Firefox users are reporting an ‘artificial’ load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it’s part of a plan to make people who use adblockers “experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.”
“They’re the same picture.”
Also, that does not explain why:
- Chrome users who use an adblocker don’t get the issue
- Firefox users who do not use an adblocker get the issue
- FIrefox users who use an adblocker, but change User Agent to Chrome, don’t get the issue
Now, if only we knew who made Chrome and YouTube… The mind boggles.
Given that Google’s been talking about switching Chrome to a new plugin format that would limit the ability of adblockers to function on Chrome, and given that Google owns Youtube and profits from the ads Youtube displays…
Nope, I’m not connecting the dots. Not sure why Google would be wanting people switch from Firefox to Chrome at this time.
It’s more obvious than that even; their SEC paperwork states that adblockers are a risk to their profits. That’s more than enough info to assume they’re going to go to war in the near future (now) with them.
They’ve always been at war with ad blockers. It’s just most major multinationals have matured or diversified to a point where they are functional monopolies, and no longer gain any value in competition or service improvement.
At this stage of the merger and consolidation phase of global capitalism, with captured governments that won’t dare break them up or fine them more than a meek virtue signal, the most cost effective way to satiate the infinite growth of capitalism is to increase the exploitation and value extraction of their existing user base as much as possible (aka enshittification).
their SEC paperwork states that adblockers are a risk to their profits.
Concluding implicitly: “… and therefore a threat to all your computers’ security” :-)
It’s more obvious than that even; their SEC paperwork states that adblockers are a risk to their profits.
Sounds like the single best reason to use one.
Dear God, won’t anyone think of the shareholders?
Just for clarity, they already switched protocols (Manifest v3), they just have continued to support the old format (v2) that allows unlock origin to work. They are discontinuing support for v2 next year.
What really pisses me off is that mv3 is becoming a standard that Vivaldi, Firefox, Opera, Edge, etc. will use.
Mind you that Firefox will adjust it to be able to fully support ad blocker.
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C’mon man not everything needs a /S
(They’re being sarcastic)
The last scenario is clearly a breach of anti-trust laws. It is time for alphabet to be broken up. Their monopoly is way worse than AT&T every was.
Alphabet’s monopoly is bad, make no mistake.
But they aren’t controlling all electronic means of communication for 90% of the continental United States, as AT&T did in the ma’ bell and pa’ bell days.
But they aren’t controlling all electronic means of communication for 90% of the continental United States, as AT&T did in the ma’ bell and pa’ bell days.
Google controls over 90% of the search business in the US and that’s the way the vast majority of people begin their browsing. It’s why US v Google is currently in the courts
MS vs US back in the 90’s did not result in anything significant. This pretty much will happen again with Google. Some lobbyists will just do their thing, some minor slaps in the wrist and concessments between DoJ and Alohabet etc and Google will continue to Googling around.
I’m not trying to argue there’s appetite to break up Google among the people with the power to do it. I’m just arguing Google has a monopoly similar to Ma Bell.
Yeah I agree
Adsense is literally 90% of the market. Let alone android…
Uh… Gmail, Ad sense, search?
They’ve got like a dozen duopolies going on, they have far more control and ability to leverage it than Bell ever did
Also, that does not explain why:
Chrome users who use an adblocker don’t get the issue Firefox users who do not use an adblocker get the issue FIrefox users who use an adblocker, but change User Agent to Chrome, don’t get the issueI am a Firefox user who uses adblock and I don’t get the issue.
I think uBlock might already be blocking that code.
I was getting the delay early yesterday and then it went away. I guess they must have done something in uBO.
Just turned it off. No difference.
YouTube rolls features out in waves
Same here. Firefox, ublock origin, privacy badger. Videos start playing in under 2 seconds. I’ve also never got the adblock warning.
Lucky I guess.
Chrome sends every single website you visit to Google. You already pay with your privacy.
What do you mean by change user agent to chrome? Asking 4 a friend
For a specific how to, there’s a bunch of firefox addons that do it, but the mozilla recommended one is this
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/
It’s super easy to use, just open it and it gives a bunch of options.
