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They have been pushing adblock detecting technologies in some regions. I’m preparing for having to stop using Youtube when they roll it out here.
Here in Austria I get the anti adblocker message every single time I visit so I don’t care much anymore and just dropped it. I’m rather watching shows now lol
Also in Austria here and no ads for me with uBlock Origin + DNS block on my firewall.
What adblocker are you using? I’m also in Austria but haven’t got it
Luckily Libretube and Piped still work so I haven’t had to visit the normal Youtube site in ages, I do know Youtube increased their aggression towards third party frontends too tho so we will see how long the Newpipe extractor will work I guess!
I don’t think you’ll be losing out on much. Their algorithm has gone to shit recently and finding anything new has become a chore.
I’ve never had history on so their algorithm has always been ass for me. Just depended on subs.
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Ad blocking is basic hygiene at this point.
I recently had to adjust ublock origin manually after ads started popping up on youtube.
Preach!
I read this as “YouTube will push even harder for non-skippable ads, and content creators can’t stop them anymore”
That’s because that’s what it says. They’re hardly trying to hide it.
It’s likely they don’t have much of a choice as a business. The more people use ad blockers, the more ads they need to show to make up for the loss in revenue.
And the more ads they show, the more people install adblockers.
Paying for Premium is another option. I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but to a creator a view from one Premium subscriber is worth much more that hundreds of views from ad-supported free tier subs. It’s the next best option outside of direct payment (Patreon, GoFundMe, etc.)
If content from these creators is really important to you and you spend a lot of time on YouTube, maybe a monthly sub is actually worth it.
Personally a major problem I have with YouTube premium is when they launched it they took some quality of life features from the free side and moved them to premium. If they didn’t do that I’d probably have premium
That’s good to know. I’m on a family plan with my girlfriend and her kids, so I haven’t seen ads in a long time.
I’m glad to hear this is beneficial to creators as well.
Yeah I don’t understand why people think they deserve good content for free? Either you pay for it through ads, or you pay for it through money (or you pay for it through either licensing fees or taxes, like the Australian ABC and British BBC). Producing and hosting videos are both pretty expensive, and YouTube’s not a charity.
The reason there’s no major competitors to YouTube is that nobody else can afford it at a scale anywhere near what YouTube does - most companies couldn’t afford to run a service 1/10 the size even.
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Yep. I doubt there were that many people using adblockers back when you only had one skippable 15 second ad at the beginning of a video. But when you have 1-2 ads every 10 minutes, on top off all the premium popups, it’s just unbearable.
I was pretty tolerant of YouTube ads up until a year ago, when they started playing unskippable food ads which I morally disagree with. No amount of “not relevant” made them go away so I’m hardcore ad-free now. I even tried YouTube premium until they decided to jack up the price on my second month of having it, so fuck em
Yeah, it’s a bit of a cycle. If it continues, they’ll likely find new ways to make ads harder to block. For example, embedding the ads directly into the same video stream as the actual video and using DRM. I have no doubt they’ve already prototyped or even fully built out solutions like this, waiting to roll out if/when they’re needed.
Youtube never was a especially profitable business on it’s own, they basically just need it for the traffic but I guess they might try to change that, if that’s the case the logical next step would be dropping independent creators! :/
I’m getting the feeling that within the next five years I’m going to be abandoning YouTube and just living without video content going forward.
It’s hard to argue that they don’t have a monopoly. I think the best thing to happen would be to break up both Google and Youtube, turn it into smaller alternatives that need to factor their appeal to users again.
I’m old enough to remember when none of this stuff existed. I have a threshold Beyond which I simply stop using the service.
I’m actually pretty close to my lifestyle from before 1995. I don’t have any cable I have basic internet I don’t do any of the Music Services. Video-wise I only have Prime and any free services I can get on Chromecast for TV. I’m getting close to my threshold with prime, as the annual fee is getting real high.
I’m already starting to lose interest in most YouTube channels. It’s not so bad here, really. I get to experience reality more.
Yeah, I’ve also been returning somewhat to how I used the internet before modern social media (and it has been nicer).
Check out PeerTube.
Smart content creators have been setting up websites, Patreons, merchandise shops, and all they need to jump ship when YouTube finally capsizes. The likely/easy/inexpensive alternative for content creators, is PeerTube.
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Half of the videos they recommend to me are things I’ve already watched. Sometimes there’ll just be blank slots like they couldn’t find any content to recommend. It’s so shit now.
I seriously wish Patreon would improve the UI because I can see that being where I get my videos. Until then, Nebula is where most of my favorite creators are flocking.
