is his shirt a label, a seasoning, or a command?
Yes
If you don’t visit YouTube…
The people say “just pay for premium” don’t seem to understand that in the beginning YouTube was free and had no ads. When google purchased it they promised to keep it that way. Then they slowly started with ads. At first they were pretty unobtrusive banners, then a short skippable preroll then multiple preroll then unskippable preroll. The reason I refuse to pay for premium is because Google created this issue and is now selling the solution. I refuse to be a part of that. It has nothing to do with the creators.
ReVanced and Grayjay do the same thing but for free and are open source so long as Google keeps trying to engineer enshitification the proud people of the open source community will engineer a solution.
I would totally pay for youtube if it was even remotely decently priced.
You can get multiple concurrents on disney+, Hulu or Netflix with blockbuster content for the same price as youtube’s slop filled premium family.
Seriously, the service is worth maybe $9 a month. I don’t want their music, i won’t use it, the quality is crap.
What are scare screens in this context?
I think it’s referring to the “you can’t block ads on YT or we might ban you” popups you get on YT occasionally, if you’re using an adblocker. I have only had it happen once or twice before I did a quick online search and found an extra filter or two to add to uBlock Origin, and then I stopped seeing them.
I wonder how much time their devs spend working on a new ad block detector scheme that gets shown to a couple dozen people before ublock origin adds it to the default filters and none of their users see it again.
I wonder if they get frustrated or just laugh and get back to the endless job. Or if they also write some of the ublock filters themselves.
This is a cold war happening in the background of the internet. If the advertising industry wins, everybody loses. Advertisement is intrusive by design.
What is a scare screen?
No idea because I use Ublock Origin/YouTube ReVanced/SmartTubeNext
Unlock origin always always always free
A big chunk of ad revenue goes to content creators, so you at least support them.
While this is technically true, this only works because of the scale. Each individual user contributes less than pennies.
If you really want to support a creator, donate 5 dollars to them every year and you will be more valuable than any ad viewer.
That’s just not true… When you have YouTube premium, you pay the creators you watch proportionally to your watch time of their content out of your subscription. You are giving them more of your money the more you watch that specific channel.
A cap of 50% of your youtube premium goes to the creators.
Small creators are given a pittance, large creators get the lions share, even with equal watch hours.
I never mentioned premium, because yes it works like that for premium. But even for that paying them directly is better, as it avoids youtube’s cut completely.
Yeah, of all the subscription services I don’t think YouTube is very egregious. The people you watch earn way more from you that way than watching ads.
I block all ads. Content creators earn more than I do by shilling for any company giving them 2 cents. They can fuck right off if they start crying about adblockers.
They show screens about that ? I haven’t seen any !
Yeah and they are pretty bad in terms of wording. It’s like „Try premium now for free“: „Yes“ or „Next time“
On desktop I get the “Video running slow? Disable your ad blocker” popup in a corner. But videos loaded normally.
On mobile everything was fine until recently. In the last couple of weeks, videos do have a small lag before loading. Still preferable to ads. And I’m just using the browser’s in built blocker.
I would not be surprised if Google deliberately introduces slowdowns to some ad blocker users.

They’re eventually gonna start banning accounts for this and then requiring login to view YouTube.
Do they think they are essential and believe I will not simply forget they ever existed?
May very well be, but that will be in line with their out of touch and deluded policies.I doubt they’ll ever actually do it, just threaten it constantly.
They’d rather have people without accounts, and/or using adblockers keep using the site. If they started actually cracking down, then it would create a significant pool of users who would use some other platform. They’d rather eat the losses of some people not viewing ads then push a significant amount of users to a potential competitor.
Much like how Microsoft hasn’t cracked down on unlicensed windows installs because it would push a significant amount of people to look for an alternative OS.
well, I don’t think people would actually move platforms if that happened. reddit did some stuff that everyone hated and it’s still absolutely massive while the alternative, Lemmy, is small af. that’s not even considering the difficulty of making an alternative to YouTube.
The difference is that Reddit was still largely usable after the API changes and most affected users weren’t getting banned. Some people have a high tolerance for ads, but a lot of people would find YouTube unusable without an ad blocker, and if YouTube was banning people, they’d be destroying a lot of the inertia against going somewhere else.
If we say that something like 20% of users on YouTube are using adblockers, that’s a big enough addressable market for a competitor to seriously take off. Enough to attract content creators and VC funding to get it off the ground. In the end YouTube would probably win, but it would be after a few years of actually having to compete. The revenue loss over that time period isn’t worth the short term gain of getting some small percentage of users to watch ads.
If YouTube felt like it could get away with banning people using ad blockers and requiring an account to watch, they would have done it a decade ago.
They got me on chrome with this. I fought with it for about an hour but if I was logged in, videos just would not load.
So back to Firefox I go wheeeee
“Experiencing interruptions? Find out why” - Naah I’m fine dude, just take your time.
Very well knowing why and watching them do their stalling is indeed fine.
