YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers | Hacker News Reader

YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers

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253 pointsthunderbong317 comments

Does anyone write articles that aren't just to serve a pre-existing bias anymore? You can't make the claim in the title without knowing the impact on Ad revenue at YouTube, some shuffling of installs of adblockers doesn't mean it's backfired. It's entirely likely YouTube considers it a huge success but people just write whatever they want. The same thing happened with Netflixes ad tier and password sharing mitigations, if you just read the articles you'd think the whole world cancelled their accounts! Score one for the little guy. But it's obvious from their earnings reports it's been a success.

+1 for this. It is difficult for me to imagine how this would not be a huge success for Google, given how ubiquitous ad-blockers are and how uncommon it is for people to configure them at all.

How ubiquitous are ad-blockers in the wild with normal/average people?

Anybody know roughly what percentage of users have any ad-blocker installed?

Among certain types of people that frequent HN they're probably pretty common for desktop browsers but among regular folks who don't have tech savvy kids or grandkids I'm guessing they're somewhat less common.

"As of 2021, 27% of US Internet users used ad blocking software" - Wikipedia

It'd be interesting to look at why and how that 27% started using ad blocking software.

I'm suspicious that that 27% of users is mostly made up of a specific subset of tech workers and their family and friends.

I think we'd all be surprised. My elderly parents are not tech geniuses, but between my brother (who is in IT) and I, we keep them robustly geared up with web safety software like adblockers and antivirus. And you go visit their friends in the over-55 community, and these people aren't savvy enough even so much as open an E-mail client, but somehow every one of them has at least some kind of blocker installed. This isn't the days of grandma isolated in her house on AOL. Everyone knows at least one tech wizard, and the wizards spread the gospel and help to install.

I've told a number of people to get Brave since the ads have gotten so obnoxious. Watching youtube on my smarttv makes me uncomfortable enough to switch to the laptop or phone or just go to the computer. Watching someone suffer through them on any device is just sad.

This feels like napster all over again. Slowly, but surely, everyone will skip the junk. I don't imagine tech-savvy kids of today will forget that there's workarounds in 10 years time.

> I don't imagine tech-savvy kids of today will forget that there's workarounds in 10 years time.

If the iPhone is any indication of progress, I don't think tech-savvy kids will have a choice in 10 years.

It seems unlikely all operating systems will move to the model EU regulators are working to force Apple away from. But Google will try WEI again.

Unfortunately, "all operating systems" are not actually within the scope of the bill; only designated gatekeepers. Apple recently pulled out this clause to argue that only iOS needed to adhere to the Digital Market Act. Platforms like tvOS, FireTV and Android TV aren't actually covered by it.

> But Google will try WEI again.

Why single out Google? Apple already rolled out remote attestation, and unlike Google they didn't block theirs from shipping. Regulators have no interest in WEI, as far as I'm aware.

I did not say no operating systems would have the distribution model iPhones have now. I said it was unlikely all operating systems would move to it. The commission found the Digital Markets Act covered Android, iOS, and Windows. Nearly all phones and a large majority of desktops and laptops in other words. tvOS was not covered because it was too little used and too little profitable.

Mentioning Google after you singled out iPhones did not single out Google. WEI would have been useless if Android and Windows didn't have attestation. And they can't require attestation for YouTube until Chrome supports attestation. They could if Safari didn't probably. They could say everyone must use a browser with attestation or the official YouTube app.

Do you believe Google will not try attestation in Chrome again?

Regulators not having interest in WEI will enable it. Your point is unclear.

My point is "nothing ever happens", and from a regulatory/administrative standpoint I see no reason to think things will change.

I don't like WEI, remote attestation, or Google/Apple as companies. I don't like advertising or the way YouTube and Google propagate it. Your belief that users will continue to 'hack the planet' in 10 years is pretty funny though. There is zero interest, commercial, regulatory or otherwise, to ensure users continue to have control over their web browser or software. It's that simple; the battle against WEI for free YouTube is already lost.

Screw looking at ad revenue... Even the numbers in the article don't support the claim. Theres a 30% increase in installs in one place, a concrete before and after number of uninstalls in a 2nd place, and a concrete after value for installs with no before in a 3rd place.

The quality of reporting is enough for me to blacklist the entire domain this was posted on from my search engine and browser.

Exactly, the only purpose this serves to enforce the already installed bias and feel good.

> Does anyone write articles that aren't just to serve a pre-existing bias anymore?

There never were articles that were free from bias. It's just that the bias is now overt to you.

Those are slightly different questions.

One of the stories about Theranos is that a journalist was detailed once to go talk to some happy customers and write a story about how great Theranos was. So she arrived, and she saw people waiting in line, and she said what she was there to do, and everyone waited around for a while, and then someone pulled the fire alarm and everybody left. No story.

I saw a conversation about this on HN back when Theranos was a current scandal, in which one person asked "well, isn't it suspicious that you arrive to do your puff piece, and everyone eyes each other nervously, and then there's an unscheduled fire alarm? Couldn't that have supported more investigation?" and the answer was "no, 'suspicious doings at shady company' is a different type of story from 'heroic company brings medicine to happy patients', and if you're assigned to write one of those stories you can't write the other one instead."

I don't know to what degree that last claim is true, and it seems like it'd be different at different outlets. But it's a good illustration of the difference between "article was written with a bias" and "purpose of writing the article was to serve a bias".

Everyone is biased. We are all products of our culture, with deeply held assumptions about how the world works.

Sometimes there is overt manipulation of the presentation too, like you mention. Eg writing a puff piece. This goes through the gears through to outright lying (eg "weapons of mass destruction").

Pretty much all journalism is manipulation. It doesn't even matter if they state they are impartial, eg the bbc. What they want us peoples trust, the reality (ie true impartiality, awareness of one's biases) is secondary.

It's definitely pretty tricky to try and even come up with statistics.

ublock was having issues early on, that required a laundry list of things to do to make sure youtube couldn't detect that something was up. I don't know if this has changed or not.

So rather than troubleshoot, what I did was turn it off on yotube, and install https://github.com/0x48piraj/fadblock, which isn't 100% perfect like the original ublock experience, but has been very durable against google's efforts. That said, fadblock seems to be considering a transition to some sort of paid model eventually, not sure what's going on with that.

Google may or may not believe they were successful in my case, depending on what they are looking for.

An update: updated and purged the ublock cache, and turned it back on. Seems to be working fine again.

It's interesting how the bias once favored large companies that paid for advertisements. However, now that most news outlets are subscription-based and don't want to lose subscribers, they strongly bias their content to what their readers want to read.

Probably also has to do with the fact that the large companies in question are effectively too big to fail and no longer rely on fleeting public opinion in order to retain power

Imagine how this biases political reporting and blurs the line of truth. Not only that but the division as both sides share stories about the same thing with completely different conclusions.

In fact you don't have to imagine it, it's been happening for a few years.

> Does anyone write articles that aren't just to serve a pre-existing bias anymore?

Yes, National Geographic Magazine.

In my experience, this is a company trading decades of goodwill for a quarterly boost. Usually doesn't end well in the long run.

Attention brokers don't have biases, they have markets. They produce the stories the market wants to read.

With linear video, there's a hard limit to what user-loyal ad-blocking can achieve with casual in-the-moment browsing: Google can ensure the ad's clock-time duration occurs, before they serve the main video. So, even if you're hiding the video, you're still punished by the wait, as your ad-blocker simulates an ad-watch.

So, next-gen ad-circumvention will probably help users queue vids for later watching, after a fake agent pretends to have watched the ads.

Or, be full-fledged pirate sites that pre-cache all popular videos for ad-free watching.

Youtube will already reinject ad rolls after some time span even if you keep a video paused, so full download of selected videos will probably be the way to go.

This has been my conclusion. I've spent the past few weeks polishing my yt-dlp scripts. Honestly, the experience of being able to watch any video I want offline and buffer-free is way better than the default YouTube experience. Sometimes I miss the comments section, but it is probably better for me that I don't have access to that.

It would be interesting to retrofit ActivityPub post feeds around mirrored YouTube videos.

Grayjay[0] for android does this with their 'Polycentric Id'.

All videos from multiple platforms supported by the app have a special comment section only available through grayjay. Functionality is still pretty limited, but it's refreshing to write a comment and know that it won't be picked up by a bot and shadow-banned/deleted without reason.

0 - https://grayjay.app/

I haven't tried this yet, but it the app's creation process was overseen/managed by Louis Rossmann

Yep, a while back I grabbed yt-dlp and I've been going through my bookmarks and locally archiving useful (or nostalgic) YouTube videos. My 8TB hard drive beats Google's enshittification.

I wonder if there is a market for a youtube downlod only mirror that creators can opt into, for this use case. Concurrent bandwidth requirements could be lower and no need for streaming tech. The service probably couldn't legally download from youtube and re-host, but if you made a desktop app that uploads to YT and the mirror service at the same time and mirrors the YT video ID on the mirror, that could be attractive to users.

All that said, how would such a service sustain itself? Probably ads. So really, same boat, different captain. I don't know.

Would you pay a subscription to be able to download your YT video queue?

> Would you pay a subscription to be able to download your YT video queue?

aka, buy youtube premium?

And get ads served some years later?

So cancel your premium subscription said some years later? At this hypothetical future time you’d be a lot more justified in piracy IMO, but today you don’t have much of a leg to stand on.

