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- cross-posted to:
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So many corporate bootlickers here, damn.
It’s like they think the only way to make money is to drown us in ads based off the telemetry they scoop up and we’re entitled brats for wanting to have a say in how our data is harvested/used against us.
That’s their business model. Drowning us in ads is literally how they make money. They aren’t a tech company. They’re an ad aggregation company. They collect data via having users use freemium services. They use that data to create anonymized profiles of millions or billions of people. They break those profiles down into subsets. And then they let ad companies buy the ability for Google to target those users with ads based on things they’re likely to buy based on the data that Google has collected. It’s a much more effective way of marketing ads than just playing ad spots on tv or on radio. Better than billboards and magazine spreads etc. That’s literally what Google (and Apple, and Amazon even) do. It’s what Facebook does. It’s what most social media does. Their tech? Just a way to get you to buy into an ecosystem so you continue to feed the profile and the algorithm and see the ads.
I’m sorry but with all do respect I do not need you to lecture me about how big data dovetails with digital marketing or the B2B side of it for google, thanks.
You don’t like the fact that they make money by showing you ads? Take your business somewhere else. You’re the one who agreed to the terms of service.
At the point where you’re using an adblocker I’d say you’re capable of researching other means to avoid ads on any platform where you don’t want them, paid or free. There’s work-arounds for this problem. Multiple of them. Including using another extension to play just the video in a frame by itself where the adblocker still works, using piped or revanced or any of the other services that offer YouTube experiences without ads (floatplane, grayjay etc), or paying for the service.
As it stands the posts I see about solutions get basically no interaction while rage posts like this get thousands of comments and upvotes and bring with them a bunch of random misinformation. I feel like there’s just too many of these posts full stop.
You don’t like the fact that they make money by showing you ads? Take your business somewhere else.
YouTube has been profitable for years before they implemented these anti-adblock measures.
Where do their profits come from?
Stop and think for a second. Nothing I said is defending this move towards aggressively combating ad locking. I don’t think YouTube is the good guy in this scenario.
But on the other hand I am tired of people who don’t want solutions they just want to bitch. There’s almost a dozen of these posts on Lemmy alone about YouTube and their draconian new adblock punishing tactics. I don’t care if you’re upset. I care that you’re actively upvoting and sharing solutions for the people who want them.
I gave this person other options besides just “pay for it or quit YouTube”. That was on purpose.
Good day.
Where do their profits come from?
The rubes who don’t use adblockers and those who subscribe.
The point is that YouTube was profitable before implementing these anti-adblocking measures.
Nothing I said is defending this move towards aggressively combating ad locking.
You don’t like the fact that they make money by showing you ads? Take your business somewhere else.
Anyways man, have a good day. Gonna block you now.
I mean, no matter what, you do have a say. You can just not use YouTube. Pretty easy, actually.
That won’t prevent Google from scraping my data from every other website I use.
I’m not sure what that has to do with YouTube detecting ad blockers.
There’s a paid service though.
Like I get the sentiment, and I use YouTube with uBlock Origin to avoid paying, but if you’re not willing to pay and you’re not willing to watch ads what are you proposing?
I didn’t say they can’t serve any ads. I said they’re drowning us in them - which even then I could tolerate except all the data they mine from us is ridiculous. Then they use opaque terms to weaponize it back at us to make us into little addicts who can’t look away and/or sell it to third parties. I do not agree with that so I do everything I can to make my telemetry worthless or otherwise inaccessible.
This is a distinction that some defenders miss. A lot of people who use ad-blockers would be fine with ads if they were restrained and not too obtrusive. But the amount and frequency of ads only seem to increase. Something that would be difficult to justify, because time does not suffer inflation.
We went from 1 skippable 5 second ad per video to multiple ads every 10 minutes or so, sometimes even unskippable 15+ second ads or even more ads in a row. When is it going to be enough? Are we supposed to take them on their word that this is necessary, simply assuming that they need it because they don’t even share financial numbers? Is our only other option to pay up, once again, the amount that they decided is a fair compensation and also keep increasing?
Seems that at the very least some way for the users to negotiate what they believe is fair is lacking in this matter. On the lack of that, no wonder some people just decide they refuse to be squeezed forever.
And let’s be honest about who this is paying: Alphabet’s 2023 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.
Adversarial tech, like adblockers, is good. We should use it. If people want users to not want to use it, they should change the product so that we don’t want to use it.
It’s not illegal for me to use an ad blocker and it should never become illegal.
But the amount and frequency of ads only seem to increase. Something that would be difficult to justify, because time does not suffer inflation.
I mean time doesn’t, but cost of ads can be cheaper due to competition and then because lots of people use adblockers they need to push more ads on those who don’t block it, really not hard to justify, plus they are a publicly owned company which means they will always suffer from the same problems every other publicly traded company does under capitalism, having to keep growing forever with ever increasing quarterly profits.
