Explanation: they weren’t using an (functional) ad blocker for some reason.
Youtube is like that bully that asks for your lunch money and when you say no, they slam you into a locker.
When you say no again, they start hitting you until you finally give that lunch money.
Once you do, they will show you the others are being abused harder when they demand more money from you.
I would love to contribute to the end of youtube.
To me, the value of youtube and it’s music is far below the €18 it costs to get me and my wife ad free. My internet costs roughly that and offers a lot of possibilites, so why should i pay double for a service that supplies about 1 millionth of what the internet itself has to offer, especially considering my wage has barely changed while i watch my rent and groceries triple in cost.
Y’all need to realize there is an end to my money, you can’t keep taking.
Youtube is like that bully
Except no one is forcing you to face that bully.
You can simply stay away.It’s either this or cable, cable sucks.
So i’d rather adblock the hell out of them.
Then you’re choosing to use their service without paying, and don’t get to complain.
Yeah, I don’t have much sympathy for this dork. You don’t need to watch YouTube.
Most people are lazy and not willing to make their life less comfortable. If they were, a lot of problems in big tech would not even exist. That’s why people still buy apple, use WhatsApp and microsoft instead of the free alternatives - because its less comfortable.
They want change, but are unwilling to be a factor in causing that change.
Look, I don’t disagree with you. YouTube has many flaws and they’ve rapidly enshittified to increase monetization. But YouTube is a far more complex* operation than your ISP. It took a decade to start making a profit on YouTube.
The amount of hardware behind it is insane. The amount of work behind it is insane. A lot of that work is performed by really expensive software engineers in the US and Europe.
It was never sustainable from the get-go. Not with a single pre-watch ad and no premium tier, anyway. They HAD to add more ads and a premium ad-free tier. Where I disagree with them is the amount of ads and the cost of the premium tier.
*The big cloud providers (including Google) have grown so big, they don’t use ISPs in the traditional sense to connect their data centers. They run their own subsea cables between continents to improve connectivity. Whether or not you like the companies, they put a LOT of work into keeping you on their platforms. Of course this is for Google Cloud customers, but YouTube basically IS a Google Cloud customer. Just an in-house one.
I’m laughing at
theirYouTube’s response. Obviously someone used a thesaurus to write it and didn’t know that “incalcitrant” is not even the word, no major dictionaries list it. It’s like using irregardless instead of regardless The wordtheyYouTube wanted is recalcitrant.And it’s very telling that
theyYouTube used that word because it shows they think they are King.Recalicitrant:
Stubbornly resistant to authority or control.
Unwilling to obey orders or to do what should be done.
Resisting authority or control; not obedient or compliant.
Edit: I’m laughing at YouTube’s response. I thought that was clear by context… I guess people who didn’t read the article didn’t get that? Maybe it was paywalled to them?
Words matter, and by using the one they did, YouTube is basically saying that they demand people obey them.
STFU
I’m laughing at YouTube’s response. I thought that was clear by context… I guess people who didn’t read the article didn’t get that? Maybe it was paywalled to them?
Or why are you telling me to STFU?
Is Elongpork on the board of directors or something?
They’re an idiot. You taught me a new word! Keep it up.
Thanks :)
Length of post + laughing at vocabulary =/= laughing at article
Plus incalcitrant has plenty of current usage.
No problem with ads with https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ Or youtube revanced :)
I haven’t read the article, but surely this is an accident? I have almost no faith left in our capitalistic society, but surely even Youtube understands that nobody is going to watch an hour long ad, right?
A lot of people leave YouTube running in the background, so they might listen to it.
The most mysterious one to me happened in 2015 or so. I was watching Zero Punctuation, and it served me an hour long computer networking lecture as an ad. Like, some Indian guy delivering a power point presentation. I was like, what’s the monetization strategy here, guys? Did this dude pay you to serve his lectures as ads? What?
At one point there was a period of time where YouTube was consistently serving me ads in Arabic, a language that I don’t speak and from a country I have never been to.
Their algorithm just breaks sometimes.
Edit: not sure why that was in capitals.
“THEY ARE ALGORITHM JUST BREAKS SOMETIME”
is what you just said
There was awhile there where my parents were getting ads for Pull-Ups Toddler diapers in Spanish.
I know there was that story about Google knowing about some guy’s daughter being pregnant before she’d actually told him.
So maybe I’m just really Arabic and haven’t noticed yet.
