There are solutions for all of these issues. You can use alternative frontends like Invidious or Piped, dedicated desktop apps like FreeTube or NewPipe and Libretube on Android to access YouTube without ads or tracking. You can also use throwaway email addresses to access websites that demand your email and there are privacy frontends for most social media sites (e.g. Libreddit for the site that shouldn’t be named, Nitter for the other site that shouldn’t be named, Proxitok for Tiktok, Proxigram for Instagram, etc.)
I fear that part of the reason is that it isn’t big enough yet for AstroTurf interest groups to care enough to invest into it. Although maybe AstroTurfing isn’t included in the enshittification label?
For social media to work in the future I think there needs to be additional safeguards that keep enshittification at bay. But picking them will be a delicate art.
Speaking of AstroTurf, they certainly are the leaders of synthetic turf. Their artificial turf is not only aesthetically appealing, but is designed to withstand the demands of the game.
between lemmy, mastodon and my own nerd projects, I’m having more fun on the internet than I have since the 90’s. so, while I hate the enshittification, the side effect has been me rediscovering what was so fun in these tubes…
And those are unfortunately 90% dead as compared to 10 years ago.
Back then I could easily find multiple chatrooms for any fandom all incredibly active. Now I’m lucky to find a singular one that isn’t dead. Fandoms mostly moved on to the big monolithic sites like reddit where interactions and conversation are incredibly artificial
Maybe this is why I’ve been so ready to fully embrace Lemmy for my internetting. It’s the opposite of enshittified, as FOSS often is.
I’ll admit though, I pay for YouTube and get more bang for the buck than any other money I spend on entertainment. I’ve had it for a while though, and did not sign up because of their renewed war on ad blocking. Plus it’s nice that the creators get paid from my view, even though it’s not much.
I pay for YouTube as well, it’s worth it bc of YouTube music which I like better than Spotify, I just need podcasts to get on board and we will be good to go. I will add YouTube is the only media I pay for (other than peacock for 1 month a year to watch tour de France)
I’ve not had good luck with Firefox on mobile, I use duckduckgo. I’m not forcing anyone to do what I do. YouTube is my main source of media for the most part. I use it on my smarts TV’s in my house - and I haven’t set up computers on all TV’s yet… So it is what it is and it works for me.
Edit: down voting my personal opinion and what I choose to spend my money on for my own convenience isn’t going to change my mind… Just saying
That’s one of the big values for me, the effortless smart device support. Sure I know tech shit and I block ads in every browser I use, but it’s nice when members of my family can just use the YouTube app, full featured, on whatever TV/phone/tablet they have access to at the moment. It’s not a matter of whether I can watch YouTube for free without seeing ads, it’s a question of whether the convenience and creator support are worth the cost of a drive thru meal per month. Add in YouTube music and I don’t even think about it any more.
It’s an ease of use thing, kind of like how Steam ended PC game piracy for many people.
Oh I think I know what you mean. DDG + Firefox has some weird behavior on YouTube. I can watch the videos but if I wanna properly load the page it gives me a request failure.
It’s kind of frustrating on mobile. Have you tried loading through a different search engine? It’s not a big issue for me but it’s something I experience too as I’m a DDG user
Direct revenue is logically a better model for creators, but I don’t like that the share of youtube premium revenue is determined by a black box. If it’s distributed according to my total monthly watch time, how can anyone say for sure whether the direct revenue split for a given channel >= potential advertising revenue had I watched without premium or adblock? I don’t think even creators could tell you based on the analytics available to them via Youtube.
I canceled and set up memberships on a few channels instead. That way I actually get something out of it (member perks), and I know that at least my favourite creators get 70% of those amounts. Also, sponsorblock
I definitely think there’s room to invent some other social websites like Lemmy; things that can A) Monetize themselves in some way other than ads, B) Formulate the way users use them so that they’re resistant to bots, C) Promote well-thought discussion points instead of just regurgitation.
I’m seriously considering something like say, a site that requires users to record a short webcam video introducing themselves before they can post. Obviously, that wouldn’t be a good venue for anyone very privacy-focused, but perhaps you get the idea.
