That's fine. I'm not their market, and I'm sure that YouTube server cost are mind-boggling. I'll just use their platform even less as they turn it into cable TV. I pay or donate for the services I truly value, and all of those respect me enough not to try to mess with my head.
As others have said, ads are psychological warfare, and I want no part in that.
They did it before with cable TV: they promised customers that by paying for a cable TV subscription, they wouldn't have to watch ads. That didn't last very long. They lied before, so they're probably lying now.
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
And you can just unsubscribe from it then instead of using a hypothetical to explain why you don't want to pay in any way for a (let's face it, extremely valuable and expensive) service?
It's not that valuable to me, it's more of a comfort-food-content provider. If I had to spend money I'd rather spend it on live music or other things outside of the house and lean ever more on the BBC radio or TV (which I happily pay for), some relatively indie creators, or the archive.
Personally I already subscribe to Nebula and Curiosity Stream, but I refuse to subscribe to YT for the above and other reasons.
I expect that YT will continue to get worse as long as they hold a dominant position, and I don't intend to wait until they're as bad and expensive as cable before resisting.
In fact, isn't the strategy YT is pursuing here (offer a service below cost to capture a market then raise costs after destroying the competition) illegal?
I don't give a fck! I'll unsubscribe from the few channels I watch on youtube (like PBS or two minute papers) and I'll stop watching youtube exactly as I stopped to watch TV 2 decades ago. I still can read. With the AI improving I'm getting the reading content exactly as I want and I'll be not needing any talking heads to aggregate news and point me to the new papers very soon anyways. If I'd like to hear these instead of reading I'll attach TTS. That's about it. Fck ads. F*ck content interruption.
Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.
I am very privacy minded and I detest advertisements and the arguments in this thread seem ridiculous even to me. I was not expecting to see a full 1984 passage that quickly!
Let’s just face the reality: the jig is up. I just really really hope the paid experience is completely ad-free.
Note that the debate is now framed around the degree of advertising or the degree of tracking that comes with their paid subscription, and the entire conversation is about whether a service is reasonable in their fee and business practices.
The entire landscape of conversation has been profoundly shifted from whether we should even allow this kind of tracking in the first place to how and what degree of tracking are we allowing.
We didn’t need any of this when Bram Cohen’s BitTorrent ruled — and it was pretty damn efficient at digital entertainment distribution. People forget, all of these services launched to unseat that system because it was kicking so much ass. It’s not like we need streaming services — these are designed replacements for non-tracking systems.
There is absolutely no reason a copyrighted entertainment system has to become streaming or come with truly VAST troves of data collection that gets sold en mass to every third party imaginable with no transparency. The technologies exist to do this in so many other ways.
Yet, that point is rarely discussed anymore — the entire debate has been quietly reframed to a question of degrees.
Now, to suggest that such a system isn’t necessary or even good elicits nothing but “it’s not a problem if you pay for an account,” and “it’s not like any other services are better about it.” The entire landscape has moved.
There is a notable shift from individual consumption through direct ownership and the general assumption of the rights of ownership to individual leasing with intensive surveillance by proxy for the exchange or consumption of what I can only refer to as “entertainment commodities.”
It’s rather insidious.
Remember Winston’s lesson: The large mass of common people do not find in themselves the need to think independently, to question or to investigate what they have been taught.
And then consider that the most powerful tool in the arsenal of power to influence humanity has convinced everyone that in order for them to be entertained they need to submit to constant surveillance and tracking in their living rooms and on their mobile devices everywhere they go. Social and streaming are the coin that is offered for this contract.
It’s very literally big brother. And the debate has been reduced to what you will pay for the privilege of watching the latest Game of Thrones episode or whatever.
It’s just becoming so conditioned that it’s becoming invisible to people.
If this sounds conspiratorial, it’s not. It’s just a statement of the value proposition that’s being offered by these platforms and what they are trading for it. And people seem to be willing to foist over every last tidbit of information about themselves to be entertained.
It’s the way that things are shifting in the debate — the classic reframing of the debate to degrees of surveillance capitalism — which is challenging.
“Simply paying for an account” is actually opting in to a massive surveillance system that has deep implications to the future of society and the AI future we are headed towards. Read the EULA on one of those streaming services sometime, and then go look at what the data brokers have on you (and yes, they have PII they just can’t sell it, but state actors can access it).
