> These filters have been obsolete since a long time, no content blockers is using these. They are just being spread by non-official sources since at least last June
The authors of the default filter lists definitely try and block these - the biggest problems seem to be YouTube changing things faster than the default filter lists normally auto-update, or other filters/extensions conflicting. Ref: https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/173jmog/youtu...
Maybe it's just A/B testing, but I got the "3 strikes and no more video playback" thing, which this DOM element blocking doesn't work around it seems :(
After years of procrastinating, I'm finally gonna get around to setting up a basic homelab to run pihole. Thanks, youtube execs and bean counters, for kicking my lazy ass into gear on this!
In a way, I kinda wish that ads worked as well as youtube suggestions. If one has good enough willpower / mental health to not use youtube as a coping device, suggestions are really amazing. I've seen so many great conference talks and other videos that have O(100) views that I would have never heard about otherwise. Ads, however, still think I'm gonna overpay for aliexpress drop-shipped items, or that I need to make a basic purchase into a way of life (e.g. that cooler company that now is somehow a lifestyle brand).
You're 100% correct. PiHole is a DNS adblocker so, essentially, it's only able to block whole domains. My understanding is Google puts YouTube ads behind the YouTube domain so if the PiHole blocked YouTube ads, it would block the entire YouTube website which defeats the purpose.
It's been awhile since I looked, but when I did a few years ago they had hundreds of subdomains for their videos (both regular and ads) and would rotate what they're used for all the time. That's why its basically impossible for PiHole to anything.
Paramount+ on apple tv just crashes immediately for me (before even the profile picker) when I have the apple tv using my pi-hole as its dns server.
It’s not even the biggest reason why PP is my least favorite streaming platform, since I have a workaround (cast from phone, which for some reason works).
I’m amazed some people would even consider subscribing to Paramount+… why? It’s yet another streaming platform ; arriving way too late in the game, and they don’t even have an interesting catalog. They just seem dead on arriving.
Viacom has a huge back catalog. Nickelodeon. Great alternative to Disney+ if the kids chews through it. It’s also just CBS All Access renamed, it’s not really late at all. It’s been around for a decade.
> For minimal system requirements, the Tube Archivist stack needs around 2GB of available memory for a small testing setup and around 4GB of available memory for a mid to large sized installation. Minimal with dual core with 4 threads, better quad core plus. This project requires docker. Ensure it is installed and running on your system.
I add all videos that I want to watch to a playlist and then run a script on my machine to download the videos. It will only download each video once as it keep tracks of downloaded videos through the file downloaded.txt so you can delete/move them freely. You can also add the script to a systemd timer or cron so to automate it.
This is the script: https://github.com/danisztls/yt-assistant. AFAIK the same can be done with a single line yt-dlp command and you can do the same to download all videos from a channel.
Mate if you get so much value from YouTube that you'll jump through these hoops just to use it without ads, why not just subscribe to premium? Personally it's by far my most bang-for-buck service.
I don’t know about OP, but, personally, the reason I don’t subscribe to premium is because they get aggressive on ads on purpose (waves of unskippable ads followed by a YouTube Premium subscription request the day after), which I believe is a dark pattern.
I would have been okay with paying for a subscription if it was to support the website or its creators – but I take manipulation attempts very badly.
I have a tiny channel that posts long (3-4 hours) gameplay videos and premium is 80% of my revenue. I do have mid-rolls and unskippable ads turned off, but in my experience those would only increase my ad revenue by 10-20%, i.e. premium would still be ~77% of my revenue. For reference the average view duration for my videos is ~25 minutes (premium pays by total watch time).
I wouldn’t even notice the subscription costs, but at this point Google has only succeeded in alienating me. I have disproportionately negative feelings about this.
If you had willingly jumped from ad block to premium any time in the last 5 years would you still feel alienated? Reacting to google blocking ad-blockers as a reason not to subscribe to premium is just rationalizing not paying creators for content.
I personally don't even remember what ads are like on Youtube and have zero idea how they've changed since the Youtube Red days.
I had Red through my google play music subscription but then they turned music into a YouTube nonsense app that removed features I liked and tripled the costs.
I'd subscribe to YouTube premium if it didn't bundle a music subscription and associated cost.
According to this article, when Youtube red was introduced in October 2015, it was $9.99/month. It's now $13.99/month. That's a 40% increase. If you adjust $9.99 in October 2015 for inflation to September 2023, it's $12.93/month. So inflation-adjusted, the price increased 8.2% from 2015 to now.
Your calculation doesnt take into account increases in income.
As mine has not increased since before 2015 then that would still be a 40% increase to me.
* Increases in income of the population then vs now, which would be good for comparing the economy then vs now (e.g. median income then vs now)
* Increases in income following cohorts, which would be good for see how on average individual people's income has risen due to both the economy and gained experience (e.g. 25 year old in 2015 would be 33 now, and thus likely make more money both due to population-wide changes (e.g. inflation) and due to having more work experience)
* Increases in income of a few individual people (the example you provided)
For the first one, this page[1], says that in 2021 dollars, the median US household income was $68410, and in 2022 (also in 2021 dollars) it was $74580. So adjusting those back to their in-year dollars, that would be $61,426.62 in 2015[2] and $86,662.50 in 2023[3]. So adjusting the Youtube Red/Premium price change, to those numbers, results in Youtube Red/Premium decreasing price by 0.7% once adjusted for the US population's medium household income.
For the second one, I think adjusting for that would should the price decreasing even more. Because each individual person's experience increases, so you would expect an individual's income to increase more than the population's income.
For the third one, I don't see how it's useful to look at a few examples. One person's income might have doubled, showing the Youtube Red/Premium dropped drastically in price. Another person's income might have halved, showing Youtube Red/Premium increases drastically in price. Another person might have become unemployed, showing Youtube Red/Premium's price increased by infinity %. Another person might have gone from unemployed to having a job, showing Youtube Red/Premium's price decreases from infinity % of income to non-infinity % of income, so basically a decrease by inifnity %.
I’m still grandfathered into my $7.99 per month plan. They did not raise the cost for existing subscribers. Which is the only reason I still subscribe. Google Music went away and YouTube Music is a mess so now I use Apple Music. I would not pay full price for YouTube premium but for $8 a month I can kind of justify keeping it. I kind of want to cancel it since I don’t actually use YouTube very often, but I know I’ll never be able to get back my grandfathered $8/month plan so I don’t cancel it. Yay loss aversion.
In my local currency it used to be the equivalent of $5.83 USD, with price increases and exchange rate changes it had tripled by 2019 from when I signed up to google play music in 2013.
Google Play Music didn't remove Youtube ads back then. Youtube Red wasn't created until 2015. So you're comparing the price of something that didn't remove Youtube ads to the price of something that does remove Youtube ads. That's not a fair comparison.
Call me entitled, but I believe people should have a fundamental right to refuse spam (errr advertising). In fact in Canada that’s more or less a thing. Basically for the same reason I think people should have a fundamental right to not listen to propaganda, or to not eat fast food. Garbage in, garbage out. You are what you eat, you are what you read/watch.
If Youtube Premium had FEATURES I cared about, I would pay for it. I refuse to pay for the privilege of basic information hygiene.
Most creators have to get sponsors because youtube is very unreliable with what can be monetized, what can't, unblocking stuff after fake reports and so on.
YouTube has actually started to do that with YouTube Premium referral program, but it is open right now to just very few YouTubers (FireShip being one of them).
>instead of them having to advertise for dubious VPN services.
Do you think Youtube wants creators to do that? Youtube doesn't get a cut of that revenue, whereas Youtube does get a cut of regular Youtube ad revenue and Premium revenue.
