Mildly Infuriating

A company isn’t successful in hyper capitalism unless they are accelerating the growth of their profits every year. They have to sell more products to existing users, acquire new paid users, charge more for their existing products, or they’re considered unsuccessful. The model literally assumes a constant infinite exponential growth of the human race where success can only be achieved if every human alive is paying for every product offering possible, buying every upsell and microtransaction, freely giving their data to be sold so that more useless products can be created at minimum cost and sold at maximum price. But also hyper capitalism lobbies for less benefits, lower pay, etc. It inevitably collapses into neo-feudalism or just slavery

And if you're a content creator, you can opt in to allow your content to be used by AI... Without compensation. 🤡

ReVanced :)

Most other companies can be selective in what they host / stream. YouTube will host/stream anything users upload and that's actually quite insane. Current statistics say that YouTubers upload 30.000 hours of video.. per hour.

Aside from the streaming/processing, only the disk space that would need is already frightening. Most of those videos will never be seen, and no ads will be played on them. The setup needed for this is massively more impressive to me than services like Netflix.

Do you perhaps have a source for those profit margins? I really wonder if they're already running break even.

I see this recommendation all the time. It frustrates me. I'm in favor of blocking ads and modding clients and whatever it takes to optimize one's experience, but the majority - by far - of my YouTube experience takes place on my TV. I can't do much to control it (pihole and other DNS solutions don't work on YouTube since their ads are hosted in the same servers as their videos).

I could perform various modifications to the operating system of my TV, and trust me it's tempting for a lot of reasons, but it was a very expensive (by my standards) TV so I want to at least wait until the warranty expires until I start experimenting.

I could also use something hooked up to my TV and mod that, which is my favorite idea, but my wife likes the interface as it is. It's an LGTV with the ... Sigh ... "Magic" remote, which I absolutely hate, but I don't want to take it away from her. It seems like that interface, especially the "magic" cursor, would be hard to replicate. I'd prefer not to go through the tedium of having two different systems.

Especially because we also have a console hooked up and no solution I've found so far has provided a simple way of switching between HDMI sources without running a disgusting number of cables. I did recently order a new receiver, so hopefully that helps with the multiple origins issue.

Obviously this is very much a a first world problem, and I apologize for my privilege, I just wanted to point out that uBO (or other software based solutions) aren't always the solution.

Premium user since Red launched.

Mobile defaults to 320p no matter what I do. I have to manually select 1080p each and every video

That is because you are paying for the premium of signing up through ios; apple takes a cut so to make money they raise the rates. It's extremely common signing up to any service through ios, that you will be charged higher than if you went to the website on your browser and sign up for it there. First link has link to Hank Green who does a great break down and investigation but provided many more examples.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/28/24166546/subscribing-to-stuff-from-your-iphone-is-a-waste-of-money

https://www.devicemag.com/youtube-premium-cost-iphone/

https://lifehacker.com/dont-sign-up-for-subscriptions-in-the-app-1850298355

https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaharziv/2020/07/08/heres-why-your-apple-app-store-purchases-may-be-a-ripoff/

https://umatechnology.org/psa-subscriptions-cost-more-when-bought-on-an-iphone/

It wouldn't be so bad if the ads were reasonably placed.

Don't target people who come in from another domain or on the first viewed video. Pre- roll ads after that. Most importantly, ad breaks at creator-defined times only. Sick of ads coming in at arbitrary times in the middle of a sentence. That's the worst part of it, IMO.

Oh and a time limit on ads. That has to happen too.

Also could somebody tell all the streaming companies that they know what language I watch all my videos in and to stop giving me Spanish language ads? Like, I got no problem with other languages, I just really feel like you're wasting your advertisers money showing them to people who don't know a quesadilla from a carton of pickles.

I was fine with it back when it was just one ad that you could skip.

I was fine with it back when it was just two ads that you could skip.

I was fine with it back when it was just two ads, and you could skip one, and the other was 5 seconds long. 10 was a stretch, but I'm patient.

Without an adblocker, now it's playing an unskippable, 10+ seconds long ad at the start AND at the end. Some ads are as long as 20 seconds. If the video is long enough, it dares to abruptly play an ad right in the middle. You can't skip that one, either. We're back to television content-to-ad ratios - the exact thing I was happy to dump once there was enough content on YouTube. I was patient. That wasn't enough for them. They can suck a beehive.

Free-at-point-of-service is a common feature of amenities provided by countries with socialist economies.

But they only work when the economy is actively managed. If you're just pumping cash into a big banking machine and telling people to grab for it, you're not incentivizing any particular economic activity. You're just encouraging entrepreneurs to get particularly good at snatching money out of the air and elbowing one another in the face.

It is because it includes YouTube Music. A really crappy Spotify clone that nobody asked for.

You used to be able to play videos in the background but they removed that feature specifically to lock it behind a paywall. YouTube will never see a dime from me because of this.

Charging for new features? Sure I guess. Removing features to charge for them later? Get fucked.

It's okay to pay for a service that you use daily.

I don't, but I disagree it's "to throw money away".