15 ms·

YouTube is testing a three-strikes policy for ad blocking

62 points by shmde 3y ago

jtode 3y ago
Has nobody learned a thing from Musk's example? Drunk on a stew of free money and ideological hegemony, these behemoths actually believe they've captured something that cannot be replaced. I post my videos on peertube now; others will follow if they go down the same path as Twitter and Reddit. I can't wait to see it happen. I really can't wait for people to realize we can federate AirBnB and Uber too. The Fed has called in the bill on the last thirty years, and all the little MBAs are about to learn, at [last], what a protocol is.
- JeremyBanks 3y ago
  [dead]
- devwastaken 3y ago
  Twitter doesn't require the infra YouTube does. YouTube can only exist because of Googles physical infrastructure and it's ad revenue subsidizing youtube. There are no replacements because you require their scale to pull it off.
- Shawnj2 3y ago
  I think YouTube might be the exception to this because of how expensive video hosting is. Mastodon is actually doing a great job funding itself but it and Lemmy/Kbin are all text based protocols. The only other sites even close to YouTube’s scale that served videos anyone could upload used to be maybe adult video sites, but even then that’s not really true anymore because of the (good) new verification policies that exist now to help curb abuse and also the second category is far more profitable per video than YouTube is. Something like 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every second and I’m not sure if donations would easily cover the costs at that scale.
  - COGlory 3y ago
    How much of that video doesn't need to be uploaded to Youtube though? If costs are distributed among hosters and viewers directly, the entire creator-viewer relationship is going to change, and a ton of useless, low quality content is going to disappear.
    - pawptart 3y ago
      That works both ways, though. Content that is high quality but is lacking broad appeal will go away as well. Full disclosure,I don't know what the right answer is here but it certainly isn't as black-and-white as this.
      - COGlory 3y ago
        Will it? If the creator is really passionate, and the few people that consume the content is passionate, it seems like the opposite will happen. Look at Patreon and Floatplane, for instances of that.
      - jtode 3y ago
        It won't go away though, as long as it has a community that wants it. What goes away is things that get entrusted to capital. Netflix will run a show for two months and then remove it from the universe because it saves them taxes or something. The internet has passed around documents containing knowledge since way before the capitalists showed up and built their silos. We are still a society that is half comprised of people who are only capable of thinking of the internet as a better television, with a ruling class willing to do whatever it takes to give them that, but it has never been that and it will never be that. YouTube is just as doomed as the rest of the Free Money Era corporations.
    - Shawnj2 3y ago
      A lot of video uploaded to YouTube is stuff like “Dorothy’s first school play” or “Epic UFO sighting” or “Josh’s 5th birthday” that gets >1000 views, the stuff that you actually see when you browse YouTube as a viewer is in the minority of content actually uploaded to the site. To the people uploading the video and a very small number of people they know having the video on YouTube is very important, but to almost everyone else it doesn’t matter. I think everyone has a few videos that they like for personal reasons that aren’t massively popular so it really depends on your definition on what needs to be uploaded to YouTube and what is quality content. By YouTube’s metrics Mr. Beast videos are of higher quality than the royal institute’s since they make the site more money so quality is also entirely subjective here.
- mindslight 3y ago
  While I agree with where you're coming from philosophically, I think you've got the dynamic wrong. The popular content creators on Youtube actually like the ads, because ads actually put real money in their pockets. So I don't foresee a mass exodus of Youtube posters due to this. I think the revolutionary spirit is best thought of solely in terms of the viewing side. I personally just use Youtube in a browser because it works well enough. I know for myself, if I ever see some pop up like this I will start using yt-dlp routinely, and it will push me towards solutions like Newpipe for new video discovery.
  - hollow-moe 3y ago
    Ads on youtube became irrelevant long ago, there's a reason for the massive increase of sponsored content. Even small creators relies on them now.
  - jtode 3y ago
    What % of total posters, though, are "popular content creators" who like the ads, and what percent are Susan Soccermom posting her kids recital? The internet is not a better television.
    - jtode 3y ago
      Follow up: what percentage of the posters who like ads are producing incredibly bad content that works right in the algorithm and blocking people, with Google's help, from reaching quality/relevant videos they want to see? I don't find very much in terms of actual entertainment there, when I look. I follow a few channels, no idea if they make money at it and I don't care because their videos are 100% related to the topic at hand and not why I need a therapist from aiassistedminimum wagetherapy.com
- scarface_74 3y ago
  If you’re blocking ads and not paying for YouTube Premium, why should Google care if you leave?
  - ews 3y ago
    network effects
