It is not just about youtube. The whole internet is bloated with ads right now, and the vast majority of them quite the opposite of discrete.
I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting. I could count the times that I have found an internet ad interesting in my lifetime using half the fingers of one hand. Personalised or not, the vast majority is useless, badly made, that just takes processing time both for the computer and my brain.
I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads. If a website says that I have to disable the adblocker to view it, and I cannot go around it, 99% of the times I do not visit it, I do not care. I pay the people I want to support directly and that's it. I use bandcamp to buy the music I like directly. I subscribe to patreon to the ones that I feel they bring value to my life. But for the occasional or ephemeral video or entertainment, I will just as easily live without, as the disruption ads cause is worse than not viewing that content.
I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites). If a website blocks this, I am not going to sacrifise my experience and I am not interested in browsing it.
Ad-blocking also gives you similar if not more extra security to anti-virus software, with fewer downsides (faster not slower). I'm afraid the ad ecosystem is so big that occasionally, threats slip through.
- I start the video, an ad is shown within 30 secs.
- I fast forward a few minutes, the SAME ad is shown again.
- I jump to anywhere on the timeline, the SAME ad is shown again.
At least show me something that is relevant, like facebook does. The ads there reflect what I usually look for. On YT, none of the ads are relevant to me, ever.
I think the core issue is:
* People don't like ads, because ads suck
* Youtube offers premium, an ad-less experience
Never have I seen self-entitled people so furious as when YT requests they buy premium in order to remove ads. What, should YT be hosted for free without ads and without a subscription?
I get that ads suck and companies suck, but self-entitled people suck too; most of us here are devs and we get paid because our company has to make money _somehow_.
YT users have two great options for paying for their access, dealing with ads or paying a subscription. They refuse either option and instead are furious that YT doesn't offer itself completely for free.
> the vast majority of them quite the opposite of discrete.
This is the main point IMO. When you have a printed newspaper or magazine you are not annoyed by the ads.
If we had ads that (1) do not move, (2) are not modal/do not pop up, (3) do not track you outside the website, (4) do not take MB's of data I would be willing to tolerate them and they could even be helpful.
Youtube has become unwatchable without ad blockers. It used to be better than TV, now it is worse and you cannot skip them.
> I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites).
Agree completely. I know people who are fine with watching ads to support the content creators and I agree. The creators should be compensated but Google are far too agressive with their ads.
Being able to manipulate my own machine and what I want to view is entirely up to me. This can't be infringed.
There is always the option today to block from the client side, but I can see this changing if there's enough money involved.
>I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting
not saying this applies to you but might it be that ads are distracting enough that they would be an actual accessibility problem affecting people with ADHD - if so is not allowing people to block ads likely to run into legal issues?
Some websites just keep throwing an enormous number of ads into your face to the the extent you start losing consciousness why you came here in the first place.
On computer, you still able to use an AdBlock but on mobile, I suffer terribly, not only because I could not disable ads but because on some sites while you are reading an article a random ad video that took about half of the screen keeps playing and scrolling down with you, even clicking the X doesn’t work most of the time but generally triggers an external link. At the bottom of the page, you start reading “best job offers in XYZ” where this XYZ is your city name deduced from your IP address, the thumbnail, as you might expect, is a “s_x_” girl lying on a bed :(
I know, free content should be supported by ads but I believe this is not the way to do it.
> I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads.
Okay, but how do you square that with the fact that hosting content costs money? Are the people and companies which provide the content you look at not allowed to earn money to keep the servers running and the sysadmins fed?
A side effect of ads (and something that ad blockers mask, giving websites a normal appearance) is that ad supported websites have the wrong incentive.
When you browse a website with no ads, you are the public. Content is provided for your use, and that's all.
When you visit an ad supported website, you are only the means to achieve an end, which is to have you in the site as much as possible, clicking on as much ads as possible. That usually had the effect of making the website content bloated.
Not all sites begin like that, but they all end like that. And ad blocking hides that ugly truth under a layer of normalcy.
I have a massive collection of Mp3s and wav files on my phone... Have cultivated it for decades now. I rarely stream music because of ads and bandwidth throttling that my mobile data provider implements.
About 2 weeks ago, I heard Black Player (App), which already works in a very unexpectedly and illogically difficult and frustrating manner, started injecting ads into my normal music library. I may just need to charge up my old iPod from now on, it doesn't ever need weekly software updates for some strange reason like everything else.
You've hit on the reason I think the Brave token is such a great idea (https://brave.com/brave-rewards/). I know it's en vogue to trash gimmicky cryptocurrencies, and to be honest I don't care how this gets implemented. The concept is great: a shared, fungible way to easily support random websites one visits, and control the kinds of ads one accepts. If sites had a little tip jar which I could easily tap to avoid ads, I'd use it. There's just too much friction today in supporting sites, and all of them want a subscription.
