I just tried to look up a specific video of a Nick Swardson stand up bit. All I searched was “Nick Swardson loitering”. There were 5 fucking ads before an actual user posted video, then one real human posted video that barely had anything to do with Nick, then 5 more fucking ads.
I knew they were forcing ads into videos but clogging the entire search feed with ads is unfuckingbelievable.
Is this really what it’s come to? Ads are more important than what I’m actually looking for? Are people really okay with this?
Better question is why are you not using an adblocker?
Because I don’t know how to do all that shit on my phone 😭
I’ve had several people try to explain but I just can’t fuckin do it. I’d need someone to sit down with me and show me while explaining every action.
Use your app store to install Firefox.
Install ublock origin Firefox extension.
Go to Youtube using Firefox.This is literally all the steps.
From my experience, if you’re on iOS then Brave is the only browser I know of that includes a built-in adblocker (although I have my own issues with Brave).
If you’re on Android, should be able to just install Firefox (or a fork like Fennec), tap the three dots in the app > Extensions > uBlock Origin
If you’re otherwise using the YouTube app, I don’t have much to add in that respect as I usually use Invidious or NewPipe.
Plenty of adblocker extensions on iOS Safari.
For YouTube, I’d recommend Vinegar, although the more general adblockers will also work.
Yes! I happen to already have a good blocker but I use Vinegar Extract for some enhancement.
Does Vivaldi not have an iOS version? It’s made by the original Opera founder that didn’t go all crypto bro and paycheck advance scammer.
FYI Brave is about to start having issues with ad blocking due to the Manifest V3 shit since it’s Chromium based
MV3 only applies to extensions. Brave’s adblocker is implemented in their content filtering engine, which is part of the browser itself. This completely bypasses the extension system.
You can block YouTube ads with AdGuard in Safari as well.
This is what I use. Good to hear it’s not depreciated on more modern versions of the OS that my ol’ 6S Plus isn’t able to run.
Brave has agreements with some ad services.
Just use a good paid ad blocker. I have Adblock pro for years as a Safari extension and I never ever see an ad.
Does iOS Edge not have the adblocker? No Firefox extensions for iOS either?
Orion Browser also has a built-in ad-blocker that also gets rid of Youtube ads. It even has some support for Firefox extensions, including uBlock Origin.
iOS or Android?
Everyone is making suggestions assuming OP uses a certain OS but you are asking the real question here.
I mean, even or Symbian or one of those other simpler ones. Just need a place to begin right?
On Android Tubular is pretty awesome.
The best answer
Assuming you’re on android, you can use this download link on your phone to download the .apk for NewPipe. This link is a direct download to install the app. (If you don’t trust my link, you can got to newpipe.net yourself), so if you click it, it should immediately start downlaoading and you can follow the steps to install the app. It’s pretty self explanatory.
It’s a frontend for youtube that removes all ads. You can’t comment or like, but you can subscribe to channels via NewPipe, just like you’re used to in youtube. But no ads. You do not need to login, it is not tied to your youtube account.
Youtube doesn’t like ad dodging frontends, so every once in while the app won’t work and you’ll need to go back to youtube (or a different alternative) for a day or two until the folks at NewPipe fix it again. It’s kind of an arms race like that, but with advertising.
For Android, NewPipe is great. I think I prefer FreeTube now however. Mostly because of the ability to use the Invidious api, built in SponsorBlock, settings coss-compatibility with the desktop version, and a better way to organize and export data (IMO). However, freetube android does has a few rough spots that newpipe doesn’t have, so ymmv.
I prefer ReVanced because it’s close to the native YT experience without the bs (blasphemy)
Another revanced lover here. You’re not alone. It takes away nothing and adds so much.
I hate to say this, but you’re exactly the reason why Youtube and other services feel safe and comfortable enshittifying their services.
Realistically I don’t use YouTube very often at all unless I’m searching for a video I already know the full name of.
After all this shit I’m just not gonna be using it at all.
The internet with a proper ad blocker is a game changer. Take the five minutes to figure it out. You’ll save more as free time than that on your first day.
Ironically, you could also YouTube how to install Firefox, then unlock.
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I used to run a public TLS DNS server that would do some hardcore ad/tracking blocking. I shut it down when I switched myself, friends and family to a private Tailscale network with VPN on the exit nodes.
It was a little janky to manage but I still have the files laying around; my point is I could turn it back on. Since it’s DNS-based it applies to all websites and apps running on your devices, and with TLS it’s also encrypted so your ISP wouldn’t be able to track your DNS requests. You would however be trusting me, a random stranger with your queries.
