YouTube confirms three-strikes test for ad blocking

You may have inadvertently stumbled into this thread on kbin.social's all federated content feed or similar, but this thread is on the pawb.social instance. You can't exactly march into the furry den and then complain that the place is chock-full of furries.

I don't want to be a jerk, but maybe don't look at content from PAWb.social if you're going to be a dick to its members simply for existing in their space. If it's truly an issue, KBin allows you to block the group (but I don't think it easily allows blocking the whole instance).

The Fediverse is awesome since it allows us all to seamlessly communicate with each other, but keep in mind we are all individual groupings of communities and looking at where the content comes from needs to become second nature. If too many people from KBin are jerks to these folks, they'll just disconnect from us and call it a day since all the good conversations in the world don't really matter if they're being treated like dirt.

With that said, even if they were talking in a KBin instance though ... seriously, it would have cost you nothing to ignore and move on (or block and move on if it really rustled your jimmies). Hell, even downvote and move on! This isn't a matter of someone being a shit-stain on humanity, it was just them using the word 'paws' to refer to a few appendages, what's the big deal? They're not asking you to do the same.

I think -- and I don't claim familiarity with the details of each company's situation -- that this may have something of a common cause.

As long as investment dollars are readily available and growth possible, it makes sense to stay in "growth" phase, burn investment dollars, lose money, grow userbase.

Once they are not, then it becomes more important to switch to monetizing the userbase that has been built up.

My understanding is that the post-COVID-19 environment -- with higher interest rates, tighter capital -- is less-amenable to obtaining investments for growth. And all tech companies will be affected by that, will tend to shift away from "burn easily-available now capital to try to increase revenue later" more into generating revenue.

I do just that. I give $15/mo total spread out across my top watched creators on patreon and use ublock origin and sponsorblock. I dont see any ads, creators get significantly more money, I pay roughly the same as premium. Google gets nothing. Win win win.

As well as what Mango said (I watch so many random videos, and I don't think there's a way to universally just give each one £1 or so), they are providing Youtube for free. Say what you want about Google, but Youtube does cost them a lot of money, and all things considered it's a pretty well put together platform.

Yes, I'd like there to be a crowdfunded alternative, and yes I wish they weren't so megacorpy and just let me download videos (it isn't costing you anything if I watch a local copy!). But really, they provide a service and £6 or so is what I would consider a fair price.

Time/effort, I watch a lot of channels and supporting them all directly would be a lot of work to set up.

I'd love for that to be the case, but realistically many Youtubers see Youtube as a revenue source (which is a terrible idea, because Google blatantly doesn't care about them), which Peertube can't really replicate.

I'm down to fuck around and find out, of course. Mastodon and Lemmy were a slam dunk for the Fediverse given how Twitter/Reddit had cataclysmic events to drive a spike of adoption and how easy/smooth the experience on Mastodon and Lemmy is for new users. This is the first thing that Youtube has really done to make users angry, and it's mostly still small potatoes. In addition, I feel like the early stages of p2p video are going to be a harder sell to the few people that are actually thinking about moving - people mostly just don't want to think about the platform they are using. If their video stutters or doesn't load nicely sometimes, they'll quickly head back to Youtube.

In my non-expert opinion, we'll need better global internet and potentially even a next-gen video codec (AV1 might be enough) before video hosting is viable for someone other than like 7 companies. Peertube is technically scalable but I feel like the introductory growing pain stage of its p2p swarm network is going to be really rough for driving adoption. The home server will probably need to be the main seeder for a while until the network matures, which means hosting costs will be more restrictive for new Peertube instances.

I have near-zero experience with Peertube though, so if anyone thinks I'm way off the mark let me know!

@Nalivai @xoagray Odysee is pretty good.

I’m using Odysee (free) and Nebula (paid) to reduce my time spent on YouTube, it isn’t much, but it is a beginning

Unfortunately yeah, at best right now there are other places you can go for some of the same content, but most creators are exclusive to YouTube. It's part of the reason I can't get completely away from Google yet.

I don't think anyone disagrees with that, but YouTube today has a lot more ads, especially spammy ones, than YouTube 7 years ago did. This is an issue with them using a business model that doesn't scale very well.

Lol funny you mention RSS. I LOVE my RSS feeds - I've been building my subscription list for decades. I used other services before Google Reader, now I use feedly (what do you use?).

I subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds of all sorts - from technical blogs to news feeds. I always try to explain to people that I get a "firehose" of content sorted by timestamp. I don't have an algorithm choosing which data to prioritize.

Did you know that Aaron Swartz (one of the original reddit developers) was also a leader who developed the RSS standards? God the word lost a great man - imagine what he could have done for humanity if he lived a full life.

I suspect it will be the same story with Youtube for me. I really don’t need to be watching Youtube 95% of the time. I tune in to videos because it’s convenient. If Google is going to make it inconvenient, the value proposition changes and I’d rather do something else to fill my time. I wonder if there will be backlash from creators now that many users are inherently disincentivized from visiting Youtube…

Funny thing is that I usually use Youtube for DIY repair videos. Now ChatGPT and simple google searches (to confirm info) have replaced most of my needs. I even use Chat to teach me how to use new software (which I would formally watch videos to learn).

Besides, I really don't watch television/videos in general. I have far more important things to do with my free time like running a small business and micro homestead to live an almost fully self sufficient lifestyle. I find skimming RSS feeds and reading selected articles a far more efficient use of my free time (I only used to visit reddit for the occasional social interaction with fellow enthusiasts of whatever topic, and hope that kbin/fediverse will replace that 'itch')

The fediverse will become niche like a lot of other forums within a couple years if FB keeps poking. What really matters is that users know that free speech is what really matters and that the only way we can win is accepting that this is worth more than internet points of any kind.