YouTube is now blocking ad blockers so I make ads run faster

Hey the creator here, was not expecting this to blow up at all. I made this I guess because of the Streisand effect, I probably never would have bothered if it weren’t for all the news about ad blockers not working.

I intend this as a second line of defence against ads, where the first line would be a conventional ad blocker.

After work I’m going to investigate the same technique for speeding up paid sponsor portions of the video.

My background is a web dev, but I make extensions in my spare time :) I recommend making some yourself they are a fun little project. This one only took about 4 hours so I’m laughing at the interest :)

If you want to see a way more awesome extension I’ve created check this out - https://mobileview.io/

In case you don't know about it, make sure to check out SponsorBlock, which optionally, automatically skips parts you don't want to see like for example sponsors (but not only). You can use this awesome DB for what you want to do.

And also Invidious.

And also their combination.

User of both, I'm unaffected by the recent adblocking issues on YouTube and I can still subscribe to channels, reliably. Without any Google account. (by the way, a simple regular RSS feed reader would do, since YouTube provides RSS feeds for each channel, but Invidious is a really convenient, specialized UI for this, without the notification / algorithm issues that seem to plague YouTube wrt this, but I digress)

All these issues are already solved by these projects. I guess one could consider contributing to them (financially or with code for instance). The official YouTube frontend actually don't need no love, others already achieve what we want.

Piped, NewPipe and FreeTube are also projects to look into (I loved NewPipe when I had a smartphone, Piped looks very good too and FreeTube looks interesting but I know less about them).

Smarttube on my tv (Nvidia shield), revanced on phone and Vivaldi with ublock, no YouTube ads anywhere.

I just pay for Premium instead of grifting. Planetary-scale server farms and video hosting is not free.

They harvest everything I do online without my consent or permission without paying me. Fair is fair

That has almost no value to them unless they can use that to show you ads. They use that data to target ads to you, that is the whole point. Do you think they care about what you do or who you are for any other reason?

So if I block the ads, I guess that makes us even.

No, it pits the entire relationship in your favor since they now don't receive anything of value from you while you still receive their service.

A trade can't be fair when only one part benefits. If you feel their services are worth nothing then stop using them.

I'm working on that. The hardest one to cut out is Google Maps, which doesn't have an ad free option.

Anyway, the value they receive is incidental: if I like content, I'll tell my friends about it. Not all of my friends dislike ads. I "market" the content via word of mouth. The content markets the subscriptions. Or the ads. Either one.

If I stop watching the content entirely (due to it becoming harder to discover) then fewer of my friends know about it. So it's not quite as black and white as you want it to be. The "grifting" population helps content to spread to the paying population.

The hardest one to cut out is Google Maps, which doesn't have an ad free option.

OpenStreetMaps is considerably more customizable, has much better hiking trail data, and doesn't hide train stations and street names when you zoom/pan. Google Maps has become awful in the last few years.

It has pretty clunky point of interest search. The main thing Google Maps does for me right now is "search for destination that I know exists, but whose exact address I don't have on hand, then navigate there." The entire flow when performing that task is quite polished. So far, I haven't found an OSM app that comes anywhere close to being as usable. Organic Maps gets close, but the spoken navigation is pretty bad.

I love OSMAnd for hiking, but it's never going to replace Google reviews, which are invaluable when traveling.

OpenStreetMaps doesn't have aerial photo views, nor does it have street view. Those two let me go to almost any part of the world and see what it looks like, what the streets and houses are like in reality instead of just their marketing brochure photos.

I don't know what fantasy realm you live in where people are "trading" with Google when they watch a YouTube video. No such thing happens. No money changes hands, there is no transaction.

What does happen, is I make a request, and Google sends some bits to me over the Internet for free, and then those bits are sitting on my PC, and my PC is my property. I have the right to do whatever I want with my property and the bits on it. If I want to transform the bits in some way, render video from some of them and not from others, all on my PC in my own home, then I can. With a few exceptions, courts have upheld that general right. Ad blocking isn't illegal, circumventing their anti-ad blocking isn't illegal, and it doesn't interfere with a "trade" because there wasn't one, Google just sends some bits for free to anyone who asks the right way.

Now Google can of course choose to refuse service to me for any reason they want. They can make their anti-ad blocking more sophisticated. That's fine, I'll use a competitor in that case, and we need to make sure the government enforces the antitrust laws on the books so that there's more competition against Google anyway. Whether YouTube is a criminal monopoly or not is currently up for debate, probably the answer is yes.

At any rate your understanding of the relationship is legally and morally flawed. You claim there is a trade between me and a probably criminal organization, where in fact there is none. On the other hand my right to control my property is one of the most fundamental rights out there. You better believe Google feels that way about their property and spends billions to protect/expand their own property rights!

So I am confused as to why you want Google to have property rights, but not the rest of us.

But hey, "You will own nothing and be happy," right? We're all really just renting our hardware I guess? It's 2023 and the concept of us little peons owning and controlling anything is obsolete, just do what Master says right?

BTW, FWIW my property rights are inalienable. I possess these rights because I was born a human, yes they are also upheld in the US Constitution, UN Declaration on Human rights etc. While government has mostly upheld them they don't come from government, they come from us being born human, so even if a government said what I was doing was illegal, it would be moral to ignore that government, resist and do it anyway. What's crazy to me is that people seem to be OK with handwaving away a basic human right just so that a corporation can make more profit off of entertainment content.

I have the right to do whatever I want with my property and the bits on it

That is false. You might think that you should have that right, but you don't.

Come and take it

Won't someone think of the trillion dollar corporations?

55% of that goes to the content creators. Most videos you watch at youtube wouldn't exist without people watching those ads.

If it has no value then why don't they stop?

Because they show ads to people. Do you think they should stop collecting your data just because you block their ads? I don't see why that would make any sense, they have no reason to incentivize ad block use.

But even if I pay them, they still collect my data. I lose either way. I'll pick the way that is better for me in that situation

But that isn't a fair trade, you argued that your data is worth enough to them that you should be allowed to use their server resources without anything extra from you. But that isn't true, every user like you costs them much more money than they earn.

In such a situation where one part pays for the other parts benefits, you should expect the part that just loses out to try to end the trade. And that is what we see happening here, youtube tries to block you since youtube doesn't want you as a user, since you lose them money.

No, you argued that my data wasn't worth anything. I argued that if it wasn't they wouldn't desperately try and get all my credit, medical, schooling, and browsing history.

What they do is incredibly immoral and despicable. There is no opt-out (even if I pay them money). Even if I never use their services they still try to vacuum up all my data.

Me watching a few YouTube videos a week is a better deal for them than it is for me.

you argued that my data wasn't worth anything

If you block all their ads. They get your data since they intend to display ads to you. I said that in the first post, did you miss that?

So why are they spying on me when I still pay them? Or are you going to still pretend that hasn't been brought up 3 times now? Or that there is no opt out for their other tracking?

So why are they spying on me when I still pay them

Since you pay them you have an account and is logged in. They do use the data they have collected about you to serve you targeted videos even if they don't serve you targeted ads, they say that in their privacy policy document. Targeted videos are for your convenience.

If you don't want it to target videos to you you can disable all that data collection here, at least I can (Not sure if you can outside of EU):

https://myaccount.google.com/yourdata/youtube

So go and disable all that if you feel their video targeting isn't worth collecting your data, but there is no way for them to target videos without having any data about you.

I don't want targeted videos. I don't even want them to know I exist. Even if I never used YouTube, that is impossible.

Their tracking is all encompassing and invasive, even without a Google account. They are a menace to the world and it should be an obligation to block their ads. If Google disappeared tomorrow the world would be better off.

Sounds like the issue is completely different then from what you brought up in your original post. You just hate Google and want to hurt them as much as possible, so then it makes sense for you to block them and consume their resources as much as possible. Thanks, that explains your position much better, why didn't you just say that from the start instead of beating around the bush for so long?

I'm not the OP but you describe exactly my point of view :)

Though I don't just hate Google but really all big tech. I even work in it but my salary doesn't buy my loyalty, just my time. Loyalty requires respect.

Nothing I just said is inconsistent with what I posted earlier. I have no desire to hurt them, but I'm not going to pretend that anything I do to them is immoral or tips the scale from what they've stolen from me over the years

You consented by using the service. You don’t have to use YouTube.

I don't consent on every other site that uses google analytics? And last time I checked, consent isn't implied.

Disable third party cookies.

But then Google won't know everything about me so that would be immoral of me to do

If that's what you believe, then I'm not sure what the original problem was.

You are free to use an adblocker. But it's completely fair for Google to refuse their services if you do.

Then they should. They are perfectly capable of actually making YouTube unusable without watching ads.

When they actually force me, I'm perfectly happy to mute my TV during ads and do something else, which is the exact same moral area as blocking ads.

Drink verification can

Google analytics isn’t relevant to this subject.

It's more complicated than that because of the network effect. Few people host their videos elsewhere.

Google did this to themselves and they are the one imposing everybody to play by their rules. Nobody asked them to kill their competitors. Besides, I'm not really concerned for them. It's not like they are struggling.

It's more complicated than that because of the network effect. Few people host their videos elsewhere.

Yes, but these things are far from essential. Most of YouTube is entertainment, which is as fungible as it gets, and what isn't (for example repair tutorials) can usually be solved by buying repair guides or hiring professionals. There are alternatives. You might not like them, but they exist.

Google did this to themselves and they are the one imposing everybody to play by their rules.

This is really peak absurdity. "Google made me use their service for free".

Nobody asked them to kill their competitors.

YouTube has competition in all of its areas. They might be the leader, but they are not the singular source.

YouTube has competition in all of its areas. They might be the leader, but they are not the singular source.

This is like saying Microsoft didn't have a monopoly on the PC market in the 90s because Apple had 5% of the market. They only feel comfortable designing serious limitations in MV3 because chrome owns 90% of the browser landscape.

This is really peak absurdity. "Google made me use their service for free".

This is not absurd, they got to where they wanted through massive investor led subsidies and buying out their admittedly better competitor (remember google video?) What they performed on the on-demand video market was a form of predatory dumping, and when all the competition was gone they used that position as well as other positions to extract "value" and cash out.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/predatorydumping.asp

I have been required to use YouTube for school and for work

I watch maybe, maybe one YouTube video per month on average. I get along just fine.

No, I did not. The fact that somebody somewhere wrote "You consent to ...." doesn't mean I actually consented.

I have no sympathy for a company that operated at a loss for enough years to price out competitors to the point it was the only real game in town.

You kill competitors and now want to dictate the price (including attention) everyone pays to see user-generated content? Yeah no.

Got zero sympathy. None. You do not command my attention - a resource I am less and less willing to pay with these days.

If that results in YouTube becoming unsustainable and collapsing and something more sustainable emerging charging a price consumers are willing to pay? Well then that sounds acceptable.

YouTube is a service that competes unethically with others and censors wildly to further its political interests.

Some of us control our computers, instead of letting every third party do it.

following your logic, people should actively engaged with ads if not they are grifting. Please tell me you work for google?

They pay to display the ad. Think of a highway ad. If you sell a highway ad placement and then cover it with a big blanket (with maybe another ad on it) so nobody sees it, that would be a serious case of fraud.

So if you tell them the ad has been displayed so you get the video, but no ad was displayed for you, then that is a form of fraud. I don't think that would hold in court since it is such a petty crime, but it is still fraud. You lie to their server so that you can see the video without ads, that is fraud.

And if I simply mute the ad and do something else until it's over? It's that still fraud?

How about if I download the ad but don't watch it?

Since when is watching an advertisement a moral imperative?

Since when is watching an advertisement a moral imperative?

Since you got paid for it. Youtube pays you by serving you content for those ads.

Note that I also block ads. However, unlike you I don't try to tell myself that I am morally right when I do so, I know that it isn't a nice thing to do and that the content I consume when doing it is paid for by all the users who doesn't block ads.

I am not sure why you try to argue that you are morally good when you block ads. Does that really matter to you? That is the most interesting part of this discussion to me, all the people who want to see themselves as good people even though they leech off others.

Since you got paid for it. Youtube pays you by serving you content for those ads.

Is that technically true though? Legally it certainly wouldn’t be, there is no explicit agreement between you and Google. Even if some people feel that they have some ‘moral’ obligation to watch those ads..

It is overall better for society to block ads because ad-funded services have bad incentives, and so anything you can do to hurt the business model is a plus.

The specific act of not watching the ad is morally neutral, you can render content sent to your computer however you want or not at all.

I consider pervasive advertisement a moral wrong. I don't have to tell myself anything to know that blocking ads is the ethical thing to do. They are already a moral perversion.

Edit:

I kind of consider it disgusting that watching a video is considered by anybody to be "payment", or that anybody legitimately believes it's somebody's duty to watch an advertisement. The worship of abusive corporations in our culture has gotten insane.

You already aren't understanding us when you come in believing that we're convincing ourselves of anything. We actually do have an ethical and moral map that is consistent with blocking ads, and we don't consider not watching a commercial to be the same thing as theft, or even to be morally questionable.

Think of a highway ad.

Equally annoying, I'd block those too if I could.

that is fraud.

I don’t think that true. Users have no have signed no contract and/or have any obligations to watch those ads.

Of course it would still be fraud if ad buyers were paying for ads which were never displaying it, except Google would be committing it. In most cases on a significant scale to warrant legal action.

Required default response to all of these comments calling me a criminal (that is the implication of grift, intended or not): I have and will never ever pay one red cent to any company to watch videos for the purpose of entertainment outside of specific creators making high quality content that I personally enjoy. You can not make me. I have zero (0) moral compunction on the subject. I will explore every legal avenue. Weep and gnash your teeth. If every other legal avenue is exhausted I will imagine new Top Cat episodes in my head. You cannot stop me.

Do you sneak into movie theaters?

As a kid I used to sit across from the drive in and watch. I also used to watch other people's TV's through their windows before I knew it was creepy.

sometimes I watch the movie in the person's seat diagonally in front of me while I'm on a plane :(

It being junk doesn't matter, if you like to watch it then it should be fair to pay for it. If you don't like to watch it then why do you even care what YouTube does, just don't watch.

They’re free to provide the service over a different channel than HTTP which restricts my ability to restrict their ads.

My user agent works for me.

I do not have a moral obligation to waste my time on content B, merely because it has been delivered alongside content A. The advertiser paid to make that offer to be, but I am not obligated to pay it any mind. That I've instructed my computer to automatically reject such offers is no sin.

For the record I do pay for premium, but that's because I want to support creators directly. I do that a lot actually; Patreon is great. But I block ads anyway, everywhere I go. There is no moral argument you can make that will convince me to actually watch ads. If companies want to stop making stuff available for free because advertising is not a sustainable business model, good! Cut the marketing out. Let it die.

I do not have a moral obligation to waste my time on content B, merely because it has been delivered alongside content A.

Of course you don't. But neither does Google have the obligation to serve you if you don't pay and don't watch ads.

I pay a certain fee in the effort I have to go to in order to block scam content reaching my home network.

Given that advertising platforms are one of the primary vectors of scam content these days, it's almost negligent to not block advertising.

Conversely, 'grifting' is exactly what you should be doing if you want to undermine the current server farm supported by advertising business model.

Videos don't need to be hosted on a server, they can be shared through peer to peer networks, which cost nothing.

Which is not something that could scale to Youtube’s levels.

nothing

Except huge amounts of drive space and upload bandwidth. Considering most (to an overwhelming degree) people consume videos on phones, tablets or laptops with relatively tiny drives it’s not realistic.

Maybe some decentralized system with content providers hosting themselves might work.

However all that is irrelevant even if it were technically feasible because it doesn’t align with the incentives many/most content creators have (they actually want to be paid either through ads or subscriptions..)

Maybe not but I don’t watch ads from ad companies like GOOG.

I prefer to think of myself as grandfathered into the free plan.

I used to pay for premium but I stopped just incase they thought ramming shorts and ‘people also watched” videos on me was the reason I was paying.

I pay for Premium and use it on one PC, but I browse logged out (with ublock) on another PC. This gives me two (slightly) different views into what the Youtube algorithm wants me to see, based on what I happen to watch on each machine. I occasionally reset cookies on the logged out machine.

