Technology

Today i was looking through the top popular shorts in a private tab. It was so depressing there were countless AI slop videos getting 300m views.

People just dont care. Its why I love Lemmy, here the people care about the tech they use and content they consume. People here have standards. But most people arent like that and eventually everyone will be designed for them and there won't be anything for us and there will be less and less people like us. I love technology and I hate what's happening to tech so much.

1. I watched YouTube ads.

2. When they got to be too much I stopped watching.

3. Then I added uBlock Origin and NoScript (even on YouTube I block some scripts) and went back to watching.

4. When bazillions of content creators started over-creating content just for revenue, and not to provide value, I started watching less and less.

5. Now content creators are producing even more garbage via AI, and now I only watch a very few real-world content creators and videos more than 2 years old. Everything else I watch on other sites. If a content creator also posts to other sites, I watch them there and not on YT.

Noticed it for a single day, then ublock must've updated and everything works fine again. I will drop YT entirely before I watch a single shitty ad on there, let alone pay for a sub.

Imagine going through the interview process, like 10 rounds or whatever leetcode bullshit, and being told you are going to be working on /blocking Ads-Blocker users/...

Fuck it, I am out of here!

It's an arms race. And when Google stops me from downloading videos to avoid ads, YouTube's videos will be replaced with other content. I mean, the videos are convenient, but there's absolutely enough content to avoid them. Plus, I can develop new hobbies.

I wonder how much they spend trying to defeat adblockers versus how much revenue they lose because of them.

I finally had to update (19.16.39 --> 20.12.46) and repatch my YouTube on Android via ReVanced. I'll probably need to do that again in 6 months. I use uBlock Origin and LibreWolf on PC and SmartTube on my TV. I hope Google understands I won't be watching YouTube with ads.

https://github.com/revanced

https://codeberg.org/librewolf

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin

https://smarttubeapp.github.io/

Or how Google decided to choke on its own greed.

I have a Premium subscription, but I can give you an even bigger reason to never use YouTube. They actively push brain rot in their search. No matter what words I use to search for something, it is almost always the same results. Looking for nostalgic videos from the 90s? YT: "Here is the most recent brain rot on the Internet."

Meanwhile on Newpipe: just another day with no ads.

Google trying its best to destroy adblockers and adblockers going "lmao low diff" is sooooo entertaining.

YouTube is really cool right now. The video ads that come up are ai voices just rambling about some new discovery and a minute in I have no idea what the ad is supposed to be for. Another cool thing that happened while I was at work was YouTube showed me some sort of blocky AI generated image in the top ~~left~~ right of what appeared to be a woman performing fellatio. The neat thing was that it was an ad for roof repair.

honestly waiting 3 seconds of buffering is not the end of the world. i just have ptsd from the last isp, and makes my brain think i dont have net.

currently experiencing this on librewolf, however cromite desktop loads in instantly. google also have to fight against revanced, smartube, tubular...etc. this is a long ass battle and bless every codemonkey fighting the big brother.

Use the grayjay app from the FUTO team

Interesting writeup with some interesting techniques. I should read these some more

I use Pop_OS & the other day I was browsing the Store & stumbled on this app called 'youtubedl-gui'. Then I found out it's also available via apt.

Really cool little piece of software. Maybe check it out

I blocked YouTube. No ads.