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oh look, another web service who wants to strangle its users for money and ad views :D when’s a peertube instance going to get some big creators on it supported by viewers? that’ll do it, i bet
Seems unlikely that a creator would jump ship from a platform that pays them to a platform that doesn’t. That being said, lots of creators also constantly complain about demonetization, so maybe they’ll start to get fed up and move to purely in-video sponsorship things. Seems most likely from a creator that’s already on a platform like nebula
Most big youtubers have in-video ads now anyways. I’m not sure what the ratio of their revenue comes from youtube ads vs in-video ads, but youtube seems pretty trigger happy about demonetizing videos. Sometimes entire channels. If someone gets the majority of their revenue from other sources than youtube ads, I could see them migrating to something like peertube.
Even with in-video ads, those must be paid based on historical (or actual?) view counts right? No matter how big you are, there’s no way you’re going to maintain view counts when switching away from YouTube.
That is quite true.
you’re definitely right on most points. but, to your point, if a creator was on a federated instance of peertube then they don’t have to worry about the wishy-washy, everchanging rules of youtube :3
I could see someone making some fork of peertube that helps creators get paid. May not be free but could get creators willing to join
Unfortunately most people post to YouTube. They might not know about Peertube. So Peertube just doesn’t have the content.
Here’s to hoping as lemmy, mastodon, etc. get name recognition peertube gets their time of day too.
How does peertube work exactly? Because if it hosts the video on just the one “instance” or server or whatever a viral video will almost certainly have it’s legs cut from under it very quickly. Don’t get me wrong I want YouTube to have viable competition but videos are huge.
You basically get how it works. The tech isn’t there yet to replace YouTube.
I figured, video is a whole different beast than text.
From the documentation:
A PeerTube instance can mirror other PeerTube videos to improve bandwidth use.
The instance administrator can choose between multiple redundancy strategies (cache trending videos or recently uploaded videos etc.), set their maximum size and the minimum duplication lifetime. Then, they choose the instances they want to cache in Manage follows -> Following admin table.
Videos are kept in the cache for at least min_lifetime, and then evicted when the cache is full.
hear, hear!
Hopefully once the issue of the ridiculous amount of resources needed for such a service is resolved. This is why we don’t have any viable youtube alternative yet, especially one that isn’t a corporate pile of junk. Once you get to a certain size if you don’t rake in the cash you shut down. So hopefully peer to peer saves the day.
yup, even youtube isn’t profitable. Video remains one of the largest sinks of resources. A 4K movie is stored on a disc of about 66GB, so about 30GB per hour of 4k video. Even with peertube it’d take the best hobbyists to run even a modest server for a few streamers. We’re talking people with PB level of storage capacities now with fiber lines to their house to truly host peertube alternatives, and if we’re talking cloud we’re talking thousands per month.
It’s not impossible, I don’t want to get people down, but that’s the major hurdle
Every video maker should host his own peertube instance with only 1 user.
yeah but then we get a youtube esque site of nerds who love hoarding hard drives and setting up selfhosted services. Which is great, I did that, but the vast majority of youtubers don’t have the knowledge/don’t want to set that up
Which makes me wonder - was the push for 60fps across the platform a move to make competition harder?
I’m not aware of anyone that was using it as a leg up on them.
hopefully 💙 video codecs have gotten pretty good, and maybe they’ll get even better to where, like you’re saying, we don’t have to shovel so many resources into hosting something like a peertube. crossing fingers 🤞
I subscribe to nebula for this reason, directly support creators and it’s very reasonably priced.
never heard of nebula, thank you for bringing it up :D
I’ve found Nebula to be great for a few creators I follow, but the amount of content isn’t high enough to wean me off of YouTube completely.
Did they ever get around to implementing playlists and autoplay of some sort? I really wanted to get into that service, but the absence of those two things just killed it for me
Not to my knowledge, no.
How is peertube in terms of hosting costs? I would assume much higher than lemmy or mastodon considering it’s all video content.
hosting cost for peertube would probably be astronomical since you’re likely hosting the videos yourself :/ unless there is some sort of federation that kind of works like bittorrent. that would be awesome
Peertube is federated. It seems to work similarly to Lemmy. I went on a random instance and clicked “discover” and noticed that I see videos from other instances. So at least the hosting cost is distributed across instances.
The other issue then is the bandwidth. Peertube uses p2p among viewers, so if there are many viewers at the same time they can take a significant load off from the server. Instances can also cache each other’s videos to split the bandwidth cost between them.
I think these design decisions means that it is possibly viable, though it is definitely way more expensive than non-video federated communities.
