wow just wow while i can’t say i didn’t see this one coming but it always amazes me where greed could lead someone
Google is an ad company. To them, a web browser is nothing more than a tool for collecting user data and delivering ads.
When you use a chromium based browser you are allowing google, an ad company, to decide what the future of web browsing should look like. And this is the result.
Firefox is the ONLY browser which is genuinely competing with google. Do you think ad and tracking blockers are going to get better or worse once they die out, and literally every major browser is running on chromium?
Use firefox and u-block origin. Enjoy a superior, ad free, browsing experience, and support the future of an open web.
It’s so encouraging to hear so many pro Firefox opinions lately. Then I remember I’m logged into the pirate instance of a federated platform and anti-corporate sentiment is probably as high as it gets.
Sadly most younger people haven’t even heard of Firefox.
Most young people are basically tech illiterate. Yeah they are fantastic with new apps and phones. But have zero idea how any of it works under the hood.
Ask them to transfer a file from a computer to a USB drive, most will not know how. They have no idea how a file system is structured or even that an app has to specifically made for different platforms… e.g. Facebook app on Apple is completely different from Facebook on Android and the two will contain different bugs and different settings.
We are almost back to default browser = internet
You’re absolutely right.
Yeah they are fantastic with new apps and phones.
I think that’s mostly because most commercial apps have fantastic ui and ux.
Most younger people have heard of it. Using what came with their computer is just easier to them though.
I agree, most of the younger people use browsers that are bundled with the operating system.
- Android = Chrome
- Windows = Edge
- Mac/iOS = Safari
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Right? After years of feeling like the only pro-firefox person left on the planet, the pro Firefox sentiment lately is a breath of fresh air, to say the least.
Well, we are in the worst cyberpunk timeline so…
It’s my preferred mobile browser because you can install ublock origin and other privacy extensions which is pretty unique
Sadly, at the end of the day I prefer edge because it
has cloud voicesis slightly fasterYoung people seem to proudly go along with the biggest name, which is really sad. They think there’s merit in that, conforming means acceptance.
Meanwhile, anytime I encounter a young non-conformist doing something very contrarian, it gives me some hope for the future. Because 99% of society is open-armedly embracing dystopia because the one thing they hate more than anything is the burden of independent thought and self-determinism. To intelligent freethinking individuals, seeing it play out is a waking nightmare.
It’s my preferred mobile browser because you can install ublock origin and other privacy extensions which is pretty unique
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More people should try out Tubesync. It’s a tool you can host yourself that essentially uses yt-dl as a backend and lets you subscribe to channels, and it’ll download videos as they come out. Gets you away from the ads and you can archive content you like forever.
I wonder if they’ll ever make that impossible. I used to go on a couple of 6 hour drives twice a week for a long time. A lot of the drive didn’t have cell service, as it was thru a bunch of mountains. I ended up making a python script that downloaded podcast episodes to listen to, and to force my brother to watch Your Mom’s House, when he was with me on the drive.
It was surprisingly simple to do this.
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I’m glad that their are contemporary historians and archivists perusing YouTube so my great-great-great-great grandchildren can watch a video game review in which a grown man gets shit on by Bugs Bunny.
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Oh shit, that description sounds weirdly familiar, but I can’t remember who it was.
Angry Videogame Nerd.
Imagine if widevine are required to watch any video, that would be disaster.
Similar to that you’ve got tubearchivist, because it’s good to have options
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That’s pretty cool, thanks
If you’re demanding I watch ads, it’s not “free”. you’re demanding my time and probably attention.
I really think we need to stop with this idea that “Something is free” because no money is exchanged. Some stuff ARE free, there are repos on git, where you can download software, there are websites that ask for nothing. However Gmail, Youtube, reddit, and the rest are not “Free” just because they aren’t directly asking for money.
Having to watch ads isn’t free. It costs me my time and it’s limited.
Technically you pay to use Youtube by watching adds. People sometimes forget that there are no free lunches.
As long as there are CEOs getting payed more than i could earn in my life for one year, i’m good with my free lunch.
I feel your sentiment. But it’s more about our impression that everything on the internet should be free.
There are people that hate subscriptions, paywalls, adds or that their personal data being sold. And yet they want to use all the services such as Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, etc. People want to have their cake and eat it too.
I am not saying that the number of adds and prices are not getting out of control but it makes sense to me that if I am not paying directly for certain services, I am paying for them with my personal data or an advertiser is paying for me instead.
Someone smarter than me once said, “if your using a service, and it seems free, then YOU are the product being bought and sold”
I don’t think this is always true, but it usually is.
There are, but they exist outside the market. Any company is going to want a return on its investment, and many people have even been trained to see themselves as “a business” and so operate transactionally in their personal lives, but many people don’t also. There are many people who do and give away many things with no expectation of return.
Firefox
This. I’m pretty sure this is a result of the ad engine changes they made to chrome a few months ago. Manifest V2 is what enables uBlock Origin to be so effective iirc and they’re removing it in chrome in favor of Manifest V3.
Firefox on the other hand still supports V2.
I was curious how people feel about Braves new Browser? I usually stick to Firefox but I’ve given it a try. It however does seem to be chromium based.
