Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled
jayd.ml
Related: Someone at YouTube needs glasses - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43846487 - April 2025 (694 comments)
jayd.ml
My personal long-term complaint is the length of video titles.
Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”.
Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence.
So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.
Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
Obnoxious.
> So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.
> Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
> The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
I'm looking at youtube right now. There's a video displayed with the title "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , ..."
That "..." is the indicator that the title has been truncated. If you hover the title with your mouse, you can see the entire thing: "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , America | Why Are They Similar?"
Not far away, there's "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support...", which expands to "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support | WIRED".
Am I using Apple TV? No. Is it really true that they removed the truncation indicator?
Yes.
For example, if you pause the video by clicking the main action button brings up an overlay that takes up almost the whole screen, so you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame. How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up. For some reason up means back and down means to open some additional UI with related videos and what not.
No other app is like this — Plex, Infuse, Apple, Netflix etc. abide by relatively sane UI controls where the action button pauses and unpauses, and up/down don't scroll between weird overlay elements.
The YouTube filled with these incredible non-unintuitive UX choices that drive me crazy. I never use it unless I have a clear idea of something I want to watch.
> you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame
You can press up on the D-pad to dismiss that overlay, if you want to see the full paused frame.
> How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up.
Maybe we have different remotes? On the latest model, you play/pause with the same button.
One issue I’ve noticed in the app is there seems to be no way to move the cursor “up” to the channel button when the video is in the last 10% of the playback bar. If you rewind it a bit, then you’re able to move the cursor up there.
Only in the last few days have Shorts appeared at the top of my home page. I fear it may be the end for me.
We were talking about Google here. (you know, former search engine, don't be evil)
YouTube did push a version of the Apple TV app that tried this, but it would cause the app to crash/black screen, no joke. They reverted it.
This would be true if the Android or Android TV would have been better. It is just profit maximization combined with crappy UX/UI. Google wants your personal data and will make UI changes to get it. (double record/send button in messages, UI elements very close to others so that they can be pressed accidentally, although there is plenty of space between other UI elements)
Maybe it could be styled a bit differently so the search bar is more prominent and in the center of the screen, but just having a search bar without any distractions is a fantastic feature.
You don't need the obnoxious refusal to show videos on the front page.
Unless you're testing this with blank accounts?
That popping up on your phone is not 100% reliable, though, and even more hilariously, when using it with YouTube, it'll sometimes just take the first handful of characters and drop the text input box on the phone. Oh, how we laughed.
(this may be a generic Apple TV problem but it's something I've only noticed on the YouTube app)
For example: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254761316?sortBy=rank
The YouTube app is a walk in the park compared to the app for Hayu which is like torture sometimes it’s so buggy.
I would've agreed until Netflix did their redesign and started pushing wrestling for whatever braindead reason. Some executives should just quit.
Everytime YouTube gets an update it gets worse. This has been true for years. It's like their design and product team is run by second-graders.
Last time I checked, the LG webOS app was just running tv.youtube.com which only expects a TV-specific user agent.
Amazon has started getting into a state, lately, where it ignores the remote, unless I go back, then go forward again.
This kind of “quality” is considered “acceptable,” in today’s world.
AppleTV has a JavaScript-based development system. It also has a fairly classic native Swift system (which I use). I suspect most apps are JavaScript, though.
[EDIT: Added the “routinely use” qualifier]
I should also qualify that it’s not really “every single one” (that’s hyperbole). It’s the ones that I routinely use (Apple, Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix).
I’ll probably get another one, sooner or later, but I’ve been waiting for them to release a new version[0],
If you rapidly keep skipping through a song, then to the next one and repeat, the performance will keep on tanking. After a while it'll take 5-10 seconds just to load a song, going to other UI sections will take 3-5 seconds to load, and eventually the application completely locks up and soft reboots itself.
Probably JavaScript garbage collectors getting overwhelmed.
Then please realise your advice is completely unneeded and unhelpful.
Edit: Did have one problem where the centre channel would occasionally drop out - this would go away if you changed the volume and didn't happen that often so wasn't a big deal. I had assumed it was a problem with the Denon receiver we use but when we replaced our original Apple TV earlier this year wit a 4K model it stopped so must have been something to do with the device.
These people care only about each other: power, influence, money, etc.
Actually using or - gasp - improving the product is beneath them.
Or do you seriously think the billionaire CEO of some white goods company knows or cares about the quality of the wash the cheap Chinese-made washing machine does? He’s got staff laundering his clothes!
Similarly it’s very clear nobody with real power at Microsoft uses their own tools. I see their seniour product managers turn up to Microsoft Ignite with Apple Macs, for crying out loud!
Given that every other app manages to get basic interaction right, I’m not inclined to believe it’s an os/hardware issue.
It's similar on desktop, if you pause the video, an overlay with recommendations appears, and it prevents you from reading the subtitles, for example.
Disclosure: I work at Google but not YouTube.
I would not be surprised if there is no QA team for the tvOS app.
The content they offer is either a big back catalog of reality TV dross, or Live sport. The live sport streams, when left open when the AppleTV is turned off will always crash and go into a frozen state where there's no way out except by force quitting the app.
Reported multiple times to their tech support, no fix in 2 years. This for sports services that cost 30GBP a month, minimum, and with a regional monopoly on coverage.
DeArrow replaces thumbnails and titles with crowd sourced versions. I can't use youtube without it anymore. Usually the titles get replaced with stuff like "How to build a table" instead of "Watch the world explode as I try to make a table!!!!!!!!!!!!". Same with thumbnails. No longer are they over-saturated close up AI generated garbage images, but usually just a screenshot from the video that shows what's really going on.
[1] https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV/issues/60#issue...
The idiotic clickbait images and titles WORK. People don't use them because they want to, they use them because they have to.
Thus -> DeArrow.
(Or follow the channels via an RSS feed and filter there)
So I don't believe someone like LTT needs to resort to clickbait. LTT has 16 millions subscribers and half a million views per video. They make plenty of ad-revenue from those videos. If he stopped making videos today, he would still be getting a sizeable income by doing nothing for at least a decade. Even some washed up YouTubers from the past get a low five figure income from their Channels.
If he has that many employees for his YouTube channel he is letting his expenses get out of control. It is as simple as that.
If he fired everyone tomorrow and stopped making videos, he would probably still be making six to seven figures a year just from people (re)-watching the existing content. I wouldn't be surprised if he has other holdings / properties that generate him income outside of YouTube.
You see this happen a lot on YouTube where someone starts getting a lot of money in via YouTube Ad-revenue and they start trying to operate it like it is a television station and paying for co-hosts and researchers etc. Costs then increase ten to twenty fold. Then once inevitably YouTube change how monetisation works or people get bored with their content and their revenue dips they resort to clickbait, scamming, and other nonsense.
This could all be avoided by just keeping control of their costs. So I have little sympathy for him saying "I have to do the click bait guys", when it was his decision to make those hires and he was already rolling in cash.
Children are attracted to soy-boy suprised pikachu face on clickbait thumbnails. CHLIDREN are ATTRACTED to EVERY second WORD being IN all CAPS!!! They like the three exclamation marks. They like flashy text on MrWhoseTheBoss videos which repeat the same thing the fucking guy is talking but just with flashy text on screen. They like the whizz-bang animations and ADHD addled three-second shots. They like the Mr. Beastification of Youtube.
I'm not a child. I'm too old and weary for that. LTT wants to do it, he can. Godspeed, and may his next twenty million subscribers fill the hole in his pocket and his soul that the first twenty million couldn't. I just ain't gonna be watching.
This have been a thing on Japanese TV since long ago, doubling down on the punchlines with subtitles or adding a comment or comeback (conveniently, Japanese text takes less space that Western text, so the characters can be relatively large). So I think they just copied it.
LTT does not have a choice
Youtube's system is adversarial. There's more content than eyeballs, so if your brand new video is placed in front of like three people who do not click on it, it stops getting shown to people entirely including subscribers!
Clickbait thumbnails and titles are what Google wants, and they provide tooling to encourage it, and punish you if you do not use it.
You want to get rid of clickbait titles and thumbnails? Kill google. Then also legislate it away because it will naturally arise in any such adversarial system.
>They like the Mr. Beastification of Youtube.
Google likes the Mr. Beastification of Youtube. Google would rather every LTT go away and be replaced with another Mr. Beast. It's more profitable that way.
I realised over the last years that my weariness with the internet was born mostly out of Youtube and Reddit. Reddit I've successfully cut out of my life, Youtube is more difficult to do because much of modern culture happens there. But I've drawn the line at the worst offenders. In tech, people like Dave2D and Marques Brownlee have managed to avoid having stupid thumbnails, so I'd rather watch them. Thereafter, I have a CalmYoutubers.md file that has the (few) channels that I find are not idiotic, so I stick to them.
They only "work" if your only goal is to get clicks. Lots of literal toddlers and stupid adults will click on idiotic clickbait. Will they stay and watch the content? Will they understand it? Will they appreciate it? Or, will they just smash their fist at the screen when the next shiny obnoxious looking thing pops up or drool all over themselves until the next video auto-plays?