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      And where are people going to go to host their videos for free at scale? It’s not like any little startup can come along and profitably host videos
      - serf 3y ago
        > And where are people going to go to host their videos for free at scale? given that YT has been doing it since 2005, I think it's safe to say that there isn't any technological or copyright 'moat' aside from just sheer scale; I would presume if YT decided to alienate their entire userbase that some 'threads'-like overnight competitor would get spun up to suck the leavers up. I don't think that it's reasonable to assume that there will be some kind of multi-media vacuum formed in the absence of YT. there is a lot of good will to manipulate away from YT should their decision-making process get excessively heavy handed, and I think someone with money or power would jump at the chance to do so.
        scarface_74 3y ago
        > I think it's safe to say that there isn't any technological or copyright 'moat'; Except that whole video costs a lot to deliver at scale and YouTube piggy backs off of Google’s existing infrastructure. Not to mention all of the content-id technology that YouTube has to try to fight copyright infringement.
        jtode 3y ago
        Perhaps scale is actually a non-problem in many cases, and only a critical one in a paradigm where there is a need to have as much traffic as possible on a site for profit reasons. A person who wants a place to talk about their cat doesn't actually need a global scale video platform, unless their cat organically goes viral and the site gets hugged to death. Most cat posters just need a given amount of heart emojis per post, that a rather small group of cat fanciers can actually manage without much problem. Similar dynamics apply to the vast majority of internet content. There might be a place for a big video platform in the post-free-money internet, where creators of (again, organically) viral content can shift network loads for a share of ad revenue or a modest fee. So while your dog is clearly bad mannered and mediocre, my dog is a goddam supermodel and he knows it and he's gonna be a star if I ever put a picture of him up. He would need YouTube for sure. My little songs and rants, nobody outside of a few friends and sidewalk passerby are ever gonna hear them and that's fine, so peertube is gonna do the job for me just fine. I think that one requires a certain kind of exposure-seeking, or else profit-seeking mindset in order to see what YouTube does as crucial. That's my take anyways.
gemanor 3y ago
YouTube knows that people who insist to not watch ads/pay premium will find a way to watch it for free, and they don't mind it. They mind of people who got the ad blocker as freeware and watched YouTube without ads when they don't mind getting it. Looking at YouTube numbers and the growing hype of Arc browser and other freeware blockers, make sense of such a not-insisting ad blocker wall.
distances 3y ago
This requires that you are logged in to YouTube, doesn't it? I'm not sure how deep in the minority I am, but I use all Google services in private browsing mode if I can get away with it.
- CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
  That's a good point. I might just designate Edge as my "google" browser :-)
- mrastro 3y ago
  Without logging in some features are restricted. Most notably allowing viewing of videos that might be graphic (e.g. involve sensitive topics) you must prove you're 18+ by logging in.
  - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
    ...or use one of the MANY download websites which DNGAF about logging in.
abracadaniel 3y ago
The cat and mouse game continues. We’ve been in a cycle of YouTube increasing the ads, driving more people to block them. I’m not sure that pushing harder on the audience with the lowest tolerance to ads is the way to go, but I guess we’ll find out. Maybe there’s enough people who will cave and don’t have the technical literacy to find further workarounds. I’ve been saying for a while, that if YouTube really cared, they’d make you login, or otherwise choose not to let you watch and here we are. Seems like the obvious workarounds are VPNs or alternative front ends.
rascul 3y ago
I would rather not use YouTube than allow ads. I may be the minority, I don't care.
- veave 3y ago
  Same here, Twitch makes you sit through 10 seconds of ads, I just ^W the tab immediately
- silisili 3y ago
  Same. I was OK when it was just 1 short ad, only sometimes. Then 1 skippable ad. Like all companies, they just kept pushing and pushing and now I'm pushing back with a zero ads tolerance. When will ad companies realize their own trickery and greed is what is directly driving ad blockers in the first place?
  - jorams 3y ago
    I used to watch YouTube on my TV without adblocker almost every day, but it's now forcing so many ads that my usage has plummeted. There's always at least two for every few minutes of actual video, they're almost all at least 20 seconds long and unskippable. The few times I do still watch a video I now have a nice (annoying) little ritual: Click and go back and repeat until the first ad is less than 10 seconds, then watch that to the end, then go back and click again which skips the second ad. It's going to play another 2 ads 5 minutes in no matter what, so I might as well.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    The subscriber count for Premium and the YouTube revenue have been growing exponentially for the last few years. YouTube premium is cheaper and has better content than almost all the other video subscription services.
