• @NocturnalEngineer@lemmy.world
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      511 year ago

      I never had an issue with YT’s 1-2 skipable ads at the beginning, or even the banner ad. But they got greedy.

      The midrolls and the unskipable ads was the trigger point for me.

      • SeaJ
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        91 year ago

        I was fine with even having a couple very short unskippable ads every other video. Now it is all of them with one in the middle of videos longer than 5 minutes. And then of course the content creator has to put in an ad because YouTube does not pay shit for views.

      • @Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee
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        -131 year ago

        I mean, they didn’t get greedy, as far as everyone knows they are losing a ton of money (at least if you can extrapolate anytbing from the fact that twitch is massively unprofitable)

        • @eskimofry@lemmy.world
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          41 year ago

          If they want to, they can go 100% paywalled. But I guess people like to conveniently forget that YouTube wants to double-dip.

        • @takeda@lemmy.world
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          41 year ago

          That was the initially when YouTube was created. Everyone knows that Google has no problem cancelling anything that’s not profitable.

        • @TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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          71 year ago

          Pretty sure YouTube has already been declared to be profitable. But frankly I’m pretty suspicious of claims of unprofitability for services being run for over a decade. Why would any for-profit company bankroll them if it wasn’t worth it? There has to be some creative accounting going on.

          • @Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee
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            -21 year ago

            Doubt it, if it was profitable, they would be announcing that to everyone as loud as they could. Besides, if twitch is unprofitable, I doubt that google is in a much better situation

            • @TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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              31 year ago

              I wouldn’t apply Twitch’s situation to YouTube, IF it’s even true, because YouTube got a much wider reach and more advertising possibilities than gaming and somewhat related audiences.

              It doesn’t seem to me a given that they’d boast about their success either. Because if they hide the situation the way they do, they can do this, turn to the customers saying “Welp, I guess this much is not enough. Gotta put more ads on it and raise prices 🤷”. It’s easier to placate the users if they are convinced it is inevitable. I imagine you are considering of what investors might think if products are said to be unprofitable, but overall Google/Alphabet still gets tens of billions in clean profits every year.

              Most of all, again, if this is such a money sink that in over a decade they couldn’t figure out how to make money of it, why would they still keep at it? Why wouldn’t they sell it off or close it? If I assume they are honest about unprofitability, as much as I doubt it, then they must be getting something else from it that is equally valuable as raw money. Maybe it’s user data. Maybe it’s the social clout of controlling a major media platform. But it has to be worth it to them or they wouldn’t be hosting it. It wouldn’t make sense.

              But personally I just think they are lying about unprofitability, including Twitch. It’s just a convenient excuse for layoffs and price hikes. It’s not like they are going to show everyone their full balance sheets.

              • @EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                21 year ago

                Interest rates have been low enough for long enough that many companies have been running on the “fake it 'til you make it” philosophy forever. Air BnB, Door Dash, Lyft, and countless others have never been profitable. But they survive by constantly taking out loans and collecting new investor money to increase their market share (the infinite growth scheme), hoping that they’ll either eventually have enough impetus to monopolize a market and bully it into being profitable, or get bought up by Google and co for a rich payout.

                This is how YouTube and Netflix got profitable. They ran at a loss until they were popular enough to turn a profit, and then switched to maximizing that profit. I imagine the same is true for the big social media sites as well. Run at a loss until you have a big enough userbase to attract advertisers. And this is exactly why Tumblr was never profitable and Verizon basically killed it trying to make it profitable. Tumblr’s population has always been the groups advertisers like the least - minorities, LGBTQ groups, sex workers, and artists/creatives. So Verizon tried to sanitize it by purging them to make it attractive to advertisers, and consequently killed the userbase that gave it it’s potential for ad profits in the process.

                • @TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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                  31 year ago

                  I see what you are saying, but Google is still not bleeding money and YouTube has become very well established already. In fact, for years YouTube contributes to Google’s primary revenue source: Advertising. Of course, this is why they are opposed to ad blockers, that much makes perfect sense.

                  But I don’t see any indication that it’s not making ends meet. And I’m not taking an executive’s word as proof, much less one from a whole different company. It’s expected that they will say whatever make their actions look good, whether or not it’s true.

    • Camelbeard
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      731 year ago

      Too be honest I was fine with seeing an ad every few videos. But at some point it became unskippable ads before , during and after a video.

      • verysoft
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        1 year ago

        Ads got too aggressive, people made adblockers, ads got more aggressive because of lost revenue, almost everyone starts using adblockers.