If all you care about are clicks and views and you don't give a shit about your audience you might as well just start posting disturbing videos of Elsa and pregnant Spider-man because as it turns out that WORKS also.
If on the other hand you respect your audience and don't want to mislead or annoy them with click-bait titles and irrelevant bullshit thumbnails then, yes you will get fewer clicks and views, but the smaller number of people viewing your videos will be people who clicked because they actually care about your content and not just because of bullshit clickbait. Those users will be thankful that your channel isn't polluted with the garbage that plagues so many other videos made by youtubers who don't care about anything but clicks.
Having and maintaining integrity is usually a little inconvenient, but it is also very much appreciated and people with integrity improve the spaces we share. Youtubers sacrificing their integrity for clicks and views isn't something they "have to do", it's just what they choose to do. If their content is actually worth watching then people will watch it without that crap, especially when it comes to an already well established channel like LTT. Don't make excuses for youtubers who care more about clicks and views than they do about their viewers or the quality of what they put out into the world.
You can always "respect your audience", but that won't pay the bills with Youtube's algorithms sadly.
It's not the world I want to live in, but it's the current reality.
I do agree it is annoying. Some people do it quite a lot with car work videos to make the car look in far worse than it is.
I do this instead: When a thumbnail and/or title is displayed on my screen feels like some variation of spammy clicky ragebait, I use the 3-dot menu and pick "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel".
Nowadays, that kind of stuff is pretty much just gone.
This has certainly nuked whole channels (and also entire categories) from my youtube feed, and that suits me just fine. I need my life to be encumbered neither by clickbait, nor by the subset of creators that are compelled to generate it in the first place.
There's more good, interesting, non-bait content created every day than any person has time to consume. The herd is plenty big enough to be culled.
I think I'll be OK without watching videos -- at all -- from people who are working to jam the cock of influence as hard as possible into whatever they can.
It is my own opinion that a creator who deliberately creates a bad thumbnail and a baited title is a bad creator, and that (by extension) I do not wish to consume their content.
There's plenty of other fish in the sea that aren't introducing themselves to me with one or more damned lies. I'm pleased to go watch what they're doing, instead.
Also a bad thumbnail isn't a damned lie. Clickbait usually just means vague and flashy.
My Youtube feed has an amazing abundance of great content. I'm learning stuff with it all the time from creators that aren't prima facie lying scumbags.
Others are free to keep the likes of Scotty Killmer and Linus employed. That's fine.
They're dead to me, and I do not miss them in my life.
Though when I go look at the last big bunch of LTT videos I don't see any lies? Scotty Killmer I can find some lies pretty fast. "New Law Will Put You in Jail for Driving Your Car" for example.
This discussion is over. You do you.
Any other app, you leave a video paused, the OS screensaver will come on. Those beautiful, aerial screensavers that are better than any screensaver I've ever seen in all my decades of working with computers. So of course the Youtube app had to block them with their own shitty variant. They have no taste and no respect.
(Although it's on a 5 minute timer which might be short enough to pre-empt everything else.)
The fact that they would ever think that was possibly an OK thing to do though shows you how brain dead they are.
Even with the missing “ (Part 2!)” added, that’s still only 68 characters. I would probably begrudgingly call this long, but I would definitely not call it “really long”—my threshold for that would be at least 90 characters.
If they’re truncating around 60 characters, I’m content to call it unreasonable.
I agree in the abstract it’s a perfectly reasonable title. It should absolutely be readable.
But it’s not. Because the app sucks.
They could use their fancy AI to generate shorter titles.
YouTube making up a shorter title would be so much worse...
Damn it, I still appear to be on 4.51.08/web_20251117_11_RC00 with no indication that there's a new version. Not looking forward to any updates...
> The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
I sometimes wonder if YouTube is a weird kink cult that gets off on people complaining about the ridiculously user-hostile decisions they make. Because it's either that or they're an evil troll cult that aims to make life just that little bit less pleasant for as many people as possible.
That’s not an option. And if it was? I wouldn’t want to use it.
Not sure why you would rely on an AppleTV or any bespoke streaming device. It's effectively a service. If you like it right now, it will be worse in a few weeks, months, or years. Eventually it will be unsupported even though the hardware still works fine. You don't own it an it'll just be made worse by the different incentives of the hardware provide and the media streaming companies.
If somebody disagrees with the above post, then get off your arse and type a fucking rebuttal. Don't lazily click downvote.
'Drive-by' downvoting so is turning this place into another reddit.... and yes this is true, no matter how cliched a comment the admins consider it to be.
Dedicated remote-oriented apps usually do improve upon that user experience.
But does it have to be an app that runs within Apple TV's walled garden?
With a $20 Android streamer box (like the one sold under Wal-Mart's in-house ONN brand), a person can install SmartTube and watch ad-free YouTube with a configurable glitz-free remote-oriented interface and SponsorBlock. (If it dies or something better comes along, it was only $20. $20 doesn't buy very many cheeseburgers these days.)
[1]: There have been attempts to improve the WWW's sofa experience, perhaps with WebTV being the largest effort. And I've sat down with a trackpad-equipped wireless keyboard and run Firefox on some manner of television-connected computing device at various times. It's always pretty severely lacking compared to browsing the web with a laptop, desktop, or pocket supercomputer. Even though it's ostensibly almost exactly the same thing, it just never really flows well at all: It's worse than using a computer and also worse than using a TV remote in ways that compound with eachother.
If they worked for me, they'd learn fast or wouldn't work for me for long.
The direction of your swipe no longer matters. All the app does is interpret wherever your finger _lifts up_ as a _directional tap_ on that side of the trackpad. So you can't do nice smooth accelerated swiping like it works _everywhere else in tvOS_; you can only use the remote as a bad D-pad.
It works so well I’ve gotten at least half a dozen neighbours to do the same. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a definitive step up in UX.
UBlock Origin Lite pulled from the Firefox extensions after being flagged for policy violation, now only available from GitHub.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/197#issueco...
EDIT: But yeah, the Mozilla reviewers are very hostile, also had to fight with them for one of my add-ons. It's ridiculous that spam and malware add-ons get a pass but privacy-conscious add-ons get rejected.
Which is fully in their right, I’m not complaining, it’s not like I’m any worse off (waiting on a black screen vs waiting while some bullshit ad tells me to CoNsUmE PrOduCt!!!)
I have found, and this might just be psychological, that if I hit pause, wait a second, then play, the video starts playing within a few seconds.
I’m really shooting myself in the foot right now aren’t I.
1Blocker and Wipr on mobile. Plain old Orion by Kagi on my Mac.
I get a very unopinionated but effective music player that has all the music I need, and it doesn't try very hard to "upsell" itself to me unlike Spotify because to Google YouTube is the real money driver.
So to me getting no YouTube ads as well is well worth it.
Premium viewcount is grossly over valued by the people who pay for it, because they need to justify their sunk cost. I doubt most content creators even track it because the difference is minimal. We're talking a few bucks a month, tops.
I remember when youtube premium first came out and YT pimped this trope super hard. Then it came to light that the difference is basically nothing because most people don't pay for premium.
I watch ten creators. I divide $10 per month between them evenly. They each get $1 per month.
Or:
I pay for YouTube premium. It costs $10 per month. I watch ten creators. The $10 goes to YouTube.
I make the following assumptions:
* YouTube only takes a portion of that $10
* YouTube divides the remaining money evenly across the creators I watch (10)
Each creator gets less than $1 per month
Which gives the creators more revenue?
No, they don’t. How are you magically sending them this money? They all signed up for that method? And it doesn’t charge a minimum transfer fee?
You’re unserious.
That's not the point and you know it.
They're not getting the payment for the video either way.
Morally I don't see how they aren't equivalent. I'm not going to stand on a high horse saying you shouldn't do either, but I don't really see how you can pretend one is less harmful to creators than the other, in terms of the basic principles involved.
"the payment for the video" as if it's a given that my ad impression is required for me to watch some video that they made available to me on their website for free.
Morally, YouTube shows the most heinous and scummy ads 24/7 on their platform and fails to take them down when reported. Gambling, AI sex games, "cure what doctors miss" ads for human use of Ivermectin - it's your moral duty to block them.
YouTube does not ask for payment, it sends the video data you want alongside some bullshit you’ll ignore and waste precious human time doing so.
Ad blocking just involves offloading the ignoring to the computer, as it should, since computers are meant to automate menial tasks.
But I think people don't get the fact that they can just request payment or only send to authenticated users from authorized IPs and so on. Instead they want to send to all IPs without payment but then get upset when I use a bunch of IPs without paying. Weird.
I'm trying to read a bunch of stuff. The entire point of a computer is to make that easy. I'm not going to repetitively click through a bunch of links when a bot can do that way faster.
It already sounds like you're using several IPs to access sites, which seems like a work around to someone somewhere trying to limit the use of one IP (or just lack of desire to host and distribute the data yourself to your various hosts).
Just because you can do something doesn't mean everyone must accept and like that you are doing that thing.
