HN comments for: Show HN: YouTube banned adblockers so I built an extension to skip their ads

Not a lot of people will like to hear this, but you can pay YouTube a few dollars per month to remove ads and allow the player to run in the background. A lot of tech people will probably earn that money in a few minutes. Is it really worth investing your own time to remove ads?

A lot of tech people will probably earn that money in a few minutes.

Great. Good for them. What about the rest of the world, some (many) of whom can't afford a(nother) monthly subscription fee?

Are they now to be excluded from participating in popular culture, if they do not wish to be subjected to obnoxious advertising?

Youtube basically reached a de-facto status of a public library, considering it contains archival TV shows, sports matches, original music, documentaries, lessons, instructions, clips of contemporary life, and so on. While median quality is much lower, it easily rivals Wikipedia in breadth and depth.

It my opinion, it should be publicly funded, without discriminating access based on willingness (ability!) to pay or to be subjected to ads.

It's possible that my comment is misinterpreted. YouTube is a service provided by a company and you have to pay for it in some way. You can pay with your time and watch ads, you can pay money and not worry about ads, or you can somehow cheat with tools, so you're again investing your time to install and maintain the cheat.

My sole argument is that a lot of people in tech are better off just paying for Premium because their time is worth more than using a cheat or watching/dealing with ads.

And for those who think it's not worth it, that's totally fine. I'm not arguing that you should pay or even use YouTube.

My only point is that devs should think carefully about the value of their time.

Is it really cheating though? My computer, my rules.

Copyright effectively gives YT an arguably illegitimate monopoly status on a lot of content which hasn't been uploaded elsewhere. Compared to, say, "modern" Usenet where files are distributed and users choose their provider.

Ads are trash and I'm somewhat willing to pay, but not on the Google terms that takes away my privacy and right to run FOSS.

My computer, my rules.

YouTube server's not running on your computer.

YouTube server's not running on your computer.

The client is, my browser is, and the ads that I suppose they want me to watch would be displayed through my computer.

You totally have the right to not watch the ads, because you're right, it is your computer and you get to decide what is done with it.

But if that's the choice you prefer to make, then the objectively more ethical thing to do is to not watch the video content either.

The ethical thing to do is shutdown YouTube because it got popular from serving pirated movies.

YouTube is an inanimate phenomena.

Blocking ads is about as unethical as shielding your eyes from the sun.

Would it be ok for me to manually mute the ad and spend the 20 seconds on a bit of breath work? I'd hate to do wrong by the monopoly...

But the cost of you watching the video you want to watch is on their dime, and the person who made the video gets nothing for their work either.

Pretty sure most people who upload things to YouTube get nothing from the video. YouTube knew what they were doing when they destroyed competition by making uploading anything for free. This is their fault and should have to live with the consequences or charge people to upload content. Charging viewers to watch content is stupid.

If YouTube blocks your player due to your ad-blocker, they are clearly telling you that they no longer want you as a visitor, and you can rest assured that your client did not download any ads. Using your argument, this is a win-win situation.

In reality, however, this is just a dumb justification for unethical behavior because people with ad-blockers will just investigate how to circumvent anti-adblock measures, to keep consuming content for free.

And this behavior is akin to software piracy, which ensured monopolies thrived. Just as in the 90s, when software piracy helped companies like Microsoft or Adobe to own the market, YouTube is now a monopoly thanks to people like you. Because alternatives, like Vimeo or PeerTube, can't differentiate by being ads-free.

And now, the monopoly, which ad-blockers helped create, is used as further justification for the existence of ad-blockers. Funny how that works out.

I wouldn't care, except the writing is on the wall for where this is going. In truth, ad-blocking still works simply because publishers like Google still allow it to work, by not investing in anti-adblock tech or lobbying for legislation that bans it altogether (e.g., DRM). It's either that or paywalls everywhere. And this will hurt the open web, much like how software piracy hurt general-purpose computing.

Enjoy the freeloading while it lasts.

I wouldn't mind paying but I refuse to pay to give them my data and mass-disseminate that for that pleasure. Once they have no access to it and its a black-box they stop obsessing about, we'll talk.

They still get your data as long as you use the service – and by using it you’re telling the creators and anyone you share links with that they need to keep giving Google their data, too, because that’s where everyone else is. Fighting this requires privacy legislation and not using YouTube.

Then they need to fix that. That's the future. This is not a negotiation and consequently, I'm amused by the tenor of this topic and the various threads that try to shift the Overton window as if that is or will remain the case

No, it’s not a negotiation. They’re going to keep tracking you and blocking ad blocker users. What I don’t understand is how anyone can care about that and think they should be putting their time and energy into cementing YouTube’s market share rather than voting with their feet.

"Voting with their feet"? With what alternative? Which other site has TF2 video tutorials on the best rollouts for cp_granary? Cmon, give me a cp_granary rollout video link that's not YouTube.

That argument could work better if premium wasn't priced at probably 10x the average revenue per user they are getting with the ads.

I don't think even Google consider it as a real option internally, it's just a way to get more money out of higher income users.

How did you come up with this number? Advertisers pay a varied rate per impression. Actually, high income users are valuable ad viewers and I'm sure advertisers pay a premium to display ads to them.

They make 11B$ from the premium subcription with only 80 millions suscribers whereas they make around 30B$ from the ads from the rest of the 2.6 billions users.

The pricing of the premium subscription is absolutely insane, they get peanuts from each users from the ads compared to that.

It’s a little pricy. But it’s a bundle with YouTube music which is better than I expected. I think the payments to creators are a little greater because of that.

It’s also a little bit moot because YouTube creators often in-line their own ads so they can’t be skipped…

For the latter there’s the open-source SponsorBlock: https://sponsor.ajay.app/

YouTube isn’t a service. YouTube is a website. The fundamental principle behind the WWW is everybody is free to point their user agent at a public website. Google wouldn’t exist without that principle, they built their empire based on having a crawler download everybody’s websites.

