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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2868 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 27, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Sooo. What are your plans for surviving the YouTube ad-pocalypse? In case you don't know, YouTube seems to be cracking down on ad-blockers, steadily ramping up their level of restrictiveness over the past 4 or so months, and ramping up even faster the last 3 weeks. Adblock Plus no longer seems to work for me on Chrome, but does work on Firefox. It'll probably be different for everyone as they dial it up for more and more customers, but it'll likely keep getting more restrictive as time goes on.

I'm guessing this has to do with the same tech trend that caused the layoffs this past year. Budgets are tighter, bubbles are popping, and sources of revenue are being more exploited. But I do wonder if this particular one will work out for Google or not.

I for one plan on leaving the platform if I ever am completely unable to make it work without ads. I think there are many others who feel the same way. This may (I hope) make things worse for content creators, especially those who rely on their own sponsorships for revenue, and will drive them towards other less restrictive platforms.

It's not like I think it's immoral or wrong for Google to pull this, but it does bother me. YouTube has been around for so long, it's life a part of my life. It's my TV, it's the way I learn and become better at most things, and for many many people, it's their livelihood. My wife randomly said to me last week as I was teaching myself some drumstick fundamentals (the kind of fundamentals with deep intricacies that you can't see easily, and need an in-depth video to go into), "how did anyone ever learn anything before YouTube?" After having been around for so long, and being so ingrained, it feels weird for YouTube to suddenly switch up how it works. I'm someone who likes to skip around videos and go back and forth a lot. When ads are present on YouTube, I cannot stand how you'll skip to a section of a video, even without having watched much actual content in the video yet, and suddenly have to watch a giant string of ads. Having to watch ads like that will ruin my usage of the platform.

I also wonder if it's technically possible for YouTube to completely crack down on all ad-blockers, but I don't know enough about how their APIs work. But since so much of it it's happening client-side, I think they'd have to control the client to have complete control. This might be why youtube no longer works on Chrome when I have adblock plus, but it still works on Firefox for me.

I've been doing ok redirecting yt automatically to Invidious in my custom browser. On Firefox I'm using LibreRedirect: https://libredirect.codeberg.page/. For music I'm using yt-dlp. Not much of a plan, though.

Right now I'm still at the stage of 'inherently trust the abilities of pirates to stay a step ahead of authorities, be slightly annoyed by having to look up the new fix and install it every 6 months'.

This strategy has held more or less true for my entire life up to this point. It is possible that in another month or year we'll the the tipping point where Google has a such a stranglehold on every digital thing in the world that they can actually succeed in ending this trend, but my priors are heavily against it.

(and note, I'm saying I believe there will be 'some solution', not that it will be adblockers forever - maybe something with VPNs or third-party/crowd-based hosts or etc, who knows)

Also YouTube bought NFL rights which are generally the most expensive content one can acquire.

I'm guessing this has to do with the same tech trend that caused the layoffs this past year. Budgets are tighter, bubbles are popping, and sources of revenue are being more exploited.

"You never know how evil a technology can be until the engineers who designed it fear for their jobs." -Stewart Baker

It will get worse, not just on the internet, but in the tech world as a whole.

Woah that's a chilling quote. But sadly accurate, I think. Modern technology (smartphone, social media) has always been a net negative on society, IMO, but it's about to get way worse.

I started using ad blockers in the 2010s, when JavaScript and Flash ads made webpages literally unreadable on PCs: slowdowns, security intrusions, scams shaped like security alerts, and so on. But things have gotten better since Firefox Quantum, HTML5, and the end of Flash; even without adblockers, my PCs at home and work are not slowed to a crawl or infected. Still, I use them generally.

I read several webcomics daily, and I support them by turning off my adblockers for their site; I do the same for YouTube now, in the belief that their ads aren’t malicious, just time-spending. Googlephabet is (literally) banking on my willingness to watch ads to keep normal YouTube free; it’s a free market social contract.

However, when I help people with their computers, I install UBO, UBO Lite, and MalwareBytes Browser Guard so I won’t have to deal with them coming crying back with viruses.

I think Google is a shitty company even by the standards of big tech, I think it’s poorly managed, and I think its business model, especially for search ads, is exploitative, ethically questionable (essentially blackmailing businesses into preventing their competitors coming up first when someone searches for their product), zero sum (or even economically net negative, given Google spends its money on hiring mountains of unnecessary software engineers to build pointless products that get shut down after a year) and parasitic. I therefore intend to freeride with ad block for as long as possible. Google should fail and I hope it does.

Haven't had any problems on Brave so far. If that and ublock and invidious all stop working I'll probably bend the knee and get premium. I don't like Youtube as a company but there's so much good content on there I think it's worth it. For example, I'm in the middle of a 6 hour documentary on the First Crusade, where else could you even find stuff like that?

Link to the documentary?

Since no one mentioned it as an option yet, I've been surprisingly happy with the YouTube client FreeTube. It's a bit more cumbersome than using the browser directly, but I didn't want to risk any possibility of my primary google account getting somehow permanently flagged by their new tattler script. I'm sure they will block the API at some point, but until then... I also found out that youtube has not been showing me new videos by a decent fraction of the channels I am subscribed to, that still show up to the RSS based feed check FreeTube uses.

