[HN Gopher] Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has B...
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Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled
Related: _Someone at YouTube needs glasses_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43846487 - April 2025 (694
comments)
Author : jaydenmilne
Score : 900 points
Date : 2025-11-25 22:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jayd.ml)
(TXT) w3m dump (jayd.ml)
| jaydenmilne wrote:
| Satire is dead
| guluarte wrote:
| also if you watch 1 single video about a topic, the next day your
| feed will be full of that
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| I usually don't mind that. Sometimes I'm looking in to a new
| product or hobby and really do want to see a whole bunch of
| that content. They also provide you a feed which purely
| contains channels you subscribe to, though I find it much lower
| quality than the normal feed.
| mc3301 wrote:
| Turning search history off on youtube about a year ago has been
| one of my best personal "digital life upgrades" in a while.
| nicce wrote:
| I did that and now it shows only polarizing videos on the
| right from both ends.
| mc3301 wrote:
| Oh, mine shows no recommendations at all. Just a blank home
| screen.
|
| So I basically either watch my curated subscriptions or
| something I specifically searched for.
| nicce wrote:
| Yeah, home screen is empty. But if you open some video,
| recommendations on right are wild.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| We know. Believe me, we know. Because you guys will tell us,
| every single time YouTube is mentioned.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| It is, apparently, very difficult for people to conceive of
| a video service that does what you want it to, and not what
| you don't want it to.
| mc3301 wrote:
| Excellent, now the collective "we" all know about it, and
| it never needs to be mentioned again[0].
|
| [0]<https://xkcd.com/1053/>
| remuskaos wrote:
| Man, today's xkcd hits hard...
| strickinato wrote:
| Actually - BOTH videos in the screenshot are ads - so there are
| zero videos on the homescreen already
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't think so? The "I Skied Down Mount Everest" is from the
| Red Bull channel. It may be a commercial channel, but it's not
| an ad, i.e. they didn't pay for placement (doesn't say
| "Sponsored" like the other one).
| dathinab wrote:
| and they are often good videos (if you like watching extreme
| sports related things), given the partial second video this
| seems likely for the account who made the screenshot
|
| but given that half a video is not a full video this still
| means we are at one single full video
|
| and an AD which is deceptively pretending to be a video
|
| I still think regulators should ban deceptive ads and require
| ads to to clearly different from the main content _on the
| first take/glance_. They way YT, Google and co handle ads is
| IMHO deceptive to a point its reasonable to say they try to
| deceive the user into clicking on the ad when they wouldn't
| have done so if they new it was an ad.
|
| And "systematically deceiving a user/customer to their
| detriment (wasting time) and your profit" isn't just shitty
| but on a gray line to outright fraud.
| amarant wrote:
| I dont particularly enjoy red bulls drinks, but their ads
| are often cool enough to be considered content.
|
| It's probably the only company with ads that are more
| enjoyable than their product.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| I used to think they were a foundation dedicated to
| funding extreme sports who also happened to sell an
| energy drink as well.
|
| Their business is basically selling poison but creating
| such absurd quantities of great free entertainment that
| everyone forgives them.
| chrneu wrote:
| I mean, in terms of getting your caffeine, Redbull is
| basically the least poison in the game. It's not even a
| lot of caffeine and doesn't contain a lot of the other
| shit that stuff like Monsters contain.
|
| Like really, checkout the redbull ingredient list
| sometime. There's not much to it.
|
| Not saying it's healthy at all. Nobody should really be
| drinking energy drinks, but Redbull is probably the least
| awful of the bunch.
| dathinab wrote:
| I wouldn't say "least".
|
| technical there are many "non energy drinks" which have
| no less caffeine or other wake-up effects as energy
| drinks.
|
| But funnily one of the ways Red Bull works is by giving
| you Vitamin B12 and Magnesium,
|
| which are commonly on a slight deficit in, case where
| people take energy drinks. They can lead to a noticeable
| feeling of boosted energy in a similar time as caffeine
| takes effect (ironically Caffeine takes 15-30min to take
| effect, anything before is either something else or a
| placebo effect...). In general if you have problems with
| low energy in the morning taking B12+Magnesium alongside
| the breakfast is a things worth trying out (just maybe
| not by drinking a Red Bull :=) ).
| jaydenmilne wrote:
| Technically correct, the best kind of correct
| superkuh wrote:
| You can use ublock origin browser extension per-site CSS rules to
| restore an arbitrary number of rows and columns to the youtube
| frontpage.
| https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube is a
| good source for these if you don't know how to write them or
| don't want to. ! YouTube frontpage - 3 columns
| per row youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row, #contents.ytd-
| rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)
| youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-
| items-per-row: 3 !important;) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-
| renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-posts-per-row: 3
| !important;) ! Optional: Hide the "Shorts" section
| to maintain clean 3x3 grid youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-
| renderer:style(display:none !important;)
|
| But also, yikes.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Whoever made automatic AI dubs a default and impossible to
| disable also needs to be fired
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I agree. But for the benefit of other people struggling, I
| haven't found a way to disable them as a user setting, but you
| can at least turn them off on a per-video basis by changing the
| video language in the playback settings (the little gear icon).
| locao wrote:
| There's no little great in embedded videos or, at least, my
| local newspaper actively disables it.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| This is not always available for some reason
| tcfhgj wrote:
| ReVanced allows disabling them, and there are extensions for
| Browsers.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| They could at least try to vaguely match the voice and maybe
| cadence of the original. AFAIU it's one of these things that
| would have been too hard ten years ago but is fairly easy now.
| Too computationally expensive probably.
| s-lambert wrote:
| Yeah ElevenLabs had this over a year ago where you could just
| upload a 30 second clip of someone's voice in another
| language and hear what it was like in English and it worked
| really well.
| chao- wrote:
| That "feature" is so egregiously bad. I regularly consume
| content in three languages, and hearing the wrong language
| coming from my speakers is so jarring. It is a uniquely awful
| experience that I had never encountered before, nor even
| imagined.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| While we're at it can we also fire the guy who made it that we
| now have to click the channel's mini thumbnail to open it,
| EXCEPT, when the channel is live and clicking the thumbnail
| takes you to the live video where you have to click the
| thumbnail again.
| tavavex wrote:
| Oh, are we talking about bad YouTube UX? How about the
| "feature" where the right and left arrows seek the video 5s
| forward and back, while the up and down arrows increase and
| decrease the volume? That is, unless the last UI element
| you've touched was the volume bar, in which case the side
| arrows will also change the volume, and you'll have to use
| the mouse to clear the focus away from that volume bar to be
| able to seek the video again. I still wonder how they managed
| to break this despite it having had a sane, consistent,
| defined behavior for probably over a decade before that
| point.
| tpxl wrote:
| > That is, unless the last UI element you've touched was
| the volume bar, in which case the side arrows will also
| change the volume, and you'll have to use the mouse to
| clear the focus away from that volume bar to be able to
| seek the video again
|
| That is a feature (of the browser). The volume bar is
| selected so it takes up the controls for left/right (this
| is what a horizontal slider does I suppose). You can also
| select the volume button and mute/unmute with spacebar
| (spacebar does the action of the UI element, like click a
| button). You can tab around the buttons under the video to
| select options, etc. all with a keyboard. If a control
| doesn't support an action, it'll be propagated up to the
| parent, which leads to the jarring feeling that controls
| are inconsistent (and also the effects, left-right just
| adjusts the volume, up-down also plays an animation).
|
| It's the usual low quality Google product, but it does make
| sense why it is so.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "Whoever made automatic AI dubs a default"
|
| well thats the thing, people is so lazy and dumb that whetever
| new feature is available, they didnt bother to find or turn on
| that shit
|
| this is the power of "default", you cant test something is
| working on hyperscale if you didnt make it default like youtube
| does
| karhuton wrote:
| Finnish to the rescue:
|
| Change your Youtube language to Finnish, which isn't
| supported by auto-dubbing (and probably never will), and all
| audio will be in original language.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| not yet
|
| in this age where google has monopoly for content created
| on the whole world, its just matter of time until they
| available
| climb_stealth wrote:
| Hold on, there is a setting to switch to original audio. Just
| click the cog wheel on the video.
|
| The outrage over this seems completely overblown. Do people not
| see the setting to switch audio?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The setting does not persist, not even within the same
| session.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Often times there is no setting to disable this
| pjio wrote:
| Is there a setting to disable it globally or has every video
| to be switched?
| auguzanellato wrote:
| Not on web mobile frontend
| climb_stealth wrote:
| Interesting! I did not realise this. Just checked and can't
| see it in that case either.
|
| So, yeah, that's pretty bad.
| jacekm wrote:
| In the meantime "YouTube No Translation" addon fixes the issue.
| https://youtube-no-translation.vercel.app/
| mpawelski wrote:
| It works when you watch video on youtube, when it's embedded
| on other site I get the automatic translation.
|
| I still cannot believe that Google doesn't understand that a
| person can speak more than one language.
| 6510 wrote:
| I was playing a game with a friend and the chat was
| increasingly full of angry people complaining about cheaters
| easily obtaining very hard to get items. He asked what I
| thought about it....
|
| Well, the game is clearly very important to these people, it is
| increasingly visible. They are clearly very emotionally
| engaged. I'd say things are going really well!
|
| Youtube was once a miraculous technical website running circles
| around Google video. I'm told they used a secret technology
| called python. Eventually Google threw the towel and didn't
| want to compete anymore. They were basically on the ground in a
| pool of bodily liquids then the referee counted all the way to
| 1.65 billion.
|
| Some time went by and now you can just slap a <video> tag on a
| html document and call it a day. Your website will run similar
| circles around the new google video only much much faster.
|
| The only problem is that [even] developers forgot <s>how</s>
| why to make HTML websites. I'm sure someone remembers the
| anchor tag and among those some even remember that you can put
| full paths inthere that point at other website that could [in
| theory] also have videos on them (if they knew <s>how</s> why)
|
| If this was my homepage I would definitely add a picture of
| Dark Helmet.
|
| https://www.rickmoranis.com
|
| Looks like he also forgot <s>how</s> why.
| 76684546548070 wrote:
| Googlers are obviously mentally challenged by the concept that
| there might be anybody in the world who has learned English as
| a second language.
|
| Bet the idea to force outdated TTS whose robotic droning that
| is the pinnacle of annoyance on every single user who speaks
| more than one language was worth a nice bonus.
| creative_name3 wrote:
| i can assure you, people working there also absolutely hate
| it as well and there would be celebrations if the responsible
| people were fired for it.
| Gazoche wrote:
| Same for auto-translated titles. It's like they can't fathom
| the idea of people speaking more than one language. At least
| give an option to turn it off!
| levocardia wrote:
| Forget the METR curve, this is the real deviation-from-linear-
| forecast we need to be worried about in 2025.
| kbenson wrote:
| What? There's obviously 1.25 non-ad videos on the home screen,
| which might as well be two, so they're right on schedule! /s
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that,
| uninstalled the apps, and now use it through the browser with
| adblockers. (Yes, on my phone and iPad.)
|
| It works so well I've gotten at least half a dozen neighbours to
| do the same. If you haven't tried it, it's a definitive step up
| in UX.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| What is a set and forget adblocker for the Apple ecosystem?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| AdGuard Pro.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Wipr, Adblock Pro, Ghostery or uBlock Origin Lite. I've used
| all four and they perform about as well as you need them to
| for an adblocker. I'm currently using uBlock.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| YouTube hasn't been working for me past two weeks with uBlock
| Origin. Video doesn't play.
| da02 wrote:
| Have you tried "uBlock Origin Lite"? It is by the same
| author, Raymond Hill (gorhill). It has been working fine. I
| use "optimal" level for the filtering mode. (Note: I use
| Chromium on Linux)
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| I'm gonna try, thanks.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Oh shit
|
| https://itc.ua/en/news/ublock-origin-lite-ad-blocker-has-
| bee...
| fn-mote wrote:
| Parent should include text not just a link.
|
| UBlock Origin Lite pulled from the Firefox extensions
| after being flagged for policy violation, now only
| available from GitHub.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| "The Firefox version of uBO Lite will cease to exist, I
| am dropping support because of the added burden of
| dealing with AMO nonsensical and hostile review process.
| "
|
| https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-
| home/issues/197#issueco...
| sunaookami wrote:
| There is no need to use uBOL on Firefox, just use the
| normal version.
|
| EDIT: But yeah, the Mozilla reviewers are very hostile,
| also had to fight with them for one of my add-ons. It's
| ridiculous that spam and malware add-ons get a pass but
| privacy-conscious add-ons get rejected.
| immibis wrote:
| It's almost like ad monopoly company Google pays them
| millions of dollars.
| sunaookami wrote:
| Not everything is a conspiracy theory. Mozilla's
| reviewers were already infamous in the XUL era. Mozilla's
| dumbness is not due to Google it's due to them
| themselves.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Counterpoint: it works, you just have to wait a bit, since
| now the server will not actually send you the video until the
| mandatory (pre-skip) ad's length has elapsed.
|
| Which is fully in their right, I'm not complaining, it's not
| like I'm any worse off (waiting on a black screen vs waiting
| while some bullshit ad tells me to CoNsUmE PrOduCt!!!)
| MandieD wrote:
| It's helping teach my five year old patience and not to
| flail around hitting the keyboard when something doesn't
| happen immediately. He only gets to watch videos and
| playlists I search out for him, and only when I'm in the
| room... no YouTube Kids here. Once he's able to spell well
| enough to search, I'll have to re-adjust.
|
| I have found, and this might just be psychological, that if
| I hit pause, wait a second, then play, the video starts
| playing within a few seconds.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Firefox + uBlock Origin + Sponsor Block + YouTube Redux on
| Mac has been working well for me for quite some time.
| misiek08 wrote:
| Make sure to update and restart Firefox.
| rjmorris wrote:
| I had the same problem. Updating uBlock Origin fixed it.
| reddalo wrote:
| Are you using Firefox? Chrome breaks YouTube if you have an
| ad-blocker.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| I find Chrome unusable, it doesn't even support UBO.
| adrianpike wrote:
| Which adblocker are you currently using? The arms race is
| getting pretty tiring...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Even on Safari with Apple's braindead "content blocker" API,
| AdGuard manages to successfully block YouTube ads.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Not so braindead after all
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Which adblocker are you currently using?_
|
| I'm really shooting myself in the foot right now aren't I.
|
| 1Blocker and Wipr on mobile. Plain old Orion by Kagi on my
| Mac.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Thank you very much for taking that risk I just updated to
| this setup
| secondcoming wrote:
| I use Brave 99% of the time just for Youtube.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| uBlock Origin continues to work well, on both desktop and
| Android.
| Hnaomyiph wrote:
| Like another poster mentioned, I use Orion on my iPad with
| ublock origin installed as an extension. It's a really great
| browser, only a few bugs here and there.
| Evidlo wrote:
| Nice try, Google!
| deanCommie wrote:
| I mean I pay for Youtube Premium because I use Youtube Music
| instead of Spotify.
|
| I get a very unopinionated but effective music player that has
| all the music I need, and it doesn't try very hard to "upsell"
| itself to me unlike Spotify because to Google YouTube is the
| real money driver.
|
| So to me getting no YouTube ads as well is well worth it.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| And I pay for Premium, because each premium view is more
| valuable to the creators than the ad supported one.
| chrneu wrote:
| for what it's worth, you could divide up your youtube
| premium membership cost and give that to 500 creators and
| they would see more revenue in their pocket than your
| premium watches get them.
|
| Premium viewcount is grossly over valued by the people who
| pay for it, because they need to justify their sunk cost. I
| doubt most content creators even track it because the
| difference is minimal. We're talking a few bucks a month,
| tops.
|
| I remember when youtube premium first came out and YT
| pimped this trope super hard. Then it came to light that
| the difference is basically nothing because most people
| don't pay for premium.
| pitaj wrote:
| Creators say that premium is a huge chunk of their
| YouTube revenue. I'm inclined to believe them over some
| random like you.
| iamtedd wrote:
| Either:
|
| I watch ten creators. I divide $10 per month between them
| evenly. They each get $1 per month.
|
| Or:
|
| I pay for YouTube premium. It costs $10 per month. I
| watch ten creators. The $10 goes to YouTube.
|
| I make the following assumptions:
|
| * YouTube only takes a portion of that $10
|
| * YouTube divides the remaining money evenly across the
| creators I watch (10)
|
| Each creator gets less than $1 per month
|
| Which gives the creators more revenue?
| thoroughburro wrote:
| > I watch ten creators. I divide $10 per month between
| them evenly. They each get $1 per month.
|
| No, they don't. How are you magically sending them this
| money? They all signed up for that method? And it doesn't
| charge a minimum transfer fee?
|
| You're unserious.
| iamtedd wrote:
| By the same method I'll be alternatively sending to
| YouTube.
|
| That's not the point and you know it.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I do pay for YouTube Premium, I see no ads, and everything
| works pretty conveniently. What's your point, that with a bit
| of extra effort you can pirate content?
| ahartmetz wrote:
| It's not piracy.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Blocking ads is hardly "pirating" content
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't really see what the difference is.
|
| They're not getting the payment for the video either way.
|
| Morally I don't see how they aren't equivalent. I'm not
| going to stand on a high horse saying you shouldn't do
| either, but I don't really see how you can pretend one is
| less harmful to creators than the other, in terms of the
| basic principles involved.
| akersten wrote:
| > the payment for the video either way.
|
| "the payment for the video" as if it's a given that my ad
| impression is required for me to watch some video that
| they made available to me on their website for free.
|
| Morally, YouTube shows the most heinous and scummy ads
| 24/7 on their platform and fails to take them down when
| reported. Gambling, AI sex games, "cure what doctors
| miss" ads for human use of Ivermectin - it's your moral
| _duty_ to block them.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Piracy involves obtaining media content for free for
| which you should normally pay for, as a result of someone
| sharing the media meant for their own personal use to the
| general public.
|
| YouTube does not ask for payment, it sends the video data
| you want alongside some bullshit you'll ignore and waste
| precious human time doing so.
|
| Ad blocking just involves offloading the ignoring to the
| computer, as it should, since computers are meant to
| automate menial tasks.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I've tried to explain this to people repeatedly and they
| don't get it. They're always like "oh no the AI scraper
| is slamming my website it's ruining everything". Um,
| maybe configure your web browser to not send me data if
| you don't want me 'scraping' your website. It's literally
| your server's choice to send me data. I'm just asking
| from a few IPs. If you want to send data to all of them
| that's your server's choice.
|
| But I think people don't get the fact that they can just
| request payment or only send to authenticated users from
| authorized IPs and so on. Instead they want to send to
| all IPs without payment but then get upset when I use a
| bunch of IPs without paying. Weird.
|
| I'm trying to read a bunch of stuff. The entire point of
| a computer is to make that easy. I'm not going to
| repetitively click through a bunch of links when a bot
| can do that way faster.
| gusgus01 wrote:
| And what is the surefire way to stop AI scrapers from
| accessing your website? If there is no way, how can this
| be an acceptable ask?
|
| It already sounds like you're using several IPs to access
| sites, which seems like a work around to someone
| somewhere trying to limit the use of one IP (or just lack
| of desire to host and distribute the data yourself to
| your various hosts).
|
| Just because you can do something doesn't mean everyone
| must accept and like that you are doing that thing.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The answer is right there: use authentication with cost
| per load, or an IP whitelist.
|
| GP is absolutely right. If your server is just going to
| send me traffic when I ask I'm just going to ask and do
| what I want with the response.
|
| Your server will respond fine if I click through with
| different IPs and it's just a menial task to have this
| distribution of requests to IPs, which is what we made
| computers for.
|
| Yeah, you're right of course that no one has to like the
| "piracy" or "scraping" or whatever other name you're
| giving to a completely normal request-response
| interaction between machines. They can complain. And I
| can say they're silly for complaining. No one has to like
| anything. Heck you could hate ice cream.
| gusgus01 wrote:
| As long as we all understand that this mentality is
| advocating for the end of an open internet. This is the
| tragedy of the commons in action, the removal of a common
| good because the few that would take advantage of it do.
