wow just wow while i can’t say i didn’t see this one coming but it always amazes me where greed could lead someone
Google is an ad company. To them, a web browser is nothing more than a tool for collecting user data and delivering ads.
When you use a chromium based browser you are allowing google, an ad company, to decide what the future of web browsing should look like. And this is the result.
Firefox is the ONLY browser which is genuinely competing with google. Do you think ad and tracking blockers are going to get better or worse once they die out, and literally every major browser is running on chromium?
Use firefox and u-block origin. Enjoy a superior, ad free, browsing experience, and support the future of an open web.
It’s so encouraging to hear so many pro Firefox opinions lately. Then I remember I’m logged into the pirate instance of a federated platform and anti-corporate sentiment is probably as high as it gets.
Sadly most younger people haven’t even heard of Firefox.
Most young people are basically tech illiterate. Yeah they are fantastic with new apps and phones. But have zero idea how any of it works under the hood.
Ask them to transfer a file from a computer to a USB drive, most will not know how. They have no idea how a file system is structured or even that an app has to specifically made for different platforms… e.g. Facebook app on Apple is completely different from Facebook on Android and the two will contain different bugs and different settings.
We are almost back to default browser = internet
You’re absolutely right.
Yeah they are fantastic with new apps and phones.
I think that’s mostly because most commercial apps have fantastic ui and ux.
Most younger people have heard of it. Using what came with their computer is just easier to them though.
I agree, most of the younger people use browsers that are bundled with the operating system.
- Android = Chrome
- Windows = Edge
- Mac/iOS = Safari
most of the younger people
You mean most people. Specifically anyone who isn’t a power user
It’s my preferred mobile browser because you can install ublock origin and other privacy extensions which is pretty unique
Firefox on android is really slow. I tried using it, but now I use Vivaldi
Pros : really fast Cons : chromium based
Right? After years of feeling like the only pro-firefox person left on the planet, the pro Firefox sentiment lately is a breath of fresh air, to say the least.
Well, we are in the worst cyberpunk timeline so…
It’s my preferred mobile browser because you can install ublock origin and other privacy extensions which is pretty unique
Young people seem to proudly go along with the biggest name, which is really sad. They think there’s merit in that, conforming means acceptance.
Meanwhile, anytime I encounter a young non-conformist doing something very contrarian, it gives me some hope for the future. Because 99% of society is open-armedly embracing dystopia because the one thing they hate more than anything is the burden of independent thought and self-determinism. To intelligent freethinking individuals, seeing it play out is a waking nightmare.
Sadly, at the end of the day I prefer edge because it
has cloud voicesis slightly faster
Thank you for this.
I’d say to you all: get used to bombshells dropping! At some point the investor pyramid scheme will go crashing down. It might be now. All those companies were on borrowed time. Until investors realised that “data” isn’t valuable on its own - it’s what you make of it. There needs to be a product that generates revenue. Spoiler alert, it is hard to come up with a business plan that takes plain usage data and makes the technical challenges worthwhile to squeeze money from it. I can feel it myself as data scientist. The honeymoon’s over, investors want to see ROI.
I mean this cycle will probably recover in a few years when the markets recover but still - some lessons stick
I just don’t get how these providers (Specifically Reddit with the API lockdown and now the stranglehold on mods, Twitter’s new login requirement, and YouTube now cracking down on adblockers) are missing the point that their sites live and die by user generated content.
I understand these sites are hugely expensive to run, but if you keep alienating those who are bringing users to your site in the first place, people will stop submitting and people will stop visiting.
To everyone who is saying they use adblock and haven’t seen this yet: YouTube probably rolled this out to a smaller percentage of users first. It allows them to understand how this change impacts user behaviour, e.g. how many users comply and disable their adblocker, how many more users close YouTube than usual etc. Most tech companies do this type of analysis before releasing a high impact change to all users.
I do close youtbe much quicker than I used to. I can watch one video and rhan I’m done. The next video starts with a full minte of ads and I’m out. I know there’s stuff like ReVanced, but I keep wondering wether it’s all worth it.
ReVanced is definitely worth setting up. It only takes a couple of minutes and vastly improves the experience using YouTube. I also homebrewed my LG tv to download a hacked YouTube ad free app for that which includes sponsorblock.
I have a premium subscription, but it logs you out. And then I see ads until I log in again and reload the page. I pay these people. I should never ever see an ad. And it’s enough that I’ve noticed the ads are more obnoxious than they used to be. I’m about done with it.
