• Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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        222 years ago

        It will always be a technology race. And it’s one that so far the content platforms have lost.

        Especially given they always abuse the upper hand when they have it, motivating the coding community to solve that problem right quick.

          • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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            12 years ago

            I agree with you that such efforts are always a threat, and I’m reminded both of the V-Chip and the current efforts in the UK to keep blokes from watching their porn (anonymously, that is, without ending up on a registry of porn watchers), what may end up adding the right to porn access as a specific chartered right in our universal charters (and some national / state charters). Here in California, the right to produce porn is explicitly established in state law, which is embarrassing to some, a point of pride to others.

            The MPAA and RIAA also tried to get all the ISPs to agree to shut down (or throttle) service after twelve strikes by an anti-piracy board, who would track the IP addies of torrents. This fueled the development of magnet links (now the standard). And meant that Xfinity and AT&T had to be extra shitty to customers due to causes they don’t care about, while folks are already desperate to disconnect from them in favor of an alternative. So they haven’t really be enforcing it.

            And yes, Google is retreating on the WEI thing for now (if only they could get the federal government to pass a law) but the blowback on an eventual universal DRM is going to be severe, including revealing to the world that TPMs don’t do what they are supposed to do as explained to the end-user, making them hostile architecture. It’ll also potentially send increased traffic (and increased business) into the EU, or out of the US into less traceable regions, and get the determined end-user interested in the dark net, because watching a cat video without ads now requires the same savvy as getting access to CSAM, active revolutionary news and restricted chemistry configurations.

            What will be more interesting to me are the consequences I haven’t imagined. To quote a favorite princess, The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

            Anyway, the go ahead and downvote me line is creepy, and brushes against poisoning the well I don’t downvote dissenting opinions, (and can’t, anyway from my Lemmy instance).

      • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏
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        132 years ago

        Been using these apps for years, when YT does their crap the community gets it fixed and rolled out within a few days (worst has been two weeks).

        Lots of thankless devs and contributors dedicated to preventing YouTube from screwing us over!

      • Gloomy
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        112 years ago

        True, but there will be New Solutions. Or no YT for me at least. I am not willing to watch a single stupid add. Not one.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    Somehow, I’m not even able to see ads on my system. I have firefox with ublock, sync on my three systems macOS, linux and windows. Not a single ad in years. I’ve tried to disable ublock, just to see the mess, and it still wont play ads. Lol. Anyway, I will stop watching youtube before watching ads. I always watch the sponsor thing tho.

  • @[email protected]
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    1582 years ago

    There’s also the option of biting the bullet and paying for YouTube Premium.

    No. Never. I’d rather stop using YT at all than giving in to coerced user-tracking.

    • @[email protected]
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      362 years ago

      I mean, I might have considered paying for YT premium if I thought it offered some value (other than disabling ads) but I won’t sure as hell pay for anything that any company is trying to blackmail me into.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        I mean you didn’t buy it before so why would you now? You don’t need excuses. You just don’t want to pay for it. Own it.

        • FlashMobOfOne
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          2 years ago

          One could argue that we’re paying for it without our consent, given the fact that Google doesn’t pay anything in taxes. That’s a cool four billion a year (at least) that they get from the American taxpayer for free.

          • @[email protected]
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            2 years ago

            One could argue that we’re paying for it without our consent

            One could argue that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. That doesn’t make it remotely true.

            Google doesn’t pay anything in taxes

            Uh. Google pays a shitload in taxes. There hasn’t been a single year that they HAVEN’T paid taxes. They paid 11 billion in income taxes alone in 2022.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        I use it because YouTube music is included and it’s great while driving, it allows background play even with the screen off (I’m talking about mobile).

        There’s something more, but nothing that a pro user cannot already do with third tools.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 years ago

          I find it funny how sometimes apps “create value” by taking something away which is included by default in similar products and goes without saying.

          In this context: YouTube is the only app I know which is denying to work when put into background or with the screen off.

          Or take some car manufacturers who start asking for a fee just to use basic functionality.

      • @[email protected]
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        102 years ago

        But that’s the wrong way around. They don’t want you to pay, they make their money through advertising. They make far more money from advertiser’s paying to put up ads than they ever make from people paying for premium.

        Same as with Facebook now bringing in an ad-free version (in the EU anyway) - they charge higher than is reasonable so that people will opt for the ad-supported free version instead.