Yeah its just reskinned chromium like the rest, but it’still nowhere near as bad as chrome, edge and the other telemetry filled ones.
Support Firefox!
Firefox on the other hand still supports V2.
For now, mozilla rely heavily on google for funding.
They dropped xul extensions to have extension compatibility with chrome a few years ago.
They dropped xul extensions to have extension compatibility with chrome a few years ago.
I still miss XUL extensions because they could properly modify UI of the browser instead of just being pieces of JavaScript run inside tabs.
How does that work exactly?
Like they are direct competitors no? Wouldn’t Mozilla be motivated to fuck google as hard as possible?
Like they are direct competitors no?
No, Google pays Firefox to make it seem like it still has competitors and isn’t a monopoly. However, a key condition of that payment is that the default search engine in Firefox is Google. They change that, they lose most of their funding – not most of their Google funding, most of their revenue (which is nearly all Google).
Wouldn’t Mozilla be motivated to fuck google as hard as possible?
If they still existed as an actual company, sure. But, it’s not. It’s a corpse that Google animates with their huge funding to make it seem like they still have competitors. Technically, Google doesn’t own Mozilla, but in a 2012 report, 85% of their funding came from Google. So, they’re never going to do anything that risks that funding.
Oh, so google has adopted the Microsoft strategy.
Strange, Id think their monopoly would be considered natural if they just let Firefox collapse and didn’t buy out dying/barely competing companies.
Back in 2005, they started paying Mozilla to promote the Google search engine via their browser. Chrome still wasn’t a thing back then. The weird thing is that they never stopped those payments even today, they even increased them on almost a yearly basis.
That was back then… Why would they do it now that it no longer makes financial sense since Mozilla is just 3% of the browser market? No clue
So there is competition. Firefox goes away there is no other browser and Google is a monopoly.
Greed? I mean they are not a charity and ads pay for the service. Don’t get me wrong I use ad block but to call it greed…
Yes, greed. Google is an extremely profitable company, wanting more money than they already have is completely unreasonable.
Unlimited growth is not impossible! Consider having all the money in the world when it starts to burn. Must be nice.
They don’t owe us jack shit. If they want to block users of AdBlock I’m sure it’s within their right to do so, and it’s within yours to look elsewhere.
It’s frustrating, but like the parent comment said: they’re not running a charity.
Precisely why internet services should be nationalized.
Youtube should be archived, burnt to the ground, and replaced
NewPipe for android is still working. Much better than the official app IMO, no ads and it actually shows the videos you subscribed to.
YouTube ReVanced has been fine for me too
NewPipe is FOSS and available in F-droid, which is a plus in my book.
Youtube Revanced has a habit of going into perpetual loading for me, so I’ve got both it and the normal YouTube app as backup
Have you tried enabling spoofing under revanced settings? That fixed it for me
I would if I could find it
Never heard of NewPipe, thanks for sharing
I’d say to you all: get used to bombshells dropping! At some point the investor pyramid scheme will go crashing down. It might be now. All those companies were on borrowed time. Until investors realised that “data” isn’t valuable on its own - it’s what you make of it. There needs to be a product that generates revenue. Spoiler alert, it is hard to come up with a business plan that takes plain usage data and makes the technical challenges worthwhile to squeeze money from it. I can feel it myself as data scientist. The honeymoon’s over, investors want to see ROI.
I mean this cycle will probably recover in a few years when the markets recover but still - some lessons stick
Holy shit! Your post made me realize that we are in Dot-com bubble burst 2.0
It’s the exact same thing, everyone and their dog, had to have a webpage. Investors finally realized that most websites had no way of generating money, and stuff came crashing down.
Same thing is happening now!
Zines are making a comeback!
DRS GME
I’m not so sure that this is anything to worry about. It’s just another step in the game of cat and mouse. Is it annoying? Of course! But if/when it goes mainstream, ad blockers are just going to push updates that make it possible to block the ad block blocker. uBlock Origin does a really good job at blocking ad block blockers on most sites.
True, especially with the fuckfuckadblock list which really mitigates most
aDvLoKC d3TeKteDbullshit.Honestly, using uBO (which is really the only blocker anyone should be using) I never see those popups anyway. And that list apparently causes unintended connections to google servers (warning, there’s some drama in this issue between the ublock dev and the list’s dev, but gorhill comes off more reasonable here.) So really, just turn on most of the filter lists in uBO settings as per your need and you should be good to go.
I didn’t know anything about the drama. Thanks for the heads up, will investigate.
No problem, I should be thanking you actually because I only found about this after seeing your comment and decided to look up the list to check if it works well with uBO
lol I’ve seen plenty of social media drama, but this is probably the most hilarious drama I’ve ever seen. Imagine getting into a fight on the GitHub issue tracker. 😆
It’s happened a couple of times by now, last time was the developer of node-ipc being roasted for shipping malware in production that thrashed hard drives if it detected a Russian IP address
Discussion at the end degrades into name calling
This was quite interesting and also incredibly cringe on the dev’s part.
oh, it happens all the time lol
a great recent-ish example is the time some kid PR’ed a dumb readme edit to an Unreal Engine repo which was used only for making people sign a TOS before getting access to the engine’s source code, which led to… this.
lol this is hilarious. I feel bad for Rohith, but the fact that it was possible for such a mistake to even be made is hilarious. The people being rude to him in the replies though all suck.
