- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
You must log in or register to comment.
It seems like we’ve all lost the plot. We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring. Try browsing for a day on a plain-no-extension browser. If you use other web enhancement tools kill those too. Straight-up internet is cancer, especially on mobile.
It’s impossible to read a 250-word article without being interrupted 5-7 times. Two of those interruptions are likely a full page overlay with give me your email, and are you sure you don’t want to subscribe, just give me your credit card number.
Then there are auto-play videos on the side, some with audio on by default. I mean I came here to read something, so of course we have things flashing and moving and making noise, it’s the most conducive environment for thought, right?
Ad blockers and script blocking are essentially a hazmat suit that allows us to withstand a hostile environment. Remember when we said myspace pages with audio and [marching-ants] borders was a bad UX? At least we didn’t have overlays back then.
Go back to basics and consider what makes a good vs bad internet experience. The reality sounds like someone with a minor case of severe brain damage. I think we’ve just become unashamed of greed as a society. It’s clearly all just about money.
Those annoying customers/users generate content and we have to put up with them so we can monetize it. *Sadly, It’s unclear if I’m talking about youtube, reddit, or nearly any other site.
Le sigh.
We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring.
Not me, sorry. Fuck ads. I’ve been ad-free for like a decade, and I’m not interested in regressing.
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.
The definition of “reasonable ads” and “just a few ads” keeps sliding. I’m old enough to remember the early internet, and that this lie has been told many times.
Just a few acceptable ads always becomes many unacceptable ads, because money.
Just like cable tv!
I’m willing to pay for site and services I consider valuable. Not with my data, not with my attention.
Even if there was a balance and the ads were non-intrusive?
I don’t need propaganda telling me to want to buy shit that I otherwise wouldn’t want to buy, no. I’ll go to other consumers (and, more specifically, people I trust) to determine what things are worth, not entities with a conflict of interest in the matter.
The whole marketing/advertising industry is illegitimate and harmful, and I’m “boycotting” the whole thing until we finish the job of destroying capitalism and it’s no longer needed anyway.
I’d rather view a few reasonable ads than have a site try to mine and sell my data.
The corporations are going to try to mine and sell your data anyway. Why wouldn’t they? You think just because they have a revenue stream through ads that they’ll give up another revenue stream from fucking over your privacy? Then I’ve got this nice bridge to sell you, too…
I think you’re right, I feel like I’m looking for a little good-will among our kind (bleak and probably misguided at best). Sellers and consumers need to coexist in some manner, but what that relationship should be is yet to be defined. For now, we’re in a place that needs change for sure.
I fully agree. Online ads used to be some banners next to the content you came to the site for. I was fine with that. As soon as they put it in front/in between/… the content, I very quickly got fed up with it.
We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring.
Not really I don’t want to view propaganda about how the new 6 wheels family killer wagon is still chill even if you’re going through the desert.
I just don’t like ads and unnecessary consumerism.
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
While we are saying “fuck reddit”, let’s say “fuck you too YT”. Fucking malware machine.
If you serve me Ads that lead to scams and malicious websites, you don’t reserve my ad revenue.
Now we need a new video platform.
The bandwidth needed would be a problem unless it’s peer to peer
There are open source federated and peer to peer video sites available already, no?
Just get an adblocker-blocker-blocker. Easy
So PeerTube is seeing uptake soon :D ? Anyway, use YouTube Revanced and say goodbye to the ads
I’m in the camp that says you should really pay for premium. It’s so worth the money. For every premium user that watches a video the creator gets a pretty good cut. Something like 55%. Blocking ads doesn’t really hurt the creator too much. Your mainly just sticking it to Google. But if your someone who watches alot of YouTube consider premium, to help your favorite creators more. Especially you get Music included.
Yep, got selected for this test and I thought my network went down.
Had to do nearly 30 mins of debugging until I realized it was youtube actively withholding JUST the video. Took some effort but managed to get them to send the videos again after resetting a bunch of things.
I refuse to view ads and will go to the ends of the earth to make that happen.
