- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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Stallman was right.
When they said?
when he said that software should be free as in freedom, because that would solve this problem
While I don’t disagree with Stallman, how would that solve this problem? This is about a major video hosting platform having market shares and injecting ads into their streams / UI. I do not see - even if every line of youtube’s software sources were public - how that would solve the issue that the hosting platform can insert ads anywhere - honestly, as much as I hate ads, I can’t even blame youtube for doing something morally questionable - they are providing a service, they are not a public institution obligated to making information accessible.
that’s right: into their UI; with free software, you could use a different UI with no ads
Serious question: how can YouTube pay the bills with zero ads? I’m not talking about making a profit, just breaking even.
which is basically what we do using ublock origin - and then they inject ads directly into the video stream, and a custom UI wouldn’t help.
Thank you.
I’m guessing not when he justified pedophilia and zoophilia.
People do nothing but incessantly complain about thing- yet still use thing. News flash folks; You’re never going to win this. YouTube will always be ahead of you on this.
And also… I’ll never understand this. I use YouTube and don’t give a shit about ads. The moment they start bothering me- I’ll stop using YouTube. It’s that easy. Don’t like it, walk away.
If you hate something so much, yet can’t stop using it- you have an addiction. Ads are not the problem here.
I haven’t seen a YouTube ad in months.
Firefox with ublock origin on desktop / laptop Grayjay mobile app Smarttube on Android TV (also Flauncher customer launcher so I don’t have to see any ads on my TV home screen)
I feel like there is an argument to be made about ads being put into damn near everything. They’ve become way too prominent in every aspect of daily life. There are so many things you cannot do without having an ad rammed down your throat. Youtube isn’t the best example of this, but if you start giving up things that have ads, you will eventually have nothing. The root problem is corporate greed. Line must go up at an ever increasing angle, and shareholders must make maximum profit. How do they accomplish that? Ads. Regulatory bodies must step in before everything we see in a digital spaces (and a lot of real spaces too) becomes covered in advertisements.
Won’t be long before we go to the beach to watch the sunset, and there’s a floating billboard for mountain Dew covering it up. It’s out of control.
So again, no one is going to win this. The only recourse is to stop using YouTube.
That’s it.
That’s how you win. You don’t play. But constantly whining about their practices while continuing to support their platform with visits is not doing the damage you think it’s doing.
They will always be steps ahead of you.
to stop using youtube, to stop using your TV sized display that you have bought for a lot of money, stop using your car because it shows ads on the dashboard, public transport for the same reason, and the public roads too because every 10 meters there will be a billboard with even integrated tracking too.
yeah, defeatism was never a solution
If you don’t like YouTube, don’t watch YouTube. Your examples are fucking ridiculous because I’m not the one crying about any of those rings.
You didn’t really reply to my comment. You kinda just said the same thing again, but anyway.
I guess we’ll just agree to disagree. You can use YouTube without viewing ads. There are ways around it.
My point was, for the average consumer, there are way too many ads being put into everything, and unless you’re savvy enough to navigate around this, the only way this will change is with regulatory intervention, which can actually happen.
Silliest comment of the week
People do nothing but incessantly complain about thing- yet still use thing.
Go ahead and show the alternative, the alternative that has the content we need.
Before you respond that youtube is an entertainment service, I want to remind you that it isn’t, but that it’s only a part of it. You won’t handwave it away as if we were discussing netflix being enshittified.
I’m not using youtube for listening to music videos and such things, never were. When I end up there it’s because of a search result showing a relevrelevant video there, like disassembly of this or that, and such.
News flash folks; You’re never going to win this. YouTube will always be ahead of you on this.
That’s objectively false. uBlock Origin devs and filterlist makers are doing a very good job.
Don’t like it, walk away.
That’s very similar to saying “don’t like your government? don’t like it, walk away, found your own”.
Yeah, that’s not his it works.I bet you would be the first to call those who abandoned youtube as cavemen for not being able to access some video you shared
I don’t care if there’s an alternative. You’re not obligated to watch YouTube. It’s not a job.
You can walk away.
Google constantly puts Youtube ads at the top of searches for information! Countless people put their information on Youtube in the form of videos! Tutorials get put on Youtube as a matter of course! There’s a trove of old media on Youtube that can’t be accessed any other way! Congratulations, you’ve won the award for the most thoughtlessly dismissive person on the internet today.
Be sure to keep whining about their practices while supporting them to continue with it.
