And an ad blocker should be part of everyone’s personal and organisational security model regardless, so you’d have to install ublock and specifically turn it off for YouTube.
But of course, the reason people block ads is most of the Google ads were straight malware at one point.
Can’t use uBO from most of the devices I actually watch YouTube on.
For me, it’s much easier to just pay for Premium. No ads on my phone, Playstation, Chromecast, or locked-down work laptop that I can’t install extensions on.
And the creators whose content I consume still get paid for my views. Honestly, it’s worth it for both my use-case and my morals.
They don’t even need to do that, since the ads come from the same domain as the app’s content. Some apps use their own DNS resolver but a lot of the time it’s for other reasons, like preventing DNS hijacking by ensuring DNSSEC records are validated.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted, paying for services you use shouldn’t be looked down upon. It’s way easier then trying to always be ahead of the ad block blockers. I do block all ads on websites though
I started Premium as Google Play Music back when. Made sense as an alternative to Spotify. In my book, it still does. Ad-free YouTube is just a bonus for a music streaming service.
It could just have something to do with the fact that many people think ads are not only annoying but also highly manipulative, creating artificial needs in people, a tool to make already successful and rich companies even richer, … and the surrounding technology to power them is unethical, hoarding tons of information, building profiles of people, tracking which websites they visit, what search terms they use, …
When people talk about blocking ads, being frustrated about them showing up, it’s just kind of disrespectful to be like “well you could just pay for the service, you know?”. Besides, who knows how much actually ends up in the creators’ pockets.
how much actually ends up in the creators’ pockets
For most, very little. For the big ones, millions of dollars, and I always resent people lecturing me about “morals” because I’m not willing to subsidize a rich person’s hobby.
Regular perople aren’t making anything from YouTube, only the ones who had the capital to invest in their channels upfront. I don’t feel compelled to pay for any of that, and I’d just as soon have their content filtered from my feed if it’s immoral not to want to see ads.
The channel I use most often is Audible Anarchist, and I really don’t think they give a fuck if I use an adblocker or even Piped to watch their videos.
Never forget that youtube filters us towards those creators, too. New creators saying a new message? They aren’t gonna get any attention. Youtube de-prioritized LGBT and BIPOC content tags for years.
Yep, I never let YouTube recommend me content, because it’s all highly-polished monetized garbage. They’ve made it purposely difficult to find videos uploaded by normal people. I used to watch this random lady with a pet squirrel who made videos with her phone, it was so fun to watch. Once it all became monetized, that got buried. It’s to the point that most of what you see on the front page, you could just as well be watching cable TV. It’s so bad.
I feel like an old man saying this, but it seems there are a lot of younger users who got sucked into the YouTube algorithm and see this all as normal or even good. That’s why you get weird accusations of “stealing” content or not supporting “creators,” as if it’s my job to subsidize some rich person’s hobby. The entire reason I liked YouTube is it was a free forum where users could share random videos with each other. If it’s not that anymore, then it can die for all I care – I don’t want it.
I can afford it and use it all the time. It’s completely unreasonable to expect a company to provide a service for you for free without any way for them to monetize you. Hosting videos isn’t free so why should they pay for you to have access to their service
I can afford it and refuse to pay on principle. I actually would be glad if Google went out of business (although extremely unlikely). Pianos Companies like them use every opportunity to cheat and modify laws to give them advantage and remove any chance of a new innovative competitor taking over. Then they expect us to act honorable and play by the rules that they set up.
They are the cancer and we need to restore old antitrust laws that supposed to prevent them from ever getting so big.
You don’t have to always be ahead. I’ve been using revanced for years now without problems. Before that Vanced. My computer has had ublock origin with 0 issues for years prior to the recent changes. To resolve those I literally had to click 2 buttons in the UI. Bam no ads. Have had no problems since. The time I’ve invested in configuring adblocking since I started watching YouTube, sometime around 2008-9, has probably amounted to 20 minutes of time.
Because LemmyWorld is full of immature users who think that anybody who pays money for a thing they get extensive use out of is a shill. They think that using adblockers is somehow sticking it to The Man.
I’m starting to understand why LW has the reputation it does now.
By being seen as the de facto “hub” for Lemmy, they’ve attracted a large chunk of Redditors who haven’t left their Redditor attitudes behind them. As LW continues to grow, I’ve been noticing a lot more immaturity on the platform as of late. It’s honestly a little disappointing to see.
