Whelp, here we go again
Mmmm, gotta love that enshittification strategy every big tech company is working on right now.
Free money ended, they are trying to squeeze
What’s with every big tech company trying to destroy their userbase this year?
Interest rates hikes stopped the free money, so companies need profit.
I’d argue they don’t need $500 million when they already make $400 million, but I’m just a lowly peasant.
tl;dr: capitalism
they think they have us sufficiently cornered on centralized sites, they may be right.
Especially with video. Reddit was easy-ish to leave – I haven’t left entirely – since it’s just a link aggregator and glorified forums. That’s nothing new to the Internet. And Twitter was easy to replace with Mastodon.
But hosting video? That’s a tough one to replicate. I know there are some other platforms out there, but I can’t imagine any could really take on YouTube, due to space and bandwidth considerations.
So yeah, I think YouTube has us all by the balls. And they know it.
Recently found this gem: https://adnauseam.io/
It’s an ad blocker that only hides ads and clicks them for you in the background, which means you waste advertiser’s money, support creators, can’t get flagged for ad blocking as easily, and they can’t build a proper profile against your ad activity since it’s all noise. Haven’t installed it yet, but this might be the push I needed.
This might be an acceptable sollution, but what happens on the other side of the ad? If something maliciously is being spreaded, the click might have to happen in an isolated form from the rest of the system or the browser.
Did all these tech companies just get together and decide to fuck us over around the same time? Seriously, what is going on with all these companies rolling out hugely unpopular new rules/changes all on one another’s heels?
The end of 0% interest means “business” no longer have access to free money. So now they want benefits, and growth but without the spending.
Also we skipped a tech bubble crash around 2008, so these corpos deaths are more than overdue.
The cicle as Doctorow says in his enshification tesis is:
1.- be good to your users, spending tons of that VC and 0% interest loan free money.
2.- be shit to your users, be good to your clients (add buyers, business that use your platform to do business)
3.- be shit to everyone. Squeeze the platform and get every last dime of value as profit.
Once you are in 3 there is no coming back. But these corporations have pulling the ladder behind them using an extra decade of dominant position to try to stop the cicle.
Personally, I’d rather pay for Nebula than YouTube premium. Most of the creators I actively follow are on there anyways, and the few that aren’t (usually the ones with very long videos) I should probably just watch with ads anyways to support them.
I had a similar thought. How fair is nebula to their creators? I heard it was somehow creator owned, but other than that I have no idea how it works.
Nebula is great in comparison, and apparently video creators make even more money from Nebula views than YouTube Premium views, which is already a lot more than ad-supported views.
Nebula’s content base is small in comparison but very quickly growing and already includes most of the longer-form video creators I would want anyway (Jenny Nicholson is one notable exception, but her Patreon channel is wildly successful so I sort of doubt she feels like torpedoing that to do a whole new platform).
But frankly, if I paid what I pay for Nebula and only got Jet Lag, it would still be worth it to me.
Another executive-driven decision by people who clearly don’t use their own product (kinda impressive really when it’s YT).
I can’t help wonder if they saw an uptick in adblocking as a result of their absurd increases in ad-time recently and somehow thought this was a reasonable solution.
8-10 unskippable ads before a video? Holy shit. That’s ludicrous.
It really is hard to fathom how that got through any internal discussion.
Its not that hard to fathom when you have worked with these types of people.
All it was was a numbers meeting, no User Experience folks in the room. They said how much revenue they would increase quarter over quarter, and how much engagement it would drive. Everyone claps, the meeting ends they move forward with the next terrible design decision. Companies no longer take focus group testing seriously for anything.
Focus groups and qualitative data are so last season. It’s all Business “Intelligence” -driven bullshit nominally based on poorly defined and even more poorly understood metrics (excuse me, “KPIs”)
I rarely use YouTube, but my nephew (he’s two) was over the other day and we put on some cartoons for him that were in YouTube since my wife and I don’t have Disney plus. I couldn’t BELIEVE how many ads it showed. One five-minute merry melodies cartoon had FOUR SEPARATE ad breaks, the third and fourth of which were both 3+ minutes long if you weren’t paying attention to skip.
Wtf?! Not even shit ass normal broadcast television has that many commercials.
Feels like every year corporations rely on the naivety of youth in an attempt to push more and more egregious shit.
Exactly right they’re normalizing ads in everything. They’re indoctrinating the youth, who don’t know any better or differently, into just accepting/expecting that all content in all forms comes with ads, and you can’t watch any of it without signing in so they can track you and sell your data.
Someone in the Fediverse (I don’t know where and who) posted that you have to add the following filters into U-Block Origin. When done you shouldn’t see any anti-adblock-warnings :
youtube.com##+js(set,yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel,false) youtube.com##+js(set,Object.prototype.adBlocksFound,O) youtube.com##+js(set,ytplayer.config.aras.raw_player_response.adPlacements,[]) youtube.com##+js(set,Object.prototype.hasAllowedlnstreamAd,true)I might add that I haven’t experienced any anti-adblock-warnings yet, but I added these filters in advance. I might be worth a shot!
I’m sure it hides the warnings, but it certainly doesn’t prevent you from being blocked…
Also or just use a front-end like as Piped (https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped) or Invidious (https://github.com/iv-org/invidious)
A handy externsion of FIrefox wil automatically redirects you, see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
So if you are on android: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.polymorphicshade.newpipe (Newpipe with sponsorblock baked in)
If you are on PC: https://freetubeapp.io/ (Piped with sponsorblock baked in)
You’re welcome.
And what are the consequences of “strikes”? Will you delete my Google account, including my email, and also screw up my Android phone and my kids Chromebook?