This is my current (fake) user agent;
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
With two or three clicks, this is my new (fake) user agent;
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 14541.0.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
A few more clicks;
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; HLK-AL00) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.5112.102 Mobile Safari/537.36 EdgA/104.0.1293.70
And finally;
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3; Trident/6.0)
Now, that last one is making it look like I’m using internet explorer… Youtube videos will not load with that last one active. Claims my browser is too old and not supported.
I don’t know why they all start with Mozilla/5.0 but the apparently a lot of websites will block your requests if you don’t have it (or a valid browser strings like it?)
Almost all user agent strings start with that Mozilla prefix because Mozilla made the first browser with “fancy” features, so in the early internet many websites checked for that string to determine if they should serve the nice website or the stripped down version. Later when other browsers added the features, that also had to add that to their user string so users would get the right site. Which just cemented the practice.
Just a reminder to not use user agent switcher unless it’s absolutely necessary, and if you do, limit it only for certain sites that need it. If enough people change their user agent, website operators will be like “See, no one use Firefox anymore. We shouldn’t bother to support it anymore”.
I don’t know why they all start with Mozilla/5.0 but the apparently a lot of websites will block your requests if you don’t have it (or a valid browser strings like it?)
This is a good summary of this mess: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
I personally like seeing Mozilla loud and proud in all the user agents.
It’s a mess, but also an echo of history.
When you browse to a website, your browser passes info about itself to the server hosting that site. This info is intended to help the server provide the best rendering code for your browser. This is called your User Agent.
However, Google is using it here to identify Firefox users, and is apparently choosing to lump them all in a box called “adblock users” instead of trying to identify an ad blocker more accurately.
If you do change your user agent, I would use an extension that does it only on YouTube domains.
We want independent metrics to show rising Firefox use, not falling.
Yeah cool I’ll have a look. Any extensions spring to mind?
That’s because they may use code to detect as blockers that is not legal in the EU, so they might have thought that they’re super crafty and used markers such as user agent for their cool coercion delay code thingy
To add on
You can spoof this user agent to see if a website does something shady depending on which browser you’re using.
So if you keep all other variables the same, and just toggle the user agent value, YouTube behaves differently
How can we do that?
I haven’t tried it in a while, but I think there are browser extensions for it. Might need to ask someone else for how to do it these days
I know several websites consider firefox’s built-in privacy settings an adblocker in certain configurations. I get notices on many sites and use no adblocker. Not sure if it’s the case here.
Supposedly Firefox users spoofing the Chrome user agent don’t get the issue because the script tries to execute the 5s delay in a way that works on Chrome but not on FF. Because the Chrome method doesn’t work on FF, it just gets skipped entirely. But I’m not sure if that’s entirely accurate, just read about it.
But then shouldn’t there be a delay when using actual Chrome?
There’s people reporting exactly that if they’re using certain ad-blocking tools.
I did see Chrome users mention a delay (on lemmy) but I haven’t personally checked it out
My understanding is the method they can use on chrome is near instant, but the alternative they use on Firefox is slower, hence the delay. Is this BS? Yeah probably, but it does at least logically follow.
5sec vs 3x20sec.
Easy choice
3x20, a bunch of wasted CPU cycles and probably a rare form of malware
Not too mention .01 points off your san permanently
Oh sanity, yeah per ad
The degree in which corporations engage in psychological warfare against customers is astounding. Not surprising, just outrageous. Don’t want notifications on? We’re going to ask you to turn on notifications in the the program every single day until you do it. Don’t want to watch ads because our infinite greed has destroyed what used to be a good platform with a reasonable number of ads before we bought it? Then we’ll make the experience less pleasant until you comply. They already make multiple parts of YouTube disagree with ad blockers on purpose to break the sites features. Not that I use anything other than NewPipe and Piped anymore anyway. I’m just sick of shitty corporations acting like we’re children who can be punished.
We are in a war indeed.
I think it’s a new trend with CEOs and investors. They want infinite growth so the strategy is aquire / create, grow, squeeze, throw away, while creating new products to migrate fed up customers. Rinse and repeat.
Investors goal: maximize ROI this year.
CEO goal: infinite growth and/or increase share price to keep funds flowing.
I believe the current economic behavior isn’t sustainable. Some day things will go south.
I actually think they are currently all going south. This increase in ads is just one part of the fall I think.