| Just because something is programmed to be a request and
| response interaction (although the use of blocklists and
| robots.txt and etc should reveal that it's not a simple
| request and response interaction), does not mean we
| should have to go all or nothing in ensuring it's not
| abused. We are still the operators of programs, it's
| still a social contract. If I block an IP and the same
| operator shows up with a different IP, it's like if I got
| kicked out of a bar and then came back with a fake
| mustache on and got confused why they think it's wrong
| because they don't have a members list.
|
| A personal website is like a community cupboard or an
| open access water tap, people put it out there for others
| to enjoy but when the reseller shows up and takes it all
| it's no longer sustainable to provide the service.
|
| Of course, it's all a spectrum: from monster corporations
| that build in the loss to their projections and
| participate in wholesale data collection and selling to
| open websites with no ads or limited ads as a sort of
| donation box; from a person using css/js to block ads or
| software to pirate for cheaper entertainment to an AI
| scrapper using swathes of IPs and servers to non-stop
| request all the data you're hosting for their own
| monetary gain. I have different opinions depending on
| where on the spectrum you are. But I do think piracy and
| ad blocking are on the same spectrum, and much closer to
| acceptable than mass AI scraping.
|
| These responses were more about your comments about AI
| scraping then the piracy vs ad blocking conversation, but
| in my opinion the gap between them and scraping is quite
| large.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Everyone thinks that their specific pet thing is the
| precious commons and the other guy is the abuser. But in
| any case, one should be able to follow the reasoning.
|
| If blocking ads is permissible because the server cannot
| control the client but can control itself; then so is
| "scraping". Both services ask of their clients something
| they cannot enforce. And both find that the clients
| refuse.
|
| If you find the justification valid but decide that the
| conclusion is nonetheless absurd, you must find which
| step in the reasoning has a failure. The temptation is
| epicyclic: corporations vs humans or something of the
| sort; commercial vs non-commercial.
|
| But on its own there is no justification. It's just that
| your principles lead you to absurdity but you refuse to
| revisit them because you like taking from others but you
| don't like when others take from you. A fairly simple
| answer. Nothing for Occam's Razor to divide.
|
| Particularly believable because the arrival of AI models
| trained on the world seems to have coincided with some
| kind of copyright maximalism that this forum has never
| seen before. Were the advocates of the RIAA simply not
| users yet?
|
| Or, more believably, is it just that taking feels good
| but being taken from feels bad?
| skydhash wrote:
| I think everyone is fine scraping for what is already
| public. But there's a lot of scrapers that just do denial
| of service. Of I have a 1TB of bandwidth from my provider
| and only 10% of it is consumed usually, it's really
| difficult to not blame someone that slurps it up in 1
| hour and prevent anyone else from accessing the content.
| danpalmer wrote:
| To be clear, this is not a value judgement. I pirate
| content sometimes, and I use adblockers, but ad blocking is
| definitely piracy - you're circumventing the method of
| paying for content.
|
| I realise that online ads have other implications such as
| tracking that, say, a blu-ray rip downloaded from a torrent
| doesn't have, but the reason for piracy doesn't change the
| fact that it is.
| komali2 wrote:
| > but ad blocking is definitely piracy
|
| This is a huge escalation of an already over-stuffed
| term.
|
| Equating piracy to theft was bad enough, now choosing to
| not view ads is also piracy, which is theft?
|
| I try to be chill here but no, foot down, absolutely not.
| Blocking ads is nothing more than determing what content
| comes in on the wire to the computer you own, or what
| content is rendered in your web browser. That's it. If
| that means someone isn't making money when they could be,
| well, too bad so sad.
|
| It's like, "if you walk past a Nike store without pausing
| to hear the sales pitch, you are stealing from Nike."
| Capitalist hellscape.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| If we're going with bad analogies I have an opposite one
| - you're walking past the Nike store and the store has a
| promotion on "Watch 5 minutes of ads and get a free pair
| of shoes", but you instead kick the TV with the ads over,
| grab the shoes and run away.
|
| Or are you going to pretend that there's no agreement
| between you and YouTube that you're going to watch ads in
| exchange for the free content?
| baumy wrote:
| I will not be pretending that. I am _asserting_ it. I
| made no such agreement with YouTube. I am very confused
| why you think I did
| tailrecursion wrote:
| I agree with this. There was no meeting of the minds, no
| contract. But, the terms in the Google account probably
| include something about the terms for viewing youtube
| videos.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Are you going to lie that you didn't know that the videos
| are shown to you in exchange for ads?
|
| Entering into a contract doesn't necessarily require you
| to sign a document. Quite a few contracts that we make
| every day require no formal acceptance, like entering a
| shop.
| baumy wrote:
| No, I'm going to state the truth that I never agreed to
| be shown ads, and you are extremely weird for lying and
| claiming that I did.
|
| Google wants to show me ads. I don't want to see them. I
| demonstrated this by blocking them. Google continues to
| show me videos anyway. Clearly they're ok with the
| arrangement. They are free to present me with written
| terms, or gate all their videos behind a login, but they
| choose not to do so.
|
| You are either very confused or playing stupid for some
| reason that I don't understand, but it isn't amusing or
| cute. This will probably earn me a dang warning but I
| don't really care - you are full of shit. You're making
| claims all over this thread that you've literally just
| made up.
| Loudergood wrote:
| and magically, the sneakers are also still there.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
|
| I disagree. If you were buying every advertised product
| and falling for every advertised scam then fair enough.
| But assuming you were ignoring them, there is no issue
| with offloading the thing you would do anyway to a
| computer and save everyone the time/bandwidth.
| danpalmer wrote:
| The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in
| front of you, not the right to a sale. Whether they
| convert you is up to them, their product, their offering,
| etc. I think you can never buy a single product from an
| ad and this is still piracy.
|
| That said, a lot of advertising is not performance/pay-
| per-click focused as you've described and is instead
| brand advertising. The point of the Coca-Cola christmas
| ads is not to get you to buy a coke today, it's to have a
| positive impression that builds over years. This sort of
| advertising is very hard to attribute sales to, but a
| good example of how you don't need to buy a product for
| seeing the ad to be worth something to the company.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| And I have the right to pay someone to watch the ads +
| videos for me, and then summarize me the video minus ads.
| Just like I have the right to hand my ad-full newspaper
| to someone, have them cut out the ads and hand me back
| the now ad-free one.
|
| If both of those are legal and ethical (I'd be curious
| what argument someone would make against this), then
| offloading this work to a machine should be just as
| ethical.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| You can rationalize this any way you want, but at the end
| of the day you're screwing over not a faceless
| corporation - but the very people who put out videos on
| YouTube.
|
| It's fine if you're OK with it, but don't pretend that
| you're not doing that.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You're not replying directly to the last comment because
| it posed a hard question, and you've resorted to an
| emotional appeal.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I'm totally cool with "screwing over" people who make
| their income screwing gullible people into falling for
| scams or buying useless, overpriced junk they don't need.
| I don't need to rationalize it for myself, I'm just
| trying to show some people the error in their ways, but
| maybe their portfolio of ad-related stocks is clouding
| their vision?
| JAlexoid wrote:
| I hate to break it to you, but you're not doing any of
| that.
|
| You seem like you have a robin hood complex or something
| similar.
| sidrag22 wrote:
| the creator is being harmed in no way at all, the ad free
| viewer is still a viewer and still could potentially
| generate more traffic to that creator by word of mouth
| algo pushing based on more views etc. Its still a net
| positive for the creator, just not AS net positive as an
| ad viewer.
|
| its not some secret that some % of viewers, block ads..
| either you lean into it and utilize it, or you pretend
| people should be obligated to only watch your videos by
| paying or watching ads, in that case find a new platform.
| aspaviento wrote:
| The choice of an individual to skip an advertisement has
| minimal impact on the content creator or the platform.
| This person isn't accountable for the decisions of others
| regarding whether they watch the ad or not. Ultimately,
| their actions only affect themselves and do not influence
| anyone involved in the advertisement process.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The Youtubers I like don't make any money from Google
| ads, because Google's draconian content policies and un-
| auditable "demonitization" system prevents them from
| making any money on such objectionable content as
| "Literally talking about how bad slavery was" or "Showing
| pictures of people who died in the Holocaust" or
| "mummifying a store bought chicken carcass"
|
| Are you watching creators who _don 't_ share such
| sentiments? You should consider that the creators who
| make large sums from youtube ad rev are the absolute
| _worst_ quality you can find. People like Mr Beast or
| Logan Paul. It primarily means you are slinging garbage
| every single day and literally hurting people for money,
| because that 's what google's algorithm optimizes for.
| Google wants to burn you out churning out slop despite
| the fact that youtube is already significantly
| overfilled.
|
| Meanwhile, all those youtube creators who made their
| living doing high quality animation a couple decades ago?
| Youtube killed their business by fiat because different
| content was more profitable for them. Multiple very
| prominent and influential animators who go all the way
| back to the early Newgrounds days were forced out of
| their job by that change.
|
| The entire reason Youtube creators started taking
| sponsorships is because Google has repeatedly reduced
| their advertising payouts, by _staggering_ amounts.
| Several times Google killed entire swaths of the smaller
| content industry simply because they felt like taking
| more of the money. They can do this because there are no
| alternatives.
|
| The reason Floatplane and Nebula and friends exist is
| entirely because Youtube constantly punishes you for
| making Non-Mr Beast content, and repeatedly cuts how much
| money you get per hour of watched content, with no
| warning or justification even offered.
|
| The creators I watch _do not want me to watch them on
| youtube_. They want me to watch them on Nebula,
| Floatplane, and Patreon. This includes many channels that
| predate Youtube being bought by Google, and ads existing
| on the service at all.
|
| Several of these creators, especially the animators, were
| prominent on Newgrounds, and made zero dollars from their
| work. Most of them have day jobs or other avenues of
| monitizing their talents, like touring or merch or music.
|
| Youtube added a feature to compete with Patreon where you
| can pay to be a "member" of a channel, and that channel
| can produce "members only" videos that you can only watch
| if you pay that channel money. Just recently, Youtube,
| without any warning or checking with creators or asking
| opinions started forcing those videos in front of users
| who are not members, and cannot see them, polluting feeds
| and making it harder to select the next video you want to
| watch and creators, including LTT, are _adamantly against
| this and do not want it_
|
| Youtube does not GAF what creators want, never has, and
| is almost always a _hostile_ and _adversarial_ entity in
| the relationship. I am not screwing over the creators by
| blocking ads, Google is screwing over the creators to
| take more profit from those ads.
| danpalmer wrote:
| But in those cases someone is still seeing the ads. It's
| when no one is seeing the ads that it becomes piracy, in
| my opinion.
|
| A summary is not the same as the content either, that's a
| fairly well tested concept (fair use, etc).
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Ok, let's switch it up a bit. I give the ad-full
| newspaper to someone not speaking the local language. Or
| an illiterate person. Or a monkey trained to be good with
| scissors. Is this also piracy? At what point does it
| become piracy? How little of an ad should someone
| see/understand before it counts as a "valid" ad view? A
| few words? A full sentence? Etc.
| danpalmer wrote:
| You're trying to nit-pick where the line is drawn. The
| point is not where the line is drawn, it's that there is
| a line.
|
| Installing an ad-blocker in your browser and never seeing
| an ad while consuming hours of content for free,
| depriving those creators of revenue, depriving the
| platform of revenue to support your usage of it, is in no
| way comparable to these at-the-margin contrived examples.
| sidrag22 wrote:
| depriving?
|
| the creators are posting their content on a free
| platform, with hopes that it will generate enough views
| so that enough of those viewers are ad watching viewers
| so that they will gain revenue. you're acting like the
| view is 100% meaningless and ONLY a bad thing, and its
| quite the opposite.
|
| the "free" view costs the creator literally nothing, and
| it gains them an additional view, if its a good video its
| potentially gonna help spread the video elsewhere where
| maybe they can find some suckers to mindlessly consume
| ads.
|
| and lets be real, the platform you are "depriving of
| revenue" is google... they operated ad free to create
| massive market capture to create the current monstrosity
| that is youtube in 2025, think they can't cut off all
| users that block ads right now? there is a reason they
| aren't doing so.
| opello wrote:
| There's an "if a tree falls in the forest" version of "if
| the viewer leaves the room" at which point has a theft
| still been visited upon the broadcaster? The business
| that paid for the ad?
|
| In a newspaper if I skip over ads with my eyes do you
| think I've marginalized/pirated/stolen from the business
| that paid for the ad? They paid for placement and not an
| impression. I'd argue that if YouTube presents the ad and
| my browser/app/whatever skips it then YouTube satisfied
| its obligation and that's where it ends. The advertiser,
| knowing full well the limitations of the access
| mechanism, made a choice to throw money into this version
| of the attention economy. It's obviously worth it to them
| or they wouldn't do it, or haven't made as careful of an
| economic decision as I would imagine I suppose.
| jemmyw wrote:
| It's not piracy. You might have a problem with it
| ethically. But you're not breaking copyright laws by
| blocking ads.
|
| Another way to look at it is additive rather than
| subtractive. If I visit a site with a text only browser
| that cannot display ads, what is your position then? And
| if I then implement the ability for my browser to play
| only the main video on any page, what then?
|
| When it comes down to it, we have no obligation to view
| the content on a webpage the way the publisher of said
| webpage wants us to. You can think of plenty of other
| examples that make "adblocking is piracy" ridiculous - I
| invert the colors but the publisher doesn't want me to
| see it with inverted colors. I wear sunglasses while
| looking at it, which changes the way it looks. Maybe the
| site I use always puts an ad in the same place so I stick
| a bit of tape on my monitor in that location, is that
| bad?
| cm2012 wrote:
| Also, Youtube pays out more to creators than anyone else
| on the web, they dwarf Patreon 10x. People who make
| youtube videos rely on ads to get paid.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| They're welcome not to make videos. But if they make them
| and lay them out there for free alongside some garbage I
| have the right to ignore, don't blame me if I do look at
| them and ignore the garbage, and since there's so much of
| it I eventually get my machine to ignore them, not unlike
| wearing gloves when dealing with a messy task as to save
| you the time of scrubbing your hands from dirt/oil/etc.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Ignoring the "garbage" is absolutely valid, but hiding it
| so that you never see it is what makes it piracy.
| timcobb wrote:
| You can say it's immoral or violates terms of service but
| as others have pointed out this isn't piracy, which has a
| very specific definition
| MonitorBird wrote:
| I hope you never get a chance to talk to Congress.
| cm2012 wrote:
| If its so gross you dont have to use/watch youtube!
| mrguyorama wrote:
| This is frankly wrong. All the creators I watch make
| their money from Patreon and use Youtube basically as a
| way to advertise Patreon to people.
|
| This was such a problem for Youtube that they flirted
| with banning linking to Patreon or suggesting viewers go
| to it. Not because it was taking money from google, but
| because it was money being paid not to google.
|
| Then Google competed by adding their own form of Patreon
| built into the system, and creators liked that and
| embraced it, and recently Youtube abused the membership
| system to pollute non-member's screens with videos they
| could not watch without paying, and creators _did not
| want this_ , but Youtube does not care what creators
| want.
|
| The people who make most of their money from Youtube ad-
| rev are the worst the platform has to offer. They are
| beholden to the algorithm, so they have to put out slop
| every single day, and make the most aggressive A/B tested
| clickbait they can manage, and even _pay to advertise
| their video on other channels and videos_ , and they are
| all better off on TikTok anyway.
|
| It's things like Five Minute Crafts and their made up
| videos.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in
| front of you
|
| Is this the way YouTube ads work? If I don't load the ad,
| is someone paying?
| tailrecursion wrote:
| No, piracy is defined as stealing a vendor's exclusivity
| by making copies and putting them up on a web site. Ad
| blocking is not the same as making copies and
| distributing.
|
| You might as well argue that covering your ears during a
| TV advertisement is piracy. That's a strange definition
| of the word if I ever saw one.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I think content piracy is generally accepted to not
| require re-distributing. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but
| if I search "watch free movies online" and find a site
| streaming bad DVD rips, I fully believe that I am
| pirating that content against the wishes of the content
| owner.
| aspaviento wrote:
| Generally accepted by whom? There are many countries that
| only consider distribution illegal so I don't think it's
| generally accepted at all.
| its_ethan wrote:
| I'd say generally accepted by the majority of English
| speaking/western society? If someone said they were going
| to "pirate a movie" there's next to zero chance they are
| referring to the distribution side of that endeavor.
|
| I feel like OP isn't asserting anything even remotely
| controversial in that definition lol
| aspaviento wrote:
| Um... no? Maybe that's true for English speakers (I'm not
| a native speaker, so I won't make assumptions), but
| thinking that Western society views it that way is a big
| stretch, especially with streaming sites. While some
| might admit to watching something on a pirate site, many
| people don't refer to it as piracy when they're using a
| streaming service.
| cwillu wrote:
| > a site streaming bad DVD rips
|
| This is redistributing.
| marssaxman wrote:
| > the right to put an advert in front of you
|
| The advertiser may well _think_ that 's what they're
| buying, but what they're actually getting is the right to
| send my browser a URL, which they hope I will fetch and
| view.
|
| I would prefer not to, so I don't.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Nobody has the right to put things on my screen that I
| don't want to see, first of all. Second, I'm never going
| to "convert", so I'm actually saving them money by
| blocking their ads, because now the ad will go to someone
| else who doesn't block it who might buy whatever Temu
| nonsense is being forced on them.
|
| Edit: oh, I see you work at Google.
| Loudergood wrote:
| You mean DoubleClick. It's clear which business model
| took over after the merger.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I keep forgetting that they bought DoubleClick. Google
| has been a surveillance company for so long now that I've
| kind of forgotten there was ever a Before Times.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Was it piracy to leave the room and make a snack during
| TV ads?
| JAlexoid wrote:
| It's becomes piracy when you create a new distribution
| without ads... which you're doing with ad blockers.
| bcraven wrote:
| https://www.tivo.com/support/how-to/how-to-use-SkipMode
|
| A data point is TiVo who are, apparently, still around
| and have a 'skip ads' button on recorded content.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Still not a new distribution.
| phantasmish wrote:
| TIL when I watch YouTube I'm distributing things.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That is not what distribution means.
|
| I _am_ allowed to splice up my personal copies of videos.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| You are allowed to splice it up, when you have a legally
| acquired personal copy.
|
| But in this case you don't have one in the first place.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They are sending the data for me to watch.
|
| Legally able to watch and legally able to splice up are
| at the same level, as far as copyright is concerned. And
| I don't even need to make an extra copy to do the kind of
| live splicing an ad blocker does.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _ad blocking is definitely piracy - you 're
| circumventing the method of paying for content_
|
| This ship sailed when adblockers first went mainstream.
| (One of the early developers dropped their product
| because they thought it was unethical.)
|
| I think we've now moved to the consensus that adblocking
| when viewing content isn't pirating. It's similar. But
| not the same, in intent, mechanism or effect.
| belorn wrote:
| > you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
|
| So it is a payment?!? Through out the last decades
| advertisement has not been liable under customer
| protection laws that regulate sales of products, and
| generally avoided local laws. The stated reason has been
| that advertisement is not a sale since the viewer is not
| recompensating the publisher. A product given for free is
| in a completely different category of law than that of a
| sale.
|
| Im old enough to remember when phone companies tried the
| tactic of giving away mobile phones for free, but which
| carried a binding contract with the carrier. Courts found
| that to be illegal and forced companies to sell them for
| 1 cent since a free product can not have a binding
| contract, which turned the transaction into a sale. The
| outcome of that meant that information of the full cost
| must be given to the customer in no unclear terms, since
| we are now dealing with a sale.
|
| Products given for free with advertisement is also
| exempted in EU from value added tax. The given reason
| (can't find the original legal source) was that viewers
| may watch nothing, some or all the advertisement, and
| that makes putting a monetary value and taxing it
| difficult. If you buy a subscription it can be taxed, but
| watching it free with adds do not. This is true for both
| physical and non-physical goods.
| Lerc wrote:
| I don't think it is piracy. Most advertising supported
| content is made freely available to you with the
| expectation that you will view the advertising. That
| expectation is not a contract and was a decision made
| without your involvement. You have no obligation to
| perform to someone else's expectations. If the content is
| made freely available you are free to watch it whichever
| way you choose. Choosing not to view the advertising
| might mean they don't get paid for producing their
| content, but you are under no obligation in the absence
| of an agreement.
|
| Piracy involves you deciding to acquire content that has
| not been made freely available.
