now I need to move away from Telegram & YouTube at the same time… oef
I’m really getting the push I need to finally get rid of the last couple Google services I still use
It’s only a matter if time til they enshittificate gmail as well.
I’m getting tired, man. these people are truly just the shittiest individuals ever.
MBAs on their way to destroy their company’s relationship with their customers and cause a socioeconomic disaster (their numbers will grow by 0.01% 💪💪)
If you don’t pay for something, you are not a customer, you are the product. If you pay for Youtube, you don’t see the ads, but you are also still their product. Lose /Lose
Okay, but if you sell cows, and all your cows escape or die, your business is still ruined
The network effect is too strong. The minority that are whining here isn’t going to make a dent. Next time you’re out, look at how many people are using ads ridden apps instead of paying $0.99 or whatever to remove them. The users have already decided their time and privacy is worthless and would rather getting the service for “free”.
Reddit is still going strong I feel.
Hey don’t blame us, blame the nepos who got on the board without even needing to study for it!
My MBA track actively rewards me for thinking like a socialist XD.
As in my profits, our losses?
Line go up 💹
Can I ask why people act like YouTube is so evil for trying to make money off their site? They provide a service I value and it costs money to do so. No disrespect to anyone who doesn’t want to watch ads or pay (like I do, I use it a LOT) but I don’t understand why some people seem to be personally insulted by the idea that they can’t get it for free forever with no strings attached.
Honest question, please don’t flame me 🙏
I pay for Nebula - $30 a year which is about £22.50. That won’t even cover two months of YouTube Premium (£12 pm), and there’s not even the discounted yearly option in the UK.
And “if you’re not paying you’re the product” is wrong - YouTube/Google would still be datamining my viewing habits to sell to advertisers.
Partially for the same reason I don’t pay for Xbox live and whatever Nintendo and Sony have; I refuse to pay a service charge for an online platform when I already purchased the hardware (in this case, computer/phone) and pay an ISP for internet access.
If they want my data and to use my bandwidth they can damn well pay for it.
Do you realize you’re using their bandwidth, too? They have to pay for upload/download just like you do.
YouTube is/ its ads are are extremely privacy intrusive and there isn’t really an alternative to the platform. Next to the comparatively obvious network effects all social media platforms rely on is also because YouTube on its own is not that profitable and probably only really makes Google money via the data collected on the platform. This means only platforms that have a gigantic ad network themselves and are able to monetize said data as well as Google can can actually compete with YouTube— and as you see, there are basically none.
Also, the whole blocking ad blockers thing is trying to fundamentally reverse the power equilibrium between the website (the server) and the person visiting it (the client); because for the last 40 years or so, the server had the purpose of delivering content to the client which could decide what to do with and how to present said content. This sharing of responsibility between the two comes in many forms, starting with simple things such as screen readers or a reading mode for the browser.
I pay other sites for creators. So for me $$ isn’t the issue. Not when premium is less than 20.
The biggest issue with YouTube for me is that their ads are very intrusive/track quite a bit about what you do/can actually be malware. On addition, there’s a good chance that money is mostly going to YouTube and not the people creating their works. There’s a reason patreon is a thing for most successful creators. I also hate ads. I don’t hate people getting paid, I hate YouTube for shoving ads down my throat and then turning around not paying people their dues. And in my opinion the worst way possible.
Noooo, this is Lemmy. If it isn’t free to use and 20% as good as the paid version, its evil.
So, instead of iterating the ancient concept of frontal assault ads towards something less intrusive and more engaging, they go the black mirror path of force feeding ads?
Sounds about right regarding the decision makers have as much creativity as a Vogon.
Man I really hate those suit MBA circlejerk idiots in positions of power.
The sad thing is they inject ads to your feed even if you have premium. I keep seeing product videos in my feed named “Meet the x product”. Youtube and google is just shameless and I’m pretty sure they’re breaking a bunch of laws.
So YouTube Premium is as worthless as I thought. Google was never great in drawing recognizable lines between their free offering and paid… and it seems their solution is to make everything as shitty as possible and barely fix the stuff they fucked up.
