It seems like we’ve all lost the plot. We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring. Try browsing for a day on a plain-no-extension browser. If you use other web enhancement tools kill those too. Straight-up internet is cancer, especially on mobile.
It’s impossible to read a 250-word article without being interrupted 5-7 times. Two of those interruptions are likely a full page overlay with give me your email, and are you sure you don’t want to subscribe, just give me your credit card number.
Then there are auto-play videos on the side, some with audio on by default. I mean I came here to read something, so of course we have things flashing and moving and making noise, it’s the most conducive environment for thought, right?
Ad blockers and script blocking are essentially a hazmat suit that allows us to withstand a hostile environment. Remember when we said myspace pages with audio and [marching-ants] borders was a bad UX? At least we didn’t have overlays back then.
Go back to basics and consider what makes a good vs bad internet experience. The reality sounds like someone with a minor case of severe brain damage. I think we’ve just become unashamed of greed as a society. It’s clearly all just about money.
Those annoying customers/users generate content and we have to put up with them so we can monetize it. *Sadly, It’s unclear if I’m talking about youtube, reddit, or nearly any other site.
Le sigh.
Wow the enshittification is at full throttle across silicon valley! Guess those investors gotta get those returns now that interest rates are spiking!
I have to imagine many of these investors also have money in areas whose prices have skyrocketed due to “inflation.” They’ve seen the profits other industries are getting away with and now big tech feels the need to do the same. These companies are supposed to be the future, after all… How will it look if big oil is more profitable than mainstream digital platforms? To investors, it looks bad.
Sadly, when your ability to generate profit relies on using your users (or the developers and mods that run your platform cough Reddit) like cheap labor, rather than providing better product at reasonable prices, digital platforms suffer in usability or features. It’s kind of a lose lose for anyone that actually cares, because so far the market hasn’t self-corrected.
That’s funny, I’m testing YouTube alternatives.
Suggestions?
My issue is that the content creators i watch probably arnt going to leave… and im sure ad blocks will find a way around it after a month or so
PeerTube seems to be the federated (decentralized) option (similar to this). Content obv is entirely different, but maybe that’s actually a good thing. Think of it as a clean slate - a fresh canvas. tbh YouTube’s content has really sucked the past few years, and mother of bog do you see the stuff that trends nowadays when you’re signed out? It’s basically become cable tv. I started using youtube bc I hated cable tv.
defederated
I’m not sure I understand what defederated means in this context. Can you explain it?
think they meant to say decentralized
yes, my brain apparently couldn’t decide between decentralized and federated, so it mooshed them together
Invidious is the most obvious. Its FOSS wrapper but it also lets you watch peertube and other federated content.
They already started to fight the project last week, Google legal contacted the project owners
I saw the reply they had. Interesting point about “We don’t use your API so we didn’t agree to the TOS of your API. Also there is no ‘we’, since we don’t host invictus; simply develop it as a product”
@PhatInferno There’s Peertube here in the fediverse. But yea, every platform will need creators which will not easily switch. Some even have youtube membership enabled on their channels, which makes it kinda impossible (without being deprived of revenue).
Unfortunately I don’t know of any other platform that would pay creators like YouTube does which is half the reason the YouTube keeps creators.
I hate the crypto bros as much as but I wonder if there is a way to set up a federated video sharing network that has a $5 monthly fee and distribute it over the creators you watcher over the month.
@Bardak if you post a video on a topic that YouTube deems problematic then it doesn’t pay you either (i.e. the demonetize that video).
Many youtubers are on platforms that accept donations tho (like Patreon), so for some, the monetization isn’t that much of an issue.
Nebula. Most of they content creators I watch are there.
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I usually follow creators through RSS, so I mix and match platforms avoiding YouTube for any creator that cross posts. A lot cross post to Odyssey though so if you wanted to have like one app in addition to YT that’d probably be the way to go, or at least worth checking out.
Yep, got selected for this test and I thought my network went down.
Had to do nearly 30 mins of debugging until I realized it was youtube actively withholding JUST the video. Took some effort but managed to get them to send the videos again after resetting a bunch of things.
I refuse to view ads and will go to the ends of the earth to make that happen.
Paying is most certainly an option, but only when that becomes the ONLY option.