How else do you expect a globally-accessible video hosting service that requires no upfront costs for users to upload millions of video files at the cost of several petabytes of data transfers every day to function?
The users generating the content people actually want to watch wouldn’t be able to do so without the monetization that’s in place, though. They can’t make content for free, and shouldn’t be expected to. And not all creators can rely on sponsorships to subsidize themselves, either, so most creators rely pretty heavily on ad revenue in order to stay afloat on the platform and keep the lights on.
If the creators can’t afford to keep creating, then that also degrades YouTube’s service as a whole, as well.
Really? I’m pretty sure people can make youtube content, and maintain a job. If youtube can’t stay afloat without invasive ads happening every 5 minutes then youtube deserves to go the way of MySpace and every other dead platform before them. Simple as that. Youtube isn’t a necessity.
“the price is what the market will bear” or whatever. I used to pay for ytp (red)/gpm. Paused for a month, went to resub, was like +$4 more a month. I don’t value yt at ~$16, not even at ~$12 really but hey, they wouldn’t fuck billions of users over in the pursing of profits, right? If yt/Google was a scrappy little startup, or a creator that I valued, sure, here’s $5 a month through patreon. But they aren’t, they bought a platform with no clear avenue to monetization/breaking even, and sat on it for 10 years, and then they want to be like ‘please we are the victim here, it’s the evil ad blockers that are forcing us into the streets!’.
G has, metrically speaking, fuck-tons of money. And if they so desperately need to clear their books, they can always close yt, anytime they want. Or they could let the customers pay what they think the service is worth. Hell, they could even shift the costs to the creators, which isn’t the worst idea in the world - it’d at least stop kids from uploading their fortnite clips with them screaming into their mics. Not everybody should be allowed in front of a webcam.
But as long as it’s [number higher than I value yt as] or [shitty experience], I will take option 3 and tell g to gag on my balls, and I shall enjoy my $5 and my ad-free experience.
Lots of options, but nah “fuck the users” came out on top. Acting like the users are the reason why they bought and operated a money pit for 15 years is just hilarious.
Once upon a time it was worth it for me too. But since every service is running up the rates, I had to decide which, if any, deserved my money. Google didn’t make the cut. I have a feeling nobody will by the end of year
Paying Google doesn’t feel like the correct thing to do when they keep making Youtube worse while increasing the price. Morally I think it’s wrong to reward their shitty decisions against other users. Personally I’m still mad about they removed the dislike counter.
uBlock origin works, but you must disable all other blockers or browser plugins doing something with youtube, as they might interfere with the adblocking capability.
For the fire stick, simply install smarttubenext. Adfree and with sponsorblock included.
Also, you might have to go into filter lists in the uBO dashboard and make sure you’ve checkmarked everything.
I’m not sure what can be done about a fire stick. I’m lucky because I have a mini PC connected to my main TV that runs Linux so I can use that to stream whatever I want. It’s one of the best setups I’ve ever had for entertainment. I just got one of those cheap wireless keyboards with a trackpad for $10 from newegg, and Linux Mint has a setting to make the UI more usable from a distance.
I do use a Roku sometimes when I travel for work, and I just deal with the ads, so if there’s a way to make something like a fire stick or roku work with a custom OS, that would be nice, but I’m not aware of anything.
Edit: Just noticed u/viking@infosec.pub has information about smarttubenext. Might look into that.
Edit: are you psychos actually pulling up YouTube on your browser?
Edit edit: Listen, I’m about convenience on this matter. I want to click a link and just have it open up. I’m also not as militant as most of you about making sure YouTube doesn’t make any money off of me because…that doesn’t make any sense. Yeah I’m going to block ads where I can but I’m not going to inconvenience myself in the process. Everyone keeps recommending revanced which admittedly I haven’t tried, but vanced worked like donkey dick. I said it.
Yes, on an Android tablet, using the PocketTube app (which manages my YT subscriptions into groups), to forward a group playlist to YT in Firefox with uBo installed, without being logged into YT in FF.
I don’t have to rely on other 3rd party servers and services working properly, I don’t get ads, and YT gets little to nothing on me as an anonymous user beyond PocketTube just pulling the latest videos from my subscriptions.
I’ve been reading all these posts about blocker warnings being displayed and having to update the uBo filters, and I haven’t seen one of those yet, without doing any of that.
My revanced setup literally shows as “Youtube” and functions identically, with sponsorblocking and adblocking. It let me disable shorts entirely and use the click-bait thumbnail circumventer. Took me 5 minutes to setup. I see a video on any app and click on it and it opens up in revanced no problem.
