- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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It seems like we’ve all lost the plot. We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring. Try browsing for a day on a plain-no-extension browser. If you use other web enhancement tools kill those too. Straight-up internet is cancer, especially on mobile.
It’s impossible to read a 250-word article without being interrupted 5-7 times. Two of those interruptions are likely a full page overlay with give me your email, and are you sure you don’t want to subscribe, just give me your credit card number.
Then there are auto-play videos on the side, some with audio on by default. I mean I came here to read something, so of course we have things flashing and moving and making noise, it’s the most conducive environment for thought, right?
Ad blockers and script blocking are essentially a hazmat suit that allows us to withstand a hostile environment. Remember when we said myspace pages with audio and [marching-ants] borders was a bad UX? At least we didn’t have overlays back then.
Go back to basics and consider what makes a good vs bad internet experience. The reality sounds like someone with a minor case of severe brain damage. I think we’ve just become unashamed of greed as a society. It’s clearly all just about money.
Those annoying customers/users generate content and we have to put up with them so we can monetize it. *Sadly, It’s unclear if I’m talking about youtube, reddit, or nearly any other site.
Le sigh.
We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring.
Not me, sorry. Fuck ads. I’ve been ad-free for like a decade, and I’m not interested in regressing.
Even if there was a balance and the ads were non-intrusive? I mean, servers and bandwidth cost money. I’m in the same boat as you where I have run ad blockers, adblocker blockers, no script, privacy enhancers, and anti-fingerprinting since forever ago.
I’d rather view a few reasonable ads than have a site try to mine and sell my data. If there was a balance, this is where I’d say it was reasonable. Since not reality, I’m with you, nuke them all, and just take the content.
The definition of “reasonable ads” and “just a few ads” keeps sliding. I’m old enough to remember the early internet, and that this lie has been told many times.
Just a few acceptable ads always becomes many unacceptable ads, because money.
Just like cable tv!
Even if there was a balance and the ads were non-intrusive?
I don’t need propaganda telling me to want to buy shit that I otherwise wouldn’t want to buy, no. I’ll go to other consumers (and, more specifically, people I trust) to determine what things are worth, not entities with a conflict of interest in the matter.
The whole marketing/advertising industry is illegitimate and harmful, and I’m “boycotting” the whole thing until we finish the job of destroying capitalism and it’s no longer needed anyway.
I’d rather view a few reasonable ads than have a site try to mine and sell my data.
The corporations are going to try to mine and sell your data anyway. Why wouldn’t they? You think just because they have a revenue stream through ads that they’ll give up another revenue stream from fucking over your privacy? Then I’ve got this nice bridge to sell you, too…
I think you’re right, I feel like I’m looking for a little good-will among our kind (bleak and probably misguided at best). Sellers and consumers need to coexist in some manner, but what that relationship should be is yet to be defined. For now, we’re in a place that needs change for sure.
I fully agree. Online ads used to be some banners next to the content you came to the site for. I was fine with that. As soon as they put it in front/in between/… the content, I very quickly got fed up with it.
We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring.
Not really I don’t want to view propaganda about how the new 6 wheels family killer wagon is still chill even if you’re going through the desert.
I just don’t like ads and unnecessary consumerism.
God, this is tangential to your point, but car and housing aesthetics have gotten terrible. Everything is BIGGER BIGGER BIGGER. People need to buy huge fucking hulked out monster trucks now for their suburban ass lives so they can make sure to fit their entire home when they commute an hour to work in soul crushing traffic. And they absolutely NEED their giant ass monstrous mcmansions. How can they survive without the extra dozen rooms that they can fill with more cheap bullshit? And don’t get me started on color. Houses are all beige, grey, monotone terrible. Cars are silver, white, grey, black. There’s no color anymore. It just feels like what’s the point? Why bother trying when this is what success looks like. We have this beautiful planet and this is the shit we fill it with. I’m sorry. /endrant
I’ll say something unexpected: I pay for YouTube. With money! Why?
- I use it every day and I’m a human who likes boosting the things that I enjoy
- I think YouTube’s content recommendations are a genuine value-add and not easily replaced
- A cut of my subscription fee goes directly back to the video creators that I watch
- The “premium” encoding levels are actually a substantial improvement to video bitrates
- Important: the premium bitrate is higher than anything previously offered and probably would not have been otherwise practical to serve for free
So yeah. I personally like YouTube enough to pay for it and I have the financial means to do so. Am I a clown for expressing personal appreciation towards a faceless megacorp? Yes. Yes I am. Constantly trying to win at every transaction in life is a drag though, so I think I’ll continue to enjoy getting swindled.
I’m also a YouTube premium user. I realize there are other ways to get around the ads, but I prefer supporting the services I enjoy using.
rather than paying for youtube premium you should use an adblocker, or download all the videos you watch, then donate the money to creators you watch. if everyone who paid for youtube premium just decided to split the cost of the subscription between the creators they watch, creators would make a lot more money and as a bonus you hurt Alphabet, one of the worst companies in the world. It’s a win win
Alright, let’s say I do that. I’ll take my $12 and split it equally between every unique channel I’ve watched in the last 30 days. Eyeballing my watch history shows… about 100 different channels.
