That was a wild read. The 4chan guys can write better dystopias than Hollywood.

Is there an image that has better quality? It’s illegible.

VC cash is drying up, and other investors are getting leery of the Silicon Valley funding model. Investors are demanding a path to profitability soon or right now.

This is why I download so many YouTube videos. This is why I have a complicated video tags and search system (I’ll put it on github eventually).

Some day it’s going to get taken away and I’m not watching those trashy ads. I’d watch a non-obnoxious 15-30 second ad every 30 minutes but they want us to watch 2 minutes of unskippable full-r*tard annoying trash every 5 minutes and I will not cooperate with that in any way shape or form.

I think a reasonable ad system is that thing where YouTubers do that sponsorship thing and make it part of the video then you can skip it if it sucks.

Just use newpipe. It’s youtube without the ads. Doesn’t have casting support, but it allows you to download the videos. You can also listen/download to the audio of videos, without fetching the video.

The great thing about using free open-source software is the immunity from corporate shenanigans.

YouTube demands NewPipe to pay $1b…

Haha

Damn straight - they can take my NewPipe from my cold dead hands :-)

Just wait until they figure out how much more $$$$ they can make by putting all content behind microtransactions:

Imagine a world where, instead of grappling with complex tokens and crypto jargon, you have a digital wallet connected to your Web browser. This wallet would automatically handle microtransactions as you browse and consume content, creating a seamless and simplified experience, reminiscent of exchanging tokens at a funfair or arcade

This transition to the Great Paywall isn’t just about the monetization of content; it’s about balancing the scales and recognizing the value of content creators in the digital ecosystem. In the next chapter of the Web, users aren’t just passive consumers but active participants whose attention carries tangible value.

There is a federated version of YouTube…

But storing video is a massive challenge, way harder than dealing with a Lemmy or Mastodon instance.

The tricks YT doesn’t want you knowing about…

NewPipe

Piped

Invidious

lol

Right there with you on that one. The biggest problem is video hosting is a pain in the rear, particularly at such a grand scale. Hopefully, video hosting platforms will go niche, thus reducing bandwidth costs for each platform and “YouTube” will be the whole federation.

YouTube is a bit of a different animal.

YouTube allows creators to monetize content - so there’s a sense of shared success. Channels from Tom Scott or Captain Disillusion are amazing, because their production in part relies on that revenue model.

YouTube also understands that without paying for popular content, you won’t get the consistent cavalcade of medium content from people that want to earn a living or notoriety through YouTube. And that include anything from videos of cats falling over, blogs about life in remote places, DIY home improvement or niche guitar technique lessons.

Meanwhile on Reddit, if a user gets thousands of upvotes and a million page views for a short story they wrote exclusively for the platform, Reddit won’t pay them a cent. The very thought is laughable.

The other thing to consider is that the technology just doesn’t exist for there to be a viable ‘federated’ YouTube. YouTube has 800 million videos - many in HD and many are hours long. That’s a big ask in terms of storage and maintenance - even several thousand videos.

Video compression has a long way to go before that changes. For now, it makes sense for leave that storage to the companies with resources.

Text, however… well, all of Wikipedia can fit on around 20 gigs - 60 million odd articles. And for the record, that can pretty much fit on an iPod from 2002.

I do wish that YouTube wasn’t a monopoly. Twitch is the only thing that’s close, and it has it’s own special lane for live streaming. Back in the old days, there was some competition - including Google Video. But that went away when Google bought YouTube. I guess there’s Vimeo, but they’ve got a very different approach.

I mean, the Justice Department is suing Google for monopolizing ad tech - and I think we could see antitrust laws used in the next few years to breakup YouTube. Maybe the successor companies would federate - like when Bell was broken up into what became Verizon and ATT - who now directly compete for customers.

Is there a video platform that works in the fediverse as well? Feel like if we are doing alternatives that we should use things that are all based off of similar decentralized tech.

“But what about profits”

That’s likely their goal. At least some percentage of ad blocking users will disable the adblock and for those that won’t, they’ll save server costs.

For corporations that care only about quarterly stock price this makes sense. They don’t care about the long term damage to the ecosystem (adblocking users still contribute in many ways).

PeerTube exists but it is not popular. It has a lot of potential though

I hate ads with a passion due to my experiences in the marketing industry and will go out of my way to never watch any. I also don’t want to pay for random internet content, especially not to companies on the stock market. (Though I do use Patreon a bit for some content creators)

Can‘t explain it much more than that. If youtube locks me out due to that, so be it. I don‘t get worked up either, I simply state my opinion on it where I please and if I‘m not wanted I leave. That‘s about it.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I block ads and don’t pay because I hate Google. In addition to their repeated violations of user privacy, they go out of their way to disable OS features unless you pay them. Like disabling background play or PiP with Safari on iOS. Those features use the same open standards as foreground web browsers, so it literally takes extra effort to break them. Effort that could instead be used to fix the numerous problems with their platform, which they don’t. I refuse to reward that behaviour.

And if you don’t watch often enough for ad-free viewing to be worth a few bucks a month to you, then why get so worked up about having to sit through an ad every now and then?

There is an awkward gap where most services (not just YouTube) don’t offer reasonable pricing for consuming small amounts of content. So if you consume a lot of YouTube, the subscription price is justified. If you consume very little YouTube, you can probably suffer through some ads. But if you’re somewhere in the middle, there isn’t a great option.

YouTube probably makes fractions of a cent off of ads on a single video it shows me, but I can’t pay fractions of a cent to watch one video.

I’d consider this to actually be a pretty widespread problem across the internet, where it’s frustratingly difficult to buy small amounts of content for a reasonable price. It’s either the subscription or nothing for a ton of services.

I was happy paying for Premium until they doubled my subscription fee out of the blue.

I was a day one Google Play Music All Access subscriber, supposedly grandfathered in to a lower subscription fee, but all that ended up getting me in the end was “Sorry, but it’s your turn to pay up now. We know you were supposed to be grandfathered in so we’ll give you a few extra months of your current rate after we bump up the costs for everyone else.”