If things keep going like this I guess I’ll abandon Youtube completely. How brighter my life will be
That’s where things are heading. I wonder what video services will replace it.
It wont be, the scale of service and ease of revenue sharing will keep it as the king of video distribution untill Google kills it (like they do to all their products). FOSS projects and self hosting can not accomodate a viral hit (the slashdot effect), and also a self-hosted project like that would have to find a way to make money for the host to keep the lights on, and even Youtube fails at that one.
scale
Who does scale really benefit, though? I don’t see how it matters from the audiences’ point of view. Say I watch Youtube for fishing videos - all the competitor needs to do to attract and keep me is offer fishing videos. I don’t really care that I can’t watch music videos on it, or cookery, or make-up tutorials, etc.
The preoccupation we have with scale should be re-examined when it comes to video distribution. A combination of user-friendly banner advertising, modern codecs, and P2P hosting should go an awful long way. If I knew ad placements provided material funding for a video site/community I loved, I’d whitelist the URL.
Video needs fragmentation.
I think scale matters because almost no person is as much of an island as your example fishing video guy. I actually have noticed almost the opposite in most people I know, YouTube is the default place to get entertainment. Across all their interests.
From both sides the network effect might be strongest with YouTube, the creators can’t leave because YouTube has virtually all of the audience, and consumers don’t want to watch singular people on other platforms because on YouTube you can stumble over interesting videos and all the people you like to watch are already there.
The only way I see for other platforms to actually grow is forced interoperability, as in videos of other platforms appearing in the YouTube frontend. Which Google would never do so the government would need to force them.
Yep, my entertainment is 90% YouTube and the rest some show. On YouTube I find everything: from a dude that does reviews of air filter for cars to somebody explaining some obscure Japanese woodworking techniques to the omniscient Indian dude that explains complex programming concepts. If there was fragmentation I wouldn’t be even able to find stuff, like in the early days of the internet that you knew the website existes because somebody shared the URLs in some usenet or some forums, before search engines became a thing.
You make good points, but I still think what I envision would be able to attract enough people interested in specific hobbies, without achieving anywhere near Youtube’s scale. I’m thinking of a scenario where the video platform is more an extension of a web community, such an an old-school forum, rather than a straight video host where the primary aim is to gain any engagement whatsoever, and where (let’s face it) all engagement is generally fungible. It’d be something member-funded and run, like good torrent trackers, and the content is an interest ‘ecosystem’ - so not only fishing content, but fishing gear coverage, and camping and hiking stuff, and meat prep and storage, and boating, etc.
This couldn’t be any worse for either creator or viewer than what YT subjects them to. There would be no having to optimize for an opaque algorithm. The pressure to self-censor would be greatly relieved. Monetization scope and content guidelines would be accountably managed - ie. by the community itself. Creators would still have their Patreon/Liberapay/etc income streams. The platform can place the odd banner ad too, like 4chan.
I wonder how much convenience and (perceived) income security is a passionate creator prepared to sacrifice in order to start exercising power over Youtube by uploading elsewhere? We all know creators hate the place…
The benefit of scale is it attracts the creators. The people making the content we want to watch aren’t all doing it as a hobby, so the chance of attracting a large audience needs to be there. Otherwise they won’t come and the site is populated with really random, low-choice stuff.
All you need is a federated link aggregator like lemmy/mastodon with a UI made for videos.
You post a link to whichever video hosting service and attach a bunch of metadata (thumbnail, description, tags) and the comment section is built in already for each post. Nobody cares where a video is hosted, as long as they can follow creators and topics.
Twitter and TikTok
Could just make a system to automate the ads like muting(or white noise) them and automatically clicking skip, is not as good but still feels like a small win
Skipping ads violates YouTube’s terms of service!
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Video playback will be blocked until you allow us to shove ads down your throat.
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You can also opt for YouTube premium, where we’ll allow you to skip the last 5 seconds of any ad! (*)
(*) ads shorter than 5 minutes do not support skipping the final 5 seconds.
