Youtube's Anti-adblock is illegal in the EU
Today I filed a formal complaint against #YouTube with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner for their illegal deployment of #adblock detection technologies. Under Article 5(3) of 2002/58/EC YouTube are legally obligated to obtain consent before storing or accessing information already stored on a...
So many corporate bootlickers here, damn.
It's like they think the only way to make money is to drown us in ads based off the telemetry they scoop up and we're entitled brats for wanting to have a say in how our data is harvested/used against us.
That's their business model. Drowning us in ads is literally how they make money. They aren't a tech company. They're an ad aggregation company. They collect data via having users use freemium services. They use that data to create anonymized profiles of millions or billions of people. They break those profiles down into subsets. And then they let ad companies buy the ability for Google to target those users with ads based on things they're likely to buy based on the data that Google has collected. It's a much more effective way of marketing ads than just playing ad spots on tv or on radio. Better than billboards and magazine spreads etc. That's literally what Google (and Apple, and Amazon even) do. It's what Facebook does. It's what most social media does. Their tech? Just a way to get you to buy into an ecosystem so you continue to feed the profile and the algorithm and see the ads.
In the second quarter of 2023, Google's revenue amounted to over 74.3 billion U.S. dollars, up from the 69.1 billion U.S. dollars registered in the same quarter a year prior.
But man if we don't pay for youtube premium how will they survive?
I'll say it again: Google pays 5-year-old "influencers" millions of dollars. They have always harvested your data to provide these free services - selling ads was just icing. They still harvest your data and sell ads and they still make the same money they've always made - only now they are insisting that everyone watch ads or pay for it as well. And of course, eventually YouTube will insist that you watch ads and pay for it. This is the equivalent of "network decay" for streaming services. This is unreasonable and while there are exceptions to the rule, most people have the same reaction to what Google is doing here: surprise, and dismay, if not outright anger and disgust.
Yet every single thread about it on the Internet is utterly overflowing with people lecturing us about how we shouldn't expect something for nothing, as if we aren't fully aware that this is the most transparent of straw men. These people insist that we are the problem for daring to block ads - and further - that we should be thrilled to pay Google for this content, as they are. And they are! They just can't get enough of paying Google for YouTube! It's morally upright, it's the best experience available and money flows so freely for everyone these days, we should all be so lucky to be able to enjoy paying Google the way they do. And of course it's all so organic, these comments.
Suggest that Google pays people to engage this narrative, however, and you will be derided and downvoted into oblivion as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac. This comment itself is virtually guaranteed to be responded to with a patronizing sarcastic and 100% organic comment about how lol bruh everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.
selling ads was just icing
You're talking about these as if they're separate things. Literally no company in existence harvests your data for any reason other than to serve better ads or to drive business decisions internally. Nobody gives a shit about your data otherwise. Ads are literally the only reason.
as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac
I mean... If the shoe fits, man.
Ok, I'll bite. Let's assume Youtube follows your advice, and stops showing ads on YouTube. Data collection is the only source of revenue. How does YouTube make money on that data? Be specific please. Who is buying the data, and what is the buyer going to do the data besides show you a targeted ad?
Suggest that Google pays people to engage this narrative, however, and you will be derided and downvoted into oblivion as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac. This comment itself is virtually guaranteed to be responded to with a patronizing sarcastic and 100% organic comment about how lol bruh everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.
Oh hey you put this part in before being downvoted this time lmao. If you think it's worth googles time to be astroturfing on fucking lemmy, you have a couple screws loose lmfao.
did you just tey to pre-emptively suggest that anyone who disagrees with you is a google paid shill?
Because if so I would like to know where I can apply for my payment from Google.
I think any reasonable person knows by now that if you don't "pay for a product you sre the product", everyone knows youtube collects data and sells it and your eyes to advertisers that's their business model, guess what those servers youtube runs on? aren't free, as you yourself said, content creators aren't free, the engineers working on YouTube aren't free, so your suggestion is that despite this, youtube should still be free and ad/data collection free.
well do tell me, how long do you think youtube will last with your business model?
I've blocked maybe eight people in thirty minutes who are implicitly demanding that corporations create the law.
