- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Or… do both. Buy premium because you are actually getting something for your money… a platform. And support ad blockers to stop the ads where the product is just a webpage.
Nah, don’t give any money to google. They have enough.
Exactly this. Funding google is a bad investment. Exactly like the comic says, give it to someone who will improve your life.
I would pay, if they would offer family pack in our country, but they don’t. Netflix is cheaper for me, I have Premium plan for 10€, and I am splitting the bill with my sister, so I only pay 5€ per month. I am not paying more than that for a YouTube.
There is still shit to block when you’re paying for premium, so yeah.
Yeah. I’m actually okay with paying for a service I use daily. Google does a bunch of evil shit to drive its advertising business, but the reality is that nothing is free and somebody has to pay somewhere.
We can pay with money or we can pay with ads and personal data.
What I would like to see is a law banning data collection for paid accounts. Because right now Google datarapes you even when you pay.
How do you explain wikipedia ?
Good loving people pay for it because they want it to be available to everyone in the world and it’s running costs are pretty low.
Video > Text
Wikipedia isn’t video hosting. The angles of nenual hosting cost for Wikipedia is around 3 million a year. YouTube probably costs nearly as much per hour to keep running.
500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s gonna be like 60 terrabytes every hour just in storage space increases.
If you were to try and host that on a cloud server like AWS the cost would increase millions of dollars every day. Google self-hosted, but it’s still unfathomingly expensive. There’s still questions over whether YouTube profitable even with all the ads and the subscriptions.
A privacy law that only works for paying customers? I think we can do far better than that.
The economic reality is not everything can be free for everyone. Privacy is the price people pay to have “free” access to services.
But right now, even those who pay to skip ads or have additional features on a service are still being mined for data.
I deny your economic reality. There is no reason social media needs to charge. It can be run purely on volunteers and donations. It may not be able to be as big as FB but that is okay. We don’t need giant multimedia companies running social media anyways.
We need strong privacy protections for everyone, not just paying customers. It is time to put an end to targeted advertising.
We’re talking about video hosting here. For a hosting site like YouTube that’s several petabytes of new storage added every day assuming no duplicates or backups of anything, plus the bandwidth, overhead, staffing, and more.
A project of that scale can’t be done by volunteer hobbyists with no money. What you’re asking for is for other people to work and spend billions annually without any expectation of compensation for just your entertainment, and you aren’t entitled to that.
Your inability to see the Internet as a distributed resource is astounding considering it’s purpose. I will repeat what I said before there is no reason social media can’t be done without the corporations controlling everything.
You can easily host your own videos, if everyone did and we used advanced sharing protocols the load can be distributed. The more people watching the more bandwidth.
You have become brainwashed into believing only YouTube can exist. You have bought into it so bad you think someone who wants your rights and privacy protected is a free loader.
We can do at all without them. There is something wrong and perverse about a single entity controlling that much of our culture. Too big to fail you say, I say too big to care about what really matters.
Okay, let’s go with your idea that everybody has the knowledge and hardware retired to self-host.
What happens when Grandma’s cute video she uploaded goes viral and 11 million people try to watch it in a 24hr period? Would we rather it simply didn’t work, or does grandma get an unexpected $7,000 bill?
Selling personal data at all should just be banned. It says personal right in the name… Giving away free services with forced adds is exploitation in my opinion. The first step to solving the issue is to require everything have a paid option that gets rid of adds and doesn’t sell personal data for additional profit. The hard part with that is preventing them from just setting the price unreasonably high.
I’d imagine there’s a point where the money from subscriptions is greater than the money from advertising and data hoarding.
The “unreasonably high” prices should be self-solving in that context, because the company won’t make more money by selling ads for less than the price of a subscription.
In fact, in order to justify raising the prices too much they’d have to change more for the ads, which in turn would hurt the ad industry by reducing the ROI in marketing.
but the reality is that nothing is free and somebody has to pay somewhere.
Youtube gained its market share and stopped any competitors arising by offering a free video platform. Now that there isn’t much hope for competition they have enshitified, plastering ads and demanding money. They endured massive loses for years just to kill competition. So boo fucking hoo when I continue using a monopolists products on the terms they originally offered.
what about revanced
I’m guessing the problem with revanced is the sheer number of projects calling themselves revanced, most of which are probably just malware.
yeah but am talking about https://revanced.app/
And patreon/liberapay for creators and journalists I enjoy.
