People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside. Actual complaints may be about how the billboards block a scenic view but that also seems like another way of complaining about the irrelevance. Similarly, if I am watching a Youtube video, I am never thinking that a disruptive message from a commercial business is relevant to my current activities (uh, passivities?). No advertisement is relevant, not even in-video direct sponsorships, hence SponsorBlock.
If I go to Costco and see an advertisement for tires... well, I’m at Costco, where I buy stuff. Things are sold at Costco and people go there to have things sold to them. I might need tires and realize I can get that taken care of while I’m at Costco. Nearly every advertisement I see at Costco is relevant because it’s selling something I can buy in the same building, indeed usually something juxtaposed close to the advertisement.
I don’t complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they’re irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.
That's not true. We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money. If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.
The YouTube ads are hated because that's the whole point. YouTube has something we want (the video), and they're keeping it from us until they we do something we don't want to do (watch an ad). We dislike these ads almost by definition. If we liked them, we'd seek them out, and we'd call them something else, like "movie trailers" or "Super Bowl ads."
I am not blind to commercial imperatives, but expecting people to ever feel anything more positive than low-level irritation with advertising is unrealistic. People do not like feeling that others matter more than them, particularly where money is involved. Spaces without adverts in them, whether physical or virtual, are simply more mentally enjoyable to people than those with them. Imagine one of the worlds wonders, natural or otherwise. Imagine the Acropolis, the Coliseum, the Buddha of Leshan - or Lake Annecy, or the Great Barrier Reef, or the Amazon. Now try and imagine a single advert which is so wonderful that it would improve any of them, contextual or otherwise. You can't, and you won't. They're pollution that we tolerate.
Bane: For you
I dislike them because they're loud, flashy, annoying, and (most of all) because YT saturates them. It even tries to put them in the middle of songs when it detects a transitional pause. And they are served so often. It's literally worse than broadcast TV, which is an incredibly low bar to step over.
Platforms should not allow advertisers free speech. They should limit the content to static imagery/shots, dissolves, and spoken narration, ie the form rather than the content. Don't tell it can't work, this was how adwords worked on Google Search for years and everyone made handsome profits. Advertising is cancer if allowed to go full spectrum. The people who work at Youtube should be deeply ashamed of what they have allowed it to become and the trash monetization incentives they've established.
Most advertising is seeking the less intelligent consumer. Or the young and still naive consumer.
They outnumber you 1 million to 1.
It's why female musicians make more money putting their name to a makeup brand then their music.
It's why Elon will make some promise that is unrealistic.
It's why Apple put low paid everyday tech support staff in their stores and called them Geniuses.
You have to put yourself in the shoes of the mainstream buyer. They see a headline and believe it.
To be clear, it's not only Google, all the big providers have so much information on all of us, but they don't seem to take advantage of it at all. I've turned the AD "customization" on/off for all kinds of things and it doesn't seem to matter in the slightest. Nearly everything I see is irrelevant to me.
> I don't complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they're irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.
They're normalized because we've been conditioned over many decades to accept them.
We were psychologically manipulated to associate brands with specific feelings engineered by advertising firms. Cigarettes were "torches of freedom". The Marlboro Man was a symbol of masculinity and confidence. Coca-Cola was the happy Christmas drink. Ads with catchphrases became cultural phenomena: "Just do it", "Whasssuuuuup", and so on.
We watched ads on cable TV even though we were paid subscribers. We watched 30 minutes of ads before a movie in the cinema. We read ads in newspapers and magazines even though we paid for them, and then when we could get them for "free", we liked even more paying with our attention than our money. We consumed TV and radio shows where "brought to you by" was just part of the content. We accepted ~20 minutes of ads for every hour of TV we watched.
So it was natural for advertising to also take over the internet. With the technology built for advertisers by very smart people who got rich in the process, they're able to create campaigns that target potential buyers much more accurately. They can build profiles of people in various invasive, shady and inventive ways, and their profits have never been higher because of it.
Never mind the fact that the same technology is used to manipulate people into thinking and acting in certain ways unrelated to their purchasing behavior, and that this is largely responsible for corrupting democratic processes, toppling governments, and the sociopolitical instability of the past decade. Several birds, one stone.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is the whole thing. There is nothing good about ads, ever. If I want information about a product, I'll go looking for it, and I won't go to an advertiser. If I'm looking to watch a YouTube video, there is absolutely no condition under which I want to hear about a product unless that's explicitly what I went to that video to hear about.
All ads are lies. There is never an ad that tells you about the flaws in a product or compares it honestly to competing product. I'm simply not interested in being lied to.
Not only are they largely irrelevant, but they are frequently in the wrong language. If I want to immerse myself in the local language, I will go outside and interact in that language. If I am listening to a podcast in English, typically around Anglophone cultural or political topics, why would they invade my space with non-English content?
I don't want to hear local music or K-Pop when I am listening to classical music.
In many cases, the language isn't even local to the country which I reside in. If I cannot have an English-only space on my own computer, I won't be using the site. There's a time and a place for immersion into other cultures. My personal computer in my home office isn't the place.
Where they’re also “irrelevant”.
But the relevancy to our current activities isn’t tied to their effectiveness.
I know that they’re effective, because I had impressionable teens tell me they wanted me to pick up Prime drinks at the store, all because they were convinced drinking Prime was cool.
But let me be clear — I hate ads, too. I hate them on TV, radio, YouTube, billboards, in my mailbox, in my email inbox, and when they cover up 50% of real estate on websites. Pretty much everywhere they show up.