Monetizing through ads isn’t the problem: The problem is that the companies keep getting greedier and seeing the new ways they can exploit the userbase.
Greed isn’t the problem, per se – it’s that outside of the biggest sites, which could hoover up ad targeting data of hundreds of millions to billions and sell that data through their own internal ad platform – the model was never viable to begin with. Notice that the enshittification really took off all soon as interest rates jumped? Tech startups have all been floating along on easy money, but now that loans aren’t basically free, VC dollars are drying up. Companies that could previously offset their capital burn with yet another round of investment now suddenly need to make money on their own merit, and are finding that they have to cut service to the bone and monetize the bejeezus out of what’s left if they have any chance of survival.
Remember when ads were just those animated gif boxes on either side of the content you actually consumed? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Then they became annoying popups, to the point that EVERY browser ships with popups blocked by default. Now it’s all javascript occupying your screen everywhere. Plus all those invasive “Notifications”
I miss forums. Not that they disappeared completely but that used to be the go-to for good info. Still is maybe, cause I’ve read through a lot of garbage trying to learn about something pretty simple and then hit a forum post that’s like “well it depends if it’s early- or late-season blight”. What? The twenty garden blog posts I studied never mention such a distinction. But there’s Jimmy in Mt Carmel Indiana breaking it down.
One thing that’s actually better for all that’s worse is the Discord means one login for everything. Back then you had to register to every forum even if you only needed one file and never came back again.
And this is exactly why we won’t actually get any new special projects, because anything which can’t be easily monetized will be treated as competition and ruined deliberately, and anything which can be easily monetized will be purchased and worn like a skin suit by greedy corpos the way the current Internet is being used.
I read only one subreddit still and it is Am I The Asshole, it is very easy to spot the ads because only one add matches the format of the posts. Anything that doesn’t start with AITA is an ad.
That gives me way more time to read books that I have been putting off. Starting with a few books by Cory Doctorow who coined that term enshittification.
It is a lot easier to make time for reading when watching a video will mean an ad before, during, and after every 5 minute clip. I subscribe to a few news shows so I can listen to them as podcasts while I work to support without having ads.
I don’t agree completely - there are a lot of things that are possible without JavaScript, which are improved either due to better UX or improved safety through JS.
Easy examples for better UX is anything to do with forms and multi-step processes. Getting validation errors while typing is massively better than getting them on submit, and it’s easy to store temporary edit states locally to prevent data re-entry. This especially goes for offline-first applications.
IMO more importantly, local JS is always preferable to server-side logic when possible, since it means your data never leaves your browser. Imagine a JSON formatter that processes data server-side - you can never be sure what they are doing with your data! Compared to that local JS is incredibly portable (every platform has a browser) and isn’t reliant on anything else. I build my utility apps both in the usual bundler way, and as single files - meaning I can offer my app as a single HTML file you can download and use however you want.
Of course the security benefits aren’t perfect - it’s always possible data is still sent somewhere. I really hope that one day we’ll get an API that allows a website to limit further network connections to specific URLs. This would give users of such applications real peace of mind.
When all I want to do is read content, no JS is needed. That has been a solved problem for decades. UX is problematic because now you have these huge PC screens and comparatively tiny mobile screens to account for. Most developers go for mobile first and completely ignore the rest, so you have loads of sites that are needlessly displayed like slow powerpoint presentations, autoscrolling to the next anchor because that’s “good UX” somehow.
Form validation with JS goes back decades and no one in their right minds relies entirely on frontend validation. It’s great because it can be immediate, but it’s easier to sidestep either by accident or on purpose. Since a lot of forms nowadays are “autogenerated” from their respective UI libraries, they come with a lot of unnecessary cruft.
meaning I can offer my app as a single HTML file you can download and use however you want
I sure hope that doesn’t need a “local server” of any sort to work. It’s one of the things that baffles me the most, javascript that only works with a npm server to connect to. I also hope it’s not bundled as an electron app, what’s the point of having an entire chrome browser bundled just to run a single page?
When all I want to do is read content, no JS is needed.
