Does uBlock Origin bypass the latest YouTube anti-adblock script?
drhyperion451.github.io
drhyperion451.github.io
If there are well over 1,000 "here now" (near top right), this confirms the anti-content blocker code has been updated.
If well below 1,000 "here now", all is fine. At time of writing, it's fine.
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Website idea: a downdetector-like site that uses reddit's "here now" numbers to give insight into whether something is going on with a certain thing.
edit: Has anyone else not really been affected by the new youtube adblock policy at all? I think I have seen the warning a single time, and I use youtube all the time. I only use ublock origin and privacy badger... on chrome. Maybe that's it.
The megathread addresses this:
> I've never seen this message. Is this because of my browser being X or Y? No, YouTube didn't roll this out to everybody yet.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/184fivk/youtu...
On all other days, I was free to watch whatever I wanted while logged in. They might complain at me about ad blocking, or not.
On all days, youtube-dl worked fine. (This matters because, contemporaneously with the anti-ad-blocking campaign, YouTube started sometimes reducing my video frame rate to 0 fps. Audio never suffered at all.)
It's not a strict regime.
not really. firefox + privacy badger + ubo. once a week or so i do get blocked but then i clear cookies, restart firefox and relogin and then it works.
You might want to see my other comment, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38542185
Do people typically respond to the YouTube anti-blocking threat prompt by disabling their ad blocker entirely, or by enhancing their ad blocking?
If it quacks like a duck...
In the end it really is question that when they manage to block adblock do they make more money than they spend in effort.
I can also heartily recommend the 'unhook' browser extension, it takes care of all of those upsells and feeds.
Maybe they are making such a fuss because it works and people end up switching to chrome / removing ad block :(.
Would be nice to see recent download graph of firefox or ublock origin so see if there is any impact.
Google is already receiving plenty of money, if they promoted youtube as a commons they should maintain it as a commons. This bait-and-switch crap has gone more than far enough.
Remember, not all that long ago their mantra was 'we don't care about ad blockers because it is only such a small percentage'. Look now.
I just see it, in the current context of layoff, as them wanting/needing more money and hoping blocker either leave (and stop costing them bandwidth) or switch to YT Premium.
I do believe that the worsening experience on YT could be a win by making platform I want to support such as nebula more attractive. Or that it could backfire with a global adblock adoption making the current ad economy less viable.
I'm just unsure if chrome/YT is not already too entrenched and that people won't use ad blocker or switch.
Until Google changes how the web works and all other browsers will align. And they can do that, since they almost own the web trough Chrome.
Don't play the game. It's not a new game. Remember when Linux was "evil commie software"?
They’d lose a couple of legacy client apps, but much less traffic than they would if they were to make it Chrome-only.
I don't see the reason to support the company, which dreams to make internet worse.
If we take this to an extreme, doesn't content just not get made? Do you think Google is going to go to a model where things are freely accessible without ads?
Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay. They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I think it's only worth $y, so I'm going to just block ads completely).
That just means, by definition, that the prices YouTube are trying to charge are too high, doesn't it? What we're seeing is basically a negotiation tactic: you either reduce the price, or we'll keep using ad blockers.
Not to mention, most creators don't really live off YouTube ads, those pay too little for the vast majority of channels as far as I understand. Creators live off their own sponsorships, Patreon etc.
Note, I'm actually someone who thinks YouTube Premium is good value for my money and am already paying for it.
They simply want the service for free, refuse to pay but are unwilling to come out and say as much, so they use host of justifications to avoid it.
Which is fair.
But, I'm in the camp of "if it's too high, just stop using it". I think this isn't different than most things. If I think the price of electricity is too high, my option isn't to say "well, your price it too high, so I'm going to use electricity for free".
I can't speak for anybody else but my content will still get made.
> Do you think Google is going to go to a model where things are freely accessible without ads?
Maybe, maybe not, whose to say what Google will do. Maybe they will value the influence or the goodwill more than the lack of income. Maybe some of the content will be free and other bits will be walled off (effectively this is already the case with youtube music). Maybe there will be less MFY content and that's perfectly ok with me, 99.99% of it is crap anyway. Youtuber isn't a profession I recognize.
> Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay.
And that's ok.
> They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I think it's only worth $y, so I'm going to just block ads completely).
Yes, or you pay and you still get ads...
How will your content get served? If you say you'll just pay to serve it, I think that's a fine answer.
Which means they would continue making content
And on other hand if users are paying you something, would they not expect not to have to watch through mediocre sponsorships?
Think about it, anyone can host gigs of videos perpetually indexed for free. What percentage of videos have fewer than 100 views?
Google has killed off profitable projects. If you think they'll dump tens of billions every year hosting videos that no one watches, you're kidding yourself.
And what we noticed with paying is that people are very unwilling to pay even a small amount for a service. For instance FB makes around over $50 per user in North America. What percentage of users do you think would pay $50 a year to use Facebook?
So? That's their problem.
> Google has killed off profitable projects. If you think they'll dump tens of billions every year hosting videos that no one watches, you're kidding yourself.
Can't wait for YouTube to die. Hopefully the replacement will be less centralized and not beholden to a single american company.
> And what we noticed with paying is that people are very unwilling to pay even a small amount for a service.
Most "services" are not worth the effort needed to pay them, the amount doesn't even come into it. This is also a self-created issue. Google et al have trained people to not pay by dumping money into these "free" services to kill the competition. Now they are upset that people don't want to pay them? I can't find a violin tiny enough to express my compassion for them.
> For instance FB makes around over $50 per user in North America. What percentage of users do you think would pay $50 a year to use Facebook?
So? They make $0 off of me. I don't care how much they can or cannot make with ads, that doesn't make ads acceptable.
That seems way too high. There's something like half a trillion hours watched per year. Does it really cost almost $0.10 for an hour of video?
So explain to me why Google will continue footing the bill when more and more people prevent them to run ads on the site.
Back in the 90's when bandwidth was expensive we managed to run a free video site without advertising. Since then bandwidth has become orders of magnitude cheaper, and G has economies of scale that no other operator can get close to, they quite literally own the fiber, the endpoints and are present in just about every meet-me room all over the world. Storage costs have dropped even further. So what you think costs Google a couple of bucks to provide per user probably costs them fractions of a cent. And if they dropped the garbage their costs would be even lower.
But if you're happy to pay whatever is asked of you, that'll be a 100 dollars thanks
That really doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
And what is or is not affordable is really dependent on where you live and that kind of money is a very large amount in some places. And especially in those places access to youtube for educational purposes can be quite important.
If so it's not just the infrastructure cost which itself is not trivial for a site like youtube.
Their whole position is horribly inconsistent.
Here in South Africa YT Premium Family is R109.99/mo (5.83 USD). By comparison, Netflix is R159/mo. Minimum wage is R25.42/hr.
