Submitted 1 year ago by Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.404media.co/youtubes-war-on-adblockers-shows-how-google-controls-the-internet/
Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
To anyone using Chrome and complaining about Google having too much control: shut the fuck up. You’re part of the problem.
Yeah and some of these people think they’re Brave and Edgy.
I see what you did there
Firefox for the win. Or Librewolf even better.
I love Librewolf, I just can’t work for hours using a browser that has dark mode disabled in order to preserve its privacy features.
Waterfox present!
Floorp is my fav!
Imo this extends to chromium too. Google owns the source code and can pull it whenever they want. Sure, chromium browsers might be able to putter along for a little bit, but my understanding is that the reason why we’re now at Chrome/Chromium vs Firefox vs Safari is because Google shits out so many new “”“standards”“” and “features” that you need a large team to keep up. It’s supposedly why browsers like Opera switched to using chromium instead of trying to maintain their own source code.
Or any chromium based browser for that matter.
Handing over Google the Internet standards on a platter.
FireFox is not only awesome but a true competitor rendering engine.
This is one reason why I don’t want the EU to force Apple to allow other rendering engines. Whether you think using Apple’s rendering engine on iOS is bad or good, it’s basically the only thing keeping Google from having complete control of the market.
Antitrust laws are not enforced nearly as much as they should be, especially in tech.
Stop using Google’s products and continue using adblockers. Don’t come back at me with excuses. Otherwise, don’t complain.
But
no, butts are over at pornhub
The real problem with any other video service is that YT has a HUGE advantage of WAY more content. I wish it weren't that way but it is.
So they will continue to dominate until similar vast content can be created elsewhere.
The real problem with any other video service is that YT has a HUGE advantage of WAY more content.
PornHub: uh, hello?
Google only has power as we the people give it to them but using their services. Same with Reddit’s power and such. Not the people here as we have unfortunately unplugged, but admittedly, all the decentralized services have significantly less content and variety of content. We need more people to join us, but they seem happy to support the centralized services they hate.
The problem with youtube in particular is there is no way to build an alternative that’s as good as YouTube (ignoring all the bad bits they’ve added). PeerTube is nice to have around, but it’s not as fast and doesn’t have all the content as youtube. There’s also Nebula, which is alright. It’s not free and doesn’t have as much content, but it’s usually a higher quality.
You’re obviously right. But it’s funny to me I find it easy to imagine a world where staying independent and hosting your own stuff was seen as cooler. Instead of YouTube and Google Buzz, we ran RSS clients akin to Outlook and Thunderbird. They torrent and seed media we’re subscribed to while we’re at work or class. It’s saved on a home server. We walk in and simply toss it up on our desktop or TV. (Or maybe a mobile client streams from your home server over the Internet or your home Wi-Fi if you’re at home )
And if you visited the website instead of YouTube’s recommendations, The creator just adds a few RSS feeds on the backend to pull thumbnails from, of other creators’ sites they enjoy.
Crazy how easy it is to daydream sometimes.
There was a world before YouTube. It grew from humble beginnings. Granted it didn’t have an incumbent to fight off, but it had all the server issues, bandwidth issues and similar.
The only thing that stops someone else doing it is the user base.
The problem with youtube in particular is there is no way to build an alternative that’s as good as YouTube
as good
I mean, assuming that’s exactly what people wan, “exactly youtube but cheaper”, then yeah it’s an impossible and thankless task to even try something of that scale. Instead it’s better to think of building youtube alternatives that are focused on one or two parameters that allow organizational optimizations. For example, much of the issue that people complain about is the storage, but a YT-alt that dedicates to eg.: archivism of old TV shows, that scan at best at 480p or 360p, wouldn’t need to spend that much in storage compared to a service that is trying to serve 4K UHD 120fps Subwoofer Surround; that combined with the topical focus suddenly makes it much more scaleable and approachable.
I’m okay with the less amount of content. Frankly, I mindlessly spent hours scrolling through “content” on reddit, and feeling no satisfaction. At least the content here is more relevant.
More people would mean more memes and rage bait. No thanks.
