YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

YouTube's new anti-adblock measures(iter.ca)

991 points by smitop 331 days ago | 1322 comments

The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance. That’s not to say whether or not the advertisement is for a product or service for which the viewer is interested in purchasing but how it relates to the context in which it is viewed.

People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside. Actual complaints may be about how the billboards block a scenic view but that also seems like another way of complaining about the irrelevance. Similarly, if I am watching a Youtube video, I am never thinking that a disruptive message from a commercial business is relevant to my current activities (uh, passivities?). No advertisement is relevant, not even in-video direct sponsorships, hence SponsorBlock.

If I go to Costco and see an advertisement for tires... well, I’m at Costco, where I buy stuff. Things are sold at Costco and people go there to have things sold to them. I might need tires and realize I can get that taken care of while I’m at Costco. Nearly every advertisement I see at Costco is relevant because it’s selling something I can buy in the same building, indeed usually something juxtaposed close to the advertisement.

I don’t complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they’re irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.

CobrastanJorji 331 days ago | |

> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.

That's not true. We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money. If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.

The YouTube ads are hated because that's the whole point. YouTube has something we want (the video), and they're keeping it from us until they we do something we don't want to do (watch an ad). We dislike these ads almost by definition. If we liked them, we'd seek them out, and we'd call them something else, like "movie trailers" or "Super Bowl ads."

Defletter 331 days ago | | |

Steel-manning the argument, near where I live, it's not that uncommon to see small to moderately sized advertisements along the road, such as a sign outside/near the entrance of a farm that's selling eggs, meat, etc. I am wholly unopposed to this. In fact, I'm very supportive of this, and used them to find a farm to buy local honey from. Whereas the stereotypical massive slabs whose advertisements get wallpapered on, I think those are distracting menaces, particularly if the primary way you see them is by driving.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 330 days ago | | |

> If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.

To be clear, this is my primary point because I’m driving, not shopping. Something that gets close to maybe agreeable (I would still dislike it) would be an advertisement for a gas/charging station on a long highway. But even then we already have official roadsigns that only show logos and are otherwise relatively unobtrusive. Similar ones for fast food, actually.

Such signs seem agreeable given there is some relevance (I legitimately might be low on gas/battery charge/food satiation levels in a context which I am actually likely to have a specific product need from one or more of the advertised businesses) and they are small enough to be ignorable when they are not actually relevant. The biggest issue I think about with that is how a business gets themselves on the sign but it’s probably not that hard once they are operating next to a highway exit.

(I loathe advertisements, so when I say “agreeable” I mean something like “not wholly disagreeable”.)

GuB-42 330 days ago | | |

If you saw a giant, attention grabbing billboard for something you are looking for, you wouldn't hate it. In the context of roads, these are businesses putting their signs on the side of the road. For example I usually find billboards/signs pointing to the nearest supermarket, restaurant or gas station to be useful, because that's the kind of thing I may want do do when I am driving, and I am getting useful information out of them.

Driving-related products like tires are annoying on a billboard on the side of the road because I am obviously not going to look at my tires while I am driving, and it is usually not something you have an urgent need for. They are however relevant (and therefore less annoying) in a gas station, where you can check your tires as you are filling up your tank. It may even give you the idea of checking tire pressure, which is a good thing. One of the most clever driving-related ad was a letter I received from the garage I did car maintenance with, reminding me a couple of weeks before the next scheduled maintenance that it was to be done (with, of course, an offer on their part). It was useful, yet 100% an ad.

And yeah, we usually call things "ads" when they are annoying and by some other word when they are not, and advertisers tend to avoid the word for this reason. Calling it "sponsored" for instance. But it doesn't change that fact.

AlecSchueler 331 days ago | | |

> We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers

If you read the rest of the paragraph it becomes clear that this is what was meant by irrelevant.

socalgal2 330 days ago | | |

> We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money. If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.

I like billboards when I'm driving down an interstate and I want to decide if I should get off at the next stop and I want to know what food options there are. (example: Driving down I5 from SF to LA). I like billboards when they tell me about an attraction coming up. (Winchester House has a billboard) I like billboards when they advertize concerts/entertainers. (Driving down the I15 from Ontario to Oceanside there are ads for who's playing at Yaamava (https://www.yaamava.com/yaamava-theater), Pala (https://www.palacasino.com/entertainment/upcoming-concerts/), etc...

derangedHorse 330 days ago | | |

> If we liked them, we'd seek them out, and we'd call them something else, like "movie trailers" or "Super Bowl ads."

I like these things but I do not seek them out.

stickfigure 330 days ago | | |

> keeping it from us until they we do something we don't want to do (pay for the service).

Fixed that for you.

balanc 331 days ago | | |

[flagged]

sdeframond 331 days ago | | |

> If the billboards were all about driving-related products

Well, I don't complain about road signs.

grepfru_it 331 days ago | | |

Nothing is wrong with billboards, I can look the other way. When the billboards show up on my dashboard and I have to stare at it before I can turn off my exit then we have problems

I don’t mind watching a video with an ad. My child and I can preoccupy ourself. When it’s a 90 second ad we are forced to watch just to watch a 45 second video I’m gonna make certain we don’t watch that ad

sandworm101 331 days ago | | |

>> that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money.

There are places where billboards act as rather effective sound barriers, shielding quiet neighborhoods from road noise.

kolektiv 330 days ago | |

As spoken by thousands of tech companies over and over - if only the ads were more relevant, users would like them! No, they never will. That's because an advert is effectively an unasked-for imposition on my attention intended to benefit somebody else more than it benefits me (should it be considered to benefit me at all). There's a name for behaviour like that: rude.

I am not blind to commercial imperatives, but expecting people to ever feel anything more positive than low-level irritation with advertising is unrealistic. People do not like feeling that others matter more than them, particularly where money is involved. Spaces without adverts in them, whether physical or virtual, are simply more mentally enjoyable to people than those with them. Imagine one of the worlds wonders, natural or otherwise. Imagine the Acropolis, the Coliseum, the Buddha of Leshan - or Lake Annecy, or the Great Barrier Reef, or the Amazon. Now try and imagine a single advert which is so wonderful that it would improve any of them, contextual or otherwise. You can't, and you won't. They're pollution that we tolerate.

derefr 330 days ago | | |

> That's because an advert is effectively an unasked-for imposition on my attention intended to benefit somebody else more than it benefits me

"Adverts" are a pretty incoherent category here. There are a lot of things that are technically advertising — placement of a product, or informational content about that product, paid for by some company's marketing department — that most people would never think to call "an ad."

For example, the end-caps in a grocery store? Ad space, auctioned off by the retailer each month!

But you're already shopping, looking for things you need, comparing brands; and these end-caps are effectively just putting things you might have been looking for anyway, where you'll find them sooner. So people don't tend to think of these as ads.

(They are ads, insofar as they succeed in getting many people to never go to the regular place in the store where that thing is, and therefore never doing a fair compare-and-contrast of the product to its alternatives, being swayed by alternatives that might be running sales, etc.)

But do they steal your time? No, in fact the opposite; if you pay attention to products on store end-caps at all, and ever buy anything from them, then they mostly will end up saving you a tiny bit of time. So consumers don't tend to perceive these as ads.

---

Now take this one little bit further: sponsored search results. These sometimes feel like ads and sometimes don't.

If you think about it, sponsored search results are a lot like store end-caps... except that their existence makes the regular "store shelves" of the SERP page take longer to get to.

