If ads weren’t riddled with malware or absolutely obnoxious…
Browsing without an ad blocker is cancerHey, remember when you could see more than a single line of text of an article on mobile? Me neither.
Time to use Firefox mobile with ublock origin
Yeah, just a second ago. Probably, something to do with Firefox. Anyway, articles these days are becoming superficial. What could be said in a few words takes an entire paragraph for some reason. Writer’s skills are on a downward trend recently. Not liking it
We’ll* have ‘AI’ summarising shitty long articles written by the same AI. The future is bright
Yeah you have to make it longer…can’t place 15 ads on a text with one paragraph
I especially love the cases where I want to check if and when series xy continues “get the Release Date of Series XY season 5” And then there is a wall of text that summarizes season 1-4 and how everybody is waiting for season 5 to then say that the date is not out yet…
This is less “crappy design” and more “asshole design”
What’s the reason why you think this is an asshole design? I can think of two:
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Advertisements in of itself is a blight on humanity
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They have a dominant market position and it’s almost impossible to compete.
But, these two things aside?
/r/assholedesign refers to user hostile design. Ads are generally unwanted and def unwanted if the person has an ad blocker. Putting a nag pop up is inherently user hostile.
I’m not the one you responded to, but I’ll say why I think it’s an asshole design:
- They have a dominant market position
- They have encouraged people to not just put fun videos on the platform, but to put critical life-saving videos there.
- Like videos on how to perform CPR
- Or videos on how to save someone who’s choking
- At first, they had few ads, or ads that were always skippable
- Now that they have a near monopoly, they’re adding more ads, and making more of them unskippable.
- To watch a lifesaving video, that was posted at a time when there were no real ads or all ads were skippable, you may have to watch a series of 30 second ads.
Then there’s the fact that virtually every video requires ads before you view it, when you might only need to see 10s of the video to know that it’s not relevant. Putting multiple ads before you’re allowed to see those 10 seconds is an asshole move. Then there’s the sheer quantity of ads. The last time I tried to watch a few music videos without an ad blocker I think it was at least 25% ad time.
Removing the ability to skip is also a major asshole move. The whole justification for skippable ads was that consumers wouldn’t skip ads that were good and relevant. If the advertiser was doing their job and making good ads, and YouTube was doing a good job and finding the right audience for those ads, then in theory the ads wouldn’t be skipped. If an advertiser was upset that users were skipping ads, YouTube could push back and say that either their ad sucked, or that they had mistargeted the ad. Now they seem to be admitting that their ad targeting is bullshit, or that they don’t care if the ad isn’t relevant to the user, the user has to watch it regardless.
But, most of this hinges on the enshittification happening once the platform has become a monopoly. If YouTube only had a 20% market share, asshole moves would push people to competitors. But, the key thing is that they lost money or barely broke even until all their competitors had folded, and then they started making things worse.
But, these two things aside?
There’s definitely more but why are you implying these two things aren’t enough?
Nope. Straight up just wondering if there was more to it that I wasn’t catching.
Ads on YouTube–like everywhere else on the web–became so obtrusive that it’s nearly impossible to view anything while still having all those ads. They’re making their content unwatchable for anyone who can’t pony up for a subscription.
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I’m somewhat surprised it took so long after they took over YouTube.
Might cause some surprising competition hopefully
Who is going to be competing for the eyeballs of people who militantly refuse to watch ads? I’d love to see YouTube have competition, but I don’t think the demographic here is particularly valuable to anyone.
Same with lemmy. Who cares about us? Seems to be working somewhat tho.
Issue with videohosting is filesizes, bandwiths, and the gigantic archive.
That’s why I said surprising competition: no, it wouldn’t be from a big typical tech company.
I think you’re wrong on the value of the demographic: there are definitely ways, sectors etc where a small group of relatively tech savvy, ad-hating, very critical, neckbearded, moob carrying people is more valuable than a large mob of typical yay-saying consumers. I’ld even say it’s the kind of niche demographic that made reddit big in the first place.
Yeah, I feel like this is all very cyclical.