Paying is most certainly an option, but only when that becomes the ONLY option.
I’ve been using an adblocker since ads starting becoming more intrusive and the internet has progressed so much that it’s become generally unusable without one. I remember when a mobile ad popped up on my phone and it straight up startled me.
My problem is that the money given to Youtube only very marginally gets to the creators…
I’d happily pay for the content on youtube, if the user experience was not as miserable as it is.
Search is basically non functional, sort by oldest is gone, search in channel is only available on desktop not on mobile, filter videos by date range is not possible, video quality is mediocre, everyone and their dog makes titles that leave no clue at all about whats actually in the video because “they do better for the algorithm”, if you want to actually read the comments or video thescription on mobile you’ll have to click “show more” and “expand” until your finger hurts, video caches only a few seconds ahead, which makes watching on flaky connections miserable, video quality defaults to 480p even on gigabit internet, subtitles have become almost completely useless, etc., etc., etc.
If they would actually care about the user experience, I’d pay. Instead they just make the ads as annoying as humanly possible, in the hopes that users pay just to get rid of the annoyance, instead of paying for an actually good service.
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.
This may be a silly question but why don’t you just use a Chromecast?
Or a Fire TV Stick with SmartTube.
I test not using YouTube.
I’ll say something unexpected: I pay for YouTube. With money! Why?
- I use it every day and I’m a human who likes boosting the things that I enjoy
- I think YouTube’s content recommendations are a genuine value-add and not easily replaced
- A cut of my subscription fee goes directly back to the video creators that I watch
- The “premium” encoding levels are actually a substantial improvement to video bitrates
- Important: the premium bitrate is higher than anything previously offered and probably would not have been otherwise practical to serve for free
So yeah. I personally like YouTube enough to pay for it and I have the financial means to do so. Am I a clown for expressing personal appreciation towards a faceless megacorp? Yes. Yes I am. Constantly trying to win at every transaction in life is a drag though, so I think I’ll continue to enjoy getting swindled.
I would happily pay for Youtube if they didn’t still scrape my data and sell it to the highest bidder.
rather than paying for youtube premium you should use an adblocker, or download all the videos you watch, then donate the money to creators you watch. if everyone who paid for youtube premium just decided to split the cost of the subscription between the creators they watch, creators would make a lot more money and as a bonus you hurt Alphabet, one of the worst companies in the world. It’s a win win
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. Now, 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. We also conveniently ignored the challenge of individually navigating numerous currency conversions…
Let’s be honest and come clean with each other now: 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 actually follow your own advice because it’s quite clearly impossible for a normal person to internationally distribute $12 among dozens of strangers.
We watch a vastly different amount of videos online I guess. I was thinking 10 or 20 people at most. But even with 100 people, if somehow you wanted to donate to every single person, the solution is simply to donate yearly rather than monthly. (Seriously tho, not judging your lifestyle, but 100 channels? That’s a lot)
You are making a lot of assumptions with your argument.
In your current model, a considerable share of your subscription money goes to the platform (in this case, Alphabet), rather than directly to creators. While this is indeed a reality of the current system, that doesn’t mean it is the most effective way to support creators, and it is this point that the suggested model seeks to challenge. Direct contributions, even if smaller in size, have a larger portion reaching the creators.
Also, your argument assumes that you donate an equal share of revenue to every creator, but that doesn’t always make sense. You have the Power of Choice: In the current model, you pay your subscription fee and have little say over how it is distributed. In a direct donation model, you have a greater ability to vote with your wallet, supporting the creators who you feel truly deserve your support.
I’m certain that you don’t actually follow your own advice because it’s quite clearly impossible for a normal person to internationally distribute $12 among dozens of strangers.
No, I don’t, I donate more than that, and most of the time without third party platforms that take their cut, but look I agree, it’s not practical for every individual to distribute $12 among dozens of creators around the world. But, if a significant number of people were to adopt this approach, the collective impact could indeed be substantial.
