58 ms·

YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

• annael32 3y ago
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• 2-718-281-828 3y ago
  So far haven't noticed any issues on FreeTube. https://freetubeapp.io/ https://freetubeapp.io/
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• juujian 3y ago
  Love this, this may actually help me to reduce my consumption of Youtube videos even further. That would be a good thing. All creators I like are also on other paid platforms. Thanks google for helping me migrate.
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• blastersyndrome 3y ago
  I use an ad blocker and I haven't gotten any such notifications about this. Are they only deploying it on certain devices and not others? I exclusively watch Youtube through the browser on desktop.
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• svantana 3y ago
  It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Spotify announced that it would start to crack down on adblockers in 2019 [1], but I've been using ublock origin on their web player since then and haven't noticed any issues (apart from the odd glitch when the blocker is trying to skip the ad). Did they get cold feet or was it mostly a PR move? https://gizmodo.com/spotify-may-suspend-your-account-if-it-catches-you-usin-1832446203 https://gizmodo.com/spotify-may-suspend-your-account-if-it-c...
  • judge2020 3y ago
    Sometimes it's just for the scentiment. For example, YouTube has had a policy since 2015 that you can't have third-party brand logos in your videos unless that brand also buys out all of YouTube's banner and in-video Ads in the video, and it couldn't be a pre-recorded ad, it had to be a sponsor spot integrated into the content. Supposedly there was no outrage and this policy stayed in place, and was just never enforced. https://youtu.be/t17PVwreKEE?t=93 https://youtu.be/t17PVwreKEE?t=93
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• NaN1352 3y ago
  Again they chose to not tell users about Premium LITE. Why? Wouldnt it convince more people to pay? And Google can try to entice users later to upgrade to the full Premium. Would t that make sense?
• torham 3y ago
  The price for premium just doesn't make sense. I would buy it if it were $1 or less per month. This seems reasonable to me, how much could they possibly make off of me in a single month with ads?
• robert8923 3y ago
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• franczesko 3y ago
  The experience on the platform became so hostile to users, while content is turning into a cable tv, I wouldn't miss it, if I would be blocked. It's not blocking an ad or two, but a full spam marathon, sometimes longer than a movie itself. Of course, it's not possible to see which movies are worth to watch, as dislikes are not visible, so more video opens, more disappointment, but also... more ads.
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• i-hate-ads 3y ago
  The best solution when you see an ad is to ctrl-click on it dozens of times. Then do it again with as many proxy/VPN/tor IPs as you can. It will cost google or the advertiser money or get them banned for clock fraud. Wish I could automate this. Which reminds me I need to install ad-nauseum again.
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• isaacremuant 3y ago
  > Premium [...] looks like free users may only be left with the option of sitting through ads False dichotomy. Free users will continue to either block their ad practices, stop watching in YouTube, download the videos, etc. It's my computer/devices. I don't simply consume because YouTube decides to operate at a loss to gain market Monopoly and targets competitors in anti competitive ways.
• nfriedly 3y ago
  I've had an adblocker in my browser for ages, but I wasn't a big youtube user because it just didn't have sufficient information density for me, even before google put ads in the platform. (Google only stuck ads in YT after they ran all of their competitors out of business!) Finding Vanced (and now ReVanced) with adblocking, SponsorBlock, and the ability to set the speed higher than 2x made it so that I actually use YouTube more regularly. (Despite the name, SponsorBlock can skip over a lot more than just sponsor segments - intros, outros, recaps, jokes, etc.) Any time I see YouTube on someone else's device I'm shocked by how awful it's become in it's default state. If I can't watch YouTube without adblock/sponsorblock/etc, I'll probably just go back to not watching YouTube. The one point where YT has improved over the years is the comment section. Aside from the occasional scammer impersonating the creator and trying to get me to send them money off-platform, the comments don't seem nearly as awful as I remember from 5-10 years ago. Also, as an aside, I pay for Nebula, and out-of-the-box, Nebula is a far superior experience to YouTube. But, I still think ReVanced has a leg up on Nebula thanks to skipping intros and the like. However, the biggest problem with Nebula is that it just doesn't have as much content that I'm interested in as YT does. It does seem to be improving, though.
  • okdood64 3y ago
    YouTube Premium is a far superior experience to Nebula.
    • k8sToGo 3y ago
      The experience yes, but not the price. At least in my country.
• noja 3y ago
  Last week I clicked a link and got TWO 15 second unskippable ads. I closed my tab after the first one. I don't want to watch a video that much. Today I tried to watch a long video and there adverts every five minutes. Closed again.
• dredmorbius 3y ago
  Not sure if it's related, but I'm noticing that my principle Invidious instance (yewtu.be) has been knocked offline, apparently by its cloud provider, and that my usually-reliable Piped fallback (piped.kavin.rocks) is showing YouTube comments on video links ... but not the video itself). I am able to play audio however using yt-dlp.
• KMag 3y ago
  So... this is pretty evil... but I thought of it a while ago and I'm not that bright, so I'm sure plenty of others have also thought of it. How long until Google / Meta / whomever just starts having faster response times and higher resolution content for people who have clicked on an add in the past N minutes? People who don't click on ads either (1) self-select away from the platform (or at least reduce their time on the platform), (2) begin to engage in quasi click-fraud, or else (3) consume fewer of the service's resources. It seems like a pretty simple way to improve the ratio of consumed resources to ad revenue.
  • f33d5173 3y ago
    As an advertiser, I don't want them to incentivize people to click on ads, because then people will do it despite lack of interest in my product, and thus just add noise to my numbers. Unless it also leads to an increase in conversions (doubtful) that just makes the individual clicks worth that much less to me.
    • KMag 3y ago
      It simultaneously incentivizes clicking on ads, but also increases the concentration of ad-susceptible users on the platform. Depending on the correlation between a high propensity to click on ads and a high propensity to buy once on a website, such a change might actually increase the quality of clicks that you get.
• joeythedolphin 3y ago
  Anyone know how to stop sites from saying, "It looks like you're using an adblocker... blah blah blah"
  • AHOHA 3y ago
    UbO, go to settings and enable the filter saying “anti-adblock killer”.
• deleted 3y ago
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• mynameisash 3y ago
  There's a 402 PAYMENT REQUIRED[0], but apparently it's been reserved for future use forever. I'm surprised there isn't a scheme by which websites can charge micropayments for content. In principle, I'm not opposed to loading up an account with $20 and paying $0.10 for an Economist article or $0.02 for a YouTube video or whatever. I honestly don't know if this exists now or has ever existed, but I would love to directly support content creators without the total garbage game theory equilibrium we seem to have settled into of every expert hocking their nutritional supplements. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#4xx_client_errors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#4xx_...
  • RandallBrown 3y ago
    Google (sort of) used to offer this feature! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor You put money in your account and basically bid against the ads that would be shown on websites you visited. I think you could even pick the images you'd see instead of ads.
  • kevincox 3y ago
    Coil [1] was an attempt to do this via Web Monetization [1]. [1] https://www.coil.com/ https://www.coil.com/ [2] https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/
  • AlwaysRock 3y ago
    I wish this could become a thing. I'd pay for a stupid NYT article every once in a while. I don't want a subscription. Let me just give you 25 cents or something. Even the work arounds are annoying so I end up just not reading the article. No one wins there.
  • ProllyInfamous 3y ago
    The last time I brought up this (very similar) idea, I was called "paranoid." I've already got the crypto, and am more than willing to pay to read articles WITHOUT HAVING TO LOG IN TO ANYTHING.
  • colinsane 3y ago
• lizknope 3y ago
  Part of the reason youtube ads are so annoying is that many of them are played at random times while you are watching a video. There is no smooth transition to the ad. When watching news or sports on television the announcers will say "And now we're going to a commercial break" and they play some outro music. Then they play some music to welcome you back. When watching a sitcom or drama the script writers plan in the commercial breaks where you would have the different acts in a play. They are natural stopping points to take a short break. Youtube ads are just random interruptions.
  • Nathan2055 3y ago
    Some creators do put in fairly natural ad breaks, since there is an option to manually define where to run ads. RedLetterMedia is the best example that comes to mind; they get to a stopping point and cut to black and then an ad plays, and then they cut back afterwards. If you’re paying for Premium or otherwise blocking ads, it just looks like a segment transition. The problem is that YouTube has on several occasions actually gone in and added huge numbers of additional automatic ad breaks, showing at random places in the video, and has stated that the “opt-out” is YouTubers manually going in and deleting those new ad breaks for every single video.[1] Most YouTubers don’t care enough to spend the time to manually fix it for every video, or just accept the excuse of “oh, but you get more revenue this way” and don’t bother. So then baking in smooth ad transitions becomes retroactively useless since YouTube is just running ads at random points in the video anyway. [1]: https://twitter.com/redlettermedia/status/1113984304852492288 https://twitter.com/redlettermedia/status/111398430485249228...
• guy98238710 3y ago
  Bloody fools. They don't know what beast they are waking up. Certain portion of ad blocker users are zealots. These people are insane and quite a few of them are quite resourceful. Just a few problems that are going to hit YT: - torrents and other piracy - rapidly evolving ad-blockers - undetectable ad-blockers sitting in a new page layer invisible to page scripts - visual ML ad-blockers detecting ads no matter how they are loaded - new ad-free P2P video sharing websites - influential users discouraging everyone from using YT - popular content creators moving off YT and advertising other hosting options
  • eYrKEC2 3y ago
    Friction is enough. At Intel they had a product where they wanted to prevent certain use cases ( I forget which), but they were satisfied keeping out everyone who didn't have $50 of equipment and a little knowledge to defeat their mechanism. They weren't afraid of electrical engineers defeating them -- they expected that. They just put in enough friction to prevent _most_ people -- pareto-optimization.
• dahwolf 3y ago
  Since about a year ago, we entered the era of consolidation. The margin call of tech. A decade of outsized unprofitable interest-free investments sure is fun, but there comes a time to pay it back. That time is now. Companies that are not profitable should very soon be profitable. Companies that are profitable yet are stagnating need to show their next growth. And that's why you have this intensity in amping up monetization across several companies. You can be absolutely sure that tech leaders are keenly watching the effects of bold moves at Twitter, Reddit, the like. Companies testing the waters to see how far they can go. We had it coming and probably shouldn't complain that much. As the dutch saying goes: when shaven, sit still. Your expectations are based on party mode, but the party stopped.
• antonymy 3y ago
  I think I'm at the point where I value an ad-free internet more than I do youtube content. Certainly not enough to pay $12/mo to watch it without ads.
• walrus01 3y ago
  The next step in the adblocker-blocker wars will be something like the Firefox ublock origin plugin that instead of blocking the ad, accepts it and plays it (looking to the httpd on the other end like the data transfer has occurred and it's being displayed in the browser), but at the end user GUI end, sends the ad to the graphical equivalent of /dev/null so the adblocker-plugin-user never sees it.
• AzulMarino 3y ago
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• nunez 3y ago
  As much as I hate ads, I think this is fair. If you dislike the ads, pay for YouTube Premium. Otherwise, you pay with your time. This might be a privileged take, but I wish the entire Internet was like this. I really hate having to use an ad-blocker for everything, but I also hate that the only way some (many?) companies make money is by shoving as many bandwidth- and resource-stealing ads and tracking scripts into my face as possible.
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• CivBase 3y ago
  Guess I'll just have to start using NewPipe on my desktop if ad blockers stop working.
• hackernewds 3y ago
  someone seems to have weaponized the TLDR feature on the Hews app for this post with a malicious tinyurl.com/.. link
• omgmajk 3y ago
  Google, again doing Google things.
