There are no better adblockers, uBlock Origin is all you need and is already updated to bypass it.
Unlock origin is the adblocker that people are installing. There are a lot of people with shitty adblockers out there, I guess they are switching.
I bet all those people with shitty adblockers are also probably googling better ad/YT compatible blockers lmaoo
I searched “YouTube adblocker” on both google and DDG. The first mention of ublock origin was in the 1st page of Google (just at the bottom, under “recommended adblockers for Firefox”, the 2nd option). There was no mention of it on DDG, even though I clicked “more results” once (so searched the equivalent of 2 pages). The problem with Google search is not google, it’s SEO, that affects all search engines.
To be fair someone that uses DDG most likely already has ublock origin.
Can confirm. I use DuckDuck Go and uBlock.
Thing is, searching with DDG takes time to get used to, as it doesn’t work the same way as Google. Google uses a lot of convenient algorithms that are also a double edged sword.
I use DuckDuck Go and uBlock
uBlock or uBlock Origin?
Eh… Um… Know what? Probably should’ve guessed that there would be a uBlock Not-The-Origin if there is a uBlock Origin.
Yeah, I meant uBlock Origin.
I just tried it and there’s plenty of results to Reddit references to U block origin on Firefox.
You’re clearly making an assumption here
You missed the joke, completely
After YouTube started filling their search results with mostly shorts, I stopped using it for new stuff. It’s terrible now.
Yeah youtubes attempt at being tiktok is just awful and they don’t even have options to not have shorts show up in the feed. On top of shorts just being inferior versions of regular videos without functional controls
This is what gets me. Wanna show me shorts? Ok. But why the fuck am I not allowed to rewind a couple of seconds if I want to? It’s an artificial, completely useless limitation that had no place in 2023.
So, no thanks.
For what it’s worth you can replace the “short” in the url with “watch” to get the old interface back.
There are obviously also extensions/userscripts that do that for you and convert all shorts into regular videos.
Truly thou art a diety
They’re not even doing a good job at cloning TT. You’ve been able to seek in TT videos for a long time now lol
Most of my browser addons are aimed at making YouTube usable. Hiding shorts is priority one
I started blocking those from appearing when they first showed up. There are a number of ways to do it. The Blocktube extension is one.
if you click ublock, select the settings cog, then in the tab that opens select ‘my filters’, you can enter the following to do the same thing:
www.youtube.com##.ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scopePersonally I avoid installing too many extentions as they are quite literally apps that auto open whenever you just want to browse the web (regardless of if you’re going to youtube, you’re computer runs a youtube specific adblock)
Thank you for this
I switched to FreeTube and now all the shorts are on a separate page I can switch over to if I feel like watching them. It’s also got SponsorBlock built in. Now I can enjoy youtube with a clean, faster interface and google isn’t tracking a damn thing. All because google got greedy and made their user experience shit.
Google didn’t get greedy, it’s doing what it’s been doing for years. Before resorting to plunging us into Matrix-like pods, they’re trying to squeeze some more data out of users.
I only wish PiP worked the way it does in Firefox, not in Edge/Chromium. I like to have my browser next to full height video on my ultrawide, but PiP will not go beyond 1080 pixels tall.
I found an extension that gets rid of the shorts, thank god
Also if you have enhancer it has an option to turn off the shorts bar and convert shorts to real videos.
Yeah, I hate how crappy search now is.
It’ll show me a couple of videos, then shorts, then some kind of recommendation list. If I actually want to do a complete search for the thing, and only the thing, I’m looking for, I have to go to advanced options and specify I’m looking for videos. JUST videos.
I don’t even care about the shorts showing up in search results. What really irks me is that you get like 3 videos related to search results, then some random unrelated shit, 3 relevant videos, more unrelated garbage, and then the rest of the actually relevant videos. I am specifically searching for something, just show me the damn thing.
Yes. The way the default search now works is that, when you search you get:
- Three or four videos that are actually from your search.
- Some recommended playlists.
- The shorts tray that vaguely has some content related to your search.
- Maybe two or three more videos from the actual search.
- “People also watch” recommendations.