I’ve had good experiences with Odysee. Not as much content yet, and it’s missing DIY videos, but I don’t see problems yet.
Odysee lacks of moderation. It’s full of conspiration bullshit, racist videos and horrible stuff.
this is very interesting, ty 💙
Peertube will unfortunately never be an answer because of the lack of way for creators to get paid for watchtime
I disagree with this, I fully believe a donation-funded content economy can work.
I imagine folks wouldn’t have a problem with this if the ads weren’t already so aggressive. Numerous ads before and during the content break it up too much. And if the content is extremely short form, it completely ruins the experience.
The number of ads and their length should be proportional to the length of the video. And any creator doing built-in ads should also not be able to inject a bunch of other ads. Burying content is an easy way to get avoided.
Print media had limits for advertisements, heck, in magazines they were premium real estate for the finest graphic designers to put together incredible imagery to get your attention. This level of care (not necessarily images or what have you) has yet to translate to the web.
Unrelated, online ads seem to go out of their way to insist that there’s nothing to be learned from print ad stacks. Which is a shame, because I’ve personally placed an irregular shape ad in the middle of a broadsheet page and placed stories around it in the manner least likely to confuse readers. Guess what the verdict was back then?
Are you saying your threshold for ads and empty foreshadowing hype is somehow under 99%? I sure do love me an ad-blocked, sponsor-blocked video that still somehow manages to waste 10 minutes to learn “no” or “I don’t know, either.”
That’s when the skip to highlight option comes in handy. And if a video doesn’t have it I end up contributing so next person can save time.
It makes the servive inconvenient and annoying to use. I just want to watch the video, not watch a 60s ad that us totally irrelevant to me.
Wow the enshittification is at full throttle across silicon valley! Guess those investors gotta get those returns now that interest rates are spiking!
I have to imagine many of these investors also have money in areas whose prices have skyrocketed due to “inflation.” They’ve seen the profits other industries are getting away with and now big tech feels the need to do the same. These companies are supposed to be the future, after all… How will it look if big oil is more profitable than mainstream digital platforms? To investors, it looks bad.
Sadly, when your ability to generate profit relies on using your users (or the developers and mods that run your platform cough Reddit) like cheap labor, rather than providing better product at reasonable prices, digital platforms suffer in usability or features. It’s kind of a lose lose for anyone that actually cares, because so far the market hasn’t self-corrected.
I have had this in my ublock origin filters for quite some time. Seems to do the trick:
!www.youtube.com ##.ytp-ce-elementdeleted by creator
I have an adbocker for twitch, it usually works, sometimes twitch can still shove an ad through, but when twitch does show an ad I just close the stream and do something else
my ublock origin works ok for twitch, although i basically only watch replays. maybe its different live
Alternate Player for Twitch still doesn’t let any ads through https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/twitch_5/
Alternate headline: Users test using only YouTube ReVanced to bypass this new system
Newpipe for me!
Newpipe x Sponsorblock fork is my go to.
Wait newpipe has a sponsorblock fork? literally the only reason I use revanced
Yep, here’s the github https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe
It’s on izzyondroid too so I’ve been using the Neo Store in favor of F-droid to update it.
Yeah, I never got why they didn’t include that.
YouTube Revanced is a savior
Hey, where do I find this? UBlock blocks the top links on DDG as “Badware risk”
Unfortunetly google is stupid and shows fake websites as the top result, with the official one beeing way down the search results.
The official website is revanced.app or the github.
Also note that the revanced team dosen’t distribite pre-patched APKs for copyright reasons. Instead you have to patch a stock APK yourself.
Ah, okay. Thanks. I can definitely patch an APK if I can get the stock APK. I’ve been using Newpipe for ages, but it would be nice to have access to my YouTube accounts while also not having ads.
ReVanced in all its forms are a blessing.
Never heard of this, does it work on desktop? NewPipe is my go to on my phone, but some content I need a large screen to watch
For Desktop, you can use FreeTube
- Private viewing by default
- Supports all platforms (Yey Linux)
- No ads
- Can create seperate profiles (Helps me with productivity)
- Download the video is required
Only downside
- Can’t comment on the videos
Well thank you! I’ll look into it. Great timing 👍
You can also look into invidious instances, if you want to avoid downloading an app.
EDIT: Or piped, https://piped.video/
Oh more options, thanks! Would you know if watching videos through any of these adds to the official video watch count? It would be nice to still contribute to the engagement metrics for some of the desktop content I watch
You can’t use ReVanced on desktop. I was mostly being sarcastic and saying everyone would just start watching on their phones. But I do most of my YouTube viewing on mobile anyway, so if I started getting hit with this, this is literally what I would do.
