Sorry Google.
I’m gonna use YouTube ad free or I won’t use it.
And I ain’t gonna pay for it.
yeah, them needing the money (??) or whatever is one thing, but this arrogant fucking attitude lately is so repugnant. set up a patreon, don’t fucking fight against your users like this. it’s not exactly real TV or oxygen, it’s fucking youtube. it’s 90% garbage anyway
That’s fine, but that’s why Google is doing this. They need people who won’t watch ads to stop using it to lower their costs. I mean what business survives with zero income? The question google is asking isn’t whether or not some people will stop using it, the question their asking is will enough of them stop for them to generate income.
Hahahahaha, do they know that using it without the ad blocker is worse than whatever else they’re going to do? I’d rather stare at 30 seconds of black screen than a 5 second ad, lmao.
Having a blank screen will make me less angry than seeing a long advertisement. Not to mention, I come from the days of dial up. I can wait a bit until I view the video.
I remember waiting 30 minutes for 75% of a badly compressed 1 minute pornvideo to load, I can outlast whatever they throw at us.
Good thing you only needed 75% of that 1 minute porn video, or you’d have had to wait even longer.
It’s the expectation and imagination in the meantime that does it.
At some point just seeing the progress bar increase a notch might be enough.
The progress bar is almost finshed!!..and I’m done.
Please, I’m not a marathon runner.
I only needed 3 seconds.
Well actually they can do much more, like for example decreasing quality to lets say 144p
I’m not saying that adblockers will not be able to bypass it, maybe there will be a solution as well, but wanted to say that the blank screen waiting is not their only weapon
*a 5 second ad every 5 minutes
If it was really that little I wouldn’t be so up in arms about it. I put a video on yesterday and had 30 seconds of ads before it started and then another 30 seconds of ads after a minute and a half. Fuck that nonsense.
Usually the only thing I find YouTube uses for is those short 30 seconds of a video I have searched for. Like how to DIY something or quick, visualdemonstrations of concepts.
As bad as YouTube has gotten, it’s already super common for me to skip over the first four or five search results, which are usually YouTube links, and just go to like the 4th or 5th one down, and fine. It’s just as useful. If I was blind or couldn’t read, that would suck, but I can live without YouTube like, I mostly already do, and used to, too.
They couldn’t possibly make the experience worse than it already is without an ad blocker.
No adblock = No youtube
To paraphrase a great philosopher: executives… uh… find a way (to make things shittier)
No YouTube. It is YOU that is stuck with ME and I will make YOUR experience worse.
Can’t possibly make it worse than shoving ads from hate groups. On my computer, I use Firefox with adblock, but on my phone and tablet I had been using the YouTube app until a few days ago. Google decided to show me a PragerU ad on mobile, so I decided to switch to Firefox mobile to watch YouTube. And the app either moved or removed the ‘don’t show this ad’ selection.
If you’re using android you might want to check out YouTube ReVanced.
If you log in, know that Google knows you’re using MicroG amd has the capacity to ban your account.
Not heard of any bans yet, but I’m probably close to ditching revanced soon because this is my primary email address and Google is getting more and more aggressive
Look in to switching to a privacy respecting email. It’s not for everyone, but i am very happy with the Proton suite of apps.
I might do that, I made this email when I was 13 and didn’t know much about the digital world
I’d advise against Proton - they’re not good at actually respecting privacy and require a premium subscription to access your email over SMTP (making it much harder to switch away and locking you into their client).
Email isn’t private. They don’t scan your email for ads which is about all you can ask for
??
They strip all the tracking from the emails. I’ll unsubscribe from ads, or turn off compromised addresses, but them not scanning my emails is a plus.
How is it not private?
Email as a protocol is not private. It wasn’t designed to be.
Please expound on your thoughts. I happen to be a paid subscriber, cause I want to support them and I appriciate the extra features I get. So the issues with the free accounts arent a problem for me, but my friends who use the free account don’t seem to have any complaints.
