Comment by JumpCrisscross
4 days ago
I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use it through the browser with adblockers. (Yes, on my phone and iPad.)
It works so well I’ve gotten at least half a dozen neighbours to do the same. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a definitive step up in UX.
Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad. Seeing a product in a youtube ad now causes me to be more likely to believe it's a ripoff.
Things like a cheap $5 fan being sold for $60 as roughly: "Super efficient A/C that will save you $100s on your electricity bill and can cool a room down in just minutes"
I assume you mean all the snake oil pre-playback ads? Mostly dangerous medical advice, solar scams, or wellness quackery.
This week, an instructional video I was watching on how to repair my water heater was suddenly interrupted by a campy ad for pussy-hair razors.
It was so ill-timed, bizarre, and inappropriate I burst out laughing.
The other one I was seeing a lot of, until very recently, was pornographic static ads that were implemented as an optical illusion. If you viewed it at full scale it was an innocuous image of a closet or chair or something, so it passed all checks, but when scaled into a thumbnail, it turns into a silhouette of a woman giving oral or something else obscene. Not sure what this technique is called or how it's done. (It's not a schooner, it's a sailboat.)
>Not sure what this technique is called or how it's done
Downscaling/downsampling attack.
Commonly used against AI systems either to pass filters or poison data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02456
If you know the sampling rate of the sampling filter you want to pass you can do some tricky encoding to show a different image at that particular resolution bypassing AI/content recognition systems. This said if it starts happening a lot Google will take those images/videos and feed them into a learning system that looks for those patterns and preemptively marks the video.
I find the downsampling thing happens on Temu ads a lot.
I do a cryptic crossword from a free UK newspaper most days, because my Dad (many thousands of miles away), also does the same crossword and we can bond over good and bad clues, and so on.
The banner ad on that page is always Temu. It always, always looks pornographic. And then you look closer, and it's completely innocuous.
I have assumed that the alogrithm is just optimising for attention, and it just so happens those images, at that scale, are going to get a lot of attention. But it does mean I can't show somebody else the crossword I'm doing for fear of looking like a degenerate pervert, and I am at risk of causing an issue if I play it on public transport.
> Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad.
Claiming that (youtube) ads are bad is a tautology at this point. What else can be expected from something competing for what is left of a user's attention at the very lowest end of a market already overflooded with crud?
The question should rather be: why would one voluntarily let one's well-being be polluted by such invasive, parasitic crap.
There is nothing normal about ads everywhere. There is nothing healthy about ads everywhere. Ads are not an inevitability.
Run an ad-blocker, protect your mental sanity.
If I were into AI, right now I'd be working on ad blocking.
Now we just need someone to build AR glasses with real-world adblocking...
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That's just... every ad. I mostly avoid products that I see in ads (like TV, radio and internet ads) ironically.
Yes, I saw a promoted video with cryptocurrency scam ("earn lot of money trading crypto with ChatGPT") for many months on European Youtube. As I remember, to become rich you just need to put your private keys into their script and run it.
The good ads are just normal videos (movies trailer, product announcements, sponsored video)
When ai slop makes it cheap to churn out the ads this is what you get. What does YT care, they get the money either way.
Enshittification continues
what I don't understand is how paying for YT ads can be profitable. I've never clicked on a YT ad _intentionally_ nor I know anyone who did, having asked a few people. I admit the brand awareness works tho.
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> Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad. Seeing a product in a youtube ad now causes me to be more likely to believe it's a ripoff.
YT needs a button to the effect of "I will never, ever, EVER, buy or use this product, stop spending money on this ad"
the obviously-AI created slop or the mobile games that I will never play, etc. is just a waste of time for basically everyone (except YT making that money, I guess)
No, why would you allow ads lol.
I did the same, but I also added in a tamper monkey script to get rid of the picture in picture thing they force on you as part of their "core experience". I wish their ux designers and PMs were less arrogant and realized their preferences are just preferences and gave us back the ability to disable stuff like this in the app.
Are they the PMs' preferences? Or are they A/B tested "optimizations" to hit their KPIs?
I think it is worse than that. Yes they A/B test. But they also have incentive to show how great their new feature idea is. So they are always picking the metrics that make their feature look better and ignoring the ones that make it look worse. So there is a thumb on the scale here.
I honestly don't care. I've taken the stance of just looking for alternatives. Chrome on Android forced grid for tabs, boom changes to Firefox everywhere. YouTube doesn't allow me to disable picture in picture, canceled my paid account and mostly stopped using it, etc...
Not being able to play Youtube in the background on your phone is unfortunately one of the main appeals of Premium. There's a lot of good mixes, concerts, etc that I play for the audio while doing something else that I can't do without Premium unless I wanted to leave my phone unlocked (and pray I don't pocket click a link).