I definitely avoid watching ads, except the non-national spots on local TV where I kinda like the local city flavor of the ads. Is that grifting? I dunno. The ads are still there in aggregate, I just won't give them my brain space. Give me a way to pay without being tracked and having my content streams tied to a single account, and I'm all over it instead of adblock.

I happily paid for YouTube lite until they cancelled it.

Any open source player client for iOS? Does not seem like any of the listed ones are compatible with iOS.

uYou+ is good, I use it regularly. Especially with a developer certificate.

Thanks, will check it out!

You can use an app currently in the App Store called "yattee" -- you can add an Invidious source in the settings, and viola you're good to go. I self-host mine, but you can totally point it at a community hosted one.

This is really cool, thanks!

Unless you're willing to root your phone, or use a developer certificate to run an unofficial app, I don't think there's any chance of getting an 3rd party youtube client on iOS. They're breaking youtube's TOS which is why they have to be side loaded on android.

I am willing to use a developer certificate to run unofficial apps...if there is code available i'd be happy to compile and load it onto my phone. I don't think there is though.

I just cannot go back to Android after years of dealing with garbage(I owned all the Nexus phones and gave up after Nexus 5) so my options have been to limit phone usage in favor of Desktop + start working on as many homemade/ open source versions of iPhone apps that I use as possible. Luckily most apps i'd be likely to have installed are just some downloaded data(text, audio, video) and some buttons. How hard can it be to scrape and rip the content and make my own container to serve that data?

For other apps like Youtube alternatives I am in search of an app.

Invidious and Piped should actually work quite well. Not apps, but work fine in a browser. That's what I'm using on the PinePhone and on regular computers. Though I don't know if Safari still has limitations that make it a pain to use. Invidious is a pain on the iPad 2 because of some dumb design decisions in Safari but I expect it to have improved since then. And maybe third party browsers will at last be allowed on iOS through third party stores, maybe also allowing SponsorBlock to be used on this platform.

I'm missing some features like being able to select a play next video easily, so I may look into writing an Invidious-based client of some sort for this, but they are so many things to do for a strongly limited time.

Maybe Piped has the features I'd like to have, I should check it out.

In case you don't know about it, make sure to check out SponsorBlock

So I don't love ads but mostly because of the privacy invasion they represent, but sponsorships I have a lot less of a problem with. Oftentimes sponsorships will have at least marginal connection with what in watch (most of the time looking at you NordVPN and Raid Shadow Legends) but to me sponsorships are the happy middle ground that allows creators to get some recompense for their labors without turning everything into an adscape dystopia.

Really I don't have a problem with ads on websites back in the day as long as they were somewhat tasteful, which they often were because the creator worked to integrate them into their work, but the constant user surveillance and spamming random nonsensical ads are what bugged me.

I mean some channels that I frequent have even turned the sponsorships into additional entertaining content (check out Ryan George's the Adstronaut or Viva La Dirt League).

Yeah, I personally hate sponsor segments but strongly sympathize with your view. I'm currently looking for a way to donate to the stuff I watch instead.

Ad based businesses also have an incentive to maximize attention and interaction rather than enjoyment, education, or user happiness.

We’ve played a few rounds of this game, we’re dumber, sadder, and more politically polarized for it.

I don't mind sponsor ads..

Do you not get bored of spending ~10% of the total time you watch videos being spent on largely brainrot gambling / predatory game advertisements?

I don’t know what you watch, but the videos I watch just have sponsorships for jewelry and other luxury products.

It’s not really worth it for me to block fashion sponsors who tell me what is popular, when I would otherwise have to go research to find the same information.

Sponsorblock was already mentioned, but also have a look at what DeArrow does, which is allow crowdsourced titles and title cards to remove the horrible ":O" face clickbait.

thanks! the thumbnail trend has gotten really, really bad. any insight into why creators are hopping on the bandwagon? is there data they have access to which suggests switching to this type of thumbnail will increase engagement?

Veritasium made a video about this : thumbnails and title so much drastically change your view count that, even if you are against it, you would be stupid to not jump into the trend, especially if your business is correlated to view counts.

But I’m like you, I’m pretty sad about it because sometimes this pushes me back very hard and I avoided some otherwise very great quality channels for months or years because of that.

My most remarkable example of this is KURZGESAGT : YouTube algorithm was always suggesting it and my brain was always thinking that this looked like cheap animated videos with colors everywhere to catch my eyes, probably with synthetic narration. I ignored it for months until I watched one by accident. And boy did I discovered it was in fact a brilliant channel with probably one of the most impressive animation and music on YouTube, an incredible narrator, one of the rare YouTube channels which provides links to studies for anything sentence they say and all of this full of poetry. Also a very non intrusive business model with pertinents sponsorships at the end of the videos and their own merchandise marketplace with actually nice items and artwork to buy.

The even sadder thing is that their thumbnails are in fact pretty good but they mostly suffered from the fact that my brain is now programmed to avoid anything catchy.

In 2015, the channel received a 570,000 US dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who later became one of their key sponsors. Kurzgesagt have made videos calling for investment in novel technologies the foundation also supports, such as carbon capture and artificial meat.

There is one good way to solve climate issues: consume less. Instead, kurzg says "we could consume, but someone will solve our issues with new great tech, like carbon capture".

Still, people like it, because it "sounds good".

There is one good way to solve climate issues: consume less. Instead, kurzg says "we could consume, but someone will solve our issues with new great tech, like carbon capture".

No, kurzgesagt says that given that people won't be willing to consume less to the required degree novel tech will also have to play a role. It's disingenuous to run around and say that 'consume less' is the solution knowing that people won't do it. At least not if they aren't forced to. Do you want to argue for forcing people? Then say it. Don't hide behind "oh, just consume less, it's the only thing that works".

Please don't assume what I wanna force or not. I don't need a new CPU for windows, but windows wants it. Similar with phones, I am forced to buy a glued brick each 3 years (2 years now, woohoo). And I don't need a "new video" each week from my favourite creator, one good video once in a while is ok for me. Carbon capture is not even working properly yet, but we already pushing it as a solution. Probably solution would be "it releases more CO2 in the end, but you are forced to buy it, and it would make great profit to people involved in it".

That's extremely disingenuous way to describe Kurtzgesagt. The channel offers high quality educational content.

There are channels without propaganda like ScienceClic/pbs space time. Good propoganda would not work if it would be too obvious. But once you read Kurtz story and try to reevaluate their "proposed" solutions to eco issues, you can see how it aligns. It is "technooptimism". Like similar to "invest into AI, it will solve all of our problems".

Sadly... Ok ok, so it is basically science video channel with sponsored content where they don't say it is sponsored content. Better description?

Ignoring the fact that KURZGESAGT is a blatant propaganda conduit, the art-style they use in their animations is so flat and devoid of any personality at all, I'm actively repulsed by it.

I’m open to debate but propaganda for what exactly ?

There was only one of their video I felt awkward was their video about the fact we will tackle climate change, I felt like they were I little too techno optimistic. But given that they have a good history in this subject, I just felt their goal was to provide optimism.

Also, I’m sorry if I’m overly paranoid but I feel strange that you created an account just to make this comment.

Propaganda for billionaires and the various methodologies they use to control and slowly reshape society. The following video is a good start:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjHMoNGqQTI

The optimism you mention in your comment is key. Conditioning the public to perceive and blindly accept the ideas and procedures commonly discussed in many of their videos as something net-positive seems to be the primary goal.

The art-style I think plays a very well-defined role in that: yes it's bland, but it's the most unlikely one to offend any one average viewer, irrespective of nationality or culture. It's just cute 2D flat birds after all.

So it is "blatant propaganda" but you can't come up with 3-4 bullets explaning your reasoning? If it were so blatent I would need to watch another video.

Veritasium is the kind of guy who makes a video explaining how his titles aren't clickbait, yet he optimizes thumbnails and video titles after the video is published to maximize views more than anyone else.

Which at least is … honest.

How do you know he does that more than anyone else?

If I remember correctly, Linus from Linus Tech Tips said begrudgingly at one point that the clickbait thumbnails increase views by 20-30%. Even he wasn't happy about having to do them, but the drop in viewership from not doing them seemed quite large and hard to disagree with.

LTT is pretty much the most clickbaity YouTuber anyway when it comes to IT. Mediocre content, extremely high monetisation including in-stream ads.

I never bother watching LTT anyway. It represents everything that's wrong with YouTube.

When it comes to creators I actually respect I'd think of Dave Jones (EEVBlog), Naomi Wu, Louis Rossman...

It’s not my favorite channel, I don’t even have a subscription to it, but for such a mainstream and popular channel it’s honestly pretty good.

Each time I stumbled upon a video of LTT, it ranged from "great" to "really ok".

There are way better channels but LTT is far from being the worst.

Hard disagree, at least on some content. The engineering videos where they do crazy hacks like negative cooling computers, swimming pool water cooling etc are all insightful and inviting viewers to explore hardware hacking and engineering.

I suspect techlinked troll HN for news content, but I watch that for the humour rather than news.

any insight into why creators are hopping on the bandwagon

It probably works.

There's already an extension that does that: Clickbait remover for YT (FF/Chrome)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

One day we'll use AI to replace ads with anti-marketing.

Ads for McDonalds replaced with obesity stats. Ads for goods rephrased to make the actors say, "you don't need it."

And one day they will use AI to place more covert ads.

'One day'...

Why would watching that add any value to the lives of anybody consuming that content?

Why not just remove it entirely? The only people that would use it are the same people that already know those stats.

My (semi) serious attempt at blocking sponsored segments: https://butter.sonnet.io

Hey, I just wanted to say that your “say hi” page is an insanely cool idea and I might take you up on that offer at some point :).

I would be super interested in seeing engagement metrics for this, especially from organic, cold, leads.

Well, here would be the ones I’m interested in: the 3 minute rant would be perfect right now as I finish processing shitty family. The general chat with topics includes several that I personally am interested in, including photography and mental health. The offer to pair program with me to help me with a programming problem? Amazing. Though I’d feel too guilty about using that one personally when the vast majority of my coding problems can be solved by Google and sometimes screaming into a pillow.

All in all, if I was looking for an employee, seeing this page would put that person at the top of the list for me because it gives off all the right vibes - team player, interested in helping others, well rounded, etc.

I'm not sure what qualifies as a cold lead here, but I've had ca. 150 calls so far. I reached out to people directly only twice with 50% success rate.

This comment seemed to generate 1k visits to my site, from and 2 called booked for Tuesday.

Most of my calls are 30m coffee chats (I'd say close to 90%).

Rants are quite rare and people tend to cancel those last minute. My theory is behind this is that the decision to book a call is more likely to be driven by emotions.

Rants rarely end up being rants. For instance, the first one I had ended up being a 2 hour discussion about life, privacy, cryptography, tech + a century-long and hemisphere-wide family history in English and Ukrainian.

If you have any questions about this -- please let me know as I'm compiling an article for untested.sonnet.io

Thanks, and yeah -- give it a go, it's a tonne of fun.

Also, you can call me for a quick 3 minute rant if a longer call feels like a commitment. In fact, I just finished my first rant today!

Whoa! I love it. For anyone wondering about the not-so-secret sauce:

https://github.com/paprikka/butter/blob/main/src/watcher/det...

The irony would be incredible if you happened to use Bard.

Why only 16x speed? Was there some kind of technical limitation or it just felt like the best option?

Yep technical limitation, the most you can speed the video element in Google chrome is 16x (the slowest is 0.07x)

I used to have a computer with an audio interface that had a wordclock input (BNC connector) and a huge rack mounted wordclock (Antelope Isochrone) to theoretically reduce jitter that a cheap internal crystal clock built into an interface might otherwise introduce. To work normally, the interface and external clock both needed to be set to the same thing (say, 48 or 192 kHz, or whatever you wanted). We quickly discovered that if the interface was set lower than the clock, any audio playback would be sped up and high pitch (and vice versa) -- not only playback from the DAW, but from anything, even YouTube videos and so forth. And of course the a/v sync was maintained, so the picture would also be sped up to match.

I wonder if this effect could be completely virtualized as an audio driver, where you choose this middleware as the default output device in the OS, and it messes with the audio clock speed: essentially overclocking the upstream (OS) side whenever an ad is detected, and dropping samples (basically a rudimentary sample rate conversion) proportionately so the downstream (hardware) side never skips a beat. I don't know how an extension/userscript would be able to communicate with said middleware, but maybe there's a way.

Aside: I wonder what would happen with live streams. Probably just periodic buffering, not from congestion but from the analog to digital conversion consuming the stream faster than it's being created. Theoretically a very miniscule version of this problem always occurs if the DAC on the production side is running slightly lower clock speed (say, 47999 Hz) than the ADC on the consumer side (say, 48001 Hz) and the player knows how to gracefully compensate to avoid occasional buffering (or buffering does occur but it's too brief for anyone to notice). Hmm.

This is absolutely fascinating and I love how this experience leads to an interesting idea for a solution to a different problem.

As an aside, what audio interface was this? Sounds fascinating (as an amateur audio-interested person).

M-Audio Delta 1010 but it could probably be anything.

Is there any chance something like this could work on chromecast?

https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV might work

I tried your extension but it wasn't able to activate in a Next14 project i'm working on... getting a hydration error.

Is this my mobile view one? Yeah I’m aware of this error so I need to fix it. Is it an open source or public repo.? That would help a lot for bug fixing

Any chance that this technique can be added to iSponsorBlockTV? :)

https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV

YouTube Premium is a top 5, maybe top 3 subscription service that I pay for. Others in that tier would be Amazon Prime, Apple One+, NYT Crosswords, and 1Password.

Watching on every device without praying that this week’s ridiculous workaround continues to function for only like $15/month feels like a bargain.

I wouldn't be able to enjoy my usage of it. I have a strong moral objection to ads, so to me paying to get rid of ads is akin to paying off the bully so they will stop beating you up. Next week they might decide you haven't paid enough, or that it doesn't even matter that you paid up -- they're bored and want to beat someone up.

I'd rather give the bully a whack in balls instead.

Asking people to provide compensation for a service isn't bullying. They even give you a choice on how you pay. You hate ads, they give you an option to avoid them and now you hate paying to avoid them. You're trying to makes yourself sound self righteous and you just sound like you believe you are entitled to others resources.

Bullshit. They're the ones who think themselves entitled to our attention.

No one "asks" people to see ads. They're the ones who show ads to people in the most underhanded, intentionally attention grabbing manner possible. When you are charged a price, it's obvious and they are up front about it. Meanwhile in advertising land they make it a point to hide the ads in prose so you don't even know you're being manipulated, the videos cut into the ad abruptly so you can't react and it's not like links have big signs in them warning you about ads inside.

Charge people money up front. If you send us ads, we'll delete them. Our attention is not currency to pay for services with.

You're being entitled to their services. They give you a way to avoid ads and still compensate them. If you don't want to do that it has nothing to do with ads you are just a leech.

Leech? That's funny. You wanna take a peek at the numerous accounts under my name?

Maybe stop offering some bullshit "free" tier before expecting people to pay you. Because that's what ad-supported YouTube is: free. It's absolutely free for everyone. They just happen to send you noise alongside the signal. Easily filtered out.

Not to mention the fact Google's still extracting value out of you via surveillance capitalism. Better pay for the creator's patreon instead, that's a perfectly ethical way to make money.

Yes a leech. They give you the option of paying with money or attention. If you choose neither but still use their service you are a leech.

It's not free, they've made that clear, just because you are able to take something without paying doesnt make it free. You can justify being a leech all you want it doesn't impact me because i neither work for YouTube nor produce content for it but it also doesn't change what you are.

Okay, paypig. I don't have to "justify" anything. I'm not obligated to watch ads, it's that simple. If they don't like that, they better have their server return 402 Payment Required instead of a free video. Otherwise I'm gonna be right here making full use of those servers as much as I want. And if they send me ads I'm deleting them. And if they block my ad deleter, I will delete their blocker. And I won't lose a second of sleep over it.

You complain about them feeling entitled to use your computer how they want while trying to justify doing the same thing to them. You are a cheap hypocrite trying to build up your actions into some kind of noble cause when the reality is you just want something for free. You want to leech. You call me a paypig but I just believe in supporting the people providing me value because i understand that someone has to or the services go away and people like you exist harming the common.

