If we're getting to the point where we need to decrypt things and reverse engineer protocols, maybe we should... not use these devices? Maybe we should opt out of this economy? Maybe we should do other things to entertain ourselves?
While I do agree with you, I am a bit concerned about the recent developments with "paid, but still has ads" subscriptions and how Youtube might slip towards such practices as well as soon as they have a large enough number of paying customers. Their premium might suddenly not be so... premium.
With respect to that, YouTube premium has been around for over ten years, the majority of which I've been a subscriber because adblocking on Apple TV (my primary YouTube experience) is far too much of a fuckabout for me to willingly engage in it, and they haven't yet done it. I think Google is well aware of the fact that Premium with ads is an utter non-starter as a product. What would you even be paying for then? This isn't like TV+ or Prime where you have exclusives, almost everyone who posts to YouTube would happily jump that ship given enough reason to.
And while there are still ads (sponsored segments) I personally have less problem with those since those are substantial money for the creators I enjoy, and a lot of the ones I watch actually manage to make them pretty funny. And hell, a couple I've even used their codes for shit over the years for. Like, an ad is an ad and some people hate all of them, but I can personally say I've engaged with ads from creators I like at an exceptional rate compared to... virtually every other type of advertising I've ever encountered.
There is for certain a wide gap between a sponsored segment from the same voice and some random ad coming in and blaring over the top. For me, I can handle the narrator delivering an ad, it's the intrusive slot machine aspect of generic ads that irk me. Happy youtube subscriber here, use the music too, great deal.
Youtube is one of the platforms where I find real value, usually in making/maintaining/repairing things, being able to skip through videos to find answers without worrying about ads definitely saves me significant time and therefore money.
Yeah I balked for a long time at paying for YouTube, but in the end, I consume magnitudes more YouTube than any other streaming platform. It's my most expensive video subscription but like... I can't say I don't use it.
It’s the only one I pay for. I have Netflix included in my cell plan. Every so often I fire it up to see what they have, find nothing, and go back to the good stuff.
Yep. Most folks I follow will record ads at a different time from the rest of the video too, wearing different clothes and in different lighting. Sometimes I can be bothered to grab the remote, sometimes not, lol.
I totally get it. That said, YouTube premium is worth every single penny and has only gained features over time; no other subscription I have comes close in terms of value.
Seems to still being trialed in only a few regions. It's No ads during videos (still display ads during search, etc.), except for shorts and music videos for 6€/m. Without all the other premium features
I wish I could do this for Spotify. Paid plans still include ads.
They cram ads into podcast episodes which themselves also have ads, so you'll get the read ads + Spotify's local ads + Spotify laughs all the way to the bank.
I believe over time not having ads will be a thing of the past, and you'll instead pay for fewer ads. Like where else are people going to go for exclusive content?
I've never heard an ad on Spotify, so this is true only for podcasts then, correct? In that case I can at least be thankful that Spotify is the worst option for listening to podcasts.
I canceled my Spotify premium subscription because they showed sponsored content in the app. Not as egregious as jamming ads in between songs, but I still don’t want to have to scroll past a “sponsored” UI element to get to what I’m actually interested in.
Just buy the content and play it from your local devices. I use streaming simply for "auditioning" new music (and there are podcasts, YouTube channels that do that without a subscription, FWIW). I prefer then to buy the tracks from Bandcamp. Hopefully the artists get a bigger slice of the revenue that way.
I don't really listen to much Spotify but I feel like just the free plan in Firefox with uBlock Origin gave me an ad-free experience the last time I used it.
Sadly I think we're in need of the AriZona Iced Tea of streaming. A company that sells a streaming service, at a fixed price, makes a small profit and is happy with that profit.
The issue is that the current streaming services have cost billions to develop and companies and investors want that money back, times a 100. The money hasn't gone into a long term product that people will be happy with for decades, it has gone into a product that needs to return large chunk of money in a short time frame (and cover up other failed ventures).