Long term I'm not sure what my plan is. I guess probably trying to watch fewer videos.

has not been showing me new ... I am subscribed to, that still show up to the RSS based feed

That's why I avoid "algorithmic"1 feeds whenever possible: No, they don't know what I want to see better than I do. They may be able to predict what I'll click on or how to maximize my time on the site, but that's just a proxy measure.

1 Yes, I know that "If there's a new post, list it" is technically an algorithm, but it doesn't count.

I strongly doubt they'd ever outright ban you for using an adblock.

I also wonder if it's technically possible for YouTube to completely crack down on all ad-blockers, but I don't know enough about how their APIs work.

They're still trying in the background; Google's still pushing [Chrome Extension] Manifest V3 whose main purpose is to permanently cripple adblockers moving forward. Sure, they met resistance, but there's literally nothing stopping them from just going ahead and having 85% of all browsers (i.e. everything that isn't Safari or Firefox) instantly helpless to block Google's ads.

Sure, they'd lose some marketshare by doing that since Firefox will continue to work and people will start dusting off their old installs, but they'll still have complete capture of the intersection of the "I clicked the Install Chrome ad on Google because I click on everything I see/I just use Edge because it's literally the same thing" and the "my technical relative/acquaintance suggested I use uBlock Origin but if it changed I'd be screwed" crowd.

One of the internal websites at my company only supports Chrome. Not "Chromium-based browsers" like Edge, just Chrome. IIRC, it was an effort to reduce development challenges, and getting 100% of employees to install a program is easier than building something with compatibility in mind.

Given the fact that User Agent switcher addons exist, I suspect that that practice has been increasing and will continue to increase in the future. There's not much point in having multiple browser engines competing if only one is allowed to access the websites you want without (the mildest forms of) "hacking".

What about all the other Chromium browsers? I doubt they're obligated to adopt it.

They're obligated to adopt it if they don't want to spend developer time patching it out. Which they don't want to afford; after all, that is why they threw out their own browser engines in favor of Chromium in the first place.

And really, what business purpose does permitting adblock in Edge serve? MS runs ads too- even in the fucking Start menu- so they have an incentive to just adopt it wholesale.

It arguably makes sense for Brave (obviously- if they can afford it, of course) and Opera to spend time patching it out, but Google can make that very difficult if they so choose (they've been slowly doing a good chunk of what used to be in the Android Open Source Project into Play Services). And there's really no other browser engine to replace with- Gecko/Firefox never got its Electron moment because Mozilla's leadership is pants-on-head retarded and would rather LARP and invent programming languages they'll never directly see a dime from so it's not a viable replacement.

I disagree that they wouldn't devote the dev time, or at least build off older forks that didn't have Manifest V3, I'm no expert, but I don't think Google's implementation of extensions is critical for maintaining broader compatibility with standards.

While Microsoft certainly craves ad revenue, I think there's a decent chance they don't adopt it simply because it lets them claim that their version of Chromium is superior to the gimped one in Chrome. Maybe they won't encourage ad blocking, but a wink wink towards more savvy users can't hurt. They seem willing to take an outright loss per user, via reward programs and the like, if that lets them maintain their market share or wrest more of it away.

I guess we'll find out soon enough.

I hate ads too, but I have noticed that a lot of people who absolutely hate ads and paywalls still expect free content to magically keep being produced for them. I mean, subscriptions or ads, those are really your only choices. People need to get paid, server fees need to be paid, etc. Shit ain't free. It's fair to complain that something is overpriced, but it's not really fair to complain that the content you want has to be monetized somehow.

People need to get paid, server fees need to be paid, etc. Shit ain't free.

If I want to pay creators I find their patreon / substack / etc., Youtube can die in fire. We don't even need them for hosting after bittorrent. The reason Google is shelling out all this cash for hosting isn't that they're hoping to make profit, it's that they're hoping to maintain control over the narrative.

"If he dies, he dies."

  • Ivan Drago

I don't really consume news media these days, on account of it being such propagandist shit. Only occasionally encounter it when something is linked in an online politics discussion. I still get annoyed when I see a paywall and, yes, I do feel entitled to read it for free. To speak to the implied bluff calling here that wouldn't I deal with the ads if I had to? Shouldn't I appreciate the hard work that goes into the service? No. I wouldn't be sad at all if all news and journalists died due to lack ad money. It's already effectively dead to me. The world might have a hard time functioning without literally any journalism, but then I don't think that's a real threat right now, nor is it a me problem. There's very few ad supported "services" that I truly could not live without if push came to shove.

People need to get paid,

Do they though? Again to keep with the news example, I would say a fairly worthless bullshit job is massively oversaturated. Do we really need BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, etc., etc. all reporting on the same news bite thing happening? Yet they all want an individual slice. Maybe there should be a culling and some people don't deserve to be paid. And right now things are holding on due to cattle like normies and people willing to put up with the bullshit because of adblock. I might be willing to throw down some money to fund actual quality (which doesn't exist in journalism) if there were only a handful of real journalists informing the world and my contribution was genuinely needed, but that's not the real status quo.

server fees need to be paid

Youtube, or rather the concept of video sharing/hosting, is one of the few ad supported things I genuinely want around for sure. But on this though I don't think it's as true as you say. Somehow they operated for years off normies without problem. MEGA and other services run without this ad aggression.

