An experiment that could become permanent:
YouTube's annoying ads often push those who don't want to pay $120 for YouTube Premium to use ad blockers. But Google isn't happy about this potentially lost revenue, and has decided to experiment with a feature that urges ad-blocker users to think again.
Redditor Sazk100 posted a screenshot earlier this week showing a YouTube popup warning that ad blockers are not allowed on the platform. It notes that ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide, and that an ad-free experience is available via the paid-for YouTube Premium. The message finishes with two options: Allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium, which is $11.99 per month or $119.99 per year for access to original programs and no ads.
Some users who've seen it say they have been able to simply close the pop-up and continue blocking ads on YouTube, but it's likely that Google will clamp down on this, or make the pop-up appear regularly enough to be a distraction.
The moderators of the YouTube subreddit wrote that an employee had confirmed the ad-blocker message was an experiment by YouTube. A Google spokesperson expanded on this in a statement to IGN.
"We're running a small experiment globally that urges viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium," they said. "Ad blocker detection is not new, and other publishers regularly ask viewers to disable ad blockers."
While most online companies make their revenue from ads, some complain that YouTube has gone too far, citing its increasing number of unskippable and extended mid-roll ads.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Friday May 12, @11:25AM (23 children)
It's the gratuitous javascript which carry the ads which are the problem. Many would accept ads in and of themselves, but the javascript-laden advertisements often carry a malware payload [theguardian.com], that applies even at reputable sites [nytimes.com]. This push to force gratuitous javascripts down everyone's throats is neither necessary nor safe.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12, @11:33AM (19 children)
I think 99% of the blocker users are in fact thinking of the ads, not rare malware payloads. Though blocking ads and their scripts is always a big help on slower computers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aafcac on Friday May 12, @11:57AM (16 children)
Probably, but when YouTube expects people to sit through ads that are literally longer than the videos that they are placed on, that is a problem. Some of the ads are 20+ minutes and even though you are allowed to skip most of that, you have to manually do so, which means that you need a free hand to skip it. So, if you're listening to the content while doing something else, you get inconvenienced.
Then there's all the videos that should be monetized, but aren't and the content that gets buried because Google doesn't think that it's adequately profitable or crosses over an arbitrary rule that wasn't a rule when the video was posted. Really, they've got nobody to blame but themselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 12, @02:00PM (12 children)
>you get inconvenienced.
Don't you know? That's what the $120 is for.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aafcac on Friday May 12, @02:02PM (11 children)
Yes, but $120 and I'm sure they'll still bury the content that I want to see. It's a ridiculous amount of money to charge for the content that other people create. Many of whom don't receive any of that because they're not a large enough channel to be monetized. Assuming that there isn't a specific reason that YouTube can get around having to pay that at all.
It's a pretty disgusting company to deal with, but it is the most popular, which makes it difficult to avoid.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 12, @03:18PM (10 children)
I was "banned" from YouTube about 6 years ago because I let my (then 13 year old) son post videos he made using my account. He did PBS mashups, nothing offensive, but not the highest quality either. After a year or so of posting literally thousands of these videos, PBS started playing coy games about "it's not a copyright strike, but it's not permissible for advertising revenue in some jurisdictions" - which was fine, the videos were never monetized anyway - he had 700 followers, but the average video would get 50 looks, 2 likes and maybe one comment. Then they started hitting harder, and I honestly didn't understand the policy which was stated "three strikes in one six month period will result in account suspension." Well, suspension sounds temporary, and we've been dinking around with copyright related noise for 18 months, so if that third strike hits within a 6 month period it sounds to me like the account will be suspended for six months at the most.... Yeah, no, once you cross their threshold you are effectively banned for life - under that user ID (which I have had for going on 20 years now...)
So, of course, my son just created another account, got 1500 followers, got banned again after a year or two (Beatles music this time), and now he's on his at least third account, this time with over 2000 followers, still not playing with monetization but maybe he's learning something about not pissing off the Copyright trolls.
Meanwhile, "Real" people who try to make a living on YouTube? Yeah, welcome to the machine, bitches. It's here to profit from you, and we will dangle just enough incentive to keep that quality "attractive" content flowing. Since lottery style incentives seem to be the most efficient motivators, that's what they're using. I have found, in six years of having no YouTube posting access - because why ban eyeballs that might click on ads? - I miss it not at all. When I have felt the need to share videos (about 3 times in the past 6 years) I use Vimeo now. I used to post recreationally to YouTube because it was fun and easy, I had a catalog of about 100 random videos, can't say that I miss them, and there are all kinds of other hosts that seem to be less problematic than YouTube, depending on what you're publishing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/comments/7v1ld5/knead_a_tropical_donut/ [reddit.com]
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday May 12, @04:44PM (1 child)
This is a good example of, pissing off the customer (even non-paying) can bite you hard in the end.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 12, @07:00PM
I sincerely believe their policies are carefully crafted and administration of them is tweaked to piss off just the right amount of just the right demographics without significantly impacting the profit growth. They are serving masters on multiple sides, gotta piss off some of each if you still want to keep them all basically happy.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Friday May 12, @06:19PM (7 children)
And before you stated to pay Google $120/yr for this service.... why? The Internet, as it is today, is unusable without uBlock Origin and NoScript. I use both. This site is one of very few that doesn't trigger either. Furthermore, l already pay less for Amazon Prime which comes with enough Prime Video to make me happy...