Seems that at the very least some way for the users to negotiate what they believe is fair is lacking in this matter. On the lack of that, no wonder some people just decide they refuse to be squeezed forever.
I mean, you can literally just not use the platform, that’s your negotiating power, but you don’t want that, nor ads, nor paying for it, you want it for free, I mean, I don’t blame you for it, I want shit for free too, who doesn’t, just not how the world works at the moment.
If you want to be this cynical about it I can only tell you one thing: the world does work like that, because people can get away with it and they do.
Yeah corporations can decide to sell our time, eyeballs and data for smaller and smaller fractions of a penny without asking us. Because clearly it isn’t about what is fair and equitable, it’s not about making sure every party gets what they deserve, it’s about what they can get away with.
Considering how much tech companies get away with, if anyone wants to moralize over not giving them what they demand, I can only laugh.
I mean they asked you, they told you the exact amount they won’t do that for, you don’t want to pay it, so they engaged you in a weapons race of adblockers vs adblocker detectors.
the world works like that because that’s how the world works currently, because that’s the point of evolution we are at, we haven’t yet moved past the capitalist system.
Because clearly it isn’t about what is fair and equitable, it’s not about making sure every party gets what they deserve, it’s about what they can get away with.
are we still talking about fucking youtube videos or did the conversation somehow changed to be about access to drinking water? damn bro, it’s youtube, a time-sink platform, you don’t need it to live
They themselves are creating ZERO content. It’s the users who are creating content.
I paid for paid for premium for a while. Then it showed me an ad for paramount + anyways. So I said fuck you google and installed an ad blocker.
Point being I was willing and did pay for the premium service. But even “ad free with premium” still wasn’t ad free. It was “ad reduced”
There are stil ads with the paid service as i understand it.
The existence of the paid offering doesn’t invalidate use of the free offering, regardless of whether people are permitting ads on the latter. Any given Youtube page is just a collection of web elements and a call to a video server: these things get loaded or blocked at my sole discretion. My hardware, my web browser, my internet bandwidth, my opsec, my time.
If I put household items out on the nature strip, I have no expectation that passers-by will have a cup of tea with me first, then take every item as an indivisible lot. So my proposal to Google is: take those items off the nature strip, put them back inside the house and lock the door. Until they do that, no issue exists, despite the company’s efforts to fabricate one.
I cannot get ad-free experience with YT Premium. I can only get ad-free videos bundled with a whole bunch of other useless shit I will never use like YT Music. And the simple reason why I cannot get only ad-free videos is because then I would pay them less, so they don’t give me the option.
I’ve recently been downvoted to oblivion for writing this exact thing, talking about online newspapers.
People don’t want ads and they don’t want to pay. They just expect to get stuff for free and I can’t decide if that’s because Lemmy is either filled with spoiled brats, or people who genuinely do not know how the world works, or both.
In their partial defence, I must say that the way companies have used the Internet up until a few years ago may have led them to believe that free content is a thing.
And, before someone comes along and tries to tear me a new one, YES, I do use uBlock on sites that harvest too many data (e.g. anything by Google) or sites that are too aggressive with ads. But at least I know that I’m either a freeloader or, in the best case scenario, a protester. And I know that, if everyone did the same, so much of the internet would just shut down or go behind paywalls.
lol you got downvoted for a perfectly reasonable question, it’s like Reddit all over again
In the second quarter of 2023, Google’s revenue amounted to over 74.3 billion U.S. dollars, up from the 69.1 billion U.S. dollars registered in the same quarter a year prior.
But man if we don’t pay for youtube premium how will they survive?
The amount of money they made is entirely meaningless without knowing their spending.
Revenue isn’t profit?
that’s google not youtube though, is it? i think youtube is running at a loss still + in a normal country that shit should have been blasted apart already way too many shit is under google.
I think they have pretty recently finally become profitable thanks to the increased amount of ads. Although you could always make the argument before that the data YouTube provides to Google that allowed their ad and data empire to thrive is invaluable whether YouTube directly profits or not.
why would it be invaluable? I am guessing it’s valuable amd is valued at a very close estimate at least.
Invaluable
adjective
beyond calculable or appraisable value; of inestimable worth; priceless:
Why are people down voting you? Damn there’s an infestation of corp simps here
the richest country in the world is a normal country regardless of your xenophobia
I’ll say it again: Google pays 5-year-old “influencers” millions of dollars. They have always harvested your data to provide these free services - selling ads was just icing. They still harvest your data and sell ads and they still make the same money they’ve always made - only now they are insisting that everyone watch ads or pay for it as well. And of course, eventually YouTube will insist that you watch ads and pay for it. This is the equivalent of “network decay” for streaming services. This is unreasonable and while there are exceptions to the rule, most people have the same reaction to what Google is doing here: surprise, and dismay, if not outright anger and disgust.