- “Shorts for you” recommendations.
If you want to get just your search results, cutting away shorts, playlists, and the recommendations that take up the majority of the search page, you’ll have to open up the filters and click on “videos” on the cl tent type list. Then you actually get to see the search results.
Thanks for the tip, I’ll try that next time. Even though it’s infuriating that it’s necessary in the first place
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for real the discovery is terrible. it’s all junk and it’s a waste of my time.
First thing I did when the shorts spam apocalypse started, was create custom ublock filters to strip them out of youtube as much as I could. Too bad I didn’t back them up before my system decided to go poof.
I just copied them over from here. Works for me.
Thanks for the hint! I mostly just ignored the shorts, but I just added that filter list to uBlock in firefox on android and it is much more pleasant when they’re not there in the first place.
the shorts tend to be so bad and pointless. occasionally there is someone who makes an effort, but the number of low effort and garbage ones made me stop looking at shorts ever.
Didn’t know about SponsorBlock until all this started. So many just found out ad blocking is possible.
I only heard about AdNauseum because of this whole debacle. It blocks ads, hasn’t temporarily broken (as far as I have seen), and I set it to “click” 80% of all ads it sees.
I have probably screwed whatever profile they built on me, cost the ad buyers money bc clicks, hurt the conversion rate for purchases to cost google money, and even possibly made money for my favorite creators and sites (depending on how they’re paid).
Though someone lmk if I am misunderstanding something about it.
Holy crap, now that is causing massive damage to advertisers. I didn’t know this existed either. If everyone used it, the entire internet would collapse because most of it is for-profit now, unlike 30 years ago (when I made my first site in notepad).
I discovered SponsorBlock after installing Smart Tube Next on a FireTV.
The other person’s been downvoted pretty heavily so I’ll volunteer to accept some.
Sponsorblock is a shitty tool for extremely selfish people that only hurts small-time content creators. You can’t argue about your data privacy, malware, corporate profits, or Google. Sponsorships are literally the least invasive and most direct form of financial support the average person can get for their content without you paying them directly. YouTubers do it because Google is already fucking them over. There’s absolutely no higher justification for it beyond annoyance at an extremely minor inconvenience and a sense of entitlement to the work of others.
You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom’s Auto Care if you could. Not every attempt at making money is evil.
You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom’s Auto Care if you could.
If someone came out and shoved the banner in my face and didn’t let me watch the game until several seconds had elapsed, yes, I’d tear the banner down too. Because it’s unacceptable.
But no one does that. The banner sits there in the outfield on the wall being unobtrusive and not interrupting the game or the flow of the game. That’s acceptable.
Make the ads unobtrusive and not interrupt the flow of the video and I don’t care. The problem is YT / YTers don’t do that. That’s why Sponser Block exists.
The creator isn’t losing money. They get paid to do the sponsorship. Skipping the segment has no effect on how much money they get because they already got it.
Sponsor block is a different beast. Should we really be doing that to our content creators? No, definitely not. Is it them or the advertising company that suffers?
Edit: Actually really surprised about this. Couple weeks ago people are sticking up for YT premium prices. Now, you are against helping the creators you watch.
The company, because the creator gets paid either way
Agree. SponserBlock is just doing the clicking for me. I did the same thing manually for a long time as my regular youtoobers got sponsored. Good for them, but I don’t need to see it and they still got sponsored.
If you weren’t planning on paying for the product, the creator won’t take any hit from you using sponsorblock. In fact, the advertiser won’t either. Nobody will be hurt by it, because it was a massive waste of your time to start with.
Fair enough but you can’t plan on paying for a product before you have seen what it was.
Well, the blocker doesn’t stop me from seeing the ad, it stops me from wasting my time manually skipping the ad. I still don’t see how that’s going to change my mind about anything.
Also, if you were thinking of getting anything from a youtube ad: they are almost exclusively bad products. If you need something, just do a tiny bit of research instead of going with the first thing a content creator agreed to shill for.
Huh, Sponsorblock is basically muting TV ads like in the old days.
Why should I be forced to watch a sponsor almost always totally unrelated to the content I seek to watch, and that the YouTuber decided to upload?
