To cure your youtube addiction, just disable your adblocker. Works very well.
Ads have been getting a LOT worse very quickly. Almost every ad I saw in a day when my UBlock wasn’t working was advertising an actual fraud. Whether crypto or recession get rich quick or “aluminum is giving you cancer.”
Advertising frequency is cranked way up. On mobile 5 second unskippables are 6-7 now. I’ll do a search and my ENTIRE screen is advertising until I scroll down and find results.
People say it’s based on your history, but I don’t buy that as none of what it shows me is even slightly relevant. It just seems like they don’t have enough relevant ads to show, so they throw shit at the wall.
I’ve wondered if it’s because I’m into 3d printing and many other people who are into are interested in action figures/minis/what have you. Possible connection?
In any case ads do seem to be getting less relevant and skeezy themes are developing.
The worst one I’ve been seeing a lot of is “single Ukrainian women”. One went as far as showing a quick and easy process of selection and “purchase”. I have no idea how that would be targeted at me, but it see a lot of them.
Jokes aside, if you do your data request from FB you should see your advertising selectors come back. Before I deleted my account, FB thought I was a 17 year old girl interested in boy bands and makeup.
I've always exclusively interacted with Youtube from my PC, with uBlock enabled. I don't see ads and because I haven't for such a long time, I've normalized that state.
Until I got a new TV, with a fancy TV OS. My mother-in-law was visiting and I was trying to play some clips of her favorite music via the TV app. I was absolutely shocked. Every 2 minutes or so, 2 brief ads in succession.
It makes viewing anything with joy impossible. You can't get into the moment as its constantly stopped in its tracks. Absolute hellish ad regime.
And while we’re on this topic: Google’s rockstar elite engineers and designers removed the ability to force a resolution for YouTube + Chromecast. But it also wrongly auto detects my gigabit internet as being too weak so it’s literally impossible to get anything above 480p on my basement TV. (Twitch and others stream in HD without issue)
There might be more involved solutions that work better but I’m not interested in accumulating stuff I have to maintain.
Twitch on the other hand? If I'm watching on mobile I'll regularly get 90 seconds or more of unskipable ads every 10 minutes. Most of the time this makes me close the app and overall has torpedoed my watch time.
Now I’m on the road and I have a laptop and an ipad. I’ve got no extra screen and the extra tab will be expensive on my battery. I tried the iPad YouTube app but I’d get an ad for every 4-5 minutes.
After a couple weeks i stopped watching YouTube altogether. I was considering getting a premium subscription but found out later that I don’t miss it that much.
I think the $5/month will be used to stream bitcoin to podcasts over lightening.