Tempted to looking in to self hosting video content, it’s a real storage hog, but if compressed, I imagine some of the mid sized youtube channels could afford to do so, the real shame will be the difficulty for smaller creators to get discovered without a common platform.
The problem isn’t storing it, it’s hosting and delivering content.
YouTube, Netflix, and all the other big streaming platforms have huge amounts of servers around the world delivering content with minimal latency and without saturating the Internet exchanges with gigantic amounts of data traffic.
If we were to do this peer-2-peer people would have to get used to waiting for pages and videos to load again.
So long as the video runs continuously once the page loads, I’m not particularly bothered by latency. Admittedly I’m not everyone, but I think most people care more about the content than the UX. I mean, hell, YouTube has a pretty miserable UX in different ways, not from lack skill on the part of the people who make and maintain it or limitations of technology, but from the poor cooperate incentives and goals that govern it.
It probably wouldn’t. Or you would have to wait a long time.
Try streaming from a site across the world and see how it is today. Then imagine saturating the networks with loads of it.
Would definitely need new infrastructure to cache popular content.
Does anyone else ever notice that the changes like this they make are done piece mail, brick by brick ,they continue to shitify the service. That’s intentional…Imagine you tube in the year 2009. I’m betting no one really remembers, and youtube made the same bet.
How many things have they taken away that users really like over the years think about it. Now imagine they did all those changes AT ONCE…TODAY… from 2005 at inception. Horrifying huh ?
Big companies always start off with an amazing array of “Standard Features” that they allow everyone to use, so that the users get hooked on them, then suddenly they make an announcement like this and they change, remove, or premium tier a feature. They know you wont like it… but they got you hooked and they know it and they dont care. It’s all driven at profiteering as much as they can off of you. Honestly I see youtube trying to become like Netflix by continuing to increase inconvenience with ads (for their profit), and ultimately making Youtube a completely payed service subscription to everyone.
They gaslight the great majority into just giving in to more ads, shittier service, and eventually a payed subscription by breaking your outrage up into small little pieces over time. STOP LETTING THEM !
Edit: So yeah Twitter/X as predicted.
Boiling the frog is one of Google’s favorite strategies
I’m glad nebula exists as a good alternative for educational content. It has successfully replaced much of the time I previously spent on YouTube.
Would be nice if they started recruiting people who create tutorials too. It’s almost impossible to find video tutorials on blender outside of YouTube and now tiktok
Oh man if they brought over quality tutorial channel I’d probably just use them from now on
They have “classes” which I think are supposed to be going in this direction.
Big Same. I’ve had it for three years now and it’s been really great to see a YouTube alternative actually flourish and survive. My subscription is almost due, and they have a lifetime option for $250 (normally $300, I think the discount is for my last years fee) that I’m sorely tempted by.
Edit: Just to note, so no one’s put off from subscribing, the current rate is $30/year. It was $50 last year. Which does mean the lifetime pass is 10 years at the current rate. But if they’re successful, that rate’s not going to stay static for all of that time. Not trying to be a shill for them, but if you like any of the creators on there it’s a good way of supporting them.
I just bought the lifetime option.
Hell yeah!!
Anyways both Nebula and Curiositystream have lifetime subscriptions available right now… 90% of my YouTube viewing is from creators on those sites anyway
I’ve had several lifetime subscriptions that have been made into paid monthly subscriptions. Lifetime subscription is a gamble that I have yet to see pay off.
It also CAN’T be good for you long-term. Eventually providers start losing money on you. Which means they fail, or they start looking for other ways to monetize you that you probably won’t like.
Like, say, Plex.
I choose yearly when I can for this kind of thing.
@weew @mastermind I already subscribed to Nebula and Curiositysreams, but hadn’t heard of that offer. Can you tell more?
Nebula: pay $300 once, lifetime access. They had it up for a week on a trial run a while ago, and they decided to bring it back for now.
curiosity stream: I think I found a deal on Stack Social, + coupon, that worked out to $180. The basic 1080p format only. Again, pay once, lifetime access.
The payoff time for Nebula is around 8 years (not counting possible price increases in the future), so you’ll have to have faith that they’ll last that long. I hope they do though. Curiositystream is obviously less. Then again, the immediate cash infusion they get from this can also help them survive/expand faster.
Around Black Friday time they have had sales and you get both for a year for around 20€ so the lifetime subscription doesn’t look so much of an attractive deal.
I really like their business model, but unfortunately did not really use curiositystream in the month I tried out the superbundle. Some of the documentaries were alright, but it wasn’t really my thing. I may return to nebula if google figures out a way to axe adblockers for good, though
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It’s much more banal. YouTube is simply a monopoly abusing its market power. People would use alternatives if they existed.
