Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
Ya I’ll never stop using ad blockers, the internet is essentially unusable without them. Mine still work on youtube but if the day comes that they don’t I’ll just stop using it. We need some competition here, things have gotten increasingly anticonsumer and the companies have gotten too comfortable doing and charging whatever they want
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I prefer to call it the stormwater drain of the information superhighway
Hahahaha, dammit this should be top comment
I’ve used adblockers for like 15 years and I genuinely get disgusted when watching YouTube without it. There’s no way I’ll go back. I even do sponsorblock to remove in-video ads.
The unfortunate thing is that I’m willing to pay a reasonable price for a lot of content creators, just not via Google/YouTube.
A dollar per channel? I follow 104 content creators om YouTube through RSS. And many more if we count all the other platforms. I can’t afford that.
It’s a difficult situation for viewers, creators and providers. I don’t have an answer, but a stop-gap solution I’d be happy to see is like 480p max for adblockers, pay for HD+. That’s reasonable based on how much ad-dodgers impact YouTube from what I’ve gathered.
I cannot watch a video from start to finish anymore. Thanks youtube. Almost every video is filled with bs fluff to reach the 8 minute mark. It annoys me greatly. Maybe also because I am in the industry and I learned in school to not use meaningless shit in my videos.
I’ve not thought about them time markers in a long time. One that was kinda funny and bearable was Dave509’s twist.
"I need to reach a certain time limit on my videos, so for a few more minutes I’ll just sit here, nod and say “I agree” and “I understand”. Feel free to share whatever with me…
Sits in absolute silence for 30 seconds while staring at the camera
Yes, I agree."
But I have noticed I’ve gravitated to longer form videos, 30m+, for the last few years. I guess it has a lot to do with the fluff.
We shall from now on call such content creators “fluffers”.
i’ve gravitated to long form interviews, 8+ hours has nothing on me. i listen to them when i go to sleep or watch art videos.
The thing that gets me is how little creators actually get per individual ad view. Now, collectively, with tens of thousands and millions of views, they get a good bag. But my watchtimes of that minute worth of ads per video? Literally nothing. A fraction of a cent so small it doesn’t exist. I could watch a creator semi-regularly for like 2 years and my contribution to their income by watching ads would be in the single digits. I give them two bucks over Patreon or something just once and that’s worth as much as me giving up hours upon hours of my life watching ads. Now, I can’t afford to give literally everyone I watch more than once a dollar or two. But I give some money here and there to a couple I watch a lot. To make up for my using an adblocker.
Honestly, I’d probably get YouTube Premium if it wasn’t fucking Google behind it.
i also have always used adblockers, but once i had to put in effort circumventing YT ads earlier this year, i discovered sponsorblock and added it. kind of funny that had it not been for YT being an ass, i would have been fine with other kind of ads.
Now that’s a solution.
Detecting adblock: 480/576p
Watching with ads: 720p/1080p/1440p Watching with Premium: 4K and high bitrate 1080p (and maybe 1440p?)
I guess if you don’t use ad blockers you somehow get used to it. It’s like someone whose job is 100% outdoors vs. someone who works indoors and then has to do a day working outside. The person who is used to cold, wind, rain, scorching sun, etc. stops noticing, even though it takes a toll on them too.
Every once in a while I end up using a browser without ad blockers enabled and it’s incredible to me that some people live like that. It really is almost unusable. Things jump around as ads load in. Ads / videos pop over the content you’re trying to use. The useful part of a page might be 60% ads: ads along the sides and breaking up the text. And then there’s the bottom area of the page which is an endless scroll of “related content” ads.
That’s not a good analogy. It’s more like saying that whenever you go outdoors for a walk on the park or do grocery shopping, you have to give up 15 minutes of your time to “donate” blood to the rich.Edit: I just finished reading your whole comment. Sorry friend. We’re on the same page.
No analogy is perfect. Yours gets at the reason for the ads – they want something from you and you have no chance to bargain or say no. Mine is more about how people can become accustomed to something that’s really unpleasant and after a while not really notice it.
