Ask HN: Has your YouTube usage decreased? With YouTube blocking adblockers, I found myself using YT a lot less. Every time I click on a video, it gets blocked. Then I realize I didn't really care about watching the video. It felt like I caught myself before lighting the cigarette. I welcome the change and it has helped free up my mental space for other stuff. |
In a sense, it has increased my usage, because I've started archiving a whole bunch of videos with youtube-dl so I don't lose them when this clock runs out.
I pay $15.40/month for YouTube Premium and it's a very good investment (better than Netflix, Max or Amazon Prime -- two of those I get for free). There's so much more independent content (not movies or TV shows) on YouTube on subject matters that I'm actually interested in. Also I get to download videos without using YT downloaders.
The biggest use case for me is actually music streaming on my phone in the background. I don't have a separate Spotify account because all the music I actually listen to is on YouTube.
That said, I can see why folks using the free tier might watch less YouTube less.
Reddit usage however, that has decreased a lot for me.
Most of store-front internet seems to be anti-procrastination. At first it looks like it want's to hook you, ie. there is click-bait title of the article. But when you open it there is GDPR pop-up and one has opportunity to pause and realize that viewing that content is not really necessary.
HN on the other hand is just text, moderation, no pop-ups. So it is easy to get hooked.
Multiple creators I follow have confirmed that YTP views are worth more to them than ad-supported views so it's a win-win in my book, the cost of one single strong drink at the bar per month to not see ads while also better supporting the people creating the stuff I want to watch.
Either way, even the current new user rate of $13.99/mo would still be worth it to me because of how much I watch Youtube on devices like my TV which can't run advanced ad blockers, it's still cheaper than some drinks I've ordered this month, but I'm certainly not going to complain about still having the discount.
If you find yourself watching low-quality videos, that’s a problem with your selection of content, not the platform itself.
Not because google took it away to protect that sweet advertising money.
The amount of ppl shamelessly stanning for companies has just gotten ridiculous.
Paying a small fee for a superior service is common sense and has nothing to with “stanning” for companies.
I also don’t even pay attention to upvotes 99% of the time, as it’s pretty unlikely that an old lecture about Hegel hosted on a philosophy channel is going to be clickbait. The clickbait stuff is almost always immediately obvious just from the title and thumbnail image alone.
But if any kind of sponsorship of a video counts as “shameless stanning” to you then yeah the whole concept of YT is just not going to be your jam.
I assume it isn’t free to stream a four hour lecture to my device, so I don’t have an issue paying a small fee to do so. $20/month is nothing compared to the value I get from it.
Grateful for YouTube and enthusiastic to pay for premium.
I get that I'm not YouTube's target captive audience. Perhaps you aren't any more either.
Though that page probably also answers why, somewhat amusingly. Swap the related queries to sort by "top" instead of "rising" and 3 of the top YouTube related queries are: "mp3 youtube" "youtube download" and "youtube to mp3".
[1] - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
This may also be due to competition from TikTok, which became available outside of China 5 years ago.[1]
I’m taking the power in to my own hands like my parents did with me owning distribution and storage. Seeing these dreadful ads played on children shows has made me realize these people have hostile intentions.
Non-English language search was largely unaffected until a year or two ago, but I guess tokenization has improved their ability to filter anything not on an allowlist to trend.
Wherever possible I try to minimize my digital footprint, just because of profiling and the algorithms assuming you want to see that and not that.
I am using youtube less as a video host for videos on my websites though. I don't need to "scale" so a VPS nginx webserver does fine. Their embeds are getting worse and it's simple enough to embed a video file in html now.
I like the platform and being able to get high quality long form content for my hobbies- coffee and particular streamers for a game I play.
But this is intentional avoidance on my part. I don't want Google to ban my Google account because I use an adblocker on YouTube.
Besides, I waste less time now.