YouTube's new anti-adblock measures | Hacker News Reader

YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

iter.ca

991 pointssmitop1,322 comments

The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance. That’s not to say whether or not the advertisement is for a product or service for which the viewer is interested in purchasing but how it relates to the context in which it is viewed.

People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside. Actual complaints may be about how the billboards block a scenic view but that also seems like another way of complaining about the irrelevance. Similarly, if I am watching a Youtube video, I am never thinking that a disruptive message from a commercial business is relevant to my current activities (uh, passivities?). No advertisement is relevant, not even in-video direct sponsorships, hence SponsorBlock.

If I go to Costco and see an advertisement for tires... well, I’m at Costco, where I buy stuff. Things are sold at Costco and people go there to have things sold to them. I might need tires and realize I can get that taken care of while I’m at Costco. Nearly every advertisement I see at Costco is relevant because it’s selling something I can buy in the same building, indeed usually something juxtaposed close to the advertisement.

I don’t complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they’re irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.

Imagine if the tire advertisement at Costco stood in front of you for 30 seconds and wouldn’t let you pass or turn around until a minimum amount of time passed.

What would Costco offer you in exchange, like a rebate on the tire itself or on anything bought at Costco maybe? Then surely a lot of people would stay.

Youtube is offering access to entertainment in exchange for 30s ads, that's a valuable proposition to many.

You can also pay for YouTube. I do. It’s nice, not crazy expensive. No ads. Creators get paid. Everyone wins.

Yes, I also appreciate the skip ahead feature that lets you fast forward over the sponsorship ads that a lot of creators have started insetting into their videos.

You lose on long run. In few years, you will pay more and still watch ads while YT will no longer be free. (let me remind you of video streaming services)

Managers want their rewards that are tied to earnings and stockholders want to earn more.

And once they both get their money, the next year reward will be tied to even more earnings. And stockholders will want to earn more.

I’ll switch to Nebula if that ever happens.

Content creators have no loyalty to YouTube and will share their content elsewhere when YouTube annoys their paying fans.

There is no if. This is how corporate greed works.

What will happen is, that content creators will spread to different providers, that also have managers and stockholders/owners.

Look what Netflix was like and how many various payable video streaming providers you have now. More than you are prepared to pay for content.

In few years, you will be torrenting content that today you watch for free.

And only because people decided to pay, showing the world that there is money to be made in YT model.

Yes, businesses want money. The point is that YouTube has no leverage on creators. they have to play nice because the barrier to entry is nil as competitors already exist in Twitch, Dailymotion, Nebula, Vimeo, Dropout, etc.

None of that helps you if you want it to be free, but for those of us willing to pay, we can happily ally with creators if YouTube gets shitty.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s a good deal now and I’m happy to take it. None of that matters if you are comparing it to piracy… obviously.

We will see how prepared you will be to pay, where each of creators you watch will be on different network and you will have to pay for each network $10/month, while you watch 20 creators.

Again, this is nothing new. It already happened with video streaming, where Youtube now is Netflix then.

This already happened with Dropout.tv when college humor left YouTube.

Yes, it ain’t perfect. The alternative is the creator literally stop making videos. YouTube is already not serving ads for demonetized videos. People doing it for the love of filmmaking can already do it for free.

No, the alternative is that you DONT pay. That you deliberately not do what is the easiest move(1) and on top of that even feel special for doing it. That you suffer a short time for better next. That you fight them with technical means. That you vote with your wallet, squeeze your teeth hard and show them you just wont pay and they will lose ad watcher if they show more ads.

And now you will tell, that people are not disciplined enough for that, that majority wont pass the marshmallow(2) experiment? That some Mike Judge movie was actually documentary?

Yes, I know.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booby_trap , A common trick is to provide victims with a simple solution to a problem, for example, leaving only one door open in an otherwise secure building, luring them straight toward the firing mechanism

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

How do creators get paid under your rubric?

They already get 55% of revenues at YouTube which is basically the highest percentage in any creator industry. How do we pay creators under your rubric and allow them to be discovered?

Looks like it worked and it works, without any changes, while the number of views is keeping their earnings to small group that will not increase as there is not infinite number of time to watch the movies. And dont "creators" me. It is about google earning more money for their stockholders and managment collecting their rewards, not about "think of the children".

>And dont "creators" me. It is about google earning more money for their stockholders and managment collecting their rewards, not about "think of the children".

Classic consumer-only socialist. You have no model for production except business is bad. If you care about labor then you care about labor getting paid. So far you've demonstrated that you have no model of paying content creators. You would rather they go away then actually pay for their services. You pretend you should be able to get it for free. If you have no model of production, then you have no model.

No, it is much simpler. Success of a company is not limited on constant growth of profit but rather of providing to workers and owners a normal life.

And in our case, it is paid in current model (actually even in model with less ads). It doesn't need any growth of profit.

Everything else is pure greed. Now the question opens, are you paying for videos or greed?

What's a "normal life"? And who gets to decide that?

> And in our case, it is paid in current model (actually even in model with less ads). It doesn't need any growth of profit.

Who are you to decide that?

Looks like the planet will. It has already started to sanitize flee infestation called humanity. And, contrary to what it was told to you, planet is fine. Nothing wrong with it. Scratching. And will joyfully survive for millions years to come. We wont.

You have no model for how labor gets paid.

Sure I do, by suckers watching ads, like it always was.

The whole thing about Google is that they are not software company (as people like to falsely believe), they are advertising company, financing everything else from ads. Including search, youtube, android, gmail and all other side projects.

And those side projects brings them data, to advertise more efficiently.

Now, seeing a trend to monetize their side toys is just pure greed, they don't really need that.

This is also the reason, why no one can compete with them. As competing with free products is impossible unless you have side financing.

By the way, did you (and everyone else) maybe read this study? https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/leave_my_br... It is very eye opening.

Your model for paying labor is "Other people should pay, but I shouldn't have to pay." That fails the basic categorical imperative.

It worked until now for, what, 20 years? And it worked very well, check Google stock.

Don't be afraid, they have calculated people not paying into the strategy.

And it wont stop working because you wont pay Google extra money. But it will become worse for most of people, including you, if you set yourself into position of slave and pay, confirming their theory that they can exploit you so much more.

Btw, did you check the link? You should really learn from it.

"vote with your wallet" is like trickle down economics, it's like if only everyone used paper straws we could prevent climate catastrophy. Split up FANGM should be the bare minimum.

It is not, but discipline is needed instead consumerism. And every half intelligent marketing guy will make it harder than to just pay. Paper straws you mentioned are just paper straws.

Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.

> Paper straws you mentioned are just paper straws

No they are the decipline you are talking about, the delusion is, if everyone used paper straws we would save the ecological destruction of the oceans. The structural problems of endless profit maximization machines can not be addressed by appealing to individual action.

> Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.

That depends on the amount of pieces, don't you think?

Ok, I wanted to avoid it, but since you didnt understand, paper straws are just straw men. They have absolutely nothing with voting with wallet, it is just some lame scenario, comparable at nothing and kicked instead of the real thing.

Or said differently: plastic straws are only a minor part in ocean pollution, while people not voting with their wallet is the main reason for all corporate shenanigans we are experiencing.

And yes, I agree it depends on number of pieces, but I don't put any trust into USA as state, even without Trump, being able to persecute billion $ corporation.

> while people not voting with their wallet is the main reason for all corporate shenanigans we are experiencing

That's what I'm getting at is wrong. The paper straws are an analogy, if everyone stopped driving cars and lived in the woods we could reduce carbon emissions significantly, therefore the reason we can't stop climate change is people not voting with their wallets. Everything is people not voting with their wallets, it applies to everything, that's why it applies to nothing.

If you are having troubles understanding, you can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

Most of your suggestions are fiction but tiktok and insta are real competitors to YouTube shorts.

I’m glad there’s competition for the one part of YouTube that I dislike even more than the ads.

Or stratify users into creators and viewers and force both strata to pay, where viewer users cannot upload and creators cannot watch (even if they paid).

Content creators have loyalty to the magic money tree on the internet, they will shake as many of the trees they can, right down to begging for $1 from every 'fan' to add to the $50,000 they make a month.

I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years. The value I get is vastly greater than Netflix or any other streaming service. But if they ever start putting ads in the paid subscriptions (like many streaming services now with their basic tier) I’ll jump ship.

Yep, you were a test project. Will people pay for free content or punish them by leaving the platform. And will they start to pay if you increase number of ads. Now they moved to next stage.

Anyway, not there yet. Frog is boiled slowly, slow enough that people dont notice until it is to late.

First they need to kill ad blockers tier. Then you increase number of ads to unbearable (they are already doing that) and get as much people as possible to paid content. Also market must be ripe enough, so there will be no more ships to jump. Then you will get ads, different tiers to pay, segmentation of content etc.

Exactly, it's the enshittification trajectory as explained by Cory Doctorow. Without laws and regulations that stop companies from doing that, it's inevitable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#Examples

So what's your alternative if I don't want ads (content is not free to make), want the creators to be paid, and paying for premium is tempting YouTube to abuse pricing? (or so you say)

Are they paid now? What are you fixing by paying, if nothing is broken (yet)?

Block the adverts, and pay the creators via Patreon. And join Nebula to build other alternatives.

I hear you, but I can only live in the now and not whatifs. I refuse to watch ads and will pay to avoid them. If a service I use makes that impossible, then I’ll no longer use the service.

And there is more content in the world right now than any single person will ever be able to consume. I have zero concerns about dropping a service.

But you don't need to drop a service. You can keep it as good as it is. You just don't reward google predatory tactics by paying, as you are literally making YT worse.

So if I don't pay and I don't want to watch ads then what? I'm not going to jump through mental gymnastics to not pay creators and Google for offering the service. If you truly don't want to reward Google, then don't use anything from Google.

How did it work until now? Anyway, we both know that care for "creators" is "think of the children" thing, but I will play along: pay them using patreon (or, I have bought this: https://theduranshop.com/the-duran-gold-eagle-premium-t-shir..., triple time overpriced but they deserve it).

For Google, don't worry. You have payed them, with your data, thousand times over. And if you stop providing today, your existing data will be exploitable for years to come.

On top of it, by paying, you create a direct trail from watched video (data) to your account, from there to your credit card and from credit card to physical person. So you are giving them even more data.

Anyway, if Google goes bankrupt, because of you, you can consider yourself a saint.

Someone who has really done something very good for the whole planet and human society.

I will lit a candle each day into your honor.

YouTube sucks because it works for advertisers, not users.

If everyone just paid like you pay for anything else in life, YouTube would work for users, and be dramatically better.

Unsurprisingly, the people who consume resources while giving nothing back are the ones making it suck the most.

> Noone goes there anymore, it's too crowded.

In theory, yes. In practice, Google's core business is selling ads, not selling access to movies.

But that is exactly the business they are trying to morph YouTube into. If we agree that being exposed to persuasion always has negative value, then ads are bad. Watching ads is the only behavior that causes them to persist. If everyone blocked them, YouTube would go out of business or switch entirely a paid model. If everyone paid, then they switched to a paid model already. The only choice the causes ads to persist and increase is to both refuse to pay, refuse to block, and still watch. So don't do that.

> But that is exactly the business they are trying to morph YouTube into.

They had so much time to do that, yet TFA is about ads getting more aggressive, not less.

Not sure what you mean. I was a test subject? The test still seems to be ongoing after 10 years. I fail to understand how any of these alleged experiments involve me.

If he had used YouTube premium for a hundred years you would still say the same? Ten years is longer than world war two lasted.

They already discontinued the premium-only content (YouTube Originals, turned out the audience isn't fit for that).

> I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years.

I struggle to see the difference between Youtube Premium and regular Youtube with the exception of ads.

It's the same shitty recommendation algorithm. It's the same "you will watch shorts or else". It's the same nerfed unusable search. It's the same "we randomly decided that your bandwidth isn't enough, here's a 480p version of the video you're currently watching".

Yes, it’s mostly just the ads. There are some nice-to-haves like video downloads and background audio on the iOS app. I almost never use search, recommendations, or shorts, but I’m sure you’re right to criticize those features.

Can you download the videos to mp4 or is it some proprietary DRM thing that only plays on YouTube? If not that just sounds like a worse version of yt-dlp

https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

I've stopped recommending this (except for in-person to friends) because it's so valuable, and I'm seriously worried about it getting stomped by YouTube.

Definitely the latter. On the iOS app you choose videos to download, and I believe they only work for 30 days without Internet access. I use yt-dlp for videos I want to archive, but I use the YouTube app downloads for one-off stuff like loading up my iPad before a flight.

> difference between Youtube Premium and regular Youtube with the exception of ads.

Yeah. That's the difference. That's literally it, the rest is window dressing. You are choosing the monetization strategy: ads or money. If you're not living paycheck-to-paycheck, and you watch a lot of YouTube, paying $13 or whatever is the sensible choice.

Yes, lots of things about the product suck, as you've described. But the content on it is good and the recommendation algorithm is pretty good, at least in its obvious goal of bringing me to new-to-me channels on a regular basis.

Number of video streaming services who have removed their ad free tiers: zero.

By this logic you lose in long term no matter what you do.

If you pay premium: they'll add ads to premium too.

If you watch ads: they'll add more ads.

If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video.

If you use another platform: the said platform will need to monetize and you are back to square one.

You just described the evolution of every streaming platform out there

> If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video.

Someone will eventually make an AI adblocker that will dynamically update the video with all ads removed or replaced. For example, let's say that I specify to my AI streaming video editor that "detect all bottles and glasses with alcohol and replace their contents with water and their labels with Liquid Death"

Similar technology will be/is already used to e.g. display a Coke can for some markets and a Beer can for other markets, depending on who paid for that market.

> If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video

If they do this then the right arrow becomes your best friend. If it's part of the stream then they have no way of blocking things so you can't skip past them. If they embed some way of notifying the app that it needs to block skipping here or there then that's what adblock would start triggering from. I'm assuming that's why they don't do it now.

I have paid for Youtube Premium for a long time. Now it’s pushing shorts (you tried to hide the section and it told you “ok, we won’t show you shorts for 30 days.” I don’t want to see them ever, respect my goddamn choices. Now you can’t hide shorts any more), telling I’m not interested is like yelling into the void, search is useless to the point of being insulting and full of clickbait. Youtube Music is so smart it keeps putting non-music videos in my playlists. Creators are deplatformed, demonetised and paid even less.

Youtube can take a hike, I’m not giving that company a dime and hope it fails. After some changes in my personal life as well, it’s good that I am not spending too much time on that awful website

At least it respects it for 30 days, the Facebook app (which I use to keep in touch with family) is a desolate place where literally every time you open the app your feed is filled with shorts and posts from people you aren’t friends with. And those aren’t event the ads!

Doesn't respect it on any of my tvs.

Agreed. This isn’t a situation where you can’t pay. YT has a clear, reasonably priced solution for no ads. It also comes with YT music.

If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.

Reminds me of the early justification of Napster where people would complain the latest B. Spears song was garbage and not worth paying for, yet it was the most downloaded song.

> If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.

The most common throughline of all pro-piracy discourse is that there's a lot of people who feel completely entitled to free entertainment, and they will come up with all sorts of bizarre mental gymnastics to justify that as something other than "I want free entertainment and don't want to see ads."

I don't think anyone could articulate a coherent logical argument as to why they feel they should get YouTube's services, and the entertainment produced by the creators who are on YouTube, while not paying either of them through any means, other than pure selfishness.

Even worse, it's come to the point where it is actively destroying the internet. Everything from every news site being paywalled to click bait mania to brain rot content focused on the bottom suckers who can't ad block.

You'll notice that it's always YouTube that is the target, though. People feel entitled to free YouTube as though by birthright. If someone doesn't like Netflix, they cancel and move on, they don't usually claim they deserve it free.

Maybe because it was not monetized originally, and so those who were around back then argue it must remain that way?

> If someone doesn't like Netflix, they cancel and move on, they don't usually claim they deserve it free.

Not really. I cancelled netflix and I went back to torrents. And I'm sure there were many like me.

I don't think I deserve it free, but by doubling the price for the adfree option they just got to the point where I didn't care anymore.

I just get it free because I can, not because I think I deserve it. I don't have ethics when it comes to megacorps. Just like they screw us over whenever they can.

Previously I subscribed because watching on netflix is less hassle than downloading. But now the price is too much of an annoyance to bother with downloading. I used to be on the 720p plan which is enough for me, and when they dropped that and included ads on the cheaper 1080p plan, I would have had to move to the ad-free 1080p and that was just too much. Literally double the price.

YouTube is providing these videos through the standard html ports with no authentication necessary, like most websites on the planet. This is how you give away information away for free on the web. I don't feel entitled to free stuff, but if someone is giving it away, why not take it?

And since I'm taking what they are giving me for free, then whether or not I decide to watch the parts they try to force on me to try to entice me to buy something I have no intention of buying is none of their business.

If they didn't leave this door wide open then I would be forced to decide if it's worth enough for me to pay to use it. But since they do I do what I want. It's not up to me to make sure that YT's and creator's business models are making them money.

> It also comes with YT music.

This is a big part of it. It drives the price up a lot but I don't want it so I pay for nothing,

> If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.

I don't pay and I use adblock and sponsorblock. I don't watch enough to make it worth it and with ads YT is literally unwatchable now. I watched a mentour pilot video the other day without the blockers and every 2-3 minutes there was an ad interruption, every time for the same stupid car. Not even relevant because I don't buy or use cars.

And there is no competition for YT right now.

Also, I really don't care about the ethics. I don't care if you think it's wrong. I'm just saying why I do it, not trying to justify it ethically. Because I have no ethics when it comes to big corporations. Just like they don't towards their customers.

Agreed, this is one of the times I'm fully behind a Google business model. I'd happily pay for products rather than have them datamine me senseless.

You have to have an account and log in to it!

I would gladly pay for YouTube as well, but I’m sure they’ll mine the shit out of me either way.

Remember, cash can only be spent once, information and data can be spent infinitely many times over.

This is still hacker news not well behaved consumer news. A friend once said to me „if you have some self respect as a techie you don’t pay for streaming“ ;)

I currently pay for Apple Music though ha

I pay for youtube too and it still completely sucks. I hate when people try this bs.

* I don't want to have to have an account and be logged in to it.

* I pay for youtube but I don't always get to use my account. Other people's houses and devices exist. Other people's accounts exist even on my own device.

* I pay for youtube and still have to get all the baked in ads.

* I pay for youtube and have a wonderful black screen with no suggestions or discoverability because I have history turned off. (the feature does not depend on the history data, because for years this was never a problem, only a few years ago they suddenly decided to essentially penalize people who don't play ball like good little data cows). This even after I partially gave in and subscribed to a bunch of channels, which previously I never did.

* I pay for youtube and still have no control to disable shorts. (don't tell me about browser plugins. The world is far more varied than one browser on one pc. There is no youtube browser plugins for roku or the 100 other platforms that have youtube players. And even on a pc, you're not always on your own pc where you are free to hack on the browser.)

Here is the value you get from paying for youtube:

It's having only 8 of your fingernails pulled out instead of all 10.

Sure. All you said is completely true. I have a good solution: don't use YouTube then.

My comment was in response to : "You can also pay for YouTube. I do. It’s nice, not crazy expensive. No ads. Creators get paid. Everyone wins."

"then don't use youtube" is a non-sequitur to that.

You can have zero finger nails pulled out if you don't watch YouTube...

Still a non sequitur. Irrelevant. The comment claimed that paying for youtube makes it good. Not using youtube does not address the claim thst paying for it makes it good.

But there are still ads. You still get the ones the creators put in. That alone shouldn't happen, there should be a requirement for creators to upload sponsorfree vids that only premium subscribers can see. That would be a whole lot fairer.

After all the creators already get paid more for premium views.

What does "disable shorts" even mean?

presumably "not being shown or suggested Shorts"?

Yes. If I'm paying money, why can't I have what I want instead of what they want to shove at me? I thought paying for it made it nice? It's not like it would be either a technical or ui challenge.

Answer is paying does not make it nice. Paying does one thing, which is significant, but the experience ovarall still sucks, including even that one thing, ads, because you still get ads.

I think the gp meant YouTube Shorts [1], Google's answer to TikTok and Instagram Reels.

1: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/

>...only a few years ago they suddenly decided to essentially penalize people who don't play ball like good little data cows...

I'm extremely skeptical that the company that makes most of it's money on the collection of data isn't still collecting data on your viewing habits (and other assorted account-related activities) just because you clicked a checkbox. I don't have a lot of great evidence to back this up but I would still see videos related to my viewing history in the after-video suggestion grid as recently as a few months ago ( before I realized I could zap it with Ublock)

Absolutely there is no reason to believe they aren't still collecting data.

But the checkbox claims that they aren't logging, and so by clicking it they know your intention is not to cooperate in their fundamental business model.

It's just yet another little deniable dark pattern pressure, making the service suck a little when you don't do what they want.

And my outrage point is you get this dark pattern pressure even while you are actually paying money at the same time.

They make more money from the free users and ads than they do from subscriptions. They actually don't want paying users, they just kind of hsve to offer the option to keep those users pacified.

> * I don't want to have to have an account and be logged in to it.

The whole point of YouTube is watching your subscriptions or recommendations based on your previous history. What is your use case if you don't even want to be logged into it?

That's only partially true for me. Recommendations? Not at all.

Subscriptions less and less. I can think of two that I regularly watch, and even those I'll just binge their most recent 2-3 every couple of months.

For me it's Ctrl/CMD+L "y [thing I'm searching for]" Enter.

I've dabbled with tools like PinchFlat to archive/stream via Jellyfin but there's niggles I haven't tackled.

Why would you pay though its really simple to block ads and youtube is already rich enough. Why bow down to consumerism and enrichment of the already rich?

> youtube is already rich enough

maybe, hard to say. but the people who make videos, and get 55% of the revenue (give or take a bit), frequently are not (unless you insist on watching mega channels only).

Well it should be a hobby to be a youtuber not a job. Monetizing it destroyed the whole platform.

While I think there is certainly a lot of questionable content because of monetization, some of my favorite YT channels exist because of it.

For example, there's a guy who rebuilt a early-1900's sailing boat from scratch, funded almost entirely by revenue from his channel. The videos are crazy high quality hand-construction porn and would never exist without the monetization aspect. Oh, and I had no prior and no current interest in boat building.

Most of the channels I follow (via RSS, rather than YT itself) are like this, and YT generally does an excellent job at putting new channels in front of me from time to time that marry my interests (even one's I didn't know I had) with phenomenally great story telling via video.

I know that it creates opportunities for people. The question is, could that guy have done it without the monetization part? Certainly, would've just taken a lot longer...

He would have given up the project. It was a full time thing for him, not a side project.

For me the only youtubers still worth watching also have patreons. I prefer paying them there. Dave from EEVBlog is one of them.

But people like linus tech tips, marcus brownlee etc, they have really gone over the edge of commercialisation. I don't bother watching them anymore.

Exactly. All those screaming clickbaity headlines etc. Even serious youtubers have this now. And all the horrible sponsor fragments. It's just no longer usable without sanitation plugins.

They screw us too though. For premium viewers they already get more money, but you still have to put up with their sponsor stuff. They could put clean videos on their patreon or something but almost nobody bothers

Why pay for clothes? Nordstrom's is already rich enough, just walk in and take something.

If you take a youtube video, they don't have one less of course.

Because they provide a great service that delivers more value than the subscription is worth.

The people provide the value, the platform just happens to have a monopoly standing in that domain...

Except for some reason I have to watch ads installed by the creators themselves despite paying 26 EUR.

I find that annoying too. In case you haven't seen, there's the sponsor block extension for that, which is not limited by anti-adblock measures.

Not on tvs.

On the rare occasion I watch YouTube via my Roku stick, ads cause me to mute the tv and skip when I can. I guess I could put a mini pc behind the TV and get all the browser extensions but this compromise is good enough for my lazy self.

Smarttube Next...

https://github.com/yuliskov/smarttube

I think paying for Youtube will increase the chances of my Google account getting banned. I've never heard of Google banning somebody for rejecting adverts. But if I pay them money, there's a chance there will be a problem with the payments, and that risks triggering false positives on automatic fraud detection. If that happens I assume I would be banned with no recourse and no human intervention. The safest thing to do is never change how you interact with Google in any way unless you absolutely have to.

I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience.

> I think paying for Youtube will increase the chances of my Google account getting banned. [...] The safest thing to do is never change how you interact with Google in any way unless you absolutely have to. I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience.

I recall that even logging into Youtube with your Google account could have that danger: if for some reason Google decided that your name isn't your real name, under its "real names" policy your whole account could get banned, even from other services like Gmail and Google Talk. It's for that reason that I've been very careful to never log into Youtube with my Gmail account, even though that account always used my real name, and even though Google+'s deep integration with YouTube is AFAIK no longer relevant.

Then I’d have to use the official YouTube app, whose UX is utter garbage compared to Tubular.

The value I get for paying YouTube doesn't match the price.

Ad blocking is already free and was free for two decades, why would I want to start paying for it now? It's not like I am breaking ToS (despite their pop-ups stating otherwise) and even if I did it is my computer and it is entirely up to me what kind of content it is and isn't going to display.

Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile.

Everyone wins aside from me, the end user. I am paying for something that is already free to do, I get nothing out of it (I still have to run stuff like Sponsorblock to get the content I actually want) and I participate in the upkeep of a business model that not only doesn't have my interests in mind but also has no issues with tricking me (there is no content moderation for YouTube ads and there are plenty of cases in which users are served scam ads).

> Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile.

Then stop watching youtube. You're just free-riding on the backs of whatever mechanisms exist to motivate the people who make videos to keep doing so. Plenty of other things to do in life other than watch videos you think are worth precisely zero <currency-units>.

> Then stop watching youtube.

Why would I, since I can watch it for free without ads ?

> Plenty of other things to do in life other than watch videos you think are worth precisely zero <currency-units>.

Oh they definitely are worth something. But I also definitely do not want to give Google money.

Or I could continue to watch YouTube and ignore this insane rule that seems to exist solely in your head.

It doesn't get rid of the ads. Most medium to big youtubers will have one or more sponsored segments inside the video.

But that's their choice, not youtube's.

Sure, but I'm paying youtube, not the creator. So I'm expecting youtube to solve the problem they promised to solve.

The problem they promised to solve was "us showing you ads".

But youtube is still showing me ads.

Specifically it's about $14 a month in the US, from what I see.

I say this number so people know how to think economically about this. Anyone who is complaining about this is annoyed, but not $14/month level annoyed on net. Otherwise they'd just get the subscription, or stop watching YouTube.

> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.

That's not true. We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money. If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.

The YouTube ads are hated because that's the whole point. YouTube has something we want (the video), and they're keeping it from us until they we do something we don't want to do (watch an ad). We dislike these ads almost by definition. If we liked them, we'd seek them out, and we'd call them something else, like "movie trailers" or "Super Bowl ads."

Nothing is wrong with billboards, I can look the other way. When the billboards show up on my dashboard and I have to stare at it before I can turn off my exit then we have problems

I don’t mind watching a video with an ad. My child and I can preoccupy ourself. When it’s a 90 second ad we are forced to watch just to watch a 45 second video I’m gonna make certain we don’t watch that ad

Why should I have to look the other way? It's the billboard that's an imposition, an intrusion, and a nuisance. (Especially when there are multiple)

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/07/sao-paulo-city-with-no...

> Nothing is wrong with billboards.

Elaborate.

Benefit of the doubt that perhaps that was the entirety of the comment at the time you posted this reply, but they did elaborate if you could take the time to read the whole thing:

> Nothing is wrong with billboards, I can look the other way. When the billboards show up on my dashboard and I have to stare at it before I can turn off my exit then we have problems

> I don’t mind watching a video with an ad. My child and I can preoccupy ourself. When it’s a 90 second ad we are forced to watch just to watch a 45 second video I’m gonna make certain we don’t watch that ad

>> that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money.

There are places where billboards act as rather effective sound barriers, shielding quiet neighborhoods from road noise.

Then build a sound barrier , no need for an advertisement on them. Or decorate it with art if you want to make them less ugly.

Found marketing director of an ad agency.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.[1]

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's a joke, calm your knickers.

I highly doubt a billboard is thick or dense enough to effectively block freeway sound. It’s not like you have a seamless wall of billboards “protecting” a neighborhood

It'll block some. It's not generally big enough to be effective.

A solid, tall, wall of wood ... Like maybe a fence? Many small towns put up fences to keep highway noise out. The residents don't see the billboards, not from their side. Only the drivers ripping by notice them.

Trees, dissipating sound instead of reflecting it, are even more effective.

How can dissipating be more effective than reflecting? Wouldn't you need multiple dense rows of trees to reach the efficacy of a single pane of sound-reflecting material?

Impedance matching (dissipation) converts more energy into heat while also reflecting and transmitting energy as sound waves.

This is some weird shilling for capitalism or weird devil's advocate tbh. Don't feel like you have to find solutions or positive sides to everything you see on the internet. Billboards are visual noise, road noise is audible noise, neither is desireable.

And I'm sure the rural landowners dont care a jot about the opinions of drivers flying past on the highway. Nobody is going to pay them to not put up ads.

Do you know what's better on those surfaces than ads? Art. Or nothing.

[flagged]

> That’s not how the economy works.

Kind of seems like how the economy works quite a lot of the time

How do those people end up making money if nobody wants what they are selling.

In the case of advertising that is the million dollar question. Determining the relationship between ad spend and revenue is next to impossible, whatever bullshit ad companies feed you to get you to spend more on ads.

> We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers

If you read the rest of the paragraph it becomes clear that this is what was meant by irrelevant.

It’s probably stretching the meaning of the word, I think obtrusive would fit better.

No it’s using the common usage of the word irrelevant rather than the ad industry term of art. In common usage, almost all ads are irrelevant unless they simply help you find what you were already looking for (like a search ad leading to the exact website you were searching for).

The ad that convinces you to buy something you hadn’t thought of before (while watching a video related to that topic) would be considered relevant by the ad industry. But that’s still irrelevant in common usage because you were watching a video, not shopping.

Steel-manning the argument, near where I live, it's not that uncommon to see small to moderately sized advertisements along the road, such as a sign outside/near the entrance of a farm that's selling eggs, meat, etc. I am wholly unopposed to this. In fact, I'm very supportive of this, and used them to find a farm to buy local honey from. Whereas the stereotypical massive slabs whose advertisements get wallpapered on, I think those are distracting menaces, particularly if the primary way you see them is by driving.

And where I live it's an ever growing hell of political signs, dominos pizza, and anyone else who realizes there is no enforcement against this wide scale littering. The signs are never removed and continue piling up. Abandoned / unmonitored lots are also a frequent target.

And it's rapidly getting worse

Glad you're cool with it though, I guess? Cuz I've considered running for office on the sole platform of having them perpetually removed and perpetrators prosecuted.

There are literally signs advertising to hire people to place more signs.

Driving through the south is always fun.

> Go to church or the devil will get you!

Where I live, there are sign regulations (total 30 sqft of road signs per lot, or less for smaller lots, 6ft maximum height, minimum 200 ft spacing, up to 2 temporary signs/lot for a maximum 60 days/year, regulations around needing to look nice, etc.). There are signs, but they are much less noticable and more function as a navigation aid rather than a call for attention.

In Portland, it's against the city code to staple signs to telephone poles.

This is, of course, completely ignored.

There are also signs stuck on wire next to freeway exits or other prime traffic areas. Typically they're on public land because a property owner would want permission or would just remove it.

There are people who angry enough about the sign proliferation that they cut the sign in half so you can't read the phone number or address or whatever.

You should be able to go online and pay a small fee (like $1 or even $.25) per sign that you put up for your garage sale or business. The money could be divided among the city, the pole owner, and people who are paid by the city to remove signs that don't have a QR code or has one that expired.

The fee could be adjusted so that garage sale signs cost much less than business signs. Business signs could only be allowed for businesses who started less than X days ago. Etc.

You'd get my vote! These boulevard signs are totally out of control. They are technically against bylaws in my town, but nobody enforces it. Two anecdotes about how insane these are:

1. I saw one last week advertising a halloween party, so it's been in the ground for over 6 months. It is on a sidewalk near the university and is passed by about 1000 people per day, and in 6+ months not ONE SINGLE PERSON said "Oh, I should talk this down".

2. I once saw a city employee get off their riding lawn mower to move one of these signs out of their way, cut the grass, then get off the mower again to put the sign back!

And echoing the GPs comment, what really gets me about these is that we all have our lives diminished so that one person or company can earn a little extra...maybe. Or in other words, 1000's of people are subjected to this and perhaps 1 person might bite?

I'll close with my favorite interpretation of advertising: Advertisers essentially steal your sense of self-satisfaction so they can sell it back to you.

> It is on a sidewalk near the university and is passed by about 1000 people per day, and in 6+ months not ONE SINGLE PERSON said "Oh, I should talk this down".

Weren't you one of those people? Why didn't you do it?

> Or in other words, 1000's of people are subjected to this and perhaps 1 person might bite?

Earlier you indicated nobody noticed (yourself excluded). Now 1,000s of people are being subjected to it?

>I once saw a city employee get off their riding lawn mower to move one of these signs out of their way, cut the grass, then get off the mower again to put the sign back!

Why wouldn't they? It's not their job to remove the sign and dispose of it. By leaving it in place, taking up space, eventually enough of these signs will pile up and cause such a problem that the powers-that-be will be forced to deal with the situation.

There is nothing to indicate that the comment was from China, where the is a separate power. In this case, the powers-that-be are the very same people who didn't do anything about it.

> Glad you're cool with it though, I guess?

Just to be clear, the advertisements that I'm referencing are ones like this (https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-signs-at-roadside-advertis...), where the goods being sold are sold on the property the sign is on, ie, they're basically shop signs. They are usually pretty small too, with larger ones needing the approval of the local authority. There does seem to be pretty good enforcement on this too. I'm definitely against advertisement billboards: those big slabs that are just there to distract you with any arbitrary advertisement that paid to be wallpapered onto it.

The first time I saw purple mountains in real life, they had a big billboard for a shopping outlet in front of them.

If you tried running for office on such a platform, expect locals to form significant organizations designed to make your life hell.

On a few nice towns here there's no regular advertisements, but shops are allowed to have nice wooden signs matching the aesthetics of the town signs.

You can still find your way around, and discover things, but looking around feels like you are finding things instead of looking at things yelling at you to find them.

In Washington state, the law is that signs along the highway have to be things you can actually purchase in the same property.

I think that rule helps strike a decent compromise: Adjacent local businesses can draw attention to themselves, but it blocks the business-plan of erecting a forest of billboards to auction off, flogging cell-phone providers or prescription drugs etc.

https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=47.42.040

Have other states adopted this? Definitely would change things in NJ.

Similarly, I’ve found numerous small businesses/attractions thanks to highway billboards while traveling. Yes, I find billboards tedious and a nuisance, but I’m happy with the tradeoff.

Except digital billboards, especially those that can switch to blinding white backgrounds at night. Those can rot in hell.

> If the billboards were all about driving-related products

Well, I don't complain about road signs.

The road signs are also unwelcome eye sores. However, they provide a lot of value by achieving safer road traffic so we tolerate them.

That value still needs to be compared and evaluated for delivering information vs delivering annoyance. If information were delivered by giant, flashing, multicolored road signs every 50 meters the answer would be different. My 2c.

Precisely. Thank you.

Road signs are relevant so we dont complain about them despite being an ugly eyesore.

We don’t complain not because road signs, in addition to being an eye sore, are relevant to our current activity, but because they provide significant value.

While relevance has some correlation to value, that correlation is pretty weak; it is easy to find examples of high relevance and very negative value. We should not conflate those.

Your opponent (with whom I agree) argued that the problem with most YT ads and billboards is negative value. Which will stay even if google makes them relevant. My 2c.

It seems we have a slightly different definition of 'relevant'.

Regardless, we all agree: roadsigns are ugly but ok, billboards are just plain bad.

Good point. I assumed relevance was approximately similar to the correlation, without a strong assumption on the signs. Which is just my interpretation, not a universal definition.

Here in the UK we have several campaigns for reducing 'street clutter', which includes excessive use of road signs.

> If we liked them, we'd seek them out, and we'd call them something else, like "movie trailers" or "Super Bowl ads."

I like these things but I do not seek them out.

Many people do, though. I've heard people say proudly that they "only watch the Super Bowl for the ads".

> If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.

To be clear, this is my primary point because I’m driving, not shopping. Something that gets close to maybe agreeable (I would still dislike it) would be an advertisement for a gas/charging station on a long highway. But even then we already have official roadsigns that only show logos and are otherwise relatively unobtrusive. Similar ones for fast food, actually.

Such signs seem agreeable given there is some relevance (I legitimately might be low on gas/battery charge/food satiation levels in a context which I am actually likely to have a specific product need from one or more of the advertised businesses) and they are small enough to be ignorable when they are not actually relevant. The biggest issue I think about with that is how a business gets themselves on the sign but it’s probably not that hard once they are operating next to a highway exit.

(I loathe advertisements, so when I say “agreeable” I mean something like “not wholly disagreeable”.)

If you saw a giant, attention grabbing billboard for something you are looking for, you wouldn't hate it. In the context of roads, these are businesses putting their signs on the side of the road. For example I usually find billboards/signs pointing to the nearest supermarket, restaurant or gas station to be useful, because that's the kind of thing I may want do do when I am driving, and I am getting useful information out of them.

Driving-related products like tires are annoying on a billboard on the side of the road because I am obviously not going to look at my tires while I am driving, and it is usually not something you have an urgent need for. They are however relevant (and therefore less annoying) in a gas station, where you can check your tires as you are filling up your tank. It may even give you the idea of checking tire pressure, which is a good thing. One of the most clever driving-related ad was a letter I received from the garage I did car maintenance with, reminding me a couple of weeks before the next scheduled maintenance that it was to be done (with, of course, an offer on their part). It was useful, yet 100% an ad.

And yeah, we usually call things "ads" when they are annoying and by some other word when they are not, and advertisers tend to avoid the word for this reason. Calling it "sponsored" for instance. But it doesn't change that fact.

> If you saw a giant, attention grabbing billboard for something you are looking for, you wouldn't hate it.

Yes, I would. When I'm looking for something, I search for it until I find it, and then after that I'm not looking for it anymore. I don't go for a drive through the countryside in the hopes that system76 have put up a billboard which blocks the view of the countryside but shows me the specs for their latest laptop model.

This is the problem. Ads may not work as well for some people (who hate them) but they work great on others. Unfortunately, because the ones it does work on spend money, the rest of us are stuck in advertising hell.