But the purpose of ads aren’t for me to like them, or to be tied to where I’m at a place I can purchase something.
The purpose is to leave a lasting impression.
And, like it or not, they’re effective enough, for some people and for some products, that they’re going to keep doing them, regardless of the fact that nearly everyone hates them.
Disagreeable to whom, exactly?
Personally, I would rather the adverts were irrelevant if it meant I didn't have my every move tracked on the web.
The main problems I have with ads are, in order from most problematic to least:
* the lengths that ad networks go to to track me, * the very real possibility of getting malware, * the lengths advertisers go to to ensure their ads are seen. (We have popup blockers in pretty much every browser nowadays for a reason.)
Take away those, and you could convince me to disable my ad blocker. Until then? Not a chance in hell.
Whilst you're correct about Costco, advertisers don't care where you are to show you an ad. The data shows that if you are laying on the couch watching YouTube and an ad appears relevant to you, that it sells. I don't think advertisers are sitting there scratching their heads as to why people don't like them. No advertiser looks at a billboard in the countryside and thinks people enjoy looking at them, its a profit making opportunity, even if that means hijacking your YouTube video on tech reviews for an Audi commercial.
The difference with Costco in your example is that the ads don't impeded on your ability to continue shopping around Costco. If you were walking around Costco and had to stop to listen to someone market to you about clothing when you were simply there to buy some bread and milk you'd get annoyed.
I could see an ad for the exact thing I need and I still wouldn't click it. Either it's a scam, or it's technically not a scam because offering 90% off in the first month of a 12 month contract is legal, or it's the worst product on the market and the only way it can get users is blowing VC cash on ads, or there's something else that will surely disappoint me.
I absolutely hate advertisements in stores specifically because of their releavance. If I go there to buy cereal, I expect to go to the cereal shelf, look at the options, evaluate them and pick the optimal one for my set of criteria.
What I absolutely do not want is for one cereal brand to be placed right as I come in, exploiting my psychological quirks to get me to either buy it on the spot without going to evaluate other options or just occupy a slightly larger part of my attention to skew my evaluation process when I get to the shelf.
Advertising is just another money multiplier. If you have a ton of money to throw at ads, you'll make more money than those that don't. And to make up the ad investment, you'll necessarily have to be a worse deal for consumers.
If you were alive before ad tech ate the world, you'd have a very different take on this whole thing.
If you visit content on the internet that the Google Ad network thinks suggest you might be interested in purchasing new tyres, then showing you ads for companies that sells tyres is, unfortunately, relevant no matter what your doing now, because you're more likely to click them, or remember the company/brand when choosing a purchase.
Also a large proportion of ads aren't designed to affect immediate purchase - cars, movies, coca-cola, and other brands are hoping to get into your (sub) consciousness so you'll remember when you buy days, weeks or months later.
I view advertising as something brought to my attention that I wouldn't otherwise buy. Being made aware of special offers is more to tweak the moment of buying stuff I was going to buy anyway but waiting for a decent price.
If I go to MediaMarkt and there's a signpost at the phone area saying "Samsung S25 100 euro discount" then I don't think this is advertising. After all the S25's are lying on the shelf right there whether the offer is there or not. I am there to at least consider buying one and I am there already looking for one before I saw the sign, it's just a notification that the price is low.
They also are a distraction, which seems pretty ironic when billvoarda are used to remind drivers to not drive distracted.
I disagree but not for the reasons I was seeing in the existing replies here. I believe that advertising is manipulative, and I don't want advertising companies to use the fact that most of my data is in their hands to pull the right strings and push the right buttons to try to get me to buy a product I wouldn't have otherwise.
However it seems impossible to last for our society with all the tracking, product placement and astroturfing.
We hate advertisements because they unsolicited manipulations to get our money.
Well, obviously. If the message was relevant or a good offer for the customer, they wouldn't need to pay to advertise it. Advertisement is for products which have low enough cost/benefit for the customer to not sell themselves.
The more relevant ads are, the worse they are. Relevant ads are more distracting and more likely to hijack the user's attention and focus against their will.
First pay with your identity (carrier phone number required for a Google account). Then double pay through Premium in the illusion you won't end up seeing ads anyway.
> billboards [...] countryside
I think people simply find this to be an ugly thing. They object to the ugliness of it. They're in the countryside -- i.e. not the town/city -- and they find themselves unable to escape (even here!) from this seedy miasma. Putting disgust into words is not a simple thing, perhaps this is the reason for the inconsistent reasoning you've noticed.
All advertising is ugly, it's an ugly business -- money grubbing manipulation. It's inherently weird to be subjected to the endless torrent of uncanny twisted art that is advertising every day for your entire life. The ads on Youtube are normalised by the same force that normalises all the other advertising -- the ads in one context normalise the ads in another. The ads on the side of the bus, on the LCD panels on the train, on the same screen that shows the timetable at the station, before the movie starts, by the seemingly sensible ads in Costco. One hand washes the other.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is the system that disputes my indisputable right to ignore them. If I paid someone to cut the adverts out of my newspaper before I read it, would I be stealing from the publisher?
Silicon valley has spent the last 30 years getting the internet to run on lies, and depends upon the charity of people willing to be lied to. Now that trillions of dollars depend upon this system, they can no longer afford to leave it up to charity, and believe that they must go to war. This is a war that they will lose.
Ban advertising, formally enshrine the right of adblockers to operate, and use the new regulation to work out a new business model, or perish in the arms race that you are absolutely destined to lose.
