My favorite "dark pattern" plausibly disguised as a simple bug is that the countdown timer, across multiple platforms I've used YouTube on, doesn't work correctly and very easily will let the ad play for a second or two longer than you intend. It behaves as if it's supposed to count down to 0 one second at a time, but there's a recurring event that is run every second to see if the countdown timer needs to be lowered. However, it's very easy for that event to be ever so slightly delayed or advanced relative to when the timer counts down, and as a result the timer doesn't get decremented correctly. It's very easy to see if you watch the timer carefully; it almost never counts evenly like it should, and it very often skips a beat entirely. (Compare with a simple timer app, which is correctly updating every frame the display renders. This isn't that hard.)
It's very plausibly a bug that a novice dealing with time in a UI would make, and in many other circumstances I'd accept that explanation. But, a bug in such a critical piece of YouTube's functionality, with a root cause I'm pretty sure I've diagnosed just by glancing at it, surviving for years and years across multiple platforms? This isn't a bug. It's policy. At scale, those seconds add up.
Sound like they implemented Vetinari’s clock from Discworld. That’s a waiting room clock that would slow down and speed up the seconds hand (and also the ticks and tocks) but the minute and hour hands would run on time. This was to make the waiting person extra nervous before their meeting with the patrician. He is by far my most favorite characters in the books.
Yes, on my smart TV app it's so slow and glitchy that the 5-second ad preview often plays for 10+ seconds before the "Skip Ad" button finally appears. Add to that the 5-7 seconds of black screen before the ad starts playing and the 2-3 seconds to resume my video, and it's a major annoyance during workouts and such.
A suspicious person would think they're billing by the actual seconds and dividing the total amount of actual seconds by the budgeted seconds in the ad to bump up the ad impressions.
I've seen it skip a second (e.g. go straight from 3 to 1) roughly as much as I've seen it do the opposite. I don't suspect foul play but I understand why someone would.
People complain a lot about Youtube ads and how awful they are but as a thought experiment I once tried to imagine the amount of storage and bandwidth Youtube must need everyday to operate.
So after some basic research it looks like they need to add almost 1 petabytes of storage and I couldn't find much info on the bandwidth and servers it uses.
As much as I don't like Google for their shady business practices, I couldn't help but marvel at this feat of engineering. It's mind blowing tbh.
I mean I can still access my video with 10 views I uploaded 8 years ago.. can't do that on my HDD and they have it in 5 formats.
>People complain a lot about Youtube ads and how awful they are but as a thought experiment I once tried to imagine the amount of storage and bandwidth Youtube must need everyday to operate.
There was a post here about how Vimeo is charging people $300+/month for their videos-- and someone did the math to show thats just the hosting/bandwidth costs. For one creator.
Youtube has millions of videos-- Im surprised their costs aren't higher. Im grateful they provide this service for free at all
I do wonder whether another approach would be starting to delete old videos with not many clicks unless you pay. This would seem to reduce storage bandwidth but I suppose they still have to support the insane amount of uploads!
Another thing would be if you upload stupid crap that no-one wants to watch, you get banned or sent a nasty letter or something...I don't know, I don't work in customer retention ;-)
This kind of thinking is really disappointing to me. It's the same mindset that caused so many people to migrate to GMail in the first place.
When GMail was introduced, google was offering a gigabyte of storage when most providers were offering a 1/10th or less of that. Many people gladly gave up access to the contents of their email in exchange for something that seemed at the time to be technologically impressive.
As of today a few gigabytes of email storage seems fairly trivial. But we still gave up a lot to enjoy that privilege.
Trust me, in 10 years this impressive amount of data will be less impressive to you.
I think the biggest dark pattern is allowing skipable ads to be long. Sometimes over an hour.
I spent some time in the hospital not too long ago, and it was physically painful for me to move enough to skip an ad. I would have been fine watching 30-60 second ads without skipping, but they just put infomercials in the middle of the video you're watching. it is outrageous.
I once got one of those Apple events (I think the second-last hardware event) as an ad. Like, the whole 2 hours plus event, as a youtube ad. I still don't know what to make of it and cannot fathom why someone would spend money for that.
My theory is that showing those ads is a bit of a check: "Are you still there or just letting it play unattended to make money for your favorite creator?"
Also annoying when you're doing something else while just listening. Then again there are some videos that are interesting enough for me to watch for a few minutes, but that makes it extra terrible that you can't scrub.
On the flip side I always chuckle when a text-only (with crappy music) ad comes on.
And you never once considered going premium to remove the ads?
Surely someone must have been able to help you out with that if you couldn’t do it yourself?
The answer exists, it’s right there with buttons for clicking given to you by Google, but people here on HN so often seem so entirely blindsided and insist there’s no such thing as ad-free Youtube.