My point is that to me (someone who blocks ads), trying to use the web without an ad blocker is extremely painful, and I find websites almost unusable. But, to someone who has never used an ad blocker, they’re used to the crap, and have developed some ‘immunity’ to the distracting images and work-arounds for the broken thing.
Anyhow, we’re on the same page. I just felt like explaining a bit better what I was getting at.
I was quite content with tolerating banner ads. Then they became animated and it went downhill after that.
I’m fine with a variety of ads, but I really hate distracting animation. The current trend seems to be that every ad is animated, so every ad is blocked.
There never will be a YouTube competitor, it requires continuous investment from a multibillion dollar company.
Nebula isn’t too bad, I like a lot of those informative creators and they collaorated and made a startup video hosting site, its essentially everything i want youtube to be. If more creators decided to do this it’s be great.
For static ads there will eventually be visual adblockers which detect ads not from their source but because they look like ads. (The mandated paid advertisement notice helps).
There is the utility that journalists use to capture YouTube video. A version that captured video content and then filtered ads visually would be unblockable.
AI will be good for that. For once it will benefit the people.
Download newpipe and never use YouTube again.
Can’t be used on desktop
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Age restricted videos are a problem otherwise it’s great. I have it on an android TV box.
To anyone using Chrome and complaining about Google having too much control: shut the fuck up. You’re part of the problem.
Yeah and some of these people think they’re Brave and Edgy.
I see what you did there
Firefox for the win. Or Librewolf even better.
I love Librewolf, I just can’t work for hours using a browser that has dark mode disabled in order to preserve its privacy features.
Because the dark mode that’s built into Firefox and other browsers sends requests to websites that can identify you. If you want dark mode on Librewolf, do as the devs recommend and get Dark Reader, as that’s clientside and doesn’t identify you, and works with pretty much every website, including ones that don’t offer a dark version.
I use regular Firefox, and I have the default dark mode disabled and Dark Reader installed. I don’t need to ask permission from websites to use dark mode any more than I need to ask Google for permission to block their ads.
that’s great! Yeah I understand the privacy implications but had no idea about Dark Reader. That’s why I love this community for answers like this. I’ll look into it as I’d prefer to use Librewolf as my daily driver.
Like I said, it doesn’t look good on every website, but for the vast majority it’s a really nice experience, especially if you are often online after dark. It’s definitely earned the high ratings it’s got, and it’s 100% getting downloaded anytime I use a new computer.
Besides the enhanced privacy it gives you, there’s also the fact that it doesn’t require loading additional style sheets, so it saves you a very small amount of bandwidth and time.
sends requests to websites that can identify you
What requests? I though that only information that the browser gives to website regarding dark theme is that your
preferred-color-schemeis nowdark.That request can be used for fingerprinting, however.
Yes, that’s one of the data points they use to fingerprint you. They only need several to get a reliable idea of who you are as you move from site to site.
the Problem is that Librewolf also doesn’t tell Extensions when system dark mode is activated, meaning you have to manually toggle between dark- and light-mode
Well some sacrifices has to be done.
I use an add on called “Dark background, white text” or something like that. Less bloated than Dark Reader.
Has to be somewhat usable while privacy oriented.
Waterfox present!
Floorp is my fav!
Imo this extends to chromium too. Google owns the source code and can pull it whenever they want. Sure, chromium browsers might be able to putter along for a little bit, but my understanding is that the reason why we’re now at Chrome/Chromium vs Firefox vs Safari is because Google shits out so many new “”“standards”“” and “features” that you need a large team to keep up. It’s supposedly why browsers like Opera switched to using chromium instead of trying to maintain their own source code.
This is a feature, not a bug.
Or any chromium based browser for that matter.
Handing over Google the Internet standards on a platter.
FireFox is not only awesome but a true competitor rendering engine.
This is one reason why I don’t want the EU to force Apple to allow other rendering engines. Whether you think using Apple’s rendering engine on iOS is bad or good, it’s basically the only thing keeping Google from having complete control of the market.
Antitrust laws are not enforced nearly as much as they should be, especially in tech.
Stop using Google’s products and continue using adblockers. Don’t come back at me with excuses. Otherwise, don’t complain.
