Literally taking away the bread and circuses

Literally one of the smartest things that Capital could do is to pool a tiny amount of their resources and make Netflix and Youtube free for the masses. These are incredible tools for keeping the masses placated.

one of the only good things about the stage of capitalism that we're in right now is that the capitalists are complete fucking idiots with no instincts for the preservation of their class. the competence has been fully bred out of them Habsburg-style at this point
Death to America
- Conversely, they've realized the general population is even more servile and neutered then they expected and they are doing this to constantly reinforce there's nothing we can do and they'll make things as shitty as they want and nobody's gonna do anything about it. They're trying to soft sell us on being back in a feudal society and they're about 60% of the way there.
  Working in exchange for housing with no pay is gonna be a thing again in our lifetimes.
  "Now watch this drive" but about the inherent contradictions of capitalism.
- I think it's arguably that they are beginning to see the end of the window of profitability and so they are gutting things on the way out. Obviously there are true failsons fucking things up like Elon, but a lot of it I think is actually them acting reasonably from the standpoint of quarterly gains and perhaps even medium-term profit-maximizing, because how intrusive Netflix ads are during a nuclear war doesn't really make a difference (meaning short-term gain is the only thing to optimize).
- Suffering from success
It's a shame the ruling class can't agree on anything if it gets in the way of their short term returns.
That's assuming Capital exists as a single centrally planned homogenate, rather than a set of competing factions all warring over the stream of revenue that media consumers produce. We did once try something akin to this, with the Public Broadcasting Service. And it was very successful, at least for a little while, in its effort to command a large audience and manipulate public opinion along a liberal ideological view.
But now we have a much more Anarcho-Capitalist approach to infotainment. We've implemented a tiered and tranched distribution of media services, from Talk Radio on the bottom-of-the-barrel free feed to Pay-Per-View streaming services on the high end. They all serve the same fundamental role as Netflix/Youtube, but the lower tiers tend to have a more vulgar and poorly produced advertising methodology.
And people still consume these channels voraciously. No shortage of folks who will suffer through five minute YouTube ads or who eventually buckle to the "Please Pay Me!!" pop-ups that soft gate the service. Similarly, Netflix has no trouble maintaining a subscriber pool of a quarter billion registered accounts (with households averaging north of 2 viewers).
The payment model serves two purposes. It forces people to register their participation - through an online account - and allows digital tagging and tracking of consumption habits. It also provides a threat of deprivation to disobedient proles. If you don't clock in, you won't have enough money to pay your bills. That includes entertainment. The cost isn't particularly prohibitive, even to the poorest economic cohorts. But you are required to buy in and sign up and maintain the account, which puts an onus on people to keep in the good graces of the capitalist managers.
As a wise man once said, if you're good at something never do it for free.
But how are the investors supposed to make money off of it?!
If their goal was to placate sure.
If their goal was to reinforce that every single tiny thing you enjoy can be taken away from you with a snap of the fingers if you even think about complaining about the people who could make that decision the situation makes more sense.
It's Alphabet, they can 100% afford to have youtube premium be the default, they're just greedy.
One of the core tenets of this charade of a system is that people need to be convinced that there's no such thing as "free". Otherwise they will start thinking that a socialist system is possible and we can't have that.

what is happening? Is big tech profitability collapsing? It seems like every big website is trying very hard to cut costs and find new sources of revenue right now

i firmly believe it's the interest rate hike. the fed rate has been set to "free money" since the GFC in 2007.
[aside from a little blip between 2016 and COVID when rates were gradually increased up to a whopping 2% over 4 years before being flattened to "free money" when COVID hit].
now, in less than 1.5 years, it's gone from "free money" to 5.5%. that's enough to make "investors" [aka, people who negotiate giant loans from investment banks to invest in companies] squeamish about negotiating additional operating loans and pressuring executives to find money under the couch cushions, so to speak..
to be fair, i think the enshittification process of trying to squeeze a buck out of everything was inevitable to capitalism, but the rise of interest rates so high over such a short window set a fire under it.
- i think the enshittification process of trying to squeeze a buck out of everything was inevitable to capitalism
  you could even call it enclosure
it was never profitable. Its all sort of been a big scam from the beginning
- the tech industry now is a lot like the 1800s rail industry in that it's changing society and hype drives investment but profitability just isn't there
my guess is that gulf state monarchy investors (Saudi, Qatar, UAE etc) haven't been satisfied with the profit margins and are demanding more control over the companies, whereas American/European investors are possibly more focused on market share
could be rising competition from Chinese tech companies as well
It could also be a collapsing bubble where everyone's realizing personal data sold to advertising companies isn't as valuable as everyone assumed it was 15 years ago. They ran out of people to scoop data from. Everyone's already got every possible type of targeted ad pointed directly at their eyeballs 24/7. The market is cornered and there's nothing left to speculate on
Apparently Google does not reveal YouTube profitability: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/google-still-isnt-telling-us-about-youtube-and-cloud-profits.html
I think this is normal Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall stuff

I go out of my way to follow the rules, like watching a sport even on the NBC website with their commercials, and then after ten minutes they say “you must sign in to your tv provider”.