Your eyes are the supply. The demand (customer) is people wanting your eyes. Relevance in ads is if your eyes are a candidate to at some point buy their product.
What your taking about at costco is essentially house ads or really signage.
Remember unless you are a brand you are not the customer for ads.
Moreover, it's now also a matter of fending off GenAI content (AKA slop) for the sake of sanity.
So, I'm clearly not the audience. Which raises the question, what is YT in the business of selling, they are trying to enforce? Lifetime?
Shit I rather willingly give info about myself so irrelevant ads can be filtered out and I dont have to waste time on them and the advertiser doesnt waste money on me
But then YouTube started PERMANENTLY interrupting what I was watching with never-ending commercials or full-on infomercials... forcing me to manually use the Skip button to stop the commercial onslaught and return to the show I was watching. And they forced me to herd the show along like this every few minutes.
I put stuff on to watch while I'm cooking or doing something; I can't run to wash my hands so I can mash the control on the remote, over and over and over.
So that's when I installed a third-party YouTube client that skips ads. Google took someone who was willing to watch ads, and turned him into someone who never sees one. So Google cost itself and the content creators, through its asshole behavior.
Then they had the gall to WHINE about the uptick in ad-blocking. It's right out of the Trump/Putin playbook: attack someone, and then feign outrage and whine when they fight back.
Calling it like it is.
I'd argue that even in a supermarket they're mostly useless and manipulative. I came in to buy bananas, you don't need to tell me doritos are buy 9, get 3 free.
Fuck ads.
Your eyes are the supply. The demand (customer) is people wanting your eyes. Relevance in ads is if your eyes are a candidate to at some point buy their orid8.
What your taking about at costco is essentially house ads or really signage.
Remember unless you are a brand you are not the customer for ads.
If you’re Coca Cola and you spend £1,000,000,000 on a Christmas TV ad of a bear drinking cola, does that increase your sales? No. It does nothing. But every year they’ll do it.
The only marketing that works is at the point of sale, and free samples. Anything which is just random and in public will not result in anything.
But the genius of the scam is, it’s not measurable. You bill £1,000,000,000 a year for marketing, and they can’t measure if it worked. How do you know if a TV ad worked? But they can’t withdraw the funding, because you’ll tell them their competitors will win. So the scam keeps going.
The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us, the more we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting. If they can't leave well enough alone and look the other way on ad blocking, (which is the only way to avoid exposing myself and family to these dangerous ads), they need to be under a lot more scrutiny for the ads they choose to run.
This is one of the things that kills me. Even in broadcasting TV, you get typical :15, :30, :60 ads with the occasional :45 or longer :90. The ad pods are also defined so that you get a set number say something like 3:00 max.
YT has scammy ads where if you are just trying to let something stream in the background while you focus on other things where an ad plays past the 5s skippable time, they have some that are full on half hour if not even longer infomercials that takes completely out of the flow of whatever you were watching. That's down right criminal to me. The fact that long form content can be used as something that interrupts someone else's content is such a strange thing to allow. They must pay out the nose for those ad impressions
If you don’t like ads pay for the service. You don’t deserve content for free.
Indeed, if there was a 'thin adblock writer line' flag it'd already be on my bumper. Than you for your service, we salute you.
I have been astounded at how scammy those ads are. There is a major class of ads that make fairly significant bullshit medical claims and I’m semi convinced the purpose is not for someone to make money but to wage psychological warfare on vulnerable people. Another class of ads says “the US government is going to collapse and that’s why you should buy a freedom battery” and the ad couches itself as a battery advertisement but how many vulnerable people hear that in the background 16 times a day and don’t end up subconsciously accepting some part of it?
In any case it’s all a manipulative cesspool and it’s bizarre to me that a property that Google otherwise values is willing to sling such slop at its users. I suspect a large part of this is that the executives who run YouTube never see their ads.
You can... just not visit youtube, right?
Why people say this? You can either not use Youtube or pay for premium. Nobody is forcing you to download hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of video?
If you don't like them, then pay for Youtube Premium and you can get ad-free experience. Although if it's not available in your country, then adblocking is a reasonable approach.
Not as fun to write about as coercion is, though.
/s
I'd highly recommend everyone try reducing their intake of passive entertainment like youtube and redirecting that time towards more creative or mindful pursuits.
You're right, I could probably finish my motorcycle build projects without videos. But why??
I find the argument of "how much you don't need in your life" not very compelling.
On one hand, we "need" very little: health, food, shelter. On the other, a life worth living is made of everything else that is not, strictly speaking, truly needed: ideas, hobbies, passions, entertainment, projects, etc.
As for youtube, I just pay for ad free. If they ever start violating that they'll also be banished to the corn field.
Probably because it wasn’t. In my experience even the stuff people consider quality on YouTube is still kinda gross engagement bait, especially things like video essays (which are an absolute plague imo)
If an actual ad played, I'd be irritated beyond belief. But when there's a 12 second buffer, I have enough patience training for slow load times that I instinctively just quickly check my email or spend a brief moment lost in thought. Especially when it's every video. If it was one in every 5 videos, I'd notice it and be bothered. When it's every video, it's part of the experience and my brain just cuts it out automatically.
We often rationalize using ad blockers because ads can be intrusive or annoying. But let’s asking ourselves: Why do we feel entitled to get this for free?
This isn’t a moral judgment. I genuinely want to understand the reasoning.