Disclosure: I work at Google but not on Youtube, and am just speculating here.
It wound up this way because Youtubers want more money than AdSense and Premium can give them. They earn a lot more from sponsorships than AdSense and Premium.
Are you suggesting that Youtube squeeze out more money per view than it's currently doing? How do you suggest doing this? I guess one way would be to block people from using adblockers...
I'm not saying creators shouldn't diversity their income streams. My first comment in this chain was pointing out that Youtube isn't urging creators to embed sponsorships, which copperx seemed to think Youtube was doing.
Youtube is widely known to demonetise videos and outright kill established channels based upon spurious inputs / phase of moon / etc. The recent Russell Brand stuff easily springs to mind, as does abuse of the Content ID three strikes policy by bad actors.
If the creators need their income to be resilient to demonetisation, they're forced to use options outside the Youtube system. Sponsorships, etc.
What I don’t understand is why YouTube is going to these lengths to penalize ad blockers when they still gate Premium behind a bundle with another service nobody wants. They even trialed an unbundled Premium in Europe two years ago, but never did anything with it: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-l...
One can only conclude that some executive at Google is still dead-set on making YouTube Music happen, and YouTube Premium will continue to suffer as a result.
Content on YouTube is shaped by the incentives Google sets on the platform. So what we get, mostly, is junk that best sells ads, best gets clicks, eyes, attention etc. etc. Just like TV was before pay cable came along. Notice how TV got better when you just paid HBO to show you good shows? Paying Google to watch YouTube without ads is like paying ABC to watch The Bachelor without ads. The content is still trash.
I have found quality content. Notice how the people who work hard to make content outside YouTube's incentives need an external Patreon to fund their work? Why should I pay to fund the Mr. Beasts while the quality creators have to find funding outside the system? Also: I am sure you've seen it -- a creator you like or admire starts succumbing to the incentives, making sillier and sillier thumbnails or "experimenting" with shorter content. Of course there's great stuff on YouTube, but they exist on YouTube despite Google's best efforts to coarsen them.
It's more about enjoying the challenge and nerdiness of defeating an anti-adblocker at this point, I would imagine. Also worth mentioning that Google's ad service is such a security vulnerability that even the FBI recommends an ad blocker.
Google is fully in the right for blocking ad blockers, banning users, or whatever. Might even end up having some profitable years for those bans.
I don't want to pay for what I don't use. I want a simple no-ad plan that I can share with my partner. I don't need and don't want to pay for Youtube Music, more than one other person, offline videos, etc.
I would also be incentivized by the ability to control how much of my money goes to each creator.
Good luck getting support from google/youtube if you have issues with your premium account. Like a friend of mine who recently decided to setup a family group on his google account, so he can include immediate family members in his household so they can access youtube via premium family plan. Nope. He got a message saying he can only switch to a new family group once every 12 months. He spent a day looking around trying to figure how to get support from an actual human being at google to resolve the issue. No luck so far. In the end, he cancelled his youtube premium.
Well, I do need $15 a month more than google needs it. Seems they aren't hurting for money either, they just want ever more of it. Between that overt greed and the psychological manipulation you have to go through in viewing ads otherwise, I find the whole thing a bit distasteful and not worth playing the game as it is. If I'm able to install tooling to bend the rules of the game ever so slightly in my favor for once in this modern world, that's whats going to happen. Letter of the law be damned.
Personally, my biggest issue with YouTube ads are how many of them are for transphobic propaganda. Paying for premium would just be rewarding them for profiting from hate speech.
Sounds good to me, how do I get those ads instead of all the ones trying to sell me stuff. Either way I'm pleased to hear that people are getting the message out.
The "only 3 more videos" thing is easy to get around (at least it was for me): Turn your adblocker off, and watch YouTube until an ad plays. Then, turn your adblocker back on. I don't even get the anti-ad blocker popups anymore.
I'd buy it, but $14/m is way too much for no ads imo. Especially since this is a "free" service where the justification for me paying X$/m is because i have to offset the ads i would have otherwise watched.
You're (Youtube, not OP hah) telling me i provided $14/m in ad revenue? Of course not.
I'd insta-buy if i could just pay to skip any ads i actually would have watched. Give me a stat showing me how many ads i missed, and how much i owe. Justify the cost you're forcing on me.
Instead i'll just drop youtube and give money to some other service that doesn't feel like it's focused on gaming me.
> Do you really think Google just set the price arbitrarily?
No, not arbitrarily. But that $14/mo bundles in the price of other services as well, namely Youtube Music. Youtube Music doesn't cost Google nothing, so obviously $14/mo isn't what they're getting from people in ad revenue. A comparable music subscription from spotify costs $11/mo, so subtract that from $14/mo. $3/mo is a fair estimate for what they expect to get for showing ads.
> My impression has always been that ad free tiers are actually less profitable for video providers.
I'd be interested to see those numbers. More importantly though, i don't want to pay more than my share if we're actually talking a fair trade of services here. If the justification is cost of video hosting vs ads i'd see, then it should be variable.
Also, it's including a service i have zero interest in. So upcharging alone is insulting.
OK, but they make YouTube. They make the rules of the game. Pay for it with $$$ or by watching Ads, don’t watch YouTube, or pretend there’s some kind of morality in stealing it.
"Stealing". Bless you, not giving up data while accessing something public is not stealing. Defending yourself against surveillance is morally unambiguous. Society as a whole, across the entire world, needs to start talking about how we support these services in a post-ad-revenue-model world.
I suspect whatever the answer we settle on, it'll be less awful than what exists now.
Like I said. Consider yourself a hero for fighting the good fight or somebody who’s convinced themselves they’re entitled to something they didn’t pay for. Whatever helps you sleep at night.
No one is convinced of that (well, in my thread at least), quit strawmaning.
I want to pay for what i use. Definitely. I struggle to see how a few dozen videos in hosting fees and possible ad revenue accounts to $14/m. It's insulting, upcharged, loaded with data mining and obfuscated for extreme profit in my assumption.
If they want to use ads as a justification for paying, great - show me how much i owe. How me how much money they missed out on by ads and i'll pay that happily. That also directly correlates to content creators, which is a win win.
Do you go to the grocery store and say, “Show me the baker’s salary as well as what the wheat, yeast, salt, and water cost and I’ll pay that happily?” No, you pay what they charge for bread or you don’t buy bread or you steal the bread.
> It’s not complicated. $13.99 for a subscription to YouTube Premium in the US.
Lol you understand, you're clearly avoiding the core idea.
> Do you go to the grocery store and say, “Show me the baker’s salary as well as what the wheat, yeast, salt, and water cost and I’ll pay that happily?” No, you pay what they charge for bread or you don’t buy bread or you steal the bread.
The grocery store isn't offering a free product with ads vs a paid subscription, using the missed ads as justification for paying. The grocery store isn't forcing you to also buy steak if you want to buy bread. The grocery store isn't offering a single tier price, subsidizing those who eat a lot by those who eat a little.
In the grocery store if you listen to a little, you pay a little. With Spotify, i can subscribe to a single service without upcharging to the $30/m unlimited podcasts (though that's changing it feels like, and i'll cancel them too). In the grocery store, if you buy a product you like you support that content creator by the amount they agreed to.
By justifying paying for missing ads they put a relationship between ads and the "cost we're stealing". So i'm offering to pay what i'm "stealing", but of course that's no where near enough because there's no way the handful of videos i watch a month equates to $14/m.
