All companies seem to be doing their best lately to cure us of our social media addiction.
Yeah for real. Enshittification has gotten me permanently off Facebook for like 4 years and Twitter for like 10. Reddit now for a few months. Getting ready to leave YouTube.
I have been playing guitar a lot more lately 😊
Been telling myself I need to get more exercise…
Are you me? I have been off of Twitter and Facebook for years now. Reddit is dead to me. YouTube seems like it’s heading in the shitter. I’ve also been playing more guitar lately too! I’m still early on, I think I’m progressing nicely but I’m firmly in the “novice” stage. Take it from someone who didn’t exercise at all before, you’ll do yourself great even taking a nice walk for 20-30 minutes every day possible. It gets easier everyday, and they become enjoyable.
Haha pretty close! I’m more of a veteran guitar player. Just very rusty. Used to be 4-6 hrs a day. Now is more like 4-6 hrs a month. Last month was more like 4-6 hrs a week though!!
I hiked a lot during the pandemic! New job has had me sitting at my desk and ordering delivery though. Too much pot and beer, and I’m starting to feel winded doing things that are setting off some early alarm bells lol
Been telling myself I need to get more exercise…
I decided to get offline more and get more exercise. I found a personal trainer who runs his own gym. He has a media center set up to play music. It plays youtube videos. Without an adblock.
I’ve seen more youtube ads at the gym than I’ve seen when I’m doomscrolling at home.
My exercise of choice is hiking, so I’m all set to see less ads when exercising.
…for now :shudder:
less not none
I’ve been using GitHib as a social media. But instead of memes I see pull requests and commits.
Back to videogame addiction it is boys!
I missed it tbh
I’m back on internet forums now. Screw the big companies.
Can you recommend some general forums that focus on a wide array of topics? Or do you only visit niché community forums?
The Whirlpool forums are probably going to meet that requirement, though they’re local to Australia. I’m not sure of a global equivalent…
Imagine if this turned out to legitimately be true, sarcasm aside.
They WANT us to stop fighting and just use social media less lmfao.
They can suck my balls and pay me a million before i enter their shitshow of a website without adblocker(s)
Indeed, I’ll go through any technical challenge to keep watching adless, or just quit if it becomes impossible (which wont happen)
Facebook has been able to get around ad blockers for years. Google’s probably going to be able to do the same.
Open your ublock Origin dashboard and add the following 4 lines:
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0) youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, []) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
You’re welcome.
I highly appreciate your effort but I’m not sure if I even want to go to YouTube anymore. Is my life really going to get worse without YouTube?
I’m worried one day they will re-encode videos with advertisements themselves, or something similar to that. Although I guess SponsorBlock takes care of that, until they straight up just break/remove extensions with their crazy “Web Environment Integrity” proposal.
That would screw up those who actually pay for YouTube. But who knows.
Not if they serve a different video based on your account status. They always have ways of doing things lol
Yeah, I knew there was some way for them to make it work.
Thank you.
Just commenting so I can remember to do this when I get home.
Hey don’t forget
You can just bookmark it.
But then people won’t comment and I’ll forget lol
Did you do it yet?
Did you remember
Just to double-check. Do we add that to “my filters”? That’s where I added it.
The illusion of infinite growth on “free use” ad based business dies when investment funds demand more benefits from former startups now turned into corporations whose only asset of value is the their users’ data. You are the product, so it’s time to squeeze you.
I think such data is currently overvalued on a overgrown ad-targeting market with too many competitors, and adding more ads only devaluates each ad value further, because users’ consuming capacity also has a limit. So I see a severe correction coming. Another bubble burst, and another crisis inside the crisis that late capitalism itself is.
Excellent analysis!
The fediverse makes the internet feel more alive than ever.
It feels less mindless scrolling and more interaction.
There are also discussions and (small) flame wars ☺️
Feels like ‘back in the day’ where everything was a bit wonky but people could actually help eachother (and not being nudge nudge nudged all the time to be distracted by something else).
