• Cagi@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Remember when every billionaire apologist was telling us how no one would do shit like this when net neutrality was being gutted?

    • yiliu@informis.land
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      1 year ago

      This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Google is not an ISP. With or without net neutrality, Google could fuck with YouTube users.

      • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Technically false. Google is an ISP. But they aren’t using their position as an ISP to slow down traffic or fast track other traffic in this instance so no it has nothing to do with net neutrality.

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Only if we narrow our scope to the commonly thought of types of net neutrality. I think if we had foreseen intentionally treating browsers differently, this type of thing would have 100% been rolled into that original conversation about net neutrality. It’s the same idea: artificially modifying a web experience for capitalist gain.

        I personally wish it could be illegal for them to do this, but I do think it would be really hard to enforce such a law.

    • alekwithak@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not just YouTube. Now I have to say I’m not a robot when searching from my phone because I dare use a VPN that’s not theirs.

      • Reddfugee42@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This is because scammers and criminals often use VPNs. They actually should be doing that.

        • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Do you know the old saying:
          if privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.

          Just because people might do stuff with things that isn’t intended or even illegal doesn’t mean you should be banning said things.
          Otherwise we’d be in a world where we have no kitchen knives, axes, wrenches, food, money, cars, planes, ships, bikes, hands, feet - you know what I mean?

        • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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          1 year ago

          There are many legitimate uses of VPN such as protecting your privacy from private interests and bypassing censorship. That’s collective punishment.

        • Malfeasant@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          You know what else spammers and criminals often do? Breathe. We need to make that more difficult.

    • SuperDuper@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I still remember Ajit Pai’s dumbass teeth as he smugly insisted that you’ll still be able to “‘gram’ your food” before covering a Chipotle bowl in a mountain of flaming hot Cheetos and an ocean of Sriracha. And that was one of the least irritating moments of that video. That whole fucking video was basically “you can still waste time with your bread, circuses, and creature comforts, you fucking peasants, now shut up and let the corporations do their thing” while ignoring every legitimate criticism of the decision to gut NN.

  • RT Redréovič@feddit.ch
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    1 year ago

    This is a good time to make aware about an amazing privacy-centric & user-friendly alternative - Peertube. It is not a big network as of now but the benefits it provides over YouTube are large - it is a part of the fediverse. Of course, only through increasing participation will the network become bigger.

    If you still wish to use YouTube, you can try third party front ends like Invidious or Piped on the browser; NewPipe(Also is a front end for Soundcloud, media.ccc.de, Peertube & Bandcamp) or LibreTube on Android.

    If you only browse YT Music, you can try HyperPipe in the browser. There are many apps for it available on F-Droid, an alternative app store for Android. My personal pick is ViMusic.

    • Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi
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      1 year ago

      Peertube is a great platform. And it has its uses. But it will never compete with YouTube - YouTube’s business model actively incentivises and pays people to post media to their platform.

      Peertube is more likely to be to be the opposite - donation run, and given videos are exponentially more expensive to host, it’s highly unlikely that creators will receive any compensation for their work. In fact it’s more likely theyl be in the list of people donating to the platform (or they’ll own the platform outright)

      While this might be fine if a creator makes the majority of its money elsewhere, via patreon or sponsors or whatever, it’s not going to work out for any aspiring or up and coming YouTube who has yet to become big enough to start diversifying their income base.

    • megrania@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      I feel like people mistake YouTube for a video hosting solution.

      But that’s not the point.

      • YouTube a huge archive of content that accumulated over the past 17 years.
      • YouTube is a content suggestion machine. Discoverability is a key aspect.
      • YouTube sets an incentive by allowing people to monetize their content.

      So, if the only thing you’re looking for is a video hosting solution, then, yes, PeerTube might be an alternative. In the same way uploading videos to your own webspace would be, and Vimeo also still exists.

      But for all the other stuff, YT is, unfortunately, unmatched, and probably will be for a while …

      • mightyfoolish@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You’re right. It also got people and ai flagging illegal content. That takes much more money then even hosting videos does. Though if the .world owners want to make a peertube insurance, I’m all for subscripting.

        Once again, I want to agree that it’s a massive undertaking that’s more than software and bandwidth.

    • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m thinking of just skipping ahead a bunch of steps and start the global resistance movement so it’s up and warm and running for when the rest of you guys start popping in after the GlobuCorpedorate attacks

    • Fisch@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Cool thing about LibreTube is that it uses Piped and you can make an account on a Piped instance, log in with that in LibreTube and your subscriptions and playlist will be synced

  • Godort@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I don’t know why they think this change is going to get anyone to switch.

