No Stupid Questions

Better question is why are you not using an adblocker?

The ad industry is truly one of the most reprehensible and insidious things humans have ever invited unto themselves. It's beyond dystopian how much of our ability to move through the world is now contingent on us allowing our brains to be bukkaked with ads that are designed specifically to bypass our rationality and embed themselves in the very fabric of our beings like psychological rootkits.

I believe conspiracism is the root of all evil. But ads are gaining on conspiracism like they're Usain Bolt being chased by an angry bee.

I have to hand it to those soulless fucking devils though, they might have pulled off one of the most brazen but successful mindfucks I've ever seen: they convinced lots of people that seeing ads about topics they were interested in was some sort of concession from the ad industry, like they were begrudgingly implementing measures to make ads "relevant" to us, and that we were somehow gaming the system because of it. It was a "win" for us to have the ads being served into our eyeballs and ears be tailor-made for us. "I'm so sick of seeing ads for products I don't even care about! I wish there was a way to make the ads be relevant to ME" said no cunt ever. But they managed to convinced us that everyone else was saying that, and that we'd won some sort of victory against them to have their advertising have the precision of a sniper rifle, versus what it was before, like some sort of shotgun fired from 150 feet away in the dark.

An entire species of marks.

Are you... raw dogging the internet without an ad blocker? You poor soul

Real homies don’t let homies view YouTube without proper adblockers turned on

I take it you haven't been paying attention. The term that has been it coined is called "enshitification" and the Google is running at the head of the pack in their race to the sewer.

What happened is that you forgot to install an ad blocker.

edit ad blocker won't help here

We estimate that we can sell up to 80% of a user's visual field without inducing a seizure.

Google knows the answer to this is: "What else are you going to use, Dailymotion?"

Which is why they're a monopoly.

How do people not know about ublock origin/sponsorblock? Lol

It's called enshittification:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Enshittification is a re-prioritization pattern where online product and service providers experience a decline in quality over time. It is observed as platforms transition through several stages: initially offering high-quality services to attract users, then shifting to favor business customers to increase profitability, and finally focusing on maximizing profits for shareholders at the expense of both users and business customers. This process results in a significant deterioration of the user experience.

Though the concept had been recognized and labeled with similar terms,[1][2] the neologism "enshittification" was coined by writer Cory Doctorow in November 2022 to describe this phenomenon. The American Dialect Society recognized the term's relevance and impact by selecting it as its 2023 Word of the Year. Doctorow has also referred to this concept as platform decay, emphasizing the inevitable decline in service quality due to these profit-driven changes.

To tackle and diminish enshittification, Doctorow advocates for two fundamental solutions: upholding the end-to-end principle and guaranteeing the right of exit. The end-to-end principle asserts that platforms should transmit data in response to user requests rather than algorithm-driven decisions. Ensuring the right of exit entails facilitating user departure from platforms without data loss, which necessitates interoperability. These strategies aim to uphold the standards and trustworthiness of online platforms, placing emphasis on user satisfaction and encouraging market competition.

How have you survived this long without UBlock?

i tried to find a clip of that olympics break dancing thing a week or two ago.

It was fucking impossible. I literally couldn't find shit, it was all AI generated videos.

Enshit.

Youtube is useless nowadays.

We need more content in PeerTube if we want that kind of website again.

Get Firefox and install uBlock Origin

Ublock. Simple as.

Are people really okay with this?

No, thats why they use adblock. Either install adblock or just use Brave or Opera browser. Ads will be gone forever

Also, search on YouTube has been utterly broken for years. You get at most 4 or 5 results and then a random series of videos that are completely unrelated to my search query.

Invidious was created due to this, it’s an extremely light weight, ad free YouTube front-end. Most of YouTube’s attempts at blocking it out fixed within a week. Try it now: https://invidious.io/

Revanced for android. Not a single add.

I've got about half a dozen plugins in Firefox specifically for YouTube to make the front page even remotely usable.

Without them YouTube isn't even worth it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Aside from adblocking making youtube actually usable, there's been such a notorious increase in enforcement of DRM.

I couldn't watch jack anything related to Olympics because NBC got youtube to spam remove practically any footage, as if I'm going to spend cash money on their shitty streaming platform to find a 30 second clip. Same thing for any ICC highlights. Only 360p widened 2 minute videos get past the filter.

Almost no such thing as public replays, clips, montages, or highlights anymore. It all gets boxed up in some corporate ownership, never to be seen again aside from the live footage.

Odysee just removed all ads of their platform and seems like a great YouTube alternative. I've been using it and uploading videos to it and I'm liking it a lot.

The comments are also much higher in quality. I'd say it's comparable like Lemmy and Reddit. Much more positivity and people who actually add something to a video. You do ofcourse have a few Nazis hanging around, but freedom goes both ways and you don't really come across them.

Besides that just use NewPipe on mobile or an AdBlocker.

YouTube is broke, but it was also deliberately punishing you for looking up Nick swardson I think?

Omg, it is full of ads... Futurama, 15 years ago...

If on a computer, install ublockorigin.

If on android, get revanced.

Enjoy not seeing ads at all.

Short answer: money

Long answer: As more and more ad sales started rolling in, YT was like: “Yes please! Can I have some more of that sweet sweet ad money?” Advertisers were like: “Yeah, sure why not. That seems to boost sales, so how much money can we dump into this black hole?” Some users were like: “WTF! I’m installing an adblocker.”

Meanwhile, nobody was like: “Yes please. I want to see more ads. Who cares about the videos as long as there are lots of ads to watch. This is the best thing ever!”

YouTube is unusable without ReVanced or (insert preferred method for adblocking here)