I would rather not watch Youtube again then be exposed to terrible ads. I accidentally went on Youtube on Chrome and one of the ads was a straight up scam. $7.54 Switch! Like maybe if they had humans vet ads like you used to do maybe I would have less of a problem with it.
It’s funny when your first sentence is taken literally. You would rather stop watching YouTube and then, be exposed to terrible ads.
it’s “than”, not “then”. To know which one to use, prononce it like if it rhymes with “ban” - instead of “hen” - in your head, you’ll know which one is correct
Lol I know exactly the company you’re talking about. I like their ads for $1 Lenovo headphones
I just stood up a selfhosted Invidious instance the other day, and I replaced YouTube ReVanced with Clipious (an Invidious client for Android) on my phone. No ads, SponsorBlock built-in, no need for a YouTube/Google account to create subscriptions, playlists, etc. And it’s highly performant since I run it behind a reverse proxy with some custom caching configuration for things like thumbnail images, static assets, etc.
Clipious can also be installed on an Android TV (has an actual Android TV interface). I’m going to end up installing it on mine, but I’m also using SmartTubeNext at the moment, which does require a YouTube/Google account for subscriptions, playlists, etc, but does have no ads, built-in SponsorBlock, and a slew of other great features. I’ll be keeping both around, since I do sometimes like to cast to my TV, and SmartTubeNext allows for that (Clipious does not, at least at this time).
Unless YouTube somehow starts dynamically splicing in ads as part of the actual video stream, there’s always going to be a way to block ads, unless they do something pretty elaborate. But that’s probably not worth the effort on their end to go that far, since the vast, vast majority of people won’t know what to do to get around that, nor will they probably care enough to try. But I think it’s clear that DNS blocking using services such as AdGuard Home, PiHole, etc, are going to become less effective over time.
I hadn’t heard of Clipious before! What are some of its advantages over SmartTubeNext and ReVanced??
That’s funny, I’m testing YouTube alternatives.
Suggestions?
My issue is that the content creators i watch probably arnt going to leave… and im sure ad blocks will find a way around it after a month or so
PeerTube seems to be the federated (decentralized) option (similar to this). Content obv is entirely different, but maybe that’s actually a good thing. Think of it as a clean slate - a fresh canvas. tbh YouTube’s content has really sucked the past few years, and mother of bog do you see the stuff that trends nowadays when you’re signed out? It’s basically become cable tv. I started using youtube bc I hated cable tv.
defederated
I’m not sure I understand what defederated means in this context. Can you explain it?
think they meant to say decentralized
yes, my brain apparently couldn’t decide between decentralized and federated, so it mooshed them together
Invidious is the most obvious. Its FOSS wrapper but it also lets you watch peertube and other federated content.
They already started to fight the project last week, Google legal contacted the project owners
I saw the reply they had. Interesting point about “We don’t use your API so we didn’t agree to the TOS of your API. Also there is no ‘we’, since we don’t host invictus; simply develop it as a product”
@PhatInferno There’s Peertube here in the fediverse. But yea, every platform will need creators which will not easily switch. Some even have youtube membership enabled on their channels, which makes it kinda impossible (without being deprived of revenue).
Unfortunately I don’t know of any other platform that would pay creators like YouTube does which is half the reason the YouTube keeps creators.
I hate the crypto bros as much as but I wonder if there is a way to set up a federated video sharing network that has a $5 monthly fee and distribute it over the creators you watcher over the month.
@Bardak if you post a video on a topic that YouTube deems problematic then it doesn’t pay you either (i.e. the demonetize that video).
Many youtubers are on platforms that accept donations tho (like Patreon), so for some, the monetization isn’t that much of an issue.
Nebula. Most of they content creators I watch are there.
YouTube is going to have a lot of trouble enforcing this. Lots and lots of people out there are going to be immediately at work finding ways around this limitation.
We’ll make some plugin that downloads the ad and tells Google it was “totally watched and stuff”.
“Say the product name into the mic to continue viewing the video”
Hah, that’ll be fun on my desktop… I don’t even have a microphone.
Oh God!
You might be thinking it’s a joke but it’s real
https://www.techradar.com/news/sony-patent-would-have-you-yell-at-your-tv-to-skip-commercials
There will be some cat-and-mouse games with blockers and anti-blockers, but the “Nash equilibrium” end result of online ads is that they will be spliced with the content into a single video stream before being sent to you. It’s not done now because it’s less work for youtube servers not to re-encode, but it can and will be done if youtube clients/browsers with addons keep ignoring downloading the ad video files, or download them but lie about playing them. We’ll come full circle back to television yet!