Me but Vivaldi and Adnauseam.io.
Ads are a dystopian nightmare but for some reason nobody seems to care
Well you’re about to re-enter that dystopian nightmare because Vivaldi is a chromium browser and is moving over to manifest v3, meaning ublock origin will no longer work. Shift over to Firefox my friend
I’m not using ublock origin, Vivaldi has built-in ad blocking. If I were to switch, I’d switch to Ladybird
Consider switching to something Firefox based cause Adnauseam will break when google kills of manifest v2 in a month or something
Yeah I’m holding out for that dude who built a new browser from the ground up and made it fully open source. It’s called Ladybird.
FYI it’s not gonna run on Windows. But you probably already know that.
Yeah by the time Win10 is deprecated I am hoping Linux is more suited towards my needs anyway. There’s little sense in going open source and staying with Windows. It’s well past its prime.
Adnauseam will break
when google kills of manifest v2 in a month or somethingIn June 2025, as of now. (Vivaldi only, other Browsers may differ, change to FireWaterLibreWolfFox regardless.)
Probably because unlike paying for the service, we don’t feel how it takes our money from us.
A psychological trick that works so great that it made a lot of services exist in the first place like the whole of YouTube. And now we’re kinda addicted to those too.
Exactly. I hate when things say FREE!* (*With Ads), because you ARE paying for it. With your PRECIOUS TIME
With your PRECIOUS TIME
That’s the least of it! What’s worse is that you’re paying with your MENTAL HEALTH, because by their nature, ads are designed to make you feel like something is wrong with your life (and that buying the product can fix it).
https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy
https://www.mqmentalhealth.org/adding-to-the-problem-advertising-and-mental-health/
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/advertisings-toxic-effect-on-eating-and-body-image/
https://adfreecities.org.uk/what-we-do/advertising-mental-health/
Thank you! I was always morally opposed to ads. Glad to have another great reason to shun them
My time is basically worthless when I’m watching YouTube
Billy should really not support them, Ad Block Plus let’s advertisers pay for having their ads checked as “acceptable advertisements”, i.e. is selling out the core functionality of their product. Billy should use uBlock origin, which afaik does not accept donations, he could however support something like PiHole .
I have no problem with the acceptable ads system. ABP doesn’t get any money from it, and the ads have to meet the criteria anyways, and it’s easy to opt out. I guess it’s a bit fishy that the list maintainers charge money to get ads reviewed, but the FAQ ThunderWhiskers posted says that smaller companies get it for free, and they only charge the bigger companies. I’m not gonna get up in arms over someone charging Disney money for a service they give the local deli for free.
I also like the way it gives companies an incentive to produce less intrusive ads. With the system, unintrusive ads reach more people. Otherwise, it’s all or nothing, which makes intrusive ads the best option from a greedy perspective; they’re far more likely to be clicked, and the only cost is the risk of damaging the ad ecosystem as a whole (and you know how little corporations can care about damaging ecosystems.)
I’m pretty sure those ads also have to meet certain criteria though.
Using ABP, I’ve never had a popup ad, full page ad, auto-playing video, or other intrusive form of advertisement. The “acceptable ads” have been quiet and out of the way in what would otherwise be empty space.
With the understanding that some websites and content creators are entirely reliant on ad revenue, I prefer to have those filtered down to those that don’t provide a burdensome experience.
I will say that having a new tab open with a solicitation for a donation / “premium” every single update (so almost daily) is irritating and they better knock that shit off if they don’t want to alienate users.
The “acceptable ads” have been quiet and out of the way in what would otherwise be empty space.
I don’t mind this whatsoever. I can appreciate the concept of free is paid for by ads, but when you force me to sit there and have to watch it, or pop ups take over the page, all that excessive nonsense, that’s when I say fuck off and use an ad blocker that will remove everything.
I actually think dating sites could be improved if they had an ad you could swipe away every 10 swipes or something. (I absolutely loath swipe only apps though. I need to know your personality not your duck face pose…) for apps with bios they could have a “banner” type ad that is between segments of the bio. Anything but “pay $50+/month to make this somewhat functional.”
uBlock origin!!