If they end up showing you the thing you were actually looking for (as they might if you're searching for a specific brand, and that brand has paid-for placement for their own name — perhaps to defend against others placing for their name; or perhaps they're bad at SEO and their website ranks badly in the organic SERPs for their own name) then these sponsored SERPs feel like they performed a genuine service for you.

Likewise, if they end up showing you something better than what you were looking for (as they might if the organic listings, ranked by SEO-ness, end up ordered askew to actual product value or popularity; while the sponsored listings, ranked by auction, end up ordered by, essentially, the paying company's stock price, and thereby by how much consumers already interact with them), then you also might come away pleased with the existence of these "ads."

But the other maybe 90% of the time, they look and feel and act like ads — things less-relevant than the organic SERPs, that you want to just get out of the way of the search — and so are perceived as ads.

---

And now, consider, say, the catalog of other products available for purchase, that used to come in-box with products from some manufacturers. You'd buy e.g. a LEGO set, or a couch from Sears, and end up with a glorified flyer telling you about all their other products — often in much greater detail than you'd get by viewing the products in a retail store. (This has been mostly superseded by the existence of online stores and product unboxing+review videos — but it's still a good object lesson.)

Were these catalogs, ads? Maybe. Probably the majority of people who received such a catalog never ordered anything from it, and had their time wasted having to dispose of it. But because these catalogs were being sent to people who the manufacturer knew already had shown willingness to purchase from them, it's likely that a much larger percentage of people were "called to action" by these catalogs than by what you'd normally think of as an advertisement.

And, in fact people sometimes would just read this type of "ad" for fun: fantasizing about things they might one day own! (I recall doing this myself, as a child, with certain toy-brand catalogs)

---

One more turn of the screw: is a movie or TV show that stands on its own as a work of entertainment, but which was made at least in part with the motivation of getting people interested in purchasing things from the franchise licensor's universe of branded products... an ad?

Certainly, back in the 80s, when advertising laws were more lax, and there were kids' cartoons running untrammeled with "integrated" advertising: embedding ads for the merchandise itself; showing the equivalent merch in the show; etc — there was every reason to call those shows "ads."

But is Hello Kitty and Friends (2020) an ad?

Now, if you said yes to that, try again with: is a Marvel movie an ad?

If you said yes + no: what's the difference? Prestige?

IshKebab 330 days ago | | |

I totally disagree. There have once or twice been adverts that I've seen where I've thought "yes! I do want one of those!". Obviously I like those adverts.

If there really was a way to magically make all adverts relevant then yes - users would like them!

But that's a totally impossible ask. Not only do websites mostly have no idea what's relevant to me (even with all the tracking) but they obviously have huge financial pressure to show me crap that I wouldn't ever want.

So, yes. Relevant advertising is good, but also basically impossible.

anigbrowl 331 days ago | |

The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.

Bane: For you

I dislike them because they're loud, flashy, annoying, and (most of all) because YT saturates them. It even tries to put them in the middle of songs when it detects a transitional pause. And they are served so often. It's literally worse than broadcast TV, which is an incredibly low bar to step over.

Platforms should not allow advertisers free speech. They should limit the content to static imagery/shots, dissolves, and spoken narration, ie the form rather than the content. Don't tell it can't work, this was how adwords worked on Google Search for years and everyone made handsome profits. Advertising is cancer if allowed to go full spectrum. The people who work at Youtube should be deeply ashamed of what they have allowed it to become and the trash monetization incentives they've established.

user3939382 331 days ago | |

They’re disagreeable because you’re having your attention robbed unsolicited for the purpose of someone else trying to get your money. The whole concept is an insult. At best they drive materialism.

PurestGuava 331 days ago | | |

You're trading your attention for entertainment you don't otherwise have to pay for.

v5v3 331 days ago | |

You don't get it. You are not the target

Most advertising is seeking the less intelligent consumer. Or the young and still naive consumer.

They outnumber you 1 million to 1.

It's why female musicians make more money putting their name to a makeup brand then their music.

It's why Elon will make some promise that is unrealistic.

It's why Apple put low paid everyday tech support staff in their stores and called them Geniuses.

You have to put yourself in the shoes of the mainstream buyer. They see a headline and believe it.

musicale 329 days ago | | |

> It's why Apple put low paid everyday tech support staff in their stores and called them Geniuses.

I always thought the geniuses were the second-level (or higher) Apple support that you escalate to when your problem isn't readily solved by the first level?

dakiol 331 days ago | | |

Couldn’t youtube easily discern those who are young and naive from those who aren’t so that the latter don’t get ads? It would be a win-win for everyone: youtube spends less (no need to spend bandwidth), companies dont get hated that much, non-naive-young consumers are not bombarded with ads.

kaptainscarlet 330 days ago | | |

Spot on. As technically apt people, we grossly overestimate the technical ability of the average user.

Corrado 331 days ago | |

I completely agree, though with a twist. Google knows everything about me and yet I get ADs for things that I would never purchase. Just because I'm a middle aged male I see trucks, and beer, and football advertisements all day long. Those are irrelevant to me. If Google would only use their immense knowledge of me and what I like, I might be more amenable to watching their ADs. Where are the ADs for geeky movies that I might enjoy (is there a new Superman movie coming out)? Or books by my favorite authors? Or video games or computer equipment or electric cars? Hell, I have grandkids so stuff for them might work on me.

To be clear, it's not only Google, all the big providers have so much information on all of us, but they don't seem to take advantage of it at all. I've turned the AD "customization" on/off for all kinds of things and it doesn't seem to matter in the slightest. Nearly everything I see is irrelevant to me.

Nextgrid 331 days ago | | |

Their incentive is to make money, not serve you relevant ads.

If a geeky movie studio pays X to show an ad to people of your profile, while a car manufacturer pays X*2, Google is better off showing you the car, even if they are internally 100% sure you'd buy the movie instead.

Kamq 330 days ago | | |

> Just because I'm a middle aged male I see trucks, and beer, and football advertisements all day long

Well, yeah. Those companies will pay to send their ad to all middle aged men. Those companies could slice and dice more to get better demographics, but they don't think it's worth it.

Google's business isn't to slice and dice the demographics to show you better ads. It's to slice and dice the demographics in any way that the advertisers will pay for.

Because the people who are willing to pay money are, ultimately, the customers.

netsharc 330 days ago | | |

The ads probably get to you subconsciously anyway, IIRC there are studies done by psychology experts (some of them also work for the ad industry) that explains the presence of random ads.

For one thing, if you're suddenly in the market for a truck, you'll see the brand that was in an ad a long time ago and you think "Oh yeah I've heard of Ford, never heard of Isuzu, let's look at the Ford much closer.". Even a tiny nudge that the ad did helps, when selling to millions. Obviously a truck is a big purchase, and you individually probably would do more research, but the nudge applied to millions might move the needle in the heads of a few dozen people.

bevr1337 330 days ago | | |

It's an established strategy to serve you irrelevant ads. When the targeting gets too specific, the people start to notice and panic.

Target is a fun example - they had cases where they revealed pregnancies through targeted ads. Now, they'll put an ad of a lawnmower (untargeted) next to the bassinet (targeted) and customers are less creeped out

ljm 330 days ago | | |

It’s better they don’t. Hyper-targeting of ads to achieve political aims has been happening for the past decade with Meta leading the way.

There is zero situation where this technology doesn’t get co-opted by adverse interests to make your life measurably worse.

