I 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.
stickfigure · 58m ago
Or 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??
atomicnumber3 · 21m ago
Yeah, I'm with you on this one. I pay for YT premium family, and it's basically the only subscription in 2025 that feels worth it to me. My wife watches YouTube instead of cable TV, so it's already a cheap cable bill. But you also get YouTube music! Which I'll admit is a slightly janky music app since it also kind of sits on top of YouTube videos that it decides are mostly music. But their actual music selection is good if you kinda know how to navigate the UI to the "real" music.
Karupan · 19m ago
I’d gladly pay for YouTube or other Google services when they offer an option to not track my activity at all. For me it’s not about seeing ads just on YouTube, but being tracked all through the web and still being served inappropriate or spammy ads.
throwaway31094 · 3m ago
With Google services, you're the product even if you're paying. No thanks.
t0lo · 26m ago
i deleted my youtube accounts and switched to patreon- can still see new videos on youtube from my patreon people cause im notified but it's far more intentional and quality content
coffeefirst · 8m ago
I’m increasing obsessed with the idea that the user—not some engagement algorithm—should be in the drivers seat. This is an interesting way to go about it…
grugagag · 1h ago
Large parts of the world population are addicted to these platforms. It’s tobacco 2.0
satoru42 · 1h ago
Tiktok is opium 3.0, but this time it's not UK selling the drugs.
memset · 47m ago
What do you do with all the extra time? How do you keep from sliding back?
joshvm · 3m ago
Top tip from using only high-latency satellite internet for long periods: add a significant delay to every request to problematic sites. As soon as the dopamine loop is broken, you'll find the wait so frustrating that you won't bother.
alexjplant · 39m ago
I install the "Undistracted" extension in all of my Brave instances. In addition to having the ability to block arbitrary URLs it has many site-specific options like blocking YouTube recommendations or the LinkedIn timeline, all of which I ruthlessly enable. You can also set it to only work on certain days and times of the week. It's immensely useful.
I also pay for Kagi which has the ability to block certain domains from results. I'd imagine that blocking Instagram, Reddit, Youtube, etc. would also prevent rabbit-holing.
dleslie · 47m ago
Turns out some of the best science shows are on PBS and Nebula.
edoceo · 9m ago
3-2-1 Contact
xdfgh1112 · 1h ago
Not surprising at all. We delude ourselves into thinking we're better because our brand of slop is educational, but it's still slop.
akersten · 2h ago
Thank 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.
dylan604 · 1h ago
> we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting
This is one of the things that kills me. Even in broadcasting TV, you get typical :15, :30, :60 ads with the occasional :45 or longer :90. The ad pods are also defined so that you get a set number say something like 3:00 max.
YT has scammy ads where if you are just trying to let something stream in the background while you focus on other things where an ad plays past the 5s skippable time, they have some that are full on half hour if not even longer infomercials that takes completely out of the flow of whatever you were watching. That's down right criminal to me. The fact that long form content can be used as something that interrupts someone else's content is such a strange thing to allow. They must pay out the nose for those ad impressions
timmg · 1h ago
> The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us...
You can... just not visit youtube, right?
cpitman · 1h ago
Or just pay for Youtube.... $8/ month gets rid of most of the ads in videos, $15/month to remove ads from music, shorts, and search results.
jmbwell · 1h ago
I was visiting my kid’s class one day. They were using some YouTube product that seemed oriented at schools, that I’d never seen before. An ad would pop up, and one of the kids (whosever turn it was next?) would run up and tap the skip ad button.
So even if you’re trying to use YouTube for something of value, you’re battling ads. Or at least our kids are.
RivieraKid · 1h ago
They're a monopoly benefiting from network effects.
akersten · 1h ago
Harder than it sounds! So much of what we interact with online winds up with YouTube in the dependency chain. Kids' coursework, how-to videos, etc. I could also just pay the $$/month to "solve" this problem, but I need my petty cash more than Google does. I'm confident the brilliant minds there can figure out how to monetize my visit even without the real-time bidding industrial complex burning my CPU cycles.
grugagag · 1h ago
Download the content offline, make a playlist. You can also archive the content forever. No distractions, its organized however you want. Yes, it does take some effort but it fixes all the problems
denkmoon · 53m ago
You can also just not watch TV. And not listen to the radio. And not receive newspapers. All mediums that have advertisements, and those advertisements are regulated to stop the most egregious types (eg. advertising sugary foods at children, tobacco products, hopefully gambling products soon).
Media, on the whole, is a good thing. We know more about the world. We know more about the excesses of the aristocracy. We know more about the violence committed by violent people (and I don't mean local petty crime. Genocide.) Before we can improve these things, we need to know about them. "just don't consume media" is a regression to a time where people knew little outside their local sphere.
Youtube/Google has a monopoly on one part of the modern media landscape and it has to be fixed. Not just put our heads in the sand.
mitthrowaway2 · 4m ago
YouTube shows ads that would never be allowed on network television, including tobacco advertisements. They can get away with it because it's hard for regulators to observe.
pixl97 · 1h ago
I'm going to assume thats much more difficult than one would expect.
yugioh3 · 1h ago
people deserve to get paid for the work they put into creating content and building platforms, no? books, movies, tv shows, news, etc, are all distributed in some way or another that costs the consumer either money or their time viewing advertising. if you don't want to watch ads, pay YouTube for a subscription.
mitthrowaway2 · 1h ago
YouTube spent about a decade and a half running unintrusive banner ads. Until they secured enough of the market that network effects locked content creators and consumers together in a two-sided market where it's hard for either group to leave unilaterally. Then they ramped up the length and intrusiveness of their ads while flouting content regulations on what they're even allowed to advertise.
Why should I reward that by paying them?
hombre_fatal · 52m ago
You can keep bringing up Google, but you're still glossing over the part where you're not paying the people creating the content you're watching.
Seems awfully convenient.
mitthrowaway2 · 43m ago
No I'm not blocking the ads, I'm just avoiding YouTube as much as possible and desperate for someone to break their stranglehold.
If I were blocking the ads, I wouldn't be aware of how bad it's gotten.
baobun · 44m ago
If enough people do it, monetizing on Youtube becomes untenable for most, driving creators to hopefully healthier platforms who might now stand a chance.
hombre_fatal · 37m ago
So if I don't like Visa and Mastercard, do I also get moral carte blanche to not pay anyone because hey I'm totally urging them to only use merchants that I prefer?
Sounds like awfully convenient motivated reasoning.
BriggyDwiggs42 · 37m ago
I give my favorite creators money through the ubiquitous patreons.
cebert · 1h ago
Ok, well either pay or don’t use YouTube then if you don’t want ads.
cwillu · 48m ago
The browser is my agent, and it will do my bidding, not google's. You building your company on something that can be legally circumvented is not my problem.
spencerflem · 1h ago
My current thought re: piracy is that I never pirate unless I'd be happy if the company I'm pirating from went out of business.
cvoss · 51m ago
If I can actually pay someone for content, then, if I don't pay, I should expect not to be granted access to content.
But that's not how YT works. YT doesn't charge you for good stuff. It charges you for not delivering crap. That's not legitimate business, that's a racket. I have no qualm punishing YT for that. Content creators are free to find other ways to monetize their labor, if their labor is actually valuable. (And so many of the good ones do, quite successfully.)
okdood64 · 9m ago
Or just pay for Premium... No one's forcing you to do anything.
mullingitover · 1h ago
> Thank you for your important work fighting this battle, it must be exhausting.
Indeed, if there was a 'thin adblock writer line' flag it'd already be on my bumper. Than you for your service, we salute you.
SequoiaHope · 1h ago
I resisted paying for premium (out of spite) until very recently and only because my girlfriend complained.
I have been astounded at how scammy those ads are. There is a major class of ads that make fairly significant bullshit medical claims and I’m semi convinced the purpose is not for someone to make money but to wage psychological warfare on vulnerable people. Another class of ads says “the US government is going to collapse and that’s why you should buy a freedom battery” and the ad couches itself as a battery advertisement but how many vulnerable people hear that in the background 16 times a day and don’t end up subconsciously accepting some part of it?
In any case it’s all a manipulative cesspool and it’s bizarre to me that a property that Google otherwise values is willing to sling such slop at its users. I suspect a large part of this is that the executives who run YouTube never see their ads.
mitthrowaway2 · 1h ago
I've seen ads on YouTube that are straight-up illegal. Including ads for tobacco. And one that was a deepfake of the Canadian minister of finance pitching a crypto investment as being risk-free and backed by the government. Another that was a deepfake of Elon Musk saying he was going to give free money to people who click the link. YouTube will run anything because they know they won't get in trouble.
grugagag · 58m ago
Screencapture it and you may have a lawsuit
cyberax · 1h ago
I'm sorry, but Youtube got to keep its servers up somehow and pay the content creators. This means ads.
If you don't like them, then pay for Youtube Premium and you can get ad-free experience. Although if it's not available in your country, then adblocking is a reasonable approach.
hansvm · 1h ago
I'm shocked and appalled that you'd call the "virtual harems" YouTube tries to get me to install either scammy or wildly inappropriate. I've reported them a dozen times, and they're still on the platform, so I'm sure Lord Google knows something I don't about their saintlihood.
/s
tlogan · 1h ago
Why 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.
whatshisface · 33m ago
You're asking the question in a way that's unreflective of how people think. They can do it and want to do it and would need a reason to not do it. So the question is, what would make someone feel like they were ethically compelled to watch an advertisement? It sounds impossible to me, maybe someone with a very unique perspective could chime in about themselves.
Here's an attempt at a double-negative answer: you can't be ethically compelled into an unethical contract, and since advertisements are manipulative, voyeuristic and seek to take advantage of the limitations of human attentional control, it's a priori impossible for watching an ad or downloading a tracker to ever be ethically compulsory.
zdragnar · 21m ago
There's a very simple answer.
You want to watch some content. The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.
You are not obligated to watch ads. You are opting to watch them in exchange for the free content, then skipping out on a commitment you volunteered for while still taking the free content.
The "unethical contact" argument is bullshit, because you made a choice but didn't live up to it. Instead of either paying or not watching, you watched anyway.
whatshisface · 8m ago
All the best to you, I hope you enjoy watching your ads. :-)
usernamed7 · 7m ago
this is ridiculous.
The provider is welcome to serve ads, and i am welcome to not watch them. When there are Ads on TV and I get up to go to the kitchen, am i skipping out on a commitment? Am I now a freeloader? Should the TV have a camera to make sure I watch all the ads like a good little boy?
People have been fastforwarding/skipping ads for decades. this is nothing new.
nadermx · 26m ago
Taking this in a more tangential, but similar thought. The copyright holder does not own the copyrights of the ad. Different copyrights.
throw123xz · 1h ago
Back when I started using Google Adsense, they had a 3 ad per page rule. You could be banned if you went above that limit. Today you can easily find web pages with 10, 15 or even more ad spots... one after each paragraph, sidebar, full page "popup", etc.