As the parent pointed out, there's a simple way for Youtube to deal with me "feeling entitled to use their computer" -- either don't make your computers publicly available via a standard web api, or return the appropriate response via that standard web api, which would be an HTTP error code.

When the server returns a 200 and the video to my request of 'video for free please', that is them choosing to accept my request for the video. Just as the common refrain goes that 'if you don't like ads, you can just not use Youtube', the argument that 'if Youtube doesn't like me blocking ads on my computer, they can just not serve me the videos' applies equally.

You are proposing making the internet worse to try and justify your leeching. They give you a way to use there service with out ads and magically you have an excuse not to do that to. You are a drain, if you're happy making the world worse that is on you mate but stop trying to make it into some holy noble cause. You're just being cheap and selfish.

I appreciate seeing your argument devolve down to just a personal attack instead of actually addressing the points I raised. I feel much more intelligent after this conversation with you.

You raised no points. You said you don't like ads. It was pointed out you can pay to not see ads and you said that was just as bad(because reasons? You're morally opposed to ad based systems but you aren't opposed enough to stop propping YouTube up with traffic. Your morals stop exactly where they would start to inconvenience you, they are pretend). And that if they really want you to compensate them for taking their resources they should make the internet worse by making it impossible for anyone to choose viewing ads over paying. You're selfish and trying to find a way to justify it that doesn't boil down to selfish and cheap and you won't find it because that is literally your only justification.

I feel much more intelligent after this conversation with you

You're welcome. Hopefully you'll feel like being less of a leech too.

I'm curious, you mention that you run several companies in your profile, are they ad-driven for their revenue?

They are in that paid traffic is essential for them but I don't directly receive income from ads for any of them. At least not in a way that an ad blocker would negatively impact my income.

We raised plenty of points. You just dismissed them, doubled down and started name calling. Welp.

You are proposing making the internet worse

We're proposing they stop pretending the service is free when it's not. If they keep giving us free stuff, who are we to refuse?

They aren't pretending it's free. You are.

My browser requests a video. They send me a video. Money has not exchanged hands. Free.

doing the same thing to them

First I'm a leech, now I'm a literal cracker who hacked his way into the trillion dollar monopolist corporation's servers and forced them to serve me videos at their expense. Even mined some Monero on their data centers while I was at it.

Are you for real my man? I'm not even gonna read the rest of your comment.

You're trying to make yourself sound cooler than just someone that expects someone else's work for free again. You're not, you are just a leech.

Sure thing, paypig. Pay them some more, maybe the trillion dollar corporation will finially notice that you exist. When they put ads in the paid service tier.

Except it's not a service that costs much money to run, so much as it is a giant silo exploiting the fact that lots of video is uploaded there. Don't you remember YouTube in 2005 before Google's purchase? It made ends meet all by itself, apparently.

OK, video quality is higher now but, but they could make the lower-quality video freely accessible -- and so could lots of other possible video-upload sites without charging $15. The value-add is not why you're paying $15.

Convenient to forget the video creators.

Creators have patreon now. It's a perfectly ethical way to make money. Doesn't even depend on copyright to work.

No it didn't make ends meet it raised something like $35m from vc and was running at a loss of around $1m a month which is why they were so quick to sell to Google despite the growth.

They also started ads in 2006 before Google bought them

Don't you remember YouTube in 2005 before Google's purchase? It made ends meet all by itself, apparently.

They were burning VC funding the whole time. Youtube didn't become profitable until a few years ago even with Google ads being there it took that much scale and added ads for them to start breaking even on it.

I'm not trying to be righteous, my moral compass is mine.

I'd be fine with YouTube being a purely paid service. Either pay, or the server returns a 500. I might even be willing to pay for it then, knowing that the only ads i might encounter are sponsor segments in the video themselves (that i can also skip right on by.)

You're trying to ascribe your actions to a moral cause instead of a financial one.

You're trying to ascribe my actions to a financial cause instead of a moral one.

Luckily for me, the only one that knows what to ascribe my actions to is..me.

Yes because they are inconsistent with the actions of a moral position you claim and entirely consistent with the actions of someone doing something for financial reasons.

It’s your behaviour I find far more in line with a bully.

“I want what you have and I’m going to take it from you in any way I desire regardless of your thoughts on the matter”

"I gave my product away for free, bundled it with some garbage no one cares about because they paid me to do it and am now angry because people are throwing the garbage in the trash where it belongs and the garbage men don't want to pay me anymore."

Even more so. You gave me a product, and I took parts of it and threw it away. Once you gave it to me, your right to define what I do with it ended in my mind -- or to put it more concretely for Youtube, you sent me the bytes, I ignored some of them. That is my right and prerogative as the owner of the computer. Don't want me to ignore any of the bytes, don't send me any of them.

Exactly. We own the machine, in its realm we are gods. We dictate what it does or doesn't do. If it is our will that ads not be displayed on our screens, then by god it's not going to happen.

It's actually offensive that these corporations even think they have any say at all about what goes on in our machines. The nerve.

I'm more offended at the people that support said corporations -- I can understand the profit motive for the corporation, but not prostrating yourself to them. To think that it should be okay to be forced to pay a month sub to a megacorp to control what I do with my computer, my hardware...is unappealing.

Always nice to find like-minded people on this site. You might enjoy this mantra I like to recite in every ad blocking thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38329083

Refined these over years here by discussing the subject with like-minded people. I always post smaller versions of it when people start trying to shame us for not tolerating ads.

Always nice to find like-minded people on this site.

There might even be more than two of us! HN unfortunately due to it's inherent bias (vis-a-vis their origin/benefactors/audience) will tend to skew a little more against this train of thought.

You might enjoy this mantra I like to recite in every ad blocking thread:

I agree with the vast majority, but some of the phrasing I think betrays a certain militantness on the issue that might turn people off. Specifically, your point about it being mind rape. I agree with the point you try to make with that, but that can conflate it with some other unsavoury topics that make it easier to try to attack your argument. The way I see it, it's not quite mind rape, but it is assault and battery on the dignity of the human mind.

There might even be more than two of us!

There are many. Someone here once told a tale of a hero who picked up a paintball gun and drove around the city blasting billboards.

A brazilian city banned billboards:

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

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...

I want to propose a similar law for my own city. The advertising is obnoxious.

assault and battery on the dignity of the human mind

Agreed.

You’ve been regularly commenting on a website that’s an advertising/marketing channel for a VC firm since 2018.

Seems like it’s more accurate to say that you have a moral objection to either ads you don’t like or things you have to pay for?

HN doesn't force me to watch or read the ads. I can always ignore the posts that are mainly advertising.

So perhaps my moral objections are to obnoxious, in your face, unavoidable advertisements.

If you read the headlines than you've read ads for thousands of products and they are unavoidable since they are inline.

I can always ignore the posts that are mainly advertising.

This is the reason advertising works. Because people think it doesn’t work on them lol.

I've been reading HN since around that time, and it's hasn't made me sympathetic toward VC. If anything it's hardened my views against consumption, greed and advertising.

Good advertising will do that to you. Make you think you hate it while it works on you.

I don’t mind giving money in exchange for useful services. I pay for YouTube because I recognize they need money through some channel, and I’d rather I just be up front and pay them for their service. Likewise I pay for Kagi, protonmail, Disney+, arstechnica, and a small variety of other service and media providers that provide value to my life. In fact, I would always rather pay up front than have them figure out some way to exploit me to fund their operations.

I don’t mind they offer alternative ways of monetizing than a subscription. A lot of folks can’t afford to pay like I can. But I deeply value the option to pay.

I’m not a fan of ad blocking on services you use that offer a pay option. I am fine with blocking in general, but if they offer the chance to just give them your money and you can afford it, you should. Every service should offer a chance to just give them your money instead of data harvesting and ad spamming as the only option.

I’m a huge supporter of open source and free software for over 35 years now, but people who make a living off their software, media, art, music, etc, should be supported as well. There’s nothing wrong with making a living doing what you love, but there’s something wrong with expecting people to give you their labors and services for free.

I’m happy to pay for any useful service that does not also track me.

Where is the eula that spells out in simple language the details of the devil’s bargain that these data thieves offer?

They are selling trinkets to the natives that have no idea what they are giving up.

Then just...don't use the service if you don't like it.

Nah. We're gonna adversarially interoperate with the service instead.

https://www.eff.org/fr/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interop...

I know what I’m giving up and it’s something that’s worthless to me.

Where is the eula that spells out in simple language the details of the devil’s bargain that these data thieves offer?

GDPR means all tracking is overt. I have a page where I can see all the things Google tracks about me and what they are used for and I can disable different categories such as location or watch history or search history or browsing history etc.

I'm happy to pay for it, but I don't always want to be logged in and gave an echo chamber created for me. When I'm not logged in, I don't want to watch ads

For other video services, when you're not logged in, you can't watch at all. Nothing's stopping you from treating YouTube the same way.

That's fine but all the streaming platforms get more expensive every x months nowadays.

Is it too expensive today? If not, sign up and then cancel when it gets too expensive. Plus at work, I get a raise every x months nowadays, too. Gotta spend it on something.

Same. I figure that since I watch this much YouTube, it’s probably worth paying for. At the moment, the rev share seems to be _okay_ compared to other creator platforms, so I take that bit of solace as well.

I agree. If you watch a lot of YouTube it's a great deal. Way cheaper than cable.

I mean, there are not workarounds every week. Since Google announced their war on adblockers, I've had to update the 'quick fixes' filter in uBlock Origin exactly once. That's it.

and that's how they get you :-)

Remember folks... when running away from a bear you don't have to outrun everyone, just the slowest person

And similarly, to get people or organizations to pay, you just have to make it much more expensive for them at every moment to hack or fork your service than just pay you. It gets harder the bigger the organization is, but works like a charm on the long tail!

If you've got an open source platform, it's a major consideration because a competitor can just fork your service and start offering it. So you have to have enough of a network effect and lock-in (e.g. ethereum nodes only taking ethereum gas as payment) that the fork is not as accepted for years, despite being faster and better (e.g. polygon). You can centralize trust (Amazon), Liquidity (exchanges) and ease-of-use through vertical integration (Apple).

The idea that "stealing" from google is somehow morally wrong is hilarious to me. Nobody owes them anything if they cant afford to host youtube then first of all its odd that its been around for so many years in the state it has, and second of all, if they cant afford to host it that their problem. Not mine.

Would you use the same justification for pirating movies? Or for stealing from large supermarkets?

Not a pointed question, I just find it genuinely interesting where people draw the line.

Ultimately in all scenarios you are consuming resources from a third party, and avoiding paying for them.

Copying/sharing media is not the same as stealing from a store. We already had this debate like 30 years ago - "You wouldn't download a car!" Unless you really believe that borrowing a book from a friend deprives the author of a sale and that that's equivalent to pickpocketing $10 from the author.

Google has every right to restrict who gets to access their services (although antitrust concerns do come up) and every user has the right to control the software on their devices.

Copying/sharing media is not the same as stealing from a store

This is different, you aren't copying youtube videos and sending them to a friend using your own resources, you are using their server capacity to watch it yourself.

So you are costing Youtube money just like stealing from a store costs the store money. So the old "copying is not theft" argument doesn't hold here. It does work for torrenting etc, but not when you stream directly from their servers.

Sure but the post I was responding to starts with "Would you use the same justification for pirating movies? Or for stealing from large supermarkets?", that's what I was responding to. Also in this context the situation is amusing to me given that YouTube's early success was built on pirated content. That continued for a long time even after Google's acquisition.

With respect to server/network resources, like I said Google is free to restrict access as they see fit.

the post I was responding to starts with "Would you use the same justification for pirating movies? Or for stealing from large supermarkets?", that's what I was responding to

The post you responded to didn't say that those two were the same, it clearly shows those two as different levels of bad if you read the next line:

"Not a pointed question, I just find it genuinely interesting where people draw the line."

So your point here is just you not understanding and reacting with a meme since his post sounded a bit similar to an argument you have seen before.

Or for stealing from large supermarkets?

This isn’t the right analogy. It’s more like someone opens up a shop where you can walk to the counter and ask for some food, and they stick a sample of some product in the bag when they give you the food. It’s not immoral to throw away the sample if you don’t want it, just like it’s not immoral to not play back the ad you get served along side a video you request if you don’t want to watch it.

If you made a robot that automatically goes there and takes the food and throws away all the samples I bet they would stop serving that robot very quickly.

Well they also have robots serving the food if we go by this analogy. Doesn't seem too unfair to streamline the process.

My computer, my code. No JS, no ads.

Also, Google it's already mining my data thru cookies/Android and earning money because of it. Thus, it's an even match.

Just turn on DNT in your HTTP headers, Google have made it clear that selectively choosing which data to process is wrong.

It's HN. People's time and effort are not valued unless it's to make rust compiler run on gameboy.

Remember the whole "news" part of HN works because people are allowed to link to "unpaywalled" version of paywalled content. It's what HN is about -- stealing premium content. If these kinds of links are banned HN will lose a lot of traffic.

Stealing and piracy are not related at all. They are not close to the same thing. Comparing them is the wrong way to make an argument.

The social contract has broken down so yes all of that is now okay.

I take issue with equating the three actions of not viewing ads, piracy and shoplifting although, I am absolutely 100% alright with all three for different reasons.

Not viewing ads is a lot more like not looking at billboards on the highway or not reading the inserts you get in your free local newspaper.

Pirating movies is a method of showing disdain for extractive and manipulative IP law that lines the pockets of nasty old rich fuds while not paying the actual artists that made a work. I would not pirate an indie film for instance.

Stealing from large supermarkets is basically just preventing them from throwing the unsold food away at the end of the profit cycle. Again the only person youre stealing from is the ruling class who profit off of hunger and poverty.

And YouTubers should make content for free?

They do until the algorithm thinks they are worth monetizing. Google doesn't give everyone who makes an account and uploads videos ad revenue.

The threshold for starting monetization isn't very high though.

* 500 Subscriber

* 3 'valid' uploads in the past 90 days

and either of

* 3k public watch hours or 3m shorts views

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/more-ways-for-creators-...

Doing any of those things without the algorithm showing your videos to people is hard though. They also require 3k watch hours in the past year so they expect you to grind for at least a year to "prove" you are worth monetizing.

That or go viral somehow and bootstrap yourself (which is likely why the shorts views are so high). Obvious not impossible as people still do it but the math seems suspect to me.

YouTube gets thousands of hours of video uploaded every second. I'm not sure what the ratio of monetized accounts to non-monetized accounts is, but if YouTube can run a channel "for free" for a year because they aren't monetizing it yet, it seems there's a threshold they are willing to accept to serve videos "nobody wants to see" until enough people do want to see it and they advertise on it.

So the high profile creators are costing YouTube money to serve their videos and YouTube wants help paying that cost. But they only extract it from channels they know are profitable because there are a lot of eyeballs on those videos.

Almost like they are promising X ad views to advertisers and want to keep that numbers game rolling. I feel like ad based spending is going to go through a correction in the next decade.

They also require 3k watch hours in the past year so they expect you to grind for at least a year to "prove" you are worth monetizing.

No, if you get 3k watch hours on a video you are good to go, you don't have to wait a year. I've seen plenty of channels get monetized within weeks since they already had an audience.

I remember when Game Grumps made "The Grumps" channel and before they even uploaded a single video to it, they were already at Diamond(I believe) subscriber count. I don't remember if they were immediately monetized or not, though.

There are other places you can post to jumpstart your channel like Reddit or social media you're only reliant on the grace of YT if you allow yourself to be. There's also still plenty of niche blogs/news sites that can send plenty of audience to your new channel if you're producing good content. You're also misreading the hours metric it's just a rolling window not a wait period. If you hit those metrics in a week you can monetize basically immediately.

It is not my responsibility to make sure people can make money off of me by means of "implied contracts" and other similar bullshittery. It is those people's choice to make those videos, and it's their choice of which platform they publish them on. But then it's MY choice of how I use the internet on a device I own.

Exactly. Which is why I feel no sympathy for the entitled complainers when google says enough and blocks the ad-blockers. As somebody that makes videos and makes a decent amount of money from it, I could care less about people that are so adamantly demanding free content getting cut off by Google. These people clearly don’t care about paying the subscription Google offers if they want to avoid ads, they clearly don’t want to watch ads to even support the creator, why would I care about having these people watch my videos?