The ads are genuinely one of my most frustrating experiences when using the Chromecast with Google TV. And seeing this kind of pattern makes it more likely that I’ll never sign up for premium YouTube (whatever it is called) and just use YouTube less.
Also, I swear they do this - If you click on the try YouTube premium for 14 days, once the 14 days end you are bombarded with extra ads. And ads that are usually not skippable. I also remember getting multiple 60 min ads. I don’t remember any of these ads but I do remember how frustrating my experience with YouTube was and still is. But I’m also the kind of person that is still surprised that advertising works.
If only I could use my raspberry pi to block all YouTube ads at home. My life would be immensely better.
For all the kvetching about ads I see regarding YouTube, most people really could just pay Google and make it go away. I mean, I don’t like paying for things either, but it’s not worth the headache of ad blockers (which aren’t available on every device) and philosophically, I would rather the internet get away from ads everywhere and I’ll help that happen if I can.
It helps that $10 is worth the many hours of use I get every month from YouTube & YouTube Music too.
There are a couple of videos of some really chill music sessions posted by the artists that I used to put on every morning when my daughter was born.
I've seen the same few vids hundreds of times and I know, like I know the sky is blue and water is wet that they had no ads.
Couple years later, my son is born and that morning peace time comes for me to put on a vid or two, next thing I know, a couple of ads bang in the middle of the video. So jarring I can't explain how pissed I was, I got straight to rooting my TV and blocking ads.
The interesting part for me is that a YouTube premium trial Google had pushed on me ended just days prior.
FYI, several alternative youtube frontend apps are available for "Chromecast with Google TV" (which is just an Android TV device), for instance the opensource Newpipe. (Though this is piracy, and you shouldn't do piracy, because piracy hurts Google and content creators - who will gladly take donations -)
FWIW I just gave up and bought youtube premium and I never see ads ever again on my chromecast. Unfortunately because the domain ads are served off of is a youtube domain something like a pihole (which I am also running) doesn't help. One idea I had was to run a chromebox instead cause that allows for browser based adblock plugins but paying the monthly fee was easier (for now).
The multivariate test is trying to increase ad clicks, and the result is a poor UX. That's not exactly an alternate theory.
Is it a dark pattern? That's not the first term I'd use to describe it, but perhaps it falls under "Misdirection" mentioned at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.07032.pdf (page 12).
I don't think it is a 'perfect balance' so much as trying to maximize the number and length of advertisements that people will tolerate at this point in time. The nature of the business model is that some product manager will be tasked with getting the advertisement revenue higher at some point in the future and they will no doubt try to push the envelope. I also feel like 'total view time' is a metric that is in service to advertisements and not the primary goal itself.
>Alternate theory: A large-scale, ongoing A/B test
Except "ongoing A/B test" isn't really a thing. The whole point of A/B is to identify and discard the worse of the two. Especially on google scale and this being applied to everyone you'd expect the data to point one way or the other really fast.
Agreed. Unfortunately when it comes to ads (which I also hate! I have adblockers installed, subscribe to premium services like Youtube premium when it makes sense...) HN commenters take leave of their wits and just start posting conspiracy theories, hysterical criticism, or if you're lucky balanced sensible criticism that nevertheless doesn't make sense in the context of the article and is just an instance of preaching to the choir.
Recently, I've been with people who unlike me don't have youtube premium and I loathe the ads. I'm so happy I pay for premium so I don't have to experience this.
I want to say "subscription is the right answer" but it clearly isn't enough for some people (netflix).
The YouTube subscription just seems excessively expensive. I find it hard to fathom they would generate anywhere near as much revenue from me watching their ads compared to the subscription cost.
I thought that until I got most of the way through the article.
It is a long winded explanation that eventually gets to its point that the skip button can appear in various formats making it a tiny bit slower to recognise and use.
Without a reasonable explanation to why it needs to change it seems like dark pattern is fair.
Google products have been incorporating a frustrating amount of dark patterns. In gmail for example, if you load one of the smart inbox tabs, it shows the rows of unread emails at the top. Right when you attempt to click on the top row, it rearranges the rows to show a few rows of ads instead (and the ads are fairly indistinguishable from the unread emails) so you end up unintentionally opening an ad.
Now, there’s no good reason for this loading pattern - since they intend to show the ads, they could have allocated a few rows, shown a loading skeleton, and then asynchronously loaded ads and emails in their expected place. Instead they now get a ton of extra ad clicks, but I wonder how happy their advertisers are to pay for these unintended clicks.
Well, some of the ad money goes to content creators. Since my wife and I each spend more time on YouTube than we do on any of Disney, Netflicks, Amazon Prime, or Hulu we “splurge” $15/month on Google’s family plan that gets no ads and all the music and music videos we need.