Better to keep them dumb and then grow a regulatory spine to put a stop to the endless proliferation of ads. It was done for advertising on other media.

kccqzy 331 days ago | | |

> Google knows everything about me

No it doesn't. Google is highly restrained when it comes to using what it knows about you to serve you ads. Way more restrained than for example Meta or the newer Chinese apps like TikTok.

ptek 331 days ago | | |

I would like to see a advertisement for “The C Programming Language - ANSI edition”. Yes I have a copy but would like to see it advertised on YouTube. Wish my copy was signed :/

scoofy 331 days ago | |

You can also pay for YouTube. I do. It’s nice, not crazy expensive. No ads. Creators get paid. Everyone wins.

stiray 331 days ago | | |

You lose on long run. In few years, you will pay more and still watch ads while YT will no longer be free. (let me remind you of video streaming services)

Managers want their rewards that are tied to earnings and stockholders want to earn more.

And once they both get their money, the next year reward will be tied to even more earnings. And stockholders will want to earn more.

mrob 331 days ago | | |

I think paying for Youtube will increase the chances of my Google account getting banned. I've never heard of Google banning somebody for rejecting adverts. But if I pay them money, there's a chance there will be a problem with the payments, and that risks triggering false positives on automatic fraud detection. If that happens I assume I would be banned with no recourse and no human intervention. The safest thing to do is never change how you interact with Google in any way unless you absolutely have to.

I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience.

ManlyBread 331 days ago | | |

The value I get for paying YouTube doesn't match the price.

Ad blocking is already free and was free for two decades, why would I want to start paying for it now? It's not like I am breaking ToS (despite their pop-ups stating otherwise) and even if I did it is my computer and it is entirely up to me what kind of content it is and isn't going to display.

Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile.

Everyone wins aside from me, the end user. I am paying for something that is already free to do, I get nothing out of it (I still have to run stuff like Sponsorblock to get the content I actually want) and I participate in the upkeep of a business model that not only doesn't have my interests in mind but also has no issues with tricking me (there is no content moderation for YouTube ads and there are plenty of cases in which users are served scam ads).

matwood 331 days ago | | |

Agreed. This isn’t a situation where you can’t pay. YT has a clear, reasonably priced solution for no ads. It also comes with YT music.

If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.

Reminds me of the early justification of Napster where people would complain the latest B. Spears song was garbage and not worth paying for, yet it was the most downloaded song.

zwnow 331 days ago | | |

Why would you pay though its really simple to block ads and youtube is already rich enough. Why bow down to consumerism and enrichment of the already rich?

apples_oranges 331 days ago | | |

This is still hacker news not well behaved consumer news. A friend once said to me „if you have some self respect as a techie you don’t pay for streaming“ ;)

I currently pay for Apple Music though ha

wiseowise 331 days ago | | |

Except for some reason I have to watch ads installed by the creators themselves despite paying 26 EUR.

Brian_K_White 331 days ago | | |

I pay for youtube too and it still completely sucks. I hate when people try this bs.

* I don't want to have to have an account and be logged in to it.

* I pay for youtube but I don't always get to use my account. Other people's houses and devices exist. Other people's accounts exist even on my own device.

* I pay for youtube and still have to get all the baked in ads.

* I pay for youtube and have a wonderful black screen with no suggestions or discoverability because I have history turned off. (the feature does not depend on the history data, because for years this was never a problem, only a few years ago they suddenly decided to essentially penalize people who don't play ball like good little data cows). This even after I partially gave in and subscribed to a bunch of channels, which previously I never did.

* I pay for youtube and still have no control to disable shorts. (don't tell me about browser plugins. The world is far more varied than one browser on one pc. There is no youtube browser plugins for roku or the 100 other platforms that have youtube players. And even on a pc, you're not always on your own pc where you are free to hack on the browser.)

Here is the value you get from paying for youtube:

It's having only 8 of your fingernails pulled out instead of all 10.

uncircle 331 days ago | | |

I have paid for Youtube Premium for a long time. Now it’s pushing shorts (you tried to hide the section and it told you “ok, we won’t show you shorts for 30 days.” I don’t want to see them ever, respect my goddamn choices. Now you can’t hide shorts any more), telling I’m not interested is like yelling into the void, search is useless to the point of being insulting and full of clickbait. Youtube Music is so smart it keeps putting non-music videos in my playlists. Creators are deplatformed, demonetised and paid even less.

Youtube can take a hike, I’m not giving that company a dime and hope it fails. After some changes in my personal life as well, it’s good that I am not spending too much time on that awful website

xigoi 331 days ago | | |

Then I’d have to use the official YouTube app, whose UX is utter garbage compared to Tubular.

whyenot 331 days ago | | |

Yes, I also appreciate the skip ahead feature that lets you fast forward over the sponsorship ads that a lot of creators have started insetting into their videos.

Oarch 331 days ago | | |

Agreed, this is one of the times I'm fully behind a Google business model. I'd happily pay for products rather than have them datamine me senseless.

hiAndrewQuinn 330 days ago | | |

Specifically it's about $14 a month in the US, from what I see.

I say this number so people know how to think economically about this. Anyone who is complaining about this is annoyed, but not $14/month level annoyed on net. Otherwise they'd just get the subscription, or stop watching YouTube.

perryizgr8 331 days ago | | |

It doesn't get rid of the ads. Most medium to big youtubers will have one or more sponsored segments inside the video.

meyum33 331 days ago | |

I don’t get how YouTube advertises. Because we use VPN in China, YouTube simply pushes ads in whatever local language my proxy server happens to be. Which baffles me quite a lot since even the most basic tracking and use history (I have two decades in Google) would tell them at least the language I can understand.

blitzar 331 days ago | | |

The parasitic nature of ad tech attracts the laziest get rich quickest tech workers who go on to management where they hire the griftiest of grifters into their ranks.

imiric 330 days ago | |

Well said.

> I don't complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they're irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.

They're normalized because we've been conditioned over many decades to accept them.

We were psychologically manipulated to associate brands with specific feelings engineered by advertising firms. Cigarettes were "torches of freedom". The Marlboro Man was a symbol of masculinity and confidence. Coca-Cola was the happy Christmas drink. Ads with catchphrases became cultural phenomena: "Just do it", "Whasssuuuuup", and so on.

We watched ads on cable TV even though we were paid subscribers. We watched 30 minutes of ads before a movie in the cinema. We read ads in newspapers and magazines even though we paid for them, and then when we could get them for "free", we liked even more paying with our attention than our money. We consumed TV and radio shows where "brought to you by" was just part of the content. We accepted ~20 minutes of ads for every hour of TV we watched.

So it was natural for advertising to also take over the internet. With the technology built for advertisers by very smart people who got rich in the process, they're able to create campaigns that target potential buyers much more accurately. They can build profiles of people in various invasive, shady and inventive ways, and their profits have never been higher because of it.

Never mind the fact that the same technology is used to manipulate people into thinking and acting in certain ways unrelated to their purchasing behavior, and that this is largely responsible for corrupting democratic processes, toppling governments, and the sociopolitical instability of the past decade. Several birds, one stone.

kerkeslager 331 days ago | |

> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.

The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is the whole thing. There is nothing good about ads, ever. If I want information about a product, I'll go looking for it, and I won't go to an advertiser. If I'm looking to watch a YouTube video, there is absolutely no condition under which I want to hear about a product unless that's explicitly what I went to that video to hear about.

All ads are lies. There is never an ad that tells you about the flaws in a product or compares it honestly to competing product. I'm simply not interested in being lied to.

palmfacehn 331 days ago | |

Consuming content online has always been about agency. You choose the content. Previous media landscapes were largely passive endeavors. Broadcast media choices were limited. You either muted the ads, turned off the TV/radio or endured the advertisements. I often find myself closing YT when ads are played.

