Dear YouTube, if anyone there ever reads this.
I tried not to block ads, I would let the preroll go and usually not skip it.
I started skipping ads when they started getting long. I recall some were several minutes long at times.
I started leaving videos part way through when there were mid-roll ads, and those got long enough that I’d often forget what I was even watching.
I started blocking the ads outright when I would be watching a relaxing video, and a very loud mid-roll ad would blow out my goddamn eardrums.
Fuck you YouTube. You abused your users, you chased off good content creators, and now you’re offering people no carrot and all stick. How about you offer to match the volume of the ads to the videos, limit the length of ads to something reasonable, and nicely tell viewers that you are making ads less annoying and that unblocking the ads helps pay the content creators.
I used to make animations for YouTube, which weren’t monetized because I hate ads, and one day they copyright struck me for some very provably public domain music, but the way they did it was to insert ads into my video without my consent so they could monetize them to send the money to the scammer who flagged me. So I just deleted my entire account, fuck them.
That didn’t stop you from making cartoons, did it?
No I just went to Vimeo lol
if they’re anything like cable ads, they actually make the ads louder than the regular programming on purpose to try to make sure you hear it if you tune out or just walk away. no relaxed, unfocused watching for you!
x2
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Lmao “you purposely made your stuff shit. Now, if you offered a basic service without all the shit, I might pay for that.”
Bruh, you don’t pay for something because it’s not shit, you pay for something because it’s good. By paying for a basic service simply because it’s not shit, you are incentivising them to enshittify their service and offer a premium “not shit” version, instead of actually improving their service.
It’s just like the people who buy the new iPhone because it actually has a headphone jack this time.
They get away with this because people don’t use the alternatives. Odysee and Rumble are actually good alternatives. No, they’re not as good as YouTube, but they’re good enough. We just need creators to also upload to those platforms. Since YouTube keeps banning and demobilising them, this problem might solve itself.
Rumble is 100% fascist Nazi bullshit, not an alternative
If your feed is “100% fascist Nazi bullshit” may I suggest you watch less Nazi bullshit, and stop subscribing to them?
Lmfao. I had literally never heard of Rumble. I opened up a private browser window and pulled it up for the first time ever…the “Featured” was fucking Newsmax TV. Now obviously this isn’t indicative of the whole site but damn that does not help your point when that’s the featured for a brand new potential user
I’m not claiming it doesn’t have Newsmax on it. I’m claiming the service is solid. If you subscribe to people you care about (and you can find creators you like) it’s a good platform alternative. I’m the first to argue we need more YouTube creators to cross-post.
Well, maybe they just don’t want to be associated with Nazis.
There are Nazis on YouTube, Reddit, and Lemmy. Why are you here? You are not automatically associated with Nazis just because they might use a platform. This is like saying veganism is evil because Hitler was a vegan.
Curious, how does monetization work on those platforms? The bigger “Content creators” typically will be making videos as a job, so to draw them you’d need a halfway decent way to monetize.
They have ads, but I think YouTube pays better. Which I suppose is why creators stick with YouTube for now.
NewPipr
to people saying YouTube is a moneysink for google:
yes it is, if you just look at direct expenses of running it. but you’re overlooking the fact that it has enabled google to amass so much data(we’re taking about 500 hours worth of videos being uploaded per minute) that they can train anything with it.
it’s a service that’s too big to fail. even whole governments, courts, and other institutions depend on it. so, I refuse to believe that YouTube will be non-existant because a sliver of users refuse to be profiled by invasive advertisements.
If you’re using uBlock Origin. Go to “Filter Lists” and Purge All Caches. That may help.
I imagine they’ll eventually find a way to prevent us from blocking ads. Twitch TV for example has found some ways to make adblock useless.
It’s a shame, and it’s really just a side effect of google racing to the bottom of the adspace game. If ads weren’t as cheap as they are today, they wouldn’t be trying to maximize the amount of users who are forced to see advertisements.