Yet every single thread about it on the Internet is utterly overflowing with people lecturing us about how we shouldn’t expect something for nothing, as if we aren’t fully aware that this is the most transparent of straw men. These people insist that we are the problem for daring to block ads - and further - that we should be thrilled to pay Google for this content, as they are. And they are! They just can’t get enough of paying Google for YouTube! It’s morally upright, it’s the best experience available and money flows so freely for everyone these days, we should all be so lucky to be able to enjoy paying Google the way they do. And of course it’s all so organic, these comments.
Suggest that Google pays people to engage this narrative, however, and you will be derided and downvoted into oblivion as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac. This comment itself is virtually guaranteed to be responded to with a patronizing sarcastic and 100% organic comment about how lol bruh everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.
selling ads was just icing
You’re talking about these as if they’re separate things. Literally no company in existence harvests your data for any reason other than to serve better ads or to drive business decisions internally. Nobody gives a shit about your data otherwise. Ads are literally the only reason.
as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac
I mean… If the shoe fits, man.
Ok, I’ll bite. Let’s assume Youtube follows your advice, and stops showing ads on YouTube. Data collection is the only source of revenue. How does YouTube make money on that data? Be specific please. Who is buying the data, and what is the buyer going to do the data besides show you a targeted ad?
Suggest that Google pays people to engage this narrative, however, and you will be derided and downvoted into oblivion as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac. This comment itself is virtually guaranteed to be responded to with a patronizing sarcastic and 100% organic comment about how lol bruh everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.
Oh hey you put this part in before being downvoted this time lmao. If you think it’s worth googles time to be astroturfing on fucking lemmy, you have a couple screws loose lmfao.
While I agree, you shouldn’t underestimate just how fucking cheap astroturfing services are, and how much easier it is to generate astroturfing posts using the plethora of LLMs out in the wild.
I still think it’s silly to think they’re doing that here, but it should be considered.
True, but it doesn’t make sense to astroturf on a site with the tiniest fraction of users, most of which are already critical of mainstream centralized social media. Why worry about doing it here when a single comment on reddit can reach millions of people when lemmy doesn’t even have as many users combined as some of the subs over on reddit.
This guy is a clown, regardless. I had an interaction with him on another thread where he edited his comment to make himself look like he predicted my response lmao. He also refuses to elaborate on some of the good faith response comments from other users because he knows his viewpoint is indefensible.
did you just tey to pre-emptively suggest that anyone who disagrees with you is a google paid shill?
Because if so I would like to know where I can apply for my payment from Google.
I think any reasonable person knows by now that if you don’t “pay for a product you sre the product”, everyone knows youtube collects data and sells it and your eyes to advertisers that’s their business model, guess what those servers youtube runs on? aren’t free, as you yourself said, content creators aren’t free, the engineers working on YouTube aren’t free, so your suggestion is that despite this, youtube should still be free and ad/data collection free.
well do tell me, how long do you think youtube will last with your business model?
OMG but the people I base my entire personality on use that platform, ergo, everyone needs to vicariously support me thought them, and any maneuver to the contrary is an attack on the very core of my essence!
-ITT
I’ve blocked maybe eight people in thirty minutes who are implicitly demanding that corporations create the law.
And one of them immediately down voted you. I wonder why they’re here on Lemmy instead of continuing to support Reddit? They clearly like to be bottoms to corpos.
We must trust our corporate overlords who will use AI to guide us in their right direction.
Everyone I don’t agree with == bootlicker 🙄
Are you arguing people should only try to be correct when it benefits a poor person? When being correct benefits a rich person we should just lie about the truth?
Then stop making stupid arguments, it only serves to make you look stupid
How very mature
I honestly don’t really care if people adblock or not but I think people need to acknowledge that adblock is essentially piracy. That doesn’t make it inherently bad or good but it has the same impacts as piracy at the end of the day. It’s a useful tool to use when companies start to get unreasonable but especially in the case of YouTube it impacts the amount of money the people who make the content earn.
But piracy has no impact at all. Pirates never wanted to buy your stuff.
Honestly, there is plenty of stuff I’d pay for but I pirate if it’s difficult to access.
I don’t know, I probably would have paid for at least half the things I pirate if I had to (especially books).
that only applies to p2p torrents where there aren’t infrastructure costs, youtube has infrastructure costs.
grabbing a torrent from the net and downloading it doesn’t cost anyone anything, it’s all volunteers providing their bandwidth for it.
youtube’s bandwidth isn’t free.
Another thing: footage provided em by content creators trains their LLM and it’s poorly paid, everybody seems to have a Patreon these days, every creator that wouldn’t be there if there was no money to be made (via said method and those live donations). So the apparent loss of money is more than compensated by the data usefulness. Then ads came. And they were few and it was fine. Then ads became insufferable. My presence there already guarantees creators output content that Google exploits for their AI. What else do I have to pay?
Let’s say I provide them with useful data with what I watch then. They know my age cos I log in and all my other info from Google services. That’s prolly why unblocked ads on the phone or tablet are always on point.
I honestly don’t really care if people adblock or not but I think people need to acknowledge that adblock is essentially piracy.