fxtentacle 3y ago
I wonder if we could just declare all older and public YouTube videos as cultural heritage and then legally backup them.
- conception 3y ago
  We, the human race, own all media. It’s all our culture. We can do what we want with it. We’ve just been trained to not remember that.
  - Lornedon 3y ago
    We, the human race, own all windows. We can just throw stones into them. We've just been trained not to remember that.
    - flangola7 3y ago
      What a mindless take
pawelduda 3y ago
And some users will be testing three-strikes policy for yt bullshit
chris37879 3y ago
I hopped on the youtube premium train a long time back, just because I mainly used youtube to consume podcasts and the like and it paid my creators better and got me no ads on youtube anywhere. The first time these BS policies hit me, a paying user, I will cancel it and never look back.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Why would you use YouTube to consume podcasts instead of a purpose built podcast player?
  - chris37879 3y ago
    Lots of reasons, chief of which being, I primarily consume them at my desk on my spare monitor, and the ones I follow usually have some visual stuff to check out. Couple that with being a programmer, and I get a lot of mileage out of youtube.
- unloco 3y ago
  I was a family subscriber for 15 a month. Then they bumped the family plan up to $23 or something like that. Yea no thanks, we have ad blockers and now use Orion browser to watch on ios mobile.
- jkaplowitz 3y ago
  The official statement from Google included in the article makes it seem like Google is de facto fine with paid YouTube Premium subscribers using ad blockers, whether or not the legalese officially allows that. That makes sense since they wouldn’t be showing you ads anyway. So I doubt they’ll be targeting you with this new policy.
  - CryptoBanker 3y ago
    Adblockers help prevent data collection, which I’m sure YT does have a problem with.
    - 3y ago
hilbert42 3y ago
How are they going to police this? I watch YouTube across multiple devices without a Google account not to mention NewPipe and other ways that Google doesn't approve of.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  It’s not hard to end up requiring a Google account.
whatwhaaaaat 3y ago
[flagged]
add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
I have a home toolchain making use of flask, yt-dlp, sponsorblock, plex, and ersatztv and it all works so well. I could not imagine watching youtube in a browser or a crappy roku app. I just have to hope this war never comes to my small village.
- arming9513 3y ago
  This sounds interesting. I tried something similar with Django. You have a write up on this?
  - add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
    It doesn't take much glue to make them work together. I paste a url into a textbox, flask runs yt-dlp in a subprocess, file saves to an area already defined to be a Plex library for youtube videos. I make playlists or ersatztv schedules as needed in the respective UIs.
villgax 3y ago
RIP Brave Browser YouTube should just stop pretending to be a free video host at this point & instead put everything behind a paywall. So much for the free service until we unicorn with VC/public money. Would be neat if they terminate Google accounts altogether to actually piss people off
jug 3y ago
No way I’d pay just to get rid of ads (and honestly that’s all I’d use Premium for). They’ll still track me and get to my personality from what I watch. So I’d essentially be paying them AND they’d still do that. That’s turning me into the ultimate sucker.
churchill 3y ago
As a free market maximalist, I believe YouTube has the right to show me as many ads as possible; but I reserve the right to close my eyes and not watch them. An adblocker helps me close my eyes at scale, and so if YouTube wants to interfere with that, that's where we'll have a little issue.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Don’t they have the right to stop serving you content?
  - churchill 3y ago
    Yes, they also do and I wholeheartedly support that as well. How many customers are they willing to piss off for their anti-adblock push? That's the question.
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      Someone who does not watch ads and does not pay for a subscription is not a customer. They are a freeloader. How many freeloaders is google willing to piss off? All of them by the looks of things.
gymbeaux 3y ago
97% of those surveyed in the article do not plan on paying for YouTube premium as a result ahahaha
2k3jh23j 3y ago
Go ahead. We have TikTok and YouTube is only used by old grannies anyway.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] this was news from late June
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  Plenty of discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36535417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36535417
nunez 3y ago
Not mad at this. You can pay to remove the ads and retain the same (better, IMO) experience. YouTube also put the kibosh on 3P clients since forever, so that's not being taken away. That's the difference between what YT has done and the un-Galaxy-brain dumb crap Reddit and Twitter have pulled.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  The difference is the default YouTube client is actually good. 3rd party clients only exist to implement paid features for free. When you pay for YouTube you get a really nice experience with no dark patterns. When you pay for reddit or Twitter you get the exact same dumpster fire.
  - abenga 3y ago
    I can't pay for YouTube in my country even if I wanted to.