GP is absolutely right. If your server is just going to send me traffic when I ask I’m just going to ask and do what I want with the response.
Your server will respond fine if I click through with different IPs and it’s just a menial task to have this distribution of requests to IPs, which is what we made computers for.
Yeah, you’re right of course that no one has to like the “piracy” or “scraping” or whatever other name you’re giving to a completely normal request-response interaction between machines. They can complain. And I can say they’re silly for complaining. No one has to like anything. Heck you could hate ice cream.
A personal website is like a community cupboard or an open access water tap, people put it out there for others to enjoy but when the reseller shows up and takes it all it's no longer sustainable to provide the service.
Of course, it's all a spectrum: from monster corporations that build in the loss to their projections and participate in wholesale data collection and selling to open websites with no ads or limited ads as a sort of donation box; from a person using css/js to block ads or software to pirate for cheaper entertainment to an AI scrapper using swathes of IPs and servers to non-stop request all the data you're hosting for their own monetary gain. I have different opinions depending on where on the spectrum you are. But I do think piracy and ad blocking are on the same spectrum, and much closer to acceptable than mass AI scraping.
These responses were more about your comments about AI scraping then the piracy vs ad blocking conversation, but in my opinion the gap between them and scraping is quite large.
If blocking ads is permissible because the server cannot control the client but can control itself; then so is “scraping”. Both services ask of their clients something they cannot enforce. And both find that the clients refuse.
If you find the justification valid but decide that the conclusion is nonetheless absurd, you must find which step in the reasoning has a failure. The temptation is epicyclic: corporations vs humans or something of the sort; commercial vs non-commercial.
But on its own there is no justification. It’s just that your principles lead you to absurdity but you refuse to revisit them because you like taking from others but you don’t like when others take from you. A fairly simple answer. Nothing for Occam’s Razor to divide.
Particularly believable because the arrival of AI models trained on the world seems to have coincided with some kind of copyright maximalism that this forum has never seen before. Were the advocates of the RIAA simply not users yet?
Or, more believably, is it just that taking feels good but being taken from feels bad?
I stated that the open internet as a whole is the commons, not any specific person's pet project, and thus, that AI scraping (or any bulk scraping done commonly and wholesale) makes it untenable for most people to keep participating. Twitter for example has gone your preferred way, mostly requiring authentication to access. There are many arguments on HN about whether that's a good move, or even a move that others could take and expect success. And that's a huge platform. Just recently there have been front page posts on HN about bringing back personal blogs, and also posts about how personal blogs not behind the great wall of Cloudflare led to TBs of "false" traffic because of scrapers, which costs real money.
I stated I think piracy, ad block, and AI scraping to be part of the same spectrum. I think the justification for ad blocking has a much lower level of burden than the justification for AI scraping to the point you need multiple IPs and argue for whitelisting as the only option to stop it, because of the amount of effect you are having.
Much like how bandwidth has different levels of payment if you use less than 100 MB or more than 1 TB, or how delivering a package that weighs 10 lbs is way cheaper than a package that weighs 1000 lbs, or how at some level of effort times repetition it makes sense to automate something programmatically vs just doing it manually. There are of course situations where each makes sense, but the expectations can vary, and the results are not always linear depending on the inputs. This all completely ignores the social aspect of it that can add a whole new layer of complexity that has it's own logic.
Scraping (or access without ads eg ad blockiing, or outside sharing of data eg piracy) has always been complained about by those that have data that people want to scrape, eg airlines or hbo or disney, it's just that now all data is data that is being scraped absolutely non-stop to the detriment of many and the gain of few that everyone has a reason to complain. It also explains why people have differing opinions.
I realise that online ads have other implications such as tracking that, say, a blu-ray rip downloaded from a torrent doesn't have, but the reason for piracy doesn't change the fact that it is.
This is a huge escalation of an already over-stuffed term.
Equating piracy to theft was bad enough, now choosing to not view ads is also piracy, which is theft?
I try to be chill here but no, foot down, absolutely not. Blocking ads is nothing more than determing what content comes in on the wire to the computer you own, or what content is rendered in your web browser. That's it. If that means someone isn't making money when they could be, well, too bad so sad.
It's like, "if you walk past a Nike store without pausing to hear the sales pitch, you are stealing from Nike." Capitalist hellscape.
Or are you going to pretend that there's no agreement between you and YouTube that you're going to watch ads in exchange for the free content?
Entering into a contract doesn't necessarily require you to sign a document. Quite a few contracts that we make every day require no formal acceptance, like entering a shop.
Google wants to show me ads. I don't want to see them. I demonstrated this by blocking them. Google continues to show me videos anyway. Clearly they're ok with the arrangement. They are free to present me with written terms, or gate all their videos behind a login, but they choose not to do so.
You are either very confused or playing stupid for some reason that I don't understand, but it isn't amusing or cute. This will probably earn me a dang warning but I don't really care - you are full of shit. You're making claims all over this thread that you've literally just made up.
I disagree. If you were buying every advertised product and falling for every advertised scam then fair enough. But assuming you were ignoring them, there is no issue with offloading the thing you would do anyway to a computer and save everyone the time/bandwidth.
That said, a lot of advertising is not performance/pay-per-click focused as you've described and is instead brand advertising. The point of the Coca-Cola christmas ads is not to get you to buy a coke today, it's to have a positive impression that builds over years. This sort of advertising is very hard to attribute sales to, but a good example of how you don't need to buy a product for seeing the ad to be worth something to the company.
If both of those are legal and ethical (I’d be curious what argument someone would make against this), then offloading this work to a machine should be just as ethical.
It's fine if you're OK with it, but don't pretend that you're not doing that.
You seem like you have a robin hood complex or something similar.
its not some secret that some % of viewers, block ads.. either you lean into it and utilize it, or you pretend people should be obligated to only watch your videos by paying or watching ads, in that case find a new platform.
Are you watching creators who don't share such sentiments? You should consider that the creators who make large sums from youtube ad rev are the absolute worst quality you can find. People like Mr Beast or Logan Paul. It primarily means you are slinging garbage every single day and literally hurting people for money, because that's what google's algorithm optimizes for. Google wants to burn you out churning out slop despite the fact that youtube is already significantly overfilled.
Meanwhile, all those youtube creators who made their living doing high quality animation a couple decades ago? Youtube killed their business by fiat because different content was more profitable for them. Multiple very prominent and influential animators who go all the way back to the early Newgrounds days were forced out of their job by that change.
The entire reason Youtube creators started taking sponsorships is because Google has repeatedly reduced their advertising payouts, by staggering amounts. Several times Google killed entire swaths of the smaller content industry simply because they felt like taking more of the money. They can do this because there are no alternatives.
The reason Floatplane and Nebula and friends exist is entirely because Youtube constantly punishes you for making Non-Mr Beast content, and repeatedly cuts how much money you get per hour of watched content, with no warning or justification even offered.
The creators I watch do not want me to watch them on youtube. They want me to watch them on Nebula, Floatplane, and Patreon. This includes many channels that predate Youtube being bought by Google, and ads existing on the service at all.
Several of these creators, especially the animators, were prominent on Newgrounds, and made zero dollars from their work. Most of them have day jobs or other avenues of monitizing their talents, like touring or merch or music.
Youtube added a feature to compete with Patreon where you can pay to be a "member" of a channel, and that channel can produce "members only" videos that you can only watch if you pay that channel money. Just recently, Youtube, without any warning or checking with creators or asking opinions started forcing those videos in front of users who are not members, and cannot see them, polluting feeds and making it harder to select the next video you want to watch and creators, including LTT, are adamantly against this and do not want it
Youtube does not GAF what creators want, never has, and is almost always a hostile and adversarial entity in the relationship. I am not screwing over the creators by blocking ads, Google is screwing over the creators to take more profit from those ads.
A summary is not the same as the content either, that's a fairly well tested concept (fair use, etc).
Installing an ad-blocker in your browser and never seeing an ad while consuming hours of content for free, depriving those creators of revenue, depriving the platform of revenue to support your usage of it, is in no way comparable to these at-the-margin contrived examples.
the creators are posting their content on a free platform, with hopes that it will generate enough views so that enough of those viewers are ad watching viewers so that they will gain revenue. you're acting like the view is 100% meaningless and ONLY a bad thing, and its quite the opposite.
the "free" view costs the creator literally nothing, and it gains them an additional view, if its a good video its potentially gonna help spread the video elsewhere where maybe they can find some suckers to mindlessly consume ads.
and lets be real, the platform you are "depriving of revenue" is google... they operated ad free to create massive market capture to create the current monstrosity that is youtube in 2025, think they can't cut off all users that block ads right now? there is a reason they aren't doing so.
In a newspaper if I skip over ads with my eyes do you think I've marginalized/pirated/stolen from the business that paid for the ad? They paid for placement and not an impression. I'd argue that if YouTube presents the ad and my browser/app/whatever skips it then YouTube satisfied its obligation and that's where it ends. The advertiser, knowing full well the limitations of the access mechanism, made a choice to throw money into this version of the attention economy. It's obviously worth it to them or they wouldn't do it, or haven't made as careful of an economic decision as I would imagine I suppose.
