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Comment by omnicognate | Hacker News Reader

The only alternatives to a service like youtube showing people ads are for its users to pay for it, for it to be funded through donations, for it to be run by the government and paid for through taxation or for it not to exist. I prefer the first or second approaches and Youtube is unusual among social media sites in actually giving me the first option. So I happily pay for premium and while I'd rather that were the only option (I think ad supported content is an inherently socially corrosive model) I dislike the attitude of those who reject ads but also refuse to pay.

(Some people are unable to afford it but that's an entirely separate social problem, and it would be unusual for somebody with the skills demonstrated in the article to be struggling to earn a living wage.)

What I would be interested in this protobuf inspection approach for would be implementing some decent parental controls. I would very much like to be able to enable/disable individual youtube channels. Currently all I can do is switch the whole site on and off. I have all the necessary infrastructure already, so I might give it a try.

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There are so many reasons to block ads. Aesthetics alone. Protecting your valuable time. Consenting to watching an ad is not the same as consenting to your entire life being tracked and monitored.

But the most important issue is that as long as malware can spread through ads (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising), everyone should be blocking all ads.

Everyone should block ads and everyone who can pay for the use of the platform should.

Given that neither Facebook nor Google can appropriately police the content of their own ad networks (to the extent that they're the two biggest purveyors of malware and scams on the internet - in this rando's opinion), there is no moral argument against blocking ads.

In fact, not blocking internet advertising is a security risk.

If they get their house in order my opinion may change, but there's currently no business reason for them to change their existing lax systems; no pressure or threat from regulation to hold them liable for what they allow on their advertising networks.

And instead paying for services if there's the option, right?

Or should we just continue consuming people's services and effort while blocking what's sometimes their only revenue stream?

I'd rather not use a service if it has ads and I can't remove them, instead of block them and make everyone else's experience worse.

Yeah it's gotten so bad that the FBI recommends an ad-blocker as a means to protect yourself from malicious sites.

https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221?=8324278624

Very well put. I have tried to argue the same point here and on reddit in past. The only real argument against I get is from the privacy perspective. That people tend to use alternative youtube clients or other such hacks to be able to consume ad free content anonymously and with the current state of google are not very keen on providing it with more information about them. Personally I am trying to degooglify my life including working my own open source alternatives for some services I don't find much other good alternatives for- google keep and google books. But my youtube usage pattern being the data shared with google is quite low on the priority list for me but reasonable minds can differ. On the other hand, if enough do start to pay for youtube premium then we would be able to much more fruitfully present our demands including for privacy when we are actual customers and not the product as in the current dynamics.

I dislike the attitude of those who reject ads but also refuse to pay.

How is this any different from changing the channel, leaving the room, or just hitting the mute button and closing your eyes in the scenario of "regular" TV when adverts or any other content you don't want to see appears? Compelled consumption should be illegal.

The assumption is that not many people would leave the room, close their eyes or mute the ads.

If you created a painless, super easy way to remove all ads, i'm sure that TV channels will also find it hard to sell to advertisers, and thus, their revenue would decrease.

In my household growing up the ads were almost always muted as soon as the roll started.

I always found it bizarre that other people did not do the same

They train you to do this when they volume boost the ads to blow your eardrums out.

Over here volume boosting is illegal, so instead they DSP ad audio to maximise envelope across all frequency bands.

Since ad sections are your typical break from a program to get to the fridge or toilet or whatever, the DSP transform makes sure you still hear the ads and pick up dialog even when far away from the TV.

Downmixing audio so that you can both hear dialogue and not lose eardrums to music and 'splosions seems to be an intractable decades old problem for the movie industry but it sure as hell been solved a dozen times over by the ad biz.

If you don’t hugely care about the quality it’s easier. Movies also want to use the dynamic range for effect but they sometimes rely on people have better home audio systems than they actually do.

Yes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression#Mark...

My grandparents did that, it was one of the principle annoyances I had with visting them as a kid

It was very shocking to go from 75dB to an ambient 30dB or something like that out in the countryside. I'd have much preferred to talk over or zone out over the commercials without the suddenly shocking lack of auditory stimulus!

That always felt counterproductive to me. I knew people who did this and they still stared at the adverts. In fact, without the sound, you are probably focusing more on the ads, trying to figure out what is going on.

