this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
572 points (97.4% liked)

Android

17621 readers
151 users here now

The new home of /r/Android on Lemmy and the Fediverse!

Android news, reviews, tips, and discussions about rooting, tutorials, and apps.

πŸ”—Universal Link: [email protected]


πŸ’‘Content Philosophy:

Content which benefits the community (news, rumours, and discussions) is generally allowed and is valued over content which benefits only the individual (technical questions, help buying/selling, rants, self-promotion, etc.) which will be removed if it's in violation of the rules.


Support, technical, or app related questions belong in: [email protected]

For fresh communities, lemmy apps, and instance updates: [email protected]

πŸ’¬Matrix Chat

πŸ’¬Telegram channels / chats

πŸ“°Our communities below


Rules

  1. Stay on topic: All posts should be related to the Android OS or ecosystem.

  2. No support questions, recommendation requests, rants, or bug reports: Posts must benefit the community rather than the individual. Please post to [email protected].

  3. Describe images/videos, no memes: Please include a text description when sharing images or videos. Post memes to [email protected].

  4. No self-promotion spam: Active community members can post their apps if they answer any questions in the comments. Please do not post links to your own website, YouTube, blog content, or communities.

  5. No reposts or rehosted content: Share only the original source of an article, unless it's not available in English or requires logging in (like Twitter). Avoid reposting the same topic from other sources.

  6. No editorializing titles: You can add the author or website's name if helpful, but keep article titles unchanged.

  7. No piracy or unverified APKs: Do not share links or direct people to pirated content or unverified APKs, which may contain malicious code.

  8. No unauthorized polls, bots, or giveaways: Do not create polls, use bots, or organize giveaways without first contacting mods for approval.

  9. No offensive or low-effort content: Don't post offensive or unhelpful content. Keep it civil and friendly!

  10. No affiliate links: Posting affiliate links is not allowed.

Quick Links

Our Communities

Lemmy App List

Chat and More


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 122 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Combine that with the 83% price increase in Australia!

YouTube can eat shit, they're screwing over even those of us willing to pay, Smarttube here I come!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yep! More people need to learn about Smarttube and Revanced!

Spread the word!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Definitely. They work way better than YouTube itself.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

As plenty of other people have already said, if YouTube Premium went up by a pittance every month (boiling frog price increases) I would probably keep subscribing. The fact that they A) clamped down on AdBlockers and B) increased Premium rates is a major disappointment.

Add to this that Patreon are introducing invasive User Agreements and it is getting more difficult to support Independent content creators.

Platforms like Curiosity Stream are looking more and more appealing to those of us who want interesting content and don’t mind parting with a reasonable amount of cash to support creators.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wouldn't give Google $32.99/m for YouTube, no matter how slowly they increased the price, that's utterly ridiculous.

I've used Curiosity Stream and Nebula before, would happily go back.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

If it company had clear rules, guidelines, treated creators like humans, I'd be glad to pay for premium too

[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I tried to watch the Thursday night football recap yesterday and accidentally opened YouTube instead of smarttube. I was shocked. I watched a minute of ads to start and one minute in I had another minute of ads. YouTube was basically unwatchable.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago

I honestly don't know how people can tolerate it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I recommend using ABD and removing the original app so you don't accidentally click it again

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago (3 children)

installing better adblockers

or just updating uBlock lol. not sure what YouTubes team was expecting here

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Some people use Google Chrome or other Chromium-based browsers that don't support proper ad-blockers because Google deprecated MV2. Firefox and its forks like LibreWolf are the only usable browsers nowadays, they are the only ones that support MV2 and proper ad-blockers like uBlock Origin.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I updated ublock but it didn't stop the ads, so I can see others doing the same. I'm guessing it didn't actually pull the very latest version or the very latest block lists for whatever reason, but others might be less patient than me.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Make sure you have no other adblockers, disable enhanced tracking protection for youtube (shield icon at address bar) and make sure you have no other custom rules set for youtube.

Also you don't need to update all the filters. Just the quick fixes section -> click the clock icon and then update.

Also this all assumes you mean uBlock Origin, not just uBlock.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Use firefox and disable all other adblockers

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

didn't work for me at first too, but other YouTube specific ad blockers had side effects (videos opened in new tabs would play automatically instead of waiting for you to switch to that tab, etc)

here's what I did:

  • reset uBlock to default settings, then purge caches and update

  • clear all caches in your browser (in Firefox/Chrome you can just search for cache in the settings search bar and it'll come up)

  • fully close and reopen browser

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's an assymetric cat-and-mouse game.

