Youtube: “GOD PEOPLE KEEP SKIPPING ADS, WHAT CAN WE DO TO STOP THIS LOSS OF REVENUE?!”
Viewers: “Maybe have standards for length and content and moderate the platform to prevent malicious actors?”
Youtube: “I KNOW, I’LL JUST MAKE FORCED ADS LONGER AND MORE OBNOXIOUS!”
Viewers: “JUST MODERATE YOUR FUCKING PLATFORM, YOU HAVE THE MONEY AND RESOURCES TO FUCKING DO IT”
Youtube: “Users are just so selfish and entitled, trying to skip ads…”
Viewers: " Fuck it installs ublock origin
If you grew up with commercial TV, not only is the frequency of ads on youtube bad, but the placement–in the middle of a sentence or a scene–is mentally and emotionally destructive.
The worst is when you’re watching something emotionally charged (pissed off or funny as fuck) they’ll put an ad exactly when the video hits you
When cable TV first came out it didn’t have ads because you were paying for the service. When Sirius satellite radio came out it didn’t have ads because you were paying for the service. When Netflix streaming came…
Adding ads to YouTube was always the plan.
That was always the plan. They were just slow walking it.
Also Youtube: DONT INSTALL UBLOCK ORIGIN OR WE’LL REMOVE YOUTUBE SHORTS!!!
Viewers:
Wait what? I have had ubo installed forever. Why is my shorts still there?!
Wait, they’re willing to reward us for using UBO?
I will sit on my floor with nothing, for hours, before i watch ads.
Ive been getting back to reading myself. Media’s become so overstimulating
Same I just bought a used kindle and jail broken it so now I have a huge library to go through and I have downloaded a bunch of movies and tv shows to my media server as well
I had a book once that had a full color spread for the movie in the middle of the book. Obviously this was a skippable ad, but still, it’s inescapable.
I’ve been collecting old books for years. Currently slogging through Mellives collection of stories printed in 1968. Could find a copy of the book turned movie, printed before the movie?
Some of those old books had ads for cigarettes in them! Mostly the cheaper paperbacks. For some reason it wasn’t as annoying, it was more of a historical artifact, an indication of the context in which the book was originally read.
yeah that’s actually pretty dope lol
I’ve found old textbooks from the 30’s with handwritten notes in them :D
history is cool
So true! Also, productive screentime has been nice. Instead of doomscrolling or mindlessly zoning out to video essays, I’ve been programming, doing some 3D modeling for 3D printing, working on some simple games, and reading long form articles from my own curated news feed.
I will sit on my floor with nothing, for hours, before i watch ads.
No, I don’t see them and the day I cannot block ads anymore is the day I am going to stop using YouTube. It’s really not that important to life.
I don’t think they’d give a shit if you left, it’s not like they’re making any money off you.
… Why would I care if they miss me?
Why would I care about their opinions at all? I’m pretty sure we care about each other’s opinions about equally as is.
Are you under the impression that Bad_Ideas_In_Bulk is one person? Physically they might be, but their words represent a massive amount of people. I think millions of people would stop watching if they had to endure youtube without adblock.
And given that YouTube probably loses money money on those people, I don’t think they would miss them.
Oh, I don’t care if they care about me. The attention of my comment was to express how unimportant YouTube has become for me.
why wait? Give invidious a try, or see if any of the creators you follow also uploads their videos in PeerTube or odyssey or something… The creators, I do follow does that - its good.
I know of PeerTube and like the concept. Out of my 57 subscribed channels only 2 are available via PeerTube, 4 more are available on other sites. I hope this will improve. I’m not using the normal YouTube interface. I’ve customised it to my needs with injected scripts plus additional cosmetic blocking, e.g. I filter out unwanted search results and removed all shorts. For now it works well enough. Anyway, I’m already in the process of reducing YouTube consumption.
Invidious is developed really poorly. The documentation even recommends restarting the service hourly for what I assume has to do with memory leakage (they don’t actually mention the reason, but memory leaks are significant either way). I’d stay away from that project.
I use Grayhay since it makes it so all platforms I follow are on there and I can easily download videos if I want, plus follow people like Louis Rossmann on peertube, YouTube, if they have patreon or nebula there too.
“unskippable”
I haven’t seen an ad on YouTube for years, with 2 simple browser plugins. Assuming you’re on a PC:
Ublock Origin Sponsor Block
If you’re using chrome, you already fucked up.