...which just got a 40+% price bump. And has zero guarantee that it won't have ads, doesn't remove sponsored segments, and sends a pittance to the actual creators.

It already has ads, promoted videos are still in your feed and still promoted over your own preferences, whether you pay or not. And of course it doesn't stop creators from having sponsored content.

So it already doesn't stop the ads. It just stops pre-roll ads.

Yes, but actually no.

The price has gone up while the Ads have gotten worse. I'll not support that financially. I'd rather just download it and move on.

To be clear, I get the need for ads, but in the past decade it's just gotten downright abusive, so they can keep it.

You build it around torrents and might earn the maintenance costs back with some non-intrusive ads.

I doubt that pirate sites that cache video will become popular, as they would have similar cost problems as the original youtube, but without Google's infinite pockets.

that is pretty easily solved with peer to peer

It doesn't scale to anything mainstream these days when the majority of people are on phones and laptops. Battery-powered devices that don't offer much storage nor constantly reliable internet. Smart TVs generally don't have a lot of storage either.

You can't even have it run in the background on iOS because of their background application limitations

A CDN is only expensive because it is inefficient. With bittorrent you can let end users be the infrastructure.

You also let the end users be your uplink speed, your availability, your malware delivery vectors, your customer complaint generators.

BT is not a magic bullet, it's actually pretty shitty in a lot of ways, and if it wasn't giant bandwidth hungry companies like yt and netflix would have been using it 10 years ago, along with every cdn on the planet

Giant companies don't use it because they want full control on their platform.

Neflix is still way more inefficient and resource wasteful than bitorrent but the copyright holders would never agree on not being able to control everything. Letting the user having the video is a taboo in the industry.

And yet, it's the only reason why I don't pay a subscription for film & series but also games.

I know that many don't care about that.

How many times have I re-watched Star Trek TNG? With a subscription based model I would have to pay every time I get the random urge to watch even a single episode.

And that payment isn't cheap either.

In this day and age there's a constant struggle for self reliance (or independence) and avoiding lock in.

> And that payment isn't cheap either.

It's like $6 a month.

I don't like paying for something I don't have control over either, but it's definitely affordable to pay for Paramount+ to satisfy a TNG rewatch every few months or whatever.

Netflix is $6.99 with ads. $15.49 for 1080p. $22.99 for 4K.

Only the 4K option meaningfully competes with torrents.

We were talking about Paramount+ which has all the trek shows, not Netflix.

Look just a few comments up: we were talking about Netflix. Then TNG, then Paramount+. Netflix didn't stop being relevant to the overall discussion.

The comment I replied to specifically mentioned TNG rewatches.

Paramount+ is the service that owns Star Trek.

So no, Netflix and its pricing is entirely irrelevant to my reply and the context it was made in.

You can set up a server or two with fast uplinks as users. That raises the floor for bandwidth and availability just fine.

The problem with content delivery is not the floor: it's the ceiling. A CDN requires much more than a server or two. Bittorrent does not. With bittorrent, you will never hit the ceiling, because every user that enters the room raises that ceiling for the rest.

The only reason that Netflix uses a CDN is copyright. Netflix as a platform fundamentally exists to put DRM between the content creator and the viewer. If the content creators were not interested in wrapping their content in DRM, then they would gladly share it via bittorrent. In fact, Spotify actually started as a P2P network. Once they were big enough, they switched to a CDN so that they could provide the DRM that copyright holders wanted.

The rest of your complaints are about moderation, which are also a feature of copyright. Plenty of people would gladly create trackers and forums that curate content the way you want. They don't, because that's illegal. Copyright took the most basic computing fundamental - copying files - and turned it into a black market. Get rid of copyright, and people will gladly GPG sign their torrents to eliminate the malware vector. Get rid of copyright, and people will gladly share the original raw copy of a file, or a lossy format that was encoded only once (with proof).

Hell, we already had that; except it had to be done in the form of private trackers, because just putting everything on a cheap server (to raise the floor) was too much legal liability; so the floor had to be raised by guaranteeing seeders. Now even that is gone, because the best private trackers (like WhatCD) get taken down by governments, and it's nearly impossible to coordinate a replacement in a black market.

This sounds a little too familiar to the "IPFS would work as a video service" argument that was so vehemently annihilated.

Look, I hate copyright and download my own Fair Use archives of many YouTube videos. I'm the last person who would be ideologically opposed to this. Even still, it should not be surprising why ad-subsidized CDNs are popular. YouTube "won" because it's the only platform out of everything listed that works:

- Rights-holders are happy that IP control is monopolized (eg. YouTube movies and music limitations)

- Viewers are happy to get something in return for an ad rather than sorting out an arbitrary seeding ratio

- Creators are happy that the most technical part of their publishing process is figuring out what "Drag and Drop" means

P2P systems like that break, unless you put a CDN in front of them. Once you scale to YouTube-level architecture, P2P doesn't keep scaling except when you control the major peers. At that point, you are so close to building a CDN pipeline that you might as well just do it.

> This sounds a little too familiar to the "IPFS would work as a video service" argument that was so vehemently annihilated.

Where? How? I surely never heard about it being "annihilated".

---

Did you even read my comment? I talked about rights-holders monopolizing content, and I talked about seeding ratios. Those are the problem that is holding back P2P video service, not winning at its competition.

> P2P systems like that break, unless you put a CDN in front of them.

The "CDN in front of them" need only be a server or two! That's not what CDN means at all.

A server or two? How long do you expect random youtube user #3283949382 to seed a video and tie up their outbound bandwidth to help out a multibillion dollar corporation? Most residential uplinks suck, and are a fraction of the downlink's speed, even on gigabit packages. It's annoyingly easy to saturate your uplink and because TCP depends on two way communication, not being able to send ACKs back to a server cripples your download speeds. You honestly expect your average youtube or netflix user to understand p2p, seeding, and have enough network chops to add some QOS to avoid tanking their internet connection? What about hard drive space? What about the fact most internet packages have monthly bandwidth caps? So no, they would need to have enough servers to deliver their videos on a "cold cache" because they could never rely on any user seeding their content for very long, if at all. Can 1 or two servers handle all of youtube's egress if no other peers were online? No.

And we haven't even touched on the philosophical angle where undoubtably there will be users who say something like "I don't want videos about x passing through my systems" or "director so and so is a person I decided to hate I refuse to seed their content" because that would happen sure as the rising tide.

You know that a mass amount of child porn is uploaded to youtube daily right? They have teams of humans who's jobs are to review flagged videos for kiddy porn and remove it from their systems. Do you want child porn seeded from your computers and internet connection? I don't. That's a good way to get your door kicked in by the fbi. How do you delete a file shared with bt or any other p2p protocol? You can't. It's literally impossible to delete a file once seeded out there and I sure as shit am not giving any company the ability to spread child porn using my systems nor am I giving them the ability to delete files from my systems. Do you not see the security nightmare? The legal nightmare?

p2p is great but it's entirely impractical to say it can replace cdns or pops and be as reliable for the businesses serving content, because it's not. And since youtube or netflix can't depend on any consistent performance or be able to do any future forecasting since it is all entirely out of their control, they would never do such a thing. And even if they did, as an end user, I don't want to be a free seed box for any business out there, even if they are giving me ad free viewing as "payment" for hijacking my expensive internet connection, hard drive space, cpu time, and electricity.

The choices are

an unreliable and extremely complicated mess of NICs spread across the globe with unpredictable uptime, unknown security, and slow and/or flaky uplinks, that needs to honor millions of users unique personal believes, privacy concerns, fair system use requests, and opt-outs, which expose them to be distributors of illegal materials while also putting their own user base at risk of criminal prosecution...

tightly controlled, fully owned pipelines of secure systems in datacenters with fast nics connected literally to the backbone of the internet

There is no choice here for any business trying to keep customers happy and make money, sorry.

Which the majority of end users don't want to be. Anyone on a laptop or phone don't want to be draining their battery and eating their bandwidth.

True, but they don't want to be buying Netflix dinner every month either.

End users have not been meaningfully presented the compromise. If they had, they would have more motivation to get mains-powered PCs, or even a seedbox or something.

Besides, uploading content isn't a significant hit on battery life unless you are doing it instead of suspend. Most of your battery is going into your backlight.

If it wasn't illegal to seed copyrighted content, we wouldn't need users to seed all night. We would just set up a few strategic public seedboxes instead.

We don't need a cache site, but to be able to have a shared content addressed storage.

I wish a single technology is developed for this, and then I don't mind if privates sites act as peers, I'd love to be able to share games I downloaded or videos I recently saw locally. It took Steam like 20yr to support sharing on the local network (with Google/Facebook/Netflix with no sharing in sight). I think that's insane and shows that hardware has been improving too fast in some sense.

Isn't this what IPFS promised and sorta delivered?

I'd even like to sell off those games. But the mafia, sorry lobby is too strong, to well smeared.

The bandwidth problem has already been solved by peer to peer file sharing. The only reason this solution is not widely deployed is copyright.

The lengths people will go to avoid paying content creators is pretty crazy.

I don't mind watching an ad or two for a reasonable length video. But if I click through to a 5 second video and it has a 15 second ad pre-rolled, I get annoyed. And if your site is annoying enough regularly enough, then I stop caring about whether "making things better for myself" is "in your best interest".

