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YouTube's new anti-adblock measures
- JoeDaDude 1y agoI watched all the ads, just at 100x speed. It doesn't work anymore - RIP the Ad Accelerator - but I could use it guilt free knowing the ads were watched and google collected their money https://github.com/rkk3/ad-accelerator https://github.com/rkk3/ad-accelerator
- mythrwy 1y agoNever once have I seen an ad and thought "I need that" and purchased the item. Not in my entire life that I recall and I'm 54. Maybe this is not the norm but I don't perceive most advertising as being particularly effective.
- righthand 1y agoSomebody start a non-publicly traded ad-based video hosting company and this will be resolved for the most part. If the concern is never "line goes up" then there is less incentive to enshittify the entire platform.
- wwweston 1y agoPaying for YouTube has probably been the digital subscription with the single greatest return on a dozen dollars. Content is uninterrupted without having to engage in the arms race. Music selection is great. Random movies are available.
- varelse 1y ago[dead]
- socalgal2 1y agoMusic selection is great. Music recommendation (and video recommendation) is utter crap. I know running something as big as youtube means there is unlikely to be a true competitor but there is sooooooooo much low-hanging fruit to do a better job. My home page is on average 60% wasted/irrelevant. I'm a little surprised they haven't added "AI" yet. They add some prompt "tell us what you like". I tried it the opposite "Do not show me cat videos!" and of course it was just keyword based and started showing me cat videos. On the video front, my Japanese is pretty good. I watched one high level Japanese language video. Now my feed is full of beginner Japanese language videos. I'm pretty confident if I could ask some LLM "Don't show me beginning level Japanese videos" it could figure it out. Same with Music. If I play any song from the 80s their shit algo will decide what I want is "hits of the 80s", not "more songs similar to the song I just played". Again, I feel like I could tell an LLM that. Play me songs by band X and songs similar to band X". "Play me songs that influenced band X" (LLM can reference interviews for that).
- mNovak 1y agoAgreed the algorithm is significantly flawed. I often have the experience of being interested in a one-off video, but don't watch it because I don't want to pollute the algorithm recommendations with similar stuff.
- wwweston 1y ago> Music selection is great. Music recommendation (and video recommendation) is utter crap. Fair point. I wonder if this is connected to the way that YouTube seems to rely more on presenting an array of suggestions than flowing linearly through a stream. In any case, I turn off autoplay and am trying to rely as much on search, follows, and curation as algorithmic recommendations, so the hit and miss quality of the recommendations doesn't bother me much personally, I could see how it might not be a great set-and-forget music replacement (for which I already have plenty of options going back into terrestrial radio origins).
- eurekin 1y agoSame here. Netflix, Hulu, Disney plus, HBO... I've had them disabled after months of zero usage. YouTube on the other hand...
- strathmeyer 1y agoBut how is it different than those of us who access it for free? I get a popup asking me to pay once a month but that's about it. Are you just happy to throw your money away if it goes to a giant corporation?
- Hackbraten 1y agoYou get rid of the ads, so it’s not exactly throwing money away.
- nbf_1995 1y ago> Are you just happy to throw your money away if it goes to a giant corporation? 45% (which is a lot) of the money goes to the giant corporation. The other 55% gets divided up among the people whose content you watched. I mostly watch smaller creators, so I don't mind 55% of my membership fee ending up in their pockets so they can keep making videos for me to enjoy. I don't watch ads, the people I watch get paid because I watched. And obviously I'm not happy about the cut google takes and I would rather a higher percentage of my money go to the creators.
- dbbk 1y agoIt's a premium service with premium features... ad-free, offline downloads... maybe you should look into it
- wintermutestwin 1y agoI’d gladly pay for ad free youtube if they weren’t double dipping by stealing my data.
- SvenL 1y agoYes, one thing for me is, that Youtube is offering music (in the form of videos) which you can't get on any other platform.
- faragon 1y agoThe more YouTube does that, the more I use Spotify.
- TJTorola 1y agoNot sure what this says about me, but I ran into youtube putting a 3 video limit on me because I was using adblocking and when I hit that limit I just ended up going outside to have a lovely day. Honestly wish video limits was just a feature I could turn on. Funny enough, awhile back they made it so that if you turned off watch history, they would disable the front page feed. Not sure if that was seen as a punishment to try to encourage people to turn back on watch history but that also ended up being a welcome change.
- kapitanjakc 1y agoI don't have watch history on. I don't see anything on my home page. I specially open youtube when I want to look at something and I have to search for it. I still watch related videos, but it's way better compared to what I got on home page.
- sharkjacobs 1y ago> if you turned off watch history, they would disable the front page feed I wish that was a configureable feature. I do have watch history turned on, and I find it useful and want to keep it, but I would love to have a cleaner less noisy front page.
- stackedinserter 1y agoI just can't pay youtube a penny, because it solidifies their monopoly and control. They can and do ban content that they think is "harmful" for whatever reason, they push content that they (not me) like, I don't want to reward any of this.
- j3th9n 1y agoI switched to Firefox because of the latest measures after 2 decades of using Chrome.
- gloosx 1y agoIm in A/B group for this, and I had to disable ublock for youtube or videos wont play showing a funny warning. Interestingly the specific autoskip ads extension for youtube still works perfectly, and I dont see any backoff or delay, maybe a short 1s flash is happening and video starts playing. If they block this too I dont mind just predownloading every video with yt-dlp out of spite.
- ricardo81 1y agoI'd noticed this behaviour while using Brave browser and experienced the half-dozen second lag and a small popover on the bottom left that when clicked on said "it's because you're blocking ads" I see also now that the "don't recommend channel" option has been removed (at least for me) which was handy for removing AI slop recommendations. It's fast coming to the point where I'll just avoid YouTube for spending some idle time.
- bawana 1y agoWait till the ads are interspersed into chatGPT output (and Gemini and Claude too). I'll need an local LLM to filter out the ads from the LLM I'm using in the cloud.
- martin82 1y agoDoes no one care about how much it costs to hosts and stream the massive amount of videos that Youtube hosts? We all just think that we are entitled to get all that for free? If you don't want ads, just pay for the damn thing.
- mostlysimilar 1y agoI'd bet they are showing us far more ads than necessary to run the platform, and many of them are trash (crap product, abrasive ad, etc.) Not to mention the tradeoffs with privacy.
- wkat4242 1y agoThis fight will soon take up a whole new level. If they start serving ads inside the content stream, blockers can use AI to determine if the content is ad or not. I don't think this fight will ever be over.
- wkat4242 1y agoI have to say also, Youtube's ads really suck now. I watched a mentour pilot video recently on a machine which did not have adblock or sponsorblock (a meta quest headset). I got the same stupid car ad every 2-3 minutes of it. It is basically unwatchable now with ads. On top of that, the guy had a 5 minute sponsor crap thing in it also. Youtube is just ridiculous now.
- randomNumber7 1y agoThe moment I can't block ads on yt will be the moment I stop using it. Besides from that I feel that I waste a lot of time there anyway so I partially hope it happens.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago[dead]
- jml19 1y agoThe biggest issue I have with YouTube advertising is placement in the video. When watching network television, ads are placed between scenes where a pause is acceptable. On YouTube I'll often get an ad in the middle of an actor's sentence or action where it completely disrupts everything and destroys the moment.
- k310 1y agoVery late to this party, but here's my two cents worth: "Random" advertising is completely irrelevant, and a total waste. "Targeted" advertising is an unwanted intrusion on my privacy. Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it -- George Monbiot [0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advertising-poison-hooked https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advert...
- danhau 1y agoOhhh, so this is why my videos take so long to start lately. Looks like I‘m in the experimental group as well. I thought my adblocker for Safari (don‘t judge) was broken - well it actually is broken, as I can‘t whitelist YT for some reason, but that‘s a different problem. This approach could work well, since it makes users think their blocker broke YT. Both brilliant and evil.
- magicalhippo 1y agoI get they want to work against ad blockers, but as a Premium member I really wish there was an easy way to watch a video without it polluting my history or recommendations. I don't want to watch ads just due to that.
- dbbk 1y agoIf you create a new profile and switch to it it keeps your Premium benefits with its own watch history. I do this for communal watching on the living room TV.
