I am so reliant on YouTube Premium that I forget people even see ads on there. I watch an awful lot of long form interviews, lectures, podcasts -- most downloaded for offline. It's the easiest $8/month of all my subscriptions.
I’m the opposite. I’ve almost entirely given up on YouTube because I know that, even if I pay, I’m subjected to the consequences of ads.
Content creators have paid sections in the video itself, the format optimises grabbing your attention, some legitimate-presenting channels are just real state for product placement...
Bad is relative. I usually don't bother with the MPV/yt-dlp combo (except for rare local downloading for backup/convenience purposes) and just let it play in the browser. Not being logged in, because I have no google account anymore. It's smooth, and plays instantly when opened in a new tab. I let it have its cookies, and don't erase them, so I get the content I like, mostly. For things I'm unsure how they'd affect the algorithm, or if they are AI-slopped music, I'm just opening them in a private window. Works for me with just uBO and some additional list subscriptons in there.
Advertisers generally avoid spending money on displaying ads to poor countries. It is interesting to see how the ads change depending on the country your IP address is from.
Very little YouTube advertising is for local businesses, partly due to geotargeting issues with YouTube ads, and YouTube isn’t a huge market for most products, due to its poverty.
SponsorBlock became an instant, install-everywhere extension for me the same way UBO had. I'm amazed how few know of it considering its value and elegance.
You can't completely escape advertising while still participating in modern society but there's still a huge difference between free and premium YouTube in this regard.
Yes, creators have paid sections but they are skippable (and note YouTube helps you skip with a little white dot in the UI[1]) and creators have a strong incentive to protect their credibility. They have an ongoing "relationship" with their viewer. Not so for the random companies that get to spam you with unskippable adverts for crypto scams or fat-free yoghurt in the freezer version.
[1]They don't like sponsored segments as they don't get a cut most of the time. They do have a programme for arranging sponsored segments via the platform, in which case they _do_ get a cut. I'm not sure if they still offer the little skip-helper dot in that case... Anyone know?
> > and creators have a strong incentive to protect their credibility.
> I haven't seen this play out very much to be honest.
"Credibility" means "relative to the interests of their audience". Faux News has a completely different, almost inverse metric for "credibility" with their "Aliuns made the pirramids!" fanbase. CNN follows a more strict "if it bleeds it leads" policy to keep their audience believing them.
There's a huge difference indeed — uBlock + SponsorBlock are superior. Not only do I not see any ads at all—including self-promotions of the video creators and their sponsorship segments—I also get to skip content-free intermissions, tangents, etc. and jump straight to the highlight of the video.
Google really screwed everyone that used this; it was marketed towards families/small groups, and now everyone is forced into Google Workspace with massive breakage for family-like stuff. Thanks Google.
Firefox + uBlock Origin + Sponsor Block (includes "skip to highlight feature) + 'Improve youtube!' = no ads, no clickbait thumbnails, and no friction plus tons of optimizations.
Search "YouTube Revanced" on Android. It's a bit of a pain to install, but it lets you customise your YouTube app and add or remove as many features as you want.
These kinds of customisations should be standard for apps people use every day.
You -> Gear icon -> Revanced Settings -> General -> Navigation Buttons -> Hide Shorts.
You need to also hide them from the feed and a few other places. You are not stupid; Revanced has too many options and the settings and large and confusing. It's easier to search "shorts" and toggle everything.
Thank you. I already had that setting enabled, but your comment inspired me to review all the settings again and I have been successful in hiding Shorts from view (for now, until Google changes something again no doubt).
Yeh, for all Google's faults in this arena, YouTube Premium is such a good buy. I consume so much YouTube I think it would be unethical for me not to pay.
Mass surveillance is one of the biggest threat to society that has come out of our industry, and is the biggest objection that many people have against modern adtech.
So how does YouTube Premium address this? Well, first you login to Google and let them associate your real name to everything you do online, not just what you do on YouTube. Then, you give them your credit card info, home address, and phone number because why not? On top of that, you get to foot the bill for all of this.
