Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

iter.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

931–940 of 1001 posts

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#931

Post by I_Can_Fix_YT »

Gareth321 wrote: post #611
stickfigure wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just pay for it? I have my whole family on my plan. Nobody gets ads. It is a bargain. You're right, I could probably finish my motorcycle build projects without videos. But why??

I used to, but I stopped recently. 1. They still serve ads. Often for Google products underneath the videos and in the feed. Content creators are also allowed to turn on contextual ads over the top of videos, as well as merchandise underneath their videos. 2. Sponsored segments are unbelievably widespread now, and can take up significant portions of the video. These are ads, and they are also permitted by YouTube. 3.…

If you use Firefox Nightly (mobile) then you can:

1. Fully block ads with uBlock Origin

2. Block in-video sponsorships with Sponsorblock

3. Block all shorts permanently with Hide Youtube-Shorts

These 3 extensions fix your issues. There is also an extension to bring back downvotes. I do not use it but I think it is widespread enough to be useful as spam detection.

This also allows you to listen to videos with your screen turned off and gives you the option to have the video playing in a tiny screen so you can watch it while doing other things on your phone.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#932

Post by wwweston »

socalgal2 wrote: post #855
wwweston wrote: post #848

Paying for YouTube has probably been the digital subscription with the single greatest return on a dozen dollars. Content is uninterrupted without having to engage in the arms race. Music selection is great. Random movies are available.

Music selection is great. Music recommendation (and video recommendation) is utter crap. I know running something as big as youtube means there is unlikely to be a true competitor but there is sooooooooo much low-hanging fruit to do a better job. My home page is on average 60% wasted/irrelevant. I'm a little surprised they haven't added "AI" yet. They add some prompt "tell us what you like". I tried it the opposite "…

> Music selection is great. Music recommendation (and video recommendation) is utter crap.

Fair point. I wonder if this is connected to the way that YouTube seems to rely more on presenting an array of suggestions than flowing linearly through a stream. In any case, I turn off autoplay and am trying to rely as much on search, follows, and curation as algorithmic recommendations, so the hit and miss quality of the recommendations doesn't bother me much personally, I could see how it might not be a great set-and-forget music replacement (for which I already have plenty of options going back into terrestrial radio origins).

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#933

Post by kolektiv »

IshKebab wrote: post #862
kolektiv wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As spoken by thousands of tech companies over and over - if only the ads were more relevant, users would like them! No, they never will. That's because an advert is effectively an unasked-for imposition on my attention intended to benefit somebody else more than it benefits me (should it be considered to benefit me at all ). There's a name for behaviour like that: rude. I am not blind to commercial imperatives, but e…

I totally disagree. There have once or twice been adverts that I've seen where I've thought "yes! I do want one of those!". Obviously I like those adverts. If there really was a way to magically make all adverts relevant then yes - users would like them! But that's a totally impossible ask. Not only do websites mostly have no idea what's relevant to me (even with all the tracking) but they obviously have huge financi…

I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing that much, but I will say: even if you show me something I love, in a way that I appreciate, but you do it in a time or place where I don't want that thing? That's still an imposition. So in a way we agree because time + place + content + style is something that is not possible to get right. There will never be an advert brilliant or relevant enough to make me happy that you showed it to me while skiing in the Norwegian mountains, or while watching my child enjoy their birthday party. Most cases are less extreme, but then most adverts are much worse - the scale will never be tipped the right way.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#934

Post by manquer »

dylan604 wrote: post #904
socalgal2 wrote: post #869

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize don't have to watch youtube right? I'm not saying I like it. I'm saying that because I don't like it I don't watch.

That's such a low effort bit of criticism of me calling out their scammy behavior. Yes, I could not watch, but that does nothing to solve the actual problem. By ignoring the problem, you're just giving them the okay to continue with scammy behavior. If they behaved like normal broadcasters and had standards on what ads they showed, I'd have much less of a problem. Some of the content that theGoogs allows and accepts…

OPs statement should be modified to “ you don’t have to watch free Youtube “,

You can always pay for it and not have any ads .

There shouldn’t be an expectation that a free service should confirm to any standards ? Why should a service be free and of high quality in its free variant ?