Yeah, I feel the same. The consequences weren’t even all that extreme. And more importantly, it’s really not his fault that Epic set up the group that way, and the grown men malding and screaming at a child like melodramatic pissbabies are truly a clownshow. I laughed out loud at the “Lock it. Lock it now.” guy - how can one sniff their own farts to such a degree?
Yeah. Seeing those things makes me wonder what it must be like to have them as coworkers.
I had no idea that this list existed, and even without it, I don’t see any of these popups with uBlock Origin. I was an AdBlock user for years until about 9 months ago when I made the switch after learning that uBlock Origin was more robust. Apparently the devs of AdBlock have a policy against blocking ad block detection because they consider it to be unfair to website owners.
This is google that we’re talking about, they can pull a Twitter and just fully restrict access unless logged in / subscribed. I don’t think uBlock origin can get around the Twitter / Facebook / Instagram log in to see this content modal.
I do not think it will happen, but even if they do implement what you have described here, it doesn’t matter. Users will be forced to sign in, and then from there, they can block ads as usual.
I haven’t had this happen using ublock origin, but if they do figure out how to block ublock origin, adnausiem (ublock origin fork) might work. It’s a fork of ublock origin that tricks the ad providers into thinking you clicked on every ad, which not only bypasses a lot of adblock detectors, it Actively costs them money by polluting their ad data with garbage.
If they really want to prevent us from watching videos without ads, they can. They know of the ad is watched or not, we can have some kind of auto-mute-during-ad but that’s it.
Question is if they will kill network effect with it.
I have already drastically reducedy yt watching because of too many sponsors… watching two minutes of sponsored material, plus two ads just to see that I don’t even wanna watch the stupid video is too much.
Not to mention those laud ads in the middle of relaxing and quiet video… few months ago one ad was starting with screaming, that’s when I said no way.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
it Actively costs them money by polluting their ad data with garbage.
Lmaoo, i’m going to install that
No way I’ll use YouTube with ads. The amount of your lifetime they waste is what I’d consider disrespectful to their users. Even if the ads were bearable, I wouldn’t turn off my ad blocker on any Google site for tracking alone.
I also don’t see myself subscribing to YouTube Premium, firstly because it’s too expensive (stop including your music streaming service and make it cheaper maybe?), but also because YouTube is just a platform with a lot of not curated content that YouTube had no part in creating.
Let’s see how the cat and mouse games between YouTube and ad blockers and alternative frontends go. If it’s too much of a hassle, I’ll just stop using YouTube. I don’t miss Twitter, I don’t miss Reddit, and I won’t miss YouTube.
Eh, I wound up with a YouTube premium subscription years ago when I subscribed to Google play music, way back when it was YouTube Red. I cannot imagine going without at this point. It became YouTube music at some point, and… Yeah.
Whats up with all these online companies just deciding to be assholes this year.
Companies are becoming even more greedy recently across the board and at a rapid pace. Some people would want you to believe Youtube wouldn’t generate billions of dollars as income annually for Alphabet for some reason. But the truth is the platform is extremely profitable already. Youtube simply wants even more now because competition has done the same. We’ve seen prices spiraling up and quality dropping in pretty much all sectors of the economy and this trend will continue for the forseeable future.
In short: Because they can (some are really stretching their boundaries, though)
and try to speak about this to anyone who doesnt see it you are basically labeled as conspiracy theorist or something and just dismissed.
Like another poster said, investors are pushing for profits. The Sillicon Valley model of throwing money at it until they figure it out is suffering with the downturn in the markets. So with the VC and investor money drying up, sites are pushing to make money to keep the lights on.
I would’t say keeping the lights on, more then trying to beat covid lvl profits.
I think this is the real thing. If online companies don’t match the extremely ridiculous and luck they had during the pandemic then they are doing “worse” even if they are doing just fine.
All of them also seem to be focused more on short term gains over long term losses (i.e. meeting quarterly goals by raising rates but driving away otherwise good customers and completely disregarding the benefit of customer loyalty.).
They were always assholes, but the end of zero interest rates is making American corporations go from boiling the frog to just smoking the frog alive.
Interest rates went up and now they need to make payments on their previously free debt.
It’s the natural path of capitalism. Squeeze just enough that you barely want to do anything. That’s literally just price meeting demand. And competition is dead so the demand is high
Really not worth watching a 10 minute video that has four minutes of YouTube ads and a minute of a sponsor pitch by the creator.
This seems somewhat intentionally coordinated, so that the squeeze everyone into submission.
It is coordinated but also driven by purely financial factors that changed over the last year. Interests are rising and suddenly those tech companies can’t just live by growth alone, they have to find ways to be profitable.
Won’t someone think of the poor tech companies?
(Just making the joke, not at you. You are correct, that is why it’s happening now.)
Not coordinated just money drying up everywhere.
