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Comment by Verdex | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand either side of the equation here.

So, on the one hand you have people who use ad blockers. The first retort that comes to mind here is: Well, we'll take our business elsewhere. Which is odd because without ads they aren't paying and them leaving is the goal.

Of course on the other hand ... when I read the title my thoughts weren't that I would be okay because I don't ad block youtube. My thought wasn't that I should buy youtube premium to avoid ads. My thought WAS that if I ever get falsely flagged, then I'll just buy a nebula subscription (or whatever) and never use youtube again.

In fact I went over to nebula to check it out.

Somebody has to pay something for youtube to be viable. But youtube got big via offering a free service and now if feels like they're trying to pull up the ladder behind themselves.

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Good point. I don't know what were their expectations for audience reaction. It surely wasn't "oh I need to turn off my adblocker then" or "oh, YouTube Premium, that's neat, lemme get my credit card".

For me, it was, in order:

- "Three strikes" and... what? Red alert! Let me drop everything and read the damn article right now, because it could be "three strikes and you lose your Google account", which is kinda big fucking deal.

- [Couple paragraphs later] oh, only disabling playback. Whew, cancel red alert.

- My kids will not be happy though the first time it hits. Neither will we, because YouTube + AdBlock is the easiest way to play our 4yo and 2yo music, without exposing them to the brain poison of modern advertising at this early age.

- (The next easiest one is NewPipe or yt-dlp, + some manual fixup, + an old phone working as an off-line music player.)

- (Also no joke on brain poison. The way kids react to an ad that occasionally slips by us is a perfect measure of how fucked up advertising is.)

- Oh well, let's hope NewPipe keeps working.

- ... also, what took them so long? I expected this so many years ago that I actually forgot this could happen.

BTW. is it only me, or is 2023 the year of "enshittification" of SaaS shifting into high gear? Like the layoff wave earlier, this also feels like suddenly happening everywhere at the same time.

> Three strikes" and... what? Red alert! Let me drop everything and read the damn article right now, because it could be "three strikes and you lose your Google account", which is kinda big fucking deal.

This is an interesting point. Like, they're not doing it today, but ... yeah, I might checkout the alternative streaming services again when I get a moment. Because you know if this initiative doesn't make a chart start to go upwards, then sooner or later somebody in a board room is going to suggest it. Better to just get off of youtube now.

> (Also no joke on brain poison. The way kids react to an ad that occasionally slips by us is a perfect measure of how fucked up advertising is.)

My kids absolutely freak out whenever they see an ad. "What's happening? Is the TV broken?" I feel like their reaction is proof that I've done at least one thing right as a parent.

Yeah, Google has me by the balls because they have my Gmail account. Time to write to my representatives telling them that Google is too big and I support anti-trust enforcement.

Or migrate to Fastmail. It's painful but doable if you have a gmail address (redirect all mail to your new address with an out-of-office automatic reply about the change). While you're at it, get your own domain (through Fastmail or others) so this never happens again (https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753394-Cus...). I was lucky enough to start out on Gmail with my own domain back when that was free, and it meant that I could migrate to Fastmail without anyone even noticing.

No affiliation with them, just very happy I made the switch.

Jeez it's like HN just learnt a new word. Would love to never read enshittification again. Someone uses it on every other submission. This is what happens when cheap money ends and businesses actually need some profitability.

Enshittification, Immiseration, Impoverishment

The words likely to sum up this decade.

Disenfranchisement was one of those for the prior decade.

It's not gone

I hate this word, but it seems to have caught on, so I don't feel like quibbling over the label we use to name the problem - it kind of distracts from the problem itself. Specifically, I gave up after I discovered this term was either coined or popularized by Cory Doctorow - if he's pushing it, I may just as well accept it.

I hope the word becomes more pervasive. I would like to see people start calling tech CEOs "Chief Enshittification Officers". The more the word enters the lexicon, the more the enshittifiers will begin to feel at least some resistance -- similar to the way "second-hand smoke" helped to trigger the decline in cigarette use in the west.

The era of free money may be over, but that doesn't mean we're required to present our gaping maws willingly as receptacles for the enshittifiers' effluent.

