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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

>Whatever, there's no problem for user. EP is for user and not for those so called creators or site owners.

It's sad to see how little sympathy there is for people other than oneself and how changes are affecting the larger ecosystem. Especially for a site as critical as YouTube to people's livelihoods.

Though having said that, at the same time I'm not surprised that someone who spends their time modifying sites to remove ads and analytics to make their personal experience better at the expense of everyone else would act this way would have this kind of selfish mindset.

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If only YouTube made ads run on the side instead of trying to emulate television.

I’m not going to sit through two 15-30 second LOUD ads just to see if a video is actually worth watching.

They also do this (or did?). But I guess on mobile this is not working well, because of limited screen estate, and people will obviously not focus much on them.

I agree that video ad experience on YouTube isn't great, but they do offer a subscription to remove ads at least.

How much do you think advertisers would be willing to pay for ads on the side, relative to what they're currently paying? You can see how people wouldn't be willing to pay the same amount for that, right?

I'm a heavy AdBlock user, I pay for YT premium, and I paid Nebula for 2 years, also I try to buy some albums on Bandcamp even with YT music subscription. What more they do want?

And I do use referral codes for the content creators I do like. My Amazon referrals do still work.

As a mostly software backend dev I even visualize the JS guy saying "it's solved" when he forgets to tell that the correct choice is to do the counting on the backend, period. Not hacking a crappy JS snippet calling a different host.

I obviously ask for more time to make sure it's reliable.

I literally saw something similar happening around some years ago in a adjacent team I was working.

I want to pay with money, not attention. Both at the same time? Non negotiable.

(This was a response to https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375 via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45276614, but we merged that thread into this one)

Youtube could fix it by counting when the video page is loaded from the server.

I don't think they'd be interested in fixing this. I suspect YouTube is trying to create a double bind for users of adblockers by pitting them against creators' incentives. People in the thread were discussing ways of disabling uBO filters to restore view reporting.

The work to do this isn't free. YouTube already has their code working, but they don't expect browsers to be blocking arbitrary requests or injecting their own javascript into the page. These kind of breakage are not free for YouTube to fix and often YouTube is the one taking the reputational hit for their site being broken. It ultimately is antisocial behavior to be breaking other's sites even if technically they can workaround the bugs being added.

> antisocial behavior

This is hard to take seriously in defense of YouTube. I suppose the most respectful answer is that I'll be willing to stop when they do.

Stop what? Showing ads? They have to fund it somehow, there will always be ads. Most users aren't willing to pay for anything on the internet, and unfortunately revenue is required to run anything at scale. You can charge users, show ads, or maybe get funding from Saudis.

> Stop what?

Tracking with javascript.

So just track you on the back end instead? I don't know what that really changes. If you mean to say just not track you at all and show you untargeted ads, well they are worth less, so they'll have to blast you with more of them.

> I don't know what that really changes.

It changes what they assume to do with my hardware and user agent.

Why be cryptic and weird when you can just plainly say whatever it is that you actually mean? Communicate clearly, nobody knows what the f you're on about.

> cryptic and weird

Mine is a common opinion within this community. I won't deny that I was short in my replies but it is hard to know what is over-explaining in this context.

Additionally, it seems that "tracking with javascript" is pretty much exactly the topic of these comments so I'm not sure why I should not have assumed that it would be clear what I meant, especially when my first comment was explicitly about YouTube tracking on the back end.

> Stop what? Showing ads?

Using abusive advertising practices and being reasonable about the number of ads shown.

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