Dear YouTube, if anyone there ever reads this.
I tried not to block ads, I would let the preroll go and usually not skip it.
I started skipping ads when they started getting long. I recall some were several minutes long at times.
I started leaving videos part way through when there were mid-roll ads, and those got long enough that I’d often forget what I was even watching.
I started blocking the ads outright when I would be watching a relaxing video, and a very loud mid-roll ad would blow out my goddamn eardrums.
Fuck you YouTube. You abused your users, you chased off good content creators, and now you’re offering people no carrot and all stick. How about you offer to match the volume of the ads to the videos, limit the length of ads to something reasonable, and nicely tell viewers that you are making ads less annoying and that unblocking the ads helps pay the content creators.
I used to make animations for YouTube, which weren’t monetized because I hate ads, and one day they copyright struck me for some very provably public domain music, but the way they did it was to insert ads into my video without my consent so they could monetize them to send the money to the scammer who flagged me. So I just deleted my entire account, fuck them.
That didn’t stop you from making cartoons, did it?
No I just went to Vimeo lol
x2
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if they’re anything like cable ads, they actually make the ads louder than the regular programming on purpose to try to make sure you hear it if you tune out or just walk away. no relaxed, unfocused watching for you!
Lmao “you purposely made your stuff shit. Now, if you offered a basic service without all the shit, I might pay for that.”
Bruh, you don’t pay for something because it’s not shit, you pay for something because it’s good. By paying for a basic service simply because it’s not shit, you are incentivising them to enshittify their service and offer a premium “not shit” version, instead of actually improving their service.
It’s just like the people who buy the new iPhone because it actually has a headphone jack this time.
They get away with this because people don’t use the alternatives. Odysee and Rumble are actually good alternatives. No, they’re not as good as YouTube, but they’re good enough. We just need creators to also upload to those platforms. Since YouTube keeps banning and demobilising them, this problem might solve itself.
Rumble is 100% fascist Nazi bullshit, not an alternative
If your feed is “100% fascist Nazi bullshit” may I suggest you watch less Nazi bullshit, and stop subscribing to them?
Lmfao. I had literally never heard of Rumble. I opened up a private browser window and pulled it up for the first time ever…the “Featured” was fucking Newsmax TV. Now obviously this isn’t indicative of the whole site but damn that does not help your point when that’s the featured for a brand new potential user
I’m not claiming it doesn’t have Newsmax on it. I’m claiming the service is solid. If you subscribe to people you care about (and you can find creators you like) it’s a good platform alternative. I’m the first to argue we need more YouTube creators to cross-post.
Well, maybe they just don’t want to be associated with Nazis.
There are Nazis on YouTube, Reddit, and Lemmy. Why are you here? You are not automatically associated with Nazis just because they might use a platform. This is like saying veganism is evil because Hitler was a vegan.
Curious, how does monetization work on those platforms? The bigger “Content creators” typically will be making videos as a job, so to draw them you’d need a halfway decent way to monetize.
They have ads, but I think YouTube pays better. Which I suppose is why creators stick with YouTube for now.
If you’re using uBlock Origin. Go to “Filter Lists” and Purge All Caches. That may help.
I imagine they’ll eventually find a way to prevent us from blocking ads. Twitch TV for example has found some ways to make adblock useless.
It’s a shame, and it’s really just a side effect of google racing to the bottom of the adspace game. If ads weren’t as cheap as they are today, they wouldn’t be trying to maximize the amount of users who are forced to see advertisements.
I suspect ad blocking will always be an arms race. The server can only ask the client to play the ad, and then rely on the client to truthfully report whether it did so.
I’m sure they’ll try to implement some type of DRM BS into the web that allows them. It’s one of the good things about projects like Gemini. I used to think it was only good for the novelty of having a web alternative protocol.
No doubt Big Tech would lobby for Microsoft to use Windows to flag Gemini browsers as malicious and then run FUD campaigns against the Gemini protocol
I’m sure they’ll try to implement some type of DRM BS into the web
Funny you say that:
Google is already testing it I think.
Y’all remember when back in the day, Google’s motto was “don’t be evil.” And then at some point somebody told them how much money there was in being evil and then they just pivoted to being a functional parody of a giant evil megacorporation from a cyberpunk novel? Cuz I remember that.
But then you’ll get prompts for “What product did you just watch an ad for?”
“Drink verification can.”
They already do this on the YouTube TV app
It’s amazing how many times someone in this thread has joked about Google doing something absurd sounding only for it to already be true.
You have to be careful with that sort of thing - some percentage of people who do watch the ads will close the tab rather than read the prompt and answer it.
