- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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oh look, another web service who wants to strangle its users for money and ad views :D when’s a peertube instance going to get some big creators on it supported by viewers? that’ll do it, i bet
It seems like we’ve all lost the plot. We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring. Try browsing for a day on a plain-no-extension browser. If you use other web enhancement tools kill those too. Straight-up internet is cancer, especially on mobile.
It’s impossible to read a 250-word article without being interrupted 5-7 times. Two of those interruptions are likely a full page overlay with give me your email, and are you sure you don’t want to subscribe, just give me your credit card number.
Then there are auto-play videos on the side, some with audio on by default. I mean I came here to read something, so of course we have things flashing and moving and making noise, it’s the most conducive environment for thought, right?
Ad blockers and script blocking are essentially a hazmat suit that allows us to withstand a hostile environment. Remember when we said myspace pages with audio and [marching-ants] borders was a bad UX? At least we didn’t have overlays back then.
Go back to basics and consider what makes a good vs bad internet experience. The reality sounds like someone with a minor case of severe brain damage. I think we’ve just become unashamed of greed as a society. It’s clearly all just about money.
Those annoying customers/users generate content and we have to put up with them so we can monetize it. *Sadly, It’s unclear if I’m talking about youtube, reddit, or nearly any other site.
Le sigh.
Wow the enshittification is at full throttle across silicon valley! Guess those investors gotta get those returns now that interest rates are spiking!
I have to imagine many of these investors also have money in areas whose prices have skyrocketed due to “inflation.” They’ve seen the profits other industries are getting away with and now big tech feels the need to do the same. These companies are supposed to be the future, after all… How will it look if big oil is more profitable than mainstream digital platforms? To investors, it looks bad.
Sadly, when your ability to generate profit relies on using your users (or the developers and mods that run your platform cough Reddit) like cheap labor, rather than providing better product at reasonable prices, digital platforms suffer in usability or features. It’s kind of a lose lose for anyone that actually cares, because so far the market hasn’t self-corrected.
I imagine folks wouldn’t have a problem with this if the ads weren’t already so aggressive. Numerous ads before and during the content break it up too much. And if the content is extremely short form, it completely ruins the experience.
The number of ads and their length should be proportional to the length of the video. And any creator doing built-in ads should also not be able to inject a bunch of other ads. Burying content is an easy way to get avoided.
Print media had limits for advertisements, heck, in magazines they were premium real estate for the finest graphic designers to put together incredible imagery to get your attention. This level of care (not necessarily images or what have you) has yet to translate to the web.
Yep, got selected for this test and I thought my network went down.
Had to do nearly 30 mins of debugging until I realized it was youtube actively withholding JUST the video. Took some effort but managed to get them to send the videos again after resetting a bunch of things.
I refuse to view ads and will go to the ends of the earth to make that happen.
Paying is most certainly an option, but only when that becomes the ONLY option.
I’ve been using an adblocker since ads starting becoming more intrusive and the internet has progressed so much that it’s become generally unusable without one. I remember when a mobile ad popped up on my phone and it straight up startled me.
I have had this in my ublock origin filters for quite some time. Seems to do the trick:
!www.youtube.com ##.ytp-ce-elementDoesn’t work anymore. Youtube now replaces the whole video player with the following message:
Ad blockers violate YouTube’s Terms of Service
- It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Video playback is blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled.
- Ads allow YouTube to be used by billions worldwide.
- You can go ad-free with YouTube Premium, and creators can still get paid from your subscription.
Alternate headline: Users test using only YouTube ReVanced to bypass this new system
Hopefully they aren’t successful like Twitch was at killing adblockers. I stopped watching twitch after they broke them. The web just wants you to pay for a million subscriptions nowadays. Meanwhile those subscriptions continue to climb in price.
I have an adbocker for twitch, it usually works, sometimes twitch can still shove an ad through, but when twitch does show an ad I just close the stream and do something else
Alternate Player for Twitch still doesn’t let any ads through https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/twitch_5/
my ublock origin works ok for twitch, although i basically only watch replays. maybe its different live
We’ll find a way around it, if not go to hell YT. Apart from posters in the real world, I am living a 100% ad-free life and I’m super happy about it.
Okay but I don’t understand. Isn’t paying to remove ads a fair deal? I don’t know, I pay for YouTube Premium and I’m kinda happy about it. The price seems fair; you get no ads, you get to download stuff, enables picture-in-picture and background playback. YouTube has been my main source of entertainment for the last couple of years so it’s the only subscription I have alongside Spotify.
The problem isn’t so much that there are ads. The problem is also what kind of ads they’re playing. YouTube has been known to play inappropriate ads without vetting them - think of those awful mobile game ads with a heavy sexual tone.
This stuff also seems to explicitly target videos that kids might watch.
