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Comment by corn-dog | Hacker News Reader

Hey the creator here, was not expecting this to blow up at all. I made this I guess because of the Streisand effect, I probably never would have bothered if it weren’t for all the news about ad blockers not working.

I intend this as a second line of defence against ads, where the first line would be a conventional ad blocker.

After work I’m going to investigate the same technique for speeding up paid sponsor portions of the video.

My background is a web dev, but I make extensions in my spare time :) I recommend making some yourself they are a fun little project. This one only took about 4 hours so I’m laughing at the interest :)

If you want to see a way more awesome extension I’ve created check this out - https://mobileview.io/

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Sponsorblock was already mentioned, but also have a look at what DeArrow does, which is allow crowdsourced titles and title cards to remove the horrible ":O" face clickbait.

There's already an extension that does that: Clickbait remover for YT (FF/Chrome)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

One day we'll use AI to replace ads with anti-marketing.

Ads for McDonalds replaced with obesity stats. Ads for goods rephrased to make the actors say, "you don't need it."

Why would watching that add any value to the lives of anybody consuming that content?

Why not just remove it entirely? The only people that would use it are the same people that already know those stats.

And one day they will use AI to place more covert ads.

'One day'...

thanks! the thumbnail trend has gotten really, really bad. any insight into why creators are hopping on the bandwagon? is there data they have access to which suggests switching to this type of thumbnail will increase engagement?

> any insight into why creators are hopping on the bandwagon

It probably works.

If I remember correctly, Linus from Linus Tech Tips said begrudgingly at one point that the clickbait thumbnails increase views by 20-30%. Even he wasn't happy about having to do them, but the drop in viewership from not doing them seemed quite large and hard to disagree with.

LTT is pretty much the most clickbaity YouTuber anyway when it comes to IT. Mediocre content, extremely high monetisation including in-stream ads.

I never bother watching LTT anyway. It represents everything that's wrong with YouTube.

When it comes to creators I actually respect I'd think of Dave Jones (EEVBlog), Naomi Wu, Louis Rossman...

Hard disagree, at least on some content. The engineering videos where they do crazy hacks like negative cooling computers, swimming pool water cooling etc are all insightful and inviting viewers to explore hardware hacking and engineering.

I suspect techlinked troll HN for news content, but I watch that for the humour rather than news.

I think you can both be right.

They put out a "crazy engineering" video maybe once every 6 months while putting out 5+ videos every single week. The majority of the videos being uploaded are them faking enthusiasm for version i+1 of whatever product giant tech company put out this week or them trashing some silly or sometimes misunderstood idea.

It’s not my favorite channel, I don’t even have a subscription to it, but for such a mainstream and popular channel it’s honestly pretty good.

Each time I stumbled upon a video of LTT, it ranged from "great" to "really ok".

There are way better channels but LTT is far from being the worst.

Veritasium made a video about this : thumbnails and title so much drastically change your view count that, even if you are against it, you would be stupid to not jump into the trend, especially if your business is correlated to view counts.

But I’m like you, I’m pretty sad about it because sometimes this pushes me back very hard and I avoided some otherwise very great quality channels for months or years because of that.

My most remarkable example of this is KURZGESAGT : YouTube algorithm was always suggesting it and my brain was always thinking that this looked like cheap animated videos with colors everywhere to catch my eyes, probably with synthetic narration. I ignored it for months until I watched one by accident. And boy did I discovered it was in fact a brilliant channel with probably one of the most impressive animation and music on YouTube, an incredible narrator, one of the rare YouTube channels which provides links to studies for anything sentence they say and all of this full of poetry. Also a very non intrusive business model with pertinents sponsorships at the end of the videos and their own merchandise marketplace with actually nice items and artwork to buy.

The even sadder thing is that their thumbnails are in fact pretty good but they mostly suffered from the fact that my brain is now programmed to avoid anything catchy.

Ignoring the fact that KURZGESAGT is a blatant propaganda conduit, the art-style they use in their animations is so flat and devoid of any personality at all, I'm actively repulsed by it.

I’m open to debate but propaganda for what exactly ?

There was only one of their video I felt awkward was their video about the fact we will tackle climate change, I felt like they were I little too techno optimistic. But given that they have a good history in this subject, I just felt their goal was to provide optimism.

Also, I’m sorry if I’m overly paranoid but I feel strange that you created an account just to make this comment.

Propaganda for billionaires and the various methodologies they use to control and slowly reshape society. The following video is a good start:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjHMoNGqQTI

The optimism you mention in your comment is key. Conditioning the public to perceive and blindly accept the ideas and procedures commonly discussed in many of their videos as something net-positive seems to be the primary goal.

