this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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A Boring Dystopia

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[–] [email protected] 126 points 4 months ago (3 children)

If things keep going like this I guess I'll abandon Youtube completely. How brighter my life will be

[–] [email protected] 38 points 4 months ago (2 children)

That's where things are heading. I wonder what video services will replace it.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It wont be, the scale of service and ease of revenue sharing will keep it as the king of video distribution untill Google kills it (like they do to all their products). FOSS projects and self hosting can not accomodate a viral hit (the slashdot effect), and also a self-hosted project like that would have to find a way to make money for the host to keep the lights on, and even Youtube fails at that one.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (3 children)

scale

Who does scale really benefit, though? I don't see how it matters from the audiences' point of view. Say I watch Youtube for fishing videos - all the competitor needs to do to attract and keep me is offer fishing videos. I don't really care that I can't watch music videos on it, or cookery, or make-up tutorials, etc.

The preoccupation we have with scale should be re-examined when it comes to video distribution. A combination of user-friendly banner advertising, modern codecs, and P2P hosting should go an awful long way. If I knew ad placements provided material funding for a video site/community I loved, I'd whitelist the URL.

Video needs fragmentation.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think scale matters because almost no person is as much of an island as your example fishing video guy. I actually have noticed almost the opposite in most people I know, YouTube is the default place to get entertainment. Across all their interests.

From both sides the network effect might be strongest with YouTube, the creators can't leave because YouTube has virtually all of the audience, and consumers don't want to watch singular people on other platforms because on YouTube you can stumble over interesting videos and all the people you like to watch are already there.

The only way I see for other platforms to actually grow is forced interoperability, as in videos of other platforms appearing in the YouTube frontend. Which Google would never do so the government would need to force them.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Yep, my entertainment is 90% YouTube and the rest some show. On YouTube I find everything: from a dude that does reviews of air filter for cars to somebody explaining some obscure Japanese woodworking techniques to the omniscient Indian dude that explains complex programming concepts. If there was fragmentation I wouldn't be even able to find stuff, like in the early days of the internet that you knew the website existes because somebody shared the URLs in some usenet or some forums, before search engines became a thing.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

The benefit of scale is it attracts the creators. The people making the content we want to watch aren’t all doing it as a hobby, so the chance of attracting a large audience needs to be there. Otherwise they won’t come and the site is populated with really random, low-choice stuff.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Could just make a system to automate the ads like muting(or white noise) them and automatically clicking skip, is not as good but still feels like a small win

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Skipping ads violates YouTube’s terms of service!

  • Video playback will be blocked until you allow us to shove ads down your throat.

  • You can also opt for YouTube premium, where we’ll allow you to skip the last 5 seconds of any ad! (*)

(*) ads shorter than 5 minutes do not support skipping the final 5 seconds.

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Ad blockers assert your belief in the web browser as user agent, not server agent

  • We know you're using an ad blocker. How dare you.
  • Alphabet's cross-subsidy, and the political value of controlling the Overton window, allows Youtube to remain publicly accessible.
  • You can get double-penetrated with Youtube Premium, first on the subscription fee then on the usage analytics.
[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 months ago

Triple penetrated, many YouTube Premium features don't even work properly.

[–] [email protected] 75 points 4 months ago (2 children)

"Violate Terms of Service" 😂 such agressive language for not wanting to watch endless ads for 2 min videos.

Get fucked.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Violate is standard legal language for breaking a contract or agreement

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

YouTube violates MY terms of service when it abuses my network infrastructure and resources to download data I did not request.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That sucks. Do you have access to a VPN with servers in Albania or Moldova? They still don't allow ads in youtube videos.

Happened to me last month, I set proton VPN to an Albanian server and everything worked until uBlock got updated to suppress the black screen of death again. Good luck!

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I can't wait for the plugin that replaces all the ads with black and white mime videos

[–] [email protected] 51 points 4 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

NOT THAT ONE!

[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 months ago

I love that their warning is an admission of failure

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Datura Network's Invidious instance has a rotating IP, so it's considerably harder for Google to block it.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago

Every Invidious or Piped instance could easily implement IPv6 rotation, the smart-ipv6-rotator is fully FOSS and easy to set up. Invidious and Piped both have official documentation on how to set it up:
https://docs.invidious.io/ipv6-rotator/
https://docs.piped.video/docs/self-hosting/#ipv6-rotator-using-docker

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's an interesting situation. YouTube needs us more than we need YouTube.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Unfortunately, that really doesn't seem to be true. YT is a monopoly, they do what they want. None of my friends use Firefox, despite me telling them that ad blockers still work on it. They could spend 3 minutes switching to Firefox and losing some of the niche features they have on Opera GX or whatever they hell they use, or they could just watch the occasional 5-second ad. They just don't care enough. I imagine most users are more than likely like that.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Just go to yewtu.be same thing. No ads, no tracking or analyzing you.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

Google foiled again by the yews!! 😂

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago

I switched over to FreeTube for all my Youtube needs.

Lets see if Google can break that one.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I wonder which will happen first: I'll quit watching youtube because the platform becomes too much of a pain in the ass for me to bother with, or I'll quit watching youtube because of how difficult it is to find content I actually want to watch.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Invidious works absolutely great as an alternative way to access all the content uploaded to YouTube. No ads at all and a way better search function.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

...until they block APIs which is also in progress right?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

Unprompted pro tip: I started running ytdl-sub on my server, added the channels I'm interested in, and now I watch youtube on my personal mediaserver and dont even open the youtube page/app anymore. Because I already know this shit is only gonna get more annoying as time moves on, and especially after the silicon valley growth imperative collapses in on itself. Let's hope we'll have ytdl working for long enough.

You can even configure it to download videos a few days later, after sponsorblock info has been submitted, then it also cuts that out. And you can set it to only keep the last {n} videos if you just intend to watch recent stuff and not keep an archive. It even works for non-youtube. I added Neo Magazine Royale from ZDF Mediathek, and it just worked (shout out to the germans who know what that is)

Cons: I don't get yt recommendations Pros: I don't get yt recommendations

But I still find good new stuff via other feeds, so 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

Still works for me with a combination of Firefox, uBlock and a VPN. I assume sharing an IP with thousands of other people screws up their detection algorithm.

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