I don’t want AR glasses for productivity or the social media bs they want to push; I want them to blight out every f’n ad that is everywhere. When they can do it in-device with no internet connection and I’ll fork over 1k for glasses immediately.

Given that so far the nearest things to successful AR glasses have been produced by Google and Meta, I think the relationship between wearing AR glasses and seeing ads is unlikely to go the way you are hoping.

(I too would love there to be AR glasses that you can put arbitrary software on, only under your control, rather than that of some rapidly-enshittifying company that has the device locked down. I suppose it's not strictly impossible that that might happen, but it doesn't seem like it's the way to bet.)

You can achieve some of that by moving to a foreign country which language you don't understand. A good experiment to realise what a relief it is to suddenly have all offline advertisements removed (and some online too, when localised based on IP)

The thing is that you are not looking for a new laptop while you are driving, but you may be looking for a gas station because your "low fuel" light just turned on. And how are you going to find that gas station (which may not be exactly on the road you are driving on) if there is no sign advertising for it?

You can tell me you can pull over and look at a map, or program it on your navigation app. Not only it is not the most convenient, maybe even unsafe, but how do you think that gas station ended up on that map? Most likely the business paid for that, making it an ad.

That's the idea, we dislike that laptop ad because we usually don't buy laptops while we are on the road, it is an irrelevant attention grab, especially when that billboard is disproportionately large. But a gas station, restaurant or convenience store is relevant to a significant fraction of the people on the road, and when the sign is reasonable, we don't usually call it a billboard, even though it is an ad and not a sign like a speed limit.

„For next gas station take exit 31“ is not an ad in the sense most people understand ads, just as a „toilet“ sign on a door is not an ad for that toilet. I feel like you are constructing a case of ads that doesn’t really fit the common definition, but maybe I misunderstand.

When's the last time you stopped for food or gas on a road trip and used billboards rather than a maps app to help you choose a place to stop?

12 days ago, driving thru North Carolina. Several times.

Gas and another restrooms.

If you're looking for restrooms, did you use billboards or the road signs that advertise rest stops or gas?

Nearly every time I go on a road trip and find myself low on gas or hungry.

Mucking with apps while driving isn't particularly safe.

> And how are you going to find that gas station (which may not be exactly on the road you are driving on) if there is no sign advertising for it?

Well, actually, in all serious travel I do, I tend to know exactly where I'm going to stop for fuel before I ever set off. It's programmed into my gps as part of my route. And I'm going to find it using my gps software.

If I'm doing a less-serious trip somewhere and I don't pre-plan my stops, the way I find places to stop for fuel is I drive along on my route, and if I need fuel, when I see a "gas" station, I stop there. Again, no billboards needed.

> You can tell me you can (snip) program it on your navigation app. Not only it is not the most convenient,

I find it super convenient. Much much more convenient than running out of fuel or not knowing if I have enough to make it to a particular place.

> how do you think that gas station ended up on that map? Most likely the business paid for that, making it an ad.

Well, that's debatable. It's a listing for an amenity of a certain type (fuel station) on openstreetmap. To be in the "Fuel" category that shows up on my gps software, you'll need to sell fuel (or your entry will get edited and you'll show up in a different category). In much the same way as a sign saying "public toilet, this way" isn't an ad.

But the debate about the blurry lines of "what is an ad?" is beside the point: have you noticed how that pattern of: "I want a thing, I search for it, I find it, and then I'm not looking for it anymore" holds true here? And also how no obnoxious billboards were involved?

Even if it is an "ad", it's in an appropriate place - on openstreetmap, in the "fuel" category, and searchable by gps coordinates. I can toggle whether I want things in the 'fuel' category to be visible in my gps software very easily - I can turn that "ad" off with exactly 2 button presses if it bugs me. It's not a huge obnoxious billboard blocking my view of the countryside, lit up with 10000W of lights at night time.

Of course I would hate it.

Ads are just mental warfare against you. Its someone trying to manipulate you for profit.

If I drive somewhere I know where I want to go. If I need supplies I can pull over and check on the map where the nearest store is.

In such case I don't care what store it's, just it's proximity.

> In such case I don't care what store it's, just it's proximity.

So you'd go to a hardware store for food? Surely you need to know what they sell.

Are you being obtuse on purpose?

Or is it natural?

It's on purpose to make the point that advertising serves a purpose.

If advertising has hammered in to me that Tesco sells food and Screwfix sells power tools then my brain has a ready made map of what those chains sell. I don't have to visit and find out for myself.

are you unable to comprehend difference between pull and push communications?

You sound like an ad exec. I never want ads ever, they are by their nature intrusive. I have never bought anything from a targeted ad on social media. If one plays and I can't turn down the volume quick enough I will make noise to avoid hearing it.

If an ad is placed in a way that forces you to look at it you have every right to want to remove it. If it's in my personal power, I do.

Have you read those comments about how people who says ads don't work on them fail to realize it works on them subconsciously when they go shopping?

I actively avoid products I see mass market advertising for. It’s a useful heuristic, if you see a YouTube advertising campaign you can basically guarantee the product is poor value for the money. That extends to basically all name brand products like soap.

Cheap signs along the road don’t trip that heuristic because they cost so little it doesn’t change the underlying economics.

I too use the metric of seeing a YouTube sponsor or ad usually means it's bad.

I was actually interested in some of those privacy/info removal services but after doing research found those to - as you said - lack value for the money.

How does an ad being on YouTube mean it's a bad product?

If a product needs to pay people to talk about it, it must not have organic buzz and popularity. Think VPNs sponsoring YouTubers, or those cheap wireless earbuds from a small brand. I wouldn't trust their quality.

Exactly why I do not own any Apple or Google products or have any subscription services. Advertise to me products I can not actually own or control for myself and I hate you.

Genuinely wondering as I would love to say what you did in your first sentence: what devices do you use? Are the Asian built phones better, or do you use a smartphone at all?

Not carried a phone in 5 years. Smart or otherwise.

When I am at a laptop or desktop I am online. When I am not, I am offline.

Personally my guess for VPN, earbuds, food delivery is that the quality is fine but it costs an extra 50% to pay for the ads.

But usually a few minutes of research reveals a better option. I'm guessing most won't so that's a success for advertising I suppose.

It’s an economic argument. The product could be fit for purpose, ie Nord VPN could work just fine.

However when you’re advertising a VPN on a cooking channel the cost per customer is quite high so they need to recuperate that high cost by charging extra. This is more true the longer the advertising campaign runs and the less a channel is related to the product, each of which drive up new customer acquisitions costs.

Obviously it’s not a perfect predictor, but it doesn’t need to be.

Ok, this makes sense. But then how would people market their product then?

Marketing overall doesn’t need to be effective marketing to me. It really depends on the product and strategy, YouTube can sell anything other options need to be product specific.

Being the value option is enabled by lower advertising spend but it also needs less advertising spend because it doesn’t look overpriced in comparison. PR firms for example may be able to get a few articles written quietly pushing your product. https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html However spending 100x as much doesn’t get you 100x as many articles. Diminishing returns hit hard and YouTube or other mass market advertisers is low on that list.

Companies can employ multiple strategies, Lexis and Toyota are car brands under the same entity targeting essentially completely different customers bases with two completely independent advertising budgets.

I see where you're coming from. I feel it's more like: you've never heard of a product. All of a sudden every YouTuber is shilling raycon earbuds.

Well that's the only place I ever hear of them. They all say they're great! I've never seen them or had anyone else attest to it except ads that all came out of nowhere. Seems like a play to make big moves in the headphone market. They sure did spend a lot on marketing, I hope enough went to design to make em actually good.

Now, I don't own any raycons because as I said seeing this behavior makes me skeptical of the product.

Meanwhile the main headphones I use I've never seen an ad for once. A friend recommend the m50x's when we were djing. I tested em and loved em. After getting them I notice they are basically an industry standard for audio which is my work. I suspect the quality product with savvy ads in appropriate places lead to this situation. No doubt in audio magazines audio technica runs ads.

When every YouTuber has done an incogni, nord, raid shadow legends, or a few others, I have to suspect they spent more on marketing than they did their product which makes me think(and has been shown a few times) that these products kinda suck.

100% how our family operates.

Advertising intensely to us is the absolute best way to lose us as a customer.

Such a claim needs evidence; by its nature, it insulates itself from counter-arguments based on experience.

If person X says "ads don't work on me", the state "I experience no influence from ads because they don't work" is indistinguishable from "I experience no influence from ads because they're so sneaky that they only affect me subconsciously".

Unfortunately, it's very hard to get individual-level evidence. You can get population-level evidence, but sometimes that evidence shows that the ads don't actually work (for instance, The Correspondent's 2019 articles about the subject).

Which is borderline nonsense nowadays. If this were another website, I'd convey it thru the meme of SpongeBob showing Patrick all the diapers* with captions of "sports betting" "pokemon speculation" "monetization in games" with maybe the last panel being "diamonds are valuable"

They have always had powerful psychological tools but they are next level nowadays. Best to just avoid.

* https://i.imgflip.com/2yg87r.png

(I don't think pokemon intentionally wants such a toxic secondary market tbf)

If it didn’t work on people companies wouldn’t spend hundreds of billions of dollars on ads. Everyone says the same thing that ads don’t work on them but the data says otherwise.

It clearly does. That's why my post was about avoiding it at all costs.

I however can confidently stand by my no purchase claim. I'm guessing you arent actually clicking facebook ads(if u don't run adblock for some odd reason.) It's not difficult to avoid that.

I think you are complaining about the signs that happen inside cities particularly on roads where traffic gets backed up and slow. Beyond that it's gas/food/hotels/motels/tourist attractions... and religious speech. But in urban areas where it's AC repair, plumbers, injury lawyers or whatever lets be real: you're not missing much of a view.

> keeping it from us until they we do something we don't want to do (pay for the service).

Fixed that for you.

I pay for youtube with generous monthly donations to ad-block devs and list maintainers... Also how about all the ads on paid services now?

Oh and I pay for plenty of services just not from vampires like youtube who rip off the actual talent and hold their audience captive.

Arrr Matey, the sails may have been luffin but they be full again!

> We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money. If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.

I like billboards when I'm driving down an interstate and I want to decide if I should get off at the next stop and I want to know what food options there are. (example: Driving down I5 from SF to LA). I like billboards when they tell me about an attraction coming up. (Winchester House has a billboard) I like billboards when they advertize concerts/entertainers. (Driving down the I15 from Ontario to Oceanside there are ads for who's playing at Yaamava (https://www.yaamava.com/yaamava-theater), Pala (https://www.palacasino.com/entertainment/upcoming-concerts/), etc...

Even if they were relevant, they'd still be holding global internet video culture behind a paywall.

First pay with your identity (carrier phone number required for a Google account). Then double pay through Premium in the illusion you won't end up seeing ads anyway.

They’re disagreeable because you’re having your attention robbed unsolicited for the purpose of someone else trying to get your money. The whole concept is an insult. At best they drive materialism.

You're trading your attention for entertainment you don't otherwise have to pay for.

Not true, cable TV runs ads and costs money. Many sports channels cost money in a cable package and still have ads. The *paid* Netflix plans have ads now.

It’s pretty clear that companies can’t stop salivating over how lucrative ads are, and will continue to shove ads down our throats inside of paid products as long as we live.

OK, but we're very specifically discussing YouTube here, which as discussed, you don't have to pay for; but if you do, you don't see ads.

...for now. But I do wonder how well this statement will age.

All of the people commenting on this thread will be dead and buried one day. That's how well all of this will age.

Society used to have the wisdom to plant trees for its children to sit under. On the whole I think I like that attitude a lot better than this "apres moi, le deluge" thinking we see so much of now.

If you do, you don’t see pre-roll and mid-roll ads. You still see embedded ads, sponsor mentions, “all the tools we used are linked below”, etc.

That's on the video creator, not YouTube. Just tell them to stop or you won't watch their videos anymore.

Except, you do.

https://www.howtogeek.com/more-ads-are-coming-to-youtube-pre...

Clearly they are referring to the ad-free plan, not the cheaper ad-subsidized plan.

Ad subsidized is not the same as ad free.

Many hybrid products/services exist to lower costs by taking on some ads. The low tier Netflix plans and $200 smart TVs are examples of this.

Sports TV is just a monopolist scam though.

You do in the end because you're buying the products that are funding the ads.

Would we have to pay for the cat videos and other things people currently share on youtube because it's the dominant platform. The creators of these are generally not paid.

I don't like ads but keep in mind the only 100% "relevant" ad is disguised as content. Is that what you want? Sponsored or generated stuff that feeds you some agenda while you think you watch something different...

Consuming content online has always been about agency. You choose the content. Previous media landscapes were largely passive endeavors. Broadcast media choices were limited. You either muted the ads, turned off the TV/radio or endured the advertisements. I often find myself closing YT when ads are played.

Not only are they largely irrelevant, but they are frequently in the wrong language. If I want to immerse myself in the local language, I will go outside and interact in that language. If I am listening to a podcast in English, typically around Anglophone cultural or political topics, why would they invade my space with non-English content?

I don't want to hear local music or K-Pop when I am listening to classical music.

In many cases, the language isn't even local to the country which I reside in. If I cannot have an English-only space on my own computer, I won't be using the site. There's a time and a place for immersion into other cultures. My personal computer in my home office isn't the place.

The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.

Bane: For you

I dislike them because they're loud, flashy, annoying, and (most of all) because YT saturates them. It even tries to put them in the middle of songs when it detects a transitional pause. And they are served so often. It's literally worse than broadcast TV, which is an incredibly low bar to step over.

Platforms should not allow advertisers free speech. They should limit the content to static imagery/shots, dissolves, and spoken narration, ie the form rather than the content. Don't tell it can't work, this was how adwords worked on Google Search for years and everyone made handsome profits. Advertising is cancer if allowed to go full spectrum. The people who work at Youtube should be deeply ashamed of what they have allowed it to become and the trash monetization incentives they've established.

I completely agree, though with a twist. Google knows everything about me and yet I get ADs for things that I would never purchase. Just because I'm a middle aged male I see trucks, and beer, and football advertisements all day long. Those are irrelevant to me. If Google would only use their immense knowledge of me and what I like, I might be more amenable to watching their ADs. Where are the ADs for geeky movies that I might enjoy (is there a new Superman movie coming out)? Or books by my favorite authors? Or video games or computer equipment or electric cars? Hell, I have grandkids so stuff for them might work on me.

To be clear, it's not only Google, all the big providers have so much information on all of us, but they don't seem to take advantage of it at all. I've turned the AD "customization" on/off for all kinds of things and it doesn't seem to matter in the slightest. Nearly everything I see is irrelevant to me.

Their incentive is to make money, not serve you relevant ads.

If a geeky movie studio pays X to show an ad to people of your profile, while a car manufacturer pays X*2, Google is better off showing you the car, even if they are internally 100% sure you'd buy the movie instead.

The next Superman movie might correctly conclude that you’re going to go see it anyway, so advertising it to the hypothetical you isn’t very valuable.

I could be wrong but I was under the impression that ads paid primarily per click, in which case surely the relevancy is important too?

In many cases the buyer pays per impression.

Even if they pay per impression, pricing is ultimately driven by clicks.

Even if you pay-per-view of an ad, a company selling tampons will not pay as much for 1 thousand views of their ads on a youtube channel for construction workers, as on a youtube channel for girl's fashion. Because the former drives no clicks/revenue, and the latter does.

So yes relevance is extremely relevant to make money.

I would like to see a advertisement for “The C Programming Language - ANSI edition”. Yes I have a copy but would like to see it advertised on YouTube. Wish my copy was signed :/

> Google knows everything about me

No it doesn't. Google is highly restrained when it comes to using what it knows about you to serve you ads. Way more restrained than for example Meta or the newer Chinese apps like TikTok.

I agree with your point, but you're also making a different argument than the point you're replying to. Google knows way more about you than they're legally able to apply to advertising. Just because they can't use it for that specific purpose doesn't mean they lack the information.

Is there a reason? Is it a matter of principle or?

It's an established strategy to serve you irrelevant ads. When the targeting gets too specific, the people start to notice and panic.

Target is a fun example - they had cases where they revealed pregnancies through targeted ads. Now, they'll put an ad of a lawnmower (untargeted) next to the bassinet (targeted) and customers are less creeped out

Idk of it is a strategy, would be interested for any background reading.

My XP at an ad-tech is that there is only so many targeted ads, and the advertisers cap how many times they want to show you an ad. When it comes time to bid to show you an ad, all of the targeted ads might have exhausted their campaigns (shown you the ad X times already, or the campaign ran out of spend). In this case, all the advertisers that would bid a _lot_ in auction are sitting out. There are still other bidders, but these are less targeted and are bidding less money. Because the highly targetted ads are exhausted, these lower targeted ads might look random. Their targeting might be instead of based on gender, city, income, the targeting might be based on just geography. The fewer targeting parameters, the lower the bid.

In effect, once all the highpy targeted campaigns are done with you, they stop bidding, and the ads with less targeting which have cheaper bids are now the auction winners. If those are exhausted too, then there is a very large pool of low rent ads which have even less targetting.

Here's a skeptical write-up about the mailers I was referencing. I like this view because it acknowledges human fallacies. For example, that an untargeted ad could feel targeted or that we may exaggerate the amount of ads that feel targeted.

https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-t...

The ads probably get to you subconsciously anyway, IIRC there are studies done by psychology experts (some of them also work for the ad industry) that explains the presence of random ads.

For one thing, if you're suddenly in the market for a truck, you'll see the brand that was in an ad a long time ago and you think "Oh yeah I've heard of Ford, never heard of Isuzu, let's look at the Ford much closer.". Even a tiny nudge that the ad did helps, when selling to millions. Obviously a truck is a big purchase, and you individually probably would do more research, but the nudge applied to millions might move the needle in the heads of a few dozen people.

> Just because I'm a middle aged male I see trucks, and beer, and football advertisements all day long

Well, yeah. Those companies will pay to send their ad to all middle aged men. Those companies could slice and dice more to get better demographics, but they don't think it's worth it.

Google's business isn't to slice and dice the demographics to show you better ads. It's to slice and dice the demographics in any way that the advertisers will pay for.

Because the people who are willing to pay money are, ultimately, the customers.

It’s better they don’t. Hyper-targeting of ads to achieve political aims has been happening for the past decade with Meta leading the way.

There is zero situation where this technology doesn’t get co-opted by adverse interests to make your life measurably worse.

Better to keep them dumb and then grow a regulatory spine to put a stop to the endless proliferation of ads. It was done for advertising on other media.

The most successful marketing campaign of all time was the marketing department convincing companies that they need marketing.

If you’re Coca Cola and you spend £1,000,000,000 on a Christmas TV ad of a bear drinking cola, does that increase your sales? No. It does nothing. But every year they’ll do it.

The only marketing that works is at the point of sale, and free samples. Anything which is just random and in public will not result in anything.

But the genius of the scam is, it’s not measurable. You bill £1,000,000,000 a year for marketing, and they can’t measure if it worked. How do you know if a TV ad worked? But they can’t withdraw the funding, because you’ll tell them their competitors will win. So the scam keeps going.

I don't drink cola myself, but it seems logical to me. The point of the expensive advert is showing everybody how rich Coca Cola is. That increases the trust people have in their products being safe and reliable because they know Coca Cola has something to lose. If they didn't advertise they'd be like those Chinese sellers named as random strings of uppercase letters. I definitely wouldn't buy cola from one of those.

Think about all the ways you a smarter than the average person.

Well this is one of them too, unfortunately.

Ads work extremely well. Often they are the single most important aspect of product. Google and Meta are two of the largest corporations on Earth entirely because thin brains click their ads all day. Your hate for ads isn't misguided, but you are hitting the wrong mark.

I don’t get how YouTube advertises. Because we use VPN in China, YouTube simply pushes ads in whatever local language my proxy server happens to be. Which baffles me quite a lot since even the most basic tracking and use history (I have two decades in Google) would tell them at least the language I can understand.

The parasitic nature of ad tech attracts the laziest get rich quickest tech workers who go on to management where they hire the griftiest of grifters into their ranks.

> If I go to Costco and see an advertisement for tires... well, I’m at Costco, where I buy stuff. Things are sold at Costco and people go there to have things sold to them

If you visit content on the internet that the Google Ad network thinks suggest you might be interested in purchasing new tyres, then showing you ads for companies that sells tyres is, unfortunately, relevant no matter what your doing now, because you're more likely to click them, or remember the company/brand when choosing a purchase.

Also a large proportion of ads aren't designed to affect immediate purchase - cars, movies, coca-cola, and other brands are hoping to get into your (sub) consciousness so you'll remember when you buy days, weeks or months later.

The most disagreeable thing is they are psychologically insidious.

I really hope ads to stay as irrelevant as possible, for as long as possible.

However it seems impossible to last for our society with all the tracking, product placement and astroturfing.

You're right to point out the "relevance factor" is not what people commonly take it to be. The context is (as always) crucial. Of course, the degree to which an individual tolerates advertising varies for a multitude of reasons.

> billboards [...] countryside

I think people simply find this to be an ugly thing. They object to the ugliness of it. They're in the countryside -- i.e. not the town/city -- and they find themselves unable to escape (even here!) from this seedy miasma. Putting disgust into words is not a simple thing, perhaps this is the reason for the inconsistent reasoning you've noticed.

All advertising is ugly, it's an ugly business -- money grubbing manipulation. It's inherently weird to be subjected to the endless torrent of uncanny twisted art that is advertising every day for your entire life. The ads on Youtube are normalised by the same force that normalises all the other advertising -- the ads in one context normalise the ads in another. The ads on the side of the bus, on the LCD panels on the train, on the same screen that shows the timetable at the station, before the movie starts, by the seemingly sensible ads in Costco. One hand washes the other.

We're all living in Truman's world. About the only thing that might make it better is maybe some of this nice Ovaltine recommended by 9 out of 10 doctors.

This pretty much applies to all ads everywhere. I mean Im a guy and I get ads for tampons on TV or a million odds for all sorts of diseases I dont have.

Shit I rather willingly give info about myself so irrelevant ads can be filtered out and I dont have to waste time on them and the advertiser doesnt waste money on me

You don't get it. You are not the target

Most advertising is seeking the less intelligent consumer. Or the young and still naive consumer.

They outnumber you 1 million to 1.

It's why female musicians make more money putting their name to a makeup brand then their music.

It's why Elon will make some promise that is unrealistic.

It's why Apple put low paid everyday tech support staff in their stores and called them Geniuses.

You have to put yourself in the shoes of the mainstream buyer. They see a headline and believe it.

Couldn’t youtube easily discern those who are young and naive from those who aren’t so that the latter don’t get ads? It would be a win-win for everyone: youtube spends less (no need to spend bandwidth), companies dont get hated that much, non-naive-young consumers are not bombarded with ads.

> It would be a win-win for everyone

Not the naive young ones. Who are also the prime target for radicalisation.

People are known to buy stuff on eBay when they are drunk. So they don't want to miss out on opportunism!!

But lots of companies are now allowing people to pay to not see ads.

Anecdotally, YouTube will show to boomer home owners scam solar product ads which they'd never show their younger, more scam-resistant counterparts. So they at least make some adjustment.

Also wouldn't we farm & sell our ad-free accounts

PS: maybe they could just show us Coke ads, whichever ubiquitous brands necessarily advertise to stay in our consciousness etc.

It just so happens that anyone who thinks ads don't affect them is naive and thus a profitable ad target.

Spot on. As technically apt people, we grossly overestimate the technical ability of the average user.

> It's why Apple put low paid everyday tech support staff in their stores and called them Geniuses.

I always thought the geniuses were the second-level (or higher) Apple support that you escalate to when your problem isn't readily solved by the first level?

It makes sense

No, we just hate ads because they're trying to tell us what to buy. It's the definition of illiberal.

10000x NO!

I absolutely hate advertisements in stores specifically because of their releavance. If I go there to buy cereal, I expect to go to the cereal shelf, look at the options, evaluate them and pick the optimal one for my set of criteria.

What I absolutely do not want is for one cereal brand to be placed right as I come in, exploiting my psychological quirks to get me to either buy it on the spot without going to evaluate other options or just occupy a slightly larger part of my attention to skew my evaluation process when I get to the shelf.

Advertising is just another money multiplier. If you have a ton of money to throw at ads, you'll make more money than those that don't. And to make up the ad investment, you'll necessarily have to be a worse deal for consumers.

Yes, advertising is bad because it works. At its core it's manipulative and well targeted adverts are the most manipulative.

When you are next in the cereal aisle take a close look at how they are arranged. What you see is advertising. Shelf space is at a high premium and companies tussle for your attention.

The product which is easiest to reach - for an adult on cereal shelves and a child in the toy section - pays a premium to be there. The smaller unknown brands are pushed to the bottom and on top where you have to stretch.

It's no different to a large Kellogg's cereal advert in your face as you walk in the shop.

> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.

The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is the whole thing. There is nothing good about ads, ever. If I want information about a product, I'll go looking for it, and I won't go to an advertiser. If I'm looking to watch a YouTube video, there is absolutely no condition under which I want to hear about a product unless that's explicitly what I went to that video to hear about.

All ads are lies. There is never an ad that tells you about the flaws in a product or compares it honestly to competing product. I'm simply not interested in being lied to.

> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.

Well, obviously. If the message was relevant or a good offer for the customer, they wouldn't need to pay to advertise it. Advertisement is for products which have low enough cost/benefit for the customer to not sell themselves.

When Google started ads they were praised for being relevant. But, as long as advertisers are willing to pay more, they can buy off the relevancy, not really caring about directly measurable conversion rates.

The worse the experience, the more likely people are to pay to remove ads entirely. So we end up with this weird situation where the ad experience degrades on purpose, rather than improving relevance or fitting the context, because annoyance drives subscriptions.

Lol you sweet summer child, they don't care if the ad is relevant to you, you're not the customer. https://medium.com/@Glenames/programmatic-advertising-101-c9...

Your eyes are the supply. The demand (customer) is people wanting your eyes. Relevance in ads is if your eyes are a candidate to at some point buy their orid8.

What your taking about at costco is essentially house ads or really signage.

Remember unless you are a brand you are not the customer for ads.

Lol you sweet summer child, they don't care if the ad is relevant to you, you're not the customer. https://medium.com/@Glenames/programmatic-advertising-101-c9...

Your eyes are the supply. The demand (customer) is people wanting your eyes. Relevance in ads is if your eyes are a candidate to at some point buy their product.

What your taking about at costco is essentially house ads or really signage.

Remember unless you are a brand you are not the customer for ads.

This is correct.

But the real customer, the brand, cares if the ad is relevant to you because they are either paying for impressions or traffic. Either way, if the ad is not relevant the analytics tools will show that campaigns in Google perform worse than campaigns bought in, say, Meta or TikTok.

It's not irrelevance, it's lack of trust.

I could see an ad for the exact thing I need and I still wouldn't click it. Either it's a scam, or it's technically not a scam because offering 90% off in the first month of a 12 month contract is legal, or it's the worst product on the market and the only way it can get users is blowing VC cash on ads, or there's something else that will surely disappoint me.

I think the theme you and other posters are stating in various ways, is that being expised to persuasion always has negative value. The motivation for some actors can be good, but it will never be universal. When seeking out information to make a purchase, one of the primary taks is to identify and filter out persuasion in the process, in the form of sponsored listings, or reddit shills. I have seen calls to ban paid persuasion, or even all paid speech. I don't know if that is compatible with the notion of free speech, or if I agree it is a good idea, but it certainly would have some good effects in addition to any bad ones.

It's not persuasion that's the issue. Opinion articles in newspapers are persuasion and I actively seek them out sometimes.

One of the blogs I used to read was The Last Psychiatrist. The author had a saying: "if you're seeing it, it's for you". In other words, if someone goes to the effort of putting something in front of you, they did it for a reason. Usually that reason is not "my company is growing via word of mouth and organic PR efforts because our product is so good, but I just want to grow faster."

I feel like it's happened to me multiple times that I've seen an ad for something I actually want, but if I click through or look up the company advertised, then do a little research on that company, I discover that it's a scam or a super crappy version, then I actually purchase the thing from a more reputable company with higher quality. So I guess they succeeded in getting me to buy something, from their competitors.

For videos media, you also have to factor in tone and pacing . Totally kill the flow of watching a video essay when a loud talking ads jump out for 5 second. That's why I have a kinder view for Youtube sponsors, since it's read by the literally same person making this video, and have total control when to place it. Even if it's NordVPN ads in a middle of a history channel.

The primary thing is that they're there, that they make the world a worse with their nash equilibrium of "everyone is doing it so everyone must continue doing it", and that they're basically rich people begging you to give them more money. Outside of a context where you have made a conscious choice to spend money, at that.

I'd argue that even in a supermarket they're mostly useless and manipulative. I came in to buy bananas, you don't need to tell me doritos are buy 9, get 3 free.

Fuck ads.

> People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside.

They also are a distraction, which seems pretty ironic when billvoarda are used to remind drivers to not drive distracted.

I hate the ad-centered nature of modern web anyway, but I don't understand why ads are not based on the content of a webpage/video. I am much less disturbed by ads eg on a podcast where the podcaster gives a sponsored message about a service relevant to the topic of the podcast. And prob if I watch the podcast I am already most probably part of the target audience. There is no need to profile me over the websites I visit or apps I am using and invade my privacy, and still fail to target me correctly. And even if you can correctly infer that fishing is my big hobby and now you should bombard me with ads about fishing, maybe this is not what I want to see or hear about when I am watching a lecture on a computer science subject, and I will definitely not want to buy anything then? Maybe it would make for a less distracting and annoying experience when I watch some videos about fishing?

> I hate the ad-centered nature of modern web anyway, but I don't understand why ads are not based on the content of a webpage/video.

This is because tracking data is google's moat.

They don't want people to offer content-based ads. Why? Because they will find out that they work pretty well while preserving privacy. And will start using them. But then Google has a problem, because to offer those you don't need a global pervasive tracking network to do it. Anyone with a few million can set up an ad network and compete with Google.

So, they try to double down on their tracking driven approach because it's something only they and a few other big ones can do. Content-driven ads they discourage with propaganda that they don't work, just not offering or making them difficult to use.

Well said.

> I don't complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they're irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.

They're normalized because we've been conditioned over many decades to accept them.

We were psychologically manipulated to associate brands with specific feelings engineered by advertising firms. Cigarettes were "torches of freedom". The Marlboro Man was a symbol of masculinity and confidence. Coca-Cola was the happy Christmas drink. Ads with catchphrases became cultural phenomena: "Just do it", "Whasssuuuuup", and so on.

We watched ads on cable TV even though we were paid subscribers. We watched 30 minutes of ads before a movie in the cinema. We read ads in newspapers and magazines even though we paid for them, and then when we could get them for "free", we liked even more paying with our attention than our money. We consumed TV and radio shows where "brought to you by" was just part of the content. We accepted ~20 minutes of ads for every hour of TV we watched.

So it was natural for advertising to also take over the internet. With the technology built for advertisers by very smart people who got rich in the process, they're able to create campaigns that target potential buyers much more accurately. They can build profiles of people in various invasive, shady and inventive ways, and their profits have never been higher because of it.

Never mind the fact that the same technology is used to manipulate people into thinking and acting in certain ways unrelated to their purchasing behavior, and that this is largely responsible for corrupting democratic processes, toppling governments, and the sociopolitical instability of the past decade. Several birds, one stone.

Ads have been on TV since the beginning of TV. And before that, that were — and still are — on radio.

Where they’re also “irrelevant”.

But the relevancy to our current activities isn’t tied to their effectiveness.

I know that they’re effective, because I had impressionable teens tell me they wanted me to pick up Prime drinks at the store, all because they were convinced drinking Prime was cool.

But let me be clear — I hate ads, too. I hate them on TV, radio, YouTube, billboards, in my mailbox, in my email inbox, and when they cover up 50% of real estate on websites. Pretty much everywhere they show up.

But the purpose of ads aren’t for me to like them, or to be tied to where I’m at a place I can purchase something.

The purpose is to leave a lasting impression.

And, like it or not, they’re effective enough, for some people and for some products, that they’re going to keep doing them, regardless of the fact that nearly everyone hates them.

> But let me be clear — I hate ads, too. I hate them on TV, radio, YouTube, billboards, in my mailbox, in my email inbox, and when they cover up 50% of real estate on websites. Pretty much everywhere they show up.

The mailbox ads can actually be quite useful. Since I started looking at them instead of just tossing them straight into the recycling bin I've discovered they often contain coupons for good deals at restaurants that I semi-regularly already go to. Those coupons have saved me noticeable amount of money on those visits.

Similarly on groceries. In the grocery case it is not coupons but advertisements of sales. 97% of the time I shop at the large supermarket nearest my home, which usually has the best prices. But occasionally there is a very good deal on something expensive like meat somewhere else and it is their mailbox flyers that let me know about it.

On relevance: I've never seen an ad on YT that would make me buy a product. I guess, this is now a matter of principle.

Moreover, it's now also a matter of fending off GenAI content (AKA slop) for the sake of sanity.

So, I'm clearly not the audience. Which raises the question, what is YT in the business of selling, they are trying to enforce? Lifetime?

As spoken by thousands of tech companies over and over - if only the ads were more relevant, users would like them! No, they never will. That's because an advert is effectively an unasked-for imposition on my attention intended to benefit somebody else more than it benefits me (should it be considered to benefit me at all). There's a name for behaviour like that: rude.

I am not blind to commercial imperatives, but expecting people to ever feel anything more positive than low-level irritation with advertising is unrealistic. People do not like feeling that others matter more than them, particularly where money is involved. Spaces without adverts in them, whether physical or virtual, are simply more mentally enjoyable to people than those with them. Imagine one of the worlds wonders, natural or otherwise. Imagine the Acropolis, the Coliseum, the Buddha of Leshan - or Lake Annecy, or the Great Barrier Reef, or the Amazon. Now try and imagine a single advert which is so wonderful that it would improve any of them, contextual or otherwise. You can't, and you won't. They're pollution that we tolerate.

I totally disagree. There have once or twice been adverts that I've seen where I've thought "yes! I do want one of those!". Obviously I like those adverts.

If there really was a way to magically make all adverts relevant then yes - users would like them!

But that's a totally impossible ask. Not only do websites mostly have no idea what's relevant to me (even with all the tracking) but they obviously have huge financial pressure to show me crap that I wouldn't ever want.

So, yes. Relevant advertising is good, but also basically impossible.

Even if it is something I would like if a friend told me about it, if I am bombarded by ads I hate it and often will find or make an alternative.

I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing that much, but I will say: even if you show me something I love, in a way that I appreciate, but you do it in a time or place where I don't want that thing? That's still an imposition. So in a way we agree because time + place + content + style is something that is not possible to get right. There will never be an advert brilliant or relevant enough to make me happy that you showed it to me while skiing in the Norwegian mountains, or while watching my child enjoy their birthday party. Most cases are less extreme, but then most adverts are much worse - the scale will never be tipped the right way.

> That's because an advert is effectively an unasked-for imposition on my attention intended to benefit somebody else more than it benefits me

"Adverts" are a pretty incoherent category here. There are a lot of things that are technically advertising — placement of a product, or informational content about that product, paid for by some company's marketing department — that most people would never think to call "an ad."

For example, the end-caps in a grocery store? Ad space, auctioned off by the retailer each month!

But you're already shopping, looking for things you need, comparing brands; and these end-caps are effectively just putting things you might have been looking for anyway, where you'll find them sooner. So people don't tend to think of these as ads.

(They are ads, insofar as they succeed in getting many people to never go to the regular place in the store where that thing is, and therefore never doing a fair compare-and-contrast of the product to its alternatives, being swayed by alternatives that might be running sales, etc.)

But do they steal your time? No, in fact the opposite; if you pay attention to products on store end-caps at all, and ever buy anything from them, then they mostly will end up saving you a tiny bit of time. So consumers don't tend to perceive these as ads.

---

Now take this one little bit further: sponsored search results. These sometimes feel like ads and sometimes don't.

If you think about it, sponsored search results are a lot like store end-caps... except that their existence makes the regular "store shelves" of the SERP page take longer to get to.

If they end up showing you the thing you were actually looking for (as they might if you're searching for a specific brand, and that brand has paid-for placement for their own name — perhaps to defend against others placing for their name; or perhaps they're bad at SEO and their website ranks badly in the organic SERPs for their own name) then these sponsored SERPs feel like they performed a genuine service for you.

Likewise, if they end up showing you something better than what you were looking for (as they might if the organic listings, ranked by SEO-ness, end up ordered askew to actual product value or popularity; while the sponsored listings, ranked by auction, end up ordered by, essentially, the paying company's stock price, and thereby by how much consumers already interact with them), then you also might come away pleased with the existence of these "ads."

But the other maybe 90% of the time, they look and feel and act like ads — things less-relevant than the organic SERPs, that you want to just get out of the way of the search — and so are perceived as ads.

---

And now, consider, say, the catalog of other products available for purchase, that used to come in-box with products from some manufacturers. You'd buy e.g. a LEGO set, or a couch from Sears, and end up with a glorified flyer telling you about all their other products — often in much greater detail than you'd get by viewing the products in a retail store. (This has been mostly superseded by the existence of online stores and product unboxing+review videos — but it's still a good object lesson.)

Were these catalogs, ads? Maybe. Probably the majority of people who received such a catalog never ordered anything from it, and had their time wasted having to dispose of it. But because these catalogs were being sent to people who the manufacturer knew already had shown willingness to purchase from them, it's likely that a much larger percentage of people were "called to action" by these catalogs than by what you'd normally think of as an advertisement.

And, in fact people sometimes would just read this type of "ad" for fun: fantasizing about things they might one day own! (I recall doing this myself, as a child, with certain toy-brand catalogs)

---

One more turn of the screw: is a movie or TV show that stands on its own as a work of entertainment, but which was made at least in part with the motivation of getting people interested in purchasing things from the franchise licensor's universe of branded products... an ad?

Certainly, back in the 80s, when advertising laws were more lax, and there were kids' cartoons running untrammeled with "integrated" advertising: embedding ads for the merchandise itself; showing the equivalent merch in the show; etc — there was every reason to call those shows "ads."

But is Hello Kitty and Friends (2020) an ad?

Now, if you said yes to that, try again with: is a Marvel movie an ad?

If you said yes + no: what's the difference? Prestige?

Yeah, you're right, "adverts" as a catch-all term is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and it's not focused enough. And thank you for a clearly, deeply considered reply!

