My SO wants to upgrade our TV, so when we go to the store, they see big, beautiful displays, and I just see ads.
I experienced this crazy onslaught of advertising to the point of reducing how much I watched YouTube. I was pretty upset and not at all inclined to pay, especially since YouTube was even putting ads on my own videos without me seeing a single cent, because my channel is too small.
Then my partner bought me a few months of a Premium Subscription as a Christmas gift.
It was pointed out to me that I watched more YouTube than any other streaming service which I was paying for.
Combined with background music on mobile, it’s changed my life.
I’m still unimpressed with the business model, but the alternative is so far worse.
Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn’t require self hosting and I’ll happily move my content there.
To me this is way too much like extortion. The more they do this the less I want to give them money.
Also I need to be logged on everywhere, which I don’t want to (have to), mostly for privacy and data harvesting reasons.
It also does not help that when I want to see something and jump around in a video, I get the same ad 30 times. No exaggeration.
It absolutely is.
It’s possibly also how they’ll get broken up by the DoJ.
The thing is… All the premium features USED TO BE FREE AND AVAILABLE UNTIL THEY LOCKED THEM BEHIND A PAY WALL.
I used to be able to have YouTube playing in the background, reduced ads, etc. All of the features.
Now, I still do because I use Firefox + ublock on mobile. Yeah, I can play this shit with my screen off (Firefox + unlock + desktop mode + turn screen off).
Fuck 'em.
It was pointed out to me that I watched more YouTube than any other streaming service which I was paying for.
Yeah, I think that YouTube provides a lot of value.
My problem is that I don’t really want Google – a company who makes a lot of their money via profiling and data-mining – logging and data-mining everything I watch.
YouTube Premium lets someone avoid ads. But as best I can tell, it’s not buying any kind of no-log service – in fact, it’s just linking your activity to your financial information, which makes logging and profiling easier. That’s not the service that I want to buy from Google.
What I’d be willing to get from Google is a “no log” service.
I pay for Kagi, for search engine service. I pay for commercial email service. I’m fine with giving money to online service providers and entrusting them with (some) of my data…but I want part of that service to be that they aren’t logging what I do and data-mining my data.
I don’t like the model of “we don’t charge up front but we make our money by extracting all the information about you that we can” model. I’m fine with that existing, because some people are more comfortable with that. But it isn’t what I want for myself.
I think that every single provider tracks your activity and the vast majority of them use it to optimise their service income from you, either by giving you better engagement, ie. making you use the service more - endless searching for content for example, or by selling the captured tracking data to the highest bidder.
Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn’t require self hosting and I’ll happily move my content there.
Nebula is the next best thing to YouTube, but not enough content creators have moved their stuff there, so it’s easy to run out of interesting videos to watch after a while. Some of the bigger folks I follow share their content on both platforms, and the incentive to watch on Nebula instead of YouTube is that content creators have more freedom with their videos on Nebula. They can post bonus/extra footage that would be automatically flagged and blocked by YouTube normally. Don’t need to dance around the censors on Nebula.
Nebula is subscription-based, so they don’t show ads anywhere on their site. But if you don’t want to pay for another subscription service, you can also do a one-time payment to have lifetime access to their site. It’s $300, which is the cost of just over 4 years of their subscription service ($6/mo). Considering I’ve had an account for over 3 years now, it’s almost paid for itself.
No offense to nebula (I’m rooting for them) but unless you exclusively watch news and educational content it basically has nothing to offer. I tried it for a year and I ended up barely using it because I don’t watch that type of content.
Yeah, like I said, it needs more content creators to dump their libraries there. It could be a fantastic competitor to YouTube if only more people knew about it and used it.
Don’t forget the benefit of being able to spite Google!
The lifetime access option shouldn’t exist for an app like that, not unless they have another primary form of income (usually ads). That type of service costs a lot of money to host and if you have a user base that does a one off purchase you stop having a good chunk of that income relatively fast
That’s just the main red flag I see from that, I would be super hesient starting on a platform that isn’t self sustaining and doesn’t have a parent company willing to chuck money at it “till it works” like Google did
I think it’s great for a ground-floor investment in a YouTube competitor. It draws more people to the platform, gets a chunk of money flowing up front to help boost the service, and they can always sunset the lifetime option if the site gets popular and revenue starts to get tight. As long as they continue to honor it for everyone who paid initially.
