On my phone I use NewPipe, which is an alternative youtube client. It has no ads (if it does, you didn’t download the official app). It may sometimes stop working however, whenever youtube changes things. Thus I recommend using their own F-Droid repository to get updates as fast as possible.
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i tried using newpipe once but it looked too much barebones to me. i was wanting to use revanced, but it don’t works on my phone for some dumb reason and last time i saw the thing we used to build custom versions of it isn’t able to make it work anymore.
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I hate ads as much as anyone, but instead of trying to get around them, wouldn’t it be better to get Youtube premium? That way the creators you watch actually get paid instead of just taking away their ad revenue and giving nothing in return.
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I pay for nebula and watch many peoples’ videos on that. Additionally If I really love a video I’ll leave open a tab with adblock disabled and the video on loop and hopefully they get ad revenue for that. I’m no going to watch ads. I owe no one ad watching, I am under no obligation to view them, etc. I want skilled creators to get payed, but honestly I don’t watch people who get enough views to be employed on ad revenue, most creators I watch make most of their money through patreon. Plus, I don’t see any reason unskilled creators should get payed for my time, so I can watch, for example, a horribly plagiarized video, or one made by someone I hate, fully guilt free. Why use a fancy youtube app (as you can’t do stuff like that on mobile)? Honestly, that’s on google. Using youtube in a browser on mobile is a horrible idea. Other site work fine on mobile, but more or less any site with an app doesn’t work well on mobile. If the website worked okay I’d use some mix of adblocking or alternate websites, but… it doesn’t/. So I take the all or nothing solution. Why no pay for yt premium? It sucks. It’s really dumb and also bad. For example, if I wish to download a video to watch at a later date, I must do it on the app or the website. Note, if i am on a website on my laptop and I go out of wifi, I no longer have access to any websites. That’s dumb. Say, I’ve downloaded something on my phone, and I’d like to watch it on my PC, and the power is out. I accont transfer the files, I cannot use any method short of figuring out screancasting. I’m sorry, but if youtube wants my money, they need to offer a better service. The service youtube offers is an order of magnetite worse than mp4 extraction from their site. They offer no value. I’ve been of the opinion that corporations should have to compete with pirates for a while. Obviously, the cost difference will always be huge, but the convenience difference should be huge in the other direction, and it isn’t. If you have any tech savyness at all, it’s genuinely easier to steal stuff than pay for it, even if money is no object. that is dumb. Streaming services, video watching platforms, etc, need to up their game, and give us the speed and convenience pirates can’t. You’ll note no one steals tiktoks. This is because tiktok’s algorithm is unpiratable, and stealing lone videos defeats the point. That’s a great example of providing economic value a pirate cannot. Youtube’s algorithm isn’t worth it to me, i do much of my watchtime on alternate clients with barely any algorithm, and I disabled watch history so the web page doesn’t have a front page of suggestions. If the algorithm was worth it, the only option for a good mobile experience would be premium, and premium on mobile works to download stuff because it’s an app and those work fine offline. Youtube could have my money, if it was willing to try. All it’s willing to do though, is shame me for not giving them money, even though the FBI legitimately recommended adblockers as a security tool, and i owe them nothing.
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What?
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I’ll note that many modern websites are able to cache their code locally, for example this very forum. So you can actually continue to use the website somewhat with just local data if your connection is lost. Of course that requires you to have loaded the page before going offline.
Also I didn’t expect the opinion that creators should be paid for their work to be so controversial, but maybe I’m just biased as I want to be able to continue to work on Thrive.
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if you have the money to pay for yt premium, then yeah, it’s probably the better option(for now, yt is testing ads on premium after all), but if you don’t have the money for it, you simply don’t have the money for it, so just use an adblocker, since you shouldn’t be spending money you don’t have, no matter what your job is
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Just asking, how long did roboromb’s and mechanicalpumpkin’s “reigns” last? As in, for how long were they “omnipresent electrons”?
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Just reading all these opinions opens my eyes to how complex the advertising issue is.