Another way to look at it is additive rather than subtractive. If I visit a site with a text only browser that cannot display ads, what is your position then? And if I then implement the ability for my browser to play only the main video on any page, what then?
When it comes down to it, we have no obligation to view the content on a webpage the way the publisher of said webpage wants us to. You can think of plenty of other examples that make "adblocking is piracy" ridiculous - I invert the colors but the publisher doesn't want me to see it with inverted colors. I wear sunglasses while looking at it, which changes the way it looks. Maybe the site I use always puts an ad in the same place so I stick a bit of tape on my monitor in that location, is that bad?
This was such a problem for Youtube that they flirted with banning linking to Patreon or suggesting viewers go to it. Not because it was taking money from google, but because it was money being paid not to google.
Then Google competed by adding their own form of Patreon built into the system, and creators liked that and embraced it, and recently Youtube abused the membership system to pollute non-member's screens with videos they could not watch without paying, and creators did not want this, but Youtube does not care what creators want.
The people who make most of their money from Youtube ad-rev are the worst the platform has to offer. They are beholden to the algorithm, so they have to put out slop every single day, and make the most aggressive A/B tested clickbait they can manage, and even pay to advertise their video on other channels and videos, and they are all better off on TikTok anyway.
It's things like Five Minute Crafts and their made up videos.
Patreon pays out $300m total across everything people use it for per year.
Not even close in scale.
Is this the way YouTube ads work? If I don’t load the ad, is someone paying?
You might as well argue that covering your ears during a TV advertisement is piracy. That's a strange definition of the word if I ever saw one.
I feel like OP isn't asserting anything even remotely controversial in that definition lol
What the guy was saying is that circumventing payment to watch a movie = pirating, and it seems like you're saying that's not the case. It seems you're saying that people saying "pirating" are referring circumventing payment and distributing, which is not at all what the majority of people mean by pirating.
Pirating != distribution for the vast majority of how people use that word - it means consuming the media without paying for it.
literally OP:
> "watch free movies online" and find a site streaming bad DVD rips
I'm not actually sure what you're issue is at this point. In the US, if someone says they're going to "pirate a movie" they are assuredly not talking about how they are going to be the one distributing the movie, just consuming it - whether that's on a "streaming" site or just downloaded and watched locally.
It seems like your argument is that "piracy" is much more specific than how people actually use the word. SO it's a semantics thing, and that's really fucking stupid lol
This is redistributing.
The advertiser may well think that's what they're buying, but what they're actually getting is the right to send my browser a URL, which they hope I will fetch and view.
I would prefer not to, so I don't.
Edit: oh, I see you work at Google.
Perhaps not literally, as in on the financial books.
But certainly in leadership "values".
A data point is TiVo who are, apparently, still around and have a 'skip ads' button on recorded content.
I am allowed to splice up my personal copies of videos.
But in this case you don't have one in the first place.
Legally able to watch and legally able to splice up are at the same level, as far as copyright is concerned. And I don't even need to make an extra copy to do the kind of live splicing an ad blocker does.
This ship sailed when adblockers first went mainstream. (One of the early developers dropped their product because they thought it was unethical.)
I think we’ve now moved to the consensus that adblocking when viewing content isn’t pirating. It’s similar. But not the same, in intent, mechanism or effect.
So it is a payment?!? Through out the last decades advertisement has not been liable under customer protection laws that regulate sales of products, and generally avoided local laws. The stated reason has been that advertisement is not a sale since the viewer is not recompensating the publisher. A product given for free is in a completely different category of law than that of a sale.
Im old enough to remember when phone companies tried the tactic of giving away mobile phones for free, but which carried a binding contract with the carrier. Courts found that to be illegal and forced companies to sell them for 1 cent since a free product can not have a binding contract, which turned the transaction into a sale. The outcome of that meant that information of the full cost must be given to the customer in no unclear terms, since we are now dealing with a sale.
Products given for free with advertisement is also exempted in EU from value added tax. The given reason (can't find the original legal source) was that viewers may watch nothing, some or all the advertisement, and that makes putting a monetary value and taxing it difficult. If you buy a subscription it can be taxed, but watching it free with adds do not. This is true for both physical and non-physical goods.
Piracy involves you deciding to acquire content that has not been made freely available.
I don't really use YouTube, but when ads play on random videos and it irritates me, I just close my eyes, the simplest version of content-blocking. (If the ad is painfully loud, I may also cover my ears in contexts where this is not extremely socially awkward)
Can we say it's immoral for me to close my eyes? Can someone's business model be the basis of an argument that it's immoral for me to exert this simple bodily function?
Is there some contract that I've signed where people have the right to my attention in any context? If they've based their business model on the assumption that this consent exists, and it does not, is it fair to say that the business model should fail?
consumer: I want to fill my content hole with content someone made through hard work right now and for free and how dare they delay that by 5 seconds after which I can press Skip. I will employ sophisticated tricks and run untrusted code in my browser to work around that delay.
also consumer: I will totally not be pissed at all if there is no free content for me anymore. Their business model should fail because I did not consent to ads. How dare anyone consider and live within an objectively true reality that things have costs?
Is not you since you said you don't use youtube. but it is what many youtube users seem to think.
if tomorrow youtube decides only paid subscribers can view videos... do they maintain that market share?
Did I just pirate my drive to work?
These are honest questions and it seems way too fuzzy to me to be making moral judgments about the whole mess.
I think one does have the right to block ads on one’s machine if one chooses.
However, personally, because of the “if ad blocking was universalized, the services I appreciate would likely not exist” reasoning, I choose not to block ads.
As for other things like “muting/covering ads on screen”, yeah, that does seem a bit fuzzy. Sometimes I’ll even use a browser extension to fast forward an ad somewhat.
I do think this is something for the individual to decide how they will deal with ads. When I mute an ad, I don’t think I’m really free riding? For one thing, I don’t think it is contrary to the expectations of those being sold the ad slot. Me fast forwarding the ads a bit probably is contrary to their expectations, so I don’t have as good justification for it, but I don’t feel like I’m cheating when I do it. (Or, if I do, it is because the particular ad is objectionable enough that I’m willing to stick it to the advertiser)
It's the same mistake libertarians make when they assume a fully informed and rational society.
It's not a way to model reality, terrible or otherwise. That’s not what it purports to do.
How how-well-things-work depends on the number of people doing a thing, varies from thing to thing. For some things, as long as one or more people behave in a particular way, a thing goes well. For other things, if even one person does a particular thing, things go badly. And there are plenty of situations in between.
These different situations call for different responses, I think.
If their copyright monitoring algorithm recognises the tracks being performed and the licence holders have opted to receive a share of ad revenue rather than issue a takedown notice, then I think the answer might well be yes.
I never claimed that ads can't be profitable; I was responding to a commenter who implied that ads are necessary in order to have a viable streaming business, which is very obviously not the case.
I'm paying for Youtube Premium, but its a plain utilitarian decision after they started hassling me with captchas and intimidations that someone at my IP address was using an ad blocker. So yeah, I'm paying protection money. But I don't feel in the least good about it.
I am not Google's accountant. They can figure it out.
> In 2024 the company made a revenue of $350.01 Billion USD
Now assuming that let's check how much it costs to host/recode/stream stuff. How dare companies want to profit right?
The outcome for me is identical. I don't see an ad, and I won't buy something.
It's the same reason why DVR recording was never piracy. It's the same thing as if I watched the show, except the DVR does it.
The difference is you still see the beginning of the ad and some people see a big part of it because they don't have the habit of muting and looking away out of fear of missing the beginning of the video for example.
> The outcome for me is identical. I don't see an ad, and I won't buy something.
You still see the beginning of the ad. Whether you buy something or not is not always what the ad is trying to do sometimes it's just raising awareness
[citation needed]
You're saying no content would be created if there were no payments?
Have you never met a real artist?
99% of internet content is complete crap, the equivalent of email spam, that only exists because each piece makes a few dollars a month from ads. On the old internet, without ads, there was plenty of useful content and much less spam.
And the spam crowds out good content, as seen in recipe sites for example.
If they were unable to gain any revenue from advertising, they would go out of business if they could not find an alternative source of income.
I feel that they are more likely to find an alternative than go out of business. That alternative might not motivate people to make content that no-one wants and trick viewers into watching. If it were a system where the users being happy dictated their income perhaps the service might be better than a system where the happiness of advertisers defines how much they get
Similar reason to why DVR recording is not pirating.
Metaphors are dangerous, but, for the purposes of this specific comparison, I see piracy as breaking into a video store and taking a disc, and ad blocking as allowing some people into my house but not others.
YouTube is free to block me as a user or put its content behind a paywall if it doesn't like me doing this, but I am also free to decide what comes into my browser.
2. I don't care.
I choose what code runs on my machine, not Google. Google can run their own code on their own machines, that's fine. Once data is in my processor, I'm going to do what I want with it. Google doesn't have to concern themselves with what I'm doing on my own computer.