Ads are phycological warfare and must be eradicated with prejudice but asking the audience to chip in a couple bucks a month seems reasonable to me.
Other people's mileage may differ, of course. It's just a personal preference.
People can freely decide whether they want to sell the content they've created or give it away for free. If it's the former, they should sell it, and if it's the latter, they should give it away for free. They just cannot and ought not rely on business models that restrict how people display information on their devices that has been sent to them voluntarily. As I said in the beginning, I have no quirks with Youtube going subscription-only.
Discover better ways to support people who do useful work. Or rather, re-discover them since they are older than ads.
You seem to think that YouTube is "every human exchange". I'm going to let that speak for itself.
YouTube is an amazing platform. It has allowed people to make videos about things they want and allowed people interested in that content to find it. Allowing people to pay (in various ways) for what they want means that other people can step up and provide that service instead of doing something else.
A good heuristic for when financial transactions are “gross” is if you are dealing with strangers or not. If you call your spouse from work and ask them to make and bring you a sandwich for lunch we would be horrified if they said it’ll cost you $20. On the other hand, no one should feel offended if you get charged when you call up a stranger to do the same thing.
There are different incentives at work in different spheres of life. Society depends on strangers doing things for other strangers. Google the Fatal Conceit to get the full picture. Bottom line is that there is nothing “gross” either for paying for something you want from a stranger or of them being paid for something they did for you.
I'd argue that _content_ is a fairly gross word that we've all come to use because we're in the industry -- "I need some _content_ around my ads so that we get some impressions". There are plenty of other words that are less marketing associated and more clearly connotative with creatively produced material - article, report, essay, story, paper, proposal, manifesto, gallery, video, photographs, exhibit, website, blog post - even material. _Content_ is efficiently produced filler. As such, yes, in the extreme less _content_ gets made, and in the absence of _content_ there is organically more of the latter category.
You can still make money on the internet without ads. Ads have in recent history been an easier, higher margin route. If the entire online ad industry fumbles, will we be substantially worse off? I don't think so: the number and size of websites would for sure shrink, but those left would have a much higher signal to noise.
Now that in and of itself is a fascinating statement that I kind of agree with? What kind of things are you thinking? The only thing I can really think of is trying to get people to pay for physical objects. Or, perhaps, providing a service that can't be copied (i.e. Video tutoring)
Ads? There are ad-blockers. Subscriptions? People will just use archive so that they don't have to pay you. Donations like Pateron? Maybe viable? I don't know exactly how the business models there work.
If centralized hosting of such "content" becomes unsustainable then that's even better.
I say this as someone who pays for YouTube Premium.
Then they abused adnetworks to take the biggest share and control over what users can do or will likely do with their user agents.
Then they degraded every site and product searchability into ads-favored keyword matching.
Then, when people started using their well-setup cardboard box traps to their taste, they demanded to either pay for that or to forcefully watch ads.
I’m not gonna play a reasonable guy here, because it’s not a logical issue. I never wanted or expected to live in an internet like that. Google can go cry in a corner and look miserable.
And everyone should install ublock origin. Think of it as Python 3 or ESM or Democracy. It’s much better, you all just have to figure out new life with it.
Who didn't want to eat Reese's pieces, drink a Pepsi free or tab, or buy a Toyota or pair of Nikes.
What you should do: starve the advertising company (you shouldn't be donating money to support "the platform" which is a trillion dollar for-profit corporation!) and donate directly to the people who ask for it and deserve it.
Youtube doesn't support creators, it milks them dry for content.
Paying Google to support creators pushes them to play to The Algorithm(tm) - which means they will adapt the presentation of their content to maximise profitability. And thereby stop making the content you're enjoying now.
As such, I think paying Google to support creators is one of the worst ways to support them. Buy their merch, support them directly on Patreon (or similar), or support a site where they ostensibly have more control (eg, Nebula). Don't coax them into a style of creating dictated by Google's algorithms.
Is there a way to build a recommendation engine with a distributed system? Or a search engine?
then they'll put the whole site behind a paywall, which could have mixed results. Everyone is focusing on paying the creators, but advertisers are also paying for moderation. voat showed us what an unmoderated reddit is like, and bitchute shows us what unmoderated youtube is like: trying to find DIY birdfeeder videos against the tide of holocaust denial and Podcast #598 of "How the Lizard Illuminati are vaxxing us with every toxic metal on the periodic table but Big Pharma Deep State maintains the elaborate coverup"
Have you actually read any YouTube comments lately? YouTube doesn't have any moderation at all.
If we win the war against Ads lots of content won’t get made. But, the content that thrives in an Ad driven world is mostly toxic rage bait. I would argue that losing this content and instead only being left with content that people will actually pay for is a big net win for humanity.
Likely we will never see a world without Ads but I can dream.
What I’d like would be focusing on the downsides: ad networks should have legal restrictions on how they collect and share data, liability for any malware they distribute, and every ad should include the legal identity of the person who paid for them (which the network is required to certify). When sites see ads as free money, they plaster them everywhere. When they have to think about the negative externalities, that becomes a more nuanced decision than “would we like more money?”
Youtube is full of clickbait, get rich quick and unhealthy influencers (how to work 80 hours a week and buy my book btw). Same with fb/ig.
Maybe we have just too much content now.
Liability for malware distribution was something I haven’t seen proposed before but totally makes sense.
The fight may not be winnable, but if you give up on the pushing back, things will get worse much faster.
I don’t think it’ll ever be possible to get everyone to pay, but if it’s easy to pay and priced low enough, paying becomes the easiest option for a lot of people. Why bother pirating music in 2023 when any number of music streaming services are about $10-11/mo?
YouTube Premium bundles YouTube music and costs $19/mo. This is higher than (or on par) a lot of streaming subscriptions.
Another annoyance is that it’s bundled with a music service. Some non-US markets experimented with a cheaper ad-free-YouTube only tier for less than half the price. When that tier of service can be offered, it is very hard to think most of the $19 goes towards storage, bandwidth, and operational overhead.
According to that, $8.55 of your $19 would go to the creators. Presumably the other $10.45 goes for storage, bandwidth, operational overhead, and profit.
I'd be quite fine if the only "content" is funded by patreons (I give £60/month to various patreons) or just people doing it for non-financial reasons.
I also just think 99% of advertising is bad taste which makes me mentally exhausted and puts me in a bad mood, so I just want it out of my sight.
Yes, I could pay for YouTube Premium, but that would go against my own interests since I would be financially supporting a platform with perverse incentives for content creators.
Can’t help but think the worry about future ads is simply rationalization for pirating now.
I would pay to watch videos using microtransactions on a platform that is not owned by a depraved company. I have no objections to compensating creators for their work in general (unlike a lot of people here, who feel entitled to get everything for free).
Furthermore, I have precious few moments on this earth, I have no desire to have to spend them watching propaganda from corps (and sometimes just unfiltered political propaganda).