It’s interesting to me to see how the frog in the pot is getting boiled — it sounds fringe and makes me uncomfortable to even write this response because I feel like such an outside in raising these points these days.
Forgive the long response. Just trying to give you a substantive answer, and certainly not trying to be aggressive in doing so so forgive.
Frankly this is unhinged. YouTube is a company providing a video streaming service. The fact that you think this is comparable to a totalitarian regime shows how divorced you are from reality.
You basically want to extract value from YouTube and content creators without offering anything in return.
If the terms of YouTube are unacceptable to you, simply stop using it. That's rather different from 1984.
With youtube premium they stop showing you ads. They also give you their spotify equivalent, youtube music.
(Of course it's true you'll still see shill review videos, and video creators doing ad reads for shitty VPNs - but those ads don't come from google)
> What kind of argument it is?
Back in the 2000s, on tech forums whenever someone would say "ad blocking is theft, server costs have to be paid somehow" someone would respond "I'd pay to remove ads if they'd let me" - well, now's our chance to do exactly that.
I adblock everything myself - but I earn a mid-career adult's salary now, and I get more value from Youtube than I do from Netflix so I don't mind paying for it. I also use gmail, google search and google maps with ads blocked, so I don't mind giving google a few bucks a month.
Yep. The people I subscribe to have a patreon where they publish YouTube links. I guess I should stop giving them money since I can’t consume their content.
But you still have to sit through the sponsor segments, right? Which are getting increasingly egregious - I've seen 12 minute videos with almost 3 minutes of sponsor fluff in the middle.
(Although if YouTube Premium has a better recommendation algorithm, I'd definitely pay for that given the current one is garbage.)
That's not YouTube, that's the content creators on there. These sponsorship deals make them a lot more money than what they get from YouTube itself. It's annoying and frustrating, but I totally get that they need to do this if they want to make a living from their channel.
If you don't like this, I suppose you can block the channels that do this and only watch amateur channels that aren't in it for the money. Or they make their money from Patreon or other sources.
For now.... Until they decide to increase the price of ad free premium and introduce a new tier at the original price that includes ads.
It's the same argument people made about how if you get free stuff you should expect ads and if you don't like things then pay for them. It turns out the things we paid for just started including ads as well.
> For now.... Until they decide to increase the price of ad free premium and introduce a new tier at the original price that includes ads.
Sure, but if that happens you cancel then. Not paying now because it might get worse in the future seems a bit backward.
Unfortunately the enshittification of the whole experience is almost guaranteed, I agree with you there. But for now Youtube Premium is very much worth it when watching a lot. I have watched >160 hours since January [0] and am super happy with it. I always use an ad blocker so my experience hasn't changed. But it feels like the right thing to do. Also because content creators get more money per view from premium users. And because I pay for the family plan I don't have to be subjected to overhearing ads played by my immediate family either.
[0] Youtube shows stats on the account page on how much the premium features were used since going premium.
"They" are the people who promised no ads in return for a subscription. They're all cut from the same cloth. And no, I don't pay for anything that promises no ads in return for a subscription. The cable companies taught us not to believe that lie decades ago.
That's interesting because the UK TV licence is £159 at the moment, which a lot of people find expensive, but that pays for all the BBC channels and programmes they make and buy, and iPlayer, and all BBC radio stations.
Youtube Premium looks pretty expensive in comparison. I agree £60 is more of a reasonable price.
I suspect/predict the ads on Youtube are going to get longer, and more numerous, and more will be unskippable, and therefore more annoying.
> where do you think one of the largest company in the world go their money from exactly?
From advertisers. That stream is being cut down by ad-blockers.
> more than enough profit
You are extracting more than enough value from YouTube already. You can either sit through the ads or pay up. It's just pure toxic entitlement at this point.
I wouldn't even mind paying for YouTube in return for an acceptable ad-free experience. But it requires creating a Google account, which automagically siphons off inordinate amounts of my personal data, on top of that, it requires providing a company I don't trust with my phone number *and* my payment details.
I am much more worried about the huge trove of culturally and historically significant content being locked in an ad infested garden than I am about today's content creators.
Maybe we shouldn't have entrusted that trove of culturally and historically significant content to a big faceless advertising company. Somehow we always end up doing that because they lure us in with free goodies before changing the deal.
