Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”

news.ycombinator.com

141–150 of 168 posts

Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”

#141
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me a break. You don't want advertising, you don't want to subscribe, and you don't want a network of sites using the same subscription. What possible solution exists that satisfies your criteria, which are way more demanding than "remotely reasonable"? This is just an excuse you've fabricated to justify your own convenience, stinginess and/or laziness.

I said what solution I wanted. Micropayments have been researched for 30 years. Anonymous crypto payments have been deployed for maybe 10. Yes, there are scaling issues. No, they're not that hard. The real problem is getting everybody to agree on what to use. ... and if a site directly tells me it doesn't like my ad blocker, I leave. I haven't gone to the ad-blocker-blocker level. I don't think that's unreasonable.

The hard problem with micropayments is that if your site sells access or content to individual users for micropayments, and you have users in multiple countries or multiple states/provinces within a country, you might have to deal with VAT or sales tax on those payments in multiple jurisdictions.

For direct micropayments to work for sites that have users in multiple jurisdictions and do not wish to find themselves on the wrong side of the law in those jurisdictions one of these approaches is probably needed:

1. Some sort of international agreement to either make it so online sales of digital content is just taxed in the seller's jurisdiction.

2. Some sort of international agreement that makes it so that even if the seller has to collect taxes for multiple jurisdictions, they can report and remit all of the collected taxes to one jurisdiction and that jurisdiction's tax office will deal with divvying it up to the others.

Europe does something like that for VAT. You register with one EU country (Ireland is a good choice for US companies). Then you just send them a quarterly report with a list of how much you sold in each country and pay them and they deal with it. You don't have to deal with tax authorities in any other EU countries.

Another approach, which does not require any new international agreements to be made, is for sites to sell through an intermediary. You structure this so that the end user actually buys from the intermediary, and the intermediary buys from your site.

If the intermediary is handling many different sites they might be big enough that they can afford the cost of dealing with sales/VAT taxes in potentially hundreds of different jurisdictions. Your site is only transacting with the intermediary and so only has to worry about at most two jurisdictions, the one you are in and the one the intermediary is in.

Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”

#142
post #129

Related: YouTube's crackdown on ad blockers intensifies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37782171 - Oct 2023 (140 comments) YouTube is testing new “skip ads” button that makes it just a bit harder to skip - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37224622 - Aug 2023 (12 comments) YouTube is testing a three-strikes policy for ad blocking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36747367 - July 2023 (72 comments) YouT…

Incidentally, along with other strengthened paywalls, this might impact HN's own acceptance of YT videos, which may not be generally available to many HN readers. In 2023, youtube.com was the single most frequently appearing site on HN front-page stories (based on HN's front-page archive), with 105 stories (of 10,950), about 1% of the total. (Based on my HN front-page analysis.) Edit: Corrected above from 10% as init…

Uhh, 100 stories would be 1%, a big distinction.

I am sure if worst comes to worst, a solution will be found. I haven’t heard anything about YouTube planning to block embeds for example.

Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”

#143
post #6

Ah, that's why the videos stopped working for me at home over PiHole.

Was a solution finally built to block YT ads with PiHole? I haven’t used it in a year or two and last I heard it was very hard / impossible to block YT ads because (like Facebook and Instagram) the ads are all served from the YT domain.

How did you do it? Can you link to a guide or docs to do it?

Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure it's A/B testing. I'm logged in with uBlock Origin and no anti-adblock is visible. I've seen someone on Reddit complaining they were getting this and loads of people replied to say they were not. They're probably trying to figure out how many users/views they will lose or how many new premium subscribers they get or something like that.

I hate A/B testing. Puts the feedback and protest mechanism working on those who complain the most. If you are a techie, you are forced to yell or silent quit the website, and most of the times I really don't have the time to waste yelling.

My team rely on a/b testing. It’s the only way we can test whether the tweaks in our ML model produce positive results or not.

Playing devils advocate here I think it’s actually a good idea that YT are testing this. They need to understand how big of a negative impact this would be if released. If enough users hate this change as you and I suspect then hopefully YT see these results in their tests and revisit their approach.

A/b testing stops the worst user experiences from getting rolled out. Our company did a high profile a/b test that got a lot of negative feedback from users and the whole redesign it got canned because of it.

Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incidentally, along with other strengthened paywalls, this might impact HN's own acceptance of YT videos, which may not be generally available to many HN readers. In 2023, youtube.com was the single most frequently appearing site on HN front-page stories (based on HN's front-page archive), with 105 stories (of 10,950), about 1% of the total. (Based on my HN front-page analysis.) Edit: Corrected above from 10% as init…

Uhh, 100 stories would be 1% , a big distinction. I am sure if worst comes to worst, a solution will be found. I haven’t heard anything about YouTube planning to block embeds for example.