I also take issue with the sudden unexamined and selective Marxism that always shows its face in these arguments. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" Money isn't JUST going to pay to server hosting. It's going to Yachts, to DEI officers living in SF, to office yoga sessions. People always make this appeal about resources needing to go to core real labor or machine costs, but it's never the reality of funding. And if that were the true concern there would be more efficient ways to do it without all the dead weight.

Bandwidth is a semi-solved problem. Pirating operates with 0 ad revenue decentralized sharing, or standard ads with shifty websites. I pay for all the basic necessities to make it work (and more) with the my bills already.

Money isn't JUST going to pay to server hosting. It's going to Yachts, to DEI officers living in SF, to office yoga sessions.

Well, to be fair, I think the libertarian response to this would be that without the draw of nice things like yachts, no person would want to become a CEO in the first place. Whomever decided to make Youtube to begin with, it took a large investment with low chance of success, so there has to be significant upside for doing it.

The libertarian response would also be "adblock go brrrr!".

I've counted on the fact that the average normie will keep watching enough ads that the service will be supported even if it never makes a dime off my attention.

And apparently the average normie's tolerance for ads, even intrusive/obnoxious ones, is way above mine, so I usually don't have the option to just accept a few minimally intrusive ads to toss a few pennies in the coffer. So yes, I end up being the classic case of a free rider.

Which actually leads to a very annoying equilibrium overall, I think. I would be generally happy to pay a premium for a geniune, no-bullshit, "we won't serve you any ads ever" subscription service.

But as we've seen with the history of basically everything else, no matter how much money they make off the subscribers, they can always squeeze a few extra pennies on the margins off if they can serve them ads in addition to taking their subscription money.

So there's constant pressure to find a way to get paying customers to tolerate ads, and thus ads seem to inevitably sneak into the system. And as mentioned before, normies seem extremely tolerant of this, so me, as a subscriber who DOES NOT want ads, am not strongly considered in the equation.

If the Schelling point is serving as many ads as possible, the only way I can possibly express my disagreement is to block ads on principle, it seems like. If they will move over to my preferred equilibrium where everyone is only served exactly as many ads as they're willing to tolerate, I'd change my tune.

I've certainly got an OOM less disposable income than the modal Mottizen, but leaving frugality aside, I expect the marginal impact of my use of adblock to be negligible.

They're simply not common, I've seen various estimates for adoption, and they're all in the low single digits at the highest.

I've seen estimates that YouTube adblocking is less than a percent, but a cursory search of the internet tells me overall adblock use is ~25%. I don't trust those figures, it doesn't jive with my personal observations at all, but I retract my initial claim.

I'm not claiming to be an "ethical pirate", but in general, I would never have purchased most of the media I pirate, and thus the impact to the producer is pretty much nil. And there have certainly been products that I've enjoyed to such an extent that I did buy them, even if it's because I decided the ease of having Steam mods or access to multiplayer was worth it, in the case of video games. That seems to me like the claim that piracy is a supply problem, which I partially endorse, because even YouTube premium is inferior to the experience when you have adblock and sponsor block in play.

Besides, Google gets money from me anyway, especially after they removed free storage on Photos.

I think you and @BurdensomeCountTheWhite have misunderstood my point. I don't care if y'all pirate or use adblockers or whatever. (I use adblockers myself, though I don't go out of my way in that particular arms race.) I'm saying a lot of people seem outraged that the people providing content want to make money from it. You can debate the worthiness of any individual creator or platform, and I also agree that I would prefer to give money directly to creators who produce work I like (and I do) rather than Google. The attitude I am addressing, however, is that "it's wrong for them to want to monetize, everything should be freeeeeee!"

"it's wrong for them to want to monetize, everything should be freeeeeee!"

For me it is in part "hopefully someone else will pay for it". Applies also to large part of Patreon-funded stuff.

I am volunteering for some stuff that is (in my opinion) strongly socially useful so I have no problem whatsoever with someone else funding providing of entertainment I like, and some evil corporation paying measly cents that costs them to host content I use. I also have no problem whatsoever with pirating music and videos, though I am taking effort to pay creators where possible.

It is more complicated than expected to pay artists and in some cases I found no way to do this. What I consider to not be a my problem, if someone has not bothered to sell their music as files then I will not pay for it.

I'm saying a lot of people seem outraged that the people providing content want to make money from it. You can debate the worthiness of any individual creator or platform, and I also agree that I would prefer to give money directly to creators who produce work I like (and I do) rather than Google.

People created great content on YouTube before the era when they could make money on it. And, indeed, I think the monetization era has resulted in worse content:

  • Clickbaity, misleading algorithmically tailored titles and thumbnails
  • Childish antics (because kids are simple creatures who click shiny things and, apparently, people making dick-sucking faces)
  • Padded video lengths (again, the algorithm)
  • Padded video release schedule (again, the algorithm)
  • Sponsored content (and the attendant conflict of interest in cases like tech reviews)
  • Native, in-video ads read from a script by the creator themselves
  • Georestrictions for legal reasons related to monetization
  • Self-censorship to avoid demonetization or stay kid-friendly (profanity, or even apparently non-profane words like "suicide"; content (like guns or violent footage); verboten opinions on culture war issues, especially trans)
  • Niche creators branching out to into the mainstream because that's where the money is, abandoning their focus on the niche topic

And that's just the creator side. On the hosting side there's an army of programmers hell-bent on increasing engagement and ad revenue at any and all cost, from UI changes (removing the dislike button, making everything huge and eye-catching as opposed to information-dense), heavily prioritizing recent videos, playing very fast and loose with search query matching (it shows you results only faintly related to your query if they're extremely popular, because it calculates that you're more likely to click on it), prioritizing well-known and official channels in search results despite not matching your search query as well as a niche channel.