That wasn’t Google, it was Target. Based on the teen’s buying habits, that she suddenly started buying certain vitamins, unscented lotion, that sort of stuff with her loyalty card, their system put two and two together and sent her coupons for maternity and baby products, which is how her father learned he was gonna be a grandpa.
Google has similar power to know more about you than your friends and family, though.
The YouTube owner explains that normal non-skippable in-stream ads are limited to just 15 seconds in length.
This is bullshit. I don’t use an ad-blocker and often get a full minute of ad. And an extra minute if I happen to pause the stream for like 30 seconds and come back to it.
I consider the internet unusable without an ad blocker, ESPECIALLY youtube. I can’t imagine life without it. It would be like camping without a tent, I guess I could get by but it can really suck depending on where you go.
Hey! Whoa! That’s not fair at all!
You can TOTALLY go camping without a tent. Just as long as you don’t camp in a mosquitto heavy area.
Just sleep outside.
Then you get wet from dew, investigated by various night creatures, etc. Mosquitoes aren’t active at night, so that’s not a concern at all.
Last time I slept outside without a tent I got fucked by a bear.
Now you know to bring lube and some candles.
Watch Youtube on the Brave Browser and you’ll get zero ads.
Not using a real ad blocker (read: PiHole or UBlockOrigin, fuck AdBlockPlus) is a serious security threat this day in age. Do yourself a favor and get that set up ASAP.
This is bullshit. I don’t use an ad-blocker.
You’re right. It IS bullshit that you don’t use an adblocker. It’s kind of like saying “This is bullshit! I don’t use oven mitts as I take hot metal trays out of the oven! Why am I the only one getting burned???”
You’re misunderstanding. They are calling out the claim of 15 seconds explicitly, they aren’t necessarily complaining about the ads.
Don’t hand wave their statement by arguing against something they aren’t talking about.
Using the internet without an ad blocker is like fucking every sex worker in Vegas without a condom.
Practice safe internet.
This message has not been sponsored by Firefox or uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger or Decentral Eyes, but if they want to throw some money my way I would accept.
It’s decentral eyes still relevant? I was reading that it use was now discouraged.
Nah, I’ve heard they stopped development. People use LocalCDN as a drop in replacement. However, by itself, it doesn’t change much when it comes to ads and tracking.
You’re pretty much asking for it by not using an ad blocker. Want it to stop? Boycott the ads.
Same. I get the whole range. Usually it’s short but occasionally it’s an hour long.
You’ve been here for two years and haven’t installed a blocker yet? That’s almost impressive
I been on the internet since the 90s. I want to know what people are seeing. A commercial here or there keeps me in the loop about what is being pushed.
1 hour unskippable ads tells me a lot about what is going on, unfortunately.
I see where you’re coming from but meanwhile I’m here using crowd sourced addons to even skip embedded video sponsorships.
Why do you need to be in the loop on ads?
I want to know what’s going on in the world.And that includes knowing what advertisers are pushing down our throats.Political ADS ads for products, things like that.How they’re going about it.
I care too much and it’s beginning a problem in my personal life
Just do that once in a while. You don’t need to subject yourself to ads every time you watch YouTube. I would say, once a week do a watch session without an ad blocker if you want to be in the loop.
There is already too much going on in the world and things trying to claim your attention. There are things we can’t control. Save your energy for that. Turn off web ads, use the uBlock Origin extension in your web browser. Try it for a week as a digital detox. If you really miss the ads you can always go back.
I don’t have a solution, but definitely find a way to care less. We only have so much time on this rock, so we might as well enjoy it.
I wonder how they managed that, I’ve been here about a year and a half and I use Linux now, lol.
I also gave it another try after many years lol
What?! You are forced to watch an ad if you pause it for too long?!
Jfc i hate this gods damned timeline
This is bullshit. I don’t use an ad-blocker
You should be kinder to yourself.
I don’t use ad blockers … I’ve gone back to my old cable TV habits from the 90s … use the mute button and take a toilet break, get a drink from the kitchen, check your social media feed, knit a sweater, talk to your spouse … then unmute and keep watching.
The bonus is that if you happen to miss the restart, you can rewind back to what you missed … we never had that in the 90s. Sure PVR existed but not everyone had one.
When using youtube, that’s a break every 5 minutes. More frequent if the videos are shorter.
I also find that I’m using Youtube less and less and just watch full professionally made programs, documentaries or shows. I’m getting to the point of wondering why I watch a bunch of mindless junk while being interrupted by even more mindless junk advertising for hours on end.