No totally. But it was fun while it lasted and if you don't want to help them make some money that's fair enough. No point being too disappointed though. C'est la vie

It’s proof the enshittification of HN has begun.

I think it's because it's happening everywhere, even outside of less profitable businesses. I flew United the other week and they played me 4 min of ads blasted through the cabin and on my screen after the safety video, even after I paid for my flight and in my mind, the "United premium". They are a heavily profitable company, making $11 billion Q4 '22, and yet, they consciously decided to make my experience flying United worse for a small profit. To me, that's the difference between "enshittification" and trying to make a viable business.

YouTube Premium reached 50 Million subscribers in 2021, so they're doing pretty well: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/50-million/

I wonder how many subscribers watch YouTube on a smart TV? That's solely the reason I subscribe myself as I can't install an ad blocker there and as far as I know things like pi-hole cant block ads in Smart TV streams either.

On Android TV there's SmartTubeNext, not sure about anything else, it's funny that Google's platform is the one that's easiest to block their ads on

Honest question: if you and your kids use YouTube to the degree you describe, why not pay for the ad free experience? Why go through so many hoops? Is it the amount of money, is it the principle, or something else?

HN readers massively overestimate the willingness of the average person to "fight the power" or whatever. When Netflix cracked down on password sharing, I was fully expecting people to realize how bad Netflix has become and to move on to other platforms. Everyone here thought they were shooting themselves in the foot. But no, the password sharing fix did exactly what they wanted it to do, and subscriptions actually increased. The truth is that no one but a couple of techies know or care what NewPipe or yt-dl are. This move by YouTube will work and there's not really anything we can do about it.

More than half of my non-techie friends have cancelled their Netflix subscriptions in the last few months because of the changes. They were already on the edge of having it anyway, so when Netflix said to pay twice as much they just left.

It's cause some people are so fucking stupid

> people to realize how bad Netflix has become and to move on to other platforms

What's supposed to be bad about it. I'm still using Netflix and never even shared my password the first time. I like it.

They were good while they were the first-mover with all the good distribution contracts signed. Now everyone and their dog runs their own streaming service, and keeps tight control of any IP they may have. Netflix catalogue was never that big - they were, and are, just very good at hiding it with UI dark patterns; now, it's even smaller. They're trying to back-fill it by funding... well, take your pick:

- Charitable view: a very broad selection of productions aimed at smaller, niche audiences, so that everyone can find something unique they like.

- Cynical view: B-rate shit, going for quantity over quality, and hoping something sticks.

Either way, at this point, many Netflix users have long ago watched everything remotely worth watching on the site, and keep the subscription out of habit (or to keep access to something they like to rewatch). It doesn't take much to lose those subscribers.

Netflix is fine for what it is, it's just there was a golden era where essentially everything was on Netflix for a reasonable monthly fee, and then content owners realized they could make their own streaming services for just their stuff and charge the same amount.

Sometimes there really are good old days.

I'll bet Netflix lost a lot of viewers who were not subscribers though. That might be okay for them, or it might not be. It depends on just how valuable all that mindshare and all those eyeballs are for them above and beyond the subscription costs.

> because it could be "three strikes and you lose your Google account", which is kinda big fraking deal.

Google accounts are fragile like people; they can suddenly cease operation, for no known reason.

I keep everything Google isolated. It's all in it's own browser or container. As for youtube, it ~only gets watched on a dedicated device attached to a TV.

> YouTube + AdBlock is the easiest way to play our 4yo and 2yo music, without exposing them to the brain poison of modern advertising at this early age.

How is this easier than paying a subscription? You get ad-free YouTube and YouTube music.

I’ve listened to 1000s of hours of YouTube since I started my premium subscription with 0 advertisements. We paid a few dollars more for a family plan and now my father and grandfather no longer watch ads either.

> I’ve listened to 1000s of hours of YouTube since I started my premium subscription with 0 advertisements.

If most people choose to do this, your premium subscription will start to have a few premium, curated ads, and you'll have to buy the next tier up to get ad-free again. Four years later, you'll have to by the next tier up just to get the premium, curated ads back.