Id say the last stage of squeeze might be more accurate.
Because it’s possible to recover now.
Once the majority of big corps reach the no return stage, we’re all screwed.
Infinite growth in a finite world is impossible.
Do we need to start requiring all C-suite managers to learn thermodynamics?
They know, they just wanna accumulate as much fat bonuses as possible before the crash.
The idea that the only real duty of corporate leadership is to drive shareholder profit is apocalyptically naive and ultimately nihilistic, and it has been since the words dribbled from Milton Friedman into the NYT magazine back in 1970.
short term. The problem is driving short term profit. In the short term, you profit by abusing your customers. If you considered long term profit, you need to also consider customer satisfaction
No, I stand by what I said.
If you build something well, it will sell itself. You won’t need financial gymnastics to make your company or the product look good.
Stupid financial tactics like stock buybacks (which, as a result of how the stock market works, have a direct positive impact on stock price) should be illegal.
The problem is the focus on profit over and above the focus on literally anything else. That’s what modern corporate leadership has come to understand as the true meaning behind Friedman’s words. And it’s killing our society, our environment, and in many cases, the companies themselves (because the tactics are obviously unsustainable).
It’s literally like that shit from Ready Player One where the guy suggests that you can fill up the VR screen with like 80% ads before the user gets sick from it. That’s what they are doing now, they will push ads until people either stop watching or not enough people subscribe to Premium. The fact that you can’t even skip ahead in a video without getting more ads, even if you just got the pre-roll ads. It’s completely unacceptable and I think that there should be laws that would prevent that type of consumer abuse.
Don’t you just love being fed plausible deniability BS over and over and over again. I’ve lost friends over this bs. People who always argue in bad faith, always invoke plausible deniability, always min/max each interaction with hidden motives - should be given no attention and credibility. Unfortunately, those people strives in corporate environments, and as you would expect, they’re often responsible for marketing, PR, sales, and corporate strategies. Corporations are the annoying lying friends you don’t want around.
YouTube didn’t have ads before it got bought IIRC, not that it would have lasted that way even if it was not bought
It’s been many years, but I remember a small banner ad below the video and maybe one to the side. It was so reasonable though it’s hard to remember for sure.
But wait, wouldn’t a 5 second pause on loading still be way better than sitting through minutes of adverts? :-D
Punishment my arse
I’d still prefer to wait 5 seconds than have to watch a fucking sanitized corporate advertisement trying to sell me bullshit I don’t want and won’t buy with annoying fucking music, voiceover, and footage of people pretending to be happy.
Fuck off, Google. Good thing this will be easily bypassed anyway.
If it were one ad I might be fine with it, but it’s usually 2-3 ads every 5-10 minutes, at a volume twice as loud as the video, and each up to 2 minutes long.
A made the mistake of watching YouTube on my TV a few weeks back, without an ad blocker. I was getting 1-3 15 second ads every 2-3 minutes!
And inserted randomly within the content
I hate ads too. Would you consider paying for a service so it’s user supported instead of ad supported? I do, pay for YouTube, Spotify, Hulu no ad tier. It gets old because it starts adding up. I’d rather pay for a user owned platform like a coop of some kind, but still, these things do cost money to run.
I won’t pay for Youtube because they keep making their product worse and treating creators horribly.
I won’t pay for YouTube because the executives are literally thousands of times wealthier than I am.
Why the fuck would I give money to people who are already obscenely rich?
People don’t have issues paying. As you said, if it was a user-run co-op, people would be fine with it. But as it stands right now the services keep raising their prices just because they can while all the money goes to the bosses and shareholders while the actual people who do most of the work get whatever is left over
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I’ll take a 5 sec delay over ads any fucking day of the week.
5 sec delay
Just now
Next up will be resetting the volume control every video, or limiting the resolutions you can view at.
They already kinda do the resolution thing. Premium gets higher bitrate versions of the videos.
Wouldn’t it be neat if YouTube had reasonable competition? You know, so when YouTube adds a five-second delay as a strange style of punishment, a different platform would look more attractive?
There will never be a real competitor to YouTube, because nobody else is willing to run at a net loss for a decade before seeing their first profitable quarter, like Google did with YouTube.
Turns out, free video hosting is expensive as fuck.
