YouTube's ‘War’ on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

The problem with any youtube competitor is that there is no way in hell they can cover the costs of the infrastructure required to host the same amount of videos youtube has and streaming them to the millions of users youtube serves daily.

I've used adblockers for like 15 years and I genuinely get disgusted when watching YouTube without it. There's no way I'll go back. I even do sponsorblock to remove in-video ads.

The unfortunate thing is that I'm willing to pay a reasonable price for a lot of content creators, just not via Google/YouTube.

A dollar per channel? I follow 104 content creators om YouTube through RSS. And many more if we count all the other platforms. I can't afford that.

It's a difficult situation for viewers, creators and providers. I don't have an answer, but a stop-gap solution I'd be happy to see is like 480p max for adblockers, pay for HD+. That's reasonable based on how much ad-dodgers impact YouTube from what I've gathered.

I guess if you don't use ad blockers you somehow get used to it. It's like someone whose job is 100% outdoors vs. someone who works indoors and then has to do a day working outside. The person who is used to cold, wind, rain, scorching sun, etc. stops noticing, even though it takes a toll on them too.

Every once in a while I end up using a browser without ad blockers enabled and it's incredible to me that some people live like that. It really is almost unusable. Things jump around as ads load in. Ads / videos pop over the content you're trying to use. The useful part of a page might be 60% ads: ads along the sides and breaking up the text. And then there's the bottom area of the page which is an endless scroll of "related content" ads.

There never will be a YouTube competitor, it requires continuous investment from a multibillion dollar company.

Download newpipe and never use YouTube again.

For static ads there will eventually be visual adblockers which detect ads not from their source but because they look like ads. (The mandated paid advertisement notice helps).

There is the utility that journalists use to capture YouTube video. A version that captured video content and then filtered ads visually would be unblockable.

Yeah and some of these people think they’re Brave and Edgy.

Firefox for the win. Or Librewolf even better.

Imo this extends to chromium too. Google owns the source code and can pull it whenever they want. Sure, chromium browsers might be able to putter along for a little bit, but my understanding is that the reason why we're now at Chrome/Chromium vs Firefox vs Safari is because Google shits out so many new """standards""" and "features" that you need a large team to keep up. It's supposedly why browsers like Opera switched to using chromium instead of trying to maintain their own source code.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Or any chromium based browser for that matter.

This is one reason why I don't want the EU to force Apple to allow other rendering engines. Whether you think using Apple's rendering engine on iOS is bad or good, it's basically the only thing keeping Google from having complete control of the market.

But

The real problem with any other video service is that YT has a HUGE advantage of WAY more content. I wish it weren't that way but it is.

So they will continue to dominate until similar vast content can be created elsewhere.

The problem with youtube in particular is there is no way to build an alternative that's as good as YouTube (ignoring all the bad bits they've added). PeerTube is nice to have around, but it's not as fast and doesn't have all the content as youtube. There's also Nebula, which is alright. It's not free and doesn't have as much content, but it's usually a higher quality.

I'm okay with the less amount of content. Frankly, I mindlessly spent hours scrolling through "content" on reddit, and feeling no satisfaction. At least the content here is more relevant.

More people would mean more memes and rage bait. No thanks.

The problem is the network effect. It's hard to switch from YT if all your favorite channels and creators are there, but it's also hard for them to switch if all the users are using YT. And because it's many different people we cannot coordinate a simultaneous transition either.

That's why i wen FF+ Duckduck + ublock and instead of reddit > Lemmy But i have to admit that YouTube is harder to replace then reddit and I've tried many alternatives.

Same. It is no longer worth it, I'll be sad to lose my music streaming, but there are other pathways that some may consider unethical.

If you subscribe to premium using an Indian IP address, for example, you'll get it for like a buck a month

YouTube Music is no longer optional. It's now bundled into the basic features of Premium and Google uses that to justify the insane price hike. Their argument is that it's cheaper than before for the dozen-or-so people that had subscribed to both YT Music and Premium. All others now "save" on the YT Music subscription, the fact that nobody saves anything by paying for a service they don't need is completely lost on them. Just corporate greed and pushing the monopoly a bit further, nothing to see here.

https://archive.ph/oOv5l

I've ditched everything but android. Been thinking about swapping roms but not all the apps I need for work will works with MicroG. And going apple is, at best, a lateral move.

I'm with you, on course to de-big-tech my life. I'm not even a power user of any of them, but got caught up in the convenience.

The only active google services I do use are

• Android and Google Pixel (because fuck Apple lol)
• Google Play Store (I sometimes use F-Droid)
• YT

I replaced my email with my very own domain
I buy my own storage to host and backup at home.
What I have from cloud storage is by chance of having Office365 (mainly because Outlook is so much superior for email management. I tried EM-client. It was worse).

I can also recommend Libretube or Clipious for Android

Literally the reason I started regularly using Firefox

Nebula, maybe? Many of my breadtube creators tell me to see their expanded content there.

Why uBlock + ABP though? Isn't uBlock alone enough? And why not Firefox instead of Opera as it's also based on Chromium?

Iirc adblock plus has been known to get bribed to allow certain ads through. I'm struggling to remember the details, but there was some controversy with them a while back. If you have ublock you don't also need ABP, just update your filters on those sites that ublock "doesn't work" on

404 sprang up from ex-Motherboard writers when Vice Media went bankrupt this year. I think their articles are alright, because paying the bills as a journalist is very hard.