Simply re-asserting your opinion doesn't lend any extra weight to your argument. If both sides just repeat their opinions, that's not a discussion.
Whatever, you already said you don't care about actual rational discourse and regard everyone else as (un)paid actors, so this is pointless.
Guys, please disable your adblockers
People disable adblockers
Malware!
When they provide all the equipment necessary to watch the content, and pay for the internet connection and power to my house, only then will they have a claim to what commands are run on my computer.
But my computer, that I paid for, using the power and bandwidth that I pay for, does not play ads.
If they don't like those terms, they can feel absolutely free to not send me any content they don't want me to watch.
Because the payment method is a scam. Imagine if all car owners were charged the same price for fuel regardless of how much they used.
Likewise, imagine watching 10 videos and being charged the same as someone who watches 200 videos.
We should pay for what we watch. The end. Ad blocking is not piracy when the payment option is at best a blunt extraction of funds from my wallet, at worst a sleazy shakedown.
Without an ad blocker I can stand up and walk to the next room - optionally muting audio output - then come back.
Is that fraud? Or should I drink a verification can?
You can say that we should not be blocking those ads, that is fine. But blocking ads is not making unauthorised copies of the content.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_N...
But sure... they're all clearly are "trillion-dollar analytics empire"
Once a year choose 3 small youtubers (larger ones are already multi-millioners, they don't need your help) and drop them $5 each.
Now you just did 1000% of what they could get from you watching ads.
It's wild how low the payout on ads is. Seriously, just flip people $1 every once in a while and it's more support than ads.
It's so stupid how people get all morally superior when they figure out that someone block ads.
how can you confidence with being so wrong btw ????
Ads bringing more money than donation ever would be
The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play.
If this is the premium experience then I don't want it.
This is the same stuff you get without buying Premium. So I guess they figure you're only paying to dodge the ads.
Which seems, to me, like a lot of money compared to (ad cost * number of ads you would see).
At this point ads are just one of the annoyances amoung so many others.
So, for health reasons, I block nearly all advertisements. It is a HUGE mental health win. There is a ton of research behind this, as well.
I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern. I'll block ads instead. I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health.
I will always happily directly support content creators. I will not watch ads.
Is this the same way of saying your mental health is important to you but you're not prepared to pay a service money to protect said mental health and support creators you like?
Honest question: Why? You do pay for toothpaste, right? If you have a gym membership, you pay extra for the convenience not to do cardio in the woods (which is great in late May, much less so in late November). You tend to pay more for nutritious food as compared to things you get at a fast food joint.
What makes a health concern related to $genericOnlineService different?
Paying for things that help you is good. Paying someone not to try to scam you is… fucked up.
If you know a platform is not good for you, AND you are negatively affected by it ... the right move is not to use it.
Cool!
“And a side of literal shit, plus a slip of paper with the number of my cousin who’ll try to swindle you”
… coo… ool.
Quietly tosses the shit and phone number in the trash, keeps the free food
You will never walk alone.
If you turn off history, you get zero videos on your home screen. This is not because the history is needed to generate the suggestions, because the blank home only started a few years ago.
I used to never subscribe to any channels, I just got reasonable feed of suggestions based off of whatever I happened to search for explicitly or if I got there by clicking a link, or by what I chose to click on even if the list starts out totally random, except of course it never was totally random because they still have ip address and other fingerprnting signals.
After they blaked out the home screen and started showing the "you're not logged in, go here to fix this error", I subscribed to a bunch of channels to provide data for generating a feed. They still don't provide any. You can take extra clicks (which is agonizing on the Roku since it just doesn't react well and misses button presses all the time) to get to the subscriptions page, which will show recent uploads exactly from those channels and no others.
I also still get several other forms of ads in the form of the embedded/native ads and the irrelevant suggestions that come from youtube's interests instead of my own, like shorts. I also still get ads simply because I don't get to use my own account all the time. When you watch youtube anywhere but your own laptop by yourself, you are at the whims of someone else's account and some other platforms app limitations.
And even on your own machine, I absolutely resent having to tie my viewing history to my identity and have someone else log all of that. So there is reason to intentionally use no account even if you otherwise have no problem paying to support not only the content producers but even the delivery system.
Why can't I disable shorts? There is no amount I can pay to hide all shorts, but I can have it for free i=on a pc with a tampermonkey or ublock script. But that only helps on a pc. I watch mostly on a TV and I have no ability to hack the roku app. Maybe if I switch to a google tv I could use newpipe or something.
Paying for premium does not make youtube good. It does not resolve much of anything. It is not remotely the touche this smarmy comment attempts to suggest.
Paying for premium takes youtube from being like pulling out 10 of your fingernails to only pulling out 8 of your fingernails.
That 2of10 fingernals relief and for the sake of the creators, that's the only reason I still pay for premium.
Use the money you save to buy a media pc that can block shorts to use to watch youtube on the tv.
It is not yet painful enough for me to invest time and energy to research less convenient ways of UX improvement. Not ... yet.
If I'm paying, I expect the best possible experience, and you just don't get that. It's not just YouTube, many streaming services are objectively inferior to pirating.
it complains about youtube app being separated into parts or smth like that
Things like a cheap $5 fan being sold for $60 as roughly: "Super efficient A/C that will save you $100s on your electricity bill and can cool a room down in just minutes"
Enshittification continues
This week, an instructional video I was watching on how to repair my water heater was suddenly interrupted by a campy ad for pussy-hair razors.
It was so ill-timed, bizarre, and inappropriate I burst out laughing.
The other one I was seeing a lot of, until very recently, was pornographic static ads that were implemented as an optical illusion. If you viewed it at full scale it was an innocuous image of a closet or chair or something, so it passed all checks, but when scaled into a thumbnail, it turns into a silhouette of a woman giving oral or something else obscene. Not sure what this technique is called or how it's done. (It's not a schooner, it's a sailboat.)
Downscaling/downsampling attack.
Commonly used against AI systems either to pass filters or poison data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02456
If you know the sampling rate of the sampling filter you want to pass you can do some tricky encoding to show a different image at that particular resolution bypassing AI/content recognition systems. This said if it starts happening a lot Google will take those images/videos and feed them into a learning system that looks for those patterns and preemptively marks the video.
I do a cryptic crossword from a free UK newspaper most days, because my Dad (many thousands of miles away), also does the same crossword and we can bond over good and bad clues, and so on.
The banner ad on that page is always Temu. It always, always looks pornographic. And then you look closer, and it's completely innocuous.
I have assumed that the alogrithm is just optimising for attention, and it just so happens those images, at that scale, are going to get a lot of attention. But it does mean I can't show somebody else the crossword I'm doing for fear of looking like a degenerate pervert, and I am at risk of causing an issue if I play it on public transport.
Claiming that (youtube) ads are bad is a tautology at this point. What else can be expected from something competing for what is left of a user's attention at the very lowest end of a market already overflooded with crud?
The question should rather be: why would one voluntarily let one's well-being be polluted by such invasive, parasitic crap.
There is nothing normal about ads everywhere. There is nothing healthy about ads everywhere. Ads are not an inevitability.
Run an ad-blocker, protect your mental sanity.
Ads are not an inevitability.
The only problem is that it will be fought tooth and nail by the incumbents, that "incidentally" also control all the propaganda diffusion channels needed to brainwash us into refusing such a change.
It would take a radical shift in humanity to get this far.
A man can dream.
I propose a new natural law: every medium that can carry advertisements, will.
Exhibit A: gasoline pumps. Why do those have ads? I'm already paying for gas. And I can't even run away.
YT needs a button to the effect of "I will never, ever, EVER, buy or use this product, stop spending money on this ad"
the obviously-AI created slop or the mobile games that I will never play, etc. is just a waste of time for basically everyone (except YT making that money, I guess)
Swears (recently backed down somewhat on this)
Anything to do with guns at all, whether you are right wing or vocally and loudly left wing.
Mummmifying a chicken on a science channel gets you demonitized.
Chemistry that results in an explosion.
Fucking any footage of any war ever so no WW2 history videos, no videos educating you about previous genocides or war crimes or crimes against humanity, you can't show pictures of the holocaust or Armenian genocide no matter how educational your content is.
A highlight reel compiled exclusively from clips pulled from your previous videos that were not demonitized will get demonitized, and when you reach out to your dedicated account manager because you are that big, they say "that shouldn't have happened" and promise you to fix it and that it will never happen again, which you take to hear, and then you produce a new highlight reel the next year following the same procedure it again gets demonitized so you reach out to your account manager again and they apologize profusely and say they will fix it and then every single video on your channel gets demonitized and your account is suddenly in peril for doing something that your account manager told you to do.
You are a channel that shows pictures of planes and documents and talks about the development of these aircraft. One day your channel is suddenly scheduled for deletion because you are a "content mill". This is an utterly baseless accusation that would take five minutes of watching your content to dispel, but you still are left waiting until T-1 for an actual human to look and turn off the "Purge you" schedule.