I didn’t say otherwise.
UX is problematic because now you have these huge PC screens and comparatively tiny mobile screens to account for. Most developers go for mobile first and completely ignore the rest, so you have loads of sites that are needlessly displayed like slow powerpoint presentations, autoscrolling to the next anchor because that’s “good UX” somehow.
Okay? I’m not sure what you’re arguing against. Some websites have bad UX, and that means the technology used to implement that bad UX is in itself bad?
Form validation with JS goes back decades and no one in their right minds relies entirely on frontend validation.
I didn’t say anyone should rely entirely on frontend validation.
It’s great because it can be immediate, but it’s easier to sidestep either by accident or on purpose. Since a lot of forms nowadays are “autogenerated” from their respective UI libraries, they come with a lot of unnecessary cruft.
Again, what exactly are you arguing for or against? You said “don’t use JavaScript when you don’t need it”. You don’t need frontend validation, it’s a nice to have, but it would be incredibly stupid to say “this form is way better without frontend validation”.
I sure hope that doesn’t need a “local server” of any sort to work. It’s one of the things that baffles me the most, javascript that only works with a npm server to connect to. I also hope it’s not bundled as an electron app, what’s the point of having an entire chrome browser bundled just to run a single page?
No, the single HTML file I’m talking about doesn’t require a server or Electron or anything besides a browser. What are you on about?
You either seem to be willfully misunderstanding me, or you’re projecting a bunch of random webdev grievances onto me. Why?
I just started a personal blog as my small contribution to combat Dead Internet Theory. I’m not going to link it here because I don’t want to doxx myself
Yea, the creation of sites like neocities is such a fun return to oldweb and the joys of relearning html and creating a static site. And tools like Jekyll for generating and maintaining your own blog are great
I hate it too and don’t deny it’s happening but I hate that phrase. It’s so crass and juvenile and seeing it repeated ad nauseam has shed any critical meaning it had.
Man, what are you talking about? YouTube has always been slow. It got even worse when they forced everyone to use dash playback, and that was over a decade ago.
Listen here my dude my brain is still stuck to the time when YouTube allowed you to make a fancy fully customized channel page which was later culled go make way for the bland mobile friendly interface ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
I’ve seen you a bit on a few of these posts, always defending these companies’ behavior. I tend to disagree with your stance. While I do understand that the infrastructure behind the sites I use is not free (trust me, I run some sites myself and my pitiful little things are expensive), I also do not think punishing users for adblock is justified. Neither is scraping as much data as can be gathered for further sale. Advertising can be very intrusive anymore and data collection from sites is no different. It’s not that the sites want to make money; it’s their insistence that the user is the product. Just pay walling the service would be much less scummy and unjustifiable than this nonsense.
No.1 Apparently not present on uBlock Origin, which makes it not a problem for me (though it’s shite that they are doing it anyway). I don’t use YouTube that often anyways.
No.2 You are not loosing a lot - it’s most likely some crappy video about a guy slipping on a banana peel or some shit like this - 99.9% you are not missing on much :D
See as much as I dislike the company, I can see how it would make sense from a business and logic point of view. They are paying for the servers and, to some extent and form, for the content, and by using any ad blocking content you sabotage their earnings from this platform. I’m surprised they are not blocking browsers with said plugins, but that would cause a major uproar. But then again, not much competition around…
fr, i didn’t use for the longest time because a 5 seconds ad before every video and some on the side never bothered me much, it was when it started being 2 UNSKIPABBLE ADS BEFORE EVERY VIDEO, PLUS MID ROLL ADS that I couldn’t deal with it anymore
Sure, the money has to come from somewhere, but, no ad server has ever managed to fully eradicate malware from the ads they serve and some sites have so much of the page covered in ads that the site simply isn’t navigable without an ad blocker. The first is on the ad server companies, but the second one is just stupid. I will simply never trust ad servers anymore after having seen computers destroyed by ad-delivered malware, including one of my own. Even if the websites themselves go back to a more restrained and reasonable number of ads, I will never turn my ad blocker off for simple safety reasons.
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