You’ll need a DVR for your YouTube. Ironically, when DVRs were a thing for TV, the most reliable method for automatically skipping commercial breaks was cutting out segments with increased sound volume profile XD
The other alternative is total DRM and a war against general computing. We already have HDMI with HDCP encryption in place, next YouTube will demand that only trusted code (that guarantees ads are played) authenticated via a TPM on authorized devices can access their video streams. Netflix and Amazon are already doing it. I can’t play either because my devices are too “free” for them.
I wouldn’t mind ads if,
- They didn’t repeat the same 3 ads every few minutes on high ad videos (No It, I will not take it >:c)
- Moderated and removed obvious scam ads
- Remove ads that are disgusting or clearly inappropriate (I have seen some stuff that could be categorized as porn in youtube ads and no I do not allow them to feed me ads based on my interests)
- If ads were still not being actively being used to spread malware/viruses (not sure if this happens on YouTube at all but I would rather be safe then sorry)
The largest issue for me is that I’ve never watched an ad and thought “I need that”. It’s just a huge waste of time that I find disrespectful and distasteful.
That being said I haven’t watched and ad in years. A bit less then a decade now, actually.
Advertising clearly does work on the whole or who would companies spend so much gold on it? Advertising shits in your head. It subtly influences consumers and advertisers have become quite sophisticated about it. There is a glut of advertising space available now so we see awful and ineffective ads but be assured a lot of the bigger players know what they are doing. This is why I block all ads. Well for that reason plus they are annoying as hell.
To be fair the aim of ads generally isn’t to make you go ‘oh now I’ll go and buy that’, it’s more about unconsciously planting the idea that $product exists so when you actually do want to buy something you buy that brand. It’s why ‘show me as many as you like, ads don’t work on me’ is complete rubbish and the only real solution is blocking them entirely on a personal level and on a social level laws that restrict where and when they may be shown.
A particularly egregious example of psychologically manipulative advertising would be ‘Joe Camel’ who was nominally just a fun mascot but in reality existed to advertise cigarettes to children so they’d buy Camels when they were old enough. Given the prevalence of really awful advertising in the present day Big Tech really does deserve the increasing comparisons with Big Tobacco I think.
To be fair, even though ads didn’t make you want to buy anything, the tax write-off was the same.
I was late to the vanced game because I was very willing to put up with the ads for a long while. But yeah, the number of commercial breaks in a 10 minute video became insane.
This, and this is why few years ago I didn’t care about yt ads on my TV. I had like 3-4 ads, 15 sec each for an hour of content, ads only between videos, not in the middle.
However, suddenly there was 3-4 ads before each video, and many times the ads started to be longer than videos.It feels like they are trying to push me into subscribing to paid YouTube by making the free version unusable without an adblock. And now they are even trying to make me disable my adblock?
And it would be nice if ads would not be played with an insane volume. Every time one sneaks by my uBlock it blasts my ears out.
We’ll find a way around it, if not go to hell YT. Apart from posters in the real world, I am living a 100% ad-free life and I’m super happy about it.
Okay but I don’t understand. Isn’t paying to remove ads a fair deal? I don’t know, I pay for YouTube Premium and I’m kinda happy about it. The price seems fair; you get no ads, you get to download stuff, enables picture-in-picture and background playback. YouTube has been my main source of entertainment for the last couple of years so it’s the only subscription I have alongside Spotify.
The problem isn’t so much that there are ads. The problem is also what kind of ads they’re playing. YouTube has been known to play inappropriate ads without vetting them - think of those awful mobile game ads with a heavy sexual tone.
This stuff also seems to explicitly target videos that kids might watch.
Yeah until they start showing ads for Premium as well. You know it’s going to happen eventually
Isn’t paying to remove ads a fair deal?
If the price were reasonable, community practices especially regarding monetization and moderation were acceptable, telemetry-tracking javascript minimal, etc. then sure.
But… we’re not there.
Absolutely, you are free to make every kind of contract if you like. Personally, I am not very invested in youTube, I don’t watch any streamers or youTubers, it’s just a video hosting platform for me. I am boycotting Google wherever I can, it is a privacy desaster and dystopia-like enterprise. NewPipe has all the ‘features’ as well, if it breaks I just let YouTube go…
I could live without youtube for sure, I have more of a Reddit problem than a YouTube problem… but it seems they fixed that for me.
Although not nice for people that can’t afford or don’t want YouTube premium, this makes a lot of sense. Hosting videos costs a lot of money, and I doubt the YouTube Premium subscribers pay even nearly enough to pay for the hosting of all these videos. Personally I just have YouTube Premium as this also gives more money to the creators that make these videos.