> The whole internet is bloated with ads right now
Internet? I think you mean everything. The whole everything is bloated with ads right now. Look around you, I bet you can see at least a dozen brand names without even leaving your chair.
People who work in marketing and ads should quit their jobs if they care at all about society, but of course they don't or they wouldn't be in marketing and advertising. Alternatively, we should just stop putting up with their bullshit because they have a long history of abusing every inch they are given.
Since I live in countries other than my own, there's a 0% chance that any given ad is relevant to me. Chances are it's in a language I don't speak or for a product I'm not eligible for, much less something I'd actually want.
This works out great because my brain doesn't get so distracted by ads, even physical billboard ads. But at the same time I use an ad-blocker to avoid wasted screen real estate.
A good way to think about the tracking urls attached to majority of websites these days, is as many different cameras tracking each person as it enters buildings and stores, using face-recognition.
Thus it stores all the places you have been and with ML and AI create some sort of personal file, with all kinds of attributes. (the more the better)
uBlock and others block these cameras from seeing your face.
To me your view is just common sense. I find it bizarre how some people seem to be treating ad-blockers like the equivalent of stealing in the comments.
It is YouTube's right to prevent me from using their site if I use an ad-blocker just as much as it is my right to stop using their service altogether if they prevent me from using it with an ad-blocker.
What people mean when they say all these things is that, "I can easily access things I want for free, so why would I ever pay?"
Yes some people give voluntarily through donations or Patreon, but it's a tiny amount of the actual number of people who derive satisfaction from the content.
The best solution for someone who hates ads is a subscription model. The thing that bothers me is that publishers still collect massive amounts of data and sell it, and some continue to have advertising or product placement. Give me ads or give me a completely untracked experience for a fee. Don't do something in between and claim that it's ad-free.
Bandcamp is interesting and I am considering it and cancel Spotify. How do you go about discovering music? I use Spotify for not only listening to my artists but for music discovery too.
On mobile YouTube right now I see two unskippable ads before every video. How long before some genius needs to juice his numbers this quarter and come up with the bright idea of three unskippable ads? Google made over $250 billion in 2021, $30 billion of that is thought to come from YouTube, can someone explain to me what is wrong with this status quo? If blocking a subset of users is such a good idea, why isn't Google rolling it out to everyone today?
To the bean counters who seem to have overwhelmed Google, losing a few users might seem like a dog losing some fleas. They are out of ideas for growth. Once blitz scaling has reached the limits of user acquisition the only play left to juice the numbers seems to be “boil the frog”, going to war with their Oort cloud of free users, pay up or else. Are the c-suite types at Google aware that this is exactly the mindset that will make their decline into irrelevance inevitable?
Elon Musk inadvertently turned Twitter into a howling wasteland in a few short months, which shows what happens when you boil the user frog too quickly. Imagine how Twitter would look today if Elon instead doubled down on making Twitter the best user experience, offering users tools to make Twitter more relevant, making it an unmissable service for users, and in turn unmissable for advertisers? But instead he pulled the lever all the way from utopia to hellscape, attempting to shake down users to restore some functionality to a clearly degraded product. Enshitifying (thanks Cory Doctorow) the user experience is not a compelling reason to subscribe.
Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product.
I'm not against advertising per se, I’m against being shaken down to regain a user experience that should be the default. Here are two examples of successful advertising models:
1. Lex Friedman does an ad read at the beginning of his podcast. It’s intentionally skippable, I skip it 90% of the time. But when I'm busy with bread dough on my hands or whatever, I'm still hearing the ads, which are mostly repeat offerings anyway. Advertising is not always appropriate, eg at a kids birthday party or showing a video in a lecture. The lesson: MAKE IT SKIPPABLE!
2. Inserts into shows / product placement, like on VFX Artists React. These seem harder for a behemoth to monetise but I like these because I know that the actual creators are getting paid. Youtube doesn't want to deal with creators with anything closer than a dashboard. This is not the end users fault, it’s not the content creators fault, it’s a symptom of absentee capitalism. Youtube should invest in creators and form true partnerships. The lesson: INVEST IN DEALING FAIRLY WITH HUMANS!
I’m not going to pay, I will continue to avoid ads but watch them occasionally. I’m going to keep playing the game of whack-a-mole finding software / hardware solutions. And when a competitor comes along with their slider set more towards user friendliness I’m going to jump ship.
YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay (And I am not talking about too broke to pay cases). Serving an infinite video catalog is very expensive in terms of all resources (And yes Netflix is not comparable, unlike YouTube, Netflix can highly leverage cache boxes at ISPs). Vimeo is one alternative for video hosting, and HN is surely not gonna like that model (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547578).