    5 seconds of nothing is still way better than a minute-long ad

    • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      They want to sell their Premium subscription. They want you to compare 5 seconds of nothing versus “0” seconds of nothing. That being said, I think uBlock Origin with up-to-date filter lists completely eliminated this delay for me.

      • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        At work, we can’t log into personal accounts. And my job isn’t going to buy YouTube premium. So now any video tutorials on YouTube is getting impossible to watch.

        This has now triggered a bunch of lazy developers into action in my entire company. Even our internal newsletters are explaining how to use adblock.

      • Squizzy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I haven’t seen any issues or ads on Youtube across all devices, except my LG tv. I don’t doubt they’re being scummy but the workarounds are working.

            • sudneo@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              The procedure to install is very easy, you can also always uninstall it and reinstall the official one, I don’t think it’s irreversible in any way. Note that I am talking about side loading using developer mode. Rooting the TV via an exploit can brick your TV instead.

              Edit: The procedure is basically described in https://webostv.developer.lge.com/develop/getting-started/developer-mode-app.

              I realize I said very simple, but I guess it depends on your familiarity with tech and command line tools.

              • Squizzy@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                I have no problem trying it, I just didn’t want to brick it is all. I am tech literate but it wouldn’t be in my hobbies so I don’t have much in the way of skillset. Anything I’ve done has been with step by step and tools 😂

                • sudneo@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Oh no, I get it, I was quite scared the first time I messed with it, and I cursed LG plenty for not letting me install safely what I want on my own TV. I found this technique to be quite safe though. You basically uninstall the official YouTube app, then do the loading and you can always remove the app and reinstall the official one.

                  I hope I didn’t sound condescending, I just realized that I had been a bit too quick labeling something easy, while I understand that for some other person reading, using a CLI tool is in itself a new thing. Good luck :)

      • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        They can try selling me their Premium subscription again when they start suggesting more than one or two videos (if that) on their homepage that actually interest me.

        Not that I’ll ever pay for it, anyway. But get me something that I’ll actually click on to get served ads before trying to sell me something to get rid of them.

      • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        uBlock Origin

        I still worry that google is going to declare ad blockers against their TOS and shut down my gdrive and 20 year old gmail. I’m trying to move away from alphabet shit but it’s not so easy with such a long history. To that end I haven’t even once used yt except not logged in on a FF private window with ublock since they started pulling this shit.

        • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Changing mail providers isn’t easy when you use their domain endings as you’ll probably have to update a bunch of accounts to use a new mail address. For the future, use email providers that allow to use your own domain(s), switching providers is a lot easier then. You can export mails from Gmail with ease though, as long as they provide IMAP you can simply sync your complete mailbox and you could even upload all of it to your new email provider.

          And Google Drive…simply transfer all your files to somewhere else and done.

    • stebo@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      5 seconds of nothing

      It’s an eternity of nothing for me now so yeah I switched. To invidious.

  • EdyBolos@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Fuck Google and YouTube, but the title is misleading, and it’s an article from three weeks ago. I’m quite surprised that this post is so upvoted, and nobody else flagged this before.

    • Imhotep@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I just read the article and I don’t see how it’s misleading. Google introduced a delay before video starts for adblock users

      • PutangInaMo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        But the register wasn’t able to reproduce it, and goes on to suggest it might be testing the capability with a random subset of users.

        • Imhotep@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Google admitted it was intentionally making its content less binge-able for users unwilling to turn off offending extensions

          a Google spokesperson explained. “In the past week, users using ad blockers may have experienced delays in loading, regardless of the browser they are using.”

          I’m not trying to be difficult i genuinely don’t understand what is misleading here.

          it feels like i’m missing something

          or is the idea the delay could be a byproduct of the action google is taking against ad blockers, but not the intended result

          In this case yeah it is a little misleading or click bait but the gist is still there

    • TangledHyphae@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Interesting, it came up in news feeds on other sites. I’ll check more in the future, that’s the first time I’ve had that happen.

    • voracitude@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Genuine question (because I’m looking too): without YouTube, where would you go to watch all the diverse videos they host? It’s a really difficult business model. Look at how expensive Floatplane is to the user. Luke and Linus have talked about how difficult it is to run on WAN Show, too: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1mZrsunukUA

      A fediverse platform would almost definitely be a worse experience in terms of speed and video quality because residential internet (at least in the majority of the US) just doesn’t have the upload to support multiple HD video streams. Therefore, it’s not really possible to host at home; a basic server at Hetzner could probably do a dozen or two direct streams with no conversion, but storage is kind of expensive just because there’s so much content, and then there’s the need for moderation, high uptime, security, “good” UX design…

      Then of course on top of all that when you don’t have creators getting paid by ad revenue, fewer will be able to spend the time on production quality because they’ll be doing it after work, so the length and/or quality suffers.

