I use uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock for YouTube and I haven’t seen an ad in ages. When I do see an ad, it’s because I’m trying to browse on somebody else’s computer.
SponsorBlock in particular is life changing. You don’t realize how much nonsense filler is in these videos. You can easily cut a 10 minute video from a mainstream YouTuber down to like 6 or 7 minutes worth of content if you skip intros, skip recaps, skip sponsorships and product plugs, and skip interaction reminders.
Sponsorblock is so good, it’s amazing. Even use it on Smarttube (firetv).
Alright I’m convinced. I’ve been using just uBlock but I’ll give sponsorblock a try.
Christ I love the Revanced project
deleted by creator
There’s also the fork NewPipe x SponsorBlock with support for SponsorBlock.
Don’t forget SmartTube for Android TV!
There’s a Revanced? I’ve been clinging on to Vanced hoping YouTube API will not change anytime soon
Yes, instead of an app you install, you patch the app yourself using a separate app. Kinda like xmanager if you’ve used that before. I’d point you to their official reddit, but… yknow… Here’s their official Discord https://discord.gg/revanced
Dude I had vanced and it died after YouTube got them to stop updating. You’re saying it’s still going!?
As far as I know, not the same team, at least officially. Unlike vanced, they don’t provide the app themselves, you have to build it yourself, but that isn’t too hard. Your given the patches and the app that writes them patches to a stock version of YouTube downloaded on APKMirror, all that plus vanced MicroG and you got Revanced
That’s awesome, I’ll definitely check it out! I’m not the most tech savvy but am up for learning:) thanks!
Oh no! Anyway…
continues using an AdBlocker
Not when they disable ad blockers like twitch
In that moment, I will use piped. If piped goes down, I will use nebula. Anything over paying youtube.
Then I won’t use youtube since the content is not really worth watching ads or paying for.
My AdBlocker still works on twitch, you just have to do some fanaegling with user scripts.
Really? How do you do it? I’m assuming you use ublock origin
Yes. You can block ads by creating a special script, you can find the info on how to do that at the end of this GitHub ticket but I’ll paste it here too.
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Navigate to the uBlock Origin Dashboard (the extension options)
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Under the My filters tab add
twitch.tv##+js(twitch-videoad). -
Under the Settings tab,
enable I am an advanced user, then click the cog that appears. -
Modify the value of
userResourcesLocationfromunsetto the URLhttps://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions/raw/master/vaft/vaft-ublock-origin.js
Then just disable and reenable uBlock to refresh it and you should be good to go.
Wow, this is awesome. Thank you for sharing this, will add this to my ublock :)
Holy shit thank you!
It ain’t much but it’s honest work
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There are still alternative frontends like piped.video that don’t show ads
This aged as expected 😓
I use adblocker in Firefox mobile. Noticed YouTube keeps downgrading the quality on every video load even tho higher quality is set to auto
They really want to tv-ify web content huh? People left TV because they were sick of ads.
I only have YouTube premium because I do not want a TV license and one is definitely cheaper than the other but the fuck man.
Cable TV did not originally have ads. That was part of the reason that people started paying for it.
What you are seeing is the natural cycle of content and greed.
Not just them either. Netflix has an ad based tier now and I wouldn’t be surprised if other platforms have them too as they realise there’s a limit to how much they can realistically charge people. It seems like we’ve circled back to the start of cable
Yeah, i use youtube and youtube music like daily, to me it worth the money than any other tv service
Yeah i am totally fine with being showed ads or paying for an ad free option. I got YouTube red when it came out and never looked back. Plus they gave us Cobra Kai, which was amazing. I do wish they also included a “we won’t sell your data” option in that premium though
not mildly infuriating. just straight up rage-inducing
NewPipe x Sponsorblock on Android, Invidious on iOS, Adblock + Sponsorblock in Firefox, SmartTubeNext on Android TV box.
Proper source or GTFO, please
Don’t forget, on a “free” platform, you are the product.
You’re the product on paid platforms, too.
This is why we use Piped and Newpipe/Libretube.
I was thinking what if we switched to a fediverse Youtube replacement, such as PeerTube. However, I don’t think this would work. For one, because there are no ads, there’s no money being made, and creators would have to be backed by donations. Not sure how much money that would bring in.
Additionally, the difference between a “creator” on lemmy/subreddit (creating a community) vs a “creator” on youtube (uploads videos) is that I can be a creator without hosting an instance here. Looks like if I wanted to upload videos to PeerTube, I’d need to make my own instance or pay for one. Maybe if there was an option to select an instance just like here on lemmy, but videos take waaayy more disk space and processing to stream than text and a few images. Could be cool to host yourself though.
I obviously don’t have a lot of data but I’ve checked the financial for the YouTuber StupidEconomics. I’ve checked him because he is the one I know that publish a detailed financial report. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1uEk4Td0fyFSGTBUhG_n6oxOanmknXi21p3VmFszCCYU/htmlview#
It looks like YouTube ads revenus are only 5-10% of his revenus. Most of his revenus are donations and public subventions.
Not only that but Youtube often demonetizes videos while also cutting ad-payments. Payments per-view today are much lower than they were 5 years ago.
It’s even worse that they’re apparently going to crack down on adblockers too. Ik people will just make anti-adblock blockers but it’s still fuckin dumb. I swear yt wants to make itself worse than cable tv in terms of ads.
If this is legit then surely an upstart would cut the knees out from youtube? Vimeo would be well placed to just gobble up their userbase
No chance.
Creating a Reddit alternative is easy because you only need to host text, and text doesn’t take up a lot of space. The entirety of Wikipedia’s text, for instance, can be compressed into something like 22 GB, which is small enough that it can be stored on low-end consumer hardware from 20 years ago. The more difficult problem is getting a user base: people don’t want to switch unless they have a compelling reason to, and even with Reddit shitting the bed recently, Reddit alternatives are still pretty empty.