Hulu is a prime example of "too many ads". I just avoid watching videos on Hulu nowadays unless I have no other choice. A 24 minute video with 6 30 second ads (or whatever it is they play) is just annoying.

You can always subscribe.

You meant YouTube Premium? Is there an anonymous payment method?

No matter how many times that platitude is repeated, it doesn't help. Because lots of people won't subscribe. The business model conflicts with normal human psychology. 'Pay us to stop annoying you' causes people to go out of their way to not pay you, because you annoyed them and they are now hostile to you. Not being annoying and upselling to premium features works better if you have premium features people are prepared to pay for.

I think the ad-free content actually is the premium feature most Youtube subscribers are willing to pay for. I know I do. On the other hand I don't think Youtube cares about users that aren't even considering to pay under any circumstances. There's no point in making the service more attractive to users that will only accept free pricing.

My Verizon subscription came with a subscription to the Disney+ package, which includes Hulu. So, as such, I _am_ paying for Hulu. And ads still show up.

I'd not mind having a way to bet against my ads, just like companies showing ads do.

I bet I'm willing to pay more money than what companies showing me ads are paying whenever I see an ad, but I can't really justify the full Youtube price given I watch around 30m a month on average

YouTube itself is not much of a content creator.

Do the actual creators get to choose the ads their content is promoting?

Are the Google ads on YT are the main revenue for creators? What amount does sponsorship play for creator's overall income from hosting on YT?

The length content creators will go to waste peoples' time to extract more ad money is even crazier.

You're right. It's time the government stopped making it compulsory to watch YouTube.

Are we actually paying them? If we were, there would be some kind of payment modal somewhere, right? Or are we paying them in exposure? /s

On a more serious note, it's not like people owe creators to dedicate their eyeballs to Youtube so they can get a share of that ads money. If you want support, there are ways to ask for it and I guess if your content is interesting, people will support you.

https://www.youtube.com/premium

YouTube premium views are significant higher cpm than ads.

Yeah with you until im blasted with political ads. Ads for medication i don’t need. Ads i have seen 100 times. Back to back un skippable ads.

If people don’t want to watch the ads and “content creators” aren’t supported they will have to do something else.

I put content creators in quotes because 97% of you tube is trash content that they all steal from the few people making original things. Most of them should not make any money.

And importantly they deliberately REMOVED the ability to quickly tell if the content is trash or not (up/down numbers)

All to protect the feeling of corporates. Wasnt that done in response to the YouTube rewind and Disney trailers down votes?

Yea this holy reverence for the glorious Content Creators (praise be their name) is kind of silly. To me, YouTube has always been a place for rando people to upload silly 10 second videos of their cat, to share, without some entitled expectation of "revenue share". I used to upload videos a lot and didn't even consider making a cent from them. We should go back to that kind of YouTube and leave this "Influencers Mass Creating Content For Money" model behind.

I'm on patreon

but also revanced

Paying content creators via YouTube memberships does not remove YouTube ads from their videos.

Paying? I don't remember being charged one goddamned cent.

That’s exactly the point. People are furious about ads on YouTube, but unwilling to take the incredibly obvious step of paying for ad-free YouTube.

They profit enough from our data.

There is no way to pay for adfree YouTube. In stream promotions are ads and it is impossible to pay to block them. Yea, sponsorblock is a great alternative.

Would you prefer Youtube to prevent creators from using sponsored content in their videos? If so, where would you draw the line? Just clear in-video ads? Is it ok to review a product that was provided by the manufacturer for free?

There's a lot of gray area which seems impossible to regulate.

Personally, if a creator serves too much sponsored content I simply wont watch them any longer. Fortunately it's not a problem among my Youtube channel subscriptions.

I don't know a good solution here. At a minimum, I'd like to see youtubers forced to label their videos with an "Ad" label if they are promoting a product.

ikr?

I met YouTube’s threshold for monetization (10k views I think it was), then they changed it to 1000 subs, demonetized me (my video topics are random, one will be an interesting dashcam clip, another about a MacBook Air repair unpublished elsewhere and therefore not really “subscribable”), then a while later, they put ads on it anyway without paying me a penny.

Another rule about some minimum hours of views, but I’m at a loss since I’ll make useful 2 minute videos that skip my life story.

F that.

Meanwhile on Adsense, I started making $2/month, which motivated me to do better and started making $20/month, then $200, and for a while $2000.

Exactly this. What kind of nonsense is this X subscriber and watched hours limit? If it earns you a few bucks that's more than nothing, but creating these artificial limits should be banned outright. Plus their algo needs to be butchered down.

It's trying to encourage consistent content creation. Think of it like employee engagement.

That's why there's so many videos that have nothing to say. If you have no content to create it's better not to add to the noise.

This is why I watch maybe 4 creators total. I have the people I trust and ignore everything else; SNR is far too low.

Now it's also 3 videos in 90 days you have to publish in order to be eligible for monetization. So you can't have passive income at YouTube, you have to create a new video each month.

3000 watched hours or 3 million shorts views lol.

They want only the cream.

But dethroning the king would need an ad delivery solution, which in turn requires an affordable payment solution.

And you would need to keep it civil, because now, if you're in the EU are liable for what people upload. And then, thanks to the DSA, you have to monitor "wrong speak". How is anyone supposed to bring up a competitor with those blockers?

if you charge me $1000 per month rent and suddenly increase it to $1500 per month I will be pissed.

if you charged me $2000 per month rent and kept it the same, I wouldn't mind paying for it.

Youtube started out as free. Now, suddenly they expect me to pay for premium, I will not be happy paying for it.

On the other hand, I have no problem paying $15 per month on Netflix.

Netflix that started at $8, then jumped to $12, then to $14 and is currently at $16? While their catalog has run in the opposite direction?

0$ to 10$ is an infinity percent increase in price, while 14$ to 16$ is not that much.

4K Netflix is $23/mo now. 4K is what you should be comparing it to given that’s what you get with YouTube Premium.

There's a story about this with the Red Cross and doughnuts: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...

Also got posted here a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23104875

The internet was built by a small community of people who wanted information to be free. Now it’s all about profiteering.

I’ll always want info, but will never pay. I have complex psychological models about platforms that selectively curate specific content.

Even Veratasium recently had a video demonetized because he included factual historical information about a suicide.

> Now it’s all about profiteering.

Unfortunately, the people who make content need to eat too.

Demonization only exists because YouTube is beholden to advertisers. If most people subscribed, it wouldn't be a problem.

I can’t help but think that being a full time YouTuber is a major risk.

It’s appealing by nature, and there’s a lot of wonderful content, but there is also a large power imbalance between the creators and the corporation.

I pay many different creators for what they produce. I refuse to watch ads.

I do as well. I find the best way to do this is YT Premium.

Actually it's the other way round.

Content creators only get something if they have more than 1000 subscribers and are currently active.

More than 90% of the content I watch on YouTube has been uploaded years ago, and was provided to YouTube FOR FREE by the "content creator". And back then in exchange you could watch those videos ad-free, too.

Then Google has changed the rules of the game in a dirty way. People who have provided the content during the last 18 years aren't paid, it's Google pocketing the ad revenue.

I am more than willing to pay for Netflix, where original content paid for by the streaming service is provided.

But I am NOT willing to pay $14 to be able to watch a 15 year old 5 minutes clip on YouTube ad-free, that was provided to them free of charge.

I would be willing to pay something to cover their traffic cost. Maybe $3 per month or so.

I agree but also if Google didn't host those old videos, you wouldn't be able to watch them unless you have downloaded them and stored on some long term storage solution.

One could also say that YouTube is part of the cultural heritage of the world, and since Google or rather Alphabet had a money printing machine, this content should be freely available to anyone.

Recently they've pushed annoying in page ads on my Adsense sites, despite them being disabled. Soon I'll have to either add a cookie wall or not have ads served in EMEA & UK.

Alphabet knows that its business model is in danger. Closed off spaces like Facebook or Discord are where people hang out. The forum culture has been condensed into Reddit and a few minor forums. Blogs are all SEO trash with content like the 7 best xyz you never knew existed or "he went out into the garden and then he saw..."

In any case, there are too many ads on YouTube and I'm not paying, especially because they make it hard to download the content off YouTube, actively hindering, slowing yt-dl (I know other solutions exist, cat mouse game). So yeah, they know of the value of that content.

The real question is, why is egress so expensive?

I fully agree to the sentiment that YouTube is part of the cultural heritage of the world.

Frankly, if Google would be taking it down, or start deleting all that old content where copyright ownership is unclear, we would lose one of the biggest archived on video history.

A radical way would be to split YouTube into the "archives" part, run by a non-profit, and the "new videos where content creators are paid" commercial site.

I don't think egress is expensive. After all, with a couple of exceptions they have neutral peerings with pretty much any ISP on this planet. And the ~$30B of revenue should be more than enough to handle storage and traffic cost.

AFAIK Google does not list the actual profits that YouTube makes, but I'd assume it's a very very profitable business - again, if you compare this to Netflix, Disney+ etc, who all have producing original content as the highest cost item on their balance sheets, they must be a pretty nice position.

So anyway, as said: I am willing to pay for original content that YouTube themselves are paying for. But I am not willing to pay for anything that was and is provided for free to them.

> More than 90% of the content I watch on YouTube has been uploaded years ago, and was provided to YouTube FOR FREE by the "content creator".

Unfortunately, I don't think this is a normal usecase. The common default usecase is people are following large content creators and watch fairy modern videos.