And PiHole, Sponsorblock, Adguard and ReVanced (depending on the device). This is a strict “no ads” household.
Smarttube for set top boxes like Nvidia shield etc: https://smarttubeapp.github.io/
This one is a must
Oh yeah I forgot that. Using Smarttube on my Android TV.
Don’t forget Grayjay (or anything FUTO makes in general)
Don’t forget Tubular on Android
Or NewPipe on Android
Tubular is a fork of NewPipe with Sponsorblock added.
Is it not on F-Droid?
No, but it’s on IzzyDroid repo, which you can add to F-Droid.
Speaking of android, Blockada has been great on my phone. It’s like a PiHole or uBlock Origin for the whole incomming network data, like AB++ used to be nearly a decade ago.
Or ReVanced on android! I’ve been running ReVanced YT since it launched and I haven’t touched the stock YouTube app since
Amazon Primevon my XBox literally doesn’t work without my PiHole. I need to block the ads otherwise nothing plays. My PiHole was recently down for a few days and suddenly we couldn’t finish any of the shows we were on.
Never trust these companies, they want to destroy their own products in the name of profit. Undermine them everywhere you can.
There is also uYou for iOS users.
Also Adaway
The vending machine would reject all bills because uBlock developers don’t accept donations.
A single piece of merch from your favorite creator will cover for any ads you would have seen for the foreseeable future anyway
I run UBO, SponsorBlock on FF. I have many t-shirts and hats from youtoobers. Someone was asking about my hat, I said it’s a youtube channel, then they asked about my shirt and I said it’s another youtube channel. I then thought of all the t-shirts I have in my drawer at home. I’d say well over half of them are youtube channel shirts. Made me think I am too deep down the youtube hole, but there is a ton of good content and I like supporting the ones I watch and enjoy. So merch is how I do it so I can be their advertisement. I may not even wear it much, but I’ll buy to support them and to tell others about their channel.
I don’t believe for one single second that this will stay ad free. YouTube will eventually do like all the assholes do and have a tiered system where the first tier is simply less ads not none.
Yep, eventually ads will creep their way into the payed system.
At the end of the day, there’s no such thing as enough money for corporations.
Even when you aren’t seeing ads their algorithm is still controlling your front page, allowing them to push partner content that isn’t directly advertising but still acts like it. The differences between a commercial for Doritos and an episode of Good Mythical Morning titled “Trying Every Doritos Flavor” from the perspective of the PepsiCo marketing department are that people might willingly click on the GMM video and they probably didn’t even have to pay anyone for the video to happen.
Sure Rhett & Link may not have a partnership with Pepsi and are just innocently making content to give their audience (I genuinely believe this), so they’ve got no part in this becoming advertising, but you would have to be incredibly naïve to believe that Google’s algorithm isn’t smart enough to recognize that video and others like it as marketable content the promotion of which can be sold to PepsiCo.Premium subscribers may not be seeing ads, but they are absolutely still seeing advertising.
edit: typos
That’s a good point, but to be honest even if those thumbnails were just straight up ads I’d be ok with that. I can simply not click on it. Having any kind of actual ad on a premium service is absolute bullshit though, that’s straight up greed…
Hell as a free user I wouldn’t mind in the slightest having their segments: videos, segment for shorts, more videos, be broken up to have videos, ad banner, shorts, videos, and banner etc… don’t lock me into having to watch an ad but I do understand they need ad revenue and I don’t mind seeing the still image ads “of the past” (well past for me since I’ve used an ad blocker for-absolutly-ever now.)
adblock plus is shilled and lets ads through.
ublock origin, folks.
Someone should edit this image lol
Did you read the title?
are you always this fun?
I find using scripts in Tampermonkey better for YouTube and twitch ad blocking
There’s a firefox extension that upgrades the twitch player and blocks ads. Can’t remember the name but it was easy to find when I searched for it.
Alternate twitch player or something like that
BetterYouTube?
ublock origin baby best adblocker ever
ublock origin is so based, the dev doesn’t even accept donations. He wants people to donate to the chads maintaining the lists his add-on uses instead.