The art-style I think plays a very well-defined role in that: yes it's bland, but it's the most unlikely one to offend any one average viewer, irrespective of nationality or culture. It's just cute 2D flat birds after all.

So it is "blatant propaganda" but you can't come up with 3-4 bullets explaning your reasoning? If it were so blatent I would need to watch another video.

Veritasium is the kind of guy who makes a video explaining how his titles aren't clickbait, yet he optimizes thumbnails and video titles after the video is published to maximize views more than anyone else.

Which at least is … honest.

How do you know he does that more than anyone else?

> In 2015, the channel received a 570,000 US dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who later became one of their key sponsors. Kurzgesagt have made videos calling for investment in novel technologies the foundation also supports, such as carbon capture and artificial meat.

There is one good way to solve climate issues: consume less. Instead, kurzg says "we could consume, but someone will solve our issues with new great tech, like carbon capture".

Still, people like it, because it "sounds good".

That's extremely disingenuous way to describe Kurtzgesagt. The channel offers high quality educational content.

There are channels without propaganda like ScienceClic/pbs space time. Good propoganda would not work if it would be too obvious. But once you read Kurtz story and try to reevaluate their "proposed" solutions to eco issues, you can see how it aligns. It is "technooptimism". Like similar to "invest into AI, it will solve all of our problems".

Sadly... Ok ok, so it is basically science video channel with sponsored content where they don't say it is sponsored content. Better description?

They offer educational content. From limited consumption I would not rate it as high quality. More like acceptable I guess.

> There is one good way to solve climate issues: consume less. Instead, kurzg says "we could consume, but someone will solve our issues with new great tech, like carbon capture".

No, kurzgesagt says that given that people won't be willing to consume less to the required degree novel tech will also have to play a role. It's disingenuous to run around and say that 'consume less' is the solution knowing that people won't do it. At least not if they aren't forced to. Do you want to argue for forcing people? Then say it. Don't hide behind "oh, just consume less, it's the only thing that works".

Please don't assume what I wanna force or not. I don't need a new CPU for windows, but windows wants it. Similar with phones, I am forced to buy a glued brick each 3 years (2 years now, woohoo). And I don't need a "new video" each week from my favourite creator, one good video once in a while is ok for me. Carbon capture is not even working properly yet, but we already pushing it as a solution. Probably solution would be "it releases more CO2 in the end, but you are forced to buy it, and it would make great profit to people involved in it".

> Please don't assume what I wanna force or not.

That's why I wrote that if you want to force people you should argue for it and not that you do want to. Please, don't accuse me of things I didn't write.

Personally, I don't think carbon capture will work very well either, but I don't see why my position should be more valid than kurzgesagts. Or why mine isn't propaganda, but theirs is.

You're not forced if you use a more open ROM of Android, like LineageOS. You can even keep using Google apps. Many phone models will keep getting updates on custom ROMs years after their stock image does.

Installing LineageOS involves unlocking the bootloader and/or acquiring root, which will make several applications (mostly banking, but afaik some streaming apps as well) refuse to launch, because your phone now trips SafetyNet (which is "yet another thing I don't need, but have to pay for").

My (semi) serious attempt at blocking sponsored segments: https://butter.sonnet.io

Hey, I just wanted to say that your “say hi” page is an insanely cool idea and I might take you up on that offer at some point :).

I would be super interested in seeing engagement metrics for this, especially from organic, cold, leads.

Well, here would be the ones I’m interested in: the 3 minute rant would be perfect right now as I finish processing shitty family. The general chat with topics includes several that I personally am interested in, including photography and mental health. The offer to pair program with me to help me with a programming problem? Amazing. Though I’d feel too guilty about using that one personally when the vast majority of my coding problems can be solved by Google and sometimes screaming into a pillow.

All in all, if I was looking for an employee, seeing this page would put that person at the top of the list for me because it gives off all the right vibes - team player, interested in helping others, well rounded, etc.

I'm not sure what qualifies as a cold lead here, but I've had ca. 150 calls so far. I reached out to people directly only twice with 50% success rate.

This comment seemed to generate 1k visits to my site, from and 2 called booked for Tuesday.

Most of my calls are 30m coffee chats (I'd say close to 90%).

Rants are quite rare and people tend to cancel those last minute. My theory is behind this is that the decision to book a call is more likely to be driven by emotions.

Rants rarely end up being rants. For instance, the first one I had ended up being a 2 hour discussion about life, privacy, cryptography, tech + a century-long and hemisphere-wide family history in English and Ukrainian.