I want to upvote you, but you’re at 69 upvotes…
Nice!
Feel free to upvote them now
Is piped working again?
NewPipe is working again, so Piped probably too
Thanks!
NewPipe is bae
No idea, I use unlock with Firefox for YT stuff.
Even works on android.
The ad industry is truly one of the most reprehensible and insidious things humans have ever invited unto themselves. It’s beyond dystopian how much of our ability to move through the world is now contingent on us allowing our brains to be bukkaked with ads that are designed specifically to bypass our rationality and embed themselves in the very fabric of our beings like psychological rootkits.
I believe conspiracism is the root of all evil. But ads are gaining on conspiracism like they’re Usain Bolt being chased by an angry bee.
I have to hand it to those soulless fucking devils though, they might have pulled off one of the most brazen but successful mindfucks I’ve ever seen: they convinced lots of people that seeing ads about topics they were interested in was some sort of concession from the ad industry, like they were begrudgingly implementing measures to make ads “relevant” to us, and that we were somehow gaming the system because of it. It was a “win” for us to have the ads being served into our eyeballs and ears be tailor-made for us. “I’m so sick of seeing ads for products I don’t even care about! I wish there was a way to make the ads be relevant to ME” said no cunt ever. But they managed to convinced us that everyone else was saying that, and that we’d won some sort of victory against them to have their advertising have the precision of a sniper rifle, versus what it was before, like some sort of shotgun fired from 150 feet away in the dark.
An entire species of marks.
brains to be bukkaked with ads that are designed specifically to bypass our rationality and embed themselves in the very fabric of our beings like psychological rootkits.
and like 90% of people think they’re completely impervious to ads lol
HEY! YOU!!! JOIN THE NAVY!!!
Damn Superliminal advertising. It’s why I joined the Navy.
I have been using adblockers for decades already. And it’s been that long since I had to see ads. Occasionally some site will have some way of it getting through but even then I have the plugin scan and it sometimes can start blocking it. Essentially, my internet has been 95% ad-free and frankly I am surprised when I encounter anyone who doesn’t do the same.
I’ve used an adblocker for ages as well, though I do wish content creators on YouTube could get some passive non-membership revenue from me without me having to disable my adblock and look directly into the Ark of the Covenant. I could get Premium, but at that point, I feel like I’ve negotiated with a terrorist.
If they have a Join in addition to subscribe that directly gives them revenue (of course not until after YouTube has taken like 80%). Also always see if they have a patreon account. I occasionally contribute to some very talented people.
For sure, that’s what I meant by membership. There’s just so many different creators I watch, I can’t afford to support them all directly. Maybe I’ll make some playlists to play on the TV with ads while I’m out of the house.
Yeah I agree there are tons and it’s not your responsibility to support them. My personal approach is if I stumble upon someone I find to be extremely talented and who is clearly working very hard at something and has been persevering for a long time, I then check to see if they’re already being helped by people. If not that’s when I consider contributing a little.
I mean I have my own family to support so it’s just a little bit here and there but it’s something. Mostly I consider it when I feel that the world is better with their work in it than without.
Most of them earn more from Patreon and merch, that’s how you support them greatly, not by watching and clicking ads.
Like, even the creators themselves tell you you can support them on Patreon or through their merch, they never tell you to get Premium, Join or click ads, as they don’t help much.
Remember that time when YT started showing banner ads below the video? Yeah, that was like just after the dinosaurs were wiped out and before blockchains became a thing. I was a long time ago, ok. Anyway, that’s when I was about to quit watching YT, but then I suddenly discovered the wonderful world of ad-blocking. Turns out, YT became watchable again.
That and all the people who say shit like “But I have to watch the ads to support the creators”, like there wasn’t 70 years of TV advertisements preceding this generation. I know I’m talking to a kid when someone says that. No one thought they were stealing from Burt Reynolds if they didn’t buy a Chrysler or tampons. It’s absurd.
I feel your vitriol and agree with it 100%.
When politicians of both parties say shit like “Americans like their private health insurance”… I kind of die a little.
When a random podcast from somewhere else in the world has a local ad injected into it by the app I downloaded it with…same.
When the godamn fucking pitcher’s mound has a CGI ad superimposed over it…same.
We’re going to advertise and conspicuously consume ourselves into extinction. So there’s that I guess.
My god that was well written. We should be friends.
The link between conspiracies and ads is way stronger than that. The ad industry really went into high gear following WWII when the people working on pumping out propaganda to drive their own side of the war stepped up the game by applying psychology, new media, and a bigger budget.