On YouTube, we went from a banner on the video to a few seconds of a video before to multiple ads before the video to multiple ad pauses even on relatively short videos (under 10 minutes). Add to that the sponsored sections of the video itself, which are added by the content creator, and other ads (stores, tickets, etc) that sometimes YouTube adds under the video even if you pay for premium.
Google Search pages used to have one or two ads at the top, with a different background colour than search results. Now sometimes I have to scroll down to see organic content, because sponsored content fills my screen.
I don't think I'm entitled to have access to all this for free, but we went too far... and so I use an adblocker on all my devices.
Here's an attempt at a double-negative answer: you can't be ethically compelled into an unethical contract, and since advertisements are manipulative, voyeuristic and seek to take advantage of the limitations of human attentional control, it's a priori impossible for watching an ad or downloading a tracker to ever be ethically compulsory.
I haven't done that with Youtube because 1) I don't need to, 2) Google is pretty bad about paying content creators properly (they prefer keeping the money for themselves) and 3) I feel no guilt whatsoever about not sponsoring trillion dollar companies by exposing myself to the pain of watching their shitty ads.
Luckily for Google, most people aren't smart enough to figure out ad blockers. Which is why they are making lots of money with Youtube and why they are a trillion dollar company. Good for them; no need to feel sorry for them.
Luckily for me, Google seems pretty conflicted about fixing this properly because they are making so much money with the way things are. If they lock down Youtube properly (not that hard technically), users and content creators might move elsewhere. They can't afford to. So good for me.
It's that simple. There is no moral dilemma here.
With how user-hostile and anti-competitive Google is behaving, this is like asking why soldiers feel entitled to shoot at the enemy. Keep giving them money, keep watching their ads that they sell on rigged auctions [1], and eventually the only way to access the web will be with locked-against-the-user browsers [2], and everything will be surveilled (though it nearly already is - Google never asks itself why it should feel entitled to follow users around the web, or in real-life, despite opt-outs [3], and you'll find support for any alternative OSes mysteriously withering due to secret anti-competitive contracts between Google and manufacturers [4]). I know this isn't the reasoning people use, but that is what the outcome will be.
As for ads - it has always been hard, nearly impossible to block them, and few people did. Just like you can't block a billboard next to the freeway, you can't block a jpeg that's served as part of the webpage you're visiting, as it's programmatically indistinguishable from native content.
What people actually block are not ads, but a hybrid half-ad-half-surveillance entity, that's called an "ad" by historical accident.
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/11/25/google-is-three-t...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
[3] https://apnews.com/article/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20200311172517/https://www.proto...
I get that Google has infinite money and infinite evil. But how convenient you also get to skip out on paying the majority expense, which goes to the creator...
And yes virtuous commentor, I know you are one of the 1.5% that convert to a patreon supporter. Now ask everyone else why they get to eat for free (while endlessly complaining that the restaurant sucks).
Why do I Adblock? Because a line must be drawn or else this marketing growth engine will consume everything. I mean literally without any consumer pushback this attention extraction engine will continue expanding until every moment of digital consumption is monetized. It’s already destroyed too much of the internet.
If Google want to force ads, they can put them in the video stream. If not, then they’re trying to have it both ways.
Most websites do not offer reasonable payment options. They'd earn fractions of a cent from the ads they'd show me, but the cheapest subscriptions they offer are several dollars.
On YouTube, the value of the service is provided by creators, but too little of the subscription is going towards the creators. To make matters worse, Google seems to pull every string they can to make creators as miserable as possible. Their actions are a detriment to the service, and not worth supporting. An 80/20 revenue split would seem much more reasonable.
In this situation, the ads are contributing barely anything to the content creation, and storage and distribution drop in price every year while youtube increases the amount of ads and decreases the video quality. So people get upset and block everything. That's part out of being fed up, and that's part out of having no way to make the ads become less bad in a non-block way.
It's my browser, my copy of the website, and I'll have my user agent do whatever I want.
Shall we do the same to open source?
“Watch this ad for 30 seconds before checking out a branch! Git commit, oops: RAID SHADOW LEGENDS”
The burden of proof is on the ads to justify why they should be watched, given that the ads themselves provide zero value to the viewer.
YouTube ads in particular are a cesspit of scams. I don't want to watch ads for things like Scientology.
Perhaps you also have to show your YouTube history when you enter the US.
I understand ad blocking isn't morally perfect but I can live with it.
Why they think I should waste my finite time, compute and bandwidth on things I don't want needs justification.
Why do advertisers feel entitled to my attention when I never agreed to give it to them? Simply visiting a page with ads doesn't mean I agree to view ads.
I'd rather not use Youtube entirely (aka be blocked off by Google) than ever be subjected to even a single microsecond of an ad. Ads are psychological manipulation and I refuse to subject myself to some slimy marketer's ad campaign. If I were made God Emperor of the Earth for the day, the one and only thing I'd do with that power is make sure these people rot away in a dark hole forever, that's how much I detest this whole "market" and the "people" involved in it.
Even paying for this stuff isn't a guarantee of anything. Their "Lite" tier has verbiage to the effect of "No* Ads (* Some will still be shown)". We've seen with cable television that the insidious cancer that is advertising creeps its way in as well, and cable was NOT cheap. Plus, it's known that for advertisers, people who actually shell out cash are even juicier targets, and you'd have to be a genuine imbecile to trust the likes of Google or Meta to not abuse you even harder, even if you pay for the service.
