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"
Most such attempts fail when not enough people subscribe to paying tiers. Good luck to them nevertheless, I hope they succeed.
Good luck to them nevertheless, I hope they succeed.
Personally, I hope the platform that welcomes Nazis crashes and burns.
Freedom goes both ways. I hate nazis, but it’s better to have their bullshit out in the open to be criticized, than have them group up on shady underground places that would only make it worse.
Absolutely fucking not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
The Nazis already put their ideas out on the open, and we saw what happened.
The opposite is “the illusion of safety because of moderated platforms”. One might think a platform that removes fake news would only have real news, but that’s obviously not the case and creates an even worse landscape.
Just because moderating platforms to eliminate Nazis only drives them to build their own spaces doesn’t make deplatforming them the wrong move. I prefer them existing in the fringes rather than being accepted into the mainstream.
Tolerance for Nazis is only possible if you are ignorant of history, or if you are actively evil. “Stupid or Evil?” Isn’t a great place to exist, but I have to conclude one way or the other every time I run into this “why don’t we just hear the Nazis out?” narrative…
We know enough about Nazis already to tell them to go fuck themselves before they even open their mouths. Giving them a voice is an act of violence.
Reading your comments is Nazis Nazis Nazis. I think you need some help.
If anyone does want to support them, even by a small amount, and don’t have much money, I personally recommend subscribing for a month or two to the Premium+ subsciption, which is only $2.99/month. It’s all I can afford atm personally, so that’s what I’m going to be doing. They deserve support just for this action alone.
I don’t understand how that’s much different than YouTube. If you pay for YouTube then you don’t get ads either.
The difference is your favorite channel won’t be destroyed by a corporate abusing copyright strike, they won’t have to self-censor themselves from saying fuck or shit. A platform making money from ads means every content creator on that platform is a slave to the advertisers
My favorite channel wouldn’t have millions of subscribers and a somewhat steady recurring income because of this.
It’s a classic catch 22: Without viewers, no content creators. Without content creators, no viewers.
I think it’s great that they try to get rid of what makes YouTube suck but I don’t see that content creators are leaving YouTube anywhere soon.
They don’t need to leave YouTube at all. That’s because Odysee provides a YouTube sync feature, that syncs every upload from YouTube with the Odysee channel. They can set the sync and never touch Odysee again if they want to. Plus, if we collectively ask our favourite YouTubers to join Odysee, and actually make them realise that Odysee exists, more of them will eventually join. Once more have joined, it will be easier to convince even more YouTubers to join again. The cycle continues, and Odysee grows.
The point of the post is that Odysee no longer has ads. I’m not trying to say you needed the subscription to remove ads. That’s how it was previously, until today. Free users don’t see ads anymore.
The difference between YouTube Premium and Odysee Premium is mainly in it’s reason for existing. YouTube Premium exists for the sole purpose of providing features that used to be free, with some extra things that most people don’t givea hoot about and never use; and, you know… to make themselves richer. It exists so that people buy it for the value it specifically brings them.
So essentially; people buy YouTube premium for the features, while people buy Odysee Premium to support the growth of the platform, help fund the platform, and support free speech. The extra features they get are just a little bonus as thanks. Not only that, but the features Odysee provides are “Early-Access” features, which means that most, if not all of those features will become available for free users eventually. At that point, I’m not sure what Odysee Premium will provide if all the features become free; they’ll have to figure something else out to give it more incentive. But as it currently stands, Odysee Premium is more like a donation than a service; which gives you extra features as thanks.
Good luck to them
Is this not a neo-Nazi/far right platform? I only ever see them linking antivax and evropa content on Odysee. That’s where I’ve heard of it.
It isn’t exclusively a Neo-Nazi platform, but it is a free-speech absolutist platform, so they have absolutely no problem platforming Nazis.
It’s basically the 4chan of tube sites. All are welcome, but if you aren’t a fascist you probably won’t fit in.
If one Nazi is allowed into a bar, it’s a Nazi bar. I’ll continue to steer clear.
something something if there’s a nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 nazis
To be honest, I’ve been using the website and I notice nothing of this. I can click a few links and get to said content, yes, but my feed and some of the categories I check are on par with YouTube. The only big difference I experience is that there’s much more content of smaller content creators.