But most of all, ads are a privacy and security risk like no other. They follow you across the internet for ages, sell your data to the highest bidder (sometimes that bidder is the feds) and are the foremost distribution network for malware.
Sorry, I rather YouTube go away than have to agree to the above.
Here is my problem with the ads: the same ads will repeat many times over the course of a video, some ads will blast obnoxiously loud, and there are just way too many ads.
Also when I say too many ads, it's not just YouTube - we are bombarded by ads everywhere now. A few days ago I was watching a 4hr YT stream on my Fire Stick (and don't block ads there) and they were cutting to ads every 5min. Also I sometimes like to listen to music during walks and cutting to an ad in the middle of a 3min song is so ridiculous and obtrusive.
YouTube premium is expensive, especially if you have other streaming services.
This is Google's problem to solve, not ours. When you are "at war" with your customers, then the business needs to stop and think "what am I doing wrong". Under capitalism, it's the buyer that decides what your product or service is worth. YouTube Premium isn't worth $14/mo to me, so yes, I will continue to block ads as much as I can.
Peertube et al exist. Patreon exists. Vimeo, Twitch, Tiktok. On one hand I'm absolutely aware that the TYPE of video content we have would change.
On the other, I'm not at all convinced that the destruction of YouTubes particular monetizing model would be a bad thing. I don't think much of value at all would be lost if people couldn't make money off Youtube the way they do now.
I'm old enough to remember that content creators existed before the youtube monetization machine.
I think if there's one thing we can rely on not stopping, it's people's urge to create and share
If the content is made only because of the ads, is it still content or actually an ad ?
They will work around ad blockers and continue to pile on repetitive and banal adverts that have nothing to do with the user until they reach breaking point (where people flee and seek alternatives), and then they will relax their system to show marginally less bullshit.
The confusing part of this battle is the app users, who do not agree with the avalanche of adverts, don't want to pay to scroll shorts until their brains leak from their ears, and cannot kick the awful habit.
I stopped watching TV 20 years ago, I have been using ad blockers as soon as they were introduced. The habit of not having to sit and watch some commercials is the most entrenched one in me. Hard to reverse a 20y habit.
I used to watch YT through the TV app until the ads became insanely outrageous (six unskippable ads for a 10 min video, including two ads one minute after the video has started). Then I just bought a mini pc and plugged it in the TV and everything was fine (except for HDR that for some reason doesn't work) and without ads.
Then a couple of weeks ago I opened the YT app on TV and it was actually a much better experience than before: skippable ads, no ads on some videos. As if they're trying to lure me to use it again.
I reset the TV app whenever the ads become unreasonable, and every time I do that, the skip ads button reverts back to the original style (skip all ads after 5 seconds).
But if I login to an account, or use an anonymous session for long enough, the skip ads button will switch to the progress ring style, with 60+ seconds of unskippable ads. When that happens, I reset the app again.
You can go the Nebula route and require users to pay (which means far fewer users) or require creators to pay (which means far fewer creators). You could also require creators to host the videos themselves, but that also requires money, expertise and causes downtime when a video goes viral.
There's also P2P, but far too many users are on mobile and behind NATs these days for that to make sense. Even if this wasn't the case, P2P is a privacy and legal nightmare, it's trivial for companies to track what IP addresses watch what videos, and seeding of copyright-infringing content usually has far worse legal consequences than merely watching.
The simple fact is that the ad ecosystem YouTube directs has produced lots of low effort "content" farming, enterprises focused on raw output at the expense of quality, truth, and frequently the intellectual property of others.
The argument that it's your machine and you choose what to run on it no longer holds when YouTube clearly no longer wants people with ad blockers as visitors.
So watch ads, pay up, or go somewhere else.
I always get downvoted for stating the obvious, but YouTube's monopoly was helped by adblockers, because alternatives, like Vimeo, couldn't differentiate themselves by being ads-free.
I suppose you were also fine with Unity's change of toś and pricing, but many others weren't. We sent a strong enough message to the company so that their CEO resigned and hit them hard in the wallet and now they know better. As should you.
What happened here is they cornered the market (a monopoly), and now are rising prices and making it impossible to use their product without giving them both your data AND money. The same thing can happen to your water, electricity and phone bills, if the governments didn't mandate anticompetitive practices in law. That is the same reason Verizon in the US is so expensive yet so bad in terms of value for money.
Stop pushing your 'accept it or move on' mentality on others. There is lot to be done here with collective action and government support, not every country is 'everybody on their own' and 'Big Corp rule' like the US. So stop it.
We don't want to go somewhere else unless we can help it, and are willing to fight for a better internet.
When a company is that big and that impactful (despite being a for-profit company), it is in interest to the general public that there are some checks and balances in place.
For me, the best scenarios is governments involve themselves as they involve themselves in other areas of business:
- telecommunications and utilities (Verizon)
- transport (Uber has different treaties/operating models in different countries)
- online marketplaces (Google)
Only through treating these behemoths as providers of "public goods/utilities" via our governments, can we have them not regressing to what any monopoly would naturally regress to: arrogant hands-twisting thugs, not afraid to exploit their users for every penny.
Keep in mind that governments already DO involve themselves in the business (mal)practices of these tech giants. For example, Tesla's new cybergarbage is unlikely to pass a scruitiny in the EU due to pedestrian safety/impact concerns. Google/Facebook/Instagram all have to respect the GDPR and its US cousin the CCPA, etc, etc. If it wasn't for measures like this, you'd not have "do-not-track" options in your browser, nor would you have adblockers in the Google play store...
I simply want MORE, quicker and better government involvement into anticompetitive practices that (mostly) US tech giants use.
- go to it's pre-aggressive-ablocking-removal state
- pay the content creators better
- moderate better so people like Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, etc don't get a platform
- Organized action in all Nordics vs Tesla, where Musk thought he can simply do whatever he wants to the workers and their wages and not negotiate with the unions: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/05/danish-union-j...
- FTC finally chasing telecoms for the insane prices of broadband in America https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/12/the-telecom-industry-is-...
As you can see, both organized worker action and government oversight work very well to curb greedy companies. So please, when you see people outraged and trying to organize, if you don't want to join, don't, but don't try to tell people to 'just accept it', because we won't. We are angry and have had it up to here with corporate greed.
Organized action and government regulation work!
I think if you are above 500k yearly income, the taxation rate should be something around 80-90% on every cent above that threshold.
If I was earning more, I would not mind sharing an ever increasing percentage of that in terms of taxes. I don't need 20 houses and 20 cars, and my own rocket, no individual person needs that. People like that should not be allowed to exist by the government.
No it isn't. It's a horrible method of funding media because as you correctly realized it ends up lowering the quality of that media. This isn't just a problem with YouTube's implementation, it is an inherent aspect of ad-based funding.