I suspect ad blocking will always be an arms race. The server can only ask the client to play the ad, and then rely on the client to truthfully report whether it did so.
I’m sure they’ll try to implement some type of DRM BS into the web that allows them. It’s one of the good things about projects like Gemini. I used to think it was only good for the novelty of having a web alternative protocol.
No doubt Big Tech would lobby for Microsoft to use Windows to flag Gemini browsers as malicious and then run FUD campaigns against the Gemini protocol
I’m sure they’ll try to implement some type of DRM BS into the web
Funny you say that:
Google is already testing it I think.
Y’all remember when back in the day, Google’s motto was “don’t be evil.” And then at some point somebody told them how much money there was in being evil and then they just pivoted to being a functional parody of a giant evil megacorporation from a cyberpunk novel? Cuz I remember that.
It still doesn’t stop queueing a few videos ahead of time and watching them though, let it play the ad to noone and just cut it out after
But then you’ll get prompts for “What product did you just watch an ad for?”
“Drink verification can.”
They already do this on the YouTube TV app
It’s amazing how many times someone in this thread has joked about Google doing something absurd sounding only for it to already be true.
You have to be careful with that sort of thing - some percentage of people who do watch the ads will close the tab rather than read the prompt and answer it.
It’s only a matter of time before they start embedding them into the video like podcasts do and you won’t be able tell the difference between ad and video with software.
Timestamps can still be voluntarily marked for an auto-skip feature to jump throughthe ads.
Not if YouTube interjects the ad after uploading and the location is randomized.
That’s why there pushing Web Environment Integrity (essentially just DRM for the entire internet)
Someone will create an extension to mute the ad and overlay it with suitably timed bite sized cat videos.
Oh, that’s just brilliant! Instead of being interrupted by intrusive ads, I’m seeing videos of fluffy cats doing adorable and funny stuff all the time.
You can block twitch ads. I literally never see them. Use https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions/blob/master/vaft/vaft.user.js with Tampermonkey.
Also, checkout S0undTV if you use android TV.
Will to be fair, Google is an ad company. We should have seen this coming.
Worst case scenario I think I’d just resort to downloading the videos to watch. Live videos is the challenge, but luckily I don’t watch live streams.
To be fair, he was talking about live streams, as in watching people in real-time.
That can be a fairly different experience, especially since downloaders don’t grab the chat at the moment. Also for unarchived streams, they can only be downloaded if you are aware and able to download at the time that the stream is still active.
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They’ll start banning Google accounts, that’ll stop quite alot of people just because of how many users use gmail or drive.
I don’t think they’ll resort to that because that would mean getting rid of their own source of income. YouTube may not be getting ad revenue, but they still collect data and that’s where the real value is.
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I just did the zap element thing on that warning. So far so good, except you can’t scroll down.
I see this as an absolute win, since that means you don’t have to read YouTube comments.
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Lmao
I occasionally see ads on Youtube. I’m not sure if this is related.
Can we pin this?
…temporarily it might help
I am much, much more likely to be willing to pay for Ublock than I am YouTube.
I haven’t watched live tv in almost 20 years because I refuse to sit through ads, and I definitely won’t sit through them on YouTube. If it was a banner or some thing on the page or the side of video that would be more acceptable, but sitting through ads to watch a YouTube video….there’s just no way.
You could subscribe
I basically don’t subscribe to any streaming services, but we got the family plan years ago and share it with a few friends and family that chip in a couple bucks each.
It’s so affordable and the content on YouTube is second to none.
I’m so happy to help content creators earn a living content I genuinely care about rather than studios led by c-suite committees.
Oh you sweet summer child
Lemmy users only want to use foss and not pay a single penny. How dare you suggest they pay a tiny amount to help pay for servers and the creators they’re watching!