I ain’t a fascist, Neo-Nazi, far-rightist, or any of the things Odysee is falsely marked by people as being, and I fit in just fine with my fellow Odysee users. Stop attacking one of the only companies who are truly trying to be the change they want to see in the world.
I mirror my stuff from youtube over there and I do not fall into these categories. To be fair, I have the tiniest of audiences anyway, so… doesn’t really matter either way.
Haven’t checked in on Odyssee for a while though. Not sure if the auto mirror thing still works.
I found your channel, and yeah, your latest YouTube uploads are still being synced to Odysee.
Thanks for checking :D that is pretty cool.
Cool. What’s your channel? I have a gaming channel for no-commentary playthrough’s. It’s not synced from YouTube, though.
no-commentary play-throughs
🤤👌 The best content.
Honestly, I might just have to think about getting into that type if thing. I am not one for editing anyway.
Go on!
Far right content is more common than on YouTube because of the guidelines, but in my experience the largest parts are crypto, privacy and similar, also a decent amount is gaming (at least that’s what I upload)
I’ve noticed that the Linux and open-source community is pretty big there, too; with a lot of them being part of the privacy community. I’m a part of this community on Odysee.
In my experience the Linux people are considerably more on peertube compared to its site, but this may just specific to the channels I watch
I don’t use PeerTube much, but I plan to. This is probably why I didn’t know it was bigger with Linux users. Though it makes sense since I tend to see PeerTube mentioned and linked to far more often on the internet than Odysee.
Pretty much, unfortunately. And the people who run Odysee have repeatedly, time and time again, defended Nazis, white supremacists, far-right conspiracies, videos calling for genocide, etc.
Although in fairness, to my knowledge they haven’t done what Musk has done for example and said “free speech [Unless you disagree with dear leader, then it’s an account ban]!” Left-wing content is left alone (not that there’s much of it on Odysee)
Ya that’s exactly what I would like to NOT support.
Well I never happened to see anything related to these topics on Odysee. I mostly used to follow tech stuff as my other hobbies like cars and basketball aren’t really present on the platform.
If you have some favourite YouTube channels from the cars and basketball world, you should try contacting them personally and asking them to sync their channel with Odysee. Even if they choose not to; at least they’ve heard of it now, know at least some of their audience may want them to, and may consider it in the future 🙂.
It might not work asking in YouTube comments though, but it’s worth a try. The reason I say this is I’ve personally tried it multiple times over the past year, and strangely I’ve been noticing that YouTube appear to be switching between banning the word “Odysee” spelled specifically that way, and not banning it. I would comment something with the word Odysee, and no matter what happens, it would immediately disappear the moment I refresh the page – commenting anything else would work fine. A few months later, I tried it again and it worked. Some time after that, it stopped working again, and it was like that for quite a while. Fast forward a month or two, and I again checked it a few days ago, and it seems to be currently working again; and all my previous comments from the past about Odysee have reappeared in my comment history, when they previously would not appear in my comment history. So now could be a good time to comment. It wasn’t a glitch with my account, because I tried it with two separate ones.
There may be content generators on there you can label that way, but that doesn’t make the platform neo-nazi.
You take all of the stuff excluded from a big platform and put it on a small platform, and it’ll swamp every other topic out. If as a platform runner you feel that you should not censor others, then this can happen.
On the flip side, there’s nothing stopping other with less controversial opinions to post there as well. Nobody is going to be told their channel about supercars isnt racist enough, or their politics channel is too-left communist.
Strongly disagree with you. If you have a bar that tolerates Nazis, you’ll find that bar becomes a Nazi bar over time. To commingle with Nazis is to accept them and their ideology.
I’d have a very hard time sending people to my videos if they sit next to a white replacement theory video.
You sometimes see that stuff on Odysee because they don’t censor it, unless it promotes violence or hatred to individuals. They do have community guidelines after all, since they can’t legally host… illegal content. In that sense there is censorship because they can’t not censor things to some extent; but the free speech and large lack of censorship is their goal regardless. As an Odysee user for over 2 years, this is the minority of content on the platform. Where you do see that content that breaks the rules… that’s what the report button is for.
You sometimes see that stuff on Odysee because they don’t censor it, unless it promotes violence or hatred to individuals.
