25 ms·

Dark pattern: how YouTube makes sure you don’t always “skip ad”

180 points by allenwhsu 4y ago

nathias 4y ago
YouTube, like TV and any other technology infested with adds seems to me completely unusable as it is, I don't understand how people are so patient and keep using it. I use uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock and Watch On Odysee extensions to improve it.
rwc 4y ago
Alternate theory: A large-scale, ongoing A/B test on what gets the perfect balance between watching ads and keeping total view time high.
- nevir 4y ago
  This seems so much more likely
- savanaly 4y ago
  Agreed. Unfortunately when it comes to ads (which I also hate! I have adblockers installed, subscribe to premium services like Youtube premium when it makes sense...) HN commenters take leave of their wits and just start posting conspiracy theories, hysterical criticism, or if you're lucky balanced sensible criticism that nevertheless doesn't make sense in the context of the article and is just an instance of preaching to the choir.
- TAKEMYMONEY 4y ago
  The multivariate test is trying to increase ad clicks, and the result is a poor UX. That's not exactly an alternate theory. Is it a dark pattern? That's not the first term I'd use to describe it, but perhaps it falls under "Misdirection" mentioned at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.07032.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.07032.pdf (page 12).
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  I don't think it is a 'perfect balance' so much as trying to maximize the number and length of advertisements that people will tolerate at this point in time. The nature of the business model is that some product manager will be tasked with getting the advertisement revenue higher at some point in the future and they will no doubt try to push the envelope. I also feel like 'total view time' is a metric that is in service to advertisements and not the primary goal itself.
- Havoc 4y ago
  >Alternate theory: A large-scale, ongoing A/B test Except "ongoing A/B test" isn't really a thing. The whole point of A/B is to identify and discard the worse of the two. Especially on google scale and this being applied to everyone you'd expect the data to point one way or the other really fast. This is just straight up dark pattern.
  - TAKEMYMONEY 4y ago
    Ongoing multivariate testing is certainly a thing, especially in high volume e-commerce, and especially on ad company's advertising-related UI. You're correct, winners are chosen and rolled out (to the majority) but then new tests are created against that winner, and that's an oversimplification.
_Algernon_ 4y ago
Just gonna leave this link to ublock origin here. If nothing else, install it as a small "fuck you" to dark patterns: Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...
- emptyparadise 4y ago
  Can't go wrong with ad blocking.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  And I'll leave this here: https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/ This also skips the sponsored parts of the actual videos ("this video is sponsored by skillshadow raid vpn,...")
  - hmate9 4y ago
    I wonder if you could build an AI using this datasource to automatically detect sponsored segments. 3.8 million segment submissions is probably enough data.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      It's been tried: https://github.com/andrewzlee/NeuralBlock https://github.com/andrewzlee/NeuralBlock
  - rocqua 4y ago
    I think this kind of add-skipping is worse. It is 'stealing' from the content creators rather than youtube. Besides, these ads are not based on surveillance capitalism but much less invasive old-school methods. Finally, there is much easier recourse against these ads. Don't watch content creators that have annoying adds. There are not many alternatives to youtube, but there are many alternatives to any given channel. Personally I also believe that in-content ads are much less annoying. I think that is because the content-creator gets to push back on really annoying adds.
mantas 4y ago
Reality: ad blocking without feeling guilty.
- Darmody 4y ago
  And they don't even care. I don't know the percentage of people using ad blockers but I'm sure it is very, very low. In fact, most users watch YouTube from the app, so no ad blocking. I just hope they don't make any significant change to their API so I can still use Vanced to listen to music when I'm outside.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
    >In fact, most users watch YouTube from the app, so no ad blocking. If many people used ublock on the Web, many would iuse NewPipe to enjoy the same ad free experience on mobile (Android). I don't understand why so we few people care about their attention? Is this just ignorance? Or do they willingly want their desires to be manipulated in order for creators to be paid by platforms? Me I'm just happy to tip the channels I follow and be a proud pirate.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      There's a lot of idiots out there for whom installing a browser extension is akin to rocket science. In fact, they may not even be aware of what extensions are.
techdragon 4y ago
They do also appear to work out stuff I’m interested in… there are rare days where I’ll get a stream of promoted Kickstarter projects that actually match my interests… then it goes back to the most generic advertising and I’ll be back to slamming the skip button.
noobermin 4y ago
Recently, I've been with people who unlike me don't have youtube premium and I loathe the ads. I'm so happy I pay for premium so I don't have to experience this. I want to say "subscription is the right answer" but it clearly isn't enough for some people (netflix).
- kmmlng 4y ago
  The YouTube subscription just seems excessively expensive. I find it hard to fathom they would generate anywhere near as much revenue from me watching their ads compared to the subscription cost.
  - rocqua 4y ago
    I found a youtube premium-lite option. It removes adds, but does not allow background play and a few other perks. But it only costs 6 euros. I found it a better deal than premium so I downgraded.
    - hundchenkatze 4y ago
      This would be great, exactly what I need. But they don't seem to offer it everywhere. I get the message "This offer is not available" when I go to https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite
      - cpeterso 4y ago
        Looks like YouTube Premium Lite is only available in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-lite-pilot-benelux-nordics-experiment-ad-free-subscription https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-l...
    - r00fus 4y ago
      I honestly would prefer a premium-lite. I don't use YT as an audio source so background tab audio is annoying (even more on mobile - stopping my phone doesn't stop the video). Really want premium-lite for family sub :D
josefresco 4y ago
When I found out my kids spend more time on YouTube than any other video platform I paid for YouTube Premium. They're a little older now and are shifting back to other platforms but I don't think we'll cancel our subscription anytime soon given how many complaints I see about their ad delivery.
- the_snooze 4y ago
  I'd be a lot more willing to pay for Premium if it were strictly to get rid of ads, without any of the bundled features that don't matter to me (e.g., Music, background playback, etc.). They experimented with it in certain European markets[0], and I'm disappointed that it hasn't made its way to the US. [0[ https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-lite-pilot-benelux-nordics-experiment-ad-free-subscription https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-l...
  - mrweasel 4y ago
    That not really something they inform subscripers about. You also don’t appear to be able to downgrade to the lite subscription. I truly don’t mind paying for ad free YouTube, but it’s not the music service I’d pick if it wasn’t bundled.
- csunbird 4y ago
  I used to pay for the Youtube Premium as well, because the app is literally unusable on an Apple TV and iOS devices without it, the ads are just too much. Unfortunately, the premium subscription does not work for the in video ads and promotions (shills) which seems to be everywhere now, so I cancelled my subscription, as I can not get the ad-free experience anymore, dropped the idea of using Youtube on devices where I can not install ublock origin. edit: The idea is that I can not get rid of ads, even with the subscription, so the value of subscription itself is severely diminished.
  - rocqua 4y ago
    Does Ublock also block the in-content ads?
Panoramix 4y ago
When I see scummy advertising practices, I get so upset that the product being advertised is associated with something bad and frustrating in my mind. I'm always a little puzzled with how there is so much money in advertising.
spuz 4y ago
Do these variations only appear on the website version of YouTube? I use an ad-blocker so I haven't noticed this pattern exactly. However, one pattern I've noticed using the mobile app is that in order to disrupt the automatic habit to skip, they seem to randomise whether or not they make any specific ad skippable. It seems some ads are always skippable, some are sometimes skippable and sometimes not and some are never skippable. It doesn't always correlate to how long the ad is either. Overall this seems to result in my actually watching the ad all the way through because it takes too much effort to figure out what kind of ad it is and whether I can press the button at the right time. At least if I do nothing, I know the video I want will play eventually.
durnygbur 4y ago
Folks are completing MSc, PhDs, submitting to cutthroat recruitment processes to architect, enable, and implement this level of malicious counterproductive sophistication. Google employees, how do you find motivation to wake up in the morning? Is it >300k USD salary and FIRE before 40? What if they told you to scam your own children for additional bonus?