Let’s ignore for the sake of argument the incredible overhead I’d have to take upon myself in order to facilitate and account for 100+ recurring micro-donations. How much more money do you think these creators would get from my direct donations rather than going through greedy Alphabet? Let’s do math together:
- Subscription: $12.48 (the extra $0.48 is applied at checkout for the 4% VAT)
- 4% VAT (rounds up): -$0.48 ($12.00)
- 1.9% + $0.30 Processor Fee (rounds up): -$0.53 ($11.47)
- 45% Platform Split (not rounded!): -$5.1615 ($6.3085)
- 100x split: $0.063085 p/channel
Ok. That’s ~$0.06 instead of the $0.12 each creator would have gotten had I simply hand-delivered two pennies and a dime to every single individual. Now, I don’t know about you… but I’m kind of too busy watching YouTube to go outside right now, so let’s go ahead and factor in what would happen if I managed to donate using a platform like Patreon instead:
- Not-Subscription: $12.48
- Rounded up: $13.00 (the donation has to be evenly divisible by 100)
- Per-creator donation: $00.13
- 4% Local Digital VAT (rounds up): -$0.01 ($0.12)
- 5% Platform Fee (rounds up): -$0.01 ($0.11)
- 5% + $0.10 Processor Fee (rounds up): -$0.11 ($0.00)
In other words: I’d be paying $0.52 more to donate a grand total of: no money. If we ignore the “no money” problem, there’s also the issue of it being literally impossible to donate such a tiny sum in the first place. We also conveniently ignored the challenge of individually navigating numerous currency conversions…
Let’s be honest and come clean with each other now: you weren’t being completely serious with me when you claimed that your suggestion was about helping ✨the creators✨. Even if you were serious, I’m certain that you don’t actually follow your own advice because it’s quite clearly impossible for a normal person to internationally distribute $12 among dozens of strangers.
YouTube feels unusable without an ad-blocker. I’ve gotten like 30min crazy conspiracy videos as an ad that shit is bonkers.
“Youtube considering incentivizing piracy”
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.
Let’s do the Peertube migration.
FreeTube, Invidious, or Rumble.
Youtube ads are such garbage. Everyone talks about how google is ‘the most advanced advertiser’ - well google, you really can’t figure out that playing the same ad for me 4 times in a 30 minute period is just going to make me hate both you and the advertiser?
If any state banned advertising entirely, I’d strongly consider moving there.
Not to mention the scams. I have tinnitus, and google knows that, so I get snake oil tinnitus ads all the time.
Seriously, if someone cures that, they won’t need to be advertising on YouTube.
If I wanted to watch 15 minutes of ads in a 45 minute video, I’d just get cable. I’m happy to watch 1 or 2 ads before a video. That’s it. So I use an app that can even remove promotions.
I do understand that if companies running ad-supported models, they need to make sure users are actually watching those ads. Seems logically to me - no ads mean no money, and no money means no sustainable business model.
On the other side, as a user, I just can’t browse the internet without an ad-blocker any more. They just got so annoying and sometimes even break the actual website.
But to be honest, I don’t see an alternative to ad-supported models except paying money directly via subscriptions plans etc. But this also will not work in the long term. I just can’t pay afford to pay a subscription for each website I visit during the day.
The biggest issue, I guess, is the amount and obnoxiousness of the ads. I could live quite well with seeing one ad banner per page-worth of scrolling, if it’s for example off to the side in a specific “your ad here” place.
Or if the ads would be thematically related to the topic at hand. I don’t want to be reminded of how much our devices listen in on us by seeing ads for diapers on a website for posting news about the Ukraine War, just because I happened to talk with my gf about how my step mom has another child now. But seeing ads for a website to buy camping tools, on a website for hiking backpacks, is fine by me.
Unfortunately those types of non-intrusive ads probably aren’t what’s raking in the most money.
Yep, got selected for this test and I thought my network went down.
Had to do nearly 30 mins of debugging until I realized it was youtube actively withholding JUST the video. Took some effort but managed to get them to send the videos again after resetting a bunch of things.
I refuse to view ads and will go to the ends of the earth to make that happen.
Paying is most certainly an option, but only when that becomes the ONLY option.
I’ve been using an adblocker since ads starting becoming more intrusive and the internet has progressed so much that it’s become generally unusable without one. I remember when a mobile ad popped up on my phone and it straight up startled me.
I’d happily pay for the content on youtube, if the user experience was not as miserable as it is.
Search is basically non functional, sort by oldest is gone, search in channel is only available on desktop not on mobile, filter videos by date range is not possible, video quality is mediocre, everyone and their dog makes titles that leave no clue at all about whats actually in the video because “they do better for the algorithm”, if you want to actually read the comments or video thescription on mobile you’ll have to click “show more” and “expand” until your finger hurts, video caches only a few seconds ahead, which makes watching on flaky connections miserable, video quality defaults to 480p even on gigabit internet, subtitles have become almost completely useless, etc., etc., etc.
If they would actually care about the user experience, I’d pay. Instead they just make the ads as annoying as humanly possible, in the hopes that users pay just to get rid of the annoyance, instead of paying for an actually good service.
This is crux of the issue. The whole websites interface is structured around ads. If you pay to get rid of them, it’s still structured around ads from its most basic level, so much so that simply getting rid of them doesn’t fundamentally change the experience.
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
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’m confused about this take. YouTube clearly has hosting costs and also pays creators. That money has to come from somewhere. They offer two options, ads or subscription. You could argue that the number of ads is too many or the cost of the subscription is too high, but demanding a service be free just because it’s technologically possible to block ads seems weird.
I never thought YouTube’s business model was very sustainable. As the world economy goes down, so does the value of ads. Creators or consumers need to pay up for all the bandwidth and storage. The question is about what is a reasonable price. Are low tiers for $3/mo. possible along with premium 4k options or does everything need to be at more than that?
So… using a ad blocker that we compile ourselves?
Wow the enshittification is at full throttle across silicon valley! Guess those investors gotta get those returns now that interest rates are spiking!