It's just absurd. Sure, the racists are pissed they can't put hate content on youtube, but lets not pretend they should be the only ones. "Forgotten Weapons" is just a gun centric antiques roadshow but "selling guns" is explicitly against policy, and all the things with guns that aren't against policy "weirdly" also get demonitized all the time.
A reminder that "demonitization" on youtube is also what gets your video not recommended to anyone to watch, including your literal subscribers (yes even if you clicked the fucking bell)
Note that Youtube provides an entire set of tooling and functionality to automatically A/B test thumbnails and titles, yet claims in their community guidelines that you should not use "A thumbnail that misleads viewers to think they’re about to view something that’s not in the video" so they just DGAF
https://rumble.com/vt62y6-covid-19-a-second-opinion.html
https://rumble.com/v28x6zk-sasha-latypova-msc.-nsa-team-enig...
(and so on; many other links)
I don't understand the reluctance of people to click Rumble links. I'd love to link you to stuff on Youtube but TPTB have decided you're not allowed to see it (this should be a very narrow category of things and those I linked and others absolutely should be allowed)
This is when they're doing outright censorship too and not just demonetization
They're a criminal cartel
Which is the primary problem of any youtube policy: It's not real, because they treat the output of some underspecced ML model as gods truth.
There was a period where you could not say the word covid without getting downranked, even in passing
Even if you believe it was important to limit the spread of misinformation about covid, youtube did not do that, and made things worse
I don't like Rumble, but Brandon Herrera I think has created a new platform specifically for Guntubers, and I don't very much like the man's content but I hope it succeeds because the policies around guns are just absurd and broken, and generally do not even remotely match the claimed policy.
Similarly, the guy from Armchair Historian tried to go his own way, but I think that failed.
The problem is not "any moderation", or "the left", like rumble seems to think. The problem is that Google's claimed policies are not their actual policies, and their claimed policies are fairly stupid and restricted for all audiences, especially if you aren't American, and are driven entirely by advertiser preferences and dice rolls.
I pray you don't work for FAANG and have your thumbs on the scales and I stand by everything I said
1. Go to youtube.com in the browser, play the video, switch back to the home screen. Video playback will stop, which is a good default behavior.
2. Swipe down from the top of the screen which brings up "Notification Center" which somewhat strangely contains a playback control for the browser.
3. Press play. Audio resumes. If it's part of a playlist, you don't have to manually advance, it will play automatically.
No ads, no youtube premium subscription, no "desktop mode", no sideloading, no additional apps other than the beloved ad blocker.
Ad blockers help with the constant nagging about "open in the app!"
I let Brave run in the background and it seems to work fine.
And they don't want to go through alternative workarounds to do so.
For me, it's actually just being able to easily share premium with other users in my household, so that I don't have to have my ears blasted with ads when they open YT on the TV. Less effort than playing around with things like pihole and hoping it doesn't break other things.
It would have been amazing value had Youtube Music, which came with YouTube Premium were half decent. But it is not. We got Spotify which isn't perfect, and then Apple Music, which for years didn't know what they were doing, and then Youtube Music, which is basically a company doesn't give a damn about Music.
We now have three Giant companies over the history of the past 30 - 40 years, once they grow big that make junk.
You pay them money, they let you stream music and otherwise stay out of your way. I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty much ideal as far as I’m concerned.
It wasn't until about 2020 before they relented. But that ideal is still true with Apple Music today.
Even beyond Apple Music, considering the other competitors I legitimately don't know what the use case for Spotify is beyond social these days.
I’m not trying to be obtuse here. I really want to understand some sort of reasonable moral justification for actively avoiding paying for a service that you are using / circumventing the mechanism by which the business makes money.
This is generally of no interest to consumers.
You might like the content, but you don’t pay for a shit box anyways.
Go into the YouTube app, settings, manage all history, under the history tab hit Delete -> delete all time.
Then go to controls (still in the manage all history dialog box under settings), under YouTube history hit Turn off. It says “pausing…” Hit Pause, and Got it.
It’s been exactly 3 months since I did that. I still watch stuff from my subscriptions and when I search for something I want to watch. There are still recommended videos when you’re watching a video but they are a lot less enticing since they are not personally targeted. I curated my subscriptions so it’s more what I would want to spend time watching instead of reaction videos for instance. My actual time watching YouTube has dropped a lot.
https://www.youtube.com/robots.txt
User-agent: *
...
Disallow: /feeds/videos.xml
...I just deleted the all-time history and now the homepage is blank as you say.
I don't think they're really deleting your viewing history, else the homepage wouldn't have looked the way it did before I deleted "all time".
I have clicked "stop showing me Shorts" several times but they keep coming back, so I don't think the homepage works properly anyway.
EDIT:
On further consideration, I think what was happening with the homepage was that it was showing me videos related to channels that I subscribe to. (But not always videos from channels that I subscribe to).
However I don't see why they can't still do that even after I delete my all-time watch history? Not that I want them to.
But if you did want them to, you could probably turn watch history back on, click on any single video, and then turn it off again, and you'd probably have a home screen dictated by your subscriptions.
Or else they just ignore the setting and it's all a lie anyway.
I think so too. I turned my history back on and watched part of one video in order to make sure I had the steps right for clearing and disabling history again. In that time, after having at least 1 video in the history, the front page was like what you said. The first recommendation made me want to click on it. It was called "why c++ is terrible" or something like that. Cleared/disabled again and back to normal (blank home page).
And shorts, just let us turn them off in the subscription page exactly like the posts.
It’s utterly baffling that a multi-billion dollar video empire doesn’t provide much of an option to their users in terms of settings.
In a better world with an actual open web, we would not have to rely on the graces of the hosting company to offer us a better UI. Our browsers would act as true "User Agents" and render the web page in a way that is best for the user.
Browsers should be able to by default pick and choose what elements of a web page get rendered, without having to reach for extensions. Browsers should be able to render things in a different order, and easily allow the user to override things like styling, size and so on. Browsers should provide this kind of flexibility by default! They should not just be canvases following orders, for the web developer to program against the user's interests.
Instead, we just punted, and handed over all of the control to the web developer. Now they decide what gets shown and not shown. They decide the layout. They decide everything!
The number of times I clicked “show less” and it has zero effect on the number of shorts.
Given the success of TikTok, the answer is apparently, "billions of people", but I just don't get it.
Without autoplay there is no engagement once the video is over. With autoplay there is the risk someone leaves the player on the background and ignores it. With looping videos people get annoyed and (if they’re like me) close the tab or skip to the next video just to get something different
Wrong question.
The right question is: "Do we blindly copy Instagram?"
I have a redirect rule that redirects https://www.youtube.com/shorts/<video-id> to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<video-id>
There should absolutely be a better answer here.
I complain about it to Google. They ignore it. They couldn't possibly give a shit.
I should probably complain to my congressman. Who also won't do shit even if they actually give a shit.
There's a long history of people not using it. Most people today don't use it.
Shorts as a whole are incredibly addictive and have a much lower benefit to drawback ratio. Parents should be able to make this cost/benefit decision for their kids. I wish I could turn them off for myself. I settled on only using YouTube on my laptop because shorts don’t have the same appeal in that context.
In the Android app it's literally just one line, which I have to scroll down to... like two pages.
Worth a try.
But if you're in the same boat, at least use something that has an adblocker, like Brave, Vivaldi or Opera.
Settings -> media -> "Block YouTube Shorts".
There are also other settings related to YouTube. Brave is the only thing I'd use for YouTube on mobile.
Youtube Shorts? Crickets.
It's IMPOSSIBLE to disable it with parental controls and it has the exact same slop as the other vertical video services.
Which kinda sucks because I'm fine with my kids watching horizontal youtube videos by certain creators, but I'd rather not they have access to the infinite pool of shorts unfiltered.
On a 1080p monitor, my unmodified Subscriptions page currently has 6 fully-visible thumbnails, consisting of 3 livestreams from people I only subscribe to for videos, 1 watched video, 1 stream VOD (which I'll never watch), and 1 unwatched video, so that's a score of 1/6. Scroll down and you start getting into more watched videos, stream VODs, the unwanted Shorts shelf, thumbnails for Upcoming videos (i.e. videos which can't be watched), and videos from people I don't even subscribe to (via YouTube's recently-added Collaborations feature).
With everything in Control Panel for YouTube enabled and a minium of 5 videos per row configured, I have 15 unwatched or partially watched (up to a configurable %) videos every time. Same thing for Home, in which other things I don't want such as Mixes and Playlists can also be hidden.
It also tends to have fixes for the other things people rightfully complain about when YouTube comes up in these threads, such as (reads down the page) blocking ads and hiding promoted content, hiding Shorts everywhere, automatically switching to the original audio for auto-dubbed videos, hiding Related videos when they appear below the video pushing comments even further down, fixing the new oversized video controls and huge videos in the Related sidebar, etc. etc.
There’s your problem. You have normal hardware. The rich SV folks at google are probably all using 6k monitors. (only half joking)
Many of these violations of my sanity could be fixed with less than 50 tokens worth of code.
I didn't know I wanted 6 videos in a row, but now that I have it, it's so much better. Also linking youtube logo to subscriptions is great.
