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Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

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Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#131

Post by kevincox »

wbobeirne wrote: post #18

Asking this question in good faith and in the interest of a productive discussion: Can someone give me their reasoning for why to use this over just paying for YouTube premium? They're providing a service that you value and spend enough time on to warrant looking for a way to not have to view ads, and if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. It fee…

I used to pay for Premium. Then they kept making the service worse and worse. Eventually I decided that they don't deserve my money.

- YouTube Music is trash. I was an inside early adopter and all of my feedback was ignored. I originally subscribed for Google Play Music (which was pretty good) but I switched back to my own collecting.

- They removed email subscription notices.

- YouTube Originals were awful. They took some of my favourite creators to make slightly better content that I can no longer share with my friends. Not to mention that you were never notified of these videos because they were completely different from normal videos in all of the YouTube UIs. (Thankfully went back on this, but I had left by that point).

- Videos always play at 360p on my 4k monitor. I need to manually up the quality at least 90% of the time. My internet is fantastic and I never see a stutter after raising the quality.

- The recommendations are always awful. I don't use them often but when I do it is all things that I have already watched.

- They keep trying to turn auto-play back on. (Although to be fair this isn't new).

- It still has ads! They just promote the Premium content (that I don't want) instead of other ads. Sure, less obtrusive but still annoying. Just let me use the damn service I have been paying for for years.

I understand the argument that I shouldn't be using the service if I'm not paying for it. In fact I don't use an adblocker on most sites because of this belief (I just back out of obnoxious sites). However 1. I've paid enough that I consider it fair for years of future viewing and 2. costing YouTube money is actually beneficial to me, because if it were to fold the content would move somewhere better.

To me YouTube is a great example of the cost of forever quadratic growth. They had a good product, it was profitable with ads or profitable if people payed for Premium. But they need to keep sucking more value from users otherwise their shareholders get angry. But I've been sucked dry and I'm quitting.

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#132

Post by Taway_vncd »

endisneigh wrote: post #19

Funny how people want content but don’t want to support content creators via ads or paying for YouTube Premium. The internet in a nutshell. Ironically if people weren’t so avoidant of paying for digital content, ads, and the subsequent tracking, would’ve never emerged.

There was a time before ads on the internet, and there was content there. Great content even. I would love to see what people create when they do it just because they want to, on their own terms and their own time, rather than chasing what will be self-sustainable or profitable.

This still exists in some places. Archive of Our Own is a great example. SCP is another. Wikipedia and StackOverflow too, for this website's audience... Or this website, indeed

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#133

Post by delecti »

ryanlitalien wrote: post #39
wbobeirne wrote: post #18

Asking this question in good faith and in the interest of a productive discussion: Can someone give me their reasoning for why to use this over just paying for YouTube premium? They're providing a service that you value and spend enough time on to warrant looking for a way to not have to view ads, and if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. It fee…

The benefits of YouTube Premium far exceed the monthly cost. I only realize this value prop when I try to access YouTube in incognito. Eye opening.

In addition to incognito, also Chromecast. A Chromecast will insert ads before videos added to the queue by non-premium accounts. As a result I got a family account so I wouldn't have to watch ads before videos my wife enqueued.

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#134

Post by BipolarCapybara »

Krasnol wrote: post #46
BipolarCapybara wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my expierience New Pipe is lacking. The fact you have to reimport the subscriptions manually is very tedious, besides I've found New Pipe breaks often and it won't let me load videos. It's pretty cool for listening to music while the screen is off, but I wouldn't recommend it as a daily Youtube driver.

I've never seen it actually "break". The only times it's not working is because YouTube changed something and you need to download a new version which works pretty good with the appropriate repo in F-Droid.

Did they fix that you have to update it only through GitHub?