It’s scary to realize that Google has me by the balls here. They can screw me in so many ways, and screw my family members as well. I’d rather have my bank credentials stolen than my email credentials, at least I can get real customer service from the bank, I can even go to a physical location and speak face-to-face with someone who can help me. Google wont give me customer support, and my email account is the closest thing to an identity I have for most businesses I interact with.
It takes a lot of work to avoid Google. Yes, there are alternatives, but in D&D terms, avoiding Google is like a -2 to all stats for your entire life, and not something we can expect the general population to do.
All this shows the need for anti-trust enforcement. The same company is controlling too much. Bust 'em up!
Moral of the story: create separate account for YouTube that has no high value services or data on it.
I’ve seen enough horror stories to know that’s not going to help. They can, and do, associate multiple accounts to same users. Be it by cookies, IP addresses, or dark magic, the end result is the same - they can upend your entire digital life if they want to. r/degoogle better hurry up and migrate to Lemmy.
I’d argue the bigger moral is that you should always own your online identity. You should buy your own domain (
@yourname.xyzor something like that) and make your email on that. So if Google bans you, you just switch email providers and keep your address.I’ve been using @fixnum.org and since a few years the alias @wim.land to do exactly this, but that’s just email.
My app purchases, photo storage, and YouTube account are all entangled in this. I could decouple from Google, but it would be very painful.
Article suggests you simply get blocked from watching additional videos. But there’s no info on how that works- is it account based? IP based? Can I wipe my YouTube cookies to bypass a block?
Spend a weekend degoogling your stuff. There are alternatives for everything now. No regrets
If they want me to stop blocking ads, they will need to get rid of ads like this. I get ads like this all the time and it’s completely inappropriate.
Seems like ad targeting works
I don’t get ads like that too often, but the annoying thing for me is when the ad is 10x louder than the video itself.
There was this one add that had a gunshot sound then a really high pitched whistle.
They might have gotten in trouble as the whistle sound was eventually removed.
I’ll stop blocked ads when I stop using their service. Not a minute sooner.
Time to use an adblock blocker blocker extension.
I think that would be NoScript.
Does youtube even work with NoScript? I would assume that google has 50 different scrips running that break the site if they aren’t allowed
Nope, you just need to allow youtube.com and perhaps ytimg.com to load the front page, but I’ve disabled suggestions and whatnot with youtube enhancer.
Would YouTube even work with NoScript enabled?
You just need to allow youtube.com and maybe ytimg.com, but videos work with only youtube.com enabled.
Twitch couldn’t beat my adblocking, it just taught me how to find and use custom scripts. Shoot your shot YT, I haven’t installed a script for your website yet but now Im gonna have too. Congrats the number of ads im gonna see from you is about to go down.
Cat and mouse game. May get me to watch a couple, but I’ll someone will have a way around it within a week.
What’s your Twitch solution? Blocking Twitch is considerably more difficult than YouTube, every solution I’ve found breaks after a month or so. Best I can get is have it display a blank screen while ads play, but I still have to wait it out, which isn’t ideal.
pixeltris on github, a search for pixeltris should get you there first result. Everything you need is on that page, including how to instal the script to ublock, im using the vid swap script and TTLOL pro. It’s not perfect but the ads are gone.
Hot take: this sucks, but YouTube premium is legit. I wish more platforms offered a paid, ad-free way to interact. I don’t feel like figuring out a way around ads but I’m not about to start watching them. So I pay a few bucks a month.
I don’t have any philosophical objection for paying to use a platform I enjoy, but in the case of youtube, they have been so deliberately detrimental to society in terms of platforming fascists that I feel bad about the prospect of paying them, even if much of the money is going to creators I do like who I’m actually watching
I’d be more willing to pay if it wasn’t $10/mo (annual cost) for a bunch of stuff I don’t care about. If they had a cheaper option that was just ad-free (maybe $5/mo?), I’d be down for that.
I also like what Kagi does with their duo plan for 2 users. Some kind of duo plan for YT premium would be nice as well, since I (and many others, I’m sure) don’t have a family of 6 people.
It’s simply a more honest model - you get content, they get money.
I would love to be able to pay for an ad-free experience for the various websites and services that I browse and use in a straightforward way instead of being leeched for ad-revenue
I wouldn’t doubt paying a hundred per month to have an ad-free life.
no ads on tv or sports, no billboards, no ads on buses. it would be awesome
The thing is that first you pay in order to avoid ads, but ads will start creeping in on the paid version in no time. Some day you’ll find yourself paying and still seeing as many ads as they decide to push. The same has been done in other platforms. Cable TV didn’t have ads when I was a kid, “because it was paid”.
Screw YouTube and Google. They aren’t getting a dime from me.
I don’t mind paying for services I use to avoid my data being the payment (like Kagi or Protonmail).
But I don’t like the idea of paying Google AND having my data farmed.
Same. I hate google, but YouTube pays content creators better than any other platform. And I am 100% on board with any service where I pay a monthly cost instead of being inundated with ads.
Copying my comment over from fmhy instance -
If you don’t mind paying ~2$ a month, you can get Family Premium using a VPN (I used India)
Current working method from HUKD: (Private/Incognito browser is best)
Create a new Google Account. Enter card details. Enter a fake billing address, any random address generator will do, as long as it’s from the correct region. Then select Try it Free. Navigate to YouTube, press YouTube Premium, and double-check that everything is in the right currency. Enter the same credit card and address information you used for creating the new Google Account. Click Buy 👍
You can then add your main Google account as a family member.👍
And then I might eventually get banned for abusing/bypassing regional pricing 🤷♂️. It’s a nice workaround but that’s all it is, it’s gonna get worse with yt
I believe any accounts joining the family need to first have a Google Payments profile in the country the owner of the plan is in before you can join. Or is that not the case anymore?
