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Comment by jsilence | Hacker News Reader

Another very effective way is to use an adblocker like uBlock origin.

Personally I feel that the engineers at YouTube are doing a good job for me and I would like to reward them for that.

Not to mention the people that worked to create the videos. Both them and the engineers deserve to eat.

Unpopular opinion, but one might argue YouTube was a better place when people did videos out of passion and not to become an "influencer" and get money.

That's still the case though. YT is probably the only platform where you can be successful doing very niche without having to sell out or churn out influencer tier content for outreach. The revenue stream is embedded, the audience is huge and channels can be pretty well siloed (as opposed to say, reddit where you can have a niche community either get easily overrun, crossposted etc). Actually the only time I've had "influencer/Drama" type of content was when I chose to watch it, otherwise YouTube is still pretty good at not pushing content you just don't watch at all to your recommendations

(Even though the recommendation system is overall awful and I can't believe an army of engineers have actually been working on it for a decade, but I digress)

Most people don't make (enough) money from YouTube though, and to get to the point where they could, they spend hundreds of hours of their time.

I'd say that's passion and i see nothing wrong with getting rewarded for doing something you like and other people enjoy watching.

> and to get to the point where they could, they spend hundreds of hours of their time

However, this often results in videos that are unnecessary bloated to fulfil the requirements to place more ads, deceptive/misleading titles, or 10-minute-videos about something that could be explained in 30 seconds.

Well, not anymore for the small publishers. Now they’re subsidizing the big publishers.

I don't mind ads in content by creators who are getting revenue from it. It maintains many interesting channels.

But ads on content where all the revenue goes to google without a penny being sent to the creator? That's not tolerable.

Do they now? Before Polymer (current YT framework) YT video page weighted somewhere around 50KB (10KB compressed) and was ordinary HTML + 1MB js player (400KB compressed). As soon as HTML part loaded the page was all there.

Now its 600KB (100KB compressed) JSON + additional 8MB desktop_polymer.js (1MB compressed) that needs to be compiled/interpreted before anything starts showing on the page - its all dynamically generated Client side. 1MB js player is on top of that.

Will uBlock origin etc block ads on YouTube? My understanding it that videos/ads are served from the same domain. (Update: a quick test suggests this method works.)

That said, either youtube-dl or Invidious [1] will do the trick. The latter can be self-hosted and emulates a more familiar YouTube experience (minus the tracking/recommendations).

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[1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

uBlock Origin works amazingly well at blocking Youtube ads. I don't know how, but it does.

Yes, uBlock origin blocks preroll and midroll ads on YouTube.

which doesn't work on TV or mobile, of course

Firefox supports uBlock Origin on mobile.

on Android

> Another very effective way is to use an adblocker like uBlock origin.

How does that work when you’re out on your iPhone and just want to check a video-link someone sent you?

Oh wait. It doesn’t.

In this case, I use the super power of self control, and I wait to be home to watch the video on a bigger and better screen, and without ads.

Firefox is the only browser i know of where you can install adblocker on mobile. Don't know if you can install this on your iPhone but on android it works like a charm.

Another solution that seems to be Android-only: YouTube Vanced. Includes AdBlock, SponsorBlock (if enabled in settings), and other Premium features like picture-in-picture and listening to music in the background.

It can work but you need to do some preparation work.

First, choose to go out with a more open platform (if only by a bit) that at least allows you the freedom to install apps which don't necessarily come with a corporate overseer's approval.

Then, install the Youtube Vanced app.

Works great on Android with Firefox mobile.

AdGuard on mobile Safari usually blocks YouTube ads for me.

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