https://www.statista.com/statistics/513049/alphabet-annual-global-income/
Let’s pause a moment and just appreciate how much money Alphabet actually make net (after expenses). $73,795,000,000 last year - higher than the GDP of entire nations, in profit.
The “bad” year, 2022 that drove all this change, they only made $59,972,000,000 net. Oh how terrible (!)
5 years ago, they made $34,343,000,000 net, so they’ve more than doubled profits.
Take a moment to appreciate that, and really consider if they “need” the money.
Shareholders: you doubled your profit last year, so I expect you to do it again this year.
*we expect you to do better than that
There, fify
Pretty much. Capitalism is completely unsustainable.
And kill the entire planet in the process if you need to.
That’s the whole company. How much did YouTube lose for them?
YouTube lost google -31.5 billion in 2023, approximately 10% of all of alphabet’s revenue.
I was genuinely confused by this statistic until I realised it was a double negative. YouTube losen’t Google a lot of money.
Yeah, sorry, sometimes I can’t help my need to play with language, when given the slightest chance.
Revenue is not profit
Yeah, unfortunately I couldn’t find revenue numbers. It seems unlikely to be costing that much to host. I’d be really surprised to learn it isn’t cash positive at this point.
Best I could find is the entire division makes about 35% profit and you’d have to assume some of that was YouTube
And as we know companies prefer to provide a service with a loss, for decades. Name a company that can make -31.5 billion and keep going. Or maybe the data went to google, where they made the money.
Not made -31.5 billion. Lost -31.5 billion. As in they brought in that much, not cost it.
Do they somehow calculate in this the value off the youtube harvested user data that serves other Google branches? No, right?
It’s funny that free third party apps literally have more features and are more user friendly than the official app with premium.
Why the fuck would I pay for less when I can get more for free?
Some years ago ago, I was a happy subscriber to Google Music. But, they added it to the graveyard, and instead grafted on some music playing functionality to YouTube and called it YouTube Music. So, I went back to Spotify.
Then I started paying for YouTube Premium Lite. It wasn’t unreasonably expensive, although it was a bit annoying I couldn’t just have “YouTube” in the household, like with Netflix. So if wife would cast a video to the TV, it would play with ads.
It was about a year ago, when Google starting cracking down on adblockers, that they also removed an option to pay for the service. I think YouTube Premium Lite wasn’t a thing in the US (correct me if I’m wrong), but they removed YT Premium Lite, and the only option left was a twice as expensive YouTube Premium bundle that included YouTube Music.
Tldr: fucked up Google Music, then removed an option to pay for YouTube premium, leaving a fairly expensive alternative with the pile of shit they replaced Google music with. It’ll be a rough time if they manage to force ads. I won’t pay for it, out of principle.
Edit: I looked at the numbers again. I’d have to pay more for YouTube than for the highest Netflix tier. It’s more than Prime and HBO combined. They also don’t have to front large sums to fund risky projects. If they didn’t include YouTube Music, I might have considered it. But with it, it just pisses me off, they can go get f.ed
I think there’s a couple things at play:
-
You know enough to find a different app and make it do what you need it to. Not a hard thing, but something many non-tech savvy people could struggle with, or more likely–
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People often will just use what’s there. We know we have options, we are aware of the privacy concerns… but many people simply aren’t and/or don’t care enough to do anything about it.
We spend a lot of time here, so it seems to us like second nature to avoid intrusive apps… I find in my day-to-day life not many people are talking about that kind of stuff, or don’t have much knowledge/experience in that realm. (I realize that is anecdotal).
I 100% agree with your statements–just trying to rationalize how so many people end up using/staying with these ever-worsening services/apps…
To prove your point I am person #2, I know things liked invidious and piped exist but I just idk haven’t gotten around to it
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To be fair, one of the apps mentioned, [Re]Vanced, is literally just the stock app with extra features patched in and the premium features enabled for free (like no ads and downloads). It makes sense that it would be more user friendly. Allowing that modified version doesn’t get them any revenue though while still costing them to host and serve the content to those users.
At least with NewPipe it supports multiple sites and is its own app with their own code and UI.
I don’t understand this argument because NewPipe still gets the video from YouTube (primarily), costing them to host…
Not really “funny”. The YouTube app is ass because it’s goal is to extract value from you and provide it to Google. Not the other way around.
I pay $4/mo, mainly for YouTube music (I’m part of a friend’s family plan).
It’s pretty convenient since you can use the background audio on an iPad as well - I don’t use it often but it’s nice when I do. And there’s no ads there it’s pretty insane seeing the level of ads when I try and use my work phone which I’m not signed into.