It’s especially funny to see this sentiment on hacker news. “Those stupid content creators, clearly if they want to make money, just don’t use YT!”. I’m curious, what’s the alternative? Cable? Good luck. Udemy? What if I’m trying to make entertainment videos? Oh, I guess I could just build my own low latency highly efficient video hosting site and get a paid subscriber base that manages to cover hosting costs and make a profit! Yea, because that’s completely realistic…

The alternative? A job. Don't make vlogging your entire full-time occupation. That simple.

If you do want to make videos that reliably earn you money, charge money for them! Make it explicit. Don't rely on implied contracts that other people may or may not honor at their discretion.

The alternative? Not my problem.

Back in my day, when the Internet was good, we did.

if they cant afford to host it that their problem. Not mine.

There goes all the useful tutorials for graphics software.

And home maintenance.

Nobody was able to learn anything prior to YouTube.

It got way, way, way easier after YouTube.

https://advancetitan.com/news/2020/12/09/how-youtube-is-chan...

And there's no guarantee anything will actually come along to replace it if it goes away. Hosting video is very, very expensive.

Is it that expensive these days? Specifically, Cloudflare R2 has free egress, so you pay a fraction of what you'd pay most other places for the underlying "serve video" part of a platform.

Cloudflare R2 has free egress

The Cloudflare TOS does not allow you to serve video from a Cloudflare address unless you’re using a Cloudflare product that is meant for video. So no, you can't make a youtube clone and make Cloudflare pay that bill for you.

Cloudflare makes their money by making users overpay for other things than egress. Video hosting is one of the exceptions where they can't make up that on other costs which is why they have another service for it.

https://imgur.com/a/nC4dHxq

Cloudflare says it's fine to serve video from R2.

It's not just Google here though. Creators also rely on ad revenue to make money.

Recently, there was a post on reddit where people posted the amount of money content creators are getting from views with ads.

I don’t remember the numbers well enough to quote it but it’s barely anything. I recommend to look it up.

And the biggest surprise for me was that older videos get even less.

The money can also vary a lot depending on what advertisers are trying to advertise on your account. Dan Olsen talks about there being a minor bidding war for his Line Goes Up video because it was attracting crypto advertisers during a frenzy so they were bidding up placement on anything related to crypto.

The money isn't great by itself but it's still money coming in too.

It could be because people are blocking too many ads?

Just so the lede isn’t buried: a creator in this sense creates content for money.

You’re also stealing from the content creators who rev share with Google. No one seems to mention that a majority of the ad revenue Google gives to content creators. If you makes you feel better, you can keep thinking it’s Google.

I'm really happy to support the tiny YouTubers I like on ko-fi or Patreon. It's way more than the pennies per year they might make from my ad views.

I feel like after the adpocolypse, creators have learnt to stop relying on ads and rely on Patreon instead. It's pretty great, actually.

No one is stealing a damn thing. We're not obligated to watch ads. Our attention is not currency to pay for services with. If anyone's stealing anything, it's them. As far as I'm concerned uBlock Origin is legitimate self-defense against their ceaseless attempts to grab my attention without my consent.

They send people videos for free. They do so hoping you'll watch the ads. At exactly no point does this ever turn into an obligation to "pay" by watching the ads. They only have themselves to blame if their business model isn't working out.

I don't think it needs to be a moral argument, I just don't think you should be indignant if they don't cater to people not making them money.

Can ad publishers filter out ad blocking users as not being their target audience? Forcing someone to watch your ad most likely triggers negative connotations about your brand.

I think advertising still works even on people who don’t like it and prefer that if not.

I never bought an advertised product in my life. If any of the brands I buy starts advertising Im going to look for something else. I look for things, it’s not the other way around.

That sounds almost impossible? Unless you're Amish or something like that.

I suppose they're being a little hyperbolic but honestly plenty of folks just buy off brand generic products at ALDI. Pretty easy to avoid advertised stuff if you just shop at discounters. Popular here in Germany even among people who are well off.

Aldi advertise.

You've never had any major brand of pop, ever?

Ok, I admit I was once a gullible teenager but luckily I didnt have any money then.

This is one of the most obviously nonsense statements I’ve ever seen made.

Probably tons of things you are missing out on.

Some of the most life-changing products I own were shown to me in an ad. Might not have bought that exact item, but the knowledge of that type of product even existing?!

Mindblowing.

Cudos for you. I try something similar, I do not buy a product if I believe I saw its ads. It is a light version of your strategy (I'm not going to watch ads to know what is advertised and what isn't), but even it doesn't work in all cases. For example, my cat eats advertized food now. Not all of it though, but dry food is advertized.

I know there's lots of empirical studies and literature on this

I believe the rationale is even if say 90% of the viewers who wouldn't buy the product anyway are now less likely to buy the product, That's considered a zero.

However if you're positively influencing the purchasing decisions on that remaining 10%, then it might be money well spent.

Thus the advertising may not affect specifically you but because this is a broadcast style exposure, that doesn't matter

I think the logic is flawed in thinking this way too. Most products have an overwhelming amount of choice. If you are not in the market for that category of product then the advertisement is not aimed at you. Even if you were annoyed by the the advertisement at that particular moment in time, if you are ever in the market for that category of product then the product will have brand recognition over its competitors and that is what is so huge and valuable.

IMO it is quite like the classic example of the heuristic that there is no such thing as bad press.

Everyone buys stuff from phones to food.

Yes but barely. I consider myself a person on whom advertising doesn't work. But then I would prefer international brands in an unfamiliar city simply because I'm getting exactly the experience or the product I already know. But IMO that's not because they advertise out of literally everything, it's because they're international, the consistency is one of the primary benefits of that. (although US McDonald's did disappoint me)

People just like to tell themselves it doesn't work on them because it makes them sound more intelligent. I've yet to actually meet a single person in my life that advertising didn't work on. You just have to talk them through how they decided on the things they own and before long they start to realise the truth.

Yeah its kinda the same like torture.

Ads are only meant for certain groups of the population. That's why you never see ads for good products that you would actually want to buy – because people who buy those kind of products make informed purchases by comparing price, features and quality.

We could dream of an internet where companies would advertise their products on relevant videos and be done with that, but they probably won't increase sales that way. Because the audience would buy their product anyway if it fit their needs.

In 2023 there are two methods of marketing:

Method 1 is competing on price, features and quality. Customers will buy your product if it fits their wants and their budget.

Method 2 is advertising, where the product itself has little to no influence on sales. Certain groups of people will buy your product because you've made them feel they should.

Even if you make the perfect product, you may well have to spend a lot on advertising.

In Fintech, it feels like the first $5 of advertising per customer just goes to persuading them that you're not a scam.

Charities, travel services and perfumes have value propositions often hard to express. Perhaps a perfect communicator could get it across in a short essay, but most rely expensive ads.

There are some domains where customers are well educated & motivated to seek out better products, like consumer electronics & cars, but those are the minority.

I can't disagree with you on charities, since their business is literally begging for money. They're never going to have a "customer" recommending them to friends and family.

Travel and Fintech are products that are for everyone, so there will always be people interested in your stuff and then recommend to their friends if your product is good. Especially for travel, people are always seeking out new "products".

I think it's interesting that you brought up cars. In the past 20 years I've only seen two types of car ads: One is the stylish young woman going on a date, the second type is with young urban adults doing street dance and then the car flashes quickly in the end of the ad. Because advertising is only directed at certain groups. To normal people, these car ads communicate "We hate you" from the car company to the consumer, and would be a net negative for the brand. But since normal people are going to compare price, gas economy and features when buying a car anyway, this brand negativity doesn't mean much.

An interesting feature of car marketing is that - in general - it only targets new car buyers. These people are a relatively small segment of the driving population.

I wonder whether those groups you describe disproportionately purchase mass market new cars.

Those groups can mostly amount to less than 10% of prospective new car buyers, if I'm allowed to speculate. I think that almost everybody who is in the market for a new car will know several persons to give them recommendations and advice. So the ads will only be targeting some people who have a lot of disposable money and few real friends to help them choose a car, and no understanding to compare cars themselves. Maybe the children of rich careerists?

Or it could be that the advertisement and media industry have their heads too far up their own asses to care what they're doing. It certainly seems like this sometimes, when huge brands can destroy themselves permanently in a matter of days with out of touch advertising.

It's more likely that you are just a standard consumer that doesn't recognise non-obvious advertising than you only buy products that don't advertise.

How do you or the people doing the comparisons you read know the product exists without advertising?

I don't buy this theory, because in my job we get a lot of new customers every year, and we don't advertise. Other forms of marketing are just so much more effective. Putting your product out there is not the same as advertising, people can find your product by search engine or other means, and then if you compete on price, quality and features, the product is marketed by word of mouth.

Do products show up on your store shelves because the company did a ton of advertising and customers were begging the store manager to sell it? Usually not. Instead these are negotiations between businesses. How often do you see ads for new products, compared to products that have been around for decades?

The only situation were advertising is wise is when you have a product that is not different from your competitors product and you have a customer base that is ignorant, so that you have a lot of margin for advertising to get your stuff moved. Ignorant in this situation can mean just ignorant on the product category.

Running a website to get traffic from a search engine is advertising, it's just not directly paid advertising.

Products often show up on store shelves for two reasons. The product does independent advertising so the store knows it will sell or they advertise to store buyers.

If you think that is the only time advertising makes sense I'm going to assume your employer is very slow growing. Advertising pretty much always makes sense one you have protect market fit. I can't think of a single business that has that which would be worse off with advertising.

This is one argument I've used in my head for ad blockers - you're removing hostile viewers so it might be a net win. It's like dropping flyers in a "no junk mail" box. I wonder if anyone studied it.

Advertisers would love to skip uninterested viewers, the problem is that someone else, in this case youtube, wants that money from the advertiser for your eye balls. I normally don’t mind the model of ads for free service but it’s a sewer of interminable garbage that is also dangerous to be exposed to (bad scripts and stuff).

interminable garbage that is also dangerous to be exposed to (bad scripts and stuff).

Not really an issue with YT video ads though right? They're just annoying and too frequent but they're not really hazardous (beyond some cognitohazard of random crank stuff).

Why would YT video ads be any different ?

AFAIK they don't get to run any scripts on your browser they just get to upload and YT plays the video.

They're not running third party JS on your machine; just a video.

Ads drive consumerism which comes with a rather large pollution problem, making the only planet we can live on that we know of more and more uninhabitable.

Some ML likely doing this: they track your interests, for example you searched adblockers in the past, it goes as a feature to ML model, and model predicts that it is unlikely you will click and make purchase, and they will bid on you much lower, as result you will see lots of cheap junk Ads..

While reading your comment, I thought abouts ads for ad blockers like "hey, we noticed you searched for ad blockers so here are the top 10 best!". That's not a good idea though.

Could be worth it the price if the top one is an extension you own and lets some specific “partner ads” through.

I can definitely see shady companies doing this.

Show ads for ad-blockers. Deliver an ad-blocker with spyware or other forms of malware.

The anti-malware industry used to be dominated by tools that ended up being malware (I’m sure that hasn’t changed much TBH).

That's not a good idea though.

I wonder why you say that. At least an ad for a specific ad blocker sounds like a great idea.

- Ideally, you don't send ads to users of your product - Users of inferior products will see your ad, and it might be super effective (if you used MY adblocker, you wouldn't be seeing this ad) - Everything else is a user that doesn't have an ad blocker, and it's probably an easy sell to say "would you like to never see ads like this?"

Almost nobody wants to see ads, but ads still probably work on most people.

They probably don't. Forced ad viewing is fundamentally dishonest: they can force the user to watch the ad, but they can't force him to pony up for what is being advertised.

I would say Facebook ads have sold me on a few things. But they are not full page, I can easily identify them and move past should I chose and at times were actually relevant to what I want. How come YouTube ads try and push the dumbest shit on me when they have all my data and know all my searches yet I’m getting ads for stuff I would never buy. So I propose google cut back on some of the video ads, force the video being watched to slim up a bit while no video ads of relevance pop on on the side.

Forcing someone to watch your ad most likely triggers negative connotations about your brand.

For a lot of advertisement that is simply not a problem.

Remember those horrible ads for dishwashing detergents or sanitary pads on TV? You probably do and you probably hated them and that was the point.

Forcing someone to watch your ad most likely triggers negative connotations about your brand.

I will give up driving before ever purchasing anything from Liberty Mutual and I caution everyone who will listen that they are a shitty company who will grift you for your last cent precisely because of this. As if watching the same stupid ad for the millionth + 1 time will suddenly make me realize that I WAS WRONG and I CAN'T LIVE without their product.

Just pay the $15 for the ad free version? The entitlement people feel for a free service that takes hundreds of millions of dollars in compute and human hours to run boggles me.

Don’t like ads? Don’t like subscription fees? Don’t like large tech companies? Great! Go to the library and check out a book.

I pirate everything anyways, why in the hell would I pay for YouTube?

55% net goes directly to the creators making the videos. The very video you are watching.

Encourage what you want to see in the world.

Encourage what you want to see in the world.

You can do that through patronage, if you have the means. Advertising never leads to that. Every sector that depends on large numbers of people contributing a small fraction (like cinema or music) ends up turning into a race to the bottom, as appealing to the lowest common denominator is the most efficient way to succeed. The advertising internet model the epitome of that.

That is only true for the largest of brands. There are hundreds of thousands of niche youtube channels that makes their creators enough money to live on so that can now work full time creating niche content for their audiences, that wouldn't be possible without youtube ads.

So at least from we see on youtube the ads leads to more niche content, not less. There aren't enough payers to sustain that many niche channels.

Maybe. From what I've seen niche channels tend to have a Patreon or similar, so neither monetization model exists in a vacuum. It's true those niche channels exist thanks to YouTube, but if they were forced to rely uniquely on ads I don't think they would be able to survive without succumbing to trend-chasing, drama and formulaic routine videos, which is what big channels seem to do for the most part.

For me personally it’s the way they’re bullying me to pay it. For years I wanted YouTube and Twitter to introduce a paid plan with less ads. And then they did, and immediately started harassing everyone who didn’t purchase it right away with ads every few seconds. It’s just rude and I don’t like being bullied into doing something.

What's the alternative here? Just offer the service with minimal ads and just hope people decide to sign up for the ad-free version - a value proposition that makes little sense since the ads are minimal?

They aren't bullying anyone. They are trying to make a business model work as efficiently as possible. Anything that relies on ad revenue is going to be predatory like this.

Your point is they're not bullies, just mere predators ?

You could've started paying almost a decade ago. I've had Premium for as long as it's existed, even when ads were "tolerable." (It was never tolerable enough for me to be able to keep a few bucks.)

I think it's ridiculous that people are only now coming out of the woodwork saying things like "I would pay if they weren't forcing me into it" or "I would pay if it wasn't so expensive now" or "I just want to pay for ad-free and not YT Music".

It's been out for years, and it was cheap before; they even had Premium Lite for a while.

And then they did, and immediately started harassing everyone who didn’t purchase it right away with ads every few seconds

Youtube premium has been a thing for 8 years now, you have had a really long time to start paying for ad-free youtube. You just didn't bother to even check if it existed until they started to push for it harder recently.

So you are a perfect example why they gave up and started becoming more aggressive now, its because it didn't work to just do it the way you think is "fair".

I 100% guarantee you that eventually the $15 tier will have “limited” ads and then the upcoming $25 tier is ad free, rinse and repeat. It’s happened with cable, it’s happened with streaming, it’ll happen with YouTube.

Doubt it. Most streaming sites are still ad free and their prices only increased with inflation. Both YouTube and creators already get way more revenue from premium subscribers than ad watchers so I doubt that'll change this decade

HBO, Hulu, Netflix, and Disney+ all have ad-supported tiers that materialized after an ad-free price increase.

US dollar inflation was 32.1% over the last decade.

Netflix increased their prices from $10/mo to $16/mo in 2011 and faced massive backlash with tech journalists praising Blockbuster and saying "Up until today, we loved Netflix":

https://www.wired.com/2011/07/netflix-price-hike-anger/

https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/hey-netflix-wtf-6368309

Today Netflix charges $15.50/mo. The price rises and falls every 2 years and we get the same whining every 2 years: https://flixed.io/netflix-price-hikes

They are entitled, but just like any commercial service this will just bloat to "ad lite" and then "full ads but you can still pay for it" - cable did the exact same thing.

