This is of course bringing up the discussion on the "morality" of Adblocking. I'd like to point out something that I don't think is getting enough attention.
There was a point in the past where video platforms were competing, and by no means was it clear that YouTube would end up dominating this area to the point of being close to a monopoly.
When YouTube won that race, they won it with a given set of parameters, including the kind and amount of ads they show. Society at large has, at that point in the past, basically decided that YouTube's offering is the best, and given this market domineering position.
YouTube is increasingly moving away from the parameters of this implicit agreement, in minor ways at first, more now. Had they "competed" in the video platform race with current policies, maybe everyone'd be using Vimeo now.
And here's the crux. YouTube can only do this because their old policies allowed them to establish this domineering position, and by doing so are breaking the implicit "deal" that actually allowed them to get into this position.
To me, there's currently no alternative to going onto YouTube. And no, I won't pay for YouTube Premium — because that wasn't part of the deal either. The platform won the race as a free platform. So, until Google can figure out how to serve a reasonable amount of safe ads — adblocker it is.
I do wonder if it could be argued (maybe even in the current monopoly case against google) whether youtube engaged in predatory or below-cost pricing in order to drive out all of its competitors, establish a monopoly, and now use that monopoly in order to "raise prices" i.e. increase the amount of ads on its service in order to maximize its profit margins.
Although this does seem to be the business plan of basically every startup out there. Get VC funding, run at a loss and burn through money but gain a monopoly market share, and once you've done that you can raise your prices and have a profit margin that far exceeds what should be normal.
They did. They ran at a huge deficit for a very long time while expanding.
But this seems to be the play book for all VC funded web apps. Facebook and MySpace did the same. In fact, you can argue that moving towards profitability too soon and too fast is what killed MySpace. But that argument only works if you are willing to see the growth phase as something other than predatory pricing.
I think your comment is a sobering input to the whole startup discussion.
Agreed. Bruce Schneier allocated a chapter in his last book, .A hacker's mind':
"Venture capital itself is not a hack. The hack is when unprofitable companies use VC funding to ignore the dynamics of the market economy. We don’t want some central planner to decide which businesses should remain operational and which should close down. But this is exactly what happens when venture capital firms become involved. The injection of VC money means that companies don’t need to compete with each other in the traditional manner, or worry about the normal laws of supply and demand. They can do what would normally be crazy things—give away their products, pay extravagant salaries, sustain enormous financial losses, provide a service that actually harms people—because of that external funding source. It’s basically central planning by elite investors, something that would be called communism if the government did it."
Hah, I'd given some thought to malinvestment in capitalism but never quite connected it to malinvestment under central planning.
It feels about right... it's almost the same thing. Except there are multiple competing "central authorities" with money, so the ones who fuck up do get burned a lot harder than they would if they were part of the very big government.
It's not really. Communism is just the super monopoly on everything by one firm (plus a bunch of kooky religious like beliefs). This subset of VC funding uses is basically abusing external funding to gain market dominance so that one can abuse your customers with product changes that make the product more profitable for you. It's very equivalent to how an oligopolist/monopolist enters new markets using money from the rest of the business to undercut everyone in the new market and push them out. It's bad for society, just like communism.
This doesn't mean there's no place for VC funding, there's lots of legitimate uses for it (i.e. handling mismatched cost/revenue flows from expansion where there are a lot of upfront costs and cash flows come over the following years). Just that it's usually more profitable to be a monopolist/oligopolist and so that has been where the money has been flowing, at great detriment to society.
In every single example up to the parent comment, the end result is a market inequlabrium.
Left unchanged, the market can have new entrants that undercut the major player. In this case, any new video playform that has fewer ads could steal market share from youtube. Rumble has entered the market to do just that.
Network effects do make this challenging, but that is for the market to decide. The more creators that dual upload and then see number shifts over to a YouTube competitor, the better,as it will force YouTube back into competition.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but this is a complete fantasy that completely ignores the point that was made a couple of comments above. No one is undercutting Google. Period.and that is the point. They have a death grip on the user base.
Just look at Twitter, it completely spit in everyone's faces and even still people cannot get out of its grips on them.
The only platforms that have even remotely survived are platforms that also own an ad network, or some other secondary source of income (like Kick and their Crypto gambling site or Twitch with their ad stock) as a way to shovel users into that fire. The market cannot solve this and has no incentive to do so. Again, it's a complete fantasy that has not once proven true.
> Just look at Twitter, it completely spit in everyone's faces and even still people cannot get out of its grips on them.
People can get out of them. People refuse to get out of them. Likely this is because YouTube and Twitter are still the most efficient platforms regardless of their regressions.
I used to have FB. Now I don't. I used to have Twitter. Now I don't. I used to have Android. Now I have Grapheneos. I used to use gmail. Now I use Fastmail, Mailcow, and shared hosting. I used to have Instagram. Now I don't.
You can decide to not be a user of a service. You can build your own! Or more easily, you can migrate to a competitor.
All of this clamoring for more regulation is nonsense. We have a market that can solve these problems. But markets work by votes. The path is harder if you take the road less traveled.
I didn't even mention regulation. You're circle jerking with yourself with a fantasy idea of the "free market" that doesn't exist in reality. You can't consume your way out of large corporations having market dominance, idk where that insane notion even is born.
You can entirely consume your way out of it, and you can also build your way out of it.
It's not fantasy. This is how markets work; how economies work.
Let's look at something like FB. At one point they were absolutely the social company. But other competitors have entered the market. In some instances, new markets were created, like Tiktok. Those new products took users away from FB. In some instances, the users will never return. This has happened precisely because someone somewhere decided to make something and challenge the existing market.
> I didn't even mention regulation
My bad. I was getting this thread confused with the one about AI regulation.
People refuse to get out of them because they are still the most efficient providers. Regardless of the user experience degradation, YouTube still offers the best product. For example, Rumble doesnt let me start looking for ve events from the beginning. YouTube does. Better experience.
My hypothesis: if YouTube only worked on Web Integrity browsers and forced a four hour ad before content was played, people woulf move elsewhere. They havent yet because YT is still the best.
Private VCs using their money to control the economy doesn't really sound much like a "system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs".
Private capitalists controlling the economy is practically the definition of capitalism. And it's bad for society indeed.
Yah, so you are really buying into the kooky religious like beliefs I see. Communism says what you have in quotations above, but it has never, ever worked that way for any serious amount of time. It always devolves into a system where the government owns everything or nearly everything and apportions things base don how it sees fit and that is a monopoly and a monopsony since the government is the sole provider of goods and services and the sole employer. It's a monopoly and it exercises power for the benefit of the bureaucracy that controls said monopoly with lip service to some idealized utopian BS.
That is not the definition of capitalism. The definition of capitalism is a system in which owners of capital control their capital in accord with their interests, which translates into competition because everyone else is also controlling their own capital and labor for their own interests. The natural outcome of this system is monopoly, which does closely resemble all the harms and dead weight loss of communism but, unlike under communism, the government is supposed to be there to stop total control, bust up the monopolies, and restore competition. It did a passable job of this until the Rehnquist supreme court in the 70s and it's time to start back in that pre-rehnquist direction. It's never time for communism.
_Dumping_, how it was called when I was young, is the main strategy of most startups out there: operate at a loss until they establish themselves (usually as the sole provider of certain services or goods) then start to climb the prices.
It _should_ be illegal, but since it's the current status quo, it won't change anytime soon.
I think that the amount of free services we got in the last decade is the strongest argument IN FAVOR of dumping. They got there through subsidized services, now they want to fleece everyone, let's see how it goes. My guess is that competitors will arise and gain market share. It's happening to Uber down here in Brazil. The prices are getting too high, Brazilians are migrating to other apps, especially InDrive, a russian based app. Capitalism is great.
I strongly believe that, at least for youtube, there are no forthcoming competitors to gain market share. Network effect is too strong, and if even an inkling of that happens the policies that lead to people leaving will be rolled back just enough.
Policies being rolled back are just the market forces adjusting itself in real time. I'm pretty sure the current trend of forcing ads on everyone will not be feasible, and I reaaaaally hope Google keeps pushing people until a peertube-like option can become a reasonable alternative to the current monopoly. I can even see "torrents for YouTube videos" becoming a thing if they keep enshitificating it.
Youtube got to its current position not by lowering prices but instead by Google making sure that Youtube videos are returned at the top of Google search results. Competing video websites don't have this advantage.
Including Google Video. Google did try the tactic of using their search engine to promote their own video platform, but it was against YouTube and Google only bought them because it didn’t work.
it didnt work because people don't search for videos via google usually. They get the video directly from youtube, or was linked by friends virally.
Plus the early days of google (before youtube acquisition), i dont think their video search was as good as the text search anyway (but i might be misremembering of course...).
> Get VC funding, run at a loss and burn through money but gain a monopoly market share, and once you've done that you can raise your prices
Slightly off topic, but the business plan of most startups seems to be "get VC funding, and exit". What you wrote may be the business plan of VCs.
I don't understand the valuation of many startups these days (even in the hypothetical case where they capture 100% of their potential market one day).
VCs don’t invest because your business has a bright future as a valuable, sustainable operation . Not anymore.
The crypto dynamics have shifted the expectations so far to cheap, quick moment they most VCs, especially the a16z kind are more about “Can I juice this business and it’s metrics enough to sell it to someone to hold the bag”.
Ironically I think the large numbers involved are basically part of that PR game - they act as proof that the business is worth it and attract attention and bagholder interest.
The crypto economy worked like that too - the NFT wash trading, the signal metrics used to sell the idea that there is value where there is none.
> The crypto dynamics have shifted the expectations so far to cheap, quick moment they most VCs, especially the a16z kind are more about “Can I juice this business and it’s metrics enough to sell it to someone to hold the bag”.
My perspective: Google is not an agent directed by morality when they interact with me, therefore I don’t allocate any morality when interacting with them. It’s a power relationship not a moral relationship.
I do feel bad for the creators, but I would rather donate to their Patreons than buy YT premium.
> I do feel bad for the creators, but I would rather donate to their Patreons than buy YT premium.
I ended up subscribing to both Nebula and Dropout.tv, especially after noticing that a good portion of my favourite YT channels are in fact on Nebula. Sadly, this is primarly larger ones, and I do feel bad about smaller creators being kinda stuck on YT… especially when it's the odd one-time well-made video that really doesn't warrant e.g. Patreon.
But yeah, the real moral quandry is with the creators. They're more or less under the same monopoly pressure; in most cases you just can't ignore the YT audience :(
Where do creators go if not YouTube!? Ideally they could self host videos which could be expensive AND not bring any revenue, neither do they are they discoverable - this is where the internet is broken these days.
And maybe this is where micro transactions would have a proper use case, i.e. if you had a browser extension where you add $5 and then you can dish out 1ct or 10ct for some content...
I'm still in favour of a fixed subscription one pays for a service like YouTube in the range of €5/month, with 95% of the proceeds going to creators. If you do nothing, the money will be doled out equally based on some set of fair (and frequently scrutinized) parameters. If the subscriber wants to, they can allocate a portion of this fee to specific creators, and also remove it from creators the you do not want to support (this might help with clickbait and empty fluff created to work well with specific searches).
It won't happen of course.
I recently had ads show up before videos on YouTube (audio only, so uBlock Origin was blocking part of it), and the only thing I felt was disgust and a mental note never to buy insurance from InShared (a Dutch insurance company) simply for repeating the same stupid jingle for each video.
I signed up for nebula too, but it's clear that nebula is not a competitive platform. Nebula does the basics, it has channels and it shows videos, that part is great.
Youtube is great because of the wide availability of videos, recommendations and (maybe not great because of this) the comments.
I know the comments are not that well liked, but it means the videos are not in a vacuum. They are in a social context. And comments are pretty good, maybe because negative ones are heavily suppressed, that's at least what it looks like.
Nebula feels empty because of those missing parts. It doesn't draw you in to new channels. I don't like half the recommendations youtube gives, but some of them I do.
This doesn't actually bother me. I find video recommendations on social media and via other channels I follow. I think the big downside here is that without any sort of free tier less people recommend Nebula channels because most people can't watch the content. Most often it is a YouTube recommendation that I then see is on Nebula.
I think in an ideal world the recommendation engine and video host would be separated. You could be recommended videos on all platforms (including single-creator websites).
This is the right response that's all too often missing from these threads.
If you want "free-market" you should deal with its basic premise that consumer pays as little as they can and seller tries to milk the consumer as much as they can. That's quite literally how it's supposed to work.
I'm very much in favor of bringing some morality to the economic system, but it shouldn't be one sided.
Morally, I consider ads to be outright evil, especially the modern day cancer we call advertisement where they track every singular molecule of your existence. As soon as these scumbags stop hiring psychologists and other similar professionals to make the most addicting and psychologically impactful advertisements possible, then maybe I'll consider them less than pure evil.
I still have uBlock turned off on a few sites, though that list is becoming vanishingly smaller. 4Chan, funnily enough, has the best ads, where it's just old school banner ads on the top of the page and the very bottom of the page. No click hijacking, no embedded ads made to mimic organic content, no fucking audio and flashing lights ads. The only type of targeting those ads have is that the general audience that goes on 4Chan is into anime and Japan, both of which I don't care about. If the internet still had these kind of ads, I think adblockers would be much less of a "problem", but since 99% of them are invasive garbage, whoever is pushing them and whoever argues it's "immoral" to block them can go fuck themselves.
a counter take from me, as someone who uses adblocks everywhere possible but used to work for facebook ads department:
ads aren't inherently bad, irregardless of much data do they track. What really bad is how this ads is targeted and how much ads is delivered. I would LOVE to see relevant to my interested and situation ads. I like fpv drones and often see interested ads on instagram and led to a purchase. The problem after that I can't just edit the vector of my interests for ads targeting and keep bombarded with something not relevant to my situation anymore, and boy so much of it I see.
I really don't know why big ads network didn't move forward with user controlled ads mechanics - because we all humans buy something anyway, it's okay of being aware of the options on the market. It's not okay to mentally torture users with irrelevant, annoying and overwhelming amount of ads.
No one is forcing you to use youtube. I think the situation is more like the opposite, adblockers are trying to gain control of youtube servers in order to obtain the product without paying.
Adblockers run within the browser's space, they don't intrude into any servers by any means whatsoever. Your statement is completely wrong and misguided.
The current implementation sends YouTube false information about whether the ad was run. That absolutely intrudes on the server. Really it's no different from telling a cashier you already paid online or something like that.
I guess we're even then, since they do not respect DNT.
[Edit] can't reply to below, but since I am not violating any law, I don't see how I need to admit to anything. I'll admit to using my user agent as intended.
What makes me really sad is that Google doesn't just not offer a "Music-less Youtube Premium" (due to a lack of attention or whatever) – no: They used to offer that product in some markets and have actively discontinued it.
The EU should look long and hard at that: the market-dominating video platform, owned by the market-dominating search and advertising company, forcing bundled pricing for YouTube in order to leverage the YT monopoly for an edge in the music streaming market.
Sounds anticompetitive as hell, and a government that actually cares about functioning markets should eviscerate them for it.
Heck, it won't even remove all ads. A significant number of creators have sponsor segments, and YT Premium won't get rid of that. Why would I pay the Premium tax to get rid of some of the ads?
the plugin "SponsorBlock for youtube" does a good job of using user submitting skipping of said content, people can even mark certain parts as 'filler' and you can also skip those also.
I'd be very surprised if it would be considering YouTube already has music where they already pays the copyright holder for. My guess is YouTube music is focused UI on an already offered service and separating it out will likely not make it cheaper, or if it does, it won't be a big difference.
I wonder if there are licensing shenanigans with music that mean they have to be bundled together otherwise you might not be able to watch pure music videos on youtube.
And the platforms that were free and distributed, i.e. torrents became illegal. Youtube started with a ton of illegal stuff (and still contains tons of illegal stuff, but mostly in languages/regions that "don't matter").
Internet speeds are maturing, and maybe it is time to try again a self-hosted or distributed model. The hard part is to put ads in it, because ad-supported is traditionally the best medium for videos. However most video creators are already having sponsorship deals
I came across whole episodes of British TV on there this very week that were uploaded 12 years ago. I know they have a strict "no humans involved, ever" system going, but the programme name was in the title and the video was one of those ones inset into a fake background and the audio was original. I find it amazing that no one (or rather nothing) with a ban button has noticed that for so long.
If they actually cared even a microgram and they couldn't even get an intern to do a days' work searching for TV show titles, there'd be enough failed Reddit moderators out there who they could recruit who would gleefully do the job for free. Not that I would want them to - it's bad enough when only bring reactive to often-spurious complaints - but it's such a completely perfect lack of interest that it must be very deliberate.
General principle of the internet seems to be people can host what they like till someone who has legal ownership of it tells them to take it down at that point they're expected to take it down and keep it off their service unless added by the owner.
That's what google is sticking to because frankly any other method would be a nightmare.
The old tv episodes might have muddy/unclear ownership and so things continue to coast along until someone exercises their right of ownership.
The TV show was first aired in 2009, and they're still on streaming services so it's hardly an orphan work. Not that I'm agitating for more or stricter enforcement, far from it, but it seems strangely lackadaisical compared to the "walk past a shop playing music and cop a copyright strike" that also happens on the very same platform.
Then again I guess YouTube makes money from ads on these videos being up, so that does explain the sphinx-like impassivity.
My favorite is that cover songs are basically outlawed by default on YouTube, even though they're entirely legal. ContentID can come and slap your channel for melodic similarities...and it's entirely down to the rightsholder whether they "allow" the video and simply take all monetization or if it is taken down and counts as a copyright strike against your channel (eventually leading to termination). And there's no way to know which will happen until you upload.
But the thing is: copyright law specifies that mechanical royalties are compulsory. Artists don't get to stop you from covering songs, as long as your distributor pays the legal n% to their distributor. But even if you pay LANDR or whoever to administer those royalties, so you can release your cover to Spotify and whatever, YouTube will still smack your channel for uploading the cover. At worst, content strike, at best you still lose all monetization.
As it turns out, "sync licenses" (the right to pair music with visual media) are not compulsory and that's what YouTube primarily cares about. Even if it's just a "video" of your album art with the music playing, you can still be arbitrarily penalized on the most popular platform for music discovery, because it's technically video and record labels can do whatever they want within the opaque framework YouTube has created.
yes it s entirely illegal hosting it , as it is copyrighted content, it even says so in the credits. there are tons of tv series from around the world being hosted, and it's not fair use even under the relaxed US laws. The fact that someone has not issued a takedown request doesn't make it legal either.
> Internet speeds are maturing, and maybe it is time to try again a self-hosted or distributed model.
Distributed, maybe.
Self-hosted? Not a chance. Sure, if you just want to share a video with some friends and family, that's fine. But if I reached the popularity of even a moderately successful YouTube channel (Say, 100K subscribers?), even the lucky few with gigabit internet at home could not handle the load.
I serve about 60TB/mo from my house (100K+ YouTube videos equivalent) and pay $100/mo for internet. So $0.001 per video would cover my ISP costs (not including server and storage infra).
My biggest issue with running a service like this would be the possibility that I'm all of a sudden serving CP from my house because the distributed model doesn't have a good moderation scheme.
Moderation tends to be the bottleneck with distributed services right now. The infrastructure is there.
I'm also a heavy user of ad blockers, but there is something to be said in defense of YouTube.
Creators have the final decision on the ads shown. I have a YouTube channel, and I always disable monetization on all my videos, so no ads are ever shown on my channel.
If you see an ad, it's because the creator decided to include one. YouTube is simply the platform that enables this choice.
They are actually removing the ability to control ads in the near future. To my understanding, the only ads creators will have full control over are midroll ads.
They will be improving ads on the platform by removing the creator's control over them.
> optimizing creator revenue and taking the guesswork out of which ad formats to use by removing individual ad controls for pre-roll, post-roll, skippable, and non-skippable ads on newly uploaded videos.
From what is written, they plan to reduce the control of where ads are placed, but still allow enabling or disabling them.
Anyway, at present it's possible to disable them if you have reached the monetization requirements on the channel, like 1000 subscribers and some amount of hours viewed.
My YT account has a total of five personally-recorded videos (from the era where smartphone cameras still sucked) with no music in the background and no monetisation on any of them.
One of the videos was hit with an automated DMCA takedown, one was hit with a "mature content" takedown, and the remaining 3 have ads on them now.
That's not necessarily true. If you are not in the Youtube partner program, Youtube can still monetize your videos and keep the ad money for themselves.
Your can individually toggle pre- mid- and Post-Roll ads. Your can even set suggested spots within the video for the mid-roll ads, but that doesn't really control how many will actually be played.
This applies to videos with no copyrighted content. If you use any excerpts or music that someone else claims, anything might happen to your video regarding ads.
I'm not sure it's a question of what's "fair" or "right" or "legal". We (as a society) need to figure out what incentive we want to impose on the world.
We (through a convoluted, but in the end democratic process that is supposed to represent the will of the people) decided that piracy is illegal not because there is some divine right of authors to get compensated, but because we believe that by making piracy too common we would kill the incentive for the future authors to create.
Similary, we will need to decide on the laws around ad blocking. If we decide to keep it accessable, then the downside is that both the infrastructure work done by Google (or its competitors) and the creative work done by authors will become less profitable and thus the quality will decline. If we don't envision this happening, we should definetly get ad blockers without a second thought.
Even prior to this change, as far back as a decade ago when Youtube (according to Google) was burning money, they still knew there was some perversely wealthy incentive to keep the platform around. Google has shut down far more useful products for far less. That leads me to believe that the value in Youtube goes far beyond ads. Right now it's merely trying to optimize and squeeze as much blood from stone as possible, up until they can measure the tipping point of maximum pain before users spend time on other platforms.