Those people and techniques then moved to the commercial market when the war ended and applied their trade to peddle us the crap their customers wanted to sell. Make us feel bad if we don’t buy product X and go on an endless consumption treadmill to try to feel good and adequate about ourselves.
It is despicable and even worse with ads targeting children.
But, but, how will people know about our product?!😩
PREACH
I could not agree more with your eloquently-written poignant rant, but I cannot resist being an extreme pedant—a shotgun fired at 150ft has a very small spread.
Sorry what exactly do you mean about conspiracism? As in the belief in conspiracy theories, right?
I’m curious what you mean when you say it’s the root of all evil
Are you… raw dogging the internet without an ad blocker? You poor soul
Don’t tell him, if too many people get ad blockers they’re just going to keep evolving
Is that really how it works? I feel like the whole ad based economy is a sham anyway, I wouldn’t mind if it collapsed and we funded websites through micropayments or gift economy
Would it be so bad if we want back to how it was before? Just people making their own sites about things they cared about? For fun or the love of the subject matter?
I like this sentence.
9 times out of 10 the ads have zero effect on my ability to search for things.
I’m not saying searches haven’t gotten worse but until this specific thing or Google’s ai search it’s been easy to ignore if you know what you’re doing.
I remember being that guy.
It never gets better, ads only ever get worse. If you are successfully ignoring ads then they aren’t doing their job, and they will keep trying different ways to get your attention until you get sick of this shit and get an ad blocker.You have found a specific thing that would improve, save yourself the hassle and get ublock now to fix this for you as well as a dozen other little things you are “living with” that will be much better when they’re gone.
Ublock on Firefox. Remember Google just kneecapped adblockers on Chrome!
Firstly it hasn’t actually happened yet, I guess you fell for the misleading windowscentral headline. Secondly it’s not really kneecapped, but required them to rewrite, which the uBO author decided not to do (as a statement I guess). Other ad blockers however have made new MV3 compatible versions that are comparable to the MV2 ones, so it’s clearly possible. Also don’t forget there are other chromium browsers besides chrome, if you use Brave you don’t even need to install an ad blocker because it’s built in.
I’m not going to get into the technical details of manifest v2 and v3, as I think it’s beside the point.
I think we can agree that given Google has announced the end of v2, recommending uBlock Origin on Chrome right now would be pretty mad, right?
Yes but that’s not relevant to my comment nor the one I was replying to?
username checks out
Ads aren’t the only thing to worry about. You’re leaving yourself dangerously exposed to malware for literally no reason.
Real homies don’t let homies view YouTube without proper adblockers turned on
But you’re stealing from content creators
As so often, you steal from the capitalist, not the workers
Sarcasm, surely.
Google knows the answer to this is: “What else are you going to use, Dailymotion?”
Which is why they’re a monopoly.
I still try Vimeo, Archives, and even PeerTube and WikiCommons.
Not watching is actually an option.
Sure. Not watching your favorite show is always an option. But if it’s your favorite show, that really sucks.
Yeah. It really does suck. You get over it eventually though. And, who knows, in a couple of years maybe someone releases all episodes in a single download and you’ll be enjoying them on a whole new level.
If you really like something that is only available on a single platform, and you don’t really enjoy that platform, and you also have zero control over the platform, get out of that situation. It will always end in frustration. Try to gain back control
It’s called enshittification:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Enshittification is a re-prioritization pattern where online product and service providers experience a decline in quality over time. It is observed as platforms transition through several stages: initially offering high-quality services to attract users, then shifting to favor business customers to increase profitability, and finally focusing on maximizing profits for shareholders at the expense of both users and business customers. This process results in a significant deterioration of the user experience.
Though the concept had been recognized and labeled with similar terms,[1][2] the neologism “enshittification” was coined by writer Cory Doctorow in November 2022 to describe this phenomenon. The American Dialect Society recognized the term’s relevance and impact by selecting it as its 2023 Word of the Year. Doctorow has also referred to this concept as platform decay, emphasizing the inevitable decline in service quality due to these profit-driven changes.
To tackle and diminish enshittification, Doctorow advocates for two fundamental solutions: upholding the end-to-end principle and guaranteeing the right of exit. The end-to-end principle asserts that platforms should transmit data in response to user requests rather than algorithm-driven decisions. Ensuring the right of exit entails facilitating user departure from platforms without data loss, which necessitates interoperability. These strategies aim to uphold the standards and trustworthiness of online platforms, placing emphasis on user satisfaction and encouraging market competition.
How have you survived this long without UBlock?
Make it 85% and show ads for anti-seizure medicine.
