The problem with any youtube competitor is that there is no way in hell they can cover the costs of the infrastructure required to host the same amount of videos youtube has and streaming them to the millions of users youtube serves daily.

I've used adblockers for like 15 years and I genuinely get disgusted when watching YouTube without it. There's no way I'll go back. I even do sponsorblock to remove in-video ads.

The unfortunate thing is that I'm willing to pay a reasonable price for a lot of content creators, just not via Google/YouTube.

A dollar per channel? I follow 104 content creators om YouTube through RSS. And many more if we count all the other platforms. I can't afford that.

It's a difficult situation for viewers, creators and providers. I don't have an answer, but a stop-gap solution I'd be happy to see is like 480p max for adblockers, pay for HD+. That's reasonable based on how much ad-dodgers impact YouTube from what I've gathered.

I guess if you don't use ad blockers you somehow get used to it. It's like someone whose job is 100% outdoors vs. someone who works indoors and then has to do a day working outside. The person who is used to cold, wind, rain, scorching sun, etc. stops noticing, even though it takes a toll on them too.

Every once in a while I end up using a browser without ad blockers enabled and it's incredible to me that some people live like that. It really is almost unusable. Things jump around as ads load in. Ads / videos pop over the content you're trying to use. The useful part of a page might be 60% ads: ads along the sides and breaking up the text. And then there's the bottom area of the page which is an endless scroll of "related content" ads.

There never will be a YouTube competitor, it requires continuous investment from a multibillion dollar company.

Yeah and some of these people think they’re Brave and Edgy.

Firefox for the win. Or Librewolf even better.

Imo this extends to chromium too. Google owns the source code and can pull it whenever they want. Sure, chromium browsers might be able to putter along for a little bit, but my understanding is that the reason why we're now at Chrome/Chromium vs Firefox vs Safari is because Google shits out so many new """standards""" and "features" that you need a large team to keep up. It's supposedly why browsers like Opera switched to using chromium instead of trying to maintain their own source code.

This is a feature, not a bug.

But

The real problem with any other video service is that YT has a HUGE advantage of WAY more content. I wish it weren't that way but it is.

So they will continue to dominate until similar vast content can be created elsewhere.

The problem with youtube in particular is there is no way to build an alternative that's as good as YouTube (ignoring all the bad bits they've added). PeerTube is nice to have around, but it's not as fast and doesn't have all the content as youtube. There's also Nebula, which is alright. It's not free and doesn't have as much content, but it's usually a higher quality.

Same. It is no longer worth it, I'll be sad to lose my music streaming, but there are other pathways that some may consider unethical.

I've ditched everything but android. Been thinking about swapping roms but not all the apps I need for work will works with MicroG. And going apple is, at best, a lateral move.