Whelp, here we go again

  • daveyeah@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Mmmm, gotta love that enshittification strategy every big tech company is working on right now.

  • liminis@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Another executive-driven decision by people who clearly don’t use their own product (kinda impressive really when it’s YT).

    I can’t help wonder if they saw an uptick in adblocking as a result of their absurd increases in ad-time recently and somehow thought this was a reasonable solution.

        • Stewie@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Its not that hard to fathom when you have worked with these types of people.

          All it was was a numbers meeting, no User Experience folks in the room. They said how much revenue they would increase quarter over quarter, and how much engagement it would drive. Everyone claps, the meeting ends they move forward with the next terrible design decision. Companies no longer take focus group testing seriously for anything.

          • interolivary@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            Focus groups and qualitative data are so last season. It’s all Business “Intelligence” -driven bullshit nominally based on poorly defined and even more poorly understood metrics (excuse me, “KPIs”)

    • LemmyAtem@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I rarely use YouTube, but my nephew (he’s two) was over the other day and we put on some cartoons for him that were in YouTube since my wife and I don’t have Disney plus. I couldn’t BELIEVE how many ads it showed. One five-minute merry melodies cartoon had FOUR SEPARATE ad breaks, the third and fourth of which were both 3+ minutes long if you weren’t paying attention to skip.

      Wtf?! Not even shit ass normal broadcast television has that many commercials.

      • liminis@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Feels like every year corporations rely on the naivety of youth in an attempt to push more and more egregious shit.

        • LemmyAtem@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Exactly right they’re normalizing ads in everything. They’re indoctrinating the youth, who don’t know any better or differently, into just accepting/expecting that all content in all forms comes with ads, and you can’t watch any of it without signing in so they can track you and sell your data.

    • stallmer@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Interest rates hikes stopped the free money, so companies need profit.

      I’d argue they don’t need $500 million when they already make $400 million, but I’m just a lowly peasant.

      tl;dr: capitalism

      • JCPhoenix@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Especially with video. Reddit was easy-ish to leave – I haven’t left entirely – since it’s just a link aggregator and glorified forums. That’s nothing new to the Internet. And Twitter was easy to replace with Mastodon.

        But hosting video? That’s a tough one to replicate. I know there are some other platforms out there, but I can’t imagine any could really take on YouTube, due to space and bandwidth considerations.

        So yeah, I think YouTube has us all by the balls. And they know it.

  • Buttons@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    And what are the consequences of “strikes”? Will you delete my Google account, including my email, and also screw up my Android phone and my kids Chromebook?

    It’s scary to realize that Google has me by the balls here. They can screw me in so many ways, and screw my family members as well. I’d rather have my bank credentials stolen than my email credentials, at least I can get real customer service from the bank, I can even go to a physical location and speak face-to-face with someone who can help me. Google wont give me customer support, and my email account is the closest thing to an identity I have for most businesses I interact with.

    It takes a lot of work to avoid Google. Yes, there are alternatives, but in D&D terms, avoiding Google is like a -2 to all stats for your entire life, and not something we can expect the general population to do.

    All this shows the need for anti-trust enforcement. The same company is controlling too much. Bust 'em up!

    • wim@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      Moral of the story: create separate account for YouTube that has no high value services or data on it.

      • Chahk@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I’ve seen enough horror stories to know that’s not going to help. They can, and do, associate multiple accounts to same users. Be it by cookies, IP addresses, or dark magic, the end result is the same - they can upend your entire digital life if they want to. r/degoogle better hurry up and migrate to Lemmy.

      • rho50@lemmy.nz
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        1 year ago

        I’d argue the bigger moral is that you should always own your online identity. You should buy your own domain (@yourname.xyz or something like that) and make your email on that. So if Google bans you, you just switch email providers and keep your address.

        • wim@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          I’ve been using @fixnum.org and since a few years the alias @wim.land to do exactly this, but that’s just email.

          My app purchases, photo storage, and YouTube account are all entangled in this. I could decouple from Google, but it would be very painful.

    • GravityAce@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Spend a weekend degoogling your stuff. There are alternatives for everything now. No regrets

    • somniumx@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      That’s the reason I’m hesitant to use a VPN for yt Premium from a cheap country. The lingering thought of losing my Gmail and android access…

    • jon@lemmy.tf
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      1 year ago

      Article suggests you simply get blocked from watching additional videos. But there’s no info on how that works- is it account based? IP based? Can I wipe my YouTube cookies to bypass a block?

    • The Doctor@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      That would be the logical thing for them to do. All it takes is a couple of folks taking it in the neck from them to make the rest fall in line.

  • ConsciousCode@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Recently found this gem: https://adnauseam.io/

    It’s an ad blocker that only hides ads and clicks them for you in the background, which means you waste advertiser’s money, support creators, can’t get flagged for ad blocking as easily, and they can’t build a proper profile against your ad activity since it’s all noise. Haven’t installed it yet, but this might be the push I needed.

    • Contend6248@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      This might be an acceptable sollution, but what happens on the other side of the ad? If something maliciously is being spreaded, the click might have to happen in an isolated form from the rest of the system or the browser.

    • itsmect@monero.town
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      1 year ago

      The question is: How much data about me and my browser does clicking on the ads leak? I’m using libre wolf with additional hardening, including noscript, and I suspect that clicking on ads will not even register with the ad company?

  • that_one_guy@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Did all these tech companies just get together and decide to fuck us over around the same time? Seriously, what is going on with all these companies rolling out hugely unpopular new rules/changes all on one another’s heels?

    • Mars@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      The end of 0% interest means “business” no longer have access to free money. So now they want benefits, and growth but without the spending.

      Also we skipped a tech bubble crash around 2008, so these corpos deaths are more than overdue.