Even though I am a big fan of open distributed media like Mastodon (follow me at @mark_watson@mastodon.social), I like to see quality paid for services. I am looking forward to spending $2/month on Twitter if they require real-people paid accounts to get rid of the bots.
When I found out my kids spend more time on YouTube than any other video platform I paid for YouTube Premium. They're a little older now and are shifting back to other platforms but I don't think we'll cancel our subscription anytime soon given how many complaints I see about their ad delivery.
I'd be a lot more willing to pay for Premium if it were strictly to get rid of ads, without any of the bundled features that don't matter to me (e.g., Music, background playback, etc.). They experimented with it in certain European markets[0], and I'm disappointed that it hasn't made its way to the US.
I used to pay for the Youtube Premium as well, because the app is literally unusable on an Apple TV and iOS devices without it, the ads are just too much.
Unfortunately, the premium subscription does not work for the in video ads and promotions (shills) which seems to be everywhere now, so I cancelled my subscription, as I can not get the ad-free experience anymore, dropped the idea of using Youtube on devices where I can not install ublock origin.
edit: The idea is that I can not get rid of ads, even with the subscription, so the value of subscription itself is severely diminished.
I find YouTube basically unusable on any device except for my laptop with an adblocker. The ads are so intrusive and cut in at such jarring moments that it's just not worth it. It's not uncommon to have to tolerate several minutes of ads just to watch a sub-10 minute video.
I watch a lot of YouTube on my smart TV even an old Roku but after the changes to the frequency of ads it was unbearable. It was to the point where I would mute the TV and put my hand up to block the ad from my eyes. I would also press back a few times to exit out of the ad and most times if done twice no ad plays.
Ads always cut off the first 5 seconds of the videos, and ads were popping up seconds after the initial two ads, and then ads cut in mid sentence. No thought of the content presented like a TV ad would do just stuff in as many as possible.
Eventually I gave in an paid the $10/moth. YouTube is broken and unwatchable without doing it that way at least on a smart TV or a Roku.
During the pandemic some product person drastically increased the number of ads and began ruining videos with ads in the middle of the videos. Music sets get screwed up and the crappy AI likes to pause jokes right before the punch line and then resume a second or two after.
At this point any video I imagine myself ever watching more than once gets downloaded with yt-dlp and automatically loaded into Plex. I had one negative experience with an artist deleting a popular video years ago, but that short term profit seeking is what pushed me to finally get everything all setup.
>By introducing so many versions of design, it forbids a pattern to be established and recognized by the users.
I dont think the author properly acknowledges just how voracious the human appetite for patterns are. We are absolute machines when it comes to spotting even the hint of a pattern, and few things can prevent us from establishing and identifying them as a function of our basic existence. millions of years of evolution have basically guaranteed that when patterns arise or exist, we are borg-like in our pursuit.
shuffling a few choices of skip is a cheap effort that probably appeased a few C level ad execs. the biggest coffin-nail for ads is of course adblock.
Folks are completing MSc, PhDs, submitting to cutthroat recruitment processes to architect, enable, and implement this level of malicious counterproductive sophistication. Google employees, how do you find motivation to wake up in the morning? Is it >300k USD salary and FIRE before 40? What if they told you to scam your own children for additional bonus?
Your last question isn't even rhetorical. For almost everyone in USA's tech, it's only a matter of compensation. Should we expect anything different when even UC Berkeley's CS program doesn't have a single ethics requirement? (EECS has one, but their CS grad output is way lower)
I wish a tech crash like dot-com would happen already—in my very naive hope that the unscrupulous rat racers whose sole purpose is to perpetuate this infinite loop of SAT-level/IQ-test job recruitment + gamified promotion optimization will leave so they can ruin another industry. This is a terrible thought to have for peers, but after the past decade of nonsensical gatekeeping and unsustainable college major growth, I genuinely feel these people increasingly make everyday work life unbearable.
I wonder how much this is still contributing to the overall problem. The content is getting views, so advertisers will still pay for ads, the algorithm will promote it more, more people will see the ads.
PSA, uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock (blocks in-video ads by automatically skipping them via crowdsourced timestamps) exist, as do Vanced for Android (until it dies, could also use NewPipe, a fork with SponsorBlock is available) and SmartTubeNext for Android-based TVs.
> By introducing so many versions of design, it forbids a pattern to be established and recognized by the users. Essentially, the users look at the design, get confused about if there is going to be a “Skip Ad” button or not, get tired of trying to figure it out, and finally pay less attention to it which increases the chance of them ending up watching ads that could have been skipped.
Honestly, this does not match (at least) my usage pattern: I am so annoyed by the ads that I always look for the skip button - sometimes successfully, sometimes in vain.
(by the way: I see strong evidence that Google's (and thus YouTube's) ad network has a lot of difficulties finding ads that are of interest for me - likely because I have quite different interests from the typical citizen; perhaps this is the reasons why YouTube's ads are so annoying for me that I always look for the skip button on YouTube).
