Show HN: Tell YouTube ads to fuck off | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Tell YouTube ads to fuck off

fuckoff.yt

54 pointsvignesh_warar80 comments

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I've been using adblockers since Firefox first introduced it back in god only knows.

So I fully support people's right to block ads.

BUT I actually purchased Youtube Premium because I found myself watching it so often. It's amazing! There is content on youtube for hours of watching every day. I lost my TV way back in 2010 so I only watch Youtube, local PBS (svtplay) and sometimes other apps, chromecasted to my projector or a big screen.

If you like youtube, why not pay for it? It's a ton of content. And with Youtube Music (although the app sucks) they're actually giving you virtually all the music of spotify, and all the content of Youtube, for 118SEK (14USD). That's a threat to Spotify I'd say.

I can't bring myself to pay for user-generated content platforms that do so much censorship, which results in the creators themselves having to self-censor (apparent in how many YTers avoid saying certain words to not trigger audio analysis that would result in demonetization).

Plus a lot of the ads are in the form of sponsor segments, which YouTube premium would not skip automatically, unlike the free add-on SponsorBlock.

Also watching R-18 YouTube videos now requires uploading an ID when doing it from an European IP. A lot of those aren't even porn videos mind you, just some videos randomly classified as mature audiences only.

Their content recommendation algorithm absolutely sucks. Spotify gave me better recommendations after a few days of use while YouTube has years of history from tens of millions of people to go by and can't do anything else than cycle the same videos/channels on repeat.

I will gladly pay to use/support a free-as-in-freedom YouTube competitor though.

Netflix and Spotify are fine in that respect because it's full of professional commissioned content.

I just wish Google/YouTube would put some pressure on YouTubers to stop filling up their videos with a shit ton of advertising for VPNs, website builders, etc. It's so annoying having to skip through so many videos and I'm not interested in any of their products either.

Creators do that because the ad revenue from YouTube is so low. So to fixed that, YouTube would either have to show more ads or introduce more paywalls.

I never understood why "show more ads" = "make more money". Wouldn't competition for fewer ad slots drive ad prices up?

Yes, what makes sponsor segments more valuable is the superior human-curated targeting.

The ad value doesn’t reach zero though, so more ads = more revenue

Those videos are required to put "contains paid promotion" or something, I think an extension should be able to detect that but don't know if one has been made yet.

Try SponsorBlock [0]. It’s crowdsourced and works very well by skipping intro/outro/sponsorship etc. parts of the videos.

[0] - https://sponsor.ajay.app/

sponsor block is an amazing extension that helps with that nuisance

Its an inventory problem.-

Also do you mean pre and post roll ads or the ads the creators them selves do ?

I'm paying for YouTube Premium, I haven't seen YT ads in years. I meant the ads that YouTubers put inside their videos.

Well the same problem exists there not many types of advertisers to go in for YouTube content.

Some of it is conservatism from brands but product fit is also a problem.

How else do propose creators make a profit or even cover their costs?

Personally I don't mind such sponsorships provided it's always made clear that it's a sponsored endorsement. Not an unreasonable way to pay the bills, and I get high-quality content free of charge.

There's a new trend to add intrusive and distracting Subscribe now! 'pop-ups' to videos. I find these intensely annoying, and they put me off revisiting a channel, but I might be in a minority.

I wouldn't mind so much if these were actual endorsements that I know the creator actually liked. But it's always nordvpn or raid shadow legends or some other bogus crap that I know they either don't understand well enough to recommend or don't play themselves, it just offered the highest paycheck.

plus your favorite youtubers actually get a little bit of money when you watch their videos, even if you see no ads

Because Google still tracks me. With Google, even as a customer you don't stop being the product. That's the only reason stopping me really.

Because YouTube employs an evil recommendation system that is designed to maximize your screen time, even if this results into addiction. There are much better and more ethical alternatives, at least for some kind of videos.

I’m having a good time with nebula for educational videos. It’s not great, but it’s good enough and it’s very reasonably priced.

I dunno, I honestly think their sacred algorithm needs work.

Here's a dead simple suggestion that would help increase viewing time for me at least; if I queue up X number of different videos, don't just base autoplayed video suggestions on the last one. Look behind and base it on the other videos too. That would make for much more diverse viewing instead of just falling asleep to the same topic/channel over and over.

My point is not on how well it performs, but more on the fact that it is designed and tuned to maximise the screen time, which results in very unpleasant effect on young and children.

And to my view, when you are the largest player, by far the one with the biggest market share and you exploit children weaknesses to make some more money, well, then you are the lowest form of life on earth.

As a YouTube content creator, thank you for supporting us.

I prefer to pay creators directly, often just a one time donation through paypal or a recurring payment

I've had premium for a while. The music app is really bad. Spotify recommendations are way better.

The music app is embarrassingly bad considering they had a functional Google Play Music app that they stopped producing and replaced with Youtube Music.

