Reminder that this is a thing that could happen.

Oh no! Anyway....

continues using an AdBlocker

Not when they disable ad blockers like twitch
- My AdBlocker still works on twitch, you just have to do some fanaegling with user scripts.
- Then I won't use youtube since the content is not really worth watching ads or paying for.
- In that moment, I will use piped. If piped goes down, I will use nebula. Anything over paying youtube.
- There are still alternative frontends like piped.video that don't show ads
- This aged as expected 😓
I use adblocker in Firefox mobile. Noticed YouTube keeps downgrading the quality on every video load even tho higher quality is set to auto

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.

Sponsorblock is so good, it's amazing. Even use it on Smarttube (firetv).
- Alright I'm convinced. I've been using just uBlock but I'll give sponsorblock a try.

NewPipe from Android saves me from this

Ublock Origins on desktop browsers. Or Freetube.
- Soon it might be Firefox exclusive though
I get a lot of videos with a Spanish audio track and no way to change it to default.
Just migrated from Vanced to ReVanced and I am loving it. Their patches even let you get rid of the Shorts and Create tabs
- https://github.com/revanced/revanced-manager/releases/latest go get it kids
- ReVanced is the bomb but I only wish casting worked with it.
  That said, SmartTube is roughly equivalent to ReVanced in functionality (even SponsorBlock) but it'll work perfectly on Android TV devices.

Christ I love the Revanced project

Don't forget SmartTube for Android TV!
- There's also the fork NewPipe x SponsorBlock with support for SponsorBlock.
There's a Revanced? I've been clinging on to Vanced hoping YouTube API will not change anytime soon
- Yes, instead of an app you install, you patch the app yourself using a separate app. Kinda like xmanager if you've used that before. I'd point you to their official reddit, but... yknow... Here's their official Discord https://discord.gg/revanced

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

Youtube has been consistently getting worse for the past 10 years now. I keep going back because that's where all the good content is and I don't think anyone could possibly create an alternative. It would just cost too much money.
- idk, some of my fellow tech furries have ridiculously large homelabs and servers that have massive amounts of storage. i don't think it's impossible, but may require someone to come up with a way for us to decentralize video which, ofc, is humungo-bonzonga-jumbo
"i can't wait for grassroots decentralization of the internet, including video" 🍻
- cheers 🍻 💙
We are the commodity for sale to advertisers. We make the content we consume, YouTube makes sure it keeps going, but for the most part they are just perpetuating viewing space for ads.
- this, of course, is not inherently bad. but when does it end? when you literally strip away all but 1 cubic centimeter of joy and ease of use of your product just to squeeze out two monies?

They really want to tv-ify web content huh? People left TV because they were sick of ads.

I only have YouTube premium because I do not want a TV license and one is definitely cheaper than the other but the fuck man.

Cable TV did not originally have ads. That was part of the reason that people started paying for it.
What you are seeing is the natural cycle of content and greed.
Not just them either. Netflix has an ad based tier now and I wouldn't be surprised if other platforms have them too as they realise there's a limit to how much they can realistically charge people. It seems like we've circled back to the start of cable
Yeah, i use youtube and youtube music like daily, to me it worth the money than any other tv service

Must be the season of boycott, youtube about to do a reddit moment.

It's like everyone's speedrunning it's downfall 😂
Peertube? I guess? Whats the alternative then?
- Aside from Peertube one I could think of is vimeo, dailymotion, dtube and twitch, then again in terms of content and servers available around the world nothing matching youtube, except maybe tiktok and twitch. There is pornhub which I think could be the best competitor for youtube barely any restrictions you can talk shit in fact some actually upload gaming videos and some random stuff aside from porn ofcourse they have a lot of servers around the world. The videos dont buffer that much. Who ever owns pornhub if they decide to have sfw alternative to it they could be best alternative to youtube.
  Edit: I think they dont have sfw because its hard to make money out of it similar to youtube which is operating at a loss. The only reason google still keeps youtube running is because its a white elephant.
- Right now, there's no viable alternative anywhere near YouTube's size. Hosting that much video content is expensive and very few companies have sufficient money and servers to support it.

@STRIKINGdebate2 Firefox + uBlock Origin is love!!!
Firefox + uBlock Origin is life!!!

Also on Android. It allows me to have extensions.
I don't need any other app besides Firefox, Revanced, and my bank's app on my phone.

Proper source or GTFO, please

This is why we use Piped and Newpipe/Libretube.

