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
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?
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.
Pretty sure most YouTubers and streamers will tell you exactly that. Sponsorships and brand deals make them way way more
I have a small channel (5k) and YouTube ads make about 40% of what I earn.
Because they think that they’ll be YouTube superstars one day, and we’re stopping them
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
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.
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.
really funny to me that it’s now been split into parts on the scroll bar
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
The ads themselves are not a problem. The problems are
- It can be security risk. Even Google has ads that redirect to malicious domain
- 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.
- The frequency is just way too much. This leave no money on table mentality makes me not give a shit.
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
Remember when people just uploaded videos to YouTube for fun instead of money?
Not really going to get into it with you, because you clearly have your mind made up, but you pretty much nailed why at the end.
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
People spend a lot of time and money making videos these days. They aren’t just random low quality things. They have teams of sometimes hundreds, use cameras worth half a million dollars, and may take a week or month to record said video while paying those hundreds of employees.
Again, not going to change your mind, Lemmy is very open about not giving a shit about others when it comes to money, but it’s not 2006 anymore, and people need to make their money back AND pay their employees.
Personally I’m fine watching a few ads to support the content I clearly want to watch. Seems weird you’d be interested enough in what someone has to show you, but refuse to help them in any way, but whatever.
Remember guys, don’t forget to hit the downvote button if you haven’t already. How dare I say anything positive that isn’t just “fuck ads, fuck YouTube, fuck everyone!”
Don’t worry, you didn’t need it.
Lemmy losers click downvote the millisecond anyone says something positive about anything non-FOSS, or a bigger corporation. You already clicked that button, just like you’ve already downvoted this one.
people need to make their money back AND pay their employees.
that’s very much a “them” problem. if i don’t want to watch ads, you won’t guilt me into it.
Tell me how to filter all that highly polished crap from my feed and searches, because I don’t want it. I hate all that shit being shoved at me. If I wanted to watch someone spouting bad takes with a highly polished commercial-friendly veneer, I’d watch cable. I hate all those monetized channels, and they can all go under for all I care, along with that entire hellsite. Then more people would support actually good non-monetized projects like peertube.
Even if what I’m doing is stealing, it’s a good thing. Can’t wait for YouTube’s demise. It’s not a fun site to use anymore because all the good non-monetized content gets buried in favor of these soul-sucking assholes.
I don’t even click people’s links anymore, because it’s always some rich bearded white male with the most painful content.
If they use all that stuff to shoot the video, it means they already made it or they spent money they shouldn’t have.
I didn’t mind getting a handful of ads an hour, i do mind that i now get like 20 minutes to watch some youtube because adulting sucks and Youtube is like: swallow these 7 ads bitch, guess what bitch we forgot we showed you 7 have some more cunt and now my 20 minutes is fucked, so i say: time for Youtube to get bent.
If what i hear is right, they are and have been operating in the red for a long time. Half of their creators are better business people than they are.
If they use all that stuff to shoot the video, it means they already made it or they spent money they shouldn’t have.
Pretty clear you’ve never owned a business. You have to invest money to start it.
If you feel that way, you should really be paying for YouTube premium, since that actually gives more money to the creators you watch than ads would. That’s the one thing that sold me on it.
I agree with your thought process but supporting YouTube by paying for it after they intentionally enshitified it to the point where you want to is the entire problem.
Use an adblocker and donate directly to creators. If someone needs to steal my time to afford to run their business, then they can’t afford to run their business.
Honestly it doesn’t seem to take very long at all. I watched live as the insurrectionists attempt to overturn democracy in the US during their failed auto-coup on January 6th less than 3 years ago.
Though there was some “it’s not real” talk in the immediate aftermath the idea that it was a false flag, antifa, not an insurrection, not a big deal, just tourists having an afternoon scroll, etc. seems to be growing.
I wonder why the “left wing radical Democrat antifa operatives engaging in a false flag attack to make Trump look bad” marched under banners with Trump’s name, admitted they were doing it for Trump, in some cases ran for office on the Republican ticket, and are actively being protected by Republican politicians.
Pretty astonishing when the whole thing was basically live streamed. I member watching it as it happened
Watching terrorist Ashli Babbitt get shot from multiple angles, then seeing comments from Trumpers like:
- She’s a hero
- She’s a false flag
- She’s not actually dead
- She didn’t do anything wrong
And this is barely two years. Going to bet a decade from now, the misinformation will be worse.