The status quo is acceptable so people use it. It works well enough and it’s practical enough that the majority of the user base sticks with a given standard, which creates momentum/inertia: the more accepted a given platform becomes the more content creators cater to it, which in turn draws and keeps more traffic.
Owners of the platform see this and monetize. It’s not bad at first but eventually greed gets the better of everyone, and they keep pushing and squeezing, usually both the base and the creators, for the privilege of playing in their playground, the defacto “place to be”… without consideration of the fact that their playground only holds that status because of the very people they’re squeezing.
Eventually they push it too far, and people start to jump ship as the enshittification finally tips their scales away from the status quo and makes finding an alternative the more attractive choice, even if it means giving up the positive aspects of the established platform.
Sometimes it can take a while but eventually one or more new platforms emerge as the new “place to be” and the cycle begins again.
Unfortunately, rather than learning from past mistakes and simply being less greedy and understanding that they need to find ways of generating profit that doesn’t alienate their creators and viewers, instead the lesson learned seems to be ‘try to find ways to trap users in your system so they can’t leave’…which never is going to work.
The ol Trust Thermocline.
That’s a great read. Thanks for sharing.
Really wonder what game company he was consulting. My bet is on Pissazrd or EA
I’ll be that guy and say this isn’t crappy design and shouldn’t be in this community. We’ve already got posts filling top of all we don’t need more where they don’t belong.
I would argue that pop-ups like this are an intentionally crappy design meant to be frustrating and get in the way. But, I understand what your saying, this is perhaps not the best suited community for this post.
I think the difference here is I view “crappy design” as something badly made or poorly executed. What you describe I would consider to be “asshole design”: perfectly well-made, but with bad intentions. I can see why you would have the different definition though, and considering the Reddit subs had a lot of these same definition issues it’s not surprising they continue here.
How dare you inconvinience me for using your stuff for free r/choosingbeggars
Tbh I’m with you on this point
How many times are you gonna lick a major corporations boot for no benefit in this single thread? Cause this is already the third time and it already made me want to barf the first time.
Barfing for getting reminded stuff cost money LMFAOOOO
King’s behaviour is typical of the lefty democrat who never had a job in his life. So eager to betray America to the democrats technocrat overlords. Disgusting.
Yeah the guy reminding you stuff costs money is the jobless one, stop projecting in my inbox bro, cringe. google bad videos free.
Note how the lefty is incapable of constructive dialogue.
You mean the guy who’s trying to watch videos for free and finger points his political beliefs if you disagree with him instead of replying with arguments? I agree with you.
Did you get your mother to write that for you?
I’d say it’s an ok design to enforce a crappy business model
Me personally, I didn’t mind ads back in the day when they weren’t so annoying. But somehow YouTube + content creators made ads so annoying at some point that I started to use ad blocker and sponsor skipper.
My theory is that by becoming so aggressive with ads , YouTube income / video actuallly decreased due to people getting fed up with ads and getting ad blockers. Now they go even more aggressive so people will start to look for alternatives.
It’ll be interesting to see following development.
That’s when my family asked me to set up adblockers.
It used to be a single 30 second ad but skippable.
It’s now 2 ads skippable, then ads randomly injected into a video. A ten min video can have twelve ads. Defenders say “Oh the content maker sets those features.”
Of which I say, “Bet. Gonna block them, find a new revenue stream because the next stage is pirating your shit.”
Also i love how people act as if Ads aren’t brainwashing bullshit lies. Marketing only exists to make you click buy, they don’t care about any other effect. Misinformation? Who cares, unhealthy habits? All good. Oh my goodness your blocking lies? Sooo unethical
Exactly this. They made their bed, they can lay in it
This is when you’re supposed to use the FOSS alternatives
Me personally because I don’t have a Google account nor saw a real gain in getting one (for what I do in my day to day), I just switched to these for subscriptions.
arent thpse just frontends?
Yep, without the need of a Google acc. No shitty ads, more functionality, and they’re typically more customizable :p
+to that. However I haven’t found proper alternative yet.
