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Comment by Geee | Hacker News Reader

Youtube, especially, turns into a whole different experience. Ad in front of every video makes it impossible to quickly browse and sort through videos. I might watch just a few seconds and then go to the next one. When ads are enabled, the experience is so painful that I'm not likely to use Youtube this way any more. I have to watch an ad before I've made the decision if I want to watch the video.

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Youtube is the reason I installed an adblocker in the first place. I don't mind watching an ad, but at some point they went from an ad every other video, to unskippable ads in-front of every video (love a 1m ad on every 10s video when I'm just browsing clips) and mid-content ads that literally just cut in and disrupt what I'm watching.

I think the other thing that pushed me to put it back on after experimenting with it off was the absolute dearth of inventory Youtube apparently thought was appropriate to show me. I watch a lot of content of various lengths in a lot of various fields but I would get the same one or two ads for days. Then I started getting the 10m+ ads that seem to be randomly OK for some reason? I don't think I could stomach another experiment.

Vanced even has SponsorBlock, which is insanely good

During the holidays, YouTube was showing me 2 15-second ads every single video. I stopped using the app and stuck to the browser. Then I found out about vanced from HW. I'm sorry to my followed channels but it became unbearable.

love a 1m ad on every 10s video

Christmas 2020 I tried to watch midnight Mass from Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York on YouTube. (Not live; after.)

SIX MINUTES of commercials at the start, and the rest of the program had TWENTY-SIX commercial breaks.

I haven't watched YouTube since.

What is happening is they are pushing you to Youtube Premium.

Sounds like they pushed him away from YouTube. And they pushed others into adblockers

One of the little absurdities of our modern world is having to watch an ad before you are allowed to watch an ad that you requested (movie trailers, superbowl ads that people sometimes share, that kind of thing)

I've been using and loving this: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext

That looks really interesting. Thanks

Well, you can buy YouTube premium and have no ads.

Or you can install an adblocker instead which also blocks much of the surveillance. There's also sponsor block which blocks ads that even paying customers are forced to see.

Don't support these advertisers in any way. Especially Google.

I hope folks that take this stance support creators in another fashion, like through Patreon. Otherwise the content that is consumed by those ad blocking won't get produced, simply because the creator can't make a living off of it. That makes me uncomfortable as I believe most of us on HN like at least some YouTube content and would like to see more of it.

I'm more than happy to pay for content. I support creators even though I know it's a crappy deal since all I get for my money is a worthless license which puts me at their mercy since I own nothing.

I will absolutely not tolerate ads of any kind and if their business model is ads I would rather see them go bankrupt than put up with it.

I happily pay for YouTube Premium because I watch tons of niche stuff that creators are able to make a living off.

YouTube has a lot of problems, and the ads for non-Premium users are probably going too far, but I find a lot of value in consuming and supporting a wealth of high quality content on obscure topics.

I do support some creators (as directly as possible) but honestly I prefer content where money was never an incentive. Ultimately it's up to creators to find ways of funding their passions and just because ads are the easiest way to do that right now does not mean that we have to support that. I also don't think I'd get bored if all ad-supported content just vanished and even if I did it would be worth it to force creators to find less manipulative funding sources. Or we could do away with all of that and make sure everyone has enough to live no matter what they do - but people would rather pay megacorporations than pay higher taxes that can be redistributed to creators.

In fact, if they double the ads on YouTube, and put ads on YouTube Premium, you can buy YouTube DoublePremium and have no ads.

I can't in good faith give so much money per month to a company with such terrible user and creator support.

No visible dislikes.

DCMA takedowns that put the burden of proof on creators rather than destructive soulless auto-claim bots.

God help you if you lose your account.

Pay money to have the exact same thing you could get easier and for free.

I wonder why people feel entitled to content they didn't pay for.

Browsing in incognito mode and behind an ad-blocking DNS server, YouTube runs pre-roll ads perhaps on 1 in 4 videos.

I've found that refreshing the page seems to always remove the ads.

Though I'm increasingly taking to searching through Invidious. (YouTube is somewhat more convenient thanks to the !yt DDG bang search.)

I also often play audio through mpv.

It sounds like this has only gotten worse since I asked HN about it almost two years ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769291

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