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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”

#291

Post by dec0dedab0de »

josteink wrote: post #164
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #157

I think the biggest dark pattern is allowing skipable ads to be long. Sometimes over an hour. I spent some time in the hospital not too long ago, and it was physically painful for me to move enough to skip an ad. I would have been fine watching 30-60 second ads without skipping, but they just put infomercials in the middle of the video you're watching. it is outrageous.

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.

But I don't mind most of the ads. To be honest, I actually like quite a few of them. It's just the ones that are longer than the content I'm watching that really get to me.

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

#292

Post by zamadatix »

alex_young wrote: post #282
zamadatix wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

That's not what I said. You've done this twice now, and I really wish you would respect the good faith principal others in this community value. I'll leave it at that.

Good faith interpretation requires a stance to build off from but so far you've made direct statements about consumer SSD prices & bandwidth billing without a stance on how it supports your conclusion then been reactionary when it was explained these statements weren't accurate or directly representative of storage costs. Beyond having already added that bandwidth costs will still dwarf storage costs even when storage costs is a large number I'm not sure what other good faith interpretations could have been made. It's not like I only attacked the consumer SSD price in bad faith and left it at that, I followed up with why even a corrected consumer SSD price would not provide an accurate estimate which was ignored to focus only on the SSD price correction.

If there is a further good faith interpretation of what you've said you'd like added to the conversation then please point it out here and lead by example. Only pointing out you think the other person should have better respected the good faith doesn't serve to help anybody understand better, in fact it goes against the principle itself.

As it stands the most solid interpretation I can come up with is still that raw SSD pricing for a consumer, even though higher than listed, can come out low enough to be less than a percentage of revenue for YouTube but this still holds no indication about storage costs actually being that low but I'm always open to stronger interpretations!

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

#293

Post by aerostable_slug »

runarberg wrote: post #127
tpoacher wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you are in the USA, I think it is illegal to play ads at a louder volume then the surrounding content. You can file an FCC complaint if you see that.

The way around this is to use an audio compressor and push the average volume up without exceeding the content's max volume. Then the ad sounds like someone shouting in the content without violating the policy.

A related dark pattern is the purposeful muffling of hearing aid advertisements. They also generally play different audio than what the models are "saying" in order to further confuse their target market and convince them they are more hard of hearing than they really are.

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

#294

Post by alex_young »

zamadatix wrote: post #292
alex_young wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I said. You've done this twice now, and I really wish you would respect the good faith principal others in this community value. I'll leave it at that.

Good faith interpretation requires a stance to build off from but so far you've made direct statements about consumer SSD prices & bandwidth billing without a stance on how it supports your conclusion then been reactionary when it was explained these statements weren't accurate or directly representative of storage costs. Beyond having already added that bandwidth costs will still dwarf storage costs even when storag…

Here are a few points you may wish to consider:

- You claimed that the numbers I referenced were based on a clear scam. The resource is in fact the first resource you will find if you google "per tb storage cost".

- You stated that I had made oversights about total cost, something I never referred to.

- You claimed without any reference that the numbers I mentioned were off by multiple orders of magnitude.

- You said I'm "hellbent on saying this half billion/year doesn't matter". I made no such statement and don't feel that way at all.

- You said I was wrong about the way peering agreements are priced between ISPs and Google, but offered no other insight other than just saying I'm wrong.

- You just called me reactionary.

Again, I think it would be beneficial if you would respect the people you're interacting with enough to at least have a more constructive discussion.

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

#296

Post by zamadatix »

alex_young wrote: post #294
zamadatix wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good faith interpretation requires a stance to build off from but so far you've made direct statements about consumer SSD prices & bandwidth billing without a stance on how it supports your conclusion then been reactionary when it was explained these statements weren't accurate or directly representative of storage costs. Beyond having already added that bandwidth costs will still dwarf storage costs even when storag…

Here are a few points you may wish to consider: - You claimed that the numbers I referenced were based on a clear scam. The resource is in fact the first resource you will find if you google "per tb storage cost". - You stated that I had made oversights about total cost, something I never referred to. - You claimed without any reference that the numbers I mentioned were off by multiple orders of magnitude. - You said…

> You claimed that the numbers I referenced were based on a clear scam. The resource is in fact the first resource you will find if you google "per tb storage cost".

There are plenty of scams to be found via Googling. You will also find many fake uSD cards for low prices as well, or other products. Google is simply a search engine not an infallible filter for what is or isn't a scam. The facts about the relative pricing should carry far more weight than the position in the search results.

> You stated that I had made oversights about total cost, something I never referred to.

The lack of reference to total cost is itself the oversight being referred to so it could only be problematic if you had referred to it not the other way around.

> You claimed without any reference that the numbers I mentioned were off by multiple orders of magnitude.

I actually referenced the other numbers in your original resource for the first order of magnitude. I explained the reasoning for the second order and I accept opposing reasoning if you disagree but you haven't provided any reasoning only reaction to the idea I'd disagree.

> You said I'm "hellbent on saying this half billion/year doesn't matter". I made no such statement and don't feel that way at all.

The quote was actually "If you're hellbent..." not "You are hellbent on".

> You said I was wrong about the way peering agreements are priced between ISPs and Google, but offered no other insight other than just saying I'm wrong.

You made the claim it's based on connections not bandwidth therefore it is your burden to provide some backing why it's true not everyone else's burden to assume it's true until they can prove it's not.

That said it doesn't even require knowing their all of their peering agreements to prove, Internet Protocol (IP) is not session based. BGP peering is done to exchange IP reachability information but it knows nothing of the sessions between those IPs as session information is another level up above the internet in the network stack https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/UD...

.

Again though none of this is providing what the more accurate good faith interpretation should have been. These are simply further reactions to my given interpretation.

> You just called me reactionary.

I have and you've said multiple things to me that could be taken worse than that but it'd be counterproductive to focus on these kinds of minor things when the goal is constructive conversation so I don't feel the desire to end messages with callouts about them

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

#298

Post by billpg »

zimpenfish wrote: post #217
scarface74 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

For the app version of YouTube, double-tapping the right-hand side of the video area will jump ahead ten seconds. Not exactly an automated jump but this works well for things like VPN ads in videos.

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

#299

Post by edgyquant »

scarface74 wrote: post #211
edgyquant wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then pay for streaming services they have professional content?

Yeah, sure, but doesn’t that prove the point that it’s a waste to pay for YouTube?

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

#300

Post by alphakappa »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #60
alphakappa wrote: post #31

Google products have been incorporating a frustrating amount of dark patterns. In gmail for example, if you load one of the smart inbox tabs, it shows the rows of unread emails at the top. Right when you attempt to click on the top row, it rearranges the rows to show a few rows of ads instead (and the ads are fairly indistinguishable from the unread emails) so you end up unintentionally opening an ad. Now, there’s no…

Wait, I am curious: you see ads on GMail? I haven’t seen ads in many years. What email client do you use? web app, phone app?

Correct. The smart inbox puts in ads. As in the YouTube example here, it's fairly unpredictable if they appear, and when they do - how they appear.
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