| foobarian wrote:
| Morally, it is piracy IMO. If you applied the rule
| universally, the site would go out of business and then
| there would be no video to see.
| Saigonautica wrote:
| I find this argument fascinating overall!
|
| I don't really use YouTube, but when ads play on random
| videos and it irritates me, I just close my eyes, the
| simplest version of content-blocking. (If the ad is
| painfully loud, I may also cover my ears in contexts
| where this is not extremely socially awkward)
|
| Can we say it's immoral for me to close my eyes? Can
| someone's business model be the basis of an argument that
| it's immoral for me to exert this simple bodily function?
|
| Is there some contract that I've signed where people have
| the right to my attention in any context? If they've
| based their business model on the assumption that this
| consent exists, and it does not, is it fair to say that
| the business model should fail?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| It was fascinating to me for a bit but it gets old
| fast...
|
| consumer: I want to fill my content hole with content
| someone made through hard work _right now_ and _for free_
| and how dare they delay that by 5 seconds after which I
| can press Skip. I will employ sophisticated tricks and
| run untrusted code _in my browser_ to work around that
| delay.
|
| also consumer: I will totally not be pissed at all if
| there is no free content for me anymore. Their business
| model should fail because I did not consent to ads. How
| dare anyone consider and live within an objectively true
| reality that things have costs?
|
| Is not you since you said you don't use youtube. but it
| is what many youtube users seem to think.
| sidrag22 wrote:
| perhaps it should be out of business then? it captured
| its market share on an ad free model... it would not have
| gotten to this size with this model from the start.
|
| if tomorrow youtube decides only paid subscribers can
| view videos... do they maintain that market share?
| aspaviento wrote:
| Many people used to go to the bathroom during commercial
| breaks while watching a movie on TV. Was that considered
| piracy? Was it immoral?
| brokenmachine wrote:
| I didn't look at the billboards when I was driving today.
|
| Did I just pirate my drive to work?
| drdeca wrote:
| Do the billboard ads fund the road maintenance? I didn't
| think they did. I thought people just bought land next to
| the road and installed signs there.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| Does Google pay for your PC, power or internet
| connection?
| drdeca wrote:
| No, but they do pay the costs of hosting/serving the
| videos, which I thought was the relevant analogy to the
| service being used when driving on a road and there being
| billboards next to the road.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Is the department of transportation owned those
| billboards and used them to fund the roads I would feel
| 0% more obligated to look at them.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Is it piracy to pirate a pirate? Most of the content that
| I view on YT is old live concerts uploaded by fans. Did
| goog pay a license for those pirate recordings? Who
| should goog pay? The label? The pirate who uploaded? The
| OG pirate who recorded the show? So doesn't this make
| them pirates too?
|
| These are honest questions and it seems way too fuzzy to
| me to be making moral judgments about the whole mess.
| drdeca wrote:
| I think saying that it is morally piracy is a little bit
| of an overstatement.
|
| I think one does have the right to block ads on one's
| machine if one chooses.
|
| However, personally, because of the "if ad blocking was
| universalized, the services I appreciate would likely not
| exist" reasoning, I choose not to block ads.
|
| As for other things like "muting/covering ads on screen",
| yeah, that does seem a bit fuzzy. Sometimes I'll even use
| a browser extension to fast forward an ad somewhat.
|
| I do think this is something for the individual to decide
| how they will deal with ads. When I mute an ad, I don't
| think I'm really free riding? For one thing, I don't
| think it is contrary to the expectations of those being
| sold the ad slot. Me fast forwarding the ads a bit
| probably is contrary to their expectations, so I don't
| have as good justification for it, but I don't feel like
| I'm cheating when I do it. (Or, if I do, it is because
| the particular ad is objectionable enough that I'm
| willing to stick it to the advertiser)
| jonners00 wrote:
| >Did goog pay a license for those pirate recordings?
|
| If their copyright monitoring algorithm recognises the
| tracks being performed and the licence holders have opted
| to receive a share of ad revenue rather than issue a
| takedown notice, then I think the answer might well be
| yes.
| usefulcat wrote:
| No one if forcing them to use ads for revenue; they could
| choose to start charging directly for the content. Seems
| to be working ok for Netflix.
| rkomorn wrote:
| The same Netflix that started offering an ad-supported
| tier that's climbed to 190M global users?
| usefulcat wrote:
| Yes, the same Netflix that gets ~90% of it's income from
| subscriptions.
|
| I never claimed that ads can't be _profitable_ ; I was
| responding to a commenter who implied that ads are
| _necessary_ in order to have a viable streaming business,
| which is very obviously not the case.
| rkomorn wrote:
| And you're comparing YouTube and Netflix here, as similar
| (enough) streaming services that could use the same
| business model?
| weregiraffe wrote:
| All things supported by ads should go out of business.
| Ads are 100% morally wrong.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| Google doesn't care about right and wrong, only what they
| can get away with. They don't deserve to be treated as a
| moral subject by you, because they will not reciprocate.
| You're free to be as shameless as they are in your
| interactions with them if you can get away with it,
| you're just playing the game at the same level as they
| are.
|
| I'm paying for Youtube Premium, but its a plain
| utilitarian decision after they started hassling me with
| captchas and intimidations that someone at my IP address
| was using an ad blocker. So yeah, I'm paying protection
| money. But I don't feel in the least good about it.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| what do you think of people making videos, they deserve
| to be paid right?
| array_key_first wrote:
| Yes, but ultimately it is not my responsibility to make
| their business model viable. That's between them and
| Google - not me.
|
| I am not Google's accountant. They can figure it out.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| It's not your responsibility. That's why Google makes you
| do it (pay or watch ads). Otherwise they can't pay
| creators and if they don't get paid then you don't get
| content you like to watch. Lose lose. So I'd say they
| kinda figured it out.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| > Otherwise they can't pay creators
|
| > In 2024 the company made a revenue of $350.01 Billion
| USD
| throwaway290 wrote:
| YouTube made THAT much money? Cool tho I want to know
| sources.
|
| Now assuming that let's check how much it costs to
| host/recode/stream stuff. How dare companies want to
| profit right?
| tcfhgj wrote:
| just wanted to show they don't need you to watch ads to
| pay them
| throwaway290 wrote:
| then you didn't did you?
| array_key_first wrote:
| Google does not make me do it, I am free to mute the ad
| and look away. I don't have to watch ads, that is my
| choice.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| If you want to be pedantic: "Google adds video pre-roll
| ad during which you are likely to see it"
| pirates wrote:
| Why is it automatically assumed that just because you
| post a video on youtube that you deserve to be paid? None
| of my videos made me any money and I'm fine with that.
| immibis wrote:
| In most cases of adblocking, that would be a good thing.
|
| 99% of internet content is complete crap, the equivalent
| of email spam, that only exists because each piece makes
| a few dollars a month from ads. On the old internet,
| without ads, there was plenty of useful content and much
| less spam.
|
| And the spam crowds out good content, as seen in recipe
| sites for example.
| Lerc wrote:
| I do apply the rule universally, they haven't gone out of
| business.
|
| If they were unable to gain any revenue from advertising,
| they would go out of business if they could not find an
| alternative source of income.
|
| I feel that they are more likely to find an alternative
| than go out of business. That alternative might not
| motivate people to make content that no-one wants and
| trick viewers into watching. If it were a system where
| the users being happy dictated their income perhaps the
| service might be better than a system where the happiness
| of advertisers defines how much they get
| array_key_first wrote:
| Right, but objectively, ad blocking is equivalent in
| outcome to muting and looking away - you don't see the
| ad. And YouTube allows that. So, in my view, it's the
| same.
|
| Similar reason to why DVR recording is not pirating.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| lol, no it's not pirating.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| I'm pretty anti-piracy, and I don't think ad-blocking is
| piracy.
|
| Metaphors are dangerous, but, for the purposes of this
| specific comparison, I see piracy as breaking into a
| video store and taking a disc, and ad blocking as
| allowing some people into my house but not others.
|
| YouTube is free to block me as a user or put its content
| behind a paywall if it doesn't like me doing this, but I
| am also free to decide what comes into my browser.
| sidrag22 wrote:
| and they won't block you, because they understand that
| their dominance of this particular style of video content
| requires allowing everyone in.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| Just use AdNausem (uBlock Origin mod) that clicks ALL THE
| ADDS. Problem solved! Wish more people used it, so the
| creators could again make money from ads.
| marssaxman wrote:
| While this is not an unreasonable way one could define
| "piracy", surely you must be aware that your definition
| is significantly more expansive than the one in common
| use?
| danpalmer wrote:
| What's the difference? Unless you take the common use of
| the term to mean peer to peer file sharing, which clearly
| isn't expansive enough (see pirate DVDs, pirate sports
| streaming, etc), then I'm not quite sure how it is a bad
| fit?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The common use means violation of copyright, specifically
| distribution rights.
|
| Payment is not a good indicator. Tons of free content has
| no payment, and a good chunk of pirate content _is_ paid
| for.
| donohoe wrote:
| No. Ad blocking is NOT piracy. It's really that simple.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| 1. It's not piracy.
|
| 2. I don't care.
|
| I choose what code runs on my machine, not Google. Google
| can run their own code on their own machines, that's
| fine. Once data is in my processor, I'm going to do what
| I want with it. Google doesn't have to concern themselves
| with what I'm doing on my own computer.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| > 1. It's not piracy.
|
| Simply re-asserting your opinion doesn't lend any extra
| weight to your argument. If both sides just repeat their
| opinions, that's not a discussion.
| 3578987532688 wrote:
| "What can be asserted without evidence can also be
| dismissed without evidence."
| venturecruelty wrote:
| You don't seem to understand. Allow me to clarify. I'm
| not interested in winning some silly argument on Hacker
| News, I'm interested in using the internet without being
| spied on or paying out the ass. I just want all of the
| Very Good Boys and Girls who are doing unpaid public
| relations work for Google to understand why the rest of
| us don't care what they think.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Oh my god, the smarminess... yes, nobody except you
| understands, of course. Thank goodness we have you to
| grace us with wisdom, while also declining to actually
| argue a point and just repeating your opinion
| (essentially, "nuh uh").
|
| Whatever, you already said you don't care about actual
| rational discourse and regard everyone else as (un)paid
| actors, so this is pointless.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Ad blockers are recommended by the FBI as safety
| measures. I follow the FBI's advice. Internet ads are a
| vector for executing untrusted code that can invoke
| exploits and engage in invasive fingerprinting. Revert
| back to the 90s web with dumb ads and I'll look at them.
| It's amazing how blinkered people will be about
| potentially malicious programs downloaded from the
| internet just because it's hidden behind a browser
| interface.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Forbes literally did this.
|
| Guys, please disable your adblockers
|
| People disable adblockers
|
| Malware!
| brokenmachine wrote:
| Just because you say it's piracy doesn't mean it is.
|
| When they provide all the equipment necessary to watch
| the content, and pay for the internet connection and
| power to my house, only then will they have a claim to
| what commands are run on my computer.
|
| But my computer, that I paid for, using the power and
| bandwidth that I pay for, does not play ads.
|
| If they don't like those terms, they can feel absolutely
| free to not send me any content they don't want me to
| watch.
| taftster wrote:
| I can absolutely decide to reject with impunity any and
| all packets that my computer receives, no matter if I
| initialized the request. I have not made a sale by
| reading some other website content and have absolute
| authority to discriminate over which data is allowed or
| blocked. Ads have absolutely no higher authority or
| preference over other packets that would obligate my
| bandwidth, attention, or time.
| exodust wrote:
| > " _you 're circumventing the method of paying for
| content_"
|
| Because the payment method is a scam. Imagine if all car
| owners were charged the same price for fuel regardless of
| how much they used.
|
| Likewise, imagine watching 10 videos and being charged
| the same as someone who watches 200 videos.
|
| We should pay for what we watch. The end. Ad blocking is
| _not_ piracy when the payment option is at best a blunt
| extraction of funds from my wallet, at worst a sleazy
| shakedown.
| lloeki wrote:
| > you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
|
| Without an ad blocker I can stand up and walk to the next
| room - optionally muting audio output - then come back.
|
| Is that fraud? Or should I drink a verification can?
| EliteGadget wrote:
| What you are describing is not piracy/Copyright
| infringement.
|
| You can say that we should not be blocking those ads,
| that is fine. But blocking ads is not making unauthorised
| copies of the content.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Some of us are old enough to remember televisions. It's
| not piracy to leave the room or turn the TV off while the
| ads are playing.
|
| See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_C
| o._v._Dish_N...
| fsflover wrote:
| > but ad blocking is definitely piracy - you're
| circumventing the method of paying for content
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45177601
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| its pirating content in a way that you dont generate
| revenue for youtuber that expect from ads
| akersten wrote:
| I'm sure that trillion-dollar analytics empire is worth
| something even without my eyeballs consuming some shitty
| pre-roll.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Most of the ad revenue actually goes to the people
| uploading content.
|
| But sure... they're all clearly are "trillion-dollar
| analytics empire"
| archargelod wrote:
| Most content creators have links to support them with
| donation or patreon.
|
| Once a year choose 3 small youtubers (larger ones are
| already multi-millioners, they don't need your help) and
| drop them $5 each.
|
| Now you just did 1000% of what they could get from you
| watching ads.
| chrneu wrote:
| what's insane, even $1 is more than they'll get from you
| watching every single one of their videos. The issue is
| processing fees on that payment, so might as well give em
| a bit more.
|
| It's wild how low the payout on ads is. Seriously, just
| flip people $1 every once in a while and it's more
| support than ads.
|
| It's so stupid how people get all morally superior when
| they figure out that someone block ads.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "what's insane, even $1 is more than they'll get from you
| watching every single one of their videos."
|
| how can you confidence with being so wrong btw ????
|
| Ads bringing more money than donation ever would be
| tailrecursion wrote:
| I'm not generating revenue for a lot of companies who are
| in the advertising business. That's not the definition of
| piracy. Find another word.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| it is because the business model is you get free content
| in exchange from revenue from ads
|
| Youtube gonna fail if everyone and I mean everyone
| suddenly stopped watching ads
|
| But I cant expect HN chuds to learn basic economic so its
| my fault
| justinclift wrote:
| > Youtube gonna fail if everyone and I mean everyone
| suddenly stopped watching ads
|
| Maybe that would be better? :)
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| cant expect much from tech bros that want people
| livelihood disappear
| phantasmish wrote:
| Every one of these discussions: "But without ad revenue a
| bunch of sites might vanish!"
|
| Me: But not internet archive, Wikipedia, or Library
| Genesis, right? So 90ish% of the Web's value is safe? Ok
| sounds good to me, let's do this.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| didn't know wikipedia has content creator, last time I
| check they called themselves "volunteer" while Wikimedia
| foundation spends money on DEI project
|
| also why we stop at youtube videos, just pirate the
| games,steal music and movie etc
|
| but don't cry when they goes bankrupt and stop releasing
| new games,movie etc anymore
|
| we can just generate new art,music,movie,games etc with
| AI
|
| after all, tech industries is created just for that
| carlosjobim wrote:
| This is the core of the faith which communists have. We
| take everything and give nothing back and then wonder why
| nobody wants to create anything. Goods and services
| simply materialize out of thin air. It's a meteorological
| phenomena really.
| phantasmish wrote:
| Other business models are fine. I would support almost
| any amount of legal push-back on ads, though, and don't
| care what happens to ad brokers.
| tailrecursion wrote:
| I understand you about the implied contract. I think it's
| more complex than that. People were making videos before
| the promise of ad revenue, and they were better videos.
| If people go away who make videos for money - which will
| never happen - it would be an improvement overall. If ad
| blockers do win, YT could edit their ads into the videos
| themselves making an ad blocker's job harder. YTers who
| want money could make their own independent deals with
| advertisers, as some do today. And YT can always charge
| money - as they do right now with premium. But if YT did
| that for all tiers, they couldn't dominate and they'd
| have competitors spring up. They know that. They also
| know if they ever asked anyone whether they agree to
| watch ads, most would say No. The prevalence of Ad
| blockers are proof that people don't want to watch the
| ads. But, as you point out, we do accept the free
| content. The thing is the world would likely be better if
| YT would charge everyone for access. Judging from video
| quality these days a lot of YTers could be doing
| something more productive than what they're doing now - I
| mean in an objective sense, better for economic health.
| But the real reason for these $0 tech services is to
| stifle competition and prevent the market from working.
| And that works to everyone's detriment. Basic economics
| doesn't function without prices.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| You wouldn't _not_ download a virus.
| mattacular wrote:
| I pay for YouTube Premium too (probably not much longer) but
| can only 'comfortably' use the site through a series of
| increasingly hacky extensions for Firefox. On non-web apps,
| there is no recourse from the UI enshittification.
|
| The general theme is the same as the article: less real
| estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch.
| There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had
| to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts
| (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some
| sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI
| generated slop you'd never want to play.
|
| If this is the premium experience then I don't want it.
| zahlman wrote:
| > The general theme is the same as the article: less real
| estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch.
| There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I
| had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for
| Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for
| some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the
| worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play.
|
| This is the same stuff you get _without_ buying Premium. So
| I guess they figure you 're _only_ paying to dodge the ads.
|
| Which seems, to me, like a lot of money compared to (ad
| cost * number of ads you would see).
| makeitdouble wrote:
| You still get the autogenerated dubs by default, the comments
| moved to end of the earth, and many other stuff (shorts etc.)
| people get pissed about.
|
| At this point ads are just one of the annoyances amoung so
| many others.
| polotics wrote:
| The massive overlays of what-to-watch-next hiding most of the
| video much too early, ie. before the very end, of the video
| you were trying to watch until the end but now just ragequit
| and downloaded instead... are very ugly
| jonas21 wrote:
| Those are there because the content creator you're watching
| decided to put them there. It's entirely up to them whether
| they show up and when they show up.
| opello wrote:
| And they can be hidden, so it's not exactly entirely up
| to them, nor should it be. If they wanted them in the
| video content they could put them there.
| polotics wrote:
| how can they be hidden?
| chrneu wrote:
| For me, and many people, advertising is a mental health
| issue. I don't enjoy those ads, they are very disturbing and
| jarring. It causes me anxiety and I don't like the things
| that those ads normalize. I don't think most people,
| especially americans, realize how far off the rails our
| society is in terms of our normalization of insane shit.
|
| So, for health reasons, I block nearly all advertisements. It
| is a HUGE mental health win. There is a ton of research
| behind this, as well.
|
| I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern.
| I'll block ads instead. I should not have to PAY MORE for a
| product that doesn't damage my health.
|
| I will always happily directly support content creators. I
| will not watch ads.
| timcobb wrote:
| You're responding to a comment that says they pay and don't
| see ads
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| > I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't
| damage my health.
|
| Is this the same way of saying your mental health is
| important to you but you're not prepared to pay a service
| money to protect said mental health and support creators
| you like?
| DocTomoe wrote:
| > I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health
| concern.
|
| Honest question: Why? You do pay for toothpaste, right? If
| you have a gym membership, you pay extra for the
| convenience not to do cardio in the woods (which is great
| in late May, much less so in late November). You tend to
| pay more for nutritious food as compared to things you get
| at a fast food joint.
|
| What makes a health concern related to
| $genericOnlineService different?
| phantasmish wrote:
| This is less like paying for a gym membership and more
| like paying some kind of fat-fairy _not_ to come inject
| you with fat while you're sleeping every night.
|
| Paying for things that help you is good. Paying someone
| _not_ to try to scam you is... fucked up.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Well, considering using YouTube _is_ something you do out
| of your own, free will ... isn 't it a bit like going to
| McDonalds, deliberately not ordering the water and the
| salad, and then taking legal action because they made you
| fat?
|
| If you know a platform is not good for you, AND you are
| negatively affected by it ... the right move is not to
| use it.
| phantasmish wrote:
| "Here's some free food"
|
| Cool!
|
| "And a side of literal shit, plus a slip of paper with
| the number of my cousin who'll try to swindle you"
|
| ... coo... ool.
|
| _Quietly tosses the shit and phone number in the trash,
| keeps the free food_
| brikym wrote:
| As a premium user I'd like to block shorts.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| If it weren't for piracy, there would be nothing on Youtube
| except highschool dropouts lobbing accusations at each other,
| and AI-generated slop.