        It’s not that you are blackmailed into paying premium, it’s that you’re encouraged not to as a way of explicitly consenting to ads.

        Basically, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

        • @[email protected]
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          212 years ago

          lmao you’re so wrong on ads being more profitable than premium, especially on a per-user basis

          According to this you can expect to make around $18/1000 views. That’s with 55% going to the creator and 45% to Google. Which means that Google makes around $14.5 per 1000 views.

          Coincidentally, that’s also rougly the price of YouTube Premium. Are you telling me that you watch a thousand videos per month?

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      At this point, I don’t even care about the user tracking. I just don’t want to sit through unskippable ads anymore. Especially when it’s the same ad over and over again.

      • Rosco
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        32 years ago

        Well then you’re in luck, you have a lot of options for removing ads before giving money to YouTube.

    • Resol van Lemmy
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      192 years ago

      Abandoning YouTube is seriously more difficult than abandoning other “non-fediverse” general social media platforms, since it’s got so much useful content that gets straight up ruined by the company that owns the website.

      I doubt PeerTube is anything better than Vimeo, at least for now, things can improve after all.

    • @[email protected]
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      282 years ago

      For desktop install and use “FreeTube”.

      Alternatively for your android phone you can use “GrayJay”

      Never. Pay. For. YouTube. Premium

  • Steve
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    282 years ago

    I’m guessing this isn’t what YouTube had in mind when they started this campaign.

    To quote The Joker, “It’ll be funny if it weren’t so pathetic…oh, what the heck, I’ll laugh anyways!” 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

  • @[email protected]
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    1262 years ago

    I love that all the centralized social media networks are scrambling to become shitty for profits right around the time users are realizing that they don’t need centralized servers to host their user-generated content. Users can take their content wherever they want and let these platforms die.

    • @[email protected]
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      572 years ago

      I’m not sure if we manage to do the same for video though; hosting these costs a lot more.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        Is there some reason you can’t start up a decentralized content hosting platform. Just let anyone with a spare hd and a spare pc at home join up?

        Like I guess I don’t really want anything illegal on my PC… Maybe this plan is awful.

      • @[email protected]
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        412 years ago

        Maybe we don’t need 4K 60FPS video to show Mr. Beast giving away more crap. Just because we can up the quality, doesn’t mean we should. Or maybe client-side real-time AI upscaling will make this a non-issue.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 years ago

          I mean, didn’t Vine fail even with mostly low-quality videos? I’m assuming even 720p could be a challenge for a decentralized site.

          EDIT: Apparently I was misremembering

          • Crit
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            52 years ago

            It didn’t fail, twitter shut it down

        • @[email protected]
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          102 years ago

          Call me old fashioned but I’d rather see high native quality available for when it is relevant. If I’m watching gameplay footage (as one example) I would look at the render quality.

          With more and more video games already trying to use frame generation and upscaling within the engine, at what point is too much data loss? Depending on upscaling again during playback means that you video experience might depend on which vendor you have - for example, an Nvidia computer may upscale differently from an Intel laptop with no DGPU vs an Android running on 15% battery.

          That would become even more prominent if you’re evaluating how different upscaling technologies look in a given video game, perhaps with an intent to buy different hardware. I check in on how different hardware encoders keep up with each other with a similar research method. That’s a problem that native high resolution video doesn’t have.

          I recognize this is one example and that there is content where quality isn’t paramount and frame gen and upscaling are relevant - but I’m not ready to throw out an entire sector of media for this kind of gain on some media. Not to mention that not everyone is going to have access to the kind of hardware required to cleanly upscale, and adding upscaling to everything (for everyone who’s not using their PS5/Xbox/PC as a set top media player) is just going to drive up the cost of already very expensive consumer electronics and add yet another point of failure to a TV that didn’t need to be smart to begin with.

          • bufalo1973
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            22 years ago

            The quality is something that depends on the content. If the video is just someone talking, 4K is overkill. And not every gameplay has to be recorded forever. Only the good ones. And even the videos can be rescaled after some time if nobody sees them.

    • @[email protected]
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      322 years ago

      This 100%. Look at forums. Back in the early days, there were lots of little independent forums. Sites like Reddit took over because you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page. We gained convenience, but didn’t think too hard about what we were losing or who we were losing it to. Then along came enshittification and we are collectively realizing what we lost. Federation is of course the solution. As I see it, the only missing piece is monetization. Platforms like YouTube make it easy to monetize page views, Twitter / X is doing the same. That’s much harder in the fediverse.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page

        RSS feeds have provided this experience for years. The problem is that a lot of sites stopped serving RSS feeds for their content. But sites like rss.app and openrss can be used to get RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them.