- bitpush 1y agoAccount Switcher > Turn on Incognito. (Not the chrome incognito, but YouTube incognito)
- _345 1y agoIIRC i stopped using this because it takes way too long to toggle on/off and another crucial mistake they make is that YouTube acts like its chrome incognito where you want full privacy and an anonymous browsing experience, I do not want that, I still want to be able to see my own history like my last few search bar queries, I just dont want NEW entries added when in incognito mode. essentially i want read only mode
- ilkke 1y agoYou can easily and quickly turn off watch on mobile. Don't remember if it's a hassle in the browser.
- k12sosse 1y agoIME this turns off the premium benefits, stupidly
- frollogaston 1y agoOh that's weird
- absurdo 1y agoI was wondering when buffering was going to be a thing. I’ve been seeing it on YT and figured it’s the Adblock wars getting heated up. The next step is to scrape the videos, strip the ads, store them on a torrent magnet and serve that instead. Yes it would have to be from a shady RU or CN or NK or IN site. I’m fine with that.
- nickff 1y ago[flagged]
- appreciatorBus 1y agoIf copyright laws were reasonable and limited to what was necessary to serve their stated purpose, I would agree with the critique - that it seems like entitled behaviour. But in a world where copyright terms are 150 years, in my opinion any premise that it serves the public is gone.
- Aachen 1y agoConsider that it's a monopoly. You can't get 99% of this content anywhere else (not even if it's marked as creative commons¹ or any other free license, publicly funded, etc.) but I don't agree with Google's/Alphabet's practices either. One could: Option 1: be a hermit and not watch anything on YouTube ever. You can't look up repair guides, fully use a news website that I'm subscribed to that got rid of their self hosted version, watch a subset of public broadcasts that we pay for via taxes, etc. It's not just entertainment / a Netflix replacement Option 2: give in and enrich this monopolistic tracking company Option 3: try to pirate the content I'd feel very different if this were Spotify or an individual artist: I can use three other music services with massively overlapping offerings from different jurisdictions. Or supermarkets, for the same reason. But if it's irreplaceable and gatekept, I can understand both sides here ¹ https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468?hl=en
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y agoI find it frustrating that so many people expect some kind of morality from consumers but not companies. It’s cold, hard business logic to use an adblocker when you have the knowhow and are annoyed enough, just as its cold, hard business logic to fight adblockers up to a point.
- edwardbernays 1y agoIf they ran less hostile ads, people wouldn't be as hostile to watching their ads. Some of the ads they run are just ridiculous and awful. Ads for scams, soft-core porn ads, just the worst of the worst.
- wat10000 1y agoI think that’s a rationalization. Most people just don’t like ads no matter what they are. And I can’t blame them, ads are terrible. But this is a case where they offer a nice subscription that takes them all away, so people ought to buy that instead.
- edwardbernays 1y agoI don't think it's a rationalization. I have two normie friends who were mostly fine seeing ads on the internet, until one night they saw one too many scum ads on YouTube. They asked me to help them install an adblocker. It was specifically the scumminess of these ads that got them to start using adblockers, which by the way the FBI recommends as a matter of course. People should buy YouTube premium for the convenience features it offers, but everyone should be blocking ads for their own safety and sanity. There is no reason to engage in the ad economy. Everyone should be blocking all ads.
- joshlemer 1y agoWell, I don't particularly enjoy ads on Reddit, Gmail, and, when I used them, Tiktok, Facebook, etc but I wasn't particularly pissed off by them either. On YT it seems just so in your way and in your face and egregious. It's like every couple minutes there's an other ad. You can't even chromecast videos to your tv to play in the background because you have to constantly babysit it or else it will load up an ad that goes on forever or 10 minutes until you come back to skip it.
- theMMaI 1y agoThe YT Premium subscription suffers from being low value imo, forced bundling with YT Music which inflates prices, and little to no synergy with Google One subscriptions in most countries.
- _345 1y agoWhat if people just paid for services they use and depend on frequently
- xnorswap 1y agoI don't want to use it. I only view because others exclusively host content there. If people hosted video elsewhere, I would gladly never visit youtube again. Creators are not going to start paying for uploads when they can push their costs to the viewers.
- mmmmmbop 1y agoWhy do you think the creators you like exclusively host content on YouTube?
- xnorswap 1y agoThat's not difficult to answer, it's because it's free / they get paid.
- bitpush 1y ago.. and that's YT's problem? This is like being angry with Apple, because an app developer created only an iOS app and didnt create an Android. What did Apple do wrong if a developer chose to only create an iOS app?
- xnorswap 1y agoYouTube is the system, you've not heard of "don't hate the player, hate the game"? If I "blamed" the creators, you'd be telling me it's not their fault, they're just incentivised by the system, they're just playing the game. But when I "blame" the system, you're telling me the system is not at fault, that it's individual choice to choose a near-monopoly on video discoverability that is propelled by and heavily benefiting from the same company's actual monopoly of search. Is it "YT's problem?"? No, it's to YT's massive benefit, it's my problem when I have to suffer through adverts.
- iterance 1y agoI have to wonder whether they are tracking changes in consumer confidence. Subjectively, I have noticed a significant drop in confidence from my peers. I do not know whether my experience generalizes, but if it does, they are playing with fire.
- ranger_danger 1y agoI'm surprised they don't just inject the ads directly into the video stream, I think that would solve their issue overnight (not that I want any ads personally). You could also rate-limit it to the playback speed to prevent pre-downloading the stream easily. But now that everything uses HLS/DASH, it's easy to inject different content right in the middle of the stream without re-encoding anything.
- aucisson_masque 1y agoI think it’s only a matter of time before it’s reality. They own the hosting website, if they want to show their user ads, they will find a way, even if it takes a few year.
- optimalsolver 1y agoCreators will never accept it.
- recursive 1y agoCreators will take what they're given. They have no leverage.
- crazygringo 1y agoI've also wondered about this for a long time. It seems like there must be something difficult about it, but I can't even guess. Otherwise it seems like they would be, no?
- ysavir 1y agoI've been getting these buffer loading times recently, and ironically, I don't mind them all that much. The annoyance of ads isn't primarily in the time it takes up, but in having the audio play and a video feed run that isn't the video I clicked on. If an actual ad played, I'd be irritated beyond belief. But when there's a 12 second buffer, I have enough patience training for slow load times that I instinctively just quickly check my email or spend a brief moment lost in thought. Especially when it's every video. If it was one in every 5 videos, I'd notice it and be bothered. When it's every video, it's part of the experience and my brain just cuts it out automatically.
- redml 1y agoFunny, until now I assumed the "buffering" was just something shoddy with the google infrastructure. Youtube has a reputation for pushing buggy/undesirable changes and already has slow javascript widgets on it so at this point I expect it and "just deal with it". It didn't even occur to me they were trying to poison the well with regards to adblockers.
- MathMonkeyMan 1y agoYeah I've been getting the initial delay with the popup "find out why playback is slow." No thanks, I already know, and it's not so bad.
- Moru 1y agoIt certainly has to be better than getting an ad that fills no need of mine. I can't say I noticed any slow loading times on youtube though that might be because the last clip I watched was probably a month ago. Only search for diy fixes on problems I have, rest online attention goes to fediverse nowadays.
- Toritori12 1y agoOut of curiosity I clicked the link and it is funny how they try to blame the extension when is them actually causing the problem.
- 1y ago
- simion314 1y agoI have no respect for Youtube/google developers, like they have apps where you need to pay to use them with the screen turned off, so they screw your battery (reducing your device live) and wasting energy so their boss gets a bigger yacht (cecause it seems ads are not enough)
- jahsome 1y agoI don't necessarily disagree but it's not a Google problem. It's a human problem. For example: What value does your comment provide the world? Enough value to offset the carbon emissions from transmission/storage/retrieval/display? Personally, I'd answer no. Thus your comment itself is a waste of energy.
- gxs 1y agoReframing a problem with anything as a human problem is a tautology - why even go out of your way to write? Only pointing it out because of the irony given the content of your post Otherwise yeah, don’t understand what parent comment is trying to say
- jahsome 1y ago> Reframing a problem with anything as a human problem is a tautology I respectfully disagree. > don’t understand what parent comment is trying to say They're trying to say Google and those who work there are greedy. I shared my "tautology" to illustrate while OP's point may be largely correct, greed is not unique to Google.
- simion314 1y ago>They're trying to say Google and those who work there are greedy. More then that, sure they show you ads, GREAT but they screw your device and environment, this makes them no money , a small fraction of users might buy premium but the rest of the users will waste energy and bdevice life, the developers contribute to killing devices and wasting energy.
