So YouTube is going to make it impossible to watch without ads. Reddit's communities are going dark because Reddit (essentially) wants more ad revenue. Facebook and Instagram have been plastered with ads for longer than they haven't.
And we're just a short hop from ads being "Attention required" with eyeballs tracked. I wonder if there's a possibility that this will shake Youtube from it's dominance.
The commercialization of the internet ruined it for the most part. Ads and tracking everywhere and people are centralized in a handful of networks of a handful of companies that want to make the most profit at all costs.
It's refreshing to see how people are starting to revolt on platforms like Reddit and Twitch. People are done with this stuff. Even if it is only a small percentage of the total amount of users, it allows for new platforms to thrive and grow, while the old platforms slowly decay. I hope this day will come for Youtube as well.
It’s too late for that. On YouTube even if you pay for premium, you still get ads in the form of sponsored segments, and probably in the recommendation algorithm (I’d be surprised if big corps had no way to pay to bump their videos in search results).
More and more platforms will try the « paid subscription with ads » in the coming years.
When people recognize how cognitively harmful ads really are, there will be a movement to pirate and rehost all content decentrally, edited to remove interstitials and sponsored segments.
Ads targeting children would be an international crime if our world was just.
People have been warned about the cognitive harm from advertisements for probably over 100 years now. Its not going anywhere unfortunately, its too profitable.
The sponsored segments as in advertising that creators have negotiated directly? I have YouTube Premium and that's the only type of ad I get, I don't get anything else.
When a free experience can do better than the premium experience, your product have a problem.
I’m not even sorry about SponsorBlock, creators still get their money, I don’t have to watch the sponsored segment, and advertisers have no way to know I didn’t watch it. So it’s zero impact on the creator, big impact on my sanity.
> advertisers have no way to know I didn’t watch it
Actually per-segment viewership gets tracked by YouTube and displayed in the YouTube creator tools. I wouldn't be surprised if those statistics get used when negotiating deals with sponsors.
Yeah, it's unquestionably tracked what exact portions of a YT video your browser actually loads and plays. All playback is controlled by JS and there's no reason YT doesn't hook into those actions and record metrics of every play/pause/seek/mute/etc. user action (in addition to actual network requests made by the browser).
I'd like to imagine a future where I can stream fractions of a cent per minute/hour to the video provider or creator in exchange for consumption of that content. That way I only pay for however much I actually consume and the platform doesn't have to serve me ads to be profitable or sustainable. This could even work without needing to register for an account, using the HTTP 402 Payment Required response status code that already exists [0][1], something your browser could handle in the background.
I know all things cryptocoin are anathema here on HN, but one of the stated goals in the satoshi whitepaper was enabling micropayments. I don’t want to give my credit card info out to every video creator I watch, but what if I could load a digital wallet and pay for streams exactly as you suggest?
This makes sense in my head, if there's an incredibly small cost to watching someone (which would add up if that someone thousands of views) and the experience doesn't revolve constantly around trying making me constantly want to consume something else.
In late 90s and early 2000s, before all Youtube, Facebook and Instagram crap, some passionate people produced content wich was available for free on their web pages.
I don't feel the need for need mass culture and mass entertainment crap, but if I would feel such a need, I would install cable TV and/or pay for it.
This era had shoutads/clickagents, eads and doubleclick for monetization. Banner ads were obtrusive and complained about at the time. I remember text ads google was pushing were actually a welcome change.
Most people are probably too poor to do too many direct payment options, so they'll get choosier about what they consume, and advertisers will still be SOL. Strangely I don't feel any pity for the human-shaped turds.
They're doing another promotion for cosmetics too. And it's not even per sandwich, it's per purchase. So to get them all, you have to have 4 separate transactions.
Nah Reddit is pretty much back to normal. The protest is over.
There are a few big subreddits like r/interestingasfuck that are still closed, but these are more like meme channels than communities. People can just get the same dozen gifs a day from r/damnthatsinteresting, r/whoadude, etc.
That might be true today - but tomorrow (1st July) may be different; that's when the API changes take effect and 3rd party apps no longer work.
If, as is widely (self) reported, many mods and power users interact with reddit via 3rd party apps; we won't see the true impact of the API changes until they're active.
Already, r/all is now a lot more of strange subreddits (trurateme?) that really shouldn't be there and were founded on much smaller communities.
If what the mods say about their tools is in fact true, then:
Next, you're going to see a lot more spam as mods tools are gone and most of America is on a long weekend with a family holiday at the end.
Next, the spammers are going to quickly figure out the mods are asleep/gone and up the crap game even more.
