• kamen@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Ads aside, what’s been infuriating me lately is that YouTube seems to have degraded the quality of existing videos and locked the previously available quality behind the “1080p Enhanced Bitrate”; I have no way of confirming this since I obviously don’t have Premium, but I’m fairly sure that the regular 1080p of old videos that I rewatch from time to time (uploaded 2-3 years ago or earlier) is now worse than it was. If it was about new uploads with something previously unavailable, it would’ve been somewhat understandable. Something also tells me that the paid tier is also going to get ads eventually.

    • lastweakness@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      From everything I’ve read, it seems they didn’t actually reduce quality and it’s just placebo from the introduction of the premium bitrate option.

      • kamen@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        Could be, I don’t know. I doubt that video creators would go through all of these old videos just to update them to a slightly higher bitrate; the other possibility is that YouTube kept the original uploads or higher bitrate variants without previously showing them (and only showed them now), but that seems like a huge waste of storage, so it seems unlikely to me. Again, we’re talking about old uploads (2-3 or up to 10 years ago), not new ones.

        The one thing I’ve seen that makes sense is updating old videos that were previously available at up to 480p and bringing them up to 720p or 1080p (with the idea of keeping the original published video with the views, comments and so on instead of uploading a new one).

    • Pavel Chichikov@lemm.ee
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      23 hours ago

      yes video quality has dropped, video suggestion algorithms have become a weird uroboric/echo chamber even if you have dozens of subscriptions, and the YouTube shorts reel refuses to be trained (no matter what I do, if I dislike every video I don’t want to see and like all the ones I do want to see and log off if it suggests too many bad videos in a row, it still feeds me an endless loop of unwanted brain rot after 5 or 6 scrolls). I hate YouTube.

      At the same time, they’ve found a good way around the ad block situation which is to promote ads as thumbnails on your “for you” video main page. I don’t know why they didn’t just do that in the first place, because honestly I don’t mind that. It’s when they constantly interrupt my videos ever freaking minute and a half that I start to get pissed.

    • qaz@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 day ago

      I’m guessing they’re going to use the classic method of increasing the subscription price and then later creating a new lite subscription that does have some ads.

      • Pavel Chichikov@lemm.ee
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        22 hours ago

        these subscription models don’t work. What these morons don’t count on is that everyone actually hates the technology deep down. We don’t want it! But it gives us a dopamine hit. And when they stack on subscription prices and lock up content and shove ads down our throat… well, the dopamine stops hitting and just get pissed. So we leave.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 days ago

    I always somehow miss when it stops working and by the time I go to YouTube again it’s already working again.

    Blessings to Gorhill

  • Powerbomb@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    I was so happy to find this post, and was saddened again to see that I didn’t have this button available when I needed it hahahaha

  • Epzillon@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    Can anyone tell me why my “purge cache” button is missing? I thought i was crazy

  • iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    YouTube Premium is the only media subscription I pay for because it’s the only one I consider worth it. I watch an unhealthy amount of YT, listen to tons of music, and even use YT as a kind of cloud storage for thousands of hours of recorded video.

    • TheTetrapod@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Sorry for the down votes, you’re 100% valid. YouTube Premium benefits me and the content creators I watch. Sure, it’s more complicated than that, but everything is, and sometimes you just have to make choices that make your life a little easier.

    • davel@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      I’d probably be paying for YouTube, if it were run by a normal media company instead of the world’s largest spy network and personal data broker. There’s no way in hell I’m giving them my credit card information.

    • glitchdx@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I used to pay for it, for the same reasons. They stopped taking my money, i don’t know why, and I noticed zero change in the quality of the service.

      I’m paying for other google services, so I don’t know why youtube specifically stopped. Oh well.

    • DogWater@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Yup.

      Family plan is 22$ for ad free yt and music subscription for 5 or 6 people

      I get that Google bad an all that, but it’s a good deal

      • comfy@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        Personally, considering I can get it for free, and that Google bad, $22 is a bad deal for me. I’d rather donate $20 to the groups helping us get around it, and spend the other $2 on jawbreakers!

        • DogWater@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Yeah but my aging parents can’t, it’s about effort. Of course I could set up something that gets around all of it but then I still have to pay for their music streaming on their phone. And the second something breaks I’m not with them to fix it.