The same way it is piracy to go to the bathroom during the commercials…
Look, the problem at hand is not if people use adblocker or not, the problem here is how Google check if you are using adblocker or not, which seems to be illegal.
Well, the full “check for adblocker” things seems to be illegal in EU, whatever way it is used, given a sentence from 2016
I don’t think it’s piracy exactly but I fully realize there would not be a huge video site like YouTube without ads or limiting it to paid subscribers.
This whole thread is a whole lot of hullabaloo about complaining about legality about the way YouTube is running ad block detection, and framing it as though it makes the entire concept of ad block detection illegal.
As much as you may hate YouTube and/or their ad block policies, this whole take is a dead end. Even if by the weird stretch he’s making, the current system is illegal, there are plenty of ways for Google to detect and act on this without going anywhere remotely near that law. The best case scenario here is Google rewrites the way they’re doing it and redeploys the same thing.
This might cost them like weeks of development time. But it doesn’t stop Google from refusing to serve you video until you watch ads. This whole argument is receiving way more weight than it deserves because he’s repeatedly flaunting credentials that don’t change the reality of what Google could do here even if this argument held water.
Everyday I think the European Union for preventing the internet from being worse than it could be. It’s sad that back when the internet was a cesspool was so far the best age for it. Normies really do ruin everything
The same EU that threaten E2EE?
The EU has its faults, too, like this BS about sacrificing encryption. Overall, there seem to be a lot of benefits reigning in big companies, though.
Who else is looking out for their citizens? I think some congresspeople in the US ask tough questions, but in the end, business just goes on as usual.
Yes, the same EU. The fact that it’s considering some poor choices doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s actions thus far have been positive and deserve appreciation. Real Life doesn’t split people neatly into heroes and villains.
Don’t be an asshole and blame regular people for shit like this. This is because of big tech
Actually I will, because big Tech used to be on the level because they knew they would be called out for fuckery. Then Facebook brought the Baby Boomers online and it was the Eternal September on steroids.
Those are still actions made by the tech companies. Blaming people for not complaining enough is not the best take on this. Just shifts the blame to the public, not to the people who made those decisions in the first place
This is the same chicken / egg thing as plastic pollutions.
Sure consumers choice of whether to discard or recycle a plastic straw is nothing compared to the decisions of corporations, but then consumers invest in those companies, buy their products, and elect representatives who do not hold them accountable.
Big tech has ruined the internet because people were willing to trade their privacy and their attention in order to watch gifs of cats playing the piano. I’m not “blaming” people for that - hell, I was one of them, but you can’t solve the problem without understanding how it’s perpetuated.
The normies support big tech, they love it. They probably work for big tech, or wish they did, or at least imagine themselves as the next Elon Musk.
The “normies” don’t even know what these things are. It’s just the big blue “f” on their phone, or the colourful camera icon.
Half this shit is installed by default on pretty much any phone you can buy.
Touch grass bud.
Strictly speaking, management at Big Tech are all normies and they make the decisions.
I think the point is solid: non-tech-people sell capabilities to other non-tech-people to make money, and this forms a feedback loop and drives direction. A non-big-tech world is wildly different because it’s more like tech people building an environment for doing things with other tech people.
Management of big tech are excessively rich assholes. The rich, by the very definition, do not fall into the category of “normal people”
Strictly speaking, that’s nonsense. Is everyone that’s not you a normie? Or is normie a ‘normal person’, which then absolutely does not include rich managers of big tech companies?
Really strange point to make, man.
“Don’t be an asshole”? As a response to a short three sentence statement where no one was an asshole…
I think you’re the fucking asshole regardless of how much blame “big tech” and corporations in general bare here.
Slow the fuck down.
It’s not the sheep’s fault they’re led to the meat grinder
If a private company has to succeed, it has to offer things ** that normies want.** FB/G is shit because this is what normies consume - the ego-display, the dopamine kick. In every enshittification of a service, there is a history of it being cravingly indulged by the mass. Now when the companies started rising up and used their monopoly, they (the normies) are realizing they have been shit-eating for a long time. One may argue the companies were not so in the beginning, but that would be a very myopic view.
Normally it wouldn’t be, but these sheep were told “Do not go to this farm or you will be cooked.” and responded with “Pffft, that’ll happen to the other guy…” or “Pfft you’re just whining because you expect everything just handed to you”
But they weren’t led. They were convinced by big tech. But in the end they choose to go into the meat grinder themselves.
But they weren’t led. They were convinced by…
Same difference man
“Normies”? Seriously?
Because “normies” are responsible for the entshitification of the Internet right?
As much as I loathe that term, it could be argued that they indirectly are.
The massive increase in the amount of people online made it profitable for companies to be online. Lack of regulations and the inability for regulators to keep up with technological advancements allowed companies to maximize profits at the expense of everything else. The complete inability of government to prevent monetary influence on legislature has prevented good regulations from developing. The fact that the average person online uses maybe five websites in total and doesn’t engage further means that most issues fly under the radar of the average person, which limits the ability of any significant amount of constituents to pressure the politicians supposedly representing them to do better, and limits the overall impact of any movement away from shitty sites to better ones.
