Youtube is still very much ad spam even if you block the ads.

Of course it depends on what kind of videos you watch. But videos themselves are becoming more ad filled and lower effort for me.

I mainly consume software, gaming, cooking and hardware news videos.

Huge portion of human effort going to ads is really sad

The extension 'sponsorblock' automatically jumps over ad reads in the video, with user-submitted start/end data.

Can't recommend it enough. And with this plugin you'll immediately notice if a video is vapid (read: only exists to plug the sponsor.)

How does the extension know if the submissions are valid and not malicious?

Users are able to "downvote" a "skip", and a skip which isn't undone is considered an "upvote".

I’m always surprised when I watch a video that is 9 minutes old and the sponsors segments get skipped automatically. That extension must be getting quite popular.

I pay for YouTube Premium to block YouTube's "native" ads on Apple TV, but yeah, the sponsorship crap is getting out of hand. I need to look into getting the Apple TV sponsorblock thing set up.

This is a side complaint on YT but I have purchased so many UHD movies and they only stream in 480P. I think you have to have some kind of YouTube certified device to play it in UHD but annoying.

Pro tip: If you still have a local record store with a used section, you can probably buy blurays and dvds super cheap. They’re typically 25-50% the price of renting on Amazon/Apple, or buying used media on Amazon.

Also, it’s actually easier to bypass the DRM crap than not, so they’ll continue to play in full resolution moving forward.

That's one of those things, gotta have all these discs... I already have a hoarding problem, but it is a solution

I want to point out I'm still an apt dweller unfortunately

Nah, you can rip the discs and sell them back/toss them.

You can also get discs from most libraries, book stores, many garage sails, ebay, for super cheap.

At that point, why not just pirate and cut out the used disk middleman since the original creators aren't seeing any money from the purchase at that point anyway?

Lip service to the law, in theory purchasing used discs supports original sales of new discs, and I at least sometimes prefer the discovery experience of physical browsing.

Borrowing from libraries sort of gives money to the creators, since the libraries seem to buy + dump lots of copies. Buying used gives the libraries money, since they dump the copies at the used store.

Alternatively, be like me, and have a $100 budget for N ~= 20 BluRays/40 DVDs. 2-3 can be new purchases if used isn't in stock.

Honestly if you've bought (oh sorry "licensed") a movie, I'd have 0 problem torrenting what you've paid for vs dealing with these games. Companies just want forever subscriptions, not purchasing in any case.

Well you obviously can't, since it's Apple.

Obviously…

https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV

It's a poor substitute for the Android TV version, but it's better than nothing.

We use an official YouTube app, and it’s all ad fraud.

It rapid rolls through video streams showing a second or two of each ad.

Presumably this is so Google can charge advertisers for impressions that don’t actually exist.

I've noticed this with shorts. I'll go through 20 or so, check my YT history and Google treats the worst ones as a watched video. I'll spend less than a second as my brain processes the slop and then skip. Sure as shit they act like I watched the whole video and recommend me more. It has to be some sort of revenue scam, no customer advantage has appeared to me yet.

I watch stuff related to photography/cinematography, fishing (creeks), hobby electronics stuff, cars. That's most of it. Some makers like Hyperspace pirate. Travel videos like Japan Maibaru travel is good. Music recommendations, search a song and click on the "Song name + mix". The travel stuff I don't travel myself but the mood/atmosphere is great like Japanese towns near coast lines.

It's funny being a developer you don't watch much developer content like Primogen though I'm jealous these guys can just talk into a camera and make money. It is a skill to be likeable/mass appeal, being entertaining.

I already know the ad anyway, "this video is sponsored by SquareSpace". Bro I'm not going to use square space alright, I'm going to go into VS Code, make a SPA, host it on S3, buy a domain, connect the DNS, setup up ALB, CDN, setup RDS, cognito and then I'll have a website. Oh I also need github actions to do the build and push out the new changes.

Will throw this random comment in. Competition with the masses is hard. I paid a friend of mine $100 per song he produced for me (which were bad). But then I can go on Epidemic Sound and for $10/mo pick from a shit ton of good songs... how does a single creator compete with that.

Sponsor block works great.

If you have YT Premium and start skipping ahead while an in video ad is playing, it helpfully provides a button to skip it. Still annoying, but much less so.

My 2.5 year old recognizes ads and says “ew, ads” because I’ve intentionally said it each time we see one.

My 5-year-old skips over them saying "Why the hell would I want that" because I was not careful enough while skipping over ads saying "Why the hell would I want that".

Children sample harder than Public Enemy.

There was a Firefox extension long ago that did NOT block ads but hid them. Basically it loaded them and for all the site knew, the add was showing, so it was transparent.

But, the ad wasn't rendering in the page. So the user didnt need to suffer them, but the website owners still profited.

The only losers where ad buyers, who IMHO are exactly the ones that should be affected.until they realize that ads are not effective.

Someone should bring something like that for current platforms. Even for video like, a placeholder video with a tip, interesting fact or whatever, playing while the page load the real video.

