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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Imagine valuing your time so little you waste it trying to block instead of just abstaining or using premium.

When Facebook started being user hostile I stopped using it wholesale.

Anti Google YouTube folks haven’t gotten the message yet.

If you make 25 an hour - the bottom decile wage for software engineering - and waste more than half an hour on this a month, idk what to say. That’s a minute a day. Chop chop.

By the way if you consider YouTube premium for family or friend group of 5 you’re paying 5 bucks a month. That means you have 12 minutes a month to waste, or about 24 seconds a day.

If you’re at a typical FANG company making entry salary you have about 5 seconds a day to waste.

Time is precious. Stop wasting it trying to fight ads when you’re capable of paying to get rid of them.

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Imagine valuing yourself and your money so little that you'd pay a company who is actively harassing you with unwanted attempts at manipulation to pretty please leave you alone and let you see the free content you want without interruption.

100% agree. Those people who care about that shouldn’t use YouTube or any Google services at all.

It’s easy to degoogle. Kagi search is a good start.

> Those people who care about that shouldn’t use YouTube or any Google services at all.

While it'd be wise to avoid Google for privacy reasons, I see no problem with people making a choice to use YouTube if they want to. People can decide for themselves how much risk they're willing to take for the content hosted there. I totally respect people's choice to avoid Google to whatever limited extent that is possible, but I also respect people's choice to engage with Google on their own terms. I'd just hope that that choice is a well informed one.

For me personally that means my use of youtube involves never logging into youtube, not using youtube to view the content hosted there (I either use NewPipe or yt-dlp to download videos and then use VLC to view them), avoiding searching for content I wouldn't want forever associated with my identity, blocking ads, blocking suggested videos, blocking comments, etc. it works pretty well for me.

It is not so simple, YouTube now hosts a lot of culturally relevant material. I stopped using Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and frankly I don’t keep in touch or visit in person with as many people anymore. Some of that is for the better, but a lot of it is strictly a negative for me.

some people just like to throw money at a problem, whereas i personally like to keep my money and use my brains or will power but thats just me.

This type of pseudo rational/economic reasonings are only half-smart. (In the same vein, I am not growing vegetables in my garden to save money or time)

In practice, many decisions are neither about money or time.

In this case, this is about voting with your wallet. I don't care about the price, but I really care about not increasing the revenue of Google.

While you make a good point, I think it's safe to say that Youtube is quite a lot more significant for the average person than facebook is.

Say that I wanted guides or tutorials on fixing something in my car, in-depth steps for making a certain recipe, or even programming courses. Youtube is easily one of the best resources for all of these and everything in general.

Saying to write-off one of the internet's best tools just because they've pushed out mv3 seems like giving up too quickly for me.

> Saying to write-off one of the internet's best tools just because they've pushed out mv3 seems like giving up too quickly for me.

If you find value in it, why don't you reward the people creating that value?

The people creating that value get very little from ad revenue. Google keeps most of the money. This is why many creators are turning to Patreon, etc.

> 25 an hour - the bottom decile wage for software engineering

You should be aware that most software engineers in the world live outside of US. Most of them make less than that. But that's just nitpicking.

The problem with your logic is that you suggest to feed the beast that will devour you whole. Youtube is involved in multiple planetary-scale propaganda campaigns.

I get the impression that a lot of the people making a stink over this are teens or people in their early 20s who have plenty of time and not a lot of disposable income. I can't help but think back to my days as a broke high school/college kid torrenting music and movies when I spent more time than I care to admit downloading and labeling mp3 files when everything I wanted was available on iTunes for a price.

Some people are in a place where time isn't their most valuable commodity.

I'm not really defending them because, personally, I think the whole thing is stupid. Youtube doesn't owe anyone anything. If you don't like their policy go somewhere else. I'm just saying that for some people it is worth their time.

how does writing incredibly smart comments on the internet factor into your little calculation ... ? you have any idea how much money you just lost? lol

>Imagine valuing your time so little you waste it trying to block instead of just abstaining or using premium.

I mean it takes ~15 seconds to update uBlock Origin's filter scripts any time there's an update to bypass YouTube. Based on my current salary that's under 50 cents worth of my time. Also I've actually had zero adblock warnings on Firefox so far, my wife had issues on Opera and uBO wasn't updated yet and I spent a minute getting Firefox set up for her so I guess that was about $1-$2 of my time.

I could be wrong, but I interpreted gp as criticizing those who make the solutions available/easy, not those who use the solutions. The former are "trying to block" which takes time -- the latter simply block which is closer to immediate. And then there's us discussing the whole thing, which shows that sometimes the pleasure is in the journey, not the destination.

Well the creator of uBlock Origin probably rakes in a few hundred thousand in donations and other revenue annually, so it's probably well worth their time too.

But yeah, arguing about it all online has always been the most fun part.

Ubo doesn't accept donations

The people who make the solutions are probably doing it because they enjoy it, just like many OSS projects. It's just like ages ago when crackers spent tons of time reverse-engineering games to defeat copy protection: it was a challenge for them, and they enjoyed sharing the results with their communities.

>I mean it takes ~15 seconds to update uBlock Origin's filter scripts any time there's an update to bypass YouTube. Based on my current salary that's under 50 cents worth of my time.

It takes me precisely 0 seconds to update uBO's scripts. It's all done automatically; am I the only one here that doesn't spend any time at all blocking ads? I installed uBO ages ago, I've spent a couple minutes going through the options and enabling almost everything useful to me (annoyance lists, etc.), and that was it. It doesn't take any effort on my part to block ads on YouTube or anywhere else now that it's set up.

Also, I've also have zero adblock warnings so far, on FF/Linux, FFNightly/Android, and SmartTubeNext.

Setting up a YouTube Premium account and managing the payment details would honestly take me far more time than it does for me to block ads.

Or how about no, and instead of just rolling over and paying for bad behavior, we fight for a free, open internet.

Youtube/Google make enough money monetizing our usage data. Now that they have cornered the market (i.e locking in the users), they are using their dominant position to crank up the prices and enshittify the free experience. That's anti-competitive practices, and they shouldn't be encouraged for that but punished instead.

If everyone would reason like you, do you think Google won't raise premium prices even more, or put ads for "lesser" premium users, a-la Netflix base subscription?

I value me not being mindraped, more than I value my time.

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