I get why they want to stay anonymous but that website is no different from any other malware site - no source, no authors just some affiliate links. Putting your google credentials in an app like that is not something people should be comfortable with.
NewPipe let's you 'subscribe' to channels without giving it any credentials. You know, like how it used to be with RSS. The good way. The user empowered way.
It has both. The RSS method is fast but doesn't have the full video data (it's missing durations, for example). The parsed version is slower but complete.
Some time ago, the version I installed (from a regular Google search) tried to use my phone as a throwaway number. For around two months I got validation codes for PayPal, confirmation calls from crypto sites and a lot of messages from horny men who click ads on porn sites. It took me a while to piece it back together.
The only reason it didn't work is that I refused the app the permission to read text messages.
Just use it w/o logging in. I have a YT account, but I never login with Vanced. I only do so when I have something very important to add in the comment section and that happens on the desktop. You don't have to be too paranoid
There is also alternative youtube front ends that don't have ads, notably Invidious[0], and work in cases where the browser doesn't have or can't support extensions such as ad blockers. For anyone interested I run my own instance that is retro tech themed[1], and there is a public instance list with more instances[2].
YouTube Vanced is miles above NewPipe in features: https://vancedapp.com - If you frequently watch videos on Android and haven't given it a spin yet, do so.
SmartTubeNext is excellent on Fire Stick, if you can get the damn APK installed!
I searched some time ago and didn't find any, so they probably don't. They do distribute the sources of their manager app and their fork of microG tho.
Yes but NewPipe is a completely from-scratch implementation and has some unique features like 3x speed or downloading videos and audio. The NewPipe UI is not as good however, so it depends on what tradeoffs you want to make.
Similar. Pi-hole, uBlock (desktop), vivaldi with adblocking (mobile, FF android has perf issues).
For the non-techie, Pi-hole isn't something I quickly recommend due to "knowing when it's the culprit", and the effort in disabling it.
I also have a simple Wireguard config (pivpn) installed as well and my mobile devices are set to always-on VPN for DNS only. Occasionally I will have to turn off the VPN to join certain public Wifi. also perhaps consider hosting your VPN on a well known port if you expect to be on restrictive networks.
Final note: Pi-hole and Pi-VPN(as a frontend to WG) can be hosted on any machine. I have them running on containers.
This is true with pihole. PiHole is one of my favorite pieces of software and true to this post opening a website off my home network can result in a horrible, ad-ridden experience. But installing PiHole seems to make a number of sites not work, or for example my devices stop updating because they can’t phone home the update server, and it’s difficult to describe to third parties how to address that. All good on my network, but it did take a little targeted whitelisting effort.
Showing ads in videos isn't exactly new. I think Youtube Premium is too expensive, particularly if you don't have any use for their subpar music feature. However the concept of paying for an ad-free experience doesn't seem alien to me. A more affordable plan that just removes the ads would be welcome (and I hear it's planned).
For text-heavy websites (blogs, news), I use archive.is as a "wget" [0], as it were. It is unreasonably affective at rendering most javascript-driven pages too (like twitter.com).
Are there any iOS app-based solutions for dealing with YouTube ads? The app you mentioned (YouTube++) appears to require a jailbroken iPhone. I've read that AdGuard Pro can work with mobile Safari YouTube ads, but I'm curious about an app solution. Seems like there's plenty of stuff out there for Android.
No, and this is one of the primary reasons I have an Android, and support side loading on iOS. I should be able to install whatever software I want on hardware that I own.
I use the paid version of 1Blocker, and it seems to handle YouTube ads from within Safari. I had to uninstalled the YouTube app to keep everything in-browser.
Youtube, especially, turns into a whole different experience. Ad in front of every video makes it impossible to quickly browse and sort through videos. I might watch just a few seconds and then go to the next one. When ads are enabled, the experience is so painful that I'm not likely to use Youtube this way any more. I have to watch an ad before I've made the decision if I want to watch the video.
Youtube is the reason I installed an adblocker in the first place. I don't mind watching an ad, but at some point they went from an ad every other video, to unskippable ads in-front of every video (love a 1m ad on every 10s video when I'm just browsing clips) and mid-content ads that literally just cut in and disrupt what I'm watching.
During the holidays, YouTube was showing me 2 15-second ads every single video. I stopped using the app and stuck to the browser. Then I found out about vanced from HW. I'm sorry to my followed channels but it became unbearable.
I think the other thing that pushed me to put it back on after experimenting with it off was the absolute dearth of inventory Youtube apparently thought was appropriate to show me. I watch a lot of content of various lengths in a lot of various fields but I would get the same one or two ads for days. Then I started getting the 10m+ ads that seem to be randomly OK for some reason? I don't think I could stomach another experiment.
One of the little absurdities of our modern world is having to watch an ad before you are allowed to watch an ad that you requested (movie trailers, superbowl ads that people sometimes share, that kind of thing)
Or you can install an adblocker instead which also blocks much of the surveillance. There's also sponsor block which blocks ads that even paying customers are forced to see.
Don't support these advertisers in any way. Especially Google.
I hope folks that take this stance support creators in another fashion, like through Patreon. Otherwise the content that is consumed by those ad blocking won't get produced, simply because the creator can't make a living off of it. That makes me uncomfortable as I believe most of us on HN like at least some YouTube content and would like to see more of it.
I'm more than happy to pay for content. I support creators even though I know it's a crappy deal since all I get for my money is a worthless license which puts me at their mercy since I own nothing.
I will absolutely not tolerate ads of any kind and if their business model is ads I would rather see them go bankrupt than put up with it.
I happily pay for YouTube Premium because I watch tons of niche stuff that creators are able to make a living off.
YouTube has a lot of problems, and the ads for non-Premium users are probably going too far, but I find a lot of value in consuming and supporting a wealth of high quality content on obscure topics.
I do support some creators (as directly as possible) but honestly I prefer content where money was never an incentive. Ultimately it's up to creators to find ways of funding their passions and just because ads are the easiest way to do that right now does not mean that we have to support that. I also don't think I'd get bored if all ad-supported content just vanished and even if I did it would be worth it to force creators to find less manipulative funding sources. Or we could do away with all of that and make sure everyone has enough to live no matter what they do - but people would rather pay megacorporations than pay higher taxes that can be redistributed to creators.
Without aggressively blocking the hundred or more ads on a webpage, I honestly don't think the web would be that useful now a days
Advertising has gone absolutely bonkers and filled the web with complete trash SEO farms with 40 links to some shitty slideshow
I don't believe the web would have caught on like it did if this current condition was v1.0
I wonder how much the website designer even views their own site. It's astounding anyone would approve of this. It now represents the brand as extremely low quality
I call it a malware blocker, rather than an adblocker - here's my reasoning:
One day I was on a classifieds site[1], browsing listings, when after a few pages, I was met with a page redirect to one of those scammy support center sites (taking over the browser), advising that my computer had been infected by a virus (obviously hadn't) and I needed to call in to "Apple's Support Center" immediately. This was on Safari (the newer useless extension-neutered version), on what I considered a reputable site. I tested again to make sure it was indeed the site that produced this, and sure enough reproduced it after browsing a few pages of listings.
I advised the site that they likely had a rogue advert in rotation causing this, but as usual, the blame got put on me instead, claiming that it was probably some extension (didn't have any - they're basically useless on Safari now) or it was my ISP, blah blah blah
That's the day I decided to use a real browser ("If it doesn't run uBlock Origin, it's not a real browser"), so I switched to Firefox and installed uBO. This is also when I decided to call such utilities as uBO "malware blockers" rather than "ad blockers".
Websites can try to deflect the blame all they want[2], but in the end if visiting your website results in any attempts to compromise my computer, it's your site doing it as far as I'm concerned.
If the website industry can't regulate itself to prevent such things, then I'm going to do it myself, and I'll push back on any claims that I'm using an "ad" blocker when I'm really guarding against malware attacks.
[1] I'm loathe to name it since I don't recall which site it was specifically, but it was a classifieds-style site, with the reputation of, say, eBay-level recognition.
I get what you're saying, but I think that's actually counter-productive. To present things like uBlock as malware blockers suggests that "any ad which is not malware is fine". I think it's perfectly justifiable to guard against non-malware ads _as well as_ malware (ads or otherwise).
I think following happens. Actual click through rate on online ads is low. People don't want to pay lots of money for ads that don't increase their revenue.
Only ones willing to pay for ads are shady business. We are talking unlicensed pills, scams, crypto etc.
Eventually those dry up so they go even lower, malware authors willing to use ads as malware vectors.
I browsed once without ad blocker on some webcomic and shit I had delivered was actually malware. As in Defender was activated.
> [...] was actually malware. As in Defender was activated.
I don't doubt that plenty of ads are malware but let's not pretend that Defender does not have tons of false positives or that MS cares about preventing them.
I guess what constitutes "malware" is based on what the ad is doing - if it's benign, it's an ad and I'm fine with that. If it's hostile/tracking scripts masquerading as an ad, then obviously that's a problem. I call it "malware blocking" because of multiple past experiences like I mentioned above, and the way to avoid them is with these "ad blockers" (though I guess a more generic term, like "content blocker", is perhaps more appropriate).
And I'm sure some would be quick to point out that running uBO as a "malware" blocker just happens to siphon up legitimate ads in the same bucket in the process (which is what I think is your point), and my reply to them is that the blockers typically won't block anything that comes from the same IP/domain as the site (as is explained in one of the linked articles). I think it's up to websites to run their ads in a way that doesn't trigger it to get blocked, because the detection pattern for most blockers is based on past abuse of these techniques.
> running uBO as a "malware" blocker just happens to siphon up legitimate ads in the same bucket in the process (which is what I think is your point)
My point's actually sort-of the inverse of that. My point is that, by describing uBO as a malware blocker, you are suggesting that "ads that are not malware are fine". That's a position you're entitled to take, but I don't agree with it - +1 to the sibling comment that rightly points out that "ads are malware for your brain". Ads are a problem, and they should be blocked. The fact that you happen to be able to also block malware with an ad-blocker is a happy coincidence - but even if that wasn't the case (i.e. even if ad-blockers _only_ blocked non-malware ads), they would still be good, moral, and justified.
I have an air filter that has 2 stages, a thin, washable filter for large dust particles and a non-reusable hepa filter that has to be replaced every 3-6 months for optimal results.
I view pihole and ublock as the washable filter. It takes care of the big stuff, prevents my computer from ever seeing most of the avenues for malware to propagate. Then my antivirus can easily mop up whatever slips through.
If it's not detecting malware, then it's not a malware blocker.
As far as I know, ad blockers work based on host name and css selectors. If there was an actual anti-malware that was so trivially bypass-able, it would be laughed out of the room. uBO blocks hosts of advertisers. AFAIK they don't distinguish between malware and non-malware, nor do they detect malware from other sources.
The people embedding the ads or even delivering them are not neccessarily malicious (in the malware sense at least). Also, as long as most people don't block ads they don't have as much incentive to counteract ad blockers. So at least for now ad blocking remains effective for both malicious and benign ad payloads.
I stopped watching network TV in the 1990s when it reached about 25% ads (i.e. 7.5 minutes of ads in a 30 minute window. May have been only 7 minutes, memory is fuzzy now).
The web was a relief. You could actually consume content and tune out the (then primitive, usually just a banner at the top) ads.
The web, specifically un-adblocked Youtube, is now at about the same point as where I quit TV. Just not worth the aggravation any more. UBlock Origin has shifted things back into favour. But will "Manifest V3" tip things back to unbearable? We'll see.
> But will "Manifest V3" tip things back to unbearable? We'll see.
Switch to Firefox now before Firefox market share dips to the level where publishers can justify not supporting it and you're stuck with only crippled adblocking forever?
This is not enough if we don't stop DRM (which Firefox also supports).
DRM essentially means: only allow access with a program that implements certain required measures to restrict user's control over their own computer. Using content decryption blobs to restrict user's access to media streams handled by their own computer — is only a beginning, Web DRM will be eventually extended to allow more restrictions, including those to make it much harder to interfere with the display of ads.
No, you don't WANT to see the web rendered "properly" (with all the ads). The browser+adblocker do the best they can to render the usably rather than "properly". The issue is that it may become impossible to render usably.
Not really, no. It's the publisher's fault if they targeted the browser in the first place. If they didn't, and it didn't render properly, then it's nobody's fault, just something that happens.
We had a couple effective strategies to deal with ads on network TV when I was a kid. I've found they they still work today.
1. If I was watching alone I would have a book with me. When ads came on I'd read the book until the ad break ended. Nowadays instead of a book it is usually an iPad, and instead of reading during the break I might work on a crossword puzzle in the NYT Crossword app or do some chess puzzles at lichess.com.
2. If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show. Heck, we were kids...it was hard to get us to not take about the show during the show. This also still works as an adult, with the only change being that the conversation is more sophisticated. E.g., kids might talk about how cool it was that Kirk made an improvised canon to shoot the Gorn, but adults might discuss the feasibility of actually making such a canon. (It probably isn't feasible BTW. Mythbusters tried it and could not get it to work using the resources available to Kirk).
> If I was watching alone I would have a book with me
That's shifting from the narrative of the show/film you're watching to a different activity
> If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show
It takes us about 1h20 to watch a c. 40 minute show with my wife, but that's because we pause throughout to discuss it. Haven't done linear TV since c. 2000, went through a couple of years in the early 00s with a mythtv box recording shows off air (with 30 second skip forwards/10 second skip back - If I remember commercial breaks almost entirely 6 or 8 skips forward), then sky plus, but nothing for the last 7 years other than streaming.
For network TV the show producers know ahead of time where the ad breaks will be and structure the story so that they come between acts.
I have noticed when things originally on network television end up on ad-supported streaming services the ad breaks sometimes no longer happen during natural breaks. When those same things end up in syndication on non-streaming cable or OTA channels the ad breaks usually do align with the natural story breaks. I wonder why OTA and cable channels can time things better than streaming services? Are the shows distributed in different formats to the two, and only one includes metadata on when the act breaks occur?
I have no idea why a successor to TiVo never came out. The idea of "fast forwarding" TV ads was way ahead of its time. I've got cable TV and would pay good money for a service like that. The same applies to Podcast ads: I would pay for a podcast player (like Podcast Republic) that could automatically skip ads, and say let people mark ad segments in a podcast so that others could skip them.
Comcast has some support for skipping ads. It doesn't work for everything, just top shows from NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CW, Bravo, HGTV, Discovery, MTV and TLC recorded after January 1, 2019 in HD. It's enabled by default on their X1 DVR boxes.
The way it works is that if you start fast forwarding, it automatically stops and switches to play when you reach the end of a commercial break. You watch normally and when a commercial starts just hit FF a few times (the first hit starts forwarding, subsequent hits switch to faster FF speed).
I dropped cable in the middle of 2020. My recollection was that it also only worked if it had been at least 24 hours since the program originally broadcast, but their documentation [1] does not mention any such limit so perhaps they dropped that limit.
YouTube is still no where near as bad as commercial TV in the UK. It's when we visit relatives who still watch TV, that I get reminded how bad it is. YouTube has a couple of ads before a video and then a 10 second one every 10 minutes or so - but the ones on the TV go on and on. Probably 5 minutes of them every 20 minutes of TV.
I did so too when I realized its actually worse, its about 19 min play for 30 min 'show' & about 43 for 60mins for most popular shows (you can verify with imdb or 'otherwise'). thats on top of what we pay them monthly.
the other hard rule I have is 'no news from narrated sources' so really no need to cable tv & have cut the cord for more than a decade now.
I seem to remember maybe 5 30sec ads so must be 2.5 minutes.
I even vaguely remember this was lampshaded in Fresh Prince (?)
Uncle Phil is having a heart to heart chat with young Nicky and in the middle says something like "ok nice talk see you in around 2 1/2 minutes" which I thought was hilarious
I wanted to show a video on YouTube to a friend. He passed me his cellphone. I searched and found the video and then something very strange happened: a completely unrelated something started playing. I said "Sorry I don't know what is this. This has nothing to do with what I wanted to show you." He then explained me that was just an advertisement and the video would play soon.
People are used to abuse. My internet is very different from the internet most people use. I feel sorry for them.
One of the services I happily pay for is Youtube Premium, though I could do without also having to pay for Youtube Music at the same time. I have same experience as you, when I somehow not logged in to Youtube. It’s a surreal mess and it’s the same 5 - 10 ads, if it’s that many, on repeat. It’s unusable.
Technically I don’t use and ad block, I just run DuckDuckGo’s privacy plugin. You can show me ads, but not track me, weirdly enough it’s 98% the same result. It facinating that ad tech cannot see the difference between ads and tracking.
YouTube's ads are a colossal mistake waiting to happen. Back in the day, Google was successful because they realized advertising on the web was a problem: ads were trying too hard to grab attention, resorting to hostile tactics that basically forced people to run ad blockers. Google said "okay, what if ads were simple blocks of text that - while not as loud and screamy - got more impressions because they aren't terrible?". And over time everyone agreed with them and they made billions of dollars.
Somehow, (probably because there is no competition - yet), Google has not applied this reasoning to YouTube ads. YouTube ads are often louder than regular videos (which they could fix on their end if they cared), they are sometimes insanely long (I recently got an "ad" which was a 40 minute "free music" thing), and depending on the video they can pop pop up at terrible moments. They still haven't figured out that YouTube is loaded with exercise videos - a content category which has exploded since 2020 and where YouTube enjoys a tremendous lead on the competition. Rudely interrupting one of those is bad and brews resentment. Instead of doing that, they could plaster the entire video with unobtrusive ads and people would both look at the ads and be happy with the service.