That's not even usable

not mildly infuriating. just straight up rage-inducing

They’re trying everything to get us to buy YT premium. At what point do they start becoming full-on commercials? Lol

amazon music too. exceeded skip count ->buy premium skip
If this post is true it pretty much would be like tv commercials.

reminder that Invidious and Piped (and LibreTube on Android and Yattee on iOS) are a thing.

Don't forget ReVanced!
- I prefer to stick to open source solutions. LibreTube lets me keep track of channels I'm interested in without a Google account.

PeerTube needs more traction.

How does PeerTube handle storage? I'm trying to imagine trying to create a federated system version of Youtube and it seems very problematic. Storage and bandwidth.
- Quoting Wikipedia:
  Each PeerTube instance provides a website to browse and watch videos, and is by default independent from others in terms of appearance, features and rules.
  Several instances, with common rules (e.g. allowing for similar content, requiring registration) can form federations, where they follow one's videos, even though each video is stored only by the instance that published it. Federations are independent from each other and asymmetrical: one instance can follow another to display their videos without them having to do the same. Instances' administrators can each choose to mirror individual videos or whole friend instances, creating an incentive to build communities of shared bandwidth.
  Videos are made available via HTTP to download, but playback favors a peer-to-peer playback using HLS and WebTorrent. Users connected to the platform act as relay points that send pieces of video to other users, lessening the bandwidth of each to the server and thus allowing smaller hardware to operate at a lower cost.
  Wikipedia Source
R.I.P Invidious. Good ol’ enshittification.
- What happened to Invidious?
PLEASE - Just do anything to give Youtube a run for its money. They're steamrolling right now due to the promise of ad-revenue to streamers though. Idk how to fight that
I think 2023-2024 are going to be the years of decentralization.
How does it monetize? What makes it attractive to creators?
- I had the same questions. The first one is answered here better than I could.
  As to monetization, I would think that that's up to the creator. The Patreon model, sponsors. Like that.

And that's why I have AdBlock

- just got revanced. life changing

NewPipe x Sponsorblock on Android, Invidious on iOS, Adblock + Sponsorblock in Firefox, SmartTubeNext on Android TV box.

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.

this makes me glad that i use ublock origin

And youtube revanced on android
- and SmartTubeNext on TV

Don't forget, on a "free" platform, you are the product.

You're the product on paid platforms, too.

And then big companies wonder why we use ad blockers.

That's wild. I would never sit through that. I've been a YouTube premium sub for years because it's bundled with music. Never knew it was this bad

Careful, lots of people take issue with paying for a service these days. /s but only kinda
YT premium has been by far the most worth it subscription for me. I spend a frankly unhealthy amount of YT, even have it running in the background while not watching actively, and I listen to YT music for hours every day. Really easy value sell for me.
But somehow people expect YT to host and deliver literal exabytes of data for free.
- These kind of unsolicited reports from users prove a really important point, and one that Spez and company would prefer to ignore. If you have good enough content people will pay for an ad-free experience.
When I canceled my Spotify subscription, I did the same. I get music and video w/o 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 obviously don't have a lot of data but I've checked the financial for the YouTuber StupidEconomics. I've checked him because he is the one I know that publish a detailed financial report. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1uEk4Td0fyFSGTBUhG_n6oxOanmknXi21p3VmFszCCYU/htmlview#
It looks like YouTube ads revenus are only 5-10% of his revenus. Most of his revenus are donations and public subventions.
- Not only that but Youtube often demonetizes videos while also cutting ad-payments. Payments per-view today are much lower than they were 5 years ago.

"Oh boy, done with my shift. Time to sit down and watch some entertaining ~~videos~~ ads!"

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.

Oh well, I have already left Twitter and Reddit this year, I'm down for one more.

Newpipe on fdroid.org

- This is kinda misleading, the only thing they can "track" about you using Newpipe is your IP address, which doesn't reveal as much info as metadata/tracking scripts in the official app do. Use a VPN and you're good
- I wasn't aware of libretube , thanks for sharing
Yes! Also Firefox with ublock origin add-on.

I wish there would be an iOS app for Peertube. Then I could start to migrate. But without a mobile app, this is not really useful.

(Yes, I know some people love to use a webpage on their phones. I don't.)

One of the biggest reasons I always use Android...

Haven’t seen it mentioned but the vinegar safari extension for iOS removes ads, allows PiP, and playing in the background.

Edited bc I’m dumber than dirt lol thanks for tip!
Thanks so much for this!!!

"Five to ten second ads are already normal what is thi- ... oh. Yeah I see what they're upset about."

