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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”

#251

Post by scarface74 »

Teever wrote: post #230
scarface74 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you want regulators to decide how much of a profit corporations should have for a non essential service like watching videos ?

"So you want regulators to decide how much of a profit corporations should have for a non essential service like smoking cigarettes? Yes I want regulators to dictate how a behemoth corporate entity like Alphabet uses a platform like Youtube in ways that they both unduly profit from and are unacceptably detrimental to society as a whole. Entities like Alphabet continue to grow and grow and the corrosive effects of the…

And the government still allows you to smoke cigarettes. Just like if you don’t want to risk getting cancer by smoking you don’t smoke.

If you don’t like the shit show that is YouTube - don’t use YouTube.

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

#252

Post by tomjen3 »

tpoacher wrote: post #123
alias_neo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of videos of some really chill music sessions posted by the artists that I used to put on every morning when my daughter was born. I've seen the same few vids hundreds of times and I know, like I know the sky is blue and water is wet that they had no ads. Couple years later, my son is born and that morning peace time comes for me to put on a vid or two, next thing I know, a couple of ads bang in th…

the worst thing about ads in the middle of relaxing music is that they are typically loud and obnoxious, instantly destroying within milliseconds any mood/relaxation benefits accrued over the preceding few hours. it's as if a frat party suddenly bombs your meditation group, trashes the place in 5 seconds, then leaves

Once it became possible to force people to pay attention to ads (compared to a newspaper where you can skip ahead and look at what you want) the quality went into the toilet.

It doesn't help that most of the products they advertise are terrible, overpriced or both and even their skipable ads aren't skipable until it has already destroyed the experience of the video you were watching. Premium is not an option because I don't use youtube logged in.

If it wasn't for my adblocker I wouldn't be spending so much time on youtube.

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

#253

Post by jsnell »

arrosenberg wrote: post #186
delecti wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a source for this claim? As far as I know, the cut of the ad revenue going to the creators has not changed since the introduction. It was 55% a decade ago, it's 55% today.

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

#254

Post by scollet »

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…

The dark pattern for me is seeing ads.

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

#255

Post by akhmatova »

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 marvel at this feat of engineering, but Google's shady business practices creep me out" is how I would put it.

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

#256

Post by zimpenfish »

woojoo666 wrote: post #229
zimpenfish wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you don’t want to see ads and you don’t want to pay not to see ads? But even if you do pay, you still see (often longer!) ads because people put sponsor segments in their videos. As far as I can tell, there's no way to skip those, paying or otherwise, except resorting to something like sponsorblock, right?

Youtube ads are to support youtube. Sponsored segments are to support the creator. They are completely separate. If you don't want youtube ads, Youtube provides an alternate payment method. If you don't want sponsored segments, that's up to the creator to provide a way out

> Youtube ads are to support youtube.

They also support the creators, surely, since there's a whole bunch of people I've watched who have no sponsored segments but are making a decent amount of money from the ads.

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

#257

Post by karmakaze »

These patterns are clearly visible and so similar that I don't even behave differently to them. I don't care about any of the variants: I wait until I see Skip Ad and press it as soon as I can. It's not even like it's ever in a different place... unless I'm earnestly interested or have time to kill and want the channel to get paid with my time.

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

#258

Post by EEBio »

scarface74 wrote: post #250
thiht wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don’t have any choice but to use YouTube?

Sure, I have a choice.

I can buy YT Premium.

Or I can run adblockers. What portion of video I decide to skip watching on my device and which HTTP calls I make and which I don't is something I can decide and it has nothing to do with ethics or morality IMHO.

Watching a free YouTube video is something like getting a magazine copy for free. There is no moral obligation to look at the ads there, I can just skip those pages and pick and choose articles I want to read, even though I got the copy for free.

If the creators are giving away too many copies for free, they can start selling them instead. Or giving them and asking for voluntary donation. Or they can find another business.

It's not my responsibility to make sure the creator is profitable running their business. That's entirely on them.

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

#259

Post by sbradford26 »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #119
sbradford26 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I agree for just YouTube it would be excessive. But they do combo it with youtube music which makes it a slightly better deal. Also personally they have the best family plan since it allows 6 accounts total and doesn't require to be "Under the same roof" like spotify. But I agree I probably wouldn't find the full price outside of the family plan worth it.

Last time I tried YouTube music, it was an underwhelming experience. I expected it to show only official videos, but it showed any random video with music. It substituted Google Play Music, where you could have a curated library and your own uploads, with random music videos.

I can't say that I have experienced the random music videos thing, but I agree it does feel like a bit of a downgrade from Google Play Music. I used the podcast part of Google Play Music a lot, since it put music and podcasts all in the same spot. Now I have had to switch to pocketcasts for that instead.

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

#260

Post by rolandog »

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…

A suspicious person would think they're billing by the actual seconds and dividing the total amount of actual seconds by the budgeted seconds in the ad to bump up the ad impressions.

But I'm not that guy.

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