When’s that? It’s been 8 years so far, so good.

It's already there, except the ads are baked into most content as "sponsored videos". They make it easy to skip over the ads (seriously, just fast forward 20-60 seconds depending on the video).

For better or worse, the vast majority of my media consumption is youtube these days and of all the subs I pay for, it's the one I get the most value out of. I don't get the cynicism.

I’ll pay for the ad free version when youtube stewards a responsible and accountable platform - both in moderating content and in proving transparent appeals instead of giving an open path for copyright trolls to harass and cause monetary harm to creators.

Until then, they get no money and I watch no ads.

If you use YouTube at all then you're not at all concerned with "a responsible and accountable platform" you're just trying to justify leeching. If you were actually concerned about those things you'd avoid using them entirety. You talk about being concerned about YouTube causing monetary harm to creators but your own actions are causing them monetary harm by denying them any payment for their value provided to you. It's hypocritical.

I don't want to financially support every person that I happen to watch. Sometimes I am curious what propaganda scumbag right wing trolls are putting out. Viewing content I disagree with is the cost of staying informed. Doesn't mean I want those creators getting a cent. YouTube isn't getting any revenue from me (from advertising or subscription) until I can allocate exactly where my money goes.

The deal was they siphon off all our private data, ruin society and get filthy rich, we get an infinite place to store cat videos.

They’re breaking the implied contract, not us.

I mean the entire point and value of that whole data siphon thing is literally the ads.

Previously they gathered all that data and didn't also display ads; that was the thing, it was seamless.

Now they want all our data, AND for us to pay to skip their ads? I'm not for it.

Just pay the $15 for the ad free version?

Why not pay people to watch the ads by a similar logic?

BTW, curious has anyone ever anywhere in the world, any media, tried creating a channel/stream which just shows ads and pays people if they watch? Wondering if that’ll work.

Also, I rarely watch YT, so for me personally $15 or whatever the price is, is too high.

Another thing, ad blockers also help in privacy. $15 may result in no ads being shown in YT, but does that also mean that Google is not collecting data? I’ll consider paying to Google for a no-data-collected mode.

Yes. There are a number of "view ads and fill out surveys and get paid" things in the world.

How are you using the word “entitlement” here? A very small number of people are looking for technological solutions to block ads, presumably motivated more by the enjoyment of the intellectual pursuit than by the disdain of ads.

I don’t see any statements or actions even remotely hinting at feeling entitled to an ad-free viewing experience. They’re simply trying to figure out how to achieve an ad-free experience.

If someone locally modifies a website’s visuals to implement dark mode, would you lambast them for feeling entitled to dark mode?

I'm absolutely entitled to decide what content plays on mwy computer. They're also absolutely entitled to send me ads along with their content. What they're not entitled to is forcing me to see those ads.

No. They're making my pay for the bundle of YouTube Music plus ad free YouTube. I'm happy with Spotify, I refuse to pay extra for a service I won't use.

If it was $10+$5 for YouTube+music, this thread would be full of people complaining that Google is nickel and diming them because there's already music on YouTube.com

I’m fine with paying for this type of service,but the last thing I want to do is give money to YouTube so it can become an even bigger defacto monopoly.

And reward their enshittification practices once they reached monopoly status.

Erm No.

Oh boo hoo.

no. sponsor block, downloading, kodi playback is free whereas you're paying for a worst experience while being tracked

The service has been free so far only because it allowed YouTube to get almost 3 billions of users and build a de facto monopoly. Now that they are the video platform, the enshittification starts. I don't see any downside in speeding up their ads: I'm not interested in rewarding their enshittification practices and I find it healthy to affirm, once again, that on my computer I play only the content I decide to play. If this hurts the business model of YouTube, good. Maybe it will help competition.

Yeah the rage here is wild to me. People constantly say "just give me an option to pay" but Youtube Premium has existed forever and remains an option.

What is the stance of the people who work against the revenue generation of the services they consume?

Should YouTube be a free service or what?

It's only a semi-ironic question. Perhaps someone has a vision for how it all works out.

Full disclosure: I work on programmatic advertising technologies.

What is your stance on borrowing from the public library, watching movies at a friend's house or getting up during commercials to make a sandwich?

The library (and the books inside it) are paid for by taxes. The movies you watch at your friend’s house was paid for by your friend. How are you paying for YouTube?

The amount of effort people spend on these sophist explanations of why they don’t have to pay for the services they use is just amazing.

What's your stance on muting TV commercials, zapping to another channel when TV commercials start, using TiVo, using TV commercials for bathroom pauses?

So we're going to fund YouTube with taxpayer money now?

Should YouTube be a free service or what?

Yes. They were loss leader for more than a decade and killed all competition because nobody had coffers deep enough to fight Google. Now because of their dominant position it’s impossible to migrate from it, because of network effect.

So f** them, not my problem. I’m willing to pay for stuff that I enjoy (old videos from 10+ years ago), I’m not going to pay for modern cancer (just open YouTube in incognito tab to understand what I mean).

This is a good point tbh.

Google did destroy the competition on the space forcing a monopoly.

So if there was a similar competing service with the same content quality and revenue models, would you subscribe/watch the ads?

Yes.

Don’t misunderstand me, I do watch YouTube ads on my TV, but I’m pissed that nobody can challenge them anymore.

You're never going to capture the "will never watch ads" group.

What is being destroyed by YouTube's current policy that led to this anti adblock attempt, is pushing too far with the ads.

Crap quality and overstuffed.

A 5 second ad on a 4 minute video? Fine.

1:30 ad, one of TWO... on same video?

Fuck. That. Noise.

It's the same segmentation issue as piracy, y'all get hyperfocused on the group that will NEVER play ball, and ruin the experience so much for those that would, that they "swap teams".

6 seconds video shows 15 seconds ad, lmao.

That pretty much sums up my opinion, too. I'm happy to pay for my time and for convenience. If you violate either, that's on you. And let's be honest, losing access to most of YouTube is a rather miniscule loss.

I’m ready to pay about a $2 per month for YT as a paid service. Personally, paying more than $2 for a software makes me want to avoid using it completely.

Agreed. More would not be worth for me. I could also do with a bit of competition. Maybe many smaller YouTubes serving different niches.

How many hours of YouTube do you consume in a month?

'If I can consume the same service with no ads I will' is my stance I think.

I'm way more likely to donate to a channel I like than I am to put up with loud annoying obnoxious ads for things I'm never going to buy anyway if I don't have to.

There's one I like, or at least used to, King's Fine Woodworking, that.. I don't know he clearly has some setting enabled that others don't, that means his channel is plastered in text link ads that just make it look crap, and you have to scroll way down to get to 'Uploads' (vs playlists of old videos you've seen before). Ads cheapen every channel they touch, the more there are the worse it is. 'Creators' are better off focussing on direct monetisation imo. Or sponsored unbiased content, product reviews etc. where it is actually related to the channel. Not like VPNs or backup battery systems are everywhere.

You're not answering the question. Do you think Youtube should just be streaming to everybody for free? Do you think that's a sustainable business model?

No I don't, I just mean if the model is ads that's fine, but if it's possible for me to block them I will, because I don't want to see them and it's not illegal.

I do understand that means maybe they have to show more to people not blocking them, or start charging, or something. I'm not saying it should be provided free and adless, I'm just saying that doesn't matter, it's not the point, if it's free and can be adless then it will be. It's not my job to make sure it's sustainable by sitting through ads.

> What is the stance of the people who work against the revenue generation of the services they consume?

Those services are fooling themselves.

Consider television. Is it immoral to mute the TV during a commercial? No. Is it immoral to go get up and get a snack or go to the bathroom during a commercial? No. TV advertisers have absolutely no expectation that TV viewers will watch their ads. So why's it that when it comes to internet advertising all the advertisers suddenly wring their hands and whine and moan about their poor business model? Ads are nonsense, I won't watch them, stop wasting my time with them, and if you want to cover costs for your service, charge me for the privilege to access it. In the meantime, if you're foolishly giving away something for free, I'm going to consume it without remorse.

The entire ad business model is nonsense, and it's not our responsibility as consumers to prop up the companies that have based their fragile fortunes on it.

I am not asking about the morality of it.

I believe consumers are in their right, moral or not, to block ads, and Youtube/Google is in their right to disable ad blockers.

I am wondering if someone has a solution because I would really be interested in hearing it.

I’ll gladly pay for useful ad free services when you stop double dipping and stealing my data.

If you use YouTube a lot, paying for no ads is a no brainer. I pay for YT premium, Apple News+, NYT, Kagi, etc. If you watch just a few videos a month, the price is just not worth it and there is no per-block pricing. Same goes for paid articles - I would have liked to read a few articles from TheInformation about OpenAI but there is no way I’d buy a subscription.

I don't feel bad for blocking YouTube ads. Other sites tried a more sustainable subscription-based model and Google crushed them by running YouTube at a loss for years. They seem like very smart people that don't need my help to turn a profit.

What is the stance of the people who work against the revenue generation of the services they consume?

Would the advertisers really want to pay for their ads to be shown to people who aren't interested in their products? Every ad view costs them money. (I know, there are also the advertisers who just want to spread their message and aren't selling any products..)

If the ads are actually useful to people, would they still jump through all these hoops to block them?

The ad supported model is only sustainable for the ad company if it is a win for both advertisers AND end users.

"You are not paying for the (premium) service, so we will degrade your service and force you to watch ads so we can pay our bills" is usually a sign that youtube is chasing after short term profits at the detriment of it's own advertisers / end users imo.

I know this is a little too simplistic and I don't have any real answers... but this is how i'm looking at this whole debacle.

First, there is the glaring ethical violation of writing software that deliberately works against the user's interest. In this case the Youtube player is not just playing the requested video, but also displaying ads, backhauling surveillance telemetry, and trying to lure users into the world of conspiracy tripe. It's unfortunate that software development has very little in the way of professional ethics and essentially relies on punk volunteers to counter the surveillance industry's continual aggression, but here we are.

Second, Youtube gained outsized winner-take-all popularity by the anticompetitive dumping of hosting and development effort at below the apparent cost. This created a simulation of the early Internet's liberating spirit while killing any competitors that could have been based around sustainable economics (ideally some combination of publisher hosting plus p2p). Blocking ads is continuing the relationship as Youtube created it.

Third, just fuck ads in general. The original post is a fun piece of art, but even seeing those three quick blips in the demo video was still an unneeded mental attack. The less I have to suffer and mentally repel corporate attempts at faking social proof, especially interruptive video/audio ones, the better my life is. If I could get AR glasses that blocked billboards, I would.

My only concern of Youtube somehow going out of business would be losing the back catalog, which I think is better served by independent archiving rather than framing business revenue as some kind of collective responsibility.

If the USPS was never a public service America would literally look differently. Maybe social media(including YouTube) is the modern day USPS, the primary way Americans interact/communicate with each other.

My stance is that ads don't work on me, so either YouTube or the advertiser is losing money on me, and they know it. Would rather choose the option that doesn't waste my time too.

Ad-supported services account for the fact that some users block ads.

If users blocking ads is enough to make the service unprofitable, the service should switch to a paid model or shut down.

It's an adversarial relationship. The service is within their rights to shove ads down your throat, and you're within your rights to fight back.

(I pay for YouTube Premium)

I pay for plenty of things, but I'm not going to pay an advertising giant for anything. Google is an abusive, greedy company, and I'm forced to pay too many of those in the course of daily life as it is.

When I'm given the choice, I only pay companies that I respect. If they successfully block ad blockers, I'll mute the ads and do something else while they're playing.

I'm fine paying for YouTube as soon as it's not in Google's hands. Until then, I'd consider it an ethical wrong for me to pay for it.

I got to say this arm race is interesting to watch.

I wonder if we'll reach a point where YT asks viewers to pass a captcha at the end of an ad to prove that they watched it before getting back to their video.

Please drink verification can.

A classic. It was such a joke back in the SA/Slashdot days. I feel like we've come a long way...into the pit...since then.

We were already heading there. Comedy is the most reliable source of truth there is.

A decent amount of that meme has come true. At least, in the sense of printer ink.

Please verify you are "professoretc" by saying "Doritos™ Dew™ it right".

https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454B2/en

I'm waiting for the end game where AI processes a native instance of the desktop and outputs a modified desktop according to criteria. Ads can be displayed and playing in the background but they get swapped by random gifs to fill time, dark ui patterns get identified and highlighted. Everything gets post processed sanitized on the final disaply layer with no interaction to the outside.

That's not the endgame.

Eventually each ad has an embedded AI that must be run to see the content after the ad. That AI evaluates whether there's a human who looks and behaves like you watching the ad. The endgame requires your AI to do a convincing impression of you to the ad AI, and to hide other signals that would reveal you doing something else, like the sound of a flushing toilet.

When your AI is pushed by more advanced ad AI to be very convincing, it has to start purchasing things occasionally, just like a typical human. It occasionally buys the things in the ads, the way humans are expected to, to avoid revealing it's not you.

This spirals out of control when your AI has to buy more things than a human would, because the ad AIs co-evolve with your AI to expect that. It won't be possible for an ordinary human to watch content unless they run a highly-evolved adblocker AI that buys enough of the things shown by the ad AIs to satisfy the ad company.

You forgot the part where your AI evolves into a reseller of cheap ad-based products, which you order to satisfy the ad AI — bringing the entire AI ecosystem into a large MLM scheme.

I'd rather just let the AI watch the video at that point and go play with my kids.

They already do a poll thing where they ask "which of the following brands have you seen ads for recently?"

I had no idea, ublock is still doing a decent job... But I get those prompts on Waze when stopped at red lights and it's super annoying!

Sounds like it might be illegal too...

I built the industry first version of that product :)

Fun way to screw with Google is to pick the worst answer (haven't seen any of the products, worse impression of the brand, etc).

Advertisers are starting to try to measure advertising effectiveness (did the user actually see our ad and like our product) instead of easily game-able metrics (impressions, time on screen, click through).

However, we found that poor ad experiences would result in poor metrics. Advertisers really don't like it when they spend millions of dollars in advertising to get a report that says "your target demographic is less likely to consider your product now after seeing your ads".

Q: When Bob greeted Alice at the door, what purse did Alice have?

A: Louis Vuitton

Didn't Sony file a patent where you had to say the brand name after an ad?

It did.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454B2/en

Hopefully so that ad companies willing to do it are patent blocked

I wonder if we'll reach a point where YT asks viewers to pass a captcha at the end of an ad to prove that they watched it before getting back to their video.

GPT-4 has entered the chat

It still gets them wrong a lot of the time

So do people.

“Please proceed to purchase the item being advertised in order to continue watching.”

Hopefully the AIs learn to pass captchas soon. I've tested gpt4 and it still gets them wrong a lot of the time.

Probably the farthest it'll go is YouTube stitching ads into the videos and not serving all the bits in advance, kinda like cable TV. And the answer will be like a VHS or DVR, where you can only skip ads if you're ok waiting.

Unless WEI becomes a thing.

If they do I will improve my extension :7

YouTube premium is one of the best value purchases I’ve made. If you subscribe to Netflix you’re probably better off canceling that and replacing it with YouTube premium. Also, you can get the family plan for not much more and share with your parents and siblings (or in-laws!)— they will be very appreciative if they watch YouTube and don’t already have premium. It’s not just for skipping ads, it also lets you download videos locally on your phone and the audio continues in the background when you switch to another phone app.

How will you feel when YouTube introduces quick ads for premium users and longer ads for free users?

There's absolutely nothing stopping the arms race from continuing past the point which you are currently satisified.

Just look at Hulu, for example.

Also, it's ridiculous that YouTube was able to convince people it's acceptable to have audio pause when in the background. If YouTube on Desktop paused audio when the tab was not the active tab it would be fundamentally unusable.

How will you feel eating a potato chip tonight, knowing that next year they'll probably make the bag smaller and increase the price?

You're not locked into subscribing to YouTube until you die. This is a misunderstanding I see frequently among hackers. They also seem to think that changing the default web browser is equal in severity to building a battleship...

It doesn't mean I'm going to try and get everyone onboard with shrinkflation though. I'm not telling everyone "aye it's a part of life, accept receiving less so that stocks can trend upward."

