wow just wow while i can’t say i didn’t see this one coming but it always amazes me where greed could lead someone
Google is an ad company. To them, a web browser is nothing more than a tool for collecting user data and delivering ads.
When you use a chromium based browser you are allowing google, an ad company, to decide what the future of web browsing should look like. And this is the result.
Firefox is the ONLY browser which is genuinely competing with google. Do you think ad and tracking blockers are going to get better or worse once they die out, and literally every major browser is running on chromium?
Use firefox and u-block origin. Enjoy a superior, ad free, browsing experience, and support the future of an open web.
It’s so encouraging to hear so many pro Firefox opinions lately. Then I remember I’m logged into the pirate instance of a federated platform and anti-corporate sentiment is probably as high as it gets.
Sadly most younger people haven’t even heard of Firefox.
Most young people are basically tech illiterate. Yeah they are fantastic with new apps and phones. But have zero idea how any of it works under the hood.
Ask them to transfer a file from a computer to a USB drive, most will not know how. They have no idea how a file system is structured or even that an app has to specifically made for different platforms… e.g. Facebook app on Apple is completely different from Facebook on Android and the two will contain different bugs and different settings.
We are almost back to default browser = internet
You’re absolutely right.
Yeah they are fantastic with new apps and phones.
I think that’s mostly because most commercial apps have fantastic ui and ux.
Most younger people have heard of it. Using what came with their computer is just easier to them though.
I agree, most of the younger people use browsers that are bundled with the operating system.
- Android = Chrome
- Windows = Edge
- Mac/iOS = Safari
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It’s my preferred mobile browser because you can install ublock origin and other privacy extensions which is pretty unique
Firefox on android is really slow. I tried using it, but now I use Vivaldi
Pros : really fast Cons : chromium based
Right? After years of feeling like the only pro-firefox person left on the planet, the pro Firefox sentiment lately is a breath of fresh air, to say the least.
It’s my preferred mobile browser because you can install ublock origin and other privacy extensions which is pretty unique
Well, we are in the worst cyberpunk timeline so…
Young people seem to proudly go along with the biggest name, which is really sad. They think there’s merit in that, conforming means acceptance.
Meanwhile, anytime I encounter a young non-conformist doing something very contrarian, it gives me some hope for the future. Because 99% of society is open-armedly embracing dystopia because the one thing they hate more than anything is the burden of independent thought and self-determinism. To intelligent freethinking individuals, seeing it play out is a waking nightmare.
Sadly, at the end of the day I prefer edge because it
has cloud voicesis slightly faster
Thank you for this.
I’d say to you all: get used to bombshells dropping! At some point the investor pyramid scheme will go crashing down. It might be now. All those companies were on borrowed time. Until investors realised that “data” isn’t valuable on its own - it’s what you make of it. There needs to be a product that generates revenue. Spoiler alert, it is hard to come up with a business plan that takes plain usage data and makes the technical challenges worthwhile to squeeze money from it. I can feel it myself as data scientist. The honeymoon’s over, investors want to see ROI.
I mean this cycle will probably recover in a few years when the markets recover but still - some lessons stick
Holy shit! Your post made me realize that we are in Dot-com bubble burst 2.0
It the exact same thing, everyone and their dog, had to have a webpage. Investers finally realized that most websites had no way of generating money, and stuff came crashing down.
Same thing is happening now!
Except everything is crashing this time because of interest rates going up and there being a recession happening globally.
Holy shit! Your post made me realize that we are in Dot-com bubble burst 2.0
It’s the exact same thing, everyone and their dog, had to have a webpage. Investors finally realized that most websites had no way of generating money, and stuff came crashing down.
Same thing is happening now!
Zines are making a comeback!
DRS GME
To everyone who is saying they use adblock and haven’t seen this yet: YouTube probably rolled this out to a smaller percentage of users first. It allows them to understand how this change impacts user behaviour, e.g. how many users comply and disable their adblocker, how many more users close YouTube than usual etc. Most tech companies do this type of analysis before releasing a high impact change to all users.
I do close youtbe much quicker than I used to. I can watch one video and rhan I’m done. The next video starts with a full minte of ads and I’m out. I know there’s stuff like ReVanced, but I keep wondering wether it’s all worth it.
ReVanced is definitely worth setting up. It only takes a couple of minutes and vastly improves the experience using YouTube. I also homebrewed my LG tv to download a hacked YouTube ad free app for that which includes sponsorblock.
You’ll hear this over and over again but that’s because it’s true: Revanced is absolutely worth it. Not difficult to set up and the experience is life changing once you see YouTube without ads
I have a premium subscription, but it logs you out. And then I see ads until I log in again and reload the page. I pay these people. I should never ever see an ad. And it’s enough that I’ve noticed the ads are more obnoxious than they used to be. I’m about done with it.
For iOS users Vinegar is a nice add-on for Safari that strips out all the ads etc.