Let’s wait until Google Maps gets ads … routing already seems fishy to me.
Thanks for your brief description… only shows me that my next Phone won’t be a Pixel.
Definitely avoid Pixels. They look better than most Android devices in terms of software imo, although it’s because they’re really locking down the firmware similar to iOS, which breaks the purpose of using Android anyway. Also the processor on the Pixels are even behind 5-6 year old phones.
Btw…Google Maps has ads already, the square icons are all ads paid by the place owners. Routing is fishy yes, because they’re actively routing people through different routes in order to collect data for their algorithms.
The biggest reason I still use Google products is there is no alternative and they fully know this.
I got a Pixel 6 because I wanted to try something new … it will probably be my last Pixel.
If there is a phone out there with Lineage/Cyanogen (or whatever it’s called now) out of the box with decent HW, I would prefer that.
The last 2 years changed Google. They feel hollow like a blimp. Looking big but no real oomph any more.
The best adblocker is to stop using youtube 🤣
I wanted to jump into using Peertube, but unfortunately Youtube grew enormous because it was the only thing at the time. Pulling people from it to other platforms with less viewers and usually no compensation is tough. (although YT compensation as of late is a joke as well)
Won’t happen. People are too addicted at watching"creators" talking shits.
The miracle of creation
So if YouTube is now serving up the ads directly to me, does that mean they’re finally liable for the content of those ads? Can we have them investigated for all the malware, phishing, illegal hate speech, etc.?
No, because that would be communism, and that killed 100 million people. You also think genocide is bad, aren’t you? And besides of that, if there were less regulations, you could make your own video platform to challenge Google’s monopoly!
i think people may have missed that you’re not serious
It’s not possible for everyone to just tell if it’s supposed to be sarcasm. ADHD makes it hard. A bad day makes it hard. A tiring day makes it hard.
The downside of the misunderstanding isn’t just downvotes. It’s possibly a proliferation of misinformation and an impression that there are people who DO think that way.
Being not serious while saying something grim is not a globally understood culture either. It’s more common and acceptable in the Western world as a joke.
So… call it accessibility, but it’s just more approachable for everyone to just put an “/s”.
Well… Communism is directly responsible for multiple famines that killed into the hundreds of millions. Then there are the inevitable purges that have taken millions of lives and hosts of terrors as well.
You’re free to dispute history if you need to, and claim that theoretically communism is nice, but in practice, history tells us that living under communism reaaaalllyy sucks.
TBF, stalinism wasn’t really communism, it was more authoritarianism than anything, but.
There are people here not from western europe or north america, we felt all of that and beyond with capitalism too. Do you think Asia and Africa, who received aid and support from the soviet union to free themselves from capitalist Europeans will fall for that ? Where did you arrive at ''multiple famines that killed into the hundreds of millions" ? Even the soviet famines of 1930s and chinese great famine ‘only’ killed at maximum intervals of estimation 9 and 50 millions each, and this article over-viewing all atrocities maxes at 150 million, with a low 10-20 million estimation, not hundreds of millions in famines alone.
Are you paraphrasing that ‘Black Book of Communism’ shtick ? It is a propaganda tool not valid in actual academic research, even by liberals that are not fraudsters, because the author twists every single communist countries-adjacent deaths as ‘‘mass killing caused by communism’’, including brilliant takes like total number of abortions (ex: France, that practices 250.000 abortions per year must be enraged with a capitalist regime that killed 5 million people only in the 21st century !) and all WW2 eastern front deaths (so both the nazi germans and allies that invaded USSR and USSR soldiers and civilians killed count as ‘killed by communism’).
Last but not least, the USSR had much higher GDP per capita and living standards than the average third world capitalist country (which is where the demographic majority of capitalist people live), so even if the USSR could not equate Switzerland, they achieved a good quality of life better than the world average.