A few years ago I was eating in an indian restaurant and I noticed a muted TV on the wall playing MKBHD's review of some drone. I was very confused why would they decide to show that. As I was eating the video ended and I realised the full review was an ad that played inside a 10 hour atmospheric video the restaurant intended to play.
I found it pretty smart, because I can imagine myself succumbing to watching a full video that was inserted as an ad if it's interesting enough.
No. You are just a MKBHD fan. There's nothing more to it. Someone else who doesn't know who Marques is will see a talking head interrupting the relaxation video. For the restaurant owner, it means they cannot rely on YouTube to play requested video content as commanded. This proves the point even further, technology instead of being smarter in the case of YouTube here, has grown to become an annoying anti-consumer product that constantly moves in the opposite direction of the user.
You haven't understood me. I found it ridiculous playing in a restaurant. It was muted anyway.
However, if I was at home, opened YouTube just to entertain myself and opened one of the algorithm suggested videos, then – in that situation – an interesting video from a channel that is unknown to me, inserted as an ad could hook me and could lead to me subscribing to said channel.
I think I got what you narrated. The element of surprise is your response to recognizing MKBHD's content playing at an unexpected unusual venue.
Instead of that suggestive ad being inserted into the video. Why not use auto-play or recommended videos section? Suggested videos in the menu work great, better even, in your case scenario for content discovery.
I don't watch YouTube with ads and I don't subscribe to YouTube Premium but I pretty much doubt in-video content suggestions disguised as ads will do a better job of predicting what I'll watch next over menu video recommendations.
I'm not happy about seeing MKBHD's video in that restaurant, I don't care at all. I also don't care about seeing that ad (or any ad for that matter).
The original comment I was replying to mentioned watching a 40 minute music video placed as a YouTube ad. I chimed in with my experience of seeing a long tech review video placed as an ad.
>I found it pretty smart, because I can imagine myself succumbing to watching a full video that was inserted as an ad if it's interesting enough.
I'm not praising the ad as a user. I'm explaining why it might be smart from the POV of the advertiser (in this case MKBHD), because it serves their goals.
Strange that MKBHD (an ad funded media of sorta itself) would pay to get people to watch the content. What's the reasoning here? Additional reach for a sponsored video?
I guess the only reason youtube ads exist is to get people to pay youtube to get rid of ads.
My parents have a smart TV and the youtube app w/o the paid youtube premium makes it a really bad experience. On iOS devices, I have yet to find a free ad blocker that properly blocks youtube ads after they put in new measures to defeat content blocker based ad blockers.
It also provided some incentive for creators to edit and post video.
I had a problem that I figured out the solution to and put up a video of it that made me a few dollars a month. Then YouTube moved the goalposts and demonetized it because I don’t (and frankly, won’t) have 1000 subscribers.
So that’s the end of my video posting on YouTube. I’ve discovered some “hack” repairs to other devices (common washing machine and MacBook speaker issues), but you won’t see my solutions on YouTube, just 99 videos saying to replace it or fumbling with software settings that aren’t the problem.
Please share your knowledge, if you don’t expect to have 1000 subscribers surely you wouldn’t expect revenue anyway. Maybe a better approach would be to encourage ‘buy me a coffee’ donations. Either way, you’re punishing society for google being an asshole.
I don’t expect (and didn’t get) subscribers because I just solve the problem. I’m not entertaining enough for you to continue watching the next video on a thing you probably don’t own.
Most likely outcome will be me posting videos on some alternative video platform. Looking at rumble.com
(I wish Amazon got into hosting videos like this, being at the place to buy seems the best place if you fail to fix).
IMO youtube is the primary platform where those looking for videos will search first up. Thing is that if you have a large number of videos, you never know when one of them will get you a large number of views and subscribers. Or maybe in future google will have different goalposts for monetization. Overall, it is always good to have videos on youtube even if you are not monetizing them.
If in future google changes monetization goalposts, then the poster can potentially make some cash from the older posted videos. And it is entirely possible that one video gets popular and brings in a ton of views and subscribers to the channel.
well, I remember watching an ad for youtube premium (or whatever is called the subscription to remove ads) which was presenting the 'no more ad breaks in the middle of videos' as a selling point. So at least some people at YT are aware of that issue
Google had to use 'better' ads to drive out competition early on, but now that they're the biggest bully on the block, they'll serve whatever obnoxious and high revenue ads they want to.
Without any html/css/<script> intervention on my website, Adsense has been able to enable additional ads that stick to the bottom of the screen and another that pops up before going to another page. It’s all opt-in, but through the Adsense portal.
It’s all automagic now, over and above the blocks I had inserted.
I feel that there is a generational gap between Youtube users that correlates with whether they will pay for premium or not.
People in their late 20s and 30s who remember Youtube as a catch-all location for lo-fi homemmade videos with few ads may not feel that YT premium is worth it, particularly if they already use adblockers, and don't use it much on mobile (where adblocking isn't possible without modded APKs). This generation also remembers torrents and Limewire, before Spotify made everything super-convenient.
Those who are more familiar with 'modern Youtube' with multiple pre-roll ads, clickbait and and influencers everywhere may be more receptive to paying just to get rid of the constant ads.
> on mobile (where adblocking isn't possible without modded APKs)
What's a modded APK?
Firefox and other browsers like Vivaldi have awesome adblocking nowadays. There are alternative frontends like invidious.
Newpipe is an oss app, perfect on Android. Vanced is very popular too but I never tried it.
But with nextdns I don't need any of those. Only newpipe because, besides the ads, having to keep the display on to listen to music while running is just stupid.
Vanced is a modded APK. It takes the YouTube APK and modifies it to block ads and sponsorship via Sponsorblock and lets you run it in the background with the screen off.
NextDNS doesn't block ads on YouTube because they're served from the same domain as YouTube videos.
Yeah I pay the same. Sure I hate Google and yada yada... But if the call for money is "we will show you no ads, and your money will go to creators", and it is a realistic amount, yes I will pay it.
I run ad-blockers everywhere (and I know there are ways to block YT ads), but will still pay if you give me this reasonable option.
> One of the services I happily pay for is Youtube Premium, though I could do without also having to pay for Youtube Music at the same time.
The forced bundling with YouTube Music is the only thing that keeps me from subscribing and keeping a trigger finger on the mute button (I use YouTube primarily on AppleTV). It's not even the price so much as it's the redundancy of subscribing to both Spotify and a lackluster Spotify competitor at the same time.
The moment Google offers YouTube Premium Lite (an unbundled version they've been trialing in European markets) in the US, I'll subscribe and never look back.
Just curious, if you owned YouTube with an overhead of tens of millions of dollars per year, how would you monetize it without ads/commercials, just to even keep up with operational costs?
I'm honestly appalled by the price for YouTube Premium. It's $15/month. That's the same as HBO Max, almost twice of Disney+ and more expensive than F1TV or Showtime which come in around $10. Per month this is 50% more than Prime! Only my UltraHD Netflix plan is more expensive. This price to me is outrageous, given that Google, unlike everyone else listed here, doesn't provide any of the content and their services is known to be awful/non-existent. All they do is in essence provide the platform.
That’s not quite correct. YouTube pays out creators who monetize their channels using YouTube ads (separate from any sponsors in the video itself). The amount paid out varies but is around $3-5 per 1000 views.
With YouTube Premium, among other features you get to avoid seeing ads. But Google still pays out creators a share of the YouTube Premium fee. See https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276
His point still stands - Google only pays a share despite having much less overheads than let's say Netflix who in addition to providing the infrastructure also create the content itself (and the production costs of it are much higher than a typical YouTube video).
Google shows you content they have licenced just like everyone else. It isn't like Netflix made all the content they host etc, Netflix also licence content from third party creators so they can host it, Google just doesn't have a filter and instead accept everyone who wants to put stuff there, and then by paying you support those smaller content creators rather than just Hollywood or other big studious like you do when you pay for Disney.
So from my perspective paying for YouTube is more important than paying for Netflix, since with YouTube you help support smaller creators, while with Netflix money gets consolidated into big names and brands. The platform takes a cut at both, but it is still better to have some go to small creators instead of everything going into giant corporations.
YouTube itself doesn't serve ads if you're paying for premium. Outside of that, sure, content creators can do their own "sponsored by" ad segments within their videos.
Keep in mind that Youtube premium is effectively a music platform as well, although you can make the same argument about Prime. Ultimately it depends on what content you consume, I spend a lot of hours on youtube and consider the advertising avoidance worthwhile for myself.
I bought prime youtube, it's basically a pay-to-get-rid-of-my-ads, fine with me but yes lower price will be better. maybe that's what they earn from a visitor per month via selling ads?
I ran ads blockers but they seems not blocking Youtube's embedded ads shown up randomly every a few minutes, which is annoying. But you might be correct, just found out: Adblock for Youtube at chrome store, will try it. Thanks.
I initially balked at the price until I realised that I probably watch 2-3x as much YouTube per month as I do Netflix, which I was already happily paying for.
It’s nice to know I’m directly supporting the channels I watch too, as I can’t feasibly sign up to dozens of Patreons.
When YouTube was primarily cat videos, it made sense as an ad-supported platform. Now that it's dominated by medium-to-high-production-value content creator stars, a subscription business model would be a much better fit.
It's actually amazing that Google has let Patreon eat its lunch on this front, the latter becoming the predominant platform for direct monetization while YouTube continues playing the chump's game of seeing how much advertising they can inflict on users before they revolt.
[edit] I'm well aware of YouTube Premium, but Google's insistence on bundling it exclusively with YouTube Music greatly limits its appeal. If they offered a standalone subscription (as they are piloting in some European markets), they could probably expand their subscriber base by a significant factor.
Put another way, if Netflix were only available as part of a bundle with a cable subscription, do you imagine they'd have more or fewer subscribers than they do right now?
But Youtube does have a subscription business model? You can pay for Youtube Premium ( https://www.youtube.com/premium ) and see it without ads, with downloads for offline viewing and listening, and so on. Almost exactly like Spotify.
Subscribing to what amounts to a search+CDN video w/ads service wholesale isn't even in the same ballpark as throwing money directly at the creators you want to support.
The salient point is YouTube/Alphabet has completely missed the opportunity of facilitating Patreon-style commerce, despite being best positioned to do so.
But instead of enabling creators to receive money directly from audiences, an advertising juggernaut like Alphabet would probably rather keep their volunteer content creators incentivized to be shills desperate for advertising dollars.
I predict all the quality creators capable of garnering support via systems like Patreon will eventually abandon YouTube altogether, leaving YouTube to become even more of a raging dumpster fire of advertising upon advertising upon advertising masquerading as content from "influencers".
Youtube has a Patreon competitor service literally built into the platform, you can "Join" a channel and it behaves exactly like Patreon. They were just very late to the party and most creators promote their Patreon more heavily.
Is that something only available to paying subscribers?
I've never even had a YouTube login, but the few channels I access fully via the web interface only ever spam me with YouTube Premium offers for eliminating ads.
There's zero offering/marketing of direct-to-creator subscriptions, not that I've seen.
There's also zero chance of my buying YouTube Premium, but a non-zero chance of my giving money exclusively to the specific creators I value - even if YouTube took something along the lines of a haircut for making just those channels ad-free.
By building a profile of each user based on their viewing history and then when they use the search engine that I also own I would show them personalized results with sponsored links to products to buy. Plus I would be selling that information to third parties. And then I would of course also show some ads to all of the the normies that surf without an adblocker.
You wouldn't even come close to breaking even from display/search ads like you mentioned. Advertisers would rather pay a lot more for pre-roll video ads, even if the user doesn't click. Those video ads usually result in a much higher ROAS. And people searching for funny cat videos on YouTube is a hell of a lot harder to categorize and monetize than traditional SERP.
This. I'd have been paying for years if it weren't Google who'd only use the payment details to link it to an identity. I have and pay for Spotify and Netflix because they're independent companies without an ad and tracking business as their main profit center, I'd be happy to add another video service to the mix. I've tried Nebula but saw all the interesting content ever posted (it's that small) in two evenings.
There was a weird movie with Justin Timberlake called "In Time" and I would use that model.
The moment a video is born, it lives until its sponsored time runs out.
If a content creator wants to leave something up and reap some internal ad-sales, or tip-generation scheme... they just have to sponsor the video with more time.
People who like it, can also sponsor it.
And sure, have some sort of "Library of Congress" feature to save videos deemed as significant...
But once the time is up... the video is gone. Exists only in memories.
Seems like a huge portion of videos are just taking up space... start pruning.
And a lot of videos... they don't matter. 40 different versions of the same old song, 20 different shots of the same sports blooper, 900 different versions of the same boring news cast. Like... none of these need to be on there taking up space / inflating the hosting bill.
Cold storage is next to toilet paper on their expense sheet. The vast majority of cost is in processing the incoming video and serving it, somewhere on the order of 25x more than the cost of storage if I recall an analysis from a ways back. Deleting the old content with such a system doesn't save much money, doesn't sound good to the users, and adds complexity. It'd be an interesting take on a popularity algorithm but they always seem to be toying with that too much as it is.
At some point, no matter how cheap cold storage is, the "dead" content costs will trump the live content streaming. Like postpone but... at some point content needs to be pruned. What's the value in keeping everything forever? 1 year after the video was last viewed? 5? Like when can you safely purge videos?
It's not just a postponement, old content takes less $ to store over time as well as takes up less % of storage over time. Just because it grows in absolute quantity doesn't mean it will inevitably become the largest costs.
Now if 15 years from now storage has stopped becoming cheaper, the rate of new content has stopped growing, the size of new content has stopped growing, and the old content is starting to become a significant fraction of the operating costs then sure. At the moment (and for the last 15 years) none of those things is happening though.
If I owned YouTube with the goal of maximizing profits, and I did not have any self imposed ethical constrains, I would focus on controlling the market of hosting videos. The technology needed to operate a video hosting is widely available and been so for the last few decades, so the only way to prevent competition and keep a market dominance would be to make sure that competitors can't compete. Keep users on the platform or else the users will end up on any number of competing platforms, splintering off the user base into more and more fragments.
With a strong market dominance one can then focus on profits with minimum risk. One way to raise profits would be to impose taxes, like with streamers get donations through "youtube bits". They could go further and demand taxes when any company do things that has monetary value, like say when a company want to make a video about their products. They could do like Facebook and many dating sites and offer a service of "promoting" users above other users. One can couple access to the site to hardware products like mobile phones, or split off features to "exclusive" access users. One can down rate the speed/quality of freeloaders, pushing users to upgrade their accounts to premium accounts.
The ways to monetize a market dominant position is to many to count. The hard problem is the iron grip needed on keeping users on the platform.
> If I owned YouTube with the goal of maximizing profits, and I did not have any self imposed ethical constrains, I would focus on controlling the market of hosting videos. The technology needed to operate a video hosting is widely available and been so for the last few decades, so the only way to prevent competition and keep a market dominance would be to make sure that competitors can't compete. Keep users on the platform or else the users will end up on any number of competing platforms, splintering off the user base into more and more fragments.
This is kinda what's happening already. Most major websites stopped hosting their own and instead publish on YouTube and embed it
As such they're selling their users' tracking which I hate, but they love it for the extra income and exposure their videos get.
Hosting videos is not hard at all. But this is not the reason why nobody hosts their own anymore. YouTube's very dominance is what keeps it dominant.
With AdWords text ads at the bottom of the video. Which is something they already do. It's less intrusive than showing a thirty second commercial in the start of every video.
Also, YouTube has a data trove of metrics that interest advertisers. Why not selling those? You have a commercial page that let’s say sells clothes and you want to upload a video to target women aged 18-25. Here’s the data to show you what you need to do, and we’ll charge you $15k to give you a detailed report. Brands would go bananas for metrics like these.
People seem to invoke the word capitalism whenever things aren't a utopia for everyone involved. Still, even without capitalism, you'll have to contend with the issue of how to cover operational expenses. Say some, more centralized, agent decides YouTube is worthwhile - how would it get paid for? A state sponsorship made possible by a tax of some sort? Perhaps it would transition to be completely pay-to-play?
The employees and servers are expending real energy keeping YouTube operational. Meaning, whether it's through ads, a more centralized body stepping in, or some other less pervasive, opt-in business model - the thing needs to cover its own costs. I don't think a lack of private property would solve much there.
The contradiction of the capitalist mode of production is not that it tries to cover its costs. That is necessary in any system of trade/production.
The problem is using social services to generate capital. A public good for private interests is wrought with contradictions. And, as you can see, covering costs =/= generating capital.
Not even mentioning that the mode continuously works to undermine itself in making production more efficient by developing technology and driving down prices but profits as a whole too.
> Still, even without capitalism, you'll have to contend with the issue of how to cover operational expenses
You're still thinking in the framework of capitalism.
Let me be clear that I think that doing anything but capitalism is bound to fail while we're living in a resource restricted reality.
Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources. It's really hard to think without the restrictions of capitalism for me, because that's the only way I've ever experienced and it's so effective at prioritizing resources and productivity. Anything else has historically always fallen short.
Though it's still a pretty fucked up and heartless system
> Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources.
That's just redefining the term costs to not include work and resources. The term resources alone makes up nearly every operational cost possible: time, man power, CPU power, metals, environment, ...
Capitalism has nothing to with defining what something costs, it has everything to do with resource ownership and its distribution.
> Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources.
"Necessary work and resources" is exactly what is meant by costs. Scarcity is a property of the universe we live in. Capitalism doesn't prescribe or create scarcity, it just offers a framework for dealing with it. All other systems also have costs and operational expenses—they just aren't borne primarily by those making the decisions.