        They did it to themselves, people were content with simple ads on a page, it’s once they started interfering with the content and access of it that they became a problem.

      • @Tak@lemmy.ml
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        191 year ago

        What boils my blood the most is how manipulative marketing is. The number of worthless ass jingles I remember from the 90’s from companies I’ve never purchased anything from is ridiculous.

    • @minibyte@sh.itjust.works
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      291 year ago

      A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads

      That’s what grinds my gears. I understand ads pay bills, but showing multiple ads before a trailer for a video game or movie is excessive.

      • TigrisMorte
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        181 year ago

        Plus nearly all advertising is insultingly stupid as to appeal to idiots.

        • @SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
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          151 year ago

          Ads are a way to fill people’s heads with brand names until nothing remains except for those brands and only those brands feel safe and familiar until it becomes a conditioned reflex to choose those products. And it works.

          The Holy Market forbids people would actually choose products based on their own experience and price.

          • @Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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            101 year ago

            I actively avoid brands with annoying ads.

            When unsubscribing from pretty much any service there’s usually little text box asking why. Whether or not it’s the real reason for leaving, I love citing obnoxious ads as the thing that pushed me out, especially for high-dollar moves like banking or insurance.

            I know it’ll never accomplish anything, but it feels good. ^_^

        • @Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
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          11 year ago

          Most ads are about brand recognition and not so much about trying to sell a specific product. Even if you think an ad is stupid, if you still can remember the brand then the ad worked.

          • @lookorex@lemmy.world
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            151 year ago

            That generally just makes me remember not to use that product or service because the ad was so annoyingly stupid

          • TigrisMorte
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            61 year ago

            No, it didn’t as brand recognition is desirable only if positive.

      • bitwolf
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        21 year ago

        I find it extremely funny that YouTube serving ads also strains the same video infrastructure they’re trying to increase revenue on.

    • @Chobbes@lemmy.world
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      211 year ago

      There is potentially a world in which you want to see ads because ads themselves do technically provide a service. You do want to know about things you care about and would want to buy… you just don’t want it obnoxiously shoved into your face all of the time in psychologically manipulative ways.

      • @skulblaka@startrek.website
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        151 year ago

        It would also help if I were served ads that even attempt to approach the vicinity of my own interests. That is vanishingly rare.

      • @evranch@lemmy.ca
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        231 year ago

        Look at the way ads used to look “back in the day”, with details about the product, its features, and reasons you would actually want to buy it. New tractor model, this many HP, pulls 4 bottom plow, burns this much diesel per hour, buy now and grow more corn.

        However it turned out that it worked better just to try to trick people into buying a product that they didn’t need, and that’s how we got the ads we have today.

        • @Untitled4774@sh.itjust.works
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          21 year ago

          Because a significant amount of our economy and daily life is predicated on filling it with superfluous crap. These ads are just a race for crap de jour.

    • @AWittyUsername@lemmy.world
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      121 year ago

      Yeah the last ad I remember seeing was for a movie, that actually looked interesting. But rather than tell me the name in the first 10 or 20 seconds they wanted me to watch to the end before revealing. So I skipped straight out of that.

      • @Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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        31 year ago

        They used to have a popup that told you the movie title and they took that away, so now they get a skip. If I am actually interested, I just google the actor I recognize.

    • @gapbetweenus@feddit.de
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      131 year ago

      Like for real, you have all the money in the world and you know what I like and don’t, so why don’t tailor the ads to not annoy the fuck out of me?

        • @gapbetweenus@feddit.de
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          61 year ago

          But they just get less money from me, because I remove all non organic ads. Would non organic ads be less annoying, they could sell more shit to me.

          • @Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            31 year ago

            We are the more aware portion of the public.
            Take a look at public linear tv for a while during prime time.
            Ad breaks every 30min with a cliffhanger in the movie.
            Atrocious.

          • TigrisMorte
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            51 year ago

            Paying attention to your needs/desires takes work. They don’t want to work, they just want, “MORE!”

            • @gapbetweenus@feddit.de
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              41 year ago

              Not really, they are clearly spending money and resources to grab my attention and it’s not like the work is done by people who are profiting in the end anyway. Than again - I’m rather anti consume to begin with, so maybe people like me are not a valuable market to beginn with, which is fair.

      • @Plopp@lemmy.world
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        21 year ago

        I’d much much much rather watch ads for products that are not the least relevant to me. I’m not going to be an active participant in my own manipulation. I’d rather be annoyed.