It’s a tangled yarn ball, but one that would struggle to exist without a majority of people to pull money from who just do not care about any of the shit that people more deeply invested in the internet care about.
Honestly, I see your argument. I don’t fully agree with it, but thank you for enlightening me.
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Every tech article I read nowadays I feel like has the appendix, “which is illegal in the EU.” Lol
The only thing still preventing mayhem along with California
Seriously. Everything causes cancer which has the unfortunate effect of dulling the fear response but it is good to know. If you want to sell your product in California, which is where silicon valley is, you need to observe their safety standards.
And thank the EU we might actually get right to repair.
Elon can block EU for Twitter if he wants to but it’s probably going to cost him even more.
Fuck yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. California is the only reason we don’t have products giving insta-cancer ect.
Cool, so YouTube will start putting pop ups that require you to consent to the detection in order to watch videos. That’s what everyone did with the whole cookies thing when that was determined to be illegal without consent.
that would be illegal too, because that information is not strictly necessary for their service - they could only opt to not provide the service in the eu
I don’t agree. They can reasonably argue that advertising is a requirement of their business model, so it is necessary to advertise. Therefore it is necessary for them to block access to those blocking advertising. The directive cited isn’t intended to make advertiser supported services effectively illegal in the EU. That would be a massive own goal. It’s intended to make deceptive and unnecessary data collection illegal. Nothing YouTube is doing is deceptive. They’re being very clear about their intention to advertise to non-subscribers.
They can reasonably argue that advertising is a requirement of their business model,
Couldn’t that claim be countered by pointing out that they already deploy a for pay approach called youtube premium?
No, because businesses have multiple revenue streams. YouTube has a subscription offering, and a free, advertiser-supported offering. Both are part of their business model.
alright
There are multiple French websites that do this. It is legal (otherwise these websites would not do this anymore, it’s been a while).
There is a popup asking you if you consent to get cookies (for advertisement). If you say “no”, it leads you to another popup with two choices :- Change your decision and accept cookies
- Pay for a premium service without advertisements
That is just because the people who enforce the EDPB guidelines just haven’t come around to fining those websites.
That practice is still illegal.
Want to speed up the process? You can report those websites. The more reports the faster those get punished.
No, that’s not that clear for the moment.
Let me explain the French case :
- Webedia is a big company that owns most of the famous French websites (jeuxvideo.com , etc.). All these websites have cookie walls with an alternative : a paid subsription. What they say, is that the website is now accessible with subscription only. However, if you accept cookies, you’ll get a discount (free access).
- The CNIL (a big French governemental entity) tried to forbid this. If someone reports a website, it’s for this entity to take action. There is no need to report Webedia, the CNIL knows already :-)
- The Conseil d’Etat (juridical entity of the French gov) said that “non”, it’s OK for Webedia to use such paywalls. The CNIL can’t forbid Webedia to use them.
- The CNIL asked the jusrists at the European level… here we are. We still don’t know.
Here is a French website where the CNIL explains this :
https://www.cnil.fr/fr/cookie-walls-la-cnil-publie-des-premiers-criteres-devaluationWell, seems like my gdpr knowledge got too rusty. at least to me its an interesting topic to actualise
Same in Germany and Switzerland. I just close the site immediately when I see this kind of blackmailing. Or use 12ft.io if I absolutely want to read the article.
Nothing more fun than having to go through some websites shitty settings to toggle everything off.
I can heartily recommend Consent-O-Matic. I’d say that it’s able to clear (and reject by default) the cookie warnings on 95% of the sites I visit.
ublock does it too if you enable the “block annoyances” option in the settings
I don’t know why I have not yet donated to these developers. They sure as hell deserve it. As soon as I get home they’re gonna get some moneys!
sadly they’re not accepting donations
I bet the list maintainers accept tips!
At the bottom of the uBlock Origin homepage there’s links to the most popular list homepages which would be a good starting point.
The Peter Lowe’s ad tracking list links to its own Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/blocklist (Confirm by clicking on the link at the uBlock Origin homepage, then at the top click on patreon).
The other ones I couldn’t find any obvious way to donate to the list maintainers.
Sadly, no ublock for me on Safari, but good to know!
Don’t use stupid browsers then ;-)
Duckduckgo browser does it too
Still a curveball. Collecting your data and having to say ot to your face are not the same.
Would be a shame if your answer to that consent question was not saved and would be required to answer each time you open up a video.
which you could get around by using another frontend for youtube or just going with vlc all the way by playing the url in vlc directly.
Firefox’s ‘Play in VLC’ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/play-in-vlc/ is brilliant for this - it does entire playlists too. It works with smpalyer, which is even better player than VLC, IMO.