Every time you are reminded how petty they are.I’m watching a 4h video. I can wait 5 seconds for it to load 😂
Oh no! The video is black for a few seconds instead of showing several ads for a minute! Whatever am I going to do???
Even if they keep the screen black for 30 second to a minute, I’d still gladly wait in silence than be subjected to advertisements.
If they ever make it impossible to watch videos without first watching ads, then I’ll just leave the platform. I have no loyalty to YouTube and I’ll sooner dump the platform and move on to other video sites than deal with enshittification and ads.
If they ever make it impossible to watch videos without first watching ads, then I’ll just leave the platform.
Yep. Then it will be time to finally start exploring peertube or something…
i wish peertube had more/better discovery tools
The problem isnt discovery its content. There isnt much good content on there. You’ll find the good stuff pretty quickly.
I take that personally :(
Actually most of my videos are just boring things that I find interesting, and I get just as many views on there as I did on YouTube. And the autocaptions are waaaaaay better.
What I like about peertube is it’s just people uploading for the love of it, not content farms and AI slop chasing a quick buck.
Edit: oh yeah and not having multiple ads on my videos.
But they offer an ad free plan that isn’t expensive, and the service is really fast and reliable, and comes with YouTube music as well. Why pay for streaming sites that still give you ads like amazon or peacock, but won’t pay for YouTube?
Why pay for streaming sites that still give you ads like amazon or peacock
I don’t? Anyone who pays for a service to show them ads is a rube?
I would actually consider paying for a service like Youtube if it truly was as simple as that, but it isn’t. Even if they aren’t showing ads after your buy premium, they are still collecting, training on, and selling your data and habits. This is payment. I don’t believe in double-dipping; if I’m already paying in my data, then I’m not going to give you money or watch your ads.
If you want to show ads without harvesting data or offer a way to pay monetarily that stops ads and data harvesting, then I’ll watch ads or buy. But I absolutely do no accept double-dipping. If I’m already paying, I’m not paying again.
So you watch ads and get your data collected? That’s crazy.
No, I don’t watch ads?
Crazy how they keep having to put words in others’ mouths to have something to argue against.
Why
pay for streaming sites that still give you ads like amazon or peacock, but won’tpay for YouTube?Fixed that for ya.
“Actually I like getting cucked by YouTube” - you
I love ad free music on my car, and no ads on my phone and pc, i and support company’s they allow my to get this service. You enjoy pricing every company is right to go to the ad models because people won’t pay for the ad free versions.
Not expensive? I just checked. It’s 8€/m for me. Which means 96€/year.
Maybe that’s not expensive for the USAians that earn hundreds of thousands per year. But it is expensive to just remove a few ads that can be easily blocked. It won’t even stop the Google tracking, it just stops the ads on YouTube. An ad blocker will also block the tracking.
I used to pay for YT.
I quit because they were very anti-creator and i did not support the changes they were making.
I don’t pay for streaming sites. 🏴☠️ And I definitely won’t give YouTube any money. I’ve always been able to browse their videos without paying a cent. I’m not about to start now.
Besides, I don’t like how everything has become subscription services nowadays. You used to be able to pay once and own a product. Now you need to pay monthly to have temporary access to a constantly changing library. No thanks, I’ll only spend money on things I can own forever.
I just dont trust them not to use the payment and account info to track me more for every other ad they serve.
They get nothing.
Well i hope you didn’t send this message from an android phone or Windows 11.
We truly live in a society, don’t we.
The way I see it, don’t make your thing free for 20 years if you want people to pay for it. At this point, it’s as natural and free as a summer’s breeze in our minds.
It’s still free though. The paid version is just an ad free version. YouTube had always had ads for the free version.
not OP but personally I watch maybe 2h of YT /month. Because I only watch one dude who posts about monthly, then the rest is just random links I’m clicking from a post or something. I donate to the guy periodically. The other links half of them are news clips or something that I could prob just get from their site.
The one-size model just doesn’t fit my use case. I’d pay for a per-time-watched plan if it was reasonably priced but it doesn’t even exist.
Honestly I could do without it entirely. Personally.
Oh that’s why it says this? Guess I’ll block this message too.
I’m fine with waiting 10 seconds at the beginning of a video. I wonder how much YouTube would save (by reducing bandwidth, smaller caches, choosing slower storage) if they didn’t have the goal to start the video virtually immediately.
That feature isn’t built into YT? I have it set on my browser to where the video needs to be manually started (excluding playlists).
My point was: You don’t need to wait for it to buffer or even load. Once the page is there, the video is playable.
I don’t know why this just happens on my laptop. Probably it’s because it has a slower CPU. Also, this website shouldn’t be this bloated
Bloat + they default to that message after a timer + they intentionally throttle users using adblock
Just using Firefox triggers the throttle too.
You can tell they’re deliberately causing the delay by the way it pops up instantly and sends you to a page about turning off adblockers. The experiencing interruptions message used to send you to a page about ISP network performance…
I’ll never pay for YouTube ever.
