I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app on my Apple TV. I can’t wait to find out how they screwed this one up.
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.
The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.
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.
The YouTube app is the worst on its own site too. I don’t login to any Google account and I turned off site history, and now the homepage is completely blank. Yup. Google won’t even show me a single video on the homepage because I refuse to turn on history. Which is actually kind of nice for preventin distractions
This is intentional on Google’s part. It’s anticompetitive behavior, to make YouTube service’s app shitty on Google’s competitor’s ecosystem. But no government seems to care—-and what will you do, stop watching YouTube?
This is nonsense. Among other things, the YouTube app on Apple TV is superior to the one on Android TV. No loud startup sound, the back button exits the app rather than popping up a menu asking "if I'm sure" or if I want to go to a screensaver mode - clean straightforward UI.
There are two apps called "DeArrow" and SponsorBlock that basically everyone should be using.
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.
At least for SponsorBlock you can run iSponsorBlockTV[1] on another computer on the same network - in addition to skipping sponsored segments, it also mutes YouTube’s own ads and auto-skips them as soon as it can.
Except that those two things are fantastic indicators for videos / channels you should be avoiding. Hiding their foolishness and then watching them anyway rewards their behavior.
Google News has this same truncation problem. I thought it would be an obvious thing to, I don't know, use the `title` attribute so mouseover reveals the rest of the snews...
> 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.
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?
I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use it through the browser with adblockers. (Yes, on my phone and iPad.)
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.
I did the same, but I also added in a tamper monkey script to get rid of the picture in picture thing they force on you as part of their "core experience". I wish their ux designers and PMs were less arrogant and realized their preferences are just preferences and gave us back the ability to disable stuff like this in the app.
Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad. Seeing a product in a youtube ad now causes me to be more likely to believe it's a ripoff.
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"
I assume you mean all the snake oil pre-playback ads? Mostly dangerous medical advice, solar scams, or wellness quackery.
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.)
I stopped using apps like this because they were always getting broken by youtube. Obviously it's intentional sabotage but still. It felt like I had to update those apps every time I used them and sometimes there was no update at that time at all. The mobile site never breaks and you have full access to extensions if you use firefox.
Not being able to play Youtube in the background on your phone is unfortunately one of the main appeals of Premium. There's a lot of good mixes, concerts, etc that I play for the audio while doing something else that I can't do without Premium unless I wanted to leave my phone unlocked (and pray I don't pocket click a link).
Counterpoint: it works, you just have to wait a bit, since now the server will not actually send you the video until the mandatory (pre-skip) ad’s length has elapsed.
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!!!)
Have you tried "uBlock Origin Lite"? It is by the same author, Raymond Hill (gorhill). It has been working fine. I use "optimal" level for the filtering mode. (Note: I use Chromium on Linux)
"The Firefox version of uBO Lite will cease to exist, I am dropping support because of the added burden of dealing with AMO nonsensical and hostile review process. "
I do pay for YouTube Premium, I see no ads, and everything works pretty conveniently. What's your point, that with a bit of extra effort you can pirate content?
To be clear, this is not a value judgement. I pirate content sometimes, and I use adblockers, but ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
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.
> you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
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.
I don't think it is piracy. Most advertising supported content is made freely available to you with the expectation that you will view the advertising. That expectation is not a contract and was a decision made without your involvement. You have no obligation to perform to someone else's expectations. If the content is made freely available you are free to watch it whichever way you choose. Choosing not to view the advertising might mean they don't get paid for producing their content, but you are under no obligation in the absence of an agreement.
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?
perhaps it should be out of business then? it captured its market share on an ad free model... it would not have gotten to this size with this model from the start.
if tomorrow youtube decides only paid subscribers can view videos... do they maintain that market share?
Just because you say it's piracy doesn't mean it is.
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 pay 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.
Ad blockers are recommended by the FBI as safety measures. I follow the FBI's advice. Internet ads are a vector for executing untrusted code that can invoke exploits and engage in invasive fingerprinting. Revert back to the 90s web with dumb ads and I'll look at them. It's amazing how blinkered people will be about potentially malicious programs downloaded from the internet just because it's hidden behind a browser interface.
> you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
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.
The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you, not the right to a sale. Whether they convert you is up to them, their product, their offering, etc. I think you can never buy a single product from an ad and this is still piracy.
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.