Also, you can make channels within your single goggle account so I made one for my mom and bro so they get no ads aswell. They have to sign in to my acct which can feel a little sketch but I trust them since they’re just using the YT app on their TVs. They stay in their own user acct. and it doesn’t affect my history or anything
I’ll give up on YouTube before I give up my ad blocks or 3rd party apps. Fuck off Google.
That’s likely what they want. If you’re not viewing their ads and your third-party app is even blocking all the tracking, then you are not providing any value to them to keep you as a ‘customer’. All it does is reduce their hosting and serving costs when you’re blocked or when you eventually stop using it.
Thing is you also stop sharing and commenting and engaging with other users. If it wasn’t useful they would pull the plug long ago, nothing technical is preventing them.
kind of, i still use youtube normally without issues with firefox + ublock.
they didnt succed in kicking me out just yet
I recall Louis Rossmann saying something along those lines, and sounded perfectly reasonable to me.
Only reasonable to a capitalist who sees everything as zero-sum.
It will go the way of Reddit…
Almost no impact to their userbase or revenue?
LOL what are you talking about? The users had a hissy fit but after that Reddit got everything they wanted. The users mostly all returned a few days later and it was business as usual. Since then they opened up about selling user data and IPO’d and still nothing.
It’s become abundantly clear now that there’s level of abuse these users won’t endure.
You could just pay for premium. Then you wouldn’t have ads
OTA TV: with ads
OTA TV: if you record you are pirating
Cable TV: you pay a fortune to have no ads!
Cable TV: now with extra premium stuff!
Cable TV: now with ads!
Cable TV: if you record, you’ll be prosecuted
Cable TV: pray we do not alter the deal further
Cable TV: why is everyone moving away from Cable TV?
Youtube: your own videos!
Youtube: your own videos are actually ours
Youtube: our videos with ads!
Youtube: now pay a fortune to remove ads!
Youtube: pray we do not alter the deal further
Youtube: if you download or remove ads you’ll be banned
This isn’t the pattern you’re looking for. Move along.
Oh, we’ll see at that point I would just like stop paying for it. That’s how I deal with services that no longer meet my expectations.
That’s exactly what people are doing.
Kind of, people are not quitting YouTube, I’m off them are still using it, but bitching that their free video streaming service needs to get paid.
They are still using it and costing YouTube money in aggregate
They are still using it and costing YouTube money in aggregate
The poor company only making $31.5 Billion a year has to eat the streaming cost for someone using as ad blocker? Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the billionaires?!
Oh no won’t someone please think of the people so entitled they believe they should get everything for free.
Like, I just don’t understand the thought process behind people like you.
Do you ask for free everything else?
I’ll pass, thanks. Too many streaming platforms already.
humanity would be better off if google went bankrupt
If the price was even relatively sane I would be okay with that honestly.
But no, they need to keep driving the price up and up. I have to pay my part so that little Jimmy can host 297 hours of white noise on his account that no one wants to watch.
They simply need to change their tactics a little. It cost you some small sane amount to host your videos there. If your videos don’t g gather watches and make money you should be the one paying for them.
I want to pay about nine bucks a month for a family account it’s just b-f rate content. You can pay less to get actual well rated movies from other services.
Also give me the option not to throw in Google music I don’t give a s*** about Google music.
No ads? What is with sponsor #1-#5 planted all over each video?
You’re just paying premium for free content, that doesn’t go away.
So you are mad at the video creators for putting sponsorships in?
No, i don’t care, because i don’t pay anything for it.
They advertise ad-free access, when in fact the ads are in the video themselves.
So you’re upset that they don’t tell you that creators can choose to put sponsorships in?
I’m not upset at all, if you want it written again.
I don’t pay for shit and it will stay that way.
At the meantime ads will get blocked and sponsors will get skipped, i’m not obliged to support anyone and i couldn’t care less.
OK, have fun not supporting the things that you like?
Lol!! Imagine if xD
Weird to see this downvoted. Youtube is actually a good service that also isn’t cheap to run, and it also pays good(?) money to the people producing popular content on the platform so why not pay for using it? Or, you know, live with the ad infestation. Businesses need money to run, and if you don’t pay for the content, then either it’s the ads or eventually the whole platform needs to be shut down.
It is a separate discussion if Premium pricing is appropriate etc. But it’s quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be “free” even though at the same time everyone is complaining about privacy violation and ads being everywhere all the time.
More things used to be free on internet 10-20 years ago.
Also the rich used to be less rich, and the poor less poor.
So clearly paying overpriced services for everything is not making anything better.
It’s a good thing they offer a non-premium version then
But it’s quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be “free”
Maybe the businesses shouldn’t have created the expectation that everything was “free” then.