On YouTube, we went from a banner on the video to a few seconds of a video before to multiple ads before the video to multiple ad pauses even on relatively short videos (under 10 minutes). Add to that the sponsored sections of the video itself, which are added by the content creator, and other ads (stores, tickets, etc) that sometimes YouTube adds under the video even if you pay for premium.
Google Search pages used to have one or two ads at the top, with a different background colour than search results. Now sometimes I have to scroll down to see organic content, because sponsored content fills my screen.
I don't think I'm entitled to have access to all this for free, but we went too far... and so I use an adblocker on all my devices.
like_any_other · 1h ago
> Why do we feel entitled to get this for free?
With how user-hostile and anti-competitive Google is behaving, this is like asking why soldiers feel entitled to shoot at the enemy. Keep giving them money, keep watching their ads that they sell on rigged auctions [1], and eventually the only way to access the web will be with locked-against-the-user browsers [2], and everything will be surveilled (though it nearly already is - Google never asks itself why it should feel entitled to follow users around the web, or in real-life, despite opt-outs [3], and you'll find support for any alternative OSes mysteriously withering due to secret anti-competitive contracts between Google and manufacturers [4]). I know this isn't the reasoning people use, but that is what the outcome will be.
As for ads - it has always been hard, nearly impossible to block them, and few people did. Just like you can't block a billboard next to the freeway, you can't block a jpeg that's served as part of the webpage you're visiting, as it's programmatically indistinguishable from native content.
What people actually block are not ads, but a hybrid half-ad-half-surveillance entity, that's called an "ad" by historical accident.
Just want to point out, adding on to OP, that creators on youtube get 55% of revenue.
I get that Google has infinite money and infinite evil. But how convenient you also get to skip out on paying the majority expense, which goes to the creator...
And yes virtuous commentor, I know you are one of the 1.5% that convert to a patreon supporter. Now ask everyone else why they get to eat for free (while endlessly complaining that the restaurant sucks).
bgwalter · 48m ago
Because the paid plan isn't anonymous and you have no guarantee that they won't sell your history to advertisers, even if you don't see ads.
Perhaps you also have to show your YouTube history when you enter the US.
BriggyDwiggs42 · 40m ago
There’s no morality one way or the other. Google couldn’t care less about me; I have no personal connection with anyone there. They’ll treat me as poorly as the law allows (and then some) if it increases their bottom line. By the same measure, I’ll do as much as I can get away with to remove the bad aspects of their service. If we lived in a system where I was using a service made by a person I knew and could talk to, then maybe there’d be more obligations to the exchange, but in this impersonal setup I feel no such obligation.
vehemenz · 36m ago
It’s my GET request. I can do what I want with it.
If Google want to force ads, they can put them in the video stream. If not, then they’re trying to have it both ways.
bitmasher9 · 1h ago
Some 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.
psychoslave · 40m ago
It takes a lot of time, money, care, education and love to grow human individual. Who would dare to even start considering paying high fees for the honor of receiving some of their time and attention? Why are video provider not paying people to obtain this privilege? No one dare to think they can get that for free, right?
nurumaik · 24m ago
Do I even need justification for not doing what I don't want to (watching ads)?
arcbyte · 50m ago
For the same reason I had all the ads cut out of my newspaper before I read it back in the day - i don't want to see them.
It's my browser, my copy of the website, and I'll have my user agent do whatever I want.
dleslie · 49m ago
They should follow in the steps of news media and simply block users who use ad blocking.
But they seem hesitant to, probably because that would risk losing the engagement of those users.
aniviacat · 1h ago
Watching 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.
usernamed7 · 10m ago
ads are awful on a good day. YOUTUBE ads are 5x worse.
I'm not going to sit there, waste my time, watching the same ads for the 5th time that has no relevance to me. Adblockers make youtube tolerable. If there were no adblockers i genuinely would be unable to use it.
Has nothing to do with a sense of entitlement, they are ads for things I would never purchase. so whats the point then? Why is it OK for people to pay to waste my time just because they paid to? What gives them the right to force me to watch that? Hard no. It's my browser, and I'll do as i damn well please.
I WOULD pay for youtube if it was a good product. But it's not. I'm not going to opine on all the reasons it's not. if/when they make it good i'll pay. That's a them problem.
but there is NO WAY i am going to start accepting ads back into my life. I'll just stop watching youtube.
charcircuit · 1h ago
There 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.
ysavir · 9h ago
I'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.
MathMonkeyMan · 3h ago
Yeah 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 · 3h ago
It 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 · 3h ago
Out of curiosity I clicked the link and it is funny how they try to blame the extension when is them actually causing the problem.
HDThoreaun · 2h ago
The extension is stealing from them. I get stealing a zero marginal cost good is minor but the agreement you make with YouTube is that you watch an ad in exchange for the video. Why should they serve you the video if you refuse your part of the agreement?
sodality2 · 2h ago
> the agreement you make with YouTube is that you watch an ad in exchange for the video
I never made that agreement. And if some software on my computer somehow gets YouTube to deliver me the content anyway, that's not my fault. In my view, it's a cat and mouse game, they can do whatever they want to try to stop me, and vice versa. If they win, I won't complain; but if I do, so be it.
HDThoreaun · 2h ago
> I never made that agreement
By clicking on the video you did. It is in their terms of service.
How is you purposefully trying to block ads not your fault? Whose fault is it that you installed an Adblock? If you went to a grocery store and told the clerk you already paid and they let you leave would that not be your fault either?
sodality2 · 1h ago
Terms of service aren't legally binding. Theft is of course illegal.
BriggyDwiggs42 · 33m ago
I’m happy to make the agreement I need to so I can access the thing I like, then turn around and violate those terms when it benefits me. Why should I feel a sense of personal obligation towards google?
Toritori12 · 1h ago
I've never said they should, they are free to implement any anti-ad-block for all I care. I just pointed out their lack of honesty about the source of the problem, they should say they are actively blocking the extension rather than the extension is malfunctioning.
mcphage · 2h ago
How are you making an agreement? You can’t say “I’ll watch this video in exchange for X minutes of ads” because YouTube will never tell you how many minutes they’re going to show you, and because they have zero interest in committing to some number of minutes of ads. It’s constantly getting worse, and this process will continue until it kills the service.
nradov · 42m ago
It won't kill the service. The media executives who run YouTube are well aware of how advertising volume affects viewership so they'll titrate up or down as needed to maximize profit.
But don't worry, something else will eventually kill YouTube. Most likely they'll miss some sort of disruptive innovation. Like maybe in 30 years everyone will have content beamed directly into their neutral implants and only a few old people will still watch online videos.
HDThoreaun · 1h ago
The agreement is you watch the ads YouTube serves you. Why would that agreement have to include the amount of ads served? If you are unhappy with their business model you can always pay for premium or stop using it. Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.
mcphage · 51m ago
That’s not an agreement, that’s just YouTube doing whatever they want. Which they can—but then—I can just do whatever I want, too. You don’t need to imagine some sort of covenant being involved.
> Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.
I don’t even do that, I just watch it as-is. I just don’t need to imagine that YouTube and I have agreed to anything.
squigz · 2h ago
> Why should they serve you the video if you refuse your part of the agreement?
I've held the position that, if YT wants to, they can block me from their platform for using an adblocker, and I would have no moral ground to stand on.
However, that isn't what they do. They try to circumvent it. They try to make it technically impossible. They try to mislead users into thinking their extensions are malicious.
ddtaylor · 3h ago
I 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.
nradov · 1h ago
How is it possible to have a high cognitive load while watching YouTube? Are you watching surgery training videos in the middle of conducting a heart transplant or something?
ddtaylor · 3m ago
I am trying to stay as recent with offerings from teams like LangGraph. The rate these frameworks, research, etc. is fast. Either way, if I've set aside some time to focus on a video about X it's very frustrating for me to first disregard a few unrelated Y.
paulcole · 2h ago
You 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?
dleslie · 2h ago
Paying for YT doesn't remove the ads.
On the other hand, the golden era of YouTube has passed. You aren't losing out on much if you simply stop using it.
pier25 · 2h ago
Youtube premium does remove all Google's ads.
Obviously not the ads the content creator has put into the video itself.
chasebank · 1h ago
There's an add-on called sponsor block, which works remarkably well, that will just skip sponsored ads inside videos.
ddtaylor · 1m ago
SponsorBlock is amazing. It tells you how much time you've saved. It adds up quick. I can't say I've met anyone who misses random two minute breaks about weird scam cooking services, etc.
dleslie · 52m ago
Depends on the Premium tier.
But yes, uBlock and Sponsorblock together do a much better job of removing the ads.
yugioh3 · 1h ago
There are no ads when I use YT premium, except for the creators' Hello Fresh type segments. Which perhaps they'd be less incentivized to pursue if people didn't use ad blockers.
dleslie · 52m ago
It depends on the Premium tier.
hombre_fatal · 45m ago
You mean just Premium Light? Still has no ads on videos.
Just sponsored shorts and banners when browsing. But we're talking about videos here.
dleslie · 42m ago
Shorts and music, for now. They'll undoubtedly expand it to all videos eventually.
cyberax · 58m ago
SponsorBlock will help you to get rid of those!
frollogaston · 2h ago
To be clear, you mean it doesn't remove YouTube-placed ads inside the video? Edit: I'm not talking about the creator's own sponsorships, or the YouTube homepage showing static ads for movies or whatever.
stingraycharles · 2h ago
I pay for YouTube premium, it absolutely removes YouTube-placed ads. Creators also get a kickback when premium users watch their videos, as they don’t make money off the YouTube ads anymore.
frollogaston · 2h ago
Ok, that's what I thought too.
aftbit · 1h ago
I wish it would also remove YouTube's internal advertising. I pay for YouTube Premium, but I can't permanently hide shorts or prevent it from popping up whatever random topic they want me to engage with. Every 30 days or so, I have to click "Show Fewer Shorts" and every week or two, I have to opt out of the topic du jour, and I have to do this separately on every device.
thordenmark · 1h ago
There is too much good content on YouTube to simply stop using it. It is a gold mine of tutorials on niche subjects. I just watched best ways to patch an air mattress, and a video on making theater quality popcorn! (and it was delicious)
hedora · 1h ago
I asked kagi’s llm for a recipe on theater quality popcorn (which I do all the time), and it gave the basic recipe (though it suggested butter, when clarified butter is superior in my opinion) with a list of tips. I’ve been having trouble with unpopped kernels (maybe a few dozen per batch), and one of the tips pointed to an excellent tutorial on avoiding unpopped / burnt kernels:
This took me far less time than watching YouTube videos, since that’s one of 5 references the LLM summary included, and the other 4 are information I didn’t need.
