ublock origin is still one step ahead of them (at least on firefox) but you may need to go into the extension settings and purge then update all your filter lists. The copy of Invidious I installed on my NAS is even more steps ahead.
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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ublock origin is still one step ahead of them (at least on firefox) but you may need to go into the extension settings and purge then update all your filter lists.
Specific instructions can be found here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/6089078
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NewPipe doesn't show ads.
Just googled this also but similar issue to freetube? Just an app to the same service if I understand correctly?
If the people you watch only upload to YouTube, how would they be available on other services?
Yes obviously there is a problem here exactly like the reddit to lemmy problem. Just another obstacle but thats okay. Probably it is solvable.
For video hosting? Good luck, that's almost certainly never going to happen. There is not one single competitor to Youtube even from corporations, there is no way any decentralised solution will work long term, especially not if you are expecting features like 4k or 60fps+ content.
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Peertube is like early Youtube - people making videos for whoever might happen to be interested, without monetary incentive. Plus a lot of crazy mixed in.
Now I generally avoid all "free" commercial services that expect you to pay with your data or by watching ads.
If I want professionally made content, I have to pay real money for it, because making that content costs real money.
But there's also still lots of people out there who make content for the fun of it, and it's equally fun to explore that.
I want to like it but... It sucks. :/
I would love if it didn't. Lemmy for example does not suck, neither does mastadon. But peertube.... It sucks.
It's not the fault of the service. It sucks because the content is just not there. So it's people's fault for not using it, but of course they don't, since the users are not there.
I checked it out last night. I really wanted to like it, but man, it sucks. There's currently very little content that I like and it seems to be a lot slower to load and navigate than YouTube. Even when i found something that I liked, the video kept buffering and buffering. It was overall a horrible experience. And i tried a couple instances. They all had those issues.
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ReVanced for youtube. This links to a Lemmy post of how to install. It also has a FAQ page if interested
Seconded. I'm about 9 months into revanced after vanced got shut down and its virtually identical. 15 min install with easy step by step guides to enjoy the good youtube has to offer without all the shit.
Also you can add or remove features you like/dislike which is a big benefit.
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Ok, if I remember correctly, YouTube barely generates, but generates nonetheless revenue for Google. There are many ways to make more money without fucking over its users by cutting costs:
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downgrade old videos with small watch count to 720p30
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make people pay for hosting >1080p60 content
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do not allow private/unlisted videos
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straight up remove 10h looped videos - they take so much space, but are technically spam - both for bandwidth and storage
And my go-to solution: focus on sponsorships as main source of revenue. They are the only ads I can tolerate and are actually effective from my experience. YouTube can just take a cut from every sponsorship on YouTube video and everyone will be happy.
Sponsorblock addon is a must for me nowadays
The old business model could not last forever… and even if it could it was not good for anyone.
Think about it
Hosting videos is expensive, someone has to pay for it. It was mostly paid by ads. Ads which many (most people) would block and many people would not ever click even when not blocked. But it still made money… The money come only from ads which 1) where not blocked 2) where at least clicked. The business relied on that.
So YT relied on ads targeting people who did not know how to block ads and people easy to manipulate by the ads (eager to buy whatever they are trying to sell). Probably not the brightest. Or just easy to be taken advantage of. So the incentive would be to promote content for those people. Not good content, not true content, just content that makes ads viewed and clicked.
People using ad-blocks were still affected by those who do not. And whole site was optimized for advertises not viewers or content creators. And that is bad.
I am all in favour of any direct form of payments instead of ads powering the internet. Sites get very little money for each view anyway – so the prices for users should also be quite small.
Unfortunately as long as ads are supposed to be normal part of internet, they may get forced even onto paying customers. We need regulations.
People were okay with ads, then YouTube started making them obnoxious. Ads every 2 minutes, postroll ads that interfere with autoplay, incredibly long "ads" which mean you need to watch YouTube like a hawk to make sure your 5 minute video hasn't been interrupted by an hour long ad you need to manually skip.
There's a balance that people need to be happy with a service, and if the service doesn't provide that then people will use things like adblockers to get it themselves. It's the same thing that happened with the first "adpocalypse" that brought about most of the big name adblockers in the first place: people were okay with unobtrusive ads, then advertisers started running popups, overlays, autoplay videos, fake system notifications, on and on and on. The advertising became so disruptive people were unable to use sites without adblockers. And so the cycle repeats.
YouTube brought this on themselves.
This is my problem with YouTube’s ads. If it was a 5-15 second video ad at the beginning/between videos, plus a banner ad or ads on the side/page, that could be sufferable. But constantly interrupting videos at random points for long ass ads does not mesh well with a short-video platform.
And I also enjoy reminding people whenever I get the chance that the FBI recommends using an adblocker for security/safety reasons: https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221
That's where I'm at as well. For a long time I didn't bother with adblocking on my TVs and a few other devices because I could tolerate 1-2 ads before every video and the occasional mid-roll ad on the longer videos. Then they started ramping things up; it was when I got 10 ads on a 6 minute video, 7 of which were the same ad that I'd finally had enough. I'm not going back, they can get bent.
I wouldn't mind paying a little bit of money every month to get YouTube ad free. However, it costs €12 a month. That's a lot of money if you only care about getting rid of ads. I personally don't need the other features (downloading videos, background play and YouTube music). If they added a 5 to 7 euro a month tier through which you could get rid of ads then that would be much more interesting to me. Now I just feel like I should keep looking for ways around their pop up shenanigans.
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lol, every one of these threads has a highly upvoted corporate shill comment.
And it's virtually guaranteed that this comment will be replied to in a paternalistic, condescending manner by a for-real-actual-lemmy-user who is only spouting Google's talking points because they realize how hard and expensive it is to host a video website you guys.
