Look, people are greedy. YouTube evidently works and is enormously profitable. As is the rest of the copyright industry. It didn't disappear once people had the power to make their own copies. If anything the industry has become more profitable and more powerful. None of this is about survival, it's about greed. If you give people the power to take more they will take it, every single time. They might not take it at first, but they will take it eventually. It's really that simple. Stories like this are boring. We know it's coming, and will keep coming. Until we build our communities in such a way that these enormous power imbalances can't happen then there will be stories like this every day.
If you want it to stop then we need AGPL software and a decentralised internet. We are in a local optimum so it will seem worse at first before it gets better.
But we already have a decentralized internet, it's just that most people will go for convenience rather of freedom...
Furthermore, some people here keep claiming that they are willing to pay for ad-less services, yet learned nothing from cable TV... even paid streaming services have ads...
Then they cancelled it, got the email back in 2023 and resorted back to add-ons to block ads, stopped watching videos on devices that didn't support that, generally only watched YouTube on the computer for educational purposes.
When I saw it was back my first thought was "are you fucking kidding me?", I simply cannot comprehend Google's product strategy, at all. The "data-driven" bullshit for determining features, product tiers, etc. turns out to be just the McNamara fallacy applied to digital products, I can't see another way to explain the whiplash Google goes through in their product decisions, feels like everyone over there responsible for these decisions is only looking at insights, dashboards, etc. without ever thinking about what the hell the product is at its core.
Adblock is digital self-defence.
> You know nothing about psychological warfare if you think ads
... cause everyone to die.
If you think ads shape opinions and everything else doesn't, you are tragically and ironically misinformed.
The only difference is that ads are explicit about it. There is no better way of subsidizing free content, clearly delimited from the content and not influencing the nature of that content unlike sponsorship blocks for example. If you take away ads all you have left is ads disguised as content + paid only content, because as I said: no one is obligated to feed anyone's black hole of content consumption for free.
So what's the deal here? $8 for "less ads but none of the premium features"? I'd understand "no ads but none of the premium features" but even for that it would be quite expensive. Who on earth is the target group for this plan?
Folks who aren't paying much attention, but are paying $8/month.
I put a youtube video on the TV last week and all the adverts were deep fakes of famous people saying you can get rich with this one trick and a QR code to scan. One of the videos was a deep fake of the UK PM Keir Starmer saying thousands of people can claim an unknown benefit. How are these adverts not considered harmful?
I used to have Premium and listen to videos in the background while working, doing chores, all kinds of stuff. I realized 95% of the content I'm listenting to is garbage, and another 5% percent is good content that deserves my full attention, not just me listening to it while doing other stuff.
Stopped paying for premium, the experience is so unbearable that after a couple of days, I stopped watching YouTube.
I guess I could also just adblock, but they keep breaking every couple of weeks (gee, I wonder why), but honestly I don't mind less YT in my life.
Premium already suffers from the issue that you're paying to not experience something, so exactly how obnoxious the thing you're skipping is a little fuzzy. Once you start adding layers of tweaks to the definition of "some" ads, its hard to imagine people being enthusiastic to pay for it.
If you're on Android, use tubular (https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular). It has no ads, built-in sponsor block and allows you to download videos and play them in the background for music.
If you're on Android TV, use Smart Tube (https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube). It basically has the same features as above, but with a TV-friendly UI.
If you're on iOS, consider switching to an OS where a big corp doesn't control what software you can run.
Yo, Dawg. I heard you like pipes in your pipes…
No one else seems to have that specific problem. Am I the only one with this issue?
Sure! I literally just picked up a new Razr 2025 last night.
Out of the box, its built in “device pulse” application sideloaded another 15 apps out of the box I never asked for, consented for, or wanted, ranging from scammy games to garbage like Tiktok and Pintrest.
I didn’t get to say “no” to those applications… sounds like a big corp controlled what software I can run. They even put the application installer into the ‘nodisable’ list so I can’t kill it, and I can’t unlock the bootloader or any of that other great stuff everyone says Androids can do.
What now?
I'd recommend getting a Pixel and installing Graphene.
There is a beta version of ublock origin lite available now on iOS [1]
It is baffling to me that people would pay to access it: the viewer is the product that is sold, not the youtube content. This is merely a bait. Content creator's customer's are the brands that want to be advertized.
That kind of thing usually kills the platform though.
What Google have done with YouTube is push it at a loss for long enough to kill competition. Once they're the only ones left, they get to dictate everything because there's nobody left to compete.
It's not _illegal_ (not exactly, anyway), but don't expect me to then call using the service and blocking ads "stealing".
_Algernon_•8mo ago
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
bugtodiffer•8mo ago
saubeidl•8mo ago
You can't give the ad-peddlers control over your digital existence.
Firefox has gotten quite good over the years. Personally, I like Zen, which has the UX of Arc, but an open source FF base.
pil0u•8mo ago
worble•8mo ago
You only need uBlock origin; get rid of Ghostery, Privacy Badger, adblock for youtube or any of that other stuff. Other extensions can cause uBlock to not work correctly.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock?tab=readme-ov-file#all-pro...
> Do NOT use uBO with any other content blocker. uBO performs as well as or better than most popular blockers. Other blockers can prevent uBO's privacy or anti-blocker-defusing features from working correctly.
lan321•8mo ago
pil0u•8mo ago
No, this is new.