I used to be have a premium family suscription, canceled it the moment google increased the price by 30%, I considered such a jump unfair compared to the rest of the economy where salaries are hardly getting adjusted to the inflation.
I read it more as katrotz cancelling YTP because it became more expensive while katrotz' income did not increase by the same amount. If things become more expensive and my wages don't increase as much I am going to cut some expenses.
$22 a month for YouTube Premium is what I pay. Donating 100% of my income (a number larger than $22/mo) was not the issue being discussed in this post.
I'm the same as you: long form and essays. I use freetube for Linux and Tubular for android, so no ads at all. I follow only youtubers who have a patreon and I support all of them (10 or so and one via kofi).
>I still can't believe that they paywalled the ability for the video to keep playing when the screen is turned off.
That's why I will never pay, no matter how much people glaze yt premium. I distinctly remember the day they took that simple feature away. uBlock and Vanced work fine, and it's also not hard to download to my media server for offline
I don't want to reward a company for shitty practices. What are they even doing at youtube besides changing the UI every 3 months and stuffing AI where it isn't wanted/needed.
At the bare minimum they need to enable the ability to blacklist entire channels, like I can easily do on my home setup. And ban AI videos without a label. Then they can have my $8
Wasn't aware of this option... I'd actually switched to YT Music because the family plan for YT premium is/was pretty good. Nice to know I can bring it down in the future.
Damn, I just looked up how long I have been paying using https://payments.google.com/ . Looks like I've been paying for youtube music since October 2014. These grandfathered people must be really really early. :]
Same here, joined up when GPM was in beta. Still on the $7.99/month. I really only use it for YTM, so if they ever up my price, I'll cancel and use Tidal or Deezer.
I've been on the family plan for a long while... was before they redid Google Music and YT Music, but it included YT ad free and Google Music, so I did that and dropped Spotify around a decade ago. I watch so much YT content, it's been worth it to keep... Though I'm glad that Rumble is there and seeing some improvements in UX, still not nearly as good as YT, but getting better.
Sponsorblock exists and is absolutely marvelous. It's a crowdsourced database of sponsored segments + an add-on that queries this database and automatically skips the sponsor segments. There's also Sponsorblock plugins for MPV if that's more your thing.
My own hypothesis is that our lives will become so saturated with ads that they will completely lose their effectiveness, advertisers and platforms will finally be forced to acknowledge that they aren't effective, and a monetization crisis will follow. Subscriptions everywhere.
It’s more like drugs in that they will be less effective , but not completely, so we will continue to get more exposures as advertisers compete for attention
They won't lose effectiveness because once in a while you will actually find something you want, click on the ad, and buy it. The reason there's ads everywhere is because they actually do work. It's not a hypothesis.
I didn't claim what you think I did. I said that I hypothesize that they will become increasingly ineffective with time. Data already shows it's trending in that direction.
Everyone learns some important lessons the first time they allow user-generated content on the public internet, particularly if you're brave enough to allow so without any login :) It's a rite of passage at this point I think, lucky OP :)
I’m reminded, by the ascii art d’s, about a metric used in game dev where users can shape content, something to the effect of time to penis (TTP): defined as the time from tool availability to when users abuse said tool to craft dong.
They might go on a hiring freeze, cancel a role, or in some cases pass on someone asking too much... But I don't think any major players are actively out trawling for "cheap and dumb". Certainly not Cloudflare, AWS and Google.
If they have a billion dollar valuation, this fairly basic (and irresponsible) vulnerability could have cost them a billion dollars. If someone with malice had been in your shoes, in that industry, this probably wouldn't have been recoverable. Imagine a firm's entire client communications and discovery posted online.
They could have sold this to a ransomare group or affiliate for 5-6 figures and then the ransomware group could have exfil'd the data and attempted to extort the company for millions.
Then if they didnt pay and the ransomware group leaked the info to the public, they'd likely have to spend millions on lawsuits and fines anyways.
They should have paid this dude 5-6 figures for this find. It's scenarios like this that lead people to sell these vulns on the gray/black market instead of traditional bug bounty whitehat routes.
