Ask HN: How broken is YouTube these days?

> _lots of_ ads everywhere

Be fair and buy Youtube Premium, or use a better Adblocker?

> Ads load better than the video

Maybe because they are shorter and there are less of them, so proxys can better cache them.

> after reporting too many of those ads, I've lost the function to report any ad at all. I'm not kidding, the menu item is just gone.

Makes sense if you are spamming the system and they considered them false flag.

> recommendations are showing me lots of videos I've watched before

Maybe you want to rewatch them or add a comment. That's not that unusual.

> OR are totally unrelated to what I'm interested in

Not YET.

> recommendations are often filled with videos from 6 to 10 years ago

Nothing wrong with old videos. There is many cool old stuff on Youtube. 6 or 10 Years is not that much. Unless you are only in gossip and news?

> All in all YouTube seems to be a total shitshow and it feels like they don't care anything at all about the user experience.

It might not be your perfect experience, but considering their size and broad audience, it's pretty hard to serve everyone equal good. And recommendations are generally a hard problem. Getting even a low number of successes is quite good.

> What's your experience on YT these days? Is it similar to mine or totally different?

I'm curious whether the ads are related to the content you watch. Maybe you are mostly watching hard to monetize videos, where only the wild ads which are not that picky with their customers are shown.

The best experience is to close the app/ site as soon as the first ad shows before a video. Not sure if it was actually the case, but after strictly following this, I thought I had trained the algo to not show me ads for a while.

Maybe you aren't from the U.S., where it is legal for big pharma to flood media with ads. It has been going on so long here that older people think it is normal. I think since people have become aware that it is not accepted practice everywhere, they try to escape it, so the commercial entities take advantage of whatever media they can.

Pi-hole, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and Enhancer for YouTube will solve your problems really quickly.

Sponsor Block is another good one.

great little extension, apparently it's skipped over 10 hours of ads for me!

That toolchain works fine on my laptop, but I used Google TV to stream the content to my TV so you have to use the YT app. That works different, although there's a Pi-hole running in my network.

Alternative android/android tv client with sponsor block baked in. https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe/

I have ad blocking everywhere except for YouTube on Roku, which, ironically, is the app I use the most to watch videos. No blocker means I get hit with ads before every video and, in some, right in the middle.

I paid YouTube membership and is a lot different for me, from Mexico.

What is that like? No ads at all? In the app and the videos?

No ads at all.

Most of my media is consumed through YouTube. If you watch YouTube frequently I highly recommend paying for YouTube premium. If you sign up over VPN via Argentina it's also extremely cheap (Google search will guide you).

If you're using a free service, expect to be the product.

If you don't want to be the product, with YouTube you can pay to be the customer instead.

Have no illusion, you're still the product - only if no data collection was part of the contract, you'd be a real customer. Youtube Premium users are also premium ad targets because they obviously have disposable income.

Youtube premium, the best few bucks I spent.

My experience is totally different, I never see ads. (mac, firefox, uBlock Origin)

> - I've got lots of video ads where pharmaceutical companies are promoting to "talk to your doctor about the vaccine for XY" - wtf, is this even legal?

It is here in the US. This style where you're prompted to ask about a treatment for a condition (or a vaccine for a disease) without naming the drug or the manufacturer was the beginning of drug ads here. Only much later did they start being able to tell us the name, but then only if they also told us in a very fast voice about all the terrible side effect symptoms reported in trials (or after general availability). I wouldn't know if this is legal in Germany, but it's worth talking to your doctor about ;)

YouTube is perfectly fine and one of the few places on the internet where personalization actually works. Don't want ads? Fine, pay up for premium.

Generally speaking, you're right. Nothing is free - esp not for YT to host the data. But I think it's fair to complain about the scope. OP mentioned unskippable 15 sec ads before a 17 sec video. That's bullshit. I've seen it. It's not just on the 4th short video. It's on every video. Sure, you can go elsewhere anytime - nevertheless it's frustrating.

Why would I give money to a site whose moderation enforces a political ideology and which was complicit in the cover up of the pandemic lies?

Because nothing is perfect. You take what you can get.

This poem for children has served me well :

https://theborrowedpoem.blogspot.com/2007/01/almost-perfect-...