So, if Google wants to block uBlock Origin or NoScript, ok, then if I can't avoid it, I will stop looking at the YouTube time waster. There is definitely some educational material there, but it's mostly in forms of opinions. But I have a feeling maintainers and users of uBlock Origin will be highly motivated to block their blockers and work around it. There will be some arms race there. Google's control of Chrome will probably not impact that arms race -- they've tried before to limit URL filters and there was a backlash on that.
Finally, I've been using ChatGPT for 2 moths now and I have to say it's far superior to Google. Reason for this is ads, again. Google search results are completely polluted with click-bait trying to leach more ad revenue and Google is complicit in this. This makes it more difficult to get answers than to use ChatGPT as a search engine and then narrow down to actual source once you have the basics. If it wasn't for Wikipedia in last decade+, the internet would have been mostly a desert of ads.
As for JS, it's mostly a no-op since JS is sandboxed. I'm least worried about JS in its current form. With sandboxing, it has serious advantages to traditional programs. Look up "Javascript Containers" for example -- very handy to make web apps ;) JS is allowing the "Network is the computer" paradigm and there is no going back on it. Single Page Applications have a huge potential of being safe that server generated content does not. But I digress ....
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 12, @06:58PM (6 children)
>And before you stated to pay Google $120/yr for this service.... why?
No, I stated that's what the $120 is for: convenience. There are people who will pay, and pay, and pay. just for a little worthless convenience.
I use ad blocks, I don't even know which ones, don't pay much attention to them, but I see evidence sometimes that they are working. I still see a ridiculous amount of advertising as well, but like you note: you can steer yourself away from the worst of the spam-ver-spam-iti-spam-sing.
>using ChatGPT for 2 moths now and I have to say it's far superior to Google. Reason for this is ads, again.
Oh, just you wait.... they are in the honeymoon build an addicted audience mode at the moment. This is a seemingly inevitable trend with good internet services that provide a service without ads, well without too much advertising, well the ads are at least not distractingly placed, well at least the content loads at the same time as the ads, well I can still tell content from advertising, well... the content I was looking for might be here somewhere inbetween all this crap...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Friday May 12, @08:09PM (5 children)
I actually paid for it! It's something I would not pay Google for. Or even GitHub for their completion version of ChatGPT - it's just less useful.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 12, @08:25PM (4 children)
Congrats. For my common research use cases ChatGPT makes inaccurate stuff up far too often, like 30-45% of the time. On the softer side, I tried to use it to write poetry/songs, and I noticed that by the time I was done with something I liked, the finished product had 5% or less content as written by ChatGPT - it may have been a semi-useful idea starter, but I never really liked anything it wrote.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Saturday May 13, @07:35PM (3 children)
For myself, it's fairly accurate. It would definitely pass basic interview questions. But it's incapable of handling more involved problems and has mistakes. It's also incapable of actual thinking -- you tell it something is wrong, it will say "yes, sorry about that" and proceed to write same thing.
But, it's very nice for basics. For example, ask what is the international code for Baby Formula on import forms and where to find it. Or what is this s390 subsystem doing without digging through IBM's mainframe manuals. It can definitely be wrong so you have to double check, but it's a massive time saver when you have general issues where you don't know where to start. Or even if you know where to start but don't want to write some basic stuff like unit test for these and that cases or but reproducer.
It has its benefits.
As for creativity, I can imagine it being as creative worse at it than a 5 year old. It really is an average answer generation tool.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 13, @08:05PM (2 children)
Yeah, my last query to it was: why does nmcli bridge creation give an "Access Denied" error in Ubuntu. It gave me a typical guess "you need to use sudo" bzzzt. A) you do not need to use sudo, and B) it was actually because nmcli has different permission structure when called via ssh terminal and I believe won't work via sudo that way either. You might say it was an unfair question, but that's how the question was put to me (with no statement "I'm running this script via ssh even though the instructions say to use a terminal on the console" just "Here's the log with the error...") First search result via Google didn't come right out and say "ssh is your problem" - but a careful read did yield the clue enough for me to bust my colleague with "Are you running this via ssh?"