      The cicle as Doctorow says in his enshification tesis is:

      1.- be good to your users, spending tons of that VC and 0% interest loan free money.

      2.- be shit to your users, be good to your clients (add buyers, business that use your platform to do business)

      3.- be shit to everyone. Squeeze the platform and get every last dime of value as profit.

      Once you are in 3 there is no coming back. But these corporations have pulling the ladder behind them using an extra decade of dominant position to try to stop the cicle.

  • nicerdicer@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Someone in the Fediverse (I don’t know where and who) posted that you have to add the following filters into U-Block Origin. When done you shouldn’t see any anti-adblock-warnings :

    youtube.com##+js(set,yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel,false)
    
    youtube.com##+js(set,Object.prototype.adBlocksFound,O)
    
    youtube.com##+js(set,ytplayer.config.aras.raw_player_response.adPlacements,[])
    
    youtube.com##+js(set,Object.prototype.hasAllowedlnstreamAd,true)
    

    I might add that I haven’t experienced any anti-adblock-warnings yet, but I added these filters in advance. I might be worth a shot!

  • TrainsAreCool@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    Personally, I’d rather pay for Nebula than YouTube premium. Most of the creators I actively follow are on there anyways, and the few that aren’t (usually the ones with very long videos) I should probably just watch with ads anyways to support them.

    • ErgodicTangle@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      I had a similar thought. How fair is nebula to their creators? I heard it was somehow creator owned, but other than that I have no idea how it works.

  • agitatedpotato@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Twitch couldn’t beat my adblocking, it just taught me how to find and use custom scripts. Shoot your shot YT, I haven’t installed a script for your website yet but now Im gonna have too. Congrats the number of ads im gonna see from you is about to go down.

    • SilentStorms@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      What’s your Twitch solution? Blocking Twitch is considerably more difficult than YouTube, every solution I’ve found breaks after a month or so. Best I can get is have it display a blank screen while ads play, but I still have to wait it out, which isn’t ideal.

      • agitatedpotato@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        pixeltris on github, a search for pixeltris should get you there first result. Everything you need is on that page, including how to instal the script to ublock, im using the vid swap script and TTLOL pro. It’s not perfect but the ads are gone.

  • JillyB@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Hot take: this sucks, but YouTube premium is legit. I wish more platforms offered a paid, ad-free way to interact. I don’t feel like figuring out a way around ads but I’m not about to start watching them. So I pay a few bucks a month.

    • TehPers@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I’d be more willing to pay if it wasn’t $10/mo (annual cost) for a bunch of stuff I don’t care about. If they had a cheaper option that was just ad-free (maybe $5/mo?), I’d be down for that.

      I also like what Kagi does with their duo plan for 2 users. Some kind of duo plan for YT premium would be nice as well, since I (and many others, I’m sure) don’t have a family of 6 people.

      • JillyB@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        In that case, you wouldn’t care about this ad-block issue. The people who do care, want to watch YouTube but don’t like ads.

    • kukkurovaca@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      I don’t have any philosophical objection for paying to use a platform I enjoy, but in the case of youtube, they have been so deliberately detrimental to society in terms of platforming fascists that I feel bad about the prospect of paying them, even if much of the money is going to creators I do like who I’m actually watching

    • Scrumpf_Dabogy@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Same. I hate google, but YouTube pays content creators better than any other platform. And I am 100% on board with any service where I pay a monthly cost instead of being inundated with ads.

    • Linnce@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Also the student version is so cheap and there is so much more content than anything really. YouTube music is awesome too.

    • popshabang@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I don’t mind paying for services I use to avoid my data being the payment (like Kagi or Protonmail).

      But I don’t like the idea of paying Google AND having my data farmed.

    • shufflerofrocks@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      It’s simply a more honest model - you get content, they get money.

      I would love to be able to pay for an ad-free experience for the various websites and services that I browse and use in a straightforward way instead of being leeched for ad-revenue

      • anon@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I wouldn’t doubt paying a hundred per month to have an ad-free life.

        no ads on tv or sports, no billboards, no ads on buses. it would be awesome

  • ram@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I’ll stop blocked ads when I stop using their service. Not a minute sooner.

  • Vertelleus@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Anyone hoping there will be a mass exodus from YouTube to other–maybe fediverse YouTube alternatives, reminiscent of the Reddit exodus?

    • Invader753@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Yes I hope, but I don’t see it happening. Creators will go where the masses are and where the money is.

    • 🦊 OneRedFox 🦊@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Well, PeerTube exists, but IDK how good it actually is since basically no one uses it. I also think professional content creators aren’t going to like the Fediverse very much since there is significantly less money in it, but for hobbyists it could work. Of all the big social media platforms, video hosting/streaming is the hardest case to replace. It’ll be interesting though. I hear PeerTube works like torrents.

  • Salad@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Copying my comment over from fmhy instance -

    If you don’t mind paying ~2$ a month, you can get Family Premium using a VPN (I used India)

    Current working method from HUKD: (Private/Incognito browser is best)

    Create a new Google Account. Enter card details. Enter a fake billing address, any random address generator will do, as long as it’s from the correct region. Then select Try it Free. Navigate to YouTube, press YouTube Premium, and double-check that everything is in the right currency. Enter the same credit card and address information you used for creating the new Google Account. Click Buy 👍

    You can then add your main Google account as a family member.👍

    HUKD link

    • Digitoll@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I believe any accounts joining the family need to first have a Google Payments profile in the country the owner of the plan is in before you can join. Or is that not the case anymore?

    • Kaldo@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      And then I might eventually get banned for abusing/bypassing regional pricing 🤷‍♂️. It’s a nice workaround but that’s all it is, it’s gonna get worse with yt