this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 401 points 1 year ago (17 children)

These tech companies have underestimated their utility. They are mostly providing mindless time wasters. If you try to charge money or create inconvenience, people will look for something else to do.

Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere. The VC grow-at-all-costs business model is fundamentally flawed. It doesn’t scale when profitability becomes a priority.

[–] [email protected] 183 points 1 year ago

i think you mean "overestimated"

[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)

Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere.

👍

My attention is all the currency YouTube will ever get from me - and it should be enough. If I post videos to YouTube (for nothing in return) and I talk to people about videos I saw on YouTube or link them to videos - then I am a net gain for Google and they should treat me as such. If anything, they should be working (nicely) to try to get me to want to pay (or view ads) and just be thankful I'm there if I don't pay (or view ads). Instead they've chosen to work at ensuring everyone is so goddamn pissed off at their bullshit that they'd rather make it their full-time job to never give them another dime. Good job, Google! Smart!

Edit: Oh look, half a dozen lectures about how Google has to make money somehow. Hi there YouTube shills, I thought I would see you here.

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[–] [email protected] 237 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are no better adblockers, uBlock Origin is all you need and is already updated to bypass it.

[–] [email protected] 113 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unlock origin is the adblocker that people are installing. There are a lot of people with shitty adblockers out there, I guess they are switching.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I bet all those people with shitty adblockers are also probably googling better ad/YT compatible blockers lmaoo

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[–] [email protected] 187 points 1 year ago (17 children)

After YouTube started filling their search results with mostly shorts, I stopped using it for new stuff. It's terrible now.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah youtubes attempt at being tiktok is just awful and they don't even have options to not have shorts show up in the feed. On top of shorts just being inferior versions of regular videos without functional controls

[–] [email protected] 84 points 1 year ago (4 children)

This is what gets me. Wanna show me shorts? Ok. But why the fuck am I not allowed to rewind a couple of seconds if I want to? It's an artificial, completely useless limitation that had no place in 2023.

So, no thanks.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I started blocking those from appearing when they first showed up. There are a number of ways to do it. The Blocktube extension is one.

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[–] [email protected] 155 points 1 year ago (32 children)

Didn’t know about SponsorBlock until all this started. So many just found out ad blocking is possible.

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[–] [email protected] 150 points 1 year ago (11 children)

There’s also the option of biting the bullet and paying for YouTube Premium.

No. Never. I'd rather stop using YT at all than giving in to coerced user-tracking.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I mean, I might have considered paying for YT premium if I thought it offered some value (other than disabling ads) but I won't sure as hell pay for anything that any company is trying to blackmail me into.

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[–] [email protected] 131 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I love that all the centralized social media networks are scrambling to become shitty for profits right around the time users are realizing that they don’t need centralized servers to host their user-generated content. Users can take their content wherever they want and let these platforms die.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm not sure if we manage to do the same for video though; hosting these costs a lot more.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Maybe we don't need 4K 60FPS video to show Mr. Beast giving away more crap. Just because we can up the quality, doesn't mean we should. Or maybe client-side real-time AI upscaling will make this a non-issue.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (7 children)

This 100%. Look at forums. Back in the early days, there were lots of little independent forums. Sites like Reddit took over because you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page. We gained convenience, but didn't think too hard about what we were losing or who we were losing it to. Then along came enshittification and we are collectively realizing what we lost. Federation is of course the solution. As I see it, the only missing piece is monetization. Platforms like YouTube make it easy to monetize page views, Twitter / X is doing the same. That's much harder in the fediverse.

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[–] [email protected] 98 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Youtube is a perfect example of why ad blockers exist. They use ridiculous ad volumes and spy on their users for data to sell.

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[–] [email protected] 90 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I love that, in a competition between a corporation worth hundreds of billions of dollars and a FOSS project, all Google managed to do was annoy uBlock Origin users for like a week. I just had to manually update the extension and restart my browser a few times.

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[–] [email protected] 84 points 1 year ago (9 children)

And they increased the fucking price for YouTube premium.

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 1 year ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (12 children)

Meanwhile, Youtube engineers and uBlock Origin volunteers are in a war of attrition, updating both the website (youtube, to block ublock) and uBlock Origin (the ad blocker, to unblock the ublock blocker) multiple times a day every day

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago

I feel like uBlock Origin has been coming out ahead more often than not. I haven't had to manually refresh my lists for the last few days.

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 1 year ago

Ublock Origin works

Brave is ass

[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Switched finally to ff. So I guess thank you google.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Spread the word to install firefox based browser, use different frontends to block youtube ads in browser, Invidious and use piped youtube apps on android to block youtbe ads: Newpipe

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago (16 children)

I had uBlock Origin installed since forever, are people just finding out about it?

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago (17 children)

NewPipe in my mobile and FreeTube in my desktop. Fuck you Google

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (21 children)

They should fucking do an experiment - 2€/$ a month for an ad-free subscription and 3€/$ a month for higher video quality+no ads subscription. I would fucking pour my money into it.

Oh wait, that would not solve lack of sponsorblock. I guess I am not interested then...

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (6 children)

They literally had that experiment with Premium Light. €6 for ad free watching, it was all I needed. But they literally sent out a mail they were stopping this tier right before they started implementing more anti-ad blocking measures.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Just this morning all the posts (here on Lemmy) were about how everyone was uninstalling their adblockers.

[–] [email protected] 133 points 1 year ago (6 children)

People should be uninstalling Chrome instead.

Adblocking still works fine on Firefox. Just update your UBO filters.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I literally have un-installed chrome. I had to use it on an office machine today and it felt weird.

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Why the fuck would anyone uninstall their ad blocker just because one site demands it? Whitelists exist for a reason.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That article was full of such blatantly misleading crap. Headline talks about record number of adblocker uninstalls, but the actual data says it was an uptick in both installs and uninstalls. In other words it was people cycling through different adblockers trying to find one that still worked.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (3 children)

And that didn't mention ublock origion, the blocker that still works...

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Not everybody is.

That's the thing, even if 95% of users currently using ad blockers block ads anyway or leave the service, YouTube still wins big.

They aren't worried at all about alienating users from which they can't extract ad revenue. Those on the margin that turn off ad blockers or subscribe to a paid plan are the target, not everyone else.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (8 children)

So today I've seen this article saying YouTube failed and another saying they've succeeded because of record uninstalls of adblockers.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago

who could have seen this coming

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't know what the whole fuzz was / is about, it's years now that I unwillingly watched ads, anywhere. So easy, piehole, newpipe, avoid any Microsoft shit, you just have to be ready to learn a bit, it's not rocket science. Ok, rocket science helped, but that's not the point...

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I dont even mind ads when its like one minute for 20 minutes of footage. Pluto TV is free to use and has commercial breaks but they never really bother me because they aren't that annoying and i get a lot of MST3K before I watch them. Youtube ad are cancer in comparison.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago

The race is on. Bitch.

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