So if YouTube is now serving up the ads directly to me, does that mean they’re finally liable for the content of those ads? Can we have them investigated for all the malware, phishing, illegal hate speech, etc.?
No, because that would be communism, and that killed 100 million people. You also think genocide is bad, aren’t you? And besides of that, if there were less regulations, you could make your own video platform to challenge Google’s monopoly! /s
i think people may have missed that you’re not serious
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This is a good question.
Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.
This is ad driven economy and bar must go 🆙
“Line go up” is the animating force of the age, the critical philosophical principal around which our entire society is arranged.
Gives me a fucking headache.
All time high all time!
Machines could be doing all the work. We could have clean energy , air ,water and food and shelter for all…
If everyone were a paying subscriber we could actually do all those things. No one wants to be ad supported, including the people at YT. But there are bills to pay.
I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.
But they’re not trying to do that. Profit isn’t enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.
So they put in ads. But that’s not enough and oh look there are more places we haven’t put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don’t we sell that too? Hey guys, we’ve heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small
protection paymentsubscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don’t like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we’re adding ads back into the service. But don’t worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don’t think that last one’s happened with YT premium yet, but it’s happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn’t put it past them.)There’s no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.
I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations.
That’s fine. No one needs you to be.
If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.
What are those? No, really, this is the crux here. The whole rest of your comment is about growth capitalism generally, and I agree it sucks in many ways. But until you can reasonably provide a working alternative to property ownership, we will continue to have things like rent and lending. Investment is a form of lending. And yes YT shareholders don’t give a shit about anything but more and more and MORE insane profit. Because to succeed, a company has to not only profit but profit above expectation, rewarding the speculative investments others have made in them.
It’s foolish though to think that YT’s management are the source of this desire for profit. It’s their shareholders. YT really want to deliver the best product while making a good living, and their staff are also minor shareholders to some extent.
But your problem is capitalism. And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism, then sheeit you are late to the game and I won’t wait up to hear what your alternative suggestions are going to be. I’ll just point out that you waved your hand at that subject and then moved on like we wouldn’t notice.
And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism,
I don’t know why you’d assume that. I’m pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn’t start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn’t hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.
As far as alternatives. I’m always up front with people in saying that I don’t have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That’s a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we’d want to live in for very long. It’s a cruel system and it’s going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don’t do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn’t going to fix the issue.
The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it’s a proposed solution. It’d be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it’s important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.
They’d have more paying subscribers if they didn’t charge more than Netflix for what amounts to user-generated content that they’re getting for free.
They’re not getting it for free. They pay video creators. And they know that the more they can pay them, the more and better content they will get.
And with any product pricing, there is always a balance between charging less to get more customers, or charging more to get more money per customer.
I’m pretty sure YouTube knows more about how to price their service than any of us.
It used to be free, it’s not like the majority of YouTube users voted yes to google takeover.
It’s not like YT is a democracy LOL
And YT was never free. It has had ads from the beginning. Perhaps not its very first months as a startup but those were supported by its seed investment capital so obviously a special and finite circumstance.
YT is ad supported. It always had been. Free services need to make money somehow and ads are one way. It is baffling watching people realize this for the first time because they’ve been shielded by their ad blocker for years, but dude, here outside that little bubble, in the real world, this is how things work.
They get loads in governments tax breaks and they data mine the fuck out of us so fuck them and their ads.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/19/social-media-companies-surveillance-ftc
I’ll continue to block them as long as we can and then move on to something else if we can’t. By paying you are just rewarding this exploitative behavior.
If you simply must pay for something then donate it to a charity instead. These companies do not need your money.
I did $390 in charitable giving last month and paid $23 for YT Premium. My priorities are just fine so please don’t lecture me on how to spend my money.
I’m using lemmy right now and it’s not ad supported and I’m not the product.
It’s always weird to me when people post on lemmy and just assert something that implies lemmy is impossible, bro your using it right now!
LOL I donate to my instance, “bro.” Lemmy costs money. You’re just freeloading for the moment.
I’m really getting the push I need to finally get rid of the last couple Google services I still use
It’s only a matter if time til they enshittificate gmail as well.
[Enshittification intensifies]
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If YouTube offered premium without music for a discounted price I’d probably be willing to pay for it. But I just want no ads, not a bunch of bundled stuff.
Seeing as these ads will be targeted and of varying length, I wonder if a SponsorBlock-like extension with the ability to accept training data from users to help identify ads.
The Plex server application has a feature which scrubs videos and identifies intros so you can skip them like you can on Netflix. Wouldn’t it be sort of like that?
Seems like a good use of AI/ML.
The fucked up part is that I have to use SponsorBlock even with Premium. I thought I was paying for no ads…like wtf?
Oh well.
YouTube can be past-tense. There’s a million places to post a video these days. Spill out some whiskey and read a book. Fuck em.
Agreed, it’s just hard to find a suitable replacement for many things like tvs, since there’s a lack of alternative apps for other platforms on things like roku or LG tvs
It all sounds insane to me because I treat every TV like a computer monitor. Whatever I plug into it is what it displays. I usually ignore the onboard software as much as possible.
The arms race continues.
Well it sounds more scary than it realistically will be.
YouTube must pass to the player the metadata of where the ads start/end. Why? Because they need to be unskippable/unseekable/etc. If the metadata is there it is possible to force the seek 🤷♂️
Just matter of time
Only if premium did not have ads. They show you ad videos as if they’re part of your “recommendations”. They also allow creators to get sponsorships within videos. So even the premium experience isn’t really ad-free and they tout that shit everywhere.
As a YT Premium subscriber I really don’t mind the sponsor sections. Money goes to the creator and a few taps and I’m back to watching. Also, I think outright banning sponsor segments is going to make creators more creative in a bad way…
I totally understand your views, although I’m paying this platform to not show me ads, that money should then go to the creators if they have to insert ads into their videos for some change. This is the platform’s fault.
I mean, it’s very easy money given you already have a channel and a name dor youself. What would YT have to pay creators to not care about such easy money?
I just want the Temu ads to stop
Most of the ads we see on our Roku Tv are political. I don’t know about Temu’s but I’d rather get non-political ads.
MythTV solved this long ago. We already have the tech to bypass this shit.
Let’s make an actual useful AI that detects ads and muted/blacks out the screen during ads. Haha
Comskip, it’s not AI, and it works fine.
On my phone I use youtube revanced and adguard dns, kiwi browser with ublock origin. On my PC I use just ublock origin. So far** I havent run into issues
AB testing, you probably haven’t been affected yet
