- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
okay Google, how about this. I already pay for premium, but Im too lazy to disable my adblocker for just your site, can we just call it a draw and move on?
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Hah! I’d like to see them try. Revanced, newpipe, throwaway accounts, I’ll find a way around it. They can pry ublock origin from my cold dead paws.
paws
Shudders
do you know what community you're in
You may have inadvertently stumbled into this thread on kbin.social’s all federated content feed or similar, but this thread is on the pawb.social instance. You can’t exactly march into the furry den and then complain that the place is chock-full of furries.
This is definitely something that’s going to take some adjustment with the “threadiverse”, I think. Not only do you need to check what the community culture is like, you also need to check what the instance culture is like.
I wish I had read your response before going into my diatribe! Would have saved me some time!
I don’t want to be a jerk, but maybe don’t look at content from PAWb.social if you’re going to be a dick to its members simply for existing in their space. If it’s truly an issue, KBin allows you to block the group (but I don’t think it easily allows blocking the whole instance).
The Fediverse is awesome since it allows us all to seamlessly communicate with each other, but keep in mind we are all individual groupings of communities and looking at where the content comes from needs to become second nature. If too many people from KBin are jerks to these folks, they’ll just disconnect from us and call it a day since all the good conversations in the world don’t really matter if they’re being treated like dirt.
With that said, even if they were talking in a KBin instance though … seriously, it would have cost you nothing to ignore and move on (or block and move on if it really rustled your jimmies). Hell, even downvote and move on! This isn’t a matter of someone being a shit-stain on humanity, it was just them using the word ‘paws’ to refer to a few appendages, what’s the big deal? They’re not asking you to do the same.
(but I don’t think it easily allows blocking the whole instance).
Kbin does have that feature, though I don’t think that Lemmy presently does.
Go to https://kbin.social/d/pawb.social
On the right-hand sidebar, or on a phone browser, at the bottom of the page, you’ll find a button labeled with a circle with a slash across it. Click that.
I don’t really think that this is the long-term solution, though, if people are going to be setting up new instances all the time. That requires work that grows with something like the square of the size of the network. It’s the functional equivalent of trying to maintain a Usenet killfile, a solution which didn’t scale. I think that what’s needed is a way to obtain some kind of feed of recommended and blacklisted content and then for people to subscribe to those easily and for it to be easy to contribute to those. You can choose the feed(s) you want to trust to help guide you to the content you want.
That makes sense! I didn’t realize we could navigate to /d/ to reference the domain.
Thanks!
I’m certainly not paying for youtube premium (and making a google account in the process). I’ll probably just stop watching youtube if uBO can’t get around it.
(Peertube speedrun?)
this could be peertube’s time to shine!
I’d love for that to be the case, but realistically many Youtubers see Youtube as a revenue source (which is a terrible idea, because Google blatantly doesn’t care about them), which Peertube can’t really replicate.
To be fair, for some youtubers, their primary source of incomes are Patreon and In-Video Sponsorships, which can be done on Peertube. After all, we’ve seen some youtubers, notably The Linux Experiment, use Peertube.
The biggest hurdles here would be user base. It’d be difficult to grow peertube’s userbase because most creators there rely on youtube as an income-- unlike reddit or twitter where it’s mostly unpaid social media stuff, so most would be scared to move to a new platform as it’d be too detrimental to rebuild their userbase.
That and the instance’s funding, which, you know…
I mean, if you make the right tools, it doesn’t take much to replicate video on both YouTube and PeerTube and God knows what else.
Though I can imagine YouTube demonetizing non-exclusive content as a way to counter that.
considers
That might run afoul of antitrust regulators, though.
I’m down to fuck around and find out, of course. Mastodon and Lemmy were a slam dunk for the Fediverse given how Twitter/Reddit had cataclysmic events to drive a spike of adoption and how easy/smooth the experience on Mastodon and Lemmy is for new users. This is the first thing that Youtube has really done to make users angry, and it’s mostly still small potatoes. In addition, I feel like the early stages of p2p video are going to be a harder sell to the few people that are actually thinking about moving - people mostly just don’t want to think about the platform they are using. If their video stutters or doesn’t load nicely sometimes, they’ll quickly head back to Youtube.
In my non-expert opinion, we’ll need better global internet and potentially even a next-gen video codec (AV1 might be enough) before video hosting is viable for someone other than like 7 companies. Peertube is technically scalable but I feel like the introductory growing pain stage of its p2p swarm network is going to be really rough for driving adoption. The home server will probably need to be the main seeder for a while until the network matures, which means hosting costs will be more restrictive for new Peertube instances.
I have near-zero experience with Peertube though, so if anyone thinks I’m way off the mark let me know!
While I am quite worried with the change. Honestly, if there’s a will there’s a way, especially for a site as big as youtube with a huge target on their back.