- I got so used that dump algorithm that at least 40% of times recommends what I’m actually interested at, that it feels so hard to go back to watch unordered vids
- Newer content is still lacking on alternatives. Like coding tutorials or documentaries etc.
- On the other hand I found many old forgotten internet classics on these alternative sites like old ads and funny clips that we used to watch at 240p back in the day.
Point one hits home. It’s nice that I can look through my feed but I also want to find new stuff and piped is not giving me that. I still use it in case my yt account gets banned lol
You should also start looking into libredirect, an extension to route your youtube traffic to invidious instances
I’ll look into that ^^ thanks friendo
You know what annoys me the most about this?
I looked up the price of Premium. It’s not great but not too bad either. I hate subscription services so I thought “I’ll just buy the annual plan”
Google doesn’t offer the Family Annual plan in my region. Only Individual Annual.
Fucks sake Google! If I’m trying to give you money, the least you could have done is make it easy!Fuck google, don’t give them a cent.
I saw this, hit the X to close that pop-up and continued on as usual. Just me?
The X works fine for me. Great design.
AFAIK they start counting strikes after a while. After 3 of them, you are banned off Youtube. Edit: I was wrong. It just disables video playback.
Didn’t happen to me yet. I’ve clicked off a bunch.
No, what happens is that a timer is added before you can click the X to close the pop-up. If you continue to close it, video playback will be locked until you disable your ad-block (or circumvent the detection).
That seems unlikely. I can see them blocking you as long as they detect ad block but not banning account / IP wise. It would lead to many non-tech people to be banned without understanding why and those are majority of their viewers who are easiest manipulated into watching ads.
Don’t login then.
I use Firefox and have uBlock Origin installed. I block ALL cookies from YouTube and Google and other Google sites. I am not signed into any Google properties and I have not seen an ad for over 10+years. I never use an app or mobile and use only a desktop on Linux.
Google will not win over products like uBlock Origin because, it’s NOT an ad blocker, it’s an element blocker. It allows the user to remove annoyances, and that sometimes includes ads.
The only way Google will get to force ads on people is if they REQUIRE you to sign in to it’s services and force cookies on you. It will have to be a walled garden. Meta, Xitter, bluesky, reddit, will all eventually go to the walled garden because they are greedy. Users will leave and the Fediverse will grow.
People are fed up with ads and all the “improvements” that sites like YouTube make. Ambient mode, auto play, end cards, notations, all unnecessary. And we block it with element blockers.I don’t think the Fediverse can really provide an alternative to YouTube. The infrastructure required for the amount of data constantly being served and processed is prohibitly expensive.
Maybe not today, and never at the scale that YouTube is right now (that’s not a bad thing), but never say never.
5 years ago no one saw a psychopath buying and actively destroying Xitter.
Technology changes quickly. It won’t be long until 10TB HDDs are standard fare, 8G is everywhere, electric cars are 40% of the market etc.
Anything is a possibility and humans get smarter and more innovative. I know this because humans can carry a small computer in their pockets.I agree. I think a big part of this move is that they know that YouTube isn’t going to last for too much longer as the only service that does exactly what they do because it will be soon be profitable for many others that don’t have the same level of scale and backing by Alphabet. This is a cash-out.
All it takes is 1 developer to add video support to lemmy, and make videos defederalized, then we could have different videos in different communities, we could have video-only communities, and those would be youtube-like.
I don’t think code is the main problem here, it is the money to invest in the server space and bandwidth for it.
Not to forget the moderation problem. You would effectively need to verify each video for bad stuff, copyright infringement, or risk getting sued for noncompliance.
And that is all neglecting the platform effect. People are on YouTube because the stuff they want to watch is there and the stuff is there because there is an audience. Because there is audience, people are willing to dump their marketing budget there. Because there is a revenue split of these marketing budgets, people are there publishing stuff. And so on and so on.
You can have the greatest platform from a technical point of view. If nobody is publishing good stuff, nobody will care.
Are you saying that it costs a lot of money to setup a video streaming service that stores terrabytes of data? From what I hear that should all just be free!
Terabytes? Youtube should be in the Exabytes by now.
