8 ms·

YouTube's crackdown on ad blockers intensifies

58 points by MilnerRoute 3y ago

g232089 3y ago
The use of the word "allowlisted" makes me want to block ads harder.
xnx 3y ago
The ad vs. adblocking wars will continue to escalate closer and closer to the "analog hole". Facebook and Apple are both desperate to be the last intermediary between your senses and the world via vr/augmented reality.
lm28469 3y ago
Between that and the push for brainless "shorts" I already reduced my use by a good 50% They might finally cure my addictions
blakesterz 3y ago
I do understand this push, and honestly I'm surprised it took them this long. I'd love to know how many people end up subscribing vs allowing ads vs reducing views drastically vs just never using YouTube again. I assume this will bite me soon, and I think I'll be in the "reducing views drastically" because there's very little I watch on YouTube that I'd want to sit through any ads for.
- Ancalagon 3y ago
  I wonder how long it takes for the ad-blockers to get around this.
  - Krasnol 3y ago
    I wonder how long it takes until a different platform becomes more popular because of all this.
    - recursive 3y ago
      And I wonder who's in a position to pay for it.
    - kevinh 3y ago
      Seems like a platform base comprised of users who neither want to watch ads nor pay for an ad-free experience is not primed for success
      - Krasnol 3y ago
        It was never 1 or 0. It's just the market pressure to generate even more every quarter. There are ways around this and ways to still generate profits. It's not like nobody was watching ads. It's not ever ENOUGH people to watch ads because you have to deliver more for the shareholder horde.
  - recursive 3y ago
    And after that, I wonder how long it will take google to get around that.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      This is going to lead us to a terrible place IMHO, where the ads are just encoded directly into the video stream so everything comes from the same origin making it very difficult for ad blockers by not giving them a different origin to block. Plus maybe rolling out widevine (DRM) for good measure. God I hate these races to the bottom.
      - chaosbolt 3y ago
        Sponsorblock does this well for sponsored segments, it even works on yt-dlp and you can download a video without the sponsored parts.
        freedomben 3y ago
        whoa amazing, thanks! It does make me mad that I pay for youtube premium and still have to see those sponsored segments.
        MaxikCZ 3y ago
        Pirating was always a big part about convinience (and accesibility), not just money. Cracked games running without needing to scavenge for CD-rom etc. You know you fail when you gimp your free service and allow users to ungimp it for cash, while someone else ungimps it better for free. Big corps never understood this, with Valve being the only counterexample I can think of.
      - gattilorenz 3y ago
        I already use sponsorblock, for the ads encoded in the video stream.
        3y ago
  - anonymousab 3y ago
    Given how a Google account or IP address ban or punishment on any of their services can basically annihilate your ability to use any of their services forevermore, including never being able to touch your emails or files ever again, I can see YouTube being very effective with this crackdown. Especially since they can/do also target any of your secondary accounts, and can also hit family members depending on various backend circumstances that users can't really know about.
    - MaxikCZ 3y ago
      And you know what? There is life without google, too.
      - anonymousab 3y ago
        It is a major inconvenience for users of Google to lose access to Google services, especially if you have years and years of stuff in Gmail or drive or photos or YouTube. Regardless of the fact that you can find some sort of replacement for any of those things individually, it would be a major stumbling block and disruption for most users to suddenly no longer have access to their email/history. The average person does not have forwarding or mirroring of all that stuff set up. I posit that that disruption is enough of a deterrent to get users to stop using ad blocking on Google services once the consequences start being applied. Though that reminds me, I don't quite know what happens to your chrome bookmarks and settings if Google obliterates your profile's account. I assume that merely syncing will stop working, but perhaps more might be disrupted.
        pepa65 3y ago
        It really doesn't take long to "take out" all your Google content and continue life elsewhere -- highly recommended for future-proofing.
- chaosbolt 3y ago
  Youtube has become garbage and it was only a matter of time before Google's lack of identity infected it as well, you can now search for a video and only get shorts and other algo suggestions completely unrelated to your search. My guess is they're going to quickly back down on that... I tried the iphone for a year before going back to android and I just stopped using youtube there, you quickly realize how unnecessary you find it, because there is no way in hell any same person is going to endure a 30 second ad for the garbage content you find there now.
  - passion__desire 3y ago
    Do you actively use "Not Interested"? It helps a lot. Another hack that I have is if I like a particular topic, I click on as many related videos as possible in the bottom suggestion list in order to "guide" the algorithm, even if I won't get back to all of them. Not sure if this has any effect but it has worked out quite well for me.
    - chaosbolt 3y ago
      I have the history and suggested content features off, I used to only rely on searching for what I wanted to watch, now it stopped working, both google search and youtube search now are trash, and search is their original product.
    - MaxikCZ 3y ago
      Not parent comentter but I even asked HN on my issue with Youtube started to ignore my "Not interested" and suggest me the videos over and over. Currently the only way to get rid of it is "Dont reccomend channel", but as soon as youtube forces ads trough adblock I just stop using it, just as I did on mobile.
    - johnnyworker 3y ago