Look i agree with you in principle. Believe it or not, i'm not justifying avoiding ads and "stealing". I am however, saying everything Youtube has done is scummy and i'd much rather see content creators move to something that is inline with both the creators and the viewers. Where data isn't harvested in mass. Where outrage algorithms don't reign supreme.
I'm not paying Facebook anymore than i'm paying Youtube.
edit: Keep in mind i pay for a lot of services. Hell i pay for my search! You know what my search does? Be honest, transparent, and clear in the relationship between what i'm buying and what i'm getting (Kagi, btw)
No, I understand your core idea, I just think it’s nonsensical and very entitled.
> So i'm offering to pay what i'm "stealing", but of course that's no where near enough because there's no way the handful of videos i watch a month equates to $14/m.
You don’t set the price (and you know you don’t yet you offer anyway)!
And the price literally does equate to $14/m if you watch those videos without ads. You can use whatever logical argument you want to convince yourself otherwise, but the numbers are right there.
If you block ads on YouTube and you don’t pay for YouTube Premium, you’re doing something you know you’re not supposed to do. Twist yourself into a pretzel to explain that it’s technically not actually stealing, but it is what it is.
Pay $14/month, watch ads, or stop watching YouTube if your moral outrage at their scummyness is that high. Or do whatever you want because it really doesn’t matter.
why should I care about """stealing it"""? I don't have any Alphabet stock, I am not employed by Alphabet, in any case they can afford to run Youtube at a loss or just shut it down.
It's kinda cute how much you care about the profit margins of a company when it will (likely) never benefit you. Maybe you should setup a donation fund for Alphabet in these hard times.
I mean surely you would personally give them at least 20 USD considering how badly they are being wronged, maybe 100 if you are feeling generous.
They gotta realize its a bigger game then, they don't get to be the only people making selfish rules. As long as people can create tooling to separate the wheat from the chaff, that's what people will be doing. If ads were considered fully benign people wouldn't spend time making, sharing, installing tooling to bypass them. Since google et al has accepted they will continue to do the unpopular thing, they shouldn't act surprised that people try and make things slightly better for themselves as they are able to.
What's the point of blocking ads when they're already not present? Or are you saying that we should block ads and refuse to pay? How is that sustainable in the long term? If you're against ads, shouldn't you support monetization models that don't involve ads?
I don't care if Google is sustainable in the long term or not, just like they don't care if they serve me malicious content and malware via their ad networks, or take money, and show me ads, from groups that want people like me dead.
We're back to 2002-style ads about meeting hot singles in your town, where you can get free "natural" Viagra, and content taken directly from weird political chain letters that are written by people who, while barely literate, are loud and opinionated.
All this performative righteousness is only going to end up hurting your cause in the long term. If a major site offers an ad-free option, and people refuse to take it, what does it tell the executives? What does it tell other publishers who are considering their monetization options? How do you think a business should respond to users that neither refuse to watch ads nor pay, can't be bargained with (see above), but nonetheless think they should be entitled to service? Companies aren't owed a viable business model, but consumers aren't owed a free service either.
The problem is higher than zero intrest rates the free money dried up where before all the platforms were chasing infinte growth and free money meant they could run deficts as long as they grew they now need to make a profit now that debt costs money plus investor cash got sucked away to Bonds, CDs, and money market accounts giving a safe 5-7%.
This is why every service went to shit at the same time in the past year.
No, look at cable. Companies will turn the dial up on ads as much as they can, consumers have shown that they'll tolerate the current level of ads on YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, etc.
It's no different than price points, not showing the amount of ads the market will bear is leaving money on the table.
Are you complaining about ads or data? The only way to avoid giving them data is to not use them, which also lets you avoid their ads and you don’t need a subscription. Simple solution.
I think it's somewhat defendable when youtube doesn't give you an option to pay for what you'd be "stealing". Overall i agree with you, but lets not pretend that Youtube doesn't feel exploitative in the corporate behavior here. Especially considering the data they're stealing from me, harvesting and selling, etc.
Ie show me the ads i'm missing, and let me pay for the view. It would be what, $3|5|7/m or w/e in value? Instead they're trying to strongarm you into an upcharge of $14/m for additional services. Show me the data they're harvesting from my viewing patterns and the added revenue they're getting from that. Tie that into my "cost" each month and reducing how much i owe.
But of course they won't do that. Because this isn't an exchange. This isn't a service we're paying for, it's a data harvest where they want to have their cake and eat it too. This is scummy in the same way that my music software, Spotify, is trying to expand revenue streams and shoving more crap (podcasts, audio books, etc) down my throat.
If Youtube isn't going to try and play fair then i'd rather leave (and will) than pay them.
Not the person you're responding to, but from how they phrased it I suspect they'd be annoyed that they're having to pay for YouTube Music as part of Premium.
You're not just paying Youtube/Google for the ad, you're paying the content creators as well. You can always buy the music directly from artists if you don't like Spotify's revenue model. Or ditch Spotify and use the free Youtube Music subscription you get with premium, maybe combined it'd be worth the $14 to you.
> You're not just paying Youtube/Google for the ad, you're paying the content creators as well.
That would only be true if Youtube proportionally split my subscription to the videos i watch.
If anything, i'm advocating for exactly what you said - more than Youtube is. Ie show me how much i owe, and then whatever money i give youtube goes to content creators and the service provider. It's proportional to the service i consume, and is ultimately fair.
Instead what we get is something (in my view) massively upcharged. Bundled with service(s) i don't use, and set at a price point that i suspect well exceeds my usage of the service.
Youtube music is actually pretty remarkable. I'm a jazz musician. One of the remarkable features of YouTube is that if you're looking for a particular recording of a jazz tune (e.g. Lou Donaldson's The Masquerade Is Over, on the Blues Walk album, 1953), it's just there. The depth of the collection is quite amazing.
And as an added bonus, if you subscribe you get no ads on youtube! :-P
Sure it is, you're not even involved in the transaction. Just because someone pays Google to show an ad doesn't mean you have to look at it.
USPS is funded by ads going through the mail and I throw
them straight in the trash without remorse. I bet you do too. Bet you don't feel guilt about going to the bathroom or fast-forwarding your DVR during commercials either. Ad space is sold on the possibility that someone will see it and you don't owe anyone valuable ad real-estate.
It's wild how many people unironically think "drink verification can" is in any way acceptable.
It sure is. I'm still watching their ads on every other site, but youtube ads for gambling and soda that interrupt while I'm watching someone talk about Bezier curves ? Na-ah.
Maybe we don't want the business models of data hoarding multibillion dollar corporations to be sustainable. Maybe there are good alternatives that don't rely so much on exploitative practices. Just a thought.
Those are great reasons not to use YouTube. If you’re worried about data mining, your ad blocker has no effect there – you have to stop using YouTube if that bothers you.
What if I considered it a moral imperative to financially damage FAANG companies in any way I can? What if I was fine paying money each month as long as it went towards harming Youtube?
It’s wishful thinking to hope that they can’t mine that. If you connect to a Google server, they’re analyzing your activity. Not running their JavaScript disrupts ads but they still get information about what type of videos you like, when and where you watch them, and what kind of devices you use.
True enough. I've thought before it'd be good to cache and mirror YouTube videos as they're watched, and then provide them through IPFS with an index that's shipped around so people can pre-filter their searches and page hits against that index first. Lots of work, obviously. More than I have time for, alas. But I'm confident that'll happen eventually.
If YouTube dies another party will take their place and hopefully learn from their mistakes. But YouTube won’t fail because it’s backed by Google and they’ll squeeze their monopoly for all that it’s worth.