If you have any questions about this -- please let me know as I'm compiling an article for untested.sonnet.io

Thanks, and yeah -- give it a go, it's a tonne of fun.

Also, you can call me for a quick 3 minute rant if a longer call feels like a commitment. In fact, I just finished my first rant today!

Whoa! I love it. For anyone wondering about the not-so-secret sauce:

https://github.com/paprikka/butter/blob/main/src/watcher/det...

The irony would be incredible if you happened to use Bard.

Why only 16x speed? Was there some kind of technical limitation or it just felt like the best option?

Yep technical limitation, the most you can speed the video element in Google chrome is 16x (the slowest is 0.07x)

I used to have a computer with an audio interface that had a wordclock input (BNC connector) and a huge rack mounted wordclock (Antelope Isochrone) to theoretically reduce jitter that a cheap internal crystal clock built into an interface might otherwise introduce. To work normally, the interface and external clock both needed to be set to the same thing (say, 48 or 192 kHz, or whatever you wanted). We quickly discovered that if the interface was set lower than the clock, any audio playback would be sped up and high pitch (and vice versa) -- not only playback from the DAW, but from anything, even YouTube videos and so forth. And of course the a/v sync was maintained, so the picture would also be sped up to match.

I wonder if this effect could be completely virtualized as an audio driver, where you choose this middleware as the default output device in the OS, and it messes with the audio clock speed: essentially overclocking the upstream (OS) side whenever an ad is detected, and dropping samples (basically a rudimentary sample rate conversion) proportionately so the downstream (hardware) side never skips a beat. I don't know how an extension/userscript would be able to communicate with said middleware, but maybe there's a way.

Aside: I wonder what would happen with live streams. Probably just periodic buffering, not from congestion but from the analog to digital conversion consuming the stream faster than it's being created. Theoretically a very miniscule version of this problem always occurs if the DAC on the production side is running slightly lower clock speed (say, 47999 Hz) than the ADC on the consumer side (say, 48001 Hz) and the player knows how to gracefully compensate to avoid occasional buffering (or buffering does occur but it's too brief for anyone to notice). Hmm.

This is absolutely fascinating and I love how this experience leads to an interesting idea for a solution to a different problem.

As an aside, what audio interface was this? Sounds fascinating (as an amateur audio-interested person).

M-Audio Delta 1010 but it could probably be anything.

When browsing the page for MobileView, I was very pleasantly surprised by the lack of a subscription option.

Not because I don't think you should be payed for your hard work, but because the extension being free allows me to recommend to any of my students - some of which are very poor.

Thanks!

That’s awesome feedback, thanks! Definitely get your students into it

Is there any chance something like this could work on chromecast?

https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV might work

Any chance that this technique can be added to iSponsorBlockTV? :)

https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV

I tried your extension but it wasn't able to activate in a Next14 project i'm working on... getting a hydration error.

Is this my mobile view one? Yeah I’m aware of this error so I need to fix it. Is it an open source or public repo.? That would help a lot for bug fixing

In case you don't know about it, make sure to check out SponsorBlock, which optionally, automatically skips parts you don't want to see like for example sponsors (but not only). You can use this awesome DB for what you want to do.

And also Invidious.

And also their combination.

User of both, I'm unaffected by the recent adblocking issues on YouTube and I can still subscribe to channels, reliably. Without any Google account. (by the way, a simple regular RSS feed reader would do, since YouTube provides RSS feeds for each channel, but Invidious is a really convenient, specialized UI for this, without the notification / algorithm issues that seem to plague YouTube wrt this, but I digress)

All these issues are already solved by these projects. I guess one could consider contributing to them (financially or with code for instance). The official YouTube frontend actually don't need no love, others already achieve what we want.

Piped, NewPipe and FreeTube are also projects to look into (I loved NewPipe when I had a smartphone, Piped looks very good too and FreeTube looks interesting but I know less about them).

> In case you don't know about it, make sure to check out SponsorBlock

So I don't love ads but mostly because of the privacy invasion they represent, but sponsorships I have a lot less of a problem with. Oftentimes sponsorships will have at least marginal connection with what in watch (most of the time looking at you NordVPN and Raid Shadow Legends) but to me sponsorships are the happy middle ground that allows creators to get some recompense for their labors without turning everything into an adscape dystopia.

Really I don't have a problem with ads on websites back in the day as long as they were somewhat tasteful, which they often were because the creator worked to integrate them into their work, but the constant user surveillance and spamming random nonsensical ads are what bugged me.

I mean some channels that I frequent have even turned the sponsorships into additional entertaining content (check out Ryan George's the Adstronaut or Viva La Dirt League).

