The YouTube app is a lousy user experience. The ads are the most intrusive and irrelevant of any service since commercial TV. For those reasons alone I would never become a paying customer. What’s worse is they have established themselves as yet another guardian of ideas. Content creators have to be careful not to talk about topics that are deemed out of line by the current msm and liberal zeitgeist. They could have been a great venue for debate during covid for example, but they censored and deplatformed world renowned scientists and doctors who dared question the cdc and wh. YouTube has the best content and I suffer through their UX to consume it but would leave as soon as there is an alternative
YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
391–400 of 1001 posts
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#392YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay (And I am not talking about too broke to pay cases). Serving an infinite video catalog is very expensive in terms of all resources (And yes Netflix is not comparable, unlike YouTube, Netflix can highly leverage cache boxes at ISPs). Vime…
> Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops.
Peer to peer streaming of the PeerTube type seems to work reasonably well. Unlike Mastodon, etc., you don't have to sign up to receive content. You just click on a URL and it works. What it doesn't offer is discovery. Nobody will find your stuff on PeerTube. They might follow links there.
I put metaverse tech demos on PeerTube.[1] Works fine, few views. No ads.
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#393I'm not angry at Youtube for blocking ads; I'm angry for Youtube existing at all. It shouldn't have to. AV content is pretty important to humanity. I want my government to tax me and spend the money on a public video repository. When some garbage for-profit outfit like Alphabet is in charge of the world's video, I expect ads and garbage content.
YouTube is extremely expensive to host and that too when it relies on Google infra which is very well optimised. Please remind me of any non trivial Government software project that didn't cost ridiculous amounts of money compared to similar private products.
Cost is certainly a consideration, but not the only consideration that matters (not to me, at any rate).
The issue of private- vs public-run projects is complicated by culture. There's a vicious cycle / virtuous circle that happens in a given society. In a place where government projects have a bad reputation (of being wasteful and substandard), it makes it difficult for government projects to succeed.
That's a long way of replying to you that you're probably correct about cost-overruns in most nations - but I don't believe it has to be that way. You can probably predict the nations I'd trot out that do a better job.
At any rate, where Youtube is concerned, I'd sooner government be in charge, regardless of cost. I don't see Youtube ever making the public good its primary focus - not if its front page, recommendations, or comments section are any indication.
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
> YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay There's also a factor of quality and trust. I don't trust YouTube Premium enough to even try it. This is mostly colored by their constant, invasive disruption of my YouTube experience (particularly apparent on mobile) with YT Premium a…
YouTube premium was probably the best decision I did. Amount of time saved on ads alone makes it worth it. Other bonus feature - downloading videos. If you make enough money it is a no brainer together with things like extra cloud storage from google, Apple and now ChatGPT
These days, I'll happily not use a service/ product/ whatever if I have to pay for it.
But YouTube Premium, ad free, is wonderful. I bought it for my parents because they watch a lot of niche stuff. But now that I have it, it's worth even the crazy price increase (to like, $22/mo or something).
I like it better than Netflix/ Disney+/ HBO Max, as it's half entertainment, half educational (whereas the other streaming services are more entertainment and often doesn't keep me interested in spite of their catalogues).
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#395YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay (And I am not talking about too broke to pay cases). Serving an infinite video catalog is very expensive in terms of all resources (And yes Netflix is not comparable, unlike YouTube, Netflix can highly leverage cache boxes at ISPs). Vime…
> because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay People don't want to pay for half-baked products: - Workspace accounts don't work - Even with standard accounts, it won't work on many devices (eg. TV apps), so you still get ads even as you paid - As Google regularly kills people's account, it also means most of us have multiple Youtube accounts that…
nonsense. these are not anywhere in the top hundred issues with the service.
workspace accounts are irrelevant to 99.99% of normal users. google hasn't encouraged using workspace accounts for consumer use for like ten years. the only place people care is on hacker news.
it works across almost all devices.
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#396Invidious is a third-party frontend (you can self-host) that solves this problem: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious As a bonus, it is super fast because it doesn't have to justify the salaries of dozens (hundreds?) of frontend developers and can get away with server-side-rendered HTML and minimal amounts of Javascript.
Seems pretty slow actually. Also the search is poor, the player is buggy, and some videos wouldn’t play at all because of format issues.
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
> YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay There's also a factor of quality and trust. I don't trust YouTube Premium enough to even try it. This is mostly colored by their constant, invasive disruption of my YouTube experience (particularly apparent on mobile) with YT Premium a…
YouTube premium was probably the best decision I did. Amount of time saved on ads alone makes it worth it. Other bonus feature - downloading videos. If you make enough money it is a no brainer together with things like extra cloud storage from google, Apple and now ChatGPT
You can save even more time by using SponsorBlock. I believe premium only gives you fake downloading -- you can't take it out of their app (correct me if I'm wrong). In contrast yt-dlp gives you direct access to the files.
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#398YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay (And I am not talking about too broke to pay cases). Serving an infinite video catalog is very expensive in terms of all resources (And yes Netflix is not comparable, unlike YouTube, Netflix can highly leverage cache boxes at ISPs). Vime…
> Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops. Peer to peer streaming of the PeerTube type seems to work reasonably well. Unlike Mastodon, etc., you don't have to sign up to receive content. You just click on a URL and it works. What it doesn't offer is discovery. Nobody will find your stuff on PeerTube. They mig…
> doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at *any scale*
Sure it works fine at trivial scale. But can it work at 1% of YouTube scale? How many nodes are needed for that to happen? Is that number viable?
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#399YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay (And I am not talking about too broke to pay cases). Serving an infinite video catalog is very expensive in terms of all resources (And yes Netflix is not comparable, unlike YouTube, Netflix can highly leverage cache boxes at ISPs). Vime…
This exactly, but even one step further - it’s time consuming and expensive to produce the videos themselves! Who’s going to create quality content if they can’t get paid for it?! This is the major value YouTube provides. They bridge the gap between consumers who don’t want to pay with producers that NEED to get paid.
Want free peer to peer streaming? Hard to build a content ecosystem on that.
Re: YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
#400It's incredible how many people go "I was almost ready to give them money" whilst using Youtube all the time with an ad blocker. I know it, I was one of them for years. Just buy the subscription. You get the free trial for a month. Nothing changes, the money is not missed, but you actually pay for something you use a lot. The biggest benefit is not being subjected to ads anymore just by being next to family members w…
Why? Does Google need to be making a higher profit than it already does? Does YouTube deserve the extra money? For what reason should we pay?
Are they actually making money off youtube? I almost doubt it. In any case I feel it might help to work against the shittification of the internet. Or maybe it doesn't, but at least it feels right.