YouTube May Force You to Watch 10 (Or More) Unskippable Ads in a Row | Hacker News Reader

YouTube May Force You to Watch 10 (Or More) Unskippable Ads in a Row

tedgioia.substack.com

63 pointsfreediver128 comments

Discussed at least twice already:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32859438 (61 points/4 days ago/142 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32835071 (100 points/6 days ago/264 comments)

It is not exactly dupe, the article links to and discusses much more than the two articles linked.

> The biggest trick the Devil ever played was convincing people that online stuff is free. But the Devil always collects, sooner or later—and we are starting to learn the actual terms of this cursed deal.

I understand the author's point, but a lot of stuff online really is free! I give away my musical arrangements, my code, and my thoughts all the time, and so do lots of other people. There's all sorts of public domain stuff where people have used their resources to make it freely available to others. You can get lots of really valuable material online for free, really and truly. I'm old enough to remember having to pay, individually, for a book containing each one of Bach's works, and now they're available for free online, along with all of Schubert, Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, Palestrina — I could not have imagined such a wealth of music when I was a young musician.

It's important to remember that search engines, walled-garden media hosts, and the like are going to worsen your experience to make money, but it's also important to remember that sometimes people do good, generous things because they want to make the world better.

Some of the best wisdom on the Internet can be found in ancient, run-down posts on blogspot.com and other old-school blog domains. The age of the posts usually indicates an absence of the begging-bowl economy that Patreon and affiliate links have created.

I love it when people post things like that on this site. It's half the reason I come here, because I sure as heck don't know how to find old stuff.

That's all fine. Just remember: the lack of perverse incentives doesn't prevent sloppy wishful thinking.

> There's all sorts of public domain stuff where people have used their resources to make it freely available to others.

This is "old internet" talk. Remember the JustinGuitar website? It was revolutionary for its time, video-based guitar lessons, completely free!

If that site had been created now, it would be a Patreon-only, "subscribe to me to Twitch" / "join my Twitter spaces" monetized mess.

I think that the distinction comes with "who" is posting the content. An individual or not-for-profit organization? Probably actually free (and probably free as in beer and speech).

But a for-profit organization posting content? There's gonna be strings attached.

More ads could be a blessing. Just today I was thinking of cancelling YT premium so that I saw ads. Being interrupted by ads would discourage me from wasting more time on YT.

I think there is an important distinction between the content itself being free and the infrastructure cost required to host things costing money.

I've had google music -> youtube red -> youtube music over the years which I still think is a fantastic deal in this day and age. No ads on youtube videos and an extensive collection of songs.

Life pro tip: Sign up for the family subscription at 15$ a month and create a family of 6 which I share with my friends. Less than 3$ a piece.

It's my understanding that monetized content creators get more revenue per view from a Youtube premium subscriber than they do from a free user being served ads. The split in revenue tends to show more revenue from ads, but it's important to remember that this is likely primarily due to the ratio of premium users vs free/ad supported users.

So as a Youtube Premium subscriber, I get the benefit of no ads, and the content creator I get to enjoy gets a benefit of a little extra income from my view. Kind of a win-win, if you ask me.

(If I'm wrong about the revenue breakdown, feel free to correct me! I'm not a youtube content creator with direct access to these metrics.)

Last I heard, you're correct. I don't hear it talked about much, but I think that's because of restrictions on the content creators. But two creators I watch have both mentioned that premium views are worth something like 10-50x more than ad views.

Yeah, I don't mind supporting content creators so this is good news to hear. I actually was part of a google beta where they paid site owners based on your visits from a prepaid account but that was cancelled a few years ago.

I'm a Google music devotee (Youtube music now I guess - please stop rebranding) because it allows me to upload my own MP3s and listen to them remotely along with their normal music collection. The app sucks and I'd like to disengage from Google, but a couple hundred album uploads later and I feel pretty locked in.