It’s weird because I feel like I’m taking back my time to watch all the shows and stuff I wanted to watch in the 90s over cable TV but never had access. If I cut all the stupid time I use to watch junk on Youtube, now I have time to watch all that stuff I wanted to watch a long time ago.
This is what finally pushed me to get an ad blocker for YT. Just pure greed.
Maybe he has frequent toilet needs… 🕳
While the company stops short of directly saying as much, it sure feels like the preposterously long ads we’re seeing here are an example of one tool in Google’s arsenal for effectively disabling YouTube playback for violators of the site’s ToS.
I don’t get it. When my adblocker works, I don’t get to see this shit. Only if it fails I’llbe confronted with hour-long ads, so the incentive to find a better blocker is even higher?
They are trying hard to block all known adblockers. And if they ever do, this will become a serious problem.
Arms races are rarely won by anyone.
They are won by arms dealers.
That’s an excellent Maxim.
True.
In this case though the arms dealers make the arms for free so I’m kind of okay with it
There are arms dealers on both sides. Anti-adblockers also require development, and I doubt anyone does that for free.
And all of it could have been avoided if google just audited/policed the ads it served. No sane person minds watching a 5-10 second add every 10-20 minutes to support the platform.
But rather than spend money expanding their ad department to audit and police the adds, they are spending gobs and gobs of money trying to force people to see view virus-delivering ads, racist ads, blatant misinformation, etc.
No one wants to be forced to spend 30 minutes watching a pragerU video on how the black man should be grateful for slavery and all the “good” its brought him
But that seems to be the world that google wants.
Remember when Google aquired YouTube and stated they didn’t intend to change anything? Remember when the only ads were those little banners you had to close? We’ve come such a long ways from where we started and what is considered “sane” these days would have been an affront back then. Google truly did slow boil the frog.
If they limited the ad time in videos, ad time would be worth more.
No sane person minds watching a 5-10 second add every 10-20 minutes to support the platform.
Fuck that. Ads are cancer. Willing consuming cancer is insanity.
This is a war that was fought by broadcast TV and the makers of videotapes, DVDs, and blu-rays. In every case the Corpos failed. So no, this arms race is and will be won by the ad blockers.
Except all of those formats are now obsolete, no major company is even making Blu-Ray players anymore, and people have moved on to others. So did they fail or did they just find a different method? I’d say the latter. How many people do you know with a working VCR at this point?
no major company is even making Blu-Ray players anymore
Uh, yes they are. What are you smoking? They even still make DVD’s and straight DVD players. They even still make VCR’s.
Pardon me, you’re correct. Sony and Panasonic are the last two holdouts.
Also, those are not VCRs still being manufactured, that’s selling off stock.
It won’t, I’ll just go do something else with my free time…
So they effectively blocked the video then?
No, they just set the bar for watching it too high for my liking.
Ads on YouTube? I don’t know what ur talking about. If people are getting ads then as far as I’m concerned that’s a skill issue.
Ads in the modern world are an idiot tax. And those of us who don’t pay that tax need the idiots to keep paying our tab.
it’s a tax on all of us whether you personally see them or not. those ads control the idiots.
There’s a chance ad blockers are eating up the ‘Skip’ button while also failing to block the ad.
A CHANCE?
Only trash adblockers like Adblock Plus and Adguard have that “chance”. uBlock Origin the goat fr frf
I don’t think Adguard is trash. It’s just not as good as UBO.
uBlock Origin works wonders. I haven’t seen a YouTube ad since I installed it.
While the company stops short of directly saying as much, it sure feels like the preposterously long ads we’re seeing here are an example of one tool in Google’s arsenal for effectively disabling YouTube playback for violators of the site’s ToS.
That makes no sense at all. It isn’t like skipping ads results in a black screen for the length of the ad.
People with adblockers aren’t going to see hour long ads or black screens when they don’t see ads in the first place.
It’s hilarious that they think it would matter to anyone with an ad blocker. I haven’t seen an ad for years on youtube. Hell I haven’t even seen promotions in videos for a few months now that I found a sponsor segment blocker.
Both are available on pc and mobile. Love it.
What do you use?
On PC Firefox with the Sponsorblock extension
On Mobile (Android) NewPipe with the Sponsorblock Fork.
Awesome, thanks!
For Android tv there’s also Smart tube next
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All that does is make YouTube money while costing money to the advertisers.
