The internet became usable after implementing the Pi-Hole. So much noise, so much wasted bandwidth, so many unnecessary lookups, gone with a Raspberry Pi and a few packages.
While other commenters are getting into the technical weeds of things, the reality is that the OP is right. Ads don’t inform, they manipulate. They’re an abusive forced-marriage that we cannot withdraw from even with ad and script blockers, because so much of society is built upon the advertising sector that it’s impossible to fully escape them. People like the OP and us are mocked for moves to block billboards in space as being “alarmist” or out of touch, yet driving along any highway in the USA will bombard you with ads on billboards, on busses, on rideshares, on overly-large signs with glowing placards, in radio and television, on streaming providers who raise our rates on what used to be ad-free packages.
Advertising is cancer, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. Let’s get rid of it.
That's the most "hacker" newsy thing to me. Whenever advertising critical articles come up, there's a large percentage of people commenting pro advertising. Yeah, I get it, you don't bite the hand that feeds you but come on. Does working in ad tech somehow influence your brains like the ones you are targeting?
It’s constant and ever-increasing. I stopped watching a 30 minute video recently after the 5th ad break just over 10 minutes in.
On desktop uBlock still works in Firefox at least. But I’ve basically given up YouTube on iOS.
My theory is that the people who fight against changing the status quo are just fundamentally opposed to change itself, not necessarily supporting the system as it currently stands. They know the ins and outs of the current system, and changing it means they have to dump knowledge and re-learn things - which they're fiercely opposed to doing. The enemy you know, over the enemy you don't, in a manner of speaking.
Those of us who can visualize futures starkly different than a continuance of the present day are a threat to those people who demand indefinite complacency and an unchanging world. Unfortunately for them, the universe is chaos and change is inevitable - so finding your own stability amidst the chaos is a skill more people need, such that necessary change might be embraced.
It feels like standover tactics, showing the worst of the worst unless you pay up.
I should also at least admit that recently,Like the last 12 months, those greasy-type ads are less common, having been replaced with more television-style ads, although they last longer. Still an improvement overall though.
Isn't it hypocritical to want YouTube to offer you its content for free? If the content is valuable to you, you should be willing to pay for it. If not, just stop watching YouTube.
I run DNS blocking at home which helps somewhat with shitty devices like Apple that don't give users any control. But my partner was looking at a local news site on her phone on the train the other day and I couldn't believe it. Literally an ad between every single paragraph plus one sticky ad at the bottom. It was like twice as much ad as content. Sickening.
I've made a product. The people who use it, like it. But I have no online following or presence, and I'm really not the kind of charismatic person who could build one. All the "community" places where I could share it in good faith are incredibly hostile to self promotion, I think because of the wave of people selling vibecoded openai wrappers as language tutors.
I can pay £40 for reddit ads, and while it has negative ROI, it gives me lots of feedback that I can use to iterate. Sure, my project seems to be a commercial dead end - people find it valuable, but most people don't find it quite valuable enough to pay for the high cost of translation - but I still think those ads had a lot of value.
That said, I use an adblocker myself, I wish more intelligent people worked on rockets rather than targeting algorithms, and I do agree that ads have a negative effect in a lot of places - it's just that they do have a real (and IMO moral) utility in some places. If you banned advertising for everything, you'd just encourage bribing moderators to let you self-promote or ensure only people with existing followings can make things.
(it's https://nuenki.app, if anyone's curious)
It's obvious that if advertising was made illegal, we would need to pay for all those services that we want to use. YouTube premium is the best example of how that would actually work.
But I do, by supporting those creators through Patreon. Paying for YouTube Premium sounds like a bad deal since I'm not directly supporting the creators for which I go to YouTube in the first place.
Sure, YouTube probably takes more off the top than Patreon. But YouTube also splits it up based on who you’re watching. I probably watch 30+ YouTube channels per week, some of which I find on the explore page and don’t even know the name of. I would never subscribe to 30+ Patreons. I think YouTube Premium is a good compromise.
If I want a product, it better be out of my own free will. If I wanted AI assisted ways to learn languages, I'd be perfectly capable of researching what's out there. If I see an ad, out of principle I won't pay a cent for anything, unless maybe it's literally the best thing since sliced bread.
Ads provide negative value to me as a consumer, therefore I want them banned.
But the economy! But the jobs!
What's the purpose of both of these? To address people's needs and wishes, or to plant new needs and wishes in the brain of consumers to then extract capital out of them?
