7 ms·

I've noticed that since the beginning of this year, YouTube has gotten very aggressive with ads, including more and more ads and multiple unskippable ads. And t

by bmitc 2y ago

I've noticed that since the beginning of this year, YouTube has gotten very aggressive with ads, including more and more ads and multiple unskippable ads. And then they treat you like an idiot with a little popup that says "What to learn more about how to get rid of ads?", which just takes you to the YouTube Premium product, which is nothing but a premium for Google. Amazon Prime has also started adding unskippable ads.

everdrive 2y ago
The hour's getting late for being able to easily avoid this sort of bullshit. It's time to gather what you can, save it locally, and then shift to physical media. DVDs, books, etc.
- bmitc 2y ago
  Yea, I've been looking into what to do. I'm tired of subscription fees for one, although Spotify has remained sane. But I absolutely refuse to pay trillion dollar corporations more money, who already steal my data, just to get rid of ads. If they kept them reasonable, it'd be fine. But nearly all of the UX/UI additions are not to make the experience better but to make you click more videos and ads. There are even times that you can't even see the last few seconds of a video because it pops up clickable things that can't be disabled.
  - jzb 2y ago
    Isn't Spotify about to raise its fees again for the second time in about two years? I dropped it a while back after the whole podcast push. Not (solely) because I'm not a fan of the people they chose to fund, but because they penny pinch on music royalties but wanted to shower podcasters with money -- I signed up for music, not podcasts! Spotify was easy (for me) to replace: I have a huge music collection already. YouTube would be tougher because I mostly rely on it for video clips I wouldn't be able to find elsewhere, except maybe Archive.org.
    - dingnuts 2y ago
      I returned to buying albums when a few that I loved disappeared off Spotify one day. It's bad enough to pay month after month and never own anything but to go listen to a favorite and find it's gone? Unacceptable. At my age I'll never average buying more than one album a month anyway, especially since you can usually hear it first on bandcamp or YouTube so it's not a gamble like the old record store days, so it isn't even more expensive
- rchaud 2y ago
  Physical media and one-time payment desktop software are the only enshittification-proof types of digital products left. I used to love the Google Music app, which did nothing besides play my locally stored music. Then one day I opened it and it had turned into yet another storefront constantly using mobile data to refresh the carousel. Since then, auto-updates have been turned off. I love being able to reject app updates. Once the app does what I want, updates can only make it worse.
mrweasel 2y ago
YouTube is unusable without Premium or an ad blocker. I can't imagine that they have many users that doesn't have either. If YouTube have an issue with adblockers, then that is a problem they brought upon themselves.
- floren 2y ago
  > YouTube is unusable without Premium or an ad blocker. I can't imagine that they have many users that doesn't have either. aside from millions of children on tablets, that is
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Sure but they are just experiencing the world for the first time and discovering what their “ground state” opinions and preferences will be. Surely exposing them to a deluge of ads can’t be harmful.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    And also the millions of adults that DO browse the web without an ad blocker and don't pay for youtube premium. Like we don't have to wonder "aw man surely nobody suffers through this" because ad companies have expressly stated, in reports that must be somewhat accurate or else the SEC comes knocking, that only 1/3 people using their services uses ad blockers. More people than not are unable or unwilling to block ads, and experience that disgusting web that plenty of us know to be obscene, obnoxious, and probably just not healthy for your brain. But I bet every worker of google willingly chooses to browse that web without an ad blocker right? Surely they are happy to experience the same world they make their money from right?
- tombert 2y ago
  Once YouTube Premium (Or Red initially, I guess), was released, it became extraordinarily hard to watch anything with ads in any capacity. When I visit my in-laws, they still have regular cable TV and I cannot believe that I ever used to sit through this much crap. I was the first person in my friend/family group to do the cord-cutting thing (2012), and so this has been kind of an issue for the last twelve years for me, because whenever I would visit them I'd be stuck with traditional media. The ads must make considerable money though; Amazon Prime started having them by default unless you pay an extra $3/month, which I will not do, and I won't watch ads, so I've just stopped watching things on Amazon, and I doubt I'm the only one; surely Amazon wouldn't annoy their customers like this unless they were getting considerable money for it. It makes me a little sad that Blu-rays appear to be getting phased out, especially for TV shows. I'm not opposed to paying for media that I consume, but I really don't want ads or DRM [1], so I'm not sure what my options are but to just consume YouTube and from my existing (quite sizeable) blu-ray collection. [1] I know Blu-ray has DRM but it's trivial to remove it in a rip so I still consider it DRM-free from a practical perspective.
akira2501 2y ago
> which is nothing but a premium for Google My understanding is that some of that money goes to creators when I watch their videos without ads. None of that bothers me. Premium content and access will always be a thing. It's the fact that the producer, the network, and the advertiser are the same entity.
omnicognate 2y ago
What would be your preferred funding model?
- exe34 2y ago
  unobstrusive still image ads next to the video when not in full screen. a credit system where if I let them use one of my devices as part of their torrent nodes, they give me free hours of video each month. a pay as you go model where I can select how many hours of YouTube I want a month and I can watch that much video.
  - omnicognate 2y ago
    Mine would be a frictionless micropayments mechanism that works across many/most sites, an idea that's as old as the web. Google are supposedly working on something like that but I'm not holding my breath.
  - throwaway14356 2y ago
    replacement torrent website with similar functions, webseeds and paid hosting options.
- bmitc 2y ago
  I'd pay for something if they actually cared about the product. They don't, so I don't. Instead, they're just bullying me and others to pay them. YouTube doesn't make any of the content, and they don't care about the UX except to funnel you into more ads. I'm not going to pay for that experience.
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    if there's one person carrying for the product for $1 and another selling junk for free that will have intrusive ads as soon as that pesky $1 guy is gone, you'd be using the free one, like everybody else
- bee_rider 2y ago
  None. We should have less entertainment. Watching TV is a waste of human potential.
nottorp 2y ago
> I've noticed that since the beginning of this year Beginning of this year? I tried only once watching something on youtube without an ad blocker... some bloodborne speed run i think, it was a little over 1 hour long. That was 2-3 years ago. It was the first time I was using the youtube app on that tablet, I generally use it for text content. Youtube decided it should give me 2 ads every 5 ... fucking ... minutes. I think that if it were television, it would have been illegal in my jurisdiction. I ended up finding it on twitch.tv which I think didn't give me any ads back then.
- throwaway14356 2y ago
  I ended up in some experiment I'm sure when it served 3 unskipable 5 min ads every 5 minutes or so
- bmitc 2y ago
  Well, however bad it was, it has gotten really bad lately. I just close out of videos and YouTube now, which I guess is good. Luckily, more of the niche content and small-time channels (the sort of videos that made YouTube nice back in the day) don't get as many ads, but even those are getting flooded with ads more and more.
anigbrowl 2y ago
It's so bad, worse than radio/TV.