What a manipulation tactic though. Phase in the change at different times for different users.

Maybe one day they'll have the ability to just roll out the shit internet for plebs and the shitter, but shinny, version for the rich.

What if someone gets left behind in the great ad war? Lol. A lone user who has never seen an ad on the Internet ever.

When it works?

get over it

Racists angry over 1 simple word change that better describes the function of said list.

A lot of people have become entitled to the idea of the "free internet." In some cases, it's understandable, like for social media where the platform is doing very little work and nearly all the value is coming from the users. I think especially in Youtube's case, people are squinting and looking at it like a social media. They wonder why Youtube's taking such a big cut when they think the content creators are the ones providing the value.

The issue here is that the complexities of video hosting, especially at the speed and quality Youtube provides, requires a ludicrous amount of effort and money. Youtube is providing a platform that is nearly unthinkable, something I consider to rival the entire television broadcasting sphere. The idea that such a colossal undertaking could be achieved without requiring revenue generation is simply naïve, and it's incredible to think that a free version is even offered at all. Nobody ever really thinks about that though, they just look at it as another platform like Facebook or Reddit, and think a lazy megacorp is stuffing their pockets for nothing.

Because this isn't just about "making anything in return" any more than neo-Nazis are booted from platforms "just for having different opinions." More people are using adblockers on YouTube because YouTube isn't simply displaying commercial advertisements, they're pushing "ads" for scams, malware, and all manner of heinous and/or sketchy content. Even separate of that, the frequency of ads and the presence of minutes-long ads you need to manually skip have made watching content difficult and unpleasant, if not unworkable. Adblocker usage is as much about restoring functionality to the site as anything.

All of these issues have been raised with YouTube, but rather than address the complaints by adjusting how ads are selected and served they've decided the only solution is for you to pay them monthly, not just a few bucks but as much as (or more than) the major video streaming services. All of this for content they do not make, at a price point far beyond what they need to be profitable. It's greed for the sake of greed, pure and simple.

That’s not the usual evil corp BS they pull.

Yes it is. Why do you think they force you to pay for YT Music when all you want is an ad free experience? I tell you why: people will come to the realization that it is stupid to pay for two music streaming services at the same time, so they will cancel their Spotify subscription. This will make it extremely hard for other services to stay competitive. It's no longer enough that their app is perhaps slightly better, or that they have the better algorithm, no one will be willing to pay the extra 11 € per month for just that. So eventually, these competing music streaming services will die (maybe with the exception of Apple Music and Amazon Music). Once YouTube has the monopoly on the music streaming market, they can raise the prices again. They are using one monopoly to build a second one. And a third one. And so on, until everything is owned by Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, or Microsoft and no one is able to compete with anything anymore. And the worst part is, that Google doesn't even deserve any of YouTube's success. YouTube's success comes from its creators. All that Google ever did is to provide some servers and some bandwith, which arguably is expensive, but it's not really an achievement. They didn't even invent YouTube, they just bought it, made it big, and now abuse it to conquer more and more markets.

YouTube was originally free, and without video ads. It remained so for some time after Google bought it. They can operate YouTube without video ads at all.

i agree, its about choice. no one should be complaining about what google is doing [with youtube].

if we dont like it, we should choose a different product.

I get what you mean, but I just don't care. I'll stop using YouTube if I can't use it with adblockers.

, video hosting is extremely expensive

Here's a solution: make people pay for having their videos hosted. Video hosting is expensive because YT has to host petabytes of shit, useless content. And I don't mean 150 versions of 'I will survive' on ukulele. I mean completely useless videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4bLDaQAle6c

Why is YT spending money on hosting this? It should be simple: you want your content hosted? Hosting individual videos would not be that expensive. You want to share couple of videos with friends? Pay $1 per month. Serious creators (with a lot of content) could still get money from ads placed in their videos but THEY should be getting the revenue, not YT. YT would get % of it back in form of the hosting fee. I would simply be a way better model.

The reason there is no competitor is that YT was intentionally run at a loss for years to quench all other video hosting platforms and establish a monopoly.

Alternatives do exist but they are irrelevant because the vast majority of content is now being uploaded to the biggest platform. Which is precisely in accordance to YT's plan.

Wait you mean youtube isn't completely free to run?!?

THANK YOU, finally, I was wondering when someone was going to stick up for the billionaire tech giants. do these stupid fucking lemmings realize that yachts don't pay for themselves??

video hosting is extremely expensive

Year over year I'm pretty sure the cost has only gone down.

TBF 4k and higher resolutions are more common but it's generally not nearly as expensive as it once was.

There's alternatives for all of that, why are you stuck on Google? You could create a new email on a different site or host your own and there would be no differences between it and a gmail account. For photo services you could build a nas that has auto backup and never pay a penny again to Google. I understand they are pervasive in the modern world so it's hard to escape but there's always options.

You can just use Piped. That way, your account data appears nowhere. Just a server querying Googles YouTube API.

There is a few tampermonkey (extension) scripts that disable the message. This is the one I use;

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/478457-youtube-anti-anti-adblock

It's taken me about 2 years to degoogle as much as I have. I've moved google photos to dropbox (soon NextCloud), gmail to fastmail, search to Kagi, music to Tidal, docs to NextCloud, and (most recently) youtube to Invidious/Freetube. None of it was particularly hard, though switching from gmail took ages. Still using android, but that's next on the chopping block.