It’s only a matter of time before they start embedding them into the video like podcasts do and you won’t be able tell the difference between ad and video with software.
Timestamps can still be voluntarily marked for an auto-skip feature to jump throughthe ads.
Not if YouTube interjects the ad after uploading and the location is randomized.
That’s why there pushing Web Environment Integrity (essentially just DRM for the entire internet)
Someone will create an extension to mute the ad and overlay it with suitably timed bite sized cat videos.
Oh, that’s just brilliant! Instead of being interrupted by intrusive ads, I’m seeing videos of fluffy cats doing adorable and funny stuff all the time.
Will to be fair, Google is an ad company. We should have seen this coming.
You can block twitch ads. I literally never see them. Use https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions/blob/master/vaft/vaft.user.js with Tampermonkey.
Also, checkout S0undTV if you use android TV.
Worst case scenario I think I’d just resort to downloading the videos to watch. Live videos is the challenge, but luckily I don’t watch live streams.
To be fair, he was talking about live streams, as in watching people in real-time.
That can be a fairly different experience, especially since downloaders don’t grab the chat at the moment. Also for unarchived streams, they can only be downloaded if you are aware and able to download at the time that the stream is still active.
You can block ads on Twitch… I use S0undTV on my firesticks and never see ads.
They’ll start banning Google accounts, that’ll stop quite alot of people just because of how many users use gmail or drive.
I just did the zap element thing on that warning. So far so good, except you can’t scroll down.
I see this as an absolute win, since that means you don’t have to read YouTube comments.
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Can we pin this?
I occasionally see ads on Youtube. I’m not sure if this is related.
I haven’t watched live tv in almost 20 years because I refuse to sit through ads, and I definitely won’t sit through them on YouTube. If it was a banner or some thing on the page or the side of video that would be more acceptable, but sitting through ads to watch a YouTube video….there’s just no way.
You could subscribe
I basically don’t subscribe to any streaming services, but we got the family plan years ago and share it with a few friends and family that chip in a couple bucks each.
It’s so affordable and the content on YouTube is second to none.
I’m so happy to help content creators earn a living content I genuinely care about rather than studios led by c-suite committees.
Oh you sweet summer child
Lemmy users only want to use foss and not pay a single penny. How dare you suggest they pay a tiny amount to help pay for servers and the creators they’re watching!
Some of us are legitimately broke (or on a very limited income). I get that some folk believe it’s the capitalist way to force us to starve or succumb to the elements to demonstrate to others that humans have no value other than their productive worth to some plutocrat.
Heave ho, thieves and beggars, never shall we die!
Ya I know. I’m living pay cheque to pay cheque. If I can’t afford something, I watch ads. It’s simple.
Why do you expect everything free?
Actually I expect some day the benefits that allow me to survive will end and I’ll be another statistic.
But for now, the United States feels that I’m better off alive, though destitute, and unable to actually afford rent in California.
In the meantime, the millennials and zoomers I know don’t expect to own anything ever. They eat whatever cheap food they can afford and pay rent and utilities and have a handful of trappings, and people write articles about how they’re not into diamonds or owning real estate, or keeping a savings account. And one by one, they too are slipping through the cracks, usually when they slip down the stairs or get injured at work or catch a cold and don’t have the strength to go into their job when their boss calls them desperate for a filler.
So regardless of what I expect, our establishment companies don’t want to give anyone anything. They reward hard workers by working them harder.
I don’t watch ads because they’re antagonistic. I tend to avoid anything that features dark patterns because I’m susceptible to them, and they signal the product has been contaminated by its manufacturers with malicious intent.
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TIL watching an ad is being treated subhuman.
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Okay. Just because you are a begging chooser doesn’t mean everyone is.
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If I can’t afford something, I watch ads
I can’t afford to pay 20€ per month–that’s more than my whole monthly phone bill with something like 50 or 100 GB of data. Cost of living is high enough as it is.
I also lack the most valuable currency there is in one’s life, one that you simply can’t get more of. Time. So I block ads, which cost a lot of time, with extreme prejudice.
Ads are also bad for my mental health, they just irritate me, rack up stress and easily swing me into bad mood.
Lastly, I don’t give a fuck about costing money to some multi-billion corporation. I don’t care about them as much as they don’t care about me; the corpos see me just as a resource to exploit as much as possible then move on to another one when there’s nothing more to exploit, and I see the corpos exactly the same way. Call it mutual parasitism. Yes, I’m a parasite. And parasites are the most successful lifeforms on Earth.
Ads are bad for your mental health? 💀
If you’re instantly stressed and angry over an ad, you have issues. That’s pathetic.