If a product is worth creating it could be created, bought, and made profitable in an ad-free society as well. The problem is it's an arms race. A good product + ads will always win against an equivalent product without. Everybody has to do ads because everybody else does them. So going ad-free only works if everybody does it at once, and I believe that requires regulation. Of course I'm also not opposed to you buying ads to promote your product, I'm opposed to the fact that the market forces you to.
Trees haven't figured out how to all reach sunlight without using enormous resources to grow high. States haven't figured out how to all stay secure without spending enormous sums on defense. This situation is similar but I feel we have a good shot at saving ourselves a whole lot of trouble by heavily limiting the ways in which advertising can legally be done.
Billboards, commercials, and advertisements fall under "advertising", the act of trying to coerce consumers into buying a thing or patronizing a product through manipulation.
Promotion, on the other hand, actively involves someone talking directly with someone else about their product, or using some other form of demonstrable evidence of your product or works.
Let's take a few examples:
* An artist sharing their latest work to their social media feeds is promotion, while shoving it in your face with incentives to buy it at their website on a random forum post is advertising.
* A lawncare company that asks a client if they could leave a small sign behind promoting their services after a job is fine, but buying advertising time on a television spot with CGI graphics and staged visuals is not.
* Demonstrating your product at a kiosk at a mall or event is promotion, but spending money on a pre-roll YouTube spot with imagery deliberately cultivated to induce purchase is advertising
I am fine with promoting something; I am not fine with advertising something. Promoting often just takes time, which anyone can reasonably do; advertising costs money, and equating that to speech means admitting money is speech, which I think most folks would agree is a very bad thing.
If you're encountering issues with promoting your product, it's likely because it's coming off as advertising. Instead of saying "I built a new app over at this URL and would love your feedback", be more specific with what you're asking for: "Is my business model viable?", "Is the UX legible and accessible by folks using screen readers?", "Could someone try penetrating my tech stack before I go live?"
Promotion as a way of soliciting feedback has to be done in a specific way, else it is advertising. That's why forums and sites are very particular about anti-advertising/anti-spam/anti-promotion rules. As long as it's not the equivalent of shouting, "HEY, LOOK AT ME" through a megaphone that's unsolicited by the forum or venue inhabitants, generally most folks in my experience are going to be fine with it.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
--Upton Sinclair
I get that YouTube doesn’t give enough of a percentage of profits to the creator, but the alternative should be a different video hosting platform that does give more profits to creators. Not patreon, which offers nothing in return. (It’s a glorified payment processor and doesn’t actually do any video hosting.)
That there are vanishingly few alternatives to YouTube in terms of actually hosting videos (I know of Vimeo and, I guess nebula? Only because it gets continually pushed on me by creators) maybe tells you that the act of hosting videos at scale is kinda hard to do profitably. Or else there’d be tons of alternative options.
I lost a lot of faith in the decency of others a month ago when I heard a song on my car radio, looked at the display to see the artist and title info that comes from the radio station, and was met with "Bounty the quicker picker upper." That slogan stayed up for at least a minute. Every possible channel of communication will be sold for ad space.
> Hosting videos isn’t cheap, who should cover that cost?
The ad revenue is in the billions and is steadily increasing each year. I would bet that the costs are more than covered.
You're changing the context of the discussion here. snailmailman had said:
> Youtube so badly wants me to pay for premium. But the ads they show me are almost entirely scams and questionably legal content [...] On desktop uBlock still works in Firefox at least. But I’ve basically given up YouTube on iOS.
Saying they're unwilling to tolerate ads in YouTube. When asked why not just pay for YouTube premium, you came and said why you don't pay for YouTube premium. When pressed, you say "because YouTube's ad model will make them the money they need to host the videos."
Since you haven't said whether you block ads, there's two ways of interpreting this:
1. You don't block ads, you're ok watching YouTube ads, and you pay the creators directly through patreon. Great! But that makes your reply -- to why snailmailman doesn't pay for YT premium -- a little off-topic, because we were discussing ad-blocking.
2. OR, you're not ok watching YouTube ads, you block them, and then pay creators on patreon directly, meaning you don't care about covering the costs of hosting videos, because you don't believe YouTube should be showing you ads, and you don't want to pay them for the service. In which case we're back to "who should cover the costs." Maybe your answer is "other suckers, but not me", which is quite hypocritical.
If YouTube were to offer me a service that I think is worth paying for, then I would. I think that YouTube Premium is not a product worth paying for based on what they're offering, and also I noticed that I watch YouTube videos less and less over the years. Nebula and Curiosity Stream convinced me to pay for their services, so perhaps YouTube just has to step up?