With video, you have both problems. Like Reddit alternatives, getting people to switch and produce content for the platform is difficult as hell. However, even if you somehow manage to succeed at that, video takes up an enormous amount of space. It simply isn’t feasible to host that much content without millions/billions of dollars of funding available if the platform takes off, and no company wants to invest that sort of money on a low probability gamble competing against one of the largest companies in the history of the world.
But in a federated alternative, no one party is responsible for hosting everything. Altogether it’s a lot of data, yes. But it’s not like Google has the whole of the internet stored on its servers.
It might not be that hard to store. A lot of Youtube videos are just filler, you wouldn’t want your instance to store massive amounts of mixtape videos for example, neither would you want to store 10 different encodings of the same video. On the flip-side, you can get 20TB drives easily enough if you have the pipe to run the server locally; and distributed storage makes it more feasible to use consumer grade hardware that’s more prone to failure.
It’s not the platform that is the problem, it’s the content. Your favorite creator’s content only exists on YouTube. I think you’d need a mass creator exodus first.
NewPipe from Android saves me from this
Ublock Origins on desktop browsers. Or Freetube.
Soon it might be Firefox exclusive though
Don’t threaten me with a good time
Good thing I switched to Firefox, then!
I fully abandoned Chromium in favor of Firefox ever since they made extensions like Ghostery work worse (on Chromium, you can only prevent a tracker from running, but it will still get (down)loaded; on Firefox, extensions like Ghostery can prevent a tracker from being loaded at all). It’s been like that for years.
I get a lot of videos with a Spanish audio track and no way to change it to default.
Just migrated from Vanced to ReVanced and I am loving it. Their patches even let you get rid of the Shorts and Create tabs
https://github.com/revanced/revanced-manager/releases/latest go get it kids
ReVanced is the bomb but I only wish casting worked with it.
That said, SmartTube is roughly equivalent to ReVanced in functionality (even SponsorBlock) but it’ll work perfectly on Android TV devices.
Didn’t know you can’t cast on Revanced! Though the benefits of Revanced’s features vastly outweigh losing that feature to me
I wish there would be an iOS app for Peertube. Then I could start to migrate. But without a mobile app, this is not really useful.
(Yes, I know some people love to use a webpage on their phones. I don’t.)
One of the biggest reasons I always use Android…
reddit and youtube really shouting out how much companies don’t give two farts about its users. there’s so much wholesome and educational content on youtube but, dogs forbid, youtube make $5 fewer in revenue than yesterday 🙄 i can’t wait for grassroots decentralization of the internet, including video
Youtube has been consistently getting worse for the past 10 years now. I keep going back because that’s where all the good content is and I don’t think anyone could possibly create an alternative. It would just cost too much money.
idk, some of my fellow tech furries have ridiculously large homelabs and servers that have massive amounts of storage. i don’t think it’s impossible, but may require someone to come up with a way for us to decentralize video which, ofc, is humungo-bonzonga-jumbo
What’s missing is a monetization strategy. Any social media platform at a scale larger than a small community is going to require some kind of revenue because servers in the basement just aren’t going to cut it for long.
Users might not like ads, but until they are willing to pay for subscriptions, that’s what they’re stuck with.
I wonder what percentage of Lemmy. World users have actually donated. Hopefully it’s sustainable enough that they can do more than pay for servers, but also hire some admins.
true, true, and true. i didn’t even think about admins. just as important D:
The technical aspects, like storage and bandwidth aren’t the only issues (though they are pretty major hurdles). The, arguably, bigger problem is the network effect. If you have the best UX possible and no content creators (that people care about), you won’t get users and without users you won’t get content creators that people care about.
If you have the best UX possible and no content creators (that people care about), you won’t get users and without users you won’t get content creators that people care about.
This. I have a small yt channel, my videos regularly get 10k+ views there. In the early days, I also uploaded to a couple of other sites (dailymotion was one, can’t remember the other). Where I was getting hundreds if not thousands of views on yt, I was getting maybe half a dozen on the other sites. My most popular video got nearly 100k views on yt, and last I looked on dailymotion it had something like 8 views. Needless to say, I didn’t bother uploading to other sites after that and just stayed on yt.
That said, I’m willing to start uploading to peertube once I’ve had a chance to look into it.
oh, of course, you’re absolutely right. it may take another rancid campaign from youtube parallel to reddit’s shenanigans that fill in the ux piece of it. or, who knows, maybe it would grow organically as people start to see their favorite sites and resources always come with a peephole and a coin slot 🙃
One thing I’m curious about… Are you aware of a way to grab an entire channel worth of videos at once? I have a few educational channels I’d like to have mirrored locally just for my own consumption.
youtube-dl is up again since it was taken down last year(i think)
It is! I got it going and was able to download some of what I wanted, thank you for the recommendation!
No worries, just wanted to spread the word of it being back. Only realized it myself recently
i think kresten has the right idea, i’ve heard good things about youtube-dl
That’s already a thing: peertube exists and does a pretty decent job, if being expensive to host and limited in content right now.
both good points
The way is PeerTube - federated and peer-to-peer.
“i can’t wait for grassroots decentralization of the internet, including video” 🍻
cheers 🍻 💙
We are the commodity for sale to advertisers. We make the content we consume, YouTube makes sure it keeps going, but for the most part they are just perpetuating viewing space for ads.
this, of course, is not inherently bad. but when does it end? when you literally strip away all but 1 cubic centimeter of joy and ease of use of your product just to squeeze out two monies?
