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Dark pattern: how YouTube makes sure you don’t always “skip ad”

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Re: Dark pattern: how YouTube makes sure you don’t always “skip ad”

#131

Post by lbriner »

ghoomketu wrote: post #43

People complain a lot about Youtube ads and how awful they are but as a thought experiment I once tried to imagine the amount of storage and bandwidth Youtube must need everyday to operate. So after some basic research it looks like they need to add almost 1 petabytes of storage and I couldn't find much info on the bandwidth and servers it uses. As much as I don't like Google for their shady business practices, I cou…

I do wonder whether another approach would be starting to delete old videos with not many clicks unless you pay. This would seem to reduce storage bandwidth but I suppose they still have to support the insane amount of uploads!

Another thing would be if you upload stupid crap that no-one wants to watch, you get banned or sent a nasty letter or something...I don't know, I don't work in customer retention ;-)

Re: Dark pattern: how YouTube makes sure you don’t always “skip ad”

#132

Post by fatnoah »

I have no idea why or how it's happening, but whenever I view a Youtube video on my personal computer, it stops after < 1 second and I get skipped right to the content. It's the only device in my home that happens to, and I'm afraid to touch anything, lest I lose that magic power.

Re: Dark pattern: how YouTube makes sure you don’t always “skip ad”

#133

Post by IE6 »

blindseer wrote: post #16

The ads are genuinely one of my most frustrating experiences when using the Chromecast with Google TV. And seeing this kind of pattern makes it more likely that I’ll never sign up for premium YouTube (whatever it is called) and just use YouTube less. Also, I swear they do this - If you click on the try YouTube premium for 14 days, once the 14 days end you are bombarded with extra ads. And ads that are usually not ski…

FWIW I just gave up and bought youtube premium and I never see ads ever again on my chromecast. Unfortunately because the domain ads are served off of is a youtube domain something like a pihole (which I am also running) doesn't help. One idea I had was to run a chromebox instead cause that allows for browser based adblock plugins but paying the monthly fee was easier (for now).

Re: Dark pattern: how YouTube makes sure you don’t always “skip ad”

#134

Post by Stevvo »

paulpauper wrote: post #48

use a vpn and new chrome session in some low income country. this will remove most of the ads but now what many content creators are doing nowadays is making the ads part pf the video itself, so you cannot skip it or block it. The product placement may transition seemingly in such a way as you may be listening to a video about the history of some math concept and suddenly the narrator will start talking about VPNs, a…

SponsorBlock extension is great; it cuts out the ads that are part of the video itself. It uses crowd-sourced tags. It gets nearly all of them; if a video is popular enough for the creator to bother putting ads in it then someone will submit the tags for it.

Re: Dark pattern: how YouTube makes sure you don’t always “skip ad”

#135

Post by cecilpl2 »

pc86 wrote: post #90
gonzo41 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often feel that the 90's child me would slap me across the face in disgust at how casually I take for granted the age of magic we live in now.

I distinctly remember waiting an appreciable amount of time to download a single Metallica mp3 on dialup as a middle schooler - maybe 20, 25 minutes? for a ~3 minute song - and a 2GB Linux distro took me like 30 seconds a few weeks ago. I'm simultaneously hopeful for what we'll be doing 20, 30 years from now, but also worried that the rate of progress is slowing (because I am by definition comparing now to the very v…

I used to download full video game soundtracks. It would take me all night to download a single album, and I'd have been disconnected from the internet when I woke up in the morning because my ISP wouldn't support a connection length longer than 8 hours.

We couldn't even stream music, let alone stream video.

Re: Dark pattern: how YouTube makes sure you don’t always “skip ad”

#136

Post by jerf »

My favorite "dark pattern" plausibly disguised as a simple bug is that the countdown timer, across multiple platforms I've used YouTube on, doesn't work correctly and very easily will let the ad play for a second or two longer than you intend. It behaves as if it's supposed to count down to 0 one second at a time, but there's a recurring event that is run every second to see if the countdown timer needs to be lowered. However, it's very easy for that event to be ever so slightly delayed or advanced relative to when the timer counts down, and as a result the timer doesn't get decremented correctly. It's very easy to see if you watch the timer carefully; it almost never counts evenly like it should, and it very often skips a beat entirely. (Compare with a simple timer app, which is correctly updating every frame the display renders. This isn't that hard.)