What other avenue is there to pay for stuff you consume ?
PeerTube distributes the load among many independent servers, which can be even run by individuals. So no, not every competitor will have the same problems.
Peertube technically has P2P, but these days with strict NAT or CGNAT being common good luck getting any kind of P2P connection going for the majority of people. Plus a lot of people on both home and mobile connections have very restrictive data caps.
Peertube relies on peer-to-peer data exchange, so the server loads are much lower than you imply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38533454
Nope. PeerTube and the like is an alternative.
If we take say, Vultr as an example for outgoing data costs, that's something like $100,000 of data for a single video.
Yes P2P will take some of that load off, but not that much with how restrictive NAT is these days.
I'm not really sure what you didn't understand about distributing the video and cost.
But if it can now, that would be the missing piece that I wasn't getting.
As a (very) small scale provider video was costing me about 0.25 cents / hour. It is certainly cheaper for a larger provider. Ad rates are not that low, the margins involved are huge.
For a premium server I would take a heavy user as a model, say 8hr/day, giving a cost of 60 cents per month. Assume processing fees and overheads are about 30%, and a user is willing to pay $10/m for a service. That still leaves $6.40 to be split between platform and content creator.
Yes, video is expensive compared to text. But in absolute terms the costs are not that expensive.
I think there's still plenty of room for innovation in the ad serving front. YouTube is far worse than it used to be. It currently has multiple ads in a 10 minute video many of which have one 5-10 second mandatory clip followed by a much longer clip that can be skipped after 5-10 seconds.
The "you have to have the remote in hand to prevent even more ads" is pretty user hostile.
To make matters worse, on Android TV/Roku, many ads require HDCP so it's pretty normal for the device to require a reboot when ads start playing if the HDCP negotiation fails.
Youtube Premium is pretty expensive for a casual user ($144/yr).
The cost of servers/bandwidth isn't lost on me and Google gets the best rates in the industry, nonetheless. They're sufficiently big they can stick cache devices all over the place directly inside ISP networks (I assume they don't pay power/bandwidth on these since ISPs end up saving money)
If it's SO expensive, and SO needs to be paid somehow by someone why do they waste so much time and money trying to push videos on me I've either A) Already watched, B) have blocked and said "Don't recommend this channel" or C) are not even related to my search query at all, yeah YouTube I'm aware Sniperwolf and MrBeast exist, No I don't want to watch them now or ever I'm searching for pasta recipes and I'm certain you have more than 4 you could show me before trying to get me to watch asinine sniperbeast content.
But the point is it's unlikely they want all non-premium users to go elsewhere, not even merely the non-premium ad-blocking users.
In fact, they don't even really want premium users if it means not still showing them ads somehow and still collecting data on them. They offer premium more or less begrudgingly because they sort of have to in order to excuse the user-hostile behavior everywhere else.
Like donating to Firefox. They donate to firefox only so that they can make chrome as terrible as they want, and point to the existense of firefox as the answer to any complaints. They don't actually want anyone to use firefox. But it's better to let a few escape than to have the bulk decide to make laws they don't want.
Ptemium is the same. They don't really want any premium users. Or rather, sure they'd happily collect a subscription from everyone AND still show ads and collect data.
Which is pretty much what they do actually. Premium doesn't actually remove all the bad elements of youtube. It just goes from pulling 8 of your fingernails out to only pulling 5 of your fingernails out.
Not at all. Non-paying viewers are worth less than zero.
> Or rather, sure they'd happily collect a subscription from everyone AND still show ads and collect data. > Which is pretty much what they do actually.
What are you talking about? There are no ads with premium.
These threads always have a bunch of this weird type of person who doesn't understand that ads from YouTube and ads that content creators put in their videos are different things. I can't tell if they're being intentionally obtuse, or just legitimately do not understand how financial transactions work. Maybe they're teenagers who haven't worked a job before?
I use a little user script that redirects me from YT shorts URLs to a normal video player URL. I found that it adds just enough friction to getting the next video that just scrolling shorts for an hour doesn't happen anymore.
Added bonus is that you can rewind a bit of video if you want to, instead of having to watch the entire video again.
The problem is the moat. The moat is money.
If I see an ad I just close YT for the rest of the day.
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/21/youtube-as-infinite-file-sto...
For extra fun, install one browser with Adblock Plus (with acceptable ads disabled) and one with uBlock Origin and swap between them as needed.
I'm sure that's exactly the behavior YT wants here.
For network effects it doesn't matter if you have 99% of the audience or 90% (assuming only 10% will leave because of anti ad blocker).
Peer to peer networks are still around. Vimeo still exists. Pretty sure DailyMotion and friends also still exist.
PeerTube and other stuff are making it easier for video communities to support themselves.
Eventually the only thing Youtube will be good for is supporting influencers and whatever mainstream media BS is going on.
Definitely not giving Google any money.
Is it really worth $13.99 to die on - nope it is not.
I recently got mad that the Wendy's biggy bag went to $7 and eat out less because I'm not paying $10+ for a single meal unless it's something I can't (easily) make at home. You can't get Subway for less than $12, and it's a fucking sandwich.
Most of my frivolous spending is on caffeine and THC. If I manage to cut those two out I'd save a bunch but then what would I have fun with? :(
What's your local price for weed? Is the hours of entertainment from YouTube not worth a joint or whatever?
Youtube is a place for me to listen to game OSTs. A weekend with VPN access and the right protocols could make my entire usage of the site obsolete.
Google simply doesn't do anything worthy of my money. Google and all its properties could disappear tomorrow and my personal computing would barely be affected. Same for Microsoft. There are ways to insulate yourself from being treated like a wallet to dip into at will.
It has been a decade since we had a TV in our household - it just laptops, tablets, phones and a PS5 for my gamer kid - so it's just Spotify/Youtube for them plus TikTok for downtime.
I rarely watch movies - think Spiderman No Way Home was the last one.
Maybe you should speak only for yourself. It is possible that most people uploading to youtube do it because of the adds, but there are plenty of people who have other reasons. Most people I watch regularly do not even have enough views to get any add revenue. There are plenty of us who prefer contents that was not created with adds in mind.
Not convinced. Many watch influencers and monetized channels and they won't leave.
The other alternatives like Nebula and Floatplane paywall all viewers, and doesn't seem open to new creators without a viewerbase.
I have tried Peer Tube many times. It, to be frank, sucks.
A few services I pay for (Spotify, Xero, etc) seem to lock a user in and then push up pricing while adding functionality I have no need for.
Not to mention the split of content across an increasing number of networks. Having to juggle 5-8 paid streaming services, to watch a few 90s films that feel like they should be on all of them, seems rough to me.
For websites that give me a popup saying disable adblock or no content, I immediately hit the back button and let them rot in no-view hell.