As for the creative side, yeah, it's really "on the nose" with most stuff, very little subtext or metaphor - probably none on purpose.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Sunday May 14, @09:12PM (1 child)
GPT-4 was more informative. See #4. I asked "nmcli bridge creation give an "Access Denied" error in Ubuntu." with nothing else. GPT-3.5 was as you describe.
But it still doesn't try to ask for more information... and it doesn't learn, even in context of the conversation. But such is life with tools.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 14, @11:23PM
That's so much worse, giving you a bunch of stuff to do that still is wrong...
At least on StackExchange you can usually tell when the poster is.... under informed.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Friday May 12, @03:04PM (2 children)
A 20 minute advertisement? What kind of stupidity is that? Surely you meant 20 seconds?
The biggest issue will be getting my wife to stop using YouTube. I'd rather ditch YouTube as a whole than not use an adblocker. Currently, I actually have a subscription to floatplane, because reasons. So, I could still get some tech news and just be sad that I don't have access to the vast trove of videos that YouTube has. Pretty much the only thing I go to YouTube for are a few specific channels that are interesting and whatever game review/playthrough/walkthrough, etc. I would rather drop YouTube like the bad habit it is, than give up my adblocker. I would rather give up on the majority of the internet than let my adblocker go. They can pry my adblocker from my cold dead hands. Okay, maybe that's a bit too far, but they started it. Perhaps, it should be more of a they can just wither and die and good riddance, comparatively. That's better.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by aafcac on Friday May 12, @03:56PM
I haven't had any that couldn't be skipped, but I do regularly get ones that are 20+ minutes long if I don't manually press the skip button. It's ridiculous. How many people are going to watch an ad that long before the video they clicked for?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Saturday May 13, @09:52AM
I can also confirm. I use ad blockers, but one of my coworkers put on some music one very quiet Friday afternoon and then left me to suffer when he got up and chatted with someone else down the hallway. I was about ready to chuck that sucker out the window.
He got back before the ad was over and we could see it was going to last about 20 minutes. I cannot fathom why anyone at Google would think this is a good idea. Once we skipped past the ad, it resumed in the middle of the song it had interrupted.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday May 12, @04:47PM
Advertisements are annoying. It just so happens that they're also scummy. Which generally leads to a hive of scum and villainy.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 12, @08:57PM
I think some users are thinking of bandwidth when they use ad blockers. I, myself, have only recently been able to get 100 meg internet. Only months ago, I was on DSL, oftentimes getting little more than half of the 10 meg I was paying for. Share that with the whole family, and you don't have much bandwidth.
Blocking ad servers made that bandwidth stretch a whole lot further!
I mean, NO ONE wants to sit for half an hour watching Youtube buffer through a ten minute video!!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DadaDoofy on Friday May 12, @11:37AM (1 child)
"even at reputable sites [nytimes.com]"
Well, that was a coffee spit moment.
No one is forcing anyone to go to sites with JavaScript. They do so of their own free will.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday May 12, @04:46PM
Yeah, hit me with a paywall banner. I'm not going to be going to your site anymore. Or at least not, if I remember that was one of those draconian sites.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Saturday May 13, @03:00AM
What got me to using an adblocker on Youtube was the day they presented me with a 30 minute unskippable ad before I could watch five minutes of fluff.
The ads are excessively long, loud, annoying, irrelevant, too frequent, and largely for borderline-scams.
THAT is why they get blocked, not because they're ads.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by higuita on Friday May 12, @11:33AM (10 children)
Yes, people use ad blockers because google made the ads too annoying, this is a arm race, youtube increase ads, more people will use ad blockers. Increase the duration of ads? more people for ad blockers... make them unskippable? you know the answer already
Mid-roll ads are specially annoying, specially on certain content, like music, where you may be in a calm and relaxing music and it jump to some annoying ad, making it mostly unusable. At very least, the ad should be inline with the mood of the video to be acceptable
Finaly, stupid ads, i once got a ad to another youtube video... that was 1h long... so the video that i was watching was 10min and got one ad that if i didn't skip, it would take 1h (and worse, it was metal music, that is even something i don't really like)
and by the way, youtube is the main video platform, but there are other smaller ones, that people should also use, competition is good, like vimeo, peertube, odysee, floatplane, dailymotion, etc
the lack of content on those platforms is the chkicken and egg problem, if there is few people on those platform, there is also less content.... increase the usage and more content will show up
(Score: 3, Informative) by MIRV888 on Friday May 12, @11:48AM (7 children)
Media servers have 0 ads, ever. With 18TB USB drives available now, this is clearly the way to go. You just gotta find someone with a decent media library.
