Oh no, another YouTube article!

This time, YouTube is dropping the hammer on people who protect their PCs from ads.

We know we're going to eventually be blacklisted by Google. At this stage in our lives, we simply give zero fucks.

This shouldn't come as a surprise given how YouTube has increased the cost of YouTube Premium to a variable rate. In some countries, monthly fees for premium subscriptions have doubled. While other services such as Netflix are telling the subscribers they get to pay premium fees to watch commercials just like cable TV does to the average American audience. With Amazon, they arbitrarily threw the middle finger at their "Prime" customers starting next year telling them they're going to get commercials whether they wanted them or not. Which ironically misses the entire point of streaming services being a better alternative to cable television.  And why is this happening? Well! Simply put it's all about Greed.

Would you like to know more?

 

Previously, Previously, Previously, Previously

Unlike other streaming services...

YouTube (and even Twitch) is a corporation unique from Netflix, Disney, and Hulu in the fact that they don't really have to pay for all of their content. It's far easier to steal from individuals who cannot defend themselves by injecting ads into their content and never issuing a check at the end of the day. In this sense, YouTube is a bigger threat to the individual than anything Pirates Bay has done.

Of course, if you satisfy the "all-mighty algorithm" enough you too the content creator can climb the pyramid of popularity and SOMEDAY get paid for it! Depending of course of how much of your intellectual property you want to give away of course! And how neutered 'audience friendly' your content is for advertisers.  This is why they're a multi-billion dollar organization. With determining that people who use ad-blockers are now a threat they hope to make even more money by starting a war with its own end-user base.

If you want to continue down the rabbit hole with how cable companies of old think. YouTube doesn't even want you to lay eyes or resolve the DNS if you have an ad blocker going. We're sure there are some asshats on the board that think it should be a punishable offense similar to piracy. Cable networks then barrier themselves away from free solutions such as unencrypted C-Band satellite services from many years ago. Which was the great cognitive dissidence of cable media. They complain about no one watching their channel. But they encrypt their network to prevent anyone from watching their channel. Home Shopping Network and NASA held out for as long as they did. But they too are not encrypted and require a pay-for package just to watch endless commercials. Because commercials themselves are classified as entertainment.

This is probably why we never liked Space Jam. It's a movie that's effectively an endless commercial.

Why block ads?

Although the picture above didn't appear on YouTube and in fact appears on a news site. They too word ad-blockers as if it is an existential threat. To which let's answer that question. 'What are the 'consequences'?":

• Everything is safer! - We've talked about how FOSS software is being attacked by Google Ad-Sense where if an end-user with no ad-blockers types in a free software they are redirected to a potentially hazardous/Malware software. Google runs zero safety checks on the advertisers that are on board with them because there are simply so many. If Google was held under the same standards they put websites through their search engine would be deemed hazardous because they offer links to sites that are hazardous on the first page of most popular keyword findings. Yes, we used Google Search as an example and not YouTube. Both are owned by the same company.
• Everything is faster! - If you block ads on a major news network like CNN, FOX, or MSNBC, you face blocking up to 20+ megs of garbage data, while the article itself is only 1-3 megs. The same is true with YouTube, it's remarkable how much crap there is not only on the main page but every time you visit a new page within YouTube.
• Everything is visible! - You don't have to sit through 1 minute of commercials the creator may or may not see residuals of in order to get to the content you are looking for. Other websites take it to an extreme by putting ads in mid-sentence or using AI to badly scrape content and produce an often incorrect answer to those trying to search for something.
• Everything is honest! - Instead of creators trying to pursue more sustainable revenue streams we're stuck with everyone click-baiting their way down to mediocrity. Anyone who has looked up a how-to on YouTube has probably seen about 3-10 videos that explain nothing before you get to that one guy who gets right to the point (and probably isn't a partner of YouTube thus he gets nothing). To YouTube this is great. More Engagement = more ads. Regardless of how low of quality it is.

Those are your 'consequences'. In which we'll survive.

About advertisement itself.

This is where S gets to make the Donald Drapers of the world sad.

You have to think about advertisements like inviting someone into your house and them paying you to shit on your floor. Ideally, you would like them to use the bathroom like it was designed for. However, this person in your house wants to let everyone know they shit in your house and insist on shitting on your white carpet floor in your living room for 'maximum exposure'. You know if they do this eventually people aren't going to show up at your house because it'll just be known as the house with shit all over!

This analogy is valid because it keeps in tune with the rules of the internet:

Everything is shit until proven otherwise.

This is why content creators would partner up with vendors that they legit use to prove (or try to prove) that what is sitting on that white carpet floor in their living room isn't shit. More appropriately, you compartmentalize your content to allow said vendor to shit on the correct area of your house.