And one of them immediately down voted you. I wonder why they're here on Lemmy instead of continuing to support Reddit? They clearly like to be bottoms to corpos.
We must trust our corporate overlords who will use AI to guide us in their right direction.
I honestly don't really care if people adblock or not but I think people need to acknowledge that adblock is essentially piracy. That doesn't make it inherently bad or good but it has the same impacts as piracy at the end of the day. It's a useful tool to use when companies start to get unreasonable but especially in the case of YouTube it impacts the amount of money the people who make the content earn.
I honestly don’t really care if people adblock or not but I think people need to acknowledge that adblock is essentially piracy.
The same way it is piracy to go to the bathroom during the commercials...
Look, the problem at hand is not if people use adblocker or not, the problem here is how Google check if you are using adblocker or not, which seems to be illegal.
Well, the full "check for adblocker" things seems to be illegal in EU, whatever way it is used, given a sentence from 2016
I don't think it's piracy exactly but I fully realize there would not be a huge video site like YouTube without ads or limiting it to paid subscribers.
This whole thread is a whole lot of hullabaloo about complaining about legality about the way YouTube is running ad block detection, and framing it as though it makes the entire concept of ad block detection illegal.
As much as you may hate YouTube and/or their ad block policies, this whole take is a dead end. Even if by the weird stretch he's making, the current system is illegal, there are plenty of ways for Google to detect and act on this without going anywhere remotely near that law. The best case scenario here is Google rewrites the way they're doing it and redeploys the same thing.
This might cost them like weeks of development time. But it doesn't stop Google from refusing to serve you video until you watch ads. This whole argument is receiving way more weight than it deserves because he's repeatedly flaunting credentials that don't change the reality of what Google could do here even if this argument held water.
Ah yeah the kind of hullabaloo that makes everyone accept cookies on every single website ;)
shoutout to Consent-O-Matic! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/
Yay for ublocks annoyance pop up blocker. No more cookie pop ups
You're missing the point/s
How is it immoral? Is Google morally obligated to provide you with a way to use their service for free? Google wants YouTube to start making money, and I'd guess the alternative is no more YouTube.
Why is everyone so worked up about a huge company wanting to earn even more money, we know this is how it works, and we always knew this was coming. You tried to cheat the system and they've had enough.
the data that is physically within your system is yours alone.
Actually, ALL the data Google has on you is yours. Google do not own the data, neither do reddit, Facebook or anyone else. They merely have a licence.
Personally I think even that is illegal. Contracts require consideration, you exchange x for y, then you have details in the terms and conditions. This is like "come in for free!" and then everything is in the terms and conditions. If you look at insurance, they're required to have a key facts page to bring to the front the main points from the terms in plain English. The cookie splash screen doesn't really do this, as it obfuscates just how much data they collect, and is for the most part unenforceable as you can't see what data they hold. Furthermore, the data they collect isn't proportional to your use of the website.
The whole thing flies in the face of the core principles of contract law under which all trading is done. They tell us our data has no value and it isn't worth the hassle of us getting paid, yet they use that data to become some of the wealthiest businesses in the world. We might not know how to make use of that data, and you'll need a lot of other data to build something to sell, but a manufacturer of nuts and bolts doesn't know how to build a car - yet they still get paid for a portion of the value derived from their product through others' work, as most of the value comes from what you can do with it. We're all being robbed, every single one of us, including politicians and lawmakers.
This whole thread is a whole lot of hullabaloo about complaining about legality about the way YouTube is running ad block detection, and framing it as though it makes the entire concept of ad block detection illegal.
Nope, the point is that, at the moment, Google seems to look where it should not look to know if a user has an adblocker and they don't ask for permission.
Let put it in another way: Google need to have my permission to look into my device.
But it doesn’t stop Google from refusing to serve you video until you watch ads.
Which is fine as long as Google can decide that I am using an adblocker without violating any law, which is pretty hard.
Of course Google could decide that it is better to leave EU and it law that protect the users, but is it a smart move from a company point of view ?
All they need to implement ad block detection is user consent, which they likely cover on their terms of service and privacy policy.
The guy really exudes “don’t you know who I am?” energy. Which is a shame since it detracts from the discussion.
