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Mmmm, gotta love that enshittification strategy every big tech company is working on right now.
Free money ended, they are trying to squeeze
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!
Moral of the story: create separate account for YouTube that has no high value services or data on it.
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.
Moral of the story is: if you’re like me and still use a main account for youtube, transition away from that account starting today. Change your business emails slowly to another service.
I’d argue the bigger moral is that you should always own your online identity. You should buy your own domain (
@yourname.xyzor something like that) and make your email on that. So if Google bans you, you just switch email providers and keep your address.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.
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?
Spend a weekend degoogling your stuff. There are alternatives for everything now. No regrets
deleted by creator
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.
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.
8-10 unskippable ads before a video? Holy shit. That’s ludicrous.
It really is hard to fathom how that got through any internal discussion.
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.
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”)
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.
Feels like every year corporations rely on the naivety of youth in an attempt to push more and more egregious shit.
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.
Executives don’t have to watch ads! They’re rich! I wouldn’t be surprised if they all had YT Premium or whatever it is.
Hearing how such people tend to be the very ‘whales’ that other executives rely on with mtx-driven games, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them had twice as many subscriptions as they could name.
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?
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.
Time to use an adblock blocker blocker extension.
I think that would be NoScript.
NoScript would sadly leave you with NoVideo.
What’s with every big tech company trying to destroy their userbase this year?
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
So if you are on android: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.polymorphicshade.newpipe (Newpipe with sponsorblock baked in)
If you are on PC: https://freetubeapp.io/ (Piped with sponsorblock baked in)
You’re welcome.
Ad blocker detection is not new, and other publishers regularly ask viewers to disable ad blockers
“everyone else is treating their customers like garbage, so they don’y hold it against us”.
Yes, we can.
I didn’t block when you had 5 second ads. I didn’t block when you had 15 second ads. I started blocking when you’d play 2+ unskippable 15 second ads back-to-back. I didn’t mind sitting through an ad when I appreciate the service you offered. Now, you’re just being greedy, and I will go to great lengths to damage your bottom line as notably as I can.
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.
Cat and mouse game. May get me to watch a couple, but I’ll someone will have a way around it within a week.
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.
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.
Anyone hoping there will be a mass exodus from YouTube to other–maybe fediverse YouTube alternatives, reminiscent of the Reddit exodus?
YouTube is a very different scale of platform… There’s probably ways that it could be done, and I know things like PeerTube do exist, but… Storing video is expensive, serving video is expensive, transcoding video is expensive… While I’d love to see it, I’d also worry a little bit about the retention of videos over time. YouTube’s video archive is kind of insanely valuable, and it’d be a shame to have it disappear. Not that I necessarily think it’s safe in Google’s hands, mind you, I just worry that people self-hosting video would drop out pretty quickly.
Yes I hope, but I don’t see it happening. Creators will go where the masses are and where the money is.
I have heard of peertube as a fediverse-based alternative, but I have not heard of anybody actually talk about really using it.
fediverse YouTube alternatives
Yea, so who’s hosting the videos and providing the bandwidth?
Video hosting is way too expensive and complex to be decentralised.
I don’t think video streaming is likely to be viable with a fedi-like model, unfortunately.
Would love to see more creators move to Nebula, though. I don’t think that would work for the casual youtubers I follow, but for the bigger producers, it’d be great.
YouTube without an adblocker is such a mess. I wish alternatives like https://odysee.com had more of the content I watch and less Nazi bullshit though. YouTube really needs some strong competition since they have an effective monopoly on long-form videos on the internet. :(
Yeah, I’m glad at least a few YouTubers are starting to mirror content on sites like Odysee though (Such as Louis Rossman). I think that, like Lemmy, it just needs to reach a critical mass of users before it’s viable
I made an account there once and immediately got racist and homophobic results, so I quit using it.
Greedy fuckers. They’re not making enough money already? And when you pay them you get shit service anyways.
I´m sure the will be no false strikes at all. And even if, I´m sure they have a quick and easy appeal process in place, just like they have with copyright.
I’d be shocked if there was even one human on the other end of their appeal process.
I was subscribed to Youtube Premium for a good while (1-2 years), and I actually liked it for the money I paid. It was/is actually a good deal.
However, the amount of cases where creators were getting wrongly copyright striked and could do nothing against it were getting to high. The creators were often against a faceless corporate system.
I don’t expect to view something on Youtube for free, however, I don’t want to support a company that is as faceless as them. They need to be more accommodating, open, communicate more.
In the end I had to cancel my subscription as I could not continue supporting those practices.
They want your money but they don’t want to actually provide any customer or creator services. They think they can automate everything but do a shit job at it.
They will never win. They will only lose.
