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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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