It’s funny from where I sit.
how do we support it? how, when we don’t upload any content, we only give them server load instead of money, and don’t even increase the view count? how? if anything this is a loss for them, but not a gain that’s for sure
So you don’t know how watching YouTube videos equate to profit for YouTube?
Best you learn how that works before we continue this discussion further.
you definitely did not read my comment. but you know what! teach me Master!
Hmmm, so what you are saying is that I am just one ad blocker failing away from being productive in life?
Soon: when you pause a video, it starts playing a video ad with audio, to make sure no silence time gets wasted from your speakers.
And your speakers are on subscription plans that charge you for every second that they play noise. Better upgrade to the next tier if you want to listen to anything else!
There is also a tax on when the speakers are not in use.
That’s fine, the ad co struck a deal with speaker co to not bill for those sound-seconds.
But now you have to watch and listen to the whole thing before you can resume the original video which was an ad to begin with.
Imagine if they pulled that on the idle timeout pause screen too…
God I hope my adbock holds up…
If it doesn’t I will make something that records the entire f****** stream and removes the commercials out of it the old fashioned way If I have to. Not my first rodeo.
Yt-DLP and it’s variation (Seal, YTDLnis, etc.), newpipe and it’s variation (Tubular, Newpipe Sponsorblock, etc) already allow you to do this without having to get manual.
Seal sold out. It’s trash now
“Seal downloader” from the Playstore and “Seal” from F-Droid are 2 very different apps. One is a a clone riddled with ads, the other one is FOSS goodness. You are free to guess which is which.
And I use YTDLP now. At some point they will make it inoperable. I’m honestly surprised they haven’t sorted it out yet.
If it happens, and you do, host it, and set up a donation box too.
Most likely, I just dedicate an old laptop, a 4k HDMI capture device, store off MP4 and feed it through comskip then take it h265 and store it off.
If I don’t do anything tricky with the browser they can’t detect that I’m doing anything tricky at all.
The only thing I’m a little concerned about is that they’re going to start doing advertising like broadcast TV did and put quarter screen commercials up for other shows in the middle of running shows.
So you want someone to broadcast, and you’re willing to pay for it, but not willing to support the content creators in any way?
I would happily watch ads if they were non-intrusive and non-interrupting ads like side banners that don’t cause popups, or product placement inside videos.
I would also pay for a platform where 100% of the money goes to paying for hosting and paying the creators.
Neither of these things are happening, so yes, I would rather donate to support piracy.
…how?
Video content never changes, but the order and content of ads do. Automated browser, record the video 2-3 times. Diff the frames and slice out the ones that don’t match between runs.
I remember back in the day, there was programs that would identify ads and remove them off on air programs. I would imagine something like that would be possible. Although at that point, just skipping the “platform” altogether might be a better solution.
My guess: Youtube-dl derivative then an ffmpeg script to detect black frames that usually sandwich commercials on TV and delete the video inside those frames.
I will find text versions of everything I need to learn about and create my own video, and then watch it.
Wait a couple more years you’ll be able to feed the descriptions through AI and make really trippy videos
If it doesn’t goodbye Youtube. I love the creators, but hate you as a platform.
That’s what we need tbh. If people get fed up and leave then eventually creators will too
Yeah, uBlock Origin not working would take me from liking YouTube a fair bit to making it unusable.
- I use Proton but keep legacy Gmail accounts around to ensure I still have access to accounts I may have forgotten about or people I knew a long time ago sending a stray email. The only other usage is logging into YouTube.
- I use a Captcha solver extension.
- I use uBlock Origin to block all their ads.
- I don’t use their DNS.
- I use DDG over their search engine and Firefox over their browser.
- I don’t use Google Drive or their office suite (I think the latter is abysmal to use tbf).
- I use DeepL over Translate.
- I use NewPipe for YouTube on mobile and have a subscription to Nebula.
- I no longer use Google Maps, opting for OSM instead.
- I still use Android and unfortunately can’t unlock the bootloader but have degoogled as far as I know how, including never even registering a Google account with it (F-Droid + Aurora Store).
YouTube is far and away the biggest means by which I interact with Google, and that falls off a cliff if I’m forced to interact with a mess of their ridiculously shitty ads every time I have to use it. uBO has likely saved hundreds of hours of watching ads over my lifetime (and probably thousands of dollars from not being subconsciously influenced by ads), and I’m not paying a subscription fee to such an unethical company to get rid of the ads. This would bring me from YouTube as a timewaster to YouTube only as strictly necessary. Even though I don’t support them directly through ads, I do support them by supporting creators I like monetarily, by sharing links and maintaining the network effect, and by giving them plenty of metadata by interacting with their service. If they do this, they ensure that I continue to monetarily support competitors like Nebula and permanently lose a grip they’ve had on me since I was a kid.