The same fucking comment every single time.
This platform is so predictable.
The problem stays the same, why should the answer change?
Mostly because the problem is systemic, so the response should be as well. Your answer was individualistic.
Individual change always places the blame on you. The real focus should be on the system that puts you under this pressure.
It wasn’t my answer, but I’ll play the part.
I agree with you in cases where individual change is hard, costly and has barely any influence on the big picture (like your “individual CO2 footprint”). But in this case the individual solution is to quit using a terrible browser and install a free extension in the new one, and it has all the impact it needs because it makes the problem go away. I can’t take anybody seriously who will willingly put themselves through youtube ads when they are this easily avoided.
In your example you say reducing your individual CO2 print is hard. It’s not. It just has no real effect against the larger problem. The same thing is true here.
And that’s why the ads will always exist and people will always complain about them. It also funds them to eventually find ways around your individual solutions.
I guess answers like these misunderstand that you’re fighting a losing battle.
Its not like those are mutually exclusive. Long term vs short term fix.
The problem stays the same, why should the answer change?
because chromium introduced a newer addon system that restricts what addons can do… effectively forcing adblockers to do a lot more work to keep functioning, with some features being impossible now
https://blog.adblockplus.org/blog/how-adblock-plus-is-getting-ready-for-manifest-v3
I dunno, I was just hoping for something more insightful.
Grayjay
Edit: instead of making a snarky comment, I should probably do the right thing for fellow lemmings and explain:
I’m fucking old and I’ve seen this before. It’s the same model as it was with TV and Cable. Air tv becomes so ad ridden than when Cable comes “ad free” we all start paying and switch over. A decade later the “base” cable TV plan is so ad ridden that they come up with “premium channels”, so you sign up for that so you can watch a movie without 10 minute ad break in the middle or 4 minute ad breaks on series. Then channels start splitting into “base” and “premium” versions (e.g. Discovery or History). Base channel is now just RealityTV garbage.
I got fed up and started following creators on Google Video (then YouTube), Vimeo, listening to stuff on ShoutCast (that was winamp’s podcast/radio thing). Then Netflix comes out, decent service. Every other media company wants a piece of the pie. Slowly but surely every decent movie/series on Netflix gets moved to their respective production company’s service: disney, HBO, Paramount+… Netflix starts toying with ads, now disney…
Slowly YT starts adding ads on the sidebar, then in the lower third, then pre-rolls. Now there’s “premium bitrate” behind a paywall. At some point I said “fuck it I’m not playing ball anymore”. Why pay premium? it’ll be the same as it’s always been. Soon enough “premium” yt will be the only way to watch over 360p quality, they’ll lower a bit the cost of YT Premium, ppl will jump in and down the road they’ll add ads back.
I’d rather donate a buck to my favorite creators, it’ll be 100x more income that whatever they’d get off my views.
Something more insightful than the obvious solution screaming in your face?
I was hoping for some comments that realized not everyone wants to go to such lengths to avoid watching ads.
Or that people use devices such as Chromecasts.
If you use a Google service on a locked down Google device, what magic fix are you hoping for? There are limits. If you’re unwilling to make any meaningful change, then unfortunately you’re out of luck and either need to suck it up and watch the ads, or pay Google for an ad-free experience. Or you can leave their ecosystem and be free.
If there’s no solution to your device, then the only solution is a new device. At some point, it made sense for me to switch out my Chromecast (gen 1? puck) and go with a dedicated media pc. Now the Chromecast lives in the garage to stream music uninterrupted while I can still watch YouTube tutorials
That’s a lot more hassle than most people are willing to go through just to watch YouTube.
Ads on YouTube are a solvable problem. Why not spread the knowledge?
because guillotines are not legal everywhere
It’s a good reply even if it helps but one person
Better specify your browser: Firefox
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Nebula exists. Curiosity Stream exists. PeerTube exists. Odysee exits. The people I value on YT already have footholds on all four. More will arrive soon enough.
Exactly my thoughts too.
You forgot https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy
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Yes. You will quit YouTube. But 99% of people won’t and they make YouTube more revenue via either watching more ads or giving up and subscribing
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None of those have all the creators and people don’t want to go between multiple apps.
This fight is lost. The way to win it now is legislation or blowing up data centers.