It’s always some VPN making wild bullshit claims about what it can do for your privacy. I respect Tom Scott for refusing a VPN sponsorship because they wanted to make him lie.
Bingo. Buy a VPN for privacy just means, give us your data instead of your ISP.
Now, a VPN provider may very well be more trustworthy than your ISP! But then again, maybe not… That depends on your circumstances and risk profile.
He did eventually take one later on, which I can imagine must’ve been a bit of a painful decision ;-;
He declined the first one, because they wanted him to lie.
He accepted the other, because they were fine with just facts.
A VPN doesn’t protect your privacy. It only helps on websites without working https, which is ridiculously rare these days. Yes, it also hides your IP address, but that is really really irrelevant. If you wanted to stay truly anonymous you’d not log in anywhere and use Tor. The only actual use case is circumventing geo blocking.
You can also circumvent geo blocking with a proxy, some of them are free, do not send any sensitive info on the free proxies however, not that a paid one is intrinsicaly safer, just like vpns.
Because the creator gets paid by them to provide you with a free product. If that fails to be the case you get nothing.
My favorite aspect of sponsorblock is blocking the incredibly repetitive ubiquitous script that every single channel copies of like, subscribe, ring the notification bell.
This is actually why i don’t like it. Most of my subs do this kinda thing rarely but occasionally. Sponsorblock creates a gap in the video that is more jarring then the 1 second self promotion, wish there was an option to only block self promotions more then 4 seconds long.
I really can’t stand requests for likes, subscribes, notification bell at all. I actually hate it more than ads, and have backed out of many a video that didn’t happen to have the segment flagged at the beginning.
I’m not at my computer to check, but I’m like 70% sure you can set a minimum segment length for skipping.
You can still use sponsorblock and configure it to not skipping sponsor segments if you want, and still enjoying the benefits of automatically skipping useless segments such as intro, outro, subscription reminders, self promotion, recaps, etc.
I used to let some creators through, but it seems like ad sponsors are locking down on creators to fit their message, so I’ve started blocking everything since it’s just useless mush.
You’re absolutely right. Sponsorblock directly harms the average people making content, it has nothing to do with Google.
It’s gross and reveals how much of the complaining about ads has absolutely nothing to do with privacy or malware or corporate profiteering or anything like that. These people are just nakedly selfish.
Wear those downvotes with pride. They mean you have a conscience and feel empathy.
Cheers. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a response to a normal ethical take. We complain about wanting free and open source products but by the looks of it nobody is able to sit through a 20 second sponsor.
If we had everything on a free open source platform people would still skip the sponsored segment.
I feel if the sponsor blocks keep up we’ll start to see the creators or sponsors combat it in ways we really don’t like.
Sponsors don’t pay the creator less if you skip the sponsor segment. That’s not tracked, at least not in a way that google will share with the creator or anyone else. If that changes someday, sure, you have a point. For now skipping the sponsor segment is as harmless as skipping through the commercials on TV.
Keyword here is for now. Just pushing them to be more intrusive. Yes they may incrementally become more intrusive in the future but it’s a decent trade-off for free content.
Whatever, either i have to manually switch forward or sponsorblock does it for me. Second option is less annoying.
I watch YT about once a week and usually an hour or less. Premium isn’t worth it for that low of use. Sponsors, I skipped, always. I’ve never once purchased from a sponsor. I also skipped subscribe crap manually (I’m not logged in, I can’t).
SponsorBlock just does it for me, kinda nice. The creator gets paid by viewership so I have helped when I watch.
Lemmy isn’t seen by 98% of the public so my mentioning it hardly spreads further awareness. What did spread it was YT themselves cracking down. It made news headlines and my own mother asked I come over and install one.
YT Streisand Effected themselves. They demanded we not use them and got more people using them because of it.
Now, my mom won’t see Google ads anywhere, not just YT. What a smart move because I know there’s probably a million new UBlock users.
The content creators get paid the exact same whether I skip the sponsor segment or not. YouTube doesn’t track that, or not in a way they share with anyone else at any rate. Sponsors aren’t going to pay the content creators less due to skips since they literally cannot see who skips the segment.