- rrsghiopnbg 4y ago
  It’s more like > $600k TC. Not sure about FIRE given a starter house is $2M.
  - paulpauper 4y ago
    lol you realize you don't have to pay the $2 million at once right. 400k is more than enough to afford a mortgage on a 2 million dollar house. they key is keeping other expenses low.
- usui 4y ago
  Your last question isn't even rhetorical. For almost everyone in USA's tech, it's only a matter of compensation. Should we expect anything different when even UC Berkeley's CS program doesn't have a single ethics requirement? (EECS has one, but their CS grad output is way lower) I wish a tech crash like dot-com would happen already—in my very naive hope that the unscrupulous rat racers whose sole purpose is to perpetuate this infinite loop of SAT-level/IQ-test job recruitment + gamified promotion optimization will leave so they can ruin another industry. This is a terrible thought to have for peers, but after the past decade of nonsensical gatekeeping and unsustainable college major growth, I genuinely feel these people increasingly make everyday work life unbearable.
RicoElectrico 4y ago
This is why I use uBlock Origin. I don't feel guilty if I have to put up with such asshole design. I would much rather have (even non-hideable) text ads in the bottom. Something similar to what they used a long time ago. Likewise with many Polish entertainment/content aggregator/news websites - there are goddamn ads in the BACKGROUND of the page! Ugh! Just look at this beauty: https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c0834752/436c59464448525156546b3d_fXOXQPcgIjqzRmVECvsw5cXaqr4rPShA.jpg https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c0834752/436c59464448525156546b3d_f...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- RajT88 4y ago
  Considering malvertising campaigns still persist, I don't feel bad using an adblocker literally anywhere.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
  Do you pay creators in some ways?
  - paulpauper 4y ago
    how did creators make money before the invention of annoying ads?
IshKebab 4y ago
I've honestly never noticed this. You just wait 5 seconds, see if it says "Skip ad" and then click it. I bet most users don't notice this either and it's probably not especially effective (but still worth it at Google scale). I can't really blame Google for not wanting people to skip ads. The fact that skippable ads even exist is kind of crazy. More of a "dimly lit pattern" maybe.
blindseer 4y ago
The ads are genuinely one of my most frustrating experiences when using the Chromecast with Google TV. And seeing this kind of pattern makes it more likely that I’ll never sign up for premium YouTube (whatever it is called) and just use YouTube less. Also, I swear they do this - If you click on the try YouTube premium for 14 days, once the 14 days end you are bombarded with extra ads. And ads that are usually not skippable. I also remember getting multiple 60 min ads. I don’t remember any of these ads but I do remember how frustrating my experience with YouTube was and still is. But I’m also the kind of person that is still surprised that advertising works. If only I could use my raspberry pi to block all YouTube ads at home. My life would be immensely better.
- phh 4y ago
  FYI, several alternative youtube frontend apps are available for "Chromecast with Google TV" (which is just an Android TV device), for instance the opensource Newpipe. (Though this is piracy, and you shouldn't do piracy, because piracy hurts Google and content creators - who will gladly take donations -)
  - JulianWasTaken 4y ago
    For Android TV, there's even the even nicer https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext which integrates SponsorBlock.
  - NoraCodes 4y ago
    That is not piracy.
  - branon 4y ago
    Accessing a publicly-available website using your preferred frontend application (NewPipe) is absolutely NOT piracy. Consider disregarding the future advice of whoever told you this. I believe this is a dangerous and misleading line of thinking.
    - phh 4y ago
mritun 4y ago
What is dark about the design pattern? They have an ad-free YT that anyone can pay to subscribe. Is it considered dark because they want the users to subscribe to paid version? I think labelling everything “dark pattern” just makes the term lose its meaning and it actually helps the real dark patterns go scot free
- theginger 4y ago
  I thought that until I got most of the way through the article. It is a long winded explanation that eventually gets to its point that the skip button can appear in various formats making it a tiny bit slower to recognise and use. Without a reasonable explanation to why it needs to change it seems like dark pattern is fair.
  - svachalek 4y ago
    Dark patterns are basically brain hacking, hacking someone else's brain to benefit yourself. This looks like some kind of massive A/B test to eke out a small percentage margin on advertising. I'd give it a few dark points for that but imo advertising itself is the dark lord of dark patterns: not only is it a brain hack, not only has it hacked all the way into social acceptability, but it is the darkness from which so many other dark patterns spawn and spring forth to bring revenue to their master.
- shantnutiwari 4y ago
  > What is dark about the design pattern? They have an ad-free YT that anyone can pay to subscribe. Yeah, the old "We want everything for free, and will complain if you spy on us or show us ads along the way"
duxup 4y ago
I don't really see this as a dark pattern. Being exposed to an ad is not a dark pattern IMO. And this particular pattern is IMO pretty dang obvious if you use YouTube much at all. Someone has to pay for YouTube ... someone has to pay for this stuff. If it is ads that's it. I think the issue involves two parties, the sites who want revenue, and the vast majority of users who want content for free. So yeah here we are on the web where most people want everything free.
- throw10920 4y ago
  Very few people are objecting to the presence of ads, but instead the fact that Google tries to trick you into watching more ads and blame yourself for doing so. In an alternate universe without this dark pattern, there would still be ads - they would just have a consistent design that allowed you to skip the skippable ones without any thought, or alternatively longer/unskippable ads.
  - duxup 4y ago
    The fact that you can or can't skip ads doesn't imply any "blame" to me.
    - zerocrates 4y ago
      I think the complaint here is not exactly about the fact that you can't skip some of the ads, but that by varying the UI a bunch, users don't reliably "catch" all the skippable ads, so they watch more of them or take longer to skip them than would be the case if it was always immediately obvious what you could and couldn't skip.
      - duxup 4y ago
        I find the idea of "varying the UI" to be way far form the ethical ethical dilemma presented.
    - throw10920 4y ago
      Ah, then let me explain it to you: The reason why Google doesn't just take a 15-second ad with a 5-second unskippable section and turn it into a 15-second unskippable ad is because people will get frustrated with Google/YouTube and leave. The current system causes people to stay, and blame themselves for not skipping the ad - "I'm just being lazy, it's only a few extra seconds." That is the dark pattern.
mint2 4y ago
So this article wasn’t about how the close caption menu more often than not opens and blocks the skip add button
poulpy123 4y ago
One point I hate on YouTube are the clickbaits thumbnails and title. I found an extension that uses a random image of the video for the thumbnail and it's much better
alphakappa 4y ago
Google products have been incorporating a frustrating amount of dark patterns. In gmail for example, if you load one of the smart inbox tabs, it shows the rows of unread emails at the top. Right when you attempt to click on the top row, it rearranges the rows to show a few rows of ads instead (and the ads are fairly indistinguishable from the unread emails) so you end up unintentionally opening an ad. Now, there’s no good reason for this loading pattern - since they intend to show the ads, they could have allocated a few rows, shown a loading skeleton, and then asynchronously loaded ads and emails in their expected place. Instead they now get a ton of extra ad clicks, but I wonder how happy their advertisers are to pay for these unintended clicks.
- mark_l_watson 4y ago
  Wait, I am curious: you see ads on GMail? I haven’t seen ads in many years. What email client do you use? web app, phone app?
  - alphakappa 4y ago
    Correct. The smart inbox puts in ads. As in the YouTube example here, it's fairly unpredictable if they appear, and when they do - how they appear.
  - tristan957 4y ago
    I can't recall seeing ads on the Android app, but there are definitely ads in the web client. The ads must do a very good job of disguising themselves if you haven't noticed them. I have moved most of my email to ProtonMail. So much nicer paying for that from a company that respects me rather than using a free product from a company who has no other purpose than to drive ad revenue.
    - sjroot 4y ago
      I’ve never seen ads. I believe the difference (and potential explanation as to why GP hasn’t seen any either) is that my account is through google workspace.
    - 4y ago
usrn 4y ago
They'll probably find some way to block this. In firefox type cs-] then press the right arrow 4-5 times, then alt-tab, then tab until "Skip add" is highlighted and hit space. No need for extra extensions or anything. Note: this lets you skip unskipable ads too.
- MiddleEndian 4y ago
  If you have Firefox anyway, why not just install uBlock Origin? I don't think I've ever seen a Youtube ad in Firefox.
  - usrn 4y ago
    It doesn't work in private mode.
    - MiddleEndian 4y ago
      Why not set it to work in private windows?