Honestly, I don't think preventing ad blockers is abusive. Hosting videos for free is simply not sustainable. It does not work. We aren't entitled to getting everything on the internet for free.
Then why did Youtube/Google start hosting videos for free? And continue to do so for so long, if it was "unsustainable" ? That was the deal they offered, and that people bought into. Now that they've achieved the soft lock in of network effects, we should accept them completely altering those terms? In the antitrust sense, this is called dumping.
If Costco decided they wanted to make a profit on their 1.50$ hot dogs and cranked the price up to 3$, they would lose a ton of goodwill and many of their loyal customers would be upset.
Google isn’t exactly struggling to make ends meet. They seem perfectly okay to be losing money on search. YouTube is no different.
It's a tangent, but that $10 roast beef sandwich is gigantic. I was surprised when they rolled out such an expensive food court item, and so I bought it, and I couldn't finish it. I took half of it home to eat later. I am not a light eater.
I’m serious, but philosophically, the onus is clearly on us to get rid of our addiction. But Youtube is a quasi-monopoly of random micro-conferences. Nebula and Vimeo aren’t on the same market. So basically we specifically like Youtube. But I’d never pay Google after what they did to James Damore.
That would be a fine argument of Google did not own the long-form general topic diy online video space. Since they do and there are no alternatives they can suck it until they (if ever) improve their business practices.
The alternatives are to not watch it, watch it under their terms, or do something you’re not supposed to do because you’ve convinced yourself that you’re right.
Stealing is never a moral obligation. The only moral choices are not using YouTube or paying for it - and if you truly believe YouTube abuses users, you definitely shouldn’t be encouraging more people to use it, which your presence does by telling creators they get more traffic there.
Paying for your own Internet, accessing something publicly accessible, and downloading your preferred subset of bits of what's available on your own hardware is not stealing.
Compelling my own property to behave against my wishes is the moral failing.
YouTube is not publicly accessible: they offer it under specific terms, namely that you watch ads or pay directly. If you don’t want to accept that deal you don’t have any more right to use their private property than you do to complain that the local movie theater wouldn’t let you sneak in when you didn’t like their ticket prices.
That doesn’t mean it’s allowed, only that they haven’t blocked it again. You can’t use your neighbors’ pool without permission just because they don’t have a guard checking IDs, either.
Not legally, no. This thread is the lower stakes version of what happens when the owner gets tired of free loaders and starts enforcing their legal rights.
YouTube offers their service under specific terms: watch ads or pay directly. If you don’t like it, your only ethical option is not using it. It’s not a basic need and anyone can live a happy and full life without it, there’s no need to pretend that not keeping your side of the agreement is somehow just if you squint hard enough.
Youtube offers a service to advertisers. The users are both the content providers as well as the content consumers, which cancels out. Youtube sells something which is essentially parasitical on the uploaders, who actually create the value that they get to sell to advertisers, but you can say symbiotic instead of parasitic as long as the uploading and downloading are free.
The mail example is great. The post office has no right to withhold your other mail between someone else and yourself, because you threw away the ad flyer someone paid them to deliver.
Meanwhile, I pay for premium and still have to suffer ads, because every video has ads in-band in the content, and I have to watch youtube on someone else's device probably 30% of the time, and have my content (what I would consume not produce) censored and inhibited by bs ai "community standards" and dmca takedowns I didn't approve of, and even without ever looking at an ad, they are collecting and selling profiling data of me which I also don't approve of. So where's my option to strong-arm youtube to force them to fully meet my "terms" and get what I'm paying for? How come it's not reasonable for me to somehow make it that if they don't please ME, that their own server side somehow breeaks unless they conform to what decide is a reasonable fair transaction?
None of this "terms" argument holds up. All they have is might, not right.
So why do you still use their service if you don’t like them so much? Whether or not you approve of the rules someone sets for use of their private property doesn’t affect their legal rights, so it seems you shouldn’t be helping them.
That begs the question of why it’s so critical to have an unlimited supply of mediocre video – you don’t need to build a competitor, just find another outlet for your spare time which is hardly a challenge.
I will write down my ethical obligation to Google on a piece of paper and wipe my arse with it. The only ethical obligation that exists is on American legislators and regulators to bring down the hammer of justice, smashing Alphabet and co-conspirators into one hundred thousand grains of sand and blow them into the wind.
And thanks for the life advice acdha, but I'm quite happy to continue 'stealing' every single second of content that I want from Google and pointing out that the platform is filled with trash, incentivizes trash, and we would all be better off if it was gone.
Hey, it’s your life. I’m just asking people to be honest about what they’re doing. That said, if you really think we’d be better off without YouTube I’m not sure how giving them your support and attention is going to get you closer to that goal.
Lots of things in different ways, but for one example, ad & premium money from videos that they demonetize.
Not to mention literally stealing original content and granting it to anyone else who simply claims copyright without proving it or being able to prove it since it's not theirs.
Then there are all kinds of indirect ways as a consequence of their various policies and how they implement and enforce them, like showing me ads after taking my premium money, or collecting and selling the profiling data of my watch/like/dislike data, etc.
Youtube Premium is a waste of money, they bundle a crappy $11/m music service with it, for $13/m. It's worse than having to pay for cable or landline telephone to get internet.
I'd pay $2/m, or even $4 bucks, for ad-free Youtube, but I'm not buying an additional music service I don't want or need.
Exactly, I used to subscribe to premium but it’s not worth the price just to avoid ads and I have no use for the rest of the stuff they bundle into premium to justify the price.
this comment never fails to appear on any Youtube blocker thread.
Good for you that you pay Youtube , but stop rubbing it in our faces. each person has its own standards
This is news to me and I don't think this is true... or it's maybe hidden away somewhere. I am a Fi subscriber using a Google Pixel phone but YouTube premium is still $13.99/month.
Unlimited Plus (the plan with free YouTube Premium) is a dollar more per month than just buying the Unlimited plan and YT Premium separately. You also only get it free for a year.
That's the footgun in google's strategy. In the all-stick no-carrot spirit of modern marketing incentives, they made their unpaid access worse without improving Premium. That only works if the garden has walls, and logging in to youtube is optional. Now youtube use falls into three options:
1) Don't log in to google, block ads. Data collected by google is lower value, resulting in less targeted internet-wide marketing, including on youtube itself when you clear your browsing session.
2) Log in. Lose time to ads. Trying to avoid this may put your entire google account at risk. Also, you gain highly targeted marketing thanks to higher quality data collection. Youtube's viewing suggestions are targeted, limiting discovery, and may become highly pigeonholed over time.
3) Pay for Premium. All the same as 2) but with less ads.
As a consumer, logging out of google and blocking youtube ads has been made by google a better experience than their own premium product. Only the producers of the majority of youtube's product are required to consume what google is doing.
This is what i did when i got the "we are going to start blocking playback ...." Message and it worked great. Moral of the story is track content creators you like with rss and you dont need to be logged in.
I was planning to code this with yt-dlp, to just download the videos and never open the webside again....
I just have to figure out how to implement sponsor-block, to remove the "this video is sponsored by shadow raid vpn" messages... probably can be done with ffmpeg :)
At the point where you're removing sponsor messages within a downloaded copy - of hope you're also sponsoring on patron or buying merch or something. There's a point where there needs to be some sort of revenue source to incentivize further content creation
just fyi, but this already exists via platforms like invidious, which is like a self-hosted youtube proxy that you interact with, and it dumps files to disk/etc. there are some other similar things already too.
not that you shouldn't use yt-dlp, because it's great!
and yes, as others mention - you can have yt-dlp use sponsorblock to cut out the ad sections too.