So what is the alternative? (Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops).
Is it weird that this makes me want to subscribe to YouTube premium less than before? Feels like I've been poised to give them money for a while, since so many people seem to like the service. Now I feel like they're challenging me to a duel.
If you weren’t a paying customer, refuse to become a paying customer, and refuse to watch the ads, they don’t gain anything by having you as a user. It only costs them to retain you.
If doing something as simple as asking you to hold up your end of the deal of using their website (letting ads load for the ad-supported content) is too much to ask but paying for the website is also too much to ask, you have to be honest that you just want a free experience.
I don’t buy the argument that you were going to pay them in the future but you decided against it because they wouldn’t let you have it for free.
I looked into subscribing because I don't mind paying to avoid the ads.
I don't like the spying that will go along with paying, given that it is Alphabet/Google. If they offered a plan to pay without the spying I would have signed up years ago.
I didn't try so I could be wrong but my guess is your payment will be tied directly to your login and so you need to have that login on the browser at all times to view the videos (without ads) and given all the decline of "do no evil" I don't trust them at all.
I also don't trust they wouldn't mess things up. I travel a lot. I paid for YouTube TV and the ludicrous junk they do to try and verify you are able to view things was a huge pain and failed quite a lot until it failed nearly always I and dropped it.
I imagine if they push me I will pay and then have to copy and paste every YouTube url into a sanitized browser instance only used for YouTube. But I don't trust Alphabet/Google to not constantly be attempting to use that subscription to improve and deepen their spying which annoys me quite a bit. I just trust them a tiny bit more than Microsoft (and I ditched using anything by Microsoft decades ago - other than my use of LinkedIn continuing after they bought it and very occasional uses of Bing to check on it).
Mate, Youtube have existed for almost 2 decades and you probably used them for most of it. I have used it to watch countless hours of lectures, talks, interviews and entertainment. You probably have the same experience of it for the past 2 decade too.
If you are not going to pay for THAT, you aren't going to pay for ANYTHING. Just admit you want free stuff. Stop deluding yourself into thinking that Youtube is somehow responsible for hosting all these for free.
i don’t think it’s weird, but i signed up for the premium trial a few weeks ago and it is simply astounding how much more enjoyable it makes things. i didn’t realize just how awful things had become until i tried youtube without ads.
i know some other folks are complaining about still getting tracked or whatever, but i think the simple truth is that youtube without ads is a vastly superior experience.
> Feels like I've been poised to give them money for a while
Pay for it or don't, but what is this nonsense about being poised (for a while) to maybe someday possibly consider thinking about purchasing the service?
It's $13. (In inflation-adjusted terms that's $7.12 the year I graduated high school.) What in the world are we talking about here? Buy it or don't. What is there to think about?
My $25/mo for life youtubetv subscription is now up to $80/mo. I'm regretting that now, but also kind of stuck because I have family members on the account.
I'm definitely not signing up for youtube premium.
My big problem with paying for Youtube is I have a workspace account for my personal domain. None of their services inter-operate with workspace services. For example, our Google Home. My wife cannot register her voice with the system because she has a 'google account' not an account on my workspace. Because of this, our Home will regularly deny her the ability to listen to "age restricted" podcasts about cooking (they sometimes swear omg). Similarly, if I pay for Youtube, I cannot "share with my family" unless they are also on my workspace.
Clearly, the solution is for me to create another google account to use for these services and only use my workspace account for one thing. But then why am I paying Google to host my workspace account? Should I pay them _MORE_ for my wife and children to also be on my workspace, as well as paying for Youtube? (don't worry, I'm working on migrating off workspaces too).
(and fwiw, I paid for youtube premium for years, and watch hours of youtube content a day)
As a bonus, it is super fast because it doesn't have to justify the salaries of dozens (hundreds?) of frontend developers and can get away with server-side-rendered HTML and minimal amounts of Javascript.
Noone seeing the obvious connection to Manifest v3?
"Oh, it appears with the new Chrome extension API it is impossible to write an adblocker that bypasses this. How could that have happened? Google told us they only have our best interests in mind, so this must've been by accident."
Maybe people wouldn't be locking your ads if you didn't have them jacked up to saturation level. I sometimes watch on a console and the number of ads is ridiculous, even worse than broadcast TV. Sometimes you get ads in the middle of songs.
It's incredible how many people go "I was almost ready to give them money" whilst using Youtube all the time with an ad blocker. I know it, I was one of them for years.
Just buy the subscription. You get the free trial for a month. Nothing changes, the money is not missed, but you actually pay for something you use a lot.
The biggest benefit is not being subjected to ads anymore just by being next to family members who don't use ad blockers. It comes with four slots for family members.