I miss them. I uninstalled mine after taking on more design responsibilities. Experiencing end-user inconveniences in-context is beneficial to design work. Profiling data and emulator testing won't viscerally inspire the "hold on— this is a bridge too far" interventions Conde Nast should have cultivated.
For example, if you were making a transit app, a savvy iPhone 13 ProMax user with a top-tier data plan will see very different problems (or at least see different priorities) on their commute than your Uncle Sidney with his belt-holstered, used, Samsung Galaxy J2 running on Ting Mobile. They're both important, but in the tech world, you have to dig a lot deeper to get the Uncle Sidney perspective.
It is not abuse. You are using the platform, the platform is monetized through ads. You requested it when you agreed to view any content on their platform.
I once sent a link to a news article to a friend at work. He became angry at me because the link I had sent him was to a malware-infested shit site. It wasn't, but the ads in the site I had intended to send had taken over his browser and made it indistinguishable from a malware link.
That's how showing ads on your site is abuse of the user.
You've just shifted the goalposts significantly and did not really reply in good faith. Showing ads is very different from linking to malware. Especially on YouTube the amount of malware is probably very low since everything is sandboxed.
I think the point is that putting so many ads on a page to the point of it becoming indistinguishable from a malware infested shit site is a form of abuse to the user. I personally agree with this take, if that's what he meant
Advertizement uses your brain power to process stimuli for the purpose of trying to sell you things that you do not need.
You did not ask for your brain to be stimulated like this - what you did ask for is the content that comes after ad. That's the thing you consented to.
Ads abuse your desire to watch something that you want to watch, by cramming in something that you did not want, leeching your precious time and brain-processing energy, in order to sell you something that you did not want to have in the first place.
I've started to think about it differently. I no longer use any ad blockers.
I actually want to experience the web (and its decline) the way it is, to take it all in, feel the pain and strengthen my patience in the process.
Also, when I visit a website that is truly obnoxious with its ads, I simply leave immediately and never go there. You build your own filter of bad actors, behaviors, and concrete sites. You don't need to block everyone, you simply walk away from abusers. You want to take notice of improper behavior before consciously and deliberately boycotting it.
Ads may be painful, but they are also insidious. That’s why they work. I avoid ads not because they’re painful (although most are), but because I simply don’t want to be influenced by whoever paid the most money to influence me.
No thanks for me. Advertisements if nothing else consume too much of my local compute resources for zero benefit to me. Why should I give them this free compute?
Don’t know. Some people charge for their content so they could try that if they didn’t want to offer content for free. Its their choice. Maybe I should allow ads and then send them a bill for their use of my local compute resources at my going rate.
Interesting that I had to scroll this far to find a defense for the payment of the modern web. How’s this different than piracy? The unspoken agreement is that you get the content in exchange for eyeballs on ads or cash up front.
> How’s this different than piracy? The unspoken agreement...
Because movie and game studios don't rely on "unspoken agreements".
In most cases publishers don't even ask me to serve ads. They try to go behind my back by asking my browser. When my browser tells them "no", they still have the option to ask me. Some sites do, and I will either turn ads on or walk away without reading anything.
When the agreement becomes spoken it becomes an agreement. There's no agreement when there's no communication.
1. How long have you been doing this ?
2. What do you think of other (not just monetization) ways ads are bad as in bloating the web, privacy and security issues ?
3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads ? You give up ? Use adblock ? Continue with ads ?
1. Been doing this for a few months, using only Safari for all my browsing.
2. My big annoyance is the weight on the CPU and battery. I have this sick pleasure from opening the network tab and seeing hundreds of requests filling my machine with garbage. :)
3. I often disable JavaScript temporarily with a hotkey - in macOS, you can map this action to any combination. This works incredibly well. Once I am done with the page, I re-enable it with a single keystroke. I only wish Safari did this just for the current page and not the entire browser.
There's also 4: It's not possible to consume content and not be affected by it. How okay are you with the fact that corporate messaging is a dominant mode of influence in your life?
Not the parent, but I've been doing the same thing. For maybe a slightly different reason.
1. Since the 90s. 2. Needs to be solved by user agents. Ad blockers generally work by host name or css selector. This doesn't filter out any of the bad guys that are really trying. 3. Continue with ads I guess. This doesn't actually happen in real life as far as I can tell.
The reason I don't use an ad blocker is that I like being able to see what's going on inside of a web browser. Prevalence of ad blockers creates an incentive to do canvas rendering based on a DRM-obfuscated data blob. That's worse for everyone.
I find it intriguing that only in the digital age have we sort of decided that the creator of something doesn't get to dictate the terms of its use.
>3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads
At least for me, I assume that they created the necessary content and get to decide how it's made available. It seems like only in the digital age do we even consider "I don't like your terms so I'm taking the content anyway" an option.
> I find it intriguing that only in the digital age have we sort of decided that the creator of something doesn't get to dictate the terms of its use.
Except that's not true. Mark Twain and Shakespeare cannot tell you you're interpreting their works incorrectly. JK Rowlings cannot stop you from making paper mache out of her books. I can timeshift and spaceshift content with tape recorders, VCRs, TiVo and more.
That may have been a poor choice of words on my part. I am struggling to come up with a better choice.
I guess the analog would be “Ms Rowlings, I think the price of your book is too high, so I am going to pay you whatever price I want to. You don’t get a choice”
Someone spent time and energy to create something, and decided that annoying ads are the price of their labor. People seem to think they now deserve the labor without the price that the creator has chosen.
In almost all your scenarios they are predicated on having compensated the author in some way. Blocking ads is consuming the content without compensating the author in any way.
Then tying it to the digital age was a strange choice. People have infringed in copyrights since before electricity, operating manual printing presses to do so.
And before that I used a VCR and would fast-forward through the ads. And before that, I would hit the mute button and get up to use the restroom or grab a snack. Or I'd change the channel and hope I remembered to change it back in a few minutes.
It's not just ads, it's also about blocking potential security threats with third party scripts and rogue domains, especially on "adult" websites such as xxx, crypto, piracy related stuffs and what not.
In my current home it's not sanely possible to get wired Internet, so I started by just using the 40GB data allowance on my phone. This was a huge mistake. With the modern Web and being ultra-careful about my browsing, I would still chew through the whole lot in a week. It was costing me insane amounts to keep my phone online.
See the OP's article - one page can be 250MB! And my data allowance was large. Many people only have 2GB on their phones. 8 web sites and they are done for the month.
I feel similarly. My default browsing mode is Firefox with enhanced protection on, but other than that, I don't use any kind of ad-blocking. But I also pay for Spotify and YouTube Premium. Other than that, sites like HN, SO, shopping sites, etc. don't have a lot of ads anyway. On the rare occasion I find myself on a site plastered with tons of ads, I just deal with it for a short while (local news I need to read) or leave. I'm actually kind of struggling here to find a site with a lot of ads. It seems to me like despite the concerning growth of ad-tech, for the internet that I care about, ads are either optional (removable for a fee), unobtrusive (like DDG), or a signal of poor quality and I won't want to go the site anyway.
> What I would like is something like an ad blocker that only blocks the tracking and surveillance.
Aren't there lots like this? At some point Ghostery did that: It would show you static banner ads no problem; it would only be the crazy javascript advert-bidding-based-on-surveillance things that wouldn't show up.
doesnt works for me, the only places I disable my adblocker is basically financial websites & healthcare related stuff. other than that it is all off.
Another thing is, since these adblock extensions get cleartext view of all the site you visit, you really want them to be completely open sourced. So only ublock origin for me.
I have a similar perspective when dealing with cookie popups, since such a perspective is necessary for something you cannot block even if you wanted to. Those with enough annoying popup hoops just get the Back button from me.
I sympathize with small creators and sites that rely on these kinds of money and are not obtrusive. It's just a test though. I will probably be back on adblocker by default.
On an adjacent note, my mother is someone who doesn't do any streaming—just regular old cable TV with constant commercials. I've asked her why she puts up with it and she just says the commercials give her a nice break to get up and go to the kitchen, the bathroom, do chores, etc. In reality, I think it's just inertia more than anything.
Recently though, she's been spending more time with my grandpa who streams everything. Last I talked to her, she said she felt very spoiled being able to watch whatever she wants, whenever she wants, with no ads. I'd tried explaining how great it is to her before, but I guess she had to live it to really understand how much better the other side is.
Blocking or avoiding ads in every facet of my life is almost a point of pride for me. I'm always alarmed when other people are just cool with it.
A friend (who does not use an ad blocker) showed me something on a website a few weeks ago and I was shocked by the invasiveness and aggressive nature of the ads. I asked him how he was able to use the web like this and he said it was annoying and that he was interrupted a lot, but he had sort of gotten use to it.
There's no way I would use a browser without an ad blocker. Doing so is counter-productive and also a major security risk.
For the longest time I refused to install an adblocker. I worked at a company that made most of its money from ads, and it felt hypocritical to run an ad blocker. Also I wanted to experience the website the same way as the users do.
For a long time I told people "my brain is my ad blocker I just ignore it". But after a while I just couldn't stand the web without it anymore. Websites got so bad I couldn't find the content anymore. My CPU would spike to 100% on some web pages and my laptop fans would spin like crazy.
It makes me sad but now I install an ad blocker on every place I can.
I'm very surprised the article went into the technical (web site sizes) instead of the psychological. People using the advertised web cannot visit a page without being bombarded by political surveys ("Are your gas prices higher under Biden? WE WANT TO KNOW"), extraneous goods (Show your love with a "My husband is a Rick and Morty fan born in March whose area code is 212!" t-shirt!), and deceptive practices ("Everyone in your area is saving on real estate taxes with this one weird trick!")
I was shocked when uBlock got flack for arranging an "Acceptable advertising" practice on their filter. It seems very similar to centralized regulations in broadcast to me. Larger, more established firms agree to a set of rules for the benefit of consumer and provider.
> I was shocked when uBlock got flack for arranging an "Acceptable advertising" practice on their filter.
The Acceptable Ads program started in AdBlock Plus (owned by Eyeo) in 2011. In 2018, uBlock (not to be confused with the highly recommended uBlock Origin) was acquired by AdBlock (which was itself acquired by an anonymous buyer in 2015, not to be confused with AdBlock Plus) and then implemented Eyeo's Acceptable Ads program by default.
The complaint against the program is that it turns Eyeo* into a rent-seeking middleman that profits from giving its users a degraded experience compared to ad blockers that block without selling exceptions, such as uBlock Origin. Eyeo is acting just like an ad seller, taking money from advertisers in exchange for its users' attention.
* And other companies? We don't know for sure who acquired AdBlock and uBlock, but it wouldn't be surprising if Eyeo did or if they have a common owner.
For a while I didn't bother with an adblocker. After countless data breaches and tracking that can still be done even with an adblocker, so I was mostly apathetic about the privacy factors. That was 3-4 years ago.
But I had a fast computer, lots of ram etc., yet still I noticed that websites were getting progressively slower and slower. And, as mentioned in the article, auto-playing video ads proliferated and became massively annoying. So I took the time to setup uBlock Origin, and gradually zapped elements on sites when they still made it through.
The difference was huge. Yes, the annoying auto-play ads (mostly) went away, but even more was the overall browsing speed was a huge improved. It was almost like the very early 00's when I went from dial-up to broadband.
It was only at this point that I realized just how much ads massively bogged down the internet.
I've had YouTube Premium since its inception. Whenever I'm around someone else who puts on a free-tier version of YouTube its rather shocking how frequent and intrusive the commercial ads are.
I ran ad blocking on Youtube for years, and I've been a Premium member since it came out (as Red back then). I can't stand ads and avoid them like the plague.
Some ads still sneak into my world though. My current peeve is when going to a restaurant and they have "the game" on full blast. I'm perfectly fine with people watching/listening to the game - and half the time the restaurant is considered a "sports bar", so I get it. But what ends up happening is that those major games are mostly ads. And the ads are twice as loud as the game. So here I am, paying to eat at a place and I'm listening to ads. I've been tempted to ask the server if we'll be receiving a discount for listening to each ad like a mobile game!
Depends on where you live. Here in the Pacific Northwest, there are plenty of TV-free restaurant choices. Back when I lived in the South, it was a lot harder to find.
I've bought the standalone keychain and the DIY TV-B-Gone. They're great but clunky. I bought a USB C IR blaster keychain hoping there'd be a TV-B-Gone app that could utilize it. No such luck.
Regarding this, sports bars in particular pay a pretty hefty fee to have public-view television service, especially regarding access to all pro-league games. I'm sure they'd be paying more in general if they opted to mute or turn off the screen during ads (since the network expects x% of the restaurant's viewers to see and hear the ad, so they get the advertiser to pay more for access to those viewers, subsidizing the restaurant's actual monthly bill).
The gym that I go to (and pay for) have ads on most of the displays (some are running TV programs). Ads for local businesses and “upgrade your membership TODAY”. It irks me. I don’t want to be distracted by these flashing screens.
But I guess there is no law that says that patrons should be shielded from ads. And I don’t think they would listen if I gave them a complaint (why would they give up a source of revenue?). So I don’t know what can be done about it short of a concerted effort by many members. And they (and myself) would probably not be motivated enough to go to that level of effort just to get rid of some irksome ads.
If there is another gym in the area with fewer ads, cancel your current membership, let them know the reason why, and go to the other gym. Let the new gym also know why you are switching to them.
I already said that it is too inconvenient for me to do some kind of protest move which won’t make a difference. All that will accomplish is that I will have to travel longer to and fro.
Another alternative is ask them to turn it down and turn on CC.
I wish more of these places would have CC on. Especially if multiple programs are on, you can't have the audio. There's a solution right there, built right in, just waiting.... page in the conversation about how accessibility can be useful to more than just the immediately disabled.
Maybe your sensorium is different than mine, but the motion, flashing, and colors of advertisements are just as irritating as the audio to me. This is especially true in an environment where there are lots of other conversations and sounds to compete with the TV noise.
Unless the volume is turned up annoyingly loud, I find the visuals to be the annoyingly loud part: The subdued hues of the painted walls, tile floors, and wood trim reflecting back to my eyes from the ambient lighting are invisible compared to the 500 nits of flourescent colors jump cutting back and forth.
Turning on CC but leaving the visual assault in place doesn't help my eyes much. I would feel less abused if they'd turn the screen off but leave the game audio over the radio.
It depends on what I'm there for, certainly. Recently I went to a piano bar with friends, and also happened to catch a particular football game. In this environment, you surrendered peace and quiet the moment you selected the restaurant. Fortunately for a football game, the audio is optional anyhow.
If I'm just there to eat, one TV is no big deal to me, but the TV Wall is definitely a distraction.
But at least don't try to have the audio on. As technically nifty as some of the restaurants are that try to have per-table speakers or a streaming option are, CC is still less obtrusive to me.
I have an ethical dilemma about YouTube. I hate ads, I hate Google, and I want to support the creators.
For those reasons adblock is a must, and paying for YouTube Premium is not an option (I’m not going to voluntarily give a single penny of my money to Google)
Sure, I’ve got CuriosityStream and Nebula subs, but not all content creators use those platforms.
Nebula seems to split profit 50/50[0] while YouTube splits it 55/45 to the channel[1], and Youtube Premium views are regarded as being sometimes 10-20x the payout of an ad-supported view[2].
A lot of big creators take sponsorship deals and have in-video ads. I know most of the ones I watch do, and I actually don't even mind them. They're personalized to the content creator's content, and are usually as entertaining as the video's contents because of it.
To support the creators whose videos I'm watching on YT, I use a whitelist add-on that disable the adblocker on those channels. Though the add-on still allows me to skip the ad, which I'm doing when it's an ad I've already seen.
YouTube Premium does nothing to stop Google using your youtube history to profile you and letting advertisers target ads at you on other sites using Google's data which is partially built on the youtube profiling.
By not loading the ads at all, it may stymie non-Google ad networks attempts to profile you.
YouTube ads are based on your watch history, not some tracking pixel, so even a regular ad blocker on YouTube.com only blocks ads and doesn't help with privacy.
I suspect that since you're a paying user, a more valuable customer, they'd want to mine your data more thoroughly to derive more profits in other ways.
I would suspect the opposite, once you start paying you go from being a product to being a customer.
If youtube was 90% premium members, it would likely be an unrecognizably better platform, since users instead of advertisers would be the core profit center.
In a normal world that would make sense but we're dealing with businesses and MBAs who need to incessantly increase their revenue. As a paying customer they could squeeze more, you're willing to pay. Non-paying customers are used as a product themselves but it's extremely hard to extract more.
That's just normal business though, and my statement is intrinsically correcting for that.
Netflix has the same MBAs and bean counters, but their product has no ads and orders of magnitude less clickbait. Its clear they make content geared for their users, not for their advertisers. Youtube is very heavy with advertiser friendly content, and both creators and users pay heavily for that (but its *quote* Free! *unquote*)
Netflix productions do content placement. It's pretty sneaky and they do use social media accounts for shenanigans like fake posts on subreddits asking "What was that jacket in TVShow S03E04?" and another account responding with a link. Big brands with recognizable logos also do product placement on those. For fantasy shows they aim to own the merchandise distribution, but for stuff that happens on the real world there's always product placement and webpage placement and stuff like that going on.
I hardly see product placement as being even remotely close to what YouTube is doing. Its probably one of the most innocuous forms of advertising. Imagine a YouTube where the worst you can come up with is a guy drinking a coke during his video.
