this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Microblog Memes

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[–] [email protected] 179 points 11 months ago (30 children)

My "favorite" lecture from young people is the one in which they berate me for "stealing content" by not watching ads on YouTube.

I have a vivid memory of YouTube being a platform where normal people could share videos of their kids and pets or other fun random low quality but entertaining things

[–] Beefytootz 79 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I don't understand why they think we care if we're stealing content regardless. I pirate movies and TV shows, but they don't whine about that, in fact, most will approve of it. Why draw the line at YouTubers?

[–] rtxn 55 points 11 months ago (6 children)

They often say that we're screwing the person who runs the channel. In reality, I'm willing to bet my left nutsack that they make a fuckton more from the occasional donations than from ads, once Google, MCNs, and the government take their share.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Pretty sure most YouTubers and streamers will tell you exactly that. Sponsorships and brand deals make them way way more

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

One of my random channels I watch straight up tells people to use adblocks and don't give YouTube a cent.

[–] Holyhandgrenade 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Patreon and merch sales are also make them money.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

And if you liked this, make sure to check out my online course where I do a deep dive of whatever this channel is about. Use code ENTHUSIASTICABOUTTHISTOPIC20 at checkout for 20% off!

[–] jaybone 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

How many nutsacks do you have? I keep all of mine in one.

[–] rtxn 4 points 11 months ago

As many as I need for redundancy.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Because they think that they'll be YouTube superstars one day, and we're stopping them

[–] Anticorp 57 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

YouTube has increased the amount of ads that used to be standard by about 1000%. You used to get about 22-26 minutes of actual content per 30 minutes of viewing. On YouTube it's about 2 minutes of advertising per 0.5-3 minutes of viewing. The majority of the things I watch on YouTube are short 30 second videos to see specific things, but Google seems to think it's okay to show me 2-3 minute long commercials before letting me see the 30 second blurb telling me the foot pounds per square inch I need to apply to my brake calipers before I can finish my brake change job. This is even more annoying now that Google doesn't surface this type of information on regular websites, where I can just quickly read the spec.

TLDR: fuck Google and fuck ads

[–] postmateDumbass 8 points 11 months ago

Google thought process includes how many page views you will go thru before showing you the page with the answer.

[–] son_named_bort 27 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It feels like YouTube has become the new Hollywood with production companies and YouTubers becoming celebrities and whatnot. Such a far cry from it's beginnings as a place where people would upload random family videos that nobody watched.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Literally the first video posted was one of the creators in a selfie video at the zoo. That's the YouTube I want back. That's what it was meant to be.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

here it is

really funny to me that it's now been split into parts on the scroll bar

[–] Anticorp 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The family members watched them, which was good enough for the person uploading it. Not everything needs to be about money and exposure. Ugghh! K.k kill me.

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[–] Pogbom 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

I have an honest question and I feel like Lemmy is a good place to have a real discussion on this. To preface this, I use adblock too so I'm kinda calling myself a hypocrite with this question :P

Why do we expect any free service not to have ads? If a paid service like Netflix introduced ads I'd be pissed, and same goes for cable TV these days. But why would something free like Youtube not have ads? How can we be bothered by ads on a service we're getting for free?

Someone help me reconcile this for my own well-being haha.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago

Ads arent inherently the problem. The problem is that the user experience often gets ruined because, for example, on certain news sites every paragraph of text you read, you get a full page ad. Imo when its like this its fully acceptable to not let them have limited revenue from you.

[–] grue 19 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Why do we expect any free service not to have ads?

Youtube has the right to serve ads along with the content, but it does not have the right to dictate what I can or can't do with the data once it hits my machine. It has no more right to hijack my property to force them upon me than it does to strap me to a chair and force my eyes open, A Clockwork Orange style.

If Youtube doesn't like that arrangement, its recourse is to serve a 403: forbidden instead of the video data.

There's also a deeper discussion to be had whether corporations have any sort of right to exist in their current form in the first place, but I'll leave that for another time.

