Remember when Google introduced text-only ads to replace flashing animated banners and pop-up ads popular at the time? I didn’t mind those and I didn’t need an adblocker.
Nowadays YouTube is the primary reason I have to use an adblocker. It is literally unusable with all the ads.
I won’t watch YouTube without an ad locker. Used to pay for premium for years through VPN in turkey, was like $4/ month for family plan. But now they region lock parent methods. So back to you block origin and Firefox in addition to a pihole setup that blocks hundreds of thousands of ad sites. Fuck advertisements.
That’s because every company’s strategy aiming to monopolize is to:
- Make a product that’s genuinely better than what’s on the market for some role. Sometimes by undercutting competition at a loss, sometimes by making things very convenient, etc.
- Once you’re big enough, make sure as you keep growing that new competition can’t pop up to challenge you. Kick the ladder down behind you, and make sure to start greasing the palms of lawmakers so they can’t challenge you in step 3.
- Once you’re so big that you’ve monopolized the market and can’t be challenged no matter what you do (both because of ladder-kicking and because everyone uses you by default), do what you’ve been wanting to this whole time and go from “boiling frog”-pace enshittification to “welp, this sucks, but now I have nowhere else to go” enshittification.
It’s why people who say “Oh, well I wouldn’t mind it if X had a monopoly because they’re way better than those other companies” are so painfully misguided.
I was using adblockers well before Google existed since the internet was already full of that shit by the time they came around. Actually was kind of a selling point for them back in the day; no clutter, no ads, simple layout, great results.
My, how the mighty have fallen…
Were the adblockers in the mid 90s blocking parts of pages like banner ads, or were they just the popup blockers? I think I may have used the latter.
They were crude by today’s standards, often just blocking entire domains.
Google lost the high ground when AI generated Joe Rogan was blatantly selling crypto scams on YouTube. Advertisers don’t even care about the quality of the advertisements, every single industry that has used advertisement as its primary foundation always becomes a group of crooks living in a cataclysmic house of cards.
Pay only for products or for services. If no payment option exists to receive that product or service - and that product or service alone with no extra baggage/strings attached - then you must assume you’re being scammed.
You don’t have to use YouTube
Woah never thought you’d get so many downvotes on frickin lemmy for pointing out the use of surveilance software is not requied.
Yeah, it got hot for a moment
You don’t even need a car. You can just walk. You also don’t really need a grocery store, you can just grow your own food.
Modern society hasn’t been about what we “need” for hundreds or thousands of years.
I don’t see your point. I am using a front end that feeds me YT content without ever opening the YT app that I actually disabled. You don’t have to use YouTube.
Which one do you use? I have a hard time finding something that works well, especially on mobile (iOS)
Edit: nvm, saw on another comment that it’s NewPipe
Haha, I understand now!
Once upon a time people would have thought it was crazy to try controlling how someone interacts with your content on the internet.
I don’t remember anyone asking if we were okay with changing that.
YouTube isn’t a necessity — and neither is the internet, really. We don’t need them to survive. That said, I do enjoy YouTube as a form of entertainment. I’ve tried alternatives like NewPipe and Invidious, but none of them work as smoothly as YouTube with ad blockers.
I use NewPipe, all YT links are redirected to NP app. It is flawless.
So you mean people dont have to use YTs native frontend?
First message sounded like you implied others could switch to peertube or something (which is an option but with tradeoffs)Yeah, I sorta shortcuted my comment. Happens all the time
