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Comment by kypro | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's been using ad blockers for years and was watching YouTube a long time before ads, it was quite a painful experience suddenly having ads pop up on every video when I started using YouTube on my tablet.

This isn't just YouTube though, the internet as a whole has slowly shifted in the direction of more ads and more pay walls. I get it, but as someone who vividly remembers the internet before ads and pay walls I still find it odd how people growing up online today just seem to accept it.

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> but as someone who vividly remembers the internet before ads and pay walls I still find it odd how people growing up online today just seem to accept it.

I find this odd - you're saying that you're only fond of the way things were when you grew up, but that it's odd how people growing up now accept their own reality?

Yep, that's the nature of things. I'm 41 but I feel like, I don't know, 26 maybe. But I'm definitely not. If I was 26 right now, I would probably have instagram, fb, etc... whereas I have no social accounts, except, I suppose HN.

I have literally no way of knowing what it would be like to have been born in 1994 instead of 1979... it's so crazy how fast things change. What would it be like if the internet was just a given when I was born instead of getting on BBS's and then the internet slowly leaks in.

>If I was 26 right now, I would probably have instagram, fb, etc...

Lol no. Not if you're a nerd, anyway. You'd mostly be on Reddit and HN. ; p The only people left on Facebook in the West are around your age.

Get Discord and Spotify and you're all caught up.

It’s not just that it’s different, it’s worse. The Internet in the early 2000s was a magical time of unsustainable sharing.

So it’s not just older == better. The early 90s and before were all shit for video and being bombarded with ads as well.

> unsustainable sharing

Indeed, that was another point I wanted to make but refrained from. Having so much content and functionality for free, with absolutely no cost (like your data being mined for pofit) is simply unsustainable... In a way, the early 2000s were the odd time, not today. Maybe that'll look different when/if humanity manages to overcome the major issues we face today and we reach an age of plenty.

I read the comment differently. I think it is marvelling at how users who first begin using the internet during a time of pervasive internet ads learn to tune them out, while users who first began using the internet during the time before pervasive internet ads lack this ability. The later group are more likely to block the ads to restore normalcy. The former are more likely to see ads as normal.

It is possible to pay for YouTube nowadays. That will get rid of ads.

If you don't want to see ads, why don't you pay for youtube premium? How else do you expect Youtube to a sustain itself if you wont' block the ads or pay for the premium ad-free subscription?

I now pay for premium, but many YouTubers have taken to do sponsorships. It's getting pretty egregious. There's a YouTube channel I won't name, where every video is a full 2+ minutes of sponsorship, paid content, please click like and subscribe, also we have Patreon, we sell merch. Even YouTube premium doesn't get rid of that.

Those can be manually skipped to some degree by jumping header or speeding up. I wonder if someone could write a browser extension to skip them automatically. I wonder if it could use AI or heuristics, or a crowdsourced database.

Your best bet for skipping this with machine learning would be to use a textual language model and the closed captions.

On desktop you could be interested by this: https://sponsor.ajay.app/

It's just like cable tv, millions of channels and nothing's on. Draped head to toe in ads, and this time its easy to block ads.

How long until the streaming services become comglomerated into one or two cable-like packages? Can't be long now and it will break apart again and reform over a hundred years with better tech ... again, maybe?

people growing up online today would rather skip ads after 5 seconds than watch commercials on traditional television or listen to advertisements on the radio. It isn't odd in my opinion.

Maybe you're not using a good ad-blocker then. I don't see ads on YouTube.

Are there adblockers that work on iPads? Or do you have to use a pihole type setup?

A DNS based blocker like pi-hole, nextdns, etc, can't block YouTube ads. Or at least it's very hard to it without breaking something as YouTube often uses the same subdomain(s) to load ads and videos.

I use Adblock Plus on iPhone - can be downloaded in App Store and works fantastically with mobile Safari. I even replaced the Youtube app with a home screen bookmark and I haven’t seen an ad since

Not with the YouTube app, but with the browser, you somewhat can.

I used adguard and it works for like 80 to 90% of the time. For the time where ad did show up, I just reload the page and it is gone.

Brave browser blocks most, if not all YouTube ads, one of the main reasons it's my default browser on iOS

DNS-based adblock is mostly, but not totally, effective.

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