MAYBE I'd be willing to pay Google if I had a guarantee that no advertisement will EVER be shoved in anywhere in the future, and that I get a guarantee that they will punish those sponsored sections that creators put into their videos if I pay for it, and if I get a guarantee that they won't continue to profile me incessantly to shove ads at me everywhere other than YT. We all know that's not happening though, and I have absolutely 0 interest in lining their coffers with both my money and my data.
I listen to Spotify Freemium. There’s a special ad that says: “Enjoy the next 30 minutes of ad-free listening”. 2 minutes later I get 2-3 ads back to back.
Enough. Happy Jellyfin user. I’ll buy up my music gradually.
Otherwise wealth would be much more equally spread across northern and Southern hemisphere.
Personally I hate advertisement, i will do everything I can to disable it but I know that at this point I’m almost pirating. There is no shame in that, internet is the Wild West : Google and their AI crawling bots aren’t better than me, they leech contents other made, other host, to build their ai and then makes money on top of it.
But they seem hesitant to, probably because that would risk losing the engagement of those users.
I actually think it would be good if there were filter lists that whitelisted ads that were not harmful to users in those ways, but that sounds difficult/impossible to fairly maintain, and I doubt anyone else wants it.
https://youtube.com/shorts/cdyhoTqWFSc?si=aSV46HfI8_0kUIy1
^ Replace the women with any "why" arguments you might have for not using ad blockers.
I'd block ads if there wasn't premium (or if premium had ads). YouTube still deserves and needs money, but ads don't "extract" the money from me. At best (and most likely*) every ad shown to me is effectively the advertiser paying YouTube to waste my time. At worst (if I actually buy the product), the ad is effectively me paying the advertiser and getting something useless or harmful. The chance a YouTube ad shows me something beneficial is too small to remotely justify the other ads which waste my time (or if I buy, the Earth's resources or my attention or etc.).
I also block ads on newspapers and other smaller sites, but don't buy their premium. Honestly, I don't think this is fair, although I think it's small in the grand scheme of things. The problem is, I don't feel those sites justify me paying, and I'd be spending well over $100/month if I subscribed to every one; I'd rather not see each site than pay, although currently I do see them without paying which is unfair (showing me ads is wasteful, as explained earlier, so I don't even consider it an alternative). You know what, I'll probably subscribe to a few (maybe AP and Reuters) and every other story I encounter, see if I can find the version on one of those sites.
* "But ads work on you subliminally." I hear and read this a lot, but I really doubt it for invasive ads like YouTube's (also billboards etc. I'm not talking about covert ads or "good" non-invasive ads like Show HN). First, I recognize many of the big advertisers (e.g. those VPNs and sodas) and will never buy their products, so those ads shown to me specifically are wasted. Moreover, I'm particularly methodical when buying things. I always go in with a plan: sometimes it's a simple plan like "buy the second-cheapest with a good description and decent reviews" or "buy what your parents do", but I never buy something because I recognize it. In fact, if something seems familiar I pay extra attention, and if I recognize it was invasively advertised, I become less likely to buy it, because I suspect invasive ads correlate with low value and want to actively dissuade invasive ads in general. "But your parents and the reviewers buy based off ads, and you buy based off them"...OK, show my parents and reviewers the ads, not me.
Ultimately, invasive ads waste my time and annoy me, and I don't see their benefits which justify that. I'd rather pay a small fee than see or hear every invasive ad (like with YouTube premium), and I suspect the advertisers would benefit from that too.
I'm not going to sit there, waste my time, watching the same ads for the 5th time that has no relevance to me. Adblockers make youtube tolerable. If there were no adblockers i genuinely would be unable to use it.
Has nothing to do with a sense of entitlement, they are ads for things I would never purchase. so whats the point then? Why is it OK for people to pay to waste my time just because they paid to? What gives them the right to force me to watch that? Hard no. It's my browser, and I'll do as i damn well please.
I WOULD pay for youtube if it was a good product. But it's not. I'm not going to opine on all the reasons it's not. if/when they make it good i'll pay. That's a them problem.
but there is NO WAY i am going to start accepting ads back into my life. I'll just stop watching youtube.
It's not free when they already track and sell user data to the highest bidder. YouTube is just trying to double-dip at this point. I'd gladly pay for premium if there was a guarantee that my user data would not sold.
I live in a west-Eu country with several well-defined language borders. Each time we cross a border (on holiday), the youtube ads change language. When I’m logged in. I don’t have a driver’s license, yet the most common ad I get is for second hand cars. I’m in a relationship, yet I regularly get ads for dating sites. I have a job, get ads for jobhunting advice. And the other day I got an add specifically for people born before my birth-year minus one.
YouTube’s ads are on the same level as Spotify’s nagging for their subscription: it’s meant to annoy users into buying their ad-free plan. They use real ads as a thin veneer.
Now it is "I hate how ads are irrelevant."
People need to understand that ads will never be 100% perfect, otherwise you would buy something every time you saw an ad. 99.99% of the ads will miss the target, and that is normal. It would be insane if it worked any other way.
For what it is worth Google has a page where you can customize what sort of ads are relevant to you. https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451...
I'm shocked
I’m not too deep into it anymore but there’s some great articles from Netflix out there talking about the crazy optimisations done to their edge servers for streaming.
To be clear this isn’t server-side ad insertion; the ad and content streams are still separate (YouTube is doing a server-side ad insertion experiment, but that’s separate from fake buffering)I pay for a subscription to The Athletic, who used to offer ad free podcasts in their app. Last month they signed an exclusive deal with Acast, and now I cannot possibly listen to their podcasts without ads.