I just upgraded after refusing. Mostly for mobile. On desktop my ad block works but on mobile it wouldnt. You can also shut off your screen on mobile and it continues to run with Premium. It kind of sucks that Youtube requires you to pay for this but I use Youtube enough to be okay with it.
I'm blocking youtube ads on my mobile quite okay and the experience is fine (IOS - AdGuard). There are some twitches here and there but it is very usable.
I bet! I run an adblocker and it's a cat and mouse game with YouTube ads slipping through. Last breakage, before I reinstalled it, I was getting ad interruptions for the same two stupid adds literally every 45 seconds.
Yeah, google can circumvent the ad blocker's attempts to block the ad playback from beginning, but if the first thing the ad does is have double verify check if you're a bot, and double verify's domain is in your adblocker's list, then the ad is going to fail and Google will try load some other ad once it errors out.
To be clear, advertising bot detection is different to website bot detection. The website bot detection is because they're worried about spambots filling comments or DDOS attacks. This is where you get the captchas. The advertiser bot detection is more for the case where the website owner is in on it and trying to boost their metrics to get more revenue from advertisers, and is more likely to be expressed via blank ad slots and demands for refunds from the website owner.
That's win-win for the server. Servers start doing this because automated traffic is cutting into their ability to provide service to humans. If you're freeing up their traffic to serve other humans you're doing them a favor.
What's this mythical world where industry execs leave profit on the table because they aren't being squeezed by ad blockers? Have you tried watching cable TV? You know, the service that was originally billed as a way to watch tv without ads?
This strikes me as wishful thinking, adblockers are such a small minority. They are just following the incentives they would always follow, adblockers or no.
Adblockers are at 27% just in the US looking at statista and other random sources, and the number is much higher if you look at the more relevant younger demographic.
There are plenty of websites that detect that I'm using an adblocker. It's mildly annoying, but then I get to decide if what I was about to read was worth it.
Most of the time it's journaldemontreal.com (and other Quebecor-related websites) that prevents me from reading their articles with my adblocker. Which is a blessing in a way, because it's basically a glorified tabloid with a lot of articles of dubious quality.
I'm on Firefox with both AdBlockPlus and uBlock Origin.
There was a time back in the IE6 era where firefox didn't really have any market share and adblockers weren't really a thing.
The advertising industry was really aggressive even then. Some publishers put as many popups and banner ads as they could. I'm not saying all publishers would do this, but I have to admit the worst actors are the ones I strongly remember.
Only difference now is that there's a lot more tracking and ads are more insidious where they blend in with content now.
Yep, the first punch was thrown by the ad industry. Popups, pop-unders and even full window advertisements were rampant before popup blockers became commonplace, to the point of being added directly to browsers.
I doubt that. Even if adblockers weren't a thing they'd push more ads since it generates more revenue. It's probably also effective at annoying users into buying a subscription to avoid (most) ads.
And global warming was much milder when we had more pirates in the world [1]. Correlation is not causation. In the same period, YouTube's management style and public-facing attitude have changed dramatically, Google's general attempt at being the "good guys" has pretty much vanished, and beancounting has taken over as the guiding principle in many respects. I have zero reason to believe that had Adblocking not been a thing, there would have been any significant difference in the frequency or intrusiveness of the ads YouTube shows.
I wouldn't call them "milder". They weren't static ads. They were video ads. Often loud and un-skippable for a certain small amount of time. This is definitely equivalent to a "punch the monkey" ad.
To be fair, if people stopped blocking ads I don't see them backing off on Ads any more; the increase in revenue and ad watch time would be kept as profit, since the current YouTube paradigm where they show 2 ads at the start and sometimes multiple mid-roll ads is so that they annoy you enough to sign up for Premium.
This is exactly the case. Every time someone starts ad-blocking, someone else has to assume that ad watch for them.
Of course this isn't 1:1 parity in reality, but the ultimate manifestation of ad blocking is that.
Google had a good system a few years ago that I was probably the only sucker who paid them for it (and probably why they stopped it). You could pay a chosen amount monthly, and they would not show you ads as a result. It wasn't perfected, but the concept was good for those who understand the problem and want to work towards a solution.
Aren't the people who use adblockers by definition those who are irritated by advertising enough that they wouldn't buy the products and services being advertised? If anything ad people should love things like uBlock Origin, it means they're not wasting their ad spend on people who aren't going to buy their products anyway.
I think that's wishful thinking. I might even think this about myself, that I don't care about ads. But they still have some effect I think. Sure, I rarely buy stuff online or anywhere, I just don't shop much, but I still get affected by ads.
Some things about our brain we just can't change: we like things we've seen before. Both brands and people. Recognition makes a big difference, for example in arbitrary choices when shopping.
I want to say they stopped it in 2018? I don't remember the name of the program, and searching "google paying for no ads" brings up a ton of unrelated adwords stuff.
I payed $5/mo and they would roll over unused funds. It worked pretty well, except that it would still show where the banners were, just blank whitespace instead of an ad.
instead of paying for premium and all of that money going to a megacorp. I spent some money on a simple browser plugin that forces YT to use the HTML5 video player.
Although every now and then an ad happens to pre-load before the video starts but I just refresh the video page and the ad goes away.
Premium views help a lot more than ad-supported views for creators, on the scale of 10-20x the payout per-view[0,1] (and it pays out regardless of the advertiser friendliness rating).
This has been a hot topic lately[2,3], but at what point is you watching YouTube for years without ads, without paying for Premium, ethically stealing or "piracy"? YouTube was buying petabytes of Hard Drive storage a day in 2012 to keep up with the demand[4], i'm sure it's nearly an Exabyte a day or more right now, so it doesn't cost $0 for YouTube to run the service, they just happen to have enough people on Mobile watching and clicking ads to make a profit[5] and subsidize the rest of us.
It's insane to me that people are arguing in favor of the advertisement companies simply because they pay the content creators a sliver of what they accept from the companies that use their ad platform.
Here's my take. It's not "piracy" or "ethical piracy" (what the fuck?). The content creators put it out on YT with the expectation that it will get viewed. The little money they receive now is simply a bonus. It's only piracy if the content creator put it out on a platform for some dollar amount (ie, direct to consumer model) and then it is later re-uploaded for free by another channel or via other means..
In other words, you can't claim piracy when the "price" is $0 up front.
As for YT, I don't really care. They are subsidized by the data that is fed to them (ie, viewing history) and resold to advertisers. They get their nut.
If anything, this should really push the forefront on innovation for a decentralized video streaming platform. One organization or group should not have this much power over who gets the "top views" via a proprietary algorithm.
The price of things don't have to be represented in dollar amounts. If I want to give you a free iPad for watching my 2 hour lecture, I don't expect you to put on some sunglasses and take a nap for 1 hour 55 minutes. If you do that, I don't have to give you that iPad even if you sued me for it.
Piracy in general is just 'unauthorized use'[0]. YouTube requires you watch ads to use their website, so not doing that is piracy. The only reason there's no consequences for adblock are because (A) it'd be bad optics and bad PR to sue regular viewers, and (B) YouTube sees the value of subsidizing those who block ads as a plus, since it means they can keep their tight grip on where 'everyone' goes to watch videos and thus where creators are required to upload if they want people to see their stuff. If they blocked ~37% [1] of viewers with adblock, different services more lenient to ad blockers (at first) would be able to actually attract viewers and perhaps get the content creators to start dual-uploading their content.
> YouTube requires you watch ads to use their website, so not doing that is piracy.
Piracy is another word for copyright infringement. Blocking ads on YouTube is not piracy because you are not violating copyright law (in any country that I'm aware of) by viewing only a portion of the content that is delivered to you. DVRs do the same thing as ad blockers for TVs, but in the U.S., the courts have ruled that DVR services do not infringe the copyrights of media companies.[1]
YouTube and other Google services don't forbid ad blocking in their terms of service.[2] If they did, there would be an uproar because Google itself includes an ad blocker in Chrome, which of course does not block any YouTube or Google ads.[3]
> which of course does not block any YouTube or Google ads
I've seen it block Google ads a few times on this one website which cycles through them every minute. It says the ad 'used too many resources and Chrome has killed it'.
You're missing so much in this analysis - the big advertising companies do much more than show ads - they stalk you in excruciating detail, they resell your private life information to untold abusers who try to gain advantage from you.
Taking advantage of you, by manipulating your mind is one of the basic premises of ads.
In some ideal 'fair' world ads would just present information for you to make rational choices - but nope, the reality is the ads industry is based on emotional/psychological manipulation. If you seek to understand you can research about the evolution of the industry since the time of Freud where they co-opted psychological techniques to sell things by exacerbating people's psychoses.
Put another way, your arguments would only make sense if the advertisers played fair but they are abusive and try to trick you. You can't make a fair deal with conniving.
The reality of this is so bad that it is destroying our society - at what point is allowing massive scale psychological manipulation/abuse for profit destroying society?
My post here is a bit ranty but I get upset at the lack of fair context in the presuppositions of your argument.
To answer the question posed by the site. How can they afford 261MB page load instead of 5MB? Because the largest expense of delivering video, the bandwidth, is still very cheap. We're talking less than one cent per gigabyte. Even if ad rates are really low, they're bringing in more than 1 cent per ad play.
This is yet another example of US/BayArea Privilege blindness.
It is NOT cheap in most places to the User. Including in the unprivileged-USA.
The user pays a lot for that bandwidth. Specially now that everyone will unknowingly move to predatory 5G home services but let me try to stay on topic.
People out of the Empire Center will pay both bandwidth and processing power. Where do you think all those old phones you trade in for the latest apple/Samsung ends up? Everyone is running phones that barely gets any security update anymore and is already slowed to the maximum by the OS itself. Trying to load and then display video ads is just evil.
And that is not web only, Apps are worse. If you install Apps, all of them are following the standard set by amazon, newegg, etc... you will get video ads along your usual usage. Ads in between search listings, ads in your cart! and you have to be much more technical to block those.
The very article ends with the following: "But even so, again: video is expensive! And I simply can’t see how it’s worth their while to autoplay video on their site. Can anyone explain this to me?!"
I'm sure this was an answer to the article this thread references. Bandwidth is cheap and it only gets cheaper.
Even if the ads weren't obnoxious and in your face, there's still the elephant in the room of malware. Every ad group has been the carrier of at least one malware ad in the last few years-- it's simply not safe to browse the web without an ad blocker.
The only way that'll change is if they go back to static images/text, and there's no way in hell the ad industry would ever allow that.
I have this moment when I have to use Youtube on my phone for some reason (such as a tutorial for how to fix something), and get blasted with 3 ads for a 1 minute video. I would never use it for long periods without an ad blocker.
Well, they have a pretty active subreddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/Vanced/ so you can see a few folks besides me championing it.
But ultimately, you can either examine the binary yourself or else trust them.
One point of note is that it does not automatically update. Whether you install it directly or use the manager app, there is always some manual process involved in updates. (The manager just notifies you when there is an update available.)
With Chrome's crippling of adblockers via their Manifest V3 mandate, I wonder if Chrome users are in for a rude awakening of how hostile and repugnant the ad laden web has become.
Doubt it - with manifest V3, most of the adverts will still be blocked. I expect more are getting through with Chrome already because of CName cloaking and uBO not being able to uncloak on Chrome.
I hate auto-playing videos. Several news websites in Germany embed an auto-playing video in a news article. Often these videos have nothing to do with the article. And then there are some that even turn into a pop-up player when you scroll down.
What's the best way to block these videos (in Chromium)? I wouldn't mind a solution where videos are completely blocked with a whitelist, since I rarely consume videos except on dedicated video sites (e.g Youtube).
An interesting thought experiment is how feasible and expensive would it be to run a large-scale PR and marketing campaign to get that 25% of adblockers to 50%, and how would this disrupt the current hegemony.
If you were given the task "Remove $1BN of ad revenue. Here is $100M to spend.", how would you do it? I'd imagine it could be reasonably high leverage.
> and how would this disrupt the current hegemony.
You would immediately see many more billions spent on making it illegal wherever it's feasible to do so. And, of course, an accelerated push to 1) neuter the ability for browsers to block content, how they block content, and what content they can block and 2) a push towards big bundles and blobs of content that can't feasibly be adblocked in realtime with the way current extensions work.
With Chrome being about 66% of the browser market, it's a really short trip to get to this future. I sure hope that Apple considers it a strategic imperative to continue developing Safari.
It is mostly why I support their restriction of only allowing Safari on iOS. Even though it might be an evil, it is a lesser evil than letting Chrome dominate, which seems all but guaranteed if they did not have iOS Safari to stop them.
At some point we need to decide as a culture to reject advertising. Stop putting ads on our own websites and apps, stop linking to sites that advertise. Either charge me money for the content or give it for free. The world will become a better place. Less compromises and capitulations to advertising companies, less mindless consumerism, less distractions. More funding for actually good content (thus a monetary incentive to create it), lower consumer prices (from less money spent on advertising).
It's almost unbelievable how big the gap is. Sometimes I try to turn it off and check links before I share them to find out if they're actually good reading experiences. I've got a couple of sites that I used to reflexively share on social media that I've since learned not to because without an adblocker they auto-play videos at the top of the page - but I never ran into that behavior when I was using them, so I thought they were fine.
I think that introducing nontechnical friends/family to adblockers and helping them set one up can be a really low-cost but high-impact kindness, I encourage people here to do so.
Maybe it's an ADHD thing and I'm overstating this, but I personally see really tangible effects on my ability to concentrate based on how many ads I'm surrounded with. Even stuff like Sponsorblock, which is honestly mostly removing intros/outros has helped a lot with how I interact with Youtube. Sure there's data savings, page load time, etc... but I also vaguely suspect that constant web advertising just flat-out affects people's mood and ability to focus more than is commonly talked about.
Seriously, ask your family members about whether they adblock, and install Ublock Origin for them if they don't. If they're on Android, consider (with their permission) swapping out their browser for Firefox (or some equivalent) and installing Ublock Origin again. If they don't mind some very minor UI differences (and in my experience many people don't), then it's an immediate speedup and data savings at the cost of maybe 3 minutes of work and explanation.
The article suggests that roughly 73% of users don't use an adblocker. Some of those users are making a conscious choice, and that's fine, but a lot of them just don't know how to install one or don't know how they work. You don't need to be actually evangelizing ad blockers to still occasionally ask someone who's complaining about ads whether or not they realize that there's a really easy way to get rid of them.
SponsorBlock is one of the coolest extensions of recent times. It's also a great example of crowdsourcing actually working for the benefit of the commons.
> I think that introducing nontechnical friends/family to adblockers and helping them set one up can be a really low-cost but high-impact kindness, I encourage people here to do so.
I have done this in the past. However, I have discovered that most of the people I introduce to ad blocking will turn it off later. This is because some sites are able to detect when you are using an ad blocker and even provide steps to turn it off. While there are ways to get around this, most of the people just preferred to turn it off.
I don't know if it makes that much difference, but I like that Ublock Origin by default only disables itself for the specific site you click it on when you click the big power button. I always try to reinforce to people how to turn Ublock Origin off if they need to (and I like that Ublock's UI makes this really easy to do), because I'd rather they disable adblocking for one site than remove it completely from their browser.
Am try to raise my 3yo daughter completely ad free. When watching a show, we exclusively use paid providers like YT, Netflix, Disney where no ads are present. Additionally, AdGuard helps removing some annoying Ads from minigame-Apps.
For now, she is very young and it doesn't matter so much. But still, I want to keep up with this as long as possible.
No free TV and no ads on web for her!
People have probably forgotten. Old media had (has) about 20% of its space (newspaper pages or media time) taken up by advertising. That was the steady state for media. I don't think it was accidental, it was the equilibrium needed to fund the media. Plus advertising frequently was one of the flashiest bits.
We're going to go back there, it's just going to take a few decades until the new media companies stabilize. Netflix has already started to ramp up its subscription prices, just give it some more time and more pressure to shareholders to increase revenue, ads will come and new subscription tiers will appear.
C'est la vie, I guess. That's who and what we are as humanity.
I use Brave which somehow (not sure how) still does a much better job than whatever adblocking extensions I can find. I am also behind a PiHole firewall anyway, so most ad servers are blocked in the first place. Hundreds of websites that are completely unusable normally are completely usable as a result.
I also have NoScript installed - it significantly decreases the amount of crap your web browser fetches and renders and thus makes browsing faster and consume less energy.
And as mentioned by blakesterz in Private mode I have both uBlock Origin and NoScript disabled because multiple websites refuse to work otherwise.
By default I visit with NoScript enabled. It usually works fine. Sometimes it doesn't, so I selectively enable scripts. As often as not, it doesn't help.
If it's at all hard to make the site work for me, I give up - it's not as if there's a shortage of websites to visit. I know when I'm not welcome.
I still use NoScript because you can quickly enable bare minimum scripts to get a site working. After a while you develop a good intuition for what is making things not work. At first it is pretty daunting and I generally don't recommend it for the less savvy.
If you just blanket turn off Js the internet basically is not useable.
The other thing they didn't get into here is that the quality of ads online is generally trash. In the old advertising world there was at least some thought and work put into ads. Now they are auto-generated nightmares. Check out this article from a few years ago if you want to see the worst of the worst: https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...
I am shocked every time I use my wife's computer and the ad blocker isnt there. I don't even understand how you could use the web on a regular basis where you have to duck, dodge, and weave better than Ali to avoid some type of disturbance.
I have friends who still don't use some sort of adblocking, no fucking idea how they browse websites without it in 2022. Anytime I've had to use a computer without uBlock Origin, they are horrible to use.