You raise some interesting points, and I'm probably pretty unusual in finding most of those things even low-grade annoying (I am genuinely slightly irked by producers having influence over store merchandising because I'd rather be free to try and choose products which genuinely suit my needs rather than having my attention nudged by certain products being shoved into my eye line).

Movies are about the only one of those areas where I'd be hesitant, but that's mainly because I'd say yes, Hello Kitty is basically an ad, and Marvel Movies... I'm not sure. I'd say the movies themselves would be worth making financially without the merchandising spinoffs, and so they can be considered a product in themselves (and perhaps also because I've never bought a single item of Marvel merch despite having seen many of the films). But you're right to point out that in many cases the line is blurry. That said, for things like YouTube - it isn't blurry in the slightest, in most cases!

>The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.

The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is the system that disputes my indisputable right to ignore them. If I paid someone to cut the adverts out of my newspaper before I read it, would I be stealing from the publisher?

Silicon valley has spent the last 30 years getting the internet to run on lies, and depends upon the charity of people willing to be lied to. Now that trillions of dollars depend upon this system, they can no longer afford to leave it up to charity, and believe that they must go to war. This is a war that they will lose.

Ban advertising, formally enshrine the right of adblockers to operate, and use the new regulation to work out a new business model, or perish in the arms race that you are absolutely destined to lose.

How old are you? I wonder if you were exposed to the world before advertising took over every aspect of our lives. Before the most valueable companies in the world were based on media and advertising sales.

If you were alive before ad tech ate the world, you'd have a very different take on this whole thing.

it's shocking how bad youtube ads are compared to say instagram or google search. maybe i'm just not targeted well.

> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.

We hate advertisements because they unsolicited manipulations to get our money.

> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.

Disagreeable to whom, exactly?

Personally, I would rather the adverts were irrelevant if it meant I didn't have my every move tracked on the web.

The main problems I have with ads are, in order from most problematic to least:

* the lengths that ad networks go to to track me, * the very real possibility of getting malware, * the lengths advertisers go to to ensure their ads are seen. (We have popup blockers in pretty much every browser nowadays for a reason.)

Take away those, and you could convince me to disable my ad blocker. Until then? Not a chance in hell.

The way I've come to think about this is that the relevance of the ad to you (as a YouTube viewer), is irrelevant. It matters not whether they are relevant to the content/topic of the video, or whether they are of the kind that SponsorBlock blocks, or those shown by YT algos. The ads serve one purpose, and one purpose alone - to bolster revenue for Google. What may have started out as a 'well-intentioned' (using the term loosely) means to recreate Costco-like ads for the digital realm in the early days of the web, was quickly consumed, like most everything else, by Corporate greed and morphed into a source of user frustration over time.

This is not true. The primary thing is that they are a tax on attention and a threat to the user's sovereignty over their focus.

The more relevant ads are, the worse they are. Relevant ads are more distracting and more likely to hijack the user's attention and focus against their will.

To me the annoyance primarily depends on how shady or high-risk the industry being advertised is. I cannot stand getting ads that have AI puppets of people like Ilia Calderón (a journalist and TV news anchor) to sell supplements or convince people to join investment chat groups.

> I don’t complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they’re irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.

Calling it like it is.

Sometimes people use the internet for non-commercial reasons. Originally those were the _only_ reasons that people used it. However the Silicon Valley ethos of online advertising faciltated by so-called "tech" coompany intermediaries assumes _all_ internet use is commercial in nature.

I think special offers are not really advertising.

I view advertising as something brought to my attention that I wouldn't otherwise buy. Being made aware of special offers is more to tweak the moment of buying stuff I was going to buy anyway but waiting for a decent price.

If I go to MediaMarkt and there's a signpost at the phone area saying "Samsung S25 100 euro discount" then I don't think this is advertising. After all the S25's are lying on the shelf right there whether the offer is there or not. I am there to at least consider buying one and I am there already looking for one before I saw the sign, it's just a notification that the price is low.

Not for me. I don't have a TV and I have used adblockers for decades. I live somewhere that I don't really notice offensively intrusive ads. And I wear blouse cancelling headphones whenever people annoy me. At this point I'm completely sensitised to over-friendly, over-confident "HEY FRIEND, DO YOU HAVE THIS PROBLEM? I HAD TOO, AND THIS WONDERFUL PRODUCT SOLVED IT". If I click on a link for Rick Astley "Never gonna give you up", damnit I don't want to listen to an ad first. I have a hair trigger insta CTRL+w on ads. Even the ones that the YouTuber directly refers to in that segment of their video. "Fuck your sponsor"

I disagree. I was willing to tolerate pretty much any ad on YouTube as long as it was normal ad length (:15, :30, or even a minute) if they eventually ended and THE PROGRAM RESUMED.

But then YouTube started PERMANENTLY interrupting what I was watching with never-ending commercials or full-on infomercials... forcing me to manually use the Skip button to stop the commercial onslaught and return to the show I was watching. And they forced me to herd the show along like this every few minutes.

I put stuff on to watch while I'm cooking or doing something; I can't run to wash my hands so I can mash the control on the remote, over and over and over.

So that's when I installed a third-party YouTube client that skips ads. Google took someone who was willing to watch ads, and turned him into someone who never sees one. So Google cost itself and the content creators, through its asshole behavior.

Then they had the gall to WHINE about the uptick in ad-blocking. It's right out of the Trump/Putin playbook: attack someone, and then feign outrage and whine when they fight back.

> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance

I disagree but not for the reasons I was seeing in the existing replies here. I believe that advertising is manipulative, and I don't want advertising companies to use the fact that most of my data is in their hands to pull the right strings and push the right buttons to try to get me to buy a product I wouldn't have otherwise.

also keep in mind: I'd wager there's so much multitasking going on that half the time people won't even be watching the advertisement.

I complain about ads on YouTube because it interrupts my attention from what I am watching, which is nothing new.

Whilst you're correct about Costco, advertisers don't care where you are to show you an ad. The data shows that if you are laying on the couch watching YouTube and an ad appears relevant to you, that it sells. I don't think advertisers are sitting there scratching their heads as to why people don't like them. No advertiser looks at a billboard in the countryside and thinks people enjoy looking at them, its a profit making opportunity, even if that means hijacking your YouTube video on tech reviews for an Audi commercial.

The difference with Costco in your example is that the ads don't impeded on your ability to continue shopping around Costco. If you were walking around Costco and had to stop to listen to someone market to you about clothing when you were simply there to buy some bread and milk you'd get annoyed.

It's not their irrelevance, it's their intrusion. The difference between going to Costco and seeing an ad for tires while I'm shopping and being forced to watch some ad online is like the difference between getting punched in the gut during a water polo game (not necessarily pleasant, but expected and to a degree necessary) versus someone kicking down my door in the middle of the night and beating the shit out of me.

Thank you for your important work fighting this battle, it must be exhausting.

The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us, the more we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting. If they can't leave well enough alone and look the other way on ad blocking, (which is the only way to avoid exposing myself and family to these dangerous ads), they need to be under a lot more scrutiny for the ads they choose to run.

> The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us...

You can... just not visit youtube, right?

I'm going to assume thats much more difficult than one would expect.

They're a monopoly benefiting from network effects.

Or just pay for Youtube.... $8/ month gets rid of most of the ads in videos, $15/month to remove ads from music, shorts, and search results.

Lite is not available everywhere, also those streaming services basically up their price every year, like we're frogs.

I had YouTube Lite for a couple years. They sent me an email saying it was being discontinued in my country. I had always been watching with an Ad Blocker. The main difference now is that they refuse to accept the money I am willing to pay them.

I pay for Premium, and have for several years now. The Lite version is not what anyone wanted. I want no ads on YouTube, without also paying for YouTube Music (which I never use). If $8/month still gets me random ads on some videos, it’s no good. I’m sure their thought was people would turn the normal YouTube app into their music player, but I’m not so sure. Eliminating background play from Lite may solve that well enough. I’d be fine with that as a compromise. I watch a lot of music related content on YouTube that isn’t stuff I’d just listen to in a music app, that I think would get caught my the music filter. On the Apple TV, videos it thinks are music don’t show comments (even when there are comments on the website). I assume all those videos would get ads on the Lite subscription, and there are a lot of them.

I’ve tried cancelling my subscription, thinking it would make me watch less YouTube. I didn’t last 48 hours. The ads were too annoying and I signed back up.

YouTube music isn't really a different service rather than a different YouTube app. Under the hood YouTube music is just YouTube with a music player UI. Taking it away wouldn't really lower the cost much.

That's part of the problem with YouTube Music. I tried to use it, but having music playlists clutter up my video playlists is pretty terrible, among other things.

I find it hard to justify paying for 2 music streaming services, so I cancelled Apple Music, because I'm paying for YouTube Music through Premium. However, I don't like it, so I'm back to manually managing a local music library in Apple's Music app. This is probably a better long-term approach than renting access to a music library on a monthly basis.

But that's my point, YouTube music isn't really a music streaming service, it's just YouTube premium.

The whole "YouTube music free!" is just marketing and a music focused app wrapped on YouTube.

YouTube premium without YouTube music would be pretty much the same cost.

That may be their internal justification, but due to their marketing, it feels like I’m forced to buy two things, when I only ever wanted one. This is why people have been asking for a YouTube Premium Lite, and what they delivered isn’t what anyone asking really wanted.

What people are asking for isn't viable, and people are confused. That's what I am explaining here.

YouTube premium would not be any cheaper without YouTube music. It's a marketing gimmick.

I understand what you’re saying, but the point still stands. YouTube has positioned this as a 2 for 1 value, that people don’t see value in. The optics are bad. It might be technically valid, but that’s irrelevant when it comes to consumer sentiment, especially when YouTube itself framed it this way.

Can I ask what you mean by "having music playlists clutter up my video playlists? I use YT music (along with my local music library) specifically because it uses YouTube content - which means that all sorts of live / niche / otherwise hard to find music is there. However, my YouTube music playlists are not visible on "regular YouTube".

I made playlists in YouTube Music, and when I went to save videos to playlists on YouTube, it would show everything. Without making some kind of naming convention with prefixes, it was hard to know what was from YouTube Music and what was from YouTube. I just had to remember, which gets harder as the number of playlists increased. This dissuaded me from using more than 1 or 2 playlists, which limited the overall value of the service.

Bundling services is another mode of anticompetitive behavior that Google/Youtube use to obscure their pricing.

Harder than it sounds! So much of what we interact with online winds up with YouTube in the dependency chain. Kids' coursework, how-to videos, etc. I could also just pay the $$/month to "solve" this problem, but I need my petty cash more than Google does. I'm confident the brilliant minds there can figure out how to monetize my visit even without the real-time bidding industrial complex burning my CPU cycles.

Download the content offline, make a playlist. You can also archive the content forever. No distractions, its organized however you want. Yes, it does take some effort but it fixes all the problems

So long as we're pretending to care about the Youtube TOS, offline downloading without premium is against their TOS. And even then you're only permitted to download and view offline through the YouTube phone app.

I care about their TOS as much as they care about their users

> I need my petty cash more than Google does

I appreciate the fact that you brought up the possibility of paying for ad-free content, but frankly I don't buy this. You can either see 100% of the content for free with some mildly annoying ad content mixed in from time to time, or you can pay them a pretty small amount to not see the annoyances.

Google is a for-profit company trying to sell a product that you find valuable. Not everything they do is squeaky-clean, but this offering couldn't be much fairer, really.

I was visiting my kid’s class one day. They were using some YouTube product that seemed oriented at schools, that I’d never seen before. An ad would pop up, and one of the kids (whosever turn it was next?) would run up and tap the skip ad button.

So even if you’re trying to use YouTube for something of value, you’re battling ads. Or at least our kids are.

I hope there's no ads before educational videos on how to do CPR or perform the Heimlich manoeuvre!

Well, first you have to log in. And yeah, there are ads even in such videos. :D

You can also just not watch TV. And not listen to the radio. And not receive newspapers. All mediums that have advertisements, and those advertisements are regulated to stop the most egregious types (eg. advertising sugary foods at children, tobacco products, hopefully gambling products soon).

Media, on the whole, is a good thing. We know more about the world. We know more about the excesses of the aristocracy. We know more about the violence committed by violent people (and I don't mean local petty crime. Genocide.) Before we can improve these things, we need to know about them. "just don't consume media" is a regression to a time where people knew little outside their local sphere.

Youtube/Google has a monopoly on one part of the modern media landscape and it has to be fixed. Not just put our heads in the sand.

YouTube shows ads that would never be allowed on network television, including tobacco advertisements. They can get away with it because it's hard for regulators to observe.

No. Youtube is a monopoly. For a huge amount pf historical video, they are the only game in town. Regulating the hell out of them -- especially gigantic fines for the insane amount of copyright piracy their business model depends upon -- is LONG overdue.

Yes, although the problem is that trying to regulate them out of existence will destroy the archive. Especially if you try to insist on copyright traceability.

It's incredible to me how YouTube has an uncountable number of "movie clip" and "TV show clip" channels with randomly generated names, to the point that you can watch pretty much any movie end-to-end, but people lose their minds about AI training using books.

Read up on vid.me, which broke YouTube's "monopoly" back in 2016-2017.

Seriously, go see what happened to them.

Turns out everyone complaining about YouTube, when given the option to jump to a new fresh user focused service, still blocks ads and refuses subscriptions.

This thread, and the hundreds like it, are why people nope the fuck out when considering creating a YT competitor.

You seem so certain on the betrayal of the content-creators.

> Read up on vid.me, which broke YouTube's "monopoly" back in 2016-2017

Okay, sounds interesting.

> May 21 (Reuters) - Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google has persuaded a federal judge in California to reject a lawsuit from video platform Rumble (RUM.O), opens new tab accusing the technology giant of illegally monopolizing the online video-sharing market.

I see what I expected: that google cheated and got away with it. Where is the betrayal?

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-defeats-rumb...

Who is Rumble and what do they have to do with vid.me?

I don't know if you are confused, but Vid.me was a totally different platform than whatever Rumble is...

> Thank you for your important work fighting this battle, it must be exhausting.

Indeed, if there was a 'thin adblock writer line' flag it'd already be on my bumper. Than you for your service, we salute you.

people deserve to get paid for the work they put into creating content and building platforms, no? books, movies, tv shows, news, etc, are all distributed in some way or another that costs the consumer either money or their time viewing advertising. if you don't want to watch ads, pay YouTube for a subscription.

YouTube spent about a decade and a half running unintrusive banner ads. Until they secured enough of the market that network effects locked content creators and consumers together in a two-sided market where it's hard for either group to leave unilaterally. Then they ramped up the length and intrusiveness of their ads while flouting content regulations on what they're even allowed to advertise.

Why should I reward that by paying them?

Ok, well either pay or don’t use YouTube then if you don’t want ads.

My current thought re: piracy is that I never pirate unless I'd be happy if the company I'm pirating from went out of business.

The browser is my agent, and it will do my bidding, not google's. You building your company on something that can be legally circumvented is not my problem.

> The browser is my agent, and it will do my bidding, not google's

I've got bad news for you

and that's why people choosing chrome over firefox has that bad news.

”I can get away with it, therefore it’s OK” is an interesting moral philosophy

It's how the world has worked for a very long time, and i dont think that has changed much today.

I'm enjoying this holier-than-thou attitude that seems to pervade a lot of comments, as though following the "rules" is all we need to do and is morally justifiable.

These "rules" weren't voted upon by either creators or consumers. Most of them are arbitrary and capricious. Features implemented by YouTube, like showing where people skip to the most, are also an attempt to cut into sponsorship dollars, was that within the "rules"?

Let me be clear: Following the "rules" under these monopolistic circumstances is the philosophy of cowardice in the face of power and doesn't hold as much intellectual merit as you might think.

Did the person I was replying to say any of that? You’re putting words in both their mouth and mine

I’m receptive to various arguments here that invoke power differentials, pragmatism, even deliberately breaking the terms of a service to help affect change, etc. I’m not necessarily someone who always follows the rules, and even though I do pay for YouTube I don’t view it as a real moral failing to use the free service with an ad blocker turned on

The comment I responded to didn’t have any of that, it just boiled down to “I can do it and they can’t stop me, so they can suck a dick”. Maybe not the end of the world when it’s directed towards Alphabet, but I hope that mindset doesn’t extend to everyone they interact with

I'm the person you were replying to, and I endorse spaceribs' comment.

My computer is my property, it will do what I ask it to just like my refrigerator, my tv, and my paper and pencil. I will remove corporate logos from my belongings, and entirely fail to look at the advertising that comes in my mail box. And if google tries to tell my computer to show me advertising, I am _entirely_ within my rights to tell my computer not to.

Janie Crane: An off switch?

Metrocop: She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)#The_B...

I'm also amused that you equate “legally circumvented” with getting away with something.

Not as interesting as "And that's 100% ok when the big people operate like that, but very very bad when the little people try to stop them."

That tends to be the approach large companies take, and are championed for it. "It's not their fault the tax code allows them to spend $50m on accountants and lawyers to find a $5b loophole" etc.

Considering that is the framework FAANG in its entirety is based on, I find your reaction quite surprising

That’s how google set up this relationship with their users.

“What goes around comes around,” shouldn’t be surprising.”

And that's how we'll eventually get mandatory DRM on all Youtube videos.

We're already halfway there with ad blocker blockers anyway; once the sum of "lost revenue due to collateral damage of blocked users on old/non-DRM-supporting browser versions" and "increased revenue due to finally defeating ad blockers" is positive, it'll happen.

If YouTube agreed with this point of view they would put up a paywall, the same way neither Nebula nor Netflix are available for free.

You can keep bringing up Google, but you're still glossing over the part where you're not paying the people creating the content you're watching.

Seems awfully convenient.

If enough people do it, monetizing on Youtube becomes untenable for most, driving creators to hopefully healthier platforms who might now stand a chance.

So if I don't like Visa and Mastercard, do I also get moral carte blanche to not pay anyone because hey I'm totally urging them to only use merchants that I prefer?

Sounds like awfully convenient motivated reasoning.

That’s how the market works. You avoid paying extra taxes than required right? Even though that denies the government extra funding. The only difference being one has been decided as wrong and the other is fine.

This is a weird framing

Yes, society has deemed that it’s fine to make use of the avenues that have been explicitly created to reduce your tax burden - that’s why they were created. Society is also relatively fine with using unintended loopholes for the same purpose (although it is a lot more controversial and criticized), because we don’t tend to punish people for breaking laws, rules and regulations that don’t exist. When we end up caring a lot about them, we plug the gaps

The other person was talking about straight up not paying for goods and services that are sold at a given price, which is stealing. The more apt comparison would be to tax evasion (actually breaking the law), which is a crime, widely considered wrong and punished accordingly

It isn't how the market works, and you absolutely don't take this line of reasoning when paying someone rendering services to you which is why you instead tried to analogize it with taxes.

You only use this argument for Youtube content creators because it's trivial to avoid payment and then backsplain it with unique moral justifications.

Are you asking what we should do about this situation?

Split up any and all monopolies, and nationalize what should provide a common good such as payment networks and internet infrastructure.

As a Google shareholder, I would love for YT to be spun out.

Arent Visa and Mastercard defacto global monopolies that have had many controversies in the oast or bowed to outside pressure, refusing to handle payments for many perfectly legal businesses ?

mono, like in monopoly, means single. They would be a duopoly. Which they aren't anyway because there is also amex and discover. So maybe a quadopoly?

Oligopoly, typically.

Yes. And they get some of your money in almost every transaction. Does that mean you are morally justified to dine out for free now?

The metaphor doesn't work because I can still pay in cash. A better metaphor would be choosing not to tip the waiter because you don't believe in the custom of tipping

Relying solely on YouTube monetisation is already untenable for many channels. That's why they do sponsorships and Patreon

No I'm not blocking the ads, I'm just avoiding YouTube as much as possible and desperate for someone to break their stranglehold.

If I were blocking the ads, I wouldn't be aware of how bad it's gotten.

Vid.me broke the stranglehold back in 2016-2017.

Their story reveals that all these people hating on YouTube are actually just selfish children doing mental gymnastics.

Their savior came, disrupted YouTube pretty deeply, then went bankrupt.

That's a needlessly hostile remark. This is part of my point. A content platform is a two-sided market, and you can't unilaterally defect from a Nash equilibrium. Back in 2017, YouTube wasn't running unskippable investment-scam and tobacco ads. They were doing their best to attract content viewers and producers away from competitors by offering a good experience. Once they'd driven the alternatives to the ground and achieved network lock-in, they began twisting the screws, gradually running ever more intrusive and distasteful ads.

Nebula might have a shot at breaking the stranglehold, and I support them, but it remains to be seen if they can do it. A lot of content creators would have to move there, and there's a lot of random stuff (recorded lectures, video instructions, music, etc) that probably never will because it doesn't fit their premium original content model.

Vid.me.was loved and celebrated as an escape from YouTube. I'm not sure what makes you think YT wasn't hated in 2017 too, premium had already been out for 2 years and any casual glance at comments from back then make it clear people were not happy.

Nebula has no shot. It has a <1% conversion rate. Creators make almost nothing from it compared to their yt channel.

My point is that the fundamental problem with the Internet and Internet services is the users entitlement to free things. The Internet would be a dramatically better place if it worked for users and not for advertisers. Vid.me was dramatically better, but it died learning that 99% of people in threads like this is full of shit and actually just entitled.

I used to pay Nebula precisely because they had premium original content, however they let in a lot of other creators to widen the (see the tyranny of the marginal user) type of content. I've since canceled my subscription because it's gotten bloated with too much lower quality content.

The whole point of Nebula is NOT to become another YT, it's meant to be curated source of media.

It’s not possible to subscribe to the stuff that you’re interested to?

Not without getting a whole bunch of crap I'm not interested in. I suspect once stablecoins are legit, there will be infrastructure that will make direct payments to content creators possible. It will unlock the mythical dream we all had to only pay for the things you wanted to see.

Stablecoins will never be legit

I give my favorite creators money through the ubiquitous patreons.

Perhaps controversial, but I rather just have ads. Not that I do not think this is a preferable model, but rather, donates cost real money and ads cost nothing except time.

While time is finite and valuable, if I am already on YouTube, then I have already committed to choice of wasting that nebulous amount of time in the first place.

I’d absolutely rather give money. For me there’s a lot less friction in that even if technically it costs time all the same. With a job I have control over how I convert time into money; not so with watching ads.

As much as youtube can waste time, I also feel like I’ve been given genuine value by certain people on the site, so I wouldn’t say it’s simply wasting time.

I watch quite a large array of channels. I am not sure I could feasibly afford to donate a meaningful amount to all them. So then, I am forced into the dilemma of deciding which ones are more worthy than others, and that is not something I am particularly willing to do.

If one's patreon did have perks associated with it, then I would be more inclined to 'donate', as well.

I feel perfectly able to decide where to allocate money. For instance, one channel has functionally introduced me to modern philosophy and inspired me to start reading a ton. I took a class and read a bunch of books I otherwise wouldn’t have. Another channel makes funny ten minute joke videos once a month. I feel totally okay giving the former way more money; they’ve provided me more value by a long shot.

I just subscribe to YouTube Premium. From what I hear, views from Premium viewers are worth more to the creators than ad funded views, and I don’t need to deal with deciding which patreons to back, and spend 10x (or more) trying to pay for each individual.

Sure, if that works better for you.

Patreon is also getting enshittified, grandfathering rates for the legacy people who give it a network effect, and then jacking them up on new creators to take advantage of their moat.

Unsurprising. I sort of feel this is just the natural cycle of the company structure, and that we have to hope any enshittifying service eventually gets bad enough to drive a large group to another platform earlier in its lifecycle. I’d support creators on any other platform if they offered to take money on it, but there’s only so much I can do as the person giving the money.

I'm very much willing to pay for their content, but not in the way of watching ads during the videos.

Your individual willingness is irrelevant.

There are not enough people with your willingness to make this mechanism work by itself.

So the choice is either to have the content exist, but rely on ads, or not have the content exist. And it's not your choice - it's the content creator's choice.

If it’s not my choice, then there’s no problem if I block the ads, right?

You can pay for Youtube Premium right now and the ads go away.

For a long time, my criticism was that Youtube Premium is needlessly bundled with Youtube Music, which is redundant for me as a Spotify user and which I refused to pay for accordingly.

Now, in at least a few countries, there's "Youtube Premium Lite", which is basically regular Youtube but without ads. If you live in one of these, in my view that's close to the ideal scenario: Everybody gets to choose between watching ads and paying.

Weird. I'm pretty sure that deciding whether or not to watch ads is entirely my choice.

Youtube Premium has existed for 10 years and creators get paid from it.

Do you happen to know if they get the same amount per view?

> YouTube channels earn revenue from viewers with YouTube Premium. Throughout this month (August 2018), I earned approximately 55p per 1000 regular views and 94p per 1000 Premium views, so it appears that if 75% of your viewers went Premium, that would actually be beneficial.

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/9agg5f/how_does_yo...

> Per user, creators usually get a LOT more from premium than ads. If I divide my monthly views by my monthly unique viewers, I get about 1.9 cents per viewer.

> The way premium works is, first youtube takes a cut--I believe it's 45%. The remaining amount is divided among all the creators you watch based on how much you watch them. I believe that's based on view time.

> So if the YT premium price is $13.99, the creators get 55% or $7.69. You would have to watch 405 different creators for each one to get 1.9 cents.

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/16c80eb/how_do_you...

So you do pay for YouTube Premium then? Or are we not going to hear back from you?

I used to, but I don't consume enough YouTube videos anymore to make it worthwhile. Give me a top-up plan that I can use to pay for individual videos and I will definitely do it.

But what's with the weirdly aggressive second part of your message?

> Why should I reward that by paying them?

Do you want to have a great YouTube experience? Paying for it gets you that.

I watch YouTube videos frequently. Never see an ad. It’s great.

If I can actually pay someone for content, then, if I don't pay, I should expect not to be granted access to content.

But that's not how YT works. YT doesn't charge you for good stuff. It charges you for not delivering crap. That's not legitimate business, that's a racket. I have no qualm punishing YT for that. Content creators are free to find other ways to monetize their labor, if their labor is actually valuable. (And so many of the good ones do, quite successfully.)

YouTube gives you two (2!) ways to pay for content. You can choose to pay with money, or you can choose to pay with your time and attention. If you don’t like paying with your time and attention, then either pay with money, or don’t use the service.

This “It charges you for not delivering crap.” line is bullshit. Serving video content costs money, they’ve given you the choice of how to pay for it, and you don’t like the choices but want to keep getting the content.

Worse. It charges you by building a profile about you.

21st century nation states can better solve video scale delivery without middle parasites like Google.

> 21st century nation states can better solve video scale delivery without middle parasites like Google.

If it's that easy, why has nobody done it?

(Hint: governments don't want to run YouTube, probably shouldn't run YouTube, and nobody else wants or can afford the immense costs that come with running YouTube.)

I'm unconvinced. I suggest that YT's outlay is a sneeze among the budget of the US. In my estimation, all nations are lagging in the definition of what constitutes a public utility. In a decade we will be facepalming why advertisements were even needed for this common infrastructure.

Most things are a sneeze compared to the budget of the federal government of the US, that doesn't mean that's a reasonable expectation for the US government (or any government) to run them.

I challenge the idea that private enterprise could solve the scaling component better than a government could. We've reached this comedy of ads and surveillance capitalism because private strategies are flailing.

As a thought experiment, is it realistic to get every tax payer to pay for funny cat videos? Because that will be a reality in your non-capitalist utopia.

Or maybe there just won't be any cat videos, because the state has decreed them unnecessary or even harmful? How about political messages, is the state going to allow those to be posted on its platform? There are bound to be a few that go against state policy...

You could argue that the same is true for broadcast TV, and I would 100% agree. The state has no business running or even funding public television.

If it followed the USPS model there would be a retention fee for the uploader and a transfer fee for the downloader, both based on size. There would also likely be a stipulation that fees not dip below the actual costs incurred which would protect private entities that might wish to compete. (Such fee minimums can be seen with some municipal internet service regulations.)

> If it followed the USPS model there would be a retention fee for the uploader and a transfer fee for the downloader, both based on size.

The problem here is that we're already only having this debate because people refuse to pay, even when what they're paying with is functionally intangible (i.e. their letting an ad play on their PC for 30 seconds.

So any model which relies on people physically paying real actual money* is doomed to fail to begin with because you're not solving the issue.

I kind of but kind of don't agree. Arguably BigTech dumping free product is the only reason we ended up here. Of course the average consumer isn't going to pay if someone else offers the full featured product fee of charge.

There's also an issue with the payment model. Creating an account, sharing a bunch of personal info, and subscribing on a recurring basis is entirely different from the USPS model where I walk into the post office and pay a one time fee in cash to get my letter where it needs to go. I suppose an analogous service might charge $/gb/mo paid up front without requiring an account. Like catbox.moe except paid.

You're literally describing how content censorship already works on YouTube and Meta. Both companies curate content and have selective - opaque - policies about what gets boosted and what gets deboosted.

Also remember that legitimate creators keep being demonetised for no reason because AI moderation has a brainfart and no human is in charge.

And then there's the clusterfuck around malicious copyright strikes made for bad faith reasons by non-owners.

With public infrastructure there's at least some nominal possibility of democratic accountability - not so much in the US, large parts of which are pathologically delusional about public infrastructure as a concept, but it should be an option in countries with saner and more reality-based policies.

why should US taxpayers subsidize a service for which non-US citizens could get a benefit from without paying any taxes?

"The gov't should pay for it" is not a solution to private problems.

> why should US taxpayers subsidize a service for which non-US citizens could get a benefit from without paying any taxes?

Because US citizens would benefit? Preventing outsiders from incidentally benefiting isn't a constitutional mandate (yet).

Would you oppose an anti-pollution measure even though it would also provide cleaner air to neighbouring countries?

Phone service is recognized as a public utility. What difference justifies the failure to label internet service as a public utility?

Most governments operate a postal service. Why then should governments not provide bare bones email and video services? You have government agencies using Zoom and similar. The analogy would be discontinuing the USPS and sending official government post via a wholly unregulated Fedex. It's absurd.

The term is natural monopoly. These are things which cannot have competition for practical reasons.

Zoom and email are not natural monopolies.

Neither is Fedex (see UPS, DHL, GSO, Amazon, the list goes on). We've still got USPS. What's your point?

USPS (and most government mail services) are to provide communication to every citizen. USPS delivers to every address in the US. So the government can send ballots, send census forms, send tax forms, etc. Sure you can use FedEx to send a parcel to remote Alaskan town, but if you watch the tracking you'll see that they just hand off to USPS in Anchorage.

USPS is not a natural monopoly, it's a government service that no one else wants to do (nor would they).

Presumably a government operated email, video, or conferencing platform would also exist for the purpose of providing communication to every citizen, no? Again I ask what point you are trying to make here?

> if you watch the tracking you'll see that they just hand off to USPS in Anchorage.

Because it's cheaper to do so. They can't offer a competitive rate because USPS is eating the cost in that case. To be clear I don't think that's a bad thing it just needs to be pointed out that if USPS didn't exist Fedex (or whoever) would deliver but would charge a much higher price to the person shipping the package.

You are the one who brought up natural monopolies and I'm not sure why. Private couriers exist yet the government still finds it worthwhile to run a public one. I asked why the same should not be true of digital communication platforms for email and video. Recall that the context of my original reply was a government operated youtube.

> In my estimation, all nations are lagging in the definition of what constitutes a public utility. In a decade we will be facepalming why advertisements were even needed for this common infrastructure.

I’m just glad others feel this way.

Why the hell can’t I have my own spam free email account from the post office? Because the ads, the precious ads.

The money goes to creators as well, not just pay for video streaming .

On average creators get paid more for premium views than they get from ads .

The mental gymnastics some will go through to justify being a cheapskate...

I block ads, everywhere, because I keep getting epilepsy-inducing ones.

The browser is my agent, just like my screenreader is.

Google is to blame here - and I'm saying that as an author who does advertise there because of marketshare.

So is your DVD player but it doesn't mean you don't have to pay for the movies

No, but if someone is handing out free DVDs with adverts on them I can put a sticker over the adverts. If the adverts are in the movie, I'm allowed to skip them.

Google are free to ban me, free to not hand me the data. But if I tell them who I am, what agent I'm using, and then they hand me data... I'm also free to throw half that data in the bin.

Especially if I'm protecting myself.

Those are two different problems. Paying creators and requiring online platforms to follow laws and not participate in crime like fraud are not the same issue.

If they want to sell a service in exchange for payment, then they are free to do so. For legal reasons they are not doing that. The explicit legal definition used by lawyers and politicians is that advertisement supported services are not a payment, but an optional content that the viewer might or might not look at. This optional aspect of advertisement is how laws distinguish between it and a sale. From a legal perspective there is a difference between selling a sample product for 1 cent, compared to giving it away for free. One is a sale, and the other is a free giveaway, and thus they are under different legal definitions.

There are similar legal theory for when a platform should be held legal responsible their products, for their advertisement, and when local laws applies and how. News papers, radio, and TV has each been forced to handle local advertisement laws and regulation, and there is a reason why most had departments to curate which advertisement they could publish. They also get held responsible if they break local law.

no. maybe you can get funding through some sort of patronage, but I'm not going to watch ads.

even if I did pay for a subscription, they would find a way to jack up the price or insert new ads while collecting my data. The landscape isn't competitive enough. People like this idea that "if you don't pay for the product, you are the product" but it's not complete. Just because you pay for a product doesn't mean you're not the product. We used to pay for cable TV, only to still get ads. We used to pay for windows licenses, now with ads!

I will continue to waste their bandwidth while blocking ads until they hopefully go bankrupt and get replaced by some bittorrent-like p2p solution.

My major problem with ads is the disrespect of my privacy. People deserve to get paid for the hard work they put. I have immense respect for creators .

But at the same time, these yt creators are relying on google ads . Which are intrusive, doesn't acknowledge and care about privacy. If you turn on ad privacy, you see gambling, scams ,crypto ads. How is that responsible? You as a creator is ok with getting money and ok with indirectly making people addicted, fall for scams? That's not right.

I am ok with sponser ads and am against sponsorblock. They are not tracking me, violating my privacy and telling me about new products .

youtube subscription doesn't stop youtube for collecting you data and use it for ads during other google service .

You're right, someone has to pay to make these AI generated ads for fake boner pills in the middle of my documentary. Won't someone think of the poor ad creators?

I resisted paying for premium (out of spite) until very recently and only because my girlfriend complained.

I have been astounded at how scammy those ads are. There is a major class of ads that make fairly significant bullshit medical claims and I’m semi convinced the purpose is not for someone to make money but to wage psychological warfare on vulnerable people. Another class of ads says “the US government is going to collapse and that’s why you should buy a freedom battery” and the ad couches itself as a battery advertisement but how many vulnerable people hear that in the background 16 times a day and don’t end up subconsciously accepting some part of it?

In any case it’s all a manipulative cesspool and it’s bizarre to me that a property that Google otherwise values is willing to sling such slop at its users. I suspect a large part of this is that the executives who run YouTube never see their ads.

I've seen ads on YouTube that are straight-up illegal. Including ads for tobacco. And one that was a deepfake of the Canadian minister of finance pitching a crypto investment as being risk-free and backed by the government. Another that was a deepfake of Elon Musk saying he was going to give free money to people who click the link. YouTube will run anything because they know they won't get in trouble.

Screencapture it and you may have a lawsuit

You are getting those ads because you are likely not very well tracked, so you get the lowest tier ads.

Most users are regular non-tech folks who are (unknowingly perhaps) well tracked and profiled. They (like my family members) get normal big name ads like you see on TV.

All I get is adds for Grammarly. Every single time.

> we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting

This is one of the things that kills me. Even in broadcasting TV, you get typical :15, :30, :60 ads with the occasional :45 or longer :90. The ad pods are also defined so that you get a set number say something like 3:00 max.

YT has scammy ads where if you are just trying to let something stream in the background while you focus on other things where an ad plays past the 5s skippable time, they have some that are full on half hour if not even longer infomercials that takes completely out of the flow of whatever you were watching. That's down right criminal to me. The fact that long form content can be used as something that interrupts someone else's content is such a strange thing to allow. They must pay out the nose for those ad impressions

> This is one of the things that kills me. Even in broadcasting TV, you get typical :15, :30, :60 ads with the occasional :45 or longer :90.

You are absolutely on to something. I think the seemingly random length of ads makes them feel somewhat more jarring to me. I also hate how sometimes the ads are just randomly interjected into a video. I know creators can control this to some degree, but older videos seem to suffer more.

I have had ads on Youtube that were hours long. Obviously, at that length, they can be skipped. I know have some kind of 'trauma response' that when I watch Youtube on a computer while laying down, AFK, I have to have my wireless mouse in close proximity in case one those long ads appears. If I could predict the intervals in which the ads occurred and for how long, then I would probably just let them run and tune them out of my mind.

Regardless, I swear Youtube serves me such long ass ads as a punishment sometimes. Sadly, my suspicion is supported by extremely weak evidence and confirmation bias. I'll just say this... Sometimes when I get served the same ad too many times, I report the ad for something like being offensive, inappropriate, or whatever. The ads seem to never come back, but I swear within a day or two, I start getting longer ads -- even movie-length ads. I have also reported ads if they happen to be something like +30s and unskippable. This makes the ad instantly dismiss (or it used to, at least).

I’m curious if YouTube tracks the phone angle/motion through the gyroscope. I swear I always get the hour-long ads when my phone is not in my hand, and I’m not able to skip it immediately.

I doubt they actually do that, but I’m sure it would increase ad view times. Im probably just only remembering the ads I don’t immediately skip.

Activity Recognition API has states ON_FOOT and STILL [0]. They can probably register to handle ON_FOOT-->STILL and wait for N minutes without touching.

This also reminds me of the Idle Detection API they tried adding in Chrome. [1]

[0] https://developers.google.com/android/reference/com/google/a...

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/idle...

My anecdote is the opposite: I never get the hour long ads when my tablet is sitting there, only when I'm holding it. I always thought they knew the long adds were playing to an empty room, holding my place in the video till I came back to skip, and YT was deliberately trying to coax me back to watch with short ads.

I also let the hour long ads play when I'm holding my phone (just to mess with the algorithm) so maybe that is just my experience.

I use a plugin on Safari called Vinegar, which converts all videos to HTML5. Because of this, I can just scrub right through an ad of any length. Only use it when signed out of your account, though, because they will eventually ban you if you do it while logged in.

You realize don't have to watch youtube right?

I'm not saying I like it. I'm saying that because I don't like it I don't watch.