If YouTube wants to put a paywall up then fine, but until then I’m going to keep using my user agent which includes an ad blocker. I didn’t turn the adblocker on specifically for YouTube and I’m not going to turn it off for YouTube.

I'm failing to understand the difference between a website and a service. Are you saying that all modern SaaS offerings are just websites? Can you give some examples of a "service?"

YouTube is a service provided by millions of content creators hosted by YouTube. If they put their content elsewhere, it will disappear and never be seen. YouTube is the tax people are being made to pay in order to have their videos seen or to see videos now, not some great provider

> YouTube is a service provided by millions of content creators...

Exactly!

Now, how do you think these millions of content creators get paid for their content? And why do you think they willingly upload the content to <insert here your streaming platform of choice -- YouTube, Twitch, Nebula, etc>?

Putting YouTube aside -- there's basically three options for the future of content:

1) we pay for content

2) somebody else pays for it (like advertisers), in exchange for something they need (e.g. visibility, ability to sell you products)

3) you freeload folks in #1 and #2 for as long as you can get away with, until you become the majority, and things start crumbling apart (creators stop producing, paywalls create a caste-like system, etc).

Don't back off from your original point, friend. It made complete sense.

The person replying to you probably wouldn't work for free or "exposure," would they?

Until it's publicly funded, it needs to be funded somehow. People who don't pay and block ads are scamming YouTube, or scamming advertisers.

Won't somebody _please_ think of the advertisers!?

lol, do as you like. But this attitude that we are somehow owed a service like youtube for free without ads is comical.

Let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that the adtech industry is just serving up harmless banner ads or 30 second videos and calling it a day. Seeing an ad is one thing, the surveillance that comes with it is a whole new insidious beast.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

If you’re worried about surveillance, stop using YouTube. It’s a Google first-party product, they don’t need ads to collect and resell information about your viewing habits.

You have a YouTube alternative to recommend I take it? Because I looked for one and there isn’t any, just a bunch of half baked sites that I can’t get to work properly. YouTube ate everything

I don’t use YouTube much so I’m skeptical that it’s impossible to live without it but the point is simply that if your top concern is surveillance, then you don’t have a choice where you continue to use Google services.

Sure, maybe we shouldn't be using YouTube at all. And I would prefer if we had more legal protections for user data in the US. But that aside, the sheer size and quality of YouTube. It's availability on every phone tv or whatever. This doesn't just happen magically.

You’re right. It’s not magic at all. It happens via monopoly and network effects

The attitude that we have to somehow endure whatever advertisers want us to and be grateful for it, just because YouTube destroyed all competition with a free-to-use model they changed after becoming a monopoly, is comical.

Considering Google and advertizers have been scamming us for decades, I'm just clawing payback.

Which advertisers have been scamming us? And does that subset encompass everyone who advertises on YouTube?

Not to mention everyone who creates Youtube videos with the expectation of making money.

Those get money off Patreon and sponsor deals. And they’re welcome to come over on Nebula or equivalent.

In any case, if they make the choice to live off advertising, it’s their problem. They are not owed a business model.

And you are not owed online videos.

It is factually incorrect to call it “scamming”, and this cancer of an idea needs to stop.

YouTube has the right to offer only paying accounts, and stop serving free videos. They are choosing not to exercise that option. In fact, they chose to monopolize video streaming by initially offering free videos with no ads. Demanding ad viewing time is a recent change to their business model.

Consumers also have the right to pay for YouTube, or to not watch YouTube, but when YouTube chooses to serve “free” videos with ads that are annoying and waste time, as long as there are easy technical options for removing the ads, the temptation is pretty high. There is no law that you must watch ads, not on YouTube, not on TV, not for billboards, not on the internet. And basically nobody wants to waste time watching ads. This is why it’s wrong to call it “scamming”.

BTW I’m perfectly fine with the idea of an ad-funded business model for free services. I’m only objecting to your framing that avoiding ads when they can puts consumers in the wrong. YouTube’s funding is YouTube’s business, and they are free to fight against ad-blockers, but please don’t be a shill or vilify people for doing the obvious and legal thing. YouTube wants you to spout this crap because Google and advertisers would love it if there was public support for making ad-watching legally mandatory, and that would be a nightmare dystopian future we don’t want.

And more importantly, they are scamming the content creators. They are not usually a massive company, but working alone, with YouTube revenue as their main income.

Why should you get content for free if you aren't able or willing to pay for it?

Do you want to work for free?

Do you want to work for free?

If I "[worked] for free", I'd be giving away hours of my time.

When Google "[gives me] content for free", they're losing fractions of fractions of a cent in bandwidth.

This is a shitty equivalence.

Are they now to be excluded from participating in popular culture, if they do not wish to be subjected to obnoxious advertising?

I think they should pay their fair share and not expect us to give them stuff for free

The 'Us' that want 'that'? Crap! I thought I was a part of a different 'us'. Or is this a different 'us' to the one i first thought?

And if all the "tech people" pay a fixed charge for YouTube regardless of how much they actually use it, they'll remove ads entirely, right?

Get real. Fuck ads. Nobody should ever have to deal with them.

Ads pay for everything online? How else do you pay for everything unless you pay them directly??

A common model is to have a free tier subsidized by the premium users. The free users still provide value to the company, because they're all prospective premium users.

Might not work here, we are not on the inside so can't see.

If youtube can't make it work, I hope they go bust so that something better can take their place.

What they are doing is working great... not sure why you would say that. They are the most popular platform, fantastic services and adding more, and easy to pay to remove ads for a reasonable amount of money. Their model is working great from a business and service perspective.

What else do you want?

You want it to be free for you where you don't have to pay anything to use it? Seems like you don't have a realistic view of what it costs to run / build / maintain this.

I've served terabytes worth of video content from my home internet connection, for free.

Congrats?

You're correct that I don't know how to run YouTube, the company, but I absolutely know what it takes to serve video. I'd like to see more people who aren't YouTube operating in the same sector.