People act like 5 seconds of effort is worth what, 120$/year? After googling, closer to 160$/year? Lmao I wish that amount of money was inconsequential to me
Revanced is quite the pain to set up, in my opinion, and the Revanced forums aren’t super helpful. The developer refuses to publish a useable guide.
I switched to NewPipe x Sponsorblock, and that one was maybe 20 seconds of downloading and installing, not counting tweaking the settings to my liking. It’s been much more stable for me. Revanced always crashed for me at exactly 3 hours of continuous use, which was a problem since I use those 8-hour ambient sound videos to help me sleep.
There’s also LibreTube, but that one can be a lot more finicky, and you have to manually switch the instance, which becomes a pain in the ass after a while.
I’m sure it’s much harder to manage a Premium subscription than it is to simply install uBO
And an ad blocker should be part of everyone’s personal and organisational security model regardless, so you’d have to install ublock and specifically turn it off for YouTube.
But of course, the reason people block ads is most of the Google ads were straight malware at one point.
Can’t use uBO from most of the devices I actually watch YouTube on.
For me, it’s much easier to just pay for Premium. No ads on my phone, Playstation, Chromecast, or locked-down work laptop that I can’t install extensions on.
And the creators whose content I consume still get paid for my views. Honestly, it’s worth it for both my use-case and my morals.
Revanced for android, SmartTube for android TV
Anything for Apple TV?
Yattee
Possibly something like PiHole? Though I’ve not tried that myself.
PiHole doesn’t work on YouTube ads unfortunately. No DNS based blocker does.
This is generally the case for any sites thay have their own ad inventory, since the ads are coming from the same servers as the site itself.
Actually this is true with anything closed sourced since they are probably using their own internal, encrypted DNS look-ups.
FOSS fixes that.
They don’t even need to do that, since the ads come from the same domain as the app’s content. Some apps use their own DNS resolver but a lot of the time it’s for other reasons, like preventing DNS hijacking by ensuring DNSSEC records are validated.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted, paying for services you use shouldn’t be looked down upon. It’s way easier then trying to always be ahead of the ad block blockers. I do block all ads on websites though
I started Premium as Google Play Music back when. Made sense as an alternative to Spotify. In my book, it still does. Ad-free YouTube is just a bonus for a music streaming service.
Agreed. Family plan is priced similar to Spotify, and ad free YouTube is a nice bonus
It could just have something to do with the fact that many people think ads are not only annoying but also highly manipulative, creating artificial needs in people, a tool to make already successful and rich companies even richer, … and the surrounding technology to power them is unethical, hoarding tons of information, building profiles of people, tracking which websites they visit, what search terms they use, …
When people talk about blocking ads, being frustrated about them showing up, it’s just kind of disrespectful to be like “well you could just pay for the service, you know?”. Besides, who knows how much actually ends up in the creators’ pockets.
For most, very little. For the big ones, millions of dollars, and I always resent people lecturing me about “morals” because I’m not willing to subsidize a rich person’s hobby.
Regular perople aren’t making anything from YouTube, only the ones who had the capital to invest in their channels upfront. I don’t feel compelled to pay for any of that, and I’d just as soon have their content filtered from my feed if it’s immoral not to want to see ads.
The channel I use most often is Audible Anarchist, and I really don’t think they give a fuck if I use an adblocker or even Piped to watch their videos.
Never forget that youtube filters us towards those creators, too. New creators saying a new message? They aren’t gonna get any attention. Youtube de-prioritized LGBT and BIPOC content tags for years.
Yep, I never let YouTube recommend me content, because it’s all highly-polished monetized garbage. They’ve made it purposely difficult to find videos uploaded by normal people. I used to watch this random lady with a pet squirrel who made videos with her phone, it was so fun to watch. Once it all became monetized, that got buried. It’s to the point that most of what you see on the front page, you could just as well be watching cable TV. It’s so bad.
I feel like an old man saying this, but it seems there are a lot of younger users who got sucked into the YouTube algorithm and see this all as normal or even good. That’s why you get weird accusations of “stealing” content or not supporting “creators,” as if it’s my job to subsidize some rich person’s hobby. The entire reason I liked YouTube is it was a free forum where users could share random videos with each other. If it’s not that anymore, then it can die for all I care – I don’t want it.
I know. I managed a YouTube partner account, but also I Googled it just now.
