Here in Austria I get the anti adblocker message every single time I visit so I don't care much anymore and just dropped it. I'm rather watching shows now lol
Luckily Libretube and Piped still work so I haven't had to visit the normal Youtube site in ages, I do know Youtube increased their aggression towards third party frontends too tho so we will see how long the Newpipe extractor will work I guess!
It's likely they don't have much of a choice as a business. The more people use ad blockers, the more ads they need to show to make up for the loss in revenue.
It's hard to argue that they don't have a monopoly. I think the best thing to happen would be to break up both Google and Youtube, turn it into smaller alternatives that need to factor their appeal to users again.
I'm old enough to remember when none of this stuff existed. I have a threshold Beyond which I simply stop using the service.
I'm actually pretty close to my lifestyle from before 1995. I don't have any cable I have basic internet I don't do any of the Music Services. Video-wise I only have Prime and any free services I can get on Chromecast for TV. I'm getting close to my threshold with prime, as the annual fee is getting real high.
I'm already starting to lose interest in most YouTube channels. It's not so bad here, really. I get to experience reality more.
Smart content creators have been setting up websites, Patreons, merchandise shops, and all they need to jump ship when YouTube finally capsizes. The likely/easy/inexpensive alternative for content creators, is PeerTube.
Half of the videos they recommend to me are things I've already watched. Sometimes there'll just be blank slots like they couldn't find any content to recommend. It's so shit now.
I seriously wish Patreon would improve the UI because I can see that being where I get my videos. Until then, Nebula is where most of my favorite creators are flocking.
Tempted to looking in to self hosting video content, it’s a real storage hog, but if compressed, I imagine some of the mid sized youtube channels could afford to do so, the real shame will be the difficulty for smaller creators to get discovered without a common platform.
The problem isn’t storing it, it’s hosting and delivering content.
YouTube, Netflix, and all the other big streaming platforms have huge amounts of servers around the world delivering content with minimal latency and without saturating the Internet exchanges with gigantic amounts of data traffic.
If we were to do this peer-2-peer people would have to get used to waiting for pages and videos to load again.
Does anyone else ever notice that the changes like this they make are done piece mail, brick by brick ,they continue to shitify the service. That's intentional...Imagine you tube in the year 2009. I'm betting no one really remembers, and youtube made the same bet.
How many things have they taken away that users really like over the years think about it. Now imagine they did all those changes AT ONCE...TODAY... from 2005 at inception.
Horrifying huh ?
Big companies always start off with an amazing array of "Standard Features" that they allow everyone to use, so that the users get hooked on them, then suddenly they make an announcement like this and they change, remove, or premium tier a feature. They know you wont like it... but they got you hooked and they know it and they dont care. It's all driven at profiteering as much as they can off of you. Honestly I see youtube trying to become like Netflix by continuing to increase inconvenience with ads (for their profit), and ultimately making Youtube a completely payed service subscription to everyone.
They gaslight the great majority into just giving in to more ads, shittier service, and eventually a payed subscription by breaking your outrage up into small little pieces over time. STOP LETTING THEM !
Would be nice if they started recruiting people who create tutorials too. It’s almost impossible to find video tutorials on blender outside of YouTube and now tiktok
Big Same. I’ve had it for three years now and it’s been really great to see a YouTube alternative actually flourish and survive. My subscription is almost due, and they have a lifetime option for $250 (normally $300, I think the discount is for my last years fee) that I’m sorely tempted by.
Edit: Just to note, so no one’s put off from subscribing, the current rate is $30/year. It was $50 last year. Which does mean the lifetime pass is 10 years at the current rate. But if they’re successful, that rate’s not going to stay static for all of that time. Not trying to be a shill for them, but if you like any of the creators on there it’s a good way of supporting them.
Anyways both Nebula and Curiositystream have lifetime subscriptions available right now... 90% of my YouTube viewing is from creators on those sites anyway
I've had several lifetime subscriptions that have been made into paid monthly subscriptions. Lifetime subscription is a gamble that I have yet to see pay off.
It also CAN'T be good for you long-term. Eventually providers start losing money on you. Which means they fail, or they start looking for other ways to monetize you that you probably won't like.
Like, say, Plex.
I choose yearly when I can for this kind of thing.
Nebula: pay $300 once, lifetime access. They had it up for a week on a trial run a while ago, and they decided to bring it back for now.
curiosity stream: I think I found a deal on Stack Social, + coupon, that worked out to $180. The basic 1080p format only. Again, pay once, lifetime access.
The payoff time for Nebula is around 8 years (not counting possible price increases in the future), so you'll have to have faith that they'll last that long. I hope they do though. Curiositystream is obviously less. Then again, the immediate cash infusion they get from this can also help them survive/expand faster.
I really like their business model, but unfortunately did not really use curiositystream in the month I tried out the superbundle. Some of the documentaries were alright, but it wasn't really my thing.
I may return to nebula if google figures out a way to axe adblockers for good, though
Doesn’t matter. People will still eat that shit up! YouTube is the best example of Stockholm syndrome I’ve ever seen. This shit should be taught about in schools.
I've massively reduced my time spent with youtube over the last year or so when I noticed that the overall experience was just getting worse and worse.
Previously I'd watch a video, and from there jump to another interesting video, and so on - now pretty much all the top level suggestions are useless already, and it's rare that after watching a video you get something worth watching recommended.
I assume it's not just youtubes fault - while I do think youtube is pushing those videos even from people I used to like I now see more videos where they go on for 20 minutes about something that should've been said in 3 minutes max.
I now almost exclusively use youtube to watch videos from people I've subscribed years ago, and as they either become annoying to go with youtubes algorithm, or eventually stop/slow uploading my usage goes down. Nowadays I often enough don't open youtube for two weeks, while previously there rarely was a day without checking at least a few videos.
now pretty much all the top level suggestions are useless already, and it's rare that after watching a video you get something worth watching recommended.
Ok people, time to decide. Do you want targeted recommendations or do you want privacy?
Because the only way for YouTube to figure out what you may find interesting today is to go through your watch history, rummage through your engagement metrics, and suck up your profile details. Then collate and process a ton of data about you and your preferences, compare that knowledge against a vast library of channels & streams to try and figure out what would likely make you click on a given video. All while fighting spam, misinformation, and people trying to game the system with SEO and clickbait. All in real-time, as over 300,000 hours of content is being uploaded every minute.
To be clear, I'm not defending YouTube or Google. I'm just saying it's not all cut-and-dried as many people think.
The problem is that there is no valid alternative at the moment, so I wouldn't call that Stockholm sybdrome. Hosting that much content for free costs ungodly amounts of money to Google
They will lose control of the pre roll and post roll ads but maintain control of the ad breaks during the video. This is actually a smart change and data driven.
And i'm here wonder: do most creator care about how ads are setup? I'm pretty sure, out of the millions of creator, only a small number of them will control how ads are display, the rest only care about how much money they make. And tbf, if a platform is free, that's how they earn money.
It's quite obvious that most people commenting here didn't read the post, given that it says 90% of creators already have all ad types enabled for pre and post video already, and that it directly leads to greater payouts to them.