Anyone else remember when new technology used to be fun and exciting instead of miserable?
Long gone are the days when I used be excited to read update notes for new features… Now I just hope they don’t god damn force an update on me.
I went back to an old APK of Twitch and refuse to update to the current dumpster fire.
I use PurpleTV and it’s been great. It’s a Twitch fork modified to block ads, reduce bloat, and include customisation for chat, player and other components.
Don’t know if we can share links here but the APK can be easily found online, still being updated semi-regularly. I won’t come back to the official app as long as I’m able. :)
Cheers for that. I had other third party apps way back in the day but they lacked some features. Will check it out.
Xtra is great https://github.com/crackededed/Xtra/
They also leak your User ID and IP to a 3rd party.
ugh.
Twire is a great alternative though.
https://github.com/twireapp/Twire
And it only connects to Twitch! :) (Plus betterttv or alternatives in case support for them are activated iirc)
is there a way to watch stuff without using a Twitch account with it? I’ve tried just skipping the login process, but search returns no results when I search for streamers or games.
Just use Free and Open Source Software!
It can always fuck up with updates, but usually you just get more free stuff and it’s awesome.
And always donate if you find the project useful!
Somewhere along the line, maybe the early to mid 2000’s they stopped making products “for” the end-user and flipped it around so the end-user (their data) is now the product, and the customers are governments, corporations, and share holders.
Because those shareholders (billionaires) and corporations drained the consumers of all of their money and now they’re the most profitable demographic to market to.
shareholders
If 0.000…01% shareholders count:
Guessing a lotta us have a few bucks in index funds… suppose that ain’t cool, gotta find a principled fund.
The most principled funds must only invest in like three companies cuz every corp has some problem.
That’s part of the reason why new community oriented projects are way more interesting to me now than most software. There are some outliers in the space who still have dedicated people in their craft rather than for money but it is fewer and farther between.
Absolutely. Although, this is just making old technology worse because web 3.0 and AI aren’t performing to corpo expectations.
That’s what happens when you aren’t the (sole) paying customer.
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Soon: when you pause a video, it starts playing a video ad with audio, to make sure no silence time gets wasted from your speakers.
And your speakers are on subscription plans that charge you for every second that they play noise. Better upgrade to the next tier if you want to listen to anything else!
That’s fine, the ad co struck a deal with speaker co to not bill for those sound-seconds.
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There is also a tax on when the speakers are not in use.
Imagine if they pulled that on the idle timeout pause screen too…
God I hope my adbock holds up…
If it doesn’t goodbye Youtube. I love the creators, but hate you as a platform.
Yeah, uBlock Origin not working would take me from liking YouTube a fair bit to making it unusable.
- I use Proton but keep legacy Gmail accounts around to ensure I still have access to accounts I may have forgotten about or people I knew a long time ago sending a stray email. The only other usage is logging into YouTube.
- I use a Captcha solver extension.
- I use uBlock Origin to block all their ads.
- I don’t use their DNS.
- I use DDG over their search engine and Firefox over their browser.
- I don’t use Google Drive or their office suite (I think the latter is abysmal to use tbf).
- I use DeepL over Translate.
- I use NewPipe for YouTube on mobile and have a subscription to Nebula.
- I no longer use Google Maps, opting for OSM instead.
- I still use Android and unfortunately can’t unlock the bootloader but have degoogled as far as I know how, including never even registering a Google account with it (F-Droid + Aurora Store).
YouTube is far and away the biggest means by which I interact with Google, and that falls off a cliff if I’m forced to interact with a mess of their ridiculously shitty ads every time I have to use it. uBO has likely saved hundreds of hours of watching ads over my lifetime (and probably thousands of dollars from not being subconsciously influenced by ads), and I’m not paying a subscription fee to such an unethical company to get rid of the ads. This would bring me from YouTube as a timewaster to YouTube only as strictly necessary. Even though I don’t support them directly through ads, I do support them by supporting creators I like monetarily, by sharing links and maintaining the network effect, and by giving them plenty of metadata by interacting with their service. If they do this, they ensure that I continue to monetarily support competitors like Nebula and permanently lose a grip they’ve had on me since I was a kid.
Captcha solver add-on? Had no idea about that. If a captcha can be solved this way, why is still being used? What’s the point?
To decrease the amount of spam. There is a misunderstanding, the same with anti-cheat. Captchas will always be solvable, there will always be people who cheat. The point is not to eliminate all bots / cheaters, but to only have to deal with a smaller number of them.