People simply want to choose which creators they support, when, and how, which is entirely their right
If someone who spends less of their time watching Clara's videos chooses to support Clara because they value her content more than Vincent's, or because they feel like Clara needs the money more than Vincent does, or for any other reason that's entirely up to them.
Similarly, it doesn't matter how many of my comments here on HN you read, you don't owe me upvotes, or responses, or donations although I might certainly appreciate them
You are then free to try to work around it, the same way Youtube is trying to work around your adblocker.
Google is being increasingly obnoxious and user-hostile in an effort to get people to pay Google money to stop harassing them and wasting their time by delaying and interrupting the free content they requested with repeated attempts at manipulation, while the people who block ads are just trying to avoid Google's unwanted (and at times harmful) behavior.
I don't think it is entirely fair to invent problems for people and then demand payment from them to stop getting in their way. That said, I don't object to Google providing people with the option of giving their money to Google either, I just don't think they need the strong arm tactics.
> Likewise with YouTube, nobody will donate to well-made instructional videos or original news reporting
There are countless examples to prove you wrong. Many people on youtube doing original news reporting and providing instructional videos get donations and many earn their living entirely from money they made on youtube (either from those people who choose to donate their money directly, or those who pay Google for Premium, or those who choose to allow themselves to be subjected to ads).
I think there are many more examples proving me right. In my estimate, about 1 in 750 to 1 in 1000 subscribers will donate to a video creator. That's "nobody". If you look at your favourite channels and compare numbers of subscribers with numbers of Patreon sponsors, I think you will see similar numbers.
It's not only YouTube, it's almost everything on the internet. Then people here complain about diminishing quality of the stuff online... Well, people who make that stuff need to eat. If they can't support themselves with producing quality content, they will do something else and that content will not be made. It will not exist. At least YouTube is a way that enables a lot of high quality content to exist. I know hackers think that these creators should go to hell if they don't accept to create their stuff for free, but I side with the creator in this one.
For me, I look forward to the day when YouTube is completely behind a paywall, so that penny pinchers are left to wallow in the filth to save their precious dollars.
This is also why unhealthy slop food is sold everywhere. Most people will happily destroy their own health and keep buying the cheapest crap so they can pinch their precious penny, instead of spending a little more on quality.
But what I've always wondered is what people want to do with that penny that they've pinched for so long?
It's an absolute category error to think you can haggle with for profit corporations worth trillions about when they've extracted enough value from you.
You ever hear the one about the missionary who tried to negotiate with the tiger? He told the tiger he could eat most of him, but he had to stop when he got to his head
The story is a bit different when it comes to the creators themselves who would get money from those ads. They offer their videos for free, and you have no obligation to support them monetarily, but if there is a youtuber whose content you really want to support there is probably some means already to pay them directly without giving anything to Google.
(Point being people paying for premium are also mad at these tactics)
* All of these platforms favor algorithmic recommendations (which are ads) over your personal content queue.
* A lot of content on Prime forces you to watch an ad of new Prime content before your show starts.
* Some of these platforms have auto-playing previews that distract you while you are navigating. Sometimes you can disable them, sometimes you can't. Sometimes the setting resets itself. These are ads.
I'd add that if one has (permanent) control of the recommendation and auto playing then they're less like ads and more tools. Especially if they are opt in.
> Thank you for being one of our first Premium Lite members.
> We’re writing to let you know that after October 25, 2023, we will no longer offer your version of Premium Lite.
And so I refused to be nudged into a more expensive subscription, YT didn't give me any more information why that subscription wasn't being offered so fuck them, I will use ad blockers for as long as they work.
The quality and quantity of ads is the problem. Getting blasted with Uber Eats ads all the time (I had a two week streak on my tablet for this crap) without any ability to tell Youtube that, no fuck no I will never eat at Uber Eats and their jingle is annoying the fuck out of me, absolutely sucks. And no I don't want to be interrupted every five minutes with an ad break that completely breaks the flow of the video, and especially not right after coming out of a 2 minute "sponsor" block shilling NordVPN, Athletic fucking Greens, Aura or AirUp.
In contrast, regular TV ads are at least placed in joint blocks that leave you enough time to go to a loo and then have 20-30 minutes of uninterrupted video. Oh, and there also won't be low-quality ads for Evony or whatever other free-to-play whale hunter games on TV either.
If I paid for YouTube Premium then I voluntarily provide even more tracking data to Google. If they offered an ad free tier where you weren't tracked then I would pay for it.
Since Google don't respect people's right to privacy or to watch content ad free I don't pay them and instead use ad blockers locally and pay for a proxy server with ad blocking DNS.
I guess YouTube could always block that domain from embedding videos, but if the extension allowed the user to set a custom domain from /etc/hosts, I'm not sure Google could stop it unless they forbid embedding on hosts that resolve to loopback address.
javascript:void(location.href='https://deturl.com/play.php?v='+location.href.split('=')[1])
when you're on a yt video click it and it will redirect using the id
I'm using this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ I've set it up to only redirect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\* so I can still use the regular YouTube UI for browsing videos. This invidious instance feels surprisingly snappy, perhaps even faster than the 'native' YouTube player.
It downloads a text file maintained by someone at a repository that lists all uBO YouTube Fixes, and compare it to the latest YouTube JS files. Not all JS updates contain anti-adblock codes, so what this website shows is pretty misleading.
> If it's red, it means we're either still working on a fix or the latest script didn't defeat our current filters.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/184fivk/youtu...
I like being logged in because I like to track what I've watched. So it's annoying to lose that when logging out. It'd be nice to have an extension that provides watch history independently of YouTube, so that I don't need to login.
The blocking per se works.
The internet is unbearable with ads. If a browser doesn't filter ads well it's unsuitable for use in 2023. If Chrome can't block YouTube ads anymore, then it's just not even a contender. The normies tend to lag a little with these things, but it won't be long before "Firefox is the one that works on YouTube" is common tech trivia.
Same with Android TV: most people accept the default launcher that serves ads and pushes content constantly. It takes some work to change the default launcher, but people won't even try. They accept it.
I pray every day that Manifest V3 will be the beginning of the end for Chrome, because it cripples ad blocking in an unacceptable way. But I very much doubt it will happen.
Now Google is repeating Microsoft's mistakes here. The more miserable the ad experience, the stronger the incentive to do something about that. And when the solution is "Install Firefox, add uBlock Origin, Tada!", there are just going to be a lot of people that will figure out how to never see ads again. Firefox works on mobile as well and runs Youtube without ads just fine there. Think about that next time you are forced to watch an ad in the Youtube app on your phone.
The irony with Youtube is that ads are just a part of the revenue stream. They also get a revenue share on sponsoring deals and a few other things. Which for most youtubers is actually their main income stream. Ads are just the cherry on the cake. Which is why Google can't just kill off browser support or move everything to premium/paid accounts. They'd lose a lot of their viewers and revenue. And as a consequence, potentially some of their content creators even. Google is completely dependent on external content providers and viewers keeping the revenue going. No content, no views, no revenue. That's why they have to keep the platform such that it maximizes exposure for good videos.