I’ve been using an adblocker since ads starting becoming more intrusive and the internet has progressed so much that it’s become generally unusable without one. I remember when a mobile ad popped up on my phone and it straight up startled me.
oh look, another web service who wants to strangle its users for money and ad views :D when’s a peertube instance going to get some big creators on it supported by viewers? that’ll do it, i bet
Seems unlikely that a creator would jump ship from a platform that pays them to a platform that doesn’t. That being said, lots of creators also constantly complain about demonetization, so maybe they’ll start to get fed up and move to purely in-video sponsorship things. Seems most likely from a creator that’s already on a platform like nebula
Most big youtubers have in-video ads now anyways. I’m not sure what the ratio of their revenue comes from youtube ads vs in-video ads, but youtube seems pretty trigger happy about demonetizing videos. Sometimes entire channels. If someone gets the majority of their revenue from other sources than youtube ads, I could see them migrating to something like peertube.
Even with in-video ads, those must be paid based on historical (or actual?) view counts right? No matter how big you are, there’s no way you’re going to maintain view counts when switching away from YouTube.
You’re allowed to upload the same .mp4 file to multiple websites. There’s absolutely no reason why a creator that isn’t getting YouTube ad money couldn’t upload to YouTube and PeerTube at the same time. Presumably if they’re getting YouTube monetization, they have some kind of exclusivity agreement.
you’re definitely right on most points. but, to your point, if a creator was on a federated instance of peertube then they don’t have to worry about the wishy-washy, everchanging rules of youtube :3
I could see someone making some fork of peertube that helps creators get paid. May not be free but could get creators willing to join
if it’s not free what’s the benefit of using PeerTube? You’re basically describing nebula
Hopefully once the issue of the ridiculous amount of resources needed for such a service is resolved. This is why we don’t have any viable youtube alternative yet, especially one that isn’t a corporate pile of junk. Once you get to a certain size if you don’t rake in the cash you shut down. So hopefully peer to peer saves the day.
yup, even youtube isn’t profitable. Video remains one of the largest sinks of resources. A 4K movie is stored on a disc of about 66GB, so about 30GB per hour of 4k video. Even with peertube it’d take the best hobbyists to run even a modest server for a few streamers. We’re talking people with PB level of storage capacities now with fiber lines to their house to truly host peertube alternatives, and if we’re talking cloud we’re talking thousands per month.
It’s not impossible, I don’t want to get people down, but that’s the major hurdle
Which makes me wonder - was the push for 60fps across the platform a move to make competition harder?
I’m not aware of anyone that was using it as a leg up on them.
Every video maker should host his own peertube instance with only 1 user.
yeah but then we get a youtube esque site of nerds who love hoarding hard drives and setting up selfhosted services. Which is great, I did that, but the vast majority of youtubers don’t have the knowledge/don’t want to set that up
this is true. having said that - i follow a peertube-based french outfit called blast (can’t speak french, just look at the pictures). if i go to a different site (peertube.stream, liberta.vip) and look at a video, the streams are coming off video.blast-info.fr.
there’s no question video is a huge resource suck, and that nobody would want to host a lot of other people’s videos. i just wonder, if the model is federated indexes but owner-hosted video, i wonder if there’s a use case that can work at scale.
I do like the idea of having individuals host their own channels, but the bar for entry needs to become incredibly simple. Granted kids can spin up minecraft servers now, so at least that easy for online hosting. Self hosting is a bit more arduous for sure, but if people can host their own plex servers then I’d expect most video creators to be able to run peer tube - when it gets that easy.
Unfortunately most people post to YouTube. They might not know about Peertube. So Peertube just doesn’t have the content.
Here’s to hoping as lemmy, mastodon, etc. get name recognition peertube gets their time of day too.
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From the documentation:
A PeerTube instance can mirror other PeerTube videos to improve bandwidth use.
The instance administrator can choose between multiple redundancy strategies (cache trending videos or recently uploaded videos etc.), set their maximum size and the minimum duplication lifetime. Then, they choose the instances they want to cache in Manage follows -> Following admin table.
Videos are kept in the cache for at least min_lifetime, and then evicted when the cache is full.
You basically get how it works. The tech isn’t there yet to replace YouTube.
Peertube will unfortunately never be an answer because of the lack of way for creators to get paid for watchtime
I disagree with this, I fully believe a donation-funded content economy can work.