There will never be a real competitor to YouTube
That sounds reasonable but you’re thinking way too small. Lets not forget that Tiktok is already more popular than YouTube with a very, very large chunk of younger people, for example.
But besides that, let’s not forget that absolute giants in the business have been toppled. Look at Yahoo! as one example. Hell, even entire countries can fall within a few decades, whole empires.
So, assuming that there will never be a decent YouTube competitor is a very limited way of looking at it. Who’s to say Google will still exist in any meaningful market leading way in 20 years?
Sure they’re big now, but what if the entire face of the internet and how we use it and what we want fundamentally changes (say with the addition of highly advanced AI that brings changes we can’t even predict right now).
There will absolutely one day be a service that can rival YouTube and eventually replace them, it’s the same with every product from every business, it’s the circle of life I suppose. But whether that will happen within the next 5 years, or 15, or 30, only time can tell :-D
Never say never, though!
TikTok isn’t YouTube. It’s two different method to consume videos. TikTok doesn’t replace YouTube per se. Some people split the available attention time between them and in favor of TikTok.
It will be hard to compete on the YouTube field. But, there is multiple places for a different way to consume video with a different user experience.
On the YouTube field, it will be hard. I don’t see creator moving with their community. The same issue has with let say Reddit, Twitter, etc.
That’s the commenter’s point: YouTube might not be replaced, but that doesn’t mean it cannot disappear.
Im surprised Amazon hasn’t stepped into the space to advertise their own products. They already own a huge storage cloud backend.
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Its so strange they let their users store 2 hour+ VODS but dont let users upload edited videos? Would make so much sense and even save them storage since user’s would replace VODs with edited videos since no one watches VODs
In the relatively rare cases that I watch stuff on twitch, I usually watch the VODs. Don’t have the time or energy to sit though hours of a stream in one sitting, nor am I usually able to catch one live, nor do I like feeling like I’ll miss something if I have to leave early, so I prefer to just watch the recordings of them at my own pace over multiple sessions.
I often watch vods. My favorite streamer’s time zone and streaming schedule mean that I can only catch a couple of hours of the beginning of their stream before going to bed, and I couldn’t regularly watch 8-10 hours of stream in one go anyway, so I watch the vods of the streams I want to see the rest of.
I’m guessing that it is probably them being comfortable with their niche, and they don’t think they can break into the YouTube model the same way YouTube couldn’t break into the Twitch model with YouTube Gaming (#killedbygoogle)
…i’m surprised pornhub hasn’t rolled out an all-ages video site…
They already make a killing with their cloud with much less business risk in the form of AWS.
Maybe. But give decentralised federated hosting a few years. It might never be a rival but it’s possible it will become a viable alternative.
If PeerTube can fix their major discoverability issues, it can potentially pose a real threat to YouTube. But that’s the biggest thing keeping it back right now, is that it’s impossible to just find anything you want to watch.
Unless you want to watch hour-long seminars on Linux. In which case, PeerTube’s got you covered.
I think discoverability is in its infancy for the fediverse in general.
But I’m old enough to remember when vast tracts of the internet were hard to find and everyone used directories. When that changed, everyone jumped online.
Yet there is a gazillion of porn sites out there. The thing is, once YouTube become shitty enough its users are itching to find an alternative, porn operators like MindGeek might launch a competitor site because they’re already have a scalable video delivery service. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re already working on it.
It’s not really a technical problem anymore. Which isn’t to say it’s easy to run such a site, but rather to stress that YouTube is like a social media site. The value is in the users (and the content that they create and consume). You could make a perfect YouTube clone, but good luck getting people to use it when their favourite creators don’t. And good luck getting creators to care when the users aren’t there.
And Lemmy is misleading. Most people don’t use Firefox. Heck, most people don’t seem to even use ad blockers.
It’s funny too because ads literally are a 5 second delay (at least) that you get when you dont use an adblocker!
I honestly think I prefer the delay over the ad.
Same. Give me the delay. At least I know that’s only five seconds, as opposed to a ten-second unskippable ad followed by another ad that I can skip after five seconds.
You’re absolutely right, but we haven’t even touched on the worst part of ads, which is how they utterly poison your brain with annoying jingles, annoying colors, and stupid catch-phrases, all psychologically engineered to get stuck in your head.