It’s not even clear to me that the mechanism they’re using today is problematic. I don’t know what it is, but the author seems to think they do but aren’t sharing details beyond “trust me bro”. I agree that some kind of inspection-based detection might run afoul of the law, but I don’t see why that’s necessary. All you need to know is that the client is requesting videos without any of the ad requests making it through, which is entirely server-side.
Exactly.
But people are hell bent on "Google doing this, bad".
I feel like they're eventually just going to embed the adverts directly into the video streams. No more automated blocking, even downloading will make you see ads. Sure, you can fast forward the video a bit, but it will be annoying enough that you'll see and hear a few seconds of ads each time, and you won't be able to just leave it running while you do other things.
the reason they are not doing it is because the ads are personalized. So if they want to bake an ad onto a video they will end up with countless videos each on with their own unique ads which is not viable logistically. So they can only do it on-the-fly. But re-encoding each video on-the-fly for each user is also a nightmare logistically, if not impossible at all.
Have you met my friend SponsorBlock?
Ha ha no. Google needs you more than you need google.
but but but the ads moneh
If google made so much money from ads, they wouldn't care if you watched it at all. They want your consumerist data and they can't get it with adblock.
but but but muh creators
Most major creators have complained about google shafting them with schizo rules about monetization. The biggers ones have started to sell merch and use other platforms as insurance. You watching those ads gives google more benefits than the creators.
Youtube is NOT essential. You can live without youtube. Simply follow the creators you like on other platforms. If you're a creator, time to diversify your platform. The iceberg is sighted and it's time to jump ship.
Google DOES make money from ads. A metric tuckton of it. Why the fuck else would they need your data other than to serve better ads???
They could easily put a “consent” requirement to access
And in the war you probably also sided with the Nazis because 'well they invaded already, might as well give up'
Everyday I think the European Union for preventing the internet from being worse than it could be. It's sad that back when the internet was a cesspool was so far the best age for it. Normies really do ruin everything
The same EU that threaten E2EE?
The EU has its faults, too, like this BS about sacrificing encryption. Overall, there seem to be a lot of benefits reigning in big companies, though.
Who else is looking out for their citizens? I think some congresspeople in the US ask tough questions, but in the end, business just goes on as usual.
Yes, the same EU. The fact that it's considering some poor choices doesn't detract from the fact that it's actions thus far have been positive and deserve appreciation. Real Life doesn't split people neatly into heroes and villains.
Don't be an asshole and blame regular people for shit like this. This is because of big tech
This is the same chicken / egg thing as plastic pollutions.
Sure consumers choice of whether to discard or recycle a plastic straw is nothing compared to the decisions of corporations, but then consumers invest in those companies, buy their products, and elect representatives who do not hold them accountable.
Big tech has ruined the internet because people were willing to trade their privacy and their attention in order to watch gifs of cats playing the piano. I'm not "blaming" people for that - hell, I was one of them, but you can't solve the problem without understanding how it's perpetuated.
Strictly speaking, management at Big Tech are all normies and they make the decisions.
I think the point is solid: non-tech-people sell capabilities to other non-tech-people to make money, and this forms a feedback loop and drives direction. A non-big-tech world is wildly different because it's more like tech people building an environment for doing things with other tech people.
"Don't be an asshole"? As a response to a short three sentence statement where no one was an asshole...
I think you're the fucking asshole regardless of how much blame "big tech" and corporations in general bare here.
Slow the fuck down.
It's not the sheep's fault they're led to the meat grinder
If a private company has to succeed, it has to offer things ** that normies want.** FB/G is shit because this is what normies consume - the ego-display, the dopamine kick. In every enshittification of a service, there is a history of it being cravingly indulged by the mass. Now when the companies started rising up and used their monopoly, they (the normies) are realizing they have been shit-eating for a long time. One may argue the companies were not so in the beginning, but that would be a very myopic view.
Normally it wouldn't be, but these sheep were told "Do not go to this farm or you will be cooked." and responded with "Pffft, that'll happen to the other guy.." or "Pfft you're just whining because you expect everything just handed to you"
"Normies"? Seriously?
Because "normies" are responsible for the entshitification of the Internet right?
As much as I loathe that term, it could be argued that they indirectly are.