You just need to curate your feed like anywhere else. Who can really stand the main page of reddit or yt or anything really?
Reddit made it so hard to use on mobile that I only check it on the weekend on my pc.
I mean subreddits like Oculus and Virtual Reality and I am sure many other niches are missing on Lemmy or very quiet.
The problem is the network effect. It’s hard to switch from YT if all your favorite channels and creators are there, but it’s also hard for them to switch if all the users are using YT. And because it’s many different people we cannot coordinate a simultaneous transition either.
That’s why i wen FF+ Duckduck + ublock and instead of reddit > Lemmy But i have to admit that YouTube is harder to replace then reddit and I’ve tried many alternatives.
I just got an email from YouTube, my premium price is going up by almost double.
Same. It is no longer worth it, I’ll be sad to lose my music streaming, but there are other pathways that some may consider unethical.
Yarr matey
If only there was a place to buy DRM free music in the file type I want for use in whatever device I want also for movies.
If you subscribe to premium using an Indian IP address, for example, you’ll get it for like a buck a month
YouTube Music is no longer optional. It’s now bundled into the basic features of Premium and Google uses that to justify an insane price hike. Just corporate greed, nothing to see here.
As much as I'm against Google: why are they imthe bad guys in this specific instance? They are in many other insurances, absolutely. But here, they dare to block a service that legitimately costs a ton of money from being used without them making anythinnin return. That's not the usual evil corp BS they pull. That's rather reasonable if you ask me. Let's not exhaust ourselves in that and focus on the real Bullshit they try to pull like their web manifest ad nightmare!
A lot of people have become entitled to the idea of the “free internet.” In some cases, it’s understandable, like for social media where the platform is doing very little work and nearly all the value is coming from the users. I think especially in Youtube’s case, people are squinting and looking at it like a social media. They wonder why Youtube’s taking such a big cut when they think the content creators are the ones providing the value.
The issue here is that the complexities of video hosting, especially at the speed and quality Youtube provides, requires a ludicrous amount of effort and money. Youtube is providing a platform that is nearly unthinkable, something I consider to rival the entire television broadcasting sphere. The idea that such a colossal undertaking could be achieved without requiring revenue generation is simply naïve, and it’s incredible to think that a free version is even offered at all. Nobody ever really thinks about that though, they just look at it as another platform like Facebook or Reddit, and think a lazy megacorp is stuffing their pockets for nothing.
i agree, its about choice. no one should be complaining about what google is doing.
if we dont like it, we should choose a different product.
Because this isn't just about "making anything in return" any more than neo-Nazis are booted from platforms "just for having different opinions." More people are using adblockers on YouTube because YouTube isn't simply displaying commercial advertisements, they're pushing "ads" for scams, malware, and all manner of heinous and/or sketchy content. Even separate of that, the frequency of ads and the presence of minutes-long ads you need to manually skip have made watching content difficult and unpleasant, if not unworkable. Adblocker usage is as much about restoring functionality to the site as anything.
All of these issues have been raised with YouTube, but rather than address the complaints by adjusting how ads are selected and served they've decided the only solution is for you to pay them monthly, not just a few bucks but as much as (or more than) the major video streaming services. All of this for content they do not make, at a price point far beyond what they need to be profitable. It's greed for the sake of greed, pure and simple.
YouTube was originally free, and without video ads. It remained so for some time after Google bought it. They can operate YouTube without video ads at all.
That’s not the usual evil corp BS they pull.
Yes it is. Then why do they force you to pay for YT Music if all you want is an ad free experience? I tell you why: people will come to the realization that it is stupid to pay for two music streaming services at the same time, so they will cancel their Spotify subscription. It will be extremely hard for other services to stay competitive. It’s no longer enough that their app is perhaps slightly better, or that their algorithm is better, no one will pay the extra 11 € per month for just that. So eventually, these competing music streaming services will die (maybe with the exception of Apple Music and Amazon Music). Once YouTube has the monopoly on the music streaming market, they can raise the prices again.
i jumped the google ecosystem a few years back seeing this coming..
i hear a lot of 'but i use googles x and googles y'. yep, and you will continue to have those chains on your wrists as long as you choose to have them there. everyone has the choice to start migrating to other email providers, other phone platforms, etc.
im not saying its easy, or something that can happen quickly... but lamenting the fact youre in up to your neck is no reason to give up. baby steps. make bob wiley proud.