• teddyh 3y ago
  “Most of you have browsers, and most of those browsers show you advertisements, and I’m very puzzled about why. The advertisements are annoying most of the time, they slow you down, they injure the concentration that you bring to whatever task it is that you’re doing, and there’s no reason why they show you advertisements; my browser doesn’t show me any advertisements. I don’t see any ads when I read The New York Times, or go to wherever it is that you are happy going to, because my browser has Adblock in it, and that pretty much ends the story. Even in this town, many of you, indeed, I would guess, most of you are probably using the Firefox browser. That means you’re two clicks away from not having any advertising on the net anymore. All you need to do is google “Adblock Plus”, and say “I’m feeling lucky”, [Laughter] thank you very much. Now you know why my friends – and they are my friends – at the Mozilla Foundation are paid tens of millions of dollars every year by Google – basically, not to bundle Adblock Plus into the default distribution of Firefox. But you also know why all the talk about advertising supported models on the web is just talk, and why it is that in the end, all of those models are fated not to work. Because in digital media, when you give people knowledge, you can’t force them to take advertising, because digital media are filterable – that’s the beauty of them.” — Eben Moglen, Free and Open Software: Paradigm for a New Intellectual Commons, 2009-03-13, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbcy_ZxXLl8#t=31m51s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbcy_ZxXLl8#t=31m51s>
• ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
  Unpopular opinion, ad blockers are the same as piracy. There's basically an agreement that in return for watching some video for free, you have to 'pay' by watching an ad. On YouTube a significant amount of this money even goes to the creator. Not really sure how you can defend your entitlement to free content with no ads, refusing to support the creator and provider, when the ad free version is reasonably priced, and even includes music. To me it sounds like thinking a restaurant is too expensive so you just dine and dash.
  • teolandon 3y ago
    Is getting up and going to pee during an ad break the same as piracy? Do I steal half the content if I close my eyes during the ad? What about muting and switching tabs? Do I pay with my inconvenience if I do it manually? Is this just about the creator getting paid, or about the poor company that's advertising to me as well?
    • ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
      >Is this just about the creator getting paid Yea, and I find it hard to understand why YouTube doesn't deserve the money either. The rest of your strawman has nothing to do with what I said.
      • teolandon 3y ago
        That's not what a strawman is. Sure, YouTube deserves the money. They should find a more reliable way than third party advertisements to get the money. Advertisers pay content creators money directly to feature sponsored ad-reads on their video, knowing full well that a lot of people will skip straight through them. If I skip an ad-read, I'm not stealing from the advertiser, even though the advertiser is expecting to get money from me. The advertiser has paid the money to deliver this ad-read to me, but I'm not paying them back. Similarly, YouTube keeps on hosting "free" video content with third party ads, knowing full well that a lot of people will block them. If I block ads, YouTube has paid for the content to be delivered to me, but I'm not paying them back. Both are investments that don't always see return on the individual level. If everyone stops buying sponsored products that appear in ad-reads, advertisers will stop paying for ad-reads. If everyone starts blocking ads, YouTube will find other ways to get compensation for the storage and bandwidth.
• zeruch 3y ago
  YT can mwah, my ass. Once the ad volume readily affects page load times, or disrupts casting flow (e.g. if my attempt to listen to Brian Eno & Jon Hassell's ambient works is intruded on every 10 minutes with an earbleed level ad for Papa John's Pizza), I just download the content locally and cast it via Emby.
• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  I blocked ads after trying to show my kids tiny cakes during election season, and every cake episode was talking about politicians who rape everyone.
• swayvil 3y ago
  Capitalism is an infinite resource sink. Your competitors will always try to outspend you. Your exploiters will always try to exploit you more. It's like living next door to a black hole. It's a bad neighbor.
• userbinator 3y ago
  I like how this article is currently right next to the "drink verification can" one. IMHO an adblocker is morally equivalent to changing the channel, muting, or leaving the room while an ad is playing on the actual "tube", and forcing me to consume content should be illegal.
• amosliberal 3y ago
  one of the many reasons why i would never work for google
• mochaki 3y ago
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• 4sellff 3y ago
  The solution to Ads is to create an alternative. We call this an Offer and it differs in the following ways: User Choice Ads: no (platform decides) Offers: yes (user decides = opt-in) Privacy Ads: no privacy (your data belongs to them) Offers: total privacy (no info collected) Rewards Ads: no reward (platform keeps all value) Offers: cash rewards (paid by seller) Participants Ads: seller -> ad platform -> buyer Offers: seller < - > buyer Disclosure: founder of sellff.com. We created Offers to facilitate a more effective and honest way for buyers to connect with sellers.
• lowlevel 3y ago
  A lot of people think ads before and after videos, or peppered eveyr 3 minutes within an hour long video are no big deal, but many of us have had enough. I pay google around $20 a month to avoid watching ads. I consider this extortion.
  • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    If they got away with blocking adblockers and people signed up for Premium, eventually the money from that wouldn't be enough because Line Always Needs Up. Eventually you'd watch more ad than video, and eventually videos would become unwatchable because every second would be peppered with ads.
• perceptronas 3y ago
  Hopefully this will result in YT losing their dominant position. (Saying as a person who pays for Premium) After Youtube removed dislikes and started pushing "shorts" – it became noticeably worse.
• dean2432 3y ago
  i don't mind it because i pay for premium, but what i mind is not being able to turn off shorts. shorts are ruining the platform and i am very tempted to drop my support because of this.
• tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
  I am glad to see that more people are against advertising than you may believe there would be through social media experience.
• bborud 3y ago
  I wish I was better at supporting alternatives to youtube.
• mrjin 3y ago
  Cool. What if I don't use it at all? I hardly use YT but yesterday, I searched something which turned out on YT. So I clicked it then I was served two ads before I can actually play it. And in just around 5 minutes or so, another ad popped out again. Thus I don't really see why not try blocking ads.
• throwuwu 3y ago
  Now that I’m experimenting with blocking YouTube altogether for longer and longer periods of time, I find that I don’t need it at all anymore. I used to heavily rely on it for tutorials but ChatGPT has replaced that; why watch a 30 minute explanation of something that winds up being tangentially related to what you’re doing when you can just talk directly to the documentation and ask follow up questions? Other than that use, everything else on YouTube was just a distraction.
  • nicce 3y ago
    > why watch a 30 minute explanation of something that winds up being tangentially related to what you’re doing when you can just In the past there used to be well written blog posts and you were able to read them in 15 minutes and better understand the matter. Now we have to waste 15 mins more of our life to get the same point.
    • throwuwu 3y ago
      I don’t even bother with blog posts anymore unless they are new information and in that case it’s often easier to use Edge and Bing chat to interrogate the page directly. It’s far better than skimming or ctrl-f
• rldjbpin 3y ago
  interesting discourse around this and ads in general, from people on both sides of the equation. a lot of creator sided things are bunch of bs from what i've experienced myself. while the public perception with popular channel is that they're making bank (in general), many professional channels are using in-video ads to make the most money. so it is very naive to use that card. not to forget that probably 90+ percent videos don't belong to people receiving the ad revenue through the program. there was a point about people taking "free" content on the internet for granted. in the current web ecosystem where tracking has carried the platforms for so long, it is not like paying for youtube will get rid of all that. pretty funny how they want it both ways with monetization. on mobile, youtube has already been twitch-level obnoxious with countering adblock efforts, with large banner ads right below the video and sometimes 20 seconds unskippable ads for a short 40 seconds video. in terms of running costs, etc, they've already been reducing video quality despite having a fast connection. the culmulation of the above points pushes me away from paying them a single penny out of principle.
• pfdietz 3y ago
  Youtube is also serving me alt right ads against gender affirming medicine. Not good, Youtube.
• Roark66 3y ago
  I'll sooner stop using youtube than watch it with the ads. I've been watching it exclusively via smartyoutubetv app (an open source android TV app). Every couple of months youtube does something to break the app. Every single time the app it fixed within a couple of hours. It's not even about just the ads. I use it because it let's me remove all the crap I don't want force fed to me while all I want it watch my subscribed channels (shorts, news etc). Smartyoutubetv let's me disable all of it. " Also, it is technically impossible to ensure users watch these ads. The more elaborate detection they use, the more elaborate emulation of these ads being watched will be made. Additionally, I used to have mixed feelings about using an ad blocker so I'd give the normal youtube client a chance now and then. Interestingly on the very first video watched I'd get pretty reasonable ads (maybe 2x5s of unskippable ad, the rest can be skipped in a 10min video), or one 30s unskippable ad in an hour long video. But continue watching and the number of ads (by ~5th video) will continue raising to obscene amounts. So no, I have no bad feelings for using the ad blocker.
  • city41 3y ago
    I don't block YouTube ads and watch YouTube quite a bit. I've not had this experience. I don't think I've ever seen an unskippable 30 second ad. It seems to me unskippable tops out at 15 seconds. When YouTube flipped the switch a few years ago to drastically increase the number of ads it was super painful. But I have to admit I've totally gotten used to it. It's still dramatically better than cable. To me, YouTube ads are just on the cusp of acceptable.
    • ProllyInfamous 3y ago
      >But I have to admit I've totally gotten used to it. Good consumer is good.
    • guestbest 3y ago
      I’ve seen multiple unskippable consecutive 15 second ads on the YouTube app on the Apple TV, and I’ve pretty sure I’ve also seen unskippable ads longer than that. I just don’t use the app anymore and plugged an old MacBook from 2011 into the tv and with Firefox and brave. My wife actually prefers that to an Apple TV now.
• westurner 3y ago
  Students don't even have the option of paying for premium using their school account, and so if you assign them videos to watch (using that account) they must watch ads; is that correct? I think YouTube should just drop the creators who demanded the greater subscription revenue that must've precipitated this change; go sell your own content. FWIW, ad-free Khan Academy videos are subsidized by Alphabet/Google/YouTube.
• worewood 3y ago
  Unless they make the ads part of the video itself by re-encoding it on the fly with the ads inserted, there will be a way around this. Instead of blocking the ads, the ad blocker just needs to download the content anyway and run it off-screen.
  • colinsane 3y ago
    inline ads don’t even fix YT’s problem. see: sponsorblock. if you’re inserting targeted ads (where each viewer sees a different length, or ads inserted at a different position), the sponsorblock approach can be modified to function as a catalog of known ads which your browser/app recognizes and skips. it’s an arms race. it’s the same flaw as DRM. Google wants to control how your device interacts with the bits it’s already downloaded. as long as the device is in your hands, they can make the bits more difficult for you to use in a manner they don’t approve of, but they can never make it impossible.
• InCityDreams 3y ago
  I tried no adblocker on youtube. I made the mistake of putting Steve Hillage: Rainbow Dome Music on. So fuck you Barilla pasta for shitting your disgraceful ad right in the middle. C'è casa? C'è merda. How the hell people do yoga and other calming things with youtube with ads is way beyond what i can understand. At least, i tried, although i got burned. Never going back - and if yt manages to defeat me, fuck them too. I'm not against ads per se, but please...try and be tasteful!
• Jean-PaulSartre 3y ago
  I analyzed all 1200 comments and asked the following: Which comment found or suggested, the best way to circumvent,avoid or get around youtube approach without paying subscription? A: None. I suggest we start doing, cause they're ahead of us..... before is too late.
• RadixDLT 3y ago
  Wow, YouTube really knows how to make friends. Testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers? Good luck with that! I just love how brave browser is blocking all the ads.
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• mthcalixto 3y ago
  They will back off when they realize they are losing viewers.
• kelvinjps 3y ago
  What I don't understand why so many ads ony face? I work as advertiser and competing with that many other ads is bad, if they were showing the user one meaningful ad , busineses would have better conversion rates and user less annoyed
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• HomeDeLaPot 3y ago
  Turning off my adblocker helped me kick my YouTube habit.
• Havoc 3y ago
  I’ll likely end up pay tbh. Usually more militant about getting aggressively pushed but in this case - I can see how serving vid isn’t cheap and the value is real so fine whatever
• noisy_boy 3y ago
  This is great. Now when I really need to watch something important, I'll deal with the ads and for the rest of the junk, it'll piss me off sufficiently to stop watching it. Fantastic news - thanks Google!
• Tozen 3y ago
  What YouTube's/Google's greed and hubris will likely result in, are more programmers aggressively testing ad blockers that can defeat their new approach or users more aggressively looking for alternatives to YouTube. And I'm totally amazed that execs at YouTube/Google haven't figured out that maybe a cheaper tier premium service for just no ads, might be a viable enough solution, versus thinking they are going to bully and intimate their customers. At least give it a try, and give users more options. Make a new basic tier for maybe $15 dollars a year, where there are no ads. There are just too many programmers in the world, to think "aggressive intimidation" is really going to work.
• davedx 3y ago
  Less YouTube for me then. I’ve already almost entirely stopped visiting Twitter. Good riddance
• sylware 3y ago
  Youtube must restore interoperability for noscript/basic (x)html browsers.
• CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  I like to keep things simple: Anyone who defends advertising in the age of psychology-hacking is either a sociopath on top, or a wannabe. Don't negotiate with terrorists, etc etc.
