YouTube's ad problem just got worse: Users now seeing 90-second unskippable ads!

Hey YouTube? The endpoint of enshittification is this: I wipe my ass and flush you. Keep going, YouTube. You’re not so important that we can’t just leave. Nebula exists. Curiosity Stream exists. PeerTube exists. Odysee exits. The people I value on YT already have footholds on all four. More will arrive soon enough. So keep at it. Keep injecting unskippable ads, flooding the feed with AI slop, letting bots post porn, demonetising and hiding quality content, using DMCA like a digital SLAPP against content creators, and using the algorithm to warp reality. Your value proposition is ubiquity. That’s it. That’s all you have. Without popular buy-in, you’re dead. We proles? We have something better than loyalty. We have spite. So keep pissing people off - because watching you die on a very stupid hill of your own design will be entertaining AF. For everyone else, see you on !selfhosted@lemmy.world and !privacy@lemmy.world. Come and learn how you can replace all of these pieces of shit. And in the meantime - yt-dlp should still work to download what you actually want to keep, and SmartTube is black magic incarnate.

Yes. You will quit YouTube. But 99% of people won’t and they make YouTube more revenue via either watching more ads or giving up and subscribing

All we can do is point the way. There are alternatives - we’re using one right now. I’m for giving people choices. People should be empowered with knowledge. Whether they choose the act on that knowledge is up to them. odysee.com peertube.tv nebula.tv curiositystream.com www.hoopladigital.com.au

None of those have all the creators and people don’t want to go between multiple apps. This fight is lost. The way to win it now is legislation or blowing up data centers.

I disagree. The fight isn’t lost - it hasn’t even started yet. People are apathetic and/or ignorant to alternatives. Some of those people can be appealed to - or on sufficient enshittification, motivated into action. Spite is a wonderful reagent. Additionally, the apathy of the masses has no impact on individual response. Things already exist that marry disparate platforms (eg: Grayjay, Kodi plug ins etc). We need not wait. And while I remain sanguine that YT will piss off enough people eventually, I’d sooner code my own app, that joins all my streams - and release it into the wild - than let others dictate what I can and cannot do.