I think an Open Source alternative would also have a lot of trouble with receiving enough funding to stay up. It would require a lot more donation compared to hosting mostly text based sites like Lemmy.
Peertube I think helps offload that by having every video be a torrent so each additional viewer increases the max bandwidth. But still not free to start
Premium more than covers costs, with a reasonable profit margin included. That’s what it really costs to host and serve that much data.
I think GP is saying the the total income from Premium doesn’t cover the cost of running all of Youtube, not that a single premium subscription doesn’t cover that one user’s costs, which it obviously does (or the people running YouTube are truly idiots).
Ah okay yeah I can see that reading. I think Premium has been growing well, so hopefully that’ll change in the future!
The ad blocking arms race churns ever onward
The comments in here are interesting to me. Ads and Premium are a way for your favorite content creators to get paid for the content that they produce. I’ve listened to a number of creators talk about the YouTube revenue sharing model and most of them (LTT and Hank Green) says that YouTube is actually really fair with how they share ad revenue and how Premium is actually a good alternative that meets the needs of the platform, users, and creators. And YouTube, the platform, DOES need to get paid as well otherwise your videos can’t get to you.
I also hate ads, like a lot, and I do whatever I can to get them off of my screen because I think they are intrusive and we have proof of how they enable tracking across the internet at large. However, for those platforms that I find extreme value in (YouTube being the example here) I see how and why ads/Premium pump value into their system. If your favorite content creator isn’t getting paid for their content, they won’t be able to sustain it long term.
One last thought about video streaming and the content we all love that is hosted by YouTube: if we were to say that we would rather our money go directly to our favorite content creators, we would end up with a very fragmented ecosystem akin to the Streaming Service MESS we are in with TV/Movies. I would LOVE to pay LTT directly through Floatplane, but then where would I be with being able to watch other content creators?
Remember when ads were short and easy to skip? They’re just getting more annoying now.
I could bear them back then, but now I can tell immediately if I accidentally use the mobile app on my phone vs my phone’s web browser.
This is the thing about ads. It’s never, ever enough. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and it doesn’t matter. We still get more ads.
Basically I think we are going to have to find more and more alternatives to the web. It’s ruined and it’s not coming back.
I know many people who are back on piracy now. It’s just impossible to take all the ads.
I have heard that the ads are getting worse and longer/unskipable. I do wonder how YouTube determines what the ‘balance’ should be. You know they have the usage and engagement statistics to back up the increase. It did get to a point where I said there was no way I could continue to use YouTube as it was; but it was also around the time that I pretty much switched to YouTube for content over Netflix/Hulu/Disney+/TV so Preimum was a no brainer as I could drop 3 or 4 streaming services for YouTube.
My understanding is that as rates have gone way down the last couple of years and it wouldn’t surprise me if Google just has less high quality ads and is dipping into the crappy cheaper ad buys to fill the space.
If they would let me just specifically pay for ad-free YouTube at a reasonable price, instead of lumping it in with a bunch of shit I don’t use and am not interested in, I would happily pay.
I understand your argument, but I think the issue is more complex. I would wish that it was just advertisers paying money to YouTube and YouTube taking its cut and giving the rest to the content creator. It used to be like that in the beginning, but it isn’t anymore. I do not pay for a YouTube subscription, because I don’t want YouTube to track my videos and create a profile of me. Especially when I often have to sift through multiple videos just to find an answer to very specific question and YouTube takes that as me being super interested in that whole topic. Watching ads on the other hand is also just a large tracking apparatus that tries to squeeze money out of my pockets. My preferences over the whole Internet is being tracked to serve me “the most relevant and personalised content”. Basically, they try to figure out what I want, before I do and then try to sell me that. If there is a way to directly support content creators (donations, subscriptions, etc), I usually do that. But I don’t want to support shady business with my data behind my back.
Very much this. If I visit the grocery store, I am not walking through other businesses just to get to each isle.
I am perfectly happy with going back to amateur YouTube somewhere else. If it was a real community of individuals I would probably post content again myself. The whole idea of YT as career content creators only is not very interesting to me any more.
I do not use an ad blocker. I use a whitelist firewall. I only visit the websites I request. If anyone wants to show me content, it must be on the servers I wish to visit. As far as I am concerned, if I invite you into my home, you head to the bathroom, open the window and let a dozen people into my home, you’re never going to get invited to visit again. This is how ads work.
If YT can’t trust these people to host their content directly, that is not my problem.