by bmitc 2y ago

everdrive 2y ago

The hour's getting late for being able to easily avoid this sort of bullshit. It's time to gather what you can, save it locally, and then shift to physical media. DVDs, books, etc.

bmitc 2y ago
Yea, I've been looking into what to do. I'm tired of subscription fees for one, although Spotify has remained sane. But I absolutely refuse to pay trillion dollar corporations more money, who already steal my data, just to get rid of ads. If they kept them reasonable, it'd be fine. But nearly all of the UX/UI additions are not to make the experience better but to make you click more videos and ads. There are even times that you can't even see the last few seconds of a video because it pops up clickable things that can't be disabled.
- jzb 2y ago
  Isn't Spotify about to raise its fees again for the second time in about two years? I dropped it a while back after the whole podcast push. Not (solely) because I'm not a fan of the people they chose to fund, but because they penny pinch on music royalties but wanted to shower podcasters with money -- I signed up for music, not podcasts! Spotify was easy (for me) to replace: I have a huge music collection already. YouTube would be tougher because I mostly rely on it for video clips I wouldn't be able to find elsewhere, except maybe Archive.org.
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    I returned to buying albums when a few that I loved disappeared off Spotify one day. It's bad enough to pay month after month and never own anything but to go listen to a favorite and find it's gone? Unacceptable. At my age I'll never average buying more than one album a month anyway, especially since you can usually hear it first on bandcamp or YouTube so it's not a gamble like the old record store days, so it isn't even more expensive
rchaud 2y ago
Physical media and one-time payment desktop software are the only enshittification-proof types of digital products left. I used to love the Google Music app, which did nothing besides play my locally stored music. Then one day I opened it and it had turned into yet another storefront constantly using mobile data to refresh the carousel. Since then, auto-updates have been turned off. I love being able to reject app updates. Once the app does what I want, updates can only make it worse.