I wish they would at least improve their god-awful UI. I'd even pay more if it meant basic sorting functionality of my own music library.

Interesting, I'm surprised they don't hit you with automated copyright claims or something. I wonder if you can use youtube-dl to help 'extricate' your library? I've used it to auto-convert my music playlists into mp3 files, and it's always worked great.

Interesting, I'm typically a curmudgeon with apps (I think most have terrible design) but the YT Music app is IMHO one of the best designed. It somewhat bucks the modern trend of being feature bare and lacking any settings.

It's specifically their UI when working with my own music collection that I find severely lacking. Almost as if they'd prefer I didn't use my own music uploads! I also dislike the UI/UX push towards their own content, when all I want is to search music or listen to my playlists, not "discover" things (aka the Home tab, which it always opens to by default).

If you're interested in a streaming service for your own music, we're building one here: https://asti.ga

Would love your feedback!

Disclaimer: this is my own commercial service.

Oh yes, ok I completely agree there. The UX for music uploads is atrocious. It's difficult to figure out how to do what you want without googling it, and it's never straightforward like it is for finding their content.

I use SyncThing to share my music collection between desktop, phone, and tablet, and use VLC to play them. flac, ogg, mp3, mp4, wma, everything just works. When I add new music it propagates to all devices.

How do you keep battery use low? The default for Syncthing Android is to wake 1x per hour to try to connect to the host machine. It really eats up battery life!

SyncThing for phones? Tablets?! How have I not heard of this?

TIL

I'm the opposite. I used to love the Google Music app until 2015 or so, when they started showing combined libraries with my local files and cloud-based Play Music files. Instant delete.

I'm with you. I used google music from it's initial release until they killed it. I still hate the youtube music app. STOP TRYING TO PLAY VIDEOS. I just want sounds.

I had the same feeling until I noticed there's a setting for this that will disable videos and just do sounds.

Connecting other people's Google accounts to mine in a "family" sounds like a great way for all 6 of us to randomly get permabanned and lose access to our email, calendar, and play store purchases.

We've been doing it for probably 10 years now. If I get banned, I've gotten my money's worth.

Same. The value for me is there. If nothing else to have a "window" in my cube where one monitor streams 4k outdoor videos. The tipping point for me were when visually nsfw ads popped up during these outdoor videos representing a men's deodorant. I didn't want to offend anyone and the direct content I wanted was worth paying for. I appreciate google for giving me the option of going ad free.

Wouldn't this tie your google account to 5 other people? So when one of those people get permabanned from Google you get banned with them?

We've been doing it for probably 10 years now. If I get banned, I've gotten my money's worth.

As a long time user following same path, I sincerely hope they won’t start adding ads to paid tier, like other content providers do.

Even just for me and my wife, given that we each watch about 1-2h of YouTube per day, paid subscription is a fantastic value, and I’m more than happy to pay instead of adblocking.

> I sincerely hope they won’t start adding ads to paid tier

I would instantly cancel my subscription at the first sight of an advert, and I'm pretty sure that Google understands that most people would.

Yeah they've finally beaten me. I started paying for premium this year. The level of effort to scrub ads from my "smart TV" is just so much higher than $10/month at this point, and it is completely unwatchable otherwise.

same, I do it primarily to stop the toxic adverts when my kids get on there.

YouTube has taught my 14yr old son how to code, and my 12 yr old daughter how to paint and draw with some talent.

Its worth it to me. I'd drop netflix before i dropped YT

> It’s even worse than that. Web users are now hooked on free—and like all addictions, this one is far costlier than you realize at the outset.

But they're saying Netflix etc are going to come up with ads on a paid subscription. So you're not safe anywhere any more.

Incidentally the last time i tried to watch a long video on youtube without ad blockers they showed me an ad every 3 minutes. Fortunately it was a game speedrun so I found it on twitch.