Yeah until they start showing ads for Premium as well. You know it’s going to happen eventually
Isn’t paying to remove ads a fair deal?
If the price were reasonable, community practices especially regarding monetization and moderation were acceptable, telemetry-tracking javascript minimal, etc. then sure.
But… we’re not there.
Absolutely, you are free to make every kind of contract if you like. Personally, I am not very invested in youTube, I don’t watch any streamers or youTubers, it’s just a video hosting platform for me. I am boycotting Google wherever I can, it is a privacy desaster and dystopia-like enterprise. NewPipe has all the ‘features’ as well, if it breaks I just let YouTube go…
I wouldn’t mind ads if,
- They didn’t repeat the same 3 ads every few minutes on high ad videos (No It, I will not take it >:c)
- Moderated and removed obvious scam ads
- Remove ads that are disgusting or clearly inappropriate (I have seen some stuff that could be categorized as porn in YouTube ads and no I do not allow them to feed me ads based on my interests)
- If ads were still not being actively used to spread malware/viruses (not sure if this happens on YouTube at all but I would rather be safe then sorry)
[EDIT] Removed a redundant word
The largest issue for me is that I’ve never watched an ad and thought “I need that”. It’s just a huge waste of time that I find disrespectful and distasteful.
That being said I haven’t watched and ad in years. A bit less then a decade now, actually.
Advertising clearly does work on the whole or who would companies spend so much gold on it? Advertising shits in your head. It subtly influences consumers and advertisers have become quite sophisticated about it. There is a glut of advertising space available now so we see awful and ineffective ads but be assured a lot of the bigger players know what they are doing. This is why I block all ads. Well for that reason plus they are annoying as hell.
To be fair the aim of ads generally isn’t to make you go ‘oh now I’ll go and buy that’, it’s more about unconsciously planting the idea that $product exists so when you actually do want to buy something you buy that brand. It’s why ‘show me as many as you like, ads don’t work on me’ is complete rubbish and the only real solution is blocking them entirely on a personal level and on a social level laws that restrict where and when they may be shown.
A particularly egregious example of psychologically manipulative advertising would be ‘Joe Camel’ who was nominally just a fun mascot but in reality existed to advertise cigarettes to children so they’d buy Camels when they were old enough. Given the prevalence of really awful advertising in the present day Big Tech really does deserve the increasing comparisons with Big Tobacco I think.
To be fair, even though ads didn’t make you want to buy anything, the tax write-off was the same.
And it would be nice if ads would not be played with an insane volume. Every time one sneaks by my uBlock it blasts my ears out.
I was late to the vanced game because I was very willing to put up with the ads for a long while. But yeah, the number of commercial breaks in a 10 minute video became insane.
This, and this is why few years ago I didn’t care about yt ads on my TV. I had like 3-4 ads, 15 sec each for an hour of content, ads only between videos, not in the middle.
However, suddenly there was 3-4 ads before each video, and many times the ads started to be longer than videos.It feels like they are trying to push me into subscribing to paid YouTube by making the free version unusable without an adblock. And now they are even trying to make me disable my adblock?
I would rather not watch Youtube again then be exposed to terrible ads. I accidentally went on Youtube on Chrome and one of the ads was a straight up scam. $7.54 Switch! Like maybe if they had humans vet ads like you used to do maybe I would have less of a problem with it.
Lol I know exactly the company you’re talking about. I like their ads for $1 Lenovo headphones
That’s funny, I’m testing YouTube alternatives.
Suggestions?
My issue is that the content creators i watch probably arnt going to leave… and im sure ad blocks will find a way around it after a month or so
PeerTube seems to be the federated (decentralized) option (similar to this). Content obv is entirely different, but maybe that’s actually a good thing. Think of it as a clean slate - a fresh canvas. tbh YouTube’s content has really sucked the past few years, and mother of bog do you see the stuff that trends nowadays when you’re signed out? It’s basically become cable tv. I started using youtube bc I hated cable tv.
defederated
I’m not sure I understand what defederated means in this context. Can you explain it?
think they meant to say decentralized
yes, my brain apparently couldn’t decide between decentralized and federated, so it mooshed them together
Invidious is the most obvious. Its FOSS wrapper but it also lets you watch peertube and other federated content.
They already started to fight the project last week, Google legal contacted the project owners
I saw the reply they had. Interesting point about “We don’t use your API so we didn’t agree to the TOS of your API. Also there is no ‘we’, since we don’t host invictus; simply develop it as a product”
@PhatInferno There’s Peertube here in the fediverse. But yea, every platform will need creators which will not easily switch. Some even have youtube membership enabled on their channels, which makes it kinda impossible (without being deprived of revenue).
Unfortunately I don’t know of any other platform that would pay creators like YouTube does which is half the reason the YouTube keeps creators.