It's good to have a healthy tension between consumer wants and corporate financials. If everyone stops using ad block today then Google reports one quarter of increased profits. Afterward, investors are normalized to that expectation, the fact everyone is watching ads is meaningless, and Google pursues whatever their next step is for squeezing blood from stone.

I want to live in a world where products are as good for me as possible without corporations going under. I do not want to live in a world where products are as poor as I'll tolerate just for profit maximization.

I believe in voting with your wallet. If a product has a good cost:benefit there's no reason to not buy it if you want it. For as long as you want it.

If they do that, I'll unsubscribe then. That's what voting with your money is.

It’s very likely for youtube to turn to paying customers to sqeeze more from them because they’re already willing to pay.

Soon there’ll be a premium premium with no ads at a premium cost, $30 a month.

YT premium is one of the few subscriptions I find reasonable tbh. Youtube music, no ads on youtube, my conscience is clean, and I support creators.

no ads on youtube

Really? No ads baked-in into videos by the creators? I.e. those skipped by another add-on, sponsorblock?

and I support creators.

Are you sure about that? Why do they need to put their own ads into videos then?

By paying Netflix, Amazon Prime, or other streaming service, you surely would: Netflix and Amazon have to pay for the content. But Youtube? They get it for free.

my conscience is clean,

But your privacy-awareness should be on alert. For YouTube premium, you have to be logged in. You can bet, that Google profiles you based on what you watch. They just don't show you the ads right on the YouTube, but surely they do elsewhere on their network.

Think of it like browser equivalent of the smart tv connected to net.

Really? No ads baked-in into videos by the creators? I.e. those skipped by another add-on, sponsorblock?

Sponsorblock, yes.

Are you sure about that? Why do they need to put their own ads into videos then?

For the people who use ad-blockers. Not me specifically and youtube doesn't provide a functionality to skip certain parts on paid views.

But your privacy-awareness should be on alert. For YouTube premium, you have to be logged in. You can bet, that Google profiles you based on what you watch. They just don't show you the ads right on the YouTube, but surely they do elsewhere on their network.

I use kagi (paid), and ad-blockers for everything else.

I can live with google having access to my [poor] music taste and view history.

and I support creators

YT cut off my favorite channels' monetization all the time. They'll never get a dime out of me.

Hard to pay for something that most users perceived as *free*

YouTube has had ads forever. It's never been free.

This is disingenuous and inaccurate. YouTube had no ads in 2005 or 2006. Further, YouTube ads in 2007, 2011 and today are not really even in the same category.

skip ads

download videos locally on your phone

the audio continues in the background when you switch to another phone app

Y... you mean like NewPipe already does?

There's also a firefox addon (firefox for android) that can help you play youtube video audio in the background.

When prices kept rising on cigarettes it was easier to quit them for good. It's been many years now. I was and still am thankful for that pricing regime.

Lately I find I waste a lot of time "relaxing" on YouTube, but I've noticed it's become TV for me; a habit like smoking was. Sure, there's thought-provoking stuff on there, but that's not what seems to show up in my feed. It looks like cable TV. I suppose I have terrible viewing preferences. This is just my experience, of course.

So, I'm ready to kick the YouTube habit and to do more "pulling" of information. Having experienced what cable TV did (eventually throwing a huge amount ads into an expensive subscription) the new fee structure makes kicking the habit an easier, healthier, and more prudent choice. I think I know where they're heading.

I'm thankful for it, frankly. It's wind at my back to pull away from too much screen time. It'll be much easier to break the habit. I've paid enough by providing my viewing preferences anyhow. And when already-profitable monopolistic non-essential services start squeezing tighter, it's surprisingly refreshing to search for new pastures.

If/when Reddit kills "old" reddit, that'll be good too.

YT Premium is the only media subscription needed.

Absolutely infuriating that Youtube used to have background play as a feature for free and then decided to hide it away behind a paywall because they had to monetize it somehow.

They also decided to get rid of Google Play Music, one of the best music streaming platforms ever created, and replace it with Youtube Music - which is absolutely god-awful. I want to play music, not watch music videos, not be limited to what's on Youtube and upload my own music to stream...

Purely for removing background play alone, they don't deserve 15 dollars a month (or whatever they're charging right now)

I use YouTube A LOT.

I follow a bunch of developers and engineering channels on it and I learn a lot of stuff on YouTube in general.

A couple of years ago, after running AdguardHome on my network, I’ve noticed that YouTube ads became more and more aggressive and that was hard to unnotice since I mostly consume YouTube on mobile devices that don’t have adblockers. I just gave up and convinced myself that YouTube, of all the services, is the one that probably deserves my money, so here I am, paying for the student plan which is 6.99€ a month. Now, after almost a year of premium, it’s probably the only plan I could not give up along with Spotify’s. I’m not used to ads anymore, I listen to a lot of stuff in background mode and I love it more than before.

Only thing that got on my nerves is that they now decided that if you don’t activate watch history you’re not going to get a Home feed, which is crazy if you ask me.

I don't subscribe to netflix, though. I'm not a compulsive viewer. I just look up the occasional thing. It's not worth it to me, but I still don't want ads.

Not to mention you get YouTube Music too. The app is inferior to Spotify but it’s good enough and let me get rid of another subscription.

Same here. No hassle whatsoever. I cannot remember seeing an ad for years now, honestly, I do not get the discussion about blockers when you have everything via Premium. I use YT a lot, more often than Apple Music for example.

The right to block advertisements is the right to close your eyes and plug your ears. Google is trying to argue that its a violation of their terms of service to close your eyes and plug your ears. It's a violation of my person to try and detect whether I'm not paying attention to your ad.

There's a good example. Some greedy gas stations blast ads while you're pumping gas: your money for gas isn't enough, they want to steal your attention as well. But a customer may wear in-ear headphones that normally play music, but can also play nothing, let the outer sounds in, except for the speech frequencies silenced by the active noise suppression. It so happens that ads rely on speech frequencies to steal attention. Problems begin when the ads platform that gas stations use and the manufacturer of those smart headphones is the same company.

After a little experimentation when they started doing this I found the second button from the top on the right immediately mutes the audio. Since then I’ve verified this works at a lot of different gas stations on car trips across the US.

a few I've seen, some kind soul will have marked the mute button with a sharpie

I'll second this. I have found some that use a different button but usually one of them cancels it so feel free to try them all. I think I've found only one that couldn't be at least muted in this way.

It used to work everywhere. Over the last 2 years, an increasing number of pumps have been modified so that this no longer works.

Some greedy gas stations blast ads while you're pumping gas: your money for gas isn't enough, they want to steal your attention as well.

While I'm just annoyed as you are by the ads blasting while I'm refueling, I want to highlight that gas stations don't typically significantly profit from selling gas; their profit might be as little as a few cents per gallon. Instead, the primary source of revenue and profits for them is usually the attached convenience store or other services.

Here's a few sources (unverified, but here for convenience):

https://fortune.com/2022/08/09/energy-profit-margins-gas-sta...

https://thehustle.co/the-economics-of-gas-stations/

https://www.theautochannel.com/news/2021/11/22/1074398-who-m...

https://www.cattlerange.com/articles/2022/04/how-much-do-gas...

https://www.projectionhub.com/post/gas-stations-industry-fin...

The right to block advertisements is the right to close your eyes and plug your ears

True

Google is trying to argue that its a violation of their terms of service to close your eyes and plug your ears.

Google can have any terms of service they want - it's their service, if you don't like the terms don't use the service?

It's a violation of my person to try and detect whether I'm not paying attention to your ad.

No it's not.

Google can have any terms of service they want - it's their service, if you don't like the terms don't use the service?

Or you could, I dunno, don't agree to their terms and use their service anyways?

Which is exactly why they want to implement WEI and shove that DRM system in to the browser specs so that you cannot abuse their service.

It's also why it's important to fight against anti user standards.

I dunno - as I've gotten older I've more taken to the idea that if you dislike how a company or a person does things, you walk away and don't engage with them anymore. Trying to dick around and bypass things you dislike while still consuming stuff from that company is showing you to be the weak party.

You look at how many people "quit" twitter over the last year - if even a quarter of those people legit just walked away (either to a different service or left that aspect of the net behind) the social media landscape would be much different right now.

Google is trying to argue that its a violation of their terms of service to close your eyes and plug your ears

Where are they doing this?

Supposedly by not providing service if you don’t watch the ads. I don’t see a strong connection. I happily pay for Premium because the value I get from YT is 3x what I pay for it, if not more.

There is an old Black Mirror episode where people have to sit in cubicles with 4 screens around them looking at ads to gain credits or something, and it tracks if you close your eyes it simply pauses the ads...

It didn't just pause the ads. It caused active discomfort with loud sounds and aggressive lighting until vision was returned to it.

I believe Google still has the right to waste 3 seconds of your time, so if they only verify that you wait for the duration of the ad, that would be a fair equivalent to you closing your eyes.

And I guess that's the next line of defense: GPU shaders to just replace ads with something more pretty to look at.

Absolutely. Bring in the cats.

"Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots."

The executives for the networks (in which I include YouTube) believe that you have a legal and moral obligation to watch their advertisements -- it's only a fair trade for supplying free, ad supported programming. By watching the show and closing your eyes and plugging your ears when the ads come on, you are cheating on your end of the deal and "actually stealing programming", and the networks have very powerful lawyers who will argue this very convincingly in court.

You don't have the right to be a thief.

If you want to live in a world where closing your eyes is stealing, I will absolutely fight a war with you over it.

I find this interesting. Do you consider YouTube to just be a consumer product or does it occupy a different space in your mind?

Google is trying to argue that its a violation of their terms of service to close your eyes and plug your ears.

No, they are trying to argue it's against their ToS to SKIP it entirely. No one is forcing you to actually pay attention, but you have to wait X seconds. You can close your eyes all you want, but you cannot entirely skip them.

if enough people start closing their eyes and plugging their ears I'd expect some PM at Google to enforce a camera requirement

I don't understand why this is any different than adblock. If this is an effective, client-side means of defeating ads, and Youtube has an effective way of defeating client-side prevention methods, then isn't this just going to be patched in the same way as adblock?

Said differently, this is clearly an arms race. I have more trust in uBlock winning an arms race than any other extension. If it fails then I don't believe any other will succeed.

One endgame is ad-blockers just blank the video and mute the sound in an undetectable way. Given the negative spiral that modern Internet usage often is, a moment of quiet to breathe and maybe break the cycle I would welcome.

I can see it now - YouTube puts a quick yes/no question after the ad to confirm comprehension. :)

Relevant green text: https://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png

Speaking of enshittification, whatever happened to imgur? That image does not load directly despite being a deep link. Plus it’s so low resolution the text is unreadable! I guess they are one step away from just taking down the http server altogether and just forcing everyone into their app which will connect via some proprietary protocol.

That's interesting. It loads directly for me and the quality seems fine. I have experienced the issue you're describing when attempting to direct link to Reddit images lately, though. I wonder why we're experiencing differences?

Imgur tracks which pages you've loaded and won't show you the image until you see the html. Literally what you're complaining about.

I dunno.. I open the link I posted in a private Chrome browser instance as well as Edge and in both cases it opens directly to it without showing the imgur branding around it

Ah I forgot to mention: I’m on mobile. I don’t see this phenomenon on desktop.

Please drink a verification can.

It's the company's fault for making you want it so much.

They'll force you to have your webcam and mic available to watch YouTube.

Mandatory eye-tracking.

There's a bunch of hypothetical takes on this, but currently youtube already has ads that won't get away without interaction.

In particular, ads can get stacked if the user doesn't skip, and they get two or three ads where they would only have gotten one if they skipped the first. Then some of the ads will stop at the last frame (I think I saw that on mobile game ads that have a store button ? didn't pay attention so might be mistaken though) until the skip button is pressed.

I think the only question for Google is how much advertiser will pay to annoy their users and when will a user just give up and do something else (I'm with you on the moment of quiet: having ads show up is a good sign to close youtube and go do something else)

That actually would be pretty nice. It would also help break the mindless loop of going from video to video.

I mean, isn’t this is basically a reason not to do any sort of prevention for most things?

It's a reason to pile all the effort into the same tool.

But the it ignores the fact that it may be able to work just because it's small.

I think I'm just biased because I built an extension a decade ago that made YouTube a better music player. It flew under the radar for a couple of years, then got popular, then I got C&D'ed and lawyered into the dirt [1][2].

It makes me sad watching people get excited about releasing their totally new, innovative YouTube extensions as if this is a welcoming space.

These extensions don't exist because they get destroyed not because it's a space ripe for innovation.

[1]https://thenextweb.com/news/how-youtube-killed-an-extension-... [2]https://imgur.com/15gaOf6

Said differently, this is clearly an arms race.

Definitely. The next phase is an AI agent "watching" (through the "analog hole") if necessary and applying computer vision systems to detect and remove ads.

This is essentially the level that high end competitive video game cheating is reaching now too.

Plugging directly into the computer as a separate device that emulates monitor, mouse and keyboard.

UBlock can't fly under the radar, but maybe this can for a while.

probably more effective than trusting ublock is to find an obscure method. ublock is too much of an easy target for google. on the flipside, something obscure is possibly harder to trust

The ad blocker arms race is still a victory for the companies. The average user is going to get tired of fighting the constantly changing strategies and debugging why their latest combination of extensions isn’t working today despite working yesterday. Even if they can figure it out half the time, that still means they’re watching 50% of the ads instead of 0%.

I also see many people capitulating, especially among my peers who realize that spending potentially hours every month keeping up with the latest adblocker tricks is not a good use of their time relative to the trivial amount of money they’re saving on YT premium.

The die hards will always fight this battle and don’t seem to care how much effort it takes. Some people derive a sense of satisfaction from gaming the system or “winning” against corporations. They all have their justifications, but it doesn’t matter much.

As long as it’s sufficiently annoying to deal with, the number of people fighting it and succeeding will be negligible small. The problem was when as blockers were so easy that they jumped from a small number of techie users and started catching on among the general public. Once an ad-supported company starts seeing a significant number of users evading the ads and also refusing to pay, they have to do something.

I submitted and got YouTube Premium. For most of my browsing, I don't mind battling with uBlock and making it work however for the rest of the family not so much, plus with premium, I can replace my Spotify subscription and also avoid ads from the YouTube app on the smart TV.

There are methods (due to various regions having various prices) that one can find YTP cheaper than listed - but I'll leave that up to people to explore.

I’ll gladly pay for ad free YouTube when google agrees to not track me.

My data is worth way more to me and, obviously, them.

If Google stops tracking you, you'll get recommended vlogs and toddler videos. Getting good recommendations and knowing what I haven't yet watched in my subscriptions is worth my viewing data.

No you wouldn't, toddler videos don't match the video you're watching

What about on the homepage?

Especially on the homepage, toddlers don't buy tracking opt-outs.

I think you're confused with what the other person meant. Without tracking the home page would be made up of just the most viewed videos. Toddler videos and vlogs. Or just the most recent Videos which would likely be even worse.

The confusion is on the other end, it's a made up problem, you don't need any tracking to solve this, and people are not that dumb to be unable to come up with sorting algorithms besides "most globally viewed" and "most recent" Besides, you ignore a use case where no recommendation is even needed, like only having a single video you opened paying without all the junk. No algorithm is also an option

Like what? They don't know anything about what you like so they are going to have to go with the global average.

So your suggestion is to just turn off recommendations? You can hide them from view using the chrome extension unhook if you want to see what that experience is like. I do it myself when I'm trying to avoid distractions but when I'm actively looking for them i turn it off.

"don't know anything" is false, there are ways to get information by... asking like you already have in many media services

And if you can't even imagine something other than the dumb "global toddler average" can exist, then it's just very sad

And I know what the non suggest experience is like, it's great, also removing the comments is nice, but then there is plenty of other rec nonsense that's harder to disable (especially on a phone). So yes, that's ONE OF the options I suggest, though you haven't said what's wrong with it, does it not count as an alternative to toddler average?

So you just want them to track you differently then?

Give me some examples of alternatives for choosing videos for a homepage where you don't track any data about the viewer.

It doesn't count as an alternative because it requires you to know what you want to view next in advance every time.

The more you pay, the more valuable your data and attention becomes. You're paying for the privilege of segmenting yourself into the "has disposable income" market.

