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YouTube strikes again, it seems
- wscourge 3y agoThey might as well run it with FF for small % of users all the time.
- Almondsetat 3y agoOh noes, Youtube wants to earn money from storing all of humanity's videos for free!
- Xenoamorphous 3y agoYes I wonder why some people think a service like YouTube (or any ad-funded service) should be completely free (even ad-free), as if it was a basic human right. Especially in the case of YouTube, which has a premium version with no ads, there's no reason to complain, really.
- diggan 3y ago> I wonder why some people think a service like YouTube The history of the service matters. If you launch something that says "Ad-free videos for free" and then X years later change to "Some ads + videos for free", people will have a reaction to that. Slowly change it over the years, and each iteration will have more reactions attached to it.
- Xenoamorphous 3y agoYes I'm sure all those using ad-blockers are thinking about YouTube origins 20 years ago. ;) If they changed their policies the right response is to stop using the service. Someone gives me something for free for a few years, and they stop doing it. Do I really have the right to make demands?
- diggan 3y agoI don't take the current "outrage" (wouldn't call it an outrage, but for the lack of other words) as "demands" as such. It's feedback from the users, that what they're doing sucks. Then it's up to each user to decide if it's worth leaving the service for, or not. So people are essentially doing what you say they should do. The service changes, users give feedback, some might leave, some might not.
- Xenoamorphous 3y agoWhy would YouTube "listen" to users with adblockers? They don't get ads, they don't pay for the premium version. They're a net loss to them (infra costs for nothing in exchange), they're better off without them so no incentive whatsoever to listen to them. And we should think about content creators too, where does the money they get paid for the views come from?
- dageshi 3y agoI don't think youtube has ever been ad free? Yet an awful lot of people feel entitled to it being so.
- diggan 3y agoYes, it was initially ad-free. Then they first launched "participatory video ads", and when asked about expanding the ads into more areas, the CEO at the time said: > we think there are better ways for people to engage with brands than forcing them to watch a commercial before seeing content. You could ask anyone on the net if they enjoy that experience and they'd probably say no A year or so later, they launched ads that ran before the video played.
- dageshi 3y agoAhh, didn't know that. Still for probably 99% of the people who youtube it has always had ads given how small the userbase would've been 17-18 years ago.
- iowemoretohim 3y agoYouTube introduced ads almost 18 years ago. There's a whole generation of users who have never experienced YouTube without ads. Not to mention the majority of users don't make use of ad-blockers.
- falloutx 3y agoIts their own fault for getting everyone hooked on free videos. If they started with charging model, no one would be complaining now.
- Xenoamorphous 3y agoShould I start stealing Pringles at the supermarket because there was a lady offering free ones of the latest flavour? They were nice by the way, Flame ones, quite spicey.
- xigoi 3y agoPringles don’t have a network effect. Other people eating Pringles doesn’t prevent you from choosing a different brand of chips.
- turbocabbage 3y agoEven if I'm personally paying for a premium account I do think that unpaying users still have two reasons to 'complain'. 1. There's no real competitor to Youtube so if you disagree with a certain thing but still want to watch how to fix your dishwasher there may not be any other place to turn to. 2. There's only one payment model. Someone who maybe follows a single type of video and doesn't watch videos every day still have to pay the same amount as someone who watches multiple videos per day. I really hate the second point since so many services these days use that model (especially newspapers, just let me pay per article).
- genman 3y agoAds didn't bother me until they started to force me to watch annoying video ads that interrupt my flow. Internet is not a bloody television, I don't like to be interrupted, it is incredibly irritating. What made the matter worse, the ads they showed were local companies or for products I actually cared and as such it did damage to the advertisers - and this was the main reason why I started using an ad blocker - to stop advertisers to damage themselves.
- Almondsetat 3y agoIf you consume so many youtube videos that ads bother you then you should consider your relationship with the platform and eventually buy the subscription. Don't complain about the internet becoming television if you are glued to it as if it was television
- genman 3y agoYou are completely wrong about this. I don't consume them almost at all. This does not mean that I accept to be interrupted. I don't want the Internet to become TV 2.0. Being able to define my own flow has been the main defining feature of the Internet for me.
- unwind 3y agoMeta: I think the title is click-baity and could be clarified. Perhaps to something like "YouTube doesn't work with ad-blockers enabled" or something.
- emmet 3y agoGuess I'm taking another week off YouTube until someone sorts out a workaround. I still don't know how people manage to watch it on a TV app with 2 unskippable 2 min ads before every 5 min video.