I think what you have in mind is YouTube Vanced. ReVanced doesn’t use the MicroG Suite.
Even Walmart lets shoplifters return to their stores after like three years. Think about that, if you owned a shop, what would mean to welcome back as a customer someone who previously stole from you?
Not that blocking ads is stealing, that they need us a lot more than we need them. Can build the nicest, fanciest store around with all the best things for sale, doesn’t mean shit if nobody shops there.
If the experience gets any worse, I just won’t watch YouTube videos. I already watch way less than I used to when it was a cool video hosting platform, before it started enshitifying.
I’ve been using microg for ages both for voiced before it got shutdown by Google and for revanced
Nothing has happened to my account
Yes, I said that, but there’s still the possibility. It’s explicitly against their terms of service and when you log into an account specifically to break their terms of service, they reserve the right to tell you to go fuck yourself
Just because they haven’t yet doesn’t mean they won’t. We’re entering a new era of enshitification
Check out Sponsor Block extension, if you aren’t using it. It’s really cool
Yeah recently starting using this and it’s excellent, no more manually trying to skip over yet another nordvpn sponsor monologue
Same I no longer use the YouTube app in my telphone
Newpipe is pretty good, you can get it through the f droid store
Fennec is Firefox for Android and it even supports uBlock, Dark Reader and others.
Oh no, how unfortunate. Sadly, we don’t have alternative YouTube clients like Invidious or Piped that can be used with LibRedirect to automatically redirect all YouTube links to these alternative front-ends. And unfortunately, you can’t use LibreTube or NewPipe on Android, as well as Yattee with this guide on iOS, iPadOS and tvOS or SmartTubeNext on Android TV.
damn this is awesome! this comment here is exactly why i hang out here instead of reddit these days. never see stuff like this there anymore, useful stuff. thank you so much!
Lemmy actually encourages me to post comments that are hopefully helpful for others. On Reddit I was just lurking, but on Lemmy, I actually participate in discussions.
I’m glad I chose to live here now
same
Yes, that’s such a shame. Thank you for making me aware that we have no such alternatives.
I’ve seen youtube content on piped I know full well to be 4k video be blurred so badly as to be nearly unwatchable- they honestly decided to spend money to make their content worse as a lever to get you to watch ads or to submit to tracking etc
I have no idea what you’re talking about. I use Piped daily and I never experienced such issues.
…and your viewing experience will be far, far worse if you don’t use one.
Right? Having an ad blocker means my video gets slowed down by a few seconds, not having an ad blocker means I get to watch a 30 second ad from a local politician telling me about how we need to get rid of fornicators. I think I know my choice lmao
local politician telling me about how we need to get rid of fornicators.
So now I have another reason to use an ad-blocker. This world needs fornicators, dammit.
This world needs fornicators
in saunters the Alphabet subsidiary gang
by a few seconds
For now.
I remember what the internet was like before we had ad-blockers. I concur with others who have said turning the blocker off would make it even worse. There no fucking way I’m turning off ad-blocking under any conditions. I’d rather just stop using the internet altogether. I can not verbalize how much I hate ads. I stopped watching TV because of ads a long time ago. Never again.
Oh man, I wish I could get a pair of AR-glasses with ad-blocking in real life. No more ads polluting the streets. That would be great.
Pretty sure any AR-glasses from the megacorps will add ads to real life soon enough. Any AR-glasses not from megacorp will be bought out to shut them down. Not like there is functional antitrust.
Yup, that’s bound to happen, which is why I’ve written off actual AR-glasses long ago. Maybe if there’s an OpenSource solution, but seeing how slow Linux phones are coming along, I’m not holding my breath. But I can still dream!
If there’s anything I’ve learned, some open source genius hacker will figure it out, publish an early demo with 99% of features, and then disappear off the face of the planet before they ever make it available.