And I have the right to pay someone to watch the ads + videos for me, and then summarize me the video minus ads. Just like I have the right to hand my ad-full newspaper to someone, have them cut out the ads and hand me back the now ad-free one.
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.
There's an "if a tree falls in the forest" version of "if the viewer leaves the room" at which point has a theft still been visited upon the broadcaster? The business that paid for the ad?
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.
It's not piracy. You might have a problem with it ethically. But you're not breaking copyright laws by blocking ads.
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?
Ok, let’s switch it up a bit. I give the ad-full newspaper to someone not speaking the local language. Or an illiterate person. Or a monkey trained to be good with scissors. Is this also piracy? At what point does it become piracy? How little of an ad should someone see/understand before it counts as a “valid” ad view? A few words? A full sentence? Etc.
You're trying to nit-pick where the line is drawn. The point is not where the line is drawn, it's that there is a line.
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.
You can rationalize this any way you want, but at the end of the day you're screwing over not a faceless corporation - but the very people who put out videos on YouTube.
It's fine if you're OK with it, but don't pretend that you're not doing that.
I’m totally cool with “screwing over” people who make their income screwing gullible people into falling for scams or buying useless, overpriced junk they don’t need. I don’t need to rationalize it for myself, I’m just trying to show some people the error in their ways, but maybe their portfolio of ad-related stocks is clouding their vision?
the creator is being harmed in no way at all, the ad free viewer is still a viewer and still could potentially generate more traffic to that creator by word of mouth algo pushing based on more views etc. Its still a net positive for the creator, just not AS net positive as an ad viewer.
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.
The choice of an individual to skip an advertisement has minimal impact on the content creator or the platform. This person isn't accountable for the decisions of others regarding whether they watch the ad or not. Ultimately, their actions only affect themselves and do not influence anyone involved in the advertisement process.
No, piracy is defined as stealing a vendor's exclusivity by making copies and putting them up on a web site. Ad blocking is not the same as making copies and distributing.
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 think content piracy is generally accepted to not require re-distributing. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but if I search "watch free movies online" and find a site streaming bad DVD rips, I fully believe that I am pirating that content against the wishes of the content owner.
I'd say generally accepted by the majority of English speaking/western society? If someone said they were going to "pirate a movie" there's next to zero chance they are referring to the distribution side of that endeavor.
I feel like OP isn't asserting anything even remotely controversial in that definition lol
Um... no? Maybe that's true for English speakers (I'm not a native speaker, so I won't make assumptions), but thinking that Western society views it that way is a big stretch, especially with streaming sites. While some might admit to watching something on a pirate site, many people don't refer to it as piracy when they're using a streaming service.
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.
Nobody has the right to put things on my screen that I don't want to see, first of all. Second, I'm never going to "convert", so I'm actually saving them money by blocking their ads, because now the ad will go to someone else who doesn't block it who might buy whatever Temu nonsense is being forced on them.
They’re welcome not to make videos. But if they make them and lay them out there for free alongside some garbage I have the right to ignore, don’t blame me if I do look at them and ignore the garbage, and since there’s so much of it I eventually get my machine to ignore them, not unlike wearing gloves when dealing with a messy task as to save you the time of scrubbing your hands from dirt/oil/etc.
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.
While this is not an unreasonable way one could define "piracy", surely you must be aware that your definition is significantly more expansive than the one in common use?
What's the difference? Unless you take the common use of the term to mean peer to peer file sharing, which clearly isn't expansive enough (see pirate DVDs, pirate sports streaming, etc), then I'm not quite sure how it is a bad fit?
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.
> ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content
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.
I'm pretty anti-piracy, and I don't think ad-blocking is piracy.
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.
Just use AdNausem (uBlock Origin mod) that clicks ALL THE ADDS. Problem solved! Wish more people used it, so the creators could again make money from ads.
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.
If we're going with bad analogies I have an opposite one - you're walking past the Nike store and the store has a promotion on "Watch 5 minutes of ads and get a free pair of shoes", but you instead kick the TV with the ads over, grab the shoes and run away.
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?
Are you going to lie that you didn't know that the videos are shown to you in exchange for ads?
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.
No, I'm going to state the truth that I never agreed to be shown ads, and you are extremely weird for lying and claiming that I did.
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.