I'd literally pay to return to the pre-monetization YouTube era. I am so fucking disgusted whenever I have to use YouTube to find something (DIY, tech reviews, some old funny thing I saw and want to look up again, footage of some recent event in the news, etc.) I cannot overstate the despair, revulsion, bitterness, and disdain I harbor about how fucking shit YouTube (and essentially the entire internet, honestly) has become over the last decade or so.

This is it, yes. I don't feel like a sucker for paying for a service I use. I feel like a sucker for paying for a service that is continuously enshittified and can afford to do it because they have a virtual monopoly.

On the hosting side there's an army of programmers hell-bent on increasing engagement and ad revenue at any and all cost, from UI changes (removing the dislike button

I still don't understand why they removed the dislike button. Isn't it going to help to serve people better content overall, and thus keep them around the platform longer, if people can downvote bad content? The only reason I could see for them removing the dislike button is if people were using it for what Google would consider to be "hateful" or "harassment", which of course Google is likely usually trying to crack down on to promote a general "we're not the bad guy" image that comes from seeming outwardly progressive.

They would never admit it, but it to me it was obvious Youtube removed visible dislikes because of the regular stream of Big Brand(tm) videos getting publicly tanked and the headlines that came with it. Game sequels revealing they were taking directions unasked for, trailers for movies heavy on The Narrative or nakedly vacuous in their creativity, cringey White House videos - all them and more were a subject to a routine phenomenon where the faceless public (or at least an engaged subset) could throw a big ol' pie the faces of institutions both public and private whenever they did something painfully stupid or miscalculated. And the power in that was knowing that when you thought something was bad, you could be sure you were not alone.

Probably only takes some polite requests to Youtube's management to curb that. And like so much else lately, it can be justified under some bullshit about protecting the little guy from hate - even though I don't think I've heard a single creator big or small being supportive of it.

I'm saying a lot of people seem outraged that the people providing content want to make money from it.

We have an overabundance of content. I would prefer that people producing content did that because they enjoyed the process and not because they thought they could make a SaaS startup out of it or earn enough ad revenue to make a living.

Since geographical restrictions don't work (if I am a videoblogger in Utopia where I can work 20 hours a week in a grocery store and spend 20 hours videoblogging, but I also have to work 20 hours a week in a grocery store, it makes sense to me to move to the US if I am popular and start telling people how good NordVPN is instead of stacking shelves), making content creation generally unprofitable worldwide is a good Gideonic filter.

Plus there's the whole thing about us writing ourselves out of existence by using ad blockers as far as advertising - and in turn everyone in power - is concerned.

I see, and I can't say I disagree myself. Google is well within their rights to monetize YouTube, not that, rights aside, I'm not going to keep on circumventing it as long as it's feasible!

Hmm.. You'd think nation-states would attempt to host their own video sites, but I suppose the free market seems to be doing alright for most purposes.

I refuse to pay or watch ads for Google specifically, because they have shown themselves to be ideologically opposed to me and prepared to devote their resources to removing and hiding things I agree with and want to watch or read. I do have direct paid subscriptions to several creators via Patreon and a paid subscription to Nebula where I watch videos that are interesting and not ideologically opposed to me, as they give their creators a significant direct cut.

It's pretty challenging to consistently and definitively refuse to give any form of support to these massive monopolies that have shown their dedication to squashing my ideology, but I do what I can, and I feel no qualms about cheating them and taking advantage of them any way that is convenient.

a lot of people who absolutely hate ads and paywalls still expect free content to magically keep being produced for them.

Correct. I absolutely expect this. And why, I hear you ask? I reasonably expect this for the exact same reason a medieval lord could expect food to be provided to him by his peasants. End of story.

I don't know if you're being ironic or edgy or you think you sound like a chad or something, but you are not a medieval lord. You neither provide protection and security for content creators (the medieval lord's theoretical obligation in return for his provisions) nor do you have an army with which to go pillage them (the actual means by which they extracted it). So go on expecting whatever you want, it doesn't change the equation.

neither provide protection and security for content creators

My taxes (and the taxes of the people like me) absolutely do provide protection and security for the rest of society. Now many of these content creators themselves are smart enough to themselves be in the group of people who produce net value and I agree they should be paid (the 6hr 1st Crusade link is absolutely amazing from the first 30 minutes or so that I've seen so far, the world is a better place for it existing), but we do have a way to pay for them, namely the taxes of me and the likes of me, which would be much better of being handed to these people for their time so they can create stuff like this rather than handing it out in housing benefit to keep poors living in expensive locations they couldn't otherwise afford (and thereby not only burning taxpayer cash but also causing a deadweight loss as high desirability accommodation close to high productivity centres gets consumed by low skilled people instead of those who can exploit such an envionment to the fullest).