- brentm 1y agoYouTube Premium costs about the same as 2 cold brew coffees and is worth the money.
- tshaddox 1y agoIt's by far the best value of any of the streaming media services.
- rafram 1y agoYeah, I will unabashedly shill for YouTube Premium. It’s cheap, it pays video creators more than ads do, and it includes YouTube Music so you can ditch Spotify.
- lanfeust6 1y agoStill has a nefarious algorithm.
- jamesponddotco 1y agoAnd tracking.
- Barrin92 1y agoPaying 13 bucks per month, which is a non trivial amount for a lot of people if it competes with other subcription services, merely to block ads on a website that doesn't even produce its own content is in my opinion one of the worst deals on the internet. That's equivalent to a Netflix subscription, which puts what, 20 billion into original content each year?
- bitpush 1y ago> doesn't even produce its own content How do you think those video bits get streamed all around the world? Magic?
- Barrin92 1y agoI assume with the same amount of magic as they do at all the other streaming platforms, but they still manage to serve up original content. Hence, as a consumer, this seems like a shoddy deal. You're basically paying for ad-free slop, which by the way like Amazon these days you have to crawl through an entire mountain of because the site barely has any content management features either
- zaran 1y agowhile ad blocking has grown in prevalence over the years, for something like youtube I'd figured it was more than counteracted by the shift to mobile / TV (where ad blocking is more complicated) whatever the merits, this (and google's neutering of extensions in chrome) signals a fundamental attitude shift from ~10 years ago; they're more interested in squeezing margins out of their dominant platforms instead of growth
- ge96 1y agoFirefox mobile has ublock origin
- frollogaston 1y ago*not on iPhone
- Aachen 1y agoTrying to watch a walled garden inside another walled ecosystem. No wonder that works how they want it and you can't simply do what you want
- frollogaston 1y agoYeah, it's true. iOS 9 Safari actually had the ability to play YouTube in the background without paying for that, and in iOS 10 they went out of their way to prevent it. And Apple signaled willingness to go along with WEI back when that was on the table.
- deanc 1y agoUse Orion. It supports FF and Chrome extensions on mobile and desktop
- Squarex 1y agoUblock Origin still does not work on Orion mobile sadly.
- ZeroClickOk 1y ago"We are working hard to make your life miserable"
- ttyyzz 1y agoHaving to pay for something so that's "less annoying" is the worst business model. YouTube Premium is very expensive. I had it for a while when I got a Pixel smartphone with a few months of YouTube Premium included. It was great. I also understand that streaming on this scale must entail incredibly high operating costs; the money has to come from somewhere. It's simply a dilemma. But there has to be a better way. Any ideas?
- xandrius 1y agoCreate a built-in Patreon to access premium videos and communities and take a cut.
- nick_g 1y agoThey’re attempting that now with “memberships.” I’m not a heavy patreon user, but the current implementation leaves a lot to be desired. I expect they’ll be able to iterate on it. An unfortunate aspect is that I’m frequently recommended videos which I would have to pay to watch. As a youtube premium subscriber, feeling like I’m constantly being upsold has begun to grate on me. I’d really appreciate a feature to hide these videos as a premium subscriber, which I have little faith in them implementing. On my laptop it’s easy enough to hide these thumbnails (as I already do with shorts) using ublock origin. However this is making me reconsider my subscription. Why should I have to use a third party tool to best use this service which I’m paying a fairly significant fee for? I’ve similarly used ublock origin to work around recent change where only three videos were shown on each row
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> An unfortunate aspect is that I’m frequently recommended videos which I would have to pay to watch. That's older than the "membership" concept. They licensed a bunch of television and movies and made them pay-per-view.
- thallium205 1y agoYoutube Premium is very expensive?
- sc11 1y agoI'd be happy to pay for premium if it actually removed all ads from the platform. I wish they forced creators to declare which segments of a video are ads for their sponsors and then removed or skipped them for premium users. Basically built-in Sponsorblock except not crowd-sourced. Alternatively, many creators already upload ad-free versions to their Patreon or other paywalled platforms, they could upload those to YouTube as well to be shown to premium users if YT allowed for it and forced them to. Alas I'm not willing to pay 13€ a month for just slightly fewer ads.
- dingaling 1y agoI don't think YouTube should get further into the dangerous spiral of chaperoning the content of videos. If there are too many sponsored segments in a video, take it up with the creator or stop watching that channel.
- yugioh3 1y agoyeah I think the free market can figure ad load out. creators who go overboard on sponsored segments will get less views, less engagement. there's a natural equilibrium.
- oblio 1y agoIn many countries ad sections have to be clearly marked for another reason the "free market" hasn't solved: disguised advertising. I wish the US got with the times.
- spudlyo 1y agoI'd love an option to be able to filter out all videos from my feed that have sponsored segments. For me, I find the best content is the underground stuff made by folks who don't have a clear profit motive.
- hollerith 1y agoYes, this is the change that would most improve YT for me.
- brightmood 1y agoSo you buy premium - now you don't have ads from YouTube anymore. But now YouTubers such as LinusTechTips and who else not want monthly payments for their exclusive content. Yea, that's not going to work. Now your watchers don't watch your content.
- bitpush 1y agoThat's a self correcting situation. If LTT sees a huge drop in their views/subscribers, they'll correct the situation. .. or a competitor (who's a competitor to LTT? GamerNexus? MKBHD?) would take their place.
- k12sosse 1y agoAdmittedly don't watch LTT because basically the content is the advertisement. Maybe it's changed.
- pests 1y agoIt’s crazy to ram as they did a revenue breakdown recently and the sponser segments was way tinier than I expected - like 10% or in that range. I was annoyed just knowing they shit on their videos just for that tiny profit boost.
- imp0cat 1y agoOh just get the screwdriver already, will you?! :) LTT does have some interesting videos, but yeah, most of their output is full of ads.
- bird0861 1y agoPlease don't associate actual journalists GamersNexus with those hucksters.
- bobsmooth 1y agoFloatplane is doing well according to the WAN show.
- FerretFred 1y ago> fake buffering is 80% of the length of the ads I run Brave on multiple devices and there's now a "glitch" a few seconds after what wouod be the ads, starts. I put up with this because the alternative is to put up with ads that treat viewers like morons with one hand in the mouse and other in the wallet.
- krosaen 1y agoI pay for YouTube premium (which gives me YouTube music too) and am happy with the lack of ads, even though many creators still mix paid sponsors into their videos. It seems the creators are motivated to keep things minimal or they will lose engagement. What I am not happy with is a lack of control over the homepage and recommendations. I would really like to be able to easily block channels from ever showing up, but you can only sort of do this if you click "don't recommend this channel anymore" from the homepage. But you can't do this if a video shows up recommended from another video. And overall, it just feels like they are spending so much effort trying to get me to watch the next video instead of enjoy the one I am trying to watch. For my kids, I came up with an ad hoc policy where they can watch from the homepage / recs on weekends but during the week have to stick to a personal playlist they can only add videos to on the weekends. This removes the algorithmically driven addictive nature of YouTube and unsurprisingly they end up moderating their use of Youtube within their alotted screen time much better. It distinguishes between, "I want to watch this" and "I want to pull the slot machine lever." But I would be a lot happier if I could better curate access to content for my kids too. Youtube Kids sucks, it ends up filtering out a bunch of interesting stuff like carpentry and nature content that hasn't been marked "for kids" in favor of videos of kids shopping for toys and stuff.
- ghfhghg 1y agoThe "don't show this channel" feature also feels like there is some kind of expiry because I've blocked a few channels multiple times now via that method. Totally a theory but sometimes YouTube has a button that says roughly "show me something new". I think that may be the source of those channels returning.
- vunderba 1y agoAgreed. I've told YT about a thousand times I have zero friggin interest in YouTube Shorts and lo and behold a few weeks later they guiltily try to sneak back into the home page.