Also, you're missing an important point. They are hosted and served for free, as well. While it's not that much cost to host and serve a single video, YT has to host and serve years and years of user generated content. You're paying for the fact that they don't have an aggressive retention policy and videos that old are indexed, stored and served, almost instantly.

Google used to have text ads on the side of search. Relevant ads. I don’t mind those. Give me those and I’ll remove my ad blocker.

I have yt premium, videos have ads//sponsored content. I don’t want to see those. Luckily I can still skip those, but I have no doubt that they’ll make that impossible at a certain point.

I don’t want nordvpn, athletic greens, or whatever is paying the most these days

No one is paying content creators on YouTube, honestly at this point that sentiment is misinformation. Google is the one who has a business relationship with content creators… how and how much they get paid is not our concern.

Honestly, Google should be paying me to get their creators’ content in front of my eyeballs, most of which contains some form of disguised or stealth marketing, or sponsored content, sponsored products, etc.

Google makes their content streams available to watch for free. It’s my own damned right to decide which streams I want to watch. Otherwise they should hide it behind a paywall.

This is without even touching on the topic of how Google exploits and abuses their relationship with content creators (BS copyright system, demonetization, etc), and the fact that the majority of the ads are scams, frauds, political misinformation, etc.

you only need to cache long enough for the ads to play, so you can start playing right away, and still download from youtube save bandwidth

No there isn't any such hard limit. People said the same thing about twitch, and now twitch adblockers use proxies for uninterupted live ad free viewing. It just works.

> So, even if you're hiding the video, you're still punished by the wait, as your ad-blocker simulates an ad-watch.

This is what happens in the TV app (or at least on my old tv) when the adserver legitimately times out.

The solution (from YouTube’s pov) is of course super simple and we all pray the engineers at Google don’t think about it: inject the ad into the video stream.

Well, the benefit then is that crowdsourced tools can skip directly over portions of the video. I already use an app called sponsor block that skips in video sponsored sections.

Not if it’s randomised. However that would make the video stream harder to cache.

That just moves the battle into identifying the ads when they play and then skipping over them and updating and maintaining the ad-identifier database. And heuristics/ML can probably be used to identify likely unknown ads.

You could probably detect 95% of randomly-inserted ads by just looking at 1. the abrupt change in audio volume and 2. a material change in some visual "fingerprint" of the video scene. If I'm watching Mister Influencer walking around outside talking with their face framed in the middle of the shot, and then all of a sudden, mid-stream, the audio gets 15% louder and the video changes to a meadow to advertise Tide detergent, that can be reliably detected without even ML.

Regardless of the 95% accuracy claim, I think this would cause to many false positives to be usable. Cuts that change visiual content and audio volume exist in original content, too.

> the engineers at Google don’t think about it

It’s an almost certainty that they’ve thought of it. This has been a worry for at least over a decade. So there must be some reason they “can’t” or don’t want to. Such as getting more valuable interaction data otherwise.

I would imagine it would be computationally untenable because it would mean the videos have to be re-encoded every time the ads need to be changed, which would be frequent enough to be very expensive. Plus, I'm not sure if they keep the original videos stored somewhere to re-use as a source to prevent degradation from re-encoding.

i would imagine the video stream is spliced, such that the ad video stream is spliced into an existing pre-encoded video stream, may be between some keyframes or some such.

This is how most livestreams works today - you have separate chunks of video streams that are spliced together.

The only real problem is if the end user can detect (reliably) where a splice _could_ happen, they can just ignore the spliced video. This is what some old twitch adblocking methods did iirc - and just show a blank screen.

But the videos are streamed to the users. So on the backend the could switch source back and forth and feed everything through the same endpoint

Nope. Look up HLS or DASH.

> So there must be some reason they … don’t want to.

…Starting with the fact that it would no longer be user-generated content that provides Google with Section 230 protection.

The toothless section 230... Will they ever get that particular hammer out of its case?

An even "better" solution would be to bake the ads into the video stream at random intervals, to prevent something like SponsorBlock but for ads.

Even a black screen for 30 seconds is better than 30 seconds of an ad. It'll be like watching cable where you mute or start channel surfing during commercial breaks.

If I had a program that would mute the ad and automatically skip it while I am listening with bluetooth headphones in the other room, I wouldn't even mind the short wait! I just can't walk away and listen to youtube on my desktop because of the ads, it's super annoying.

Does anyone know of something for linux/firefox that would do this? Thanks!

> So, even if you're hiding the video, you're still punished by the wait, as your ad-blocker simulates an ad-watch.

I would gladly accept a pause instead of an ad. I needed to stop using the android TV device because of how many ads they were pushing on 10-minute videos. It was too distracting. It just made me stop using YouTube completely on that device. No content is worth so many ads. Nothing.

Now I am only using the laptop, where some kind of ad blocker still works.

Have you tried SmartTube? https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube

I use it, and while it's less polished than the official YouTube app, the ad blocking definitely works.

YouTube should offer ad-free videos that have the ad fees paid ahead of time by the account that posted the video. Videos could be made to be ad-free for certain areas, demographics, etc. to maximize viewers as needed.

In this way the video effectively becomes the ad and the viewer doesn't have any interest in blocking it.

"If you're looking alternatives, extensions like uBlock Origin still work when used on Firefox.

There's also the option of biting the bullet and paying for YouTube Premium."

Let's see. (a) Use Firefox when watching YouTube or (b) pay money to the company that is the source of the problem, in order to keep using a browser they designed to support surveilance advertising services, where the terms allow the company to keep collecting data about you. Difficult choice.

(c) pay money to the company that spends extraordinary amounts of money to host and serve you these videos while simultaneously paying creators, carrying the creator economy, helping companies advertise their products and recommending you videos you may like, while giving you the ability to watch these video from any browser of your choice.

(d) pay for Nebula, which is run by creators for creators, and get ad-free content (including sponsorships removed from the videos) while simultaneously supporting the development of smaller YouTube alternatives rather than feeding the beast.

I signed up for a one year Nebula subscription after one of my favorite YouTubers posted a discount link. I wanted to support him, and I found the price to be fair. In the few months I’ve been subscribed, I’ve found that the library is much much smaller than I’ve expected. I knew it wouldn’t be YouTube, but I did expect a bit more. The other big pinchpoint I’ve found with Nebula is the lack of comments. Yes, certain parts of YouTube have been known in the past to have a pretty toxic comment section, but the content I watch tends to have valuable, constructive comments that I look forward to reading. Nebula does not support comments at all, and I think that’s by design. Even if they supported comments, I doubt it has enough momentum to have valuable discussions at this point.

If you care enough about someone's videos to have discussions about them, something like Discord seems like a much better platform for those discussions than a video's comments section. The value of YouTube comments is the ability to easily link to specific mm:ss timestamps, and that could be had with a chat service that creates a thread for each video and auto-links text of the form mm:ss (as well as a "copy video link with timestamp" option on the video host).

I don't know. Saying Discord, a chronological text service, is a good replacement for YouTube comments is like saying Matrix would replace Hacker News.

The main advantage of YouTube comments is being able to gauge the temperature of a video. If the top comment's bad, the video probably isn't great. Combine that with dislikes and you have a semi-decent QC system.

(re: dislikes, Return YouTube Dislikes is a great extension.)

If the top comment is bad, the video author probably doesn't delete comments.

What is your point? They didn't say the video is good if the top comment is good.

I had a similar experience with their small library. I honestly had no need to subscribe for a second month because there was nothing left to watch.

I pay people who make videos (and various other creative folks) directly. I don't want to help companies advertise their products, and "recommendations" are garbage that I literally never want. Just show me my subscribed channels in chronological order and nothing else.

I agree with you. And as a webmaster, am amazed at what YouTube must spend on bandwidth. But just yesterday the CEO and Founder of Cloudflare commented on HN: “At scale, bandwidth is effectively free.”

He’s no dummy. Which is it?

Same as renting vs owning. Eventually you become the company laying the undersea cables and incremental increase in bandwidth utilisation effectively costs zero but you still have to pay to own and maintain all this infra.

The cost isn't just bandwidth, but also:

- infrastructure (memory, CPU, disks...): all of which must deal with the huge amounts of data they manage (500+ hours of video uploaded every minute).

- personnel cost (developers, SREs...) (almost) all of whom have substantial salaries that support the gigantic scale (1 billion+ hours of content viewed every day)

It's astonishing to me how seldom this point is acknowledged by people who I otherwise judge to be intelligent and well-informed.

The company, which has never hid that it is a commercial enterprise and not a charity, offers two options for users to pay to view its content: with their cash, or with their attention. The result? Endless bitterness for not providing said content completely free.

Ironically the most tremulous bitterness comes from people who go to work each day at companies just like this company, and who expect to be compensated for the value they provide.

Yep.

Then instead of a boycott or avoiding YT - a herculean amount of time and effort is spent trying to find ways to still use YT.

"They're bad. They're evil. Ads are unethical.", followed by /me plays next video

If someone objected to the way electricity is generated, would you demand they live without electricity to prove their sincerity?

YT worked hard to become a monopoly, so they should accept the limitations and pushback that comes with being a monopoly. (IOW, as a monopoly they shouldn't be allowed to say: these are our terms, take it or leave it.)

you will never fight the libertarian mindset on hacker news, you argue about monopolies and they just hear "winners"

People would have to agree they were monopolies first to even argue about that.

