All companies seem to be doing their best lately to cure us of our social media addiction.
Can you recommend some general forums that focus on a wide array of topics? Or do you only visit niché community forums?
The Whirlpool forums are probably going to meet that requirement, though they're local to Australia. I'm not sure of a global equivalent...
Open your ublock Origin dashboard and add the following 4 lines:
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0) youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, []) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
You're welcome.
I highly appreciate your effort but I'm not sure if I even want to go to YouTube anymore. Is my life really going to get worse without YouTube?
Nah it definitely won't lol. But there's gonna be those times people link it and you're gonna get annoyed by it otherwise.
One day peertube will figure out peer to peer at large scale and then everything will change.
I'm worried one day they will re-encode videos with advertisements themselves, or something similar to that. Although I guess SponsorBlock takes care of that, until they straight up just break/remove extensions with their crazy "Web Environment Integrity" proposal.
Not if they serve a different video based on your account status. They always have ways of doing things lol
Just to double-check. Do we add that to "my filters"? That's where I added it.
Yep that should usually be the first thing that opens.
I have never had any issues with youtube ads since the changes with this. They will probably adapt to it eventually but so far no problems, european region though so who knows if they have different approaches to different regions. Judging by your instance choice I assume you're in the UK like myself though.
Ah. I went through the ublock settings from the addons page, maybe thats why I threw ke the first page.
Let's just hope it carries on, but I'm not a programmer, so I couldn't tell if there could be a workaround.
And yes, I am from England.
There's loads of things they can do but ultimately it'll just provoke a new method of countering it. This is why they want to push software level changes to browsers that would allow them to prevent adblocking entirely.
Yeah, I don't see how they think they could ever win this.
Much like a lot of others on here, I am fully prepared to lose access to sites if they force me into their bullshit.
That's one part of how the internet dies, there are others. For example: soon the vast majority of the content on the internet will have been created by bots (AI or not). Or even by malicious folks pushing narratives.
TLDR: not only the internet is becoming more annoying to use it is also constantly becoming less useful with worse content replacing everything that was ever good
And the problem with content created by bots is that it is usually made to not look like that was the case. Sometimes that's not the problem like some random site with information about a video game can have all of its content generated automatically based on data extracted from that game. That is fine.
But other cases, specially with AI content, can be much worse. There was a recent example where some site with history content had generated some pages using an AI and that AI created a page about Scimitars which included information taken from Dungeons and Dragons, but presented then as historic facts.
And the main problem here is that the internet feeds on itself. Texts are copied from one site to another by non-AI bots. Some text created by AI in one site gets copied to multiple threads on reddit, hacker news, stack overflow, 4chan and all sorts of places. Places that are scanned by search engines and often picked as preferred search results by users.
Then Google these days try everything to make a larger profit from you. That includes "stealing" content from inside websites to display on top of the search results page - so that you never click away from the Google site. In order to do that more efficiently, they give preference to sites that allow this behavior over sites with actual better search results. Try googling "country in Africa with the letter K".
So in the end all your search results will soon be stuff that was written by AI. And remember: AI doesn't think. It won't ever do. AI is just a robot role-playing as human.
When you see a comedian doing a Stephen Hawking impression, you don't expect them to publish scientific papers, in fact you don't pay any attention to what they actually say, because you know it'll either be rubbish or just a repeat of something that Hawking had said before. AI is the same thing. It'll never be intelligent, it'll only get better at imitating humans, by looking at what humans say. And with their content taking over the internet, it'll soon be imitating itself.
And the only memory of the golden years of the internet, will maybe be Wikipedia. Have you donated to them yet? Think about how many times you've used it and remember it has never shown an ad other than their pleas for donation. Please consider giving them a few bucks when you've some to spare.
I think you're probably right but I also think that people will try to adopt by going back to the old forum model of access-restricted, highly moderated, trust-based spaces for individual topics instead of mega-aggregators like Reddit.
Maybe that's just hopium and nostalgia though.
I think you might be right. Imagine a fediverse app that allows content creators to self-host videos. They get the generated revenue directly instead of going through the website, they get paid in direct relation to how many videos they serve, and when I see an ad there, I know I am effectively paying the content creator.
I think the solution is to just return to the old web https://thewebisfucked.com/
The illusion of infinite growth on "free use" ad based business dies when investment funds demand more benefits from former startups now turned into corporations whose only asset of value is the their users' data. You are the product, so it's time to squeeze you.
I think such data is currently overvalued on a overgrown ad-targeting market with too many competitors, and adding more ads only devaluates each ad value further, because users' consuming capacity also has a limit. So I see a severe correction coming. Another bubble burst, and another crisis inside the crisis that late capitalism itself is.
While there are a billion things Google does that annoys me I'm not able to figure out how to create and maintain a video streaming platform without ads or paywall that finances both creation and the providing material.
I mean, who are the competitors and how do they finance it if not in a similar way?