Not only are they largely irrelevant, but they are frequently in the wrong language. If I want to immerse myself in the local language, I will go outside and interact in that language. If I am listening to a podcast in English, typically around Anglophone cultural or political topics, why would they invade my space with non-English content?

I don't want to hear local music or K-Pop when I am listening to classical music.

In many cases, the language isn't even local to the country which I reside in. If I cannot have an English-only space on my own computer, I won't be using the site. There's a time and a place for immersion into other cultures. My personal computer in my home office isn't the place.

jader201 330 days ago | |

Ads have been on TV since the beginning of TV. And before that, that were — and still are — on radio.

Where they’re also “irrelevant”.

But the relevancy to our current activities isn’t tied to their effectiveness.

I know that they’re effective, because I had impressionable teens tell me they wanted me to pick up Prime drinks at the store, all because they were convinced drinking Prime was cool.

But let me be clear — I hate ads, too. I hate them on TV, radio, YouTube, billboards, in my mailbox, in my email inbox, and when they cover up 50% of real estate on websites. Pretty much everywhere they show up.

But the purpose of ads aren’t for me to like them, or to be tied to where I’m at a place I can purchase something.

The purpose is to leave a lasting impression.

And, like it or not, they’re effective enough, for some people and for some products, that they’re going to keep doing them, regardless of the fact that nearly everyone hates them.

tzs 330 days ago | | |

> But let me be clear — I hate ads, too. I hate them on TV, radio, YouTube, billboards, in my mailbox, in my email inbox, and when they cover up 50% of real estate on websites. Pretty much everywhere they show up.

The mailbox ads can actually be quite useful. Since I started looking at them instead of just tossing them straight into the recycling bin I've discovered they often contain coupons for good deals at restaurants that I semi-regularly already go to. Those coupons have saved me noticeable amount of money on those visits.

Similarly on groceries. In the grocery case it is not coupons but advertisements of sales. 97% of the time I shop at the large supermarket nearest my home, which usually has the best prices. But occasionally there is a very good deal on something expensive like meat somewhere else and it is their mailbox flyers that let me know about it.

akersten 331 days 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.

mcdeltat 331 days ago |

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.

ysavir 331 days 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 331 days 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.

Toritori12 331 days 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.

Moru 331 days 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.

rf15 331 days ago | | |

turns out you rather stare at an empty plate than being served shit

redml 330 days ago | |

Funny, until now I assumed the "buffering" was just something shoddy with the google infrastructure. Youtube has a reputation for pushing buggy/undesirable changes and already has slow javascript widgets on it so at this point I expect it and "just deal with it". It didn't even occur to me they were trying to poison the well with regards to adblockers.

BrtByte 330 days ago | |

It's like the difference between waiting in line vs being trapped in a loud sales pitch

tlogan 331 days 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.

mycatisblack 331 days ago |

Here’s something many people probably don’t know.

I live in a west-Eu country with several well-defined language borders. Each time we cross a border (on holiday), the youtube ads change language. When I’m logged in. I don’t have a driver’s license, yet the most common ad I get is for second hand cars. I’m in a relationship, yet I regularly get ads for dating sites. I have a job, get ads for jobhunting advice. And the other day I got an add specifically for people born before my birth-year minus one.

YouTube’s ads are on the same level as Spotify’s nagging for their subscription: it’s meant to annoy users into buying their ad-free plan. They use real ads as a thin veneer.

apitman 331 days ago |

> On Firefox this is easily resolvable - you can use a HTML filter to filter out the script tag from the source HTML before the page even starts being parsed. But that relies on extension APIs that Chromium doesn’t support.

I'm shocked

top_sigrid 331 days ago | |

Youtube pushing ads in this way has convinced several non-technical friends who couldn't care less about their browser-choice to switch to Firefox with uBlock origin. Blocking ads in Chrome became such a hustle and is basically not working for Google's own services. Recommending people how don't care to not use chrome in the past was basically hopeless and now I have seen some switch basically from their own. Which I don't want to interpret too much into, but gives a little hope.

qiine 330 days ago | | |

GOOD

madars 331 days ago | |

The second Chrome drops uBlock Origin (as part of their "Manifest V3 without blocking Web Request" plan), I'm off to an alternative browser. Enough is enough.

gregoryl 331 days ago | | |

Do it now? I use Firefox on all devices, it's completely fine.

cobertos 331 days ago | | |

Didn't this already happen? It just seems like it was only progressively rolled out to Chrome browsers. My work PC was hit with this about a month ago, and now I get ads there...

Evidlo 331 days ago | | |

On the upside, if they do, it might obviate the need for YouTube's anti adblocker measures because of the small market share of non-chromium browsers

wiseowise 331 days ago | | |

I’ve heard this threats for 8 years.

“If they press their shoe on me even further, then I’m leaving!”

Firefox been free and there for you for decades, yet you still use this spyware crap from an Ad company. Disgusting.

meepmorp 330 days ago | | |

> I'm going to help them expand their power and influence over the web until they cross an arbitrary point with that power, at which point I'll cut them off and move to a strictly weaker competitor who will be in an even worse position by then!

GOOD plan

ddtaylor 331 days 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 331 days 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?

nicbou 331 days ago | | |

It's the digital equivalent of being stopped by canvassers on your way to something important.

ddtaylor 331 days 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 331 days 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 331 days 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.

frollogaston 331 days 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.

dmd 331 days 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.

mindslight 331 days 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.

adzm 331 days ago | | |

Seriously, it's a great price for a great service.

ranger_danger 331 days 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.

pier25 331 days 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.

ryukoposting 331 days ago | |

I refuse to, because we all know where that road ends. YouTube pilots brief pre-roll ads for Premium users. Then mid-roll ads. Then longer ads. Then they open the floodgates. Google reliably acts with contempt for its users, I'm only responding accordingly.

climb_stealth 331 days ago | |

Hah, this so much. For me it's worth the money for the family plan just to not be exposed to ads playing on family members' devices.

nicbou 331 days ago | |

I create a different kind of content that Google used to train their AI and offer AI summaries. Those same summaries mean I will soon need to find another way to make rent.

BeFlatXIII 329 days ago | |

Would you like a golden sticker?

2OEH8eoCRo0 331 days ago | |

Fuck that.

My household uses Newpipe we don't pay for shit.

yugioh3 331 days ago | | |

Stealing from creators shouldn't be celebrated.

otterley 331 days ago | | |

Out of curiosity, what pays your own salary?

wao0uuno 330 days ago | |

And because of people like you I can enjoy their services for free. Thank you.

vjulian 331 days 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 331 days 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 331 days ago | | |

Video hosting is expensive. Making videos is expensive. You're not noble for stealing from Youtube or its creators.

felineflock 330 days ago |

There are 3 primary undesirability aspects of ads:

1) ads as irrelevant intrusions (in spite of all data Google collects, ads are mostly irrelevant for any person)

2) ads as ugly or blockers of beauty

3) ads as thieves of attention or downright theft (scam ads, illegal products)

Then, should we pay to get rid of ads or not? Two opposite opinions:

1) paying YouTube support creators

2) paying YouTube rewards the "shitification" of the platform

But even for those who pay there are issues: the content creator's own sponsorships, shorts, the risk of account banning by Google.