I welcome the block frankly. Youtube is both a productivity hole and a recreation hole. I welcome more actual entertainment and work back into my life.
Yesterday at least. Same for me initially but now not so much. Time will tell. Current process is to disable the blockers then refresh until the video is served without an add, usually after two or three times, then re-enable.
This sounds like Valve's "piracy is a service problem" ethos, butvfor ads, where YouTube is crossing the threshold of making the ads so inconvenient their efforts will be counterproductive (but not quantifiably counterproductive to bean counters... Yet.)
I agree. I used to watch youtube with ads, no problem. But then there was the infamous update that made ads really annoying, usually it was 5s before a video and then it became two unskippable ads in the star plus an ad every 10 minutes or so. That's when I started using an ad block.
This might not be the "correct" solution, but it works for me. Has Gorhill (uBO's developer) provided a better solution? If so, would someone mind posting the full and complete set of steps?
This is nice and all for now while YouTube allows dismissal of the warning. However, YouTube could go nuclear and just not allow any video to play at all if an ad blocker is detected. No DOM element removal will solve that. I'm not sure if that qualifies as scorched earth on YT's part, but it is an option.
This, in turn, will spawn user scripts which work around the detection. Any client-side solution will be an arms race between Google and user script/adblock devs. The only real way to prevent it is to withhold the video stream from the CDN until the client has streamed the full ad and/or bake it into the video stream. My impression is that Twitch does this for its live streams (although not VODs).
given that in-stream ads still have blocking/ignoring methods I think that if this arms race keeps going that ultimately the data (video, whatever) is going to be stuffed behind some hard authentication barrier of some sort -- and then traditional piracy methods will take over like single-user-rebroadcast/etc.
The number of people who will do all the things necessary to play in that arms race gets smaller and smaller with each extra difficulty.
In the end, if the only way to block the ads is to have a setup so complicated that only 1 in 10,000 people would be able and willing to maintain it, that’s basically perfect. The people who will spend hours and hours perfecting and maintaining their ad blocking setup were never going to buy premium anyway and they’re negligible drains on resources.
I look forward to my browser-based TiVo, buffering videos to ship over ads just like in the 00s... TV started as advertising channels, it's not surprising YouTube converges towards the cesspool of cable TV.
Well if they copy Twitch I suspect it will be circumvented very quickly. My adblock works just fine for Twitch, I do not see any adverts (unless I open using incognito).
Another option is to require Chrome for playback outside of authenticated apps, and lock Chrome down.
TBH baking it into the video stream is probably the easiest path. The whole video doesn't have to be re-encoded if the ad is spliced in. This is a "soft lockdown" since the ad can theoretically be manually skipped by the user, but its probably good enough.
I wonder when they’ll completely forgo HTML and will just start serving giant polymorphic/obfuscated WebAssembly blob that would perform all the rendering
baking into the video stream loses their ability to auction off ads in realtime to customize ads per viewer based on all of the analytics they've hoovered up on that viewer. they aren't doing the hoovering to go back to old school pre-determined ad placement
It makes it harder but there’s no technical reason why they couldn’t assemble the video on the fly and splice in ads seamlessly based on the same selection logic they used now.
Personally, I’d just start generating temporal IDs for all content (user or ad) so there was no way to know what the stream contained w/o something prohibitively expensive on the client side. Permalinks, since they’re necessary would just redirects (to a temporal URL).
A temporal URL here uses different random looking values for the each user rather than a fixed one (like a URL shorter), and encode a validity window (not before/after).
The core idea here being that the code in the app doesn’t know the difference between ads and user content, which would make it very difficult for any intermediary to do so. And, if if they did the URL for the “real” content wouldn’t work until the time to play the ad had passed - so what’d be the point in bothering?
Like others have said - ya just have to pay for the things you value. No shame in being thrifty, but as I learned from my first employer: pick great suppliers and never force them out of business.
> This, in turn, will spawn user scripts which work around the detection. Any client-side solution will be an arms race between Google and user script/adblock devs
No, you can't adblock remote attestation. Trust me, the whole idea is cryptographically sound (with a proper implementation of course), people have been building out the remote attestation/TPM space for 20 years now. It is unambiguously possible to use a TPM to detect modification of BIOS, OS, drivers, or anything else in the system, and you effectively cannot modify the TPM at all, and it has minimal attack surface (it just is a key-signing machine, essentially).
Every time it's brought up (like I previously suggested that it could be used by NVIDIA/etc to disrupt mining operations from a VBIOS level) there's people who think there is some easy runaround and if there was the whole idea would be broken from the start. The TPM provides a secure root to start the cryptographic validation from, and while you can mod the software, it will be immediately evident from the attestation, and they will simply not serve the video. Or in the case of a GPU, you can have the PC attest to the drivers being official and unmodified, and if that doesn't happen the GPU refuses to clock up the memory bus, if the workload displays the characteristics of mining (100% memory load, flat and constant and low shader load).
At best it will be an arms race between TPM developers and adblock devs.
There is also the "analog gap", but that's been notionally plugged for years using HDCP. Early implementations were quickly broken, HDCP 2.3 is still doing pretty well, and it provides a massive speedbump to people who think they're just going to plug a capture card in and loop the video through.
Netflix and others have been doing this for years and the tricks are well-known at this point. Netflix doesn't push too hard, but they won't serve you the highest-quality video if you don't have a secure signal path either.
AFAIK at this point most of the "ripping" of decryption keys/etc for streaming content happens not by attacking the TPM, but by using android devices that are allowed to skate with reduced security modes, and just having a giant stack of them so when one device gets banned they throw it away and move onto the next.
>AFAIK at this point most of the "ripping" of decryption keys/etc for streaming content happens not by attacking the TPM, but by using android devices that are allowed to skate with reduced security modes, and just having a giant stack of them so when one device gets banned they throw it away and move onto the next.
Without a TEE (eg. trustzone), you're not going to get anything above 540p, at least with widevine. Note TEE is baked into the SoC itself, so while it's not impossible to find a bug, it's much harder than finding a exploit in android or system apps.
I unfortunately can't find references at the moment, but I've heard that some/most of this is done with nVidia Shield TV boxes which have the same Tegra X1 security flaws used to exploit the early Nintendo Switches.
Reminder to everyone to back up your Google account, and perhaps have separate accounts for email and regular usage (better yet transition away from gmail).
YouTube already does exatly this for me. If uBlock origin is active it loads the base site, but all video tiles are just grey squares and the video titles below are just grey bars.
Not at home. If I remember I post one tomorrow. It's only on my Desktop. I have zero adds on mobile. Looks like they are trying a few different versions
Note that the ublock origin creator has specifically recommended you don’t do custom filters like this because it can mess up elements that the other filtersets are keying on, and it’s not guaranteed to be stable over time. So something like this can actually result in you seeing ads, if it becomes stale. Which it will because YouTube is changing this up every day, practically.
The best defense is to purge caches and update filter sets every day.
I think the only "happy ending for everyone" if Google is going to ban ad-blockers for YouTube is if they make the ads less annoying.
What makes YouTube's ads annoying:
- the number of them
2 ads at the start is way too much. 1 max.
Middle of video ads should be content creator controlled.
- the ads they choose to show
Google showing me the same few very annoying (to me) ads and gives me no option to avoid those specific ads.
I have done the unthinkable and given up on YouTube as a daily site I visit. Now I will only visit it if I have to - e.g. someone link to it. Yes, I hate those specific ads that much.
No thanks. Not so long as the service is owned by a corporation who does not respect users.