This loop has a limit

It generally reaches its zenith when some executives realize they're leaving huge amounts of money on the table by not advertising to all these proven paying consumers. When they realize that, they enshittify the product, make fat stacks and then bounce to the next big thing when there's nothing left to squeeze.

There's literally no context where it makes sense for these sociopaths to not advertise to us. They'd put ads under our eyelids if they could. They'd put ads in our dreams.

They'd put ads in our dreams.

At that point, people would revolt to the extent money loses its meaning.

Likewise, i'd be interested in paying for a YouTube experience that wasn't so horribly over engagement engineered. I'm sick of click-bait and header images that are all powered by engagement culture. I'm sick of YT shoving tons of things down my throat just because i clicked on a single video.

Want to justify $14/m? Try giving me feature in-line with me as a viewer or customer. Instead it'd rather drop the service entirely. So they're going to war with me, and eventually i'll just leave.

Frankly though i'm happy to see these moves affect the community. I want to see more competition, and i'd love to give money ($7/m seems good to me) to a company that is more in-line with features i want.

I dunno, sounds like an empty promise.

When the masses start doing that region thing it will clearly not work anymore, youtube will make sure you’ll pay the maximum price they can get from you.

youtube will make sure you’ll pay the maximum price they can get from you.

and then they'll add ads to premium too

and then you can cancel

To me this has never been a valid reason (and there have been many) to not get Premium.

My late grandmother used to say that cable companies once made the same promise about paying for TV.

My two cents: if you're using YouTube do much that this bothers you, then just buy premium. It's well worth it in my opinion. You also get the music service. I use it instead of Spotify. I think you also get a few free movies too. No I don't work for Google.

YouTube premium is $17 a month in my market. I'm not paying $17 a month to remove ads from YouTube tier content. I'd pay $2 a month tops. Netflix is $22 a month for premium and Amazon Prime is $10 a month. YouTube does not even come close to providing similar value as those services. I'm not interested in any of the other junk they force you to buy with YouTube premium, it's just bundling to inflate the cost.

For me it’s about where I’m spending my time (YouTube), not so much the pure cost to make the content itself (Netflix, etc.). I spend far more time watching YouTube than anything else, background and foreground, which makes the $15 or whatever (am in the US, I don’t actually know what I pay because I’ve never questioned its value to me unlike Netflix, etc.) worth it to me.

I think it’s totally fair if you don’t think it’s worth it for you though. I’m very willing to (and have!) cancel most other services (except for Max which I get for “free” from my ISP) in favor of YouTube because I find the content far more engaging and I can tailor it to my interests far better.

I’ll also add that a decent chunk of my viewing is on mobile (phone or iPad) where ad blocking isn’t slightly more difficult using the YouTube native app.

There's nothing stopping you from signing up in a different market and paying $2 ;)

Do you get to the checkout line and name your price to the store because you’re “not paying $6 for that sandwich since I don’t like the bread they used and don't plan to eat it” too?

Not saying that $17 a month is a fair price, but we should not forget that "YouTube tier content" includes all the music. Its value is a solid 10$ a month imho.

$15 for this, $20 for that, $10 for that. Even my damn rowing exercise machine's apps are asking $15 a month. I am not going to spend $200/month for subscriptions. If I can get away with cracked versions and blockers I will. It is corporate greed at this point.

It's not corporate greed to ask for money for a service they offer that costs them money to run.

Also half that money goes to the creators you watch, so it's also about supporting whose content you consume. And if they don't offer you 7.5$ of value per month... why are you even watching them?

I get your point. I too hate that subscriptions add up, and that too many products that were but once are moving to a subscription model.

However, this is partly on us too. For years we have been blocking ads on services we use, saying we want alternative means of monetization over tracking, blocking ads. Now this is the end result. At least YouTube still offers add supported model. Some websites have been subscription only for a while now.

GOOG is evil and they’re there to be used for free. I would never pay them a dime.

Well... here's my predicament: I resided in the US for a while, and then moved back to my home country where pay is significantly lower. Youtube still asks me to pay 22$ per month, based on the US fee structure. Google clearly knows my locale. Still there is no way to officially request a change in fare structure.

I do pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime.

For some reason, Google is not really customer friendly. It is so bothersome - just yesterday, I had to watch an ad which interrupted a paid promotion segment in a youtube video. Reminds me of an old Onion article about a starbucks opening inside the restroom of another starbucks. [1]

Some content creators have explicitly opted for non-monetization on their videos, yet ads are shown before, after, and during.

Given Google's frequent change of mind, it's really probable that they amend the terms and conditions so that even premium users have to watch a few ads.

[1] https://www.theonion.com/new-starbucks-opens-in-rest-room-of...

if you're using YouTube do much that this bothers you, then just buy premium.

Is one obliged to be moral when dealing with an amoral company?

Most people would rather spend hours of their time to build a workaround.

Although, even on the minimum wage of my country, four hours of work is around half a year of youtube premium. based on the average salary for a developer it's probably around three years of youtube premium.

I will say, if I start to get ads on youtube premium then I'll start building workarounds but until that day, it makes sense to just pay the fee.

Don’t pay for the cow if you can get the milk for free.

I don't get why people have no problem paying for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc but are so stubborn about YouTube in particular, when myself and I know many others watch more YouTube than any streaming service.

Even when ad blocking extensions work, it's only for browsers. If you're on Android you can install hacky modified apks, but YouTube breaks them every once in a while and then you're waiting for an update and having to go through some patching process again (I have to do this with YouTube Vanced to watch YouTube on the cheap Kindle Fire I use exclusively for YouTube in bed). If you're watching on a smart TV YouTube app or Apple TV or something... I assume there's options, but you're again gonna be wasting so much time on maintenance and keeping things up to date in the ad-blocking arms race, I'd rather just pay. And I don't know why anyone should expect YouTube to be infinitely ad-free and payment-free forever. All that storage and data transfer ain't free.

Far from it that I'll defend Google, but I don't know what's so special about YouTube where it's the one service people use more than anything else they pay for, but they won't pay for it.

Even with YouTube Premium, many YouTube videos contain sponsorship messages within the video. I know they're there for reasons, but having two types of advertising does make YouTube different than Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ etc.

Netflix definitely has some "placed" products in some movies.

I’ve never seen Olivia Coleman turn round and say “what an amazing nights sleep with my foobar mattress, use code HRH for 3 months free subscription”.

I don't know who Olivia Coleman is, but I've seen stuff this blatant on Netflix. There was a reality show where they go looking for antiques and hidden gems in old barns. But on the way, they got real hungry and had to stop for a delicious SubWay™ sandwich, featuring this limited time promotional menu item that's amazingly tasty and filling.

One of the episodes of Stranger Things took like a one-minute break to do a soda ad. Probably the most jarring and disruptive “produce placement” (but really, it was more of an embedded ad) that I’ve seen.

YouTube isn't paying for server costs with the $0 they make on ad reads that go from the sponsor directly to the creator.

You can just tap right on your keyboard a few times to get past those anyway.

Netflix invests in content creation, as do other streaming platforms. YouTube piggybacks it's business on amateurs, largely paying them with "exposure" and some fractions of a cent per view.

Good, reliable video streaming is not cheap nor easy. I think they're providing a very valuable resource to creators.

I’m with you. I get a lot of value out of YouTube, mostly consume though the TV app. I pay for YouTube premium.

What is really annoying is the mobile app. The mobile app is constantly pushing shorts on me, I have no interest, that’s not why I use YouTube and if I only used the mobile app I don’t think I’d pay and instead use YouTube less. The mobile app Home Screen is junk content for me now where as the TV app brings relevant longer content…although they are sneaking in one or two shorts.

I installed Firefox on my phone originally just to get away from the awful Android YT UI.

Yeah I think youtube is well worth paying for. That said, there are other websites that immediately throw up anti-adblock gates asking for money before I've even read the site at all. I just instantly leave those sites.

No, I will not endure ads to "sample" your site. If you want to charge for it then great, I applaud you, but you need a way to let have a trial or some way to know if they want to sign up to pay, and also set the price right. Your little niche website is not the same value as youtube or netflix.

I don't want YouTube, I want the content. YouTube has the content it has because it's public.

Netflix et al are simple models: they pay upstream providers like Hollywood studios for works and they charge viewers to access them. It is a private space; it's like showing a film in a cinema. They get to charge access, but they also have to pay for the films.

YouTube doesn't pay upstream providers anything, nor do they produce anything (of worth) themselves. They get their content for free because they are a public space. It's like a town square: they get performances for free, but they don't get to charge access.

Except they do want to charge access. In other words, they want to have their cake and eat it too.

I'm not a compulsive viewer. It's simply not worth it to me to pay a subscription fee for something I use sporadically. That's why I don't pay for Netflix etc. or any other subscription I don't get value from.

A pay by usage model I would be more likely to get behind. In fact, I already do pay some uploaders via Patreon. But I would also expect to be able to download the videos and play them on repeat without incurring extra costs (after all, it's a waste of bandwidth to watch stuff on repeat and I have my own storage space). This way I could also be sure my payment is going towards worthwhile contributions and not the brain rotting garbage they seem to want me to watch.

I don't get why people have no problem paying for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc but are so stubborn about YouTube in particular, when myself and I know many others watch more YouTube than any streaming service.

I never used any of these platforms, but I can guess the reason: these platforms were always paid, which sets the expectation that one has to pay to get access to them. YouTube, on the other hand, has for a very long time been available as non-paid (and even logging in is optional, with rare exceptions). Furthermore, YouTube has for a very long time worked even when the user has an ad blocker installed and enabled (few people customize their ad blocker; if they installed it because they were annoyed with DoubleClick animated ads, or with DoubleClick tracking their every move across the whole web, they won't care what else the default lists of their ad blocker blocks). People are used to viewing YouTube without having to pay, and if they use ad blockers, without ads (and people who are not used to viewing ads are going to be more annoyed at excessive ads then people who are already used to watching some ads). It's natural to feel some anger at the other party altering the deal, and having to pray they don't alter it any further.

And beyond that, it has always been socially acceptable to ignore and/or reject ads; I might be showing my age with these examples, but things like going to the bathroom during the ads, muting the audio, pausing the recording during an ad break (or fast-forwarding through them during playback), and so on, were always acceptable, and nobody would scream that you MUST watch the ads or you're stealing from the TV station. Why should YouTube be any different (and it even has "Tube" in its name to make the analogy stronger)?

Youtube still works as normal (no ads, no problems) for me with the latest Firefox and uBlock Origin.

Since Firefox is apparently going to follow google with blocking ad blocks, do you have any thoughts of what browser you might move to next?

Firefox said it will adopt Manifest V3 in the interest of cross-browser compatibility.

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/11/chrome-pushes...

Manifest v3 doesn't prevent adblockers from working

Google has announced it will shut down Manifest V2 in June 2024 and move on to Manifest V3, the latest version of its Chrome extension specification that has faced criticism for putting limits on ad blockers.

Manifest V2 is the old model. The Chrome Web Store no longer accepts Manifest V2 extensions, but browsers can still use them. For now. Manifest V3 is supported generally in Chrome 88 or later and will be the standard after the transition planned to take place in June 2024.

MV2 is not required to block ads

It removes the dynamic mechanism. Under v3 adblockers wont be able to decide on the spot, only declare static lists.

They adopt manifest v3 in addition to their current APIs. I.e adblockers on Firefox are going nowhere.

Firefox's implementation of Manifest V3 will work with software like ad blockers as it does not have the same limitations imposed on the browser side.

Having v3 is good, but only having v3 is bad. Is Firefox removing v2 support?

I sometimes get blocked but refreshing the ads and quickfixes lists on ublock solves it every time

This website will tell you if uBlock Origin bypasses YouTube Anti-Adblock.

https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/

Same here (I also use EFF Privacy Badger though). Also not getting ads with Chromium and uBlock Origin.

Could this be a country-specific thing?

I suspect that, too. I got two weeks of anti-ad blockers that required refreshing uBlock Origin. Then all anti-adblock messages stopped. Maybe Portugal has low priority. As far as I can see, practically no one will pay for Youtube Premium here.

Most adblocker users are unaffected because it's only had a limited rollout. I've both been affected and unaffected using same software in an inconsistent way.

Does YouTube work without JS? This might be one way to avoid ads as well as a network wide Pi Hole.

I hate it when YouTube / Google needs to exploit everyone's data and privacy in order to make money.

Pi Hole

They serve the ads from the same domain, as the site itself.

Surely it's possible to block the paths to the ad on the site itself.

Pihole is only intercepting DNS resolve requests. Those only resolve the domain itself. If they don't use a different domain to serve ads, then it can't be blocked that way.

Not with DNS blocking, which is what the pihole is

Pi Hole just blocks on DNS level, I believe.

The problem is that it will refuse to play content if it can't play the ad.

Good thing the whole site is a bug, though I rarely end up on YT by accident since videos are marked in web etiquette.

For twitter.com a filter option here on HN would be nice but a domain blocker might do.

Does anything at all run without JS these days? I swear all I wanted was to read a blog post, and it loaded more megabytes of JS than the text and pictures combined.

I thought Twitter had a no Javascript version but apparently that stopped a couple of years ago.

I ran Noscript about 10 years ago. At first I didn't notice any difference. Then, over a period of only a year or so, things started to break. I would notice that my friends' web experience seemed remarkably different to mine. Eventually I capitulated and enabled JS again. Seeing it all happen at one rather than at a trickle over time was quite shocking.

I still design web sites without JS first. In fact, I design them without even CSS. It's called progressive enhancement. Many of them have only a sprinkling of convenient but not necessary JS.

One example that comes to mind is Kagi.

They makes it a design point that Kagi should work even without javascript enabled.

Not even close.

I didn’t bother with ad blockers till last year.

But YouTube got so bad, they seem to force you towards premium at the moment.

Minute long ads forcing me to interact on chrome cast. It’s a pain.

I don’t mind paying for a good subscription but it’s gotten a bit crazy. Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Disney, prime, regular tv. You can lease a cheap car for that combined.

There’s are alternatives to all this shitshow: consume a lot less, read books instead and dust off those torrent clients.

RSS style torrent feed where i could auto download ripped episodes of my favourite YT shows would be dynamite. No waiting no buffering no ads.

That was basically popcorn time. Don't know if it's still around.

This is what I’ve done. I was never “into” YouTube so don’t get the hubbub, but for movies and TV shows a good public tracker and Transmission are great.

Add a cheap ereader and libgen and even better. Better than that? A cheap paperback.

Even without pirating things, I couldn't imagine subscribing to all those things at once. The rare times a good movie comes out, my wife and I buy cheap tickets, that's it.

Soulseek is really awesome. There was one uploader with 3 petabytes but haven’t seem him online recently.

I repeatedly got 30min long ads and they are so repetitive that I really wonder why anyone pays money for them. What's the point in showing me the same ad 50 times per week?

You watched 25 hours worth of the same ad per week?? /s

In all seriousness, I would guess seeing the ad so much would mean you have more brand awareness of it?

Usually the 30-minute ads are total scam spiels for fake products or bunk science. I let one play just for grins to see how long it runs.

And I get them on Megadeth HQ album videos. Not generally the kind of audience that goes for these specific things being advertised.

Now I have this mental image of Holy War playing only for there to be a record scratch and some guy going "join Anglicanism, we have cake."

Ads are targeting to the viewer not the video. So megadeth fans might not like the product but someone willing to watch a 30 minute ad about it probably really likes it.

The only times I've put up with ads so far is when casting to my TV.

I don't mind the ad recommendations on home and after a video, but having to watch an extended ad or 2 before a video, and continuosly throughout the video, is enough for me to get off YouTube as an entertainment platform.

Still useful for tutorials, but that much advertising makes the experience completely unenjoyable. Doubly so if the ad has to be "skipped" or else will run for 3 minutes, and I'm in the middle of something with hands occupied (cooking, working out...)

You can pay to turn off ads. There I saved YouTube as an entertainment platform for you.

im good. for entertainment SoundCloud and netflix are good enough, youtube just makes good recommendations. not worth >$100/year

You can also install uBlock Origin.

https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/

We've seen this movie before: You can pay to turn off ads all the way up until YouTube decides to change the bargain.

It’s like $16/month which is insane

Am in the same place... I consume YouTube on my SmartTv (native app on LG WebOS).