    • @NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      Because that has been tried so many times over the decades.

      The good sites put effort in to curate their ads and make sure they are things their audiences would enjoy. Lots of webcomics STILL have blog posts about doing this. Same with one of the more popular “steam deck” websites.

      The problem is that this doesn’t work. Because people don’t permitlist those sites. They just block everything for the exact same reasons “I pirate it and if I like it I’ll buy it” was always a blatant lie for the vast majority of people (and no, I don’t care who consider themselves exceptions to that).

      So when curated and “good” ads have almost zero benefit over shitty and obnoxious ones? The focus stops being “let’s serve good ads and trust our users to have our backs” and more “What can we do to actually get ANY ad revenue out of this so that we can keep the lights on?”

        • @NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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          -31 year ago

          Let’s break that down

          When? “Will it Blend?” is about the only time I can think of when a company went in an alternative direction and turned their ads into entertainment and was quite successful at that.

          I mean, if your goal is for the ads to be entertaining, people REALLY liked Chuck (high concentration of chuds aside) and Community. And Soap Operas literally came out of the idea of integrating advertisements into media.

          Also… it is not just a meme that people are increasingly more interested in the ads than the stoppages during the Super Bowl.

          Also, this was a driving force behind Flash. Ads that were “games”.

          But my point is more the efforts to make less obtrusive ads that are visually appealing AND relevant to the viewers.

          How many products do even have as little as an official unboxing video? Stuff like the SteamDeck teardown is what I would love every company doing for all their product. But it’s super rare. Why limit your ads to 30sec fake nonsense when you could have 15min of talking about your product in detail?

          Sorry. You are talking about wanting 15 minute pre-roll ads? Do you want to maybe rethink that? Please. I beg you. Don’t put that evil into the world.

          Also: What you are describing is literally an infomercial. Ron Popeil’s rotisserie oven and bigass syringe come to mind, but also Vince “I got my ass beat by a prostitute” Offer and Billy “Never met anything I didn’t want to snort” Mays (RIP) come to mind.

          Also… with a word from our sponsor, we have Linus “I can’t have a warranty because people would attack my family” Sebastien and LMG. Or any other heavily sponsored review channel. And… people run “sponsor block”. While watching a fucking ad for the latest Samsung phone.

          There wouldn’t be a need or even the ability to block anything if it wouldn’t be forced on the user. If Youtube had a “show me a random ad” button, I’d click it. I don’t hate ads. I hate bad ads that are forced in my face when I don’t need them.

          This is right up there with “I’ll buy it if I like it after I fully watch all twelve seasons”. Sure there are people who would willingly watch ten ads per hour if it meant that others didn’t have to see any. Uhm… Okay, I actually can’t even pretend that is true.

          Or, to be slightly less mocking: Subscription models. Those have proven to be incredibly lucrative to people who “made it big” already. They are a constant struggle for up and comers. Because I would probably throw a few bucks at J Kenji Lopez-Alt every month if it got me a steady feed of recipes and videos. As much as I like him, I can’t see myself doing that for Ethan Chlebowski because he is still nowhere near as established and is very much a “home cook” in terms of “knowledge”.

          Because, trust me, all your favorite content creators would love it if they didn’t need to do any sponsored content or negotiate with brands/marketing firms and just got a giant check in the mail every week from their fans. Very few can pull that off to the degree required to make “quality” content. Otherwise nobody would have ever heard of Raid Shadow Legends and Better Help.

          Or, if I can move to the greater root problem of “how to make money while making media”, let’s look at video games. Some of the pseudo-live games will have a LOT of DLC. Like literally hundreds of cosmetic skins that have no bearing whatsoever on the gameplay and exist almost entirely as a “tip jar” to fund the free content updates. And… people lose their mind. And they use it as an argument that the game is bad because if you wanted to buy all 500 skins for your player character in an FPS that has been getting steady updates for 4 years now, it would cost you 300 dollars. THE HORROR. FUCK LAZY DEVS!!!

          I have plenty of downtime where I wouldn’t mind seeing what new products are around. Gameify that stuff. Make it interesting. Make it explorable. Make it interactive. You have million dollar budget, mountains of collected data and random garbage forced into the users face is the best you can come up with?

