All companies seem to be doing their best lately to cure us of our social media addiction.

They can suck my balls and pay me a million before i enter their shitshow of a website without adblocker(s)

Open your ublock Origin dashboard and add the following 4 lines:

youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)

youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)

youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])

youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)

You're welcome.

The fediverse makes the internet feel more alive than ever.

It feels less mindless scrolling and more interaction.

The illusion of infinite growth on "free use" ad based business dies when investment funds demand more benefits from former startups now turned into corporations whose only asset of value is the their users' data. You are the product, so it's time to squeeze you.

I think such data is currently overvalued on a overgrown ad-targeting market with too many competitors, and adding more ads only devaluates each ad value further, because users' consuming capacity also has a limit. So I see a severe correction coming. Another bubble burst, and another crisis inside the crisis that late capitalism itself is.

That's one part of how the internet dies, there are others. For example: soon the vast majority of the content on the internet will have been created by bots (AI or not). Or even by malicious folks pushing narratives.

TLDR: not only the internet is becoming more annoying to use it is also constantly becoming less useful with worse content replacing everything that was ever good

And the problem with content created by bots is that it is usually made to not look like that was the case. Sometimes that's not the problem like some random site with information about a video game can have all of its content generated automatically based on data extracted from that game. That is fine.

But other cases, specially with AI content, can be much worse. There was a recent example where some site with history content had generated some pages using an AI and that AI created a page about Scimitars which included information taken from Dungeons and Dragons, but presented then as historic facts.

And the main problem here is that the internet feeds on itself. Texts are copied from one site to another by non-AI bots. Some text created by AI in one site gets copied to multiple threads on reddit, hacker news, stack overflow, 4chan and all sorts of places. Places that are scanned by search engines and often picked as preferred search results by users.

Then Google these days try everything to make a larger profit from you. That includes "stealing" content from inside websites to display on top of the search results page - so that you never click away from the Google site. In order to do that more efficiently, they give preference to sites that allow this behavior over sites with actual better search results. Try googling "country in Africa with the letter K".

So in the end all your search results will soon be stuff that was written by AI. And remember: AI doesn't think. It won't ever do. AI is just a robot role-playing as human.

When you see a comedian doing a Stephen Hawking impression, you don't expect them to publish scientific papers, in fact you don't pay any attention to what they actually say, because you know it'll either be rubbish or just a repeat of something that Hawking had said before. AI is the same thing. It'll never be intelligent, it'll only get better at imitating humans, by looking at what humans say. And with their content taking over the internet, it'll soon be imitating itself.

And the only memory of the golden years of the internet, will maybe be Wikipedia. Have you donated to them yet? Think about how many times you've used it and remember it has never shown an ad other than their pleas for donation. Please consider giving them a few bucks when you've some to spare.

Once most of the YouTube users are captured under the subscription, prices will raise again and again and again and again and again and ag

While there are a billion things Google does that annoys me I'm not able to figure out how to create and maintain a video streaming platform without ads or paywall that finances both creation and the providing material.

I mean, who are the competitors and how do they finance it if not in a similar way?

Proferring it as ToS violation is actually quite concerning for anyone using the same google account for their primary email and as a youtube account'

Drink verification can.

Please drink a verification can

Mastodon exploded when Elon took over Twitter. Lemmy exploded when Reddit changed it's api rules. I think the problem is not that YouTube doesn't fuck things up, because they often do. Perhaps the alternatives are not good enough for early majority to migrate. We need more early adopters to migrate ASAP. (I'm thinking of PeerTube, but perhaps Odyssee has beter changes at the moment)

Peertube mass migration when?

Dear Youtube,

I've been using you daily since before you were bought by Google. I have watched undoubted millions of youtube videos over the last 17 years.

The mother fucking nanosecond you start blocking me from watching your content because I have an ad blocker is the moment I sit here and just rip every each and every single mother fucking video I want to watch to view entirely offline. Given you've tried and failed for a decade now to stop us from doing that I trust it'll solve both our needs, you won't have me blocking your ads, and I won't need to ever see em. Savvy? Savvy!

With a level of spite indescribable,

Me.

Edit: For those whining about my entitlement: QQ more idc.

Edit 2: Ya'll still commenting and downvoting a week later while I haven't thought about any of you at all lmao. Rent free!

Not the internet, the web, there is a distinction and the internet will be fine we will just move to other protocols and leave the ad companies out in the cold.

Quick! Let's move all Youtube channels to the fediverse (PeerTube), before people are getting conditioned to another sick behavior created by rich people.

I don't completely mind. This is a boon to platforms like Nebula and CuriosityStream, which I think respect creators more with revenue and users with no ads. Sure it's not free but there are no shennanigans like this.

The proxy wars begun again they have

I’m on vacation for the next two weeks. I only really need to log into Google for work. I got proton mail subscription and I’ve been moving all my personal stuff to that slowly. I’m going to finish it off and just cut Google out completely for personal use.

inb4

"You have viewed wrongthink and can't view YouTube for 48 hours"

I will continue to use ublock and let Google lose money in the process I don't mind. In fact I'm all for it

Now there forcing people who have their watch history off to turn back it on

As part of a general trend, yeah it looks that way. But, this is just YouTube. It's a big part of the web, but it's not the web, and definitely not the internet. It sounds like there's already ways around it though so for the type of folks who would have ad blocked I don't see a lot changing, which does make me wonder the point of this is though.

Corporate profits and soulless capitalism aside. Do you think that petabytes of server space and countless hours of making videos for your entertainment should be free?

I mean lets imagine we create a space for creators to upload without most of the revenue going to a fat ceo. There are no algorithms tweaked for constant numbing entertainment just to squeeze every last minute of our attention. Just a platform for people to talk about their passion and create content heaps better than the shit on the tv. Would we still be bitching that it should be free? Because i think we would

I miss YouTube Vanced, it had better UI and more features than the official app. I pay for premium and I like it and all, but I wish they could've adopted some features from Vanced instead of monetizing previously free features such as background play.

Revanced is still working for me