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Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

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Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#271

Post by zahlman »

mattacular wrote: post #74
danpalmer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do pay for YouTube Premium, I see no ads, and everything works pretty conveniently. What's your point, that with a bit of extra effort you can pirate content?

I pay for YouTube Premium too (probably not much longer) but can only 'comfortably' use the site through a series of increasingly hacky extensions for Firefox. On non-web apps, there is no recourse from the UI enshittification. The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBl…

> The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play.

This is the same stuff you get without buying Premium. So I guess they figure you're only paying to dodge the ads.

Which seems, to me, like a lot of money compared to (ad cost * number of ads you would see).

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#272

Post by venturecruelty »

danpalmer wrote: post #59
tcfhgj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking ads is hardly "pirating" content

To be clear, this is not a value judgement. I pirate content sometimes, and I use adblockers, but ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content. I realise that online ads have other implications such as tracking that, say, a blu-ray rip downloaded from a torrent doesn't have, but the reason for piracy doesn't change the fact that it is.

1. It's not piracy.

2. I don't care.

I choose what code runs on my machine, not Google. Google can run their own code on their own machines, that's fine. Once data is in my processor, I'm going to do what I want with it. Google doesn't have to concern themselves with what I'm doing on my own computer.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#273

Post by MBCook »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #64
MBCook wrote: post #19

I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app on my Apple TV. I can’t wait to find out how they screwed this one up. My personal long-term complaint is the length of video titles. Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”. Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But t…

> Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence. > So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not intereste…

It’s different on Apple TV.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#274

Post by venturecruelty »

danpalmer wrote: post #110
Nextgrid wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're circumventing the method of paying for content. I disagree. If you were buying every advertised product and falling for every advertised scam then fair enough. But assuming you were ignoring them, there is no issue with offloading the thing you would do anyway to a computer and save everyone the time/bandwidth.

The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you, not the right to a sale. Whether they convert you is up to them, their product, their offering, etc. I think you can never buy a single product from an ad and this is still piracy. That said, a lot of advertising is not performance/pay-per-click focused as you've described and is instead brand advertising. The point of the Coca-Cola christmas ads is…

Nobody has the right to put things on my screen that I don't want to see, first of all. Second, I'm never going to "convert", so I'm actually saving them money by blocking their ads, because now the ad will go to someone else who doesn't block it who might buy whatever Temu nonsense is being forced on them.

Edit: oh, I see you work at Google.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#275

Post by venturecruelty »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #100
komali2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but ad blocking is definitely piracy This is a huge escalation of an already over-stuffed term. Equating piracy to theft was bad enough, now choosing to not view ads is also piracy, which is theft? I try to be chill here but no, foot down, absolutely not. Blocking ads is nothing more than determing what content comes in on the wire to the computer you own, or what content is rendered in your web browser. That's it.…

[flagged]

YouTube sends my browser a lot of data, a LOT of data. It's not my fault if some of that data doesn't make it to the screen, or if hardware on my network blocks certain DNS requests. No, I asked YouTube for a web page, and it sent one back to me. I'm not sure why everyone is so eager to let someone else dictate what code they run on their own machine. It's really strange.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#277

Post by Saigonautica »

foobarian wrote: post #244
Lerc wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is piracy. Most advertising supported content is made freely available to you with the expectation that you will view the advertising. That expectation is not a contract and was a decision made without your involvement. You have no obligation to perform to someone else's expectations. If the content is made freely available you are free to watch it whichever way you choose. Choosing not to view the a…

Morally, it is piracy IMO. If you applied the rule universally, the site would go out of business and then there would be no video to see.

I find this argument fascinating overall!

I don't really use YouTube, but when ads play on random videos and it irritates me, I just close my eyes, the simplest version of content-blocking. (If the ad is painfully loud, I may also cover my ears in contexts where this is not extremely socially awkward)

Can we say it's immoral for me to close my eyes? Can someone's business model be the basis of an argument that it's immoral for me to exert this simple bodily function?

Is there some contract that I've signed where people have the right to my attention in any context? If they've based their business model on the assumption that this consent exists, and it does not, is it fair to say that the business model should fail?

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#278

Post by bronco21016 »

walt_grata wrote: post #115
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #12

I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use it through the browser with adblockers. (Yes, on my phone and iPad.) It works so well I’ve gotten at least half a dozen neighbours to do the same. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a definitive step up in UX.

I did the same, but I also added in a tamper monkey script to get rid of the picture in picture thing they force on you as part of their "core experience". I wish their ux designers and PMs were less arrogant and realized their preferences are just preferences and gave us back the ability to disable stuff like this in the app.

Are they the PMs' preferences? Or are they A/B tested "optimizations" to hit their KPIs?

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#279

Post by sidrag22 »

foobarian wrote: post #244
Lerc wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is piracy. Most advertising supported content is made freely available to you with the expectation that you will view the advertising. That expectation is not a contract and was a decision made without your involvement. You have no obligation to perform to someone else's expectations. If the content is made freely available you are free to watch it whichever way you choose. Choosing not to view the a…

Morally, it is piracy IMO. If you applied the rule universally, the site would go out of business and then there would be no video to see.

perhaps it should be out of business then? it captured its market share on an ad free model... it would not have gotten to this size with this model from the start.

if tomorrow youtube decides only paid subscribers can view videos... do they maintain that market share?

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#280

Post by Brian_K_White »

danpalmer wrote: post #36
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #12

I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use it through the browser with adblockers. (Yes, on my phone and iPad.) It works so well I’ve gotten at least half a dozen neighbours to do the same. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a definitive step up in UX.

I do pay for YouTube Premium, I see no ads, and everything works pretty conveniently. What's your point, that with a bit of extra effort you can pirate content?

I also pay for premium, and have for at least 15 years since it was called Red, and the experience is complete garbage.

If you turn off history, you get zero videos on your home screen. This is not because the history is needed to generate the suggestions, because the blank home only started a few years ago.

I used to never subscribe to any channels, I just got reasonable feed of suggestions based off of whatever I happened to search for explicitly or if I got there by clicking a link, or by what I chose to click on even if the list starts out totally random, except of course it never was totally random because they still have ip address and other fingerprnting signals.

After they blaked out the home screen and started showing the "you're not logged in, go here to fix this error", I subscribed to a bunch of channels to provide data for generating a feed. They still don't provide any. You can take extra clicks (which is agonizing on the Roku since it just doesn't react well and misses button presses all the time) to get to the subscriptions page, which will show recent uploads exactly from those channels and no others.

I also still get several other forms of ads in the form of the embedded/native ads and the irrelevant suggestions that come from youtube's interests instead of my own, like shorts. I also still get ads simply because I don't get to use my own account all the time. When you watch youtube anywhere but your own laptop by yourself, you are at the whims of someone else's account and some other platforms app limitations.

And even on your own machine, I absolutely resent having to tie my viewing history to my identity and have someone else log all of that. So there is reason to intentionally use no account even if you otherwise have no problem paying to support not only the content producers but even the delivery system.

Why can't I disable shorts? There is no amount I can pay to hide all shorts, but I can have it for free i=on a pc with a tampermonkey or ublock script. But that only helps on a pc. I watch mostly on a TV and I have no ability to hack the roku app. Maybe if I switch to a google tv I could use newpipe or something.

Paying for premium does not make youtube good. It does not resolve much of anything. It is not remotely the touche this smarmy comment attempts to suggest.

Paying for premium takes youtube from being like pulling out 10 of your fingernails to only pulling out 8 of your fingernails.

That 2of10 fingernals relief and for the sake of the creators, that's the only reason I still pay for premium.

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