All neo-nazi /far right content promotes violence and hatred to individuals, since groups are made up of individuals.
My understanding was that Odysee served the purpose to upload videos that could no longer be uploaded on YouTube due to YouTube’s community guidelines. The time I checked out that website the front page was full of manosphere types and the Evropa documentary and anti vax crap
That was never the purpose of the platform, otherwise it would have been marketed that way. The platform allows more content than YouTube does, so it’s not far-fetched to assume that people would use the platform for that, and tell others they should use the platform because of that. What random people on the internet promoted the platform being good for is not the same thing as the platform owners themselves creating the platform for that very purpose. If you really care about the “purpose” of the platform, just watch some of LBRY’s oldest videos on the platform from before the Odysee frontend even existed yet for LBRY; where they were first revealing their visions for the platform and the progress they had made.
Also note that plenty of people upload stuff to Odysee for their preservation efforts. Just because some documentary that talks about medical misinformation or promotes a conspiracy theory (for example), exists on the platform; it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s there to promote the idea; it’s simply there so that people who want to see the video can see it. I’ll watch content that was censored from YouTube and other big-tech social media platforms because I just want to see what was said. People have the right to that level of freedom; Odysee provides it because they should.
Yikes. So if there weren’t laws, they would let worse stuff fly than endorsing genocide.
deleted by creator
Focused on “free speech”?
When I see that used multiple times by a platform operator it invariably means they’re right-wing wingnuts and/or the platform will devolve into right wing drivel while silencing dissent.
The only way free speech can survive is with decentralized platforms like email and lemmy. Any time there is central control free speech isn’t.
This isn’t even a true statement. Mods are human and can silence views they don’t like.
Go post some progressive and democratic views or criticize authoritarian support over on the grad.ml side. See how long it is before you’re shut down, blocked or even banned. There’s no free speech rule just because the platform is decentralized.
The only mitigating factors are that you can have a platform for opposing views, but even that isn’t a guarantee here because the instance can be defederated and effectively silenced.
It’s free speech in a federated environment because someone can’t remove your voice.
It doesn’t obligate anyone to listen to you. So federated instances having opinions about who they talk to doesn’t contradict free speech.
People who want to talk about The Second Coming of the Space Pope are free to do so and don’t require any third party to let them do so.
That’s what I said regarding starting your own instance to say what you want. I’m not sure why you felt the need to reiterate that.
And you also repeated what I said that nobody is obligated to listen to you - the instance can be defederated or admins can ban you.
So you essentially agree?
I disagree with you saying my statement isn’t true.
Any system that is centralized, and requires a third party to “allow” speech will tend to not have free speech.
You think Lemmy has free speech? Some major mods here are quite liberal in controlling exactly what speech and ideas they allow their uses to be exposed to, and that is how it will always be by those desiring power over others.
Yes, Lemmy is 100% free speech.
We can make lemmy.spacepope.org and nobody can silence us. It doesn’t prevent other instances from refusing to listen to the truth of space, but those who want to participate can.
Yup. And on descriptive grounds, the whole thing falls into a false dichotomy: treating free speech as an all-or-nothing matter, instead treating freedom of speech as a scale. And that giving someone complete freedom of speech always means restricting the freedom of speech of someone else.
(I typically exemplify this through a guy with a megaphone in an offline plaza. Telling him to drop off the megaphone reduces his ability to reach willing listeners, thus his freedom of speech; but if you leave him alone nobody else can be heard, so their freedom of speech is lowered.)
Thank you, you put it better than I could. It’s not binary, it’s not all or nothing. You can have some freedom of speech and yet still not really have freedom of speech if you’re silenced by those who disagree.
Yes, your megaphone example is a special case of the paradox of tolerance. In this instance, tolerance of loud voices means quiet voices are drowned out.
It’s related - Popper’s paradox highlights that you can’t compromise with some people, while my focus is that you need to impose some limits.
It’s easy to tweak the example though, to be more like the paradox - if the megaphone guy is telling people to kick off the plaza some people, or saying stuff to make them leave.
Yes, or if multiple people get into a megaphone arms race and are all noise blasting each other so hard that no one can hear anything anymore.
Looks like you care zilch for free speech. If you and others with this opinion cared for free speech, you would promote your own alternative ideas on those platforms to even things out, instead of whining that there’s more opposing views to yours on the platform than not.