It's so sad to hear people talk like this. Can you not imagine anyone doing anything just for public good?

Even small non-profits have operating costs to cover.

When we’re talking about consistently serving video at the scale they are, those costs won’t be minute.

Obviously they’re looking to turn a profit (if not profiting already), but I don’t think the situation changes dramatically either way.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Sigh, almost nothing can survive without money to pay for it. Either through donations, some type of business model, etc.

My day to day "job" is something for the public good and I do it without getting paid for it. But it still has to make money to survive even with that.

The only options here are

1. deal with ads,

2. pay to support the service without ads,

3. use adblocking and be a free rider off people doing #1, or

4. expect web services to be given to you as an act of charity

You and I are both doing #3, but let's not pretend it's some act of noble civil disobedience. It is good for us that others are subjected to ads, as it allows us to get useful services for free without having to be.

First of all YT and other companies hooked people on free stuff and after years are doing bait and switch - it is totally on them - not on the people wanting free stuff. They should not offer free stuff in the first place to be fair.

Which is also now they are abusing their market position built by cutting all other companies that could do the same but simply could not get past dumping price of free by VC fueled "startups". Which I believe some government org should look into.

Second of all they benefit by externalizing all negative effects of their platforms where they don't handle moderation of offensive comments towards creators which causes lots of psychological damage. There is whole load of evidence they even set it up in ways to specifically get people dependent on dopamine from watching just one more video.

Lastly - cable TV in US was paid with no ads and when they found out they can earn more money they still put in ads.

For me it is noble act of civil disobedience.

If you hate YouTube this much, then stop using it.

First of all YT and other companies hooked people on free stuff and after years are doing bait and switch - it is totally on them - not on the people wanting free stuff.

So you're addicted and can't stop now?

I do block ads as an act of civil disobedience. I also pay for services, when I consider it to be appropriate. The problems with the ad industry run much deeper than ads merely being annoying to look at.

It is bad that anyone is ever subjected to ads.

We're talking about this right now on a web service given to us as an act of charity (modulo the occasional sponsored job listing), and I'd like more of the web to be like that. Refusing to participate in the ad revenue model makes sites like this more likely to arise.

We're talking about this right now on a web service given to us as an act of charity (modulo the occasional sponsored job listing)

I think your modulo is missing some aspects. How many VCs are as famous as YC among tech workers? How many of them have as much credibility in the tech scene as YC? How much of that comes from this site?

I don't know how much it costs to run it, but I assume it's peanuts compared with what YC gets out of it. I wouldn't confuse altruistic charity (e.g. donating anonymously to a cause you don't personally benefit from) with what boils down to sponsorship and getting the goodwill that comes with it.

Adblocker users aren't free riders, they still pay the money google gets for showing ads

If you have a better way to fund sites like YouTube that doesn't involve either adverts or paying a fixed subscription I'd love to hear it!

Pay by use, for either the people watching or the ones hosting video content

You're right in the absolute, but the issue here is that YT has a monopoly. So if it gets too easy for them to make people abandon ad blocking like this, what stops them from rising their prices every year ?

I see this as a nice "balance" that reminds them (if enough people don't cave in) that their monopoly is not giving them a free rein to do anything they want.

They are quickly losing that monopoly to TikTok. It's only a matter of time. TicTok has added 10 minute videos. When they add 1hr videos it will mostly be the end of YouTube's monopoly

Which, FWIW, they got there by being the only player. It's interesting that no one else has really tried until TikTok

I thought tiktok only had brainless videos though.

TikTok is eating the lunch of YouTube, Instagram and Facebook & expanding content by attracting higher quality creators. They're even expanding into shopping. At one point, YouTube only had random videos or pirated shows.

Tim Tok has been struggling with a massive problem where many creators that actually start to get big on the platform end up migrating to YouTube anyway because their pay sucks compared to YouTube, the same goes for instagram and every other platform in the industry. Youtube has a lot of problems but nobody pays better than them https://youtu.be/jAZapFzpP64?si=KrLqetuhzmer2T8H

Nope, content creators are moving en masse due to more fair payout model

Source? All I've heard about TikTok is that it barely pays out at all so content creators mostly sees it as a way to get eyeballs on things that do generate money, like their youtube channels.

Maybe that was true in the past but there's a lot of high value production nowadays on it, including short series.

How do I see 10 minute videos? I usually get mostly brainless content with the stupid voice or music in it.

Than search up some of the content you would like to see. The algorithm is quick and effective.

TikTok is a skinners box, we shouldn’t subject ourselves to machines that are that manipulative

Also, if there’s a thing I would want to support less than a massive data harvesting scheme is a Chinese massive data harvesting scheme.

YT doesn't have a monopoly, it has market share because 99% of the users watch content for free (via ads). If they made everyone pay or the ads were unbearable you'd see the market shift to other youtube front ends or other streaming sites entirely.

Personally, I pay for YT premium since it's a slightly better way to support creators (that I don't directly pay via Patreon) and I get Youtube Music. If they raised their prices unreasonably, I'd just enable my youtube-dl script on my plex server and watch for free there.

Where exactly are YouTube’s competitors? It has none for 99% of the content I watch, although udemy is good for beginner courses

Directly: sites like Twitch are close. Indirectly: Netflix, HBO, etc. all compete for screen-based entertainment.

I also watch a lot of Youtube, outside of a couple of good movies and TV shows that I stream from my plex. So YT premium makes a lot of sense for me

Do you use Twitch? I don’t really see the direct competition besides YouTube’s small amount of live streamers that directly compete with Twitch streamers.

TikTok.

Also - just because it doesn't have the content that you, personally, watch, does not make it not a competitor.

Between Reddit, TikTok, Twitch, Instagram, etc Youtube hardly has a monopoly.