It feels like a culture war between corporations and the OG user base. They reeled us in and monopolized the market with the idea of “free”. Now that competitors are few and far between, they want to change the game and reel in literal billions. I have absolutely no sympathy for their “lost profits”. They are making enough as-is, and I have no problems saying that out loud.
So brave. Here’s a cookie 🍪.
Lol you again being a cuck. Literally a perfect consumer. Give all your money away, and maybe I should give you a link to my PayPal since you’re such a philanthropist. Take your privilege and fuck off
My privilege? You’re expecting servers to pay for themselves without ads or subscriptions. Idiot.
Keep sucking off billionaires you fucking sodomite
How? Because I understand how the world works? How do you expect servers to get paid for? Genuine question. Ads or subscriptions are the only way.
Continue to be a begging chooser.
You’re gonna continue paying for shit that I will get for free, like it or not. People smarter than you and I have found solutions to this kind of greed for years and they’ll continue to do the same. So you can get on your high horse or you can shut your bitch ass up because we’re both getting the same content and I’m not paying shit. Again, shove your privilege up your ass because throwing money around doesn’t make you white-savior wannabe ass any more righteous than me
Holy crap
Piped is about to get another user
Why wouldn’t they block Piped?
For the past few months, they have been rather aggressive with IP bans for Piped instances, yeah.
Oof
Yeah I could care less about people saying they’d watch ads of they were less intrusive. I’m not, I don’t give a fuck about YouTube’s sustainability who happened to still have major growth while I ran an AdBlock this entire time.
Maybe I’d consider paying if YouTube was the actual product I was paying for. Instead I get privacy invasive spying and my data being harvested, while am paying to do so. The product I’d want to pay for would have zero privacy invasive stuff involved. Which that isn’t going to exist, so I’m never going to pay.
If YouTube premium was $4.99 a month it’d be worth a consideration. But then again adblocking is free and privacy respecting
Google kind of sucks.
What was their last big success? Google maps? Pretty much everything they do lately is some combination of shitty or prematurely killed.
Google more than just kind of sucks. Like you said they haven’t done shit in a long time outside of making the internet more hostile with shit like this and their planned chrome-based anti adblock (a LOT of browsers run on chromium which would bring the same shit, Mozilla4lyfe)
Also, the google graveyard is just pathetic at this point. They truly can’t do shit outside of anti-user bullshit
UP FIREYFOX!
Android? Google Photo? Google Pixel? Google Pay? Google Apps? Chrome? Chromebook? Google Drive? Chromecast? Android Auto?
They launched a ton of successful stuff since Maps came out in 2005
Google photo sucks
What do you prefer using?
Immich is on a par with Google Photos, imo. It’s self hosted though, so not for everyone.
Yeah I have an immich instance myself, and do plan on relying more on that as I max out my Google drive size.
The bigger issue I gave with that is remote backup still imposes a cost, and like you said you gotta know what you’re doing to safely expose that to the Internet.
That is true. I only use mine locally, so it’s not a problem. Although you can remote access via Tailscale for safety. It’s quicker and easier than trying to set up remote proxies etc, about which I know nothing. Tailscale took 5 mins.
Does it? It’s a fantastic service that works really well, whether it’s worth the price or privacy is a slightly different conversation
whether it’s worth the price
You don’t have to pay Google a penny. I bought a quite cheap (50-60$) used but working Pixel 1 XL specifically for unlimited lifetime full-quality Google Photos upload.
Android is developed by a consortium of developers called The Open Handset Alliance under an open source license. It is most certainly not a Google product, any more than Linux is a Canonical product. As in, they help develop it but it’s not their product.
Most of their innovation has been for developers it seems.
Edit for clarification: since Google maps
Ignoring everything after Google maps is ignorant as hell. I mean Google Photos is literally used by a massive percentage of iPhone users as well, because it’s so good.
You seem to be unfamiliar with hyperbole, or maybe just didn’t recognize it here.
Also they kind of enshittified Google photos by walking back the unlimited storage promise. Probably not the best project to point to for “Google doesn’t suck” arguments.
They didn’t walk it back. Pixel 1 still has unlimited storage.
You’re insufferable. Whatever fits your agenda.
You’re insufferable. Whatever fits your agenda.
irony
It’s not insufferable to call it insufferable behavior. That’s not irony.
Ya because saying Google walked back on a promise when they didn’t. Whatever lies to fit your agenda. Pixel 1 still gets unlimited backups.
https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-changes/
choke on it
edit: after being confronted with the evidence, this user started deleting comments, making the proof inaccessible.
unless you know where to look
You’re insufferable. Whatever fits your agenda.
if only ads arent annoying and loud, i have no problems unblocking them. but damn, they’re unbearable atleast in my region.
