- cross-posted to:
- tech@lemmy.fmhy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- tech@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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In a fight between a corporation and a bunch of people very determined to get content for free, history shows the corporation always loses.
It’s not even that people want stuff “for free.”
I mean… well… who doesn’t love free stuff, but really if the legit product is priced fairly and buying it provides some actual useful service and isn’t inconvenient or comes packaged with scummy garbage hindering it, then people will pay for it.
The problem is - that’s not what publicly-traded companies like to do. Valve’s Gabe Newell said it best (paraphrasing) - “Piracy is a problem with a service… not the customer.”
Shitty services or actions businesses take to place a barrier of any kind between customer and the product they seek as a means to lazily extract more money from customers - especially that which is perceived as greedy will make more people seek alternative means of obtaining said product.
Ask people who host Plex servers why they put movies on their server when they already have a Blu-Ray of it.
It’s always “because the disc has un-skippable ads” or “they didn’t include Ben Affleck’s commentary track on it where he shits on Michael Bay for being a goddamn moron,” or “I don’t like seeing 14 different warnings before watching the movie I like” or “I don’t like seeing 10 min of ads every 5 min of watching my favorite show.”
It’s hardly ever “I like being a thief” or “I couldn’t afford it…” and in the case of the latter, they weren’t going to buy it anyway.
I run a plex server because I don’t want to subscribe to 15 different services with 15 different shitty UIs just to watch TV. FF and rewind always works the same on Plex and the pause button is always in the same spot.
Every time I open Netflix or Hulu or Prime I am infuriated that it doesn’t immediately take me to the last show I was watching.
Also I like to watch shows as they originally aired, not with missing episodes that Hulu pulled to keep advertisers happy (It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Community come to mind).
I have totally just purchased a few Anime seasons because I didn’t want to deal with ads when streaming it via Crunchyroll. Considering the speed I watch it at, I’d have had to pay for like 3 months of service to not get ads, or I can buy it and permanently own it for a little more.
I won’t watch things with ads anymore if I can help it.
Got a link to the video of Ben Aflfleck shitting on Michael Bay? The one you’ve linked is just him having a wee jingoistic boner
The only lose on their own terms. That meaning they don’t make quite as much money as they used to. It’s still money hand over fist.
Information tech people say we have introduced new measures and methods to guarantee compliance with our policies. And pirates answer challenge accepted
Guess I’m getting banned then, I will never disable my adblockers, the internet (and Youtube especially) is goddamn unusable without them.
This is where VPNs come into play. You can ban me all you want, I’ll just come back with a different IP.
I’d much rather sink money into a bunch of VPN providers than disable my adblocker or worse, pay YouTube.
I don’t quite understand how they’re gonna “ban” you if you’re not logged in. Which you can accomplish with an incognito tab. What are they gonna do, block the IP?
What are they gonna do, block the IP?
This is exactly what they will do, yes.
With carrier grade NATs, they’d block a bunch of people, even subscribers…
This has been an issue with carrier grade NATs and IP banning for…ever, though. It hasn’t stopped IP banning from being a thing.
My first thought was “what if there’s a service outage and I can’t load advertising content from their CDN?” It’s very clearly a different location because otherwise ublock would block actual content.
If they don’t do that and just check for things like ublock client side, guess my decision to put pi hole on my network was smart.
Pihole doesn’t work with youtube ads though, unless I missed something?
It works inconsistently and shittily, often blocking videos as well as ads. The best solution is something like umatrix that scans the page, identifies ads, and filters those.
You can’t block youtube advertisements with pihole. At least not reliably, and at least not “in video” ads. It’s hitting a moving target, and probably not worth the effort. You also will probably be able to block some small chunk of them, but far from all youtube ads. And even then, they’ll eventually just change it so that if you try, it’ll break your access to youtube videos, too. Of course, the current pihole regex to block ads also already blocks some videos, too, anyway.
Can’t wait until they find out about dynamic IPs
Never understood IP bans. 2 minutes to restart my router and I’m there again!
It’s why they’re not really done for users any more. Still very useful for blocking malicious servers or networks though.
Oh no! I’ll have to restart my router and come back 60 seconds later with another IP! Let them block the poor rando who gets my IP next.
