There are no better adblockers, uBlock Origin is all you need and is already updated to bypass it.
There’s also the option of biting the bullet and paying for YouTube Premium.
No. Never. I’d rather stop using YT at all than giving in to coerced user-tracking.
For desktop install and use “FreeTube”.
Alternatively for your android phone you can use “GrayJay”
Never. Pay. For. YouTube. Premium
NewPipe still works well for me on Android.
I assume you need to be rooted for Gray Jay?
No, it works fine for me. It’s just an apk.
At this point, I don’t even care about the user tracking. I just don’t want to sit through unskippable ads anymore. Especially when it’s the same ad over and over again.
Well then you’re in luck, you have a lot of options for removing ads before giving money to YouTube.
I love that all the centralized social media networks are scrambling to become shitty for profits right around the time users are realizing that they don’t need centralized servers to host their user-generated content. Users can take their content wherever they want and let these platforms die.
This 100%. Look at forums. Back in the early days, there were lots of little independent forums. Sites like Reddit took over because you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page. We gained convenience, but didn’t think too hard about what we were losing or who we were losing it to. Then along came enshittification and we are collectively realizing what we lost. Federation is of course the solution. As I see it, the only missing piece is monetization. Platforms like YouTube make it easy to monetize page views, Twitter / X is doing the same. That’s much harder in the fediverse.
you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page
RSS feeds have provided this experience for years. The problem is that a lot of sites stopped serving RSS feeds for their content. But sites like rss.app and openrss can be used to get RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them.
My understanding of RSS is that it’s basically a list of metadata and links for content… Its always seemed to me to be a great way to aggregate the content you want to see. He did specifically mention keeping an Identity across multiple forums and I’m not aware of any RSS implementation that provides that functionality though… are you? That’s a huge feature to miss if we’re talking about social link aggregators like Reddit and Lemmy.
One of the main advantages of RSS is that it doesn’t track you or require an account for it to work. As you said it’s only a XML or JSON file wth the latest items posted on the website.
RSS is great for content consumption. It’s a shame that many sites stopped serving it- same thing with podcasts, now everyone wants you to listen on this or that platform instead of just publishing a normal RSS feed full of MP3 files.
That said though, RSS doesn’t help for participation, it’s a one-way tech.
I guess if you have forums that put out RSS feeds you could aggregate them together for post titles, but that’s still clumsy. Lemmy does it much more elegantly.
Patreon for monification?
Ads suck. And honestly, if we had less content creators, they’d be fine. There are a lot of absolutely degenerates out there. Let’s cull the herd a bit and let us speak individually with our wallets.
That’s a fair point. Patreon, or whatever comes next, needs to drastically reduce friction. That by the way is why Amazon is so successful, reducing purchase friction. Right now if you have something that a million people will take for free, and you start to charge just one penny for it, your audience of a million will drop to like 12. Not because people don’t want to spend a penny, but because they don’t want to fill out a form and put in their name address credit card number expiration date security code phone number email address etc. If there was a button they could click that was like ‘instant donate 5 cents’ most people would click that a lot.
The closest thing I’ve heard to that was a crypto called basic attention token, which aimed to do just that. They are making a big mistake though in that they are only integrating with Brave browser rather than making a universal plug-in. So the idea of a universal solution is still a ways off I guess. But I think to make it zero friction it will have to be crypto based in some way.
It’s like we’re reverting to the days you would go to homestarrunner.com, illwillpress, etc to see content from people you actually wanted to see content from. Honestly looking forward to it
Ublock Origin works
Brave is ass
Youtube is a perfect example of why ad blockers exist. They use ridiculous ad volumes and spy on their users for data to sell.
ive had ads longer than the video i watch and then ads when that video ends
YouTube doesn’t sell user data, the data is for targeting ads.
YouTube doesn’t sell user data Yes, they do. Look up “data brokers”. That data is anonymized but reverting that process is easy, especially if you have stuff like location history in there. Here’s one of many examples of it happening and impacting people’s lives.
the linked article doesn’t describe getting data from Google, but getting data from grindr and other apps. Grindr is notorious for this kind of thing and makes it easy to locate users…in fact its the main feature of the app so its impossible to fix.
There are different levels of privacy. Many of the issues with Google are theoretical or philosophical, but location broadcasting apps like grindr are clear and present dangers to your privacy.
Many of the issues with Google are theoretical or philosophical
See that comment. Google sends user data to potential advertisers for them to determine the price they are willing to pay to show an ad to that user and which ad they show. So no, the data they collect on you gets out there.