• activiation 3y ago
  I always wondered why they didn't do that sooner
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• whateveracct 3y ago
  Is yt-dlp affected? Could I preload videos to avoid ads still?
• alpark3 3y ago
  Though I have premium, I actually don't mind Youtube ads that much. Compared to regular old banners ads throughout the internet, Youtube ads feel much nicer and interesting to watch. Much more production value, like TV ads(because they literally are). Of course, no ads are better than any ad, but I can't ignore the fact that ad-enabled Youtube is free.
• 0xfedbee 3y ago
  > Child is dying from choking. YouTube search: how to stop a baby from choking > Two 30 second ads about how important vitamins are for me to get pregnant Meanwhile baby is dead. Install adblocker so I can save my next eligible heir quickly. > Next baby is choking. Quickly open YouTube. YouTube: you are blocked. Now I have two dead babies but thank god I know how to get pregnant again because of those Vitamins.
  • marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Ad-free experience: Hey what's up child-rearing nation! I hope you're having a wonderful day! Today we're gonna be about saving your child from choking! I know right, my kid is choking, your kid is choking, it just keeps happening! They're blue in the face and gagging and you don't know what to do! *laughs* But before we get to that, I need to tell you about our sponsor, ridge wallet, fuck, skip ahead alright, that was great, now the first step is to locate your kid, if they're choking they may not be making a lot of noise so you need to look carefully. Then you need to make sure they're actually choking, are they breathing or what, maybe just holding their breaths. Then to fix the problem, well I'm gonna tell you about that but first let me give a shout out to NordVPN, you wouldn't want someone to download your IP address while you're out looking for dying kid tutorials *skip ahead* alright and what you do next is you call 911, and they'll maybe know what to do. Alright, that's it for today, don't forget to slap that like and subscribe button and next time we'll talk about what to do when your frying oil's caught fire [ominous cut to running faucet]
    • asimovfan 3y ago
      Ah yes, if i just watch the ads, google will be sincerely generous and there will be no ads in the content anymore. If i do everything the corporations think is good for me, life will be so great :) I am just underhanded and thats why we don't deserve good things :(
    • 0xfedbee 3y ago
      This is spot on.
    • 3y ago
• galkk 3y ago
  YouTube premium family is best value for money for all streaming services. Just don’t waste time on adblocking, as it works reliably only on desktop. I used ublock and it was more or less cuccessfully fighting ads on desktop, but they still were present on phone (new pipe just sucks, and I moved to iPhone anyways), iPad, Xbox and tv. Premium removed all of them. Also gave downloads for offline viewing. I still use sponsorblock on desktop though. And miss it a lot everywhere else. Mandatory disclaimer. I’m Google employee but do not work for YouTube and I’m paying for premium with my own money.
  • freitzkriesler2 3y ago
    After Elsagate, I am flabbergasted any parent would trust YouTube kids to show appropriate content. Even one that works for Google.
  • mozman 3y ago
    I never watch youtube on my phone, always desktop and like you sponsorblock has become essential. I can't bring myself to give YT money when I can address my use case for free. YT's hostile user approach also rubs me the wrong way, I can't reward that behavior
    • unmole 3y ago
      How exactly is YouTube user hostile?
      • mozman 3y ago
        Aggressively pushing shorts, opaque/biased moderation, lack of appeals, removing power user features such as sorting creator videos, disabled the like button, totally ruined comment hierarchy when G+ was pushed aggressively, etc.
  • asimovfan 3y ago
    I use ublock on desktop and newpipe on mobile and i only see ads when i am looking at someone elses screen.
• throwing_away 3y ago
  If they break uBO and yt-dlp, it might actually kill the platform.
  • Zinu 3y ago
    Money from advertisers doesn’t decrease long-term without uBO/yt-dlp users (since they don’t watch ads and pay for them). So less operating costs for Youtube, and more money for creators (in theory, if YT doesn’t keep the costs savings). That should help the platform, not kill it.
    • guerrilla 3y ago
      It's not about that. It's the network effect and motivating making alternatives viable. Other sites might get good as a result of the exodus.
• k4rli 3y ago
  And 1080p quality is somehow a "premium" feature now. Could YouTube be the next platform to ditch after reddit died? At least the official clients, NewPipe is quite nice.
  • BXlnt2EachOther 3y ago
    1080p as it existed before is still available for all users; they added a new, higher-bitrate 1080p format to premium.
• ytthrowaway 3y ago
  you can use vpn to sign up to youtube premium from india or some other cheap location without strict address requirements and pay two bucks a month
  • MaxikCZ 3y ago
    Isnt youtube basically merged with google, thus you need to have separare indian account jusr for google?
    • eimrine 3y ago
      Who needs Google search in 2023? The only google services I use are Gmail, Translate, Youtube and their core project - 8.8.8.8
      • Wazako 3y ago
        You have deepl to replace translate, it's incredibly better and can replace words. The only advantage of Translate is ocr camera.
        • eimrine 3y ago
          Thank you, I will definitely use it for short sentences. But my typical scenario is to throw a whole webpage from HN if I am too tired to read it in English. I do not see how deepl can translate a whole webpage, all I see is 1500 symbols with no registration.
    • kayxspre 3y ago
      Not really. You need a separate payment profile in the country you intend to subscribe to it. My Play Store profile is USA-based, but I'm in Thailand and I subscribe for the 1-year plan for $44.99. A new payment profile is created for YouTube billing, though I deleted it as it's quite a hassle to manage different profile; I'll create a new one if needed.
  • xnorswap 3y ago
    Advocating fraud to save a fiver a month?
• eimrine 3y ago
  I love this idea because finally there is some force which can make me less watching youtube and I certainly am not going to deepen my profile with a bank credentials (but I would pay for premium with crypto if it will be possible)
  • unmole 3y ago
    > deepen my profile with a bank credentials (but I would pay for premium with crypto if it will be possible Bull fucking shit. There are services like Privacy.com which allow you to pay without deepening your profile.
    • eimrine 3y ago
      I am not an US citizen. And even if I would, I do not believe that privacy.com does not give anything and everything to FATCO.
      • pcthrowaway 3y ago
        What crypto are you using that you're not worried about just being tracked on-chain? XMR?
        • eimrine 3y ago
          I use Bitcoin + several wallet.dat each of those is bond to a different VPN. It means that I absolutely do not care about on-chain tracking on each wallet.dat because I am sure that nobody can tie my different addresses to a single person.
          • EternalUsenet 3y ago
            This seems quite unnecessary and over-complicated. Trust me, Google will have you tracked one way or the other, so it might be better to just grab a prepaid visa gift card for your Youtube Premium subscription and save yourself the trouble. Any grocery or convenience store can sell those to you with untraceable cash with ease.
• suddenclarity 3y ago
  I get that people hate companies but $7 a month for unlimited video on any device with 500 hours uploaded every minute. That's a decent deal. The only drawback is that you don't get Sponsorblock on smart devices. People seem to overestimate how much the average person care about online outrage. Netflix, Reddit, Twitter.. They all seem fine despite being declared dead numerous times.
  • guy98238710 3y ago
    It's not their content though. Most people upload stuff without any intent to monetize or otherwise control it. YT, like other large sites, was built through mass-scale theft of what was supposed to be public domain works. Sure it's their servers, but then it's their fault they don't allow redistribution via third party channels.
  • prepend 3y ago
    I don’t watch many YouTube videos. Maybe 1-5/month. And it depends on many factors so isn’t predictable. I don’t want to pay$7/month so when I do get a link I don’t get annoyed by YouTube’s UX.
  • est31 3y ago
    I remember people saying years ago that reddit's redesign is not a problem because it has API access and you can use third party clients... The $7 is the current price, it does not reflect future changes. If the pool of potential customers is dry, they will try other means of increasing revenue, including increases of that price. They might also turn the $7 into a requirement to watch YouTube at all, and show ads anyways.
    • prirun 3y ago
      > They might also turn the $7 into a requirement to watch YouTube at all, and show ads anyways. Yep. All cable channels started out ad-free. When cable was introduced, the cost was $35/mo for all channels (there were no movie channels initially), justified by not having ads.
  • danielEM 3y ago
• 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
  As someone who has no "special love" for YouTube, I feel like the equation for YouTube is different for me that what they have in mind. YouTube chose to host a public mode of displaying videos that someone in a third world country made or Linus Sebastian made. As long as they don't put everything behind Netflix style login, I will fight tooth and nail with UBO. I don't care about "ethics" of ad blockers. If its public, I will do what I darn want. Want to stop me, well put it behind a paywall. That does two things. I don't use Netflix so any content there is of 0 interest to me. You don't get to stay public and expect ad dollars. It doesn't work like that on the internet. Same for NYT. I don't pay for it and have no use for content there. If if were an ad supported one, then I could use an ad blocker. Think of it this way. If you screen your movie in a cinema hall, I will watch it if I pay for a ticket. Fair and square. If it is played on a public roadshow, I will skip all ads or skip it altogether. The org has to decide. Either make content pay per use or free. No middle ground.
  • midoridensha 3y ago
    > If its public, I will do what I darn want. Want to stop me, well put it behind a paywall. The ethics are pretty clear I think: if I navigate with my browser to YouTube, or any site with ads, I'm able to see the content, plus annoying ads. I don't have to watch the ads: I can use an ad-blocker to tell my browser to not render those ads. The site has every right to serve me HTML/JS/video however they wish, but they have no right to tell me what to do with that data. If I want to ignore part of it, that's my right, and if I use automated means to ignore selected parts, that's also my right. If they want to spend massive resources trying to figure out ways to get around my automated means, or to detect my ad-blocker and refuse to send me data, they can do that too, but at what cost? But if they want to avoid this arms race of ad-blocking, they can just do what Netflix does: require payment and an account to get in. As for paywalls, those are really the same thing as ads usually: they load the article, then use JS to block it. You can block the JS and read the article.
    • eipi10_hn 3y ago
      Yes, in fact the "ethics" is written clearly in web standards principles: > 2.12 People should be able to render web content as they want > People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts or auto-played videos. We will build features and write specifications that respect peoples' agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf. https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/#render https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/#render --- And guess who is one of the members of World Wide Web Consortium: https://www.w3.org/membership/list/?initial=g&ecosystem= https://www.w3.org/membership/list/?initial=g&ecosystem= > Google's mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
• vintermann 3y ago
  I quit twitch over their attempts at adblock-blocking, and I will for YouTube too if it becomes a thing.
• jraph 3y ago
  I wonder what effect it will have on Invidious. By the way, this seems to coincide with their attempts to kill it [1]. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1688025600&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1685606400&page=0&prefix=true&query=invidious&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1688025600&dateRange=custom&...
• dogleash 3y ago
  I pay for twitch turbo, I even had youtube tv during football season. So I'm not that cost sensitive, and don't oppose giving youtube money for a service. But logging in on every browser and device I watch youtube on? Fuck, I'd rather not. Also, I never login to my personal google account at work. Before google bought youtube, my account there was called something like "duntwantacct".
• phneutral26 3y ago
  >> Before the reliance on ad blockers, people turned to YouTube Vanced to enjoy a Premium-like experience for free. However, the service was shuttered in March last year due to legal pressure from Google. With ad blockers now seemingly on the way out, it looks like free users may only be left with the option of sitting through ads That is simply not true. There are numerous alternatives to YouTube Vanced, including NewPipe, LibreTube or SkyTube. Only to name a couple. And then there still is invidious. So no, you don't have to sit through ads.
  • 3836293648 3y ago
    And revanced
• TheBozzCL 3y ago
  I wonder if we're gonna see an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker kinda race going on here. As long as the code runs in the users' browser, there should be a way around it. Makes me wonder if they'll ever move to WASM... though I assume there's gonna be ways to block ads regardless.
  • rolph 3y ago
    im assuming there's gonna be ways to bypass y0utub3 and go straight to the videos. in the meantime g00gle continues to footgun, provide motivation and traction for exodus and competition, and a peertube-like non-exclusive for the masses.
  • lp0_on_fire 3y ago
    I'll just stop using YouTube if they make ads unblockable. The quality of content on the site has decreased dramatically as the result of of their pushing corporate media/youtube "creators" to the top of search results. It's literally not worth it to me to pay for a subscription that _might_ reduce the number of ads I see.
