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submitted 1 year ago by ijeff@lemdro.id to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[-] Nobody@lemmy.world 402 points 1 year ago

These tech companies have underestimated their utility. They are mostly providing mindless time wasters. If you try to charge money or create inconvenience, people will look for something else to do.

Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere. The VC grow-at-all-costs business model is fundamentally flawed. It doesn’t scale when profitability becomes a priority.

[-] umbrella@lemmy.ml 178 points 1 year ago

i think you mean "overestimated"

[-] Supervisor194@lemmy.world 68 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere.

👍

My attention is all the currency YouTube will ever get from me - and it should be enough. If I post videos to YouTube (for nothing in return) and I talk to people about videos I saw on YouTube or link them to videos - then I am a net gain for Google and they should treat me as such. If anything, they should be working (nicely) to try to get me to want to pay (or view ads) and just be thankful I'm there if I don't pay (or view ads). Instead they've chosen to work at ensuring everyone is so goddamn pissed off at their bullshit that they'd rather make it their full-time job to never give them another dime. Good job, Google! Smart!

Edit: Oh look, half a dozen lectures about how Google has to make money somehow. Hi there YouTube shills, I thought I would see you here.

[-] obinice@lemmy.world 44 points 1 year ago

Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let's say every user of a service is like you. Attention is all the currency they'll ever get from you, that's totally cool, absolutely. I'm totally that way too. But they've got to make money somehow, so if you're not the paying customer, someone else has to be.

I'm not saying it has to be ad sales either, but if we want a world in which we can use services for free without ads, we need to come up with an alternative way for them to make money. It has to come from somewhere, and by the bucketload.

If every user thinks like you, then it doesn't matter how many people you talk to or share links with, you're not a net gain on their service, you bring nothing to it.

Why should they, or anybody, be thankful that you honour them with your presence, if you contribute nothing of value? What makes you so entitled to use somebody's product for free with no strings attached?

Ads suck, I'm eager for us to move past them once we figure out an alternative that keeps products in business and us receiving things for free. But we can't deny the reality we live in right now either. Even huge companies like Google (who yes, do suck) have to make money to survive.

[-] daltotron@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago

I think generally you will find that people of this opinion hold that it is unreasonable that we have privatized basically all of the internet infrastructure. These people tend to be in favor of expecting the consumer spends more on hardware for hosting, and enthusiasts, hobbyists, non-profits, and occasionally companies develop the software necessary to make the internet function, rather than companies just paying for tons and tons of warehouses of servers, and then just forcing the software to all become fucked up walled gardens while the actual utilities everyone rests upon is left to rot.

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[-] rubythulhu 40 points 1 year ago

Youtube produces almost none of their own content, instead they rely on other humans to create that content.

Use your ad blocker if you want, but stop treating youtubers as google employees (they’re not, they often have a much more frustrating relationship than you do) and start supporting them through other means.

To you, those people are just helping you waste your time. if that’s your real argument here, stop wasting your fucking time and do something else more worth your precious time, or start supporting content producers directly through non-youtube methods. Or just stop fucking watching.

Those people aren’t on youtube because they’re buying into corporate google dick-wrangling, they want to produce videos and have them get watched, and youtube is a place that hosts their videos for free AND gives them ad revenue share for hosting youtube ads.

You aren’t some hero for adblocking youtube but still watching it. google won’t notice your small dip in their revenue, but the youtuber who made it will.

Wanna support the people who entertain you (or, i guess, “waste your time”, if that’s what you consider entertainment to be — if all you want is to waste your time, don’t ads do the same thing for you?). Pay them directly for their content. Want to take a fake stand that supports nobody but yourself and your own inconveniences, install an ad blocker and boast on the internet about how you’re totally fucking over google and the people who create youtube content by doing so. But don’t treat yourself like some hero for doing so.

[-] joyjoy@lemm.ee 66 points 1 year ago

You could've stopped after the second paragraph.

[-] Nobody@lemmy.world 54 points 1 year ago

If content creators provide 90% or even 60% of value to YouTube, why is Google a trillion dollar company while major content creators are fighting for scraps that fall from their table? Why are content creators who aren’t in the top tier compensated so little for what they bring to the table?

YouTube is nothing without content. Unionize. Stand together and get paid what you’re worth.

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[-] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 49 points 1 year ago

Who are you gonna defend next, the landlords?

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[-] mojo@lemm.ee 236 points 1 year ago

There are no better adblockers, uBlock Origin is all you need and is already updated to bypass it.

[-] calcopiritus@lemmy.world 112 points 1 year ago

Unlock origin is the adblocker that people are installing. There are a lot of people with shitty adblockers out there, I guess they are switching.

[-] cm0002@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago

I bet all those people with shitty adblockers are also probably googling better ad/YT compatible blockers lmaoo

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[-] ohlaph@lemmy.world 184 points 1 year ago

After YouTube started filling their search results with mostly shorts, I stopped using it for new stuff. It's terrible now.

[-] Rakonat@lemmy.world 63 points 1 year ago

Yeah youtubes attempt at being tiktok is just awful and they don't even have options to not have shorts show up in the feed. On top of shorts just being inferior versions of regular videos without functional controls

[-] elbarto777@lemmy.world 85 points 1 year ago

This is what gets me. Wanna show me shorts? Ok. But why the fuck am I not allowed to rewind a couple of seconds if I want to? It's an artificial, completely useless limitation that had no place in 2023.

So, no thanks.

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[-] Whirling_Cloudburst@lemmy.world 39 points 1 year ago

I started blocking those from appearing when they first showed up. There are a number of ways to do it. The Blocktube extension is one.

