Maybe this is my mid-life crisis. Quitting forums, and now quitting watching youtube and probably pulling my videos from there.
There’s no big blow up about anything. I use an adblocker about half of the time and the other half I don’t. If I’m running YT in the background while working or doing something in the shop, I stream it through my PC with an adblocker.
Of course, YT doesn’t like this. My videos also are, let’s be fair, generally forgettable, and I don’t have ads enabled, which gives them even lower priority. YT lays ads over them, anyway, and at this point, I have no idea how many it does lay over them -but it’s at least one per video, and probably more. Since I opted out of adsense, they just keep whatever they advertise, which based on actual view counts is about $2 a day.
I get why they are suddenly stopping content I have in the background if I’m using an adblocker – they have a platform that is crap compared to what it used to be, and they have a parent company that doesn’t pay dividends and shareholders who will tolerate that only as long as growth looks like it needs to be log transformed to make a reasonable chart to view. Except that’s no longer the case.
The original YT of unique content is gone in favor of Anne of All Trades (Animal Trades as the YT closed captioning program will spell it out) and Numbly Stumps and other people who are really at the low end on my list of people. Fake nice conversations thinking about what they can get out of other people and that’s about it. I’m sure they’d disagree, but I don’t care.
Yesterday, for the first time, my layer of users (sometimes adblock and sometimes not) got high enough priority for YT to stop videos and badger me about having to dump the ad blocker or buy their pay service.
No thanks! I found it a little bit annoying at first. But as I thought about it more, I realize I haven’t examined my thoughts in general about the platform and not wasting time there. I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw something useful for woodworking or toolmaking, and usually, I’m streaming something at low resolution minimized like a podcast – that you can just listen to somewhere else.
Most of the other upstart video sites have also gone to crap for various reasons. I remember when vimeo was first set up – it was low traffic, but it looks like it’s probably been bought by a venture capital group or a new private owner and now they’ve sort of stopped pretending that they aren’t just hoping to get the content creators to pay. The content that comes up on it shows what looks to me like a change in favor of curated advertising or marketing spots of a few minutes long.
I went to Rumble, and it’s full of a lot of stuff I wouldn’t watch, but in between some of that is more typical main stream stuff old style like YT used to be – no censoring words or whatever else, and one ad at the beginning of a 2 hour podcast, and the ad isn’t 3 minutes of someone claiming to have the cure for cancer or trying to sell some inane idiotic thing like I get on YT ads if I’m not able to go to my non-adblock devices and turn skip ads.
It’s kind of like a refreshing throw back – to hear words that have been woked right out of other podcasts. And I don’t mean political words, but things my mother would’ve called “adult language”.
So, goodbye YT. You and google have just gotten too greedy for me. I’d literally rather just turn on over the air TV in the background at this point.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 
Stop watching YT if you want—I hate the ads too—but please don’t pull your videos, ever. They are an essential resource. Seriously, I will be REALLY FUCKING PISSED if you pull them, and lots of people will miss out.
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You’re probably not smiling when you posted that, but for some reason, I got a real chuckle out of reading it. I guess I’ll figure out another way to host them before I pull them entirely. There’s not enough space here. I would expect if YT keeps pushing, an alternative site that doesn’t come from a long established platform will probably pop up.
There’s definitely a lot of stuff to sift past on rumble, but I can avoid things that I don’t care about a lot easier than I can tolerate manipulation and censorship.
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Hi David,
Not saying you have to stay with yt, but if the ad(or adblocker) is the main problem, there are some quick and easy solutions. If you use an android phone, try NewPipe, it plays videos without any ads and supports playing in the background with the screen shut off out of the box. If you are using linux/mac/*bsd, you can find some command line yt video search program and play the video directly in vlc. For windows, I haven’t used it for a long time but I believe vlc also works on windows.
As for the video contents, I am not sure there is a cure…
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One can probably play games for a while until YT decides they actually won’t allow ad blocking. They’re walking a line right now where they go from being annoying to full retrenchment. I’m sure they know what will happen if they block adblock users- their site traffic amounts will go down and so will the ad revenue. It’s an interesting modeling problem to look at, but it’s more of a principles thing for me at this point. I’ve done a lot of sorting and “oh God” each time you’re watching a video and you realize that the point of it was to get to pushing link revenue traffic 2/3rds of the way through or whatever else. That’s valuable to YT – the group who proves to be buyers, even if it’s not immediately obvious.
Rumble sure has plenty of chaff to sort through, but I’d rather sort through that than one algorithm pushed thing after another trying to prioritize the “dumb” videos and shove off the kinds of things I actually watch – like the Buchanan series on making chairs. I complain a lot about youtube and the studio/non-ad revenue model where creators make only a small fraction of their revenue from ads in the first place, but it just hasn’t occurred to me that it’s maybe better just to stop going to the site and revamp. E.g., the podcasts can just be audio direct from the source and maybe I can watch less online content in general.
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Hi David,
I totally got your point, and my poor choice of word in the above comment, it is more like a workaround than a solution to watch yt videos without ads or interruptions with adblocker.
