It's funny, I had YouTube's paid offering for a few years (I used the service a lot and want to support non ad-based revenue streams). But they changed something a while back that started giving me a degraded experience, and eventually made the site unusable. Did some digging and it turns out they were detecting my adblock and intentionally making my experience bad despite being a paid customer. I submitted a ticket or whatever but of course nobody gave a shit. I ended up upgrading my adblocker to something that worked on the new YouTube but of course at that point why keep the subscription if I have to fight some ads arms race anyway?

Ads are useful and have their place in keeping the web accessible to everyone, but Google's anti user policies really stretch that relationship.

It's funny how experiences can be so different (likely by Google's design, of course). I've been having degraded experience with YouTube using uBlock Origin on Vivaldi. I elected to make use of a one-month trial for Premium. Suddenly these problems went away. Interestingly, after canceling the trial, the problems still haven't come back (yet). Things like, I would load a video, it'd start playing, but the browser tab itself would just block for a good 20-30 seconds. The entire time, the video is playing (well, I could hear the audio but the visuals were frozen). Then things would unblock and comments would appear, etc.

The difference between my YouTube interface with and without premium is stark. Aside from the ads, it seemed like the algorithm pushed less slop in front of me to avoid. Purely anecdotal, and likely affected by A/B bullshit (or nowadays would it be more like A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H/I/J/K/L/M/N/O/P/Q/R/S/T/U/V/W/X/Y/Z).

Bullying their paying customers is such an insane choice

Why would you use Adblock if you pay for premium?

There are other websites on the internet, and I don't want to/didn't consider toggling off ghostery, noscript, ublock origin, etc per domain that I choose to pay for.

Because Adblock doesn't just block ads, it also blocks invasive trackers that I consider malware.

Paying to remove Ads means I don't want ads, it doesn't mean I consent to all of the other invasive tracking they do.

I've paid for Youtube Premium for a decade, use adblock in my browser, have no issues with performance on Youtube.

I only watch YouTube on my iPad or rarely my android TV, and there, the premium experience is worth it, since it's difficult to block ads on those platforms anyway.

If your experience with YouTube is primarily through browser then yeah I can see why that experience is shitty.

I'm fine with sites detecting adblock, in the sense that I will just not go to those sites. But if I already pay for an ad free experience then there's no reason for them to care about my adblock, unless they're just mad they can't track me, in which case, they can fuck all the way off.

And yes, I know that Google is in that camp, so they can indeed fuck all the way off.

I was in complete agreement until:

> Ads are useful and have their place in keeping the web accessible to everyone,

No. Advertising is a cancer on commerce.

Its encrapification is real. It has been slow though, mostly affecting niche interests and smaller creators. And the ad experience has definitely gotten worse, but adblockers help. Try using youtube without and adblocker.

I pay for the subscription and don’t see any ads. It comes with YouTube Music. It’s great.

None of your videos have in-video ads? "This segment is sponsored by NordVPN!" style stuff?

Content creators still have their embedded ads. You just avoid all the non-skippable you tube ads

There's another plug-in called SponsorBlock that will skip over most of those.

I use Youtube on a Chromecast with the SmartTube-beta app, which skips in-video ads, if they are demarcated by the creator - and most videos with in-video ads have that. The app just skips right by the in-video ad, as well as a bunch of other non-interesting video content if it is specified in the video timecodes by the creator.

Another great feature of SmartTube-beta - and it's the feature that brought me to that app - is the ability to completely remove all "shorts" from the entire app. No more shorts. I've configured the app to eliminate them completely like they never existed.

> if they are demarcated by the creator - and most videos with in-video ads have that

I'm almost positive that SmartTube is using the SponsorBlock database, which does not depend on creator-submitted demarcation, but rather on user-generated/crowd-sourced segment tagging. https://sponsor.ajay.app/

This sounds amazing. I personally resorted to FreshRSS and an extension that allows me to spoof feeds from YouTube and socials as if they were RSS. It’s not perfect, but it is a chronological plain-text (apart from hyperlinks) list of content that I feel materially healthier for having switched to. My past experiences with alternative frontend interfaces for YouTube is that they last a few months, then Google tweaks their API just enough to break them all for a few weeks.

I also pay for YT Premium, and I have maintained a family subscription since they initially offered one. I wish they would just provide Premium users with options for turning off shorts, comments (per-channel ideally, but across the board would be fine too), games, and everything else I don’t care to ever engage with.