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[-] Zacryon@feddit.de 162 points 1 year ago

There’s also the option of biting the bullet and paying for YouTube Premium.

No. Never. I'd rather stop using YT at all than giving in to coerced user-tracking.

[-] NoRodent@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago

I mean, I might have considered paying for YT premium if I thought it offered some value (other than disabling ads) but I won't sure as hell pay for anything that any company is trying to blackmail me into.

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[-] Tygr@lemmy.world 152 points 1 year ago

Didn’t know about SponsorBlock until all this started. So many just found out ad blocking is possible.

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[-] Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee 134 points 1 year ago

I love that all the centralized social media networks are scrambling to become shitty for profits right around the time users are realizing that they don’t need centralized servers to host their user-generated content. Users can take their content wherever they want and let these platforms die.

[-] nicoweio@lemmy.world 60 points 1 year ago

I'm not sure if we manage to do the same for video though; hosting these costs a lot more.

[-] Muffi@programming.dev 43 points 1 year ago

Maybe we don't need 4K 60FPS video to show Mr. Beast giving away more crap. Just because we can up the quality, doesn't mean we should. Or maybe client-side real-time AI upscaling will make this a non-issue.

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[-] TheTimeKnife@lemmy.world 97 points 1 year ago

Youtube is a perfect example of why ad blockers exist. They use ridiculous ad volumes and spy on their users for data to sell.

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[-] fne8w2ah@lemmy.world 92 points 1 year ago
[-] Lianodel@ttrpg.network 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I love that, in a competition between a corporation worth hundreds of billions of dollars and a FOSS project, all Google managed to do was annoy uBlock Origin users for like a week. I just had to manually update the extension and restart my browser a few times.

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[-] r3df0x@7.62x54r.ru 85 points 1 year ago

Ublock Origin works

Brave is ass

[-] andy_wijaya_med@lemmy.world 82 points 1 year ago

And they increased the fucking price for YouTube premium.

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[-] Blaster_M@lemmy.world 82 points 1 year ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Meanwhile, Youtube engineers and uBlock Origin volunteers are in a war of attrition, updating both the website (youtube, to block ublock) and uBlock Origin (the ad blocker, to unblock the ublock blocker) multiple times a day every day

[-] grue@lemmy.world 47 points 1 year ago

I feel like uBlock Origin has been coming out ahead more often than not. I haven't had to manually refresh my lists for the last few days.

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[-] gapbetweenus@feddit.de 70 points 1 year ago

Switched finally to ff. So I guess thank you google.

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[-] disconnectikacio@lemmy.world 67 points 1 year ago

Spread the word to install firefox based browser, use different frontends to block youtube ads in browser, Invidious and use piped youtube apps on android to block youtbe ads: Newpipe

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[-] AMillionNames@sh.itjust.works 60 points 1 year ago

I had uBlock Origin installed since forever, are people just finding out about it?

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[-] silencioso@lemmy.world 57 points 1 year ago

NewPipe in my mobile and FreeTube in my desktop. Fuck you Google

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[-] WindowsEnjoyer@sh.itjust.works 56 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They should fucking do an experiment - 2€/$ a month for an ad-free subscription and 3€/$ a month for higher video quality+no ads subscription. I would fucking pour my money into it.

Oh wait, that would not solve lack of sponsorblock. I guess I am not interested then...

[-] DV8@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago

They literally had that experiment with Premium Light. €6 for ad free watching, it was all I needed. But they literally sent out a mail they were stopping this tier right before they started implementing more anti-ad blocking measures.

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[-] maquise@ttrpg.network 48 points 1 year ago

Just this morning all the posts (here on Lemmy) were about how everyone was uninstalling their adblockers.

[-] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 131 points 1 year ago

People should be uninstalling Chrome instead.

Adblocking still works fine on Firefox. Just update your UBO filters.

[-] Subverb@lemmy.world 43 points 1 year ago

I literally have un-installed chrome. I had to use it on an office machine today and it felt weird.

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[-] ThunderWhiskers@lemmy.world 59 points 1 year ago

Why the fuck would anyone uninstall their ad blocker just because one site demands it? Whitelists exist for a reason.

[-] smokingManhole@lemmy.world 36 points 1 year ago

I'll stop using Internet before I even consider whitelisting YouTube.

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[-] yukichigai@kbin.social 50 points 1 year ago

That article was full of such blatantly misleading crap. Headline talks about record number of adblocker uninstalls, but the actual data says it was an uptick in both installs and uninstalls. In other words it was people cycling through different adblockers trying to find one that still worked.

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[-] Pons_Aelius@kbin.social 41 points 1 year ago

And that didn't mention ublock origion, the blocker that still works...

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[-] sagrotan@lemmy.world 45 points 1 year ago

I don't know what the whole fuzz was / is about, it's years now that I unwillingly watched ads, anywhere. So easy, piehole, newpipe, avoid any Microsoft shit, you just have to be ready to learn a bit, it's not rocket science. Ok, rocket science helped, but that's not the point...

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[-] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 42 points 1 year ago

Not everybody is.

That's the thing, even if 95% of users currently using ad blockers block ads anyway or leave the service, YouTube still wins big.

They aren't worried at all about alienating users from which they can't extract ad revenue. Those on the margin that turn off ad blockers or subscribe to a paid plan are the target, not everyone else.

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[-] yuunikki@lemmy.dbzer0.com 40 points 1 year ago
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[-] ElBarto@sh.itjust.works 39 points 1 year ago

So today I've seen this article saying YouTube failed and another saying they've succeeded because of record uninstalls of adblockers.

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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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