The massive increase in the amount of people online made it profitable for companies to be online. Lack of regulations and the inability for regulators to keep up with technological advancements allowed companies to maximize profits at the expense of everything else. The complete inability of government to prevent monetary influence on legislature has prevented good regulations from developing. The fact that the average person online uses maybe five websites in total and doesn't engage further means that most issues fly under the radar of the average person, which limits the ability of any significant amount of constituents to pressure the politicians supposedly representing them to do better, and limits the overall impact of any movement away from shitty sites to better ones.
It's a tangled yarn ball, but one that would struggle to exist without a majority of people to pull money from who just do not care about any of the shit that people more deeply invested in the internet care about.
Every tech article I read nowadays I feel like has the appendix, "which is illegal in the EU." Lol
The only thing still preventing mayhem along with California
Seriously. Everything causes cancer which has the unfortunate effect of dulling the fear response but it is good to know. If you want to sell your product in California, which is where silicon valley is, you need to observe their safety standards.
And thank the EU we might actually get right to repair.
Elon can block EU for Twitter if he wants to but it's probably going to cost him even more.
Fuck yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. California is the only reason we don't have products giving insta-cancer ect.
Cool, so YouTube will start putting pop ups that require you to consent to the detection in order to watch videos. That's what everyone did with the whole cookies thing when that was determined to be illegal without consent.
that would be illegal too, because that information is not strictly necessary for their service - they could only opt to not provide the service in the eu
I don’t agree. They can reasonably argue that advertising is a requirement of their business model, so it is necessary to advertise. Therefore it is necessary for them to block access to those blocking advertising. The directive cited isn’t intended to make advertiser supported services effectively illegal in the EU. That would be a massive own goal. It’s intended to make deceptive and unnecessary data collection illegal. Nothing YouTube is doing is deceptive. They’re being very clear about their intention to advertise to non-subscribers.
There are multiple French websites that do this. It is legal (otherwise these websites would not do this anymore, it's been a while).
There is a popup asking you if you consent to get cookies (for advertisement). If you say "no", it leads you to another popup with two choices :
Nothing more fun than having to go through some websites shitty settings to toggle everything off.
I can heartily recommend Consent-O-Matic. I'd say that it's able to clear (and reject by default) the cookie warnings on 95% of the sites I visit.
A lot of the cookie notifications can't collect data until you accept them (or follow their annoying "opt-out" workflow). If you install UBlock Origin and go to its settings > 'Filter lists' and enable the "EasyList - Cookie Notices" you can block a lot of cookies. If they can never nag you and you never opt in, assuming they're following the law, you shouldn't be tracked.
I only just posted a meme about the EU flooring companies for going against their regulations. It was my first post too :)
I'd really like to add YouTube to it. Godspeed.
The only government actually doing shit. *Also, California
All these fuckers are our neighbors and for many of us former employers.
We know exactly how they think, and what they think of us.
Andreesen is the tip of the iceberg.
unless it is strictly necessary for the provisions of the requested service.
YouTube could quite easily argue that ads fund their service and therefore an adblock detector would be necessary.
that's not how it is to be interpreted.
it means something like in order for google maps to show you your position they NEED to access your device's gps service, otherwise maps by design can not display your position.
Adblock detection has literally already been ruled on though (it needs consent). I'm sure there are nuances above my understanding, but it's not that simple.
Their precedent is that they sold our data for 20 years before this and are now the biggest company in the world, so they can go pound sand.
In the interest of making criticisms factually correct, they don't "sell" user data, they make money through targeted advertising using user data. They actually benefit by being the only ones with your data, it's not in their interest to sell it.
That's a very good point. I'm not very aware of EU regulations, I wonder if there has been established precedent in court
Call me naive, but doing something illegal is never OK in the eyes of the law, whether I deem it necessary or not. I would have to receive a legal exception to the rule, as it were. As it stands, it's illegal.
doing something illegal is never OK in the eyes of the law
yeah, doing something illegal is illegal, hard to argue with that tautology.
but you seem to be living under the impression that immoral = illegal, which is not the case.
I think what they were saying is that the law specifically makes exceptions for things that are necessary. Others are saying ads are not necessary per the law's definition, but that's a separate issue.