That is because the technical challenge of making a prototype that is 90% of the way there is not the same as that last 10% and building a business around it. Those are very different skills. So you start needing a team, a business and money. It absolutely can be done, and there companies like Pine64 that do it. I’ve got a small one. Running a business is very hard. Running an open source business is harder as you are going against the grain of that world.
OpenSource phones are crippled by the phone duopoly and apps for everything. Apps for some things you really need. My business bank now requires an app for “security” and that app won’t run on rooted or alternative ROMs Androids. Least I’ve not managed to make it do so. I’m going to have to get an insecure, Google owned, muggle phone just to use our business banking at all.
We need the market regulating before OpenSource phones, or any alternatives, can thrive.
The website normally works fine. No app required.
This is true of my personal bank. But the business bank we use need a security device, but they have dropped that and there is now an app for Android or iOS. That’s that does what is basically one time codes.
To be fair, when we have GrapheneOS there’s no need for Linux phones, as Graphene has the FOSS-ness, privacy, security, etc. So very few actually care more than “yeah linux phone would be cool”
Hey, how else are they going to make money from that $1500 pair of AR glasses you bought?
I cannot stand ads anymore to the point that when I happen to watch TV stream and ad break come up, I put the TV on mute and go browse Lemmy on my phone.
I’m in the same boat and often wonder what right these billboard companies have to put their messages in my face
Billboards are illegal in several states. It’s one of the ways they’ve kept Hawaii beautiful.
I remember the first time I saw ads on YouTube, I had just set up a new computer and wanted to test everything. So I opened Firefox and loaded a YouTube video. I got a preroll and wondered “wait ad’s, on YouTube?” Then I realized I had been using AdBlock for so long I never witnessed the transition from ad free YouTube to YouTube with ads.
These days I use unlock origin, Sponsorblock and revanced. For now it still works but maybe I’ll leave YouTube soon :/
Yesterday a site for image translation I was using didn’t load the image. so I thought maybe it’s the adblock and man that was a horrible experience. How can people Stand all those flashing bullshit.
They had a long time to make the ad watching process less painful, or adding actual value to a premium subscription, but they are doing everything to make YouTube worse.
i could maybe start to swallow the actual tech getting worse (just like everything else is lately) but this arrogant, odious attitude they’re putting on lately is so obscene and anti-consumer. it’s like it’s their god-given right to serve us ads and our solemn duty to consume them.
YouTube premium should have built-in sponsorblock. That’s one of the ways that free clients are literally better than the paid service, mostly on mobile. Let me change the theme to different colours, let me show/hide the “shorts” and “create” tabs. In general, just give me the features that YouTube revanced has on the official app.
If the price was like $5 per month and it gave you no ads and 4K steaming it might be worth it. But at the current pricing it just isn’t good value since YouTube doesn’t produce content like other streaming services (and creators still have to rely on sponsorships for their livelihood regardless of whether the viewer is a premium subscriber) that justifies paying the higher prices for the service.
Instead their attack on their customers rather than just making the service valuable enough to pay for makes me never want to give them a cent.
I know right? Executives just never seem to get that you actually need to provide value to have people want to sign up for it. Saying that though, there’s a lot of dumb consumers out there that just pay for it if needed.
I had the paid service until they jacked up the price for no reason at all. The second they announced the price hike for no reason I cancled my sub and have just been using a third party app to watch it on my phone or ublock on firefox
They should allow premium users to use third party YouTube clients using an API, like Reddit before Spez’s war on third party apps.
Wonder how much money they’ve wasted trying to block the blockers
It’s even more weird all that invested time into people who are going to find ways to block them either way, instead of focusing on their userbase that doesn’t use them. Seems like they are rummaging through the couch cushions for pennies at this rate.
Since this whole debacle started, they’ve just made ad blockers more prevalent to people who didn’t know about them. Ad blocker use is actually up now compared to when they started making this a big deal. So, in a way, they actually screwed themselves.
Ah, the good ol’ Streisand effect.
