Until earlier this year I just watched the ads because in some small way it supports creators and I could deal with it. Then they increased the number of ads per watch-time to egregious levels.
I certainly wasn't going to reward a company for making the existing service worse by subscribing. Started using the apps people mention immediately and also setup pihole to block more ads.
Well they need ads to pay for streaming all of those conspiracy videos, aliens crap, repackaged copies of other videos, ai generated crap, shitty "click and subscribe!" videos, etc...
(Creators should start backing up their content and get ready to shift to new platforms)
Been an avid Youtube viewer since the very beginning. Now, I'm paying for the site and using a bunch of extensions just to get a worse experience than I was getting on youtube 5 - 10 years ago. After seeing all of my favorite content become unprofitable and die off, I am so ready to jump ship. I think in the immediate future, Patreon and Nebula are providing the alternative that will get creators paid reliably.
Fuck em. I'll just stop watching if it comes down to it. Hell, even without an alternative.
Ublock Origin users: purge cache and update. A fix has been deployed.
Maybe one day all of the mega corporations on the internet will finally drive me from the internet itself and I'll finally do something useful with my time.
Until that day...
cool. don't need YouTube and the constant "OMG you won't believe what happens next" crap littered in the feed
I remember when there were no ads. Ugh.
I miss the good old days on YouTube.
The ads make Youtube unwatchable so if necessary I'll figure out how to sideload Piped onto the house TV, or, failing that, just plug my laptop in and watch shit through Piped.
We need an AdBlock for adblockers now. Hopefully this will get bypassed.
Not just that. I have always turned of history and analytics since 2020. I use you tube to check news about happening events in my region(politics and stuff), so I can open the video on invidious or newpipe. But yesterday, as I opened you tube, it threw me this message... So, now I feel better, but seems, they have never stopped tracking what I search and watch, even when I opted to keep it off. Also maybe it is due to new feature where we can see the full video in hover mode, without clicking it to watch. But whatever, I wanted to let lemmy people to know that something like this happened yesterday to me.
Watch history is an absolutely essential metric for Youtube - I can understand how you've been led to believe that turning this option off is opting out from that data collection, but no. What this setting is asking is if you want the data collected to be represented to you as recommendations for other videos to watch. It absolutely doesn't change what data is collected, just whether the videos you've watched should be accounted for when the algorithm is finding new videos to recommend.
They were able to build a business and be profitable for over a decade but now all of the sudden ad block is destroying YouTube? 🤔
There used to be a trick where you can skip ads in youtube app by pretending to report it. i’ve used that to skip the 2x30s unskippable ads over the years, but that was patched recently.
So instead of occasionally watching ads while scrolling through comments, I’ve now opt to watch youtube in browser with UblockOrigin. And good luck to google for playing catch-22 with adblockers.
Shame that I used to have youtube in my adblock whitelist
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