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Crappy Design @sh.itjust.works

Sabre363 @sh.itjust.works

2y ago

Hey Google, go fuck yourself entirely

50 comments

This is when you're supposed to use the FOSS alternatives
https://invidious.io/
https://newpipe.net/
https://freetubeapp.io/
Me personally because I don't have a Google account nor saw a real gain in getting one (for what I do in my day to day), I just switched to these for subscriptions.
- arent thpse just frontends?
  
  Yep, without the need of a Google acc. No shitty ads, more functionality, and they're typically more customizable :p
- +to that. However I haven't found proper alternative yet.
  I got so used that dump algorithm that at least 40% of times recommends what I'm actually interested at, that it feels so hard to go back to watch unordered vids
  Newer content is still lacking on alternatives. Like coding tutorials or documentaries etc.
  On the other hand I found many old forgotten internet classics on these alternative sites like old ads and funny clips that we used to watch at 240p back in the day.
  
  Point one hits home. It's nice that I can look through my feed but I also want to find new stuff and piped is not giving me that. I still use it in case my yt account gets banned lol
- You should also start looking into libredirect, an extension to route your youtube traffic to invidious instances
  
  I'll look into that ^^ thanks friendo

Me personally, I didn't mind ads back in the day when they weren't so annoying. But somehow YouTube + content creators made ads so annoying at some point that I started to use ad blocker and sponsor skipper.
My theory is that by becoming so aggressive with ads , YouTube income / video actuallly decreased due to people getting fed up with ads and getting ad blockers. Now they go even more aggressive so people will start to look for alternatives.
It'll be interesting to see following development.
- That's when my family asked me to set up adblockers.
  It used to be a single 30 second ad but skippable.
  It's now 2 ads skippable, then ads randomly injected into a video. A ten min video can have twelve ads. Defenders say "Oh the content maker sets those features."
  Of which I say, "Bet. Gonna block them, find a new revenue stream because the next stage is pirating your shit."
- Exactly this. They made their bed, they can lay in it

You know what annoys me the most about this?
I looked up the price of Premium. It's not great but not too bad either. I hate subscription services so I thought "I'll just buy the annual plan"
Google doesn't offer the Family Annual plan in my region. Only Individual Annual.
Fucks sake Google! If I'm trying to give you money, the least you could have done is make it easy!

If ads weren't riddled with malware or absolutely obnoxious...
Browsing without an ad blocker is cancer
- Hey, remember when you could see more than a single line of text of an article on mobile? Me neither.
  
  Time to use Firefox mobile with ublock origin
  
  Yeah, just a second ago. Probably, something to do with Firefox. Anyway, articles these days are becoming superficial. What could be said in a few words takes an entire paragraph for some reason. Writer's skills are on a downward trend recently. Not liking it

This is less "crappy design" and more "asshole design"

I'm somewhat surprised it took so long after they took over YouTube.
Might cause some surprising competition hopefully
- Who is going to be competing for the eyeballs of people who militantly refuse to watch ads? I'd love to see YouTube have competition, but I don't think the demographic here is particularly valuable to anyone.
  
  Same with lemmy. Who cares about us? Seems to be working somewhat tho.
  Issue with videohosting is filesizes, bandwiths, and the gigantic archive.
  That's why I said surprising competition: no, it wouldn't be from a big typical tech company.
  I think you're wrong on the value of the demographic: there are definitely ways, sectors etc where a small group of relatively tech savvy, ad-hating, very critical, neckbearded, moob carrying people is more valuable than a large mob of typical yay-saying consumers. I'ld even say it's the kind of niche demographic that made reddit big in the first place.

I saw this, hit the X to close that pop-up and continued on as usual. Just me?
- The X works fine for me. Great design.
- AFAIK they start counting strikes after a while. After 3 of them, you are banned off Youtube. Edit: I was wrong. It just disables video playback.

