Technology

Knowing what I know about the costs of streaming video, I really want to know what the alternative is for a platform that can't just throw money down the drain. To my mind, there are only two options here - people watch ads (within reason, but 2 hour ads aren't resonable), or people pay YouTube (a la Premium).

If you want things for free, the only way to make that happen sustainably is ads right now. Donations simply will not work, especially for something with the costs that video incurs - to say nothing about being able to compensate creators for their time and effort.

Whats the percentage of YT users who use Adblock tools? i think it's a tiny number, mainly the power users.

I wonder if this would affect things like Newpipe (android YouTube client replacement with no ads) or even just playing streams via MPV. I assume that stuff is relatively safe since it's grabbing the actual video streams, but I'm sure there is still a way they could block them.

Yeah please do, I will just stop using YouTube and that would be a good thing.

So soon we will need an adblocker blocker blocker to use YouTube?

I watch youtube, I mean, who doesn't? But there is nothing on there, no creater, no content, that would stop me from going cold turkey with the site if they are actually able to pull it off.

laughs in SmartTube

First trying to kill off invidious, and then this? What a world.

I pay for Premium (bc I watch mostly from the TV using a console or AppleTV) but this sucks. Especially because how annoying and long a bunch of these ads are now.

I took the L and started paying for YT Premium since you can't really get rid of ads on LG TV otherwise

Did it with a bit of malicious compliance and opted for Family plan using argentinian VPN, totaling at less than $3 a month (and constantly dropping) for 5 people.

I'd be much happier to pay if I could ensure I don't get personalized recommendations and I could use it with yt-dlp. I can probably opt out of personalized recommendations, but I haven't checked yet because I don't use youtube through its main interface much.

They can choke

Call me lumberjack cause I wish a nigga wood pay for YouTube premium. With how many times YT tells me I’m not connected to the internet while my phone has a 3 bars of 5G (for whatever that’s worth) connection, hell naw I’m not paying for youtube premium. They move the goalpost way too often for what counts as “monetizable content” to the point that it’s neutering my favorite content creators to keep the lights on. TBH I’d rather pay Nebula

Oh gosh, that's unfortunate.

Good thing I've been using NewPipe! I'm reading the post for other alternatives, but feel free to suggest some to me directly, if you'd like.

Honestly, I've always been surprised as to why YouTube even tolerates adblockers. It's basically a no-brainer for them to bake ads into the stream and disable skipping

I understand why they're doing this, but if you make a service that was once free, paid, it's not a good look.

Now we need a new video platform.

Well, this certainly explains my difficulty with YouTube over the last few days. Ironically, the piped instances still seem to be fine...

This might just be enough to push me primarily over to Rumble. There are fewer and fewer reasons to use YouTube and more and more reasons not to.