It's funny in a sad way - I haven't used Twitch much in the last year or so because the unskippable ads they show when you visit streams or VODs became intolerable. So I often find myself going to YouTube since I already pay them to disable ads, while on Twitch you have to subscribe to a channel to make the ads go away, even on a first visit.

Lots of Twitch streamers put their content up on YT these days and I suspect this is part of why.

You'll still be able to pay for a Netflix account without ads. It will just be more expensive. They're in a very difficult spot, they have rising costs and a diminishing offering so they can't raise prices because most people won't pay more and get less. Hence the introduction of ads to reduce the pain.

> they have rising costs and a diminishing offering

Quality has nothing to do with this eh?

Sure, but it's not entirely Netflix's fault; their content providers got into the streaming game themselves. Netflix is left desperately trying to build a catalog of first-party offerings before it's too late.

Some of it's shit, but you could say the same about Disney's back catalog.

Totally agree, but Netflix's decisions on what original content to make I think had a big impact. They dumped truckloads of money into many things that could have been done much cheaper, but they wanted to be a AAA hollywood producer so have perfect effects and CGI. They also mainly invested in content that is popular within the social bubble inside of Netflix. Whether they are right or wrong in their political positions[1], they are quite unaligned with the market at large and are one of the least diverse companies out there[2]. This I think has led to some poor strategic decisions they've made, and has led to an extreme amount of group-think that leaves them surprised that decisions they made didn't go as well as everybody thought they would. At Netflix's scale, they can't afford to be missing (or even alienating in some respects) large chunks of the possible market. That doesn't mean they can't have a wide range of content targeting at different niches, but it does mean they they shouldn't over-focus on specific niches and neglect others. In the last couple of years they do seem to have been reversing course, but it's trying to turn an aircraft carrier with a lot of forward momentum.

[1]: Personally I think they're right in many of them, but I'm not aligned with the market at large either.

[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/most-liberal-tech-companies-...

Meh. No matter if ideology laden or not, their content is low quality and more of the same.

I don't really watch series, I prefer standalone films that begin and end. But I saw the missus watch the same high school drama with a high school drama skin, vampire skin, historical skin etc. In case it's not clear, those were different Netflix original series. Don't see how they were different or original.

It is entirely Netflix's fault.

They overstepped into broadcasters' turf with House of Cards and other AAA shows created on their own label. That accelerated efforts for broadcasters to pull their shows and build their own platforms.

Meanwhile Netflix pretends that it has no choice but to raise prices despite no longer having to pay $500m/yr or whatever for rights to Friends, The Office, Parks and Rec etc.

The broadcasters were always going to get into the game.

The Office was Netflix's single most watched show (https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-mov-netfl...) at the time. They'd rather have kept paying for the content than lose it; "go to one place for most of your stuff" was their key value prop for a long time.

> They'd rather have kept paying for the content than lose it;

No they wouldn't. They don't own any part of The Office. Leaving their business dependent on third-party inventory suppliers is something every analyst hammered the CEO on during earnings calls.

The whole point of creating their own shows was to be able to free themselves off the licensing yoke and sell their own IP. Not just on Netflix, but also to cable TV stations internationally.

They have done a terrible job in that respect. Modern Netflix reminds me of British TV in the '80s; extremely stale shows with low budgets.

> They don't own any part of The Office.

Doesn't matter. Amazon doesn't own a lot of the products they sell, either. It'd be a big hit to them to lose the third-party sellers. Same for Netflix.

> The whole point of creating their own shows was to be able to free themselves off the licensing yoke and sell their own IP.

This is inverting cause/effect. "We're losing the licensed content" was the motivation for building up their own catalog.

They've dumped an astronomical amount of investment into original content that isn't very good, sometimes with producers that have little to no experience but are popular for other reasons with the segment of people who make the decisions at Netflix, but can alienate other users.

Even if the quality of their own series had been better, they would still have rising costs and a diminishing offering so I doubt it would have been enough to turn the tide.

