this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Crappy Design
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Noticed that theres no equivalent to r/crappydesign here yet so i made one
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I use Firefox and have uBlock Origin installed. I block ALL cookies from YouTube and Google and other Google sites. I am not signed into any Google properties and I have not seen an ad for over 10+years. I never use an app or mobile and use only a desktop on Linux.
Google will not win over products like uBlock Origin because, it's NOT an ad blocker, it's an element blocker. It allows the user to remove annoyances, and that sometimes includes ads.
The only way Google will get to force ads on people is if they REQUIRE you to sign in to it's services and force cookies on you. It will have to be a walled garden. Meta, Xitter, bluesky, reddit, will all eventually go to the walled garden because they are greedy. Users will leave and the Fediverse will grow.
People are fed up with ads and all the "improvements" that sites like YouTube make. Ambient mode, auto play, end cards, notations, all unnecessary. And we block it with element blockers.
I don't think the Fediverse can really provide an alternative to YouTube. The infrastructure required for the amount of data constantly being served and processed is prohibitly expensive.
Maybe not today, and never at the scale that YouTube is right now (that's not a bad thing), but never say never.
5 years ago no one saw a psychopath buying and actively destroying Xitter.
Technology changes quickly. It won't be long until 10TB HDDs are standard fare, 8G is everywhere, electric cars are 40% of the market etc.
Anything is a possibility and humans get smarter and more innovative. I know this because humans can carry a small computer in their pockets.
All it takes is 1 developer to add video support to lemmy, and make videos defederalized, then we could have different videos in different communities, we could have video-only communities, and those would be youtube-like.
I don't think code is the main problem here, it is the money to invest in the server space and bandwidth for it.
And that is all neglecting the platform effect. People are on YouTube because the stuff they want to watch is there and the stuff is there because there is an audience. Because there is audience, people are willing to dump their marketing budget there. Because there is a revenue split of these marketing budgets, people are there publishing stuff. And so on and so on.
You can have the greatest platform from a technical point of view. If nobody is publishing good stuff, nobody will care.
Not to forget the moderation problem. You would effectively need to verify each video for bad stuff, copyright infringement, or risk getting sued for noncompliance.
Are you saying that it costs a lot of money to setup a video streaming service that stores terrabytes of data? From what I hear that should all just be free!
Terabytes? Youtube should be in the Exabytes by now.
Bluesky is slowly gaining more users after multiple Xitter announcements. Xitter is going to be Netflix of social media.
That's where you're wrong. Firefox market share is dropping month on month for the last decade with no sign of turning around. Blink is forcing Manifestv3 soon which doesn't support many features uBlock Origin needs to work effectively. Sure, other Chromium forks claim they'll continue to support v2, but we'll see if that lasts after Google removes the code and they have to actually maintain Blink for the first time ever. None of the forks (except maybe Edge) have the engineering staff to keep up with rebasing against Blink.
That just sounds exhausting, to be honest.
It reads like copypasta to me lol
ADs might become forced onto everyone with this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
Do you leave the house? Or just take your desktop with you?
I don't need to watch videos when I'm not home. And I prefer a real screen.
I was thinking more about the fact you’ve not seen an advert for 10 years.
They’re on every site these days not just videos. Perhaps you just meant video ads.
It's really not difficult at all to avoid almost every single ad, just use ublock origin in your browser (use firefox on android to be able to use ublock origin on mobile), and use newpipe on your phone for watching youtube videos.
I do use ublock on my pc but still see some ads.
On my phone in iOS but I use NextDNS which gets rid of a lot of ads. So much so that if I search for X and you get the shopping results I have to turn off NextDNS to be able to follow that link.
But I still see ads.
I use Firefox & uBlock Origin, it stops ads everywhere. I won't use a computer that does not have that installed. I see no ad on any site of any kind.
Reads like https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html