That’s one part of how the internet dies, there are others. For example: soon the vast majority of the content on the internet will have been created by bots (AI or not). Or even by malicious folks pushing narratives.
TLDR: not only the internet is becoming more annoying to use it is also constantly becoming less useful with worse content replacing everything that was ever good
And the problem with content created by bots is that it is usually made to not look like that was the case. Sometimes that’s not the problem like some random site with information about a video game can have all of its content generated automatically based on data extracted from that game. That is fine.
But other cases, specially with AI content, can be much worse. There was a recent example where some site with history content had generated some pages using an AI and that AI created a page about Scimitars which included information taken from Dungeons and Dragons, but presented then as historic facts.
And the main problem here is that the internet feeds on itself. Texts are copied from one site to another by non-AI bots. Some text created by AI in one site gets copied to multiple threads on reddit, hacker news, stack overflow, 4chan and all sorts of places. Places that are scanned by search engines and often picked as preferred search results by users.
Then Google these days try everything to make a larger profit from you. That includes “stealing” content from inside websites to display on top of the search results page - so that you never click away from the Google site. In order to do that more efficiently, they give preference to sites that allow this behavior over sites with actual better search results. Try googling “country in Africa with the letter K”.
So in the end all your search results will soon be stuff that was written by AI. And remember: AI doesn’t think. It won’t ever do. AI is just a robot role-playing as human.
When you see a comedian doing a Stephen Hawking impression, you don’t expect them to publish scientific papers, in fact you don’t pay any attention to what they actually say, because you know it’ll either be rubbish or just a repeat of something that Hawking had said before. AI is the same thing. It’ll never be intelligent, it’ll only get better at imitating humans, by looking at what humans say. And with their content taking over the internet, it’ll soon be imitating itself.
And the only memory of the golden years of the internet, will maybe be Wikipedia. Have you donated to them yet? Think about how many times you’ve used it and remember it has never shown an ad other than their pleas for donation. Please consider giving them a few bucks when you’ve some to spare.
I think the solution is to just return to the old web https://thewebisfucked.com/
I think you’re probably right but I also think that people will try to adopt by going back to the old forum model of access-restricted, highly moderated, trust-based spaces for individual topics instead of mega-aggregators like Reddit.
Maybe that’s just hopium and nostalgia though.
I think you might be right. Imagine a fediverse app that allows content creators to self-host videos. They get the generated revenue directly instead of going through the website, they get paid in direct relation to how many videos they serve, and when I see an ad there, I know I am effectively paying the content creator.
deleted by creator
I Google “country in Africa with the letter k” and don’t get what you mean.
For most folks now, Google shows the text from this link as the answer:
Once most of the YouTube users are captured under the subscription, prices will raise again and again and again and again and again and ag
And the quality of the service is going to get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and wor
Why is getting everyone cut off bef
Oh god, no. The fediverse killer is ba
While there are a billion things Google does that annoys me I’m not able to figure out how to create and maintain a video streaming platform without ads or paywall that finances both creation and the providing material.
I mean, who are the competitors and how do they finance it if not in a similar way?
I’d argue Youtube was better when creators weren’t paid and people were just having genuine fun. The internet used to be free and filled with content by people with passion. Much like users and the current state of the fediverse.
I really just hate the “influencer culture” it spawned, and every idiot trying to emulate that meta instead of just making content.
I can absolutely understand that point of view and even agree to an extent.
However, as a counterpoint: creative people being able to support themselves with their work means they can focus on their art instead of it just being a side hobby to their money making job
Yes, but then you get channels like Linus Tech Tips where it became less about product reviews and just about volume production garbage content and forced contraversial content to keep revenue stream.
You also get countless other smaller channels that are just large enough to have youtube be their primary income, but small enough where they stay true to their original intent.
Anytime it is your primary income there is built in propensity to stray to ensure you income is maintained when viewership might wane. I think the channels where a dude works full time and youtube is the side gig has more chance of maintaining integrity.