If only we had to pay for the service, the service was good and we had our privacy. We pay to pad googles shitty anti consumer, anti free internet pockets, so they can make the service worse and they data mine everything.
Bluesky is slowly gaining more users after multiple Xitter announcements. Xitter is going to be Netflix of social media.
ADs might become forced onto everyone with this:
Reads like https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
Do you leave the house? Or just take your desktop with you?
I don’t need to watch videos when I’m not home. And I prefer a real screen.
I was thinking more about the fact you’ve not seen an advert for 10 years.
They’re on every site these days not just videos. Perhaps you just meant video ads.
It’s really not difficult at all to avoid almost every single ad, just use ublock origin in your browser (use firefox on android to be able to use ublock origin on mobile), and use newpipe on your phone for watching youtube videos.
I do use ublock on my pc but still see some ads.
On my phone in iOS but I use NextDNS which gets rid of a lot of ads. So much so that if I search for X and you get the shopping results I have to turn off NextDNS to be able to follow that link.
But I still see ads.
I use Firefox & uBlock Origin, it stops ads everywhere. I won’t use a computer that does not have that installed. I see no ad on any site of any kind.
That just sounds exhausting, to be honest.
It reads like copypasta to me lol
Everyone needs to sign out on desktop if you’re using Ublock origin bypass. This whole TOS thing could be grounds to start going after your account they don’t achieve the outcome they’re looking for
Then I’ll just make another account . . . with blackjack and hookers.
All very well unless your account is also your mail email. I’m not draft enough for that to be the case, but many are.
Thankfully it isn’t hard to remove with ublock origin. Just enter Element picker mode and select the pop up to remove it. Then do the same for the greyed out background & it’ll work normally.
Yeah, I got no issue with removing it, but it’s still agrivating to see even once.
Don’t worry. Soon they will cover this loophole as well.
You’re right. They will. But then unlock origin will find a way around those.
Adblockers will win at the end of the day because I control what’s on my machine.
How to remove the background? It seems to remove the whole page for me.
The element is called #opened (you’ll see it pop up in the text box when you select the right one). The only downside I’ve seen so far is that you can scroll down to the comments while you have a video open in full screen. Although I guess that’s kinda cool
can scroll down to the comments while you have a video open in full screen
That was allready a thing for years now. I thought it was a feather they implemented.
this is asshole design
Please explain.
If they manage to kill ReVanced I’m done with YouTube. I’ll subscribe to Nebula or something.
Use Invidious! No ads, no username required, no reporting to YouTube, Sponsorblock can be used, and you still get unlimited access to YouTube’s content. There are dozens of instances, but inv.tux pizza usually works for me.
I know that Nebula has exclusive infotainment, but sometimes I just want to watch people be bad at video games.
I feel like this might be blasphemous around here, but I actually like being logged in and getting tailored algorithmic suggestions on YouTube. Unlike most people it seems to know my interests pretty well.
Same. I really like my newpipe, but the sheer amount of unfiltered fuckface influencer bullshit videos ‘currently trending’ on it’s frontpage is more disgusting than any algorithmic youtube bubble will ever be.
These frontends need to introduce a preferred-startpage feature that enables setting Subscriptions as the default. I’d be interested to know from others if there’s any technical hurdle, because I’m surprised it’s not already available.
I’d dig a integration of youtube subscription manager.
Most Invidious instances allow you to sign up for an account on the instance to subscribe to people and track your history. Alternatively, I use the FreeTube app on computers I control for “watching TV”. It can track and transfer your subscriptions and history locally if you choose to use those features.
I still get recommended videos next to watched ones from both services. For those who see that as a negative, I think FreeTube allows you to hide any YouTube elements you don’t want to see.
Oh? Maybe I’ll look into it then. I’ve found some of my favourite channels from suggestion in my feed.
Checking this out based on your recommendation and I already like it. Simple, no bullshit, and is similar to use to something like NewPipe but for desktops.
yeah i found it this morning entirely because of the ad block thing (i actually don’t ad block YT because i want to support creators, but i hate that now that’s not a choice, so i’m making the last remaining choice available)
Firefox + LibRedirect add-on + FreeTube