It takes a week to copy 14 TB with usb 2. So I'm told.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12, @12:29PM (5 children)
A week? How on earth does it keep track of all that data?
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday May 12, @12:50PM (4 children)
This sort of thing is what bittorrent and jigdo style transfer programs are great for. Check to see what files you've got, check to see which ones don't match and then patch/download the bits that are different.
I am a bit curious though as to precisely who it is that is using USB2 for this sort of large transfer. If you've got that many files, it seems like USB3 or some other bus would be more appropriate.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 12, @02:03PM (2 children)
>If you've got that many files, it seems like USB3 or some other bus would be more appropriate.
My media servers aren't the most up-to-date or powerful computers in the house...
My drives are only 2TB, but the oldest is pushing 12 years of age now.
2TB can copy across USB 2.0 and WiFi in about a day, or so I'm told.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday May 12, @02:53PM (1 child)
OK, that makes sense, that just seemed kind of odd to me. So, it's quite a bit faster than Windows 10 then. Copying that much stuff to or from a USB2 device would take like a week, or more. It's absurd that after so many decades, MS still can't get things like that right. FreeBSD can do the same thing in a much more reasonable time frame.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 12, @03:23PM
Yeah, I was doing an scp from Ubuntu to Ubuntu, via in house WiFi, it was going fast enough that I didn't bother to look for faster ways.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Friday May 19, @07:42AM
Yeah my server is IBM Xeon 2.66 Ghz quad with 5 4Tb drives. It only has USB 2.0.
I know. It's ancient, but it does what I need it to do. It is nice making a backup onto a single drive. I used to have use more than one.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Friday May 12, @10:55PM
Some good content is created for YouTube. I support several groups via Patreon that do urban exploration. They document and capture beautiful buildings and infrastructure that the public would never get to see. You can't buy this stuff on physical media.
https://www.youtube.com/@ExploringtheUnbeatenPath [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/@TheProperPeople [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/@bwturbex [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Tork on Friday May 12, @11:40PM
I have been super angry about this ever since. They show local ads on YoutubeTV, why do they fucking care if my elderly uncle is far away if he's getting ads from his area?!? *I* am paying them a monthly fee, a family plan fee, AND they are getting legit ad revenue from all of us!
I'm too deep in a project right now to spend any time sorting this out, but right now I'm frequently fantasizing about dumping YTTV and buying seasons of stuff on iTunes. Totally happy to pay for my shit but damn Google, quit reminding me you exist.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Saturday May 13, @03:03AM
I see we've had the very same experience and incentives to block YT's freakin' awful ads... I got a 30 minute unskippable in front of a 5 minute vid, enough was enough.
The /embed/ trick usually works, or Hooktube.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday May 12, @11:35AM (2 children)
See also the recent change in the Videos tab that forces display of "for you" instead of "latest" which pretty much everyone hates and I'm sure in the usual Hegel thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern the newly create problem will be 'fixed' by subscribers gaining the new feature of not having the wrong display order of videos.
The hack around it is removing "watched history" or whatever it is in the settings thus "for you" isn't defaulting anymore.
Anyway long way around saying Youtube sucks. What would the world do without a service that uses small bash shell scripts for customer service? Its all good news for YT's competitors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12, @11:44AM
Better to bookmark channels directly than rely on an account and subscriptions. Although I still get new videos I want to see on the homepage and in recommendations.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Friday May 12, @12:07PM
I wonder how long until people decide that it's no longer worth their effort and just start posting all their stuff elsewhere. They've decided to make it hard to get to the stuff that people actually want, and allow videos that are for scams or not even properly targeted, then they're surprised that people are blocking them. If the videos that had the ads could actually be counted on to receive some of the ad revenue, I doubt people would be as interested in adblocking. But, when you have no way of knowing if a video creator is actually getting paid, it makes it a lot harder to feel too bad about blocking videos that are probably for scams anyways.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MIRV888 on Friday May 12, @11:41AM (1 child)
Adblock & noscript is just how the internet works. (for me)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by inertnet on Friday May 12, @11:59AM
Exactly. It's also not "potentially lost revenue" because if I can't block the ads, I'll just find another way to spend my time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12, @11:51AM (5 children)
For what little of value remains on YouTube I just use a downloader and watch it offline. The site is so bloated and slow even without ads as to be nigh unuseable (on a bloody i7).
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday May 12, @12:47PM (4 children)
Yes, it's gotten to the point where often the comments don't even load the first time. I'll then have to refresh before I can even see any of the comments.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Friday May 12, @06:24PM (1 child)
Comments? You mean spam bots talking to each other?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Saturday May 13, @02:23AM
I'm autistic and most of the channels I frequent are from other autistic people. I haven't really seen much of a spam problem there, it's mostly real people talking to each other. I think that most spambots pretty much break when confronted with autistic communication though. There isn't even much of the way of trolling as there aren't usually enough people in those chat sections to bother with.