    • tharkun__ 3y ago
      This. I recently re-setup my HTPC and forgot to add the usual plugins and suddenly instead of actually being able to watch youtube stuff, there was a BS ad every few minutes. It was essentially unwatchable. But I would never pay premium for that. Sure I care about some of that content, but it's not a lot and if I had to pay for it, I'd rather pay the author directly via say Patreon than to give it to Google and the author may or may not get some of that and they constantly have to try and "be nice to the algorithm" in order to get their share of the money. I really don't care if the algorithm thinks they're worthy of being listed in people's feeds. I like their content, period.
      • _trampeltier 3y ago
        And most serious (tech) channels are on other platforms too. So most times no problem.
• Moldoteck 3y ago
  Strange move, people use adblockers for a reason, 2-3 unskipable bs ads. Instead better limit quality to 480/720p. This way they'll save money for traffic. No adblocker?, Can go up to 1080p. Yt premium?, Welkome to 4k. Yt premium+?, Welcome to >8k
  • tetris11 3y ago
    Its not worth it. You don't watch YouTube videos for the fancy graphics, you listen to it for the commentary with some visual guides. 480p is more than enough for most
    • shostack 3y ago
      I watch a lot of gaming videos or instructional videos that benefit from better resolution when viewing on my iPad. It is beyond aggravating I can't set them to at least 1024 by default.
    • acdha 3y ago
      You might not, but there’s a ton of great content where the quality is very noticeable – anything related to nature, astronomy, sports, the tons of niche genres which involve looking at real world things in detail like rail fans, building/architecture fans, bird watchers, etc. is really unpleasant to watch at 480p. That’s the size of an iPad icon! Stuff like conference talks, of course, really don’t matter but there’s so much material that no generalization won’t be inaccurate for millions of watchers.
    • blooalien 3y ago
      At least 720p if a screencast is involved (educational videos). 480p screen text often becomes nearly unreadable mush.
    • Moldoteck 3y ago
      imo it's woth it not for the sake of user conversion, but for the sake of minimizing the cost for network load. Technically they'll have the same revenue, but profit will increase due to optimizing the delivery and since most yt users dont have premium I believe this can be a big chunk of money
• lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  > “In cases when viewers feel they have been falsely flagged as using an ad blocker, they can share this feedback by clicking on the link in the prompt.” At this point, such a statement almost feels as though it is explicitly stating that the "feedback" will be ignored. It probably won't be in aggregate but why should I expect that my individual report will be acted upon?
  • nottorp 3y ago
    It's google. There will never be any feedback unless your complaint makes it to the HN front page.
• atonse 3y ago
  Please do it, YouTube. I need something to break my YouTube addiction and this’ll do it. I’ll just buy a no-ads kindle and read like an old man.
  • impissedoff1 3y ago
    Stop supporting drm, get the better kobo
    • shmde 3y ago
      You can jailbreak Kindle.
      • ProllyInfamous 3y ago
        Will it still support my "3G for life" Kindle? Narrator: ...it wasn't for life.
• NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  This is a rather disturbing move to me, as I am a YouTube addict and adblocker user. I use NextDNS, a DNS-based service that's like your own PiHole in the cloud. It is sometimes tricky for me to disable adblocking! There are a couple of approaches. Resetting my DNS servers to defaults is disruptive and error-prone; it's a non-starter. I find it peculiar that there is no knob on NextDNS that says "disable blocking features and act like normal DNS" even though they themselves enable such a feature if you run out of free monthly queries. You can disable a bunch of features one-by-one, but of course that affects all sites, not just the one. You can whitelist any domain you want, but that involves a cycle of testing and guessing which ones are emanating from the site you want to use. In short, there's no straightforward way of just telling NextDNS "don't block ads while I'm on YouTube.com" and it's for that reason that I sort of miss uBlock Origin. However, YouTube does use native domains for all its ad serving, and I see them all now anyway, so I don't believe that this new policy will adversely affect my usage profile.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • Workaccount2 3y ago
    Have you considered just paying for something that you use a lot?
    • 6D794163636F756 3y ago
      I did this. I was skeptical at first but it's such a big qol improvement. I got a family plan so now that's what I bring to the streaming service exchange with the family and they love me for it
    • NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      > Have you considered just paying for something that you use a lot? Where did I say that I do not pay for it?
    • Gigachad 3y ago
      I was kind of against it since it seemed like a waste to pay for spotify and youtube music, but its honestly worth it just for ad free youtube alone. Only video streaming service I pay for.
• finger 3y ago
  Could you, in theory, stream a “video” of a website to the user and handle only the input (mouse, keybord) from the user? The user would then not interact with a website but with a “video” where everything is rendered server side thus making it impossible to block any ads.
  • govg 3y ago
    Sounds like ssh -x.
  • leduyquang753 3y ago
    You can then try to calculate how much more ad time would be needed to cover the cost of pulling over that move.
  • Rebelgecko 3y ago
    Too bad Stadia got (mostly) killed off, sounds like the perfect use case
• exabrial 3y ago
  Do it! We'll finally have reason to buy the Nebula subscription and we can get out of the monopoly market.
  • throwawaymobule 3y ago
    Here's hoping someone writes a youtube-dl extractor for that site soon. Haven't gotten around to doing it myself, despite manually downloading a bunch of videos using Firefox's network tab.
    • qbrass 3y ago
      yt-dlp has one.
      • throwawaymobule 3y ago
        I hadn't noticed. Thanks. Now I just have to put a token somewhere in my mpv/yt-dlp setup.
• EA-3167 3y ago
  Is there some business school teaching people that the sure way to profit is through an arms race against your own customers?
  • acdha 3y ago
    How are people who don’t pay for what they use customers? They cost YouTube money but if they’re not watching ads they’re not bringing in revenue and it’s highly unlikely that they’re bringing enough promotional value to defray that. I could see some push for ethical ads or security but at some point you need to pay for what you like, either by subscribing to premium or watching ads.
    • yummypaint 3y ago
      Until this very moment google has considered the wisest move to be trying to keep all potential users on their platform, and it's arguably part of why they have maintained such dominance. It has always depended on network effects and the nearly uncompensated efforts of creators. They have been getting greedier and greedier under the relentless quarter over quarter pressure to grow. Now we have mandatory ads on all videos, including non-monetized ones, and creaters who made the mistake of trusting youtube are systemtically defrauded through arbitrary demonetization. I certainly feel no obligation to pay tithes to google.
      • acdha 3y ago
        Paying for what you use isn’t tithing. It’s straight up capitalism – if you don’t like it, don’t take the deal. It’s completely optional and you’ll probably be better off for it given how many people describe their YouTube usage as an addiction.
        • EA-3167 3y ago
          Surely the corollary to this is users monetizing their data? Or is it just Youtube allowed to freely extract whatever value they feel like?
• tchbnl 3y ago
  Can't blame Google for finally getting to the point of doing this. There's probably a lot of extra money left on the table because of ad blockers. YouTube isn't a public service. You can either pay the $12/mo for Premium for no ads and other perks or watch ads to subsidize the site.
  • redeeman 3y ago
    or you can just block it, atleast for now. an option that many choose to make use of :)
• mxxx 3y ago
  I purchased a year of YouTube premium while I was on holiday in Turkey and it didn’t cost much. I mostly did it for YouTube music but the no ads thing is pretty great too.
• garciasn 3y ago
  From the article: >“YouTube’s ad-supported model supports a diverse ecosystem of creators, and provides billions of people globally access to content for free with ads,” the company’s statement says. Let's at least be 100% honest with everyone and stop with the disingenuous garbage: 1. Ad-blocker usage is roughly 25-30% of US users. 2. The average YouTube content creator makes less than 0.02 per ad view and thus why many of the large ones choose to use sponsors instead. Most YouTube content creators aren't making ANY money, let alone enough for them to care all that much. For those that are, they're doing just fine w/ad-blockers being used. 3. Google made nearly $70 billion in Q1; they're not hurting at all, especially their executives. 4. The on-going rise in the use of ad-block technologies is simply because platforms, sites, etc, are all absolutely inundating viewers with so much trash in an effort to make more money that it's almost a requirement to use them without having a shitty experience.
  • Nathan2055 3y ago
    > The average YouTube content creator makes less than 0.02 per ad view The number I see tends to fluctuate between $1 to $1.50 per 1,000 views, or about $0.001 to $0.0015 per view. (YouTube makes around twice that in direct gross revenue, and splits it up 55% to 45% between the creator and the platform, respectively.) This obviously fluctuates substantially: if you produce videos that are viewed by prime demographics advertisers are more interested in, you tend to make more. YouTube also has better individual deals signed with their topmost creators, giving them a better revenue split or a different advertiser pool that’s willing to pay more for the most popular YouTubers. Shorts and livestreams also work a bit differently, but that’s too complicated to get into here. CGP Grey has a great video on how YouTube ads work: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KW0eUrUiyxo https://youtube.com/watch?v=KW0eUrUiyxo Sponsors, meanwhile, typically offer massively better rates. Estimates very a lot more, and it depends on your individual track record as a creator, but I’ve seen numbers thrown around ranging from $2.50 to $10 per 1,000 views at the lower end. The biggest creators are apparently being quoted $50 or more per 1,000 views, and that number goes up exponentially as your channel grows. That’s why seemingly every YouTuber is taking those deals, they’re unbelievably lucrative compared to the integrated YouTube ads. Combine that with a healthy Patreon and it’s no wonder why YouTubers are still able to do so well despite Google infamously difficult behavior.
• stevenicr 3y ago
  The primary reason I use an adblocker is to prevent malware / viruses. I would be more accepting of ads in general if: 1 - they were all served from the primary websites server - eg yahoo blaming third party ad servers for injecting virus scripts and taking no responsibility is not okay with me. 2 - I had easy choices to block ads for things like gambling and alcohol at the ip level, not just browser level. 3 - no flashing animated ads on static text pages. I am amazed at some pages I see trying to read 6 sentences and instead I get three at a time with 3 moving ads taking up most of the space. Obviously it'd be fine to have moving ads during a 'commercial break' in a video.. but overlay a banner over it or next to it and having it moving is just wrong imho. I didn't use youtube much at all for a long time, but have recently trained the thing to give me interesting videos about CSS, new tools like framer io, clickup, AI, 'productizing' and other helpful content is now available to me easier now.. So if I could not block ads on youtube now, I would have to pay the $12 for premium if that's what it costs.. I would suggest having a checkbox to add in a $5 bucket for tips to content creators and give a way to tip multiple of 10 cents or something - as I would like to support some of the folks adding value to the platform, and I'm guessing going 12 premium wouldn't help them much if at all. A few days ago I brought up some lists of 'YT watch history' - it's a decent amount for me the past few months - if 2 minutes of time was added to each one, and I had an employer, that company would be burning a fair amount of money for me to wait for ads each week at this point. I also worry that ads at beginning of videos can be unfair when it seems a good percentage of videos I click then skip into a bit and find that they are not what I was expecting / hoping for and the click itself, 3 second buffering, and 2 second seek - were a huge waste of time, I can't imagine getting hit with added ads in those equations.
  • paulddraper 3y ago
    > they were all served from the primary websites server > I had easy choices to block ads for things like gambling and alcohol at the ip level ???
    • stevenicr 3y ago
      > they were all served from the primary websites server - - If your website is YooToo dot com, then serve the ads from your server - not a subdomain (easy to offload to other server), - I've seen many instances where malware was injected by web sites that pull their ads from third party servers.. sometimes it's a third party ad network, sometimes it's a bad actor that makes a deal with a desperate site to host ads server from their server, (I'd see a fair amount of offers from lesser known entities offering to place flash ads on sites for a few hundred a month back in the day, I'm sure it's still a thing using javascript and similar these days, I've seen things flagged from sites that host video files lately) There's been malware ads served from yahoo dot com - that were injected by a third party server - I think the details show they fake the ad for X city where XY company is located and server the viruses to other cities.. this is also sketchy for data tracking (outside jurisdictions?) and other issues. > I had easy choices to block ads for things like gambling and alcohol at the ip level - I don't think it's right to serve ads for alcohol to people that do not want them, same with gambling and similar - think about it this way, the technology exists to push weight loss, abilify, and other drugs to people who have been flagged as depressed, we should be able to prevent ads in the same way. I've seen opt-out of ad networks by going to a site and checking off tracking / targeted marketing / remarketing from a, b - z networks - but these I believe add a cookie to the browser you are using - so you opt out of targeted ads in that one browser on that one device - I think people should be able to sign a document online and opt out of gambling, drugs, sugar, alcohol, and many other types of ads if they want to block them, and it should be via ip address - so it's blocked on phones, chromecasts, vizio tvs, playstations, laptops, tablets - all the things that connect... the big ad networks should be able to handle this with minor code changes.