You’ll hear this over and over again but that’s because it’s true: Revanced is absolutely worth it. Not difficult to set up and the experience is life changing once you see YouTube without ads
Odysee is a great, decentralised alternative if you are looking to jump ship.
If you do end up sticking with youtube, ReVanced is good. Smart Tube Next is good for TVs, and firefox + ublock origin on desktop.
For iOS users Vinegar is a nice add-on for Safari that strips out all the ads etc.
If you’re demanding I watch ads, it’s not “free”. you’re demanding my time and probably attention.
I really think we need to stop with this idea that “Something is free” because no money is exchanged. Some stuff ARE free, there are repos on git, where you can download software, there are websites that ask for nothing. However Gmail, Youtube, reddit, and the rest are not “Free” just because they aren’t directly asking for money.
Whats up with all these online companies just deciding to be assholes this year.
Firefox
The more ad-riddled they make the platform to try and monetise users, the more they make adblocks necessary to even be usable.
I didn’t use to both with adblockers. I didn’t like ads, but they didn’t affect me enough for me to go through any effort blocking them.
Now I use blockers everywhere, on every platform. Even for creators I like, because I know how little they actually make for ads - so how bout instead of watching 12 hours of ads so they can get 2c, I just send them a dollar or buy their merch every once in a while to not watch ads at all? Etc.
Ads could have had a place. There are ads that serve a purpose, that have minimal disruption but still give businesses a way to develop awareness for those who might want to use them.
Movie trailers (including when they stopped trailing movies and started leading them) are examples of ‘acceptable ads’ to me. When I purchase something from a store and they include a printed card from their sponsor. When sports teams have logos for being sponsored. A work van with the business logo parked while out on call. Etc.
But the internet’s online ads? Email spam? Telemarketing? These are forms of advertising that are actively hostile, and they’ve become the default. So now a user that wants to be on the internet at all is best served by block all ads, including the ones that would’ve otherwise been reasonable.
Google will never make me feel guilty for blocking ads when they’re already making their search engine unusable, too.
And while I’m at it, here’s the filters to add to your uBlock Origin’s MY FILTERS settings to block YT’s blocker:
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)
youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
Blockers to block blockers. insert Xzibit meme
Thanks BTW.
I’ll add this the next time I’m on my computer.
Same
Wait, surely that doesn’t work? It might block the "disable your adblocker popup but there’s no way this is all it takes for yt to continue serving videos?
It’s feasible that there are other variables that have been missed, but essentially this works. The server asks us a question, and we answer it. We just skip the bit where we provide evidence.
It’s like looking up the answers in the back of the textbook on a test. The only thing the server sees is the paper we’re handing in, it has no idea if we cheated or not.
Boring technical explanation:
For a server (in this case, YouTube) to see what a client (your computer) is doing, it has to reach out and ask it. When a request is made, the two points will ‘handshake’ to confirm that they heard the request, then when they’ve done it. It looks something like this:
- Client to server: are you prepared?
- Server to client. Yes, I am prepared. (503 if failure)
- Acknowledge. Client requests [data].
- Request received.
- (Server processes request.)
- Server to client. Are you prepared for response?
- Yes, I am prepared.
- Acknowledge. Response sent.
- Response received. Close connection.
- Connection closed.
These steps can be repeated any number of times in response to a single user mouseclick, depending on what you’re trying to do. A ‘request timeout’ error is what happens if client/server asks “are you prepared?” and it takes too long for the server/client to answer “yes, I am”, so you hang up the phone.
For the server to treat clients differently at all, it needs to contact them for feedback. For adblocking, it has to ask your client if you’re adblocking. Usually the server does this by sending the client a request to serve an ad - if your client never answers back to confirm it was loaded, then the server knows you blocked the ad. The devs can tell the server that if it doesn’t get a certain answer, to enable the punishment effects. (They’ll technically be sent anyway; they’re just hidden/disabled by default if your client handshakes the ad.)
What these scripts do is lie to the server. The server asks the client if we received the ad, we ignore the script that checks whether the ad is loaded and instead directly change the answer to claim it has. Since all the server sees is the confirmation, it doesn’t know the difference.
NewPipe for android is still working. Much better than the official app IMO, no ads and it actually shows the videos you subscribed to.
YouTube ReVanced has been fine for me too
NewPipe is FOSS and available in F-droid, which is a plus in my book.
