So I’ve been using youtube ad blockers since pretty much when ad blocker extensions were first available. Lately though I’ve been getting hit more and more with these messages that YT was sending out every 5 or so videos telling me that adblockers aren’t allowed. No problem, just gotta wait 5 seconds to x it out and then close my video. The straw that broke the camel’s back though was when instead of a close-able pop-up, they just posted it in front of a video and wouldn’t let me watch anything until I disabled my adblocker.
So I disabled it and… wow. It’s just so, so, trash. 2 ads before a video plus midrolls and every video ever. I tried listening to a playlist of songs and was getting a midroll ad every single time. Imagine trying to just listen to music for 3 minutes and getting interrupted by a commercial for a chevy silverado! Half the ads were for youtube premium and they specifically mentioned that it would get rid of all the ads. It just felt so damn predatory. I couldn’t enjoy anything that wasn’t already demonetized.
And you know I’m fine with ads I guess. I could live with an ad before every video, but the fact that I was getting upwards of 5 ads in a 10 minute video was just plain absurd. I also hate that youtube got rid of the yellow markers to show you when an ad was coming up, so now it’s just out of nowhere and always interrupts a key part of the video.
I stayed at a place last year that had a RokuTV, YouTube was practically unusable on it due to the absurd number of ads that would play. Even more infuriating was that they were often the same ad, repeated.
It’s being rolled out on a person by person basis. If you’ve been targeted like I have you have to keep updating the extension to keep up with their arms race
Do you seriously think advertisers buy each user’s data individually, and sometimes Google goes “oh hey guys just a heads up, that individual is using an ad blocker 👍🏼”?
I could totally see a company doing a market analysis paying for this data. They’d be looking for for counts of people interested in a thing or in a demographic…then they can determine if it’d be worth it to develop a product targeting that group
Personal data isn’t only used for ads. In this case a users watching history can be sold especially if it’s connected in some way to a demographic profile. There could be many more ways to monetize many other things the user does.
Not long ago, I was watching 5 skipable ads after 10 minutes of video on Viki. It was a time when they were distributing Korean and Chinese Drama at a pace no independent subtitle team would keep up. The shows were culturally interesting, they were a community spirit you could feel even when not participating in subtitling. The video player was good with nice features like learning mode and timestamped comment. It was an acceptable tradeoff.
Today’s Viki and YouTube quality is barely sufficient for not favoring pirated website which have in the mean time greatly improved their user experience.
Use Piped as a front end for y–t—. It’s open source & non-tracking, but views still count. The creator is active on the fedi too.
Individual servers sometimes go off line or lose quality when they’re rate limited. Just try a different server when that happens. If the one you’re using at the time shows ads and there are too many, check preferences to turn them off.
(My addiction is Thai. Also watch some c- and k- too.)
i’ve only found k-drama communities on lemmy and it seems like they’re all abandoned. i know several k-fanatics on mastodon, some hardcore c-drama folk and 3 other thai fans. i don’t know if lemmy plays well with the more twitter-like parts of the fediverse but i can introduce you there if you have an account. i think we can DM on here?
I haven’t had to deal with video ads for years simply because I don’t use the website and use patched APKs to block ads. I’m thinking it was/is the right choice due to gøøgl€’s ongoing war against ad blocking in general. Don’t know a solution to the browser problem outside of using alternative frontends like libretube or invidious or whatever if you don’t mind not logging in.
in the end, you’re leeching off a service you enjoy.
I don’t think that’s a fair or true statement.
For one thing, the “service” here has risen to a point of ubiquity that it’s a de facto public space. Everything is on YouTube – legacy media channels, individual enthusiasts, alternative media outlets, the worlds of tech, fashion, politics, sports – you name it. If you were deprived of all access to it, you would have a qualitatively poorer access of what is going on in society. So it’s not equivalent to a traditional service like a trade.