- Aachen 1y ago> I pay for YouTube premium (which gives me YouTube music too) I'm curious about a buyer's perspective: would you say this is "tying"? (Seems like an ambiguous word for it but I can see no other translation for koppelverkoop) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) To me it seems like trying to undermine the market for music streaming (which is currently somewhat healthy with a handful of competing services worldwide where you can get access to most artists' work) by abusing the monopoly on videos that people often want a subscription on. The parent corp has so much cash to spare, giving away music for nearly free is worth it to make it extremely difficult to compete in this other market. From an individual's point of view, you're a thief of your own wallet if you don't get this two in one deal (assuming you want both). I'm not sure how to feel about people who buy this
- nine_k 1y agoOff topic, but I must praise the simple, no-nonsense, readable design of the linked post, and how it loads instantly. Kudos.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoRelated: Google is intentionally throttling YouTube, slowing down users with ad blockers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44304293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44304293
- bryankaplan 1y agoI've come to rely on a robust method of adblocking YouTube which I believe to be perfectly reliable and impossible for YouTube to circumvent: avoid watching YouTube. Incidentally this method also reliably prevents false buffering.
- tmaly 1y agoThe number of ads they run reminds me of the good old days where half of the TV show time was commercials.
- southernplaces7 1y agoAbsurd but true in a similar way: I get a tiny spark of nostalgia on those occasions where a bit of sponsored promotion pops into part of some podcast i'm listening to as a YT video while I do chores. (Ublock running, so no third party ads at least) The thing about those idiotic third party ads on YouTube, which is so grotesquely annoying is that, unlike TV ads of old, some of then can literally run for dozens of minutes at auto-increased volume unless you go to your device and skip them at some point. That is some particularly shitty nonsense right there.
- tmaly 1y agoWhen I use to listen to radio, I dreamed of a system that would auto mute the commercials
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoIt's worse, because at least cable commercials can be skipped.
- spuz 1y agoCable commercials can be skipped?
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoSince DVRs, which we've had since 1999.
- icehawk 1y agoWhen was that? I'm genuinely asking, since I remember the breakdown from when I was recording TV to my computer and editing out the commercials, as 10 minutes of commercials and 20 minutes of TV show.
- UltraSane 1y agoI have every right to try to block YouTube ads and YouTube has every right to try to defeat whatever I do.
- dbbk 1y agoThey could very easily just ban ad blockers from the Chrome extension store, but they haven't
- k12sosse 1y agoAnd they too, to try to stop people using their platform from doing so.
- squigz 1y agoNo they do not have that right. They do not have the right to try to circumvent what I'm telling my browser to do. If they don't like what it's doing, they can block me from the platform.
- UltraSane 1y agoAt the most fundamental they have the right to send or not send video data to you.
- rasz 1y agoProblem is Google also controls what used to be called "user agent".
- UltraSane 1y ago
- thangalin 1y agoMostly stolen from elsewhere: ! Stop sites from prompting to sign into Google account ||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$xhr,script,3p ! Stop annoying reels from littering friend feeds www.facebook.com##[aria-label="reel"]:upward(2) youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element-show youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0) youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, []) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true) ! Don't use the obnoxious new bold font for titles, use the old font instead www.youtube.com###title h1 yt-formatted-string:style(font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; font-weight: 400 !important;) www.youtube.com##h3.ytd-playlist-panel-renderer .title .yt-formatted-string:style(font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; font-weight: 400 !important;) ! Remove branding bugs in the bottom corner www.youtube.com##div.iv-branding www.youtube.com##.annotation.annotation-type-custom.iv-branding ! Disable live video previews on hover www.youtube.com##+js(aeld, /^(?:mousemove|pointermove|pointerenter)$/, buttons) ! Remove "Scroll for details" www.youtube.com##.ytp-button.ytp-fullerscreen-edu-button ! Remove "This video contains paid content" warning www.youtube.com##.ytp-paid-content-overlay ! Remove badges www.youtube.com##.ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope.badges www.youtube.com##ytd-badge-supported-renderer.ytd-video-primary-info-renderer ! Remove badges in lists, expand video title to fill that space again www.youtube.com##.ytd-badge-supported-renderer.style-scope.badge-style-type-verified.badge www.youtube.com###menu > .ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope www.youtube.com##.ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope.metadata:style(padding-right:0!important) ! Remove chat www.youtube.com###chat ! Remove sidebar www.youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-renderer.ytd-app.style-scope www.youtube.com##ytd-app[mini-guide-visible] ytd-page-manager.ytd-app:style(margin-left:0px!important) ! Remove the shadow over the top of videos www.youtube.com##div.ytp-gradient-top www.youtube.com##.ytp-chrome-top ! Reduce opacity of the shadow over the bottom of videos www.youtube.com##div.ytp-gradient-bottom:style(opacity: 55% !important) ! Reduce opacity of video length labels www.youtube.com##ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer.ytd-thumbnail.style-scope:style(opacity:75% !important) ! Remove Next button. I only ever hit this accidentally, losing my place ! and my playback buffer >:-[ www.youtube.com##.ytp-left-controls > .ytp-button.ytp-next-button ! Remove Miniplayer button www.youtube.com##.ytp-button.ytp-miniplayer-button ! Force YouTube to display the complete copyright information in the description www.youtube.com###expanded-metadata:style(display:block !important) ! Don't load the preview image before the video loads (saves some bandwidth) ||i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/*/maxresdefault.webp ||i.ytimg.com/vi/*/maxresdefault.jpg ! Remove interactions (eg if you never login to YouTube) www.youtube.com###like-button www.youtube.com###dislike-button www.youtube.com###sponsor-button www.youtube.com###hover-overlays www.youtube.com###subscribe-button www.youtube.com###flexible-item-buttons www.youtube.com###button-shape www.youtube.com###reply-button-end ! Remove sidebar items that are only applicable to logged-in users www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-section-renderer.ytd-guide-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(1) www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-section-renderer.ytd-guide-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2) ! Remove "Watch Later" and "Add to Queue" www.youtube.com###hover-overlays ! Remove the "skeleton" shown before the page loads www.youtube.com##.skeleton www.youtube.com###info-skeleton www.youtube.com###meta-skeleton www.youtube.com###owner-name www.youtube.com##.skeleton-bg-color www.youtube.com###home-page-skeleton www.youtube.com###masthead-skeleton-icons ||www.youtube.com/s/desktop/*/cssbin/www-main-desktop-watch-page-skeleton.css ||www.youtube.com/s/desktop/*/cssbin/www-main-desktop-player-skeleton.css ! Remove the live previews on the scrubber bar (saves some bandwidth, but ! not worth it IMO) ||i.ytimg.com/sb/* www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip-bg www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip-image www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip:style(border-radius:0px;!important)*
- southernplaces7 1y agoIf YouTube's ads were like the TV ads of olden days, they might even be marginally tolerable. They're not however. In my experience, they not only deliberately increase volume to pretty much screech whatever insipid bullshit is being offered at you, but they also can sometimes run for dozens of minutes unless you manually go to your device and press "skip". TV ads never did these sorts of utterly shitty, tedious things. I even wonder how anything so fucking hostile and annoying to a YT free user can possibly be effective? Who's actively paying for all this garbage ad placement with such scummy little playback mechanics?
- Belopolye 1y ago> TV ads never did these sorts of utterly shitty, tedious things. Until the CALM Act was passed in 2010, networks actually did increase the volume on advertisements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudness_Mitigation_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...
- southernplaces7 1y agoDidn't know about that, but unsurprising. At least they couldn't extend their length almost indefinitely too, unless you manually skipped.
- Belopolye 1y agoIt was around that time that I stopped watching cable television altogether. If you want to back down memory lane, search on YouTube for old recordings of network TV ad breaks from the late 90s and early 2000s- they’re just obnoxious.
- frollogaston 1y agoYeah, I was reading this and thinking wut, TV sucks. Like half the time watching a show (most likely a rerun) is ads, even if it's a paid cable channel. And even after that 2010 law, pretty sure the ads are louder than the shows. And the ads are even worse nowadays because the ads exclusively target old people, so 90% are drugs or gold-buying scams. Somehow the cable STBs are super laggy nowadays too, like they rewrote the video decoder in Javascript or something, cause it used to be fine. The only thing I miss at all is being able to leave a TV on and have it keep playing something reasonable, not convince itself that watching a car review means I want to watch a screaming kid trolling in Minecraft followed by the Syrian Civil War.