A lot of the cookie notifications can’t collect data until you accept them (or follow their annoying “opt-out” workflow). If you install UBlock Origin and go to its settings > ‘Filter lists’ and enable the “EasyList - Cookie Notices” you can block a lot of cookies. If they can never nag you and you never opt in, assuming they’re following the law, you shouldn’t be tracked.
I only just posted a meme about the EU flooring companies for going against their regulations. It was my first post too :)
I’d really like to add YouTube to it. Godspeed.
The only government actually doing shit. *Also, California
All these fuckers are our neighbors and for many of us former employers.
We know exactly how they think, and what they think of us.
Andreesen is the tip of the iceberg.
unless it is strictly necessary for the provisions of the requested service.
YouTube could quite easily argue that ads fund their service and therefore an adblock detector would be necessary.
that’s not how it is to be interpreted.
it means something like in order for google maps to show you your position they NEED to access your device’s gps service, otherwise maps by design can not display your position.Correct. Youtube can still play videos on your screen on a technical level without the need for adblocker detection. Their financial situation is not relevant in that respect.
Correct. Youtube can still play videos on your screen on a technical level without the need for adblocker detection. Their financial situation is not relevant in that respect.
This is why I’ve never had an issue blocking ads. Pick a couple creators you like, join their patreon or buy some merch. You owe YT nothing.
This so much! Same argument for piracy tbh.
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Sure, but Google has created a monopoly where no one else can even compete.
If Google wasn’t so shady with their practices including playing extremely fast and loose with our data and trust, I MIGHT have the goodwill to sit through 50% of the commercials they inject suddenly with no respect for the place they’re added in the content. 100% though? I’m honestly shocked anyone can sit through it.
They do evil, or at least won’t not do evil.
And they require us to trust them?
I’d disagree here. To me it seems like YouTube isn’t a monopoly because Google is being monopolistic with it (if you do have any examples of this, please show me) but rather because of the ridiculous scale and expense of such a project. The infrastructure to support something like YouTube at the scale of YouTube is insane, and I doubt many organisations or companies have the ability to even dream of it, not to mention the extreme network effect with something like YouTube. Google doesn’t have to be monopolistic (I’m sure they would be if there were viable competitors, sure, not saying that Google’s a saint) because it’s almost impossible to compete just in sheer complexity and cost.
It’s kind of like how the entire semiconductor industry is dependent on lithography machines from one company: ASML. But that’s not because they’re being anti-competetive, it’s because their products are insanely, extremely complex, precise and advanced. Decades upon decades and billions and billions of RnD.
The big problem with Google is that they are in, or a part of, almost everything on the internet, and it all funnels users back to them one way or another.
Their search favors their own things, so if you search for anything, YouTube will come up most of the time. This by itself is enough to kill competition. Their search also recommends their browser heavily if you’re not using it, which is how they became the most-used browser, which defaults to their search, which by default recommends YouTube in most searches.
Even if you don’t use Chrome, don’t worry because they will pay absolutely nuts money to be the default search on their competitors browsers, which is again more people to YouTube. And if that isn’t enough, most browsers are built on Chromium, which Google maintains, meaning they can sway the course of their competitors browsers over the long term, which they are doing by selectively killing and bringing in certain technologies over years.
Android, which is also Google, I believe has YouTube installed by default, or at least all of my phones have had it. Trying to compete with defaults is almost unachievable. It’s easy to think that people will change settings, but most people don’t.
I agree that the technology and infrastructure needed to run YouTube is huge, and it’s amazing, but that’s only part of the story. Google has so much control of so many things that even if you could build the same thing, that’s only the beginning.
But it’s not only YouTube, it’s the same for Gmail. Gmail has so much market share that they can kill competitors by making another email service seem unreliable. And all of their services point back to Gmail.
It’s not just that they have a monopoly on video, they have a monopoly on the whole internet.
Don’t put all the financial costs on one single company. Spread the financial costs out among lots of people and run small peertube servers. If a creator becomes popular, then the people watching their videos at the same time will be sharing the video with anybody else who loads it afterwards and take load off the server so it does not crash.
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What do you mean? Google has a bunch of competitors.
You can start uploading your videos somewhere else right now. You won’t, because everyone is on YouTube.
That’s called the network effect, and we’re to blame for maintaining it.
Back when it was unintrusive banner ads and the like? Sure, you might have had a point then. But now, with multiple unskippable 2 minute ads, before, during, and after the video? Fuck no.
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The thing is, YouTube has no value to me. The only reason I use it is because of the creators on there. They make the content and they deserve my money but if I could, I would use a different platform. YouTube has created a Monopoly, which makes it impossible to watch the videos anywhere but on their platform tho.