For another, blocking ads is not merely refusal to pay a fee of some kind. Advertisements are cognitively intrusive, designed to affect your willpower and decision-making, used to track and control your behaviour, compromise your digital safety, and turn you into a product for companies to whom you do not give your consent for the opportunity to be exploited. Blocking that system of “payment” is not simply prudent but right, and the choice between paying a monetary fee or being so exploited is not a fair choice at all.
So mediums with advertising should not be allowed to seek monetary payment? Only mediums without advertising should do so?
I’m not understanding your logic here.
For me it’s pretty simple. There is a product - would you like to pay for it?
I feel that all the scary words you can add to a paragraph about advertising based revenue for digital mediums is just your tool to justify your behavior of sticking it to the man.
So mediums with advertising should not be allowed to seek monetary payment? Only mediums without advertising should do so?
Not quite sure how you got to the point you did there. There are different ways to advertise – billboards and TV/radio adverts, e.g., while often odious, are something you can more easily divert your attention from and which are not tracking devices or the product of turning you personally into an item for sale. I dislike them and would prefer a world without them but I don’t think their being attached to organisations in and of itself ought to deprive those organisations of income.
I’m not understanding your logic here.
That is apparent.
For me it’s pretty simple. There is a product - would you like to pay for it?
This is called “begging the question” as a response to me – I’ve called into question exactly both your premise and conclusion, for reasons you’ve not actually engaged with, and then you’ve re-asserted them. You have assumed what you’ve set out to prove.
(1) it is not simply a product (or service – you’ve changed tune there), for the reasons I’ve already outlined. Its use and availability is not analogous to something you can pick off the shelf or pay a tradesperson to do for you. (2) therefore, the question of paying for it (and how) demands different kinds of answer. In the country I’m from, e.g., healthcare is a right and not paid for, neither is early-years education up to 18, and so on. Both are “products” or “services” in some sense of the term, but to speak of payment here is complex and the answer doesn’t simply carry over from thinking about normal products/services.
I feel that all the scary words you can add to a paragraph about advertising based revenue for digital mediums is just your tool to justify your behavior of sticking it to the man.
This can only be a disingenuous response, surely? Rather than engage with the criticism of the nature of modern internet advertising and how corporations use it to affect people, you’ll just summarise it as “scary words”.
I’m being completely serious and I’m interested to understand more about what you mean. You are saying that YouTube is not merely a service and then you’re equating it to something like healthcare and education. Now I must ask are you the one that is being serious?
I’m being completely serious and I’m interested to understand more about what you mean.
It doesn’t strike me that way when you also write things like this:
you’re equating it to something like healthcare and education.
“equating” sets up a straw man. Such a tactic gives me the impression you think of this as some sort of battle that you want to win rather than a good-faith discussion.
What I had written was not an equating – and I think you should have or indeed did see that – only a comparison to show that something’s being describable as a product or service “in some sense” does not mean it is the sort of thing we pay for in a traditional way. This contradicts the central inference of your argument.
The answer to how I would actually characterise the “service” of YouTube is already in the first comment, so I’ll just quote it again:
For one thing, the “service” here has risen to a point of ubiquity that it’s a de facto public space. Everything is on YouTube – legacy media channels, individual enthusiasts, alternative media outlets, the worlds of tech, fashion, politics, sports – you name it. If you were deprived of all access to it, you would have a qualitatively poorer access [to] what is going on in society. So it’s not equivalent to a traditional service like a trade.
I stand by that; YouTube has a near monopoly over that media form, and if you require access to information and essentially a key plank of the online public square, then you need to go through it. I regard it as a (positive rather than negative) right that we do all have – not to use YouTube specifically but for information, opinion, discourse, politics and more to be available to us all. As it happens, YouTube is a key platform for the arrangement of all these things. Twitter also is/was, which is why Musk’s buyout was in principle concerning, and then in practice very shit once he created a two tier system of access to and impact on that public space.
I’m open to having this discussion but every single response from you begins with you telling me that I’m not interested in having this discussion. If you could just leave that part out so we can have the discussion, it would be much easier. I believe that’s referred to as ad hominem. If you don’t think it is - ok, it’s not. But please stop allowing that to distract from a discussion if you could.