Did you specifically skip past the past where I said they silence dissent?
But thanks for telling me what I believe.
Do they? Do you have evidence?
Because I’m interested in YT alternatives. I pay for Nebula, and I’m interested in other platforms as well, especially if they champion free speech (like, actual free speech, not whatever Musk means by “free speech”).
Sure. Me. I’ve had comments deleted by admins when I criticized things like Russia feeding arms to Iran, operating misinformation campaigns, and generally trying to destabilize democracies.
That’s lame. Was that before or after LBRY’s bankruptcy? I’m wondering if they’ve changed their admins.
Finally: ad-free Nazi Propaganda.
focused on free speech
Is this like…an actual commitment to free speech, or is “freeze peach” I.e. the right claiming they are being silenced online with no evidence and demanding they never be held accountable for what they say?
Unfortunately, it’s probably the latter.
Executive Julian Chandra wrote to Odysee site moderators that “a Nazi that makes videos about the superiority of the white race” was not grounds for removal from Odysee.
They have actively defended far-right content, even videos that have openly called for genocide.
For balance, though, they haven’t purged left wing content like some “free speech” people do (not that there’s much of that there anyway)
Why does that always end up being the case?
Because good people aren’t free speech absolutists, because we understand the danger of leaving violent or dishonest ideas unchallenged.
Anyone who thinks Nazism is an idea worthy of consideration is just a Nazi. That argument was concluded in 1945, and the only people revisiting it are people who want a different conclusion.
Do they also suppress left/socialist content?
If they did, then yeah it’s a shit service.
I am by no means defending Nazi content. But if they are allowing any speech, I’d say this is closer to being “free speech” than Twitter currently is.
Yes, it goes both ways. And they aren’t using the platform to push any of their personal believes either.
Speech doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and all ideas aren’t equal. The libertarian idea of absolute free speech is a half-baked notion that holds that Nazi philosophies are equal to Humanist philosophies, and they each deserve the same megaphone and chance to thrive.
Fuck. That. And fuck anyone who thinks that or platforms Nazis. Libertarian free speech is a myth that only benefits Nazis and other bad actors.
Are you seriously telling me that you think videos on YouTube and other mainstream platforms aren’t being censored? People need to stop calling it a “right” platform. People of all political ideologies are on the platform, you are just picking out the stuff you don’t like; the platform isn’t even political or meant for that purpose; it’s meant for all forms of content creation.
Why do you think they have the categories in their sidebar, "Pop Culture; Artists; Education; Lifestyle; Spooky; Gaming; Tech; Comedy; Music; Sports; Universe; Finance 2.0; Spirituality; News & Politics; Wild West – in that order… Notice Politics is second last?
I didn’t call it anything, I’m asking. I never said YouTube was a free speech platform. In fact I didn’t say anything about YouTube.
Please read what I wrote again. “Free speech” is a very loaded term now online so I was seeking clarification on what “free speech” means to them. It was a genuine question that is warranted when browsing online in 2024.
Sorry… I apologise for the misunderstanding and mini-rant.
You appeared to me to be asking a rhetorical question in a sarcastic manner and implying that they aren’t really committed to free speech, and the reason I was frustrated was because I’m quite sick of this platform being labelled as right/far-right when it isn’t. YouTube was just an example one mainstream platform that censors content.
If you’d like to see an example of how committed they are to free speech, I can’t really easily provide a direct source to a question that broad, but I do recommend taking a look at some of LBRY’s earliest posts on Odysee which you’ll find will highlight some of their original goals and vision (LBRY is the protocol Odysee used to use, and Odysee was created by the same team as LBRY). Otherwise, maybe just take a look around the platform, and try to see what kind of opinion or political-related content is on the platform that you don’t tend to see on others which have greater censorship.
Edit: Accidentally commented early, so had to edit it to finish typing. Edit 2: Clarified info about who LBRY is.
I’ll be mindful of my wording in the future. I want to reiterate that this was a genuine question.
I do think if a lot of people are telling you the site is right wing then maybe you should take a broader look around. You don’t have to be participating in that garbage for it to be occurring.
Well I know there’s a lot of right-wing content on there, but I also know there’s a lot of other content there, too. So I don’t think it’s okay when people call it a “right-wing” platform, just because it appears to have more of it on there compared to other platforms.