We first get adverts. And gee-golly-whillikers, they're also malware vendors and other terribvle horrible nogood crap you just don't want. And exploits. So yeah, you block ads with Ublock Origin.
Some shit site gets the idea to "block adblock". Detects a few common ones. But disabling javascript almost always works. But annoying.
By the time the chumps make "anti-anti-block adblock", we'll neuter that as well.
The endgame is something terrible like a WebAssembly that does forced downloads to get the content you want all in a VM like thing. That's what Widevine is already doing, kind of. Im just surprised that more for-profit news/media companies aren't doing exactly that, since now you have to pop off the payload in a container and try to detect what an ad is and isnt.
As an aside: If you're running Firefox, download Sponsorblock. It skips over the shit in-video adverts on Youtube with "a message from our sponsor". Oh, and you dont get this even IF you pay youtube.
What's next, "YouTube tests pausing videos when you look away from ads"?
This is a slippery slope that I definitely do not want to be going down. At that rate, "drink verification can" is not far off.
When I used to watch the actual TV I changed the channel, muted, or left the room during ads. My eyes, my ears, my brain. I will not be forced to consume.
I'm pretty torn here. I don't believe I deserve access to free content, and there's _nothing_ wrong with any site blocking access if you don't want to see ads.
I've done a lot of digital curtailing in my life, but Youtube has been hard to avoid. It's both good and bad, as they have some of the most amazing content in the whole world, but also some of the most addictive trash that I can't stop watching. Because the service is so addicting, I'm not sure I could justify paying for it, even though the value it brings is incredible.
On a related note, I hate how A/B testing has become an excuse to aggravate a subsegment of your customer base to 'quantify' a feature or service.
Getting an adblocker denied message on youtube to determine exactly how much YT can annoy you in the service of stuffing more ads into your videos is both actively user-hostile and very definitely evil.
In most medical research, there are all types of consents that are required before you get subjected to this.
They are going to start an arms race. This will likely lead to much further advances in ad-blocking that would be a bad outcome for them. This is a balancing act for sure. I guess they must see lots of people blocking ads to think it's worth while going for it. This could even be a smaller team looking at bumping up their metrics or hit perf goals without seeing the larger impact across the company.
To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money.
Sometimes when I've forgotten to log in and see what it's like without, it's amazing anyone can watch videos on there. Like a lot of people I've generally been OK to watch ads in exchange for free content but it seems over the years instead of ads getting better and/or more relevant to my interests (even broadly), they're getting much worse.
I assume this is the result of companies just accepting ££ for anything rather than having more quality control?
I would have bought premium years ago if the free version lets you play in background when on mobile. This attitude of going out of your way to cripple EXTREMELY basic feature to get me to pay premium didn't sit well with me.
Asking me to pay for the ability to have background play to me is akin to opening a restaurant and serving unsalted food and asking 2% extra for salt in the food.
I already pay for a few other google services (google one, google cloud etc) and their customer service (that I have needed on the rare occasion) is ..... almost non existent as well.
Will most probably use alternate frontends or a pihole or whatever other alternative there is for as long as I can.
Man, the amount of misunderstanding present in the comments here is astonishing.
1. YT doesn't decide how many ads to show. The creator of the video gets to choose exactly how many ads are shown and when and where they are shown.
If you see too many ads on your videos, get pissed off at the creators you're watching, not YT.
2. Ad revenue is a very large portion of income for most creators. It's definitely not as large as sponsorship deals, but it's nothing to sneeze at. You people who are entitled to your free content aren't sticking it to the man by refusing to watch ads. Instead you're directly hurting the creators you enjoy watching by specifically depriving them of any ad revenue they may otherwise have gained from you. Shut up and sit down and watch the 30 second ad or stop watching YT altogether. The creators don't give a crap either way because you clearly don't give a crap about financially supporting them in the simplest way possible.
3. If anything, I believe YT will stop showing ads if they're too prevalent. There's a feature where creators can play ads at the beginning/ending of their videos. These ads don't play all the time, and I think that's because the YT algorithm is making sure that if you're doing something like playing music it doesn't play an ad at the beginning of every single song even if the video creator tries to make that happen.
Honestly, these comments read as if cable didn't exist just a few years ago (and still does today!) where they literally play 2 minutes of ads for every 5ish minutes of content. Even with DVR, skipping through the ads would take around 30 seconds (and then you have to adjust to make sure you didn't skip too far and everything) which is the length of typical YT ads. Buck up and pay up to support the "amazing" content that you selfishly indulge in and refuse to pay for out of a warped sense of entitlement.
Contrary to popular belief, most content creators are not putting their content out for free. They're putting it out knowing the majority of viewers will at least watch the ads and help them make money.
I use YouTube with an ad blocker and I am not a Premium subscriber anymore and won't pay out of principle after the dislike button removal, which has made using YouTube for tutorials and how-to videos useless for me. Instead, I support creators whose content I enjoy off-YouTube.
