I don’t really know how people can expect YouTube to exist without some sort of income.

The age of free content is coming to a close as VC funds dry up. Serving video is expensive.

In reaction to this news from YouTube, I signed up for Premium. $12/mo for my main source of content? Easy decision.

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.

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.

God forbid you pay or watch the ads. Truly dark times for zoomers.

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.

Since when has it been anything BUT advertisements or paywalls?

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

Endless September 2: Youtube boogaloo

Amn shit is hitting the fan. Google has been clamping down in ad blockers. First with Manifest v3, then the DRM shit, killing YT mods by making it mandatory to sign-in and more.

no, just use firefox with ublock

It’s been ages since I have entered the youtube.com domain, I use the libredirect extension to go to invidious instances. Sometimes the instances are blocked and I have to try another one but its a small price to pay for internet freedom. Still, google is trying to sue invidious for using their API, which they don’t, they just scrape the website, but I would like to see the bullshit google comes out with.

Too be fair if you are a customer you are hopefully no longer the product.

I quit YouTube not long ago. Highly recommended. :)

Ads are memetic malware

No one here considers that we might not need a “competitor” for YouTube at all. Videos have been a disaster for the web. Information that can easily be relayed and digested in a 1000-word article is instead stretched into a 30-40 minute video with ad breaks. The less aid about TikTok, Instagram, and other bullshit video platforms the best. We don’t need this shit. We need to go back to Web 1.0. Web as a means to share information and talk to people. There’s no room for ShitTube there.