- YouTube is intensifying efforts to combat adblockers, including blocking video playback and warning users of potential account suspension.
- Increased ads on YouTube have driven many users to adblockers, hurting both YouTube’s ad revenue and content creators reliant on ad-based income.
- Despite these measures, many users are leaving YouTube or finding workarounds, leading creators to seek alternative revenue streams off-platform.
If you care about that you don’t use YouTube at all or support creators that do. Even using 3rd party apps or services feeds into that. This feels like a serious non sequitur on any thread about any Google product.
Unfortunately that’s not an option. Youtube has not only host “fun” videos, but repair videos, learning materials and even university course learning materials, none of them to be found elsewhere.
There is literally no way to opt out of Google’s data collection if you are going to use their products. Using another frontend shifts the data profile but it still exists and provides value to them. It’s reasonable to say it’s a bad thing. It’s unreasonable to say there are no other ways. I grew up in a public library and I can still get most of the information I need from a public library without Google products (things I can’t get usually come through inter-library loan or direct connections with subject matter experts at, say, a maker space). This seems to be less of “I’m against invasive corporations” and more of a “I don’t like the solutions available to avoid invasive corporations.”
I wouldn’t care if they would only keep aggregate statistics, not stats about individual users, and when watching through a public frontend my usage blends in with that of many other people.
That’s not how that works.
I’m interested, how that works?