A channel where a dude works full time and YouTube is a side gig wouldn’t buy a $250k sound chamber to measure how loud the fans are on a crappy prebuilt (GN - the people who made the initial video about LTT). There are significant benefits to being full time dedicated to creating this content, and being paid well in response. Something like this would only be possible following your model if they already made tons of money outside of YT, in which case, they’re already rich so what’s stopping them from going full time doing what they want anyway and uploading those videos?
Seems a lot of channels grow and employ more people but for like no reason now they have a bunch of employee’s and costs and have to undermine their morals and quality to push out content to make money. In reality the quality of content has gone down so what was the point except employing friends and family at best.
This is just how art is in general.
You bring a great point I hadn’t considered before. Only people with passion for something will do it for free while many more people with so that for cash. Though it’s interesting to see that cash doesn’t make passionate people’s content better it just makes more mediocre content.
Well, people with a passion also want to do what they do for a living.
There’s also a class issue at play. If it can only be an unpaid hobby, then only people with the time to dedicate to it (in lieu of a second paying gig) and the disposable income to buy the necessary equipment (financed entirely by their paid job) are able to participate. For example, I work with people who are also working artists. They use the income from selling their art from their hobby to pay for those materials. It’s not enough to live off, so it’s not their primary income, but they wouldn’t be able to participate in their hobby at the level they currently are if they weren’t able to sell their work. Allowing people to profit from their labor makes these spaces more inclusive and diverse.
Certainly - and there still are those channels that we all love for their dedication. But there are a lot more mediocre channels too
If they weren’t paid there would just be way more sponsorship deals and ad reads.
I think this person pines for the days of “Charlie bit me” and the "Harder Better Faster Stronger"s, when people posted videos because they had free time and wanted to share their hobbies, not because they wanted money.
I’m a little torn on this and I think it is relevant beyond video. I can see an emerging non-commercial web coexisting with the commercial one.
On the same note, it is amazing how people complain about quality of journalism, but get mad if they see an ad or have to pay a subscription to news sites.
I do have to second that concept there. Giving everything away absolutely free is not a sustainable business model. If we don’t like ads, and we don’t like paywalls, we need to actually start figuring out a sustainable model. And no tiny ads that are nowhere near where anyone looks, do not actually generate revenue, because people don’t fork over much money to put up ads in places where few people will see them.
So we either need a system to have people give money directly to avoid ads, or we need a system of ads that… well are appealing both to those who want to post ads, while being acceptable to end users.
Yea I dont think people realize how little those tiny lil ads around the corners of the display pay. It’s very little
There’s always Web Monetization, where you can put some fixed money in and it is supposed to be streamed to the sites you visit by your browser. But I’ve never seen it actually implemented as a requirement for a site.
I don’t have much money right now to donate to help fund my favorite content creators, though I absolutely would, but I do have a lot of technical knowledge and I could donate compute time, disk storage space, and/or bandwidth to host redundant copies of data for a given web service (akin to seeding Torrents, or ZeroNet zites)
There are some things like that. For Podcasting there is the value for value method (I forget the name) you watch / listen to content which sends you credits, you can also purchase credits. If you like a channel you can send them your credits. So it is direct support rather than ads giving portion of revenue. If cash is difficult they ask for value for value by donating your time to help in someway, completly optional though. odysee and LBRY were setup that way also, but too bad LBRY CEO was charged with securities fraud
I’ve noticed that right-wing propaganda outlets generally do not paywall, but “center” and center-left outlets usually do.
That’s because the content is not the product.
That’s because those propaganda outlets are generally bankrolled by billionaires who profit through tax cuts enacted by politicians voted into power by people radicalized by the propaganda. Different business model
The opposite is true in Australia. All the Murdoch papers are hard-paywalled—they usually can’t even be bypassed by tools like 12ft. The slightly-less-right-wing papers from Fairfax use a soft paywall that can be bypassed with Incognito mode.
The rigidly centralist ABC is required by statute to be freely available, and left leaning media like the Guardian and the Conversation use, at most, a modal requesting donations which can be dismissed.