"But I think without the help of an adblocker I would find it much worse."
Not at all. Because I don't use an adblocker, I don't visit websites that are infested with ridiculous numbers of ads. These sites are not worth reading anyway. I read sites I pay for, I go to my bank, I pay bills, I read Haskell API docs, etc etc.
If I used an adblocker, I'd waste even more time on Internet garbage.
The site appears to be hugged to death...but the thrust of the idea seems pretty obvious on the surface...I'd add that it also probably follows financial, if not technically savvy groups.
The person with a $50 Walmart Burner phone's experience will be a WHOLE LOT DIFFERENT from the person with the $1100 smartphone with ad blocking turned on.
I wish it had full addon support though, rather than just Mozilla's curated selection of 20 or so. I have to install an app to do twitter -> nitter redirection when it could just be a browser extension.
It is possible to use your own list of addons, but it's needlessly difficult [1]. I hope they will support a slightly less insane workaround eventually.
I occasionally check to see if Firefox has unbroken extensions on Android and won't be back to using it as my primary browser on my phone until it does or Kiwi ceases to be an option.
If companies chose to run simple, clean, quiet advertisements there would be no need to block ads. They have only themselves to blame for creating a nightmare user experience.
I have never used an add blocker. If the page is too intrusive with toxic adds, I just close the page. Also, if I go to any page that launches a pop-up to subscribe or some other stupid crap, I again just close the page, never to return.
Different people view different webpages due to different interests. And different people also have different thresholds for what would be "toxic adds". I know a lot of articles posted here would fail that threshold for me.
I got so used to having uBlock that I couldn't relate to the memes about YouTube adding multiple unskippable ads recently. I'm like "they did?". It is like I browse a different web and it's awesome.
The belief that advertisers are owed my attention is absurd.
Since forever, you could opt of viewing ads. Ad in a magazine? Next page. TV commercial? Great time for a bathroom break. But now advertisers have decided that you MUST watch their ad. There's a countdown timer for. If the browser loses focus, the timer stops. How long before they're tracking eyeballs for enforcement? Oh wait, not long at all.
> The belief that advertisers are owed my attention is absurd.
You are trying to rationalize theft through self-righteous nonsense.
If you don't want the ads, don't use the site/service/content. Simple as that. Anything else is you stealing it.
You don't get to decide how a site pays for the cost of running their operation. They do. If they decide ads is the way and you don't like it, don't use their site. Stealing the content does not make you virtuous, no matter how you might attempt to distort reality. It makes you a thief.
"I don't how you do things, so I am going to steal your product!"
Who's stealing it? I asked for an article through the customary channels and they served it to me. Inside that article, they offered a whole set of embedded resources for me to choose to load, and I opted out of a lot of them.
You have obviously convinced yourself it is OK to steal because you think it is OK to steal, because you think it is OK to steal. Good for you.
What you never see are the jobs you might affect through your actions. You have actually convinced yourself that you are entitled to use someone else's work product without paying for it in any way. All I can say is that I hope one day someone does the same to you. Maybe then you'll understand that theft has consequences.
If you don't like advertising, stop stealing the products, services and content it supports.
Calling ad blocking "theft" is an absurd take. It is not theft to only consume part of the content that is provided to you. There is no law that requires the viewer to consume all of the content provided in a format, in any country that I'm aware of. It would also be immoral to compel the viewer to spend their time and attention on dross.
Correct. You have no idea what it means to respect someone's property and livelihood. Hence a creative interpretation that allows you to take while explicitly blocking their ability to generate revenue.
If a site owner publishes content and makes it available free of charge, it is available for visitors to consume free of charge. Your argument shows a lack of respect for the autonomy of internet users, who are not obligated to consume ads just because they are presented alongside other site content, just as TV viewers are not obligated to watch the ads during commercial breaks. Site owners have alternative means of generating revenue (affiliate links, sponsored content, merchandise, donations, etc.) and the option of charging for site content. No site owner is entitled to revenue from advertising.
I don't like ads. Yet I respect the fact that the product supplier needs them to pay the bills.
You don't like ads. You have zero respect for the product supplier. You consume their work product and delete the ads, using an artificially-constructed moral high ground to justify it.
The web would not exist if your world view had been dominant from the early days. Few people are interested in paying for anything directly. Gmail has 1.5 billion users. Care to guess how many pay for the service? Nobody is going to pay for search, and yet it is one of the most valuable tools on the internet, arguably the one thing that makes it work. A service like YouTube is incredibly valuable, not just from an entertainment perspective but also for learning and more. Once again, nobody wants to pay for it.
I could go on. There are millions of excellent sites beyond what Google has to offer. What's more important is that none of these services would have been built to where they are today were it not for the use of advertising as a revenue generation channel.
At a higher philosophical level, the question might be:
What future valuable service or product would we not allow to germinate if nobody wants to pay for anything and everyone uses ad blockers. Like it or not, this is one of the easiest ways for entrepreneurs to finance their dreams and ideas on the web. Given the vast majority of people will not pay for anything, the options become very few. This is certainly true at inception. Later on, as a business matures, other potential revenue streams surface.
Go try and start something like Facebook (about 3 billion users) and ask people to pay you just $1 per year. Aside from the fact that it would be impossible to support the infrastructure and people needed to run such a beast, well, nobody is going to hand you even $1 per year for the service. I don't care what features and privacy enhancements you might offer, nobody is going to pay. What's left? Well, initially, advertising. That's the only way. Sad, but true.
We don't have to like reality, but we should understand it.
I respect the ability of site owners to make their own decisions about how to run their own businesses. I respect the courage it takes for a site owner to accept responsibility for their own decisions. When a site owner chooses to supply content without charging for it and without stipulating that it must be consumed in its entirety without an ad blocker, I respect that. And if some of that content interests me, I will accept the site owner's offer of free content and consume the parts that I want to consume, while ignoring or blocking the parts that I don't.
How I spend my time and attention on the site is my personal decision, not the site owner's decision, not your decision, and not anyone else's decision. I don't care if an unsound and generally unaccepted ethical theory like the one you're advocating for disregards my individual right to spend my time and attention as I please. I don't care if you would rather prioritize someone else's profit over my autonomy. My time and my attention belong to me.
I don't use Gmail, and I would prefer Gmail's user base to be distributed among many smaller companies that compete with each other to provide better products. I don't use Facebook, and I would prefer it to be completely supplanted by fediverse services that don't violate the privacy of users and non-users, and don't create poor working conditions for its contractors.* YouTube is not irreplaceable either, and I would rather see a variety of platforms like PeerTube instances and Vimeo break YouTube's near-monopoly of online video content in the U.S. and many other countries. I fully understand the reality of online advertising, which only amplifies my support for ad blocking.
When there's a law that makes adblocking illegal. I will gladly leave the web behind forever. But to equate adblocking to stealing is hyperbolic nonsense. And to out right call me a thief is insulting. Looks like I struck a nerve; or maybe this whole thread did. Maybe you're in ad tech? I hope you are. I hope you read through this entire thread and soak in just how rotten your industry is; so reviled even here on HN.
When companies SEO-shove it in my face and almost literally beg me to take it.. oh I don't feel entitled but it's hard to avoid. Stop shoving it in my face and I won't take it.
> And then reality hits: There was never any free pizza. And the pizza is gone. Along with the jobs and everything else it created.
So clickbait, SEO spam sites, content farms, and other trash that scream "free pizza" and hand you a bag full of ads will be gone from the internet? This is like cure for cancer, I look forward to it!
You are exaggerating, the vast majority of the ad-supported internet does not fit your "clickbait, SEO spam sites, content farms, and other trash" narrative. Once again, it is convenient to construct such a narrative to justify taking from truly useful sites.
I must ask: Do you mean to say that you only visit "clickbait, SEO spam sites, content farms, and other trash" sites with your ad blockers?
Likely not. What is a far more likely scenario is that you frequent sites that deliver you enough value that you choose to visit them. This is that context I am referring to when I speak of theft. Not the useless content-farm junk you seem to want to use as a means of justification for blocking ads on the sites you visit.
If you don't like their use of advertising, don't visit the sites.
Note that what we are discussing here isn't a requirement for you to CLICK on ads and make money for them. Not at all. All this boils down to is not interfering with these sites displaying their ads and engaging in marketing to you that might result in revenue. That's what you are objecting to.
You want the people who create and manage the valuable content you provide to work for you for free. That is a remarkably shitty position to take, and I am being kind. Give me your valuable content or service --which I enjoy and want to consume, repeatedly-- and do it for nothing, while actively interfere with your ability to earn any money and promote others to do the same.
I won't shed a tear if every ad supported site vanishes from the internet. Yes, I think the vast majority of them are useless, and the only reason I visit them is because someone else links them or, because of SEO, they end up in the way when you search for something. Usually these sites are worse than what you'd get if search engines skipped straight to the good, valuable sites with no ads; their value is generally negative, not positive. Good sites get buried because of everyone who's spamming the internet for quick buck. I refuse to support ad-supported sites, because ad-money and the incentive it creates for spam is ruining the internet. Spammers' ability to earn money by creating more spam should be revoked. Anyone who supports that "business" model is partly responsible for spam and trash.
If a site owner doesn't want to provide content for free of charge, then they shouldn't do that. Nobody is forcing a site owner to provide free content. Site owners can charge for the content if they want to.
But if a site owner does choose to provide their content for free, it is not the responsibility of the site visitor to ensure that such a business model is successful. Internet users do not have any legal or moral obligation to avoid consuming content that is provided free of charge. Internet users also do not have any legal or moral obligation to consume all of the content that is presented in one place.
It is not the responsibility of Internet users to ensure the jobs of people in the advertising industry. Compelling users to view ads (when they view other content) to protect those jobs would be an infringement on individual rights for a very poor reason. That's why ad blockers and DVRs are legal in every country that I'm aware of.
So, you think that the only people who's jobs are affected by this theft are those in the advertising industry?
I have news for you. Those jobs are not affected at all. Advertising isn't going away, ever. The channels change, but advertising survives. There's plenty pre-internet history on that.
The jobs that are affected are those from the sites that rely on ad income to pay for salaries and their costs. If 100% of internet users used ad-blocking millions of jobs would evaporate almost overnight.
I'll give you a simple example of this. A good friend of mine runs a nice little site where he and his wife provide valuable and well-researched nutritional information for pet owners. They work very hard to create their content. This site is their sole income. This is what they do to house and feed their kids, to have a life. Nearly 100% of their income is form advertising on their site. If they did not generate this income they would go bankrupt and likely lose everything.
Why do people like you think it is OK to steal their work product? I don't get it. How can anyone rationalize that. Once you get down to ground reality, it's theft.
No business is entitled to survive eternally on its existing business model. Businesses must adapt to changing market conditions if they want to succeed in the long term. And every business owner goes in with the understanding that success is not guaranteed.
Hopefully, your friend is keeping track of the increasing popularity of ad blocking and developing alternative sources of revenue to supplement their display ads. Affiliate links, sponsored articles, subscriptions for premium content, merchandise, and donations are common monetization pathways for websites.
Reading a website without loading or viewing the ads is not "stealing" or "theft", since the site owner voluntarily provided the content free of charge. If the site owner doesn't want people to read their content for free, they should charge for it. No viewer is obligated to load or consume all of the content provided in any medium, and a site owner has no inherent right to compel a visitor to spend time or attention on any part of the site.
> No business is entitled to survive eternally on its existing business model. Businesses must adapt to changing market conditions if they want to succeed in the long term.
Typical totalitarian view coming from an artificially constructed moral high ground. Now you want to tell people how to create, finance and run a business. Most people who think this way have never run a non-trivial business in their lives and have no idea what it takes.
Nope, defending the right to block ads is a libertarian position because it affirms the autonomy of individual internet users. No individual is obligated to go out of their way to enrich another person's business or support the viability of someone else's business model. Please don't make assumptions about my personal life, you have no idea who I am.
> It is nothing less than delusional to convince yourself that you are entitled to the entire web without paying for any of it.
I never said I'm entitled to the entire web for free. Don't try to make it seem like I'm brazenly pirating my way across the internet. There are plenty of services behind paywalls and subscriptions that I choose to support with my actual dollars.
> Do you know what happens at this end of the scale when your 100% ad-blocked utopia becomes reality? Do you have any clue?
Yes. Actually I do. I'm old enough to know what life was like before the internet. We all got along just fine back then. One could argue we were better off than we are now.
For a brief shining period the internet was a blank canvas, full of actual wonder and discovery. Seriously, it felt amazing to connect and just explore. But look at what it has become; a wasteland where 2 advertising giants waged a war of psychological manipulation.
> Along with the jobs and everything else it created.
Eyeballs for dollars. Its a grotesque machine. If it all burned down tomorrow, nothing of value would be lost. Not even the jobs you claim. (Except, of course, the ad networks, the PII data miners, the blog spammers, and the rest of the seedy by products that sprout from these networks...so, like I said, nothing of value lost.)
> I never said I'm entitled to the entire web for free. Don't try to make it seem like I'm brazenly pirating my way across the internet. There are plenty of services behind paywalls and subscriptions that I choose to support with my actual dollars.
Great. Then, if you are a principled person and do not agree with the way advertising is being used on the 'net, don't use anything other than what you pay for. That's the morally and ethically correct stance to take.
What ad-blocker users are saying is: I don't like advertising. I am still going to use your work product and I am not going to pay you a dime for any of it.
Well, that's wrong.
> If it all burned down tomorrow, nothing of value would be lost.
I don't think you have a good sense of the scale and breath of what online marketing supports.
They have ads. Blocking them would mean the service would suffer and maybe even shutdown.
There are millions of sites like that, where valuable content or services are offered. I belong to several manufacturing related forums that would not exist were it not for their ability to monetize the hard work required to keep them going. I personally know a couple of people running these sites. They work 16 hour days, seven days a week, to keep their communities going. It's very hard work and it is very, very far from "nothing of value".
Since WebMD is providing its content free of charge and not requiring visitors to refrain from blocking ads, visitors are free to consume the content on WebMD without paying and while blocking ads. The business model seems to be working well for WebMD, since its parent company (Internet Brands) is still in the private equity portfolio of its owner, the investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, which had a net income of about $4.9 billion in 2020. Their 2020 Form 10-K also says:*
> The most significant increases in value of our privately held investments related to increases in AppLovin Corporation (technology sector), Kokusai Electric Corporation (manufacturing sector), and Internet Brands, Inc. (technology sector).
If WebMD, your friends' sites, or any other sites end up not performing well under a business model driven by display advertising, then they should transition their business model to one that is more profitable. A person who works hard is not entitled to a successful business, and internet users are definitely not legally, morally, or ethically obligated to contribute to the success of other people's businesses.
A lot of people are saying this but I disagree that you are either on one side or the other. If you pay a monthly subscription to the Washington Post, their website is still absolutely covered with advertisements - moving, video, intrusive advertisements that IMHO make the site unusable. So I'm not owed free content. I'm paying for it. And since I'm paying for it, don't shove a bunch of crap down my throat when I want to see the stuff I paid for.
I don't recall how long ago this was, but I bought a digital subscription to The Economist only to discover the site refused to make good on my subscription while I had an adblocker active. I canceled the subscription explaining why.
I've since resubscribed as their site no longer does this. It seems so crazy to me that I tried to search for when The Economist changed their policy and found nothing relevant, other than a spate of 2015 stories about how they contracted with an ad-tech firm to determine how many subscribers were using adblockers, but the service subjected their readers to malware.
Newspapers have always made their money by selling their audience to advertisers. However, it wasn't too hard to ignore the ads in print and there is a limit to how malicious a print ad can be.
How about making content that people actually feel like they obtain value in their lives from. They'd pay for that. Instead we have the majority of content creators engaged in an arms race to hijack your attention and produce the most outrageous, rather than best, content possible because more outrage = more eyeballs = more ads.
No, they wouldn't pay for that. This is a dumb myth that people use to brush off their guilt. If something can be taken for free with no repercussion, most people will take it for free.
We're in a feedback loop where content is being pulled towards the lowest common denominator of people who don't ad-block, which is a terrible uninformed click-bait hellhole.
You can ad block, I do myself (with a pretty big whitelist), but understand that if you are not contributuing (money or ad views) your opinion of the internet is irrelevant. Start paying, then complain as a paying customer.
Many sites on the internet provide little more than infrastructure and moderation for the content provided by users of that site. I think every one of those users has a relevant opinion about the internet itself whether or not they are forking over money or being subjected to advertising.
The internet did not spring into being for the sake of ad-tech.
I support several content creators on Patreon because I greatly value their content and want them to continue making it. I realise not everyone is in a position to do so and that is fine.
> If something can be taken for free with no repercussion, most people will take it for free.
This is clearly not true. Netflix found massive success even though it was, and still is, incredibly easy to pirate everything you want to watch. Indie games with poor or non-existent DRM make money on Steam even though pirate copies exist.
Yes, of course there is a loss to piracy. Is that loss greater than what surveillance capitalism is pushing onto us? I doubt it, but you may think otherwise.
As long as it is possible to make money with ads, the web will be full of SEO-optimized trash, clickbait, and other worthless "content" full of ads, and it will drown out anything of quality. If you're giving them ad views, you're partly responsible for and contributing towards the sorry state of the internet. Start blocking ads, and ask everyone you know to do the same.
My point is that content has evolved steadily into becoming something that a great deal of the population actually feels bad about consuming. They feel bad about losing hours on Youtube clicking video after video, but they can't stop because their brains have been hijacked by the fine interplay between algorithm and content creator driving this madness. Nobody would pay for this content if they had to. They don't event _want_ to watch it really.