Saving Jews during the holocaust in Germany was illegal. How naive are you?
Thank fuck for EU and GDPR
"when has the EU ever done anything for us"
Oh it did.
It's nothing to do with GDPR acording to the link of the post (people should read more than headlines..)
... We're gonna get another cookie click-through, aren't we?
Do you consent to our use of intrusive browser detection, anti-cheat, rootkit usage and invasive brain implants to bombard you with ads?
Yes | Also yes but more annoying to click through
Yeah, pretty much
Google: You will accept our legitimate interest and you will like it.
Another three cheers for the EU! 🇪🇺🍻🥂
FUCK YEAHHHHHHHH. YOUTUBE IS FUCKED LMAOOOOOOOOOOOO
EU to the rescue again!
EU wants to make sure I see ads? Screw that. Freaking capitalists. Seems the US doesn't have a monopoly on capatalism.
I am not paying for Premium again until they bring the dislike button back.
I am not paying for Premium.
It was pathetic for them to hide away this button with its statistics. Honestly it's an valuable tool.
Too many big companies got their feefees hurtied because we downthumbered their stupid announcements. Think of them for once 😭
As if it made any real difference while we had it...
Shouldn't have been paying for it in the first place.
Don't ask how, but my dad found out that at least with Ublock, cleaning the cache in the addon makes it bypass the stupid pop-up.
Because they updated their filters so you have to clear the old cached filters
Going to give a heads up that sometimes ublock origin can fall behind because google supposedly updates their anti-adblock BS twice a day. But all you need to do is be patient, give it some time and eventually UBO gets updated. Then you can clear cache and update your filters to block YT's BS.
you can compare the version numbers and if they're off, ubo will eventually update it.
As an English person I thought yay that means us. Then I remembered. . .
The EU ruling was in 2016, well before Brexit happened in 2019, so we should have the same law.
Except that EU court rulings don't count in countries that stupidly left, no matter when they happened.
You could pass a similar law yourself, but that's probably not going to happen with either the abysmal Tories or the feckless centrist party Keir "I want to be Tony Blair" Starmer has turned Labour into in charge 😮💨
Not that the social media corps have ever given a shit.
You should all go file a complaint with a data protection agency.
The thread in the linked social network suggests concentrating the complaints to the Irish DPC: https://forms.dataprotection.ie/contact
It seems like it worked, the same guy published an update asking people to stop filing the same complaint again and again. The agency is looking into it.
Thanks for highlighting this, I might have missed it otherwise.
expired
I didn't know either, but I figured any option is better, the filings are read by humans after all. Still, as another poster pointed out, the agency is already investigating.
And then we have Chat control V2…
I'm happy to report that the vote was postponed because they did not have the votes for the proposal to pass. I know it is not a definitive victory because they will simply try to do it again, but it's good that they failed once again.
Good to know, actually
You linked a webpage as an embedded image. If you meant to make a link, use:
If you meant to embed:
Thanks
Apart from the Orwellian scale and invasiveness of the whole thing, I also find the automatic inclusion of cops extremely troubling.
In most if not all countries, you don't have to have done anything wrong in order for any interaction with cops to potentially harmful up to and including the risk of being murdered by them. And they're just gonna automatically call them on every false positive of a likely extremely flawed algorithm 😬🤬
So is this basically saying youtube isn't allowed to detect an adblocker?
I'm not sure I really follow why that specifically is something they're policing.
It about device detection and privacy. Websites in the EU aren't allowed to scan your hardware or software without your permission, to protect the users privacy. Adblockers fall under this.
If thats how it works, they could very easily just check if the ad ever got loaded and refuse to serve you content until it does. Going after the way they prevent people from abusing their services doesn't stop them from preventing them - it just gives them a new hurdle and that's not a very big one.
As I understand it, detecting an adblocker is a form of fingerprinting. Fingerprinting like this is a privacy violation unless there is first a consent process.
The outcome of this will be that consent for the detecting will be added to the TOS or as a modal and failing to consent will give up access to the service. It won't change Youtube's behavior, I don't think. But it could result in users being able to opt out of the anti-adblock... just that it also might be opting out of all of YouTube when they do it.
