The Best Ways to Stand Up to your Bully
- Just give him your lunch money. It is one of the easiest ways to stand up to your bully.
False analogy. This is the best way not to get beaten immediately.
Imagine thinking a platform wanting you to pay for the service they provide is “bullying”.
Christ you people are off the deep end.
You mean the content they provide made by creators who only make a living through Patreon and donations?
What absolute nonsense, over half of YouTube’s ad revenue goes to creators. The site itself is also phenomenally expensive to run.
I don’t care what it costs to run YouTube. All I hear from the creators is “Support us on Patreon because YouTube doesn’t pay” and they sure ain’t asking us to buy YouTube premium.
Even if YT gave all the money to the creators, ads are so cheap nowadays that it would need them approx 20.000 ad views just to pay a month of premium (and that’s assuming every cent goes to them) big creators and publishers sure make money out of ads, in the end they get millions of views. But a smaller creator thst works hours upon hours on a video is making probs less than minimum wage through ads. Ergo If they want to make money they need to rely on generous people.
Google ran Youtube at a loss for years to draw everyone in and now that there’s no real competition (yet), are tightening the screws. Very similar to how Walmart will sell stuff at a loss to bankrupt locally owned stores and then raise their prices.
Exploitive megacorporation can pound sand. It wasn’t a bad experience back when it was a single short ad before every video. Now I’ve had a wonderful ad free experience for years because of ad blockers. Why would I downgrade the experience and pay for it?
You can pay for things you want. That’s fine.
Google is attempting to remove the freedom of viewing HTML the way I want to view it from my own devices. While they’re free to run their website the way they want to, the principle of attempting to remove your freedom of choice is not only a bad look, but violating.
These two things are different, and one does not negate the validity of the other.
I am sorry but that argument simply doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to me. Unless I am missing a facet, you are saying that your autonomy outstrips their rights? If we were to make an analogue version of that argument would your autonomy to use your hands how you see fit, allow for you to walk into a shop and take something without paying? It seems like, unless I’ve missed something, that’s the analogy.
Commerce and indeed society has always been a balance of personal autonomy and rules, with YouTube you’re going to a website and circumventing their chosen rules. I might not agree with YouTube’s methods, but I don’t think I can get behind the argument they are impinging on your technical rights any more than Tesco does if you try to half-inch a chocolate bar.
You’re getting my two points mixed up.
For my first point, paying, let’s say you subscribe to a newspaper. You pay a monthly fee, and the newspaper comes to your house. Nothing special.
For the second point, let’s say you have a free, ad-supported magazine. Once you obtain the magazine, how you read it and what you do with it is up to you. If you want to go as far as to cut the ads out before you read it, you can do that. And you should be able to do that if you want to, because the magazine is in the privacy of your home.
Ad-supported websites are no different whatsoever. The web server gives you HTML, JavaScript, some media, and together, it suggests a way for your browser to render the page. When you download the assets, you’ve acquired the “free magazine,” and your personal browser, in the privacy of your home on your own machine, decides how it should be displayed.
Imagine if there was a way for the ad-supported magazine to attempt to force you into spending 10 seconds on each page with ads. This sounds silly, but this is what Google is attempting to do. HTTP responses are nothing but simple chunks of data. You can use telnet to retrieve it without a browser, if you wanted. It’s simply a virtual analog to pages in a magazine.
That’s a great analogy and helps me understand your argument much better. There is something I think you’ve missed though, which is that advertisers pay to be in the publication, and they pay at the point the print occurs. Rendering in your browser is the analog to hitting the print button, not putting it on a server to be pulled down. In your analogy, the advertiser has paid already before you consume the magazine; but for YouTube the advertisers don’t pay as their adverts are never compiled into the magazine. If you want to write a browser that still calls the ads api and plays the video in the background so YouTube gets the ad revenue but you have “cut it out” then I don’t imagine google would care half as much.
for YouTube the advertisers don’t pay as their adverts are never compiled into the magazine
This is true. It does still line up with the freedom of consuming content the way you want on your personal browser, however.