Then how about compensating creators directly? (Patreon or PayPal for example)

What I don't get is the questioning on the morality of ad blocking. No one should be obligated to watch an ad in one's own device, regardless of whatever "Terms of Service" (which is not a contract). It may be unfair to the content creator who relies on that revenue though.

josephcsible 331 days ago |

> This locks a few global objects by using Object.defineProperty to set them as non-writable, which prevents later code from overwriting them with a Proxy that alters their behaviour. So uBlock Origin can only proxy JSON.stringify if it can run before this locker script does.

This seems like a bug in browsers, or possibly in the spec. Page content and scripts should never be able to restrict what browser extensions can do.

rasz 331 days ago | |

>This seems like a bug in browsers

oh its a Chrome feature! Around 2 years ago Chrome pushed an update that speedup time to load first initial page by delaying Extension initialization. Last page you closed Chrome on will load before uBo, will be able to bypass all filters/block and will be able to detect uBo being loaded.

uzerfcwn 331 days ago | |

Feel free to write a bug report to Chrome developers or ManifestV3 authors. In the meantime, Firefox users can override any delivered content with the webRequest API.

dkga 331 days ago |

Dear YouTube,

It’s not so much that I don’t want to see ads - nobody does, but very very often the ad breaks the vibe of what I am watching and it displeases me to the point I will invest my soul and energy to block ads. Some real-life examples:

- watching a video about coding where the creator has a monotonic, calm voice that keeps me engaged, and VS Code in dark mode which is easy on my eyes in my dark room at 2am, then suddenly comes an ad with bright lights, incredibly high sound and a high-energy backtrack.

- watching a meditation video, the exact same ad appears.

You get the idea.

At the very least, please ensure the ad is in the same volume as the original video. That alone wouldn’t be too hard. In addition, please at least try to match the background overall brightness or color, and the vibe. All this would create value because people would actually watch much more ads.

magicalhippo 331 days 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 331 days ago | |

Account Switcher > Turn on Incognito. (Not the chrome incognito, but YouTube incognito)

_345 331 days 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

k12sosse 331 days ago | | |

IME this turns off the premium benefits, stupidly

james_pm 331 days 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.

sc11 331 days 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 331 days ago | | |

Right, but that's annoying and you gotta remember. Something easier would be nice.

nick_ 331 days 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.

dbbk 330 days ago | |

If you create a new profile and switch to it it keeps your Premium benefits with its own watch history. I do this for communal watching on the living room TV.

pests 331 days ago | |

Just delete it from watch history when your done, is what I do.

arccy 331 days 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

TJTorola 330 days ago |

Not sure what this says about me, but I ran into youtube putting a 3 video limit on me because I was using adblocking and when I hit that limit I just ended up going outside to have a lovely day. Honestly wish video limits was just a feature I could turn on.

Funny enough, awhile back they made it so that if you turned off watch history, they would disable the front page feed. Not sure if that was seen as a punishment to try to encourage people to turn back on watch history but that also ended up being a welcome change.

sharkjacobs 330 days ago | |

> if you turned off watch history, they would disable the front page feed

I wish that was a configureable feature. I do have watch history turned on, and I find it useful and want to keep it, but I would love to have a cleaner less noisy front page.

kapitanjakc 330 days ago | |

I don't have watch history on.

I don't see anything on my home page.

I specially open youtube when I want to look at something and I have to search for it.

I still watch related videos, but it's way better compared to what I got on home page.

sc11 331 days 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 331 days 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 331 days 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.

yugioh3 331 days 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.

fsmv 331 days ago | |

They actually do have this but it's only on the mobile app. Most videos if you tap to skip forward an auto skip button shows up.

xmgplays 331 days ago | | |

I have recently started seeing this on the website, too. It also shows up after you use the temp 2x speed mode by holding left mouse button on the video/tap-holding the video on the app.

CrossVR 331 days ago |

> As I’ll explain, the fake buffering is 80% of the length of the ads you would’ve seen, so even with fake buffering you’re still saving time using an adblocker.

I don't care if the fake buffering is 100% of the ad length. Not having to see the pre-roll ad and no ad breaks during the video is worth the wait.

absurdo 331 days 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.

HDThoreaun 331 days ago | |

The next step is to auto download all the videos you might want to watch onto your plex server and strip the ads

wwweston 330 days ago |

Paying for YouTube has probably been the digital subscription with the single greatest return on a dozen dollars.

Content is uninterrupted without having to engage in the arms race. Music selection is great. Random movies are available.

zaran 331 days 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 331 days ago | |

Firefox mobile has ublock origin

frollogaston 331 days ago | | |

*not on iPhone

CaptainFever 331 days ago |

I just use yt-dlp (YTDLnis on Android, which has a great UI that makes it quite YouTube-like). Downloading instead of streaming (read: downloading then automatically deleting) is so much better.

1. It's all offline play, so I can use my favorite players like VLC. Also, no buffering (after the initial download, of course).

2. I can do anything I want to the video: make edits, splice ads out, extract audio, generate subtitles or dubs, etc.

3. It saves Google server costs! Well, comparing to streaming the same video from them multiple times with adblock on, at least.

MathMonkeyMan 330 days ago | |

I do this so I can watch powerpoint style math videos with the colors inverted, so it's white text on black background instead of black text on white background.

Download the video and then open with `mpv --vf=negate --hwdec=no`.

apples_oranges 331 days ago |

Fake buffering is much better than watching an ad, even if it were longer. Looking at a wait spinner probably is much better for the brain than some attention grabbing ad content.

JoeDaDude 330 days ago |

I watched all the ads, just at 100x speed. It doesn't work anymore - RIP the Ad Accelerator - but I could use it guilt free knowing the ads were watched and google collected their money

https://github.com/rkk3/ad-accelerator

ttyyzz 331 days 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?

elric 331 days ago |

I wouldn't be adverse to paying for YT (or similar services) if they took cash payments. But no, you have to get a subscription. Which involves giving Google your personal details, thus giving the world's biggest data hoarder even more data.

Imagine going back in time 20 years. You want to buy a newspaper from a stall. And the vendor tells you to wait and stare at an add for 30 seconds before you can pick up the magazine. The alternative is that you give that vendor a copy of your ID and credit card. It's insane.

Most of these problems would go away if we had "online cash" (please don't start talking about cryptocurrency). Want to watch a video? Watch an add or pay €0.01. Of course all the money-laundering hysteria will prevent that from happening.

Ultimately, terrorism is why we have ads.

butz 331 days ago |

Good time as any to inform about existence of PeerTube instances. And maybe, to think about better use of your time and watch less videos on the internet? This video could've been a blog post and all that jazz :)

ryukoposting 331 days ago |

I'll take 12 seconds of silence over seeing the same goddamn T-Mobile ad for the 100th time. Seriously, I can watch a 5 minute video and at it'll play the exact same ad THREE TIMES, at the start, somewhere in the middle, then at the end again. And it's always the most loud, obnoxious ad imaginable.

I was skeptical of SmartTube but it really is the only way YouTube is tolerable anymore.

UltraSane 331 days ago |

I have every right to try to block YouTube ads and YouTube has every right to try to defeat whatever I do.

squigz 331 days 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.

UltraSane 330 days ago | | |

At the most fundamental they have the right to send or not send video data to you.

dbbk 330 days ago | |

They could very easily just ban ad blockers from the Chrome extension store, but they haven't

UltraSane 330 days ago | | |

Serious people use Firefox and uBlock Origin.

redml 330 days ago | | |

im sure that's for antitrust reasons.

rasz 331 days ago | |

Problem is Google also controls what used to be called "user agent".