mark_l_watson 4y ago
Well, some of the ad money goes to content creators. Since my wife and I each spend more time on YouTube than we do on any of Disney, Netflicks, Amazon Prime, or Hulu we “splurge” $15/month on Google’s family plan that gets no ads and all the music and music videos we need. Even though I am a big fan of open distributed media like Mastodon (follow me at @mark_watson@mastodon.social), I like to see quality paid for services. I am looking forward to spending $2/month on Twitter if they require real-people paid accounts to get rid of the bots.
ghoomketu 4y ago
People complain a lot about Youtube ads and how awful they are but as a thought experiment I once tried to imagine the amount of storage and bandwidth Youtube must need everyday to operate. So after some basic research it looks like they need to add almost 1 petabytes of storage and I couldn't find much info on the bandwidth and servers it uses. As much as I don't like Google for their shady business practices, I couldn't help but marvel at this feat of engineering. It's mind blowing tbh. I mean I can still access my video with 10 views I uploaded 8 years ago.. can't do that on my HDD and they have it in 5 formats.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  google and YouTube generate insane profits. they could show fewer ads and it would not impair the functionality of YouTube
  - elzbardico 4y ago
    Who gets to decide what is an "insane" profit? You?
    - paulpauper 4y ago
      Re-read the post. They could afford to run fewer ads. Right now, google is optimizing for profits at the possible cost of user experience, which may hurt google long-term. It's their right to do that, but I think it's a poor idea in the long term.
    - ASalazarMX 4y ago
      The Market(TM)
    - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
      Given that Alphabet still refuses to release profit numbers for Youtube, right now, no one but Alphabet. And given the context of this conversation is about ads, dark patterns, and more broadly, privacy, I think it's perfectly reasonable that we have that conversation.
paulpauper 4y ago
use a vpn and new chrome session in some low income country. this will remove most of the ads but now what many content creators are doing nowadays is making the ads part pf the video itself, so you cannot skip it or block it. The product placement may transition seemingly in such a way as you may be listening to a video about the history of some math concept and suddenly the narrator will start talking about VPNs, and when that happens I just hit the back button. At this point the problem has gotten bad enough that I stopped watching any channels where this may happen, which is many of them now.
- thallium205 4y ago
  What's worse is those who do pay for YouTube premium will still get these ads.
- Stevvo 4y ago
  SponsorBlock extension is great; it cuts out the ads that are part of the video itself. It uses crowd-sourced tags. It gets nearly all of them; if a video is popular enough for the creator to bother putting ads in it then someone will submit the tags for it.
harg 4y ago
I find YouTube basically unusable on any device except for my laptop with an adblocker. The ads are so intrusive and cut in at such jarring moments that it's just not worth it. It's not uncommon to have to tolerate several minutes of ads just to watch a sub-10 minute video.
pluc 4y ago
And how we make sure to always skip ads is 1) use an adblocker 2) use a pihole 3) use sponsorblock anything short of the first two is literally using a different internet. Marketers and Advertisers would ruin the net if we let them.
- jrootabega 4y ago
  I wonder how much this is still contributing to the overall problem. The content is getting views, so advertisers will still pay for ads, the algorithm will promote it more, more people will see the ads.
  - pluc 4y ago
    I think it creates a hierarchy of Internauts, ones that have the technical know-how and/or tools awareness needed to negate all the pollution and ones that don't and must suffer extra to compensate for the former. It's what I meant when I said there was a different Internet out there depending on how adept you are at "customizing" your Internet.
NoraCodes 4y ago
I don't think I've seen a YouTube ad in years. uBlock Origin plus SponsorBlock make for a much better watching experience.
- Stevvo 4y ago
  Depends what devices you are watching on. e.g. you probably can't block ads on the YouTube app that comes on your TV.
  - m0ngr31 4y ago
    https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext
jeffhuys 4y ago
Do you own a Macbook with touch bar? Use Safari and skip ads by using the scrubbing feature of the touch bar. No adblock needed, all ads skippable, and they're none the wiser. Mwua-ha-haaa.
elzbardico 4y ago
That's why a pay for Youtube Premium. I find it irrealistic to expect to be able to access youtube content without either paying for it or having to watch ads. Nothing is free, ever. Even public education is paid by people's taxes.
karaterobot 4y ago
This doesn't sound much like a dark pattern to me. I think they probably have a few variations they use based on the length of the ad, and some agreement with the sponsor, but that's just speculation. It would be much more evil if sometimes the "see more about this product" button was where the "skip ad" button was, so that users who were reflexively clicking it would get sent to the sponsor. Has anybody here ever been so confused by these variants that you watched more than an additional 1/4th of a second of the ad?
charlie0 4y ago
Don't forget the "oh, I see you didn't skip the first ad. Let me play a much longer second ad".
geodel 4y ago
Maybe more productive way is to use youtube premium instead of looking dark pattern in youtube ads. Or is the idea is something similar to if restaurant displayed unlimited buffet ads and some jackass customer decides wasting trays of uneaten food is okay. Anything else is restaurant owner is liar and using dark pattern to lure customers.
jrootabega 4y ago
I have a special hatred for the ads which stick an additional 5 second outro after their (false) progress timer reaches 0:00 It's lying. Trying to be unpredictable to prevent you from being able to unconsciously skip ads is one thing, but lying is unforgivable.
725686 4y ago
I haven't even noticed the differences. I just wait until the skip button appear, or wait a few seconds before glancing. Who cares about to he text?
lkxijlewlf 4y ago
I'm convinced the countdown timer lingers on the 5 longer than a second, also.
mobiuscog 4y ago
I would likely pay for youtube premium if the TV app wasn't so absymal. However, having something that does not allow sorting by 'new' (and constantly recommending videos that are many years old), regularly re-introducing channels that have been marked as 'do not show' along with injecting the popular junk into 'for you' despite me having constantly marked similar as 'not interested'. There is no way I will pay premium for such a terrible experience, even if it does remove ads. The TV experience - where I consume most content - is fast becoming the biggest reason to never use youtube.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  The AppleTV app for YouTube is… fine, but certainly not great. Google, like Facebook, seems to believe in algorithms above anything less. It sort of make sense when you’re relying on showing ads, but it degrades the experience for those who actually pay for the service. That being said, my YouTube Premium subscription is easily the one I get the most enjoyment from, as compared to Netflix, HBO and similar.
setr 4y ago
My favorite variation is “you can skip in 5 seconds” but the ad itself is 5 seconds long
zaptrem 4y ago
Speaking of dark patterns, Medium paywalling other people's writing.
fatnoah 4y ago
I have no idea why or how it's happening, but whenever I view a Youtube video on my personal computer, it stops after < 1 second and I get skipped right to the content. It's the only device in my home that happens to, and I'm afraid to touch anything, lest I lose that magic power.
jerf 4y ago
My favorite "dark pattern" plausibly disguised as a simple bug is that the countdown timer, across multiple platforms I've used YouTube on, doesn't work correctly and very easily will let the ad play for a second or two longer than you intend. It behaves as if it's supposed to count down to 0 one second at a time, but there's a recurring event that is run every second to see if the countdown timer needs to be lowered. However, it's very easy for that event to be ever so slightly delayed or advanced relative to when the timer counts down, and as a result the timer doesn't get decremented correctly. It's very easy to see if you watch the timer carefully; it almost never counts evenly like it should, and it very often skips a beat entirely. (Compare with a simple timer app, which is correctly updating every frame the display renders. This isn't that hard.) It's very plausibly a bug that a novice dealing with time in a UI would make, and in many other circumstances I'd accept that explanation. But, a bug in such a critical piece of YouTube's functionality, with a root cause I'm pretty sure I've diagnosed just by glancing at it, surviving for years and years across multiple platforms? This isn't a bug. It's policy. At scale, those seconds add up.
- wizzard 4y ago
  Yes, on my smart TV app it's so slow and glitchy that the 5-second ad preview often plays for 10+ seconds before the "Skip Ad" button finally appears. Add to that the 5-7 seconds of black screen before the ad starts playing and the 2-3 seconds to resume my video, and it's a major annoyance during workouts and such.
  - SteveMoody73 4y ago
    On an old TV I have it can take at least 5 seconds before it starts counting down. I've just assumed it was a badly maintained app. Have 3 smart Tvs and YouTube seems to behave different on all of them. May have to look into it.
- aequitas 4y ago