      I know got one of two (always one or the other) execution clips (as in, a human kneeling in front of someone with a weapon, at least according to the thumb, never watched it) when scrolling to far totally benign searches (namely remixes of songs that have a lot, trying to find some I like). I did click "not interested", and after a few months it popped back again. up Couldn't find it right now, so maybe it got reported often enough, but my guess would be the "algorithm" "realized" that this video got a lot of clicks regardless of search, so why not sprinkle it into all searches, right? And that's silly, and I claim it would be even with perfectly good intentions. It's just wasting huge amounts of energy on something that is worse, and cannot ever be good (that is, the whole algorithms second guessing people stuff). Give me "dumb" search that returns things that contain the terms in the title or description, or that are linked in the descriptions of videos that contain them. Or even find an open way (i.e. not restricted to Google, and not "the way Google likes it", but decent and simple and clean) to show videos on web pages that contain them. Page rank is not perfect and can be gamed, but it's actually feasible to make that good -- it used to be stellar compared to what we have now, now imagine what we could do with all that was learned and invented in the meantime. Crafting searches to make pinpoint landings on what you are looking for, if it exists, is a delightful art. Remember http://www.fravia.net/ http://www.fravia.net/ ? It's like remembering having and being able to use a screwdriver, instead of there being this fairy that you can ask for help, which sometimes shows up instantly and fastens the screw, and sometimes shows up pretending to not know what a screw is while reaching in your pocket... which is at best as good as having and being able to use a screw driver, and potentially infinitely worse. So on average, it's infinitely worse. Logic :D And when it comes to clicking "not interested", I know that in the long run my wishes aren't respected anyway, and I've gotten so cynical about this stuff that I basically just view it as a further signal to a bad actor (if not abuser) that yes, I saw this thing, didn't just scroll by it, noticed it enough to strongly dislike it, and am now offering a futile plea to please not show me that again. I'd rather close the tab altogether. This rant wasn't directed at you or your suggestion, not at all! But I just had to get it out, I hope you understand. I'm so over the whole web as a worse version of TV, where the middlemen get the vast majority of profits plus information on how to better poison you, and you get the poison. Teach people digital literacy instead of giving them "free" assistants that very well might one day become their captors or worse, to the degree they aren't already.
- mjr00 3y ago
  > I do understand this push, and honestly I'm surprised it took them this long. I'm not too surprised it took this long -- the % of viewers who are on a PC, not a phone, and technically savvy enough to install an ad blocker is relatively small, so it wasn't worth the effort. But now, with the death of ZIRP and the demand that these tech companies which were experiencing infinite growth somehow continue to grow infinitely, they're very much in "squeeze blood from a stone" mode.
- somesortofthing 3y ago
  I think the reason they don't is because the overlap between users with the general internet savvy to use an ad blocker and users who have the general internet savvy to literally never pay attention to or click on ads is pretty high. It's sort of the same problem reddit had -- There's just no way to monetize users like this other than locking the entire service behind a paywall for everyone, shutting out the much more lucrative remainder of your customer base.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Google has been posting the numbers on this. Premium subscriptions are skyrocketing year on year.
stas2k 3y ago
I had to resort to my own Invidious instance plus Sponsorblock. Its looks is very much like OG Youtube and it is unusually fast: no overdone JS. You can also sync it up to Clipious on the phone and get a clean, bloat free Youtube experience without ads or slow page loads.
- RajT88 3y ago
  I've been using yewtu.be recently. It's pretty good! I may have to run my own.
jjbinx007 3y ago
If only they would crack down on all the scam ads. I still get deepfake ads purporting to show Elon Musk and Martin Lewis promoting crypto and the like. No amount of reporting by me and even reporting on by mainstream media seems to make a difference.
ArtemZ 3y ago
I started using Ncdownloader (which works on top of yt2k) extension for my Nextcloud installation, so now I just copy paste video url and get either an MP4 or mp3 in my cloud where I don't worry about ads. I think their argument that they do this to "ensure that its content creators are compensated for their work" is not genuine given their practice to de-monetize the same content creators with no explanation or, apparently, for their political views. For example, California Insider youtube channel was demonitized and I suspect that this is because Google was unhappy with the narrative.
vidanay 3y ago
Make the goddamn YT Premium "family" plan work with Google Workspaces and I'll sign my whole family up today.
- jonny_eh 3y ago
  I suggest making an extra gmail account just for YouTube, and other consumer focused Google products. I mainly use a Workspace account for personal use, and it's what I do.
  - vidanay 3y ago
    That's great. Now tell all my family members that have 10+ years of YT history with their Workspaces accounts that they have to switch to a new Gmail account. It's a non-starter.
brink 3y ago
[flagged]
- cactusplant7374 3y ago
  Conservatives have Rumble now. Since everyone knew from the beginning YT was run by liberals in SF (no disrespect meant), I don't see the issue.
- za3faran 3y ago
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  - brink 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - za3faran 3y ago
      [flagged]
MattGaiser 3y ago
Is there a reason they don’t just add the ads directly into the video?
- ArtemZ 3y ago
  It will be much more difficult to show personalized ads this way
- almatabata 3y ago
  They cannot stop you from skipping those ads either. You just need to buffer and skip ahead. They would need to develop a very complicated solution that would not solve the problem of people not watching the ads. Actually this would make it even easier to skip the ads.