| snicky wrote:
| Just here to say thank you to everyone arguing/explaining why
| ad blockers are not piracy using interesting arguments better
| than my own.
|
| You will never walk alone.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I also pay for premium, and have for at least 15 years since
| it was called Red, and the experience is complete garbage.
|
| If you turn off history, you get zero videos on your home
| screen. This is not because the history is needed to generate
| the suggestions, because the blank home only started a few
| years ago.
|
| I used to never subscribe to any channels, I just got
| reasonable feed of suggestions based off of whatever I
| happened to search for explicitly or if I got there by
| clicking a link, or by what I chose to click on even if the
| list starts out totally random, except of course it never was
| totally random because they still have ip address and other
| fingerprnting signals.
|
| After they blaked out the home screen and started showing the
| "you're not logged in, go here to fix this error", I
| subscribed to a bunch of channels to provide data for
| generating a feed. They still don't provide any. You can take
| extra clicks (which is agonizing on the Roku since it just
| doesn't react well and misses button presses all the time) to
| get to the subscriptions page, which will show recent uploads
| exactly from those channels and no others.
|
| I also still get several other forms of ads in the form of
| the embedded/native ads and the irrelevant suggestions that
| come from youtube's interests instead of my own, like shorts.
| I also still get ads simply because I don't get to use my own
| account all the time. When you watch youtube anywhere but
| your own laptop by yourself, you are at the whims of someone
| else's account and some other platforms app limitations.
|
| And even on your own machine, I absolutely resent having to
| tie my viewing history to my identity and have someone else
| log all of that. So there is reason to intentionally use no
| account even if you otherwise have no problem paying to
| support not only the content producers but even the delivery
| system.
|
| Why can't I disable shorts? There is no amount I can pay to
| hide all shorts, but I can have it for free i=on a pc with a
| tampermonkey or ublock script. But that only helps on a pc. I
| watch mostly on a TV and I have no ability to hack the roku
| app. Maybe if I switch to a google tv I could use newpipe or
| something.
|
| Paying for premium does not make youtube good. It does not
| resolve much of anything. It is not remotely the touche this
| smarmy comment attempts to suggest.
|
| Paying for premium takes youtube from being like pulling out
| 10 of your fingernails to only pulling out 8 of your
| fingernails.
|
| That 2of10 fingernals relief and for the sake of the
| creators, that's the only reason I still pay for premium.
| nullc wrote:
| They keep doing it because you keep paying them.
|
| Use the money you save to buy a media pc that can block
| shorts to use to watch youtube on the tv.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| I do pay for YouTube Premium - and I still get ads when
| someone has YT Videos embedded on their website. YouTube
| knows who I am, the cookies are set, there is no reason to
| give me ads.
|
| It is not yet painful enough for me to invest time and energy
| to research less convenient ways of UX improvement. Not ...
| yet.
| array_key_first wrote:
| The point is that the pirated experience is both easier to
| access and more convenient.
|
| If I'm paying, I expect the best possible experience, and you
| just don't get that. It's not just YouTube, many streaming
| services are objectively inferior to pirating.
| ElectricalTears wrote:
| Revanced is the best UX for Android, can remove a lot of things
| as well (like shorts).
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| I never managed to install it
|
| it complains about youtube app being separated into parts or
| smth like that
| bcraven wrote:
| That's a feature: if you can't work out which YouTube apk
| to patch them you'll never work out the rest of the
| installation process.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| Its a bold strategy, Cotton, lets see if it pays off for
| em
| nhumrich wrote:
| It also contains more ads then you tube itself.
| vitorgrs wrote:
| There's no ads on Revanced...
| charcircuit wrote:
| Yes, there are. But there is a toggle to switch them on
| and off.
| vitorgrs wrote:
| Not sure why mine there's no ads... Never had to toggle,
| as far I remember. I used Revanced Manager.
| spaqin wrote:
| Possibly they installed it from one of the scam sites
| that pop up when you search for YouTube Revanced.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's scams all the way down!
| 1bpp wrote:
| You're using a fake version that probably also has
| malware. https://revanced.app
| clearleaf wrote:
| I stopped using apps like this because they were always
| getting broken by youtube. Obviously it's intentional
| sabotage but still. It felt like I had to update those apps
| every time I used them and sometimes there was no update at
| that time at all. The mobile site never breaks and you have
| full access to extensions if you use firefox.
| komali2 wrote:
| I've loved Grayjay as an alternative YouTube client. It can
| pull in videos from other platforms as well, and it can Cast
| videos! AdBlock and sponsorblock built in too.
| walt_grata wrote:
| I did the same, but I also added in a tamper monkey script to
| get rid of the picture in picture thing they force on you as
| part of their "core experience". I wish their ux designers and
| PMs were less arrogant and realized their preferences are just
| preferences and gave us back the ability to disable stuff like
| this in the app.
| bronco21016 wrote:
| Are they the PMs' preferences? Or are they A/B tested
| "optimizations" to hit their KPIs?
| kevincox wrote:
| I think it is worse than that. Yes they A/B test. But they
| also have incentive to show how great their new feature
| idea is. So they are always picking the metrics that make
| their feature look better and ignoring the ones that make
| it look worse. So there is a thumb on the scale here.
| walt_grata wrote:
| I honestly don't care. I've taken the stance of just
| looking for alternatives. Chrome on Android forced grid for
| tabs, boom changes to Firefox everywhere. YouTube doesn't
| allow me to disable picture in picture, canceled my paid
| account and mostly stopped using it, etc...
| tdeck wrote:
| I've been doing this for years, but recently they have nerfed
| mobile web YouTube and it's limited to 360p (at least it seems
| to be for me).
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are _really bad_.
| Seeing a product in a youtube ad now causes me to be more
| likely to believe it 's a ripoff.
|
| Things like a cheap $5 fan being sold for $60 as roughly:
| "Super efficient A/C that will save you $100s on your
| electricity bill and can cool a room down in just minutes"
| R_D_Olivaw wrote:
| When ai slop makes it cheap to churn out the ads this is what
| you get. What does YT care, they get the money either way.
|
| _Enshittification continues_
| riffraff wrote:
| what I don't understand is how paying for YT ads can be
| profitable. I've never clicked on a YT ad _intentionally_
| nor I know anyone who did, having asked a few people. I
| admit the brand awareness works tho.
| gosub100 wrote:
| There's a counterintuitive effect sometimes, which is
| that the person who tolerates a stupid ad is also more
| likely to buy the product. This was used by email
| spammers whose messages came littered with deliberate
| grammatical errors as an efficient filter against too-
| smart targets.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| I assume you mean all the snake oil pre-playback ads? Mostly
| dangerous medical advice, solar scams, or wellness quackery.
|
| This week, an instructional video I was watching on how to
| repair my water heater was suddenly interrupted by a campy ad
| for pussy-hair razors.
|
| It was so ill-timed, bizarre, and inappropriate I burst out
| laughing.
|
| The other one I was seeing a lot of, until very recently, was
| pornographic static ads that were implemented as an optical
| illusion. If you viewed it at full scale it was an innocuous
| image of a closet or chair or something, so it passed all
| checks, but when scaled into a thumbnail, it turns into a
| silhouette of a woman giving oral or something else obscene.
| Not sure what this technique is called or how it's done.
| (It's not a schooner, it's a sailboat.)
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Not sure what this technique is called or how it's done
|
| Downscaling/downsampling attack.
|
| Commonly used against AI systems either to pass filters or
| poison data.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02456
|
| If you know the sampling rate of the sampling filter you
| want to pass you can do some tricky encoding to show a
| different image at that particular resolution bypassing
| AI/content recognition systems. This said if it starts
| happening a lot Google will take those images/videos and
| feed them into a learning system that looks for those
| patterns and preemptively marks the video.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| I find the downsampling thing happens on Temu ads a lot.
|
| I do a cryptic crossword from a free UK newspaper most
| days, because my Dad (many thousands of miles away), also
| does the same crossword and we can bond over good and bad
| clues, and so on.
|
| The banner ad on that page is always Temu. It always,
| always looks pornographic. And then you look closer, and
| it's completely innocuous.
|
| I have assumed that the alogrithm is just optimising for
| attention, and it just so happens those images, at that
| scale, are going to get a lot of attention. But it does
| mean I can't show somebody else the crossword I'm doing for
| fear of looking like a degenerate pervert, and I am at risk
| of causing an issue if I play it on public transport.
| sunaookami wrote:
| That's just... every ad. I mostly avoid products that I see
| in ads (like TV, radio and internet ads) ironically.
| chickensong wrote:
| No, why would you allow ads lol.
| fransje26 wrote:
| > Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad.
|
| Claiming that (youtube) ads are bad is a tautology at this
| point. What else can be expected from something competing for
| what is left of a user's attention at the very lowest end of
| a market already overflooded with crud?
|
| The question should rather be: why would one voluntarily let
| one's well-being be polluted by such invasive, parasitic
| crap.
|
| There is nothing normal about ads everywhere. There is
| nothing healthy about ads everywhere. Ads are not an
| inevitability.
|
| Run an ad-blocker, protect your mental sanity.
| crote wrote:
| Now we just need someone to build AR glasses with real-
| world adblocking...
| gambiting wrote:
| I mean, it can be done with legislation too. Poland where
| I'm from used to be absolutely plastered with giant
| bilboards everywhere you looked, you literally couldn't
| go anywhere without seeing some ad in your perhipheral
| vision. But recently a new law was passed that banned
| _all_ advertising in public spaces unless it 's literally
| a banner above your store, and we suddenly got our public
| spaces back. It's almost weird not seeing ads on every
| tree and every 10 meters by the side of the road.
| fransje26 wrote:
| Exactly. I'm not from Poland, but this exact example came
| to mind when writing my comment.
|
| Ads are not an inevitability.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
| fransje26 wrote:
| Thank you for this great link. A short read, well worth
| reading. And I fully agree with the proposition.
|
| The only problem is that it will be fought tooth and nail
| by the incumbents, that "incidentally" also control all
| the propaganda diffusion channels needed to brainwash us
| into refusing such a change.
|
| It would take a radical shift in humanity to get this
| far.
|
| A man can dream.
| fransje26 wrote:
| https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/A_Bicyclops_Built_for_Tw
| o
| array_key_first wrote:
| Ahh, but once you get neurolink and the ads are injected
| directly into your subconscious mind what happens then?
|
| I propose a new natural law: every medium that can carry
| advertisements, will.
|
| Exhibit A: gasoline pumps. Why do those have ads? I'm
| already paying for gas. And I can't even run away.
| kgwxd wrote:
| If I were into AI, right now I'd be working on ad blocking.
| skydhash wrote:
| The good ads are just normal videos (movies trailer, product
| announcements, sponsored video)
| codedokode wrote:
| Yes, I saw a promoted video with cryptocurrency scam ("earn
| lot of money trading crypto with ChatGPT") for many months on
| European Youtube. As I remember, to become rich you just need
| to put your private keys into their script and run it.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > _Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad.
| Seeing a product in a youtube ad now causes me to be more
| likely to believe it 's a ripoff._
|
| YT needs a button to the effect of "I will never, ever, EVER,
| buy or use this product, stop spending money on this ad"
|
| the obviously-AI created slop or the mobile games that I will
| never play, etc. is just a waste of time for basically
| everyone (except YT making that money, I guess)
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that,
| uninstalled the apps, and now use... rumble and tiktok.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Youtube's censorship is one reason I won't pay for it. Rumble
| is a legitimate site even as people decry its existence (it
| would be less necessary if Youtube didn't decide on being the
| world's opinion police)
| immibis wrote:
| Which opinions are you trying to access?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| A non-comprehensive list of things youtube tells you to
| self censor or you will be financially punished, or
| _punishes you for showing or telling despite not being
| listed in their community guidelines in any way_
|
| Swears (recently backed down somewhat on this)
|
| Anything to do with guns at all, whether you are right
| wing or vocally and loudly left wing.
|
| Mummmifying a chicken on a science channel gets you
| demonitized.
|
| Chemistry that results in an explosion.
|
| _Fucking any footage of any war ever_ so no WW2 history
| videos, no videos educating you about previous genocides
| or war crimes or crimes against humanity, you can 't show
| pictures of the holocaust or Armenian genocide no matter
| how educational your content is.
|
| A highlight reel compiled exclusively from clips pulled
| from your previous videos that were not demonitized will
| get demonitized, and when you reach out to your dedicated
| account manager because you are that big, they say "that
| shouldn't have happened" and promise you to fix it and
| that it will never happen again, which you take to hear,
| and then you produce a new highlight reel the next year
| following the same procedure it _again_ gets demonitized
| so you reach out to your account manager again and they
| apologize profusely and say they will fix it _and then
| every single video on your channel gets demonitized_ and
| your account is suddenly in peril for doing something
| that your account manager told you to do.
|
| You are a channel that shows pictures of planes and
| documents and talks about the development of these
| aircraft. One day your channel is suddenly scheduled for
| deletion because you are a "content mill". This is an
| utterly baseless accusation that would take five minutes
| of watching your content to dispel, but you still are
| left waiting until T-1 for an actual human to look and
| turn off the "Purge you" schedule.
|
| It's just absurd. Sure, the racists are pissed they can't
| put hate content on youtube, but lets not pretend they
| should be the only ones. "Forgotten Weapons" is just a
| gun centric antiques roadshow but "selling guns" is
| explicitly against policy, and all the things with guns
| that aren't against policy "weirdly" also get demonitized
| all the time.
|
| A reminder that "demonitization" on youtube is also what
| gets your video not recommended to anyone to watch,
| including your literal subscribers (yes even if you
| clicked the fucking bell)
|
| Note that Youtube provides an entire set of tooling and
| functionality to automatically A/B test thumbnails and
| titles, yet claims in their community guidelines that you
| should not use "A thumbnail that misleads viewers to
| think they're about to view something that's not in the
| video" so they just DGAF
| alex1138 wrote:
| And everything to do with covid
|
| https://rumble.com/vt62y6-covid-19-a-second-opinion.html
|
| https://rumble.com/v28x6zk-sasha-latypova-msc.-nsa-team-
| enig...
|
| (and so on; many other links)
|
| I don't understand the reluctance of people to click
| Rumble links. I'd love to link you to stuff on Youtube
| but TPTB have decided you're not allowed to see it (this
| should be a very narrow category of things and those I
| linked and others absolutely should be allowed)
|
| This is when they're doing outright censorship too and
| not just demonetization
|
| They're a criminal cartel
| alex1138 wrote:
| I meant demonetization of other things outside of covid
| too, not just that
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Specifically, the COVID policies massively impacted
| _people trying to spread official info about covid_ even.
|
| Which is the primary problem of any youtube policy: It's
| not real, because they treat the output of some
| underspecced ML model as gods truth.
|
| There was a period where _you could not say the word
| covid without getting downranked, even in passing_
|
| Even if you believe it was important to limit the spread
| of misinformation about covid, _youtube did not do that,
| and made things worse_
|
| I don't like Rumble, but Brandon Herrera I think has
| created a new platform specifically for Guntubers, and I
| don't very much like the man's content but I hope it
| succeeds because the policies around guns are just absurd
| and broken, and generally do not even remotely match the
| claimed policy.
|
| Similarly, the guy from Armchair Historian tried to go
| his own way, but I think that failed.
|
| The problem is not "any moderation", or "the left", like
| rumble seems to think. The problem is that Google's
| claimed policies are not their actual policies, and their
| claimed policies are fairly stupid and restricted for all
| audiences, especially if you aren't American, and are
| driven entirely by advertiser preferences and dice rolls.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Many of you absolutely do not deserve the power of
| downvotes
|
| I pray you don't work for FAANG and have your thumbs on the
| scales and I stand by everything I said
| sreya wrote:
| Not being able to play Youtube in the background on your phone
| is unfortunately one of the main appeals of Premium. There's a
| lot of good mixes, concerts, etc that I play for the audio
| while doing something else that I can't do without Premium
| unless I wanted to leave my phone unlocked (and pray I don't
| pocket click a link).
| R_D_Olivaw wrote:
| I'm fairly certain if you use a browser and the desktop
| version of the site you can listen with the screen
| off/locked.
| cjameskeller wrote:
| Firefox Android can play audio even when the phone is locked,
| and I use it regularly.
| just-another-se wrote:
| brave on android can also do the same, not sure about ios
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| Note: If you have a mid-range to lower end phone, battery
| optimization might stop your playback anyway by default.
| You can exclude Firefox from battery optimization though.
| shminge wrote:
| If you're on Android, YouTube Revanced does this (+many other
| premium features)
| qwerpy wrote:
| My iPhone running Safari and uBlock Origin lite is able to do
| this. I don't have the youtube app installed. I don't even
| think the ad blocker is necessary for background audio, but I
| don't want to see ads.
|
| 1. Go to youtube.com in the browser, play the video, switch
| back to the home screen. Video playback will stop, which is a
| good default behavior.
|
| 2. Swipe down from the top of the screen which brings up
| "Notification Center" which somewhat strangely contains a
| playback control for the browser.
|
| 3. Press play. Audio resumes. If it's part of a playlist, you
| don't have to manually advance, it will play automatically.
|
| No ads, no youtube premium subscription, no "desktop mode",
| no sideloading, no additional apps other than the beloved ad
| blocker.
| arialdomartini wrote:
| TIL Thank you pal, it perfectly works!
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| You can open youtube in the phone's web browser and install
| an extension that blocks a site's ability to tell when focus
| has left the page/app. This is how I listen to some music on
| my phone while working out.
|
| Ad blockers help with the constant nagging about "open in the
| app!"
| alextingle wrote:
| NewPipe
| DirkH wrote:
| Never works
| EliteGadget wrote:
| I run Brave (Android) on my phone and don't have any ads on
| Youtube. I think it worked on Brave iOS but I sold my iPhone
| last year.
|
| I let Brave run in the background and it seems to work fine.
| a96 wrote:
| Brave is a series scam company.
| EliteGadget wrote:
| I don't think that is true and I don't really care. The
| browser works properly, it has ad-blocking built in and
| it is trivial to turn off the other nonsense in the
| browser.
| stack_framer wrote:
| I also stopped using the YouTube app in favor of the Brave
| browser on my desktop and my Android phone (no extensions
| needed). I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on YouTube!
| strix_varius wrote:
| I also use Brave on all my devices - it also works on Amazon
| Prime. Prime frequently made me offers to upgrade to an ad-
| free experience that I didn't understand... surely this is a
| bug, I already have an ad-free experience. Then I installed
| the Prime app on my TV and realized the constant barrage of
| ads that Brave has been protecting me from!
| a96 wrote:
| Brave is a series scam company.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| Why do you think this?
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| There's odd and end features that some people prefer with
| Premium. E.g. offline downloads to watch when you're out of
| signal, background play, etc.
|
| And they don't want to go through alternative workarounds to do
| so.
|
| For me, it's actually just being able to easily share premium
| with other users in my household, so that I don't have to have
| my ears blasted with ads when they open YT on the TV. Less
| effort than playing around with things like pihole and hoping
| it doesn't break other things.
| ksec wrote:
| >I used to pay for YouTube premium
|
| It would have been amazing value had Youtube Music, which came
| with YouTube Premium were half decent. But it is not. We got
| Spotify which isn't perfect, and then Apple Music, which for
| years didn't know what they were doing, and then Youtube Music,
| which is basically a company doesn't give a damn about Music.
|
| We now have three Giant companies over the history of the past
| 30 - 40 years, once they grow big that make junk.
| kevincox wrote:
| Yes, I very happily payed for YouTube Premium when it came
| with Google Play Music. Them turning that off in favour of
| the awful YouTube Music was the straw that broke the camels
| back.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > Apple Music, which for years didn't know what they were
| doing
|
| You pay them money, they let you stream music and otherwise
| stay out of your way. I don't know about you, but that's
| pretty much ideal as far as I'm concerned.
| ksec wrote:
| I still remember Apple Music App was all about the magical
| "Next Song" and they went their way to hide Repeat One
| button because they want you to do "Discovery".
|
| It wasn't until about 2020 before they relented. But that
| ideal is still true with Apple Music today.