But
no, butts are over at pornhub
Google only has power as we the people give it to them but using their services. Same with Reddit’s power and such. Not the people here as we have unfortunately unplugged, but admittedly, all the decentralized services have significantly less content and variety of content. We need more people to join us, but they seem happy to support the centralized services they hate.
The problem with youtube in particular is there is no way to build an alternative that’s as good as YouTube (ignoring all the bad bits they’ve added). PeerTube is nice to have around, but it’s not as fast and doesn’t have all the content as youtube. There’s also Nebula, which is alright. It’s not free and doesn’t have as much content, but it’s usually a higher quality.
You’re obviously right. But it’s funny to me; I find it easy to imagine a world where staying independent and hosting your own stuff was seen as cooler. Instead of YouTube and Google Buzz, we ran RSS clients akin to Outlook and Thunderbird. They torrent and seed media we’re subscribed to while we’re at work or class. It’s saved on a home server. We walk in and simply toss it up on our desktop or TV. (Or maybe a mobile client streams from your home server over the Internet or over your home Wi-Fi if you’re at home )
And if you visited the website instead of YouTube’s recommendations, The creator just adds a few RSS feeds on the backend to pull thumbnails from, of other creators’ sites they enjoy.
Crazy how easy it is to daydream though, when I’m not the one putting the work in.
I find it easy to imagine a world where staying independent and hosting your own stuff was seen as cooler.
Sadly, money trumps “cool” most of the time.
RSS would have been it. Ask around how many people even get the concept of it.
We have had it all but people chose the dumb version of it.
There was a world before YouTube. It grew from humble beginnings. Granted it didn’t have an incumbent to fight off, but it had all the server issues, bandwidth issues and similar.
The only thing that stops someone else doing it is the user base.
The problem with youtube in particular is there is no way to build an alternative that’s as good as YouTube
as good
I mean, assuming that’s exactly what people wan, “exactly youtube but cheaper”, then yeah it’s an impossible and thankless task to even try something of that scale. Instead it’s better to think of building youtube alternatives that are focused on one or two parameters that allow organizational optimizations. For example, much of the issue that people complain about is the storage, but a YT-alt that dedicates to eg.: archivism of old TV shows, that scan at best at 480p or 360p, wouldn’t need to spend that much in storage compared to a service that is trying to serve 4K UHD 120fps Subwoofer Surround; that combined with the topical focus suddenly makes it much more scaleable and approachable.
I’m always a bit shocked the worlds governments don’t start offering free email/hosting to their citizens. It’d give them a cheap way to surveil that was “opt-in” (but would probably catch a lot of dumb people) and everyone would have a “verified” email for official stuff too. It seems like a good investment to me.
What about Vimeo?
I’m also curious why people pretend it doesn’t exist when they say “there is no other video uploading platform like youtube”
Vimeo is expensive, I don’t know how it works today, but when I tried it, I had to pay to upload some videos.
ok, I think I had missed this crucial difference in the business model lol
Interesting! I had no idea.
What happened to dailymotion and vimeo?
More the commercial/pro side of things. They cost money.
I’m okay with the less amount of content. Frankly, I mindlessly spent hours scrolling through “content” on reddit, and feeling no satisfaction. At least the content here is more relevant.
More people would mean more memes and rage bait. No thanks.
You just need to curate your feed like anywhere else. Who can really stand the main page of reddit or yt or anything really?
Reddit made it so hard to use on mobile that I only check it on the weekend on my pc.
Yup, I used to do that. But then the admins took over some of my curated subs, e.g. programming subs, when the mods refuse to open them up. So now I don’t go to those anymore.
I mean subreddits like Oculus and Virtual Reality and I am sure many other niches are missing on Lemmy or very quiet.
Oh yeah, that’s a good point.
The problem is the network effect. It’s hard to switch from YT if all your favorite channels and creators are there, but it’s also hard for them to switch if all the users are using YT. And because it’s many different people we cannot coordinate a simultaneous transition either.
That’s why i wen FF+ Duckduck + ublock and instead of reddit > Lemmy But i have to admit that YouTube is harder to replace then reddit and I’ve tried many alternatives.
I just got an email from YouTube, my premium price is going up by almost double…
Same. It is no longer worth it, I’ll be sad to lose my music streaming, but there are other pathways that some may consider unethical.