YouTube used to be 1 skippable ad at the start of the video. Now it’s multiple unskippable ads throughout the video. If the 1 skippable ad wasn’t a viable business model then they shouldn’t have been pretending it was and then changing things later once people have gotten used to the “free” system.
I timed it today on an hour video. It’s an ad every 3 minutes I got. This is fucking mental. 20 ads for an hour long video.
I rarely watch YouTube on chromecast, I will be watching less going forward
I was checking out Archer for streaming the other day and noticed the episodes were 22 minutes long, which means 8 minutes of commercials in that half-hour TV time slot, or 26.666% of the total time.
That’s why I stopped watching TV in the first place, they’re essentially offering to “pay” you 22 minutes of entertainment for every 8 minutes of ads you’ll watch and that’s just completely not worth it to me. Would you pay $2 to watch an hour-long show? If so, to watch ads instead, you’d pay them 16 minutes of your time, and your labor would be paid at a tad less than 8 dollars an hour in entertainment as currency. If you’d only pay a dollar, halve that.
I play games so that my entire 30 minutes is fun and I’ll pay for it with the money I make at my job rather than paying the TV industry in minutes of my time…the thing I have the least of. It’s this really weird setup that’s just become accepted where they pay us out in entertainment at near minimum-wage rates for time spent trying to program us.
(Archer aside…on shit that ain’t even that entertaining)
The whole fuckin thing isn’t worth it.
So you would like a plan that uses the same amount of bandwidth and power as they used back then, with one skippable ad, for free?
Yup.
YouTube could easily avoid AdBlockers by simply having ad part of the video itself. Not pulling it from a different server, not hijacking your video player to prevent user controls, just part of the video like any other part of the video and AdBlockers would not be able to detect it. They’re not going to do that though, because then users won’t be forced to watch an ad they have no interest in.
Do you realize how low quality your stuff would be?
Then people would bitch that they can’t get the high quality version for free
Do you realize how low quality your stuff would be?
YouTube makes $30 billion a year. They’ll be fine.
Then people would bitch that they can’t get the high quality version for free
Reducing the max resolution for people who aren’t on YouTube Red will come next once they stop focusing on AdBlockers.
“Service quality will continue to decrease until profits improve!”
But it’s quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be “free” even though at the same time everyone is complaining about privacy violation and ads being everywhere all the time.
That is exactly the issue, but you are placing quite a bit too much of your disapproval on the audience.
Google (and others) have built business models off of data mining because so many people didn’t give a shit for so long about it. They have monetized their users for the entire time they have owned the platform. They have trained their own users to feel like the product was free while using those people for advertising dollars.
People have always hated ads, but you had generations of folks who were born before the internet who mostly just accepted the ads were going to be there, and also have never given a single thought to privacy. That slice of the pie is getting smaller, for various reasons.
Now Google have decided since they can’t reliably exploit enough of their users, it’s time to start charging them directly. They are fighting against their own inertia. It is they who have trained users with “we aren’t asking you for $$, so don’t worry about how we’re paying for all this, trust me bro.”
The modern audience is increasingly made up of people with both the will and capability to set up ad blocking and/or privacy protecting measures. Sorry Google, we aren’t going down quietly.
I have the impression ad block literacy has declined a lot. 10-15 years ago I’ld be surprised if someone of friends, peers, same age group people didn’t have ad blocking. Now… I’m often surprised if they do, because it became less common to “put in the effort” of using ff with ublock.
You are absolutely right! Part of the horribleness is exactly companies like Google who were the ones teaching people that everything should be “free” as in usable without explicit money transaction, and now they are the ones who are (thanks to EU I guess) trying to revert that and make the business model viable through subscription.
So I do get why the problem exists and I feel no empathy for the companies that are to blame for that. But, I do worry that we have a whole generation of people who think that stuff should just exist and have no monetary value like it just materialized out of thin air without anyone working on it before and neither having to keep it running. That is not a healthy mental model and it will contribute to predatory companies being able to harvest data out of these people in the future meanwhile privacy-first companies can’t get them as customers because they have to actually ask for money for their services.
But, I do worry that we have a whole generation of people who think that stuff should just exist and have no monetary value like it just materialized out of thin air without anyone working on it before and neither having to keep it running. That is not a healthy mental model and it will contribute to predatory companies being able to harvest data out of these people in the future
I see where you are coming from there, and I don’t disagree with your opinion, but I do still think that while that may objectively be a mindset that is potentially harmful, I feel the net impact in this context is more likely to be increased contribution to and support of things that really are Free (gratis and libre), nudging reality closer to a place where a lot of those sorts of services are free or donation-supported, and less likely to be in corporate hands unless those corporations improve their behavior.