It is not that I expect these people (specifically) to provide high quality content to me for free, it is more that I expect to be provided high quality content for free by virtue of my position in society and how much I contribute to it.

nor do you have an army with which to go pillage them

There effectively is an army which goes and pillages the likes of me for my taxes on threat of being jailed, and then freely celebrates this pillaging. All I ask is that it be equally turned on the lower classes when they protest, yet again, about wanting even more of the societal surplus generated by the productive being redirected to them, and then showing absolutely zero thanks for what they are given.

So go on expecting whatever you want, it doesn't change the equation.

The point of my expectation is not in a hope that the world will change, I'm far too cynical for that, it's more for my own self to have zero moral pangs when I download and run more and more complicated scripts to keep on breaking anti-adblock. In the end if I have a device that I have full control over, there really isn't much YouTube or anyone else can do to control the exact content I see or that I don't see, they can only make my life hard, but not stop what I do on my own device.

The point is that when I do avoid ads I will not feel bad inside about depriving creators of their livelihoods, but rather feel good inside for asseting my control over my own device.

Here in the UK you are not allowed to turn left on a red light (the equivalent to right turn on red in the US), however back home where I am from it's permitted in certain locations, including my birthtown and its environs. When I am on my bike I freely turn left on red lights if it is safe to do so and do not feel bad about it at all, while not feeling the same way for breaking a light by going straight through. I basically consider it my birthright to turn left on red, something that is given to me by virtue of my birth and denied to the native brits purely based on where they were born (now they can change their law if they want to, and I think it would be sensible, but that's up to them).

To be honest with you I would freely turn left on red when driving as well were it not for the fact that cars have number plates and I'd get fined. So I don't do it. However I don't see this restriction as "yet another traffic rule" but rather as an undue and unfair restriction rather than a just law that has the "mandate of heaven". I see such a rule as being in the same class of rules that punish using a VPN in China. I wouldn't consider someone using one a "bad person", even though technically they broke the law, same here I would not consider a person that constantly turns left on red when safe to do so a bad person in a way that I would consider someone who breaks red lights to be bad.

However the British government does not have the bandwidth to stop all cyclists turning left on red (just like how China does not have the bandwidth to stop all VPNs), and so I freely do it, and when I do it I feel good about myself, because claiming what you are rightfully entitled to is not something to be ashamed of at all, but rather something to be proud of. If the government stopped fining cars that turned left on red I would start turning left on red as well, even though i the equivalent scenario where the government stopped fining cars that broke red lights by going striaght through I would not start going straight through. This is because I fundamentally believe I have an entitlement to turn left on red, while I have no such entitlements to run red lights. Whenever I turn left on red on my bike I feel good inside, but when I break red lights on red my internal moral compass tells me that I just did something wrong.

I have zero expectations that my belief and the beliefs of those who think like me make it at all any more likely that the government is likely to legalise left turns on red at all, but that's not the point of it, the point is for my own moral compass to see my actions as right and just vs wrong and a mere artifice. Same with my beliefs about what I am entitled to with online content, the point is for me to feel good and right and just as I apply the latest patch that continues to break whatever anti-adblock script YouTube et. al. are now pushing.

I mean, subscriptions or ads, those are really your only choices

I have deep aversion to paying Google, for multiple reasons. I would be far more likely to pay actual content creators, not middleman and infrastructure provider.

Interesting, I sort of grudgingly pay Google for infrastructure services (like fiber). I like their services there, and I'd be happy to pay that amount to most companies; it's that it's Google that bothers me, because I'm bothered by much of the rest of their business and politics.

I wonder if there are themes that we can connect to other topics. Maybe it's really the "middleman" role that people don't like. Though, I imagine this is connected to the general concern that, on the internet, middlemen tend to be successful due to network effects rather than making better products. Everyone goes to YouTube, because all the content is on YouTube, not necessarily because they built a better platform for distributing video. (Though, their platform is quite good at distributing video... save for all the ad annoyances.)

So, perhaps this is a bit of a hangover of the FOSS movement. If it's just a thing that performs a middleman function, people think that it could be mostly provided by a FOSS solution. I suspect that this intuition is mostly not wrong; it would be easy to have a FOSS solution that replaces YouTube. Wikipedia is similar here. One salient difference is that storing/hosting all that video is much more costly than storing/hosting Wikipedia. We just had the Elon-inspired hullabaloo about how much money is going to Wikipedia, so perhaps it's the same intuition.

Perhaps, then, setting aside one of the primary problems with FOSS (that the proprietary folks try super hard to make their products incompatible with FOSS solutions; see Microsoft trying desperately to "update" their file types to break Linux software), we could think about what "ideal" solutions to this problem could look like that comport with people's intuition.

I think everyone's happy to pay content providers in some way. And everyone is happy to pay for the storing/hosting costs in some way. The question is, "What is the right mechanism to get these prices paid without succumbing to huge monopoly rents of a network-entrenched middleman?"