Next, the creeps are going to post more less-than-kosher material, with reporting of it essentially going into unread inboxes by overworked mods.
Next, r/all is going to be, well, boring and gross. All the spam will make you go, huh, that's not very interesting. All the less-than-kosher stuff is going to make you go yuck.
Then, you're going to say to yourself, we'll see how long this lasts. And if it lasts until ~July 8th or so, you'll have found your next reddit fix.
Again, all predicated on what the mods are saying is true.
> Next, the creeps are going to post more less-than-kosher material, with reporting of it essentially going into unread inboxes by overworked mods.
If anything can hurt Reddit, it's that kind of material. Advertisers really, really don't like controversial content, and are the first to pull out of any service that even smells of controversy or political incorrectness, see what happened to Twitter revenues after the Musk takeover. The Reddit protests would have been far more effective if people started posting (and/or moderators stopped removing) gore, porn and Swastikas everywhere, maybe with a sprinkling of racism and homophobia on top.
I can't wait. Reddit will not be able to afford moderation like FB/Twitter (which already isn't sufficient) and will run afoul of content laws in multiple countries. Sweet karma.
Not really though. The impact of the API issue being protested hasn't even occured yet. It'll be up to individuals tomorrow to cope with the objectively worse experience of browing reddit mobile on browser with the ads and annoying naggy pop-ups or the official app. I went back to reddit after the protests, but I fully expect the degraded experience to naturally nudge me towards lemmy and HN. I just can't imagine dealing with that shit when I whip out my phone during a toilet break.
That may look like it, but I think the most important 1% has already left or will leave Reddit this week. Those people are the people that are also the bigfest contributers of the platform, be that as content creators, moderators or app/tool developers.
Even more important: Alternative platforms had a huge surge in usercount. They don't reach the number of Reddit of course, but rheu don't need to. They are their own thing and many do now have enough users to replace Reddit for most usecases of many users.
I've been having a blast on the Ferdiverse for the last few weeks. I'm also trying out tildes.net and squabbles.io. It's all very refreshing and reminds me of early reddit and old forums.
I'm actually somewhat glad this all happend. I'd have never dicovered all these platforms otherwise. And I'm not alone in that perspective
I’m willing to bet that we’re not far off from YouTube including ads even if you pay. We’ve already seen other streaming services start to do this. I think the streaming services will become more interested in ad revenue than they are in paying subscribers.
What about in 5 years, when they've normalized subscriptions with the ad levels you expect today, and their shareholders demand more dividends. What then? Ads baby. Why would it stop when literally every public corporation's ONLY goal is to extract more money out of you, the consumer? Foolish thinking.
What country are you in? I have YouTube Premium and I don't get _any_ ads at all from YouTube, only the sponsored segments from creators directly (and no, NordVPN, I don't need a VPN, yes I know you exist).
Why should they? YouTube Premium literally says ad-free.
Not my problem how Google moderates their videos. They’re pretty efficient in demonetizing videos or entire channels for a couple of swear words or god forbid a nipple somewhere, but taking a mental dump in my head with some useless shit that I don’t care about is apparently fine.
Yes sponsorblock, which I cited above. But at this point, why pay for YouTube premium? If I have to install sponsorblock, I might as well install uBlock origin and get a better user experience for free.
The point is, uBlock origin is supposedly not going to work with the new system. You claimed that there "will be no way to avoid ads", which is strictly untrue. Youtube Premium + sponsorblock is the counterpoint.
Youtube won't take my money even if I wanted to give it to them. I've got no credit card nor the desire to get one, and it's the only payment method accepted.
> I wonder if there's a possibility that this will shake Youtube from it's dominance.
Sadly, very unlikely. I recommend AdBlockers and YouTube app alternatives without ads to basically everyone and the vast majority of people would rather watch ads than deal with installing something even if it'll take a few seconds.
There's enough of us (adblock users) for Google to want to take profit from but not enough to make a dent in YouTube's monopoly even if we all moved to something else.
Not impossible. It's not like they're going to DRM this shit with treacherous execution environments and all that. Your browser is still your user agent. I'm sure an extension to bypass this would pop up days after the wide rollout, if any.
> if there's a possibility that this will shake Youtube from it's dominance.
Yes, I'm sure everyone is fighting for an audience who refuse to pay and block all ads. And of course the audience who do sit through ads or pay are therefore not going to switch and stick with YouTube.
So unless you want to burn money, I really don't see a viable business model there. Unless you think you can take the initial hit to grow a big enough audience and then force ads and paid subscriptions on everyone to make that money back.
And we're just a short hop from ads being "Attention required" with eyeballs tracked. I wonder if there's a possibility that this will shake Youtube from it's dominance.