A hard to summarize version of that sort of path and mindset is what initially pushed me away from Windows, but over more than a decade I’ve developed lots more reasons than cost for why I’d never go back, and for why I’ve become a Free Software enthusiast and advocate.
Stuff should be free. We live in an age where every one of us could be living a life of comfort and reasonable luxury with a modicum of work. In the meantime those of us who aren’t being showered by the excesses of capitalism are fully entitled to stand in the splashes.
Well I mean stuff always has some costs assigned to it. Even if we are talking about Google or software in general, there are still people needed to create and maintain the software itself for the products, who in part also need to put some food on the table and get a roof above their heads. Then there are the infrastructure costs which are enormous on a global video streaming service like Youtube. Now, I do acknowledge that Google engineers are usually insanely well-paid, but that’s the way life is when you absolutely need the people working for you. Other companies might choose to cut features while searching for cheaper developers but it is what it is. In the end, nothing is free and you always end up paying for services in a way or another. And I’m not sure if I would like to continue on the “free” services path that we saw in the last 15 years.
Is it downvoted? I’m on kbin so I can’t see anything but kbin votes and I have nothing but upvotes. lol
Edit: downloaded to downvoted
It is, it has -9 points right now. While unpopular opinion, I agree with it if you like the content.
I use it, but I am trying to move to podcast and other platforms as much as possible.
Podcasts have their place in my routine.
It’s funny how this comes after Chrome’s switch to Manifest V3, which makes ad blocking not possible on Chrome and was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers. Now that Chrome users can’t block ads on the first-party site, they’re going after third-party clients. Such coincidental timing.
“security reasons” is the classic cop-out for making users lives more miserable.
Like what are you gonna do, argue that you don’t care about security?
Has that actually rolled out yet? I thought it was only announced and planned for late this year.
was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers.
I had not heard of Manifest v3 and actually can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not. I guess you are.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-still-hurts-privacy-security-innovation
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-limit-ad-blockers-starting-june-2024/
They’ve been trying for years to implement this at a large price to the users. They always try to hide under the guise of security.
https://www.ghacks.net/2024/04/16/google-intensifies-fight-against-youtube-adblockers/
Man they’re fucking out of their minds!!!
I only care about how this will affect Floorp’s user agent spoofing abilities thought 😶🌫️🌫️
They’re not being sarcastic, they are repeating Google’s (bs) justification
They are being sarcastic, with the emphasis on “purely”, while saying Google’s justification. It’s exactly to point out it’s bs.
yes exactly what sneezycat said. I was being sarcastic and pointing out that Manifest V3 was always a crackdown on ad blocking and nothing else.
Sure, I guess I maintain its that’s not what sarcasm is but we do agree on the point
If it is not sarcasm then the justification is not bs. And OP agrees it is sarcasm.
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firefox!!!
firefox and ublock origin has existed all along cmon, ditch that spyware already whats the holdup, what makes people so damn allergic to using anything other than chrome
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https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
This won’t change your mobile experience, but on desktop this makes Firefox absolutely gorgeous. I’ve been using it for at least a year now and it still blows me away every time I happen to see the stock UI.
I literally don’t know what people who say this mean. It looks totally modern, almost identical to the chrome and edge UIs, it’s fully customizable, and there are thousands of extensions to alter the appearance in a single click, not to mention custom css styling if you want complete control.
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ive been using it for (quite) a while and its always looked like a carbon copy of every other browser and vice versa
There’s only so much you can do on a mobile browser to be fair, they all look the same
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How is the mobile app terrible? I’ve been using it for years with no issues, and it has many extensions that chrome on Android doesn’t allow like adblocking.
The tabs in FF are great, for years now FF has been much better at handing huge accounts of passive tabs, and there are tons of extensions to provide any functionality you could want.
I guarantee you if you just install a few extensions that you like and use it for a week you won’t even notice any more.
There are a ton of other WebKit/Blink based browsers to choose from! Safari, Vivaldi, Brave… not to mention good old Firefox and Gecko!
Are there any semi-popular alternative browsers still based on WebKit? I thought most of them like Brave and Vivaldi were based on Chromium’s Blink rather than WebKit.
Technically not really, I just said WebKit to avoid breaking down the whole fork situation in my comment. Blink isn’t that different in reality so, WebKit for simplicity. Safari and Chrome are much closer to one another than Firefox is to either, so 🤷♂️
Vivaldi and Brave use Blink (Chromium), not WebKit
They are practically the same thing.
Uh, no? They’re absolutely not the same.