If I pay for something then I own it. Therefore I should receive a copy of it and can view it as many times as I like on any device I like. Youtube does not do this, so I won't pay for it. I see no value in paying for a delivery mechanism when the mechanism itself is hostile to owning the content.
I'll pay for the content by paying the producers directly if I see value in the content. I have done exactly this.
That limits content to the producers that have their own distribution mechanisms, which tend to be larger content creators. the small creator that uses Youtube, Twitch, etc for distribution will be the most hurt by such a policy.
Do you apply the same "If I pay for something then I own it" rule to content you consume via TV subscription services? What about if you pay to view a movie in a theater?
> Do you apply the same "If I pay for something then I own it" rule to content you consume via TV subscription services?
Yes. I don't pay for TV subscription services. What little TV I watch is freely received from broadcasts and can quite simply, and legally, be recorded.
> What about if you pay to view a movie in a theater?
No. I pay for the experience of being at the theater. The movie is irrelevant. It's like paying for the experience of being at a well groomed park with staff paid to maintain the grounds. Also, I rarely go to theaters because their experiences are terrible and aren't well groomed parks; I only go with friends which is then a group activity. Group activities certainly don't convey the same type of ownership.
The happy ending here would be Google being less monopolist with video streaming.
Google has done an outstanding job to use their position making YouTube the streaming platform of the Web, GCP incentives, dominance in smart TV, Google account integration, Android etc. This isn't mentioned enough.
Now we're seeing a strategy towards Premium and anti ad blocking patterns while they remain top and any alternatives just can't get a footing in this space to compete.
> Middle of video ads should be content creator controlled.
They are, sort of.
As a content creator you pick the position for the ads, but it doesn't mean they'll pop up there for everyone, there's only a chance they'll show up there. For example you could put mid-roll ads every minute, but youtube will only pick one of those positions so the viewer only sees an ad every 10 minutes or so, the real "cooldown time" depends on what data youtube has on the viewer.
Content creators can disable mid-roll ads completely.
This 100%. Once the client becomes too hostile, I'll just stop using the service. I've been clear of Reddit since Apollo shut down, and if ad blocks stop working on youtube, I'll just find something else to do.
Apart from just Ads, I use the "Block Element" feature of uBlock to cut down on a lot of other visual noise within sites. For youtube I block the giant rows of "related" video suggestions (which I guess you could consider as ads), and youtube shorts from showing up in my subscription feed.
I like YouTube Premium. It's worth it. For a bunch of tech people... Wouldn't we see more people wanting to pay for software, a service and intellectual property?
I'd consider YouTube premium if they implement something similar to sponsor block and actually block in-video advertising by the content creators. Google isn't giving me an add-free experience if every creator is telling me to buy NordVPN or join nebula.
In general, yes. The problem to me is that I really view YouTube as an addictive distraction, rather than value. I pay the TV license because it's the law, even though I never use it. I'm actually slightly looking forward to not being able to/wanting to use YT, so I can spend that time being creative instead.
I think society as a whole will loose out more than its individuals on having this extremely broad (dis)information sharing nixed.
Yeah, at first I was comparing it with Netflix where you’re paying for content and it seemed like an awful deal because you already get the content without paying. The thing that made me decide it was worth it is when I compared it to Spotify instead. A service I use multiple times daily where I can get the content for free anyway, but paying to get rid of the ads just removes all of the friction from the experience.
Yes, from an authentic service provider, YouTube Premium is just a donation to Google, who will continue to monetize you in the same way that they have for the last decade, while thanking you greatly for a few extra bones they can throw into the coal-engine of Bard.
There are anecdotes from creators in this thread explaining they get a lot more from premium than from ads.
I hate ads. I like supporting creators. And I like paying for services I use.
YouTube premium is absolutely worth it. The number of people I know with very good salaries who refuse to pay a small amount a month for something they use constantly (this or other examples) never ceases to amaze me.
How much is it going to creators though? If the number is reasonable I’ll sign up for youtube premium now. I doubt it though. And ads for creators don’t do much, especially small channels I follow on youtube.
At this point I prefer to support the creators directly through patreon or other ways than google, who doesn’t care about either users, content makers nor anybody else except their own bottom line.
According to this video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BC3uI18oLU , there is a 55% revenue share with creators. So, about half of that money goes to maintaining and improving YouTube and the rest goes to the content creators themselves.
That sounds promising. So let’s say I only watch 2 creators judiciously. Will the share of my monthly membership distribute equally to them after the maintenance cut? Let’s say maintenance and google’s cut is 50%. Will the rest of 50 split evenly between the two creators? I genuinely want to understand that. Somehow I doubt google would keep their part of the deal and not put their hand into the honey. If they did keep their word they’re basically a utility and I would not mind paying for it, I would even encourage more to do it.
I'm disappointed the term "anti-anti-adblocker" isn't instead "adblocker blocker blocker". If we're going to use repetitive negatives, we might as well lean into it.
I the anti- prefix is against something, but that thing itself could be blocked, so you have an adblocker, and YouTube deploys anti-adblockers, and then you retaliate with anti-adblocker blockers, and they retaliate with anti-anti-adblocker blockers and so on as infinitem.
If you have a VPN with a Ukraine location, you can set it to there and purchase YouTube Premium for ~$2.70/month. That's what I just ended up doing. I use Mullvad as my vpn provider.
Premium actually gives more money to creators you watch on YouTube than ads do. It's win-win IMO. Save yourself time, give them more money. Also comes with YouTube Music which is quite good (arguably worse than Google Play Music was but eh)
If someone on the internet says they want money to hand it to individuals in need I believe them. Especially when it is a global, for-profit, money-printing monopoly power like Google, who have repeatedly demonstrated through their actions as an organization that they are nothing but honest, upstanding, and true to their word, fully deserving of our trust (and money).
How much do creators actually get from premium subscriptions? All you're doing is repeating some empty marketing mumbo jumbo. I've never heard a creator say anything about the "youtube premium" income they've gotten, pretty sure it's not even broken down that way for them and google being able to bundle in a music streaming service just further affirms to me that they do not need my money.
I'd much rather directly support creators that deserve it trough patreon or ko-fi and pay for spotify premium instead of giving google any of my money
I'm not a creator but a while ago there was this creator who was widely applauded on HN for their transparency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34225192 Scroll down a bit and you can see Google shows that they made $27,099.86 from YouTube premium.
Creators get even more money if you instead donate to their Patreon or click the big "Thanks" button under the video to contribute to their channel directly. Best part is you don't have to turn off your adblock!
Thanks, but I don't need luck since I mainly watch videos from the same channels. Throwing each some spare change now and then is not hard.
I reckon you don't subscribe to premium because you think every random channel of every random video you happen to watch deserves your money? I certainly don't feel bad when my adblock prevents me from wasting any more of my time when I click on a clickbait-ty Linus Tech Tips video.
My problem with it it's that demonetized channels don't get money from premium viewers. If a creator gets demonetized because of advertisers guideline, why go out of your way to punish him by removing premium monetization as well?
While I understand your point, I still wouldn't give money to a company with such privacy violations. If YouTube had a subscription option where YouTube only used my watch history to improve my suggestions, then I'd gladly pay a subscription for it. But in its current form, I either give money to Alphabet while they continue to track me and sell my data to advertisers, or I just block the ads myself to avoid giving them money. There's no way in hell I'm going to pay for the product and be the product.
It's sad that the creators have to get caught in the middle of this, of course, but they can be supported through other platforms, like Patreon, ko-fi, etc., which kinda solves the issue. Or better yet, a YouTube replacement, like Nebula.
