I recently stopped watching youtube altogether and surprisingly haven't been missing it. And I used to watch a LOT (like hours per day) of youtube, mostly quality educational/scientific content. But ultimately you'd be surprised how much you don't need in your life. And side effect is no more ads. If someone sends me an occasional youtube video to watch, I'll take a look, but otherwise no engagement with the platform.
I'd highly recommend everyone try reducing their intake of passive entertainment like youtube and redirecting that time towards more creative or mindful pursuits.
Or just block the ads, let others subsidize it for me until the executive greed eventually turns the product to crap and we collectively move on to the newer options that have filled the gap. Cable used to mostly be ad free as well. Now normal TV shows are 21 minutes with 9 minutes of ads. Older TV show reruns are actually sped up with parts cut out of them.
Google created a monopoly by making the product great with unobtrusive ads and now is trying to change the deal. There is absolutely already a plan in place where the number of paying premium users hits some critical number and they "test out" short ads. I am not going to reward them.
I just checked my uBlock stats inside of AdNauseum on my personal laptop. This is a machine I have not used regularly in over 2 years. Being generous I am assuming every ad blocked was static, not animated, had no sound, and required no interaction by me to skip, so just was a one second glance.
I have gotten back 115+ days of my life to do things I actually want to do. 10.34 million ads. From one single machine, in just Firefox. I now have AdGuard on my network and use Tailscale to block ads on all my devices. There is no world where I ever go back to seeing ads that I can block and definitely will not be rewarding them for trying to push ads on what was a great product.
I’d gladly pay for YouTube or other Google services when they offer an option to not track my activity at all. For me it’s not about seeing ads just on YouTube, but being tracked all through the web and still being served inappropriate or spammy ads.
> when they offer an option to not track my activity
this right here, im not opposed to paying for content, but the tracking and sharing is a big concern for me too
if all i'd watch are tv shows like netflix its one thing, but yt has such broad content i'd rather not be advertised/tracked about stuff i just clicked once and never again...
While I strongly doubt this fully disables tracking, you can at least disable your watch history on youtube which will have the effect of the recommendation algorithm not adjusting to your preferences.
You can change it from Google account > Data & Privacy > History Settings > youtube History
If you have youtube premium + a general purpose ad blocker + disable watch history its really hard to tell if you are being tracked.
If you do decide to disable watch history, be prepared for just how terrible the median youtube interest is. All recommendations become beyond worthless.
Yeah, I'm with you on this one. I pay for YT premium family, and it's basically the only subscription in 2025 that feels worth it to me. My wife watches YouTube instead of cable TV, so it's already a cheap cable bill. But you also get YouTube music! Which I'll admit is a slightly janky music app since it also kind of sits on top of YouTube videos that it decides are mostly music. But their actual music selection is good if you kinda know how to navigate the UI to the "real" music.
People dont understand how world works. Management reward are tied to earning more money. As long this is true, the next year, the reward will be tied to earning even more. The more you pay, the more it will cost. And when people wont be prepared to pay more, alternative model will be invented, like adding ads to paid content. There is only one way to stop this - break it from the start and make it nonviable, don't pay.
They are trying to block ads blockers as some manager wasn't able to get reward. Or is worried he wont get it. And this mean that money that can be collected from ads has peaked. Now come the "optimizations", now payable, then no longer free, later payable with ads, then they will squeeze content creators, that will move to other platforms where you will have to pay for multiple platforms where you were once watching it for free on YT.
Sounds familiar?
Made it as short as possible, but this could be wall of text, from comparing to what happened to streaming services etc. Without piracy (not advocating but it is a fact that it forced publishers into internet model) we would probably still buy content on CDs and DVDs, maybe BluRays.
Greed of infinite growth in finite system has destroyed the planet and you can bet it will destroy YT too.
If someone really likes Youtube content - sure, I guess. For me the cost isn't worth it - when I compare with other streaming services.
I got rid of the Youtube app from my Roku many months ago, and I haven't missed it. That wouldn't be the case for most other streaming apps that I still have.
I think for me - right from the day Youtube launched - I never liked the interface. It's the worst streaming interface of all the streaming services.
I did the same thing with Netflix. Also, killed off my Prime subscription and quit the entirety of Amazon. Well, except for AWS, because that's going to be impossible until they accidentally all the data.
As for youtube, I just pay for ad free. If they ever start violating that they'll also be banished to the corn field.
i deleted my youtube accounts and switched to patreon- can still see new videos on youtube from my patreon people cause im notified but it's far more intentional and quality content
I’m increasing obsessed with the idea that the user—not some engagement algorithm—should be in the drivers seat. This is an interesting way to go about it…
I’m starting to look at “engagement” as an anti-statistic. Like, if you’re chasing engagement, what other more meaningful thing are you ignoring? Or, the more engagement something has, the less value it has to society.
Top tip from using only high-latency satellite internet for long periods: add a significant delay to every request to problematic sites. As soon as the dopamine loop is broken, you'll find the wait so frustrating that you won't bother.
I install the "Undistracted" extension in all of my Brave instances. In addition to having the ability to block arbitrary URLs it has many site-specific options like blocking YouTube recommendations or the LinkedIn timeline, all of which I ruthlessly enable. You can also set it to only work on certain days and times of the week. It's immensely useful.
I also pay for Kagi which has the ability to block certain domains from results. I'd imagine that blocking Instagram, Reddit, Youtube, etc. would also prevent rabbit-holing.
Thank you for your important work fighting this battle, it must be exhausting.
The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us, the more we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting. If they can't leave well enough alone and look the other way on ad blocking, (which is the only way to avoid exposing myself and family to these dangerous ads), they need to be under a lot more scrutiny for the ads they choose to run.
> we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting
This is one of the things that kills me. Even in broadcasting TV, you get typical :15, :30, :60 ads with the occasional :45 or longer :90. The ad pods are also defined so that you get a set number say something like 3:00 max.
YT has scammy ads where if you are just trying to let something stream in the background while you focus on other things where an ad plays past the 5s skippable time, they have some that are full on half hour if not even longer infomercials that takes completely out of the flow of whatever you were watching. That's down right criminal to me. The fact that long form content can be used as something that interrupts someone else's content is such a strange thing to allow. They must pay out the nose for those ad impressions
> This is one of the things that kills me. Even in broadcasting TV, you get typical :15, :30, :60 ads with the occasional :45 or longer :90.
You are absolutely on to something. I think the seemingly random length of ads makes them feel somewhat more jarring to me. I also hate how sometimes the ads are just randomly interjected into a video. I know creators can control this to some degree, but older videos seem to suffer more.
I have had ads on Youtube that were hours long. Obviously, at that length, they can be skipped. I know have some kind of 'trauma response' that when I watch Youtube on a computer while laying down, AFK, I have to have my wireless mouse in close proximity in case one those long ads appears. If I could predict the intervals in which the ads occurred and for how long, then I would probably just let them run and tune them out of my mind.
Regardless, I swear Youtube serves me such long ass ads as a punishment sometimes. Sadly, my suspicion is supported by extremely weak evidence and confirmation bias. I'll just say this... Sometimes when I get served the same ad too many times, I report the ad for something like being offensive, inappropriate, or whatever. The ads seem to never come back, but I swear within a day or two, I start getting longer ads -- even movie-length ads. I have also reported ads if they happen to be something like +30s and unskippable. This makes the ad instantly dismiss (or it used to, at least).
I’m curious if YouTube tracks the phone angle/motion through the gyroscope. I swear I always get the hour-long ads when my phone is not in my hand, and I’m not able to skip it immediately.
I doubt they actually do that, but I’m sure it would increase ad view times. Im probably just only remembering the ads I don’t immediately skip.
It’s absolutely #%^*ing insane how bad and often inappropriate the ads are, to the point that I swear YouTube is in growth trouble. It feels like there’s just management layers who need their bonus or promotion, driven by some percent growth or some KPI so their standards are at the floorboards. I’ve seen porn in the still frame ads on mobile once (much worse than Evony Online if you remember those ads…)
I have all ad targeting features turned off on my account - which I assume means i unfortunately get the bottom-of-the-barrel ads.
The still frame ads are always NSFW games or ads for viagra-like products. In shorts, the ads are always scams of some kind. Usually deepfakes of elon musk “giving investment advice” but also “medical experts” recommending likely dangerous scams, or “free money the government isnt telling you about” if you give them all your information, or weird ai generated videos advertising mystery products that certainly don’t actually exist.
In front of (and in the middle of) actual videos, it’s a mix of the all the scams, plus the occasional ad for a legitimate product, but rarely in my native language. Usually Spectrum internet ads exclusively in spanish.
I got a gun ad a few times several months ago. Advertising features such as “no license required” and “easy to sneak through security”. As blatantly illegal as it was, the ad ran for at least a full month. I reported it every time I saw it, but I’m convinced those reports aren’t ever viewed by anyone.
I continue blocking these ads on my desktop without remorse. I only encounter the ads on my iPhone.
people deserve to get paid for the work they put into creating content and building platforms, no? books, movies, tv shows, news, etc, are all distributed in some way or another that costs the consumer either money or their time viewing advertising. if you don't want to watch ads, pay YouTube for a subscription.
YouTube spent about a decade and a half running unintrusive banner ads. Until they secured enough of the market that network effects locked content creators and consumers together in a two-sided market where it's hard for either group to leave unilaterally. Then they ramped up the length and intrusiveness of their ads while flouting content regulations on what they're even allowed to advertise.
Perhaps controversial, but I rather just have ads. Not that I do not think this is a preferable model, but rather, donates cost real money and ads cost nothing except time.
While time is finite and valuable, if I am already on YouTube, then I have already committed to choice of wasting that nebulous amount of time in the first place.
If enough people do it, monetizing on Youtube becomes untenable for most, driving creators to hopefully healthier platforms who might now stand a chance.
So if I don't like Visa and Mastercard, do I also get moral carte blanche to not pay anyone because hey I'm totally urging them to only use merchants that I prefer?
Sounds like awfully convenient motivated reasoning.
That’s how the market works. You avoid paying extra taxes than required right? Even though that denies the government extra funding. The only difference being one has been decided as wrong and the other is fine.
The browser is my agent, and it will do my bidding, not google's. You building your company on something that can be legally circumvented is not my problem.
If I can actually pay someone for content, then, if I don't pay, I should expect not to be granted access to content.
But that's not how YT works. YT doesn't charge you for good stuff. It charges you for not delivering crap. That's not legitimate business, that's a racket. I have no qualm punishing YT for that. Content creators are free to find other ways to monetize their labor, if their labor is actually valuable. (And so many of the good ones do, quite successfully.)
YouTube gives you two (2!) ways to pay for content. You can choose to pay with money, or you can choose to pay with your time and attention. If you don’t like paying with your time and attention, then either pay with money, or don’t use the service.
This “It charges you for not delivering crap.” line is bullshit. Serving video content costs money, they’ve given you the choice of how to pay for it, and you don’t like the choices but want to keep getting the content.
No. Youtube is a monopoly. For a huge amount pf historical video, they are the only game in town. Regulating the hell out of them -- especially gigantic fines for the insane amount of copyright piracy their business model depends upon -- is LONG overdue.
I was visiting my kid’s class one day. They were using some YouTube product that seemed oriented at schools, that I’d never seen before. An ad would pop up, and one of the kids (whosever turn it was next?) would run up and tap the skip ad button.
So even if you’re trying to use YouTube for something of value, you’re battling ads. Or at least our kids are.
Harder than it sounds! So much of what we interact with online winds up with YouTube in the dependency chain. Kids' coursework, how-to videos, etc. I could also just pay the $$/month to "solve" this problem, but I need my petty cash more than Google does. I'm confident the brilliant minds there can figure out how to monetize my visit even without the real-time bidding industrial complex burning my CPU cycles.
Download the content offline, make a playlist. You can also archive the content forever. No distractions, its organized however you want. Yes, it does take some effort but it fixes all the problems
So long as we're pretending to care about the Youtube TOS, offline downloading without premium is against their TOS. And even then you're only permitted to download and view offline through the YouTube phone app.
You can also just not watch TV. And not listen to the radio. And not receive newspapers. All mediums that have advertisements, and those advertisements are regulated to stop the most egregious types (eg. advertising sugary foods at children, tobacco products, hopefully gambling products soon).
Media, on the whole, is a good thing. We know more about the world. We know more about the excesses of the aristocracy. We know more about the violence committed by violent people (and I don't mean local petty crime. Genocide.) Before we can improve these things, we need to know about them. "just don't consume media" is a regression to a time where people knew little outside their local sphere.
Youtube/Google has a monopoly on one part of the modern media landscape and it has to be fixed. Not just put our heads in the sand.
YouTube shows ads that would never be allowed on network television, including tobacco advertisements. They can get away with it because it's hard for regulators to observe.
Without the ads, I'd probably spend way too much time on YouTube. I need something to push me into the rage-quit territory after enough time has passed.
I resisted paying for premium (out of spite) until very recently and only because my girlfriend complained.
I have been astounded at how scammy those ads are. There is a major class of ads that make fairly significant bullshit medical claims and I’m semi convinced the purpose is not for someone to make money but to wage psychological warfare on vulnerable people. Another class of ads says “the US government is going to collapse and that’s why you should buy a freedom battery” and the ad couches itself as a battery advertisement but how many vulnerable people hear that in the background 16 times a day and don’t end up subconsciously accepting some part of it?
In any case it’s all a manipulative cesspool and it’s bizarre to me that a property that Google otherwise values is willing to sling such slop at its users. I suspect a large part of this is that the executives who run YouTube never see their ads.
I've seen ads on YouTube that are straight-up illegal. Including ads for tobacco. And one that was a deepfake of the Canadian minister of finance pitching a crypto investment as being risk-free and backed by the government. Another that was a deepfake of Elon Musk saying he was going to give free money to people who click the link. YouTube will run anything because they know they won't get in trouble.
I'm sorry, but Youtube got to keep its servers up somehow and pay the content creators. This means ads.
If you don't like them, then pay for Youtube Premium and you can get ad-free experience. Although if it's not available in your country, then adblocking is a reasonable approach.
I'm shocked and appalled that you'd call the "virtual harems" YouTube tries to get me to install either scammy or wildly inappropriate. I've reported them a dozen times, and they're still on the platform, so I'm sure Lord Google knows something I don't about their saintlihood.
Or you could instead give them the middle finger and take anything they put out there. TOS are not binding contracts and until you're contractually bound to do otherwise, taking what they're handing out is completely reasonable.
> On Firefox this is easily resolvable - you can use a HTML filter to filter out the script tag from the source HTML before the page even starts being parsed. But that relies on extension APIs that Chromium doesn’t support.
The second Chrome drops uBlock Origin (as part of their "Manifest V3 without blocking Web Request" plan), I'm off to an alternative browser. Enough is enough.