I am not worried about Google going forth with this. I see others asking what happens when users won't pay for a subscription and at the same time won't view ads? I believe the answer is pretty clear.
YouTube will either decide to suck up that they won't see ad revenue from a portion of the audience (ad blockers are and will always be a niche thing, there is no reality in which YouTube buckles because too many people block ads, especially since YouTube is predominantly viewed on devices where ad blocking is not as easy as in the desktop browser) or they will close up shop.
The fact is that YouTube currently occupies a spot in the online sphere which will always be occupied by someone: being the top service for hosting videos for free and showing them to audiences for free. There is a line of businesses which would jump on the opportunity of filling YouTube's "woeful" position of being the top dog in online video.
YouTube's collapse would be devastating considering the amount of culture and history stored on there. But new video content will always find a home and reach online. And Google knows this which is why they will IMO never give up on YouTube even if it were operating with loss again. Storage is only getting cheaper and their moat with YouTube is the user-generated content. Gate it too heavily and creators will find a place where they can post content more freely and users will fine a place where they can view content more freely.
I don't expect this to be anything other than YouTube pulling a Netflix with their password sharing crackdown complete with the back-paddling that ensued once they realized how replaceable they really are to a sizeable portion of their viewers loosing which would be more expensive than keeping it.
[+] [-] freehorse|2 years ago|reply
I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting. I could count the times that I have found an internet ad interesting in my lifetime using half the fingers of one hand. Personalised or not, the vast majority is useless, badly made, that just takes processing time both for the computer and my brain.
I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads. If a website says that I have to disable the adblocker to view it, and I cannot go around it, 99% of the times I do not visit it, I do not care. I pay the people I want to support directly and that's it. I use bandcamp to buy the music I like directly. I subscribe to patreon to the ones that I feel they bring value to my life. But for the occasional or ephemeral video or entertainment, I will just as easily live without, as the disruption ads cause is worse than not viewing that content.
I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites). If a website blocks this, I am not going to sacrifise my experience and I am not interested in browsing it.
[+] [-] red_admiral|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lofaszvanitt|2 years ago|reply
- I start the video, an ad is shown within 30 secs.
- I fast forward a few minutes, the SAME ad is shown again.
- I jump to anywhere on the timeline, the SAME ad is shown again.
At least show me something that is relevant, like facebook does. The ads there reflect what I usually look for. On YT, none of the ads are relevant to me, ever.
It's just ridiculous.
[+] [-] fennecfoxy|2 years ago|reply
Never have I seen self-entitled people so furious as when YT requests they buy premium in order to remove ads. What, should YT be hosted for free without ads and without a subscription?
I get that ads suck and companies suck, but self-entitled people suck too; most of us here are devs and we get paid because our company has to make money _somehow_.
YT users have two great options for paying for their access, dealing with ads or paying a subscription. They refuse either option and instead are furious that YT doesn't offer itself completely for free.
[+] [-] jcarrano|2 years ago|reply
This is the main point IMO. When you have a printed newspaper or magazine you are not annoyed by the ads.
If we had ads that (1) do not move, (2) are not modal/do not pop up, (3) do not track you outside the website, (4) do not take MB's of data I would be willing to tolerate them and they could even be helpful.
Youtube has become unwatchable without ad blockers. It used to be better than TV, now it is worse and you cannot skip them.
[+] [-] bilekas|2 years ago|reply
Agree completely. I know people who are fine with watching ads to support the content creators and I agree. The creators should be compensated but Google are far too agressive with their ads.
Being able to manipulate my own machine and what I want to view is entirely up to me. This can't be infringed.
There is always the option today to block from the client side, but I can see this changing if there's enough money involved.
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|2 years ago|reply
not saying this applies to you but might it be that ads are distracting enough that they would be an actual accessibility problem affecting people with ADHD - if so is not allowing people to block ads likely to run into legal issues?
[+] [-] redbell|2 years ago|reply
Some websites just keep throwing an enormous number of ads into your face to the the extent you start losing consciousness why you came here in the first place.
On computer, you still able to use an AdBlock but on mobile, I suffer terribly, not only because I could not disable ads but because on some sites while you are reading an article a random ad video that took about half of the screen keeps playing and scrolling down with you, even clicking the X doesn’t work most of the time but generally triggers an external link. At the bottom of the page, you start reading “best job offers in XYZ” where this XYZ is your city name deduced from your IP address, the thumbnail, as you might expect, is a “s_x_” girl lying on a bed :(
I know, free content should be supported by ads but I believe this is not the way to do it.