These “near monopolistic public spaces” such as Twitter and YouTube have costs associated with them. How do you feel that we as users/consumers/citizens of the public space support it’s existence?
I know this isn’t YouTube’s fault but one thing that bugs me about yet premium is when creators dump baked in ads.
As a user you have 3 options:
Deal with it and manual skip (in a way this feels like skipping commercials on cable tv Dvr)
Get ready to buy a ton of patreon subscriptions (kills the point of getting yt premium).
Get a modded client/ use browser extensions and use sponsorblock
Now the one exception to this is nebula where like YouTube you pay an all access fee but no baked in ads (I pay for this currently).
I do wonder if creators had the option to make videos available via YouTube premium only (say early access and no baked in ads). Would more people pay and would creators use this system? (They wouldn’t have to worry about demonetization).
@Deemo@locuester About the first option, if you’re talking about sponsor sections, you can autoskip them using #sponsorblock. It’s an addon which does… well… what the name says.
Only gripe is your stuck to the web version of youtube (especially on ios).
If you want sponsorblock in the native youtube app you have to side load a mod which means either dealing with apple’s 7 day limit refresh or paying for a apple dev acount/ signing service subscription.
Android there is revanced (no sideloading subscriptions needed).
There’s probably a good workaround to program. I noticed that, when in “windowed” mode on a computer, you can just drag the cursor to the end of ads and it skips them.
Diversion, the ad blocker built into the Merlin fork of the Asus router firmware, is able to do this. It functions in the same way as a pihole. It’s not always perfect, but serviceable on devices that can’t use an adblocker like chromecasts.
That is actually how the Xbox user interface started to look like after a while. It went from “what you probably want functions” to 80% ad, whitespace and “suggestions” with a Play the game somewhere in there.
For people using smart TVs, consider hooking up an old laptop or desktop to your TV. You can use a wireless mouse/keyboard (or other input peripheral) and you’ve got a living room setup that allows you to use ad-blockers and your own browser and video player (I recommend PotPlayer), among other advantages.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
I stayed at a place last year that had a RokuTV, YouTube was practically unusable on it due to the absurd number of ads that would play. Even more infuriating was that they were often the same ad, repeated.
I’ve never had this happen to me with Firefox + ublock origin.
If you want youtube on mobile, I recommend Libretube. Or just use mobile Firefox with ublock origin.
It’s being rolled out on a person by person basis. If you’ve been targeted like I have you have to keep updating the extension to keep up with their arms race
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I don’t think they’ll care or miss you, to be honest. It’s not like they’re making money off you.
deleted by creator
Who would pay for data on a person you can’t advertise to?
Do you seriously think advertisers buy each user’s data individually, and sometimes Google goes “oh hey guys just a heads up, that individual is using an ad blocker 👍🏼”?
No, but having a handful of people who will never see their ads devalues the whole package.
I could totally see a company doing a market analysis paying for this data. They’d be looking for for counts of people interested in a thing or in a demographic…then they can determine if it’d be worth it to develop a product targeting that group
They’re absolutely making money
How? How do they profit off someone who refuses to view ads?
With their personal data obviously.
their personal data that they use to show them… ads
Personal data isn’t only used for ads. In this case a users watching history can be sold especially if it’s connected in some way to a demographic profile. There could be many more ways to monetize many other things the user does.
They don’t sell data. They sell ads. Selling data would directly erode their ability to sell ads.
Not long ago, I was watching 5 skipable ads after 10 minutes of video on Viki. It was a time when they were distributing Korean and Chinese Drama at a pace no independent subtitle team would keep up. The shows were culturally interesting, they were a community spirit you could feel even when not participating in subtitling. The video player was good with nice features like learning mode and timestamped comment. It was an acceptable tradeoff. Today’s Viki and YouTube quality is barely sufficient for not favoring pirated website which have in the mean time greatly improved their user experience.
Use Piped as a front end for y–t—. It’s open source & non-tracking, but views still count. The creator is active on the fedi too.