      I dunno dude, I really hope someone smarter than me has figured this out, but it’s a tough problem.

    • lemmyingly@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I wonder if there are bot farms for Lemmy/Fediverse… There must be

  • namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    However bad they may make it, it can’t possibly be worse than it is for non-adblock users.

    But hey, if they want to torpedo their own services, have at it. It’s not like they have a reputation for it or anything…

      • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I wonder why they would kill old videos instead of just removing those 10-hour plus loops of the same song over and over again that nobody watches. You’d think those giant loop videos would be taking up far more space.

        • pokemaster787@ani.social
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          You’d think those giant loop videos would be taking up far more space

          Someone above posted an article saying they aren’t actually. But you’d be surprised at how little space those 10 hour videos can actually take. They’re highly compressible since they’re just the same still image and the same audio on repeat. A good compression algorithm (which Google certainly is using) would basically compress it into one instance of the song and how many times to repeat it (more complex than that, but that’s the idea)

          • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Sometimes they are, if it’s just audio and a static image. Some of them definitely are not that though. The ones with visualizers or full music videos or the like are not nearly as compressible.

    • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      About a week ago YouTube rolled out a new interface for ads. I cannot skip 90% of ads now. Many are around a minute in length. Always 2 ads at the beginning of every video, even if it’s only 10 seconds in length. Always 2 ads at the end of every video.

  • The Uncanny Observer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    Are they, though? I’ve been using Firefox and uBlock Origin for years and I’ve not had an issue other than needing to manually update my filters three times since this started.

    • samus12345@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, however “worse” it is for adblock users, it can’t compare to how awful the ads are.

        • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          IIRC it was one lower court case in Germany… That’s so many asterisk attached as to be meaningless, even if that judgement isn’t struck down or amended (unlikely), that still only applies to Germany (or was it one state within Germany?).

          The way the EU works is that it mandates each sovereign country to implement the mandate into their national laws, so jurisprudence in Germany doesn’t mean anything at all anywhere else.

          • Infinitus@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Also, courts in Europe can’t make laws like in the US. Their rulings aren’t considered to be law.

            • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              It’s a bit more nuanced than that…

              Civil Law (used almost everywhere in the world outside the Commonwealth) still has Case Law, but it is held subordinate to legislation (itself usually built on top of Roman and Napoleonic law), whereas historically common law is built out of nothing but case law (because English kings had better things to do than concern themselves with the squabbles of peasants).

              Still, when presented with a novel case that isn’t specifically legislated for, judges in Civil Law countries can still make a ruling, and subsequent trials will have to take that ruling into acount.

            • Gladaed@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              How is that relevant? Just because some foreign entity has different laws doesn’t mean you cannot have yours. We shouldn’t always repeat us policy as gospel. Just look at their social policy nightmare.

        • ZickZack@fedia.io
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          1 year ago

          Basically the stuff they need to detect whether ads are actually shown needs information of the device state that are generally not available according to Article 5(3) ePR.

    • OfficerBribe@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      It was some low effort attempt talking about “code that I do not like running on my PC” or something like that, words like “malware” were thrown around. Basically if detecting adblocks is illegal so should be any JavaScript code.

    • the_q@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Right? I’ll be scrolling through my feed and bam random Jordan Peterson video and then some black guy pointing up at a video of Trump. I don’t want to see that crap ever, but Google gets paid by these guys so they just insert that crap wherever.

  • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
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    WHAT?! I didn’t believe it for a second when the whole planet immediately noticed at the same time!

    But then again, they DID admit it. Which means they have nothing to hide! And that’s transparent, and bold. We should reward companies for doing the right thing. Not only criticize them when they didn’t do wrong!

    Tinkle Fingerent!

        • auf@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          How’s that different from purchasing YouTube Premium?

            • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              was an obvious attempt at humour

              One thing I’ve learned from my time here on Lemmy, never assume anything when you’re replying, be explicit, even bordering on legalese, when discussing with someone else here.

              People and conflict bots will nitpick the fact of things not said and use it against you.

              At the very least conclude your subtle joke comment with a /s, the universal signal for “please don’t yell at me, I was just joking around”.

  • z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    *Laughs with RSS feeds, Invidious redirects, Newpipe and Sponsorblock.

  • JoShmoe@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    Despite their wasted efforts, it just doesn’t matter. Circumventing all this is still too easy. Only the impatient are doomed.