youtube getting more aggressive… i’ve got firefox and ublock but this shit is still coming up

2 points

To be fair it is how they make their money.

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10 points

Yeah, but do they need more money? It’s ruining their product.

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1 point

If they don’t make money, YouTube will get shut down, and we’ll lose the archive of past videos.

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8 points

ehh, youtube is barely profitable, you can tell when it is because they make a big stink about it being profitable! in investor stuff. and then they go quiet the next year.

google absolutely doesn’t need more money, but youtube doesn’t really make money. also creators struggle more to get paid these days. I don’t really think googles solution here is the right one, it’ll just drive people away. But getting free stuff forever, and never watching an ad, in this case just hurts small content creators

google will go on even if youtube shuts down.

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2 points

I’d say that the monetization is what hurts small content creators.

Content creators ought to make videos to present their ideas using visual and audio when that is the best media to do so. However most just make videos to make money.

Small content creators who don’t monetize their content don’t get shown. Instead it’s all clickbait through and through to get those nickels.

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5 points

They could restructure executive pay and be more profitable. Throwing ads in it seems like the lazy way to turn a profit, but it IS Google and that IS what they do.

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0 points
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Remember the days when people posted videos just to post videos and share them and not expect to make money from them? I do. In fact, I’m old enough to remember the entire Internet operating this way. Before Google existed.

Now almost everybody goes into content creation with dollar signs as their motivation. Even people that don’t do shit but just sit and talk in front of a mic or play video games expect to get paid.

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1 point

I watched all the ads when they started. I installed an adblocker when the ads became more of a nuisance than a short break. It is always a service problem always.

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22 points
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Deleted by creator
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6 points

I mean yeah, suck a fat dick, I’m with you. But IMO paying for YouTube isn’t wrong. If not for ads, they gain nothing from me. I used to lock them in. 3rd party instance, no google accounts, separate browser clients, ad block, sponsor block… everything a decently smart systems engineer could think of.

That’s wrong. I pay for services like nebula, why not pay for YouTube?

I currently pay about 2 bucks a month for YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. I legally share it with people I’m close with. 30 bucks a year for unlimited ad free (other than sponsorships) is very affordable, even if I didn’t share it with family and friends.

I still don’t share personal information with them. They probably think I live in Argentina or something because my account is not defined to a region and my IPA reads as residential Argentina most of the time.

YouTube started as a free to use service (in terms of monetary cost). There’s no way they could ever go from that to pay to use. Content creators depend on YouTube being accessible without monetary compensation through the viewer’s wallet. At the same time, upkeep for on demand 4k video up- and downstreaming is not easy, not simple, not cheap. Not cheap at all. Go ask Nebula and the likes.

Ads are ineviteable. You want goods and services, you pay for them. If you don’t feel like spending money, you will pay by watching ads and/or by giviny away personal information that in turn can be used to create monetary value in some form or another (better advert targeting, better market analysis, etc.).

Strategically avoiding any form of payment for goods and services is frankly immoral. It’s exactly the same as stealing. It morally is stealing. If you go to the store and steal a product, you’re doing the same. You cost said store money without reimbursing them by paying for it. Blocking ads and especially sponsorships is immoral and you have every right to do it as it stands. Just don’t complain about companies disliking your behaviour.

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6 points
Deleted by creator
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-1 points

yeah, but you are using youtube’s servers which costs for transferring data

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3 points

You sound like a rational and friendly dude. Yet morality in regards to google and its cost of operating? Remember when their slogan literally was “Don’t be evil!”? And the moment they took it down? They’re mainly responsible for the whole enshittification of the Web.

Even if you block everything from them and appear data-worthless, you will still have to solve fucking recapthchas (or work for free for them) or simple get denied access to so so many sites.

And even if you avoid those too, billions won’t. I call this idiocracy-Flatrate. They pay, i don’t. In the end google will still live forever and dominate the net.

Wouldn’t betray a small-time indie of their donation or anything. But the literal satan of the net? Fork them. In the eye.

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2 points

I don’t feel like adressing every point seperately because I’m just slothing with my cat in my bed right now. I’ll just be rambling a bit.

Anyways. Yeah sure, Google is a bad company in many regards, I’m with you. Morals and ethics are about as subjective as it gets, so here’s my take on that. Just because some entity is morally in the wrong doesn’t justify my own actions, whatever they may be. What makes it fair to obtain goods and services from Google without paying the price? It’s quasi-stealing but I already brought that up before. If the Alphabet Corp. (Google and stuff) is so bad, then maybe you should avoid their products by principle.

I know in the grand scheme it doesn’t matter what I do. The odds of my actions actually doing anything at all are quite low. Where I’m from people used to say “somewhere a bag of rice tipped over”. It’s inconsequential. And I believe that’s true in everyday life but I also know it’s not true in the grand scheme. While I am an individual, I have to look at my actions as if they are not. It doesn’t matter if I burn through 100 gallons of petrol a day… but it does matter if we all do it.

So yes, I agree with you in each and every way. Except I somehow also don’t. It’s really hard to live by the same morals and ethics each and every day. Utilitarism sounds good… but not for everything, same goes for deontology. Many concepts in ethics are not compatible with eachother and I don’t think it’s “normal” to even strive to find your own morals.

Google may be bad, but their business model with YouTube specifically isn’t really all that evil. They maintain a well established, feature rich platform and people get to share their content on that site for free. A small percentage earns money or even gets to make a living through that. They also maintain said platform for advertisers with promises on how often their ads will be shown and how they will be placed, received and forced upon a user. In this instance it’s not entirely clear who the bad guy is. All of em, kind of.