Yeah, I personally hate sponsor segments but strongly sympathize with your view. I'm currently looking for a way to donate to the stuff I watch instead.

Ad based businesses also have an incentive to maximize attention and interaction rather than enjoyment, education, or user happiness.

We’ve played a few rounds of this game, we’re dumber, sadder, and more politically polarized for it.

Any open source player client for iOS? Does not seem like any of the listed ones are compatible with iOS.

Unless you're willing to root your phone, or use a developer certificate to run an unofficial app, I don't think there's any chance of getting an 3rd party youtube client on iOS. They're breaking youtube's TOS which is why they have to be side loaded on android.

I am willing to use a developer certificate to run unofficial apps...if there is code available i'd be happy to compile and load it onto my phone. I don't think there is though.

I just cannot go back to Android after years of dealing with garbage(I owned all the Nexus phones and gave up after Nexus 5) so my options have been to limit phone usage in favor of Desktop + start working on as many homemade/ open source versions of iPhone apps that I use as possible. Luckily most apps i'd be likely to have installed are just some downloaded data(text, audio, video) and some buttons. How hard can it be to scrape and rip the content and make my own container to serve that data?

For other apps like Youtube alternatives I am in search of an app.

uYou+ is good, I use it regularly. Especially with a developer certificate.

Thanks, will check it out!

Invidious and Piped should actually work quite well. Not apps, but work fine in a browser. That's what I'm using on the PinePhone and on regular computers. Though I don't know if Safari still has limitations that make it a pain to use. Invidious is a pain on the iPad 2 because of some dumb design decisions in Safari but I expect it to have improved since then. And maybe third party browsers will at last be allowed on iOS through third party stores, maybe also allowing SponsorBlock to be used on this platform.

I'm missing some features like being able to select a play next video easily, so I may look into writing an Invidious-based client of some sort for this, but they are so many things to do for a strongly limited time.

Maybe Piped has the features I'd like to have, I should check it out.

You can use an app currently in the App Store called "yattee" -- you can add an Invidious source in the settings, and viola you're good to go. I self-host mine, but you can totally point it at a community hosted one.

This is really cool, thanks!

Smarttube on my tv (Nvidia shield), revanced on phone and Vivaldi with ublock, no YouTube ads anywhere.

I just pay for Premium instead of grifting. Planetary-scale server farms and video hosting is not free.

They harvest everything I do online without my consent or permission without paying me. Fair is fair

You consented by using the service. You don’t have to use YouTube.

I don't consent on every other site that uses google analytics? And last time I checked, consent isn't implied.

Disable third party cookies.

But then Google won't know everything about me so that would be immoral of me to do

If that's what you believe, then I'm not sure what the original problem was.

Ok, then disable third party cookies, unironically.

You are free to use an adblocker. But it's completely fair for Google to refuse their services if you do.

Then they should. They are perfectly capable of actually making YouTube unusable without watching ads.

When they actually force me, I'm perfectly happy to mute my TV during ads and do something else, which is the exact same moral area as blocking ads.

> Drink verification can

Google analytics isn’t relevant to this subject.

It's more complicated than that because of the network effect. Few people host their videos elsewhere.

Google did this to themselves and they are the one imposing everybody to play by their rules. Nobody asked them to kill their competitors. Besides, I'm not really concerned for them. It's not like they are struggling.

> It's more complicated than that because of the network effect. Few people host their videos elsewhere.

Yes, but these things are far from essential. Most of YouTube is entertainment, which is as fungible as it gets, and what isn't (for example repair tutorials) can usually be solved by buying repair guides or hiring professionals. There are alternatives. You might not like them, but they exist.

> Google did this to themselves and they are the one imposing everybody to play by their rules.

This is really peak absurdity. "Google made me use their service for free".

> Nobody asked them to kill their competitors.

YouTube has competition in all of its areas. They might be the leader, but they are not the singular source.

> YouTube has competition in all of its areas. They might be the leader, but they are not the singular source.

This is like saying Microsoft didn't have a monopoly on the PC market in the 90s because Apple had 5% of the market. They only feel comfortable designing serious limitations in MV3 because chrome owns 90% of the browser landscape.

> This is really peak absurdity. "Google made me use their service for free".

