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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.
We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring.
Not me, sorry. Fuck ads. I’ve been ad-free for like a decade, and I’m not interested in regressing.
Even if there was a balance and the ads were non-intrusive? I mean, servers and bandwidth cost money. I’m in the same boat as you where I have run ad blockers, adblocker blockers, no script, privacy enhancers, and anti-fingerprinting since forever ago.
I’d rather view a few reasonable ads than have a site try to mine and sell my data. If there was a balance, this is where I’d say it was reasonable. Since not reality, I’m with you, nuke them all, and just take the content.
The definition of “reasonable ads” and “just a few ads” keeps sliding. I’m old enough to remember the early internet, and that this lie has been told many times.
Just a few acceptable ads always becomes many unacceptable ads, because money.
Just like cable tv!
Even if there was a balance and the ads were non-intrusive?
I don’t need propaganda telling me to want to buy shit that I otherwise wouldn’t want to buy, no. I’ll go to other consumers (and, more specifically, people I trust) to determine what things are worth, not entities with a conflict of interest in the matter.
The whole marketing/advertising industry is illegitimate and harmful, and I’m “boycotting” the whole thing until we finish the job of destroying capitalism and it’s no longer needed anyway.
I’d rather view a few reasonable ads than have a site try to mine and sell my data.
The corporations are going to try to mine and sell your data anyway. Why wouldn’t they? You think just because they have a revenue stream through ads that they’ll give up another revenue stream from fucking over your privacy? Then I’ve got this nice bridge to sell you, too…
I think you’re right, I feel like I’m looking for a little good-will among our kind (bleak and probably misguided at best). Sellers and consumers need to coexist in some manner, but what that relationship should be is yet to be defined. For now, we’re in a place that needs change for sure.
I’m willing to pay for site and services I consider valuable. Not with my data, not with my attention.
We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring.
Not really I don’t want to view propaganda about how the new 6 wheels family killer wagon is still chill even if you’re going through the desert.
I just don’t like ads and unnecessary consumerism.
God, this is tangential to your point, but car and housing aesthetics have gotten terrible. Everything is BIGGER BIGGER BIGGER. People need to buy huge fucking hulked out monster trucks now for their suburban ass lives so they can make sure to fit their entire home when they commute an hour to work in soul crushing traffic. And they absolutely NEED their giant ass monstrous mcmansions. How can they survive without the extra dozen rooms that they can fill with more cheap bullshit? And don’t get me started on color. Houses are all beige, grey, monotone terrible. Cars are silver, white, grey, black. There’s no color anymore. It just feels like what’s the point? Why bother trying when this is what success looks like. We have this beautiful planet and this is the shit we fill it with. I’m sorry. /endrant
I feel you… the world is a sad place today…
My truck is white because it’s hot AF outside and it there is a LOAD of difference between dark colors and white in the sun.
I fully agree. Online ads used to be some banners next to the content you came to the site for. I was fine with that. As soon as they put it in front/in between/… the content, I very quickly got fed up with it.
Wow the enshittification is at full throttle across silicon valley! Guess those investors gotta get those returns now that interest rates are spiking!
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.
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
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”
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
@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 $5 monthly fee and distribute it over the creators you watcher over the month.
@Bardak if you post a video on a topic that YouTube deems problematic then it doesn’t pay you either (i.e. the demonetize that video).
Many youtubers are on platforms that accept donations tho (like Patreon), so for some, the monetization isn’t that much of an issue.
Nebula. Most of they content creators I watch are there.
432432$@$#@23
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.
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.
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rather than paying for youtube premium you should use an adblocker, or download all the videos you watch, then donate the money to creators you watch. if everyone who paid for youtube premium just decided to split the cost of the subscription between the creators they watch, creators would make a lot more money and as a bonus you hurt Alphabet, one of the worst companies in the world. It’s a win win
I don’t think there is anything wrong with paying for what you consider to be value. I pay for Nebula for similar reasons. Similarly, I don’t have a problem with free services including modest ads to cover their costs and even make a profit.
I do have a problem with ads that have gotten so aggressive that the free experience becomes unusable. For many providers, I feel like they have lured in content creators by promising free access and then changed the bargain after the fact by making the free tier intolerable.