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The funniest part is they want to watch an ad (trailer) but they aren’t allowed to watch that ad without watching other ads first! Xzibit would be so proud.
Ad blockers assert your belief in the web browser as user agent, not server agent
- We know you’re using an ad blocker. How dare you.
- Alphabet’s cross-subsidy, and the political value of controlling the Overton window, allows Youtube to remain publicly accessible.
- You can get double-penetrated with Youtube Premium, first on the subscription fee then on the usage analytics.
Triple penetrated, many YouTube Premium features don’t even work properly.
“Violate Terms of Service” 😂 such agressive language for not wanting to watch endless ads for 2 min videos.
Get fucked.
YouTube violates MY terms of service when it abuses my network infrastructure and resources to download data I did not request.
Violate is standard legal language for breaking a contract or agreement
That sucks. Do you have access to a VPN with servers in Albania or Moldova? They still don’t allow ads in youtube videos.
Happened to me last month, I set proton VPN to an Albanian server and everything worked until uBlock got updated to suppress the black screen of death again. Good luck!
Black screen of death? I got a black monitor earlier while doing some work and listening to YouTube. I thought maybe my device overheated. Is this a thing YouTube is doing?
I can’t wait for the plugin that replaces all the ads with black and white mime videos
Sus mime
NOT THAT ONE!
D
I love that their warning is an admission of failure
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Interestingly, I am having this problem on Linux. EndeavourOS. It’s a rolling release distro, so probably a new “cutting-edge” browser feature broke the ad blockers.
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using uBlock Origin in Firefox or Vivaldi
Datura Network’s Invidious instance has a rotating IP, so it’s considerably harder for Google to block it.
Every Invidious or Piped instance could easily implement IPv6 rotation, the smart-ipv6-rotator is fully FOSS and easy to set up. Invidious and Piped both have official documentation on how to set it up:
https://docs.invidious.io/ipv6-rotator/
https://docs.piped.video/docs/self-hosting/#ipv6-rotator-using-docker
It’s an interesting situation. YouTube needs us more than we need YouTube.
Unfortunately, that really doesn’t seem to be true. YT is a monopoly, they do what they want. None of my friends use Firefox, despite me telling them that ad blockers still work on it. They could spend 3 minutes switching to Firefox and losing some of the niche features they have on Opera GX or whatever they hell they use, or they could just watch the occasional 5-second ad. They just don’t care enough. I imagine most users are more than likely like that.
Am I the only one that pays for YouTube Premium? I get not wanting to pay for things. I don’t feel bad for Google here, but I also don’t understand what people expect. The government happily subsidizes Musk to litter outerspace. Maybe the government should be subsidizing YouTube?
I want to pay for the content on youtube and I believe that the creators deserve it as well as I understand that the platform costs money. But the UX is so bad and youtube very obviously does not care at all about their viewers, that I morally just can’t justify giving them money for that level of service.
You might want to watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q3ZXQZZlcE
Did you mean this? https://yewtu.be/watch?v=4Q3ZXQZZlcE
I’d pay for it if they didn’t overcharge so much. Their content is provided to them for free, but they charge more than Netflix to distribute it. Fuck that.
YouTube ad tier: $0
Netflix ad tier: $6.99
YouTube premium: $13.99
Netflix standard: $15.49Huge caveats incoming.
They don’t charge more than Netflix, but most of their content is definitely provided to them for free. On top of that, most of YouTube’s original content is behind their premium subscription paywall. I tried to see how many of their originals shows are actually viewable with their ad tier and it’s hard to pin down a number. My speculation is it doesn’t matter because either so few people are willing to pay for premium or their originals aren’t very marketable. Off the top of my head I’d heard of exactly one YouTube original.
Netflix lowest ad-free price was $9.99 until three days ago.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/2/24190632/netflix-ad-free-basic-plan-discontinued
I should’ve specified I was citing Netflix’s current US pricing https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926 and YouTube’s current US pricing https://www.youtube.com/premium.
Oh thanks I was looking at old information.