  - vidanay 3y ago
    Remember when TiVo/Dish/DirecTV tried putting ads in DVRs that only appeared while fast forwarding recorded content?
    - almatabata 3y ago
      My god no i did not know that. During fast forward and pausing even: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/business/media/23adco.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/business/media/23adco.htm...
- smcleod 3y ago
  Probably because they’re already pack with ads from the creators.
geijoenr 3y ago
From my point of view YouTube with Adds is unbearable. And I don't feel the subscription service is offering as much value as any other streaming platform. If it was a bit cheaper I would may be consider it, but for my specific use case (just watch random videos and some channels) at this price is just not worth it and I will just stop using the platform.
- jjice 3y ago
  I pay $14 a month for YouTube Premium. YouTube is my most used streaming service and I think it's completely worth it. Maybe if you don't consume a lot of YouTube it's not that valuable to you but I'd rather have YouTube over Netflix, HBO, Hulu, etc all combined.
  - frizlab 3y ago
    For me it’s the exact opposite, I’d rather have Disney+, Prime Video, Apple TV+, etc. over youtube (and I do).
  - kubectl_h 3y ago
    > I'd rather have YouTube over Netflix, HBO, Hulu, etc all combined. Had the realization recently at a family reunion that, aside from Succession, I haven't watched a full season/series of a TV/streaming show in the last few years. I actually don't know what the shows of the moment are. I almost exclusively watch YouTube in the evenings, if I'm watching anything at all. I've been sub'd to YouTube Premium since it was called YouTube Red. Anytime I have to watch it withs ads I'm horrified. I wish I could give yearly subs out as gifts.
    - drcongo 3y ago
      Horses for courses I guess, but I don't think I've ever seen anything on YouTube that I would consider paying for. I'm sure I'm in a tiny minority, but I find the relentless chasing of "fame" to be completely grotesque and a large contributor to the rise of fascism. No way I'm going to fund that.
scarygliders 3y ago
Adblockers should get more devious then. I've not looked into exactly how adblockers work, but I presume they just don't allow advert content through to be rendered by the browser - they block the html/css/js from loading in the page - and that's how places like Youtube and other sites can detect one is using an adblocker. If I were going to write an adblocker, I'd make it such that it pretends to load and play/display the adverts, meanwhile allowing the video which the user intends to watch through. The adblocker basically says somehow that "yup! I'm the browser and your advert was definitely rendered. Honest, guv'nor!" Something like that. (I fully recognize that I may be talking out of my ass if my assumptions above are incorrect.)
- Freedom2 3y ago
  Your approach sounds entirely feasible, and it doesn't make sense why others haven't thought of it yet. I'm not surprised that the HN community is full of great ideas, though.
- dpedu 3y ago
  That's why they want the Web Environment Integrity api.
  - martin1975 3y ago
    judging by the flame fest they received on their github issues/comments section, I doubt they'll be proceeding. Then again, money talks and b.s. takes the walk every time and twice on sunday.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      The standard playbook on this is: table it for 6 months, then try again as quietly as possible. Repeat until the outrage is tolerable. Works great for corporations and governments alike. Eventually people won't be outraged and will just quietly take whatever they're giving us.
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      I don’t think some angry comments on GitHub are going to stop them with the amount of money on the table here.
colpabar 3y ago
Why hasn't this happened to me yet? I watch youtube videos ALL the time and I have never once been prompted to turn off ublock. The only time I see ads is on my phone.
- timbit42 3y ago
  You could be using NewPipe which has uBlock Origin, or the version that also has SponsorBlock.
yvoschaap 3y ago
My domain was blocked from serving Adsense (for some a pedantic reason). Fortunate result, if I watch youtube loaded from their own embed script but hosted from my domain there are never ads!
- cactusplant7374 3y ago
  You should offer embedding as a service lol.
  - yvoschaap 3y ago
    I did https://yvoschaap.com/youtube.html https://yvoschaap.com/youtube.html
cactusplant7374 3y ago
I'm worried that if I block adds and get caught they will eventually sanction my other Google accounts (i.e. Gmail and Drive). I'm thinking about adding YouTube to /etc/hosts and only browsing through Tor.
- gaius_baltar 3y ago
  You can drop YT logins completely. On desktop use Firefox Account Containers to always open YT in an isolated container and never login. On Android, just use NewPipe. Of course, you won't have personal recommendations, playlists, watch later, etc. bu in the current state of the things, it is a feature.
  - timbit42 3y ago
    You can also use RSS to subscribe to YT channels. I use Flym on Android along with NewPipe w/SponsorBlock.
- tomjen3 3y ago
  Google can ban you from their services permanently for any reason. What I did was move to my own domain. Its hosted with Apple, but that is not important, I can always move it. I changed most places to use my domain, for the rest I set up a forward from Gmail to my own domain. Then I did a Google Checkout so I have all my mail locally. I moved from Google search to Duck Duck go and now partially to Kagi and AI. Gmail is very sticky, but the hardest Google services to leave was a) Android and b) Youtube. Android meant buying an iPhone and I still haven't found anything that competes with Youtube.
justapassenger 3y ago
I understand people who block ads on the sites where you have no option to pay to remove them, especially if they're intrusive and you get served tons of random JS and popups everywhere you click. But here - you can pay. And if you think it's too much and doesn't reflect value it brings - well that's your choice, but its not a charity and they can (and should IMO) fight with ad blocking. Disclaimer - I pay for YT family plan that I share with my wife and it's most useful subscription we have - YT is our main source of media consumption.
