No, Youtube. You're not getting my money.
Originally written . Last edited .
Listen to this article:
Not until you bring back the features you removed.
I've been using Adblock or Ublock Origin since probably about -. My memory is hazy around this, but my vague memory tells me that I installed Adblock because Youtube introduced non-skippable ads. The norm when you were on a page, ready to watch a video, before this, was one of, or usually all three, of these:
- A boxed ad above the list of recommended videos.
- A small pop-up ad inside the video player, above the timeline.
- A preroll ad, skippable after 5 seconds.
The first two are harmless enough. The third was annoying, but tolerable. Not being able to skip it if the ad was only 7 seconds long was also fine. Any longer than that, and you've annoyed me enough to install Adblock on every computer I regularly use. Not only that, but you've kept pushing for more ads, to the point that I never end up watching through an ad, even on computers that aren't mine. I'll borrow a laptop from a friend just to show them something, I'll find the video, and I'll install Ublock Origin, because I realise they don't have it the instant I click play, and it's quicker and easier to install Ublock Origin than it is to watch that ad. I will go out of my way to not watch Youtube on my phone, or on my TV, or on a console, because the experience is functionally broken. Well done Youtube, you've played yourself.
Maybe in a vacuum this would have been fine. But Youtube keeps implementing the most ass-backwards, user-hostile anti-features you could imagine, and removing features people cared about. How about removing dislikes? Nobody except Youtube's corporate partners wanted that. And even that system was on a steady decline. Emplemon made a great video on this topic called Why You Should Like Dislikes. We used to have a star system, where you could rank a video from 1 to 5. But since most people only ranked stuff either a 1 or a 5, they switched over to a binary system instead. The reason for this was bad, but it made some level of sense. After that, likes and dislikes became less and less prominent, first with a green and a red bar, then a blue and grey bar, then a grey and grey bar, then just into (often truncated) numbers, and now into nothing, unless you install an add-on, which doesn't actually fix the problem, since it's just using an estimate, since Youtube doesn't expose the true number of dislikes anymore. At the time Emplemon made his video, it was a funny joke that Youtube would eventually remove dislikes, since it had been talked about by YouTube, but that this was an obviously bad idea, but that YouTube had already kept on introducing anti-features for a while. The joke was that even YouTube weren't that stupid. The morsel of truth that made the joke funny was that YouTube were fucking stupid. Turns out that morsel of truth was the whole thing after all.
Another removed feature was community subtitles. I've even made contributions to videos with those myself. It was a pain, but I thought it was worth it. It's a great accessibility feature. Just having a clean set of subtitles in the language the video is in helps a lot to make the automatically translated subtitles more readable. But no, they removed those because few people used them. Of course they were rarely used, THEY'RE A FUCKING ACCESSIBILITY FEATURE YOU GITS! People don't use accessibility features unless they need them. I share Tom Scott's opinion that any professionally produced content on Youtube should be professionally subtitled. Call it a business expense. If you disagree with me, fuck off. Community subtitles was a band-aid on that problem, but they took it away without even acknowledging the actual problems.
Annotations were on Youtube from the very beginning. You have no idea how much history was lost when Youtube killed them. My favourite set were on Austin Wintory's commentary on the music he made for Journey. That video had his entire commentary as annotations. If he hadn't gone out of his way to reupload that video with the text baked in, it would functionally have been lost (that video's annotations would probably have been preserved by the people who genuinely cared, but accessing that quickly becomes a pain if it isn't done right). How many video sets which used annotations to navigate to other videos in that set were functionally destroyed because you can no longer use the system upon which it was built?
Not to mention the degraded experience on the other side of the table. Content creators on Youtube largely aren't happy with them either. I remember a question CGP Grey was asked on Hello Internet a long time ago, something along the lines of 'Do you feel safe and well taken care of as a content creator on Youtube?', to which the answer was 'no', because the return on investment on videos was usually not worth it when counting income from Youtube by itself, and future returns were trending downwards. I believe this coincided with or was sometime after the first Adpocalypse, but either way it was clear that Youtube as a platform was mostly fine, but you didn't want to put all your eggs in one basket. Shame there is only one as far as video creation is concerned unless you go into film or Tele-Vision™. No wonder 90% of youtubers at any level of actual success have a Patreon or something else to generate additional cash flow, since Youtube straight up doesn't. At best it's some extra money to put in the bank if the rest of the show goes to shit.
If what you're offering is a constantly degrading experience, then I don't want it. As a matter of fact, you've managed to radicalise me into believing that we should make advertising illegal, because apparently, we can't have nice things.
Now I'm trying to escape Youtube's grip ever more, but it's proving tough. Freetube has proven to be a largely better overall experience for me as a user. I still miss the return of dislikes, but if the maintainers of the project generally have my interests as a user in mind, unlike Youtube, and the overall experience is better, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make, and I can also live with a vague hope that the guy behind Return Youtube Dislike will come to his senses and get off his arse and make a more sensible implementation of his plugin; one that Freetube could also use. But I can't fucking escape. I'm now IP blocked by Youtube, probably since I've opened a few too many videos at once or something stupid like that, and Freetube, being a privacy first project, doesn't allow you to log in to Youtube through their client. So unless I use a VPN, or get around to getting a different IP (which I'd rather not do for unrelated reasons), I can't really use Freetube anymore. And who's to say that won't just happen again? Fuck off, Youtube.
But I'll compromise. I'm willing to pay for an ad-free experience on Youtube, at whatever reasonable cost is for a Streaming Service™ is nowadays, if the rest of the experience isn't degraded. I subscribe to exactly Zero streaming services, and didn't even think Netflix was that worth it when it was good (in hindsight it probably was), so me being willing to pay for YouTube, but nothing else, should hopefully say something. If you bring back community subtitles, bring back annotations (you don't even have to let people make new ones! just let the old ones stay on the site in some actual capacity approximating the way they were there originally), and you bring back a dislike counter, with it turned on by default on new video uploads, I'll forgive you, to the extent I am able. I don't even need the older page layouts back, even if I prefer them. I'll manage. But you'll never do that, because you're a cooperation. You don't need me as a user. So instead, I will continue to believe that advertising is evil and should be illegal to the same extent littering should be.
something something enshittification
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