EDIT: I realized now you’re just giving supplemental old info.
But in theory they’re paying for that content out of Premium subscriptions.
Probably not enough, but that’s supposed to be part of what it’s for.
Use newpipe or freetube and just send the creators you watch most that money. Google can go fuck themselves
I’d pay for it with money, but I am already paying with my data you see.
I’m okay with seeing an acceptable level of advertisement. Content creators have ad reads within their videos which are skippable, and they’ve resorted to that because YouTube doesn’t pay very well. It used to be that you’d get a short ad at the start of every video or two, and maybe another short ad per 7 minutes or so. Now, it’s pretty common for every video to have at least 20 seconds of ad before starting and another 10-30 seconds of ad every 3-5 minutes or so. I like watching on my PS5 while doing chores, so I’m subject to all of these ads. I actually have fully abandoned videos halfway in because of ads that were 60 seconds before I would have the option to “skip” the ad.
I pay for enough things in my life that I was okay with the trade-off of the ads on YouTube. Now, it’s (no joke) about 5 minutes of ads interrupting a 20 minute video, and there’s usually a 2 minute ad read within that 20 minute video, so really 7 minutes of ads per 18 minutes of content. But it’s not really 18 minutes of content because there’s an intro, an outro, and a “remember to like, comment, subscribe, and smash that bell” bullshit too. It’s roughly 2:1 ratio of actual content to ads and fluff. I’m not fucking paying to take it from 2:1 to 3:1 and they can eat my entire asshole for even suggesting such a thing. Maybe instead of trying to hold eyeballs ransom with the choice of either subscription payments or and overabundance of ads, they should charge for uploading videos to their servers. Sound like a terrible idea? Then I’m sure they’ll do it within 5 years. Because fuck everybody, that’s why.
Yep. Google treats their service like television, but it’s not television. We all watch the videos on computers and computers are owned by users and each user gets to decide what their computer does, full stop.
The ad model for youtube will always be circumvented by the fact that our computers can run whatever code we want it to (despite Microsoft’s and Apple’s efforts). If that means that youtube goes subscription only, so be it. If that means youtube can’t sustain itself as a business with ad revenue, then so be it. It would mean that decentralized alternatives gain popularity and it would most likely be to the benefit of everyone who isn’t a corporation.
Youtube has a stranglehold on creativity, open speech, and fair use. Youtube will demonetize a video for saying too many swear words. They’ll demonetize or restrict a video for talking about non-sexual lgbt content. They’ll take down legal and legitimate videos for copyright infringement even though it’s fair use.
Youtube is bad for creators and it’s bad for users.
Just go to yewtu.be same thing. No ads, no tracking or analyzing you.
Google foiled again by the yews!! 😂
I wonder which will happen first: I’ll quit watching youtube because the platform becomes too much of a pain in the ass for me to bother with, or I’ll quit watching youtube because of how difficult it is to find content I actually want to watch.
I’ve got a few Patreon shows that host video content on YouTube, but because they’re directly linked and not monetized through YouTube they’re pretty friendly to visit.
I do need a better way to find streamable music. YouTube Music has been a miserable experience, but it has the largest library short of Spotify, which is also miserable.
I found YTM to have more niche music selections vs Spotify.
You could always try plexamp if you want to self-host.
Functionally it works (barring technical difficulties)
But it means building up a large personal library, when what I’d prefer is a browsable public music library.
I switched over to FreeTube for all my Youtube needs.
Lets see if Google can break that one.
Invidious works absolutely great as an alternative way to access all the content uploaded to YouTube. No ads at all and a way better search function.
…until they block APIs which is also in progress right?
Of course that’s true, but in the medium run the site is destroying itself through enshittification. We don’t need to care about that, as long as we can access the videos we want to access for the time being.
In other words, I completely agree with you, and it’s not a scary message.
They are now blocking content from playing, on one and loading on the other.
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Google cornered the video market and killed all competition by mining all of our data and selling it for years.
Now that they are too big to fail they want to turn around and extort us all. The price for premium is NOT reasonable.