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#135

Post by wbobeirne »

JSavageOne wrote: post #54
wbobeirne wrote: post #18

Asking this question in good faith and in the interest of a productive discussion: Can someone give me their reasoning for why to use this over just paying for YouTube premium? They're providing a service that you value and spend enough time on to warrant looking for a way to not have to view ads, and if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. It fee…

The same reason people use adblockers, get around news article paywalls, and/or pirate. Because they can, and don't see ethical issues with it. > if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. How likely is this though? For example despite adblockers already being widely available, it seems that a significant portion of internet users if not most don't a…

Having worked on a largely ad-supported website in the early '10s, I can definitely say the rise of ad blockers had a meaningful impact on ad revenue. I didn't mind this at all, I much preferred the product investing more effort in making the subscription that removed ads have attractive features, but if users had a way to also get all of the subscription features without paying, I don't think the business would have been able to sustain itself.

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#136

Post by autoexec »

k12sosse wrote: post #90
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel content on the internet was free for so long, people just feel entitled to it. Now everyone is anti-ad, with most not being able to support an argument as to why targeted ads are bad (like any human at Google cares how user 1839028934 watches vtubers for 8 hours a day), but they still feel entitled to consume content for free.

It's weird that people just think because it's available over the Internet it should be free because "this isn't how it worked in 1993". Would love to see what would happen if YouTube went behind a paywall - even a low figure like $1.99 a month to view anything at all. How would this change consumption habits, how would this change producing habits.

> It's weird that people just think because it's available over the Internet it should be free because "this isn't how it worked in 1993".

The idea is older than the 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

when it comes to the vast majority of the content on youtube, it was created by someone other than google with the expectation that it would be free.

There is now an expectation that people should be able to find and listen to any song they want on youtube (to a lesser extent movies and TV shows too), but that has less to do with how people feel about the internet and more about our broken copyright system and that most of that content used to be broadcast to the public.

If youtube were behind a paywall most people wouldn't spend as much time (if any) watching youtube videos and far fewer people would bother creating content for it. That'd be a losing situation for Google since they need the public's eyes on ads and a steady stream of data to mine from both content creators and viewers.

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#137

Post by Pooge »

bmicraft wrote: post #110
Pooge wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now everyone is anti-ad I became anti-ad. I absolutely cannot browse the web normally without having uBlock Origin installed. Websites that place intrusive ads are responsible for this. > they still feel entitled to consume content for free Yes, and I agree with you. But even if YouTube became a paid service, Google would still find a way to track you and continue its shady privacy practices. There's some entitleme…

The real problem with ads is that you have to pay vastly more to remove them through a subscription (where it is even possible) than the revenue they would have brought.

If every Snapchat user paid $2/month, wouldn't Snapchat have decent revenue? For some service the infrastructure might cost a lot, but I don't think it applies to Snapchat (it's a very "ephemeral" photo-sharing platform, after all).

Another way would be to charge for every photo you upload. Those that share more pay more, which would make sense.

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#139

Post by wbobeirne »

kevingadd wrote: post #72
wbobeirne wrote: post #18

Asking this question in good faith and in the interest of a productive discussion: Can someone give me their reasoning for why to use this over just paying for YouTube premium? They're providing a service that you value and spend enough time on to warrant looking for a way to not have to view ads, and if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. It fee…

Personally, I pay for Premium but I also think everyone should run an ad-blocker on Google properties. I certainly do. It's at least nice if my premium sub gives 3 cents to the creators of the videos I watch since they wouldn't be getting ad money...

That's personally where I fall as well, I pay for most sites I get a lot of value out of, but continue to run ad blockers. It's quite frustrating how many sites continue to show you ads even if you're a paid subscriber.

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#140

Post by autoexec »

wbobeirne wrote: post #18

Asking this question in good faith and in the interest of a productive discussion: Can someone give me their reasoning for why to use this over just paying for YouTube premium? They're providing a service that you value and spend enough time on to warrant looking for a way to not have to view ads, and if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. It fee…

> and if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely.

I doubt this. Youtube provides google with a lot more than a means a push ads. It gives them massive amounts of data about the viewers and the content creators to mine for their own use. They collect that data if you view ads on the platform or not.

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