What still gets me is that even with YT Premium, there are still ads if the content creators decide to embed them as part of the content. Yes, they are skippable, but there are still ads…that I paying, to NOT see. This is also a moral issue. What does the exact definition of “no ads” actually mean to YT and is their definition misleading or purposefully vague?
Unless they qualify their definition with something like “you may still see in-video sponsored content”, ad-free should 100% ad-free, and it is irritating that that (perhaps) through some nuanced definition of “ads” that they allow this. IMO this needs to be investigated by the FCC.
If you look at the advertising literature for Premium, it simply says “Enjoy ad-free videos…” with no asterisk or fine print that has any exclusions. Perhaps there is something deeply buried in one of the “terms and conditions” documents that allows for this, but I haven’t taken the time to look. My point is, YT and the content creators benefit from these ads on a supposed no-ad plan. Imagine if other streaming services like Netflix started doing this.
Yeah there are various ways to sneak advertising into content, but that why this is so insidious. Is product placement an “ad”? Is a quick mention of a sponsor an “ad”? Is a “passive” ad such as background graphic or wearing a sponsor’s t-shirt an “ad?”. Where do we draw that line? I think we’ve simply been conditioned to accept that ads are a normal and acceptable part of life, even if you pay not to have them. Remember when cable TV first became available to the public? It was supposed to be, and was at first, ad-free because you paid for it unlike broadcast TV. Now, cable TV is more ads than content in many cases, and those who have it pay dearly because in most markets, the cable companies have an effective monopoly. We have become the dystopian future we predicted and abhorred, but don’t even know it.
That's actually an interesting question in itself. Google also has a domineering (though not monopoly) position in ads. If someone were to try to compete with an ad-funded service… how much of a problem would that be?
Also: part of the problem is the quality of the ads. Could you actually get "better quality" ads for a competitor video platform? Do such ads even exist in sufficient number at this point? (I vaguely remember a significant portion of larger companies reducing their internet ad budgets because they simply weren't seeing good returns…)
There is a very interesting example, but unknown to western readers. It's called Bilibili.
It's the largest video platform in China[0]. However, it keeps losing money since forever, including in last year, and is expected to keep losing more in 2023.
[0]: Youtube is blocked in China and you need a VPN to access it there.
Do realize that viewers are not YouTube's only "customer". They spend a lot of time and energy courting video creators as well, and their monetization program is one of the few that allows even mid-sized creators to record videos for a living.
YouTube's partner program pays relatively little, though. Pretty much all mid-sized creators I follow also have sponsors and/or a Patreon - that's their main source of income.
It's still one of the best on the internet. That said, if you have the viewers to get monetized on YouTube, you probably have the viewers to make even more money off sponsorships/patreons/etc.
I don't see any question on morality of blocking ads. Under no circumstances any living soul may be forced to view any kind of displeasing content. Web is an open protocol, anything accessible on the web with http code 200 is free to download. After downloading, I can alter that content in any way. Simple like that.
If Youtube wants to control their content and users - they should create their own protocols or at least closed network using web protocols, write their own client software and distribute it.
You have essentially laid out the tech company playbook. In so many cases, hyper-growth is subsidized by investors (or another part of a giant business). The product is offered to the public at FAR below cost in order to gain a monopoly-like market share. After they have successfully killed all viable competitors, they ratchet up prices (and/or ad-delivery), decrease spend on customer service, etc. and rake in profits. This is why the “growth mindset” is so ingrained in SV tech culture.
There was a point in the past where various empires were competing, and by no means was it clear that The Roman Empire would end up dominating the world close to being a monopoly.
The Roman Empire is moving away from the parameters of their implicit win, including the kind and amount of victories they score. Had they "competed" in world domination with the current policies, maybe everybody would speak Persian by now.
No, I won't be subject to the Byzantine Empire - because that was not part of the deal either. The empire was build on Rome. So until the Byzantines can figure out how to win _reasonable_ amount of _military victories_ - I won't pay taxes.
Do you realize how shallow your argument sounds ? :)) Of course Youtube is turning the screws now that they have the lock-in. Ethics have nothing to do with it. And they will turn the screws until you either pay up or stop going there all together.
> This is of course bringing up the discussion on the "morality" of Adblocking. I'd like to point out something that I don't think is getting enough attention.
Don't forget the flipside, the "morality" of interfering with a user's freedom to selectively ignore certain content.
Give a dollar(unprofitable and unsustainable service) for a pennies by burning the money of the investors to capture a market then switch to high profit margin business practices and milk out the captured market thereafter.
Sure, it can be framed as spend money when developing a product then make profit of it when released but the winners are determined by keeping alive the developed product longer than everyone else ane when everyone else is gone, then monetise.
People who spent billions of dollars to run YouTube at loss for years were not philanthropists, they rightfully expect to make that money back and make much more on top of it.
Because providing a product/service below cost to drive competitors out of the market followed by using your new monopoly to raise prices is exactly the definition of illegal predatory pricing.
Apart from the Youtube stuff, the post also highlights something else, entitlement towards free services like uBlock origin.
> It’s one thing to play cat and mouse with YouTube. It’s quite another to deal with a wave of angry users.
> And then one of the moderators actually deleted their Reddit account. “The ID in the post wasn’t updated because my mother was hospitalized,” they said.
It’s sad to see them leave because of some drive-by comments — new users who sign up for Reddit, leave their comments,
I have seen this becoming more and more common on open source projects and totally free services, where people act as if they are entitled to something as if it is their god given right. The people doing public services like uBlock origin can only take so much from the mob.
It also feels awful to be called a beggar and a panhandler just because you're trying to find a balance and build a sustainable project by having a donation popup (that can be disabled) in your software.
This disgusting review was sitting at the top of the review page for Search by Image on the Chrome Web Store: https://i.imgur.com/P1QU176.png
This person has edited their review a couple of times in the past year which pushed it to the top, and also emailed me with a similar demeaning message. I've reported it to Google staff, and they thought that the review did not break their content policy, so they did not remove it.
So yeah, it hurts when you're offering so much of your free time for so little benefits, or none at all, and a couple of entitled jerks still manage to poison the well for everyone.
With each abusive message the thought of no longer offering up your time and the results of your work for free grows stronger and stronger. It's no surprise that people either quit, sell their open source projects, or stop offering it for free.
> It also feels awful to be called a beggar and a panhandler just because you're trying to find a balance and build a sustainable project by having a donation popup (that can be disabled) in your software.
Interrupting someone's browsing experience to ask for donations is both providing a poor user experience and is in poor taste. I think it's fine to solicit donations in the browserAction popup, the settings page or even the initial installation window, but doing so elsewhere would deservedly be criticized.
A donation popup is shown once a year, and only when you use the extension, it does not randomly interrupt your browsing experience. Te popup can even be disabled from the extension's options. It is similar to a donation prompt being shown when an app is opened, once a year.
That's what this person was complaining about, that they've seen a donation prompt once when they've initiated an image search with the extension.
There is no winning with some of these people, they want your time and the results of your work, they want it for free, and they want it to be neatly packaged and presented exactly the way that is most convenient for them. If you deviate even a little bit from their unreasonable expectations, you'll be promptly attacked.
Once your projects grow past a certain size, threats of physical violence also become a regular occurrence, here's a milder email I have received last year: https://i.imgur.com/LKJQq1p.png
This kind of harassment is happening every 1-2 weeks on different channels, we keep these private messages because everything has to be documented in case law enforcement needs to be involved.
Not defending the trolls, but this kind of abuse is part and parcel of merely being online and putting anything out there. I've received hate mail and even one death threat from just commenting on HN. Lots of unhinged (but ultimately cowardly) people out there who feel empowered by distance and anonymity. I don't know a single female internet user who hasn't been on the receiving end of absolutely vile anger and hate at least once. Thick skin is a must.
> There is no winning with some of these people, they want your time and the results of your work, they want it for free, and they want it to be neatly packaged and presented exactly the way that is most convenient for them. If you deviate even a little bit from their unreasonable expectations, you'll be promptly attacked.
You're making a pretty big leap from "users prefer these things" to "users expect these things".
Are you going to pretend you don't want things to be free, neatly packaged, and convenient? Who wouldn't want this?
And the idea that a four star review which starts with "A good extension." is an "attack" is absurd. Given it appears you expect your users not to express any preferences that aren't exactly what you've implemented, perhaps it's you who has unreasonable expectations?
> Once your projects grow past a certain size, threats of physical violence also become a regular occurrence, here's a milder email I have received last year: https://i.imgur.com/LKJQq1p.png
> doing so elsewhere would deservedly be criticized.
I suggest that these people express their criticism by not using the software in question. I doubt the typical purveyor of free-as-in-* software who's stuck between a rock and a hard place re: monetization particularly cares what somebody who doesn't understand the personal specifics of their dilemma thinks about their chosen solution to it.
> I suggest that these people express their criticism by not using the software in question.
Do you also suggest that when an application is ad-ridden or potentially malware-ridden to also just not use the app? Naturally that's an option, but the review is to warn other users of their experience.
I don't think death threats or calling people slurs is appropriate, but the review being complained about it is pretty mundane.
> Do you also suggest that when an application is ad-ridden or potentially malware-ridden to also just not use the app? Naturally that's an option, but the review is to warn other users of their experience.
Is a restaurant owner pissed off about a one star review by somebody who didn't like the decor in the bathroom implicitly suggesting that people who receive food poisoning at a restaurant have no right to communicate that experience to other potential customers? Is a homeowner who puts out ant traps in her kitchen tacitly endorsing genocide?
I think there is such a vast gulf between displaying a mildly annoying message asking for donations and tricking someone into installing malware on their computer that anybody with a moderately intact sense of proportionality should have no trouble seeing it. So, no, I don't suggest that.
I think there's even greater utility in telling people about minor things that might annoy them, because those minor things aren't going to get a developer's application pulled from the app store, but have a meaningful impact on the user's experience.
You really think it's more important for me to air my grievances about a free software's occasional donation nag messages than to tell other potential users it's a front for malware? That's honestly really strange, and I categorically disagree.
It's greater utility in the sense that there's other mechanisms in place to report malware that are more effective at getting that changed than just the review section.
Reviews are much more useful for applications that stick around on the app store, or chrome web store, or whatever else, because well, they're still there.
I disagree. In my experience, user/customer reviews have been vastly more useful to me for learning about serious safety or quality issues with a product or service than they have been for any purpose (unspecified because I really can't think of any) predicated on learning about specific users' weird gripes. I can practically smell the unreasonableness dripping off that review somebody linked above, and I would ignore it if I spotted it in a list of reviews—but unfortunately I can't ignore it out of the aggregate rating.
Anyway, this isn't going anywhere productive, so I'm out.
> I suggest that these people express their criticism by not using the software in question.
As with most "love it or leave it" arguments, this is a transparent attempt to silence critics without actually bothering to engage with criticism, even if it's constructive.
Anything you put in front of a significant number of people will be criticized, and rightly so, because it's not perfect. Admitting things aren't perfect is the first step to making things better.
This argument is particularly disigenuous in the context of a discussion about YouTube, because YouTube is effectively a monopoly in a number of ways--it's effectively an argument that once a product reaches monopoly status, it can do whatever it wants and nobody can criticize.
Adults learn to accept, integrate, and throttle their intake of criticism. If you haven't, you have some growing up to do.
> Yes, and it's people's prerogative to write reviews criticizing the software that is published, regardless of whether it's paid or not.
Do you think that review was respectful, now that you know that the donation prompt was not obtrusive nor randomly shown (see my other comments, it has been explained in detail)? Don't you feel that the way this person expressed themselves was rather demeaning, and perhaps somewhat unjust?
Not particularly, but I also wouldn't really describe it as particularly disgusting or demeaning, either. It could have been worded better, but I'm not going to read too deeply into what random people on the internet say about me personally.
I find anything that's trying to interrupt what I'm doing like popup advertisements, cookie modals, and other things of the sort irritating because it forces me out of my workflow and requires action to continue what I was doing. It doesn't really matter how frequent it is. When i'm actively installing extensions I expect there to be a popup that is giving me information about the application. Dark Reader has a donation button featured on their popup from their action. I don't find this to be invasive even though it's there literally any time I interact with the extension. I ended up paying for the extension on safari because I liked it so much.
That's just my opinion, though. There's a lot of things that I find distasteful that would make me uninstall an application that seemingly don't bother the majority of people, and ultimately, you have a right to make your application how you see fit, but I don't think there's anything wrong with criticizing it for what that user clearly views as distasteful.
I don't think that your opinion that the prompt was not obtrusive is objective truth. Whether a prompt is obtrusive or not is very much a matter of subjective opinion, and I tend to value user opinions on user experience over creator opinions on user experience.
The fact that the donation prompt was shown on startup doesn't undermine the reviewer's preference for not seeing a donation prompt at all. They're factually incorrect on a minor detail, but that doesn't change the larger point.
The rudest part of the review was them referring to the prompt as "panhandling", which is actually inaccurate, and if I were writing the review I would have used a milder, more accurate word there (maybe "soliciting"?). But in receiving any communication from anyone, it's unreasonable to expect people to communicate perfectly, and I try to understand people rather than criticize how they communicate their ideas. I certainly would not describe that as "disgusting" or "appalling".
And again, I'm not saying you should remove the donation prompt. In fact, if you made it show up every time until a user donated, I'd have no objections. Users wouldn't like this, but you're not obligated to fulfill users' every wish. Just as users aren't obligated to fawn over everything you do when it doesn't do what they want it to do.
Believe it or not, users can want things, and you can ignore what they want, and those are both okay!
No, I'm not implying that at all. The author of the software isn't the only one who might improve the software based on the criticism. A completely different person might decide to clone the software with suggested improvements, for example.
I flagged this comment because it contains a personal attack:
> Adults learn to accept, integrate, and throttle their intake of criticism. If you haven't, you have some growing up to do.
Normally I would respond to this kind of thing in a different way, but the (apparently) lone HN moderator has previously informed me that stooping to the level of such attacks is just as bad in HN's eyes as being the one to make them in the first place. Accordingly, I place my rhetorical fate in the hands of the mod[s], and I look forward to seeing your rule-breaking comment removed.
If you want to know what I have to say, feel free to start a new subthread replying to me with the rulebreaking content removed. I would be all too happy to respond to any substantive arguments you are able to present without resorting to personal attacks as a rhetorical crutch.
I disagree that constructive criticism is against the rules.
If you want to say something, say it, if you don't, don't--why would I care? I've said my opinion and posturing that you're better than the discussion doesn't persuade anyone that you're right. It hasn't been my experience that when people self-censor, they later reveal they had some brilliant counterargument that we were all missing out on.
I totally agree with this sentiment. Could I also bill the creator for my time invested in learning the software and adjusting my workflows for it, all the hours invested before the hidden anti-features showed the true intention of the software? Otherwise this whole argument could legitimize spyware. I could not reasonably decide to stop using the software before I was informed of the anti-features, regardless of how their invasiveness.
It's definitely a strange proposition, but you could try it yourself.
Install Signal on your phone and start using it, in a couple of months you will be shown a donation popup a single time when you open the app. At this point uninstall the app and contact Signal's development team to send them an invoice for your invested time that has now been ruined when that donation prompt has interrupted your messaging experience.
Also call them beggars and panhandlers, after all that's perfectly reasonable, and even respectable.
For the record, I get that donate popup on Signal every couple weeks, and it's all the more annoying because I donated for several years until they recently removed SMS support.
Either we should accept software with hidden misfeatures without complaining, in which case the user must receive compensation for their time, or we should complain and inform others of the misfeature.
Uninstalling the software in silence is an invitation for more spyware and trojaned software.
Sure, and why stop there? You might also e.g. bill/sue the author of a free software you invested time into learning because they are no longer providing free updates, rendering the software obsolete and your time investment wasted.
> This disgusting review was sitting at the top of the review page for Search by Image on the Chrome Web Store: https://i.imgur.com/P1QU176.png
> This person has edited their review a couple of times in the past year which pushed it to the top, and also emailed me with a similar demeaning message. I've reported it to Google staff, and they thought that the review did not break their content policy, so they did not remove it.
So? What's the point you're making? Users aren't allowed to have preferences about software they get for free? User experience doesn't matter for free software? Who did you release this software for if not for users?
It's a 4 star review, ffs. Do you think every review that isn't glowing is disgusting? Why on earth would you expect Google staff to remove a review which merely expresses a preference?
It really feels like a significant portion of Hacker News just doesn't really grok the whole "doing nice things for other people" thing. If you only did this for money or glowing praise for how generous you are, you'd have been better off choosing one of those and pursuing it singlemindedly instead of trying for both money and being perceived as generous, and then being surprised when people notice you aren't doing either perfectly. And sure, you're not obligated to just do it out of the kindness of your heart, and you have every right to choose how nice you want to be. But if you aren't doing it for purely prosocial reasons, then maybe don't expect people to fawn over how purely prosocial you are.
You've lost the plot if you think that it is normal or acceptable to call the maintainers of an app or extension beggars and panhandlers if there is a donation prompt shown once a year when you open the app. Most people would in fact find it appalling and demeaning to treat people with such little respect. I think you should also take a second look at your own performance in this thread, and maybe ask a friend for an opinion about your comments, because that behavior is not normal either.
> Most people would in fact find it appalling and demeaning to treat people with such little respect.
You don't speak for most people, nor do I believe you know much about most people. If you've got access to any evidence I am not aware of, feel free to share, but until that point, I can only assume this is just your opinion, which you are trying to present as most people's opinion.
> I think you should also take a second look at your own performance in this thread, and maybe ask a friend for an opinion about your comments, because that behavior is not normal either.
Asked my girlfriend. Her statements: 1. "Why are you arguing with people on the internet?" (Answer: I was bored.) 2. "That guy [you] is overreacting."
You've already checked your opinions with the Google staff, and been told they don't agree with you. Why would you think one of my friends is going to agree with you more? How many outside opinions are you willing to ignore to maintain your delusion that your opinion is universally agreed upon? I'm pretty sure none of the people who are agreeing with you in this thread have actually read the mild, polite 4/5 star review you're describing as "disgusting".
In a larger sense, you've not engaged with anything that the review said or that I said. You're just calling opinions disgusting, appalling, demeaning, etc., without actually bothering to disprove the concrete claims being made.
I asked questions in my previous post, and they aren't just rhetorical. You might consider answering them:
"What's the point you're making? Users aren't allowed to have preferences about software they get for free? User experience doesn't matter for free software? Who did you release this software for if not for users?"
Unfortunately, after all my observations of humans over the course of decades, I feel like real empathy is actually pretty rare in humans. It might be common in fictitious characters, but not in real people.
empathy to random humans is rare, empathy to those in your immediate vicinity is not. I suspect the biggest asshole at your work probably has empathy for their family.
The fundamental issue at play here is trying to manipulate language by using the word disgusting to evoke a stronger reaction than is warranted.
At some point you're going to need a stronger word than disgusting because you've watered it down so much. Where do you go?
It sounds good, but a lot of people just aren't mentally equipped for that: some people are fighters, some just aren't. So instead of confronting the assholes and putting up the "wall of shame" like you suggest, they'll just give up and go find another hobby that doesn't result in receiving such vile messages.
The people we're talking about are providing a service for free, with no direct benefit to them. Why would they go into the line of fire for something like that?
It is our collective duty to make sure individuals providing a service to society are treated with respect. If we can't do that then we simply don't deserve their time and effort.
Why would someone who fears crossing photocell doors try it again and again... For years? To overcome the phobia, that's why.
Nah, people need to be brought out of the protecting bubble.
You give money to them, so they have a tangible evidence that their work means something. Not just stars and patting in the back. Time to stop the open source beggar movement.
Regularly having to deal with abusive comments takes a mental toll on you no matter how much of a tough guy you are. Why do you think we're entitled to them not only sacrificing their time, but also their mental heath? Donations on most open-source projects don't even come close to covering the costs of either.
Again, we are not entitled to their services and assholes can and will ruin nice things for all of us.
Not really. Tbh I like to gut these people. Most of those who belittle-berate others are weak people, they compensate for something. Once I give them some treatment, 99% percent backs off, because they don't like the barrage of insults/whatever.
I never said we are entitled for anything. I don't like that oss developers get paid nothing and have to - seemingly - beg for sponsorhip/money. But the open source model was ugly from the get go. You build something up, decide to abandon it, and people fork it, expropriate it, and the original dev is forgotten. They get nothing. The actual guy, who maintains it might get something in the future, but who created the foundation - since he left the project - gets nothing. Ridiculous.
The open source movement/idea is flawed and needs to be changed, that's all.
It's unfortunately been this way for a long, long time. Though it does seem to have gotten more frequent in recent years. I've been running PortableApps.com for nearly 2 decades and, in that time, I've been sworn at, harassed, doxxed, received death and rape threats, etc. My personal favorite was a user who accused me of donating a kidney to my father because I thought I was better than everyone else and to try to garner donations. Despite the fact that I donated it years before PortableApps.com existed. Just this week I had someone mad a meet for not updating an app due to the fact that I am recovering from a concussion.
The common advice to delete toxic people from your life applies to those online as well. I don't think of this as a FLOSS-centric problem. Instead of taking it personally I try to think of a suffering person lashing out at the world attempting to spread misery. Then I hit the delete/block button and move on.
Thank you for your work at PortableApps. Windows isn’t my daily OS but when I get my hands on it from time to time, the apps you pack are what keep me sane.
Every single time I meet one of the developers of an open source project that has benefited me in some way, I always make it a point to tell them "Thank you" and let them know how (and how much) their generosity benefited me, and how much I really appreciate it. I also make efforts to help out in any ways I'm able. Sometimes that's cash (when I've got some available to spare), and sometimes it's just helping out in support channels, or bugreports / pull requests, etc.