I didn't get that amount of variations the OP sees so far, but I've been wondering if the number of ads you get and the distribution of skippable vs unskippable ads is somehow personalized.
At least my subjective impression is that when I go on a youtube binge, over time it will slowly increase the number of ads it shows back-to-back and also increases the amount of nonskippable ads.
I wonder if there is some kind of reinforcement learning going on, which tries to figure out just how many ads I'm willing to tolerate before switching away. (Or employ the good old "boiling frogs" strategy and train me to tolerate more ads over time)
I got no evidence for this at all of course, so just a conspiracy theory for now.
YouTube, like TV and any other technology infested with adds seems to me completely unusable as it is, I don't understand how people are so patient and keep using it.
I use uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock and Watch On Odysee extensions to improve it.
use a vpn and new chrome session in some low income country. this will remove most of the ads
but now what many content creators are doing nowadays is making the ads part pf the video itself, so you cannot skip it or block it. The product placement may transition seemingly in such a way as you may be listening to a video about the history of some math concept and suddenly the narrator will start talking about VPNs, and when that happens I just hit the back button. At this point the problem has gotten bad enough that I stopped watching any channels where this may happen, which is many of them now.
SponsorBlock extension is great; it cuts out the ads that are part of the video itself. It uses crowd-sourced tags. It gets nearly all of them; if a video is popular enough for the creator to bother putting ads in it then someone will submit the tags for it.
I've seen another YT dark pattern lately. I often skip ads with youtube-dl (download the video and watch offline). But sometimes I like to be even more aggressive and skip the whole video, by using ytdl to download the closed caption text (VTT file) so I can read it instead of watching the vid. I have a python script that reformats the .vtt (a messy xml file full of timestamps and other markup) into something like readable text, and that worked pretty well until recently.
Lately I've found that 1) more videos don't have auto transcription, and 2) the vtt files have gotten messed up so that the timestamps are no longer properly interspersed with the text. My script strips them all out except once per minute, so if I find something interesting or confusing in the transcript, I can quickly find that spot in the video and watch it. That doesn't work any more. The hack is still better than nothing but I wonder what YT is up to, messing up a feature like that, which was presumably done for accessibility reasons, so its breakage likely has consequences beyond annoying freeloaders like me.
These patterns are clearly visible and so similar that I don't even behave differently to them. I don't care about any of the variants: I wait until I see Skip Ad and press it as soon as I can. It's not even like it's ever in a different place... unless I'm earnestly interested or have time to kill and want the channel to get paid with my time.
Do these variations only appear on the website version of YouTube? I use an ad-blocker so I haven't noticed this pattern exactly. However, one pattern I've noticed using the mobile app is that in order to disrupt the automatic habit to skip, they seem to randomise whether or not they make any specific ad skippable. It seems some ads are always skippable, some are sometimes skippable and sometimes not and some are never skippable. It doesn't always correlate to how long the ad is either. Overall this seems to result in my actually watching the ad all the way through because it takes too much effort to figure out what kind of ad it is and whether I can press the button at the right time. At least if I do nothing, I know the video I want will play eventually.
Another random one I’ve come across. I can block most YouTube ads with uBlock Origin in the browser. I can also cast my browser tab to an Android TV device. But if I try and cast a tab with YouTube, it will open the app instead of casting the browser, and I can’t block ads in the app.
This article comes across as a bit conspiratorial. I feel like "dark pattern" is on the verge of losing meaning when it's applied in cases like this as opposed to for example: making accept cookies one click and reject multiple clicks (which Google is also guilty of).
I would likely pay for youtube premium if the TV app wasn't so absymal.
However, having something that does not allow sorting by 'new' (and constantly recommending videos that are many years old), regularly re-introducing channels that have been marked as 'do not show' along with injecting the popular junk into 'for you' despite me having constantly marked similar as 'not interested'.
There is no way I will pay premium for such a terrible experience, even if it does remove ads. The TV experience - where I consume most content - is fast becoming the biggest reason to never use youtube.
The AppleTV app for YouTube is… fine, but certainly not great. Google, like Facebook, seems to believe in algorithms above anything less. It sort of make sense when you’re relying on showing ads, but it degrades the experience for those who actually pay for the service.
That being said, my YouTube Premium subscription is easily the one I get the most enjoyment from, as compared to Netflix, HBO and similar.
This doesn't sound much like a dark pattern to me. I think they probably have a few variations they use based on the length of the ad, and some agreement with the sponsor, but that's just speculation.
It would be much more evil if sometimes the "see more about this product" button was where the "skip ad" button was, so that users who were reflexively clicking it would get sent to the sponsor.
Has anybody here ever been so confused by these variants that you watched more than an additional 1/4th of a second of the ad?