If it gets more expensive it may be the tipping point. Every month or so my wife asks "Are we using Netflix that much? Do we still need to pay this?" and I answer "Well, it's not that much really.." - so if it increases then maybe I can't argue anymore. I don't think it'll matter much for heavy Netflix users, but I suspect it may drain Netflix from that large pool (I suspect) of users who just find it convenient to have it available just in case, for the occasional use.. because it's not that expensive. Yet. Oh, and there's zero chance that I would ever choose an ad-based option.

Yes, very much agree. The frequent price hikes are pushing it into territory that is just too much to be a throwaway subscription. It's into territory of "is this really a monthly bill we are getting value from?"

If they raise prices again, or God forbid put ads on my sub or require me to hike my price to escape them, I'll definitely cancel and look elsewhere for entertainment. And I have had a sub with them since long before they started streaming (I do miss the nostalgia of the DVDs by mail actually).

That's the same dialog in my house. I wonder if Netflix has any idea how close many of us are to cancelling our subscriptions? Wouldn't be surprised if they incurred a 15% to 20% drop in subscribers throughout 2023.

I'm guessing they do know, but think it's just a money thing. It isn't. I didn't cancel because of the price, although that was a factor. The main reason I canceled (actually, I switched to the DVD plan) is that I spent too much time searching for something to watch vs just watching something to relax.

With Netflix's DVD recommendation engine back in the early days, I liked most things they recommended. Now, instead of recommending things I will like, it feels like they are just shoving their own content down my throat. It's not just a price issue, it's a time and value issue. More ads do not solve the time and value issues, and in fact make them worse. So I have to agree with you, they're going to see more cancellations.

You bring up another frustration I have with Netflix - their recommendations suck! If you don't know exactly what it is you want to watch you're likely going to spend too much time trying to find something.

>But they're saying Netflix etc are going to come up with ads on a paid subscription. So you're not safe anywhere any more.

TBF it's just a reversion to the mean. We payed $100+ cable subscriptions for decades to watch content that was >30% ads.

> We payed $100+ cable subscriptions for decades to watch content that was >30% ads.

I'd rather pay that than know that my streaming provider is paying $100m/yr alone for Friends, a show that ended almost 20 years ago.

How much would a $100 cable subscription cover, 8 netflixes? You got like 100+ instead.

Netflix offers you far more than 100 movies to choose from at any given time.

Of course in terms of breath, a cable subscription is more like Netflix + Disney+ + Nebula + HBO, and the price quickly gets comparable except for the lack of ads in the modern alternatives.

Good fucking luck with that. One ad and I'm gone.

If they ever start throwing in ads to premium, I'll go back to relying on adblock, and if that doesn't work I'll just watch something else. Old TV shows on rotate go quite far.

ublock still works perfectly on firefox

Sometimes (very rarely) a video won't start until I turn off ublock, for some reason. But I can turn it back on after it starts playing and everything is fine.

Happened to me too.

Could be some test they are running to see what happens if they detect ublock and prevent playback?

I'm calling your bluff. You won't leave. YouTube is too ubiquitous and useful. Nothing else can replace it.

You'll just learn to tolerate the ads, or buy YT Premium.

> YouTube is too ubiquitous and useful

Is this a young person thing? At almost 50, I've found YouTube to be moderately interesting, but I probably watch something on it a few times a month and would effortlessly be able to leave it behind for the rest of my life if it became unusably annoying.

I'm 52, and probably watch more youtube than any other content provider. However, that only started when I got premium and no longer had to deal with ads. If I had to deal with ads, my watching would drop like a rock.

It's very much about what (channels) you watch on it.

I find the main page without being logged in is filled almost entirely with absolute garbage I have zero interest in and would never watch.

The channels I follow, though, are on topics I find interesting, and generally produce quite good content. I watch YouTube when I just feel like vegging out - it's the modern substitute for "channel surfing". Very easy to find 5 to 12 minute long videos that are interesting, yet not the same commitment as a full tv series. For some hints: Smarter Every Day, CGP Gray, Not Just Bikes, Kurzgesagt, Linus Tech tips, Wendover Productions, colinfurze, Rick Beato, 8bit guy, SciShow..