Sure and Google is not a data broker. Look at how good uses your data they are transparent about it. And your link talks about apps selling data.
I looked more into it and Google doesn’t sell the data, that’s true, but they disclose it as a part of them selling ad spaces.
Google monetizes personal data in other ways, some of which involve disclosing personal data to third parties. One of those ways is real-time bidding system (RTB) that powers Google Adsense.
In a nutshell, a website makes advertising spaces available for advertisers through Google Adsense’s intermediation. Several advertisers bid for the same advertising spaces whenever a visitor loads a page in an automated real-time auction. This real-time bid involves disclosing personal data to advertisers to cater their ads better.
https://www.simpleanalytics.com/blog/does-google-sell-your-data
They should fucking do an experiment - 2€/$ a month for an ad-free subscription and 3€/$ a month for higher video quality subscription. I would fucking pour my money into it.
Oh wait, that would not solve lack of sponsorblock. I guess I am not interested then…
They literally had that experiment with Premium Light. €6 for ad free watching, it was all I needed. But they literally sent out a mail they were stopping this tier right before they started implementing more anti-ad blocking measures.
Not a penny to those bastards. Should YouTube and Google along with it rot to hell, I don’t care. Maybe we’d finally get better alternatives running at full capacity.
And who will pay for those?
People valuing the content and the platform.
For now our best chance for free platform is Odysee/Lbry - at least crypto bros can keep tue platform running for the sake of it. Or PeerTube, but less likepy since it’s more enthusiasm-driven, and enthusiasm only gets you so far.
Also, Nebula, CuriosityStream and other similar subscription services are good - and people pay for them.
I pay for Youtube, but I’m clearly in the minority. Look at all the pitchforks in this thread not willing to pay one cent or watch one ad but demanding the content…
There is a difference, though, and I know why those pitchforks are raised. YouTube is a video service behemoth, and it is owned by Google, a Big Tech company that has little respect for its users. It is one of the last things most Lemmy users (known on average for their hate of Big Tech, hence why we don’t have this discussion on Reddit) would want to support.
Many of them would, and some do, support alternatives. But there is just nothing to the scale of YouTube, which exacerbates the problem as users often have nowhere else to go. And so they will do their best to use YouTube in a way that gives 0 benefits to Google, and will only be happy to see this giant fall and replaced by something more user-centric, free from corporate control, and privacy-friendly.
I appreciate that, but I don’t think the vast majority support alternatives. It’s just “I want it free and I want it now”.
Also, if you don’t support Google you most probably don’t support the creators, very few of them have patreon or similar and just rely on ad revenue/sponsors.
I am not bothered by Google at all, at least in the EU you have pretty good control about the data they collect and I feel it’s used well. I get pretty good recommendations on YouTube and the ads I get on other sites are at least somewhat relevant.
I see the chances of a competitor replacing it and being more privacy-friendly close to none. Maybe TikTok will replace YouTube over as GenZ takes over, and I see that as a solid negative.
Nebula can only afford to do that because basically nobody who subs to nebula actually watches the videos on it. They did a video about their revenue model and people treat it as a way to support the creators, not to actually watch content
Nebula is pretty awesome and the type of content is great. I miss some light entertainment content though, so the network effect is at work. Still, nebula is the only streaming platform I’d consider subscribing as their policy is great and they do provide good value.
Meh I had nebula a couple years ago and it had some missing features and fairly poor depth of content. The same few bits constantly being pushed. I’m hopeful it improves but I wasn’t using it.
They’d absolutely 100% be losing money with a $2 ad free tier. Ads make significantly more than that per user per month. Same with your “”“solution”“” for higher res video. Bandwidth is goddamn expensive.
I agree, but they’d get a large number of users to subscribe.
And then maybe they wouldn’t complain when they raised the price to $3. And a few months later maybe $3.50. Then $5.
A few years ago, people wouldn’t have paid over $15 for a standard Netflix tier without 4K. But the way to boil a frog is to make them nice and comfy in lukewarm water, then keep increasing the temperature slowly… So even if they lose money, maybe a low price for the ad-free YouTube could make sense, from a business perspective.
Every time Netflix rises prices it makes it to the news (let alone all the drama on twitter/reddit/etc), I don’t know what frog boiling you’re talking about.
Yet they keep posting more and more profits. Subscriber count has only increased despite the content being lower quality and prices being higher. The fact that we don’t like them increasing the prices doesn’t mean it isn’t working for them.