Not to mention you basically can't skip the in-video sponsors that content creators need to survive. I pay for premium and watch it on the TV (no SponsoBlock there), so it's getting to a point where I'm holding the fucking remote/phone to skip ads on every freaking video.

I absolutely hate this.

Do the creators need sponsorships to survive? I have no idea about how YouTuber revenue works.

Yes. It's in line with the social media industry: the top ~0.1% gets ridiculous amounts of money from sponsors and ads, while everyone else can barely scrape by.

> your premium subscription will start to have a few premium, curated ads, and you'll have to buy the next tier up to get ad-free again.

This has never happened to me even once with any service that I pay for. Hulu is the closest, but they replaced a free tier with a cheap-with-ads tier. Their expensive tier at least once had "some ads that were contractually required" but i never saw them.

And I think if "most people" paid for YTP they'd be drowning in revenue so I doubt that they'd be desperate to screw that up by repositioning YTP as something other than "ad-free."

I might get flamed for this, but while I see the reason to hate and adblock mainstream sites that have awful ads and have no paid ad-free option (see most newspapers and TV stations, especially local ones, everything that has those idiotic bottom-feeding ads at the bottom of an article, Yahoo, AOL, Newsweek, Gizmodo etc.) ... in contrast, YTP is there, it's twelve bucks a month, I don't see why anyone wouldn't pay for it instead of trying to cheat. Not saying it's a crime or even immoral, but they don't owe you video content and trying to subvert the conditions they place on access seems like basically cheating. Kind of like not paying your water bill (when you could afford it) and just using the public restroom next door 10 times a day. Not illegal, but... seems like a bad plan.

> How is this easier than paying a subscription? You get ad-free YouTube and YouTube music.

First of all, isn't YouTube Music dead? Didn't it die twice already? Secondly, I don't know. I didn't look into YouTube Premium precisely because they're pushing it way too hard. I don't trust Google, I don't trust them handling ads and child-related content on YouTube right, after various YouTube Kids fiascoes. I don't trust people who are pushing their products/services this hard - so far, I was never wrong. Whatever curiosity I had about YouTube Premium, they burned it by the third time in a day I got interrupted by a full-screen "activate a trial" ad, optimized to have distracted people subscribe by mistake.

Not to mention, the way YouTube Premium story evolves, this really feels like extortion. It technically isn't, and they're in their rights, but perception matters - and because of that, I'm willing to spend a lot of effort, and even a lot of money with someone else, just to not have to deal with YouTube Premium, YouTube ads and other YouTube bullshit, while retaining easy access on the relatively infrequent occasion I want to play something from their catalogue.

YouTube Music replaced Google Play Music, which is what Google shut down. I use YouTube Music all the time.

Good points. Just to answer, Google is dying. Search and YouTube are legacy technology. It looks like they hit a runaway economic train where they must enshittify their product worse to keep the balance shit, which drives more people away, which requires further enshittification. Google is in major trouble.

> First of all, isn't YouTube Music dead? Didn't it die twice already?

Nope. Never died. I've been using it for at least a year.

> BTW. is it only me, or is 2023 the year of "enshittification" of SaaS shifting into high gear?

I think the West is escalating its war on user control of anything networkable, and content blocking is a security hole. Western governments prefer that everyone be using the same few monitorable, censorable, and compliant communication mediums in the same way, and is ignoring or supporting massive private media/tech businesses when needed in order to reach that goal.

They looked at China's Great Firewall and thought "great idea!" It's just now coming to fruition.

As for YouTube, what should they do? I see 3 options but maybe I'm missing some:

1. Make everyone pay

2. Make everyone either watch ads or pay, user's choice

3. Eliminate all ads. Since there would be little reason to sign up for YTP once ads are eliminated, they're going to have to have "Pledge drives" where they try to beg you to pay just out of generosity, to support a public service for all. Somehow this seems like it'll never not lose huge amounts of money.

4. (sort of the status quo up till now) Nerds get to block ads, and are subsidized by Premium subscribers and suckers.