UltraSane 330 days ago | | |

I use Firefox and uBlock Origin

k12sosse 331 days ago | |

And they too, to try to stop people using their platform from doing so.

southernplaces7 331 days 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 331 days ago | |

> TV ads never did these sorts of utterly shitty, tedious things.

Until the CALM Act was passed in 2010, networks actually did increase the volume on advertisements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...

southernplaces7 331 days ago | | |

Didn't know about that, but unsurprising. At least they couldn't extend their length almost indefinitely too, unless you manually skipped.

asadotzler 331 days ago | | |

Some did, some of the time. And many of us stopped watching those stations when it really kicked in back in the early 90s.

k310 328 days ago |

Very late to this party, but here's my two cents worth:

"Random" advertising is completely irrelevant, and a total waste.

"Targeted" advertising is an unwanted intrusion on my privacy.

Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it -- George Monbiot [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advert...

Belopolye 331 days ago |

I gave up and wrote a script to scrape the channels I like with yt-dlp into my Plex server.

JKCalhoun 331 days ago | |

That's a good idea for channels you know you like.

Belopolye 331 days 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.

paulcole 331 days ago | |

I gave up and paid for YouTube Premium. Probably a top-3 subscription that I’ll never cancel.

Belopolye 331 days 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.

squarefoot 330 days ago |

It's so ironic that they resort to these tactics that ultimately ruin the experience for everyone and ultimately attract more users into using adblockers. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the number of users with adblockers installed was so small that Google actually spent more money implementing all those techniques against them than it could lose in lost advertising just by not doing anything.

danhau 325 days ago |

Ohhh, so this is why my videos take so long to start lately. Looks like I‘m in the experimental group as well. I thought my adblocker for Safari (don‘t judge) was broken - well it actually is broken, as I can‘t whitelist YT for some reason, but that‘s a different problem.

This approach could work well, since it makes users think their blocker broke YT. Both brilliant and evil.

FerretFred 331 days 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.

tzs 331 days 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.

cyberax 331 days ago |

I'm curious, has someone tried the authenticated Youtube Premium API in third-party clients?

I'd love to use Invidious or Peertube to watch the videos, but I also want my subscription money to go to the video creators. Youtube allocates it proportionally to the viewing time.

qwertox 331 days ago |

When I start a video and it shows an ad, and 15 seconds into the video I reload the page (similar to switching a channel on tv forth and back again), why do I need to view intro ads again?

Google is so greedy that they don't care the slightest bit about being fair.

brightmood 331 days 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 331 days ago | |

Floatplane is doing well according to the WAN show.

bitpush 331 days 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 331 days ago | | |

Please don't associate actual journalists GamersNexus with those hucksters.

k12sosse 331 days ago | | |

Admittedly don't watch LTT because basically the content is the advertisement. Maybe it's changed.

pabs3 331 days ago |

Wonder if people will start moving away from the YT frontend to other apps like Grayjay.

SilverSlash 331 days ago |

I've seen several people argue about the quality of ads on YouTube. For me it's not about that. I've been using ad blockers for almost 15 years now. Youtube has been free AND ad free for me for a very long time. I don't want to be interrupted with ads now or ever regardless of their quality.

The point is, I'm making zero excuses about why I don't want to see ads on youtube. It's been that way and I want it to remain that way. No subscriptions and no ads. People watching yt on their phones and TVs will still see ads or pay for premium and they can support the service.

gausswho 331 days ago |

What new feature of significance has YouTube actually delivered in years?

areyourllySorry 331 days ago | |

the topics at the top of the homepage, sorting comments by timestamp, the little card when you click on someone's profile picture with other comments on the same channel (which was only on mobile for a while), they improved auto captioning recently and are toying with dubbing, modern codecs… it's the little things that make it better

gausswho 331 days ago | | |

I do appreciate the auto captioning and codec fight. shakes fist at patent trolls

Could care less about the social bits. Comments have been filtered better but I will never trust their black box. With Enhanced YouTube extension I remove all of that so I can retain focus apart from the video at hand.

thangalin 331 days 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)*

ge96 331 days 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 331 days ago | |

"I want free hosting and an audience but I don't want to pay for it"

ge96 331 days 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)

markus_zhang 331 days ago | | |

Well, no one pushes YouTube to give free services right? Come on, make us pay for it! See what happens.

jenders 331 days ago |

YouTube is enabling creative people to make a living wage from doing what they love the most and providing immense value to niche communities. If you get value from it, just pay for it.

ChrisArchitect 331 days ago |

Google is intentionally throttling YouTube, slowing down users with ad blockers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44304293

1970-01-01 330 days ago |

I would love YouTube to include comments in their ads as they do with all other videos. To borrow a current phrase, they chicken out on actual critical feedback and keep pushing their money making agenda with an iron fist. If YouTube actually cared to make their users happy, public comments in ads would filter out all the garbage ads in hours and the entire platform would be forced to accept a minimum yet independent and user driving bar for advertising.

jml19 328 days ago |

The biggest issue I have with YouTube advertising is placement in the video. When watching network television, ads are placed between scenes where a pause is acceptable. On YouTube I'll often get an ad in the middle of an actor's sentence or action where it completely disrupts everything and destroys the moment.

ocfnash 331 days ago |

I'm a bit surprised nobody seems to have mentioned http://fixyt.com

I have a bookmarklet:

javascript:(function() {window.location=window.location.toString().replace(/^https:\/\/www.youtube\./,'http://fixyt.');})()

and whenever I want to watch a YouTube video, I just click that and enjoy an ad-free experience.

gloosx 330 days ago |

Im in A/B group for this, and I had to disable ublock for youtube or videos wont play showing a funny warning. Interestingly the specific autoskip ads extension for youtube still works perfectly, and I dont see any backoff or delay, maybe a short 1s flash is happening and video starts playing. If they block this too I dont mind just predownloading every video with yt-dlp out of spite.

DudeOpotomus 330 days ago |

Ad tech is the reason our society is so polarized. YouTube and Google fund the disinformation and propaganda universe. These fringe people never had a chance to broadcast let alone become wealthy before Google put ads on everything. And now, not only are they given a platform, they're rewarded for being the loudest, most angry, most polarizing, most obnoxious people possible.

Rewarding sensationalism without any oversight is the core problem with society today.

Profits over priciples.

What's nuts is reading thought this thread and reading comments from all the people who think that earning money with digital content is a right. And worse, that because they've earned money in the past, they're entitled to do it forever.

There are no longer any guard rails on sensationalism and since the only measure of success is by the very Fox guarding the Henhouse, it's optimized for the Fox's profit, not public's health and society's principles.

Advertising ruined the world. Ad Tech is a cancer.

wkat4242 330 days ago |

I have to say also, Youtube's ads really suck now.

I watched a mentour pilot video recently on a machine which did not have adblock or sponsorblock (a meta quest headset). I got the same stupid car ad every 2-3 minutes of it. It is basically unwatchable now with ads.

On top of that, the guy had a 5 minute sponsor crap thing in it also.

Youtube is just ridiculous now.

ReptileMan 330 days ago |

Dear Google, just reduce the price of premium to sane levels. no way you are displaying 15$ worth of ads per person per month.

johan914 331 days ago |

As a young person, I get perfectly normal corporate advertisements on YT, with the very rare porno dating ad. My parents on the other hand, get a never ending stream of the shittiest scams, AI voiceovers of Joe Rogan and Zelensky, dick pills. It's clear their tracking targets elderly users with scams. I would never pay for YT premium.

jekwoooooe 331 days ago |

I pay for YouTube premium. Surely everyone here can too. This stuff isn’t free so either deal with ads or pay for premium

asadotzler 331 days ago | |

This stuff is freely available on the open web and I don't deal with ads or pay for premium because there's zero compelling reason to do so.