  Sound like they implemented Vetinari’s clock from Discworld. That’s a waiting room clock that would slow down and speed up the seconds hand (and also the ticks and tocks) but the minute and hour hands would run on time. This was to make the waiting person extra nervous before their meeting with the patrician. He is by far my most favorite characters in the books.
Quequau 4y ago
This is an interesting piece but why is there some sort of redirected url used instead a normal one? That seems like a dark pattern itself.
nimbius 4y ago
>By introducing so many versions of design, it forbids a pattern to be established and recognized by the users. I dont think the author properly acknowledges just how voracious the human appetite for patterns are. We are absolute machines when it comes to spotting even the hint of a pattern, and few things can prevent us from establishing and identifying them as a function of our basic existence. millions of years of evolution have basically guaranteed that when patterns arise or exist, we are borg-like in our pursuit. shuffling a few choices of skip is a cheap effort that probably appeased a few C level ad execs. the biggest coffin-nail for ads is of course adblock.
dec0dedab0de 4y ago
I think the biggest dark pattern is allowing skipable ads to be long. Sometimes over an hour. I spent some time in the hospital not too long ago, and it was physically painful for me to move enough to skip an ad. I would have been fine watching 30-60 second ads without skipping, but they just put infomercials in the middle of the video you're watching. it is outrageous.
- josteink 4y ago
  And you never once considered going premium to remove the ads? Surely someone must have been able to help you out with that if you couldn’t do it yourself? The answer exists, it’s right there with buttons for clicking given to you by Google, but people here on HN so often seem so entirely blindsided and insist there’s no such thing as ad-free Youtube. What gives? I just don't get it.
  - sophacles 4y ago
    Ad-free youtube doesn't get rid of "paid content" in videos. "paid content" is just ads. So if you pay for youtube premium you get rid of some ads, not all the ads.
    - delecti 4y ago
      That's clearly a different kind of thing though. Sponsored content in videos is just stuff you don't like, but it's still the video you clicked on. Youtube injected ads on top of the video is not the content you clicked on. Youtube premium unambiguously solves the problem that the top-level comment was complaining about (mid-roll ads that can be a half-hour or longer), you're just moving the goal posts.
      - sophacles 4y ago
        I'm not moving anything. If you want to call something ad-free, IMHO it shouldn't have ads.
robertlagrant 4y ago
This isn't great, but there's no ethical dilemma. Being able to skip an advert at all is a pretty recent luxury.
gundmc 4y ago
This article comes across as a bit conspiratorial. I feel like "dark pattern" is on the verge of losing meaning when it's applied in cases like this as opposed to for example: making accept cookies one click and reject multiple clicks (which Google is also guilty of).
dghughes 4y ago
I watch a lot of YouTube on my smart TV even an old Roku but after the changes to the frequency of ads it was unbearable. It was to the point where I would mute the TV and put my hand up to block the ad from my eyes. I would also press back a few times to exit out of the ad and most times if done twice no ad plays. Ads always cut off the first 5 seconds of the videos, and ads were popping up seconds after the initial two ads, and then ads cut in mid sentence. No thought of the content presented like a TV ad would do just stuff in as many as possible. Eventually I gave in an paid the $10/moth. YouTube is broken and unwatchable without doing it that way at least on a smart TV or a Roku.
- Larrikin 4y ago
  During the pandemic some product person drastically increased the number of ads and began ruining videos with ads in the middle of the videos. Music sets get screwed up and the crappy AI likes to pause jokes right before the punch line and then resume a second or two after. At this point any video I imagine myself ever watching more than once gets downloaded with yt-dlp and automatically loaded into Plex. I had one negative experience with an artist deleting a popular video years ago, but that short term profit seeking is what pushed me to finally get everything all setup. Now there are no ads.
jedahan 4y ago
Twitter doesn't count blocked accounts as ad impressions. If I see an ad on twitter, I block the account that displayed it. Invariably, there is another ad in the next 3-5 tweets. I can do this 3 or 4 times in a row before I give up looking at the feed because the signal-to-noise ends up being too low when 25% of my feed are ads. My guess is that after blocking an account, the ad you saw doesn't count as an impression. It's also possible that 25% is normal, but it doesn't seem that way if I scroll and not block accounts.
frizlab 4y ago
The very very few times I allow yt video to play (in private nav only), if I ever see an ad I just reload the page until the ad is gone. It works (but I watch like 1 video every 6 month, so YMMV).
arrosenberg 4y ago
Another random one I’ve come across. I can block most YouTube ads with uBlock Origin in the browser. I can also cast my browser tab to an Android TV device. But if I try and cast a tab with YouTube, it will open the app instead of casting the browser, and I can’t block ads in the app.
cercatrova 4y ago
PSA, uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock (blocks in-video ads by automatically skipping them via crowdsourced timestamps) exist, as do Vanced for Android (until it dies, could also use NewPipe, a fork with SponsorBlock is available) and SmartTubeNext for Android-based TVs.
galuggus 4y ago
You could tell them to 'fuck off' with this extension fuckoff.yt
throw7 4y ago
youtube music will often interrupt startup and ask you to signup now with a large button at the bottom. There is small text below it (not even a button) to say "not now". That line of text is wedged in really close to the "close" button. frankly, also, shutting down an existing app (well liked google play music) and implementing a less functional replacement (for their benefit) should be called the Google Two Step Dark Pattern Shuffle.
clarge1120 4y ago
TouchTunes jukeboxes -seem- to use a dark pattern of playing music nobody wants to listen to in order to encourage jukebox purchases. It could also be that the default music is stuff that is less popular.
xg15 4y ago
I didn't get that amount of variations the OP sees so far, but I've been wondering if the number of ads you get and the distribution of skippable vs unskippable ads is somehow personalized. At least my subjective impression is that when I go on a youtube binge, over time it will slowly increase the number of ads it shows back-to-back and also increases the amount of nonskippable ads. I wonder if there is some kind of reinforcement learning going on, which tries to figure out just how many ads I'm willing to tolerate before switching away. (Or employ the good old "boiling frogs" strategy and train me to tolerate more ads over time) I got no evidence for this at all of course, so just a conspiracy theory for now.
Cypher 4y ago
What ads?
karmakaze 4y ago
These patterns are clearly visible and so similar that I don't even behave differently to them. I don't care about any of the variants: I wait until I see Skip Ad and press it as soon as I can. It's not even like it's ever in a different place... unless I'm earnestly interested or have time to kill and want the channel to get paid with my time.
NavinF 4y ago
What a long winded way of saying “YouTube is AB testing 5 UIs for skipping ads”. There’s zero evidence that this tricks anyone; Just a bunch of hand-waving.
throwaway81523 4y ago
I've seen another YT dark pattern lately. I often skip ads with youtube-dl (download the video and watch offline). But sometimes I like to be even more aggressive and skip the whole video, by using ytdl to download the closed caption text (VTT file) so I can read it instead of watching the vid. I have a python script that reformats the .vtt (a messy xml file full of timestamps and other markup) into something like readable text, and that worked pretty well until recently. Lately I've found that 1) more videos don't have auto transcription, and 2) the vtt files have gotten messed up so that the timestamps are no longer properly interspersed with the text. My script strips them all out except once per minute, so if I find something interesting or confusing in the transcript, I can quickly find that spot in the video and watch it. That doesn't work any more. The hack is still better than nothing but I wonder what YT is up to, messing up a feature like that, which was presumably done for accessibility reasons, so its breakage likely has consequences beyond annoying freeloaders like me.
q-big 4y ago
Quote from the article: > By introducing so many versions of design, it forbids a pattern to be established and recognized by the users. Essentially, the users look at the design, get confused about if there is going to be a “Skip Ad” button or not, get tired of trying to figure it out, and finally pay less attention to it which increases the chance of them ending up watching ads that could have been skipped. Honestly, this does not match (at least) my usage pattern: I am so annoyed by the ads that I always look for the skip button - sometimes successfully, sometimes in vain. (by the way: I see strong evidence that Google's (and thus YouTube's) ad network has a lot of difficulties finding ads that are of interest for me - likely because I have quite different interests from the typical citizen; perhaps this is the reasons why YouTube's ads are so annoying for me that I always look for the skip button on YouTube).
stefanwlb 4y ago
prirai 4y ago
Ublock with Sponsorblock, Invidious, Freetube or Newpie and you're good to go!

