By far the most effective way to end ads would be to come up with an internet business model that doesn't need ads or subscriptions to stay alive.

This would be a god tier level development, and would seriously cripple Google's core business (serving ads) and youtube as well (serve ads or subscription).

Given that things cost money, I'm not sure how you want to accomplish that in a sustainable fashion. Somewhere, someone down the line is paying money, even if it's not you. And if it's not you, you're the product, as the popular saying goes. So paying a subscription fee really is the best solution.

One can imagine a different structure, where a wealthy philanthropist or organization funds the site, but that's just shifting the costs around. The other option is the government runs it, out of our tax dollars, which could work, if there wasn't a powerful vocal contingent of politicians that still buys the line that government can't do anything right.

Here’s your solution: YouTube, but backed by blockchain. Instead of hashing or whatever nonsense happens on blockchain, your “mining” actually does something mildly useful and serves videos. You get coins or something. Since there’s no real value in blockchain products and everything is completely fabricated, you can show people their coin value is going up, because why not. So they can continue to “invest” with their compute.

Been feeling inspired by the SBF case lately.

Jokes aside, distributing compute to users is one way to avoid having expensive servers, which tend to be powered by ads, if not direct payments. There is the fediverse. Not sure how well that would work here, but there’s probably some potential. And before that there has been e.g. torrenting communities that require certain seed ratios. Basically: the product is “free” but you need to participate in some form that adds value rather than just leeching. The distributed model is established, I just don’t think it will ever outcompete a centralized one, if for no other reason than distributed communities have strategy and cash flow problems. As in, they don’t really have any functional mechanism to build, fund, and execute on a competitive strategy like YouTube can. All they can really do is make a product and hope people like it. But competing on merit is never enough.

This is called peertube, and the topmost viewed video on peertube.tv sorted by "Global views" had 57K views in total.

Youtube, OTOH, used, and currently uses a number of marketing strategies to drive traffic to their site, and paid out ~$10B++ annually for content creators. GP's comment on "Given that things cost money" is not governed by compute, rather, cost of customer acquisition for the platform, and cost of content creation by creatives. Somebody, somewhere, has to pay for these. That is the merit of this battleground.

> By far the most effective way to end ads would be to come up with an internet business model that doesn't need ads or subscriptions to stay alive.

There are many! The problem is that the ads model supports the "winners take all" strategy that permeates Silicon Valley and all its copycats. There is no room for peaceful coexistence.

Peer to peer networks. "Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the World Wide Web was close to a P2P network in that it assumed each user of the web would be an active editor and contributor, creating and linking content to form an interlinked "web" of links."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer

Blockchain?

Eventually it will have to become content extraction. Load the page in the background, load the ad, capture frames from the video window and use some process to detect and remove the frames that show an ad. Take the clean video feed and show it in another interface than the original page. This would also be a countermeasure against direct injection of ads into the content stream.

Agreed. Computers are slowly being maimed to the point where we are going to go back to using DVR (digital video recorder, a time shifting device like tivo) but for computers.

Also note that so far, most streaming services have succeeded in protecting their high res codecs. KodiTV can play a big variety of services but usually only at 540p (widevine L2?).

Tim Berners-Lee overriding the standards bodies and approving Encrypted Media Extensions had the desired effect of keeping the web relevant, of letting all these streaming services spring up, all accessible on the web. Because it afforda the companies enough security to feel like they can do so.

It's unclear to me how we build DVRs anew. Do we disassemble a monitor scan-out & record the embedded-Display-Port or lvds or whatever signal, and play that back? The infernalizarion of computing has proceeded apace against humanity.

The maiming of computers is the logical outcome of allowing walled gardens to become acceptable, thanks to the halo of Apple. The rest is numbers and history.

Meanwhile: https://sponsor.ajay.app/

Though if youtube is really going to end up blocking ad-blockers, this one may stop working too, of course.

Help starving lone devs keep up important projects.

The big fish are Ublock Origin and AdBlock Plus, as well as YT front ends like yt-dl, Invidious and Newpipe, but by favorite project is https://github.com/uazo/cromite

Bromite already almost died before uazo took over.

I think YouTube is eventually going to assert control through Chrome, and the community is going to be caught flat footed with everyone still relying on Chrome extensions.

The entire adblock industry feels like https://xkcd.com/2347/

Boycott YouTube in favor of other video services? Pay for YT Premium?

Why spend so much energy bypassing compensation for an otherwise free service? It just pushes more ads in front of less sophisticated users or encourages producers to lock all content behind paywalls.

Note that when paying for YT premium, you have to be logged in. Google will still collect the data, build your profile, just not show you the resulting ads on youtube. But they will use that data to show you targeted ads elsewhere. Plus now you cannot invalidate that data by dropping cookies, etc.

This is one of the many reasons that Google has never had me as a paying customer, even though I like YouTube's content enough to pay something for it. Over the years, things like this have eroded the trust I have for Google to effectively zero.

Instead I pay other services like Nebula to watch creators I first discovered on YouTube. Unfortunately, most creators don't have an alternative like this in place.

What makes you think Nebula doesn't do the same thing?

Like I said, there are several factors in my decision making. At this point I assume most services will eventually succumb to enshittification. So, bouncing between ships, bailing as they start to sink feels like the name of the game. It's not necessarily that I trust Nebula, it's that I don't trust the advertising company, Google.

That said, some other reasons that work in Nebula's favor are that the creators seem to be involved in the ownership and they can publish material without the fear of YouTube's demonetization. The value proposition isn't exactly one to one and goes beyond the advertising/funding.

Have you seen YouTube with ads? They slap 2-3 15s ads in a 5m video. It's unwatchable.

Yes, and that has not been my experience. Perhaps the creators you enjoy are more aggressive about monetization?

I don’t want to be logged in. I don’t want them invading my privacy.

Sounds like a boycott is the only real solution for you.

Yes.