The reason I don’t like YouTube is because they remove features everyone wanted to keep, then add stuff nobody ever wanted. They demonetize creators for no reason all the time and a lot of the rules they have for staying monetized are stupid and actively make the content worse, like not being allowed to swear. The DMCA takedown system is also extremely flawed, you can literally file a takedown for any video and they’ll instantly remove it and give the creators channel a strike without checking anything about the takedown request. This has led to channels being removed (3 strikes and your channel gets removed), eventhough they didn’t even do anything wrong. And even if the DMCA takedown is actually justified, you get a strike even when the video is years old, which is stupid because you can’t remember every single video, so you shouldn’t get a strike if it’s that old already. Communication with YouTube, when they’ve once again made a mistake, is also very difficult because the only way to reach them is though Twitter and also only if your tweet gets popular enough that they actually see it or care about it.
AdBlockers are the only way to vote with your wallet. A service with this many huge flaws is nothing I want to support or even use.
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Strictly speaking, isn’t that exactly how the DMCA is designed to work? Aren’t they technically violating it anytime they actually review something manually and decide to ignore a DMCA notice? I don’t think how Google responds to DMCA notices has really been tested with respect to keeping their safe harbor protections.
Removing content that didn’t violate the DMCA is not how it should work and older content should obviously still be removed but you don’t have to get a strike for that
which makes it impossible to watch the videos anywhere but on their platform tho
The creators are free to upload content anywhere they want without restrictions. It’s not YouTube’s fault that they don’t.
Uploading content to other websites is just not worth it. You won’t get views anywhere else.
When you say YouTube crested a monopoly, what do you mean? There are tons of video hosting and streaming websites. Basically all social media platforms have video now, as well.
I mean that I can’t really use other video platforms because the content I want is on YouTube. If you upload videos you also kind of have to use YouTube because otherwise almost no one is going to see your videos and you also can’t really make money with it.
I don’t disagree with what you are saying, but its really not my problem and I don’t feel obliged to help them make money.
Its not my problem if their service is costly and not profitable. They don’t have to do it. I have no moral obligation to them being profitable.
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do you think that the content creators that you enjoy would be able to exist as profitable businesses
I’m probably showing my age, but there was a time in human history, where people created things not because it was or could be a profitable business, but because they were inspired to share their vision, or humor, or art with the world. In the years before 2008, and in this mythical time on the internet, we did and were and created simply “for the lulz”. If anything, I think that focusing on the idea that your job on the internet is to “generate content” is a toxic leak from neoliberalism/ VC culture. Its the commoditization of the self.
No one joined SA’s or Farks photoshop contests because it made them money. We did it because it allowed us to be funny, to one another, for one another. We pitched in together to cover the server costs and that was that. In fact, that’s how Reddit stayed alive. We pitched in together to cover server costs so that we could do things for ourselves (memes, nudes, music, whatever…). I learned to code making crappy flash games for new grounds not because it was profitable, but because it was fun, and cool to be a part of a community who loved to make thing and then give them away.
The enshitification of all things is a symptom of a broader issue, which is the commoditization of the process of self actualization, which happens through lived experience. The human desire to build, to create, to make art, to talk, chat and communicate; its part of a process where we find out who we are.
There are plenty of things in life that are worth doing that aren’t profitable. The ideal that we should allow a neo-liberal doctrine to determine how we find out about ourselves via our creative expression, for me, is worth resisting.
It’s Google. They can afford it.
Just replying to confirm that “strictly necessary” has never meant, “makes us money.” It means technically necessary.
Adblock detection has literally already been ruled on though (it needs consent). I’m sure there are nuances above my understanding, but it’s not that simple.
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Blargerer is probably saying that because the Mastodon post OP linked to says “In 2016 the EU Commission confirmed in writing that adblock detection requires consent.”
That, in turn, is probably referring to a letter received from the European Commission by the same person, which you can see here: https://twitter.com/alexanderhanff/status/722861362607747072
It’s not exactly a “ruling”, but it’s still pretty convincing.
You consent to their terms of service and privacy policy when you access their website by your continued use. They disclose the collection of browser behavior and more in the privacy policy. I suspect they are covered here but I don’t specialize in EU policy.
Their terms of service have to be compliant with local laws though. You can’t just put whatever you want in there and expect it to stand up in court.
This is true. And I’ll disclaim again that I’m not an expert on EU law or policy. But I’m not familiar with a US policy or law that would preclude that consent to collection from being a condition of use. I’ve written these policies for organizations, and I think it will be a difficult argument to make. I’d love to read an analysis by a lawyer or policy writer who specializes in the EU.
Not an expert either, but from what I’ve seen, the EU actually has some amount of consumer protection. The USA on the other hand mostly lets big corporations get away with whatever they want, as long as they make some “donations”.
I haven’t agreed to any new terms and the adblocker appears for me
Assuming it didn’t exist for months or years before this. As far as I know, blocking ads has always been against ToS.
This sign can’t stop me because I can’t read!
Also required should be YouTube accepting liability for damage done by malicious ads or hacks injecting malware onto user systems via ad infrastructure.
Why wouldn’t the hacker just be liable instead?
Because Google is the one trying to force consumers to raw dog the internet.
Their precedent is that they sold our data for 20 years before this and are now the biggest company in the world, so they can go pound sand.
