Unlock origin + Firefox! The harassment stops. I'd rather donate to the unlock team monthly instead of paying google for a solution to a problem they created.
Actually YouTube kinda built in the feature lol. It detects sections of the video most people skip and gives you a button to skip it as well. All right inside the YouTube app.
AdAway (F-Droid) will do the same but on-device (so it works everywhere), and if you're rooted it'll do it without the VPN by directly updating the hosts file.
If an open source app asks me to do so, I usually give it a five star review. It's the least I can do to support them and make them visible on Google Play.
Everything is just routing around people telling you "no."
Government regulation is literally the epitome of being told "no" and they spend all the money in the fucking world to force it into a "yes."
I mean, these people are so far up their own asses, I've seen ad industry people say seriously that people avoiding ads is breaking a contract. The genuine attitude that if they paid for the ad, in real life or online, that we owe them our eyes on it because they spent money on it. They're so far out of touch that they can't even face small risk.
Is it really a shock that a lot of people in corporate America are actual fucking rapists?
Gates, Weinstein, Musk, Trump, McMahon, I could go on... Plenty of these guys are well documented as not being able to take "no" for an answer, even if there's no evidence they raped anyone (Gates, for example).
Invidious or Piped are great options, that also let you hide all the distractions like suggested videos, the toxic dumpster fire that's the comments section, and so on. Piped even implements SponsorBlock without needing to install the addon.
Their full screen popups when I first open the app have started to load the subscribe button a second before anything else on screen. I keep catching myself about tap it out of pure reflex and I think they doing it on purpose.
Imo this should actually be illegal. I'm find with reasonable promotional displays and offers, but there needs to be some legal option to permanently decline. Having to tell YouTube "no" literally hundreds of times is legitimately ludicrous
You go to a coffee shop, you order a coffee, open your laptop and start working. After you're done with your coffee the waiter comes and asks you whether you would like to pay. You say no and continue working. One hour later they ask you again whether you would like to pay. You say no and continue working. Two hours later the waiter insists you either pay and leave, or pay for two coffees, and they bring you another one, then you can stay and work. You call the police because you're being harassed, and post on lemmy about predatory coffee shop practices trying to upsell you a second coffee. The police arrests the waiter and you get 9000 upvotes on lemmy.
Running a video-on-demand platform is very, very expensive. Just an FYI.
In the comments to your coffee shop story someone points out that coffee shops deserve to be paid for the coffee and the working space you occupy. The comment gets heavily downvoted with other commenters providing great counter-arguments, like "the coffee is ridiculously overpriced, like a 100% margin, it's an evil for-profit business and we shouldn't pay those" and "they just had a coffee, it costs them almost nothing, the rest of the time they werr just working, which didn't incur any costs on the coffee shop. The coffee shop are assholes, if they let the OP work till the evening, they would've paid for their coffee".
Someone even suggested a new commercial model for the coffee shop: everyone makes their own coffee, it's free, and so is seating, funding is donation-based. They have certainly seen such a place before, although, they themselves would never be up for running one cuz they have a day job to pay the bills.
Then you are walking along the street when the city folds in on itself. You realize Leonardo Dicaprio is there. This is a dream? As if from afar, you hear a faint voice crying, "Murph! Don't let me leave, Murph!"
Youtube premium gives you a higher bitrate option as well.
I think it's only for lower resolutions (other than 4k) but if the video was uploaded with an absurdly high bitrate you can see a slightly less destroyed version.
Google bought out YouTube and operated it at loss for most of its life, effectively making it a monopoly in the process, and only started to earn money on it when there was no way any other alternative would come up and endanger it.
If you ignore this, YouTube Premium is a pretty good offer. And I personally like the fact that I support content creators, without the need of watching ads that are nothing more than cancer for society.
That said, I would still prefer YouTube to return to its roots and separate from Google, since it's pretty much possible for it to stand on its own right now, I guess.
In Germany, the family plan costs €23.99, but the worst part is that even when you pay for it, there are still ads from the creators within the videos. Essentially, you’re paying for nothing, not to mention that they are much more expensive than all other video platforms.