180 points by allenwhsu 4y ago

YouTube, like TV and any other technology infested with adds seems to me completely unusable as it is, I don't understand how people are so patient and keep using it. I use uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock and Watch On Odysee extensions to improve it.

rwc 4y ago

Alternate theory: A large-scale, ongoing A/B test on what gets the perfect balance between watching ads and keeping total view time high.

nevir 4y ago
This seems so much more likely
savanaly 4y ago
Agreed. Unfortunately when it comes to ads (which I also hate! I have adblockers installed, subscribe to premium services like Youtube premium when it makes sense...) HN commenters take leave of their wits and just start posting conspiracy theories, hysterical criticism, or if you're lucky balanced sensible criticism that nevertheless doesn't make sense in the context of the article and is just an instance of preaching to the choir.
TAKEMYMONEY 4y ago
The multivariate test is trying to increase ad clicks, and the result is a poor UX. That's not exactly an alternate theory. Is it a dark pattern? That's not the first term I'd use to describe it, but perhaps it falls under "Misdirection" mentioned at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.07032.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.07032.pdf (page 12).
BitwiseFool 4y ago
I don't think it is a 'perfect balance' so much as trying to maximize the number and length of advertisements that people will tolerate at this point in time. The nature of the business model is that some product manager will be tasked with getting the advertisement revenue higher at some point in the future and they will no doubt try to push the envelope. I also feel like 'total view time' is a metric that is in service to advertisements and not the primary goal itself.
Havoc 4y ago
>Alternate theory: A large-scale, ongoing A/B test Except "ongoing A/B test" isn't really a thing. The whole point of A/B is to identify and discard the worse of the two. Especially on google scale and this being applied to everyone you'd expect the data to point one way or the other really fast. This is just straight up dark pattern.
- TAKEMYMONEY 4y ago
  Ongoing multivariate testing is certainly a thing, especially in high volume e-commerce, and especially on ad company's advertising-related UI. You're correct, winners are chosen and rolled out (to the majority) but then new tests are created against that winner, and that's an oversimplification.

_Algernon_ 4y ago

Just gonna leave this link to ublock origin here. If nothing else, install it as a small "fuck you" to dark patterns: Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

emptyparadise 4y ago
Can't go wrong with ad blocking.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
And I'll leave this here: https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/ This also skips the sponsored parts of the actual videos ("this video is sponsored by skillshadow raid vpn,...")
- hmate9 4y ago
  I wonder if you could build an AI using this datasource to automatically detect sponsored segments. 3.8 million segment submissions is probably enough data.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    It's been tried: https://github.com/andrewzlee/NeuralBlock https://github.com/andrewzlee/NeuralBlock
- rocqua 4y ago
  I think this kind of add-skipping is worse. It is 'stealing' from the content creators rather than youtube. Besides, these ads are not based on surveillance capitalism but much less invasive old-school methods. Finally, there is much easier recourse against these ads. Don't watch content creators that have annoying adds. There are not many alternatives to youtube, but there are many alternatives to any given channel. Personally I also believe that in-content ads are much less annoying. I think that is because the content-creator gets to push back on really annoying adds.

mantas 4y ago

Reality: ad blocking without feeling guilty.

Darmody 4y ago
And they don't even care. I don't know the percentage of people using ad blockers but I'm sure it is very, very low. In fact, most users watch YouTube from the app, so no ad blocking. I just hope they don't make any significant change to their API so I can still use Vanced to listen to music when I'm outside.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
  >In fact, most users watch YouTube from the app, so no ad blocking. If many people used ublock on the Web, many would iuse NewPipe to enjoy the same ad free experience on mobile (Android). I don't understand why so we few people care about their attention? Is this just ignorance? Or do they willingly want their desires to be manipulated in order for creators to be paid by platforms? Me I'm just happy to tip the channels I follow and be a proud pirate.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    There's a lot of idiots out there for whom installing a browser extension is akin to rocket science. In fact, they may not even be aware of what extensions are.

techdragon 4y ago

They do also appear to work out stuff I’m interested in… there are rare days where I’ll get a stream of promoted Kickstarter projects that actually match my interests… then it goes back to the most generic advertising and I’ll be back to slamming the skip button.

noobermin 4y ago

Recently, I've been with people who unlike me don't have youtube premium and I loathe the ads. I'm so happy I pay for premium so I don't have to experience this. I want to say "subscription is the right answer" but it clearly isn't enough for some people (netflix).

kmmlng 4y ago
The YouTube subscription just seems excessively expensive. I find it hard to fathom they would generate anywhere near as much revenue from me watching their ads compared to the subscription cost.
- rocqua 4y ago
  I found a youtube premium-lite option. It removes adds, but does not allow background play and a few other perks. But it only costs 6 euros. I found it a better deal than premium so I downgraded.
  - hundchenkatze 4y ago
    This would be great, exactly what I need. But they don't seem to offer it everywhere. I get the message "This offer is not available" when I go to https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite
    - cpeterso 4y ago
      Looks like YouTube Premium Lite is only available in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-lite-pilot-benelux-nordics-experiment-ad-free-subscription https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-l...
  - r00fus 4y ago
    I honestly would prefer a premium-lite. I don't use YT as an audio source so background tab audio is annoying (even more on mobile - stopping my phone doesn't stop the video). Really want premium-lite for family sub :D

josefresco 4y ago

When I found out my kids spend more time on YouTube than any other video platform I paid for YouTube Premium. They're a little older now and are shifting back to other platforms but I don't think we'll cancel our subscription anytime soon given how many complaints I see about their ad delivery.

the_snooze 4y ago
I'd be a lot more willing to pay for Premium if it were strictly to get rid of ads, without any of the bundled features that don't matter to me (e.g., Music, background playback, etc.). They experimented with it in certain European markets[0], and I'm disappointed that it hasn't made its way to the US. [0[ https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-lite-pilot-benelux-nordics-experiment-ad-free-subscription https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-l...
- mrweasel 4y ago
  That not really something they inform subscripers about. You also don’t appear to be able to downgrade to the lite subscription. I truly don’t mind paying for ad free YouTube, but it’s not the music service I’d pick if it wasn’t bundled.
csunbird 4y ago
I used to pay for the Youtube Premium as well, because the app is literally unusable on an Apple TV and iOS devices without it, the ads are just too much. Unfortunately, the premium subscription does not work for the in video ads and promotions (shills) which seems to be everywhere now, so I cancelled my subscription, as I can not get the ad-free experience anymore, dropped the idea of using Youtube on devices where I can not install ublock origin. edit: The idea is that I can not get rid of ads, even with the subscription, so the value of subscription itself is severely diminished.
- rocqua 4y ago
  Does Ublock also block the in-content ads?

Panoramix 4y ago

When I see scummy advertising practices, I get so upset that the product being advertised is associated with something bad and frustrating in my mind. I'm always a little puzzled with how there is so much money in advertising.

spuz 4y ago

Do these variations only appear on the website version of YouTube? I use an ad-blocker so I haven't noticed this pattern exactly. However, one pattern I've noticed using the mobile app is that in order to disrupt the automatic habit to skip, they seem to randomise whether or not they make any specific ad skippable. It seems some ads are always skippable, some are sometimes skippable and sometimes not and some are never skippable. It doesn't always correlate to how long the ad is either. Overall this seems to result in my actually watching the ad all the way through because it takes too much effort to figure out what kind of ad it is and whether I can press the button at the right time. At least if I do nothing, I know the video I want will play eventually.

durnygbur 4y ago

Folks are completing MSc, PhDs, submitting to cutthroat recruitment processes to architect, enable, and implement this level of malicious counterproductive sophistication. Google employees, how do you find motivation to wake up in the morning? Is it >300k USD salary and FIRE before 40? What if they told you to scam your own children for additional bonus?

rrsghiopnbg 4y ago
It’s more like > $600k TC. Not sure about FIRE given a starter house is $2M.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  lol you realize you don't have to pay the $2 million at once right. 400k is more than enough to afford a mortgage on a 2 million dollar house. they key is keeping other expenses low.
usui 4y ago
Your last question isn't even rhetorical. For almost everyone in USA's tech, it's only a matter of compensation. Should we expect anything different when even UC Berkeley's CS program doesn't have a single ethics requirement? (EECS has one, but their CS grad output is way lower) I wish a tech crash like dot-com would happen already—in my very naive hope that the unscrupulous rat racers whose sole purpose is to perpetuate this infinite loop of SAT-level/IQ-test job recruitment + gamified promotion optimization will leave so they can ruin another industry. This is a terrible thought to have for peers, but after the past decade of nonsensical gatekeeping and unsustainable college major growth, I genuinely feel these people increasingly make everyday work life unbearable.