Youtube Revanced has a habit of going into perpetual loading for me, so I’ve got both it and the normal YouTube app as backup
Have you tried enabling spoofing under revanced settings? That fixed it for me
I would if I could find it
Never heard of NewPipe, thanks for sharing
I haven’t had this happen using ublock origin, but if they do figure out how to block ublock origin, adnausiem (ublock origin fork) might work. It’s a fork of ublock origin that tricks the ad providers into thinking you clicked on every ad, which not only bypasses a lot of adblock detectors, it Actively costs them money by polluting their ad data with garbage.
If they really want to prevent us from watching videos without ads, they can. They know of the ad is watched or not, we can have some kind of auto-mute-during-ad but that’s it.
Question is if they will kill network effect with it.
I have already drastically reducedy yt watching because of too many sponsors… watching two minutes of sponsored material, plus two ads just to see that I don’t even wanna watch the stupid video is too much.
Not to mention those laud ads in the middle of relaxing and quiet video… few months ago one ad was starting with screaming, that’s when I said no way.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
it Actively costs them money by polluting their ad data with garbage.
Lmaoo, i’m going to install that
I get that servers, bandwidth, manpower, utilities and buildings aren’t free, and with more and more people using ad blocking, all that user data they have harvested isn’t worth much anymore. So I think we are going to see an increase in subscription based services, and man do I hate it.
Because You just know it’s going to increase and squeeze evey last dime from their users. Because it’s never enough to have their expenses covered and earn some money… They constantly need to earn more. Just look at Netflix, declining in contents, increasing restrictions and rising price.
The way that YouTube treats their users and content creators for that matter, I’ll never enter a subscription from there. Removing features, blocking people with no way of appealing and letting scammers and spammers run rampant on their platform. Yeah, no thanks.
I used to love using YouTube for music, it was great at suggesting new and exciting music. But then it was split into a separate service and they nuked the algorithm. Now I can discover music by popularity or moods, and as someone whos into EDM, hardstyle, rock, metal and heavy metal… that’s a piss poor way to find new music.
I’m finding this with my Spotify. The discover new music algo just feeds me the same 30 or so songs that I’ve listened to a million times it must be broken.
Don’t you have access to “Discover Weekly” anymore? My MO is: start curating some playlist based off a genre or theme, start radio from it, keep adding suggestions that fit and I like. Then have a huge playlist with my “I really liked and would play this anytime” and if I find I’m replaying a new song it goes there as well, then, based on your new searching and adding stuff, your next week’s discover might get a lot more interesting. Also shazam stuff on the go and add it to respective playlists, even maybe IFTTT to a Shazam playlist, and even (we need to find a fediverse alternative but I had IFTTT setup to add to a Reddit playlist picking from Music and ListenToThid top posts as well) . So, basically, you need to branch out first so spotify can continue to branch out for you.
IFTTT is insane. I did this a few years ago that I added new songs from my discover weekly list. I have several days of music I’ve not yet listened to by forgetting to go through my discover weekly every week.
If you’re on mobile clear your data cache. It seems to me like the app prioritizes a handful of cached songs it’s already downloaded, probably to save bandwidth, and doubly so when you’re in an area with poor signal.
Speaking of Spotify, I wonder how long it will be before they gut their desktop app for free users. It just feels too functional to be long for this world, especially given how unusable the app is if you don’t have premium.
YouTube is the only thing I don’t mind paying a subscription for. I consume an unreasonable amount of media on YouTube. They host something like 4.5 petabytes of new videos every day. For me, the value I get from there is easily worth the price of premium. I couldn’t say that for any other streaming service.
what’s the fediverse alternative to YouTube? seems like this is the way the 2020’s are going
As much as I’d like to see an alternative to YouTube on the fediverse, I can’t see myself using it much unless my favorite content creators move on over there too. And I can’t see them moving.
Oddysee is built on LBRY, which I believe is the closest thing. I think there’s something else called PeerTube, but I’m not sure what it is exactly (haven’t looked into it).
I might be too pedantic, but Odysee/LBRY is a blockchain-based decentralized network. But its not federated and it doesn’t use activitypub like Lemmy and mastodon. I would only call Peertube to be part of the fediverse.
Not too pedantic at all; those are indeed two distinct ways of creating similar applications. In my opinion, federated alternatives are more appealing than those based on blockchain technologies. Federated networks are proving to provide a more palatable experience through hybrid decentralized centralization.