In other words, it doesn’t hurt the content creator in the slightest.
There’s also the option of biting the bullet and paying for YouTube Premium.
No. Never. I’d rather stop using YT at all than giving in to coerced user-tracking.
I mean, I might have considered paying for YT premium if I thought it offered some value (other than disabling ads) but I won’t sure as hell pay for anything that any company is trying to blackmail me into.
I mean you didn’t buy it before so why would you now? You don’t need excuses. You just don’t want to pay for it. Own it.
One could argue that we’re paying for it without our consent, given the fact that Google doesn’t pay anything in taxes. That’s a cool four billion a year (at least) that they get from the American taxpayer for free.
One could argue that we’re paying for it without our consent
One could argue that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. That doesn’t make it remotely true.
Google doesn’t pay anything in taxes
Uh. Google pays a shitload in taxes. There hasn’t been a single year that they HAVEN’T paid taxes. They paid 11 billion in income taxes alone in 2022.
I use it because YouTube music is included and it’s great while driving, it allows background play even with the screen off (I’m talking about mobile).
There’s something more, but nothing that a pro user cannot already do with third tools.
I find it funny how sometimes apps “create value” by taking something away which is included by default in similar products and goes without saying.
In this context: YouTube is the only app I know which is denying to work when put into background or with the screen off.
Or take some car manufacturers who start asking for a fee just to use basic functionality.
But that’s the wrong way around. They don’t want you to pay, they make their money through advertising. They make far more money from advertiser’s paying to put up ads than they ever make from people paying for premium.
Same as with Facebook now bringing in an ad-free version (in the EU anyway) - they charge higher than is reasonable so that people will opt for the ad-supported free version instead.
It’s not that you are blackmailed into paying premium, it’s that you’re encouraged not to as a way of explicitly consenting to ads.
Basically, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
lmao you’re so wrong on ads being more profitable than premium, especially on a per-user basis
According to this you can expect to make around $18/1000 views. That’s with 55% going to the creator and 45% to Google. Which means that Google makes around $14.5 per 1000 views.
Coincidentally, that’s also rougly the price of YouTube Premium. Are you telling me that you watch a thousand videos per month?
That makes a lot of sense.
For desktop install and use “FreeTube”.
Alternatively for your android phone you can use “GrayJay”
Never. Pay. For. YouTube. Premium
NewPipe still works well for me on Android.
I assume you need to be rooted for Gray Jay?
No, it works fine for me. It’s just an apk.
I really hope not
You don’t need root because this is its own app unlike the apps like revance which patch your existing YouTube app.
You don’t need root for ReVanced. It can patch an APK from storage.
Abandoning YouTube is seriously more difficult than abandoning other “non-fediverse” general social media platforms, since it’s got so much useful content that gets straight up ruined by the company that owns the website.
I doubt PeerTube is anything better than Vimeo, at least for now, things can improve after all.
At this point, I don’t even care about the user tracking. I just don’t want to sit through unskippable ads anymore. Especially when it’s the same ad over and over again.
Well then you’re in luck, you have a lot of options for removing ads before giving money to YouTube.
I love that all the centralized social media networks are scrambling to become shitty for profits right around the time users are realizing that they don’t need centralized servers to host their user-generated content. Users can take their content wherever they want and let these platforms die.
I’m not sure if we manage to do the same for video though; hosting these costs a lot more.
Maybe we don’t need 4K 60FPS video to show Mr. Beast giving away more crap. Just because we can up the quality, doesn’t mean we should. Or maybe client-side real-time AI upscaling will make this a non-issue.
Call me old fashioned but I’d rather see high native quality available for when it is relevant. If I’m watching gameplay footage (as one example) I would look at the render quality.
With more and more video games already trying to use frame generation and upscaling within the engine, at what point is too much data loss? Depending on upscaling again during playback means that you video experience might depend on which vendor you have - for example, an Nvidia computer may upscale differently from an Intel laptop with no DGPU vs an Android running on 15% battery.