YouTube has some competitors…
Twitch - Not for general purpose video uploads and sort of stingy with how much you can upload. Twitch only saves highlights and YouTube saves everything you’ve ever uploaded.
Tiktok - Chinese spyware. Every video is vertical. Every video has stupid songs playing in the background and that TikTok logo. Not really for long form videos or anything serious.
Vimeo - You pay them to upload your video.
…if not in a similar way
Twitch - not different from YouTube since they display ads and they have a premium service. On top of that I can add that without female streamers dressing sexy and not always playing video games Twitch would not have as high revenue.
Tiktok. - still shows ads so they are not financing things in a different way.
Vimeo - yes, they finance their services in a different way. But it still doesn’t answer how their content creators make money since Vimeo charge the content creators and doesn’t allow ads. But seriously, Vimeo isn’t a competitor to YouTube. I have a hard time imagining how they would grow to even a third of the size of YouTube.
paywall that finances both creation and the providing material.
Finance creation? It promotes lazy copycat contents. Even respectful (at least before their YouTube career) tech/artisan/DIYers etc are falling for the clickbait, the YouTube’s basic/teen humor… I pass on the tabloid stuff.
You want to make views. use these keywords:
- Apple
- I spent $$$ on …
- AI
The thing is that platform is just a TV.
I guess content creators should also pay for their access on the platform, not just a cut on the revenue. it will enforce good/honest creation .You might criticize the content all you want but it’s another discussion for another time. The question is still it still how to finance a site like YouTube, with the content and amount of viewers it has, without ads or fees.
Your solution with content owners/creators paying for the housing of their creation is Vimeo.
Not even close to YouTube
YouTube quality can’t compete with premiere television. Or even the premiere league
It’s ok that you have that opinion.
I spent $$$ on Apple AI! You won’t believe what happened next!
pretty sure yt has little competition, at least around western audiences (not sure how the situation is outside here), and i doubt hosting a website is actually expensive. If anything, a lot of banks are getting worried on the lack of real money they have. Thats apparently needed to revive us industry because us government doesnt want its facilities in china anymore (doensn’t make sense though, the government has no problem creating money out of thin air, to save big banks). For that reason the entertainment sector is starting to monetize everything possible, squeezing out of people that on average, don’t actally have all that much money.
At least that my understanding of it
Hosting regular websites with heavy traffic can start to get expensive. Video streaming is extremely expensive.
Could something built on ipfs not compete?
wait actually didn’t know this. Can you expand on that? tbh i’m quite ignorant in technology
If one video stream to one user uses 128 kilobyte per second out of your 100 megabit internet connection 781 users can watch that stream at the same time. However, the ISP will charge you per transferred gigabyte each month. So let’s say that you serve 781 users that video 24/7 in a full month of 31 days … It will be 100 megabit divided by 8 to get 12.5 megabyte. So it’s 12.5 megabyte per second. That’s 750 megabyte per minute. That’s 45 gigabyte per hour. That’s 1 terabyte or day. So around 31 terabyte traffic per month. (If you use this much bandwidth you will get a discount but it’s still not going to be
Now, that’s just for 781 simultaneously users.
What is we need to serve 781000 simultaneous users?
Now, this far we’ve only been talking about one video on repeat 14/7. What about 100000 videos and enough programmers and computers to design as system that lets each and every user choose any video whenever they need to? Now you suddenly have thousands of servers and harddisks running in a couple of hundred places on earth 24/7.
Now this is for you to provide your users 100000 different videos even before you start to pay content creators for their hard work.
Also, you need to be available 24/7 so now you have to make backups, redundant servers on different location that can take over in case of an accident, dedicated internet connection (being alone on the internet cable is not the same as sharing it with 100 other sites) and a whole lot of other things you need to take care of.
What about offering the 500 million videos YouTube offers their users?
… and all of this cost is paid out of your pocket?