It's like people are being intentionally obtuse in this thread, almost like there's a bunch of paid shills

Let's read your list and consider which of those options hosts long form video content

Reddit: a link aggregator, not a video hosting site Tiktok: Chinese data collection machine that hosts very short form videos Instagram: data collection machine that hosts pictures your mom likes and short form videos Twitch: focused on streaming and gaming, not a YouTube competitor

TikTok absolutely is a competitor. I'm not sure why it has to host long form content for it to be considered a competitor.

If more people get their video entertainment from TikTok, then they watch YouTube less.

Most blatantly, YouTube literally launched shorts recently - an exact TikTok competitor clone.

Depending on your threshold for "long form", nearly all of them:

Reddit has supported direct video uploads for literal years, maybe 5 years at this point, and up to 15 minutes in length. TikTok also collecting your data doesn't change that it hosts videos, and supports up to 10 minutes, and that limit has been increasing as they try to be a more general purpose video platform. Instagram hosts pictures, but also livestreams and videos, both short-form (a few minutes), and long-form (IGTV supports to an hour). Twitch is the only one that seems to clearly not support long-form video content, but even then it's still a competitor because that's not all Youtube does either.

There's nothing quite like being forced to continuously pay someone money to solve a problem they're causing you. Well, there is something a bit like that, and it's called "racketeering". Paying youtube to solve the problem of youtube's obnoxious ads may not rise to the same level, but it's close enough that I find it extremely distasteful.

Don't reward companies for creating artificial problems just so that they can bill you for getting out of your way. Save your money for companies that offer solutions to problems they didn't invent.

YouTube is a private service funded by revenue that has to come from somewhere, we're not entitled to have it for free. How do you suppose they'll earn money without ads or subscriptions?

It isn't the user's responsibility to find a working business model for a corporation. The same principle applies whether it is a news web site or a free video hosting web site.

A business model based on taking away basic web browser functionality like being able to play videos in the background and removing unwanted content then selling it back to the user is a toxic business model. Anybody who pays for a blatant scam like Youtube "Premium" is part of the problem.

Nobody is asking you to find them a business model, just to be honest about what you’re doing. If you don’t like YouTube, stop going there - then Google doesn’t your data and you don’t have to care about their design decisions.

Surprise: you can like the content on YouTube (which is not their property in the first place) without liking YouTube. YouTube is practically holding an incredible amount of knowledge and information hostage to feed Google’s insatiable desire for profits.

You can like the content while hating the delivery mechanism and trying to fix it up to the best of your ability.

But you’re not fixing it up at all: only ripping off the people who made the content you like. Google still gets all of your data and they can share it however they want at that point.

Go watch my videos on YouTube. I won’t get a dime. I have no idea what you are talking about. Maybe, if I get enough subscribers, Google will bless me with some portion of the money they get.

Why did you put them on YouTube? If it’s for free hosting, ease of use, or ease of discovery, well, that’s what they’re giving you even if you don’t generate enough activity to get a direct payment. Nobody is compelled to put content on YouTube, they’re doing it because they get something out of the deal – and that’s paid for by ads. You don’t have to like it but if you don’t, stop using it and start supporting creators elsewhere so you’re not reinforcing the idea that everything has to be on YouTube.

That’s kind of not the point. They ate the competition by offering free hosting, that was their entire point of existing. Now they are realizing why everyone else was charging for hosting… but charging the wrong person.

In reality, I once had monetized videos until one day they changed the rules to “number of subscribers” and none of my videos mentioned “subscribe” so I didn’t have enough. Oh well.

Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. Most people will never see a dime of the money made from their videos. One-hit-wonders on YouTube are now pointless.

YouTube is practically holding an incredible amount of knowledge and information hostage to feed Google’s insatiable desire for profits.

Free storage of data uploaded by willing users = hosting the data hostage?

It’s a monopoly. You can’t exactly go elsewhere. Try it for 30 days

I have been doing it for considerably longer than 30 days. It’s not hard.

I've been paying Google with my data since long before youtube started. They've certainly been collecting it and profiting from it without writing checks to me. Maybe when youtube stops collecting data and they delete all they have they can start asking for money, but ultimately I'm not going to worry about how the trillion dollar multinational corporate giant which has been exploiting us since at least the 2000s is going to keep stuffing their pockets with cash. They've done pretty damn well for themselves so far, even though ad blockers have always existed. They'll figure it out.

And I bet you use Google's other services for free.

The whole point is that there is no moral/ethical way to enter a “contract” with a party who has been knowingly siphoning (read “stealing”) your and everyone else’s data without being upfront about it since time immemorial. Oh you want to enter a contract with me? Send me an invoice at the end of every month about what data you collected from me and how you used it to pay for the services. Otherwise, there’s no way they won’t be double dipping.

Or they can drop the adtech business or spin it out as a separate company. But either way currently there is no way to fairly deal with ad tech companies with thinly veneered “free” services on top.

Your data is not worth anything. If you think I’m wrong, trying paying your mortgage with it.

I can’t pay my mortgage with a car either. Or US dollars, for that matter. Are those worthless as well?

Huh?! You can sell your car, or take a loan against it. You can convert US dollars into your local currency.

Your individual data is worthless. Data is only worth something in aggregate.

I am paying for that although I don't use them and don't watch ads. Guess who pays for the ads other people watch

Absolutely. I've got zero time for the argument that I should be paying one of the world's richest companies rent. Particularly when they're going about it this way.

I'm not signing up to their enshitification pathway.

Great work extension author, I look forward to checking this out.

I have no intention of ever giving YouTube money. A multi billion dollar company basically treated it as a loss leader for over a decade to eradicate the competition, and now they have “won” they want to squeeze users as much as they can. Resources are cheaper and yet they now show more ads per video than ever. No doubt they are trying to position YouTube so it can survive on its own going forward now the regulatory bodies have awoken. I have no intention of supporting that.

FYI, I use adnauseum and don’t seem to get served ads on YouTube on my desktop where it is installed. I don’t choose to “block” ads on YouTube, so I guess they just aren’t serving them to adnauseum users.