62 points by shmde 3y ago

Has nobody learned a thing from Musk's example? Drunk on a stew of free money and ideological hegemony, these behemoths actually believe they've captured something that cannot be replaced. I post my videos on peertube now; others will follow if they go down the same path as Twitter and Reddit. I can't wait to see it happen. I really can't wait for people to realize we can federate AirBnB and Uber too. The Fed has called in the bill on the last thirty years, and all the little MBAs are about to learn, at [last], what a protocol is.

JeremyBanks 3y ago
[dead]
devwastaken 3y ago
Twitter doesn't require the infra YouTube does. YouTube can only exist because of Googles physical infrastructure and it's ad revenue subsidizing youtube. There are no replacements because you require their scale to pull it off.
Shawnj2 3y ago
I think YouTube might be the exception to this because of how expensive video hosting is. Mastodon is actually doing a great job funding itself but it and Lemmy/Kbin are all text based protocols. The only other sites even close to YouTube’s scale that served videos anyone could upload used to be maybe adult video sites, but even then that’s not really true anymore because of the (good) new verification policies that exist now to help curb abuse and also the second category is far more profitable per video than YouTube is. Something like 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every second and I’m not sure if donations would easily cover the costs at that scale.
- COGlory 3y ago
  How much of that video doesn't need to be uploaded to Youtube though? If costs are distributed among hosters and viewers directly, the entire creator-viewer relationship is going to change, and a ton of useless, low quality content is going to disappear.
  - pawptart 3y ago
    That works both ways, though. Content that is high quality but is lacking broad appeal will go away as well. Full disclosure,I don't know what the right answer is here but it certainly isn't as black-and-white as this.
    - COGlory 3y ago
      Will it? If the creator is really passionate, and the few people that consume the content is passionate, it seems like the opposite will happen. Look at Patreon and Floatplane, for instances of that.
    - jtode 3y ago
      It won't go away though, as long as it has a community that wants it. What goes away is things that get entrusted to capital. Netflix will run a show for two months and then remove it from the universe because it saves them taxes or something. The internet has passed around documents containing knowledge since way before the capitalists showed up and built their silos. We are still a society that is half comprised of people who are only capable of thinking of the internet as a better television, with a ruling class willing to do whatever it takes to give them that, but it has never been that and it will never be that. YouTube is just as doomed as the rest of the Free Money Era corporations.
  - Shawnj2 3y ago
    A lot of video uploaded to YouTube is stuff like “Dorothy’s first school play” or “Epic UFO sighting” or “Josh’s 5th birthday” that gets >1000 views, the stuff that you actually see when you browse YouTube as a viewer is in the minority of content actually uploaded to the site. To the people uploading the video and a very small number of people they know having the video on YouTube is very important, but to almost everyone else it doesn’t matter. I think everyone has a few videos that they like for personal reasons that aren’t massively popular so it really depends on your definition on what needs to be uploaded to YouTube and what is quality content. By YouTube’s metrics Mr. Beast videos are of higher quality than the royal institute’s since they make the site more money so quality is also entirely subjective here.
mindslight 3y ago