If creators have a problem with the revenue loss, their contract is with Google and they should take up those concerns with Google. If Google has a problem with how I consume their public content, they can make it non-public or try to block me in some other way.

I owe neither of those entities anything and until they either make the content non-public or find a way to block me without blocking others they want to see their content, I'll keep on consuming it how I like.

jekwoooooe 330 days ago | | |

It’s not “freely available” it’s available with ads. You are just circumventing the ads which is akin to piracy. I’m not making a moral judgement but at least be honest about it. You are trying to consume nonfree content without paying anything

NetOpWibby 330 days ago |

I don’t have a YouTube account and yet their algorithm creates a feed for me anyway. Pretty sweet.

This means they’re also collecting data about some random person in my area but I don’t have a Google account either so that data isn’t really useful.

Ad block FTW

At some point I gotta do a network-wide block instead of per computer.

penguin_booze 331 days ago |

Even as a uBlock and Firefox user, I get the occasional delay at the start of some videos. My workaround is to click on another random video (which, for some reason starts playing immediately), and then go back to my original video, and that starts playing straight away. No-mo waiting.

stackedinserter 330 days ago |

I just can't pay youtube a penny, because it solidifies their monopoly and control. They can and do ban content that they think is "harmful" for whatever reason, they push content that they (not me) like, I don't want to reward any of this.

gblargg 330 days ago |

On my outdated Firefox (with uBlock Origin of course), I've found that opening videos in a new tab (middle click) eliminates ads, while left-clicking reliably shows an ad. I've gotten the fake buffering recently no matter how I open videos.

nine_k 331 days ago |

Off topic, but I must praise the simple, no-nonsense, readable design of the linked post, and how it loads instantly. Kudos.

mythrwy 330 days ago |

Never once have I seen an ad and thought "I need that" and purchased the item. Not in my entire life that I recall and I'm 54.

Maybe this is not the norm but I don't perceive most advertising as being particularly effective.

wkat4242 330 days ago |

This fight will soon take up a whole new level. If they start serving ads inside the content stream, blockers can use AI to determine if the content is ad or not. I don't think this fight will ever be over.

iterance 331 days 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.

krosaen 331 days 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.

randomNumber7 330 days ago |

The moment I can't block ads on yt will be the moment I stop using it.

Besides from that I feel that I waste a lot of time there anyway so I partially hope it happens.

tigrezno 331 days ago |

AI will kill youtube. You'd be able to watch youtube with like 20 seconds global delay while an AI will silently skip all the ads it finds.

It will be our personal content censor.

jay_kyburz 331 days ago | |

That's a level of optimism I haven't encountered in a while.

Sure AI will stream Youtube for you, but it will be chock-a-block full of its own ads.

The actors will pause mid sentence, turn to the camera and smile while they slam down a coke and tell us all about the latest samsung phone.

BrtByte 330 days ago |

Makes me wonder how sustainable this arms race is long-term… will users just give up and pay for Premium, or will adblockers keep finding creative ways around it?

tmaly 331 days ago |

The number of ads they run reminds me of the good old days where half of the TV show time was commercials.

icehawk 331 days 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.

tmaly 325 days ago | | |

My recollection was that this was in the mid 90s.

tzs 331 days 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 331 days 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.

tmaly 325 days ago | | |

When I use to listen to radio, I dreamed of a system that would auto mute the commercials

add-sub-mul-div 331 days ago | |

It's worse, because at least cable commercials can be skipped.

spuz 331 days ago | | |

Cable commercials can be skipped?

mensetmanusman 331 days ago |

I have been fed over 1000 meat stick advertisements in the past couple months. I’m probably consuming all their ad budget as digital meat sticks.

rs186 331 days ago |

Curious -- why adblocks like uBlock Origin are not very effective at streaming services like Netflix/Hulu (at least the last time I tried)?

interestica 330 days ago |

I accidentally did something. I don’t get ads on YouTube in Chrome on iOS. I have a few ideas on how

jenny91 330 days ago | |

Most likely is that you are in some control group to determine effects of ads in general.

interestica 330 days ago | | |

Nah. I get ads in the app and on other browsers. It happened after I was futzing around with dns settings years ago. There’s some combination of whatever I did that keeps chrome ad free. It has persisted through iOS updates as well.

j3th9n 330 days ago |

I switched to Firefox because of the latest measures after 2 decades of using Chrome.

dbg31415 331 days ago |

Discord recently started using a fake loading screen if you have an ad blocker enabled. What’s hilarious (and a little infuriating) is that the app is still obviously working under the hood — you can literally see masked text updating in real time when people send you messages. It’s not “loading,” it’s just refusing to render content locally. They’re not even blocking access to the service — they’re just trying to frustrate you into disabling your ad blocker without explicitly saying that’s what they’re doing. Classic dark pattern.

What’s worse is the privacy side. Discord apparently leaves the microphone open even when you’re using push-to-talk. There’s been anecdotal evidence from users monitoring their network traffic that mic input is still active in the background, likely being piped to local buffers or held in memory under the guise of latency reduction. That might sound innocent, but the distinction between “open but not recording” and “recording” is razor thin when the user has explicitly told the app not to listen until a key is pressed. At minimum, it’s a trust violation — at worst, it’s surveillance theater.

This is the standard bait-and-switch. Build a good product, earn user trust, then slowly degrade it with tracking, telemetry, ads, and manipulative UX until it’s barely recognizable. Discord used to be a breath of fresh air compared to Skype or Teamspeak, and now it’s another data-harvesting machine with a gamer paint job. It’s telling that more users are looking into self-hosted options or jumping to alternatives like Matrix or Mumble. Discord doesn’t have ads yet, but all the groundwork is being laid — and people are right to be wary.

everyone 331 days ago |

If I cant watch Youtube without ads, then I just wont watch it at all.

tropicalfruit 331 days ago |

meanwhile 40m seems to be the new 10:07

videos getting more bloated, recycling the same crap with 90% filler. just like google blog spam.

and tell me how much are your shitty ads worth without anyone to watch them?

YOUTUBE is getting F_CKED!!

peenoise 331 days ago |

Dear dkga, you willing to invest your soul but cant even pay 3 bucks a month. You have a cheap soul. Hey Cheapoo. Dont forget the creators you so willingly watch are paid through them, without ads, there are no creators you so love.

knowitnone 331 days ago |

They can advertise to me all day and I wouldn't buy a thing

jordigh 331 days 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 331 days ago | |

Yep. And I kinda hate Grammerly now. Whatever it is.

osigurdson 331 days ago |

I downloaded some free songs back in the Napster days but now I happily pay for or watch ads for any content that I consume. I have zero interest in ad blockers / other tricks as I want the content creators to get compensated.

calmbonsai 331 days ago |

Don't consume YT content on YT. That's the secret.

martin82 330 days ago |

Does no one care about how much it costs to hosts and stream the massive amount of videos that Youtube hosts?

We all just think that we are entitled to get all that for free?

If you don't want ads, just pay for the damn thing.

mostlysimilar 330 days ago | |

I'd bet they are showing us far more ads than necessary to run the platform, and many of them are trash (crap product, abrasive ad, etc.) Not to mention the tradeoffs with privacy.

faragon 330 days ago |

The more YouTube does that, the more I use Spotify.

BLKNSLVR 330 days ago |

What about the gross content of their shorts clips?