Grocery store wants me to buy groceries. I steal them instead. Grocery store didn’t ban me so clearly they don’t mind me taking goods without paying. Grocery store is free to require membership like Costco but they don’t, so clearly they are ok with the situation.
did you give the grocery store an account name and tons of other information while stealing and they still allowed it? and welcomed you back the next visit, for years on end using those same credentials?
also did the grocery store start out as a free food store similarly to youtube? and then just expect people pay despite not enforcing it?
I can point directly to the law in whatever jurisdiction you care to name that makes doing what you describe illegal.
You cannot point to anything that makes it illegal to view videos on a publicly accessible website without watching the ads that usually play before them.
This is how I feel about claiming that stealing from YouTube isn’t actually stealing. Juvenile nonsense. That’s why I came up with a nonsense counter argument
I agree with this. There was no meeting of the minds, no contract. But, the terms in the Google account probably include something about the terms for viewing youtube videos.
You seem to mistakenly believe that a contract requires some sort of a signed document or something.
You know that when a public pace of business has "No dogs" sign and you enter it, that you entered into a contract with that business... right? And it doesn't matter if you noticed it or not.
> You know that when a public pace of business has "No dogs" sign and you enter it, that you entered into a contract with that business
You are incorrect about that, which probably invalidates your other arguments. A condition of entry is not a contract. If you disobey the condition of entry then you have not broken a contract, and nothing changes between you and the business owner. They can ask you to leave and they can trespass you if you do not, but importantly, they can do those things for any reason they like, whether you obey the conditions of entry or not.
It is not a contract by law, nor does it meet the definition of a contract.
Similarly, YouTube can retract their website from public view, or attempt to block you specifically. But you have not entered into a contract with them by viewing the site.
The deal you make with YouTube is that you watch the ad in exchange for the video. Your argument is like “the cashier didn’t stop me from walking out of the grocery store so it’s not stealing”
I don’t make a deal when I visit a website, and especially not when I have to visit it because it became the de-facto standard when sharing video content. I just get my computer to ask for some bytes and the server happily sends them to me. If the server happened to send me some garbage in addition, I am free to make my computer ignore it.
I would love to be educated: when did I enter into an agreement with YouTube that I must watch ads to use their website?
YouTube is sueing me for damages. Their claim: I used their website but didn't watch the ads. (Maybe I used an ad blocker. Maybe I turned off my monitor and unplugged the speakers when the ads played. Maybe I walked away and let the ad play in a different room). What evidence do they submit in court to demonstrate I violated an agreement?
You've made quite a few comments across this thread, as have others that support your position. Not even within the YouTube TOS has anyone pointed out a contractual obligation to view ads. Not to mention YouTube doesn't require you to agree to their TOS to view videos.
With this in mind, it's perfectly understandable that someone could browse YouTube without any comprehension of something you seem totally confident on. I'm not being goofy here, I understand that YouTube wants me to view ads, I just genuinely am not aware of any contractual obligation to do so if I view videos.
I'm serious. Show me in the Youtube Terms of Service where it says that blocking ads is against the contract. I've looked. Carefully. There is no such language there.
I don't think you actually looked very closely, so it's weird you've doubled down on that lol
Item 2 of "Permissions and Restrictions" says you aren't allowed to "circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage with, or otherwise interfere with any part of the Service (or attempt to do any of these things), including security-related features or features that (a) prevent or restrict the copying or other use of Content or (b) limit the use of the Service or Content;"
where "content" is earlier defined as basically anything Google/YT sends you (which would include the ad).
A quick google search also takes you to a pretty straightforward statement from Google/YT: "When you block YouTube ads, you violate YouTube’s Terms of Service."
None at all. I walk in, I look at what's on offer, and if they don't have what I'm looking for, I leave without buying anything.
There's a legal obligation not to steal, of course, and if you want to call that a contract I can't stop you. But if you're claiming there's an implicit contract to buy something when you walk into a store, you're wrong.
Now, if I was walking into the store all the time just to stand around not buying anything, that would be trespassing, and if they asked me to leave their property I'd be obligated to follow their wishes. But if I'm walking in in order to buy some bananas, but they're nearly out of bananas and the ones they have left all look bad, then I'm perfectly within my rights to walk out without buying anything.
In what way are you claiming that the grocery store analogy holds to adblocking on Youtube?
If you want groceries you have to pay. If you want YouTube videos you need to pay by playing the ad(legally speaking, obviously you can steal if you like). I don’t see any difference.