deedree · 1h ago
How would you know you won’t get sick? LLM’s scare me with the random stuff. It can be useful in specific cases but I certainly wouldn’t get any recipes that way. I would seriously reconsider friend.
frollogaston · 2h ago
You 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 · 2h ago
You’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 · 2h ago
Except 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.
jbm · 2h ago
I don't know if this is serious or not but I get zero ads with Youtube Premium even on my phone.
sandworm101 · 2h ago
Youtube premium can look very different between places/people. Many with premium still see them. Youtube seems to be testing various markets to see how many ads it takes before people cancel their subscriptions. Also, you have to accept google cookies and such for them to identify you as a subscriber, so many privacy-focused users will see ads regardless of premium subscriptions.
iamjackg · 1h ago
I'd love more info about this, because I've been paying for Youtube premium for years and I haven't seen a single ad.
conradkay · 1h ago
They have "premium lite" as an option for me (US) which says "most videos ad-free*"
betenoire · 2h ago
what? 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
mindslight · 2h ago
Giving them money rewards them for pulling a bait and switch where they set the price of hosting plus watching video at free, but are now trying to extort the ecosystem after so many people spent effort uploading. Don't encourage hostile behavior.
frollogaston · 2h ago
What did you want them to do instead, put ads or charge money per view starting in 2005?
mindslight · 1h ago
Sure, that would have been one honest option. Dumping an artificially free option into the market crowded out other options from being adopted or even developed.
paulcole · 42m ago
How did you expect them to pay for the cost of the service?
The cost of hosting still seems to be free. Isn’t it the watching that comes with a cost?
josephcsible · 1h 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.
pier25 · 2h ago
I'm more than happy to pay for Youtube Premium to remove ads for all the family and ensure content creators can monetize their work.
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 2h ago
Fuck that.
My household uses Newpipe we don't pay for shit.
yugioh3 · 1h ago
Stealing from creators shouldn't be celebrated.
myself248 · 1h ago
I support a _shitpile_ of creators on Patreon and Kofi and more. I subscribe to Nebula, and I get as much as I can from the creators' own pages on those services.
I'm doing my best to move my viewing off of YouTube, and move the money off of YouTube, in hopes that it eases the creators moving off of YouTube.
inversetelecine · 59m ago
Ah, the old "stealing" line.
otterley · 1h ago
Out of curiosity, what pays your own salary?
Aachen · 1h ago
I'm sure that's pure curiosity and not trying to make a point in a roundabout way...
vjulian · 1h ago
I find it hard to discern whether your post is sarcasm. Assuming it’s not, I’m surprised that someone is so cheerfully and voluntarily paying an extra fiat to the virtual landowner.
yugioh3 · 1h ago
Have you ever made a video before? It's actually quite a lot of work, especially if it's any good. Hours upon hours of time.
bobsmooth · 1h ago
Video hosting is expensive. Making videos is expensive. You're not noble for stealing from Youtube or its creators.
No comments yet
ranger_danger · 9h ago
I'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.
peer2pay · 3h ago
It has to be a cost thing. HLS is so insanely optimised down to the hardware level that adding any kind of compute for targeting would increase costs exponentially.
I’m not too deep into it anymore but there’s some great articles from Netflix out there talking about the crazy optimisations done to their edge servers for streaming.
oneseventwonine · 25m ago
Agree, it has to do with cost, considering the sheer number of videos they have. Plus, oftentimes the ad won't be relevant after a week or two, in which case they can't re-encode again.
esperent · 2h ago
It would break all the time stamps as well, unless you had fixed length ads. Sponsorblock already skips ads embedded in videos, so I don't think this would make ads much harder to block.
BriggyDwiggs42 · 28m ago
True, it would be sorta impossible to make timestamps work without sending the length of the ad section, so you could easily skip it programmatically.
cyberax · 53m ago
> HLS is so insanely optimised down to the hardware level that adding any kind of compute for targeting would increase costs exponentially.
Not really. They'll just need to recode for you that one minute with the ad. The rest of the video can stay the same.
If they're doing it smartly, they can even avoid full recompression and just splice in the ad.
thomassmith65 · 3h ago
They don't want to boil the frog too quickly. Eventually, Youtube will embed ads directly into the stream. As the post mentions:
To be clear this isn’t server-side ad insertion; the ad and content streams are still separate (YouTube is doing a server-side ad insertion experiment, but that’s separate from fake buffering)
eddythompson80 · 2h ago
Yep. It's been pretty funny actually both here but especially on r/youtube.
Pretty much since YouTube started cracking down on adblockers, r/youtube top post Every. Single. Day. is usually someone complaining that they just got hit with "adblock detected" and comments split between "Yeah it sucks, hit me last month" and "Huh, uBlock Origin works fine for me. I must be super smart. YouTube can't defeat me"
mullingitover · 1h ago
> Eventually, Youtube will embed ads directly into the stream
We've all seen what they're doing with AI-generated video, and we know their market and political power. Eventually they'll be remaking the video so the person or animal or rock or tree on the screen is giving AI-generated product testimonials.
noman-land · 3h ago
There exists crowdsourced adblocking based on timestamps (SponsorBlock, Tubular). Soon we will have realtime on-device content-aware AI adblocking. They will ever win.
thomassmith65 · 3h ago
Once we get content-aware AI adblocking, every video and podcast will turn into a product placement.
xnx · 2h ago
I use content aware ad blocking to remove inserted and native ads from podcasts. The next level adblocking will be rewriting content that is overly commercial.
noahjk · 2h ago
Any info on how you do that?
toomuchtodo · 2h ago
LLM ad blockers as content processors are next.
nickthegreek · 1h ago
got any links to set this up?
hsbauauvhabzb · 2h ago
It’s already a race to the bottom, blocking tech improves and so does marketing. The latter will pump out as much as you’re scientifically proven to accept before switching off.
ekianjo · 2h ago
They are already doing product placement everywhere..'
thomassmith65 · 2h ago
Few shows are relentless about it.
In the future, everything will be like that vapid chicken wing podcast (the one where they bring on an interesting, talented person and then waste half an hour interviewing her about sriracha)
So Ira Glass will be narrating This American Life while simultaneously reviewing different varieties of Doritos, etc.
...or the producers of The Rest is History will add the Planters Peanut Man as a third host
...or Marques Brownlee will review every product in relation to how well it works with Bose headphones
sodality2 · 2h ago
> Few shows are relentless about it.
My favorite relentless one is Tracker (Amazon Prime), who spend approximately 30% of screen time dedicated to showing off a GMC pickup and Airstream, but the most egregious was one dialog line:
> As Colter enters and gives them hugs, Velma remembers that they got a gift for him. Reenie hands him the gift - very conspicuously packaged in an Amazon box with its trademark logo and blue tape - and says, "I've gotta say, next-day delivery is pretty sweet. Thank you, Amazon Prime!"
nickthegreek · 1h ago
that is not what they do on hot ones. sean is an intelligent interviewer and their team goes above and beyond to find interesting lore in people’s past to showcase. guests are routinely impressed.
thomassmith65 · 1h ago
If a person enjoys a show that is also a brand of hot sauce, it's not for me to say they shouldn't. It's just not my thing; I have too many hangups.
squigz · 2h ago
No, the future will not be like that.
thomassmith65 · 1h ago
I've seen the future, and it kills 99.99% of germs, bacteria and viruses...
...it powers through tough grease and grime
...with no harsh smells!
The future is Fantastik®.
bitpush · 1h ago
I'm sorry to burst your bubble but ad blockers are on borrowed time.
This is like saying I was able to sneak into a concert. Sure, but at some point the restrictions are gonna come down hard.
grugagag · 42m ago
There will always be a cat and mouse chase, regardless of technology advancements.
smitop · 1h ago
YouTube is currently running an A/B test for server-side insertion according to what some other people have posted. I'm not getting SSAI ads so I can't really know much about them though.
Retr0id · 1h ago
One could splice ads out of the video on the client just as easily as they splice them in, assuming you can detect them (which could be done via crowdsourced databases a la sponsorblock).
cyberax · 52m ago
They can splice the video just for you at a random location.
walthamstow · 8h ago
That's how some podcast houses do it. Sometimes they'll be mid sentence and the ad will come in.
I pay for a subscription to The Athletic, who used to offer ad free podcasts in their app. Last month they signed an exclusive deal with Acast, and now I cannot possibly listen to their podcasts without ads.
k12sosse · 3h ago
How does Twitch do it? They're super aggressive and even using third party clients that do a good job and not displaying ads, you still get an occasional "commercial break" screen where they're not serving you the content, or the ad, just a "let's all go to the lobby" screen.
ekimekim · 2h ago
Twitch puts the ads directly in the HLS stream, but as seperate segments from the content (a HLS stream is made of many small video files, on twitch they're about 2s long). They're trivial to recognize and filter out (they're actually explicitly tagged as ad segments) but it still won't serve you the actual stream you were trying to watch - the ad segments override it. The best you can do is just block until the first non-ad segment arrives.
thaumasiotes · 2h ago
Those clients could be doing a better job - when twitch starts playing an ad on the main stream, they also provide a secondary stream that shows the actual content.
crazygringo · 8h ago
I'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?
kevindamm · 2h ago
I suspect the difficulty is due to a fear of it turning away too many users, not necessarily a technical one.
recursive · 2h ago
Turning them to where? Doubt it. Those are low value users anyway.
ilkke · 2h ago
If the value was low they wouldn't be squeezing it.
lanfeust6 · 8h ago
The creators themselves will include sponsor segments in their videos, but some users go a step further and use sponsorblock to automatically skip through.
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 2h ago
If they had balls they'd force the user to be logged in.
optimalsolver · 8h ago
Creators will never accept it.
recursive · 2h ago
Creators will take what they're given. They have no leverage.
magicalhippo · 9h ago
I 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.
bitpush · 9h ago
Account Switcher > Turn on Incognito. (Not the chrome incognito, but YouTube incognito)
_345 · 9h ago
IIRC 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 · 2h ago
You can easily and quickly turn off watch on mobile. Don't remember if it's a hassle in the browser.
k12sosse · 3h ago
IME this turns off the premium benefits, stupidly
frollogaston · 2h ago
Oh that's weird
james_pm · 9h ago
I would love something like what Spotify has - private listening. In the meantime, I just go into the YouTube history and remove anything that I don't want to pollute my recommendations. Turning off search history entirely also is good.
pests · 1h ago
Just delete it from watch history when your done, is what I do.
sc11 · 8h ago
You can remove videos from your watch history and in my experience that does have an impact on the recommendations as it's not factored in anymore
magicalhippo · 8h ago
Right, but that's annoying and you gotta remember. Something easier would be nice.
arccy · 3h ago
I just have a different tab with the history page open to pause / resume history
you don't even need to refresh the page you use to play videos
nick_ · 3h ago
YES. I've been wanting this for years. I want a switch that signals to the analytic/algorithm system that I am consuming this content either...