So I get aboard my ship, put on my eyepatch and find the game in an Iranian server farm. I don’t want to be a pirate, they make me.

Trying to find the seasons of the One Piece anime that haven't been uploaded to Netflix yet (and were taken down from Crunchyroll and Funimation) turned me into the King of the Pirates.
- A VPN and a decent sized hard drive with Jellyfin is way cheaper than 12 different streaming services that either all have the same shit, don't have the shit I want, or has ok original content that gets canceled after 2 seasons.
- Kinda off topic but I'm actually mad that one piece (live-action) is good because i know Netflix will ruin it somehow. I'm still
  about the Witcher

I dont understand how there isnt a mass exodus from youtube already, whats keeping people there? If they pulled this shit in 2005 itd be done for.

massive backlog of content, only place creators can easily make money from uploading vids I'm pretty sure, so the big creators will never switch, and a lot of smaller creators have at least a fantasy of making it big if their vids go viral, if not a goal. Honestly a government would have to step in a break up YT at this point, it's got a monopoly on vids and I don't think any platform will ever be able to break it tbh.
- Boomer take
  With the attention span of Zoomers and younger generations, TikToks will be everything that anybody needs as nobody can watch videos longer than 3 minutes anyways
- Social media changes incredibly quickly. Think of how recently TikTok came onto the scene, and how it changed every other site. Reddit made the worst video player ever to try to copy TikTok.
Video hosting is expensive is the main reason. Only google has the money and they can't even make it profitable
That's the place where the videos are
Whats stopping them? A couple things, is my guess.
How many hours of garbage are uploaded there, every minute? The bar for entry is nonexistent. All you need is a webcam.
YouTube will lose its crown eventually but there is nothing waiting in the wings as a replacement. Yet.
- Patiently waiting for China's video service to show up and be much better.
- TikTok sorta has. Though it mostly claimed the short formats that youtube seemed to have abandoned when it dropped
- i tried to switch to vimeo back in 2011 and they deleted my shit (gameplay videos) because it wasn't "artistic" enough. instantly went walk of shaming back to youtube
It costs a lot of money to host all that video
There isn't a competing video platform.
Video data is really really big. Not many have the resources to store it forever and send it globally on demand. And also pay money back to the creators who upload the videos in the first place.
Vidme tried and failed, not profitable.
Vimeo is not comparable, it's for corporate/work/advertising videos. Not for consumers.
What the fuck is Dailymotion?
Netflix is curated shows, not comparable.
Sky is paid sports on TV, not comparable.
Nebula only works because viewers have to pay, not to mention that uploading to Nebula is extremely exclusive due to their high standards for creators. It makes sense that Nebula exists - but it isn't a YouTube competitor.
The only other free consumer video platform right now is TikTok, which is only suited for short vertical videos.
A competitor to YouTube that does the same thing is not possible. Only a megacorp like Google has the money to throw away.
- ByteDance could probably afford to make a western-facing youtube clone, but there's presumably enough competition in China that they wouldn't bother doing something just for the west.
  This is making me wonder, what are the Chinese youtube equivalents? IIRC Weibo's more of a twitter. Is it just BiliBili?

Textbook enshittification. Rope them in, then pull the rug.

You know, if they just simply kept ads to be some banner on the top and bottom of the page, maybe some image on the side that didn't interrupt you, the most intrusive thing being that the ad may be brightly colored and animated so your eye moves to it, nobody would EVER block ads. But they brought this upon themselves.

Used to be that way, and we definitely blocked ads then too. Having seizure flashes in the corner of your eye is incredibly annoying
I started using adblock when ads only existed in this form because I had ADHD.

They cannot do it any other way. The vertical integration, the monopolization, the ridiculous amount of advertisement, it's all a race towards a shrinking profit. Carve out a smaller niche for advertising with targeted ads (just run your ads for the people who will actually buy your product!) but all you're doing is saturating an almost critically saturated market of advertisers. As the margins continue to shrink, my guess is you'll see a very shitty "free" tier and some very expensive memberships. The "enshittification" continues

I haven't seen this and i use ublock origin. Is there any context or other source

?