I’m confused about this take. YouTube clearly has hosting costs and also pays creators. That money has to come from somewhere. They offer two options, ads or subscription. You could argue that the number of ads is too many or the cost of the subscription is too high, but demanding a service be free just because it’s technologically possible to block ads seems weird.
I subscribe to nebula for this reason, directly support creators and it’s very reasonably priced.
I’ve found Nebula to be great for a few creators I follow, but the amount of content isn’t high enough to wean me off of YouTube completely.
Did they ever get around to implementing playlists and autoplay of some sort? I really wanted to get into that service, but the absence of those two things just killed it for me
Not to my knowledge, no.
How is peertube in terms of hosting costs? I would assume much higher than lemmy or mastodon considering it’s all video content.
hosting cost for peertube would probably be astronomical since you’re likely hosting the videos yourself :/ unless there is some sort of federation that kind of works like bittorrent. that would be awesome
Peertube is federated. It seems to work similarly to Lemmy. I went on a random instance and clicked “discover” and noticed that I see videos from other instances. So at least the hosting cost is distributed across instances.
The other issue then is the bandwidth. Peertube uses p2p among viewers, so if there are many viewers at the same time they can take a significant load off from the server. Instances can also cache each other’s videos to split the bandwidth cost between them.
I think these design decisions means that it is possibly viable, though it is definitely way more expensive than non-video federated communities.
I’ve had good experiences with Odysee. Not as much content yet, and it’s missing DIY videos, but I don’t see problems yet.
Odysee lacks of moderation. It’s full of conspiration bullshit, racist videos and horrible stuff.
this is very interesting, ty 💙
If you serve me Ads that lead to scams and malicious websites, you don’t reserve my ad revenue.
I do understand that if companies running ad-supported models, they need to make sure users are actually watching those ads. Seems logically to me - no ads mean no money, and no money means no sustainable business model.
On the other side, as a user, I just can’t browse the internet without an ad-blocker any more. They just got so annoying and sometimes even break the actual website.
But to be honest, I don’t see an alternative to ad-supported models except paying money directly via subscriptions plans etc. But this also will not work in the long term. I just can’t pay afford to pay a subscription for each website I visit during the day.
I’ll say something unexpected: I pay for YouTube. With money! Why?
- I use it every day and I’m a human who likes boosting the things that I enjoy
- I think YouTube’s content recommendations are a genuine value-add and not easily replaced
- A cut of my subscription fee goes directly back to the video creators that I watch
- The “premium” encoding levels are actually a substantial improvement to video bitrates
- Important: the premium bitrate is higher than anything previously offered and probably would not have been otherwise practical to serve for free
So yeah. I personally like YouTube enough to pay for it and I have the financial means to do so. Am I a clown for expressing personal appreciation towards a faceless megacorp? Yes. Yes I am. Constantly trying to win at every transaction in life is a drag though, so I think I’ll continue to enjoy getting swindled.
I just stood up a selfhosted Invidious instance the other day, and I replaced YouTube ReVanced with Clipious (an Invidious client for Android) on my phone. No ads, SponsorBlock built-in, no need for a YouTube/Google account to create subscriptions, playlists, etc. And it’s highly performant since I run it behind a reverse proxy with some custom caching configuration for things like thumbnail images, static assets, etc.
Clipious can also be installed on an Android TV (has an actual Android TV interface). I’m going to end up installing it on mine, but I’m also using SmartTubeNext at the moment, which does require a YouTube/Google account for subscriptions, playlists, etc, but does have no ads, built-in SponsorBlock, and a slew of other great features. I’ll be keeping both around, since I do sometimes like to cast to my TV, and SmartTubeNext allows for that (Clipious does not, at least at this time).
Unless YouTube somehow starts dynamically splicing in ads as part of the actual video stream, there’s always going to be a way to block ads, unless they do something pretty elaborate. But that’s probably not worth the effort on their end to go that far, since the vast, vast majority of people won’t know what to do to get around that, nor will they probably care enough to try. But I think it’s clear that DNS blocking using services such as AdGuard Home, PiHole, etc, are going to become less effective over time.
The comments in here are interesting to me. Ads and Premium are a way for your favorite content creators to get paid for the content that they produce. I’ve listened to a number of creators talk about the YouTube revenue sharing model and most of them (LTT and Hank Green) says that YouTube is actually really fair with how they share ad revenue and how Premium is actually a good alternative that meets the needs of the platform, users, and creators. And YouTube, the platform, DOES need to get paid as well otherwise your videos can’t get to you.