Also, patreon and similar platforms are only used for convenience, and are not the end all be all, for instance liberapay takes no fees (with the exception of the processing fees that are charged by the payment processor).
That’s reasonable. I’d be fine paying but I just feel like the cost is too high for my usage. I don’t use YouTube enough to justify the cost. If they had like a lower tier where for 5 bucks a month I could skip x ads or ads on x hours of videos I’d be a subscriber already.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with paying for what you consider to be value. I pay for Nebula for similar reasons. Similarly, I don’t have a problem with free services including modest ads to cover their costs and even make a profit.
I do have a problem with ads that have gotten so aggressive that the free experience becomes unusable. For many providers, I feel like they have lured in content creators by promising free access and then changed the bargain after the fact by making the free tier intolerable.
I didn’t know that you also get higher bitrate with premium. That might change things for me. Most of the time I watch YouTube on a desktop where I can use uBlock but when I watch on my iPad the ads get really annoying and I have already thought about getting premium just to get rid of the ads while watching videos during breakfast. Having higher bitrate would be a nice bonus.
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.
What I find most annoying is that it’s still not possible to get Premium Lite (Premium without music, offline and background play) because I already have Spotify and don’t really need background and offline play. 12 EUR/month is a steep price for just removing ads.
Translation: YT tests randomly pissing off users until they get fed up and leave for another site. if a site tells me I can’t partake of their content with my adblocker engaged, I simply find my fix elsewhere.
“Youtube considering incentivizing piracy”
Youtube ads are such garbage. Everyone talks about how google is ‘the most advanced advertiser’ - well google, you really can’t figure out that playing the same ad for me 4 times in a 30 minute period is just going to make me hate both you and the advertiser?
If any state banned advertising entirely, I’d strongly consider moving there.
Not to mention the scams. I have tinnitus, and google knows that, so I get snake oil tinnitus ads all the time.
Seriously, if someone cures that, they won’t need to be advertising on YouTube.
Try YT subscription from Argentina…😎
how much does that cost?
Less than $1,50/month
Less than 15 USD a YEAR.
well, thats a steal. I guess one needs a vpn and a local credit card?
I’ve heard people losing their google, thus their important gmail account, from using a VPN to buy a cheap subscription. Also heard that if you make a throwaway account just for that, if you ever log in with both accounts on the same machine, the two will be associated and banned together. So yeah, proceed at your own risk.
important gmail account
lol… irony…
VPN, yes. For some reason your regular credit card works just fine. They don’t check at all.
Honestly, others do have point when they say we are basically leeching off of the platform. I honestly don’t think I’d mind paying for youtube, I currently don’t because it kind of just got ingrained in me that youtube was “free”. I think the ad supported model is fundamentally flawed though.
Platforms will always want to make it worth it for advertisers to work for them. With the huge trove of user data that sites like Youtube, Twitter, Facebook etc. have they will use that to leverage personalized ads that will feed your brain with garbage all day and coax you into buying shit you don’t need or sometimes even falling for scams.
I’d honestly like it better if these sites just straight up charged you right out of the gate. Maybe on top of that we could have sites be interoperable, like the fediverse, so it’s not necessarily what the site offers but how they offer it to you. Making you want to pay for an experience that you truly can’t get anywhere else.
I started paying for YT Premium years ago after I got fed up with the ads. I value the content and I think the service is actually really good so why not pay for using it? Premium users also generate more income for creators so that’s also a huge upside since I want the creators to thrive as well and keep on making good content on the platform. I think the basic ad-free subscription is only 4,99€ and Premium including YT Music is 9,99€ here in Finland so not bad at all compared to for example Netflix.
It’s one thing to replace Reddit since it’s basically just serving text content but replacing YouTube is not easy at all. Videos take huge amounts of space, bandwidth costs arms and legs after you gain any user base and then you also would have to be attractive to the content creators somehow. I think YT at it’s current state is worth the subscription cost and given how the platform works it’s also IMO completely reasonable to either force users to watch the ads or pay for ad-free subscription.