[+] [-] tmtvl|2 years ago|reply
Okay, but how do you square that with the fact that hosting content costs money? Are the people and companies which provide the content you look at not allowed to earn money to keep the servers running and the sysadmins fed?
[+] [-] shaky-carrousel|2 years ago|reply
When you browse a website with no ads, you are the public. Content is provided for your use, and that's all.
When you visit an ad supported website, you are only the means to achieve an end, which is to have you in the site as much as possible, clicking on as much ads as possible. That usually had the effect of making the website content bloated.
Not all sites begin like that, but they all end like that. And ad blocking hides that ugly truth under a layer of normalcy.
[+] [-] winternett|2 years ago|reply
About 2 weeks ago, I heard Black Player (App), which already works in a very unexpectedly and illogically difficult and frustrating manner, started injecting ads into my normal music library. I may just need to charge up my old iPod from now on, it doesn't ever need weekly software updates for some strange reason like everything else.
[+] [-] Gareth321|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|2 years ago|reply
Internet? I think you mean everything. The whole everything is bloated with ads right now. Look around you, I bet you can see at least a dozen brand names without even leaving your chair.
People who work in marketing and ads should quit their jobs if they care at all about society, but of course they don't or they wouldn't be in marketing and advertising. Alternatively, we should just stop putting up with their bullshit because they have a long history of abusing every inch they are given.
[+] [-] unsupp0rted|2 years ago|reply
This works out great because my brain doesn't get so distracted by ads, even physical billboard ads. But at the same time I use an ad-blocker to avoid wasted screen real estate.
[+] [-] tempera|2 years ago|reply
Thus it stores all the places you have been and with ML and AI create some sort of personal file, with all kinds of attributes. (the more the better)
uBlock and others block these cameras from seeing your face.
[+] [-] DirkH|2 years ago|reply
It is YouTube's right to prevent me from using their site if I use an ad-blocker just as much as it is my right to stop using their service altogether if they prevent me from using it with an ad-blocker.
[+] [-] mitchdoogle|2 years ago|reply
Yes some people give voluntarily through donations or Patreon, but it's a tiny amount of the actual number of people who derive satisfaction from the content.
The best solution for someone who hates ads is a subscription model. The thing that bothers me is that publishers still collect massive amounts of data and sell it, and some continue to have advertising or product placement. Give me ads or give me a completely untracked experience for a fee. Don't do something in between and claim that it's ad-free.
[+] [-] midnightGhost|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdilla|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wafriedemann|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OscarTheGrinch|2 years ago|reply
To the bean counters who seem to have overwhelmed Google, losing a few users might seem like a dog losing some fleas. They are out of ideas for growth. Once blitz scaling has reached the limits of user acquisition the only play left to juice the numbers seems to be “boil the frog”, going to war with their Oort cloud of free users, pay up or else. Are the c-suite types at Google aware that this is exactly the mindset that will make their decline into irrelevance inevitable?
Elon Musk inadvertently turned Twitter into a howling wasteland in a few short months, which shows what happens when you boil the user frog too quickly. Imagine how Twitter would look today if Elon instead doubled down on making Twitter the best user experience, offering users tools to make Twitter more relevant, making it an unmissable service for users, and in turn unmissable for advertisers? But instead he pulled the lever all the way from utopia to hellscape, attempting to shake down users to restore some functionality to a clearly degraded product. Enshitifying (thanks Cory Doctorow) the user experience is not a compelling reason to subscribe.
Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product.
I'm not against advertising per se, I’m against being shaken down to regain a user experience that should be the default. Here are two examples of successful advertising models:
1. Lex Friedman does an ad read at the beginning of his podcast. It’s intentionally skippable, I skip it 90% of the time. But when I'm busy with bread dough on my hands or whatever, I'm still hearing the ads, which are mostly repeat offerings anyway. Advertising is not always appropriate, eg at a kids birthday party or showing a video in a lecture. The lesson: MAKE IT SKIPPABLE!
2. Inserts into shows / product placement, like on VFX Artists React. These seem harder for a behemoth to monetise but I like these because I know that the actual creators are getting paid. Youtube doesn't want to deal with creators with anything closer than a dashboard. This is not the end users fault, it’s not the content creators fault, it’s a symptom of absentee capitalism. Youtube should invest in creators and form true partnerships. The lesson: INVEST IN DEALING FAIRLY WITH HUMANS!
I’m not going to pay, I will continue to avoid ads but watch them occasionally. I’m going to keep playing the game of whack-a-mole finding software / hardware solutions. And when a competitor comes along with their slider set more towards user friendliness I’m going to jump ship.
[+] [-] crop_rotation|2 years ago|reply
So what is the alternative? (Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops).
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|2 years ago|reply
If doing something as simple as asking you to hold up your end of the deal of using their website (letting ads load for the ad-supported content) is too much to ask but paying for the website is also too much to ask, you have to be honest that you just want a free experience.