Odysee is a great, decentralised alternative if you are looking to jump ship.
If you do end up sticking with youtube, ReVanced is good. Smart Tube Next is good for TVs, and firefox + ublock origin on desktop.
If you’re demanding I watch ads, it’s not “free”. you’re demanding my time and probably attention.
I really think we need to stop with this idea that “Something is free” because no money is exchanged. Some stuff ARE free, there are repos on git, where you can download software, there are websites that ask for nothing. However Gmail, Youtube, reddit, and the rest are not “Free” just because they aren’t directly asking for money.
Whats up with all these online companies just deciding to be assholes this year.
Companies are becoming even more greedy recently across the board and at a rapid pace. Some people would want you to believe Youtube wouldn’t generate billions of dollars as income annually for Alphabet for some reason. But the truth is the platform is extremely profitable already. Youtube simply wants even more now because competition has done the same. We’ve seen prices spiraling up and quality dropping in pretty much all sectors of the economy and this trend will continue for the forseeable future.
In short: Because they can (some are really stretching their boundaries, though)
and try to speak about this to anyone who doesnt see it you are basically labeled as conspiracy theorist or something and just dismissed.
Like another poster said, investors are pushing for profits. The Sillicon Valley model of throwing money at it until they figure it out is suffering with the downturn in the markets. So with the VC and investor money drying up, sites are pushing to make money to keep the lights on.
I would’t say keeping the lights on, more then trying to beat covid lvl profits.
I think this is the real thing. If online companies don’t match the extremely ridiculous and luck they had during the pandemic then they are doing “worse” even if they are doing just fine.
All of them also seem to be focused more on short term gains over long term losses (i.e. meeting quarterly goals by raising rates but driving away otherwise good customers and completely disregarding the benefit of customer loyalty.).
Interest rates went up and now they need to make payments on their previously free debt.
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They were always assholes, but the end of zero interest rates is making American corporations go from boiling the frog to just smoking the frog alive.
Why is it all in July too???
Firefox
I get that servers, bandwidth, manpower, utilities and buildings aren’t free, and with more and more people using ad blocking, all that user data they have harvested isn’t worth much anymore. So I think we are going to see an increase in subscription based services, and man do I hate it.
Because You just know it’s going to increase and squeeze evey last dime from their users. Because it’s never enough to have their expenses covered and earn some money… They constantly need to earn more. Just look at Netflix, declining in contents, increasing restrictions and rising price.
The way that YouTube treats their users and content creators for that matter, I’ll never enter a subscription from there. Removing features, blocking people with no way of appealing and letting scammers and spammers run rampant on their platform. Yeah, no thanks.
I used to love using YouTube for music, it was great at suggesting new and exciting music. But then it was split into a separate service and they nuked the algorithm. Now I can discover music by popularity or moods, and as someone whos into EDM, hardstyle, rock, metal and heavy metal… that’s a piss poor way to find new music.
YouTube is the only thing I don’t mind paying a subscription for. I consume an unreasonable amount of media on YouTube. They host something like 4.5 petabytes of new videos every day. For me, the value I get from there is easily worth the price of premium. I couldn’t say that for any other streaming service.
I’m finding this with my Spotify. The discover new music algo just feeds me the same 30 or so songs that I’ve listened to a million times it must be broken.
Speaking of Spotify, I wonder how long it will be before they gut their desktop app for free users. It just feels too functional to be long for this world, especially given how unusable the app is if you don’t have premium.
Don’t you have access to “Discover Weekly” anymore? My MO is: start curating some playlist based off a genre or theme, start radio from it, keep adding suggestions that fit and I like. Then have a huge playlist with my “I really liked and would play this anytime” and if I find I’m replaying a new song it goes there as well, then, based on your new searching and adding stuff, your next week’s discover might get a lot more interesting. Also shazam stuff on the go and add it to respective playlists, even maybe IFTTT to a Shazam playlist, and even (we need to find a fediverse alternative but I had IFTTT setup to add to a Reddit playlist picking from Music and ListenToThid top posts as well) . So, basically, you need to branch out first so spotify can continue to branch out for you.
If you’re on mobile clear your data cache. It seems to me like the app prioritizes a handful of cached songs it’s already downloaded, probably to save bandwidth, and doubly so when you’re in an area with poor signal.
I haven’t had this happen using ublock origin, but if they do figure out how to block ublock origin, adnausiem (ublock origin fork) might work. It’s a fork of ublock origin that tricks the ad providers into thinking you clicked on every ad, which not only bypasses a lot of adblock detectors, it Actively costs them money by polluting their ad data with garbage.
If they really want to prevent us from watching videos without ads, they can. They know of the ad is watched or not, we can have some kind of auto-mute-during-ad but that’s it.
Question is if they will kill network effect with it.
