bye bye youtube

I salute comrade Google in their ongoing attempts to ruin every leisure activity until only domestic terrorism is left

Its incredible the way they're destroying the circuses while we're all so low on bread
- Could be a chapter's opening quote in some future history book.
- They're convinced it's a vibecession amd we're living large and whining about itm
Imagine life in a post‐Google world.
- Google Realism.

if this kills freetube for me I'll just stop using youtube altogether

my life will probably meaningfully improve

It's kind of like how Reddit killing off 3rd party apps just made me stop wasting so much time on reddit.
- Daily time on Reddit went to zero. I only go there for answers to obscure questions now
- It's remarkable how addicting it got, for the first week after the apps stopped I kept clicking purely on reflex. I very occasionally check in using Firefox mobile but I'm not logged in and refuse to use the app
basically my position at this point.
Do it fuckers, free me!
- the internet is a mind prison that we lock ourselves inside voluntarily, the perfect capitalist finger trap
  and they're making it so fucking bad that we don't want to anymore

Hell, one of the appeals of cable TV when it first came out was that there weren't any commercials. It's a never-ending cycle.
They probably aren't going to kill themselves. They've cornered a big enough section of the market that they can count on a large portion of their userbase staying. If this change increases their revenue by 45% and reduces their userbase by 30% its still a net gain. The longterm issue here is losing the creators that make really high quality content. But most of their revenue comes from people like Mr. Beast and random beauty vlogger and angry gamer man. So idk.
- If this change increases their revenue by 45% and reduces their userbase by 30% its still a net gain.
  Please be the thing that helps PeerTube get off the ground. Video hosting is too damn expensive, so its probably wishful thinking that this could be like the event that gave us thousands of new libs to bully.
  All these proxy frontends should implement federation and caching, then have a setting where admins can set the instance to cache the last X gigs of videos they proxied. Better yet if Lemmy and Mastodon were to also cache posted videos too.
- The problem with a 45% increase is that people who actually use adblockers is only around 10-20% of their userbase, but more intrusive ads will probably affect the other 80-90% of people and make at least some of those people use youtube far less as well. It also primes the market for a youtube competitor to come along and offer the same service, but with far less intrusive ads. I don't believe any company can be "too big to fail." I don't think this will be some massive overnight thing though, but it might start a chain reaction that leads to people using something else in the future. (Like if something like TikTok started letting people make long form content in response to this, it could cause a lot of people to move to their platform from youtube)
Every western alternative to YT failed so far and things like p2p are obviously not anywhere near viable.
If there is ever a non-western alternative like Tiktok, well its obvious it wont be allowed. So realy there is very little reason to be optimistic about this.
If YT dies it will be because people moved on to some other entertainment form, maybe VR will be the big thing in 2060 and people will laugh at us idiots wasting time watching "non interactive media" just like we laugh at newspapers and radio. Maybe the "AI" nonsense will actualy deliver something remotely useful for making videos on-demand or something, though that is just cringe and silly it may happen...
So unless that is where we're heading I think sadly YT will be here to stay for at least a another 10-20 years.
To be honest in the medium-long term I'd bet on climate change making energy prohibitive and therefore killing most of current social media server capacity than anything else.
- peertube is viable
  Not at youtube's scale, perhaps, but its usable

damn I guess I'll just have to actually commit to downloading and watching pirated TV shows and movies instead of endlessly grazing on video essays while I'm working on stuff

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
- wouldn't this also download the ad, if it gets injected in the video stream?
- Seems like a lot of people are having trouble using that too. YouTube's lately been blocking Invidious, Piped, and NewPipe from accessing videos.

Every ad executive should be thrown into the Marianas trench. Without pity or hesitation. Every tech nerd that facilitated their plans will be chained to them at the hip. One of them will be shot before they get tossed overboard.

How will we determine which gets shot? We'll use an aLgOriThM.