If YouTube wants to block me from viewing a video that has ads because I use an adblocker, fine. But if they start blocking me from all videos then they best start paying everyone who has ever uploaded a video that has a single view. Let's not forget that nobody is going to YouTube because of Googles content.
I mean sure, I am fine with any service I am actively using either charge me money via subscription or monetize is some other form. If I don't want that to happen, I'd not use that service.
If the costs of managing HackerNews is so high, sure let them sell ads or offer a subscription service. But if you are comparing HackerNews hosting costs to YouTube, you need a reality check. HackerNews probably costs less than 1000$ a month to host, everything included. I am sure YouTube spends more than that every second buying new storage servers.
I don't think most people realize the scale of YouTube - it's offering anyone on this planet to upload as many videos as they want, in resolution as high as 8K, while also offering the ability to monetize their content for creators. I think that is pretty damn impressive. I use YouTube often, and I am totally fine with them making money off my data via ads (when I am not paying for YouTube premium).
> I mean sure, I am fine with any service I am actively using either charge me money via subscription or monetize is some other form. If I don't want that to happen, I'd not use that service.
Same. Unfortunately, YouTube is a dopamine slot machine that makes money off ads shown on (often inappropriate) videos that keep kids addicted to their phones. It's also a site that constantly invades their users privacy. It also boosts often irrevelant and trashy channels to the front page. It's also a total CPU/RAM hog, its app is constantly getting slower, and generally a piss poor experience all around. Using Invidious/Newpipe/Youtube-DL makes all of this painfully obvious. If YouTube were a service that cost $5 a month, had no invasive tracking, and wasn't 95% garbage videos by "influencers" trying to hit the algorithm jackpot, I'd pay for it.
> If the costs of managing HackerNews is so high, sure let them sell ads or offer a subscription service. But if you are comparing HackerNews hosting costs to YouTube, you need a reality check. HackerNews probably costs less than 1000$ a month to host, everything included. I am sure YouTube spends more than that every second buying new storage servers.
My point is, none of us really know what it costs to host Hackernews, YouTube, or any website on the internet, and we don't know if any of these sites are struggling financially or need our financial support.
> I don't think most people realize the scale of YouTube - it's offering anyone on this planet to upload as many videos as they want, in resolution as high as 8K, while also offering the ability to monetize their content for creators.
Yes. Unfortunately, they don't do that for creators or users. They do that so they can sell more ads.
> I am totally fine with them making money off my data via ads (when I am not paying for YouTube premium).
I am glad you are fine with it. I just wish you were fine with people being able to choose what data their browsers download.
What's the principle? I should get anything I want for free as long as I can get away with it? I shouldn't have to pay for anything if I don't want to?
Genuinely curious what the principled argument is here.
Unless they totally remove the ad-free tier, I don't see how this is different than any other price hike. Or do you think that companies shouldn't have the right to hike prices?
We had the "old" internet and we had ads... a text banner here and there, and then an image or maybe a gif banner on the other side. Noone really cared, sites got ad views, users got content.
Then ads moved to flash (security issues), popups, popups when you close the first popup, video was added, with sounds, two banners became 20, fixed location floating divs were added, and in the case of youtube, a 3 minute video of something contains 3 minutes of ads.
So yeah... they had a chance, went way overboard, and now they complain that people block ads.
> We had the "old" internet and we had ads... a text banner here and there, and then an image or maybe a gif banner on the other side. Noone really cared, sites got ad views, users got content.
The "old" internet was also run by hobbyists without a profit motive, and did not have sites that hosted your videos for free. A few static banner ads might be able to keep the "old" internet afloat, but it certainly would not be able to keep today's internet afloat.
The "old" internet was full of people fighting hot linking because a JPEG being embedded on a popular forum took down your website for a considerable time.
Then the internet ran on an investor bubble that let companies serve content at a loss in hopes of a future acquisition.
Now ads are proving to be the only reliable way to get income out of videos. There are affordable options out there, but because these services were once free everybody feels like they're entitled to free hosting and media.
and the ones, where you click on a link, it openes in a new tab and the original tab gets replaced with an ad.. so you close an ad, and lose all your "back" history.
Also, real-life ads need regulation too... like some limits of X square meters of ads per 1 km^2 of area... preferably X going slowly towards zero.
Let content creators figure that out with their audiences. YouTube should just be a batteries included public video hosting service, with video creators as the customer. Creators with video views passing a threshold would need to pay google or have their videos downgraded to 240p, then temporarily disabled if they continued not to pay. Users would get some amount of space and bandwidth as part of a free tier to help them get started. It'd be like AWS but for video content creators, instead of like a shitty cable network.
Can you imagine some small time Roblox Youtuber blowing up and ending up with a sudden bandwidth bill in the hundreds of thousands? Popups with "this month's watch count has been reached, please ask @contentcreator to pay for more views"? Making uploaders pay would absolutely destroy the platform.
The only person hurt under that scheme would be just that, people who go viral out of nowhere. Other users could re-upload the video to mirror it though, so there's an easy workaround.
Seems like a small price to pay for a YouTube with integrity that respects both creators and viewers and treats both fairly without trying to exploit anyone.
But if a creator I like gets a big bill, I’ll take their video and re-upload it without their permission to mirror it and cut down their bandwidth bill.
I’m fine paying for content (I subscribe to Nebula and Spotify, for example); I am not fine paying to enrich organizations that engage in widespread surveillance and ad technology. Ads make the world worse. Creators make it better.
Google’s problem is that their mission statement is fundamentally misleading. They aren’t here to organize the world’s information and make it accessible, they are here to maximize ad revenue. The information thing is a means to an end. For them, ads are the point, because content doesn’t generate revenue - ads do.
That’s a fair position, but shouldn’t you simply shorten it to not using YouTube? Your activity helps their ad system and using it tells creators that they get more views by putting things on YouTube.
So because a company sells ads and you don’t like that, you refuse to pay them to not see ads?
Only ensuring that they will try to show even more ads since not enough paying customers exist?
Don’t you think that maybe if all the people in this thread being really righteous about not paying and “ad company“ or to actually pay it might show them there’s a better way?
They're a "give away a product for free for 15 years to gain market share then act indignicant when people won't pay whatever price you ask" company. I think that's what people don't want to support.
Brave is what I'm using, but I must have gotten put into the A/B group since I now see the blocker.
Changing the shield setting to "aggressive" hasn't beaten the block.
But I've heard from others that they use Brave with "standard" settings and still don't see the block. That makes me think they aren't in the A/B group and NOT that Brave has found a way to adequately block it.
Lots of people here who seem to think that the only viable options are to pay what they view is an exorbitant subscription fee, watch ads, or block ads. There is, of course, a third option. Nobody is forcing you to watch YouTube. You can just not do that.
It’s funny to look back on all the people who were doing the “see, the world didn’t fall apart just because apple had to allow sideloading” over the last month. Like the law didn’t even come into effect yet and google is already flexing their monopoly power / browser monoculture, but people think that just because the internet didn’t explosively destruct overnight that everything is gonna be just fine.
See also, the “well, if they start abusing it, we can pass a new law to handle that!”. Yeah ok that’ll be great in 10 years, but what about now?
Manifest v3, the chrome Secure Enclave/remote attestation of ad delivery, and other measures are going to be coming down the pipe at an accelerated rate, and there's absolutely nothing to put the brakes on them anymore, because we now have a browser monoculture run by the world's largest adtech oligopoly. But people got their emotional victory over apple users and the app-review process.
Next stage: Youtube requires chrome, install it or get out. And I better see some remote attestation on that request, if you want FREE video. Why wouldn't they, when chrome/chromium control like 95% of every web request that's not iOS?