Not I, thank you. The folks who create and release open source software (which I myself have not done in many years now). I'm just reacting appropriately to their generosity which is actively contributing to the world being just that little bit better because of their actions / decision. :~)
You and me both. They're the people keeping alive the original "hacker spirit" from "ye olden days" of computers, back when it was all new and exciting to have an actual "home computer" on your desk at home. Almost all software back then was "open source" (though we didn't call it that yet). :P
> I have seen this becoming more and more common on open source projects and totally free services, where people act as if they are entitled to something as if it is their god given right.
Do you count YouTube as a "free service" (with ads) in this case?
I wonder if there is an overlap with people that expect free stuff and people that use uBO on YouTube. YT does offer most users YT premium, which gives users an ad free experience.
Disclosure: I worked at YT in the past, but still pay for premium because I don't want the ads.
I pay for YT premium and Ads are still my #1 complaint about YT.
Partly this is by design, where it seems to decide that a creator having a "merch" ad integration doesn't count as an ad. Which might be understandable (but still not what I want) if merch meant creator's face on a mug, but it also includes products where a home fix it channel will have an overlay of products from Home Depot which is literally just an ad with no caveats (an overlay that obscures the video on Chromecast, it's part of YT UI not embedded in the video).
Though I guess I'm also unclear how often I see that because Premium is buggy and how often it's intentional. Ever since they made YT on Chromecast an "app" it's been a disaster of account state bugs where it also keeps trying to enforce safe mode (which blocks half of everything, including practically any music video) because it says it's not logged in even though I'm trying to cast from a phone that is logged in.
> a creator having a "merch" ad integration doesn't count as an ad.
this is why you also install sponsorblock (https://sponsor.ajay.app/). Only whitelist the channels you want to "support", if you really want to make sure to eyeball the sponsorship (which doesn't really help unless it happens to be a product you actually are interested in buying).
This is the reason I won't pay for youtube red. It doesn't do what it says. It says "ad-free" but only filters some of the ads. It's literally false advertising. It's doubly frustrating because youtube can easily fix it if they want. They would just like the extra money.
If a channel hasn't make any ad/premium revenue yet, Google still has the content for the cost of supporting the upload--i.e. they got it almost for free.
The fact is, Google takes on no risk and does none of the work of creating content, and takes a 45% cut for distribution, and is free to continue changing their terms to make things worse for content creators.
You still have ads despite paying YouTube not to show you ads. They're hardcoded into the videos themselves now. You're also tracked and profiled by Google which is an indignity unto itself.
I think deadmutex is pointing at a bit of irony and hypocrisy at how we're saying it's bad for people to feel entitled to free adblock support (and ask for more) but champion people feeling entitled to free videos by blocking the ads or refusing to pay for no ads.
There is no "entitlement" to videos. They are free. YouTube sends them to us for free. They do so hoping we're gonna look at the ads. We're under exactly zero obligation to actually do that though. It is not at all our responsibility to make their business model work.
Abusing open source developers is the true entitlement.
Another true entitlement is adblock users complaining that YouTube is greedy, etcetera, now that they're actually kicking said users off their site. You (in the general sense) are certainly not responsible for making YouTube's business work, but by a similar token they are certainly not under any obligation to continue serving data to users who don't generate any revenue.
> by a similar token they are certainly not under any obligation to continue serving data to users who don't generate any revenue
Sure. Let's see them return HTTP 402 Payment Required instead of a free video stream then. I'm actually okay with that.
Somehow I doubt they'll ever do that. They want that mass market appeal, don't they? I know it. You know it. Everyone knows it. Just like the "free" apps who do anything in the world to get themselves installed so they can start monetizing.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at here. By all accounts, YouTube is implementing countermeasures that block adblock users from watching videos on their site. What is functionally different between that and returning a 402, especially since you can in fact pay for ad-free YouTube?
Nope. Still free, they just managed to circumvent my browser extension. They're not even supposed to know I have it installed.
They need to either start charging everyone for access or stop complaining. I pay for access to a lot of things but I'm not paying money to avoid ads. I sure as hell am not gonna pay money to watch videos with hard coded ads.
> They need to either start charging everyone for access or stop complaining. I pay for access to a lot of things but I'm not paying money to avoid ads.
Then don't. It's fine. However please don't complain about not being able to get access to the content on Youtube without paying or watching ads.
> I sure as hell am not gonna pay money to watch videos with hard coded ads.
That's up to the content creators, not Youtube. Very few of my subscribed channels use hard-coded apps and if they do they need to make up for it with worthwhile content.
I don't complain. If I see an ad I just close the tab. uBlock Origin and yt-dlp is the only reason I watch stuff on YouTube at all.
> That's up to the content creators, not Youtube.
Their business relationships are not my concern. I'm not paying to watch ads. Maybe YouTube should implement their own Sponsor Block system for the benefit of their paying customers.
Content creators have other revenue streams these days. The ones I enjoy have quite the following on Patreon and other such platforms. Unlike ads, those are perfectly ethical ways to make money and I wish them all the success in the world. They don't even require copyright to work since they don't depend on artificial scarcity.
Expecting that the videos will be free with no qualifiers (such as an ad playing) is also entitlement. Not that you have said that explicitly but that seems to be a common assumption among many adblock users.
YouTube is free to make windows and Mac apps, and turn off their web views.
They're relying on me doing work to run a browser that renders their ads, rather than providing a binary. They're not sending me a page of ads, they're sending me a couple files that I can choose how to show and what to put through a JavaScript interpreter
They're also free to build more serious adblock countermeasures into their website, which is exactly what they're doing now, and people are complaining about it.
As GP said, maybe this is not your position, but it's a common enough one that their comment is not out of line (given that you are the one who replied to them).
>YouTube is free to make windows and Mac apps, and turn off their web views.
I have revanced which edits their binary to remove ads. I don't see what your point has to do with mine though. My point is this: adblock users are grazing from youtube's field. We are eating the grass that youtube has planted and watered. To expect that such a field exists and then to expect that it can be eaten from at will is entitlement. To say "but they put up no fence" (or, more accurately, a weak fence) is not a refutation of this point. In fact it is exactlty what defines it as being a tragedy of the commons.
Ad blockers are free. They’re made available to be downloaded for free. It is not at all our responsibility to make their business model work. Open source developers are entitled.
So you think people watching over-the-air television are morally obligated to watch the ads and not mute them, leave the room, use a DVR to skip them, etc.?
One is the best, most reliable video serving platform on the planet and the other is a scriptkiddie’s project that evidently doesn’t even work and he’s so salty about it that he had to make a post.
The OP is a post by a random person discussing reddit drama. As far as I can tell, the author of uBO isn't involved in any of it.
uBO does work fine, and is easily one of the most valuable pieces of end user software there is. Raymond Hill is very generous and has made a very positive impact on the world.
But I don't understand why this would be annoying at all to the developers. I have absolutely zero conundrum with just ignoring a request if I'm not in the mood to do it.
Most of them I even delete outright, but I still have requests that were sent to me in 00s that I'm keeping just in case one day "I'm in the mood".
And yes, people request (demand!) crazy things, and have done so for decades. There are even "If you don't do it, then $threat" guys. And my area of software is generally industrial/professional....
I mean, you still read them though, right? And you somewhat sort out the ones based on how much of a buffoon the user is? Maybe someone with excellent writing skills and having demonstrated reading all the documentation and FAQs is still asking for help in a respectful and intelligent way, and so maybe you engage.
All of that is mental tax. And it gets tiring, even if you're mostly ignoring the request. It's still tiring even when you're in the mood for it.
Just saying, it's a hard thing and I definitely sympathize for the way which open source / open project / volunteer collaborators get treated.
> Maybe someone with excellent writing skills and having demonstrated reading all the documentation and FAQs is still asking for help in a respectful and intelligent way, and so maybe you engage.
You mean it gets tiring to find the entertaining messages instead of the random trash? Because it doesn't matter how much effort the sender has put, or how intelligent his request/question/contribution/comment is. If I'm not in the mood, I will ignore it. I'm doing it for the fun, not to provide free support, so I will only read stuff that is fun to me. Obviously being an intelligent question is likely to add points, but it's not always the case.
It's not like this is race to see who is the least Torvalds-like of the bunch. It's 100% OK to just ignore everything. The people who complain "I had to moderate comments while my mother was in the hospital!" look like they have an addiction, or a runaway hobby.
I even have an online board for this sort of requests and generally I just read the subject lines. Fortunately for them, once your software is popular enough, a lot of people seem to like to reply to other people's questions, for some reason.
But I know I can't. I'm perfectly fine ignoring the buffoons. But I feel much anxiety over ignoring an insightful request or comment that would benefit both myself and the user if I were to engage.
If I'm passionate about a project (in whatever form of contribution), I definitely want to help people who are genuinely looking for help. The problem is the signal to noise is way out of line, heavy skewed the wrong direction.
For me it's a mental tax to wade through and find the good requests sorting them out from the bad ones. And it causes anxiety to miss the good ones.
> "For me it's a mental tax to wade through and find the good requests sorting them out from the bad ones."
This might be one of those very valid use-cases for an "A.I." / LLM to classify "hostile" messages into some sort of "junk bin" and maybe flag ones it's not entirely certain about for human review. Could fairly dramatically cut down on the garbage hopefully, leaving only the stuff worth reading.
Some people just aren't suited for certain jobs. There's nothing wrong with the person, and there's nothing wrong with the job (in this case, the job "just is").
But why are you working on a project? If it isn't for the money then you are doing it to 'give back to the community'. But if they are turning hostile to you then why continue?
Who is "they"? In the UBO threads I've seen there are about a hundred supportive comments for every entitled dickhead - if that's enough to make you characterise the community as "turning hostile" then you are unlikely to ever be satisfied. Bad and inconsiderate people exist. The sensible thing to do is just ignore them.
I tend to go one step further than "ignore mode" (when I'm not bein' so utterly stupid as to get sucked in and actually respond) and actively block them any and every way that I can so that I never see that person's crap again.
Because you want to see that sort of project exist and if no one else is doing it, why not yourself? That's why I work on (certain) projects anyway, not for any community support or for money.
> "Because you want to see that sort of project exist and if no one else is doing it, why not yourself?"
That right there was my understanding of how most open source projects come into existence. Building a thing because it's a thing you want, and it don't yet exist in the form you're seeking, so ... "I'll just make it myself!" Then you throw it out into the world, because "Hey, why not?"
These services have had years to set up privacy-preserving micropayment systems. Instead they want your PI and a monthly fee, all the while using network effects to create defacto monopolies.
I am talking about free and open source products like ublock origin and not YouTube itself. Entitilement towards youtube can be debated, entitlement toward uBlock origin is just bad behaviour.
If we're going through the hassle of micropayments and other unnecessary beggar stuff, when why rely on some big company to take a cut of the money? Just setup a bank account and host your videos on a simple web hoster. If you're not willing to learn how to use wordpress then don't complain about youtube putting ads.
Ironically, "entitlement towards free services like uBlock origin" is exactly the kind of sentiment that leads to the use of ad-blockers in the first place.
So it can scarcely be surprising that the sorts of people blocking youtube abs because they want the content for free, are the same sorts of people that feel entitled to uBlock Origin's services for free.
If you want youtube's content without ads, then pay for it. If you despise ads, but refuse to pay, then don't watch youtube.
> Ironically, "entitlement towards free services like uBlock origin" is exactly the kind of sentiment that leads to the use of ad-blockers in the first place
Entitlement towards tracking me across the internet and delivering malware is why I use an adblocker.
Why can't I just use an ad blocker? My machine, my choice of what and how I display things on it. You haven't presented any argument why people shouldn't use ad blockers. I suppose the pejorative term "entitled" is supposed to replace the actual argument?
Doesn't the same apply to YouTube then? People who want to block ads are entitled imo. Those people outright refuse to pay or to simply not use the service if they don't like ads. And it enrages so many people when this is pointed out.
Google made a mistake in offering free drive, gmail, Google docs, etc etc. Imagine telling someone in the 90s all the shit we get for free with a couple ads/our data being sold.
People have free will, they should use it, and stop using these services if they don't like ads or want their data sold.
Pay for email instead of your Gmail. Everyone refuses to do this, they'd rather shake hands with a devil and then cry when their soul is taken.
Why does youtube have a paid option to avoid ads but not to avoid the violation of our privacy?
Everyone talks about how no one cares about their privacy and just want free stuff. When the world was signing up for gmail or watching youtube, where was the big click to acceopt that explained the (obscenely unfair) trade users were making?
Entitled? Google is the one that feels entitled to our data.
> Those people outright refuse to pay or to simply not use the service if they don't like ads. And it enrages so many people when this is pointed out.
YouTube used to offer “Premium Lite” which was reasonably priced and only offered ad-free YouTube.
But now Google has shut down that subscription and only offer is one more than twice the price which includes lots of things people don’t want. I can see why some people refuse to pay for that.
> People have free will, they should use it, and stop using these services if they don't like ads or want their data sold.
People have free will, and they should use it the way you want them to?
No thanks, I don't agree to the rules set forth by the ad-supported companies. I think I'll use my free will to install an adblocker.
I don't use Gmail any more, but that's because there are viable alternatives for people with my technical abilities. Not everyone is a software dev. The tradeoffs for most people switching off Gmail aren't acceptable.
When the choices are "conform to what this company wants" or "don't have working email", that's not freedom of choice. Freedom requires real viable alternatives. Only in late-stage-capitalist hellholes like Hacker News is this sort of choice considered freedom.
I literally read someone on HN recently saying that if people didn't want to pay tens of thousands yearly for insulin they were welcome to not, i.e. the choices are pay a pharma company or die. That's a much more extreme example, but it's pretty typical of HN these days.
The way I see it, Youtube feels entitled to get some of my ad viewing time. If they'd pay me 14.95 USD per month, I'd probably watch their ads. But they never made me that offer, they believe I should spend my time to increase their business revenue for free. Not only that, they've convinced tens of thousands of unemployed people to make content for them!
Of course Ublock users think they are entitled to free stuff when the whole point of the tool is getting free access to sites without paying for ad free.
We could apply LLMs to act as an interface with the angry crowd, rephrasing angry comments into constructive criticism and summarizing needs. In turn LLMs could be applied to synthesise development progress and answer the angry crowd. Everyone would be happy.
I'm pretty familiar with scale and open source. Entitled jerks can fuck off. They take away from your passion and those helpful & respectful users. I draw a hard line there - not letting haters get in the way of love.
> I have seen this becoming more and more common on open source projects and totally free services, where people act as if they are entitled to something as if it is their god given right. The people doing public services like uBlock origin can only take so much from the mob.
Only donators should be allowed to review the service and complain then.
> Free. Open-source. For users by users. No donations sought.
> If you ever want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which are available to use by all for free.
The technology that constitutes the internet is fundamentally incompatible with this opinion, despite that businesses would absolutely love if they could convince people otherwise. Trying to prevent me from modifying whatever you send me for my purely private use is mostly infeasible and potentially immoral, regardless of how that simple reality affects your business model.
It is not the user's responsibility to alter their behavior to support a business's strategy. If a video hosting platform is mathematically unsustainable with the number of people who choose to view ads, along with any other sources of income, then that's just the way it is: Unsustainable (However, the answer to the question is: It's sustainable. Leadership just might not like what that means in practice).
It isn't incompatible actually. Remote attestation exists and platforms that allow rampant ad blocking will go the same way as PC gaming did due to rampant piracy and cheating: become a second tier platform that gets some stuff late and other stuff never :(
If your form of payment is running malware, don't be surprised that security software (recommended by the FBI mind you[0]) blocks it. Same as if your form of payment were running a crypto miner or exploiting local IoT devices to set up a botnet.
Don't be surprised also that if your business is distributing malware that people won't be very sympathetic toward you when they take the bait you offer without running the payload.
Aren't ads in YouTube locked down to displaying a video and some plain text you fill into a template. Doesn't sound like a great attack vector. I understand this for shady file sharing sites, but in the case of yt I'm not so sure.
You're implying that my not watching your short video that you sent to me is equivalent to my not paying for a service you just rendered. The fact that this extremist opinion is anything but ultra-fringe is evidence of the deeply greedy, entitled, irrational, antagonistic, dangerous, bully-ish relationship some businesses have with citizens.
The internet is not a platform for exchanging services for the promise that the user viewed a short video. It is a general purpose platform, on which you happen to be able to almost implement said exchange. The fact that it's "almost" is not the user's fault - you are simply trying to do something at odds with the platform you are using. You are free to use a different platform, or adjust your strategy on the current platform in an honest manner. But trying to alter the premise of the internet in order to remove that "almost" is immoral. If you don't feel that way, that's a pretty fundamental disagreement that is likely unreconcilable.
Most Internet traffic happens with the agreement that you watch ads alongside the content you actually want to see. This is not a fringe position, it's the absolute majority of all traffic.
If you don't want to see the ads, you can just not use my service, what's so hard to understand there.
That's actually a mentality that was "bolted on" by the advertising industry after the fact, once they realized how utterly wrong they were about their assertion that "The Internet is just a passing fad. Nobody will ever want to advertise on the Internet." (That's an almost exact quote from a lot of advertising folks I talked to back in the early days of the Internet, when websites were just starting to get popular.) Prior to their involvement in the Internet, it was purely just a network of networks, not a giant global advertising platform. They "jumped on the bandwagon" and corrupted it to their needs, and everyone else's wants and needs be damned, and then they convinced everyone "It's always been that way".
The problem is that for YouTube to get that payment, I have to give them, and other ad networks a major view in to my whole life.
Ad networks are currently scum of the earth, easily giving lawyers a good name.
If ad networks were riddled with crime, invasion of privacy, and other bullshit, people would be much more willing to entertain them.
Today though, they’re obnoxious AND invade your privacy AND may actually just a virus AND are of questionable legality or outright illegal.
It’s not just about funding the platform. You’re not “getting a service in exchange for payment”. Or at least, that is massively understating the behaviour of the scum of the earth ad networks.
> The problem is that for YouTube to get that payment, I have to give them, and other ad networks a major view in to my whole life.
Wait... does that mean, Google could offer "DoubleClick Premuim", where I pay to not see any DoubleClick ads whatsoever, anywhere on the web, but the websites I visited would still get their funding? I think I'd pay $10/mo for that.
Don't fall for that scam. If you pay for such a service, it only increases the value of your attention even further. You're clearly demonstrating you have enough disposable income to pay their extortion fees. It only makes them want sell to you even more. You're paying to segment the market for them.
There is no context where a rational businessman would choose not to advertise to you. Someone will at some point realize they're leaving money on the table and the policy will be reverted.
They have no limits. They'd put ads under our eyelids if they could. In our dreams. The only way to deal with such people is to block their ads unconditionally and with extreme prejudice.
> There is no context where a rational businessman would choose not to advertise to you.
...except, the businessman wanting to show me an advert doesn't have a choice. The website chose DoubleClick; I'm paying DoubleClick not to show me any ads.
Websites that don't choose DoubleClick either get adblocked, or I avoid, thus making less money from me.
There is some expected value that DoubleClick will get from me in the course of a month; that's not infinite, and if it's a reasonable fee (like, $12/mo) then they'll get a lot more from me than if I use an ad-blocker.
Then they realize you're paying about $150 a year to avoid ads. That fact alone increases the value of your attention. Thus you gotta pay them even more money to avoid ads. Which increases the value of your attention further. At some point the value exceeds what you're willing to pay and it's back to ads. Then they start selling your personal information to the highest bidder which includes the fact you have enough disposable income and a willingness to pay not to be bothered. The only possible outcome is rent seekers pouring out of the woodwork to try and grab a little of your sweet disposable income.
The only way to deal with these people is to reduce their profits to zero, not come up with ways to increase them. We simply decide that ads are unacceptable and that's the end of it. They either adapt or die.
> That fact alone increases the value of your attention.
OK, but does it increase my value to more than $150/year? I mean, just how much are people willing to pay for me to see ads?
I mean ultimately, if someone is paying $5 to show me an ad, either they're going to go bankrupt, or it's going to be pretty darn good. If paying $12 once means I'm on the "costs $5 to show this person ads" list, then that's probably still worth it. :-)
Who knows? Maybe if the value of your attention increases too much they'll socialize it among themselves or something. Instead of 1 company paying for an ad slot, 10 of them will band together and pay 1/10th of the cost to share the same slot instead. I'm sure they'll find a way.
Pay-per-view creates a perverse incentive to make SEO noise and make it more difficult to find what you want. You would be mostly paying to make your life worse. Better to just block ads, encourage and help others to block ads, and hope those sites die.
I certainly understand the perverse incentive, but that's already the incentive we're working under. And how do you propose we fairly compensate people for the value they've created when making content? How can we support artists, journalists, and so on to do the work that we enjoy?
If everyone did as you suggest, spammy SEO sites will be the last to die, because the effort invested to make them is so much lower than the effort of quality content.
If they're worthwhile and looking to be paid, you pay them. If they're not worth paying, they go out of business, and SNR improves.
From what I've seen on youtube, almost all professional "content creators" make very shallow entertainment (or thinly veiled ads), which at least personally usually just makes me feel disappointed in myself for having wasted my time if I indulge.
> And how do you propose we fairly compensate people for the value they've created when making content?
> How can we support artists, journalists, and so on to do the work that we enjoy?
We either pay them before the work is completed or in an ongoing manner to support their activities. Patronage. Crowdfunding. Plenty of people seem to be achieving success via platforms like Patreon and GitHub Sponsors. This is ethical.
Google has repeatedly experimented with that. It always fails because the amount advertisers subsidize your internet experience is more like on the order of hundreds or thousands of dollars per month, not ten.