Every time I see that name I just think
Mmmmmm… marinara trench…
- marijuana trench
They all get a free trip to see the titanic
I don't know why the tech bro in charge of trying to get ads through uBlock doesn't just contribute to uBlock. You'd never have to think another day in your life and you'd be left alone forever in a Sisyphusian bargain with your manager that you need just 1 more week of work on the problem.
Make problem 1
Solve problem 1
Make problem 2
Solve problem 2
Make problem 3
Solution to problem 3 makes you vulnerable to problem 1
- Good point. Could be their very own job security.

this will effectively kill the entire ASMR community.

nobody wants a loud ass ad injected into a soothing calming noise video. i'm just going to DL my favorite vids before this shit ruins them

So far I've managed to get by with Firefox and an ad blocker, but the second I start seeing ads I'm dropping YouTube (which I should anyway) and putting in the effort to pirate music/movies/shows/etc.

Yeah all this means is pirates are going to start ripping popular youtube channels
- honestly lol, something to dump them on peertube would be great.

Tech companies doing everything they can lately to get me exclusively listening to vinyl, watching blu-rays, and reading paper books.

modern problems require modern solutions - let ai watch adds

Wouldn't surprise me if that is already over 50% of ad "watches" on youtube. People setting up a server that just watches tons of youtube videos simultaneously to boost their ad revenue.
EDIT: Did some quick maffs, if a PC is running 24/7 it would use about $4.8 worth of electricity per day, and internet may cost around $2 per day, (We can assume unlimited broadband for simplicity). Youtube pays out an average of 0.018 cents per ad watch, so taking that as a quick and dirty amount gives us 378 ad watches per day, or 16 per hour, which isn't really a huge amount for an program set up to just watch multiple videos in multiple tabs (I haven't checked to see if youtube will not pay out for ads watched in a different tab). It probably wouldn't be worth doing it though, as this would just be an amount to break even, and even doubling this amount would only be a profit of less than $7 per day. You'd probably have better luck just wandering around the streets looking for loose change. Unless you could do this in such a way to get tens of thousands of views per day (and not trigger any bot detection on youtube), it is probably just easier to make Elsagate content if you want to try a get rich quick scheme off of youtube.
- No one was really watching the trailers, but Netflix didn't need to know that. The goal was to passively run these phones 24/7, with each collecting a fraction of a penny for each ad they "watched." Hobbyists and those looking to make a bit of money across the U.S. have been doing the same, buying dozens or hundreds of phones to generate revenue so they can afford some extra household goods, cover a bill, buy a case of beer, or earn more income without driving for Uber or delivering for Grubhub. The farms are similar to those found overseas, often in China
  , where rows and rows of phones click and scroll through social media or other apps to simulate the engagement of a real human. Every few months, a video of these Chinese farms goes viral, but in bedroom cupboards, stacks in corners of living rooms, or custom setups in their garage, American phone farmers are doing a similar thing, albeit on a smaller scale.
  source
I just need it to mute and unmute it. Maybe also put black mask over video.

Sounds pretty resource intensive at scale... I'll be impressed if they pull it off.

Also a bizarre move considering they are so hard on for ads because Youtube is incredibly expensive to maintain. You are going to pay for comically large servers by... burning more computer time inserting ads into streams? Google screwed adbuyers before by not actually showing the ads where they were supposed to, Idk why they are trying so hard instead of doing more of that.
- I was of the impression that a farcically low number of people even used adblockers in the first place.
- Possibly they don't want to be actually showing ads, they just want to threaten you with hard to skip and hard to block ads so that you'll buy Premium, but they won't actually go out and say "yeah YouTube is pay to play now" because that'd be a bad move
Not really. If you know what you're doing video stream manipulation is easy. They might just do the Webm concat thing (two webm files put together is just a single webm)
- Not just that, these big tech companies have some genuine black magic fuckery with their tech it's unbelievable. I about lost it when I discovered that Google Drive files are not all copied 1:1 in their datastores. Same runs of 0s and 1s in your file and other files in anybody's Google Drive files are stored only once, and so when you retrieve the file, it actually recreates your uploaded file with a bunch of pointers in sequence to all these different data locations

When/if revolution does indeed occur, tech giants all need to be treated like the Romanovs.