• Krisjohn 3y ago
  Two things spring to mind: My experience with a YouTube premium trial ended immediately upon being told that I couldn't play music in a second place at the same time. And ad-blocking is part of my security posture. I have plenty of local storage. Moving forward, maybe good videos won't just go into a playlist with the assumption that YouTube will continue to be available.
• acomjean 3y ago
  I mean they want you to subscribe to YouTube premium. At least they’re being honest about this and give you the option. I have a few issues with google but this isn’t one (After being forced to spend many hours upgrading to google analytics rev 4….) It’s expensive, but I’ve done it, but it also includes YouTube music which I like.
  • dan1234 3y ago
    I actually switched away from Apple Music when I subscribed to YouTube premium, so it’s only really cost me £2 extra per month. YouTube music is definitely not as good as Apple Music (or Spotify) but it’s acceptable for the combined cost.
  • arketyp 3y ago
    I found YouTube Music surprisingly full-fledged. The library is not as complete as Spotify or Apple Music of course, but, you also get the user uploads, which is a much more reliable resource for those few odd tracks. With Premium you also get to minimize the YouTube app on the phone. It's nice for talks and discussions that are not uploaded as podcasts.
    • tcfhgj 3y ago
      ReVanced solves minimizing
    • graftak 3y ago
      With Apple Music you can add your privately owned music to the library too. It even outdates Apple Music with a now legacy service called iTunes Plus that allowed you to stream your private music collection with iTunes from ‘the cloud’ for €25/year. Back in the day I even used this to ‘white-wash’ low quality mp3 files to 256kbps acc files instead. I think it is actually user-hostile to force users to pay for YouTube Music when you want access to ad free YouTube videos, probably why in Europe YouTube Premium Lite exists (without Music), because tie-in purchases (translated term) are generally not allowed here.
  • gnyman 3y ago
• midoridensha 3y ago
  This should be interesting. I wonder how (or if) the pop-up warning works with 3rd-party apps.
• patrickdavey 3y ago
  Just make YouTube lite available everywhere...
• PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  I need to write something that uses yt-dlp to download videos and play as they download, then delete after it is no longer needed.
  • Arcuru 3y ago
    Several media players will do that in the background for you, 'mpv' and 'vlc' come to mind. 'mpv' even has a sponsorblock script that will skip the sponsored segments if you so chose. I occasionally use this for convenience, even though I pay for YT Premium.
    • PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      Sure but I want something integrated into the browser. I don't think anything like what I described exists just yet.
• RandomBK 3y ago
  I feel this was the inevitable outcome of the increased availability/popularity/awareness of ad blockers - a tragedy of the commons scenario that's set us on an escalating feedback loop that won't end well for anyone involved. EDIT: I do wonder if the price point of youtube premium is too high to capture an audience that simply doesn't want ads but doesn't care about any other features. $6/mo feels higher than the typical per-user ad revenue. EDIT2: While I don't know youtube's average revenue per user, both Facebook and Google's ARPU for the NA segment is ~$100-$200/y, which would put $6/mo quite close to the replacement cost of lost ads revenue.
  • timmg 3y ago
    > EDIT2: While I don't know youtube's average revenue per user, both Facebook and Google's ARPU for the NA segment is ~$100-$200/y, which would put $6/mo quite close to the replacement cost of lost ads revenue. $100/12 = $8.33 $200/12 = $16.66
  • imposterr 3y ago
    I'm okay with this if it means more platforms start to offer paid access with no ads. There are so many ad supported services out there that don't even have a paid option.
  • sircastor 3y ago
    I'm curious about that myself. We dropped our Youtube premium family plan when they upped the price to $22. We just recently got an email that Paramount was doubling our Paramount+ subscription price and "adding" Showtime. I don't want showtime. I just want to pay a small price to be ad free. The lower price tier is with Ads. The trouble is apparently that Ads are worth more to these companies than ad-free subscribers.
    • anurag6892 3y ago
      agree with the last part. The average YouTube user seems to be clicking through ads more often than we think. This is similar to credit cards, where banks get most of their interest revenue from few users.
• Animats 3y ago
  " YouTube users will have only two options: to disable their ad blocker and allow ads or subscribe to YouTube Premium to get rid of all advertisements." Or Vimeo, or Facebook, or TikTok, or ...
  • rektide 3y ago
    Or tivo/dvr'ing our own computers. It's just a big stupid farce when technology is used to bluntly cudgel users. Even if the user intents arent what corporations want.
    • Vecr 3y ago
      You mean, setting up a computer with image recognition to listen to RSS feeds (multiple of https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=WHATEVER https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=WHATEVER), go to the videos in the feeds when new ones show up, and record only non-ad sections to a capture card? You would then be able to watch the videos ad-free from a USB stick or SSD at a later time.
  • Gigachad 3y ago
    None of those platforms are a realistic alternative to youtube.
    • cwkoss 3y ago
      Since I started using TikTok, my demand for YouTube is down 95%
      • Gigachad 3y ago
        Should have specified further. Sure, if you are only looking at memes and youtube shorts, TikTok might be an alternative. Personally my youtube use is mostly 20min / 1 hour educational videos or background noise played on a TV. Nothing but youtube really covers this use case well. I’m quite satisfied with the platform since all the enshitification is removed on the premium version which provides pretty good value for money.
• charcircuit 3y ago
  Personally I would like it if a certain amount of membership / superchats would give you the ability to block ads or unlock YouTube premium.
• HissingMachine 3y ago
  So does this mean YT will stop demonetizing creators I watch?
  • flangola7 3y ago
    Which creators?
    • HissingMachine 3y ago
      Majority of them actually, about every channel I sub to mentions about being demonetized for one reason or other and have alternative means to support them, and I do mean majority, guitar channel plays too many bars of a song, demonetized, channel covering ukraine war or other conflicts, demonetized, podcast has a guest, demonetized, news channel covers a topic, demonetized. YT is garbage, but that's just my personal perspective.
• LeoPanthera 3y ago
  They're going to break yt-dlp aren't they.
• goda90 3y ago
  YouTube needs a history-less mode. I want to watch random videos without them impacting my recommendations. I have Premium, but I'll use ad blocker in a private browsing session specifically for this.
  • shmde 3y ago
    YouTube without recommendations is absolute pure cancer. On chrome desktop there is an option to delete cookie everytime you close browser. That resets your recommendation history.
  • tommiegannert 3y ago
    If I go to https://www.youtube.com/feed/history https://www.youtube.com/feed/history, I can hit "Pause watch history". Isn't that enough?
  • dredmorbius 3y ago
    Log out of Google.[1] Browse in Incognito mode. Better: access through an Invidious or Piped instance. ________________________________ Notes: 1. And never log back in again.
  • xlbuttplug2 3y ago
    At least on the android app, there is an incognito mode. But you do lose your ad-free experience last I checked.
    • Forbo 3y ago
      This was exactly the reason I cancelled my subscription. I'm paying for no ads, so don't shove them down my throat when I want to watch something without it fucking up the algorithm. Just because I want to watch a video my friend swnt to me of Alex Jones say some disgusting heinous shit one time doesn't mean I want to have it fed to me like I'm being prepared to be made into foie gras.
      • SllX 3y ago
        I’m the type that wouldn’t even tap the link if I saw that it was garbage (seriously, you can set boundaries with friends, an Alex Jones clip will do nothing to improve your life); but for the odd misclick, or if I go in not knowing what I’m watching, I instantly nuke that shit from my history. But yeah, the incognito mode is bollocks.
• operatingthetan 3y ago
  Are there ways for the adblockers to make another move and be more discrete in a way youtube can't see?
• sircastor 3y ago
  So YouTube is going to make it impossible to watch without ads. Reddit's communities are going dark because Reddit (essentially) wants more ad revenue. Facebook and Instagram have been plastered with ads for longer than they haven't. And we're just a short hop from ads being "Attention required" with eyeballs tracked. I wonder if there's a possibility that this will shake Youtube from it's dominance.
  • smarkov 3y ago
    > I wonder if there's a possibility that this will shake Youtube from it's dominance. Sadly, very unlikely. I recommend AdBlockers and YouTube app alternatives without ads to basically everyone and the vast majority of people would rather watch ads than deal with installing something even if it'll take a few seconds. There's enough of us (adblock users) for Google to want to take profit from but not enough to make a dent in YouTube's monopoly even if we all moved to something else.
  • ThatPlayer 3y ago
    > if there's a possibility that this will shake Youtube from it's dominance. Yes, I'm sure everyone is fighting for an audience who refuse to pay and block all ads. And of course the audience who do sit through ads or pay are therefore not going to switch and stick with YouTube. So unless you want to burn money, I really don't see a viable business model there. Unless you think you can take the initial hit to grow a big enough audience and then force ads and paid subscriptions on everyone to make that money back.
  • grishka 3y ago
    Not impossible. It's not like they're going to DRM this shit with treacherous execution environments and all that. Your browser is still your user agent. I'm sure an extension to bypass this would pop up days after the wide rollout, if any.
  • cwkoss 3y ago
    Reminds me of 'PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN' copypasta Ads are truly a cancer on human culture, I hope society decides to wage a war on them soon.
• aorth 3y ago
  I had a YouTube Premium family plan (US) for awhile because I don't want my family to see ads. The problem is that I need to use a VPN all the time for it to work because I live outside the US. That gets cumbersome... so I cancelled it and use ad blockers and a rooted LG TV for now. In the modern world there are so many people that are citizens some place, but work or revel often in other places. These kind of restrictions are a nuisance.
• numbol 3y ago
  Personally, one solution is to subsrcibe for Nebula + CurisoityStream bundle to support creators (bought 2 subscriptions for me and friend) https://curiositystream.com/?coupon=nebula https://curiositystream.com/?coupon=nebula and use something like PeerTube for the rest of the stuff. Youtube have great catalogue of the lectures and other educational material, so it is still kinda irreplaceable
• michelb 3y ago
  A few day ago I disabled my ad blocking to test something and then browsed some of my daily sites. If ad blocking ever becomes impossible, I'll quit using the web immediately.
• zb3 3y ago
  I hope they succeed, that would be beneficial for my mental health, productivity and happiness.
• FrostKiwi 3y ago
  Anyone know, if there is an adblocker with a "hide" mode instead of a "block" mode? I mean, instead of blocking the connection fetch the ad, but hide it visually? I would be fine with a YouTube ad blocker, that allows ads to play, but just mutes and `display:none`'s the video player element.
  • guerrilla 3y ago
    There is one but I can't recall the name...
  • DeathArrow 3y ago
    That's really a clever idea. And when companies will realize they are paying lots of cash to YT but very few users are actually watching the ads, maybe they'll stop paying YT.
    • kaimac 3y ago
      This will lead to the post-ad captcha. "To continue watching the video, select which product was being advertised"
  • lemper 3y ago
    adnauseam[1]. it does load all the ads, but makes them invisible and clicks all of them. [1] https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/
• matthewfelgate 3y ago
  YouTube with ADs is virtually unusable in my opinion. It's bad enough the spam of shorts I struggle to block. And now I'm getting alerts for shorts. It's long overdue for a decent alternative to YouTube.
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  I would pay, but most of YT is junk, filled with clickbaits and commercials. So, it's not worth it for the rare truly interesting thing I can find there. If I can't watch it with ublock, I will search for some alternative measures that will still allow me to watch without seeing ads. If no such measures will exist, then I'll quit watching youtube. Maybe I'll go for Vimeo or DailyMotion.
• no_time 3y ago
  This is bad. Unlike netflix, its not even viable to pirate all the content due to the sheer number of videos.
• BasedAnon 3y ago
  It's a good thing I regularly archive the channels I like
• hombre_fatal 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • nathanaldensr 3y ago
    It scales for me just fine, thanks.
  • yellowgazelle 3y ago
    [flagged]
• onetokeoverthe 3y ago
  Alphabet self immolation in progress. Piss off 80% for a 4% bump in premium.