I would agree, the whole point was to enable conversation without the distraction of the ad sounds. If you're gonna watch the damned things anyway I'm not sure it helped

If you created a painless, super easy way to remove all ads

We had that almost 3 decades ago:

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/1995/09/20/with-this-vcr-com...

My last CRT TV had a picture in picture mode. When ads started I pressed the PiP button on the remote, placed the channel I was looking at in the PiP window and started watching something else. When the ads were over I came back to that channel or stayed on the other one if I found something more interesting.

I watch TV on my tablet now, streamed from a Raspberry PI with a TV Hat. Again, I activate the popup player, start browsing, maybe checking HN or whatever. I put the volume off. Maybe I start doing something else. The advantage of a tablet is that I can bring it with me wherever I go in my house. The TV, not so much. I rarely switched on my TV in the past two years.

If the ad is displayed but you don't watch it you're hurting the advertiser, but id the ad is not displayed at all you're hurting the platform.

Serious question here. What's the difference between not responding to the ad in any meaningful way vs blocking the ad entirely? Does youtube know when you've blocked the ad and therefore the content creator earns less ad revenue?

It's different becaue regular broadcast TV pay a fee to get the channel out of a limited amount of available spot, and then use that limited available spot to have higher ad price.

Of course on cabled channels, they get part of the fee of your package.

There is no "compelessed consumption", there is available package "this for free with ads", or "this for a fee", you're free to chose the one you want or neither.

I'm certain your company whichever it is would have an issue if I wanted to use its services but then run away when it came time to pay the bill.

We need to differentiate a little more here. Instead of me having to watch another f*ing viagra ad, since I'm male and above 40, we should instead talk about substituting ads with getting actual fecal matter thrown at us. Your argument still applies. I should accept this because it is in my interest to support advertisers, since, really, I work for one. (In that I work for a private company that also pays for ads.)

Now before you dismiss this as childish and/ or obnoxious: please consider the point. We cannot gloss over _what_ we "have" to watch and not just that it's an ad.

It is true that things have to be paid for and I am 100% for this. But if you want me to basically degrade myself in order for me to get to watch your content, then wtf?

> I dislike the attitude of those who reject ads but also refuse to pay

And I dislike YouTube's hostile ad escalation in recent years. One ad - fine, two ads - hmmm, three ads - what the hell. Unskippable ads. Inappropriate ads. Loud-ass eardrum ripping ads. Ads even on Premium.

I have premium but don’t see any ads, except the sponsorships of the creators themselves. Which is a bit annoying but not a lot YouTube can do about.

>not a lot YouTube can do about. //

They've tried? It seems like it would be pretty easy to detect ad sequences in larger channels.

I don't know maybe auto skip on them for premium users? I have an extension that does just that, surely google can do it too

And even if you get rid of the ads, the sponsored content is not going anywhere.

I find this a false proposition, there are plenty of other ways to to support a video streaming platform. There is nothing that suggest a platform like youtube has to exist in it's current form either. If a monetizing strategy does not work it is not the users holding it wrong. People consumed videos online before youtube and will be consuming after youtube just fine. It is not like Google is the creative mind behind the content either, in fact, the streaming part is by far the most boring problem.

I really dislike the attitude of defending megacorps and worrying about their bottom lines, especially anti customer ones like Google.

You claim that there are plenty of other ways to support a video streaming platform yet fail to mention even one of them.

Things cost money. Every monetizing strategy involves users paying for it or the company making money from the users indirectly. OP mentions both of these. So tell me, what's a monetizing strategy other than these that works?

People consumed videos online at a very limited scale before YouTube, and those videos were usually hosted by few, generous individuals. Even if every user in the world decides to contribute 50% of their device storage for a decentralized streaming platform, I doubt it would even fit a small part of all videos in YouTube's catalog right now.

I really dislike the attitude of hating megacorps without really proposing any viable alternatives.

Nitpicking alternatives is not the main point. There is nothing that suggest a platform like youtube has to exists in its current form.