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| ... and they let you upload music and have it exist
| natively in the interface and streamable anywhere you're
| logged in, the exact feature I was using Google Music for.
|
| Even beyond Apple Music, considering the other competitors
| I legitimately don't know what the use case for Spotify is
| beyond social these days.
| jdhwosnhw wrote:
| I would genuinely like to understand this perspective. Ads or
| paying for premium is how the underlying business makes money.
| The UX might suck but you have a choice - you can just not
| watch YouTube. The approach you describe (which i understand is
| a popular one) is equivalent to justifying robbing a store
| because their prices are too high.
| allarm wrote:
| It's not a robbery if noone is getting robbed. That's a very
| bad analogy really.
| jdhwosnhw wrote:
| You are using a service without paying for the service by
| actively circumventing the payment mechanism. Is that not
| stealing?
| asldfkasgkj wrote:
| Is it okay if I go the bathroom or get another beer while
| the commercials play? If so, why?
| jdhwosnhw wrote:
| Thats like saying the grocery store is ok with me eating
| some of the grapes while I shop so they must be ok with
| me walking out without paying for my groceries.
|
| I'm not trying to be obtuse here. I really want to
| understand some sort of reasonable moral justification
| for actively avoiding paying for a service that you are
| using / circumventing the mechanism by which the business
| makes money.
| aembleton wrote:
| The approach is the equivalent of avoiding the end of aisles
| so that you don't even look at the products that companies
| are paying to the store to promote.
| jdhwosnhw wrote:
| Except in this case the only way the store makes money is
| either by you paying an entrance fee or by you looking at
| the products. You are being delivered a service (whose
| delivery costs money) while actively circumventing the
| mechanism the store employs to be compensated for that
| service.
| jiehong wrote:
| YouTube is the content, not the box.
|
| You might like the content, but you don't pay for a shit box
| anyways.
| sys32768 wrote:
| To YouTube's credit, at least the remaining videos aren't
| vertical.
| troupo wrote:
| Not for long: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45872870
| PaulHoule wrote:
| They're catching up with the recommendation technology China had
| 5 years ago.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| _#shorts_
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Was just talking with my son about how some YouTubers who
| made short videos long ago started making longer and less
| succinct videos because they thought the algorithm favored
| long videos and then TikTok happens.
| cloudflare728 wrote:
| HN typically use the word "steal" when Chinese companies do the
| same thing from American or European companies.
|
| It's taking them 5 years stealing Chinese algorithms.
| MBCook wrote:
| I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app
| on my Apple TV. I can't wait to find out how they screwed this
| one up.
|
| My personal long-term complaint is the length of video titles.
|
| Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right
| now there is one on my screen titled "The Best Decisions Every
| Video Game Console Developer Made".
|
| Now if you didn't know, that is not the whole title. But there's
| absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know
| that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is
| clearly not the end of a sentence.
|
| So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the
| video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things
| such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you're not
| interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in
| the title. In this case you also see "(Part".
|
| Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
|
| The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the
| video.
|
| Obnoxious.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Google News has this same truncation problem. I thought it
| would be an obvious thing to, I don't know, use the `title`
| attribute so mouseover reveals the rest of the snews...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Now if you didn't know, that is not the whole title. But
| there's absolutely no indication of that. The only way you
| actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the
| screen is clearly not the end of a sentence.
|
| > So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the
| video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things
| such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you're not
| interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in
| the title. In this case you also see "(Part".
|
| > Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
|
| > The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the
| video.
|
| I'm looking at youtube right now. There's a video displayed
| with the title "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! |
| Europe, Africa, Asia , ..."
|
| That "..." is the indicator that the title has been truncated.
| If you hover the title with your mouse, you can see the entire
| thing: "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe,
| Africa, Asia , America | Why Are They Similar?"
|
| Not far away, there's "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing
| Questions | Tech Support...", which expands to "Alex Honnold
| Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support | WIRED".
|
| Am I using Apple TV? No. Is it really true that they removed
| the truncation indicator?
| MBCook wrote:
| It's different on Apple TV.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| > Am I using Apple TV? No. Is it really true that they
| removed the truncation indicator?
|
| Yes.
| atombender wrote:
| The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.
|
| For example, if you pause the video by clicking the main action
| button brings up an overlay that takes up almost the whole
| screen, so you can no longer see the content in case you paused
| to freeze the frame. How do you start it again? By clicking the
| same button, right? No! By clicking up. For some reason up
| means back and down means to open some additional UI with
| related videos and what not.
|
| No other app is like this -- Plex, Infuse, Apple, Netflix etc.
| abide by relatively sane UI controls where the action button
| pauses and unpauses, and up/down don't scroll between weird
| overlay elements.
|
| The YouTube filled with these incredible non-unintuitive UX
| choices that drive me crazy. I never use it unless I have a
| clear idea of something I want to watch.
| cmckn wrote:
| Agreed the interface is clunky.
|
| > you can no longer see the content in case you paused to
| freeze the frame
|
| You can press up on the D-pad to dismiss that overlay, if you
| want to see the full paused frame.
|
| > How do you start it again? By clicking the same button,
| right? No! By clicking up.
|
| Maybe we have different remotes? On the latest model, you
| play/pause with the same button.
|
| One issue I've noticed in the app is there seems to be no way
| to move the cursor "up" to the channel button when the video
| is in the last 10% of the playback bar. If you rewind it a
| bit, then you're able to move the cursor up there.
|
| Only in the last few days have Shorts appeared at the top of
| my home page. I fear it may be the end for me.
| yearolinuxdsktp wrote:
| This is intentional on Google's part. It's anticompetitive
| behavior, to make YouTube service's app shitty on Google's
| competitor's ecosystem. But no government seems to care---and
| what will you do, stop watching YouTube?
| Arainach wrote:
| This is nonsense. Among other things, the YouTube app on
| Apple TV is superior to the one on Android TV. No loud
| startup sound, the back button exits the app rather than
| popping up a menu asking "if I'm sure" or if I want to go
| to a screensaver mode - clean straightforward UI.
| gessha wrote:
| I guess they just hate their users lmao
| atty wrote:
| Never ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently
| explained by incompetence. And i think it's fair to say
| the best and brightest at Google aren't turning their
| attention to YouTube lately. Except maybe to make
| training datasets for Gemini N+1 :)
| jacquesm wrote:
| In the case of industry giants malice should be assumed.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Never ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently
| explained by incompetence.
|
| We were talking about Google here. (you know, former
| search engine, don't be evil)
| immibis wrote:
| Can malice be emergent behaviour?
| a96 wrote:
| Well, psychopathy is an inherent feature of corporations.
| I wouldn't be surprised it malice will quickly develop
| where that appears profitable.
| hylaride wrote:
| Their customers are advertisers, not users. By the looks
| of things they love them.
| ashdksnndck wrote:
| > the back button exits the app rather than popping up a
| menu asking "if I'm sure"
|
| YouTube did push a version of the Apple TV app that tried
| this, but it would cause the app to crash/black screen,
| no joke. They reverted it.
| hulitu wrote:
| > This is intentional on Google's part. It's
| anticompetitive behavior, to make YouTube service's app
| shitty on Google's competitor's ecosystem
|
| This would be true if the Android or Android TV would have
| been better. It is just profit maximization combined with
| crappy UX/UI. Google wants your personal data and will make
| UI changes to get it. (double record/send button in
| messages, UI elements very close to others so that they can
| be pressed accidentally, although there is plenty of space
| between other UI elements)
| stogot wrote:
| The YouTube app is the worst on its own site too. I don't
| login to any Google account and I turned off site history,
| and now the homepage is completely blank. Yup. Google won't
| even show me a single video on the homepage because I refuse
| to turn on history. Which is actually kind of nice for
| preventin distractions
| Huppie wrote:
| I have the same. While it's a bit jarring the first time
| you see it, I now consider this a feature instead of a bug.
|
| Maybe it could be styled a bit differently so the search
| bar is more prominent and in the center of the screen, but
| just having a search bar without any distractions is a
| fantastic feature.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If you want a pure search, you can get there from your
| address bar without even visiting the site first. Or if
| you really want the search bar on the site, you can go to
| youtube.com/search for a nice blank page.
|
| You don't need the obnoxious refusal to show videos on
| the front page.
| codedokode wrote:
| It's actually good, the default videos are usually fighting
| videos, dash camera videos and garbage TV series. You don't
| want to see them anyway.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That's just what it gives you.
|
| Unless you're testing this with blank accounts?
| Y-bar wrote:
| It's so bad. Last time I tried to use it I was unable to fill
| in my password for my account because Google had implement
| some custom input element and custom keyboard which did not
| contain some of the characters I have in my password. And of
| course there was no possibility to paste or use keychain.
| e40 wrote:
| If you have an iPhone you can input with that, including
| paste.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > If you have an iPhone you can input with that,
| including paste.
|
| That popping up on your phone is not 100% reliable,
| though, and even more hilariously, when using it with
| YouTube, it'll sometimes just take the first handful of
| characters and drop the text input box on the phone. Oh,
| how we laughed.
|
| (this may be a generic Apple TV problem but it's
| something I've only noticed on the YouTube app)
| e40 wrote:
| Swipe down from the upper right and select the "remote"
| icon. If it's not there, edit the menu and add it.
| Y-bar wrote:
| The YouTube app I have discovered that feature is the
| only place it is unavailable in.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Tried it from my iPhone now, but no, paste still does NOT
| work.
| e40 wrote:
| You have the keyboard input up and it doesn't work? You
| see the text on your phone, but it doesn't appear on the
| ATV? Never seen that one.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Yes! It doesn't work at all. This is, as I wrote, that
| the YouTube app on Apple TV has a custom keyboard on-
| screen input without any way to put actual focus on the
| text/password field to trigger the Remote app on the
| iPhone to enable input such as pasting anything.
|
| For example: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2547613
| 16?sortBy=rank
| mrkpdl wrote:
| > The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.
|
| The YouTube app is a walk in the park compared to the app for
| Hayu which is like torture sometimes it's so buggy.
| Zanfa wrote:
| > The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.
|
| I would've agreed until Netflix did their redesign and
| started pushing wrestling for whatever braindead reason. Some
| executives should just quit.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I know Prime did this for quite some time, unaware if they
| still do. The main YouTube web app also suffers from this
| same issue, though at least the play button disappears.
|
| Everytime YouTube gets an update it gets worse. This has been
| true for years. It's like their design and product team is
| run by second-graders.
| k4rli wrote:
| Is it a real app anyway on that platform? I doubt it.
|
| Last time I checked, the LG webOS app was just running
| tv.youtube.com which only expects a TV-specific user agent.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| I've been using YouTube.com/tv with a Samsung agent for
| years. Although I did have to recently switch from abp to
| ubo because abp stopped playing videos for me.
| hhh wrote:
| You're meant to use the dedicated pause button on the apple
| tv remote to pause without any overlay. Anything that uses
| the apple built in player has ui appear when you hit the
| center button. Same for Netflix.
| atombender wrote:
| No, in the Netflix app, the main button both pauses and
| unpauses. Same in every other app I use -- except YouTube.
| nedt wrote:
| You'd think they've done it on purpose so you don't watch
| Youtube on TV. I tried but it's so bad you'd never open it a
| second time. And that's the platform where there are no ad
| blockers, so it must be good for them ...
| dv_dt wrote:
| Perhaps it's a dark pattern to keep you using the youtube app
| on your phone and casting it
| zelos wrote:
| The iPhone app has weird bugs too. Currently (for me, at
| least) the brand text that appears in the overlay box on
| adverts is black text on a black background and virtually
| illegible. If they're not even worried about bugs in the
| revenue-generating ad part of the app, what hope is there
| for the rest?
| ruined wrote:
| oh, that's worse. there's been a bug for months now where
| airplayed videos forcibly select an autodub track in a
| random language, and there's no way to disable it or change
| tracks. i wish i was joking
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Apple TV apps, in general, are terrible. Every single one
| [that I routinely use] (including Apple's apps) _regularly_
| crash or lock up, often leaving it to me, to force-quit.
|
| Amazon has started getting into a state, lately, where it
| ignores the remote, unless I go back, then go forward again.
|
| This kind of "quality" is considered "acceptable," in today's
| world.
|
| AppleTV has a JavaScript-based development system. It also
| has a fairly classic native Swift system (which I use). I
| suspect most apps are JavaScript, though.
|
| _[EDIT: Added the "routinely use" qualifier]_
| bildung wrote:
| I have zero experience with these, but _every_ app crashing
| could also indicate a hardware issue. Faulty memory
| perhaps?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have two sets (one is a 4K, and the other, a regular
| set). It happens on both. The crashes are different,
| though, for each app. Usually, it's the app falling into
| a fugue state, at some point, as I am channel-surfing (I
| do that, a lot).
|
| I should also qualify that it's not _really_ "every
| single one" (that's hyperbole). It's the ones that I
| routinely use (Apple, Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix).
|
| I'll probably get another one, sooner or later, but I've
| been waiting for them to release a new version[0],
|
| [0] https://share.google/YL2EBlQfewN9CGDxD
| jorvi wrote:
| Interestingly enough the same happens on both Spotify's
| desktop and Chromecast / Apple TV application when you
| "song surf".
|
| If you rapidly keep skipping through a song, then to the
| next one and repeat, the performance will keep on
| tanking. After a while it'll take 5-10 seconds just to
| load a song, going to other UI sections will take 3-5
| seconds to load, and eventually the application
| completely locks up and soft reboots itself.
|
| Probably JavaScript garbage collectors getting
| overwhelmed.
| codedokode wrote:
| Javascript garbage collector wouldn't take so long...
| probably it's launching a new thread or process (for
| example, DRM decryption) for every song, and there
| becomes too many of them. Or it runs out of memory and
| starts swapping.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| > I have zero experience with these
|
| Then please realise your advice is completely unneeded
| and unhelpful.
| arethuza wrote:
| That might be something wrong with your particular device -
| we've had two Apple TVs over 10+ years and they've been
| remarkably stable. I didn't even know how to "force quit" -
| I looked it up when you mentioned it.
|
| Edit: Did have one problem where the centre channel would
| occasionally drop out - this would go away if you changed
| the volume and didn't happen that often so wasn't a big
| deal. I had assumed it was a problem with the Denon
| receiver we use but when we replaced our original Apple TV
| earlier this year wit a 4K model it stopped so must have
| been something to do with the device.
| nullbyte808 wrote:
| would explain why LG smart TV apps run like crap. The
| devices are not capable of handling a javascript engine at
| full speed.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Sure they are. The amount of JavaScript that actually
| needs to run to give you a video browser is very little
| at a time. The bloat is a software problem.
| MBCook wrote:
| That is not my experience. It's extremely rare for me to
| ever need to kill an app.
| rsynnott wrote:
| The odd thing is, they seem to be getting progressively
| _worse_. The Netflix one was way better when the first
| 'modern' (app-y) appletv came out, say. Even the YouTube
| one used to be basically _fine_.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| I can genuinely only assume that Google simply refuses to do
| the sane, normal thing for the platform.
|
| Given that every other app manages to get basic interaction
| right, I'm not inclined to believe it's an os/hardware issue.
| codedokode wrote:
| > so you can no longer see the content in case you paused to
| freeze the frame.
|
| It's similar on desktop, if you pause the video, an overlay
| with recommendations appears, and it prevents you from
| reading the subtitles, for example.
| Thorrez wrote:
| I've only experienced that on embedded videos, not on
| youtube.com . Are you experiencing it on youtube.com ? I
| tried it just now, and was able to view a video on
| youtube.com , pause it, and keep reading the subtitles with
| no recommendations popping up.
|
| Disclosure: I work at Google but not YouTube.
| codedokode wrote:
| Yes, it's possible that you are right - I checked it on a
| random video, and there is no overlay.
| chrneu wrote:
| There are two apps called "DeArrow" and SponsorBlock that
| basically everyone should be using.
|
| DeArrow replaces thumbnails and titles with crowd sourced
| versions. I can't use youtube without it anymore. Usually the
| titles get replaced with stuff like "How to build a table"
| instead of "Watch the world explode as I try to make a
| table!!!!!!!!!!!!". Same with thumbnails. No longer are they
| over-saturated close up AI generated garbage images, but
| usually just a screenshot from the video that shows what's
| really going on.
| jason_oster wrote:
| Neither of these are available on Apple TV. Otherwise, you
| make a good suggestion; install them where available.
| ZekeSulastin wrote:
| At least for SponsorBlock you can run iSponsorBlockTV[1] on
| another computer on the same network - in addition to
| skipping sponsored segments, it also mutes YouTube's own
| ads and auto-skips them as soon as it can.
|
| [1] https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV
| herewulf wrote:
| Except that those two things are fantastic indicators for
| videos / channels you should be avoiding. Hiding their
| foolishness and then watching them anyway rewards their
| behavior.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| LTT specifically AB tested the stupid thumbnail vs relevant
| + titles.
|
| The idiotic clickbait images and titles WORK. People don't
| use them because they want to, they use them because they
| have to.
|
| Thus -> DeArrow.
|
| (Or follow the channels via an RSS feed and filter there)
| Tanoc wrote:
| There are great channels that have had acceptable
| audience growth without resorting to bucket scraping like
| that. In fact the channels I see that have the most
| engagement and the most stable view numbers video to
| video are the ones specifically avoiding the "gaping maw
| pointing at a red circle" sort of thumbnails and the "YOU
| WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT" or "X PHENOMENON - THE
| RESULTS WILL SHOCK YOU" titles. Knowing how Youtube works
| it's more of a detriment to have those unstable views
| because that screws with how well Youtube promotes you in
| the Recommended and Trending pages, and makes it harder
| to have high paying deals with sponsors since they don't
| know if your video's going to do five million views or
| seven hundred and fifty thousand. The only way you can
| make that work consistently is if you have a captive
| audience, but people do get tired of it quickly and will
| start to reflexively avoid your videos. They'll
| especially avoid them if someone else tried that
| clickbait format and annoyed or even offended them.
| EliteGadget wrote:
| I've heard this argument before as someone with a small
| number of subscribers, In use relevant titles and
| thumbnails (I do partially use AI but that is "make me a
| Tux image with a builders hat on"). When I post a video I
| get a decent number of viewers for my channel size.
|
| So I don't believe someone like LTT needs to resort to
| clickbait. LTT has 16 millions subscribers and half a
| million views per video. They make plenty of ad-revenue
| from those videos. If he stopped making videos today, he
| would still be getting a sizeable income by doing nothing
| for at least a decade. Even some washed up YouTubers from
| the past get a low five figure income from their
| Channels.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| A single washed up Youtuber getting residual income is
| very different from someone running a full-ass company
| with a bit under 100 employees.
| EliteGadget wrote:
| The point being made is that he has plenty of income (it
| is in the 10s of millions I am sure).
|
| If he has that many employees for his YouTube channel he
| is letting his expenses get out of control. It is as
| simple as that.
|
| If he fired everyone tomorrow and stopped making videos,
| he would probably still be making six to seven figures a
| year just from people (re)-watching the existing content.
| I wouldn't be surprised if he has other holdings /
| properties that generate him income outside of YouTube.
|
| You see this happen a lot on YouTube where someone starts
| getting a lot of money in via YouTube Ad-revenue and they
| start trying to operate it like it is a television
| station and paying for co-hosts and researchers etc.
| Costs then increase ten to twenty fold. Then once
| inevitably YouTube change how monetisation works or
| people get bored with their content and their revenue
| dips they resort to clickbait, scamming, and other
| nonsense.
|
| This could all be avoided by just keeping control of
| their costs. So I have little sympathy for him saying "I
| have to do the click bait guys", when it was his decision
| to make those hires and he was already rolling in cash.
| isolatedsystem wrote:
| There are children and there are adults. Children have
| more free time. Children watch more YouTube than adults.
| So LTT's audience is probably more children too.
|
| Children are attracted to soy-boy suprised pikachu face
| on clickbait thumbnails. CHLIDREN are ATTRACTED to EVERY
| second WORD being IN all CAPS!!! They like the three
| exclamation marks. They like flashy text on
| MrWhoseTheBoss videos which repeat the same thing the
| fucking guy is talking but just with flashy text on
| screen. They like the whizz-bang animations and ADHD
| addled three-second shots. They like the Mr.
| Beastification of Youtube.
|
| I'm _not_ a child. I 'm too old and weary for that. LTT
| wants to do it, he can. Godspeed, and may his next twenty
| million subscribers fill the hole in his pocket and his
| soul that the first twenty million couldn't. I just ain't
| gonna be watching.