It's mostly the bigger channels that seem to have those problems, channels with only a few hundred subscribers are barely worth the effort.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Saturday May 13, @02:38AM (1 child)
Has anybody else gotten this, that the comments don't load at all? I had this happen for awhile, then they came back for a few weeks, then they left again: The circular user badge to the left of the comment and the "4 replies" link underneath loads, but the comment content itself is just a blank white field. For all of them.
Not sure whether to complain or thank YouTube, since YT comments are generally like dipping yourself into a sewer anyway.
And if I really want to I can still load the comments on mobile for some reason. Just not on my desktop Chrome/ium installs.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Saturday May 13, @03:07AM
Happens with older SeaMonkey most of the time.
With more or less current Chrome, only rarely.
However my internet is presently really slow, and that makes comments disappear, along with the video description. Also occasionally crashes Chrome (on linux).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rich on Friday May 12, @12:37PM (7 children)
There's a word for it: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification [wiktionary.org], first widely described as such in the semincal Cory Doctorow article at https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ [wired.com]
Both producer and consumer sides of the platform are affected. The viewers merely note increasing add load and loss of useful features. But the content providers suffer from a much nastier strategy: "heating". They think they've hit it big when their little channel suddenly racks up hundreds of thousands of subscribers and can live the high life of a YouTube star. But then the heating is turned down and they have to resort to ever more desperate productions to keep their stream going.
Apparently, catering to a dumb majority helps, which is why we see the open-mouth thumbnails, lots of CAPITAL LETTERS, words like "insane" and "Hitler" even when it's not about the guy himself, and "Dark Something" channel names.. I'd rather have the filtering sort those out. AI probably would do a marvelous job at filtering that mouth-breathing junk.
I have installed browsers with and without ad-blockers and when I occasionally see a YT video on an unblocked browser, I can attest that the ad-load has unbearable. Someone has put up the theory that an ad-paid video site might be a non-sustainable thing, but I don't know about the traffic vs revenue numbers and don't have my own judgement on that.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Friday May 12, @01:32PM
I'm sure that the content providers won't get any part of the $11.99 if you'd decide to pay YouTube. Besides, like you, I'm not interested in show offs that live off the ads. Like that guy that crashed his plane for the views, in today's news (the crash was last year but now he gets his day in court). I don't even want to know people like that.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Friday May 12, @02:13PM (1 child)
We just liked the word...
But you didn't have to go looking for a link to 'Enshittification' - we covered it with a submission by owl [soylentnews.org] linking to here [pluralistic.net] on 21 Jan 2023 from Cory Doctorow's own site, 2 days before the wired article too.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday May 12, @02:36PM
Here's a A Dark Secret: HITLER didn't tell me about your INSANE links!!! 8-O
Guess it shows how my perception already has suffered (among other newfangled stuff) from social media. I might even have picked up the word here. But to be fair, the owl post had "TikTok" in the title and one might assume it's only about irrelevant (*) silly dances, even though Doctorow wrote in his essay that all platforms are affected.
(*) On TikTok, they don't even have the attention span for relevant dances like the one to "Hare Hare Yukai" or even the Ankou (Anglerfish) dance in full length.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SingularityPhoenix on Friday May 12, @03:01PM
Google invested a lot of money into cornering the market. Now that no one can compete with them, they have no motive to provide a good service. They are maximizing revenue. I feel no guilt adblocking while google abuses its monopoly. All the big tech monopolies need to be broken up.
Even with adblock, youtube spends a lot of space promoting their shorts and video rentals. It gets harder to find stuff I want to watch.
(Score: 4, Informative) by aafcac on Friday May 12, @03:13PM (2 children)
Perhaps if they'd stop messing with the people making the content and stop fixing the algorithm results to push things that people don't want, they'd be able to get more money from ads. I've subscribed to things, I've hit the notify button, I should get those videos, but in a lot of cases, YouTube seems to think that I didn't do that on purpose and just kind of buries them.
Also, an awful lot of the ads are crypto scams and the like. I'm not sure what the purpose of showing me those ads is as I'm never going to give them any money. Meanwhile, they could be showing me ads that are targeted to the video that I'm watching and I might actually click the link and buy the product.
This is more or less what happens when people that are incompetent are allowed to run amok. They could simply just target the ads to the content that's being viewed and allow people to find the content that interests them and be done with it. Instead, they try to target the viewers and rig the search results to show things that they think are more popular, and they get nothing. I can't remember the last time I intentionally clicked on one of the links as so few are actually relevant to me.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Saturday May 13, @02:31AM (1 child)
Did you also set your notification settings after Liking and Subscribing? Ring that bell!!1!!