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Firefox has had data sync for a long ass time.
It’s even end-to-end encrypted!
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I mean… yes? If you’re saying that Chrome sucks now, then why would you want to switch on some platforms but not others?
What the fuck? Can you sync chrome to edge and edge to opera? What kind of bad faith bullshit ass argument are you trying to pull here?
You’re claiming that you cant sync data on Firefox, when you absolutely can. Then you claim that what you meant was that you cant cross browser sync on multiple devices. Well congratufuckinglations, you can’t on any other browser either.
What is wrong with you?
What’s wrong with you? Are you unable to read my comment, or is it comprehension problems?
I’m saying if I switch to Firefox, I have to switch it on both PC and mobile, but I hate the UI on mobile. I can’t leave one as Chrome (mobile) and the other as Firefox (PC) and expect them to work together (sync). Thus, I’d rather stock to Chrome because the ui is better.
The mobile app is great.
You can use the session on your desktop on the go automatically on Firefox.
Are they going to officially allow third party apps at all? The stock app is terrible, and not just because of excessive, unskippable advertising and bizarre restrictions around background play. When you search for anything, at least half of the results are completely unrelated to what you searched for in an attempt to increase user engagement metrics. It keeps trying to get you to watch shorts in its bad TikTok clone. Sometimes it recommends unrelated shorts with disturbing thumbnails in the middle of your search results. It keeps autodetecting that the video quality should be 360p on a connection easily capable of 4k, and resetting back to 360p at the start of every new video. The UI for live streams puts things on top of other things that are more important.
And all of those come down to money
Search shows you random videos because “the algorithm” is hoping to drive you through to videos that are the most monetized and the most likely to keep you on the platform based on their data
The shorts thing is because they can pack more ads into 15 second bits of content while using less bandwidth and they’re hoping to hijack your attention with an “endless stream” of short clips a la TikTok or instagram reels
The video bandwidth drops to low every time because they’re hoping people will still watch, see the ads, and not bump the quality up, saving Google on bandwidth costs
The live streams thing is just more advertising revenue again
None of that applies if you’re a paying customer like me, and I see all the same bs. So no, it’s really just bad design, it’s not trying to do any of the stuff you mentioned.
Even that’s just a monetary decision. They are choosing not to spend money to build a custom “premium” experience for paying customers and instead just stripping ads, keeping the existing engagement/monetization driven UI in place. A customized UI takes more dev time, costs more in engineering labor, etc
Why would they design it to be any better if you’re still willing to pay for it?
The live streams thing is not about advertising. Problems like putting the hearts button on top of the chat instead of next to the chat or having the chat cover up the entire left side of the stream every time a single message is sent are just because they don’t care.
As soon as I have to see shorts, YouTube is dead to me. I hate the format with a passion.
bizarre restrictions around background play
there’s nothing bizarre about it - the free version is shitty on purpose
They already do but it’s pretty restrictive in what can be changed about the experience:
https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-policies-guide#examples_3
Please download and archive your favorite channels and videos!
Host them yourself to watch them locally.
Especially do this for educational material, share it wide and far!
We are entering a very dark age of techno-dystopia, we need to fight it with everything we have. Pirate, seed, screen-record, download, archive, share, never give up.
Quick shout out to yt-dlp. It comes everything you need to download, transcode, and even use Sponsorblock!
I also recommend NewPipe for Android. It lets you download in multiple formats and shows comments in a mobile format (you can get it through the F-Droid store or from github.)
NewPipe
FreeTube for Windows. Finally stable, download options, subs, history, ex-/importable data, locally, no ads of course. It’s awesome!
Next to KDEconnect, I freaking love Freetube. Just a nice application
Btw FreeTube is not just available for Windows, it also works perfectly on Linux and macOS
Made a script/cron job to auto dl new videos from my favorite channels with ytdlp and then they are hosted through jellyfin. Archived forever, ad free, accessible to me from anywhere.
Another quick shout out to Tube Archivist, it’s perfect for archiving YouTube videos
This is the way.
Not again … Well, let’s wait a week or so for the clients to fix that.
Third party apps: “OK. We’ll show ads. Muted. Behind a black overlay. If we really can’t find a workaround.”
I think YouTube wouldn’t care as long as they got paid
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Years ago I used to use an app called “AdSkip” or something along those lines that used the accessibility API to automatically mute and skip all YouTube ads. I’d imagine the screen black-out would be trivial to add on top
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not for YouTube but there is for twitch yea
Please don’t leave me hanging.
