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Comment by emsy | Hacker News Reader

A year ago or so I was listening to podcasts on YouTube while falling asleep. I didn't mind an occasional ad. Then they ramped up the ads like crap. Easily every 5 minutes or so (the funniest ones were the "Troubles falling asleep?" ads that jolted me awake). I stopped almost completely ever since. The sad thing is that I would gladly pay for the service, but I'm not going to pay a company that uses my data AND my money. Plus I have to use it with an account at google. No thanks. I have no hopes for an ethical competitor to arise, there's simply no market for it.

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The person who uploaded the podcast to YouTube decides how many ads are on a video though:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6175006?hl=en

The uploader specifically had to add "ad breaks" to the video for that to happen.

I wonder if the number of possible ad breaks has an upper limit.

Here's an episode of a show for kids with 21 ad breaks in 24 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZbhdpLuYfE

Screenshot of the above video with yellow ad markers in the seek bar (youtube v14.31.50 on Android): https://ibb.co/gr8ZqjY

YouTube premium costs 10$ a month. Anyone living in first world (while posting on hacker news) countries and spend hours a week on youtube shouldn't be complaining about ads on youtube.

Read the comment. Money isn't the issue.

How about complaining on behalf of all the people who can't afford $10 a month, like teenagers, people in lesser developed countries, etc? You're happy for them to be spammed with toxic advertising while people who are better off get an opt-out?

I'm consistently shocked how many people haven't installed uBlock Origin (a plugin for Firefox and Chrome). It takes about 3 seconds and you never hear or see an ad again.

Why not listen to podcasts on a podcast app?

Yeah I do that now but ngl the recommendations are really useful to find good older stuff that’s off the radar in most podcast apps.

Spotify is pretty good for podcasts, their search anyway.

mps-youtube is an excellent workaround for this (though it's limited by a per-day API limit that applies to all users of the app AFAICT).

The best feature is that you can compile a playlist, through search, manual selection, etc., and save that locally to disk. Then play through the selection(s) as you like.

You aren't limited to playback through mps-youtube, as you can also use other tools -- mpv with its '--ytdl' flag will play YouTube (and many other sites') content, including from a saved playlist of URLs (see above).

There's a lot of good and useful content on YouTube. The platform itself increasingly gets in the way of that. I also don't want to be personally tracked or have my history recorded, so I (all but) never make use of the service whilst logged in. Given that I've ceased logging in to Google at all since the fall of G+, that's pretty much a certainty.

As others have mentioned, using podcast apps directly is another excellent option, and one I've been increasingly making use of.

(History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps FTFW!)

An adblocker or the NewPipe YouTube app (or iOS equivalent, if any?) make YouTube ad-free for now.

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