Yep I agree, the ad supported Internet was a mistake and we should never have stopped paying for the services we use. I just hope that these changes will increase people's willingness to pay, then other platforms who aren't owned by the largest ad broker might have a chance.
Attention and personal information are not a valid payment methods. Either charge money up front or accept the risk we're going to delete your ads and block your tracking.
Because our minds are sacred. They're not empty spaces they get to insert brands and products into at will. I consider that a form of violence. Their surveillance capitalism should be literally illegal. They should be scrambling to forget all about us the second we're done transacting with them, not amassing vast amounts of information into data lakes.
As a user, I have a right to control what is executed and rendered on my devices. It's not the user's fault that internet advertisements have become a security threat, a significant visual nuisance, and now an environmental issue [1].
Additionally, for those with neurological issues, I imagine using a browser without content blocking must be unnecessarily difficult. It would be a tragedy if these users lost control over the content rendered in their browser.
Additionally, for those with family members who struggle with discerning scams and other forms of manipulative advertising, content blocking is a legitimate tool for mitigating this risk.
Honest answer, I have no interest in doing that research. I wouldn't know how to make that determination with any degree of confidence. Even if I could, I feel like it would require that I constantly monitor how a site delivers its ads.
Fortunately, I am at a point in my life that if I really like something, and they offer an ad-free subscription, I can support them that way.
While it has ultimately come up in this discussion my honest input is most of the comments I see here evaded the elephant in the room of all of it which is that Google doesn't do a good enough job of vetting the people who advertise with it, its search engines have repeatedly allowed malware to slip through the cracks leading to people being exploited and nothing stops those same malware developers from serving up ads on YouTube with the self same malware and engaging in malvertisement.
"Entitled" came up a lot, but I would have to disagree. Au contraire, YouTube is the one that feels "Entitled" to show me advertisements, even when that feature potentially exposes me to the risk of Malware.
While I agree to an extent, to me the larger issue is that Youtube has become the default video hosting platform with no real competition.
I adblock everything but I am sympathetic to the idea that video hosting costs money. But I watch, on average, less than 1 hour of Youtube videos a month, so paying for Youtube makes no sense. Plus I have issues with privacy (part of the reason I've never created a Youtube account). The videos I do watch on Youtube are short ones for a specific need: e.g., a company showing me how to install their product in an easy way (I'd prefer a write up, but sometimes those are so bad you need to rely on a video), or a simple how-to on changing the battery in X model of car. So when I do need to go to Youtube for something, often its because the video is nowhere else. People don't even think of hosting it elsewhere. I don't watch any long form stuff there, don't listen to music there, etc., so paying for premium makes no sense.
I wish there was a free and open video platform that had a funding model like Wikipedia, where people could upload things that they had no intention of "monetizing".
Especially when youtube's early success was built on piracy. That continued for a long time even after Google's acquisition. Arguably still is a major contributor regardless of Content ID.
Yes, true. Gain traction through piracy to get to an immense size, let everyone use the service for free to grow even larger, introduce ads but only easily blockable ones, then slowly tighten the vise.
I'd say Youtube has distributed unauthorized copyrighted works to FAR more people. Most people have never heard of PirateBay or have any idea what a torrent is.
Pirate Bay websites disappear all the time due to network uptime or just evading copyright cops. Youtube just sits there however, churning out its trove of pirated content and have the gall to throw ads on it.
> But I watch, on average, less than 1 hour of Youtube videos a month, so paying for Youtube makes no sense
What's your issue with having to watch ads if you watch less than 1 hour of video content a month?
> I wish there was a free and open video platform that had a funding model like Wikipedia, where people could upload things that they had no intention of "monetizing"
There's a lot of content on YouTube that people upload that they have no intention of monetizing.
> I wish there was a free and open video platform that had a funding model like Wikipedia
> What's your issue with having to watch ads if you watch less than 1 hour of video content a month?
Moral issues, security issues, etc. These have been discussed in pretty much every thread about adblocking ever, really. I get that you might disagree with them, of course, but no need to rehash the here. I don't even like company logos displayed on my clothing, so you can guess which side of the "how much do you hate ads?" spectrum I'm on.
> There's a lot of content on YouTube that people upload that they have no intention of monetizing.
So on those you never see ads? Hilariously I don't actually know how Youtube works since the only time I've seen ads is when someone who doesn't use an adblocker shows me something (i.e., extremely rarely). Firefox + uBlock Origin (and Adblock Plus before that) has been enough to guard me for as long as I can remember.
> Why don't you or someone else try starting one?
Well, I can't speak for anyone else but I'm a middle-aged historian, so starting a video hosting platform is far beyond my expertise. Though in general asking someone "why don't you just go build it yourself" in response to a complaint about a service, software, or hardware item is a bit trite.
How is blocking ads not a moral issue? Video creators also get hurt by ad blockers, not just YT, which does have costs associated with serving you video.
> So on those you never see ads?
I think they started showing ads on them, just fewer. They do cost storage and bandwidth, so what's wrong with that?
> Well, I can't speak for anyone else but I'm a middle-aged historian, so starting a video hosting platform is far beyond my expertise. Though in general asking someone "why don't you just go build it yourself" in response to a complaint about a service, software, or hardware item is a bit trite
Popular web sites are typically co-founded by non-tech folks. Anyway, what I meant that if you looked into starting one, you'd understand the immense scale of storage and bandwidth costs.
There is a moral issue, you're right. Blocking ads is clearly morally permissible. Blocking ads is equivalent to not locking at billboards and skipping ad pages in a magazine (or tearing the pages out). There is no moral issue with any of that. You've bought a PC, you run whatever software you like on it. You have a right to chose how your machine displays content you download from the net. In turn, the maker of a web page can chose to offer whatever they want. If they need more money, then they can transmit the content only if you pay. That's perfectly feasible and reasonable. What they cannot and should be able to decide is how your machine displays their content and what kind of other software you use on your machine.
I believe that - if at all - only tightly controlled government authorities should be allowed to force display messages on end user machines, and if so, only in severe emergencies and for the protection of civilian lives.
People in this debate sometimes argue based on costs and money lost from ad revenue. These are business discussions that have no place in the moral evaluation at all. Not every business model works. So what, find another business model, is the answer.
Blocking ads is not morally permissible. Charging ads by the display is.
Any ad should charge the user by ad displayed or attempted to display, not by click or any other way. Just as TV advertisement. If the user goes to make a sandwich, skip it or remove the sound the ad should still be charged to owner of the ad.
Do you have any arguments for this opinion or is it an expression of a personal moral sentiment?
My argument why ad blocking is morally permissible is that it's a matter of the end users personal freedom if and how they display content from remote servers. They should be allowed to use a hex editor, plaintext, braille, TTS, a browser with or without ad ons, etc., and must be allowed to modify the content for their display purposes as they wish as long as they don't redistribute it. That's even a central idea of the HTML specification. There are also plenty of analogies to similar freedoms, for example if I buy a magazine (or get it for free) I can tear out ad pages and use them to fire my stove.
Redistribution is another matter and concerns copyright, but I just can't see any reason why the maker of a web page ought to have a right (or even feel entitled) to control my machine and how the data they voluntarily send to my machine is displayed on it. It's not as if anyone forces them to send the data in the first place.
I don’t have any kind of business relationship or agreement with content creators. This is their problem and YouTube’s problem.
I only deal with YouTube, which sends video streams to my computer for free, and I’m exercising my right to decide what I want to play on my own computer that I own.
More and more content creators are getting their income through sponsorships and referrals, anyways, as they feel the squeeze of YouTube’s exploitative and predatory behaviour.
Yes but, how are the content creators my problem, especially when Google isn't vetting their ads well enough to keep scam and malvertising people off their and networks. I could raise you to counter that the morally right thing to do is block those ads, at least until Google starts vetting its advertisers well enough to keep scammers out. How do content creators feel, profiting from the scamvertising going on on google's platforms?
As they said, you aren't breaking new ground by asking these questions. Maybe bring yourself up to the state of the art of this debate etc. and contribute to that discussion wherever it is
> What's your issue with having to watch ads if you watch less than 1 hour of video content a month?
Why should I be forced to watch something I don’t want to watch? Google sends my computer a stream of “[ad][ad][content]”. It’s my own damn choice which parts of that to watch.
There are several instances, but that is not the solution to what the parent comment is pointing out. Videos are being published on YouTube because of network effect; it has become the defacto platform.
I ditched Chrome after a Google ad hijacked the browser and attempted download malware onto my device. If you value your own security you absolutely should be using a browser with support for ad blocking extensions. At the same time Google must be held criminally liable for the massive amounts of fraud their ad business facilitates.
Yup, this is exactly why I installed ublock origin on my grandparents computers. Malware and scams are too prevalent across the web, and unfortunately, google SERP and Youtube aren't immune.
Youtube's home page seems to always have, at the top, some kind of get-rich-quick video advertisement when I (rarely these days) visit it. Far from trying to improve on this, it feels as if Google/YT are actively trying to normalise scam advertising. I just cannot support that, at all, ever.
If Google has no mechanism to prevent their platform from being used by scammers, I feel it's my responsibility that their platform doesn't reach my screen, lest I, or my family members fall for a scam - which can be psychologically damaging beyond the potential financial damage.
I've mentioned before that this isn't a problem Google are inspired to solve, since their current advertising scheme successfully scales to the size of the Web. However, appropriately policing advertising to ensure scams don't get through would seriously affect the ability to scale. And it's the scaling that makes the billions.
Regulate Internet advertising the same way television advertising is regulated.
I don't understand. Youtube is not forcing you to watch their videos, and that they show ads is an information you are already aware of before watching them. So I don't understand how it is YouTube's "Entitlement".
Even if the advertising were perfect in every way I'd run ad-block.
you don't get free access to my time, there will never be a point where I'm willing to spend time watching an advertisement or sifting through advertisements looking for real content.
I haven't watched television regularly since the mid-90's specifically due to the commercials, I'll be damned if I'm going to do it online.
And I don't give a shit if you think I'm entitled or not, it's my time not yours.
Look if YouTube red was still a thing I'd pay for it. I really hate youtubes suggestions and shorts need to go away but charging me extra for YouTube music isn't an incentive it's a deterrent.
At a certain scale, you can no longer say "it's just business".
YouTube is where people go to post and upload videos. YouTube has a dominant place in the market and in people's minds.
Does it cost money to run? Yes. Does Google deserve to have those costs covered? Yes. Should Google be entitled to abuse their dominant position? Certainly not.
I do feel bad for who high-quality creators are not able to make ends meet, but I have zero sympathy for a business the size of Google.
> At a certain scale, you can no longer say "it's just business".
Of course you can. Me blocking ads is just business. It's nothing personal.
Them blocking my blocking is also just business. Me blocking their blocking is likewise just business.
Either they'll give up or I'll give up. Whichever happens, that content will make less money.
IOW, the money that content is making right now is exactly what the market will bear.
If too many people stop watching because they can't block the ads then content producers have to decide to migrate, to stay and make exactly what their product is worth, or to simply stop producing.
It's purely business for all parties involved, including the product i.e. viewers.
> Does it cost money to run? Yes. Does Google deserve to have those costs covered? Yes
Those are not the terms of the implicit (and somewhat explicit) deal Google/YT originally offered.
Any and every net pundit and idiot pointed out at the start that any video hosting system that became as successful as YT said it wanted to be (and has become) would cost a fortune to provide.
YT could have said from the start "once this scales beyond <small scale> we'll need to charge <X> because the only alternative to that are ads". But they never said that, they just gave us ads even if we didn't want them.
Color me too unsympathetic, Frankly I've been stream ripping them with yt-dlp for quite a while now. I'm motivated to do more of that now.
It's one thing if Google were demanding I watch their ads to get the free video in exchange, but it is not an honest broker, because it doesn't vet the people it allows to advertise with it thoroughly enough to prevent scams and everything else from slipping through.
And frankly i'm taking a moral stand as well by blocking their ads, I refuse to allow Google to profit off of scammers in my or my families name.
This is false logic. Youtube is free to not show anyone anything - once they send me data and it leaves their system, they have no claim to it.
When I shout on a public street "sing me the Francoise Hardy version of I'll Be Seeing You," no one has to reply. If they do reply, but they decide to sing a 2 minute ad for a pyramid scheme first, I am free to cover my ears till the song comes on.
Google's servers have a public internet IP. I can "shout" a request to them. The data they send back to me, is mine to do with as I please. I am free on My computer, from the memory buffer on a RAM stick I own, to ignore some of the bytes, in My RAM change some of the bytes, or save some of the bytes to a file on my HDD. They are free to ignore any request I shout at them, but they have zero say in what I do on equipment they do not own.
> Youtube is free to not show anyone anything - once they send me data and it leaves their system, they have no claim to it.
Okay well they're about to not show you the videos. You support their latest announcement right? It is completely in line with the the philosophy you just put forward.
Not really. They're still showing people videos for free. Only difference is they're detecting the ad blocker and discriminating. That's a bug, they're not supposed to know about the blocker.
If you read the entire comment before replying to the comment, you would have your answer before you asked the question.
"They are free to ignore any request I shout at them"
I don't have any opinion on, nor care about their latest announcement to do with their hardware as they please. Their announcements are theirs and of no concern of mine. It's just a random website the has content duplicates available at a hundred more places. Bing video search has fifty times more results than youtube for example for any item I search.
Given that, of course, they're always going to show me their videos, because about a day after whatever change they make, software (that runs on my computer against my data) will catch up. They've made changes like this many times over many years. For about a week awhile ago the ads were not blocked and I stopped clicking youtube videos and just typed the title into bing and in 5 seconds played the same video from another source. Worked 100% of the time.
Sorry if that's not the gotcha you were going for.
>because about a day after whatever change they make, software (that runs on my computer against my data) will catch up.
Exactly: it just takes one bored or determined hacker to investigate their changes and update the ad-blocking software, and suddenly everyone is able to see the videos and block the ads again. The ad-blockers don't seem to have trouble keeping people around to do this work.
> they are free to ignore any request I shout at them
Exactly. That's why they're blocking ad-blocker users now. You're describing the exact thing they are doing and going to do more. Guess you're actually supporting Youtuber's policy.
A lot of absurd moralizing here about "you're stealing by not watching ads".
I keep adblock on for most sites because ads are so intrusive and often malware vectors. If advertisers want my eyes they need to not be obnoxious.
I started blocking YouTube ads in particular because it kept serving me ads that were brazenly homophobic ("how gross and smelly is gay sex? Find out!")
I feel no moral problem with this, if you do then your priorities are bad, IMO.
Edit: as a counter example, ubo doesn't seem to work on Twitch but I have never attempted to find a different solution as it has never run ads worse than the usual "lying about how good a product is" you always get with marketing. Further, I don't see them very often because the channels I watch the most I buy subscriptions.
We saw similar things with The Voice referendum recently.
When someone has paid to manipulate society en masse, and there are no more targeted controls to stop the content being forced on you available, why is anyone surprised people choose to filter that?
... and Australia has (had maybe?) pretty good rules around television advertising. I mean, at least it's a good way up the logarithmic scale from internet advertising standards anyway.
P.S. I use Clive Palmer's advertising as a useful data point for what not to support, so it's not a total waste.
That's a really good point about Twitch ads. I leave Twitch ads enabled for channels I regularly watch and I cannot recall seeing any malware or scam ads. Some can be annoying (especially if it queues the same ad 3 times in a row), but they're all from legitimate companies offering legitimate products and services.
Twitch ads have no chill, not that others do either but...
They run at different volumes than streamers. They run over streamer's content. They run pre-roll ads so you can't "flip channels". If I accidentally reload the page or the Twitch video player crashes, pre-roll ad. The ads aren't related to the steamers and streamers don't get to tell Twitch to not play a certain ad during their stream. I can pay $10 a month for Twitch Turbo but that just promotes ad revenue over subbing.
I bought 4 six month subscriptions to some of my favorite streamers in September for about $80. My internet costs $69.99 so that's kind of a bargain.
The pre-roll has basically stopped me using Twitch entirely now. Just last week I checked out an sub I used to subscribe to, immediate pre-roll for 1 minute and I was out.
i have never found myself to be in agreement with any ads. That is just how it works. I don't like alcohol ads. I don't like ads that start off with one topic, get viewer's interest, and then switch topics (geico, progressive). I don't like ads that advertise holiday travel with barely clothed women (what's driving the sales?). I don't like clickbait ads.
If we were to work off of morals, commerce and morals don't go hand in hand.
So going back to topic, is it moral to block the ad and stop the revenue to a content creator? The content creator should not be getting revenue from alcohol companies or companies that profit off of intoxication. But everything else? No restrictions.
The moralizing is a bit pointless since every big tech company is trying to monopolize and lock-in users as much as possible. It's just the old blitzscaling enshitification cycle. They have deep enough pockets to subsidize the cost until monopoly status is achieved. Pot meet kettle.
The time and money I save by using ad blockers, I use for helping other people, the world, the environment. I don't feel morally guilty for blocking adds.
I use NewPipe on my phone, SmartTubeNext on my Android TV, and uBlock+FF inside of a container without being logged in on my laptop.
I was at a friend's house yesterday and they showed me a video on YouTube. I couldn't believe how many ads there were. It was unwatchable. Not sure how people don't pay for premium or block ads. What a miserable experience.
> uBlock+FF inside of a container without being logged in on my laptop
Would love to see more newbie guides (perhaps videos hehe) on how to set this up.
> couldn't believe how many ads there were. It was unwatchable.
I'd go further, a single ad makes it unwatchable for me. That includes on work computers where I'm not (and can't) logged into my google account to access paid youtube without ads.
At a glance, the linked extension uses Firefox native containers, like the Facebook container it forks. All it does is assign the site to a container, so the user doesn't have to do it manually.
Not the GP but I spend very little time on YouTube. Even me binging YouTube is watching maybe one or two videos in a row. I hate YouTube ads because they're usually worse than the most obnoxious TV ads with blaring audio or just obnoxious content.
I don't watch YouTube enough that Premium is anywhere close to worth the money. So I happily block ads and will drop YouTube in a second if they block me for using an ad blocker.
They'd be better off limiting the quality of streams to ad blockers. By blocking those users YouTubers lose paid placement online advertising.
> I hate YouTube ads because they're usually worse than the most obnoxious TV ads with blaring audio or just obnoxious content.
It's the absolute bottom of the barrel, too. AI voices pitching scam colon cleanses and scam detox shakes, and yes everything is LOOOOUD and interruptive. At least on network TV, the content has natural pauses for ads, but on YouTube they just shove em in whenever. Nothing quite like listening to quiet ambient or classical piano music and then all of a sudden some giant, roided-out asshole is screaming at me: "LET ME HELP YOU GET RRRRRRRIPPED AT THE GYMMM!!!"
I have no ethical qualms about blocking that shit.
You can manage where mid-rolls are placed, but that requires the uploader to actually care enough to carve out natural pause points and then specify them as manual ad breaks in YouTube studio.
Most just rely on the auto-ad placement, which claims to intelligently place them in natural breakpoints, but in practice is absolutely terrible at it.
Whenever uBlock crashes and gets auto-disabled by Chrome, I'm always impressed by the sheer dearth of quality ads. Gone are the days of soda ads and movie trailers, now YouTube just serves up some TTS portrait video with the camera barely in focus talking about the most mind-numbing scam products imaginable, an Evangelical church talking about how Trump is the second coming of Christ (which feels like a pretty blatant violation of the first commandment, and probably also the second, but hey, I'm an apostate, so what would I know...), or just straight up MLM pitches.
> Nothing quite like listening to quiet ambient or classical piano music and then all of a sudden some giant, roided-out asshole is screaming at me: "LET ME HELP YOU GET RRRRRRRIPPED AT THE GYMMM!!!"
To expand on this I find ads are even on random videos. So you might get one video with no ads followed by a video that has mid-roll ads. There's no rhyme or reason to it. There's no clear expectation set that a video is going to have ads or not, let alone their super obnoxious ads. Ads on YouTube are a total shit show.
There's no aspect of YouTube that makes me think "damn I should watch more YouTube" and certainly nothing that makes me think I should pay for it. It seems everything YouTube does is try to drive me away by being frustrating. Maybe they are because I've fallen into some A/B test group that makes the YouTube experience too obnoxious to use.
Not OP, but I prefer to watch ads instead of subscribing to Premium, but not because I do not want to pay, rather because being logged in implies more tracking and personalization. I prefer it stateless.
As the dev of a macOS app that breaks all the time because of external hardware, the tone of the article hits close to home. (I’m talking about https://lunar.fyi/ whose brightness control commands can be blocked by USB-C hubs, “smart” monitors, too long cables etc.)
I had to disable public GitHub issues on the app repo [1] because people seemed to fuel each other with spiteful comments and “why can’t you just!!” sentences.
The contact form still attracts many such “entitled” people and it hurts to wake up to such messages, but at least I can choose to ignore those if I can’t bring anything to the discussion. There’s no peer pressure.
These people are expecting too much from a handful of developers who are sharing a lot of free work and time that could have been spent better than hunting new IDs in URLs and updating regular expressions.
I believe that FOSS maintainers should jump to the public showroom of providing open source software with a much stronger mentality of quoting and adhering to the license more frequently. That solves a lot of the user entitlement, in my experience. Just like a proprietary software provider would first try to be helpful but otherwise point to some rules that limit their responsibility.
Paraphrasing most if not all of the open source licences, the software is provided with no guarantee, not even with a promise that it will be fit for any purpose. Most users don't even think of the possibility that, given how the source code is offered, private contractors can be hired to make whichever modifications are deemed useful by anyone. I like to remind that to people who get too insistent.
That's basically a less lazy reply form of "just fork it", but it tends to draw the line pretty well. Just quote the license, folks. Otherwise, people usually don't bother to read it.