        • @[email protected]
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          92 years ago

          RSS is great for content consumption. It’s a shame that many sites stopped serving it- same thing with podcasts, now everyone wants you to listen on this or that platform instead of just publishing a normal RSS feed full of MP3 files.

          That said though, RSS doesn’t help for participation, it’s a one-way tech.
          I guess if you have forums that put out RSS feeds you could aggregate them together for post titles, but that’s still clumsy. Lemmy does it much more elegantly.

      • @[email protected]
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        222 years ago

        Patreon for monification?

        Ads suck. And honestly, if we had less content creators, they’d be fine. There are a lot of absolutely degenerates out there. Let’s cull the herd a bit and let us speak individually with our wallets.

        • @[email protected]
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          142 years ago

          That’s a fair point. Patreon, or whatever comes next, needs to drastically reduce friction. That by the way is why Amazon is so successful, reducing purchase friction. Right now if you have something that a million people will take for free, and you start to charge just one penny for it, your audience of a million will drop to like 12. Not because people don’t want to spend a penny, but because they don’t want to fill out a form and put in their name address credit card number expiration date security code phone number email address etc. If there was a button they could click that was like ‘instant donate 5 cents’ most people would click that a lot.

          The closest thing I’ve heard to that was a crypto called basic attention token, which aimed to do just that. They are making a big mistake though in that they are only integrating with Brave browser rather than making a universal plug-in. So the idea of a universal solution is still a ways off I guess. But I think to make it zero friction it will have to be crypto based in some way.

    • @[email protected]
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      242 years ago

      It’s like we’re reverting to the days you would go to homestarrunner.com, illwillpress, etc to see content from people you actually wanted to see content from. Honestly looking forward to it

  • Rosco
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    2 years ago

    Good, fuck those greedy bastards. yt-dlp + mpv with sponsorblock FTW, bonus points for stopping using a YouTube account altogether and using RSS feeds for your subscriptions instead.

  • @[email protected]
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    212 years ago

    Someone please add a vivaldi-like tab tiling feature in Firefox so I can switch to it and leave the chromium cancer away.

  • kamen
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    292 years ago

    What happened to the idea of small, non-intrusive banner ads? Of course it’s not realistic to expect those on YouTube and they bring much less revenue compared to in-your-face video interstitials per impression, but I’m much more likely to whitelist those.

  • @[email protected]
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    262 years ago

    So the article.claims that Youtube’s plan backfired because uninstall rates on some AD blockers increased and a percentage of those users cited “YouTube” as the reason.

    I don’t know if it’s just me but that’s a massive stretch. I would like to hear numbers from YouTube themselves before jumping to any conclusions. These companies operate on scale and usually have enough data to back these decisions. Can it go wrong, sure. Has it already backfired. Not sure.

  • 👁️👄👁️
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    2222 years ago

    There are no better adblockers, uBlock Origin is all you need and is already updated to bypass it.

    • @[email protected]
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      1032 years ago

      Unlock origin is the adblocker that people are installing. There are a lot of people with shitty adblockers out there, I guess they are switching.

      • @[email protected]
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        322 years ago

        I bet all those people with shitty adblockers are also probably googling better ad/YT compatible blockers lmaoo

        • @[email protected]
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          82 years ago

          I just tried it and there’s plenty of results to Reddit references to U block origin on Firefox.

          You’re clearly making an assumption here

        • @[email protected]
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          192 years ago

          I searched “YouTube adblocker” on both google and DDG. The first mention of ublock origin was in the 1st page of Google (just at the bottom, under “recommended adblockers for Firefox”, the 2nd option). There was no mention of it on DDG, even though I clicked “more results” once (so searched the equivalent of 2 pages). The problem with Google search is not google, it’s SEO, that affects all search engines.

          • TalkingCat-
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            202 years ago

            To be fair someone that uses DDG most likely already has ublock origin.

            • @[email protected]
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              112 years ago

              Can confirm. I use DuckDuck Go and uBlock.

              Thing is, searching with DDG takes time to get used to, as it doesn’t work the same way as Google. Google uses a lot of convenient algorithms that are also a double edged sword.