They own the hosting website, if they want to show their user ads, they will find a way, even if it takes a few year.
1) ads as irrelevant intrusions (in spite of all data Google collects, ads are mostly irrelevant for any person)
2) ads as ugly or blockers of beauty
3) ads as thieves of attention or downright theft (scam ads, illegal products)
Then, should we pay to get rid of ads or not? Two opposite opinions:
1) paying YouTube support creators
2) paying YouTube rewards the "shitification" of the platform
But even for those who pay there are issues: the content creator's own sponsorships, shorts, the risk of account banning by Google.
Then how about compensating creators directly? (Patreon or PayPal for example)
What I don't get is the questioning on the morality of ad blocking. No one should be obligated to watch an ad in one's own device, regardless of whatever "Terms of Service" (which is not a contract). It may be unfair to the content creator who relies on that revenue though.
Ads shouldn't exist. The fact that most human endeavours now are forced to use ads is insane.
Many of the people I watch add "jump ahead" buttons for these sections now, which is neat.
As someone who uses an ad blocker I do think it's immoral, and I do pay for YouTube premium and other stuff where reasonable.
> 1) paying YouTube support creators
> 2) paying YouTube rewards the "shitification" of the platform
I have a third opinion. I expect that if enough people pay Google, they will remove the free service altogether, add ads to the paid service, and perhaps introduce a new, more expensive ad free tier. Paying them not only rewards the enshitification, it encourages the next step.
This seems like a bug in browsers, or possibly in the spec. Page content and scripts should never be able to restrict what browser extensions can do.
oh its a Chrome feature! Around 2 years ago Chrome pushed an update that speedup time to load first initial page by delaying Extension initialization. Last page you closed Chrome on will load before uBo, will be able to bypass all filters/block and will be able to detect uBo being loaded.
It’s not so much that I don’t want to see ads - nobody does, but very very often the ad breaks the vibe of what I am watching and it displeases me to the point I will invest my soul and energy to block ads. Some real-life examples:
- watching a video about coding where the creator has a monotonic, calm voice that keeps me engaged, and VS Code in dark mode which is easy on my eyes in my dark room at 2am, then suddenly comes an ad with bright lights, incredibly high sound and a high-energy backtrack.
- watching a meditation video, the exact same ad appears.
You get the idea.
At the very least, please ensure the ad is in the same volume as the original video. That alone wouldn’t be too hard. In addition, please at least try to match the background overall brightness or color, and the vibe. All this would create value because people would actually watch much more ads.
It's not enough of course.
Anyway, ads being annoying and disruptive is the point, they want to sell premium subscriptions because a steady $10 a month on a subscription often forgotten about for years is more valuable and profitable to them than showing ads. (I presume)
I'm very skeptical about this statement.
There is a simple way to stop watching ads: pay for premium. It's 100% effective and works right now.
What you are saying is that you want Google to make your ad experience better because you don't want to pay money to use their service.
You somehow use it enough for ads to bother you but not enough to pay for it.
This paradoxal type of user is too common and makes no sense to me.
- music mixes, good lord - three minutes into some great mix and suddenly I'm hearing from Uber Eats yet again
I want to support the creators, but thank goodness for yt-dlp
Funny enough, awhile back they made it so that if you turned off watch history, they would disable the front page feed. Not sure if that was seen as a punishment to try to encourage people to turn back on watch history but that also ended up being a welcome change.
Alternatively, many creators already upload ad-free versions to their Patreon or other paywalled platforms, they could upload those to YouTube as well to be shown to premium users if YT allowed for it and forced them to.
Alas I'm not willing to pay 13€ a month for just slightly fewer ads.
I don't care if the fake buffering is 100% of the ad length. Not having to see the pre-roll ad and no ad breaks during the video is worth the wait.
The next step is to scrape the videos, strip the ads, store them on a torrent magnet and serve that instead. Yes it would have to be from a shady RU or CN or NK or IN site. I’m fine with that.
Content is uninterrupted without having to engage in the arms race. Music selection is great. Random movies are available.
whatever the merits, this (and google's neutering of extensions in chrome) signals a fundamental attitude shift from ~10 years ago; they're more interested in squeezing margins out of their dominant platforms instead of growth
1. It's all offline play, so I can use my favorite players like VLC. Also, no buffering (after the initial download, of course).
2. I can do anything I want to the video: make edits, splice ads out, extract audio, generate subtitles or dubs, etc.
3. It saves Google server costs! Well, comparing to streaming the same video from them multiple times with adblock on, at least.
Imagine going back in time 20 years. You want to buy a newspaper from a stall. And the vendor tells you to wait and stare at an add for 30 seconds before you can pick up the magazine. The alternative is that you give that vendor a copy of your ID and credit card. It's insane.
Most of these problems would go away if we had "online cash" (please don't start talking about cryptocurrency). Want to watch a video? Watch an add or pay €0.01. Of course all the money-laundering hysteria will prevent that from happening.
Ultimately, terrorism is why we have ads.
I was skeptical of SmartTube but it really is the only way YouTube is tolerable anymore.
In my experience, they not only deliberately increase volume to pretty much screech whatever insipid bullshit is being offered at you, but they also can sometimes run for dozens of minutes unless you manually go to your device and press "skip". TV ads never did these sorts of utterly shitty, tedious things.
I even wonder how anything so fucking hostile and annoying to a YT free user can possibly be effective? Who's actively paying for all this garbage ad placement with such scummy little playback mechanics?