So if there hadn’t been a giant company with ample resources to subsidize YouTube all that time, who could have built a comparable video service and how would it have survived? Wouldn’t that mean they would have had to squeeze viewers for money in the same way sooner?

There is no mandate that YouTube must exist in its current state. YouTube serves two roles, one as a free service to host videos, one as a roulette machine that might pay out money if your "content" is favored by "the algorithm".

A huge amount of videos on YouTube are created for their own sake, with no expectation of going viral or making money off them. PeerTube fulfills the "free video host" role while also being ad-free. I might be naive, but I believe this is how most people saw YouTube around 2012.

The "seeking to make money on YouTube" role is artificially created as a result of a massive corporation running a loss-leader for a decade, dictating what content gets popular through recommendation algorithms, and literally paying people to encourage them to produce more of the desired addicting content.

Who knows what would have happened if YouTube had not been bought out and been allowed to compete fairly with P2P technologies as they emerged.

A huge amount of videos on YouTube are created for their own sake, with no expectation of going viral or making money off them.

It's estimated that there are 1 billion YouTube videos, compared to 600k videos hosted by PeerTube. Thats a 4 order of magnitude difference. Saying that PeerTube can "fill this role" is an outrageous assumption about scaling.

Sure, I should have said "P2P based video sharing like PeerTube". The point is that for videos with no expectation of making money, P2P is a better model than YouTube, as it is both free and ad-free.

I am not saying that PeerTube is better and that people should be using it. I am saying that it is worse, because of the way YouTube developed and made competition impossible.

So if there hadn’t been a giant company with ample resources to subsidize YouTube all that time, who could have built a comparable video service and how would it have survived?

My two cents:

1. Decentralization. I run my own PeerTube instance, with a bunch of my videos and a few viewers per day, and it requires basically zero maintenance. A RPi4 with a decent SSD is more than enough to run it, and unless you get hundreds of views per minute a decent home broadband connection is also more than enough. If you get more traffic, you can always ask people to contribute - and most of the folks on decentralized networks usually are happy to contribute. Plus, being ActivityPub compatible, from a single Mastodon or PeerTube profile, or even any RSS/Atom reader, you can follow channels on any instance. We often underestimate how easy it has become to run your own stuff if you know how to run a Docker container, and how easy it is to use syndacation and open protocols to publish to one place and broadcast to everyone. For some reason, the "you need a big centralized platform with big servers that can autoscale, big financial backing and a big surveillance adware business model in order to serve some .mp4 files" dogma is hard to kill.

2. Creators-run platforms. I've been an early supporter of Nebula and I keep contributing to them. I get all the videos that my favourite educational creators post on YouTube, plus exclusive content, without ads and without YouTube's hostile practices, for ~$3/month, and I know that the platform is run by the creators themselves, so the money goes directly to them. The success of platforms like Nebula sends a clear message to YouTube: people are happier to pay a monthly subscription to a service that only offers a curated subset of what's available on YouTube, knowing that that money goes directly to the creators, rather than watching ads every 5 minutes on YouTube and getting all of Google's privacy-invasive and developer-hostile business practices.

If I understand it correctly, as a PeerTube viewer I'm not only downloading the video, but also sharing it. Before I watched it.

This is a problem in countries where uploading copyrighted and illegal material has strong legal consequences (so I'd not want to share a video before I watched it fully so I can at least can see it doesn't have any obvious illegal content)

The viewing-is-sharing model is indeed a problem of PeerTube - and, I'd argue, of any decentralized network based on a P2P mesh. But it definitely alleviates the content distribution asymmetry problem - by spreading the load on the viewers small/medium instances can afford to scale up much more easily.

You can alleviate the problem by browsing some "borderline" profiles/instances with Tor/VPN though, or even just disable the "Help share videos being played" setting from the profile settings.

You'd still be buffering RealPlayer.

No, DailyMotion (and probably others) existed before Youtube and worked just as well. They simply lost at the "winner takes all" market share war.

This is faulty reasoning. Chocking all competitors in the crib does not mean there have not been competitors nor does it mean these platforms with superior UX could not still come to dominate.

But having the size of YT means it’s very hard to lose.

Personally, I wish platforms like peertube or bitchute would be much more know. But since YT is the place where everybody is watching it naturally follows that somebody new will post the video on YT first (and only) as well.

who could have built a comparable video service and how would it have survived?

Don't conflate being unwilling to give Google money with being unwilling to give anyone money.

I want out - I want to switch to a competitor, I'll pay money to do so. But Google's anticompetitive practices have taken that option from me. They broke the system and then get mad when I refuse to work within that system; so what?

treated it as a loss leader for over a decade to eradicate the competition, and now they have “won” they want to squeeze users as much as they can

every silicon valley startup ever has this same plan of attack, and no one bats an eye. it's kind of like a long-term bait-and-switch. that's just how these things work, apparently. sadly.

Yes the entirety of web2.0 has been a bait & switch scheme. No one can actually afford to just serve the platform, ads don't generate enough leads to make up for the cost of running them, and the average person can't afford to pay a $5-10 subscription for each web service they have grown accustomed to using every day.

You realize that it’s not “just a few dollars” right? Where I live, it’s as much as a cable TV subscription without the cable TV.

Second, the entire reason they have those insane costs is because they got rid of the competition. Doing this at smaller scales is not nearly as expensive per user.

I was considering getting YouTube Premium, but then I realized that it wouldn't work while incognito. I very often open videos in private tabs so it doesn't destroy my recommendations, so I'd still need an adblocker.

There is an incognito mode within YouTube by clicking your profile picture and “turn on incognito”

Also available on mobile.

Works great with Premium.

On my iPhone, selecting this option brings the ads straight back, unfortunately.

I think this is only available on mobile, actually. I don't see this option on desktop.

You can remove videos from your YouTube history and then they won't influence the recommendations you get.

Recent product improvements have also made this process really easy.

in youtube history settings you can turn off history recording while you binge on trash content, and if you forget, you can remove it from the list in history. the setting persists across sessions and devices. note that this is different from the incognito setting which does turn ads back on...