• downrightmike 3y ago
  My Browser My Rights. I don't allow ads because no matter how good you are, someone will figure out how to get malware into ads. Once a system is compromised, best to burn it and start over. And now there are UEFI viruses that can reinstall malware even after the OS is wiped. And then there is the recent Gigabyte Motherboard discovery they were loading EXEs silently without approval. So no, I will not lower my protection.
  • Xenoamorphous 3y ago
    Their site, their rights (to block you)? You're going to cost them bandwidth and give nothing in exchange, so it's only fair. Nothing forces you to visit the site.
    • kergonath 3y ago
      It’s a straw man. Nobody is saying they don’t have the right to stop serving content to people who block ads.
  • darig 3y ago
    [dead]
  • mikro2nd 3y ago
    "I don't allow ads" because ads are malware for the human brain. An ad is explicitly designed to hack our minds/emotions, and I, for one, won't go there (as far as I am able).
    • flir 3y ago
      Same applies to an awful lot of youtube's actual content. (If you enjoyed this comment, please like and subscribe. It really helps me create more great content like this.)
    • vanilla_nut 3y ago
      Exactly. Snow Crash explores the idea of a "mind virus", which seemed a little silly when I originally read the book. But nowadays, it's clear that most ad campaigns are exactly that: hacks of the brain. Just think about the ad strategies of, say, Coca-cola and Pepsi. They don't tell you about a new product. They don't inform you about any benefits of their product, or advantages relative to the competition. They purely exist to keep the brand names in your head, and associate the brand names with images of people having fun. And the saddest part is, it works! We desperately need regulation to prevent companies from hacking consumer's brains into zombies who grab products on the shelf based on how many times they've heard the name spewed out of their television in the last 24 hours. On the flip side, I would be happy to allow purely informative, contextual, non-tracking ads in my browser. Objective statements about new products I'm actually interested in? Sure! Privacy invading, mind manipulating mental malware? No thanks.
• nine_zeros 3y ago
  Large companies have become money sucking dinosaurs. Much like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft of the 90s. Can't wait to see some competition eating them.
  • Qem 3y ago
    > Can't wait to see some competition eating them. We let them get too big. Nowadays they just buy the competition in the cradle, even if just to drive nascent products into the ground.
  • nness 3y ago
    Until a competitor devices a revenue stream that is just as profitable as advertising and data capture (obviously it won't be a subscription model) then we're stuck in the perpetual cycle of "enshittification" as companies move to protect their revenue.
    • nine_zeros 3y ago
      The ads business is certainly one of enshittification. But, it becomes too shitty when the incumbents start milking every possible inch of the screen for as many seconds as they can. This happened with tv, cable, newspapers, and now streaming services. There is a always a chance that the next generation gets hooked on to a different platform. That phase where an emerging competition is eating the incumbent's lunch is the best time to be there.
  • throw9away6 3y ago
    Competition has been banned and legislated away. Remember YouTube only became big because it mostly served copyrighted content in the early days. If you tried that now you would get sued into oblivion
• drcongo 3y ago
  Doubt I watch as many as 3 videos per month on YouTube. I hate everything about it, it's cesspool of scamming, racism, conspiracy nutters and people debasing themselves for clicks. I hope this kills it.
  • hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
    There's a lot of amazing content on YouTube. It's just not mainstream and so unlikely that it'll be recommended to you.
    • ncallaway 3y ago
      What are some of those channels?
      • coldpie 3y ago
        Oh man! I watch a ton of YouTube. I'll take up an opportunity to promote some of my favorites. Presented in no order, just scrolling through my subscriptions: Older tech: LGR, Cathode Ray Dude, Techmoan Video games: Cinemassacre, Masahiro Sakurai, Jeremy Parish, Cybershell, Basement Brothers, Retro Game Mechanics Explained, Brian David Gilbert, GTV Japan, Displaced Gamers Synthesizers/music theory: Red Means Recording, Alex Ball, Andrew Huang, Rob Scallon, Rachel K Collier, David Bruce Hardware/engineering: Element14, Technology Connections, Applied Science Guitar: Justin Johnson, Rhett Shull, Guitar Salon International, Andertons, Brandon Acker, Philip McKnight, Alamo Music Center
        • ncallaway 3y ago
          Awesome! Most of those are new to me! Thank you
        • selykg 3y ago
          For Guitar, I'd remove Rhett Shull, dude is just a YouTube channel hocking gear he gets for free. It used to be interesting when he talked about touring but now that he's a full time YouTuber and doesn't play live or touring he's just selling ads and his courses. Courses, which, frankly are not that unique or good. I'd add a few different guitarists in here though. Paul David's genuinely seems like a great dude. Stewmac has fun stuff though it is generally driven around selling their stuff, but I think they're still highly educational most of the time. Emerald City Guitar's has some really cool videos now and again, and I dig their videos on some of the vintage gear they have and find inspiration in that. Gracie Terzian has great music theory videos, she's the one that helped me fully understand the circle of fifths. I also really enjoy Eric Haugen, he has a few courses on TrueFire now as well. I also dig Alamo Music Center, watching Cooper shred an acoustic is always a good way to spend 10-15 minutes. Dude can play.
• behnamoh 3y ago
  That's what happens in monopolies. Until we find a way to move most useful YT content to another platform (e.g., Vimeo), we'll have to deal with YT's greedy policies.
  • justapassenger 3y ago
    YT is monopoly, yea. But them trying to fight people using costly service for free isn’t big monopoly concern.
    • dahart 3y ago
      A little too much spin there. They don’t have to offer a free service, they choose to. YT can do whatever they want with their platform as far as I’m concerned, but implying that people are stealing is disingenuous. YT got popular in the first place by offering a free service, and they are still offering a free service with ads that I’m not obligated to watch. They could, if they wanted, charge admission for all viewers, and skip the ads, they could choose to not offer free service. They’re intentionally not doing that so that they can have their cake and eat it too by offering a free service but inserting ads into it. It’s YT’s choice alone to offer the costly service for free, their wish is that people watch the ads, but fortunately whether we watch them is our choice. Note that YT’s testing here isn’t primarily to punish people, in part it’s to do an experiment to find out if they’ll lose viewers by demanding they watch the ads, precisely so that they can continue to choose to offer a ‘free’ service, and in part it’s to normalize the kind of spin you’re repeating here, to get people to believe they should submit to ad-watching and that they’re obligated to participate. They have been turning the screw on this for years and they will continue to, because it statistically works, but by participating in their narrative, by suggesting people are grifting when ad-blocking, you’re helping them normalize this concept.
      • cruano 3y ago
        You don't have to watch YouTube videos, you choose to.
        • 3y ago
• pinkgazelle 3y ago
  There's many other platforms serving video. Youtube highly constraints their content, in the same way Google does, in ways that often don't align with my searches More and more I end up using other platforms like Rumble or Rutube
• blibble 3y ago
  so if you're not logged in: clear cookies and resume? that'll take what, 5 minutes to be added to the ad blocker extension
  • explaininjs 3y ago
    Yes, Cookies, the only possible way the engineers at 1.5T dollar company thought to identify end users.
    • blibble 3y ago
      unless they're willing to ban entire households/CGNATs, there's really not much they can do about it (short of requiring a login to watch videos)
      • explaininjs 3y ago
        Not at all. They simply must build a function to determine the probability that a given {browser fingerprint, IP} will block ads. If the probability exceeds some threshold (derived from expected potential ad revenue vs cost of service, perhaps), they won’t be served video. This is downright trivial for a google engineer, and I bet you could and would do it too if your company’s finances (aka your salary/livelihood) depended on it.
        • blibble 3y ago
          > They simply must build a function to determine the probability that a given {browser fingerprint, IP} will block ads. this is all extremely gameable if you have a CGNAT ip (like say, if you own a mobile phone) > If the probability exceeds some threshold (derived from expected potential ad revenue vs cost of service, perhaps), they won’t be served video. that's not what they've described in the article though is it > This is downright trivial for a google engineer I dunno, seems like they hire anyone these days
          • explaininjs 3y ago
• RamblingCTO 3y ago
  You know, if YouTube wouldn't insist on absolutely annoying the living shit out of me with unskippable, bad, long, and frequent ads I wouldn't mind that much. But YouTube with ads is one of the worst things there are.
  • jvolkman 3y ago
    There are no ads if you pay
    • RamblingCTO 3y ago
      I don't like being bullied into a subscription by out of line ads. The subscription doesn't add any value. YouTube still fails to create a viable business model that doesn't depend on bullying.
    • scblock 3y ago
      Until there are. You're crazy if you trust Google to not change this down the road.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • jvolkman 3y ago
        They charge monthly. You can cancel.
      • musictubes 3y ago
        You pay for the service that they offer now. If they add ads later on you can quit. Not paying now because of something they could do in the future doesn’t make any sense.
    • amelius 3y ago
      It's not fair because they became a monopoly by offering a free service. Now they can ask whatever they want.
    • 3y ago
• o_m 3y ago
  I don't have a Youtube/Google account and I don't use any of their apps, so how are they going to block me, go for my IP address? I don't see a reason to have an account, RSS works just fine for subscriptions.
  • colinsane 3y ago
    what players do you use for RSS video? right now i use RSS for comics, blogs, and podcasts. i could reuse the podcast stuff probably, but i expect there’s stuff out there tailored more specifically to video.
  • gochi 3y ago
    From other articles, it wouldn't be an account ban but rather at the video level. So you use a browser with adblock and try to watch 3 different videos, then the video player will stop loading at all, changing browsers or clearing cookies/data would likely reset the count but apply again after 3 detections. Although I do assume they would use a combination of other data like your IP to be more aggressive with detection blocks.
• pera 3y ago
  This is very bad: If you have ADHD ad-blockers are essential to use platforms like YouTube as they let you block comment sections and suggested content, which are highly distracting.
  • hutzlibu 3y ago
    You can configure uBlock origin to only let through the ads, but still block the other garbage. Or you can pay for youtube - or you can find something else. I hope this move will strengthen alternatives.
    • pera 3y ago
      Yeah but if they are simply detecting user agents with ad-blockers (which is often the case) then it won't matter
      • cuttysnark 3y ago
        > they are simply detecting user agents with ad-blockers The browser's user agent string doesn't change based on plugins installed, or at all--unless end user changes it purposefully. The ad-block detection is likely and usually a separate script that runs an interval check on the existence/visibility of ad-related DOM elements (which would be false when hidden/removed by a plugin or even the developer tools)
        • pera 3y ago
          A "browser" is a user agent: https://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/work/wiki/Definition_of_User_Agent https://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/work/wiki/Definition_of_User_Agent
• honeybadger1 3y ago
  I already have backed off of youtube so much because of how awful they have made the experience, this will be it for me entirely if they implement this.
  • honeybadger1 3y ago
    Time to spin up some docker containers folks. https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped
  • ChatGTP 3y ago
    Honestly, my feed is so full of rubbish, clickbait thumbnails and misinformation that I really can't even believe it's a Google product. It's just so polluted. It's really come to the stage where I actually "hope" the search helps me find what I'm looking for, the sea of bullshit on YT is vast and difficult to navigate now. For a time, I would say I was quite addicted to YouTube, but now I'm so turned off by it and I find that it is mostly full of really low grade content. I hardly even think to look the front page it unless I'm looking for something very specific. I treat it like a bank job now, race in, get what I need then straight back to the get away. Personally, I feel similar to you, if they force me off it with Ads, good. I had though about paying but the smut they suggest I watch is just a turn off.
    • Regnore 3y ago
      > Honestly, my feed is so full of rubbish, clickbait thumbnails and misinformation that I really can't even believe it's a Google product. It's just so polluted. This is not all that different than my experience with even Google Search these days. Half the time I search for something on Google the top 10 are all ads/SEO spam sites. There are certain things that I search that still give the best results out of all search engines (usually very specific queries), but more and more I want to be able to pay Google to leave out the shit.
      • aqfamnzc 3y ago
        > the top 10 are all ads... Did someone say top 10!?? Top 10 ad platforms 2023! Our top picks for adblockers this year! Top 10 ways to add numbers 2023! Best notepAD trusted reviews! Best adblue products on amazon in 2023!
• Panoramix 3y ago
  The greedy bastards won't even pay taxes. If there was a good alternative I would switch in a heartbeat. I am happy to pay content creators, but paying $12 or $18 per month just so they disable some anti-patterns really rubs me the wrong way.
  • kernal 3y ago
    They paid 11.4 Billion in 2022 and 14.7 Billion in 2021.