Some of us are legitimately broke (or on a very limited income). I get that some folk believe it’s the capitalist way to force us to starve or succumb to the elements to demonstrate to others that humans have no value other than their productive worth to some plutocrat.
Heave ho, thieves and beggars, never shall we die!
Ya I know. I’m living pay cheque to pay cheque. If I can’t afford something, I watch ads. It’s simple.
Why do you expect everything free?
Actually I expect some day the benefits that allow me to survive will end and I’ll be another statistic.
But for now, the United States feels that I’m better off alive, though destitute, and unable to actually afford rent in California.
In the meantime, the millennials and zoomers I know don’t expect to own anything ever. They eat whatever cheap food they can afford and pay rent and utilities and have a handful of trappings, and people write articles about how they’re not into diamonds or owning real estate, or keeping a savings account. And one by one, they too are slipping through the cracks, usually when they slip down the stairs or get injured at work or catch a cold and don’t have the strength to go into their job when their boss calls them desperate for a filler.
So regardless of what I expect, our establishment companies don’t want to give anyone anything. They reward hard workers by working them harder.
I don’t watch ads because they’re antagonistic. I tend to avoid anything that features dark patterns because I’m susceptible to them, and they signal the product has been contaminated by its manufacturers with malicious intent.
If I can’t afford something, I watch ads
I can’t afford to pay 20€ per month–that’s more than my whole monthly phone bill with something like 50 or 100 GB of data. Cost of living is high enough as it is.
I also lack the most valuable currency there is in one’s life, one that you simply can’t get more of. Time. So I block ads, which cost a lot of time, with extreme prejudice.
Ads are also bad for my mental health, they just irritate me, rack up stress and easily swing me into bad mood.
Lastly, I don’t give a fuck about costing money to some multi-billion corporation. I don’t care about them as much as they don’t care about me; the corpos see me just as a resource to exploit as much as possible then move on to another one when there’s nothing more to exploit, and I see the corpos exactly the same way. Call it mutual parasitism. Yes, I’m a parasite. And parasites are the most successful lifeforms on Earth.
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Oh no, some troll on the internet thinks I’m the one with issues. What will I ever do.
People out here being dramatic af.
Looks like they deleted their comment, but someone was saying watching ads is being “sub human”.
Like homie there are literal wars going on rn and you think having an ad shown to you is a violation of your human rights. Then they turn around and call other folks privileged. Bruh lol.
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You regard mental health issues as a character flaw in 2023? All of western civilization deals with intergenerational dysfunction and late stage capitalism. Of course we’re stressed out.
Usually we only hear derision regarding mental health from the alt-right. Are you an alpha male? Are you a Brexiteer?
Educate yourself on the harsh conditions of the real world and grow some empathy.
Otherwise there will be no-one left to stand for you when the Leopards come to eat your face.
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TIL watching an ad is being treated subhuman.
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Okay. Just because you are a begging chooser doesn’t mean everyone is.
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It feels like a culture war between corporations and the OG user base. They reeled us in and monopolized the market with the idea of “free”. Now that competitors are few and far between, they want to change the game and reel in literal billions. I have absolutely no sympathy for their “lost profits”. They are making enough as-is, and I have no problems saying that out loud.
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Could you explain what you mean by that comment?
Lol you again being a cuck. Literally a perfect consumer. Give all your money away, and maybe I should give you a link to my PayPal since you’re such a philanthropist. Take your privilege and fuck off
My privilege? You’re expecting servers to pay for themselves without ads or subscriptions. Idiot.
Keep sucking off billionaires you fucking sodomite
How? Because I understand how the world works? How do you expect servers to get paid for? Genuine question. Ads or subscriptions are the only way.
Continue to be a begging chooser.