That painting of the red army soldier inside the czars palace but it’s me inside googles server room lmfao
- Fuck that's too good I wish I was an accomplished painter just so I could create this
- Now that would be a photo I'd keep forever if this does occur if I'm there to take it.

Hahahaha, this is what made me quit twitch, for good. I'll do the same with YouTube. It'll suck, yes, but it'll ultimately be good for me and my mental health. 3 years from now I won't miss YouTube.

Ublock origin still works fine on twitch
- I've never had a problem with uBlock Origin until today. I know it's serious when they've broken through it.
- Oh yeah? I should probably check it out again then. It most certainly didn't work several years ago when I quit twitch (Ublock origin is still the adblocker I use) (I don't remember exactly when I stopped using twitch, time is a fuck)
  Edit: oh you seem to be correct! I just went on twitch for the first time in years, and, uh, no ads? That actually might be pretty bad for me. Because I will watch streams all day if I'm not stopped from doing so somehow. Well, damn, but also, it's objectively good, so I'm torn
  Edit again: oh wait no, just saw an ad, and I'm unwilling to figure out exactly why or what I could do to mitigate it, since twitch is bad for me anyway. Ah well, no twitch for me, it's ok!
I'm using Vaft + ublock origin from https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions#twitchadsolutions, works great for me.
Just as a protip or whatever for people, if you split tunnel VPN traffic specific domains that twitch uses for ads, you will get no ads. You just gotta VPN to countries which don't serve ads. An easy one included with most cheap, commercial VPNs is Ukraine. They don't have ads. Neither does Russia, although proxies and VPNs to Russia are less common I guess due to sanctions. Poland has ads but less to my knowledge. You can google like Twitch ad domains and find the domains Twitch uses. I have several domains automatically routed through different VPNs in my home network and all my Twitch traffic is included in that. Never get ads except if the VPN stops working.

I saw ads for the first time in years on YouTube today. uBlock Origin couldn't stop it... Fuck.

Time to download and hoard youtube videos.

Be own archive
been doing this for years and at this point I've got such a huge backlog it'd take me years to get through it all

I was informed last night one ofmy favorite Gachimuchi channels got nuked because Billy ass was too hot for YT. It isn't getting better. The enshittification continues to find new levels to torture us with.

Just gotta urge Shaun and Hbomberguy to migrate to Bilibili

They literally make money on YouTube ads. Why would they switch to something that cuts off their revenue? Videos on YouTube that are not monetized don't show ads.

Love the strategy. 1. Buy a video streaming site, 2. run it at a loss for like 15 years because your other businesses print money, 3. now that there's no competition just crank up the ads because where the fuck are people going to go lol

\excited peertube noises

It won't be long before adblockers find another workaround

Sadly this approach is very likely impossible to block. It's much more computationally intensive for google, which is why they haven't done this in the past, but it is essentially impossible to block if done well.
- Yeah I'm super pessimistic about this. On the user end it will be damn near impossible to tell the difference between ad and video when it's all the same stream or data from the same server connection and URL.
- I kind of wonder though...server side ad injection would work well for Twitch because the video player cant buffer more than a few seconds. But youtube? The player could buffer the entire video.

Nooooo! I hate how Twitch does that

Fuck, so that's why my ad blockers don't work on Twitch?
I spent over an hour trying to dial in NoScript and uBlock settings to get the ads to fuck off, and now I just quit Twitch altogether

Fuck. This will probably also break castblock, which I use to auto mute AdSense ads and auto skip sponsorblock segments when watching on my Chromecast.

wtf do not

GOD FUCKING DAMNIT!!!! I haven't seen an ad in years and now I have to sit here for 3:18 through an ad for a FUCKING RAIN JACKET!! I will never buy one of these things just for making me sit through this. And holy shit, learn your market people.