How long do you think those advertisers will stay when it turns out they’ve paid $1M in advertising with no change in sales?
The advertising team will just blame it on something else. They have the numbers showing their ads are being watched, everything else is conjecture.
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I hear what you are saying but the truth is that they will stay, just so they aren’t missing, regardless of ROI. Case in point is Xitter. The numbers clearly state that the level of engagement and sales conversion from Xitter ads is pitiful, especially when compared to Bluesky, yet advertisers still hang in there…just in case.
That’s because at a certain point ads become less about direct sales, and more about brand recognition. This is why Coke has a massive advertising budget. You know what Coke is. You’re either going to buy a Coke or you’re not. But by advertising as heavily as they do, they’re reminding you that they exist.
That’s why their heaviest advertising season is Christmas. Some of the advertisements don’t even show their product. Some do, but some just show Santa flying his sleigh with cheery christmas music. Then their Coke logo gets spelled out in the stars as he passes by.
It’s just so you assosiate their brand with good emotions. But it requires an almost constant barrage of ads, and it’s direct sales are impossible to measure.
I think Google doesn’t care about that at all.
They most likely pay peanuts compared to you for “bandwidth” (which for them is more of an electricity cost and trough-output allocation than a specific numeric value like consumers and smaller companies have). You also cache the video on your own device making the multiple tab thing useless if you don’t know what you’re doing. And Google can also just block you when they attack their servers, move traffic around, and so much more advanced stuff that protects their infrastructure.
tl;dr: Trying to boycott Google by trying to waste their resources is useless.
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200gig was surpassed what, 8 years ago? They have super active load balancing based on your region. You could purchase a Fiber gigabit line and only watch videos 24/7/365 and nobody at YouTube would ever notice.
As I said it’s 100 times more advanced than that.
They can switch IPs, datacenters, regions, whatever they want. They even have access to BGP routing.
They also use some custom switches according to Wikipedia:
The private side of the network is a secret, but a recent disclosure from Google[90] indicate that they use custom built high-radix switch-routers (with a capacity of 128 × 10 Gigabit Ethernet port) for the wide area network. Running no less than two routers per datacenter (for redundancy) we can conclude that the Google network scales in the terabit per second range (with two fully loaded routers the bi-sectional bandwidth amount to 1,280 Gbit/s).
One solution to that problem is to close YouTube on your device and do something else with your time.
Sharing another app suggestion(s) for Android: Tubular [0] or the more up-to-date LastPipeBender [1].
Both apps differ from NewPipe and its variants by integrating with PeerTube along with YouTube, apart from providing features like SponsorBlock and ReturnYouTubeDislike.
I have started using PeerTube much more often as my subscriptions from YouTube and PeerTube are now shown together, which makes for a seamless and superior experience altogether.
[0] https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular [1] https://github.com/MaintainTeam/LastPipeBender
I either watch YouTube without ads or don’t watch at all. We need a new platform for videos.
Peertube looks good… but has nearly no content or content creators, which is the reason Google nearly has monopoly with Youtube
Not a fediverse thing, but I pay $5 a month for nebula. I think it’s worth it to support creators. And I believe the whole “if you’re not paying for something you’re the product”. Though you can still be the product even if you do pay.
Is there any competitor like Nebula that’s not solely focused on informational/longform videos? I come from the age when hobbyists made silly memetic animations and shared them around, not even necessarily for profit. I’m sure many of those people consider YouTube to be some level of evil and would enjoy an alternative that’s actually organic.
I ended up getting a lifetime subscription, and it’s definitely worth it, but it’s not a replacement for YT entirely.
Dropout.tv has good comedy videos which is largely lacking from Nebula, but I find it buffers more often for me, which makes it uniquely bad among all the streaming services I’ve used.
But, I watch plenty of fan compilations / animatics for stuff on YT from my recommendations, and I haven’t found them anywhere else either because they don’t exist or because they don’t get recommended to me. It seems difficult for that kind of stuff to exist without free, easy uploads AND free, easy viewing.
Finally there are some people that primarily do Twitch that I subscribe to on YT. I’ve tried watching them on Twitch, and I prefer the content after their YT editor has worked their magic.
Dropout.tv was created by college human right? Idk if their old videos would hold up today, but I remember liking their content. Nice to know they’re still around.
Yeah, they even finally rebranded the YT channel last year so it is now Dropout instead of CollegeHumor. They are doing some interesting stuff currently (Gamechanger is almost always good), and all their old sketches and programs are there too.