I don't pay attention to this kind of thing much, but it seems to be a "Sometimes-Always-Never notify me"-type thing, even after you subscribe, for some reason.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday May 13, @02:48AM
I think so, but they keep changing the process. The fact that you even need to take that additional affirmative step is kind of ridiculous.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday May 12, @01:09PM (7 children)
YouTube apparently hasn't detected my ad blocker (yet).
Because there are 2 arms races going on:
1. Websites want to force ads through ad blockers. Ad blockers want to block the ads the websites are forcing through.
2. Websites also want to force people to turn off their ad blockers to make it easier to force their ads through. Ad blockers want to get better at avoiding detection by websites so that doesn't work.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12, @01:18PM (6 children)
Which ad blocker is that (the one that YouTube doesn't find)?
I'm using EFF Privacy Badger (blocks trackers) and it's sort of the other way, some sites claim I have an ad-blocker installed (I don't).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12, @01:29PM (1 child)
The usual Adblock Plus works fine, but that could change because they haven't rolled out these updates to all users. You can get the real info you need about privacy addons here: https://digdeeper.club/articles/addons.xhtml [digdeeper.club]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Saturday May 13, @02:27AM
Ever since ABP and NoScript got into their dickwaving contest, and it became widely known that ABP has a whitelist, I've moved off of them. uBlock Origin person here.
Everything in life goes to shit sooner or later, in the case of companies these days usually within 10 years max. How long has AdBlock Plus been around now?
Make the thing nice for free, enjoy several years of success, then monetize it and flush it down the crapper.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday May 12, @02:03PM (1 child)
uBlock Origin, which seems to do a pretty good job with minimal hassle.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday May 13, @03:13AM
I use UBO also, and while I don't see the ads, I do often get a momentary gap, or occasionally a fail and have to reload the page -- pretty sure those are ads vs UBO, because sometimes it will keep crashing the page until I skip forward a couple minutes.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday May 12, @02:23PM (1 child)
I use the Brave browser, which blocks ads by default. It seems to be pretty good at avoiding detection.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday May 12, @04:41PM
I tried Brave for a bit, but I've been using Mozilla since it's infancy. Internet Explorer/Microsoft Edge(Good 'ol ME style there) have always been their own brand of bad. Except now ME is also Chrome kind of bad. Pretty much the only good choice is to choose something that's not Microsoft or Google controlled. I would say Apple, but if you're using Apple may as well Apple.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Funny) by Revek on Friday May 12, @01:19PM (1 child)
Ill just switch to downloading all the video and watching it that way.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 3, Informative) by MIRV888 on Friday May 19, @07:44AM
Ditto. I just pull whatever youtube I want to watch as Mp4.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ChrisMaple on Friday May 12, @01:38PM (10 children)
YouTube wouldn't need so many ads, or need to charge so much for ad-free viewing, if they didn't have to pay the salaries of censors (who are either snowflakes or have a vicious political bias,)
Something that's censored: medical information that opposes politically-protected lies, even when the information is presented by a member of the British Parliament.
Something not censored: transparently absurd claims for an expensive medical product presented in a paid ad.
Something that's censored: mild profanity by someone whose political views YT opposes.
Something not censored: Extended and repeated profanity by someone they like.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12, @01:50PM (4 children)
Google offers this definition from the Oxford Dictionary:
> cen·sor verb
> past tense: censored; past participle: censored
> examine (a book, movie, etc.) officially and suppress unacceptable parts of it.
> "my mail was being censored"
Since YouTube is part of Alphabet (Google), it's a company and not "official" in any way. What YouTube chooses to show is their business. Not to be confused with censorship.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12, @03:03PM
If and when corporate censorship affects you, you'll be screaming a different tune.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aafcac on Friday May 12, @03:43PM
That was a viable opinion before the town square got corporatized. For so many people, this is the place that they have to interact. And if not this site, then a different corporate site.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ChrisMaple on Friday May 12, @07:31PM
Office: The place in which the business of an individual, business, or government bureau, etc. is carried out.
Official: Of or relating to an office or position of authority.
The pronouncements and orders of a Chief Executive Officer are official.
..
