When you have a goose that produces a reliable daily supply of golden eggs do you:
- keep collecting your daily egg
or - see if giving it a good kick or two gets you more eggs
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Technology
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As YouTube increases the number and length of ads, the amount of traffic behind blockers rises accordingly.
This is also just... a function of the evolving digital space. The consolidation of the internet ownership sphere and the modernized APIs/coding tools afford server-side content warehouses more and more power over what the end user receives.
Because AWS owns all the fucking rack space, because ISP monopolies are the defining feature of western net access, and Microsoft force-feeds people their proprietary interfaces, we're moving away from the point where clients control what they display and closer to the point where everything's just a dumb-terminal for big business.
We're effectively backpeddling from Web 2.0 to Terrestrial TV.
Youtube most likely never made any money. Hosting these vast amounts of video is expensive. Google stopped telling us how much they money youtube made them lose. You would think they would start bragging when they could make a profit off of it.
That being said, this still sucks of course.
Although they don't profit directly from youtube, it's a strategy they take to impede competition from arising and keeping their name as the main one. It's the kind of strategy only multibillionaire companies can do, and, in my opinion, something that should be restricted, because it affects smaller businesses to the point of becoming inviable.
More notably, its a strategy they can do when borrowing costs are functionally zero.
A lot of this shit is just the consequence of Fed Rate Policy. No more cheap money means these loss leaders are actually being expected to generate profit, not to just act as clearing houses for propaganda.
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"But what about profits"
Just FYI for anyone reading: Invidious and Piped are great YouTube mirrors, and Piped even blocks in-video sponsor sections!
We need a Lemmy not that comments on all YouTube links and gives an invidious link instead
They have really gone all out on the whole enshittification process during the past couple of years, haven’t they?
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As fill-in ads are a vector for computer viruses and other malware I for one will NOT be disabling my ad blocker unless YouTube is willing to provide a lifetime subscription to something like Life Lock and make me whole for anything lost to whatever malware arrives as a part of an ad.
Where else can I watch sci-show, Linus-tech-tips, and all the other channels I subscribe to?
Just use newpipe. It's youtube without the ads. Doesn't have casting support, but it allows you to download the videos. You can also listen/download to the audio of videos, without fetching the video.
Newpipe will probably be blocked as well if youtube is doing this. Honestly not sure why youtube hasn't blocked yt-dlp and others already.
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This is why I download so many YouTube videos. This is why I have a complicated video tags and search system (I'll put it on github eventually).
Some day it's going to get taken away and I'm not watching those trashy ads. I'd watch a non-obnoxious 15-30 second ad every 30 minutes but they want us to watch 2 minutes of unskippable full-r*tard annoying trash every 5 minutes and I will not cooperate with that in any way shape or form.
I think a reasonable ad system is that thing where YouTubers do that sponsorship thing and make it part of the video then you can skip it if it sucks.
Great, now YouTube is being further enshittified.
We did the Twitter to Mastodon migration. Now we are doing the Reddit to Lemmy/kbin migration. When are we doing the YouTube to Peertube migration?
That's impossible or at least very difficult, right now. Video content is very expensive. LBRY is the only feasible option.
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When will companies finally understand that some people won‘t watch ads no matter what tricks they employ. I‘d rather watch no video at all than a single ad. If that is their goal, fine.
And the percentage of people using ad blocking has to be crazy low. I've never seen another person in public with ad blocking. Every time I happen to see someone watching youtube, there's ads playing.
oh boy, I wish youtube kills itself like reddit is doing right now so decentralized alternatives can become widely adopted
YouTube is a bit of a different animal.
YouTube allows creators to monetize content - so there's a sense of shared success. Channels from Tom Scott or Captain Disillusion are amazing, because their production in part relies on that revenue model.
YouTube also understands that without paying for popular content, you won't get the consistent cavalcade of medium content from people that want to earn a living or notoriety through YouTube. And that include anything from videos of cats falling over, blogs about life in remote places, DIY home improvement or niche guitar technique lessons.
