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Comment by thiht | Hacker News Reader

It’s too late for that. On YouTube even if you pay for premium, you still get ads in the form of sponsored segments, and probably in the recommendation algorithm (I’d be surprised if big corps had no way to pay to bump their videos in search results).

More and more platforms will try the « paid subscription with ads » in the coming years.

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When people recognize how cognitively harmful ads really are, there will be a movement to pirate and rehost all content decentrally, edited to remove interstitials and sponsored segments.

Ads targeting children would be an international crime if our world was just.

People have been warned about the cognitive harm from advertisements for probably over 100 years now. Its not going anywhere unfortunately, its too profitable.

But with premium the scroll bar at least will tell you where to scroll to to skip the ad via the histogram.

With SponsorBlock it will skip the ad for you.

The sponsored segments as in advertising that creators have negotiated directly? I have YouTube Premium and that's the only type of ad I get, I don't get anything else.

I have SmartTubeNext and I don’t even have that.

When a free experience can do better than the premium experience, your product have a problem.

I’m not even sorry about SponsorBlock, creators still get their money, I don’t have to watch the sponsored segment, and advertisers have no way to know I didn’t watch it. So it’s zero impact on the creator, big impact on my sanity.

> advertisers have no way to know I didn’t watch it

Actually per-segment viewership gets tracked by YouTube and displayed in the YouTube creator tools. I wouldn't be surprised if those statistics get used when negotiating deals with sponsors.

>and advertisers have no way to know I didn’t watch it

So YouTube has no idea that the content was skipped by SponsorBlock? I find that hard to believe.

Yeah, it's unquestionably tracked what exact portions of a YT video your browser actually loads and plays. All playback is controlled by JS and there's no reason YT doesn't hook into those actions and record metrics of every play/pause/seek/mute/etc. user action (in addition to actual network requests made by the browser).

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