I’ve ditched everything but android. Been thinking about swapping roms but not all the apps I need for work will works with MicroG. And going apple is, at best, a lateral move.
I’m with you, on course to de-big-tech my life. I’m not even a power user of any of them, but got caught up in the convenience.
The only active google services I do use are
I replaced my email with my very own domain
I buy my own storage to host and backup at home.
What I have from cloud storage is by chance of having Office365 (mainly because Outlook is so much superior for email management. I tried EM-client. It was worse).
The YouTube adblocker overlay and such doesn’t work if you’re in incognito mode. You’re welcome.
Stop begging them, stop using them.
Very much agreed. The entitlement is crazy.
Google doesn’t owe you anything, video hosting is extremely expensive. There’s a reason no competitor exists.
How dare they charge to deliver you a service?
THANK YOU, finally, I was wondering when someone was going to stick up for the billionaire tech giants. do these stupid fucking lemmings realize that yachts don’t pay for themselves??
My solution is and for quite a long time was to use NewPipe on mobile and Invidious on pc.
Does it really say “allowlisted” instead of “whitelisted?” WTF?
Opera GX + uBlock + ABP. I stopped seeing this shit a long time ago. (Opera de-googles where necessary, and has its own store. You can still install from other chrome stores, if something is not available in theirs)
Frankly though, Alphabet needs to start being made accountable for their own “de-privacy” behaviour, in the name of their own profits.
And on a side note, is it just me or did 404media just came out of nowhere, and is spamming “news” posts. I’ve read a few of them, and they seem more like opinion pieces, and less factual. They really seem to have little supporting evidence, proper content (the meat, proof, details) and the complete post content is paywalled.
Defederated world, can we please prioritise non-paywalled sites over monetised ones?
Adnauseam! Adguard for desktop loaded with anti AdBlock killer! Lifetime license available!
Sorry I have tourette’s syndrome
they can cry harder
Is there any real free alternative? And I mean free refered to freedom, I know PeerTube exists but finding a good/known instance to upload content knowing that the instance won’t go down is hard.
If they start showing me this message, I’ll have no reasonable choice except to disable the ad blockers for YouTube. Sadly I’m embedded in the Google world with a gmail account and I use their photos service. I can’t risk losing access to those.
No doubt they’ll roll this anti ad block technology out to their other sites in the future and the internet will suddenly be a bleak, hideous place.
If it wasn’t for all these articles, I wouldn’t even know that something changed. Firefox + uBlock works the way it used to.
And cloudflare controls the connectivity… luckily they’re not (yet) evil and are happy just to provide infrastructure.
Kyle_The_G@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Ya I’ll never stop using ad blockers, the internet is essentially unusable without them. Mine still work on youtube but if the day comes that they don’t I’ll just stop using it. We need some competition here, things have gotten increasingly anticonsumer and the companies have gotten too comfortable doing and charging whatever they want
ubermeisters@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Catch me rawdoggin’ the information highway? No thanks
naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
I prefer to call it the stormwater drain of the information superhighway
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Hahahaha, dammit this should be top comment
DarkenLM@kbin.social 1 year ago
The problem with any youtube competitor is that there is no way in hell they can cover the costs of the infrastructure required to host the same amount of videos youtube has and streaming them to the millions of users youtube serves daily.
rockSlayer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
How about a decentralized, federated service instead of hoping a major corporation tries to “save” us?