One idea would be to break the trust into two different components. One component is only responsible for the base hosting of things, and the other is responsible for attaching ads to content. That is, all of the ad revenue would go to the creators and Company A, who selects which ads to show for which videos. Then, Company B would be responsible just for deliverying the content provided by Company A/creators to the end user. This would still leave the question of how to pay for Company B. Long ago, back in 2009 when YouTube was bleeding money, Slate estimated, YouTube's badwidth costs at about $360M/yr. Ignoring the licensing fees they cite (because hypothetical Company B won't have those), their top number was about $450M/yr. Back in 2009. It's certaintly more expensive now. Let's just say it's $500M-1B/yr, just for data storage/distribution. How do we actually figure out how to pay for that without stuffing Company B right back into the ad chain? Even the bloated amount of donations that go to Wikipedia wouldn't scratch the surface of that price tag.

For audio podcasts, competition can work really well and easily. The cost of storing/distributing just audio is far cheaper, so creators/folks like Company A could easily and cheaply be hosted on several different podcast apps. But with video, in order to have multiple competing storing/distribution companies, you'd either need to have all of them simultaneously dumping $500M-$1B/yr into storage/distribution, or more likely, the landscape would fracture into, "We're the storage/distribution company that has exclusive rights to Creators X, Y, and Z," that we're seeing with other streaming services. I'm not sure I'm actually seeing any good options.

As I sort of mentioned above, Google is no stranger to the idea of commoditizing your complement in order to make sure that it's not fucked/annoying to people enough to cause problems for your own business. That's the idea of Google Fiber. They're perfectly happy to run it as a very simple, no bullshit, fee-for-subscription model. They don't inject ads into the general traffic that comes into your house on the fiber. But the only folks with any sort of pull in the matter who would want to commoditize the storing/distributing complement would be the creators. Unfortunately, they're diffuse enough that it is hard to imagine them being able to come together and say, "Enough is enough. YouTube's pushing of ever more ads and taking bigger proportions are cutting into our share, too. We should band together, all contribute some amount to set up a true competitor that either doesn't have a subscription cost or has a minimial one, but which is foundationally committed to not adding ads beyond what the individual creator chooses to add.

This would probably start off looking like a worse proposition than YouTube to most creators. "You want me to handle my own ads and pay to have you host my content? Right now, YouTube automatically does the ad bullshit for me, and I just get a check, not write one." So, I imagine that significant capital would have to be risked to keep prices for them very low while independent ad companies could develop which "handle the ad component" for them. Would be very difficult to get off the ground.

Without, of course, just government anti-trust efforts decreeing that Google split up YouTube hosting/distributing in some way from the broader business. But I'm really not sure how exactly they'd be able to get a decree to work here either.

With Google I hate several of things they did. Mostly free software adjacent stuff, latest case is so called "web environment integrity" (and by integrity they mean that corporations can control how your browser behaves).

And they are simply overly large and overly powerful. I dislike idea of funding cyberpunk type dystopia, and fully blocking their ads and badgering is not taking much.

Then turn that into a deep aversion to using their products.

I am not obligated to do this. I am using Youtube without Google ads and without paying and plan to continue it as long as my methods are working. Or until Google turns extremely evil.

I am also in process of migrating away one of services that become paid relatively recently.

Why not propose to build our own internet while you're at it?

I'm not complaining that content has to be monetized. But youtube did make it work for a long time with their existing model, so they must have been doing at least somewhat alright.

And there are ads that I'd be happy with, like non-video ads. @netstack mentioned a video-only adblocker, which I'd be happy with.

And lots of content creators I watch have sponsorship worked into the video. That's fine, too. But youtube's current solution is the most obtrusive and debilitating way of going about it, for all reasons I stated above and that others stated throughout this thread, that just about ruins the platform for me.

Google became the advertising behemoth it is today by creating an ad network that promised to be (and for a long time delivered on being) non-intrusive at a time when online advertising was getting extremely obnoxious. It's a bit disappointing to see them stoop to these practices now that they have no real competition, but such is the way of things. Maybe a new competitor will arise to take advantage of the situation like they once did.

I have YT Revanced on mobile, and it doesn't need a rooted phone anymore.

On PC, after they messed with Ublock Origin, I found a tampermonkey script that worked, but then UO itself got updated to avoid the adblock detectors.

I don't see them winning the battle in the longterm, there are far too many legacy clients for them to easily succeed in their endeavors, even if they're trying harder than ever.

Revanced stopped working for me back in June-ish. It still works for you?

Newpipe is even better than revanced.

Are you using the old version? The one I have has a patching app that can handle multiple different apps, as well as create a new YT client by modifying the apk. It works perfectly.

There are a couple podcasts I'll listen to, not live, on youtube and some of them (but not others) will now have ads at like 1 every three minutes. And instead of just giving me a 5 second ad and moving on, it's this long shit that needs to be manually skipped after 5 seconds. It renders passive listening on youtube completely impossible.

I am unsure why some content gets this treatment and others do not. Is it chosen by the creator or an algorithm?

The frequency of the ads is in the hands of the creator but they can't choose to not have ads at all and some other restrictions (like not being able to put all the ads at the end etc.)

Not anymore. Back in the day, the creator could choose whether to enable ads in the first place, and for smaller channels, below the monetization threshold, there were no ads at all. Then YT took it out of their hands, even if the person in question gets no cut of the money.

That's one surprising benefit of being at war and under sanctions. Google was probably afraid of showing Ukrainian political ads to Russians and getting blocked altogether, so there are no ads here at all.