The point is that people think that it’s effective. It’s the illusion of security, which does actually keep some of the more stupid spammers and bad actors at bay. It doesn’t stop the ones that are determined though, nothing does.
+1 on the Nebula subscription. It’s worth every penny. That and Dropout are the only streaming subscriptions I still maintain.
That’s what we need tbh. If people get fed up and leave then eventually creators will too
If it doesn’t I will make something that records the entire f****** stream and removes the commercials out of it the old fashioned way If I have to. Not my first rodeo.
Yt-DLP and it’s variation (Seal, YTDLnis, etc.), newpipe and it’s variation (Tubular, Newpipe Sponsorblock, etc) already allow you to do this without having to get manual.
And I use YTDLP now. At some point they will make it inoperable. I’m honestly surprised they haven’t sorted it out yet.
Seal sold out. It’s trash now
“Seal downloader” from the Playstore and “Seal” from F-Droid are 2 very different apps. One is a a clone riddled with ads, the other one is FOSS goodness. You are free to guess which is which.
I will find text versions of everything I need to learn about and create my own video, and then watch it.
Wait a couple more years you’ll be able to feed the descriptions through AI and make really trippy videos
…how?
Video content never changes, but the order and content of ads do. Automated browser, record the video 2-3 times. Diff the frames and slice out the ones that don’t match between runs.
I remember back in the day, there was programs that would identify ads and remove them off on air programs. I would imagine something like that would be possible. Although at that point, just skipping the “platform” altogether might be a better solution.
My guess: Youtube-dl derivative then an ffmpeg script to detect black frames that usually sandwich commercials on TV and delete the video inside those frames.
If it happens, and you do, host it, and set up a donation box too.
Most likely, I just dedicate an old laptop, a 4k HDMI capture device, store off MP4 and feed it through comskip then take it h265 and store it off.
If I don’t do anything tricky with the browser they can’t detect that I’m doing anything tricky at all.
The only thing I’m a little concerned about is that they’re going to start doing advertising like broadcast TV did and put quarter screen commercials up for other shows in the middle of running shows.
So you want someone to broadcast, and you’re willing to pay for it, but not willing to support the content creators in any way?
I would happily watch ads if they were non-intrusive and non-interrupting ads like side banners that don’t cause popups, or product placement inside videos.
I would also pay for a platform where 100% of the money goes to paying for hosting and paying the creators.
Neither of these things are happening, so yes, I would rather donate to support piracy.
Like way to kill your platform for anything educational where you want to pause to look at a graph.
Look at the article linked to it. It has a render of a pause ad being a banner that shrinks the video player somewhat, but the paused video is viewable.
That’s a lot of faith that the ads would be SFW, let alone not distracting.
YouTube wants you to keep watching the videos. The more time you spend on the site the more ads you see. They care about finding the balance of acceptable ad load to maximize ad space, which requires a consistent user base. I have faith that this is their objective. Also, videos take time to load and a user hitting pause is unpredictable. A light weight display ad is probably the best technically feasible way to grab a user’s attention in that brief moment of hitting pause. Especially when pause means a user wants to mute audio to do things like take a phone call, a video would turn off users to the platform.
It doesn’t need to be an animated visual to be distracting or NSFW…
What if you paused so you could see something? You’re not allowed to read that text in the background because ads
Great point. I already find this to be a problem with the recommendations that pop up when paused, and the end-video elements they throw over everything despite having that turned off everywhere I can find it. It’s all so dumb. Just so damn dumb.
They’ll likely do what other platforms have done and let you X out the ad til you unpause
This already happened. People looking up CPR instructions because a loved one is dying, only to be met with three unskippable ads.
Goodbye Meemaw.
Yeah, that may be so, but priorities man. Priorities! Think of our profits man! In this harsh economy, ever ad counts! We’re only controlling 90% of the internet while we strive for 100%. That’s 10% short. 10%! We only had a revenue of 305 billion in 2023 which is not nearly enough to cut down on ads. Billionaire lives matter man! Come on, everybody, say it all together: Make millionaires billionaires again! Billionaires first! Meemaws don’t consume enough anyway. Screw her. By the way, want some penis enlargement pills?