I’m also a YouTube premium user. I realize there are other ways to get around the ads, but I prefer supporting the services I enjoy using.
I subscribed to a paid version of YouTube Music many years ago, and at some point, due to some changes by YouTube, this automatically converted into a Premium YouTube membership, and I’ve been somehow locked in at $9.99/mo since then. Thankfully, my wife doesn’t care about watching ads, so we don’t need the family plan. That being said, even if I had to pay full price, and even if my other family members wanted Premium, I’d still pay for it. It’s 100% worth it from my perspective, for all of the reasons you mentioned.
I didn’t know that you also get higher bitrate with premium. That might change things for me. Most of the time I watch YouTube on a desktop where I can use uBlock but when I watch on my iPad the ads get really annoying and I have already thought about getting premium just to get rid of the ads while watching videos during breakfast. Having higher bitrate would be a nice bonus.
Eh, I’m not here to hawk product. The higher bitrate is nice to have, but the impact of bitrate on video quality is perhaps a bit overblown. In a lot of situations, you’d have to pixel-peep to spot the improvement – youtubers are pretty good at making videos look nice under the core quality settings.
On the other hand, ads suck. I’d have never watched enough YouTube to buy premium without years of heavy adblocking (shoutout to ReVanced Manager). Getting an ad-free experience out-of-box is very convenient and could possibly be worth the value of the subscription depending on your usage & means.
What I find most annoying is that it’s still not possible to get Premium Lite (Premium without music, offline and background play) because I already have Spotify and don’t really need background and offline play. 12 EUR/month is a steep price for just removing ads.
If you watch YouTube videos on a small smartphone screen, sure, the bitrate does not matter that much. But whenever I watch it on my 55" 4k TV I cringe every time the image gets a bit busy and suddenly there are blocking artifacts everywhere
I second this. Probably the best $15 I spend for my family every month. No ads for kids watching YT on their own is nice peace of mind for me and my wife.
And because I already pay for it, we’ve slowly all migrated over from Spotify to YT Music and been surprisingly happy with it.
That’s reasonable. I’d be fine paying but I just feel like the cost is too high for my usage. I don’t use YouTube enough to justify the cost. If they had like a lower tier where for 5 bucks a month I could skip x ads or ads on x hours of videos I’d be a subscriber already.
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.
Yeah until they start showing ads for Premium as well. You know it’s going to happen eventually
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.
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 could live without youtube for sure, I have more of a Reddit problem than a YouTube problem… but it seems they fixed that for me.
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 have to find more and more alternatives to the web. It’s ruined and it’s not coming back.
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.
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.
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.
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.
and I’m testing Youtube Revanced on my phone for unlimited ad-free background play for nothing!
I do understand that if companies running ad-supported models, they need to make sure users are actually watching those ads. Seems logically to me - no ads mean no money, and no money means no sustainable business model.
On the other side, as a user, I just can’t browse the internet without an ad-blocker any more. They just got so annoying and sometimes even break the actual website.
But to be honest, I don’t see an alternative to ad-supported models except paying money directly via subscriptions plans etc. But this also will not work in the long term. I just can’t pay afford to pay a subscription for each website I visit during the day.
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Most people don’t use ad blockers. Link below says 43% use them world wide, as per user reports. Ad blocking is (only) detected in 18% of web sessions on computers among American users. https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users
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I’m pretty sure YouTube has always operated at a net loss (strictly in terms of revenue and expenses). But of course, the value of the data Google owns makes up for it.
The biggest issue, I guess, is the amount and obnoxiousness of the ads. I could live quite well with seeing one ad banner per page-worth of scrolling, if it’s for example off to the side in a specific “your ad here” place.
Or if the ads would be thematically related to the topic at hand. I don’t want to be reminded of how much our devices listen in on us by seeing ads for diapers on a website for posting news about the Ukraine War, just because I happened to talk with my gf about how my step mom has another child now. But seeing ads for a website to buy camping tools, on a website for hiking backpacks, is fine by me.