$1-2 per 1,000 views is what I’m reading, but I can say I personally saw numbers at least five times less than that with the amount I managed.
If anyone wants to support a creator, just donate money to them directly. They’ll be absolutely floored by the gesture.
I don’t disagree, but things like that have to be monotized in some way or else they would not exist.
I can afford it and use it all the time. It’s completely unreasonable to expect a company to provide a service for you for free without any way for them to monetize you. Hosting videos isn’t free so why should they pay for you to have access to their service
They’re datamining us to the tune of billions.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-sell-your-data-heres-how-company-shares-monetizes-and
I can afford it and refuse to pay on principle. I actually would be glad if Google went out of business (although extremely unlikely). Pianos Companies like them use every opportunity to cheat and modify laws to give them advantage and remove any chance of a new innovative competitor taking over. Then they expect us to act honorable and play by the rules that they set up.
They are the cancer and we need to restore old antitrust laws that supposed to prevent them from ever getting so big.
You don’t have to always be ahead. I’ve been using revanced for years now without problems. Before that Vanced. My computer has had ublock origin with 0 issues for years prior to the recent changes. To resolve those I literally had to click 2 buttons in the UI. Bam no ads. Have had no problems since. The time I’ve invested in configuring adblocking since I started watching YouTube, sometime around 2008-9, has probably amounted to 20 minutes of time.
Because LemmyWorld is full of immature users who think that anybody who pays money for a thing they get extensive use out of is a shill. They think that using adblockers is somehow sticking it to The Man.
I’m starting to understand why LW has the reputation it does now.
LW has a reputation?
By being seen as the de facto “hub” for Lemmy, they’ve attracted a large chunk of Redditors who haven’t left their Redditor attitudes behind them. As LW continues to grow, I’ve been noticing a lot more immaturity on the platform as of late. It’s honestly a little disappointing to see.
I mean, attempting to monetize every single thing in life is juvenile and short sighted as well.
How else do you expect a globally-accessible video hosting service that requires no upfront costs for users to upload millions of video files at the cost of several petabytes of data transfers every day to function?
On donations?
I mean the flip side of that is that youtube would be worthless without the content the users generate.
The users generating the content people actually want to watch wouldn’t be able to do so without the monetization that’s in place, though. They can’t make content for free, and shouldn’t be expected to. And not all creators can rely on sponsorships to subsidize themselves, either, so most creators rely pretty heavily on ad revenue in order to stay afloat on the platform and keep the lights on.
If the creators can’t afford to keep creating, then that also degrades YouTube’s service as a whole, as well.
Really? I’m pretty sure people can make youtube content, and maintain a job. If youtube can’t stay afloat without invasive ads happening every 5 minutes then youtube deserves to go the way of MySpace and every other dead platform before them. Simple as that. Youtube isn’t a necessity.
“the price is what the market will bear” or whatever. I used to pay for ytp (red)/gpm. Paused for a month, went to resub, was like +$4 more a month. I don’t value yt at ~$16, not even at ~$12 really but hey, they wouldn’t fuck billions of users over in the pursing of profits, right? If yt/Google was a scrappy little startup, or a creator that I valued, sure, here’s $5 a month through patreon. But they aren’t, they bought a platform with no clear avenue to monetization/breaking even, and sat on it for 10 years, and then they want to be like ‘please we are the victim here, it’s the evil ad blockers that are forcing us into the streets!’.
G has, metrically speaking, fuck-tons of money. And if they so desperately need to clear their books, they can always close yt, anytime they want. Or they could let the customers pay what they think the service is worth. Hell, they could even shift the costs to the creators, which isn’t the worst idea in the world - it’d at least stop kids from uploading their fortnite clips with them screaming into their mics. Not everybody should be allowed in front of a webcam.
But as long as it’s [number higher than I value yt as] or [shitty experience], I will take option 3 and tell g to gag on my balls, and I shall enjoy my $5 and my ad-free experience.
Lots of options, but nah “fuck the users” came out on top. Acting like the users are the reason why they bought and operated a money pit for 15 years is just hilarious.
You say YouTube’s solution was “fuck the users”, but the solutions you offered are “fuck the creators”. I’m not sure how that’s any better.
uBlock works on Firefox on Android.
ReVanced replaces native YouTube app and Smart Tube replaces YouTube on TV.
That does nothing to address my moral concern, which is ensuring that the creators whose content I watch are getting paid.