I agree, but I do need to keep a chromium browser around for the odd times that: my webcam decides to flicker uncontrollably during a meeting, a website just happens to put JS that runs terribly on Firefox in the hot path and it slows to a crawl, or a new feature is being demonstrated with Chrome only support.
Beats ads, as far as I'm concerned, but I can't help but feel like your average user wouldn't agree.
I worked for Mozilla for 25 years and kept other browsers around the whole time. There's nothing wrong with having other browsers, and nothing technical that prevents it, so do that :D
I can't think of a time I didn't have more than one browser, even in 1995 when I made Netscape my default, I kept Cello around for some things. More browsers are better than fewer, not only for the industry, but for individuals too.
I used to keep a Chrome-based browser installed "just in case." But for about the last 5 years I've simply refused to have it on my machine. It's not needed.
Didn't this already happen? It just seems like it was only progressively rolled out to Chrome browsers. My work PC was hit with this about a month ago, and now I get ads there...
I've been getting these buffer loading times recently, and ironically, I don't mind them all that much. The annoyance of ads isn't primarily in the time it takes up, but in having the audio play and a video feed run that isn't the video I clicked on.
If an actual ad played, I'd be irritated beyond belief. But when there's a 12 second buffer, I have enough patience training for slow load times that I instinctively just quickly check my email or spend a brief moment lost in thought. Especially when it's every video. If it was one in every 5 videos, I'd notice it and be bothered. When it's every video, it's part of the experience and my brain just cuts it out automatically.
It certainly has to be better than getting an ad that fills no need of mine. I can't say I noticed any slow loading times on youtube though that might be because the last clip I watched was probably a month ago. Only search for diy fixes on problems I have, rest online attention goes to fediverse nowadays.
The extension is stealing from them. I get stealing a zero marginal cost good is minor but the agreement you make with YouTube is that you watch an ad in exchange for the video. Why should they serve you the video if you refuse your part of the agreement?
> the agreement you make with YouTube is that you watch an ad in exchange for the video
I never made that agreement. And if some software on my computer somehow gets YouTube to deliver me the content anyway, that's not my fault. In my view, it's a cat and mouse game, they can do whatever they want to try to stop me, and vice versa. If they win, I won't complain; but if I do, so be it.
By clicking on the video you did. It is in their terms of service.
How is you purposefully trying to block ads not your fault? Whose fault is it that you installed an Adblock? If you went to a grocery store and told the clerk you already paid and they let you leave would that not be your fault either?
I've never said they should, they are free to implement any anti-ad-block for all I care. I just pointed out their lack of honesty about the source of the problem, they should say they are actively blocking the extension rather than the extension is malfunctioning.
I’m happy to make the agreement I need to so I can access the thing I like, then turn around and violate those terms when it benefits me. Why should I feel a sense of personal obligation towards google?
How are you making an agreement? You can’t say “I’ll watch this video in exchange for X minutes of ads” because YouTube will never tell you how many minutes they’re going to show you, and because they have zero interest in committing to some number of minutes of ads. It’s constantly getting worse, and this process will continue until it kills the service.
It won't kill the service. The media executives who run YouTube are well aware of how advertising volume affects viewership so they'll titrate up or down as needed to maximize profit.
But don't worry, something else will eventually kill YouTube. Most likely they'll miss some sort of disruptive innovation. Like maybe in 30 years everyone will have content beamed directly into their neutral implants and only a few old people will still watch online videos.
The agreement is you watch the ads YouTube serves you. Why would that agreement have to include the amount of ads served? If you are unhappy with their business model you can always pay for premium or stop using it. Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.
That’s not an agreement, that’s just YouTube doing whatever they want. Which they can—but then—I can just do whatever I want, too. You don’t need to imagine some sort of covenant being involved.
> Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.
I don’t even do that, I just watch it as-is. I just don’t need to imagine that YouTube and I have agreed to anything.
> Why should they serve you the video if you refuse your part of the agreement?
I've held the position that, if YT wants to, they can block me from their platform for using an adblocker, and I would have no moral ground to stand on.
However, that isn't what they do. They try to circumvent it. They try to make it technically impossible. They try to mislead users into thinking their extensions are malicious.
Why do we justify blocking ads, even when we know the content we’re consuming isn’t free to create and even if the content is free, it still costs money to store and distribute?
We often rationalize using ad blockers because ads can be intrusive or annoying. But let’s asking ourselves: Why do we feel entitled to get this for free?
This isn’t a moral judgment. I genuinely want to understand the reasoning.
Back when I started using Google Adsense, they had a 3 ad per page rule. You could be banned if you went above that limit. Today you can easily find web pages with 10, 15 or even more ad spots... one after each paragraph, sidebar, full page "popup", etc.
On YouTube, we went from a banner on the video to a few seconds of a video before to multiple ads before the video to multiple ad pauses even on relatively short videos (under 10 minutes). Add to that the sponsored sections of the video itself, which are added by the content creator, and other ads (stores, tickets, etc) that sometimes YouTube adds under the video even if you pay for premium.
Google Search pages used to have one or two ads at the top, with a different background colour than search results. Now sometimes I have to scroll down to see organic content, because sponsored content fills my screen.
I don't think I'm entitled to have access to all this for free, but we went too far... and so I use an adblocker on all my devices.
You're asking the question in a way that's unreflective of how people think. They can do it and want to do it and would need a reason to not do it. So the question is, what would make someone feel like they were ethically compelled to watch an advertisement? It sounds impossible to me, maybe someone with a very unique perspective could chime in about themselves.
Here's an attempt at a double-negative answer: you can't be ethically compelled into an unethical contract, and since advertisements are manipulative, voyeuristic and seek to take advantage of the limitations of human attentional control, it's a priori impossible for watching an ad or downloading a tracker to ever be ethically compulsory.
You want to watch some content. The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.
You are not obligated to watch ads. You are opting to watch them in exchange for the free content, then skipping out on a commitment you volunteered for while still taking the free content.
The "unethical contact" argument is bullshit, because you made a choice but didn't live up to it. Instead of either paying or not watching, you watched anyway.
I actually pay, rather than watch the ads, but a large part of that was also dumping Spotify and using the YouTube music app instead for listening in the car.
> The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.
You're wrong in both parts.
1. There is no way to pay to only remove all ads. YT premium bundles some music nonsense and also doesn't remove ads added by creators.
2. "Watching" isn't part of the contract, only "injected ads" are. Do you read every billboard in exchange for the benefit of better roads financed with ad revenue?
The music nonsense is bundled because YouTube is full of music videos and music in the backgrounds of videos and they have to pay the record labels to play the music in the music videos. They have "YouTube Premium Lite" that doesn't include music, but then you get ads on videos that have music in them.
This makes no sense, it's not hard to filter out music videos, and music in regular videos wouldn't cost the same as the whole music premium, also Lite isn't just about music:
> Ads however may appear on ... Shorts, and when you search or browse.
So again, you can't pay just to replace ads. (By the way, there is another huge difference - premium is a subscription, so not tied to ad time replaced)
If they can't afford a YouTube subscription, they're not going to be buying anything that would be advertised anyway.
Let's be honest here, ads are trying to get you to buy things, but "psychological abuse" is a pretty extreme hyperbole, especially for people already in such tight poverty. They've got enough going on that someone trying to get them to buy shitty knives or switch their car insurance isn't going to be impactful.
> Let's be honest here, ads are trying to get you to buy things
The issue is that those are not the only ads Youtube is showing to people. You can basically upload any video and make it an ad. Sometimes Youtube's moderation fails and some nasty stuff slips through the cracks:
> In the latest incident, a Redditor describes how their young nephew was exposed to an explicit ad while watching a Fortnite stream by the well-known YouTuber Loserfruit.
> “My 7yr nephew was watching Loserfruit (Fortnite streamer) and then came up to me asking what Loserfruit is doing because this ad started playing,” the concerned uncle shared.
Hell, they'll show weight loss ads to people with eating disorders - and this one might just be intentional rather than a failure of Youtube's moderation:
“In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and suspended 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year,” the platform told us at the time.
I wonder what proportion of those 5.5 billion inappropriate ads were removed only after people watched and reported them.
The provider is welcome to serve ads, and i am welcome to not watch them. When there are Ads on TV and I get up to go to the kitchen, am i skipping out on a commitment? Am I now a freeloader? Should the TV have a camera to make sure I watch all the ads like a good little boy?
People have been fastforwarding/skipping ads for decades. this is nothing new.
Technically, the provider only really cares that the ads played, not that you were paying attention to them.
Unlike DVR for TVs, you are not welcome to skip playing them entirely. They've been pretty clear that skipping them via the use of ad blockers is a violation of the terms of service.
With how user-hostile and anti-competitive Google is behaving, this is like asking why soldiers feel entitled to shoot at the enemy. Keep giving them money, keep watching their ads that they sell on rigged auctions [1], and eventually the only way to access the web will be with locked-against-the-user browsers [2], and everything will be surveilled (though it nearly already is - Google never asks itself why it should feel entitled to follow users around the web, or in real-life, despite opt-outs [3], and you'll find support for any alternative OSes mysteriously withering due to secret anti-competitive contracts between Google and manufacturers [4]). I know this isn't the reasoning people use, but that is what the outcome will be.
As for ads - it has always been hard, nearly impossible to block them, and few people did. Just like you can't block a billboard next to the freeway, you can't block a jpeg that's served as part of the webpage you're visiting, as it's programmatically indistinguishable from native content.
What people actually block are not ads, but a hybrid half-ad-half-surveillance entity, that's called an "ad" by historical accident.
There’s no morality one way or the other. Google couldn’t care less about me; I have no personal connection with anyone there. They’ll treat me as poorly as the law allows (and then some) if it increases their bottom line. By the same measure, I’ll do as much as I can get away with to remove the bad aspects of their service. If we lived in a system where I was using a service made by a person I knew and could talk to, then maybe there’d be more obligations to the exchange, but in this impersonal setup I feel no such obligation.
Just want to point out, adding on to OP, that creators on youtube get 55% of revenue.
I get that Google has infinite money and infinite evil. But how convenient you also get to skip out on paying the majority expense, which goes to the creator...
And yes virtuous commentor, I know you are one of the 1.5% that convert to a patreon supporter. Now ask everyone else why they get to eat for free (while endlessly complaining that the restaurant sucks).
Ads are a litmus test for how much a service values its users and the ecosystem it’s built upon. When premium cable first replaced broadcast television it had no ads in lieu of a subscription cost. Now you pay a subscription and get ads. The same is true for streaming services which switched to ad supported subscriptions.
Let’s look at YouTube; in the early years ads were few and far between, then came mid roll ads, then end roll ads, then multiple ads in a row. Now YouTubers started doing their own ad reads, baked into the video.
We’re in a growth oriented era, so companies and individuals will take more and more, as much as they can to keep the numbers going up. What they’re taking is your time; a very precious commodity in my opinion.
Why do I Adblock? Because a line must be drawn or else this marketing growth engine will consume everything. I mean literally without any consumer pushback this attention extraction engine will continue expanding until every moment of digital consumption is monetized. It’s already destroyed too much of the internet.
Great analogy. Its the same reason why I grab stuff off of supermarkets and walk out. If they really cared about it, they'll invest in better technology to stop me. Suckers.
Some websites will stop me from accessing content because I use an ad blocker. I think that’s fair play, and take my attention somewhere else. I don’t hide that I use adblocker, and it’s easy enough to identify.
It takes a lot of time, money, care, education and love to grow human individual. Who would dare to even start considering paying high fees for the honor of receiving some of their time and attention? Why are video provider not paying people to obtain this privilege? No one dare to think they can get that for free, right?
Huh? You're on their website to watch videos. And it costs them money to send you those bits. And they offer two ways for you to compensate. Watch ads, or pay premium.
What is so difficult for you to understand this business relationship?
It's Google. The relationship is not consensual but adversarial. Google attempts to get free things from me. I attempt to get free things from Google.
It's like asking a lawyer why does he defend an obviously guilty client? Because it's adversarial system, his job is to protect his client, not to worry about the other side. The other side is trying to maximize their advantage too. Google has defined my relationship with it in such terms through its behavior.
If YouTube were still an independent operator I would be more amenable to your argument.
In any case, the fact I can recite an ad from memory shows that I am at least watching some of their ads, notably on mobile.
Back when I listened to Spotify Premium, they would mess around with the shuffle or add a “smart” shuffle to the UI that you can’t opt out of. They would try to insert songs to my playlists where they don’t belong. Gtfo let me listen to my music.
I listen to Spotify Freemium. There’s a special ad that says: “Enjoy the next 30 minutes of ad-free listening”. 2 minutes later I get 2-3 ads back to back.
Enough. Happy Jellyfin user. I’ll buy up my music gradually.
I don't, I pay for YouTube premium. I think YouTube deserves money for its service, and it needs money for its employees and infrastructure.
I'd block ads if there wasn't premium (or if premium had ads). YouTube still deserves and needs money, but ads don't "extract" the money from me. At best (and most likely*) every ad shown to me is effectively the advertiser paying YouTube to waste my time. At worst (if I actually buy the product), the ad is effectively me paying the advertiser and getting something useless or harmful. The chance a YouTube ad shows me something beneficial is too small to remotely justify the other ads which waste my time (or if I buy, the Earth's resources or my attention or etc.).
I also block ads on newspapers and other smaller sites, but don't buy their premium. Honestly, I don't think this is fair, although I think it's small in the grand scheme of things. The problem is, I don't feel those sites justify me paying, and I'd be spending well over $100/month if I subscribed to every one; I'd rather not see each site than pay, although currently I do see them without paying which is unfair (showing me ads is wasteful, as explained earlier, so I don't even consider it an alternative). You know what, I'll probably subscribe to a few (maybe AP and Reuters) and every other story I encounter, see if I can find the version on one of those sites.
* "But ads work on you subliminally." I hear and read this a lot, but I really doubt it for invasive ads like YouTube's (also billboards etc. I'm not talking about covert ads or "good" non-invasive ads like Show HN). First, I recognize many of the big advertisers (e.g. those VPNs and sodas) and will never buy their products, so those ads shown to me specifically are wasted. Moreover, I'm particularly methodical when buying things. I always go in with a plan: sometimes it's a simple plan like "buy the second-cheapest with a good description and decent reviews" or "buy what your parents do", but I never buy something because I recognize it. In fact, if something seems familiar I pay extra attention, and if I recognize it was invasively advertised, I become less likely to buy it, because I suspect invasive ads correlate with low value and want to actively dissuade invasive ads in general. "But your parents and the reviewers buy based off ads, and you buy based off them"...OK, show my parents and reviewers the ads, not me.
Ultimately, invasive ads waste my time and annoy me, and I don't see their benefits which justify that. I'd rather pay a small fee than see or hear every invasive ad (like with YouTube premium), and I suspect the advertisers would benefit from that too.