I do this to keep my recommendations clean.

Can you do this on a mobile device like an ipad? Can you do this when not logged in?

I very often open videos in private tabs so it doesn't destroy my recommendations

+1, I thought you were talking about me :)

If you log in to YouTube it does.

Some people are just freeloaders. They'll dress up their refusal to pay in any number of ways but what it comes down to is they just want stuff for free and aren't honest enough to just say that.

Call me a freeloader then. My computer, my internet service, my choice. I'll do what I want with my computer as long as I don't break a law, there is no moral right side in this debate.

That’s a valid position as long as you don’t complain about them locking down their service more.

Next thing you know, you won’t be able to mute your speakers or switch to another tab. Or even leave your chair to go to the bathroom. After all, YOU MUST PAY YOU DUES to watch YouTube!

This just means that Youtube isn't worth the ad watching time for them that Youtube feels entitled to. I personally, for example, will continue watching Youtube with an ad blocker but I'm also perfectly fine if Youtube closes entirely or becomes subscription-only.

This is a fact that internet publishers simply don't want to accept: the value of what you're offering is so low, that the most I'm willing to pay you for it is zero dollars.

This affects publishers both large and small, from Youtube to mommy bloggers. Like all those recipe blogs filled with bloat so they can stuff more ads. And the passive aggressive popup complaints about asking me to disable my adblocker: absolutely not. Sorry dude, but the value of what you're offering is worth "free" to me, and you can prove this to yourself by switching to a subscription payment model for whatever you're publishing. You'll make almost nothing compared to what you make from ad revenue because what you're offering just isn't as valuable as you think it is.

Oh kind of like how Google has been freeloading on our private data for decades? Yep you're right, Google isn't honest enough, so I'm happy to stick it to them.

As someone who uses ublock and gives £50/month away on Patreon: no

I am not giving into Google s coercion. Why are you?

How should YouTube be funded? How is it coersion?

It's up to them to figure out. But if their only solution is inconvenience users to the point they start bleeding money then screw them.

They have figured it out, and they even have two options so you can pick which you prefer.

How should YouTube be funded?

Maybe they can do something with their trillions of dollars, or since we're already paying for youtube with our data, maybe they can do something with that and all the other highly personal and intimate details of our lives they've collected primarily without our consent (and at times through violations of the law). Seems like they ought to have some kind of way to make money with that... Maybe they can let people pay them to get to the top of search results or something. Maybe they could sell locked down data collecting laptops or do something with cell phones? They seem pretty smart, I'm sure they'll figure it out.

or maybe they should cut monetisation by half.

I enjoy the premium features. I’m happy to pay for software I use a lot. Content creators get paid for videos I watch. I hate ads.

From my point of view it’s more than worth the cost.

As a student, while I do write and maintain software for my job and my FOSS projects, I do not make enough to justify yt premium at all

They should definitely offer a free or almost free student version. Supporting students is a good thing.

There is a free way for students to use it - with ads.

There's an even better free way for students to use it - with adblocker! It even saves Google the bandwidth of streaming the ads! How considerate!

There's a Student version of YT Premium for ~$8/month.

yes.

ads represent (to me) psychological coercion, exploitative capitalism, fear-mongering, and generally the worst cultural and psychological trends packed into dense snippets of trash.

very few of the things I actually use and adore were ever advertised to me in any way other than by trusted word-of-mouth, and the results of that are staggeringly better-fit than anything i've ever encountered on the web.

and that isn't even talking over the ads shown for wars and efforts I don't support, ads that are vehicles for malware, or ads that are vehicles for either propaganda from a state agency or somewhat radical organizations.

Most videos on YT are simply not worth my trading of values for the exposure to the trash. The transition from "creator place" to "media moat" isn't something I appreciate nor am I willing to participate in.

simply put : Ad-blockers simply enable me to stay in a better place mentally. The moment they started getting iffy on YT I tried to disable them and got a bunch of war-gore imagery thrown in my face from some NGO relief group begging for money in the midst of a hobby machinery video, these types of ads and abusive imagery are simply inappropriate, and I won't let the media be held hostage against me for the sake of collecting a toll or else being exposed to it : I just won't participate on that side of the net.

Uhm right. So you agree that paying to remove ads is the sensible option?

Then coercion succeeds. The point of coercive ads is to make you spend money. Either on advertised products ... but if they can force you to pay for just not seeing the ads it's even better. It's cutting out the "middle men" of real world economy from this extortion scheme.

This response does not really address the question in the comments it is attached to.

I don't personally use adblockers. I have no problems paying a few dollars a month. I do have an issue with providing banking details to social media platforms.

You don’t have to, you can pay through Apple Pay or Google Pay if you’re on mobile.

Funny. Don't give Youtube your credit card, use Google Pay instead.

What is funny about it? The person I responded to was concern about sharing banking information with social platforms. Apple and Google pay aren’t social platforms.

For me, the money itself isn't really a problem.

Creating a Google account, however, is a problem. Having to log in with that account is a problem. Having to link the account with a credit card or some other payment method is a problem. Having the account tied to my identity via a phone number, and/or the payment method, is a problem. Having the account used to track my viewing history is a problem. Having to possibly deal with a suspended/banned/compromised account, payment issues, and so on, is a problem.

Those are far too many problems to deal with, just to watch some videos.

If there was something more like dropping coins/bills in the hat of a street performer, I'd generally be willing to pay.

Ironically, if you watch youtube in incognito mode, it doesn't complain about adblockers.

If there was something more like dropping coins/bills in the hat of a street performer, I'd generally be willing to pay.

Some of the people producing on youtube have arrangements for this (kofi, patreon etc); there's also one built into youtube called "superchat", but of course that relies on being logged in and giving google your payment info.

Chef's kiss. How are techy people this damn ignorant about what's really going on in that contract. Yes the ads are invisible, but you can get that for free but more importantly, free of the Goog's nonsense and aggregation. Why do you pay to sow your data like its wild oats or something? Sad!