Now we get to do it again with RCS, where it's an "open" system that's chock-full of proprietary google extensions that google refuses to license or interoperate on. But everyone will nod along at how bad imessage is, and deliver us right into google's own proprietary system.
The entirety of HDCP exists to prevent this. That has literally been the driving factor in Secure Enclave adoption since day 1 too (along with bitlocker, but, video DRM has always been the other big one).
There will always be vulnerabilities and improper implementations and workarounds, but, the entire point of secure enclave is for someone at netflix or your employer's HQ to be comfortable knowing they have a toehold in your machine that can't be broken via Remote Attestation, and that there is no way for you to get the keys out of it when it's acting as a HSM.
You can always disable it/etc, or use another browser (like firefox) that doesn't provide a secure enclave. But then, google won't serve you video, just like netflix reduces the stream quality for people who don't have the hardware DRM set up right.
Since 95% of the world is already using chrome anyway (other than ios), this is a pretty low-risk move.
that'd be infeasible to do given the sheer volume of videos uploaded per day. even if we limited it to the most subscribed creators (10m+ subs) it'd be hard for pirates to keep up.
Not to mention seeding. If we had enough seeders to keep that sort of volume up, those p2p video services would be in a much better state.
I don't follow what one has to do with the other. Sounds like quite a stretch to compare or relate the two there. I could just be missing what you are implying there.
I pay for premium so this won't affect me, but it's always interesting seeing the efforts even a trillion dollar company has to go through to fight against a relative few very determined "hackers" underground.
It's not really a relative few, most estimates place ad blocking usage among web users between 25-45%. Since YT is somewhere around 10% of overall Google revenue, you're looking at up to a 5% increase in total revenue just based off of this, with basically ~all of that flowing into profit since there's not much cost. Pretty huge.
I homelab a huggin instance to scrape my favorite channels for new videos and then send them to a ytdl like program. Then it dumps them in Jellyfin. No ads, and no rabbit holes :)
How are you organizing them in Jellyfin? Some popular ones have tvdb entries so it’s easy to just treat them as tv shows, but the rest are a problem. I tried the somewhat-neglected Youtube library-type plugin for it a while back, and don’t remember exactly what was wrong, but recall finding it worse than nothing.
Downloading the videos is always an option, but I’ve found it’s too much of a hassle when browsing content. It works really well when you’re planning on going offline, though!
I haven't set it up yet, but youtube channels have RSS feeds so programmatically feeding a list of channels into a watch-later folder should be straightforward.
I've had the same ad-blocker for ages, and I wasn't receiving any of the YT anti-ad block popups until today. Interestingly, today was when I switched my default search engine in Chrome from Google to Kagi. I have to wonder if there is some kind of evaluation of what Google-y things you use for whether the ad-block popup occurs or not.
Google is scared, and desperate to fund it's ML products. This is not an isolated incident, they will continue to burn goodwill across their entire product lineup (Gmail, Maps, Search, Drive) in an effort to liquidate as much as possible to fund an ML war chest.
YouTube pays most creators zero, treats them like serfs, and allows people to steal any money they might make if some rando says that the channel is allegedly using their song with little recourse and no interaction with humans. Creators live in fear of a strike against their account, that's wrong. I don't have too much sympathy for Google. Google only cares about advertisers and don't give a crap about creators. I'd rather (and do) pay creators directly.
Note: for me,disabling Firefox 'enhanced' protection and updating uBlock Origin filters fixes the issue. An initial packet examination showed little changed. I hope others will weigh in, however.
I’m curious why I haven’t seen any ads or warnings to disable my ad blocker on YT yet. I do watch a lot of videos. I guess they are likely rolling it out and I will get it eventually.
What is the cost for Google to serve YouTube data to users, is it $0.01/hour/DAU, or is it median 2-3x Premium subscription per user? If it's latter, how will this ever work out?
And, with inevitable encation spreading across Web, what is its long-term replacement? Is it App market dystopia, or some sort of Metaverse system, or could it be fragmented regional Webs? We have been seeing more Gitea repository in Chinese, leaked Russian footage in Telegram, European developer anecdotes from Mastodon, etc.
I think we're just heading for (hopefully) a return to fragmentation of content. YouTube's dominance was largely from them pouring Google Ad money into the platform such that content creators made decent money while users didn't have to suffer as many ads as other platforms.
But over the years creators have become less dependent on Google ad money, instead relying more on sponsorships, paid subscriptions ala Patreon and superchat style systems for live streams. Leaving the audience as the only leverage YouTube has.
Now on top of that Google is creating incentives for people to look for alternatives. If it's already reasonable for people to self host alternate frontends like Invidious, it's only a matter of time till a gradual shift and fragmentation starts to occur.
I think Google would've had a much easier time of forcing people to not use adblock if they hadn't spent the past decade burning good will with the way they treat content creators.
This is my hope as well. If the majority of a content-creator's revenue comes from in-video sponsor segments, what difference does it make where the video is uploaded. Most podcasts follow this model, with the exception of ones that have a lucrative exclusive arrangement with a particular service, like Joe Rogan's on Spotify.
This already happened with many of the right-wing creators that were banned from YT some time back. Many of these creators upload to multiple 'alt-tech' sites (e.g. Rumble), and rely on sponsors or direct support, which isn't locked to YT.
Here’s a crazy idea… I don’t want to give any money to Google, but I would happily pay double the amount in taxes to get public infrastructure of comparable quality.
(I mean, that’s the hard variation of what I said… A softer variation would allow for public-corporate partnerships, or would merely regulate corporate activity much more.)
Peer to peer social network for indexing, querying and sharing torrents, using personal computers/phones/rented seed services to seed files, with a distributed indexing algorithm that branches out from contacts to their contacts to some depth in a recursive fashion, and a distributed search that queries your contacts as well as special index nodes that are well connected in the larger social network.
Then we'd have things like PeerTube built on top of this distributed social network, which would handle fetching video thumbnails, metadata, etc and presenting it in a YouTube style interface.
I guess the good news is that uBlock Origin is open source, so if the main addon stops being supported, it's possible for someone else to implement a new addon where they left off (indeed, uBlock Origin is this to the original uBlock).
The real adblocker is people uploading their videos to s3 (or s3 compatible) in the first place :-)
Youtube was revolutionary when it came out but now it doesn’t offer much other than discoverablity. Since you need to work hard to be discovered anyway you can do that via X (etc.)
Just need some people to make the tools so average jo can do it.
I will never understand why people continue to spam PiHole as a solution to blocking the ads of services that stream their ads from the same domain (as YouTube does).
Presumably people that _actually run_ PiHole instances (like myself) will know this, which makes me wonder what demographic is making this appear as a valid suggestion.
Please pay for YouTube Premium if you can afford it and watch a lot of videos. It's not cheap to stream and store the insane amounts of data they handle and I think it's a genuinely fair price.
If everyone just constantly tries to circumvent YouTube's evolving adblock-detection methods, at some point YouTube is going to do something drastic.
There's no way of knowing what they might resort to, but usually efforts to thwart the pirates end up hurting the legitimate paying customers instead.
There aren't many online platforms/services that I think provide enough value to justify their own existence, nevermind sending them money on a monthly basis. YouTube Premium though is most certainly one of the exceptions.
Not even touching on the uploading and live streaming aspects, just the fact that you can stream full HD content 24/7 to multiple devices, embed the videos on other websites and it works perfectly with essentially zero down time is incredible. Paying like $10 a month to avoid any advertising at all PLUS access to their music streaming service... subscribing is such a no-brainer to me.