Gah! You're right.

I should have caught that as the largest category ovrall (all years) is general news sites at about 8.5% of all FP stories. So no single site should rank above that.[1]

YT is still the single top site for 2022 front page stories though. Top 10:

  Site                            Stories     Points (   mean  )  Comments (   mean  )
  ------------------------------  -------     ------ ----------   -------- ----------
  n/a                                 432     167275 (  386.32 )    125304 (  289.39 )
  youtube.com                         105      27243 (  257.01 )     12489 (  117.82 )
  nature.com                           80      17694 (  218.44 )     11716 (  144.64 )
  wikipedia.org                        68      12258 (  177.65 )      5855 (   84.86 )
  nytimes.com                          67      21190 (  311.62 )     21765 (  320.07 )
  arstechnica.com                      63      18319 (  286.23 )     12057 (  188.39 )
  ieee.org                             53       9432 (  174.67 )      5933 (  109.87 )
  reuters.com                          53      28360 (  525.19 )     29033 (  537.65 )
  theguardian.com                      49      12228 (  244.56 )      8677 (  173.54 )
  quantamagazine.org                   48      11293 (  230.47 )      5519 (  112.63 )
  science.org                          47      12485 (  260.10 )      7655 (  159.48 )
"n/a" are posts without links, typically Ask/Tell HN, Who's Hiring/Wants to be Hired threads, etc.

________________________________

Notes:

1. "General news" has actually fallen in recent years, with programming/code submissions (frequently Github/Gitlab repos, plus language-specific sites, etc.) at 10.5% of all front-page submissions in 2023, blogs at 10.25%, academic/science (5.2%), and general news (4%).

Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”

#146
post #112
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Louis Rossman has been saying that he gets much more money if you purchase something from his store rather than from ads, and that for this reason he doesn't care if viewers use an adblocker or not. This is just a single data point though, other youtubers have a different stance on this matter.

Presumably he would care if users used an ad blocker that deleted his ads for his store, given that he appears to be using YouTube as a way to advertise his real business.

He is using YouTube to promote what he does, but AFAIK not in the form of YouTube ads, instead he publishes content about what he does in the form of videos on his channel.

Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”

#147
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there really a way for Google to end this cat/mouse game in their favor? Yet another "update" to the web extension manifest.

That will affect a large number of users but if word gets out that this weird fork of Firefox[0] will allow them to view YouTube with no ads, Google is suddenly forced to enable browser attestation such that only versions of Chrome will allow people to use YouTube. That will likely affect those in the US but EU authorities sometimes like to curb these antitrust behaviors. I also get the feeling that such a change wil…

> Amazon seems primed to start eating their lunch with Twitch

That seems extremely unlikely, Twitch has already destroyed a lot of the goodwill they had with creators. Policy changes (or attempts) regarding baked-in ads, revenue splits, forced exclusivity, there's probably more.

Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”

#148
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy to pay for content, as soon as sites provide me with a remotely reasonable way of doing that. Advertising is not a reasonable way. A separate subscription, with a credit card interaction, for every site I happen to hit once a year, is not a reasonable way. Demanding a bunch of personal information is not a reasonable way. Trying to lock me into an "ecosystem of partners" is not a reasonable way. Globally ac…

Give me a break. You don't want advertising, you don't want to subscribe, and you don't want a network of sites using the same subscription. What possible solution exists that satisfies your criteria, which are way more demanding than "remotely reasonable"? This is just an excuse you've fabricated to justify your own convenience, stinginess and/or laziness.

Such a sad comment to see on a tech enthusiast hacker site

Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”

#149
post #146
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably he would care if users used an ad blocker that deleted his ads for his store, given that he appears to be using YouTube as a way to advertise his real business.

He is using YouTube to promote what he does, but AFAIK not in the form of YouTube ads, instead he publishes content about what he does in the form of videos on his channel.

But ad blockers are happy to edit videos to remove sponsorship segments, so they'd also be happy to remove his self promotion. Ad blockers don't care about the exact form of ads, right? They just want to get rid of all of them leaving the content.

Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”

#150

YouTube has been getting passive aggressive lately. My homepage is gone now because I have search history off. It used to just show me videos of channels I'm subscribed to but now I have to click on "Subscribed" to instead. Anyone know a quick way to redirect the root and ONLY root page of Youtube to my subscriptions on Firefox and Safari? I'm a premium subscriber btw so this is just obnoxious. For those unaware, if…

I just bookmark the "subscriptions" page instead of the homepage.
Post reply on HN