If Google refuses to offer a paid version or made it unaffordable then it would be different , but the paid version is pretty affordable with lower pricing in countries with less purchasing power

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#935

Post by bevr1337 »

seadan83 wrote: post #824
bevr1337 wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an established strategy to serve you irrelevant ads. When the targeting gets too specific, the people start to notice and panic. Target is a fun example - they had cases where they revealed pregnancies through targeted ads. Now, they'll put an ad of a lawnmower (untargeted) next to the bassinet (targeted) and customers are less creeped out

Idk of it is a strategy, would be interested for any background reading. My XP at an ad-tech is that there is only so many targeted ads, and the advertisers cap how many times they want to show you an ad. When it comes time to bid to show you an ad, all of the targeted ads might have exhausted their campaigns (shown you the ad X times already, or the campaign ran out of spend). In this case, all the advertisers that…

Here's a skeptical write-up about the mailers I was referencing. I like this view because it acknowledges human fallacies. For example, that an untargeted ad could feel targeted or that we may exaggerate the amount of ads that feel targeted.

https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-t...

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#936

Post by kolektiv »

derefr wrote: post #888
kolektiv wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As spoken by thousands of tech companies over and over - if only the ads were more relevant, users would like them! No, they never will. That's because an advert is effectively an unasked-for imposition on my attention intended to benefit somebody else more than it benefits me (should it be considered to benefit me at all ). There's a name for behaviour like that: rude. I am not blind to commercial imperatives, but e…

> That's because an advert is effectively an unasked-for imposition on my attention intended to benefit somebody else more than it benefits me "Adverts" are a pretty incoherent category here. There are a lot of things that are technically advertising — placement of a product, or informational content about that product, paid for by some company's marketing department — that most people would never think to call "an a…

Yeah, you're right, "adverts" as a catch-all term is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and it's not focused enough. And thank you for a clearly, deeply considered reply!

You raise some interesting points, and I'm probably pretty unusual in finding most of those things even low-grade annoying (I am genuinely slightly irked by producers having influence over store merchandising because I'd rather be free to try and choose products which genuinely suit my needs rather than having my attention nudged by certain products being shoved into my eye line).

Movies are about the only one of those areas where I'd be hesitant, but that's mainly because I'd say yes, Hello Kitty is basically an ad, and Marvel Movies... I'm not sure. I'd say the movies themselves would be worth making financially without the merchandising spinoffs, and so they can be considered a product in themselves (and perhaps also because I've never bought a single item of Marvel merch despite having seen many of the films). But you're right to point out that in many cases the line is blurry. That said, for things like YouTube - it isn't blurry in the slightest, in most cases!

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#937

Post by infensus »

cobertos wrote: post #398
madars wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second Chrome drops uBlock Origin (as part of their "Manifest V3 without blocking Web Request" plan), I'm off to an alternative browser. Enough is enough.

Didn't this already happen? It just seems like it was only progressively rolled out to Chrome browsers. My work PC was hit with this about a month ago, and now I get ads there...

You can still re-enable the extension for now

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#938

Post by zouhair »

Aicy wrote: post #825
zouhair wrote: post #822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have only one: Ads. Ads shouldn't exist. The fact that most human endeavours now are forced to use ads is insane.

I like adverts. They inform me about good things I could buy that I otherwise wouldn't have known about.

That's not the point of ads.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#939

Post by zouhair »

felineflock wrote: post #873
zouhair wrote: post #822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have only one: Ads. Ads shouldn't exist. The fact that most human endeavours now are forced to use ads is insane.

Ads are a brute force approach to the challenge of having useful information (company X offers Y) reach their target (people who needs Y presently or in the future). If you say no ads should exist, then what alternatives would you have for that challenge?

Humanity lived without ads for thousands of years, I think we can do without.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#940

Post by krosaen »

Aachen wrote: post #312
krosaen wrote: post #65

I pay for YouTube premium (which gives me YouTube music too) and am happy with the lack of ads, even though many creators still mix paid sponsors into their videos. It seems the creators are motivated to keep things minimal or they will lose engagement. What I am not happy with is a lack of control over the homepage and recommendations. I would really like to be able to easily block channels from ever showing up, but…

> I pay for YouTube premium (which gives me YouTube music too) I'm curious about a buyer's perspective: would you say this is "tying"? (Seems like an ambiguous word for it but I can see no other translation for koppelverkoop) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) To me it seems like trying to undermine the market for music streaming (which is currently somewhat healthy with a handful of competing services wo…

Yeah probably, if I didn’t get it bundled I may very well be using spotify. But Yt music doesn’t suck and its YT integration is mildly nice.
Post reply on HN