People on both left and right have long been complaining about the "corporate state." Whether big businesses are suppressing information because government is extorting them ("Nice business you have here. It would be too bad if you were subject to a Congressional investigation...") or if they're suppressing on their own initiative, the result is the same: suppression of information.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 13, @12:25AM
If they're doing it for the government, then they are acting as an agent of the state. That is definitely censorship. Luckily we still have alternatives, but we need an uncensored search engine to seek them out. Let's try this one [yacy.net]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday May 12, @02:06PM (3 children)
If you know anything at all about British Parliament, you know full well that being an MP makes you less believable, not more. They are, after all, politicians, and if a politician tells you the sky is blue you would do well to look up before believing them.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by RedGreen on Friday May 12, @03:29PM (1 child)
"If you know anything at all about British Parliament, you know full well that being an MP makes you less believable, not more."
If they are member of the Repugnant Party wanna to be party the Conservatives then 99.99999999% of the time they are trying to do harm to their people and are totally lying their ass off. Like the idiots in the US they aim to be like they have went out of their way to kill off many of their citizens using the garbage they spew at all times as they can. Usually the other parties while being lying cocksuckers are not out to actively kill off the people they serve, they try to do some good for the people unlike that right wing trash.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 13, @02:22AM
you want to try that again in english?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 13, @12:31AM
They don't care if you "believe" them, they just want you to reelect them
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Friday May 12, @06:40PM
YouTube generally has good policy for that and doesn't censor things. You generally have to bat-shit-crazy to get censored there, and even then, it's unlikely. Maybe if you trigger the AI filters on some stuff?
Demonetization, on the other hand, is completely different game. Many content creators now use alternatives to getting funded, like patreon or whatever.
You see, you would be semi-correct there except for the 2nd part about political views. And semi-correct, because they don't censor here, but demonetize and stop recommending these videos and channels ;) That would actually be a good thing because 10 years ago you could get to some weird-ass place by just following some recommended click-bait for 5 clicks. you often then got a comment like "ok, I've reached end of internet for today"
Also, funny thing in hindsight to remember is that Nazis always portrayed themselves as victims of the Communists and that they had to protect their nation from external and internal enemies. .... so, if your internal opinions about the world start to sound like that (the wrong political views are all against me, etc. my country is under attack by immigrants, minorities or some other group that can't defend themselves), then you should re-evaluate that maybe you don't have good company in your views.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday May 12, @01:51PM (3 children)
My problem is, to pay for a premium Youtube account, I need a Youtube account. Therr's no way on God's green Earth I'm opening ANY account with Google: they track me heavily enough when I try my hardest to anonymously evade their surveillance, I have no intention of helping them by voluntarily identifying myself.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday May 12, @04:38PM
I've been on the Google and Microsoft e-mail services for so long, they probably know more about me than almost anyone. Doesn't mean I'm going to accept advertisements from either of them, though. Certainly not the stupid kind, which is most of them.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Saturday May 13, @02:19AM
Aside from the privacy concerns...
Maybe if it didn't cost $12 a month. Really? YouTube is not worth almost $150/year to me. Maybe $5/mo, if I'm feeling generous. Reduce it to $20/yr and I'd probably pay. There's no way in hell Google is hurting, that they have to pry more money out of our hands :P
AKA the "12 different streaming sites problem", which is why I still use DownloadHelper/yt-dlp to rip stuff off bootleg streaming sites. (That, and I've watched like a grand total of 4 shows that were actually on in the last 10 years. Current TV sucks.)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday May 13, @03:17AM
That's why I have a GMail account, that I use for nothing else: to keep all the Google snooping in one place.
Meanwhile, I've had Google's whole swarm of adservers in HOSTS for so many years that they probably think I'm dead. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday May 12, @02:10PM (1 child)
Have not seen any so far. I suspect that if they were to show up the viewership or eyeballs on youtube videos would plummet. That said they might not care as non-paying-eyeballs doesn't count. But then the entire views/subscriber numbers shown on youtube are faulty anyway -- there is noway that someone that have 100k+ subs only have 5-10k views on their videos etc.
If this gets implemented I suspect I can just run circles around it anyway. The previous tricks if the adblocking doesn't work or if the content is age or geo-locked is to just either VPN in there or to use one of those sites that download the video content to you -- that neatly also skips all the ads, geolocation checks, age checks and such.
So I don't really understand what they hope to gain here. All this will do is reveal the fraud that is there viewer and sub numbers, sort of like how Musk noted that a lot of the twitter users are basically zombie users or doesn't exists anymore.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday May 12, @02:50PM
There is, they bury those videos and don't show them to those that have subscribed, because they have other videos that they'd rather the subscribers watch. I wouldn't mind the ads so much if YouTube wasn't rigging the algorithm and was actually passing some of the money to the creators consistently. It's one thing to require that there be enough ad revenue to justify the cost of accounting for the money and transfer fees, but what they're doing goes above and beyond that with the requirements getting stricter and stricter over time.