A) sincerely, trustfully, optimistically, etc.
...or...
B) critically, skeptically, experimentally, observationally, etc.
ai_assisted_dev · 26m ago
Perfectly 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?
nadermx · 24m ago
What's the actual % of people using ad blockers anyways? I feel it cant even be near double digits.
usernamed7 · 19m ago
I'd pay for it if youtube was worth it (it's not)
sc11 · 8h ago
I'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 · 6h ago
I 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.
spudlyo · 18m ago
I'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 · 15m ago
Yes, this is the change that would most improve YT for me.
yugioh3 · 1h ago
yeah 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.
ttyyzz · 8h ago
Having 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?
sidrag22 · 2h ago
its creating a problem and selling the solution to that problem. im surprised there isnt more of a distaste for youtube out there for just their overall product... ads aside. One of the better things ive done for myself this past year is remove the right sidebar as well as almost all of the homepage.
my youtube homepage is just that left sidebar, which has dots if a new video for one of the channels i care about uploads. It totally frees me from clickbait thumbnails, and "youtube rabbit holes".
youtube has just been getting slaughtered with horrible trends of mindless content, low effort documentary stuff, all sorts of low effort garbage with high effort thumbnails/titles. it is so nice to just rid myself of all of it.
frollogaston · 2h ago
They created the product before creating the problem
sidrag22 · 2h ago
market capture and figure out monetization later :)
like a forest preserve deciding theyd like billboards in the middle of their paths after a few years.
grandiego · 3h ago
At least on TV I occasionally catch randomly interesting ads... sometimes. On YT, I'm stuck with the same obnoxious commercial from a company whose service I strongly dislike, playing on loop ever since they associated me to some related product category. They think pestering me with more interruptions will win me over, but their analytics are working in reverse. I can't understand why they're so clueless.
yugioh3 · 1h ago
Is it actually expensive though? Or does it just feel that way? A movie costs $15, or roughly 13 cents per minute of watch time.
The average daily YouTube watch time is north of 40 minutes per day for adults in the US. That's a penny per minute for YouTube... 11x cheaper than a movie.
callc · 1h ago
It’s a psychological problem. Going from $0 to $1 is a mountain.
Starting a product or service at $30 / month sets expectations up front (no ad supported free tier)
This is an incompatible strategy with venture backed “get all the market share possible by offering services for free to crush competitors so we can have a monopoly to exploit later” mindset
pie_flavor · 3h ago
Premium is a good deal if you would have already had Music, and Music is pretty great while also being a good deal. They also have a cheaper 'Premium Lite' these days, though apparently some content still has ads if you use it.
charcircuit · 1h ago
>some content still has ads if you use it
It's for content that use music. As you said of you want ad free music you need the full one.
thallium205 · 8h ago
Youtube Premium is very expensive?
ttyyzz · 8h ago
I would pay that 130€ / year if I was alone. I have to be responsible with the money I earn as I have to feed 3 kids and my wife is not working. We also use other different streaming services like netflix, spotify family... adding youtube premium seems not reasonable for me at the moment.
antoniojtorres · 3h ago
Commenting to share my experience: I ran into and ended up with youtube because it bundles youtube music as well, allowing me to consolidate. I was able to invite my household to the same account.
I also wanted to ensure my views resulted in the creators being paid, it goes without saying that the royalties for streaming are abysmal and is a separate conversation, but it was a contributing factor for me.
torgoguys · 1h ago
In the USA I subscribe to Youtube Premium family. The rate is just $3.00 a month more than Spotify family. For that price you get both the Spotify-equivalent Google-owned service (confusingly called YouTube Music) AND you get ad-free Youtube as a bundle. Basically just $3/month for no ads on Youtube is worth it and much easier to justify for a household on a tight budget.
It might be worth looking into if the pricing differential is similarly minimal where you live.
paulcole · 2h ago
Adding something that users don’t like but that makes the company money to those who are unwilling/unable to pay for it seems very reasonable.
xandrius · 8h ago
Create a built-in Patreon to access premium videos and communities and take a cut.
nick_g · 8h ago
They’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 · 2h 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.
mbac32768 · 8h ago
In 2025 it's actually not that expensive. CDNs aggressively drive down the cost of streaming video.
A 1080p music video costs about one tenth of one cent to serve to one person at retail CDN rates.
You could easily host this yourself and decide what the terms are to view it. E.g. ads, or paywall or free because you benefit from the exposure.
Once upon a time AdSense/YouTube saved you from getting an unmanageable $5,000 bill from your ISP because your content went viral but nowadays their value proposition is more about network effects plus built-in revshare scheme.
dieortin · 5h ago
Assuming your numbers are correct, you’re ignoring all the rest of the infra
briffle · 6h ago
Youtube is $14/month. netflix is $17/month. That is VERY expensive, considering that most of Netflix's cost is production. Youtube has almost no production costs. Their users create content.
Maybe if they paid their users more, so they didn't also have to add 'sponsor segments' inside their video's it would make more sense. The bundling music for the same price is the same crap cable and phone companies have been doing for decades, that most people hate. Let me buy just youtube without ads, and keep spotify.
But as it sits right now, $14/month for video's without youtube ads, but still with ads added by the creators themselves (or paid promotion, I guess) is pretty expensive, compared to $17/month for actual movies with no ads at all.
BXlnt2EachOther · 5h ago
YouTube gives, I think, 55% of revenue (not just profits) to creators, which could be considered similar to production costs making up a majority of expenses.
mirashii · 3h ago
Just for comparison, Netflix in 2024 spent somewhere between $14B and $17B on content, and made $34B in revenue.
blinding-streak · 2h ago
But Netflix doesn't let you upload your own videos and show them to anyone on earth. The businesses are different.
smoe · 3h ago
I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music a couple of years ago because of Spotify showing disruptive ads/promotions on the premium plan. YT Premium for Music + Videos is worth it for me, being about 2.5USD more expensive per month than Spotify where I live. But I agree that one should just be able to subscribe to them separately.
vunderba · 3h ago
You're not wrong, but the amount of content on YouTube (that they need to index, store, and stream) is several orders of magnitude more than what's on Netflix.
And for that matter, the number of active viewers is also significantly higher since there's no paywall. AND they also support live streaming.
bobsmooth · 1h ago
$14 is the average cost for a McDonald's trip. It's really not that much.
absurdo · 9h ago
I 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 · 2h ago
I don't understand this approach. You're going to violate someone else's copyright because you want what they have, but don't want to comply with their terms; this seems like very entitled behavior to me. Isn't it easier and more moral to just abstain from viewing their videos?
BriggyDwiggs42 · 19m ago
I 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.
Aachen · 54m ago
Consider 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
If 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.
HDThoreaun · 2h ago
The next step is to auto download all the videos you might want to watch onto your plex server and strip the ads
zaran · 8h ago
while 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 · 3h ago
Firefox mobile has ublock origin
frollogaston · 2h ago
*not on iPhone
Aachen · 45m ago
Trying 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
pabs3 · 48m ago
Wonder if people will start moving away from the YT frontend to other apps like Grayjay.
Belopolye · 2h ago
I gave up and wrote a script to scrape the channels I like with yt-dlp into my Plex server.
JKCalhoun · 2h ago
That's a good idea for channels you know you like.
Belopolye · 2h ago
Discovery 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 · 1h ago
I 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 · 2h ago
I gave up and paid for YouTube Premium. Probably a top-3 subscription that I’ll never cancel.
Belopolye · 1h ago
Having 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.
tzs · 1h ago
Another 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 · 52m ago
Curious -- why adblocks like uBlock Origin are not very effective at streaming services like Netflix/Hulu (at least the last time I tried)?
southernplaces7 · 3h ago
If 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 · 3h 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.
Didn't know about that, but unsurprising. At least they couldn't extend their length almost indefinitely too, unless you manually skipped.
Belopolye · 2h ago
It 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 · 2h ago
Yeah, 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.
pests · 1h ago
Live TV apps like Pluto scratch that last itch for me. Can put it on a movie channel or stargate reruns and just leave it alone.
brightmood · 8h ago
So 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.
bobsmooth · 1h ago
Floatplane is doing well according to the WAN show.
bitpush · 8h ago
That'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.
bird0861 · 3h ago
Please don't associate actual journalists GamersNexus with those hucksters.
k12sosse · 3h ago
Admittedly don't watch LTT because basically the content is the advertisement. Maybe it's changed.
pests · 1h ago
It’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.
ge96 · 3h ago
If 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 $13 I will get it, I have been converted
arccy · 3h ago
"I want free hosting and an audience but I don't want to pay for it"
ge96 · 3h ago
Yeah I get if that's why I said it
I do pay for it, the time to make the content
Sucks how everything is like that nowadays, IG, Reddit
(have to join a platform to be seen)
No comments yet
markus_zhang · 3h ago
Well, no one pushes YouTube to give free services right? Come on, make us pay for it! See what happens.
kllrnohj · 3h ago
YouTube Premium has existed for years now... You're absolutely able to pay for an ad-free experience, and it provides more financial support to creators than ads do
markus_zhang · 2h ago
That is a good point. But I usually pay through Patreon. I wonder which one is better, and if I can attribute YT premium to a specific author?
appreciatorBus · 1h ago
The existence of premium is not the same as parent poster’s, “make us pay for it” idea, aka a paywall.
If YouTube and its content actually has value, then presumably a paywall would have no effect of revenues of YouTube or creators. On the other hand if the content is actually nearly worthless, the vast majority of people would find something better to do with their time.
I know which outcome I’d be betting on!
JumpCrisscross · 3h ago
> make us pay for it! See what happens
I pay for YouTube and Nebula.
markus_zhang · 3h ago
That’s your choice and I respect that.
Kranar · 3h ago
You can pay for Youtube and you won't get ads.
ge96 · 3h ago
I thought you still got ads guess I'll find out
I'll compromise, I'll get premium but still have my adblock
stavros · 3h ago
They are, aren't they?
thangalin · 3h ago
Mostly stolen from elsewhere:
! Stop sites from prompting to sign into Google account
||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$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)*
tzs · 2h ago
> ! Remove "This video contains paid content" warning
Why?
thangalin · 1h ago
> Why?
I didn't write the filter, hence, "Mostly stolen from elsewhere."
Madmallard · 3h ago
Is this something to put in host file? What is this
ivanjermakov · 3h ago
These are filters for uBlock Origin.
vlod · 3h ago
ublock-origin, open dashboard > "my filters" list
tcfhgj · 3h ago
perhaps filter rules for uBlock Origin
ronsor · 3h ago
uBlock filters
calmbonsai · 1h ago
Don't consume YT content on YT. That's the secret.
