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Comment by WaxProlix | Hacker News Reader

It's funny, I had YouTube's paid offering for a few years (I used the service a lot and want to support non ad-based revenue streams). But they changed something a while back that started giving me a degraded experience, and eventually made the site unusable. Did some digging and it turns out they were detecting my adblock and intentionally making my experience bad despite being a paid customer. I submitted a ticket or whatever but of course nobody gave a shit. I ended up upgrading my adblocker to something that worked on the new YouTube but of course at that point why keep the subscription if I have to fight some ads arms race anyway?

Ads are useful and have their place in keeping the web accessible to everyone, but Google's anti user policies really stretch that relationship.

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Bullying their paying customers is such an insane choice

I was in complete agreement until:

> Ads are useful and have their place in keeping the web accessible to everyone,

No. Advertising is a cancer on commerce.

I've paid for Youtube Premium for a decade, use adblock in my browser, have no issues with performance on Youtube.

It's funny how experiences can be so different (likely by Google's design, of course). I've been having degraded experience with YouTube using uBlock Origin on Vivaldi. I elected to make use of a one-month trial for Premium. Suddenly these problems went away. Interestingly, after canceling the trial, the problems still haven't come back (yet). Things like, I would load a video, it'd start playing, but the browser tab itself would just block for a good 20-30 seconds. The entire time, the video is playing (well, I could hear the audio but the visuals were frozen). Then things would unblock and comments would appear, etc.

The difference between my YouTube interface with and without premium is stark. Aside from the ads, it seemed like the algorithm pushed less slop in front of me to avoid. Purely anecdotal, and likely affected by A/B bullshit (or nowadays would it be more like A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H/I/J/K/L/M/N/O/P/Q/R/S/T/U/V/W/X/Y/Z).

I only watch YouTube on my iPad or rarely my android TV, and there, the premium experience is worth it, since it's difficult to block ads on those platforms anyway.

If your experience with YouTube is primarily through browser then yeah I can see why that experience is shitty.

I'm fine with sites detecting adblock, in the sense that I will just not go to those sites. But if I already pay for an ad free experience then there's no reason for them to care about my adblock, unless they're just mad they can't track me, in which case, they can fuck all the way off.

And yes, I know that Google is in that camp, so they can indeed fuck all the way off.

Why would you use Adblock if you pay for premium?

There are other websites on the internet, and I don't want to/didn't consider toggling off ghostery, noscript, ublock origin, etc per domain that I choose to pay for.

Because Adblock doesn't just block ads, it also blocks invasive trackers that I consider malware.

Paying to remove Ads means I don't want ads, it doesn't mean I consent to all of the other invasive tracking they do.

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