561–570 of 1001 posts
I was watching hours every day, and I don’t even miss it. There’s so much content to watch on streaming platforms that I can never run out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance. That's not true. We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money. If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck. The YouTube ads are hated because that's…
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Kind of seems like how the economy works quite a lot of the time
Youtube will not win this battle.
So, Google is merely optimizing the ad clicks and impressions here. If they succeed in becoming too obnoxious with their ads, viewers might leave for other platforms, and then content creators would follow. So, fighting ad blocking has diminishing returns and can actually have a negative impact on them. Which is why ad blocking is still effective in 2025 and why Youtube has thrived by being not too effective with their anti ad blocking measures. This is more about selling the notion to advertisers that they are a really good advertising platform than it is about fighting the minority of users who block their ads no matter what. It won't work. But it won't matter as long as advertisers keep on paying for advertising on Youtube.
The irony of their latest efforts is that it is driving away users from Chrome to more effective alternatives (Firefox, Brave, etc.) and it's driving content creators to depend on sponsor ship deals instead of advertising money from Google. The only reason Chrome exists is actually ads. So, more effective counter measures against ad blocking in Chrome could end up hurting their ad revenue. And Google's behavior is actually causing for increasingly stronger calls to break up Google. None of that is good for Google and their advertising revenue.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance. That’s not to say whether or not the advertisement is for a product or service for which the viewer is interested in purchasing but how it relates to the context in which it is viewed. People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside. Actual complaints may b…
> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance. That's not true. We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money. If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck. The YouTube ads are hated because that's…
Well, I don't complain about road signs.
I'm surprised they don't just inject the ads directly into the video stream, I think that would solve their issue overnight (not that I want any ads personally). You could also rate-limit it to the playback speed to prevent pre-downloading the stream easily. But now that everything uses HLS/DASH, it's easy to inject different content right in the middle of the stream without re-encoding anything.
Injecting the ads directly would make them skippable. Unskippable ads are inherently detectable (because the unskippability has to be communicated to the client-side player controls), so there’s no easy way out.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance. That’s not to say whether or not the advertisement is for a product or service for which the viewer is interested in purchasing but how it relates to the context in which it is viewed. People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside. Actual complaints may b…
What new feature of significance has YouTube actually delivered in years?
the topics at the top of the homepage, sorting comments by timestamp, the little card when you click on someone's profile picture with other comments on the same channel (which was only on mobile for a while), they improved auto captioning recently and are toying with dubbing, modern codecs… it's the little things that make it better
Could care less about the social bits. Comments have been filtered better but I will never trust their black box. With Enhanced YouTube extension I remove all of that so I can retain focus apart from the video at hand.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance. That’s not to say whether or not the advertisement is for a product or service for which the viewer is interested in purchasing but how it relates to the context in which it is viewed. People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside. Actual complaints may b…
I don’t get how YouTube advertises. Because we use VPN in China, YouTube simply pushes ads in whatever local language my proxy server happens to be. Which baffles me quite a lot since even the most basic tracking and use history (I have two decades in Google) would tell them at least the language I can understand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I block ads, everywhere, because I keep getting epilepsy-inducing ones. The browser is my agent, just like my screenreader is. Google is to blame here - and I'm saying that as an author who does advertise there because of marketshare.
So is your DVD player but it doesn't mean you don't have to pay for the movies