Fun to consider, if these were BLM protestors doing the exact same thing, they would be cheering the loudest.
A recent Behind the Bastards on Alex Jones (part 1) has recordings of Info Wars from January 6 - before Jones had had a chance to call in and tell them to shut the fuck up before they got noticed as being complicit
It’s funny (and scary) hearing them being like, “It’s all happening! The second American Revolution is underway! The Patriots have control of the Capitol!”
Jones quickly learned that he needs his listeners to be “panic-adjacent” rather than actually in panic mode. Panicking people don’t buy brain pills.
It was a near immediate campaign to convince people not to believe their lying eyes and ears. I think deep down, the spin doctors know that they’re lying though.
Oh, is it time for that Sartre quote again?
“Never believe that [they] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. [They] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
Same thing in Canada with the fucker convoy in Ottawa. Traitors tried to overthrow a democratically elected government, literal fascists were present and Ottawa was held captive by these morons. Conservatives attempt to frame it as fake and a party. Fuck them.
The hell? None of what you just said happened. There were a lot of attempts to make that seem so. Remember the rash of police chiefs resigning and that bullshit with the stolen semi full of guns from a cop shop? The only literal fascists there were the fucking cops you clown.
I was sitting in a control room at work while it was happening and all the conservative coworkers I had were saying “Look at all those Antifa’s pretending to be Trump supporters!”
I’m glad I left that job…
Well, see, the mistake was expecting any of this to make sense. They gave up on even pretending to make sense a long time ago, it is all Gish galloping away now - because, as long as you say the Magic Keywords that make people’s brains make with the angry chemicals, it doesn’t actually necessarily matter what else you say.
I find the opposite more annoying. If your memory of those events is accurate there’s plenty of things to point to to back it up.
But then you have older people like my father who…I don’t know, something has completely rewritten their memories of significant events to the point where he claims many things happened differently than verifiable recorded history. It’s impossible to argue with that because of him seeing me pointing out that’s not true as an attack and accusing him of lying.
My favorite was arguing with a much older (late 70s) friend of my dad’s about how Obama ruined the economy and stock market, and when I told him that was objectively not true and the GFC was in full swing well before Obama was even elected, he was like “I know because I owned stocks and stuff, how would you even know?” Even when I pulled up a graph of the S&P 500 and showed the days he was elected and sworn in, he just said “Oh, that can’t be right, the graph must be wrong”. Showing the DOW and other composites from multiple sources did nothing to convince him. He was absolutely positive his retirement fund was doing great up until Obama was elected.
Yes Jerry, I’m sure that the entire stock market was just wrong, and it’s not the fact you consume nothing but FOX News and will only refer to the 44th president as “The N*gger” potentially causing a bit of bias.
something has completely rewritten their memories of significant events to the point where he claims many things happened differently than verifiable recorded history.
That’s what they want you to think.
Sadly, “they” has shifted from “the gubment” to “the Jews”.
It was weird to read about protests that I attended that were completely different from my experience. That was the first time I realized that no one in the media necessarily eventually gets the story right.
What would you think if your parents say it’s time to put you up for adoption every time you get into an argument? What a fucking weird thing to get upset over and think of throwing your parents away just because of an argument
Educating a child and arguing about things is one of the most normal things in the world. Dealing with an adult who refuses to acknowledge objective reality is a sign of mental decline. These two things are not the same.
Fr it adult homes make sense for people without children or problematic families, but how can you take a person who has raised you and showered you with love and stick him in a glorified hospital?
Or maybe someone rewrote the books. I’ve long had a suspicion a lot of the Mandela effect is just people with long memories who missed the propaganda rewrite.
I find it strange that people somehow mistrust all of the news and history of today but think the very same news sources and historians of the past were somehow accurate.
The news is written in a hurry. History is written with perspective. Both are drawing upon the same sources in the modern era except the history has more time to cross reference them. It is only natural that we get a better, clearer version of history as time and research is allowed to work on it.
I’m convinced humans have some kind of natural inherent fetishization of “old knowledge”.
If it happened outside of living memory they somehow knew more or had special magical knowledge we just don’t understand or can’t interpret from our perspective. The older, the more true people can be convinced that it is.
As if there is some kind of “platonic ideal” of thoughts or ideas from which all others are derived from, where the further back something back it is, it MUST be more true
I really hope this is just missing the /s at the end.