Same, I technically have a Google account and Gmail address because I'm an Android user. I've never actually used by Gmail address or given it to anyone, I don't log into my Google account on the desktop so all my Google account has is a small amount of data from my phone.

I've never looked into Youtube Premium until this thread but it seems to be available for 10€ a month in my location. That's a reasonable amount of money I could certainly pay if I had the option of doing so privately. I don't want to have my viewing history associated with my account, I don't want to log into my Google account and have it remember my searches.

Give me a way to pay for the service without my subsequent use being tracked and data mined, and I'd be happy to pay.

If they had a premium version for something like a third of the prince I would gladly pay for it. I don't care about Youtube music, offline mode or background playing. I just want to get rid of the ads - and their current model doesn't offer anything that does only that for less money.

I dont think that this would be any cheaper, (maybe excluding yt music would cost them little less? idk) but this price is mostly what they think removing ads is worth and rest is like a free bonus.

In my country yt premium costs almost like Spotify premium and for me it doesn't bring enough value in comparison

They tested a premium lite that only included removing ads, at about half the price of normal premium, sadly they discontinued it this month

That's because it was intended to show the music industry it wouldn't canibalise Spotify subs so Google could get cheaper music licensing, and it showed the opposite. So now ad free YouTube wil never be cheaper than Spotify/Apple Music et al. YouTube Music is bundled because it's free.

Yes, it is. To me ads are totally useless. I have never bought anything. It's nothing else than unnecessary distraction. I'm not worried about not paying this monstrously huge company.

Ads are about subtly and unknowingly influencing attitudes and beliefs, not direct sales

What? Don't you want to shop like you're a billionaire?

/same

I would pay a few dollars for ALL the Google benefits: no ads, a little bigger drive, youtube premium, music. Then i'd feel i had a bargain. By splitting everything i just feel..milked.

Good point. I never understood why they didn't offer this. Apple does.

Apple's deal is not even a good deal - it only works out if you use all the services that no one uses.

Yes, it’s worth it to exercise my right to choose what runs in my computer.

A web browser is a client application and I get to choose how it renders the content the server sends to me.

Yes, and you get to choose between doing that and getting blocked because it’s their server. Stealing entertainment is hardly a bold stroke for freedom.

By that logic, going to the bathroom while ads are playing is “stealing”

It's more than a few dollars. It's not an expense that makes sense to everyone.

Anecdotally: I use YouTube very rarely. I follow a couple of channels that post new episodes now and then. And sometimes I need to study some DIY technique, or someone sends me a link to something they thought was funny or interesting; basically my use is random and mostly utility-driven, and certainly not fueled by me endlessly trawling YT for entertainment.

So for me, the ads are super annoying because they steal time away from me when I need to access some random video, and ad-to-video ratio is rather huge. But since I'm a light user, it will never make sense to pay for it. In fact, I often close down a video when I'm met with an ad, because it's just not important enough. For me, the ads kill the potential spontaneous joy that could be had from a short video.

Many people do pay for YT, and I don't really understand the attraction unless you're a parent with kids. But everyone is different.

Same. I would gladly pay for adfree, but the price is hard to justify for infrequent casual users.

They should introduce a lower tier with a usage limit. Say $5/mo for the first 50 videos being adfree.

So how much would you pay per video to not have an ad?

Because that wasn't the deal.

Nobody complained when YT was monopolizing online video because it was convenient and free and then they proceed to bait and switch us into paying.

Screw them, I won't pay out of principle.

The deal was that you watch ads in exchange for unlimited video. Then they added the option to pay instead of watching ads.

If you no longer like either deal, stop reinforcing their market share: your usage tells creators they need to stay on YouTube.

In the UK it's £13/month which is noticeable for people in ordinary jobs, paying rent, and with half a dozen similar things wanting monthly money also.

Agreed. It’s clearly over the limit of things you care about.

I don’t regret the couple of evenings I spent installing Yattee and Piped on my own server. Now I need not worry about YouTube.

Over 10 years I’ll have saved enough to get a MacBook Pro

You don't want to make inconveniencing you profitable for companies.

If you like watching video, the people who make and host it need to get paid somehow. There are only three real choices: don’t watch it, watch with ads, or pay to watch.

Anything else is just fooling yourself into believing that other people will work for free making the things you like and the endgame for that is unskippable ads and more content only available to subscribers behind DRM.

Yes. For start I worry that if I will use YouTube while logged then it will increase risk of my mail account being randomly banned by Google. I already got "your account is temporarily disabled" once after I used "import mail filters" feature.

Also, I do not want to risk accidentally sharing exact videos I watch, while logged in.

Also, I anyway need to download videos as browser player lags while VLC does not.

Your account isn't going to be randomly banned just from watching Youtube.

I cancelled Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+. They just kept getting more expensive yet I barely watched content on them.

Youtube Premium is the best subscription video service out there in my opinion. I'm very happy with it being the one thing I pay money for.

Just the one last one to quit and your free ;) - I don't use any of them and I don't see ads

This is the worst time to replace your ad blocker with YouTube Premium, because by doing so, you're rewarding their bad behavior.

I agree, which is why I cancelled my Premium subscription when all this started. I’m not interested in paying Google to degrade the viewing experience for everyone else.

I tried that once, but paying changed the ui in some way that I found to be a huge degradation. Dont remember what exactly it was, but now Im using the adblocker again. Just ublock works fine btw, as long as you keep it and its filters up to date.

It would be useful if you can elaborate because as a paid user I've never spotted any UI or UX degradation and I'm now curious.

YouTube wiped out part of the music industry by hosting so much illegitimate music and had either zero or almost zero ads for most of its history until it’s monopoly was complete. Now that it’s captured almost 100% of online video content, it’s pulling a bait and switch and pretending to be copyright friendly while bombarding it’s captured audience with ads who have nowhere else to go. They don’t deserve a penny from any of us

And anyway, the videos themselves are ads and contain sponsored and affiliate content anyway, the tracking is intense, etc. you don’t get much value from your subscription

Yep #enshitification engaged.