For that they'd need to improve their UX. I pay for it (on top of YT Premium) for the principle, and try to use it as much as possible, but it's often a forced experience. For instance some videos refuse to load, downloads sometimes don't work, notifications are unreliable, there are no playlists so creators create whole new channels for a special series which is hard to keep track of, etc.
Except for the fact they the UX of Nebula is strictly worse compared to YouTube Premium. The YouTube algorithm actually keeps my homepage fairly relevant. Nebula on the other hand has no way to customise the homepage which invariably has the kind of content I specifically want to avoid. And that's not even going into the aweful CDN. I can stream YouTube at 4K without a hitch but Nebula can't even manage HD without getting stuck.
> which automagically siphons off inordinate amounts of my personal data
What personal data? If you only use that Google Account to watch YouTube, there's only your viewing habits plus all the information you provide when creating the account (name, address, phone, payment, all of which can be obscured to an extent)..
In life, people often say unjustified things about people they don't know, and I fear this branch of the discussion is only noise.
But I choose to believe GP is serious, and you might consider that if your best retort is a variation of "but if you got what you wanted, you'd move the goalposts", you might be replying to a valid point.
Not quite sure what you're on about. I pay for plenty of services, online and offline. But as time goes on, I find that paying for stuff on the internet is becoming more of a pain, rather than less. Especially when dealing with megacorps like Google or MS.
None of my phone numbers are public. I don't know about where you live, but where I live it's perfectly possible to keep your phone number private. The only ones who are able to look up my phone number are public services like 911 equivalents and a few others.
Its public in the sense that it's not a secret. You give out your phone number to friends and family. They may download apps that request them to share all contacts. You may give your number to businesses to contact you, or to enable 2FA. The "privacy" of your phone number depends on many 100s of individual contacts and businesses to maintain some sort of privacy as well, which as we know is near impossible.
Your number is out there no matter how careful you are with it. I don't think it really matters which country you live in at this point.
Technically that could be, but in practice there's a huge difference. In addition to several private phones I also have a work phone, and that number isn't set private. On that one I receive scam calls, ads, phishing, questionnaires every single day. My auto-blocking app stops a lot of it fortunately.
On my own phones I never receive a single one of these. Not one.
Technically yes. Practically, thanks to FB scraping, we have public phone numbers for around 20% of Czech citizens. Check your country, I think scraping and leaks was and will be everywhere.
1. My phone number is not public information. It's PII and protected, among other things, by GDPR. Phone numbers are also a huge pain to change, and (in my neck of the woods) it's become extremely difficult (and not entirely legal) to obtain burner SIMs.
2. Payment details, depending on the exact payment method, expire in the order of years. Someone as big as Google can easily correlate payments across a wide variety of services. Whether they are allowed to, and whether they do, is a different matter.
Almost two decades worth of content now locked behind worsening ad dystopia. I wish they didn't have this amount of immense power over the human race and the information it has access to.
Alphabet Inc needs to be broken with antitrust. Youtube has to be a separate company.
What a massive failure of democracy that this hasn't happened already.
Fuck FAANG.
> Almost two decades worth of content now locked behind worsening ad dystopia. I wish they didn't have this amount of immense power over the human race and the information it has access to.
It's not neccessarily all locked behind - hopefully, a lot of the creators have local copies of the videos, which they can upload to a competitor, if need be.
I paid for youtube premium, then youtube banned my account for "deceptive practices", on a 10+ year youtube old account tied to ~20 year gmail account has only ever viewed videos, only a handful of comments, last of which was years ago.
The kicker? When your youtube account gets banned, you cannot access the subscription page to even cancel youtube premium. You're only allowed to appeal every couple weeks, and for over 6 months appeal has been automatically rejected via automated system because rejection comes within minutes of submitting appeal.
The second kicker? I paid for another youtube premium account during the appeal process and somehow that account also gets banned for "deceptive practice". Same deal with appeal process.
The third kicker? I also pay for Google One, which boasts live person service. They basically said they have no ability to coordinate with youtube team and I'm shit out of luck. I'm assuming a live person told me that since it took a few days for the ticket to get processed.
So after 6 months and $150 and losing access to all my music and playlist on youtube music locker, I had to change credit cards to stop the charges on the gamble that it didn't affect my primary google account.