That's such a low effort bit of criticism of me calling out their scammy behavior. Yes, I could not watch, but that does nothing to solve the actual problem. By ignoring the problem, you're just giving them the okay to continue with scammy behavior. If they behaved like normal broadcasters and had standards on what ads they showed, I'd have much less of a problem. Some of the content that theGoogs allows and accepts and distributes is appalling.

Being unable to accept critical comments and just brush them off with "just don't watch" is just really not appropriate. You can also just not reply to comments on HN when you don't have anything that contributes the conversation, but yet you chose not to do that yourself.

OPs statement should be modified to “ you don’t have to watch free Youtube “,

You can always pay for it and not have any ads .

There shouldn’t be an expectation that a free service should confirm to any standards ? Why should a service be free and of high quality in its free variant ?

If Google refuses to offer a paid version or made it unaffordable then it would be different , but the paid version is pretty affordable with lower pricing in countries with less purchasing power

Broadcast tv is free to consume as much as you can stand. They have standards and practices that they conform and have fines assessed for infractions. Why do we accept that but have weak comments about “you don’t have to watch” for YT? Thanks for confirming the agency I have, but that does nothing to moving the conversation in a compelling manner at all.

Traditional Broadcast TV(or radio[1]) uses limited shared airwaves.

You can have only so many channels, so they has to be acceptable to plurality of people over whom you are transmitting and therefore needs content(and ad) moderation and acceptable standards.

YouTube is not a shared public good, does not have a technical limitation for another provider with different flavor to compete.

---

More comparable is Cable TV. No content restrictions apply to Cable TV, this is why HBO doesn't have to censor by blurring/bleeping even common swear words as CBS/NBC/ABC/Fox do, or follow regulations around what kind of content can be shown on prime time versus late night or allocate time for just news.

There are plenty of low quality cable channels and they make money(i.e. enough people want them) like reality TV, pure telemarketing channels, televangelists or porn or anything in between, there are no standards that they need to comply whatsoever.

While the confusion is understandable, few people actually get their TV over airwaves, for most consumers it looks like it is all cable or IP these days, the comparison is not valid.

Expecting standards in a shared public limited good does not compare against expecting it from YouTube.

---

[1] Meaning AM/FM stations. Modern Radio (i.e. Podcasts) or Satellite services (SiriusFM etc) can do whatever they want.

"You criticise society, yet you live in it. Curious."

I'm shocked and appalled that you'd call the "virtual harems" YouTube tries to get me to install either scammy or wildly inappropriate. I've reported them a dozen times, and they're still on the platform, so I'm sure Lord Google knows something I don't about their saintlihood.

I'm sorry, but Youtube got to keep its servers up somehow and pay the content creators. This means ads.

If you don't like them, then pay for Youtube Premium and you can get ad-free experience. Although if it's not available in your country, then adblocking is a reasonable approach.

The sheer resistance to paying for YouTube Premium is proving the need for ads.

YouTube has an estimated worth, if it were a stand-alone company, of $475 billion to $550 billion. I'm sure they'll survive off just fine continuing to sell my personal information just like that always have.

Yes, it's a perfectly suitable model. I don't have a problem with it. (but I do use YouTube frequently enough that I decided to pay for premium)

Google do not, and literally never have "sold your personal information."

They deliver targeted advertising due to the information they have. That's the model. They make literally zero dollars a year selling personal information.

Source? Google is literally an online ad monopoly, and being sued for it. They did track and continue tracking users, and they sell data though their SSP, DSP, ad networks, ad exchanges they own.

That is not "selling data".

That is exactly what I said. They sell targeted advertising.

The data is their golden goose. They only sell the eggs.

Find the webpage where you can buy googles user data. Not where you can buy ad slots, but where you can buy the raw tracking data like data brokers sell.

I'll wait.

Try looking for something like "cia ads track" in your favorite search engine. The data comes with the ads, it's not a secret.

Wait no further: https://ads.google.com/intl/en/home/tools/insights-finder/

Heavily aggregated data. Nothing even close to personally identifying.

Still, it is _personal_ data collected and sold by Google, which was the point raised by gp comment. As for it being personally identifying, the aggregation/pseudonymization/anonymization process doesn't even prevent precise identification [0]. I'd say it's pretty close.

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10933-3

Or just pay for Premium... No one's forcing you to do anything.

Wait until Google shows ads in premium too. Paid-for cable TV did the same rugpull decades ago.

So what's your argument? That YouTube shouldn't exist, or that it should be a charity? Something else?

Both sound like good options to me. Split it up or turn it into a nonprofit. Although I suppose the former would man paying 15 bucks to each baby YouTube, so maybe not.

How about advertising without the tracking? Advertising not shown specifically to me because of any attributes Google thinks apply to me? Advertising limited to a 5s lead in at the start of the video (today, this video is sponsored by …) and a static banner hidden when going full-screen. Advertising held to high standards, and advertising which can be vetoed by the video's uploader. In short, ethical advertising.

Google can surely figure this out and still turn a profit on Youtube. Greed stops them from doing this.

Google almost certainly doesn't turn a profit on YouTube now. It would unquestionably lose billions of dollars a year with the advertising you want.

Why? Surely knowing the content of the video gives them enough context to serve advertising relevant to the viewer without tracking.

At the very least they could guarentee that YouTube Premium tracking doesn't get used for profiling later. I think that would be a very acceptable solution but they don't offer it.

You pay but you're still snooped on.

> So what's your argument? That YouTube shouldn't exist, or that it should be a charity? Something else?

I've been thinking about it for a long time (years). I don't really have the right words for my thoughts, and I think charity is probably closest.

But yes, at this point, I think that many "free" services should be charities to prevent them from being corrupted by rugpulls.

That’s the thing about modern capitalism. Making profit isn’t enough, the profit has to keep growing. So once the market is saturated, you either reduce perks, jack up prices, bundle new features to jack up prices (my GSuite bills doubled in ~3 years before I went in and adjusted the plan; the latest price hike “reflects the significant added AI value”), or find new ways to monetize the same users (ads, “partners”, etc.). It’s inevitable.

Sure, then stop paying for it when they start showing ads in premium. It's a monthly subscription.

Not paying for it because it might become bad some time in the future is not a great argument.

I’m a Premium subscriber. If they show me a single ad I will unsubscribe immediately.

Without the ads, I'd probably spend way too much time on YouTube. I need something to push me into the rage-quit territory after enough time has passed.

I subscribe to Premium and quit a while back with this idea in mind. It didn’t work. The ads made me rage-sign-up-for-premium.

Of the various streaming platforms I subscribe to, I probably get the most value from YouTube.

Though I wish there was an option to get it for less without YouTube Muisc, that didn’t also lead to ads on YouTube itself. I was excited when I saw Lite announced, then I read the details and my excitement quickly faded and turned into disappointment.

Or, you could just honor the terms you clearly understand the content is being offered under, and just not use the service.

Not as fun to write about as coercion is, though.

Or you could instead give them the middle finger and take anything they put out there. TOS are not binding contracts and until you're contractually bound to do otherwise, taking what they're handing out is completely reasonable.

Alright, but when they give the middle finger back at you in other ways, you made your bed.

> TOS are not binding contracts

American courts have had no difficulty in holding that TOS are binding IF done correctly. It wouldn't be prudent to imagine that YouTube's lawyers don't know how to do that.

Santa Clara Law professor Eric Goldman knows approximately everything about this subject. He posts frequent updates on his blog.

https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/category/licensingcont...

It’s absolutely #%^*ing insane how bad and often inappropriate the ads are, to the point that I swear YouTube is in growth trouble. It feels like there’s just management layers who need their bonus or promotion, driven by some percent growth or some KPI so their standards are at the floorboards. I’ve seen porn in the still frame ads on mobile once (much worse than Evony Online if you remember those ads…)

I have all ad targeting features turned off on my account - which I assume means i unfortunately get the bottom-of-the-barrel ads.

The still frame ads are always NSFW games or ads for viagra-like products. In shorts, the ads are always scams of some kind. Usually deepfakes of elon musk “giving investment advice” but also “medical experts” recommending likely dangerous scams, or “free money the government isnt telling you about” if you give them all your information, or weird ai generated videos advertising mystery products that certainly don’t actually exist.

In front of (and in the middle of) actual videos, it’s a mix of the all the scams, plus the occasional ad for a legitimate product, but rarely in my native language. Usually Spectrum internet ads exclusively in spanish.

I got a gun ad a few times several months ago. Advertising features such as “no license required” and “easy to sneak through security”. As blatantly illegal as it was, the ad ran for at least a full month. I reported it every time I saw it, but I’m convinced those reports aren’t ever viewed by anyone.

I continue blocking these ads on my desktop without remorse. I only encounter the ads on my iPhone.

YouTube has decided that my family is African American and Spanish speaking at some point, and nothing will convince them otherwise. We are neither of those things. At one point a few years ago my daughter wanted to listen to the Peppa Pig album in Spanish and I guess maybe that’s why?

It’s crazy how bad and mistargeted it all is.

> The still frame ads are always NSFW games or ads for viagra-like products. In shorts, the ads are always scams of some kind. Usually deepfakes of elon musk “giving investment advice” but also “medical experts” recommending likely dangerous scams

WHAT?? This (and similar anecdote in parent comments) is completely shocking, I had no idea this was a thing. All ads I get on YouTube are blue chip companies or (big budget) movie trailers...seeing a porn still in an ad on YouTube would floor me

I haven't seen porn in an ad, but there was a month when I kept getting deepfake Elon Musks giving investment advice every time I tried to watch something on YouTube.

Maybe YouTube puts us into different ad groups, or something like that.

So, from my perspective, YouTube ads have an opposite effect... when I see something advertised on YouTube, I automatically suspect that it is some kind of scam.

Idk man instead of freeloading how about paying for the service? I generally avoid dismissive comments like these but I think it needs to be said.

If you don’t like ads pay for the service. You don’t deserve content for free.

Even if you pay for YouTube you will still see ads inserted by the content creators.

That's not up to YouTube, that's what the creator is doing.

YouTube could stop it if they wanted.

The creators must specify the start and end timestamp of the ad (some do), so you would be allowed to skip it easily.

You can if you have Premium. If you start manually skipping forward, the UI gives you a ‘Jump ahead’ button that skips straight to the end of the segment (based on crowd-sourced data, it seems).

No, this is clearly a false equivalence.

You see the content you choose to click on. Should my premium membership mean that Youtube blocks me from viewing Superbowl commercials the day after? Or movie trailers? Premium is simply paying Youtube so that Youtube will not show you Youtube's ads.

So what? It's still paying to see less ads. If ads bother you, pay

>If ads bother you, pay

I have paid but I still see ads.

Stop playing dumb

This is a silly criticism, but for the record the sponsorblock extension does a great job at skipping these.

You are no more freeloading by ignoring the ads they serve you than by watching them.

I start paying them when they start paying me for my data.

I don't think Google deserves money for ai generated ads for fake boner pills.

Google already makes untold amounts of money from spying on me. Yesterday I started seeing new recommended videos related to a show I watched on my private jellyfin server.

Google spies on me everywhere, tracks me across the open internet and my local network, then sells this data to whoever for God knows how much money and you want to tell me I owe Google even more money?

Buddy you need some perspective.

>forcing

Why people say this? You can either not use Youtube or pay for premium. Nobody is forcing you to download hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of video?

Maybe stop using Google services then? It's very straight forward to boycott something you don't agree with.

Your position is that you should be able to use YouTube completely for free then? How is that financially sustainable?

Cue a long list of people who will say "I would pay for Premium except X Y and Z".

The fact is free YouTube is only possible with ads, and potentially only with the extremely detested ads we're talking about here. The other major UGC video platform (Twitch) is not profitable.

Broadcast TV and even cable or fixed content library streaming is A LOT cheaper to run than something like YouTube. I don't mean purely machine-wise, I also mean in terms of salaries, and those do matter to keep the service up and running, not to mention growing

I recently stopped watching youtube altogether and surprisingly haven't been missing it. And I used to watch a LOT (like hours per day) of youtube, mostly quality educational/scientific content. But ultimately you'd be surprised how much you don't need in your life. And side effect is no more ads. If someone sends me an occasional youtube video to watch, I'll take a look, but otherwise no engagement with the platform.

I'd highly recommend everyone try reducing their intake of passive entertainment like youtube and redirecting that time towards more creative or mindful pursuits.

Large parts of the world population are addicted to these platforms. It’s tobacco 2.0

Tiktok is opium 3.0, but this time it's not UK selling the drugs.

Not surprising at all. We delude ourselves into thinking we're better because our brand of slop is educational, but it's still slop.

Or just pay for it? I have my whole family on my plan. Nobody gets ads. It is a bargain.

You're right, I could probably finish my motorcycle build projects without videos. But why??

Yeah, I'm with you on this one. I pay for YT premium family, and it's basically the only subscription in 2025 that feels worth it to me. My wife watches YouTube instead of cable TV, so it's already a cheap cable bill. But you also get YouTube music! Which I'll admit is a slightly janky music app since it also kind of sits on top of YouTube videos that it decides are mostly music. But their actual music selection is good if you kinda know how to navigate the UI to the "real" music.

A lot of people will spend $30 at a coffee shop in a week. Maybe $150 in one month.

I think $15 for a whole month of entertainment, tutorials, and useful content and to pay the people who create the videos is worth it.

You also have to account for whatever awful thing Google is likely to do with your $15.

Like giving 55% of it to content creators

Or routing it to support work for countries with profitable contracts, but questionable dedication to human rights.

As do coffee roasters.

Or lowering the price at which you can buy an election outcome.

I’d gladly pay for YouTube or other Google services when they offer an option to not track my activity at all. For me it’s not about seeing ads just on YouTube, but being tracked all through the web and still being served inappropriate or spammy ads.

  > when they offer an option to not track my activity

this right here, im not opposed to paying for content, but the tracking and sharing is a big concern for me too

if all i'd watch are tv shows like netflix its one thing, but yt has such broad content i'd rather not be advertised/tracked about stuff i just clicked once and never again...

While I strongly doubt this fully disables tracking, you can at least disable your watch history on youtube which will have the effect of the recommendation algorithm not adjusting to your preferences.

You can change it from Google account > Data & Privacy > History Settings > youtube History

If you have youtube premium + a general purpose ad blocker + disable watch history its really hard to tell if you are being tracked.

If you do decide to disable watch history, be prepared for just how terrible the median youtube interest is. All recommendations become beyond worthless.

at this point, there's no use in implanting the goal posts into the ground, they're going to be moved again in a few seconds.

Then just use a burner account with a fake name…

If someone really likes Youtube content - sure, I guess. For me the cost isn't worth it - when I compare with other streaming services.

I got rid of the Youtube app from my Roku many months ago, and I haven't missed it. That wouldn't be the case for most other streaming apps that I still have.

I think for me - right from the day Youtube launched - I never liked the interface. It's the worst streaming interface of all the streaming services.

Hm, in my opinion there's no such thing as "YouTube content". Content, that's the blanket word I object to.

What there is is people (and companies) uploading stuff. Some useful, some entertaining, some mindless, some for me, some not for me.

I cannot say "YouTube content" is -- or is not -- for me because the notion is meaningless. Individual videos and channels are definitely for me, and are hard to find elsewhere. YouTube by itself is not a thing.

Yeah putting a reaction video in the same category as a video essayist/documentary is strange. In a sea of content farm videos there are still many interesting islands of thought-provoking stuff on youtube.

Or just block the ads, let others subsidize it for me until the executive greed eventually turns the product to crap and we collectively move on to the newer options that have filled the gap. Cable used to mostly be ad free as well. Now normal TV shows are 21 minutes with 9 minutes of ads. Older TV show reruns are actually sped up with parts cut out of them. Google created a monopoly by making the product great with unobtrusive ads and now is trying to change the deal. There is absolutely already a plan in place where the number of paying premium users hits some critical number and they "test out" short ads. I am not going to reward them.

I just checked my uBlock stats inside of AdNauseum on my personal laptop. This is a machine I have not used regularly in over 2 years. Being generous I am assuming every ad blocked was static, not animated, had no sound, and required no interaction by me to skip, so just was a one second glance.

I have gotten back 115+ days of my life to do things I actually want to do. 10.34 million ads. From one single machine, in just Firefox. I now have AdGuard on my network and use Tailscale to block ads on all my devices. There is no world where I ever go back to seeing ads that I can block and definitely will not be rewarding them for trying to push ads on what was a great product.

Everyone wants to talk about other people being greedy when justifying their own coincidental preference for not giving away money they don’t have to.

Nebula is there, it’s not free either.

Things at scale are so incredibly cheap if you take out unnatural profits.

This argument doesn't really hold.

They split revenues 55/45 with creators. That level of profit sharing is basically unheard of in television, film, books, etc.

Again, yea, there are monopoly concerns, but you’re going to move the goalposts to “anything scalable” being worth stealing from then good luck to you.

I’m not going to pretend I don’t use Adblock, but when sites actually enforce using it, I’m not going to pretend they’re evil for doing it.

They are not responsible for the content, so they are not a publisher, more like the company that prints the newspapers. Imagine if NYT printers charged more if NYT decided to raise the sticker price?

Why not charge creators for the infrastructure cost?

YouTube Premium starts at 14$ which is wildly un-representative of the price it takes to run the site.

You mention revenue sharing - but either you are a publisher and share both revenue and responsibilities with creators, or you are not a publisher.

If we for a moment imagine that they are a publisher, then they better pay their content creators a livable wage - or not sign them - and the content creators better not show ads, as I have already paid them through YouTube.

If we imagine for a second that they are merely a distribution platform, then they better not interfere with what I see with ads, or make a value judgement on my curated feed - ISPs also don't interject ads into your browsing.

I never said that they should not be able to make money. But services like YouTube tries their absolute best to both have the cake on eat it. And that is not fair.

Making any profit at all on a service that hosts and streams 4K video from everyone to everyone over the Internet while also compensating the creators of that video is no mean feat.

We don’t know that YouTube has become profitable yet.

I'm barely sure that the long term strategy of YouTube is "more ads". The premium account won't be always ads free

But it is now. And there's no contract, so it's easy to cancel if that ever changes.

This is a big misunderstanding of the business model. The price might go up, but there will always be a tier with no ads.

Unfortunately, the way ads work, the people who pay to avoid ads are inevitably the ones worth advertising to. The Nash equilibrium is that every user sees ads.

That sounds off to me. I would think that the people who pay to avoid ads are very likely to jump to ad blockers if the ad-free subscription ceases to exist. Not to mention that they’re going to be very unlikely to convert on advertising.

You would, but most people who pay are not technically savvy enough to get the right adblock, keep it up to date, etc.

The paid service would of course have to offer something else other than “no ads” if they started showing ads in it

The type of people who have already indicated that they have disposable income, and are willing to pay for a service, are more attractive to advertisers than people who are known to have opted for a worse experience for free

This is why the price goes up.

If the LTV of a "good" user (e.g. user who buys things from ads) is X, you price the non-ad tier at X + Y. Y is the premium you pay for not wanting to see ads.

So you're right, but also wrong, in that you can extract EVEN MORE money from the user you were talking about through a non-ad tier.

Companies (Meta, Google, etc) get better at advertising -> LTV goes up -> non-ad tier goes up

If that ever happens then we can reopen the discussion of the morality of adblockers on youtube. In the mean time, just pay for it.

People dont understand how world works. Management reward are tied to earning more money. As long this is true, the next year, the reward will be tied to earning even more. The more you pay, the more it will cost. And when people wont be prepared to pay more, alternative model will be invented, like adding ads to paid content. There is only one way to stop this - break it from the start and make it nonviable, don't pay.

They are trying to block ads blockers as some manager wasn't able to get reward. Or is worried he wont get it. And this means that money that can be collected from ads has peaked. Now come the "optimizations", now payable, then no longer free, later payable with ads, then they will squeeze content creators, that will move to other platforms where you will have to pay for multiple platforms where you were once watching it for free on YT.

Sounds familiar?

Made it as short as possible, but this could be wall of text, from comparing to what happened to streaming services etc. Without piracy (not advocating but it is a fact that it forced publishers into internet model) we would probably still buy content on CDs and DVDs, maybe BluRays.

Greed of infinite growth in finite system has destroyed the planet and you can bet it will destroy YT too.

Except the alternative model will be invented even when people can pay more — do both and make even MORE.

It used to be practically shameful for large companies to run ads on their websites. They had clean websites with only their content. Especially for subscribers. Now they’re all filled with ads!

> Or just pay for it?

So I do now, but only since I moved to a country where it doesn't cost so much. I watch maybe 6 hours absolutely tops of YouTube a month? I get charged $7/m for it, which still feels usurious, but in the UK they want almost $17/m which is firmly in "go fuck yourself" territory. I'd like them to tier pricing so casual users like me aren't paying for people who are using YouTube as their primary entertainment mechanism.

My higher point was you probably don't need video entertainment in your life. Surely you would agree that just about any hobby is more holistically enriching than watching youtube? Not to mention other issues surrounding mass video content.

YouTube provides a lot of information and learning material for hobbies. That’s what I mostly use it for, besides music, and movie reviews which save so much time compared to having to watch the movie (so do reduce time spent with video entertainment).

You vastly underestimate the practical uses of youtube. Crash course alone gets millions of people through their formal education.

I used to, but I stopped recently.

1. They still serve ads. Often for Google products underneath the videos and in the feed. Content creators are also allowed to turn on contextual ads over the top of videos, as well as merchandise underneath their videos.

2. Sponsored segments are unbelievably widespread now, and can take up significant portions of the video. These are ads, and they are also permitted by YouTube.

3. YouTube has been making the service worse and worse as time goes on. I cannot turn off shorts, even though I despise them. They're all over my feed. Removing the downvote score means I cannot tell if a video is spam before clicking on it now. Ostensibly YouTube serves more video hours now, but at our expense.

4. YouTube recently raised my price 40% overnight.

There was space for reasonable prices without making their service worse. They crossed that line for me and I think for many others too.

It sounds like you don't like the experience and an adblocker isn't going to change that. If you don't like youtube and you don't watch it... it's fine? Everyone is entitled to their preferences.

Specifically though:

2. Content creators shill for things, sure. Youtube doesn't stop you from fast-forwarding through these segments. These creators are real human beings that put a ton of work into bringing me content and I don't begrudge them making some money. These are the ads that work on me; I deliberately use their affiliate links. I want them to spend more time making content. Hell there are a dozen different Youtube creators I pay monthly on Patreon just because!

I don't find these sponsorships terrible and at any rate it's not Youtube's fault.

3. Yeah I would love to have a Shortblocker extension in my browser, no argument there. But I don't think the visible downvotes make any material difference. The recommendation algorithm is excellent and I don't see spam.

4. The price is still extremely reasonable compared to the value I get. Maybe it isn't for you, that's fine. But the fact is you can pay for no-ads; complaining about adblock behavior rings incredibly hollow.

> It sounds like you don't like the experience and an adblocker isn't going to change that.

It does though. It blocks the modal ads by content creators, the merchandise ads, and the feed ads for Google products. With other extensions I can skip through sponsored segments and see a downvote approximation.

> Content creators shill for things, sure. Youtube doesn't stop you from fast-forwarding through these segments. These creators are real human beings that put a ton of work into bringing me content and I don't begrudge them making some money. These are the ads that work on me; I deliberately use their affiliate links. I want them to spend more time making content. Hell there are a dozen different Youtube creators I pay monthly on Patreon just because!

My house is an ad free space and I do find these ads intolerable. I'm happy to pay for content I like, but there is no way for me to pay for this content without these ads. Indeed, YouTube Premium was sold to me as paying content creators more than ads, and I purchased it on that premise. This wasn't enough for content creators, however, and they wanted to make even more money. That's fine, but I refuse to listen to their ads, and I do not owe them my attention to watch their ads. So I use SponsorBlock.

> Yeah I would love to have a Shortblocker extension in my browser, no argument there. But I don't think the visible downvotes make any material difference. The recommendation algorithm is excellent and I don't see spam.

The downvote score makes an ENORMOUS difference to MANY people. It allows us to determine what is spam at a glance. YouTube is filled with low quality content which isn't helpful and is often harmful. YouTube does a terrible job of policing this content. Often the very worst content will trick a large number of people into clicking on it, which makes the algorithm think it's good content, and promotes it to even more people. This is great for YouTube's bottom line, but serving people DIY advice which could harm them is bad for us, the users. A high downvote ratio indicates that the content is inaccurate, harmful, or spam, and we can avoid it BEFORE we sit through the whole video.

If you use Firefox Nightly (mobile) then you can:

1. Fully block ads with uBlock Origin

2. Block in-video sponsorships with Sponsorblock

3. Block all shorts permanently with Hide Youtube-Shorts

These 3 extensions fix your issues. There is also an extension to bring back downvotes. I do not use it but I think it is widespread enough to be useful as spam detection.

This also allows you to listen to videos with your screen turned off and gives you the option to have the video playing in a tiny screen so you can watch it while doing other things on your phone.

Thank you. I assume this isn't available on iPhone?

Nowhere near as good as Firefox on Android. That said you can get a clunky version with Brave. It's got a block and You can use use picture in picture to throw the video in the background. It sometimes pauses if you lock the screen but if you play around, there's a kind of race condition where you hit play again at the right time and it'll work.

There's also uYouPlus if you have a way to load apps without going through the store.

I will never pay for an ad-supported product. As long as YouTube accepts money from advertisers, their loyalty is split between users and advertisers. And advertisers will eventually win: if YouTube Premium gains traction, advertisers will be willing to pay more for access to premium users, and YouTube can only ignore that for so long. YouTube Premium will have ads eventually--it's just a matter of time. It already happened to cable, it happened to Prime, and it will happen to every streaming service that relies on ads eventually.

The only answer is to support companies that do not receive any money from ads (i.e. Kagi). Until that exists for streaming, I'm blocking ads and not giving them a cent.

> Or just pay for it? I have my whole family on my plan.

Thats exactly what some mobster would say to you when asking/forcing you for some money to buy protection for his etablisment.

I see that you can argue that you use a service that costs money. Yes. But the advertising is unacceptable not only because it is advertising, but also because of its content AND the way it is delivered. You can't support that.

> Or just pay for it?

on top of all the things already mentioned like privacy issues, etc.

- you'll also still see "Branded Content" when paying Google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branded_content

- because of Googles "monopoly", they take a big % of your money, instead of you actually paying the content creators themselves.

> You're right, I could probably finish my motorcycle build projects without videos. But why??

> redirecting that time towards more creative or mindful pursuits.

Google just bumped the subscription cost for my 2-person household to 18,99€

I don't want to pay for 6 members. I don't want YouTube Originals. I sure as hell don't want YouTube Music. And I'd really like it if I didn't have to manually set my videos to the premium bitrate every damn time.

I'd be fine with paying 10€ for no ads + premium. But for almost 20€/month, I'm thinking of just going back to adblockers.

For 20€/month I expect them to not allow any sponsored content in my feed, including those served by the authors.

Luckily I kinda have that option with sponsorblock.

Turns out some of the best science shows are on PBS and Nebula.

3-2-1 Contact

What do you do with all the extra time? How do you keep from sliding back?

I install the "Undistracted" extension in all of my Brave instances. In addition to having the ability to block arbitrary URLs it has many site-specific options like blocking YouTube recommendations or the LinkedIn timeline, all of which I ruthlessly enable. You can also set it to only work on certain days and times of the week. It's immensely useful.

I also pay for Kagi which has the ability to block certain domains from results. I'd imagine that blocking Instagram, Reddit, Youtube, etc. would also prevent rabbit-holing.

Top tip from using only high-latency satellite internet for long periods: add a significant delay to every request to problematic sites. As soon as the dopamine loop is broken, you'll find the wait so frustrating that you won't bother.

I love this idea, what sort of technical methods do you have in mind for implementing it?

I imagine there are tools that will artificially slow down requests.

The lazy way would be to VPN somewhere as far away as possible and throttle your bandwidth. That would get you 250ms of round trip latency for free. In Antarctica we had up to 3000ms on a bad day. You learn to do stuff offline, build from source instead of download compiled binaries and use Kiwix. Nowadays it's less of an issue because you can ask LLMs questions and have them search for you and all you need to transfer is text. Much much easier than loading heavy websites.

This app looks fun: https://jagt.github.io/clumsy/index.html (randomly interferes with your packets)

Wait you people have extra time?!?

I started reading again. Which has been quite enjoyable after the initial bump of "reading is boring compared to <favourite new video content>". Also putting more time into things I know I find more rewarding. And sometimes, just doing nothing much is nice as a brain break.

i deleted my youtube accounts and switched to patreon- can still see new videos on youtube from my patreon people cause im notified but it's far more intentional and quality content

I’m increasing obsessed with the idea that the user—not some engagement algorithm—should be in the drivers seat. This is an interesting way to go about it…

I’m starting to look at “engagement” as an anti-statistic. Like, if you’re chasing engagement, what other more meaningful thing are you ignoring? Or, the more engagement something has, the less value it has to society.

You can use YouTube with just the subscriptions list and never visit the algorithmic tab. That’s how I use it most of the time.

I did the same thing with Netflix. Also, killed off my Prime subscription and quit the entirety of Amazon. Well, except for AWS, because that's going to be impossible until they accidentally all the data.

As for youtube, I just pay for ad free. If they ever start violating that they'll also be banished to the corn field.

True, I have the same feeling. It's nice to limit my time spending on yt or other passive entertainment.

For some of us, YouTube is part of our creative and mindful pursuits. It either drives our interests (much like reading a magazine about specialized topics would, in the past), or explains how to do something, or simply builds a community of like minded people all over the world.

I find the argument of "how much you don't need in your life" not very compelling.

On one hand, we "need" very little: health, food, shelter. On the other, a life worth living is made of everything else that is not, strictly speaking, truly needed: ideas, hobbies, passions, entertainment, projects, etc.

Passively consuming content is not the same as reading a magazine or a book.

Agreed that anyone can fill their own free time with whatever they want. But youtube is just junk food for the mind, packaged as stuff that interests you. It’s conveniently split to increase ad revenue, uses clickbait to drive engagement, and all the techniques developed on TV the past 80 years to keep us glued in front of the screen. Youtube and the “content” itself is designed to keep you watching.

And I say that as someone who used to mainly watch long form essays, not the trending bullshit. It’s all just distraction and opium for the masses, disguised as edutainment.

> But youtube is just junk food for the mind, packaged as stuff that interests you

This is demonstrably false.

There's no such thing as "YouTube stuff", there's thousands of people uploading videos, some interesting to you, some not, some junk, some very in-depth, some garbage, some very thoughtful -- Sturgeon's Law applies. There are music videos, science videos, history videos, hobby videos, videos analyzing everything under the sun (e.g. the amazing Every Frame A Painting), etc.

I don't know which videos you watch, but mine aren't "junk food".

It is not demonstrably false. You operate under the assumption that more knowledge and the more you know about things, the better. So from your point of view spending 12 hours watching philosophy essays and history videos can only be a good thing.

Well, I strongly disagree with this (widespread) premise. It is still marketing-driven consumption and another form of pervasive distraction which plagues the modern world, whether you spend 6 hours watching reality TV or essays on the conquests of Genghis Khan. What matters is how much time you spend in a stupor passively receiving useless information, to detach yourself from a reality you have no control over; the content itself is just a matter of taste.

I want to stress there is of course a difference between decompressing with a nice and well-written YouTube video after dinner and wasting your life watching memes. But it is still a form of distraction, and YouTube does its utmost to make the experience as exciting and addictive as possible, just like McDonalds.

> It is not demonstrably false

Yes, yes it is. I only have to find one non-junk video to invalidate your assertion, and since I've found hundreds, your assertion is false.

> You operate under the assumption that more knowledge and the more you know about things, the better. So from your point of view spending 12 hours watching philosophy essays and history videos can only be a good thing

No, I said nothing of the sort. It's very difficult to discuss anything with someone having such a difficulty engaging with the arguments as stated.

By the way, if you're going to make the claim that knowing more (or being curious about the world) is not a good pursuit in life, then... good luck with that! You won't find many people who agree.

> What matters is how much time you spend in a stupor passively receiving useless information, to detach yourself from a reality you have no control over; the content itself is just a matter of taste.

Wow. Stupor? Useless? Who are you to determine what is stupefying or useless to others? (By the way, I fixed my toilet thanks to a YouTube video teaching me how. Was this useless and stupefying?).

> But it is still a form of distraction, and YouTube does its utmost to make the experience as exciting and addictive as possible, just like McDonalds.

Everything that is not sleeping, eating and taking a dump is a form of distraction. This doesn't provide any insight.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the kind of videos you find in YouTube is what someone else arguing with you is watching. Maybe you watched junk videos, and they shaped your opinion of YouTube. Maybe you're logged off, in which case YouTube's recommendations are so random and garbage, they could give you a bad impression. I'm always logged in, and the recommendations I get are mostly relevant and good quality; I seldom get recommended meme videos or garbage.

PS: I'm sure someone once made the same argument you're making, only about books.

I think your point is great and we are on the same page. It very much is an issue of philosophy towards wellbeing. Without trying to sound too up my own ass, I think people differ on their perspectives here because they are on different points in the journey of understanding life and their wellbeing. I used to be of the opinion that limitless technology in all forms is brilliant, and no of course mobiles phones are not an issue, social media is fine, and me watching 6 hours of youtube a day is great! You could argue with me all day and my opinion wouldn't have changed because it was beyond my framework of thinking about life to have a different opinion. And then gradually, after a lot of learning about the world and myself, my framework has changed. Now I realise my opinions before were not as aligned with my own wellbeing as they could have been. I would invite everyone to take time to reflect and consider alternative ways of living which could be more beneficial for them and the world.

> It very much is an issue of philosophy towards wellbeing.

Exactly, it is a philosophical issue, whereas the person I was replying to was debating on the grounds of “knowledge is good”. I grew up with computers, saw the spread of the Internet but lately I cannot wonder if what we as a society, as tech workers have achieved over the past 20 years to be a net negative for humanity. I very much subscribe to the thesis that the effect of any form of technology, however small, has a radical effect on society; it profoundly changes the world in ways no one can predict, and I wonder whether the common place belief that technological research and innovation, often driven by pure greed, is not at utterly reckless and destructive philosophy.

Yet this is still a fringe position. People are starting to get disillusioned, but the common opinion is that this is good, progress is good, and the solution to the ills of society is more technology, more Internet, more data and more algorithms.

Humanity doesn’t need more knowledge, nor does it need more data and more information. In fact, I would claim this hunger for data, to know more, to measure more, to be a primary cause of the ills of modern society. We have become machines, operant and dependent on information, we forgot the human and biological dimension of our lives.

> but the common opinion is that this is good, progress is good, and the solution to the ills of society is more technology, more Internet, more data and more algorithms.

This is not my position at all.

It seems to me that you need to argue extremes and strawmen in order to sustain your point of view.

I'm not arguing in favor of unchecked technology or "more of everything". That's your burden to bear, not mine.

Please do me the courtesy of actually engaging with what I'm saying, not what you believe I might be saying.

The sentence you quoted says “the common opinion”, and for some reason you think you’re being singled out. I was making a generic, societal argument with another poster.

I do not get why you disagree with such hostility, and take it personally.

It is fine to disagree, you know. It would be better to debate the opposing opinion instead of getting so defensive, but alas. This is getting tiring. Good day to you.

You specifically addressed me with strawmen and wild assumptions about what I believe (generally reducing them to ridiculous extremes, never a good faith debate tactic).

See? This was addressed to me, not in general.

> Exactly, it is a philosophical issue, whereas the person I was replying to was debating on the grounds of “knowledge is good”.

"The person I was replying to" is me, so again you're singling me out.

And I'm not hostile, or do you think people pointing out you're misrepresenting their opinions are "hostile"?

> It would be better to debate the opposing opinion instead of getting so defensive, but alas.

Alas, for this to work, you would need to engage with what the person you're replying to actually wrote, defend your position ("it's junk food for the mind", "it's opium"), be open to having your mind changed if the arguments are good, and avoid making unsupported assertions about my belief system or what I think about knowledge and technology.

Don't act all offended now just because I called you out.

Apologize if you made wrong assumptions, and resume the argument in good faith, and for all that's good and honest -- lose the "I know better" attitude.

Each to their own. I'm not saying youtube is all garbage useless content, definitely there are quality conversations about varying topics. The level of community probably varies between interests and for my interests, youtube was hardly a core facet of the hobby. Perhaps for you it's different.

However, I will add 2 counterpoints. Firstly, I don't think consuming a huge amount (e.g. the amount I was) of passive video content is good for your wellbeing. Second, I think it's interesting to examine why youtube must "drive" your hobby/interest to a large degree. Is there perhaps a mental trap of thinking you must be in with the crowd and the latest and greatest? What about growing your creative pursuit organically through your own journey? Just things to consider - may or may not be applicable. It was applicable for me and my photography hobby. There's tonnes of photography content out there but most of it is generic crap and I've found it more rewarding to go my own path so to speak.

> Second, I think it's interesting to examine why youtube must "drive" your hobby/interest to a large degree. Is there perhaps a mental trap of thinking you must be in with the crowd and the latest and greatest?

No? There's the "human as a social animal" aspect, I enjoy being part of a community.

Nothing particular to YouTube here.

Your point about community is valid, we need community.

I would argue though that digital community is a tenuous definition in comparison to in-person community. I won't claim this doesn't differ person to person but for me doing a hobby with people has no comparsion to watching youtube videos about the hobby (even though I am introverted). I like to consider to myself: "is this digital interaction preventing or taking the place of an in-person interaction I could be having right now?" 6 hours of youtube a day was preventing a lot. Further I considered my own hobbies which themselves were primarily digital and may be unhelpful for finding fulfilment in social aspects of life.

> mostly quality educational/scientific content

Probably because it wasn’t. In my experience even the stuff people consider quality on YouTube is still kinda gross engagement bait, especially things like video essays (which are an absolute plague imo)

I have also greatly decreased the time I watch YT and I have not been missing it. I used to have playlists, favs, lots of channels to follow. I stopped doing all that. Occasionally I’d “watch“ something on the background while I work, but it has to be non-engaging. The truth about YT is—you don’t need it.

Same! It has gotten a lot more expensive and even if I pay for premium, content creators show sponsored ads. I don’t know what I’m paying for.

I've been getting these buffer loading times recently, and ironically, I don't mind them all that much. The annoyance of ads isn't primarily in the time it takes up, but in having the audio play and a video feed run that isn't the video I clicked on.