Watching ads just offloads the cost on other people. I would go as far as saying that watching ads is immoral (if you can avoid it), as you are effectively stealing from others.
ads are awful on a good day. YOUTUBE ads are 5x worse.
I'm not going to sit there, waste my time, watching the same ads for the 5th time that has no relevance to me. Adblockers make youtube tolerable. If there were no adblockers i genuinely would be unable to use it.
Has nothing to do with a sense of entitlement, they are ads for things I would never purchase. so whats the point then? Why is it OK for people to pay to waste my time just because they paid to? What gives them the right to force me to watch that? Hard no. It's my browser, and I'll do as i damn well please.
I WOULD pay for youtube if it was a good product. But it's not. I'm not going to opine on all the reasons it's not. if/when they make it good i'll pay. That's a them problem.
but there is NO WAY i am going to start accepting ads back into my life. I'll just stop watching youtube.
> This locks a few global objects by using Object.defineProperty to set them as non-writable, which prevents later code from overwriting them with a Proxy that alters their behaviour. So uBlock Origin can only proxy JSON.stringify if it can run before this locker script does.
This seems like a bug in browsers, or possibly in the spec. Page content and scripts should never be able to restrict what browser extensions can do.
oh its a Chrome feature! Around 2 years ago Chrome pushed an update that speedup time to load first initial page by delaying Extension initialization. Last page you closed Chrome on will load before uBo, will be able to bypass all filters/block and will be able to detect uBo being loaded.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I support a _shitpile_ of creators on Patreon and Kofi and more. I subscribe to Nebula, and I get as much as I can from the creators' own pages on those services.
I'm doing my best to move my viewing off of YouTube, and move the money off of YouTube, in hopes that it eases the creators moving off of YouTube.
But you'll invariably watch from a way way bigger shitpile of creators, so without some more efficient mechanism you won't be able to spread your support properly
I find it hard to discern whether your post is sarcasm. Assuming it’s not, I’m surprised that someone is so cheerfully and voluntarily paying an extra fiat to the virtual landowner.
I'm surprised they don't just inject the ads directly into the video stream, I think that would solve their issue overnight (not that I want any ads personally). You could also rate-limit it to the playback speed to prevent pre-downloading the stream easily. But now that everything uses HLS/DASH, it's easy to inject different content right in the middle of the stream without re-encoding anything.
It has to be a cost thing. HLS is so insanely optimised down to the hardware level that adding any kind of compute for targeting would increase costs exponentially.
I’m not too deep into it anymore but there’s some great articles from Netflix out there talking about the crazy optimisations done to their edge servers for streaming.
It would break all the time stamps as well, unless you had fixed length ads. Sponsorblock already skips ads embedded in videos, so I don't think this would make ads much harder to block.
Agree, it has to do with cost, considering the sheer number of videos they have. Plus, oftentimes the ad won't be relevant after a week or two, in which case they can't re-encode again.
They don't want to boil the frog too quickly. Eventually, Youtube will embed ads directly into the stream. As the post mentions:
To be clear this isn’t server-side ad insertion; the ad and content streams are still separate (YouTube is doing a server-side ad insertion experiment, but that’s separate from fake buffering)
Yep. It's been pretty funny actually both here but especially on r/youtube.
Pretty much since YouTube started cracking down on adblockers, r/youtube top post Every. Single. Day. is usually someone complaining that they just got hit with "adblock detected" and comments split between "Yeah it sucks, hit me last month" and "Huh, uBlock Origin works fine for me. I must be super smart. YouTube can't defeat me"
> Eventually, Youtube will embed ads directly into the stream
We've all seen what they're doing with AI-generated video, and we know their market and political power. Eventually they'll be remaking the video so the person or animal or rock or tree on the screen is giving AI-generated product testimonials.
There exists crowdsourced adblocking based on timestamps (SponsorBlock, Tubular). Soon we will have realtime on-device content-aware AI adblocking. They will ever win.
I use content aware ad blocking to remove inserted and native ads from podcasts. The next level adblocking will be rewriting content that is overly commercial.
I imagine you can do it by AI-transcribing the podcast while preserving timestamp metadata for each symbol. Use LLM to identify undesirable segments (ask it to output json or something) and then cut them out from the audio with ffmpeg.
Then you would need to set up a server that would do all this and serve as a 'mirror' to your podcasts without the ads.
If you've gone through that much effort, you might as well turn it into a subscription service. It would be resource intensive, but some people would gladly pay through their nose to rid their podcasts of ads.
It’s already a race to the bottom, blocking tech improves and so does marketing. The latter will pump out as much as you’re scientifically proven to accept before switching off.
In the future, everything will be like that vapid chicken wing podcast (the one where they bring on an interesting, talented person and then waste half an hour interviewing her about sriracha)
So Ira Glass will be narrating This American Life while simultaneously reviewing different varieties of Doritos, etc.
...or the producers of The Rest is History will add the Planters Peanut Man as a third host
...or Marques Brownlee will review every product in relation to how well it works with Bose headphones
My favorite relentless one is Tracker (Amazon Prime), who spend approximately 30% of screen time dedicated to showing off a GMC pickup and Airstream, but the most egregious was one dialog line:
> As Colter enters and gives them hugs, Velma remembers that they got a gift for him. Reenie hands him the gift - very conspicuously packaged in an Amazon box with its trademark logo and blue tape - and says, "I've gotta say, next-day delivery is pretty sweet. Thank you, Amazon Prime!"
that is not what they do on hot ones. sean is an intelligent interviewer and their team goes above and beyond to find interesting lore in people’s past to showcase. guests are routinely impressed.
YouTube is currently running an A/B test for server-side insertion according to what some other people have posted. I'm not getting SSAI ads so I can't really know much about them though.
One could splice ads out of the video on the client just as easily as they splice them in, assuming you can detect them (which could be done via crowdsourced databases a la sponsorblock).
That's how some podcast houses do it. Sometimes they'll be mid sentence and the ad will come in.
I pay for a subscription to The Athletic, who used to offer ad free podcasts in their app. Last month they signed an exclusive deal with Acast, and now I cannot possibly listen to their podcasts without ads.
How does Twitch do it? They're super aggressive and even using third party clients that do a good job and not displaying ads, you still get an occasional "commercial break" screen where they're not serving you the content, or the ad, just a "let's all go to the lobby" screen.
Twitch puts the ads directly in the HLS stream, but as seperate segments from the content (a HLS stream is made of many small video files, on twitch they're about 2s long). They're trivial to recognize and filter out (they're actually explicitly tagged as ad segments) but it still won't serve you the actual stream you were trying to watch - the ad segments override it. The best you can do is just block until the first non-ad segment arrives.
Those clients could be doing a better job - when twitch starts playing an ad on the main stream, they also provide a secondary stream that shows the actual content.
Maybe; I don't know anything about it. I will note that that belief could easily develop, true or not, if twitch streams start out in low resolution and increase as you buffer them.
A third-party client has room to make a dramatic improvement on the twitch experience by not dropping audio while you make the switch from the ad stream to the content stream.
They are working on it. Web YT player no longer fetches separate video and audio streams from the server, it requests them pre bundled and receives a single server side muxed stream.
I've also wondered about this for a long time. It seems like there must be something difficult about it, but I can't even guess. Otherwise it seems like they would be, no?
The creators themselves will include sponsor segments in their videos, but some users go a step further and use sponsorblock to automatically skip through.
I get they want to work against ad blockers, but as a Premium member I really wish there was an easy way to watch a video without it polluting my history or recommendations. I don't want to watch ads just due to that.
IIRC i stopped using this because it takes way too long to toggle on/off and another crucial mistake they make is that YouTube acts like its chrome incognito where you want full privacy and an anonymous browsing experience, I do not want that, I still want to be able to see my own history like my last few search bar queries, I just dont want NEW entries added when in incognito mode. essentially i want read only mode
I would love something like what Spotify has - private listening. In the meantime, I just go into the YouTube history and remove anything that I don't want to pollute my recommendations. Turning off search history entirely also is good.
I'd be happy to pay for premium if it actually removed all ads from the platform. I wish they forced creators to declare which segments of a video are ads for their sponsors and then removed or skipped them for premium users. Basically built-in Sponsorblock except not crowd-sourced.
Alternatively, many creators already upload ad-free versions to their Patreon or other paywalled platforms, they could upload those to YouTube as well to be shown to premium users if YT allowed for it and forced them to.
Alas I'm not willing to pay 13€ a month for just slightly fewer ads.
I don't think YouTube should get further into the dangerous spiral of chaperoning the content of videos. If there are too many sponsored segments in a video, take it up with the creator or stop watching that channel.
I'd love an option to be able to filter out all videos from my feed that have sponsored segments. For me, I find the best content is the underground stuff made by folks who don't have a clear profit motive.
yeah I think the free market can figure ad load out. creators who go overboard on sponsored segments will get less views, less engagement. there's a natural equilibrium.
I was wondering when buffering was going to be a thing. I’ve been seeing it on YT and figured it’s the Adblock wars getting heated up.
The next step is to scrape the videos, strip the ads, store them on a torrent magnet and serve that instead. Yes it would have to be from a shady RU or CN or NK or IN site. I’m fine with that.
I don't understand this approach. You're going to violate someone else's copyright because you want what they have, but don't want to comply with their terms; this seems like very entitled behavior to me. Isn't it easier and more moral to just abstain from viewing their videos?
If copyright laws were reasonable and limited to what was necessary to serve their stated purpose, I would agree with the critique - that it seems like entitled behaviour. But in a world where copyright terms are 150 years, in my opinion any premise that it serves the public is gone.
Consider that it's a monopoly. You can't get 99% of this content anywhere else (not even if it's marked as creative commons¹ or any other free license, publicly funded, etc.) but I don't agree with Google's/Alphabet's practices either. One could:
Option 1: be a hermit and not watch anything on YouTube ever. You can't look up repair guides, fully use a news website that I'm subscribed to that got rid of their self hosted version, watch a subset of public broadcasts that we pay for via taxes, etc. It's not just entertainment / a Netflix replacement
Option 2: give in and enrich this monopolistic tracking company
Option 3: try to pirate the content
I'd feel very different if this were Spotify or an individual artist: I can use three other music services with massively overlapping offerings from different jurisdictions. Or supermarkets, for the same reason. But if it's irreplaceable and gatekept, I can understand both sides here
I find it frustrating that so many people expect some kind of morality from consumers but not companies. It’s cold, hard business logic to use an adblocker when you have the knowhow and are annoyed enough, just as its cold, hard business logic to fight adblockers up to a point.
Having to pay for something so that's "less annoying" is the worst business model. YouTube Premium is very expensive. I had it for a while when I got a Pixel smartphone with a few months of YouTube Premium included. It was great. I also understand that streaming on this scale must entail incredibly high operating costs; the money has to come from somewhere. It's simply a dilemma. But there has to be a better way. Any ideas?
its creating a problem and selling the solution to that problem. im surprised there isnt more of a distaste for youtube out there for just their overall product... ads aside. One of the better things ive done for myself this past year is remove the right sidebar as well as almost all of the homepage.
my youtube homepage is just that left sidebar, which has dots if a new video for one of the channels i care about uploads. It totally frees me from clickbait thumbnails, and "youtube rabbit holes".
youtube has just been getting slaughtered with horrible trends of mindless content, low effort documentary stuff, all sorts of low effort garbage with high effort thumbnails/titles. it is so nice to just rid myself of all of it.
At least on TV I occasionally catch randomly interesting ads... sometimes. On YT, I'm stuck with the same obnoxious commercial from a company whose service I strongly dislike, playing on loop ever since they associated me to some related product category. They think pestering me with more interruptions will win me over, but their analytics are working in reverse. I can't understand why they're so clueless.
Is it actually expensive though? Or does it just feel that way? A movie costs $15, or roughly 13 cents per minute of watch time.
The average daily YouTube watch time is north of 40 minutes per day for adults in the US. That's a penny per minute for YouTube... 11x cheaper than a movie.
It’s a psychological problem. Going from $0 to $1 is a mountain.
Starting a product or service at $30 / month sets expectations up front (no ad supported free tier)
This is an incompatible strategy with venture backed “get all the market share possible by offering services for free to crush competitors so we can have a monopoly to exploit later” mindset
Premium is a good deal if you would have already had Music, and Music is pretty great while also being a good deal. They also have a cheaper 'Premium Lite' these days, though apparently some content still has ads if you use it.
I would pay that 130€ / year if I was alone. I have to be responsible with the money I earn as I have to feed 3 kids and my wife is not working. We also use other different streaming services like netflix, spotify family... adding youtube premium seems not reasonable for me at the moment.
Commenting to share my experience: I ran into and ended up with youtube because it bundles youtube music as well, allowing me to consolidate. I was able to invite my household to the same account.
I also wanted to ensure my views resulted in the creators being paid, it goes without saying that the royalties for streaming are abysmal and is a separate conversation, but it was a contributing factor for me.
In the USA I subscribe to Youtube Premium family. The rate is just $3.00 a month more than Spotify family. For that price you get both the Spotify-equivalent Google-owned service (confusingly called YouTube Music) AND you get ad-free Youtube as a bundle. Basically just $3/month for no ads on Youtube is worth it and much easier to justify for a household on a tight budget.
It might be worth looking into if the pricing differential is similarly minimal where you live.
They’re attempting that now with “memberships.” I’m not a heavy patreon user, but the current implementation leaves a lot to be desired. I expect they’ll be able to iterate on it.
An unfortunate aspect is that I’m frequently recommended videos which I would have to pay to watch. As a youtube premium subscriber, feeling like I’m constantly being upsold has begun to grate on me. I’d really appreciate a feature to hide these videos as a premium subscriber, which I have little faith in them implementing. On my laptop it’s easy enough to hide these thumbnails (as I already do with shorts) using ublock origin. However this is making me reconsider my subscription. Why should I have to use a third party tool to best use this service which I’m paying a fairly significant fee for? I’ve similarly used ublock origin to work around recent change where only three videos were shown on each row
In 2025 it's actually not that expensive. CDNs aggressively drive down the cost of streaming video.
A 1080p music video costs about one tenth of one cent to serve to one person at retail CDN rates.
You could easily host this yourself and decide what the terms are to view it. E.g. ads, or paywall or free because you benefit from the exposure.
Once upon a time AdSense/YouTube saved you from getting an unmanageable $5,000 bill from your ISP because your content went viral but nowadays their value proposition is more about network effects plus built-in revshare scheme.
Youtube is $14/month. netflix is $17/month. That is VERY expensive, considering that most of Netflix's cost is production. Youtube has almost no production costs. Their users create content.