To be honest I sometimes (rarely) do get heartfelt messages like these, and it’s what still keeps me working on apps. Sure, it feels ok to sell a bunch of licenses and get a few thousand dollars at the end of the month, but it feels so much better to see your hard work appreciated and people improving their lives with it.
This ad block debate makes me think about patio11’s post “The optimal amount of fraud is non zero”. Essentially in trying to make a system as fraud-free as possible you make it too difficult to work with / the cost of fighting fraud is higher than the cost of the fraud.
Ads vs Ad Blockers seem to be in that space, but on the cost of customer good will. Can YouTube squeeze more money from ads by doing this? Sure. Is it worth the customer anger? Maybe?
> patio11’s post “The optimal amount of fraud is non zero”.
Thanks, I just skimmed this post. It seems to me that "optimal" is substituting for "cost effective". The optimal amount of fraud is always zero, it's just not cost effective given the existence of people willing to go to lengths to commit fraud.
> Can YouTube squeeze more money from ads by doing this?
The third option is that this would incentivize a portion of the viewership to purchase Youtube Premium. Netflix seems to be benefiting with the same strategy.
It's not just cost effectiveness. It's about how awful you will make the user experience for real users if you tried to bring fraud truly to 0. It's essentially the security-convenience tradeoff. In terms of YouTube, it's the monetization-experience tradeoff.
Yes, because the corporations are optimizing for cost effectiveness (return on sales or return on investment).
Corporations don't care what the user experience is for its own sake. They care about keeping and retaining paying users. After a point they don't bother making the user experience better, because it isn't cost effective to do so.
But cost effectiveness makes it sound like you can fix it by throwing money at it. The point is that you cannot fix it, even with infinite money, because you will reach zero users before you reach 0 fraud.
The way to fix it with infinite money is to have individual human curators (concierge services) for every customer. This eliminates fraud and makes a very, very easy-to-use "user interface" when the human concierges are well trained.
Regardless, even if I'm wrong with "cost effective", the word still isn't "optimal".
However well trained they may be, humans are notoriously easy to manipulate and engineer around. Humans in a customer service role especially, since they are by definition expected to be helpful by default.
> This is not a hypothetical. In many healthcare systems, that is the approximate timeframe for medical practice, doctors are amongst the most expensive and selectively educated service professionals on the planet, and can still be readily hoodwinked by a bad faith approach.
Yes, because they are trained, licensed, and incentivized to place other things above fraud detection or customer service itself. I was literally discussing with the other person about Youtube, for which 5 - 10 years of training is sufficient to train a concierge and still leave 4.5 - 9.5 years dedicated to fraud detection and prevention.
People complain about health care all of the time, yet most of them still come back to it. The threshold for flouncing due to bad user interface is a lot higher than for Youtube.
If they're paid enough you can select for humans with superior talents and, at least as important, training. Heck, with infinite money you could have them train for 5 or 10 years before ever having a real-case person to interact with.
I think part of the problem here is a mistaken interpretation on my part. I was thinking of "optimal" in terms of an ideal society in which no fraud takes place. I think the article writer was thinking of "optimal" in terms of optimizing the solution to a problem given the constraints and freedoms of current society.
The willingness and ability of people to commit fraud is not a constant. It's highly variable depending on social context. The more you allow fraud also changes society to accept more fraud, which is a vicious circle.
More than 10% of telemetry-enabled Firefox users worldwide use adblockers. In Poland it's 15%. In the United States, Germany, and Russia it is closer to 20%, and in France it is closer to 30% [1].
But Firefox is under 5% of browser market share (generous estimates still seem to put it under 5%—the low-side estimate is closer to 2.5%) and its users are almost-certainly far more likely than most to use ad blockers.
Do you want to pretend-argue with me, or to positively assert that Edge, Chrome, and Safari users ad block at a rate similar to Firefox users? This is silly.
Most users have never even heard of Firefox. I just installed it on someone's phone yesterday, along with uBO; they had never heard of it before, but were very excited about being able to watch YouTube without ads. My social circle isn't very large, so me helping occasional non-technical users install FF+uBO on their phones isn't going to affect the numbers very much.
Even in the tech company I work in (not an adtech company), most people use Chrome, not Firefox.
Germany, mostly older users. We had a manual HEAD request to our google ads script for a while where we’d log the results (successful: yes/no). 30-35% blocked ads.
Statista has a pretty nice writeup available here. [1] Granted some of the data is going to be contradictory, because they are an aggregator and not a source. So for instance in one section they claim the overall rate of ad blocking in the US is 26.4%, yet in another section their data suggests 30% of mobile users are blocking ads, while 51% of desktop users are. Pretty hard to see how that adds up to 26.4% overall.
Regardless of the noise in the data, it at least seems clear that whatever the number is - it's way above 10%, and growing. This is probably why YouTube is willing to go to war with their users over it, one of the very few things Google has ever done that could directly imperil one of their monopolies. Potentially driving off a substantial number of your users at the time when there are more viable alternatives than ever is a quite a bold move. Let's see how it plays out.
I suspect they also want to push users onto YouTube Premium, since they are offering a free trial when you click through from the banner. (At least, this is the route that I took as a user.)
dont ask for tech support on this particular problem, and instead just wait for an update. It's unlikely that any report from any user is going to add nor be helpful anyway.
Neither side is wrong. Youtube has every right to try as hard as it can to get users to view ads. And users have every right to try as hard as they can to block those ads.
I don't have a right to ad-free youtube, but I do have every right to try and control what things get sent to and viewed on my computer. If I (and people like me) are abundant enough and succesful enough, then youtube and other services will be forced to abandon an ad-supported model. I'm personally ok with that.
But as long as they are attempting to pursue ad revenue, I'm going to try and avoid those ads, for a host of reasons.
I'm less sure that humanity is incapable of finding another way to foster the creativity and the education/entertainment value the world gets out of youtube. I'd love to see us try and only go back to advertising if that is indeed the only/best way.
Yes ad-supported YT is "free" of direct cash payment, but how much do we (society) "pay" in form of thoughts that we wouldn't have had where it not for an advertiser to force it onto us. I sometimes wonder if advertising is a kind of corruption and will be outlawed / considered inhumane at some point in the future.
It would be a great benefit to society if it weren't free. It would stimulate competition in the space, allow varied ideas to thrive as different media ecosystems and market research models could flourish. The few entities in control of marketing at large are in control of what free thought is perceived to be acceptable or preferred in society regardless of whether or not it reflects any truth about how we actually feel about anything.
The above causes people with extreme ideas to feel a sense of entitlement towards specific political stances which breeds intolerance towards opposing views, which leads towards greater political divisiveness. All of those things are in opposition to the values of a society based on sharing ideas and critically thinking about political issues.
They'll have your data regardless if you pay for the service or not. And nothing is free, they need to pay for the service, now, if you do pay for the service they should enable more privacy.
> if you do pay for the service they should enable more privacy.
They're never doing that.
I pay for ad-free Kagi search. I'd pay for an ad-free YT competitor. It would need to be run by someone other than Google though since I'd never trust them if they said they were giving me more privacy.
For the educational side of YouTube, Nebula is great. The platform is very robust (it streams HD video at 2x speed with no difficulty), and it's run by the guy behind one of the largest educational youtube channels. Most of the great educational options are available there, and creators even strip out sponsorships before uploading, so you're getting a truly ad free experience.
Google does not sell your data. Your data is their most valuable weapon, they use it to target ads. They wouldn't sell it for anything, it's more valuable to them to hold it.
How's that? Its algorithm is not exactly making the world a better place. It's filled with propaganda from all corners of the political spectrum with about zero responsibility.
But there is also TikTok, which is even worse. So yeah, in that way you could be right.
If only we could pay for the things we use, and only that.
YouTube has been such a big boon to the world in helping people learn. The amount of people who have learnt several skills from YouTube enabling them to make a living is very very large. I know several people who had non STEM education and taught them CS via YouTube and went on to have good SWE careers. Whole of MIT OCS is hosted on Youtube. All of Khan Academy videos are also hosted on Youtube.
They could be hosted elsewhere. Why should free education material that is already funded by donations be locked behind ad based hosting? Hosting is not that expensive if you're using only those services. Especially in the countries where it's mostly being used.
I've personally run servers for several businesses in the streaming education space. And one business that serves over 40,000 concurrent connections. The entire business fits into 1.5 racks at a local DC. The monthly cost is under $5,000 for the service, space, and cooling.
There is an initial cost to purchase some servers, switches, etc.
I'd be surprised if Khan academy had much more than that many active connections.
It's really just not that expensive, no matter how much AWS wants to sell you on that falsehood.
What do you mean funded by donations? People making educational YouTube videos have their income from YouTube advertising and Premium subscribers. People having utility from their videos should pay for them.
I find it incredible that people accept and support enormous amounts of tax money from workers go to pay for worthless schools, while at the same time they are grinding their teeth at the suggestion that they pay a few dollars for incredibly well made educational videos.
Why does the screeching teacher or professor deserve a high monthly salary, good job security and a good pension, while the person making educational videos that improve people's lives all over the world deserve to have her videos pirated by hackers?
See the post I was replying to.
Khan Academy, MIT free courses, etc.
Those are in fact funded by donations. If you check the viewership numbers on individual course videos, it is unlikely they are generating a positive revenue from YouTube payouts.
As for being upset that people don't want to pay, I think I can help with that. People don't want to pay TWICE. We already donated to Khan or MIT. Why are we also paying YouTube to obfuscate FREE content?
Khan should choose a different method of delivery. YouTube is not a proper platform for educational videos.
Those are but two of thousands of channels publishing educational videos. The vast majority of them are dependent on money from YouTube for their income. Would Khan or MIT be able to host and deliver their videos at a price that would make it worthwhile to ditch YouTube, or would that take away donator money from other functions?
It allows all of those channels to join a competing platform that's better suited for education, rather than piggy backing on a platform built for watching nonstop cat videos. Education and YT are not remotely good for each other.
Imagine that college is free, and you're studying to become a doctor. Every seven minutes during your O. Chem lecture, Kanye West jumps in front of the professor to tell you how much he likes Pepsi.
It's the wrong platform.
> a platform built for watching nonstop cat videos.
And who are you to decide that YouTube should be for cat videos and not high quality educational and documentary videos? On our family TV we have YouTube subscribed to a lot of documentary and educational channels. Recommendations are consistently of the highest quality. On my FreeTube I have other subscriptions to more immersive quality scientific and crafts videos. There is no other platform where videos like these are published.
Who are you to come and say that these videos shouldn't be on YouTube and that these creators shouldn't get paid from me watching their videos? How does our use infringe on yours?
You might as well say that serious debate or business should not be conducted online, because everybody knows the internet is for porn and Minecraft.
There has been a silent revolution lately on YouTube as to the offering of high quality content. Things aren't how they used to be.
>Who are you to come and say that these videos shouldn't be on YouTube and that these creators shouldn't get paid from me watching their videos? How does our use infringe on yours?
I'm me. I'm the world's leading expert on my own opinion. If you watch enough YouTube, you might become an expert on someone's opinion, but likely not on mine.
Your use doesn't infringe anything. Please check that you've responded to a comment relevant to your defensive take on the situation. My comment, again, is in regards to Khan Academy, a 501c venture.
Residents of third world countries can use it in place of a university education, since they don't have one.
In short, I don't think you're on topic. But, maybe I'm the one that didn't understand.
Does your family use YouTube in place of a university education, but you'd prefer to watch ads than to have donors from wealthier nations pay to remove them for you?
If you answered yes, I'm intrigued. Please continue. If not, you're probably off topic and needlessly defending against a point I'm not making.
I might have missed something, but going through the parent comments, I didn't see any mention of Khan Academy before you mentioned it in a reply to my post. So to me the topic is about educational videos in the broad sense, not about Khan Academy specifically.
> Does your family use YouTube in place of a university education, but you'd prefer to watch ads than to have donors from wealthier nations pay to remove them for you?
No, I pay for YouTube premium for my family. The price is a bargain and creators get paid better for the things we watch. Yes, I 100% use YouTube in place of a university education, because I don't have any interest in getting degrees in astronomy, middle eastern politics, law, archeology etc. Not to mention the knowledge you can educate yourself on with YouTube that isn't available within academia.
ipfs or torrents integrated into the browser. The "sharing economy" and p2p were huge back before corporations figured out how to get it under control and corral people back onto centralized, ephemeral streaming platforms.
Instead of a "like" people could give a video a pin, and then they'll have their own offline copy as long as they want it, and also help share it.
I think the bigger issue with p2p nowadays is the move to portable devices. The majority of people nowadays are on phones if not laptop and tablets. P2P has the user giving up their storage, battery life, and data. It works fine in more niche applications, but it'll never be mainstream.
It's probably not even possible on iOS devices because of the limitations in background processes.
My phone is linked to my desktop and can send tabs. No reason it couldn't proxy p2p connections (and pins) though my desktop. Or more generally torrent/ipfs gateways could be a thing people pay for (or ISPs might offer to reduce their own transfer costs by caching popular content), making it easy for mobile users while keeping the fundamental technology distributed. Mobile devices could also pin directly to cloud storage.
There's a massive design space here if we didn't already have google dumping on the market. Or if we didn't allow media companies (who don't want p2p) to monopolize providing Internet service. And if government subsidies and spectrum licenses came with an ipv6 mandate so we could ditch NAT.
If you are talking about educational content for the entire world, I would argue that it's a significantly smaller achievement, than a service where everyone is watching cat videos all night.
Free education is a niche market for a niche audience.
YouTube is hardly the correct platform for that.
> How's that? Its algorithm is not exactly making the world a better place. It's filled with propaganda from all corners of the political spectrum with about zero responsibility.
I think this is true, but youtube is also a platform where people can share video content with a big chunk of the internet connected world for zero money. I think that's pretty cool, particularly when I think about all the small accounts I follow whose content just wouldn't be available without youtube (or a similar platform).
Nah, rubbish. We've been able to do high quality video with P2P protocols for decades at this point. We have the bandwidth and the storage just sitting there. The only reason we haven't developed a system like YouTube is because we have YouTube. But take YouTube out of the picture and we're very ready for something like Wikipedia for videos.
Let's not forget that just 20 years ago we didn't even have a free encyclopaedia. I'm assuming, of course, when you talk of a "devastating loss" you mean the educational videos not the brain rotting shite like "Mr Beast" or hours upon hours of gameplay footage.
Then the solution for you is extremely simple: Do not go to youtube.com
Then you won't have to be bothered by any videos that people made with the expectation of being paid.
But what are you doing in a discussion about YouTube? You're free to make as many videos as you please and share them by P2P. YouTube is a partner for video creators for distributing their videos. You are not in that partnership in any way.
As I explained in another comment, YouTube is not that. Netflix is that. Patreon is that.
YouTube is something different. It's more like Wikipedia to many people.
Believe me when I say if I could avoid YouTube I would. They've made it abundantly clear they don't want people like me. But what choice do I have when the vast majority of stuff is uploaded there? It's like saying "just stop breathing if you don't like air pollution".
I don't care about technicalities. I care about practicalities. YouTube can either be the free public repository of videos or it can be private like Netflix and facilitate payments between consumers and creators. Not both.
If this were about YouTube's costs then they could charge creators for hosting and bandwidth costs. If I set up a website, I pay for it, not you. Why should video be the other way around?
YouTube knows it needs to attract creators by being the free, public platform with one hand, but as soon as it gets that content it uses it to extract money from users with the other.
Any of these things would be good:
* YouTube goes private like Netflix,
* YouTube acts like a video host and charges uploaders for the service like any other web host,
* YouTube accepts they are like Wikipedia and cuts their costs by using technology like P2P and/or make the market absorb the costs by negotiating better peering deals (ie. push the bandwidth costs on to internet subscribers).
But masquerading as the free, public internet video platform then expecting to get paid for it by users who now have no other choice? Forget it.
YouTube attracts creators by giving them free hosting as well as paying them. If you've thought of YouTube as a Wikipedia, you've had the wrong impression. But how can you continue with the wrong impression while being aware that they don't want people like you?
Paid and ad-supported video has been around for decades, there's nothing strange about it. If you're used to going to the soup kitchen for free meals, few are going to sympathize when you're going to the restaurant of your choice and demand free meals. "But they don't have the salad that I like at the soup kitchen, I have no other choice!". Maybe the restaurant should start charging the chefs for their usage of kitchen equipment so that you can get the free meal of your liking? Maybe it's their fault for letting you in and now they owe you a free meal? They could have been members only like the fancier restaurant on the other side of town.
You are offering a "solution" to a sentence taken out of the larger context. Poster is arguing for a platform for videos that are not made for payment.
It's not a given that YouTube would be lost. For example, I could see a world where it was collectively 'nationalized' by the UN, made ad-free and accessible to all.
I have YouTube Premium. But I worry that once a substantial portion of the user base goes Premium, they'll also start to slip in ads. I think the ad business has made everyone who cares paranoid.
There's plenty of precedent for this. Amazon has said they'll be introducing ads on Prime Video, where everyone has already paid for the service. I've seen ads on other already-paid-for services too. The simple fact is that business people will always want more ads everywhere, no matter how much it degrades the customer experience, because extra revenue is easier to measure than customer disgust. In their personal lives they probably hate ads as much as we do, but a fatter paycheck can buy a lot of hypocrisy.
This is such a huge downside with subscription services in general. The product itself can change right under your nose and there's nothing you can do about it but cancel. First I was paying to filter out content, now I'm paying for access? That's a totally different thing that I didn't agree to.
If you frame it in a different context it sounds ridiculous. "Actually we're getting out of the video streaming business and just mailing you postcards that we think look neat. Still charging you the same rate every month, though."
No, Google still is an ad company. I do not want my identity and payment info tied to my watch history. I do not trust Google to not use my data for monetization outside of youtube (e.g., selling my 'anonymized' user persona to data aggregators). Hence, using a google account to get youtube premium is not an option.
> I do have every right to try and control what things get sent to and viewed on my computer.
I agree with your statement but I'm not sure how it applies to ads. I hate ads as much as the next person, but blocking them is kind of like using the service and refusing to pay for it.
There are two proper ways to not see ads on Youtube. You can either pay for Youtube premium, or not watch Youtube videos.
There are legitimate reasons to block ads, like preventing tracking. But if you're blocking ads because you think the service you're using isn't worth letting them through, then don't use the service?
When a website actually tells me that I can't use it with an ad blocker, then I leave and don't come back. I don't have an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker, there's no technical barrier to detecting my ad blocker and responding accordingly.
Until that happens, I'm forced to assume that the service actually does get enough value from my attention that it's not worth it to them to lose my business (such as it is), and I am certainly not going to voluntarily subject myself to ads that aren't actually essential.
These are good points. There is also a separate point to make, which is that YouTube doesn't (in large part) create videos, they "just" host other people's videos. YouTube wants to capture a bigger and bigger slice of the value created by interactions of other people with each other. There is a question of how much monetization YouTube "deserves" versus how much they are able to actually extract from people by being a de-facto monopoly. (This is Doctorow's "enshittification" process.)
Right, that's an interesting point. On the one hand, Youtube itself doesn't add value. The creator uploads are the value.
But if Youtube didn't monetize, presumably with the rise of the Youtube star, content creators wouldn't make enough money and would not publish there. So if you think of it from this angle, Youtube needs to go to war with ad blockers simply because their content creator, the users adding value, require them to do so.
I also wonder if the rise of the "this video is sponsored by xyz" segments in people's videos have cause more harm. That ad money that is circumventing Youtube entirely, paid directly to the content producer. So Youtube might be "jealous" of this revenue and wants to encourage its content producers to let them run ads only? because it's easier that way?
> I also wonder if the rise of the "this video is sponsored by xyz" segments in people's videos have cause more harm. That ad money that is circumventing Youtube entirely, paid directly to the content producer. So Youtube might be "jealous" of this revenue and wants to encourage its content producers to let them run ads only?
I think this is exactly right, but what's missing from the story is that YouTube created this problem. I'm mostly on educational YouTube, and in that sector creators turned to sponsorships because the alternative was to constantly wonder whether your next video would be demonetized and lose out on all the revenue (while still showing ads on the videos!) Sponsorships are a much more predictable revenue stream.
If YouTube wanted to support creators better, they wouldn't do it by adding more and more ads (to the point where my wife is finally approaching me to ask about ad block), they would do it by actually addressing creator concerns about reliability of their revenue streams.
> demonetized and lose out on all the revenue (while still showing ads on the videos!)
Demonetized is often a misnomer in this case. The actual term YouTube uses is "limited monetization", which shows the limited ads on the video, and still earns the creator money from those ads. The issue comes from those ads being super cheap because no one wants to put ads on those videos, and therefore the creator makes a fraction of the usual revenue. Found at least 1 post from 3 years ago saying 1% [0]
> they would do it by actually addressing creator concerns about reliability of their revenue streams.
Until users are more willing to pay for YouTube, YouTube will continue to have their own concerns about their revenue streams, which is the same ads. Basically giving the ad companies all the power in this ecosystem. [1]
I've heard plenty of creators advocate for Premium because it is also a more predictable (and profitable) revenue stream and takes the ad companies out of the ecosystem. [2]
Youtube definitely adds value though. The ability to upload and forget, comments, comment moderation, subscriptions, playlists, recommendations, community posts, transcoding, closed captioning, video section labeling.
They may not all be valuable to each individual person, but all together they form the YouTube experience.
> I do have every right to try and control what things get sent to and viewed on my computer
I love this sort of mental gymnastics (the passive voice is a nice addition, too).
You know you can win this game quickly by not visiting YouTube again or by paying YouTube $15/month?
