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Comment by wly_cdgr | Hacker News Reader

Seems perfectly reasonable. Y'all think this shit is cheap and easy to build and maintain? Just buy YT Premium, jeez.

Of course hosting YouTube isn't cheap, but giving money to google is unethical. If a less dangerous company owned YouTube it'd be a different story.

I recommend Nebula for any channels which are on there; they make much more money that way. I recommend NewPipe for channels that aren't on Nebula; let YouTube die if it needs to be so user-hostile to survive. (Yes, I know it's a lot easier for me to say when I haven't staked my livelihood on YT and I wouldn't be the one being sacrificed if YT were to actually die. I don't really have an answer to that except that I'm supporting alternatives where I can.)

Who decided that they became the de-facto default for video hosting? They have terrible policies (censorship) and nobody should trust Google.

Sorry, no, paying for this "service" would be the same as paying the mafia for their protection service.

Then they can use the same content filters they demonetize channels for to filter out the gross, deceptive, and outright scam ads. But I haven’t seen any initiative for that to happen on googles end.

If YouTube wants me to watch their ads or pay for premium they need to get rid of sponsored content where 20% of video is just about the sponsor.

Yes, this bothers me as well. I pay for YouTube premium but that does not skip the "native" ads that YouTube considers part of the content. Sometimes, it legitimately is something interesting as product like when LTT launched their screwdrivers (I decided they were too much for me, but were worth a look), but to hear about Better Help, Hello Fresh, Nord VPN, or Raid Shadow Legends again... it pisses me off.

YT isn't adding those sections, the creator is. Maybe instead of blaming YouTube, ask your favourite YouTuber to not add the sponsorship section? And when they reply saying they need them to pay their bills, send them your reply of what business model they should instead adopt ?

How come YouTube is advertising to me but not giving back enough to the creator such that that creator then has to take sponsors to pay the bills? If YouTube's ad tech were good and the deals fair, the sponsors would just advertise on YouTube and the creators would get paid too. the fact this isn't happening means the process is failing, and it's certainly not my job nor my problem to fix it. Until they figure that shit out, I'm going to keep blocking both.

It is a YouTube problem. They can suspend and remove creators who have ads in their videos. They just don't care and want people to pay for premium.

SponsorBlock skips those. The downside is the video sometimes needs to be a couple of hours old before someone gets around to adding the skip sections.

how much longer do you think google is going to allow that?

A couple of years I imagine.

Google doesn't embed or control those adverts and doesn't benefit directly from them, and they might not want to anger the minority of their user base with this addon any more than they already are by forcing yet more unskippable ads on them.

If the seek bar was disabled while a "this video is sponsored by" segment started playing, I would just stop using YouTube immediately.

I think it's expected. Even if YouTube have some large scale advantages, it cannot be cheap to run their infrastructure.

As a YouTube Premium subscriber, where I think the argument breaks down is how absolutely garbage their recommendation algorithm has become. While I don't agree with the tactic, I can see why YouTube would push content that keeps the users engaged/pacified and don't see why exactly they would use the same shitty algorithm on people who pay to not see ads. A great up-sell could be better control of the recommendations, perhaps set a "target profile" for yourself.

For the free-tier I still think YouTube dialed the monetization knob up way to fare. There are currently way to many ads and the quality of those ads is rather low and their relevance is questionable. I don't blame YouTube for attempting to crack down on ad-blockers, but they need also need make ads more tolerable. The current allowed ads, their runtime and placement basically makes the actual videos impossible to watch.

YouTubes current quest for ever growing revenue has resulted in an insane manipulation of its users, pushing ever more brain numbing content and its going to cost them users if they also crack down on ad blocking to hard, while not increasing the incentive to pay for Premium. It's a vicious spiral of pushing ads so hard that more and more people tries to avoid them.

If it made them no money it wouldn’t be worth billions

buy YT Premium and then yt-dlp all the videos you want

Stop feeding me malware through ads, and I will unblock, and watch a few.

Stop censoring lawful creators, and I will buy premium.

... Or a lifetime Nebula membership, if you want to support a company that deserves it.

And you don't have to simp for Google publicly, but ya are.

you would be amazed at what bigtech cogs are ready to do once their paychecks depend on Ads.

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