If you don't veg out in front of the tv anyway, there's no no point of doing it front of YouTube. But if you do, it sure beats watching the last half of a rerun of some random sitcom you've seen a million times.

Yes. I am your age and feel similarly about YouTube. However, I teach young people and they have zero boundaries with technology. Worse is that their cognition has evolved with technology such as YouTube, at its core. Turning off YT would be like turning off a section of their brains.

I stopped watching YT when they upped the numbers of ads last year. I don’t think I miss anything. I am actually thankful that Google did that. The YT algorithm is targeted towards making you waste your time. It’s addictive in the worst way possible.

Content quality has been on a downward trend for years now and the introduction of shorts have made things even worse. People seem to be reusing TikTok videos a lot which are basically content devoid of actual content.

What’s supposedly so ubiquitous on YT that you believe you can’t do without?

Aside from DIY videos what do people use YouTube for? Music Videos? I know the White House does some announcements and I think they're streamed on YouTube but I doubt there would be commercials there.

-edit-

I guess people do put up some good product reviews, but you can just read a website or the person posting the review could disable ads or something. I'm not sure YouTube is as important as people are making it out to be. It reminds me of Facebook "but how will I do X without Facebook?" Idk, you either don't do that or find an alternative. I haven't had Facebook since at least 2011 or so and I don't think I'm really missing anything. It's just FOMO.

I mainly use it for video versions of podcasts I like. I mostly just do audio only on my phone, but if I'm home I'll usually throw on the video version on youtube.

Yea and even then do they typically have a lot (or any?) of ads in the video in addition to sponsor call outs and promos codes and such?

YouTube for me is in the category of online content that I value at zero. Same for many articles from random sources I come across. This doesn't mean I don't look at them, but it means that if I have to do anything - like signup, or even accept cookies, I generally just move on.

New alternatives seem to be cropping up lately, I found odysee delightful to use, the ui is nice and snappy and there is plenty of content to choose from.

https://odysee.com/

I already pay for yt premium. I don't dislike paying for content, I dislike ads.

And no, I'm serious about being out if they add ads, I _really_ dislike ads and I've already abandoned several services by now for this reason.

What useful things are on YouTube? I'd miss some conference videos but they're probably hosted elsewhere.

Yeah, just wait until some HNer mentions a great talk on YT.

I download it and watch it at my leisure with no adverts. I'm not going to drop everything and watch a one hour talk right now anyway.

Replace YouTube with MySpace and see how that post reads.

Perhaps consider Invidious, Piped, or alternative UI. Pair with Privacy Redirect / libredirect to redirect any hits to youtube to your trusted instance.

What I dislike most about YouTube is how awful it is at showing appropriate ads - regardless of how often I indicate that I don't want see a particular ad something similar comes along.

The actual mechanism for recommending content seems pretty good - but the ad recommendations I get are crazy.

>The actual mechanism for recommending content seems pretty good - but the ad recommendations I get are crazy

Seems the right way to do it from YT's perspective. By recommending things you will like, you are much more likely to keep watching. But the ads are not for you. They are for their actual customers. Your input on that is much less valuable than meeting impression counts for their customers.

On the demand side it's an auction. Google has advertising slots and companies want to buy them.

The issue is, once you visit a business website or physical location that has a high profit margin you're now captured 100% by them. Companies that sell jewelry for example have huge markups and thus huge advertising budgets. They basically just buy up all your ad impressions.

It's even worse with FB ads. The majority of what I see is an obvious fraud, outright illegal, or a scam of some kind.

> The majority of what I see is an obvious fraud, outright illegal, or a scam of some kind.

The great disruption of automated bid-match advertising platforms was finding a market for all the ads that would have run afoul of television, newspaper and radio standards.