Please explain to me how YouTube is the sole supplier of a good or service and how they use high barriers of entry to prevent potential competitors from joining? How do Vimeo, Dailymotion, TikTok, Twitch, Rumble, etc continue to exist?

It's a monopoly to the users, when a source of crucial information (say, a politicians' declaration) is only made available on Youtube.

It may not be to the market, because the politicians could have hosted that declaration video elsewhere but that's not the users' concern. They could ask owners to post their videos elsewhere, but that's not the users' choice.

How is that YouTubes fault?

The politicians are putting the information in the wrong place. Why not fix that?

Is YouTube a monopoly?

I must disagree.

In antitrust terms, a company doesn't have to be the only one that exists to be a monopoly.

Microsoft was ruled a monopoly in United States v. Microsoft Corp despite the existence of Linux, BSD, Solaris, and other alternatives.

The FTC is currently accusing Amazon of being an unlawful monopoly despite the existence of thousands of small competitors.

Meh. Argument about company rights to be asshole works only until this company becomes monopoly.

What part of charging for content makes them an "asshole"?

I also think you're using the term "monopoly" incredibly loosely. I could host a video on my laptop right now, if I could be bothered setting up dynamic DNS and didn't expect much traffic. I could probably host it on my phone (certainly after jailbreaking it).

You deliberatily twisted my comment, which means that you understanded my point, but don't want to discuss it and just want to attack it.

Please express you dissatisfaction in a more constructive way. Please take part in discussion and be civil.

>You deliberatily twisted my comment

I genuinely have no idea how you could come to this conclusion. What part of your original comment do you feel I "twisted"?

>Please take part in discussion and be civil.

What part of my comment was uncivil?

No part of charging for content makes someone an asshole.

The part where your service is de facto the globally monopolistic video delivery and discovery platform, with nearly every creator being, more likely than not, present exclusively on your service (short of influencer mills like TikTok/Instagram), is the part that makes you an asshole if your enforce ads.

I think there's a legitimate debate to be had about whether YouTube is a monopoly (I don't consider it to be), but how can you claim that it "enforces" ads when they provide the option of buying YouTube Premium instead?

Assuming for the moment that it is a monopoly, to claim that YouTube is behaving badly, I think you would have to claim that both of its options (viewing with ads, viewing without ads and paying for YouTube Premium) were unfair, e.g., because the price of Premium is too high. But that is an argument that I never see being made. Is that the argument you are making?

They spent extraordinary amounts of money to capture the market and drive competitors out of business. It's called predatory pricing and it should be punished, not rewarded.

Pay money to a surveillance capitalism company to segment yourself into the "has disposable income and is willing to spend it" category of the market, driving the value of your attention even higher!

What the hell is a "creator economy".

A website full of so-called content that the website operator did not produce, which for the website operator, a trillion dollar advertising company, serves one purpose: as bait for ad targets.

Would this be an example of YouTube "creators"

https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-obituary-pirates/

In addition to better adblockers, I also learned how to use them better. For example, to update ublock origin's filter lists (which I now do every few days), click the ublock chrome addon icon (top right) -> cog icon -> 'update'.

I also never knew there were sites that give you exactly the same youtube videos, but without ads (and improved privacy).

One such site is called 'invidious'. I made a very basic chrome addon that places the invidious link right next to the actual (youtube) link, so now if youtube blocks me, it's only ctrl + click to watch the same video ad-free. https://github.com/stevecondylios/invidious-linker#invidious...

Install a better browser too. Use Firefox. uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Ad-nauseum is open source and based on Unlock Origin. It works on both Firefox and Chrome, but not available in the Chrome store so it has to be installed as an unpacked extension. Opera is miles better than vanilla Chrome and Ad-nauseum is available in their webstore as well.

HN: Sustaining yourself with ads is a dying business model!

also HN: Of course I won't pay any money, how dare you!

Go ahead, try and make it into this crusade to make the internet better. At the end of the day, you're justifying taking money from creators instead of paying (with ads or premium). You make software dev money, grow up.

did you just build an imaginary opponent that you could strike down?

I use HN and I pay for YT premium so at least part of your assumptions are wrong

I decided to make my own top level comment instead of arguing with 10 people individually. But you’re right, it was hyperbole.

I prefer to redistribute the savings I get from ad-blocking(vs premium -Youtube is completely unusable with ads) to smaller creators via patreon.

I honestly couldn't care less about the huge youtubers. They're usually quite diversified and tend to also have a good chunk of die hard fans that practically shove money down their throats. They also get paid a lot more for sponsorships. They'll be fine.

Smaller creators really need the little ad revenue they get. And they have to work really hard for it too. So I actually do feel bad about blocking ads in those cases, and whenever possible I find other ways to send them some money.

You forgot 'modern advertising is non-consensual psychological manipulation and should be illegal'. Maybe if we decided to not allow our minds to be polluted for other's profit, the business model would collapse and allow a better one to replace it. One that actually rewarded creators rather than offer a minority table scraps.

Okay you’re still just justifying not paying for something though. If you pay for Premium, you’re not subjected to ads and the creators get paid.

Is Youtube still collecting data to refine Premium users marketing profile and use that data on other Google properties?

During this debacle I did discover SponsorBlock - https://sponsor.ajay.app/

This is different from YouTube platform ad-blocking, instead it is crowd-sourced auto-skip of in-video sponsorship messages etc. Quite configurable, really appreciating it so far.

It's a killer feature of YouTube Re-Vanced and was also in YouTube Vanced before that was shuttered.

I'm Firefox user and I do have adblockers installed, but on youtube I have them disabled since they are threttening to ban users with adblockers. Now I read some people still got banned (even in this thread) and that makes me thinking I'm glad I'm not using youtube much anymore, and moved most of my stuff from google in case their algorithms decide I have to be banned.

Regarding ads quality, I have 2 channels I check for new videos every now and then. One of the channels includes their own ads (they sell merch related to their content)- for that reason I don't care much about ads Youtube wants me to see, I have already watched creator's add and I'm actually visiting their online shop to look around for gift ideas. The other channel's videos are mostly demonetized, so I don't watch adds there. The channel runs patreon link so I still have a way to pay for content if I feel it's worth the price..

In another HN thread, someone said that the playback speed for the ads is the same as for the videos. This makes it seem like an easy workaround (for now) is to use an extension that allows arbitrarily fast playback. When an ad appears, hit the 'increase speed' button half a dozen times, and it'll be over in a few seconds.

Of course, this may end up being a game of cat and mouse, but it might be uncommon enough for YT to never end up blocking it.

Does uBlock Origin bypass YouTube Anti-Adblock? This website will tell you.

https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/

> Does uBlock Origin bypass YouTube Anti-Adblock? This website will tell you.

> https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/

I don't know what it is about this link that I love so much but thanks for sharing.

Have been a uBlock Origin user for many, many years. While I wouldn't want a dashboard (of sorts) for all my extensions, I am thrilled to have one for this one vital piece of software.

I’ve been using YouTube way less since they did this. I watch YouTube on 3 devices; iPhone, iPad and my desktop. On two of those I’m already forced to watch ads, and I accepted it. Now besides the ads content creators already put in their videos, I’m also being forced to watch at least 4 ads in a 10 minute video.

I get that they’re not going for user experience with the ad milking, but how many people will just give up on YouTube, like me. Or do the forced ads just make up for the people leaving?

Less people is fine. People who watch for free (with ad blockers) technically cost more than if they just leave.

I guarantee most people will either shell out for YT premium or just keep watching with the ads.

People who watch ads > people who pay for YT premium > people who don’t use YouTube > people who use adblockers on YouTube.

Fewer people is only fine if they watch for free with ad blockers. If people who don't use ad blockers start leaving because of proliferation of ads then problems will arise.

I've also dropped Youtube (for now!).

This experience has been the single most effective mechanism I've encountered for preventing my occasional late night, low energy YouTube doom scrolling.

What difference does it make if you stay or leave? You never contributed any revenue anyway. That’s the whole point.

Does YouTube not make money of all the ads I watched?

In the short term, there will be ways around Youtube's ad technology. But in the not too distant future, it will be painful enough to not really be viable for the vast majority of people.

If we truly want a way to reward content creators, and avoid the rent-seeking and privacy disrespecting behavior of Google, a much larger conversation really needs to be had. They enjoy a very strong first mover advantage, coupled with the benefit of almost insurmountable network-effects.

There's no obvious answer.

Not exactly first mover : they bought YouTube (and let Google Video to die).

I'm not aware of anything they created in-house that was ultimately successful, other than the original search engine. But YouTube does have first mover advantage, even if it wasn't owned by Google at the time.

Anyone else see that the embed API seems to get out of Ads scott-free? I was banned from watching videos on youtube.com proper for a bit (they’ve since given up // uBlockOrigin improved), but on my website that embeds arbitrary videos there’s never any ads presented, even with blockers disabled.

Honestly it’s a bit of a bummer - I’d like for the original content creators I’m “proxying” to have the potential to be compensated.

Advertisers don't like appearing on random webpages.

So is there anything to stop an adblocker from simply redirecting you to a proxy site with an embed?

A significant number of videos are disabled from embedded play

Perhaps, but I've yet to encounter one.