While I agree with where you're coming from philosophically, I think you've got the dynamic wrong. The popular content creators on Youtube actually like the ads, because ads actually put real money in their pockets. So I don't foresee a mass exodus of Youtube posters due to this. I think the revolutionary spirit is best thought of solely in terms of the viewing side. I personally just use Youtube in a browser because it works well enough. I know for myself, if I ever see some pop up like this I will start using yt-dlp routinely, and it will push me towards solutions like Newpipe for new video discovery.
- hollow-moe 3y ago
  Ads on youtube became irrelevant long ago, there's a reason for the massive increase of sponsored content. Even small creators relies on them now.
- jtode 3y ago
  What % of total posters, though, are "popular content creators" who like the ads, and what percent are Susan Soccermom posting her kids recital? The internet is not a better television.
  - jtode 3y ago
    Follow up: what percentage of the posters who like ads are producing incredibly bad content that works right in the algorithm and blocking people, with Google's help, from reaching quality/relevant videos they want to see? I don't find very much in terms of actual entertainment there, when I look. I follow a few channels, no idea if they make money at it and I don't care because their videos are 100% related to the topic at hand and not why I need a therapist from aiassistedminimum wagetherapy.com
scarface_74 3y ago
If you’re blocking ads and not paying for YouTube Premium, why should Google care if you leave?
- ews 3y ago
  network effects
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    And where are people going to go to host their videos for free at scale? It’s not like any little startup can come along and profitably host videos
    - serf 3y ago
      > And where are people going to go to host their videos for free at scale? given that YT has been doing it since 2005, I think it's safe to say that there isn't any technological or copyright 'moat' aside from just sheer scale; I would presume if YT decided to alienate their entire userbase that some 'threads'-like overnight competitor would get spun up to suck the leavers up. I don't think that it's reasonable to assume that there will be some kind of multi-media vacuum formed in the absence of YT. there is a lot of good will to manipulate away from YT should their decision-making process get excessively heavy handed, and I think someone with money or power would jump at the chance to do so.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        > I think it's safe to say that there isn't any technological or copyright 'moat'; Except that whole video costs a lot to deliver at scale and YouTube piggy backs off of Google’s existing infrastructure. Not to mention all of the content-id technology that YouTube has to try to fight copyright infringement.
        jtode 3y ago
        Perhaps scale is actually a non-problem in many cases, and only a critical one in a paradigm where there is a need to have as much traffic as possible on a site for profit reasons. A person who wants a place to talk about their cat doesn't actually need a global scale video platform, unless their cat organically goes viral and the site gets hugged to death. Most cat posters just need a given amount of heart emojis per post, that a rather small group of cat fanciers can actually manage without much problem. Similar dynamics apply to the vast majority of internet content. There might be a place for a big video platform in the post-free-money internet, where creators of (again, organically) viral content can shift network loads for a share of ad revenue or a modest fee. So while your dog is clearly bad mannered and mediocre, my dog is a goddam supermodel and he knows it and he's gonna be a star if I ever put a picture of him up. He would need YouTube for sure. My little songs and rants, nobody outside of a few friends and sidewalk passerby are ever gonna hear them and that's fine, so peertube is gonna do the job for me just fine. I think that one requires a certain kind of exposure-seeking, or else profit-seeking mindset in order to see what YouTube does as crucial. That's my take anyways.