"Random" advertising is completely irrelevant, and a total waste.
"Targeted" advertising is an unwanted intrusion on my privacy.
Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it -- George Monbiot [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advert...
This approach could work well, since it makes users think their blocker broke YT. Both brilliant and evil.
I run Brave on multiple devices and there's now a "glitch" a few seconds after what wouod be the ads, starts. I put up with this because the alternative is to put up with ads that treat viewers like morons with one hand in the mouse and other in the wallet.
That means if those videos show up in a search, or on your home page, or in a recommendation they do not have the red bar on the bottom that indicates that you have already watched them.
I'd love to use Invidious or Peertube to watch the videos, but I also want my subscription money to go to the video creators. Youtube allocates it proportionally to the viewing time.
Google is so greedy that they don't care the slightest bit about being fair.
The point is, I'm making zero excuses about why I don't want to see ads on youtube. It's been that way and I want it to remain that way. No subscriptions and no ads. People watching yt on their phones and TVs will still see ads or pay for premium and they can support the service.
! Stop sites from prompting to sign into Google account
||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$xhr,script,3p
! Stop annoying reels from littering friend feeds
www.facebook.com##[aria-label="reel"]:upward(2)
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element-show
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)
youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
! Don't use the obnoxious new bold font for titles, use the old font instead
www.youtube.com###title h1 yt-formatted-string:style(font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; font-weight: 400 !important;)
www.youtube.com##h3.ytd-playlist-panel-renderer .title .yt-formatted-string:style(font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; font-weight: 400 !important;)
! Remove branding bugs in the bottom corner
www.youtube.com##div.iv-branding
www.youtube.com##.annotation.annotation-type-custom.iv-branding
! Disable live video previews on hover
www.youtube.com##+js(aeld, /^(?:mousemove|pointermove|pointerenter)$/, buttons)
! Remove "Scroll for details"
www.youtube.com##.ytp-button.ytp-fullerscreen-edu-button
! Remove "This video contains paid content" warning
www.youtube.com##.ytp-paid-content-overlay
! Remove badges
www.youtube.com##.ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope.badges
www.youtube.com##ytd-badge-supported-renderer.ytd-video-primary-info-renderer
! Remove badges in lists, expand video title to fill that space again
www.youtube.com##.ytd-badge-supported-renderer.style-scope.badge-style-type-verified.badge
www.youtube.com###menu > .ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com##.ytd-compact-video-renderer.style-scope.metadata:style(padding-right:0!important)
! Remove chat
www.youtube.com###chat
! Remove sidebar
www.youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-renderer.ytd-app.style-scope
www.youtube.com##ytd-app[mini-guide-visible] ytd-page-manager.ytd-app:style(margin-left:0px!important)
! Remove the shadow over the top of videos
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-gradient-top
www.youtube.com##.ytp-chrome-top
! Reduce opacity of the shadow over the bottom of videos
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-gradient-bottom:style(opacity: 55% !important)
! Reduce opacity of video length labels
www.youtube.com##ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer.ytd-thumbnail.style-scope:style(opacity:75% !important)
! Remove Next button. I only ever hit this accidentally, losing my place
! and my playback buffer >:-[
www.youtube.com##.ytp-left-controls > .ytp-button.ytp-next-button
! Remove Miniplayer button
www.youtube.com##.ytp-button.ytp-miniplayer-button
! Force YouTube to display the complete copyright information in the description
www.youtube.com###expanded-metadata:style(display:block !important)
! Don't load the preview image before the video loads (saves some bandwidth)
||i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/*/maxresdefault.webp
||i.ytimg.com/vi/*/maxresdefault.jpg
! Remove interactions (eg if you never login to YouTube)
www.youtube.com###like-button
www.youtube.com###dislike-button
www.youtube.com###sponsor-button
www.youtube.com###hover-overlays
www.youtube.com###subscribe-button
www.youtube.com###flexible-item-buttons
www.youtube.com###button-shape
www.youtube.com###reply-button-end
! Remove sidebar items that are only applicable to logged-in users
www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-section-renderer.ytd-guide-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(1)
www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-section-renderer.ytd-guide-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2)
! Remove "Watch Later" and "Add to Queue"
www.youtube.com###hover-overlays
! Remove the "skeleton" shown before the page loads
www.youtube.com##.skeleton
www.youtube.com###info-skeleton
www.youtube.com###meta-skeleton
www.youtube.com###owner-name
www.youtube.com##.skeleton-bg-color
www.youtube.com###home-page-skeleton
www.youtube.com###masthead-skeleton-icons
||www.youtube.com/s/desktop/*/cssbin/www-main-desktop-watch-page-skeleton.css
||www.youtube.com/s/desktop/*/cssbin/www-main-desktop-player-skeleton.css
! Remove the live previews on the scrubber bar (saves some bandwidth, but
! not worth it IMO)
||i.ytimg.com/sb/*
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip-bg
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip-image
www.youtube.com##div.ytp-tooltip:style(border-radius:0px;!important)*Funny I make YT videos too trying to build an audience, I'd like to not put ads on it but not my choice
I don't understand how people can just accept ads it drives me insane when some random shit starts playing
I already lost money with YT, I bought so many UHD movies on their platform ($20 ea) and they won't stream it in HD unless you're on a supported device or ad-ridden tv
edit: alright, aftrer seeing it's $13 I will get it, I have been converted
Google is intentionally throttling YouTube, slowing down users with ad blockers
I have a bookmarklet:
javascript:(function() {window.location=window.location.toString().replace(/^https:\/\/www.youtube\./,'http://fixyt.');})()
and whenever I want to watch a YouTube video, I just click that and enjoy an ad-free experience.