By your reasoning, every single platform should be in the same shitty state of yt. Google is not as annoying, and most users don’t need access to those google services that are paywalled (at least in my country). as far as i’ve seen, only yt and sometimes twitch put ads that you must watch in order to access their services. At least they hope we must watch them, i guess. Your argument was wonderful big numbers, but you got me with more questions than before
Text things are extremely data light. All of wikipedia’s text is smaller than a 2k movie. There is absolutely data stuff happening in the background on the server that makes it more complicated, but the actual piped data that goes from a google search result is actually quite small (though larger than it used to be).
Video is at the other end. There’s only so many things you can do to a video to reduce the amount of stuff you send to the user (and a lot of the things you do put more strain on the user’s computer to interpret what you’ve sent).
Music, singular images, video game data, and mass data tend to be somewhere in the middle, though context does matter for each of them.
Comparatively, sending videos and storing videos for later use is many times a more resource-expensive task than sending an image, forum post, email, weather updates etc.
It doesn’t have to be ads before videos, but it does have to be something (subscription services, the page itself being littered with ads, state backing etc).
By your reasoning, every single platform should be in the same shitty state of yt
What comparable platforms are you talking about that is not running ads or have some sort of pay-to-watch?
If we talk about Twitch and their revenue I can promise you that they would not be very profitable without female streamers dressed sexy that doesn’t always play video games.
We now live in a world where users got used to never have to pay for content or experience. Even though Google makes insane money in different areas the cost for running and developing YouTube is huge. I’m not a fan of ads (I don’t see ads when at home because of how I have set up my network) and the subscription plans always seems too pricey for the value I get when using different streaming services
But all of this doesn’t change the fact that even though I don’t like ads or paying for content I still haven’t come up with a better solution myself.
Just use PeerTube or Jellyfin.
Yea of all the things to bitch about with Google, this one’s pretty understandable tbh
Proferring it as ToS violation is actually quite concerning for anyone using the same google account for their primary email and as a youtube account’
Note to self: create a burner account just for YouTube.
Wait I already did.
Unless you also have a burner device for using it from, Google definitely know that both of those accounts belong to you, and a TOS violation on one will cause both to be suspended anyway. They will quote the section of their TOS related to using another account to get around a suspension.
Well I don’t have a main Google account because Google, so having a burner YouTube account is great for privacy.
Might actually be a great time to move the last things I use my Google account to other services
Drink verification can.
Please drink a verification can
Better than having to watch ads IMHO
Mastodon exploded when Elon took over Twitter. Lemmy exploded when Reddit changed it’s api rules. I think the problem is not that YouTube doesn’t fuck things up, because they often do. Perhaps the alternatives are not good enough for early majority to migrate. We need more early adopters to migrate ASAP. (I’m thinking of PeerTube, but perhaps Odyssee has beter changes at the moment)
Peertube mass migration when?
Reddit = Text based platform. Text: 1 Character = 1 Byte
Migration Difficulty: Easier than curing my depression
Youtube = Video based platform. Videos: [Error, Not Enough Storage] (Also bandwidth)
Migration Difficulty: Maybe try your luck at winning the lottery instead (and if you win, you can spend the money hosting a Peertube Instance)
🥲
Bandwidth is easily dealt with for PeerTube as it’s peer-to-peer.
There are problems with PeerTube but everyone jumps to bandwidth and storage, yet they’re the things that PeerTube has solutions for.
The issues I’ve seen are hurdles in federating because of many undesirable instances/content (somewhat fixed by community whitelists) and privacy since p2p exposes IP addresses.
Otherwise PeerTube is super interesting to me as a platform with a lot of potential.
One of the areas where YouTube/Vimeo/Facebook/Twitch really excel, compared to things like PeerTube, is storing a shitload of file formats with all the different options of resolution/quality and codec. When a user uploads a supported file, YouTube automatically generates files containing h.264 video in mp4 containers at several different resolutions/bandwidth/quality settings, and then processes the more popularly viewed videos into more bandwidth-efficient codecs, like VP9 or AV1 (at the cost of much more processing/server load, which is why they only do this for videos that reach a particular threshold of views).