People would find a way to get around the whole ad-block thing, especially with 3rd party site scraping client like Newpipe (or its equivalent on pc) or Invidious (sure, they got a bit of dmca going on, but there will probably be another individual willing to retake the mantle similar to revanced when vanced were shut down).
So many social media services are going to shit right now, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube… This might be the time to shine for fediverse.
Either this is the year where people start to realize you can do things without a profit motive, or the fediverse is destined to be like irc - too good to die, too scary to grow
It sure does feel like a race to the bottom.
right? It seems like this summer is just the time everyone decided “naa, we’ll be the worst”
I think – and I don’t claim familiarity with the details of each company’s situation – that this may have something of a common cause.
As long as investment dollars are readily available and growth possible, it makes sense to stay in “growth” phase, burn investment dollars, lose money, grow userbase.
Once they are not, then it becomes more important to switch to monetizing the userbase that has been built up.
My understanding is that the post-COVID-19 environment – with higher interest rates, tighter capital – is less-amenable to obtaining investments for growth. And all tech companies will be affected by that, will tend to shift away from “burn easily-available now capital to try to increase revenue later” more into generating revenue.
Cory Doctorow described this phenomenon best with his “enshittification” stuff. First platforms give all their surplus value to their uses to drive adoption, then they shift it to their customers once the users are locked in, then they shift it to themselves once their customers are also locked in, so at the end you have a platform that’s not serving the users or the customers, only the shareholders.
Yeah, the big spike in interest rates is causing all the big tech players to make the pivot to enshittified profitability fast enough that it’s way more visible than usual.
Is there a good Youtube alt yet? I’d love if there were.
Youtube, I know you aren’t going to read this, but could you PLEASE make it clearer in your marketing that about half the premium sub goes to the creators?
I’m not giving you £12 a month, but giving you £6 a month and giving £6 a month to creators is something I can get behind. Like, you don’t need to be so antagonistic here, you can just lean into the “support creators!” aspect much, much more.
50% is ridiculous. Why not support the creators directly themselves instead of Google?
I do just that. I give $15/mo total spread out across my top watched creators on patreon and use ublock origin and sponsorblock. I dont see any ads, creators get significantly more money, I pay roughly the same as premium. Google gets nothing. Win win win.
As well as what Mango said (I watch so many random videos, and I don’t think there’s a way to universally just give each one £1 or so), they are providing Youtube for free. Say what you want about Google, but Youtube does cost them a lot of money, and all things considered it’s a pretty well put together platform.
Yes, I’d like there to be a crowdfunded alternative, and yes I wish they weren’t so megacorpy and just let me download videos (it isn’t costing you anything if I watch a local copy!). But really, they provide a service and £6 or so is what I would consider a fair price.
Time/effort, I watch a lot of channels and supporting them all directly would be a lot of work to set up.
Huh … Out of curiosity, if as an individual I made something that did it for you, how would you feel about it if I charged a cut, and what percentage would you feel good about? Let’s assume it works through Patreon or something, and I never touch the money directly?
I’m trying to build apps and things that I think would make people’s lives better, and I kind of hate money. I don’t like spending it, I usually don’t like getting it, and I really, really hate asking for it…but I’m quickly draining through my savings, and I think I’d feel better if people were happy to offer it to me because they want to support what I’m doing.
I looked into ads since that would spread a slight annoyance, and I’d keep them subtle and with no tracking, but they kind of suck…I was thinking of ads with a paid option with no ads and little extra features like turning Twitter links to nitter, and clean builds hosted on 3rd party app stores for free for people who care about privacy.
There’s also the subscription option, and I was thinking that was asking a lot, but after reading your post maybe I didn’t factor in the convenience
I’d like to hear your take on all of it
I think everyone donates sometimes, the whole system works because a chunk of the population is like you, and sees the content and immediately feels “I need to support this”
It’s always wild to me when I see fans hounding creators to hurry up and set up a Patreon
I think for a service that did only distributed the money automatically, I wouldn’t want to see more than a 10% cut.
Youtube at 50% doesn’t seem that bad to me, because they’re also hosting the videos by providing the storage and bandwidth.
I refuse to disable my ad blocker… and it seems that many others won’t either.
hah. no. not on a platform where the lead thinks serving you a good dozen unskippable ads to test your patience is a fun little experiment. sure is the year of big platforms trying everything to get rid of users
In cases when viewers feel they have been falsely flagged as using an ad blocker, they can share this feedback by clicking on the link in the prompt.
and you can bet that ill (ab)use that. might as well make it just a bit harder for them
I probably would have dismissed it without thinking about it, but now that I know I’m on board.
If I’ve learned one thing from the Reddit situation it’s that civil disobedience towards increasingly hostile social media is easy and satisfying.