If content platforms were forced to have a subscriber model. People would only pay for what they actually _want_ access to.
When the content provider offers the content for free, the viewer obtains the right to consume any portions of the content they want for free. If a website wants to require the viewer to consume all of the content when they view it, they can do that in their terms of service, though it might not be legally enforceable. Most sites don't.
The fact that you're talking about "content" shows the commercial mindset. The web used to be mostly where people shared information and media about things they loved with no expectation of making money. It still is underneath all the commercial crap piled high within the walled gardens. Take off the profit blinders and see the web can be motivated by other things.
I don't think anyone feels they are "owed" anything. I do, however, feel I have the right to download whatever someone puts online, and not download and view the adjacent ads.
Whether or not that keeps the lights on in that business is not really my problem. It becomes my problem if it's content I care about that disappears. Without ads, perhaps 90% of the free content of the web would disappear. Since I run an adblocker, I'm completely fine with that.
I think that the idea that "people would largely stop making content for the web if that weren't ads" is a myth. Sure, the money seeking people wouldn't do it anymore and a lot less people would be able to make a living off of it. But think of all the web content makers that currently don't make a lot of money, which I believe is a lot of people since not everyone who has blog earns a living from it. I'm not saying we wouldn't lose anything but this idea the "90% of the web would disappear or be paywalled" is kinda insane and quite unlikely
Based on how many trash sites show up in search (even after search engines' algorithms try hard to downrank garbage), I wouldn't be surprised if more than 90% of the web is there only to make a quick buck with ads. According to Wikipedia, 90% of all email traffic in 2014 was spam, despite hosting providers and ISPs blocking ports and taking a hard stance on spam. I have no reason to believe the web is much better, especially given that spinning up a trash site is not going to start alerts and get IP blocks banned the same way that sending email spam does.
I think removing ads' profitability and the incentive to create more trash would be good for the web.
But you're right that with all the trash gone, there's would still be millions and millions of useful sites. The entire web isn't motivated by ad impressions and there are good reasons to run sites with no ads whatsoever.
I'm not owed free content; but nor do I owe anyone my eyeballs. If you put up a site on the public internet, then it's reasonable to assume the site's public. If it turns out my assumption is wrong, I just go away - I'm not going to argue with a webmaster who is determined to make me see stuff I don't want to see.
I have 600 records, pay directly for a YouTube show, pay for 5 substack blogs, I have hundreds of dvds, 500books, endless video games for multiple consoles, Netflix, hbomax, Hulu, boomerang, Shudder, Amazon, I've had sling, CBS watch, wb archive, criterion, and others.
I go through periods of Pandora or Spotify.
The reality is every company wants to charge but they all want to be on the open web at the same time.
Can't have it both ways.
I control what downloads on the internet I pay for, on the device I own.
If you didn't erect a paywalls? Your fault. Not mine.
I wouldn't bed a stranger without a condom
I don't browse without an ad blocker. Or privacy badger.
People who understand ad blockers but don't use them are corporate sychophants.
Does anyone actually feel like they are owed anything for free (site seems down, apologies if the author said as much)?
I will browse news and articles sometimes -because- they are free. If they were not, I simply no longer visit said page. I don't feel I'm owed their content in any way, and I'm OK just walking away if they decide to paywall it.
Yep, I had a weird experience at a friends house when his smart TV youtube was playing ads every few minutes, while I was trying to listen to the Dead. Really killed my vibe maan. Apparently it's the uploader's fault for choosing to monetise.
I cannot tolerate ads at all now. Part of my issue with them is that you have no control over what you are being shown, obviously. It's the same problem with all the new social media platforms, in general. Anything can popup. And once you've seen something, to cant unsee it.
Open ended question, is there a solution? Inherently people trying to make money from their website either have to charge people directly with money for access or indirectly by having them see/hear ads. Advertisers inherently want their ads to be seen/heard, which means there is pressure to make their ads more intrusive. Yet the more intrusive the ads become, the more annoyed the person accessing the content becomes (and thus perhaps becomes more likely to get an ad blocker). The more people that block ads, the more the website needs to make from each person who isn't blocking ads (likely meaning additional pressure to make ads more intrusive). What path are we headed down? What happens when so many people are blocking ads that the amount of value needed to be extracted from those who don't block ads is impossible to achieve? Does the internet consolidate more?
I personally use ad blockers. Right now I'm browsing with Ghostery and AdBlock. I'm surprised that only 27% of people use them currently. Makes me want to check out my parents computers when I visit next and make sure they have an ad blocker installed. But back to the questions, does this mean that the contract between websites their visitors is inherently broken? Is the current situation a race to the bottom? Is that tenable? What's the alternative?
Well, let's find out. Ads suck all of the air out of the room. If you provide your content through another business model, someone else can just copy your content and slap ads on it and make a few bucks. And because search engines function on those same ads, they're incentivized to send you to the spam sites instead of the real source of the content. If we kill ads as a business model, then we can start to explore other business models and find out what actually works.
> Inherently people trying to make money from their website either have to charge people directly with money for access or indirectly by having them see/hear ads.
No. There are other options. One example is the Patreon model. I pay for several creators who do not gate their content to payment. They make their content available to everyone, for free. I could view their content for free, but I want to encourage them to continue creating, so I pay them for it. Is it a viable option for every situation? I don't know. But the mere existence of ad-based business models means it's very difficult to explore non-ad-based solutions. For this, and a whole host of other reasons, using an ad-blocker is more ethical than not.
Regulation. It's a harsh measure, but I doubt there is another one. The last 20 years people tried to find alternative solutions. We have pay-walls, we have crowdfounding, we have various subscription models, I fail to see a solution that hasn't been tried, but yet every single year we get exposed to more ads. It seems extremly unlikely that there is something that could replace ads.
But what is the logical solution when there is a damaging thing in society that can't be replaced by healthy alternatives? It's regulation.
Now I know that a ban on ads seems unlikely. But I honestly don't think we have a choice. Because the alternative is that the ad-industry keeps creeping into every single aspect of our lifes, like they have done ever since their emergence. And with the advance of AR, smart homes and AI assistants this seems like a bad idea.
If any regulation about ads ever comes into existence it will be against adblockers, making them illegal or something. Or do you happen to have billions and power and influence to lobby like crazy?
That could happen, but it is a nightmare scenario. It would essentially attack the agency you and your browser has; in effect, it would obligate your browser -- and your computer -- to do as a server tells. Having full control over your own computer would be illegal. It also raises questions about whether such restrictions would cover your network. For example, would it also become illegal to null-route ad servers' IP addresses on your local network?
Of course, I wouldn't put it past regulators. In fact, copyright in EU comes close to doing exactly what the above would require.
Yea I have to agree. Although it'd be interesting to see some sort of regulation against advertisers, it's hard to imagine a situation where that actually comes to fruition. In all honesty although I don't like ads, sites are well within their rights to try as hard as they can to show them to me, so long as that doesn't extend past their website.
So the solution is having the choice of either paying not to have ads or having ads? I'm not saying that is right or wrong, I just want to clarify.
Food for thought, I wonder if that works specifically for them because it's harder to block their ads. I.e. it typically takes a different level of expertise to block their ads, as compared to a browser extension (have to block their ad traffic on a network level). Or is it really something else about their product?
As a counter example, I don't pay for youtube premium. Definitely part of the reason behind that is because it's easy to block them so long as I'm watching in a browser.
Curious - why does Youtube not figure out how to outsmart ad blockers? Is it technically not possible to embed ads into the video such that the ad blocker cannot detect it?
Good question. It is a cat and mouse game but certainly possible for YouTube to (at least) only release part Y of the video after a certain amount of time has elapsed since part X was released. And if YouTube really wanted to seamlessly glue the ads and video together, I think it would be insurmountable from an adblocker's perspective.
I started watching Adam Curtis' Century of the Self [1] recently, then decided to fact check [2]. Curtis makes out Sigmund Freuds nephew Edward Louis Bernays as the inventor of modern advertising, but he exaggerates for effect as usual. I've been a fan of busting ads for a long time, at least since I learned as a boy that I was being psychologically manipulated.
We're an activist hub and the headquarters of Adbusters magazine, the journal of the mental environment. Since 1989, our international collective of artists, designers, writers, musicians, poets, punks, philosophers and wild hearts has been smashing ads, fighting corruption and speaking truth to power. [3]
[1] The Century of the Self - Part 1: "Happiness Machines"
If Google priced Premium to replace the very small revenue they must receive for adverts (at least for the small amount I use YouTube), that would be one thing. But they're asking for a lot more.
Two parents w 6 Google logins between them (2 personal, 4 work entities) and 4 kids, each w a personal and school account.
This would require 14 YouTube Premium accounts. Um...no.
Ad blocking is a security issue. When web sites start taking responsibility for their ad content, we can have a discussion on if it is "theft" or not. As long as they farm their ads out to third party providers and wash their hands of any of the security implications and responsibilities, I will continue to block them.
I use ublock and have setup a dns blocker through openwrt and have even added my own items to the blacklist. I am astoundished how much traffic leaves my machine "just sitting there".
At this point my blocklist has something like 77.614 domains blocked and I do not believe that its going to get less.
what is intersting is that I grew up with the uncensored internet and the things i found are not on the list of things that I definitly will block for my children.
Its kind of the opposite approach of a censored web for children because to be honest im not so much worried about their activities, but far more concious of the bad actors out there.
I always had adblocker since I got internet, someone told me to use it to reduce my internet bill when I paid per Mb. I always had AdBlock+ , it was the first thing I installed on my PC, always. I started seeing people complaining on too many ads on random websites and youtube, but I never noticed YT had ads until I saw discussions on it on reddit. Now I'm full time adblocker, Brave, µblock and DNS ad-blocks in OpenWRT.
I think my habits and me installing adblockers for everyone resulted in worse web for everyone else, the more people block ads, the more ads there will be for the rest.
Better yet, go all the way in with No script and experience an even better email. A lot faster, too. Enabling us even on a handful of sites has a measurable impact on battery life on underpowered devices such as phones.
HN is working perfectly fine without js. For obvious reasons, most non video/chat/app sites work just fine as well.
I write us for a living so I'm not against in the least. It works for me.
My mind is blown every time I see what regular people experience. Horrible, though I am not sure it's worse than what we had to deal with back in the flash and days a decade ago. Could be.
Aside from the manipulative and downright unproductive type of economy we are left with, how much energy (in terms of Wh) is wasted by video ads? Energy doesn’t lie, even if a publisher can seemingly offset their costs with a CDN. The real trouble is that energy pricing is not correlated with total cost of production in most countries. Could energy pricing that accounted for pollution, resource depletion as well as the production cost itself, help us as a species in removing such counterproductive businesses?
I believe there's also a substantial cost as e-waste when people dump devices that are no longer powerful enough to display ad-filled garbage without terrible lag and stutter.
It would be nice if we had the option to ask for $1 to our visitors, but we don't because the credit card and payments racket works its magic. Just what are websites supposed to do to survive? Shutting down is not a valid answer
Of course the #1 culprits are the advertisers themselves, because they don't care about their craft, they are lazy and just push all their money to google. But the web should be like an arcade machine where people can pay to get content, and current regulation makes that impossible
The only reason I occasionally use an adblocker is to try to experience the web how what seems like a sizable subset of users experience it, for that shared experience. Honestly, the two don't seem that different in most cases outside of the worst ad-ridden sites.
Side-note: I don't run ads on any of the sites I manage, yet deal with dozens of bug reports each year as adblockers aggressively find new ways to break sites. IME, ad blockers are about as much as a nuisance as the ads themselves.
Until a decade ago, I've always tried to be the better person. I did not block ads and for sites that I liked, I even intentionally clicked on ads.
I can tolerate ads. Also 10 on a page. And they can even blink. What I cannot tolerate is malware, personal data theft, and ads destroying the performance of any website. Ads have become a liability and advertisers have made it loud and clear that I'm not a human being, instead a resource to be exploited, and no tactic is below their standards.
I experience this on my phone where adblock doesn't work that well. It's absolutely horrible to use the web there. The screen is already small, and then it gets filled with overlays getting me to use an app, ads, autoplaying videos, ...
I'm at the point where my phone is just an alarm, instant messenger and casual camera, since other apps are also full of annoying ads.
If you're using Android, install Firefox and the Ublock Origin plugin. I use it for watching ad free YouTube videos as well, instead of the YouTube app.
Frankly I have no problem with ads that are simple (text/images/untracked). The ad industry has made it clear they would rather be utterly obnoxious and creepy so therefore as far as I’m concerned they can wither and die.
Firefox+addons seem to work best for blocking ads which is why I am increasingly concerned about that browser being marginalized.
I've used adblockers since they were invented and rarely experience the unfiltered internet.
In recent years, though, I've wondered if it might actually be better to turn that all off. Are we adblockers just getting a more purified stream of clickbait "news" and enraging social media posts, without the ads there to remind us that it's all trash?
Yep. Most of the things you find with a Google search are obvious SEO trash even if you don't see the ads. The quality of the content reminds you that it's all trash.
I remember one time I was talking about web ads with a few friends and said something along the lines of 'you have to be stupid as fuck not to use an adblocker on the internet these days' and literally 3 out of 5 people immediately popped up and said they don't use them. All were using one within a week, lol.
I don't use any "ad blocker" plugins, but I do use EFF's Privacy Badger, which blocks all cookies it determines are tracking cookies. Many websites deduce it'ss blocking their ads, because they're addicted to tracking us, but I feel no guilt. I wouldn't risk browsing without it.
What I find interesting is that in my experience people with lots of add blocking are more likely to pass on HORRIBLE links. They don't know and thus pass on garbage sites (full of ads and such) where the folks I know without ad blockers are more careful of what they subject their friends to.
It's not just ads that contribute to link sharing nightmares. If you leave certain query parameters in a Twitter link you get a hard login wall after about 10 seconds if you aren't logged in. Other sites such as Quora do something similar: redirect you to a login wall if you click to expand an answer (only if some url query param is present). On Twitter that behavior is much worse, of course. To view a reply thread you must click the share button and manually copy and paste it into a new tab or you'll get a login wall. It's truly amazing how hostile big players are to UX when they aren't getting their way.
I doubt very much the author experiences the web he claims to. There are many websites that requires ad blockers to be disabled, and unless you really don't care about a large part of the web (incidentally, the one he's talking about, the one with ads), there's no way to get that experience.
Firefox for Android supports uBlock Origin. Works great, highly recommended.
iPhone solutions seem less advanced, unfortunately, but they exist. Personally I use one called "Adblock Pro," but that's not an endorsement, just the one I tried that has stuck.
I wish I had a better way to support content sites without paying for individual websites. I’m guessing this would never happen, but I would definitely pay a single monthly fee to get access to all the major news sites and if it helped ensure some level of journalistic integrity.
Adblock on my openwrt router is like my bare minimum to surf the web. I’m aware of pi-holes and per device ad blocking via add-ins/vpns/whatever but it’s so dead simple to handle this at the gateway level it’s difficult to imagine doing it any way else.
Adblockers are available for several mobile browsers; system-wide adblocking exists, but tends to be more work. What is keeping you from using an adblocker on mobile?
I have Ad-block but still see a lot of Ads. I started to shun certain websites (major news sites particularly) a while ago. The only occasions I turn it off is when I legitimately believe that authors deserve a bit of extra revenue from Ads.
I'm very curious what would happen if Apple suddenly announced that for the next version of Safari (20% of browser market share when combining mobile and desktop), adblocking would be included and ask the user if they want it on.
The real question is, if you are going to autoplay a huge video is do video ad units perform better than anything else? Last I looked, video ads were pretty cheap, and didn't have good stories on conversion. Has that changed?
I'm still looking for a block list that simply removes all video content from various franchise and local news sites. It is rarely actually relevant to the article, and is often vastly less information dense.
Yeah, it's more that I will run into an article on some local news site I've never visited before far more frequently than I'll end up on one I looked at previously.
They all seem to implement an ever-so-slightly different player, which means manually blocking the unique element (s) each time.
Definitely a use case for a standard community sourced list.
As to the reason it's worth it, here are a couple of reasons:
When legacy media companies sell ad space, often they do not do so through an auction mechanism but through a direct purchase model. That means someone paid anywhere from a few hundred to thousands to be on that page. That gives them more of a client relationship and so they can feel more burdened to make sure advertising clients get 'visibility' and bang for their buck.
Also, they can sell ads in their videos with estimated view/impression counts. If they autoplay, the view count goes up even if you're not watching the video so an unsophisticated ad consumer thinks the ad spend is justified.
I don't run ad campaigns anymore, but I did for eight years and I always preferred no autoplay because intentional viewing is much more valuable for what I was selling.
The reason I use an ad blocker and noscript is because focused reading is impossible without these countermeasures. It's as if they don't want me to read and pay attention what they wrote.
Well, technically, they're not making money from what they wrote so yeah, they only care that you see the ads, and they only care about the headline insomuch as it draws you in to click so you can see the ads.
Vaguely related: I’ve been using NextDNS for a while now, and it’s wonderful. I subscribed to a paid plan just to support the company. Recommended, if you haven’t already checked them out.
I swear the ad industry are in bed with cellular operators. Data usage from ads taps directly into peoples data plans, why would not there exist a kickback scheme for this?
I used to use adblockers but then certain websites stopped working and displayed banners saying to turn of my adblocker, so i did, and then it all seemed kind of pointless.