I'm or probably won't pay but this feels immoral. Not a fair transaction where you consume content and bandwidth but give back nothing in return.

A few dollars? Don't remember what they charged here, but I found it completely overpriced. There are many months a year I manage not to waste any time on Youtube. While I generally prefer paying for service over surveillance capitalism I found Youtube far too less value for the money for my usage. For someone using it hours every week, the price might be more in line with the costs.

I could subscribe to a pay per view with monthly cap model.

For now I use it with ads, hate it, and use it less. Only for information gathering, certainly not for entertainment.

Absolutely

Yes

"a few dollars"

I personally just watch the ads, but I understand why one would not want to subscribe to the service even if it is reasonably priced. It is not the sticker cost, but the additional cost of the cognitive load that comes with a subscription. Having to remember yet another service that needs to be paid for, that needs to be cancelled when you don't want it anymore, that needs to be included in budgeting, etc. occupies a lot of mind space for the lifetime of the service.

An ad blocker can be created and then forgotten about.

A family plan is an order of magnitude more than a few dollars. £20/m (£240/year) in the UK. That’s a few dollars a month short of an Xbox Series S console yearly.

Probably not worth anyone's time to remove ads but I can't convince myself that the premium subscription is worth buying, I feel like many are in a similar situation and struggle due to how addicting (and useful) the platform can be.

About two years ago, pre-adblocking crackdown, I was having a great time with YouTube and I considered buying the premium subscription because I really liked the product.

Then the number of ads and their frequency changed massively, ruining the whole experience for me, the premium subscription went from feeling like "something I want because of perceived value" to "something I now need because YouTube has been made unusable in an attempt to coerce me into paying".

I went from checking out the prices and planning the purchase to blocking the whole domain on my pihole for all devices except my workstation.

I was also very disappointed by the subscription model: no yearly plan, no way to bundle it with the Google One subscription that I already pay for, the price of a family plan Vs individual subscription is predatory and anti-consumer (325% higher per individual).

Youtube isn't worth the "few dollars" for me (it's actually very expensive). However, I'm using an ad blocker instead. They still work and give you a seamless experience.

of course you can pay, but where's the fun in that.. in a hacker's mind hacking youtube is time well spent.

I used to have Premium back when it was called Red, because I got grandfathered from Google Music All Access. Then when my card expired they had me put in a new card. They didnt bother grandfathering me, so I didnt bother with YouTube premium since I am not paying double, despite paying for Google Music All Access… since launch. My phone renewal was around the corner so I got an iPhone this time and got Apple One with everything it offers. I am much more happier. Last I heard they wanted to nerf Google Music for YouTube music which is an awful exchange.

Now I dont mind ads but if they are annoying or too many, or worse: their new adblocking system was detecting me as adblocking despite me having it all off, or it not working on mobile whatsoever, you know the site is just flat out broken for me, well… I will just refuse to go on YouTube.

They proverbially kick me in the shins for every video I watch. Typically more than once, and for ever increasing periods of time. And once they're done kicking I get asked if I want to give them money so they stop kicking me.

Right.

It's $14 month now. It's still worth paying for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38065387

I'd pay in a heartbeat for youtube premium if youtube weren't owned my the FAANG companies. I dislike these companies and don't want them to have a cent of my money so I'll continue to be a freeloader and I don't care if the company goes bankrupt because the world needs more competition.

i am subscribing to yt premium but i don't like supporting google. i despise their active shadow banning on yt. this company is actively blocking legit constructive comments on "sensitive topics" such as religion. it's disgusting and also dangerous that a big corporation is declaring what should be allowed and not allowed to think and express.

A few dollars? Try in the order of 17 bucks a month. It costs more than Netflix where I am.

Is it really worth investing your own time to remove ads?

Yes, because like anything google, pretty soon the few dollars you pay per month to make ads go away will mean "pay to see fewer ads". Exactly like what happened to cable and subscription services.

You can also do this for _free_

Haha. This. I had to swallow that $30 a month cost. Because by going through the family sharing, I am saving so much heaxh and time wastage for my family who use YouTube for learning (school, college…), parents who watch videos, listen to music etc. well worth it for me.

Or you could not give them any funding to push their DRM agenda on the web?

I am happy to steal the content and I shall do that with yt-dlp and VLC because it is the best user experience for actually watching videos. The browser is not anyway.

I can't (in my country).

Sure , supporting the evil megacorp suppressing any real alternative products seems like the ethical thing to do.

Yes, it is worth my time.

Ads are cancer.

If you can't find some other less toxic way to support your business then it should die.

You can't! No ads is bundled with Youtube Music and other useless options.

Most of us pay for a lot of services like netflix, spotify, etc.

We are ok with paying, but not:

- giving money to a user hostile company with a terrible moral track record

- giving money to keep being tracked anyway

- having to log in with a google account that can be locked a down any time, and will take over your entire android phone even from a single app

- being served ads from other unrelated services using data collected from google service we paid for

A lot of tech people will probably earn that money in a few minutes

The average compensation for a software engineer, in the realively wealthy country of Italy, is like 40k annually. 140 bucks per year just to remove ads is obscene

You can get a netflix subscription for that money (which invests billions into content) or like 5 digital newspaper subscriptions (who do investigative journalism)

I'd pay for YouTube if it curated its content to skip all the clickbait, engagement garbage, AI-generated channels, scam videos and so on, which make this unbearable to use.

Even if you remove the ads, it's WORK to find quality content on YouTube these days, and this happens to a large degree because they incentivize their content providers to trick the algorithm and users into watching garbage for money. We saw the same happen with Twitter in real time when they announced revenue sharing.

YouTube is more broken today than it ever was. I don't know the exact recipe for fixing this, but this ain't it. I'm not paying to support this cesspool.

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)