- that_guy_iain 3y agoThey've already created a workaround. Last night it was blocking me, this morning I was fine. It was mitigated within hours.
- hutzlibu 3y agoSame for me, but it might also be youtube, that is giving us more time.
- that_guy_iain 3y agoSeems pointless to block all videos and then remove that block for no real reason.
- hutzlibu 3y agoSame reason they did not block us yet - better to have some users that block ads, than have those users on other plattforms. Now too many people used ad blockers - so step by step they want to "encourage" people to look at ads again or pay for premium. But too strictly enforcing it from day one - would probably mean too many people going away. But giving more time and nagging, more might enlist for premium. (I won't, I seldom use youtube)
- scruple 3y agoLibreWolf is still working just fine, as far as I can tell.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoThe workaround I use is called "Don't use a TV app", or any other software written by an advertising company. Watch less YouTube, never send behavioural data to an advertising company and never send HTTP requests for ads (youtube.com), only send HTTP requests for video (googlevideo.com).
- ssijak 3y agoI don't understand how people feel righteous in being furious about it. Imagine 100% of users using adblocks. How can the site function? Are they charity? If you get value from the site, there is a premium option, and you will see no ads (plus other features). If you don't have money to pay, or don't want to, you can use it and have some ads. I know they are annoying, but common you expect Youtube to be charity?
- diggan 3y agoIf YouTube launched today with ads and blocking adblockers, people wouldn't have the same reaction. Either they'd be fine with it, or they'd stop using it, and a small minority would try to work around it. But people got used to YouTube first without any sort of ads at all, then a small bit of ads, then a lot of ads. Now another change from what people are used to is introduced, where they try to block adblockers, so of course people will have a reaction. Not saying it's "ethically OK" or whatever, just trying to reason about why people think like they do. I do understand it somewhat. Imagine if HN suddenly started having proper ads (not just job ads like today), then the community would also react to it, as we've built our expectations on how it is today.
- piva00 3y agoYouTube went slicing the salami to display more ads over time. It got to a point where I decided to pay them for the "Premium Lite" subscription since the only feature I wanted was "no ads", I didn't care about downloads, YouTube Music, or whatever other offerings they have, I just wanted no ads and was happily paying for it. Then they killed that subscription tier, I just got an email with 30-day notice that my Premium Lite subscription wouldn't exist anymore and I had to upgrade to Premium, that was the last straw and I'm happily using ad blockers and will continue using it for as long as they work. I tried to pay for it, they fucked me over, I have no ethical issues with using an ad blocker, it's the only power I have left. That's the core issue, they slowly degraded the experience to show more ads while also removing ways to pay for a no ads feature without the cruft of other unnecessary features, I won't pay for them.
- 3y ago
- Timber-6539 3y agoJust skip the Youtube website, they've made it clear that don't want pirates on their property.
- yreg 3y agoThis is a simple cat-and-mouse game, but what are the major possible escalations in the future? How expensive would it be for YouTube to encode the ad directly into the video stream? If that ever happens I can't see any blocking solution other than have an AI pre-screen the content, identify ads and jump over them.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoForce users to login.
- bejd 3y agoThe SponsorBlock [0] addon has already solved that for sponsored/ad segments in videos. Rather than AI, crowdsourced timestamps lets it automatically skip past adverts. [0] https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/
- yreg 3y agoYeah, but that's trivial because the sponsorship is always the same content at the same timestamp and with the same length.
- wongarsu 3y agoSponsor segments are baked into the video stream by the creator, yet the sponsorblock extension exists and is really good. They just crowdsource the labeling of sponsor segments (and other segments, like intros, subscription reminders etc). Youtube could try to serve everyone a different video stream with ads added at different times. But even that's unlikely to work: around the turn of the century we got DVRs that could automatically skip commercials in recorded television signals, and later DVR software could do the same. There are a couple of techniques to do that, but the most obvious is that commercials and commercial blocks have common lengths and very different sound from the actual program (louder and mixed differently). The same techniques would work on Youtube ads. And of course most of the youtube ad revenue seems to come from a somewhat limited selection of ads, so fingerprinting the video stream for segments that reappear in different videos across the userbase is also a viable technique. This is an arms race youtube can't win, no matter how much money they are willing to throw at video encoding.