The best part is that Youtube ad revenue is low enough that everyone who can is doing their own sponsor segments, so paying for Youtube to remove their ads doesn’t remove a lot of the ads. The only way to an ad-free experience is adblock+sponsorblock.
I’ll never understand why people are proud to waste their life watching ads. Or are proud to use adblock and steal the content being posted by small creators. You’re really sticking it to the little guy, great job.
If the little guy is staking their livelihood on revenue from getting in bed with the devil, they deserve nothing.
Fuck YouTube too while we’re at it.
I would pay if it was a quality service and not ran by clowns
Also not run by oligarchs
All oligarchs are clowns, but all clowns are not oligarchs
And they didn’t do their damndest to destroy competitors
How is YouTube not a quality service lmao
well the Apple TV app is shit and the platform is overrun with AI slop
People who only watch two or three 20-minute videos from the top of their recommendations on their home tab may have no idea the platform is as sloppy as scrollers know it to be.
Try saying suicide or rape, or making a channel where all of your videos are under 10 minutes and trying to get paid for it.
You do you. I like my YT Premium. Many of the creators I watch there simply don’t publish anywhere else, and I don’t have time for ads, especially if I’m watching on my smart TV.
This used to be the case, but it’s a different equation now. Ads used to be one or two per video. Fine, I get there are bills to pay.
Now it’s pure greed and pushing us to a subscription for a service they purposely made shitty so we would think exactly what you are. 4-5 ads, with forced ads interrupting the videos, and auto redirects to more ads after the video fonishes. Unskippable multi-minute ads.
And if you’re thinking “well then just pay for it”, tell that to Netflix, Hulu, and all of the streaming services that were “ad-free” until they decided that actually, pay twice as much or watch ads (even though your paying).
So while I understand you’re saying, you’re assuming Google will play fair. They won’t. They will up the price, they will still force ads, and it will get worse. I’m taking a stand now saying enough is enough. I’m not rewarding them for enshittifying the service.
Check out Nebula, it is paid but there are no ads and they have a decent amount of YouTubers and are adding more regularly.
Also your feed is based on subscriptions not an algorithm.
This is the future - independent creator channels and collectives. In truth we consumers might end up paying slightly more, but vastly more of what’s collected will go into the hands of the actual creators and creatives than to a bunch of suits who do nothing.
I am also a Nebula subscriber and preferentially view creators there if the content is also on YT. I purchased a lifetime subscription to Nebula; I hope I get my money’s worth.
My YT subscription page (https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions) is also just what I’ve subscribed to, in reverse-chronological order. Unfortunately, that’s not all the YT I consume, plenty of after-video recommendations, and sometimes I intentionally visit the main page, which is all algorithm. I do need to work on that – near-ending algorithmic recommendations are probably not the best thing to spend my limited life time on.
Oh don’t worry, I’m there, I’ll happily give money to them
No one is assuming anything. I cancelled my netflix when they started that shit and stopped watching prime. These are services you can turn off when the terms dont align with your approval. If/When google tries the same shit ill cancel that too.
I decided to keep Netflix (and just pay for the ad-free tier), but dropped prime because there was some content that was not available ad-free, and UBO (et. al.) was unable to strip them.
So you refuse to pay because they MIGHT do something bad? That’s a pretty weak argument. You’re taking a stand against… What? You were never a paying customer in the first place, and they have not enshitified YouTube Premium in the over 10 years I’ve had it. In fact, I still pay a grandfathered $8/mo for my account - which is grace I was never given by Hulu or Netflix as they repeatedly jacked up the price over that same timespan. Seems to me they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt.
They actually did. They called it Google Play Music, and Google TV/Google Play Videos. I paid for those. Youtube Music and Youtube premium are the enshittified versions of those, and they will continue to make them worse.
I will concede that the YouTube Music app started (and might still be) worse than GPM was in the end. But I’m not sure it could be considered enshittification. Yeah, the YTM app itself was kinda shit, especially at first - but they didn’t make the service materially worse and charge more for features they took away. They didn’t jack up the price to coincide with the “new” service, they just consolidated the two separate services into one. They didn’t introduce ads. They didn’t silently take down a ton of the music offered and leave the price the same - they still have the same 100M tracks as the other guys, and you ONLY get music from those other services.
I agree and get where you’re coming from on this example - but I think people use the term enshittification more broadly than it’s actual definition, and in my opinion this doesn’t fit.
Hahahaha class war
Do ye folks not have newpipe?
i do, and i get a pop up every time i use it now, warning that their services will likely end this fall
My friend told me that you just wouldn’t be able to download it again in the fall or something, but it’ll still work
How do I get that on iOS?
Hell if I know, I avoid apple like the plague.
And I avoid android like the plague; what’s your point?
I hate when people just say “android android android”.
By leaving your walled garden.
No thanks. Seems more like android is coming into the garden.
if you use apple products then, that’s skill issue for a few months more.
if youbuse apple products then, that’s skill issue for a few months more.
I might use apple products but I now how to spell and use punctuation.
sorry, English is not my first language.



