Where's the obligation to watch ads spelled out? The legal obligation to pay for groceries is spelled out in the law: they are the possession of the store, and if you want to acquire them you need to exchange something else of value (money) for them, at which point they become yours.
What is the thing that compels you to watch ads on a service like Youtube? There's nothing in the law; if there is anything, it would be spelled out in the Youtube terms of service: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms
Can you find it for me? I've looked. Many times. It isn't there.
YouTube sends my browser a lot of data, a LOT of data. It's not my fault if some of that data doesn't make it to the screen, or if hardware on my network blocks certain DNS requests. No, I asked YouTube for a web page, and it sent one back to me. I'm not sure why everyone is so eager to let someone else dictate what code they run on their own machine. It's really strange.
> The deal you make with YouTube is that you watch the ad in exchange for the video.
Did I? Can you tell me where I made this deal? I navigated to YouTube.com, I don't see a contract, I don't see a place to sign or a hand to shake. Where is this bilateral agreement?
I think what you meant to say was, YouTube really very much wants me to watch their ads, and I don't care to, so I won't.
If your counter is that then YouTube will shut down, I say, oh well, I've already archived all the videos I care about, and someone else will replace them, or not, and either way life will go on.
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.
Piracy involves obtaining media content for free for which you should normally pay for, as a result of someone sharing the media meant for their own personal use to the general public.
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.
I've tried to explain this to people repeatedly and they don't get it. They're always like "oh no the AI scraper is slamming my website it's ruining everything". Um, maybe configure your web browser to not send me data if you don't want me 'scraping' your website. It's literally your server's choice to send me data. I'm just asking from a few IPs. If you want to send data to all of them that's your server's choice.
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.
And what is the surefire way to stop AI scrapers from accessing your website? If there is no way, how can this be an acceptable ask?
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.
The answer is right there: use authentication with cost per load, or an IP whitelist.
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.
As long as we all understand that this mentality is advocating for the end of an open internet. This is the tragedy of the commons in action, the removal of a common good because the few that would take advantage of it do. Just because something is programmed to be a request and response interaction (although the use of blocklists and robots.txt and etc should reveal that it's not a simple request and response interaction), does not mean we should have to go all or nothing in ensuring it's not abused. We are still the operators of programs, it's still a social contract. If I block an IP and the same operator shows up with a different IP, it's like if I got kicked out of a bar and then came back with a fake mustache on and got confused why they think it's wrong because they don't have a members list.
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.
"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.
what's insane, even $1 is more than they'll get from you watching every single one of their videos. The issue is processing fees on that payment, so might as well give em a bit more.
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.
For me, and many people, advertising is a mental health issue. I don't enjoy those ads, they are very disturbing and jarring. It causes me anxiety and I don't like the things that those ads normalize. I don't think most people, especially americans, realize how far off the rails our society is in terms of our normalization of insane shit.
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.
> I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health.
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?
I also pay for premium, and have for at least 15 years since it was called Red, and the experience is complete garbage.
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.
I pay for YouTube Premium too (probably not much longer) but can only 'comfortably' use the site through a series of increasingly hacky extensions for Firefox. On non-web apps, there is no recourse from the UI enshittification.
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.
> 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.
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).
The massive overlays of what-to-watch-next hiding most of the video much too early, ie. before the very end, of the video you were trying to watch until the end but now just ragequit and downloaded instead... are very ugly
Those are there because the content creator you’re watching decided to put them there. It’s entirely up to them whether they show up and when they show up.
Like another poster mentioned, I use Orion on my iPad with ublock origin installed as an extension.
It’s a really great browser, only a few bugs here and there.
Wipr, Adblock Pro, Ghostery or uBlock Origin Lite. I've used all four and they perform about as well as you need them to for an adblocker. I'm currently using uBlock.
I've loved Grayjay as an alternative YouTube client. It can pull in videos from other platforms as well, and it can Cast videos! AdBlock and sponsorblock built in too.
I mean I pay for Youtube Premium because I use Youtube Music instead of Spotify.
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.
for what it's worth, you could divide up your youtube premium membership cost and give that to 500 creators and they would see more revenue in their pocket than your premium watches get them.
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.
"Enhancer For Youtube" is a firefox extension that disables much of the nonsense in Youtube's UI. I can't use youtube without it anymore. There might be a chrome version? Idk, using chrome with youtube is dumb af tho so probably don't do that.
