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Comment by chankstein38 | Hacker News Reader

The thing that sucks is I pay for YouTube Premium to remove ads then youtubers always have sponsored segments. It makes my $20/mo useless because I'm spending time watching ads still. I don't have a solution I'm just stating my perspective on it.

That said, SponsorBlock has been around for years. I've been using it for as long as I can remember. Basically any decent-sized channel's videos already have the sponsored segment skipped. I'm not sure why someone just posted it but we're well beyond SponsorBlock "taking off".

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Same feeling here. It's gotten twice as expensive, which is insane by itself. But worse is the jarring rotation of sponsored advertisers.

it's reminiscent of NASCAR. Or, like being a kid forced to watch advertising during TV breaks, wondering why the TV screen istrying to sell me cigarettes.

It's maybe a bit social-media-toxic to say that some youtubers are my "favorite people" in that i look forward to their takes on the topics they cover. I lose interest though when that youtuber presents to me an unprompted ad for my testicular health.

I have no solution for creators consumers or google :(

I always wondered why YouTube themselves didn't start restricting sponsored segments. I don't necessarily agree with the idea (not a big fan of how restrictive youtube already is) but I always thought it was odd they were ok with their premium offering being devalued by sponsored segments.

Someone spotted a "SKIP"-button for sponsored segments and posted about it on the LTT-subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1ekajmt/is_y...

I have YouTube Premium and on my phone I sometimes get a "Jump ahead" button that pops up on the bottom right corner when the video is in fullscreen. It doesn't just appear during sponsored segments but also during "less exciting" moments of a video like the introduction.

They just give you 10% of SponsorBlock so you dont get SponsorBlock :D

They could stop sponsored segments, but they couldn't stop creators and users from going to other platforms where they allow sponsored segments. They have far less control than e.g. Apple with the app store (where they literally can stop other app stores from ever coming into being, barring regulation that changes that).

> but they couldn't stop creators and users from going to other platforms where they allow sponsored segments

It's not like there are many viable competitors, at least for long form videos.

If youtube stopped allowing sponsored segments that puts pressure on the market to produce such a thing. Even now creators are trying to come up with alternatives. Nothing has panned out, but something like stopping sponsored segments could very well tip a large number of people who want to get paid to find another way to get paid.

So what, even despite high-profile creators such as Practical Engineering constantly pushing for Nebula (the largest of them), it's still a fraction of their YouTube following.

Most of the time, the complete content is a disguised AD anyway. Same for most hollywood movies.

People getting their own sponsors means Google doesn't need to increase rates to compensate creators. Who wouldn't take a deal for a 3rd party to pay part of your "employee" compensation if they were given a chance? Google still has plenty of sponsors going directly to them anyway.

> It's gotten twice as expensive, which is insane by itself.

No. Look, I'm not happy to pay more, but YT is really great. It's completely obviated the need to watch broadcast or cable TV for me (yes I know, sports...). They haven't enshittified it at all, and since I'm a music lover, I love that they include YT music (although I sorely miss its predecessor). There is the sum-of-human-knowledge and then some !! on youtube. it's absolutely worth what they charge. In fact, I dont know how they can even order enough storage to keep the thing running. tl;dr the features and content has grown proportionately with the price increase.

>They haven't enshittified it at all

really? There are entire posts dedicated to how many features Youtube cut removed, or messed up over the years. as a old school forum boomer I still hate that they changed from a nested comments section to "twitter feed of loose chains" over a decade ago.

I won't go on a whole rant on every little feature, but the service has definitely gotten worse. It just so happens that the tech core still works fine enough (smoothly watching videos on nearly any platform), and the business core is powered by user-generated content which is as good as you choose.

P.S. I sure do wish we got Youtube Premium Lite wasn't cancelled. I do just mostly want ad-free browsing. I can manage around offline/offscreen videos and no YT Music (also miss Google Play Music btw).