FerretFred · 8h 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.
knowitnone · 3h ago
They can advertise to me all day and I wouldn't buy a thing
jordigh · 2h ago
The 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.
JKCalhoun · 2h ago
Yep. And I kinda hate Grammerly now. Whatever it is.
nine_k · 8h ago
Off topic, but I must praise the simple, no-nonsense, readable design of the linked post, and how it loads instantly. Kudos.
iterance · 9h ago
I 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.
tmaly · 5h ago
The number of ads they run reminds me of the good old days where half of the TV show time was commercials.
icehawk · 3h ago
When 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.
tzs · 1h ago
Are you mostly watching short videos? I mostly watch videos that are 10+ minutes and I've never had YouTube come anywhere near either the number or total length of ads that I saw on cable or that I see on broadcast TV.
southernplaces7 · 3h ago
Absurd 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.
add-sub-mul-div · 3h ago
It's worse, because at least cable commercials can be skipped.
spuz · 3h ago
Cable commercials can be skipped?
add-sub-mul-div · 21m ago
Since DVRs, which we've had since 1999.
bird0861 · 3h ago
Youtube will not win this battle.
tcfhgj · 2h ago
Before YouTube loses, blocking ads will be criminalized.
Capitalism always wins
BriggyDwiggs42 · 4m ago
I mean most adblocking software is open source and easily acquired, a lot like torrenting software it’d be near impossible to actually enforce anything.
squigz · 2h ago
Criminalized where?
Not everyone is American.
Aachen · 38m ago
Ransomware 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..
krosaen · 8h ago
I 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.
Aachen · 29m 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)
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
ghfhghg · 8h ago
The "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 · 2h ago
Agreed. 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.
UltraSane · 3h ago
I have every right to try to block YouTube ads and YouTube has every right to try to defeat whatever I do.
squigz · 2h ago
No 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.
k12sosse · 3h ago
And they too, to try to stop people using their platform from doing so.
ChrisArchitect · 8h ago
Related:
Google is intentionally throttling YouTube, slowing down users with ad blockers
If 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.
crazygringo · 9h ago
Where are you located? I've never seen any of those.
Pretty much all of my YouTube ads are for TV shows, movies, cars, mobile games, consumer products, and various consumer services. Volkswagen, Dove, TurboTax, etc. All incredibly mainstream.
Maybe you're located in a country or region maintain advertisers avoid?
furk · 5h ago
In Germany, they keep showing me Israeli propaganda ads. Couldn’t imagine a better adblock reminder myself.
dzhiurgis · 4h ago
Subtle Godwin’s law
hellotheretoday · 8h ago
I don’t get soft core porn ads but I do scams all the time. Bullshit supplements, pyramid schemes, “buy my program to make money” type things. Otherwise it’s mostly political ads, more legitimate consumer products like dishwasher detergent, gambling, and mobile games. NE USA for reference
edwardbernays · 7h ago
Personally, for my own value system, I consider the gambling ads to be as bad as scam ads. I think we'll soon come to see the social harm of gambling ads to be as bad as tobacco ads. We should strive for a culture where people see an ad for addictive services or substances and feel an instinctive, pre-conscious disgust. They are the dirty, disgusting, bloodsucking bedbugs of society.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 8h ago
I get all the ads you mention but I have also gotten the deepfake crypto scam ads. Youtube doesn't discriminate as long as the check clears.
edwardbernays · 8h ago
I'm in America. I only see these scummy ads I talk about, and I assume it's because I'm extremely aggressive about preventing myself from being tracked and profiled. My friends made the horrible mistake of looking into cryptocurrency on Google while signed into their account, so they got targeted by scum crypto ads.
crazygringo · 7h ago
It sounds like you've explicitly opted yourself into the lowest common denominator ads. It's understandable that mainstream companies want to maximize their advertising impact by only targeting the viewers where there is data to suggest the viewers will actually be interested in their products.
I'm honestly not really sure why you're complaining. If you don't want to be tracked or profiled, you're going to get the lowest quality ads. Why do you think higher-quality advertisers should be wasting money trying to reach you, when you are going out of your way to avoid any interest in them?
To be clear, I'm not criticizing what you're doing to avoid tracking, or your stance against it. But I'm questioning why you would then complain about the ads you receive.
edwardbernays · 7h ago
I'm not complaining that higher-quality advertisers aren't spending money trying to reach me. I'm saying the fact that the lowest common denominator ads are so hostile is reason enough to completely avoid them.
This might be a controversial take, but I don't want to see soft-core porn ads. I don't want to see scam ads. I don't want to see the worst of the worst. It is not a necessary state of affairs that the lowest common denominator ads are ads that are explicitly attempting to prey upon the least informed, most vulnerable members of society.
The fact that the worst ads are the way that they are is indicative of YouTube's willingness to engage in user-hostile activities.
If they were less willing to engage in hostile ads, there would be less hostility towards their ads.
YouTube's solution is extremely simple: vet ads and don't accept money to run hostile ads.
crazygringo · 7h ago
> is reason enough to completely avoid them.
Right, then avoid them. Either don't use YouTube, or else pay for Premium so you don't see them.
You claim people are hostile to watching YouTube's ads because of their quality. But I don't think so -- I think they're mostly seeing normal ads, not scammy ones. Because they're not taking measures against tracking. Your experience would seem to be very much an outlier.
I simply don't see the ads you're talking about, not even a little bit, so I can't really speak to YouTube's acceptable ads policies. But just so you know -- you can also mark checkboxes in your Google profile around which categories of ads you are and aren't interested in. I actually did that, and got less ads for categories I have zero interest in. That may help your ads experience, and make your ad quality complaints go away, if you're philosophically OK with that, since you're providing data freely rather than through tracking.
edwardbernays · 3h ago
No, I'm going to continue watching YouTube while also avoiding their ads. If they want to engage in an adversarial relationship then I will as well. Until there's another competitor in the space that provides the same value, I will just take value from the only game in town. They don't owe me their service, but I also don't owe a bad faith monopolist anything. I do pay for premium, and I also block all of their analytics and ads at the network level.
EDIT: also, I think everyone should block ads. We should snub advertisers and surveillers all of the time. If they want to be hostile towards users, users should be hostile towards them.
Capitalists have had it too good for too long. It's time consumers stop caring about how the poor capitalist will make their dime.
Until the capitalists take the time to respect us, the consumers, we don't owe them anything.
It's time for reciprocity. If they're hostile, we reciprocate. If they're cooperative, we reciprocate.
nickthegreek · 1h ago
giving them $13/month is not being hostile to them, it’s being a long term customer. they have exactly the relationship they want with you,
minus your adblocking. i too pay for premium, run a pihole and use ubo. i pay for premium because the company sells a quality product at a good price and adfree. sponsor segments is another thing, but solveable. i also use sponsorblock and have a docker setup to autoskip segments on devices connected to my wifi. but out of all streaming services out there, yt actually seems like the least vampiric.
crazygringo · 3h ago
> I do pay for premium
You pay for Premium?
Then why are you complaining about ads when you don't even see them?
And why are you talking about being hostile to a company when you pay them every month?
I'm even more confused than before.
ndriscoll · 7h ago
Weird way to blame the victim and not the organization pushing scams on people. I vaguely recall that 20 years ago, Google served things like nonprofit or government PSAs when they didn't know what to serve (or thought you were botting), not financial scams.
Speaking of PSAs, the US federal government issued a PSA a couple years ago recommending use of an ad blocker to avoid becoming a victim of financial scams/fraud (purged now for some reason). Why they don't prosecute the ad companies for being the ones to select and deliver the mark is anyone's guess.
Maybe they just want you to buy Premium and get rid of ads altogether. I think it's really good value now, especially the family plan, if you use YouTube heavily, like my kids do.
kyriakos · 8h ago
All my ads are local brands, supermarkets, sport stores and delivery apps. Never seen any had ads, they are annoying but nothing abnormal.
forinti · 8h ago
I don't get such nasty ads, but the ones I get are extremely repetitive. I see the same 3 ads all the time: one for a car, one for a bank, one for clothes.
wat10000 · 9h ago
I 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.
random_ind_dude · 8h ago
I pay for YouTube Premium, but what I am afraid will happen is that once enough users opt to pay for the service, YouTube may pull an Amazon Prime and show ads, and then ask for more money to not see the ads.
wat10000 · 5h ago
Same. But I'll certainly enjoy it while it lasts.
joshlemer · 9h ago
Well, 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 · 8h ago
The 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.
ndiddy · 8h ago
They offer a cheaper version that isn't bundled with Youtube Music, but then you get ads on official music uploads since I guess that's how the licensing works out. https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite
yjftsjthsd-h · 6h ago
Premium Lite has ads, just less. Currently, it's
> Ads however may appear on music content, Shorts, and when you search or browse.
I find it to be an excellent value. It’s the only streaming service I pay for. It’s full of stuff I want to watch and well worth the price.
edwardbernays · 9h ago
I 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.
downrightmike · 8h ago
Even google can't keep malware ads out of their system. If we say have geek squad remove the malware, its $149.99, all because google wanted to show me a $0.0001 value ad. No thanks.
nine_k · 8h ago
You underestimate your attention's value by two orders of magnitude. A typical YouTube ad impression cost is about half a cent or so, sometimes several cents. We're talking serious business here!
sitzkrieg · 8h ago
why would you pay geeksquad to run some programs
No comments yet
Izikiel43 · 8h ago
Yeah, I find instagram ads not that annoying, and they actually promote things I would buy (I've bought a couple of things over the years through their ads).
Youtube/google ads? Never bought anything, automatically assume they are a scam.
brentm · 9h ago
YouTube Premium costs about the same as 2 cold brew coffees and is worth the money.
rafram · 8h ago
Yeah, 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.
tshaddox · 8h ago
It's by far the best value of any of the streaming media services.
ndriscoll · 8h ago
A family plan says it's $23/month. That's well over the cost of a 3 lb tin from Costco ($18.69 by me), which is several weeks if not a month of cold brew.
rafram · 8h ago
We're kind of getting off track here, but a 3-lb tin of preground coffee is not going to taste very good by the time you finish it, if it ever tastes good at all. It's pretty likely to be low-quality and stale before you even pull it off the shelf.
HDThoreaun · 2h ago
Whole bean is the same price
Barrin92 · 8h ago
Paying 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 · 8h ago
> doesn't even produce its own content
How do you think those video bits get streamed all around the world? Magic?
icehawk · 3h ago
People make the videos, and then sometimes youtube pays them for it.
pyth0 · 2h ago
People make videos because there is a platform which makes it incredibly easy to share that video all across the planet without cost to them. And in turn that platform has an enormous base of viewers for that content. To suggest that a world without YouTube (or a similar service) would look the same is ludicrous.
