it's reminiscent of NASCAR. Or, like being a kid forced to watch advertising during TV breaks, wondering why the TV screen istrying to sell me cigarettes.
It's maybe a bit social-media-toxic to say that some youtubers are my "favorite people" in that i look forward to their takes on the topics they cover. I lose interest though when that youtuber presents to me an unprompted ad for my testicular health.
I have no solution for creators consumers or google :(
It's not like there are many viable competitors, at least for long form videos.
Cigarette commercials have been illegal since 1971.
No. Look, I'm not happy to pay more, but YT is really great. It's completely obviated the need to watch broadcast or cable TV for me (yes I know, sports...). They haven't enshittified it at all, and since I'm a music lover, I love that they include YT music (although I sorely miss its predecessor). There is the sum-of-human-knowledge and then some !! on youtube. it's absolutely worth what they charge. In fact, I dont know how they can even order enough storage to keep the thing running. tl;dr the features and content has grown proportionately with the price increase.
really? There are entire posts dedicated to how many features Youtube cut removed, or messed up over the years. as a old school forum boomer I still hate that they changed from a nested comments section to "twitter feed of loose chains" over a decade ago.
I won't go on a whole rant on every little feature, but the service has definitely gotten worse. It just so happens that the tech core still works fine enough (smoothly watching videos on nearly any platform), and the business core is powered by user-generated content which is as good as you choose.
P.S. I sure do wish we got Youtube Premium Lite wasn't cancelled. I do just mostly want ad-free browsing. I can manage around offline/offscreen videos and no YT Music (also miss Google Play Music btw).
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Removing features is absolutely part of enshittification.
Yeah, any day now YT is going to shut its doors.
Not paying for shit like that, only because they put a clause in the TOS that says ad free only means ad free music.
I have no qualms using any ad blocking option available. And I am happily paying for creators using patreon or other means they provide.
They hunt me with banners and popups for random musicians almost every day.
What they provide is an ad free music "listening experience", meaning: it is not audio ads. It's a really sneaky and toxic product in that way.
Are we, though? Regular ad blockers are still only used by a minority of web browser users. I would be surprised if SponsorBlock has larger market share than that.
There is no perfect solution because the interests are diametrically opposed. Many CC's don't WANT to be a business, but if you want to work full time you need to be. Businesses' main incentive is to get max customers or max revenue, while a concumer's incentive is to get as much as possible for as little money as possible.
Ironically enough, the RAID SHADOW LEGENDS (since we're talking about the "usual suspects) financial model may be the best of both worlds, at the expense of some well off people (and some unfortunate addicts): have whales bankroll 80% of the game and subsize the free players. But that probably can't happen with 99.99% of video creators.
The various creators I used to follow on Nebula have no ads at all in the videos published in Nebula, compared to those they post on Youtube. Not sure if its applicable for all creators on Nebula though.
I was gonna post a similar comment but with the opposite conclusion: SponsorBlock has been around for years, and the people who are really annoyed by sponsors are mostly already using it. Most of the rest of the population either doesn't mind sponsor segments (me) or isn't willing to go to the trouble of installing addons. Of course, there's always going to be people who become aware of it due to threads like this and start using it, but I'd venture that that's too small a number for worries about this suddenly "taking off".
That said, SponsorBlock has been around for years. I've been using it for as long as I can remember. Basically any decent-sized channel's videos already have the sponsored segment skipped. I'm not sure why someone just posted it but we're well beyond SponsorBlock "taking off".