I also run a self-hosted AdGuard service for DNS-level adblocking, but it sounds like Google’s getting around that as well. Next stop will be DNS with SSL and a proxy. I am a little concerned that I am having to establish what must appear from the outside to be a very sketchy anonymizing infrastructure, and it’s all just to use the web the way I always have, whilst avoiding the increasingly intrusive and anxiety-inducing tracking and advertising.

In the old days people would pay to host video content and now people pay Google to watch other people's hosted video content. It's funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving companies money for nothing. I'm still waiting for the first company to start selling bottled air next!

You're talking as if video content has no intrinsic value of its own. Of course it does.

"Now people pay cable companies to watch TV shows. It's funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving companies money for nothing."

I mean, when it launched the point of paying for cable instead of getting TV for free via broadcast was no ads

Now cable has ads and costs a fortune; I didn't know anyone who has it. I do still watch a little broadcast though, the price is right even if the programming isn't great.

If there's nothing on I turn it off and look at my phone

> point of paying for cable instead of getting TV for free via broadcast was no ads

No, the point of paying for cable was to get more TV. Most cable stations have always had ads. You're probably thinking of HBO, which is a tiny subset of overall cable output.

The original point of cable was Community Antenna TV, where you'd get a much better quality signal (and often even additional out-of-market but nearby channels). Then broadcasters decided to go into specifically seeking nationwide coverage (Ted Turner was a pioneer in this area). They also decided, due to the sports leagues, that cable should only deliver local stations in the same market as your location through blackouts (through my childhood I went from getting three ABC affiliates and two CBS affiliates, to one of each). It became unprofitable to manage blacking out the out-of-market station any time they were both running network or sports programming, so the out-of-market stations were generally removed (I also wouldn't be surprised if negotiations for retransmission consent included terms preventing carriage of out-of-market stations).

I don't think there was a time Cable didn't have ads, certain channels like HBO yeah, but never cable as a whole. The attraction was just having way more content.

In the 1950s when Cable started in the US, there were no Cable channels. Cable was literally renting a pipe to a big antenna instead of your own small antenna in your house, so you got broadcast with better signal strength.

The first Cable channel was HBO. The second was TBS, it had ads from the beginning.

I get a lot of value from youtube - hours of entertainment. Also I don't pay and use an ad blocker which is maybe a bit unfair but thanks to the people who do pay.

There are tons of companies selling bottled air. Here's a story from 7 years ago. There are lots more now: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/jan/21/fresh-air-for...

Using an adblocker certainly won't help smaller creators and niche interests. If you don't want ads but want to support creators, pay for Premium.

I have a question. How much do small creators get for views from Premium users? Say they get a few thousand views per video, would they get anything from Premium users?

Probably not much for a few thousand. My understanding is that it requires continually producing videos that attract 100k+ viewers. It doesn't pay a lot, but it attracts direct sponsors who pay better. The biggest money comes from selling your own products and services, like "How to make millions on YouTube" seminars.

I've seen some breakdowns, and (depending on the content, because different ad segments can be more or less lucrative) view time from Premium users tends to be worth more, and often way more.

As I understand it, a chunk of your membership fee is divided amongst all monetized creators you watch on a monthly basis, proportional to your watch time. A different chunk of your membership fee is divided between the creators and record labels, for your watch/listen time of Shorts and Youtube Music.

So the size of the creator is only relevant insofar as it can determine whether the channel is eligible for monetization. View time is not worth a different amount depending on the size of the creator.

A lot of them have sponsors which pay more than the ads, or are on Patreon, or are also on other platforms that pay them a higher proportion or allow videos that risk demonetisation on Youtube, or sell merch, or something else.

Sure, and if you're a patreon supporter, or support them on a non-YouTube platform, great. But if they're monetized and you're just watching them on YouTube, which probably 90% of people do, then running an adblocker is preventing them from earning money they would otherwise have earned. Whether or not they're _also_ earning money via other means is irrelevant.

Lol, if you want to support them pay their patreon. The few cents they get from you paying premium won't support them.

I don't understand what point you're attempting to make. Yes, of course if you pay someone $5 a month on Patreon, they'll be getting more money from you than if you just used Premium or disabled your adblocker. And if you paid them $100/month, that would be more than $5. So?

