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So because YouTube is an essential subscription on the internet if you want to avoid being bombarded by nonstop ads, I use YouTube Music as my primary streaming app to avoid paying for another service. I’ve been beta testing their YouTube Labs ‘AI Hosts’ feature. I’ve been noticing a distinct lean towards the kinds of things.
It is comfortable summarizing a musician or a song. It will go on about an artist’s queer journey or struggles with mental health or how a song is meant to represent the Iraq War. It will also go into a Latino accent when playing songs or artists whose names sound like they’re from Central America, though the host is a milquetoast man.
I’ve been trying an experiment where I play traditional conservative, usually country, songs to see what it says about them. I’ve been trying old Johnny Cash, that Rich Men North of Richmond song, and old Dixie songs. Haven’t been able to get the host to comment on any of these. I was just thinking about how this should work if released out of beta.
It’s pretty hard to provoke the host to talk about certain songs. Sometimes it will describe the last track or the upcoming track - or the song / artist from either in general. Not easy to predict when it will jump in between songs.
I could be wrong, but it seems odd to let an AI talk about music with left leaning undertones but (possibly..) not do the same for right wing music because it’s not as ‘safe’. But then again, there is some left leaning extremist music à la ‘Punch a Nazi’ - should YouTube not allow their host to talk about real underground punk band origins or Dixie songs?
Seems contentious and risky to let your AI potentially talk about music or musicians with extremist undertones. But what about like Kanye? What should it say about his antisemitism? Should his name just blacklisted from mention by an AI host?
Music is the one place where there is little to no appetite for outright censorship - it is very bad PR to gatekeep music, in most cases. In Kanye’s case, you might get removed from official playlists, but they’re not going to prevent people from listening to your music.
Curious why folks jump through so many hoops to avoid either ads or paying for a subscription.
If the content is so compelling that you’re willing to give it a slice of your finite attention, why would you not want creators to be compensated for it?
I say this somewhat hypocritically as someone who used to sail the high seas. Decades ago that was a matter of funds, then convenience, and now both those are non-issues.
A) There is effectively infinite content out there. The value of any individual slice of it asymptotically approaches zero. My life would not degrade notably if it were to disappear.
B) Ads are a GENUINE waste of time, 99% of the time I will never click on it, have no interest in the product or service in question, and in fact am driven AWAY from such product if the ad is particularly offputting. Get better at targeting your ads if you want my attention. I will not spend my money, why would I spend my time watching?
C) I'd rather give money to the creator directly, and not to the platform that is honestly a minimal value-add, but leverages its network effects to continue to act as the middleman between creator and viewer whilst pretending to be the reason this connection happened at all.
I want to punish the platform for bad behavior.
But platforms are the reason that creators and viewers can match each other at all. It's not a minimal value-add, it's a necessary (but not sufficient) piece of the entire transaction.
Which platform?
I find creators and content I like via Twitter, Facebook, Reddit (well, not much anymore), Youtube, Goodreads, Rottentomatoes/Metacritic, Google searches, like six different streaming services, group chats, very rarely via normal broadcast television, and the occasional word of mouth.
TheMotte occasionally, too.
Which of these should I be sending money to to 'thank' for acting as an intermediary for my awareness of some creator and their content?
Like, do I owe a local Movie Theater an ongoing allegiance past my ticket purchase for showing me a movie that I later go on to purchase on a DVD?
The Algorithms are not providing some unique functions that isn't available elsewhere, and the content they're 'curating' is, as stated, nearly infinite.
If these platforms were happy to act as just dumb "show me what I want and help me find other things I want" services, I'd be more tolerant. What they ACT as is "we'll show you what you want, smothered in Ads, then try our damnedest to funnel you to the content we want to show you and keeps your attention as long as possible... while shoving ads into your eyes the whole time."
Its practically hostile design, and I return that hostility with hostility.