Newpipe, a YouTube-like website :facepalm:

(I can't believe no one made a remark about that yet)

Anecdotally, I was hit by the Youtube clampdown on Ad-Blockers and it worked. I couldn't watch without disabling my blockers. My workaround strategy then became to open the link I wanted to view in a private (Firefox) window where I wasn't logged in to my Youtube account. It was inconvenient, but it did the trick for my needs.

Now, in the last five days, I am no longer being stopped by Youtube's message when clicking on videos. As if the entire initiative has gone away.

Has anyone else experienced this turn of events?

One theory is that one or several of my ad-blockers (Ghostery, UBlock Origin, Enhancer) have since implemented a workaround that defeats Google, but I have yet to do any serious tests.

I worry that the arms race will continue, and eventually Google will activate the nuclear option: ban somebody’s google account for ad blocking on YouTube.

It just doesn’t seem worth it. Youtube mostly hosts bottom of the barrel garbage anyway. Why stick around?

I was reading here posts of people who lost their google account (can't remember url) and when I have first seen it I moved everything away from google and from other huge email providers- I don't want to live in world where I have to be affraid of loosing something for using a browser plugin...

I don't access Youtube with a Google account so I wouldn't be impacted. I'd actually like that move actually, as it would certainly foster some alternatives to Youtube (e.g PeerTube), as most owners post their content on Youtube only because it's just free and the most popular video website.

Client side ads clearly don't work. It's a matter of time until YouTube DRMs everything or puts the ads in the video stream itself like Twitch.

But they can't send me different ads than you if they put the ads in the video stream, ie, it'll screw up their targeting I think.

Video stream doesn't have to be static.

Dynamic ad insertion means that the ad will be stitch to the video dynamically. For the same piece of content you and I request, the ad being shown to you and me could be drastically different. Google IMA SDK can do that.

https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/6147120?hl=en

On Twitch it still blocks the ads, you just have to wait until they finish streaming. Waiting beats being mind raped by ads so it's still a great experience.

try TTV LOL Pro, it uses proxies to display the stream during the ad play so you don't even get interrupted.

Nice!

It's funny, people are talking about YouTube, but for me it's the opposite : uMatrix stopped working for YouTube ads years ago, meanwhile I hadn't seen Twitch ads for years. Then coming back to Twitch a few days ago, I started seeing Twitch ads again - I wonder what changed ??

Then you scrub forward like tivo

What about using a proxy, and rewriting the YouTube api response as a means of an ad blocker? Zero second ad clips.

Is anyone trying this approach?

Detail more how you think it could work.

Just attempted to look at the YouTube ssl api requests using Charles proxy.

Looks like their app uses certificate pinning, so this approach won’t work.

I wonder why nobody posted it here.

LibRedirect: A browser extension that redirects YouTube, Twitter, TikTok... requests to alternative privacy friendly frontends and backends.

https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect

Like clockwork, each time an article like this one is published, individuals emerge to pressure others into watching advertisements with remarks like "poor trillion dollar corporation," label them as "entitled" for not wanting to invest time in continuous ads (bearing in mind that time only moves forward and can't be reclaimed), or assert that paying for a premium subscription is not a significant expense. It could be $1 for all I care.

Let us commence from the beginning. Perhaps not all of Hacker News' user base came online when the internet was still characterized by freedom and openness, and "content" was created to share information, whether accurate or not, or simply for entertainment. This state of affairs persisted for a few years during YouTube's early days, but the situation began to deteriorate around 2010. From 1997 to 2009, one could argue that the internet was, to a large extent, a tolerable place to be.

The aggressive monetization and profiling tactics pursued by the mega-corporations that have tightly gripped the internet, driven by the unrelenting pursuit of endless year-over-year growth, have turned the internet into a breeding ground for scams and content designed to evoke manipulable emotional responses such as anger, sadness, and regret.

I am unwavering in my refusal to tolerate advertisements, whether in videos, music, or on websites, regardless of how vigorously these companies or their supporters attempt to persuade people to sink more of their time passively being bombarded with ads. Even engaging in debates with these individuals serves their purpose because, like Jehovah's Witnesses, their objective is to shift the argument and move the goalposts until they can declare victory, or gain the moral high ground defending the trillion-dollar corp.

For me, YouTube is a pastime, not a profession or a job. If beer money can be derived from it, that's wonderful. Nowadays, most YouTubers feature videos with non-skippable ads inserted by Google, run Patreon campaigns for direct support, sell merchandise, and include sponsored segments within their videos. I only realized the extent of this when I used SponsorBlock for a couple of years, and its API failed a few days ago.

Google does not require my financial support, and I have no intention of squandering my valuable time on their unskippable advertising. Nor do I wish to be profiled by them. If they are truly facing financial difficulties, they can reduce their relentless year-on-year growth. A well-established, consistently profitable company can support families without exploiting the user base. I feel no guilt in employing every means at my disposal to counteract their ceaseless efforts to make the internet a less enjoyable place: it's my device, and my rules.

The day Google demands payment for its services similar to Netflix, I will simply cease using it altogether. Until then, I remain indifferent to the opinions of internet strangers or corporate advocates who label me as "entitled"—their words hold no sway over me. I will continue to pursue my course of action and assist those who share the same stance. You are free to disable your ad-blockers and subscribe to the premium service if you so choose. I will not, and I will support (to me) worthy content creators on Patreon where applicable. Google shan't see nor earn no money from me.

Now, for those who find themselves entangled in this bog and wish to eliminate ads:

* Firefox, Chromium etc: µblock origin [0] + SponsorBlock [1]

* Safari: Invidious [2] and Piped [3]

* iOS (no jailbreak needed): uYouPlus [4], uYouExtra [5], Yattee [6]

* Android: ReVanced [7], GrayJay [8]

* Android TV / Shield / FireTV / FireStick: SmartTube [9]

* webOS (LG TV): dev mode + sideload [10]

My own setup: µblock origin on Firefox in Windows, Piped on macOS, uYouPlus on iOS, SmartTube on a FireStick for the LG C2. SponsorBlock is either directly and natively integrated or enabled separately where needed.

[0] https://redd.it/17j6ygs

[1] https://sponsor.ajay.app

[2] https://api.invidious.io

[3] https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/wiki/Instances

[4] https://github.com/qnblackcat/uYouPlus

[5] https://github.com/arichorn/uYouPlusExtra

[6] https://github.com/yattee/yattee

[7] https://revanced.app

[8] https://grayjay.app

[9] https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube

[10] https://github.com/webosbrew/dev-manager-desktop

I do feel the nostalgia, I do remember early internet and I do miss it too. I must be getting old.

Push for poisoning your profile with Ad Nauseum in Firefox over UBlock. Unique extensions can only be used to profile in browsers that are already tracking everything you look at anyway.

Wow that's a lot of words to justify the thing you were already doing. How about this, "I use adblock because I don't wanna see ads"

Why does it have to be this profound thing? I pay for YT Premium but I'm not going to judge others who don't want to.

Nice try deviating the discussion

You’re stealing money from people who create the content you watch. There’s nothing noble about parasitic behavior and no one is fooled by your deflection to make it about a trillion dollar company.

don't care, ask Google to share more of their yearly trillion dollar revenue

Is it stealing to switch channel when TV broadcasts ads?

Personally, I go to the public library to steal content.

Great! Get your videos from the library then.

TV ads don’t pay per impression.

Is it stealing when ads broadcadter gets the impression and you do not see the advert?

Another thought, if I watch the video including ads, but while wathing it I saved the recording (without adds) so I can watch it again multiple times, would you label this as stealing?

Asking from curiosity, I'd rather not visit the website if they'd accused me of being a thief..

I've noticed the same two or three HN usernames pushing YouTube Premium in several of these discussions now. It's almost like a coordinated effort.

>YouTube’s efforts to stop ad blockers could result in more complex blocking tactics. These more complex tactics could lead to the creation of unintentional security holes.

Just say that you want to leach from the website and not pay for it. Trying to tell YouTube to not bypass ad blockers because it would make YouTube less secure is pure coping.

I have absolutely no shame in leaching off a company with a 1.62 trillion market cap.

How do you balance that ethically against the content creators who have decidedly smaller market caps? I’m not judging by the way I’m just curious your thought process.

I donate to them directly. Zelle, Venmo, Patreon, whatever can get them fiat.

I can only speak for myself, but there's a strong chance most content consumers don't weight heavily towards a content creator's livelihood. While I recognize that it's significant work to be a content creator, I also don't necessarily hold it as high as any other 9-5 job. As a result, my ethnical scale weighs heavily against the ad-sponsored profit machines - 1T MegaCo, or YouTube channels pushing products.

For the creators who I do extract definitive value from (how-tos, DIY, teachers, etc), I'll donate directly or subscribe to a Patreon for a bit of time.

I don't think Patreon is an effective solution. People only have a limited Patreon budget and I'm sure it skews towards large YouTubers and is pretty winner take all.

There's a three way ecosystem: the content creator, Google and the consumer. Money can only enter the system through either ads or premium subscriptions.

Other parties involved:

* Patreon (already mentioned, money definitely enters the system through here)

* Sponsors (VPNs, CuriosityStream, Brilliant, etc.)

* Nebula (a premium subscription for a non-Google service)

* Merch companies

* Book sales

Google would love for you to think it's a three-way system and they're the one and only middle-man who can help you to fund creators you like, but it's completely and totally false. Pushing their monopolistic line as if it were the truth does nothing to help the creators, it only helps Google.