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Where do I pay to remove sponsor segments?
  - justapassenger 3y ago
    Ask channels you watch about it. It’s not youtube doing that.
  - xfitm3 3y ago
    SponsorBlock
- gaius_baltar 3y ago
  YT Premium only makes the problem worse by requiring you to log in using an account that is tied to your real world identity and was used for payment processing. You just end up giving more data points to Google to track you, cross-reference with other sources and shove more ads in other platforms, still get native ads, and Google can just add their own ads later (as it is happening step by step with streaming companies).
- smcleod 3y ago
  YT premium starts at $20/month in Australia for a single person, that’s far more than most other streaming services and you still have to put up with advertising and clickbait from creators.
  - 3y ago
ChickeNES 3y ago
Am I the only one who watches enough YouTube content that I just pay for Premium without question?
- denvaar 3y ago
  I am the same way, and I enjoy YT Music as well.
Kye 3y ago
My Ask HN from 2020: "Are YouTube ads getting worse?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769291 I didn't always block ads on YouTube, but they pushed me to it. And apparently enough people for them to do this. There still isn't enough on there to make it worth subscribing for me. ~$170/year is not a small amount of money.
- freedomben 3y ago
  I've been paying since Youtube Red, and I'm almost to the point where it's not worth it anymore. The price has gotten really high, and so much of the content I watch has ads baked into it by the creator, so I still mostly have to watch ads. Youtube's aggressive demonetization of viewpoints they don't like is really leading to a bad UX and is near the tipping point for me.
  - xfitm3 3y ago
    SponsorBlock is a wonderful tool. I use uBlock origin and have not seen an ad for a long time, perhaps years with one or two exceptions.
  - mikecoles 3y ago
    Wasn't the Red subscription price supposed to be locked to something like $7. Was that ever a thing?
    - Kye 3y ago
      If Google ever made a promise, I would weigh it as highly as their confidence in every slick video announcing a new chat app.
geod_of_ix 3y ago
https://ublockorigin.com/ https://ublockorigin.com/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/
renegat0x0 3y ago
Platforms like subscriptions not only because of money. YouTube does know a lot about users, but it can be sure that you are likely not a bot if you have an account.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  YouTube knows a ton about most of its users since they’re using chrome with a google account.
xnx 3y ago
This crackdown is also in preparation for moving podcasts into YouTube where ads can be injected into them more readily than in the Google Podcasts app.
iteratethis 3y ago
I had been using Youtube exclusively from a browser with uBlock Origin and only learned about its ads persistence when we finally upgraded our ancient TV. I was in shock, the service is close to unusable with ads. At the same time, the reality check is that ads continue to be the way to monetize the masses as no other model works at this scale of users. So do expect it to get worse. By means of IP, the Web Integrity API, whether you've opted-in to this new "Ad topics" thing in Chrome...the future direction is to discriminate clients. You will see the ad or not see the service. The only resistance is to just watch less or not at all.
bigfryo 3y ago
The built-in ad blocker on Brave browser seems to work fine
oldbbsnickname 3y ago
Around 2012, YT's shittiness level reached OTA TV levels and that's when I peaced out. My rule: it's not worth using YT, TikTok, or any other corporate behemoth with your attention as their product. So if a form of media runs ads, I'm out. There's nothing particularly defensible about YT's readily commodifiable service and indefensible business model except the power law distribution of a monopoly. YT's closest competitor/alternative was once Vimeo. The problem was their founders made a critical error of taking venture funding and, later, going public, leading to poor decisions driven by the board that gradually wrecked it. YT is allowed by the market to be shitty because there is no viable competitor in their space. The biggest touted contenders aren't much of a threat: TikTok started as a copy of Vine, so it's unsuitable for substantive, long-form content. Instagram is TikTok plus pictures. Twitch is pigeonholed for specific uses: gamers and ear-licking models. Reddit Live isn't for persistent, on-demand content hosting. There isn't much else except tiny startups, some of which may well be better for both viewers and creators. To be a YT competitor I'd want to use: Charge content creators and viewers a modest subscription fee so they don't have to have ads AND have engagement and monetization tools for the creators. Don't spam me with ads for viral cat videos.
Etrnl_President 3y ago
Give me what I want, and I will gladly pay: Truly anonymous unpersonalized YouTube under the old algorithm from the early 2000s. No tracking, no censorship, no manipulation, no boosted videos… Truly anonymous payment options. Google-free viewing. But you make most of your money by tracking all that, and keeping me from finding the videos I actually want to watch, so who am I kidding.
xela79 3y ago
why do they think can decide what content you want to be downloaded through your internet connection and displayed on your devices? once the bits & bytes enter my network, you're free to do with them what you want, they have no say in what is done with that data. If it's filtered, that is not their decision to make
- therealpygon 3y ago
  I don’t know that “I don’t understand why they are mad that I’m stealing from them even though I agreed to pay for the cost by watching ads” is really the argument that you are hoping for. YouTube is a business and delivering video costs a significant amount of money. If you want to use it you are agreeing to watch ads to pay for that costs or to pay for a premium plan. At least be honest with yourself about the situation, and this comes from someone he vehemently hates ads as much as the next person, but that is “the cost of admission” so to speak.