Sure. Neither is a gas station or a grocery store or any other service. The fact that you can go to Whole Foods doesn't mean Albertson's isn't providing value. And I guess it's hypothetically possible to contract with General Mills to buy your Lucky Charms directly, just about as impractical as viewers and content creators figuring out how to interact directly without TikTok or Instagram.
With the exception of TheMotte, they all already have very solid business plans. And FWIW, I doubt most of them are basing it on curation or discovery as a fundamental source of value. If anything, their only metric when deciding what to show is whatever scores the highest engagement when they A/B test, which I think you already grok.
You're only burning your own soul, being angry at the world like that. Especially for something that you can very well live without (live everyone pre-2010).
The gas station or grocery store sells me the desired product, takes my money, and gives me a receipt.
If a grocery store also attempted to add random items to my grocery cart that I had to physically remove before I hit the checkout line, because "we algorithmically predicted you'd want to buy this one too!" I would probably go to a different grocery store.
Incidentally Aldi is my favorite Grocery Store because it doesn't play games with putting items on 'sale' or do weird pricing practices with coupons. It provides reasonable quality products at what I can generally expect is the lowest price around, and that's it. I appreciate this commitment to simply providing the goods and not trying to futz with the customer to get them to buy more.
That's the sum total of what I want from my media platforms too.
I hope I don't have to explain why grocery stores putting all the products in one physical place is certainly a greater value-add to me (from a pure logistics standpoint) than youtube attempting to shove random videos into my eyes, when I can go to any website I wish with no effort and find the precise content I want with minimal time investment.
Grocery stores have put trashy magazines, Diet Coke and candy bars in the checkout aisle since time immemorial.
Not Aldi. At least, not so aggressively.
And I have dreamed of setting the magazine rack at the Publix checkout on fire for as long as I can remember.
Someone buys those things, I assume. I've literally never seen someone pick one up.
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checkout aisle =/= grocery cart
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Most of the people on youtube I watch are already having to supplement their income via ads they willingly insert into their videos. Or setup patreons, or advertise for off-youtube streaming sites(because youtube is a censoring hell that would make Orwell blush), or...
So no, I'm not giving youtube access to my hardware and internet to force their advertising on me. If I want to support the people I watch on youtube, I'll do so directly.
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My first reason is the less important of the two and may be futile, but I like to make a best effort at privacy: Watching YouTube logged out without persistent cookies, Google is probably doing a fair amount of tracking. Watching YouTube logged in, Google is definitely doing an awful lot of tracking.
Secondly, and more importantly, I prefer not to give money to de facto monopolies which participate in culture-war censorship. YouTube’s most obvious offenses from my perspective are on COVID, guns, and the alt-right broadly construed. If anyone has a more complete list, I am interested.
In a market with more intermediaries, focusing on niches is fine. If you want to restrict your little video platform to the five Quakers still adhering to the plain speech testimony, using “thee” instead of “you,” knock thyself out. But if YouTube starts banning every video containing the word “you,” that is best interpreted as an attempt at social control by a powerful company, and I don’t want to support it.
I used to give to a few creators through Patreon. But Patreon, then a de facto monopoly in its niche, began dropping right-wing creators and I stopped for the same reason. Now that there are SubscribeStar, Floatplane, etc., as alternatives, I should figure out whom I want to support and for how much and get back to it. And since Patreon is no longer a gatekeeper, I can also be comfortable giving through Patreon again.
I have also switched to buying books through Barnes & Noble rather than Amazon when I can, because Amazon started down the road to censorship. But it looks like maybe it has reversed course, so I should reëvaluate Amazon too.
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I wouldn't mind compensating some of my favorite creators. I just don't want Google getting my money.
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Because the hoops are minor (install noscript and ublock origin which you have to do anyway) and the platform has been enshittified to hell even without the ads.
Unless, like me, you like to watch videos on an actual television, and don't want to figure out how to side load apps. That being said, I don't pay for You Tube, just suffer.
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How much of the money is going to the creators? I assumed it was an elsevier situation where the creators make it for free and then tje publisher makes all the money.