Proof? Aren’t there classes of videos non monetized on youtube? When I just google search for cpr and find the american red cross I quickly found written instructions as well as a youtube video that doesn’t appear to have any ads. Isn’t the problem that some video creators intentionally create videos for CPR in hopes of monetizing?
https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/83733719?hl=en
This means as a creator that’s not in YPP [Youtube Partner Program], you may see ads on some of your videos. Since you’re not currently in YPP, you won’t receive a share of the revenue from these ads, though you’ll still have the opportunity to apply for YPP as you normally would once you meet the eligibility requirements.
Thanks for the checking. I think the whole argument is pretty wild and specious, and factually suspect, that someone died because a person couldn’t look up the cpr video on time. YouTube is not a platform that is meant to deliver on demand life saving training. In NYC all the restaurants and workplaces have signs up in designated areas with instructions on how to do cpr. I suspect someone is going to more quickly look up written instructions or infographics if they need to Google. But really, this just speaks to the importance in staying up to date on CPR practices and having school and HR classes that teach this on a recurring basis. Using this as an argument against all ads is kind of nuts.
Also, the first step of most CPR instructions is call 911. So if you follow instructions, how are you watching a video on the phone? And can’t the operator coach you through the steps? https://www.redcross.org/take-a-class/cpr/performing-cpr/cpr-steps
Not defending YouTube here, but CPR is so time sensitive that if they were looking up instructions, she was a goner anyway.
Have you had CPR training? What you stated isn’t true. Every second counts. But looking up instructions and seeing a easy video will still help massively.
Exactly. It takes over a minute for permanent brain damage from a lack of oxygen, and it can take several, several minutes before actual death.
CPR started anytime within that range will help keep the person alive, as you are literally forcing their body to intake oxygen and pump the blood.
If you find someone without a heart beat and they aren’t already cold then call 911 and start cpr
Yes in fact I teach it and do it regularly. Out of hospital cardiac arrest survival rates are atrocious even when the person performing CPR is properly trained, let alone a panicked person trying to look up instructions on YouTube.
And I’m 100% not saying that a person shouldn’t attempt to do CPR in this scenario, just saying that any realistic scenario where the compressor is trying to look up instructions in real time is bound to fail. That’s why I volunteer my time teaching community members how to do it properly, even if it’s hands-only CPR (eg no rescue breaths)
Hey look, a blatant lie disguised as a fact!
I wonder how this furthers your agenda…
And good people argue how adblock and sponssrblock are fair game for your shitty company practices
It’s excellent that alternatives and ad blockers do exist but we need regulatory action to hold companies accountable for things that are designed to worsen user experience to pressure people into paying. It’s also a serious accessibility issue, to increasingly have everything be bright and loud and motion filled and unpausable all the time. This trend goes beyond YouTube and it sucks, we need to regulate this nonsense.
It’s pretty stupid to introduce ads on the pause screen. Usually I would pause something because I am either:
A) Being interrupted and need to focus on something else like a phone call or a family member talking to me, and wouldn’t be paying attention to the screen anyways.
B) Need to leave to go somewhere else like the fridge for a snack and wouldn’t be paying attention to the screen anyways.
Or
C) Just want to take a break and want to do something else which involves opening another window or program and wouldn’t be paying attention to the window with YouTube open.
In every scenario where I pause YouTube and add playing would not provide any value to the entity paying YouTube to play the ad.
And in every scenario, if an ad began playing when I pause youtube it would cause me to mute my sound and/or turn off my monitor and just cause me to get super annoyed at YouTube or at whatever product is being advertised and how to never buy it ever.
governments will not do anything that upsets the big companies like Google. Adblockers are are only defence against Google and others.
Actually, good news, they have! Google just lost its search monopoly trial with the US government, and they seem to be about to lose their advertising monopoly trial too. The US FTC also just released a report (not a legal action) concluding that all the big companies have abused data collection and recommended that the government do something to make those practices unprofitable for companies. I know the EU has also been doing some significant stuff, both against apple specifically and big gatekeeper companies generally. You can certainly argue it’s not enough, and I would agree with you - but it’s given me some optimism that more action and real enforcement might be in the near future in many countries.
What a weird downslope of a take that will obviously result in authoritarian government power expansion and futher censorship.
Just stop using it and support alternatives that dont do it. Have some self control.
Name a single viable alternative to YouTube at this point in time. Alternative frontends don’t count, since they still rely on YouTube to work. None of the creators I watch upload anywhere else.
People always say shit like this as if people don’t have a multitude of different life circumstances that affect and coerce how they interact with technology. That’s just how capitalism works. It’s not a matter of willpower. Privacy Bootstraps Theory is unhelpful. Being able to completely opt out of entrenched tech monopolies is a privilege. It’s great that you can do that, not everybody can.