I studied for a bit a few years back and we had a series of courses called “ethics for engineers”. It was mainly about figuring out what you get to do and what you have to do as an engineer of any kind in terms of ethics. Right now I’m wondering, would I really feel all that bad as a software engineer or whatnot at such a company? It really depends I guess. Sure, increasing the ad counter from 2 to 3 sucks for users. Yet they accept it in some way u know? If they didn’t accept, they wouldn’t stay on YouTube. Using YouTube is not something you are forced to, you could, at any time, just stop. So, if supplying more ads is really totally nessecary to have the platform be profitable (which, be honest, in some form or another, it must be), it’s morally sound. Would it really be better to let the platform die? I don’t belive so. I believe the platform kind of self regulates in a sense that it would just die off it they took any negative aspect too far.

I don’t know what they promise their content creators… this view might look completely different by the way.

So. Yeah. Dunno. I don’t think “cheating” YouTube by blocking ads or whatnot is all that fair. It’s still legal, though. Probably still better to stay away if you believe that they are such a bad company.

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3 points

So you don’t think the content creators you are watching should make money? How else are they to support themselves?

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3 points
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Deleted by creator
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7 points

Let me add to that: Ads are a cancer and advertisers are the carcinogen

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7 points
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This is the way.

Ads are not just cancer, on YouTube they’re also fucking scams, the ones claiming to be mr.beast and those that promises free vbucks comes to mind. Ads as a service needs to die, it’s an over-abused market with no real value.

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1 point

Amen brother. Ads are cancer. Except for tiny indie-devs or such who will never get enough moneyz by donation alone. There i could tolerate it, knowing I’m worthless to any advertiser anyway. They just waste their money.

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3 points

I’m paying for nebula

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1 point

Amen.

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3 points

Anyone who pays for premium is a fucking loser.

What a subtle take. Anyone who doesn’t conform to my view points must be inferior.

Everyone actively working at the google enshittification should honestly consider jumping off a fucking bridge. You’re an awful person and you make the world a worse place to be in.

Yes, inciting people to kill themselves, sure. You do know there are many corporations (cue the oil and gas industry) which are monstrously worse than Google.

Anyone who really thinks that Google right now is the main thing making the world a worse place sure lives in a bubble. But then, these YouTube bad posts I have been seeing since almost over a month ever since this thing started rolling out. I get it, it is bad but would you stop harping over it like it is the end of the world? There is more to tech than just posting Google bad every alternate day.

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2 points
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Deleted by creator
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1 point

It’s alright. I can relate with the sentiments of these posts. It wasn’t a change that folks were expecting which Google is rolling out [is it still in A/B testing or slowly everyone is getting countrywise] and since people’s primary email account is often linked to GMail, there is always a fear that too much overriding might cause a ban[ though Google hasn’t done so in the past till now ].

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18 points
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I see nothing wrong with Google wanting to make money on YouTube, and I actually own YouTube Premium myself.

But they should really fix YouTube experience, if you don’t use subscriptions box, your main page will be filled with click-baity low-effort videos and that really sucks. There are also other issues as well.

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5 points
Deleted by creator
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11 points

That is true. I hate Shorts and have to block it via uBlock filters. Also, I hate their mobile app. I can’t select a precise app wide video quality. There are only two options: High and Low in the settings. I need to go to Advanced settings upon playing each video to manually set a precise video quality, say 720p. This experience is sub par and below what NewPipe used to provide. I mainly use YouTube Music as a service but they bundle YouTube Premium for little onto it.

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2 points

My front page is usually pretty good on YouTube.

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3 points

I gave up and got premium. It actually works out because we’ve cancelled Disney+ and Paramount+ and switched from the Spotify family plan to the Youtube Premium family plan and we’re saving money, but I’m annoyed that I’ve resorted to this.

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0 points

You gave up and got premium. My guy.

Congratulations, you’re part of the problem.

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12 points

I actually don’t mind subscription services in general. I would rather pay a monthly fee and not get any ads.

The issue is of course with Google is that your subscription cost is not only the money you pay per month. You’re also giving them your data and many YouTubers end up putting ads inside their videos anyways.

Really what we need is a sort of Peertube service with a model that uses ads and optional subscription service (to remove ads) to generate revenue.

This revenue would first pay for all expenses to run the service and then the remainder be split between all content creators relative to how many views or subscribers each content creator manages get.

The issue with current Peertube is that video hosting is expensive. Video hosting at scale is even more so. However, with enough subscribers the math starts to even out. I don’t know at what # this becomes viable.

Open source and transparent services ran by non-profits

I would be more than happy to pay a subscription for this. I donate regularly to lichess and Wikipedia for this reason. We need to support these projects because they’re the only viable path forward, I believe, that doesn’t end in inevitable enshittification.

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2 points

many YouTubers end up putting ads inside their videos anyways

Sponsorblock plugin for firefox?

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5 points

Am I the only one who thinks “Allowlisted” is a seriously stupid term? Why, pray tell, can’t we use name of a colour anymore?

And no, I won’t Caucasianlist YouTube, ever.

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33 points
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Eh, I’m not a huge fan of fixing deep societal issues with quick lazy rebranding of words either, but I do admit that AllowList / BlockList is much clearer in intent than Whitelist / Blacklist is.

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11 points

GreenList and RedList might also work, but I agree there’s nothing more clear to what you’re blocking or allowing than a BlockList and AllowList. As clunky as it sounds at first.

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