All companies seem to be doing their best lately to cure us of our social media addiction.
Can you recommend some general forums that focus on a wide array of topics? Or do you only visit niché community forums?
Open your ublock Origin dashboard and add the following 4 lines:
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)
youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
You’re welcome.
I highly appreciate your effort but I’m not sure if I even want to go to YouTube anymore. Is my life really going to get worse without YouTube?
Nah it definitely won’t lol. But there’s gonna be those times people link it and you’re gonna get annoyed by it otherwise.
One day peertube will figure out peer to peer at large scale and then everything will change.
I’m worried one day they will re-encode videos with advertisements themselves, or something similar to that. Although I guess SponsorBlock takes care of that, until they straight up just break/remove extensions with their crazy “Web Environment Integrity” proposal.
Not if they serve a different video based on your account status. They always have ways of doing things lol
Just to double-check. Do we add that to “my filters”? That’s where I added it.
Yep that should usually be the first thing that opens.
I have never had any issues with youtube ads since the changes with this. They will probably adapt to it eventually but so far no problems, european region though so who knows if they have different approaches to different regions. Judging by your instance choice I assume you’re in the UK like myself though.
Ah. I went through the ublock settings from the addons page, maybe thats why I threw ke the first page.
Let’s just hope it carries on, but I’m not a programmer, so I couldn’t tell if there could be a workaround.
And yes, I am from England.
The illusion of infinite growth on “free use” ad based business dies when investment funds demand more benefits from former startups now turned into corporations whose only asset of value is the their users’ data. You are the product, so it’s time to squeeze you.
I think such data is currently overvalued on a overgrown ad-targeting market with too many competitors, and adding more ads only devaluates each ad value further, because users’ consuming capacity also has a limit. So I see a severe correction coming. Another bubble burst, and another crisis inside the crisis that late capitalism itself is.
That’s one part of how the internet dies, there are others. For example: soon the vast majority of the content on the internet will have been created by bots (AI or not). Or even by malicious folks pushing narratives.
TLDR: not only the internet is becoming more annoying to use it is also constantly becoming less useful with worse content replacing everything that was ever good
And the problem with content created by bots is that it is usually made to not look like that was the case. Sometimes that’s not the problem like some random site with information about a video game can have all of its content generated automatically based on data extracted from that game. That is fine.
But other cases, specially with AI content, can be much worse. There was a recent example where some site with history content had generated some pages using an AI and that AI created a page about Scimitars which included information taken from Dungeons and Dragons, but presented then as historic facts.
And the main problem here is that the internet feeds on itself. Texts are copied from one site to another by non-AI bots. Some text created by AI in one site gets copied to multiple threads on reddit, hacker news, stack overflow, 4chan and all sorts of places. Places that are scanned by search engines and often picked as preferred search results by users.
Then Google these days try everything to make a larger profit from you. That includes “stealing” content from inside websites to display on top of the search results page - so that you never click away from the Google site. In order to do that more efficiently, they give preference to sites that allow this behavior over sites with actual better search results. Try googling “country in Africa with the letter K”.
So in the end all your search results will soon be stuff that was written by AI. And remember: AI doesn’t think. It won’t ever do. AI is just a robot role-playing as human.
When you see a comedian doing a Stephen Hawking impression, you don’t expect them to publish scientific papers, in fact you don’t pay any attention to what they actually say, because you know it’ll either be rubbish or just a repeat of something that Hawking had said before. AI is the same thing. It’ll never be intelligent, it’ll only get better at imitating humans, by looking at what humans say. And with their content taking over the internet, it’ll soon be imitating itself.
And the only memory of the golden years of the internet, will maybe be Wikipedia. Have you donated to them yet? Think about how many times you’ve used it and remember it has never shown an ad other than their pleas for donation. Please consider giving them a few bucks when you’ve some to spare.
I think you’re probably right but I also think that people will try to adopt by going back to the old forum model of access-restricted, highly moderated, trust-based spaces for individual topics instead of mega-aggregators like Reddit.
Maybe that’s just hopium and nostalgia though.
I think you might be right. Imagine a fediverse app that allows content creators to self-host videos. They get the generated revenue directly instead of going through the website, they get paid in direct relation to how many videos they serve, and when I see an ad there, I know I am effectively paying the content creator.
I think the solution is to just return to the old web https://thewebisfucked.com/
While there are a billion things Google does that annoys me I’m not able to figure out how to create and maintain a video streaming platform without ads or paywall that finances both creation and the providing material.
I mean, who are the competitors and how do they finance it if not in a similar way?