gemanor 3y ago

YouTube knows that people who insist to not watch ads/pay premium will find a way to watch it for free, and they don't mind it. They mind of people who got the ad blocker as freeware and watched YouTube without ads when they don't mind getting it. Looking at YouTube numbers and the growing hype of Arc browser and other freeware blockers, make sense of such a not-insisting ad blocker wall.

distances 3y ago

This requires that you are logged in to YouTube, doesn't it? I'm not sure how deep in the minority I am, but I use all Google services in private browsing mode if I can get away with it.

CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
That's a good point. I might just designate Edge as my "google" browser :-)
mrastro 3y ago
Without logging in some features are restricted. Most notably allowing viewing of videos that might be graphic (e.g. involve sensitive topics) you must prove you're 18+ by logging in.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  ...or use one of the MANY download websites which DNGAF about logging in.

abracadaniel 3y ago

The cat and mouse game continues. We’ve been in a cycle of YouTube increasing the ads, driving more people to block them. I’m not sure that pushing harder on the audience with the lowest tolerance to ads is the way to go, but I guess we’ll find out. Maybe there’s enough people who will cave and don’t have the technical literacy to find further workarounds. I’ve been saying for a while, that if YouTube really cared, they’d make you login, or otherwise choose not to let you watch and here we are. Seems like the obvious workarounds are VPNs or alternative front ends.

rascul 3y ago

I would rather not use YouTube than allow ads. I may be the minority, I don't care.

veave 3y ago
Same here, Twitch makes you sit through 10 seconds of ads, I just ^W the tab immediately
silisili 3y ago
Same. I was OK when it was just 1 short ad, only sometimes. Then 1 skippable ad. Like all companies, they just kept pushing and pushing and now I'm pushing back with a zero ads tolerance. When will ad companies realize their own trickery and greed is what is directly driving ad blockers in the first place?
- jorams 3y ago
  I used to watch YouTube on my TV without adblocker almost every day, but it's now forcing so many ads that my usage has plummeted. There's always at least two for every few minutes of actual video, they're almost all at least 20 seconds long and unskippable. The few times I do still watch a video I now have a nice (annoying) little ritual: Click and go back and repeat until the first ad is less than 10 seconds, then watch that to the end, then go back and click again which skips the second ad. It's going to play another 2 ads 5 minutes in no matter what, so I might as well.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  The subscriber count for Premium and the YouTube revenue have been growing exponentially for the last few years. YouTube premium is cheaper and has better content than almost all the other video subscription services.

fxtentacle 3y ago

I wonder if we could just declare all older and public YouTube videos as cultural heritage and then legally backup them.

conception 3y ago
We, the human race, own all media. It’s all our culture. We can do what we want with it. We’ve just been trained to not remember that.
- Lornedon 3y ago
  We, the human race, own all windows. We can just throw stones into them. We've just been trained not to remember that.
  - flangola7 3y ago
    What a mindless take

pawelduda 3y ago

And some users will be testing three-strikes policy for yt bullshit

chris37879 3y ago

I hopped on the youtube premium train a long time back, just because I mainly used youtube to consume podcasts and the like and it paid my creators better and got me no ads on youtube anywhere. The first time these BS policies hit me, a paying user, I will cancel it and never look back.