Unfortunately those types of non-intrusive ads probably aren’t what’s raking in the most money.
If you serve me Ads that lead to scams and malicious websites, you don’t reserve my ad revenue.
This will lead to an increase of ad-blocker-blocker-blocker development.
yo dawg I heard you like blockers
The adblocking arms race escalates further!
They already exist and are quite effective, I wonder whether YouTube is able to detect those too
So you’re saying we need an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker.
Wait really? Is there a recommended extension for this?
There is Nanodefender for Firefox. Just be aware that there are different versions of this for Firefox and chome but those will actually track you. The original developer sold their code to people with bad intentions, this is a fork.
It’ll happen. I just hope that it will just become semi-diffucult to do it, so that non-technical people give in so Google is happy, then the 0.1% of us can enjoy our adblocked youtube.
Came here to say this as well. It’s a game of cat and mouse.
It’s just natural evolution.
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.
At least with my subscriptions I’ve been noticing an increase in sponsored segments. And you know what? I don’t mind. It’s much less jarring when the “host” is also doing the ad and pretty much just works it into the video. People have to make money, and this old-school approach works for me. Reminds me of ads in old TV/radio shows. And it doesn’t suddenly change the scene and quadruple the volume along with seizure-inducing backgrounds.
I use YouTube a lot, both on my phone via ReVanced and my smart TV via SmartTubeNext, completely ad free. If Youtube manage to block videos unless the users deactivate their adblockers, even if I enjoy Youtube a lot, I’ll just stop watching videos. The quantity of ad per video is just insane. No way I can stand watching all those ads.
While I don’t disagree, YouTube won’t care. Currently folk like you and I who evade their ads are freeloading. We get all the content and YouTube gets nothing in return. Having those who block ads abandon watching doesn’t lose YouTube anything, and maybe saves them a little bandwidth bill I guess?
Yup I know they does not care about me or anyone of us, but I’m not willing to stay on that platform if the experience is terrible due to ads
Unpopular opinion around these parts, I imagine, but I bought a family sub.
Me and 5? 6? other people get ad-free viewing, the creators get a little more for our views, and no worries about finding ad-blocking youtube viewers for my in law’s smart-tvs or my idevices.
Especially given just how intrusive they are; they completely interfere with technical explanations or comedic timing.
It’s like everyone saw what Twitter did, and thought they could get away with doing the same
Say hello to Odysee.com
I tried to use Odyssee in the past moths but the lack of content is a no go for me. I’ve had hard times to find something that I enjoyed watching on Odyssee, but I’ll give it a second shot, maybe I’ll find something interesting this time.
It continues to grow as YT becomes an increasingly inhospitable towards anyone who isn’t million dollar company. Smaller teams and individuals aren’t exactly being kicked out, but they are gradually being encouraged to quit. Guess where they have been duplicating their videos?
Even Veritasium doesn’t feel safe on YT, and that’s why you can find those videos on Odysee.
If they really block adblockers, I will subscribe. To Nebula. It’s got everything I want, adfree (including sponsored segments), extra content and is cheaper. And the content creators get a bigger share of the money.
There is nothing stopping you from subscribing to nebula right now. Since I haven’t gotten any ads on YouTube in many years and even use sponsorblock to skip those annoying video segments I started thinking about how I am basically leeching off of most content creators. Subscribing to nebula was a no-brainer. It’s about $4.16 per month on the yearly plan and lets me support all content creators I watch on there at once rather than subscribing to each and every one of them on patreon and I still don’t see any ads
I’m not familiar with Nebula. Are known Youtubers on that platform?
Thanks! That list is much longer than I expected!
Yeah I think I initially signed up for a free month because I wanted to watch some nebula exclusive content and was pleasantly surprised by how many creators I was already subscribed to release their stuff there. It made it a no brainer to subscribe to nebula.
I signed up for JetLag. The other great creators are a great bonus.
I’ve been considering nebula for a while, but I also use Patreon to support creators that I appreciate.
I only support one channel on patreon because it is quite niche and at this point I am pretty invested in that parasocial relationship. I find it difficult to justify supporting many different content creators, but I am also still a student so I don’t exactly have money to throw away.