The final kicker. For shits and giggle I send another appeal on both accounts after a year. The second one somehow magically passed review and was unbanned. The first account, tied to my primary google/gmail of almost 20 years remains banned.
You mean you kept paying them for blocked accounts? Can't you just block the payment directly?
Though you might be able to sue them. They took your money without providing the service you paid for. Though I must say it's a bizarre business practice to block paid accounts without even explaining why. It's another lesson not to rely on these large faceless corporations.
I had Google One and domain services on payment. Didn't want to risk disruption by cancelling credit card and didn't know if changing credit # card whether youtube would automatically use new payment method. Basically have too much of life tied up in the ecosystem to risk even more damage over ~20 dollars a month. Let alone potentially get on some litigation shit list if I took them to court.
Also can't remove credit card because you need some sort of valid default payment. Ended up setting up a gift card as backup payment for other services, then changed credit card number. Thankfully youtube didn't use other services backup payment method, and basically they cancelled account after no pay.
It's bizarre (infuriating) a paid account can't get in person service. It's bizarre paying for Google One for in person service doesn't extend to youtube. But yeah rough lesson to learn. Still stuck in Google ecosystem due to reasons, but have more frequent / redundant backups. Meanwhile, shameless use of adblock & sponsorblock for youtube.
Not risking getting on Alphabets bad side with even minor litigation that might wreck the rest of my google services. Even idea of reversing credit charge was a risky as some comments online notes they got into google support hell trying to reverse scam microtransaction charges.
I recently started paying for Youtube's ad-free experience. It's been wonderful. I pay for all these other streaming services - but I would gladly replace it all with just Youtube given the breadth and diversity of content on there.
When I wasn't paying for it - the ads were atrocious. The worst part is that my kids would have to slog through ads too - and I just didnt need them being advertised to.
Youtube is a benefit to humanity and I am happy to dish out the $12/month it costs for Premium. (Yes, sure, I drank the koolaid)
As miserly as this is I’ll probably end up paying their Danegeld as long as they don’t mess with SponsorBlock too. My motivation is a straightforward ‘see as few ads as possible at as little cost as possible’. Of course the problem with Danegeld is that it’s usually a temporary solution to the Viking problem, I bet they’ll start infesting premium with ads at some point too.
At the end of the day business to consumer advertising on YouTube boils down to ‘waste x of your limited breaths and heartbeats being lied to and gaslit by a brand’ and I genuinely don’t understand how someone can believe adtech like that is a social good unless their salary directly depends on it. Advertising is psychological pollution and I believe online it should be strictly regulated in the same way advertising is regulated on British TV.
Only a select group of users for now, apparently. That's probably why I haven't experienced this yet.
If I do run into this limit, I'm not sure what I'll do. No YouTube will win me back a lot of free time. I want to read more, but somehow all my free time seems to be eaten up by Youtube. Maybe less Youtube would be good for me.
And what about embedded videos? Some local government agencies are using Youtube to post instructions how to use their complicated service system. Will those be blocked too?
I'm not blocking ads here, tools that I use for watching YT wont show them - Freedtube (dekstop) or NewPipe (Android).
I cannot use YT in browser, because I don't have YT account anymore and most of videos require scanning my ID for age verification or tightening my personal phone number for creating account. If terms of use support their monopoly, I'll find other ways.
I always wondered why google doesn't just interleave the ads straight into the video stream until the user has finished watching them? Plenty of streaming services do this now and it's not like youtube is still serving up a big .mp4 file to download these days, it's all just small segments.
Playing the segments you either need to explicitly define all the files you download in the manifest, which is inefficient. Or you need to have a segment template which defines a formula for the segment names that increments with time. With that the player can generate the video segment that needs to be fetched for playback.
When you create an ad break you'd have to have some backend which split the traffic routing so that media segments came from a different source. And that source would be unique for every user. This is hella complex for the CDN edge infrastructure at scale because you need systems which understand the state of the individual users session. It's much easier for them to manipulate the playback manifest so that it stitches different periods for ads and content.
Ads, the few sucessfully circumventing blockers, will still play perfectly fine and load fast. Unbelivable how the western world delegated their digital life to ad companies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517238
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36535417
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36538577
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36530393
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526224