That being said I do get quite some ads on Twitch(and I know there's solutions to this, but they're separate from uBlock origin and I have to keep updating them cause they keep breaking so I stop caring sometimes). The way I solve it there is to just have 2 different streams open in 2 different tabs, one of them muted, as soon as ads start I switch to the different stream.
Directive 2002/58/EC legal text: 3. Member States shall ensure that the use of electronic communications networks to store information or to gain access to information stored in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned is provided with clear and comprehensive information in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC, inter alia about the purposes of the processing, and is offered the right to refuse such processing by the data controller. This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out or facilitating the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order to provide an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user.
Alexander Hanff has been fighting the fight to make this a reality and recognized by courts.
Mainstream media coverage of the story: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/7/23950513/youtube-ad-block...
Not only it is illegal, it's also not at all how HTTP was designed to work. If a business use case makes it so that the system doesn't want to serve a request, the server can (and should) return one of 4xx error messages. Returning with OK and then doing invasive malware-esque data mining is not A-OK.
Who sits in a meeting and pushes this? "We could up our viewership by starting a war with a niche browser primarily used by open source hackers.." Does that sound foolish only in my head?
I don't browse, don't comment, don't vote. Don't share casually.
YT and other corporates cutting their nose off to spite their face?
If the wind changes on some ideological, political, social points - Youtube can become about as popular and relevant as vinyl records, CD's. And they won't notice it, until long after the process is irreversible.
Reminds me of the time I experimented with running Synology OS on a PC or pirated music - it became such a hassle waiting for new patches or fixing my MP3 collection that it was just easier to pay for a license to UnRaid and Spotify move on with my life.
The value my family gets out Youtube > Netflix atm so I have no qualms about paying.
It even has SponsorBlock built in, so it can be configured to skip things like intros, recaps, or sponsor segments.
It could be a good reason to switch to Google's Android box device (Chromecast with Google TV) where this is supposedly simpler.
Thing is, I've watched YT on my phone and it seems like the ads take a lot longer to stream than the time before I can dismiss the popup. The popup is a minor annoyance but better than a couple ads.
an added benefit is there are no recommendations so you can't get sucked in to the algo, nor tracked by it
if you come across a random video you want to watch you can have a bookmarklet to ytdl it to jellyfin
Is there documentation somewhere on how to do it well?
Not the point, but I felt like I had to mention it.
For example, the real implied free storage in GMail has implicitly been reduced by 80%. Their failure to reduce prices and in fact their price INCREASES are just pure greed on display.
There’s a huge difference between no ads, and unskipable ads shat out every seven minutes, with another two at the start of every video.
Television isn’t even this bad.
Would be like proving an alternative to cater to shoplifters.
Either accept the cat-and-mouse game, pay for YT premium, or stop using YouTube. Complaining that Google is somehow wronging you by not giving you the free video hosting you're entitled to is asinine.
They should not be allowed to profit from their anti-competitively acquired monopoly, even in ways that their competitors would have if they had not been driven out of business.
> They're only now putting ads in videos,
They've been showing ads on videos since 2007, before Google even bought YouTube.
> charging for not-doing-that,
They've been offering that for 8 years, about half the lifetime of YouTube.
> Complaining that Google is somehow wronging you by not giving you the free video hosting you're entitled to is asinine.
Google are using our browsing and video watching data already. That's enough (and has been enough over many years) for them to monetize their service. What they are doing now with the attack on adblockers on Youtube is corporate greed as they simply want MORE monetization.
And what they are doing to adblockers in general with manifest v3 and Privacy Sandbox is simply anti-competitive practices.
> Either accept the cat-and-mouse game, pay for YT premium, or stop using YouTube. And how about no? What's in to you? Working in Youtube and worried your boss can't buy his 5-th Tesla? Understand that there are some people not happy with the enshittification of the internet, and we want to fight for a better one.
Why do you think that data is valuable? Because it can better target ads to you. Ads that you then block. Making the data worthless...
The only way they are allowed to legally monetize data for marketing purposes is to find other users that don't have do-not-track + opted in for marketing targeting, and show the ads to them.
Additionally, they can (and do) utilize bulk usage data (from many people) by feeding it into their ecosystem. For example, a video about cats being more popular than another will pop up higher on the search rankings when somebody searches for "cat". User "labor"/interest moderates the content on the platform, which makes it more attractive, and increases the overall number and engagement of users. Out of those users there is some % that have opted in for marketing, and can be legally targeted by personalized ads.
And many will change the channel and watch something else in the meantime. Youtube checks that you have clicked away and just waits for you, basically FORCING you to watch the ad. TV and radio don't do that, neither do magazines.
If Youtube was TV, in this analogy every channel has an ad as soon as you open it. Oh, and when you go back to a channel you switched from due to an ad, that very same ad is waiting for you to watch it dutifully.
As for the TV analogy, it’s a paid option which still serves ads. YouTube offers a paid option which does not serve ads. Should they ever try to cross the line of charging money and still serving ads then all bets are off.
This whole thing is happening because content makers have become VERY entitled to the system of advertising which pays them; rather than innovate in the space, they're trying to moralize and legalize their way into forcing the audience not to look away. Don't let it happen folks.
To be clear, I'm not saying YT should give things away; I'm saying the mask should come off and they should outright charge money.
So what is a better term for unauthorized use of compute and bandwidth?
The terms of service for YT are: watch ads or pay for premium. This is so that YT can pay their bills (hosting, salaries, cheques to creators).
> They're giving a product away for free, and people are consuming it for free; end of story.
No they are not. They are providing a service according to certain terms of service. If you don't like the terms feel free not to use the service.
If it's unauthorized, why is the server responding with that data? Youtube has a very simple solution if they don't want the data they send to you to be modified at your discretion -- don't send the data. Their servers are perfectly free to respond with some kind of HTTP error code and not serve up the video data. Once they've sent me the bytes, their control over which of said bytes I consume, modify or discard is over.
I never agreed to any terms of service. My browser made a request and their servers responded with some data. If my request alone constitutes accepting a terms of service, I too should be free to include some sort of X-ToS header with my requests that impose similarly onerous terms on the operator of the server I am making the request to, provided they respond with a non-error HTTP code. Like, lets say, for every Youtube video I load, Youtube must provide a full-ride college scholarship to 1000 kids.
Businesses get to define their own rules and if you don't abide by them they're allowed to choose not to do business with you. You either need to agree to their terms of service (no adblock) or you need to take your business else where. They don't owe you anything.
Your mentality seems to be that a restaurant can offer free meals to anyone who walks in and sits down, then after they're already eating, demand they watch an annoying ad on a screen built into the table, and somehow the diners are morally obligated to watch it instead of just covering it up with their menu. That's BS.
