YouTube "forbidding" ad blockers. Concerns, if any?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

Okay, update. The warnings have returned, but very sporadically; they seem to lock on to channels, and once UBlock clears a channel, it’s fine. Hopefully.

This just goes back to a nagging peeve I’ve had for a long time, anytime one thing…website, company, organization, resource, whichever…is allowed to become the thing, without viable alternatives, at some point a raging misanthrope always takes control and ends up ruining it. I’ve seen it with Blockbuster Video, Barnes and Noble, and Miku Hatsune (goddammit… :cry:). Heck, one word: Twitter. I was skeptical about this quickie-cheapie service from day one, and when a lot of good, honest, intelligent people started using it as their day-to-day platform, it just about blew me away. Now when the ship finally sinks, there won’t be anything with a fraction of the accessibility, power, or prestige to take its place.

Likewise, I didn’t like the idea of the now-vast majority of video content being on a single platform run by a single company for the simple reason that once the massive corporation in charge finally goes bad, it’s going to create global agony. (Think of it as the monotheism problem, except that the higher power actually exists.) I’ve already had issues with the repeatedly rejiggered rating systems, the total inability to block undesired comments and commenters, and the Tiktok-pandering emphasis on shorts. But as long as it was the video place, I had to deal.

But there’s a limit to everything, and I will not enable the corporate machine by springing for an overpriced premium service. (Seriously, this is what you get! That’s it! Pathetic!) If the end result is that I get completely blocked out, fine. Nothing is forever in this world. There’s no point getting attached to a video site than to Blockbuster Video, Fun Factory, CD players, or Miku Hatsune (or, y’know, those other guys).

I’ll do my best to enjoy my vacation now. :slightly_smiling_face:

62

With the way youTube treats it’s content providers that play by the rules, I’m shocked there is not another viable alternative service by now.

63

The last time they pissed off their creators, we ended up with Patreon.
Edit: I don’t actually know the timeline, Patreon was probably around earlier, but I remember a lot of youtubers putting content over there when youtube changed how (much) they pay their creators.
I’ve yet to use Patreon however.
Has anyone used Nebula yet?

64

Remember that Brave is based on Chromium and guess who owns Chromium? Something to keep in mind.

65

For another method to access Youtube see FreeTube:

What is FreeTube?

FreeTube is a YouTube client for Windows, Mac, and Linux built around using YouTube more privately. You can enjoy your favorite content and creators without your habits being tracked. All of your user data is stored locally and never sent or published to the internet. FreeTube grabs data by scraping the information it needs (with either local methods or by optionally utilizing the Invidious API). With many features similar to YouTube, FreeTube has become one of the best methods to watch YouTube privately on desktop.

66

I didn’t see a FAQ* section (do they have a github page with it?), but my immediate question is, how do they provide suggestions? Assuming they do that. If no data is sent to the internet, are they’re importing some type of meta data from youtube videos and sifting through it locally to decide what to suggest?
My other guess was that this program essentially acts as a client with your channel/account being the server. It could populate your home page with the front page and put what you watch back into your history to keep suggestions current/correct.

Or am I missing something?

*Found the FAQ section, it doesn’t address technical questions, however, it did mention that they have no intention of building something similar for Android:

Android is also a waste of time because you should be using NewPipe if you’d like a similar experience. We don’t see a reason to make an Android app when NewPipe is a very nice equivalent to what we would make anyways.

So, if this works well, NewPipe might be the answer for Androids.

67

I’ve used NewPipe for Android. It’s fine; it plays videos. Instead of logging into your YouTube account, you import your subscription list, and then it shows a list of new videos. Instead of a custom recommendation list, I think it is just using the generic YouTube front page recommended videos.

All of this is such a psychological bad place for Google to be. Even when I know what is happening, I still am trapped not wanting to pay for YouTube. It used to be free, so asking for money makes me feel like they are taking something away from me, and I don’t want to do it, even though I do pay for other streaming services, which are watched less in our house than YouTube.

If the choice is ads or not watch, I will pick not watch.

68

To me, the difference is Netflix pays for the content they serve. The likes of Google and Twitter (X) get their content for free. Yes, Google pays for the servers but so does Netflix.

69

Is there any way to leave comments on Freetube?

70

Here is a whole page of alternative front ends to youtube; enjoy

71

I had a Nebula trial code at some point, and I did not notice any ads.

I recall this topic has come up before: people post stuff on Youtube (among other platforms) because it’s big atm and they need all the publicity they can get, but (my opinion now) if Youtube and/or Google go bankrupt, there will always be alternatives anyway, so fuck the megacorporations; you should certainly not support them or condone their anti-creator policies.

72

The problem is scale, I think. If youtube disappeared suddenly, there’d be other places the creators could go, but I have to assume none of those places would be ready for it. Unless someone sees the writing on the wall and has the money and/or resources to start scaling up, we’re going to be in for a bumpy few months/years until the dust settles.

Regarding Nebula, I hear many of the people I watch talking about it, however, I had no idea how many of those people were directly involved in getting it up and running. Sam from Half As Interesting/Wendover Productions did a video about Nebula and his/their involvement in it.

73

Well yes, a sudden complete shutdown of e.g. YouTube would be inconvenient. nobody would be paying to have that kind of stand-by capacity at the ready just in case YouTube poofed out of existence.

And of course it would take awhile for the reality of network effects to work their magic and slowly but surely winnow the several contenders for Son-of-YouTube down to just one monopolistic survivor.

One might hope that monopoly’s management would look up the wreckage of YouTube and think twice about enshittifying their own company to the point all their content providers bolted. One would almost certainly be disappointed however.

74

That Free Tube did the trick for me. Now I just have to start repopulating all the sites I was following.

75

I was fighting almost daily with YouTube using uBlock (reloading uBlock scripts…easy to do but still).

I have found using Incognito (Private Window on Firefox) I don’t have to do that. I log in as me too so I get my recommendations and can comment and whatnot. So far, no fuss at all.

76

I haven’t had any problems with uBlock since I followed the advice I mentioned in post #53

77

No, network effects is not the major reason for the success of Youtube. Instead it is that Youtube is usually at the top of Google search results .

78

Back in the day, YouTube was one of the few places that you could upload and share videos for free. It was also one of the only video delivery sites that didn’t require installing some other program to work. Sure, it needed a Flash plugin for your browser, but you probably already had that. You didn’t need to download RealPlayer, Quicktime, or whatever Microsoft was calling their media player back then.

Just like Google search, (except Google bought YouTube) it was one of those things where it was legitimately better than the competition.

None of that excuses Google’s later bad behavior and continued enshitification.

79

The main proble - i reckon - is not only who’d be stepping into those big shoes … but LOSING the huge back-catalogue of content …

80

One would hope that each person / business who has put something up on YouTube kept a copy for themselves. If not, they deserve to not survive to the next generation.