Yeah I guess that would make sense. I thought the same standards applied to Facebook advertising. I think the FTC sets them. Am I wrong in that thinking?

The FTC can only investigate if they receive a tip-off. Most niche online ads that aren't standards-compliant don't run for very long, and can be hard to trace.

FB's ad management system is also largely automated, and frequently rejects ads, before accepting a version of it that hasn't been modified. It would be hard to create an evidentiary paper trail proving that FB accepted ads that didn't comply with standards.

For me that’s a general problem. Facebook is trying to get me to buy a new car, at 2-3 times what I am willing to spend on a car (I can practically see the marketing department scream but you make good money, but of course that doesn’t mean I will spend them on overpriced vehicles).

The joke is that I just bought a car some months ago, so they missed it and missed it.

I don’t know whom you scream at to show me things worth their cost. Instead of showing me things I might want they just force you to watch more ads for terrible things.

I don’t know if you tried to tell them your interests, but it seems like they just ignore them.

They are probably also picking up on the car shopping/research you likely did before your recent car purchase. Classic problem of ad targeting: they don't know when to stop (i.e. they don't actually know that you have ended your search and already bought the thing)

I've certainly been vigorously telling them what I'm not interested in - which is pretty much every ad they've shown me.

It could be an effort to get me to sign up for YouTube premium.... at the expense of whoever is paying for the ads.

I think it's the advertisers that assess user profiles and bid on who they want to show the ads to. YouTube would only be responsible for choosing from the collection of advertisers that select you. YouTube would want to maximize the bid price as well as the likelihood of success so that the advertisers will continue to get value from their ad-spend, right?

If you don't have many advertisers choosing profiles like yours, YouTube's algorithm won't play much of a role in selecting what ads you see.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Every ad I get on YouTube is for TikTok. And then I go on HN and read about TikTok being an existential threat to Google.

You can't show what you don't have.

Every ad I see on Youtube shorts is the same scammy "Government of Canada will give you a refund if you do this" type of garbage.

I'm sure they'd love to have Breitling or Nike pay for an ad spot, but those brands aren't going to be interested.

I get crazy ads too. But the ads I get seem to be created by crazy people, to target people who aren't crazy but which they'd like to turn crazy.

I get the sense I am the demographic they are targeting. No accident.

This will keep getting worse until it actually makes people go elsewhere. YouTube and Google are testing the limits of their product(s) as revenue generators now and will continue to try to increase profits this way until some other factor forces them to stop.

I think that eventually people may move over to other online video sharing platforms and not until then will you see the increase in ads slow down or reverse.

I have a YouTube channel where I post stuff interesting to friends and family (drone videos, kids vacation videos, etc). I'm lucky enough to have 15k subscribers, so I'm monetized. Wow. $30 a month!

But for every video that I can, I disable the "Non-Skippable video ads" option. I also disable the "during video" ads if the video is longer.

I don't mind making 0.001 cents every time someone watches one of my videos. But I don't want to annoy the hell out of someone who takes the time and effort to watch a video.

On a related note is $1 monthly per 5k subscribers a typical rate for YouTube?

No, it's more based on views (and ad views, presumably). The number of subscribers doesn't matter much, in my experience, since your videos are never really pushed to your subscribers unless they search for them.

The thesis of this article is that advertisements no longer work as an enticement to get people to buy things, so they've started being used as a cudgel to force people into subscriptions, and it's going to get worse.

I think this was clear a long time ago, but I guess it's good when someone says it on a fairly widely read blog.

I'm really bored with the professional blogosphere jumping on every random little drama that comes about. I didn't expect it from Ted Gioia. I bet stratechery will have an article on "too many youtube ads!" soon enough.

Youtube ran an experiment on displaying all the ads in one go when watching long videos on a TV. That's it. You can't read anything into their motives, because you have no idea why they were running the experiment, or what the results of the experiment were. What if people preferred watching all their ads up front, instead of pausing the video every 3 minutes to play an ad?