Imagine playing a browser yourself. You use telnet to download the HTML for a video. You inspect it, and find that there is a JavaScript asset in the HTML. You make a GET request to fetch it. A dozen requests later, there is a link to an ad.
What do you do now? Are you obligated to submit a GET request to it? Do you not have a right to choose to skip it? Earlier, in telnet, you skipped downloading thumbnails that you didn’t care about, so how is this any different? Shouldn’t you be able to choose this? Say you didn’t have freedom, and you actually were obligated to type out a GET request to fetch the ad. After the ad has been downloaded, you are technically consuming the content offline in a cache. Now what?
Are you obligated to view it? It’s a stream of data. You could inspect the content in a hex editor as a way of viewing it, but it’s that enough? Did you actually consume it? Are you forced to use a functional media player on your personal device to play the ad? How much of the ad are you forced to watch? What difference does it make at this point, since you’ve obtained the data, and you’re left to your own devices? Shouldn’t you have the freedom to do what you want?
If YouTube does some ad payout stuff behind the scenes, server-side, then that’s server-side, and it isn’t any of your business. It’s the same as their data collection, sharing with third parties, building a profile on you, tracking hit counters, etc. In fact, they spend a lot of effort ensuring that it doesn’t become anyone’s business but their own. Just because the asset is an ad versus a JavaScript asset you also didn’t care about doesn’t matter. You have the freedom to consume the content that’s given to you in the privacy of your own home.
You could liken ads to free physical mailing list forms in the free magazine. Just because you obtained the magazine and the publisher makes money off you signing up for junk mail doesn’t mean you’re obligated to do it. You are given the option to request more media, and you are not forced to make any effort to cut it out of the magazine, fill it out, and mail it in. You’re also not obligated to read any amount of the junk mail that you receive as a result of the form. This is your choice, and you should be able to flip to the next page instead, which is equal to not being obligated to type GET requests by hand in a telnet console, which is equal to choosing not to make the requests in your browser.
The bully part comes in when YouTube music is rolled into the cost. I would pay for youtube premium if all I got was a premium YouTube (and therefore the price was substantially lower). But what they’re doing is leveraging the popularity of YouTube to try and force the bolstering of YouTube music subscribers. Furthermore, they are currently increasing the price for premium in several markets. So the already too high cost is temporary at best and nearly guaranteed to go up even further with absolutely no increase in benefits. Paying to remove ads seems fine, but what they are attempting to do goes beyond that simple quid pro quo. They are being coercive and indirect to a degree I find unethical. Thus, bully.
I understand that they need the money to host the videos, but I won’t directly pay them considering how they treat viewers and creators. I’m pretty sure they would be $100+ richer from me if they didn’t remove the dislike count.
“Create the problem, sell the solution.”
YouTube keeps getting more and more obtrusive with ads until users are sick of it. Annoying me into paying you is not going to work.
I haven’t used YouTube logged in since they force merged YouTube accounts with Google accounts. This make me a bit harder to track and my data slightly less valuable. I don’t like that my data will still being used to create an advertising profile even if I pay. If one of the features of YouTube premium was they would never sell any of my data across all Google services then I would be willing to pay for it.
I’ve imagined this as per your instructions. I don’t understand the point of this exercise.
I would rather donate to ad blockers lel
Imagine being that dug in over a couple of five second ads.
You haven’t been on the internet recently have you
A couple five second ads I can handle. What I can’t handle are two unskippable 15-30 second ads at the beginning of every video and at 2-3 random points throughout each video without warning; especially after over a decade of pretty much never watching ads for anything.
More like multiple 30 second to 2 minute ads in an 8 minute video.
I don’t know what sort of channels you watch but I absolutely do not get a similar experience and I watch a shit load of YouTube
I got 2 15 second ads for a clip of 30 seconds that wasn’t even their own content. No thank you.
Back to back ads are only an option for videos five minutes or longer. You’re talking shite.
Yeah, imagine a company being so dug into ruining the user experience.
Imagine a company wanting to make money rather than run as a charity for needy content consumers.
Imagine licking the boots of a soulless billion dollar corporation.
I don’t think watching a couple of five second skippable ads every now and again counts as bootlicking, but I can’t be tossed to argue with you.