That would become even more prominent if you’re evaluating how different upscaling technologies look in a given video game, perhaps with an intent to buy different hardware. I check in on how different hardware encoders keep up with each other with a similar research method. That’s a problem that native high resolution video doesn’t have.
I recognize this is one example and that there is content where quality isn’t paramount and frame gen and upscaling are relevant - but I’m not ready to throw out an entire sector of media for this kind of gain on some media. Not to mention that not everyone is going to have access to the kind of hardware required to cleanly upscale, and adding upscaling to everything (for everyone who’s not using their PS5/Xbox/PC as a set top media player) is just going to drive up the cost of already very expensive consumer electronics and add yet another point of failure to a TV that didn’t need to be smart to begin with.
The quality is something that depends on the content. If the video is just someone talking, 4K is overkill. And not every gameplay has to be recorded forever. Only the good ones. And even the videos can be rescaled after some time if nobody sees them.
I mean, didn’t Vine fail even with mostly low-quality videos? I’m assuming even 720p could be a challenge for a decentralized site.EDIT: Apparently I was misremembering
It didn’t fail, twitter shut it down
I distinctly remember reading that on somewhere reputable but it seems you’re right. Thanks for the fact check.
Is there some reason you can’t start up a decentralized content hosting platform. Just let anyone with a spare hd and a spare pc at home join up?
Like I guess I don’t really want anything illegal on my PC… Maybe this plan is awful.
This exists. For example, for general decentralized storage, there’s storj.io, and there’s PeerTube. But I guess there’s a reason it’s not more widespread. I’d happily be proven wrong, though.
This 100%. Look at forums. Back in the early days, there were lots of little independent forums. Sites like Reddit took over because you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page. We gained convenience, but didn’t think too hard about what we were losing or who we were losing it to. Then along came enshittification and we are collectively realizing what we lost. Federation is of course the solution. As I see it, the only missing piece is monetization. Platforms like YouTube make it easy to monetize page views, Twitter / X is doing the same. That’s much harder in the fediverse.
Patreon for monification?
Ads suck. And honestly, if we had less content creators, they’d be fine. There are a lot of absolutely degenerates out there. Let’s cull the herd a bit and let us speak individually with our wallets.
That’s a fair point. Patreon, or whatever comes next, needs to drastically reduce friction. That by the way is why Amazon is so successful, reducing purchase friction. Right now if you have something that a million people will take for free, and you start to charge just one penny for it, your audience of a million will drop to like 12. Not because people don’t want to spend a penny, but because they don’t want to fill out a form and put in their name address credit card number expiration date security code phone number email address etc. If there was a button they could click that was like ‘instant donate 5 cents’ most people would click that a lot.
The closest thing I’ve heard to that was a crypto called basic attention token, which aimed to do just that. They are making a big mistake though in that they are only integrating with Brave browser rather than making a universal plug-in. So the idea of a universal solution is still a ways off I guess. But I think to make it zero friction it will have to be crypto based in some way.
you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page
RSS feeds have provided this experience for years. The problem is that a lot of sites stopped serving RSS feeds for their content. But sites like rss.app and openrss can be used to get RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them.
RSS is great for content consumption. It’s a shame that many sites stopped serving it- same thing with podcasts, now everyone wants you to listen on this or that platform instead of just publishing a normal RSS feed full of MP3 files.
That said though, RSS doesn’t help for participation, it’s a one-way tech.
I guess if you have forums that put out RSS feeds you could aggregate them together for post titles, but that’s still clumsy. Lemmy does it much more elegantly.My understanding of RSS is that it’s basically a list of metadata and links for content… Its always seemed to me to be a great way to aggregate the content you want to see. He did specifically mention keeping an Identity across multiple forums and I’m not aware of any RSS implementation that provides that functionality though… are you? That’s a huge feature to miss if we’re talking about social link aggregators like Reddit and Lemmy.
One of the main advantages of RSS is that it doesn’t track you or require an account for it to work. As you said it’s only a XML or JSON file wth the latest items posted on the website.