(They won’t do this for exactly that reason)
The natural next place for people to go to once they can’t block ads on YouTube’s website is to go to services that
exploit the APIscrape the website to serve free content (NewPipe, Invidious, youtube-dl, etc.). If that happens at a large scale, YouTube mightshut off its API just like Reddit didserve lawsuits against them in a similar way to Reddit shutting off API access and we’ll end up in scenario where creators are forced to move to Peertube, and, given how costly hosting is for video streaming, it could be much worse than Reddit->Lemmy+KBin or Twitter->Mastodon. Then again, YouTube has survived enshittiffication for a long time, so we’ll have to wait and see.
The thing is, none of the services you listed use YouTube’s API. They scrape the data directly from the page. YouTube can’t really do much against it. They’re apparently currently trying to shut down Invidious, though I’m not sure how they’re planning to do that considering Invidious is open-source, meaning anyone can develop and host it.
My bad you are correct I’m just talking out of my ass
The apps you mentioned are scraping or pretending to be the official app.
The official API doesn’t have public methods to build an alternative third party player .
The only way YouTube can stop those apps (beside blackmailing devs with legal letters) is to shut down both their own website and their own app
They can ban google accounts of people who use those apps though. I can see them doing it.
i dont need to log in to them they wouldnt know my account
Unfortunately in this case google play protect scans what apps you have installed on your phone by default if you have an android phone and have logged into the play store.
IOS users should be unaffected by that as well as de-googled android users.
The vast majority of people that watch youtube, are most likely not using an ad block and won’t be affected by this at all. Just like the vast majority of reddit users use the official app, and the vast majority of people on twitter stayed.
It will take a lot more than this to make something else the next big thing. Just like lemmy is nowhere near as popular as reddit, mastadon is nowhere near as popular as twitter. Yes those of us technical enough or that care enough will use an ad block or similar, but we are in the minority, and always will be.
According to the latest estimates, the ad blocking user penetration rate in the United States stood at approximately 26 percent in 2020, indicating that roughly 73 million internet users had installed some form of ad blocking software, plugin, or browser on their web-enabled devices that year.
https://www.statista.com/topics/3201/ad-blocking/
Sounds like will affect 1/4 of youtube users. I highly doubt google would be doing this if it wasn’t getting in the way of making more money.
Damn that is depressing, only 26%? Need to pump those numbers up…
In YouTube’s case, I don’t think peertube can beat YouTube.
The vast majority of content is content made by people who do it for a living. The monetization scheme is exactly why YouTube got so big - they make videos and the ad revenue pays them for running ads on those videos.
Even if creators have sponsorships and patreons, there’s no way they’d choose a platform that they have to pay to keep running over one that pays them to upload their content. It doesn’t make any business sense. - video is exponentially more expensive to store and process than pictures and text.
On top of that, peertube only has discoverability through word of mouth. There’s no central recommendations page or anything to even give creators a chance at growing. The only discoverability they’ll have is word of mouth and xposting/boosting on mastodon Lemmy and other webisites.
The only way it would become remotely viable is either
-
some kind of advertising scheme (which isn’t really in the spirit of fedi, as it gives big advertising companies power over peertube instances that decide to do it)
-
some form of global patreon with a revenue split - essentially the server owner takes the money required to keep it running and then the creators fight over the rest. And most likely, if the instance gets popular, the costs of serving that video could possibly leave next to nothing for the creator - it might be mitigated by inter-instance video caching, but it’s still not ideal - especially considering a large amount of traffic would go to mastodon and lemmy instances which won’t or can’t cache the video.
I like the idea of peertube, but I think it’s only really viable for short clips that are uploaded specifically for Lemmy and mastodon use - in other words, users who aren’t planning to make money off of the videos.
I only use peertube for one specific streamer since his vods get deleted on twitch eventually and he makes his money streaming and from patreon anyway. I think it’s doable if the content creators agree to do this as backups for their streams, but they definitely need to have an alternate source of income, it’s not a yt replacement.
-
This one would be a true test for sure, while PeerTube try to address the bandwidth issue by utilizing bit torrent protocol, it still challenging. One idea I can envision is that when PeerTube see videos that are sufficiently popular, it can decide to reduce server bandwidth for it since users are likely sharing bandwidth with each others and reallocate it for the less watched video.