It's very plausibly a bug that a novice dealing with time in a UI would make, and in many other circumstances I'd accept that explanation. But, a bug in such a critical piece of YouTube's functionality, with a root cause I'm pretty sure I've diagnosed just by glancing at it, surviving for years and years across multiple platforms? This isn't a bug. It's policy. At scale, those seconds add up.

Re: Dark pattern: how YouTube makes sure you don’t always “skip ad”

#137

Post by Stevvo »

NoraCodes wrote: post #71

I don't think I've seen a YouTube ad in years. uBlock Origin plus SponsorBlock make for a much better watching experience.

Depends what devices you are watching on. e.g. you probably can't block ads on the YouTube app that comes on your TV.

Re: Dark pattern: how YouTube makes sure you don’t always “skip ad”

#138

Post by lordgrenville »

tristan957 wrote: post #116
mark_l_watson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, I am curious: you see ads on GMail? I haven’t seen ads in many years. What email client do you use? web app, phone app?

I can't recall seeing ads on the Android app, but there are definitely ads in the web client. The ads must do a very good job of disguising themselves if you haven't noticed them. I have moved most of my email to ProtonMail. So much nicer paying for that from a company that respects me rather than using a free product from a company who has no other purpose than to drive ad revenue.

Happens in the Android app too, just not in the "Primary" tab. So annoying.

Re: Dark pattern: how YouTube makes sure you don’t always “skip ad”

#139

Post by gadrev »

phh wrote: post #45
blindseer wrote: post #16

The ads are genuinely one of my most frustrating experiences when using the Chromecast with Google TV. And seeing this kind of pattern makes it more likely that I’ll never sign up for premium YouTube (whatever it is called) and just use YouTube less. Also, I swear they do this - If you click on the try YouTube premium for 14 days, once the 14 days end you are bombarded with extra ads. And ads that are usually not ski…

FYI, several alternative youtube frontend apps are available for "Chromecast with Google TV" (which is just an Android TV device), for instance the opensource Newpipe. (Though this is piracy, and you shouldn't do piracy, because piracy hurts Google and content creators - who will gladly take donations -)

But you can't "cast" from Newpipe (you'd have cast the phone's screen and play stuff in Newpipe in your phone). Which anyways is what I do when I start getting too many ads (typically I just shutdown the TV and try to time turning it back on so the ad is finishing. it's something of a mini-game).

EDIT: I'm referring to the original chromecast, not the new "Chromecast with Google TV"

Re: Dark pattern: how YouTube makes sure you don’t always “skip ad”

#140

Post by zamadatix »

alex_young wrote: post #93
ghoomketu wrote: post #43

People complain a lot about Youtube ads and how awful they are but as a thought experiment I once tried to imagine the amount of storage and bandwidth Youtube must need everyday to operate. So after some basic research it looks like they need to add almost 1 petabytes of storage and I couldn't find much info on the bandwidth and servers it uses. As much as I don't like Google for their shady business practices, I cou…

What do you think a petabyte of storage costs? SSDs currently start at $15k / PB and presumably Google’s pricing at volume is better. Data transfer is priced by connection and not by bandwidth, so that cost will not scale linearly. https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&disk_types=e...

Even the Amazon comments know that's a scam (well that and unavailable to actually purchase) and there is a reason the next disk in the list is 5x the price:

> A 2T SSD for $38 sound to good to be true and of course they are a scam, don't buy they don't work

But that's not even the biggest oversight here on storage, these drives also need to be attached to something which will need to be cooled, networked, and powered in a reliable enough way the service continues operating when you have 10s of thousands of these. You'll also need to store more than exactly the amount of data since you can't just lose videos any time there is a failure.

In all it's still going to be dwarfed by encoding and bandwidth costs but that doesn't mean 15k/PB is any less an order of magnitude or two off on storage costs.

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