Don't they look at their past work and notes at least? It's shameful how bad Youtube Music is. Just the fact that there's a pause between tracks, I mean come on... I know there's an extensive list on some subreddit of all the issues with the youtube music app.

Do the people who actually make the content get a sizeable chunk of the cash? I don't want to pay a monopoly that shits on smaller publishers at the behest of larger, incumbent publishers. For this reason I prefer using something like Patreon and block ads on the current monopoly platform.

Same. I watch tons of content on YouTube, so it's money well spent. And you get the bonus of YouTube Music which isn't as good as Spotify but is fine to use. I can't remember how much it cost, but I pay for the family version too, so nobody in the family has to watch the ads.

I've found it's no longer worth the money. All my favorite content providers started shilling directly in their videos. I cancelled and have been watching a lot less youtube because the product placement has become annoying.

I bristle at paying for YouTube Premium seeing as how I'm already paying for YouTube TV. If Google offered it as an add-on option at 50% of the cost I'd add it in a heartbeat, though of course I'd prefer to see it just added as part of the service.

- Because you will still be looking at ads inside the video content: Product placement, also known as embedded marketing.

- Because Youtube still tracks you and sells a detailed profile of you to other ad companies (privacy risks)

- Because the actual content makers get only a tiny bit of your payment

For those watching YouTube on Android, I'd strongly recommend NewPipe (via F-Droid)[0]. Its feature-set probably exceeds that of the official YouTube app, plus you can import your subscriptions and there are no ads and I think most if not all of the tracking is also removed.

[0]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/

Oh thankyou for reminding me of NewPipe. I find the YouTube app on Android unusable - the interface is too "messy" for me, plus it usually has ads vomited inbetween the things I'm trying to look at.

I’d be happy if people stopped posting poorly shot and barely edited video tutorials and explaining material to YouTube. You used to be able to search for information about products and find information now your at the whim of people posting YouTube videos with enough description info to find it, usually it will actually be a repost by someone who found it relevant to the context your actually looking for. So much stuff I’ve been watching on YouTube lately would be much much better as a series of pictures with some text explaining each one, it’s especially frustrating to see this sort of thing in online forums.

People have started to just post tear down videos or assembly instructions as an embedded video with little (sometimes no) additional information! I have to download the videos and scrub back and forth to get a decent look at small parts or re-listen to their explanations that could have been read and understood first time, not to mention how often I have to go to YouTube, watch upwards of 3 or 4 advertisements triggered by scrubbing around a video only to work out that the video doesn’t even have the information I’m interested in. It’s driving me mad and I want it to stop. Insert your own meme about Eternal September here obviously.

Youtube Red/Premium/whatever they're calling it this week is the best subscription I pay for. I would rather axe Netflix before I get ads back on Youtube.

I was instantly turned off when they made listen in background a paid feature. Placing basic QoL features that were previously free behind a paywall is an easy way to piss off users.

Hi Everyone. Thanks for posting to Show HN

I made this

Ads keep slipping through my ad-blocker so I made this extension to make me feel better.

It changes the words 'Skip ads' to 'fuck off' on YouTube.

uBlock Origin and tweaking filter subscriptions should do the trick; you can also go for more drastic solution and use invidious front-end and/or freetube.

> It changes the words 'Skip ads' to 'fuck off' on YouTube.

Something is already defunct if you see the 'Skip ads' button, no need to put lipstick on a pig, use a proper adblocker.

Invidious (https://github.com/iv-org/invidious) allows me to tell YouTube and Google to fuck off. Not just the ads but the tracking, dark patterns and their terribly slow UI.

I use FreeTube (https://freetubeapp.io) as front end on my PC/Laptop. But it's not available on mobile devices.

I find irony in the implicit endorsement of Google Chrome while trying to shake Google YouTube.

I would recommend using Channel Whitelist[0] to enable ads on creators which you would like to support.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-channel-wh...

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-chann...

Just use uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes but that's not as fun (and creators get no revenue)

Use Patreon, although I hope something better replaces it.

Combined with a Pi-Hole it's quite effective. Saves more than 30% traffic.

This is my monthly reminder to everyone that Brave browser blocks most ads - including YouTune ads. It has the added benefit that you don't have to install a 3rd-party ad-blocker (which is one over Firefox for me).

Just make sure you are running latest version - as it seems youtube moves things around which breaks the ad-blocking until the next Brave update (which come thick and fast).

(I don't work for Brave)

Nice.

I would like something similar to replace the X in the top left corner of modal windows that suddenly cover what I'm reading while I scroll down a page, under the bizarre assumption that I might want to "Subscribe for updates!" to this blog that I have only just visited for the first time in my life because it matched my search results.

I love the having the option of paying for a service I use heavily (like YouTube) while having infrequent content (blogs, newspapers) ad-supported.