| codedokode wrote:
| > repeat the same thing the fucking guy is talking but
| just with flashy text on screen
|
| This have been a thing on Japanese TV since long ago,
| doubling down on the punchlines with subtitles or adding
| a comment or comeback (conveniently, Japanese text takes
| less space that Western text, so the characters can be
| relatively large). So I think they just copied it.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >LTT wants to do it, he can.
|
| _LTT does not have a choice_
|
| Youtube's system is adversarial. There's more content
| than eyeballs, so if your brand new video is placed in
| front of like three people who do not click on it, _it
| stops getting shown to people entirely_ including
| subscribers!
|
| Clickbait thumbnails and titles are what _Google_ wants,
| and they provide tooling to encourage it, and punish you
| if you do not use it.
|
| You want to get rid of clickbait titles and thumbnails?
| Kill google. Then also legislate it away because it will
| naturally arise in any such adversarial system.
|
| >They like the Mr. Beastification of Youtube.
|
| _Google_ likes the Mr. Beastification of Youtube. Google
| would rather every LTT go away and be replaced with
| another Mr. Beast. It 's more profitable that way.
| isolatedsystem wrote:
| I don't care, simple as that. I'm _also_ in an
| adversarial relationship with LTT, and with Google.
|
| I realised over the last years that my weariness with the
| internet was born mostly out of Youtube and Reddit.
| Reddit I've successfully cut out of my life, Youtube is
| more difficult to do because much of modern culture
| happens there. But I've drawn the line at the worst
| offenders. In tech, people like Dave2D and Marques
| Brownlee have managed to avoid having stupid thumbnails,
| so I'd rather watch them. Thereafter, I have a
| CalmYoutubers.md file that has the (few) channels that I
| find are not idiotic, so I stick to them.
| autoexec wrote:
| > The idiotic clickbait images and titles WORK. People
| don't use them because they want to, they use them
| because they have to.
|
| They only "work" if your only goal is to get clicks. Lots
| of literal toddlers and stupid adults will click on
| idiotic clickbait. Will they stay and watch the content?
| Will they understand it? Will they appreciate it? Or,
| will they just smash their fist at the screen when the
| next shiny obnoxious looking thing pops up or drool all
| over themselves until the next video auto-plays?
|
| If all you care about are clicks and views and you don't
| give a shit about your audience you might as well just
| start posting disturbing videos of Elsa and pregnant
| Spider-man because as it turns out that WORKS also.
|
| If on the other hand you respect your audience and don't
| want to mislead or annoy them with click-bait titles and
| irrelevant bullshit thumbnails then, yes you will get
| fewer clicks and views, but the smaller number of people
| viewing your videos will be people who clicked because
| they actually care about your content and not just
| because of bullshit clickbait. Those users will be
| thankful that your channel isn't polluted with the
| garbage that plagues so many other videos made by
| youtubers who don't care about anything but clicks.
|
| Having and maintaining integrity is usually a little
| inconvenient, but it is also very much appreciated and
| people with integrity improve the spaces we share.
| Youtubers sacrificing their integrity for clicks and
| views isn't something they "have to do", it's just what
| they choose to do. If their content is actually worth
| watching then people will watch it without that crap,
| especially when it comes to an already well established
| channel like LTT. Don't make excuses for youtubers who
| care more about clicks and views than they do about their
| viewers or the quality of what they put out into the
| world.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| It's a business. Clicks (and views) equal money.
|
| You can always "respect your audience", but that won't
| pay the bills with Youtube's algorithms sadly.
|
| It's not the world I want to live in, but it's the
| current reality.
| NewLogic wrote:
| A business engaging in unethical practices, not
| respecting its audience and standing by the quality of
| its content.
| blkhawk wrote:
| "Watch the world explode as I try to make a
| table!!!!!!!!!!!!" is unlikely its more like "Watch the world
| explode as I try to make this thing!!!!!!!!!!!!".
| EliteGadget wrote:
| Hey, Only 50% of one of my thumbnails are AI generated
| Garbage!
|
| I do agree it is annoying. Some people do it quite a lot with
| car work videos to make the car look in far worse than it is.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I used to use a browser extension that devolved thumbnails
| and titles. That seemed nice, but I stopped using it a few
| years ago because I don't want that kind of content in my
| life and changing the window dressing didn't fix it.
|
| I do this instead: When a thumbnail and/or title is displayed
| on my screen feels like some variation of spammy clicky
| ragebait, I use the 3-dot menu and pick "Not interested" or
| "Don't recommend channel".
|
| Nowadays, that kind of stuff is pretty much just gone.
|
| This has certainly nuked whole channels (and also entire
| categories) from my youtube feed, and that suits me just
| fine. I need my life to be encumbered neither by clickbait,
| nor by the subset of creators that are compelled to generate
| it in the first place.
|
| There's more good, interesting, non-bait content created
| every day than any person has time to consume. The herd is
| plenty big enough to be culled.
|
| I think I'll be OK without watching videos -- at all -- from
| people who are working to jam the cock of influence as hard
| as possible into whatever they can.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| A bad thumbnail doesn't mean bad content. If I rejected
| them upfront I'm sure I could find _something_ to replace
| those channels that meets the bar of "interesting", but
| I'd rather judge videos on the actual video and focus on
| how much I enjoy watching.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| We may have a difference of opinion.
|
| It is my own opinion that a creator who deliberately
| creates a bad thumbnail and a baited title is a bad
| creator, and that (by extension) I do not wish to consume
| their content.
|
| There's plenty of other fish in the sea that aren't
| _introducing_ themselves to me with one or more damned
| lies. I 'm pleased to go watch what they're doing,
| instead.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If that's enough of a sin to be a bad creator, I think it
| _does_ become difficult to find replacements after a
| while.
|
| Also a bad thumbnail isn't a damned lie. Clickbait
| usually just means vague and flashy.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| In my world, I define myself what I consider to be a sin.
|
| My Youtube feed has an amazing abundance of great
| content. I'm learning stuff with it all the time from
| creators that aren't prima facie lying scumbags.
|
| Others are free to keep the likes of Scotty Killmer and
| Linus employed. That's fine.
|
| They're dead to me, and I do not miss them in my life.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You can decide what's a sin, I'm just saying that fast
| exclusions really do eat into the watch options.
|
| Though when I go look at the last big bunch of LTT videos
| I don't see any lies? Scotty Killmer I can find some lies
| pretty fast. "New Law Will Put You in Jail for Driving
| Your Car" for example.
| hapticmonkey wrote:
| Remember when the Youtube app overrode the AppleTV
| screensavers, to show their own screensavers if Youtube was
| paused.
|
| Any other app, you leave a video paused, the OS screensaver
| will come on. Those beautiful, aerial screensavers that are
| better than any screensaver I've ever seen in all my decades of
| working with computers. So of course the Youtube app had to
| block them with their own shitty variant. They have no taste
| and no respect.
| paperpunk wrote:
| Your comment is past tense - does that mean they've stopped
| doing this? Please, Lord. I had to set my ATV to go to
| screensaver in a ridiculously short amount of time to preempt
| the YouTube one.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| From what I've seen recently, they have stopped - I get
| Snoopy (current screensaver of choice) every time, no
| matter what app is running.
|
| (Although it's on a 5 minute timer which might be short
| enough to pre-empt everything else.)
| electroly wrote:
| It was in place for a couple of days, tops, before they
| reverted it. The backlash was immense and immediate. And
| with good reason: in addition to the obvious reasons why it
| sucked, the YouTube screensavers just _looked terrible_. I
| couldn 't believe how bad they were.
| MBCook wrote:
| YES. That was HORRIBLE. Thankfully that only lasted like a
| day or two.
|
| The fact that they would ever think that was possibly an OK
| thing to do though shows you how brain dead they are.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So
| right now there is one on my screen titled "The Best Decisions
| Every Video Game Console Developer Made"._
|
| Even with the missing " (Part 2!)" added, that's still only 68
| characters. I would probably begrudgingly call this long, but I
| would definitely not call it "really long"--my threshold for
| that would be at least 90 characters.
|
| If they're truncating around 60 characters, I'm content to call
| it unreasonable.
| MBCook wrote:
| It's only "really long" because it doesn't fit on my screen.
|
| I agree in the abstract it's a perfectly reasonable title. It
| should absolutely be readable.
|
| But it's not. Because the app sucks.
| synack wrote:
| Every time you see an ellipsis "..." you know that the designer
| put form over function. Hiding data from the user is never the
| right answer.
|
| They could use their fancy AI to generate shorter titles.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| And if someone puts in a 500 character title, it still can't
| be truncated?
|
| YouTube making up a shorter title would be so much worse...
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube
| app on my Apple TV.
|
| Damn it, I still appear to be on 4.51.08/web_20251117_11_RC00
| with no indication that there's a new version. Not looking
| forward to any updates...
|
| > The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the
| video.
|
| I sometimes wonder if YouTube is a weird kink cult that gets
| off on people complaining about the ridiculously user-hostile
| decisions they make. Because it's either that or they're an
| evil troll cult that aims to make life just that little bit
| less pleasant for as many people as possible.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Long titles that put the important context beyond the fold are
| a form of clickbaiting, I just refuse to watch those videos
| entirely. I'm sure most of the videos are fine but I cannot
| reward bad behavior, and besides, clicking on clickbait will
| get you even more clickbait in the suggestions.
| everdrive wrote:
| I know no one likes hearing this because it's glib, but there's
| really no reason to use "apps" whatsoever. They're always worse
| in some baffling way, and until people start abstaining from
| them we'll be stuck here.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| They can use features like GPU, USB, NFC, etc trivially;
| whereas websites and PWAs may not be able to at all.
| everdrive wrote:
| In principle they could have good UIs, but some accident of
| incentives manages to prevent this. It's better for forgo
| the features to retain control over your own device.
| MBCook wrote:
| And how should I use a web browser on my Apple TV?
|
| That's not an option. And if it was? I wouldn't want to use
| it.
| everdrive wrote:
| >on my Apple TV
|
| Not sure why you would rely on an AppleTV or any bespoke
| streaming device. It's effectively a service. If you like
| it right now, it will be worse in a few weeks, months, or
| years. Eventually it will be unsupported even though the
| hardware still works fine. You don't own it an it'll just
| be made worse by the different incentives of the hardware
| provide and the media streaming companies.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| You raise an interesting point. Performing the act of
| browsing the web on the TV from the sofa in the living room
| has been mostly[1] a non-starter for as long as we've had a
| web to browse, since the user experience sucks.
|
| Dedicated remote-oriented apps usually do improve upon that
| user experience.
|
| But does it have to be an app that runs within Apple TV's
| walled garden?
|
| With a $20 Android streamer box (like the one sold under
| Wal-Mart's in-house ONN brand), a person can install
| SmartTube and watch ad-free YouTube with a configurable
| glitz-free remote-oriented interface and SponsorBlock. (If
| it dies or something better comes along, it was only $20.
| $20 doesn't buy very many cheeseburgers these days.)
|
| [1]: There have been attempts to improve the WWW's sofa
| experience, perhaps with WebTV being the largest effort.
| And I've sat down with a trackpad-equipped wireless
| keyboard and run Firefox on some manner of television-
| connected computing device at various times. It's always
| pretty severely lacking compared to browsing the web with a
| laptop, desktop, or pocket supercomputer. Even though it's
| ostensibly almost exactly the same thing, it just never
| really flows well at all: It's worse than using a computer
| and also worse than using a TV remote in ways that compound
| with eachother.
| everdev wrote:
| And yet here I am being told by young devs that these kinds of
| terrible UX decisions don't matter, or I get mocked for
| bringing them up. They don't have the cognizance of experience
| to know why these things matter or can, and they struggle to
| even conceptualize how things like this can be security holes
| open for spammers and scammers.
|
| If they worked for me, they'd learn fast or wouldn't work for
| me for long.
| striking wrote:
| For me this change was reverted quite quickly, I think within the
| week. On my Apple TV at least it is back to 3 (and a quarter)
| videos displayed at a time.
|
| I like to think that it was the feedback I submitted that pushed
| them to change it. However, it was more likely a change in
| viewership that would cause them to revert it back. I know my
| viewing habits definitely changed, I found myself spending more
| time looking through the thumbnails and then giving up to go
| watch content on other platforms.
|
| 4.51.08/web_20251117_11_RC00
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It's not a revert, merely A/B testing to see which version
| leads to more "engagement".
|
| They're also testing the same on the web, half the time I get
| the normal sidebar, half the time I get a 300% zoomed one where
| I can only see like 3 video thumbnails before having to scroll
| (jokes on them, I don't - but then again I block ads so I don't
| count either way).
| striking wrote:
| If it happens to me again, I will have to find my content
| elsewhere. It's not even a conscious decision, I just got
| genuinely fatigued from the experience.
|
| On the bright side, maybe I'd be better off. There are
| probably better things I could be doing with my time.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| How do you submit feedback?
| orphea wrote:
| Not really related but... have anyone else noticed that
| suggestions on the home page became much worse recently? I'm
| getting a lot of unrelated videos which are often very old, like
| published up to 18 years ago. OTOH, videos from subscriptions are
| not getting suggested, I often have to check individual channels
| to see if they posted anything new. What's happening?
| nicbou wrote:
| Use the subscriptions page for the channels you follow. I use
| Unhooked to make it my home page.
| chrneu wrote:
| If you pay attention, this happens every few months. This is
| youtube tweaking the algorithm.
|
| Every time they tweak the algorithm, content creators scramble
| to figure out what changes they made so they can exploit it.
| That's why every few months all the major channels change their
| styles to all be the same. Gotta exploit that algo!
| orphea wrote:
| > this happens every few months
|
| Well, maybe, yeah, but I do think it was never _this_ bad.
| 1a527dd5 wrote:
| Ahh, I thought this was just happening to me. I used to watch a
| fair bit of YT on my PS4, but a few months ago my home screen was
| basically empty save a few ad videos.
|
| It was pushing me heavily to sign in; which I do _not_ want to
| do.
|
| End result was I just stopped watching YT.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| On desktop, press command/ctrl and minus to zoom out and increase
| the home page's density. It will make text on watch page harder
| to read, but with theatre mode, the video playback size should be
| unaffected.
| Aeglaecia wrote:
| i feel like modern youtube just does not scratch the itch that
| youtube once scratched , it now feels like methadone replacement
| therapy. available viewing options have been reduced to either
| short form content or long form content , there is nothing
| between. i dont enjoy frying my brain with short form content and
| i dont have the attention span to watch bloviation with the
| express intent of stretching out video times to maximise revenue.
| honestly i feel like this applies to the internet as a whole , a
| facsimile of its former self being puppeted to achieve control.
| someone probably predicted this , right ?
| polarphi wrote:
| YouTube has become so bad that I had to resort to Tampermonkey
| scripts to become bearable.
|
| First was the disgusting pink tones in the progress bar. Then the
| oversized thumbnails / less videos per page. Then the horrible
| over sized player controls. And now the oversized suggestions on
| the side bar.
|
| Not to mention the obnoxious amount and duration of ads.
|
| It's getting worse and worse.
|
| These are all symptoms that something is very wrong.
| chrneu wrote:
| you can do all this with one extension and no scripts: Enhancer
| for Youtube.
|
| Also recommend DeArrow and SponsorBlock.
|
| But also flip content creators a $5 every once in a while.
| That's more revenue than they'll ever get from you watchin
| their videos.
| notanormalnerd wrote:
| You know who has great information density? Pornhub. If you open
| Pornhub on a 4K screen, you will absolutely see none of the
| thumbnails. I think YouTube is overdoing it, but it is really a
| thing of: people are either using really small screens or 1080p.
| 4K is still not around much.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Because unlike YouTube, porn is an actually competitive
| industry with plenty of "tube" sites to choose from. So they
| have to compete on UX.
| komali2 wrote:
| Google "Ethical Capital Partners."
|
| Operates:
|
| Pornhub
|
| RedTube
|
| YouPorn
|
| Brazzers
|
| Digital Playground Men.com
|
| Reality Kings
|
| SpankWire
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| Not sure what this comment is getting at. Those may be the
| collection of sites owned by a single company, but there
| are still -oceans- of porn of every conceivable niche, on
| hundreds of thousands of sites, some still bigger than
| those. Whereas there's pretty much a single, monopolized
| provider for mainstream video: youtube. And a porn
| conglomerate is the problem? GP is still correct, there's
| still real competition in the space, unlike youtube.
| chrneu wrote:
| Very US centric take here. Ya know there are other
| countries, languages, etc out there, right?
| komali2 wrote:
| All of the websites I listed are in Mandarin for me and
| have content catered towards local fetishes. I have no
| idea what you're talking about.
| taftster wrote:
| I saw "Mandarin" and "local fetishes" and thinking I'm
| glad I have no idea what you're talking about, too!
| chrneu wrote:
| There's an old adage that if you follow the tech that porn
| adopts, you'll generally be ahead the average consumer curve.
|
| I think there's another version that if porn adopts a tech
| that means that the tech will work. Like, a lot of VR
| adoption early on was porn. By a lot, I mean most.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Has VR caught on? Genuine question; I am not a gamer, but I
| see no real adoption elsewhere. The occasional movie is
| offered in 3D, but it's generally post-rendered, which
| makes the effect crappier - and it's occasional, not the
| majority.
| greycol wrote:
| It's really hard to tell because with the currently high
| price for headsets it leans really hard into being a
| solitary activity.
|
| Don't get me wrong you can play games like beat saber ala
| singstar or rockband taking turns but it's an order of
| magnitude more if you want the second "controller" and
| you need much more space. Let alone the equivalent of
| buying an extra TV for everyone you want to watch a movie
| with.
|
| When you add on the ergonomics of the device which even
| with good setups mean you need "heavy" cabling or have
| limited runtime due to battery it's hard to recommend it
| to even mates who use their whole weekend on gaming.
|
| That being said I have a Pimax 8k I bought second hand
| and VR is really an awesome experience when you're in it
| so it's easy to see why the excitement is still there.
| I'll also mention some of the extreme sports camera stuff
| is often 360 if not 3d which benefits from a headset.
| podgorniy wrote:
| Aah, the free market quazimonopolies avoid and despise at all
| costs (usually carried by customers)
| 1bpp wrote:
| They just need to fix search..
| IAmBroom wrote:
| YT or PH? I mean, both, really.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Yes. 1080p screen density is still so popular. Looking around
| new laptops it's still the bulk in Windows land, including OLED
| and ultra high refresh rate monitors. Same for TVs.
|
| Even on macs many are using scaling factors that render close
| to 1080p.
|
| The issue really would be why YouTube can't bother managing
| more layouts. It still blows my mind there's only one single
| YouTube experience per platform, when their viewership
| basically span the world's population.
| gessha wrote:
| Because they fired a bunch of engineers, fired/reorged the
| PMs and whoever is left is working on the AI shlop.
| array_key_first wrote:
| On laptops more than 1080p (or an aspect ratio equivalent) is
| just a waste. Less battery life and everything is too small
| to see anyway so you have to scale.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Unfortunately the YouTube PM org's myopia is accelerating: with
| this data I now project that there will be zero videos on the
| homescreen around May of 2026 now, up from September.
|
| There are already zero videos if you visit with no youtube
| history. That seems... fine?
| qilo wrote:
| > There are already zero videos if you visit with no youtube
| history [...]
|
| since August 2023 [0]
|
| [0]
| https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/139222780?hl=en&ms...
| delichon wrote:
| > maybe our mandatory NeuraLinks are coming sooner than I
| thought.
|
| The founder of NeuraLink has recently proposed to deploy sentient
| robots to watch criminals, removing the need for incarceration.
| There is a lot of synergy possible here with mandatory neural
| links. The bot could not only watch us but also press our
| buttons. "Criminal", being such a flexible concept, should pose
| little problem to globalizing this paradigm. For one thing, it
| will make it possible to harvest any number of clicks necessary,
| so advertising becomes obsolete, and so does content.
|
| God, I hope I'm not a prophet.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| I can see this mandatory in a country like north korea where
| government would gladly use this tech to control citizens from
| defecting etc
|
| but after recent EU balooney request like chat control etc, I
| cant be so sure anymore
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _sentient robots to watch criminals, removing the need for
| incarceration_
|
| These are slap drones [1] from Banks's _The Player of Games_
| [2].
