Are they including all those 10-hour long loop videos I uploaded?

I’ve never been one to really get into the loop of watching YouTube endlessly. It’s felt like my use has been more like a search engine.

For me it’s not really been a great source of entertainment. At best background noise. Quantity of hours is a useless metric for me when most of it is stuff that feels like unnecessary content. I think it’s most telling that what makes YouTube watchable for me is sponsorblock with one of my most used functions skip to highlight, and blocktube to block the popular channels that dominate search results. And lately youtubetranscript to just save myself time watching and overly long 10+ minute long segment in favor of quickly skimming over the words.

I feel the algorithm promoting long videos has ruined the quality with now more videos trying to fit that minimum length.

I sleep to lectures on youtube so I probably clock up a lot of hours a day and ads would ruin that forever - so I pay

but i do enjoy a lot of creator channels too, so it’s worth it for that as well. plus i really fucking hate ads.

part of me also thinks - it must cost a bomb to deliver that much data and storage, plus the bandwidth for 4k video at any time, plus paying the people who make content. some of them are millionaires, youtuber is kind of a career and it’s not all in-video endorsements.

at some point, someone has to pay, and it’s the advertisers paying to access me, or it’s me paying. i’d rather pay. i’d prefer it if it was free but i kind of get that it’s not. I couldn’t pay to host youtube and develop the platform and have everyone watch free.

How much of those channels are actually quality content let alone manage to keep the attention of viewers to watch an entire video? It’s like a cable services advertising that it has thousands of channels. Videos that manage to hold my attention even for 10 minutes on YouTube has been rare, and mostly aided by 2x speeds to shorten it down by half.

I’m sorry but I find this deeply comic and I can’t stop giggle

At the same time, clickbait has always existed. There’s a reason trash emerged from tv to become his own subgenre

That’s a symptom of a broken system. It’s literally users creating their own ads because the platform’s ads aren’t getting them paid.

On a related note, you can skip those ads with a plugin, or the right app on Android and Android TV.

That’s not a bad idea. I could consider making an extra Google account just for that so that way if for some reason it went screwy it doesn’t affect being able to log into other services.

Man, I hate Google.

I wouldn’t be absolutely sure about this. In the end, everything on the web still boils down to (mostly) simple HTTP GET requests. If you open a webpage, then you are served the file you requested (usually HTML with CSS for styling and JavaScript for special actions) and your browser handles the display of them and the execution of their scripts. This means that you can program a browser to detect and remove ads directly from the code and also eradicate malicious detection scripts potentially employed by Google that are meant to find out whether the ads are displaying correctly. If Google would want to circumvent this, they would either have to make YouTube available solely over their own app or block such behaviour on the client’s end, for example by manipulating the browser’s code to block ad-blocking functionality. Google is actually pursuing the latter with their Chromium browser, which is also the foundation for some others, including Microsoft Edge. This is why it’s important that people start to move away and use Firefox for browsing, THE free/libre software non-profit web solution since decades. Because then Google is essentially powerless, if they don’t want to take YouTube off the web.

Watching all this from the sidelines, I’m very pleased that I took the time to de-Google my critical daily services, already.

Yep, they are ramping up to disable all of the scripts and extensions.

Lately, I’ve been getting 403 errors in Newpipe after a video has been playing for about a minute. I think they’re starting.

They are capable of detecting it because they aren’t putting much effort into being undetectable. If there was a need, uBlock Origin itself could be made entirely undetectable.

Of course the YouTube script running in your browser will be able to detect changes made to the page and request blocking. However, the said script can be modified by a different extension to either receive incorrect data about blocked requests and page information, or to send a fabricated result back to the server. Google can react to it by modifying the script, and the extension would need to adapt accordingly. It’s a game of cat and mouse.

If there was a need, we could have YouTube running in an entirely clean headless browser with no adblockers, while the real browser we use pulls data from it and strips out the ads.

Ultimately, currently we have the last word on what happens on our end. Unfortunately, Google’s webDRM, pushed by traitors to humanity Ben Wiser, Borbala Benko, Philipp Pfeiffenberge and Sergey Kataev, is trying to change that.

Oh, they absolutely are capable of telling if you have uBlock Origin installed. However, uBlock is also capable of blocking scripts, so you can make a filter to block whatever part of the scripts on the page it is that detect your adblocker. I’ve never seen an anti-adblocker that didn’t use Javascript, and the great thing about Javascript is that your browser can just… Ignore it.

Linus’s video on their sponsors gave them way too much benefit of the doubt for scummy practices I would have dropped a company for

My first impression for anything on YouTube is untrustworthy spam. Don’t matter who it is. It’s just the reality of paid sponsorships, and anyone being paid is going to generally talk up the positives, and talk up how much integrity they have. It’s not just a YouTube thing either. I assume the same for celebrity endorsements even if it is in an area they are an expert in like sports, since product they use isn’t the quality that reaches consumers. Sometimes even the products they use is crap and ends up hurting them. Example Lonzo Ball and the shoes he endorsed.

It’s just general good skepticism towards the marketing machine. Nobody is to be trusted when it comes to what they are paid to shill.

Linus is getting sponsorship from either actually useful tech software that is for enterprise or it’s some weird niche software or product that no one ever needs.

Ctrl+F’ing my way through the transcript of a 38min crafting video to see when they’re ever actually going to do the thing they made the video about, if they ever get around to it at all.

Somehow, more than once, the answer was no.

Until its no longer profitable like the hundreds of other BS google tricks you into supporting only to ditch later https://killedbygoogle.com/ . Also in what world are you paying under $4 the standard package today is $13.99

Perhaps, but you can only crush so much blood from a stone and the masses are slowly becoming destitute.

Social networks don’t succeed or fail on casual viewers alone. Youtube is a video sharing site, not a content producer. If they get so toxic that the content producers start finding alternatives, then the casual viewers won’t all leave right away.

If it gets so bad that big creators, like pewdiepie, have alternatives that grow in relevance and youtube loses its critical market share then it will eventually lose the casual viewers too, especially if those alternatives aren’t up to their eyeballs in ads.

We saw this with digg losing its place to reddit, where they sold out their content to publishers. Content got thinner and worse until the vast majority of users left for reddit.

This may not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. For reddit it was the API lockdown, for twitter it’s… well I could point to any number of individual decisions but let’s just call them Elon Musk. Facebook hasn’t quite hit that tipping point yet I don’t think.

With youtube I can easily see this being part of a string of decisions to promote publisher content over user content. They’re already selling views which could really sink them in the end.

Audience is only part of the equation, arguably not the largest part. How many content creators use adblock? The big ones already know how completely meaningless ad revenue is because youtube doesn’t pay them enough and they are already aware of how easy it is to block ads. Also they’re more likely to be using youtube on a desktop because they use one to create, and they also are more aware of the alternatives like revanced. If youtube makes it impossible for creators to use their own platform they’ll leave in droves, and they will have the voice to encourage their audience to follow. Youtube isn’t the main voice on their own site, the creators are.

Once that happens, the audience will naturally follow. That’s how social media sites have failed in the past. They’ve pissed off the power users to the point they finally left, then the content declined, then users followed.

Youtube is making the same mistake so many big companies do - of mistreating the people who actually make the product they’re selling. It’s a fundamental contradiction that only leads to decline in the end, it’s just a matter of when. This may not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, if this isn’t it, then something down the line will be.