You’re gonna continue paying for shit that I will get for free, like it or not. People smarter than you and I have found solutions to this kind of greed for years and they’ll continue to do the same. So you can get on your high horse or you can shut your bitch ass up because we’re both getting the same content and I’m not paying shit. Again, shove your privilege up your ass because throwing money around doesn’t make you white-savior wannabe ass any more righteous than me
It’s an end of an era. I’ve been on reddit for over a decade, and on youtube for even longer. Crazy to think I might be giving up both of those services within a few months of each other. Feels like the internet is dying. Oh well. Maybe I’ll go back to reading a shitload.
If YouTube premium was $4.99 a month it’d be worth a consideration. But then again adblocking is free and privacy respecting
Yeah I could care less about people saying they’d watch ads of they were less intrusive. I’m not, I don’t give a fuck about YouTube’s sustainability who happened to still have major growth while I ran an AdBlock this entire time.
Maybe I’d consider paying if YouTube was the actual product I was paying for. Instead I get privacy invasive spying and my data being harvested, while am paying to do so. The product I’d want to pay for would have zero privacy invasive stuff involved. Which that isn’t going to exist, so I’m never going to pay.
I don’t really know how people can even use YouTube without ad blockers. Sitting through minutes of advertisement is not going to make me want to buy your product if I start mentally associating your product with frustration and annoyance. If these video ads are going to be repetitive and annoying, at least make them funny.
It seems like there is nowhere on the Internet to get away from ads currently, even here, where you thought you are safe, you are now reading an ad for my newest movie (you know the one), now also available on streaming!
Youtube is getting on cable tv levels of bad. On a regular ~10min video you will first deal with a few preroll ads and at least one is unskippable, then the creator will have a 2+ minute sponsor segment (I don’t mind those since they are usually well presented). There will also be multiple midroll ad spots.
Depending on video length, it’s gonna soon be literally more ad than video. They are still stealing and selling your data though, and also making the web worse for everyone with DRM shit.
Fuck. Google.
I had already migrated to Invidious since last year because I degoogled everything. Seems like now its time to look for real youtube alternatives.
I haven’t turned off ad-blocking in 20 years. That’s because I “don’t allow” companies to use my home and my computer as their place of business.
Does anyone else remember back in the days of VCR, the networks wanted to push a technology that disallows you from fast-forwarding through ad breaks on the stuff you recorded?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Holy crap
Piped is about to get another user
Why wouldn’t they block Piped?
For the past few months, they have been rather aggressive with IP bans for Piped instances, yeah.
Oof
If you’re using UBlock Origin do the following:
Go to settings. Go to Filter Lists. Click purge all caches. Click update now.
That’s it, this message should disappear entirely.
Google kind of sucks.
What was their last big success? Google maps? Pretty much everything they do lately is some combination of shitty or prematurely killed.
Google more than just kind of sucks. Like you said they haven’t done shit in a long time outside of making the internet more hostile with shit like this and their planned chrome-based anti adblock (a LOT of browsers run on chromium which would bring the same shit, Mozilla4lyfe)
Also, the google graveyard is just pathetic at this point. They truly can’t do shit outside of anti-user bullshit
UP FIREYFOX!
Android? Google Photo? Google Pixel? Google Pay? Google Apps? Chrome? Chromebook? Google Drive? Chromecast? Android Auto?
They launched a ton of successful stuff since Maps came out in 2005
Google photo sucks
What do you prefer using?
Immich is on a par with Google Photos, imo. It’s self hosted though, so not for everyone.
Yeah I have an immich instance myself, and do plan on relying more on that as I max out my Google drive size.
The bigger issue I gave with that is remote backup still imposes a cost, and like you said you gotta know what you’re doing to safely expose that to the Internet.
That is true. I only use mine locally, so it’s not a problem. Although you can remote access via Tailscale for safety. It’s quicker and easier than trying to set up remote proxies etc, about which I know nothing. Tailscale took 5 mins.
I personally love it. Being able to search “Tom at the beach drinking a cocktail” and get all the relevant pictures is magic.