This is not absurd, they got to where they wanted through massive investor led subsidies and buying out their admittedly better competitor (remember google video?) What they performed on the on-demand video market was a form of predatory dumping, and when all the competition was gone they used that position as well as other positions to extract "value" and cash out.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/predatorydumping.asp

Only if we ignore facts. Chrome only has a 64% market share, not 90%. Nobody has ever dominated a consumer tech market in the same way that Microsoft dominated the 90s.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/

On top of that, YouTube is only one choice of many for user created videos. Sites like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit are all top 20 sites that host user created videos. A number of YouTube creators mirror their content to Nebula and other creator platforms. Twitch is yet another alternative and is likely more popular than YouTube’s live feature.

We also have to count every streaming video service from the legacy media companies and Netflix/Amazon/Apple as competition as well.

In the 90s you couldn’t complete basic computing tasks without Internet Explorer and Office. Even while fully admitting to YouTube’s relative dominance of its niche, the situation is not the same.

> Only if we ignore facts. Chrome only has a 64% market share, not 90%. Nobody has ever dominated a consumer tech market in the same way that Microsoft dominated the 90s.

I think that browser market share is just one facet of the power Chrome holds over the web. Open source development, w3c membership and committee assignments, leadership in the direction the web takes, should also be considered alongside how much Chrome is being used directly.

> On top of that, YouTube is only one choice of many for user created videos. Sites like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit are all top 20 sites that host user created videos.

These are primarily social media products, it's not easy or intended to use these services in the same way as you would use Youtube. Video is a "Feature".

> In the 90s you couldn’t complete basic computing tasks without Internet Explorer and Office. Even while fully admitting to YouTube’s relative dominance of its niche, the situation is not the same.

I think it's the spectre of this past that people recognize as being the inevitable conclusion of the enshittification process, which is why the alarm bells are sounding now.

While I feel like your arguments are absolutely sound in isolation, I personally don't know "how much dominance is too much dominance?" considering the stakes, and I would certainly rather be cautious. That said, what sort of act do you think is a "bridge too far" for Google to implement?

I have been required to use YouTube for school and for work

I watch maybe, maybe one YouTube video per month on average. I get along just fine.

YouTube is a service that competes unethically with others and censors wildly to further its political interests.

Some of us control our computers, instead of letting every third party do it.

No, I did not. The fact that somebody somewhere wrote "You consent to ...." doesn't mean I actually consented.

If you went to the site and continued to use it, you consented. That’s how EULAs work.

Your consent was given by the fact that you directed your browser to interact with the service continually, if that’s something that you did.

You can’t say you didn’t consent to be searched if you walked into an airport. You can’t say you didn’t consent to be splashed with water if you got on the log flume ride. Your own ignorance or disagreement with the fact that you can get searched at an airport or wet on a lot flume ride isn’t really an excuse.

EULA is just a wishlist of a service or software provider. Nothing more unless it's upheld in court. And sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't:

https://superuser.com/questions/30940/is-an-eula-enforceable...

Comparison to real world situations when the trigger is physical presence are not a good example exactly because they require physical presence, something unachievable in the virtual world of software and internet.

I have no sympathy for a company that operated at a loss for enough years to price out competitors to the point it was the only real game in town.

You kill competitors and now want to dictate the price (including attention) everyone pays to see user-generated content? Yeah no.

Got zero sympathy. None. You do not command my attention - a resource I am less and less willing to pay with these days.

If that results in YouTube becoming unsustainable and collapsing and something more sustainable emerging charging a price consumers are willing to pay? Well then that sounds acceptable.

That has almost no value to them unless they can use that to show you ads. They use that data to target ads to you, that is the whole point. Do you think they care about what you do or who you are for any other reason?

If it has no value then why don't they stop?

Because they show ads to people. Do you think they should stop collecting your data just because you block their ads? I don't see why that would make any sense, they have no reason to incentivize ad block use.

But even if I pay them, they still collect my data. I lose either way. I'll pick the way that is better for me in that situation

But that isn't a fair trade, you argued that your data is worth enough to them that you should be allowed to use their server resources without anything extra from you. But that isn't true, every user like you costs them much more money than they earn.

In such a situation where one part pays for the other parts benefits, you should expect the part that just loses out to try to end the trade. And that is what we see happening here, youtube tries to block you since youtube doesn't want you as a user, since you lose them money.

No, you argued that my data wasn't worth anything. I argued that if it wasn't they wouldn't desperately try and get all my credit, medical, schooling, and browsing history.

What they do is incredibly immoral and despicable. There is no opt-out (even if I pay them money). Even if I never use their services they still try to vacuum up all my data.

Me watching a few YouTube videos a week is a better deal for them than it is for me.

> you argued that my data wasn't worth anything

If you block all their ads. They get your data since they intend to display ads to you. I said that in the first post, did you miss that?