If you disable watch history, youtube tries to "punish" you by disabling nearly the non-subscription recommendations and shorts not from your subscriptions and a number of other things.
maybe there will be another tier of youtube premium in a few years that removes shorts, and people can try to guilt you for blocking them using browser extensions like they do for ad blocking.
There are 0 videos on my YouTube homepage, just a screen asking me to turn on history. Just the way I like it. Here’s what I did:
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.
Low _usable_ information density is one of the main things I made Control Panel for YouTube [^0] to tackle, especially in Subscriptions.
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.
I honestly think that at some point, there will be no recommendations page. You'll open YouTube and it'll start autoplaying the video that they (or the advertisers) think you should see. You'll be able to skip to other videos from there, like on short-form content platforms. Likes and subscriptions will dictate how likely it'll be that you'll see a video by that creator in the future. Search and other "outdated" features will be tucked away and purposefully made even more useless than they already are.
One of the things I dislike about the Youtube app on Apple TV is how it appears to maintain an entirely separate list of recommended videos, specific to the kinds of videos I tend to watch on TV, versus the phone and desktop (which might themselves also each have their own recommendation algorithm, but my behavior there is closer so as to not notice).
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.
Yeah, I wish the UI could let me browse the various silos of videos I like to watch instead of trying to be clever with one feed.
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.
It's difficult to capture into words how much contempt I hold for Google and Amazon, two companies which lost their way long ago and are now actively user-hostile.
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.
>entire energy is devoted to making their customer's lives more miserable
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’m still using Amazon as much as I was before, it’s just a more miserable experience now which I can feel and the annoyances are compounding. I’ve not yet done anything that would show in their numbers, like cancel my prime or start trying to shop elsewhere or even boycott them altogether, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy as I was and would say they’re pushing me to a point of defection. All to say, they should be smart enough to not just do uninformed numerical analysis. They need to hone a gut feeling for how pleased people are or build metrics around that. They should see satisfaction is waning. In fact, it may be what’s driving this behavior. If satisfaction is down, people leave, sales slump, then they make more user hostile changes in hopes to cover the sales gap with existing customers, but results in satisfaction going down at every pass. It’s a vicious cycle.
For me this change was reverted quite quickly, I think within the week. On my Apple TV at least it is back to 3 (and a quarter) videos displayed at a time.
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.
It’s not a revert, merely A/B testing to see which version leads to more “engagement”.
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).
If it happens to me again, I will have to find my content elsewhere. It's not even a conscious decision, I just got genuinely fatigued from the experience.
On the bright side, maybe I'd be better off. There are probably better things I could be doing with my time.
That "feature" is so egregiously bad. I regularly consume content in three languages, and hearing the wrong language coming from my speakers is so jarring. It is a uniquely awful experience that I had never encountered before, nor even imagined.
While we’re at it can we also fire the guy who made it that we now have to click the channel’s mini thumbnail to open it, EXCEPT, when the channel is live and clicking the thumbnail takes you to the live video where you have to click the thumbnail again.
Oh, are we talking about bad YouTube UX? How about the "feature" where the right and left arrows seek the video 5s forward and back, while the up and down arrows increase and decrease the volume? That is, unless the last UI element you've touched was the volume bar, in which case the side arrows will also change the volume, and you'll have to use the mouse to clear the focus away from that volume bar to be able to seek the video again. I still wonder how they managed to break this despite it having had a sane, consistent, defined behavior for probably over a decade before that point.
I agree. But for the benefit of other people struggling, I haven't found a way to disable them as a user setting, but you can at least turn them off on a per-video basis by changing the video language in the playback settings (the little gear icon).
They could at least try to vaguely match the voice and maybe cadence of the original. AFAIU it's one of these things that would have been too hard ten years ago but is fairly easy now. Too computationally expensive probably.
Yeah ElevenLabs had this over a year ago where you could just upload a 30 second clip of someone's voice in another language and hear what it was like in English and it worked really well.
Googlers are obviously mentally challenged by the concept that there might be anybody in the world who has learned English as a second language.
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.
I was playing a game with a friend and the chat was increasingly full of angry people complaining about cheaters easily obtaining very hard to get items. He asked what I thought about it....
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.
You know who has great information density? Pornhub. If you open Pornhub on a 4K screen, you will absolutely see none of the thumbnails. I think YouTube is overdoing it, but it is really a thing of: people are either using really small screens or 1080p. 4K is still not around much.