Barrin92 · 8h ago
I 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
bitpush · 8h ago
We're comparing two different companies here. Netflix et al, are in the business of producing original content (good for them), while YouTube et al are in the business of serving user-generated content.
That's not a bug, but a feature. Its the same difference as a high end restaurant, and a hole in the wall restaurant. Both are serving food, yes, but they are doing business in different categories. You cant go to the second restaurant and be like, the food you served didn't come with a smile like this other restaurant here. They seem to have figured it out, why cant you.
Or similarly, you cant go to the high end restaurant and be like - you charge for water now? Why cant you be like this other hole-in-the-wall restaurant.
Barrin92 · 6h ago
the entire point is that in this analogy youtube is quite literally the mega chain self serving restaurant on the most decrepit corner, somehow charging you premium prices despite you having to refill your own water.
They're curating nothing, there's garbage everywhere and you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food
bitpush · 4h ago
> you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food
Then dont go to the restaurant if the "hygiene" is not upto your standards? Why do you insist on eating food from that resturant, and insist that it needs to be free?
xboxnolifes · 5h ago
Netflix costs around double of Youtube Premium for the technical equivalent experience (No ads, UHD playback). It's not like they're charging the same amount for some much better service.
wat10000 · 5h ago
It's interesting to see such different experiences.
To me, YouTube is the gateway to those wonderful hole-in-the-wall places where you get real food made from scratch by people who care. Yeah, there's also a ton of shit. You have to actually make choices, not just take whatever it puts at the top of your recommendations. But the good stuff is there, and it's really good. A gigantic corporation may be intermediating, but the content is real stuff from real people.
Services like Netflix are the soulless mega-chain restaurants serving committee-designed meals that have been focus-grouped and cost-optimized to death.
sidrag22 · 1h ago
there are an absurd amount of different takes on it, its pretty crazy. I probably focus too much on the bad content, meant to grab attention. For that reason i have a distaste for youtube because it sorta pushes that type of stuff to the top, which in my mind makes more people make similar cash grab type content.
meanwhile youtube is actively attempting to keep user's viewing as long as possible... netflix probably doesnt really care if you watch for 2 hours a week vs 10 hours a day, they just want the monthly payment.
ge96 · 3h ago
I might be convinced here, I was under the impression that even after you bought premium you would still see ads
wat10000 · 5h ago
I don’t care what they pay to create content. I care about how much stuff they have that I want to watch. YouTube knocks this out of the park. Netflix fails. I actually have Netflix for free (with some ads) through my cell phone plan and I haven’t used it in a year. I use YouTube daily and the subscription fee is well worth it to remove the ads.
lanfeust6 · 8h ago
Still has a nefarious algorithm.
jamesponddotco · 8h ago
And tracking.
simion314 · 9h ago
I 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 · 8h ago
I 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 · 8h ago
Reframing 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 · 7h 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 · 6h 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.
Velorivox · 12m ago
That is the user's choice. If a user comes to a bookshop wherein they are allowed to read the books for free but only in the store, they have little right to argue that they should be allowed to take the books home like paying customers because the store's lighting is not to their liking and they want to read in 6000K. They are free to picket outside and claim that the store is ruining people's eyesight, but no one sane will take them seriously.
Furthermore, the appropriate solution to this "problem" would be to stop letting people read anything for free.
simion314 · 6h ago
Can you guess how much is my comment energy usage compares versus all the devices that run YouTube with the screen on?
What about those electronic devices that will end their life sooner because of that?
My hope is that other people will read my comment, add their own support or feedback and maybe at least one single person will think mroe and had the morals to refuse implementing anti environment and anti user features.
ranger_danger · 8h ago
How else would you propose they make money (and satisfy contract obligations)? Because nobody else has figured out a better solution.
pirates · 6h ago
it’s funny that you bring up contractual obligations while google ignores the iOS app store rule (contractual obligation) about locking features like PiP behind paywalls.
simion314 · 6h ago
>How else would you propose they make money (and satisfy contract obligations)? Because nobody else has figured out a better solution.
Do they make money from those millions of devices that run with the screen on? How ? Is some devil paying them for the damage caused to the environment?
For ads it makes sense but not for this shit policy, if they hate the users that they use youtube for free and ads are not enough for them then either put more ads, or find some other methods that do not screw then environment (maybe use the sound of crying babies each 30 seconds if you are not a premium )
k12sosse · 3h ago
For babies crying I just come to the YT premium threads on HN.
_345 · 9h ago
What if people just paid for services they use and depend on frequently
xnorswap · 9h ago
I 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 · 8h ago
Why do you think the creators you like exclusively host content on YouTube?
xnorswap · 8h ago
That's not difficult to answer, it's because it's free / they get paid.
bitpush · 8h 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 · 8h ago
YouTube 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.
bitpush · 8h ago
> YouTube is the system
But isnt YouTube a mere player in the game as well?
ndriscoll · 5h ago
Alphabet is the fifth largest company in the world, has earnings higher than most countries' GDP, and is established to have engaged in illegal behavior as a monopolist. It's fair to say they're closer to "the system" than "a player".
Not that this was part of the suit, but the whole practice of giving things away for free and subsidizing them with stalking and ads obviously distorts or completely destroys markets, so yes they can be blamed for doing that. The behavior of these companies is so bad that people in a recent thread were claiming things like chat services (where a single computer can provide service for millions of users) cannot be sustainably run by charging money.
xnorswap · 8h ago
I think viewing YouTube in that manner would be a nihilist point of view.
I can't think of an adjective less suitable for Alphabet/Google/YouTube than "mere".
crazygringo · 8h ago
There's a long tail of people who don't use YouTube frequently but click play on videos embedded on other sites, or on videos linked.
So of course they're never going to pay. That's the problem advertising solves -- infrequent users can be monetized.
YouTube already has an option to pay to avoid ads, for frequent users. And lots of people subscribe to it.
create-username · 8h ago
If people were just paid for services that used them and manipulate them with tracking and behaviour profiles
add-sub-mul-div · 8h ago
I've always paid for cable without complaining, but the adtech surveillance reality that was innovated by the tech industry makes me less willing to support them.
lurk2 · 8h ago
The only reason people use YouTube is because it has had a de facto monopoly on video distribution for the last 15 years.
Teever · 8h ago
What if Google didn't horde whatever data it could about me from the analytics systems that it has installed on a myriad of websites without my consent?
What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?
What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?
bitpush · 8h ago
> What if Google didn't horde whatever data it could about me from the analytics systems that it has installed on a myriad of websites without my consent?
Arent you voluntarily using their website? Nobody is forcing you to open your browser, and type y-o-u-t-u-b-e-dot-c-o-m.
> What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?
MKBHD, LTT and others are willingly uploading videos to YouTube. YT doesnt have an exclusive deal with any of those. Infact, those folks are free to upload the same video to Vimeo, Twitch and others. What is YT doing wrong here?
> What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?
Such as?
queenkjuul · 7h ago
Google analytics tracking is embedded in probably millions of non-Google websites, and YouTube videos get embedded in all sorts of pages.
bitpush · 6h ago
Arent websites voluntarily embedding Google Analytics? They can decide today, if they wanna switch to Plausible, or any of the other analytics providers right?
I still fail to understand how this is a fault of a company? Would you blame Apple if everyone bought iPhones? What should Apple do? Ask people not to buy their phones?
ndriscoll · 6h ago
If airtags were used almost solely to nonconsensually and surreptitiously stalk people (i.e. not to track the belongings of the people buying them), yes I think it would be fair to blame Apple. Especially if that were the advertised purpose, as it is with GA.
bitpush · 4h ago
Google Analytics is a tool that websites use to track users, similar to how a store might use a pen & paper to keep track of phone numbers or names. The store made the decision to buy the pen to track users. Why are you angry with the pen company?
Google Analytics is not going around tracking users. They provide a service that the website you decided to go to (cnn.com, bbc.com) is using. If you have to be angry, be angry with cnn or bbc.
ndriscoll · 4h ago
Pens have a purpose other than surveillance, and aren't as capable as machines. A better analogy would be Bluetooth trackers and cameras with machine vision to identify and watch people's movements and eye gaze as they move around the store. And yes, that is creepy and the manufacturers should be criticized for creating it.
Also, client side scripts do not run on the website's property. They are taking advantage of the wide-open security model of web clients (the model they coincidentally get to define because they dump massive amounts of money into giving away a free browser, making competition in the space nearly impossible) to use people's computers for unauthorized purposes. It's a malware payload just like a crypto miner. They should be treated the same way (or more severely) that they would be if they published miners and told web developers to add them to get free money (taking their own cut of course). The operator and the tool creator should both be blamed for shady behavior when the tool is designed and advertised for shady purposes.
Teever · 5h ago
It's the fault of the company because they leverage their illegal monopoly position to do this.
You're operating under this unrealistic assumption that Google is an innocent entity that has not broken the law to get to the position that they are in.
This is false. Google does not play by the rules and as such your assertion that people should in turn play by the rules when interacting with Google is unreasonable.
bitpush · 4h ago
I dont follow your logic. The website you visit (cnn, bbc) has made the decision to use Google Analytics. They can very well stop using the GA, and nothing would happen.
Imagine all the restaurants in the world used IKEA for their tables & chairs. Can you say OMG IKEA has a monopoly? No sir, IKEA didnt go into the stores and install the tables & chairs, the restuarants did. Will you be angry with IKEA?
Teever · 4h ago
I would imagine that those sites use GA because it's the best tool for their needs. It's probably the best tool for their needs because it is both a very well developed tool with superior integration with other parts of their platforms and has a large developer base that is familiar with it. These advantages come from Google's monopolistic practices and the money and resources that it provides them.
I can certainly imagine such a thing but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant to the situation as IKEA has as far as I'm aware never been ruled to be a monopoly while Google has.[0]
Ultimately my position on this subject comes down to this: Google does things that are hostile to me. They do things that are hostile to you. They do things that are hostile to society writ large. They break the law and violate the social contract. My morals necessitate responding to such an entity with disregard for whatever they're legally entitled to.
I don't like the way that I'm surveilled by Google and I don't like the way that they abuse their monopoly position and lobby the government to make it impossible for me to evade that surveillance.
To bring the conversation back to where it started: I already pay them with my privacy, I pay for the economic harm their monopolistic practices have on society, and I pay for the corrosive effects their lobbying has on the political structure.
I'm not going to be paying them for an ad free Youtube experience.
Business asking for money for goods and services rendered is checks notes making your life miserable?
lurk2 · 8h ago
> checks notes
This is obnoxious.
bryankaplan · 7h ago
I'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.
