it’s even more expensive. I just don’t see fediverse video working great long term without big money to back it.
I thought the 10 minute was a monetization requirement.
It’s kinda cute how they are utterly loosing with adblocker crackdown and now they are saying they will even handle their party apps. No company will handle an open source project full of talented people pissed of by ads.
Reddit managed pretty well, let’s be real. The 3rd party app protests were essentially a speed bump that lost a tiny subsection of users that advertisers didn’t want anyways. Everyone else just migrated to the official app or website.
In their defense, advertisers weren’t seeing those same people.
You can still use third party apps, they are just not in the playstore. Just like with YouTube right now