Have you tried uBlock Origin recently? In the settings, you can turn on the Unbreak and Annoyances filters to eliminate these anti-adblock banners. I haven't encountered one in a long time.
This may be an extreme take, but recently I've been removing websites with Google Analytics et al. from my bookmarks. If the user is not being respected when it comes to tracking what that does hint at when it comes to content?
> I would imagine margins are pretty thin these days if you run a magazine website. Advertising revenue isn’t what is used to be and the money they make for each visitor is probably the lowest it has ever been
Webmasters need to diversify their income streams. Obviously AD revenue doesn't cut it anymore. You need to implant affiliate links, do paywalls, paid subscriptions to content, and sell merch on a Shopify-powered site that is separate from the main magazine/blog. Ghacks for example sells software and services on their deals subdomain[0], but I'm not sure if it's that profitable.
What will be the long term consequences of majority of us using AdBlocks? And who will fill the void when running a website is economically unfeasible?
Think of it like this : a majority of well respected publications are behind paywalls ; so people are consuming information from Facebook memes or WhatsApp posts or worse. And we know how well that is going for us as a society?
YouTube ads are freaking annoying. But I know that the creators of those channels I watch depend on those to make a decent living and overwhelming majority of them are not rich.
In FireFox I have my ad blockers disabled in Private Mode so nothing is getting in the way if I'm testing or some site is being weird. Sometimes it's SHOCKINGLY different how a page looks with the blockers in place. I really can't believe anyone would user a browser without an ad blocker if they knew how things would look while using one. The web is a much better place with a blocker in place.
(Yes, I know, we get a huge amount of amazing "free" content thanks to the ads and assorted trackers and other garbage out there)
I feel zero guilt about ad blocking. There was some period of discussion on the subject back in like 2003 but the ad companies went to war against human civilization and there's been no going back. It corrupts and twists everything it touches into a constant hustle for eyeball-cash and an entire generation has now reached adulthood knowing nothing but that hustle touching every bit of media they ever interact with. Who even knows what they'll do with that.
In 2005 or so there was a bunch of trojans going around for IIRC Blizzard games to steal account creds on various sites and my first response to that was "huh, that site has ads?"
People give Brave grief over BAT, and maybe with good reason, but it's one the few efforts to try and bring some sort of involvement to the public side of it as to where the money is flowing that seems to have a chance of going anywhere.
> It corrupts and twists everything it touches into a constant hustle for eyeball-cash
This cannot be overstated. Everything today is a battle for eye-balls and ad money. The corruption is insane. You can't even buy appliances designed perform their function well. Instead you can buy cheap junk for less than cogs because they make money selling your data to ad companies instead of making money by making products that are actually good.
The concept of "value" for consumers has been completely twisted and I am not looking forward to seeing where this race to the bottom will end up.
> You can't even buy appliances designed perform their function well
You can't research good appliances either online, because the SERPs are stuffed with SEO-ed blogs and sometimes industry magazines, monetized with Amazon affiliates or other networks, with titles like "5 best dishwashers in 2022". Unless you know someone in the industry or offline with knowledge you don't know what to buy.
This is noticeable in many other consumer goods verticals, e.g. good luck researching decent home gym equipment that is durable and not overpriced with fat margins.
There's no adblocker for this problem either. Google is complacent with their fat ad revenue and monopoly on search and doesn't care.
One market where this has always been a problem is tools. So almost 20 years ago we were told in shop class that the industry magazines and reviews were basically all paid for by manufacturers. The solution we learned was to always buy the cheapest option first. If it breaks or fails to meet your needs understand how and why and then move on to a more costly tool that you can demonstrate is better in the specific way you need it to be. Of course thats not always practical or feasible but for the majority of items it really is.
Battery powered hand tool systems are a big cost now, especially that brushless motor have got so good. Its important to think about them as a system, like will replacement batteries still exist in 2 years, can more tools work with the same battery, etc. That makes it harder to try something and see how good it is. I agree with you re many tools though. For tools I'd recommend talking to someone who works with them daily to get a real opinion, and wouldn't trust anything I read
Batteries are a point of vendor lock-in and forced obsolescence. Not saying modern tech isn’t great, but young me who spent all that money tooling up with cordless has changed to older me who honestly prefers corded or hosed (or even ICE) tools when the application allows for it, not just for the longevity of the tool but the power (amps/psi), lighter weight, and availability of service (no issues with charging, temperature problems, etc) during a job.
Can anyone explain why such systems are so seemingly successful? I find it surprising. It seems great to create vendor lock-in, but they also change the form factor frequently enough that you have to replace your entire system in order to benefit from it being a system anyway; at which point you might change vendors. It feels like the first vendor that stops changing form factor wins; but they all still keep changing them.
My best guess is that by doing this they can raise margins on some items by making them lower quality or by charging more than they could otherwise get away with. If a brand has a great tool X, you might buy their lousy tool Y just to be able to use the same chargers and batteries.
For me, anyway, as a non-carpenter, I just end up with an annoying bespoke set of chargers and batteries.
The major brands do not change formats often. The store brands do change formats though. By Milwaukee or Dewalt and you will have tools and parts for many years, or even Ryobi if you want to save a penny. (There are others, just the 3 that come to mind).
The thing about their system is the whole only works so long as they keep you locked in. Once you make a choice you are locked into that choice and won't be looking at alternatives - but if they change batteries you suddenly are faced with the loss of your entire investment and so you are likely to look at the competition and might buy something else. That makes changing battery formats less attractive to the big brands trying to get people who buy a lot of tools.
The store brands have a different motivation: they know you won't be buying them again anyway, so they don't care. Changing formats means they can come up with some tiny reason the new one is better and try to sell the next customer on how their new battery is better.
If you are not a buying a lot of tools your plan isn't bad, just throw away the tools when the batteries die in 10 years. The tiny reasons some battery is better - over 10 years might add up to something slightly better than before anyway.
When my SO and I were renovating our home we followed some advice like the ones in this thread. First we had relatively cheap power tools. One the one hand early on we could not easily afford to invest more and also we wanted to learn what we really needed.
After the first ones broke we asked around and received only three recommended brands. DeWalt, Makita or the Blue Bosch line (in Germany). We went for DeWalt and never looked back. The power cells haven't changed in form or fitting in the years since and we could not be happier with performance and durability.
It is like deciding on a DSLR system. Once you are invested into Canon, Nikon, Sony or the likes with lenses and accessories you are locked in but also you learn to really know your tools and imho receive a productivity boost.
For example - whenever I am with other people and need to use their tools, I have to look at them and see how they work, what buttons/knobs are where and so on. With my DeWalt tools this is already muscle memory and the work as an extension of my arm - my brain uses them as if they were a part of me. This let's me focus more on the task I want to perform, not on the tool.
Milwaukee is still selling their nicad batteries, if you were in that platform before. The big brands (and this includes Ryobi, etc) do not change their batteries much at all.
The smaller brands like Craftsman and "store brands" seem to change relatively randomly.
For a lot of people "cheapest tool first" is their goto (and not for the principled reason you shared).
So eventually the cheapest tool makers get enough money to buy up the differentiated quality makers for their logo with enough branding power to price discriminate, and slap it on products from the same cheap factory line.
A lot of times the price differential is such that I can buy two or three of item x for the price of a single premium version. If you seldom use the tool and it isn’t getting handled a lot (transportation, etc), this is the way. You can replace the item and still come out ahead.
There’s also that motto of “I’m too poor to buy it twice”, which comes into play when item y has a price like 75% of the premium version and/or you know the tool will have some rough travel and high demand, or time lost from outage isn’t acceptable. Then just spend the money on known-solid brands.
Reviews are an area where I really value specialized forums more than social media or blogs or industry publications.
In all cases with reviews even when no monetization involved, there can be a bandwagon mentality for brands and also people convincing themselves the high price they paid matters for something (even though it may not).
This strategy is smarter than it sounds at first. If you don't have any obvious criteria for comparison available, failing fast and iterating on that is a way to come up with criteria by yourself.
It requires a strong character to throw away things when they don't work well.
I bought the cheapest drilling machine and it is so bad I end up borrowing one from a neighbor when I need to drill something.
But I can't make myself to throw away the useless one.
I’m also unable to throw things away, but I do give things away or sell at a fraction very often. It’s also a fun past time. I don’t have anything useless at home anymore.
Where I live, Craigslist works really well for this situation - someone will take it away for free for sure and you might even be able to get something for it.
This is what I do. I just put in "first email I get gets it" people will be at your house in an house or less to grab it. I'm always honest like "The bearings seem a little wobbly to me, but if you want it, it's yours if you can show up and pick it up today"
Sometimes the cost for a quality piece of gear is incremental though, so you buy a harbor freight thingamajig then it breaks so you buy the Milwaukee thingamajigfor twice the price, for a total of 300% of the cost of the original thing. You could have saved 30% in that case by just buying the good thing in the first place.
Alternatively this thingamajig is so rarely used that you buy the harbor freight version and use it a few times a year. It becomes a life long tool and you save a fair bit of the price.
The second time you buy a type of tool you definitely need to go for quality, the first time though, are you certain you're actually going to be constantly using that tool?
The only exception to watch out for is when buying a crappy version of x will negatively color your new experiences with an activity. Tools meant for precision but the cheap versions are plastic rattle traps that get out of calibration/alignment from basic use can be extremely frustrating to someone just getting started in an activity. The user may throw their hands up and quit whereas a good quality tool would have made their new hobby more enjoyable/accessible (e.g. no, it’s not you, you’re just fighting a really crappy tool every step of the way). Again, tasks/activities that require repeatable precision come to mind here.
I'd argue then that the level of usage dictated a better one. Most people don't actually use tools to failure. I've owned edging tools, routers, sanders, even a small metal lathe from Harbor freight that have handled 10+ years of very occasional use just fine. If you're using things so much that they fail, yes, buy a more quality version. If it fails on the first use, Harbor freight happens to have a very generous return / exchange policy within the first 30 days.
You have to expect that this will happen a certain amount of the time when you use the "buy the cheapest tool" strategy. Of course, really, it's not "buy the cheapest tool"; it's "buy the cheapest tool that could possibly work," sort of like "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" in agile.
If the tool breaks quickly, that's not usually a terrible outcome. Most companies have at least a 90 day limited warranty you could take advantage of in that case. In many cases, you can even just return the damn thing to the store where you bought it and get a refund or exchange for a better tool. This, of course, assumes that the reason you needed the thing in the first place isn't incredibly time-sensitive, but, usually, it works out fine.
Of course, if it lasts forever, then, great! But, in the intermediate scenario, where you encounter the limitation of the tool a little ways down the road, that's actually where this strategy shines, because you get a chance to upgrade to a better tool without wasting a ton of money on top of the line equipment right away. I know photographers who do this with lenses all the time: they'll rent a new lens for a week or something, go out and shoot it to see how it really works, and then determine whether they want to commit to it. $100 spent on a lens rental has saved some of my friends more than $1000 on glass they don't need. And, if they ultimately do end up buying the lens, that $100 is $100 well spent for peace of mind that they will actually get the use out of the thing that they actually bought it for. And, I think the Harbor Freight strategy makes a lot more sense if you view the initial purchase from HF as possibly a long term rental.
Now, there is that one caveat that you need to buy "the cheapest tool that could possibly work." If you're a professional machinist, for instance, don't go buying a $5 caliper and thinking that will be good. Go and spend the $150 or whatever on a Mitutoyo instrument to begin with, because you know damn well you will need it. This is just an example I pulled from personal experience, as I needed a caliper for hobby purposes a few years ago and ended up looking at things ranging from that $5 caliper on up to precision instruments. For my purposes, the low end is totally fine, because I don't need accuracy better than 0.1mm, and it's not my professional livelihood on the line. But, if you're a professional, never trust an instrument that doesn't come with a certificate of calibration.
I've also used this strategy with good success on photography equipment, myself. I wanted a DSLR camera I could use to take pictures for hobby purposes, mostly intended for web use. I did a little research and decided that a used Nikon D3400 was for me. So, I went to eBay, found one that only had about 1200 clicks on the shutter that came with the 18-55 kit lens and the original box for $325 (tax and shipping included), and I bought it. I augmented that with a used 90mm Tamron macro lens for under $150 and I was good to go.
It has one or two small limitations that either only come into play outside of the original use case I had in mind, or which aren't really annoying enough to mention, but, for the most part, it's been a spectacular camera that I spent under $500 on, as opposed to spending $1000 on a Z50 (or, you know, gone really crazy and gotten a D850 or a Z9), and then another $900 on a new Nikon 105mm macro lens, but, for my purposes, I can take photos that are 95% as good as what I could ultimately produce with the more expensive equipment, but, I can legitimately say this strategy has saved me over $1000.
I did exactly the same thing when I started learning to play the cello. A new, carved wooden cello suitable for a student probably runs around $2000-2500, and that doesn't necessarily include a decent bow. This is also an instrument one will certainly grow out of if one continues playing. I did my research and went out and bought a Yamaha electric for $3000 and went to a cello shop to try out bows, ending up with a nice $1200 bow. I ended up with an instrument I'll never outplay and a bow that will last me years. The alternative would have probably been a much less playable bow and instrument, or a lot more money expended.
I've noticed a problem when I try to buy tools (especially automotive tools): The only tools available locally are cheap and crappy. I know they are crappy because half the reviews state that it didn't even work once.
But I can't pay more to get a higher quality version of the tool, because the store doesn't even bother stocking a higher quality version.
If I plan ahead, I can shop online and find a quality tool. But what I really want is the option to buy a quality tool during a weekend project.
In the days of Amazon (aka Aliexpress) that advice has to become more nuanced though. You still need a baseline of fitness-for-purpose rather than one-click buying a GENSYM Cordless Drill and thinking it might possibly suffice. And the traditional go-to of (brick and mortar curated) Harbor Fright has become somewhat expensive thanks to Trump's inflation, as well as increasing margins due to popularity (see also: Monoprice).
There's also just quality of life. As a DIYer I'm not particularly concerned about wearing out tools. But still I might want to pay more for better ergonomics, ecosystem compatibility, power, tolerances, or other non-longevity qualities, rather than being stuck with an adequate but suboptimal tool that gets the job done while bothering me.
Harbor Freight's "low quality" tools will work for a great many average home owners doing some upgrading or light work. We absolutely fall into the trap of wanting the best thing ever, but how many people actually need the top of the line Milwaukee or Makita brand biscuit joiner for the 2 tables they ever make at 200$, vs the Harbor Freight one at 60 that you can probably find a coupon for to make it 45-50?
On that note though, an even worse practice is when a brand achieves notoriety for quality and starts making "light" versions of their tools. One example of this before they went belly up was Craftsman making nearly identical looking "Sears" brand that weren't covered by the craftsman warranty. Bosch also did this with pimping out their brand name to extend to rather crappy home appliances here in the EU. Black and Decker was synonymous with reliability in the early 80s, and I still have some jigsaws and circular saws from my dad that work great from that era, but anything from them now is arguably worse than the cheapest things you can buy at Harbor Freight.
I'm sure a bunch of executives made nice bonuses selling the brand value down the river, though.
It's an incentive problem. It's extremely difficult to get incentives aligned over a timeline longer than a few years that it might take for options or stock to vest or clawbacks to expire.
I managed to get a 48" flex bit stuck in my wall when I was running ethernet last summer. Since it was the last hole I needed and it only cost me $9 at Harbor Freight, I left it in the wall and called it good. The $90 bit from Home Depot probably would have meant removing a bunch of drywall and then having to patch it.
The batteries on my ~20 year old Craftsman cordless drill are finally getting to the point where they won't hold a charge. I'll probably have to bite the bullet and wade into the mess of "brand-name" tools the next time I have a significant project.
For a replacement like that, it's probably worth watching for Father's Day and other sales. With cordless tools, you're really buying into a battery accessory system, and it's good to know what tools are available for the battery you select.
100%. One of the areas I will spend more on is cordless tools. The modern Dewalt stuff has built me a deck and a campervan, and when it comes to lawn tools the E-go stuff has been fantastic. Both of those definitely locked me into a "system" as you say but both also covered just about any future use case I would have.
I have a 72 inch drill bit "stored" up in my attic amongst the rafters. There was one particular location where I really needed it at that time, so I just left it up there. I think it costs $15 off Amazon. If I never need it again, I figure I can deal with the hassle of getting it down from the attic.
For your 20 year old Craftsman, seriously look around for aftermarket replacement batteries. You might find them out there for pretty cheap. I did for my DeWalt.
Man, you said it about B&D. My family owned a small business, now bankrupt. One of the things my dad did to try to save it was start selling tools retail. He's very brand loyal, and of an older generation, so he was convinced selling B&D in the 90s was the way to go. The tools were such plastic crap. Meanwhile we had mid century era versions of the same tools in the workshop at home that were still going strong. Obviously my dad's idea didn't work. We got creamed by big box stores and the brands they hawk. And honestly rightfully so.
But anyhow, what happened with B&D has happened to so many previous quality brands. It's really frustrating to me.
"This is noticeable in many other consumer goods verticals, e.g. good luck researching decent home gym equipment that is durable and not overpriced with fat margins."
I agree with you but there's a simple shortcut you can employ: purchase commercial/industrial models that you see being used in industry.
Gym equipment is a good example: your local, serious weightlifting gym is probably using Hammer Strength plate-loaded machines and Rogue frames/racks.
Cooking: Look in the commercial kitchen of a high end restaurant - that's where I first saw my commercial microwave being used.[1]
TV: NEC P461 commercial display - I found the model number by climbing behind the arrivals/departures board at the airport.
