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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”

#191

Post by edgyquant »

Aissen wrote: post #145
shantnutiwari wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. There was a post here about how Vimeo is charging people $300+/month for their videos-- and someone did the math to show thats just the hosting/bandwidth costs. For one creator. Youtube has millions of videos-- Im surprised their…

What costs are you using ? Because cloud costs are definitely outrageous, and definitely not what an at-scale operation like Vimeo or YouTube is paying.

Especially a place like YouTube that is vertically integrated with their cloud provider.

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

#192

Post by edgyquant »

saynay wrote: post #177
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.

This hit me hard a bit ago. I had hiked for an hour or so to the middle of a forest, pulled out my phone and was viewing a crystal clear live stream made by a random person on the other side of the planet, in higher quality than any movie I could have seen as a child, and it was free for both of us and needed no special equipment.

I feel the term “no special equipment” is doing a lot of heavy lifting considering how much special equipment there is in a single smartphone.

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

#193

Post by edgyquant »

pc86 wrote: post #92
paulpauper wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google and YouTube generate insane profits. they could show fewer ads and it would not impair the functionality of YouTube

Google might. But does YouTube? Should other Google properties subsidize YouTube if it doesn't generate "insane profits" by whatever metric you're using that word?

YouTube is the largest social media site (or at least was a couple of years ago.) Google gets a lot more value than just cash out of it, otherwise they’d have shut it down.

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

#194

Post by Teever »

elzbardico wrote: post #84
paulpauper wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google and YouTube generate insane profits. they could show fewer ads and it would not impair the functionality of YouTube

Who gets to decide what is an "insane" profit? You?

Regulators.

And since the US seems to have abrogated those responsibilities they are falling to the EU.

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

#195

Post by jrootabega »

cpeterso wrote: post #167
jrootabega wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even setting aside the explicit ads, there's also the fact that the vast majority of YouTube content has been diluted and corrupted to be a vehicle for YouTube ads.

For example, I read that so many YouTube videos are stretched out to ten minutes because that's the minimum duration to get two ads on your videos.

Yep, but I think it was the minimum for placing midroll ads. Now it's 8 minutes, but the "sightly over 10 minutes" phenomenon is still very much alive!

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

#196

Post by edgyquant »

devnulll wrote: post #142
boardwaalk wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the kvetching about ads I see regarding YouTube, most people really could just pay Google and make it go away. I mean, I don’t like paying for things either, but it’s not worth the headache of ad blockers (which aren’t available on every device) and philosophically, I would rather the internet get away from ads everywhere and I’ll help that happen if I can. It helps that $10 is worth the many hours of use I g…

I am a huge fan of YouTube Premium. Youtube has become the de-facto video platform in our household, having totally displaced traditional shows. To pay $10 per month to have unlimited content w/o ads is perfect. I don't understand the pushback.

The pushback is because all of the shows I want to watch are still half ads. The content creators insert them, surely they have a rational reason, but I’m not interested in the economics if I pay for ad free I want ad free. I would pay quite a bit more than 10$ for this, but the option just isn’t there.

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

#197

Post by flatiron »

83 wrote: post #185
pc86 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Torrents were a blessing. it said completed you at least knew it was OK.

Now a days with everything SSL it’s not really an issue. But I do remember getting bad HTTP/FTP downloads before encryption was a “thing”

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

#198

Post by Havoc »

rwc wrote: post #2

Alternate theory: A large-scale, ongoing A/B test on what gets the perfect balance between watching ads and keeping total view time high.

>Alternate theory: A large-scale, ongoing A/B test

Except "ongoing A/B test" isn't really a thing. The whole point of A/B is to identify and discard the worse of the two. Especially on google scale and this being applied to everyone you'd expect the data to point one way or the other really fast.

This is just straight up dark pattern.

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

#199

Post by scarface74 »

gaius_baltar wrote: post #189
josteink wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you don’t want to see ads and you don’t want to pay not to see ads? What business model should Google use for YouTube?

But you can always use a prepaid debit card.

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

#200

Post by everdrive »

crtasm wrote: post #154
cecilpl2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How long ago are you talking? Realplayer came out in 1995, I was listening to live DJs over my dialup connection in 1996.

I never had a fast or consistent enough dial-up connection to stream audio. I tried multiple times, but it never worked for me. I'd get maybe 15-30 seconds of contiguous sound, and the whole thing would fail.

I did download MP3s though. A 3mb MP3 file would usually take me approximately an hour. And I downloaded ~3,000 this way.

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