I have already drastically reducedy yt watching because of too many sponsors… watching two minutes of sponsored material, plus two ads just to see that I don’t even wanna watch the stupid video is too much.
Not to mention those laud ads in the middle of relaxing and quiet video… few months ago one ad was starting with screaming, that’s when I said no way.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
it Actively costs them money by polluting their ad data with garbage.
Lmaoo, i’m going to install that
No way I’ll use YouTube with ads. The amount of your lifetime they waste is what I’d consider disrespectful to their users. Even if the ads were bearable, I wouldn’t turn off my ad blocker on any Google site for tracking alone.
I also don’t see myself subscribing to YouTube Premium, firstly because it’s too expensive (stop including your music streaming service and make it cheaper maybe?), but also because YouTube is just a platform with a lot of not curated content that YouTube had no part in creating.
Let’s see how the cat and mouse games between YouTube and ad blockers and alternative frontends go. If it’s too much of a hassle, I’ll just stop using YouTube. I don’t miss Twitter, I don’t miss Reddit, and I won’t miss YouTube.
Eh, I wound up with a YouTube premium subscription years ago when I subscribed to Google play music, way back when it was YouTube Red. I cannot imagine going without at this point. It became YouTube music at some point, and… Yeah.
what’s the fediverse alternative to YouTube? seems like this is the way the 2020’s are going
As much as I’d like to see an alternative to YouTube on the fediverse, I can’t see myself using it much unless my favorite content creators move on over there too. And I can’t see them moving.
Oddysee is built on LBRY, which I believe is the closest thing. I think there’s something else called PeerTube, but I’m not sure what it is exactly (haven’t looked into it).
I might be too pedantic, but Odysee/LBRY is a blockchain-based decentralized network. But its not federated and it doesn’t use activitypub like Lemmy and mastodon. I would only call Peertube to be part of the fediverse.
Greed is what got me to the point of not wanting to watch any AD ever.
More people should try out Tubesync. It’s a tool you can host yourself that essentially uses yt-dl as a backend and lets you subscribe to channels, and it’ll download videos as they come out. Gets you away from the ads and you can archive content you like forever.
I wonder if they’ll ever make that impossible. I used to go on a couple of 6 hour drives twice a week for a long time. A lot of the drive didn’t have cell service, as it was thru a bunch of mountains. I ended up making a python script that downloaded podcast episodes to listen to, and to force my brother to watch Your Mom’s House, when he was with me on the drive.
It was surprisingly simple to do this.
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I’m glad that their are contemporary historians and archivists perusing YouTube so my great-great-great-great grandchildren can watch a video game review in which a grown man gets shit on by Bugs Bunny.
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Oh shit, that description sounds weirdly familiar, but I can’t remember who it was.
Angry Videogame Nerd.
Imagine if widevine are required to watch any video, that would be disaster.
Similar to that you’ve got tubearchivist, because it’s good to have options
That’s pretty cool, thanks
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I think it’s less enforceable than they think - every system someone sets up will eventually be circumvented.
It’ll be a pain for a few months, or we’ll see a federated alt pick up creators.
To be honest, YouTube would be the hardest thing to replace. And if they ever stream ads from the same URLs as content I don’t see a blocker being overly successful.
I disagree, something like Sponsorblock is working quite well already for ads embedded in the video and unless YouTube makes serious sacrifices in UX I don’t see how they could prevent this.
They already do stream ads from the same urls. It’s why a pihole can’t block youtube ads.
But you can tell what’s coming, since apps like SmartTubeNext and Revanced can skip them.
It’ll probably just be a cat and mouse game, as it always has been.
They already do stream ads from the same urls. It’s why a pihole can’t block youtube ads.
But you can tell what’s coming, since apps like SmartTubeNext and Revanced can skip them.
It’ll probably just be a cat and mouse game, as it always has been.
you are already seeing things such as nebula. to me it’s amz
There are already open source Alternatives. But not federated.
What about peertube? Since Twitter -> Mastadon | Reddit -> Lemmy Why not Youtube -> Peertube next :D
Is there something wrong with odysee?
@rclkrtrzckr yeah the fact that is waste of electric power over PeerTube.
It lacks Federation too.
Replacing a megacorp service is only possible when the stars align and said megacorp makes a fuckup so big users start jumping and these users are still a tiny speck compared to the total userbase. Still I hope Reddit dies slowly.
Really not worth watching a 10 minute video that has four minutes of YouTube ads and a minute of a sponsor pitch by the creator.
Yeha, if they are pushing this, the least they can do is lower the amount of ads.
2 ads before a video starts is just too much. Also the constant ads during the videos. Screw that.
No more YouTube for me I guess.
I remember when someone was laughing at me when i downloaded some niche videos that i liked to rewatch from yt because that someone thought that it will be there available and forever. Remember that they wanted to paywall 4K vids at some point.
You’ll pry my downloaded Wee Sing YTPs out of my COLD DEAD PIRATE HANDS