There's an old adage that if you follow the tech that porn adopts, you'll generally be ahead the average consumer curve.
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.
Not sure what this comment is getting at. Those may be the collection of sites owned by a single company, but there are still -oceans- of porn of every conceivable niche, on hundreds of thousands of sites, some still bigger than those. Whereas there’s pretty much a single, monopolized provider for mainstream video: youtube. And a porn conglomerate is the problem? GP is still correct, there’s still real competition in the space, unlike youtube.
Yes. 1080p screen density is still so popular. Looking around new laptops it's still the bulk in Windows land, including OLED and ultra high refresh rate monitors. Same for TVs.
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 don't think so? The "I Skied Down Mount Everest" is from the Red Bull channel. It may be a commercial channel, but it's not an ad, i.e. they didn't pay for placement (doesn't say "Sponsored" like the other one).
and they are often good videos (if you like watching extreme sports related things), given the partial second video this seems likely for the account who made the screenshot
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.
I mean, in terms of getting your caffeine, Redbull is basically the least poison in the game. It's not even a lot of caffeine and doesn't contain a lot of the other shit that stuff like Monsters contain.
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.
I hate the forced AI generated English translation of the non-english shorts with the passion of a million suns. It should never have been the default. If you are the person who made that decision, fuck you. If you know that person, please pass on my sentiments.
I can highly recommend using YouTube through Firefox with extensions or ReVanced that try to fix these hostile and anti user decisions. Although I do sometimes wonder why I do spend so much time on a platform that hates me so much.
They have also gotten more aggressive on trying to get you to sign in. I have appreciated the shitty UX changes they have made which has resulted in me using it less. It’s just filler and I need less of that in life, so thanks for chasing me away.
On my work PC, they all but forced me to create an account just to watch videos. I could not find a way around it (I didn’t try super hard). I don’t use my personal accounts on that device so I just created a throwaway.
Ahh, I thought this was just happening to me. I used to watch a fair bit of YT on my PS4, but a few months ago my home screen was basically empty save a few ad videos.
It was pushing me heavily to sign in; which I do _not_ want to do.
On desktop, press command/ctrl and minus to zoom out and increase the home page's density. It will make text on watch page harder to read, but with theatre mode, the video playback size should be unaffected.
I already have 0 videos on youtube home screen, some combination of not being logged in, firefox privacy settings and ad blocker causes youtube to post a passive aggressive message and a search bar. I kinda like that Ui.
I miss when I could search youtube for "cats" and I'd get just raw cat footage.
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...
Was just talking with my son about how some YouTubers who made short videos long ago started making longer and less succinct videos because they thought the algorithm favored long videos and then TikTok happens.
i feel like modern youtube just does not scratch the itch that youtube once scratched , it now feels like methadone replacement therapy. available viewing options have been reduced to either short form content or long form content , there is nothing between. i dont enjoy frying my brain with short form content and i dont have the attention span to watch bloviation with the express intent of stretching out video times to maximise revenue. honestly i feel like this applies to the internet as a whole , a facsimile of its former self being puppeted to achieve control. someone probably predicted this , right ?
YouTube has become so bad that I had to resort to Tampermonkey scripts to become bearable.
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.
Not really related but... have anyone else noticed that suggestions on the home page became much worse recently? I'm getting a lot of unrelated videos which are often very old, like published up to 18 years ago. OTOH, videos from subscriptions are not getting suggested, I often have to check individual channels to see if they posted anything new. What's happening?
If you pay attention, this happens every few months. This is youtube tweaking the algorithm.
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!
That's not even the main problem. Youtube is basically unwatchable with all the ads. Maybe it's just me but it often feels like it's badly broken. I found skipvids a while back. I find the videos on YT and watch them there. I don't watch yt often so that's the path of least resistance for me.
> Unfortunately the YouTube PM org’s myopia is accelerating: with this data I now project that there will be zero videos on the homescreen around May of 2026 now, up from September.
There are already zero videos if you visit with no youtube history. That seems... fine?
You can use ublock origin browser extension per-site CSS rules to restore an arbitrary number of rows and columns to the youtube frontpage. https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube is a good source for these if you don't know how to write them or don't want to.
I usually don't mind that. Sometimes I'm looking in to a new product or hobby and really do want to see a whole bunch of that content. They also provide you a feed which purely contains channels you subscribe to, though I find it much lower quality than the normal feed.