Yeah, sorry I was specifically replying to part about seeing the content from communities (or everything on the internet, really) in one view. Keeping your identity across multiple forums is platform-specific and would be solved by Lemmy directly. RSS feeds would just give you the updates and the links directly to the content. But once you click through to go to each website, you’d just be using your already-logged-in state on the platform.
It’s like we’re reverting to the days you would go to homestarrunner.com, illwillpress, etc to see content from people you actually wanted to see content from. Honestly looking forward to it
Great Jorb!
I said you did a great jeeeeaaaeeeeoooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrb!
Youtube is a perfect example of why ad blockers exist. They use ridiculous ad volumes and spy on their users for data to sell.
uBlock Origin FTW!
Meanwhile, Youtube engineers and uBlock Origin volunteers are in a war of attrition, updating both the website (youtube, to block ublock) and uBlock Origin (the ad blocker, to unblock the ublock blocker) multiple times a day every day
I feel like uBlock Origin has been coming out ahead more often than not. I haven’t had to manually refresh my lists for the last few days.
Yep, it’s going to be a constant game of cat-and-mouse from now on. Google isn’t going to relent on this.
Oh, of course not. But uBlock Origin and pihole aren’t going anywhere. Hell, they’d probably have to get legislation to slow it down, but good luck fighting that battle. Hollywood’s war against piracy is a good comparison.
something something offer a better service than the pirates
Exactly. We’ve come a long way from $6/m netflix. I would rather give up youtube than pay them $10/m. I GLADLY paid $1/m to a twitch adblocker the other day. Ill pay, but not fucking $10/m when I can avoid it with some complications for free.
I’m scared that that’s the endgame here. By educating people about ad blockers, they might be purposely tanking their business model so they can cry to the government to ban ad blockers to save them.
Not even, they’ve already tried to make the case of Anti-adblock bypass violating DMCA and it hasn’t gone anywhere. Unlike piracy where it can and is claimed as a violation of copyright law.
Shoutout to /r/PiHole
Is that how this works over here?
I think its c/Pihole
but I haven’t figured it our yet
/c/PiHole ?
Edit: that doesn’t work as a one tap link.
Reminds me of the IM wars back in the latter 90s / early 00s. At one point, briefly, AIM and Trillian were pushing updates to negate each other every few hours.
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And they increased the fucking price for YouTube premium.
They reduced the price!
And forcibly added a YouTube music sub to the price…
I don’t think they did a proper cost-benefit analysis for this one. Feels like the new CEO learned of ad blockers and put down a diktat.
No, I think the advertisers learned of ad blockers and started putting pressure on the new CEO. “Why am I paying you $X,000,000 for an ad buy that people can just block? And you’re not doing anything about it?!”
So they put some development resources behind it, make some noise, get the internet in a tizzy, so the advertisers feel like they’re being heard and listened to and some progress is being made. Then later they can say, “hey look, less than 1% of ads are being blocked on our platform but views have gone up by 6%, so we’ll only increase the ad cost by 5% this year and call it even.”
Boom, everyone wins and they can drop it, at the cost of just a little bit of their dignity and self-respect.
Ublock Origin works
Brave is ass
Switched finally to ff. So I guess thank you google.
I had uBlock Origin installed since forever, are people just finding out about it?
NewPipe in my mobile and FreeTube in my desktop. Fuck you Google
it’s only a matter of time before those don’t work anymore
It will always be a technology race. And it’s one that so far the content platforms have lost.
Especially given they always abuse the upper hand when they have it, motivating the coding community to solve that problem right quick.
it’s a race that they will win easily with something like this https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md#goals
go ahead and downvote me it will help you make your point
While it’s unlikely that they won’t attempt to get something similar to WEI onto the internet at some point, they have recently given up on this iteration of the concept.
true statements
I’ll do my part in helping you make your point, sir!
I agree with you that such efforts are always a threat, and I’m reminded both of the V-Chip and the current efforts in the UK to keep blokes from watching their porn (anonymously, that is, without ending up on a registry of porn watchers), what may end up adding the right to porn access as a specific chartered right in our universal charters (and some national / state charters). Here in California, the right to produce porn is explicitly established in state law, which is embarrassing to some, a point of pride to others.