I hate the crypto bros as much as but I wonder if there is a way to set up a federated video sharing network that has a $5 monthly fee and distribute it over the creators you watcher over the month.
@Bardak if you post a video on a topic that YouTube deems problematic then it doesn’t pay you either (i.e. the demonetize that video).
Many youtubers are on platforms that accept donations tho (like Patreon), so for some, the monetization isn’t that much of an issue.
I usually follow creators through RSS, so I mix and match platforms avoiding YouTube for any creator that cross posts. A lot cross post to Odyssey though so if you wanted to have like one app in addition to YT that’d probably be the way to go, or at least worth checking out.
Nebula. Most of they content creators I watch are there.
deleted by creator
I’ll say something unexpected: I pay for YouTube. With money! Why?
- I use it every day and I’m a human who likes boosting the things that I enjoy
- I think YouTube’s content recommendations are a genuine value-add and not easily replaced
- A cut of my subscription fee goes directly back to the video creators that I watch
- The “premium” encoding levels are actually a substantial improvement to video bitrates
- Important: the premium bitrate is higher than anything previously offered and probably would not have been otherwise practical to serve for free
So yeah. I personally like YouTube enough to pay for it and I have the financial means to do so. Am I a clown for expressing personal appreciation towards a faceless megacorp? Yes. Yes I am. Constantly trying to win at every transaction in life is a drag though, so I think I’ll continue to enjoy getting swindled.
The comments in here are interesting to me. Ads and Premium are a way for your favorite content creators to get paid for the content that they produce. I’ve listened to a number of creators talk about the YouTube revenue sharing model and most of them (LTT and Hank Green) says that YouTube is actually really fair with how they share ad revenue and how Premium is actually a good alternative that meets the needs of the platform, users, and creators. And YouTube, the platform, DOES need to get paid as well otherwise your videos can’t get to you.
I also hate ads, like a lot, and I do whatever I can to get them off of my screen because I think they are intrusive and we have proof of how they enable tracking across the internet at large. However, for those platforms that I find extreme value in (YouTube being the example here) I see how and why ads/Premium pump value into their system. If your favorite content creator isn’t getting paid for their content, they won’t be able to sustain it long term.
One last thought about video streaming and the content we all love that is hosted by YouTube: if we were to say that we would rather our money go directly to our favorite content creators, we would end up with a very fragmented ecosystem akin to the Streaming Service MESS we are in with TV/Movies. I would LOVE to pay LTT directly through Floatplane, but then where would I be with being able to watch other content creators?
Remember when ads were short and easy to skip? They’re just getting more annoying now.
I could bear them back then, but now I can tell immediately if I accidentally use the mobile app on my phone vs my phone’s web browser.
This is the thing about ads. It’s never, ever enough. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and it doesn’t matter. We still get more ads.
Basically I think we are going to get more and more alternatives to the web, and find information and entertainment without ads.
I know many people who are back on piracy now. It’s just impossible to take all the ads.
I have heard that the ads are getting worse and longer/unskipable. I do wonder how YouTube determines what the ‘balance’ should be. You know they have the usage and engagement statistics to back up the increase. It did get to a point where I said there was no way I could continue to use YouTube as it was; but it was also around the time that I pretty much switched to YouTube for content over Netflix/Hulu/Disney+/TV so Preimum was a no brainer as I could drop 3 or 4 streaming services for YouTube.
My understanding is that as rates have gone way down the last couple of years and it wouldn’t surprise me if Google just has less high quality ads and is dipping into the crappy cheaper ad buys to fill the space.
Once, I played the first YouTube of the day on the Roku, and instantly got 2 minutes of unskipable ads (4, 30 second segments) with (what I would categorize as) unnecessarily sexual content on a children’s playdough video. That was when I installed and configured PiHole for the Roku. That was the last straw. My 2-yo niece should not have seen a dude’s butt. A 5-second video-age-appropriate ad, ok. An age-appropriate banner on the bottom, ok. 2 minutes of unskipable adult ads on a kid’s video, no. I started blocking, when they started intruding.
If they would let me just specifically pay for ad-free YouTube at a reasonable price, instead of lumping it in with a bunch of shit I don’t use and am not interested in, I would happily pay.
I understand your argument, but I think the issue is more complex. I would wish that it was just advertisers paying money to YouTube and YouTube taking its cut and giving the rest to the content creator. It used to be like that in the beginning, but it isn’t anymore. I do not pay for a YouTube subscription, because I don’t want YouTube to track my videos and create a profile of me. Especially when I often have to sift through multiple videos just to find an answer to very specific question and YouTube takes that as me being super interested in that whole topic. Watching ads on the other hand is also just a large tracking apparatus that tries to squeeze money out of my pockets. My preferences over the whole Internet is being tracked to serve me “the most relevant and personalised content”. Basically, they try to figure out what I want, before I do and then try to sell me that. If there is a way to directly support content creators (donations, subscriptions, etc), I usually do that. But I don’t want to support shady business with my data behind my back.