And let’s not even go into how they prey on your fears and insecurities, or deceive you into thinking you need things that you actually don’t. How they prey on vulnerable children, or the elderly, or brainwash small children into manipulating their parents against their best interests. Or how privacy has been shredded since the advent of behavioral tracking.
I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that advertising is one of the world’s biggest psychological hazards. I would rather sit in an empty room with no stimulation whatsoever than let that poison into my brain.
If I see an unskippable ad, I like to play the game “Roll the dice until Youtube gives up”. Hit the refresh key until it gives me the correct video length. Devalues Youtube’s ad product and costs YouTube more.
am close video on mobile
That is the way to do it. Then open it on NewPipe or another 3rd party app without ads if you want to see it.
They’re still letting you skip ads??
At some point Hulu did that - just like three, thirty-second blocks of silent ‘shame on you for ad blocking!’ I totally preferred that to ads…
Now I just don’t use Hulu?
Ah, the good old days. Put on your show, get up and grab your snack/drink, come back just in time for the show to start, no ads the rest of the way
And even before that when adblockers just straight up worked on Hulu no shame screens to be found
I’ve been using Nebula. It’s a subscription-based alternative with no advertising, but I get it for free because I’m subscribed to Curiosity Stream (which is basically Netflix, but for documentaries).
The only downside to Nebula is that there aren’t a lot of content creators on it, so you don’t have the variety of videos that YouTube offers.
The captions suck too. I subscribed to the same deal as you. I did it mostly to support the creators. But I basically never use it. The creator whose affiliate link I used to sign up? Their own captions are amazing on YouTube (human written with colour and positioning) and auto generated garbage on Nebula.
Turns out people don’t want to compete with something that runs at a loss. and as soon as someone figures out how Google will just copy them with a massive infrastructure lead.
I’m still waiting for MindGeek to launch an SFW version of pornhub to compete with YouTube. If YouTube keeps getting shittier, they might eventually do it.
Peertube is almost there. Just needs a good server really, most of the servers are too small for the market share. Or at least fit the general public, I’m loving it ATM.
“supposed to”
Oopsie whoopsy, we accidentally made competing browsers disadvantaged.
Deliberate, disguised as accidental. Disgusting.
Hanlon’s razor - “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
This is not only adequately explained by stupidity, but it makes the most logical sense to be explained by stupidity. They are actively fighting a war with AdBlockers. They are trying to block AdBlockers, and AdBlockers are working as quickly as possible to fight those changes. Then Google has to fire back as quickly as possible. This is resulting in rapid published changes to counteract AdBlockers and their retaliation. It makes all too much sense that their fight against AdBlockers did not work as intended. The people making these changes are Google software developers, and I really do not think any of them have an issue with Mozilla.
I don’t know how stupid YouTube devs would have to be to:
-
Tie the delay that was supposed to fight AdBlock to user-agent (changing it to chrome fixes the issue)
-
Ignore Youtube Premium users that pay for ad-free experience
For those reasons I think it’s pretty safe to say that this goes beyond stupidity and into malice territory.
What evidence is there of this being user-agent based? I’ve heard people make this claim, but I have not seen evidence of it and when testing on my own machine there was no delay at all.
I’d wager Googles only releasing it to some users at first like they do with most things.
-
Unless you consider fighting adblockers a futile stupidity, you should first apply Occam’s razor - explanation requiring least amount of assumptions is probably the correct one.
In this case spoofing user-agent string of Chrome is enough to fix all the performance issues on Firefox, meaning there is no fancy anti-adblock code or anything like that.
Right, they got caught doing some hot button issue shit with the FCC talking about renewing the NN rules and they didn’t want to reignite the debate themselves. Google owns YT. Google makes money on ads, yeah, but they are also dominating the browser game with more people switching to firefox. Both explanations make sense, but only one of them calls for covering up/lying. Also, when any company gets caught doing something that they have some other excuse for, I’m liable to believe the appearance rather than the PR response.
This is under the assumption that the user agent change is real. I have seen this spread time and time again, and every time I ask if there is any evidence. So I will ask you as well: do you have evidence for it, or have you experienced it first hand? I have yet to have someone prove that this is true, and I have not been able to create it myself (I tried, but never got a delay to begin with). So until there is evidence that this is true, and not just a rumor being spread, than Occam’s razor cannot apply.