Does it? It’s a fantastic service that works really well, whether it’s worth the price or privacy is a slightly different conversation
whether it’s worth the price
You don’t have to pay Google a penny. I bought a quite cheap (50-60$) used but working Pixel 1 XL specifically for unlimited lifetime full-quality Google Photos upload.
You got me! Android came after maps in 2008. So that’s not a great argument for recent development. Is pixel meaningfully different than Nexus? That would put it in 2010, or 2016 if you insist pixel is a big innovation.
Chromebooks are also a 2010 project.
Google pay I don’t think is a success? Didn’t they like relaunch it recently and shit it up by tying it to phone numbers instead of your Google account? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/google-pays-disastrous-year-continues-promised-bank-account-feature-is-dead/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-pay-hopes-to-recover-from-brutal-2021-with-new-leadership/ . Also the original release is 2011. Quite some time ago. But technically newer than maps!
Drive is 2012. Dang, got me. But that’s still more than 10 years old, so my actual point seems to stand.
Chromecast is 2013, so maybe within this decade.
Auto is 2015 but I know nothing about it.
I guess I should’ve said “in the past 7 years” instead of exaggerating and saying since maps!
But all “successes” are gonna be years old. You don’t turn something like Chromebook into an overnight success. It takes years for an ecosystem to grow, users to find use cases, software revisions to polish the product, word of mouth, etc.
For comparison the Apple watch came out in 2015 and Airpods in 2016. What other successes has Apple had in the past 7 years? Maybe their AR thing will take off, but if it does it’s probably 5-10 years from becoming a mass market product.
Android is developed by a consortium of developers called The Open Handset Alliance under an open source license. It is most certainly not a Google product, any more than Linux is a Canonical product. As in, they help develop it but it’s not their product.
That is really playing with words… Android (the OS people run on their phone) was originally developed by a company bought by Google, which then funded it, made the overwhelming number of contributions to it for 19 years, does the marketing, certification plus all the non-open source elements that make the experience what 99.99% of users get everyday when they use their phone.
Ignoring everything after Google maps is ignorant as hell. I mean Google Photos is literally used by a massive percentage of iPhone users as well, because it’s so good.
You seem to be unfamiliar with hyperbole, or maybe just didn’t recognize it here.
Also they kind of enshittified Google photos by walking back the unlimited storage promise. Probably not the best project to point to for “Google doesn’t suck” arguments.
They didn’t walk it back. Pixel 1 still has unlimited storage.
You’re insufferable. Whatever fits your agenda.
You’re insufferable. Whatever fits your agenda.
irony
It’s not insufferable to call it insufferable behavior. That’s not irony.
Ya because saying Google walked back on a promise when they didn’t. Whatever lies to fit your agenda. Pixel 1 still gets unlimited backups.
https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-changes/
choke on it
edit: after being confronted with the evidence, this user started deleting comments, making the proof inaccessible.
unless you know where to look
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You’re insufferable. Whatever fits your agenda.
They didn’t walk it back. Pixel 1 still has unlimited storage.
And for some time, other devices did as well. And then they changed it. Would some other term than “walking back” describe “they offered a good deal to customers, and then changed it to a less good deal” better for you?
Do you like work for Google or something? Probably not. The handful of people I’ve met who work there aren’t nearly this zealous about defending it.
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Are you hanging your entire argument on the word “lifetime”?
From their announcement
Starting June 1, 2021, any new photos and videos you upload will count toward the free 15 GB of storage that comes with every Google Account or the additional storage you’ve purchased as a Google One member. Your Google Account storage is shared across Drive, Gmail and Photos. This change also allows us to keep pace with the growing demand for storage. And, as always, we uphold our commitment to not use information in Google Photos for advertising purposes. We know this is a big shift and may come as a surprise, so we wanted to let you know well in advance and give you resources to make this easier.
From this you can infer photos prior to June 21 2021 did not count against the storage. And now they do. Making the product worse for users.
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Most of their innovation has been for developers it seems.
Edit for clarification: since Google maps