          Again, see the entire concept of sponsored media

          You are forgetting that there is an advertiser in all this. People that care about getting clicks on ads will have no problem tricking users into accidentally clicking on ads. But why are the advertisers themselves ok with that? If I want to advertise a product I’d not be interested in paying for accidental clicks users were tricked into, I’d be interested in finding users that are interested in the product I want to sell. And I really don’t see current ads doing that very well. They might be better than literally nothing, but I really don’t see them being better than all the potential ways to make better ads.

          Because advertisement works.

          A few years back, one of the WWE shows basically ran an ad for “fuck time island” or whatever it was called every single commercial break. It was some sort of reality dating show or whatever. And you could watch in real time as the squaredcircle crowd started off by complaining and mocking and very rapidly changed their rules so they could have a discussion thread on it every single week where people were actually interested.

          Or just think about how many times people have muttered 'eat fresh" while reading up on public transit in many cities.

          They might be better than literally nothing, but I really don’t see them being better than all the potential ways to make better ads.

          Again. Attempts have been made for literally decades. Sites curated really quality ads and people still ran adblock. Youtubers try to work with good companies for their sponsorships and people still run sponsor block. Hell, people often won’t even click the affiliate link to buy the product they just watched a 30 minute review of. The “better” way is something that people either haven’t blocked yet or can’t block.

          • @NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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            11 year ago

            Good point

            Even when someone highlights a video as an exemplar of “being an ad”, people still are bombarded with alternatives that hinder the monetization of even that.

    • @EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
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      71 year ago

      A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads. Every Youtuber holding a product into the camera is an ad. And people want to watch that. They want to know what new products are out there. It just has to presented appropriately.

      I doubt so - Sponsorblock exists. I guess some don’t mind it because it supports the creators they like directly.

    • @jws_shadotak@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I’ll never understand why they spend so much effort pushing ads into people’s faces

      money

      Also, disappointingly, most people don’t care about the ad all that much.

    • gian
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      31 year ago

      A 15min video from a Youtuber reviewing a product in detail is way more effective than any regular ad I have ever seen, yet there are almost no ads in that style.

      True. But probably that money does not go to Google but to the Youtuber directly, so for Google this is still a cost.

    • @Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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      81 year ago

      Way ahead of you. Recently got Nebula, which has dramatically reduced the amount of time I spend on YT. Besides, this way I can help also the people who make the videos. They don’t need to be so dependent on the whimsical and unpredictable nature of the algorithm and the ever changing landscape of what is or isn’t advertiser friendly on the platform.

      If YT feels like further cranking up the enshittification dial, I say, bring it on. I’m ready to drop my watch time even lower than it currently is.

      • danielbln
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        341 year ago

        I mean, I like a good Google hate train as much as the next guy, but that’s kind of a legitimate thing to want.

        • @eskimofry@lemmy.world
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          61 year ago

          It’s YouTube’s fault for setting the wrong expectations when they benefited from wild growth and success by being free all these years. I dare they go 100% paywalled. I know they won’t. Otherwise they can’t double dip on both premium and advertiser money. Even if they manage to go 100% paywall, it’s inevitable that they will start introducing adverts to paying customers as well.

      • @InternetUser2012@midwest.social
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        131 year ago

        That’s a double edged sword though, lose viewers and you lose appeal to advertisers. Lose users and they’re going to go somewhere else. That somewhere else will eventually grow and be competition. The bigger it gets, the faster it will grow.

      • @eskimofry@lemmy.world
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        71 year ago

        They used the “You” as in the people, during their growth years to build their platform. Now they are going against the people since they no longer need us.

  • Pons_Aelius
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    1931 year ago

    A new wave of slowdowns is hitting users, with the only resolutions being disabling the ad blocker or upgrading to premium.

    Or just switching to ublock origin.

    Or just switching to newpipe.

    Or just switching to freetube.

    etc

    etc

    etc

    • @Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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      691 year ago

      I have ublock origin on firefox and it’s really bad for me currently. This has traditionally been the good combo I believe.

      Not just slowing down, but stopping, then restarting after skipping a few seconds that you cannot access no matter what.

      For now the best solution I’ve found is to copy the video url, open potplayer and just hit the paste command and the video runs flawlessly.

      So they’ll have to close that loophole eventually, which means enshittifying the video streaming protocol for everything that isn’t the native web viewer, which will inconvenience more people who were used to something working, leading to another workaround, leading to…

      Youtube is gradually accelerating their enshittification. I’m looking forward to when it comes to a real head. Too many serious interested parties rely on it. I don’t know if peertube will be the first fallback, but I’m sure it’ll get a big bump.