Except Google has done the exact same thing to numerous other products and have multiple anti competition cases against them specifically related to Chrome. Hanlon’s Razor doesn’t apply IMO if there is a track record of the behaviour, as that clearly shows intent and premeditation.
All of the people saying “I’d rather wait five seconds than watch an ad” seem to be optimistic that it will continue to be 5 seconds and YouTube won’t keep upping it.
But they can’t extend it longer than the shortest ads, since then it’ll affect users after they watch ads too, which kinda defeats the point
Exactly, so this still guarantees a better experience than ad viewers because you will always have the minimum ad length
That’s not a problem. Just put in longer ads. Or multiple ads in a row.
Or multiple ads in a row.
They aleady do that
I’ll take 20 minutes of silence over 1 second of ads. I will never willingly watch an ad I didn’t explicitly request. Ever.
Life is short and I won’t devote any of it to advertisements.
That being said, I do pay for YouTube premium because I do use it a lot and understand that the platform has every right to make money. But that makes what they’re doing with Firefox and ad blockers worse.
Honestly, worst case scenario, if YouTube manages to completely eliminate adblockers, maybe by making some kind of cryptographic system where the browser has to provide a token embedded inside the ad video stream in order to access the video, I would still use an extension to mute sound and draw a black bar over the ads while technically playing them in the background, it’s not the wait time that bothers me, it’s how repetitive and obnoxious the ads are, I just don’t want to perceive them.
Which is why you have to void warranties and go through a lot of hassle to r Unlock the bootloader, or root your own phone and have actual control over it.
And that’s the reason Google is trying to push shitty web standards to remove your control.
And why Apple and Microsoft keep restricting your access to your OS, with rumors of Windows 12 being cloud-only.
Many governments around the world don’t want you to have any control or privacy. Many tech giants don’t want you to have any control or privacy. It’s the same old thing religions have done forever. Enforce a lack of control and privacy through violence, social pressure, or resources. Only now, the enforcement style is indirect, trying to say you don’t own your device, can’t use ad blockers or privacy tools, have to agree to terms and conditions that waive your rights, your usage has to be monitored, or that backdoors have to be built into everything.
Don’t expect this behavior to stop unless regulation is created to prevent it, or the company caves to financial or social pressure to change…for now.
Don’t expect regulation to be created unless you put people who care about privacy and such in power.
Even then, people in power need to be held accountable if they misbehave, or nothing else matters.
It all comes back to class struggle and politics.
“Which color hat did the extra in the background of your latest ad wear?” Wrong answer = 10 ads.
If they could, YouTube would hire someone to sit on your couch and make sure you consume the ads with your utmost attention.
So 5 seconds of silence… Yeah punish me daddy google.
YouTube says it’s part of a plan to make people who use adblockers “experience suboptimal viewing”
As opposed to the perfectly optimal experience you get when allowing ads
A 5 second break, while suboptimal, is significantly less suboptimal than having to watch 20+ second ads.
Yes, but ads make them money.
5 second ad delay in blessed silence
5 seconds of someone screaming into my ear “BUY! BUY! BUY!”
Oh, no! Better disable my ad blocker quick!
Ah yes, because ad viewers get to enjoy the video immediately with zero delay whatsoever. You sure showed those adblock using scum by… Still having a better experience with adblock enabled by virtue of only subjecting them to silence instead of an ad while still not making any money.
Even assuming what they’re claiming is truely their intention, it’s still dumb as hell.
I’d rather a 5 second pause then see something trying to hijack my freewill.
No ads or delays > No ads with delays >>>>>> ads
Honestly, as long as the video itself doesn’t have interruptions, I’m okay with the ad-free experience having a small delay or even lower video resolution. I don’t have to have 4k 120 FPS video on everything.
What I don’t want is constant interruptions, wild changes in emotional tone or volume, obnoxious and manipulative ads, politically sponsored bullshit, or constant pestering to disable my ad blocker and tracking protection. In short, once the video starts, leave me alone.
