Yeah, I think Facebook has the better algorithms for knowing what I'm interested in.

I use Instagram more than Facebook but quite a few times I've seen ads for things that have caught my attention. I've even bought something because of one.

I've never bought anything by looking at a Google ad. They are almost always something I know about already. What good is an ad for something I know about?

This is how brand advertising works, it's psychological 'trickery' to try and associate that brand with what people find positive, such associations influence us when we make buying choices or when we react to other people's buying choices.

For many years I thought I was immune to such ads, but really I think we are all affected by them -- increased desire for 'things', with reduced happiness for anyone who can't or won't buy them.

> This is how brand advertising works, it's psychological 'trickery' to try and associate that brand with what people find positive, such associations influence us when we make buying choices or when we react to other people's buying choices.

Not sure how cursing at highly repetitive ads that aren’t relevant to me is a considered “positive”.

everyone on HN somehow thinks they are too smart for ads. get over yourself.

So far YouTube's ads haven't convinced me to invest - much less invest with those advertised companies; frankly, I would probably go to my bank if I were to get into investing, I mean I already trust them with my money.

- Ads crank up the volume to 11.

We were watching Eurovision singing contest the other day from YT and my gawd was that annoying. Adds in the middle of every song, volume being cranked up for the adds, and as a icing on the cake, probably due to bug somewhere, the playback went to pause after each ad (iPhone airplaying to AppleTV).

That’s what TV (first, broadcast, and then, cable) was like in the 80s and 90s, and was a small part of why we jumped at internet video.

For TV, there were devices that promised to automatically lower the volume when commercials came on - I don’t remember how they were supposed to work.

I wonder if those devices simply looked at the volume and said, "If it's high [perhaps for a few seconds at a time], then it's probably an ad". Seems like a pretty good heuristic.

I had one of those but it was built into our TV, a Magnavox. It relied on a small black frame that local broadcasters used to insert their ads. National broadcaster like NBC would stream to their local affiliates. And the stream would have blank spaces to an insert their own ads. It’s very fast ,0.1s, that your eye would see briefly but to smart enough electronics was very perceptible. Once the commercial block was detected volume goes down. And the subsequent black frame turns it back up.

It's a tiny algorithm listening to output volume and reacting to drastic changes via the VolUp/Dn buttons on your remote (figuratively): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression

"Night mode", if it is present, should also do this to a lesser extent. I am grateful for this feature in movies where light chit-chat is interrupted by window-shattering explosion sounds.

TV ads (almost) never interrupted the flow of the show you were watching, because the show was specifically designed around the ad breaks. Radio ads always came between songs.

YouTube is now just sticking ads in any old where in videos. The middle of a song. The middle of a sentence. It's revolting, and in many cases it ruins the content you're actually trying to watch.

If you've got a local public broadcaster, you might want to watch the stream via them instead.

Eurovision should usually be free of ads after all.

You know, if someone would constantly burst into rooms shouting at the top of their lungs for you to give them money, we'd beat them with a wrench. Yet this same behavior is not only tolerated and excused, but encouraged, when done in the name of business profits.

And we wonder why society is so fucked up.

Excellent point!!

> And we wonder why society is so fucked up.

I'd rephrase that to "and there are people who want to debate whether blocking advertisements is morally defensible" as this is not so much an indictment of "society" as it is an exposition of the moral bankruptcy of the advertising industry. The question should not be whether blocking ads is morally defensible but the other way around, whether exposing yourself and others to "modern" advertising is defensible - to which the answer is a wholehearted "Hell No".

Give me a catalogue full of ads like the Computer Shopper [1] magazine of yore and I'll sing praise of the advertisers who clearly showed what they sold for which prices. I actually bought the thing - imagine that, paying money for a telephone book-sized magazine filled with nothing but ads - because it was useful in showing what the market had to offer. A modern-day Computer Shopper would be filled with...

...lifestyle-related drivel

...virtue signalling diversity statements without any relation to whatever product is sold

...celebrities doing things they only do because they get millions for it

...clearly stupid clueless men who only make it through their day because they have women and girls to correct their stupid mistakes, bad choices and silly habits

...some more diversity statements but this time with celebrities

...etc.

Now I understand I'm not really part of the target market the advertisers are trying to brainwash and that the nothing-but-a-list-of-products-with-prices style of advertising does not appeal to everyone. Find some other way of reaching your target market which shares the simplicity and honesty of this type of advertising, stop shouting, stop the brainwashing, get rid of the subliminal messaging, ditch the lifestyle drivel, just quit being bottom feeders and get back to advertising products and prices, no more and no less. Unless you want to be beaten with a wrench that is but in that case you better start wearing helmets and toques.

[1] https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-february-1986/C...

> We were watching Eurovision

Eurovision is basically a big tourism add wrapped in a sell of the cheapest, dullest more forgettable pop songs available. Watching publicity is the whole experience

At least for YT there's a solution: YT Vanced

Or other YouTube clients with ads disabled :) There is even a SmartTV YouTube App that works like a charm. It even skips as blocks in the video itself. Only casting then uses the original app with ads.

