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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”

#181

Post by m0ngr31 »

csunbird wrote: post #19
josefresco wrote: post #7

When I found out my kids spend more time on YouTube than any other video platform I paid for YouTube Premium. They're a little older now and are shifting back to other platforms but I don't think we'll cancel our subscription anytime soon given how many complaints I see about their ad delivery.

I used to pay for the Youtube Premium as well, because the app is literally unusable on an Apple TV and iOS devices without it, the ads are just too much. Unfortunately, the premium subscription does not work for the in video ads and promotions (shills) which seems to be everywhere now, so I cancelled my subscription, as I can not get the ad-free experience anymore, dropped the idea of using Youtube on devices where…

Sponsorblock?

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

#182

Post by m0ngr31 »

Stevvo wrote: post #137
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.

https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext

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

#184

Post by signal11 »

josteink wrote: post #164
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #157

I think the biggest dark pattern is allowing skipable ads to be long. Sometimes over an hour. I spent some time in the hospital not too long ago, and it was physically painful for me to move enough to skip an ad. I would have been fine watching 30-60 second ads without skipping, but they just put infomercials in the middle of the video you're watching. it is outrageous.

And you never once considered going premium to remove the ads? Surely someone must have been able to help you out with that if you couldn’t do it yourself? The answer exists, it’s right there with buttons for clicking given to you by Google, but people here on HN so often seem so entirely blindsided and insist there’s no such thing as ad-free Youtube. What gives? I just don't get it.

> And you never once considered going premium to remove the ads?

I’m pretty much “no” on paying for a product that encourages clickbait and misinformation. This isn’t a uniform “no Google” thing, I use GCP, but paying for YouTube just seems icky.

If it can’t survive as a business (or become so ad-heavy that it’s a UX nightmare), hey maybe there’ll be new opportunities for others. Vimeo, maybe Twitter, with Musk’s new zeal for making orgs pay for Twitter?

UX nightmares always get competition. Altavista, Experts Exchange, Skype/WebEx… all faced nimbler competitors. I don’t see YouTube being an exception.

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

#185

Post by 83 »

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…

We had a second phone line for dial up internet - I remember spending three weeks downloading a copy of Age of Empires (roughly 250mb), praying it wouldn't be corrupt or a bad file. It downloaded successfully, but to my dismay it was the expansion. Took me another month to get the actual game to download, at least at that point I had the expansion as well :)

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

#186

Post by arrosenberg »

delecti wrote: post #176
sophacles wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad-free youtube doesn't get rid of "paid content" in videos. "paid content" is just ads. So if you pay for youtube premium you get rid of some ads, not all the ads.

That's clearly a different kind of thing though. Sponsored content in videos is just stuff you don't like, but it's still the video you clicked on. Youtube injected ads on top of the video is not the content you clicked on. Youtube premium unambiguously solves the problem that the top-level comment was complaining about (mid-roll ads that can be a half-hour or longer), you're just moving the goal posts.

No, no, no, this is letting YouTube off the hook. The whole reason content creators started doing in-video promotions is because YT kept squeezing them for ad revenue. The top comment is absolutely correct - adfree should be adfree - that is YouTube’s problem to solve, not the customer’s.

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

#187

Post by phh »

branon wrote: post #118
phh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -)

Accessing a publicly-available website using your preferred frontend application (NewPipe) is absolutely NOT piracy. Consider disregarding the future advice of whoever told you this. I believe this is a dangerous and misleading line of thinking.

Fun, I thought my sentence would trigger the pro-ad people, not the other side.

I don't think there is any legal definition of "piracy" (except for ships). My own definition of piracy is "accessing content without paying the official fee". Here "official fee" is the ad. Also, it can be seen as equivalent to DDoS, since you are voluntarily using Google's cloud resources while breaching their EULA.

Personally, when using newpipe, I do feel like I'm stealing unrightfully bandwidth from Google, though the price for that bandwidth is definitely not worth a tenth of the ads Google show me.

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

#188

Post by aequitas »

jerf wrote: post #136

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…

Sound like they implemented Vetinari’s clock from Discworld. That’s a waiting room clock that would slow down and speed up the seconds hand (and also the ticks and tocks) but the minute and hour hands would run on time. This was to make the waiting person extra nervous before their meeting with the patrician. He is by far my most favorite characters in the books.

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

#189

Post by gaius_baltar »

josteink wrote: post #164
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #157

I think the biggest dark pattern is allowing skipable ads to be long. Sometimes over an hour. I spent some time in the hospital not too long ago, and it was physically painful for me to move enough to skip an ad. I would have been fine watching 30-60 second ads without skipping, but they just put infomercials in the middle of the video you're watching. it is outrageous.

And you never once considered going premium to remove the ads? Surely someone must have been able to help you out with that if you couldn’t do it yourself? The answer exists, it’s right there with buttons for clicking given to you by Google, but people here on HN so often seem so entirely blindsided and insist there’s no such thing as ad-free Youtube. What gives? I just don't get it.

YT Premium only makes the problem worse by still allowing native ads and requiring you to log in using an account that is tied to your real world identity (for payment processing). You just end up giving more data points to Google to track and don't get rid of all ads.

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

#190

Post by arrosenberg »

Another random one I’ve come across. I can block most YouTube ads with uBlock Origin in the browser. I can also cast my browser tab to an Android TV device. But if I try and cast a tab with YouTube, it will open the app instead of casting the browser, and I can’t block ads in the app.
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