Like I said in my original comment, a Nebula subscription is only $6/mo. A lifetime access payment is over 4 years of subscriptions up front. That’s a nice chunk of change to help get them established.
I saw someone’s video about how Nebula works (I think Legal Eagle? He was advertising it hardcore on YouTube for a while) and the subscription service is how they pay content creators. He said it’s a more stable income than YouTube, where your videos earn advertising money based on trends and visibility. If you’re not YouTube famous (and the algorithm doesn’t make you visible), you’re not going to make any money on the platform. But Nebula gives you a more solid income, plus the freedom to make the content you want. No AI moderators flagging videos because it thought it detected the word “suicide” or something. No forcing you to include key words or pushing regular videos on a tight schedule to ensure the algorithm keeps recommending your channel.
Not only is this true and annoying, but other things about the ads are getting worse, too.
I recently had to factory reset my TV and, after the first time I opened the YouTube app, immediately had to find the “don’t play video preview” option. It worked, except for the huge banner ad at the top of the list of videos, which still saw fit to play with deafening sound when I didn’t immediately change the video selection. I can’t find a setting to disable this.
Also, I’ve noticed the “fewer ads for this long video” message popping up during videos longer than thirty minutes (and now it seems like longer than twenty minutes). Not only is that message condescending like they’re doing me a favor, but I’m pretty sure it’s not true, at least not by much; and the ads are definitely longer and mostly unskippable.
Like someone else says in this thread, it feels like extortion.
Try this, if your TV can run it: https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ No ads, and there is even sponsor block included, so you don’t have to hear the annoying „segue to our sponsor“ and „please like and subscribe“ nonsense.
Android: revanced manager
Pc: firefox+ublock+dearrow+sponsorblock
AndroidTv: smartTubeNext
I haven’t seen an ad in years
iOS DID have Yattee, but it’s basically unusable at this point unless I’m doing something terribly wrong on my end. Every time I try to use it, even when signed in, I get errors no matter which back end I use.
It doesn’t work, because it relies on Piped/Invidious. Both are currently broken, because Google is trying everything to block third party clients/APIs/proxies for YouTube.
I use the Orion browser with uBlock Origin installed and get 0 ads on YouTube.
Brave can also block YT ads, but I’m not so sure about the extensions. If all you care about is blocking ads, brave is good enough. If you care about sponsorblock and many other FF extensions, Orion is probably way better.
SmartTube is so good. You get it for no ads; you keep it for all the dope features. It’s like YT way back in the day with more advanced shit for anyone that loves tinkering with all the fiddly bits.
Firestick: https://www.firesticktricks.com/
What’s the difference between smart tube and smatttubenext?
it’s the one after
I wouldn’t call them ‘better’ alternatives. They’re easier to install for sure. Personally, I’ve used revanced, newpipe, and libretube and love them all. I stuck with newpipe, since that’s what my family uses now, and it’s easier to troubleshoot when I have it too. And revanced takes some steps, more than just “install this package, done”.
I’d say they are objectively better, because are independent, free & open source apps, instead of relying on patching Google’s proprietary software.
Which one of those do I pick if I actually want to be logged in and have Youtube keep track of my watch history, automatically synchronized between devices?
If you want to use YouTube for that, it seems like ReVanced is your only option. But you can also create an account on a Piped instance, and have your playlists synced. LibreTube is the only app that supports this.
I appreciate your viewpoint, as it’s a part of what makes the software development community so great. I don’t necessarily agree with it, personally, since they all rely on proprietary backend (YouTube), but I truly do appreciate it.
I just don’t want any proprietary software on my devices (for many reasons, most importantly privacy and user freedom). I can use a VPN to privately connect to the YouTube backend, but things get much harder when the proprietary spyware is actually on my device.
I don’t disagree with this point. Calling them objectively better however, is not covering the whole story imo. They are objectively better if your goal is to deproprietarize (not a real word) as much as possible. But if your goal is to just block ads as seamlessly as possible while still keeping all other features in YouTube, then those FOSS apps drop to subjectively better.
Well yeah, I agree. FOSS apps do lack features like logging in (to a Google account), the recommendation algorithm, etc. On the other hand, ReVanced is not exactly easy to install for new users. Both approaches are valid and get the job done (blocking annoying ads). I appreciate the calm and pleasant conversation.
They aren’t better IF you enjoy most of YouTubes features. Usability is key, and messing around with Revanced manager twice a year has been worth it easily.
Being OS doesn’t suddenly make worse UX better.
