- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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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.
I feel this way about many sites and services. There are a few that are on the fringe of worthwhile and not willing to pay for. If it did work on paid models only, I wonder what would happen to growing services that don’t have the user base to exist on paid subscriptions alone but may be or are better alternatives to the current paid dominant providers. I.e. would this create a higher barrier of entry in a market than exists today, reducing competition and strengthening market monopolies?
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.
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
I feel you… the world is a sad place today…
My truck is white because it’s hot AF outside and it there is a LOAD of difference between dark colors and white in the sun.
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.
YouTube feels unusable without an ad-blocker. I’ve gotten like 30min crazy conspiracy videos as an ad that shit is bonkers.
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“Youtube considering incentivizing piracy”
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.
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 $12 among dozens of strangers.
FreeTube, Invidious, or Rumble.
Let’s do the Peertube migration.
At least with my subscriptions I’ve been noticing an increase in sponsored segments. And you know what? I don’t mind. It’s much less jarring when the “host” is also doing the ad and pretty much just works it into the video. People have to make money, and this old-school approach works for me. Reminds me of ads in old TV/radio shows. And it doesn’t suddenly change the scene and quadruple the volume along with seizure-inducing backgrounds.
Yeah I wouldn’t hate this quite so much.
But then the creator gets the ad revenue instead of the platform, and they just can’t have that can they.
One of my fave podcasts is hosted by an intelligent, genuine woman who happens to have a very soothing voice. She covers topics that matter to me, and as a person who has sensory issues, the fact I’ve never found her jarring is rare. I wish I could pay to skip the ad service she uses, because I’m just trying to be calm and peaceful and learn something that’ll improve my life when some prat jumps in and starts yelling at me about a casino or some irrelevant trash.
Bring back creator vetted ads. At least they’d be (hopefully) more relevant and fit the tone of the media I’m choosing to engage with.
That’s funny, I’m testing YouTube alternatives.
Suggestions?
My issue is that the content creators i watch probably arnt going to leave… and im sure ad blocks will find a way around it after a month or so
432432$@$#@23
I imagine folks wouldn’t have a problem with this if the ads weren’t already so aggressive. Numerous ads before and during the content break it up too much. And if the content is extremely short form, it completely ruins the experience.
The number of ads and their length should be proportional to the length of the video. And any creator doing built-in ads should also not be able to inject a bunch of other ads. Burying content is an easy way to get avoided.
Print media had limits for advertisements, heck, in magazines they were premium real estate for the finest graphic designers to put together incredible imagery to get your attention. This level of care (not necessarily images or what have you) has yet to translate to the web.
So… using a ad blocker that we compile ourselves?
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oh look, another web service who wants to strangle its users for money and ad views :D when’s a peertube instance going to get some big creators on it supported by viewers? that’ll do it, i bet
Seems unlikely that a creator would jump ship from a platform that pays them to a platform that doesn’t. That being said, lots of creators also constantly complain about demonetization, so maybe they’ll start to get fed up and move to purely in-video sponsorship things. Seems most likely from a creator that’s already on a platform like nebula
you’re definitely right on most points. but, to your point, if a creator was on a federated instance of peertube then they don’t have to worry about the wishy-washy, everchanging rules of youtube :3
I’m confused about this take. YouTube clearly has hosting costs and also pays creators. That money has to come from somewhere. They offer two options, ads or subscription. You could argue that the number of ads is too many or the cost of the subscription is too high, but demanding a service be free just because it’s technologically possible to block ads seems weird.
Hopefully once the issue of the ridiculous amount of resources needed for such a service is resolved. This is why we don’t have any viable youtube alternative yet, especially one that isn’t a corporate pile of junk. Once you get to a certain size if you don’t rake in the cash you shut down. So hopefully peer to peer saves the day.
yup, even youtube isn’t profitable. Video remains one of the largest sinks of resources. A 4K movie is stored on a disc of about 66GB, so about 30GB per hour of 4k video. Even with peertube it’d take the best hobbyists to run even a modest server for a few streamers. We’re talking people with PB level of storage capacities now with fiber lines to their house to truly host peertube alternatives, and if we’re talking cloud we’re talking thousands per month.
It’s not impossible, I don’t want to get people down, but that’s the major hurdle
this is true. having said that - i follow a peertube-based french outfit called blast (can’t speak french, just look at the pictures). if i go to a different site (peertube.stream, liberta.vip) and look at a video, the streams are coming off video.blast-info.fr.
there’s no question video is a huge resource suck, and that nobody would want to host a lot of other people’s videos. i just wonder, if the model is federated indexes but owner-hosted video, i wonder if there’s a use case that can work at scale.
I do like the idea of having individuals host their own channels, but the bar for entry needs to become incredibly simple. Granted kids can spin up minecraft servers now, so at least that easy for online hosting. Self hosting is a bit more arduous for sure, but if people can host their own plex servers then I’d expect most video creators to be able to run peer tube - when it gets that easy.
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.
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.
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.
I test not using YouTube.
If I wanted to watch 15 minutes of ads in a 45 minute video, I’d just get cable. I’m happy to watch 1 or 2 ads before a video. That’s it. So I use an app that can even remove promotions.