Maybe you can also try firefox + ublock origin, I haven’t had any problem with yt so far, just in case you still want to watch one or two videos there.
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David, I don’t have anything like the clout that Steve does, I’m just a humble enjoyer of your content, but i hope equally as strongly that the valuable content you have provided stays available somehow. As you highlighted, so little exists it would be a shame to lose more. It is yours however, and you of course need to do what you feel right about, I just want to let you know how much those of us out here value what you provide. It would be sorely missed if no longer available anywhere.
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Thanks, Jonathan. My first reaction was to just pull all of the videos on principle and sooner rather than later just to spite YT for being greedy. They wouldn’t care, of course, but I do a lot of things all or none, and it doesn’t make much sense for me to whack one end of their equation and support the other.
You and Steve have made me think a little bit more about it, and I’ll figure something out before I do that vs. the other way around. I could only host a small subset of the videos here – they would get almost no traffic here, but view counts isn’t really the point.
Steve’s use of caps reaction was especially entertaining because I sort of figured if I just yanked the videos, I’d get a message like a month later from someone “where did they go?”
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David, I’m glad you’re going to give it some more thought and hope you find something that feels right to you too. I think everything you’ve produced is of value and would hate for people in the future to miss out, but if it comes down to having to pick just a small subset, I would vote for your videos on plane making to be the last to go followed by the unicorn method ones. But man, I just scrolled through all of your videos to make sure I wasn’t missing anything and it truly is an amazingly valuable resource from simple saw sharpening to scraper filing, plane sole flattening, and of course all the metal work. So wonderful for anyone truly wanting to get started and progress working by hand. Such a no nonsense approach. It feels in a way like the old texts we get to look back on and learn from now but in video demonstration form. I really hope you can find something that works for you, but I totally get and respect not wanting to support something you inherently don’t agree with. Thanks as always.
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Thanks Jonathan. I can’t match the old texts for succint precision, though. But I guess that’s probably OK, because people don’t seem to get what’s in them until they have enough experience to, and most people give up on getting there because doing things the way Nicholson describes, for example, is what makes working by hand tolerable or even pleasant.
The exception being the Warren Mickley types who do and read those things long before they’re stylish.
The hobby of hand work probably is a lot like antique buying in the 90s, though. Everything antique was flying up and average people wanted to buy antiques and watch the road show and so on. Some of the rarities have declined 90% in 25 years, and I think hand tools are headed for the doldrums again.
I’m hooked at this point and don’t care whether it’s popular or anyone else wants to talk about it. And I wonder if the top layer of people who don’t lose interest when traffic declines really ever changed.
At this point, I think it’s maybe smarter for me to spend more time compacting useful information and organizing /indexing it on here. Something I don’t really do.
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I’m still working my way through the planemaking videos, but many of the other vids have already changed how I think about a number of techniques, for the better. I think it would be a shame to fully scrap all that thoughtful long-form material (avoiding the “Content” word here) but I agree that youtube is largely an attractive-nuisance-slash-living-nightmare.
As far as I know there are no Nicholson tutorials on e.g. spot-sanding a giant metal bodied plane until it’s actually flat, or analyzing the polish Autosol puts on an iron. Many of the practical insights in your videos were embarrassingly revelatory for me. I’ve felt way, way less lost in my own sad-sack woodworking efforts thanks to advice from an actual ornery human than I ever did while bouncing around in the forcibly-sunny Content Creator oversimplifications of Sellers et al.
Maybe you could stash the vids on Internet Archive (archive.org) along with all the illegible Holtzapffel scans and 1938 Millers Falls catalogs? I think they’ll take video and it seems sort of appropriate. But I like the written format here, too, and I’ll be glad to see your future thoughts wherever you put them.
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Thanks, and the idea for archive or something else is probably not a bad idea. I have a feeling youtube is attempting to move to a pay only setup and they’re done with the idea of growing. They’ve never sent me a person notice for using an adblocker, but I see on reddit they are disabling YT accounts for “content violations” for people who use apps that are intended to pull the video only and spoof YT into thinking the individual is watching everything while delivering only the video to the end user. I don’t use any of those apps, but I was (and still would be) using adblock and sponsor block.
And I guess I assumed incorrectly that almost all of the video views are people who chance upon the channel, look a little bit, realize it’s not as entertaining as produced stuff and move on.
I just need to make sure I’ve pulled all of my videos into hard storage before I do something that gets my login banned from YT in general. I think that’s probably coming.
There’s a lot of weird stuff on rumble to navigate around, but typical there is a 1.5 hour video podcast with one ad at the beginning. I kind of forgot how youtube was when it first started adding ads, and you could hardly complain about 15 seconds of ads for 15 minutes or 90 minutes of content.
With the jarring sponsor nonsense – sometimes five or up to 30 minutes through the middle of a long video, it’s just bonkers to think of paying for the service to avoid the ads. Kind of like someone throwing nails on the street and selling a magnetic bumper.
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