58 points by MilnerRoute 3y ago

g232089 3y ago

The use of the word "allowlisted" makes me want to block ads harder.

xnx 3y ago

The ad vs. adblocking wars will continue to escalate closer and closer to the "analog hole". Facebook and Apple are both desperate to be the last intermediary between your senses and the world via vr/augmented reality.

lm28469 3y ago

Between that and the push for brainless "shorts" I already reduced my use by a good 50% They might finally cure my addictions

blakesterz 3y ago

I do understand this push, and honestly I'm surprised it took them this long. I'd love to know how many people end up subscribing vs allowing ads vs reducing views drastically vs just never using YouTube again. I assume this will bite me soon, and I think I'll be in the "reducing views drastically" because there's very little I watch on YouTube that I'd want to sit through any ads for.

Ancalagon 3y ago
I wonder how long it takes for the ad-blockers to get around this.
- Krasnol 3y ago
  I wonder how long it takes until a different platform becomes more popular because of all this.
  - recursive 3y ago
    And I wonder who's in a position to pay for it.
  - kevinh 3y ago
    Seems like a platform base comprised of users who neither want to watch ads nor pay for an ad-free experience is not primed for success
    - Krasnol 3y ago
      It was never 1 or 0. It's just the market pressure to generate even more every quarter. There are ways around this and ways to still generate profits. It's not like nobody was watching ads. It's not ever ENOUGH people to watch ads because you have to deliver more for the shareholder horde.
- recursive 3y ago
  And after that, I wonder how long it will take google to get around that.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    This is going to lead us to a terrible place IMHO, where the ads are just encoded directly into the video stream so everything comes from the same origin making it very difficult for ad blockers by not giving them a different origin to block. Plus maybe rolling out widevine (DRM) for good measure. God I hate these races to the bottom.
    - chaosbolt 3y ago
      Sponsorblock does this well for sponsored segments, it even works on yt-dlp and you can download a video without the sponsored parts.
      - freedomben 3y ago
        whoa amazing, thanks! It does make me mad that I pay for youtube premium and still have to see those sponsored segments.
        MaxikCZ 3y ago
        Pirating was always a big part about convinience (and accesibility), not just money. Cracked games running without needing to scavenge for CD-rom etc. You know you fail when you gimp your free service and allow users to ungimp it for cash, while someone else ungimps it better for free. Big corps never understood this, with Valve being the only counterexample I can think of.
    - gattilorenz 3y ago
      I already use sponsorblock, for the ads encoded in the video stream.
      - 3y ago
- anonymousab 3y ago
  Given how a Google account or IP address ban or punishment on any of their services can basically annihilate your ability to use any of their services forevermore, including never being able to touch your emails or files ever again, I can see YouTube being very effective with this crackdown. Especially since they can/do also target any of your secondary accounts, and can also hit family members depending on various backend circumstances that users can't really know about.
  - MaxikCZ 3y ago
    And you know what? There is life without google, too.
    - anonymousab 3y ago
      It is a major inconvenience for users of Google to lose access to Google services, especially if you have years and years of stuff in Gmail or drive or photos or YouTube. Regardless of the fact that you can find some sort of replacement for any of those things individually, it would be a major stumbling block and disruption for most users to suddenly no longer have access to their email/history. The average person does not have forwarding or mirroring of all that stuff set up. I posit that that disruption is enough of a deterrent to get users to stop using ad blocking on Google services once the consequences start being applied. Though that reminds me, I don't quite know what happens to your chrome bookmarks and settings if Google obliterates your profile's account. I assume that merely syncing will stop working, but perhaps more might be disrupted.
      - pepa65 3y ago
        It really doesn't take long to "take out" all your Google content and continue life elsewhere -- highly recommended for future-proofing.
chaosbolt 3y ago
Youtube has become garbage and it was only a matter of time before Google's lack of identity infected it as well, you can now search for a video and only get shorts and other algo suggestions completely unrelated to your search. My guess is they're going to quickly back down on that... I tried the iphone for a year before going back to android and I just stopped using youtube there, you quickly realize how unnecessary you find it, because there is no way in hell any same person is going to endure a 30 second ad for the garbage content you find there now.
- passion__desire 3y ago
  Do you actively use "Not Interested"? It helps a lot. Another hack that I have is if I like a particular topic, I click on as many related videos as possible in the bottom suggestion list in order to "guide" the algorithm, even if I won't get back to all of them. Not sure if this has any effect but it has worked out quite well for me.
  - chaosbolt 3y ago
    I have the history and suggested content features off, I used to only rely on searching for what I wanted to watch, now it stopped working, both google search and youtube search now are trash, and search is their original product.
  - MaxikCZ 3y ago
    Not parent comentter but I even asked HN on my issue with Youtube started to ignore my "Not interested" and suggest me the videos over and over. Currently the only way to get rid of it is "Dont reccomend channel", but as soon as youtube forces ads trough adblock I just stop using it, just as I did on mobile.
  - johnnyworker 3y ago
    I know got one of two (always one or the other) execution clips (as in, a human kneeling in front of someone with a weapon, at least according to the thumb, never watched it) when scrolling to far totally benign searches (namely remixes of songs that have a lot, trying to find some I like). I did click "not interested", and after a few months it popped back again. up Couldn't find it right now, so maybe it got reported often enough, but my guess would be the "algorithm" "realized" that this video got a lot of clicks regardless of search, so why not sprinkle it into all searches, right? And that's silly, and I claim it would be even with perfectly good intentions. It's just wasting huge amounts of energy on something that is worse, and cannot ever be good (that is, the whole algorithms second guessing people stuff). Give me "dumb" search that returns things that contain the terms in the title or description, or that are linked in the descriptions of videos that contain them. Or even find an open way (i.e. not restricted to Google, and not "the way Google likes it", but decent and simple and clean) to show videos on web pages that contain them. Page rank is not perfect and can be gamed, but it's actually feasible to make that good -- it used to be stellar compared to what we have now, now imagine what we could do with all that was learned and invented in the meantime. Crafting searches to make pinpoint landings on what you are looking for, if it exists, is a delightful art. Remember http://www.fravia.net/ http://www.fravia.net/ ? It's like remembering having and being able to use a screwdriver, instead of there being this fairy that you can ask for help, which sometimes shows up instantly and fastens the screw, and sometimes shows up pretending to not know what a screw is while reaching in your pocket... which is at best as good as having and being able to use a screw driver, and potentially infinitely worse. So on average, it's infinitely worse. Logic :D And when it comes to clicking "not interested", I know that in the long run my wishes aren't respected anyway, and I've gotten so cynical about this stuff that I basically just view it as a further signal to a bad actor (if not abuser) that yes, I saw this thing, didn't just scroll by it, noticed it enough to strongly dislike it, and am now offering a futile plea to please not show me that again. I'd rather close the tab altogether. This rant wasn't directed at you or your suggestion, not at all! But I just had to get it out, I hope you understand. I'm so over the whole web as a worse version of TV, where the middlemen get the vast majority of profits plus information on how to better poison you, and you get the poison. Teach people digital literacy instead of giving them "free" assistants that very well might one day become their captors or worse, to the degree they aren't already.
mjr00 3y ago
> I do understand this push, and honestly I'm surprised it took them this long. I'm not too surprised it took this long -- the % of viewers who are on a PC, not a phone, and technically savvy enough to install an ad blocker is relatively small, so it wasn't worth the effort. But now, with the death of ZIRP and the demand that these tech companies which were experiencing infinite growth somehow continue to grow infinitely, they're very much in "squeeze blood from a stone" mode.
somesortofthing 3y ago
I think the reason they don't is because the overlap between users with the general internet savvy to use an ad blocker and users who have the general internet savvy to literally never pay attention to or click on ads is pretty high. It's sort of the same problem reddit had -- There's just no way to monetize users like this other than locking the entire service behind a paywall for everyone, shutting out the much more lucrative remainder of your customer base.
Gigachad 3y ago
Google has been posting the numbers on this. Premium subscriptions are skyrocketing year on year.

