https://www.statista.com/statistics/513049/alphabet-annual-global-income/

Let's pause a moment and just appreciate how much money Alphabet actually make net (after expenses). $73,795,000,000 last year - higher than the GDP of entire nations, in profit.

The "bad" year, 2022 that drove all this change, they only made $59,972,000,000 net. Oh how terrible (!)

5 years ago, they made $34,343,000,000 net, so they've more than doubled profits.

Take a moment to appreciate that, and really consider if they "need" the money.

It's funny that free third party apps literally have more features and are more user friendly than the official app with premium.

Why the fuck would I pay for less when I can get more for free?

I'll give up on YouTube before I give up my ad blocks or 3rd party apps. Fuck off Google.

It's funny how this comes after Chrome's switch to Manifest V3, which makes ad blocking not possible on Chrome and was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers. Now that Chrome users can't block ads on the first-party site, they're going after third-party clients. Such coincidental timing.

Are they going to officially allow third party apps at all? The stock app is terrible, and not just because of excessive, unskippable advertising and bizarre restrictions around background play. When you search for anything, at least half of the results are completely unrelated to what you searched for in an attempt to increase user engagement metrics. It keeps trying to get you to watch shorts in its bad TikTok clone. Sometimes it recommends unrelated shorts with disturbing thumbnails in the middle of your search results. It keeps autodetecting that the video quality should be 360p on a connection easily capable of 4k, and resetting back to 360p at the start of every new video. The UI for live streams puts things on top of other things that are more important.

Please download and archive your favorite channels and videos!

Host them yourself to watch them locally.

Especially do this for educational material, share it wide and far!

We are entering a very dark age of techno-dystopia, we need to fight it with everything we have. Pirate, seed, screen-record, download, archive, share, never give up.

Not again ... Well, let's wait a week or so for the clients to fix that.

Third party apps: "OK. We'll show ads. Muted. Behind a black overlay. If we really can't find a workaround."

They've been trying for a minute. Must be different now that they're saying it!

Checks notes

Nope, revanced still works.

My newpipe 😔

Gotta love this shit. Conservatives/companies: "Let the market decide!" The market: "We are tired of you cramming ads down our throats and fundamentally do not want it and will actively fight you on it." Companies: "Waaaaaa, they are fighting us."

As soon as 3rd party clients don't work as they do anymore, I am stopping going to YouTube. Simple as, I know it doesn't matter as a singular thing, I am just one user. Was the same with reddit, now I am here but reddit is still going (how well we don't need to debate now).

I've been using youtube on Firefox with ublock since the premium price raise. Even on android. The experience is not great, but that makes sure I don't have ads at all.

Also discovered unhooked addon yesterday. Is desktop only, but great for going into less youtube rabbit holes that waste my time.

Youtube isn't some one of a kind miracle. There's at least a dozen already-established streaming platforms that would take its place. There are thousands of websites that have no problems hosting gigs and gigs of porn, so it's not as difficult as people think.

Honestly, huge shout out to the wave of enshittification crashing through Google and reddit and forcing me off their platforms. Decade-long debilitating addiction solved.

Fuck them. I'd rather donate quadruple the money for premium to my favourite creators directly than give a single penny to this parasitic mega corporation.

The issue is not only the ads, it's the stupid shit it throws you to keep you hooked, it's the stupid shorts that literally no one asked for, it's every stupid little thing that fights for your attention. Basically the app doesn't work for you, it works against you. That's not the case with third party apps, they have you, the user, in mind, not their profits.

I'll just use Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin then, literally anything is better than ads

Damn, I got my setup so perfect on the TV with SmartTube. But I will not be able to tolerate ads. Then I'd rather only watch on Firefox with uBlock on my laptop.

Showing it the middlefinger since >half a year

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/489585-ultimate-youtube-ad-remover-and-detection-bypasser/code

https://openuserjs.org/scripts/Kraust/Youtube_Embed_Redirect

Hey Google, FUCK YOU.

Don't worry, third party clients will rectify the issue.

I personally have no problem with paying for a service. However, if I buy premium to remove the ads, YT has no longer the need to collect my data. But it is Google and they won't stop collecting. That, plus the fact that Google basically has a monopoly with youtube are the reasons I don't buy premium.

I’ve Invidious hosted on my Little Raspberry Pi 4, and using it’s WPA app on every device I got.

Zero ad + Decent UI + Access to highest video quality

https://invidious.io/

Peertube is planning on releasing an official app this year. Just thought I'd throw that out there.