So why are they spying on me when I still pay them? Or are you going to still pretend that hasn't been brought up 3 times now? Or that there is no opt out for their other tracking?

> So why are they spying on me when I still pay them

Since you pay them you have an account and is logged in. They do use the data they have collected about you to serve you targeted videos even if they don't serve you targeted ads, they say that in their privacy policy document. Targeted videos are for your convenience.

If you don't want it to target videos to you you can disable all that data collection here, at least I can (Not sure if you can outside of EU):

https://myaccount.google.com/yourdata/youtube

So go and disable all that if you feel their video targeting isn't worth collecting your data, but there is no way for them to target videos without having any data about you.

I don't want targeted videos. I don't even want them to know I exist. Even if I never used YouTube, that is impossible.

Their tracking is all encompassing and invasive, even without a Google account. They are a menace to the world and it should be an obligation to block their ads. If Google disappeared tomorrow the world would be better off.

Sounds like the issue is completely different then from what you brought up in your original post. You just hate Google and want to hurt them as much as possible, so then it makes sense for you to block them and consume their resources as much as possible. Thanks, that explains your position much better, why didn't you just say that from the start instead of beating around the bush for so long?

Nothing I just said is inconsistent with what I posted earlier. I have no desire to hurt them, but I'm not going to pretend that anything I do to them is immoral or tips the scale from what they've stolen from me over the years

I'm not the OP but you describe exactly my point of view :)

Though I don't just hate Google but really all big tech. I even work in it but my salary doesn't buy my loyalty, just my time. Loyalty requires respect.

So if I block the ads, I guess that makes us even.

No, it pits the entire relationship in your favor since they now don't receive anything of value from you while you still receive their service.

A trade can't be fair when only one part benefits. If you feel their services are worth nothing then stop using them.

I'm working on that. The hardest one to cut out is Google Maps, which doesn't have an ad free option.

Anyway, the value they receive is incidental: if I like content, I'll tell my friends about it. Not all of my friends dislike ads. I "market" the content via word of mouth. The content markets the subscriptions. Or the ads. Either one.

If I stop watching the content entirely (due to it becoming harder to discover) then fewer of my friends know about it. So it's not quite as black and white as you want it to be. The "grifting" population helps content to spread to the paying population.

> The hardest one to cut out is Google Maps, which doesn't have an ad free option.

OpenStreetMaps is considerably more customizable, has much better hiking trail data, and doesn't hide train stations and street names when you zoom/pan. Google Maps has become awful in the last few years.

OpenStreetMaps doesn't have aerial photo views, nor does it have street view. Those two let me go to almost any part of the world and see what it looks like, what the streets and houses are like in reality instead of just their marketing brochure photos.

I love OSMAnd for hiking, but it's never going to replace Google reviews, which are invaluable when traveling.

It has pretty clunky point of interest search. The main thing Google Maps does for me right now is "search for destination that I know exists, but whose exact address I don't have on hand, then navigate there." The entire flow when performing that task is quite polished. So far, I haven't found an OSM app that comes anywhere close to being as usable. Organic Maps gets close, but the spoken navigation is pretty bad.

I don't know what fantasy realm you live in where people are "trading" with Google when they watch a YouTube video. No such thing happens. No money changes hands, there is no transaction.

What does happen, is I make a request, and Google sends some bits to me over the Internet for free, and then those bits are sitting on my PC, and my PC is my property. I have the right to do whatever I want with my property and the bits on it. If I want to transform the bits in some way, render video from some of them and not from others, all on my PC in my own home, then I can. With a few exceptions, courts have upheld that general right. Ad blocking isn't illegal, circumventing their anti-ad blocking isn't illegal, and it doesn't interfere with a "trade" because there wasn't one, Google just sends some bits for free to anyone who asks the right way.

Now Google can of course choose to refuse service to me for any reason they want. They can make their anti-ad blocking more sophisticated. That's fine, I'll use a competitor in that case, and we need to make sure the government enforces the antitrust laws on the books so that there's more competition against Google anyway. Whether YouTube is a criminal monopoly or not is currently up for debate, probably the answer is yes.

At any rate your understanding of the relationship is legally and morally flawed. You claim there is a trade between me and a probably criminal organization, where in fact there is none. On the other hand my right to control my property is one of the most fundamental rights out there. You better believe Google feels that way about their property and spends billions to protect/expand their own property rights!

So I am confused as to why you want Google to have property rights, but not the rest of us.

But hey, "You will own nothing and be happy," right? We're all really just renting our hardware I guess? It's 2023 and the concept of us little peons owning and controlling anything is obsolete, just do what Master says right?

