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Asking google for suicide topics usually starts off with a big info box (non-ad unit) of:

  Need help? United States:
  1 (800) 273-8255
  National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
  
  Hours: 24 hours, 7 days a week
  Languages: English, Spanish
  Website: www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
As for YouTube ad engineers, pretty much everybody on the planet knows forced pre-roll youtube ads are a bad idea. Nobody wants to watch them. So, the engineers implementing these things must be under corporate (read: clueless) pressure to crapify the user experience solely to appease management.

(edit: It's also hilarious how ad tech people refuse to recognize how evil and backwards their entire business models are. They vehemently defend, downvote, and mob-mentality their way through the cognitive dissonance of hurting hundreds of millions of users in exchange for retaining their jobs. Because, after all, if I'm doing the work, it can't be bad, right? I'm not a bad person, so the people arguing against me must be the evil ones.

One comment theme that seems to get instant downvotes on HN: the concept you are not entitled to track and record every client-side user action. So many people assume invasive tracing and recording of all user behavior is "just how the world works" and "if we don't do it, we'll fall behind." Kinda military-oligarchy mindset, isn't it? If we don't have all the power, who knows what people will do!)



>Asking google for suicide topics usually starts off with a big info box (non-ad unit) of:

Yeah, I wasn't suggesting those were ads.

> ... pretty much everybody on the planet knows forced pre-roll youtube ads are a bad idea. Nobody wants to watch them.

Totally agree. I'm amazed a better method hasn't been implemented.


>pretty much everybody on the planet knows forced pre-roll youtube ads are a bad idea

What makes you say that?




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