Enshit.
Enshat?
Who’s Steve Jobs?
i tried to find a clip of that olympics break dancing thing a week or two ago.
It was fucking impossible. I literally couldn’t find shit, it was all AI generated videos.
That one is a Olympic copyright issue. Either NBC since they pay so much for the rights or the IOC flag videos immediately so all your left with is low quality videos.
It genuinely ruins trying to find Olympics content if NBC doesn’t cover that specific event
why would you ever copyright video clips of the olympics though, nobody fucking pays for cable or has time to watch streams. And we’re also only talking about like 2 minutes worth of content, I’m pretty certain that would be fair use.
The Olympics are less and less about the athletes and what the human body and mind can achieve and more an more about the sponsorship deals. These corps pay big bucks for exclusivity deals.
yeah but that’s all pre broadcast shit, it’s irrelevant to some 3 minute clip being uploaded to youtube containing that segment of footage.
If you want people to care about it, it has to be accessible, and clearly, it’s not very accessible.
here you go https://odysee.com/@deniel22:b/raygun:1
thank god for piracy, finally i know what people were fucking talking about
Thank you for this. I watched the whole thing. It’s undeniable that Raygun can do a lot of things I can’t, but her performance paled in comparison with the other competitors. Three four times I got the goosebumps when the other competitors did truly amazing moves!
This is to be expected, Google does the same thing with their search engine; delay providing the most accurate and related results in order to get users to see more ads per search.
i have adblock so they arent even getting any money
I tried that yesterday to show some dinner guests. 20 videos later, I gave up
this is why i keep a local archive, only my stupidity and inability to find shit in my horde make me look like a dumbass.
Raygun is the best, but I also failed to find it and I have YouTube Red (or whatever Google calls it now). The Olympics was on that feed like hoss on some slop.
yeah idk i thought some of what she did was pretty good, she demonstrates good control, i think she mainly needs to work on fluidity and transitions though, some of them were awful.
Get Firefox and install uBlock Origin
It’s still pretty shitty even with. Can’t search for shit, 5 items down they’re showing you completely different results from what you searched for.
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Gotta keep you addicted to the content they know will steal your attention.
Psychological dopamine abuse.
The search results are still full of ai generated videos
ugh yes that is an issue. there might be extensions that replace yt thumbnails though
Youtube is useless nowadays.
We need more content in PeerTube if we want that kind of website again.
How does peertube work exactly? If I host an instance do I need massive storage on my server to host all the videos or is it distributed amongst the other instances? Do I have control of what videos I host on my instance? I’d hate to be hosting and helping spread Nazi propaganda (or any propaganda for that matter).
Most peertube instances are isolated from most of the other instances to avoid hosting a ton of videos. Honestly, your instance doesn’t have to federate with other peertube instances since most people leave comments from other fediverse apps
AFAIK if you open an instance videos are hosted in your instance, and may be replicated in other instances via Federation.
Also it supposedly can work p2p if mutiple users are watching the same video it distributed the download. In my experience nowadays it always end using http download.
Moderation an everything about ita users fall into the instance host and moderators. I don’t know if you can do an approval system, I would suppose so, but I’m not certain.
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librewolf my beloved
Keep in mind that Opera is a shady company. Please avoid their products if you’re able and willing.
You should not use anything from Opera. The company is chasing trends, and its most successful ventures in recent history have been ripping off poor people in developing countries and marketing to gamers with a meme social media account. The company’s failed experiments have been abandoned without directly informing users, leaving them at increased risk of security problems.
I am debating between Brave or Firefix. Any arguments for/against?
Brave is run by some pretty shady people who do things like automatically adding affiliate links to your URL or collecting donations for content creators without their consent
As far as an actual browser goes, Brave is based on Chromium so its more likely to work on every site but it has a bunch of crypto nonesense added that you probably would want to uninstall. There are more extensions that will “just work” on Chromium browsers, for example I’ve had issues with the Postman extension on Firefox before
Firefox is based on Gecko, its pretty well supported and follows all the standards but there is probably a higher chance that a site might break (usually down to its pretty strict privacy defaults) there isn’t really much bloat (other than a Pocket integration that you might want to turn off)
Mozilla also feel (to me at least) like one of the last groups of Good People on the web, you can reach their manifesto to learn more.
Ublock. Simple as.
Also, search on YouTube has been utterly broken for years. You get at most 4 or 5 results and then a random series of videos that are completely unrelated to my search query.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. If you have to click through 10 shitty videos before finding the one you’re looking for, that’s 10x more engagement to sell to advertisers.