If one video stream to one user uses 128 kilobyte per second out of your 100 megabit internet connection 781 users can watch that stream at the same time. However, the ISP will charge you per transferred gigabyte each month. So let's say that you serve 781 users that video 24/7 in a full month of 31 days ... It will be 100 megabit divided by 8 to get 12.5 megabyte. So it's 12.5 megabyte per second. That's 750 megabyte per minute. That's 45 gigabyte per hour. That's 1 terabyte or day. So around 31 terabyte traffic per month. (If you use this much bandwidth you will get a discount but it's still not going to be
Now, that's just for 781 simultaneously users.
What is we need to serve 781000 simultaneous users?
Now, this far we've only been talking about one video on repeat 14/7. What about 100000 videos and enough programmers and computers to design as system that lets each and every user choose any video whenever they need to? Now you suddenly have thousands of servers and harddisks running in a couple of hundred places on earth 24/7.
Now this is for you to provide your users 100000 different videos even before you start to pay content creators for their hard work.
Also, you need to be available 24/7 so now you have to make backups, redundant servers on different location that can take over in case of an accident, dedicated internet connection (being alone on the internet cable is not the same as sharing it with 100 other sites) and a whole lot of other things you need to take care of.
What about offering the 500 million videos YouTube offers their users?
... and all of this cost is paid out of your pocket?
Text things are extremely data light. All of wikipedia's text is smaller than a 2k movie. There is absolutely data stuff happening in the background on the server that makes it more complicated, but the actual piped data that goes from a google search result is actually quite small (though larger than it used to be).
Video is at the other end. There's only so many things you can do to a video to reduce the amount of stuff you send to the user (and a lot of the things you do put more strain on the user's computer to interpret what you've sent).
Music, singular images, video game data, and mass data tend to be somewhere in the middle, though context does matter for each of them.
Comparatively, sending videos and storing videos for later use is many times a more resource-expensive task than sending an image, forum post, email, weather updates etc.
It doesn't have to be ads before videos, but it does have to be something (subscription services, the page itself being littered with ads, state backing etc).
By your reasoning, every single platform should be in the same shitty state of yt
What comparable platforms are you talking about that is not running ads or have some sort of pay-to-watch?
If we talk about Twitch and their revenue I can promise you that they would not be very profitable without female streamers dressed sexy that doesn't always play video games.
We now live in a world where users got used to never have to pay for content or experience. Even though Google makes insane money in different areas the cost for running and developing YouTube is huge. I'm not a fan of ads (I don't see ads when at home because of how I have set up my network) and the subscription plans always seems too pricey for the value I get when using different streaming services
But all of this doesn't change the fact that even though I don't like ads or paying for content I still haven't come up with a better solution myself.
Mastodon exploded when Elon took over Twitter. Lemmy exploded when Reddit changed it's api rules. I think the problem is not that YouTube doesn't fuck things up, because they often do. Perhaps the alternatives are not good enough for early majority to migrate. We need more early adopters to migrate ASAP. (I'm thinking of PeerTube, but perhaps Odyssee has beter changes at the moment)
I switched to Nebula its affordable and has lots of interesting content from YouTubers I most often watched. Their business is sustainable, pays the creators fairly and has no ads or recommendation algorithm.
I've also tried out Odyssey and had the same issues with it. There was one or two channels I would actually watch, but I think the crypto stuff attracts a certain libertarian type. I don't think it's sustainable long term.
Actually I don't think there is anything wrong with odysee tehcnically. It is just marketed awfully.
It also takes much less time and effort to create content for a foum compared to a video platform, that might interfere when trying to build a community from the ground up
Quick! Let's move all Youtube channels to the fediverse (PeerTube), before people are getting conditioned to another sick behavior created by rich people.
Now there forcing people who have their watch history off to turn back it on
I miss YouTube Vanced, it had better UI and more features than the official app. I pay for premium and I like it and all, but I wish they could've adopted some features from Vanced instead of monetizing previously free features such as background play.
ReVanced is doing the thing for me where it lets you get about 10sec into a video and freezes. IIRC, I'll have to look for an update. I had to use regular YouTube on my phone today and my god, it's unusable. Absolute trashfire of ads and sponsored videos clogging up my feed.
Had the same issue. The solution that worked for me is going to Settings>Youtube>Miscellaneous then turning on "Spoof Player Parameter" and "Spoof Player Parameter Type". Might help if you update beforehand too.
Nope, you just need to patch it yourself! Install the ReVanced Manager and you'll be ad free in no time!
YouTube revanced everyone. YouTube revanced.
Or newpipe if you don't want a Google account
I had to download new recommended version of YouTube and patch it, because videos didn't load after 1-2 minutes with older version. It's first time I had to re-patch.
Yesterday I had notification about no playback until I update my app. After restarting the app playback was enabled.
I used to think people who downloaded videos on YouTube, forum posts with guides or useful info and other data were weird.
They were right.
With archive.org under threat some of it will be gone for good unfortunately. Save what you can when you can it might not be there later.
As part of a general trend, yeah it looks that way. But, this is just YouTube. It's a big part of the web, but it's not the web, and definitely not the internet. It sounds like there's already ways around it though so for the type of folks who would have ad blocked I don't see a lot changing, which does make me wonder the point of this is though.
