Even if there was a balance and the ads were non-intrusive? I mean, servers and bandwidth cost money. I’m in the same boat as you where I have run ad blockers, adblocker blockers, no script, privacy enhancers, and anti-fingerprinting since forever ago.

I’d rather view a few reasonable ads than have a site try to mine and sell my data. If there was a balance, this is where I’d say it was reasonable. Since not reality, I’m with you, nuke them all, and just take the content.

God, this is tangential to your point, but car and housing aesthetics have gotten terrible. Everything is BIGGER BIGGER BIGGER. People need to buy huge fucking hulked out monster trucks now for their suburban ass lives so they can make sure to fit their entire home when they commute an hour to work in soul crushing traffic. And they absolutely NEED their giant ass monstrous mcmansions. How can they survive without the extra dozen rooms that they can fill with more cheap bullshit? And don’t get me started on color. Houses are all beige, grey, monotone terrible. Cars are silver, white, grey, black. There’s no color anymore. It just feels like what’s the point? Why bother trying when this is what success looks like. We have this beautiful planet and this is the shit we fill it with. I’m sorry. /endrant

Most big youtubers have in-video ads now anyways. I’m not sure what the ratio of their revenue comes from youtube ads vs in-video ads, but youtube seems pretty trigger happy about demonetizing videos. Sometimes entire channels. If someone gets the majority of their revenue from other sources than youtube ads, I could see them migrating to something like peertube.

you’re definitely right on most points. but, to your point, if a creator was on a federated instance of peertube then they don’t have to worry about the wishy-washy, everchanging rules of youtube :3

I could see someone making some fork of peertube that helps creators get paid. May not be free but could get creators willing to join

yup, even youtube isn’t profitable. Video remains one of the largest sinks of resources. A 4K movie is stored on a disc of about 66GB, so about 30GB per hour of 4k video. Even with peertube it’d take the best hobbyists to run even a modest server for a few streamers. We’re talking people with PB level of storage capacities now with fiber lines to their house to truly host peertube alternatives, and if we’re talking cloud we’re talking thousands per month.

It’s not impossible, I don’t want to get people down, but that’s the major hurdle

hopefully 💙 video codecs have gotten pretty good, and maybe they’ll get even better to where, like you’re saying, we don’t have to shovel so many resources into hosting something like a peertube. crossing fingers 🤞

never heard of nebula, thank you for bringing it up :D

Did they ever get around to implementing playlists and autoplay of some sort? I really wanted to get into that service, but the absence of those two things just killed it for me

I’ve found Nebula to be great for a few creators I follow, but the amount of content isn’t high enough to wean me off of YouTube completely.

Here’s to hoping as lemmy, mastodon, etc. get name recognition peertube gets their time of day too.

hosting cost for peertube would probably be astronomical since you’re likely hosting the videos yourself :/ unless there is some sort of federation that kind of works like bittorrent. that would be awesome

I disagree with this, I fully believe a donation-funded content economy can work.

Odysee lacks of moderation. It’s full of conspiration bullshit, racist videos and horrible stuff.

this is very interesting, ty 💙

That’s when the skip to highlight option comes in handy. And if a video doesn’t have it I end up contributing so next person can save time.

This is crux of the issue. The whole websites interface is structured around ads. If you pay to get rid of them, it’s still structured around ads from its most basic level, so much so that simply getting rid of them doesn’t fundamentally change the experience.

I pay for premium and the only reason is because I watch a lot of youtube on my TV. However their app is terrible on cable boxes. I’ve had 3 different brand boxes and they all have the same issue. If you rewind the video it stutters while playing from the buffer until you get back to live.

And it’s so annoying if you have a ton of channels you are subbed to. The algorithm will only show you videos from like the last dozen or so of your subs that you watched videos from. Then show me tons of videos I have absolutely no interest in. Or tons of videos on the same topic that are basically just plagiarized from each other.

Newpipe x Sponsorblock fork is my go to.

Is there anything like newpipe but for yt music? Ideally on fdroid, revanced is… confusing… to maintain.

Hey, where do I find this? UBlock blocks the top links on DDG as “Badware risk”

For Desktop, you can use FreeTube

• Private viewing by default
• Supports all platforms (Yey Linux)
• No ads
• Can create seperate profiles (Helps me with productivity)
• Download the video is required

Only downside

• Can’t comment on the videos

I had the same issue, so I’ve been developing a Newpipe front-end for the web tubo

You can’t use ReVanced on desktop. I was mostly being sarcastic and saying everyone would just start watching on their phones. But I do most of my YouTube viewing on mobile anyway, so if I started getting hit with this, this is literally what I would do.