I'll give you an example. I'm super into game development. I also love the NBA. NBA videos are posted nearly every day and I click on them. Gamedev videos, not so often. So what do I get? Tons of NBA content because that's what I click on in my recommended. What I want, though, is for the recommendations to think about what I would _like_ to watch and not just what I _do_ watch. I think a curation site would help alleviate this problem, especially if I could steer it more than Youtube's.
On your personalized level: Don't let the algorithm work against you; instead, help it work for you. If you're being inundated with NBA videos and want fewer of them, then pick one or more of them and declare that you're "Not interested." This slows the flood of any over-abundant topic.
URLIST was really great for this sort of things but they never made enough money.
Back in my day on the cattle ranch, the cattle had unique magnetic identifiers on their ears. They put their head in the feeder and get fed only what the rancher wants each specific one to to eat.
Netflix's revenue is subscription based long form videos. That should be a viable business model. Instead, they seem to be willfully heading in the direction of serving slop to an audience that's not fully engaged. This road leads them into direct competition with YouTube and TikTok.
When my son moved out of the house recently, he went on the additional household plan. What struck me was that the user interface steered heavily toward the option that includes ads. We had to search for the small print to let him pay Netflix a few dollars more for the non-ads version.
In the late 90's and early 2000's there was a sense that ads were a reasonable tradeoff for free services on the internet. If the last 20 years have taught us anything, it's that the perverse incentives are a catastrophe.
Operates:
Pornhub
RedTube
YouPorn
Brazzers
Digital Playground Men.com
Reality Kings
SpankWire
I think there's another version that if porn adopts a tech that means that the tech will work. Like, a lot of VR adoption early on was porn. By a lot, I mean most.
Don't get me wrong you can play games like beat saber ala singstar or rockband taking turns but it's an order of magnitude more if you want the second "controller" and you need much more space. Let alone the equivalent of buying an extra TV for everyone you want to watch a movie with.
When you add on the ergonomics of the device which even with good setups mean you need "heavy" cabling or have limited runtime due to battery it's hard to recommend it to even mates who use their whole weekend on gaming.
That being said I have a Pimax 8k I bought second hand and VR is really an awesome experience when you're in it so it's easy to see why the excitement is still there. I'll also mention some of the extreme sports camera stuff is often 360 if not 3d which benefits from a headset.
Even on macs many are using scaling factors that render close to 1080p.
The issue really would be why YouTube can't bother managing more layouts. It still blows my mind there's only one single YouTube experience per platform, when their viewership basically span the world's population.
I feel more people would benefit from better screens even for their reports or excel work, but I wouldn't be holding my breath on most standard companies paying for it if there's no OSHA style law mandating it.
> battery life
I think we've reach a decent place, even the Surface Pro line with around 3K displays has double digit battery life for office type tasks.
YouTube has gotten worse with every release. Endless, pointless UI changes. Sneaky resolution downgrades. When your video says "Auto 1080p" it's like 480p quality, manually choose 1080p and watch it change.
Amazon has been working overtime to make your experience worse. The latest innovation is to eliminate invoices for US customers. This wasn't a mistake, as it was rolled out gradually over a few months, with workarounds quickly plugged as users become aware of them. Oh, there still is a "view invoice" button but it's just a redirect to order summary now.
Dark patterns galore since cancelling Prime. Every checkout flow I'm hit with a minimum of two clicks where I have to decline or change something. Ordering a packet of laundry soap feels like buying a used car.
The employees that implement this stuff dare to call themselves "engineers" yet their entire energy is devoted to making their customer's lives more miserable, which they are somehow paid a disgusting amount of money to go do.
Real engineers solve problems.
These people invent new problems to then go solve, likely because they are chasing their next promotion.
There's a lot of folx who got into this business for all the wrong reasons and we're now seeing the results of that on a massive scale.
If these changes are not hurting user metrics are they really making their lives miserable? When you are optimizing an experience for billions of users, numbers are the only thing you can trust.
I suspect there is no metric specifically answering the question "do users want [enshittification of the day]?"
There are probably plenty that measure success with dark patterns however, like viewership and engagement.
Classic example: reactions and watch time as measuring engagement. Leads to shittier content being promoted because the more garbage something is, the more outraged people will be.
And that's why Facebook has "optimized" itself to be as shitty of a platform as humanly possible.
The difference is stark. I use YouTube on the Apple TV to play mostly background videos; 8 hour AI generated lofi mixes, burning fireplaces, things like that. Ambiance. Its all that gets recommended now when I pull up the app; but only on the TV.
This behavior is somewhat desirable: but the issue is, the youtube apple TV app is an abhorrent experience that feels deeply tailored to stop you from getting to any content that is not expressly recommended. And these videos are all that get recommended. A new Linus Tech Tips video might be in my feed on desktop/mobile; but finding that video on the TV literally requires me to search "Linus Tech Tips" and go to their channel -> all videos.
I certainly don't mind the platform raising the prominence of videos I tend to watch on that platform; but to me it feels like I should be able to at least scroll down on the home page a bit to get a more "centralized" view into everything my account watches and would be recommended.
And it’s like Youtube thinks I only want to watch the last three genres at any moment. If I branch out, then it pops another favorite genre from the set.
Sometimes I’ll go months or even years forgetting about video genres I love until I randomly remember it.
Feels like a wasted opportunity, and it should have more in common with music apps.
! YouTube frontpage - 3 columns per row
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row, #contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 3 !important;)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-posts-per-row: 3 !important;)
! Optional: Hide the "Shorts" section to maintain clean 3x3 grid
youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer:style(display:none !important;)
The tyranny of distance (you can do x where x is usually 'ignore feedback' and you can get away with it separated by hundreds of miles, where otherwise you might get punched in the face) kills me with companies like this. You can't just ignore all of us (the customer isn't always right but it wouldn't kill you to listen every once and a while and if you don't, we'll gradually stop using your product). But you can, because listening to The People isn't where the product managers decide it should be or isn't where the ad dollars are or whatever
It's an emperor has no clothes situation. They know it we know it everybody knows it but we're all (corporate, anyway) just going to ignore it and plug our ears
---
! YouTube 7 Videos Per Row Fix (Home and Channel Pages)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)
youtube.com###contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 7 !important;)
! YouTube 7 Videos Per Row Fix (Channel Page margin fix)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:style(margin-right: calc(var(--ytd-rich-grid-item-margin)/2) !important; margin-left: calc(var(--ytd-rich-grid-item-margin)/2) !important;)
! YouTube 7 Videos Per Row Fix (Font Size fix)
youtube.com###video-title.ytd-rich-grid-media:style(font-size: 1.4rem !important; line-height: 2rem !important;)
youtube.com###metadata-line.ytd-video-meta-block:style(font-size: 1.2rem !important; line-height: 1.8rem !important;)
youtube.com###video-title.ytd-rich-grid-slim-media:style(font-size: 1.4rem !important; line-height: 2rem !important;)
I like to think that it was the feedback I submitted that pushed them to change it. However, it was more likely a change in viewership that would cause them to revert it back. I know my viewing habits definitely changed, I found myself spending more time looking through the thumbnails and then giving up to go watch content on other platforms.
4.51.08/web_20251117_11_RC00
They’re also testing the same on the web, half the time I get the normal sidebar, half the time I get a 300% zoomed one where I can only see like 3 video thumbnails before having to scroll (jokes on them, I don’t - but then again I block ads so I don’t count either way).
On the bright side, maybe I'd be better off. There are probably better things I could be doing with my time.
That is a feature (of the browser). The volume bar is selected so it takes up the controls for left/right (this is what a horizontal slider does I suppose). You can also select the volume button and mute/unmute with spacebar (spacebar does the action of the UI element, like click a button). You can tab around the buttons under the video to select options, etc. all with a keyboard. If a control doesn't support an action, it'll be propagated up to the parent, which leads to the jarring feeling that controls are inconsistent (and also the effects, left-right just adjusts the volume, up-down also plays an animation).
It's the usual low quality Google product, but it does make sense why it is so.
well thats the thing, people is so lazy and dumb that whetever new feature is available, they didnt bother to find or turn on that shit
this is the power of "default", you cant test something is working on hyperscale if you didnt make it default like youtube does
Change your Youtube language to Finnish, which isn’t supported by auto-dubbing (and probably never will), and all audio will be in original language.
in this age where google has monopoly for content created on the whole world, its just matter of time until they available
The outrage over this seems completely overblown. Do people not see the setting to switch audio?
So, yeah, that's pretty bad.
I still cannot believe that Google doesn't understand that a person can speak more than one language.
Well, the game is clearly very important to these people, it is increasingly visible. They are clearly very emotionally engaged. I'd say things are going really well!
Youtube was once a miraculous technical website running circles around Google video. I'm told they used a secret technology called python. Eventually Google threw the towel and didn't want to compete anymore. They were basically on the ground in a pool of bodily liquids then the referee counted all the way to 1.65 billion.
Some time went by and now you can just slap a <video> tag on a html document and call it a day. Your website will run similar circles around the new google video only much much faster.