If an actual ad played, I'd be irritated beyond belief. But when there's a 12 second buffer, I have enough patience training for slow load times that I instinctively just quickly check my email or spend a brief moment lost in thought. Especially when it's every video. If it was one in every 5 videos, I'd notice it and be bothered. When it's every video, it's part of the experience and my brain just cuts it out automatically.

Yeah I've been getting the initial delay with the popup "find out why playback is slow." No thanks, I already know, and it's not so bad.

It certainly has to be better than getting an ad that fills no need of mine. I can't say I noticed any slow loading times on youtube though that might be because the last clip I watched was probably a month ago. Only search for diy fixes on problems I have, rest online attention goes to fediverse nowadays.

Out of curiosity I clicked the link and it is funny how they try to blame the extension when is them actually causing the problem.

The extension is stealing from them. I get stealing a zero marginal cost good is minor but the agreement you make with YouTube is that you watch an ad in exchange for the video. Why should they serve you the video if you refuse your part of the agreement?

> Why should they serve you the video if you refuse your part of the agreement?

I've held the position that, if YT wants to, they can block me from their platform for using an adblocker, and I would have no moral ground to stand on.

However, that isn't what they do. They try to circumvent it. They try to make it technically impossible. They try to mislead users into thinking their extensions are malicious.

> the agreement you make with YouTube is that you watch an ad in exchange for the video

I never made that agreement. And if some software on my computer somehow gets YouTube to deliver me the content anyway, that's not my fault. In my view, it's a cat and mouse game, they can do whatever they want to try to stop me, and vice versa. If they win, I won't complain; but if I do, so be it.

> I never made that agreement

By clicking on the video you did. It is in their terms of service.

How is you purposefully trying to block ads not your fault? Whose fault is it that you installed an Adblock? If you went to a grocery store and told the clerk you already paid and they let you leave would that not be your fault either?

It is legally binding. By accepting ToS, or using service with ToS, you are entering a legal contract. And as long as ToS isn't breaking laws (like Digital Services Act in EU, or Online Safety Act in the UK) it can be fully enforced.

Here is an example of ToS being enforced: https://kennedyslaw.com/en/thought-leadership/article/2023/n...

> By accepting ToS, or using service with ToS, you are entering a legal contract

Half right. Only if I accept them affirmatively with a clickwrap, like your article mentions. Implicitly accepted ones do not count. I’m not signed into youtube.com, so there is no acceptance of ToS.

Even browse-wrap is legally binding, if visible enough (and it is visible just under the confirmation button on that massive Cookie Acceptance modal dialog when you come to YouTube).

No, you didn't make that agreement.

TOS is a NOTICE, not a contract.

There's zero agreement happening when you visit a website.

Assuming you didn't do something actually illegal while using their service, without a contract the most they can do is ban you from the service, or try to.

Here is an example of ToS being enforced: https://kennedyslaw.com/en/thought-leadership/article/2023/n...

Another example https://www.internetlibrary.com/cases/lib_case392.cfm

How are you making an agreement? You can’t say “I’ll watch this video in exchange for X minutes of ads” because YouTube will never tell you how many minutes they’re going to show you, and because they have zero interest in committing to some number of minutes of ads. It’s constantly getting worse, and this process will continue until it kills the service.

The agreement is you watch the ads YouTube serves you. Why would that agreement have to include the amount of ads served? If you are unhappy with their business model you can always pay for premium or stop using it. Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.

That’s not an agreement, that’s just YouTube doing whatever they want. Which they can—but then—I can just do whatever I want, too. You don’t need to imagine some sort of covenant being involved.

> Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.

I don’t even do that, I just watch it as-is. I just don’t need to imagine that YouTube and I have agreed to anything.

There is no agreement. TOS is a notice not a contract. It's not stealing because it's public content, publicly accessible to anyone with the technology to do so.

If Google wants to make YouTube a service with actually binding contracts and not TOS notices no one reads or respects, it can put the whole thing behind a login and end un-authed public web traffic. They're free to do that but they won't because they know that would kill the site dead, and quickly so.

I think you need to read about contract law before continuing to double down. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract#Common_law_contracts is as good a place as any to start). A notice you put up on a website does not form a contract.

Contracts of adhesion are still contracts, just that they have less enforceability and narrower legal scope.

It won't kill the service. The media executives who run YouTube are well aware of how advertising volume affects viewership so they'll titrate up or down as needed to maximize profit.

But don't worry, something else will eventually kill YouTube. Most likely they'll miss some sort of disruptive innovation. Like maybe in 30 years everyone will have content beamed directly into their neutral implants and only a few old people will still watch online videos.

The time line for these sorts of things seems to be: they’ll slowly make YouTube worse and worse, but just not bad enough to kill it. And then something else will come along, and people will be so dissatisfied with the quality of YouTube that people dump it en masse.

Couldn't they fix at 1:1 ad:content ratio and codify it into the charter so that they couldn't give a better or worse deal to the parties even if they wanted?

They could commit to any number of things, but they don’t want to.

I've never said they should, they are free to implement any anti-ad-block for all I care. I just pointed out their lack of honesty about the source of the problem, they should say they are actively blocking the extension rather than the extension is malfunctioning.

I’m happy to make the agreement I need to so I can access the thing I like, then turn around and violate those terms when it benefits me. Why should I feel a sense of personal obligation towards google?

You're not even making an agreement. You're reading a notice, if that. In most cases it's entirely moot legally and only really useful as a policy tool for the provider to hang its "we're blocking you" authority on.

Having said that, I 100% agree. If Google allows for non-logged in users, it's a public website and we can consume it however we like, until Google decides to try to block us. That's what it's doing now, trying to block users from consuming the content however they like, a core feature of the public web. Fortunately, blocking us is very very hard for sites not behind a login. If they want not-logged in use, they either go to war with my tech, favored by platform, or they let it slide.

Now, Google owns Chrome, so they can also go to war in the browser and standards bodies as well. But for now, the web is open and accessible and that means, wiht the right technology (Firefox plus uBlock Origin for me) you can watch all those video ad-free and there's nothing Google can do to stop you.

TOS is not an agreement, it's a notice, an assertion from the provider that mandates absolutely nothing from you.

TOS is like me putting a sign up at the end of my driveway saying if you approach my home, you owe me $10. If you pull up to my house, I demand the $10, and you don't pay me, I cannot forcibly take $10 from you, nor can I call the cops or sue over the $10.

You never agreed to anything and certainly not in any legally binding format.

Notices are not contracts and TOS notices are notices.

Taking something without paying for it is theft. You can get into whatever legalize you want but that doesn’t change the fact that you are doing what the vast majority of people recognize as the common definition of theft. Is it illegal? No idea frankly but it’s certainly a decent reason for YouTube to stop serving you videos. Getting mad at YouTube for not serving you when you are not playing by their rules makes absolutely no sense to me and really just seems overwhelmingly entitled.

> Taking something without paying for it is theft.

You keep using the word "theft". Let's grab the definition of "theft" from a legal dictionary:

> Theft is the taking of another person's personal property with the intent of depriving that person of the use of their property. Also referred to as larceny.

The intent of depriving another of their property is a key element of theft. When one receives a copy of data, no one is deprived of their property. It's substantially similar to how I can not steal your car by taking a photo of it.

Not only that, but the typical intellectual property industry nonsense of referring to unauthorized copying as "theft" does not apply. Google, who have acquired a right to distribute this data, are serving it to you.

> You can get into whatever legalize [sic] you want but that doesn’t change the fact that you are doing what the vast majority of people recognize as the common definition of theft.

The legalese matters because it's the best way we've come up with to consistently reason about topics like this regardless of shared values.

There is no theft happening in the case of blocking ads.

Your claim about "the vast majority of people" is patently absurd -- because you have not provided and almost certainly do not possess any evidence to substantiate it -- and lacks a basis in fact. Regardless, we do not reason about these things based on the fluctuating opinion of the masses. There is no case in which blocking ads meets "the common definition of theft".

I never agreed to that. Shrinkwrap contracts don’t count. Also, if they don’t want to serve me the video without ads, they’re welcome to do that.

> Also, if they don’t want to serve me the video without ads, they’re welcome to do that.

That’s what they are actually trying to do lol.

Are they really trying? They have vast resources and engineering talent. I doubt they are sincerely trying and failing to implement something that radio and broadcast television have managed to do for the better part of a century.

turns out you rather stare at an empty plate than being served shit

It's like the difference between waiting in line vs being trapped in a loud sales pitch

Funny, until now I assumed the "buffering" was just something shoddy with the google infrastructure. Youtube has a reputation for pushing buggy/undesirable changes and already has slow javascript widgets on it so at this point I expect it and "just deal with it". It didn't even occur to me they were trying to poison the well with regards to adblockers.

Why do we justify blocking ads, even when we know the content we’re consuming isn’t free to create and even if the content is free, it still costs money to store and distribute?

We often rationalize using ad blockers because ads can be intrusive or annoying. But let’s asking ourselves: Why do we feel entitled to get this for free?

This isn’t a moral judgment. I genuinely want to understand the reasoning.

There is a category of people for where if they are able to get away with not paying for something than they think it would be foolish not to.

Some websites will stop me from accessing content because I use an ad blocker. I think that’s fair play, and take my attention somewhere else. I don’t hide that I use adblocker, and it’s easy enough to identify.

Watching ads just offloads the cost on other people. I would go as far as saying that watching ads is immoral (if you can avoid it), as you are effectively stealing from others.

> Why do we feel entitled to get this for free?

With how user-hostile and anti-competitive Google is behaving, this is like asking why soldiers feel entitled to shoot at the enemy. Keep giving them money, keep watching their ads that they sell on rigged auctions [1], and eventually the only way to access the web will be with locked-against-the-user browsers [2], and everything will be surveilled (though it nearly already is - Google never asks itself why it should feel entitled to follow users around the web, or in real-life, despite opt-outs [3], and you'll find support for any alternative OSes mysteriously withering due to secret anti-competitive contracts between Google and manufacturers [4]). I know this isn't the reasoning people use, but that is what the outcome will be.

As for ads - it has always been hard, nearly impossible to block them, and few people did. Just like you can't block a billboard next to the freeway, you can't block a jpeg that's served as part of the webpage you're visiting, as it's programmatically indistinguishable from native content.

What people actually block are not ads, but a hybrid half-ad-half-surveillance entity, that's called an "ad" by historical accident.

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/11/25/google-is-three-t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity

[3] https://apnews.com/article/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb

[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20200311172517/https://www.proto...

Back when I started using Google Adsense, they had a 3 ad per page rule. You could be banned if you went above that limit. Today you can easily find web pages with 10, 15 or even more ad spots... one after each paragraph, sidebar, full page "popup", etc.

On YouTube, we went from a banner on the video to a few seconds of a video before to multiple ads before the video to multiple ad pauses even on relatively short videos (under 10 minutes). Add to that the sponsored sections of the video itself, which are added by the content creator, and other ads (stores, tickets, etc) that sometimes YouTube adds under the video even if you pay for premium.

Google Search pages used to have one or two ads at the top, with a different background colour than search results. Now sometimes I have to scroll down to see organic content, because sponsored content fills my screen.

I don't think I'm entitled to have access to all this for free, but we went too far... and so I use an adblocker on all my devices.

AdSense had that rule when you manually placed the ads on your website. Ever since they started doing automatic placements with AI or whatever, they simply spam the page with ads.

Pretty much all article-based sites, recipes, news, blog posts, anything built with wordpress to blogspot. Their algorithm seems to ensure that there is always 1 ad visible on screen at all times. With font sizes as big as they are these days this means 1 ad every two paragraphs.

And the auto placement is enabled by default on new accounts, and all these new "features," get automatically enabled from time to time. I'm sure there is a mountain of webmasters that didn't even notice that their websites have gotten filled with ads.

The worst one is that interstital that appears whenever you click a link. I'm pretty sure Google had a rule against that type of popup, and then they literally made the popup themselves.

On the other hand, all of this can be disabled.

The question is how much money does a website need to make to stay online. If it could survive with fewer ads, I'm sure there would be fewer.

For the same reason I had all the ads cut out of my newspaper before I read it back in the day - i don't want to see them.

It's my browser, my copy of the website, and I'll have my user agent do whatever I want.

They should follow in the steps of news media and simply block users who use ad blocking.

But they seem hesitant to, probably because that would risk losing the engagement of those users.

Or make all videos DRM protected and pre-ad-injected, with fast forward disabled at and around ads.

Because the paid plan isn't anonymous and you have no guarantee that they won't sell your history to advertisers, even if you don't see ads.

Perhaps you also have to show your YouTube history when you enter the US.

There’s no morality one way or the other. Google couldn’t care less about me; I have no personal connection with anyone there. They’ll treat me as poorly as the law allows (and then some) if it increases their bottom line. By the same measure, I’ll do as much as I can get away with to remove the bad aspects of their service. If we lived in a system where I was using a service made by a person I knew and could talk to, then maybe there’d be more obligations to the exchange, but in this impersonal setup I feel no such obligation.

It takes a lot of time, money, care, education and love to grow human individual. Who would dare to even start considering paying high fees for the honor of receiving some of their time and attention? Why are video provider not paying people to obtain this privilege? No one dare to think they can get that for free, right?

They are paying you, they are paying you with free content. It's actually a trade. Free content in exchange for your attention on ads

That's not how it works at societal level. The social structure is funnelling people to some mind-time eater. The fact that it's labeled free doesn't matter much. There is nothing as free content consumption, because people necessarily need to pay with time and attention they allocate to access it, not even mentioning all the extra burden like acquiring access to the device/platform/seat/whatever without which there is no way one is going to be spectator of anything.

One can always pay more attention at the continuous flow of local events that cosmos provide to self, instead of whatever other humans wish they would focus on.

It’s my GET request. I can do what I want with it.

If Google want to force ads, they can put them in the video stream. If not, then they’re trying to have it both ways.

Great analogy. Its the same reason why I grab stuff off of supermarkets and walk out. If they really cared about it, they'll invest in better technology to stop me. Suckers.

Your analogy is terrible. GET requests can be denied.

You're asking the question in a way that's unreflective of how people think. They can do it and want to do it and would need a reason to not do it. So the question is, what would make someone feel like they were ethically compelled to watch an advertisement? It sounds impossible to me, maybe someone with a very unique perspective could chime in about themselves.

Here's an attempt at a double-negative answer: you can't be ethically compelled into an unethical contract, and since advertisements are manipulative, voyeuristic and seek to take advantage of the limitations of human attentional control, it's a priori impossible for watching an ad or downloading a tracker to ever be ethically compulsory.

Taking this in a more tangential, but similar thought. The copyright holder does not own the copyrights of the ad. Different copyrights.

There's a very simple answer.

You want to watch some content. The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.

You are not obligated to watch ads. You are opting to watch them in exchange for the free content, then skipping out on a commitment you volunteered for while still taking the free content.

The "unethical contact" argument is bullshit, because you made a choice but didn't live up to it. Instead of either paying or not watching, you watched anyway.

All the best to you, I hope you enjoy watching your ads. :-)

I actually pay, rather than watch the ads, but a large part of that was also dumping Spotify and using the YouTube music app instead for listening in the car.

this is ridiculous.

The provider is welcome to serve ads, and i am welcome to not watch them. When there are Ads on TV and I get up to go to the kitchen, am i skipping out on a commitment? Am I now a freeloader? Should the TV have a camera to make sure I watch all the ads like a good little boy?

People have been fastforwarding/skipping ads for decades. this is nothing new.

Technically, the provider only really cares that the ads played, not that you were paying attention to them.

Unlike DVR for TVs, you are not welcome to skip playing them entirely. They've been pretty clear that skipping them via the use of ad blockers is a violation of the terms of service.

> Technically, the provider only really cares that the ads played, not that you were paying attention to them.

Advertisers do care about them. It's just that they don't have a way to track/measure it.

And if they could find a way to make you pay attention you’d better believe they’d do it in a heartbeat

When Apple first launched face ID, there was talk (I can't remember where) of developers being excited about the possibility of tracking where their users were looking.

And apple, being not terrible in this one specific regard (their privacy record tends to be decent for a tech giant), didn’t allow it fortunately. Not sure if the same is true on other phones.

So if ad blocking extensions could make YouTube think you watched the ad, then they’d be fine?

Ironically, they'd try to get you ... or someone... anyone! on fraud. Can you imagine the same argument made in the example of getting up and going to the kitchen?

> Your honor, they agreed to our terms and conditions which stipulate you MUST stay in the recliner facing forward the whole time. By getting up to <do something important and not waste their life watching ads>, they've defrauded our advertisers! We demand to be repaid in the form of 43 lazyboy hours per year.

Whenever I’m in a situation where I can’t skip an ad (e.g. TV, radio, on foreign computer, etc), I usually turn down the volume and look away. Am I, in some sense, stealing whenever when I am not thoroughly considering each of the generous offers that Brand and Company have paid money to have delivered personally to devices of people like me? Is this inconvenient time spent while avoiding their message my penance, and is trying to skip it altogether somehow what turns my actions into sin?

Of course it’s all about everyone getting paid! I always just find it silly when my fellow plebeians try to echo some false obligation to abide by this system when people like us have been avoiding it for as long as it has existed.

AdNauseum simulate ad clicks, which I've always found to be an interesting concept. Sadly it will never reach a critical mass of users for it to be effective.

https://adnauseam.io/

There's a difference between letting an ad play and you simply ignoring it, and using technical means from preventing that ad playing at all.

Principally - the latter actually affects the compensation given to the creator of whatever video you're watching. The former does not.

Except TV and YouTube can offer similar, but not necessarily same, purpose.

TV, speaking of cable, is exclusively for entertainment. YouTube is used for pretty much everything these days. Imagine being in a panic, looking for a video how perform CPR, and getting 30 seconds unskippable ad.

Then it seems that blocking ads is the more honest thing to do! Otherwise the company placing the ad would be unfairly paying money for a service not actually delivered. This also makes the market more efficient, as blocking ads is a clear signal their products aren't desired.

Do the less fortunate not deserve to have access to culture and information without being subjected to the psychological abuse that is advertising?

If they can't afford a YouTube subscription, they're not going to be buying anything that would be advertised anyway.

Let's be honest here, ads are trying to get you to buy things, but "psychological abuse" is a pretty extreme hyperbole, especially for people already in such tight poverty. They've got enough going on that someone trying to get them to buy shitty knives or switch their car insurance isn't going to be impactful.

> Let's be honest here, ads are trying to get you to buy things

The issue is that those are not the only ads Youtube is showing to people. You can basically upload any video and make it an ad. Sometimes Youtube's moderation fails and some nasty stuff slips through the cracks:

> In the latest incident, a Redditor describes how their young nephew was exposed to an explicit ad while watching a Fortnite stream by the well-known YouTuber Loserfruit.

> “My 7yr nephew was watching Loserfruit (Fortnite streamer) and then came up to me asking what Loserfruit is doing because this ad started playing,” the concerned uncle shared.

Source: https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-explicit-ads-proble...

Hell, they'll show weight loss ads to people with eating disorders - and this one might just be intentional rather than a failure of Youtube's moderation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckeatingdisorders/comments/18gx1v... (Just one example but it's not hard to find more)

"Psychological abuse" is very much not hyperbole in the worst case scenarios. And as an extra bonus, Youtube promotes scam ads as well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39117360

This seems to be a very big problem for YouTube:

  “In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and suspended 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year,” the platform told us at the time.

I wonder what proportion of those 5.5 billion inappropriate ads were removed only after people watched and reported them.

> ads are trying to get you to buy things

Are they? The last time I made the mistake of watching youtube without an ad blocker I got served US right-wing propaganda. I live in Spain, always have, and Google knows enough about me to know I'd despise that content.

Have you tried watching YouTube in the west without Adblock or YouTube premium?

Psychological abuse doesn’t even begin to describe experience.

I have. It was mostly the usual nonsense- overpriced kitchen knives, stupid phone games, car insurance, clothes, that sort of thing.

Nothing about anything I saw rose even close to the level of psychological abuse.

Showing multiple ads across a couple of minutes video and at least one add at the start is not a psychological abuse to you? I'm not binge watching YouTube anymore, and I have premium, but this is borderline insane. Imagine EVERY action that you do is being monetized and you're literally prevented from doing anything while the ad is showing.

“Literally prevented from doing anything” - well this is a complete lie, so we can ignore the rest of what you said.

Excuse me? You can somehow watch video through the ad?

You said “doing anything”. Read your own comment…

Google isn't obligated to pay the bandwidth costs just so the population can have ad-free access, no.

> The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.

You're wrong in both parts.

1. There is no way to pay to only remove all ads. YT premium bundles some music nonsense and also doesn't remove ads added by creators.

2. "Watching" isn't part of the contract, only "injected ads" are. Do you read every billboard in exchange for the benefit of better roads financed with ad revenue?

The music nonsense is bundled because YouTube is full of music videos and music in the backgrounds of videos and they have to pay the record labels to play the music in. They have "YouTube Premium Lite" that doesn't include music, but then you get ads on videos that have music in them.

This makes no sense, it's not hard to filter out music videos, and music in regular videos wouldn't cost the same as the whole music premium, also Lite isn't just about music:

> Ads however may appear on ... Shorts, and when you search or browse.

So again, you can't pay just to replace ads. (By the way, there is another huge difference - premium is a subscription, so not tied to ad time replaced)

YouTube music is nice, though.

It being "nice" does not negate the fact that there's no way to pay for _only_ ad removal.

You’re just factually incorrect on 1. Creator sponsors are not YT ads, by your logic i wouldn’t be allowed to watch a movie trailer on youtube because it’s technically an ad for something.

What we choose to watch on youtube is also up to us.

> Creator sponsors are not YT ads

They are. YT shows content, and has several mechanisms of including paid ads in that content. From content consumption perspective there is no difference which specific mechanism is used.

> by your logic i wouldn’t be allowed to watch a movie trailer

No, that's your own twisted logic. By my logic you'd be free to consume directly whatever you want, just be able to "pay and get no ads"

And what if I want to watch mightycarmods entire videos including their personal sponsorship segments? Are you just going to take that away from me?

Stop fallaciously pretending they’re the same thing.

> No, that's your own twisted logic [stop fallaciously doing that!]. By my logic you'd be free to consume directly whatever you want, just be able to "pay and get no ads"

>You want to watch some content. The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.

Thee provider made the content public on the Web. That means I can view it under any terms I chose until they find a way to exclude me without excluding all the attention that being on the public Web gives them.

There are not 2 options as you claim. There are infinite options to the user here. Google may prefer you engage in only one of two ways, but they have no legal ground to require that with content on the public Web.

This is a pedantic response to a reasonable suggestion. It is not reasonable to complain about a product or service you are not paying for.

The pedantry comes not from someone using their User Agent however they want to use it. It comes from a company trying to (with receipts and lawsuits to prove it) LITERALLY redefine the World Wide Web into their own money making machine, and punish anyone who rocks their boat. They can cry "legal argument" all they want. At the end of the day, they're trying to force pedantry on their users. The only problem is most of the public has bought it Hook, Line and Sinker.

> have no legal ground

That's moving the goalposts of the conversation.

No it's not. It's shining a light on where the real WWW goalposts are and always have been.

>I can view it under any terms I chose until they find a way to exclude me without excluding all the attention that being on the public Web gives them.

This is the unsung argument everyone forgets! It goes to the very start of why someone might register a domain name and set up a website on the... World Wide Web... for people to visit with their User Agent software, ask for some HTML and get some HTML back. "HOW DARE YOU NOT DO A RANDOM SOCIALLY DEFINED THING AFTER ASKING FOR OUR HTML (AND OTHERS' MP4S)?"

I feel like you can make the same argument in favor of being allowed to DDOS. Yes it's public, but I don't think that gives you a moral out for viewing the content in a way the publisher doesn't want.

> The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.

Wrong. The content provider explicitly states “ad-free”, yet I still see ads from content creators themselves.

The terms of the contract are the terms encoded in the HTTP protocol. They are:

- I, as the user, (or my user agent on behalf of me) ask for a resource.

- YT, as the provider, (or the server on YT's behalf) decide whether to send that resource to me.

- If you do, I'll use or not use it in accordance with my user agent configuration.

I asked for the video, and YT chose to send it to me. I'm not going to lose sleep over the morality of using the web as it was intended to be used.

Why isn’t simply avoiding YouTube considered a viable solution?

Stop playing dumb

“Why isn’t simply avoiding de facto standard video delivery platform isn’t simply an option?”

You brought up something I’ve been thinking about too: the real issue is that YouTube has effectively become a monopoly. It’s the de facto standard for online video.

It makes me wonder: is there room for meaningful competition or an alternative platform? And if so, how could it be made sustainable? Are there any viable revenue models beyond ads and surveillance capitalism?

Google has enough cash to squash any competitors. For now, the only remotely hopeful viable alternative is the creator-owned Nebula.

If you can’t make a reasonable attempt to answer your own question, you’re not here to argue in good faith.

Just want to point out, adding on to OP, that creators on youtube get 55% of revenue.

I get that Google has infinite money and infinite evil. But how convenient you also get to skip out on paying the majority expense, which goes to the creator...

And yes virtuous commentor, I know you are one of the 1.5% that convert to a patreon supporter. Now ask everyone else why they get to eat for free (while endlessly complaining that the restaurant sucks).

People create for free. The content that is created in order to earn revenue suffers because of it.

Creators choose to host their content on platform that puts it on the public Web where ads are easily blocked. If creators have an issue, it is with Google, not my ad blocker.

I don't owe creators anything; I have no agreements with them. Google is the one with creator contracts.

Google may owe creators something, but I certainly don't and I'm not going to adopt Google's burden on that.

Honestly the kind of video out there made solely to make money aren’t what I’m looking after, I wouldn’t mind if they all went away.

YouTube has always been the guy showing how to replace a 97 Honda civic oil filter in an unedited 5 minutes video and 240p, or the one sharing their passion. You know, the genuinely interesting stuff.

Right, because all that hardware needed for storing and streaming all that video is free.

55% is OK

Do I even need justification for not doing what I don't want to (watching ads)?

ads are awful on a good day. YOUTUBE ads are 5x worse.

I'm not going to sit there, waste my time, watching the same ads for the 5th time that has no relevance to me. Adblockers make youtube tolerable. If there were no adblockers i genuinely would be unable to use it.

Has nothing to do with a sense of entitlement, they are ads for things I would never purchase. so whats the point then? Why is it OK for people to pay to waste my time just because they paid to? What gives them the right to force me to watch that? Hard no. It's my browser, and I'll do as i damn well please.

I WOULD pay for youtube if it was a good product. But it's not. I'm not going to opine on all the reasons it's not. if/when they make it good i'll pay. That's a them problem.

but there is NO WAY i am going to start accepting ads back into my life. I'll just stop watching youtube.

I don't feel entitled to it. I don't like the company Google

ARE YOU OVER 40 AND THE ONLY AI YOU KNOW IS CHATGPT?

The burden of proof is on the ads to justify why they should be watched, given that the ads themselves provide zero value to the viewer.

YouTube ads in particular are a cesspit of scams. I don't want to watch ads for things like Scientology.

Huh? You're on their website to watch videos. And it costs them money to send you those bits. And they offer two ways for you to compensate. Watch ads, or pay premium.

What is so difficult for you to understand this business relationship?

It's Google. The relationship is not consensual but adversarial. Google attempts to get free things from me. I attempt to get free things from Google.

It's like asking a lawyer why does he defend an obviously guilty client? Because it's adversarial system, his job is to protect his client, not to worry about the other side. The other side is trying to maximize their advantage too. Google has defined my relationship with it in such terms through its behavior.

If YouTube were still an independent operator I would be more amenable to your argument.

In any case, the fact I can recite an ad from memory shows that I am at least watching some of their ads, notably on mobile.

It's funny that you think that me sending a GET request to an IP makes me enter a business relationship.

Back when I listened to Spotify Premium, they would mess around with the shuffle or add a “smart” shuffle to the UI that you can’t opt out of. They would try to insert songs to my playlists where they don’t belong. Gtfo let me listen to my music.

I listen to Spotify Freemium. There’s a special ad that says: “Enjoy the next 30 minutes of ad-free listening”. 2 minutes later I get 2-3 ads back to back.

Enough. Happy Jellyfin user. I’ll buy up my music gradually.

Ads are a litmus test for how much a service values its users and the ecosystem it’s built upon. When premium cable first replaced broadcast television it had no ads in lieu of a subscription cost. Now you pay a subscription and get ads. The same is true for streaming services which switched to ad supported subscriptions. Let’s look at YouTube; in the early years ads were few and far between, then came mid roll ads, then end roll ads, then multiple ads in a row. Now YouTubers started doing their own ad reads, baked into the video. We’re in a growth oriented era, so companies and individuals will take more and more, as much as they can to keep the numbers going up. What they’re taking is your time; a very precious commodity in my opinion.

Why do I Adblock? Because a line must be drawn or else this marketing growth engine will consume everything. I mean literally without any consumer pushback this attention extraction engine will continue expanding until every moment of digital consumption is monetized. It’s already destroyed too much of the internet.

I don't, I pay for YouTube premium. I think YouTube deserves money for its service, and it needs money for its employees and infrastructure.

I'd block ads if there wasn't premium (or if premium had ads). YouTube still deserves and needs money, but ads don't "extract" the money from me. At best (and most likely*) every ad shown to me is effectively the advertiser paying YouTube to waste my time. At worst (if I actually buy the product), the ad is effectively me paying the advertiser and getting something useless or harmful. The chance a YouTube ad shows me something beneficial is too small to remotely justify the other ads which waste my time (or if I buy, the Earth's resources or my attention or etc.).

I also block ads on newspapers and other smaller sites, but don't buy their premium. Honestly, I don't think this is fair, although I think it's small in the grand scheme of things. The problem is, I don't feel those sites justify me paying, and I'd be spending well over $100/month if I subscribed to every one; I'd rather not see each site than pay, although currently I do see them without paying which is unfair (showing me ads is wasteful, as explained earlier, so I don't even consider it an alternative). You know what, I'll probably subscribe to a few (maybe AP and Reuters) and every other story I encounter, see if I can find the version on one of those sites.

* "But ads work on you subliminally." I hear and read this a lot, but I really doubt it for invasive ads like YouTube's (also billboards etc. I'm not talking about covert ads or "good" non-invasive ads like Show HN). First, I recognize many of the big advertisers (e.g. those VPNs and sodas) and will never buy their products, so those ads shown to me specifically are wasted. Moreover, I'm particularly methodical when buying things. I always go in with a plan: sometimes it's a simple plan like "buy the second-cheapest with a good description and decent reviews" or "buy what your parents do", but I never buy something because I recognize it. In fact, if something seems familiar I pay extra attention, and if I recognize it was invasively advertised, I become less likely to buy it, because I suspect invasive ads correlate with low value and want to actively dissuade invasive ads in general. "But your parents and the reviewers buy based off ads, and you buy based off them"...OK, show my parents and reviewers the ads, not me.

Ultimately, invasive ads waste my time and annoy me, and I don't see their benefits which justify that. I'd rather pay a small fee than see or hear every invasive ad (like with YouTube premium), and I suspect the advertisers would benefit from that too.

Blocking ads needs no justification.

Why they think I should waste my finite time, compute and bandwidth on things I don't want needs justification.

Your brain baffles me. I have already decided that i will never ever buy any of the shit in these ads, it would save THEM TIME AND MONEY AND LYING TO THE AD BUYERS to not show me the ads. THEY are doing the immoral thing here to force waste my time for no positive benefits

> Why do we justify blocking ads, even when we know the content we’re consuming isn’t free to create and even if the content is free, it still costs money to store and distribute?

In this situation, the ads are contributing barely anything to the content creation, and storage and distribution drop in price every year while youtube increases the amount of ads and decreases the video quality. So people get upset and block everything. That's part out of being fed up, and that's part out of having no way to make the ads become less bad in a non-block way.

> Why do we feel entitled to get this for free?

It's not free when they already track and sell user data to the highest bidder. YouTube is just trying to double-dip at this point. I'd gladly pay for premium if there was a guarantee that my user data would not sold.

It's because people are fucking lazy and completely lost in the digital world. Thinking YouTube should somehow be free is absurd and I'm sick of seeing this bullshit on this site in particular where a lot of the people here are actively involved in this kind of thing. Avg salary on this site is probably north of $200k and they're bitching about paying a few bucks a month for YouTube.

Advertising is predatory by design. It is my moral duty not only to resist advertising, but to do everything I can to make it as ineffective as possible.

You can avoid the advertising by paying for the service then

How much is a media service worth? How much does it cost to produce? Can I pay a reasonable fee to the right people?

Most websites do not offer reasonable payment options. They'd earn fractions of a cent from the ads they'd show me, but the cheapest subscriptions they offer are several dollars.

On YouTube, the value of the service is provided by creators, but too little of the subscription is going towards the creators. To make matters worse, Google seems to pull every string they can to make creators as miserable as possible. Their actions are a detriment to the service, and not worth supporting. An 80/20 revenue split would seem much more reasonable.

I pay for YouTube Premium, but I don’t share your moral opposition to ad-blocking. It’s not entitlement, because the service is totally free to stop serving me the videos.

Once you have something, you don’t want to let it go. Even if it’s not morally justifiable.

Otherwise wealth would be much more equally spread across northern and Southern hemisphere.

Personally I hate advertisement, i will do everything I can to disable it but I know that at this point I’m almost pirating. There is no shame in that, internet is the Wild West : Google and their AI crawling bots aren’t better than me, they leech contents other made, other host, to build their ai and then makes money on top of it.

This is the same situation as with the media industry, e.g. music and movies and piracy. Studies have shown that people who pirate wouldn't buy the product even if they had the opportunity (i.e. is if they had the money or if it was easy to buy). So I guess the content is not good enough.

> Why do we justify blocking ads, even when we know the content we’re consuming isn’t free to create and even if the content is free, it still costs money to store and distribute?

Shall we do the same to open source?

“Watch this ad for 30 seconds before checking out a branch! Git commit, oops: RAID SHADOW LEGENDS”

Because I control my computer, and if I don't want to see ads, I have the right to automatically filter them out on my side. (Yes, yes, and Google has the right to block me from accessing their servers.)

Very simple. I don't self flagellate because it hurts and I don't like it. And there's no need for me to self flagellate. So why would I? In exactly the same way, there's no need for me to watch stupid ads. I've had ad blockers ever since they came into existence. There is no incentive for me to disable them. When I need to, I actually pay for content on Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Apple, etc. It's not a money issue.

I haven't done that with Youtube because 1) I don't need to, 2) Google is pretty bad about paying content creators properly (they prefer keeping the money for themselves) and 3) I feel no guilt whatsoever about not sponsoring trillion dollar companies by exposing myself to the pain of watching their shitty ads.

Luckily for Google, most people aren't smart enough to figure out ad blockers. Which is why they are making lots of money with Youtube and why they are a trillion dollar company. Good for them; no need to feel sorry for them.

Luckily for me, Google seems pretty conflicted about fixing this properly because they are making so much money with the way things are. If they lock down Youtube properly (not that hard technically), users and content creators might move elsewhere. They can't afford to. So good for me.

It's that simple. There is no moral dilemma here.

Perhaps one justification for blocking ads is protecting users from personal information harvesting, tracking, and malware delivered through advertising networks. Aside from that, I can't think of a justification.

I actually think it would be good if there were filter lists that whitelisted ads that were not harmful to users in those ways, but that sounds difficult/impossible to fairly maintain, and I doubt anyone else wants it.

I've harped on this before: the problem is that the ads if they are fraudulent or harmful in other ways and the companies making money when presenting deserve get their shit blocked. Especially if they can target ads to vulnerable people. These are huge profitable companies that moderate the content they profit of but as soon as someone pays them they turn the blind eye.

Yep, it's a straight up safety issue with all the scam ads. I pay for YouTube premium but sometimes my parents and grandparents don't log in, accidentally sign out, watch it on the browsers, etc that it's safer to block them all. It only takes one to get through and gen AI is not helping.

I don't need to justify jack

Ads are bad for you and bad for the planet. Google is a monopoly and doesn't even create the content themselves.

I understand ad blocking isn't morally perfect but I can live with it.

I use an ad blocker for a safer experience. There's far too many malicious advertisements on youtube, google, etc. and I don't want to be anywhere near that.

I don't feel entitled to anything. YouTube is free to stop serving me content at any time. It's trivial to refuse to serve people content they haven't paid for.

Why do advertisers feel entitled to my attention when I never agreed to give it to them? Simply visiting a page with ads doesn't mean I agree to view ads.

I don't pretend I have some moral high ground, I just don't want to see ads, and if I can do that and still not pay, I will do that. I don't care if it's unobtrusive, I don't care if it's relevant or not, I don't care if it's for a service I love and would otherwise be happy to talk/hear about, advertisements are a cancer that should be eradicated and I will not pretend to care about the opinions of people whose livelihoods rides on selling me crap.

I'd rather not use Youtube entirely (aka be blocked off by Google) than ever be subjected to even a single microsecond of an ad. Ads are psychological manipulation and I refuse to subject myself to some slimy marketer's ad campaign. If I were made God Emperor of the Earth for the day, the one and only thing I'd do with that power is make sure these people rot away in a dark hole forever, that's how much I detest this whole "market" and the "people" involved in it.

Even paying for this stuff isn't a guarantee of anything. Their "Lite" tier has verbiage to the effect of "No* Ads (* Some will still be shown)". We've seen with cable television that the insidious cancer that is advertising creeps its way in as well, and cable was NOT cheap. Plus, it's known that for advertisers, people who actually shell out cash are even juicier targets, and you'd have to be a genuine imbecile to trust the likes of Google or Meta to not abuse you even harder, even if you pay for the service.

MAYBE I'd be willing to pay Google if I had a guarantee that no advertisement will EVER be shoved in anywhere in the future, and that I get a guarantee that they will punish those sponsored sections that creators put into their videos if I pay for it, and if I get a guarantee that they won't continue to profile me incessantly to shove ads at me everywhere other than YT. We all know that's not happening though, and I have absolutely 0 interest in lining their coffers with both my money and my data.

I mean, props for being honest, but you are exactly the reason companies like YouTube have to work so hard to trounce and blockers. And you're likely the reason legislation will eventually move in YouTube's favor. Your "no moral high ground" claim is a bold way to say you just want content, which costs people money to make, for free

I was trying to show someone a scene from a 45-minute YouTube video the other day. I didn't know where it was so I was randomly choosing points to watch. _Every single time_ I clicked on the scrubber I was hit with a 30-second advertisement. Mind you, I always watched maybe 3 seconds of the actual content before moving on. After the 8th time I gave up and vowed to never open YouTube on a device without adblock again. This was so beyond the pale I'm never going to give Google another cent.