Alright, let’s say I do that. I’ll take my $12 and split it equally between every unique channel I’ve watched in the last 30 days. Eyeballing my watch history shows… about 100 different channels.

Let’s ignore for the sake of argument the incredible overhead I’d have to take upon myself in order to facilitate and account for 100+ recurring micro-donations. How much more money do you think these creators would get from my direct donations rather than going through greedy Alphabet? Let’s do math together:

• Subscription: $12.48 (the extra $0.48 is applied at checkout for the 4% VAT)
• 4% VAT (rounds up): -$0.48 ($12.00)
• 1.9% + $0.30 Processor Fee (rounds up): -$0.53 ($11.47)
• 45% Platform Split (not rounded!): -$5.1615 ($6.3085)
• 100x split: $0.063085 p/channel

Ok. That’s ~$0.06 instead of the $0.12 each creator would have gotten had I simply hand-delivered two pennies and a dime to every single individual. I don’t know about you… but I’m kind of too busy watching YouTube to go outside right now, so let’s go ahead and factor in what would happen if I managed to donate using a platform like Patreon instead:

• Not-Subscription: $12.48
• Rounded up: $13.00 (the donation has to be evenly divisible by 100)
• Per-creator donation: $00.13
• 4% Local Digital VAT (rounds up): -$0.01 ($0.12)
• 5% Platform Fee (rounds up): -$0.01 ($0.11)
• 5% + $0.10 Processor Fee (rounds up): -$0.11 ($0.00)

In other words: I’d be paying $0.52 more to donate a grand total of: no money. If we ignore the “no money” problem, there’s also the issue of it being literally impossible to donate such a tiny sum in the first place. Of course, we’ve also conveniently ignored the issue of individually navigating numerous currency conversions…

Let’s be honest with each other: you weren’t being completely serious with me when you claimed that your suggestion was about helping ✨the creators✨. Even if you were serious, I’m certain that you don’t follow your own advice because it’s quite clearly impossible for a normal person to internationally distribute $12 among dozens of strangers.

Eh, I’m not here to hawk product. The higher bitrate is nice to have, but the impact of bitrate on video quality is perhaps a bit overblown. In a lot of situations, you’d have to pixel-peep to spot the improvement – youtubers are pretty good at making videos look nice under the core quality settings.

On the other hand, ads suck. I’d have never watched enough YouTube to buy premium without years of heavy adblocking (shoutout to ReVanced Manager). Getting an ad-free experience out-of-box is very convenient and could possibly be worth the value of the subscription depending on your usage & means.

How is it $15/mo for you? When I look at a family plan it’s $23/mo. I’m using Spotify with a student discount right now, but my wife and I accidentally kick each other off from time to time and it’d be nice to not have to worry about that. $15 would be worth considering since we just freed up some money by cancelling Netflix.

The family plan was the best $15 I spent for many years but when they raised the rates this past year I took a look at all my streaming subscriptions and YouTube didn’t make the cut any longer. There’s a small chance I’ll resub as an individual down the road but for now it’s ad blockers for me.

Advertising clearly does work on the whole or who would companies spend so much gold on it? Advertising shits in your head. It subtly influences consumers and advertisers have become quite sophisticated about it. There is a glut of advertising space available now so we see awful and ineffective ads but be assured a lot of the bigger players know what they are doing. This is why I block all ads. Well for that reason plus they are annoying as hell.

To be fair the aim of ads generally isn’t to make you go ‘oh now I’ll go and buy that’, it’s more about unconsciously planting the idea that $product exists so when you actually do want to buy something you buy that brand. It’s why ‘show me as many as you like, ads don’t work on me’ is complete rubbish and the only real solution is blocking them entirely and laws that restrict where and when they may be shown.

A particularly egregious example of psychologically manipulative advertising would be ‘Joe Camel’ who was nominally just a fun mascot but in reality existed to advertise cigarettes to children so they’d buy Camels when they were old enough. Given the prevalence of really awful advertising in the present day Big Tech really does deserve the increasing comparisons with Big Tobacco I think.

To be fair, even though ads didn’t make you want to buy anything, the tax write-off was the same.

This, and this is why few years ago I didn’t care about yt ads on my TV. I had like 3-4 ads, 15 sec each for an hour of content, ads only between videos, not in the middle.

However, suddenly there was 3-4 ads before each video, and many times the ads started to be longer than videos.It feels like they are trying to push me into subscribing to paid YouTube by making the free version unusable without an adblock. And now they are even trying to make me disable my adblock?