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.
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.
FYI, SponsorBlock isn’t just for skipping sponsored segments. SB gives you granular control over the sorts of sections you can skip, and it only auto-skips sponsors by default. However:
There are several categories of section, including intro animation/intermission (“an interval without actual content”), preview (i.e. where the information already exists later in the video), sponsor (a segment made in return for payment from a third party), unpaid/self-promotion (e.g. “buy my merch”), interaction reminder (e.g. “remember to like and subscribe”), and endcards/credits. (There’s also “filler tangent/jokes”, but I haven’t tried this one.)
For each of these categories, you can choose to disable altogether, show in the seek bar, prompt to manually skip, or auto skip.
So even if you would never want to skip a sponsored segment in your life, the extension still saves a ton of time if you have no/limited interest in watching even just one of the above-listed categories.
Absolutely! And what I ran down is just the extent of the features I personally interact with; there are a fair few more, including one that aims to combat clickbait by changing clickbaity titles.
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.
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).
For me it’s a way to help support content creators, along with donations/merch, although admittedly not having to even try to block the ads is a nice bonus.
I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a YouTube fan, and it will be something I continue to evaluate.
There is clearly a value proposition or no one would pay for it.
I personally don't like to reward any company using the pay to not be inconvenienced model
A lot of people would rather fight adblockers (idk, literally never been an issue for me),
use xManager (oh right spotify is free) ,
Pay creators you like through patreon (or buy their shitty amazon links or merch or whatever)
Premium is just rewarding youtube for making their platform worse in order to sell premium and fuck that noise.
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.