|
| [1] https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Slap-drone
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > it will make it possible to harvest any number of clicks
| necessary, so advertising becomes unnecessary and obsolete
|
| But then again, this is already possible, and has the
| advertising industry shit-scared, thus all the interest in
| blocking AI-related scrapers since they circumvent the whole
| "wasting _human_ time" element.
| daemonologist wrote:
| Ah yes, the Culture solution
| (https://groups.google.com/g/alt.books.iain-
| banks/c/nbW7GxRQ6...). (Always seemed rather cruel to the
| drone, to me.)
| bgwalter wrote:
| There are lots of proposals. Recently, he retweeted a pundit
| who said that murderers should be hanged and that Europe
| achieved its level of civilization by executing 1-2% of its
| population for eugenic purposes:
|
| https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1992599328897294496#m
| tavavex wrote:
| You know the world is heading in a good direction when the
| world's richest man with nearly half a trillion dollars is
| starting to muse about whom he wants to start killing off.
| You know, for the "common good".
| danpalmer wrote:
| What's the point being made in this article?
|
| That TVs have lower information density than desktop browsers?
| Like, yeah, obviously.
|
| That if you don't sign in to YouTube and don't pay to remove the
| ads, that you'll get prompted to sign in and you'll see ads? That
| doesn't seem particularly problematic.
|
| Sure it's mildly funny that a funny projection is true in a very
| contrived way, but it doesn't really stand up to any criticism. I
| use YouTube almost exclusively through the Apple TV app, and it's
| fine, I'd even say it has improved a little over the last few
| years. I like the low information density because I sit
| approximately 3m from the screen and navigate with a TV remote.
| jaydenmilne wrote:
| Unfortunately I don't have pictures from before this change,
| but you used to get 5-6 videos I believe. Now you get two (and
| maybe one is an ad).
|
| The point is that I made a joke projection in my last post in
| April that by next May there would be only one video on the
| homepage, because obviously that would be ridiculous, right?
| Then I turned on my TV and it happened.
|
| See the previous blog post: https://jayd.ml/2025/04/30/someone-
| at-youtube-needs-glasses....
| danpalmer wrote:
| On my Apple TV I get 2.5 thumbnails per row and 2 rows. I
| honestly think that's appropriate for a TV interface and I
| basically like the UI. I find YouTube's Apple TV app to be
| the least clunky of all the carousel-of-videos apps that I
| use.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Sure it 's mildly funny that a funny projection is true in a
| very contrived way_
|
| I think you got it -- that's the point right there, nothing
| more...
| spartanatreyu wrote:
| Compare the 1.25 video thumbnails shown on the apple tv app to
| the thumbnails on Steam's big picture mode (designed for people
| sitting on a couch far away from a tv):
|
| 1. https://emilio-gomez.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/03/steamos-...
|
| 2. https://preview.redd.it/new-big-picture-mode-is-finally-
| publ...
| yk wrote:
| I already have 0 videos on youtube home screen, some combination
| of not being logged in, firefox privacy settings and ad blocker
| causes youtube to post a passive aggressive message and a search
| bar. I kinda like that Ui.
| dav43 wrote:
| It's crazy you can pay for premium, which is not cheap, and you
| can't disable shorts.
|
| The number of times I clicked "show less" and it has zero effect
| on the number of shorts.
| com2kid wrote:
| Shorts are up to 3 minutes long now. At this point they are
| just vertical videos. I fully expect the supported length to
| keep increasing!
| mcmoor wrote:
| Vertical videos with much shitter UI. Inability to skip ahead
| or turn back may be understandable for <30 second videos, but
| not more.
| joe_guy wrote:
| And auto repeat, sadly.
| jtokoph wrote:
| And no captions
| gwd wrote:
| Auto-repeat is the thing that most mystifies me about
| shorts. I understand the idea behind auto-play, although
| I disable it; but who on earth wants to watch the exact
| thing they just watched _by default_?
|
| Given the success of TikTok, the answer is apparently,
| "billions of people", but I just don't get it.
| wrxd wrote:
| My theory is that it is a way of forcefully grabbing
| people's attention.
|
| Without autoplay there is no engagement once the video is
| over. With autoplay there is the risk someone leaves the
| player on the background and ignores it. With looping
| videos people get annoyed and (if they're like me) close
| the tab or skip to the next video just to get something
| different
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > but who on earth wants to watch the exact thing they
| just watched by default
|
| Wrong question.
|
| The right question is: "Do we blindly copy Instagram?"
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They put seek controls on them quite a while back.
| tpxl wrote:
| Ctrl + Right click, Show controls will bring up the classic
| controls (play, pause, volume, seek, full screen) on
| Firefox. I'm sure other browsers have something similar.
| Haven't found a way to turn this on permanently for all
| videos though :/
| ringer wrote:
| Shorts are normal videos too, so you can view them in the
| normal player.
|
| I have a redirect rule that redirects
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/<video-id> to
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<video-id>
| ares623 wrote:
| New prophecy just dropped
| k4rli wrote:
| All vertical videos I've uploaded have automatically turned
| into shorts and there doesn't seem to be a way to toggle
| this.
| gblargg wrote:
| Add black bars manually or make them longer than 3 minutes.
| left-struck wrote:
| Nah shorts have a different culture and style. I don't mean
| anything technical. For me I can't stand the style and I
| avoid it completely.
| gblargg wrote:
| Maybe in the future they will support horizontal shorts as
| well. /s
| preinheimer wrote:
| Ive installed a browser extension to remove them on the
| desktop.
|
| There should absolutely be a better answer here.
| sidrag22 wrote:
| maybe there will be another tier of youtube premium in a few
| years that removes shorts, and people can try to guilt you
| for blocking them using browser extensions like they do for
| ad blocking.
| RulerOf wrote:
| What's crazy is that I can't turn them off for my children.
|
| I complain about it to Google. They ignore it. They couldn't
| possibly give a shit.
|
| I should probably complain to my congressman. Who also won't do
| shit even if they actually give a shit.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| You could just not let your kids go on YouTube.
|
| There's a long history of people not using it. Most people
| today don't use it.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I successfully kept my kids off of YouTube until their
| elementary school gave them Chromebooks. Then they were at
| least only on YouTube during class.
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| YouTube has a lot of really positive educational content. I
| have learned so much from it. For instance, I was able to
| learn photography from it. Yes it's still social media in a
| way, but the benefits can really outweigh the drawbacks
| with proper use.
|
| Shorts as a whole are incredibly addictive and have a much
| lower benefit to drawback ratio. Parents should be able to
| make this cost/benefit decision for their kids. I wish I
| could turn them off for myself. I settled on only using
| YouTube on my laptop because shorts don't have the same
| appeal in that context.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| I don't even see any shorts, unless I click the shorts tab on
| the web.
|
| In the Android app it's literally just one line, which I have
| to scroll down to... like two pages.
| tarxvf wrote:
| If you disable watch history, youtube tries to "punish" you by
| disabling nearly the non-subscription recommendations and
| shorts not from your subscriptions and a number of other
| things.
|
| Worth a try.
| chrneu wrote:
| "Enhancer For Youtube" is a firefox extension that disables
| much of the nonsense in Youtube's UI. I can't use youtube
| without it anymore. There might be a chrome version? Idk, using
| chrome with youtube is dumb af tho so probably don't do that.
| pzmarzly wrote:
| Using Chromium-based browsers is the only way to play HDR
| videos, since Mozilla is dragging their feet for years with
| implementing support for that. I use Firefox for everything
| except for YouTube because of that.
|
| But if you're in the same boat, at least use something that
| has an adblocker, like Brave, Vivaldi or Opera.
| jimangel2001 wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, what channels on YT do you follow
| that upload HDR content regularly?
| jbaiter wrote:
| It really is. I've been using Revanced to patch out the Shorts
| feature on my phone, works decently well, but I'm technically
| violating the ToS with that, despite shelling out 15EUR/month
| for it. Obnoxious.
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| Brave has a setting to disable YouTube shorts. Both on the
| mobile app, and desktop version.
|
| Settings -> media -> "Block YouTube Shorts".
|
| There are also other settings related to YouTube. Brave is the
| only thing I'd use for YouTube on mobile.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| It's difficult to capture into words how much contempt I hold for
| Google and Amazon, two companies which lost their way long ago
| and are now actively user-hostile.
|
| YouTube has gotten worse with every release. Endless, pointless
| UI changes. Sneaky resolution downgrades. When your video says
| "Auto 1080p" it's like 480p quality, manually choose 1080p and
| watch it change.
|
| Amazon has been working overtime to make your experience worse.
| The latest innovation is to eliminate invoices for US customers.
| This wasn't a mistake, as it was rolled out gradually over a few
| months, with workarounds quickly plugged as users become aware of
| them. Oh, there still is a "view invoice" button but it's just a
| redirect to order summary now.
|
| Dark patterns galore since cancelling Prime. Every checkout flow
| I'm hit with a minimum of two clicks where I have to decline or
| change something. Ordering a packet of laundry soap feels like
| buying a used car.
|
| The employees that implement this stuff dare to call themselves
| "engineers" yet their entire energy is devoted to making their
| customer's lives more miserable, which they are somehow paid a
| disgusting amount of money to go do.
|
| Real engineers solve problems.
|
| These people invent new problems to then go solve, likely because
| they are chasing their next promotion.
|
| There's a lot of folx who got into this business for all the
| wrong reasons and we're now seeing the results of that on a
| massive scale.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >entire energy is devoted to making their customer's lives more
| miserable
|
| If these changes are not hurting user metrics are they really
| making their lives miserable? When you are optimizing an
| experience for billions of users, numbers are the only thing
| you can trust.
| _vertigo wrote:
| Lies, damned lies, and statistics
| conductr wrote:
| I'm still using Amazon as much as I was before, it's just a
| more miserable experience now which I can feel and the
| annoyances are compounding. I've not yet done anything that
| would show in their numbers, like cancel my prime or start
| trying to shop elsewhere or even boycott them altogether, but
| that doesn't mean I'm happy as I was and would say they're
| pushing me to a point of defection. All to say, they should
| be smart enough to not just do uninformed numerical analysis.
| They need to hone a gut feeling for how pleased people are or
| build metrics around that. They should see satisfaction is
| waning. In fact, it may be what's driving this behavior. If
| satisfaction is down, people leave, sales slump, then they
| make more user hostile changes in hopes to cover the sales
| gap with existing customers, but results in satisfaction
| going down at every pass. It's a vicious cycle.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> If these changes are not hurting user metrics_
|
| I suspect there is no metric specifically answering the
| question _" do users want [enshittification of the day]?"_
|
| There are probably plenty that measure success with dark
| patterns however, like viewership and engagement.
| array_key_first wrote:
| The metrics are bad. Data driven decision making is a very
| easy trap. If you capture the wrong data then you just
| optimize for worse stuff.
|
| Classic example: reactions and watch time as measuring
| engagement. Leads to shittier content being promoted because
| the more garbage something is, the more outraged people will
| be.
|
| And that's why Facebook has "optimized" itself to be as
| shitty of a platform as humanly possible.
| haunter wrote:
| Funnily porn sites do 100x better UX than Youtube. Both on web
| and mobile. Probably because there is no monopoly but actual
| competition among them.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Yes, Manwin competes with Mindgeek competes with Aylo competes
| with Ethical Capital Partners.
| binarymax wrote:
| Why. Why are they doing this. It's the same with Netflix. I don't
| understand. What is the metric that goes up when they show a
| couple giant videos.
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| I would presume the conversion rate for those specific three
| videos are much higher then if they're just three of twenty
| charcircuit wrote:
| It may reduce decision paralysis and they are hoping their
| recommendation is good enough.
| tavavex wrote:
| I honestly think that at some point, there will be no
| recommendations page. You'll open YouTube and it'll start
| autoplaying the video that they (or the advertisers) think
| you should see. You'll be able to skip to other videos from
| there, like on short-form content platforms. Likes and
| subscriptions will dictate how likely it'll be that you'll
| see a video by that creator in the future. Search and other
| "outdated" features will be tucked away and purposefully made
| even more useless than they already are.
| binarymax wrote:
| Madness
| ares623 wrote:
| "Video surfing" does have a nice ring to it. You should be
| a Youtube PM.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Isn't this just Shorts already?
| mirrorlake wrote:
| It's also TV in 1950.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Maybe you could have a couple of different feeds that you
| could choose from, we might call these "channels". You
| could perhaps assign numbers to the channels for convenient
| selection using the remote. Hmm, why does this remind me of
| something?
| bambax wrote:
| Came here to ask the same question. How do they benefit from
| showing less videos? I don't get it.
| OrangeMusic wrote:
| I assume people click on the first "video" (not realizing
| it's an Ad).
| csomar wrote:
| It's an Ad. Next quarter their revenue is up 25%. Since they
| need to grow 25% each quarter, by the end of 2026 YouTube will
| strictly display only Ads.
| VMG wrote:
| "Make product worse, get money"?
|
| https://dynomight.net/worse/
| paulnpace wrote:
| > Why. Why are they doing this.
|
| Back in my day on the cattle ranch, the cattle had unique
| magnetic identifiers on their ears. They put their head in the
| feeder and get fed only what the rancher wants each specific
| one to to eat.
| loudmax wrote:
| I find it baffling how bad Netflix's recommendation engine is.
| I can understand YouTube's priorities being skewed toward slop
| because their business model is delivering ads. It's not
| surprising that you have to fight the algorithm to find
| worthwhile content among the garbage on YouTube.
|
| Netflix's revenue is subscription based long form videos. That
| should be a viable business model. Instead, they seem to be
| willfully heading in the direction of serving slop to an
| audience that's not fully engaged. This road leads them into
| direct competition with YouTube and TikTok.
|
| When my son moved out of the house recently, he went on the
| additional household plan. What struck me was that the user
| interface steered heavily toward the option that includes ads.
| We had to search for the small print to let him pay Netflix a
| few dollars more for the non-ads version.
|
| In the late 90's and early 2000's there was a sense that ads
| were a reasonable tradeoff for free services on the internet.
| If the last 20 years have taught us anything, it's that the
| perverse incentives are a catastrophe.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Neuralink was mentioned, and it immediately made me remember the
| sad stories of the rhesus macaques that were used as Neuralink
| animal test subjects for brain implants. The quality of the work
| was poor and they were able to pull the implants out and then the
| implants got loose, causing bacterial and fungal infections and
| swelling and the macaques had to be euthanized. But not before
| banging their heads against everything, picking on the holes in
| their skulls and going insane as their brains got increasingly
| infected. Reading that kind of disgusting inhumane crap makes me
| ashamed of being a member of the same species.
|
| If you want to read more the search keywords are: "Animal 20"
| "Neuralink"
|
| > Animal 20 was seen "pulling on port connector which is now
| dislodged (no longer secured)". The next day, Animal 20 was
| "picking at incision and occasionally pulling on implant". Soon,
| infections developed. On Dec. 20, UC Davis staff found antibiotic
| resistant E. coli and Candida glabrata, a fungal infection, at
| the surgical site. They discussed a "necropsy next week", meaning
| they planned to euthanize Animal 20.
|
| Fucking cowards.
| chrneu wrote:
| This is normal in the meat industry. It sucks it happens to
| test subjects, or any living creature, but this is nothing
| compared to the daily cruelty inflicted upon innocent animals
| that we deem "food".
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| That's not even the main problem. Youtube is basically
| unwatchable with all the ads. Maybe it's just me but it often
| feels like it's badly broken. I found skipvids a while back. I
| find the videos on YT and watch them there. I don't watch yt
| often so that's the path of least resistance for me.
| drivers99 wrote:
| There are 0 videos on my YouTube homepage, just a screen asking
| me to turn on history. Just the way I like it. Here's what I did:
|
| Go into the YouTube app, settings, manage all history, under the
| history tab hit Delete -> delete all time.
|
| Then go to controls (still in the manage all history dialog box
| under settings), under YouTube history hit Turn off. It says
| "pausing..." Hit Pause, and Got it.
|
| It's been exactly 3 months since I did that. I still watch stuff
| from my subscriptions and when I search for something I want to
| watch. There are still recommended videos when you're watching a
| video but they are a lot less enticing since they are not
| personally targeted. I curated my subscriptions so it's more what
| I would want to spend time watching instead of reaction videos
| for instance. My actual time watching YouTube has dropped a lot.
| postalrat wrote:
| I see the same screen and wonder why they don't suggest videos
| based on subscriptions. I assume they figure no suggestions
| will nag people into enabling history.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| I thoroughly love this experience. I open subscriptions as
| needed to catch up on things I care about. Otherwise I use the
| homepage to search for something. No distractions. No
| infinitely scrolling feed of slop and ads.
| wrxd wrote:
| I did that as well and also removed all the subscriptions form
| YouTube itself and instead have all the channels I like in my
| RSS reader
| jstanley wrote:
| I tried to make a custom Subscriptions view for YouTube but
| they kept blocking me for trying to scrape hundreds of RSS
| feeds.
| pbalau wrote:
| Maybe because their robots.txt disallows that?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/robots.txt User-
| agent: * ... Disallow: /feeds/videos.xml
| ...
| drivers99 wrote:
| That would be the next level I should do. Maybe not RSS, but
| just making an html file linking to various channels (similar
| to bookmarks) organized by category, while removing them from
| subscriptions (and curate the list even further). Check out
| the channels when I feel like it, like how we used to surf
| the web. Right now, I'm seeing whatever is newest today which
| favors channels that churn out content like it's their job
| (which it is in a lot of cases).
| jstanley wrote:
| Weirdly I've had history turned off for just over 10 years (I
| can tell from the date on the most recent entry), but my
| YouTube homepage shows me videos related to things I've watched
| recently anyway.
|
| I just deleted the all-time history and now the homepage is
| blank as you say.
|
| I don't think they're really deleting your viewing history,
| else the homepage wouldn't have looked the way it did before I
| deleted "all time".
|
| I have clicked "stop showing me Shorts" several times but they
| keep coming back, so I don't think the homepage works properly
| anyway.
|
| EDIT:
|
| On further consideration, I think what was happening with the
| homepage was that it was showing me videos related to channels
| that I subscribe to. (But not always videos _from_ channels
| that I subscribe to).
|
| However I don't see why they can't still do that even after I
| delete my all-time watch history? Not that I want them to.
|
| But if you did want them to, you could probably turn watch
| history back on, click on any single video, and then turn it
| off again, and you'd probably have a home screen dictated by
| your subscriptions.
|
| Or else they just ignore the setting and it's all a lie anyway.
| ghtbircshotbe wrote:
| Internet companies will stop storing user data the same day
| AI companies stop training on copyrighted data.
| drivers99 wrote:
| > On further consideration, I think what was happening with
| the homepage was that it was showing me videos related to
| channels that I subscribe to
|
| I think so too. I turned my history back on and watched part
| of one video in order to make sure I had the steps right for
| clearing and disabling history again. In that time, after
| having at least 1 video in the history, the front page was
| like what you said. The first recommendation made me want to
| click on it. It was called "why c++ is terrible" or something
| like that. Cleared/disabled again and back to normal (blank
| home page).
| unfitted2545 wrote:
| You can go even further and remove the recommendations panel
| when you're watching a video using the eye dropper on uBlock
| Origin, it's so good.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| This was one of the most relaxing things I've done.
| Recommendations are so bad so useless, despite paying for
| premium for peace, it's just hassle to interact with the
| platform.
|
| And shorts, just let us turn them off in the subscription page
| exactly like the posts.
|
| It's utterly baffling that a multi-billion dollar video empire
| doesn't provide much of an option to their users in terms of
| settings.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > It's utterly baffling that a multi-billion dollar video
| empire doesn't provide much of an option to their users in
| terms of settings.
|
| In a better world with an actual open web, we would not have
| to rely on the graces of the hosting company to _offer_ us a
| better UI. Our browsers would act as true "User Agents" and
| render the web page in a way that is best for the user.
|
| Browsers should be able to by default pick and choose what
| elements of a web page get rendered, without having to reach
| for extensions. Browsers should be able to render things in a
| different order, and easily allow the user to override things
| like styling, size and so on. Browsers should provide this
| kind of flexibility by default! They should not just be
| canvases following orders, for the web developer to program
| against the user's interests.