(Score: 5, Touché) by GloomMower on Friday May 12, @03:08PM (2 children)
I really like how a lot of the ads are for products that are obviously snake oil products with a long made up story, human trafficking adjacent mail order brides, or mobile games that show very stupid game play or game play that isn't even in the actual game they are selling.
The snake oil ads take stock video and add a text to speech voice over for some long narrative in how some genius discovered something revolutionary and now you can have it.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday May 12, @04:35PM (1 child)
I literally don't browse the internet without my adblocker. Using a site like YouTube, without one, seems like a recipe for disaster.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Friday May 12, @06:00PM
This. If your site won't let me see it with my ad blocker enabled, I don't want to see your site. It's that simple. Life's too short.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday May 12, @03:19PM (3 children)
YouTube channels that read a script and insert an advertisement into their video are the lesser of the two evils. They are doing work to make the money to create content, etc. and it works. I would much rather sit through a few seconds of advertisements that they've put in and still use YouTube, if it really came down to you must have advertisements or go home. Assumedly, you like the YouTube channel host(s) for the channels that you are watching. Which already makes the advertisements less stupid. Especially, if they have creative license and/or good tie-ins. It makes me think back on the "advertisements" that Red Skelton did on B/W TV. Sure, perhaps they sponsors and paying him good money or the studio good money or the like. Yet, it was done in Red Skelton style and it was hilarious. Actually worth watching nowadays. Perhaps those were just his spoofs on them, I really can't tell at this point. Still, advertisements done like that, are actually entertaining and flow with what you're watching. Probably the most important part is that those kinds of advertisements don't create an additional attack vector.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWQWzZVw61o&pp=ygUbcmVkIHNrZWx0b24gdGlkZSBjb21tZXJjaWFs [youtube.com] (Click at your own risk, I've just grabbed a random YouTube video compilation of Red Skelton commercials. Unwatched and unclicked. Same for the Deadeye video below, because John Wayne + Red Skelton == awesome.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQcdI_ZRYjM&pp=ygUbcmVkIHNrZWx0b24gdGlkZSBjb21tZXJjaWFs [youtube.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Saturday May 13, @02:10AM (2 children)
https://www.google.com/search?q=sponsorblock [google.com]
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 13, @05:29AM (1 child)
I'd like to see an AI that I can program to watch TV all day, and trigger on redundant content, that is, the exact starts and ends of identical content of -say- 20 seconds or more, and flag that for skip or cut on the transcribed copy.
The AI will proxy for me, and watch those seemingly endless re-runs of the exact same message. Then show me the copy with the redundant information removed.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Saturday May 13, @07:53AM
Until then we rely on open source "enough eyeballs."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday May 12, @03:44PM
My ad blocker is very quiet. Not loud at all. I like uMatrix because it gives fine grained control.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Friday May 12, @07:21PM (4 children)
I see a lack of insight in the comments...
YouTube isn't a charity. They aren't gouging users either, they are literally losing money providing free video hosting for the world.
Unless you want to play a child, you have to accept that either YouTube figures out a viable monetization strategy, through some combination of ads and paid services (which they are doing in this post), or they shut down.
It's certainly possible that free video hosting at scale isn't viable period, but IMO it is a net positive to have such a free video hosting provider if they can make it work, even if YouTube has to undergo "enshittification" (also known as financial reality).
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12, @07:59PM
While this is all nice and true, nobody forced Google to buy YouTube, ruin it, ruin it some more afterward, and add even more ads than it initially had and simultaneously make them more intrusive. They ran it into the ground and are upset about it, and are now trying to shift the blame for that to the userbase.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 12, @09:16PM
Lack of insight? Perhaps some of us don't realize yet, that Google is the major internet gatekeeper. The gatekeepers are making insane amounts of money, from government, from business, from private citizens.
How much money would Google have to squander on meaningless bullshit, before they started hurting? The only tech company with deeper pockets (I think) would be Apple. Either of their budgets dwarfs those of entire nations.
It doesn't really matter though. A lot of content producers are moving, and viewers are following them. When offered a choice of Youtube or Rumble, I'll almost always click the Rumble link. Apparently, Rumble is making money, and they don't try to block my ad-blockers.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday May 13, @02:28AM
YouTube isn't a charity, but they could make the ads a lot less annoying and a lot more effective by simply targeting the ads to the videos and just give people the videos that they want rather than pushing big channels. So many of the ads that I've seen lately are for outright scams, but somehow a bit of foul language too early in a video or talking about taboo subjects is enough for YouTube to demonetize a video.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Friday May 19, @07:54AM
That's apparent by what they pay users for content.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Friday May 19, @07:51AM
I've been anti-advertising since before the internet. I just hate being influenced to buy X. 30 minute shows were actually 23 minutes on old timey tv. The rest were ads. It hasn't changed much.