I would happily pay a few dollars a month to use YouTube ad-free, and with a bandwidth limit. I don't need to watch everything in 1080p and higher. For podcasts 144p is fine. Let me pay for the bandwidth I use.

What does “free” mean to you?

I'll think about the morality of ad blocking around the same time that Google thinks about the morality of all the crap they do all the time.

> Why do we justify blocking ads ...

https://youtube.com/shorts/cdyhoTqWFSc?si=aSV46HfI8_0kUIy1

^ Replace the women with any "why" arguments you might have for not using ad blockers.

Bait-and-switch.

Here’s something many people probably don’t know.

I live in a west-Eu country with several well-defined language borders. Each time we cross a border (on holiday), the youtube ads change language. When I’m logged in. I don’t have a driver’s license, yet the most common ad I get is for second hand cars. I’m in a relationship, yet I regularly get ads for dating sites. I have a job, get ads for jobhunting advice. And the other day I got an add specifically for people born before my birth-year minus one.

YouTube’s ads are on the same level as Spotify’s nagging for their subscription: it’s meant to annoy users into buying their ad-free plan. They use real ads as a thin veneer.

Well, it works. Unfortunately it doesn’t remove sponsored content in the videos. I’m paying for an ad free experience, but I’m still hearing about AC1. Annoying.

You should check SponsorBlock out: https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock.

First it was "I hate how much ad companies track me and build profiles on me."

Now it is "I hate how ads are irrelevant."

People need to understand that ads will never be 100% perfect, otherwise you would buy something every time you saw an ad. 99.99% of the ads will miss the target, and that is normal. It would be insane if it worked any other way.

For what it is worth Google has a page where you can customize what sort of ads are relevant to you. https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451...

> First it was "I hate how much ad companies track me and build profiles on me."

> Now it is "I hate how ads are irrelevant."

This is an HN echo-chamber complaint, made by people who work for advertisers trying to come up with a way to make their ads seem less awful.

The fact is, relevant ads aren't better. They're still ads, and ads are still inherently bad.

If I'm looking for a used car, I do not want to hear ads from Bob's Lemon Shop about why they're the best place to buy cars. If Bob's Lemon Shop is the best place to buy cars, I'll find that out from independent reviewers who have shopped their before. An ad from Bob's Lemon Shop is relevant to my interest, but that makes it worse because now I'm susceptible to manipulation by the company that paid the most for ads instead of making a more rational decision based on true information from unbiased sources. Having more relevant ads is not good for me, it's good for advertisers.

Ads of that kind tell me they need ads, which tells me they’re probably not doing too well, so I’ll avoid them

You’re turning things around.

When the largest ad company in the world, which also has the largest fingerprint silo in the world, spews out ads that are 100% irrelevant …

My kids are watching some kid stuff and ads about sanitary napkins show up. At least google degrades the experience and helps me fight the screen time war.

And it's hard to believe with all the data they collect that the system is really that dumb…

Ralf Schumacher?

Well done Sherlock

> On Firefox this is easily resolvable - you can use a HTML filter to filter out the script tag from the source HTML before the page even starts being parsed. But that relies on extension APIs that Chromium doesn’t support.

I'm shocked

The second Chrome drops uBlock Origin (as part of their "Manifest V3 without blocking Web Request" plan), I'm off to an alternative browser. Enough is enough.

Do it now? I use Firefox on all devices, it's completely fine.

Seconded. Been on Firefox for years and greatly prefer my experience on Firefox both on desktop and mobile (Android) compared to any other browser.

I use PWAs a lot and Firefox dropped support

I agree, but I do need to keep a chromium browser around for the odd times that: my webcam decides to flicker uncontrollably during a meeting, a website just happens to put JS that runs terribly on Firefox in the hot path and it slows to a crawl, or a new feature is being demonstrated with Chrome only support.

Beats ads, as far as I'm concerned, but I can't help but feel like your average user wouldn't agree.

I used to keep a Chrome-based browser installed "just in case." But for about the last 5 years I've simply refused to have it on my machine. It's not needed.

A few years ago I uninstalled all remainders of Chrom(e|ium) from my laptop. Last week I had to get install it again because of a webflasher for a device that would only work on it. It's now gone again, and not missed.

I worked for Mozilla for 25 years and kept other browsers around the whole time. There's nothing wrong with having other browsers, and nothing technical that prevents it, so do that :D

I can't think of a time I didn't have more than one browser, even in 1995 when I made Netscape my default, I kept Cello around for some things. More browsers are better than fewer, not only for the industry, but for individuals too.

Didn't this already happen? It just seems like it was only progressively rolled out to Chrome browsers. My work PC was hit with this about a month ago, and now I get ads there...

You can still re-enable the extension for now

On the upside, if they do, it might obviate the need for YouTube's anti adblocker measures because of the small market share of non-chromium browsers

I’ve heard this threats for 8 years.

“If they press their shoe on me even further, then I’m leaving!”

Firefox been free and there for you for decades, yet you still use this spyware crap from an Ad company. Disgusting.

> I'm going to help them expand their power and influence over the web until they cross an arbitrary point with that power, at which point I'll cut them off and move to a strictly weaker competitor who will be in an even worse position by then!

GOOD plan

Youtube pushing ads in this way has convinced several non-technical friends who couldn't care less about their browser-choice to switch to Firefox with uBlock origin. Blocking ads in Chrome became such a hustle and is basically not working for Google's own services. Recommending people how don't care to not use chrome in the past was basically hopeless and now I have seen some switch basically from their own. Which I don't want to interpret too much into, but gives a little hope.

GOOD

I don't care when YouTube does a buffer thing because blocking ads for me is about distractions and context switching. My cognitive load is already very high and it's extremely frustrating to have to filter out more garbage.

You could just pay the $13/month? Would save the worries about context switching further taxing your already high cognitive load? And I would expect your high cognitive load helps you earn well above $13/month?

You can 1. pay the $13/mo 2. try to make the adblocker work or 3. not watch YouTube. So far options 2 on desktop and 3 on iPhone have been ok for me.

You’re forgetting: 4. Don’t use an adblocker and watch YouTube.

I’ve been doing #1 for over 5 years and will never do anything different (up to say $50-ish USD a month).

Except they want it both ways. I tried Youtube Premium for a few months. Slowly but surely the ads came back, so back to blocking and not paying I went.

what? I don't see ads unless the creator themselves are doing it, and even then it's two clicks on the right arrow button and we move on

Sponsorblock is a god send. It automates all that

I don't know if this is serious or not but I get zero ads with Youtube Premium even on my phone.

Youtube premium can look very different between places/people. Many with premium still see them. Youtube seems to be testing various markets to see how many ads it takes before people cancel their subscriptions. Also, you have to accept google cookies and such for them to identify you as a subscriber, so many privacy-focused users will see ads regardless of premium subscriptions.

I'd love more info about this, because I've been paying for Youtube premium for years and I haven't seen a single ad.

They have "premium lite" as an option for me (US) which says "most videos ad-free*"

Paying for YT doesn't remove the ads.

On the other hand, the golden era of YouTube has passed. You aren't losing out on much if you simply stop using it.

To be clear, you mean it doesn't remove YouTube-placed ads inside the video? Edit: I'm not talking about the creator's own sponsorships, or the YouTube homepage showing static ads for movies or whatever.

I pay for YouTube premium, it absolutely removes YouTube-placed ads. Creators also get a kickback when premium users watch their videos, as they don’t make money off the YouTube ads anymore.

Ok, that's what I thought too.

I wish it would also remove YouTube's internal advertising. I pay for YouTube Premium, but I can't permanently hide shorts or prevent it from popping up whatever random topic they want me to engage with. Every 30 days or so, I have to click "Show Fewer Shorts" and every week or two, I have to opt out of the topic du jour, and I have to do this separately on every device.

Youtube premium does remove all Google's ads.

Obviously not the ads the content creator has put into the video itself.

There's an add-on called sponsor block, which works remarkably well, that will just skip sponsored ads inside videos.

SponsorBlock is amazing. It tells you how much time you've saved. It adds up quick. I can't say I've met anyone who misses random two minute breaks about weird scam cooking services, etc.

I don't use sponsor block and don't think I've ever seen an ad like that.

I'd like to think some content creators are more scrupulous than others, and I have good enough taste not to watch the unscrupulous ones ;-)

Some creators do a better job and anyone is free to whitelist those creators. There are a few creators I have whitelisted, but to be honest, they don't run "better" ads than other creators. Sure, some make them more "digestible" by making them jokes, but even a content creator I support a ton is still just running your basic Squarespace ads. Creators do the best they can to map the available sponsorships to their audience, but the fact remains that the lions share of sponsorships available are for services we are not interested in and advertising has stopped being an effective way to lure audiences.

Depends on the Premium tier.

But yes, uBlock and Sponsorblock together do a much better job of removing the ads.

There's also a button to skip commonly skipped sections - basically sponsor skip.

There is too much good content on YouTube to simply stop using it. It is a gold mine of tutorials on niche subjects. I just watched best ways to patch an air mattress, and a video on making theater quality popcorn! (and it was delicious)

I asked kagi’s llm for a recipe on theater quality popcorn (which I do all the time), and it gave the basic recipe (though it suggested butter, when clarified butter is superior in my opinion) with a list of tips. I’ve been having trouble with unpopped kernels (maybe a few dozen per batch), and one of the tips pointed to an excellent tutorial on avoiding unpopped / burnt kernels:

https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/perfect_popcorn/

This took me far less time than watching YouTube videos, since that’s one of 5 references the LLM summary included, and the other 4 are information I didn’t need.

How would you know you won’t get sick? LLM’s scare me with the random stuff. It can be useful in specific cases but I certainly wouldn’t get any recipes that way. I would seriously reconsider friend.

There are no ads when I use YT premium, except for the creators' Hello Fresh type segments. Which perhaps they'd be less incentivized to pursue if people didn't use ad blockers.

SponsorBlock will help you to get rid of those!

It depends on the Premium tier.

You mean just Premium Light? Still has no ads on videos.

Just sponsored shorts and banners when browsing. But we're talking about videos here.

Shorts and music, for now. They'll undoubtedly expand it to all videos eventually.

Giving them money rewards them for pulling a bait and switch where they set the price of hosting plus watching video at free, but are now trying to extort the ecosystem after so many people spent effort uploading. Don't encourage hostile behavior.

What did you want them to do instead, put ads or charge money per view starting in 2005?

Sure, that would have been one honest option. Dumping an artificially free option into the market crowded out other options from being adopted or even developed.

This is how all tech companies got funded, and still do. YouTube doesn't even have much of a network effect, it's just that nobody made anything comparable that was actually better.

> This is how all tech companies got funded, and still do

This isn't really germane to what's right. We all know how the surveillance industry operates - subsidizing investment, lock in, and then enshittification. And sure, it seems to work for it in a pragmatic sense. But that doesn't mean we should find virtue in rewarding it, which was what the original argument is about.

> YouTube doesn't even have much of a network effect

I'm not interested in arguing with goalposts being moved, especially by ignorance.

Is it more right for you to expect something for nothing?

Youtube themselves created that expectation, so yes.

How did you expect them to pay for the cost of the service?

The cost of hosting still seems to be free. Isn’t it the watching that comes with a cost?

Seriously, it's a great price for a great service.

How is it possible to have a high cognitive load while watching YouTube? Are you watching surgery training videos in the middle of conducting a heart transplant or something?

I am trying to stay as recent with offerings from teams like LangGraph. The rate these frameworks, research, etc. is fast. Either way, if I've set aside some time to focus on a video about X it's very frustrating for me to first disregard a few unrelated Y.

It's the digital equivalent of being stopped by canvassers on your way to something important.

I'm surprised they don't just inject the ads directly into the video stream, I think that would solve their issue overnight (not that I want any ads personally). You could also rate-limit it to the playback speed to prevent pre-downloading the stream easily. But now that everything uses HLS/DASH, it's easy to inject different content right in the middle of the stream without re-encoding anything.

Creators will never accept it.

Creators will take what they're given. They have no leverage.

I've also wondered about this for a long time. It seems like there must be something difficult about it, but I can't even guess. Otherwise it seems like they would be, no?

I suspect the difficulty is due to a fear of it turning away too many users, not necessarily a technical one.

Turning them to where? Doubt it. Those are low value users anyway.

If the value was low they wouldn't be squeezing it.

Get valuable or leave I guess.

The creators themselves will include sponsor segments in their videos, but some users go a step further and use sponsorblock to automatically skip through.

That's how some podcast houses do it. Sometimes they'll be mid sentence and the ad will come in.

I pay for a subscription to The Athletic, who used to offer ad free podcasts in their app. Last month they signed an exclusive deal with Acast, and now I cannot possibly listen to their podcasts without ads.

How does Twitch do it? They're super aggressive and even using third party clients that do a good job and not displaying ads, you still get an occasional "commercial break" screen where they're not serving you the content, or the ad, just a "let's all go to the lobby" screen.

Those clients could be doing a better job - when twitch starts playing an ad on the main stream, they also provide a secondary stream that shows the actual content.

i believe that secondary stream is used for picture in picture so its lower quality, like 480p or something

Maybe; I don't know anything about it. I will note that that belief could easily develop, true or not, if twitch streams start out in low resolution and increase as you buffer them.

A third-party client has room to make a dramatic improvement on the twitch experience by not dropping audio while you make the switch from the ad stream to the content stream.

Twitch puts the ads directly in the HLS stream, but as seperate segments from the content (a HLS stream is made of many small video files, on twitch they're about 2s long). They're trivial to recognize and filter out (they're actually explicitly tagged as ad segments) but it still won't serve you the actual stream you were trying to watch - the ad segments override it. The best you can do is just block until the first non-ad segment arrives.

There exists crowdsourced adblocking based on timestamps (SponsorBlock, Tubular). Soon we will have realtime on-device content-aware AI adblocking. They will ever win.

Once we get content-aware AI adblocking, every video and podcast will turn into a product placement.

They are already doing product placement everywhere..'

Few shows are relentless about it.

In the future, everything will be like that vapid chicken wing podcast (the one where they bring on an interesting, talented person and then waste half an hour interviewing her about sriracha)

So Ira Glass will be narrating This American Life while simultaneously reviewing different varieties of Doritos, etc.

...or the producers of The Rest is History will add the Planters Peanut Man as a third host

...or Marques Brownlee will review every product in relation to how well it works with Bose headphones

No, the future will not be like that.

I've seen the future, and it kills 99.99% of germs, bacteria and viruses...

...it powers through tough grease and grime

...with no harsh smells!

The future is Fantastik®.

> Few shows are relentless about it.

My favorite relentless one is Tracker (Amazon Prime), who spend approximately 30% of screen time dedicated to showing off a GMC pickup and Airstream, but the most egregious was one dialog line:

> As Colter enters and gives them hugs, Velma remembers that they got a gift for him. Reenie hands him the gift - very conspicuously packaged in an Amazon box with its trademark logo and blue tape - and says, "I've gotta say, next-day delivery is pretty sweet. Thank you, Amazon Prime!"

that is not what they do on hot ones. sean is an intelligent interviewer and their team goes above and beyond to find interesting lore in people’s past to showcase. guests are routinely impressed.

If a person enjoys a show that is also a brand of hot sauce, it's not for me to say they shouldn't. It's just not my thing; I have too many hangups.

Even though I hate advertising I think Hot Ones is one of the few efforts to do a good job with this.

1. Interviewing a guest while they are eating insanely spicy food is an extremely novel idea and the guest's reactions and answers end up being really interesting and unexpected as a result. It humanizes famous people in a way I've never seen before because you can't just bluff your way through it.

2. The hot sauce vendors are often small companies or indie makers (at least they used to be). This is way different than reviewing 11 bags of Superman Transformers 3D Doritos Walmart Product Placement for the next blockbuster.

3. Hot sauce is interesting! Nearly every culture on every continent has hot sauce. They are made from a huge variety of interesting and unusual ingredients but are also simple and can be made at home. Hot sauce hasn't been explored in this way in popular culture.

I use content aware ad blocking to remove inserted and native ads from podcasts. The next level adblocking will be rewriting content that is overly commercial.

LLM ad blockers as content processors are next.

Any info on how you do that?

I imagine you can do it by AI-transcribing the podcast while preserving timestamp metadata for each symbol. Use LLM to identify undesirable segments (ask it to output json or something) and then cut them out from the audio with ffmpeg.

Then you would need to set up a server that would do all this and serve as a 'mirror' to your podcasts without the ads.

I actually found a project which does almost exactly what you've described:

https://github.com/jdrbc/podly_pure_podcasts

You almost exactly described my process: podcast-dl > whisper > Gemini > ffmpeg > ftp > cheap web host

If you've gone through that much effort, you might as well turn it into a subscription service. It would be resource intensive, but some people would gladly pay through their nose to rid their podcasts of ads.

I'd definitely like to make it easier to use and spread it more widely, but I can't directly distribute the edited (copyrighted) podcast files. Might share transcript markers of the text right before and after ad segments, which is like a slightly more complicated version of what SponsorBlock does.

What's your prompt for Gemini like, does it include examples of ads? Assume you're using Flash for cost?

I also have a setup like this, I transcribe with Whisper and send it to OpenAI 4o-mini to detect ads then clip those segments with pydub, but my prompt must be lacking because the success rate on detecting ads is maybe 60%

My Gemini Flash 2.0 prompt: "Below is the transcript of a podcast preceded by a line number. Reply with the line numbers that are likely to be from advertisements, promotions, commercials, sponsorships, or ending credits."

I think it's better than 60%, but I should definitely set up some evals.

I split the text by sentence, but was considering having the LLM try and put into paragraph (that might conceptually chunk commercial sentences together), but what I've got has been good enough for me.

I wanted to switch to Flash 2.5, but it looks like they increased the price a lot.

I think I could do a fair bit of ad identification just with text heuristics: "This podcast is sponsored/supported by...", etc.

got any links to set this up?

Not yet. It's an extremely crude collection of scripts and code, but I should still put it out there soon.

It’s already a race to the bottom, blocking tech improves and so does marketing. The latter will pump out as much as you’re scientifically proven to accept before switching off.

I'm sorry to burst your bubble but ad blockers are on borrowed time.

This is like saying I was able to sneak into a concert. Sure, but at some point the restrictions are gonna come down hard.

There will always be a cat and mouse chase, regardless of technology advancements.

All I ask is that I can pay the creator directly for content without any middle-man. Anything less will be routed around.

It's not like sneaking into a concert. It's like attending a free concert at a mall and wearing a mask so the cameras can't read your lips. Or covering your phone screen with your hand when you show a friend a private photo of a special moment.

> It's like attending a free concert at a mall

Who pays for the electricity, upkeep, security and airconditioning of the mall? Who pays for the sound stage, the technicians, the lighting of the mall?

The band decided to perform at the mall, because they like the facilities there. They always had a choice to perform at their house ("own website"), but they chose the mall ("YouTube") and as long as YouTube is hosting their videos, YouTube deserves to be compensated.

That is between the band and the mall. The public didn't sign up for anything.

It's not analogous to sneaking into a concert. YouTube is open and public, always has been. It would not be YouTube if it wasn't.

Nobody can stop you from putting a black screen over the ad, or a scenic nature video.

They don't want to boil the frog too quickly. Eventually, Youtube will embed ads directly into the stream. As the post mentions:

  To be clear this isn’t server-side ad insertion; the ad and content streams are still separate (YouTube is doing a server-side ad insertion experiment, but that’s separate from fake buffering)

Yep. It's been pretty funny actually both here but especially on r/youtube.

Pretty much since YouTube started cracking down on adblockers, r/youtube top post Every. Single. Day. is usually someone complaining that they just got hit with "adblock detected" and comments split between "Yeah it sucks, hit me last month" and "Huh, uBlock Origin works fine for me. I must be super smart. YouTube can't defeat me"

> Eventually, Youtube will embed ads directly into the stream

We've all seen what they're doing with AI-generated video, and we know their market and political power. Eventually they'll be remaking the video so the person or animal or rock or tree on the screen is giving AI-generated product testimonials.

It has to be a cost thing. HLS is so insanely optimised down to the hardware level that adding any kind of compute for targeting would increase costs exponentially.

I’m not too deep into it anymore but there’s some great articles from Netflix out there talking about the crazy optimisations done to their edge servers for streaming.

It would break all the time stamps as well, unless you had fixed length ads. Sponsorblock already skips ads embedded in videos, so I don't think this would make ads much harder to block.

True, it would be sorta impossible to make timestamps work without sending the length of the ad section, so you could easily skip it programmatically.

> HLS is so insanely optimised down to the hardware level that adding any kind of compute for targeting would increase costs exponentially.

Not really. They'll just need to recode for you that one minute with the ad. The rest of the video can stay the same.

If they're doing it smartly, they can even avoid full recompression and just splice in the ad.

Agree, it has to do with cost, considering the sheer number of videos they have. Plus, oftentimes the ad won't be relevant after a week or two, in which case they can't re-encode again.

If they had balls they'd force the user to be logged in.

One could splice ads out of the video on the client just as easily as they splice them in, assuming you can detect them (which could be done via crowdsourced databases a la sponsorblock).

They can splice the video just for you at a random location.

Sure, and I can use "technology" to identify those splices, and fix them in various ways that work for me because I control the client (unlike Chrome users) and that gives me the power to make the web behave how I want it to, if I'm willing to put in the effort (or someone else does it for me.)

YouTube is currently running an A/B test for server-side insertion according to what some other people have posted. I'm not getting SSAI ads so I can't really know much about them though.

They are working on it. Web YT player no longer fetches separate video and audio streams from the server, it requests them pre bundled and receives a single server side muxed stream.

I think it’s only a matter of time before it’s reality.

They own the hosting website, if they want to show their user ads, they will find a way, even if it takes a few year.

Injecting the ads directly would make them skippable. Unskippable ads are inherently detectable (because the unskippability has to be communicated to the client-side player controls), so there’s no easy way out.

Twitch seems to have won the war against adblockers by injecting directly into the video stream. It’s been months now and I still see ads. I assume it isn’t as easy as you say to skip them otherwise uBlock would have done it already.

For livestreaming it's easier because you can't skip forward anyway

The core difference is that when Twitch plays an ad, they'll never send you that part of the video. [1] So buffering doesn't help. If YouTube would do this, you could have a custom player that preloads enough of the video so that all ads could be automatically skipped and as a viewer you wouldn't notice their existence. However, on Twitch, even if you're willing to give up the live factor and would buffer, you still would have missing parts of the video where an ad was placed. So you would lose content. [2]

[1] They do send a super low resolution stream with no audio, but not the actual quality you are watching in.

[2] Right now Twitch does not stop sending content in markets where they don't have ad inventory. So there are actually browser extensions already that will use a custom foreign market server to proxy the video during ad breaks, so that you can still have an 100% effective ad blocker.

The server can just ignore the player and send the bytes for the ad until its finished.

The server can't completely ignore the player, as it would have to adjust the embedded timestamps to be consistent with the skip operations, or otherwise the player won't show the video. In other words, the server would have to act as if the ad is embedded wherever you skip to in the video. Not only would it mean that users lose their position in the video when they try to skip, since after the ad it would continue in a different place, but it would also mean that timestamps don't uniquely identify positions in the non-ad parts of the video anymore, which is a nonstarter in many ways.

JS on the client (which is already required) can be instructed by the server to manipulate the timeline. You could zero it out completely (or stop it from moving at all) while an ad is playing and then return it to the right spot after, this is not rocket science.

For JS on the client side to be able to behave in the way you describe, it has to be informed by the server about the unskippable parts. Thus browser extensions are informed as well, and can take action correspondingly. In the worst case, they’ll behave as YouTube’s new hold screen does now.

Anything that JS on the client can do is also under control of browser extensions. We are talking about YouTube’s options under that constraint.

I don't think there's any reason the JS would have to know ahead of time, and the server still controls what video fragments are served when, so I don't think JS can be reliably used to skip ads that are embedded in the video stream, especially if the download speed is limited to somewhere close to the playback speed.

When the player performs a skip, it waits for stream packages whose timestamps match the new position after the skip. It’s the client who requests a different segment of the video, and waits until it receives the respective segment, as identified by the embedded timestamps. Skipping isn’t a purely server-side operation in that sense, the client side has to cooperate. The server has no control over which timestamps the client wants to play.

The only other alternative is to make the video a live stream of indefinite length where the user can’t skip forward beyond the farthest point they already played.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, or how it invalidates anything I said already. Not trying to be rude, I just don't understand where you're going with this.

The server can always just say no, here are the bytes for you, and this is the timestamp, deal with it.

I'm more than happy to pay for Youtube Premium to remove ads for all the family and ensure content creators can monetize their work.

Fuck that.

My household uses Newpipe we don't pay for shit.

Out of curiosity, what pays your own salary?

I'm sure that's pure curiosity and not trying to make a point in a roundabout way...

Not the same poster, but: Products and services that someone actually signed a contract to pay for. Google is free to not send me free video if they don't want to, I'm just connecting to their website using my browser.

But the only reason so many creators are exclusively on youtube is the fact that anyone can watch there. Google tolerates my ad blocker to some degree (unlike other sites) because the alternative is losing market share and they know it.

If creators feel cheated, they can ask youtube to stop serving their videos for free for its own interests. I'd like to see the status quo change actually.

Exactly. YouTube wants to have its cake and eat it too. YouTube would not be what it is today if it wasn't public and free at the point of use.

Anyone is free to do something in private and ticket people for it. I'm doing a concert tonight in my home, it's 100 credits for a ticket, hope you'll come! I can't guarantee anyone will come, but I can guarantee anyone who comes will pay.

There are platforms like Floatplane that use this model.

Then there's the busking model. You do it in public. You can't guarantee anyone pays, but they'll definitely come, and some will probably pay.

YouTube wants both. It wants to be the place where people busk (like the public square) but also force advertising on you. You can't have it both ways. Either go private or accept that this is public and I will do what I want with my browser.

I love the concert/busking framing, I'm definitely using that from now on.

Stealing from creators shouldn't be celebrated.

I support a _shitpile_ of creators on Patreon and Kofi and more. I subscribe to Nebula, and I get as much as I can from the creators' own pages on those services.

I'm doing my best to move my viewing off of YouTube, and move the money off of YouTube, in hopes that it eases the creators moving off of YouTube.

But you'll invariably watch from a way way bigger shitpile of creators, so without some more efficient mechanism you won't be able to spread your support properly

This is a problem itching for a solution. I'm determined to find a solution other than Youtube.

Google’s way of spreading that support is truly the most efficient (10s to 100s of millions per year right to the CEOs pocket).

Had me in the first half...

Ah, the old "stealing" line.

It's not stealing from creators. The creators have an agreement with Google not with me. If they feel they have been shorted, they can take it up with Google.

If watching with an adblocker is stealing because the video creator doesn't get ad revenue, is not watching also stealing, since they also don't get revenue? If not, how is one taking from them and the other not? What have they lost in the first case but not in the second?

It costs money to serve video. In exchange for being served the video, you watch the ad. By not watching the ad, you're stealing from YouTube and creators.

The alternative is not watching them, not paying. Revenue is unchanged.

I find it hard to discern whether your post is sarcasm. Assuming it’s not, I’m surprised that someone is so cheerfully and voluntarily paying an extra fiat to the virtual landowner.

Video hosting is expensive. Making videos is expensive. You're not noble for stealing from Youtube or its creators.

It's not stealing. It's using. I have no obligation under any legal framework to use their content the way they wish I would. Trust me, or pay a lawyer to learn the same truth at considerably more cost.

You're legally and morally in the wrong. Just accept this instead of getting defensive. I pirate literally all of the media I consume but I don't think I;m in the right for doing so.

It's not stealing; no one is deprived of anything except rent.

If anything the cost of making the video is sunk by the creator just once and then rapidily payed off.

Once that happens it's just hosting costs and Moore's, Kryder's and Koomey's Laws are brining that down exponetially.

Funnily enough though you never see the amount of avertising shown getting shorter to represent the lower costs involved eh?

It costs money to serve video. You're stealing from YouTube and by extension creators. No amount of mental gymnastics will change this.

If it's costing YouTube so much, then they can freely switch to showing no videos to non-paying users at all. But they won't do that, because people watching without paying is what got them to where they are.

As for the creators, it's up to them to decide whether they want to publish under these terms and risk having their content viewed without being paid for, or not put it on YouTube.

Have you ever made a video before? It's actually quite a lot of work, especially if it's any good. Hours upon hours of time.

Think of it like you're a street musician. You put a basket on the floor, play your music, people go by, some might pay you, most won't.

Is it wasted time? That's up to you to decide, then choose whether you want to keep doing that or not.

If you want to charge for it directly, then sell tickets for a concert (put videos on Patreon).

Hah, this so much. For me it's worth the money for the family plan just to not be exposed to ads playing on family members' devices.

I create a different kind of content that Google used to train their AI and offer AI summaries. Those same summaries mean I will soon need to find another way to make rent.

I refuse to, because we all know where that road ends. YouTube pilots brief pre-roll ads for Premium users. Then mid-roll ads. Then longer ads. Then they open the floodgates. Google reliably acts with contempt for its users, I'm only responding accordingly.

And because of people like you I can enjoy their services for free. Thank you.

Would you like a golden sticker?

There are 3 primary undesirability aspects of ads:

1) ads as irrelevant intrusions (in spite of all data Google collects, ads are mostly irrelevant for any person)

2) ads as ugly or blockers of beauty

3) ads as thieves of attention or downright theft (scam ads, illegal products)

Then, should we pay to get rid of ads or not? Two opposite opinions:

1) paying YouTube support creators

2) paying YouTube rewards the "shitification" of the platform

But even for those who pay there are issues: the content creator's own sponsorships, shorts, the risk of account banning by Google.

Then how about compensating creators directly? (Patreon or PayPal for example)

What I don't get is the questioning on the morality of ad blocking. No one should be obligated to watch an ad in one's own device, regardless of whatever "Terms of Service" (which is not a contract). It may be unfair to the content creator who relies on that revenue though.

> the content creator's own sponsorships, shorts...

Many of the people I watch add "jump ahead" buttons for these sections now, which is neat.

Install the Sponsorblock extension. It does this automatically, provided someone watched the video before you and told it where the sponsor is. It can also, optionally, skip over "like and subscribe!", "buy my merch", intro and outro jingles, and other potentially low-value segments.

It's actually YouTube that adds those as a feature for Premium subscribers. It infers the locations automatically using viewing data.

I have only one: Ads.

Ads shouldn't exist. The fact that most human endeavours now are forced to use ads is insane.

I like adverts. They inform me about good things I could buy that I otherwise wouldn't have known about.

You seem to use the word "good" very liberally.

That's not the point of ads.

Ads are a brute force approach to the challenge of having useful information (company X offers Y) reach their target (people who needs Y presently or in the future).

If you say no ads should exist, then what alternatives would you have for that challenge?

Humanity lived without ads for thousands of years, I think we can do without.

That time coincided with humanity living near the lowest standards of life.

No one is obligated to watch ads though. No one is obligated to use the service.

As someone who uses an ad blocker I do think it's immoral, and I do pay for YouTube premium and other stuff where reasonable.

When you ignore or don't click on the ads, is that also immoral?

> Then, should we pay to get rid of ads or not? Two opposite opinions:

> 1) paying YouTube support creators

> 2) paying YouTube rewards the "shitification" of the platform

I have a third opinion. I expect that if enough people pay Google, they will remove the free service altogether, add ads to the paid service, and perhaps introduce a new, more expensive ad free tier. Paying them not only rewards the enshitification, it encourages the next step.

> This locks a few global objects by using Object.defineProperty to set them as non-writable, which prevents later code from overwriting them with a Proxy that alters their behaviour. So uBlock Origin can only proxy JSON.stringify if it can run before this locker script does.

This seems like a bug in browsers, or possibly in the spec. Page content and scripts should never be able to restrict what browser extensions can do.

>This seems like a bug in browsers

oh its a Chrome feature! Around 2 years ago Chrome pushed an update that speedup time to load first initial page by delaying Extension initialization. Last page you closed Chrome on will load before uBo, will be able to bypass all filters/block and will be able to detect uBo being loaded.

Feel free to write a bug report to Chrome developers or ManifestV3 authors. In the meantime, Firefox users can override any delivered content with the webRequest API.

Dear YouTube,

It’s not so much that I don’t want to see ads - nobody does, but very very often the ad breaks the vibe of what I am watching and it displeases me to the point I will invest my soul and energy to block ads. Some real-life examples:

- watching a video about coding where the creator has a monotonic, calm voice that keeps me engaged, and VS Code in dark mode which is easy on my eyes in my dark room at 2am, then suddenly comes an ad with bright lights, incredibly high sound and a high-energy backtrack.

- watching a meditation video, the exact same ad appears.

You get the idea.

At the very least, please ensure the ad is in the same volume as the original video. That alone wouldn’t be too hard. In addition, please at least try to match the background overall brightness or color, and the vibe. All this would create value because people would actually watch much more ads.

And please, no 30 minute ads.

I'll add another one:

- music mixes, good lord - three minutes into some great mix and suddenly I'm hearing from Uber Eats yet again

I want to support the creators, but thank goodness for yt-dlp

>All this would create value because people would actually watch much more ads.

I'm very skeptical about this statement.

There is a simple way to stop watching ads: pay for premium. It's 100% effective and works right now.

What you are saying is that you want Google to make your ad experience better because you don't want to pay money to use their service.

You somehow use it enough for ads to bother you but not enough to pay for it.

This paradoxal type of user is too common and makes no sense to me.

> There is a simple way to stop watching ads: pay for premium. It's 100% effective and works right now.

For now. With the ever increasing number of "premium" services that promised no ads, but slowly start introducing them, it is just a matter of time before YouTube does the same.

At which point, if it ever gets to that, you're free to stop paying them. I do not understand what point you're making here.

Yeah the problem for YouTube is that they bundle a bunch of other services with the premium package. They occasionally conduct surveys to gauge user awareness of these features. I myself don’t use any of them, just the ad-free experience.

Thus trying to reintroduce ads to the premium users will remove the only reason I’m paying for it in the first place.

Not the poster, but the point I think that Google is engaging in a clear-cut bait and switch. First, "free email, good UX", "free video hosting, minimal ads". Then, once the dependency sets in, use a standard playbook of degrading the lower tiers and charging for removing the inconveniences.

I am not claiming that Google is the only company doing that; it is not. But there is a reason that bait and switch is illegal in most places. My 2c.

This is not bait and switch, going by the definition on the Wikipedia page. It's closer to 'dumping' where goods or services are supplied below cost to drive out competitors.

There is a simple way to stop watching ads

Requires getting out a credit card. Even simpler is an ad blocker.

As for the ethics of ad blocking, I'll consider unblocking ads when Google stops with the unethical (think Tai Lopez) and downright malicious ads (deepfakes of Elon suggesting to invest in crap like "Quantum AI"), and only then will I reconsider removing the blocker and maybe even paying.

Put simply, ad blockers provide a safer browsing experience.

Of course it's nicer to get stuff for free. Leeching is leeching, though, no matter how you try to justify it. Maybe you can find some alternative way to support the creators of the content you seem to be enjoying.

Agreed. I've probably got a few thousand hours on youtube, more than just about everything else. It's immensely valuable, yet I refuse to pay for Youtube. Not quite sure why.

I'm perfectly happy paying for two $5 coffees a month that I hardly remember consuming, just because I was perched and a bit tired while on a walk in the city. I pay $25 for a more comfy seat for a 3 hour flight. I pay $15 for a single movie ticket, and another $15 for $3 worth of snacks. I pay $30 for a 30 minute cutting of my hair. I pay $20 for a 3 minute slingshot at the fair. I pay $30 for a 20min taxi.

Yet I refuse to pay $14 for Youtube that I use 30 hours a month, because with adblockers I don't have to. And if Youtube makes adblocking awful enough, I simply will pay. As annoying as youtube ads are, I'd never think to complain about them because it has an easy solution.

> There is a simple way to stop watching ads: pay for premium. It's 100% effective and works right now.

It may be effective at not showing you ads on YouTube specifically, but then you’re helping Google build a more accurate profile on you (from your watch habits) to exploit further. Personally, I’m not comfortable with that because Google has proven time and again that it cannot be trusted.

I would pay for Nebula.tv if it had a few other specific creators.

Using YouTube enough for ads to bother someone does not imply it’s “enough” to pay for. There’s nothing paradoxical about it.

Humans don’t value things as a binary decision between it either being worth it as free or equal to the cost it’s being sold at. Everyone has a price point for a service they think is fair, for which they’ll start seeking alternatives when exceeded. This is how markets work.

Time spent does not correlate with cost-independent value. This is doubly true with social media platforms.

Any business model where ads can be paid off has no incentive to make good ads. Ads are meant to be annoying enough so that people prefer paying. Hence the war on ad-blockers.

This is too simplistic. Youtube started as an ad-supported service and today ads still generate the lion share of Youtube's revenue. Youtube ads are some of the most expensive to buy; Google has no incentive to push viewers off the ad-supported tier.

Google wants you to watch ads OR pay for a subscription, but it doesn't necessarily care which; they make money off you either way.

The reason Youtube offers a premium tier at all is to cater to the minority market of time-poor money-rich users who would rather pay than watch ads, which is just a smart move to broaden their audience and diversify their revenue streams. But it's not the primary way Youtube makes money and likely never will be.

depending on what they watch and how much time watching, youtube might actually lose money on a premium user. I imagine it's not easy to watch enough be worth $12 dollars worth of ads in one month tho...

I don't think so.

Using a $20 CPM [1] (Cost Per Mille, the money advertisers pay per 1000 views), $12 turns out to be 12/20 * 1000 / 30 = 20 ads per day. I would argue that the average youtube premium user watches less than that.

And I would argue that youtube really knows the numbers, and google would not lose money. Don't forget they've turned evil ;)

[1] source is the most recent Big Time video

The main problem with this analysis is that not all Youtube viewers are of equal value to advertisers. Premium subscribers are the people who have demonstrated that they are willing and able to spend money on luxuries. These are also the primary audience of advertisers (compared with, say, the elderly living off welfare, minors without a credit card, people living in poor countries).

Every premium subscription Youtube accepts reduces the value of its ad-supported audience, not just in an absolute sense (i.e. this user won't watch ads anymore), but in the sense that it lowers the CPM advertisers are willing to pay for the remaining “cheapskates”. The premium subscription price has to account for that, which is why the price should be significantly higher than the average ad revenue per user.