Patreon = video consumer pays

Sponsers = another word for advertisers

Nebula = consumer pays again (similar to yt premium)

The only exceptions are merch and book sales, which only a small amount of big YouTubers have access to.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could pay a monthly subscription, and any video you viewed gave the creators a small fraction?

You're moving the goalposts. I was replying to this:

> There's a three way ecosystem: the content creator, Google and the consumer.

Patreon is a different company than Google. So is Nebula. Sponsors pay the creator directly and don't go through Google.

> Wouldn't it be nice if you could pay a monthly subscription, and any video you viewed gave the creators a small fraction?

Yes, and I'm very happy with my Nebula subscription, thank you very much. It's nice to know that I'm contributing to creators without contributing to the centralization of the web.

Sorry, I realized I was wrong with my initial comment. It's actually a 4 party system: the content consumers + ad companies on one side, with the platform and content creators on the other.

But yes, I think we are in agreement overall. If the money can't flow in through ads, the consumers need to pay the platforms and creators directly.

Direct donations are a much, much better way to engage and support creators. The marginal Youtube view is worth ~$0 and relying on views for ad impressions skews incentives toward clickbait.

Clickbait aka good marketing is always going to be important regardless of the monetization model for a video creator.

So how much did you donate last month to your favorite creators?

Content creators make quite a lot more money through their YouTube Premium viewers than through their ad-sponsored viewers; so, if they don't have a patreon or merch, YouTube Premium is the best way to support them.

personally what I do is consider all of the non-profit material that has been uploaded to youtube gratis that they've decided to profit off of in various different ways, even though they have had no part in the cost or creation of the material.

I suppose the same way a company makes trillions stealing and reselling personal data of billions of people.

I support the content creators I care about directly (or as directly as possible through services like Patreon or ko-fi. Others I might consume the content of but it is by no means deemed important to me. Even a one off $5 payment is more than they'd ever make off of me via ad revenue even if I watch every video on their channel for years.

I host a lot of things out of pocket with the sole intention being to share them - not to profit off of them. I recognize that this is a privilege not everyone has but the internet was much better off when the incentive to create content was to share with other people even of it was at a personal loss. Now the incentive is what can go viral, get the most clicks, and be just clickbaity enough that people keep clicking but not clickbaity enough that people stop clicking. No thank you. If that is what the internet is I'd rather it die off so I don't really care if I'm contributing towards it dying or not.

Content creators are being compensated increasingly through alternative means like Patreon, Nebula, sponsorships, merchandise, etc.

Being a youtuber is a hobby, not a job. They do not deserve to be paid.

You aren't a real person, and don't deserve opinions.

My grandfather always said - "Bold assertions dismissing other people as unworthy will get you everywhere in life, you ungrateful little shit - that's all the birthday present you deserve".

I'm a CEO, my opinion decides whether my workers can feed their families this month

Your workers decide if your business continues to exist.

Why not? And what's the threshold where you would feel shame?

Speaking candidly, somewhere between 50M revenue and 250B. The higher the revenue, the higher standard I hold them to.

>Just say that you want to leach from the website and not pay for it.

I'm tired of hearing this.

I use ad blockers, but I still had to sit through the "Wait 5 seconds to click through this ad" stuff. Then, it went up to like 30 seconds after you clicked through some ads. After a few more of those, it would escalate to not being able to click through the ad at all - you had to watch it in full before whatever you wanted to see. After a few further views, you then had to watch two ads before proceeding.

And you know what? I didn't mind that at all. That's how YT makes money, so whatever.

And then last week they told me to fuck off because I used an ad blocker that still let their ads through. So, now I mind. Fuck that.

Edit: Between this and WEI, it's hard not to see this as a part of a broader user-hostile plan from Alphabet.

Even if you were to pay for premium and thus "get rid of ads", there are still ads that show up. YouTube shopping widgets [0] still appear, as do creator posted ads.

[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/13376398

That's adjusted in the price, at least in my country (India) it's pretty cheap and I like how the vast majority is able to access all the content for free since it's ad supported. It has made a huge difference in many people's lives.

So does Wikipedia. And at one point, I was able to download the whole thing on my computer because I was online only for few hours a day. I'm not seeing Wikipedia asking to disable any adblockers.

Wikipedia is a non profit and runs on donations. Static text vs YouTube scale service are also very very different in costs. That tutorial on internet is free, I can download the whole thing on my computer, why is that 5 years university degree program charging fees?

Yeah if I'd pay for premium I'd want something like sponsorblock to be included by default.

There is a real test of principles-vs-self interest in topics like this one. YouTube is a free site that offers a free service. They owe the rest of us nothing. They were never running the site to be a charity for users.

I get people using YouTube. I get people not using YouTube. People getting angry with YouTube for experimenting with their advertising strategy, however, does not flow from honourable principle-based reasoning.

Honourable? I was watching ads, I was doing what they asked. Then they decided that I get to see no content just because an ad blocker - one that was letting their ads through - was installed.

That's not honourable, that's over the line.

Do you feel like the decision makers at Google are acting on honourable principle-based reasoning?

Choosing principles after assessing the person you're dealing with is also avoiding honourable principle-based reasoning.

The thing about principles is they depend on the person, not the Google.

Personally I'm watching news coverage of several current events which Youtube is severely censoring by demonetizing anyone that uses clear language and unblurred video. Smaller creators keep getting banned without knowing why, just for talking about these subjects. This cannot help but provide forceful editorial direction given the events in question.

When ads do get through, the content has fallen into a rut where I'm exclusively viewing anti-trans hate group ads or anti-Palestinian hate group ads.

ContentID has rendered fair use discussion of popular media almost impossible; While a creator discusses how much they liked a scene in a film, my eyes are being shown half-second clips from OTHER FILMS or from stock footage.

That's not what I agreed to at all when I started using Youtube. This platform has gone insane.

I'll turn off my adblocker when youtube stops serving me scams.

It was serving fake history from a random right wing weirdo for my parents. YouTube ads are the worst.

Ad blockers are a security measure:

https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/pl/security/news/cybercrime...

I have no problem leaching... it's also about a better browsing experience and security.

YouTube ads can not serve malicious javascript

"can not" maybe... but it wouldn't be the first time a "trusted" company served malware.

But the issue goes beyond just getting stuff from youtube directly. They are absolutely a source of links to unsafe places - their advertisement platform serves ads that send you to places with unsafe javascript.

So even if you was correct about "can not" (which is obviously untrue)... they can and regularly do cause issue none the less.

And "but youtube" sidesteps the issue that ad blockers aren't just security from youtube. Youtube is one of millions of websites. Full of shitty websites with horrible security practices and awful practices around annoying advertisements.

>So even if you was correct about "can not" (which is obviously untrue)...

It is not obviously untrue. Internet ads with malicous JavaScript come from sketchy ad networks. YouTube does not auction its ad space to third party ad networks.

Google search literally showed an ad for a fake keepass just a few weeks ago.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fake-keepass-...

Showing that ad did not serve malicous javscript which is what we are talking about.

That's what you're talking about. OP is talking about security in general. Phishing and honeypotting isn't malicious, in your mind?

Also even if YouTube doesn’t serve malicious JS, that doesn’t mean the website they’re advertising doesn’t.

Malicious JS, to be fair, shouldn’t be able to do really any significant damage. However, it is the right of the user to decide what gets displayed on their screen and grabs their attention span.

As others have stated, I'm actually focused on the bigger picture more than just "YouTube directly".

Ad Blockers stop the secondary stuff (ad campaigns that YouTube serves sending you to unsafe places) as well as primary stuff (actual "malicious" JavaScript served directly from YouTube). (they also do stuff like block trackers and the like but those aren't the topic of conversation here precisely other than saying that Ad Blockers are a security measure on many levels - not just on YouTube proper)

While the odds are low that YouTube itself will serve malicious JavaScript... the chance isn't 0. They have better security practices than other smaller companies but stupid or malicious employees exist and - as I think I said - things have been known to happen. Even with best practices stuff like supply chain attacks exist as do stuff like stuff injected into dependencies.

So while there hasn't been an "actual" breach at YouTube (if you exclude their malicious ad campaigns which "only" direct you to unsafe places but aren't DIRECTLY served by YouTube)... the fact remains that interacting with YouTube (or anything on the internet) WILL lead to eventually to unsafe places.

I have no problem admitting that YouTube is going to be better at not directly serving adware/malware/etc... but can you admit that that's not what I personally am focused on? My original statement that Ad Blockers are security is 100% justified based on the decades of experience at this point.

But if people are uninstalling their adblockers to use youtube, now the entire web is less secure for them.

I don't want to pay for it. That's good, because it's free. I don't have to watch the ads if I don't want to. I have no such obligation.

They give you the videos for free. You don't have to watch ads. I don't know why you think you have to do that. You don't.

With that logic, I guess YT reserves the right to refuse service for users like you?

I don't understand your meaning, but youtube can refuse service to anyone, not just me.

No, you have to pay for it. It's not charity and you are not entitled. You can choose to not watch ads but don't cope by pretending to be moral or ethical about it.

How do you pay for something that is free?

> No, you have to pay for it.

No, I don't.

> It's not charity and you are not entitled.

You're right. I'm not entitled to it. They give them away for free. I'm taking advantage of that. They've been doing it a long time. I'll keep watching them until they're not offered anymore.