Edit:// as long as I would need 2 premium accounts for all my active devices I don't accept that as a real solution

Vanced has essentially been disabled recently, unable to play anything. I don't know if YouTube is going on a murdering spree of everything that threatens ads on the platform.

On mobile it's annoying yes, but there is always a working solution around. On TV however the app "SmartTubeNext" seems to update faster than YouTube patches. (Afaik there are multiple Vanced clones like revanced in case you are using the original)

If you have a solution on mobile, please do DM me :) I've tried multiple workarounds and none of them seem to permanently fix the problem

Firefox for Android + Ublock? Throw in Background Video fixer too.

The only missing feature is casting at that point

Revanced with a client version spoof works for me.

Brave?

There's now revanced which works just fine though.

Actually it lives again in the form of Revanced.

You do have to build an APK yourself by applying patches to an official YT APK but it's pretty easy to so with the CLI tool and works a treat.

Also legally much safer than Vance's.

The smart TV YouTube all you're mentioning also allows you to link up your phone's YouTube app with a code in the settings, and then cast without ads

If that works thank you soooo much!

At least for YT there's a solution: YT Premium.

Sure, as other comments have said, it doesn't scale to all websites, but youtube isn't just any website.

I'm not paying for anything until they remove the "this is the bubble we have prepared for you" recommendation algorithm.

Plus I gladly watch ads, but not the same ads (do the companies pay triple if I watch the same ad from them I wonder) ever again.

Repitition reinforces the ads, just like in other 'learning', advertisers will always want us to retain their ads, I can't see the 'waterboard them with annoying ads' technique going away in any country that Capitalism manages to keep its talons embedded in.

Yeah, but I will never put winter tires on my car, because it's useless where I live. So, maybe, the targeting was subpar. Also, repetition reinforces me to enable ublock again.

The problem for me there is that those ads are usually complete garbage or outright scams. It's not for a real product that I could even buy.

Check out the 'Unhook' browser extension.

You can go directly to the subscriptions tab.

Or hell, Youtube has an API; You can write your own frontend.

> I'm not paying for anything until they remove the "this is the bubble we have prepared for you" recommendation algorithm.

Indeed, and what bothers me most is that it is "one" bubble. I wish there was a selection of tags to choose what mood I am in. Sometimes I only want math and science suggestions, sometimes I want to watch 3Dprinting or FreeCAD video's and other times I just want to discover some music. But Youtube mixes these three different moods together (even though I never play music on Youtube in the morning, nor watch math video's in the late evening). Please Youtube, let me choose my current 'bubble'.

The ios app lets you do that at least. At the top of the Home Screen I can choose “podcast”, “history” etc though within those it’s still recommendation based.

this is only a short term solution as once enough people have YT premium they'll start adding ads in there too

just like cable tv

And more recently Netflix for their ad-supported lowest tier. Not sure if it has been rolled out yet though.

Does YT Premium block the sponsored ad slots? Because if not, that's a pointless product.

That's fair. Because also probably the people the advertisers want to reach MOST are exactly the people who have the spare money (and willingness to spend it) to shell out for YT Premium.

Sigh.

Check out SponsorBlock

You mean embedded native stuff? No, but SponsorBlock does and I use both. YT Premium pays creators for YT views and the analytics don't appreciably differentiate whether you watched an ad or skipped it, so I'm pretty comfortable with the two.

(The apps don't work with SponsorBlock and that does drag, but I mostly don't watch native-advertising videos on my TV so whatever.)

I sometimes wonder if people who are buying ads ever watch YT and see how irrelevant the ads are. Seems like a big waste of advertising budget.

Spaced repetition ;) It works, and they know it.

It doesn't work for me, It just makes me hate the platform even more.

The ad I most frequently get on YouTube - we’re talking three times per video, every other video - is for a shingles vaccine targeted at adults over 60.

No amount of spaced repetition is going to make me, an adult decades under the age of 60, talk to my doctor about that shingles vaccine. This cannot possibly be a truly cost-efficient ad platform.

You are just a little bit extra resistant, but no worries, there are decades to beat you down, chip by chip.

Thank you for spreading the word about our shingles vaccine. It's nice to see the ad is working.

While it is irritating the frequency of them, personally I prefer ads that aren't relevant. I'll spend my money when I want and I don't like to be manipulated by an ad. Plus I like to feel that online marketers know as little about my preferences as possible and are wasting their advertising budget just showing me useless products and services. I'm looking at you Grammarly...

It’s weird that I didn’t realize this for long. Chances are you are probably in market for presumably irrelevant products, it’s only that a lot of us don’t find those topics entertaining.

I wouldn’t mind a nice representative calmly onboarding me with an exciting new middle eastern investment opportunities, I might even enjoy listening to those with a glass of tap water on one hand. That of course is because it is an extremely relevant topic to me /s

Exactly this.

The only point i would add is the long ads that require an action to skip (30+ minutes).

More recently I have also been getting clear scams as ads and no amount of reporting can get rid of them.

These are the reasons I spent the time blocking the ads on all devices. Maybe Google should fix their ads to make them less awful instead of starting the death of Youtube.