I think any European country that offer unmetered connectivity is going to find itself becoming the hub for video sites.
Maybe the general public is more compliant than I am, but my money for YouTube creators goes to them via Patreon. Google not knowing how to break even on a bandwidth- and storage-intensive property it’s owned for more than a decade does not constitute an emergency I need to have any part in paying for.
If very recent history is any guide, this is exactly how you get people searching “YouTube alternatives uBlock.” No one is saying there aren’t enough ads on the site; the increasing malignancy of ads over the years is why people categorically reject whitelisting youtube.com, and “more ads” is not a solution to any user-facing problem.
Yeah, video ads are the popup ads of our days. Just as intrusive. Money corrupts :(
If I can’t watch YouTube without ads, I won’t watch it at all.
Same. I left that shit behind when I ditched TV and there’s 0 chance in hell I’m ever going back.
Rabbits
Ad companies can’t handle the idea that people don’t want to be hit with ads every 5 minutes. “Well, it’s just BAD ads”… no, it’s having my experience constantly interrupted.
I would be okay with it if the amount of ads and their length were reasonable, like one in the beginning and one at the end or something. For a longer video, I wouldn’t even mind one at the midway point.
I didn’t start using adblockers until I was literally inundated and bombarded and sometimes with ads running the length of a movie (no, literally).
It completely ruins the experience. I’m happy to support my creators directly though and I do.
part of the issue, imo, is that creators also put ads in their videos. So you get two pre-roll ads, a sponsor segment, an ad in the middle, and then another sponsor segment. Maybe throw in some product placements as well. And one of those ads might be 1.5 hours long if you don’t manually skip it. I know I’m not the only one who woke up after falling asleep to a video to find themselves 45 minutes into some ad.
After living with ublock and sponsorblock for so long, it’s shocking to watch youtube without them.
I don’t mind the sponsor segments as much, I usually just skip to the end of them, but that’s only because it’s how my creators make actual money, and it’s not every video, and when you have adblock on, then it’s not as annoying.
But yes, you’re right, couple ads with sponsorships and product placements and soon the actual meat of the video is one tenth of the length. So what are we really watching here?
I started using an ad blocking DNS on top of browser extension blockers, and it’s such a beautiful thing.
It’s both. I dread the coming election year, and it’s why I won’t even THINK of paying for a streaming service that has advertising. I will pay the extra money to avoid them.
Honestly, I miss the banner ads YouTube had back in the day.
if we don’t watch their ads now because of how intrusive and poor quality they are, where’s the logic leap to they get money from us if we can’t block their ads? We just move on or get better at blocking, they don’t actually get money in this scenario… This is the problem with tech decisions these days, the companies are completely out of touch. You can’t use consumers as products and then charge them for it, and make no mistake about it you are the product.
Banksy had it right:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
A long winded way of saying: Advertising shits in your head
Companies fill the space now with their hideous brands, waging the same frenzied battle as the jungle species in order to appropriate the public space and attention with images and words, like animals with their screams and piss’
~ Michel Serres
Sounds like a statement I can get behind. I don’t know who Banksy is, can you point me in the right direction?
He’s a street artist from the UK, his identity hasn’t been officially confirmed because he works with graffiti a lot.
You are about to have a great time.
Every time they make blocking ads harder, more people give up and live with it than those who leave or find a way around it. As much as I wish that wasn’t the case, it unfortunately is.
We just move on or get better at blocking
Why serve a user base that won’t either pay money to view a video or watch ads that fund it?
Maybe if the subscription cost was just the amount of money they make off the ads…
That tells you the true value of advertising to you. They make more than the take because they are an advertising company who has just built a stupid service to entice people to view the ads and give up their habits. They are undercutting their core business by offering an ad-free sub in the first place, which is why they overcharge for it. They’d rather make some money than none, but they hate that they can’t advertise to you.
Going this hard to fight ad blockers isn’t going to work like YouTube thinks it will. The only thing it’s going to do is force people to find ways to bypass it or just start using a YouTube alternative. If YouTube is serious about wanting people to use ad blockers less, they should have conducted some form of a survey to find out why people use ad blockers on YouTube and then make changes to either find some sort of a middle ground with ad block users or try to incentives users to turn off their ad blocker.