The MPAA and RIAA also tried to get all the ISPs to agree to shut down (or throttle) service after twelve strikes by an anti-piracy board, who would track the IP addies of torrents. This fueled the development of magnet links (now the standard). And meant that Xfinity and AT&T had to be extra shitty to customers due to causes they don’t care about, while folks are already desperate to disconnect from them in favor of an alternative. So they haven’t really be enforcing it.
And yes, Google is retreating on the WEI thing for now (if only they could get the federal government to pass a law) but the blowback on an eventual universal DRM is going to be severe, including revealing to the world that TPMs don’t do what they are supposed to do as explained to the end-user, making them hostile architecture. It’ll also potentially send increased traffic (and increased business) into the EU, or out of the US into less traceable regions, and get the determined end-user interested in the dark net, because watching a cat video without ads now requires the same savvy as getting access to CSAM, active revolutionary news and restricted chemistry configurations.
What will be more interesting to me are the consequences I haven’t imagined. To quote a favorite princess, The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
Anyway, the go ahead and downvote me line is creepy, and brushes against poisoning the well I don’t downvote dissenting opinions, (and can’t, anyway from my Lemmy instance).
Been using these apps for years, when YT does their crap the community gets it fixed and rolled out within a few days (worst has been two weeks).
Lots of thankless devs and contributors dedicated to preventing YouTube from screwing us over!
True, but there will be New Solutions. Or no YT for me at least. I am not willing to watch a single stupid add. Not one.
That’s what Youtube is trying. Either pay or at least stop using it, so you don’t cost them money.
there will be New Solutions.
you’re an overflowing toilet of optimism
Try LibreTube on mobile.
It crashes every time I try to open a video
Check which version you’re on. If it’s not 0.19.0 you need to update. F-Droid now has the newest version.
Ok fixed thanks
This is the way.
They should fucking do an experiment - 2€/$ a month for an ad-free subscription and 3€/$ a month for higher video quality+no ads subscription. I would fucking pour my money into it.
Oh wait, that would not solve lack of sponsorblock. I guess I am not interested then…
They literally had that experiment with Premium Light. €6 for ad free watching, it was all I needed. But they literally sent out a mail they were stopping this tier right before they started implementing more anti-ad blocking measures.
Oddly enough, the “lite” subscription was introduced in some other countries during the time they shut it off in the launch countries.
I wonder if they’re testing willingness to spend using the cheaper sub, then pulling it if it turns out people are likely to buy the pricier plan once the lower tier isn’t available anymore?
I had the light subscription for over a year, not planning on paying for useless stuff like the music stuff though. Had it through a family plan years before and it was laughably bad compared to Spotify.
I’m personally a fan of YT Music, glad we’ve got some options though!
Options are of course great. What makes YT music a better option than Spotify Premium for you if I might ask? I found when I was trying it years ago it didn’t seem to have an all encompassing music library. (It not having 10 years of playlists and recommendations that I do actually enjoy for new music is something I missed but couldn’t count against it as a product ofcourse)
I much prefer the UI and it (used to?) allow uploading my own music where the offering was lacking. Notably, Spotify also didn’t have these songs, so having them in one library is great. The recommendations are also spot on for me, but like you said that could be attributed to having used it for a long while (used Play Music pretty much from its inception).
Considering I’d want to pay to get rid of ads on YouTube too having the music service bundled is a bonus. I used to pay for the music service standalone before that.
I bet that Spotify will do just fine now, although last time I tried (some time last year) I didn’t immediately like the UI, and the shuffle seemed to work oddly in large playlists. What it does have over YT Music for sure is integrations with other parties, I wish YT was better in that regard.
Thanks for the feedback, my most recent car does have a native YT music app so if I can keep a decent music library along with no ads it would be worth considering.
And Spotify shuffle in large playlist was plain broken for years indeed. I could have 1000+ songs in a list and shuffle would loop 20 of them.
Nebula can only afford to do that because basically nobody who subs to nebula actually watches the videos on it. They did a video about their revenue model and people treat it as a way to support the creators, not to actually watch content
Could Nebula work as a Patreon-competitor. Patreon as a company is totally fucked iirc - the investors are treating the company like a piggy bank, which is a shame because it is easily a profitable and viable company.