Maybe if they paid their users more, so they didn't also have to add 'sponsor segments' inside their video's it would make more sense. The bundling music for the same price is the same crap cable and phone companies have been doing for decades, that most people hate. Let me buy just youtube without ads, and keep spotify.
But as it sits right now, $14/month for video's without youtube ads, but still with ads added by the creators themselves (or paid promotion, I guess) is pretty expensive, compared to $17/month for actual movies with no ads at all.
YouTube gives, I think, 55% of revenue (not just profits) to creators, which could be considered similar to production costs making up a majority of expenses.
I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music a couple of years ago because of Spotify showing disruptive ads/promotions on the premium plan. YT Premium for Music + Videos is worth it for me, being about 2.5USD more expensive per month than Spotify where I live. But I agree that one should just be able to subscribe to them separately.
You're not wrong, but the amount of content on YouTube (that they need to index, store, and stream) is several orders of magnitude more than what's on Netflix.
And for that matter, the number of active viewers is also significantly higher since there's no paywall. AND they also support live streaming.
while ad blocking has grown in prevalence over the years, for something like youtube I'd figured it was more than counteracted by the shift to mobile / TV (where ad blocking is more complicated)
whatever the merits, this (and google's neutering of extensions in chrome) signals a fundamental attitude shift from ~10 years ago; they're more interested in squeezing margins out of their dominant platforms instead of growth
Discovery is always going to be an issue, but for those who want to get away from doomscrolling their life away for the algorithm-god, it’s a rather comfy way to enjoy content.
Having sailed the high seas since middle school I suppose it was only natural that I continue to build upon my multi-terabyte horde of movies, archived websites, books, music, and video games to include content from hobbyist HAM radio operators and long-form urban legend documentaries from YT channels.
If YouTube's ads were like the TV ads of olden days, they might even be marginally tolerable. They're not however.
In my experience, they not only deliberately increase volume to pretty much screech whatever insipid bullshit is being offered at you, but they also can sometimes run for dozens of minutes unless you manually go to your device and press "skip". TV ads never did these sorts of utterly shitty, tedious things.
I even wonder how anything so fucking hostile and annoying to a YT free user can possibly be effective? Who's actively paying for all this garbage ad placement with such scummy little playback mechanics?
It was around that time that I stopped watching cable television altogether.
If you want to back down memory lane, search on YouTube for old recordings of network TV ad breaks from the late 90s and early 2000s- they’re just obnoxious.
Yeah, I was reading this and thinking wut, TV sucks. Like half the time watching a show (most likely a rerun) is ads, even if it's a paid cable channel. And even after that 2010 law, pretty sure the ads are louder than the shows. And the ads are even worse nowadays because the ads exclusively target old people, so 90% are drugs or gold-buying scams. Somehow the cable STBs are super laggy nowadays too, like they rewrote the video decoder in Javascript or something, cause it used to be fine.
The only thing I miss at all is being able to leave a TV on and have it keep playing something reasonable, not convince itself that watching a car review means I want to watch a screaming kid trolling in Minecraft followed by the Syrian Civil War.
Another thing they are sometimes doing is failing to add videos that you watched with ad blocking on to your history.
That means if those videos show up in a search, or on your home page, or in a recommendation they do not have the red bar on the bottom that indicates that you have already watched them.
If adblock stopped working I would leave, which is interesting to me as I wonder what I'd do with my new time.
Funny I make YT videos too trying to build an audience, I'd like to not put ads on it but not my choice
I don't understand how people can just accept ads it drives me insane when some random shit starts playing
I already lost money with YT, I bought so many UHD movies on their platform ($20 ea) and they won't stream it in HD unless you're on a supported device or ad-ridden tv
edit: alright, aftrer seeing it's $13 I will get it, I have been converted
YouTube Premium has existed for years now... You're absolutely able to pay for an ad-free experience, and it provides more financial support to creators than ads do
The existence of premium is not the same as parent poster’s, “make us pay for it” idea, aka a paywall.
If YouTube and its content actually has value, then presumably a paywall would have no effect of revenues of YouTube or creators. On the other hand if the content is actually nearly worthless, the vast majority of people would find something better to do with their time.
I downloaded some free songs back in the Napster days but now I happily pay for or watch ads for any content that I consume. I have zero interest in ad blockers / other tricks as I want the content creators to get compensated.
! Stop sites from prompting to sign into Google account
||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$xhr,script,3p
! Stop annoying reels from littering friend feeds
www.facebook.com##[aria-label="reel"]:upward(2)
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element-show
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)
youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
! Don't use the obnoxious new bold font for titles, use the old font instead
www.youtube.com###title h1 yt-formatted-string:style(font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; font-weight: 400 !important;)
www.youtube.com##h3.ytd-playlist-panel-renderer .title .yt-formatted-string:style(font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; font-weight: 400 !important;)
! Remove branding bugs in the bottom corner
www.youtube.com##div.iv-branding
www.youtube.com##.annotation.annotation-type-custom.iv-branding
! Disable live video previews on hover
www.youtube.com##+js(aeld, /^(?:mousemove|pointermove|pointerenter)$/, buttons)
! Remove "Scroll for details"
www.youtube.com##.ytp-button.ytp-fullerscreen-edu-button
! Remove "This video contains paid content" warning
www.youtube.com##.ytp-paid-content-overlay
! Remove badges
www.youtube.com##.ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope.badges
www.youtube.com##ytd-badge-supported-renderer.ytd-video-primary-info-renderer
! Remove badges in lists, expand video title to fill that space again
www.youtube.com##.ytd-badge-supported-renderer.style-scope.badge-style-type-verified.badge
www.youtube.com###menu > .ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com##.ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope.metadata:style(padding-right:0!important)
! Remove chat
www.youtube.com###chat
! Remove sidebar
www.youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-renderer.ytd-app.style-scope
www.youtube.com##ytd-app[mini-guide-visible] ytd-page-manager.ytd-app:style(margin-left:0px!important)
! Remove the shadow over the top of videos
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-gradient-top
www.youtube.com##.ytp-chrome-top
! Reduce opacity of the shadow over the bottom of videos
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-gradient-bottom:style(opacity: 55% !important)
! Reduce opacity of video length labels
www.youtube.com##ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer.ytd-thumbnail.style-scope:style(opacity:75% !important)
! Remove Next button. I only ever hit this accidentally, losing my place
! and my playback buffer >:-[
www.youtube.com##.ytp-left-controls > .ytp-button.ytp-next-button
! Remove Miniplayer button
www.youtube.com##.ytp-button.ytp-miniplayer-button
! Force YouTube to display the complete copyright information in the description
www.youtube.com###expanded-metadata:style(display:block !important)
! Don't load the preview image before the video loads (saves some bandwidth)
||i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/*/maxresdefault.webp
||i.ytimg.com/vi/*/maxresdefault.jpg
! Remove interactions (eg if you never login to YouTube)
www.youtube.com###like-button
www.youtube.com###dislike-button
www.youtube.com###sponsor-button
www.youtube.com###hover-overlays
www.youtube.com###subscribe-button
www.youtube.com###flexible-item-buttons
www.youtube.com###button-shape
www.youtube.com###reply-button-end
! Remove sidebar items that are only applicable to logged-in users
www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-section-renderer.ytd-guide-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(1)
www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-section-renderer.ytd-guide-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2)
! Remove "Watch Later" and "Add to Queue"
www.youtube.com###hover-overlays
! Remove the "skeleton" shown before the page loads
www.youtube.com##.skeleton
www.youtube.com###info-skeleton
www.youtube.com###meta-skeleton
www.youtube.com###owner-name
www.youtube.com##.skeleton-bg-color
www.youtube.com###home-page-skeleton
www.youtube.com###masthead-skeleton-icons
||www.youtube.com/s/desktop/*/cssbin/www-main-desktop-watch-page-skeleton.css
||www.youtube.com/s/desktop/*/cssbin/www-main-desktop-player-skeleton.css
! Remove the live previews on the scrubber bar (saves some bandwidth, but
! not worth it IMO)
||i.ytimg.com/sb/*
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip-bg
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip-image
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip:style(border-radius:0px;!important)*
Not sure if it's the same one, but I managed to consistently click the "includes paid promotion" banner on video thumbnails so I open a tab with the help page explaining what sponsorships are instead of the video.
I'm curious, has someone tried the authenticated Youtube Premium API in third-party clients?
I'd love to use Invidious or Peertube to watch the videos, but I also want my subscription money to go to the video creators. Youtube allocates it proportionally to the viewing time.
So you buy premium - now you don't have ads from YouTube anymore. But now YouTubers such as LinusTechTips and who else not want monthly payments for their exclusive content. Yea, that's not going to work. Now your watchers don't watch your content.
It’s crazy to ram as they did a revenue breakdown recently and the sponser segments was way tinier than I expected - like 10% or in that range. I was annoyed just knowing they shit on their videos just for that tiny profit boost.
Perfectly fair. It's not like YouTube is some free open source platform. Infra needs to be paid, creators need to be paid, they have a whole eco-system. Why not just pay for premium if you use it that much?
I run Brave on multiple devices and there's now a "glitch" a few seconds after what wouod be the ads, starts. I put up with this because the alternative is to put up with ads that treat viewers like morons with one hand in the mouse and other in the wallet.
I have to wonder whether they are tracking changes in consumer confidence. Subjectively, I have noticed a significant drop in confidence from my peers. I do not know whether my experience generalizes, but if it does, they are playing with fire.
The point of most ads isn't to get you to buy things. Most ads just want you to think of the product and be aware it exists. Their objective is to slowly hijack your brain.
If you know what "it gives you wings" or "the happiest place on earth" means, the ads already worked.
Ads are trying to combat obscurity. A brand with bad reputation is far better than a brand nobody's ever heard of.
Are you mostly watching short videos? I mostly watch videos that are 10+ minutes and I've never had YouTube come anywhere near either the number or total length of ads that I saw on cable or that I see on broadcast TV.
When was that? I'm genuinely asking, since I remember the breakdown from when I was recording TV to my computer and editing out the commercials, as 10 minutes of commercials and 20 minutes of TV show.
Absurd but true in a similar way: I get a tiny spark of nostalgia on those occasions where a bit of sponsored promotion pops into part of some podcast i'm listening to as a YT video while I do chores. (Ublock running, so no third party ads at least)
The thing about those idiotic third party ads on YouTube, which is so grotesquely annoying is that, unlike TV ads of old, some of then can literally run for dozens of minutes at auto-increased volume unless you go to your device and skip them at some point. That is some particularly shitty nonsense right there.
I pay for YouTube premium (which gives me YouTube music too) and am happy with the lack of ads, even though many creators still mix paid sponsors into their videos. It seems the creators are motivated to keep things minimal or they will lose engagement.
What I am not happy with is a lack of control over the homepage and recommendations. I would really like to be able to easily block channels from ever showing up, but you can only sort of do this if you click "don't recommend this channel anymore" from the homepage. But you can't do this if a video shows up recommended from another video. And overall, it just feels like they are spending so much effort trying to get me to watch the next video instead of enjoy the one I am trying to watch.
For my kids, I came up with an ad hoc policy where they can watch from the homepage / recs on weekends but during the week have to stick to a personal playlist they can only add videos to on the weekends. This removes the algorithmically driven addictive nature of YouTube and unsurprisingly they end up moderating their use of Youtube within their alotted screen time much better. It distinguishes between, "I want to watch this" and "I want to pull the slot machine lever." But I would be a lot happier if I could better curate access to content for my kids too. Youtube Kids sucks, it ends up filtering out a bunch of interesting stuff like carpentry and nature content that hasn't been marked "for kids" in favor of videos of kids shopping for toys and stuff.
> I pay for YouTube premium (which gives me YouTube music too)
I'm curious about a buyer's perspective: would you say this is "tying"? (Seems like an ambiguous word for it but I can see no other translation for koppelverkoop)
To me it seems like trying to undermine the market for music streaming (which is currently somewhat healthy with a handful of competing services worldwide where you can get access to most artists' work) by abusing the monopoly on videos that people often want a subscription on. The parent corp has so much cash to spare, giving away music for nearly free is worth it to make it extremely difficult to compete in this other market. From an individual's point of view, you're a thief of your own wallet if you don't get this two in one deal (assuming you want both). I'm not sure how to feel about people who buy this
The "don't show this channel" feature also feels like there is some kind of expiry because I've blocked a few channels multiple times now via that method.
Totally a theory but sometimes YouTube has a button that says roughly "show me something new". I think that may be the source of those channels returning.
Agreed. I've told YT about a thousand times I have zero friggin interest in YouTube Shorts and lo and behold a few weeks later they guiltily try to sneak back into the home page.
Discord recently started using a fake loading screen if you have an ad blocker enabled. What’s hilarious (and a little infuriating) is that the app is still obviously working under the hood — you can literally see masked text updating in real time when people send you messages. It’s not “loading,” it’s just refusing to render content locally. They’re not even blocking access to the service — they’re just trying to frustrate you into disabling your ad blocker without explicitly saying that’s what they’re doing. Classic dark pattern.
What’s worse is the privacy side. Discord apparently leaves the microphone open even when you’re using push-to-talk. There’s been anecdotal evidence from users monitoring their network traffic that mic input is still active in the background, likely being piped to local buffers or held in memory under the guise of latency reduction. That might sound innocent, but the distinction between “open but not recording” and “recording” is razor thin when the user has explicitly told the app not to listen until a key is pressed. At minimum, it’s a trust violation — at worst, it’s surveillance theater.
This is the standard bait-and-switch. Build a good product, earn user trust, then slowly degrade it with tracking, telemetry, ads, and manipulative UX until it’s barely recognizable. Discord used to be a breath of fresh air compared to Skype or Teamspeak, and now it’s another data-harvesting machine with a gamer paint job. It’s telling that more users are looking into self-hosted options or jumping to alternatives like Matrix or Mumble. Discord doesn’t have ads yet, but all the groundwork is being laid — and people are right to be wary.
Ransomware doesn't have to be illegal in North Korea to convict a North Korean who did it, either in absence or with extradition, in the country where the damage was done
With Alphabet being from a country with extreme capitalism, the comment you're replying to seems applicable no matter where the viewers are (regardless of whether I agree with their viewpoint/outlook). YouTube's owners can choose to block or prosecute whoever doesn't comply with their terms. Not saying that's likely, just that: this isn't a matter of needing to be on the American continent
Edit: perhaps interesting to realise that, conversely, laws in North Korea might make it illegal for Alphabet to have certain terms if they want to serve consumers in their market. (A better example here would be EU with copyright legislation that makes it illegal to sign away your moral rights, for instance.) It works both ways and both could legally prosecute the other at the same time and both win in their area! But with YouTube being able to gatekeep the content here, one has more power than the other..
I mean most adblocking software is open source and easily acquired, a lot like torrenting software it’d be near impossible to actually enforce anything.