RicoElectrico 4y ago

This is why I use uBlock Origin. I don't feel guilty if I have to put up with such asshole design. I would much rather have (even non-hideable) text ads in the bottom. Something similar to what they used a long time ago. Likewise with many Polish entertainment/content aggregator/news websites - there are goddamn ads in the BACKGROUND of the page! Ugh! Just look at this beauty: https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c0834752/436c59464448525156546b3d_fXOXQPcgIjqzRmVECvsw5cXaqr4rPShA.jpg https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c0834752/436c59464448525156546b3d_f...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
RajT88 4y ago
Considering malvertising campaigns still persist, I don't feel bad using an adblocker literally anywhere.
rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
Do you pay creators in some ways?
- paulpauper 4y ago
  how did creators make money before the invention of annoying ads?

IshKebab 4y ago

I've honestly never noticed this. You just wait 5 seconds, see if it says "Skip ad" and then click it. I bet most users don't notice this either and it's probably not especially effective (but still worth it at Google scale). I can't really blame Google for not wanting people to skip ads. The fact that skippable ads even exist is kind of crazy. More of a "dimly lit pattern" maybe.

blindseer 4y ago

The ads are genuinely one of my most frustrating experiences when using the Chromecast with Google TV. And seeing this kind of pattern makes it more likely that I’ll never sign up for premium YouTube (whatever it is called) and just use YouTube less. Also, I swear they do this - If you click on the try YouTube premium for 14 days, once the 14 days end you are bombarded with extra ads. And ads that are usually not skippable. I also remember getting multiple 60 min ads. I don’t remember any of these ads but I do remember how frustrating my experience with YouTube was and still is. But I’m also the kind of person that is still surprised that advertising works. If only I could use my raspberry pi to block all YouTube ads at home. My life would be immensely better.

phh 4y ago
FYI, several alternative youtube frontend apps are available for "Chromecast with Google TV" (which is just an Android TV device), for instance the opensource Newpipe. (Though this is piracy, and you shouldn't do piracy, because piracy hurts Google and content creators - who will gladly take donations -)
- JulianWasTaken 4y ago
  For Android TV, there's even the even nicer https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext which integrates SponsorBlock.
- NoraCodes 4y ago
  That is not piracy.
- branon 4y ago
  Accessing a publicly-available website using your preferred frontend application (NewPipe) is absolutely NOT piracy. Consider disregarding the future advice of whoever told you this. I believe this is a dangerous and misleading line of thinking.
  - phh 4y ago

mritun 4y ago

What is dark about the design pattern? They have an ad-free YT that anyone can pay to subscribe. Is it considered dark because they want the users to subscribe to paid version? I think labelling everything “dark pattern” just makes the term lose its meaning and it actually helps the real dark patterns go scot free

theginger 4y ago
I thought that until I got most of the way through the article. It is a long winded explanation that eventually gets to its point that the skip button can appear in various formats making it a tiny bit slower to recognise and use. Without a reasonable explanation to why it needs to change it seems like dark pattern is fair.
- svachalek 4y ago
  Dark patterns are basically brain hacking, hacking someone else's brain to benefit yourself. This looks like some kind of massive A/B test to eke out a small percentage margin on advertising. I'd give it a few dark points for that but imo advertising itself is the dark lord of dark patterns: not only is it a brain hack, not only has it hacked all the way into social acceptability, but it is the darkness from which so many other dark patterns spawn and spring forth to bring revenue to their master.
shantnutiwari 4y ago
> What is dark about the design pattern? They have an ad-free YT that anyone can pay to subscribe. Yeah, the old "We want everything for free, and will complain if you spy on us or show us ads along the way"

duxup 4y ago

I don't really see this as a dark pattern. Being exposed to an ad is not a dark pattern IMO. And this particular pattern is IMO pretty dang obvious if you use YouTube much at all. Someone has to pay for YouTube ... someone has to pay for this stuff. If it is ads that's it. I think the issue involves two parties, the sites who want revenue, and the vast majority of users who want content for free. So yeah here we are on the web where most people want everything free.

throw10920 4y ago
Very few people are objecting to the presence of ads, but instead the fact that Google tries to trick you into watching more ads and blame yourself for doing so. In an alternate universe without this dark pattern, there would still be ads - they would just have a consistent design that allowed you to skip the skippable ones without any thought, or alternatively longer/unskippable ads.
- duxup 4y ago
  The fact that you can or can't skip ads doesn't imply any "blame" to me.
  - zerocrates 4y ago
    I think the complaint here is not exactly about the fact that you can't skip some of the ads, but that by varying the UI a bunch, users don't reliably "catch" all the skippable ads, so they watch more of them or take longer to skip them than would be the case if it was always immediately obvious what you could and couldn't skip.
    - duxup 4y ago
      I find the idea of "varying the UI" to be way far form the ethical ethical dilemma presented.
  - throw10920 4y ago
    Ah, then let me explain it to you: The reason why Google doesn't just take a 15-second ad with a 5-second unskippable section and turn it into a 15-second unskippable ad is because people will get frustrated with Google/YouTube and leave. The current system causes people to stay, and blame themselves for not skipping the ad - "I'm just being lazy, it's only a few extra seconds." That is the dark pattern.

mint2 4y ago

So this article wasn’t about how the close caption menu more often than not opens and blocks the skip add button

poulpy123 4y ago

One point I hate on YouTube are the clickbaits thumbnails and title. I found an extension that uses a random image of the video for the thumbnail and it's much better

alphakappa 4y ago

Google products have been incorporating a frustrating amount of dark patterns. In gmail for example, if you load one of the smart inbox tabs, it shows the rows of unread emails at the top. Right when you attempt to click on the top row, it rearranges the rows to show a few rows of ads instead (and the ads are fairly indistinguishable from the unread emails) so you end up unintentionally opening an ad. Now, there’s no good reason for this loading pattern - since they intend to show the ads, they could have allocated a few rows, shown a loading skeleton, and then asynchronously loaded ads and emails in their expected place. Instead they now get a ton of extra ad clicks, but I wonder how happy their advertisers are to pay for these unintended clicks.

mark_l_watson 4y ago
Wait, I am curious: you see ads on GMail? I haven’t seen ads in many years. What email client do you use? web app, phone app?
- alphakappa 4y ago
  Correct. The smart inbox puts in ads. As in the YouTube example here, it's fairly unpredictable if they appear, and when they do - how they appear.
- tristan957 4y ago
  I can't recall seeing ads on the Android app, but there are definitely ads in the web client. The ads must do a very good job of disguising themselves if you haven't noticed them. I have moved most of my email to ProtonMail. So much nicer paying for that from a company that respects me rather than using a free product from a company who has no other purpose than to drive ad revenue.
  - sjroot 4y ago
    I’ve never seen ads. I believe the difference (and potential explanation as to why GP hasn’t seen any either) is that my account is through google workspace.
  - 4y ago

usrn 4y ago

They'll probably find some way to block this. In firefox type cs-] then press the right arrow 4-5 times, then alt-tab, then tab until "Skip add" is highlighted and hit space. No need for extra extensions or anything. Note: this lets you skip unskipable ads too.