I'm not the kind of person to be inclined to buy 'premium' because they progressively enshittified their free service to make premium seem like the only rational option, but I'm even less inclined to give money to a company that promotes the complete trash and borderline adult and often fraudulent content of their shorts.

I usually refuse to login to YouTube to find the occasional thing, and I'm always bombarded with this trash.

How can anyone support that? Gross.

Also, it should not be forgotten that the FBI, no less, recommend ad blocking just for general internet safety. YouTube has just as much scam advertising as the rest of the internet, since it's almost all Google (who don't seem to be able to police their own platform, and don't seem to be held to account for such dereliction of duty).

righthand 330 days ago |

Somebody start a non-publicly traded ad-based video hosting company and this will be resolved for the most part. If the concern is never "line goes up" then there is less incentive to enshittify the entire platform.

constrictpastel 331 days ago |

I get ads for secret solar panel information that the 'Electric Companies don't want me to know about'. Concern-troll ads, that feel like psychological warfare, about every health ailment that I might potentially have. Boomer-bait 'Patriot-Power Pack! Survival food, ammo and eagle coins. Kolon-Klense type product depicting a woman sitting on the porcelain throne complaining that she can't crank a shit. Las but not least. An over-eager Sylvester Stallone excited to show me his one amazing....salt trick?

bongodongobob 331 days ago |

Thinking YouTube should be free is ridiculous. Pay for a subscription or deal with ads. This discussion is so fucking stale.

vixen99 331 days ago | |

So stale that ~750 folk have commented.

bongodongobob 329 days ago | | |

Of course, it's controversial.

bird0861 331 days ago |

Youtube will not win this battle.

jillesvangurp 331 days ago | |

Yep, they need viewers to click the like/subscribe button. They need that so content creators keep on providing content to Google for free in exchange for popularity metrics. Which they need to close sponsorship deals (because Google isn't paying them a whole lot).

So, Google is merely optimizing the ad clicks and impressions here. If they succeed in becoming too obnoxious with their ads, viewers might leave for other platforms, and then content creators would follow. So, fighting ad blocking has diminishing returns and can actually have a negative impact on them. Which is why ad blocking is still effective in 2025 and why Youtube has thrived by being not too effective with their anti ad blocking measures. This is more about selling the notion to advertisers that they are a really good advertising platform than it is about fighting the minority of users who block their ads no matter what. It won't work. But it won't matter as long as advertisers keep on paying for advertising on Youtube.

The irony of their latest efforts is that it is driving away users from Chrome to more effective alternatives (Firefox, Brave, etc.) and it's driving content creators to depend on sponsor ship deals instead of advertising money from Google. The only reason Chrome exists is actually ads. So, more effective counter measures against ad blocking in Chrome could end up hurting their ad revenue. And Google's behavior is actually causing for increasingly stronger calls to break up Google. None of that is good for Google and their advertising revenue.

tcfhgj 331 days ago | |

Before YouTube loses, blocking ads will be criminalized.

Capitalism always wins

squigz 331 days ago | | |

Criminalized where?

Not everyone is American.

BriggyDwiggs42 331 days 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.

ricardo81 330 days ago |

I'd noticed this behaviour while using Brave browser and experienced the half-dozen second lag and a small popover on the bottom left that when clicked on said "it's because you're blocking ads"

I see also now that the "don't recommend channel" option has been removed (at least for me) which was handy for removing AI slop recommendations. It's fast coming to the point where I'll just avoid YouTube for spending some idle time.

mrkramer 331 days ago |

I also noticed fake buffering[0], it is disgusting but it seems like they are usually on their adblocker blocking spree for a few weeks and then they give up. Their goal is to annoy you not to unblock adblocker and watch ads but to make you buy YouTube Premium because they would earn more money from subscription than they would from you watching ads.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/v1YSWVM.png

kerkeslager 331 days ago |

ITT: advertisers, pretending there's something that could be changed about ads that would make them not ads.

Fundamentally, ads are bad. There just isn't a change you can make to ads that makes them okay.

At a personal level, ads distract us, they tell us we don't have enough, aren't attractive enough, just generally aren't enough. They don't inform us: a one-sided view of a product absent criticisms or comparison to competing products is effectively just a lie.

At an economic level, ads break any benefit to capitalism. Instead of companies competing to provide the best product at the lowest cost, ads make it so a worse product at a higher cost can become the market leader. Ads are one of the primary drivers of the enshittification of everything. Ads allow companies to launch with garbage products that nobody would ever pay money for, slap ads on them to monetize, and thereby prevent competing products actually worth paying for from ever even coming to market.

The only answer is to refuse, on principle, to view ads. If a company receives money from advertisers, you're the product, not the user. If a product has a "free" tier paid for by ads, paying to hide ads doesn't help because you're still competing with advertisers for that company's loyalty, and advertisers will always win in the end (i.e. ads in cable TV--mark my words, there will be ads in all the premium-tier streaming services eventually).

edwardbernays 331 days ago |

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.

kotaKat 331 days ago |

Do I have to go show up at Youtube's HQ and start deliberately slowing people down from entering the building?

Note: when security shows up, I'm going to tell them "maybe later" if I'm asked to leave.

bawana 330 days ago |

Wait till the ads are interspersed into chatGPT output (and Gemini and Claude too). I'll need an local LLM to filter out the ads from the LLM I'm using in the cloud.

hrhhggf 331 days ago |

Dang it

Tokkemon 331 days ago |

And the arms race continues.

MagicMoonlight 331 days ago |

I don’t use youtube anymore. I’m not paying them for slop content they don’t even produce. I’m not watching slop ads.

I was watching hours every day, and I don’t even miss it. There’s so much content to watch on streaming platforms that I can never run out.

brentm 331 days ago |

YouTube Premium costs about the same as 2 cold brew coffees and is worth the money.

rafram 331 days 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.

Barrin92 331 days 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 331 days ago | | |

> doesn't even produce its own content

How do you think those video bits get streamed all around the world? Magic?

wat10000 331 days 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.

ge96 331 days ago | | |

I might be convinced here, I was under the impression that even after you bought premium you would still see ads

tshaddox 331 days ago | |

It's by far the best value of any of the streaming media services.

ndriscoll 331 days 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 331 days 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.

lanfeust6 331 days ago | |

Still has a nefarious algorithm.

jamesponddotco 331 days ago | | |

And tracking.

simion314 331 days 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 331 days 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 331 days 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

simion314 331 days 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 331 days ago | |

How else would you propose they make money (and satisfy contract obligations)? Because nobody else has figured out a better solution.

simion314 331 days 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 )

pirates 331 days 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.

_345 331 days ago |

What if people just paid for services they use and depend on frequently

xnorswap 331 days 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 331 days ago | | |

Why do you think the creators you like exclusively host content on YouTube?

add-sub-mul-div 331 days 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.

crazygringo 331 days 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.

Teever 331 days 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 331 days 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?

create-username 331 days ago | |

If people were just paid for services that used them and manipulate them with tracking and behaviour profiles

lurk2 331 days ago | |

The only reason people use YouTube is because it has had a de facto monopoly on video distribution for the last 15 years.

ZeroClickOk 331 days ago |

"We are working hard to make your life miserable"

bryankaplan 331 days 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.

ianpenney 331 days 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.

ai_assisted_dev 331 days 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 331 days ago | |

What's the actual % of people using ad blockers anyways? I feel it cant even be near double digits.

usernamed7 331 days ago | |

I'd pay for it if youtube was worth it (it's not)