Oh, cool; more reason to use Piped and Invidious lmao
Technology
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Honestly if I worked at YouTube and they asked me to implement this I'd quit.
Fuck youtube and fuck their ads, this shit is getting out of hand
God the ads are awful. If they start blocking apps like Vanced and Browsers like brave, i will make a PiHole. And they can never block it.
I think a pi hole dosen't work for youtube ads.
Piholes rely on blocking DNS requests to ad servers, but on youtube the servers that host the videos and the servers that host the ads are the same thing.
Unfortunately this is a question that comes up very often in the Pi-Hole community where the answer is always: no, a Pi-Hole cannot block YouTube ads.
This is because a pihole blocks at the DNS level and YouTube serves their ads from the YouTube.com domain. Block that and you lose full access to the site.
They recommend running either uBlock Origin alongside it and/or use apps such as newpipe for android and freetube for desktop.
That said, I will always recommend setting up a Pi-Hole if you're able to as the benefits of blocking trackers and ads from the entire network (which includes your cellphones, smart TVs, printers, IP cameras, etcetera) is definitely a good thing. Once set up it is 99% a "set it and forget it" kind of setup.
The big issue for me is the content to ad ratio is completely out of whack.
There's always the Revanced Project on Android. Honestly though, I've cut way back on YouTube after their algorithm started shoveling crap at me. Now it's hard to find genuinely informative videos. It's all "This guy got PERMANENT ORGASM FACE DISORDER Tears of the Kingdom" type videos, instead of ones on science, technology, and news.
Ever tried looking at youtube while in incognito mode? What's popular is a hellscape of lowbrow garbage that makes reality tv look downright erudite. I still like the site when it shows me all the channels I've curated, but otherwise, goddamn...
Yet another platform to boycott? Excellent!
Right! I'm enjoying all these FOSS alternatives lately. I really hope they're here to stay.
Knowing what I know about the costs of streaming video, I really want to know what the alternative is for a platform that can't just throw money down the drain. To my mind, there are only two options here - people watch ads (within reason, but 2 hour ads aren't resonable), or people pay YouTube (a la Premium).
If you want things for free, the only way to make that happen sustainably is ads right now. Donations simply will not work, especially for something with the costs that video incurs - to say nothing about being able to compensate creators for their time and effort.
Unpopular opinion: I like paying for YouTube Premium to get rid of ads and still make it possible for creators and YouTube to get paid and survive an keep offering me entertainment.
In addition you also get YouTube Music so no need to pay for Spotify. It might not have as good features but I listen to music specifically so I only search for what I want to listen to and don't want any algorithms anyway.
I pay for nebula, which is significantly cheaper and has a lot of creators that I am interested in supporting, plus extra content from them.
Yeah I think it's a good option for a lot of people.
As a counterpoint, I recommend watching Louis Rossman's take on why he recommends people pirate instead of paying for YouTube Premium. His general philosophy on things is that you should pay for things unless you're getting an inferior service to the pirates. In this case of YouTube Premium, he considers it restrictive enough (won't let him watch videos offline) that he cancelled his subscription and now recommends piracy.
My counterpoint to yours: YouTube Premium is not available in all countries.
Beyond that, I personally used YouTube Red for years until they killed Google Play Music. I was an avid user of GPM, had several playlists and radios tuned there, and when they announced the move to YT Music, I was hesitant but gave them until literally the last minute to add the features from GPM that didn't exist on YTM, but they never did.
I cancelled my YouTube Red subscription the day that the GPM app on my phone said it wouldn't work again, and on that day I swore I'd never pay YT another penny directly.
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.
Honestly, I pay for YouTube Premium because I find value in it. The price is reasonable for where I live, and it's my main source of entertainment. I don't like watching movies/TV shows that much so YouTube is my jam. So the convenience of being able to download videos, ad-free viewing, picture-in-picture, background playback etc. is totally worth it for me. I know if I dig hard enough and use an Android phone/tablet I can get those features without having to pay, but I don't like Android and again, the features are worth the small price.
For me, YouTube Premium and Spotify broke piracy because they're more convenient than pirating.
Call me lumberjack cause I wish a nigga wood pay for YouTube premium. With how many times YT tells me I’m not connected to the internet while my phone has a 3 bars of 5G (for whatever that’s worth) connection, hell naw I’m not paying for youtube premium. They move the goalpost way too often for what counts as “monetizable content” to the point that it’s neutering my favorite content creators to keep the lights on. TBH I’d rather pay Nebula