Considering they can use this knowledge to apply it to the entire Google ecosystem, I’d say they aren’t wasting money in learning about new ways to fuck us over.
These shenanigans have me rapidly transitioning from “I don’t want to see your annoying ads” to “I don’t want you to make any money at all”.
I’m already there, and I’m applying this thinking to every site - including the one hosting this article.
Same, I view the whole internet through uBlock and a pihole, so my value as an “impression” is virtually zero.
I’m not against for-profit websites making some money (and I run my own website, which generates a whopping $0), but Google has jumped the shark with their sketchy malware bullshit, and I’m starting to root for that organization to die.
I mean what’s the difference between me not watching ads and me watching ads but still not buying their shit because I don’t need it? I go out of my way to not buy anything I get ads for, so all it does is waste my time. I’m saving the advertisers money because they don’t need to pay to show me ineffective ads.
Switched to duckduckgo purely because I wanted to stop giving Google money via searching
Can’t be worse than the experience with the ads…
Yeah. The current amount of unskippable ads means there cannot possibly be a worse experience. Any kind of ad blocking, even if it means learning to write and compile your own code is better than base YouTube.
I watch YouTube content on my tv, and get ads, next to using it on my PC where I block them. Generally I did not mind the ads, since it is part of the business model.
But frankly the experience on the tv is degrading quickly in the last 12 months:
From 2 skippable ads at the start (and end) of a video, I now get 2 longer unskippable ones, but regularly it doubles to 4 and a 5th that is either short or skippable. And if it’s still 2 at the start then usually 1-2 mins in I see 2 more long ads … If I have the gall to rewind or forward the video I get 2 more long ads, usually followed by 2 short ones a minute or two later… Some of that is probably ad-space tagged by the creators, but clearly YT overrules that and places its own ad markers.
Slowly I feel it’s leaning towards punishment to watch content on YT, at least on the tv.
On top of that there is the annoying interface that blocks a full 30% of the screen, often blocking the one thing I wanted to look at. Then the ads that always break subtitles of the video, or somehow enforcing subtitles in a language that I can not read.
And don’t get me started on the topic-bubble the algorithm captures the user in.
YT should have left it as it was a few years ago, but it is forcing more and more ads, making things unfriendlier for both the viewer and creator, all to squeeze the viewers for more and more revenue.
It’s a shame it’s all so detrimental to the wealth of knowledge on there.
So if a good and proper alternative is able to stand on its feet I will gladly follow the creators and watch the new stuff on there.
Use smarttube instead of the official YouTube app, the ads are gone and it’s better in every other way as well. Faster, more features, quality settings stay where you left them, sponsorblock support and much more.
Is that better than newpipe?
I don’t think Newpipe is available on GoogleTV, but I could be wrong. You can log into your Google account with SmartTube so it functions more like the YouTube app with adding to your watch history, keeping your subs synced, and getting recommendations in the GoogleTV UI on top of having sponsorblock. It’s more like Vanced than Newpipe.
Just buy or build a pc and plug it into the TV screen
It’s more customisable than a smart tv and you can even set up something like kodi
The ads make it pretty bad. They’d have to work really hard to make it worse without ads.
Wait until they make it so you either have to wait 20 minutes to watch a video or turn off your adblocker.
Because they can do that if they want and they will if they feel it’s worth it to them.
I kinda want to see what the folks behind ublock origin would do if they did do that…
It could be that they don’t have any recourse. At some point, I think Google will decide that the data they can harvest from people blocking ads will not be worth the cost of the server time and bandwidth. uBlock Origin has been doing well so far, but Google has far more money and resources to throw into this than they do. They’re going up against a Goliath and in these cases, Goliath often wins.
I’m not saying I want any of this to happen. I just know Google.
I mean… it definitely will if you turn off your ad blocker.
Yeah, I’ve been on YouTube with ads and if it weren’t for the Skip Ads button I could not tolerate it. Try to watch a 10 minute video and it starts with a 3 minute ad. How is that remotely reasonable?