Regulating capitalism = authoritarianism. What a weird take. Regulating capitalism =/= abolishing capitalism, this I can understand. But your take… wow.
Do you think regulations are just blanket authoritarian actions. Sometimes we need government intervention to ensure and protect people’s rights.
🤡
Are they so dumb They don’t realize that when we pause a video we are likely not watching or even near our fucking phone or screen at that time?
They do, they’re probably just hoping the advertisers don’t and keep paying for more ad space.
They don’t care. If the advertisers pay for that spot then they make money! This has been the story with TV ads for decades.
They do, and they don’t care. The algorithm is actually tailored to find out if/when you fall asleep while watching videos, and then recommends longer videos in autoplay when it believes you are, because they’ll get to play you more ads and cash out more. When/if they implement pause ads advertisers will have an even bigger case against against yt inflating ad watch time to make more money. Facebook has this issue as well.
The algorithm is actually tailored to find out if/when you fall asleep while watching videos, and then recommends longer videos in autoplay when it believes you are, because they’ll get to play you more ads and cash out more.
You might be misremembering / misinterpreting a little there. This behavior is not intentional, it’s just a side effect of how the algorithm currently works. Showing you longer videos doesn’t equate to showing you more ads. On the contrary, if you get loads of short videos you’ll have way more opportunities to see pre-roll ads, but with longer videos, you’re just to just the mid-roll spots in that video. So YouTube doesn’t really have an incentive to make it work like that, it’s just accidental.
Here’s the spiffing Brit video on this, which I think you might have gotten this idea from: https://youtu.be/8iOjeb5DTZI
Edit: to be clear, I fully agree that YouTube will do anything to shove ads down our throats no matter how effective they actually are. I’m just saying that this example you’ve brought is not really that.
Huh yea you’ve actually got a great point there. Also one of the YouTubers I watch is quite open about his knowledge on content creation and the algorithm and he once claimed yt knows when and to whom showing ads is beneficial, if you don’t mind sitting thru ads your supposedly more prone to get them, which is the reason why every time I’m using the official YouTube client for whatever reason I make sure to close and reopen the video as many times as it takes until I get it to start playing with no ads 😂 If that is true they’d def use that as an opportunity to roll out more ads cus no ones there to skip em
Advertising these days is less of a way for websites and services to make free money.
Of course websites and services that serve ads will deny this vehemently because advertisers who become aware of such practices (typically known as click fraud) will cut off those websites from ad revenue very quickly and stop serving ads there.
The idea is to trick the advertising companies into thinking that we are there and we are watching, and we care, so that they will pay money to the website to display ads there.
It’s the opposite. If you pause the video you the viewers are almost always looking at the screen. The pause button on a mobile phone or web browser is literally on the player. You are guaranteed to see it immediately after you push the button. You will see it when you un pause. These ads are display banners not video. It only takes a second to see the ad.
Unlike video ads that just auto play, especially when the video player auto plays more videos, there probably is more probability you aren’t actually watching, unlike pause ads that require user activity and focus on the screen to push the pause button.
Google probably only spent months researching this and they only have all the tracking and user studies to know what you said. Please ignore the obvious fact that you are looking at the screen when you are pausing or resuming a video, KingJalopy knows better and Google is just dumb. Nobody will see any of these ads and they are adding them in vain.
The fuck they are
I’d rather see them on pause screen than interrupting the playback but because we can’t have any nice things, interruptions will also only get worse.
Yeah, I guarantee you google isn’t interested in showing you one or the other. They want the revenue from both. My only question is, if you pause an ad, can you get another ad in your ad?
The infinitebad windows, how deep can you go!?!?
Don’t most YouTubers make more money with their own sponsorships than from YT ads? Can we start the mass migration to PeerTube already?
I don’t think Peertube would handle mass migration of Youtube creators, unless each and every one of them set up their own instance.
I’d honestly be curious to see how that plays out. Every creator hosts their own content while strengthening and spreading the Peertube network.
I feel like that would quickly solidify it as a viable alternative.
Except content creators want to create content, not maintain an instance.
In time the technical knowledge requirements may be reduced. I could see a small company selling pre-setup media servers with a couple TB of storage. Just plug it in, load up your videos and your basically done.
And if you don’t have comments/users, there is little that needs to be maintained.