Obviously, they wouldn’t do that because it would require that they listen to their users and everyone knows how much they like to listen to their users before making any kind of decision.
I guess 2023 is the year of enshittification.
It’s been getting worse and worse but damn this year really ramped it up
I’d be fine paying Google for YouTube Premium if I could use it without being logged in. I’d take an access key for anonymous ad-free viewing for $20 a month. But Google is never going to offer that because the data-harvesting is the whole point of YouTube to them. Google is a data-slurping company with an advertising division that dabbles in video, search and phones as side hustles.
In any case, if they really do crack down on adblockers, there are always other methods of watching their videos ad-free, and if I really like a creator, I’ll subscribe to their Patreon or watch them on Nebula.
still works for me with (re)vanced, so far. pirates will hopefully do their thing in the meantime to make sure nobody has to be capitalized on. google should have been broken up years ago…
This just seems like another element an ad blocker could block.
Not if they track this server-side, then you just get banned or can’t open any more videos after 3 videos, and won’t have the message telling you why.
It definitely depends on how they implement it. If they implement it server-side, it’ll probably work, but what’s stopping you from viewing YouTube signed out? IPs change frequently, cookies can be cleared, etc.
I would say the entire experience of using youtube is having your feed with subscriptions and suggestions. Juggling being logged in in one window to browse around and decide what to watch, get the links, then paste them into another window to watch them while logged out doesn’t sound like a good time.
Ads is also a bad time. So probably going to just drop the platform and stop consuming content from all those creators I’ve been following in some cases for nearly a decade.
I will probably just watch ads, provided they’re not too obtrusive. I can deal with 15-20s as long as it’s supporting a creator. Now, start chaining 3/4/5 ads together and I’ll watch content elsewhere.
I just use freetube. I can subscribe to the channels I want without an account, use sponsor block to block sponsored content, and even use invidious to proxy connections if I want. No ads, not even in-video ads.
I guess someone will probably make an extension for that. In Firefox for instance I know there are containers and extensions can interact with containers.
I don’t think it would be that hard to replace the “open video” action with a “open in a new container where you are anonymous” action. You could probably do even more tbh
If they want to no longer be the default internet video platform, that’s a quick way to do it.
Let them test, I will just use container(so they can’t track my account). And if ad block not working, I will just not watch that video. And eventually move away from YouTube if it’s annoying.
I’ve been using ad blockers since I was on dial-up, I’m not going to stop using them now. If youtube blocks me, I will get my videos elsewhere. There’s too much crap on youtube to sift through to find what you’re looking for now anyways.
More time for my Plex & Steam libraries.
Good news to everyone! We’ve wanted an alternative to YouTube for a long time. Now it looks like Google that next big step in forcing alternative platforms to rise in it’s place. I’m an avid user of YouTube, but not a snowball’s chance in hell will I buy Premium when they are trying to shove it down my throat like that. That’s a very good way to get people to NOT buy something but for some reason companies don’t seem to understand.
Gabe Newell said it best: “We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.” - Piracy was down and streaming subscriptions were up when Netflix first came about due to the ease/convenience of it, but piracy is seeing a return due to the mishandling and misconception of companies about how to gain profit through improved services vs increased pricing/poor performance.
The reason I bring this up is because YouTube, like many companies, thinks they’re “solving” the issue of adblocking by force-feeding this kind of bullshit to the masses, but all they’re doing is forcing more people to turn to alternatives instead.
I wouldn’t be so sure about Netflix. They’re watching the wave of streaming competitors start to crumble, with HBO Max getting dismantled, and now Paramount+ looking like it’s ready to throw in the towel. They seem to be reacting to incoming lower consumer choice.
The rest, though…
Looking forward to the day YouTube creators start moving to Odysee or Peertube or something similar
currently Odysee is a lot of right wing stuff (not my thing) and tinfoil hat level privacy tech stuff (def my thing, but I have other interests…)
and Peertube is… Peertube is just a UI mess so I can’t even summarize the content well. Especially because I am pathetically monolingual despite several semesters of foreign languages 💀
It’s unfortunate more people aren’t willing to give new websites the same chance we/they gave YouTube and the like back when they were new. Yeah they’re going to be bare bones/UI will be messy, but that stuff takes time to improve.