Neuralink was mentioned, and it immediately made me remember the sad stories of the rhesus macaques that were used as Neuralink animal test subjects for brain implants. The quality of the work was poor and they were able to pull the implants out and then the implants got loose, causing bacterial and fungal infections and swelling and the macaques had to be euthanized. But not before banging their heads against everything, picking on the holes in their skulls and going insane as their brains got increasingly infected. Reading that kind of disgusting inhumane crap makes me ashamed of being a member of the same species.
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.
This is normal in the meat industry. It sucks it happens to test subjects, or any living creature, but this is nothing compared to the daily cruelty inflicted upon innocent animals that we deem "food".
> maybe our mandatory NeuraLinks are coming sooner than I thought.
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.
> it will make it possible to harvest any number of clicks necessary, so advertising becomes unnecessary and obsolete
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.
There are lots of proposals. Recently, he retweeted a pundit who said that murderers should be hanged and that Europe achieved its level of civilization by executing 1-2% of its population for eugenic purposes:
You know the world is heading in a good direction when the world's richest man with nearly half a trillion dollars is starting to muse about whom he wants to start killing off. You know, for the "common good".
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.
Unfortunately I don't have pictures from before this change, but you used to get 5-6 videos I believe. Now you get two (and maybe one is an ad).
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.
On my Apple TV I get 2.5 thumbnails per row and 2 rows. I honestly think that's appropriate for a TV interface and I basically like the UI. I find YouTube's Apple TV app to be the least clunky of all the carousel-of-videos apps that I use.
Compare the 1.25 video thumbnails shown on the apple tv app to the thumbnails on Steam's big picture mode (designed for people sitting on a couch far away from a tv):
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.
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.
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
> 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?
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.
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"
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.)
Enshittification continues
it complains about youtube app being separated into parts or smth like that
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!!!)
https://itc.ua/en/news/ublock-origin-lite-ad-blocker-has-bee...
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...
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.
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?
if tomorrow youtube decides only paid subscribers can view videos... do they maintain that market share?
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 pay 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.
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.
A summary is not the same as the content either, that's a fairly well tested concept (fair use, etc).
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
Is this the way YouTube ads work? If I don’t load the ad, is someone paying?
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.
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.
A data point is TiVo who are, apparently, still around and have a 'skip ads' button on recorded content.
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.
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.
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.
also did the grocery store start out as a free food store similarly to youtube? and then just expect people pay despite not enforcing it?
I can point directly to the law in whatever jurisdiction you care to name that makes doing what you describe illegal.
You cannot point to anything that makes it illegal to view videos on a publicly accessible website without watching the ads that usually play before them.
You claim we're stealing.
In Texas, theft is a crime per Sec. 31.03:
> THEFT. (a) A person commits an offense if he unlawfully appropriates property with intent to deprive the owner of property.
Please link the law, and jurisdiction, that is broken when I view a YouTube video and don't view the ad.
https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.31.htm#31....
Nobody disagrees with you that YouTube wants us to view ads.
You know that when a public pace of business has "No dogs" sign and you enter it, that you entered into a contract with that business... right? And it doesn't matter if you noticed it or not.
You are incorrect about that, which probably invalidates your other arguments. A condition of entry is not a contract. If you disobey the condition of entry then you have not broken a contract, and nothing changes between you and the business owner. They can ask you to leave and they can trespass you if you do not, but importantly, they can do those things for any reason they like, whether you obey the conditions of entry or not.
It is not a contract by law, nor does it meet the definition of a contract.
Similarly, YouTube can retract their website from public view, or attempt to block you specifically. But you have not entered into a contract with them by viewing the site.
It's literally a legal contract, under contract law. It's called a unilateral contract.
I didn't expect a Dunning-Kruger effect on NH, but here we are.
This applies double, when you knowingly circumvent the agreement that "you're not aware of"
I would love to be educated: when did I enter into an agreement with YouTube that I must watch ads to use their website?
YouTube is sueing me for damages. Their claim: I used their website but didn't watch the ads. (Maybe I used an ad blocker. Maybe I turned off my monitor and unplugged the speakers when the ads played. Maybe I walked away and let the ad play in a different room). What evidence do they submit in court to demonstrate I violated an agreement?