BTW, FWIW my property rights are inalienable. I possess these rights because I was born a human, yes they are also upheld in the US Constitution, UN Declaration on Human rights etc. While government has mostly upheld them they don't come from government, they come from us being born human, so even if a government said what I was doing was illegal, it would be moral to ignore that government, resist and do it anyway. What's crazy to me is that people seem to be OK with handwaving away a basic human right just so that a corporation can make more profit off of entertainment content.

> I have the right to do whatever I want with my property and the bits on it

That is false. You might think that you should have that right, but you don't.

Come and take it

By your logic, because you own your hardware and can do whatever you want with it, you should be allowed to hack into other computers. After all, it's just pressing keys on a keyboard you own and sending bits from a computer you own?

Your incredibly reductionist take does not consider the fact that you exist in an ecosystem of relationships and economics.

That’s not what he’s saying. The statement is that he’s free to manipulate his computer as his property and since all the data that resides on it. There are exceptions to this, namely when it comes to infringing on the rights of others, but with the case of client side data the argument stands true.

The flaw in your thinking comes from not knowing that one can acknowledge property rights without the notion that anything can be done with their property. A baseball bat may be mine but it doesn’t mean I have the right to hit someone else’s property with it. I can, however, paint, carve, or otherwise destroy my bat without serious consequence.

Nope. Wrong. That other system is someone else's property. You don't have the right to vandalize someone else's property, ergo, breaking into another system over the network and causing damage to it is illegal.

Property laws are just as relevant to computer systems as they are to anything else.

Won't someone think of the trillion dollar corporations?

55% of that goes to the content creators. Most videos you watch at youtube wouldn't exist without people watching those ads.

How generous, with a conflict of interest on who decides the split. Good, most is garbage. One reason I use it rarely.

55%? You mean Google shared the metadata and the resulting profile it build of you across the web 55% with the creator?

Obviously not. They give a pittance of what they make with a single ad while continuing to use the data they acquire for as long as they want without you having any say in the matter. They simply steal this "useless" data and make billions year over year.

I do not have a moral obligation to waste my time on content B, merely because it has been delivered alongside content A. The advertiser paid to make that offer to be, but I am not obligated to pay it any mind. That I've instructed my computer to automatically reject such offers is no sin.

For the record I do pay for premium, but that's because I want to support creators directly. I do that a lot actually; Patreon is great. But I block ads anyway, everywhere I go. There is no moral argument you can make that will convince me to actually watch ads. If companies want to stop making stuff available for free because advertising is not a sustainable business model, good! Cut the marketing out. Let it die.

> I do not have a moral obligation to waste my time on content B, merely because it has been delivered alongside content A.

Of course you don't. But neither does Google have the obligation to serve you if you don't pay and don't watch ads.

I pay a certain fee in the effort I have to go to in order to block scam content reaching my home network.

Given that advertising platforms are one of the primary vectors of scam content these days, it's almost negligent to not block advertising.

I happily paid for YouTube lite until they cancelled it.

following your logic, people should actively engaged with ads if not they are grifting. Please tell me you work for google?

They pay to display the ad. Think of a highway ad. If you sell a highway ad placement and then cover it with a big blanket (with maybe another ad on it) so nobody sees it, that would be a serious case of fraud.

So if you tell them the ad has been displayed so you get the video, but no ad was displayed for you, then that is a form of fraud. I don't think that would hold in court since it is such a petty crime, but it is still fraud. You lie to their server so that you can see the video without ads, that is fraud.

And if I simply mute the ad and do something else until it's over? It's that still fraud?

How about if I download the ad but don't watch it?

Since when is watching an advertisement a moral imperative?

> Since when is watching an advertisement a moral imperative?

Since you got paid for it. Youtube pays you by serving you content for those ads.

Note that I also block ads. However, unlike you I don't try to tell myself that I am morally right when I do so, I know that it isn't a nice thing to do and that the content I consume when doing it is paid for by all the users who doesn't block ads.

I am not sure why you try to argue that you are morally good when you block ads. Does that really matter to you? That is the most interesting part of this discussion to me, all the people who want to see themselves as good people even though they leech off others.

I consider pervasive advertisement a moral wrong. I don't have to tell myself anything to know that blocking ads is the ethical thing to do. They are already a moral perversion.

Edit:

I kind of consider it disgusting that watching a video is considered by anybody to be "payment", or that anybody legitimately believes it's somebody's duty to watch an advertisement. The worship of abusive corporations in our culture has gotten insane.