Very much this. If I visit the grocery store, I am not walking through other businesses just to get to each isle.
I am perfectly happy with going back to amateur YouTube somewhere else. If it was a real community of individuals I would probably post content again myself. The whole idea of YT as career content creators only is not very interesting to me any more.
I do not use an ad blocker. I use a whitelist firewall. I only visit the websites I request. If anyone wants to show me content, it must be on the servers I wish to visit. As far as I am concerned, if I invite you into my home, you head to the bathroom, open the window and let a dozen people into my home, you’re never going to get invited to visit again. This is how ads work.
If YT can’t trust these people to host their content directly, that is not my problem.
And YouTube, the platform, DOES need to get paid as well otherwise your videos can’t get to you.
I disagree. YouTube is owned by Google as we all know very well. They don’t need to show you ads technically. I get why they would want to, because obviously its a company and they want to make more and more money. But I (and many more like me), as users we feel that it gets to a point where I’m not watching a video with ads sprinkled in, but ads with a video sprinkled in. So I as a consumer will find ways to circumvent that, and avoid watching ads. There comes a point where they’re getting far too greedy and I can no longer tolerate the extent to which their “more and more money” practices get to. As another commenter mentioned, the ads arms race will simply continue turning. As for creators, there are other ways for them to make money, as was the case when YouTube was still a younger thing. Now there’s even more options such as Patreon. Also, bigger brands such as LTT inevitably branch out and create separate revenue streams (think LTT store). Obviously, not every creator might want to do that simply to get paid, but when did we shift to this idea that its a job. Even though I’m young(er), I still remember the beginning of YouTube, though barely. It seems like it was more people back then that wanted to do this as a passion, not that they felt “I need to release a video every week at a set day and time or I get less money” as it seems to be now.
I wouldn’t even mind that much if the ads didn’t interfere with the primary function of the site, which one would think is to serve content (the product) to me (the consumer). Such as ads which are not part of the video but are loaded on the side for example. However, this is not the case. Primarily I think because we have reached a point in the internet’s timeline where people using it are not the customers anymore, but the product. And we’re being sold to ad companies.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk xD
YSK that Premium pays considerably less to creators than any other form of monetization.
So, if you want to support your favorite creator, literally send them a dollar.
One dollar is more than what that creator will ever make from a single viewer on YouTube.
I just stood up a selfhosted Invidious instance the other day, and I replaced YouTube ReVanced with Clipious (an Invidious client for Android) on my phone. No ads, SponsorBlock built-in, no need for a YouTube/Google account to create subscriptions, playlists, etc. And it’s highly performant since I run it behind a reverse proxy with some custom caching configuration for things like thumbnail images, static assets, etc.
Clipious can also be installed on an Android TV (has an actual Android TV interface). I’m going to end up installing it on mine, but I’m also using SmartTubeNext at the moment, which does require a YouTube/Google account for subscriptions, playlists, etc, but does have no ads, built-in SponsorBlock, and a slew of other great features. I’ll be keeping both around, since I do sometimes like to cast to my TV, and SmartTubeNext allows for that (Clipious does not, at least at this time).
Unless YouTube somehow starts dynamically splicing in ads as part of the actual video stream, there’s always going to be a way to block ads, unless they do something pretty elaborate. But that’s probably not worth the effort on their end to go that far, since the vast, vast majority of people won’t know what to do to get around that, nor will they probably care enough to try. But I think it’s clear that DNS blocking using services such as AdGuard Home, PiHole, etc, are going to become less effective over time.
I hadn’t heard of Clipious before! What are some of its advantages over SmartTubeNext and ReVanced??
No google account
The main advantage to me is that I can work with Invidious as a backend, and whatever I configure there will reflect in Clipious as a client. So as I subscribe to new channels in Invidious, add or update playlists, etc, Clipious will reflect these changes accordingly. Advantages of selfhosting Invidious that indirectly benefit Clipious are of course built-in adblocking by virtue of how Invidious works, SponsorBlock support, and the ability to cache static assets, such as video thumbnails for faster load times, using a reverse proxy (Nginx is what I use). There’s a lot more we could dive into beyond this, such as no Google account requirement (for enhanced privacy).
One area where the SmartTubeNext and YouTube ReVanced combo has the advantage is the convenience of being able to cast from your handheld device to your TV. Clipious/Invidious has no casting ability. But I can totally live without that.
undefined> ehind a reverse proxy with some custom caching configuration for things like thumbnail images, static assets, etc.
Really curious what those nginx settings are, Clipious on my phone only shows broken thumbnails from my invidious instance
I have all my Nginx files separated and using
includestatements for organization, so I can’t quickly and easily post an example, but a good place to start looking is at the various proxy_cache directives.