|
| Instead, we just punted, and handed over all of the control
| to the web developer. Now _they_ decide what gets shown and
| not shown. _They_ decide the layout. _They_ decide
| everything!
| insin wrote:
| Low _usable_ information density is one of the main things I made
| Control Panel for YouTube [^0] to tackle, especially in
| Subscriptions.
|
| On a 1080p monitor, my unmodified Subscriptions page currently
| has 6 fully-visible thumbnails, consisting of 3 livestreams from
| people I only subscribe to for videos, 1 watched video, 1 stream
| VOD (which I'll never watch), and 1 unwatched video, so that's a
| score of 1/6. Scroll down and you start getting into more watched
| videos, stream VODs, the unwanted Shorts shelf, thumbnails for
| Upcoming videos (i.e. videos which can't be watched), and videos
| from people I don't even subscribe to (via YouTube's recently-
| added Collaborations feature).
|
| With everything in Control Panel for YouTube enabled and a minium
| of 5 videos per row configured, I have 15 unwatched or partially
| watched (up to a configurable %) videos every time. Same thing
| for Home, in which other things I don't want such as Mixes and
| Playlists can also be hidden.
|
| It also tends to have fixes for the other things people
| rightfully complain about when YouTube comes up in these threads,
| such as (reads down the page) blocking ads and hiding promoted
| content, hiding Shorts everywhere, automatically switching to the
| original audio for auto-dubbed videos, hiding Related videos when
| they appear below the video pushing comments even further down,
| fixing the new oversized video controls and huge videos in the
| Related sidebar, etc. etc.
|
| [^0] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
| 1over137 wrote:
| > On a 1080p monitor...
|
| There's your problem. You have normal hardware. The rich SV
| folks at google are probably all using 6k monitors. (only half
| joking)
| Orygin wrote:
| It's the same issue on big screens. I have a ultra wide 2k,
| and in full screen I only have 3 videos on the homepage.
| kuschku wrote:
| Even on expensive, high-res screens, the homepage looks like
| this: https://i.k8r.eu/YOHPqQ.png
| anhner wrote:
| This is so awesome! This is why I love the desktop, my machine
| is still mine.
| fhennig wrote:
| I love this, thank you so much for building this!
|
| I didn't know I wanted 6 videos in a row, but now that I have
| it, it's so much better. Also linking youtube logo to
| subscriptions is great.
| rubyfan wrote:
| They have also gotten more aggressive on trying to get you to
| sign in. I have appreciated the shitty UX changes they have made
| which has resulted in me using it less. It's just filler and I
| need less of that in life, so thanks for chasing me away.
| conductr wrote:
| On my work PC, they all but forced me to create an account just
| to watch videos. I could not find a way around it (I didn't try
| super hard). I don't use my personal accounts on that device so
| I just created a throwaway.
| aeyes wrote:
| When did you create the throwaway? The last time I tried they
| directly asked for a phone number.
| rubyfan wrote:
| Yeah the phone number thing across services is out of hand
| and we need a hide my email type solution for it now.
|
| I checked in at a restaurant recently and they asked for my
| number to text me when our table was ready. As soon as the
| number finished they had my name and all sorts of info I
| never gave them. It's totally out of control.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| What's the polymarket on NO videos on the homepage AND THREE ads?
| bryanhogan wrote:
| I can highly recommend using YouTube through Firefox with
| extensions or ReVanced that try to fix these hostile and anti
| user decisions. Although I do sometimes wonder why I do spend so
| much time on a platform that hates me so much.
| duxup wrote:
| I miss when I could search youtube for "cats" and I'd get just
| raw cat footage.
|
| Now I get cat influencers and influencers selling me on them ...
| while they tell me how to pick a cat. Maybe I find kinda raw cat
| footage, with a title that is misleading, annoying music, text
| bubbles popping all over it :(
|
| I just want what I searched for ... youtube doesn't give me that.
|
| It's not that unlike when I open the home page, I've no control
| and so much of that isn't what I'm looking for...
| lan321 wrote:
| For me it's 3 videos of what I searched for and then it just
| goes to my normal recommended. One of the issues I still
| haven't fixed with an extension so I just search videos via
| normal web search.
| neop1x wrote:
| Sometimes it helps to use intitle:cats and other advanced
| search operators https://granwehr.com/blog/youtube-search-
| operators
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Similar over at Netflix with the UI layout update they introduced
| in May. Oversized, limiting carousel items.
|
| https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/netflix-new-homepage-...
| everyone wrote:
| ublock origin \ my filters
|
| youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-
| per-row: 5 !important)
|
| Ive had that for a couple years.
| yearolinuxdsktp wrote:
| YouTube app on Apple TV is inexcusable garbage, likely
| intentionally so. Google doesn't want you to have a good
| experience on an Apple product.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| As a workaround just disable the watch history. Then there are no
| videos on the home screen.
| 827a wrote:
| One of the things I dislike about the Youtube app on Apple TV is
| how it appears to maintain an entirely separate list of
| recommended videos, specific to the kinds of videos I tend to
| watch on TV, versus the phone and desktop (which might themselves
| also each have their own recommendation algorithm, but my
| behavior there is closer so as to not notice).
|
| The difference is stark. I use YouTube on the Apple TV to play
| mostly background videos; 8 hour AI generated lofi mixes, burning
| fireplaces, things like that. Ambiance. Its all that gets
| recommended now when I pull up the app; but only on the TV.
|
| This behavior is somewhat desirable: but the issue is, the
| youtube apple TV app is an abhorrent experience that feels deeply
| tailored to stop you from getting to _any_ content that is not
| expressly recommended. And these videos are _all_ that get
| recommended. A new Linus Tech Tips video might be in my feed on
| desktop /mobile; but finding that video on the TV literally
| requires me to search "Linus Tech Tips" and go to their channel
| -> all videos.
|
| I certainly don't mind the platform raising the prominence of
| videos I tend to watch on that platform; but to me it feels like
| I should be able to at least scroll down on the home page a bit
| to get a more "centralized" view into everything my account
| watches and would be recommended.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Yeah, I wish the UI could let me browse the various silos of
| videos I like to watch instead of trying to be clever with one
| feed.
|
| And it's like Youtube thinks I only want to watch the last
| three genres at any moment. If I branch out, then it pops
| another favorite genre from the set.
|
| Sometimes I'll go months or even years forgetting about video
| genres I love until I randomly remember it.
|
| Feels like a wasted opportunity, and it should have more in
| common with music apps.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I hate the forced AI generated English translation of the non-
| english shorts with the passion of a million suns. It should
| never have been the default. If you are the person who made that
| decision, fuck you. If you know that person, please pass on my
| sentiments.
| month13 wrote:
| My latest favorite is now that the Subscriptions panel adds a
| bonus "Recommended" row at the top, and then two rows down, a
| "Recommended Shorts"
| gyulai wrote:
| Reminds me of a comment I wrote just recently:
|
| >> I think that anyone who is technically sufficiently well-
| versed, is going to avoid that hellscape like the plague. So
| then, who is the actual audience for this stuff? My guess would
| be: the old folks' home around the corner, which, sooner or
| later, will be forced to upgrade those TVs to smart-TVs. And once
| those old folks put in their credit card numbers or log in with
| their Amazon accounts, there goes a lot of people's inheritance.
|
| My own elderly father is wise to the scam, but not confident in
| his ability to navigate the dark patterns. So now, he is afraid
| to input his credit card information into anything digital,
| essentially excluding him from cultural participation in the
| digital age. << [1]
|
| With that frame (the target audience for smart TVs is old
| people), "needing glasses" is not all that far-fetched.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462816
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| I was going to disagree by saying that the menus are extremely
| confusing to the elderly. However if the goal is to extract
| money from them by generating confusion about what is an on-
| demand vs a streaming piece of media; you could not design a
| better software system. Reminds me of the theory that micro-
| transaction revenue in video games has driven menu UI in the
| direction of confusing and disorientating the player.
| mdavid626 wrote:
| As with many other similar sites, it's time to get off YouTube as
| well. The times when one could watch good content not made for
| money, are over. It's about watching as much content as you can,
| the more addictive the better.
| zombot wrote:
| Total enshittification has won and reality is indistinguishable
| from satire. And still we continue to empower the enshittifiers
| while complaining loudly about the self-inflicted wounds.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I just opened the YouTube app on my Android phone and there is
| similarly _one_ video on the home page!
| kalaksi wrote:
| Recently noticed that YouTube had also removed the button for
| disabling autoplay if you're not logged in. The enshittification
| continues.
| Havoc wrote:
| It is rapidly becoming unusual. Already needs a bunch of
| extensions to make things bearable.
|
| At some point it'll become so shit people will look at trying to
| sidestep their frontend entirely. In other news YouTube is
| clamping down on ability to download videos...what a coincidence
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| On a sidenote, there is surprisingly no universal agreement on a
| default font size and "scaling" of a website.
|
| Common recommendation is font-size: 14px on html element, but I
| often encounter websites that are way off in scaling.
| ruszki wrote:
| Isn't the recommendation to not use px at all? Or just
| "Pepperidge farm remembers"?
| globular-toast wrote:
| Sigh... You'd think people would know this by now. What does
| it even mean to be a "web developer" if you don't know the
| difference between pixels and text size? It seems like such a
| fundamental thing, like a decorator knowing how to calculate
| how much paint is needed for a job. But no... now we have web
| browsers where a pixel isn't even a pixel, it's 4 pixels, on
| a "HiDPI" display...
| dvh wrote:
| Sorry pal but font size is not something you decide. Font size
| is something I decide!
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Absolutely. Would be great to have a consistent starting
| point.
| kevincox wrote:
| This is unfortunately true. It feels like "1rem" should be the
| ideal body don't size. But on desktop browsers this is often
| quite small.
|
| Personally I configure my browser's default font size (1rem) to
| something nice and readable, but I'm sure that the number of
| people who do this is <10%. Probably closer to 1%.
|
| But either way I would recommend against hardcoding a size in
| px.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Ironically, most people I know are now using alternative YouTube
| front-ends not for the ad blocking, but just for tracking their
| subscriptions in a proper list and skipping the junk in the home
| page.
| guillevg wrote:
| Yes, YT UX is awful, specially on TV. I found about SmartTube and
| it is great, I recommend it. You can choose the grid size, among
| many other things (most importantly, no ads!).
| blurr123 wrote:
| that "i skied down mount everest" promotion by redbull is out of
| control. its the epitome of 'look at me' syndrome
| alex1138 wrote:
| I used to lurk the Google forums (they even changed the goddamn
| format of the forums now to where clicking things is tedious and
| I'm sure it's 100% intentional) and going back years with Google
| and also I suspect Youtube it was full of users complaining about
| "You're ignoring all our advice/wants in this thread". I don't
| remember all of it, but it was product managers being incredibly
| selective
|
| The tyranny of distance (you can do x where x is usually 'ignore
| feedback' and you can get away with it separated by hundreds of
| miles, where otherwise you might get punched in the face) kills
| me with companies like this. You can't just ignore all of us (the
| customer isn't _always_ right but it wouldn 't kill you to listen
| every once and a while and if you don't, we'll gradually stop
| using your product). But you can, because listening to The People
| isn't where the product managers decide it should be or isn't
| where the ad dollars are or whatever
|
| It's an emperor has no clothes situation. They know it we know it
| everybody knows it but we're all (corporate, anyway) just going
| to ignore it and plug our ears
| sarreph wrote:
| > I now project that there will be zero videos on the homescreen
| around May of 2026 now
|
| This is already true. If you sign out of YouTube or turn your
| "Watch History" off you see zero videos on the home screen.
| somat wrote:
| On desktop it has already hit zero. Clear all your tokens and go
| to home page, no videos.
|
| I am being a bit obtuse of course, if you have any sort of
| identifying tokens it does show videos, but the irony was too
| good to waste on mere facts.
| podgorniy wrote:
| What could users do with this quazimonopoly? YT PMs can keep
| being discunnected from user's needs as long and far as their
| personal worldview limitations allow and bare no consequences.
| reddalo wrote:
| YouTube _is_ a monopoly, and with huge barriers to entry.
|
| Nobody else has the money, the infrastructure and the content
| to build a YouTube alternative.
| OrangeMusic wrote:
| The money or infrastructure: factually false.
|
| The content: well I guess that's the network effect.
|
| To be honest I don't understand content creators who bitch
| about YouTube constantly (about "the algorithm",
| demonetization, strikes and more), but DON'T put their
| content somewhere else at least as an alternative. You don't
| have to _move_ but at least also publish your videos to a
| podcast platform or something?
| haspok wrote:
| Ever heard of Nebula?
| kotaKat wrote:
| I'd also like to scream at Youtube for the "experiencing
| interruptions? find out why!" bullshit that enforces a five
| second wait before videos will load.
|
| I only put 2+2 together when I was running yt-dlp and realizing
| there was a "Sleeping 5.00 seconds as required by the site..."
| before downloads would kick in and... wellp. It all makes sense
| now.
|
| As an ISP representative, I am getting absolutely pissmad that
| YouTube is gaslighting our users and making them think that our
| service is "terrible" because of perceived buffering on _every_
| video load because YouTube wants to play a shitty cat and mouse
| game against adblockers for all.
| mooktakim wrote:
| Can someone write about how terrible the YouTube Android app is,
| so that some PM can actually fix it? Its an app i use constantly
| and hate using it all the time. I accidently click to another
| video and lose the position of where i was. It used to confirm
| the play of another video, but now it doesn't. The offline
| feature is terrible; you can't play something and make it go
| offline. It used to cast really well, with a "casting queue".
| When i disconnect from my TV, its still logged in.
| Adding/removing/changing the watch queue is so bad that I have to
| use my laptop to make changes. When browsing, you can't tell
| whether a video is already on your watch list; it's not always
| accurate. Sometimes you click add, and it removes it from the
| watch list because it's also in the list. Many more things..
| can't think of them right now.
| sph wrote:
| Good timing, now that the inept PMs at YouTube have decided to
| move the Subscription and Watch Later buttons on my desktop UI
| and make them more cumbersome to reach. What the hell are they
| even doing?
|
| Like a sibling commenter mentioned, I used to happily pay for
| Premium, but I'd rather put up with the misery (and ad-block)
| than give them a single cent ever again. Why should I reward
| pervasive enshittification?
|
| Sort yourselves out, Youtube.
| Sammi wrote:
| I use the Stylus[0] extension with this style in order to fix it:
| ytd-rich-item-renderer { max-width: 265px; }
| /* Show full length title instead of ellipsis cutoff at two
| lines. */ a.yt-lockup-metadata-view-model__title {
| display: inline !important; }
|
| [0]
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpee...
| aembleton wrote:
| If you've already got uBlockOrigin then you can add this to it
| instead of another extension. Add these filters:
| youtube.com##.ytd-rich-item-renderer:style(max-width:265px;
| !important;) youtube.com##.yt-lockup-metadata-view-
| model__title:style(display:inline; !important;)
| whichquestion wrote:
| If you have history turned off and you're not signed in, the
| number of videos they show on the home screen is already zero
| bentt wrote:
| I really don't understand why there are not sites that curate
| Youtube videos? Like, present basically the same recommendation
| UI, but just hand pick cool videos around different topics? Hell,
| it could even be like Reddit with voting... but the algorithmic
| recommendation engine that Youtube uses is NOT aligned with my
| interests. It's aligned ONLY with my behavior. I want to learn! I
| want to explore! I do NOT want to get corralled into the same
| videos as everyone else just because they are engaging.
|
| I'll give you an example. I'm super into game development. I also
| love the NBA. NBA videos are posted nearly every day and I click
| on them. Gamedev videos, not so often. So what do I get? Tons of
| NBA content because that's what I click on in my recommended.
| What I want, though, is for the recommendations to think about
| what I would _like_ to watch and not just what I _do_ watch. I
| think a curation site would help alleviate this problem,
| especially if I could steer it more than Youtube's.
| swah wrote:
| API limits? I've been testing RSS + NetNewsWire for this.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| You could just... make a subreddit for it, right? Youtube
| videos still have URLs that can be linked to from anywhere.
|
| On your personalized level: Don't let the algorithm work
| against you; instead, help it work for you. If you're being
| inundated with NBA videos and want fewer of them, then pick one
| or more of them and declare that you're "Not interested." This
| slows the flood of any over-abundant topic.
| bentt wrote:
| Thanks yeah thats a fair point. I just get a sense that
| incentives are misaligned. I pay $30/mo for family premium
| primarily to keep my kids away from ads, but Youtube still
| finds more ways to squeeze us by steering us around for
| retention instead of to what we actually want.
| mzajc wrote:
| People here might be interested in Invidious[0], a FOSS web
| frontend for YouTube. By default it shows 4 videos per row, but
| that can be trivially adjusted with CSS. It's a little light on
| features, but otherwise very customizable.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
| user____name wrote:
| It's one video and it's titled "Why the Third Reich CURED CANCER
| but your GOVERNMENT does't want you to know." And has twelve ads
| on protein powder and dishwasher tablets in some foreign
| language.
| S0y wrote:
| If you use Ublock you can add this to your filters to restore a
| sane number of videos per row:
|
| ---
|
| ! YouTube 7 Videos Per Row Fix (Home and Channel Pages)
|
| youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents
| !important;)
|
| youtube.com###contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents
| !important;)
|
| youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-
| per-row: 7 !important;)
|
| ! YouTube 7 Videos Per Row Fix (Channel Page margin fix)
|
| youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:style(margin-right:
| calc(var(--ytd-rich-grid-item-margin)/2) !important; margin-left:
| calc(var(--ytd-rich-grid-item-margin)/2) !important;)
|
| ! YouTube 7 Videos Per Row Fix (Font Size fix)
|
| youtube.com###video-title.ytd-rich-grid-media:style(font-size:
| 1.4rem !important; line-height: 2rem !important;)
|
| youtube.com###metadata-line.ytd-video-meta-block:style(font-size:
| 1.2rem !important; line-height: 1.8rem !important;)
|
| youtube.com###video-title.ytd-rich-grid-slim-media:style(font-
| size: 1.4rem !important; line-height: 2rem !important;)
| flipgimble wrote:
| The content on YouTube should qualify it to be preserved as a
| treasure of humanity. Think of all the college lectures,
| conference proceedings, sporting events, citizen journalism,
| podcasts that are the backbone of new communities and cultural
| revolutions. It is the modern version of public access TV and
| expresses a close to compelte spectrum of human interests.
|
| At the same time Google Product Managers (or whatever euphemism
| for middle management they use at Google) are dumbfoundingly
| short shighted and myopic. They canibalize and destroy the value
| of the website to make some engagement or ad numbers go up,
| persumably in a short term play for promotion. When the
| consequences of their efforts to enshittify become apparent, they
| are long gone to another FAANG or moved up to executive level
| where severance packages mean they suffer no consequences. Its a
| shame there is no incentive to make the best product for the long
| term usefullness.
|
| and I've paid full subscription price for a couple of years now
| to avoid the ads, and I can barely stand what it has evolved
| into. My screen is 80% games, shorts, "ads" and categories I
| didn't ask for.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| For the last year I've mostly only been dropping into YouTube
| just to see how bad it's become. Invidious isn't my favourite bit
| of software, but it _is_ better than the stock youtube interface.
| Also, on my ChromeCast (yes, I know it 's not supported anymore)
| the YouTube app will play an ad in the middle of a video and
| never return to the original video. Most of what I do is look
| around to find videos that look interesting then download them
| with yt-dlp so I can watch complete videos.
|
| There's probably a market out there for video hosting that
| doesn't suck. I think a video search / discovery platform on top
| of Vimeo might be useful.
| lacoolj wrote:
| "...I fired up YouTube on an Apple TV..."
|
| I thought Apple TV was a subscription service? Does Apple make
| TVs now?
| kulshan wrote:
| https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-4k/
| matt3D wrote:
| I have a slightly similar frustration; Netflix, Disney et al
| requiring me to figure out the name of the film by deciphering
| the poster. I don't know how this passes any kind of
| accessibility testing.
| behole wrote:
| I am dreaming of the day a YT killer shows up. I enjoy the
| content enough to pay for premium but the laundry list of
| problems is GROWING. I feel like "TV" is on the precipice of a
| paradigm shift. I wish YT was not going to be our substrate for
| that moment but it looks inevitable.
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