> Google wants you to watch ads OR pay for a subscription

Actually I suspect the logical operator here is `AND`. In fact, this is largely what holds me back from paying for any Youtube subscription; frankly I don’t trust them to show me zero ads ever regardless of what fee I pay. So I will keep playing the cat-and-mouse game as long as it lasts.

Do they serve you ads today when you have a paid subscription?

If they ever start doing that, you could stop paying. But not paying now for the hypothetical possibility that they may start serving you ads in the future sounds more like an excuse.

YouTube doesn't, but many video creators do. Not something YouTube has much control on though, for them, that's just content and is served as such. You can use the SponsorBlock extensions to automatically skip these if you want.

Right, but the claim was “GOOGLE wants you to watch ads AND pay for a subscription” and that doesn't seem to be supported by the evidence.

I get that as a premium subscriber you still see in-stream sponsored content, but that's because the creator wants that, not Google. I think Google would rather have those sponsored messages be run as regular Youtube ads instead, so they can take their 45% (?) cut of the ad revenue while letting premium subscribers skip them.

Google did well my making the main search ads not too annoying - just a bit of text rather than flashing dancing nonsense. If they'd done the later people would have switched to bing or what have you.

Yep, the worse the ads, the more likely you are to pay to avoid them. It's no wonder the user experience keeps degrading

Huh? Who do you think are creating and buying the ads? Ads are supposed to get the word out about products. No-one is making ads with the intention to annoy people

And videos like this one really shouldn't ever have ads, they shouldn't try to block playback for having an adblocker installed, and they shouldn't tell you to "sign in to confirm you're not a bot"[0], and it feels like YouTube should be liable for negligent manslaughter when they do all of the above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtYSTrjKonU

[0] https://i.imgur.com/8SDKRkZ.png

I'm anti ads as much as the next person, but negligent manslaughter for showing ads? That isn't reasonable.

They've captured the online video provider market by price dumping in a way nobody but Google could afford, and have become THE video website. Now they're implementing restrictive measures in a negligent manner that affect first-aid videos that people have come to rely on.

Google clearly has the AI know-how to label when videos are important medical videos. They could skip ads and skip forced sign-in, but they don't care enough. There was a viral tweet once about somebody's grandma choking on a fishbone where YouTube responded telling them to buy YouTube Premium, so they're probably aware, but don't care enough. And they're implementing more measures like the forced sign-in for scraping prevention that happen to disproportionately affect public networks at restaurants and hotels. That's negligence.

Why's it so unreasonable?

Uploader choose to monetize vid, not Google. It's a per video option.

That's no longer true as of around 5 years ago. They'll show ads on any video they like.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2475463?hl=en "YouTube may also place ads on videos in channels not in the YouTube Partner Program."

If you become eligible and join the YouTube partner program I believe there may be a toggle then, but for non partners it's completely up to YouTube.

And the forced sign-in of course never was controllable by creators.

Okay, but not really, right? once you upload a couple videos you become eligible to join the partner partner program. You just click yes that you've joined it and then you get the ability to select yes or or no for monetization. Certainly, WebMD is part of the partner program and is monetizing these videos on purpose, the same way that they have ads on the WebMD site. Having to sign in to use YouTube is not really that big of a bar. WebMD is making these choices, not YouTube.

There's a big difference between being a monopoly and negligent manslaughter.

WebMD decided to put ads on that video. Every uploader has that option, to monetize or not.

YouTube is the most creator friendly social media platform that exists now. Creators choose when to include ads and receive a large amount of the revenue.

There's laws dictacting ads for TV, one of them was raising the volume for ads, the other was banning increasing the loudness of the ad to have the same effect as raising the volume without raising the volume. I presume these all apply - or should apply - to YT and co as well.

It's not enough of course.

Anyway, ads being annoying and disruptive is the point, they want to sell premium subscriptions because a steady $10 a month on a subscription often forgotten about for years is more valuable and profitable to them than showing ads. (I presume)

I don't think YT will implement any of these. annoying people with ads is feature not a bug.

But you have remembered those ads, YouTube's main objective has been achieved.

I will raise you an ad about politicians loudly accusing each other of rape while watching a black and white Christmas cartoon with the family around a fireplace.

And I'll raise you a string of six ads in a row for various less-than-legal products and services interrupting the Christmas mass stream from Saint Patrick's Cathedral.

I haven't watched YouTube since.

I get they want to work against ad blockers, but as a Premium member I really wish there was an easy way to watch a video without it polluting my history or recommendations. I don't want to watch ads just due to that.

Account Switcher > Turn on Incognito. (Not the chrome incognito, but YouTube incognito)

IIRC i stopped using this because it takes way too long to toggle on/off and another crucial mistake they make is that YouTube acts like its chrome incognito where you want full privacy and an anonymous browsing experience, I do not want that, I still want to be able to see my own history like my last few search bar queries, I just dont want NEW entries added when in incognito mode. essentially i want read only mode

You can easily and quickly turn off watch on mobile. Don't remember if it's a hassle in the browser.

IME this turns off the premium benefits, stupidly

Oh that's weird

I would love something like what Spotify has - private listening. In the meantime, I just go into the YouTube history and remove anything that I don't want to pollute my recommendations. Turning off search history entirely also is good.

You can remove videos from your watch history and in my experience that does have an impact on the recommendations as it's not factored in anymore

Right, but that's annoying and you gotta remember. Something easier would be nice.

I just have a different tab with the history page open to pause / resume history you don't even need to refresh the page you use to play videos

YES. I've been wanting this for years. I want a switch that signals to the analytic/algorithm system that I am consuming this content either...

A) sincerely, trustfully, optimistically, etc.

...or...

B) critically, skeptically, experimentally, observationally, etc.

Just delete it from watch history when your done, is what I do.

If you create a new profile and switch to it it keeps your Premium benefits with its own watch history. I do this for communal watching on the living room TV.

Not sure what this says about me, but I ran into youtube putting a 3 video limit on me because I was using adblocking and when I hit that limit I just ended up going outside to have a lovely day. Honestly wish video limits was just a feature I could turn on.

Funny enough, awhile back they made it so that if you turned off watch history, they would disable the front page feed. Not sure if that was seen as a punishment to try to encourage people to turn back on watch history but that also ended up being a welcome change.

I don't have watch history on.

I don't see anything on my home page.

I specially open youtube when I want to look at something and I have to search for it.

I still watch related videos, but it's way better compared to what I got on home page.

> if you turned off watch history, they would disable the front page feed

I wish that was a configureable feature. I do have watch history turned on, and I find it useful and want to keep it, but I would love to have a cleaner less noisy front page.

I'd be happy to pay for premium if it actually removed all ads from the platform. I wish they forced creators to declare which segments of a video are ads for their sponsors and then removed or skipped them for premium users. Basically built-in Sponsorblock except not crowd-sourced.

Alternatively, many creators already upload ad-free versions to their Patreon or other paywalled platforms, they could upload those to YouTube as well to be shown to premium users if YT allowed for it and forced them to.

Alas I'm not willing to pay 13€ a month for just slightly fewer ads.

I don't think YouTube should get further into the dangerous spiral of chaperoning the content of videos. If there are too many sponsored segments in a video, take it up with the creator or stop watching that channel.

yeah I think the free market can figure ad load out. creators who go overboard on sponsored segments will get less views, less engagement. there's a natural equilibrium.

In many countries ad sections have to be clearly marked for another reason the "free market" hasn't solved: disguised advertising. I wish the US got with the times.

I'd love an option to be able to filter out all videos from my feed that have sponsored segments. For me, I find the best content is the underground stuff made by folks who don't have a clear profit motive.

Yes, this is the change that would most improve YT for me.

This is a feature that could probably be added to sponsorblock. They have the data already.

They actually do have this but it's only on the mobile app. Most videos if you tap to skip forward an auto skip button shows up.

I have recently started seeing this on the website, too. It also shows up after you use the temp 2x speed mode by holding left mouse button on the video/tap-holding the video on the app.

> As I’ll explain, the fake buffering is 80% of the length of the ads you would’ve seen, so even with fake buffering you’re still saving time using an adblocker.

I don't care if the fake buffering is 100% of the ad length. Not having to see the pre-roll ad and no ad breaks during the video is worth the wait.

I was wondering when buffering was going to be a thing. I’ve been seeing it on YT and figured it’s the Adblock wars getting heated up.

The next step is to scrape the videos, strip the ads, store them on a torrent magnet and serve that instead. Yes it would have to be from a shady RU or CN or NK or IN site. I’m fine with that.

The next step is to auto download all the videos you might want to watch onto your plex server and strip the ads

Paying for YouTube has probably been the digital subscription with the single greatest return on a dozen dollars.

Content is uninterrupted without having to engage in the arms race. Music selection is great. Random movies are available.

Music selection is great. Music recommendation (and video recommendation) is utter crap. I know running something as big as youtube means there is unlikely to be a true competitor but there is sooooooooo much low-hanging fruit to do a better job.

My home page is on average 60% wasted/irrelevant.

I'm a little surprised they haven't added "AI" yet. They add some prompt "tell us what you like". I tried it the opposite "Do not show me cat videos!" and of course it was just keyword based and started showing me cat videos.

On the video front, my Japanese is pretty good. I watched one high level Japanese language video. Now my feed is full of beginner Japanese language videos. I'm pretty confident if I could ask some LLM "Don't show me beginning level Japanese videos" it could figure it out.

Same with Music. If I play any song from the 80s their shit algo will decide what I want is "hits of the 80s", not "more songs similar to the song I just played". Again, I feel like I could tell an LLM that. Play me songs by band X and songs similar to band X". "Play me songs that influenced band X" (LLM can reference interviews for that).

Agreed the algorithm is significantly flawed. I often have the experience of being interested in a one-off video, but don't watch it because I don't want to pollute the algorithm recommendations with similar stuff.

> Music selection is great. Music recommendation (and video recommendation) is utter crap.

Fair point. I wonder if this is connected to the way that YouTube seems to rely more on presenting an array of suggestions than flowing linearly through a stream. In any case, I turn off autoplay and am trying to rely as much on search, follows, and curation as algorithmic recommendations, so the hit and miss quality of the recommendations doesn't bother me much personally, I could see how it might not be a great set-and-forget music replacement (for which I already have plenty of options going back into terrestrial radio origins).

Same here. Netflix, Hulu, Disney plus, HBO... I've had them disabled after months of zero usage.

YouTube on the other hand...

But how is it different than those of us who access it for free? I get a popup asking me to pay once a month but that's about it. Are you just happy to throw your money away if it goes to a giant corporation?

You get rid of the ads, so it’s not exactly throwing money away.

> Are you just happy to throw your money away if it goes to a giant corporation?

45% (which is a lot) of the money goes to the giant corporation. The other 55% gets divided up among the people whose content you watched.

I mostly watch smaller creators, so I don't mind 55% of my membership fee ending up in their pockets so they can keep making videos for me to enjoy.

I don't watch ads, the people I watch get paid because I watched. And obviously I'm not happy about the cut google takes and I would rather a higher percentage of my money go to the creators.

It's a premium service with premium features... ad-free, offline downloads... maybe you should look into it

I’d gladly pay for ad free youtube if they weren’t double dipping by stealing my data.

Yes, one thing for me is, that Youtube is offering music (in the form of videos) which you can't get on any other platform.

while ad blocking has grown in prevalence over the years, for something like youtube I'd figured it was more than counteracted by the shift to mobile / TV (where ad blocking is more complicated)

whatever the merits, this (and google's neutering of extensions in chrome) signals a fundamental attitude shift from ~10 years ago; they're more interested in squeezing margins out of their dominant platforms instead of growth

Firefox mobile has ublock origin

*not on iPhone

Trying to watch a walled garden inside another walled ecosystem. No wonder that works how they want it and you can't simply do what you want

Yeah, it's true. iOS 9 Safari actually had the ability to play YouTube in the background without paying for that, and in iOS 10 they went out of their way to prevent it. And Apple signaled willingness to go along with WEI back when that was on the table.

Use Orion. It supports FF and Chrome extensions on mobile and desktop

Ublock Origin still does not work on Orion mobile sadly.

Orion is a buggy mess. Horrible experience overall.

I just use Vinegar [0] and watch YT on Safari. It also allows me to listen to the videos with the phone locked.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...

Safari + Vinegar is my favorite way to watch youtube on any platform. One minor bug I sometimes notice is that the PiP option stops working between videos until you actually hit refresh.

Agreed about Orion, I keep it around and update it and try it out every now and again but I don’t think the experience is there yet.

It's too bad, the stock Safari in iOS 9 did both those things. Nowadays the rare times I want to watch YT on Safari, I just refresh the page once or maybe twice, which somehow makes it not show an ad.

I just use yt-dlp (YTDLnis on Android, which has a great UI that makes it quite YouTube-like). Downloading instead of streaming (read: downloading then automatically deleting) is so much better.

1. It's all offline play, so I can use my favorite players like VLC. Also, no buffering (after the initial download, of course).

2. I can do anything I want to the video: make edits, splice ads out, extract audio, generate subtitles or dubs, etc.

3. It saves Google server costs! Well, comparing to streaming the same video from them multiple times with adblock on, at least.

I do this so I can watch powerpoint style math videos with the colors inverted, so it's white text on black background instead of black text on white background.

Download the video and then open with `mpv --vf=negate --hwdec=no`.

Fake buffering is much better than watching an ad, even if it were longer. Looking at a wait spinner probably is much better for the brain than some attention grabbing ad content.

I watched all the ads, just at 100x speed. It doesn't work anymore - RIP the Ad Accelerator - but I could use it guilt free knowing the ads were watched and google collected their money

https://github.com/rkk3/ad-accelerator

Having to pay for something so that's "less annoying" is the worst business model. YouTube Premium is very expensive. I had it for a while when I got a Pixel smartphone with a few months of YouTube Premium included. It was great. I also understand that streaming on this scale must entail incredibly high operating costs; the money has to come from somewhere. It's simply a dilemma. But there has to be a better way. Any ideas?

Create a built-in Patreon to access premium videos and communities and take a cut.

They’re attempting that now with “memberships.” I’m not a heavy patreon user, but the current implementation leaves a lot to be desired. I expect they’ll be able to iterate on it.

An unfortunate aspect is that I’m frequently recommended videos which I would have to pay to watch. As a youtube premium subscriber, feeling like I’m constantly being upsold has begun to grate on me. I’d really appreciate a feature to hide these videos as a premium subscriber, which I have little faith in them implementing. On my laptop it’s easy enough to hide these thumbnails (as I already do with shorts) using ublock origin. However this is making me reconsider my subscription. Why should I have to use a third party tool to best use this service which I’m paying a fairly significant fee for? I’ve similarly used ublock origin to work around recent change where only three videos were shown on each row

> An unfortunate aspect is that I’m frequently recommended videos which I would have to pay to watch.

That's older than the "membership" concept. They licensed a bunch of television and movies and made them pay-per-view.

Youtube Premium is very expensive?

I would pay that 130€ / year if I was alone. I have to be responsible with the money I earn as I have to feed 3 kids and my wife is not working. We also use other different streaming services like netflix, spotify family... adding youtube premium seems not reasonable for me at the moment.

Commenting to share my experience: I ran into and ended up with youtube because it bundles youtube music as well, allowing me to consolidate. I was able to invite my household to the same account.

I also wanted to ensure my views resulted in the creators being paid, it goes without saying that the royalties for streaming are abysmal and is a separate conversation, but it was a contributing factor for me.

In the USA I subscribe to Youtube Premium family. The rate is just $3.00 a month more than Spotify family. For that price you get both the Spotify-equivalent Google-owned service (confusingly called YouTube Music) AND you get ad-free Youtube as a bundle. Basically just $3/month for no ads on Youtube is worth it and much easier to justify for a household on a tight budget.

It might be worth looking into if the pricing differential is similarly minimal where you live.

You are Right, its a Great Idea actually.

In 2025 it's actually not that expensive. CDNs aggressively drive down the cost of streaming video.

A 1080p music video costs about one tenth of one cent to serve to one person at retail CDN rates.

You could easily host this yourself and decide what the terms are to view it. E.g. ads, or paywall or free because you benefit from the exposure.

Once upon a time AdSense/YouTube saved you from getting an unmanageable $5,000 bill from your ISP because your content went viral but nowadays their value proposition is more about network effects plus built-in revshare scheme.

Youtube is $14/month. netflix is $17/month. That is VERY expensive, considering that most of Netflix's cost is production. Youtube has almost no production costs. Their users create content.

Maybe if they paid their users more, so they didn't also have to add 'sponsor segments' inside their video's it would make more sense. The bundling music for the same price is the same crap cable and phone companies have been doing for decades, that most people hate. Let me buy just youtube without ads, and keep spotify.

But as it sits right now, $14/month for video's without youtube ads, but still with ads added by the creators themselves (or paid promotion, I guess) is pretty expensive, compared to $17/month for actual movies with no ads at all.

YouTube gives, I think, 55% of revenue (not just profits) to creators, which could be considered similar to production costs making up a majority of expenses.

Just for comparison, Netflix in 2024 spent somewhere between $14B and $17B on content, and made $34B in revenue.

I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music a couple of years ago because of Spotify showing disruptive ads/promotions on the premium plan. YT Premium for Music + Videos is worth it for me, being about 2.5USD more expensive per month than Spotify where I live. But I agree that one should just be able to subscribe to them separately.

You're not wrong, but the amount of content on YouTube (that they need to index, store, and stream) is several orders of magnitude more than what's on Netflix.

And for that matter, the number of active viewers is also significantly higher since there's no paywall. AND they also support live streaming.

But Netflix doesn't let you upload your own videos and show them to anyone on earth. The businesses are different.

$14 is the average cost for a McDonald's trip. It's really not that much.

Assuming your numbers are correct, you’re ignoring all the rest of the infra

Premium is a good deal if you would have already had Music, and Music is pretty great while also being a good deal. They also have a cheaper 'Premium Lite' these days, though apparently some content still has ads if you use it.

>some content still has ads if you use it

It's for content that use music. As you said of you want ad free music you need the full one.

At least on TV I occasionally catch randomly interesting ads... sometimes. On YT, I'm stuck with the same obnoxious commercial from a company whose service I strongly dislike, playing on loop ever since they associated me to some related product category. They think pestering me with more interruptions will win me over, but their analytics are working in reverse. I can't understand why they're so clueless.

its creating a problem and selling the solution to that problem. im surprised there isnt more of a distaste for youtube out there for just their overall product... ads aside. One of the better things ive done for myself this past year is remove the right sidebar as well as almost all of the homepage.

my youtube homepage is just that left sidebar, which has dots if a new video for one of the channels i care about uploads. It totally frees me from clickbait thumbnails, and "youtube rabbit holes".

youtube has just been getting slaughtered with horrible trends of mindless content, low effort documentary stuff, all sorts of low effort garbage with high effort thumbnails/titles. it is so nice to just rid myself of all of it.

They created the product before creating the problem

market capture and figure out monetization later :)

like a forest preserve deciding theyd like billboards in the middle of their paths after a few years.

Adding something that users don’t like but that makes the company money to those who are unwilling/unable to pay for it seems very reasonable.

Is it actually expensive though? Or does it just feel that way? A movie costs $15, or roughly 13 cents per minute of watch time.

The average daily YouTube watch time is north of 40 minutes per day for adults in the US. That's a penny per minute for YouTube... 11x cheaper than a movie.

It’s a psychological problem. Going from $0 to $1 is a mountain.

Starting a product or service at $30 / month sets expectations up front (no ad supported free tier)

This is an incompatible strategy with venture backed “get all the market share possible by offering services for free to crush competitors so we can have a monopoly to exploit later” mindset

I wouldn't be adverse to paying for YT (or similar services) if they took cash payments. But no, you have to get a subscription. Which involves giving Google your personal details, thus giving the world's biggest data hoarder even more data.

Imagine going back in time 20 years. You want to buy a newspaper from a stall. And the vendor tells you to wait and stare at an add for 30 seconds before you can pick up the magazine. The alternative is that you give that vendor a copy of your ID and credit card. It's insane.

Most of these problems would go away if we had "online cash" (please don't start talking about cryptocurrency). Want to watch a video? Watch an add or pay €0.01. Of course all the money-laundering hysteria will prevent that from happening.

Ultimately, terrorism is why we have ads.

Good time as any to inform about existence of PeerTube instances. And maybe, to think about better use of your time and watch less videos on the internet? This video could've been a blog post and all that jazz :)

I'll take 12 seconds of silence over seeing the same goddamn T-Mobile ad for the 100th time. Seriously, I can watch a 5 minute video and at it'll play the exact same ad THREE TIMES, at the start, somewhere in the middle, then at the end again. And it's always the most loud, obnoxious ad imaginable.

I was skeptical of SmartTube but it really is the only way YouTube is tolerable anymore.

I have every right to try to block YouTube ads and YouTube has every right to try to defeat whatever I do.

And they too, to try to stop people using their platform from doing so.

No they do not have that right. They do not have the right to try to circumvent what I'm telling my browser to do. If they don't like what it's doing, they can block me from the platform.

At the most fundamental they have the right to send or not send video data to you.

Problem is Google also controls what used to be called "user agent".

I use Firefox and uBlock Origin

They could very easily just ban ad blockers from the Chrome extension store, but they haven't

Serious people use Firefox and uBlock Origin.

im sure that's for antitrust reasons.

If YouTube's ads were like the TV ads of olden days, they might even be marginally tolerable. They're not however.

In my experience, they not only deliberately increase volume to pretty much screech whatever insipid bullshit is being offered at you, but they also can sometimes run for dozens of minutes unless you manually go to your device and press "skip". TV ads never did these sorts of utterly shitty, tedious things.

I even wonder how anything so fucking hostile and annoying to a YT free user can possibly be effective? Who's actively paying for all this garbage ad placement with such scummy little playback mechanics?

> TV ads never did these sorts of utterly shitty, tedious things.

Until the CALM Act was passed in 2010, networks actually did increase the volume on advertisements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...

Didn't know about that, but unsurprising. At least they couldn't extend their length almost indefinitely too, unless you manually skipped.

It was around that time that I stopped watching cable television altogether.

If you want to back down memory lane, search on YouTube for old recordings of network TV ad breaks from the late 90s and early 2000s- they’re just obnoxious.

Yeah, I was reading this and thinking wut, TV sucks. Like half the time watching a show (most likely a rerun) is ads, even if it's a paid cable channel. And even after that 2010 law, pretty sure the ads are louder than the shows. And the ads are even worse nowadays because the ads exclusively target old people, so 90% are drugs or gold-buying scams. Somehow the cable STBs are super laggy nowadays too, like they rewrote the video decoder in Javascript or something, cause it used to be fine.

The only thing I miss at all is being able to leave a TV on and have it keep playing something reasonable, not convince itself that watching a car review means I want to watch a screaming kid trolling in Minecraft followed by the Syrian Civil War.

Live TV apps like Pluto scratch that last itch for me. Can put it on a movie channel or stargate reruns and just leave it alone.

>exclusively target old people, so 90% are drugs or gold-buying scams.

Haha, so then what if i'm young but want some shady gold investments while I look into trying Ambien?

Oh the gold buying ads come by mail, you only sell your gold on TV. I heard they pay even higher than market rate if you order some orbexlitol with it.

Some did, some of the time. And many of us stopped watching those stations when it really kicked in back in the early 90s.

Very late to this party, but here's my two cents worth:

"Random" advertising is completely irrelevant, and a total waste.

"Targeted" advertising is an unwanted intrusion on my privacy.

Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it -- George Monbiot [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advert...

I gave up and wrote a script to scrape the channels I like with yt-dlp into my Plex server.

That's a good idea for channels you know you like.

Discovery is always going to be an issue, but for those who want to get away from doomscrolling their life away for the algorithm-god, it’s a rather comfy way to enjoy content.

I haven't discovered anything on YT for a looong time, and now I also installed unhook, so I don't even see any recommends.

I gave up and paid for YouTube Premium. Probably a top-3 subscription that I’ll never cancel.

Having sailed the high seas since middle school I suppose it was only natural that I continue to build upon my multi-terabyte horde of movies, archived websites, books, music, and video games to include content from hobbyist HAM radio operators and long-form urban legend documentaries from YT channels.

It's so ironic that they resort to these tactics that ultimately ruin the experience for everyone and ultimately attract more users into using adblockers. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the number of users with adblockers installed was so small that Google actually spent more money implementing all those techniques against them than it could lose in lost advertising just by not doing anything.

Ohhh, so this is why my videos take so long to start lately. Looks like I‘m in the experimental group as well. I thought my adblocker for Safari (don‘t judge) was broken - well it actually is broken, as I can‘t whitelist YT for some reason, but that‘s a different problem.

This approach could work well, since it makes users think their blocker broke YT. Both brilliant and evil.

> fake buffering is 80% of the length of the ads

I run Brave on multiple devices and there's now a "glitch" a few seconds after what wouod be the ads, starts. I put up with this because the alternative is to put up with ads that treat viewers like morons with one hand in the mouse and other in the wallet.

Another thing they are sometimes doing is failing to add videos that you watched with ad blocking on to your history.

That means if those videos show up in a search, or on your home page, or in a recommendation they do not have the red bar on the bottom that indicates that you have already watched them.

I'm curious, has someone tried the authenticated Youtube Premium API in third-party clients?

I'd love to use Invidious or Peertube to watch the videos, but I also want my subscription money to go to the video creators. Youtube allocates it proportionally to the viewing time.

When I start a video and it shows an ad, and 15 seconds into the video I reload the page (similar to switching a channel on tv forth and back again), why do I need to view intro ads again?

Google is so greedy that they don't care the slightest bit about being fair.

So you buy premium - now you don't have ads from YouTube anymore. But now YouTubers such as LinusTechTips and who else not want monthly payments for their exclusive content. Yea, that's not going to work. Now your watchers don't watch your content.

That's a self correcting situation. If LTT sees a huge drop in their views/subscribers, they'll correct the situation.

.. or a competitor (who's a competitor to LTT? GamerNexus? MKBHD?) would take their place.

Admittedly don't watch LTT because basically the content is the advertisement. Maybe it's changed.

It’s crazy to ram as they did a revenue breakdown recently and the sponser segments was way tinier than I expected - like 10% or in that range. I was annoyed just knowing they shit on their videos just for that tiny profit boost.

Oh just get the screwdriver already, will you?! :)

LTT does have some interesting videos, but yeah, most of their output is full of ads.

Please don't associate actual journalists GamersNexus with those hucksters.

Floatplane is doing well according to the WAN show.

Wonder if people will start moving away from the YT frontend to other apps like Grayjay.

I've seen several people argue about the quality of ads on YouTube. For me it's not about that. I've been using ad blockers for almost 15 years now. Youtube has been free AND ad free for me for a very long time. I don't want to be interrupted with ads now or ever regardless of their quality.

The point is, I'm making zero excuses about why I don't want to see ads on youtube. It's been that way and I want it to remain that way. No subscriptions and no ads. People watching yt on their phones and TVs will still see ads or pay for premium and they can support the service.

What new feature of significance has YouTube actually delivered in years?

the topics at the top of the homepage, sorting comments by timestamp, the little card when you click on someone's profile picture with other comments on the same channel (which was only on mobile for a while), they improved auto captioning recently and are toying with dubbing, modern codecs… it's the little things that make it better

I do appreciate the auto captioning and codec fight. shakes fist at patent trolls

Could care less about the social bits. Comments have been filtered better but I will never trust their black box. With Enhanced YouTube extension I remove all of that so I can retain focus apart from the video at hand.

Mostly stolen from elsewhere:

    ! Stop sites from prompting to sign into Google account
    ||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$xhr,script,3p

    ! Stop annoying reels from littering friend feeds
    www.facebook.com##[aria-label="reel"]:upward(2)

    youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
    youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element-show

    youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)
    youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)
    youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])
    youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)

    ! Don't use the obnoxious new bold font for titles, use the old font instead
    www.youtube.com###title h1 yt-formatted-string:style(font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; font-weight: 400 !important;)
    www.youtube.com##h3.ytd-playlist-panel-renderer .title .yt-formatted-string:style(font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; font-weight: 400 !important;)

    ! Remove branding bugs in the bottom corner
    www.youtube.com##div.iv-branding
    www.youtube.com##.annotation.annotation-type-custom.iv-branding

    ! Disable live video previews on hover
    www.youtube.com##+js(aeld, /^(?:mousemove|pointermove|pointerenter)$/, buttons)

    ! Remove "Scroll for details"
    www.youtube.com##.ytp-button.ytp-fullerscreen-edu-button

    ! Remove "This video contains paid content" warning
    www.youtube.com##.ytp-paid-content-overlay

    ! Remove badges
    www.youtube.com##.ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope.badges
    www.youtube.com##ytd-badge-supported-renderer.ytd-video-primary-info-renderer

    ! Remove badges in lists, expand video title to fill that space again
    www.youtube.com##.ytd-badge-supported-renderer.style-scope.badge-style-type-verified.badge
    www.youtube.com###menu > .ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope
    www.youtube.com##.ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope.metadata:style(padding-right:0!important)

    ! Remove chat
    www.youtube.com###chat

    ! Remove sidebar
    www.youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-renderer.ytd-app.style-scope
    www.youtube.com##ytd-app[mini-guide-visible] ytd-page-manager.ytd-app:style(margin-left:0px!important)

    ! Remove the shadow over the top of videos
    www.youtube.com##div.ytp-gradient-top
    www.youtube.com##.ytp-chrome-top

    ! Reduce opacity of the shadow over the bottom of videos
    www.youtube.com##div.ytp-gradient-bottom:style(opacity: 55% !important)

    ! Reduce opacity of video length labels
    www.youtube.com##ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer.ytd-thumbnail.style-scope:style(opacity:75% !important)

    ! Remove Next button. I only ever hit this accidentally, losing my place
    ! and my playback buffer >:-[
    www.youtube.com##.ytp-left-controls > .ytp-button.ytp-next-button

    ! Remove Miniplayer button
    www.youtube.com##.ytp-button.ytp-miniplayer-button

    ! Force YouTube to display the complete copyright information in the description
    www.youtube.com###expanded-metadata:style(display:block !important)

    ! Don't load the preview image before the video loads (saves some bandwidth)
    ||i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/*/maxresdefault.webp
    ||i.ytimg.com/vi/*/maxresdefault.jpg

    ! Remove interactions (eg if you never login to YouTube)
    www.youtube.com###like-button
    www.youtube.com###dislike-button
    www.youtube.com###sponsor-button
    www.youtube.com###hover-overlays
    www.youtube.com###subscribe-button
    www.youtube.com###flexible-item-buttons
    www.youtube.com###button-shape
    www.youtube.com###reply-button-end

    ! Remove sidebar items that are only applicable to logged-in users
    www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-section-renderer.ytd-guide-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(1)
    www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-section-renderer.ytd-guide-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2)

    ! Remove "Watch Later" and "Add to Queue"
    www.youtube.com###hover-overlays

    ! Remove the "skeleton" shown before the page loads
    www.youtube.com##.skeleton
    www.youtube.com###info-skeleton
    www.youtube.com###meta-skeleton
    www.youtube.com###owner-name
    www.youtube.com##.skeleton-bg-color
    www.youtube.com###home-page-skeleton
    www.youtube.com###masthead-skeleton-icons
    ||www.youtube.com/s/desktop/*/cssbin/www-main-desktop-watch-page-skeleton.css
    ||www.youtube.com/s/desktop/*/cssbin/www-main-desktop-player-skeleton.css

    ! Remove the live previews on the scrubber bar (saves some bandwidth, but
    ! not worth it IMO)
    ||i.ytimg.com/sb/*
    www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip-bg
    www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip-image
    www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip:style(border-radius:0px;!important)*

Is this something to put in host file? What is this

perhaps filter rules for uBlock Origin

ublock-origin, open dashboard > "my filters" list

These are filters for uBlock Origin.

uBlock filters

> ! Remove "This video contains paid content" warning

Why?

> Why?

I didn't write the filter, hence, "Mostly stolen from elsewhere."

Not sure if it's the same one, but I managed to consistently click the "includes paid promotion" banner on video thumbnails so I open a tab with the help page explaining what sponsorships are instead of the video.

If adblock stopped working I would leave, which is interesting to me as I wonder what I'd do with my new time.

Funny I make YT videos too trying to build an audience, I'd like to not put ads on it but not my choice

I don't understand how people can just accept ads it drives me insane when some random shit starts playing

I already lost money with YT, I bought so many UHD movies on their platform ($20 ea) and they won't stream it in HD unless you're on a supported device or ad-ridden tv

edit: alright, aftrer seeing it's $13 I will get it, I have been converted

"I want free hosting and an audience but I don't want to pay for it"

Yeah I get if that's why I said it

I do pay for it, the time to make the content

Sucks how everything is like that nowadays, IG, Reddit

(have to join a platform to be seen)

You pay to make the content. You would have to "pay" to make the content no matter where you hosted it. You don't pay YouTube to host it. That's a silly argument.

You seem to ignore that you would probably have no audience - or have a significantly smaller audience - were it not for YouTube hosting your content. They are providing you a service, but you seem to think that nobody - not you, not your viewers - should have to trade anything for that service, despite the hosting and streaming of video being one of the most expensive possible tech services in the world (bar perhaps running genAI models.)

I dunno it's just very annoying how a lot of people have memed themselves into this train of thought where the big tech companies aren't actually providing them anything of value, when if they decided to suddenly stop providing their services they would be up a creek without a paddle.

Well, no one pushes YouTube to give free services right? Come on, make us pay for it! See what happens.

> make us pay for it! See what happens

I pay for YouTube and Nebula.

That’s your choice and I respect that.

They are, aren't they?

You can pay for Youtube and you won't get ads.

I thought you still got ads guess I'll find out

I'll compromise, I'll get premium but still have my adblock

There are no ads on Premium.

Source: I have Premium and have adblock disabled on YouTube - no ads.

you don't get ads from Youtube. the people you watch may still say sponsored stuff.

YouTube Premium has existed for years now... You're absolutely able to pay for an ad-free experience, and it provides more financial support to creators than ads do

That is a good point. But I usually pay through Patreon. I wonder which one is better, and if I can attribute YT premium to a specific author?

YT Premium revenue goes to the same creators you watch otherwise but they get compensated more for your views than they do for any other person's views.

e.g. Linus Tech Tips posted up their share of revenue from AdSense in 2024; YT Premium made up 37% of their revenue despite being 29% of their views.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeCP-0nuziE

Whether that makes a given creator more money versus Patreon depends on how much you watch them, frankly.

That's different though. Paying through Patreon is directly giving the creators a larger share, but neither party (you or the creator) pays for video hosting service in this transaction.

Your argument only makes sense if you watch the creator's videos exclusively on Patreon (paid by the cut they take from your transaction) or on a platform like Vimeo (paid directly by the creator for hosting). In which case, what Youtube does isn't relevant to you.

Patreon now lets users upload videos.

The existence of premium is not the same as parent poster’s, “make us pay for it” idea, aka a paywall.

If YouTube and its content actually has value, then presumably a paywall would have no effect of revenues of YouTube or creators. On the other hand if the content is actually nearly worthless, the vast majority of people would find something better to do with their time.

I know which outcome I’d be betting on!

the OP said "make us pay" not "give us the option to pay"

Until they make us pay, put the entire site behind a paywall or similar, I'll keep enjoying their public web content using my clients of choice, some of which modify the content in various ways for various reasons, entirely of my choosing.

YouTube is enabling creative people to make a living wage from doing what they love the most and providing immense value to niche communities. If you get value from it, just pay for it.

Google is intentionally throttling YouTube, slowing down users with ad blockers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44304293

I would love YouTube to include comments in their ads as they do with all other videos. To borrow a current phrase, they chicken out on actual critical feedback and keep pushing their money making agenda with an iron fist. If YouTube actually cared to make their users happy, public comments in ads would filter out all the garbage ads in hours and the entire platform would be forced to accept a minimum yet independent and user driving bar for advertising.

The biggest issue I have with YouTube advertising is placement in the video. When watching network television, ads are placed between scenes where a pause is acceptable. On YouTube I'll often get an ad in the middle of an actor's sentence or action where it completely disrupts everything and destroys the moment.

I'm a bit surprised nobody seems to have mentioned http://fixyt.com

I have a bookmarklet:

javascript:(function() {window.location=window.location.toString().replace(/^https:\/\/www.youtube\./,'http://fixyt.');})()

and whenever I want to watch a YouTube video, I just click that and enjoy an ad-free experience.

Im in A/B group for this, and I had to disable ublock for youtube or videos wont play showing a funny warning. Interestingly the specific autoskip ads extension for youtube still works perfectly, and I dont see any backoff or delay, maybe a short 1s flash is happening and video starts playing. If they block this too I dont mind just predownloading every video with yt-dlp out of spite.

Ad tech is the reason our society is so polarized. YouTube and Google fund the disinformation and propaganda universe. These fringe people never had a chance to broadcast let alone become wealthy before Google put ads on everything. And now, not only are they given a platform, they're rewarded for being the loudest, most angry, most polarizing, most obnoxious people possible.

Rewarding sensationalism without any oversight is the core problem with society today.

Profits over priciples.

What's nuts is reading thought this thread and reading comments from all the people who think that earning money with digital content is a right. And worse, that because they've earned money in the past, they're entitled to do it forever.

There are no longer any guard rails on sensationalism and since the only measure of success is by the very Fox guarding the Henhouse, it's optimized for the Fox's profit, not public's health and society's principles.

Advertising ruined the world. Ad Tech is a cancer.

I have to say also, Youtube's ads really suck now.

I watched a mentour pilot video recently on a machine which did not have adblock or sponsorblock (a meta quest headset). I got the same stupid car ad every 2-3 minutes of it. It is basically unwatchable now with ads.

On top of that, the guy had a 5 minute sponsor crap thing in it also.

Youtube is just ridiculous now.

Dear Google, just reduce the price of premium to sane levels. no way you are displaying 15$ worth of ads per person per month.

As a young person, I get perfectly normal corporate advertisements on YT, with the very rare porno dating ad. My parents on the other hand, get a never ending stream of the shittiest scams, AI voiceovers of Joe Rogan and Zelensky, dick pills. It's clear their tracking targets elderly users with scams. I would never pay for YT premium.

I pay for YouTube premium. Surely everyone here can too. This stuff isn’t free so either deal with ads or pay for premium

This stuff is freely available on the open web and I don't deal with ads or pay for premium because there's zero compelling reason to do so.

If creators have a problem with the revenue loss, their contract is with Google and they should take up those concerns with Google. If Google has a problem with how I consume their public content, they can make it non-public or try to block me in some other way.