Admittedly option 3 sounds stupid, I just can't think of any other options for YouTube where it doesn't cease to exist.

Option 2. is unstable - if you split users into two camps, "watching ads" and "paying", it so happens that it's the second camp that the advertisers want the most to reach: people with disposable income and willingness to spend it. You can expect significant pressure from the business side to somehow advertise to that second group.

This is, in fact, a point raised by many commenters in the thread - it's very likely that Premium will stop being ad-free once it gains a large enough user base. See also: cable TV, or any other paid-for medium whose initial value proposition was... "we charge you for it, but there are no ads!".

Option 3. - nah, can't imagine it either.

Option 4. - that would be going back to the "good years". I don't think it's possible for YouTube - they'd have to somehow undo or reverse the pressures that got them to the situation today. See also: image hosting service cycle - they start bullshit-free, then they get progressively worse, but it's only when they go past the "nerds block ads, whales pay, suckers get ads" stage - when they disturb that balance - that they die.

> This is, in fact, a point raised by many commenters in the thread - it's very likely that Premium will stop being ad-free once it gains a large enough user base.

I mean... then you stop paying and download an ad blocker. Why not enjoy the utopia of paid commercial free video content while it lasts. It's not like you're locked in somehow.

Exactly, it’s month to month. I just pay and get something great.

It's almost like the growth plan of every tech company in the last decade or so... Grow big by burning capital ("to hell with cost of acquisition our CLV will be so high once they're locked in"); build an ad network; realise an operating profit; fight tooth and nail to protect that ad network...

Even Uber is becoming an ads company...

> Even Uber is becoming an ads company...

Yeah, with youtube it kind of makes sense that the ads would be there. Uber (TIL), Windows 11, and non-media experiences/services/goods in general looking for ways to sell ads makes my skin crawl.

Just wait until doorbells play you an ad when you press the button.

If given a single magical wish, I wonder how much havoc I could wreck by wishing that immediately before someone intends to purchase ad time or join an ad network or whatever they mystically gain an understanding of exactly what the ROI is going to be for them. My conceit is that 99% of entities that purchase ad time have a significantly negative ROI because at the end of the day the only thing that an advertiser has to be good at selling to exist is their own services.

Things like doorbells/thermostats/light switches I'm not too worried about because they don't have network effects -- I can build my own with very little time investment and it can have better features and more reliability than most other options. The boundary here is currently probably TV's, it's insane to me that I can't get an affordable high quality TV without tracking and ads. I can block the TV at the router, but something like Amazon Sidewalk could be used to get around my sandboxing.

Platforms which require network effects to function like YouTube, Twitter, Email (deliverability), etc have a different dynamic. They're very difficult to abandon once you've come to rely on them.

> Things like doorbells/thermostats/light switches I'm not too worried about because they don't have network effects

Until the government comes in and mandates you need such and such light switch/thermostat/doorbell because of some regulation and conveniently all of the ones on the market which meet that spec are adware-infested nightmares.

And it doesn't even need to be some sort of authoritarian thing. Someone could just offer really cheap, highly functional devices that just happen to also have ads.

You can get your own doorbell, but if everyone else has a doorbell with ads on it, then you kind of still have to deal with it.

"It's okay, I'll just text them instead of going to their front door." Oh they'll consider that too. The free monthly subscription is only valid when you end up with at least 10 ad plays during that month. You don't even have to push the button, the doorbell sees you and plays the ad. And your friends have an incentive to take just a few extra seconds to get to the front door even though they texted back that the door was unlocked and they're right there.

I doubt this will happen but then again I never saw “Gas Station TV” (the most obnoxious ads ever at the fill pump) coming.

I saw a brand new machine for measuring blood pressure at the store and sat down because why not. It had unskippable screens demanding my personal info then it says “gathering your data” for a full THIRTY seconds after measuring my blood pressure which was conveniently just the amount of time to show me a commercial. It made me want to throw up.

I’m sure Walmart threw out all the old blood pressure machines that worked for 30 years and put these abominations in. It just makes my skin crawl how dystopian that machine was.