Am contemplating buying a Chromecast with Google TV, and installing SmartTubeNext on it, just so I can escape the ad barrage: - 2 ads on video start, unskippable - multiple (at least 2) 2 ad breaks during even a 10 minute video, almost always unskippable.

And the worst thing? It's the same 5-10 ads that you get!... they rotate in and out on a weekly basis, but the sensation is you see the same frickin ones over and over again! I don't work in marketing, but if I ever get to speak to someone who does, I'll definitely tell them that repeatedly seeing your ad will definitely put me off your client's product, even if it is the best choice on the market.

I already own a Chromecast Ultra, but it sits unused for more than a year now.

I'll never get YouTube Premium. I (maybe) can afford it, but it's too much for what I get in return.

you spend so much time on YouTube that you feel the need to hack together an ad skipping solution by plugging stuff into your TV and installing dubious sounding software. Just do a simple math of watch time in hours / per month (youtube provides these metrics), take around 10-15% of that time as ad time, multiply by your calculated income / hour and you'll be surprised by how much value there is in premium.

You'd be surprised how much value there is in just paying people to stop hitting you in the face.

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

It can be much worse. The NHL used to play the same ad, many many times throughout a game, often multiple times in a row. They would also play that same ad for the entire season. We used to watch with remote in hand at all times, ready to mute at any moment. I honestly considered it inhumane. Thankfully ESPN handles games now and they are much more "normal" on how they do ads.

There is a saying in marketing, I forget the specific words, but it can take up to 5 repeated views of the same ad for someone to make their mind up about buying a product.

I was watching my kid use YouTube, and literally every time she's shown an ad on TV, quick as lightning, she goes into the menu that handles complaints about the ad and tells it "never show me this ad again". Which also ends the ad break.

I think it's odd that YouTube hasn't simply proxied the ads into the same stream to make them indistinguishable from the video. Technically the browser is pulling chunks of video from their servers, and the ad content is pulled from different servers which ad blockers restrict. If the ad chunks weren't identifiable, there would be no practical way of blocking them. It'd be like removing commercials - or those in-video sponsorship segments - from a live broadcast.

It seems YouTube is creating an arms race with ad blockers and alienating users by threatening bans than simply changing the way the ads are served. Yes, there's a whole industry around bidding for, dynamically serving and tracking ads using VAST and all that, but I'm positive Google has the market power to change that.

I think it's odd that YouTube hasn't simply proxied the ads into the same stream to make them indistinguishable from the video.

Yeah, same -- cable TV has been doing that since god knows how long. There must be some internal engineering reason(s) behind it.

And cable TV has had the same workaround, tivo.

One small reason is they use ads as "payment" for things. Scrubbing through a video looking for a certain spot will require you to watch an ad almost every time you stop scrubbing. They also make you watch an ad if you pause the video for too long. When you unpause it, it immediately jumps into an ad. That's on top of the mid ad breaks the video already has.

The cost of doing so would be magnitudes more than what they could make from ad money.

I could build such a system for a mere billion.

The hardest part would be to redesign the video play UI to ensure timestamp references still works and the progress bar is user friendly. Live video streaming is a harder problem to solve than injecting ads in a video and they already do that, so the technical parts aren't hard for them to do at all.

I think it's odd that YouTube hasn't simply proxied the ads into the same stream to make them indistinguishable from the video.

I would assume they do this for caching and personalization. Presumably, YouTube can make more from personalized ads. However, if they embedded these ads in the main video stream caching would be more challenging.

I don't think he's referring to actually baking in the ads into the video stream, but rather just having video URLs transparently redirect to ad content.

So for instance, if normally the first 100 bytes of the video (as fetched via yt-dl) are like "googlevideo.com/gibberish-id?signature&rage=0-100", then you could transparently insert an ad into the next 100 bytes by making "googlevideo.com/gibberish-id?signature&rage=100-200" return the ad. Of course this makes the serving logic much more complicated, so it's probably why they don't do it. You'd also have to appropriately cut on a keyframe, muck around with muxing so things splice properly, and so on.

Another possibility to enforce that ads are seen (or at least things are appropriately delayed) is to simply only return video URLs if there was a "pingback" that an ad was seen. So if you serve a 10 sec ad, but the user requests a video URL before the 10 seconds are up, just reject it. This requires a bit more logic on the serving end to track state, but is easier than the previous proposal.

Here's a way to counter your proposal:

- Fetch the video multiple times

- Cut out the non-overlapping segments from the video shown to the user.

This assumes that a different ad is shown every time. Crowd-sourcing like with Sponsor Block could come in handy here.

There is an entire ecosystem built up around youtube timecodes as bookmarks. If you simply bake an add in I'm guessing it would massively messup those bookmarks.

I just wish I could convince Google that I will never buy certain products that they force feed me ads on continuously. No, I will never buy a Chromebook, so please stop putting that ad everywhere. No, I am not going to switch to an Android phone either.

Everyone feels that way, but in a large population some percentage will be swayed. Display ads are a statistics game, not a transactional one.

But there are oodles of other things that I would consider buying! They'd do better with random ideas for Christmas gifts for family members, which would be nice given that it is the season...

We need to kick this up a notch, with automated recognition of the advertiser and either complaint letters generated to their sales team email addresses, a media regulator, or for those with physical stores, geofenced notifications on your device to remind you how intrusive the brand has been/directions to the nearest competitor's store at the tap of a button.

You can absolutely advertise on an intrusive platform, but as consumers, we can aggressively boycott/make your marketing work against you.

Yes, but they can get you to talk about Chromebooks and Android phones by advertising them incessantly. See, you just did it again!

I bought my current car only because I was able to block the car maker being stupid and force me to watch their ads on Youtube. I didn't use ad-blocker before but interruptive video ads were the last straw for me.

In fact, everyone should instead band together to finance development of more maximally open hardware for laptops and phones and tablets.

How can you prove you are trustworthy?

I (Firefox+uBlock Origin on FreeBSD, Windows 10, Rocky, CentOS), logged in, have not encountered this yet.

I also run a small channel mostly with ROIO bootlegs. The channel has never been penalized, it has a small but growing user base, and all the videos have been monetized by someone else. I also sometimes watch a video from my cellphone where the ads run.

These might be the factors why I still didn't get the Youtube stick.

P.S they've been monetized by companies that have no rights to monetize them whatsoever. However I have no rights over the material and if legal holders wish to battle the record companies that hogged my videos, that's great. If I have a recording of TV broadcast of singer-songwriter playing his material in a public festival, the record label that paid and released studio version of those songs has no stake in that. There can be a complex contract between broadcaster, festival and the performer, but I'm sure record company is not part of it unless it has explicitly funded the festival or the broadcast, which is a rarity, not applicable to my videos. The algorithm IDs these tracks as studio versions or as official live version which then trigger "ownership" by those record companies.

So let's not pretend Youtube is some fair entity that needs to be paid fairly. They don't play fair themselves.

So let's not pretend Youtube is some fair entity that needs to be paid fairly. They don't play fair themselves.

If you want to use a service in a way that the service provider doesn't want you to, I think it's best to just say so. It's obvious there's a difference between things that are hard to figure out automatically, and deliberately not playing fair.

I'm using a public website the way I want to, by having control over its network requests and visual elements.

If they don't like that, they have venues. One of them is paywall, the other is move to closed ecosystem with proprietary service client. Both would have huge negative impact on the business. So they need to cope with downsides on hosting their service over an open standard in an open ecosystem, where power users can and will take control of how their devices are rendering the content.

I understand. I regularly go and pick flowers from a display in a public park to keep inside my house. There's nothing they can do.

My point is that there's no point pretending we're righting any injustices, or the organisations we do this to deserve this behaviour. We do it because we it's hard to stop us, and there's nothing inside us stopping us from gaining from another's effort.

Your analogy is typical for anti-piracy talk and it's bogus. If you pick out flowers from public park, the park is left without flowers. End of story.

Fair is subjective.

Is anyone else hesitant to do this because they’re scared that google accounts may end up terminated as a result of violating EULA?

I don't browse the web while logged in. Never trusted them with my browsing history.

You think their data matching capabilities wouldn’t make that link?

Make a new account.

Use Fastmail. It's not free, but that's okay to be because it means their business model is fundamentally different.

I only watch logged out anyways. If you don't install other extensions (DF Youtube was the one I had that caused ad blocking to be detected) and stay with uBlock origin and sponsorblock, it won't be detected. It's a huge time sink anyways. I'd suspect most people would be better off without watching Youtube logged in.

Google has been voluntarily blocking ads here in Russia since 2022 due to the sanctions (from what I understand, so that monetization didn't translate into taxes paid to the government). I now live in a completely ads-free world for 2 years. So I wonder, if it's possible for people abroad to somehow proxy ad-related traffic through Russia so that Google itself blocked ads.

Nice try, Putin. I'm not VPN-ing my traffic through Russia :)

The idea was to VPN only ad traffic (which would be automatically blocked anyway). Proxying video content through Russia would considerably increase latency.

If you can determine which traffic is ad traffic; why not just block it?

Well VPN is off the table as almost all of them will be blocked by russia's regulators

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327017 same idea, but open sourced.

Thanks for the shoutout :)

Got a pr about increasing the speed to 16x wonder if it's same person. I only set the ad speed for 10x, since it can access the skip button and do button.click() if there are longer adds.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ad-accelerator/gpbo...

I was also surprised most of the downloads are from Japan

Working great for me. Thank you for making it.

Only note I have is I didn't get any warning to restart the browser, but it wasn't working I believe until I did. That could cause a few people to think it doesn't work and to uninstall. (I had a few tabs open I didn't want to close which is the only reason I noticed)

You're welcome, glad it helps!

Thanks for sharing the issue around installing, I haven't seen that one before but I'll see if I can reproduce & fix

TIL 16x is the max speed, so thats why they both chose it

Why don’t people just not use YouTube if they don’t like the ads? Simple.

Peertube is there for those folks. People keep whining about the monopoly but won’t go to another service to help grow it.

People also whine about sponsor ads, as if you have to watch those videos or those channels. Don’t consume their content if you don’t like it.

At the end of the day, if you don’t want to be tracked, hate ads and hate Google the solution is simple: stop using YouTube.

The anti Facebook people understand this, which is why we don’t see incessant posts about facebooks anti-Adblock on HN. The kind of people on HN who hate Facebook probably just don’t visit the site at all. Same with Reddit vs mastodon. Twitter vs threads. Quora vs ChatGPT.

Anti YouTubers seem unique in their constant whining yet reluctance to stop using what they hate.

Because it's the only platform you can find on a Google search.

And surely it's self evident that if everyone blocked ads, the service would stop functioning?

So all this is about being the "Special Few" who can get away with it, despite often positioning themselves as the Moral Choice because the adverts are bad.

Why don’t people just not use YouTube if they don’t like the ads?

Simple: the videos they want to watch don't exist elsewhere. PeerTube doesn't help you if nobody you watch publishes to it.

I use PeerTube, I run my own instance. PeerTube really sucks compared to YouTube. Even with all of the enshittification and google crippling the service, the quantity, quality, and discoverability of videos on YouTube has no comparison at all anywhere.

People use YouTube for the reason they use anything: there simply is no viable alterative.

Whining at people to use PeerTube doesn't help. You have to convince people to publish there before anyone can use it.

Because these websites create expectation. If everyone is using YouTube, won't you be missing something by not going? If you started using the service when you felt it was great and it deteriorated since, would it really be unfair to feel a sort of betrayal?

You should go tell drug addict to just stop, not that hard. Maybe also to everybody complaining about house pricing, after all our ancestors build theirs with log and dirt why would you need something else.

I encountered this approach before (I think here on HN) and had a question since then: when video ads run faster, can't YT just compare the expected time to the actual time and flag the user, show an anti-ad blocking popup, etc?

That could get into clock sync issues though that would have to be carefully thought through. What happens if a user’s system clock updates during an ad roll? What about a user watching an ad on a train that passes through a time zone boundary?

They could measure server-side, which would be more difficult to block.

I’d like to see some combination of ad nauseum (play ad in an invisible/silent background to support the content creators) and auto-mirroring to bittorrent (to let the real video play while google thinks the ad is playing, and also, for anti-censorship).

These are too rare events to matter, aggregate data and if there are too many skips, start blocking

YouTube, Google - just pull the trigger guys. Make YouTube a completely paid for platform.

This instantly loses the main selling point: Massive audience. If they manage to get 20% of people to pay (which would be huge) they'd lose hundreds of millions of viewers still.

YouTube Shorts can remain unpaid, where you watch an ad after every short.

There are so many people currently employed at Google whose livelihood (think mortgage payments, food, gasoline) depend on having a problem that they can work on but never solve.

The fact that civilization now runs on ads is insane to me. How did we get here?

Brewed down to one cause I would say Edward Bernays.

we glorified companies like Google.

I can't believe the number of people here that think YouTube has some right to access my eyes and attention.

No one is forcing them to stream me free data. What I do with the data they send me is none of their business. I've never consented or given them permission to access me.

I guess it's not disruption when we do it.

A lot of those people work for adtechs. Once you realize that 50% of bigtech is relying almost entirely on ads, a lot of people are simply advocating for keeping their FAANG salaries by forcing us to watch debilitating ads.

Watching one ad and then clearing cookies seems to work for me. (shrug)

Blocking cookies on YouTube worked perfectly so far for me.

And on top of it I don't get forcefully logged in to it anymore (I never wanted that in the first place).

Well trained, citizen.

Blipvert

Zik Zak: Know Future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnvJREBGy84

Just buy premium. Not only do you avoid ads on all your devices (tv, phone, computer), you also get background playing of yt videos on your iPhone, which is an awesome feature. Not to mention, you support the livelihoods of the creators you watch (they get 55% of that money!)

And ad a bonus, you get to be tracked everywhere for a tiny monthly fee ! Who wouldn't want that ! /S

Or you could get youtube premium and not have to bother with a bookmarklet

I find it interesting that people don't tout the same logic to Windows: paying through the nose to get the enterprise version gets rid of of Microsoft's dirty widgets and spam. But somewhat paying Google is OK, paying Microsoft is no-no.

I can recommend this this FF extension to get fine-grained video speed control, without a 2x speed cap (which often isn't fast enough)

https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed

It has served me well for years and works on YT ads as well as other sites with similar players

When I tried manually changing the video element’s playbackRate the subtitles would desync

It reminds me of an article I wrote with code in 2012 about modifying the speed of YouTube in Windows using instrumentation [1]. When YouTube used Adobe Flash.

[1] https://blog.nektra.com/2012/06/13/controlling-the-speed-of-...

Good on you for ensuring poor people have a way to deal with ads.

So silly to blocks ads on YouTube . IMO YouTube has an excellent - paid ad free experience that financially makes sense both for me and content creators. Blocking ads on YouTube just seems evil …

Hey nice! I always wanted a subliminar ads player! Now I can just order online things without knowing why!

Hmm. You'd still have to disable uBlock Origin on youtube and thus let google track you?

Am I missing something or was exactly something like this on "Show HN" the last days? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327017

using edge with ublock origin I haven't seen any ads. If I use chrome I get problems.

I noticed that I don't get the adblocker message when I connect with a Cambodian IP, but when I use a VPN let's say in Singapore I get the message. It appears that currently Youtube Premium is not available in Cambodia.

So Ad blocker + IP from Cambodia still works like a charm.

If only regulatory bodies were as motivated in combating advertising’s huge data privacy issues inherent in RTB as Google are in beating down people trying to not have their data sent to hundreds of third parties without consent.

So you recreated Blipverts?

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

Is anybody working on a way to mute ads? Like listen to everything and detect ads, remote control volume on the device playing them?

I’m oddly OK for now with the pop up. Still would rather it to an ad. Makes me reflect on if I really want to have surfed to where I am. And I find myself moving on or seeking elsewhere.

This may all change. But the friction\value trade offs are a bit ‘shrug’ for me. Maybe instant video is still novelty and waiting a few seconds to see it, isn’t so different.

“then we released bears to take care of the wolves and we had too many bears so we released the tigers…”

Sounds like a modern version of "record it on VHS, then fast forward through the ads"

And I take great pleasure to manually shift to invidious instances just out of spite.

Does not "block blockers" for me. Hopefully stays this way or I am out of it

Yep, I have been doing this for a very long time as well. Works like a charm.