That's fine, but then they can also choose to retaliate how they want. It's really weird that everything you're saying seems to boil down to "I don't need to play by their rules, but they need to play by mine."
I'm of the opinion that if you want to bypass their ads that's fine, but you can't get angry when they take action to prevent that.
> Your mentality seems to be that a restaurant can offer free meals to anyone who walks in and sits down, then after they're already eating, demand they watch an annoying ad on a screen built into the table, and somehow the diners are morally obligated to watch it instead of just covering it up with their menu. That's BS.
Yes, that's my attitude. I don't know why it wouldn't be. If a restaurant wanted to make me watch an ad before every single bite, then that's their prerogative. I wouldn't eat there, but if that's what they want to do, then that's their choice.
If YouTube wants to make you watch 10 ads before a 30 second video then more power to them. If they want to take action against people trying to bypass that then good for them. Similar to the example above, I'm not going to use them, but I don't get to dictate how they run their business. If you don't like their actions, then take your business elsewhere. They don't own you anything and vice versa. It's really as simple as that.
It’s more like a restaurant kicking out a group that just wants to sit at a table for free without buying anything.
In Australia there is ABC, SBS, Community Broadcasting Foundation, Channel 31, etc,
"Hey fellow hackers. I am a hacker myself and I totally don't work for Google. Ads are good, mkay?"
Bruh, dunno what planet you live on and how brainwashed you have to be to think blocking ads is theft. It's like getting a fine when there are ads on the radio and you change the station, or ads on the TV and you changing the channel.
It's your device, it's the creator's content, and Youtube facilitates you seeing that content. In return, they can (and very much do) monetize your usage data, your interests, etc, and give some of that value to the creator. That should have been the relationship between creator, service and consumer. However, monetizing the trove of data they have on you is not enough for them.
What they are doing now is motivated by pure corporate greed and desire to squeeze every possible cent out of their dominant position. They can and don't care about your experience, knowing that there is hardly an alternative for you, and that, my friend, is called a monopoly. And wherever there are monopolies, users suffer. So don't sell me the idea that poor poor Google can't make ends meet and need to force feed me 100 ads during one video so they can survive. This is a monopoly saying a big "fuck you" to their users and trying to scalp them by enshittifying their service and forcing you to pay for the "premium".
Forcing you to watch content that you didn't want to and pausing the ad counter while you have clicked away is the TV equivalent of the ADs following you on every channel and not relenting until you have watched them. They have no excuse
How do you think they're monetizing your data? By definition it's not by showing you ads, you're blocking them. Also not by using the data to make their paid service so good that you'll really want to subscribe, since you obviously are entitled to the service for free.
The reality is that your data is worthless, and your use of the service is a liability rather than an asset. And you'll be equally worthless to any competitor, which was the GP's actual point.
I disagree. Bulk usage data is a type of platform moderation which makes certain content more or less popular, and it improves the quality of the platform overall when fed into their algorithms. That's how google search is made as well. That rises the number of users to the platform. Out of that number, some don't mind paying for it, and some don't mind being tracked/showed ads.
In a nutshell, mine and your usage usage/engagement, regardless if we block ads or not, helped them improve heir platform, which resulted in increase in paying users.
For example PS plus. You spend time in the service and then your subscription runs out and you can’t access or even fully use games you paid for.
What makes google different? Why do users endure the pain?
> A different ID doesn't always mean the detection will occur.
So that definitely seems to be the case according to everything except the "NO"
That makes about as much sense as saying a store hiring a security guard to reduce theft is having a tantrum.
The value of me watching ads is absolutely zero. (From my point of view in fact, it's negative).
Advertising works on multiple levels, with direct sales not necessarily being the only acceptable result:
Besides, I only watch youtube ad-free. If this becomes impossible I will simply stop watching youtube, so, I don't think this strategy will have much effect on me either, at least within the context of youtube.
Very much a tantrum.
However, once they serve me something and it’s received by my user agent, I will use that user agent however I see fit to parse and display (or not display) that content.
I’ll rephrase my position: Google is free to ban my IP, require a payment before serving me videos, or whatever else they feel is appropriate to stop me from using their electricity without being compensated appropriately. But if they serve me a page containing a video, I have every right to instruct the software on my device to render that video however I see fit. This in no way is morally or legally comparable to stealing, theft, fraud, or whatever other words people are throwing around.
It might frustrate you personally -- the same way it might frustrate you to have to pay money to see a movie at a movie theater -- but I don't see what isn't acceptable about it socially.
Advertisers want more though, and inventory owners have drunk deep from the cash hose for so long that they want to normalize and enforce behavior that we the public have merely put-up-with till now. We as the audience are now being told that we OWE the pizza store our time and eyeballs; throwing away the ad flyer, why, that's STEALING! If you're a moral citizen, you'll sit there and read every line of copy, sing along with every jingle, watch every dancing mascot, otherwise you're a thief. We keep this up, and closing your eyes will soon be a crime.
I still don't see how it has anything to do with a tantrum. A tantrum is someone yelling and screaming because they aren't getting what they want. This is Google getting exactly what it wants, and I don't see any yelling and screaming.
It's just quietly asserting its rights to block adblockers.
For example, what if I had a robot that detected when an ad was being played on youtube, and automatically turned off my monitor and headphones momentarily, turning them back on once the ad was over. Would that violate google's "rights"?
https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Themen/Verbraucherinnen-und-Verbr...
In general? Of course not.
On a webpage they serve to you? Of course they have the right to, to the extent JavaScript makes it possible. What possible legal basis could there be for them not to have that right? With limited exceptions, they have the right to do wherever they want with their webpage code. And there is no legal exception against blocking adblockers.
I don't see how they could, I can always look away. In that case, what is the effective difference between that and ad blockers that control what code/images run/display on my computer?
The are not "giving things away": they have terms of service. The agreement is: pay for premium or watch the ads. (This way they can pay their bills (including employee salaries and the creators that make the content).)
never gets old
This is absolute flagrant greediness that I won't tolerate. Either stop collecting my personal data completely OR take my money. You can't have both.
I'm sorry, but I don't believe in the slightest they don't collect my personal data when I'm paying them. I find it difficult to trust any of their promises due to their poor reputation.
And yes, I realize I can play music via the same subscription but I have been using Spotify since before it existed outside Sweden and really enjoy it. I will not be leaving any time soon.
Youtube premium does not works for incognito mode. This requires careful, and manual curation of my "history" page.
No thank you.
Whenever I've use YouTube not logged in the recommendations have been pretty worthless.
"We" as in those other guys have to create all the videos without compensation and I watch them without giving any compensation. What a nice "we" we have, I wonder how long the other guys will stick around?
Good grief, no. That 9$ is urgently required in order to purchase healthy food at spiralling prices, and to pay for the requirements for healthy activities.