No they do not have that right. They do not have the right to try to circumvent what I'm telling my browser to do. If they don't like what it's doing, they can block me from the platform.
If they ran less hostile ads, people wouldn't be as hostile to watching their ads. Some of the ads they run are just ridiculous and awful. Ads for scams, soft-core porn ads, just the worst of the worst.
Where are you located? I've never seen any of those.
Pretty much all of my YouTube ads are for TV shows, movies, cars, mobile games, consumer products, and various consumer services. Volkswagen, Dove, TurboTax, etc. All incredibly mainstream.
Maybe you're located in a country or region maintain advertisers avoid?
I don’t get soft core porn ads but I do scams all the time. Bullshit supplements, pyramid schemes, “buy my program to make money” type things. Otherwise it’s mostly political ads, more legitimate consumer products like dishwasher detergent, gambling, and mobile games. NE USA for reference
Personally, for my own value system, I consider the gambling ads to be as bad as scam ads. I think we'll soon come to see the social harm of gambling ads to be as bad as tobacco ads. We should strive for a culture where people see an ad for addictive services or substances and feel an instinctive, pre-conscious disgust. They are the dirty, disgusting, bloodsucking bedbugs of society.
I agree and feel it is a reflection on social decline. While I don’t think prohibition it the way forward it is unsettling that we tolerate this as a society. Would we tolerate youtube advertising for heroin or even recreational marijuana? We certainly don’t for tobacco and we probably shouldn’t for alcohol.
I work in mental health and I am seeing more people who spend a substantial amount on “parlays”. Many examples downplay or hide the behavior from their social network and the extreme examples spend a significant amount. The advertising is obviously predatory and goes against what we know about control dynamics in addict behavior but we tend to view that as a personal moral failing rather than exploiting basic biology and as a result allow the dealer to ruin countless lives before any action is taken (see Purdue and Teva lawsuits)
I'm in America. I only see these scummy ads I talk about, and I assume it's because I'm extremely aggressive about preventing myself from being tracked and profiled. My friends made the horrible mistake of looking into cryptocurrency on Google while signed into their account, so they got targeted by scum crypto ads.
It sounds like you've explicitly opted yourself into the lowest common denominator ads. It's understandable that mainstream companies want to maximize their advertising impact by only targeting the viewers where there is data to suggest the viewers will actually be interested in their products.
I'm honestly not really sure why you're complaining. If you don't want to be tracked or profiled, you're going to get the lowest quality ads. Why do you think higher-quality advertisers should be wasting money trying to reach you, when you are going out of your way to avoid any interest in them?
To be clear, I'm not criticizing what you're doing to avoid tracking, or your stance against it. But I'm questioning why you would then complain about the ads you receive.
I'm not complaining that higher-quality advertisers aren't spending money trying to reach me. I'm saying the fact that the lowest common denominator ads are so hostile is reason enough to completely avoid them.
This might be a controversial take, but I don't want to see soft-core porn ads. I don't want to see scam ads. I don't want to see the worst of the worst. It is not a necessary state of affairs that the lowest common denominator ads are ads that are explicitly attempting to prey upon the least informed, most vulnerable members of society.
The fact that the worst ads are the way that they are is indicative of YouTube's willingness to engage in user-hostile activities.
If they were less willing to engage in hostile ads, there would be less hostility towards their ads.
YouTube's solution is extremely simple: vet ads and don't accept money to run hostile ads.
Right, then avoid them. Either don't use YouTube, or else pay for Premium so you don't see them.
You claim people are hostile to watching YouTube's ads because of their quality. But I don't think so -- I think they're mostly seeing normal ads, not scammy ones. Because they're not taking measures against tracking. Your experience would seem to be very much an outlier.
I simply don't see the ads you're talking about, not even a little bit, so I can't really speak to YouTube's acceptable ads policies. But just so you know -- you can also mark checkboxes in your Google profile around which categories of ads you are and aren't interested in. I actually did that, and got less ads for categories I have zero interest in. That may help your ads experience, and make your ad quality complaints go away, if you're philosophically OK with that, since you're providing data freely rather than through tracking.
No, I'm going to continue watching YouTube while also avoiding their ads. If they want to engage in an adversarial relationship then I will as well. Until there's another competitor in the space that provides the same value, I will just take value from the only game in town. They don't owe me their service, but I also don't owe a bad faith monopolist anything. I do pay for premium, and I also block all of their analytics and ads at the network level.
EDIT: also, I think everyone should block ads. We should snub advertisers and surveillers all of the time. If they want to be hostile towards users, users should be hostile towards them.
Capitalists have had it too good for too long. It's time consumers stop caring about how the poor capitalist will make their dime.
Until the capitalists take the time to respect us, the consumers, we don't owe them anything.
It's time for reciprocity. If they're hostile, we reciprocate. If they're cooperative, we reciprocate.
giving them $13/month is not being hostile to them, it’s being a long term customer. they have exactly the relationship they want with you,
minus your adblocking. i too pay for premium, run a pihole and use ubo. i pay for premium because the company sells a quality product at a good price and adfree. sponsor segments is another thing, but solveable. i also use sponsorblock and have a docker setup to autoskip segments on devices connected to my wifi. but out of all streaming services out there, yt actually seems like the least vampiric.
Weird way to blame the victim and not the organization pushing scams on people. I vaguely recall that 20 years ago, Google served things like nonprofit or government PSAs when they didn't know what to serve (or thought you were botting), not financial scams.
Speaking of PSAs, the US federal government issued a PSA a couple years ago recommending use of an ad blocker to avoid becoming a victim of financial scams/fraud (purged now for some reason). Why they don't prosecute the ad companies for being the ones to select and deliver the mark is anyone's guess.
Maybe they just want you to buy Premium and get rid of ads altogether. I think it's really good value now, especially the family plan, if you use YouTube heavily, like my kids do.
I don't get such nasty ads, but the ones I get are extremely repetitive. I see the same 3 ads all the time: one for a car, one for a bank, one for clothes.
I think that’s a rationalization. Most people just don’t like ads no matter what they are. And I can’t blame them, ads are terrible. But this is a case where they offer a nice subscription that takes them all away, so people ought to buy that instead.
I pay for YouTube Premium, but what I am afraid will happen is that once enough users opt to pay for the service, YouTube may pull an Amazon Prime and show ads, and then ask for more money to not see the ads.
Well, I don't particularly enjoy ads on Reddit, Gmail, and, when I used them, Tiktok, Facebook, etc but I wasn't particularly pissed off by them either. On YT it seems just so in your way and in your face and egregious. It's like every couple minutes there's an other ad. You can't even chromecast videos to your tv to play in the background because you have to constantly babysit it or else it will load up an ad that goes on forever or 10 minutes until you come back to skip it.
The YT Premium subscription suffers from being low value imo, forced bundling with YT Music which inflates prices, and little to no synergy with Google One subscriptions in most countries.
They offer a cheaper version that isn't bundled with Youtube Music, but then you get ads on official music uploads since I guess that's how the licensing works out. https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite
I don't think it's a rationalization. I have two normie friends who were mostly fine seeing ads on the internet, until one night they saw one too many scum ads on YouTube. They asked me to help them install an adblocker. It was specifically the scumminess of these ads that got them to start using adblockers, which by the way the FBI recommends as a matter of course. People should buy YouTube premium for the convenience features it offers, but everyone should be blocking ads for their own safety and sanity. There is no reason to engage in the ad economy. Everyone should be blocking all ads.
Even google can't keep malware ads out of their system. If we say have geek squad remove the malware, its $149.99, all because google wanted to show me a $0.0001 value ad. No thanks.
You underestimate your attention's value by two orders of magnitude. A typical YouTube ad impression cost is about half a cent or so, sometimes several cents. We're talking serious business here!
Yeah, I find instagram ads not that annoying, and they actually promote things I would buy (I've bought a couple of things over the years through their ads).
Youtube/google ads? Never bought anything, automatically assume they are a scam.
Yeah, I will unabashedly shill for YouTube Premium. It’s cheap, it pays video creators more than ads do, and it includes YouTube Music so you can ditch Spotify.
A family plan says it's $23/month. That's well over the cost of a 3 lb tin from Costco ($18.69 by me), which is several weeks if not a month of cold brew.
We're kind of getting off track here, but a 3-lb tin of preground coffee is not going to taste very good by the time you finish it, if it ever tastes good at all. It's pretty likely to be low-quality and stale before you even pull it off the shelf.
Paying 13 bucks per month, which is a non trivial amount for a lot of people if it competes with other subcription services, merely to block ads on a website that doesn't even produce its own content is in my opinion one of the worst deals on the internet.
That's equivalent to a Netflix subscription, which puts what, 20 billion into original content each year?
People make videos because there is a platform which makes it incredibly easy to share that video all across the planet without cost to them. And in turn that platform has an enormous base of viewers for that content. To suggest that a world without YouTube (or a similar service) would look the same is ludicrous.
I assume with the same amount of magic as they do at all the other streaming platforms, but they still manage to serve up original content. Hence, as a consumer, this seems like a shoddy deal. You're basically paying for ad-free slop, which by the way like Amazon these days you have to crawl through an entire mountain of because the site barely has any content management features either
We're comparing two different companies here. Netflix et al, are in the business of producing original content (good for them), while YouTube et al are in the business of serving user-generated content.
That's not a bug, but a feature. Its the same difference as a high end restaurant, and a hole in the wall restaurant. Both are serving food, yes, but they are doing business in different categories. You cant go to the second restaurant and be like, the food you served didn't come with a smile like this other restaurant here. They seem to have figured it out, why cant you.
Or similarly, you cant go to the high end restaurant and be like - you charge for water now? Why cant you be like this other hole-in-the-wall restaurant.
the entire point is that in this analogy youtube is quite literally the mega chain self serving restaurant on the most decrepit corner, somehow charging you premium prices despite you having to refill your own water.
They're curating nothing, there's garbage everywhere and you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food
> you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food
Then dont go to the restaurant if the "hygiene" is not upto your standards? Why do you insist on eating food from that resturant, and insist that it needs to be free?
Netflix costs around double of Youtube Premium for the technical equivalent experience (No ads, UHD playback). It's not like they're charging the same amount for some much better service.
It's interesting to see such different experiences.
To me, YouTube is the gateway to those wonderful hole-in-the-wall places where you get real food made from scratch by people who care. Yeah, there's also a ton of shit. You have to actually make choices, not just take whatever it puts at the top of your recommendations. But the good stuff is there, and it's really good. A gigantic corporation may be intermediating, but the content is real stuff from real people.
Services like Netflix are the soulless mega-chain restaurants serving committee-designed meals that have been focus-grouped and cost-optimized to death.
there are an absurd amount of different takes on it, its pretty crazy. I probably focus too much on the bad content, meant to grab attention. For that reason i have a distaste for youtube because it sorta pushes that type of stuff to the top, which in my mind makes more people make similar cash grab type content.
meanwhile youtube is actively attempting to keep user's viewing as long as possible... netflix probably doesnt really care if you watch for 2 hours a week vs 10 hours a day, they just want the monthly payment.
I don’t care what they pay to create content. I care about how much stuff they have that I want to watch. YouTube knocks this out of the park. Netflix fails. I actually have Netflix for free (with some ads) through my cell phone plan and I haven’t used it in a year. I use YouTube daily and the subscription fee is well worth it to remove the ads.
I have no respect for Youtube/google developers, like they have apps where you need to pay to use them with the screen turned off, so they screw your battery (reducing your device live) and wasting energy so their boss gets a bigger yacht (cecause it seems ads are not enough)
I don't necessarily disagree but it's not a Google problem. It's a human problem.
For example: What value does your comment provide the world? Enough value to offset the carbon emissions from transmission/storage/retrieval/display? Personally, I'd answer no. Thus your comment itself is a waste of energy.
> Reframing a problem with anything as a human problem is a tautology
I respectfully disagree.
> don’t understand what parent comment is trying to say
They're trying to say Google and those who work there are greedy. I shared my "tautology" to illustrate while OP's point may be largely correct, greed is not unique to Google.
>They're trying to say Google and those who work there are greedy.
More then that, sure they show you ads, GREAT
but they screw your device and environment, this makes them no money , a small fraction of users might buy premium but the rest of the users will waste energy and bdevice life, the developers contribute to killing devices and wasting energy.
That is the user's choice. If a user comes to a bookshop wherein they are allowed to read the books for free but only in the store, they have little right to argue that they should be allowed to take the books home like paying customers because the store's lighting is not to their liking and they want to read in 6000K. They are free to picket outside and claim that the store is ruining people's eyesight, but no one sane will take them seriously.
Furthermore, the appropriate solution to this "problem" would be to stop letting people read anything for free.
Can you guess how much is my comment energy usage compares versus all the devices that run YouTube with the screen on?
What about those electronic devices that will end their life sooner because of that?
My hope is that other people will read my comment, add their own support or feedback and maybe at least one single person will think mroe and had the morals to refuse implementing anti environment and anti user features.
it’s funny that you bring up contractual obligations while google ignores the iOS app store rule (contractual obligation) about locking features like PiP behind paywalls.
>How else would you propose they make money (and satisfy contract obligations)? Because nobody else has figured out a better solution.
Do they make money from those millions of devices that run with the screen on? How ? Is some devil paying them for the damage caused to the environment?
For ads it makes sense but not for this shit policy, if they hate the users that they use youtube for free and ads are not enough for them then either put more ads, or find some other methods that do not screw then environment (maybe use the sound of crying babies each 30 seconds if you are not a premium )
.. and that's YT's problem? This is like being angry with Apple, because an app developer created only an iOS app and didnt create an Android. What did Apple do wrong if a developer chose to only create an iOS app?
YouTube is the system, you've not heard of "don't hate the player, hate the game"?
If I "blamed" the creators, you'd be telling me it's not their fault, they're just incentivised by the system, they're just playing the game.
But when I "blame" the system, you're telling me the system is not at fault, that it's individual choice to choose a near-monopoly on video discoverability that is propelled by and heavily benefiting from the same company's actual monopoly of search.
Is it "YT's problem?"? No, it's to YT's massive benefit, it's my problem when I have to suffer through adverts.
Alphabet is the fifth largest company in the world, has earnings higher than most countries' GDP, and is established to have engaged in illegal behavior as a monopolist. It's fair to say they're closer to "the system" than "a player".
Not that this was part of the suit, but the whole practice of giving things away for free and subsidizing them with stalking and ads obviously distorts or completely destroys markets, so yes they can be blamed for doing that. The behavior of these companies is so bad that people in a recent thread were claiming things like chat services (where a single computer can provide service for millions of users) cannot be sustainably run by charging money.
I've always paid for cable without complaining, but the adtech surveillance reality that was innovated by the tech industry makes me less willing to support them.
What if Google didn't horde whatever data it could about me from the analytics systems that it has installed on a myriad of websites without my consent?