Tokkemon · 3h ago
And the arms race continues.
ianpenney · 1h ago
I’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.
I'd highly recommend everyone try reducing their intake of passive entertainment like youtube and redirecting that time towards more creative or mindful pursuits.
You're right, I could probably finish my motorcycle build projects without videos. But why??
I also pay for Kagi which has the ability to block certain domains from results. I'd imagine that blocking Instagram, Reddit, Youtube, etc. would also prevent rabbit-holing.
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.
This is one of the things that kills me. Even in broadcasting TV, you get typical :15, :30, :60 ads with the occasional :45 or longer :90. The ad pods are also defined so that you get a set number say something like 3:00 max.
YT has scammy ads where if you are just trying to let something stream in the background while you focus on other things where an ad plays past the 5s skippable time, they have some that are full on half hour if not even longer infomercials that takes completely out of the flow of whatever you were watching. That's down right criminal to me. The fact that long form content can be used as something that interrupts someone else's content is such a strange thing to allow. They must pay out the nose for those ad impressions
You can... just not visit youtube, right?
So even if you’re trying to use YouTube for something of value, you’re battling ads. Or at least our kids are.
Media, on the whole, is a good thing. We know more about the world. We know more about the excesses of the aristocracy. We know more about the violence committed by violent people (and I don't mean local petty crime. Genocide.) Before we can improve these things, we need to know about them. "just don't consume media" is a regression to a time where people knew little outside their local sphere.
Youtube/Google has a monopoly on one part of the modern media landscape and it has to be fixed. Not just put our heads in the sand.
Why should I reward that by paying them?
Seems awfully convenient.
If I were blocking the ads, I wouldn't be aware of how bad it's gotten.
Sounds like awfully convenient motivated reasoning.
But that's not how YT works. YT doesn't charge you for good stuff. It charges you for not delivering crap. That's not legitimate business, that's a racket. I have no qualm punishing YT for that. Content creators are free to find other ways to monetize their labor, if their labor is actually valuable. (And so many of the good ones do, quite successfully.)
Indeed, if there was a 'thin adblock writer line' flag it'd already be on my bumper. Than you for your service, we salute you.
I have been astounded at how scammy those ads are. There is a major class of ads that make fairly significant bullshit medical claims and I’m semi convinced the purpose is not for someone to make money but to wage psychological warfare on vulnerable people. Another class of ads says “the US government is going to collapse and that’s why you should buy a freedom battery” and the ad couches itself as a battery advertisement but how many vulnerable people hear that in the background 16 times a day and don’t end up subconsciously accepting some part of it?
In any case it’s all a manipulative cesspool and it’s bizarre to me that a property that Google otherwise values is willing to sling such slop at its users. I suspect a large part of this is that the executives who run YouTube never see their ads.
If you don't like them, then pay for Youtube Premium and you can get ad-free experience. Although if it's not available in your country, then adblocking is a reasonable approach.
/s
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.
Here's an attempt at a double-negative answer: you can't be ethically compelled into an unethical contract, and since advertisements are manipulative, voyeuristic and seek to take advantage of the limitations of human attentional control, it's a priori impossible for watching an ad or downloading a tracker to ever be ethically compulsory.
You want to watch some content. The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.
You are not obligated to watch ads. You are opting to watch them in exchange for the free content, then skipping out on a commitment you volunteered for while still taking the free content.
The "unethical contact" argument is bullshit, because you made a choice but didn't live up to it. Instead of either paying or not watching, you watched anyway.
The provider is welcome to serve ads, and i am welcome to not watch them. When there are Ads on TV and I get up to go to the kitchen, am i skipping out on a commitment? Am I now a freeloader? Should the TV have a camera to make sure I watch all the ads like a good little boy?
People have been fastforwarding/skipping ads for decades. this is nothing new.
On YouTube, we went from a banner on the video to a few seconds of a video before to multiple ads before the video to multiple ad pauses even on relatively short videos (under 10 minutes). Add to that the sponsored sections of the video itself, which are added by the content creator, and other ads (stores, tickets, etc) that sometimes YouTube adds under the video even if you pay for premium.
Google Search pages used to have one or two ads at the top, with a different background colour than search results. Now sometimes I have to scroll down to see organic content, because sponsored content fills my screen.
I don't think I'm entitled to have access to all this for free, but we went too far... and so I use an adblocker on all my devices.
With how user-hostile and anti-competitive Google is behaving, this is like asking why soldiers feel entitled to shoot at the enemy. Keep giving them money, keep watching their ads that they sell on rigged auctions [1], and eventually the only way to access the web will be with locked-against-the-user browsers [2], and everything will be surveilled (though it nearly already is - Google never asks itself why it should feel entitled to follow users around the web, or in real-life, despite opt-outs [3], and you'll find support for any alternative OSes mysteriously withering due to secret anti-competitive contracts between Google and manufacturers [4]). I know this isn't the reasoning people use, but that is what the outcome will be.
As for ads - it has always been hard, nearly impossible to block them, and few people did. Just like you can't block a billboard next to the freeway, you can't block a jpeg that's served as part of the webpage you're visiting, as it's programmatically indistinguishable from native content.
What people actually block are not ads, but a hybrid half-ad-half-surveillance entity, that's called an "ad" by historical accident.
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/11/25/google-is-three-t...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
[3] https://apnews.com/article/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20200311172517/https://www.proto...
I get that Google has infinite money and infinite evil. But how convenient you also get to skip out on paying the majority expense, which goes to the creator...
And yes virtuous commentor, I know you are one of the 1.5% that convert to a patreon supporter. Now ask everyone else why they get to eat for free (while endlessly complaining that the restaurant sucks).
Perhaps you also have to show your YouTube history when you enter the US.
If Google want to force ads, they can put them in the video stream. If not, then they’re trying to have it both ways.
It's my browser, my copy of the website, and I'll have my user agent do whatever I want.
But they seem hesitant to, probably because that would risk losing the engagement of those users.
I'm not going to sit there, waste my time, watching the same ads for the 5th time that has no relevance to me. Adblockers make youtube tolerable. If there were no adblockers i genuinely would be unable to use it.
Has nothing to do with a sense of entitlement, they are ads for things I would never purchase. so whats the point then? Why is it OK for people to pay to waste my time just because they paid to? What gives them the right to force me to watch that? Hard no. It's my browser, and I'll do as i damn well please.
I WOULD pay for youtube if it was a good product. But it's not. I'm not going to opine on all the reasons it's not. if/when they make it good i'll pay. That's a them problem.
but there is NO WAY i am going to start accepting ads back into my life. I'll just stop watching youtube.
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.
I never made that agreement. And if some software on my computer somehow gets YouTube to deliver me the content anyway, that's not my fault. In my view, it's a cat and mouse game, they can do whatever they want to try to stop me, and vice versa. If they win, I won't complain; but if I do, so be it.
By clicking on the video you did. It is in their terms of service.
How is you purposefully trying to block ads not your fault? Whose fault is it that you installed an Adblock? If you went to a grocery store and told the clerk you already paid and they let you leave would that not be your fault either?
But don't worry, something else will eventually kill YouTube. Most likely they'll miss some sort of disruptive innovation. Like maybe in 30 years everyone will have content beamed directly into their neutral implants and only a few old people will still watch online videos.
> Or you can steal from them, that’s what I do. I’m just not afraid to admit it.
I don’t even do that, I just watch it as-is. I just don’t need to imagine that YouTube and I have agreed to anything.
I've held the position that, if YT wants to, they can block me from their platform for using an adblocker, and I would have no moral ground to stand on.
However, that isn't what they do. They try to circumvent it. They try to make it technically impossible. They try to mislead users into thinking their extensions are malicious.
On the other hand, the golden era of YouTube has passed. You aren't losing out on much if you simply stop using it.
Obviously not the ads the content creator has put into the video itself.
But yes, uBlock and Sponsorblock together do a much better job of removing the ads.
Just sponsored shorts and banners when browsing. But we're talking about videos here.
https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/perfect_popcorn/
This took me far less time than watching YouTube videos, since that’s one of 5 references the LLM summary included, and the other 4 are information I didn’t need.
I’ve been doing #1 for over 5 years and will never do anything different (up to say $50-ish USD a month).
The cost of hosting still seems to be free. Isn’t it the watching that comes with a cost?
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.
My household uses Newpipe we don't pay for shit.
I'm doing my best to move my viewing off of YouTube, and move the money off of YouTube, in hopes that it eases the creators moving off of YouTube.
No comments yet
I’m not too deep into it anymore but there’s some great articles from Netflix out there talking about the crazy optimisations done to their edge servers for streaming.
Not really. They'll just need to recode for you that one minute with the ad. The rest of the video can stay the same.
If they're doing it smartly, they can even avoid full recompression and just splice in the ad.
Pretty much since YouTube started cracking down on adblockers, r/youtube top post Every. Single. Day. is usually someone complaining that they just got hit with "adblock detected" and comments split between "Yeah it sucks, hit me last month" and "Huh, uBlock Origin works fine for me. I must be super smart. YouTube can't defeat me"
We've all seen what they're doing with AI-generated video, and we know their market and political power. Eventually they'll be remaking the video so the person or animal or rock or tree on the screen is giving AI-generated product testimonials.
In the future, everything will be like that vapid chicken wing podcast (the one where they bring on an interesting, talented person and then waste half an hour interviewing her about sriracha)
So Ira Glass will be narrating This American Life while simultaneously reviewing different varieties of Doritos, etc.
...or the producers of The Rest is History will add the Planters Peanut Man as a third host
...or Marques Brownlee will review every product in relation to how well it works with Bose headphones
My favorite relentless one is Tracker (Amazon Prime), who spend approximately 30% of screen time dedicated to showing off a GMC pickup and Airstream, but the most egregious was one dialog line:
> As Colter enters and gives them hugs, Velma remembers that they got a gift for him. Reenie hands him the gift - very conspicuously packaged in an Amazon box with its trademark logo and blue tape - and says, "I've gotta say, next-day delivery is pretty sweet. Thank you, Amazon Prime!"
...it powers through tough grease and grime
...with no harsh smells!
The future is Fantastik®.
This is like saying I was able to sneak into a concert. Sure, but at some point the restrictions are gonna come down hard.
I pay for a subscription to The Athletic, who used to offer ad free podcasts in their app. Last month they signed an exclusive deal with Acast, and now I cannot possibly listen to their podcasts without ads.
A) sincerely, trustfully, optimistically, etc.
...or...
B) critically, skeptically, experimentally, observationally, etc.