- 4ggr0 3y agoThere's quite a genius workaround to this - it's actually possible to link a credit card to your google account and buy something called YouTube Premium. Actually removes ads, even on TV, insane! i used an ad-blocker on YT since forever, when they started blocking them I bought YT Premium over VPN in a cheaper country. not sure how google is supposed to serve 4k 60FPS videos to people all over the world without them paying. i pirate movies and shows at home so it's not like i don't get it. but the entitelment about watching YouTube for free is a bit weird to me. it worked for years, we were able to cheat the system by just blocking ads. now they're starting to prevent it. too bad for us. but ya just gotta deal with it. i'm unhappy about it too, but i can't really blame them.
- falloutx 3y agoGoogle isn't some startup and no of people on ad blockers is minute
- 4ggr0 3y agoYeah. And? They want to milk the last drops of $$$ out of their customers, as usual. If they want to block ad-blockers on their service then so be it. i don't like the venture capital culture, enshittification pisses me off, the constant race for more revenue, growth and profits while cutting jobs and wages annoys me as well. but for me there's no moral argument against them blocking ad-blockers without criticizing the whole system around it. do i think that services should be federated, open-source and non-profit oriented? Yes, of course. but YouTube is not that, at all, so being angry about them blocking this is just so unnecessary to me. it seems to me that people are just veeeery pissed of that they either have to pay for it or stop using it. they don't know where to aim their anger at so they're just angry at Google.
- EduardoBautista 3y agoYou are right. A startup would, instead, never show an ad, allow themselves to run out of money, upload a photo of themselves crying on LinkedIn about letting go all of their staff, and then say that they just couldn't find a way to monetize the app.
- 3y ago
- vslira 3y agoFor the life of me I don't know how people don't think twice about subscribing to Netflix and others while consider it unreasonable to subscribe to YouTube. It's easily 10x the value.
- 3D30497420 3y agoIt probably depends on how you use it. I mainly use it for entertainment, so Netflix and YouTube are closer comparisons. In Europe, the YouTube family plan is €23.99 (my wife would not be happy if only I got Premium). In contrast, Netflix is €12.99 for 2 devices (people). I know the economics are complex (storage, tooling, etc.), but from a simple consumer perspective, YouTube doesn't really pay for the content creation, so why is it almost double the price?
- Jensson 3y ago> YouTube doesn't really pay for the content creation Half of the subscription goes to creators, they do pay.
- ChatGTP 3y agoI'll tell you why? I've always known what the deal is with Netflix, I pay them money, for a fairly discrete service that let's me watch movies. I'm not getting targeted by adds or tracked around the internet, or any other nonsense for paying to watch a movie. Google on the other hand is a whole other level of blurriness when it comes to my privacy and what they plan on doing with the money I give them. Does it just go to more shady addictive algorithm development and such? Maybe if Google completely changed their model for YT to be, you pay premium and we no longer try get you hooked on some spammy click bait news feed and you get access to see "downvotes" again so you can easily identify shit content, then I'd pay, but they can't do that because they suck.
- EduardoBautista 3y agoI am sure these ideas have been thrown around at YouTube, but maybe a better alternative would be limiting videos to only 720p resolution for non-premium users, for example. There is a reason no other competitor has emerged. Not even Netflix offers 1080p on their basic _paid_ plan, which I recall being limited to 720p.
- 3D30497420 3y agoAnd drop YouTube Music. I imagine that's a decent part of what I'm paying for, and I don't want it. This is basically Premium Lite, which YouTube axed last year: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23889917/youtube-premium-lite-subscription-discontinued-retired https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23889917/youtube-premium-...
- conradfr 3y agoI've seen videos where the top quality is only for premium. 720p videos on Youtube don't look great these days so maybe your idea would work ;) But if Youtube want to reduce costs maybe stop insisting on autoplay.
- DeathArrow 3y agoI can still watch YouTube without ads. Chrome/uBlock and Edge with integrated ad blocker.
- jovial_cavalier 3y agoI want them to hurry up and patch adblock entirely. That way, people can get to making the alternative that doesn't suck right away. They know this, that's why they're doing the frog in a boiling pot routine.
- DeathArrow 3y agoHow long until they introduce ads for YouTube Premium users?
- bigtex 3y agoBrave and ublock origin worked for me on a Mac without purging caches.
- renegat0x0 3y agoI have written a simple extension to go around the YouTube notification. Whenever I want to view the video I click the extension. It replaces entire page with embed iframe. This allows the video to be played without problems. I do not know if that violates YouTube policy, though. https://github.com/rumca-js/youtube-link-embedder https://github.com/rumca-js/youtube-link-embedder Release version https://github.com/rumca-js/youtube-link-embedder/releases/tag/v.1.0 https://github.com/rumca-js/youtube-link-embedder/releases/t...