Rewarding sensationalism without any oversight is the core problem with society today.
Profits over priciples.
What's nuts is reading thought this thread and reading comments from all the people who think that earning money with digital content is a right. And worse, that because they've earned money in the past, they're entitled to do it forever.
There are no longer any guard rails on sensationalism and since the only measure of success is by the very Fox guarding the Henhouse, it's optimized for the Fox's profit, not public's health and society's principles.
Advertising ruined the world. Ad Tech is a cancer.
I watched a mentour pilot video recently on a machine which did not have adblock or sponsorblock (a meta quest headset). I got the same stupid car ad every 2-3 minutes of it. It is basically unwatchable now with ads.
On top of that, the guy had a 5 minute sponsor crap thing in it also.
Youtube is just ridiculous now.
This means they’re also collecting data about some random person in my area but I don’t have a Google account either so that data isn’t really useful.
Ad block FTW
At some point I gotta do a network-wide block instead of per computer.
Maybe this is not the norm but I don't perceive most advertising as being particularly effective.
What I am not happy with is a lack of control over the homepage and recommendations. I would really like to be able to easily block channels from ever showing up, but you can only sort of do this if you click "don't recommend this channel anymore" from the homepage. But you can't do this if a video shows up recommended from another video. And overall, it just feels like they are spending so much effort trying to get me to watch the next video instead of enjoy the one I am trying to watch.
For my kids, I came up with an ad hoc policy where they can watch from the homepage / recs on weekends but during the week have to stick to a personal playlist they can only add videos to on the weekends. This removes the algorithmically driven addictive nature of YouTube and unsurprisingly they end up moderating their use of Youtube within their alotted screen time much better. It distinguishes between, "I want to watch this" and "I want to pull the slot machine lever." But I would be a lot happier if I could better curate access to content for my kids too. Youtube Kids sucks, it ends up filtering out a bunch of interesting stuff like carpentry and nature content that hasn't been marked "for kids" in favor of videos of kids shopping for toys and stuff.
Besides from that I feel that I waste a lot of time there anyway so I partially hope it happens.
It will be our personal content censor.
What’s worse is the privacy side. Discord apparently leaves the microphone open even when you’re using push-to-talk. There’s been anecdotal evidence from users monitoring their network traffic that mic input is still active in the background, likely being piped to local buffers or held in memory under the guise of latency reduction. That might sound innocent, but the distinction between “open but not recording” and “recording” is razor thin when the user has explicitly told the app not to listen until a key is pressed. At minimum, it’s a trust violation — at worst, it’s surveillance theater.
This is the standard bait-and-switch. Build a good product, earn user trust, then slowly degrade it with tracking, telemetry, ads, and manipulative UX until it’s barely recognizable. Discord used to be a breath of fresh air compared to Skype or Teamspeak, and now it’s another data-harvesting machine with a gamer paint job. It’s telling that more users are looking into self-hosted options or jumping to alternatives like Matrix or Mumble. Discord doesn’t have ads yet, but all the groundwork is being laid — and people are right to be wary.
videos getting more bloated, recycling the same crap with 90% filler. just like google blog spam.
and tell me how much are your shitty ads worth without anyone to watch them?
YOUTUBE is getting F_CKED!!
We all just think that we are entitled to get all that for free?
If you don't want ads, just pay for the damn thing.
I'm not the kind of person to be inclined to buy 'premium' because they progressively enshittified their free service to make premium seem like the only rational option, but I'm even less inclined to give money to a company that promotes the complete trash and borderline adult and often fraudulent content of their shorts.
I usually refuse to login to YouTube to find the occasional thing, and I'm always bombarded with this trash.
How can anyone support that? Gross.
Also, it should not be forgotten that the FBI, no less, recommend ad blocking just for general internet safety. YouTube has just as much scam advertising as the rest of the internet, since it's almost all Google (who don't seem to be able to police their own platform, and don't seem to be held to account for such dereliction of duty).
I see also now that the "don't recommend channel" option has been removed (at least for me) which was handy for removing AI slop recommendations. It's fast coming to the point where I'll just avoid YouTube for spending some idle time.
Fundamentally, ads are bad. There just isn't a change you can make to ads that makes them okay.
At a personal level, ads distract us, they tell us we don't have enough, aren't attractive enough, just generally aren't enough. They don't inform us: a one-sided view of a product absent criticisms or comparison to competing products is effectively just a lie.
At an economic level, ads break any benefit to capitalism. Instead of companies competing to provide the best product at the lowest cost, ads make it so a worse product at a higher cost can become the market leader. Ads are one of the primary drivers of the enshittification of everything. Ads allow companies to launch with garbage products that nobody would ever pay money for, slap ads on them to monetize, and thereby prevent competing products actually worth paying for from ever even coming to market.
The only answer is to refuse, on principle, to view ads. If a company receives money from advertisers, you're the product, not the user. If a product has a "free" tier paid for by ads, paying to hide ads doesn't help because you're still competing with advertisers for that company's loyalty, and advertisers will always win in the end (i.e. ads in cable TV--mark my words, there will be ads in all the premium-tier streaming services eventually).
Note: when security shows up, I'm going to tell them "maybe later" if I'm asked to leave.
I was watching hours every day, and I don’t even miss it. There’s so much content to watch on streaming platforms that I can never run out.