MiddleEndian 4y ago
If you have Firefox anyway, why not just install uBlock Origin? I don't think I've ever seen a Youtube ad in Firefox.
- usrn 4y ago
  It doesn't work in private mode.
  - MiddleEndian 4y ago
    Why not set it to work in private windows?

mark_l_watson 4y ago

Well, some of the ad money goes to content creators. Since my wife and I each spend more time on YouTube than we do on any of Disney, Netflicks, Amazon Prime, or Hulu we “splurge” $15/month on Google’s family plan that gets no ads and all the music and music videos we need. Even though I am a big fan of open distributed media like Mastodon (follow me at @mark_watson@mastodon.social), I like to see quality paid for services. I am looking forward to spending $2/month on Twitter if they require real-people paid accounts to get rid of the bots.

ghoomketu 4y ago

People complain a lot about Youtube ads and how awful they are but as a thought experiment I once tried to imagine the amount of storage and bandwidth Youtube must need everyday to operate. So after some basic research it looks like they need to add almost 1 petabytes of storage and I couldn't find much info on the bandwidth and servers it uses. As much as I don't like Google for their shady business practices, I couldn't help but marvel at this feat of engineering. It's mind blowing tbh. I mean I can still access my video with 10 views I uploaded 8 years ago.. can't do that on my HDD and they have it in 5 formats.

paulpauper 4y ago
google and YouTube generate insane profits. they could show fewer ads and it would not impair the functionality of YouTube
- elzbardico 4y ago
  Who gets to decide what is an "insane" profit? You?
  - paulpauper 4y ago
    Re-read the post. They could afford to run fewer ads. Right now, google is optimizing for profits at the possible cost of user experience, which may hurt google long-term. It's their right to do that, but I think it's a poor idea in the long term.
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    The Market(TM)
  - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
    Given that Alphabet still refuses to release profit numbers for Youtube, right now, no one but Alphabet. And given the context of this conversation is about ads, dark patterns, and more broadly, privacy, I think it's perfectly reasonable that we have that conversation.

paulpauper 4y ago

use a vpn and new chrome session in some low income country. this will remove most of the ads but now what many content creators are doing nowadays is making the ads part pf the video itself, so you cannot skip it or block it. The product placement may transition seemingly in such a way as you may be listening to a video about the history of some math concept and suddenly the narrator will start talking about VPNs, and when that happens I just hit the back button. At this point the problem has gotten bad enough that I stopped watching any channels where this may happen, which is many of them now.

thallium205 4y ago
What's worse is those who do pay for YouTube premium will still get these ads.
Stevvo 4y ago
SponsorBlock extension is great; it cuts out the ads that are part of the video itself. It uses crowd-sourced tags. It gets nearly all of them; if a video is popular enough for the creator to bother putting ads in it then someone will submit the tags for it.

harg 4y ago

I find YouTube basically unusable on any device except for my laptop with an adblocker. The ads are so intrusive and cut in at such jarring moments that it's just not worth it. It's not uncommon to have to tolerate several minutes of ads just to watch a sub-10 minute video.

pluc 4y ago

And how we make sure to always skip ads is 1) use an adblocker 2) use a pihole 3) use sponsorblock anything short of the first two is literally using a different internet. Marketers and Advertisers would ruin the net if we let them.

jrootabega 4y ago
I wonder how much this is still contributing to the overall problem. The content is getting views, so advertisers will still pay for ads, the algorithm will promote it more, more people will see the ads.
- pluc 4y ago
  I think it creates a hierarchy of Internauts, ones that have the technical know-how and/or tools awareness needed to negate all the pollution and ones that don't and must suffer extra to compensate for the former. It's what I meant when I said there was a different Internet out there depending on how adept you are at "customizing" your Internet.

NoraCodes 4y ago

I don't think I've seen a YouTube ad in years. uBlock Origin plus SponsorBlock make for a much better watching experience.

Stevvo 4y ago
Depends what devices you are watching on. e.g. you probably can't block ads on the YouTube app that comes on your TV.
- m0ngr31 4y ago
  https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext

jeffhuys 4y ago

Do you own a Macbook with touch bar? Use Safari and skip ads by using the scrubbing feature of the touch bar. No adblock needed, all ads skippable, and they're none the wiser. Mwua-ha-haaa.

elzbardico 4y ago

That's why a pay for Youtube Premium. I find it irrealistic to expect to be able to access youtube content without either paying for it or having to watch ads. Nothing is free, ever. Even public education is paid by people's taxes.

karaterobot 4y ago

This doesn't sound much like a dark pattern to me. I think they probably have a few variations they use based on the length of the ad, and some agreement with the sponsor, but that's just speculation. It would be much more evil if sometimes the "see more about this product" button was where the "skip ad" button was, so that users who were reflexively clicking it would get sent to the sponsor. Has anybody here ever been so confused by these variants that you watched more than an additional 1/4th of a second of the ad?

charlie0 4y ago

Don't forget the "oh, I see you didn't skip the first ad. Let me play a much longer second ad".

geodel 4y ago

Maybe more productive way is to use youtube premium instead of looking dark pattern in youtube ads. Or is the idea is something similar to if restaurant displayed unlimited buffet ads and some jackass customer decides wasting trays of uneaten food is okay. Anything else is restaurant owner is liar and using dark pattern to lure customers.

jrootabega 4y ago

I have a special hatred for the ads which stick an additional 5 second outro after their (false) progress timer reaches 0:00 It's lying. Trying to be unpredictable to prevent you from being able to unconsciously skip ads is one thing, but lying is unforgivable.

725686 4y ago

I haven't even noticed the differences. I just wait until the skip button appear, or wait a few seconds before glancing. Who cares about to he text?

lkxijlewlf 4y ago

I'm convinced the countdown timer lingers on the 5 longer than a second, also.

mobiuscog 4y ago

I would likely pay for youtube premium if the TV app wasn't so absymal. However, having something that does not allow sorting by 'new' (and constantly recommending videos that are many years old), regularly re-introducing channels that have been marked as 'do not show' along with injecting the popular junk into 'for you' despite me having constantly marked similar as 'not interested'. There is no way I will pay premium for such a terrible experience, even if it does remove ads. The TV experience - where I consume most content - is fast becoming the biggest reason to never use youtube.

mrweasel 4y ago
The AppleTV app for YouTube is… fine, but certainly not great. Google, like Facebook, seems to believe in algorithms above anything less. It sort of make sense when you’re relying on showing ads, but it degrades the experience for those who actually pay for the service. That being said, my YouTube Premium subscription is easily the one I get the most enjoyment from, as compared to Netflix, HBO and similar.

setr 4y ago

My favorite variation is “you can skip in 5 seconds” but the ad itself is 5 seconds long

zaptrem 4y ago

Speaking of dark patterns, Medium paywalling other people's writing.

fatnoah 4y ago

I have no idea why or how it's happening, but whenever I view a Youtube video on my personal computer, it stops after < 1 second and I get skipped right to the content. It's the only device in my home that happens to, and I'm afraid to touch anything, lest I lose that magic power.

jerf 4y ago

My favorite "dark pattern" plausibly disguised as a simple bug is that the countdown timer, across multiple platforms I've used YouTube on, doesn't work correctly and very easily will let the ad play for a second or two longer than you intend. It behaves as if it's supposed to count down to 0 one second at a time, but there's a recurring event that is run every second to see if the countdown timer needs to be lowered. However, it's very easy for that event to be ever so slightly delayed or advanced relative to when the timer counts down, and as a result the timer doesn't get decremented correctly. It's very easy to see if you watch the timer carefully; it almost never counts evenly like it should, and it very often skips a beat entirely. (Compare with a simple timer app, which is correctly updating every frame the display renders. This isn't that hard.) It's very plausibly a bug that a novice dealing with time in a UI would make, and in many other circumstances I'd accept that explanation. But, a bug in such a critical piece of YouTube's functionality, with a root cause I'm pretty sure I've diagnosed just by glancing at it, surviving for years and years across multiple platforms? This isn't a bug. It's policy. At scale, those seconds add up.

wizzard 4y ago
Yes, on my smart TV app it's so slow and glitchy that the 5-second ad preview often plays for 10+ seconds before the "Skip Ad" button finally appears. Add to that the 5-7 seconds of black screen before the ad starts playing and the 2-3 seconds to resume my video, and it's a major annoyance during workouts and such.
- SteveMoody73 4y ago
  On an old TV I have it can take at least 5 seconds before it starts counting down. I've just assumed it was a badly maintained app. Have 3 smart Tvs and YouTube seems to behave different on all of them. May have to look into it.
aequitas 4y ago
Sound like they implemented Vetinari’s clock from Discworld. That’s a waiting room clock that would slow down and speed up the seconds hand (and also the ticks and tocks) but the minute and hour hands would run on time. This was to make the waiting person extra nervous before their meeting with the patrician. He is by far my most favorite characters in the books.