I also hate ads, like a lot, and I do whatever I can to get them off of my screen because I think they are intrusive and we have proof of how they enable tracking across the internet at large. However, for those platforms that I find extreme value in (YouTube being the example here) I see how and why ads/Premium pump value into their system. If your favorite content creator isn’t getting paid for their content, they won’t be able to sustain it long term.
One last thought about video streaming and the content we all love that is hosted by YouTube: if we were to say that we would rather our money go directly to our favorite content creators, we would end up with a very fragmented ecosystem akin to the Streaming Service MESS we are in with TV/Movies. I would LOVE to pay LTT directly through Floatplane, but then where would I be with being able to watch other content creators?
Remember when ads were short and easy to skip? They’re just getting more annoying now.
I could bear them back then, but now I can tell immediately if I accidentally use the mobile app on my phone vs my phone’s web browser.
This is the thing about ads. It’s never, ever enough. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and it doesn’t matter. We still get more ads.
Basically I think we are going to have to find more and more alternatives to the web. It’s ruined and it’s not coming back.
I know many people who are back on piracy now. It’s just impossible to take all the ads.
I have heard that the ads are getting worse and longer/unskipable. I do wonder how YouTube determines what the ‘balance’ should be. You know they have the usage and engagement statistics to back up the increase. It did get to a point where I said there was no way I could continue to use YouTube as it was; but it was also around the time that I pretty much switched to YouTube for content over Netflix/Hulu/Disney+/TV so Preimum was a no brainer as I could drop 3 or 4 streaming services for YouTube.
My understanding is that as rates have gone way down the last couple of years and it wouldn’t surprise me if Google just has less high quality ads and is dipping into the crappy cheaper ad buys to fill the space.
Once, I played the first YouTube of the day on the Roku, and instantly got 2 minutes of unskipable ads (4, 30 second segments) with (what I would categorize as) unnecessarily sexual content on a children’s playdough video. That was when I installed and configured PiHole for the Roku. That was the last straw. My 2-yo niece should not have seen a dude’s butt. A 5-second video-age-appropriate ad, ok. An age-appropriate banner on the bottom, ok. 2 minutes of unskipable adult ads on a kid’s video, no. I started blocking, when they started intruding.
I understand your argument, but I think the issue is more complex. I would wish that it was just advertisers paying money to YouTube and YouTube taking its cut and giving the rest to the content creator. It used to be like that in the beginning, but it isn’t anymore. I do not pay for a YouTube subscription, because I don’t want YouTube to track my videos and create a profile of me. Especially when I often have to sift through multiple videos just to find an answer to very specific question and YouTube takes that as me being super interested in that whole topic. Watching ads on the other hand is also just a large tracking apparatus that tries to squeeze money out of my pockets. My preferences over the whole Internet is being tracked to serve me “the most relevant and personalised content”. Basically, they try to figure out what I want, before I do and then try to sell me that. If there is a way to directly support content creators (donations, subscriptions, etc), I usually do that. But I don’t want to support shady business with my data behind my back.
Very much this. If I visit the grocery store, I am not walking through other businesses just to get to each isle.
I am perfectly happy with going back to amateur YouTube somewhere else. If it was a real community of individuals I would probably post content again myself. The whole idea of YT as career content creators only is not very interesting to me any more.
I do not use an ad blocker. I use a whitelist firewall. I only visit the websites I request. If anyone wants to show me content, it must be on the servers I wish to visit. As far as I am concerned, if I invite you into my home, you head to the bathroom, open the window and let a dozen people into my home, you’re never going to get invited to visit again. This is how ads work.
If YT can’t trust these people to host their content directly, that is not my problem.
If they would let me just specifically pay for ad-free YouTube at a reasonable price, instead of lumping it in with a bunch of shit I don’t use and am not interested in, I would happily pay.
And YouTube, the platform, DOES need to get paid as well otherwise your videos can’t get to you.