What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?
What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?
> What if Google didn't horde whatever data it could about me from the analytics systems that it has installed on a myriad of websites without my consent?
Arent you voluntarily using their website? Nobody is forcing you to open your browser, and type y-o-u-t-u-b-e-dot-c-o-m.
> What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?
MKBHD, LTT and others are willingly uploading videos to YouTube. YT doesnt have an exclusive deal with any of those. Infact, those folks are free to upload the same video to Vimeo, Twitch and others. What is YT doing wrong here?
> What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?
Arent websites voluntarily embedding Google Analytics? They can decide today, if they wanna switch to Plausible, or any of the other analytics providers right?
I still fail to understand how this is a fault of a company? Would you blame Apple if everyone bought iPhones? What should Apple do? Ask people not to buy their phones?
If airtags were used almost solely to nonconsensually and surreptitiously stalk people (i.e. not to track the belongings of the people buying them), yes I think it would be fair to blame Apple. Especially if that were the advertised purpose, as it is with GA.
Google Analytics is a tool that websites use to track users, similar to how a store might use a pen & paper to keep track of phone numbers or names. The store made the decision to buy the pen to track users. Why are you angry with the pen company?
Google Analytics is not going around tracking users. They provide a service that the website you decided to go to (cnn.com, bbc.com) is using. If you have to be angry, be angry with cnn or bbc.
Pens have a purpose other than surveillance, and aren't as capable as machines. A better analogy would be Bluetooth trackers and cameras with machine vision to identify and watch people's movements and eye gaze as they move around the store. And yes, that is creepy and the manufacturers should be criticized for creating it.
Also, client side scripts do not run on the website's property. They are taking advantage of the wide-open security model of web clients (the model they coincidentally get to define because they dump massive amounts of money into giving away a free browser, making competition in the space nearly impossible) to use people's computers for unauthorized purposes. It's a malware payload just like a crypto miner. They should be treated the same way (or more severely) that they would be if they published miners and told web developers to add them to get free money (taking their own cut of course). The operator and the tool creator should both be blamed for shady behavior when the tool is designed and advertised for shady purposes.
It's the fault of the company because they leverage their illegal monopoly position to do this.
You're operating under this unrealistic assumption that Google is an innocent entity that has not broken the law to get to the position that they are in.
This is false. Google does not play by the rules and as such your assertion that people should in turn play by the rules when interacting with Google is unreasonable.
I dont follow your logic. The website you visit (cnn, bbc) has made the decision to use Google Analytics. They can very well stop using the GA, and nothing would happen.
Imagine all the restaurants in the world used IKEA for their tables & chairs. Can you say OMG IKEA has a monopoly? No sir, IKEA didnt go into the stores and install the tables & chairs, the restuarants did. Will you be angry with IKEA?
I would imagine that those sites use GA because it's the best tool for their needs. It's probably the best tool for their needs because it is both a very well developed tool with superior integration with other parts of their platforms and has a large developer base that is familiar with it. These advantages come from Google's monopolistic practices and the money and resources that it provides them.
I can certainly imagine such a thing but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant to the situation as IKEA has as far as I'm aware never been ruled to be a monopoly while Google has.[0]
Ultimately my position on this subject comes down to this: Google does things that are hostile to me. They do things that are hostile to you. They do things that are hostile to society writ large. They break the law and violate the social contract. My morals necessitate responding to such an entity with disregard for whatever they're legally entitled to.
I don't like the way that I'm surveilled by Google and I don't like the way that they abuse their monopoly position and lobby the government to make it impossible for me to evade that surveillance.
To bring the conversation back to where it started: I already pay them with my privacy, I pay for the economic harm their monopolistic practices have on society, and I pay for the corrosive effects their lobbying has on the political structure.
I'm not going to be paying them for an ad free Youtube experience.
I've come to rely on a robust method of adblocking YouTube which I believe to be perfectly reliable and impossible for YouTube to circumvent: avoid watching YouTube. Incidentally this method also reliably prevents false buffering.
I'd highly recommend everyone try reducing their intake of passive entertainment like youtube and redirecting that time towards more creative or mindful pursuits.
You're right, I could probably finish my motorcycle build projects without videos. But why??
I just checked my uBlock stats inside of AdNauseum on my personal laptop. This is a machine I have not used regularly in over 2 years. Being generous I am assuming every ad blocked was static, not animated, had no sound, and required no interaction by me to skip, so just was a one second glance.
I have gotten back 115+ days of my life to do things I actually want to do. 10.34 million ads. From one single machine, in just Firefox. I now have AdGuard on my network and use Tailscale to block ads on all my devices. There is no world where I ever go back to seeing ads that I can block and definitely will not be rewarding them for trying to push ads on what was a great product.
if all i'd watch are tv shows like netflix its one thing, but yt has such broad content i'd rather not be advertised/tracked about stuff i just clicked once and never again...
You can change it from Google account > Data & Privacy > History Settings > youtube History
If you have youtube premium + a general purpose ad blocker + disable watch history its really hard to tell if you are being tracked.
If you do decide to disable watch history, be prepared for just how terrible the median youtube interest is. All recommendations become beyond worthless.
I think $15 for a whole month of entertainment, tutorials, and useful content and to pay the people who create the videos is worth it.
They are trying to block ads blockers as some manager wasn't able to get reward. Or is worried he wont get it. And this mean that money that can be collected from ads has peaked. Now come the "optimizations", now payable, then no longer free, later payable with ads, then they will squeeze content creators, that will move to other platforms where you will have to pay for multiple platforms where you were once watching it for free on YT.
Sounds familiar?
Made it as short as possible, but this could be wall of text, from comparing to what happened to streaming services etc. Without piracy (not advocating but it is a fact that it forced publishers into internet model) we would probably still buy content on CDs and DVDs, maybe BluRays.
Greed of infinite growth in finite system has destroyed the planet and you can bet it will destroy YT too.
I got rid of the Youtube app from my Roku many months ago, and I haven't missed it. That wouldn't be the case for most other streaming apps that I still have.
I think for me - right from the day Youtube launched - I never liked the interface. It's the worst streaming interface of all the streaming services.
As for youtube, I just pay for ad free. If they ever start violating that they'll also be banished to the corn field.
I also pay for Kagi which has the ability to block certain domains from results. I'd imagine that blocking Instagram, Reddit, Youtube, etc. would also prevent rabbit-holing.
The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us, the more we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting. If they can't leave well enough alone and look the other way on ad blocking, (which is the only way to avoid exposing myself and family to these dangerous ads), they need to be under a lot more scrutiny for the ads they choose to run.
This is one of the things that kills me. Even in broadcasting TV, you get typical :15, :30, :60 ads with the occasional :45 or longer :90. The ad pods are also defined so that you get a set number say something like 3:00 max.
YT has scammy ads where if you are just trying to let something stream in the background while you focus on other things where an ad plays past the 5s skippable time, they have some that are full on half hour if not even longer infomercials that takes completely out of the flow of whatever you were watching. That's down right criminal to me. The fact that long form content can be used as something that interrupts someone else's content is such a strange thing to allow. They must pay out the nose for those ad impressions
You are absolutely on to something. I think the seemingly random length of ads makes them feel somewhat more jarring to me. I also hate how sometimes the ads are just randomly interjected into a video. I know creators can control this to some degree, but older videos seem to suffer more.
I have had ads on Youtube that were hours long. Obviously, at that length, they can be skipped. I know have some kind of 'trauma response' that when I watch Youtube on a computer while laying down, AFK, I have to have my wireless mouse in close proximity in case one those long ads appears. If I could predict the intervals in which the ads occurred and for how long, then I would probably just let them run and tune them out of my mind.
Regardless, I swear Youtube serves me such long ass ads as a punishment sometimes. Sadly, my suspicion is supported by extremely weak evidence and confirmation bias. I'll just say this... Sometimes when I get served the same ad too many times, I report the ad for something like being offensive, inappropriate, or whatever. The ads seem to never come back, but I swear within a day or two, I start getting longer ads -- even movie-length ads. I have also reported ads if they happen to be something like +30s and unskippable. This makes the ad instantly dismiss (or it used to, at least).
I doubt they actually do that, but I’m sure it would increase ad view times. Im probably just only remembering the ads I don’t immediately skip.
The still frame ads are always NSFW games or ads for viagra-like products. In shorts, the ads are always scams of some kind. Usually deepfakes of elon musk “giving investment advice” but also “medical experts” recommending likely dangerous scams, or “free money the government isnt telling you about” if you give them all your information, or weird ai generated videos advertising mystery products that certainly don’t actually exist.
In front of (and in the middle of) actual videos, it’s a mix of the all the scams, plus the occasional ad for a legitimate product, but rarely in my native language. Usually Spectrum internet ads exclusively in spanish.
I got a gun ad a few times several months ago. Advertising features such as “no license required” and “easy to sneak through security”. As blatantly illegal as it was, the ad ran for at least a full month. I reported it every time I saw it, but I’m convinced those reports aren’t ever viewed by anyone.
I continue blocking these ads on my desktop without remorse. I only encounter the ads on my iPhone.
Why should I reward that by paying them?
Seems awfully convenient.
If I were blocking the ads, I wouldn't be aware of how bad it's gotten.
While time is finite and valuable, if I am already on YouTube, then I have already committed to choice of wasting that nebulous amount of time in the first place.
Sounds like awfully convenient motivated reasoning.
Split up any and all monopolies, and nationalize what should provide a common good such as payment networks and internet infrastructure.
I've got bad news for you
But that's not how YT works. YT doesn't charge you for good stuff. It charges you for not delivering crap. That's not legitimate business, that's a racket. I have no qualm punishing YT for that. Content creators are free to find other ways to monetize their labor, if their labor is actually valuable. (And so many of the good ones do, quite successfully.)
This “It charges you for not delivering crap.” line is bullshit. Serving video content costs money, they’ve given you the choice of how to pay for it, and you don’t like the choices but want to keep getting the content.
You can... just not visit youtube, right?
So even if you’re trying to use YouTube for something of value, you’re battling ads. Or at least our kids are.
Media, on the whole, is a good thing. We know more about the world. We know more about the excesses of the aristocracy. We know more about the violence committed by violent people (and I don't mean local petty crime. Genocide.) Before we can improve these things, we need to know about them. "just don't consume media" is a regression to a time where people knew little outside their local sphere.
Youtube/Google has a monopoly on one part of the modern media landscape and it has to be fixed. Not just put our heads in the sand.
Indeed, if there was a 'thin adblock writer line' flag it'd already be on my bumper. Than you for your service, we salute you.
I have been astounded at how scammy those ads are. There is a major class of ads that make fairly significant bullshit medical claims and I’m semi convinced the purpose is not for someone to make money but to wage psychological warfare on vulnerable people. Another class of ads says “the US government is going to collapse and that’s why you should buy a freedom battery” and the ad couches itself as a battery advertisement but how many vulnerable people hear that in the background 16 times a day and don’t end up subconsciously accepting some part of it?
In any case it’s all a manipulative cesspool and it’s bizarre to me that a property that Google otherwise values is willing to sling such slop at its users. I suspect a large part of this is that the executives who run YouTube never see their ads.
If you don't like them, then pay for Youtube Premium and you can get ad-free experience. Although if it's not available in your country, then adblocking is a reasonable approach.
/s
Not as fun to write about as coercion is, though.
I'm shocked
Beats ads, as far as I'm concerned, but I can't help but feel like your average user wouldn't agree.
I can't think of a time I didn't have more than one browser, even in 1995 when I made Netscape my default, I kept Cello around for some things. More browsers are better than fewer, not only for the industry, but for individuals too.
If an actual ad played, I'd be irritated beyond belief. But when there's a 12 second buffer, I have enough patience training for slow load times that I instinctively just quickly check my email or spend a brief moment lost in thought. Especially when it's every video. If it was one in every 5 videos, I'd notice it and be bothered. When it's every video, it's part of the experience and my brain just cuts it out automatically.
I never made that agreement. And if some software on my computer somehow gets YouTube to deliver me the content anyway, that's not my fault. In my view, it's a cat and mouse game, they can do whatever they want to try to stop me, and vice versa. If they win, I won't complain; but if I do, so be it.
By clicking on the video you did. It is in their terms of service.
How is you purposefully trying to block ads not your fault? Whose fault is it that you installed an Adblock? If you went to a grocery store and told the clerk you already paid and they let you leave would that not be your fault either?
But don't worry, something else will eventually kill YouTube. Most likely they'll miss some sort of disruptive innovation. Like maybe in 30 years everyone will have content beamed directly into their neutral implants and only a few old people will still watch online videos.
> Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.
I don’t even do that, I just watch it as-is. I just don’t need to imagine that YouTube and I have agreed to anything.
I've held the position that, if YT wants to, they can block me from their platform for using an adblocker, and I would have no moral ground to stand on.
However, that isn't what they do. They try to circumvent it. They try to make it technically impossible. They try to mislead users into thinking their extensions are malicious.
We often rationalize using ad blockers because ads can be intrusive or annoying. But let’s asking ourselves: Why do we feel entitled to get this for free?
This isn’t a moral judgment. I genuinely want to understand the reasoning.
On YouTube, we went from a banner on the video to a few seconds of a video before to multiple ads before the video to multiple ad pauses even on relatively short videos (under 10 minutes). Add to that the sponsored sections of the video itself, which are added by the content creator, and other ads (stores, tickets, etc) that sometimes YouTube adds under the video even if you pay for premium.
Google Search pages used to have one or two ads at the top, with a different background colour than search results. Now sometimes I have to scroll down to see organic content, because sponsored content fills my screen.
I don't think I'm entitled to have access to all this for free, but we went too far... and so I use an adblocker on all my devices.
Here's an attempt at a double-negative answer: you can't be ethically compelled into an unethical contract, and since advertisements are manipulative, voyeuristic and seek to take advantage of the limitations of human attentional control, it's a priori impossible for watching an ad or downloading a tracker to ever be ethically compulsory.
You want to watch some content. The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.
You are not obligated to watch ads. You are opting to watch them in exchange for the free content, then skipping out on a commitment you volunteered for while still taking the free content.
The "unethical contact" argument is bullshit, because you made a choice but didn't live up to it. Instead of either paying or not watching, you watched anyway.
You're wrong in both parts.
1. There is no way to pay to only remove all ads. YT premium bundles some music nonsense and also doesn't remove ads added by creators.
2. "Watching" isn't part of the contract, only "injected ads" are. Do you read every billboard in exchange for the benefit of better roads financed with ad revenue?
> Ads however may appear on ... Shorts, and when you search or browse.
So again, you can't pay just to replace ads. (By the way, there is another huge difference - premium is a subscription, so not tied to ad time replaced)
Let's be honest here, ads are trying to get you to buy things, but "psychological abuse" is a pretty extreme hyperbole, especially for people already in such tight poverty. They've got enough going on that someone trying to get them to buy shitty knives or switch their car insurance isn't going to be impactful.