I don’t buy the argument that you were going to pay them in the future but you decided against it because they wouldn’t let you have it for free.
[+] [-] curiouscats|2 years ago|reply
I don't like the spying that will go along with paying, given that it is Alphabet/Google. If they offered a plan to pay without the spying I would have signed up years ago.
I didn't try so I could be wrong but my guess is your payment will be tied directly to your login and so you need to have that login on the browser at all times to view the videos (without ads) and given all the decline of "do no evil" I don't trust them at all.
I also don't trust they wouldn't mess things up. I travel a lot. I paid for YouTube TV and the ludicrous junk they do to try and verify you are able to view things was a huge pain and failed quite a lot until it failed nearly always I and dropped it.
I imagine if they push me I will pay and then have to copy and paste every YouTube url into a sanitized browser instance only used for YouTube. But I don't trust Alphabet/Google to not constantly be attempting to use that subscription to improve and deepen their spying which annoys me quite a bit. I just trust them a tiny bit more than Microsoft (and I ditched using anything by Microsoft decades ago - other than my use of LinkedIn continuing after they bought it and very occasional uses of Bing to check on it).
[+] [-] anon-3988|2 years ago|reply
If you are not going to pay for THAT, you aren't going to pay for ANYTHING. Just admit you want free stuff. Stop deluding yourself into thinking that Youtube is somehow responsible for hosting all these for free.
[+] [-] bagacrap|2 years ago|reply
What I don't understand is why you feel entitled to benefit from this resource without supporting it in any way.
[+] [-] wkdneidbwf|2 years ago|reply
i know some other folks are complaining about still getting tracked or whatever, but i think the simple truth is that youtube without ads is a vastly superior experience.
[+] [-] dionidium|2 years ago|reply
Pay for it or don't, but what is this nonsense about being poised (for a while) to maybe someday possibly consider thinking about purchasing the service?
It's $13. (In inflation-adjusted terms that's $7.12 the year I graduated high school.) What in the world are we talking about here? Buy it or don't. What is there to think about?
[+] [-] lysp|2 years ago|reply
That gives you an annual individual plan for $15usd p.a.
[+] [-] mvdtnz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lamontcg|2 years ago|reply
I'm definitely not signing up for youtube premium.
[+] [-] katbyte|2 years ago|reply
It also pays the content creators I watch more money. So imho it’s a win win. No ads for me more money for the peoples content I enjoy
[+] [-] miah_|2 years ago|reply
Clearly, the solution is for me to create another google account to use for these services and only use my workspace account for one thing. But then why am I paying Google to host my workspace account? Should I pay them _MORE_ for my wife and children to also be on my workspace, as well as paying for Youtube? (don't worry, I'm working on migrating off workspaces too).
(and fwiw, I paid for youtube premium for years, and watch hours of youtube content a day)
[+] [-] Nextgrid|2 years ago|reply
As a bonus, it is super fast because it doesn't have to justify the salaries of dozens (hundreds?) of frontend developers and can get away with server-side-rendered HTML and minimal amounts of Javascript.
[+] [-] hannob|2 years ago|reply
"Oh, it appears with the new Chrome extension API it is impossible to write an adblocker that bypasses this. How could that have happened? Google told us they only have our best interests in mind, so this must've been by accident."
[+] [-] anigbrowl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] climb_stealth|2 years ago|reply
Just buy the subscription. You get the free trial for a month. Nothing changes, the money is not missed, but you actually pay for something you use a lot.
The biggest benefit is not being subjected to ads anymore just by being next to family members who don't use ad blockers. It comes with four slots for family members.
[+] [-] pierat|2 years ago|reply
Some shit site gets the idea to "block adblock". Detects a few common ones. But disabling javascript almost always works. But annoying.
So http://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/#filterlist is created. And it "anti-block adblock" is here. And works well.
By the time the chumps make "anti-anti-block adblock", we'll neuter that as well.
The endgame is something terrible like a WebAssembly that does forced downloads to get the content you want all in a VM like thing. That's what Widevine is already doing, kind of. Im just surprised that more for-profit news/media companies aren't doing exactly that, since now you have to pop off the payload in a container and try to detect what an ad is and isnt.
As an aside: If you're running Firefox, download Sponsorblock. It skips over the shit in-video adverts on Youtube with "a message from our sponsor". Oh, and you dont get this even IF you pay youtube.
[+] [-] userbinator|2 years ago|reply
This is a slippery slope that I definitely do not want to be going down. At that rate, "drink verification can" is not far off.
When I used to watch the actual TV I changed the channel, muted, or left the room during ads. My eyes, my ears, my brain. I will not be forced to consume.