[–] CurlyMoustache 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Is is like muting during a commercial break, or going out of the room to do something else. What happens in my home, is under my control. You want to stop me from doing that? Refuse to serve me content. I'm fine with that

[–] paintbucketholder 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's like flipping over the ad pages in a magazine. It's like taking the advertisement brochures out of a newspaper and throwing them into the trash. It's like leaving the room during halftime break. It's like taping a show without the commercial breaks. It's like walking past a poster without reading it. It's like getting your letters from the mailbox and throwing away the advertising mailers. It's like going to the cinema and talking during the ads that are playing before the movie. It's like walking down the sidewalk and ignoring the people trying to sell you merchandise. It's like switching channels when commercials come on.

But for some reason, people are trying to tell me that I'm ethically and morally in the wrong for blocking fucking YouTube ads.

[–] divineslayer 4 points 11 months ago

Well said. I’ll remember this point next time blocking YouTube ads comes up in discussion.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You're asking someone who'd spent a good chunk of my life creating Skyrim mods for free and volunteering for services in my community with no recompense or desire for money how I expect people to contribute things they presumably enjoy without getting paid? To be clear, you're asking me this from a server on a federated platform that is held together with community love and free-will donations?

I know we've been conditioned by capitalism to reduce everything to its monetary worth, but I feel like we should know better here.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Fair point, but the instance I use doesn't allow image uploads because of the disk space issue. Videos take way more space than that. And, of course, you can't just slap in a single drive, you need RAID or something so when a drive fails, you don't lose stuff.

Add in bandwidth concerns, and it's a legitimate question. Hosting a general video site can't be cheap, and people generally won't pay for it.

If we did want a community run video hosting site ala Lemmy, how would that work? What would it cost the hosters?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

That's PeerTube. Idk what it's costing the hosts exactly, but my server is apparently bringing in enough in donations to be viable.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

To add on to what the others have said, there should always be competition between free and paid services. Free services should provide only what they are capable of with the limitations they operate under due to a donation model, while paid services can use all the advantages they can get with advertising, big budgets for hosting, etc. Free and open-source often still won under these conditions. Think Encarta against Wikipedia. If paid wins, that's fine, people can still have a reasonably good alternative with the free option.

The problem arises when a corporation builds on the back of a free resource, and then starts charging users once the network effects kick in. With YouTube, Google was able to leaverage 20 years worth of videos that people lovingly uploaded (although 10 of those years were in the post-ad plagued world) and then start forcing people to bend to their monetization rules. Most of those people didn't upload to YouTube because they wanted to make money off their videos, they just wanted to share a funny video. If given the choice, they would have chosen free instead of ad-driven. We have no choice since all that content is now locked behind YouTube's ad walls.

[–] TheBat 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The ads themselves are not a problem. The problems are

  1. It can be security risk. Even Google has ads that redirect to malicious domain
  2. Ads that are getting in the way of accessing information. That includes popups, automatically playing videos etc. Hell, one of the major reason why I started using adblock was to block those annoying flash banners.
  3. The frequency is just way too much. This leave no money on table mentality makes me not give a shit.
[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Now it's so commercialized that I'm not posting anything on YouTube anymore, simply because I know that I'm going to get so many emails about how my video of me building a Lego set or whatever, violated some new social taboo that was invented 5 minutes ago, and how they are going to send the YouTube police after me to send me to the shadow Realm

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I would like to watch this video of you building a Lego set

[–] Agrivar 3 points 11 months ago

Me too, sounds relaxing! Maybe set to some chill music?

[–] Agrivar 3 points 11 months ago

Really? I still randomly upload videos of me gaming, sometimes with background music, but no titles or voice-overs and I never get any comments or emails. I must not be offending people correctly.

[–] CurlyMoustache 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Never understood that idea of thought. I decide what happens in my machine and my browser

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Lol, I've got a friend that likes to tell me how his YouTube Red subscription pays for his favorite streamers' bills.

Like... Just give those people the money directly. Why pay Google the lions share? I guess some people just enjoy the taste of boot. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[–] nl4real 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Remember when people just uploaded videos to YouTube for fun instead of money?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I miss that time so much. I feel like Tik Tok wouldn't have become so popular if YouTube hadn't become the monetized abomination it is now.

[–] SCB 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I have a vivid memory of YouTube being a platform where normal people could share videos of their kids and pets or other fun random low quality but entertaining things

this is now TikTok. YouTube hasn't been that platform for a long time, since at least Vine.

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