You've made quite a few comments across this thread, as have others that support your position. Not even within the YouTube TOS has anyone pointed out a contractual obligation to view ads. Not to mention YouTube doesn't require you to agree to their TOS to view videos.
With this in mind, it's perfectly understandable that someone could browse YouTube without any comprehension of something you seem totally confident on. I'm not being goofy here, I understand that YouTube wants me to view ads, I just genuinely am not aware of any contractual obligation to do so if I view videos.
Next time I’ll instead pay someone to watch the videos on my behalf and then summarize me the videos sans-ads.
Will you also sumi?
I'm serious. Show me in the Youtube Terms of Service where it says that blocking ads is against the contract. I've looked. Carefully. There is no such language there.
Item 2 of "Permissions and Restrictions" says you aren't allowed to "circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage with, or otherwise interfere with any part of the Service (or attempt to do any of these things), including security-related features or features that (a) prevent or restrict the copying or other use of Content or (b) limit the use of the Service or Content;"
where "content" is earlier defined as basically anything Google/YT sends you (which would include the ad).
A quick google search also takes you to a pretty straightforward statement from Google/YT: "When you block YouTube ads, you violate YouTube’s Terms of Service."
[TOS]: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms#c3e2907ca8
[Help Center]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14129599?hl=en#:~:...
There's a legal obligation not to steal, of course, and if you want to call that a contract I can't stop you. But if you're claiming there's an implicit contract to buy something when you walk into a store, you're wrong.
Now, if I was walking into the store all the time just to stand around not buying anything, that would be trespassing, and if they asked me to leave their property I'd be obligated to follow their wishes. But if I'm walking in in order to buy some bananas, but they're nearly out of bananas and the ones they have left all look bad, then I'm perfectly within my rights to walk out without buying anything.
In what way are you claiming that the grocery store analogy holds to adblocking on Youtube?
Deaf and blind people are allowed to enter despite their inability to see and hear adverts and jingles.
Fully able people with headphones that avoid looking at ads are not ejected.
You have a very weak position here that isn't advanced by this analogy.
What is the thing that compels you to watch ads on a service like Youtube? There's nothing in the law; if there is anything, it would be spelled out in the Youtube terms of service: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms
Can you find it for me? I've looked. Many times. It isn't there.
Did I? Can you tell me where I made this deal? I navigated to YouTube.com, I don't see a contract, I don't see a place to sign or a hand to shake. Where is this bilateral agreement?
I think what you meant to say was, YouTube really very much wants me to watch their ads, and I don't care to, so I won't.
If your counter is that then YouTube will shut down, I say, oh well, I've already archived all the videos I care about, and someone else will replace them, or not, and either way life will go on.
That's quite literally what we call piracy.
I don't know if you're making some edge case argument without elaborating, or if you're just being ridiculous.
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.
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.
"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 gonna fail if everyone and I mean everyone suddenly stopped watching ads
But I cant expect HN chuds to learn basic economic so its my fault
Maybe that would be better? :)
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.
But sure... they're all clearly are "trillion-dollar analytics empire"
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?
At this point ads are just one of the annoyances amoung so many others.
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.
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).
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.
The number of times I clicked “show less” and it has zero effect on the number of shorts.
Worth a try.
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.
There should absolutely be a better answer here.
In the Android app it's literally just one line, which I have to scroll down to... like two pages.
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.
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.
[^0] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
There’s your problem. You have normal hardware. The rich SV folks at google are probably all using 6k monitors. (only half joking)
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.rickmoranis.com
Looks like he also forgot <s>how</s> why.
The outrage over this seems completely overblown. Do people not see the setting to switch audio?
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.
Operates:
Pornhub
RedTube
YouPorn
Brazzers
Digital Playground Men.com
Reality Kings
SpankWire
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.
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.
It was pushing me heavily to sign in; which I do _not_ want to do.
End result was I just stopped watching YT.
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...
https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/netflix-new-homepage-...
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.
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!
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important)
Ive had that for a couple years.
There are already zero videos if you visit with no youtube history. That seems... fine?
So I basically either watch my curated subscriptions or something I specifically searched for.
[0]<https://xkcd.com/1053/>
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.
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.
These are slap drones [1] from Banks’s The Player of Games [2].
[1] https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Slap-drone
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games
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.
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1992599328897294496#m
but after recent EU balooney request like chat control etc, I cant be so sure anymore
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...