The issue is that such a company either needs to make their own first-party content, or pay licensing fees for third-party content, and the companies those license fees are paid to are always looking to either cut out the middle service in favor of their own or increase what they're charging.
I think most people don't have a problem paying for something that gives proper added value.
But what's happening is that companies are degrading the basic experience and expecting people to either be OK with it (like Roku's increasingly intrusive ad experience) or to pay up to avoid it (like with YouTube).
Perhaps on review of specific ad presentation practices, you could argue for a degradation of experience, but showing adds more or less within YouTube to free users seems like an acceptable method of generating revenue.
As an aside, the fact that people pay for cable and still have 4-7 minute ad-breaks every 15 minutes make anything YouTube does pale in comparison.
Except for the tracking that ads use and the possibility of getting malware because they aren't curated as well as they should be.
I also don't like companies aggressively trying to get me to buy stuff I don't want. Show a static image on the right somewhere with a link. Hell, show a dozen of them. Still less intrusive than an ad that shows up while you're in the middle of a video.
But the poor ad companies are apparently on the brink of bankruptcy based on how hard they are pushing things. Just a little bit of composure or any respect for the people that they are pushing these on and I'd have a different viewpoint. But they are always all-in on this.
Or you can opt out. Both options are equally valid.
I won't pay for YouTube because the consistency of YouTube is massively variable. Sometimes channels I watch skip 6 months between videos. When I do watch stuff its usually in the background or when I just have a few minutes spare. Spending money to fill that time is unjustifiable unless it's a really low amount, and YouTube Premium isn't low enough yet.
Oddly though, if I could buy 100 'skip this ad' tokens for $10 that I could use when I'm pushed for time, but just suffer the ads when I'm not, I'd seriously consider it.
You can, but the complaint rings hollow when we’re talking about a service with enormous amounts of actual good content, and a straightforward non-abusive paid plan. If you don’t think it’s worth it, that makes complete sense. If somebody decides there isn’t anything worth paying or watching ads and just bails out, totally sensible. But this “ads are so terrible we should just abandon the service” thing is weird here. YouTube is an example of doing it right. They use ads to support a free tier, and have a paid plan that removes them. They don’t do nonsense where they take your money and still show you ads. They don’t serve unvetted ads that infect your computer with malware or mine cryptocurrency. If people won’t even consider paying for this (not merely deciding it’s not worth it, but refusing to even consider it as a possibility) then I have to conclude that they just think they’re entitled to get stuff for free.
Netflix shows ads to paying customers. We've seen the same playbook across a wide variety of products and services, it's only a matter of time until paying users get milked too.
When that happens, I’ll stop saying “just pay for it.” But until it does, I’ll continue paying for YouTube and being befuddled by people who get upset at their ads.
Increasingly the "basic" paid plan has ads and you now have to pay even more to not have ads. Doesn't seem like playing the game is doing anyone any favours.
Having the ability to tell a company enough is a enough serves as a ceiling for bullshit.
Where are you finding this "basic" plan? YouTube Premium has only a single tier that is completely ad-free. I hate Google as much as anyone, but shouldn't truth matter?
I've gone back to pirating everything. I can afford to pay for all the services, it's just the service and content quality has gotten so bad that it's just not worth it. I DO pay for content from other markets (French, Israeli, and Japanese), just not mine.
It's just like vehicles. There isn't a single vehicle sold in my market that I would pay anything for (ok, maybe the Ford Maverick). There's a bunch in other markets (Europe, South America, Asia), just not mine.
> I've gone back to pirating everything. I can afford to pay for all the services, it's just the service and content quality has gotten so bad that it's just not worth it.
If the content is so bad, then why the need to pirate it?
I started reading a great deal more at the start of the pandemic. I've kept it going since and it has been a real boon. I also switched back to physical books because I actually own them..
