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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

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dleslie

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.

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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 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.

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.

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.

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