My iPhone running Safari and uBlock Origin lite is able to do this. I don't have the youtube app installed. I don't even think the ad blocker is necessary for background audio, but I don't want to see ads.
1. Go to youtube.com in the browser, play the video, switch back to the home screen. Video playback will stop, which is a good default behavior.
2. Swipe down from the top of the screen which brings up "Notification Center" which somewhat strangely contains a playback control for the browser.
3. Press play. Audio resumes. If it's part of a playlist, you don't have to manually advance, it will play automatically.
No ads, no youtube premium subscription, no "desktop mode", no sideloading, no additional apps other than the beloved ad blocker.
TIL Thank you pal, it perfectly works!
Firefox Android can play audio even when the phone is locked, and I use it regularly.
Note: If you have a mid-range to lower end phone, battery optimization might stop your playback anyway by default. You can exclude Firefox from battery optimization though.
brave on android can also do the same, not sure about ios
I'm fairly certain if you use a browser and the desktop version of the site you can listen with the screen off/locked.
If you're on Android, YouTube Revanced does this (+many other premium features)
I run Brave (Android) on my phone and don't have any ads on Youtube. I think it worked on Brave iOS but I sold my iPhone last year.
I let Brave run in the background and it seems to work fine.
Brave is a series scam company.
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You can open youtube in the phone's web browser and install an extension that blocks a site's ability to tell when focus has left the page/app. This is how I listen to some music on my phone while working out.
Ad blockers help with the constant nagging about "open in the app!"
NewPipe
Never works
Revanced is the best UX for Android, can remove a lot of things as well (like shorts).
I stopped using apps like this because they were always getting broken by youtube. Obviously it's intentional sabotage but still. It felt like I had to update those apps every time I used them and sometimes there was no update at that time at all. The mobile site never breaks and you have full access to extensions if you use firefox.
I never managed to install it
it complains about youtube app being separated into parts or smth like that
That's a feature: if you can't work out which YouTube apk to patch them you'll never work out the rest of the installation process.
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It also contains more ads then you tube itself.
There's no ads on Revanced...
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>I used to pay for YouTube premium
It would have been amazing value had Youtube Music, which came with YouTube Premium were half decent. But it is not. We got Spotify which isn't perfect, and then Apple Music, which for years didn't know what they were doing, and then Youtube Music, which is basically a company doesn't give a damn about Music.
We now have three Giant companies over the history of the past 30 - 40 years, once they grow big that make junk.
Yes, I very happily payed for YouTube Premium when it came with Google Play Music. Them turning that off in favour of the awful YouTube Music was the straw that broke the camels back.
> Apple Music, which for years didn't know what they were doing
You pay them money, they let you stream music and otherwise stay out of your way. I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty much ideal as far as I’m concerned.
I still remember Apple Music App was all about the magical "Next Song" and they went their way to hide Repeat One button because they want you to do "Discovery".
It wasn't until about 2020 before they relented. But that ideal is still true with Apple Music today.
... and they let you upload music and have it exist natively in the interface and streamable anywhere you're logged in, the exact feature I was using Google Music for.
Even beyond Apple Music, considering the other competitors I legitimately don't know what the use case for Spotify is beyond social these days.
I also stopped using the YouTube app in favor of the Brave browser on my desktop and my Android phone (no extensions needed). I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on YouTube!
I also use Brave on all my devices - it also works on Amazon Prime. Prime frequently made me offers to upgrade to an ad-free experience that I didn't understand... surely this is a bug, I already have an ad-free experience. Then I installed the Prime app on my TV and realized the constant barrage of ads that Brave has been protecting me from!
Brave is a series scam company.
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I've been doing this for years, but recently they have nerfed mobile web YouTube and it's limited to 360p (at least it seems to be for me).
There's odd and end features that some people prefer with Premium. E.g. offline downloads to watch when you're out of signal, background play, etc.
And they don't want to go through alternative workarounds to do so.
For me, it's actually just being able to easily share premium with other users in my household, so that I don't have to have my ears blasted with ads when they open YT on the TV. Less effort than playing around with things like pihole and hoping it doesn't break other things.
YouTube hasn't been working for me past two weeks with uBlock Origin. Video doesn't play.
Counterpoint: it works, you just have to wait a bit, since now the server will not actually send you the video until the mandatory (pre-skip) ad’s length has elapsed.
Which is fully in their right, I’m not complaining, it’s not like I’m any worse off (waiting on a black screen vs waiting while some bullshit ad tells me to CoNsUmE PrOduCt!!!)
It's helping teach my five year old patience and not to flail around hitting the keyboard when something doesn't happen immediately. He only gets to watch videos and playlists I search out for him, and only when I'm in the room... no YouTube Kids here. Once he's able to spell well enough to search, I'll have to re-adjust.