Individual servers sometimes go off line or lose quality when they’re rate limited. Just try a different server when that happens. If the one you’re using at the time shows ads and there are too many, check preferences to turn them off.
(My addiction is Thai. Also watch some c- and k- too.)
deleted by creator
i’ve only found k-drama communities on lemmy and it seems like they’re all abandoned. i know several k-fanatics on mastodon, some hardcore c-drama folk and 3 other thai fans. i don’t know if lemmy plays well with the more twitter-like parts of the fediverse but i can introduce you there if you have an account. i think we can DM on here?
deleted by creator
correct
I haven’t had to deal with video ads for years simply because I don’t use the website and use patched APKs to block ads. I’m thinking it was/is the right choice due to gøøgl€’s ongoing war against ad blocking in general. Don’t know a solution to the browser problem outside of using alternative frontends like libretube or invidious or whatever if you don’t mind not logging in.
Another option is paying a couple bucks and not having to worry about it. Might even make you feel good knowing you’re supporting the platform.
I don’t fault you for tinkering and finding ways around it - that’s fun. But in the end, you’re leeching off a service you enjoy.
yeah google really needs more money, poor guys
I don’t think that’s a fair or true statement.
For one thing, the “service” here has risen to a point of ubiquity that it’s a de facto public space. Everything is on YouTube – legacy media channels, individual enthusiasts, alternative media outlets, the worlds of tech, fashion, politics, sports – you name it. If you were deprived of all access to it, you would have a qualitatively poorer access of what is going on in society. So it’s not equivalent to a traditional service like a trade.
For another, blocking ads is not merely refusal to pay a fee of some kind. Advertisements are cognitively intrusive, designed to affect your willpower and decision-making, used to track and control your behaviour, compromise your digital safety, and turn you into a product for companies to whom you do not give your consent for the opportunity to be exploited. Blocking that system of “payment” is not simply prudent but right, and the choice between paying a monetary fee or being so exploited is not a fair choice at all.
So mediums with advertising should not be allowed to seek monetary payment? Only mediums without advertising should do so?
I’m not understanding your logic here.
For me it’s pretty simple. There is a product - would you like to pay for it?
I feel that all the scary words you can add to a paragraph about advertising based revenue for digital mediums is just your tool to justify your behavior of sticking it to the man.
Not quite sure how you got to the point you did there. There are different ways to advertise – billboards and TV/radio adverts, e.g., while often odious, are something you can more easily divert your attention from and which are not tracking devices or the product of turning you personally into an item for sale. I dislike them and would prefer a world without them but I don’t think their being attached to organisations in and of itself ought to deprive those organisations of income.
That is apparent.
This is called “begging the question” as a response to me – I’ve called into question exactly both your premise and conclusion, for reasons you’ve not actually engaged with, and then you’ve re-asserted them. You have assumed what you’ve set out to prove.
(1) it is not simply a product (or service – you’ve changed tune there), for the reasons I’ve already outlined. Its use and availability is not analogous to something you can pick off the shelf or pay a tradesperson to do for you. (2) therefore, the question of paying for it (and how) demands different kinds of answer. In the country I’m from, e.g., healthcare is a right and not paid for, neither is early-years education up to 18, and so on. Both are “products” or “services” in some sense of the term, but to speak of payment here is complex and the answer doesn’t simply carry over from thinking about normal products/services.
This can only be a disingenuous response, surely? Rather than engage with the criticism of the nature of modern internet advertising and how corporations use it to affect people, you’ll just summarise it as “scary words”.
I’m being completely serious and I’m interested to understand more about what you mean. You are saying that YouTube is not merely a service and then you’re equating it to something like healthcare and education. Now I must ask are you the one that is being serious?
It doesn’t strike me that way when you also write things like this:
“equating” sets up a straw man. Such a tactic gives me the impression you think of this as some sort of battle that you want to win rather than a good-faith discussion.
What I had written was not an equating – and I think you should have or indeed did see that – only a comparison to show that something’s being describable as a product or service “in some sense” does not mean it is the sort of thing we pay for in a traditional way. This contradicts the central inference of your argument.