How is YouTube detecting adblockers? Wouldn't it be with the information the user's browser is already passing to them?
It could check if the ad is present in Dom maybe?
Or they just check the machine to see if the malware served in the ad is present.
Using javascript ofc.It checks if ads successfully loaded and showed to user if not showing banner to u.
uBlock Origin has no issues with blocking ads.
I get trying to fight it via legal means, but it is a solved problem.
Do you wish for more consent popups or do you hope that youtube is afraid of causing friction and will go back to how things were?
While I kinda sympathise, I won't be filing a complaint. I want Youtube to become so shit that even the average user will start looking for alternatives. I want ads plastered everywhere on that site and adblockers to fail miserably at blocking them. I want the average user to be so bothered by the ads that when they stumble upon an alternative they try and convince people to switch. I want content creators to be so bothered by it that they make videos promoting the use of another service.
Make this a competition for alternatives. Don't make it easy for users to stay on Youtube.
Since every person can become a piece of shit, it is useless to constantly change services, so only rules can teach us to live differently from other beasts.
Ok Satan
I'm sure content creators will be pissed that more ads are served on their videos haha. Oh no! More money! Whatever will they do? The conversation about ads has two sides where consumers are on one and content creators and youtube are on the other.
While I'd absolutely love for there to be a youtube alternative, they have a pretty much complete monopoly on online video distribution. Hosting all that data is expensive so competitors would need some serious financial backing which would likely put the competitor service in the hands of a large corporation.
two sides where consumers are on one and content creators and youtube are on the other.
Youtube and content creators are not on the same side. This woefully reduces a complex problem with many different actors down to a Right Side and a Wrong Side, and anyone whose not on My Side, must be on the Wrong Side.
This is frivolous and ridiculous.
If europeans had spent as much time building youtube competitors as they spent trying to find holes to litigate, europe would be richer
There are plenty already, why aren't you using them?
there were . Does dailymotion still even exist?
It's easier than ever to host things now, but EU laws ensure it would be sued to oblivion and die within a month.
Are you aware that Dailymotion, arguably Youtube's most serious competitor, is a French company?
We did just what you suggested.
Now it's time for internet giants to play by the rules (e.g., privacy-wise, tax-wise), or there will never be room for competition.
good thing that it is tiny so it is not affected by the DSA
I'm all about sailing the seven seas, yar har, but at some point the time spent trying to circumvent ads exceeds the $15. Support the people you watch. Hell, I pirate games and if I like it I'll buy it later. There's a difference between not getting taken advantage of by corporations and just straight screwing over people trying to make a living.
I'd still rather give directly to the creators than indirectly through Youtube. Youtube can change how much money those creators get, and I can... as well, I guess, but at least that's an individual choice, rather than a choice made for me.
Yeah that's alright, not what I'd do myself but it's something. I personally get exhausted when so many people get entitled to thinking they should have the undisputed right to slink through every website, take all the content they want, and not pay in attention, data, or their wallet. Shit costs money and people either forget or don't care. Even Lemmy, someone's fronting the cost for this instance.
And there's a difference between supporting creators and supporting a cash grab company screwing over everyone and everything around them.
Is there a difference? Sure. The problem is doing the former without the latter getting in the way. Small creator can't make videos if YouTube dies. Can't find new people to watch their videos. To support them. I think it's way too easy for people for forget that these platforms facilitate an essential service that is being taken for granted. There is no meaningful alternative.
The way the guy was flexing about being an "expert", while it may or may not be true (I haven't independently verified his credentials), is extremely offputting. Refusing to engage with hecklers is a better policy than flexing with your education, credentials, and experience.
How is it offputting to say "listen to me because I'm an expert, here's my credentials"? Everybody's so fast to claim "fake news" nowadays that demonstrating your credibility has become a requirement.
Yep. He took a massive ego trip early on and immediately came across as someone I don’t particularly want to side with.
I’m a web developer and fundamentally disagree with his take on what JavaScript can do on the client side. I see what he’s getting at but I think he’s wrong. JavaScript can certainly detect access to resources (ads in this instance) without violating any enforceable policies. Half the internet does error handling with JS for things that won’t load - how can this be construed as violating eprivacy? Nonsense.