Twitter doesn't count blocked accounts as ad impressions.
If I see an ad on twitter, I block the account that displayed it. Invariably, there is another ad in the next 3-5 tweets. I can do this 3 or 4 times in a row before I give up looking at the feed because the signal-to-noise ends up being too low when 25% of my feed are ads.
My guess is that after blocking an account, the ad you saw doesn't count as an impression. It's also possible that 25% is normal, but it doesn't seem that way if I scroll and not block accounts.
One point I hate on YouTube are the clickbaits thumbnails and title. I found an extension that uses a random image of the video for the thumbnail and it's much better
Maybe more productive way is to use youtube premium instead of looking dark pattern in youtube ads.
Or is the idea is something similar to if restaurant displayed unlimited buffet ads and some jackass customer decides wasting trays of uneaten food is okay. Anything else is restaurant owner is liar and using dark pattern to lure customers.
I don't know the percentage of people using ad blockers but I'm sure it is very, very low. In fact, most users watch YouTube from the app, so no ad blocking.
I just hope they don't make any significant change to their API so I can still use Vanced to listen to music when I'm outside.
I have no idea why or how it's happening, but whenever I view a Youtube video on my personal computer, it stops after < 1 second and I get skipped right to the content. It's the only device in my home that happens to, and I'm afraid to touch anything, lest I lose that magic power.
They do also appear to work out stuff I’m interested in… there are rare days where I’ll get a stream of promoted Kickstarter projects that actually match my interests… then it goes back to the most generic advertising and I’ll be back to slamming the skip button.
That's why a pay for Youtube Premium. I find it irrealistic to expect to be able to access youtube content without either paying for it or having to watch ads.
Nothing is free, ever. Even public education is paid by people's taxes.
TouchTunes jukeboxes -seem- to use a dark pattern of playing music nobody wants to listen to in order to encourage jukebox purchases. It could also be that the default music is stuff that is less popular.
The very very few times I allow yt video to play (in private nav only), if I ever see an ad I just reload the page until the ad is gone. It works (but I watch like 1 video every 6 month, so YMMV).
Do you own a Macbook with touch bar? Use Safari and skip ads by using the scrubbing feature of the touch bar. No adblock needed, all ads skippable, and they're none the wiser.
youtube music will often interrupt startup and ask you to signup now with a large button at the bottom. There is small text below it (not even a button) to say "not now". That line of text is wedged in really close to the "close" button.
frankly, also, shutting down an existing app (well liked google play music) and implementing a less functional replacement (for their benefit) should be called the Google Two Step Dark Pattern Shuffle.
What a long winded way of saying “YouTube is AB testing 5 UIs for skipping ads”. There’s zero evidence that this tricks anyone; Just a bunch of hand-waving.
Being exposed to an ad is not a dark pattern IMO. And this particular pattern is IMO pretty dang obvious if you use YouTube much at all.
Someone has to pay for YouTube ... someone has to pay for this stuff. If it is ads that's it.
I think the issue involves two parties, the sites who want revenue, and the vast majority of users who want content for free. So yeah here we are on the web where most people want everything free.
Very few people are objecting to the presence of ads, but instead the fact that Google tries to trick you into watching more ads and blame yourself for doing so.
In an alternate universe without this dark pattern, there would still be ads - they would just have a consistent design that allowed you to skip the skippable ones without any thought, or alternatively longer/unskippable ads.
I pay for YouTube, but they still apply dark patterns, namely, they constantly turn auto play back on after a week or so despite me turning it off time and again.
I've honestly never noticed this. You just wait 5 seconds, see if it says "Skip ad" and then click it. I bet most users don't notice this either and it's probably not especially effective (but still worth it at Google scale).
I can't really blame Google for not wanting people to skip ads. The fact that skippable ads even exist is kind of crazy.
In firefox type cs-] then press the right arrow 4-5 times, then alt-tab, then tab until "Skip add" is highlighted and hit space. No need for extra extensions or anything.
This is why I use uBlock Origin. I don't feel guilty if I have to put up with such asshole design. I would much rather have (even non-hideable) text ads in the bottom. Something similar to what they used a long time ago.
Likewise with many Polish entertainment/content aggregator/news websites - there are goddamn ads in the BACKGROUND of the page! Ugh!
jerf|3 years ago
It's very plausibly a bug that a novice dealing with time in a UI would make, and in many other circumstances I'd accept that explanation. But, a bug in such a critical piece of YouTube's functionality, with a root cause I'm pretty sure I've diagnosed just by glancing at it, surviving for years and years across multiple platforms? This isn't a bug. It's policy. At scale, those seconds add up.
aequitas|3 years ago
wizzard|3 years ago
rolandog|3 years ago
But I'm not that guy.
jrootabega|3 years ago
ghoomketu|3 years ago
So after some basic research it looks like they need to add almost 1 petabytes of storage and I couldn't find much info on the bandwidth and servers it uses.