That's interesting. I know vitamin D can improve sleep quality in people who are deficient, and sleep quality helps with dream recall -- I wonder if that's the mechanism or it's something else.
A cursory search shows lots of redditors taking Vitamin D (some of them way, way too much btw) and having wild dreams too.
I take 800IU a day and haven't noticed anything on that little.
By what metric? Jeez. People, you need to get your blood checked. There is no one-fits-all dosage. In winter, 4000 IU/d was enough to raise my blood levels well into the excessive range.
My 4000 units were after blood testing and also after genetic testing which showed some VDR mutations that might benefit from supplementation. As mentioned in another comment, that dose brings me slightly over 30 ng/ml, so basically borderline ok.
I fully agree that supplementation should always be combined with both blood testing and also a general medical evaluation.
Current recommendations are 800 IU per day if you’re not significantly deficient. Always keep testing at least once a year or so. I took 5000 IU per day for a while, which ended up pushing me over 60 ng/ml. That’s considered too high a level and may have negative health effects.
I tested after taking 4000 IU daily for quite a while and ended up at 30.9 ng/ml, so I guess I have some buffer left. But I fully agree, regular testing is prudent when supplementing anything above common established levels.
Yeah, I showed a really mild deficiency in my work so they just suggested adding a low daily dose for me. I wouldn't expect to have had any side effects.
I was very deficient and they gave me 50k UI per day prescription vitamin D3 for 60 days. Sure enough I was high-normal on my next test. 800ui is likely not enough to have any effect unless you consistently take it for years.
It was for 60 days. If they continued to take this much indefinitely it would surely cause troubles, but 60 days when starting from deep deficiency is reasonable.
It is high, but it's not extreme. 50k IU just once is an equivalent of about 7000 IU daily for a week, which won't really move the needle much if you're seriously deficient (in fact, it's still within what's considered a safe daily dose for healthy people - you can produce more than that from sunlight alone). You can feel free to take your "hammer" weekly, no deficiency required.
When I took >5000 IU daily for three months, I only raised 25(OH) D level in my blood from 9 to 30 ng/ml, and there's no evidence of toxicity below 150 ng/ml.
Of course, when dealing with high doses you need to keep your levels in check, as absorption can differ between individuals.
Dear Neal Stephenson: thanks for actually ending your well-thunk writings with complete sentences/thoughts.
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I just finished Dave Wallace's 520 page PhD thesis, his first novel The Broom of the System, which literally ends with a liar proclaiming:
>I am a man of my
( "word" is presumed to follow, but another DFW book which just [abruptly!?!] ends )
Like his other two novels (Infinite Jest & Pale King), Broom is an ensemble of disconnected characters, with no clear destination nor moral lessons navigated in a few-hundred-too-many pages — just raw human condition. Very powerful writing style, but with no executive function.
Now that I've read 2000+ pages of David Foster Wallace, I will continue NOT recommending his novels to anybody (this is the same review I gave after IJ and PK). DFW was definitely a powerful thinker/writer, but he should have stuck to his shorter non-fiction meanderings.
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After writing all of the above, I clanked around with the topic of incomplete sentences ending books:
>Your sense that the mid-sentence ending and related choices feel like bullying is a legitimate aesthetic and emotional response, not a misreading or a sign you “don’t get it”
About half-way through I had to resist the urge to skip to the end to see if he did that. An opportunity lost.
I'll admit, of the few books of his I've read, I always felt like they ended a couple of chapters too soon or a couple of chapters too late — which has put me off reading more of his books despite some interesting premises. I suspect some of the deeper themes are lost on me in my bedtime readings. Just not my cup of tea at the end of the day, literally.
I don't appreciate these kinds of simple one-line referential jokes on HN, but your joke was to emulate perfectly the central issue of TFA, so I do agree that it brings into question who did and who did not read the article -- I know you read it.
I think it was a good enough joke or witty remark grounded in the crux of the article that it’s worth it. And it’s certainly interesting to see the “whoosh” past many of the commenters
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