Just pay?

If that wasn't a worse experience than using an adblock or sponsor block..

How is it worse?

Bruh. You're welcome to try it and see for yourself.

YT without additional client-side mods is nagware filth full of Tiktok shit in the form of shorts, endless sponsor sections per video, awful community posts because what a video platform needs to be is social media too, and no end of miscellaneous garbage.

I have and I have not really experienced what you describe or don't care.

Maybe this is an app/browser thing? I almost only ever used the app for the past 8 years so I've not bothered to optimise the web client, perhaps there is a large difference there?

The one thing you mention that I have seen is the shorts. But that is one recommendation second from the top of the feed which I just scroll past and I'm not bothered by again, and occasionally the shorts are of interest to me.

It's possible we have very different tolerances, or what I consider severe annoyances aren't so for you.

The YT app by default is clogged with bullshit that gets in the way of my primary use case, which is to see videos from people I'm subscribed to, as well as occasional fresh recommendations. When I open it right now, even using a patched app, the entire front page is taken up by crap I'm not interested in, like live streams, shorts, or playlists.

Further, my modified client has a ton of QOL feature that YT either never had or has deprecated, like forcing video resolution and so on.

Strange. Some of that I have literally never seen promoted, like live streams.

The one gripe i do agree with is the promoted playlists (mixes), that is completely useless to me and I would like to disable the feature. It's not a major issue, it takes a millisecond to scroll past but it is a completely unnecessary annoyance and I dont see why they wouldn't allow you to disable this.

Furthermore, I might have agreed with you more a few years ago (4+ maybe), when the recommendation algorithm was pure garbage, but as it is now I rely more on the algorithm than subscriptions anyway. First off, the rexommendqtions are pretty good and include plenty of things I wouldn't have found ok my own and it also solves the issue of creators that make different kinds of content on same channel, only some of which I'm interested in, which used to be a frequent problem for me.

I'm quite happy with the recommendations myself, I guess we simply have different thresholds for annoyance.

I still suggest you try a modded client yourself, if you're feeling conscientious you could still pay for Premium and use it too, I think you'd find that acceptable right?

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This is what I've been doing for years, starting back when Google Music became a thing, because subscription to that also came with a subscription to YouTube Red (a terrible name for their premium service, given the existence of RedTube - though still preferable to calling it YouTube One like every single brand in existence has been doing the last decade). Once Google Music got shuttered I just kept the YouTube Red subscription at the same price.

Of course, this makes me the sucker who got baited into a service I didn't initially want and stuck with it just out of laziness and inertia. I rationalize it that $10/mo is worth it for the hours I must save not watching ads on YT, to say nothing of the disruption and annoyance, but that rationalization is going to be harder for others depending on their circumstances, I admit.

Paying a small fee for a service you use a lot doesn't sound like being a sucker.

It can be when you're accustomed to not paying, and you see plenty of others not paying. If free riding is an option, why not take it? In this case, it's partly the extra convenience and the little warm and fuzzy feeling I get from doing things above board, but, again, that seems just like rationalizations that I'm telling myself so I don't feel too much like a sucker.

In this case, it's partly the extra convenience and the little warm and fuzzy feeling I get from doing things above board, but, again, that seems just like rationalizations that I'm telling myself so I don't feel too much like a sucker.

It's rationalisations all the way down!

Seriously though, what do you use for music now, you don't use YouTube music? It sucks so much, but I haven't found another music streaming service that will let me upload several thousand tracks to it (and I assume youtube wouldn't let me these days either.)

I decided to just embrace streaming and use YT music now. It's good enough for my needs, since I'm not the type of person to listen to music much, and the few times I feel like putting something on, just a YT recommended playlist does the job well enough. I've also actually come around to not hating discoverability - i.e. YT recommending music to me that I hadn't listened to before.

Am I a sucker for not stealing from my local grocery store or not paying for PT? I'm sure I could get away with both with little to no negative consequences.

You wouldn't steal a car.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg?si=KHIsWoGo3JgSvR5Q

Ignoring the discussion about IP, you're not copying here. You're literally stealing.

Ad blocking on a streaming site seems less like stealing to me than what the "you wouldn't steal a car" campaign was targeting. In the streaming ad-block case, you're just finding clever ways around certain aspects of the APIs/functionality that they're already putting forth. In the downloading movie case, those movies were never supposed to be put up for distribution on the pirating sites to begin with.

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Yeah the number of people who just expect to never pay for anything and think it's some kind of moral statement on their part... Fundamentally unserious. Pay, watch ads, don't use their product. Three very easy choices.

There's no way I'm incentivizing them to do this. I'm very stingy, I barely pay for any services.

I don't like it, but I just swallow the little bit of poison. I mostly watch YouTube on mobile, where it's already more trouble than it's worth to try to get around the ads.

The biggest point of friction for me is that the "skip" feature effectively guarantees I have to be constantly ready to interact with the screen while watching long-form content, since there is seemingly no limit on the length of advertised content if it's skippable - I'm routinely served videos 30 minutes or longer. It's inconvenient when I have something on in the background while doing housework and I'm not near the phone, or occasionally if I'm watching or listening to long-form content in bed.

