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Comment by oconnor663 | Hacker News Reader

Normally I despise anti-ad-blocker tactics as much as most folks here, but I want to give YouTube credit where credit is due: They provide a straightforward way to pay for ad-free service. I've often complained when other sites don't do that.

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To be honest, it's not entirely ad free. While I pay for it, the sponsored videos are full of sponsored ads as well. Yes, I make an effort not to support the content providers that are filling their videos with sponsored ads, but this is becoming more prevalent and YouTube Premium is becoming less valuable as a result.

I have Premium and I still use Revanced on my mobile devices because of Sponsorblock integration. It's crazy how many ads YouTube videos have these days.

That’s unstoppable, though, short of deploying AI to detect references to sponsors. The only way to discourage that is to boycott the creators in question.

I agree it’s unstoppable (except by YouTube multiplying the amount they pay creators), but there are actually two avenues already available:

1. YouTube could force creators to add their own “sponsored ad” tags

2. SponsorBlock uses crowd-sourced timestamps to determine when the sponsored sections are

In both cases they could be filtered out trivially

Yes, but the logical end for that is that they’ll stop have discrete sponsor segments and start mixing it throughout the programs like daytime TV used to.

As a user, you can block (skip) them with SponsorBlock (which uses a crowdsource database that's incredibly good).

YouTube could easily stop them by making it against the ToS and enforcing it.

Which is why I go out of my wave to use sponsorblock and anti thumbnail addons.

I'm not watching your embedded ad noty, there's a reason why LTT shadowbans anyone who mentions it

You can also use the SponsorBlock extension to help with some of that (and contribute where someone hasn’t already done so).

That ad-free service comes with pervasive tracking.

The algorithm is a key part of youtube. AI recommendations is both expected and useful to people.

That profiling escapes YouTube and pops up elsewhere in the Google intelligence service.

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