Don't everyone on HN use ublock origin? I haven't seen an ad in years.

I don't want the ads, but I'd rather see the carefully curated list of creators I care about be able to get paid, and Youtube Music works for me. Youtube Premium is worth it.

same. firefox with ubO is my best friend.

Same here.

Sideloaded the latest and greatest YouTube++/uYou/uYouPlus/(currently uYouEnhanced) on my iPhone and re-sign it weekly with AltStore, Trollstore, or use a jailbroken equivalent on a device that managed to stay jailbroken.

There’s a few other new options I’ve seen through Reddit for web viewing, iOS content blockers, or hosting your own VPS invidious/piped instance with rotating ipv6 servers (not google/aws/digital ocean as they require using a web panel).

You can leave ads on for whitelisted creators sponsored advertising content also.

YouTube seems to be doing subtle dark patterns if you use uBlock origin.

For example, I can watch videos, but I often get an "error" if I try to seek in the video.

Phones and TVs.

> The ads are insane.

The ads are indeed insane. They break YouTube in practice. YouTube, in its wisdom, much like a mobster in the protection racket, offers you an out: pay for Premium. I ended up doing this because YT is one of the things I use the most. The alternative was having Firefox with uBlock Origin on every mobile device in my household, I suppose, but this wasn't feasible.

YouTube Premium took the win :(

> I just can't see how this model is sustainable. I don't want to waste time watching videos that could have been a short paragraph

Depends on what you're watching. I always disliked, say, programming tutorials in video form -- give me text, to read and understand at my own pace. Many video tutorials are unnecessarily longwinded and always go at the wrong pace for me, either too fast or too slow.

But I watch tons of videos about other topics where video is the right form. I watch hobby tutorials, I watch videos about cinema/art, etc, and I feel video is the right format for me.

Where do you see ads on Youtube? I have seen maybe one or two in 10 years.

I see them almost guaranteed unless I'm logged in. I ended up paying for Premium to remove them.

More and more content creators are just embedding them directly into their videos. Either by just mentioning sponsor names in the flow of what they are talking about, or doing little sidebars where they talk about/promote their sponsors.

I don't mind these so much because they are easy to skip, but ad-blockers don't catch them.

It's harder to avoid bad quality videos that now you can't see downvotes.

As for the video being unnecessarily long - I have played with copying the transcript from the video into ChatGPT, but they tend to be too long for ChatGPT to handle.

Kagi has an Universal Summerized function that can give you a nice summary of a video.