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Xtra was one of them I used to use, but they have a bunch of different ad blocks that do it too now. Multistream services do it as well
You can use SafeTwitch with LibRedirect
For Android, I recommend Xtra
no need just yet, so im guessing no
They’ve been trying for a minute. Must be different now that they’re saying it!
Checks notes
Nope, revanced still works.
We are officially ON NOTICE
Soon be Blasted, Slammed, Potentially even Yeeted
I’m told the past tense is yote.
That sounds like a sex act.
God dam did you see that last night? She yoted him so hard in front of everyone.
That’s because revanced is still youtubes app, just lightly modified.
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Women are not property, nor are they software
That’s your take from this?
It’s a false equivilence
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I simply cannot get revanced to even download to my phone, and I’m not smart enough to troubleshoot it.
How motivated are you? Motivated enough to buy something good?
Depends on where you get it. Recently had to go through and find another version, as mine was detected by YouTube and just said to download the official version of YouTube to play videos.
Same. Gotta keep in the game.
My newpipe 😔
I’ve mostly only noticed that the comments won’t load, not a big loss imo
Likewise but im sure it wont stop there
I think Google engineers drag their feet on this.
Like - Google’s pre-installed corporate Firefox and Chrome both have ad blockers. Ublock origin is installed by default on Firefox (I can’t remember what was installed on chrome, I only used it for the work suite/cloudtop and did everything else on FF).
Nobody I worked with at Google liked ads… But I didn’t work at YouTube. So maybe it’s different there.
But I suspect the engineers are doing it just to show management that they’re doing something but it’s half hearted.
Real efforts and real threats of it getting locked down, sure, but half hearted effort.
There’s already a patch for comments in the release candidate for the new version
I switched them off by default.
As soon as 3rd party clients don’t work as they do anymore, I am stopping going to YouTube. Simple as, I know it doesn’t matter as a singular thing, I am just one user. Was the same with reddit, now I am here but reddit is still going (how well we don’t need to debate now).
You’re not alone. Don’t think that. A lot of people will do the same. I’m right there with ya. Fuck YouTube
Gotta love this shit. Conservatives/companies: “Let the market decide!” The market: “We are tired of you cramming ads down our throats and fundamentally do not want it and will actively fight you on it.” Companies: “Waaaaaa, they are fighting us.”
Conservative companies promoting free market economy: Government, make it a crime to not use our products!
“A company should be able to decide not to do business with individuals for ideological reasons.”
Twitter, Facebook, etc. start filtering misinformation and banning offenders.
“Mah freedoms are being infringed!”
The problem with YouTube Premium is the pricing tiers are completely out of touch with what people are willing to pay and what services they’re willing to pay for.
Let me compare to Discovery+. For $9 a month, loads of shows that ran on TV for decades can be streamed at 1080p (or whatever resolution they were available in), on up to four devices at the same time. They still have some original shows that they spend money to make. This service does not have ads.
Let’s also compare to Nebula, which like Discovery+ also has original content funded by the platform. Every content creator there is also an invited owner of the platform, so their cost structure is a bit different, but they still have to sustain the costs of running a streaming platform while compensating the creators of said content for views. Nebula is a microscopic $5 a month per user with no ads.
YouTube is a platform with entirely user-generated content (costs YT nothing except bandwidth) that is already supported at the free tier with a gratuitous amount of ads. This service has been available completely free with ad support for nearly two decades. The lowest “premium” tier they offer is $14 a month for one person to stream ad-free, at a better 1080p bitrate, be able to download videos or watch them in the background in the official app, pay creators for every view, and have a music streaming app thrown in for good measure. The only other tier is all the same stuff in a $22 monthly family plan for six users, but they all have to be in the same “household” or you’re technically breaking TOS, so in practice it’s often more like $22 for three people, and heaven forbid any of you travel for work.
Two of the “premium” features should be free anyway. You can’t watch a video without downloading it at least once, so the bandwidth cost is the same. If you download it and play it more than once, that actually saves YouTube bandwidth, and therefore cost. Any video that’s played more than once is probably going to be played a lot more than once, so this would add up, especially if the app downloads the ad spots ahead of time. Background play doesn’t cost them any bandwidth at all and is a trivial feature to implement, so it’s put behind a paywall as an artificial restriction for no other reason than to annoy users for not paying. Both of these are anti-features; to charge for them is anti-consumer. They engender spite in users, making them less willing to pay for Premium and more determined to find alternatives.
