I’ve been using youtube on Firefox with ublock since the premium price raise. Even on android. The experience is not great, but that makes sure I don’t have ads at all.
Also discovered unhooked addon yesterday. Is desktop only, but great for going into less youtube rabbit holes that waste my time.
If they’re going to find it on lemmy they’re going to find it anywhere. Also, they already know about ublock origin, and its unlikely they’d even care about unhooked, since it doesn’t block ads.
Let’s pause a moment and just appreciate how much money Alphabet actually make net (after expenses). $73,795,000,000 last year - higher than the GDP of entire nations, in profit.
The “bad” year, 2022 that drove all this change, they only made $59,972,000,000 net. Oh how terrible (!)
5 years ago, they made $34,343,000,000 net, so they’ve more than doubled profits.
Take a moment to appreciate that, and really consider if they “need” the money.
Yeah, unfortunately I couldn't find revenue numbers. It seems unlikely to be costing that much to host. I'd be really surprised to learn it isn't cash positive at this point.
And as we know companies prefer to provide a service with a loss, for decades. Name a company that can make -31.5 billion and keep going. Or maybe the data went to google, where they made the money.
Damn, I got my setup so perfect on the TV with SmartTube. But I will not be able to tolerate ads. Then I’d rather only watch on Firefox with uBlock on my laptop.
I did for many years. But then I moved to Korea and they don’t allow family plans and paying 4 individual ones is just not in our budget. Then probably just no YouTube for me.
How did Google manage to buy YouTube, and then make YouTube the video monopoly it currently is ? One of the pillars of that foundation is open source software used by Google, for free. Some of that open source software maintained for a long time by unpaid and sometimes burned out software developers. All the YT video watchers commenting here in this post wanting to pay content creators and wanting content creators live off that : Google is run by a few laughing billionaires who probably care most about shareholders and being able to make more money by exploiting ads on the billions of hooked end users. Besides paying YT and content creators consider supporting small scale open source projects as well. Help out wherever and whenever you can with open source software. Take back your digital sovereignty. Big tech is not your friend. Open source empowers and shares with others as in sharing is caring.
That content does not belong to YouTube. And they also do not pay for 99% of it.
YouTube depends on people to use it for it’s existence. They also depend on those users to upload content so that YouTube can then treat that content as if it is its own and monetize it.
If I was in such a precarious position I wouldn’t go about making the experience crappy for those users that I’m desperately dependent upon.
Are they going to officially allow third party apps at all? The stock app is terrible, and not just because of excessive, unskippable advertising and bizarre restrictions around background play. When you search for anything, at least half of the results are completely unrelated to what you searched for in an attempt to increase user engagement metrics. It keeps trying to get you to watch shorts in its bad TikTok clone. Sometimes it recommends unrelated shorts with disturbing thumbnails in the middle of your search results. It keeps autodetecting that the video quality should be 360p on a connection easily capable of 4k, and resetting back to 360p at the start of every new video. The UI for live streams puts things on top of other things that are more important.
Search shows you random videos because “the algorithm” is hoping to drive you through to videos that are the most monetized and the most likely to keep you on the platform based on their data
The shorts thing is because they can pack more ads into 15 second bits of content while using less bandwidth and they’re hoping to hijack your attention with an “endless stream” of short clips a la TikTok or instagram reels
The video bandwidth drops to low every time because they’re hoping people will still watch, see the ads, and not bump the quality up, saving Google on bandwidth costs
The live streams thing is just more advertising revenue again
None of that applies if you’re a paying customer like me, and I see all the same bs. So no, it’s really just bad design, it’s not trying to do any of the stuff you mentioned.
Even that’s just a monetary decision. They are choosing not to spend money to build a custom “premium” experience for paying customers and instead just stripping ads, keeping the existing engagement/monetization driven UI in place. A customized UI takes more dev time, costs more in engineering labor, etc
The live streams thing is not about advertising. Problems like putting the hearts button on top of the chat instead of next to the chat or having the chat cover up the entire left side of the stream every time a single message is sent are just because they don’t care.
Like - Google’s pre-installed corporate Firefox and Chrome both have ad blockers. Ublock origin is installed by default on Firefox (I can’t remember what was installed on chrome, I only used it for the work suite/cloudtop and did everything else on FF).
Nobody I worked with at Google liked ads… But I didn’t work at YouTube. So maybe it’s different there.
But I suspect the engineers are doing it just to show management that they’re doing something but it’s half hearted.
Real efforts and real threats of it getting locked down, sure, but half hearted effort.
Add comment