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.
my youtube homepage is just that left sidebar, which has dots if a new video for one of the channels i care about uploads. It totally frees me from clickbait thumbnails, and "youtube rabbit holes".
youtube has just been getting slaughtered with horrible trends of mindless content, low effort documentary stuff, all sorts of low effort garbage with high effort thumbnails/titles. it is so nice to just rid myself of all of it.
like a forest preserve deciding theyd like billboards in the middle of their paths after a few years.
The average daily YouTube watch time is north of 40 minutes per day for adults in the US. That's a penny per minute for YouTube... 11x cheaper than a movie.
Starting a product or service at $30 / month sets expectations up front (no ad supported free tier)
This is an incompatible strategy with venture backed “get all the market share possible by offering services for free to crush competitors so we can have a monopoly to exploit later” mindset
It's for content that use music. As you said of you want ad free music you need the full one.
I also wanted to ensure my views resulted in the creators being paid, it goes without saying that the royalties for streaming are abysmal and is a separate conversation, but it was a contributing factor for me.
It might be worth looking into if the pricing differential is similarly minimal where you live.
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
That's older than the "membership" concept. They licensed a bunch of television and movies and made them pay-per-view.
A 1080p music video costs about one tenth of one cent to serve to one person at retail CDN rates.
You could easily host this yourself and decide what the terms are to view it. E.g. ads, or paywall or free because you benefit from the exposure.
Once upon a time AdSense/YouTube saved you from getting an unmanageable $5,000 bill from your ISP because your content went viral but nowadays their value proposition is more about network effects plus built-in revshare scheme.
Maybe if they paid their users more, so they didn't also have to add 'sponsor segments' inside their video's it would make more sense. The bundling music for the same price is the same crap cable and phone companies have been doing for decades, that most people hate. Let me buy just youtube without ads, and keep spotify.
But as it sits right now, $14/month for video's without youtube ads, but still with ads added by the creators themselves (or paid promotion, I guess) is pretty expensive, compared to $17/month for actual movies with no ads at all.
And for that matter, the number of active viewers is also significantly higher since there's no paywall. AND they also support live streaming.
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.
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
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
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.
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?
Until the CALM Act was passed in 2010, networks actually did increase the volume on advertisements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...
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.
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.
.. or a competitor (who's a competitor to LTT? GamerNexus? MKBHD?) would take their place.
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
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)
No comments yet
If YouTube and its content actually has value, then presumably a paywall would have no effect of revenues of YouTube or creators. On the other hand if the content is actually nearly worthless, the vast majority of people would find something better to do with their time.
I know which outcome I’d be betting on!
I pay for YouTube and Nebula.
I'll compromise, I'll get premium but still have my adblock
Why?
I didn't write the filter, hence, "Mostly stolen from elsewhere."
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.
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.
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.
Capitalism always wins
Not everyone is American.
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..
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.
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)
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
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.
Google is intentionally throttling YouTube, slowing down users with ad blockers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44304293
Pretty much all of my YouTube ads are for TV shows, movies, cars, mobile games, consumer products, and various consumer services. Volkswagen, Dove, TurboTax, etc. All incredibly mainstream.
Maybe you're located in a country or region maintain advertisers avoid?
I'm honestly not really sure why you're complaining. If you don't want to be tracked or profiled, you're going to get the lowest quality ads. Why do you think higher-quality advertisers should be wasting money trying to reach you, when you are going out of your way to avoid any interest in them?
To be clear, I'm not criticizing what you're doing to avoid tracking, or your stance against it. But I'm questioning why you would then complain about the ads you receive.
This might be a controversial take, but I don't want to see soft-core porn ads. I don't want to see scam ads. I don't want to see the worst of the worst. It is not a necessary state of affairs that the lowest common denominator ads are ads that are explicitly attempting to prey upon the least informed, most vulnerable members of society.
The fact that the worst ads are the way that they are is indicative of YouTube's willingness to engage in user-hostile activities.
If they were less willing to engage in hostile ads, there would be less hostility towards their ads.
YouTube's solution is extremely simple: vet ads and don't accept money to run hostile ads.
Right, then avoid them. Either don't use YouTube, or else pay for Premium so you don't see them.
You claim people are hostile to watching YouTube's ads because of their quality. But I don't think so -- I think they're mostly seeing normal ads, not scammy ones. Because they're not taking measures against tracking. Your experience would seem to be very much an outlier.
I simply don't see the ads you're talking about, not even a little bit, so I can't really speak to YouTube's acceptable ads policies. But just so you know -- you can also mark checkboxes in your Google profile around which categories of ads you are and aren't interested in. I actually did that, and got less ads for categories I have zero interest in. That may help your ads experience, and make your ad quality complaints go away, if you're philosophically OK with that, since you're providing data freely rather than through tracking.
EDIT: also, I think everyone should block ads. We should snub advertisers and surveillers all of the time. If they want to be hostile towards users, users should be hostile towards them.
Capitalists have had it too good for too long. It's time consumers stop caring about how the poor capitalist will make their dime.
Until the capitalists take the time to respect us, the consumers, we don't owe them anything.
It's time for reciprocity. If they're hostile, we reciprocate. If they're cooperative, we reciprocate.
You pay for Premium?
Then why are you complaining about ads when you don't even see them?
And why are you talking about being hostile to a company when you pay them every month?
I'm even more confused than before.
Speaking of PSAs, the US federal government issued a PSA a couple years ago recommending use of an ad blocker to avoid becoming a victim of financial scams/fraud (purged now for some reason). Why they don't prosecute the ad companies for being the ones to select and deliver the mark is anyone's guess.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221221123349/https://www.ic3.g...
> Ads however may appear on music content, Shorts, and when you search or browse.
- https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/15968883?hl=en
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Youtube/google ads? Never bought anything, automatically assume they are a scam.
That's equivalent to a Netflix subscription, which puts what, 20 billion into original content each year?
How do you think those video bits get streamed all around the world? Magic?
That's not a bug, but a feature. Its the same difference as a high end restaurant, and a hole in the wall restaurant. Both are serving food, yes, but they are doing business in different categories. You cant go to the second restaurant and be like, the food you served didn't come with a smile like this other restaurant here. They seem to have figured it out, why cant you.
Or similarly, you cant go to the high end restaurant and be like - you charge for water now? Why cant you be like this other hole-in-the-wall restaurant.
They're curating nothing, there's garbage everywhere and you're expected to pay 13 bucks so there's no hairs in your food
Then dont go to the restaurant if the "hygiene" is not upto your standards? Why do you insist on eating food from that resturant, and insist that it needs to be free?
To me, YouTube is the gateway to those wonderful hole-in-the-wall places where you get real food made from scratch by people who care. Yeah, there's also a ton of shit. You have to actually make choices, not just take whatever it puts at the top of your recommendations. But the good stuff is there, and it's really good. A gigantic corporation may be intermediating, but the content is real stuff from real people.
Services like Netflix are the soulless mega-chain restaurants serving committee-designed meals that have been focus-grouped and cost-optimized to death.
meanwhile youtube is actively attempting to keep user's viewing as long as possible... netflix probably doesnt really care if you watch for 2 hours a week vs 10 hours a day, they just want the monthly payment.
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.
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
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.
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.
Furthermore, the appropriate solution to this "problem" would be to stop letting people read anything for free.
What about those electronic devices that will end their life sooner because of that?
My hope is that other people will read my comment, add their own support or feedback and maybe at least one single person will think mroe and had the morals to refuse implementing anti environment and anti user features.
Do they make money from those millions of devices that run with the screen on? How ? Is some devil paying them for the damage caused to the environment?
For ads it makes sense but not for this shit policy, if they hate the users that they use youtube for free and ads are not enough for them then either put more ads, or find some other methods that do not screw then environment (maybe use the sound of crying babies each 30 seconds if you are not a premium )
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.
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.
But isnt YouTube a mere player in the game as well?
Not that this was part of the suit, but the whole practice of giving things away for free and subsidizing them with stalking and ads obviously distorts or completely destroys markets, so yes they can be blamed for doing that. The behavior of these companies is so bad that people in a recent thread were claiming things like chat services (where a single computer can provide service for millions of users) cannot be sustainably run by charging money.
I can't think of an adjective less suitable for Alphabet/Google/YouTube than "mere".
So of course they're never going to pay. That's the problem advertising solves -- infrequent users can be monetized.
YouTube already has an option to pay to avoid ads, for frequent users. And lots of people subscribe to it.
What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?
What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?
Arent you voluntarily using their website? Nobody is forcing you to open your browser, and type y-o-u-t-u-b-e-dot-c-o-m.
> What if Google wasn't a monopoly who amassed insane amounts of capital to do this?
MKBHD, LTT and others are willingly uploading videos to YouTube. YT doesnt have an exclusive deal with any of those. Infact, those folks are free to upload the same video to Vimeo, Twitch and others. What is YT doing wrong here?
> What if Google didn't lobby governments around the world for special treatment?
Such as?
I still fail to understand how this is a fault of a company? Would you blame Apple if everyone bought iPhones? What should Apple do? Ask people not to buy their phones?
Google Analytics is not going around tracking users. They provide a service that the website you decided to go to (cnn.com, bbc.com) is using. If you have to be angry, be angry with cnn or bbc.
Also, client side scripts do not run on the website's property. They are taking advantage of the wide-open security model of web clients (the model they coincidentally get to define because they dump massive amounts of money into giving away a free browser, making competition in the space nearly impossible) to use people's computers for unauthorized purposes. It's a malware payload just like a crypto miner. They should be treated the same way (or more severely) that they would be if they published miners and told web developers to add them to get free money (taking their own cut of course). The operator and the tool creator should both be blamed for shady behavior when the tool is designed and advertised for shady purposes.
You're operating under this unrealistic assumption that Google is an innocent entity that has not broken the law to get to the position that they are in.
This is false. Google does not play by the rules and as such your assertion that people should in turn play by the rules when interacting with Google is unreasonable.
Imagine all the restaurants in the world used IKEA for their tables & chairs. Can you say OMG IKEA has a monopoly? No sir, IKEA didnt go into the stores and install the tables & chairs, the restuarants did. Will you be angry with IKEA?
I can certainly imagine such a thing but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant to the situation as IKEA has as far as I'm aware never been ruled to be a monopoly while Google has.[0]
Ultimately my position on this subject comes down to this: Google does things that are hostile to me. They do things that are hostile to you. They do things that are hostile to society writ large. They break the law and violate the social contract. My morals necessitate responding to such an entity with disregard for whatever they're legally entitled to.
I don't like the way that I'm surveilled by Google and I don't like the way that they abuse their monopoly position and lobby the government to make it impossible for me to evade that surveillance.
To bring the conversation back to where it started: I already pay them with my privacy, I pay for the economic harm their monopolistic practices have on society, and I pay for the corrosive effects their lobbying has on the political structure.
I'm not going to be paying them for an ad free Youtube experience.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/05/business/google-loses-antitru...
This is obnoxious.