Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
To anyone using Chrome and complaining about Google having too much control: shut the fuck up. You’re part of the problem.
This is one reason why I don’t want the EU to force Apple to allow other rendering engines. Whether you think using Apple’s rendering engine on iOS is bad or good, it’s basically the only thing keeping Google from having complete control of the market.
As much as I’m against Google: why are the the bad guys in this specific instance? They are in many other instances, absolutely. But here, they dare to block a service that legitimately costs a ton of money from being used without them making anything in return. That’s not the usual evil corp BS they pull. That’s rather reasonable if you ask me. Let’s not exhaust ourselves in that and focus on the real Bullshit they try to pull like their web manifest ad nightmare!
A lot of people have become entitled to the idea of the “free internet.” In some cases, it’s understandable, like for social media where the platform is doing very little work and nearly all the value is coming from the users. I think especially in Youtube’s case, people are squinting and looking at it like a social media. They wonder why Youtube’s taking such a big cut when they think the content creators are the ones providing the value.
The issue here is that the complexities of video hosting, especially at the speed and quality Youtube provides, requires a ludicrous amount of effort and money. Youtube is providing a platform that is nearly unthinkable, something I consider to rival the entire television broadcasting sphere. The idea that such a colossal undertaking could be achieved without requiring revenue generation is simply naïve, and it’s incredible to think that a free version is even offered at all. Nobody ever really thinks about that though, they just look at it as another platform like Facebook or Reddit, and think a lazy megacorp is stuffing their pockets for nothing.
Ya I’ll never stop using ad blockers, the internet is essentially unusable without them. Mine still work on youtube but if the day comes that they don’t I’ll just stop using it. We need some competition here, things have gotten increasingly anticonsumer and the companies have gotten too comfortable doing and charging whatever they want
Download newpipe and never use YouTube again.
Can’t be used on desktop
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If they start showing me this message, I’ll have no reasonable choice except to disable the ad blockers for YouTube. Sadly I’m embedded in the Google world with a gmail account and I use their photos service. I can’t risk losing access to those.
No doubt they’ll roll this anti ad block technology out to their other sites in the future and the internet will suddenly be a bleak, hideous place.
You can just use Piped. That way, your account data appears nowhere. Just a server querying Googles YouTube API.
for whatever reason, i’ve been having issues using Piped where videos just don’t buffer at all. Anyone else facing this? NewPipe on my phone works perfectly though
I had that problem, not sure what made it go away maybe allowing scripts or disabling ublock origin.
Google only has power as we the people give it to them but using their services. Same with Reddit’s power and such. Not the people here as we have unfortunately unplugged, but admittedly, all the decentralized services have significantly less content and variety of content. We need more people to join us, but they seem happy to support the centralized services they hate.
I’m okay with the less amount of content. Frankly, I mindlessly spent hours scrolling through “content” on reddit, and feeling no satisfaction. At least the content here is more relevant.
More people would mean more memes and rage bait. No thanks.
I mean subreddits like Oculus and Virtual Reality and I am sure many other niches are missing on Lemmy or very quiet.