- ge96 1y agoIf adblock stopped working I would leave, which is interesting to me as I wonder what I'd do with my new time. Funny I make YT videos too trying to build an audience, I'd like to not put ads on it but not my choice I don't understand how people can just accept ads it drives me insane when some random shit starts playing I already lost money with YT, I bought so many UHD movies on their platform ($20 ea) and they won't stream it in HD unless you're on a supported device or ad-ridden tv edit: alright, aftrer seeing it's $13 I will get it, I have been converted
- arccy 1y ago"I want free hosting and an audience but I don't want to pay for it"
- ge96 1y agoYeah I get if that's why I said it I do pay for it, the time to make the content Sucks how everything is like that nowadays, IG, Reddit (have to join a platform to be seen)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- PurestGuava 1y agoYou pay to make the content. You would have to "pay" to make the content no matter where you hosted it. You don't pay YouTube to host it. That's a silly argument. You seem to ignore that you would probably have no audience - or have a significantly smaller audience - were it not for YouTube hosting your content. They are providing you a service, but you seem to think that nobody - not you, not your viewers - should have to trade anything for that service, despite the hosting and streaming of video being one of the most expensive possible tech services in the world (bar perhaps running genAI models.) I dunno it's just very annoying how a lot of people have memed themselves into this train of thought where the big tech companies aren't actually providing them anything of value, when if they decided to suddenly stop providing their services they would be up a creek without a paddle.
- bird0861 1y agoYoutube will not win this battle.
- tcfhgj 1y agoBefore YouTube loses, blocking ads will be criminalized. Capitalism always wins
- squigz 1y agoCriminalized where? Not everyone is American.
- Aachen 1y agoRansomware doesn't have to be illegal in North Korea to convict a North Korean who did it, either in absence or with extradition, in the country where the damage was done With Alphabet being from a country with extreme capitalism, the comment you're replying to seems applicable no matter where the viewers are (regardless of whether I agree with their viewpoint/outlook). YouTube's owners can choose to block or prosecute whoever doesn't comply with their terms. Not saying that's likely, just that: this isn't a matter of needing to be on the American continent Edit: perhaps interesting to realise that, conversely, laws in North Korea might make it illegal for Alphabet to have certain terms if they want to serve consumers in their market. (A better example here would be EU with copyright legislation that makes it illegal to sign away your moral rights, for instance.) It works both ways and both could legally prosecute the other at the same time and both win in their area! But with YouTube being able to gatekeep the content here, one has more power than the other..
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y agoI mean most adblocking software is open source and easily acquired, a lot like torrenting software it’d be near impossible to actually enforce anything.
- 1y ago
- ddtaylor 1y agoI don't care when YouTube does a buffer thing because blocking ads for me is about distractions and context switching. My cognitive load is already very high and it's extremely frustrating to have to filter out more garbage.
- paulcole 1y agoYou could just pay the $13/month? Would save the worries about context switching further taxing your already high cognitive load? And I would expect your high cognitive load helps you earn well above $13/month?
- frollogaston 1y agoYou can 1. pay the $13/mo 2. try to make the adblocker work or 3. not watch YouTube. So far options 2 on desktop and 3 on iPhone have been ok for me.
- paulcole 1y agoYou’re forgetting: 4. Don’t use an adblocker and watch YouTube. I’ve been doing #1 for over 5 years and will never do anything different (up to say $50-ish USD a month).
- dmd 1y agoExcept they want it both ways. I tried Youtube Premium for a few months. Slowly but surely the ads came back, so back to blocking and not paying I went.
- betenoire 1y agowhat? I don't see ads unless the creator themselves are doing it, and even then it's two clicks on the right arrow button and we move on
- snapplebobapple 1y ago
- Tokkemon 1y agoAnd the arms race continues.
- knowitnone 1y agoThey can advertise to me all day and I wouldn't buy a thing
- JKCalhoun 1y agoYep. And I kinda hate Grammerly now. Whatever it is.
- jordigh 1y agoThe point of most ads isn't to get you to buy things. Most ads just want you to think of the product and be aware it exists. Their objective is to slowly hijack your brain. If you know what "it gives you wings" or "the happiest place on earth" means, the ads already worked. Ads are trying to combat obscurity. A brand with bad reputation is far better than a brand nobody's ever heard of.
- Belopolye 1y agoI gave up and wrote a script to scrape the channels I like with yt-dlp into my Plex server.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoThat's a good idea for channels you know you like.
- Belopolye 1y agoDiscovery is always going to be an issue, but for those who want to get away from doomscrolling their life away for the algorithm-god, it’s a rather comfy way to enjoy content.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoI haven't discovered anything on YT for a looong time, and now I also installed unhook, so I don't even see any recommends.
- paulcole 1y agoI gave up and paid for YouTube Premium. Probably a top-3 subscription that I’ll never cancel.
- Belopolye 1y agoHaving sailed the high seas since middle school I suppose it was only natural that I continue to build upon my multi-terabyte horde of movies, archived websites, books, music, and video games to include content from hobbyist HAM radio operators and long-form urban legend documentaries from YT channels.
- pier25 1y agoI'm more than happy to pay for Youtube Premium to remove ads for all the family and ensure content creators can monetize their work.
- wao0uuno 1y agoAnd because of people like you I can enjoy their services for free. Thank you.
- BeFlatXIII 1y agoWould you like a golden sticker?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoFuck that. My household uses Newpipe we don't pay for shit.
- otterley 1y agoOut of curiosity, what pays your own salary?
- Aachen 1y agoI'm sure that's pure curiosity and not trying to make a point in a roundabout way...
- debugnik 1y agoNot the same poster, but: Products and services that someone actually signed a contract to pay for. Google is free to not send me free video if they don't want to, I'm just connecting to their website using my browser. But the only reason so many creators are exclusively on youtube is the fact that anyone can watch there. Google tolerates my ad blocker to some degree (unlike other sites) because the alternative is losing market share and they know it. If creators feel cheated, they can ask youtube to stop serving their videos for free for its own interests. I'd like to see the status quo change actually.
- akersten 1y agoThank you for your important work fighting this battle, it must be exhausting. The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us, the more we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting. If they can't leave well enough alone and look the other way on ad blocking, (which is the only way to avoid exposing myself and family to these dangerous ads), they need to be under a lot more scrutiny for the ads they choose to run.
- dbbk 1y agoYour position is that you should be able to use YouTube completely for free then? How is that financially sustainable?
- aprilthird2021 1y agoCue a long list of people who will say "I would pay for Premium except X Y and Z". The fact is free YouTube is only possible with ads, and potentially only with the extremely detested ads we're talking about here. The other major UGC video platform (Twitch) is not profitable. Broadcast TV and even cable or fixed content library streaming is A LOT cheaper to run than something like YouTube. I don't mean purely machine-wise, I also mean in terms of salaries, and those do matter to keep the service up and running, not to mention growing
- timmg 1y ago> The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us... You can... just not visit youtube, right?
- pixl97 1y agoI'm going to assume thats much more difficult than one would expect.
- RivieraKid 1y agoThey're a monopoly benefiting from network effects.
- 1y ago
- josephcsible 1y ago> This locks a few global objects by using Object.defineProperty to set them as non-writable, which prevents later code from overwriting them with a Proxy that alters their behaviour. So uBlock Origin can only proxy JSON.stringify if it can run before this locker script does. This seems like a bug in browsers, or possibly in the spec. Page content and scripts should never be able to restrict what browser extensions can do.
- rasz 1y ago>This seems like a bug in browsers oh its a Chrome feature! Around 2 years ago Chrome pushed an update that speedup time to load first initial page by delaying Extension initialization. Last page you closed Chrome on will load before uBo, will be able to bypass all filters/block and will be able to detect uBo being loaded.
- uzerfcwn 1y agoFeel free to write a bug report to Chrome developers or ManifestV3 authors. In the meantime, Firefox users can override any delivered content with the webRequest API.
- ratmeadow 1y agoI recently stopped watching youtube altogether and surprisingly haven't been missing it. And I used to watch a LOT (like hours per day) of youtube, mostly quality educational/scientific content. But ultimately you'd be surprised how much you don't need in your life. And side effect is no more ads. If someone sends me an occasional youtube video to watch, I'll take a look, but otherwise no engagement with the platform. I'd highly recommend everyone try reducing their intake of passive entertainment like youtube and redirecting that time towards more creative or mindful pursuits.
- grugagag 1y agoLarge parts of the world population are addicted to these platforms. It’s tobacco 2.0
- satoru42 1y agoTiktok is opium 3.0, but this time it's not UK selling the drugs.