They are slowly rolling it out; the reports have been trickling in for the past few weeks. Last I heard was firefox users getting hit. Apparently not even uBlock is immune.
- You just have to keep updating it unfortunately. It's messing up my custom filter blocks which is annoying
  https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/178yasm/youtube_antiadblock_and_ads_october_16_2023/
- Apparently not even uBlock is immune
  Can confirm, it sucks
- I got it in ublock but used the block element feature to block it. Now I can't scroll down to comments or see the recommended vids but videos play fine.
I use ublock and FF across 4 devices and got a warning on one computer over the weekend.
if they get aggressive with it, it'll just reduce my YT usage. like if I really want to watch something, I'll open up a crap little chromium browser that does nothing but watch youtube videos. assuming ublock and FF don't find a way around this.
slowly rolling out andf ublock doesnt stop it (maybe soon) which sucks ass.

Shit's making me ready to kill myself tomorrow. No, Youtube adblock doesn't matter, most of my Youtube consumption happens on the TV app with my remote. This isn't about personally losing my bread and circuses, this is about how the best social medium we currently have is Youtube other such mediums like TikTok (don't even use it, but recognize it as extraordinarily important and innovative). But every way the ruling class forces us to change our lifestyle based on their ads borders on life ruining. Because it's not about the actual bread or the circuses, it's about elevating the bread and circuses, making them bigger and thinner than ever so we feel more satisfied but more starved.

“Enshittification” is the academic term for the phenomenon

Replying directly to the image:

The endgame is for you to die!

What is their endgame?

Why do you care? The hell are you going to do about it? You're 4chan, You've been cheering on hellworld ever since you were born.

All they have to do is blame the Jews and you will be willing to DIE for the people that ruined your life, just so you can feel like you have power over something.

First paragraph could be a new site tagline

I just blocked their blocking popup with ublock's "block element" feature.

Works fine but I can't scroll down to comments or see recommended videos anymore. Loss of those features is probably an improvement though tbh.

how did u do this i tried but the rest of the site stays greyed out and can't click anything. Can you post what you have in the "My Filters" ?
- This first section is an older one I had when they first started this stuff. The second one I added yesterday. They probably combine in some way, I have no idea how the first one works someone here posted it when the first wave of bullshit ages ago.
  
  youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0) youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, []) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
  
  ! 2023-10-16 https://www.youtube.com www.youtube.com##tp-yt-paper-dialog.ytd-popup-container.style-scope www.youtube.com##.opened

The cia need their mind control machine to make a profit

I'll tell you their plan:

Take all red blooded, meat eating, toilet shitting, masculine patriots and kill their boners with advertising to stop conservatives from procreating. All the pink haired pro World War 3 consumers will become aroused by the ads, and will eventually outbreed conservativism and American Values. Conservative men today have no choice but blow each other just a little to get hard for procreation sex with their wives

I just cam a little

I stopped watching youtube for entertainment when i got spammed with cookie thingy, although i'm a type of guy who will wait for 5 hours for torrent to download instead of paying 2 bucks.

Now i just catch up on invidious every week with pbs spacetime and wtyp

although i'm a type of guy who will wait for 5 hours for torrent to download instead of paying 2 bucks.
as you should

This guy will just sheepishly retreat into the videogames he claims to hate on /v/. America's reputation is so low that it's fun to think that these guys not getting good enough TV and games means a world war has to happen, but in reality their butthurt doesn't influence stuff like that, it's just a narcissistic cope.

Also the content isn't gone, they just have to watch ads. He's just plain making shit up.

id take this shitty version then the one theyre rolling on me now. Its a similar pop up but instead of giving me 3 videos to watch before an ad I have to wait a time before it lets me close out of the pop up and play the video...for every single video. Pulling up like 6-7 videos in background and then having to do that every time is bullshit. Im literally gonna not use youtube anymore. Is there like a nitter for youtube or some shit. I am not watching fucking ads on a desktop...

Is there like a nitter for youtube or some shit
invidious. but like nitter, youtube will occasionally break it, and instances will appear and disappear.
i have this one too but it's like 5sec. Not ideal but way better than watching an ad. My connection sucks i'm usually sitting around for at least 5sec for the video to load anyway

Could you just use OffLiberty to download the videos locally to circumvent the ads?

It's been pushing me to consume more free content like podcasts and public domain audiobooks.

Is this dual power?

I just click allow and close the pop-up lol, haven't had issues with it blocking me from playing. I use the YouTube Enhancer extension rather than a dedicated blocker, maybe that's why?