The straightforward solution is just to pay the $9 a month for YouTube Premium. I pay more per month for streaming services that I spend many fewer hours per month watching than YouTube. Like you say, it's an incredibly valuable platform in terms of access to information and breadth of content. The fact that I haven't paid up is all the evidence I need that the inconvenience of the ads is minor, and fleeting.

I mostly watch YouTube on mobile, where it's already more trouble than it's worth to try to get around the ads.

If you have an Android, you should check out NewPipe.

It seems inconsistent on my end. Sometimes they insist, sometimes they don't - whenever a video tries to play ads, I just close it and re-open it in a private window in firefox. Those are spared somehow.

I just close it and re-open it in a private window in firefox. Those are spared somehow.

Going to a private window would mark you as a new user. It makes sense for Google not to enforce restrictions too harshly on new users. Google wants you to get addicted to the service first.

The obvious downside of this is that you can't login to preserve your watch history / subscribe / get recommendations.

You can still remain logged in and subscribe to channels or add videos to lists on your regular firefox window; just use private windows to actually watch whatever comes with ads. Yeah, recommendations may not work, but search still does.

I can live with the downsides here, at least as it is now.

I don't have any particular plan right now. I am firm on not caring to watch much youtube on any platform where I have to suffer through their full ads.

Things are weirdly erratic right now. I expect Youtube and uBlock Origin are actively fighting each other. Some devices can play video normally sometimes, and other times get the blocked video thing. Other devices it works fine every time. Firefox without being logged into Google and a bunch more ad and script blockers seems to work pretty consistently. I set up a redirector Chrome plugin to redirect youtube watch links to an invidious instance, which also seems to work pretty well but is a bit clunkier. Using yt-dlp to download videos and watch on desktop is also an option.

I also already got a paid subscription to Nebula, since I figure there's enough quality interesting content to be worth paying for, and reportedly a fair amount goes to the creators.

Those are cool ideas. I was also thinking of maybe using YouTube-dl for downloading videos and watching offline.

Use uBlock Origin. Youtube change the implementation slightly quite often though, but all you have to do then is to go into the dashboard for uBlock Origin (icon with 3 gears), purge all caches and click Update Now. I've been told that YT will probably never change the platform to such an extent that this solution won't work.

I love uBlock Origin. Learning how that extension work made my web-browsing so many times easier!

The only sites on my whitelist are my bank, Substack and the Motte.

The best part is that it's not just ads. You can block any user-hostile elements you want. For example, I got rid of the fluff and junk on fandom.com so their wikis were actually readable.

I actually re-activated it for my bank page because they started adding weird elements I found annoying on the dashboard and I could kill them with uBlock.

Thanks! I'll try it out. I've seen people in Reddit mention it, but there are a lot of people mentioning malware programs, trying to take advantage of people's panic, so I didn't know if uBlock origin was to be trusted or not

It's legit for sure. Btw, close any active tabs that are showing YT before doing the purge thing. Might have to restart the browser afterward too.

In the immortal words of Peter Griffin: Oh, my God, who the hell cares?

Why don't you just hit the mute button and let the ads play while you browse in another browser tab? Did your parents fail to teach to you the overwhelming importance of the TV remote's mute button when you watched traditional television with them, two or three decades ago? I don't understand why people complain so much about watching a few short seconds of advertisements in exchange for dozens of minutes of FREE video.

It's my understanding that, if you don't skip until the 30-second mark, then the ad counts as having been "watched", so the uploader still gets paid. There's at least one Chrome extension that you can set up to automatically skip ads after the 30-second mark. I don't know whether Safari has anything similar.

YouTube intentionally makes it very difficult to actively avoid ads. You’ll be served a varying number of varying-length ads, some of which are skippable after certain periods, and others which aren’t. If such an extension exists, it’s probably a good solution, but it’s historically always been better just to toss the whole edifice.

When I switched to Firefox I was on board with a video-only adblocker. Sidebar and banner ads are both fine by me. But YouTube has really gone all or nothing, so that’s out.

For what it’s worth, the period in which I started to be annoyed by TV ads was right around the time I discovered video games. The consequences were obvious.

Ooh, yeah, a video-only adblocker would be great. It's too bad Youtube is taking this hardline stance.

The creators I watch are generally demonetized anyway, so google just makes money off of their work without compensating them.

No. I'd rather not watch videos at all then.

If muting ads and sitting there works for your lifestyle, good for you

Sooo. What are your plans for surviving the YouTube ad-pocalypse?

Brave Browser and https://piped.kavin.rocks/ (it's a bit unreliable though).

It's not like I think it's immoral or wrong for Google to pull this, but it does bother me. YouTube has been around for so long, it's life a part of my life.

Wow. Personally I am unable to retain literally any positive feelings for any of the major platforms, no matter how big of a part of my life they are.

will drive them towards other less restrictive platforms.

Why would such platforms survive? Surely, if Google has to exploit "sources of revenues" because "budgets are tighter, bubbles are popping", smaller institution will have to. Or is google in a particularly bad situation?

Well, I can't say that I know for a fact other platforms would be able to survive. But I bet that there will be a bunch that would be willing to try, to fill in the gap of YouTube. I also think it's likely that some Big tech companies are in very different situations than small ones, enough that they may want to try to cash in their chips where others may not

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