    • timmytokyo 3y ago
      So they're effectively paying one half of one quarterly profit each year. Where can I sign up for this tax rate?
• gorbachev 3y ago
  Time to stop using my Google account when using YouTube. Too bad for all those subscriptions YouTube channel owners lose.
  • secondcoming 3y ago
    Enjoy the absolute garbage that will appear on the home screen when you open it up!
  • clsec 3y ago
    Maybe try FreeTube[1]. You can subscribe to channels with it. [1]https://freetubeapp.io/ https://freetubeapp.io/
• Verdex 3y ago
  I don't really understand either side of the equation here. So, on the one hand you have people who use ad blockers. The first retort that comes to mind here is: Well, we'll take our business elsewhere. Which is odd because without ads they aren't paying and them leaving is the goal. Of course on the other hand ... when I read the title my thoughts weren't that I would be okay because I don't ad block youtube. My thought wasn't that I should buy youtube premium to avoid ads. My thought WAS that if I ever get falsely flagged, then I'll just buy a nebula subscription (or whatever) and never use youtube again. In fact I went over to nebula to check it out. Somebody has to pay something for youtube to be viable. But youtube got big via offering a free service and now if feels like they're trying to pull up the ladder behind themselves.
  • dayvid 3y ago
    It costs a lot of money to run YouTube. If someone wants to make a competitor, they’re free to do so, but most will charge because of how expensive it is or you could use a PeerTube-like system. I pay for YouTube Premium and get value out of YouTube. I’m also an adult with a decent paying job so it’s not a big deal for me. Maybe the mistake of these conglomerates is getting people accustomed to a certain level of service for free.
    • mrguyorama 3y ago
      Nebula charges about $10 a year, and makes a pretty good profit right now.
      • kdbg 3y ago
        Pretty sure that price is only for your first year if you sign up with a code/link from one of their creators. The advertised rates are currently $5/month or $50/year.
    • neop1x 3y ago
      It costs YouTube a lot of money because they pretended to be a free service and allowed anyone to upload enormous amounts of video data which they now have to continue storing and serving.
• techwizrd 3y ago
  I have YouTube Red so I'm not affected, but I really hate how it's implemented for Google accounts with your own domain. Bringing your own domain and paying Google for the privilege makes you a second-class citizen with Google services. I oppose this because paying Google is not enough, and often makes for a worse customer experience.
  • KingOfCoders 3y ago
    Not yet. See Netflix. They will push ads on paying customers and then add a higher tier that is ad free (saying nothing about you, you might just pay more to stay add free, no judgment about you here)
    • kurthr 3y ago
      Yep, see CNN! Remember when you paid for cable so there weren't ads (yeah, I'm old)? The best was a retrospective (20th or 25th) on CNN one NewYears in the early 2000s, which had old footage of CNN. In one of them, the anchors were bragging about how they didn't have ads that biased their coverage of events... Then it broke to an ad. I had to laugh, because the (unpaid?) intern who put that together had to know how it was going to look when actually viewed by the public.
• pcurve 3y ago
  More ads, more blockers. Use of blocker has been on the rise because YT has been failing in modulating amount of ads vs annoyance. Rooster coming home to roost. And not for users, but for YT. They should tread carefully.
• kitsunesoba 3y ago
  This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium, but something that a lot of ad-based services don't seem to grasp is why people block ads. It's because they've become increasingly obnoxious. Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter or maybe an animated GIF banner with 3 frames. No, adblockers became popular because ads kept getting more loud (both visually and audibly), in your face, and resource hungry (remember those flash ads that'd keep your CPU pegged?). The web became unusable if you didn't have a blocker installed. Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch.
  • stcroixx 3y ago
    Not why I block ads. I simply hate them in any form.
  • frankfrankfrank 3y ago
    My list or reasons I go hard against ads, even though I can appreciate quality ads that can serve a legitimate purpose: 1) tracking me across in serval ways, only making me more fanatical about it by selling my information and activity to who know whom. 2) malware/virus injections … it still happens way too often. 3) garbage ads; for garbage products, products/services I just purchased, or the infamous scam ads to defraud people.
  • tjpnz 3y ago
    Ads also constitute a security and privacy threat and are frequently an attack vector for phishing schemes - even on Google search. I'm not going to disable my adblocker and risk becoming a crime victim.
  • ianbutler 3y ago
    I recently unblocked ads on a website that I use semi frequently in an effort to contribute to them as they had crossed my threshold for something I feel I should pay for. The page erupted into animation and sound. I immediately turned my blocker back on. Sorry website, you're quite useful but I won't subject myself to that.
    • 3y ago
• RalfWausE 3y ago
  Hah, first twitter, then reddit and now youtube... let big tech kill itself!
• karaterobot 3y ago
  They're completely within their rights to try to enforce their policies. On the other hand there's an approximately 0% chance I'll go back to watching Youtube with ads. People seem to like Youtube Max or whatever they call their subscription fee. On the other hand it's hard to get me to pay for something I already had by taking it away and making me pay to get it back. I bet I'll end up paying them someday, but I think I'll try just not going to Youtube anymore first and see if that sticks.
• user3939382 3y ago
  If Google had the power to implement a device that forced your eyelids open to look at ads they would do it. Their company is user hostile and we should move as far as possible away from their services.
  • xnx 3y ago
    This is true of every advertiser. With regards to advertising, in most cases, Google is very admiral compared to its peers.
    • thrown1212 3y ago
      They’re the admiral of their peers in this space, no doubt of that.
  • JCharante 3y ago
    How are they user hostile? It's people who do not want to pay for the service and do not want to watch ads to use the service who are the problem. How else should Youtube make money from those users? They must literally lose money on those users.
    • Faark 3y ago
      I did consider paying. But I also want to do quite a bit of YouTube in private browser tabs. their age gate already makes that quite annoying. I certainly won't pay and still get such blocks...
      • crazygringo 3y ago
        Then that's nothing against YouTube, you've basically ruled out paying for any service on the internet because you refuse to stay logged in and apparently can't be bothered to log in each time you open a private tab. Not really sure how you expect content creators to be paid at all for what they produce, then.
        • 3y ago
• capybara_2020 3y ago
  I wonder, will Google be liable if someone clicks on a malicious ad and gets infected or worse?
• hutzlibu 3y ago
  If this really comes, I think it would be not too hard to modify the ad blockers, that ads are being "served" but into the void (muted, invisible container). In a way, that makes it hard or impossible for ad blocker dedection. Blocking youtube ad videos will be more hard to block without detection. Not an optimal solution, as it still uses more data, but nothing is, if we cannot solve the base problem that we have an ad financed internet.
  • liendolucas 3y ago
    You might want to try: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/
• seydor 3y ago
  the best type of ads is the sponsorships that youtubers already do. Why doesnt youtube take advantage of them and create a platform for them? the ads they run are disruptive, annoying as F , loud, they last unpredictably long etc etc.
• INTPenis 3y ago
  I hate ads so much that I'm actually paying for Youtube premium. I work in IT, I build systems, I know there are various solutions, but none of them guarantee that I can travel freely with my cellphone and connect it to any smart TV and get an AD-free experience. So I'll gladly pay for that freedom. Freedom is very important to me, not just that it's open source, or that I have power over ads, but also freedom of time and leisure. Ads take away freedom from me, it's a powerless feeling when an ad comes on. Real 1stworldproblem here but since we're on the topic...
  • ProllyInfamous 3y ago
    This is the exact reason I still pay for Pandora (music streaming service): to remove the advertisements. My dentist's office doesn't pay for this service, so I have to hear advertisements while under the drill... which is frustrating. I've even offered to pay for Doc's subscription!
  • 4ggr0 3y ago
    The only trick I know of is to use a VPN provider to connect to Argentina or Turkey and buy YouTube Premium from there. Works with your normal account. Showed this trick to my dad and he now pays $2 per month instead of $16. In India you can buy a whole year for $16, but our credit cards didn't work. I'm happy with uBlock Origin :D
    • INTPenis 3y ago
      That's wild, if true. I mean I pay about 11 USD/month for my Youtube premium, but 2 dollars sounds insane. And I think youtube music is included in that.
      • jmercan 3y ago
        It is because without price localization, most of USD based subscriptions or purchases would be lunacy. For example if the US price of Factorio was directly converted into Turkish Lira, it would cost ~10% of monthly minimum wage. But please, I plead people to not abuse it. It only forces developers to bump up prices and make games and digital goods inaccessible. [1]. There was already a x10 price bump last year with Steam Turkish localization exchange rate update and rumors say another x2 is coming soon. I understand people like cheap stuff but please don't pull the ladder on us. I apologize for not being born in the "correct" country but getting out isn't as easy and we deserve to have some minor entertainment meanwhile. There is already an economical crisis going on. [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/588650/view/3346757662555863561 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/588650/view/33467576...
• BasedAnon 3y ago
  "You have nothing! Nothing to threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength."
• patrec 3y ago
  Excellent news. One big reason why the deleterious adware economy has no viable competitor is that somewhat sophisticated users can partially opt out of it and get subsidized by the less savvy. By forcing people to pay for youtube premium (which, in fairness to Google is very reasonably priced) or look elsewhere, non-surreptitiously-paid-for consumer services become much more viable. Unfortunately, the other reason non-surreptitiously-paid-for services are currently not viable is that most people, including the vast majority of HN seem to be, uhm, not very sophisticated about reasoning about costs (to most people the k-gadzillions that google makes apparently materialize out of thin air, instead of really coming out of large_overhead_factor*k gadzillions they personally proportionally pay for). This seems hard to overcome. reply
• MagicMoonlight 3y ago
  Youtube is trash now. I could move on pretty easily. If anything I might be better off watching actual content instead of youtube.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• KingOfCoders 3y ago
  I do think this: Youtube has excellent content form people who put a lot of effort into it, but do not have a lot of subscribers, don't earn a lot and don't produce a lot of traffic. Then there are millions of low effort videos that produce millions of clicks. Youtube should have a model that adapts to this.
• zarathustreal 3y ago
  If you can't afford to host the services, don't host the services. If users can't afford to provide you with free content, users shouldn't provide you with free content. It is immoral to fund an ostensibly free service that you cannot afford to host for free by forcing users to do something they don't want to do. Granted, Google abandoned "don't be evil" a long time ago
• mcpackieh 3y ago
  I block ads because they're psychological warfare that corporations wage against me. I don't care how unobtrusive the ads are. I don't care if the ads don't track me. I grew up changing the channel on TV when ads came on, and ripping adverts out of magazines before sitting down to read them. I vote for billboard bans whenever I can. I have zero tolerance for ads of any sort. Advertisers have no morals, they're completely depraved. They'll eagerly exploit a teenager's self-conscious body issues to sell useless beauty products. They sell sugar water to fat people and at every turn promote the rampant consumerist culture that is destroying our planet. They're lower than pond scum and I never want to see a single ad from them ever.
  • zeekaran 3y ago
    I wish this view was mainstream. I also used to change the channel when ads came on, or at least muted and briefly did something else. I will never tolerate ads, and especially never pay to be advertized at.
    • berniedurfee 3y ago
      I still do, though I hardly watch much regular TV anymore. Can’t listen to a radio either, not enough music in between stations to get away from ads. I pay for a few subscription services and get my entertainment _mostly_ ad free. Unfortunately there’s no similar subscription I can buy to escape advertising as I walk down the street.
  • RoyGBivCap 3y ago
    >To those men in their oddly similar dark suits, their cold eyes weighing and dismissing everything, the people of this valley were a foe to be defeated. As he thought of it, Dasein realized all customers were "The Enemy" to these men. Davidson and his kind were pitted against each other, yes, competitive, but among themselves they betrayed that they were pitted more against the masses who existed beyond that inner ring of knowledgeable financial operation. >The alignment was apparent in everything they did, in their words as well as their actions. They spoke of "package grab level" and "container flash time" -- of "puff limit" and "acceptance threshold." It was an "in" language of militarylike maneuvering and combat. They knew which height on a shelf was most apt to make a customer grab an item. They knew the "flash time" -- the shelf width needed for certain containers. They knew how much empty air could be "puffed" into a package to make it appear a greater bargain. they knew how much price and package manipulation the customer would accept without jarring him into a "rejection pattern." >And we're their spies, Dasein thought. the psychiatrists and psychologists - all the "social scientists" we're the espionage arm. The Santaroga Barrier, Frank Herbert, 1968
• _gabe_ 3y ago
  This is just so funny to me. Google has to have the absolute worst PR for any company I've ever seen to make this happen. Somehow, they've duped the general public (at least on HN) into believing they insert the ads into videos. All they need to do is run a marketing campaign about how as a content creator you get to decide when ads play, whether they're unskippable, and how many ads to place in your video. Blast that all over the internet so people realize that the ads in videos are not there because of YT (unless that channel has < 1K subs and < 4K watch hours, then that's definitely YT). Leave angry comments on the videos you watch and tell the creators your pissed at them for how many ads they place. This is one area YT gives almost full autonomy to the creator. They can choose everything except which ads get played.