The only problem is that [even] developers forgot <s>how</s> why to make HTML websites. I'm sure someone remembers the anchor tag and among those some even remember that you can put full paths inthere that point at other website that could [in theory] also have videos on them (if they knew <s>how</s> why)
If this was my homepage I would definitely add a picture of Dark Helmet.
Looks like he also forgot <s>how</s> why.
Bet the idea to force outdated TTS whose robotic droning that is the pinnacle of annoyance on every single user who speaks more than one language was worth a nice bonus.
but given that half a video is not a full video this still means we are at one single full video
and an AD which is deceptively pretending to be a video
I still think regulators should ban deceptive ads and require ads to to clearly different from the main content _on the first take/glance_. They way YT, Google and co handle ads is IMHO deceptive to a point its reasonable to say they try to deceive the user into clicking on the ad when they wouldn't have done so if they new it was an ad.
And "systematically deceiving a user/customer to their detriment (wasting time) and your profit" isn't just shitty but on a gray line to outright fraud.
It's probably the only company with ads that are more enjoyable than their product.
Their business is basically selling poison but creating such absurd quantities of great free entertainment that everyone forgives them.
Like really, checkout the redbull ingredient list sometime. There's not much to it.
Not saying it's healthy at all. Nobody should really be drinking energy drinks, but Redbull is probably the least awful of the bunch.
technical there are many "non energy drinks" which have no less caffeine or other wake-up effects as energy drinks.
But funnily one of the ways Red Bull works is by giving you Vitamin B12 and Magnesium,
which are commonly on a slight deficit in, case where people take energy drinks. They can lead to a noticeable feeling of boosted energy in a similar time as caffeine takes effect (ironically Caffeine takes 15-30min to take effect, anything before is either something else or a placebo effect...). In general if you have problems with low energy in the morning taking B12+Magnesium alongside the breakfast is a things worth trying out (just maybe not by drinking a Red Bull :=) ).
I checked in at a restaurant recently and they asked for my number to text me when our table was ready. As soon as the number finished they had my name and all sorts of info I never gave them. It’s totally out of control.
Nobody else has the money, the infrastructure and the content to build a YouTube alternative.
The content: well I guess that's the network effect.
To be honest I don't understand content creators who bitch about YouTube constantly (about "the algorithm", demonetization, strikes and more), but DON'T put their content somewhere else at least as an alternative. You don't have to _move_ but at least also publish your videos to a podcast platform or something?
There's probably a market out there for video hosting that doesn't suck. I think a video search / discovery platform on top of Vimeo might be useful.
Common recommendation is font-size: 14px on html element, but I often encounter websites that are way off in scaling.
Personally I configure my browser's default font size (1rem) to something nice and readable, but I'm sure that the number of people who do this is <10%. Probably closer to 1%.
But either way I would recommend against hardcoding a size in px.
https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/netflix-new-homepage-...
» I think that anyone who is technically sufficiently well-versed, is going to avoid that hellscape like the plague. So then, who is the actual audience for this stuff? My guess would be: the old folks' home around the corner, which, sooner or later, will be forced to upgrade those TVs to smart-TVs. And once those old folks put in their credit card numbers or log in with their Amazon accounts, there goes a lot of people's inheritance.
My own elderly father is wise to the scam, but not confident in his ability to navigate the dark patterns. So now, he is afraid to input his credit card information into anything digital, essentially excluding him from cultural participation in the digital age. « [1]
With that frame (the target audience for smart TVs is old people), "needing glasses" is not all that far-fetched.
There are already zero videos if you visit with no youtube history. That seems... fine?
since August 2023 [0]
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/139222780?hl=en&ms...
It was pushing me heavily to sign in; which I do _not_ want to do.
End result was I just stopped watching YT.
ytd-rich-item-renderer {
max-width: 265px;
}
/* Show full length title instead of ellipsis cutoff at two lines. */
a.yt-lockup-metadata-view-model__title {
display: inline !important;
}
youtube.com##.ytd-rich-item-renderer:style(max-width:265px; !important;)
youtube.com##.yt-lockup-metadata-view-model__title:style(display:inline; !important;)But the filters actually need to be like this:
youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer{max-width:265px; !important;}
youtube.com##yt-lockup-metadata-view-model__title{display:inline; !important;}I only put 2+2 together when I was running yt-dlp and realizing there was a "Sleeping 5.00 seconds as required by the site..." before downloads would kick in and... wellp. It all makes sense now.
As an ISP representative, I am getting absolutely pissmad that YouTube is gaslighting our users and making them think that our service is "terrible" because of perceived buffering on every video load because YouTube wants to play a shitty cat and mouse game against adblockers for all.
So I basically either watch my curated subscriptions or something I specifically searched for.
Now I get cat influencers and influencers selling me on them ... while they tell me how to pick a cat. Maybe I find kinda raw cat footage, with a title that is misleading, annoying music, text bubbles popping all over it :(
I just want what I searched for ... youtube doesn't give me that.
It's not that unlike when I open the home page, I've no control and so much of that isn't what I'm looking for...
Every time they tweak the algorithm, content creators scramble to figure out what changes they made so they can exploit it. That's why every few months all the major channels change their styles to all be the same. Gotta exploit that algo!
> this happens every few months
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important)
Ive had that for a couple years.
At the same time Google Product Managers (or whatever euphemism for middle management they use at Google) are dumbfoundingly short shighted and myopic. They canibalize and destroy the value of the website to make some engagement or ad numbers go up, persumably in a short term play for promotion. When the consequences of their efforts to enshittify become apparent, they are long gone to another FAANG or moved up to executive level where severance packages mean they suffer no consequences. Its a shame there is no incentive to make the best product for the long term usefullness.
and I've paid full subscription price for a couple of years now to avoid the ads, and I can barely stand what it has evolved into. My screen is 80% games, shorts, "ads" and categories I didn't ask for.
If you want to read more the search keywords are: "Animal 20" "Neuralink"
> Animal 20 was seen "pulling on port connector which is now dislodged (no longer secured)". The next day, Animal 20 was "picking at incision and occasionally pulling on implant". Soon, infections developed. On Dec. 20, UC Davis staff found antibiotic resistant E. coli and Candida glabrata, a fungal infection, at the surgical site. They discussed a "necropsy next week", meaning they planned to euthanize Animal 20.
Fucking cowards.
I thought Apple TV was a subscription service? Does Apple make TVs now?
It's taking them 5 years stealing Chinese algorithms.
Like a sibling commenter mentioned, I used to happily pay for Premium, but I'd rather put up with the misery (and ad-block) than give them a single cent ever again. Why should I reward pervasive enshittification?
Sort yourselves out, Youtube.
First was the disgusting pink tones in the progress bar. Then the oversized thumbnails / less videos per page. Then the horrible over sized player controls. And now the oversized suggestions on the side bar.
Not to mention the obnoxious amount and duration of ads.
It's getting worse and worse.
These are all symptoms that something is very wrong.
Also recommend DeArrow and SponsorBlock.
But also flip content creators a $5 every once in a while. That's more revenue than they'll ever get from you watchin their videos.
At some point it’ll become so shit people will look at trying to sidestep their frontend entirely. In other news YouTube is clamping down on ability to download videos…what a coincidence
This is already true. If you sign out of YouTube or turn your "Watch History" off you see zero videos on the home screen.
I am being a bit obtuse of course, if you have any sort of identifying tokens it does show videos, but the irony was too good to waste on mere facts.
The founder of NeuraLink has recently proposed to deploy sentient robots to watch criminals, removing the need for incarceration. There is a lot of synergy possible here with mandatory neural links. The bot could not only watch us but also press our buttons. "Criminal", being such a flexible concept, should pose little problem to globalizing this paradigm. For one thing, it will make it possible to harvest any number of clicks necessary, so advertising becomes obsolete, and so does content.
God, I hope I'm not a prophet.
but after recent EU balooney request like chat control etc, I cant be so sure anymore
These are slap drones [1] from Banks’s The Player of Games [2].
But then again, this is already possible, and has the advertising industry shit-scared, thus all the interest in blocking AI-related scrapers since they circumvent the whole “wasting human time” element.
That TVs have lower information density than desktop browsers? Like, yeah, obviously.
That if you don't sign in to YouTube and don't pay to remove the ads, that you'll get prompted to sign in and you'll see ads? That doesn't seem particularly problematic.
Sure it's mildly funny that a funny projection is true in a very contrived way, but it doesn't really stand up to any criticism. I use YouTube almost exclusively through the Apple TV app, and it's fine, I'd even say it has improved a little over the last few years. I like the low information density because I sit approximately 3m from the screen and navigate with a TV remote.
The point is that I made a joke projection in my last post in April that by next May there would be only one video on the homepage, because obviously that would be ridiculous, right? Then I turned on my TV and it happened.
See the previous blog post: https://jayd.ml/2025/04/30/someone-at-youtube-needs-glasses....
I think you got it -- that's the point right there, nothing more...
1. https://emilio-gomez.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/steamos-...
2. https://preview.redd.it/new-big-picture-mode-is-finally-publ...