LPThinker@lemmy.world 1 year ago
One alternative that seems promising is Nebula. It only fills a small part of the role YouTube currently occupies, since it focuses on being a platform for high quality professional content creators to make unfiltered content for their audience, but it’s funding model seems to be much more honest, stable, and so far viable than an ad-supported platform or the other alternatives. I don’t think anything could realistically replace all facets of YouTube (and I think the internet might be healthier if it were a little bit less centrally-located). A self-sustaining, straight-forwardly funded platform like Nebule seems like the best path forward to me.
qarbone@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The problem with any competitor is providing enough value to content producers to get them to make the move.
knatschus@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Why not? Youtube was big before google bought it
registrert@lemmy.sambands.net 1 year ago
I’ve used adblockers for like 15 years and I genuinely get disgusted when watching YouTube without it. There’s no way I’ll go back. I even do sponsorblock to remove in-video ads.
The unfortunate thing is that I’m willing to pay a reasonable price for a lot of content creators, just not via Google/YouTube.
A dollar per channel? I follow 104 content creators om YouTube through RSS. And many more if we count all the other platforms. I can’t afford that.
It’s a difficult situation for viewers, creators and providers. I don’t have an answer, but a stop-gap solution I’d be happy to see is like 480p max for adblockers, pay for HD+. That’s reasonable based on how much ad-dodgers impact YouTube from what I’ve gathered.
OrangeCorvus@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I cannot watch a video from start to finish anymore. Thanks youtube. Almost every video is filled with bs fluff to reach the 8 minute mark. It annoys me greatly. Maybe also because I am in the industry and I learned in school to not use meaningless shit in my videos.
Ser_Salty@feddit.de 1 year ago
The thing that gets me is how little creators actually get per individual ad view. Now, collectively, with tens of thousands and millions of views, they get a good bag. But my watchtimes of that minute worth of ads per video? Literally nothing. A fraction of a cent so small it doesn’t exist. I could watch a creator semi-regularly for like 2 years and my contribution to their income by watching ads would be in the single digits. I give them two bucks over Patreon or something just once and that’s worth as much as me giving up hours upon hours of my life watching ads. Now, I can’t afford to give literally everyone I watch more than once a dollar or two. But I give some money here and there to a couple I watch a lot. To make up for my using an adblocker.
Honestly, I’d probably get YouTube Premium if it wasn’t fucking Google behind it.
aceshigh@lemmy.world 1 year ago
i also have always used adblockers, but once i had to put in effort circumventing YT ads earlier this year, i discovered sponsorblock and added it. kind of funny that had it not been for YT being an ass, i would have been fine with other kind of ads.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Now that’s a solution.
Detecting adblock: 480/576p
Watching with ads: 720p/1080p/1440p Watching with Premium: 4K and high bitrate 1080p (and maybe 1440p?)
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I guess if you don’t use ad blockers you somehow get used to it. It’s like someone whose job is 100% outdoors vs. someone who works indoors and then has to do a day working outside. The person who is used to cold, wind, rain, scorching sun, etc. stops noticing, even though it takes a toll on them too.
Every once in a while I end up using a browser without ad blockers enabled and it’s incredible to me that some people live like that. It really is almost unusable. Things jump around as ads load in. Ads / videos pop over the content you’re trying to use. The useful part of a page might be 60% ads: ads along the sides and breaking up the text. And then there’s the bottom area of the page which is an endless scroll of “related content” ads.
elbarto777@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s not a good analogy. It’s more like saying that whenever you go outdoors for a walk on the park or do groceries, you have to give up 15 minutes of your time to “donate” blood to the rich.
dunestorm@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There never will be a YouTube competitor, it requires continuous investment from a multibillion dollar company.
Kyle_The_G@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Nebula isn’t too bad, I like a lot of those informative creators and they collaorated and made a startup video hosting site, its essentially everything i want youtube to be. If more creators decided to do this it’s be great.
VelvetStorm@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Download newpipe and never use YouTube again.
derpgon@programming.dev 1 year ago
Can’t be used on desktop
Littleborat@feddit.de 1 year ago
Age restricted videos are a problem otherwise it’s great. I have it on an android TV box.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
For static ads there will eventually be visual adblockers which detect ads not from their source but because they look like ads. (The mandated paid advertisement notice helps).
There is the utility that journalists use to capture YouTube video. A version that captured video content and then filtered ads visually would be unblockable.
DrDickHandler@lemmy.world 1 year ago
AI will be good for that. For once it will benefit the people.