Captcha solver add-on? Had no idea about that. If a captcha can be solved this way, why is still being used? What’s the point?
To decrease the amount of spam. There is a misunderstanding, the same with anti-cheat. Captchas will always be solvable, there will always be people who cheat. The point is not to eliminate all bots / cheaters, but to only have to deal with a smaller number of them.
The point is that people think that it’s effective. It’s the illusion of security, which does actually keep some of the more stupid spammers and bad actors at bay. It doesn’t stop the ones that are determined though, nothing does.
+1 on the Nebula subscription. It’s worth every penny. That and Dropout are the only streaming subscriptions I still maintain.
And next… after opening the app you will have to watch ad before you can do anything
Come on, this is Google we’re talking about. The ads come before opening the app.
True, maybe they do both and then some more when you try to close it.
Is anyone even remotely surprised by this?
Like way to kill your platform for anything educational where you want to pause to like at a graph.
Look at the article linked to it. It has a render of a pause ad being a banner that shrinks the video player somewhat, but the paused video is viewable.
That’s a lot of faith that the ads would be SFW, let alone not distracting.
YouTube wants you to keep watching the videos. The more time you spend on the site the more ads you see. They care about finding the balance of acceptable ad load to maximize ad space, which requires a consistent user base. I have faith that this is their objective. Also, videos take time to load and a user hitting pause is unpredictable. A light weight display ad is probably the best technically feasible way to grab a user’s attention in that brief moment of hitting pause. Especially when pause means a user wants to mute audio to do things like take a phone call, a video would turn off users to the platform.
It doesn’t need to be an animated visual to be distracting or NSFW…
It’s like all the sci-fi stories of ads everywhere
So dystopian. The number of novels I’ve read where Advertisements existing on a screen has become the main source of revenue, what a bizarre science fiction fantasy land that would be…
We are just missing the perpetual ad drones in the sky.
Anyone else remember when new technology used to be fun and exciting instead of miserable?
deleted by creator
That’s what happens when you aren’t the (sole) paying customer.
Absolutely. Although, this is just making old technology worse because web 3.0 and AI aren’t performing to corpo expectations.
Somewhere along the line, maybe the early to mid 2000’s they stopped making products “for” the end-user and flipped it around so the end-user (their data) is now the product, and the customers are governments, corporations, and share holders.
Because those shareholders (billionaires) and corporations drained the consumers of all of their money and now they’re the most profitable demographic to market to.
Long gone are the days when I used be excited to read update notes for new features… No I just hope they don’t god damn force an update on me.
Just use Free and Open Source Software!
It can always fuck up with updates, but usually you just get more free stuff and it’s awesome.
And always donate if you find the project useful!
I went back to an old APK of Twitch and refuse to update to the current dumpster fire.
I use PurpleTV and it’s been great. It’s a Twitch fork modified to block ads, reduce bloat, and include customisation for chat, player and other components.
Don’t know if we can share links here but the APK can be easily found online, still being updated semi-regularly. I won’t come back to the official app as long as I’m able. :)
Cheers for that. I had other third party apps way back in the day but they lacked some features. Will check it out.
Xtra is great https://github.com/crackededed/Xtra/
They also leak your User ID and IP to a 3rd Party.
ugh.
Twire is a great alternative though.
https://github.com/twireapp/Twire
And it only connects to Twitch! :) (Plus betterttv or alternatives in case support for them are activated iirc)
is there way to watch stuff without using a Twitch account with it? I’ve tried just skipping the login process, but search returns no results when I search for streamers or games.
That’s part of the reason why new community oriented projects are way more interesting to me now than most software. There are some outliers in the space who still have dedicated people in their craft rather than for money but it is fewer and farther between.
Having a hard enough time just trying to fucking skip back 20 seconds without accidentally tapping on the creators’ page.
Just use the arrow keys
accidentally tapping
Sounds like mobile to me
I use uBlock Origin and haven’t seen a YouTube ad in 6 years, I cannot imagine trying to watch videos that try to show advertisements in the middle of them, lol. It’s why I download all the TV and Movies I watch too. Advertisements are for people who, don’t know how to silence them, the lazy, and those got guilted into allowing themselves to be brainwashed.
The sad thing is that most people won’t even give a damn.
YouTube is unwatchable. No way I can make it through those ads.
Firefox + ublock origin = no ads
anyone who doesn’t already know this doesn’t want to be helped
(+) SponsorBlock = chef’s kiss
