[blindseer]

I think YouTube will "win" this war, unfortunately. Even people that "join" individual channels cannot watch content from those channels if they use AdBlock. At some point these people are either going to buy premium or turn off the ad-blocker.

It boggles my mind that engineers and managers that have kids and are working on the YouTube team think this is okay and this is what the future of the platform should look like.

It's the beginning of the end of an era, and I'm immensely sad to see what the internet has become and where it is heading.

[crimsontech]

> At some point these people are either going to buy premium or turn off the ad-blocker.

Or they stop going to YouTube. In the past 12mo my use of these platforms has reduced a huge amount. I no longer visit Twitter or Reddit because they blocked 3rd party apps, forcing me to view adverts, I would rather not be a user on a user hostile platform.

Deep down, most of us know these are huge time sinks providing very little real value to ours lives so it doesn’t take much friction added by the platform to make people turn away from their bad habits.

[tapoxi]

What's the viable alternative to YouTube? Tiktok?

[anonymouskimmer]

Various channels mirror their content to Nebula (also a pay platform, but with premium features), Odysee, Rumble, and yeah Tiktok.

[taftster]

There are no good alternatives. There's literally no place left to get good topical or technical content without just loads of crap to go with it.

It's either a very depressing thing, or maybe an opportunity, depending on how rose colored your glasses are.

[chmod775]

YT is too big for people who hate ads to not invest a massive effort. The ad blocker endgame will be YT videos being "pre-watched" by a headless browser running in the background and the video data grabbed from there (either recorded or directly). You then watch the ad-less video in a custom frontend. If implemented correctly there's pretty much nothing YT could hope to do about this.

[briHass]

Sounds like how DVRs worked on cable TV back in the day. Some were even sophisticated enough to use the typical video cutout before commercials to auto skip them on playback.

Now, of course, we have community efforts like SponserBlock that could easily identify ad locations or some form of auto detection based on analyzing the video of they insert the ads at random locations in the video stream itself.

I'm certain this is coming. There's very little on YT I need to watch right now, and having a bunch of videos already downloaded and de-ad-ified would suffice. It would prevent the mindless watching anyway.

[BLKNSLVR]

Wasn't one of Kimdotcom's ventures scraping YT videos for the creation of his own streaming platform at some stage?

Seems like slightly less of greasy activity now than it was then.

"Count eight" about halfway down the page: https://cip2.gmu.edu/2015/09/22/lets-get-real-about-kim-dotc...

[Buttons840]

I'd even be cool with just blanking my screen and muting the sound when an ad is playing. Given my usual YouTube watching mindset, a brief moment to to just breath would be good for me.

[russell_h]

> Even people that "join" individual channels cannot watch content from those channels if they use AdBlock

Is content from publishers you’ve subscribed to normally ad-free? I don’t understand the relationship between these things