Then, when someone views a video, it seamlessly sends the “best” video for that person’s resources and supported codecs, including stepping up or down in quality mid-stream based on the performance of that connection.
Decentralization of these functions is a complex task, because not everyone will have the right hardware to do these things efficiently. Intel, AMD, and Apple CPUs support different hardware acceleration for video encoding or decoding, while Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and Apple have different GPU support, too. So transcoding and related functionality tends to be much more device-dependent. It’s not an insumountable problem, but in the meantime we’ll just basically live with less efficient quality-per-bandwidth settings on PeerTube videos. So that’ll exacerbate the cost of storage and bandwidth (or the quality) in a service that relies on user-donated storage and bandwidth.
Since video hosting is difficult, and there’s monetization, it won’t be very soon. Video hosting platforms are more resillient of enshittification side effects, and Alphabet will rather lose money on hosting videos, than let go off of a monopoly they have through YouTube.
Monetization is stupid, uploading both on youtube and peertube is easy. User using adblock don’t generate monetization anyway. Also, there’s all the sponsors nowadays
Many have to rely on YouTube premium instead, as adblocking is getting more and more difficult, and also difficult on mobile.
Monetization is how many can allow themselves to make videos. Not everyone can find a part-time job, that still pays enough to at least somewhat sustain yourself.
Soon, let them stab themselves some more.
Dear Youtube,
I’ve been using you daily since before you were bought by Google. I have watched undoubted millions of youtube videos over the last 17 years.
The mother fucking nanosecond you start blocking me from watching your content because I have an ad blocker is the moment I sit here and just rip every each and every single mother fucking video I want to watch to view entirely offline. Given you’ve tried and failed for a decade now to stop us from doing that I trust it’ll solve both our needs, you won’t have me blocking your ads, and I won’t need to ever see em. Savvy? Savvy!
With a level of spite indescribable,
Me.
Edit: For those whining about my entitlement: QQ more idc.
Edit 2: Ya’ll still commenting and downvoting a week later while I haven’t thought about any of you at all lmao. Rent free!
I mean… ‘oh no a person who doesn’t watch our ads is going to not watch our ads’
Not sure they’ll care about the ‘loss’’
Now it’s “a person who doesn’t watch our ads isn’t using up bandwidth”
Then they logically wouldn’t have cared about the adblock in the first place…? Although I’m intending to go back to doing the same and it’s not about whether I make them sad or not. It’s a quality of life thing.
I mean they care about adblock because it blocks their ads… They don’t expect people to know beyond just using adblock
They don’t care. You cost them money.
Don’t wait! We need to all start ripping videos and sharing in torrents. We have to back up all the educational quality videos.
Just like with shows / movies, it’s time to start hoarding because things will only get worse.
Oh trust me my 30TB of HDD’s and ADHD already got started on the data hoarding front many a year ago. Haven’t had a paid subscription to anything since Netflix in 2014 lmao.
30tb doesn’t even cover the movies in my library, let alone TV, YouTube, etc. Get ripping son
Soon as I find a sugarmama to buy my broke ass some new HDD’s I will 🤣
Any tools available for ripping cataloging youtube videos ala sonarr?
undoubted millions of youtube videos over the last 17 years
4 million would be just over 644 videos watched every single day for each one of those 17 years.
I salute your dedication.
I’m having a bad, bad, day
It’s about time that I get my way
Streaming whatever I see
oh, indescribable me
I’m having a bad, bad, day
If you block my ad blocker that’s not okay
Watch, this is so fun to see
oh, indescribable me
Oh no, YouTube has been losing money on you for 17 years, they’re gonna be so sad.
How can you feel this level of entitlement - surely you should just be grateful for the 17 years and millions of videos you have been able to watch for free?!?!
qq more yourself - you are the one bitching about a company not subsidising your free-loading ass.
Not the internet, the web, there is a distinction and the internet will be fine we will just move to other protocols and leave the ad companies out in the cold.