Revanced all the way

I wish you didn't have to be rooted for revanced to edit the official reddit app. If any of you are rooted and want to patch a Reddit APK for me with all patches I'd greatly appreciate it.
- Just another to confirm, I'm very much not rooted, and very much using Revanced every day
- I'm rooted, give me a bit and I'll try to patch it for you
- I've was able to install it and I'm not rooted. Where did you see that rooting is necessary? Btw, you can also find all the up-to-date revanced APKs here if you don't want to build them yourself. https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps/releases
- You don't need to be rooted. You just need the .apk from APK Mirror, then open Revanced Manager, go to Patches - Select an application, chose the "storage" option in the bottom left, select your downloaded .apk and patch it.

Content industry trying increase the greed game now just like brick and mortar has been doing to us since Covid. Fantastic.

Revanced

I have YouTube ad free for a while now. Quite expensive, but I also watch it a lot, so it makes sense.

I bit on the 3 free months offer awhile back, and they got me. I just couldn't go back to the ads. $11.99/mo feels expensive, but like you I watch it all the time.
- Do you guys not use AdBlock and revanced?
- I had it when it was $8.99 and included Google Play Music... I unsubscribed once they discontinued Google Play Music and replaced it with the (far inferior) YouTube Music. Even now, YouTube Music is still missing some features and songs from Google Play Music.
  That plus music disappearing from both services due to licensing issues is why I canceled my account. It convinced me to set up my own Plex server, rip some CDs, and use Plexamp instead.

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 started using Piped.video a year ago on my computer, which could also skip sponsored segments. Couldn't be more happier.

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.

I'm already not using Twitch much at all because of that. Even with an ad-blocking extension on the browser, it's an awful and infuriating experience. You can see how frequent and how long the ad breaks are even through the adblocking. When I use it on my phone that has no blocking, it's just... I click a random stream to see what the streamer is doing and I get locked into 3 minutes of ads before I can even see that. I usually just back out and close the app when that happens.
- If you have a VPN, set your location to Poland and you will not have any ads on twitch. I guess they have some law against it or something.

Are there any methods for blocking adverts when using the Youtube app on the Xbox? Already feel like they show a ridiculous amount.

PiHole maybe? I have no experience with one but I believe it blocks ads on all devices on your LAN.
- Unfortunately it does not work for youtube at all.

Can someone create frontend app for TizenTv? I feel like it will be annoying as fck or i'll just stop using yt on tv for good.

https://bizwest.com/2023/06/13/judge-landlord-can-evict-twitter-from-spark-offices-in-boulder/

No surprise. Scumbag owner does scumbag things.
Bloomberg reported this month that “Twitter is late on more than $10 million of payments to an array of companies that provide services from public relations advice to branded merchandise, according to claims in court filings.”
Many of those vendors, like Avalanche, are small, local businesses.

If this is legit then surely an upstart would cut the knees out from youtube? Vimeo would be well placed to just gobble up their userbase

No chance.
Creating a Reddit alternative is easy because you only need to host text, and text doesn't take up a lot of space. The entirety of Wikipedia's text, for instance, can be compressed into something like 22 GB, which is small enough that it can be stored on low-end consumer hardware from 20 years ago. The more difficult problem is getting a user base: people don't want to switch unless they have a compelling reason to, and even with Reddit shitting the bed recently, Reddit alternatives are still pretty empty.
With video, you have both problems. Like Reddit alternatives, getting people to switch and produce content for the platform is difficult as hell. However, even if you somehow manage to succeed at that, video takes up an enormous amount of space. It simply isn't feasible to host that much content without millions/billions of dollars of funding available if the platform takes off, and no company wants to invest that sort of money on a low probability gamble competing against one of the largest companies in the history of the world.
- But in a federated alternative, no one party is responsible for hosting everything. Altogether it's a lot of data, yes. But it's not like Google has the whole of the internet stored on its servers.
- It might not be that hard to store. A lot of Youtube videos are just filler, you wouldn't want your instance to store massive amounts of mixtape videos for example, neither would you want to store 10 different encodings of the same video. On the flip-side, you can get 20TB drives easily enough if you have the pipe to run the server locally; and distributed storage makes it more feasible to use consumer grade hardware that's more prone to failure.
It’s not the platform that is the problem, it’s the content. Your favorite creator’s content only exists on YouTube. I think you’d need a mass creator exodus first.

Here is the clean link: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/xfnihd/no_just_no/

Here is how to clean links: https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-clean-urls/

Here is why you should clean links: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/importance-clean-urls-when-sharing-social-media-mary-silva

On that note: https://github.com/AUTplayed/imguralbumbot/blob/master/README.md

dude, just spam close and open the video skipping all the ads and then you're good

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.