As much as I don't like Google for their shady business practices, I couldn't help but marvel at this feat of engineering. It's mind blowing tbh.
I mean I can still access my video with 10 views I uploaded 8 years ago.. can't do that on my HDD and they have it in 5 formats.
shantnutiwari|3 years ago
There was a post here about how Vimeo is charging people $300+/month for their videos-- and someone did the math to show thats just the hosting/bandwidth costs. For one creator.
Youtube has millions of videos-- Im surprised their costs aren't higher. Im grateful they provide this service for free at all
gonzo41|3 years ago
lbriner|3 years ago
Another thing would be if you upload stupid crap that no-one wants to watch, you get banned or sent a nasty letter or something...I don't know, I don't work in customer retention ;-)
paulpauper|3 years ago
qbrass|3 years ago
sixothree|3 years ago
When GMail was introduced, google was offering a gigabyte of storage when most providers were offering a 1/10th or less of that. Many people gladly gave up access to the contents of their email in exchange for something that seemed at the time to be technologically impressive.
As of today a few gigabytes of email storage seems fairly trivial. But we still gave up a lot to enjoy that privilege.
Trust me, in 10 years this impressive amount of data will be less impressive to you.
scarface74|3 years ago
akhmatova|3 years ago
ohyoutravel|3 years ago
alex_young|3 years ago
Data transfer is priced by connection and not by bandwidth, so that cost will not scale linearly.
https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&disk_types=e...
dec0dedab0de|3 years ago
user_7832|3 years ago
gniv|3 years ago
solarkraft|3 years ago
On the flip side I always chuckle when a text-only (with crappy music) ad comes on.
josteink|3 years ago
Surely someone must have been able to help you out with that if you couldn’t do it yourself?
The answer exists, it’s right there with buttons for clicking given to you by Google, but people here on HN so often seem so entirely blindsided and insist there’s no such thing as ad-free Youtube.
What gives? I just don't get it.
blindseer|3 years ago
Also, I swear they do this - If you click on the try YouTube premium for 14 days, once the 14 days end you are bombarded with extra ads. And ads that are usually not skippable. I also remember getting multiple 60 min ads. I don’t remember any of these ads but I do remember how frustrating my experience with YouTube was and still is. But I’m also the kind of person that is still surprised that advertising works.
If only I could use my raspberry pi to block all YouTube ads at home. My life would be immensely better.
boardwaalk|3 years ago
It helps that $10 is worth the many hours of use I get every month from YouTube & YouTube Music too.
alias_neo|3 years ago
I've seen the same few vids hundreds of times and I know, like I know the sky is blue and water is wet that they had no ads.
Couple years later, my son is born and that morning peace time comes for me to put on a vid or two, next thing I know, a couple of ads bang in the middle of the video. So jarring I can't explain how pissed I was, I got straight to rooting my TV and blocking ads.
The interesting part for me is that a YouTube premium trial Google had pushed on me ended just days prior.
CraigJPerry|3 years ago
There's clients for many other platforms, even traditionally locked down ones like iOS Safari etc.
phh|3 years ago
IE6|3 years ago
zerocrates|3 years ago
Edit: or is maybe the issue here the mere presence of ads versus them being blocked in a browser?
rwc|3 years ago
TAKEMYMONEY|3 years ago
Is it a dark pattern? That's not the first term I'd use to describe it, but perhaps it falls under "Misdirection" mentioned at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.07032.pdf (page 12).
BitwiseFool|3 years ago
Havoc|3 years ago
Except "ongoing A/B test" isn't really a thing. The whole point of A/B is to identify and discard the worse of the two. Especially on google scale and this being applied to everyone you'd expect the data to point one way or the other really fast.
This is just straight up dark pattern.
nevir|3 years ago
savanaly|3 years ago
noobermin|3 years ago
I want to say "subscription is the right answer" but it clearly isn't enough for some people (netflix).
kmmlng|3 years ago
nemacol|3 years ago
I could see paying if it was a totally clean experience but to pay and get rid of part/half of the ads I would see does not seem worth it to me.
ghaewrhaerga|3 years ago
mritun|3 years ago
Is it considered dark because they want the users to subscribe to paid version?