I'll be that guy and say this isn't crappy design and shouldn't be in this community. We've already got posts filling top of all we don't need more where they don't belong.
- I would argue that pop-ups like this are an intentionally crappy design meant to be frustrating and get in the way. But, I understand what your saying, this is perhaps not the best suited community for this post.
  
  I think the difference here is I view "crappy design" as something badly made or poorly executed. What you describe I would consider to be "asshole design": perfectly well-made, but with bad intentions. I can see why you would have the different definition though, and considering the Reddit subs had a lot of these same definition issues it's not surprising they continue here.
- yeah, this is a policy OP doesn't like, not bad design

this is asshole design
- Please explain.

Everyone needs to sign out on desktop if you’re using Ublock origin bypass. This whole TOS thing could be grounds to start going after your account they don’t achieve the outcome they’re looking for
- Then I'll just make another account . . . with blackjack and hookers.

Thankfully it isn't hard to remove with ublock origin. Just enter Element picker mode and select the pop up to remove it. Then do the same for the greyed out background & it'll work normally.

Only ever watch YouTube via SmartTubeNext. Ad free for free. Fuck you Google.

If they manage to kill ReVanced I'm done with YouTube. I'll subscribe to Nebula or something.
- Use Invidious! No ads, no username required, no reporting to YouTube, Sponsorblock can be used, and you still get unlimited access to YouTube's content. There are dozens of instances, but inv.tux pizza usually works for me.
  I know that Nebula has exclusive infotainment, but sometimes I just want to watch people be bad at video games.
  
  I feel like this might be blasphemous around here, but I actually like being logged in and getting tailored algorithmic suggestions on YouTube. Unlike most people it seems to know my interests pretty well.

I need YouTube like I need another barium enema.

They really think this will work, don't they?

I use Firefox and have uBlock Origin installed. I block ALL cookies from YouTube and Google and other Google sites. I am not signed into any Google properties and I have not seen an ad for over 10+years. I never use an app or mobile and use only a desktop on Linux.
Google will not win over products like uBlock Origin because, it's NOT an ad blocker, it's an element blocker. It allows the user to remove annoyances, and that sometimes includes ads.
The only way Google will get to force ads on people is if they REQUIRE you to sign in to it's services and force cookies on you. It will have to be a walled garden. Meta, Xitter, bluesky, reddit, will all eventually go to the walled garden because they are greedy. Users will leave and the Fediverse will grow.
People are fed up with ads and all the "improvements" that sites like YouTube make. Ambient mode, auto play, end cards, notations, all unnecessary. And we block it with element blockers.
- I don't think the Fediverse can really provide an alternative to YouTube. The infrastructure required for the amount of data constantly being served and processed is prohibitly expensive.
  
  Maybe not today, and never at the scale that YouTube is right now (that's not a bad thing), but never say never.
  5 years ago no one saw a psychopath buying and actively destroying Xitter.
  Technology changes quickly. It won't be long until 10TB HDDs are standard fare, 8G is everywhere, electric cars are 40% of the market etc.
  Anything is a possibility and humans get smarter and more innovative. I know this because humans can carry a small computer in their pockets.
- Do you leave the house? Or just take your desktop with you?
  
  I don't need to watch videos when I'm not home. And I prefer a real screen.

This is a long time coming. Who in their right mind thought that a service that allows pretty much anyone to upload gigabytes of videos would be free forever. I get that people don't like ads, but the amount of outrage is overkill.
- It’s less about not liking ads and more that the ads are plagued with scams, spam and whatever else.
  Don’t we think that they should be held accountable for the type of ads they run on there? Crypto scams, get rich quick, and mlms to name a few.
  The same goes for the MSN homepage it’s fucking ridiculous.
  Also, if they want to serve me ads, then stop selling my data too. If I sign up for premium they’ll still sell your data anyway.
  I am not really in a place where I would want to defend billion dollar companies.

50 comments