Consider a freemium model without the threat of adxtortion, obviously this would require youtube to offer a significant value add and/or premium content besides trying to be a monopoly and gatekeeping eyes. Make it purely subscription based (e.g. Netflix before ads). Ask creators to pay for the blue checkmark. Make it a loss leader. Plenty of adult streaming sites manages to do just fine without youtube style invasive ads. I'm sure much smarter people can name countless other ways as well, it also does not need to be a 1-1 alternative either.

> There is nothing that suggest a platform like youtube has to exist in it's current form either.

This. PeerTube can provide similar benefits without centralization.

By the same logic, it's irresponsible to watch ads and not buy the products. That's after all what keeps the wheels turning.

I remember I had this discussion after a school political debate in the 90s, with (adult) actual politicians. Textbooks at the time were not publicly funded, and naturally the textbook companies jacked up prices for their captive audience forced to buy their books.

This one party had the "brilliant" idea of ad-funded textbooks. I asked, if the textbook companies currently take $50 for the book, if it was instead funded by say McDonalds ads, how many extra burgers would each student have to buy that year? They didn't have any good answer to that.

None. The textbooks would then be subsidized by McDonalds' advertising budget, reducing their profit margin.

It's the same as blocking YouTube ads; Google still pays the creator as if you had watched the ads, so your video playback is being subsidized by Google's ad business profits.

When you choose not to block ads, you aren't "supporting creators", you are supporting Google shareholders.

Point is, McDonald's wouldn't do that for long. They don't have that big margins.

Google's shareholders might, for a while, for the sake of "control". But either way, it's not sustainable. The anti-adblockers are right about that part. They're just wrong that watching ads without spending a ton of money on the products help matters.

This happened for real, actually, at least some german science fiction publishing houses did that. They would "insert" a page into the book, which picks up the story in some really cheesy way and then bends in within two sentences towards the main character needing a quick soup now (the advertise was for soup always, they just had that one sponsor apparently).

See here (picture gallery): https://johannes.freudendahl.net/2019/01/werbung-in-romanen/

The introduction goes like: "Only Kirk kept helping himself, because he was convinced he would need strength for the upcoming events." and then below the black bars the actual ad: "The reader should do same bla e.g. soup bla takes just 5 minutes etc"

Just some anecdote.

I use Youtube through Piped (https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped) to preserve privacy, block ads, and prevent getting sucked in by the algorithm.

The only part of Youtube that I find valuable is the content. Not the UI, not the comments, algorithm. Free content hosting is nice, but it's not the only platform hosting videos for free.

If I wanted to pay for a streaming service, it'd be Nebula (https://nebula.tv/), because I know it benefits creators.

But I'm never turning off the adblocker, thank you.

> it's not the only platform hosting videos for free.

You're only looking at this from your own point of view. The content producers are looking for monetization options, and youtube is the only game. Nebula might be sufficient for some small amount of content producers, but it's unlikely to hit mainstream, and not enough people want to pay.

It's unfortunate, but ads are the only game in town on the internet atm.

Piped is a great web-based service, but since tvOS does not support web browsers on the Apple TV, to block YouTube ads, you either have to stream Piped videos to the Apple TV from another Apple device using AirPlay screen mirroring or use a workaround like the one described in TFA.

I'm using NewPipe (https://newpipe.net) on Android TV which provides an ad-free YouTube experience just like the Android phone version of NewPipe. Piped would also work on an Android TV browser like TV Bro (https://github.com/truefedex/tv-bro).

The legitimacy of ad blocking is well-established. People have been using DVRs, VHS players, and tape recorders to capture and consume ad-free broadcasts for decades.

While Nebula has some creators om it that I follow, no platform comes close to having the broad collection of channels YouYube does.

I follow a wide variety of channels, but there are maybe a dozen to 20 that I would consider essential. Maybe 3-4 are on Nebula.

I think for a lot of viewers and creators, YouTube is simply inevitable at this point.

On top of that, in my experience both CuriousityStream and Nebula's search functionality is pretty bad: I got fed up of the number of times I searched for something mentioned in a spoken "advertisment" by users like Mustard on youtube who said they have extra content on those services and then I can't find it or find out how to list all videos by those users, I stopped my subscription to them...

> If I wanted to pay for a streaming service, it'd be Nebula (https://nebula.tv/), because I know it benefits creators

Huh? Ad revenue and Premium subscription also ends up as direct payouts for YouTube creators, what are you talking about? Why the need for this BS?