I can understand both sides and I’ve been on both sides. Wanting to donate to show appreciation and help support an awesome project, and not accepting donations due to creating the burden of unfair support/development expectations for a volunteer project.
It really is such a cool extension.
I believe gorhill says to support the filter list maintainers
Ah yes: Why don’t you accept donations?
[…] Have a thought for the maintainers of the various lists. These lists are everything. I can not emphasize this enough.
Firefox, uBock Origin, and Malwarebytes.
Hard-earned?
You don’t know what daddy and Billy did in the panel before.
to really support them, buy merch, subscribe to their patreon, make a donation via kofi… there are so many more viable ways to actually support your content creator than YT+.
Agree! I do merch and patreon for the channels I frequent.
i think back in the day i would use adblock plus with chrome
I gave Premium a shot. Then the one time I wanted to use the feature Google said I was paying for - being able to download videos - I found out that it was just a glorified pre-buffer.
- Can’t view the video outside the youtube app, source video file encrypted ✅️
- Can’t view the video if you havent connected to the internet in 3 days ✅️
- Does less than your average youtube downloader that you can find with one search ✅️
- Literally just saving Youtube bandwidth because they destroyed every benefit you would get if it was actually reasonable ✅️
Enshittification isnt just limited to free users folks. Slammed that cancellation button right then and there. Good luck earning back my trust, I’m happy to pay if you didnt scream so loudly that even if I paid, you were going to treat me like shit anyways.
I pay for it and I like the perks. You are giving YouTube money, but also the creator of the video. And synchronizes the view with your account. And takes it into account for the dreaded “algorithm” (which I also find useful, plenty of cool channels discovered thanks to it).
What did you expect, exactly?
I like those perks too, but if I pay more to be able to download videos (which again, I could’ve used a free tool for) I want to be able to do whatever I want with it. Download means getting a file I can watch using my own video player and store for later even if Youtube dies tomorrow, If I go on holiday without internet, or if my internet goes down for a week. Anything.
If Google is going to be “Uhm aksually, you are technically downloading it, thats why we can advertise it like that”, then I’m already downloading literally every video I watch. And thats not the kind of bullshit you give to a paying customer. That is spitting in my face for paying you. Why does a non-Premium user get better service with free third party youtube downloaders?
It’s a matter of principle.
I see your point. For videos I want to hoard forever I also use yt-dlp, but for watching colbert on a plane, the app does just fine.
Yeah, I thought it was a nice compromise. It seemed sensible that if Premium is the ‘compliant’ response to not wanting ads, the ‘compliant’ response to using third party tools to download videos was to just be able to do things more easily and with more options through Premium as well. But apparently they wanted to advertise something anyone who’s wanted to download a youtube video would not describe as ‘downloading’, which is easily out competed by free (but at times shady) tools.
Ever go to a video website, click a download button under a video, and NOT have that video in your downloads folder? Literally that. That’s what i expect from a download button.
On android the download folder is a mess. I honestly prefer to have the videos in the app. I used newpipe before and it was a bit less convenient (although more flexible).
Never used it on a computer, tho, that would make sense there.
I get that. It would be totally fine if it just gave the option. But yes the issue is more egregious on PC.
I only use YouTube on PC. I’m kinda old school now though. My phone is pretty much just a phone now. Only app I use is lemmy other than maps and normal stuff. No social media on my phone.
Isn’t lemmy social media? Mora than YouTube IMHO.
I consider lemmy in different realm of social media. The people here are not at all like the people I meet irl where I live. If I ever met someone from my small town who even knew what lemmy was id shit myself.
Make sure that google can’t kill you without consequences after you bought one month of their subscription.
Ah yes, the Disney model
Wow thanks for the heads up on that! I kept getting tempted by that “Download” button thinking “No…it can’t be that easy.”
It’s kinda amazing how much content uses existing content…so they quietly can’t ruin downloading without tanking a lot of traffic.
Exactly, thinking that is what I was getting pulled me over the edge, I sometimes remember a music video I want to listen to on my phone during my commute and I don’t want to spend 30 minutes either getting on my PC to download it with a tool, or using a third party downloader which can at times be shady. So upgrading that to a single click in the app seemed like a great deal. Crushingly disappointed when I found out how it actually was. Turns out the real answer was NewPipe, which I don’t even have to pay for.