I have found, and this might just be psychological, that if I hit pause, wait a second, then play, the video starts playing within a few seconds.
Firefox + uBlock Origin + Sponsor Block + YouTube Redux on Mac has been working well for me for quite some time.
Have you tried "uBlock Origin Lite"? It is by the same author, Raymond Hill (gorhill). It has been working fine. I use "optimal" level for the filtering mode. (Note: I use Chromium on Linux)
I'm gonna try, thanks.
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I had the same problem. Updating uBlock Origin fixed it.
Make sure to update and restart Firefox.
Are you using Firefox? Chrome breaks YouTube if you have an ad-blocker.
I find Chrome unusable, it doesn't even support UBO.
I would genuinely like to understand this perspective. Ads or paying for premium is how the underlying business makes money. The UX might suck but you have a choice - you can just not watch YouTube. The approach you describe (which i understand is a popular one) is equivalent to justifying robbing a store because their prices are too high.
The approach is the equivalent of avoiding the end of aisles so that you don't even look at the products that companies are paying to the store to promote.
Except in this case the only way the store makes money is either by you paying an entrance fee or by you looking at the products. You are being delivered a service (whose delivery costs money) while actively circumventing the mechanism the store employs to be compensated for that service.
YouTube is the content, not the box.
You might like the content, but you don’t pay for a shit box anyways.
It’s not a robbery if noone is getting robbed. That’s a very bad analogy really.
You are using a service without paying for the service by actively circumventing the payment mechanism. Is that not stealing?
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I do pay for YouTube Premium, I see no ads, and everything works pretty conveniently. What's your point, that with a bit of extra effort you can pirate content?
For me, and many people, advertising is a mental health issue. I don't enjoy those ads, they are very disturbing and jarring. It causes me anxiety and I don't like the things that those ads normalize. I don't think most people, especially americans, realize how far off the rails our society is in terms of our normalization of insane shit.
So, for health reasons, I block nearly all advertisements. It is a HUGE mental health win. There is a ton of research behind this, as well.
I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern. I'll block ads instead. I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health.
I will always happily directly support content creators. I will not watch ads.
You're responding to a comment that says they pay and don't see ads
> I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health.
Is this the same way of saying your mental health is important to you but you're not prepared to pay a service money to protect said mental health and support creators you like?
> I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern.
Honest question: Why? You do pay for toothpaste, right? If you have a gym membership, you pay extra for the convenience not to do cardio in the woods (which is great in late May, much less so in late November). You tend to pay more for nutritious food as compared to things you get at a fast food joint.
What makes a health concern related to $genericOnlineService different?
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Blocking ads is hardly "pirating" content
To be clear, this is not a value judgement. I pirate content sometimes, and I use adblockers, but ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
I realise that online ads have other implications such as tracking that, say, a blu-ray rip downloaded from a torrent doesn't have, but the reason for piracy doesn't change the fact that it is.
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I don't really see what the difference is.
They're not getting the payment for the video either way.
Morally I don't see how they aren't equivalent. I'm not going to stand on a high horse saying you shouldn't do either, but I don't really see how you can pretend one is less harmful to creators than the other, in terms of the basic principles involved.
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You wouldn't not download a virus.
its pirating content in a way that you dont generate revenue for youtuber that expect from ads
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You still get the autogenerated dubs by default, the comments moved to end of the earth, and many other stuff (shorts etc.) people get pissed about.
At this point ads are just one of the annoyances amoung so many others.
The massive overlays of what-to-watch-next hiding most of the video much too early, ie. before the very end, of the video you were trying to watch until the end but now just ragequit and downloaded instead... are very ugly
Those are there because the content creator you’re watching decided to put them there. It’s entirely up to them whether they show up and when they show up.
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I pay for YouTube Premium too (probably not much longer) but can only 'comfortably' use the site through a series of increasingly hacky extensions for Firefox. On non-web apps, there is no recourse from the UI enshittification.
The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play.
If this is the premium experience then I don't want it.
> The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play.
This is the same stuff you get without buying Premium. So I guess they figure you're only paying to dodge the ads.
Which seems, to me, like a lot of money compared to (ad cost * number of ads you would see).
Just here to say thank you to everyone arguing/explaining why ad blockers are not piracy using interesting arguments better than my own.
You will never walk alone.
The point is that the pirated experience is both easier to access and more convenient.
If I'm paying, I expect the best possible experience, and you just don't get that. It's not just YouTube, many streaming services are objectively inferior to pirating.
I do pay for YouTube Premium - and I still get ads when someone has YT Videos embedded on their website. YouTube knows who I am, the cookies are set, there is no reason to give me ads.
It is not yet painful enough for me to invest time and energy to research less convenient ways of UX improvement. Not ... yet.