scarface_74 3y ago
Why would you use YouTube to consume podcasts instead of a purpose built podcast player?
- chris37879 3y ago
  Lots of reasons, chief of which being, I primarily consume them at my desk on my spare monitor, and the ones I follow usually have some visual stuff to check out. Couple that with being a programmer, and I get a lot of mileage out of youtube.
unloco 3y ago
I was a family subscriber for 15 a month. Then they bumped the family plan up to $23 or something like that. Yea no thanks, we have ad blockers and now use Orion browser to watch on ios mobile.
jkaplowitz 3y ago
The official statement from Google included in the article makes it seem like Google is de facto fine with paid YouTube Premium subscribers using ad blockers, whether or not the legalese officially allows that. That makes sense since they wouldn’t be showing you ads anyway. So I doubt they’ll be targeting you with this new policy.
- CryptoBanker 3y ago
  Adblockers help prevent data collection, which I’m sure YT does have a problem with.
  - 3y ago

hilbert42 3y ago

How are they going to police this? I watch YouTube across multiple devices without a Google account not to mention NewPipe and other ways that Google doesn't approve of.

aaomidi 3y ago
It’s not hard to end up requiring a Google account.

whatwhaaaaat 3y ago

[flagged]

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago

I have a home toolchain making use of flask, yt-dlp, sponsorblock, plex, and ersatztv and it all works so well. I could not imagine watching youtube in a browser or a crappy roku app. I just have to hope this war never comes to my small village.

arming9513 3y ago
This sounds interesting. I tried something similar with Django. You have a write up on this?
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  It doesn't take much glue to make them work together. I paste a url into a textbox, flask runs yt-dlp in a subprocess, file saves to an area already defined to be a Plex library for youtube videos. I make playlists or ersatztv schedules as needed in the respective UIs.

villgax 3y ago

RIP Brave Browser YouTube should just stop pretending to be a free video host at this point & instead put everything behind a paywall. So much for the free service until we unicorn with VC/public money. Would be neat if they terminate Google accounts altogether to actually piss people off

jug 3y ago

No way I’d pay just to get rid of ads (and honestly that’s all I’d use Premium for). They’ll still track me and get to my personality from what I watch. So I’d essentially be paying them AND they’d still do that. That’s turning me into the ultimate sucker.

churchill 3y ago

As a free market maximalist, I believe YouTube has the right to show me as many ads as possible; but I reserve the right to close my eyes and not watch them. An adblocker helps me close my eyes at scale, and so if YouTube wants to interfere with that, that's where we'll have a little issue.

Gigachad 3y ago
Don’t they have the right to stop serving you content?
- churchill 3y ago
  Yes, they also do and I wholeheartedly support that as well. How many customers are they willing to piss off for their anti-adblock push? That's the question.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    Someone who does not watch ads and does not pay for a subscription is not a customer. They are a freeloader. How many freeloaders is google willing to piss off? All of them by the looks of things.

gymbeaux 3y ago

97% of those surveyed in the article do not plan on paying for YouTube premium as a result ahahaha

2k3jh23j 3y ago

Go ahead. We have TikTok and YouTube is only used by old grannies anyway.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe] this was news from late June

ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Plenty of discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36535417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36535417

nunez 3y ago

Not mad at this. You can pay to remove the ads and retain the same (better, IMO) experience. YouTube also put the kibosh on 3P clients since forever, so that's not being taken away. That's the difference between what YT has done and the un-Galaxy-brain dumb crap Reddit and Twitter have pulled.

Gigachad 3y ago
The difference is the default YouTube client is actually good. 3rd party clients only exist to implement paid features for free. When you pay for YouTube you get a really nice experience with no dark patterns. When you pay for reddit or Twitter you get the exact same dumpster fire.
- abenga 3y ago
  I can't pay for YouTube in my country even if I wanted to.