Instead of trying to figure out what people are actually willing to pay for, which is the expected behavior of a market actor, Google continues to behave like a monopoly that can dictate terms to its users. This is why people refuse to pay for Premium. If they made the anti-features free, and introduced a Premium tier that is $7 a month to one user for nothing more than better bitrate streaming with no ads, people would sign up in droves. There could be a $9 tier for streaming boxes like Roku or Chromecast that offers Premium service for any account viewed from that one specific device, without having to sign up each individual account for premium, which satisfies another niche. The $14 tier could remain for those who also want music streaming (an extra $7 is still much cheaper than Spotify premium), and the $22 tier could still be a significant value proposition for actual families.
It’s not that the price offered for the $14 premium plan isn’t reasonable for what it offers - the issue is that what it offers doesn’t match the actual needs of many people who use adblockers or third-party clients, on top of insulting users with anti-features. Until YouTube management can be made to understand this, they will continue to screech impotently about ad-blockers while driving users away and leaving potential revenue on the table.
Ofcourse you always get youtube music with the subscription, which they claim ads extra value. But I dont want youtube music, I already pay for another service. So for me it would be a waste of money
I pay for the family plan and they use google music. I use pandora because my station is older than my 16yo niece that’s on my yt plan.
Fuck them. I’d rather donate quadruple the money for premium to my favourite creators directly than give a single penny to this parasitic mega corporation.
The issue is not only the ads, it’s the stupid shit it throws you to keep you hooked, it’s the stupid shorts that literally no one asked for, it’s every stupid little thing that fights for your attention. Basically the app doesn’t work for you, it works against you. That’s not the case with third party apps, they have you, the user, in mind, not their profits.
Youtube isn’t some one of a kind miracle. There’s at least a dozen already-established streaming platforms that would take its place. There are thousands of websites that have no problems hosting gigs and gigs of porn, so it’s not as difficult as people think.
It kind of is. YouTube has decades of history. Unfathomable amounts of video. No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast. It would cost an unbelievable amount of money in servers and maintenance let alone moderation. The problem is this is a service, like many others that exist today, that does not bring in more money than it costs. YouTube exists because it’s a branch on a megacorporation tree, but even Google will eventually need to find a way to make it profitable. It is impossible to fund this for free or anywhere close to free.
No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast.
The number of times I’ve heard “XYZ will never happen” in the area of tech from one person or another over the decades (or made the mistake of thinking so myself) is high.
Youtube will either become reasonable in their practices again (which could include a pricing adjustment for ad-free access), or will be replaced as the de facto video service. It may not happen in the short timespan we’d all like to see, but it will happen.
History would suggest that, but I’m starting to believe we’re in a tech service bubble that’s ready to pop. I touched on this in my comment, but it’s becoming clearer than ever that the vast majority of the services we use today are not sustainable on a number of levels. Economically, they’re all a mess.
Food delivery services are bleeding money constantly in the hopes that one day they’ll find a way to profit. They won’t. It’s an insane business model. The actual cost of the service is many times the price of the food you’re buying. Uber/Lyft already isn’t keeping prices low enough to be a cheap option anymore because they’ve coasted too long on VC funding and it’s time for them to start making money. But they still aren’t and if they charged what it actually costs to operate, no one would use it. Many online platforms can’t sustain themselves despite being major social media hubs. Streaming services spend more on buying up movies, shows, IP rights, and other streaming services than their subscriptions bring in.
The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse. I think we’ve already had it as good as it’s gonna get and we’re going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they’ve pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade. It’s not just Lemmy’s favorite buzzword “enshitification.” I think a lot of what we expect from the Internet is not sustainable and it’s not going to stick around in any form we would want.
The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse.
While you’ve got some reasonable points, I’m about 14 years into using exclusively the OS everyone tried to tell me would never be viable on the desktop as my only desktop OS, and have been able to find opportunities to deploy it in my day job also. Haven’t used Windows except when paid to in all that time.
And we’re conversing here on Lemmy, which may be objectively “worse” than Reddit by some metrics, but not any metrics that matter to me, nor, I think, to the majority of its users.
When I’m done typing this I’m going to fire up my Jellyfin client to connect to my free and open source Jellyfin media server, and watch some content on that system which does everything I’d ever hoped a media server would do, even though I was confidently told by many people when it first forked from Emby (after Emby was enshittified) that it would be dead in two years, and certainly could never begin to compete with Plex. (I have never missed Plex for a single minute since moving to Jellyfin)
Those are just three recent examples that I could think of without much effort. As you may be thinking, all of them are far smaller in scale than youtube, and yet, all three of them are things that quite happily serve my needs without spying on me or requiring exorbitant fees to feed someone else’s greed. I can (and do) support them financially, and in other ways, because I choose to.
I’m not listing more examples because I’m too lazy to, not because lots more don’t exist.