The big jump in interest rates is forcing all of big tech to pivot pretty hard.
Okay, new theory: Google, Reddit, and Twitter are taking part in a breakneck race to see who can become the most hated platform on all of the internet. Within just the past few days we’ve had this three-strikes test, Elon’s new 600-Tweet reading limit, and I’m pretty sure we all know what’s going down with Reddit.
Here’s my theory - Musk met with trump in 2020, and while it seemed like he started simping for the guy, it actually woke him up to the danger the world is in.
I used to praise him because not because he was a visionary - he’s not. Rather, because he read a lot of sci-fi growing up, and got the public and investors to get excited about important tech for humanity.
He also watches anime, and in Lelouch, a sci-fi anime, Lelouch dethrones the tyrannical emperor, his father. He starts as a populist hero, starting a grassroots resistance. He frees Japan, then works his way to the emperor enthroned in Britain .
He keeps going, taking the last few countries still free from Britannia though incredibly ruthless methods. He takes over the world, and starts to act like a tyrant, uniting the world in hatred against himself. He then arranges his friend, a popular war hero, to very publicly assassinate him
The world is now at peace - he demilitarized it to “secure his rule”. The people are hopeful, they’re finally free from tyranny - but they remember it well. There’s no leaders and they’ll need to organize, but not under an individual.
He became a symbol to take on everyone’s hatred, a powerful reminder of the dangers of giving away authority. And while it seemed like he was destroying everything in his way, everything he did removed threats that would make it harder to build a kinder, better world.
It’s called the zero requiem - and I’ve been joking since Musk was locked into buying Twitter that this is what he’s doing.
But damn if he hasn’t followed that script - not only is he going down along with Twitter, but he managed to convince all the big corporate networks to turn on their users too.
When he announced they would remove blocking it started to be less of a joke, that sounds dumb on every level… But this isn’t just killing the cash cow, this is doing it with explosives so no one can even use the meat. No way no one ran the numbers against metrics and told him just how crazy and stupid this is… He’s weaning the users off Twitter even as he makes it even more user hostile
Everything Google has done since the end of the, “Don’t be evil”, days has made me want less and less to do with them. I’ve been trying to scrub them from my life for a bit now, the only two things I still use being Gmail and YouTube. Though I’m pretty close to cutting those ties as well now. I just wish more the creators i liked weren’t only on there.
The problem is, there is no alternative to youtube. Like, at all.
I’m using Odysee (free) and Nebula (paid) to reduce my time spent on YouTube, it isn’t much, but it is a beginning
Unfortunately yeah, at best right now there are other places you can go for some of the same content, but most creators are exclusive to YouTube. It’s part of the reason I can’t get completely away from Google yet.
I seriously don’t understand why they’re so aggressive about this.
I would consider maybe turning off my adblocker if they ran single ads and didn’t make them so long, and actually did some curation on their ads so I didn’t see a fake MrBeast scam ad or political ad every time. Yet they don’t, so I will continue to find ways to block ads until I no longer can.
Companies pay YouTube for advertisements. Google’s not just putting ads on videos for fun.
I don’t think anyone disagrees with that, but YouTube today has a lot more ads, especially spammy ones, than YouTube 7 years ago did. This is an issue with them using a business model that doesn’t scale very well.
Interest rates were basically zero for a decade, then they spiked this year with every indication that they aren’t going back to zero anytime soon.
This is radically shifting the approach for many tech companies.
Not saying I like it, just saying it’s why rapid enshittification is happening
Maybe just stop watching youtube? I don’t even watch an hour of youtube tutorials a month. Go ahead and kick me off, I’ll just stop visiting the site. Just like I’m doing with reddit (which I’ve even blocked at the router level to avoid it)
I was surprised at how little I actually cared about the reddit communities I was subscribed to. I switched to Lemmy on 6/12 and just never thought about reddit again. I use a couple RSS feeds to get the same news now (which is a better idea anyway), and Lemmy has enough people in the topics I’m actually interested in so I don’t feel like I’m missing any important discussion.
I suspect it will be the same story with Youtube for me. I really don’t need to be watching Youtube 95% of the time. I tune in to videos because it’s convenient. If Google is going to make it inconvenient, the value proposition changes and I’d rather do something else to fill my time. I wonder if there will be backlash from creators now that many users are inherently disincentivized from visiting Youtube…
Lol funny you mention RSS. I LOVE my RSS feeds - I’ve been building my subscription list for decades. I used other services before Google Reader, now I use feedly (what do you use?).
I subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds of all sorts - from technical blogs to news feeds. I always try to explain to people that I get a “firehose” of content sorted by timestamp. I don’t have an algorithm choosing which data to prioritize.
Did you know that Aaron Swartz (one of the original reddit developers) was also a leader who developed the RSS standards? God the word lost a great man - imagine what he could have done for humanity if he lived a full life.