Why does that make it okay to use an adblocker?

Because google already has enough money and the people I watch won't be getting any useful amount of money anyway, so why go through it?

I use patreon for ones I care about. And many of the niche interests I'm interested in are demonetized anyways which is the crux of the issue.

My YT premium recently expired for a payment issue and ffs the ads are absolutely insane.

The advertising tier has gradually gotten worse on YouTube.

> …they landed on a decent ad model.

You must be joking. YT is so insufferable, I can only watch it via Firefox with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger active. And even then only if and as long as I absolutely have to.

YouTube only still "works" because of the cat and mouse ad blocker game. I don't know how but my new ad blocker seems to fast forward through all the ads. For a little while YouTube had them licked and I was watching 10 to 20 second ads all the time so temporarily gave up on YouTube until the ad blockers caught up again. Now YouTube is still functionally broken on TVs and mobile phones but works fine on a desktop computer still.

Why not just pay for premium?

Not OP. I did pay, for 10y. But the video quality kept slowly degrading (lower bitrate). And ads in the video content kept increasing.

YouTube also increased advertising some paying shows, YouTube shorts, and more. No way to say no, only "yes forever" or "no thanks not right now". And it comes back in a few weeks.

It also constantly sneakily lowers the video quality.

So I stopped paying. I combine ad block and sponsor block and I forget another one to cleanup the UI.

Often I download the video so that I can actually seek around without buffering (because YouTube buffers as little as possible to save cost, which I can understand).

Content nowadays is 30min instead of 5min. So you better be ready to skip and seek.

YT premium has higher bit rates and sponsor block built in, but they don't call it that or advertise that it even exists. Instead they say it allows you to "skip commonly skipped segments of video" but basically it is sponsor block.

It's the bitrate we used to have before they made it a premium plus all star plus+ feature and downgraded the rest.

Netflix did the same. In fact they even silently downgraded us from 4k HDR surround sound during a software update. And nothing can get us back the max quality anymore. I stopped paying all together.

So you know what doesn't buffer, has the absolute best quality (like 4x the bitrate etc), all the languages and what not? pirated content.

It's just stupid how much easier it is to obtain predictable quality without stutter by downloading rather than actually paying a streamer service.

Plus the ads and other UX dark patterns are through the roof.

I’m amazed people can get rid of shorts for a few weeks. For me, I tell it I don’t want to see them and it’s literally back as soon as I refresh the feed. It’s aggressively anti-UX.

Pay for a global monopoly that has always subsided its operation with infinite money from a near ad and search monopoly and private equity? Yeah, I will keep my uBlock Origin active, no thanks.

Watching things without having to log in is my use case. Not something that Google would want to ever cater for, so ad blocking it is.

I feel like YouTube's enshittification is already here. The algorithm has long been terrible, they now punish users for disabling watch history, and the ads are more frequent, longer, and more annoying. If not for inertia (lots of video creators still uploading primarily or solely there), I'd have abandoned YouTube entirely a long time ago.

>YouTube is 20 years old now. Either the encrapification is very slow or they landed on a decent ad model.

Have you seen how many ads are in a video on YouTube? On desktop its no issue, but I use the YouTube app on my Apple TV now and then, and I tried to watch a few relatively short video, and I saw easily 4-6 ads per video, some of which were 90+ seconds long. Its awful

The YouTube search has been unusable for me for about the last year or so (maybe longer?), since every ~5 results are interrupted with clickbait only barely related to my query (and then, past a certain point, they all become unrelated).

I do subscribe so I don't see ads. My complaints with YouTube are: I don't want "Shorts" in my suggestions, and yes they recently added the option to remove them but it's only temporary. They always come back and I always say "don't show me this" and they say "got it, we won't show you Shorts anymore" but in a few weeks they always come back. Do they think I forgot?

And they have some kind of little games now, which I don't have any interest in, but they have no option to remove them from my suggestions.

For me the text has changed from "don't show me this" to "show less of this" and they come back about once a week now. I also have no option to remove them from the subscriptions feed.

I think a similar thing is happening with their crappy games too. They keep coming back (the games still say "don't show me this" though).

YouTubes content moderation guidelines / removal of videos that have any content just the slightest topic they don't want to see discussed is kind of a no-go why they don't get my money.

So websites move to the Spotify model of getting paid... that's gonna suck.