Yes, though it's been a while now; I was getting into consuming a lot of content off YT, but massively cut back when I first started to hear that they were going to try and force ads. Since then I had a partial relapse in the form of YT on a smart TV, but eventually it got to be too much - I think the last straw was when I tried to watch a medium length video (~15-20m?) and had... I think it was the third ad break that made me close out and go watch HBO ("Max") instead.
Ask HN: Has your YouTube usage decreased?
51–60 of 74 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has your YouTube usage decreased?
#52No, I signed up for premium a few months ago and happily pay the $20/month. YouTube has literally millions of hours of high-quality interviews, lectures, courses, etc. and paying is worth every penny. If you find yourself watching low-quality videos, that’s a problem with your selection of content, not the platform itself.
The overwhelming majority of the stuff you mentioned was put up for free with 0 monetization intent. Is Google also putting ads into non-monetized content as well?
Pretty sure it’s only monitized content unless it has copyright issue (music). Then ad is shown to pay artist. Demonetized videos might also still have ads I think.
Re: Ask HN: Has your YouTube usage decreased?
#53They intermittently remove the blocks for me every 20 or so clicks. Haven't seen an ad or the ad blocker blocker in over a week now.
Re: Ask HN: Has your YouTube usage decreased?
#54No, I signed up for premium a few months ago and happily pay the $20/month. YouTube has literally millions of hours of high-quality interviews, lectures, courses, etc. and paying is worth every penny. If you find yourself watching low-quality videos, that’s a problem with your selection of content, not the platform itself.
Ah yes, it's the consumer's fault for no longer being able to use the up/down ratio to tell if a video is clickbait or low quality.
Not because google took it away to protect that sweet advertising money.
The amount of ppl shamelessly stanning for companies has just gotten ridiculous.
Re: Ask HN: Has your YouTube usage decreased?
#55I decided to check this out with Google Trends, out of curiosity. The answer [1] is surprising. Over the past 5 years there's been a quite substantial downward trend in interest in YouTube, at least as far as what people search for. Though that page probably also answers why, somewhat amusingly. Swap the related queries to sort by "top" instead of "rising" and 3 of the top YouTube related queries are: "mp3 youtube" "…
> Over the past 5 years there's been a quite substantial downward trend in interest in YouTube
This may also be due to competition from TikTok, which became available outside of China 5 years ago.[1]
Re: Ask HN: Has your YouTube usage decreased?
#56No, I signed up for premium a few months ago and happily pay the $20/month. YouTube has literally millions of hours of high-quality interviews, lectures, courses, etc. and paying is worth every penny. If you find yourself watching low-quality videos, that’s a problem with your selection of content, not the platform itself.
Ah yes, it's the consumer's fault for no longer being able to use the up/down ratio to tell if a video is clickbait or low quality. Not because google took it away to protect that sweet advertising money. The amount of ppl shamelessly stanning for companies has just gotten ridiculous.
I don’t particularly like Google and have been slowly trying to move my accounts away from them.
Paying a small fee for a superior service is common sense and has nothing to with “stanning” for companies.
I also don’t even pay attention to upvotes 99% of the time, as it’s pretty unlikely that an old lecture about Hegel hosted on a philosophy channel is going to be clickbait. The clickbait stuff is almost always immediately obvious just from the title and thumbnail image alone.
Re: Ask HN: Has your YouTube usage decreased?
#57No, my YouTube usage as stayed the same.
I pay $15.40/month for YouTube Premium and it's a very good investment (better than Netflix, Max or Amazon Prime -- two of those I get for free). There's so much more independent content (not movies or TV shows) on YouTube on subject matters that I'm actually interested in. Also I get to download videos without using YT downloaders.
The biggest use case for me is actually music streaming on my phone in the background. I don't have a separate Spotify account because all the music I actually listen to is on YouTube.
That said, I can see why folks using the free tier might watch less YouTube less.
Re: Ask HN: Has your YouTube usage decreased?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think so, but I don't want to risk it in case it does start happening.
If you're that worried about that, it might be time to mitigate the risk anyhow and move from Google as a single critical dependence.
I am. My email is with someone else, and I am trying to move everything else.
Re: Ask HN: Has your YouTube usage decreased?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think so, but I don't want to risk it in case it does start happening.
Sounds like it’s time to start diversifying. How is it acceptable that one company could have that sort of control over you?
I am diversifying. But I'm still trying to mitigate the risk on this end too.
Besides, I waste less time now.
Re: Ask HN: Has your YouTube usage decreased?
#60It has, but not because of ads or watch history. At some point over the past five years, the accuracy and immediacy of Google's search became a factor in the political stability of the US, and YouTube and Google search have been aggressively reduced to serving inert, ahistorical, commercially safe results. No monthly fee will fix that.
Non-English language search was largely unaffected until a year or two ago, but I guess tokenization has improved their ability to filter anything not on an allowlist to trend.