317 points
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Whatever happens on my browser is client side, which is hardware and software I own. I can make what I own do what I want. It’s a right.

It’s like Google saying that I can’t skim a magazine in my home, and that I must read the ads. Google can do what they want server-side, and I’ll do what I want client-side.

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99 points

They’re not saying you can’t have an adblocker. They’re saying their software will try not to serve you their data if you do, or at least make it inconvenient.

You have a right to your computer. You do not have a right to their service.

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73 points

That’s exactly what I said, yeah

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69 points

Me after reading the 1st comment: “OK. True. Fair.” Me after reading the 2nd comment: “OK. True. Fair.” Me after reading the 3rd comment: “OK. Also true. Also fair.”

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21 points

No, you don’t have a right to it. If they want to they can put the entire site being a subscriber paywall. That’s their call. But until they do that i will continue to access the site with my adblocked browser.

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11 points

You do have a right to your computer. After content is delivered to you, you have downloaded data, and your own hardware and software acts to consume said downloaded data. After it is downloaded, even if it is in a browser in a cache, it is considered offline content. This also applies to streaming media chunks, too: once it’s downloaded, you have acquired it locally.

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3 points

They don’t have the right to disregard my right to privacy either, yet here we are.

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3 points

Well… They do because it’s their tos, no?

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1 point

But their software is just blocking based on browser. Their message to you is not “don’t use an ad blocker”. It’s “use chrome and you won’t have this problem”. Theyre literally just hoping to abuse their position as a monopoly in video to try and strengthen their monopoly on browsers.

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1 point
*

Is that why I haven’t had any problems? I thought it was either Google A/B testing again or my ad blocker updating often enough to keep up, but I do have a user-agent changer installed in Firefox that’s configured to tell YouTube I’m on Chrome…

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56 points

And as a service provider, they can choose to degrade your experience. It goes both ways.

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74 points

Except they want to send you videos. The power is with you, the viewer. Without you, advertisers will have no reason for buying ads. Google can’t collect your data either. Realise that you have this power. Youtube is not like electricity or clean water. We can live without it if push comes to the shove.

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29 points

To be fair, what they want is to make money off of you, be it through metadata or through advertising. It’s just that sending you videos happens to be the model which they use to get the metadata or advertising income.

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26 points

They don’t want to send us videos, they want to serve us ads and annoy us into buying Youtube Premium, which someone using adblocker won’t see, or need. From their point of view they would win either way - if they successfully block adblockers it either converts us into ad watchers, premium subscribers, or we fuck off and stop using their bandwidth.

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6 points

You have no value to advertisers if they can’t serve you ads. By not doing so, they’ll also cut down on bandwidth costs, so it’s a double positive for them.

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15 points

Yep, they can send me 500s if they want to, too

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7 points

Technically 400s would be more appropriate here. :)

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9 points

If the service degrades to far due to using ad blockers then I’ll just stop watching anything on YouTube. Easy.

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25 points

Okay then. That was always allowed.

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18 points

Umm, ok. You were not making them any money before, when you were blocking their ads, why would they care if you left?

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20 points

Google can do what they want server-side

Sure, like not sending you videos. 🤔

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14 points

Client side DRM is coming.

They’re mostly there on Android already.

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14 points
*

You forgot to mention it’s also coming to all Chromium based browsers (i.e. Chrome, Edge, Brave, etc) as well in the form of ManifestV3

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5 points

Manifest V3 doesn’t really have the real client side DRM. It just has the ad-blocker breaking API changes. The real DRM will be whatever comes of the abandoned Web Environment Integrity API. (It’s not really abandoned just shifted over to only Android WebView.)

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1 point

Couldn’t they fork Brave and have both a current and a ManifestV3 version?

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10 points

That’s ok. Us nerds have been defeating DRM in its many forms for decades. This will be no different.

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4 points

Not really true for video games. Plenty of popular games still with uncracked denuvo…

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9 points

It’s called a “User Agent” for a reason.

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6 points
*

You can, but as a part of doing what they want serverside they can ask for some kind of proof you don’t have an adblocker on the server-side, you can reverse engineer that and spoof the checks and it becomes an arms race just like we have now… You’re effectively just saying the status quo is a-ok with you

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10 points
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I don’t personally enjoy the status quo, but they’re not obligated to serve me any videos if they don’t want to. However, if they have given me media to consume on my devices, it’s up to me to decide how I consume the media that was already delivered.

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2 points

Let’s just hope they don’t start injecting their ads into the video stream itself

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1 point
Deleted by creator
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162 points
*

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

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100 points

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

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65 points

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.

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15 points

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.

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3 points

Illegal to do…what? Not offer high-res videos? To have any delay before streaming videos? To refuse to serve you videos, even if doing so caused them to lose money? How would you enforce that on Google, much less on smaller startups? Would it apply to PeerTube instances?

Google sucks for doing this. It’ll drive people to competitors–hopefully even federated competitors. But laws to ‘fix’ the problem would be nearly impossible to craft–and would be counterproductive in the long term, because they’d cement the status quo. Let Google suck, so that people switch away from it.

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10 points

Google is literally an ISP. They provide my internet service.

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3 points

Well, fair. But even in that case, they have every right to degrade your YouTube experience, as owners of YouTube. As ISP (I mean, assuming NN was still a thing) they couldn’t selectively degrade traffic, but YouTube has no obligation to you under net neutrality.

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1 point

Thank you

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50 points

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.

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-35 points

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

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23 points
*

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?

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12 points

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

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8 points

What’s scammy or criminal about doing a Google search?

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1 point

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

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38 points
*

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.

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-28 points

DAE nET nEUtrAliTY?!?!

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142 points

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.

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40 points
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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.

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32 points
*

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 …

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2 points
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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.

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1 point

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

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0 points
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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

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132 points

Well that’s only fair.

It already made it worse for non-adblock users.

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14 points

You had me in the first half. Ngl

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13 points

I’m 3 hours late to make this same joke

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5 points

Sadly it’s not a joke.

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122 points

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…

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i am more worried about the old videos wipe thats coming soon

Sooo many peoples uploaded memories and documentaries are going to becone lost forever

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18 points

Wait, what?

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11 points

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.

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13 points

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)

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-1 points

10-hour plus loops of the same song over and over again that nobody watches.

I tend to fall asleep to one of those videos of being on the beach with ocean sounds, so /shrug.

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9 points
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They aren’t wiping videos.

From a literal 5 second Google search: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/is-youtube-deleting-old-videos-1234737099/

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5 points

Wait what?

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4 points

Who’s going to wipe the old videos?

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8 points

Google’s going to delete inactive google accounts. So if you see a channel whose last upload was six years ago, there’s a good chance it’s about to be deleted

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7 points

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.

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3 points

I’m not getting that many ads. Could I see the new interface?

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