And revanced takes some steps, more than just “install this package, done”.
It depends. Personally I patch it and then share the patched apk with friends and family, so for them it’s literally just “install this package, done” without compromising security.
I thought about doing this, but didn’t want to essentially be their maintainer. I do that enough at work lol
Tbh I share an apk twice a year on a shared Whatsapp group and that’s all the “maintaining” I do, so I don’t care that much. I’ve had worse
Obligatory post mentioning that Freetube exists on Android as well. With Syncthing, I sync history, playlists and subscriptions. It’s brilliant.
I know that it exists, I don’t think it’s a particularly good solution on Android though. There are native apps like the ones I mentioned before.
Btw syncing an SQLite database with syncthing sounds painful. How often do you have to deal with sync conflicts?
Now do Android TV! All I want is to be able to allowlist channels for my kids but block everything else. I know an htpc is a better option but I’m lazy.
This is my exact setup and couldn’t be happier with it.
I used to watch on ps4, but couldn’t stand the ads anymore so I bought a new PC and repurposed my old PC into a Linux TV box. Now I watch freetube on my TV with no ads and no tracking.
How do you control it? Any fancy integration or just good old mouse?
At first I connected the PS4 dualshock controller to the PC via bluetooth and configured it to move the cursor similarly to how the ps4 works, but the virtual keyboard on Linux Mint kept popping up and going away randomly so I bought a mini Bluetooth keyboard with a small touch pad instead.
I did also try voice commands and it worked great, but I didn’t want to carry a mic around so I never really used it.
Imagine watching YouTube. Your kid, spouse, grandparent, whatever falls and gets badly hurt. You pause the video (out of habit, instead of shutting off the TV) to tend to them. You toss the remote as you rush off the couch, the remote is lost. Instead of silence so you can hear whether they’re breathing and be able to hear and talk to the emergency services dispatcher, you hear an unskippable ad. They parish, because the dispatcher couldn’t hear you and get the ambulance truck to your door in time.
Imagine watching YouTube. You’re alone in your house. You hear something at the window behind you. You pause the video, since it’s probably nothing, to listen more intently. Instead of silence to allow you hear the burglar, you hear an ad for something you would never buy, as the burglar breaks into your house and attacks you for that sweet, sweet PS5. You parish, because you couldn’t react in time.
Edge cases? Maybe. Possible? Yes. Will YouTube/google be charged with accessory to murder? I highly doubt that.
Pause ads are a very bad, and very dangerous, idea.
When I see you perish all I can think of is:
You are watching TV and hear a noise in a nearby room
PAUSE TV_
you pause the TV but to your dismay the TV plays an ad by a political candidate!! The sounds of the shadowy figure are drowned out
SHUT TV OFF_
whoops! Unfortunately for you this is a smart TV! And you need your phone to shut it off, it’s in the same room that the noise is coming from
RUN AWAY
You hear glass break.
…
Unable to pinpoint the location of your adversary, you are caught by surprise and bludgeoned by a steel bar and lay in a pool of your own blood. As your vitality seeps away through the hole in your fractured skull, you wonder the many outcomes that will never come to pass had you had YouTube Premium
You perish
START OVER? Y/N
You made it into a choose your own adventure template hahahahaha
That’s what years of Zork and other DOS text based adventures do to you… Oh and Shadowgate with its unfair trial and error bullshit
Agreed, but the word you want is perish, as parish relates to a land/area.
Hahahahaha!! Good catch! Fixing now
They have actually started serving ads with a skip button… That only skips to the next ad.
That’s been a thing for years now like back before I got premium which was at least 4 years ago the skip button would skip the first ad and then bring you into a timed ad afterward that you couldn’t skip, was obnoxious as hell
I got premium
Don’t expect things to improve after happily paying consecutive ransoms.
it’s improved for me, as someone who easily watches 20ish hours of video a week It’s worth it for me to not have to deal with all the hassle of ad block on it. I run a pihole for everything else but the cat and mouse game got old. I currently get my money’s worth, but if it raises much further I’ll cancel.
Not “if” but “when”. They have you and million others on the hook and already plan their next step to extract more money from you.
I’m going to show this real quick and then we’re going to move on, so pause the video if you want to take a closer look…
Phone: rings
Me: “better pause Youtube so that I can answer without noise in the background”
Youtube: plays ad with even louder audio
Me:
Better switch to some horror film murder compilation video before answering the phone. At least I know it’s going to be all screams and blood splattering on the walls while I’m talking on the phone.