Your username contains “googl”, and 9 days ago you commented on a post about Google stock options with an insider perspective. It sounds like you either work, or have previously worked, at Google. I would advise disclosing this if you’re going to write a comment about YouTube ads.

Nah, it's fine. I'm posting my own opinion. I'm a nobody leaf node in the corporate hierarchy in an inconsequential project. I'm not tribal. I have no special insider insight into...anything really. I can list off 1,000 things I hate about google if you'd like. If I was trying to hide anything, I wouldn't have this username.

     Our goal is to develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible. In pursuing this goal, we may do things that we believe have a positive impact on the world, even if the near term financial returns are not obvious.

     -IPO founder's letter
     https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004-ipo-letter/

Yes, Susan Wojcicki is doing just fine as CEO. The 5th ad for satellite TV service, and the 10th ad showing a pickup truck towing horses up a mountain road will significantly improve my life! /s

I've begun avoiding products I've been presented ads for. If only we could get enough people to do the same.

Yeah. I am just gonna not watch the video then. I suspect many others will do so as well.

Of course, "force" is headline hyperbole. You always have the option of closing the window and not watching Youtube.

Yeah this is the approach I’ve taken. From watching YT everyday to now watching maybe one video a week. I find I read much more now… and none of my books have ads in them :)

Why is this being scaled up so much now?

Just chance/gradual progression, or is there currently pressure to make more money?

There are limited number of humans on the planet, most of which YouTube already reached. So the only other way to increase ad revenue is to increase number of ads per user. This is a short term tactic though as there will be a point where this will have diminishing and even opposite outcomes.

ReVanced is just around the corner.

Nice, I was hoping to see someone pick up the slack here.

They cannot force me to do anything. Even assuming I didn’t have all the blocker plugins I do, if I’d have to watch more than 10s of ads to see something, I’d just not watch it.

I just download content locally. If I see interesting channel, I grab it all, and watch latter on my phone. Easy with termux, ytbdl and 1TB sd card :)

As I get older I'm just becoming less interested in video content of any kind. TV shows don't interest me. Movies hold negative interest for me. Nothing beats a book, frankly. I feel sorry for the people in the bottom 80% of the IQ spectrum for who reading is more difficult or who don't have minds that are interested in ideas.

Facebook forces you to watch 15 seconds unskippable Ad. But Facebook is kind enough to let you skip the 2nd Ad after 5 seconds \s

I think i found a windows user. Before downvoting please try to solve a puzzle

My Solution:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-for-youtub...

What the heck happened to the numbers 3->9. They're going from 2 unskippable ads straight to 10.

Luckily I am waning on useful content. I seem to just be watching Russel Brand and Joe Rogan clips now. I'm replacing this time suck with useful things.

I don't understand how YouTube justifies $15/month when it's not much more than a video hosting service. Netflix is priced similarly and it spends billions generating its own content PLUS hosting the content.

Are other people targeted by the one hour long looped Turing ads? Is there anything we can do about that? Can I just leave it on and put my phone on mute and have them get charged for the duration of the view?

FreeTube, uBlock Origin, Pi-Hole... I haven't seen ad on YouTube for many years. Even sponsored content is skipped on timeline.

I think that little "subscribe to Youtube TV" box might be the most rejected thing in human history.

I heart NewPipe.

Enjoy it while you can, since they're one cease and desist and/or DMCA takedown request away from the end much like when Vanced was shut down.

Wasn't Vanced a modified version of the official YouTube app ? I think that's why it was nuked. Newpipe is just an extractor is has no copyrighted code in it from Google.

But no one is forcing you to use YouTube

Ads? What's that?

No, they can't.

lol no it won't

I swear substack is just a place to share emotionally manipulative fanfiction after a topic got discussed to death. This is basically all hot takes from the last HN and Reddit threads badly glued together with some whiny wording.

Lol, ads

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