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Decentralised YouTube alternative Odysee no longer serving ads (odysee.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Odysee, a decentralised YouTube alternative focused on free speech, is officially ending the serving of ads on the platform, starting today. The post:

"Dear friends of Odysee, Starting today, we're removing all ads. We don't need ads to make money as a platform and we are confident in the development of our own new monetisation programs that will help creators earn a living and at the same time keep Odysee alive. Ultimately, sacrificing the overall user experience to make a few bucks isn't worth it to us and nor is it even sustainable for a platform that wishes to make something truly open and creatively free.

As we take this decision, one thing is certain to us, media platforms (even ones that market themselves as 'free-speech') typically devolve into advertising companies and end up becoming beholden to their paymasters. It's been that way for centuries and is never going to change.

As we see YouTube become more aggressive with their ad deployment and 'Free Speech' platforms try to build their own ad businesses it's apparent to us that we're building a model for Odysee that will keep it sustainable not only financially, but in its ability to provide an incorruptible user experience.

Our approach may be considered niche or unconventional, that's fine by us. Odysee will be used by the world on terms that are agreeable to its users, and we know our users don't like ads.

Best, Founder & Creator, Chief Executive Officer. Julian Chandra"

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

What bloat? And Spyware...?

The only trackers they use are onetrust geolocation cookie, which determines the country and state/city, but not exact location, based on your IP address. Than there's googletagmanager, which I agree they should remove just for being Google.

Calling them spyware for the tiny speck of data-collection they do is petty, when you're completely ignoring the things that prove they specifically care about privacy. For one, you can sign up completely anonymously; secondly, you can comment and post videos under the name "Anonymous"; thirdly, according to their Privacy Policy:

Third-party disclosure: We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your Personally Identifiable Information unless we provide users with advance notice. This does not include website hosting partners and other parties who assist us in operating our website, conducting our business, or serving our users, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential...

Fourth: they are the only website I've ever known of to actually respect the "Do Not Track" setting that you can explicitly toggle in your browser settings. There is no standard way of managing "Do Not Track" signals in the industry, so 99% of websites have no systems in place to stop themselves collecting your data when this browser setting is enabled.

There's some tracking they were doing prior to their ads removal a few days ago in regards to what ads you were clicking on. But everything related to ads will likely be removed from the policy very soon, as the policy was last updated in 2021 when they were still serving ads. Example:

We, along with third-party vendors such as Google use first-party cookies (such as the Google Analytics cookies) and third-party cookies (such as the DoubleClick cookie) or other third-party identifiers together to compile data regarding user interactions with ad impressions and other ad service functions as they relate to our website.

Odysee is not spyware, and nor is it bloated. Even if you could argue it has some amount of bloat (which is usually subjective, so you probably can); it still wouldn't be anywhere near the 50x more bloat that YouTube, the very thing they are trying to be an alternative to, have themselves.