But no, it’s much better to exert your “rights” to try and control what gets sent to your computer. Also known as what you requested (since you know that ads are part of YouTube).
Firstly: I pay for youtube premium. Secondly, I honestly do not understand what gymnastics you think I am going through. I can view and control whatever content is sent to my computer. I do not have an obligation to allow any company to send arbitrary data or to force me to view it. Do you think it's similarly bad to skip around a video, when clearly the content creator meant for it to be a whole complete video? How about if I skip ahead when the content creator has a sponsor ad section?
You are right, I could choose to just not go to youtube (or any other ad-supported website). Or, I could choose to view whatever portions of a website are made publicly available, in whatever way seems best to me. Just like I don't have to go to youtube, they don't have to make it publicly available. It goes both ways.
By that same logic I have no right to complain when a website uses 3rdparty trackers, or tries to run a monero client without my knowledge, because after all, I should have known they would do that ahead of time and not visited the site. But since I did, since I 'requested' it, I should just take everything I'm given and do exactly as told, mmhm.
> But no, it’s much better to exert your “rights” to try and control what gets sent to your computer.
But no, it's much better to exert your "rights" to try and control what gets run and shown on end-users computers.
> Also known as what you requested
I requested the video, nothing else. I don't care what you think I should or shouldn't know, I'm only trying to access the video and I am only requesting the video. If Youtube doesn't want me messing with the bytes they're sending me, they should not send them to me.
It's because you have to use YouTube. You don't get a choice. Content creators who upload to other sites don't get an audience, and audiences who go to other sites don't get any content.
This is effectively a monopoly. It probably doesn't fit any legal definition of a monopoly but it has all the hallmarks of an abusive relationship between a service and a customer base. And therefore you shouldn't feel any guilt of depriving Google of their ad-revenue or their mining of your personal data.
Google's not some poor little startup that bit off more than it could chew and accidentally ended up serving videos to the entire world, they have strategically maneuvered themselves into this position for the money and influence they stand to gain by putting themselves in a position where they have information and control over how information is exchanged between people online.
If I were an advertiser on YouTube I would be very wary of YouTube's efforts on this. I wouldn't want to be paying YouTube for ad views of people who find advertising so annoying that they make such an effort to block it.
Best case scenario, frustrated ex-adblock-users will ignore my ads by muting them or looking away, so I'm paying the same price for less value, sometimes as low as zero. Worst case scenario, these users will actively despise my brand and avoid it altogether because they will associate it to their disdain for YouTube ads, so I'm paying for negative value.
> frustrated ex-adblock-users will ignore my ads by muting them or looking away
That's exactly what I do when something manages to slip past my blocker. I also mute my TV and pick up my phone when ads start playing.
I don't generally hate the brands though. I understand there are some perverse incentives at work in the market which means they have to spend money on advertising or be outcompeted by others who do. I blame the advertising industry itself. There's one exception though: where I live, some businesses are so obnoxious they pay people to drive around playing loud advertisements all over the city and in my neighborhood. Those certainly get my utmost hate. I'd blacklist them forever but I can't even understand what the ads are saying anyway.
Yeah. I used to rip out the ad pages from magazines and throw them in the trash too. Apparently I've been unknowingly "stealing" from them all this time!
The trouble is that ads frequently don't try to make you love a brand. What they do is build up familiarity - for example, a rule of thumb they all use, that you will notice everywhere, is to repeat the product name at least 3 times.
Then when you're at the store or buying a service, you are more likely to choose a product you are familiar with. Even if you don't consciously acknowledge that familiarity.
Nobody is immune to advertising - the people who fool themselves into thinking they're immune are less likely to notice its effects.
> Nobody is immune to advertising - the people who fool themselves into thinking they're immune are less likely to notice its effects.
I'm not talking about people who think they are immune to advertising, I'm talking about people who take active measures to reduce its effect on them—be it technological (adblock), sensory (muting) or psychological (disdain). I would argue that people who think they are immune to advertising are not motivated to do any of these things.
In any case though, I have never seen any data or research that supports that common truism that "nobody is immune to advertising". If anything, it may be true that nobody is immune to some kind of advertising—not to generic advertising per se.
It is well accepted that advertising should be targeted by age, income, culture, educational level demographics. An ad designed for American teenagers probably won't work well on a middle-aged Indian lawyer, and an ad targeted at Indian educated professionals is not well suited for a 20-something Italian mechanic. So how can we assume that an ad that works on a person who makes no conscious effort to block or avoid ads will work just as well on a person who is constantly taking active steps to avoid them?
This is simply wrong. For instance, when buying medicine, I make it a matter of honor to buy "the generic version of brand X, please". It can even be the same price. I would NEVER, EVER, buy the one that uses a gimmick and advertise itself. Ads are just like hypnosis, they work on the gullible/dumb share of the populace.
The most pervasive ads that I get whenever I accidentally go to YouTube without adblock are for Liberty Mutual home insurance, who already refused me as a customer years ago. So yeah, it just serves as a reminder to tell people they suck.
I don't think most people use adblockers, people who don't know what browser extensions are just suffer the ads.
If users would want to make Youtube change its policy, there's a better way: get together and start acting like a click farm. If you click every ad on every page and immediately open the tabs you opened, advertisers will start paying Google for nothing. Something like a subreddit coming together would definitely have a noticeable impact on larger advertisers.
The AdNauseam approach to ad blocking isn't great for the security side of ad blocking, but it'll hit advertisers where it hurts the most: their wallets, and being forced to expand filtering (potentially flagging more users as false positives).
It's possible, and that's why I wouldn't broadly recommend it. It's been a while since I heard anyone use browser 0days through ads, but it's still rather annoying to have to keep in mind.
I ran AdNauseam for a while but in combination with a PiHole the result wasn't interesting. Every clicked link ended up blocked by PiHole anyway. Perhaps it's for the best.
I wonder if one could set up an isolated VM that can click these links for you in a Firecracker style 5 second VM isolated from anything important. It could probably run in the cloud, all you'd need to do is forward the GET/POST request the Google Ads redirect causes and let a virtual browser do its thing.
It seems like a technical solution might work here: instead of opening the ads within the browser, open a separate, containerized browser and copy the ad link over there and open it, in the background, so any malware is unable to affect your data.
>The AdNauseam approach to ad blocking isn't great for the security side of ad blocking
It's for this reason I'll never use it. Some kind of automated headless version of AdNauseam that could be installed on a Raspberry Pi is something I would be more comfortable using.
I use an ad blocker just as a blanket response to too much crap on websites and being uninterested in having advertising be in my face as much as it would be without. However, that's not to say that all advertising is irrelevant, or that I'm immune to it. When an ad gets through usually my response is something to the tune of "oh well".
The devil's advocate argument against your second to last point is that you'd actually be getting higher value from getting an ad on the eyeballs of an adblock user, because your ad is a bigger slice of the total ads they might see in a day. Do you want your ad to be 10% of the total ads somebody sees, or 0.5%?
It sounds nice in principle, but, anecdotally, I had some youtube ads slip through on my phone recently and made a mental note against buying any of the brands advertised.
I get the emotional response, but it's not logical. The only thing the advertiser did wrong was pay Google to advertise their product. Can you imagine what percentage of products or services you regularly buy that have done that?
I have a special reserve of hatred tucked away for advertisers who take up that much of my consciousness. It's top-shelf, cask-conditioned hatred. Rare, excellent stuff.
So if you see 10 ads in a day, say while you're sitting in a doctor's office, you hate each advertiser? What if one of them is from a business you already patronize?
Agreed, but I think the key is: targeting + good creative. Ad networks often allow targeting to some extent and I suggest targeting your audience as much as possible. 2nd, if the ad isn't relative to me BUT is interesting or funny, then I also often don't mind that.
> I’ve never seen someone put together a coherent defense of the practice
Let me give it a try then.
As part of part of our cognitive functions, our attention is inalienable. It is ours. It's not theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. It's not currency to pay for services with. They do not get to insert brands and taglines into our minds without our consent. Advertising is mind rape and ad blocking is justified self-defense. I literally don't care how many billions they lose, I will block ads, I will help others block ads and I won't lose even one second of sleep over it. They are not entitled to our attention. Their choices are to charge money up front or to deal with it. If they send us ads, we'll delete them.
Because I'm not "taking" anything. They're the ones who send people stuff for free. They're more than capable of returning HTTP 402 Payment Required instead of a video stream. If they send me ads instead I'll delete them.
Don't turn this around on us. They're the ones poisoning the well by offering free stuff with implicit strings attached and thereby normalizing "free" services. We're under exactly zero moral obligation to "pay" them by looking at ads. They have absolutely no one else but themselves to blame for their business model and the assumptions they made.
For random websites, adblockers provide security against malvertisers.
On Youtube, it's convenience and unwillingness to either pay or stop using the service. I don't have a problem being unethical to Google, but I will probably end up paying once my adblocker no longer works on Youtube.
Many people have literally grown up with Youtube, and a large section of them have used ad blockers for most of their lives. They see the adblockblock on Youtube as an attempt to take away a service that's supposed to be (ad) free, because to them, it always has been free. When you see Youtube as the free, unlimited repository of videos that the internet provides you with, forcing minute long ads on Youtube would feel like putting billboards in a national park.
The same is true for many other services. Everyone is mad that Netflix wants its customers to pay. The best stretch I've found is that Netflix tweeted "sharing is caring" once, but sharing accounts within a household has always been allowed.
In their attempts to undercut the competition by shedding money to provide services for free or for cheap, large corporations have cultivated a large audience that expects everything for free with no contribution from their end. Fifteen years of free, almost ad-less service, is a long time, and it changed the culture of the internet.
No and you should also not feel guilty for ignoring the ads on a YT video. Getting a chip implanted in your brain which filters out advertisements from your vision would be closer to installing an ad blocker in your browser; and I don't know how I would feel about companies denying free service to people with such chips implanted.
Not really a fair comparison. The equivalent to "looking the other way," on YouTube would be exactly that, looking somewhere other than the ad (opening another browser, going to the bathroom, etc.).
Ad Blockers are essential painting over the bus stop ad completely, so you don't even have a chance to see it.
Blind people would be fine as they wouldn't be wearing the glasses. Being physically unable to see the ads and purposely hiding them, are two different things.
While the comparison is not 1:1 but the result is the same in the two cases. I don't see the ads, one of them I have more control on how effective I can prevent ads. Also in both cases I pay for the bus from my money so that I pay for the internet connection from my own money. The internet is built on free protocols and I can use it whatever I want.
Google does not pay TCP/IP..etc designers/operators a portion of theid ad revenue. Why would they feel entitled to the the internet infrastructure they don't pay for?
This all comes down to consent: someone who pays for a billboard knows that not everyone will look at it, people who create open source software or open standards know that other people will use their work to make money, etc.
The problem is that YouTube is not providing free video but rather ad-supported video. If you don’t like that, it’s like seeing someone else’s GPL code: your choice is take it on the terms offered, negotiate other terms, or don’t use it.
YouTube advertisers aren't affected by this - it's the content producers who aren't getting paid, and potentially even YouTube no longer making enough to pay for the resources you use. YouTube has an enormous library now but if people who make content start thinking of it as smaller and smaller payments they're going to making new content.
Because it costs them money to host the videos on their servers, you're not paying for the protocol to deliver the content, just like you're not paying for the roads when you ride the bus. Additionally it cost the content creators time, money, and energy to make the content. People should get paid for that. So you're also paying the bus driver, the mechanics, etc.
People pay for the roads that is being used while riding a bus. It is built and maintained by their taxes. Bus fares is going towards other costs from operations to salaries. YouTube on the other hand is a freeloader on the internet infrastructure.
That's a ridiculous take. The Internet isn't just free infrastructure that anyone can use. The data has to live somewhere.
2,500 people work at YT. They pay salaries, have offices, manage servers to store the videos, pay their content creators, etc.
So nobody is allowed to start an internet company and make money from it?
Uber is a business using roads that people pay for, should they not make money? Should those drivers not get paid as well?
Please chill up and don't forget the HN guidelines [1]
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
That is not the point of my comment, you misinterpreted the meaning of my comments and then built an assumption that it says that "nobody is allowed to start an internet company and make money from it?"
Which is not what my comments says. I will also not try to engage with a discussion in which side don't discuss in a good faith. Specially coming from a new account created for this purpose only.
Hey man, sorry forgot about this thread. Anyway, calling something ridiculous, as in it's easily open to ridicule, is not necessarily an insult when the specific thing is exactly that. Try not to be so easily offended. Especially online.
Also, I responded to every example you had with clarifying questions that were designed to get you to think about your points and back them up or (hopefully) change them. Reading comprehension is important. Saying things like "that wasn't my point" then not realizing what you implied nor clarifying what your point actually is a prime example of why. You don't have to say something directly to make an implication, which is exactly what you did on multiple points.
Gaslighting me into "not acting in good faith," so you don't have to actually think about the strength of your point (or lack thereof) is however the very thing you claim I'm doing. I just wanted to say that I hope you get more confidence in debate so that you aren't so quick to play the victim when your argument is held to the tiniest bit of scrutiny and try to take some imaginary moral high ground that isn't there.
At the very least, everyone sees the same ads. Bus stop ads (for now) don't have access to your private information, don't make models out of you and don't abuse that information in order to serve you highly targeted ads.
Think we agree that blocking ad blockers is in YouTube's immediate, short-term interest. However, I'm not sure it's in their long-term interest because it goes against the principle of reciprocation.
Regarding reciprocation, a lot of platforms offer a free tier and then offer additional features for paid subscribers. There's the principle of reciprocation at play: they give me something for free and that then makes me more likely to pay for additional features. But I'm only willing to pay for features, not to have an annoyance, like ads, removed. The conditions I'd have to agree to feel coerced ... like making an agreement with Darth Vader: "pray YouTube doesn't alter the deal further by now only blocking 50% of ads for a paid subscriber." What do I, as an end user, get out of this other than feeling hostile towards YouTube?
It's my computational device and my internet connection. I think there's a very complex argument to be made but this isn't the forum for it.
Why aren't you hostile against your Internet service provider for charging you for access? Why do you accept paying the ISP to access YouTube, but not paying YouTube or video creators?
I think with ISPs there's an obvious upfront material cost for building infrastructure. In that sense I'm very much the consumer. Obviously, there's substantial infra cost too with social media platforms like YouTube. However, the consumer-producer dichotomy isn't as clear with social media platforms since the user base is the product. That is, the value of a social media platform comes first from the masses of people using it and second the design, the infrastructure, etc. This is why I think reciprocity (in the psychological sense) is so important for social media companies because the product can just walk out the door.
My understanding is that content creators see very little or next to none of the ad revenue. The content creators are the reason people are using YouTube. So I prefer to support them through Patreon. Second, I've heard that the vast, vast majority of content creators make next to nothing through YouTube -- these content creators are paying the opportunity cost to "make it big" or simply enjoy making content or using YouTube as a promotional vehicle for other services. I'm not trying to define a moral equivalence of why it's right to directly support content creators but not YouTube (Google is making enough money off me so that I have a clear conscience), but for the price of their ad free service I'd like to see a more equitable distribution.
You are mixing two completely different groups when talking about users. Some users make and publish content. YouTube and others are dependent on them. Some users consume content, and as the end consumer they are the people who have to pay if producers want to have an income. Either paying directly in money, or by suffering advertising.
It's not about the infrastructure cost of YouTube's servers, but the time and effort cost of the people producing the videos. Hackers seem to conveniently always forget about these people.
A pure consumer is not worth anything to YouTube or any other platform if they're not paying or can't be advertised to. They're just a cost with no benefit.
I think the argument for paying content makers (through YouTube) is higher than the argument for paying ISPs. When the cables are laid, they don't cost any time or money except for a little of maintenance. Video creators work constantly to publish their stuff.
I agree that YouTube should distribute revenue more equally among their creators, so that it stops being a casino of people working for scraps trying to make it big (Hollywood anybody?). I think it's OK to support creators through Patreon and such instead of paying for Premium, but it might not be very fair in the end, because people unwittingly will donate to creators making the type of videos they want to be associated with and not the creators making the type of videos they are spending the most time watching.
I think it is fair that a video creator who doesn't ask for donations and didn't make her videos with the aim of making money, also gets paid her fair share if a lot of people are watching and enjoying her videos. That's why premium makes more sense to me than the hassle of donating.
but the time and effort cost of the people producing the videos. Hackers seem to conveniently always forget about these people.
FWIW, I tend to find the opposite. Maybe the people I know are just more vocal about things that make them look good to others.
A pure consumer is not worth anything to YouTube or any other platform if they're not paying or can't be advertised to. They're just a cost with no benefit.
I disagree but I understand what you're getting at. In the case of YouTube, you may be correct (or more correct than me). I'm thinking of platforms like Strava or dating apps where an active user population is part of the attraction to upsell features to paying customers.
Why do you ask? Because it would cause them more harm than benefit. They have thousands of people working on that and this is the conclusion they got so far.
I never used youtube without adblock and won't ever use it. I hope they block adblocks so it become so annoying that better options start to appear again.
Better options don't magically appear. Especially in an unsustainable market: nobody wants an audience of users who don't watch ads and don't pay. Where's the money to make the better option coming from?
I don't think not wanting to pay for YouTube is the same as not wanting to pay, period. I happily pay for Nebula but block ads on YouTube. I know plenty of people who do the same, or subscribe to patreons and such of people they follow.
Patreon is still heavily reliant on YouTube for the actual video hosting. Vimeo didn't go well [0]. Patreon has started their own video hosting service in beta, but haven't finalized prices yet. Even then plenty of creators would probably rather upload on YouTube for free than pay for Patreon.
Other services like Nebula are not a replacement for YouTube in this use case and many use cases. The comment I was replying to wouldn't be asking for better options instead of just using Nebula if it was.
YouTube is not the creator/owner of the content. There are even channels that are actively against the advertising business model and that rely on off-platform subscriptions and donations. I.e. the creator still gets value even if no ads show on their videos.
YouTube still shows ads on those channels though. And the more eyeballs and YT subscriptions these channels get, the more YT makes money off them.
Now what percentage of viewers use ad blockers? 5%? 10%?... YT still makes money off the rest. It's not like those are a worrying cost center to YT. Why then go to those extremes to shave the last penny of the last person who really strongly does not want to see the ads (which potentially undermines the advertiser's purpose of making you like their product)?
Chrome is also a "free" product. I could reverse your logic and ask why they shouldn't inject their ads into the HTML you downloaded from somewhere, from first principles?
Almost every argument is readily dismantled because Google offers a paid, ad-free version of the service.
I can see a privacy argument being made by folks who don't want their viewing history associated with one account but also don't want ads. I'm not an expert, but I'm not sure what monetization strategy would appease those folks. Proof of work on crypto mining for each video you want to watch, with any found coins going to Google?
I'll try to explain why I use adblock, use YouTube, but won't be paying for YouTube premium.
First of all, I absolutely will not have ads in my own home. Ads are bad enough in public, but they will not be in my home. This is completely non-negotiable.
So then, what are my choices? Well there are paid-for services like Netflix, for example. This is a straightforward choice for me: I either pay for it or I don't. Simple.
Then there's the web. The web is essentially a public place. It thrives because it's free at the point of access. Unlike netflix, YouTube put itself on the web. It would not have become anywhere near what it is if it were like Netflix and behind a paywall. They used their "free" and "public" image to make themselves the only place on the internet for videos.
What they want is to have their cake and eat it too: they want to be the dominant public platform, but they want guaranteed revenue like Netflix too.
What I want is just to pay for my bandwidth fairly. If I pay for YouTube (which I must because remember ads are non-negotiable) then I'm not going to pay for any other platform. So YouTube grows as a monopoly. This is not the web.
So you might say, well just stop using YouTube then, but why should I? I don't want to use YouTube. I'm not there because of anything they deliver, I don't care about 4K quality or whatever. I'm there because I want to learn how to put up a shelf. A lot of that videos are posted by people thinking they are doing a public service and sharing knowledge. If YouTube were behind a paywall then they'd post them somewhere else.
So they just need to make up their mind. You want money? Then don't be public. Watch other platforms grow overnight. Watch P2P video sharing grow (which is how it should be). You want to be public and be the only video platform? Then I'll be blocking the ads when I try to access video in the only practical way I can.
Also, if this is about the cost then why not get the uploaders to pay for it? After all, it's their content that's being stored. Again, because if they did that then YouTube would not be the Borg of video content that it is.
I wager most of the YouTube engineers use an ad blocker. As do many of the other people who work on YouTube. They don't want ads either. They know they are intrusive and obnoxious.
From first principles: any person’s most limited resource in life is their attention, and YouTube should be grateful that anyone is willing to dedicate any attention to videos on their service at all considering the power it grants The Algorithm to shape our ways of thinking about ourselves, each other, and the world we inhabit.
Ads, paywalls, and all other forms of access-control are a way of obscuring the relationship between programming and programmed, inverting it to me about me wanting to access them instead of them wanting to access me. It’s like that Cartmanland episode of South Park where telling people they can’t come to the park makes everyone want to come to the park.
This is not unique to YouTube or other streaming services, just the newest and most effective in the long line of newspapers, Hollywood, radio, TV, etc, and why all of those previous forms of media are as well-aligned with the US Government as is “““Big Tech”””. Ever gone for a Cultural Victory in Civ?
Youtube is very much in the wrong here. They are playing victim while there's hundreds of firms out there that would kill to be in their position, but cannot as Youtube has the monopoly on video on demand. Is this what we want, one megacorp for every major industry? Sounds like the Soviet Union and very much the polar opposite of competition, which is the base for any capitalistic society. A healthy market would have sorted this adds mess out by itself. Even if Youtube were an entity on it's own and not already owned by an even more massive corp, it'd be way overdue for breaking up.