stas2k 3y ago

I had to resort to my own Invidious instance plus Sponsorblock. Its looks is very much like OG Youtube and it is unusually fast: no overdone JS. You can also sync it up to Clipious on the phone and get a clean, bloat free Youtube experience without ads or slow page loads.

RajT88 3y ago
I've been using yewtu.be recently. It's pretty good! I may have to run my own.

jjbinx007 3y ago

If only they would crack down on all the scam ads. I still get deepfake ads purporting to show Elon Musk and Martin Lewis promoting crypto and the like. No amount of reporting by me and even reporting on by mainstream media seems to make a difference.

ArtemZ 3y ago

I started using Ncdownloader (which works on top of yt2k) extension for my Nextcloud installation, so now I just copy paste video url and get either an MP4 or mp3 in my cloud where I don't worry about ads. I think their argument that they do this to "ensure that its content creators are compensated for their work" is not genuine given their practice to de-monetize the same content creators with no explanation or, apparently, for their political views. For example, California Insider youtube channel was demonitized and I suspect that this is because Google was unhappy with the narrative.

vidanay 3y ago

Make the goddamn YT Premium "family" plan work with Google Workspaces and I'll sign my whole family up today.

jonny_eh 3y ago
I suggest making an extra gmail account just for YouTube, and other consumer focused Google products. I mainly use a Workspace account for personal use, and it's what I do.
- vidanay 3y ago
  That's great. Now tell all my family members that have 10+ years of YT history with their Workspaces accounts that they have to switch to a new Gmail account. It's a non-starter.

brink 3y ago

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cactusplant7374 3y ago
Conservatives have Rumble now. Since everyone knew from the beginning YT was run by liberals in SF (no disrespect meant), I don't see the issue.
za3faran 3y ago
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- brink 3y ago
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  - za3faran 3y ago
    [flagged]

MattGaiser 3y ago

Is there a reason they don’t just add the ads directly into the video?

