If things keep going like this I guess I’ll abandon Youtube completely. How brighter my life will be
That’s where things are heading. I wonder what video services will replace it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You make good points, but I still think what I envision would be able to attract enough people interested in specific hobbies, without achieving anywhere near Youtube’s scale. I’m thinking of a scenario where the video platform is more an extension of a web community, such an an old-school forum, rather than a straight video host where the primary aim is to gain any engagement whatsoever, and where (let’s face it) all engagement is generally fungible. It’d be something member-funded and run, like good torrent trackers, and the content is an interest ‘ecosystem’ - so not only fishing content, but fishing gear coverage, and camping and hiking stuff, and meat prep and storage, and boating, etc.
This couldn’t be any worse for either creator or viewer than what YT subjects them to. There would be no having to optimize for an opaque algorithm. The pressure to self-censor would be greatly relieved. Monetization scope and content guidelines would be accountably managed - ie. by the community itself. Creators would still have their Patreon/Liberapay/etc income streams. The platform can place the odd banner ad too, like 4chan.
I wonder how much convenience and (perceived) income security is a passionate creator prepared to sacrifice in order to start exercising power over Youtube by uploading elsewhere? We all know creators hate the place…
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.
All you need is a federated link aggregator like lemmy/mastodon with a UI made for videos.
You post a link to whichever video hosting service and attach a bunch of metadata (thumbnail, description, tags) and the comment section is built in already for each post. Nobody cares where a video is hosted, as long as they can follow creators and topics.
Twitter and TikTok
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
Skipping ads violates YouTube’s terms of service!
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Video playback will be blocked until you allow us to shove ads down your throat.
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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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The funniest part is they want to watch an ad (trailer) but they aren’t allowed to watch that ad without watching other ads first! Xzibit would be so proud.
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.
“Violate Terms of Service” 😂 such agressive language for not wanting to watch endless ads for 2 min videos.
Get fucked.
YouTube violates MY terms of service when it abuses my network infrastructure and resources to download data I did not request.
Violate is standard legal language for breaking a contract or agreement
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!
Black screen of death? I got a black monitor earlier while doing some work and listening to YouTube. I thought maybe my device overheated. Is this a thing YouTube is doing?
I can’t wait for the plugin that replaces all the ads with black and white mime videos
Sus mime
NOT THAT ONE!
D
I love that their warning is an admission of failure
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Interestingly, I am having this problem on Linux. EndeavourOS. It’s a rolling release distro, so probably a new “cutting-edge” browser feature broke the ad blockers.
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using uBlock Origin in Firefox or Vivaldi
Datura Network’s Invidious instance has a rotating IP, so it’s considerably harder for Google to block it.
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
It’s an interesting situation. YouTube needs us more than we need YouTube.
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.
Just go to yewtu.be same thing. No ads, no tracking or analyzing you.
Google foiled again by the yews!! 😂
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.
I’ve got a few Patreon shows that host video content on YouTube, but because they’re directly linked and not monetized through YouTube they’re pretty friendly to visit.
I do need a better way to find streamable music. YouTube Music has been a miserable experience, but it has the largest library short of Spotify, which is also miserable.
I found YTM to have more niche music selections vs Spotify.
You could always try plexamp if you want to self-host.
Functionally it works (barring technical difficulties)
But it means building up a large personal library, when what I’d prefer is a browsable public music library.
I switched over to FreeTube for all my Youtube needs.
Lets see if Google can break that one.
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.
…until they block APIs which is also in progress right?
Of course that’s true, but in the medium run the site is destroying itself through enshittification. We don’t need to care about that, as long as we can access the videos we want to access for the time being.
In other words, I completely agree with you, and it’s not a scary message.
They are now blocking content from playing, on one and loading on the other.
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 🤷♂️
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.