Yarr matey
That’s getting harder though, at least in my experience. Circa 2010, it was music and shit everywhere. Now it’s slimmer pickin’s, it seems.
I’ve tried torrents but those seemed to all be dead ends, i found another website that uses some backdoor from a streaming service and the file info is actually correct but you get songs 1 by 1. Which takes a lot of time.
If you just want YTM for free there’s beatbump on web and Innertune or ViMusic on android
If only there was a place to buy DRM free music in the file type I want for use in whatever device I want also for movies.
If you subscribe to premium using an Indian IP address, for example, you’ll get it for like a buck a month
I did that for a month from Argentina, then Visa stopped working. I started a personal invidious instance and haven’t looked back.
a bit off topic but when you say personal instance where is it hosted? And if it is strictly personal, doesn’t google create the same profile for you which will be assigned in your IP if it is hosted in your house, or in your VPS’s IP if hosted elsewhere?
I have a VPN gateway VM that randomly chooses a VPN region.
interesting. thanks for sharing!
YouTube Music is no longer optional. It’s now bundled into the basic features of Premium and Google uses that to justify the insane price hike. Their argument is that it’s cheaper than before for the dozen-or-so people that had subscribed to both YT Music and Premium. All others now “save” on the YT Music subscription, the fact that nobody saves anything by paying for a service they don’t need is completely lost on them. Just corporate greed and pushing the monopoly a bit further, nothing to see here.
Paywalled article 🙃
This shows me a never ending stream of CAPTCHAs.
Your milage may vary - but in general just force a full refresh and it should clear up
The YouTube adblocker overlay and such doesn’t work if you’re in incognito mode. You’re welcome.
i jumped the google ecosystem a few years back seeing this coming…
i hear a lot of ‘but i use googles x and googles y’. yep, and you will continue to have those chains on your wrists as long as you choose to have them there. everyone has the choice to start migrating to other email providers, other phone platforms, etc.
im not saying its easy, or something that can happen quickly… but lamenting the fact youre in up to your neck is no reason to give up. baby steps. make bob wiley proud.
I’ve ditched everything but android. Been thinking about swapping roms but not all the apps I need for work will works with MicroG. And going apple is, at best, a lateral move.
GrapheneOS has sandboxed Play Services which basically means they run just like a normal app on your device and you get to choose the permissions they get. My bank’s app works with it too (no GooglePay tho). It does require you to get a Google Pixel phone though, which might defeat the whole purpose for some.
Good to know, thank you.
I’m with you, on course to de-big-tech my life. I’m not even a power user of any of them, but got caught up in the convenience.
The only active google services I do use are
- Android and Google Pixel (because fuck Apple lol)
- Google Play Store (I sometimes use F-Droid)
- YT
I replaced my email with my very own domain
I buy my own storage to host and backup at home.
What I have from cloud storage is by chance of having Office365 (mainly because Outlook is so much superior for email management. I tried EM-client. It was worse).
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I simply open up YouTube+Ublock in Firefox on my smartphone.
I actually like the personalized video recommendations from being signed in sometimes, but I still don’t like my data being sold. I use both.
Same. Firefox +uBlock on mobile. The YouTube app actually kinda sucks. Never used it
My solution is (and for quite a long time was) to use NewPipe on mobile and Invidious on pc.
Adnauseam! Adguard for desktop loaded with anti AdBlock killer! Lifetime license available!
Sorry I have tourette’s syndrome
Adnauseam is great, but it also leaves some ads on pages.
Strict blocking
This works! Firefox + ublock did not.
Firefox + ublock definitely works.
You are right. I updated ublock and now it works.
Not always. Adnauseam makes the anti-adblock bullshit think you’re clicking on ads.
There’s also adguard for desktop which filters ads through a mechanism that’s outside of your browser, which makes it much more difficult for things running inside web pages to fuck with it.
Yeah I just switched back to ff from chrome and YouTube has never sent me their little warning on ff
I can also recommend Libretube or Clipious for Android
Literally the reason I started regularly using Firefox
I’ll be switching back to it.
they can cry harder
