Honestly, considering the YouTube algo and platform, what are people even watching on there in 2026 that is worth it?
So much of it is a person looking into a camera with a microphone having one sided pre-written opinion debates.
Even educational and conference talk videos don’t seem worth the duration.
Smart TVs are really just somebody else’s computer that you paid for to watch ads on.
This. There is a reason why dumb displays of a similar size are much more expensive. Because the manufacturer can’t feed you ads and sell your data …
I don’t understand the need for those. My smart tv is functioning exactly as a computer monitor. It is connected via a display connection to my computer, and nothing else. It does show a brief warning that it is unconnected to the internet whenever I turn it on, but it disappears after 10 seconds or so.
Yeah, but that’s not how most people use Smart TVs. Also, they’re still coming for you, next up they’ll try to insert ads via HDMI. and good luck finding a Smart TV with display port.
For me it isn’t the length, but the frequency that is bothering me. It’s insain, it’s like every 3-5 mins depending on the video length. It’s unusable atleast in my case. Only watching from devices I have adblocker on now. Not my phone.
I will sit on my floor with nothing, for hours, before i watch ads.
YouTube revanced 👌
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 [email protected] and [email protected]. 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.
Odysee exits
ewww, nothing but far right garbage on that site
Why ewww?
I like paying for services rather than using free services that sell my data and brainwash me with ads. Adblock is fine, but how are they supposed to make money? Should the service be free?
I get where you’re coming from, but the issue isn’t that YouTube makes money, it’s how aggressively they’re doing it simultaneously.
- Charge advertisers? Fair enough.
- Charge viewers a Premium fee to avoid ads? …ok.
- Quietly tighten the screws on ad-blockers while doing both? That’s where it gets cynical.
The platform runs on creator content, yet payout rates, especially for smaller channels, have barely moved while YouTube’s revenue keeps growing. They’re squeezing every side of the equation at once while the people actually making the product worth watching see the least of it.
Ad-blocking isn’t theft. It’s a rational response to a platform that’s decided unskippable ads are acceptable on top of an already profitable model. If the value exchange felt fair, fewer people would bother. Early days of streaming showed that people accept a fair deal. Enshittification has driven many of us back to the seven seas.
I don’t mean this in an accusatory way, but did you write this with AI? I feel I’m becoming paranoid and seeing AI authorship in everything. The structure matches ChatGPT output.
No.
Clankers were trained on the writing style of individuals such as myself (ASD). While I do consciously (and subconsciously) code switch, I’m aware I have a default “sounds like ChatGPT” voice when dealing with technical discussions, especially if I’m trying to be precise or guard myself from accusation or attack.
I’m ok with it, but I’m now going to autism at you / over explain it, partially because I think it might help you parse the difference between human and machine when reading these things.
You asked in apparently good faith and you deserve a full explanation.
The underlying pattern comes from a perversion of the “measure twice, cut once” mentality; I create the crux of the argument, forecast likely objections, rewrite to close off said objections, sand the edges off, check if I was unintentionally offensive, check if I presented the facts to the best of my ability, check for logical fallacies, then finally sweep to see if there is any ambiguity or obvious attack surfaces left. Then I read it out loud to myself.
That mode flattens everything into a “safe, palatable, high signal to noise ratio, use dot points so people don’t lose you, don’t write like yourself” style.
(And I still miss typos sometimes. That actually really, really irks me).
Anyhow, when I said the clankers copy us, I didn’t mean just vocabulary. Expand the CoT (chain of thought) the next time you use ChatGPT; you’ll see they made it do this exact same process.
PS: You’re not the first to point it out either. It’s one of the reasons I dubbed my blog Clanker Adjacent
It’s your fault.
YouTube is proprietary and Google can do whatever they want.
Removed by mod
We don’t flex on wasting money for greedy corporations here.
Removed by mod
