Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.prototypr.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 302 posts

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

#231

Post by delecti »

WorldMaker wrote: post #205
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.

Quoted post unavailable.

I signed up for Premium before the situation got as bad as it currently is. The worst ads I had seen by that point were either 5-30 second unskippable, or 15-120 second skippable. Even at that point, signing up for Premium felt like a fantastic deal. I never felt gaslight or manipulated into it, it just felt like paying an acceptable price for a very attractive set of features. It feels like you have a counterproductive set of principles if they keep you from paying a reasonable price for a good set of features. Premium also gives a much bigger chunk of money to creators, which makes the situation seem even better to me.

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

#232

Post by thiht »

scarface74 wrote: post #199
gaius_baltar wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There’s no business model YouTube could adopt that I would accept because I don’t trust Google. Even as a paying customer, they still extract your data, and probably sell it.

I use adblockers and alternative YouTube clients wherever I can and I don’t care, because I have no choice.

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

#233

Post by ripply »

LadyCailin wrote: post #28
duxup wrote: post #18

I don't really see this as a dark pattern. Being exposed to an ad is not a dark pattern IMO. And this particular pattern is IMO pretty dang obvious if you use YouTube much at all. Someone has to pay for YouTube ... someone has to pay for this stuff. If it is ads that's it. I think the issue involves two parties, the sites who want revenue, and the vast majority of users who want content for free. So yeah here we are…

I pay for YouTube, but they still apply dark patterns, namely, they constantly turn auto play back on after a week or so despite me turning it off time and again.

This doesn't happen to me (browser/iOS), auto play is a setting local to where you enable it. Moving to another new player will always have auto play enabled.

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

#234

Post by Larrikin »

dghughes wrote: post #170

I watch a lot of YouTube on my smart TV even an old Roku but after the changes to the frequency of ads it was unbearable. It was to the point where I would mute the TV and put my hand up to block the ad from my eyes. I would also press back a few times to exit out of the ad and most times if done twice no ad plays. Ads always cut off the first 5 seconds of the videos, and ads were popping up seconds after the initial…

During the pandemic some product person drastically increased the number of ads and began ruining videos with ads in the middle of the videos. Music sets get screwed up and the crappy AI likes to pause jokes right before the punch line and then resume a second or two after.

At this point any video I imagine myself ever watching more than once gets downloaded with yt-dlp and automatically loaded into Plex. I had one negative experience with an artist deleting a popular video years ago, but that short term profit seeking is what pushed me to finally get everything all setup.

Now there are no ads.

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

#235

Post by xg15 »

I didn't get that amount of variations the OP sees so far, but I've been wondering if the number of ads you get and the distribution of skippable vs unskippable ads is somehow personalized.

At least my subjective impression is that when I go on a youtube binge, over time it will slowly increase the number of ads it shows back-to-back and also increases the amount of nonskippable ads.

I wonder if there is some kind of reinforcement learning going on, which tries to figure out just how many ads I'm willing to tolerate before switching away. (Or employ the good old "boiling frogs" strategy and train me to tolerate more ads over time)

I got no evidence for this at all of course, so just a conspiracy theory for now.

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

#236

Post by InitialLastName »

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.

> it was free for both of us

Where did you get this free cell phone and data plan?

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

#237

Post by TAKEMYMONEY »

Havoc wrote: post #198
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.

Ongoing multivariate testing is certainly a thing, especially in high volume e-commerce, and especially on ad company's advertising-related UI. You're correct, winners are chosen and rolled out (to the majority) but then new tests are created against that winner, and that's an oversimplification.

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

#238

Post by WorldMaker »

delecti wrote: post #231
WorldMaker wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I signed up for Premium before the situation got as bad as it currently is. The worst ads I had seen by that point were either 5-30 second unskippable, or 15-120 second skippable. Even at that point, signing up for Premium felt like a fantastic deal. I never felt gaslight or manipulated into it, it just felt like paying an acceptable price for a very attractive set of features. It feels like you have a counterproduct…

I'm happy for you that you've been lucky so far in your relationship with YouTube. It does not invalidate my experience of the relationship.

I've chosen to spend the equivalent money (and more) more directly in Patreon and Bandcamp relationships with the creators I follow. I know a much bigger chunk of that money makes it to creators, and I have a good idea directly how much creator sees per dollar I spend, not just some assuaging stats from some Google algorithm that it is supposed to go to creators. (Getting back to: this relationship I have with Google/YouTube has trust issues, and that's also something that I have difficulty trusting, that Premium actually gives more money to creators.)

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

#239

Post by tomatotomato37 »

gadrev wrote: post #139
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 -)

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"

If you get some type of streaming box with an open version of Android TV you can just run Newpipe on the box. The most capable one is the Nvidia shield but for just running a YouTube client there are probably cheaper ones you can get off Alibaba or similar.

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

#240

Post by alex_young »

zamadatix wrote: post #140
alex_young wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 powere…

I'm really sorry I posted a price I found on a simple Google search. Let's say you're right and SSDs are actually $150/TB. Now our 1 PB is still just $150k. Not even a fraction of revenue worth worrying about.
Post reply on HN