Getting so many NSFW dating/straight up p##n ads. I shit you not they have even had CP ads I have seen. Disgusting and completely illegal.
The amount of ads that I get on mobile YouTube about meeting Ukrainian women is alarming to say the least
I got russian ones. Jesus christ they are running a fucking massive trafficking ring at the least.
Do you have briefing history turned on? If so, hmmmm…
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Ads are served based on your browsing history. If you have never watched those, then you probably should check on you 8yo child or wife’s who’s using the same acc
Not necessarily true. They are mostly advertised as “music videos” or something like this. If YouTube would know it’s porn or even CP, they wouldn’t serve the ads and block the account.
There are other factors that also play a role like location or age.
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Usually most of my YouTube ads are for bullshit training programs (and I do mean bullshit, like pseudosciencey shit) or gambling.
Both are just at the edge of legality (I am pretty sure some cross it).
Except since last month, because now almost all are for that Scorsese movie. I mean, I don’t mind being advertised that, but I’ve seen these ads so much that all they managed to do is make me hate it despite barely knowing anything about it.
Also, unskippable ads keep being longer. Now it’s reached two 20-second ads interrupting even short-ish videos every 5 minutes or so.
So yeah, people, that’s what YouTube looks like without an ad blocker now. Gee, I wonder why so many block them.
YouTube is the cable tv of 2023
Does anyone else remember back in the days of VCR, the networks wanted to push a technology that disallows you from fast-forwarding through ad breaks on the stuff you recorded?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
How did manipulation to make you buy specific shit become so accepted?
Advertisement is brainwashing and should be against human rights.
Suck my balls Google
Even if I have to sit through 30 seconds of silence, is there a way to redirect the ad to a ghost browser so I don’t have to listen to something like grubhubs stupid video?
Not exactly what you have described but better https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
I hear the ungoogled chromium is immune to the youtube antiadblock bs while getting rid of google’s influence, leaving you to be able to keep your Firefox identity safe without compromising your privacy by going to a browser you know is maintained by a community instead of another corporation
For me personally, even when it’s to my detriment, I intentionally go out of my way to use Firefox because other than Safari, it’s the last major independent browser engine and I want to be at least one user of it, if it helps keep it relevant. That being said, I feel that Firefox might become more relevant and arguably already has because of crap like this.
Fair enough, I mentioned ungoogled chrome because websites are lenient to it, and I use it for those sites that are being a pain in my ass. Also, I use the ungoogle chromium to separate my Firefox fingerprint from those privacy invading sites. It’s a strange quirk of mine, but I’m hoping it pays off to prevent them from identifying my browsing habits.
Yeah that’s totally fair enough and I can totally see that.
Stop using YouTube, go for new pipe/piped/invidious instead. Same content without the fucking bullshit.
Example: http://yt.whateveritworks.org
Freetube is another valid option
Or ReVanced
Cannot get this to work for the life of me. Worked for a bit, then it stopped working again and no amount of repatching fixes it
I ran into the same problem. Uninstalling and trying again without touching any of the options for setup worked instead of going in and messing with the toggles. I hope it helps. I would suggest you look for a Lemmy uhh… What do we call them? Subreddit? I mean they are on the other site too and perhaps you can get assistance there if you’re still having issues
R🤮ddit has subr🤮ddits, while Lemmy has communities and instances.
There’s probably a guide on the db0 instance
Thanks I’ll give it a try
All I need YouTube, specifically, for is to access new posts on my subscription list and to give my content creators likes and views. But I have to be logged in for that, and so far, the blocks seem to be limited to logged in viewers. So right now I’m just not logging in, lol. And if YouTube won’t let me give my preferred content creators likes and views by trapping them behind a login/adwall, I can still use my subscription list with Freetube (which is awesome on PC) or one of the other front ends.
You can easily get all your YouTube data via something called Google Takeout; do that and you have a list of all your subscriptions, history, lists, etc and you won’t lose access to it just because you’re logged out, or no longer using the YT front end for your viewing needs.
Also, when I get a bit of time to make the switch, I am going to start using a different account for Youtube. One I don’t give a shit if they shut down. There is a free import/export tool in the Chrome web store called “Subscriptions Importer For YouTube” that lets you import 50 subscriptions at a time (more if you pay for premium), but honestly I’d do it manually just to insulate myself from having the entire account banned for ad evasion, which is a possibility depending on just how badly they want to force ads/free up drive space.
So try watching on a different browser without logging in, and see what happens. You should be able to get in just fine. And logging in on your main browser will still enable you to get your YouTube data, which you can then use however you like. It’s a pain in the ass, sure, but right now it might be either that or ads, until a more stable situation is reached.
Fuck youtube