It’s not perfect, but there will eventually be a point where YouTube becomes so enshitified that people begin to switch to alternatives.
Nah, your ISP doesn’t give you enough bandwidth to host your own mini YouTube. You vastly underestimate the bandwidth required to run the service. It’s massive, which is why PeerTube is having a hard time gaining traction.
Not all creators need the same bandwidth.
Exactly. More work for likely less pay.
This, my friends, is a classic lemmy argument: “how about someone whom I already don’t pay anything go and do more work for less pay, so I can enjoy my content free, without ads, and don’t need to bother with an AdBlock”.
How about, you, anon, set up a server, provide a simple upload API, and convince your favorite content creator to upload there? Since it’s no costs for them and very little work, they might. Maintain that for a year, then we’ll talk.
Then realize that YouTube was losing billions every year for over a decade, and that their current model is the only way it can be profitable for them 😅
The unfortunate business model of the current tech world.
And the only way to teach them to drop this BS is to migrate to a better thing as soon as the enshitification starts.
I would’ve told you we shouldn’t have fallen into this trap to begin with, but that implies cooperation of the entire internet. And that ain’t happening.
On the other hand, we can accept that this is how things are. We get years of free trial and pay for it in the next years. 13$/month is not an insane amount of money for the value provided. And it’s shared with creators in a transparent manner, so it’s not like they’re hording all of it either.
If I had a million dollars I’d start a company that sets up and manages federated software like Mastodon and Peertube.
This has been the case since some time before the Adpocalypse iirc.
YT will likely attempt to play creators and viewers off one another. Similar to how hospitality does so with patrons and staff re: tips. You could see a FUD campaign aimed at anyone republishing their work on competitor sites.
odysee can also be a option from peertube as well but odysees privacy policy they sell non pii data according to them if they dont sell user data we will be good
I wonder what made their leadership continue to escalate into increasingly bullshit decisions. What happens if I need to pause because I need my PC to be quiet so I can address something and still an ad suddenly starts playing, completely interrupting what I wanted to address in a completely intrusive way? I’ll tell you what happens, I’ll either find some way to disable that from happening, switch to a service that doesn’t do it if I can, or just begin avoiding it all together.
Brilliant planing, YouTube. Whoever has been left as its leadership is a dumbass.
Not to mention it’ll push more people towards using Adblockers. And since chrome is cracking down on Adblockers as well, people start using another browser altogether. It seems like Google is self-sabotaging with these kind of decisions.
Hilarious isn’t it? I stopped using Google search because they fucked it up too bad. I stopped watching YouTube years ago too because they already fucked it up.
I guess they just don’t want users anymore.
I guess they just don’t want users anymore.
Actually, they do; it’s just that Google has become a bit short-sighted. They’ve started prioritizing short-term revenue over long-term growth and user experience.
They seem to have forgotten that focusing on the long term and prioritizing user experience were the key factors that made them an internet giant in the first place.
In any case, Google is a sinking ship. I’ll give them a max of seven years before they become the next Yahoo if they keep making incompetent decisions like this.
Whoever has been left as its leadership is a dumbass.
Not in the slightest. More likely their annual bonus depends on boosting revenue right now. So they’re incentivised to generate short term increases in revenue but not for longer term. Plus, also, if/when Youtube goes tits up they’ll just get a different CEOing job (with “increased revenue by 25% in 2024 on their resume”) rinse and repeat.
Money.
Also I imagine the ads will be silent but animated, like a regular website ad but full screen, essentially turning whatever you’re watching it on into a giant billboard.
It’s just another thing to block I guess.
I should have opened the article, that’s a lot less intrusive than what I thought. If this is the extent of it, and frankly considering that Google let’s you opt out of personalized tracking when many sites have begun forcing them onto users and forcing me to constantly clear their cookies, that makes me a lot less mad with them.
not if you use ublock origin or newpipe
And SmartTubeNext on Android TV
I use both!
Or LibreTube
OK, I’ve been dicking around with LibreTube for 4 hours now and I can’t figure out how to, or if I need to, create a login, and where exactly I would do that, given the several sources under “instance”.
For the sake of fuck, why are so many open source projects gut-wrenchingly awful at providing any beginner user info?
The easiest solution is to go to Settings -> Instance and toggle both “Disable Piped proxy” and “Local stream extractions”
Just gonna say I hate this when other apps do this. I pause cause I need to concentrate on something else. Showing an ad just makes that even harder. Now I have to pause AND close the app.
Just close it straight away…