More broadly, I grew up during the time when very nearly everything regarding using a personal computer really was controlled by corporations, and was exorbitantly expensive. I had a computer because I was privileged enough to have parents who could buy me one, but the only free or inexpensive things to do with it were: Piracy (via locally copying each others’ games in most cases), Bulletin Board Systems, and learning to program. Shareware and Freeware existed, but with some notable exceptions tended to be not so good for various reasons, and the selection was not especially broad.
There was no free/cheap equivalent like the Raspberry Pi to play with, but if you really wanted to pinch pennies you could build a PC with a kit from Heathkit or Radio Shack, for a fee that was still out of reach for a great many people due to cost or skill. There was not a global internet where people could collaborate and teach each other, and to whatever degree things like BBSs and Quantumlink (which eventually became AOL) might have been capable of providing those sorts of interpersonal connections, the critical mass wasn’t there in a way that it is today.
We have Linux. We have cheap and/or open hardware. We have a vast trove of Free (not just gratis: libre) software that anyone in the world can use to run on that hardware, and improve on their own without penalty. We can share knowledge with others at a rate unheard of for most individuals decades ago. We have numerous examples of users who keep such services and products going, and thriving, without needing to siphon money out of the public as fast as possible to appease shareholder value.
I predict that any such collapse as you describe will be transient, and it will pass far more quickly than it would have in the past. We (gesturing broadly) have the technology, the capability, and (I think) the desire to move past reliance on many of these services and corporate-controlled environments, and various individuals are already doing so. What emerges on the other side after such a paradigm shift as you predict won’t be Youtube, but that won’t mean it’s a step backwards, either.
we’re going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they’ve pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade
I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing overall.
It’s not just Lemmy’s favorite buzzword “enshitification.”
Enshittification is a concept that has a little bit more depth than just being Lemmy’s favorite buzzword.
I understand where you’re coming from. I’m not personally a Linux user despite a lot of what I value overlapping with the Linux community broadly. I do think much of the technology we use today can and should be replaced by open source alternatives and I’m optimistic about growing interest globally in that regard. I’m not at all suggesting we submit to the new corporate-controlled Internet or go back to a pre-2000s lifestyle.
But I think we’re talking about different things, so let me just bring it back to YouTube. A lot of what we can do is limited by inescapable expenses: server costs and labor. We can say labor is optional because a lot of open source projects are developed and maintained by volunteers. But people do need money to live, so this project becomes the side gig, not the full time job. YouTube’s already a mess with moderation. Imagine a video platform with no full time staff to review illegal uploaded content, DMCA requests, comments, etc. But the bigger issue is the scale of YouTube, trying to make billions of videos play seamlessly at all times all over the world and just work. I can’t fathom the infrastructure needed for that. It would cost far more than it would make in donations if that was all it was accepting. No ads means the budget is that much smaller. If the small percentage of users with YouTube Premium doesn’t bring in enough to keep things running, the open source version wouldn’t either. And fewer people would be willing to pay for it.
This is what I mean by services that are unsustainable. Yes, clearly the technology makes it possible. But there is a cost to it and I think we’re entering a time when we don’t get those things for free anymore.
I think the primary difference in our views is that I don’t think Youtube needs to be replaced by something like it to be replaced. I don’t claim to have a viable approach in mind, but I’m certain one exists.
I would love a federated network of video platforms as long as they can all be searched collectively. Would be great if videos could even be migrated to other instances if storage becomes too limited on one of them. Yeah, it probably isn’t ideal that YouTube is all one platform, but it certainly makes it easy to find what you’re looking for most of the time.
If the modern internet teaches us anything, its that everything is ephemeral even when you stringently catalogue every last byte of data. People just dont need access to 90% of YouTube’s library, yet Youtube has to pay big money to make 100% of that library available 24/7 365.
There’s already rips at the seams of these systems. Time is not on the side of YouTube.
Video hosting is still rather expensive, live streaming even more. Not sure that even youtube is profitable. Until some new tech comes along I think only amazon would be able to support some kind of viable alternative - and not sure they will be much better.
Like which?
Google “Odysee”.
It’s currently my preferred YouTube alternative. Granted it obviously doesn’t have as much content as YouTube. But several well known content creators post to both YouTube and Odysee now.
Some of the ones I follow include: Louis Rossman, Anton Petrov, SomeOrdinaryGamers, and Zach Star Himself. Just to name a few.
And there’s also a browser extension called “Watch on Odysee” which adds a button to the YouTube video if the video is also found on Odysee so you can “watch on Odysee” instead of YouTube. Which can help you locate your favorite youtubers on the platform and let you follow them.
And there is also an Odysee mobile app if you like watching videos on mobile.
This is just one example, but I hope it helps ;-)