Cutting or removing features!= enshittification. To me that word means contracts with early cancellation fees, charging more for long form or educational content, pop-ups, rate limiting ( you get 10 vids per day on your free plan), charging to upload, billing authors for bandwidth used, and so on. I don't think you realize how good we have it.

Your definition slightly off. Here it is from the guy who coined the term:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Removing features is absolutely part of enshittification.

>Then, they die.

Yeah, any day now YT is going to shut its doors.

You must have an incredible lack of imagination, the story of software is the story of mayflies.

> Or, like being a kid forced to watch advertising during TV breaks, wondering why the TV screen istrying to sell me cigarettes.

Cigarette commercials have been illegal since 1971.

Good to knoW that the entire world is under a single jurisdiction.

r/USDefaultism

Wow thanks for this

If your creators are also on Nebula ( https://nebula.tv , no affiliation other than being a former user) it may be worth considering.

The various creators I used to follow on Nebula have no ads at all in the videos published in Nebula, compared to those they post on Youtube. Not sure if its applicable for all creators on Nebula though.

> I'm not sure why someone just posted it but we're well beyond SponsorBlock "taking off".

Are we, though? Regular ad blockers are still only used by a minority of web browser users. I would be surprised if SponsorBlock has larger market share than that.

That's fair I just mean I was recommended it by someone and have recommended it to others. Mostly just expressing people know about it and it's been around a while not necessarily intending to assert that it's ubiquitous.

> That said, SponsorBlock has been around for years. I've been using it for as long as I can remember. Basically any decent-sized channel's videos already have the sponsored segment skipped. I'm not sure why someone just posted it but we're well beyond SponsorBlock "taking off".

I was gonna post a similar comment but with the opposite conclusion: SponsorBlock has been around for years, and the people who are really annoyed by sponsors are mostly already using it. Most of the rest of the population either doesn't mind sponsor segments (me) or isn't willing to go to the trouble of installing addons. Of course, there's always going to be people who become aware of it due to threads like this and start using it, but I'd venture that that's too small a number for worries about this suddenly "taking off".

I think, to some degree, this was my sentiment as well just not stated as clearly. I meant to say basically "SponsorBlock has been around and I know of a couple people who use it so it's taken off but hasn't caused any kind of revolution" but have been dealing with somethings in life and I think just was short with my explanation.

being around for years =/= mass awareness. Just look at Hacker News ;)

There is no perfect solution because the interests are diametrically opposed. Many CC's don't WANT to be a business, but if you want to work full time you need to be. Businesses' main incentive is to get max customers or max revenue, while a concumer's incentive is to get as much as possible for as little money as possible.

Ironically enough, the RAID SHADOW LEGENDS (since we're talking about the "usual suspects) financial model may be the best of both worlds, at the expense of some well off people (and some unfortunate addicts): have whales bankroll 80% of the game and subsize the free players. But that probably can't happen with 99.99% of video creators.

This is why I started using SponsorBlock. I've been a YouTube Premium subscriber since it first became available (when it was called YouTube Red), but I'm still inundated with long-form "ads" for Made In cookware and other such nonsense.

Exactly why I instantly stopped paying for Spotify. They even went so far as to have regular advertising before podcasts.

Not paying for shit like that, only because they put a clause in the TOS that says ad free only means ad free music.

I have no qualms using any ad blocking option available. And I am happily paying for creators using patreon or other means they provide.

Oh Spotify does not have ad free music and there is no subscription level that makes Spotify music free of advertisements.

They hunt me with banners and popups for random musicians almost every day.

What they provide is an ad free music "listening experience", meaning: it is not audio ads. It's a really sneaky and toxic product in that way.

Couldn’t agree more. Enshittification as a symptom of (hopefully) late stage ~~cancer~~ capitalism.

You can still manually skip the sponsored segments. That's not the case with most ads on YouTube, so your subscription is not worthless.

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