Not sure if you're talking about Adnauseam, but this is basically the lawful evil version of the extension you're describing. https://adnauseam.io/

Adnauseam actually clicks on every ad in the background, otherwise it's just a wrapper on uBlock Origin.

Yes! That one. But we need it for video ads as well now.

Ads are an evil that must be removed from the internet, and draining the wallets of companies using ads, without upside, would make them place less value on them.

If ads are not effective, why do you think companies keep buying them? Surely they would have realized by now.

Companies have ad budgets that must be spent to the last dollar lest that dollar be deducted from next year's budget.

The only reason why have an ad budget is because buying ads was effective. If they were no longer effective there would be no ad budget

Ad buyers wouldn't be buying ads if they weren't effective.

>The only losers where ad buyers, who IMHO are exactly the ones that should be affected.until they realize that ads are not effective.

Honest question, what do you envision will keep the free-internet free in lou of ads? Do you think a pay-walled internet, $3 for this site, $5 for this....would ever take off?

I too block ads, but feel like i'm slowly contributing to the death spiral of the internet

The internet used to be free.

It's so sad to read that there is people who is completely oblivious to the time when we had amazing free Gopher sites, or the WWW started and was fully Free (with L as in Libre).

People born in 2000+ have no idea about that time

Servers cost money, at the end of the day

Perhaps in recent years informational blog articles are mostly ads for the writer's products, services, and the chance to employ them? Informational stuff will remain public and free because eager seekers of monetization will easily convert to creators of marketplace-protected products and sell something on Steam or Gumroad. As long as one's primary purpose is to be informed, there will always be some writer not monetizing that particular piece of information. Maintaining the infrastructure (data centers and cables) eventually costs a lot of money and it must be paid by somebody eventually. Serving text pieces from a CDN is cheap enough for any blogger to personally afford, but no sane video hosting website will stop putting ads around.

The people who "accept ads as a part of life" are funding the content you read and watch. You are not in any way "a bad person", but you should be thankful that not everyone blocks ads.

Ads are intentional psychological manipulation, and nobody should be thankful to anyone allowing this. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

Have always felt it's not really any different to allowing a website to run a JS crypto miner. It moves money (which is why it's done) but wastes resources (time/energy) so is on net a detriment to affordability.

So then how do you think websites should make money?

Many sites already exist to sell products (like Temu) or a paid subscription (like Dropbox), such that ads or crypto miners would just be double-dipping. On average, you would need to pay less than you do now if resources were not wasted on ads/crypto miners.

For websites that aren't costly to host (blogs, tutorials, ...), there's often no need to monetize at all. Non-commercial sites on some topic ran by passionate hobbyists are already typically higher quality than sites designed for profiting through adspam/SEO.

Donations and volunteer work (like Wikipedia) can be viable where there are non-negligible costs to cover. Grants and public funding can also help if it's a worthwhile cause.

Some institutions/people benefit indirectly in recognition from putting information online - like universities, product support forums, or a security researcher writing up an investigation into a malware campaign. Could consider this a form of advertising, but the resources are being used in a productive way rather than just intentionally wasting time.

Non-wasteful use of your time and computing resources are also fine by me, like torrent trackers that require you to maintain a minimum seed ratio. Google's CAPTCHAs are already sneakily giving you annotation work, just not paying for it.

I'd claim federation also helps, in that services that ostensibly benefit from being one massive site (due to network effect) can actually be split up into smaller more feasible nodes. I use SDF's Mastodon/Lemmy instances for example, and host a Matrix server.

Venture capital funds the content, on the hope that people watch ads in the future. Online ads now are a very different beast compared to what AdWords was from 2002-2007 - not dependent on full-spectrum surveillance through their own browser, their own mobile operating system, video streaming and cloud suite.

Google accumulated untold riches from those primitive ads yet they and Meta have tightened the screw a little bit more in each passing year.

> Venture capital funds the content, on the hope that people watch ads in the future.

Obviously, this isn't sustainable in itself.

> Google accumulated untold riches from those primitive ads yet they and Meta have tightened the screw a little bit more in each passing year.

Google doesn't have to actually make any content, they just link to it. This is relatively cheap.

If you're actually producing content (that isn't AI slop), you don't get the benefit of that sort of scale. There's no way to automate it.

Google also takes the lion's share of the ad revenue. They're the reason youtube creators resort to sponsorships instead of relying on youtube's inbuilt ads. They even put ads on the videos of new youtube accounts and profit off them while telling said new accounts that they can't get any of that revenue for their own work until they hit Google's arbitrary threshold of subscribers/views. And they've been abusing the hell out of their chokehold monopoly on ads, via adsense, at every level of the system.

Point being, the fact that google ads currently don't yield much revenue per click/view for most people isn't necessarily just because they are ads.

Even so, corporations will never voluntarily conclude that they're making enough ad money. Line must go up, forever, because reasons.

That's an evil thing to say. No, that's not true.