At no point have I been obligated to watch their ads. I didn't strike some deal with them where I promised to watch their ads in exchange for videos. I'm simply accepting their free videos. You don't get to invent obligations in other people that they never agreed to.

Yes, you can choose to take advantage of any system by not playing by the rules. I pray to God it doesn't become a paid only service cutting off the poor people who are poor but not cheap.

> Yes, you can choose to take advantage of any system by not playing by the rules.

What rule do you think there is that requires me to watch youtube ads? By what mechanism do you think I'm beholden to that rule? Is it a real rule that I have to abide by for some reason, or more like a feeling you have about the way things should be?

I am genuinely curious where you think my obligation to watch ads comes from.

The rule of give and take. You get something, they get something. What's your stance on big companies profiting off of open source tech without giving absolutely anything back? Do you think they have any obligations at all?

> What's your stance on big companies profiting off of open source tech without giving absolutely anything back? Do you think they have any obligations at all?

No, they don't. Not beyond what's explicitly in the license.

It may be in their interest to invest in open source software they use. Or they may simply want to do it, even if it's not in their interest. But they have no obligation to do so. If they did, it would be in the license, and as a result that license would not be open source. To say that users of open source software are obligated to contribute is an attack on the idea of open source.

The reason I license my software the way I do is so that users are not required to do anything to see it or use it. That's the whole point. I'm giving it away, like youtube does their videos.

> you are not entitled

They aren't entitled to our attention either. We're not gonna watch ads and there's nothing they can do about it. Either they give up the mass appeal of free content and start charging money for access or they deal with it.

> Just say that you want to leach from the website and not pay for it.

In what universe does anyone have a moral obligation (let alone a legal obligation) to pay them anything?

But if we did somehow have a moral obligation to pay them, why would we have that obligation in the particular format of having to sit hostage while they put on their own little timeshare sales pitch for products none of us want?

For that matter, is there a philosophical method of severing marketing from freedom of speech, such that we can just ban marketing outright and be done with it?

What moral obligation do you have to pay your bill at dinner?

It's the same idea, it's a transaction. YouTube and the creators on the platform provide content for free, and you only have to view an ad (or pay). You are essentially choosing to dine and dash, just without the same of doing it in person.

Don't call this a transaction because it's not. They sent us a video for free. They did so hoping we were going to look at the ads. They took a risk and it didn't work out for them. They only have themselves to blame when their business model doesn't work out.

> Don't call this a transaction because it's not. They put food on our table for free. They did so hoping we were going to pay after eating it. They took a risk and it didn't work out for them. They only have themselves to blame when their business model doesn't work out.

Nonsense. Restaurants give you a menu and the prices of everything they offer you are clearly listed. At no point do they insidiously attempt to extract that value out of you via indirect means. Some restaurants will even charge you up front before making your meal.

Bull. I don't open up my browser and get fed YouTube videos. I choose to go to YouTube and watch videos. At no point did they "send me" a YouTube video for free.

They did actually send it to you for free. You asked for a video. It came to you, you gave up nothing.

No, the terms of service (TOS) mandates how and what you can do on their site.

A snippet: " Permissions and Restrictions You may access and use the Service as made available to you, as long as you comply with this Agreement and applicable law."

Not a dang thing in there about "free". Now, you can argue whether or not your saw those terms, or agreed to them, but the TOS are legally binding.

Don't like those TOS, fine, makes no difference to me. But calling those videos "free" is not only naive, but wrong.

A non logged in user agree is not presented with a TOS.

Non-enforceable, not legally binding, and not even presented to non-logged in users. Are you just making shit up now?

> No, the terms of service (TOS) mandates how and what you can do on their site.

Worse than meaningless.

For a contract to be valid, they need to talk to me in person, and get my signature. They don't get to pretend it's a contract and bully the rest of the world into acting like it is.

If they do not like me sending http requests to them, it's up to them to ignore them.

> but the TOS are legally binding.

Not only are they not legally binding, anyone who makes claims like this should be denied all political rights. No voting, no sitting on juries, none of it. You have demonstrated your profound and fundamental unfittness to decide policy for other people, and humanity can't really risk it if you say you've seen the error of your ways.

I sent them an HTTP request. They sent me back an HTTP response containing a video. They could have returned HTTP 402 Payment Required instead.

We're under zero obligation to watch ads, moral or otherwise.

I have my adblock on for targeted ads. I believe the lengths that these companies go through to profile you to serve you ads are terribly invasive.

Even if you pay for YT Premium, the tracking does not stop: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/111257004092595145

My adblocker is off for DuckDuckGo. DDG does not track my activity across websites.

I'm one of the few suckers here paying for YT Premium. This is what I got rewarded with for being a paying customer: https://mastodon.social/@lazycouchpotato/111347456188566575 Precious screen real estate ruined with Shorts. They've set themselves into this monopoly position leaving you nowhere else to go, and are dead set on making the experience as terrible as possible to extract every little bit of "engagement" out of you.

I don't sympathize with Google for users wanting to use an ad blocker on YT. I'd gladly support YT if any other half-decent company owned it.

Can’t they force you to inject ads into the video feed? Or is that in some way illegal

There are already ways around that such as SponsorBlock.

If they match the bitrate and such of the source video and make it seemless how would that be reliably detectable?

Communities come together to mark video segments, possibly aided by AI which looks for and identifies significant changes in production that suggest injected ads.

What are you guys currently using that’s most effective and easy to use?

I don't get why people are so against ads.

How else should creators of content you enjoy get paid?

Should users be forced to watch at least one ad per YouTube session for "subscribed" content and make watching an ad optional for other content?

Nearly every creator who makes money on YouTube these days takes sponsorships, which I don't mind at all. Sponsorship segments have no tracking, are very skippable, and some creators make them fun enough to be worth watching in their own right. They're integrated into the video at a logical break point (rather than interrupting at odd times), and the creator can choose to avoid a sponsor that doesn't line up with their values.

Similar methods include merch drops, writing a book and selling it through your existing fan base, and having a Patreon that you plug during the video.

All of this is preferable to the nightmarish ads that YouTube typically serves and the insane amounts of tracking they use which somehow still manages to completely miss the mark when finding topics that would appeal to me.

>Sponsorship segments have no tracking

No, the creator gets anonymized stats for their videos of the viewer's demographics. These get shared with brands. In some ways there is less privacy than normal YouTube ads.

Eh, I guarantee you that the creators get less detail than Google has. Anonymized aggregate stats are a far cry from the individual profile Google builds of you.

Yeah but a good chunk of their income comes from YouTube, still. You can either put up with the ads/ad-blocking cat and mouse, or pay for Premium.

If you adblock you are objectively making creators lose money. I'm not trying to take a moral high ground on this, but be honest about what you're doing at least.

They are not entitled to money, therefore they can't "lose" money.

This whole "oh those poor creators" argument is ridiculous.

Most youtube content is trash. When you produce trash but feel entitled to receive money for that trash, what does that make you? This is not a proper, healthy mindset.

Why are you watching videos that are trash? I watch videos that I like.

Because we can't do anything anymore without someone trying to talk us out of our money. Because our time is valuable. Because we're more than just a wallet to extract value from. Because our attention isn't for sale, it's something we offer to what we determine deserves it.

Ads exist to do one thing; convince you that you want something that you don't want. The thing about products you want is, you don't need them advertised to you in order to want to buy them. Ads prey on our insecurities, and are literal psychological manipulation. The sense of urgency, the fear of missing out, social status, 99 cents, you will finally be happy with this new thing, you will finally be cool with this new thing, you will finally find love with this new thing, you'll finally be a man/woman with this new thing, they'll finally notice you with this new thing. Fuck advertising. We live in a world where the biggest thing of a sporting event are the fucking ads they play between the sport. We live in a world where ads on displays track us via bluetooth signatures in the real world and are then tied to your online ad profile to help determine your demographics. Fuck ads.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231027211008/https://www.nytim...

https://web.archive.org/web/20231031142140/https://www.nytim...

> Because our time is valuable

Buy youtube premium

Ads help people discover goods and services they may find value in. There are goods and services people would want to buy, but they just don't know that they exist until an ad shows them that it exists.

90% of what I see advertised(and sponsored) is garbage SAAS products and other junk.

> I don't get why people are so against ads.

Because my mind is sacred and my attention is inalienable. They do not get to put things in my mind without my consent. I consider that a violation of my personal integrity and ad blocking to be justified self-defense.

> How else should creators of content you enjoy get paid?

I dunno. Any way they can manage, so long as it's not advertising. My attention is not currency to pay for services with.

Because some ads are really irritating with loud music and annoying voices, advertising things I have no use for. And they keep playing me the same 2-3 ads over and over.

If they would just advertise things I was interested in, and skip/block the ones I'm not, then I would watch them.

I would assume you don't know about the days of drive-by advertising malware, and the fact it came from ANY type of media. Animated .gifs, video streams, vulnerable .mp3 files, javascript injection, and worse.

Ad blocking is basic security on the internet. It is literally security 101.

Youtube is like a drug dealer that sells a mix or sugar, opium and poison in 8:1:1 proportion. Sugar is the flashy junk that gives an illusion of fulfillment. Opium is the behavioral tricks that rattle the primitive emotions and desires. The poison is ads - a variety of synthetic substances provided by the dealer's customers; those substances mess with the neural transmitters with the goal of implanting certain images and associations into the brain.

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