I think labelling everything “dark pattern” just makes the term lose its meaning and it actually helps the real dark patterns go scot free
theginger|3 years ago
shantnutiwari|3 years ago
Yeah, the old "We want everything for free, and will complain if you spy on us or show us ads along the way"
alphakappa|3 years ago
Now, there’s no good reason for this loading pattern - since they intend to show the ads, they could have allocated a few rows, shown a loading skeleton, and then asynchronously loaded ads and emails in their expected place. Instead they now get a ton of extra ad clicks, but I wonder how happy their advertisers are to pay for these unintended clicks.
mark_l_watson|3 years ago
12ian34|3 years ago
mark_l_watson|3 years ago
Even though I am a big fan of open distributed media like Mastodon (follow me at @mark_watson@mastodon.social), I like to see quality paid for services. I am looking forward to spending $2/month on Twitter if they require real-people paid accounts to get rid of the bots.
josefresco|3 years ago
the_snooze|3 years ago
[0[ https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-l...
csunbird|3 years ago
Unfortunately, the premium subscription does not work for the in video ads and promotions (shills) which seems to be everywhere now, so I cancelled my subscription, as I can not get the ad-free experience anymore, dropped the idea of using Youtube on devices where I can not install ublock origin.
edit: The idea is that I can not get rid of ads, even with the subscription, so the value of subscription itself is severely diminished.
harg|3 years ago
dghughes|3 years ago
Ads always cut off the first 5 seconds of the videos, and ads were popping up seconds after the initial two ads, and then ads cut in mid sentence. No thought of the content presented like a TV ad would do just stuff in as many as possible.
Eventually I gave in an paid the $10/moth. YouTube is broken and unwatchable without doing it that way at least on a smart TV or a Roku.
Larrikin|3 years ago
At this point any video I imagine myself ever watching more than once gets downloaded with yt-dlp and automatically loaded into Plex. I had one negative experience with an artist deleting a popular video years ago, but that short term profit seeking is what pushed me to finally get everything all setup.
Now there are no ads.
nimbius|3 years ago
I dont think the author properly acknowledges just how voracious the human appetite for patterns are. We are absolute machines when it comes to spotting even the hint of a pattern, and few things can prevent us from establishing and identifying them as a function of our basic existence. millions of years of evolution have basically guaranteed that when patterns arise or exist, we are borg-like in our pursuit.
shuffling a few choices of skip is a cheap effort that probably appeased a few C level ad execs. the biggest coffin-nail for ads is of course adblock.
durnygbur|3 years ago
usui|3 years ago
I wish a tech crash like dot-com would happen already—in my very naive hope that the unscrupulous rat racers whose sole purpose is to perpetuate this infinite loop of SAT-level/IQ-test job recruitment + gamified promotion optimization will leave so they can ruin another industry. This is a terrible thought to have for peers, but after the past decade of nonsensical gatekeeping and unsustainable college major growth, I genuinely feel these people increasingly make everyday work life unbearable.
rrsghiopnbg|3 years ago
pluc|3 years ago
1) use an adblocker
2) use a pihole
3) use sponsorblock
anything short of the first two is literally using a different internet. Marketers and Advertisers would ruin the net if we let them.
jrootabega|3 years ago
Panoramix|3 years ago
I'm always a little puzzled with how there is so much money in advertising.
cercatrova|3 years ago
NoraCodes|3 years ago
Stevvo|3 years ago
q-big|3 years ago
> By introducing so many versions of design, it forbids a pattern to be established and recognized by the users. Essentially, the users look at the design, get confused about if there is going to be a “Skip Ad” button or not, get tired of trying to figure it out, and finally pay less attention to it which increases the chance of them ending up watching ads that could have been skipped.
Honestly, this does not match (at least) my usage pattern: I am so annoyed by the ads that I always look for the skip button - sometimes successfully, sometimes in vain.
(by the way: I see strong evidence that Google's (and thus YouTube's) ad network has a lot of difficulties finding ads that are of interest for me - likely because I have quite different interests from the typical citizen; perhaps this is the reasons why YouTube's ads are so annoying for me that I always look for the skip button on YouTube).
xg15|3 years ago
At least my subjective impression is that when I go on a youtube binge, over time it will slowly increase the number of ads it shows back-to-back and also increases the amount of nonskippable ads.
I wonder if there is some kind of reinforcement learning going on, which tries to figure out just how many ads I'm willing to tolerate before switching away. (Or employ the good old "boiling frogs" strategy and train me to tolerate more ads over time)
I got no evidence for this at all of course, so just a conspiracy theory for now.
nathias|3 years ago
I use uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock and Watch On Odysee extensions to improve it.
paulpauper|3 years ago
but now what many content creators are doing nowadays is making the ads part pf the video itself, so you cannot skip it or block it. The product placement may transition seemingly in such a way as you may be listening to a video about the history of some math concept and suddenly the narrator will start talking about VPNs, and when that happens I just hit the back button. At this point the problem has gotten bad enough that I stopped watching any channels where this may happen, which is many of them now.