There are too many perverse incentives linked to the advertisement business model. Perhaps we should just ban it.

On a long enough timeline every company becomes and ads company.

Are the oil companies ads companies?

Maybe? Every gas pump I've gone to in the past half decade has had a TV playing ads at me. So at least part of the oil company ecosystem has an ad component.

I recently moved back to a city where I rarely have to drive, which is nice, but I was driving a lot last year, and "do the pumps have those godawful TV ads or not" became my #1 criterion when deciding where to buy gas. What an unbearable racket!

If lobbying governments to ignore the world slowly boiling to death is ads, then yes.

Do you happen to know anybody who denies climate change? Because their talking points came from an oil company.

It's like "Carcinisation" for tech companies.

Question: If you'd rather they didn't exist than be ad-supported, why not just ignore them? Surely VC money wasn't going to keep things like YouTube, Uber, and the rest artificially cheap or free with no strings forever, right?

I feel like due to the VC-enabled delayed monetization that tends to happen with startups, we have all (me included) become convinced that it's sustainable to expect a bunch of ad-free, subscription-free content that just creates itself and teleports onto our computer, forever and ever. TANSTAAFL though.

The key about ads and ad-blocking is simple: I don't care. I don't care about any of these companies. I don't care about their costs or business model. And I don't particularly care about their product, because it is ephemeral and optional to me.

There's far too many people in "business" today who think they provide anything of any real, determinable value to me rather then a passing fancy which will be easily replaced or discarded.

And this doesn't just apply to the content hosters: it also applies to their advertisers. There is nothing of value being advertised these days. It's all misrepresented junk, when it's not outright scams. It isn't worth ever exposing yourself to.

+1000

My first thought upon hearing this was "oh, I guess my time lost to youtube-dl + mpv of those few channels I have bookmarked will finally be reclaimed!" (assuming this breaks it)

This move makes zero sense on their part. Cutting off your addicts is a horrible approach to being a drug dealer. You always keep them hooked to your supply, if you wholly interrupt it they'll quickly seek replacement. That's literally what created the illicit opioid crisis - folks lost their prescription opioids and immediately pivoted to street dealers.

Surely youtube has better options than outright blocking users of adblockers... Why wouldn't you first just restrict the quality of videos they can access to extremely low-res. It lessens the bandwidth burden on you, and may be enough to keep them under your spell and away from the competitors supply.

They’ve already done that in a way, I can only watch 720p on mobile with safari + Adblocker and it always always between each video resets to 360p unless I tap to change it every time. To get higher res than that I have to download the app.

> So, on the one hand you have people who use ad blockers. The first retort that comes to mind here is: Well, we'll take our business elsewhere. Which is odd because without ads they aren't paying and them leaving is the goal.

I use an ad blocker. If I can no longer block ads on YouTube, yes I will just stop using YouTube, or use an Invidious/Piped instance. I think your mistake is believing everyone who uses ad-block also believes ad-free YouTube is worth paying for. I do not.

Further, if Invidious, Piped, NewPipe, and yt-dlp stop working as well, I will simply just watch drastically less YouTube, which is what Google wants.

> Somebody has to pay something for youtube to be viable.

I don't care. Would I care if YouTube was run by a small company that didn't employ dark patterns or fuel unhealthy addiction of innappropriate content in kids? Probably, but YouTube is run by megacorp, so no, I don't care about their server costs.

>I think your mistake is believing everyone who uses ad-block also believes ad-free YouTube is worth paying for. I do not.

No, they are saying that they will not "lose your business" because there was no business in the first place, which is true.

It was hard to parse that sentence; I see now what they meant, thank you. Although that also seems to imply ad-block users are indignant. I don't mind leaving YouTube.

Nonpaying users still have value. If they didn't, companies wouldn't pay for bots to follow them on social media.

It costs a lot of money to run YouTube. If someone wants to make a competitor, they’re free to do so, but most will charge because of how expensive it is or you could use a PeerTube-like system. I pay for YouTube Premium and get value out of YouTube. I’m also an adult with a decent paying job so it’s not a big deal for me.

Maybe the mistake of these conglomerates is getting people accustomed to a certain level of service for free.