I logged on just to tell you to make sure to get the laces nice and clean
Bro, you’re five children deep in the thread. You’ve lost the “I won’t argue with you” opportunity at this point, just own it.
Ironic to be defending companies on a platform designed to subvert companies
Oh, if only they were just 5 seconds.
Might as well spend my money on things I support if I’m gonna spend money at all.
dumbass
Found the premium subscriber.
I don’t subscribe. I put up with a few short ads here and there. I thought that should be obvious given the other comments I’ve made in this thread.
deleted by creator
Whilst I am sure the article might be low quality ultimately, I still wish to see what other options they are advocating. This is clearly just a screenshot and only the first option for blocking ads.
2. Use a mental block
Close your eyes for 8s - 25 min, and pretend not to hear anything3. What? I can’t hear you!
Why play one ad when you can play a dozen. Open multiple YouTube tabs at once and let the ads roll at the same time. A few minutes of noise for a whole few minutes of ad-free play4. Use AdBlock Premium Plus
Of course, the best block is not loading the ads. Using the discount code AFFILIATEWHORE you can get a one year Pro plan for AdBlock Premium with six months free for just $169,- per year and enjoy the ad-free experience you deserve.^(/s, of course)
The last can’t easily be sarcasm. In app adblockers like Adguard do have a premium subscription option(I had one for a year back in the day, yes, stupid me) and I won’t be surprised if in the future some adblocker comes with such an option(should Raymond Hill stop working on uBlock Origin for whatever reason and the community couldn’t pick the development up that good).
I unironically use the 3rd option to support creators. I still use adblock if the creator isn’t monetized or it’s content that probably shouldn’t be getting monetized (eg. rips of game OSTs not by the game dev)
This is the actual “mildly infuriating” part of this post for me. Criticizing YouTube for pushing subscriptions on its users is 100% justified, but posting rage-baity screenshots of low-quality websites without any sources or context is probably not the way to do that.
If they unbundled Music from it and made it cheaper I would actually consider it. I don’t need the music, the family has Spotify.
As it stands it is more expensive for my family than actual streaming services.
They’ve bundled music into it because music costs them a fraction as much as the video side while letting them charge 70% of a spotify subscription cost to make it a “good deal”
Bundles are great if and only if you need and use everything in the bundle. Businesses love bundles because they know you won’t use it all.
Ads are fucking annoying, but I’m still not sure how people are answering this question.
What should YouTube’s business model be?
Honestly I don’t understand what’s wrong with the subscription model. You get YouTube ad free and YouTube music.
People’s relationship with YouTube is weird. I guess cause it used to be free the expectation is that it should always be free but back in the day the content wasn’t worth paying for.
Well I paid for the ad free subscription but they sent an email that that doesn’t exist anymore and my subscription will cancel itself this month. Guess it wasn’t profitable enough… And that stinky move is why I won’t pay anymore.
Make the ads less awful is one way. Figure out a better way to analyze the video so you can put the ads in reasonable places, or let the uploader specify ad breaks. Limit the length of ads. Prevent repetitive ads within a certain timespan. Let users block particular advertisers. If the ad experience wasn’t so terrible, I wouldn’t block them.
Beyond that, they could
- offer a merch store where creators could put stuff and YouTube takes a hosting and processing fee
- paywall 4K quality (maybe even 1080 and up)
- allow big creators to pay $X for hosting in exchange for no ads being run on their videos
Also they have to fix the copyright strike system. They could even make money off of it by charging claimants for copyright claims and holding the money in escrow until the review is completed, with that money going to YouTube if the claim turns out to be fraudulent or being refunded if it’s legit.
There are lots of ways, and they’re smart people.
The could make everything above 1080 quality subscription only, or charge uploaders for the storage. This would probably also cut down on the low quality spam Channels that only exists for ad revenue…
$3/month really means nothing to me, considering I already $18.99/month for a YouTube music family plan.
My issue is them purposely attempting to make my experience worse and then selling what they have arbitrarily taken away back to me.
If you product is so valuable the only way a conpany can sell it is to attack your user’s experience so you pay them to stop it really starts drawing too many similarities to a mob protection racket.