This isn’t some mom and pop company trying to serve videos. They abused their size and are now abusing it again.
And the fact that there’s people like you defending them is a problem. We have to fight the mega corp and the bootlickers in our ranks.
Wait, how did they kill all competition by mining our data? Because they could do things cheaper than compwtitors, or…?
The literarily made money off our backs by selling our privacy. Using those I’ll-gotten gians they pushed out the competition.
They didn’t do things “cheaper” they just stole from all of us and now they want more money on top.
You seem like you’re getting distracted here. I’m asking about the claim about them killing off competition by stealing our data. Can you go into more detail on how that worked, how the stealing of our data killed off the competition?
I can probably help with some of the explanation on this. Not necessarily the data stealing side of things but definitely how they killed off competition. Youtube operated at a loss for a looong time while providing a stable and well functioning platform where creators could make a decent amount of money this resulted in year over year userbase growth. This not only made it harder for other platforms to break into the market as no creator would want to spend time making content on a platform with less users but also the other platforms did not have the capital behind them to operate at such a loss so they die out or they get purchased by google/youtube for a bargain and get shut down. Now youtubes userbase is so captive that they are pretty much free to essentially abuse their users almost as much as they want because as a viewer theres not really any other platform out there that has the creators you watch and as a creator theres no platform thatll get you enough views to be sustainable. Its a cycle that has to be kicked off by something big like youtube going down because thats the only way users are going to migrate.
You kind of see something similar with big box stores, companies moving into areas or even just gas stations. Big gas station companies arent in the gas business, they are in the real estate and convenience store business. They often sell gas at a loss even though they have their own fuel logistics supply chain. Other stations who rely on income from fuel sales and less so convenience sales struggle because they cant secure the selection in the store and dont have their own fuel logistics. Many go belly up unless they have something unique that keeps people coming in like restaurants or a unique drink selection. Once most if not all the local stores go out of business then the big store prices rise and the consumer is abused.
Google has stated that theyve operated youtube at a loss for a very long time but (and this is my speculation) its been done intentionally to edge out the competition and retain sympathy from its userbase to justify the abuse. Youtube is making massive revenue but they are spending it. If google/alphabet didnt see it as a profit stream it would have been killed a long time ago. My theory is they are sorta playing the game from both sides and overspending on overhead and padding the execs wallets more and more just to tell investors and shareholders that while revenue has increased, so has overhead/labor/etc just to take home their own fat paycheck while also milking their userbase for as much as they can. At some point its gunna break but execs have already made out on their goods. Yes video hosting and platform development is expensive but I do believe youtube is not spending most of its money there and that it doesent need all the overhead spending think of how crappy their content review system is. Nothing gets seen by a human except in very specific circumstances
Ok, thanks. So because they were subsidizing video costs by selling out data.
That’s what I meant when I said “cheaper” and he pushed back, but maybe that wasn’t clear enough.
I’m curious if there’s data for how much this was a factor, vs the traditional “giant company with deep pockets is willing to fund at a loss to grow market share” situation.
Either way, I probably understand what he meant now which is what I was after, thanks.
I wouldn’t mind paying, if they didn’t took away my right to privacy and stopped scraping all of my devices like freaking malware. Even if you don’t use any of their services.
As long as they do that, I feel no remorse not paying for their content.
You’re minimizing the abuse. Used to be fine with ads when it was 1-2 max but then it got abusive and greedy. Someone who yells at you once or twice may just be angry, upset, or so on. Someone who yells at you constantly is abusive
I can’t honestly believe you just equated more ads on TV to abuse.
Gaslighting is another way people justify abuse
I don’t think that term means what you think it means.
At the same time they are enforcing the ban on adblocks they are creating solutions for sponsor blocks to skip the ads that actually bring some money to youtube creators.
Funny how the paying for media content works, you can pay youtube but not the creator of that content, the creator himself gets next to nothing if the youtube algorithm doesn’t favour the content. Not a boring dystopia at all.