Last but not least, the USSR had much higher GDP per capita and living standards than the average third world capitalist country (which is where the demographic majority of capitalist people live), so even if the USSR could not equate Switzerland, they achieved a good quality of life better than the world average.
why would this be relevant? The US had a higher per capita GDP than the USSR and it was capitalist, surely that means that capitalism would be better here?
that’s like saying capitalism is directly responsible for school shootings because it happens all the time in the US. but no one’s dumb enough to claim that because that’s not how things work.
well, technically the USSR exported lots and lots of grain during the 30s famine. So.
It’s still not perfect, but you could argue there was mismanagement there.
The problem with pretending to be a dumbass on the Internet, is it’s almost impossible to outdo the professionals.
Poe’s law
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This kind of messages should have a “/s” attached. IMHO, that’s just proper Netiquette.
I kind of inferred the /s by the end of the post, but respect that such inference isn’t universal. Also there are many /s comments that I wouldn’t infer if it wasn’t explicit.
No, at least not in the USA. They’re still protected under Section 230, which makes them immune from liability of third-party content on their platform.
now serving up the ads directly to me
What do you think they were doing before? 🤔
Does anybody know how this will affect the EU?
no because of sec 230 and publisher rights, they were still directly serving them before, the only difference now is that it’s tied into the video stream directly, rather than broken out as a second one.
In the past they have always said that they aren’t transmitting the content and so it’s the responsibility of the transmitter of the data. Now the content at least appears to be coming from youtube not the advertisers. So I’m curious if that’s enough to make it fall under section 230 which would require that they make a good faith effort to remove “objectionable” content.
Great, now it’s Russian roulette every time you hit that pause button. <clickPause> ¡BOOM ZERODAY MALWARE!
This is a good question.
Imma start subscribing to the RSS feeds of torrents made for specific channels before i watch ads.
If youtube wants to make their website so hostile its easier to get better versions of youtube videos without YouTube then those games will be played.
RSS feed -> yt-dlp script -> auto queue the folder into the player of your choice. Hmm…
(Edit: Though that may not actually work considering this is apparently fully server side. Gonna have to get clever…)
(Edit: Though that may not actually work considering this is apparently fully server side. Gonna have to get clever…)
Next step is machine learning to recognize ads and cut them out automatically hah.
Don’t need to go that far, i think. If you had your extension hash some piece of each keyframe (basically: tokenize some IDs for each keyframe) and submit them to a database you could then see which parts were shown to everyone vs only to some people and only display those. Basically similar to how sponsorblock crowd sources its sponsor segment detection but automated. Some people would see the ads but then you’d know what the og video was unless it gets edited.
This is assuming they’re not reencoding the video for each advertisement, which they probably aren’t. If they are it probably gets easier, actually. Sponsorblock could do that.
Oh that’s a smart way of doing it!
The battle goes on and on.
I read about some sucker that paid for YouTube premium and still got ads in his pause screen. Lol.
Happy I left google 90% and I am trying to leave the services that I cannot change my email or require a Google account
My last bastions of Google are:
- Email. Its rock solid stable, but I know they are using it to mine data. This is a good service…but im still looking at proton at some point to make the switch. Or coming up with a solution myself.
- Maps. Maps is also another really good service they give out for free. I have tried a huge number of alternatives, but still have no real alternative. OSM+ is the closest and works really well in emergencies but its pretty terrible at searching for anything specific to get to.
- Youtube. This is the one I think I can possibly remove at some point. Some creators have their videos on other sites so it might be a mishmash for a while. But the best ones dont. I might just get into audio-books or some other sort of entertainment. Peertube is also a great alternative. And throwing money at !tilvids@mstdn.social might be better in the long run.
Ironically their search has taken a turn for the worse, so other sites are much better in my opinion.
For me it’s prob Google play store: Cannot Google phone at this time Gmail (partially and currently moving) Youtube (idk if this counts but a frontend am using to watch yt videos) Google maps partially (only for streetview Usally)
Fdroid is pretty good, I get most of my apps from there by now. I don’t game on my phone though.
Seeing as these ads will be targeted and of varying length, I wonder if a SponsorBlock-like extension with the ability to accept training data from users to help identify ads.