YouTube does it for revenue and has to spend money to enhance their anti-adblock system, while there is an army of volunteers online who will gladly defeat these enhancements for free with an impact on a massive scale.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But YouTube has A LOT of money

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The Internet has A LOT of volunteers

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm thankful for the volunteers but goodwill is not gonna last forever. Especially easy to burnout on goodwill when casual users goes apeshit on devs whenever things don't work. The system is stacked against volunteers.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago

For every tech company with an r&d team fighting this stuff, there's a plethora of programming wizards whose sole purpose in life is to defeat them.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Or worse, they are just using third party clients.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Are there any yt 3rd party that support chromecasting?

That is the only thing keeping me from switching away from the official app.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I use YouTube revanced. Chromecast works, just have to turn it on in settings.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)
load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm assuming this will escalate to some insanely locked down DRM scheme. Guess I'll enjoy uBlock, ReVanced and yt-dlp while I can

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Well Google has recently been forcing through its awful Web Environment Integrity proposal so...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

yeah it'll probably find its way in under a different name in a more subtle way. use firefox

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I was wondering because I have yet to see an adblock warning and I use YouTube daily.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (4 children)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Never would've guessed.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I've heard others say that many people are uninstalling ad blockers.

I guess its just how you interpret the data

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

What's often left out is people are uninstalling terrible ad blockers and installing better ones. The terrible ones allow certain ads (from advertisers who pay to get through) or even inject their own ads.

Some disinformative articles are trying to use that to claim that because people are uninstalling [insert bad scammy adblocker name] that people are uninstalling adblockers altogether.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I pay for YouTube premium, but it's a lot of money given they have $0 production cost.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Production, sure. Operational costs, not so much zero. I don't understand how people think video streaming on any scale can be supported without any income. I don't think they're recent pricehike is reasonable, but to think anyone deserves to be able to stream 4k video (albeit low bit rate) without any sort of compensation is beyond me.

I pay for Youtube Premium, because I get a legit way to bypass ads and the creators I watch gets payed more than if I watched ads, but I also use an adblocker pretty much everywhere because they are intrusive and annoying. However I'm not under any illusion that doing so does directly hurt the income of the sites I visit.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

People doesn't really seem to understand how costly and difficult it is to offer a service with 99.99% availability.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I'm completely aware of the financial issues YouTube is facing, but they got themselves into this mess (and most other companies as well, who provide a service for "free"). They make users accustomed to a level of service, build a userbase and ride on investments with the expectation that they'll figure out how to make money when they reach mass adoption.

The fact that youtube premium took years to even conceptualize is a massive failure on their part. Or how 1080p+ video wasn't a paid feature to begin with. Making your users get used to a level of service, then making their experience more miserable and selling a solution to the problem they made does not bode well with people who have been on the platform before "things turned to shit".

It also doesn't help that the first course of action was to increase the amount of ads, increase retainment, "enshifficate" the platform in order to increase the time people spend on the site (=more ad revenue). Now I'm at a point that I can't use YouTube without uBlock, sponsorblock, return youtube dislikes and Revanced (includes the latter two extensions for mobile), turning useless features off (or with the case of dislikes, back on) and stopping the bombardment of ads.

Youtube premium would still provide me with a worse experience, so why would I switch? They should figure out how to provide people additional value for their money, and shouldn't have accustomed people to a level of service that they 100% knew wouldn't be sustainable.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I just got an email saying the subscription will go up by 60% in April (I'm on a grandfathered premium plan).

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had uBlock Origin and I didn't mind paying for YouTube Premium. When I will mind paying for YouTube Premium will be when all of my feed is full of reactionary populist channels, not to avoid paying part of the income that pays some of the people making a career out of streaming on the platform I've been avoiding even watching ads on.

It will be a losing battle for the people not trying to look for alternatives - in the end, Google has control of the backend, they can eventually decide to incorporate ads directly into the streams that are served to people protocol wise and they can decide to forego giving users any warning of when an ad will play and when they will try to force the video into forced reproduction.

That the streams are served in a way where the browser can discern when it should play the ads is more of a courtesy from a legacy architecture that came from a Google that wasn't intent on cracking down on people adblocking, and people may have to revert back to using more specific and resource intensive YouTube adblockers that try to guess when a commercial break is starting and ending directly from the video stream like old school VCRs did: https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-2869,00.html

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

These days I imagine a database of ads can be built up. Every time a new ad appears, it could well be in the database within a day. Then within 5 or 10 frames, the ad could be detected and the database would know exactly how long to skip forward.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Sponsorblock already works like magic.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The worst-case endgame is, you can send the videos, but they'll never reach my eyeballs. Send those frames to /dev/null and store the video stream where I can watch it as often as I like.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And now I use brave which has a built in ad-blocker so I don't have them as my browser anymore either.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

"Sorry, we noticed that you are using a browser that isn't Google Approvedβ„’. Therefore YouTube won't play any video and also, we deleted your YouTube account."

load more comments
view more: next β€Ί