mrweasel 2y ago

YouTube is unusable without Premium or an ad blocker. I can't imagine that they have many users that doesn't have either. If YouTube have an issue with adblockers, then that is a problem they brought upon themselves.

floren 2y ago
> YouTube is unusable without Premium or an ad blocker. I can't imagine that they have many users that doesn't have either. aside from millions of children on tablets, that is
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Sure but they are just experiencing the world for the first time and discovering what their “ground state” opinions and preferences will be. Surely exposing them to a deluge of ads can’t be harmful.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  And also the millions of adults that DO browse the web without an ad blocker and don't pay for youtube premium. Like we don't have to wonder "aw man surely nobody suffers through this" because ad companies have expressly stated, in reports that must be somewhat accurate or else the SEC comes knocking, that only 1/3 people using their services uses ad blockers. More people than not are unable or unwilling to block ads, and experience that disgusting web that plenty of us know to be obscene, obnoxious, and probably just not healthy for your brain. But I bet every worker of google willingly chooses to browse that web without an ad blocker right? Surely they are happy to experience the same world they make their money from right?
tombert 2y ago
Once YouTube Premium (Or Red initially, I guess), was released, it became extraordinarily hard to watch anything with ads in any capacity. When I visit my in-laws, they still have regular cable TV and I cannot believe that I ever used to sit through this much crap. I was the first person in my friend/family group to do the cord-cutting thing (2012), and so this has been kind of an issue for the last twelve years for me, because whenever I would visit them I'd be stuck with traditional media. The ads must make considerable money though; Amazon Prime started having them by default unless you pay an extra $3/month, which I will not do, and I won't watch ads, so I've just stopped watching things on Amazon, and I doubt I'm the only one; surely Amazon wouldn't annoy their customers like this unless they were getting considerable money for it. It makes me a little sad that Blu-rays appear to be getting phased out, especially for TV shows. I'm not opposed to paying for media that I consume, but I really don't want ads or DRM [1], so I'm not sure what my options are but to just consume YouTube and from my existing (quite sizeable) blu-ray collection. [1] I know Blu-ray has DRM but it's trivial to remove it in a rip so I still consider it DRM-free from a practical perspective.

akira2501 2y ago

> which is nothing but a premium for Google My understanding is that some of that money goes to creators when I watch their videos without ads. None of that bothers me. Premium content and access will always be a thing. It's the fact that the producer, the network, and the advertiser are the same entity.

omnicognate 2y ago

What would be your preferred funding model?

exe34 2y ago
unobstrusive still image ads next to the video when not in full screen. a credit system where if I let them use one of my devices as part of their torrent nodes, they give me free hours of video each month. a pay as you go model where I can select how many hours of YouTube I want a month and I can watch that much video.
- omnicognate 2y ago
  Mine would be a frictionless micropayments mechanism that works across many/most sites, an idea that's as old as the web. Google are supposedly working on something like that but I'm not holding my breath.
- throwaway14356 2y ago
  replacement torrent website with similar functions, webseeds and paid hosting options.
bmitc 2y ago
I'd pay for something if they actually cared about the product. They don't, so I don't. Instead, they're just bullying me and others to pay them. YouTube doesn't make any of the content, and they don't care about the UX except to funnel you into more ads. I'm not going to pay for that experience.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  if there's one person carrying for the product for $1 and another selling junk for free that will have intrusive ads as soon as that pesky $1 guy is gone, you'd be using the free one, like everybody else
bee_rider 2y ago
None. We should have less entertainment. Watching TV is a waste of human potential.

nottorp 2y ago

> I've noticed that since the beginning of this year Beginning of this year? I tried only once watching something on youtube without an ad blocker... some bloodborne speed run i think, it was a little over 1 hour long. That was 2-3 years ago. It was the first time I was using the youtube app on that tablet, I generally use it for text content. Youtube decided it should give me 2 ads every 5 ... fucking ... minutes. I think that if it were television, it would have been illegal in my jurisdiction. I ended up finding it on twitch.tv which I think didn't give me any ads back then.

throwaway14356 2y ago
I ended up in some experiment I'm sure when it served 3 unskipable 5 min ads every 5 minutes or so
bmitc 2y ago
Well, however bad it was, it has gotten really bad lately. I just close out of videos and YouTube now, which I guess is good. Luckily, more of the niche content and small-time channels (the sort of videos that made YouTube nice back in the day) don't get as many ads, but even those are getting flooded with ads more and more.

anigbrowl 2y ago

It's so bad, worse than radio/TV.