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Using Brave browser to listen to ad-free music on YT is essentially 0 hoops.
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Most content is not so compelling that I am willing to pay for it compared to all the other content that is out there and free.
Beyond that, getting an adblock is not a lot of hoops in my mind. If I cared a lot for my time I would not want to waste any of it on an ad. Or waste any of it by paying for something I don't have to. Given I had to spend time to get money in the first place.
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If you're not being deleted from youtube and other normie platforms and thrown in jail you're not musicing hard enough.
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So you get Music included when you pay for YouTube?
Is Music a worthy alternative to Spotify? All the same podcasts etc?
Yeah imo it’s great. Recommendations are solid and community playlists are really good. There’s a lot of edits that you can only find on YouTube, which is a nice bonus. Never used it for podcasts but I’m sure you can use it for ones that aren’t platform exclusive (and you can probably find a reup on YouTube anyways)
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If there’s anything I potentially would want from YouTube such that I’d consider paying for it is to tell me what the background music is that’s often playing in the background of certain videos that I like. Sometimes the music only gets sampled in part of the video, making it impossible for you to determine what it is or where it’s from. It doesn’t happen often but it’s happened a small handful of times such that an option to extract or point to the other contents involved in the creation of the video may be worthwhile. Content creators often don’t list it in the video description.
It depends on the subject area in question, but a lot of Youtube background music is just taken from the soundtrack to a Japanese Fighting game called Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes].
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proxy frontend: inv.nadeko.net - give that guy your money, instead of Google.
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Adblock and it's mobile equivalents like AdGuard/NewPipe mean you never need to subscribe to YouTube etc.
NewPipe breaks often. I use it but it's buggy and needs updates often to get past the latest attempt by alphabet to stop it.
Ublock origin and the like don't get past the often pretty long "loading" period when the ad would have been playing.
It's often enough that when it happens, you're not surprised, but not so often that paying for a subscription makes any sort of sense.
And on the off chance it was taking them a while to update the alternative players, I never experienced the issues ublock / Brave's builtin blocker.
I do most of my YTing on my pc though, so a phone app is always of partial use to me.
So do I:
I mostly stick with FreeTube.
One minor issue that you may or may not have any idea about:
I've set the Firefox addon LibRedirect to open youtube links in freetube. When it does so, a new freetube window is not created, it'll 'overwrite' the current first/main window, regardless of any video already playing there. Any way to remedy that?
Sorry, clicking youtube link is such a rare scenario for me that I'm completely satisfied copy-pasting them like a caveman.
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FreeTube seems great. Thanks!
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This is possibly worth its own top level post at some point but AdGuard is currently fighting what looks like state actor attempts to censor archive.is (it's not clear which state if any is actually responsible, but they at least claim to represent French regulators). AdGuard responded pretty well in this case but the general method of spamming CSAM reports to censorship-friendly regulators scales much better than most private internet infrastructure middlemen can handle.
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They’re getting progressively more aggressive on this front, though. It’s a cat and mouse game, so you may be right. Lately it sounds like they’ve been doing backend delays that force the duration of the ad to complete before you can view the video.
For those that just want to use the iOS app or use their TV’s built in app, it’s easier to stomach the $25 dollars a month. But I know a lot of people that won’t out of principle.
uBlock Origin still works for me. I get the delay occasionally but not all the time.
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I'm fine wirh backend delays forcing the end of the ad, it's better to stare at a blank screen than have typical advertising slop served to you.
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How about just VPN to a country where Google doesn’t serve ads?
If you believe your time is worth money, it might be worth the tradeoff to not have to bother. My main thing is I use iOS where you can’t get vanced YouTube apk or whatever. Until recently, my whole family was under a premium plan until they started gating location of family organizer.
I use YouTube 100x more than HBO Max or anything else. I feel the current price point is worth not hassling with VPNs / ad blockers and knowing I’ll never see an ad on any device.
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