Meanwhile on Reddit, if a user gets thousands of upvotes and a million page views for a short story they wrote exclusively for the platform, Reddit won't pay them a cent. The very thought is laughable.
The other thing to consider is that the technology just doesn't exist for there to be a viable 'federated' YouTube. YouTube has 800 million videos - many in HD and many are hours long. That's a big ask in terms of storage and maintenance - even several thousand videos.
Video compression has a long way to go before that changes. For now, it makes sense for leave that storage to the companies with resources.
Text, however... well, all of Wikipedia can fit on around 20 gigs - 60 million odd articles. And for the record, that can pretty much fit on an iPod from 2002.
I do wish that YouTube wasn't a monopoly. Twitch is the only thing that's close, and it has it's own special lane for live streaming. Back in the old days, there was some competition - including Google Video. But that went away when Google bought YouTube. I guess there's Vimeo, but they've got a very different approach.
I mean, the Justice Department is suing Google for monopolizing ad tech - and I think we could see antitrust laws used in the next few years to breakup YouTube. Maybe the successor companies would federate - like when Bell was broken up into what became Verizon and ATT - who now directly compete for customers.
The other thing to consider is that the technology just doesn’t exist for there to be a viable ‘federated’ YouTube.
Well, Peertube exists. But I agree it is very hard to get close to the amount of videos YouTube hosts without it becoming too expensive. But that is even true for companies like Google, which is why they are pushing these changes. It seems like people need to accept that a video platform must either show ads, make you subscribe, or receive substantial donations.
I almost can't believe Wikipedia is only 20GB btw. Does that include all the pictures on there?
Does that include all the pictures on there?
It can't. 60 million odd articles with pictures only taking 20GB? I doubt it. Just the text taking up so few space that I can believe.
I almost can't believe Wikipedia is only 20GB btw. Does that include all the pictures on there?
That's English compressed text only, decompressed text is closer to 90GB
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Then I’m going to begin not fucking watching YouTube.
Also youtube-dl/yt-dlp (or mpv directly) if you just want to play and/or download videos and don't care about the UI or subscription stuff.
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Isn't that something they can also target and shut down? Either through legal action or blocking calls from unverified sources?
There is a federated version of YouTube...
But storing video is a massive challenge, way harder than dealing with a Lemmy or Mastodon instance.
My rational mind realises it’s such an expensive system to run that it’s reasonable for them to charge or show ads. The problem is they’ve been extremely aggressive with ads and pushing subscriptions, to the point where I’m pretty resentful of the idea. Plus they’ve neglected so many things (like allowing aggressive copyright predators and refusing to implement sensible human-based appeals processes) that they really should have dealt with and instead embraced an algorithm that I’m pretty sure is at least partially responsible for the radicalisation of large groups of people.
I.. don’t mind paying for shit. I just don’t want to give them money.
Also: wow there’s federated video sharing? Bet that’s not cheap to run.
I think the other issue is that giving them money doesn’t stop some of the ads iirc
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YouTube is the only Google service I use on a regular basis. Happy to leave them behind if they continue with this type of behavior.
It would be less convenient, but it is what it is and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s ads.
Nebula is really good at this point. Almost everything I enjoy watching is one there now.
Seems like one of the best options to support your favorite creators.
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Seems like it's profit squeezin season on every major platform.
I feel like extensions are pretty savvy for fixing this. If not, I will waste less time on YouTube. Hell, why not another big site getting over my limit for hoops that are worth jumping through vs value I get.
Yup, a lot of my time got wasted on YouTube.. I watched "educational" and "interesting" videos but I have to say that many of the creators got caught into enshittification process too.. I would do well with 95% reduction in watch time. However, if they start a real war against adblockers.. 100% reduction will it be.
The 10min minimum is why I pretty much stopped posting. If you don't provide enough viewing time for 2 pre-rolls and one intermission your revenue per 1k views drops off and you don't get promoted to new viewers.