That being said I’d love for this feature to go away and would be happy to see YouTube and Google go pound sand.. but this feels like a stretch. It was inevitable enshittification imo.
I'm all for personal freedoms but you're getting a service you pay no money for and then get pissed that they are getting the money out of you another way. Sound like people being petty.
It is a service, but you aren't the consumer, you're the product.
Yeah yeah the standard pedantic response to web services who use ads.
But how about a real response? People want to block ads and still consume content. If you feel the cost is too high then shouldn't people watch some ads and block others to only "pay what you want." Everyone seems to want the service for free and then cry that when you don't pay your get your videos.
Explain how this is different than going to a grocery store and then being pissed they wont let you just walk away with food without paying?
It is a service, but you aren't the consumer, and you're the product.
I think the internet is turning to shit and that Google/Youtube is greedy like every other conglomerate.
But… they have to get something from people using there services. I personally use YouTube like an iPad kid so I have premium. I like the EUs tech laws but I don’t think they should rule that a computer can’t push ads (assuming the ads are not malicious)
They're not ruling that YT can't push ads, though. They're ruling that they're sniffing around the user's computer for things that aren't preventing them provide the service.
In the end, Google has options. One would be, and I'm not saying this is the best one, that they charge everyone to access their site. You know... they way some newspapers do. I'm sure there are other options.
As a free user they get engagement, which may or may not offset what they get out of those that do provide them income. It seems like that was good enough for a couple decades.
I...really don't think it was ever about engagement. I think most free users just didn't have an adblocker.
I think ublock orgin's adoption just picked up over the years, and it's not as if Youtube gets cheaper (I'd imagine it just gets more expensive)
I mean engagement is great, they make the algorithm work (well, "work") but I'm pretty sure the ads were the selling point (for google) before premium was even an option.
assuming the ads are not malicious
All ads are malicious.
I like the EUs tech laws but I don’t think they should rule that a computer can’t push ads (assuming the ads are not malicious)
EU techs law don't ban to push ads, they say that you cannot look into my device to check it I (could) see them without asking for my permission for something that you don't need to provide a service.
they have to get something from people using there services
If the ads weren't absolutely overwhelming (easily around 50% of all watch time, last time I watched without blockers) and if they weren't so poorly implemented (starting ads at random times and not even caring if they're cutting someone off mid-sentence, making 2min+ ads unskippable, accepting ads from very questionable advertisers) it might feel a bit less onerous.
I was fine paying the premium light subscription price and now they're killing it and forcing me off that plan and to pay 50% more to add features I 100% don't use and don't want to use. And of course they'll just jack up the price again in 6-12 months because it's never enough.
YouTube's ads have been malicious for years. If now they try to push the ads they used to have people wouldn't have a reason to complain. But the way YouTube and Google are maximizing all their cash grabs they need to be put down in any way possible.
Fine. We all agree ads sucks. But I struggle to understand why you people keep fighting against a company while simultaneously being apparently so addicted to their products. Just do yourself a favor and stop using it altogether.
Just do yourself a favor and stop using it altogether.
I would, if the people that make the videos would fucking move to another platform. Problem is Youtube has a monopoly, 99% of the viewerbase is on that website, it's borderline impossible to get any real traction outside of it.
We're not on YouTube because of the companie or its service, but for the people who create content on that platform. The problem is there isn't a viable alternative for either creator or consumer, which basically makes YouTube a monopoly.
What i mean that there a lot of interesting alternative on the internet, not necessarily in video format (which is often very time consuming/inefficient with respect to the actual content/time ratio).
It's kind of like saying "if your country sucks so much, just leave"
Platforms aren't like gas stations, even if you get off a platform, the hostile choices a platform makes ripple through society
Watching a Youtube video here and there is not an addiction. Google has a monopoly in the area. I've switched from Chrome to Firefox, and use both Google and Yandex search, but I can't really switch away from Gmail, and if I want to watch e.g. a music video or some educational clip or interview, etc. etc. 99.9% of the time Youtube is the only place where I can do that.
I guess where you're coming from is the annoyance with the endless complaining about Twitter and reddit. But those two, while definitely unhealthily large and living off an addicted userbase, are still not in a position as monopolistic and as unavoidable as Youtube's.