I can recommend "minitube" [1]. It's super minimalistic, and requires you to actively search for things to find them. No ads, no feeds, no short videos, nothing - just playlists for search terms. Uses yt-dlp and mpv behind the scenes, so it's using less than 5% CPU on my small Intel NUC machine, too.
I can't stress enough how it is soooo much better in terms of what type of content I consume now. Mr-Beast-cutting-style dumb videos ain't stand a chance to get my attention now.
Ironically, the author built it to be a children-safe environment to consume YouTube.
The problem is, that there is no alternative yet for that.
Movies are not an issue, there's piracy, music is not an issue, there's piracy, books are not an issue, there are libraries... and piracy, but youtube is still limited, and the only way to avoid the ads is to buy another device (computer), thus turning pretty much any smarttv (with features you paid for) into a dumb display (that you mostly cannot even buy anymore).
The alternative is paying for things you like so the people who make them can continue doing so. If you don’t think YouTube is worth paying for, it might be a good idea to reconsider the amount of time you spend on it or whether you want to help promote it.
Piracy offers the best service there is. You used to be able to buy DVDs, vhs tapes, etc., and you'd get the media, and even then you had to sometimes fast forward through ads.
Now, it's impossible to buy media in many cases, even if you click "buy", it might be gone after a month, because some contract somewhere expires, there are ads even in paid plans, there are limits, to what I can do with that media, and more and more services require you to continue paying for content you already "bought".
When they fix the "buy" button to actually mean "buy", and when they remove ads from "no ads" plans, i might reconsider. Until then, they're not getting any of my money anyway, piracy or not.
> When they fix the "buy" button to actually mean "buy", and when they remove ads from "no ads" plans, i might reconsider. Until then, they're not getting any of my money anyway, piracy or not.
This pretty much sums it up for me. I lost so much money over the years for so much content I technically should still "own access to".
And not just media, games and books, too. It's so ridiculous how important things like anna's archive have become because otherwise science would be so crippled that it wouldn't even function anymore.
"Piracy" of digital goods is an oxymoron... I don't think it's immoral. If you pay publishers, the creators don't get paid. And about the legality, well, just ask Meta what they think about torrenting.
Meta, however, is hoping to convince the court that torrenting is not in and of itself illegal, but is, rather, a "widely-used protocol to download large files." According to Meta, the decision to download the pirated books dataset from pirate libraries like LibGen and Z-Library was simply a move to access "data from a 'well-known online repository' that was publicly available via torrents."
To defend its torrenting, Meta has basically scrubbed the word "pirate" from the characterization of its activity. The company alleges that authors can't claim that Meta gained unauthorized access to their data under CDAFA. Instead, all they can claim is that "Meta allegedly accessed and downloaded datasets that Plaintiffs did not create, containing the text of published books that anyone can read in a public library, from public websites Plaintiffs do not operate or own."
While Meta may claim there's no evidence of seeding, there is some testimony that might be compelling to the court. Previously, a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, had testified that Meta allegedly modified torrenting settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur," which seems to support authors' claims that some seeding occurred. And an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang appeared to show that Meta allegedly tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to "avoid" the "risk" of anyone "tracing back the seeder/downloader" from Facebook servers. Once this information came to light, authors asked the court for a chance to depose Meta executives again, alleging that new facts "contradict prior deposition testimony."
If you pay publishers, the creators don't get paid.
Sure they do. The amount they get paid might not be enough. But by pirating, your guarantee the creator gets nothing at all. So... I stand by my statement. But, I will definitely agree that the whole "digital media" economy is fundamentally broken and hostile to both creators and consumers.
Sure, technically some creators get paid something. Some creators don't get paid anything. If those creators don't have the means to sue, that's their problem.
> the whole "digital media" economy is fundamentally broken and hostile to both creators and consumers.
This is why I think it's actually our moral imperative to not pay into this system wherever possible. (But personally, I choose to not consume rather than pirate. I'll pirate something to check it out. If it's nice, I'll buy it.)