The good way of doing it? Include the advertisement in your video and have it as a brief break from the content or at the end of your content.

The bad way? Like how Twitch does it. Where in the middle of a streamer talking to their audience the advertisement interrupts shitting all over their content.

Solutions.

YouTube has been rolling out its ad-block detection slowly to groups of people. If you didn't get it yet. You eventually will.

This is because YouTube is rolling almost daily builds to combat the filters that are being put in place by Ublock Origin and AdBlock. The developers of those applications are simply responding to a threat.

This is kinda how the YouTube versus uBlock war is going on daily at the time of this post. This will continue until their parent company gets really shitty and removed their plugin from their browser storefront as Chrome controls 70 percent of the market.

Because turning off ad blocking and letting YouTube unvetted sponsors through to your computer is systematically dangerous.

There are things you could do with adding filters inside of UBlock to further block the javascript activity from triggering this screen above.

However, What if we told you that the best cure for YouTube is not really using YouTube at all? If you aren't even going to their website DIRECTLY. Then the possibility of getting ANY javascript on your front door suddenly turns into a non-issue.

Enter Invidious/FreeTube.

I first have to talk about Invidious as that is what the FreeTube app rests upon. Simply put. Invidious is an open-source front-end replacement for YouTube. By replacing the entire front-end of YouTube you cannot get commercials/ads or any unnecessary content when watching videos on YouTube.

 

Invidious of course as a lot of public mirror sites are available. For those technically able and having the resources you can download and set up your very own instance.

However, what if you don't want to set up a server? And you don't (and shouldn't) trust any of the public mirrors to log in to? Well, boys, girls, robots, and cyborgs, this is where FreeTube steps in.

FreeTube is ALSO an open source and available for every computer-based platform known to Earth because of it. But the unique element of FreeTube is that you don't have to log in to an Invidious server. All of the data about your subscriptions and lines is stored locally on your computer. This allows for even more control over your own data. Which we like!

Another thing that made us really dig FreeTube is the option buttons of the player. You can download ANY resolution format that is posted on YouTube without the need is a 'premium' account. You can Alternate between legacy formats for slower machines and dash formats to access WEBM and AV1 codecs. You can even just go audio only if you are using the service like a music player.

We especially use the download option so we can take music/podcasts in our favorites and upload them to our phone before we enter the airport where Wi-Fi is still a high commodity item while in flight.

 

When it comes to transferring your subscription data from YouTube to Freetube the documentation on this was rather solid.. We had a minor hang-up where during the Google Takeout exports it wanted to export EVERYTHING which of course would lock the entire process. If for some reason all of the boxes are checked only check the box for YouTube and export that. As you will need the subscriptions.csv file out of the takeout.zip file Google will generate for you.

Missing features.

The only thing that would make FreeTube even better is if there was an Android/iPhone version of this software. We know that's asking a bit much out of open source. However, we live in an era where there are people who don't even own a computer. They own cell phones and do everything through their cell phones. They're the type of audience YouTube preys upon because they accept advertisements as just a part of the ecosystem they are on instead of looking for ways to improve their lives and time.

Other YouTube Alternatives.

Odysee - We talked about these guys in the past. Probably the only Web3 product that we gave a good review to because functionally it doesn't need Web3 to work. We guess an update to this is one of our concerns came true in the fact that LBRY lost its lawsuit with the SEC.  Depending on the direction of Odysee itself it could simply walk away from LBRY as a reflector service and just archive everything locally on their own video servers. Since Odysee and LBRY are almost joined at the hip we don't see that happening. Also, despite their claims that technically a decentralized service could last forever. That without anyone really updating the software with security upgrades and features. It will die eventually.

As far as the content because of their -almost- no censorship nature (Hey, gotta keep the CP off of the servers) a lot of the older age of YouTube such as Leefy-style trash posts while playing a game show up there more so than anywhere else. Beyond this major YouTubers tend to use the network as just a backup server in case YouTube fucks off. Hey, it might be an alternative for people who don't want to load anything AND want a client for their Android Phone which Odysee does give.

Vimeo - Although technically older than YouTube it hasn't really gotten a lot of love because Vimeo well... Has standards.

It's a great provider if you a very artsy kind of individual and want to have a level of creative expression without too much censorship. Showing a naked body would get you permabanned on Twitch or YouTube but as long as it has some kind of artistic meaning instead of porn being the sake of porn Vimeo will leave it alone (Which hey, everyone knows there is porn-hub for that). They don't allow let's-plays or gamer reviews. They don't allow still shots for musicians to upload.