As a premium user I'd like to block shorts.
I also like that there’s no ads in premium. Speaking of premium things, I also really like Brilliant for learning things quickly and Surfshark VPN because it protects my privacy when I’m on the go.
I also pay for premium, and have for at least 15 years since it was called Red, and the experience is complete garbage.
If you turn off history, you get zero videos on your home screen. This is not because the history is needed to generate the suggestions, because the blank home only started a few years ago.
I used to never subscribe to any channels, I just got reasonable feed of suggestions based off of whatever I happened to search for explicitly or if I got there by clicking a link, or by what I chose to click on even if the list starts out totally random, except of course it never was totally random because they still have ip address and other fingerprnting signals.
After they blaked out the home screen and started showing the "you're not logged in, go here to fix this error", I subscribed to a bunch of channels to provide data for generating a feed. They still don't provide any. You can take extra clicks (which is agonizing on the Roku since it just doesn't react well and misses button presses all the time) to get to the subscriptions page, which will show recent uploads exactly from those channels and no others.
I also still get several other forms of ads in the form of the embedded/native ads and the irrelevant suggestions that come from youtube's interests instead of my own, like shorts. I also still get ads simply because I don't get to use my own account all the time. When you watch youtube anywhere but your own laptop by yourself, you are at the whims of someone else's account and some other platforms app limitations.
And even on your own machine, I absolutely resent having to tie my viewing history to my identity and have someone else log all of that. So there is reason to intentionally use no account even if you otherwise have no problem paying to support not only the content producers but even the delivery system.
Why can't I disable shorts? There is no amount I can pay to hide all shorts, but I can have it for free i=on a pc with a tampermonkey or ublock script. But that only helps on a pc. I watch mostly on a TV and I have no ability to hack the roku app. Maybe if I switch to a google tv I could use newpipe or something.
Paying for premium does not make youtube good. It does not resolve much of anything. It is not remotely the touche this smarmy comment attempts to suggest.
Paying for premium takes youtube from being like pulling out 10 of your fingernails to only pulling out 8 of your fingernails.
That 2of10 fingernals relief and for the sake of the creators, that's the only reason I still pay for premium.
They keep doing it because you keep paying them.
Use the money you save to buy a media pc that can block shorts to use to watch youtube on the tv.
It's not piracy.
If I go to the bathroom during an ad break, am I "pirating" the content?
If it weren't for piracy, there would be nothing on Youtube except highschool dropouts lobbing accusations at each other, and AI-generated slop.
I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use... rumble and tiktok.
Youtube's censorship is one reason I won't pay for it. Rumble is a legitimate site even as people decry its existence (it would be less necessary if Youtube didn't decide on being the world's opinion police)
Which opinions are you trying to access?
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Many of you absolutely do not deserve the power of downvotes
I pray you don't work for FAANG and have your thumbs on the scales and I stand by everything I said
Which adblocker are you currently using? The arms race is getting pretty tiring...
uBlock Origin continues to work well, on both desktop and Android.
> Which adblocker are you currently using?
I’m really shooting myself in the foot right now aren’t I.
1Blocker and Wipr on mobile. Plain old Orion by Kagi on my Mac.
Thank you very much for taking that risk I just updated to this setup
I use Brave 99% of the time just for Youtube.
Like another poster mentioned, I use Orion on my iPad with ublock origin installed as an extension. It’s a really great browser, only a few bugs here and there.
Nice try, Google!
Even on Safari with Apple’s braindead “content blocker” API, AdGuard manages to successfully block YouTube ads.
Not so braindead after all
I've loved Grayjay as an alternative YouTube client. It can pull in videos from other platforms as well, and it can Cast videos! AdBlock and sponsorblock built in too.
What is a set and forget adblocker for the Apple ecosystem?
Wipr, Adblock Pro, Ghostery or uBlock Origin Lite. I've used all four and they perform about as well as you need them to for an adblocker. I'm currently using uBlock.
AdGuard Pro.
I mean I pay for Youtube Premium because I use Youtube Music instead of Spotify.
I get a very unopinionated but effective music player that has all the music I need, and it doesn't try very hard to "upsell" itself to me unlike Spotify because to Google YouTube is the real money driver.
So to me getting no YouTube ads as well is well worth it.
And I pay for Premium, because each premium view is more valuable to the creators than the ad supported one.
for what it's worth, you could divide up your youtube premium membership cost and give that to 500 creators and they would see more revenue in their pocket than your premium watches get them.
Premium viewcount is grossly over valued by the people who pay for it, because they need to justify their sunk cost. I doubt most content creators even track it because the difference is minimal. We're talking a few bucks a month, tops.
I remember when youtube premium first came out and YT pimped this trope super hard. Then it came to light that the difference is basically nothing because most people don't pay for premium.
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