The answer to how I would actually characterise the “service” of YouTube is already in the first comment, so I’ll just quote it again:
I stand by that; YouTube has a near monopoly over that media form, and if you require access to information and essentially a key plank of the online public square, then you need to go through it. I regard it as a (positive rather than negative) right that we do all have – not to use YouTube specifically but for information, opinion, discourse, politics and more to be available to us all. As it happens, YouTube is a key platform for the arrangement of all these things. Twitter also is/was, which is why Musk’s buyout was in principle concerning, and then in practice very shit once he created a two tier system of access to and impact on that public space.
I’m open to having this discussion but every single response from you begins with you telling me that I’m not interested in having this discussion. If you could just leave that part out so we can have the discussion, it would be much easier. I believe that’s referred to as ad hominem. If you don’t think it is - ok, it’s not. But please stop allowing that to distract from a discussion if you could.
These “near monopolistic public spaces” such as Twitter and YouTube have costs associated with them. How do you feel that we as users/consumers/citizens of the public space support it’s existence?
I know this isn’t YouTube’s fault but one thing that bugs me about yet premium is when creators dump baked in ads.
As a user you have 3 options:
Now the one exception to this is nebula where like YouTube you pay an all access fee but no baked in ads (I pay for this currently).
I do wonder if creators had the option to make videos available via YouTube premium only (say early access and no baked in ads). Would more people pay and would creators use this system? (They wouldn’t have to worry about demonetization).
Curious on your thoughts
@Deemo @locuester About the first option, if you’re talking about sponsor sections, you can autoskip them using #sponsorblock. It’s an addon which does… well… what the name says.
I do use sponsorblock 😅
Only gripe is your stuck to the web version of youtube (especially on ios).
If you want sponsorblock in the native youtube app you have to side load a mod which means either dealing with apple’s 7 day limit refresh or paying for a apple dev acount/ signing service subscription.
Android there is revanced (no sideloading subscriptions needed).
On a final note I am considering trying https://grayjay.app/
It bundles odessy, nebula, youtube and a few other platforms in one app (it also includes sponsorblock and return dislikes for youtube).
https://beehaw.org/comment/1359450
There’s probably a good workaround to program. I noticed that, when in “windowed” mode on a computer, you can just drag the cursor to the end of ads and it skips them.
For me, what works perfectly is this setup:
Desktop – Adguard
Android – YouTube ReVanced
Never get adverts ever. The day I’m forced is the day I stop using it altogether.
Serious question. Can a pihole stop this? I’ve been thinking about building one for my house.
Pinhole works at the network level. You need browser extensions like ublock-origin to filter this on the client side.
Edit: You also have apps like adguard, which work like Pihole, and do cosmetic filtering like ublock-origin.
It won’t stop ads delivered by the same servers as the content.
Diversion, the ad blocker built into the Merlin fork of the Asus router firmware, is able to do this. It functions in the same way as a pihole. It’s not always perfect, but serviceable on devices that can’t use an adblocker like chromecasts.
The best part is that it gets worse
Show me something that gets better.
x
Fuck the advertisers. I care way more about them turning screws on the creators.
https://www.soundandvision.com/files/_images/200902/2172009173627.jpg
False. The screen doesn’t have 99% ad to 1% actual content. Not an accurate representation of the future.
Go away, I’m baitin’.
That is actually how the Xbox user interface started to look like after a while. It went from “what you probably want functions” to 80% ad, whitespace and “suggestions” with a Play the game somewhere in there.
yeah that shit was never sustainable not sure how people deal with it,adblock forever
Leaving my project Tubo in case someone finds it useful. Support for it just got merged on Libredirect
For people using smart TVs, consider hooking up an old laptop or desktop to your TV. You can use a wireless mouse/keyboard (or other input peripheral) and you’ve got a living room setup that allows you to use ad-blockers and your own browser and video player (I recommend PotPlayer), among other advantages.
if it runs android they can jus run Smart tube, its basically perfect