I’m not arguing it will work forever, but for now, it’s been a viable strategy.
I completely agree the price is far too high.
I actually do subscribe but only because I get a deal through my mobile network that, long story short, cuts the price by two thirds.
I can’t understand their pricing policy at all. And they’re doing a terrible job at explaining their cost basis if it’s actually what it costs to serve video to us (highly doubt it).
…or you can install firefox on android with uBlock origin and many other extensions, and use mobile youtube website
Just this morning all the posts (here on Lemmy) were about how everyone was uninstalling their adblockers.
People should be uninstalling Chrome instead.
Adblocking still works fine on Firefox. Just update your UBO filters.
I literally have un-installed chrome. I had to use it on an office machine today and it felt weird.
proud of you
I’m so happy I can freely use Firefox at work. 😅
The default browser at my work is Firefox lol, only our testing team and a few others use Chrome. It’s a pretty welcome change 👍
I find it a little funny when we get Chrome-specific bug reports though
And that didn’t mention ublock origion, the blocker that still works…
It did at the very very bottom. I almost missed it.
That article was full of such blatantly misleading crap. Headline talks about record number of adblocker uninstalls, but the actual data says it was an uptick in both installs and uninstalls. In other words it was people cycling through different adblockers trying to find one that still worked.
I actually removed a lot of ad blockers from all my devices once I found that uBO could do it all. That could be what they are seeing from others as well, perhaps!
I dont even mind ads when its like one minute for 20 minutes of footage. Pluto TV is free to use and has commercial breaks but they never really bother me because they aren’t that annoying and i get a lot of MST3K before I watch them. Youtube ad are cancer in comparison.
Seriously, I wouldn’t even bother futzing with adblockers on my Android TV if it was reasonable, but fucking 45 seconds of ads for every 5 minutes of content is just ridiculous. I almost wonder if it was all an experiment to see how much they could get away with…
They probably expiremented an answer to that question and came to find it was: “not enough”. So now they become desperate to get out of the reds.
Same the normal ads aren’t much of an issue for me, especially since some are skippabke. But about a year or so ago, I was getting 30 minute ads. They were skippable, but if I was just playing the shows in the living room while making dinner in the kitchen or whatever, I had to constantly go hit the button on the remote or be stuck watching 30 minute infomercial for a product I’d never even consider buying. Are they still allowing these long ads?
I don’t know what the whole fuzz was / is about, it’s years now that I unwillingly watched ads, anywhere. So easy, piehole, newpipe, avoid any Microsoft shit, you just have to be ready to learn a bit, it’s not rocket science. Ok, rocket science helped, but that’s not the point…
Removed by mod
I have to learn??!! Fuck it where do I sign up for you’re pro or whatever
/$
Switched finally to ff. So I guess thank you google.
I went the route of accepting their 2-month trial of Premium, and immediately disabled it from continuing after the 2 months. Hopefully that’s enough time to come up with an acceptable solution that works the way I want it to. Honestly, if Premium was like $5/month, they’d get my money. But for almost triple that? Fuck no, never happening.
Triple for now. After a while they will quadruple it. People will be a paying 100$+ on subscription fees
Good, fuck those greedy bastards. yt-dlp + mpv with sponsorblock FTW, bonus for stopping using a YouTube account altogether and using RSS feeds for your subscriptions instead.
Bro… How to setup RSS feed for YouTube subscriptions…
Just replace CHANNEL_ID with the ID of the channel you want to get the RSS feed from (to my knowledge it’s only limited to the last 15 items) : https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID
Or using curl and sed : curl -s youtube_channel_url | sed -n ‘s/.*title=“RSS”\s+href=“([^”]+).*/\1/p’
Don’t watch it. I mean they have to make money. I block ads I don’t care and I’m not making up bs to justify it. I don’t cause I want to and I can.
I’m more than happy to support my favourite content creators by other means, be it simple donation or merch. I will never subject myself to stupid ads, no matter the reason.
Based, fuck YouTube
I agree sadly most of the content is there already
I had uBlock Origin installed since forever, are people just finding out about it?
More like most people don’t have the patience to learn the difference between uBlock and UBlock Origin. Also, a lot of people just install Ad Block because they you tell them to install a ad blocker, they just install the one called AdBlock.
Not really making fun of it, just genuinely curious. Are people still installing Adblock Plus? It has had an Acceptable Ads Committee for over a decade now. What were people using if not that?
Haha look at these people who doesn’t know everything in the world from birth!
Tell me you misunderstood the comic without telling me.