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None of those well ever compare to youtube. You think all the videos are going to stay on those platforms forever? You think they well scale to youtube levels of users?
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You can also contribute to PipeLine, it’s a desktop client that aggregates YouTube and a few others. And it’s written in Rust.
The issue with YouTube is the network effect though. Even if you can get a lot of users to use one of those multi platform clients, it’s still hard to get the creators to leave. And till they stay, the users stay.
it doesn’t matter, when people are fed up with that shit they will just go back to watch any other platform (tv, streaming, tiktok)
scale does not matter, these alternatives are not trying to scale like youtube because youtube is unsustainable in the first place
Can somebody explain peertube for me? It sounds like it should be a federated video service, but either the federation doesn’t work very well or there’s nothing on it.
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I finally gave up and subscribed, but only because the people I wanted to watch weren’t all available elsewhere and because I was lazy
but this year I will be canceling YouTube as my last subscription
Odysee exits
ewww, nothing but far right garbage on that site
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Ublock must be blocking them. Huh, oh well.
I have noticed lately that in FF with ublock the videos have refused to play for an ad like length of time. Probably ab testing something.
I’d rather look at a loading screen than an ad.
If the video refuses to play, just reload the page. That fixes it for me.
Yeah I don’t wait for it either but it does cause me click the play button a few times and watch the throbber spin for a second before I do.
I notice that I don’t pay attention to videos as much any more. It’s just stuff playing in the background while I game or edit an image or browse piefed or something. So if it “hangs” for a couple seconds while ublock fights the ads, it doesn’t really bother me.
AFAIK that is youtube delaying the video stream on purpose because you were supposed to watch ads in that time. If you wait 5-10 seconds it will start playing. For me it happens only on the first video, and autoplay is still instant afterwards. I am gladly waiting out the loading screen than watch ads. Knowing that I probably make google lose money on every view makes the wait even more bearable (I am never logged in, and anyways I always run youtube in private mode, so there’s almost no profiling happening)
You could try to change the user-agent to make it a little bit faster (google slows down youtube on firefox btw) or you could try to sue google for unfairness or smth
Seriously. I’m not seeing any ads… just AirPlay YouTube to my Apple TV, and I’m good to go
The enshittification will continue until… No man, it’ll just continue.
I wonder how many ads Vader needed to deal with.
he was so pissy cause the inside of his helmet was just ads for pharmaceuticals he couldn’t afford.
Last time I saw a youtube ad was probably 2009. Or it might have been 2008.
Android: https://newpipe.net/
Smart TV: https://smarttubeapp.github.io/
Computer: https://ublockorigin.com/
SmartTube is for Android, as is NewPipe. You need a Smart TV with Android TV. Other TVs do not have a way out.
Their way out is using an external device.
Of course, but it’s a bit misleading. I thought it might be helpful to add that comment.
SmartTube is for Android
And the developer has left from what I read, its still working for now but Im starting to see a few videos that wont play
Huh? Last release is from three days ago and the last commit to SmartTube’s GitHub repository is two hours old.
Where did you read that the developer left?
SmartTube
the version I have has not had any updated for months. Theres an error on it saying it will no longer be updated
The repo was compromised and you need to change sources. Check the announcements
I will check that thanks
You need a Smart TV
No.
My solution is to just close youtube. There’s nothing on there I want to see that badly.
Mine is Firefox + adblockers.
I like watching SciShow and Crashing Out.
My setup to make YouTube bearable:
Firefox mobile and the following extensions:
- uBlock Origin
- DeArrow
- Hide-Shorts
- SponsorBlock
I suggest adding “fix youtube search” to get rid of the stupid suggestions you get when searching.
About half the comments here are just people saying they use Ublock origin.
If you’re getting the ads you’re there to watch something you wanted to watch.
And you can decide the thing you want isn’t worth the cost.
But they’re coming for everything. There won’t be anywhere to go to get information. You’ll give up everything?
I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. YouTube is already near the bottom of my list for source of information and I already have more sources of entertainment than I have time, so if they manage to win their war on ad blockers, I have no problem never visiting the site again.
what Buddahriffic said. :) I ain’t got that kind of time. (Caveat–am looking at little things occasionally on my phone–this must be a nightmare for people using YT TV.)
I just realised i haven’t watched a single ad in like 2 years
Thanks ublock origin!