ArtemZ 3y ago
It will be much more difficult to show personalized ads this way
almatabata 3y ago
They cannot stop you from skipping those ads either. You just need to buffer and skip ahead. They would need to develop a very complicated solution that would not solve the problem of people not watching the ads. Actually this would make it even easier to skip the ads.
- vidanay 3y ago
  Remember when TiVo/Dish/DirecTV tried putting ads in DVRs that only appeared while fast forwarding recorded content?
  - almatabata 3y ago
    My god no i did not know that. During fast forward and pausing even: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/business/media/23adco.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/business/media/23adco.htm...
smcleod 3y ago
Probably because they’re already pack with ads from the creators.

geijoenr 3y ago

From my point of view YouTube with Adds is unbearable. And I don't feel the subscription service is offering as much value as any other streaming platform. If it was a bit cheaper I would may be consider it, but for my specific use case (just watch random videos and some channels) at this price is just not worth it and I will just stop using the platform.

jjice 3y ago
I pay $14 a month for YouTube Premium. YouTube is my most used streaming service and I think it's completely worth it. Maybe if you don't consume a lot of YouTube it's not that valuable to you but I'd rather have YouTube over Netflix, HBO, Hulu, etc all combined.
- frizlab 3y ago
  For me it’s the exact opposite, I’d rather have Disney+, Prime Video, Apple TV+, etc. over youtube (and I do).
- kubectl_h 3y ago
  > I'd rather have YouTube over Netflix, HBO, Hulu, etc all combined. Had the realization recently at a family reunion that, aside from Succession, I haven't watched a full season/series of a TV/streaming show in the last few years. I actually don't know what the shows of the moment are. I almost exclusively watch YouTube in the evenings, if I'm watching anything at all. I've been sub'd to YouTube Premium since it was called YouTube Red. Anytime I have to watch it withs ads I'm horrified. I wish I could give yearly subs out as gifts.
  - drcongo 3y ago
    Horses for courses I guess, but I don't think I've ever seen anything on YouTube that I would consider paying for. I'm sure I'm in a tiny minority, but I find the relentless chasing of "fame" to be completely grotesque and a large contributor to the rise of fascism. No way I'm going to fund that.

scarygliders 3y ago

Adblockers should get more devious then. I've not looked into exactly how adblockers work, but I presume they just don't allow advert content through to be rendered by the browser - they block the html/css/js from loading in the page - and that's how places like Youtube and other sites can detect one is using an adblocker. If I were going to write an adblocker, I'd make it such that it pretends to load and play/display the adverts, meanwhile allowing the video which the user intends to watch through. The adblocker basically says somehow that "yup! I'm the browser and your advert was definitely rendered. Honest, guv'nor!" Something like that. (I fully recognize that I may be talking out of my ass if my assumptions above are incorrect.)

Freedom2 3y ago
Your approach sounds entirely feasible, and it doesn't make sense why others haven't thought of it yet. I'm not surprised that the HN community is full of great ideas, though.
dpedu 3y ago
That's why they want the Web Environment Integrity api.
- martin1975 3y ago
  judging by the flame fest they received on their github issues/comments section, I doubt they'll be proceeding. Then again, money talks and b.s. takes the walk every time and twice on sunday.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    The standard playbook on this is: table it for 6 months, then try again as quietly as possible. Repeat until the outrage is tolerable. Works great for corporations and governments alike. Eventually people won't be outraged and will just quietly take whatever they're giving us.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    I don’t think some angry comments on GitHub are going to stop them with the amount of money on the table here.

colpabar 3y ago

Why hasn't this happened to me yet? I watch youtube videos ALL the time and I have never once been prompted to turn off ublock. The only time I see ads is on my phone.

timbit42 3y ago
You could be using NewPipe which has uBlock Origin, or the version that also has SponsorBlock.

yvoschaap 3y ago

My domain was blocked from serving Adsense (for some a pedantic reason). Fortunate result, if I watch youtube loaded from their own embed script but hosted from my domain there are never ads!

cactusplant7374 3y ago
You should offer embedding as a service lol.
- yvoschaap 3y ago
  I did https://yvoschaap.com/youtube.html https://yvoschaap.com/youtube.html

cactusplant7374 3y ago

I'm worried that if I block adds and get caught they will eventually sanction my other Google accounts (i.e. Gmail and Drive). I'm thinking about adding YouTube to /etc/hosts and only browsing through Tor.

gaius_baltar 3y ago
You can drop YT logins completely. On desktop use Firefox Account Containers to always open YT in an isolated container and never login. On Android, just use NewPipe. Of course, you won't have personal recommendations, playlists, watch later, etc. bu in the current state of the things, it is a feature.
- timbit42 3y ago
  You can also use RSS to subscribe to YT channels. I use Flym on Android along with NewPipe w/SponsorBlock.
tomjen3 3y ago
Google can ban you from their services permanently for any reason. What I did was move to my own domain. Its hosted with Apple, but that is not important, I can always move it. I changed most places to use my domain, for the rest I set up a forward from Gmail to my own domain. Then I did a Google Checkout so I have all my mail locally. I moved from Google search to Duck Duck go and now partially to Kagi and AI. Gmail is very sticky, but the hardest Google services to leave was a) Android and b) Youtube. Android meant buying an iPhone and I still haven't found anything that competes with Youtube.

justapassenger 3y ago

I understand people who block ads on the sites where you have no option to pay to remove them, especially if they're intrusive and you get served tons of random JS and popups everywhere you click. But here - you can pay. And if you think it's too much and doesn't reflect value it brings - well that's your choice, but its not a charity and they can (and should IMO) fight with ad blocking. Disclaimer - I pay for YT family plan that I share with my wife and it's most useful subscription we have - YT is our main source of media consumption.