The issue is that those are not the only ads Youtube is showing to people. You can basically upload any video and make it an ad. Sometimes Youtube's moderation fails and some nasty stuff slips through the cracks:
> In the latest incident, a Redditor describes how their young nephew was exposed to an explicit ad while watching a Fortnite stream by the well-known YouTuber Loserfruit.
> “My 7yr nephew was watching Loserfruit (Fortnite streamer) and then came up to me asking what Loserfruit is doing because this ad started playing,” the concerned uncle shared.
Source: https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-explicit-ads-proble...
Hell, they'll show weight loss ads to people with eating disorders - and this one might just be intentional rather than a failure of Youtube's moderation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckeatingdisorders/comments/18gx1v... (Just one example but it's not hard to find more)
"Psychological abuse" is very much not hyperbole in the worst case scenarios. And as an extra bonus, Youtube promotes scam ads as well:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39117360
The provider is welcome to serve ads, and i am welcome to not watch them. When there are Ads on TV and I get up to go to the kitchen, am i skipping out on a commitment? Am I now a freeloader? Should the TV have a camera to make sure I watch all the ads like a good little boy?
People have been fastforwarding/skipping ads for decades. this is nothing new.
Unlike DVR for TVs, you are not welcome to skip playing them entirely. They've been pretty clear that skipping them via the use of ad blockers is a violation of the terms of service.
Advertisers do care about them. It's just that they don't have a way to track/measure it.
With how user-hostile and anti-competitive Google is behaving, this is like asking why soldiers feel entitled to shoot at the enemy. Keep giving them money, keep watching their ads that they sell on rigged auctions [1], and eventually the only way to access the web will be with locked-against-the-user browsers [2], and everything will be surveilled (though it nearly already is - Google never asks itself why it should feel entitled to follow users around the web, or in real-life, despite opt-outs [3], and you'll find support for any alternative OSes mysteriously withering due to secret anti-competitive contracts between Google and manufacturers [4]). I know this isn't the reasoning people use, but that is what the outcome will be.
As for ads - it has always been hard, nearly impossible to block them, and few people did. Just like you can't block a billboard next to the freeway, you can't block a jpeg that's served as part of the webpage you're visiting, as it's programmatically indistinguishable from native content.
What people actually block are not ads, but a hybrid half-ad-half-surveillance entity, that's called an "ad" by historical accident.
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/11/25/google-is-three-t...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
[3] https://apnews.com/article/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20200311172517/https://www.proto...
I get that Google has infinite money and infinite evil. But how convenient you also get to skip out on paying the majority expense, which goes to the creator...
And yes virtuous commentor, I know you are one of the 1.5% that convert to a patreon supporter. Now ask everyone else why they get to eat for free (while endlessly complaining that the restaurant sucks).
Why do I Adblock? Because a line must be drawn or else this marketing growth engine will consume everything. I mean literally without any consumer pushback this attention extraction engine will continue expanding until every moment of digital consumption is monetized. It’s already destroyed too much of the internet.
If Google want to force ads, they can put them in the video stream. If not, then they’re trying to have it both ways.
Perhaps you also have to show your YouTube history when you enter the US.
It's my browser, my copy of the website, and I'll have my user agent do whatever I want.
The burden of proof is on the ads to justify why they should be watched, given that the ads themselves provide zero value to the viewer.
YouTube ads in particular are a cesspit of scams. I don't want to watch ads for things like Scientology.
What is so difficult for you to understand this business relationship?
It's like asking a lawyer why does he defend an obviously guilty client? Because it's adversarial system, his job is to protect his client, not to worry about the other side. The other side is trying to maximize their advantage too. Google has defined my relationship with it in such terms through its behavior.
If YouTube were still an independent operator I would be more amenable to your argument.
In any case, the fact I can recite an ad from memory shows that I am at least watching some of their ads, notably on mobile.
I listen to Spotify Freemium. There’s a special ad that says: “Enjoy the next 30 minutes of ad-free listening”. 2 minutes later I get 2-3 ads back to back.
Enough. Happy Jellyfin user. I’ll buy up my music gradually.
I'd block ads if there wasn't premium (or if premium had ads). YouTube still deserves and needs money, but ads don't "extract" the money from me. At best (and most likely*) every ad shown to me is effectively the advertiser paying YouTube to waste my time. At worst (if I actually buy the product), the ad is effectively me paying the advertiser and getting something useless or harmful. The chance a YouTube ad shows me something beneficial is too small to remotely justify the other ads which waste my time (or if I buy, the Earth's resources or my attention or etc.).
I also block ads on newspapers and other smaller sites, but don't buy their premium. Honestly, I don't think this is fair, although I think it's small in the grand scheme of things. The problem is, I don't feel those sites justify me paying, and I'd be spending well over $100/month if I subscribed to every one; I'd rather not see each site than pay, although currently I do see them without paying which is unfair (showing me ads is wasteful, as explained earlier, so I don't even consider it an alternative). You know what, I'll probably subscribe to a few (maybe AP and Reuters) and every other story I encounter, see if I can find the version on one of those sites.
* "But ads work on you subliminally." I hear and read this a lot, but I really doubt it for invasive ads like YouTube's (also billboards etc. I'm not talking about covert ads or "good" non-invasive ads like Show HN). First, I recognize many of the big advertisers (e.g. those VPNs and sodas) and will never buy their products, so those ads shown to me specifically are wasted. Moreover, I'm particularly methodical when buying things. I always go in with a plan: sometimes it's a simple plan like "buy the second-cheapest with a good description and decent reviews" or "buy what your parents do", but I never buy something because I recognize it. In fact, if something seems familiar I pay extra attention, and if I recognize it was invasively advertised, I become less likely to buy it, because I suspect invasive ads correlate with low value and want to actively dissuade invasive ads in general. "But your parents and the reviewers buy based off ads, and you buy based off them"...OK, show my parents and reviewers the ads, not me.
Ultimately, invasive ads waste my time and annoy me, and I don't see their benefits which justify that. I'd rather pay a small fee than see or hear every invasive ad (like with YouTube premium), and I suspect the advertisers would benefit from that too.
But they seem hesitant to, probably because that would risk losing the engagement of those users.
Why they think I should waste my finite time, compute and bandwidth on things I don't want needs justification.
I'm not going to sit there, waste my time, watching the same ads for the 5th time that has no relevance to me. Adblockers make youtube tolerable. If there were no adblockers i genuinely would be unable to use it.
Has nothing to do with a sense of entitlement, they are ads for things I would never purchase. so whats the point then? Why is it OK for people to pay to waste my time just because they paid to? What gives them the right to force me to watch that? Hard no. It's my browser, and I'll do as i damn well please.
I WOULD pay for youtube if it was a good product. But it's not. I'm not going to opine on all the reasons it's not. if/when they make it good i'll pay. That's a them problem.
but there is NO WAY i am going to start accepting ads back into my life. I'll just stop watching youtube.
This seems like a bug in browsers, or possibly in the spec. Page content and scripts should never be able to restrict what browser extensions can do.
oh its a Chrome feature! Around 2 years ago Chrome pushed an update that speedup time to load first initial page by delaying Extension initialization. Last page you closed Chrome on will load before uBo, will be able to bypass all filters/block and will be able to detect uBo being loaded.
On the other hand, the golden era of YouTube has passed. You aren't losing out on much if you simply stop using it.
Obviously not the ads the content creator has put into the video itself.
But yes, uBlock and Sponsorblock together do a much better job of removing the ads.
Just sponsored shorts and banners when browsing. But we're talking about videos here.
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.
I’ve been doing #1 for over 5 years and will never do anything different (up to say $50-ish USD a month).
The cost of hosting still seems to be free. Isn’t it the watching that comes with a cost?
My household uses Newpipe we don't pay for shit.
I'm doing my best to move my viewing off of YouTube, and move the money off of YouTube, in hopes that it eases the creators moving off of YouTube.
I’m not too deep into it anymore but there’s some great articles from Netflix out there talking about the crazy optimisations done to their edge servers for streaming.
Not really. They'll just need to recode for you that one minute with the ad. The rest of the video can stay the same.
If they're doing it smartly, they can even avoid full recompression and just splice in the ad.
Pretty much since YouTube started cracking down on adblockers, r/youtube top post Every. Single. Day. is usually someone complaining that they just got hit with "adblock detected" and comments split between "Yeah it sucks, hit me last month" and "Huh, uBlock Origin works fine for me. I must be super smart. YouTube can't defeat me"
We've all seen what they're doing with AI-generated video, and we know their market and political power. Eventually they'll be remaking the video so the person or animal or rock or tree on the screen is giving AI-generated product testimonials.
Then you would need to set up a server that would do all this and serve as a 'mirror' to your podcasts without the ads.
https://github.com/jdrbc/podly_pure_podcasts
In the future, everything will be like that vapid chicken wing podcast (the one where they bring on an interesting, talented person and then waste half an hour interviewing her about sriracha)
So Ira Glass will be narrating This American Life while simultaneously reviewing different varieties of Doritos, etc.
...or the producers of The Rest is History will add the Planters Peanut Man as a third host
...or Marques Brownlee will review every product in relation to how well it works with Bose headphones
My favorite relentless one is Tracker (Amazon Prime), who spend approximately 30% of screen time dedicated to showing off a GMC pickup and Airstream, but the most egregious was one dialog line:
> As Colter enters and gives them hugs, Velma remembers that they got a gift for him. Reenie hands him the gift - very conspicuously packaged in an Amazon box with its trademark logo and blue tape - and says, "I've gotta say, next-day delivery is pretty sweet. Thank you, Amazon Prime!"
...it powers through tough grease and grime
...with no harsh smells!
The future is Fantastik®.
This is like saying I was able to sneak into a concert. Sure, but at some point the restrictions are gonna come down hard.
I pay for a subscription to The Athletic, who used to offer ad free podcasts in their app. Last month they signed an exclusive deal with Acast, and now I cannot possibly listen to their podcasts without ads.
A third-party client has room to make a dramatic improvement on the twitch experience by not dropping audio while you make the switch from the ad stream to the content stream.
A) sincerely, trustfully, optimistically, etc.
...or...
B) critically, skeptically, experimentally, observationally, etc.
Alternatively, many creators already upload ad-free versions to their Patreon or other paywalled platforms, they could upload those to YouTube as well to be shown to premium users if YT allowed for it and forced them to.
Alas I'm not willing to pay 13€ a month for just slightly fewer ads.
The next step is to scrape the videos, strip the ads, store them on a torrent magnet and serve that instead. Yes it would have to be from a shady RU or CN or NK or IN site. I’m fine with that.
Option 1: be a hermit and not watch anything on YouTube ever. You can't look up repair guides, fully use a news website that I'm subscribed to that got rid of their self hosted version, watch a subset of public broadcasts that we pay for via taxes, etc. It's not just entertainment / a Netflix replacement
Option 2: give in and enrich this monopolistic tracking company
Option 3: try to pirate the content
I'd feel very different if this were Spotify or an individual artist: I can use three other music services with massively overlapping offerings from different jurisdictions. Or supermarkets, for the same reason. But if it's irreplaceable and gatekept, I can understand both sides here
¹ https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468?hl=en
my youtube homepage is just that left sidebar, which has dots if a new video for one of the channels i care about uploads. It totally frees me from clickbait thumbnails, and "youtube rabbit holes".
youtube has just been getting slaughtered with horrible trends of mindless content, low effort documentary stuff, all sorts of low effort garbage with high effort thumbnails/titles. it is so nice to just rid myself of all of it.
like a forest preserve deciding theyd like billboards in the middle of their paths after a few years.
The average daily YouTube watch time is north of 40 minutes per day for adults in the US. That's a penny per minute for YouTube... 11x cheaper than a movie.
Starting a product or service at $30 / month sets expectations up front (no ad supported free tier)
This is an incompatible strategy with venture backed “get all the market share possible by offering services for free to crush competitors so we can have a monopoly to exploit later” mindset
It's for content that use music. As you said of you want ad free music you need the full one.
I also wanted to ensure my views resulted in the creators being paid, it goes without saying that the royalties for streaming are abysmal and is a separate conversation, but it was a contributing factor for me.
It might be worth looking into if the pricing differential is similarly minimal where you live.
An unfortunate aspect is that I’m frequently recommended videos which I would have to pay to watch. As a youtube premium subscriber, feeling like I’m constantly being upsold has begun to grate on me. I’d really appreciate a feature to hide these videos as a premium subscriber, which I have little faith in them implementing. On my laptop it’s easy enough to hide these thumbnails (as I already do with shorts) using ublock origin. However this is making me reconsider my subscription. Why should I have to use a third party tool to best use this service which I’m paying a fairly significant fee for? I’ve similarly used ublock origin to work around recent change where only three videos were shown on each row
That's older than the "membership" concept. They licensed a bunch of television and movies and made them pay-per-view.
A 1080p music video costs about one tenth of one cent to serve to one person at retail CDN rates.
You could easily host this yourself and decide what the terms are to view it. E.g. ads, or paywall or free because you benefit from the exposure.
Once upon a time AdSense/YouTube saved you from getting an unmanageable $5,000 bill from your ISP because your content went viral but nowadays their value proposition is more about network effects plus built-in revshare scheme.
Maybe if they paid their users more, so they didn't also have to add 'sponsor segments' inside their video's it would make more sense. The bundling music for the same price is the same crap cable and phone companies have been doing for decades, that most people hate. Let me buy just youtube without ads, and keep spotify.
But as it sits right now, $14/month for video's without youtube ads, but still with ads added by the creators themselves (or paid promotion, I guess) is pretty expensive, compared to $17/month for actual movies with no ads at all.
And for that matter, the number of active viewers is also significantly higher since there's no paywall. AND they also support live streaming.
whatever the merits, this (and google's neutering of extensions in chrome) signals a fundamental attitude shift from ~10 years ago; they're more interested in squeezing margins out of their dominant platforms instead of growth
In my experience, they not only deliberately increase volume to pretty much screech whatever insipid bullshit is being offered at you, but they also can sometimes run for dozens of minutes unless you manually go to your device and press "skip". TV ads never did these sorts of utterly shitty, tedious things.
I even wonder how anything so fucking hostile and annoying to a YT free user can possibly be effective? Who's actively paying for all this garbage ad placement with such scummy little playback mechanics?
Until the CALM Act was passed in 2010, networks actually did increase the volume on advertisements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...
If you want to back down memory lane, search on YouTube for old recordings of network TV ad breaks from the late 90s and early 2000s- they’re just obnoxious.
The only thing I miss at all is being able to leave a TV on and have it keep playing something reasonable, not convince itself that watching a car review means I want to watch a screaming kid trolling in Minecraft followed by the Syrian Civil War.