Maybe it's just my bubble, but it is often I hear that "Our Nebula subscribers fund this show, we couldn't do this with youtube revenue alone" or "Signing up to Nebula with my link gives me a steady source of income that youtube just cannot provide".

I’m in the exact same mindset as you; youtube allows you to pay to rid yourself of ads (which is ironic because the more free you are with money the more attractive you must be to advertisers)- so I think they are better than most.

but if I must take an alternative position: the last time I used youtube without premium (which happens sometimes because its not so smooth to log in if its a temporary session); the number and length of the ads was absurd, multiple levels of unskippable ads, minutes long, with volume that is much higher than the content itself. Awful experience and I can see why people who don’t have the free money want to lower it a little.

Thats of course not including sponsored content which contains an ad inside the video itself- even YT premium users get those.

There are extensions that mark these "premium" ads and let you skip them.

> So I happily pay for premium and while I'd rather that were the only option (I think ad supported content is an inherently socially corrosive model)

Still doesn't protect you from in-video sponsorships (skullshare, OstVPN, etc.), product placements, etc. Some creators especially do these because it protects them from platform demonetization risk.

Same shit with paying for cabletv & movie theatre tickets. If anything, people that pay are their most valuable targets for ads.

Even a newspaper that I sub to runs ads and a zillion trackers against me. Ugh.

I get where you're coming from, but the platform could more to protect paying members from this. E.g. creators with over $x revenue must tag promos so the platform ships them for paying users

To me at least the sponsorblock extension is completely ethical when you are using youtube premium. The creators get paid extra for a premium view anyway, plus I don't think advertisers for in video ads pay per view of that segment (if there are even tools to detect that metric) or anything like that so you're not even hurting the creator. But I agree that something built in by youtube for premium users would be nicer. Would get youtube more premium users too I think because I was e.g. initially hesitent too of buying premium because I knew I would still be getting in video sponsors.

It doesn’t, but Nebula does. Creators don’t put sponsorships in their Nebula videos. And they had a lifetime subscription recently so personally I jumped on it and don’t have to deal with Yet Another Subscription…

I can be a petty individual at times, and the thing that convinced me to never pay a cent to youtube was their removing the ability for the app to continue to play the clip in the background when switching to another app or locking the phone.

I listen to news and podcast-esque things in the car going to work or school drop-off / pick-up, on the way to sport etc. I'd begrudgingly tolerate the ads if the app background-played but it doesn't without paying for premium. I'm somewhere on an "entitlement" scale here, but background-play being a premium feature really feels like it's stretching the friendship.

So... alternative front-end it is. Great experience and no ads to boot.

The said ability also exists in a premium subscription. So what you effectively saying is that YouTube offers you a valuable feature, but you refuse to pay for it.

Correct.

It is fair to not want pay enshittification tax to rent seekers.

The said ability exists on the YT website if you use desktop mode on the mobile browser.

Asking you to pay for service costs and content is not rent seeking. That's not what that phrase means.

No but you have to agree on the enshitification part. Youtube turned to one of the worst UX apps I have on my phone, I hate paying them for such a shitty product and I'm waiting for the time they're off this planet

But meanwhile you keep using that shitty awful app, aren't you?

Given that YouTube is a monopoly, I would call it rent seeking.

Monopoly in what exactly?

YouTube is not offering a valuable feature here. It's an OS feature. YouTube is going out of its way for you not to have this feature, unless you pay them (even though it wasn't them who brought you the feature to begin with). I understand why this upsets people.

Imagine Youtube preventing you from adjusting the volume unless you paid. This is similar.

> removing the ability for the app to continue to play the clip in the background when switching to another app or locking the phone.

Do you know that the paid version has this exact feature? This is a limitation of the ad-supported version, because advertisers are paying to actually have people watch their ad.

Yes

So they didn't remove it did they? You just refuse to pay for that service and spread bs to make you feel better?

They removed it from in front of the paywall to behind the paywall. The non-paid version used to do it. It was a memorably jarring experience working out WTF happened when background-play was rugged.

I don't remember it ever playing in the background without a sub, when was that?

Use the YouTube mobile site within Firefox.