Not sure how people imagine production costs can be covered otherwise without ads?! Not to mention creator's profits without which there is no incentive to create in the first place...

Exactly. But unfortunately, that's how we learned to use the internet: Leech everything for free if possible.

The kind of person who methodically blocks ads (such as myself) overlaps strongly with the kind of person who, if they couldn't block the ads, would intentionally avoid or boycott the product being advertised out of shear spite, so it's no real loss to the advertiser. I suspect that if advertisements were to be made absolutely unblockable, the amount offered per ad view would probably decrease proportionally and creators would keep roughly the same income as now.

> Not sure how people imagine production costs can be covered without ads?!

It is the producers' job to figure this out and find ethical ways to finance their work.

If they make a decision of having ads on their content, they must be prepared to face the consequences. One of them might be that for many people ads in any form are unacceptable.

You've never lost a product or service you really liked or relied on because it went out of business, have you?

I did. Allofmp3.com.

This is not a solution to the problem, just a rather weak attempt at "sticking it to the man". Apart from not using youtube at all - which is not always possible - I'd suggest bypassing the web interface by using youtube-dl or streamlink. Add an extension like "Open With" and point it to a script which opens videos in the format you want (e.g. low resolution for slower links/devices, audio-only for lectures, etc) and right-click youtube (etc - this works for all sites supported by youtube-dl/streamlink, including twitter and facebook) links to watch/listen. An added advantage is that you're not confronted with the comment section, thus saving time and annoyance.

On Android this whole process can be automated by using NewPipe - get it on FDroid.

"2 minutes setup" is mentioned in various places on the page, as well as on the chrome store page.

Why 2 minutes? I assume this is used as a stand-in for "very short time", because there's no way it actually takes two minutes to install unless your internet is particularly slow, and I don't imagine there's much to configure.

It seems a bit out of place, especially when the extension itself centers around the problem of 5 seconds feeling like an eternity.

Edit: I just installed it as a test, and it was ~instant.

If I didn't already have an adblocker to remove these ads in the first place, I would certainly love feel like I am sticking it to YouTube with this extension. Nice job!

please check it out on Product Hunt

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/f-ckoff

I'm thinking of making someting similar for 'accept cookies'

There are multiple filter lists for this very thing. For uBlock Origin, open the dashboard and go to the Filter lists tab, then look in the Annoyances section. “Fanboy’s annoyance” and “EasyList Cookie” both cover blocking these things. Make sure cosmetic filters are enabled.

Fun idea, but I have added uBlock and Adblocker specifically to spite YouTube recently as their adds are getting crazy, and again out of spite I wont pay premium.

I often get the 'skip ads' text with UBLOCK so I made this

Out of spite for the ads you won’t pay for the service, which would disable the ads?

I think a lot of people feel youtube are adding a lot of ads to downgrade the free experience and get people to pay for premium.

What is the benefit of using both? I only use uBlock Origin and never see ads or the skip message on YouTube.

Kind of pointless if the message doesn’t actually reach the advertiser. There are a lot of advertisers whom I would like to, in-person or remotely, tell to fuck off for being so completely irrelevant as to constitute a major annoyance. There are advertisers with clever, interesting ads that I voluntarily watch, but the bulk of them produce the same boring, unwatchable crap that just becomes societal noise.

I know ads in radio, TV and public spaces are heavily regulated. Why legislation doesn't do the same online is beyond me. E.g. "you are allowed to show a maximum of 30 seconds of ads every 15 minutes of playtime". Also, "don't freaking increase the volume". I can't imagine the frequent interruptions are good for mental health.

Is there such regulation for TV though?

It feels like it's 15 minutes of ads followed by 15 minutes of content right now.

In the European Union TV ads are limited to 20% in one clock hour: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

> 2. Paragraph 1 shall not apply to announcements made by the broadcaster in connection with its own programmes and ancillary products directly derived from those programmes, sponsorship announcements and product placements.

That's the workaround used to put more then 20%

FYI there was a known recent issue for Chrome/ium with uBlock Origin and TamperMonkey:

https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1401243256755785729

Firefox with uBlock Origin still works wonderfully.

Nice thought, but browser extensions should be installed extremely selectively. All it takes to compromise your browser is one extension author taking a huge bribe to pass control to a malware author. I only install for critical functionality. Mild conveniences begone.

I really wish you could choose to receive ads selectively based on the channel you are watching. There are some channels I have zero issue with helping monetize by watching an ad or two, but I don't want to support every channel this way.

SponsorBlock does this.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

I got YT Premium. Happy to pay for no ads. TBH I feel like people will use any reason to justify the simple fact they are just cheap. Idk.

How does this even get approved on chrome web store lol, anyhow congrats on the launch!

There's a category for mature content

hahaha it'll make me to watch again these annoying wix ads. Love the idea!

Okay I loved the disappearing trick, so funny.

this gives me energy

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