mardifoufs 3y ago
Where do I pay to remove sponsor segments?
- justapassenger 3y ago
  Ask channels you watch about it. It’s not youtube doing that.
- xfitm3 3y ago
  SponsorBlock
gaius_baltar 3y ago
YT Premium only makes the problem worse by requiring you to log in using an account that is tied to your real world identity and was used for payment processing. You just end up giving more data points to Google to track you, cross-reference with other sources and shove more ads in other platforms, still get native ads, and Google can just add their own ads later (as it is happening step by step with streaming companies).
smcleod 3y ago
YT premium starts at $20/month in Australia for a single person, that’s far more than most other streaming services and you still have to put up with advertising and clickbait from creators.
- 3y ago

ChickeNES 3y ago

Am I the only one who watches enough YouTube content that I just pay for Premium without question?

denvaar 3y ago
I am the same way, and I enjoy YT Music as well.

Kye 3y ago

My Ask HN from 2020: "Are YouTube ads getting worse?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769291 I didn't always block ads on YouTube, but they pushed me to it. And apparently enough people for them to do this. There still isn't enough on there to make it worth subscribing for me. ~$170/year is not a small amount of money.

freedomben 3y ago
I've been paying since Youtube Red, and I'm almost to the point where it's not worth it anymore. The price has gotten really high, and so much of the content I watch has ads baked into it by the creator, so I still mostly have to watch ads. Youtube's aggressive demonetization of viewpoints they don't like is really leading to a bad UX and is near the tipping point for me.
- xfitm3 3y ago
  SponsorBlock is a wonderful tool. I use uBlock origin and have not seen an ad for a long time, perhaps years with one or two exceptions.
- mikecoles 3y ago
  Wasn't the Red subscription price supposed to be locked to something like $7. Was that ever a thing?
  - Kye 3y ago
    If Google ever made a promise, I would weigh it as highly as their confidence in every slick video announcing a new chat app.

geod_of_ix 3y ago

https://ublockorigin.com/ https://ublockorigin.com/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/

renegat0x0 3y ago

Platforms like subscriptions not only because of money. YouTube does know a lot about users, but it can be sure that you are likely not a bot if you have an account.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
YouTube knows a ton about most of its users since they’re using chrome with a google account.

xnx 3y ago

This crackdown is also in preparation for moving podcasts into YouTube where ads can be injected into them more readily than in the Google Podcasts app.

iteratethis 3y ago

I had been using Youtube exclusively from a browser with uBlock Origin and only learned about its ads persistence when we finally upgraded our ancient TV. I was in shock, the service is close to unusable with ads. At the same time, the reality check is that ads continue to be the way to monetize the masses as no other model works at this scale of users. So do expect it to get worse. By means of IP, the Web Integrity API, whether you've opted-in to this new "Ad topics" thing in Chrome...the future direction is to discriminate clients. You will see the ad or not see the service. The only resistance is to just watch less or not at all.

bigfryo 3y ago

The built-in ad blocker on Brave browser seems to work fine

oldbbsnickname 3y ago

Around 2012, YT's shittiness level reached OTA TV levels and that's when I peaced out. My rule: it's not worth using YT, TikTok, or any other corporate behemoth with your attention as their product. So if a form of media runs ads, I'm out. There's nothing particularly defensible about YT's readily commodifiable service and indefensible business model except the power law distribution of a monopoly. YT's closest competitor/alternative was once Vimeo. The problem was their founders made a critical error of taking venture funding and, later, going public, leading to poor decisions driven by the board that gradually wrecked it. YT is allowed by the market to be shitty because there is no viable competitor in their space. The biggest touted contenders aren't much of a threat: TikTok started as a copy of Vine, so it's unsuitable for substantive, long-form content. Instagram is TikTok plus pictures. Twitch is pigeonholed for specific uses: gamers and ear-licking models. Reddit Live isn't for persistent, on-demand content hosting. There isn't much else except tiny startups, some of which may well be better for both viewers and creators. To be a YT competitor I'd want to use: Charge content creators and viewers a modest subscription fee so they don't have to have ads AND have engagement and monetization tools for the creators. Don't spam me with ads for viral cat videos.

Etrnl_President 3y ago

Give me what I want, and I will gladly pay: Truly anonymous unpersonalized YouTube under the old algorithm from the early 2000s. No tracking, no censorship, no manipulation, no boosted videos… Truly anonymous payment options. Google-free viewing. But you make most of your money by tracking all that, and keeping me from finding the videos I actually want to watch, so who am I kidding.

xela79 3y ago

why do they think can decide what content you want to be downloaded through your internet connection and displayed on your devices? once the bits & bytes enter my network, you're free to do with them what you want, they have no say in what is done with that data. If it's filtered, that is not their decision to make

therealpygon 3y ago
I don’t know that “I don’t understand why they are mad that I’m stealing from them even though I agreed to pay for the cost by watching ads” is really the argument that you are hoping for. YouTube is a business and delivering video costs a significant amount of money. If you want to use it you are agreeing to watch ads to pay for that costs or to pay for a premium plan. At least be honest with yourself about the situation, and this comes from someone he vehemently hates ads as much as the next person, but that is “the cost of admission” so to speak.