I use uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock for YouTube and I haven't seen an ad in ages. When I do see an ad, it's because I'm trying to browse on somebody else's computer.
SponsorBlock in particular is life changing. You don't realize how much nonsense filler is in these videos. You can easily cut a 10 minute video from a mainstream YouTuber down to like 6 or 7 minutes worth of content if you skip intros, skip recaps, skip sponsorships and product plugs, and skip interaction reminders.
reddit and youtube really shouting out how much companies don't give two farts about its users. there's so much wholesome and educational content on youtube but, dogs forbid, youtube make $5 fewer in revenue than yesterday 🙄 i can't wait for grassroots decentralization of the internet, including video
It's even worse that they're apparently going to crack down on adblockers too. Ik people will just make anti-adblock blockers but it's still fuckin dumb. I swear yt wants to make itself worse than cable tv in terms of ads.
I was thinking what if we switched to a fediverse Youtube replacement, such as PeerTube. However, I don't think this would work. For one, because there are no ads, there's no money being made, and creators would have to be backed by donations. Not sure how much money that would bring in.
Additionally, the difference between a "creator" on lemmy/subreddit (creating a community) vs a "creator" on youtube (uploads videos) is that I can be a creator without hosting an instance here. Looks like if I wanted to upload videos to PeerTube, I'd need to make my own instance or pay for one. Maybe if there was an option to select an instance just like here on lemmy, but videos take waaayy more disk space and processing to stream than text and a few images. Could be cool to host yourself though.
I finally got a Nebula subscription. A lot of my YouTube favorites are on there, and I've found a couple new ones to follow. I still wind up on YT for a few folks, but that number is dropping.
And as a PSA: YouTube might or might not be secretly cracking down on 3rd party clients. There have been issues with Invidious & yt-dlp and I have had a few instances where NewPipe on Android bugged out. Let's see where this leads to
I have essentially stopped using YouTube at this point due to the ads, and the first time I get 5 unskippable ads will be the last time I use YouTube. I already essentially quit after it stopped being 1-2 20s skippable ads or 1-2 5s unskippable ads, which I thought was fair as long as it was no more than twice in 20-30 minutes. Now I get 2 unskippable 20s ads every time and there really isn’t anything on YouTube I want to watch that much.
Between the GCN app and Nebula I've spent less and less time on YouTube recently. Happy to pay Nebula for the privilege as well, they do such a good job and support creators far better than YouTube do.