The Plex server application has a feature which scrubs videos and identifies intros so you can skip them like you can on Netflix. Wouldn’t it be sort of like that?
Seems like a good use of AI/ML.
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The ads come at different entry and exit points for every user.
They’re not referring to the YouTube ads, but the “let’s take a minute to talk about today’s sponsor nordvpn that I used on my trip to Antarctica.” This is a part of the video file itself, and it starts and ends at the same time for all users.
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Pretty sure they just use timestamps from a crowdsourced database, just like sponsorblock.
Nope, it’s analyzing the sound to guess where the intro starts and ends. Turns out this is pretty simple to implement, but quite reliable. Source: worked for Plex
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This is about intro detection in TV shows, not ad blocking. I’m not proposing this as a good way to block ads, just noting that this feature in Plex doesn’t use a database.
YouTube alternatives?
Odysee (they said no to ads recently)
Rumble, Peertube
To follow creators you could try GrayJay https://grayjay.app/
until it stops working, yt-dlp and jellyfin.
Wouldn’t yt-dlp be forced to download the server-side ads, too?
Ads will always be detectable because you cannot speed up or skip an ad like you can the rest of the video.
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
If all else fails, I’d enjoy a plugin that just blanks the video and mutes the sound whenever an ad is playing. I’ll enjoy the few seconds of quiet, and hopefully I can use that time to break out of the mentally unhealthy doom spiral that is the typical YouTube experience.
Unless you are watching live content, you are correct
i remember when i put a video at 2x speed the next ad i got was also at 2x speed lmao
always be detectable
Maybe with some content ID system… but you’ve just predicted their 2025 update which we might imagine would go something like this:
I briefly touched on this in a lengthy comment when this scheme was originally floated a few months ago. Your prediction, which granted is something that Youtube/Google absolutely would try if they thought they could get away with it, would only work on viewers that remained within the confines of Youtube’s native player.
Any third party app capable of bullying or tricking Youtube into handing them the video data is free to do whatever it wants to with it afterwards, even if this ultimately means impeccably pretending to be the official Youtube player in order to get the server to fork over the data. Furthermore, video playback is buffered so a hypothetical pirate client would have several seconds worth of upcoming video to analyze and determine what it wants to do with it.
Youtube could certainly make this process rather difficult by including some kind of end-to-end DRM or something, but at the end of the day you need to make a playable video stream arrive on the client’s device or computer somehow, and if you can’t guarantee full control of the entire environment in which that happens, dedicated nerds will find a away to screw with that data.
Oh, the year is 2100 and YouTube only plays on dedicated Alphabet-produced hardware (available “free” of course) with cam-proof screens? Storytelling will come back in style with a vengeance overnight!
…and then, with the passion of a man whose next meal depends on it, he pleads:
”like and subscribe.”
OK kids good night!
No you don’t have to be able to detect it if you can’t skip. Since they’re injecting the stream directly every time you hit skip they move the counter and when you come back in it just continues to stream you the ad. Just let the time code go negative at the end of the video if you skipped.
All they have to do is not really care about minutes and seconds displaying correctly exactly if you’re working around with fast forward. Alternately they could also just disable fast forward and rewind if they detect you’re using it to abuse commercials.
I think Sooner or later, pretty much all blocking becomes a store the entire video with commercials and strip the commercials out with comskip end. If you’re just storing the buffer off, and stripping it out privately there’s not really a lot they can do about that.
Just let the time code go negative at the end of the video if you skipped.
horrendously bad UI, this should never be done, recalculate the time, maybe. But don’t just make it negative, that’s fucking stupid.
I may not like it, but you do make an interesting technical argument.
I think it would still be detectable though because of buffering.
What you’re saying assumes that videos are streamed frame-by-frame: “here’s a frame”, “okay, I watched that frame”, “okay, here’s the next frame”.