No competition -> no capitalism -> no personal prosperity -> no personal financial freedom
Youtube is entitled to the technical shenanigans it uses to force people to watch ads and I am entitled to the technical shenanigans I use to avoid them on my own device.
If youtube blocks off access completely, people will stop considering it a reliable video host and another "default" website will take its place.
I'm also kinda amazed that in order to avoid YT's anti-adblocker you just have to logout from Google's account and you're golden. Basically, Google is indirectly destroying their own userbase that way. "Oh Google, you're blocking me now? lol what am I needin ya for anyway?"
What genius came up with the idea anti-adblock flagging Google accounts?
There are many reasons why youtube reigns supreme but I wonder if newer, extremely efficient video codecs designed with AI inference (as shown in some demos for the last 2 years) would help in breaking up youtube's moat. It's very clear to me that the cost of hosting video content is one of the main things keeping alternatives from popping up, and maybe a codec 50x more efficient than what we have now will finally help us break free from google...
I didn't do the calculations, but it sounds like trading hosting cost for GPU cost.
Or you can decode on client side, but what if the client device is not powerful enough? Maybe decode on server or client depending on if the user has better internet connection or GPU...?
But anyway it's not my point at all. My point is that if your "killing feature" to attract existing YouTube users to your platform is "No ads", then, well, good luck to survive financially.
Arguably having a more efficient video codec lowers the financial burden on those types of sites, tough probably not enough. Going a bit further, I'm also not just thinking of content aggregation "tube" sites but such advances could allow content creators to self host video in their own websites, just like we do with images on a blog post for the last 25 years. But of curse, hosting your own site is a bit out of fashion nowadays :(
I am otherwise unGoogled on purpose (Kagi, Fastmail, Apple Maps, etc.) and YouTube Premium is some of the best money I spend on a monthly basis, especially because of family usage and plan. YouTube Music has been a surprisingly excellent throw-in as well, and I often end up using it more than Apple Music because it's so easy to browser-search with an Alfred shortcut. I want to support creators, and cannot personally wrap my head around western IT folks deeming it worthwhile to either spend time watching ads or trying to evade them.
At a technical level, what prevents Google from deploying unblockable ads on YouTube? I’m honestly surprised adblockers are able to block YouTube at all.
The easiest way to prevent an adblocker from blocking is to make ads and real content indistinguishable in frontend code and network requests. Tie ads and real content together in a way that if you block ads, the video also doesn’t load.
Or in the case of video ads, you could stream the ad as part of the video itself instead of a separate pre roll.
If I had a billion dollars of revenue on the line, I’m pretty sure I’d be able to make the YouTube player serve ads in a way that evades adblockers. The fact that they haven’t been able to do this makes me think I’m underestimating the difficulty of the problem.
Or in the case of video ads, you could stream the ad as part of the video itself instead of a separate pre roll.
Back when people watched an actual "tube", ads were indeed like that. Yet VCRs could easily detect and skip over them when recording. Remember that this was before AI too, so the technology exists to counter it already.
I suspect YouTube keeps the ads separate from the content because the sort of "splicing" that would be required is not trivial to do at the scale YouTube handles video. Also, perhaps they'd rather users who are adblocking not waste their bandwidth downloading ad videos which are going to be ignored anyway.
I think this may be referring to DVRs of the early 2000s. They used basic logic to look for a blip (dropout) in the video signal that usually happened when a commercial break was inserted. It worked surprisingly well.
The parallels here are uncanny, because there were tons of lawsuits from networks unhappy about this, as well as lawsuits from consumers making similar arguments as seen in this thread about how advertisements are awful and they don't have any responsibility to watch them.
Also there are tones in the audio and/or material in scan lines 484-525 whose purpose is to tell the sponsors' automatic monitoring and auditing devices that the commercials were aired at the proper times and that VCR's can also use for commercial advance
In the Netherlands I remember typing in a code to record something. That code corresponded to a specific start and end timestamp. So in that case it ‘skipped’ the commercials.
Seems to be similar to the SponsorBlock extension for YouTube then, where start and end timestamps are crowdsourced for various types of filler, such as intros and end credits, sponsor segments, calls to subscribe, etc.
If ads are indistinguishable from the regular video, can't people just skip past them? Afterall, regular video can be fast-forwarded / skipped.
I will tell my computer to automatically skip video that was originally marked as unskippable.
If things really escalate, I will tell my computer to blank the screen and mute the audio when an ad is playing. I will do this with a keybinding, or maybe with an AI. This will be undetectable to the server.
I did not see your comment & posted something pretty similar :
Not sure this is the best topic to ask this.
This is not a domain I am knowledgeable about but : if Youtube detects (somehow) when an ad is blocked , why don't adblockers become "adfastworwarders" ?
I am using a bookmarklet to play Youtube videos faster & I noticed the videos are also played at the same speed. Couldn't "adfastworwarders" detect the start of an ad & like play it at x10 or x20? It would still create a tiny "cut" in the watching experience but perhaps a way to skip ads ?
I agree this form of blocking will be less appealing to many, but personally, I wouldn't mind a few moments to just breathe, especially when I'm doing ad heavy things. Instead of blanking the screen I might instead show a screen that says "Is there something better you should be doing?".
At that point I would auto download any videos from my subscriptions so they are controllable locally. Then an AI or integration with an Sponsorblock could skip the adverts.
Host this all in a system similar to plex and it would be quite transparent.
> The easiest way to prevent an adblocker from blocking is to make ads and real content indistinguishable in frontend code and network requests. Tie ads and real content together in a way that if you block ads, the video also doesn’t load.
Ads that the creators themselves put in their videos are exactly what you're suggesting. Yet there exist fairly-effective (if not perfect) ad blockers for those, too.
If it's statically spliced, yes. but if it is dynamically spliced in, it'd be harder to do the same to block it. You'd have to detect the ad itself, and YouTube may not allow the video to be timeseeked, which might make the viewing experience suck with a black screen for the duration the ad.
Different users are shown different ads, so you would need to dynamically edit the video and audio stream, injecting additional content into it.
It would raise the server-side costs by an order of magnitude, because instead of just serving prerecorded content from storage, you would need to do non-trivial GPU-intensive stream processing.
It's not that hard to splice the stream, as this is clearly being done for DTV already, but as you pointed out, needing to splice in different content for each user in the same connection is not easy, especially when the segments probably reside on different servers.
YouTube is at the breaking point for me this week. Apparently I was tested with the optional popup that I needed to remove my adblocker or else. I refused now they don't bother with the popup and just display a message on the video itself and block me because of my adblocker. Literally a few minutes ago I tried to reply to a comment on my phone (that doesn't have adblockers) and every ad would cause what I typed to disappear while I was typing so I had to make sure to only comment after like 3 ads ran first. But I got so frustrated with it I left halfway through the video. Google is known for having bad service with useless customer support so why would I want to pay for service I know will continue to get worse no matter what? There is no reward for trying to maintain what I had. Are there no other means then a subscription to bring back what I once had for free? Why not invent something instead of ruining my feeds and forcing dumb shorts everywhere that are worse then tiktok? I am happy to pay it's competition for service.
YouTube will "lose" the war, but they'll make adblocking difficult enough for a while that it might get some premium subscribers in the short term in exchange for the loss of goodwill.
I think YouTube will "win" this war, unfortunately. Even people that "join" individual channels cannot watch content from those channels if they use AdBlock. At some point these people are either going to buy premium or turn off the ad-blocker.
It boggles my mind that engineers and managers that have kids and are working on the YouTube team think this is okay and this is what the future of the platform should look like.
It's the beginning of the end of an era, and I'm immensely sad to see what the internet has become and where it is heading.
> At some point these people are either going to buy premium or turn off the ad-blocker.
Or they stop going to YouTube. In the past 12mo my use of these platforms has reduced a huge amount. I no longer visit Twitter or Reddit because they blocked 3rd party apps, forcing me to view adverts, I would rather not be a user on a user hostile platform.
Deep down, most of us know these are huge time sinks providing very little real value to ours lives so it doesn’t take much friction added by the platform to make people turn away from their bad habits.
YT is too big for people who hate ads to not invest a massive effort. The ad blocker endgame will be YT videos being "pre-watched" by a headless browser running in the background and the video data grabbed from there (either recorded or directly). You then watch the ad-less video in a custom frontend. If implemented correctly there's pretty much nothing YT could hope to do about this.
Sounds like how DVRs worked on cable TV back in the day. Some were even sophisticated enough to use the typical video cutout before commercials to auto skip them on playback.
Now, of course, we have community efforts like SponserBlock that could easily identify ad locations or some form of auto detection based on analyzing the video of they insert the ads at random locations in the video stream itself.
I'm certain this is coming. There's very little on YT I need to watch right now, and having a bunch of videos already downloaded and de-ad-ified would suffice. It would prevent the mindless watching anyway.
I'd even be cool with just blanking my screen and muting the sound when an ad is playing. Given my usual YouTube watching mindset, a brief moment to to just breath would be good for me.
I think this is a bit backward in that the reason they're having to force it and facing resistance in the first place is that they've burned a ton of goodwill over the years through increasing ads, refusing to fix their DMCA process and letting their AI run rampant banning and demonetizing people at random with almost no way of actually talking to a human.
It's also kind of interesting to see people acting like it's entitled for people to be mad that the service that drove most other early competitors out by showing unsustainably low ads is now bait and switching by showing increasingly more ads. There's a reason there are more smaller competitors starting to pop up as YouTube has burned through leftover goodwill.
I paid for premium for a while but had to use scripts to block the “other people watched” and other junk like shorts showing in my search results. Eventually I stopped my subscription and used adblockers instead.
I use YouTube to search for videos on subjects I want to watch, but it seems that Google want YouTube to be like a TV channel where you just turn it on and watch what they show you.
No TV channel that I've watched has stopped a few minutes into a program and asked me if I was still watching requiring interaction for the content to continue playing. Ever.
What makes you think that Youtube will "lose"? From a technical perspective, they have been rather conservative in their efforts so far. It can get so much worse, they could bake ads directly into the video stream or automatically randomize their API.
Don't forget that Google also owns Chrome, which by its dominance over the market can be used to effectuate DRM (such as widevine, or web integrity). They also own the Chrome Web Store, and they can ban any extensions that bypass Youtube ads (they already ban extensions with the ability to download Youtube videos, strangely they allow downloaders for any other site).
Google has a lot of money, and a lot of fingers in critically important pies, to make their wishes a reality should they deem to do so.
Pirates and crackers have won every single time in the history of BigCo vs BlackHat. The more draconian and clever google gets, the more talented hackers are drawn to the cause of defeating them, and the more motivated people become to spite them. The only winning move is not to play.
Depends on what you consider winning. Consider that out of the 20% of internet users that have adblock today, only a fraction will be willing to turn to illicit means should Google get serious, especially if it requires anything more complicated than installing an extension.
Also keep in mind that pirate groups are able to crack L1 Widevine only because some companies let the keys slip in a breach. The keys are burned as soon as they are discovered, making it impractical to disseminate them for public use.
It's only because individual movies/tv shows have a high enough value (versus the cost of cracking it, the risk of your keys being burned) that pirate groups are able to thrive. This wouldn't work well with Youtube as it's value is primarily derived from having a large quantity of content.
I don't think many people would be willing to pay per Youtube video as they do for a movie.
No they haven't. Consoles are the clearest example of where they lost, but also how frequently do new jailbreaks for modern iPhones appear?
Big tech can afford well paid security teams and uBlock Origin is a bunch of frustrated volunteers who are quitting now they're facing serious resistance for the first time. And Google haven't even exhausted 5% of their options.
Because you're an active user and thus help make the site "popular". We're seeing on Twitter what happens when management starts ignoring this basic logic of the internet.
They're currently forcing logged-in users to share screenshots if they want to share something with non-logged-in friends and preserve any context whatsoever (you can no longer see replies, or what a xit was in response to, if you're not logged in—all you can see is a single xit). Search also doesn't work anymore if you're not logged in, and if you visit a user's page, their xits are ordered by some even-more-nonsensical-than-usual algo that puts years-old xits near the top. The site's basically totally unusable if you don't have an account.
This may be making some metric (account signups, presumably?) go up, but sure seems risky to me.
On Twitter and Reddit, the users most affected were also the people providing most value to the platform (tweets, reddit submissions, discussion, moderation). They're fairly symmetric platforms.
On YT, the people providing the value are the content creators. That is the same content creators who get a revenue share from ads and premium. They're the ones who benefit the most from blocking ad blockers. The people watching videos with ad blockers (and sponsor block)? They're not providing anything in exchange, to the platform or the creators.
If I'm referring thousands of people to YouTube, and I stop doing that while simultaneously joining the chorus of anti-YT sentiment on the internet, their bottom line should care.
Reminds me of DJT stuffing his caterer for his wedding — “but you will be able to tell potential clients that you catered my wedding!” — which was no help at all when she had to pay bills for the food and staff.
Nobody using the site is a pure money sink. Every video watched, in what order, on what topics, is data contributed to the machine. The fact that you’re blocking ads is even useful information.
That's the price they pay for being ubiquitous. The alternative is to lose a good % of their userbase to a competitor that can make a better use of this audience.
a) there is no such user that is a pure money sink. Even without a subscription and all the ad blockers in the world they're still leaving a valuable data trail.
b) YT is a propaganda engine, too. It serves that end to allow nearly-unlimited membership.
I don't think they will lose. The average luddite doesn't care about seeing ads and will look perplexed at you if you tell them about ad blockers. Other services injecting ads into video streams have already been 'winning' for years. Ultimately youtube will push the envelope until even the people paying for premium will be seeing ads and savvy people will move on to pre-downloading videos and stripping ads from them before watching or similar janky solutions.
I suspect it’ll be like Twitch where they tried hard for a while and then stopped because of the diminishing returns. YouTube will probably shake out everyone who doesn’t really understand tech and then find they are spending the same amount for less gains. And then the situation will stabilize again.
Where did twitch stop? Unless you do more and more custom shenanigans, uBlock origin has not blocked twitch ads for a long long time, and the ads are extremely repetitive.
They haven't lost any good will from me. I don't feel entitled to use an ad supported service for free without the ads. Personally I've been paying for premium for a while and I find it worth it.
Did you always watch the ads on live TV? you never changed the channels, muted it, went to the loo, or fast-forwarded through the ads when you'd recorded something to VHS?
Ad-avoidance is hardly a new thing. And as ads have got increasingly obnoxious and untrustworthy, ad-avoidance technology has inevitably become more popular.
> I don't feel entitled to use an ad supported service for free without the ads
So don't watch things for free. Many people think that if a company is giving things for free you are not obligated to pay them in any way. The company can stop it if they can't afford anymore.
* convince advertisers audience is seeing the ads they pay for
The content is free in the sense Google pays (close to) nothing and in the sense that creators can go to a different platform (as long as viewers come too).
Cost centers are data centers, bandwidth and labour maintaining the platform. Wrt. the latter, I would estimate the anti ad blocker stuff has significant costs, but isn't eating into the dev cycle in an existential way yet.
At some point they might be in trouble. Anyone have an idea when?
After luxuriating in an ad-free YouTube it was shocking coming back to the "real world" -- too many, too often, and of no interest (and with all the info Google has on me?!)
They don't want to show the same ads to everybody: they maximize their advertising income when they show different ads to different people depending on what people are interested in and buy.
It's not uncharted territory. It's just more expensive comput-wise, and I expect google to make that calculation to conclude it's not worth the cost yet.
But compute costs could drop, and change the equation.
It's not just compute. It's storage, and network costs too. Right now they can cache the ads and video next to the user. But Google likes to target ads at particular users, in fact they formalised this in FLoC. In FLoC (since renamed to Topics API and now shipping in Chrome) groupings of users are called cohorts. There are lots of cohorts, eg: male / female, baby boomer / gen-Y / gen-Z / millennial, parents / single, religious / secular, conservative / liberal, income range. An ad might be targeted at a specific combination, such as conservative male parent. But there are a lot of possible combinations. Not 10's but 100's. This means you have to produce version of the video that targets each possible combination, and that in turn means your storage, network and computer costs balloon by 100's.
It's a big number. They avoid it by having the browser doing the mixing. I can't see that changing.
Sad to see this because Google won't let me pay for Premium—it is not available in most of the countries I've lived in for the last few years. I wish I could pay for the right for my kids to not see ads, but Google won't let me. It's terrible when a relaxing piano video gets interrupted by some loud, materialistic ad and my kids can't take their eyes off it.
Jordan and Kenya. I'm American, for what it's worth. Frustrating that I can't just pay and use Premium while they sort out their content jurisdiction issues. They know what I'm watching, and from where—can't they figure out how to do their licensing stuff?!
If I subscribe while in the US/EU (or on a VPN) it works, but the second you connect from an IP in a country that isn't supported, you get a notice that you will see ads. And it's not realistic or efficient to be on a VPN on all my (and my family's) devices 24/7.
Apparently those countries are important enough to provide the service and show ads – is it really so absurd that people in those countries are frustrated by not having the ability to buy YT Premium?
I'd feel more guilty adblocking Youtube if I was certain a fair share the advertising money was going to the creators producing the content. But from their own testimonies, Youtube keeps demonetizing videos for absurd reasons, or allows bad actors to file false copyright claims and outright steal their revenue.
It's gotten to the point where I've seen a couple creators give up on the Youtube monetization and go "I don't care, use Adblock, I make my money on sponsorships anyway". There's also been a rise in popularity of creator-owned platforms like Floatplane and Nebula.
No, but it also pays for users attention, data and opportunity cost, basically me not using another platform competitor. I could be reading a book instead too.
The big issue is, I know ads pay for Youtube, but maybe 1 times out of 100 do I see an ad that promotes positive feelings about the product being advertised. the other 99 times I am less inclined to purchase the product out of annoyance by the ad. Shouldn't the billions of dollars of recommendation research at this point reached a peak where ads are ideally appealing to the viewers they're served to? Wouldn't that maximize profits for all sides? It still feels like ads at this point are aimed deliberately to annoy me.
Ads work whether you like them or not. If you see an ad for a toaster from brand ToastX that annoys you and no other toaster ads then you are more likely to buy ToastX brand when you are shopping for a toaster.
People do not remember the ads when they go shopping. Instead our brain goes "I've seen this brand before". (Obviously a positive emotion works better)
This insidiousness.and manipulation is a good reason to block them as much as possible.
And maybe the recognition of manipulation might strengthen our mental resistance and increase consideration when shopping for things. Almost all people including myself don't bother!
It's like Google, with all its tracking might, is unable to actually show relevant ads.
That, or it's broken on purpose.
The proof of this may be that ads on YT are actually completely unrelated to the content I subscribe to and watch on YT. Even if Google has zero web tracking information on me, they know what are my interests through what I watch on their own platform.
Yet, I have never seen an ad for something related to the topics I follow.
This makes me think that Google is not interested in being too good at targetting ads, they wouldn't have much to sell otherwise.
If YouTube provides a service that removes ads ONLY for $4.99/month, they would already have my money. However they have to bundle it with YouTube Music and other stuff into "Premium", then never mind.
Until extremely recently, they did offer exactly such a service, though only in a handful of markets (mine was one). They called it Premium Lite.
It was exactly what you want, a much lower priced subscription which just removed ads, and didn't include any other premium features. I happily paid for it.
Even if they did that there would be no guarantee the price would remain the same. Google has done unannounced price increases for premium at least 3 times in the last year or so.
My main issue with YouTube, being a paying customer, it's that they still try to shove trash down your throat like cringe shorts or stupid bullshit news.
I still think there's some shady monetization going regarding their recomedation system as well, where the "algorithm" will recommend shit that has nothing to do with the content you watch
I use uBO for many years now and from time to time I wondered why YouTube worked so well even without the ads. Knowing how much effort is being put into this, explains a lot.
I absolutely love this extension and every time I come across a browser without it, I am horrified what the normal web is like today. Thanks a lot for providing everyone with a very good chance to experience a much better web.
The argument for the morality of adblockers, in my opinion, begins and ends with the idea that, were the adblocker something you could insert in your brain directly, you would clearly have the right to do so, and also clearly have the right not to disclose this to google.
Google gets paid by advertisers to go fishing. They bait the hooks. I don't think it is reasonable to complain that the fish eat the bait and not the hooks.
Maybe it's not good for their business model, but I don't understand why the fish has any duty to the fisherman. You want me to pay for this content? Great, let's settle on a price that doesn't involve your dominant market position first. What do you think you could charge everyone without losing your moat? That seems like a price I'm much more willing to pay.
* Who paid for the computer displaying the content?
* Who paid for the electricity powering that computer?
* Who paid for the internet service the computer is connected to?
* Who paid for the housing the computer is in?
The answer to all of those is ME. That seals it personally, I am not seeing ads in my own home when I'm paying for all that.
I'm not denying Google has costs to keep YT running. I'm just stating that from my perspective, I've already paid plenty - both upfront and monthly.
It would be different if it was a computer in a public library where I paid for nothing, and the ad revenue went to support that library. But that isn't the situation.
Just to summarize: I have nothing against marketing/ads as long as it is responsible, treats me with respect, as a human being, and does not break local laws.
I have multiple problems with YouTube ads and online ads in general.
It seems, to me, that there are severe flaws in online advertisement regulations or it's just extremely hard to enforce.
One can compare the regulations and what responsibilities advertisers have for ads in other media vs. online ads.
Here are some of the reasons why I have problems with YouTube ads:
1. Online ads are often scummy, marketing some pyramid scheme, plainly lying with fake videos/screenshots, breaking my country's laws (probably, hard to verify) or, in the case of some web ads, contain malware.
2. YouTube takes no responsibility for what is shown to me or on which videos (for example, showing political propaganda from "ultra right" as ads).