Nebula charges about $10 a year, and makes a pretty good profit right now.

Pretty sure that price is only for your first year if you sign up with a code/link from one of their creators.

The advertised rates are currently $5/month or $50/year.

It costs YouTube a lot of money because they pretended to be a free service and allowed anyone to upload enormous amounts of video data which they now have to continue storing and serving.

It's not a mistake, they do it on purpose. Most tech companies spin up with free offerings to acquire critical mass, and then pull the rug out from under their users once they feel like they can squeeze money out of them without scaring all of them away.

Social media does it (Reddit, Twitter). Video games do it (COD, yearly releases, DLC). eCommerce does it (Walmart, Amazon). IaaS does it (Heroku).

Don't give them the benefit that it's a 'mistake', it's very intentional. CAC is a metric used by all tech companies and is calculated to build network effects and large user-bases. I find it unethical and borderline fraudulent to build these community pillars and then defile them for profit. We'll be left with absolutely nothing free in life, no town squares and no transfer of information without fees.

Whether you or someone else can afford $10/mo is completely irrelevant.

They could also, like, go back where they would show a meaningful ad every 10 videos. and not 4 with every video you attempt to watch.

My child watched a 10 minute video the other day on a machine that doesn't have an adblocker installed on it.

There were 4 "commercial breaks" of 2, unskippable 30 second ads. So, 4 minutes extra.

That's an extra 40% of the original video length (10 minutes). That's 30% of the total length (14 minutes).

It's almost exactly the same as broadcast tv, maybe slightly high? TV averages 12-20 minutes per 60 of tv being ads.

Not really sure what to do with that. It feels like I should be upset, but really, it's proportionate to what already exists and I'm only upset because it's worse than it was 10 years ago.

In your summary, you described: -A service you pay for (traditional cable) has 30-40 percent of it's time -dedicated to charging you more. (time cost to watch the ads). -It has gotten worse both traditionally and on streaming media. -Your child, who is in no way associated with the payment structure, is forced to absorb malicious ads despite being too young to consent to the information being "forced". -(my observation) Media spot advertising does not work, is largely targeted incorectly.

We're PAYING for our kids to become desensitized to attention-vampiricity and we're unsure if it is ok to be upset? Yes!

So that's not what I was getting at. I was simply comparing the ad content from YouTube to traditional media. The original post claimed that it has too many ads, so I thought I'd do the math. I was surprised it turned out the way it did. Maybe that is just conditioning?

Your argument is a different thing. Valid as well, but completely different.

I'm really puzzled with the ad business model. I always wonder if those silly mobile game ads can get really bring the mobile game developer additional revenue? And even for other ads that look less stupid comparing with those mobile games, I think I had never been attracted to purchase something due to ads, nor I would prefer them when I actually need to buy something (note that I keep my spending minimal, so I am probably not their targets anyway...)

The mobile games are the weirdest to me, because most of them that I see are ads for games that are also primarily ad supported. It’s ads all the way down. I suspect that a lot of it is riding on VC funding that will eventually dry up, breaking everyone’s business models.

Why would you not use an ad blocker?

Perhaps because you believe that using an ad blocker escalates an arms race that leads to bad outcomes for all internet users.

Whether or not you use one doesn't change this arms race from existing. It just gives you a moral fig leaf without changing anything substantiative.

At least I have a fig leaf then. I'm open to suggestions.

You're acknowledging the legitimacy of people who justify their existence by automating "Hey,listen!" That is foisted on every other individual on the planet, without their consent.

In this case, it's only foisted on people that visit the site in question. That's the main variable I control.

The problem is, that in many cases, the amount of ads is higher than the amount of usable content in a video, even without counting the in-video ads (by the content creator). This is also true for many "normal" websites, where (especially some news sites) almost literally beg you to turn adblock off, since they cannot write content without it, and you naively do so once, to be bombarded by 50 different autoplaying ads, popups, overlays, banners, ads that move while you scroll, ads that break content into many small pieces, etc., forcing you to turn the adblock off, or with no alternative, to just close the page, because it's unusable.

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