      • nicetriangle
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        91 year ago

        Plex does not recognize them in terms of pulling down metadata but you can still organize them in folders and browse that way. I find the Plex route is a healthier way to engage with video content than platforms that just keep serving you whatever the algorithm thinks will keep you peeled to the screen. It’s more intentional and less of a passive consumption kinda thing.

      • quirzle
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        31 year ago

        tl;dr: Yes, but probably takes some effort for most content.

        Plex will play the files, but metadata is hit or miss. If it’s something that’s on thetvdb or themoviedb, it can be matched as a series or movie, respectively. With some effort, you could also probably include all the relevant metadata when downloading the videos, then have plex use local metadata, which could cover anything not big enough for the big metadata providers.

        I think it’s also possible to find plug-ins/scripts that will pull metadata directly from youtube, but I’ve had bad luck relying on that stuff and then development stopping, so I avoid it these days.

    • @BakerBagel@midwest.social
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      251 year ago

      People dont really care where their content comes from, so long as it loads properly. But content creators dont want to migrate from the platforms they have all their followers on. If i have a decent YouTube channel that is large enough to be my primary income, I’m locked in because there is no real way to migrate all those followers over to a new platform. Nebula is the closest i think we have to a true YouTube competitor, but it’s a tiny fraction of the user base and most Nebula videos are available on YouTube for free.

      • @ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Reputation, if you think Nintendo is copyright happy when people put their things on YouTube wait for it to be on “pornhub kids”

        LoL wouldn’t even let YouPorn’s team compete

        • SeaJ
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          1 year ago

          I love how they have clearly tried to hide that they make their money from porn. They used to be called MindGeek. The private equity firm that owns them is called Ethical Capital Partners.

          • Flying Squid
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            21 year ago

            Ethical Capital Partners

            So I assume they can guarantee none of the women in the porn they show are victims of human trafficking.

            (I can’t know that in the porn I watch either, but I don’t host it.)

            • KillingTimeItself
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              51 year ago

              in fairness, they did delete most of their content base after a minor was found to be on the platform. To the degree that keeps investors happy, i suppose they do.

  • @zbyte64@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    221 year ago

    I don’t always click on a YouTube ad, but when I do it’s a UI failure because it’s an accidental click. How much do you want to bet this crackdown is a distraction from the fact their ad system doesn’t perform as well as advertised?

  • UltraMagnus0001
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    101 year ago

    I feel its slowing down Smarttube too, because I have to wait a few seconds for the video to start now. I don’t know if it’s a bug

  • k-rad
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    101 year ago

    I remember when they first put ads in and people rebelled. Frogs in a pot because it’s not like any of you will actually use peertube

  • TeoTwawki
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    801 year ago

    “We’ll make our service worse, that’ll show them!”

    Ok google, good luck with that.

  • @net00@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I dusted off an old laptop, put debian on it, put an SSD and now I have my own invidious instance, among other services…

    No ads, no throttling, no bullshit. Google is very welcome to suck it. I’d gladly stop using youtube, but there’s no competition.

  • @AgentGrimstone@lemmy.world
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    621 year ago

    I wish we can fast forward to the part where Youtube completely destroys itself and a new platform takes its place so we can enjoy it for 10 years before the enshittification cycle restarts again.

    • Camelbeard
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      151 year ago

      Also I’d rather wait without ads than wait with ads, like what’s the point?

      • @ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world
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        131 year ago

        If you wait in front of an empty screen it’s much more pleasant than being in front of visual and audio spam drilling into your head.

        It’s of course true that YouTube can’t support a website for free, so it would be the correct thing to watch some ads: problems arising are that (A) some ads are malicious (either as misinformation or as viruses or as links to those), (B) they’ve grown from a reasonable amount to an unreasonable one and often interrupted at the worst possible time)

  • @A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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    991 year ago

    I really wish government would just come in already and shatter google into a million pieces with the anti-monopoly hammer already.

    Google is far worse than AT&T ever was when it was shattered into the baby bells.

    Just gotta learn from AT&T to not let them re-congeal back together like somekind of fucked up liquid metal terminator 20+ years down the line.

  • @Zummy@lemmy.world
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    111 year ago

    I am for sure one of the smaller number of people doing this, but I watch YouTube on my TV using the TV app. As a result I always had to watch ads. I wish I could avoid them. I suppose a could watch from an alternative and then AirPlay it to my TV, but that’s about it.