3. The amount of online ads per minute of video is often obscene, even if you can skip some of them.
4. Ads volume is through the roof - this is intentional.
5. (off-topic) Zero protection from YouTube against abuse of copyright strikes.
6. (off-topic) YouTube takes no responsibility for their recommendation algorithms and yet wants to make money on all videos, regardless of the topic. I think such behaviour is irresponsible for such a big corporation as Alphabet.
Edit:
To summarize: please treat me with respect and I'll watch your ads.
I wouldn't mind subscribing to YouTube Premium. I use YouTube a crap ton, and every time I hear a creator weigh in on the matter, they claim that subscribers that use YTP earn them way more than 100s of ad views. This could potentially solve my problem with patron, where I just don't have the monthly budget to support everyone directly. A fixed donation that's divided up between everyone I watched that month sounds like a good alternative to those who don't make the cut for my patron budget.
However, I hate how they price YTP. Why is everyone so allergic to options/add-ons with subscriptions? Ideally, I just want to pay for two seat license to YTP+Music, so my wife and I can consolidate our Spotify duo plan with YTP. Failing that, I would love to pay for just YTP without Youtube music and keep Spotify. Under the current model I would have to either pay for two separate full price subscriptions for $28, or for less money, get the family plan and have 3 extra licenses I don't need. I could sublet them to friends or other family, but I don't want to mix our accounts together, and I shouldn't have to be a mini-landlord because Google won't do $14/m + $2.5/m per seat.
I've been wondering, how much does the average YouTube viewer generate in revenue by watching ads? $0.1 a month? $0.25? $0.5 if avid viewer?
Given that I'm not an avid viewer and I do not care at all for YouTube Music, I just find the monthly cost of YouTube Premium too high.
I don't know what the right price should be, but by comparing with other digital subscriptions I have, I think I would be OK with paying something like $5 a month.
It could be like a lighter version of Premium. Just ad-free and none of the other "benefits".
It looks like the average revenue is $1/user/month. However, the "average" isn't very interesting because the typical person that signs up to this would likely be far above average--no one is going to pay $5/month if they watch a single video, but if you watch 2 hours/day that's a great deal. So it's hard to say what a "fair" price would be.
Others in the thread have pointed this out, but they did have a lite plan that wasn't rolled out broadly for some insane reason. They axed it this month:
I did some napkin math on this and I think 5 USD will not replace the ad revenue or even half of it. Keep in mind that this is the price only in the developed world and in the developing world both the YouTube premium price and ad price are very low and generate little revenue.
- Select "Watch ads later" a few times, until required, so time sensitive situations aren't bothered
- Choose "Watch 1 long ad, then no more today" and pay the piper all at once with a couple minutes of ads.
- Only relevant ads! When I worked at [video game news co], video game content got video game ads. The now defunct Grooveshark's ads were bands showcasing their music and upcoming shows.
And doesn't this Youtube ads issue seem like Google is getting desperate for ad revenue? Like they have a lever and they're pulling it to 100% now.
> Select "Watch ads later" a few times, until required, so time sensitive situations aren't bothered
- People will simply clear their cookies when it becomes required, and this will be automated via extensions.
> Like they have a lever and they're pulling it to 100% now.
They are not pulling it to 100%, I think yt-dlp and similar stuff is still working. If they want to do it at some point, they will have to do it before adblocking usage is more than 50% of the population, at which point the uproar will be even higher and the change impossible to make.
True, and we do, but broadcast and cable TV have done this for decades, and some current streaming services do this. If an advertiser wants to pay for guaranteed attention, maybe some sort of "click this dot in next 10 seconds" and the ad ends, else it'll play through. The online ad space is a pile. Silly options may work better than the current models.
>> Maybe that’s how YouTube will win this war of attrition.
YouTube will win because they are financially incentivised to so so. UBO and other free blockers will fail because there is so much downside, and no upside.
Wars are always won by those with the most resources, whether it is money or people or both.
I say this not to gloat (I'm no fan of google) but rather because it can be useful to understand both the goals, and where the goals are leading to.
I know HN doesn't appreciate some truths being spoken, and I imagine I'll be down-voted, but YouTube is paid for by advertisers. Content creators are paid by adverts (and embedded sponsors.)
Yes we all want our entertainment for free. Yes we done want ads. Yes we dont want to pay for our content (or our software.) I get that, I really do.
But content creators need to eat. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth. Since I'm not chipping in, I appreciate advertisers doing so.
Personally, and this is not a recommendation, or a judgement, I don't use an ad blocker. I'd there are too many ads I stop visiting a site. For the rest, including YT, I understand what I get and I understand what I give. I get this is not the popular HN position. Each sees this his own way.
> YouTube will win because they are financially incentivised to so so. UBO and other free blockers will fail because there is so much downside, and no upside.
This has been the situation for the ad-blocking war since it started. If the pro-ads side is destined to win, they're sure taking their sweet time about it.
You call it a war, I'm not sure YouTube thinks of it that way.
YouTube revenue was 29.2 billion dollars in 2022. On the other side you have a couple guys complaining about Reddit users.
Sure, a few tech-savy folk install ad-blockers, and Google keeps the space dynamic enough to avoid it getting serious traction. But it's less a "war" and more of a minor irritation.
Winning isn't making ad-blocking go away, winning is 29.2 billion $. The entitled user base will do the rest.
> wars are always won by those with the most resources
Youtube's early success was in large part due to enabling mass music piracy. That war was won, principally, by youtube and pirates, when rightsholders agreed to youtune them distribute music for only meagre advertising revenue. Besides youtube, torrenting music continues basically unchecked today, despite the massive resources available to combat it, and the strong financial incentive to do so.
Along those lines, a general solution to youtube (or other) adblocking looks like: person 1 records their screen with a high def camera while a video plays, removes the ads, and creates a torrent of it. A simple browser extension detects a link to a youtube video, and redirects to a web torrent of the same video. An approach like this has no possible response from youtube, though hosting might be expensive, and availability might therefore be poor.
An instance of a similar solution to paywalling of content on various sites like patreon involves scraping the content and rehosting it elsewhere. Websites hosting such content are frequently very popular. One would imagine that patreon would be well resourced in this domain, but apparently they have been ineffectual.
I feel like if you're the type of person to download uBlock and set specific filters you're the type of person to never click on an ad on purpose.
I don't understand why Youtube is doing this, wouldn't it make their numbers look better if the people that won't click ads never have them delivered to them (5% of users clicked on ads vs 1% of users clicked on ads)
I.try to search for videos on a peertube instance first. Not much is there, but I want the few who put content there to be rewarded with my eyeballs. More video is uploaded someplace than there is time. Even if we restrict ourself to great content you can't watch it all (most are also looking for a subject they are interested in which keeps things manageable)
I use youtube in Firefox via a dedicated container, I wish that I can specify ublock rules by container because I have to disable most of rules to avoid adblock detection of youtube. I don't know what it is possible except creating a specific profile for YouTube which is annoying.
I wonder why Youtube does not try other kinds of ads.why not ads in the sidebar, under the videos etc. They know which products and keywords are mentioned, and sometimes i google them anyway. Why do they insist on silly clickbait ads that are much worse than old-time TV ads. I don't want that because i don't like people wasting my time beyond a few hundred milliseconds. They d probably have made more money if they showed me banner ads instead of trying to make me stop using blockers
I guess it's because they want to sell "video inventory" to their advertisers. But why really? They own both the demand and the supply of advertising and they can 'convince' advertisers to use banners instead of videos. Why not be a good monopoly ?
>I guess it's because they want to sell "video inventory" to their advertisers. But why really?
My guess is because the non-modal video ads are the only things that a human can not ignore easily. Banner blindness is a thing and I'm pretty sure we are great at "blocking" everything around the video (that we actually want to look at).
So the only option is to withhold what we want (the content) until we consumed what we don't want (the ad).
> Google ad revenues from search alone were at $42.6 billion, up from $40.7 billion in the second quarter of the previous year. This marked a 4.8% annual rise. Meanwhile, gross revenue from YouTube ads came in at just under $7.7 billion, a 4.4% increase from the $7.3 billion in Q2 2022.
I run ad-blockers because most of the internet becomes unusable without them and I'd rather focus on education and interesting things. If that ceases to be the case, I'll cease using the internet and go to my local library. There's no scenario where I'll watch ad's on youtube. The internet is just not structured for money making unless its a paid service. Advertisers are the aberration here. They're wasting their and others' time and contributing to global warming unnecessarily. Maybe if people had more critical thinking skills they would see what a burden advertising/marketing/propaganda is on their time and how often they become biased by it - in one form or another.
I’m totally surprised that the users who don’t want to pay for youtube premium and who don’t want to pay their fair share through ads are also the entitled type who harass the adblock devs expecting instant service for free.
This is not a domain I am knowledgeable about but : if Youtube detects (somehow) when an ad is blocked , why don't adblockers become "adfastworwarders" ?
I am using a bookmarklet to play Youtube videos faster & I noticed the videos are also played at the same speed. Couldn't "adfastworwarders" detect the start of an ad & like play it at x10 or x20? It would still create a tiny "cut" in the watching experience but perhaps a way to skip ads ?
I've never paid for Youtube because it isn't a proper product. It's a hodgepodge network of amateur videos that've been cobbled together into an offering that just barely resembles something you can throw a price tag on.
There's plenty of content o Youtube that's simply stolen from the original creators (home video fail compilations, newsreader bloopers). Yet YT can take a cut of the ad revenue from the tens of millions of view those videos get.
Fucking hell, if you don't like ads then just don't use YouTube.
Everyone bitches about this sort of stuff and then refuses to boycott.
Look at the fucking shitshow Twitter has become under ol Musky...and have people left? Yeah, some for sure, but not very many at all.
The problem isn't just these companies, we can't act like the problem isn't us as well.
Pay for their services, or stop using them. If enough people did this simple thing, they'd have to react to it. Twitter would already be dead if everyone had _actually_ left.
I don't care about YT and would happily use anything else. However, I do care about the content placed there exclusively. Much of that older video may not be available elsewhere, and it was probably uploaded at the time under the assumption that it would remain freely available. I'm usually not watching videos popular enough to make any money for the creators. They certainly didn't have any exclusivity arrangement.
> entitlement towards free services like uBlock origin.
To be fair uBlock origin users feel entitled to use YouTube, an extremely expensive operation to run, without giving anything in return.
I say this as someone who uses Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin. Websites are nigh unusable without ad block. But as far as ads go YouTube is far and away one of the least offensive imho.
If you don’t like ads you could choose to pay for YouTube Premium or simply not use the service. Demanding to use the service for free is rather entitled.
I’ve never given YouTube or any ad sponsored website anything in return. Whether I use software or not, the last thing on earth I’ll do is watch your ad. Not done seen one for over 20 years and I intend to keep that streak.
You’re talking like you’re making a strong, principled stand. But, imho, the actual principled stand would be to not consume content from ad-supported platforms. It’s especially unprincipled when a platform offers a paid tier that disables ads.
TikTok makes money via ads and in-app purchases. How do you think TikTok makes so much money? How do you think YouTube should make money storing and serving petabytes of high quality video?
Ads are the unfortunate trade off we make to keep things free. I hate ads. I hate the idea of ads. Tailored propaganda to manipulate you into purchasing product just sounds awful… especially when it’s targeted at children (a demographic where advertising is especially effective).
I think YouTube’s current system is a fair deal. You either watch the content and pay by watching ads, or you pay by purchasing YouTube premium. If you don’t want to pay, and you don’t want to watch ads: leave.
>As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation.
A lot of the HN comments are about YouTube, but this article is really about how toxic the internet technology enthusiast community can be. The uBO volunteer teams are trying their best to give people the tools and information they want, but they’re becoming the outlet for people’s anger instead.
The part about people failing to follow instructions but then taking the time to complain about the instructions not working hits home for me. My limited experience being on the front lines of a much less popular project was marked by similar experiences: Many of the people who took the time to make accounts and participate in online forums seemingly had all the time in the world to complain about us, but couldn’t be bothered to read basic instructions. In many cases people would write pages of complaints about us and rant on social media about how awful we were before they’d even try contacting support.
Not everyone is awful like this. It’s actually only a small number of people. However, it doesn’t take many people to make forums and social media into completely toxic places for a subject. The first impression for anyone coming to Reddit or other places for support might be that it’s a dumpster fire, even though it could be as few as 20 in a vocal, toxic minority setting the tone.
The internet is a weird place. The demographic of users who complain that the volunteer support staff for their free ad blocker which lets them avoid watching ads on their free website being toxic is not at all surprising to me.
My solution seems ethically valid: I watch the majority of YT videos on a browser with adblocks turned off, but if it's a long technical video I'm trying to learn something from, then I use a full adblock setup on a different browser because the advertising interruptions make concentration impossible.
I suppose if I was rolling in money I'd just pay for premium - though I'm sure all that data would also be fed into their user-marketing-optimization database and sold on to whoever, which I also dislike.
Interesting, I was expecting to hear kind of the opposite: that you'd selectively tolerate the ads on videos that meet some bar (where that bar might be quality, importance, education, artistic value, personal support for the creator, etc.) and then leave the ad blocker on for all the junky other things that we honestly need less of. But maybe you only watch good non-junky things anyway, in which case, carry on.
For tech capable people following a few channels and nothing else, here’s another option.
Set up and use podsync. It uses your free API credits to monitor YouTube content and downloads them for you. Then just use any simple web server to share the static files and import the “channel” using your favorite Podcast player.
End result, you have YouTube ad-free in your podcast app, with notifications (per channel) for new episodes and likely some offline caching.
While this is my top favorite way to watch YT, I also support my channels directly through Patreon.
Youtube, I don't want Youtube Music or Youtube Shitnuggets. Give me a plan where I pay 5€ a month just to watch youtube with no fucking ads. Is that not enough ?
By the way I haven't seen a single ad on Youtube in a year because of sanctions. Do not need an adblocker. Wish other ad platforms would comply with sanctions too.
I use an ad blocker but I'm not entitled. If YouTube decides to stop me from using it I'll either pay for Premium or stop watching YouTube. I don't think I have any right to watch it for free without paying if they don't want to allow that.
It's hard to know if in the long run they will start requiring subscriptions, develop better anti-blocker tech, or just give up and eat the loss. But somehow I wouldn't bet on #3.
Just embed the ads in the video stream at upload time. I might be inclined to not fast forward if they're short enough and entertaining.
I will always use an ad blocker otherwise, because the main thing I'm protecting against is tracking. Similarly, I don't mind the old school static ads some blogs and websites still use but I will go out of my way to block all dynamic ads for the same reason (tracking).
It's interesting how few users can ruin a FOSS project. I doubt Google would stoop this low, but sabatage seems surprisingly practical by pumping a lot of low effort comments through open communication systems.
The uBO had similar issues with Facebook's anti-adblock. IMO the anti-adblock worked. The maintainers probably all muted the thread, and now 99% of the time, ads show up in the feed.
I don't see why it should. Every game torrent I've ever uh, "evaluated", has had a never ending stream of comments of "it doesn't work" from people who don't read the instructions. I never the uploader get involved in the comments. We used to call them noobs and tell them to re-read the instructions, that would be that.
"YouTube isn't rolling out the anti-adblock to everyone. It seems to depend on things like your account, browser, and IP address. And if you're not logged in or you're in a private window, you're safe."
If I am not mistaken one also needs to have Javascript enabled.
I would have expected for youtube to splice the ads directly into the video stream ages ago. Combined with some stream throttling it'd make it almost impossible to skip (or at least waiting for the ad to be over).
I watch ads on YouTube mobile app because there in no way to block ads over there but why the hell YouTube and Google want me to watch ads on a desktop YouTube?! Doesn't majority of Google's and YouTube's ad revenue come from mobile?
I know that Firefox Android supports extensions and therefore adblocker but I want to use YouTube's native mobile app because it is faster, more stable and has more features than the mobile web version of YouTube.
It would not be a problem if YouTube and other platforms would serve us ADs that are not annoying but they are sharing everything everywhere. I'm marketing guy by profession and I'm creating Ads, but I still use adBlockers.
I guess I fall in the minority camp here, that I don't mind paying for YouTube to not see ads. I think they've earned it, the creators earned it, but I still use Sponsorblock to block most other ads on Youtube.
I just wish people with free time could gather together and build a completely distributed Google (YouTube, Search etc.)
* On top of Freenet 2023
* As performant as Google
* Funding the project by ads. Yes, you need it.
Reddit shouldn't be considered as a tech support site. As most of the drama happens there. GitHub issues might have less drama as compared to that. Just avoid reddit at all costs for your peace of mind.
Here's what I do, I use Brave for YouTube and another browser for everything else. Brave apparently bocks the ads and they don't get to spy on me anywhere else but their own site.
Look, just say you’re a cheapskate if you use Adblock and don’t pay for Premium. Just say “I want to get something for nothing”. There are people that refuse to tip because they think the tipping system in the US is immoral. No, they’re just cheap. People are here writing tomes on why they don’t want to pay with attention or $$$ when they’re really just cheap.
Edit: Look if you’re going to downvote, at least provide a coherent rebuttal. K8sToGo already failed in that regard with this gem: “Well since you are not cheap you can just buy premium for all of us. Thanks in advance.”
How about "I want to get something for the price previously agreed"? I didn't start out blocking ads because there was a reasonable amount for them. There no longer is. Youtube broke their implicit agreement with me, so I really don't feel bad for doing the same in return.
If youtube ever manages to actually block adblockers I'll simply stop using youtube.
What do you mean by implicit agreement? Why can’t companies change how many ads they run over time? It seems entitled to use a product you’re in no way paying for. Like if this were water or food, and corporations made it impossible for people to be able to afford it, I could see an argument for stealing it. But this is YouTube. No one _needs_ YouTube.
Google freely sends a bunch of video content to my computer. Why don’t I have the right to decide which parts of that content I want to watch? Which parts are permitted to execute on my computer?
My computer, my home, my rules. Google has their policies, I have mine. It’s none of Google’s business whether I watched the ads or not.
Surely you must understand that if everyone took that view and ran Adblock on YouTube that eventually the site would be shut down and all of that content would be lost.
I just don’t get it. The casual “theft” here that’s socially tolerated (like say the theft of product from retail stores that’s so common now) just seems wild to me. Why shouldn’t creators be compensated for their work?
This is desillusional... How can it be a good thing ? Blaming users not willing to be forced to watch brain-washing videos is the right thing ? Really ?
I'm pretty sure there's a middle ground agreement. Such as serving 480/720p videos for free users, 1080p+ for ad watchers and 4k+ for subscribers. YouTube already makes a good amount of money only from monetizing watching habits and selling that data. We're giving away our tastes and deepest interests to a company at a daily basis for multiple decades. Why should we show them pity ? They don't have any for us.
YouTube has already implemented Premium-only quality in a form of 1080p Premium, i.e. higher bitrate 1080p. Though they don't seem to be worried that yt-dlp can download it without a subscription. Maybe they will make 2160p option Premium in the future, the backend is ready.
Some interesting information in that article about youtube blocking people with privacy plugins. So it seems you need to wave your state given privacy rights to to use youtube.
Even after disabling my only adblocker, Youtube seems to partally load, then break for long periods. I don't even have any extra privacy plugins installed, but I do use Brave browser, that does have some privacy settings built in. If I try to open in private mode, the video loads fine.
> Some interesting information in that article about youtube blocking people with privacy plugins. So it seems you need to wave your state given privacy rights to to use youtube.
There is an adblocker for Youtube. It's called Youtube Premium for $13.99 a month. Youtube is a business pure and simple. You either pay with your attention/time (ads) or cash money. I think its hard for people to realize they are like any other streaming service like Netflix, Disney+ or Hulu.
I want YouTube to be free!
I want my YouTube ad free!
I want my adblocker free!
I want support and devs for my free adblocker to be on top of everything and to make sure I never have to watch an ad and never pay a dime on the Internet!
Not sure if it's AdNauseam or BypassPaywalls (which does prevent you from seeing your logged in algorithmic recommendations), but I'm not getting ads or bothered anymore. I was, using Brave, with or without uBlock Origin turned on.
Hopefully this brings more creators over to Rumble, Bitchute, and/or Odysee though -- it's about time YouTube gets ditched en masse, and not just for the fringe content.
Holy moley the ads. This latest campaign finally convinced me to turn off the adblockers on youtube and goodness Foxnews emergency rations and buygold are the ads utter contemptable garbage. Obvious scams, get rich quick schemes, Trump political ads....please for all that is holy get that shit off of my screen.
I'd even be willing to watch a blank screen for the length of the ads if I didn't have to see this trash.
With great need for revenue comes great foolishness. Like the idea you could squeeze the 1% of the population who could, if hostile, easily undo all your drm defenses in a bang and help the rest of the population to do that too. Another unity moment, created by well incentivized management.
There was a point in the past where video platforms were competing, and by no means was it clear that YouTube would end up dominating this area to the point of being close to a monopoly.
When YouTube won that race, they won it with a given set of parameters, including the kind and amount of ads they show. Society at large has, at that point in the past, basically decided that YouTube's offering is the best, and given this market domineering position.
YouTube is increasingly moving away from the parameters of this implicit agreement, in minor ways at first, more now. Had they "competed" in the video platform race with current policies, maybe everyone'd be using Vimeo now.
And here's the crux. YouTube can only do this because their old policies allowed them to establish this domineering position, and by doing so are breaking the implicit "deal" that actually allowed them to get into this position.
To me, there's currently no alternative to going onto YouTube. And no, I won't pay for YouTube Premium — because that wasn't part of the deal either. The platform won the race as a free platform. So, until Google can figure out how to serve a reasonable amount of safe ads — adblocker it is.