With buffering videos will preload the next 30 seconds of video, and so if you pressed a button to skip ahead 10 seconds, that often happens instantly because the computer has already stored the next 30 seconds of video. Your plan to just pretend to skip ahead doesn’t work in this case, because my computer can know whether or not it really did skip ahead, because of buffering.
i feel like with a relatively basic audio and visual analysis you could probably get a decently accurate detection of ads, paired with a collective “sponsor block” type system, this would like be very reliable. Even just ignoring the stream info itself.
My brain just does that anyway, after decades of ads I just tune them out. And at home I use ad blockers.
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Advertisers claim that it’ll work eventually which is how they can justify companies paying them to display ads, and how they can justify paying for ads on a service like YouTube or even a website. In a sense they are being hung out to dry, many of the big companies seen in ads these days don’t actually need to convince you to buy their product because they have an almost complete monopoly on the market, they’re only technically not monopolies, so you’re going to buy their products anyway or live without the convenience. This is why among other things Ad-funded internet is considered a bubble in a sense, because advertisers are spending money paying websites to show people things they don’t think or care about, but somehow this translates into profits? Seems like the only one profiting is the site being paid, and the creator on it.
I’m sure Nestle, Pepsi Co. P&G, CocaCola Bottling Co. Walmart, Amazon, and the other big boys really need to tell others about them or people wouldn’t know they exist and buy from them. Get real, these companies have their foot in the door, when it comes to the whole consumers buying from them. You can’t not buy from them and live as anyone else would, it takes effort to cut them out, and in many cases living without the convenience they bring.
That’s not how it works. Or, rather, that’s not only how it works. Sure, advertisers dream of users who see an ad once and run to buy a product. But ad effects are spread over time. They build brand recognition. They fake familiarity. Say you are in a supermarket and you want to buy a new type of product that you haven’t bought before. Very likely you’ll pick something familiar-sounding, which you heard in an ad. Ads pollute the mind even if the most obvious effects are, well, obvious and easily discarded, more subtle influence remains.
If it makes you feel any better, I intentionally never use products that have intentionally repetitive messaging or earworm tendencies out of spite. Though I know I’m probably in the minority
Do we unintentionally use products we didn’t realize repetitively messaged us?
We’ll never know…
Just kidding, we can be sure it’s incredibly well studied given the billions and billions of dollars going into ads!
Totally no bias in these studies at all either, they totally wouldn’t try to skew these studies for personal gain and to try and justify the huge spending on ad money right?
surely large corpos would waste billions on ads if they didn’t see any financial return right!
Also, we should be taking a page from the propaganda playbook right now, that should pretty much tell us all we need to know lol.
You can fool some of the people some of the time… right? :)
I’d expect nothing less than executives at a number of the Fortune 50 to be ruthlessly cutthroat, including when it comes to vetting the claims of their marketing teams.
(I know I’m speaking about studies I only assume to exist by the way, will have to research it later)
I think the main problem is that this type of reasoning can’t actually be proven scientifically, even if we have a study there’s not a guarantee it’s unbiased (who do you think funds research on advertising effectiveness). Then there is the problem that every product or brand in modern advertising is likely one of the handful of pseudo monopoly brands. One might argue that a person bought their product because they heard it in an ad, but in reality they might not have really had much choice, that makes it hard to say if people buy the products because they’re familiar or if they just don’t have much option.
The main point I’d like to make is that advertisers would like to believe they aren’t wasting money or time, they need people to believe it in some capacity, because if enough people don’t, eventually the dumb and blind companies who give them money will realize it too and stop giving them money. That’s why the ad-funded internet is considered a bubble, it’s not worth it, or necessary in a lot of cases, and the moment the dumb and blind corpos realize that, they’ll stop dumping money into a hole.
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
Mission failed sucessfully, if people can speed up or scroll through the ad, then it kind of defeats the point since people can skip ahead or increase the speed.
Hence “mission accomplished”
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I wish I had more upvotes to give this comment cause you are so on the money.
Yep. YouTube must include a manifest with each video to tell the player what time ranges are un-skippable. Baked in ads were doomed from the beginning 🤡
Are they? What if the server refuses to serve the video until the ad’s duration has passed? You’d have no better option than to hide it, which most people wouldn’t bother with.