You already aren't understanding us when you come in believing that we're convincing ourselves of anything. We actually do have an ethical and moral map that is consistent with blocking ads, and we don't consider not watching a commercial to be the same thing as theft, or even to be morally questionable.

The simple fact is that video hosting is incredibly expensive. Do you still want information on the internet to be freely shareable via video? Ads are the price.

> Do you still want information on the internet to be freely shareable via video?

Yes. And I'm willing to pay for it in taxes, or directly to creators and hosts, but I'm not going to pay Google after the massive amounts of abuse and anti-competitive behaviors. I will never pay Google.

> Ads are the price.

I don't accept that. Ads as "funding" for "free" content is a myth.

It is overall better for society to block ads because ad-funded services have bad incentives, and so anything you can do to hurt the business model is a plus.

The specific act of not watching the ad is morally neutral, you can render content sent to your computer however you want or not at all.

> It is overall better for society to block ads because ad-funded services have bad incentives

This would eliminate most free flows of information. I really doubt that is the "better evil" compared to watching the occasional ad.

> Since you got paid for it. Youtube pays you by serving you content for those ads.

Is that technically true though? Legally it certainly wouldn’t be, there is no explicit agreement between you and Google. Even if some people feel that they have some ‘moral’ obligation to watch those ads..

> Think of a highway ad.

Equally annoying, I'd block those too if I could.

> that is fraud.

I don’t think that true. Users have no have signed no contract and/or have any obligations to watch those ads.

Of course it would still be fraud if ad buyers were paying for ads which were never displaying it, except Google would be committing it. In most cases on a significant scale to warrant legal action.

bad analogy. An Adblock would be similar to blocking part of my windshield so I don't see the highway ads. No fraud there.

Required default response to all of these comments calling me a criminal (that is the implication of grift, intended or not): I have and will never ever pay one red cent to any company to watch videos for the purpose of entertainment outside of specific creators making high quality content that I personally enjoy. You can not make me. I have zero (0) moral compunction on the subject. I will explore every legal avenue. Weep and gnash your teeth. If every other legal avenue is exhausted I will imagine new Top Cat episodes in my head. You cannot stop me.

It being junk doesn't matter, if you like to watch it then it should be fair to pay for it. If you don't like to watch it then why do you even care what YouTube does, just don't watch.

They’re free to provide the service over a different channel than HTTP which restricts my ability to restrict their ads.

My user agent works for me.

Do you sneak into movie theaters?

As a kid I used to sit across from the drive in and watch. I also used to watch other people's TV's through their windows before I knew it was creepy.

sometimes I watch the movie in the person's seat diagonally in front of me while I'm on a plane :(

Maybe not but I don’t watch ads from ad companies like GOOG.

I prefer to think of myself as grandfathered into the free plan.

I pay for Premium and use it on one PC, but I browse logged out (with ublock) on another PC. This gives me two (slightly) different views into what the Youtube algorithm wants me to see, based on what I happen to watch on each machine. I occasionally reset cookies on the logged out machine.

I definitely avoid watching ads, except the non-national spots on local TV where I kinda like the local city flavor of the ads. Is that grifting? I dunno. The ads are still there in aggregate, I just won't give them my brain space. Give me a way to pay without being tracked and having my content streams tied to a single account, and I'm all over it instead of adblock.

Conversely, 'grifting' is exactly what you should be doing if you want to undermine the current server farm supported by advertising business model.

Videos don't need to be hosted on a server, they can be shared through peer to peer networks, which cost nothing.

Which is not something that could scale to Youtube’s levels.

> nothing

Except huge amounts of drive space and upload bandwidth. Considering most (to an overwhelming degree) people consume videos on phones, tablets or laptops with relatively tiny drives it’s not realistic.

Maybe some decentralized system with content providers hosting themselves might work.

However all that is irrelevant even if it were technically feasible because it doesn’t align with the incentives many/most content creators have (they actually want to be paid either through ads or subscriptions..)

I used to pay for premium but I stopped just incase they thought ramming shorts and ‘people also watched” videos on me was the reason I was paying.

I don't mind sponsor ads..

Do you not get bored of spending ~10% of the total time you watch videos being spent on largely brainrot gambling / predatory game advertisements?

I don’t know what you watch, but the videos I watch just have sponsorships for jewelry and other luxury products.

It’s not really worth it for me to block fashion sponsors who tell me what is popular, when I would otherwise have to go research to find the same information.

Fair, I have never seen a single jewellery / luxury sponsor (It's more Raycon, Raid shadow legends etc for me), however I wouldn't ever purchase them even if I did.

My experience is that most sponsors are overpriced, largely garbage products, that they must pay YouTube to promote in order to sell.

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