The irony of this is that Rogue's popularity is due in no small part to their close partnership with Westside Barbell, a quirky club obsessed with both high-end equipment and steroid usage in equal measure. There's a lot of bad equipment out there, but the majority of people, training at home or in a gym, do not need Rogue equipment, and I'm willing to bet that Rogue has higher margins than some of the other good equipment manufacturers.
Agree with others, great advice. I suggested this once for my partner - she needed a laptop and loved her work laptop, so I suggested she look for a refurbished version of her work laptop for personal use, as business laptops often are fairly cheap after their warranty expires and the original owner returns it. She still uses it to this day.
It's the market for lemons problem. If it's your job, it's worth it to learn all you need to know to differentiate between junk and quality. If you're buying one of the 75 different appliances in your home, you'll probably just look at a review site, which can easily be gamed by companies selling junk.
The industry has large, potentially repeating customers, who use the equipment until it fails and who often have the resources to sue if a supplier screws then over too badly. This moves the risk/reward sweet spot for vendors towards the “provide good product for fair price” end and away from the “build shoddy malicious crap and spend your money on advertising.”
And I learn that Google is actually upset that its search results are suffering degradation by rampant, runaway SEO—they reap what they sow, and at everyone’s expense. Such brought to mind The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner as the web faces its own environmental collapse:
“You…treated the world like a fucking great toilet bowl. You shat in it and boasted about the mess you’d made. And now it’s full and overflowing, and you’re fat and happy and black kids are going crazy to keep you rich. Goodbye!”
I type "reddit" after the query and Reddit usually has good recommendations.
Yes, advertisers can and do try to invade subreddits posing as "real" users to promote sham products. But I haven't seen this actually working: sometimes Redditors recommend products which are way too expensive (still good quality, but the extra price really isn't worth it), but if someone recommends a genuinely crappy product, they get downvoted and replies saying "don't buy this"
I used to type “reddit” after my searches to look for genuine and real reviews, but even that is now being gamed.
Advertisers and shady affiliate marketing schemes have caught on and nearly every search result I try is now filled with junk, upvote farmed nonsense with fake accounts using similar naming schemes.
For me the problem with Reddit is not even the astroturfing. It's that, similarly to SEO and Google, people have figured out the kind of posts and replies that get upvotes. So, on niche subreddits, you get a lot of folklore and second-hand advice repeated by people addicted to internet points, or, like other poster put it better below, "well meaning beginners offering advice outside of their skill level". The Geil-Mann Amnesia Effect is strong in that site.
The top post in the relevant enthusiast sub recommending stuff to buy had no actual information, but it was stuffed with Amazon affiliate links. It was basically a "Top 5 X 2022" post except it was on Reddit instead of its own spam blog
Another think you'll see a lot of is bots looking for "listical" and blog info so some side hustle person can piece together an article on something they know next to nothing about.
By the way, while I have you here, have you considered extending your used car's warranty?
Most of the VPN discussion/coupon subs are literally run by the VPN companies themselves. r/VPNCoupons and r/VPN are run by Surfshark, for example. Nord and CyberGhost also run astroturf rings for themselves too.
This is one downside I will agree is a consequence of tracking technology on the web. There is no way for "genuine" discoverability to hide on the internet anymore. After a while, sites will start noticing that their purchase traffic is coming from Reddit so they'll start targeting it and before you know it, even the bad producers/products are being spammed there.
Meh if you put a little effort into it by checking the post & comment history of the person doing the review it should give you a clue. Sure some companies have bought accounts with lots of Karma and "good will" in the past but I think that's pretty rare.
> This is noticeable in many other consumer goods verticals, e.g. good luck researching decent home gym equipment that is durable and not overpriced with fat margins.
I think Google dropped the ball on their search objectives in this department. Why is it so bad at helping us search products? If I specify something with 2-3 conditionals why can't it match all the clauses, filter out fake reviews, out of stock, not shipped to my region and such?
They don't want to help us find what we want to buy, they want to sell us what the advertisers have to sell, and the two don't match. They want to sell us things we don't need, this is the reason we never buy anything from the ads and their whole industry is a scam.
The only solution I found to that is to bypass google completely and directly go search on Reddit, where real humans have human opinions (sometimes HN, too).
Consumer Reports does a great job at giving honest reviews. They go through multiple steps to ensure manufacturers don't know they're purchasing their products as well (to avoid getting beefed up 'review units').
And no, their service is not supported by ads - You have to pay for a subscription. Consumer Reports needs to be mentioned more IMO. Because even on reddit, there are companies that offer advanced stealth-like astroturfing campaigns for products/services.
The counterargument is that Consumer Reports could be intruded by corporate shills, but their reputation is solid and they've been around for a long time.
I use CR, but they do miss the target sometimes. They extrapolate a lot between models, sometimes farther than I think is justified by saying they are 'similar'. And occasionally they make really boneheaded recommendations that I just don't understand. On their recommendation I bought a Samsung washer and dryer pair, which both broke within the first 12 months. A bit of research on the appliance forum, and it turns out that all the repair guys say pretty much the same thing -- don't buy Samsung appliances, they're unreliable crap. As someone who owns three Samsung appliances (the third being a refrigerator), I wholeheartedly agree. Never again. Refrigerators are notoriously unreliable regardless of manufacturer, but Samsung really sets the bar pretty low.
So they're definitely not perfect - but it seems like they do far, far more research than the average online source, and are far more reliable, more consistently reliable, and have a much wider array of tested devices (as opposed to a blogger who might test a bunch of products in one specific category).
We can do better than CR - but right now, afaict they're the best we have.
And unfortunately, you're never really sure on Reddit, either. I found I was too willing to put those, what, 5-10 voices telling me to pick a certain brand up on a high pedestal, because they seemed like real people. They didn't sound like advertisers. But, honestly, how hard is it to fake 5-10 accounts to push your product, or buy high-karma accounts?
My go-tos are sites like Wirecutter, where it seems like the hit to their reputation would be too high to be blatantly bought-out, even if they'll generally only hawk products that can be bought on Amazon or other sites that give them affiliate money. They're not always perfect, but I trust that they're trying to do what they set out to do.
I'm a Consumer Reports + self-investigation guy (using all sources). I do use Wirecutter but I put low weight on their ultimate recommendations. I use them to find what else is out there.
The main issue with most review sites is that they're kids. Companies like NYT/Wirecutter don't want to pay old men that are experts in manufacturing. They hire kids with little life experience to review something like a washing machine. They haven't had 2 or even 1 washing machine in their entire lives. They wouldn't even be capable of doing a teardown. Let alone identifying which parts are quality vs not.
Unless of course your main qualification is not trying to find something that is built to last. Which is the hardest thing to get these days. Finding garbage like electronics and software is easy. Everyone wants to sell you software rather than high quality manufactured goods. And I want the least software possible as I'm very anti-technology for a software developer.
My research sources would be roughly in this order:
1. Consumer Reports (teardowns, can't beat this method. You pay them directly, if interested in least conflict of interest)
2. Wirecutter (good for a free source, but puts near-zero weight on reliability)
3. Amazon reviews (can find some old timers reviewing there but always keep in mind that most people aren't very intelligent. They maintain nothing and won't skim a manual)
4. Reddit (a lot of zero life experience kids on that, meaning generally anyone under 40)
To be fair(er) to WC, most of their review introductions typically mention interaction with people with longer histories in whatever the relevant business is, so it's clear that they recognize their outsider status. How much interaction they really have with these niche experts and what impact it has on their reviews, I don't know.
Let me share a resource with you, where an experienced community with skin in the game review products under the context of bargain hunting! www.ozbargain.com.au
Looking past the bargain and location aspects, this site is super useful for understanding products in greater detail
I find the best results on reddit when I look for the same company selling only that type of thing. They often moderate the sub on that topic and are very open about being a seller of it, and know their product. Note this is actually selling the product - not to be confused with amazon links. They need to have a real business, and while they moderate the sub they never have links to their store (instead it is search my profile to buy from me).
4chan's /g/ for tech gear and /diy/ for bigger gear is great for that sort of thing. There's "generals" for common subjects like headphones, PC building etc, and "stupid questions thread" where you can ask about anything. Do note that 4chan can be very offensive and politically incorrect, you need a bit of a thick skin to get along there.
I have yet to find a question Reddit has a good answer for, so I also add `-site:reddit.com` if my query has been SEO'd into a page full of their spam.
The net-net of all of this is that I buy a lot more stuff from brick and mortar stores now, where they've done the curation, and will only carry the stuff that sells best per square foot, and minimizes their returns.
I feel like "scale" on the Internet has gone completely off the rails and has become just worthless "noise." Sure, anyone can post and sell whatever they want, but you lose all notions of reputation and trust. It all becomes a shouting match among those who can ad-spam and SEO their way to the top. Those shitty fly-by-night randomly-named Chinese brands on Amazon come to mind.
See also Youtube/Spotify/etc view/listen/impression farms. It really does make it so much noise, you can pretty much guarantee any large scale account is using these too and bot followers because it's an arms race for attention.
This was my experience when trying to buy a new fridge. Due to the design of my kitchen, there is a very narrow choke point leading into it. There is no door. As a result I have to very careful when shopping for fridges. Mostly simply will not fit.
Almost everything about fridges nowadays wants to promote the virtues of the amazing new features associated with them.
After hours of searching, I narrowed it down to 3 models. All were the most basic fridge & freezer combo I could find. Exactly one of them was in stock, so I got that one.
The answer to deceptive online reviews is Consumer Reports. While the web initially made CR not worthwhile, as time progressed it's once again very valuable. I would never buy any appliances without paying for a subscription first.
I'm doing this myself before I buy a treadmill. I want the most reliable one, not the most tech features, and while my hunch is Sole is the one for me based on their warranty, I'm going to confirm with CR before dropping $1,600 on one.
The problem is that people plug their ears and put blinders on to avoid spending $30 for teardown advice from an outfit like Consumer Reports. Too cheap for their own good.
I love the 'best of' sites that only have Amazon links. If its not on Amazon it must not exist and could not possibly be the best, right? But some brand from China you've never heard of will be on the list.
Speaking of which, anyone know what happened at The Verge? It may not ever have been a bastion of great journalism, but these days 30-50% of the content is (occasionally well-targeted) product advertising or "you can now buy the Xbox here for the best price ever" or "Walmart has this promo right now". It's such a noticeable and abrupt change to the content mix.
This is something I had to teach my dad. But he believed it thoroughly until he had a few high purchase items fail outside of warranty. My advice to him has been look for customer reviews and he suspicious of the positive ones and aware of all the negative ones. My other advise is buy from a reputable distributor like Costco who makes returning something incredibly easy.
YouTube is pretty good here. The algorithm does a pretty good job at providing results that aren't the equivalent of blog spam and it is immediately obvious when you are watching a low quality video.
consumerreports.org does exactly what you want, but you have to pay for it. if you don't want to pay for it, then you get what you pay for. google isn't complacent. google has a large number of paying customers that aren't you. you don't live in a socialist utopia. you live in a world where things cost money. you can pay for the information you want, or someone else can pay for you to have the information they want you to have.
The funny part is I remember a time when even on HN the majority defended ads for a myriad of reasons, and one of those reasons was that people actually liked ads and wanted them.
This line of reasoning has completely disappeared from the mainstream. I think that's a problem for the ad companies. They have not yet lost the war, but it seems they have lost the argument.
The funny part is I remember a time when even on HN the majority defended ads for a myriad of reasons..
There's quite a lot of HN readers who work for businesses that derive most of their revenue from ads (Google, Facebook, content companies, etc) so there's always going to be people here who are willing to stand up for ads. The famous Upton Sinclair quote is quite appropriate - "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I remember this. "People want personalized information on products they are interested in. How else would they find out about them?" As if people would be at a loss buying a car or breakfast cereal or a pair of shoes without ads.
I do think there's a reasonable argument for ads, since people don't always know what they could be looking for [1]. Independent magazines can serve a similar purpose, but the difference is between an organization that claims to be unaffiliated with the manufacturer, and needs to be constantly policed to make sure they aren't lying about it, and just being up-front about your affiliation, and only needing to be constantly policed to make sure you aren't lying about the product itself.
Unfortunately, web ads suck. Because there isn't enough Gatekeeping(tm), I can't buy things from web ads, because the probability of it being a scam is too high.
If they didn't know what they could be looking for, perhaps they didn't really need the thing in the first place. If the product is good enough, then it should grow in usage through word of mouth.
I'm very anti-advertising but I think from a production standpoint this is yes and no. Without advertising, it doesn't make sense to put in the capital expenditure to create new products that require a high upfront cost because there's no demand for it. Advertising is used to create demand. Under a different economic model, this feature of the production environment would not be as necessary.
Perhaps the capital expenditure shouldn't have been made in the first place. Our earth is careening towards an environmental cliff. We don't need people finding more ways emit CO2 into the atmosphere. If people really need the thing they'll find it and word will get around.
I agree to a great extent. We produce a lot of stuff that isn't necessary or is designed with excessive packaging, un-ecofriendly elements that may be replaceable, and is intentionally designed to reach obsolescence quickly. I despise our system, I'm just elucidating its internal logic.
This exactly, most of this stuff will just end up taking up space in someone's basement for 20 years used maybe once or twice. Its not only a waste of money but raw materials and energy
Full disclosure, I run ad blocker, I love my ad blocker.
I get what you're trying to say, but here's a counter example. I have a hobby of astrophography. I live in a rural area without many other people nearby interested in the stars, much less a highly technical hobby like astrophography.
Asking on message boards like cloudynights, or reddit gets you a lot of well meaning beginners offering advice outside of their skill level.
I'm currently building an observatory and I need input on which mount to use in my observatory. I don't have a good concept of what to buy for it as I've only dealt with really beginner mounts and I'm not a beginner anymore, and there's no astrophography retail stores within travel distance. Online advice is poor and hard to weed out those who are beginners meaning well and those who actually know what they're talking about.
However, to pull us back to what we're talking about here, I get a magazine for the industry called Sky and Telescope and it has ads. To me, ads are one of the best things about that magazine because it lets me know what options I have that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of, or have any way to compare.
Though to be fair, ads in a magazine don't spy on you, don't infect your computer, don't move and steal attention and don't follow you around. But I think there is a place for targeted, well behaved ads.
I get what you are saying, and as a young hobbyist back in the day I loved perusing ads in specialist magazines. These days though I'm a much more informed and involved buyer, and have found that ads are usually not a great indicator of the best product or service for a particular need. I don't agree that online advice is worse than ads. It's a matter of doing the legwork to find the right place online for a particular interest, and also cross-referencing multiple sources to avoid getting caught by astroturfing. Ads are biased by their design and nature, and in most cases the placer of the ad has zero interest in making sure you choose the best product. They want you to buy their product even if it's not the best fit.
It makes sense in isolated situations, like Netflix recommending content based on previous content you liked on their platform. I think it becomes creepy once that data leaves the domain where I originally generated it.
It is and many get paid for it. You think those top prime picks are most viewed/best rate.. no they are picked by an editor for a variety of reasons some include clauses in deals or money spent/relationship with the studio.
Around 2011 or so this was me. I generally didn't ad block and thought that seeing a few ads was a reasonable price for the free content online. Ads became ridiculous though and lost any sense of balance, the web became borderline unusable without one.
I have sold on eBay for over a decade and at some point the desktop site became so slow as to be unusable with ad blocking. No idea who at eBay thinks getting in the way of sales to spam people with banner ads is a good idea.
There was a time when I purposely unblocked Facebook ads because they were actually showing me some interesting content and products in a fairly non-invasive way.
And occasionally I still get those but lately almost all ads I see are some interesting headline that then takes me to a page with an for nonsense products every paragraph and an extremely fluffy article to tell me that dinosaurs had feathers / the Romans had steam engines or something similar.
Yeah, I remember good ads there. Used to be the only reason I went on Facebook. I just checked to see what ads it would show these days. They were terrible and 4-5 of them had some hilarious typos in them.
I have a theory most ads (especially invasive ones) don't actually target most people, not just tech-savvy users but anyone. They target "dumb", very-manipulable people who see these crazy ads and actually spend loads of money on them, out of impulse or whatever reason.
I feel cruel saying this but I really think it's true. Just like how most games have microtransactions because a minority of people who will spend an incredible amount of money on them. Most people are caught in the crossfire and ads just annoy them and steer them away from the product, but mass advertising is an effective way to target the minority who ultimately spend enough on the product to offset the cost.
Most ads I'm seeing lately have been on relatives' computers while using shady movie streaming sites. Most of the ads are deceptive things like, you click on the movie to play it and it opens a popup of a different movie, which then asks you to make a free account (and presumably uses those credentials to try and steal your other accounts).
On the other side of the spectrum: using the Instagram app was the first time in my life I felt positive about the ads I was being shown. I was shown ads for microdosing psilocybin (it's legal here) which blew my mind hahah. It's almost like I got through the uncanny valley and into the other side where ads are actually relevant!
Pretty weird since I almost never use Facebook. But I use Google, GMail and YouTube all the time ... and yet, the YouTube and Google Ads really suck! (They seem to be based on IP address rather than identity: I keep getting shown stuff that's obviously based on my housemate's browsing.)
To be clear there was still the gross undercurrent of "okay, why the hell do they know that?" but it was nice to see it actually working as intended for once.
Targeting potential marks absolutely makes sense and avoids scrutiny from savvy people who might call it out as a scam and potentially blow up the entire operation. This is also why web advertising is so much more dangerous than print advertising - at least with the latter, everyone can see what's being advertised and blow the whistle if necessary.
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