Seems like that would foil a plugin, but I think it would effectively kill video scrubbing, or simultaneous streams, depending on how that restriction was implemented. I still don’t see this working well for YouTube
When Twitch this I rented a VPS in Russia that costs me $3 a month. I now route all my traffic through it and have no ads in Twitch (and im assuming YT too now?)
No you have to switch your vpn to Albania to avoid YouTube ads.
If YouTube offered premium without music for a discounted price I’d probably be willing to pay for it. But I just want no ads, not a bunch of bundled stuff.
And then there are people like me, who aren’t opposed to paying for access in theory, but will never be okay with having the videos I watch be tied to an account. It’s inconvenient and I don’t trust Google with my watch history, even when the option is turned off.
Also I wouldn’t pay until: Youtube stops showing ads for hate groups; stops its manipulative recommendations and push towards right-leaning and extremist content; stops manipulating creators to all make the same kind of video in order to please the algorithm; removes hate content and extremist content; stops auto-flagging and removing fair-use content.
I get what you’re saying, but YouTube music is pretty much just a different front end for the normal site.
Sure, it does some filtering to attempt to be music only (though I’ve seen non music stuff sneak in before) but in the end, you get pretty much the same core experience if you open up the YouTube app and start “watching” a song (with premium for the background play capability).
I’d be willing to bet this is why they won’t go the route you’re talking about.
I’d prefer some kind of limited amount of viewing. I don’t watch a ton of YT, so give me some kind of reasonable ad-free cap. I’m willing to pay to not see ads, but I don’t watch enough to be worth their asking price.
I would rather micro transactions. Like just load up a dollar and get like 1000 minutes ad free…with the ability to turn off and save for later.
Don’t think a dollar is going to give you anywheee near 1000 minutes of ad free video.
It should. That’s more than I would spend on things they are advertising
Yeah, I’m guessing an ad makes them at most a couple cents, and I’m totally willing to compensate them for not getting the ad revenue. I just don’t like the current options: ads or tons of money per month for a service I don’t use enough to justify.
Even then it doesn’t have sponsorblock or a customisable UI like revanced does.
It’s crazy how unofficial free is actually better than official paid.
See, I don’t really mind the sponsored segments. Some creators actually have fun with their ad reads, like the Map Men or Colin Furze. But if it’s boring I just tap the forward button on my Apple TV remote and skip past.
If I’m paying for premium, I just don’t want ads! But they keep trying to shove it down my throat regardless
Different ads though. One is from YouTube and one is from the creator.
Irrelevant
Exactly. In my opinion, that’s Google’s biggest mistake, and I can’t believe some people are okay with it. Everyone attacks YouTube as if they are the biggest villains, but let’s not forget that without them, most creators would be nothing. Most people here are aware of how difficult it is to maintain such a platform, yet they are unrealistic with their attacks. And yes, I am someone who has LineageOS installed, which says enough about what I think of Google, but sometimes you have to be fair. If they banned creators from having ads within their videos, I might even consider paying for premium.
yep, we’re back at “piracy is a service issue”
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The ones that pay are the ones running the ads. If the content creators have to pay, they will be the ones doing ads. This is how AV content has worked since the dawn of broadcast radio.
This is exactly me.
I’ve been paying £5 a month by using a VPN to sign up for Premium from Ukraine. Been doing so for the past couple of years without complaint. Literally all I need from them is to fuck off the adverts. I have Apple Music for music and I’m happy with it.
Now they’ve rumbled us and will be cutting off our Premium next month.
I am fucked if I’m paying those ratfuckers £20 a month just so I can watch other people’s hard work without the adverts they force in. Fuck that noise.
So I’m now researching ways to get my subs onto Plex so I can carry on watching on my Apple TV.
I use this for my plex yet subscriptions https://ytdl-sub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Note they will throttle ips so I recommend a vpn if you’re snagging huge channels.
I’m a bit surprised they don’t do this actually. Premium is good valued off you use the music side of it as well, which I do, but not for just ad free YouTube.