Wait, there's more, got another two minute ad for a fucking murder fantasy pistol holster so you can quick draw on a tactically ascertained threat...

Then the videos are freezing and not loading for shit. Do I need to use a VPN to watch anything now?

They must be doing a limited or selective rollout again to test the new methods on only some accounts. Because I'm not getting any ads breaking through uBlock Origin. I've tested with phone and laptop on multiple videos and it's still working as it always has for me.
- Well, it pissed me the hell off. Even worse, all the ads were bro dude bullshit that's just targeting men's insecurities. I'm going to just be using my downloader extension if this keeps up.

Google won't stop the psychological warfare until everybody is that guy from Black Mirror sitting in a cell surrounded by screens with unblockable ads

God dammit. I just got a raspberry pi to deal with this in the home. The so called future sucks.

I mean I've always been baffled that this wasn't already how it works. It seemed to me if they wanted to make them hard to block this was the obvious answer

only reason i can think of is it might be more computationally expensive

I will stop watching youtube if i cant block ads

I know I'm encroaching on very dangerous bootlicker terrain here, but it's obvious that a service like YouTube, that lets you upload and watch as many videos as you want and let's users monetize their videos to such a degree that a non-insignificant number of people can live off of it, needs to make money somehow. If you want to see what a service that doesn't have ads look like, look at Vimeo, where creators pay out of the ass to upload any videos at all. And unlike most services YouTube does actually give you an option to opt out of ads. YouTube Premium might be too expensive, but 55% of that does actually go to the video creators. I'll take that a million times over shit like Facebook or tiktok that doesn't give you that option at all.

Use ad blockers, pirate all media, steal shit from the supermarket, it's all cool and correct to do so, but to pretend like this is some new extra greedy move is just ridiculous.

you're right, 1) within the confines of capitalism, 2) assuming YouTube is operating like a utility, and 3) not worrying about what they do with their half of the revenue. Really, YouTube should be operated by the state at a loss and as a utility, but yeah, as a market product, it does sorta make sense that they have to charge for it and get really nasty as soon as people don't wanna pay.
- The only state I’d trust to run YouTube would be North Korea
- in agreement with you, except under communism there will be no need for youtube (as it would be nothing but a giant money and technologyhole), as we'll just have communal television, communal cinemas, communal theaters and communal video stores instead.
Ads are the memetic equivalent of toxic waste. It's bad enough they're allowed to exist at all, but the notion that they should be permitted to be dumped directly into personal computers is obscene and the idea that it's somehow wrong to prevent this from happening is laughable.
If google wishes to display ads they may do so passively on their own property, and any effort to invade my personal space and mind with this hazardous waste must be both condemned and thwarted by any means necessary.
- Obviously ads are bad for the soul and the mind, but please don't be ridiculous, it's very easy to simply not go on YouTube (or if you can't help yourself pay the 13 bucks for premium). It's not like every other aspect of human life and actual public space hasn't been invaded by ads to a much bigger degree, where companies do ostensibly only "passively display ads on their property". Do you walk around ripping off ads from billboards or painting over ads in subway stations?
- I genuinely doubt running a service that allows people to upload ~270.000 hours of videos a day and that makes those videos available almost instantly is cheap, or that they'd own the infrastructure to do so regardless of whether they own YouTube or not.
but to pretend like this is some new extra greedy move is just ridiculous.
I disagree. Google ran Youtube at a massive loss for many many years and effectively killed all competition in doing so. If Youtube had to play by the same rules as everybody not owned by Google the video streaming world would probably be very different today. Video streaming has always been extremely expensive. Youtube has just been subsidized by infinite money from Google Search. They can turn on the ads now because there's no competition.
- YouTube was never able to dominate the live-streaming market though, mostly because people keep committing murders on livestreams, I think Facebook leads the pack in murders but I’m not sure. YouTube really needs to up its murders per million users metrics if they have a chance of ever overtaking twitch.