I disagree. YouTube is owned by Google as we all know very well. They don’t need to show you ads technically. I get why they would want to, because obviously its a company and they want to make more and more money. But I (and many more like me), as users we feel that it gets to a point where I’m not watching a video with ads sprinkled in, but ads with a video sprinkled in. So I as a consumer will find ways to circumvent that, and avoid watching ads. There comes a point where they’re getting far too greedy and I can no longer tolerate the extent to which their “more and more money” practices get to. As another commenter mentioned, the ads arms race will simply continue turning. As for creators, there are other ways for them to make money, as was the case when YouTube was still a younger thing. Now there’s even more options such as Patreon. Also, bigger brands such as LTT inevitably branch out and create separate revenue streams (think LTT store). Obviously, not every creator might want to do that simply to get paid, but when did we shift to this idea that its a job. Even though I’m young(er), I still remember the beginning of YouTube, though barely. It seems like it was more people back then that wanted to do this as a passion, not that they felt “I need to release a video every week at a set day and time or I get less money” as it seems to be now.
I wouldn’t even mind that much if the ads didn’t interfere with the primary function of the site, which one would think is to serve content (the product) to me (the consumer). Such as ads which are not part of the video but are loaded on the side for example. However, this is not the case. Primarily I think because we have reached a point in the internet’s timeline where people using it are not the customers anymore, but the product. And we’re being sold to ad companies.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk xD
YSK that Premium pays considerably less to creators than any other form of monetization.
So, if you want to support your favorite creator, literally send them a dollar.
One dollar is more than what that creator will ever make from a single viewer on YouTube.
We’ll find a way around it, if not go to hell YT. Apart from posters in the real world, I am living a 100% ad-free life and I’m super happy about it.
Okay but I don’t understand. Isn’t paying to remove ads a fair deal? I don’t know, I pay for YouTube Premium and I’m kinda happy about it. The price seems fair; you get no ads, you get to download stuff, enables picture-in-picture and background playback. YouTube has been my main source of entertainment for the last couple of years so it’s the only subscription I have alongside Spotify.
Yeah until they start showing ads for Premium as well. You know it’s going to happen eventually
The problem isn’t so much that there are ads. The problem is also what kind of ads they’re playing. YouTube has been known to play inappropriate ads without vetting them - think of those awful mobile game ads with a heavy sexual tone.
This stuff also seems to explicitly target videos that kids might watch.
Isn’t paying to remove ads a fair deal?
If the price were reasonable, community practices especially regarding monetization and moderation were acceptable, telemetry-tracking javascript minimal, etc. then sure.
But… we’re not there.
Absolutely, you are free to make every kind of contract if you like. Personally, I am not very invested in youTube, I don’t watch any streamers or youTubers, it’s just a video hosting platform for me. I am boycotting Google wherever I can, it is a privacy desaster and dystopia-like enterprise. NewPipe has all the ‘features’ as well, if it breaks I just let YouTube go…
I could live without youtube for sure, I have more of a Reddit problem than a YouTube problem… but it seems they fixed that for me.
and I’m testing Youtube Revanced on my phone for unlimited ad-free background play for nothing!
Honestly, others do have point when they say we are basically leeching off of the platform. I honestly don’t think I’d mind paying for youtube, I currently don’t because it kind of just got ingrained in me that youtube was “free”. I think the ad supported model is fundamentally flawed though.
Platforms will always want to make it worth it for advertisers to work for them. With the huge trove of user data that sites like Youtube, Twitter, Facebook etc. have they will use that to leverage personalized ads that will feed your brain with garbage all day and coax you into buying shit you don’t need or sometimes even falling for scams.
I’d honestly like it better if these sites just straight up charged you right out of the gate. Maybe on top of that we could have sites be interoperable, like the fediverse, so it’s not necessarily what the site offers but how they offer it to you. Making you want to pay for an experience that you truly can’t get anywhere else.
This should go quite well for YouTube. popcorn gif
This will lead to an increase of ad-blocker-blocker-blocker development.
yo dawg I heard you like blockers
The adblocking arms race escalates further!
It’ll happen. I just hope that it will just become semi-diffucult to do it, so that non-technical people give in so Google is happy, then the 0.1% of us can enjoy our adblocked youtube.
Came here to say this as well. It’s a game of cat and mouse.
It’s just natural evolution.
They already exist and are quite effective, I wonder whether YouTube is able to detect those too
So you’re saying we need an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker.
Wait really? Is there a recommended extension for this?
There is Nanodefender for Firefox. Just be aware that there are different versions of this for Firefox and chome but those will actually track you. The original developer sold their code to people with bad intentions, this is a fork.