- xdfgh1112 1y agoNot surprising at all. We delude ourselves into thinking we're better because our brand of slop is educational, but it's still slop.
- stickfigure 1y agoOr just pay for it? I have my whole family on my plan. Nobody gets ads. It is a bargain. You're right, I could probably finish my motorcycle build projects without videos. But why??
- tlogan 1y agoWhy do we justify blocking ads, even when we know the content we’re consuming isn’t free to create and even if the content is free, it still costs money to store and distribute? We often rationalize using ad blockers because ads can be intrusive or annoying. But let’s asking ourselves: Why do we feel entitled to get this for free? This isn’t a moral judgment. I genuinely want to understand the reasoning.
- rwmj 1y agoI'll think about the morality of ad blocking around the same time that Google thinks about the morality of all the crap they do all the time.
- Culonavirus 1y ago> Why do we justify blocking ads ... https://youtube.com/shorts/cdyhoTqWFSc?si=aSV46HfI8_0kUIy1 https://youtube.com/shorts/cdyhoTqWFSc?si=aSV46HfI8_0kUIy1 ^ Replace the women with any "why" arguments you might have for not using ad blockers.
- jacquesm 1y agoBait-and-switch.
- charcircuit 1y agoThere is a category of people for where if they are able to get away with not paying for something than they think it would be foolish not to.
- bitmasher9 1y agoSome websites will stop me from accessing content because I use an ad blocker. I think that’s fair play, and take my attention somewhere else. I don’t hide that I use adblocker, and it’s easy enough to identify.
- aniviacat 1y agoWatching ads just offloads the cost on other people. I would go as far as saying that watching ads is immoral (if you can avoid it), as you are effectively stealing from others.
- calmbonsai 1y agoDon't consume YT content on YT. That's the secret.
- ianpenney 1y agoI’m not gonna buy your stupid hoodie. Stop shaming me into feeling I’m not a man because I don’t have one. Absolute trash.
- tzs 1y agoAnother thing they are sometimes doing is failing to add videos that you watched with ad blocking on to your history. That means if those videos show up in a search, or on your home page, or in a recommendation they do not have the red bar on the bottom that indicates that you have already watched them.
- rs186 1y agoCurious -- why adblocks like uBlock Origin are not very effective at streaming services like Netflix/Hulu (at least the last time I tried)?
- pabs3 1y agoWonder if people will start moving away from the YT frontend to other apps like Grayjay.
- rapeddangagain 1y ago[dead]
- ai_assisted_dev 1y agoPerfectly fair. It's not like YouTube is some free open source platform. Infra needs to be paid, creators need to be paid, they have a whole eco-system. Why not just pay for premium if you use it that much?
- usernamed7 1y agoI'd pay for it if youtube was worth it (it's not)
- nadermx 1y agoWhat's the actual % of people using ad blockers anyways? I feel it cant even be near double digits.
- hrhhggf 1y agoDang it
- mschoch 1y ago[dead]
- hrhhggf 1y ago[flagged]
- mschoch 1y ago[dead]
- apitman 1y ago> On Firefox this is easily resolvable - you can use a HTML filter to filter out the script tag from the source HTML before the page even starts being parsed. But that relies on extension APIs that Chromium doesn’t support. I'm shocked
- madars 1y agoThe second Chrome drops uBlock Origin (as part of their "Manifest V3 without blocking Web Request" plan), I'm off to an alternative browser. Enough is enough.
- gregoryl 1y agoDo it now? I use Firefox on all devices, it's completely fine.
- xingped 1y agoSeconded. Been on Firefox for years and greatly prefer my experience on Firefox both on desktop and mobile (Android) compared to any other browser.
- owebmaster 1y agoI use PWAs a lot and Firefox dropped support
- tjlingham 1y agoI agree, but I do need to keep a chromium browser around for the odd times that: my webcam decides to flicker uncontrollably during a meeting, a website just happens to put JS that runs terribly on Firefox in the hot path and it slows to a crawl, or a new feature is being demonstrated with Chrome only support. Beats ads, as far as I'm concerned, but I can't help but feel like your average user wouldn't agree.
- zargon 1y agoI used to keep a Chrome-based browser installed "just in case." But for about the last 5 years I've simply refused to have it on my machine. It's not needed.
- osigurdson 1y agoI downloaded some free songs back in the Napster days but now I happily pay for or watch ads for any content that I consume. I have zero interest in ad blockers / other tricks as I want the content creators to get compensated.
- jekwoooooe 1y agoI pay for YouTube premium. Surely everyone here can too. This stuff isn’t free so either deal with ads or pay for premium
- asadotzler 1y agoThis stuff is freely available on the open web and I don't deal with ads or pay for premium because there's zero compelling reason to do so. If creators have a problem with the revenue loss, their contract is with Google and they should take up those concerns with Google. If Google has a problem with how I consume their public content, they can make it non-public or try to block me in some other way. I owe neither of those entities anything and until they either make the content non-public or find a way to block me without blocking others they want to see their content, I'll keep on consuming it how I like.
- jekwoooooe 1y agoIt’s not “freely available” it’s available with ads. You are just circumventing the ads which is akin to piracy. I’m not making a moral judgement but at least be honest about it. You are trying to consume nonfree content without paying anything
- cyberax 1y agoI'm curious, has someone tried the authenticated Youtube Premium API in third-party clients? I'd love to use Invidious or Peertube to watch the videos, but I also want my subscription money to go to the video creators. Youtube allocates it proportionally to the viewing time.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dbg31415 1y agoDiscord recently started using a fake loading screen if you have an ad blocker enabled. What’s hilarious (and a little infuriating) is that the app is still obviously working under the hood — you can literally see masked text updating in real time when people send you messages. It’s not “loading,” it’s just refusing to render content locally. They’re not even blocking access to the service — they’re just trying to frustrate you into disabling your ad blocker without explicitly saying that’s what they’re doing. Classic dark pattern. What’s worse is the privacy side. Discord apparently leaves the microphone open even when you’re using push-to-talk. There’s been anecdotal evidence from users monitoring their network traffic that mic input is still active in the background, likely being piped to local buffers or held in memory under the guise of latency reduction. That might sound innocent, but the distinction between “open but not recording” and “recording” is razor thin when the user has explicitly told the app not to listen until a key is pressed. At minimum, it’s a trust violation — at worst, it’s surveillance theater. This is the standard bait-and-switch. Build a good product, earn user trust, then slowly degrade it with tracking, telemetry, ads, and manipulative UX until it’s barely recognizable. Discord used to be a breath of fresh air compared to Skype or Teamspeak, and now it’s another data-harvesting machine with a gamer paint job. It’s telling that more users are looking into self-hosted options or jumping to alternatives like Matrix or Mumble. Discord doesn’t have ads yet, but all the groundwork is being laid — and people are right to be wary.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y agoThe primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance. That’s not to say whether or not the advertisement is for a product or service for which the viewer is interested in purchasing but how it relates to the context in which it is viewed. People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside. Actual complaints may be about how the billboards block a scenic view but that also seems like another way of complaining about the irrelevance. Similarly, if I am watching a Youtube video, I am never thinking that a disruptive message from a commercial business is relevant to my current activities (uh, passivities?). No advertisement is relevant, not even in-video direct sponsorships, hence SponsorBlock. If I go to Costco and see an advertisement for tires... well, I’m at Costco, where I buy stuff. Things are sold at Costco and people go there to have things sold to them. I might need tires and realize I can get that taken care of while I’m at Costco. Nearly every advertisement I see at Costco is relevant because it’s selling something I can buy in the same building, indeed usually something juxtaposed close to the advertisement. I don’t complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they’re irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.
- nfRfqX5n 1y agoit's shocking how bad youtube ads are compared to say instagram or google search. maybe i'm just not targeted well.
- fracus 1y ago> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance. We hate advertisements because they unsolicited manipulations to get our money.
- Sophira 1y ago> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance. Disagreeable to whom, exactly? Personally, I would rather the adverts were irrelevant if it meant I didn't have my every move tracked on the web. The main problems I have with ads are, in order from most problematic to least: * the lengths that ad networks go to to track me, * the very real possibility of getting malware, * the lengths advertisers go to to ensure their ads are seen. (We have popup blockers in pretty much every browser nowadays for a reason.) Take away those, and you could convince me to disable my ad blocker. Until then? Not a chance in hell.
