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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”

#261

Post by scarface74 »

EEBio wrote: post #258
scarface74 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pag…

Then why complain? I don’t complain about how crappy public access cable tv is (ie YouTube). I just don’t watch crappy public access TV.

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

#262

Post by saynay »

edgyquant wrote: post #192
saynay wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Special" in this case being non-commodity.

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

#264

Post by nybble41 »

sophacles wrote: post #246
nybble41 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's product here is the hosting and distribution service. If you pay for YT Premium then Google doesn't place any ads in their product. The content of the videos—including any "native" ads inserted by the video creators—isn't up to them.

If they can't deliver ad-free, they should not try to sell me ad-free. They could sell me something that isn't a lie instead.

Google is delivering their service ad-free. It's not their fault you choose to use their ad-free hosting and distribution service to view third-party videos which contain ads.

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

#265

Post by zamadatix »

alex_young wrote: post #240
zamadatix wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the question was "how much would it cost to buy 1 PB worth of consumer grade SSDs" $150k sounds like a great answer. Going on the 1 PB/day Number that's ~$55M/year for some raw disk. Add another order of magnitude for needing more than just a raw disk to store 1 PB/day, as already explained, and that's ~500M/year on storage related costs. If you're hellbent on saying this half billion/year doesn't matter because the bandwidth cost (which is not paid per connection btw) would be much larger then sure but it's still unrelated to the cost of a standalone consumer SSD.

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

#266

Post by spixy »

scarface74 wrote: post #219
edgyquant wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having complete control over the vast majority of internet video content

There is nothing stopping content producers from hosting their own content on something like S3+CloudFront or the cheaper (than AWS) alternatives.

and yet they are not doing it

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

#267

Post by MonkeyClub »

rolandog wrote: post #260
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.

> But I'm not that guy.

Yep, that was jerf :-P

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

#268

Post by [deleted] »

nybble41 wrote: post #264
sophacles wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can't deliver ad-free, they should not try to sell me ad-free. They could sell me something that isn't a lie instead.

Google is delivering their service ad-free. It's not their fault you choose to use their ad-free hosting and distribution service to view third-party videos which contain ads.

[deleted]

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

#269

Post by throwaway81523 »

I've seen another YT dark pattern lately. I often skip ads with youtube-dl (download the video and watch offline). But sometimes I like to be even more aggressive and skip the whole video, by using ytdl to download the closed caption text (VTT file) so I can read it instead of watching the vid. I have a python script that reformats the .vtt (a messy xml file full of timestamps and other markup) into something like readable text, and that worked pretty well until recently.

Lately I've found that 1) more videos don't have auto transcription, and 2) the vtt files have gotten messed up so that the timestamps are no longer properly interspersed with the text. My script strips them all out except once per minute, so if I find something interesting or confusing in the transcript, I can quickly find that spot in the video and watch it. That doesn't work any more. The hack is still better than nothing but I wonder what YT is up to, messing up a feature like that, which was presumably done for accessibility reasons, so its breakage likely has consequences beyond annoying freeloaders like me.

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

#270

Post by sophacles »

nybble41 wrote: post #264
sophacles wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can't deliver ad-free, they should not try to sell me ad-free. They could sell me something that isn't a lie instead.

Google is delivering their service ad-free. It's not their fault you choose to use their ad-free hosting and distribution service to view third-party videos which contain ads.

Google's advertising says "Watch youtube ad-free". It doesn't say "watch youtube ad-free unless the video you're watching embeds ad content as well", heck it doesn't even say "Watch youtube ad-free*".

So whatever they are actually providing, it's not what they are selling.

As I said in several comments now: My opinion is that if you try to sell me ad-free, sell me an actually ad-free product.

edit: it also occurs to me that the recommender and search engine will not mark nor honor my "ad-free" status, nor will the auto-play feature. So if I pay for ad-free and google says "hey watch this video with lots of paid promotion next", wouldn't that just be google pushing more ads on me even if I supposedly pay for "no ads"?

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