Google? The last people i am concerned about. Content makers, that's an interesting story. SV and others rips them off, and crushes the business models that supported their livelyhoods. But now I have to be concerned about the youtube content makers?
Think about it. People do things without recompense all the time. It's called joy, or something. It is a fact. If that's not possible, they could investigate setting up patreons.
What YT have somehow done is repackage their business model in vivo in your head. It's not Yt's business model at all. It is a moral obligation to creators.
The obvious call concern is that Google are emotionally exploiting you. As the services are addictive by nature, that is par for the course.
Consumers with a moral concern for the world rather than just passing emotional whims are supposed to allow themselves to recognise how hard nosed the investors and executives are.
This is all business. All transactions. Forget the selling of attention and data. Your presence and interest in a thing is advertising, and affirms it as something of value.
I'm respectful of the desire to support people who create things of value for us, but it's absolutely vital to realise that one of life's great joys is doing so for free.
Frankly sometimes when I feel there's also an air of desperation around this discussion. If the transition from free to paid service can't be normalised, a lot of people on here would seem to stand to lose or face uncertainty.
I wish I could impart upon people there is a great need to frequently revisit and exploring our moral, ethical social contracts - and to realise how flimsy our justifications are, and how limited we are in being able to concieve of the realities involve. There's something childlike about it. It's hard to know when just to leave that alone, as entire point is that life might not offer any certainty whatsoever as to the 'goodness' inherent in the act or any protection against it unwittingly - in the final analysis - proving to be a terrible thing for all involved, if only we understood (but we can't).
Basically... uhhh.... we could stand to be hard nosed consumers. Not cynical, but perhaps not avoiding the "realist" view that there are huge and unavoidable ambiguities and contradictions in everything we are engaging with, and pretending otherwise is not about being a wise adult, it's about silly and childish ideas such as good and evil.
I think it's important to remember life was fine for everyone long before Google, and would be just fine if they vanished in the next two decades.
I think this part is how our views differ. YouTube is a whole lot different than it used to be, and it's a whole lot deeper than what it looks on the surface. There's a ton of videos there that aren't made to be addictive. For example world class instructional videos, educational videos, and such.
You can rant at me for going to the super market, claiming they're exploiting me by putting addictive sugar and other crap in the candy bars and potato chips. That is what you go to the supermarket for and the only thing you see. But I go to the back to buy vegetables and a steak.
> I think it's important to remember life was fine for everyone long before Google, and would be just fine if they vanished in the next two decades.
The same can be said of any technology, or just in general anything. But information can have immense value. Today if you have a car problem you can go on YouTube and find a video with an expert showing you exactly what to do. Just one of many examples. There was no business model for independent video creators before YouTube. Now the consumer can choose freely, instead of the capitalist or communist scumbag executives deciding what should be seen.
> This is all business.
Yes, and the product is incredibly cheap for the amount of value you can get from it.
One thing communists and capitalists have in common is that they can never enjoy life for a single moment. One for the obsession of making a dollar, the other for the obsession of saving a dollar. All beauty is sucked out of life by these materialistic faiths.
I use ad blockers everywhere, but for me it’s „set it and forget it“. I don’t have time and energy to adjust that regularly.
I do understand that with Premium they actually have an incentive to pivot from their current surveillance tech niche to a more decent model, but uhhhh. That's Google we're talking about. It's just not happening.
When Facebook started being user hostile I stopped using it wholesale.
Anti Google YouTube folks haven’t gotten the message yet.
If you make 25 an hour - the bottom decile wage for software engineering - and waste more than half an hour on this a month, idk what to say. That’s a minute a day. Chop chop.
By the way if you consider YouTube premium for family or friend group of 5 you’re paying 5 bucks a month. That means you have 12 minutes a month to waste, or about 24 seconds a day.
If you’re at a typical FANG company making entry salary you have about 5 seconds a day to waste.
Time is precious. Stop wasting it trying to fight ads when you’re capable of paying to get rid of them.
It’s easy to degoogle. Kagi search is a good start.
While it'd be wise to avoid Google for privacy reasons, I see no problem with people making a choice to use YouTube if they want to. People can decide for themselves how much risk they're willing to take for the content hosted there. I totally respect people's choice to avoid Google to whatever limited extent that is possible, but I also respect people's choice to engage with Google on their own terms. I'd just hope that that choice is a well informed one.
For me personally that means my use of youtube involves never logging into youtube, not using youtube to view the content hosted there (I either use NewPipe or yt-dlp to download videos and then use VLC to view them), avoiding searching for content I wouldn't want forever associated with my identity, blocking ads, blocking suggested videos, blocking comments, etc. it works pretty well for me.
I mean it takes ~15 seconds to update uBlock Origin's filter scripts any time there's an update to bypass YouTube. Based on my current salary that's under 50 cents worth of my time. Also I've actually had zero adblock warnings on Firefox so far, my wife had issues on Opera and uBO wasn't updated yet and I spent a minute getting Firefox set up for her so I guess that was about $1-$2 of my time.
But yeah, arguing about it all online has always been the most fun part.
It takes me precisely 0 seconds to update uBO's scripts. It's all done automatically; am I the only one here that doesn't spend any time at all blocking ads? I installed uBO ages ago, I've spent a couple minutes going through the options and enabling almost everything useful to me (annoyance lists, etc.), and that was it. It doesn't take any effort on my part to block ads on YouTube or anywhere else now that it's set up.
Also, I've also have zero adblock warnings so far, on FF/Linux, FFNightly/Android, and SmartTubeNext.
Setting up a YouTube Premium account and managing the payment details would honestly take me far more time than it does for me to block ads.
Say that I wanted guides or tutorials on fixing something in my car, in-depth steps for making a certain recipe, or even programming courses. Youtube is easily one of the best resources for all of these and everything in general.
Saying to write-off one of the internet's best tools just because they've pushed out mv3 seems like giving up too quickly for me.
If you find value in it, why don't you reward the people creating that value?
In practice, many decisions are neither about money or time.
In this case, this is about voting with your wallet. I don't care about the price, but I really care about not increasing the revenue of Google.
Some people are in a place where time isn't their most valuable commodity.
I'm not really defending them because, personally, I think the whole thing is stupid. Youtube doesn't owe anyone anything. If you don't like their policy go somewhere else. I'm just saying that for some people it is worth their time.
Youtube/Google make enough money monetizing our usage data. Now that they have cornered the market (i.e locking in the users), they are using their dominant position to crank up the prices and enshittify the free experience. That's anti-competitive practices, and they shouldn't be encouraged for that but punished instead.
You should be aware that most software engineers in the world live outside of US. Most of them make less than that. But that's just nitpicking.
The problem with your logic is that you suggest to feed the beast that will devour you whole. Youtube is involved in multiple planetary-scale propaganda campaigns.