- bufferoverflow 1y ago[dead]
- bongodongobob 1y agoThinking YouTube should be free is ridiculous. Pay for a subscription or deal with ads. This discussion is so fucking stale.
- vixen99 1y agoSo stale that ~750 folk have commented.
- bongodongobob 1y agoOf course, it's controversial.
- b0a04gl 1y ago[dead]
- butz 1y agoGood time as any to inform about existence of PeerTube instances. And maybe, to think about better use of your time and watch less videos on the internet? This video could've been a blog post and all that jazz :)
- 5350-uiop-1130 1y agomeanwhile 40m seems to be the new 10:07 videos getting more bloated, recycling the same crap with 90% filler. just like google blog spam. and tell me how much are your shitty ads worth without anyone to watch them? YOUTUBE is getting F_CKED!!
- gausswho 1y agoWhat new feature of significance has YouTube actually delivered in years?
- areyourllySorry 1y agothe topics at the top of the homepage, sorting comments by timestamp, the little card when you click on someone's profile picture with other comments on the same channel (which was only on mobile for a while), they improved auto captioning recently and are toying with dubbing, modern codecs… it's the little things that make it better
- gausswho 1y agoI do appreciate the auto captioning and codec fight. shakes fist at patent trolls Could care less about the social bits. Comments have been filtered better but I will never trust their black box. With Enhanced YouTube extension I remove all of that so I can retain focus apart from the video at hand.
- apples_oranges 1y agoFake buffering is much better than watching an ad, even if it were longer. Looking at a wait spinner probably is much better for the brain than some attention grabbing ad content.
- penguin_booze 1y agoEven as a uBlock and Firefox user, I get the occasional delay at the start of some videos. My workaround is to click on another random video (which, for some reason starts playing immediately), and then go back to my original video, and that starts playing straight away. No-mo waiting.
- elric 1y agoI wouldn't be adverse to paying for YT (or similar services) if they took cash payments. But no, you have to get a subscription. Which involves giving Google your personal details, thus giving the world's biggest data hoarder even more data. Imagine going back in time 20 years. You want to buy a newspaper from a stall. And the vendor tells you to wait and stare at an add for 30 seconds before you can pick up the magazine. The alternative is that you give that vendor a copy of your ID and credit card. It's insane. Most of these problems would go away if we had "online cash" (please don't start talking about cryptocurrency). Want to watch a video? Watch an add or pay €0.01. Of course all the money-laundering hysteria will prevent that from happening. Ultimately, terrorism is why we have ads.
- CaptainFever 1y agoI just use yt-dlp (YTDLnis on Android, which has a great UI that makes it quite YouTube-like). Downloading instead of streaming (read: downloading then automatically deleting) is so much better. 1. It's all offline play, so I can use my favorite players like VLC. Also, no buffering (after the initial download, of course). 2. I can do anything I want to the video: make edits, splice ads out, extract audio, generate subtitles or dubs, etc. 3. It saves Google server costs! Well, comparing to streaming the same video from them multiple times with adblock on, at least.
- MathMonkeyMan 1y agoI do this so I can watch powerpoint style math videos with the colors inverted, so it's white text on black background instead of black text on white background. Download the video and then open with `mpv --vf=negate --hwdec=no`.
- tigrezno 1y agoAI will kill youtube. You'd be able to watch youtube with like 20 seconds global delay while an AI will silently skip all the ads it finds. It will be our personal content censor.
- jay_kyburz 1y agoThat's a level of optimism I haven't encountered in a while. Sure AI will stream Youtube for you, but it will be chock-a-block full of its own ads. The actors will pause mid sentence, turn to the camera and smile while they slam down a coke and tell us all about the latest samsung phone.
- johan914 1y agoAs a young person, I get perfectly normal corporate advertisements on YT, with the very rare porno dating ad. My parents on the other hand, get a never ending stream of the shittiest scams, AI voiceovers of Joe Rogan and Zelensky, dick pills. It's clear their tracking targets elderly users with scams. I would never pay for YT premium.
- MagicMoonlight 1y agoI don’t use youtube anymore. I’m not paying them for slop content they don’t even produce. I’m not watching slop ads. I was watching hours every day, and I don’t even miss it. There’s so much content to watch on streaming platforms that I can never run out.
- SilverSlash 1y agoI've seen several people argue about the quality of ads on YouTube. For me it's not about that. I've been using ad blockers for almost 15 years now. Youtube has been free AND ad free for me for a very long time. I don't want to be interrupted with ads now or ever regardless of their quality. The point is, I'm making zero excuses about why I don't want to see ads on youtube. It's been that way and I want it to remain that way. No subscriptions and no ads. People watching yt on their phones and TVs will still see ads or pay for premium and they can support the service.
- everyone 1y agoIf I cant watch Youtube without ads, then I just wont watch it at all.
- mrkramer 1y agoI also noticed fake buffering[0], it is disgusting but it seems like they are usually on their adblocker blocking spree for a few weeks and then they give up. Their goal is to annoy you not to unblock adblocker and watch ads but to make you buy YouTube Premium because they would earn more money from subscription than they would from you watching ads. [0] https://i.imgur.com/v1YSWVM.png https://i.imgur.com/v1YSWVM.png
- mycatisblack 1y agoHere’s something many people probably don’t know. I live in a west-Eu country with several well-defined language borders. Each time we cross a border (on holiday), the youtube ads change language. When I’m logged in. I don’t have a driver’s license, yet the most common ad I get is for second hand cars. I’m in a relationship, yet I regularly get ads for dating sites. I have a job, get ads for jobhunting advice. And the other day I got an add specifically for people born before my birth-year minus one. YouTube’s ads are on the same level as Spotify’s nagging for their subscription: it’s meant to annoy users into buying their ad-free plan. They use real ads as a thin veneer.
- _bent 1y agoRalf Schumacher?
- mycatisblack 1y agoWell done Sherlock
- powvans 1y agoWell, it works. Unfortunately it doesn’t remove sponsored content in the videos. I’m paying for an ad free experience, but I’m still hearing about AC1. Annoying.
- itsmevictor 1y agoYou should check SponsorBlock out: https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock.
- kjrfghslkdjfl 1y ago[dead]
- AlienRobot 1y agoFirst it was "I hate how much ad companies track me and build profiles on me." Now it is "I hate how ads are irrelevant." People need to understand that ads will never be 100% perfect, otherwise you would buy something every time you saw an ad. 99.99% of the ads will miss the target, and that is normal. It would be insane if it worked any other way. For what it is worth Google has a page where you can customize what sort of ads are relevant to you. https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451?hl=en https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451...
- dkga 1y agoDear YouTube, It’s not so much that I don’t want to see ads - nobody does, but very very often the ad breaks the vibe of what I am watching and it displeases me to the point I will invest my soul and energy to block ads. Some real-life examples: - watching a video about coding where the creator has a monotonic, calm voice that keeps me engaged, and VS Code in dark mode which is easy on my eyes in my dark room at 2am, then suddenly comes an ad with bright lights, incredibly high sound and a high-energy backtrack. - watching a meditation video, the exact same ad appears. You get the idea. At the very least, please ensure the ad is in the same volume as the original video. That alone wouldn’t be too hard. In addition, please at least try to match the background overall brightness or color, and the vibe. All this would create value because people would actually watch much more ads.
- commandersaki 1y agoAnd please, no 30 minute ads.
- danparsonson 1y agoI'll add another one: - music mixes, good lord - three minutes into some great mix and suddenly I'm hearing from Uber Eats yet again I want to support the creators, but thank goodness for yt-dlp
- AlienRobot 1y ago>All this would create value because people would actually watch much more ads. I'm very skeptical about this statement. There is a simple way to stop watching ads: pay for premium. It's 100% effective and works right now. What you are saying is that you want Google to make your ad experience better because you don't want to pay money to use their service. You somehow use it enough for ads to bother you but not enough to pay for it. This paradoxal type of user is too common and makes no sense to me.
- vprcic 1y ago> There is a simple way to stop watching ads: pay for premium. It's 100% effective and works right now. For now. With the ever increasing number of "premium" services that promised no ads, but slowly start introducing them, it is just a matter of time before YouTube does the same.
- kotaKat 1y agoDo I have to go show up at Youtube's HQ and start deliberately slowing people down from entering the building? Note: when security shows up, I'm going to tell them "maybe later" if I'm asked to leave.