As mentioned in another blog. Vimeos life-blood is they're the best bang for the buck if you want to host videos privately for your company or network. Which is why you don't hear much of them from a public light. They've also been trying to take the approach of assisting people in making videos more so than just being a dump site for people to upload.

 

Rumble - I've watched this network in passing and it's functional. Mobile support for it is certainly there. The biggest issue people have with this network is how politically alt-right the place has gotten. With good reason. Because on YouTube if you perhaps disagree about how America was handling the COVID-19 virus. You could get your channel banned under the guise of misinformation. There were actual doctors talking about psychological cases dealing with suicide that were also banned from YouTube as well. Finally, you have the majority of independent news kicked off from YouTube because of their double standards of having major networks spew whatever crap that they want on YouTube. But when it comes from the individual. Nope, not having that!

Rumble if anything is a lot more stable than Odysee. Content quality is about the same on certain topics but somewhat better if you're into political talk. If you dig into the categories of Rumble there certainly is a lot more than just politics as it seems they too want a piece of that Twitch gaming action that Amazon is currently abusing the fuck out of their people with.

PeerTube - Man, we wanted this to really take off. But every time we went shopping to see/find any really good ones we were at a total loss. PeerTube is almost treated like a CMS of sorts. If you wanted to become your own YouTube Esque server. You can! Of course that involves all of the responsibility of running your own video streaming service such as the bandwidth costs, administration time, and well. CONTENT!

It's one thing to run a video streaming service. It's another to put stuff onto the service to make it worthwhile for people to come by. In the instances that we have seen work and have decent content you almost have to question if the content there was actually legal to begin with. Months later that instance is gone.

PeerTube also has the capability of "Federation" where you can listen to other instances for videos so your users aren't isolated to just what is on your server. Apparently, it's compatible with mastodon instances as well. Haven't really seen that pop up all too much in our instance.

We would say the best instance that shows off if you have a lot of video content it's an excellent CMS would the blender instance. As they tried to be on YouTube and mark all of their videos with free and no ads but YouTube decided to put their own crap onto their channel anyways and not pay them.

Unfortunately, no mobile support for PeerTube. perhaps in the future, this is something FreeTube could incorporate into their app as well. Who knows.

Replace all the links!

Own a website? Social network? Replacing everything *youtu.be* with an Invidious or an Odysee link. We know we're some small-time website but if enough people link AWAY from youtube to commercial-free alternatives it's a great way of sending a fuck you message to those advertisers. Google will of course exert their force to continue making YouTube number 2 in the market to their search engine. But that doesn't mean they get free help with this.

Thinking of switching to firefox to escape alphabets corperate grip? be prepared to deal with obstructive code.

Super thanks to gareppa on mastodon for finding this!

In this part of youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/96766c85/jsbin/desktop_polymer_enable_wil_icons.vflset/desktop_polymer_enable_wil_icons.js

There's some code that does an agent detect that slows down firefox.

setTimeout(function() {
c();
a.resolve(1)
}, 5E3);

Now, Ublock to the rescue once again!

Add this filter into your Ublock and you are golden. "Open your Ublock icon, click on the gears, and finally go into "My Filter".

www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), *, 0.001)

Like magic, firefox goes through youtube as fast as chrome. Wooooow! What is antitrust right?!?

Final thoughts.

No, we're keeping all of our ad blockers on. Especially the Adblock.  Just as a reminder to -never- use YouTube. Enjoy nothing from us!

Chances are, your favorite YouTuber will not be leaving YouTube because they may have made the mark where they are a partner. Where they are getting money from YouTube. In which, good on them! Understand that YouTube makes money in more ways than advertisement. They still have their old search engine model making them money as well, Where every video you click and every word you type in gets recorded and analyzed by third-party companies. This is why you can't play the little violin for YouTube saying that ad-blockers are going to ruin the company. They'll be perfect fine datamining your metric analysis of all of your devices.

Also, understand that you can only make money on YouTube if you play by their Disney-esque rules. Not everyone wants to deal with some vapid unbox video while the guy rambles for 10 minutes before opening his Temu 'gifts' endangering his audience in supporting such a sketch-ass company.

Then again. Not everyone wants to put up with my diatribes either. However, you do get the consolation prize of not having products shoved down your throat every paragraph. And thus, you take the wins when you can.

If you found our solution helpful. We don't want your God dammed money! Instead, support the developers of FOSS software like Invidious and FreeTube. And understand that YouTube with a flick of the wrist can change its whole API blacking out this client. So be sure to slam download on as many of your favorite videos on YouTube. They can't ad-block you if it's already on your hard drive.

That's what server said.

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