[+] [-] wnevets|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] everdrive|2 years ago|reply
I've done a lot of digital curtailing in my life, but Youtube has been hard to avoid. It's both good and bad, as they have some of the most amazing content in the whole world, but also some of the most addictive trash that I can't stop watching. Because the service is so addicting, I'm not sure I could justify paying for it, even though the value it brings is incredible.
[+] [-] htrp|2 years ago|reply
Getting an adblocker denied message on youtube to determine exactly how much YT can annoy you in the service of stuffing more ads into your videos is both actively user-hostile and very definitely evil.
In most medical research, there are all types of consents that are required before you get subjected to this.
[+] [-] WestCoastJustin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kim_Bruning|2 years ago|reply
If a site decides to go so far as to actively prevent you from using it without an adblocker, I consider that to be a pretty bad sign.
Fortunately almost no one does that.
[+] [-] john___matrix|2 years ago|reply
Sometimes when I've forgotten to log in and see what it's like without, it's amazing anyone can watch videos on there. Like a lot of people I've generally been OK to watch ads in exchange for free content but it seems over the years instead of ads getting better and/or more relevant to my interests (even broadly), they're getting much worse.
I assume this is the result of companies just accepting ££ for anything rather than having more quality control?
[+] [-] haha69|2 years ago|reply
Asking me to pay for the ability to have background play to me is akin to opening a restaurant and serving unsalted food and asking 2% extra for salt in the food.
I already pay for a few other google services (google one, google cloud etc) and their customer service (that I have needed on the rare occasion) is ..... almost non existent as well.
Will most probably use alternate frontends or a pihole or whatever other alternative there is for as long as I can.
[+] [-] _gabe_|2 years ago|reply
1. YT doesn't decide how many ads to show. The creator of the video gets to choose exactly how many ads are shown and when and where they are shown.
If you see too many ads on your videos, get pissed off at the creators you're watching, not YT.
2. Ad revenue is a very large portion of income for most creators. It's definitely not as large as sponsorship deals, but it's nothing to sneeze at. You people who are entitled to your free content aren't sticking it to the man by refusing to watch ads. Instead you're directly hurting the creators you enjoy watching by specifically depriving them of any ad revenue they may otherwise have gained from you. Shut up and sit down and watch the 30 second ad or stop watching YT altogether. The creators don't give a crap either way because you clearly don't give a crap about financially supporting them in the simplest way possible.
3. If anything, I believe YT will stop showing ads if they're too prevalent. There's a feature where creators can play ads at the beginning/ending of their videos. These ads don't play all the time, and I think that's because the YT algorithm is making sure that if you're doing something like playing music it doesn't play an ad at the beginning of every single song even if the video creator tries to make that happen.
Honestly, these comments read as if cable didn't exist just a few years ago (and still does today!) where they literally play 2 minutes of ads for every 5ish minutes of content. Even with DVR, skipping through the ads would take around 30 seconds (and then you have to adjust to make sure you didn't skip too far and everything) which is the length of typical YT ads. Buck up and pay up to support the "amazing" content that you selfishly indulge in and refuse to pay for out of a warped sense of entitlement.
Contrary to popular belief, most content creators are not putting their content out for free. They're putting it out knowing the majority of viewers will at least watch the ads and help them make money.
[+] [-] tomashubelbauer|2 years ago|reply
I am not worried about Google going forth with this. I see others asking what happens when users won't pay for a subscription and at the same time won't view ads? I believe the answer is pretty clear.
YouTube will either decide to suck up that they won't see ad revenue from a portion of the audience (ad blockers are and will always be a niche thing, there is no reality in which YouTube buckles because too many people block ads, especially since YouTube is predominantly viewed on devices where ad blocking is not as easy as in the desktop browser) or they will close up shop.
The fact is that YouTube currently occupies a spot in the online sphere which will always be occupied by someone: being the top service for hosting videos for free and showing them to audiences for free. There is a line of businesses which would jump on the opportunity of filling YouTube's "woeful" position of being the top dog in online video.
YouTube's collapse would be devastating considering the amount of culture and history stored on there. But new video content will always find a home and reach online. And Google knows this which is why they will IMO never give up on YouTube even if it were operating with loss again. Storage is only getting cheaper and their moat with YouTube is the user-generated content. Gate it too heavily and creators will find a place where they can post content more freely and users will fine a place where they can view content more freely.
I don't expect this to be anything other than YouTube pulling a Netflix with their password sharing crackdown complete with the back-paddling that ensued once they realized how replaceable they really are to a sizeable portion of their viewers loosing which would be more expensive than keeping it.
[+] [-] thomassmith65|2 years ago|reply
AV content is pretty important to humanity. I want my government to tax me and spend the money on a public video repository.
When some garbage for-profit outfit like Alphabet is in charge of the world's video, I expect ads and garbage content.