YouTube pays five-year-old "influencers" millions of dollars. Obviously this is because it is losing money which is your fault for using an adblocker. 🙄
I'm not sure the comment calling for regulation is a corporate shill. It's a pretty level-headed look at things imo, because the truth is YT cannot afford to operate for free. We live in a system that just doesn't allow that, for better or worse. Unfortunately, the way we went about funding things on the internet (outside of ridiculous amounts of capital flowing to startups for years, which doesn't really apply to YT/Google) was ads, and they have gotten wildly out of hand. This is on top of an insane amount of data harvesting. We have to face the reality that any major, data-heavy platform like YT is going to need significant revenue.
We need a solution to either lower the cost of (opening things up for individuals to host), or more efficiently fund, services we like if they're going to stick around in the current state of the world. Even if we say "google can eat the cost" we're still putting all our faith in the goodwill of an entity that is designed to do the opposite of what we're asking. That's begging for issues.
Peer-to-peer stuff is the best solution I've seen, or self-hosting. I'm far from an expert, but from what I understand the tech just isnt there yet for it to become the norm. All that data has to go somewhere, and storage is prohibitively expensive at a certain point.
Hosting videos is expensive, someone has to pay for it.
That's what Bittorrent is for.
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I'd be in favor of direct payments too if any of the money actually made it to the content creators I watch. As it it most of their videos wind up demonitized so I'm not going to pay youtube just so youtube can pay copyright trolls. If they started pushing back against the people/companies filing false copyright claims then I would be willing to pay. But we all know that won't happen.
Not to mention cases where they demonetize a video/channel and still run ads on it 🙄
Apparently the content isn't advertiser-friendly enough to pay the creators, but it IS advertiser friendly enough to advertise on.
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Update your ad blocker, you only get that when it's out of date
Libretube. Get v0.19 or higher, youtube just screwed around with its code and broke v0.18. I love how it works with sponsor block to even skip those "this video is brought to you by xyz incorporated, be sure to Yada Yada Yada..." segments.
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I don't understand this. And not saying it to stir up hate, or troll. This came up for me, I closed the pop-up, and watched the video with no ads. It only added a single click to the whole thing. And they've since gone away for me. Don't know why they stopped, though they have.
I think the term is A-B testing. When a company wants to see what effect a change will have, they don't force it on everyone at once, just on a certain number of people (A), and then see what happens compared to the rest (B).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/A-B_testing_example.png
This is why you'll always get people saying, "Huh, I haven't seen that. It's not doing it for me on [browser]." They're in the (B) group...for now.
The data the company wants is to know if, do the test people like the change (or are at least willing to tolerate it)? Or do they spend less time on the site? If so, how much? If the results are within their predictions, they'll expand the testing until everyone is in (A).
There can also be A-B-C-D-etc testing, where some people who get the blocking windows would be able to close it, and some wouldn't. How many of each ended up disabling their adblock?
This also helps to "boil the frog", where they can slowly get people used to the idea that this is happening, rather than having a whole wave of surprised outrage at once.
I believe Google is "testing" it right now, so for some people it's been slowly escalating to where they were allowed 3 videos before it stopped them from watching anymore videos with the ad blocker enabled.
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I moved to YouTube premium a few years ago, family subscription, to share with up to 5 people. YouTube is my main source of entertainment and the 15 bucks total (or whatever the conversion rate is) is less than 90 minutes of a movie in a cinema, nit even including transportation and snacks. I get my news, tech news/reviews, tutorials, documentaries, inspiration and laughs on there. I watch it while getting ready in the morning, on my lunch break and for a longer while in the evening. I share it with 2 other people so it works out to around 5 bucks a month. And the creators I like get a big portion of that.
Sure, around 60 bucks a year might sound a lot, but it's the only service I pay for (except the 2 bucks a month Disney plus trial until December). As a small bonus YouTube music transformed my Google home devices into a multi-room audio Sonos alternative for under 1/3 of the price.
I still use NewPipe on my phone for downloads for offline use and yt-dlp for content I want to hoard.
Actual unpopular opinion: get yt premium. It gives creators the money they would've got for you watching an ad, while giving you an ad free experience, and also includes yt music which might take some adjustments if you're used to Spotify, but then you will also not be supporting Spotify which is probably the worst streaming service in terms of paying artists.
(They're all bad and many people would argue similarly against supporting Google via YouTube, so perhaps it's a moot point, but that's part of how I justify my sub to myself anyways.)
Lol no. Youtube pays way less then spotify to the artists. Tidal and bandcamp are the only "ok" options.
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Or you could just become a member of their channel. I look at it this way though. If a youtuber I'm watching has lots of subscribers, one more member in that community probably isn't going to make a difference. If a youtuber I'm watching doesn't have the subscriber numbers they deserve, I will become a member. I always choose the highest tiers for them too. And join their patreon and do the same there. If I do that, I will actually listen/watch on patreon then put both YouTube versions in my watch list for when I need background noise and just upvote both videos.
That way they get all the things I can possibly do for them without giving youtube as much as I give the creators. This is my understanding of how that works though. With premium, if they actually give any of that money to the creators (my heart says no, corporations suck), it would be way less than the channel membership would give them. I don't actually know how much premium costs though.
Please do correct me if I'm wrong. At the moment I don't have very many people on my memberships. And I know most people these days probably can't afford to do that, but even a $1 or $2 membership to one or a couple of them can make a difference to the ones you really support and who probably need it more than they'd get from premium.
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I still haven’t encountered this. Use FF with updated uBO filter lists and you should be fine.
If you are visiting YT on mobile, ReVanced has been working perfectly for me on Android. I'm not sure if there is cross-platform support, but there are alternatives to traditional adblockers out there.
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