I haven’t seen an ad in 16 years. Thanks ublock origin/dns hole/not watching TV/not going to the movies/not reading magazines.
Well, i wont watch ads. If it comes to it i’d rather have a program thats recording videos in real time so i can skip the ad segments later in my recording like in the good old vhs times.
This should only become a necessary solution if YouTube invents a way to inject ads directly into the video stream of the video you’re watching, like old school broadcasting.
That is sort of what sponsored segments are, and what sponsorblock is quite effective at dealing with.
If they’re injected on the fly at variable time points, it gets harder, but I suspect fingerprinting could work well enough.
Even better, yeah. So this solution shouldn’t feel necessary unless as a last ditch effort, definitely.
uBlock Origin and revanced are still effective at blocking. Sponsorskip (available as a Firefox plugin or built into revanced) even skip sponsored segments inside videos!
Might want to check out morphe(Revanced might be dead?)
Revanced might be dead?
Revanced is not dead. Revanced Extended(RvX) was discontinued and rebooted with the new name Morphe. Both are two different projects and both are alive.
That was what my grandpa also did many years ago, he was living in the future! Or we’re going backward.
Like others, desktop I’m using Firefox with ublock origin. Android phone, Firefox with ublock origin. Android TV, SmartTube. Ad blockers have always outpaced Google in my experience though I use youtube maybe like twice a week and I don’t randomly browse reccomendations. Just there for specific stuff
Enjoy it while it lasts. With Google forcing developers to register their Android apps (or they’re not allowed to be installed, unless you’re a developer), it puts pressure on applications like Firefox (or ublock origin) to tow-the-line.
This won’t happen tomorrow or next year, but the writing is on the wall, unless people push back or the government begins to push back on Big Tech.
The removal of device owner rights has always been a slow boil.
edit: fixed typo
You can still install them, they announced the rules weeks ago.
-
You need to go into the phone settings and enable developer mode (this doesn’t mean YOU’RE a developer)
-
Flip a setting to on that will allow it
-
See some scary prompts and acknowledge no one is asking you to do this
-
Reboot the phone (its intended to cut off communication with who might be scamming you). (edit: I think this reboot step specifically is a clever idea)
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Wait 24 hours.
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Install the app
From there you can keep the phone in the ‘unlocked’ state, or allow it to relock after 7 days.
I’m not saying this is good, but it IS still possible.
I understand and agree with your sentiment, but try explaining how ”developer mode" does not make you a developer to my Grandma.
It’s the same b.s. optics that invented “sideloading” as some technically shady practice, when it has always been: just installing the stupid app.
Maybe your grandma who doesn’t understand that, shouldn’t be installing unverified apps without someone like yours guidance? That’s not a hard concept if they’re going as far as installing something else not from a store.
You’d still need “developer mode” to install f-droid or epic games apk.
People shouldn’t be scared or intimidated out of installing non-google store fronts.
…but yes, Grandma should avoid random apks pulled from the internet.
Also, somehow preventing adblock would trigger the creation of a corporate competing product. This is a bigger threat to Google than people stealing their bandwidth.
-
I’m hoping by the time googles Android goes to shit, GrapheneOS is readily available on more phones or PostmarketOS. Same with Linux with KDE Plasma Bigscreen running on a minipc rather than using an android TV box
When you see the long ad, just close the fuckin’ browser window. Immediately. And then use something else.
They’ll only get the point and change if you stop giving them your eyeballs for shit you don’t wanna see.
youtube has ads?
Yeah, it is a great advertisement company, that lets you watch ads for free, but sometimes it shows videos that are not ads. I am glad that they are slowly patching up this issue. /s
might be hard to do if its a SMART TV/
It works somewhat on a TV. You can close and reopen the video until it starts without or just a 5s skippable ad.
Nobody in their right mind connects their TV to the internet. If they do, well they are already fucked.
Haven’t seen a YouTube ad on TV in years. SmartTube works great.
Me using SmartTube and PipePipe/Tubular:
lol wut?
Don’t forget Unwatched if you’re on iOS platforms!
Seems like youtube forces sign-in using Unwatched on iOS? An alternative is Vinegar which replaces the video player in Safari, and skips the ads, mostly and usually (until youtube updates some things then vinegar needs to catch up).
Why would you even use them when revanced is there now
Youtube has ads? But seriously, this is hurting the honest user.