But in case it isn’t…
Which is more likely? That all the media outlets have gone through all of their records and replaced them with different records and all the books out there have been trashed and replaced with new books saying different things and the internet has been scrubbed of all of the real stories and photos and replaced with fake ones? Or that a few misguided people, who weren’t paying very close attention in the first place, misremembered an event?
As an early GenX whose been online since the BBS days this happens all the time but honestly the historical revisionism isn’t main problems, it’s the loss of context around the history.
Well, traditional news sources have lowered the bar enough that social media isn’t really much worse in a lot of cases. Especially considering how many “news” there is about social media content; it makes it seem that something like Twitter is the “source” that the news is citing. The lines have been blurred, seemingly intentionally so it’s hard to blame people for not having a good barometer who grew up in an ecosystem of generalized enshitification.
I think of it this way. Me, my father and my grandfather all read the newspaper the same way. We all went to the store with cash in our pockets. We all talked to bank clerks. Another thing is that there were a lot more historic dramas when we were coming up. Old style candle stick phones and telegraph operators were a common trope.
You want some context around history…go listen to Dan Carlins Hardcore History.
I still remember the so-called Greatest Generation and Silent Generation falling in love with Reagan, combined with Baby Boomer hedonistic indifference, resultng in liberal Democrats getting ripped to shreds at the ballot box. As an adapt-or-die reaction to Bernie-style Democrats getting electorally decimated in the 80s and 90s, the Democratic Party shifted to the center… and republicans got batshit insane with AM radio and 24-hour propaganda television.
Recent history has showed me in real time how it takes several elections to smash something down… or build something up. Yet there are too many people who seem to believe that one single election is a magic wand that can cure every goddamned evil in politics and society. And if they don’t get what they want, they don’t vote again, or they tune out entirely - “there were elections? I didn’t notice” - constantly putting Democrats in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
Case in point of Democrats getting bold: LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act into law, and the country got Nixon twice. Democrats lost the entire south electorally for generations, to this day and beyond.
Also, Democrats have to deal with hysterical and/or opportunistic right wing shitheads who abuse their power to sabotage every policy proposal, or even the normal functioning of the government at every level, pointless government shutdowns that paralyze the entire apparatus, including day-to-day essentials like teachers and park rangers.
Fascist bastards who enjoy flirting with visions of dictatorship… as long as they’re the dictator. Who are constantly looking for ways to subvert democracy. Nixon, Cheney, the orange intestinal parasite.
This is the math Democrat politicians have to work with whenever making a far-reaching decision.
Complicating the hellish job even further, there’s all those fickle, cherry-picking oh-so-pure voters who demand being catered to instantly and get their “knowledge” from twitter, a noisy drag on the equation.
Since the 90s, the right wing bastards have perfected the dark art of exploiting 24-hour mass media to keep people rabidly ignorant, to divide and conquer with a “politics for idiots” mantra that bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe.
I saw it all happen in real time.
LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act into law, and the country got Nixon twice. Democrats lost the entire south electorally for generations, to this day and beyond.
Does Georgia mean nothing to you? 😭 We trying.
I wonder what’ll break the cycle? If we do nothing, we are collectively doomed.
I think things will change for the better when all the people who breathed lead for a large portion of their early lives are all dead.
I feel ya, but I also feel like we should at least discuss a plan b just in case it wasn’t solely the lead…
I get this every time someone says “both sides are the same!” Like, I’ve watched who’s started basically every major military conflict in my life, who keeps cutting taxes for the rich and who keeps gutting social programs that would benefit the poor, who keeps trying to remove rights and prevent others from getting the rights they’re owed, who’s tanked the deficit and brought this country to near financial collapse multiple times, etc.
It’s like accelerated around politics in general though. People will still foam at the mouth about how all of the accusations against Trump are just a psyop to bring down their one true god. Meanwhile, he’s standing there holding a selfie cam like “what’s up my true believers, I totally did every single thing they said and I’d do it again twice with your mother and Jesus himself watching.” People out there still saying Trump isn’t a rapist after not only a court of law found him to be one, and -literally everyone has heard a tape of him telling you exactly how to do sex crimes.- But it’s like that for everything. Republicans are just straight up saying shit right into the microphone, and then 30 seconds later pretending like it’s never happened.