And still, I’m more likely to stop using YouTube than to stop using an ad blocker.
That’s what they want. Get all the users they aren’t able to monetize off the platform to lower their costs.
I mean, I like a good Google hate train as much as the next guy, but that’s kind of a legitimate thing to want.
Follow the damn train, CJ!
Ooooooh my dawg
It’s YouTube’s fault for setting the wrong expectations when they benefited from wild growth and success by being free all these years. I dare they go 100% paywalled. I know they won’t. Otherwise they can’t double dip on both premium and advertiser money. Even if they manage to go 100% paywall, it’s inevitable that they will start introducing adverts to paying customers as well.
They used the “You” as in the people, during their growth years to build their platform. Now they are going against the people since they no longer need us.
Good news: you can have the best of both by watching everything for free through piped video!
Watching YouTube load slowly is better than watching ads.
Exactly! I started surfin’ da information highway in the 90’s. I remember watching an image unveil itself slowly as a morning sunrise.
I really wish government would just come in already and shatter google into a million pieces with the anti-monopoly hammer already.
Google is far worse than AT&T ever was when it was shattered into the baby bells.
Just gotta learn from AT&T to not let them re-congeal back together like somekind of fucked up liquid metal terminator 20+ years down the line.
50% of congress wants to know how the computer mouse stays alive without food.
They pretend to be ignorant but they’re really looking the other way because they’re lobbied for meager sums like $10,000
Our best and brightest?
“We’ll make our service worse, that’ll show them!”
Ok google, good luck with that.
At this point I’m convinced they’re trying to drive people away to shrink the overhead on bandwidth and servers, but it doesn’t work like that. Not after you got them hooked on videos of cats after years of a steady drip of memes.
I wish we can fast forward to the part where Youtube completely destroys itself and a new platform takes its place so we can enjoy it for 10 years before the enshittification cycle restarts again.
The problem is that only conglomerates can eat the cost of running such a platform. Ads will be the end of free interne, that’s for sure.
I’m not so sure – YouTube is much larger than you might think. It’s not the video platform you grew up with anymore. No one in this world can match the backlog and content density/diversity of YouTube, not even all streaming services combined. People complaining that YouTube is dying because a few YouTubers “retire” from their main gig or that it’s not the same anymore don’t understand how YouTube works. They might not comprehend that the time of their “bubble” has come to an end. When this happens, there are already five new bubbles/niches that are even bigger, and you might not have heard of them, but they are more successful than their “predecessor.” The old bubble is still there to consume in the backlog. Someday in the future, AI will have a field day with the data accumulated via YouTube.
It is transforming, for sure, but I don’t think it will destroy itself completely. In a sense, you can say it will destroy whatever view you had of YouTube as a platform because it is not what it once was.
To my knowledge, YouTube will hit the billion-user milestone this year (Netflix currently at ~250 million paid users). If we look at other data trends from streaming services, it suggests that YouTube will grow more over the coming years. I don’t know how anyone can match YouTube as a whole. In certain niches, sure, but as a whole, it would be like fighting windmills. There’s a reason no one tries to tackle YouTube as a platform and only goes for certain niches.
And if it would be federated, there would be no cycle.
I will download videos then. I refuse to not use an adblocker on the modern internet.
Pirate everything, it’s the only way to show greedy corporations the content should be free.
My worry with all this is that they might say fuck it and put DRM for all YouTube videos which would block attempts to download the videos. Not make it impossible as seen with streaming services but not as trivial as now…
The day they go 100% paywalled, is the day their dominance ends. They will never do this because, contrary to the corporate dickriders in this thread they rely on bait and switch tactics to draw the crowd in the first place.
I didn’t say anything about paywalled.
Google’s plan is to DRM the web
That’s why Invidious exists.
Oh no (continues to watch on freetube) anyway…
Alternative front ends are a god send.
Revanced Extended ftw!
What is freetube? (Sorry for the stupid question)
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One of the few uYou+ users on iOS.
YouTube speed has been shit ever since they stopped actually buffering.
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Time and time again we can only conclude: Piracy is justified!
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only corporate apologists.
Anything better than listening 3 songs and getting 5 ads.
Stop being trash youtube. Be normal like you once were and i would actually consider a paid subscription IF i get to fully exclude shorts on my side of the platform.
Not at all a solution, but worth mentioning that in a YouTube URL you can replace /shorts/ with /v/ and get the normal player for the same video.
I just want the short form content out of my life, but your tip might help others who dislike the player and not the video’s.
Nationalize YouTube.
Specifically, nationalize the backend, Google can keep their website. And place it in the hands of something like the UN, rather than any specific country. I hardly trust Uncle Sam any more than Google’s investors. They’ve successfully monopolized video hosting, now turn it into a public resource.
And open it up to the world, too. Google might get to keep their website, but everyone else can access the same database, too. May the best front end win.
Curiously, that would mean a peer-tube network of server instances for which YouTube becomes a frontend.
I am for sure one of the smaller number of people doing this, but I watch YouTube on my TV using the TV app. As a result I always had to watch ads. I wish I could avoid them. I suppose a could watch from an alternative and then AirPlay it to my TV, but that’s about it.
If you had an android device you’d be allowed to install an alternative YouTube app.
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Just install smart tube
Good things come to those who wait (and block ads)
Also I’d rather wait without ads than wait with ads, like what’s the point?
If you wait in front of an empty screen it’s much more pleasant than being in front of visual and audio spam drilling into your head.
It’s of course true that YouTube can’t support a website for free, so it would be the correct thing to watch some ads: problems arising are that (A) some ads are malicious (either as misinformation or as viruses or as links to those), (B) they’ve grown from a reasonable amount to an unreasonable one and often interrupted at the worst possible time)
Been using revanced, sometimes using Iceraven (ff fork) w/ ublock origin on phone, and using librewolf (another ff fork) also w/ ublock origin on desktop. So far never encountered slow down since November 2023.
Is this slow down only on select extension issue? Although when it first happend (late 2023) I was thrown up by sudden yt not loading on my librewolf but it only happend only on single day, afterward it gone.