While I appreciate free things, I know that I can’t keep getting free things if the people making them can’t afford to do so.
Once upon a time it was worth it for me too. But since every service is running up the rates, I had to decide which, if any, deserved my money. Google didn’t make the cut. I have a feeling nobody will by the end of year
Paying Google doesn’t feel like the correct thing to do when they keep making Youtube worse while increasing the price. Morally I think it’s wrong to reward their shitty decisions against other users. Personally I’m still mad about they removed the dislike counter.
Nobody’s forcing you to use it, then.
I’m not. I’m just commenting on the moral argument you mentioned.
The most moral course of action would be to simply boycott the service altogether.
It’s crazy how unaware people are of the options out there, and the little effort it takes.
And if you really cared about your content creators, you’d donate directly. You’re giving more money to Google than to them.
Enjoy your subscription price hike
For some reason, those never work for me. I’ve tried at least 3 different YouTube and blockers and they all fail.
Also there’s no blockers for something like a fire stick, which sucks.
uBlock origin works, but you must disable all other blockers or browser plugins doing something with youtube, as they might interfere with the adblocking capability.
For the fire stick, simply install smarttubenext. Adfree and with sponsorblock included.
https://smarttubenext.com/firestick/
Very long hdmi cable.
Are you using Firefox?
Also, you might have to go into filter lists in the uBO dashboard and make sure you’ve checkmarked everything.
I’m not sure what can be done about a fire stick. I’m lucky because I have a mini PC connected to my main TV that runs Linux so I can use that to stream whatever I want. It’s one of the best setups I’ve ever had for entertainment. I just got one of those cheap wireless keyboards with a trackpad for $10 from newegg, and Linux Mint has a setting to make the UI more usable from a distance.
I do use a Roku sometimes when I travel for work, and I just deal with the ads, so if there’s a way to make something like a fire stick or roku work with a custom OS, that would be nice, but I’m not aware of anything.
Edit: Just noticed u/viking@infosec.pub has information about smarttubenext. Might look into that.
That isn’t really an option for Android.
Edit: are you psychos actually pulling up YouTube on your browser?
Edit edit: Listen, I’m about convenience on this matter. I want to click a link and just have it open up. I’m also not as militant as most of you about making sure YouTube doesn’t make any money off of me because…that doesn’t make any sense. Yeah I’m going to block ads where I can but I’m not going to inconvenience myself in the process. Everyone keeps recommending revanced which admittedly I haven’t tried, but vanced worked like donkey dick. I said it.
What about ReVanced, NewPipe, or Grayjay?
Didn’t know about Grayjay until now. Thanks for bringing it up - it looks really promising!
Firefox for Android can.
I have firefox mobile with uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock addons and haven’t seen a fucking ad in two years. No app needed.
Hell yeah I am. Fuck them trackers!
Yes, on an Android tablet, using the PocketTube app (which manages my YT subscriptions into groups), to forward a group playlist to YT in Firefox with uBo installed, without being logged into YT in FF.
I don’t have to rely on other 3rd party servers and services working properly, I don’t get ads, and YT gets little to nothing on me as an anonymous user beyond PocketTube just pulling the latest videos from my subscriptions.
I’ve been reading all these posts about blocker warnings being displayed and having to update the uBo filters, and I haven’t seen one of those yet, without doing any of that.
My revanced setup literally shows as “Youtube” and functions identically, with sponsorblocking and adblocking. It let me disable shorts entirely and use the click-bait thumbnail circumventer. Took me 5 minutes to setup. I see a video on any app and click on it and it opens up in revanced no problem.
People act like 5 seconds of effort is worth what, 120$/year? After googling, closer to 160$/year? Lmao I wish that amount of money was inconsequential to me
Revanced is an app
My mans really forgot about Revanced and Newpipe huh…
(Somehow Vanced still works on my old S8 and that has now become my dedicated YouTube player until it, or Vanced, dies)
Revanced is quite the pain to set up, in my opinion, and the Revanced forums aren’t super helpful. The developer refuses to publish a useable guide.
I switched to NewPipe x Sponsorblock, and that one was maybe 20 seconds of downloading and installing, not counting tweaking the settings to my liking. It’s been much more stable for me. Revanced always crashed for me at exactly 3 hours of continuous use, which was a problem since I use those 8-hour ambient sound videos to help me sleep.
There’s also LibreTube, but that one can be a lot more finicky, and you have to manually switch the instance, which becomes a pain in the ass after a while.