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Comment by shiroiushi | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to ditch YouTube to avoid annoying commercial breaks. Any decent ad-blocker will skip the ads in YouTube videos, or you can even use an alternative viewer like SmartTube.

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Or pay for it and support the people who's content you're watching and the company who's infrastructure is providing it.

Unfortunately paying for these services to avoid ads will never work. It was first promised by cable TV when they first scaled out coaxial around the country. You paid for TV in part to not have ads. That worked great until the advertisers increased their bid. It was tried when VHS kicked off but eventually even tapes rented from Blockbuster had ads once the advertisers increased their bid. And now it is happening to streaming services. For over a decade I paid Netflix specifically to avoid the ads but as more people do that it decreases the supply of passive attention, which prompts advertisers to increase their bid again, and now it's almost impossible to continue paying to avoid ads. Now I have to pay a fee and watch ads. I would gladly pay YouTube to avoid watching ads but it just won't work. They will start taking my money each month and then they will also push ads at me after I pay them consistently for a long time. We're well beyond "fool me twice" territory.

This is not true about cable TV at all.

Cable TV was first a means to get over the air stations to places where they couldn’t receive it. These stations always had ads

Next, cable started delivering the “Superstations” like the local Atlanta station TBS and Chicago’s WGN which had ads from day one.

The only channels that didn’t have ads from day one were the premium channels like HBO that still don’t have ads.

You're on to something.

I'm signed into my TV and whenever friends cast a video Google mysteriously forgets that it's not allowed to show me ads.

>and whenever friends cast a video Google mysteriously forgets that it's not allowed to show me ads.

That's because it's using their credentials when they cast, not yours.

Then why do I have it the other way where when I cast from a yt premium phone it still shows ads.

I've been using Google premium to not see ads for years now. It's great and apparently the video makers earn more too. I don't love Google's domination and some of their practices but this is pretty reasonable.

Agreed, but the subscription is generally month to month, so I take advantage until that happens and then cancel, like I did with the other crummy streaming services that have done this (Netflix, Prime, etc).

That said, while I find those services pretty scummy for what they've done, I've fled back to spending a lot more time with books. There's plenty of them to read before I die and it's unlikely they'll be similarly molested.

One of the nice things about TV/movies that you don't get with books is a "shared experience": you can't read a book with your girlfriend or your family, but sitting on the couch with your girlfriend and watching a movie is totally normal and enjoyable.

Or don't pay for it and you get even a better treatment with hiding ads (SponsorBlock). the free solution is way better than the paid one if we are talking about Youtube.

>Or pay for it and support the people who's content you're watching and the company who's infrastructure is providing it.

This, it's well worth the price for 'free' youtube and music. I'm not a fan of ads or paying for much either, but it's really surprising how many people here are so against paying for the things they use.

There are still plenty of advertisements placed by the channels themselves. Almost all the big ones I follow do so unfortunately. It's a bit of a shame.

Sincerely,

An otherwise happy youtube premium family customer

It is, unfortunately, not really a workable value proposition if you watch a single-digit number of youtube videos per month.

Most other media streaming services have reasonable non-subscription options - e.g. you can buy individual albums/movies/TV seasons from Apple, etc.

Paying for their annoying algorithm and deaf ears features.

Or refuse to give in to extortion and don't.

What’s the extortion?

I hate bait and switch done on me when they were giving free stuff out. I was there when creators were purely about having fun, trying stuff out and sharing it with the world.

But for kids these days it mostly is fair game - you want to watch funny cat videos, pay up or watch ads.

You can always have fun with friends from over the world and send each other videos no one is forcing you to post it on YT.

Because the videos in YouTube premium still have ads. But because the ads are built-in to the videos by the "content creators" themselves, they call them "sponsor segments". YouTube Premium doesn't include SponsorBlock.

It does in a limited capacity now [1]. No, it doesn't auto-skip for you and it's not nearly as quickly updated as SponsorBlock itself is, but it works fine enough on the iOS app.

[1] - https://9to5google.com/2024/05/05/youtube-premium-jump-ahead...

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