If things keep going like this I guess I’ll abandon Youtube completely. How brighter my life will be
That’s where things are heading. I wonder what video services will replace it.
It wont be, the scale of service and ease of revenue sharing will keep it as the king of video distribution untill Google kills it (like they do to all their products). FOSS projects and self hosting can not accomodate a viral hit (the slashdot effect), and also a self-hosted project like that would have to find a way to make money for the host to keep the lights on, and even Youtube fails at that one.
scale
Who does scale really benefit, though? I don’t see how it matters from the audiences’ point of view. Say I watch Youtube for fishing videos - all the competitor needs to do to attract and keep me is offer fishing videos. I don’t really care that I can’t watch music videos on it, or cookery, or make-up tutorials, etc.
The preoccupation we have with scale should be re-examined when it comes to video distribution. A combination of user-friendly banner advertising, modern codecs, and P2P hosting should go an awful long way. If I knew ad placements provided material funding for a video site/community I loved, I’d whitelist the URL.
Video needs fragmentation.
I think scale matters because almost no person is as much of an island as your example fishing video guy. I actually have noticed almost the opposite in most people I know, YouTube is the default place to get entertainment. Across all their interests.
From both sides the network effect might be strongest with YouTube, the creators can’t leave because YouTube has virtually all of the audience, and consumers don’t want to watch singular people on other platforms because on YouTube you can stumble over interesting videos and all the people you like to watch are already there.
The only way I see for other platforms to actually grow is forced interoperability, as in videos of other platforms appearing in the YouTube frontend. Which Google would never do so the government would need to force them.
Yep, my entertainment is 90% YouTube and the rest some show. On YouTube I find everything: from a dude that does reviews of air filter for cars to somebody explaining some obscure Japanese woodworking techniques to the omniscient Indian dude that explains complex programming concepts. If there was fragmentation I wouldn’t be even able to find stuff, like in the early days of the internet that you knew the website existes because somebody shared the URLs in some usenet or some forums, before search engines became a thing.
The benefit of scale is it attracts the creators. The people making the content we want to watch aren’t all doing it as a hobby, so the chance of attracting a large audience needs to be there. Otherwise they won’t come and the site is populated with really random, low-choice stuff.
All you need is a federated link aggregator like lemmy/mastodon with a UI made for videos.
You post a link to whichever video hosting service and attach a bunch of metadata (thumbnail, description, tags) and the comment section is built in already for each post. Nobody cares where a video is hosted, as long as they can follow creators and topics.
Twitter and TikTok
Could just make a system to automate the ads like muting(or white noise) them and automatically clicking skip, is not as good but still feels like a small win
Skipping ads violates YouTube’s terms of service!
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Video playback will be blocked until you allow us to shove ads down your throat.
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You can also opt for YouTube premium, where we’ll allow you to skip the last 5 seconds of any ad! (*)
(*) ads shorter than 5 minutes do not support skipping the final 5 seconds.
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Ad blockers assert your belief in the web browser as user agent, not server agent
- We know you’re using an ad blocker. How dare you.
- Alphabet’s cross-subsidy, and the political value of controlling the Overton window, allows Youtube to remain publicly accessible.
- You can get double-penetrated with Youtube Premium, first on the subscription fee then on the usage analytics.
Triple penetrated, many YouTube Premium features don’t even work properly.
“Violate Terms of Service” 😂 such agressive language for not wanting to watch endless ads for 2 min videos.
Get fucked.
Datura Network’s Invidious instance has a rotating IP, so it’s considerably harder for Google to block it.
Every Invidious or Piped instance could easily implement IPv6 rotation, the smart-ipv6-rotator is fully FOSS and easy to set up. Invidious and Piped both have official documentation on how to set it up:
https://docs.invidious.io/ipv6-rotator/
https://docs.piped.video/docs/self-hosting/#ipv6-rotator-using-docker
I can’t wait for the plugin that replaces all the ads with black and white mine videos
Sus mime
NOT THAT ONE!
D
That sucks. Do you have access to a VPN with servers in Albania or Moldova? They still don’t allow ads in youtube videos.
Happened to me last month, I set proton VPN to an Albanian server and everything worked until uBlock got updated to suppress the black screen of death again. Good luck!
I love that their warning is an admission of failure
Just go to yewtu.be
Google foiled again by the yews!! 😂
just wait a bit for ublock to update their scrips/feed then it’ll work again.
happens to me every now and again, at least on windows, but then I switched to linux and it just stopped happening. Hell I don’t even get ads on Twitch anymore when I would all the time regardless of what extentions I used on windows.
Interestingly, I am having this problem on Linux. EndeavourOS. It’s a rolling release distro, so probably a new “cutting-edge” browser feature broke the ad blockers.
which browser are you using on it?
Still works for me with a combination of Firefox, uBlock and a VPN. I assume sharing an IP with thousands of other people screws up their detection algorithm.
I switched over to FreeTube for all my Youtube needs.
Lets see if Google can break that one.
It’s an interesting situation. YouTube needs us more than we need YouTube.
Unfortunately, that really doesn’t seem to be true. YT is a monopoly, they do what they want. None of my friends use Firefox, despite me telling them that ad blockers still work on it. They could spend 3 minutes switching to Firefox and losing some of the niche features they have on Opera GX or whatever they hell they use, or they could just watch the occasional 5-second ad. They just don’t care enough. I imagine most users are more than likely like that.
Invidious works absolutely great as an alternative way to access all the content uploaded to YouTube. No ads at all and a way better search function.
…until they block APIs which is also in progress right?
Of course that’s true, but in the medium run the site is destroying itself through enshittification. We don’t need to care about that, as long as we can access the videos we want to access for the time being.
In other words, I completely agree with you, and it’s not a scary message.
oh no, anyway now you have more time to watch stuff that people put actual talent into like movies and tv shows and documentaries (this is a jab at youtube in general and not this specific video)
Try Brave browser. It work
Shame about the crypto bs and homophobia though.
Homophobia? I missed that. What happened?
Brendan Eich founded Brave after being booted from Mozilla over his opposition to same-sex marriage.
Browsers be homophobic now? Wild times
Not the browser itself, but the CEO of the company that develops it. (He used to work at Mozilla, but had to resign because of his homophobic actions) https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/mozilla-ceo-eich-resigns-after-controversy/
Yea I know, it was a joke
Yup. Brave works great on iPhone, too. PiP, no ads, even downloads work fine. And thanks to Airdrop I can watch ad free on TV.
Until yesterday I had a cheap Premium subscription going on but YouTube cancelled it because they found out I don’t live in Asia. Like fuck, it’s not about the money. 5? Maybe 6 or 7? That would have been fine by me. But 20 fucking bucks a month for that? Yeah, nah. Either fix your prices or I will continue to look for workarounds.
Yattee with this guide is another good option for iOS, iPadOS and tvOS (you could also use it on macOS, but I prefer FreeTube or just using Piped or Invidious in the browser). It’s also fully open source: https://github.com/yattee/yattee