My problem with YouTube’s ads right now is divided into 2 parts:
- Interruption in the middle of the video, disrupting the viewing experience (and I know they do this intentionally and without warning. Something that, if I’m not mistaken, could violate laws in certain places in the world)
- Advertisements with question marks. Advertisements whose subject matter is not suitable for the general public (crossing red lines, such as sex appeal, perverted advertisements or something that could be criminal [not going into details] - why does YouTube allow them to present this content in the form of an advertisement?!) or are not related to my field of interest at all (I assume it can get through because it’s not always easy to know what a person wants, but it’s still annoying that you suddenly receive an advertisement for children’s toys even though you have nothing to do with a child [not that I know of] or an advertisement for Japanese knives in the voice of an AI… It grinds the gears)
Paying YT just to escape these advertisements, even if paying the content creators (and there are some that I respect very much, and I have high standards) with the problems I described earlier is, in my pure opinion - will only encourage them to continue with these problems, at the expense of those content creators. I’ve heard more than one content that talks about this problem that YouTube automatically puts a crazy amount of (if in a half-hour video something like 27 within the video itself!!! That’s almost an advertisement for every minute!!) and he had to manually remove them just so that the viewing experience of his content would be passable.
I don’t know about you, but this is a serious problem that I notice that is just starting to bubble up here and not just on YT - these are more and more things starting to demand more and more money from consumers to bring the same quality or even worse than it was. I know about inflation but still… It happens relatively much faster compared to inflation, but I don’t know enough about economics to say exactly what’s going on there or to say what’s right or wrong.
But I feel like something is wrong today and I'm afraid it will only get worse if they don't do something about it - regulation or something like that.
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Creators SHOULD be payed. I shouldn’t be choosing between watching ads or paying for a broken service. I hope folks didn’t miss my beginning part where I talked about ways i try to help creators or that it doesn’t even help them that much to watch ads. The kind of person who uses adblock and stuff tends not to click on ads or be too susceptible anyways, we don’t make the money to be honest. We do more by being vocal about creators we like, and support them more directly, and other ways. Google’s system isn’t built for creators, if it were great and perfect and all I had to do was watch ads, sure, maybe, maybe premium, dunno, but that doesn’t matter, it isn’ nearly as good as it could be.
Yeah, if youtube wants people to pay for this belgium they should try selling something that isn’t belgium.
Yeah, caches and stuff, but say i’m on a plane so I start my laptop. I open firefox, type youtube.com to watch some videos I downloaded with premium, and uh, what happens next? No webpages load is what happens. It’s a download mechanism that doesn’t do what downloads are for.
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Should we create a proper thread for this discussion or no?
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I suspect the discussion is about done anyway. We wouldn’t have a misc thread in the first place if each 5-8 posts on a certain topic all needed to be split into separate threads…
I did see it. And it is great if you support the creators you watch with the same amount of money they would get as a cut from premium views.
I just see in general whenever ads are discussed, that everyone thinks it is their basic right to block all ads, which I’m fine with, but then there’s no one in those discussions who brings up the point that by not watching ads you remove your support from the creators you like. Unless you support them in some other ways.
I watch so many channels that it would require a lot of effort for me to sign up to all of their Patreons or find if they have merch. And I’d need to pay way, way more to even join 1$ tiers for all the creators I watch. So Youtube premium allows me to support all the creators I watch with a fixed amount each month, even if Google takes a big cut, but that’s kind of the only viable alternative (with the other being like paying way more each month and joining like 20+ Patreon pages).
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Do any of you have any experience with alternatives to YouTube?
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Yeh it’s genuinely irritating. I don’t think I should accept a failure of an alternative, and you do, which is fine.
Nebula is quite good at what it is (not youtube, but something), anything else is kinda a failure.
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Maybe one day one of the alternatives will takeover…
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Unfortunately, YouTube pushes ads on accounts who have not even applied for them, and those people do not get any money compensation from those ads.
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I wonder just how far can YT push this until they are so bad some other platform just pops up and becomes mainstream…
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Considering regulations may be relaxed, or even abolished in the U.S., I fear YouTube could do much worse in the future.
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They might be lifted in the US, but US is not the entire world. Would they just change how stuff work differently in various places?
Depends on the politics of the rest of the world. With the rise of the right, there tends to be less regulations on business overall. This the only time I will say this much politics due to the forum rules.
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