The creators of the site allow Nazi content and say that doesn’t break their terms of service. On every other site, Nazism and promoting that ideology is not allowed.
This is what you are arguing for. A site that differentiates itself from other video hosting platforms by giving Nazis a safe space.
While we are at it, lets cancel the postal service since they allow Nazi’s to send newsletters.
Are you seriously telling me that you think videos on YouTube and other mainstream platforms aren’t being censored?
No, they never said anything like that. Read the comment you’re responding to again.
Can you recommend me more than a few hardcore leftist content creators exclusively releasing content on Odyssee?
Isn’t this the crypto bro, far right haven site? No thanks.
It split from LBRY, which originally pushed a cryptocurrency system kind of like Brave’s BAT. They’re now trying to go decentralized, but it’s with a blockchain system, so I guess we’ll see where that goes (blockchain isn’t a problem, provided they’re not pushing a currency).
I’m interested to see where it goes, so I sub to a few channels I’d otherwise watch on YouTube. But I’m not giving them any of my money until they earn it. I’m currently paying for Nebula because a few of my favorite channels are there, and I’d be willing to pay for Odysee if there was a decent value proposition.
Why not do proper research about the platform before attacking one of the only platforms trying to create the change they want to see in the world?
Please be aware, Odysee was recently purchased by a Crypto company that also acquired an NFT company.
For more info, see my comment here: https://slrpnk.net/comment/9749921
I would not recommend investing any time or money into the platform, as it will inevitably crash and burn as the owners walk away flush with cash while everyone else is left holding the bag.
Peertube is not ideal, but it is currently the only alternative that isn’t tied to a shady crypto scheme.
I attack them because the change they want to create is not one I want. You can keep your Nazi and crypto trash to yourself.
Are they still using LBRY? Or did they switch to a different protocol?
They officially announced they were switching to the Arweave protocol in a post a little under a month ago, but I’m not sure if it’s happened yet; haven’t looked further into it yet, and it was revealed by other sources a little while prior to that.
I was curious what Arweave was, so I went to their site.
Turns out it’s yet another crypto scheme.
I was though this statement on their landing page was particularly funny:
The Arweave protocol is stable, mature and widely adopted.
It’s a blockchain system, but that doesn’t mean it’s related to cryptocurrencies in any way. Maybe it is, idk, but blockchain != cryptocurrencies, many cryptocurrencies use blockchains though because it’s useful for what they’re trying to do.
Honestly, after all the shit YouTube is pulling with their ad systems, I wouldn’t mind those old tiny banner strip ads that used to occasionally pop up at the bottom of a video. Compared to the current standard of 3 minutes of unskippable ads interrupting every other video, those little banners are downright unobtrusive.
Hell, I never minded those in theory, it was only how obnoxious they were made that was the problem.
Don’t forget that ads used to be context aware instead of user aware. Which was perfect for privacy.
Oh wow I forgot about those
Good, ads sucks.
- Install watch on odysee extension.
- Make a odysee account
- Continue your normal habits of watching YouTube but being redirected to odysee when creators have posted there.
- hurt YouTube just a little bit.
I’m so sick of hearing that odysee is only a nazi crypto scam. That content exists on every platform but by shitting all over every option that comes out and then whining when YouTube does more anti user crap is just ridiculous.
You don’t need to just use odysee. You can use YouTube for your recommendations then be redirected for the content. Eventually when recommendations are there it will be an easy transition for the majority of people but until then, at the very least don’t step on the face of a working competitor that has good intentions.
P.s. You don’t need to use the token, it was mostly just given to viewers and creators for free.
I just synced my youtube channel with odysee… Yeah a bunch of alt right trash is floating around but the only way to change that is to drown it out with actual content. The more normal content uploaded the less breathing room for the outrageous bullshit in feeds. Hopefully my library helps.
Awesome! What’s your channel?
Unfortunately I can’t share it on this account but it’s a channel for the maker community and related tools :P
Cool, yeah that’s fair enough. I was unsure about sharing my own channel here too, considering I’m very careful about my privacy.
Ditto lol I spent a long time changing accounts and setting up new ones to have a unified handle across the net I can just share my real opinions about lol gotta keep it up it’s hard work out here.