They exist!
- Peertube
- Odysee
- Rumble Above is just a few of them.
They are not alternatives because they don’t have content. Streaming video is fairly trivial. Having content is not.
Streaming video is NOT trivial.
Video files are big. There’s so much costs involved in hosting, compression, transcoding, distributing across CDNs, and serving, that “free” tiers on those services are just not feasible long-term. Even a multi-billion corporation like Google/Alphabet was only willing to burn cash on that for so long.
PeerTube offloads distributing and serving across the viewers, so the more popular a video becomes, the more “CDN” its viewers provide.
It only has the “downside” of less control and the inability of the platform to insert ads, so all promotions are directly controlled by the content creators themselves, who “in exchange” only need a minimal server to host their videos.
While it’s been hard to find good stats, something to the effect of several hundreds of hours of video footage is uploaded to YouTube every minute.
Processing, storing, and streaming that is not remotely a trivial task.
I’d say content is trivial, but having the sheer variety of content that youtube has is not. Odysee has some decent stuff on there- even some decent original stuff that isn’t just a mirror of someone’s youtube channel. But it’s not going to have the same niche, specific content I might look up on youtube.
They are for me at least since all of my favourite Youtuber upload videos on Odysee and Peertube too.
Are those actually hosting videos or just accessing YouTube? Because for the latter, most people still want the algorithm and the interaction/support to the creators they follow
All of those host videos themselves, they’re not like piped or invidious.
Oh that’s nice. Are many YouTubers cross posting there?
Hardly any, even though Odysee has an option to auto upload whatever you’re uploading to YT on their platform.
No one is really posting content to any of the alternatives really. Maybe if you are really into crypto-hype or other very niche topics, there will be a little content. But not much.
Personally I can’t understand doomsrolers that “prefer” the “algorithm”.
I’ve massively reduced my time spent with youtube over the last year or so when I noticed that the overall experience was just getting worse and worse.
Previously I’d watch a video, and from there jump to another interesting video, and so on - now pretty much all the top level suggestions are useless already, and it’s rare that after watching a video you get something worth watching recommended.
I assume it’s not just youtubes fault - while I do think youtube is pushing those videos even from people I used to like I now see more videos where they go on for 20 minutes about something that should’ve been said in 3 minutes max.
I now almost exclusively use youtube to watch videos from people I’ve subscribed years ago, and as they either become annoying to go with youtubes algorithm, or eventually stop/slow uploading my usage goes down. Nowadays I often enough don’t open youtube for two weeks, while previously there rarely was a day without checking at least a few videos.
now pretty much all the top level suggestions are useless already, and it’s rare that after watching a video you get something worth watching recommended.
Ok people, time to decide. Do you want targeted recommendations or do you want privacy?
Because the only way for YouTube to figure out what you may find interesting today is to go through your watch history, rummage through your engagement metrics, and suck up your profile details. Then collate and process a ton of data about you and your preferences, compare that knowledge against a vast library of channels & streams to try and figure out what would likely make you click on a given video. All while fighting spam, misinformation, and people trying to game the system with SEO and clickbait. All in real-time, as over 300,000 hours of content is being uploaded every minute.
To be clear, I’m not defending YouTube or Google. I’m just saying it’s not all cut-and-dried as many people think.
what would likely make you click on a given video […] while fighting […] clickbait
While most of the rest is true, clickbait makes you click, so it isn’t something YouTube necessarily wants to combat.
Same with “rage-bait”, or content that you’ll click on just because it’s so preposterous that you’d want to criticize it in the comments.
Both are trash, yet not against YouTube’s interests.
This is my view. I went the privacy route. The result is the addictiveness of the service went way down. For me, that’s a win.
There are other ways to give us content we might like. For example, have a list of topics and categories we can select. This reduces invasiveness while providing some benefit.
The problem is that does not give Google what it wants out of the relationship.
The problem is that there is no valid alternative at the moment, so I wouldn’t call that Stockholm sybdrome. Hosting that much content for free costs ungodly amounts of money to Google
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This is the way.
We’ve been able to survive for 200,000 years without any of this s***.
Insane that there are still people who aren’t using adblock these days lol.
They will lose control of the pre roll and post roll ads but maintain control of the ad breaks during the video. This is actually a smart change and data driven.
And i’m here wonder: do most creator care about how ads are setup? I’m pretty sure, out of the millions of creator, only a small number of them will control how ads are display, the rest only care about how much money they make. And tbf, if a platform is free, that’s how they earn money.
It’s quite obvious that most people commenting here didn’t read the post, given that it says 90% of creators already have all ad types enabled for pre and post video already, and that it directly leads to greater payouts to them.
