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Comment by ranting-moth | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but YT seems to be doing a lot of A/B testing so what works for others doesn't mean it works for you.

If I see an ad I just close YT for the rest of the day.

I've found that you can also refresh the page until YouTube knows you're just wasting their bandwidth and gives up serving ads for a while, or open the video in Incognito mode where it seems to give you a grace period.

For extra fun, install one browser with Adblock Plus (with acceptable ads disabled) and one with uBlock Origin and swap between them as needed.

> If I see an ad I just close YT for the rest of the day.

I'm sure that's exactly the behavior YT wants here.

Their whole business is based on retention, so I don’t think that’s true.

What is the value of retention if you can't monetize it!?!

For network effects it doesn't matter if you have 99% of the audience or 90% (assuming only 10% will leave because of anti ad blocker).

I should generate some incompressible 4K 60 FPS videos that consist of three hours of randomly generated static and upload them out of spite.

Someone already beat you to it

https://hackaday.com/2023/02/21/youtube-as-infinite-file-sto...

I doubt it'd do anything to harm Google. Storage is dirt cheap and Google effectively has endless amounts of money and resources.

I'm not sure if "incompressible" is possible, at least in a way that Google would still consider an annoyance.

It's not, Google's encoding targets bitrate, not quality. If you upload incompressible content, all you get is forcibly compressed artifacts. Makes no difference to them if it's random noise or a high-effort video essay.

Easy to do with ffmpeg/mencoder.

private browsing w/ ad block seems to be working, its only when logged in do i get a warning

They're expanding the testing -- I recently got a warning when in private browsing and not logged in, but I haven't had an ad or warning when logged in (yet).

Love the strategy.

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