I’m sold! I’m going to subscribe for a month and try it out.
Is nebula good?
I’m also a Nebula subscriber for the same reason stated above. A lot of my favorite creators are on Nebula and either post their videos a week or two early on Nebula, or post extended versions of their videos on Nebula.
There’s no ads or sponsorship segments, so it makes for a pleasant experience. Admittedly, the Nebula “originals” which are exclusive to Nebula, is a fairly small catalogue. But what is there is high quality.
The Nebula subscription is worth it for me to support creators and have a better viewing experience… And to see each Jetlag episode a week early.
Tbh I dont use it enough, but I love that’s it no ads like you said. Also feels good to support creators instead of Google. I’ll check out the originals!
There’s definitely good material on it. Was a big fan of “Dracula’s Ex-Girlfriend” short film, for instance.
But its also got your garden variety YouTube crap.
They have a $30/ year annual subscription (I’m not certain if that’s a purely introductory rate or not). Most of the content is non-exclusive but it’s ad-free and many creators remove the sponsor segments or even include exclusive content on their Nebula version. It seems pretty worthwhile to me
I might try it for a month, thanks for the info _
It’s alright. Most of my favorites aren’t on there, but there’s some decent content there.
The problem is hosting (storage, network) is expensive.
IIRC some platforms (feddit.org, catbox.moe) pays $1000 per month, and that’s mostly just static images.
Videos is much more than that. Who pays for that?
I have a hunch Linus at LTT could float his own storage for whatever stuff he wants to host. The same way you and me have to pay for our own online storage.
Hosting is only half the equation you have to be able to serve it people all around the world at once with no buffering. People have no clue how amazing YouTube is for a free service. Bandwidth costs a fuckload of money too to add to the hosting cost.
PopcornTime might be a good model for a decentralized YouTube system. You could pick a movie and then it would find a torrent and start downloading it.
Yeah, that would mean everybody pays for hosting videos themselves. The question is: is that a viable strategy / are users willing to put up with that.
are users willing to put up with that.
No. People are used to stuff being free.
Tell you the truth, once upon a time I really didn’t mind the ads. In fact I was quite happy to support the creators that I like with watching the ads that appeared on their videos. But then YouTube started getting smarmy by blocking my suggestions because I didn’t use history on my account. And then there’s the problem of the ads getting longer. At which point I got fed up and downloaded the adblock software to stop seeing this garbage. And then this little war broke out over ads on the platform.
Quite frankly, so long as the people who make the software to block ads continue to do that kind of work I will continue to download their software and make Google spend boatloads of their own money to try to block the blockers. Because the blockers aren’t going anywhere. Not to mention that the blockers were not quite as popular before Google started this little campaign. And now they have made people so hyper aware of the fact that they can actually go out and find some way to skip these stupid ads that they’ve basically dug their own grave. Broadcast TV spent decades on this failed quest.
Exactly right. Two 15 second ads in between shows two midstream 15 to 30 second ads, I was perfectly fine with watching those ads.
When they started letting content creators pick the number of ads, and they started letting more than 30 seconds of ads per break, now I have incentive to block them.
Capitalism dictates that they need to make 20% more every year. They cannot continue to get 20% more ad revenue every year without increasing ads substantially.
When a handful of companies owns everything and they can no longer buy new companies up to make more money, They can’t make their numbers. All they can do is gut us for the last 20% and then go out of business.
Yeah, me too.
I liked watching ads 12 years ago, they were a funny interjection/change.
Nowadays the ads are so extremely obnoxious, it feels as if they’re poisoning my mind. No way i’m even gonna watch them for a second.
I was the exact same way. I could justify watching ads to support the people I watched, but then I learned how little compensation a creator actually gets from one view and decided my time was more valuable. Plus I just got too used to never seeing ads and could never go back.
This video sums up the sentiment you’re describing nicely.
just make it a subscription service already and see how many people remain…
You do know you can subscribe already, right?
what I mean is a model where a subscription is required to watch anything. Even that is more graceful than the hacky 1 hour long youtube video solution to their problems.
They have and most users are still around because the alternatives are far too light on content. The creators drive the show, not the users.
They did. The subscription service still shows ads.
Do you mean the promoted content done by the youtubers themselves? Because there are no YouTube ads when you use Premum.
And Premium recently came out with a feature that makes it really easy to skip the promotional content.
This is not true.
no, subscription only as in you can only watch if subscribed
Subscribed what 🤔