In the interest of making criticisms factually correct, they don’t “sell” user data, they make money through targeted advertising using user data. They actually benefit by being the only ones with your data, it’s not in their interest to sell it.
That’s a very good point. I’m not very aware of EU regulations, I wonder if there has been established precedent in court
Call me naive, but doing something illegal is never OK in the eyes of the law, whether I deem it necessary or not. I would have to receive a legal exception to the rule, as it were. As it stands, it’s illegal.
doing something illegal is never OK in the eyes of the law
yeah, doing something illegal is illegal, hard to argue with that tautology.
but you seem to be living under the impression that immoral = illegal, which is not the case.
I think what they were saying is that the law specifically makes exceptions for things that are necessary. Others are saying ads are not necessary per the law’s definition, but that’s a separate issue.
Saving Jews during the holocaust in Germany was illegal. How naive are you?
Thank fuck for EU and GDPR
“when has the EU ever done anything for us”
Oh it did.
Almost like something/someone can do some good on one side, and also do stupid stuff on the other. Wild concept, I know.
It’s nothing to do with GDPR acording to the link of the post (people should read more than headlines…)
… We’re gonna get another cookie click-through, aren’t we?
Do you consent to our use of intrusive browser detection, anti-cheat, rootkit usage and invasive brain implants to bombard you with ads?
Yes | Also yes but more annoying to click through
The cookie banner law should have specified the exact text that had to be displayed and it should have been really scary.
I think the law should require a button for enabling all non-marketing cookies.
The law already states that it must be as easy to deselect everything as it is to select all.
If they have a allow all button, they also need a allow only required button.
Well clearly many if not most sites are in violation of that part. Will be very interesting to see what, if anything, the EU are gonna do about that!
Personally I’m pessimisticly hopeful and yes that’s a possible thing shut up 😝
Allow only essential doesn’t include analytics cookies, allow all includes everything. They should either make it easy with maximum 3 checkboxes but you can still unfold them to precisely manage, or make a button to disable only marketing cookies.
Yeah, pretty much
Google: You will accept our legitimate interest and you will like it.
Another three cheers for the EU! 🇪🇺🍻🥂
FUCK YEAHHHHHHHH. YOUTUBE IS FUCKED LMAOOOOOOOOOOOO
EU to the rescue again!
Rescue lol. The EU is singlehandedly bringing forth the end of online privacy.
Really interested in your thought process here
Probably referring to this. https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
EU wants to make sure I see ads? Screw that. Freaking capitalists. Seems the US doesn’t have a monopoly on capatalism.
Eh, no, it’s the exact opposite of that.
They’re probably talking about the anti-encrypted message regulations. EU wants to make end-to-end messengers illegal to “protect the children”.
Huh? This is about youtube wanting to make sure you see ads, and people complaining to the EU to make them censure youtube for it. Not sure where you got that EU wants to make sure you see ads.
I am not paying for Premium again until they bring the dislike button back.
I am not paying for Premium.
It was pathetic for them to hide away this button with its statistics. Honestly it’s an valuable tool.
Too many big companies got their feefees hurtied because we downthumbered their stupid announcements. Think of them for once 😭
UP RYD!
As if it made any real difference while we had it…
Shouldn’t have been paying for it in the first place.
Don’t ask how, but my dad found out that at least with Ublock, cleaning the cache in the addon makes it bypass the stupid pop-up.
Because they updated their filters so you have to clear the old cached filters
Going to give a heads up that sometimes ublock origin can fall behind because google supposedly updates their anti-adblock BS twice a day. But all you need to do is be patient, give it some time and eventually UBO gets updated. Then you can clear cache and update your filters to block YT’s BS.
you can compare the version numbers and if they’re off, ubo will eventually update it.
As an English person I thought yay that means us. Then I remembered. . .
The EU ruling was in 2016, well before Brexit happened in 2019, so we should have the same law.
Except that EU court rulings don’t count in countries that stupidly left, no matter when they happened.
You could pass a similar law yourself, but that’s probably not going to happen with either the abysmal Tories or the feckless centrist party Keir “I want to be Tony Blair” Starmer has turned Labour into in charge 😮💨
Nearly all EU rulings up until the UK left in 2019 are a part of British law. If the ruling was before the Brexit referendum then it would definitely count. Specifically with GDPR, the government confirmed that they adopted the EU’s law.
Furthermore, this isn’t a court ruling, it was a written reply from the European Commission, ie the people that wrote the law.
I guess I sit corrected and pleasantly surprised then 🙂
It’s nothing to do with GDPR acording to the link of the post (people should read more than headlines…)
You’re right, it’s the ePrivacy Directive, which predates GDPR by many years (2002).
Not that the social media corps have ever given a shit.
Very much not true.
The app Threads from Meta had to be rewritten due to its extensive tracking in the US market. Not legal in the EU.
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They give a shit when they start getting fined based on a % of their revenue
When it’s a percent of the revenue, it’s just the cost of doing business.
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