This is specifically about TV apps.
I don’t get ads. I pay 🤷♂️.
Yeah, apparently paying for a service you use and enjoy is stupid or something. 🤷♂️
The bastards are cracking down on getting cheap YT premium with a VPN. Now requires a payment method from the region you’re purchasing via :/
I’ve uninstalled it off the smart TV, started playing videos on laptop. On mobile I use YT via safari with ad blocker, on IOS and not willing to jailbreak or anything like that.
I am not a content creator and do not upload anything. My use would just be as a consumer.
As a consumer, I will not use YT simply because of ads and the way they have made removing ads without a premium subscription so ridiculously difficult and time consuming.
Imo, having ads thrown in your face when you pause it, is reason enough not to use again.
I also noticed that they started showing ads upon opening YouTube on Android TV.
Google sucks so bad.
Thats why i have a dumb tv with a little linux pc attached to it, so i can open piped and jellyfin in my librewolf browser.
Tell me more, pretend I am in idiot…how do I do this?
- Go to <insert distro>.com
- Download iso
- burn iso to usb stick (ventoy!)
- install on pc
- install ublock origin on firefox
- done
also get a dumb tv ofc
despite what people will say, ubuntu is still a rock solid distro. Alternatively, tumbleweed is brilliant too.
real!! just do the thing to disable snaps and it’s perfect for anyone
I disagree. Native packages are still a bit more hassle-free, but snaps have gotten really good by now. And you can do some things that debs can’t, like setting up an entire nextcloud installation with a four-words-long terminal command.
You don’t need a dumb TV, just switch the input. If your TV shows ads when connected to other inputs, yeet that TV out of your house today.
Disconnect it from your network. Hard to serve ads if it can’t contact the servers it is pulling them from.
Yup, working on setting up VLANs so I can keep the stuff I like (DLNA from the NAS) without the stuff I don’t (ads).
Got a new TV a month ago. Fucked up and connected it to wireless, no idea what I was thinking. The only way to kill the connection (from the TV side) was a factory reset.
Windows is like that now. Once you enter an internet connection, you’re screwed. No way out but a full reinstall.
Set up a mini PC like a used Lenovo ThinkCentre, install Linux, and add a keyboard with trackpad. Run Jellyfin and Piped on your homelab, then ‘obtain’ media for your Jellyfin-Instance. Enjoy TV without distractions or tracking!
Follow ups,
Whats the trackpad for?
Any guide on jellyfin setup?
Also homelab 😂😂
Trackpad: Because i decided to not go with anything like kodi, i need a mouse and as i can not use a mouse when sitting on the couch i got a keyboard with integrated trackpad.
Jellyfin: There are a hole lot of guides on jellyfin. Just put it in to youtube and you will find plenty of stuff. The only thing is ‘obtaining’ the media to fill your library. There are a lot of ways and it depends on what language you need your content to be in to make any decision.
Homelab: Well if you want to run anything like piped or jellyfin you need a homelab. This could also be just a RaspberryPi. To get Piped with subscription feed running you can use my guide: https://gist.github.com/WreckingBANG/405235949c655cd8246188ba25c42277
Keyboard+trackpad so you can sit on the couch and have keyboard+mouse controls on the TV.
You could also use Chromecast with SmartTube. Works like a charm. Let me know if you need help with it.
Its not opensource tho, so you are still getting google tracking.
Sure, it was only meant as a way to circumvent ads on the TV
Are you me? Except I use FreeTube instead of Piped. I am so happy with this solution. Years of discontent of watching services going through the enshittification cycle… everything just becoming so underwhelming. This has given me back freedom over my own media consumption. No ads. No endless scrolling through bullshit content. Just a nicely personally curated selection of movies and TV shows (on Jellyfin) and an ad-free YouTube-experience with sponsorblock and dearrow enabled, and blocking of live chats and shorts.
what model? im looking into getting a dumb tv myself but havent found anything good
Well its just old sony tv and i am looking for a replacement with better quality and it is pretty hard to find anything. I will probably just go with a smart tv and never connect it to the internet. You can hack samsung TVs to jump straight into a hdmi input so i will probably do that even tho i am not happy witb it.
same with amazon. its the latest newness. I really miss rabbit ears.
I have rabbit ears hooked into my Plex server so I can record the few shows left on linear broadcast tv