Federated networks are also able to leverage community goodwill to provide a free experience. Blockchains are just a tool to extract money from users in the name of immutability.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but is value inherently necessary to perpetuate PoW or verification steps in a Blockchain? In other words, do you need to create value for it to work? I didn’t think that was a necessary first step, but I suppose it could be if it’s all driven by miners or some other random PoW mechanism with a monetary incentive.
Nano is a good example of a no-value-generating blockchain. And it works
It’s not inherent (for example private blockchains exist and are being used, but private blockchains may as well be a centralized system anyway), but it is a soft requirement. You may create a Blockchain without mining rewards, but then there is no incentive to do work and you are much more vulnerable to 51% attacks. You could argue that federated servers already perform work out of the goodness of their hearts, but in the case of federated networks the work being done is much less than PoW blockchains, because only the first node to validate a block does useful work, all the other mining done is worthless. That in turn means that you are hammerring your server (if you aren’t, see above comment about 51% attacks) for effectively 0 reward. If you add the fact that blockchains as they exist must always be dealing in some sort of “value” exchange, and it means blockchains always are just money exchange schemes. Their volatility also turns them from stores of money to speculation a instruments and then it’s even harder to build community on it (I suggest the second part of the Line Goes Up documentary on yt for the community aspect of blockchains).
I’m pretty sure peertube is just a selfhosted version of YouTube that caches YT videos locally. Not an actual separate platform to upload videos to. I could be mistaken.
Partially correct. You can self host peertube instances. What differentiates it from YouTube is:
- Instances can share their video lists with other instances via ActivityPub. Even to Mastodon and Lemmy.
- PeerTube video player is peer to peer. You can download the video from the server directly or from another peer watching the same video. This may be helpful for livestreams.
Definitely did not realize this, that is really cool! Thanks for sharing.
Also its a separate okatform. Could be used to cache YT videos but that’s not its primary purpose.
Its a separate platform. It could be used to cache YT videos but that’s not its primary purpose.
I’ve been tracking the Fediverse loosely since stumbling into StatusNet and OStatus in 2011. To see the fediverse alive and well after being away for so long makes me very happy, though I don’t share the same political opinions as many of the people here.
That said, I’d argue there needs to be a way to spin up PeerTube and educate the masses on how to do that instead of starting a YouTube channel.
No way I’ll use YouTube with ads. The amount of your lifetime they waste is what I’d consider disrespectful to their users. Even if the ads were bearable, I wouldn’t turn off my ad blocker on any Google site for tracking alone.
I also don’t see myself subscribing to YouTube Premium, firstly because it’s too expensive (stop including your music streaming service and make it cheaper maybe?), but also because YouTube is just a platform with a lot of not curated content that YouTube had no part in creating.
Let’s see how the cat and mouse games between YouTube and ad blockers and alternative frontends go. If it’s too much of a hassle, I’ll just stop using YouTube. I don’t miss Twitter, I don’t miss Reddit, and I won’t miss YouTube.
Eh, I wound up with a YouTube premium subscription years ago when I subscribed to Google play music, way back when it was YouTube Red. I cannot imagine going without at this point. It became YouTube music at some point, and… Yeah.
More people should try out Tubesync. It’s a tool you can host yourself that essentially uses yt-dl as a backend and lets you subscribe to channels, and it’ll download videos as they come out. Gets you away from the ads and you can archive content you like forever.
I wonder if they’ll ever make that impossible. I used to go on a couple of 6 hour drives twice a week for a long time. A lot of the drive didn’t have cell service, as it was thru a bunch of mountains. I ended up making a python script that downloaded podcast episodes to listen to, and to force my brother to watch Your Mom’s House, when he was with me on the drive.
It was surprisingly simple to do this.
deleted by creator
I’m glad that their are contemporary historians and archivists perusing YouTube so my great-great-great-great grandchildren can watch a video game review in which a grown man gets shit on by Bugs Bunny.
deleted by creator
Oh shit, that description sounds weirdly familiar, but I can’t remember who it was.
Angry Videogame Nerd.
Imagine if widevine are required to watch any video, that would be disaster.
Similar to that you’ve got tubearchivist, because it’s good to have options
That’s pretty cool, thanks
I get why you like it. But in order to use this as intended with my browsing habits, it looks like I’d need to invest in some hefty storage systems and I’m not doing that
I remember when someone was laughing at me when i downloaded some niche videos that i liked to rewatch from yt because that someone thought that it will be there available and forever. Remember that they wanted to paywall 4K vids at some point.
You’ll pry my downloaded Wee Sing YTPs out of my COLD DEAD PIRATE HANDS
