I was happily using this for a year or so now. Feels fairer than using an ad blocker. But now they apparently want more money out of people. Feels like some sort of internet video apocalypse is happening, where the services become extremely fragmented and expensive, like YouTube, netflix, hbo, Hulu, Disney+ and whatnot. Each wants some 10-20€ out of your pocket.
I guess that means back to ad blockers and piracy…
I think we’re starting to see the beginning of YouTube’s end. The algorithm is actively choking the life out of the platform, they’re forcing viewers to pay fees that seem to keep getting bigger and bigger, and they’re making life miserable for creators while also paying them less and less.
Once another platform comes along that ticks enough boxes to satisfy people then YouTube will be absolutely screwed. The only reason we all use that wretched site is because there is no viable alternative. More and more creators are moving to premium platforms like Nebula that offer better deals for viewers and creators alike. I’m likely to jump ship myself once more people I watch also join up.
Youtube is still the biggest video website on the world and there just isnt a viable competitor to it and nor is there financial incentive for anyone to jump into something like it given the overhead and cost. Hell even early on when youtube was lower resolution and ran worse on hardware it still beat out competitors like vimeo, dailymotion, and the various early internet content creator sites that spun off of youtubes early copyright purge.
At the end of the day they serve a tiny amount of ads which honestly is more of a minor inconvenience(especially when you remember what TV was like) and the algorithm is pretty hit and miss(personally on my feed it’s not bad). Even worst case scenario if the adblockers stop working youtube will probably still not die.
It would take an antitrust hearing or something to really push youtube off of it’s top spot and it would be interesting to see what that would look like for the site(though I suspect a google dismembering would leave youtube intact and just remove it form other alphabet brands which wouldnt entirely fix the issue).
Hell look at what happened on reddit. That was a very visible very big protest and there was a huge amount of outrage and reddit skews nerdy enough that the userbase actually pays attention and cares about whats going on. Weeks later and not a lot has changed. Lemmy and some other alternatives became viable but even then it And thats essentially just a big message board which links to content on other sites, in terms of design it should be easier to replicate compared to an open video site that anyone can upload to.
I wouldn’t say that nothing has changed. Maybe you have to be a former daily user to notice, but most of the subs have gone downhill. Quality of posts is at a 10-year low, likely due to the mass exodus of power users and mods. I’m not saying that every valuable user has left, and I’m not saying that reddit is dead. But the quality-to-shit ratio went from 60/40 to 40/60, and it is noticeable.
Yeah I’ve been back there a few times to check, and the reddit I knew is most certainly dead. Its corpse will stumble around for a while animated by venture capital necromancy, but it’s not really a threat any more and will stop moving soon enough. Youtube still has much enshittification to go before it gets to that point.
What requires YouTube’s end is a competitor, and there is no competition. People might complain about YouTube, but it still remains the free video streaming platform. Everything else is paid, including small streamers like Nebula. You also have small content creators relying on YouTube to advertise and draw traffic.
You might jump ship, but the market doesn’t seem to be doing so. If anything, people are reevaluating their paid streaming services to go less instead of more. People will complain about YouTube, but it is still the cheapest option.
Haven’t they said the same thing about the last 10 adocalypses
Yes, but we keep hoping something better will show up, it’s just taking way too long.
I think something like Reddit/Lemmy needs to happen to YouTube, the content creators are just not at that point yet.
There is a fediverse version of YouTube already called PeerTube. But people are finding it’s incredibly expensive to host video streaming servers and is a large part why it hasn’t really taken off.
Well, that and a host of other problems with its interface. Nobody’s very interconnected, so it’s hard to find videos.
Once another platform comes along that ticks enough boxes to satisfy people then YouTube will be absolutely screwed.
This is 100% true, the issue is it’s very unlikely for that happen out of nowhere. Youtube is a service that needs a lot of work & $ to compete with & they have all the content creators locked in as well. Personally I would love to be on a video platform where people just want to spread information for fun & to educate people, how youtube used to be, instead of everyone monetizing everything with clickbait video covers, titles, while making arbitrarily long videos to satisfy some Youtube ad criteria.
So they’re actively working to block ad blockers, showing more ads, and bundling the ad free version with a worse version of Spotify—a no-win scenario.
The Google’s breakup can’t happen fast enough.
Audio quality and algorithm is better than Spotify just saying.
This is true. Best use is still using something like soulseek for offline files but algorithm actually let’s you discover outside of the same couple dozen bands
ive discovered countless countless bands on spotify, just through the discover weekly playlist too
One word: reVanced
More words: No need to thank me. Thank the developers instead.
Purged by creator
I was happily using Lite as well and them just announcing it’s discontinuing in a month feels really unfair. I don’t want the added functionality of youtube premium. I don’t want to pay €15 a month for the same thing I had before for half the money. Now I have to find an alternative, and I think for me it will also be ad blockers and piracy. I’ll miss casting youtube to my TV ad free though…
Here’s an unrelated list of Invidious instances
And, no idea why this comes to mind as well, but since we’re being off-topic, I’m gonna post the site for youtube-vanced.
Freetube is also lovely