- CrossVR 1y ago> As I’ll explain, the fake buffering is 80% of the length of the ads you would’ve seen, so even with fake buffering you’re still saving time using an adblocker. I don't care if the fake buffering is 100% of the ad length. Not having to see the pre-roll ad and no ad breaks during the video is worth the wait.
- ocfnash 1y agoI'm a bit surprised nobody seems to have mentioned http://fixyt.com http://fixyt.com I have a bookmarklet: javascript:(function() {window.location=window.location.toString().replace(/^https:\/\/www.youtube\./,'http://fixyt.'); http://fixyt.');})() and whenever I want to watch a YouTube video, I just click that and enjoy an ad-free experience.
- jenders 1y agoYouTube is enabling creative people to make a living wage from doing what they love the most and providing immense value to niche communities. If you get value from it, just pay for it.
- constrictpastel 1y agoI get ads for secret solar panel information that the 'Electric Companies don't want me to know about'. Concern-troll ads, that feel like psychological warfare, about every health ailment that I might potentially have. Boomer-bait 'Patriot-Power Pack! Survival food, ammo and eagle coins. Kolon-Klense type product depicting a woman sitting on the porcelain throne complaining that she can't crank a shit. Las but not least. An over-eager Sylvester Stallone excited to show me his one amazing....salt trick?
- kerkeslager 1y agoITT: advertisers, pretending there's something that could be changed about ads that would make them not ads. Fundamentally, ads are bad. There just isn't a change you can make to ads that makes them okay. At a personal level, ads distract us, they tell us we don't have enough, aren't attractive enough, just generally aren't enough. They don't inform us: a one-sided view of a product absent criticisms or comparison to competing products is effectively just a lie. At an economic level, ads break any benefit to capitalism. Instead of companies competing to provide the best product at the lowest cost, ads make it so a worse product at a higher cost can become the market leader. Ads are one of the primary drivers of the enshittification of everything. Ads allow companies to launch with garbage products that nobody would ever pay money for, slap ads on them to monetize, and thereby prevent competing products actually worth paying for from ever even coming to market. The only answer is to refuse, on principle, to view ads. If a company receives money from advertisers, you're the product, not the user. If a product has a "free" tier paid for by ads, paying to hide ads doesn't help because you're still competing with advertisers for that company's loyalty, and advertisers will always win in the end (i.e. ads in cable TV--mark my words, there will be ads in all the premium-tier streaming services eventually).
- ryukoposting 1y agoI'll take 12 seconds of silence over seeing the same goddamn T-Mobile ad for the 100th time. Seriously, I can watch a 5 minute video and at it'll play the exact same ad THREE TIMES, at the start, somewhere in the middle, then at the end again. And it's always the most loud, obnoxious ad imaginable. I was skeptical of SmartTube but it really is the only way YouTube is tolerable anymore.
- peenoise 1y agoDear dkga, you willing to invest your soul but cant even pay 3 bucks a month. You have a cheap soul. Hey Cheapoo. Dont forget the creators you so willingly watch are paid through them, without ads, there are no creators you so love.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoI have been fed over 1000 meat stick advertisements in the past couple months. I’m probably consuming all their ad budget as digital meat sticks.
- qwertox 1y agoWhen I start a video and it shows an ad, and 15 seconds into the video I reload the page (similar to switching a channel on tv forth and back again), why do I need to view intro ads again? Google is so greedy that they don't care the slightest bit about being fair.
- BrtByte 1y agoMakes me wonder how sustainable this arms race is long-term… will users just give up and pay for Premium, or will adblockers keep finding creative ways around it?
- gblargg 1y agoOn my outdated Firefox (with uBlock Origin of course), I've found that opening videos in a new tab (middle click) eliminates ads, while left-clicking reliably shows an ad. I've gotten the fake buffering recently no matter how I open videos.
- interestica 1y agoI accidentally did something. I don’t get ads on YouTube in Chrome on iOS. I have a few ideas on how
- jenny91 1y agoMost likely is that you are in some control group to determine effects of ads in general.
- interestica 1y agoNah. I get ads in the app and on other browsers. It happened after I was futzing around with dns settings years ago. There’s some combination of whatever I did that keeps chrome ad free. It has persisted through iOS updates as well.
- ReptileMan 1y agoDear Google, just reduce the price of premium to sane levels. no way you are displaying 15$ worth of ads per person per month.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoI would love YouTube to include comments in their ads as they do with all other videos. To borrow a current phrase, they chicken out on actual critical feedback and keep pushing their money making agenda with an iron fist. If YouTube actually cared to make their users happy, public comments in ads would filter out all the garbage ads in hours and the entire platform would be forced to accept a minimum yet independent and user driving bar for advertising.
- felineflock 1y agoThere are 3 primary undesirability aspects of ads: 1) ads as irrelevant intrusions (in spite of all data Google collects, ads are mostly irrelevant for any person) 2) ads as ugly or blockers of beauty 3) ads as thieves of attention or downright theft (scam ads, illegal products) Then, should we pay to get rid of ads or not? Two opposite opinions: 1) paying YouTube support creators 2) paying YouTube rewards the "shitification" of the platform But even for those who pay there are issues: the content creator's own sponsorships, shorts, the risk of account banning by Google. Then how about compensating creators directly? (Patreon or PayPal for example) What I don't get is the questioning on the morality of ad blocking. No one should be obligated to watch an ad in one's own device, regardless of whatever "Terms of Service" (which is not a contract). It may be unfair to the content creator who relies on that revenue though.
- chippiewill 1y agoNo one is obligated to watch ads though. No one is obligated to use the service. As someone who uses an ad blocker I do think it's immoral, and I do pay for YouTube premium and other stuff where reasonable.
- noqc 1y agoWhen you ignore or don't click on the ads, is that also immoral?
- leereeves 1y ago> Then, should we pay to get rid of ads or not? Two opposite opinions: > 1) paying YouTube support creators > 2) paying YouTube rewards the "shitification" of the platform I have a third opinion. I expect that if enough people pay Google, they will remove the free service altogether, add ads to the paid service, and perhaps introduce a new, more expensive ad free tier. Paying them not only rewards the enshitification, it encourages the next step.
- bayindirh 1y ago> the content creator's own sponsorships, shorts... Many of the people I watch add "jump ahead" buttons for these sections now, which is neat.
- NetOpWibby 1y agoI don’t have a YouTube account and yet their algorithm creates a feed for me anyway. Pretty sweet. This means they’re also collecting data about some random person in my area but I don’t have a Google account either so that data isn’t really useful. Ad block FTW At some point I gotta do a network-wide block instead of per computer.
- squarefoot 1y agoIt's so ironic that they resort to these tactics that ultimately ruin the experience for everyone and ultimately attract more users into using adblockers. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the number of users with adblockers installed was so small that Google actually spent more money implementing all those techniques against them than it could lose in lost advertising just by not doing anything.
- eth0up 1y ago[dead]
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoWhat about the gross content of their shorts clips? I'm not the kind of person to be inclined to buy 'premium' because they progressively enshittified their free service to make premium seem like the only rational option, but I'm even less inclined to give money to a company that promotes the complete trash and borderline adult and often fraudulent content of their shorts. I usually refuse to login to YouTube to find the occasional thing, and I'm always bombarded with this trash. How can anyone support that? Gross. Also, it should not be forgotten that the FBI, no less, recommend ad blocking just for general internet safety. YouTube has just as much scam advertising as the rest of the internet, since it's almost all Google (who don't seem to be able to police their own platform, and don't seem to be held to account for such dereliction of duty).
- DudeOpotomus 1y agoAd tech is the reason our society is so polarized. YouTube and Google fund the disinformation and propaganda universe. These fringe people never had a chance to broadcast let alone become wealthy before Google put ads on everything. And now, not only are they given a platform, they're rewarded for being the loudest, most angry, most polarizing, most obnoxious people possible. Rewarding sensationalism without any oversight is the core problem with society today. Profits over priciples. What's nuts is reading thought this thread and reading comments from all the people who think that earning money with digital content is a right. And worse, that because they've earned money in the past, they're entitled to do it forever. There are no longer any guard rails on sensationalism and since the only measure of success is by the very Fox guarding the Henhouse, it's optimized for the Fox's profit, not public's health and society's principles. Advertising ruined the world. Ad Tech is a cancer.