Quequau 4y ago

This is an interesting piece but why is there some sort of redirected url used instead a normal one? That seems like a dark pattern itself.

nimbius 4y ago

>By introducing so many versions of design, it forbids a pattern to be established and recognized by the users. I dont think the author properly acknowledges just how voracious the human appetite for patterns are. We are absolute machines when it comes to spotting even the hint of a pattern, and few things can prevent us from establishing and identifying them as a function of our basic existence. millions of years of evolution have basically guaranteed that when patterns arise or exist, we are borg-like in our pursuit. shuffling a few choices of skip is a cheap effort that probably appeased a few C level ad execs. the biggest coffin-nail for ads is of course adblock.

dec0dedab0de 4y ago

I think the biggest dark pattern is allowing skipable ads to be long. Sometimes over an hour. I spent some time in the hospital not too long ago, and it was physically painful for me to move enough to skip an ad. I would have been fine watching 30-60 second ads without skipping, but they just put infomercials in the middle of the video you're watching. it is outrageous.

josteink 4y ago
And you never once considered going premium to remove the ads? Surely someone must have been able to help you out with that if you couldn’t do it yourself? The answer exists, it’s right there with buttons for clicking given to you by Google, but people here on HN so often seem so entirely blindsided and insist there’s no such thing as ad-free Youtube. What gives? I just don't get it.
- sophacles 4y ago
  Ad-free youtube doesn't get rid of "paid content" in videos. "paid content" is just ads. So if you pay for youtube premium you get rid of some ads, not all the ads.
  - delecti 4y ago
    That's clearly a different kind of thing though. Sponsored content in videos is just stuff you don't like, but it's still the video you clicked on. Youtube injected ads on top of the video is not the content you clicked on. Youtube premium unambiguously solves the problem that the top-level comment was complaining about (mid-roll ads that can be a half-hour or longer), you're just moving the goal posts.
    - sophacles 4y ago
      I'm not moving anything. If you want to call something ad-free, IMHO it shouldn't have ads.

robertlagrant 4y ago

This isn't great, but there's no ethical dilemma. Being able to skip an advert at all is a pretty recent luxury.

gundmc 4y ago

This article comes across as a bit conspiratorial. I feel like "dark pattern" is on the verge of losing meaning when it's applied in cases like this as opposed to for example: making accept cookies one click and reject multiple clicks (which Google is also guilty of).

dghughes 4y ago

I watch a lot of YouTube on my smart TV even an old Roku but after the changes to the frequency of ads it was unbearable. It was to the point where I would mute the TV and put my hand up to block the ad from my eyes. I would also press back a few times to exit out of the ad and most times if done twice no ad plays. Ads always cut off the first 5 seconds of the videos, and ads were popping up seconds after the initial two ads, and then ads cut in mid sentence. No thought of the content presented like a TV ad would do just stuff in as many as possible. Eventually I gave in an paid the $10/moth. YouTube is broken and unwatchable without doing it that way at least on a smart TV or a Roku.

Larrikin 4y ago
During the pandemic some product person drastically increased the number of ads and began ruining videos with ads in the middle of the videos. Music sets get screwed up and the crappy AI likes to pause jokes right before the punch line and then resume a second or two after. At this point any video I imagine myself ever watching more than once gets downloaded with yt-dlp and automatically loaded into Plex. I had one negative experience with an artist deleting a popular video years ago, but that short term profit seeking is what pushed me to finally get everything all setup. Now there are no ads.

jedahan 4y ago

Twitter doesn't count blocked accounts as ad impressions. If I see an ad on twitter, I block the account that displayed it. Invariably, there is another ad in the next 3-5 tweets. I can do this 3 or 4 times in a row before I give up looking at the feed because the signal-to-noise ends up being too low when 25% of my feed are ads. My guess is that after blocking an account, the ad you saw doesn't count as an impression. It's also possible that 25% is normal, but it doesn't seem that way if I scroll and not block accounts.

frizlab 4y ago

The very very few times I allow yt video to play (in private nav only), if I ever see an ad I just reload the page until the ad is gone. It works (but I watch like 1 video every 6 month, so YMMV).

arrosenberg 4y ago

Another random one I’ve come across. I can block most YouTube ads with uBlock Origin in the browser. I can also cast my browser tab to an Android TV device. But if I try and cast a tab with YouTube, it will open the app instead of casting the browser, and I can’t block ads in the app.

cercatrova 4y ago

PSA, uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock (blocks in-video ads by automatically skipping them via crowdsourced timestamps) exist, as do Vanced for Android (until it dies, could also use NewPipe, a fork with SponsorBlock is available) and SmartTubeNext for Android-based TVs.

galuggus 4y ago

You could tell them to 'fuck off' with this extension fuckoff.yt

throw7 4y ago

youtube music will often interrupt startup and ask you to signup now with a large button at the bottom. There is small text below it (not even a button) to say "not now". That line of text is wedged in really close to the "close" button. frankly, also, shutting down an existing app (well liked google play music) and implementing a less functional replacement (for their benefit) should be called the Google Two Step Dark Pattern Shuffle.

clarge1120 4y ago

TouchTunes jukeboxes -seem- to use a dark pattern of playing music nobody wants to listen to in order to encourage jukebox purchases. It could also be that the default music is stuff that is less popular.

xg15 4y ago

I didn't get that amount of variations the OP sees so far, but I've been wondering if the number of ads you get and the distribution of skippable vs unskippable ads is somehow personalized. At least my subjective impression is that when I go on a youtube binge, over time it will slowly increase the number of ads it shows back-to-back and also increases the amount of nonskippable ads. I wonder if there is some kind of reinforcement learning going on, which tries to figure out just how many ads I'm willing to tolerate before switching away. (Or employ the good old "boiling frogs" strategy and train me to tolerate more ads over time) I got no evidence for this at all of course, so just a conspiracy theory for now.

Cypher 4y ago

What ads?

karmakaze 4y ago

These patterns are clearly visible and so similar that I don't even behave differently to them. I don't care about any of the variants: I wait until I see Skip Ad and press it as soon as I can. It's not even like it's ever in a different place... unless I'm earnestly interested or have time to kill and want the channel to get paid with my time.

NavinF 4y ago

What a long winded way of saying “YouTube is AB testing 5 UIs for skipping ads”. There’s zero evidence that this tricks anyone; Just a bunch of hand-waving.

throwaway81523 4y ago

I've seen another YT dark pattern lately. I often skip ads with youtube-dl (download the video and watch offline). But sometimes I like to be even more aggressive and skip the whole video, by using ytdl to download the closed caption text (VTT file) so I can read it instead of watching the vid. I have a python script that reformats the .vtt (a messy xml file full of timestamps and other markup) into something like readable text, and that worked pretty well until recently. Lately I've found that 1) more videos don't have auto transcription, and 2) the vtt files have gotten messed up so that the timestamps are no longer properly interspersed with the text. My script strips them all out except once per minute, so if I find something interesting or confusing in the transcript, I can quickly find that spot in the video and watch it. That doesn't work any more. The hack is still better than nothing but I wonder what YT is up to, messing up a feature like that, which was presumably done for accessibility reasons, so its breakage likely has consequences beyond annoying freeloaders like me.

q-big 4y ago

Quote from the article: > By introducing so many versions of design, it forbids a pattern to be established and recognized by the users. Essentially, the users look at the design, get confused about if there is going to be a “Skip Ad” button or not, get tired of trying to figure it out, and finally pay less attention to it which increases the chance of them ending up watching ads that could have been skipped. Honestly, this does not match (at least) my usage pattern: I am so annoyed by the ads that I always look for the skip button - sometimes successfully, sometimes in vain. (by the way: I see strong evidence that Google's (and thus YouTube's) ad network has a lot of difficulties finding ads that are of interest for me - likely because I have quite different interests from the typical citizen; perhaps this is the reasons why YouTube's ads are so annoying for me that I always look for the skip button on YouTube).

stefanwlb 4y ago

prirai 4y ago

Ublock with Sponsorblock, Invidious, Freetube or Newpie and you're good to go!