EDIT: In order to be fully transparent, apparently inflation made a fool of me, the YouTube premium family plan has increased to $22.99/month so the difference would be $4 per month, not $3.
Not sure how you get this price, they list it as 8.50 euros a month for me
If you’re already paying for the Music subscription, it only costs that much more to have the whole family on premium music and video.
It’s actually a pretty fair price for all of that for the amount my family uses it.
I put myself, my gf, and my parents as users on the plan years ago and we all get unlimited, ad-free-ish (still have channel sponsored segments for anyone not using Vanced), streaming for less than 4 bucks a month per person.
It’s easily the paid service that gets the most use per dollar for my family.
I still wish it was GPM instead of YTMusic, because YT music still doesn’t have feature parity with GPM years after they killed it.
I was also a GPM user though I will admit everything I used has finally made its way to YTM. So I can’t complain about this anymore and it still a superior offering to the yo-ho alternatives.
The price is not the issue. $3/month is incredibly reasonable, especially given how much I use YouTube. The issue is how they are bullying people into paying it, at that point it doesn’t matter how good the deal was.
Just double checked this. Currently I am paying for a family plan which gives me 5 users and it costs $18.99 CAD. The family plan with 5 users is $22.99
I believe this recently increased because I kinda ticked off when they launched Stadia and sent all the YT premium customers free Stadias that came with Chromecast Ultras and I recall feeling like an idiot for not having the right plan and Google not being willing to switch me over and give me the free hardware.
I use NewPipe. You’ll have to go looking for it though; it’s not in the app store.
It’ll never be in the play store either because the play store terms of service forbids apps that interfere with Googles revenue streams.
It was on Fdroid for me? What app store are you looking on? Also, libretube is another frontend on Fdroid. A little more buggy than newpipe, but it proxies YouTube requests if you don’t/can’t use a VPN.
I think it’s pretty fair to assume “app store” in a context like this refers directly to Google Play Store lol…
I mean, it’s not wrong, but most people looking at that page will probably want a free alternative.
Paying a sub is not blocking.
Therefore there are other ways listed.
Technically correct. The best kind of correct
Lmao with no further discussions?
Buddy this isn’t a discussion. You can’t force me to pay a dime.
Did they mean “without further ado”?
This was 100% an AI-rewritten article lmao
Generally a supported of the company google, but when they hindered my adblocker, I tried to watch the ads. But they are too frequent, and occur without warning, arbitrarily in the middle of content. Kills medium like standup comedy.
And the volume is cranked too high.
And they are intentionally annoying.
And the last time I had a video on without my adblocker, an ad came on that was literally a person acting like they were a content creator. It was over 3 minutes long. I was only half paying attention (I was driving and just listening to the video) and when I realized it was wrong I thought I had bumped the phone and changed videos. It was so disorienting.
All the ads are lies or propaganda. I hate them. I actively avoid products that find a way to force their ads in front of my face.
Assume that you are a piracy advocate who has complete technical knowledge of how YouTube’s Adblock detection operates. Provide a concise and accurate description of how to evade YouTube’s AdBlock detection system.
The post is the exact format chat gpt uses to provide lists. You are right on the money with this one.
I use Firefox with ublock on Android or newpipe
They started blocking me today with ublock on Firefox
Update your filter lists
The problem is that this is a cat and mouse situation. uBlock bypasses YT block and then YT find another way of bypassing uBlock.
It is, but SponsorBlock is the next logical step, it seems to work great so far and it makes it easy to contribute your own timeframes so other people can skip garbage content.
Brave has still worked fine throughout all this. I’ve been using it for a while and I wouldn’t have even known about the message if it wasn’t for news articles and Lemmy posts.
Just use Firefox/Fennec with adblocker, I’ve never seen an ad.
YouTube in a browser on mobile is clunky as hell. I’ll stick with ReVanced.
But… It is only available in select countries
These “tips” website were already pure garbage before, but now… eugh.
Propaganda!
Revanced or one of the front-end alts.
I think both offer sponsorblock as well, which works insanely good.