I can appreciate that Google has spent its entire existence trying to find another revenue stream beyond advertising, and largely failed, but I don’t care. If my choices are to continue being manipulated and lied to by companies and politicians paying for the privilege, and not using YouTube, I’ll just stop using YouTube. I’ve done it before with other services I used much more frequently.
Either they shut up about using ad blockers, or they give me an alternative.
And yes, I realize this is a very selfish and entitled response. If I get value out of something that costs other people time and money to provide me, it is fair that I give back in some way. Traditionally, that was done via companies serving ads and spying on its users.
But enough is enough. Modern advertising and tracking keep getting worse, and trying to enforce them is not the way to move forward.
Bro my position is very clear. I’d rather forget about YouTube entirely than let ads back into my life
Freetube? It’s an app, look it up
None of these alternate options allow me to watch on my TV without ads. I almost never watch anything on my phone, and when I do I have YouTube revanced for that
Brave on android lets you watch youtube with no ads. As long as the adblocking and fingerprint blocking is set to aggressive
While I think Google is a monster that needs to be destroyed, it’s silly to me that your two options are either block ads or leave. The third option would be pay for the service. If your only problem is the ads and not the tracking (which probably isn’t true, but it’s the only complaint you made in the comment), then paying for it is a valid solution. It shouldn’t be controversial to say video hosting costs money to run, which obviously includes YouTube. So giving it out for free is simply not a realistic option. You’re free to leave, but you won’t have anywhere else to go that meets the “free and no ads” requirement. If you realistically don’t want ads, you will have to pay. And if you’re fine with paying, YouTube is currently the platform with the most content to offer.
Honestly, I’m thankful paying is an option. I wish Google would offer a paid package overall to stop the tracking/data collection. I would literally just give them my money for actual privacy with their services.
The problem is that the paid option eventually gets ads anyway. See cable TV and soon Netflix.
Furthermore, the price of YouTube Premium is increasing.
Gotta ensure the greedy corporation makes record profits quarter over quarter.
https://9to5google.com/2023/07/19/youtube-premium-price-increase/
The problem is that the paid option eventually gets ads anyway.
The problem is that YouTube hasn’t done something, but you think they will? Cable television has basically always had commercials. When it started, it was mostly just government broadcasts, but when it got popularly commercialized, adverts were introduced. Netflix has a paid option with ads, but they also still have an ad-free option, so that still doesn’t really substantiate your argument either.
There is no real evidence to think they will add ads to their paid service. Of course it’s possible, but we don’t need to make up things Google might do in the future to call them evil. There’s plenty of things they’re currently doing.
The pressure of ever-increasing profits demands it.
Your comment assumes two things.
- Companies try to make more profit
- YouTube will make more profit by having ad contained paid tiers
The fist point is a fact of life.
The second one is simply not fact. It could be profitably, but it is far from guaranteed. They could just as easily make far more money by keeping the paid tier ad-free to avoid the loss of subscribers.
I would pay for the service if it weren’t an absolutely ridiculous price.
$14 a month is bonkers.
I value YouTube, at most, at about $5 a month. I can easily do without it.
I value YouTube, at most, at about $5 a month. I can easily do without it.
There you have it. If the cost of the service is not worth it, then users won’t buy it. Either enough users will pay for it that the service will stay as it is for the price it is, they will decrease the cost of the service, or improve the service they are offering. Or, given Google’s track record, just kill of the service entirely.
I will also point out that many users pay for Spotify for $11 USD a month. YouTube premium includes YT Music, which is a direct competitor to Spotify. So for users who pay for Spotify, it would be virtually $3 for ad-free YouTube. Of course this doesn’t work if you don’t pay for a music streaming service, but as far as services go it certainly isn’t unreasonably priced. Sure, it may be unfair that they don’t offer just a YT ad-free package, perhaps with all this backlash they will. Or perhaps not. It’s Google, they’ll do whatever they fuck they want.
do you know what makes them even more money? Making you pay, and then selling your data anyway!
You CANNOT opt out of data collection from youtube. Just pay them or they’ll put an absurd amount of ads to the point it’s not usable anymore.
You CANNOT opt out of data collection from youtube
Right, and that’s exactly what I said. Though Google specifically doesn’t really need to sell your data. They just use it themselves to advertise to you.