Haha, so then what if i'm young but want some shady gold investments while I look into trying Ambien?
That means if those videos show up in a search, or on your home page, or in a recommendation they do not have the red bar on the bottom that indicates that you have already watched them.
Funny I make YT videos too trying to build an audience, I'd like to not put ads on it but not my choice
I don't understand how people can just accept ads it drives me insane when some random shit starts playing
I already lost money with YT, I bought so many UHD movies on their platform ($20 ea) and they won't stream it in HD unless you're on a supported device or ad-ridden tv
edit: alright, aftrer seeing it's $13 I will get it, I have been converted
I do pay for it, the time to make the content
Sucks how everything is like that nowadays, IG, Reddit
(have to join a platform to be seen)
If YouTube and its content actually has value, then presumably a paywall would have no effect of revenues of YouTube or creators. On the other hand if the content is actually nearly worthless, the vast majority of people would find something better to do with their time.
I know which outcome I’d be betting on!
I pay for YouTube and Nebula.
I'll compromise, I'll get premium but still have my adblock
Why?
I didn't write the filter, hence, "Mostly stolen from elsewhere."
I'd love to use Invidious or Peertube to watch the videos, but I also want my subscription money to go to the video creators. Youtube allocates it proportionally to the viewing time.
.. or a competitor (who's a competitor to LTT? GamerNexus? MKBHD?) would take their place.
I run Brave on multiple devices and there's now a "glitch" a few seconds after what wouod be the ads, starts. I put up with this because the alternative is to put up with ads that treat viewers like morons with one hand in the mouse and other in the wallet.
If you know what "it gives you wings" or "the happiest place on earth" means, the ads already worked.
Ads are trying to combat obscurity. A brand with bad reputation is far better than a brand nobody's ever heard of.
The thing about those idiotic third party ads on YouTube, which is so grotesquely annoying is that, unlike TV ads of old, some of then can literally run for dozens of minutes at auto-increased volume unless you go to your device and skip them at some point. That is some particularly shitty nonsense right there.
What I am not happy with is a lack of control over the homepage and recommendations. I would really like to be able to easily block channels from ever showing up, but you can only sort of do this if you click "don't recommend this channel anymore" from the homepage. But you can't do this if a video shows up recommended from another video. And overall, it just feels like they are spending so much effort trying to get me to watch the next video instead of enjoy the one I am trying to watch.
For my kids, I came up with an ad hoc policy where they can watch from the homepage / recs on weekends but during the week have to stick to a personal playlist they can only add videos to on the weekends. This removes the algorithmically driven addictive nature of YouTube and unsurprisingly they end up moderating their use of Youtube within their alotted screen time much better. It distinguishes between, "I want to watch this" and "I want to pull the slot machine lever." But I would be a lot happier if I could better curate access to content for my kids too. Youtube Kids sucks, it ends up filtering out a bunch of interesting stuff like carpentry and nature content that hasn't been marked "for kids" in favor of videos of kids shopping for toys and stuff.
I'm curious about a buyer's perspective: would you say this is "tying"? (Seems like an ambiguous word for it but I can see no other translation for koppelverkoop)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
To me it seems like trying to undermine the market for music streaming (which is currently somewhat healthy with a handful of competing services worldwide where you can get access to most artists' work) by abusing the monopoly on videos that people often want a subscription on. The parent corp has so much cash to spare, giving away music for nearly free is worth it to make it extremely difficult to compete in this other market. From an individual's point of view, you're a thief of your own wallet if you don't get this two in one deal (assuming you want both). I'm not sure how to feel about people who buy this
Totally a theory but sometimes YouTube has a button that says roughly "show me something new". I think that may be the source of those channels returning.
What’s worse is the privacy side. Discord apparently leaves the microphone open even when you’re using push-to-talk. There’s been anecdotal evidence from users monitoring their network traffic that mic input is still active in the background, likely being piped to local buffers or held in memory under the guise of latency reduction. That might sound innocent, but the distinction between “open but not recording” and “recording” is razor thin when the user has explicitly told the app not to listen until a key is pressed. At minimum, it’s a trust violation — at worst, it’s surveillance theater.
This is the standard bait-and-switch. Build a good product, earn user trust, then slowly degrade it with tracking, telemetry, ads, and manipulative UX until it’s barely recognizable. Discord used to be a breath of fresh air compared to Skype or Teamspeak, and now it’s another data-harvesting machine with a gamer paint job. It’s telling that more users are looking into self-hosted options or jumping to alternatives like Matrix or Mumble. Discord doesn’t have ads yet, but all the groundwork is being laid — and people are right to be wary.
Capitalism always wins
Not everyone is American.
With Alphabet being from a country with extreme capitalism, the comment you're replying to seems applicable no matter where the viewers are (regardless of whether I agree with their viewpoint/outlook). YouTube's owners can choose to block or prosecute whoever doesn't comply with their terms. Not saying that's likely, just that: this isn't a matter of needing to be on the American continent
Edit: perhaps interesting to realise that, conversely, laws in North Korea might make it illegal for Alphabet to have certain terms if they want to serve consumers in their market. (A better example here would be EU with copyright legislation that makes it illegal to sign away your moral rights, for instance.) It works both ways and both could legally prosecute the other at the same time and both win in their area! But with YouTube being able to gatekeep the content here, one has more power than the other..
Google is intentionally throttling YouTube, slowing down users with ad blockers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44304293
Pretty much all of my YouTube ads are for TV shows, movies, cars, mobile games, consumer products, and various consumer services. Volkswagen, Dove, TurboTax, etc. All incredibly mainstream.
Maybe you're located in a country or region maintain advertisers avoid?
I work in mental health and I am seeing more people who spend a substantial amount on “parlays”. Many examples downplay or hide the behavior from their social network and the extreme examples spend a significant amount. The advertising is obviously predatory and goes against what we know about control dynamics in addict behavior but we tend to view that as a personal moral failing rather than exploiting basic biology and as a result allow the dealer to ruin countless lives before any action is taken (see Purdue and Teva lawsuits)
I'm honestly not really sure why you're complaining. If you don't want to be tracked or profiled, you're going to get the lowest quality ads. Why do you think higher-quality advertisers should be wasting money trying to reach you, when you are going out of your way to avoid any interest in them?
To be clear, I'm not criticizing what you're doing to avoid tracking, or your stance against it. But I'm questioning why you would then complain about the ads you receive.
This might be a controversial take, but I don't want to see soft-core porn ads. I don't want to see scam ads. I don't want to see the worst of the worst. It is not a necessary state of affairs that the lowest common denominator ads are ads that are explicitly attempting to prey upon the least informed, most vulnerable members of society.
The fact that the worst ads are the way that they are is indicative of YouTube's willingness to engage in user-hostile activities.
If they were less willing to engage in hostile ads, there would be less hostility towards their ads.
YouTube's solution is extremely simple: vet ads and don't accept money to run hostile ads.
Right, then avoid them. Either don't use YouTube, or else pay for Premium so you don't see them.
You claim people are hostile to watching YouTube's ads because of their quality. But I don't think so -- I think they're mostly seeing normal ads, not scammy ones. Because they're not taking measures against tracking. Your experience would seem to be very much an outlier.
I simply don't see the ads you're talking about, not even a little bit, so I can't really speak to YouTube's acceptable ads policies. But just so you know -- you can also mark checkboxes in your Google profile around which categories of ads you are and aren't interested in. I actually did that, and got less ads for categories I have zero interest in. That may help your ads experience, and make your ad quality complaints go away, if you're philosophically OK with that, since you're providing data freely rather than through tracking.
EDIT: also, I think everyone should block ads. We should snub advertisers and surveillers all of the time. If they want to be hostile towards users, users should be hostile towards them.
Capitalists have had it too good for too long. It's time consumers stop caring about how the poor capitalist will make their dime.
Until the capitalists take the time to respect us, the consumers, we don't owe them anything.
It's time for reciprocity. If they're hostile, we reciprocate. If they're cooperative, we reciprocate.
You pay for Premium?
Then why are you complaining about ads when you don't even see them?
And why are you talking about being hostile to a company when you pay them every month?
I'm even more confused than before.
Speaking of PSAs, the US federal government issued a PSA a couple years ago recommending use of an ad blocker to avoid becoming a victim of financial scams/fraud (purged now for some reason). Why they don't prosecute the ad companies for being the ones to select and deliver the mark is anyone's guess.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221221123349/https://www.ic3.g...
> Ads however may appear on music content, Shorts, and when you search or browse.
- https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/15968883?hl=en
Youtube/google ads? Never bought anything, automatically assume they are a scam.
That's equivalent to a Netflix subscription, which puts what, 20 billion into original content each year?
How do you think those video bits get streamed all around the world? Magic?
That's not a bug, but a feature. Its the same difference as a high end restaurant, and a hole in the wall restaurant. Both are serving food, yes, but they are doing business in different categories. You cant go to the second restaurant and be like, the food you served didn't come with a smile like this other restaurant here. They seem to have figured it out, why cant you.
Or similarly, you cant go to the high end restaurant and be like - you charge for water now? Why cant you be like this other hole-in-the-wall restaurant.
They're curating nothing, there's garbage everywhere and you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food
Then dont go to the restaurant if the "hygiene" is not upto your standards? Why do you insist on eating food from that resturant, and insist that it needs to be free?
To me, YouTube is the gateway to those wonderful hole-in-the-wall places where you get real food made from scratch by people who care. Yeah, there's also a ton of shit. You have to actually make choices, not just take whatever it puts at the top of your recommendations. But the good stuff is there, and it's really good. A gigantic corporation may be intermediating, but the content is real stuff from real people.
Services like Netflix are the soulless mega-chain restaurants serving committee-designed meals that have been focus-grouped and cost-optimized to death.
meanwhile youtube is actively attempting to keep user's viewing as long as possible... netflix probably doesnt really care if you watch for 2 hours a week vs 10 hours a day, they just want the monthly payment.
For example: What value does your comment provide the world? Enough value to offset the carbon emissions from transmission/storage/retrieval/display? Personally, I'd answer no. Thus your comment itself is a waste of energy.
Only pointing it out because of the irony given the content of your post
Otherwise yeah, don’t understand what parent comment is trying to say
I respectfully disagree.
> don’t understand what parent comment is trying to say
They're trying to say Google and those who work there are greedy. I shared my "tautology" to illustrate while OP's point may be largely correct, greed is not unique to Google.
More then that, sure they show you ads, GREAT but they screw your device and environment, this makes them no money , a small fraction of users might buy premium but the rest of the users will waste energy and bdevice life, the developers contribute to killing devices and wasting energy.
Furthermore, the appropriate solution to this "problem" would be to stop letting people read anything for free.
What about those electronic devices that will end their life sooner because of that?
My hope is that other people will read my comment, add their own support or feedback and maybe at least one single person will think mroe and had the morals to refuse implementing anti environment and anti user features.
Do they make money from those millions of devices that run with the screen on? How ? Is some devil paying them for the damage caused to the environment?
For ads it makes sense but not for this shit policy, if they hate the users that they use youtube for free and ads are not enough for them then either put more ads, or find some other methods that do not screw then environment (maybe use the sound of crying babies each 30 seconds if you are not a premium )
If people hosted video elsewhere, I would gladly never visit youtube again.
Creators are not going to start paying for uploads when they can push their costs to the viewers.
If I "blamed" the creators, you'd be telling me it's not their fault, they're just incentivised by the system, they're just playing the game.
But when I "blame" the system, you're telling me the system is not at fault, that it's individual choice to choose a near-monopoly on video discoverability that is propelled by and heavily benefiting from the same company's actual monopoly of search.
Is it "YT's problem?"? No, it's to YT's massive benefit, it's my problem when I have to suffer through adverts.
But isnt YouTube a mere player in the game as well?
Not that this was part of the suit, but the whole practice of giving things away for free and subsidizing them with stalking and ads obviously distorts or completely destroys markets, so yes they can be blamed for doing that. The behavior of these companies is so bad that people in a recent thread were claiming things like chat services (where a single computer can provide service for millions of users) cannot be sustainably run by charging money.
I can't think of an adjective less suitable for Alphabet/Google/YouTube than "mere".
So of course they're never going to pay. That's the problem advertising solves -- infrequent users can be monetized.
YouTube already has an option to pay to avoid ads, for frequent users. And lots of people subscribe to it.
What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?
What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?
Arent you voluntarily using their website? Nobody is forcing you to open your browser, and type y-o-u-t-u-b-e-dot-c-o-m.
> What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?
MKBHD, LTT and others are willingly uploading videos to YouTube. YT doesnt have an exclusive deal with any of those. Infact, those folks are free to upload the same video to Vimeo, Twitch and others. What is YT doing wrong here?
> What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?
Such as?
I still fail to understand how this is a fault of a company? Would you blame Apple if everyone bought iPhones? What should Apple do? Ask people not to buy their phones?
Google Analytics is not going around tracking users. They provide a service that the website you decided to go to (cnn.com, bbc.com) is using. If you have to be angry, be angry with cnn or bbc.
Also, client side scripts do not run on the website's property. They are taking advantage of the wide-open security model of web clients (the model they coincidentally get to define because they dump massive amounts of money into giving away a free browser, making competition in the space nearly impossible) to use people's computers for unauthorized purposes. It's a malware payload just like a crypto miner. They should be treated the same way (or more severely) that they would be if they published miners and told web developers to add them to get free money (taking their own cut of course). The operator and the tool creator should both be blamed for shady behavior when the tool is designed and advertised for shady purposes.
You're operating under this unrealistic assumption that Google is an innocent entity that has not broken the law to get to the position that they are in.
This is false. Google does not play by the rules and as such your assertion that people should in turn play by the rules when interacting with Google is unreasonable.
Imagine all the restaurants in the world used IKEA for their tables & chairs. Can you say OMG IKEA has a monopoly? No sir, IKEA didnt go into the stores and install the tables & chairs, the restuarants did. Will you be angry with IKEA?
I can certainly imagine such a thing but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant to the situation as IKEA has as far as I'm aware never been ruled to be a monopoly while Google has.[0]
Ultimately my position on this subject comes down to this: Google does things that are hostile to me. They do things that are hostile to you. They do things that are hostile to society writ large. They break the law and violate the social contract. My morals necessitate responding to such an entity with disregard for whatever they're legally entitled to.
I don't like the way that I'm surveilled by Google and I don't like the way that they abuse their monopoly position and lobby the government to make it impossible for me to evade that surveillance.
To bring the conversation back to where it started: I already pay them with my privacy, I pay for the economic harm their monopolistic practices have on society, and I pay for the corrosive effects their lobbying has on the political structure.
I'm not going to be paying them for an ad free Youtube experience.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/05/business/google-loses-antitru...
This is obnoxious.