I suspect it will be the same story with Youtube for me. I really don’t need to be watching Youtube 95% of the time. I tune in to videos because it’s convenient. If Google is going to make it inconvenient, the value proposition changes and I’d rather do something else to fill my time. I wonder if there will be backlash from creators now that many users are inherently disincentivized from visiting Youtube…
Funny thing is that I usually use Youtube for DIY repair videos. Now ChatGPT and simple google searches (to confirm info) have replaced most of my needs. I even use Chat to teach me how to use new software (which I would formally watch videos to learn).
Besides, I really don’t watch television/videos in general. I have far more important things to do with my free time like running a small business and micro homestead to live an almost fully self sufficient lifestyle. I find skimming RSS feeds and reading selected articles a far more efficient use of my free time (I only used to visit reddit for the occasional social interaction with fellow enthusiasts of whatever topic, and hope that kbin/fediverse will replace that ‘itch’)
I used other services before Google Reader, now I use feedly (what do you use?).
I use self-hosted FreshRSS, and Readrops on my phone to synchronize with that.
RSS is amazing for sure, especially if you can limit the firehose to specific categories that you’re interested in. The modern web does not like RSS because it’s too pure and useful, and they need to inject user engagement/algorithmic-despair into you somehow.
I try not to use ChatGPT, just because I don’t want to get addicted to relying on someone else’s service. AFAIK, ChatGPT is actually quite intensive to run, so I don’t believe in a free lunch forever there. I’m betting they’re trying to get people hooked before pulling the rug. I will start trying stuff like that if it becomes open source and self-hostable etc.
As for unique and useful Youtube videos, yeah there’s still a wrinkle there. As an example, I keep up-to-date with Matrix’s “Matrix Live” video blogs on Youtube, and I don’t think they host them anywhere else. I will be consciously limiting any interaction I have on Youtube that’s not needed though.
I don’t have a Google account so I actually just use RSS feeds for every Youtube channel and get their content delivered that way!
@cassetti @stefenauris @yote_zip I could never find a service that matched GReader. I tried Protopage but it was way more Yahoo Portal-y.
I use self-hosted FreshRSS and Readrops on my phone, if you haven’t tried those before. I’m not too picky with my RSS feed readers though!
I already don’t see ads and don’t subscribe, but I legitimately get $12/month of good from YouTube. I’d be willing to pay that for the service they make available. None of the other streaming services available are as useful to me.
However, right now it’s hard for Google to data-mine me. Getting YouTube Premium means linking my identity to YouTube activity, and makes it easier for Google to build their profile of me. I don’t want that. If Google were to say that this means no logging, no data-mining of YouTube Premium customers, I’d be a lot more amenable to subscribing.
In cases where users feel they have been falsely accused
…what? You’ve either been falsely accused or not. It’s not an opinionated matter.
I mean technically, if you get blocked, you say that’s BS! I don’t even know what an ad blocker is! And it turns out your son installed it because you shouldn’t let sites in your browser without protection, you’ve felt you were falsely accused, but the accusation wasn’t false.
It could also be read as you feel your falsely accused, and it turns out Google had a bug, you were falsely accused, and you also felt that you were.
This entire thing is being done in an extremely hostile way though… They teach you to use clear, concise, neutral, and non-accusatory language as part of UX best practices. The proper message would be “if you feel this is in error”.
Instead of cutting the video until you turn off your ad blocker (as is the standard and looks a lot better if you), they’re using threatening sounding language and putting it in press releases. Instead of neutral terms, they’re using legalese. Instead of saying you should remove unlock because ad blockers can cause problems (which is technically true, if very misleading), they’re giving people messages saying that it slows down your browser, which is entirely untrue - blocking a dozen requests is cheaper than sending one and reading the response, let alone rendering the ad. The only way it slows down your browser is if chrome sees it in your add ons and starts Bitcoin mining in the background
The whole thing is very strange, especially since historically Google has been pretty delicate with the issue. They’ve blocked the video if the ads don’t show a few times, but quickly backed off when people made a fuss.
They also have been signaling “were going to push ad blockers off chrome” for like a year now, they announced this basically when they started doing it
I guess it’s a new age, where tech companies have given up on even pretending they respect us
The second Internet is dying, long live the fediverse
The fediverse will become niche like a lot of other forums within a couple years if FB keeps poking. What really matters is that users know that free speech is what really matters and that the only way we can win is accepting that this is worth more than internet points of any kind.
Well, after reddit. I see a youtube exodus coming. Its totally fine not subscribing for premium, if you support your favorite creators directly
Why the fuck do you pay for that shit?
When I watch YouTube on my TV, I just hit the “skip ad” button. If they take that button away, I’ll probably stop going to YouTube, unless it’s someone doing a live thing.