Nebula is pretty awesome and the type of content is great. I miss some light entertainment content though, so the network effect is at work. Still, nebula is the only streaming platform I’d consider subscribing as their policy is great and they do provide good value.
I’m not really certain what value nebula provides other than some creators uploading occasional content exclusively on nebula. Without nebula they’d just… Upload it to YouTube, which is free, so I’m not sure what the difference is
Meh I had nebula a couple years ago and it had some missing features and fairly poor depth of content. The same few bits constantly being pushed. I’m hopeful it improves but I wasn’t using it.
Not a penny to those bastards. Should YouTube and Google along with it rot to hell, I don’t care. Maybe we’d finally get better alternatives running at full capacity.
And who will pay for those?
People valuing the content and the platform.
For now our best chance for free platform is Odysee/Lbry - at least crypto bros can keep tue platform running for the sake of it. Or PeerTube, but less likepy since it’s more enthusiasm-driven, and enthusiasm only gets you so far.
Also, Nebula, CuriosityStream and other similar subscription services are good - and people pay for them.
I pay for Youtube, but I’m clearly in the minority. Look at all the pitchforks in this thread not willing to pay one cent or watch one ad but demanding the content…
There is a difference, though, and I know why those pitchforks are raised. YouTube is a video service behemoth, and it is owned by Google, a Big Tech company that has little respect for its users. It is one of the last things most Lemmy users (known on average for their hate of Big Tech, hence why we don’t have this discussion on Reddit) would want to support.
Many of them would, and some do, support alternatives. But there is just nothing to the scale of YouTube, which exacerbates the problem as users often have nowhere else to go. And so they will do their best to use YouTube in a way that gives 0 benefits to Google, and will only be happy to see this giant fall and replaced by something more user-centric, free from corporate control, and privacy-friendly.
I appreciate that, but I don’t think the vast majority support alternatives. It’s just “I want it free and I want it now”.
Also, if you don’t support Google you most probably don’t support the creators, very few of them have patreon or similar and just rely on ad revenue/sponsors.
I am not bothered by Google at all, at least in the EU you have pretty good control about the data they collect and I feel it’s used well. I get pretty good recommendations on YouTube and the ads I get on other sites are at least somewhat relevant.
I see the chances of a competitor replacing it and being more privacy-friendly close to none. Maybe TikTok will replace YouTube over as GenZ takes over, and I see that as a solid negative.
They’d absolutely 100% be losing money with a $2 ad free tier. Ads make significantly more than that per user per month. Same with your “”“solution”“” for higher res video. Bandwidth is goddamn expensive.
I agree, but they’d get a large number of users to subscribe.
And then maybe they wouldn’t complain when they raised the price to $3. And a few months later maybe $3.50. Then $5.
A few years ago, people wouldn’t have paid over $15 for a standard Netflix tier without 4K. But the way to boil a frog is to make them nice and comfy in lukewarm water, then keep increasing the temperature slowly… So even if they lose money, maybe a low price for the ad-free YouTube could make sense, from a business perspective.
Every time Netflix rises prices it makes it to the news (let alone all the drama on twitter/reddit/etc), I don’t know what frog boiling you’re talking about.
Yet they keep posting more and more profits. Subscriber count has only increased despite the content being lower quality and prices being higher. The fact that we don’t like them increasing the prices doesn’t mean it isn’t working for them.
I’m not arguing it will work forever, but for now, it’s been a viable strategy.
Plus, no way would it ever stay at that price. Nothing ever does. The only service I pay for now is spotting, and that’s just to have ad-free music on my half-hour drive to work.
I completely agree the price is far too high.
I actually do subscribe but only because I get a deal through my mobile network that, long story short, cuts the price by two thirds.
I can’t understand their pricing policy at all. And they’re doing a terrible job at explaining their cost basis if it’s actually what it costs to serve video to us (highly doubt it).
Linus Tech Tips did a nice video on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDsJJRNXjYI
But it should not be done by LTT, but by Google.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=MDsJJRNXjYI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