I too am happy pay for nice things, but I am never happy to pay a monopolist just on principle; so I don't.

But you're happy to use the monopolist's service.

yes, absolutely, but only inasmuch as it only decreases their producer surplus so it doesn't actually cost them anything. If the monopolist allowed competition, then I'd evaluate and choose, but I don't have that choice till then.

You could choose to not use YouTube out of principle.

Besides these days it's barely a monopoly with TikTok.

"you can believe in the benefits of law and order, and just walk away any time you encounter a thief who doesn't". Yes, or I can steal my stuff back which gives me pleasure.

"anyway, you can switch from the high end monopolist to the low brow monopolist so I don't see what you're complaining about" Yes, you don't.

the right to wear hair-shirts is not the only principle that counts.

Do you shoplift as well to stick it to Walmart?

Nowhere in YouTube’s voluminous terms of service does it say that you have to watch the ads.

Why are you defending a multi billion dollar company from something that the users aren’t obliged to do in the first place?

The issue with paying for youtube premium is that you are still left with tons of ads. Until YouTube themselves doesn't tackle this issue as it should I refuse to pay to see sligtly less ads.

I pay for YouTube premium and have never seen an ad. Not sure what's happening with you.

Half of the content on YouTube could be considered to be an ad by itself. Also sponsors are being advertised regularly within videos which I would consider to be ads too

It strongly depends on the kind of content you watch. I watch a lot of YouTube, but hardly any of it has sponsored content.

There's always SponsorBlock: https://sponsor.ajay.app/

A lot of the videos I see have ads in them, section whith "this video is sponsored by this and that". That's definitely an ad. I would say most new (past few years) content by established channels has these. Some more obnoxious than others.

That's a way to look at it, and another way to look at it is this:

I already pay Google much more than I care to and am willing to in the form of my privacy and personal data because of the ubiquitious surveillance that Google performs on as many people as they possibly can.

If I could cut Google out of my life I would do it in an instant, but I can't because they won't allow it. In lieu of that I take whatever I can from them.

“To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.” -- Abbie Hoffman

If you could cut Google out easily, you wouldn't be using YouTube. Who are you lying to, yourself or us?

People paid for cable and they still forced ads on people.

And YouTube doesn't. And you can stop paying when they do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37280072

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37280895

By that logic we shouldn't be even a allowed to look away or mute our sound when the ads are playing, after all if enough people did it it would be just as "damaging" as people with ad blockers.

Also, YouTube is a video streaming monopoly, if it didn't exist there would be a significant chance of new streaming platforms to succeed, but given that it captured the marked such chance is unlikely to exist, monopoly that they achieved hosting videos free of ads (or very light on these) and now that they have the control want to force people to pay or watch a ridiculous amount of ads.

If the advertisers had their way unimpeded, we'd be in "drink verification can" territory now.

In case some people here don't know about that reference: https://old.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/1ggg4u/please_drink_...

You mean like PBS?

But now they have ads.

It's possible to download stuff you like, for free, without being funded by donations, ads, or being run by the government. P2P.

People using their excess Internet connectivity, they already pay for for other reasons, to share content with others.

It works for socially disadvantaged, too.

> I dislike the attitude of those who reject ads but also refuse to pay.

What about fair advertising? The main problem here nobody dares to talk about because dealing with it would undermine the very essence of capitalism: unlimited growth, is that there is no way to have fair advertising exactly as there's no way to have a fair use of any resources. Once you allow anything to be used for profit, it will be abused from the strongest players at the expense of the others until the last drop. It would be extremely easy to put well defined limits on how much advertising can be shown, and make the Internet a better place, but no way, it's anti capitalistic and therefore a no-no. Ad blockers weren't born the same day advertising came to the Internet, and many years passed until someone realized we needed them; that was the day surfing became such a horrid experience thanks to unlimited, pervasive and ever growing advertising.

edit: and, by the way, I still have to see some company going bankrupt because of ad blockers.

Does anyone recall when cable TV first came out - "Pay for cable, see no ads!!!"

That didn't last long...

You can go to the cinema, buy a ticket, buy a popcorn, and then watch ads there.

This is why you enter the theater 20 minutes after the hour that is written on the ticket

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