I owe neither of those entities anything and until they either make the content non-public or find a way to block me without blocking others they want to see their content, I'll keep on consuming it how I like.

It’s not “freely available” it’s available with ads. You are just circumventing the ads which is akin to piracy. I’m not making a moral judgement but at least be honest about it. You are trying to consume nonfree content without paying anything

I don’t have a YouTube account and yet their algorithm creates a feed for me anyway. Pretty sweet.

This means they’re also collecting data about some random person in my area but I don’t have a Google account either so that data isn’t really useful.

Ad block FTW

At some point I gotta do a network-wide block instead of per computer.

Even as a uBlock and Firefox user, I get the occasional delay at the start of some videos. My workaround is to click on another random video (which, for some reason starts playing immediately), and then go back to my original video, and that starts playing straight away. No-mo waiting.

I just can't pay youtube a penny, because it solidifies their monopoly and control. They can and do ban content that they think is "harmful" for whatever reason, they push content that they (not me) like, I don't want to reward any of this.

On my outdated Firefox (with uBlock Origin of course), I've found that opening videos in a new tab (middle click) eliminates ads, while left-clicking reliably shows an ad. I've gotten the fake buffering recently no matter how I open videos.

Off topic, but I must praise the simple, no-nonsense, readable design of the linked post, and how it loads instantly. Kudos.

Never once have I seen an ad and thought "I need that" and purchased the item. Not in my entire life that I recall and I'm 54.

Maybe this is not the norm but I don't perceive most advertising as being particularly effective.

This fight will soon take up a whole new level. If they start serving ads inside the content stream, blockers can use AI to determine if the content is ad or not. I don't think this fight will ever be over.

I have to wonder whether they are tracking changes in consumer confidence. Subjectively, I have noticed a significant drop in confidence from my peers. I do not know whether my experience generalizes, but if it does, they are playing with fire.

I pay for YouTube premium (which gives me YouTube music too) and am happy with the lack of ads, even though many creators still mix paid sponsors into their videos. It seems the creators are motivated to keep things minimal or they will lose engagement.

What I am not happy with is a lack of control over the homepage and recommendations. I would really like to be able to easily block channels from ever showing up, but you can only sort of do this if you click "don't recommend this channel anymore" from the homepage. But you can't do this if a video shows up recommended from another video. And overall, it just feels like they are spending so much effort trying to get me to watch the next video instead of enjoy the one I am trying to watch.

For my kids, I came up with an ad hoc policy where they can watch from the homepage / recs on weekends but during the week have to stick to a personal playlist they can only add videos to on the weekends. This removes the algorithmically driven addictive nature of YouTube and unsurprisingly they end up moderating their use of Youtube within their alotted screen time much better. It distinguishes between, "I want to watch this" and "I want to pull the slot machine lever." But I would be a lot happier if I could better curate access to content for my kids too. Youtube Kids sucks, it ends up filtering out a bunch of interesting stuff like carpentry and nature content that hasn't been marked "for kids" in favor of videos of kids shopping for toys and stuff.

The "don't show this channel" feature also feels like there is some kind of expiry because I've blocked a few channels multiple times now via that method.

Totally a theory but sometimes YouTube has a button that says roughly "show me something new". I think that may be the source of those channels returning.

Agreed. I've told YT about a thousand times I have zero friggin interest in YouTube Shorts and lo and behold a few weeks later they guiltily try to sneak back into the home page.

> I pay for YouTube premium (which gives me YouTube music too)

I'm curious about a buyer's perspective: would you say this is "tying"? (Seems like an ambiguous word for it but I can see no other translation for koppelverkoop)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)

To me it seems like trying to undermine the market for music streaming (which is currently somewhat healthy with a handful of competing services worldwide where you can get access to most artists' work) by abusing the monopoly on videos that people often want a subscription on. The parent corp has so much cash to spare, giving away music for nearly free is worth it to make it extremely difficult to compete in this other market. From an individual's point of view, you're a thief of your own wallet if you don't get this two in one deal (assuming you want both). I'm not sure how to feel about people who buy this

Yeah probably, if I didn’t get it bundled I may very well be using spotify. But Yt music doesn’t suck and its YT integration is mildly nice.

The moment I can't block ads on yt will be the moment I stop using it.

Besides from that I feel that I waste a lot of time there anyway so I partially hope it happens.

AI will kill youtube. You'd be able to watch youtube with like 20 seconds global delay while an AI will silently skip all the ads it finds.

It will be our personal content censor.

That's a level of optimism I haven't encountered in a while.

Sure AI will stream Youtube for you, but it will be chock-a-block full of its own ads.

The actors will pause mid sentence, turn to the camera and smile while they slam down a coke and tell us all about the latest samsung phone.

Makes me wonder how sustainable this arms race is long-term… will users just give up and pay for Premium, or will adblockers keep finding creative ways around it?

The number of ads they run reminds me of the good old days where half of the TV show time was commercials.

Absurd but true in a similar way: I get a tiny spark of nostalgia on those occasions where a bit of sponsored promotion pops into part of some podcast i'm listening to as a YT video while I do chores. (Ublock running, so no third party ads at least)

The thing about those idiotic third party ads on YouTube, which is so grotesquely annoying is that, unlike TV ads of old, some of then can literally run for dozens of minutes at auto-increased volume unless you go to your device and skip them at some point. That is some particularly shitty nonsense right there.

When I use to listen to radio, I dreamed of a system that would auto mute the commercials

It's worse, because at least cable commercials can be skipped.

Cable commercials can be skipped?

Since DVRs, which we've had since 1999.

When was that? I'm genuinely asking, since I remember the breakdown from when I was recording TV to my computer and editing out the commercials, as 10 minutes of commercials and 20 minutes of TV show.

My recollection was that this was in the mid 90s.

Are you mostly watching short videos? I mostly watch videos that are 10+ minutes and I've never had YouTube come anywhere near either the number or total length of ads that I saw on cable or that I see on broadcast TV.

I have been fed over 1000 meat stick advertisements in the past couple months. I’m probably consuming all their ad budget as digital meat sticks.

Curious -- why adblocks like uBlock Origin are not very effective at streaming services like Netflix/Hulu (at least the last time I tried)?

I accidentally did something. I don’t get ads on YouTube in Chrome on iOS. I have a few ideas on how

Most likely is that you are in some control group to determine effects of ads in general.

Nah. I get ads in the app and on other browsers. It happened after I was futzing around with dns settings years ago. There’s some combination of whatever I did that keeps chrome ad free. It has persisted through iOS updates as well.

I switched to Firefox because of the latest measures after 2 decades of using Chrome.

Discord recently started using a fake loading screen if you have an ad blocker enabled. What’s hilarious (and a little infuriating) is that the app is still obviously working under the hood — you can literally see masked text updating in real time when people send you messages. It’s not “loading,” it’s just refusing to render content locally. They’re not even blocking access to the service — they’re just trying to frustrate you into disabling your ad blocker without explicitly saying that’s what they’re doing. Classic dark pattern.

What’s worse is the privacy side. Discord apparently leaves the microphone open even when you’re using push-to-talk. There’s been anecdotal evidence from users monitoring their network traffic that mic input is still active in the background, likely being piped to local buffers or held in memory under the guise of latency reduction. That might sound innocent, but the distinction between “open but not recording” and “recording” is razor thin when the user has explicitly told the app not to listen until a key is pressed. At minimum, it’s a trust violation — at worst, it’s surveillance theater.

This is the standard bait-and-switch. Build a good product, earn user trust, then slowly degrade it with tracking, telemetry, ads, and manipulative UX until it’s barely recognizable. Discord used to be a breath of fresh air compared to Skype or Teamspeak, and now it’s another data-harvesting machine with a gamer paint job. It’s telling that more users are looking into self-hosted options or jumping to alternatives like Matrix or Mumble. Discord doesn’t have ads yet, but all the groundwork is being laid — and people are right to be wary.

If I cant watch Youtube without ads, then I just wont watch it at all.

meanwhile 40m seems to be the new 10:07

videos getting more bloated, recycling the same crap with 90% filler. just like google blog spam.

and tell me how much are your shitty ads worth without anyone to watch them?

YOUTUBE is getting F_CKED!!

Dear dkga, you willing to invest your soul but cant even pay 3 bucks a month. You have a cheap soul. Hey Cheapoo. Dont forget the creators you so willingly watch are paid through them, without ads, there are no creators you so love.

They can advertise to me all day and I wouldn't buy a thing

Yep. And I kinda hate Grammerly now. Whatever it is.

The point of most ads isn't to get you to buy things. Most ads just want you to think of the product and be aware it exists. Their objective is to slowly hijack your brain.

If you know what "it gives you wings" or "the happiest place on earth" means, the ads already worked.

Ads are trying to combat obscurity. A brand with bad reputation is far better than a brand nobody's ever heard of.

I downloaded some free songs back in the Napster days but now I happily pay for or watch ads for any content that I consume. I have zero interest in ad blockers / other tricks as I want the content creators to get compensated.

Don't consume YT content on YT. That's the secret.

Does no one care about how much it costs to hosts and stream the massive amount of videos that Youtube hosts?

We all just think that we are entitled to get all that for free?

If you don't want ads, just pay for the damn thing.

I'd bet they are showing us far more ads than necessary to run the platform, and many of them are trash (crap product, abrasive ad, etc.) Not to mention the tradeoffs with privacy.

The more YouTube does that, the more I use Spotify.

What about the gross content of their shorts clips?

I'm not the kind of person to be inclined to buy 'premium' because they progressively enshittified their free service to make premium seem like the only rational option, but I'm even less inclined to give money to a company that promotes the complete trash and borderline adult and often fraudulent content of their shorts.

I usually refuse to login to YouTube to find the occasional thing, and I'm always bombarded with this trash.

How can anyone support that? Gross.

Also, it should not be forgotten that the FBI, no less, recommend ad blocking just for general internet safety. YouTube has just as much scam advertising as the rest of the internet, since it's almost all Google (who don't seem to be able to police their own platform, and don't seem to be held to account for such dereliction of duty).

Somebody start a non-publicly traded ad-based video hosting company and this will be resolved for the most part. If the concern is never "line goes up" then there is less incentive to enshittify the entire platform.

I get ads for secret solar panel information that the 'Electric Companies don't want me to know about'. Concern-troll ads, that feel like psychological warfare, about every health ailment that I might potentially have. Boomer-bait 'Patriot-Power Pack! Survival food, ammo and eagle coins. Kolon-Klense type product depicting a woman sitting on the porcelain throne complaining that she can't crank a shit. Las but not least. An over-eager Sylvester Stallone excited to show me his one amazing....salt trick?

Thinking YouTube should be free is ridiculous. Pay for a subscription or deal with ads. This discussion is so fucking stale.

So stale that ~750 folk have commented.

Of course, it's controversial.

Youtube will not win this battle.

Before YouTube loses, blocking ads will be criminalized.

Capitalism always wins

Criminalized where?

Not everyone is American.

Ransomware doesn't have to be illegal in North Korea to convict a North Korean who did it, either in absence or with extradition, in the country where the damage was done

With Alphabet being from a country with extreme capitalism, the comment you're replying to seems applicable no matter where the viewers are (regardless of whether I agree with their viewpoint/outlook). YouTube's owners can choose to block or prosecute whoever doesn't comply with their terms. Not saying that's likely, just that: this isn't a matter of needing to be on the American continent

Edit: perhaps interesting to realise that, conversely, laws in North Korea might make it illegal for Alphabet to have certain terms if they want to serve consumers in their market. (A better example here would be EU with copyright legislation that makes it illegal to sign away your moral rights, for instance.) It works both ways and both could legally prosecute the other at the same time and both win in their area! But with YouTube being able to gatekeep the content here, one has more power than the other..

I mean most adblocking software is open source and easily acquired, a lot like torrenting software it’d be near impossible to actually enforce anything.

Yep, they need viewers to click the like/subscribe button. They need that so content creators keep on providing content to Google for free in exchange for popularity metrics. Which they need to close sponsorship deals (because Google isn't paying them a whole lot).

So, Google is merely optimizing the ad clicks and impressions here. If they succeed in becoming too obnoxious with their ads, viewers might leave for other platforms, and then content creators would follow. So, fighting ad blocking has diminishing returns and can actually have a negative impact on them. Which is why ad blocking is still effective in 2025 and why Youtube has thrived by being not too effective with their anti ad blocking measures. This is more about selling the notion to advertisers that they are a really good advertising platform than it is about fighting the minority of users who block their ads no matter what. It won't work. But it won't matter as long as advertisers keep on paying for advertising on Youtube.

The irony of their latest efforts is that it is driving away users from Chrome to more effective alternatives (Firefox, Brave, etc.) and it's driving content creators to depend on sponsor ship deals instead of advertising money from Google. The only reason Chrome exists is actually ads. So, more effective counter measures against ad blocking in Chrome could end up hurting their ad revenue. And Google's behavior is actually causing for increasingly stronger calls to break up Google. None of that is good for Google and their advertising revenue.

I'd noticed this behaviour while using Brave browser and experienced the half-dozen second lag and a small popover on the bottom left that when clicked on said "it's because you're blocking ads"

I see also now that the "don't recommend channel" option has been removed (at least for me) which was handy for removing AI slop recommendations. It's fast coming to the point where I'll just avoid YouTube for spending some idle time.

I also noticed fake buffering[0], it is disgusting but it seems like they are usually on their adblocker blocking spree for a few weeks and then they give up. Their goal is to annoy you not to unblock adblocker and watch ads but to make you buy YouTube Premium because they would earn more money from subscription than they would from you watching ads.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/v1YSWVM.png

ITT: advertisers, pretending there's something that could be changed about ads that would make them not ads.

Fundamentally, ads are bad. There just isn't a change you can make to ads that makes them okay.

At a personal level, ads distract us, they tell us we don't have enough, aren't attractive enough, just generally aren't enough. They don't inform us: a one-sided view of a product absent criticisms or comparison to competing products is effectively just a lie.

At an economic level, ads break any benefit to capitalism. Instead of companies competing to provide the best product at the lowest cost, ads make it so a worse product at a higher cost can become the market leader. Ads are one of the primary drivers of the enshittification of everything. Ads allow companies to launch with garbage products that nobody would ever pay money for, slap ads on them to monetize, and thereby prevent competing products actually worth paying for from ever even coming to market.

The only answer is to refuse, on principle, to view ads. If a company receives money from advertisers, you're the product, not the user. If a product has a "free" tier paid for by ads, paying to hide ads doesn't help because you're still competing with advertisers for that company's loyalty, and advertisers will always win in the end (i.e. ads in cable TV--mark my words, there will be ads in all the premium-tier streaming services eventually).

If they ran less hostile ads, people wouldn't be as hostile to watching their ads. Some of the ads they run are just ridiculous and awful. Ads for scams, soft-core porn ads, just the worst of the worst.

I think that’s a rationalization. Most people just don’t like ads no matter what they are. And I can’t blame them, ads are terrible. But this is a case where they offer a nice subscription that takes them all away, so people ought to buy that instead.

I don't think it's a rationalization. I have two normie friends who were mostly fine seeing ads on the internet, until one night they saw one too many scum ads on YouTube. They asked me to help them install an adblocker. It was specifically the scumminess of these ads that got them to start using adblockers, which by the way the FBI recommends as a matter of course. People should buy YouTube premium for the convenience features it offers, but everyone should be blocking ads for their own safety and sanity. There is no reason to engage in the ad economy. Everyone should be blocking all ads.

Well, I don't particularly enjoy ads on Reddit, Gmail, and, when I used them, Tiktok, Facebook, etc but I wasn't particularly pissed off by them either. On YT it seems just so in your way and in your face and egregious. It's like every couple minutes there's an other ad. You can't even chromecast videos to your tv to play in the background because you have to constantly babysit it or else it will load up an ad that goes on forever or 10 minutes until you come back to skip it.

The YT Premium subscription suffers from being low value imo, forced bundling with YT Music which inflates prices, and little to no synergy with Google One subscriptions in most countries.

They offer a cheaper version that isn't bundled with Youtube Music, but then you get ads on official music uploads since I guess that's how the licensing works out. https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite

Not available (anymore) in many countries

Premium Lite has ads, just less. Currently, it's

> Ads however may appear on music content, Shorts, and when you search or browse.

- https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/15968883?hl=en

I find it to be an excellent value. It’s the only streaming service I pay for. It’s full of stuff I want to watch and well worth the price.

I pay for YouTube Premium, but what I am afraid will happen is that once enough users opt to pay for the service, YouTube may pull an Amazon Prime and show ads, and then ask for more money to not see the ads.

Same. But I'll certainly enjoy it while it lasts.

Where are you located? I've never seen any of those.

Pretty much all of my YouTube ads are for TV shows, movies, cars, mobile games, consumer products, and various consumer services. Volkswagen, Dove, TurboTax, etc. All incredibly mainstream.

Maybe you're located in a country or region maintain advertisers avoid?

I get all the ads you mention but I have also gotten the deepfake crypto scam ads. Youtube doesn't discriminate as long as the check clears.

I'm in America. I only see these scummy ads I talk about, and I assume it's because I'm extremely aggressive about preventing myself from being tracked and profiled. My friends made the horrible mistake of looking into cryptocurrency on Google while signed into their account, so they got targeted by scum crypto ads.

It sounds like you've explicitly opted yourself into the lowest common denominator ads. It's understandable that mainstream companies want to maximize their advertising impact by only targeting the viewers where there is data to suggest the viewers will actually be interested in their products.

I'm honestly not really sure why you're complaining. If you don't want to be tracked or profiled, you're going to get the lowest quality ads. Why do you think higher-quality advertisers should be wasting money trying to reach you, when you are going out of your way to avoid any interest in them?

To be clear, I'm not criticizing what you're doing to avoid tracking, or your stance against it. But I'm questioning why you would then complain about the ads you receive.

I'm not complaining that higher-quality advertisers aren't spending money trying to reach me. I'm saying the fact that the lowest common denominator ads are so hostile is reason enough to completely avoid them.

This might be a controversial take, but I don't want to see soft-core porn ads. I don't want to see scam ads. I don't want to see the worst of the worst. It is not a necessary state of affairs that the lowest common denominator ads are ads that are explicitly attempting to prey upon the least informed, most vulnerable members of society.

The fact that the worst ads are the way that they are is indicative of YouTube's willingness to engage in user-hostile activities.

If they were less willing to engage in hostile ads, there would be less hostility towards their ads.

YouTube's solution is extremely simple: vet ads and don't accept money to run hostile ads.

> is reason enough to completely avoid them.

Right, then avoid them. Either don't use YouTube, or else pay for Premium so you don't see them.

You claim people are hostile to watching YouTube's ads because of their quality. But I don't think so -- I think they're mostly seeing normal ads, not scammy ones. Because they're not taking measures against tracking. Your experience would seem to be very much an outlier.

I simply don't see the ads you're talking about, not even a little bit, so I can't really speak to YouTube's acceptable ads policies. But just so you know -- you can also mark checkboxes in your Google profile around which categories of ads you are and aren't interested in. I actually did that, and got less ads for categories I have zero interest in. That may help your ads experience, and make your ad quality complaints go away, if you're philosophically OK with that, since you're providing data freely rather than through tracking.

No, I'm going to continue watching YouTube while also avoiding their ads. If they want to engage in an adversarial relationship then I will as well. Until there's another competitor in the space that provides the same value, I will just take value from the only game in town. They don't owe me their service, but I also don't owe a bad faith monopolist anything. I do pay for premium, and I also block all of their analytics and ads at the network level.

EDIT: also, I think everyone should block ads. We should snub advertisers and surveillers all of the time. If they want to be hostile towards users, users should be hostile towards them.

Capitalists have had it too good for too long. It's time consumers stop caring about how the poor capitalist will make their dime.

Until the capitalists take the time to respect us, the consumers, we don't owe them anything.

It's time for reciprocity. If they're hostile, we reciprocate. If they're cooperative, we reciprocate.

> I do pay for premium

You pay for Premium?

Then why are you complaining about ads when you don't even see them?

And why are you talking about being hostile to a company when you pay them every month?

I'm even more confused than before.

giving them $13/month is not being hostile to them, it’s being a long term customer. they have exactly the relationship they want with you, minus your adblocking. i too pay for premium, run a pihole and use ubo. i pay for premium because the company sells a quality product at a good price and adfree. sponsor segments is another thing, but solveable. i also use sponsorblock and have a docker setup to autoskip segments on devices connected to my wifi. but out of all streaming services out there, yt actually seems like the least vampiric.

Weird way to blame the victim and not the organization pushing scams on people. I vaguely recall that 20 years ago, Google served things like nonprofit or government PSAs when they didn't know what to serve (or thought you were botting), not financial scams.

Speaking of PSAs, the US federal government issued a PSA a couple years ago recommending use of an ad blocker to avoid becoming a victim of financial scams/fraud (purged now for some reason). Why they don't prosecute the ad companies for being the ones to select and deliver the mark is anyone's guess.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221221123349/https://www.ic3.g...

I don’t get soft core porn ads but I do scams all the time. Bullshit supplements, pyramid schemes, “buy my program to make money” type things. Otherwise it’s mostly political ads, more legitimate consumer products like dishwasher detergent, gambling, and mobile games. NE USA for reference

Personally, for my own value system, I consider the gambling ads to be as bad as scam ads. I think we'll soon come to see the social harm of gambling ads to be as bad as tobacco ads. We should strive for a culture where people see an ad for addictive services or substances and feel an instinctive, pre-conscious disgust. They are the dirty, disgusting, bloodsucking bedbugs of society.

I agree and feel it is a reflection on social decline. While I don’t think prohibition it the way forward it is unsettling that we tolerate this as a society. Would we tolerate youtube advertising for heroin or even recreational marijuana? We certainly don’t for tobacco and we probably shouldn’t for alcohol.

I work in mental health and I am seeing more people who spend a substantial amount on “parlays”. Many examples downplay or hide the behavior from their social network and the extreme examples spend a significant amount. The advertising is obviously predatory and goes against what we know about control dynamics in addict behavior but we tend to view that as a personal moral failing rather than exploiting basic biology and as a result allow the dealer to ruin countless lives before any action is taken (see Purdue and Teva lawsuits)

Victim blaming much?

In Germany, they keep showing me Israeli propaganda ads. Couldn’t imagine a better adblock reminder myself.

Subtle Godwin’s law

Yeah, I find instagram ads not that annoying, and they actually promote things I would buy (I've bought a couple of things over the years through their ads).

Youtube/google ads? Never bought anything, automatically assume they are a scam.

I don't get such nasty ads, but the ones I get are extremely repetitive. I see the same 3 ads all the time: one for a car, one for a bank, one for clothes.

Even google can't keep malware ads out of their system. If we say have geek squad remove the malware, its $149.99, all because google wanted to show me a $0.0001 value ad. No thanks.

why would you pay geeksquad to run some programs

You underestimate your attention's value by two orders of magnitude. A typical YouTube ad impression cost is about half a cent or so, sometimes several cents. We're talking serious business here!

Google does what is best for their bottom line. The worse the ad experience is the more likely people are to pay for premium.

Maybe they just want you to buy Premium and get rid of ads altogether. I think it's really good value now, especially the family plan, if you use YouTube heavily, like my kids do.

All my ads are local brands, supermarkets, sport stores and delivery apps. Never seen any had ads, they are annoying but nothing abnormal.

Do I have to go show up at Youtube's HQ and start deliberately slowing people down from entering the building?

Note: when security shows up, I'm going to tell them "maybe later" if I'm asked to leave.

Wait till the ads are interspersed into chatGPT output (and Gemini and Claude too). I'll need an local LLM to filter out the ads from the LLM I'm using in the cloud.

Dang it

And the arms race continues.

I don’t use youtube anymore. I’m not paying them for slop content they don’t even produce. I’m not watching slop ads.

I was watching hours every day, and I don’t even miss it. There’s so much content to watch on streaming platforms that I can never run out.

YouTube Premium costs about the same as 2 cold brew coffees and is worth the money.

It's by far the best value of any of the streaming media services.

Yeah, I will unabashedly shill for YouTube Premium. It’s cheap, it pays video creators more than ads do, and it includes YouTube Music so you can ditch Spotify.

Still has a nefarious algorithm.

And tracking.

Paying 13 bucks per month, which is a non trivial amount for a lot of people if it competes with other subcription services, merely to block ads on a website that doesn't even produce its own content is in my opinion one of the worst deals on the internet.

That's equivalent to a Netflix subscription, which puts what, 20 billion into original content each year?

> doesn't even produce its own content

How do you think those video bits get streamed all around the world? Magic?

I assume with the same amount of magic as they do at all the other streaming platforms, but they still manage to serve up original content. Hence, as a consumer, this seems like a shoddy deal. You're basically paying for ad-free slop, which by the way like Amazon these days you have to crawl through an entire mountain of because the site barely has any content management features either

We're comparing two different companies here. Netflix et al, are in the business of producing original content (good for them), while YouTube et al are in the business of serving user-generated content.

That's not a bug, but a feature. Its the same difference as a high end restaurant, and a hole in the wall restaurant. Both are serving food, yes, but they are doing business in different categories. You cant go to the second restaurant and be like, the food you served didn't come with a smile like this other restaurant here. They seem to have figured it out, why cant you.

Or similarly, you cant go to the high end restaurant and be like - you charge for water now? Why cant you be like this other hole-in-the-wall restaurant.

the entire point is that in this analogy youtube is quite literally the mega chain self serving restaurant on the most decrepit corner, somehow charging you premium prices despite you having to refill your own water.

They're curating nothing, there's garbage everywhere and you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food

Netflix costs around double of Youtube Premium for the technical equivalent experience (No ads, UHD playback). It's not like they're charging the same amount for some much better service.

It's interesting to see such different experiences.

To me, YouTube is the gateway to those wonderful hole-in-the-wall places where you get real food made from scratch by people who care. Yeah, there's also a ton of shit. You have to actually make choices, not just take whatever it puts at the top of your recommendations. But the good stuff is there, and it's really good. A gigantic corporation may be intermediating, but the content is real stuff from real people.

Services like Netflix are the soulless mega-chain restaurants serving committee-designed meals that have been focus-grouped and cost-optimized to death.

there are an absurd amount of different takes on it, its pretty crazy. I probably focus too much on the bad content, meant to grab attention. For that reason i have a distaste for youtube because it sorta pushes that type of stuff to the top, which in my mind makes more people make similar cash grab type content.

meanwhile youtube is actively attempting to keep user's viewing as long as possible... netflix probably doesnt really care if you watch for 2 hours a week vs 10 hours a day, they just want the monthly payment.

> you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food

Then dont go to the restaurant if the "hygiene" is not upto your standards? Why do you insist on eating food from that resturant, and insist that it needs to be free?

People make the videos, and then sometimes youtube pays them for it.

People make videos because there is a platform which makes it incredibly easy to share that video all across the planet without cost to them. And in turn that platform has an enormous base of viewers for that content. To suggest that a world without YouTube (or a similar service) would look the same is ludicrous.

> To suggest that a world without YouTube (or a similar service) would look the same is ludicrous.

It could be ludicrous, if that argument were being made.

I don’t care what they pay to create content. I care about how much stuff they have that I want to watch. YouTube knocks this out of the park. Netflix fails. I actually have Netflix for free (with some ads) through my cell phone plan and I haven’t used it in a year. I use YouTube daily and the subscription fee is well worth it to remove the ads.

I might be convinced here, I was under the impression that even after you bought premium you would still see ads

A family plan says it's $23/month. That's well over the cost of a 3 lb tin from Costco ($18.69 by me), which is several weeks if not a month of cold brew.

We're kind of getting off track here, but a 3-lb tin of preground coffee is not going to taste very good by the time you finish it, if it ever tastes good at all. It's pretty likely to be low-quality and stale before you even pull it off the shelf.

Whole bean is the same price

I have no respect for Youtube/google developers, like they have apps where you need to pay to use them with the screen turned off, so they screw your battery (reducing your device live) and wasting energy so their boss gets a bigger yacht (cecause it seems ads are not enough)

I don't necessarily disagree but it's not a Google problem. It's a human problem.

For example: What value does your comment provide the world? Enough value to offset the carbon emissions from transmission/storage/retrieval/display? Personally, I'd answer no. Thus your comment itself is a waste of energy.

Reframing a problem with anything as a human problem is a tautology - why even go out of your way to write?

Only pointing it out because of the irony given the content of your post

Otherwise yeah, don’t understand what parent comment is trying to say

> Reframing a problem with anything as a human problem is a tautology

I respectfully disagree.

> don’t understand what parent comment is trying to say

They're trying to say Google and those who work there are greedy. I shared my "tautology" to illustrate while OP's point may be largely correct, greed is not unique to Google.

>They're trying to say Google and those who work there are greedy.

More then that, sure they show you ads, GREAT but they screw your device and environment, this makes them no money , a small fraction of users might buy premium but the rest of the users will waste energy and bdevice life, the developers contribute to killing devices and wasting energy.

That is the user's choice. If a user comes to a bookshop wherein they are allowed to read the books for free but only in the store, they have little right to argue that they should be allowed to take the books home like paying customers because the store's lighting is not to their liking and they want to read in 6000K. They are free to picket outside and claim that the store is ruining people's eyesight, but no one sane will take them seriously.

Furthermore, the appropriate solution to this "problem" would be to stop letting people read anything for free.

So if Samsung makes a TV that will use 10x more energy if you decide not to buy the Premium Subscription you will comment that is actually a Good thing, free markets and so on, fuck that environment and fuck the "Don't be evil promise" .

Today Big Tech moto should be "Be as evil as you are able if it makes money".

Hopefully some civilized countries can add laws about wasting energy and killing devices for no good reason.

EDIT: The Google/Samsung exampel is affecting the entire planet not only the individual that "choose" that he really wants his device to be screwed and his energy bill to increase. So the individual "freedom" is screwing the entire planet for no fucking good reason , at least if you waste the battery to show ads I can understand it.

Can you guess how much is my comment energy usage compares versus all the devices that run YouTube with the screen on?

What about those electronic devices that will end their life sooner because of that?

My hope is that other people will read my comment, add their own support or feedback and maybe at least one single person will think mroe and had the morals to refuse implementing anti environment and anti user features.

How else would you propose they make money (and satisfy contract obligations)? Because nobody else has figured out a better solution.

it’s funny that you bring up contractual obligations while google ignores the iOS app store rule (contractual obligation) about locking features like PiP behind paywalls.

>How else would you propose they make money (and satisfy contract obligations)? Because nobody else has figured out a better solution.

Do they make money from those millions of devices that run with the screen on? How ? Is some devil paying them for the damage caused to the environment?

For ads it makes sense but not for this shit policy, if they hate the users that they use youtube for free and ads are not enough for them then either put more ads, or find some other methods that do not screw then environment (maybe use the sound of crying babies each 30 seconds if you are not a premium )

For babies crying I just come to the YT premium threads on HN.

What if people just paid for services they use and depend on frequently

I don't want to use it. I only view because others exclusively host content there.

If people hosted video elsewhere, I would gladly never visit youtube again.

Creators are not going to start paying for uploads when they can push their costs to the viewers.

Why do you think the creators you like exclusively host content on YouTube?

That's not difficult to answer, it's because it's free / they get paid.

.. and that's YT's problem? This is like being angry with Apple, because an app developer created only an iOS app and didnt create an Android. What did Apple do wrong if a developer chose to only create an iOS app?

YouTube is the system, you've not heard of "don't hate the player, hate the game"?

If I "blamed" the creators, you'd be telling me it's not their fault, they're just incentivised by the system, they're just playing the game.

But when I "blame" the system, you're telling me the system is not at fault, that it's individual choice to choose a near-monopoly on video discoverability that is propelled by and heavily benefiting from the same company's actual monopoly of search.

Is it "YT's problem?"? No, it's to YT's massive benefit, it's my problem when I have to suffer through adverts.

> YouTube is the system

But isnt YouTube a mere player in the game as well?

I think viewing YouTube in that manner would be a nihilist point of view.

I can't think of an adjective less suitable for Alphabet/Google/YouTube than "mere".

Alphabet is the fifth largest company in the world, has earnings higher than most countries' GDP, and is established to have engaged in illegal behavior as a monopolist. It's fair to say they're closer to "the system" than "a player".

Not that this was part of the suit, but the whole practice of giving things away for free and subsidizing them with stalking and ads obviously distorts or completely destroys markets, so yes they can be blamed for doing that. The behavior of these companies is so bad that people in a recent thread were claiming things like chat services (where a single computer can provide service for millions of users) cannot be sustainably run by charging money.

There's a long tail of people who don't use YouTube frequently but click play on videos embedded on other sites, or on videos linked.

So of course they're never going to pay. That's the problem advertising solves -- infrequent users can be monetized.

YouTube already has an option to pay to avoid ads, for frequent users. And lots of people subscribe to it.

What if Google didn't horde whatever data it could about me from the analytics systems that it has installed on a myriad of websites without my consent?

What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?

What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?

> What if Google didn't horde whatever data it could about me from the analytics systems that it has installed on a myriad of websites without my consent?

Arent you voluntarily using their website? Nobody is forcing you to open your browser, and type y-o-u-t-u-b-e-dot-c-o-m.

> What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?

MKBHD, LTT and others are willingly uploading videos to YouTube. YT doesnt have an exclusive deal with any of those. Infact, those folks are free to upload the same video to Vimeo, Twitch and others. What is YT doing wrong here?

> What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?

Such as?

Google analytics tracking is embedded in probably millions of non-Google websites, and YouTube videos get embedded in all sorts of pages.

Arent websites voluntarily embedding Google Analytics? They can decide today, if they wanna switch to Plausible, or any of the other analytics providers right?

I still fail to understand how this is a fault of a company? Would you blame Apple if everyone bought iPhones? What should Apple do? Ask people not to buy their phones?

If airtags were used almost solely to nonconsensually and surreptitiously stalk people (i.e. not to track the belongings of the people buying them), yes I think it would be fair to blame Apple. Especially if that were the advertised purpose, as it is with GA.

Google Analytics is a tool that websites use to track users, similar to how a store might use a pen & paper to keep track of phone numbers or names. The store made the decision to buy the pen to track users. Why are you angry with the pen company?

Google Analytics is not going around tracking users. They provide a service that the website you decided to go to (cnn.com, bbc.com) is using. If you have to be angry, be angry with cnn or bbc.

Pens have a purpose other than surveillance, and aren't as capable as machines. A better analogy would be Bluetooth trackers and cameras with machine vision to identify and watch people's movements and eye gaze as they move around the store. And yes, that is creepy and the manufacturers should be criticized for creating it.

Also, client side scripts do not run on the website's property. They are taking advantage of the wide-open security model of web clients (the model they coincidentally get to define because they dump massive amounts of money into giving away a free browser, making competition in the space nearly impossible) to use people's computers for unauthorized purposes. It's a malware payload just like a crypto miner. They should be treated the same way (or more severely) that they would be if they published miners and told web developers to add them to get free money (taking their own cut of course). The operator and the tool creator should both be blamed for shady behavior when the tool is designed and advertised for shady purposes.

> manufacturers should be criticized for creating it.

Manufacturers make things when there's a market. If Google didnt build Google Analytics, someone else would (Maybe Microsoft, or Apple) because the demand exists.

Other people steal, run scams, etc. Doesn't mean I have to. Google doesn't have to create surveillance software even if they suppose someone else will.

Why haven't they created crypto miners for even more profit? It would be more ethical and less wasteful than the surveillance/ads combo. Obviously others will and have done it.

Sure, there's a need for a product like GA, and in a vacuum someone else would create a similar product but whatever value it provides to the market and the users does not justify socially malignant behaviour from a convicted monopolist

If GA didn't exist there's no guarantee that the alternatives would create the same negative externalities that damage privacy of strangers while delivering value to the users of the software.

Google Analytics ultimately operates the way it does not because it's necessarily the best way to provide value to the sites that use it, but because it serves Google's monopolistic and unscrupulous interests.

It's the fault of the company because they leverage their illegal monopoly position to do this.

You're operating under this unrealistic assumption that Google is an innocent entity that has not broken the law to get to the position that they are in.

This is false. Google does not play by the rules and as such your assertion that people should in turn play by the rules when interacting with Google is unreasonable.

I dont follow your logic. The website you visit (cnn, bbc) has made the decision to use Google Analytics. They can very well stop using the GA, and nothing would happen.

Imagine all the restaurants in the world used IKEA for their tables & chairs. Can you say OMG IKEA has a monopoly? No sir, IKEA didnt go into the stores and install the tables & chairs, the restuarants did. Will you be angry with IKEA?

I would imagine that those sites use GA because it's the best tool for their needs. It's probably the best tool for their needs because it is both a very well developed tool with superior integration with other parts of their platforms and has a large developer base that is familiar with it. These advantages come from Google's monopolistic practices and the money and resources that it provides them.

I can certainly imagine such a thing but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant to the situation as IKEA has as far as I'm aware never been ruled to be a monopoly while Google has.[0]

Ultimately my position on this subject comes down to this: Google does things that are hostile to me. They do things that are hostile to you. They do things that are hostile to society writ large. They break the law and violate the social contract. My morals necessitate responding to such an entity with disregard for whatever they're legally entitled to.

I don't like the way that I'm surveilled by Google and I don't like the way that they abuse their monopoly position and lobby the government to make it impossible for me to evade that surveillance.

To bring the conversation back to where it started: I already pay them with my privacy, I pay for the economic harm their monopolistic practices have on society, and I pay for the corrosive effects their lobbying has on the political structure.

I'm not going to be paying them for an ad free Youtube experience.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/05/business/google-loses-antitru...

If people were just paid for services that used them and manipulate them with tracking and behaviour profiles

I've always paid for cable without complaining, but the adtech surveillance reality that was innovated by the tech industry makes me less willing to support them.

The only reason people use YouTube is because it has had a de facto monopoly on video distribution for the last 15 years.

"We are working hard to make your life miserable"

I've come to rely on a robust method of adblocking YouTube which I believe to be perfectly reliable and impossible for YouTube to circumvent: avoid watching YouTube. Incidentally this method also reliably prevents false buffering.

I’m not gonna buy your stupid hoodie. Stop shaming me into feeling I’m not a man because I don’t have one. Absolute trash.

Perfectly fair. It's not like YouTube is some free open source platform. Infra needs to be paid, creators need to be paid, they have a whole eco-system. Why not just pay for premium if you use it that much?

What's the actual % of people using ad blockers anyways? I feel it cant even be near double digits.

I'd pay for it if youtube was worth it (it's not)

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