  • photochemsyn 3y ago
    > "Leave angry comments on the videos you watch and tell the creators your pissed at them for how many ads they place." This will get your account shadowbanned, i.e. you'll be able to see your comments and votes but nobody else will be.
    • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      What if you post something innocuous at first and then edit it later after the mod queue has bumped it down and no one is likely to review it?
  • kzrdude 3y ago
    Then you'd protect youtube by pitting creators vs viewers and giving creators incentive to decrease youtube's income.. the total effect of this might not be so great.
  • yafbum 3y ago
    Taking flak for ads is part of the service they provide. It'd be pretty stupid of them to throw their content partners under the bus in this way.
  • renewiltord 3y ago
    Part of their value is insulating creators from this. It's like Ticketmaster protects artists from pricing concerns.
• WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  Honestly, seeing an old spice ad isn't going to make me buy old spice. And seeing a 1 hour ad for some guy telling me to stop eating what I'm eating to have no-wipe bowel movements isn't going to make me buy the stuff. There have been studies done about plumbers. The ones that pay money to get on top in the White Pages have worse reviews than the ones that work by word of mouth. I go by the same thing. If you feel that your product needs an ad, it's probably overpriced and / or doesn't do what it says it does.
  • tofuahdude 3y ago
    Yet here you are talking about old spice due to their ads. It worked. They got what they wanted from you.
  • Pent 3y ago
    it's been about mindshare for awhile now, you just mentioned <brand> so you're inadvertently advertising for them for free on hn
• stefanos82 3y ago
  What a fascinating opportunity is given to us to finally break free from YouTube and computer in general; no more cat videos lol!
• bitwize 3y ago
  "Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing programming." --Jamie Kellner
• miki123211 3y ago
  If you're on iOS, I highly recommend Yattee[1], a free Youtube app with no ads, background playback and sponsor block built-in. The way they get around App Store restrictions is by claiming that they aren't a Youtube app. They're technically a video-watching app which is supposed to be used with your own personal server. The server API they require, however, is supported by Invidious[2], an open-source, privacy-preserving Youtube front end. If you configure an Invidious instance in settings[3] (you don't have to host your own, there are plenty of them out there), you effectively get access to the entirety of Youtube. It's not a replacement for the official app by any means, it doesn't have a recommendation feed, it doesn't let you log in with a Google account, so it doesn't sync watch history with your other devices, it doesn't let you cast to Youtube-enabled devices, post comments, scroll through shorts etc, but if you have a playlist or a specific, longer video in mind, it's quite good. It also supports Invidious accounts, which let you manage channel subscriptions. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629 [2] https://invidious.io/ https://invidious.io/ [3] https://gonzoknows.com/posts/yattee/ https://gonzoknows.com/posts/yattee/
  • topicseed 3y ago
    Or just pay for YouTube Premium?
    • 0xffff2 3y ago
      I pay for Premium. Sadly it doesn't stop creators from inserting their own ~ads~ sponsorships into the videos directly so Sponsorblock is still a non-negotiable component of Youtube for me.
      • scrollaway 3y ago
        I highly recommend Nebula. Not only is it adfree and sponsor free, it’s also much more curated than YouTube so the odds of finding good quality videos there are very high. Plus I paid for the lifetime subscription there so … no subscription for me.
• ProtoAES256 3y ago
  I can't recommend enough of the spiritual successor to Vanced since the article briefly mentioned that. It's called Revanced. It requires more hoops than usual but I'm sure the intelligent folks here won't have a problem with that. It's on Github. Other results are probably fake.
  • moffkalast 3y ago
    I wouldn't have a problem with it if it actually worked, it always crashes when patching for me. NewPipe is another option which works since it's a full client, though it doesn't handle logging in and youtube without an account and personalized recommended is like swimming in a river of garbage.
  • earthling8118 3y ago
    I've had plenty enough of a problem with it. The original required me to install a separate app in order to install it. I've yet to successfully make revanced work. Admittedly I only tried once but the hassle was enough to just use newpipe. It isn't perfect at all and is lacking a lot of what I want but it works. It just works.
    • anticrymactic 3y ago
      It is very difficult and the official docs are notoriously bad. If your still interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/comments/yhkmze/updated_revanced_tutorial/ https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/comments/yhkmze/updated...
• kgwxd 3y ago
  I'm a family premium member. After the recent price hike, it's the most expensive streaming plan I have, by a long shot. uBO does so much more than block ads and I have a no-exceptions policy on whitelisting, even when I'm paying for the service. I'm curious if they'll still try to stop me.
• folugna37 3y ago
  I’m not sure if anyone else feels this way, but the sight of many ads on the internet makes my blood boil like nothing else. I think it’s because some ads treat your intelligence like you’re a brainwashed idiot who will fall for anything. Ads like these are the reason I use adblock.
• rumori 3y ago
  I’ve subscribed to Youtube when I found no way to block state propaganda in my country. Instagram lets me hide ads I don’t like, while there’s no way to get rid of them on Youtube. Maybe I’m the proof that the strategy works but now I despise Youtube and Google with a passion while being surprisingly sympathetic with Instagram and happily accepting ads there. Both of them serve completely irrelevant ads for me though.
  • squaresmile 3y ago
    Yep, I've also commented on how harmful ads seem to be more common on YouTube compared to Instagram and Facebook. Maybe Facebook use more human reviewers in smaller regions compared to Google? Maybe Facebook have better data due to their social network? Idk but the YouTube ads in my country are also shockingly bad compared to YouTube in the US.
• Khaine 3y ago
  Youtube ads are bad in several ways: 1) they have these ads that pop-over and hide the content 2) there ad breaks are cut into content at in-opportune moments. At least on TV, the content is designed around the ad breaks 3) I have recently seen ads for gambling powered by cryptocurrencies, how can Google allow these ads baffles me Collectively, these things make the ads on YouTube infuriating. It's then made worse by the ramp up in the volume of ads. Either work with content creators on when ads are displayed to make the content and ad experience better (a la tv) or come up with a different method. And for the love go god, git rid of those stupid ads that pop over the content.
  • cruano 3y ago
    > or come up with a different method Let me introduce you to Paying for the services you use™
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• Cyder 3y ago
  the real issue, is that when enough people consume a service, it becomes a 'utility', and you are penalized if you don't use it. As such, if a percentage of the population uses something, it should be regulated as a 'utility'. Copyright laws should reflect this also. Most jobs I've seen (even outside of tech ) require familiarity with Windows and Office, ie. basic skills linked to one platform. Google is used enough and thus influential enough, it should be classified a public utility and forced to comply with strict utility laws ( which requires government approval to modify prices ). IANAL, but I'm sure there are layers that could contrive the social penalties of not using Google service. People make this logical leap in their brains without recognizing it when they use a service for years and rely on it for their daily information, then turn on the high paid exec's who are trying to squeeze a dollar from every user. Red Hat, Reddit, Google, Microsoft, Comcast, all need reigning in because of their necessarily high required utility in civilization.
  • colinsane 3y ago
    mm i understand the argument, but looking at the other utilities around me, i think it has to be a last resort. we have way more options navigating this in the space of bits than we do of matter. monopolies sort of suck no matter how they’re owned or operated: rather to force the non-critical monopolies to break up than to immortalize them as utilities.
  • Buttons840 3y ago
    I agree. Eventually companies become so big that not using them is, in D&D terms, a -2 to all stats for your entire life. I mean, in exchange for giving them so much money that its gravitational field warps all of democracy, can we not get a little customer service when needed?
• etchalon 3y ago
  At some point, the only option left will be to bake the ads into the video, so they can neither be skipped nor blocked. I assume the only reason this isn't done is dynamic insertion, but at some point the CPU horsepower necessary to do that on-demand will be available.
• etchalon 3y ago
  YouTube Premium is one the best deals in tech. For 10/mo you get a functionally infinite content library that's refreshed every day, and you never see an ad.
• Merad 3y ago
  They've become increasingly hostile about ads in general. I sometimes watch youtube on my TV via Roku, which sadly doesn't have ad blockers, and there's been a noticeable rise in long ads that can't be skipped. It's pretty routine now to get 30s long ads that are unskippable, and just a few days ago I got one that was nearly 90s.
• squarefoot 3y ago
  Most ads are a pile of garbage crafted in a way to brainwash people into thinking they need something that they actually don't. And the more sophisticated they are, the more costly they become and need to be pushed again and again down the users throats to remain profitable. My point is that unless there is some sort of pro-users regulation against advertising, ads use will be abused just like anything that is not regulated is abused by the strongest animals in the pack at the expense of the weakest. Those of us who remember how was surfing the web in its infancy recall the text ads, the small banners, then side frames, then animated ones, then popups, then interstitials, then videos with one ad at the beginning, then more ads scattered during play time, etc. Advertising has been growing since day one, and will continue to grow; no matter what the users accept today, it won't be enough tomorrow, and more and more annoyances will come. This must be stopped, either by regulation or by the use of ad blocking. I think we'll see some development in AI regarding this field. If i had the skills, I'd explore the possibility of a headless browser that unbeknownst to Google uses local AI to fully play ad filled videos, then remove all crap and pass them to the user browser.
• SirMaster 3y ago
  I watch all my youtube through yt-dlp piped into a media player, so there are just no ads to even happen that way.
• m3047 3y ago
  I don't block ads, I block technology, for largely political reasons. I have the technical skills to do so, which almost certainly puts me in a minority. But all the whining from ad-supported corps is just whining, and if that doesn't work an attempt at extortion. If the copy said "Looks like you're blocking trackers and content from properties we don't own" instead of "Looks like you may be using an ad blocker" it would be more truthful. Maybe somebody should go after them for deceptive advertising.
• ocfnash 3y ago
  I've been using fixyt.com to avoid YouTube grossness for years. Thanks to the bookmarklet below, whenever I land at youtube.com I'm only ever a click away from escaping their awful, awful app. javascript:(function() {window.location=window.location.toString().replace(/^https:\/\/www.youtube\./,'http://fixyt.'); http://fixyt.');})()
• dreamcompiler 3y ago
  Hey Youtube: I've never logged in to you because I don't want you tracking me. I've never subscribed to, voted on, or commented on a video because all those things require logging in. For the handful of creators I like, I support them on Patreon. For the other random crap that I occasionally find useful, I use ad blockers or youtube-dl, and I'll continue using them until they stop working. When that day comes, you and I part company. You do what you gotta do, and I'll do what I gotta do. Cheers!
• Lolaccount 3y ago
  When Youtube stop serving me un-reportable "Meet young women from Ukraine" unsexy-supposedly-"alluring"-AI-uncanny-valley picture adverts ... Or the current rubbish "Shop like a billionaire ... buy Nike trainers for 55 cents" crap-verts ... When Youtube stop serving me the above bullshit, perhaps I'll take their advertising efforts more seriously ...
• wandering23 3y ago
  [dead]
• firefoxkekw 3y ago
  For me, being able to block/remove all the videos in the main page, shorts, the other people also..., the video recommendations and all the crap that Youtube have these days is so important. I would pay a lot for a service that gives me the most useful answers instead of what is most likely to make me watch for longer, I know that is their business model to maximize view time to sell more adds but I wish they would sell me a subscription that allows me to customize the UI to show only a search bar, show only educational content when I use the search function and when I'm watching a video don't show me any recommendation or try to pull any tricks on me to spent more time in the platform, nothing more, I would gladly pay 50$ a month for this type of service on Youtube, until then uBlock origin to the rescue, my attention span and productivity is worth more than all the crap the Youtube team tries to pull.
• sledgehammers 3y ago
  _Everything_ is getting more shit day after day. Internet is burning. The sources of information are getting scarce, it's almost unbelivable.