Hacker News Reader

Comment by WhyIsItAlwaysHN | Hacker News Reader

So no youtube?

I find _yt-dlp_ to be the best ad-block solution for Youtube. One can watch it offline and archive it if value has been found.

Web Brower with ad-blocking setup can still have advertisements leak through. When it does and it still does after three refreshes, I just don't watch and move on.

I will always be a sunk-cost for Google.

Yes and if you follow certain channels a lot, tube archivist is a really great tool to automate that.

If you pay for YouTube, there are no ads. [edit] except for those ones that podcasters add in the middle. "[15 minutes in] Alright, now is a great time to tell you about my sponsor tell you about my sponsor!", and you skip ahead, and it shows the product nonetheless.

That's what sponsorblock is for <3

YouTube is tolerable with ads. If I found it intolerable, I would pay. Or not visit.

'Rainbow Dome Musick', by Steve Hillagr..glorious soothing music, then 30 mins in, a Barilla pasta advert. Sorry, youtube - I tried.

Humans are just so damn different in their tolerance to wasting time. I can't take feeling like I wasted 10 seconds of my time on an ad even when watching an video for recreation.

If an ad isn't blocked, I fast forward through it. If I can't fast forward, I mute it. If I can't mute it, I'll mute my computer and change tabs for the duration. If it's a page in a magazine, I flip it quickly. If it's a billboard I'll avert my gaze. If it's in an airplane I take out my headphones and cover the screen.

I find being advertised to so annoying there's no way in hell I will spend my limited time on this planet willingly consuming an ad.

Or you could not consume the content.

I'd rather do all the stuff I said.

The problem I run into is e.g. if I need to replace the the steering wheel cruise control buttons in my car, a random youtuber doing that is the only reasonable option getting instructions on that, which isn't something a youtube subscription scales to.

So random youtuber gave you something of value - something that saved you hundreds of dollars from not having to get a professional repair - yet you have something against random YouTuber getting paid?

If I could give the youtuber cash in exchange for the video, I'd have no problem with that.

Watching ads simply isn't something I'm willing to consider. Like if the transaction was "have someone spit in your face and in exchange you get a how-to video and they get paid based on the amount of spit you get in your mouth", I'd feel similarly about that business model.

Yeah, why should I watch your content? If you want me to watch your crap, please pay me. Otherwise it's my time and attention, you expect to get for free.

It's doubly crazy to me that someone would let a machine take their time like that. An inanimate object, and they give it any amount of respect instead of fixing it to do what they want.

If modern ads weren't built to be intentionally manipulative to the nth degree, whilst also extracting a huge amount of private data of the viewer, I might be more tolerant of them.

Lately without an ad blocker YouTube will give me an ad every minute. Basically unusable.

Yes I noticed this too when I watched it once in my VR headset which doesn't have a blocker.

Really how do people put up with that shit??

Why pay if you can simply block? Google has more than enough money.

Having said that YouTube is so enshittified in other ways too (screaming thumbnails and titles, sponsors which need sponsorblock, random AI clickbait videos) that I rarely feel like watching it at all anyway.

You talking about the creators that have ads in their videos?

I tend to skip those, although map men's are good, but I also tend to prefer those who don't have ads.

YouTube premium is one of the best subs you can buy if you watch a lot of YouTube. Plus you get Music.

YT Music would be be better if I did not have to double check every of its suggestion for AI generation. Some accounts to make their AI use public which is nice but there's no way to see their channel info in YT Music to look for that.

Cant say I've ever heard any AI generated music on YTM before

This probably depends on if you've used it enough to make some playlists and give it an idea of the real music that you like.

You can actually tap on the channel name and scroll down to see the About section (at least on iOS).

I never had genAI tracks being suggested on YouTube Music. Though it might be a factor that my account predates genAI music.

I use the web version and when clicking an artist's name I only see a description for well-known ones. Other channels don't show any description even though the YouTube side has one.

I assume one requirement for getting genAI tracks is being initially fine with hearing music from random channels and also hearing music produced after 2022; if one only cares (for example) about pre-2020 very well-known music they're probably going to be safe.

I regularly listen to recent music, but often tracks I explicitly search for, and autoplay based on those I “liked”. My “Liked Music” playlist has several thousand entries, so I suspect that heavily steers what I’m presented with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com