Stevvo|3 years ago
thallium205|3 years ago
charlie0|3 years ago
throwaway81523|3 years ago
Lately I've found that 1) more videos don't have auto transcription, and 2) the vtt files have gotten messed up so that the timestamps are no longer properly interspersed with the text. My script strips them all out except once per minute, so if I find something interesting or confusing in the transcript, I can quickly find that spot in the video and watch it. That doesn't work any more. The hack is still better than nothing but I wonder what YT is up to, messing up a feature like that, which was presumably done for accessibility reasons, so its breakage likely has consequences beyond annoying freeloaders like me.
karmakaze|3 years ago
spuz|3 years ago
arrosenberg|3 years ago
gundmc|3 years ago
jrootabega|3 years ago
It's lying. Trying to be unpredictable to prevent you from being able to unconsciously skip ads is one thing, but lying is unforgivable.
mobiuscog|3 years ago
However, having something that does not allow sorting by 'new' (and constantly recommending videos that are many years old), regularly re-introducing channels that have been marked as 'do not show' along with injecting the popular junk into 'for you' despite me having constantly marked similar as 'not interested'.
There is no way I will pay premium for such a terrible experience, even if it does remove ads. The TV experience - where I consume most content - is fast becoming the biggest reason to never use youtube.
mrweasel|3 years ago
That being said, my YouTube Premium subscription is easily the one I get the most enjoyment from, as compared to Netflix, HBO and similar.
karaterobot|3 years ago
It would be much more evil if sometimes the "see more about this product" button was where the "skip ad" button was, so that users who were reflexively clicking it would get sent to the sponsor.
Has anybody here ever been so confused by these variants that you watched more than an additional 1/4th of a second of the ad?
jedahan|3 years ago
If I see an ad on twitter, I block the account that displayed it. Invariably, there is another ad in the next 3-5 tweets. I can do this 3 or 4 times in a row before I give up looking at the feed because the signal-to-noise ends up being too low when 25% of my feed are ads.
My guess is that after blocking an account, the ad you saw doesn't count as an impression. It's also possible that 25% is normal, but it doesn't seem that way if I scroll and not block accounts.
poulpy123|3 years ago
geodel|3 years ago
Or is the idea is something similar to if restaurant displayed unlimited buffet ads and some jackass customer decides wasting trays of uneaten food is okay. Anything else is restaurant owner is liar and using dark pattern to lure customers.
mantas|3 years ago
Darmody|3 years ago
I don't know the percentage of people using ad blockers but I'm sure it is very, very low. In fact, most users watch YouTube from the app, so no ad blocking.
I just hope they don't make any significant change to their API so I can still use Vanced to listen to music when I'm outside.
mint2|3 years ago
fatnoah|3 years ago
techdragon|3 years ago
elzbardico|3 years ago
setr|3 years ago
lkxijlewlf|3 years ago
clarge1120|3 years ago
frizlab|3 years ago
jeffhuys|3 years ago
Mwua-ha-haaa.
throw7|3 years ago
frankly, also, shutting down an existing app (well liked google play music) and implementing a less functional replacement (for their benefit) should be called the Google Two Step Dark Pattern Shuffle.
NavinF|3 years ago
725686|3 years ago
robertlagrant|3 years ago
Quequau|3 years ago
That seems like a dark pattern itself.
duxup|3 years ago
Being exposed to an ad is not a dark pattern IMO. And this particular pattern is IMO pretty dang obvious if you use YouTube much at all.
Someone has to pay for YouTube ... someone has to pay for this stuff. If it is ads that's it.
I think the issue involves two parties, the sites who want revenue, and the vast majority of users who want content for free. So yeah here we are on the web where most people want everything free.
throw10920|3 years ago
In an alternate universe without this dark pattern, there would still be ads - they would just have a consistent design that allowed you to skip the skippable ones without any thought, or alternatively longer/unskippable ads.
the_snooze|3 years ago
LadyCailin|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
scollet|3 years ago
IshKebab|3 years ago
I can't really blame Google for not wanting people to skip ads. The fact that skippable ads even exist is kind of crazy.
More of a "dimly lit pattern" maybe.
prirai|3 years ago
galuggus|3 years ago
usrn|3 years ago
In firefox type cs-] then press the right arrow 4-5 times, then alt-tab, then tab until "Skip add" is highlighted and hit space. No need for extra extensions or anything.
Note: this lets you skip unskipable ads too.
MiddleEndian|3 years ago
Cypher|3 years ago
zaptrem|3 years ago
_Algernon_|3 years ago
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...
ajsnigrutin|3 years ago
https://sponsor.ajay.app/
This also skips the sponsored parts of the actual videos ("this video is sponsored by skillshadow raid vpn,...")
emptyparadise|3 years ago
sergiotapia|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
RicoElectrico|3 years ago
Likewise with many Polish entertainment/content aggregator/news websites - there are goddamn ads in the BACKGROUND of the page! Ugh!
Just look at this beauty: https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c0834752/436c59464448525156546b3d_f...
RajT88|3 years ago
rcMgD2BwE72F|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
stefanwlb|3 years ago
[deleted]