I can highly recommend using YouTube through Firefox with extensions or ReVanced that try to fix these hostile and anti user decisions. Although I do sometimes wonder why I do spend so much time on a platform that hates me so much.
I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use it through the browser with adblockers. (Yes, on my phone and iPad.)
It works so well I’ve gotten at least half a dozen neighbours to do the same. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a definitive step up in UX.
Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad. Seeing a product in a youtube ad now causes me to be more likely to believe it's a ripoff.
Things like a cheap $5 fan being sold for $60 as roughly: "Super efficient A/C that will save you $100s on your electricity bill and can cool a room down in just minutes"
I stopped using apps like this because they were always getting broken by youtube. Obviously it's intentional sabotage but still. It felt like I had to update those apps every time I used them and sometimes there was no update at that time at all. The mobile site never breaks and you have full access to extensions if you use firefox.
I did the same, but I also added in a tamper monkey script to get rid of the picture in picture thing they force on you as part of their "core experience". I wish their ux designers and PMs were less arrogant and realized their preferences are just preferences and gave us back the ability to disable stuff like this in the app.
Counterpoint: it works, you just have to wait a bit, since now the server will not actually send you the video until the mandatory (pre-skip) ad’s length has elapsed.
Which is fully in their right, I’m not complaining, it’s not like I’m any worse off (waiting on a black screen vs waiting while some bullshit ad tells me to CoNsUmE PrOduCt!!!)
Have you tried "uBlock Origin Lite"? It is by the same author, Raymond Hill (gorhill). It has been working fine. I use "optimal" level for the filtering mode. (Note: I use Chromium on Linux)
"The Firefox version of uBO Lite will cease to exist, I am dropping support because of the added burden of dealing with AMO nonsensical and hostile review process. "
I do pay for YouTube Premium, I see no ads, and everything works pretty conveniently. What's your point, that with a bit of extra effort you can pirate content?
For me, and many people, advertising is a mental health issue. I don't enjoy those ads, they are very disturbing and jarring. It causes me anxiety and I don't like the things that those ads normalize. I don't think most people, especially americans, realize how far off the rails our society is in terms of our normalization of insane shit.
So, for health reasons, I block nearly all advertisements. It is a HUGE mental health win. There is a ton of research behind this, as well.
I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern. I'll block ads instead. I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health.
I will always happily directly support content creators. I will not watch ads.
To be clear, this is not a value judgement. I pirate content sometimes, and I use adblockers, but ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
I realise that online ads have other implications such as tracking that, say, a blu-ray rip downloaded from a torrent doesn't have, but the reason for piracy doesn't change the fact that it is.
> you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
So it is a payment?!? Through out the last decades advertisement has not been liable under customer protection laws that regulate sales of products, and generally avoided local laws. The stated reason has been that advertisement is not a sale since the viewer is not recompensating the publisher. A product given for free is in a completely different category of law than that of a sale.
Im old enough to remember when phone companies tried the tactic of giving away mobile phones for free, but which carried a binding contract with the carrier. Courts found that to be illegal and forced companies to sell them for 1 cent since a free product can not have a binding contract, which turned the transaction into a sale. The outcome of that meant that information of the full cost must be given to the customer in no unclear terms, since we are now dealing with a sale.
Products given for free with advertisement is also exempted in EU from value added tax. The given reason (can't find the original legal source) was that viewers may watch nothing, some or all the advertisement, and that makes putting a monetary value and taxing it difficult. If you buy a subscription it can be taxed, but watching it free with adds do not. This is true for both physical and non-physical goods.
> you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
I disagree. If you were buying every advertised product and falling for every advertised scam then fair enough. But assuming you were ignoring them, there is no issue with offloading the thing you would do anyway to a computer and save everyone the time/bandwidth.
The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you, not the right to a sale. Whether they convert you is up to them, their product, their offering, etc. I think you can never buy a single product from an ad and this is still piracy.
That said, a lot of advertising is not performance/pay-per-click focused as you've described and is instead brand advertising. The point of the Coca-Cola christmas ads is not to get you to buy a coke today, it's to have a positive impression that builds over years. This sort of advertising is very hard to attribute sales to, but a good example of how you don't need to buy a product for seeing the ad to be worth something to the company.
The advertiser may well think that's what they're buying, but what they're actually getting is the right to send my browser a URL, which they hope I will fetch and view.
No, piracy is defined as stealing a vendor's exclusivity by making copies and putting them up on a web site. Ad blocking is not the same as making copies and distributing.
You might as well argue that covering your ears during a TV advertisement is piracy. That's a strange definition of the word if I ever saw one.
And I have the right to pay someone to watch the ads + videos for me, and then summarize me the video minus ads. Just like I have the right to hand my ad-full newspaper to someone, have them cut out the ads and hand me back the now ad-free one.
If both of those are legal and ethical (I’d be curious what argument someone would make against this), then offloading this work to a machine should be just as ethical.
Ok, let’s switch it up a bit. I give the ad-full newspaper to someone not speaking the local language. Or an illiterate person. Or a monkey trained to be good with scissors. Is this also piracy? At what point does it become piracy? How little of an ad should someone see/understand before it counts as a “valid” ad view? A few words? A full sentence? Etc.
There's an "if a tree falls in the forest" version of "if the viewer leaves the room" at which point has a theft still been visited upon the broadcaster? The business that paid for the ad?
In a newspaper if I skip over ads with my eyes do you think I've marginalized/pirated/stolen from the business that paid for the ad? They paid for placement and not an impression. I'd argue that if YouTube presents the ad and my browser/app/whatever skips it then YouTube satisfied its obligation and that's where it ends. The advertiser, knowing full well the limitations of the access mechanism, made a choice to throw money into this version of the attention economy. It's obviously worth it to them or they wouldn't do it, or haven't made as careful of an economic decision as I would imagine I suppose.
You can rationalize this any way you want, but at the end of the day you're screwing over not a faceless corporation - but the very people who put out videos on YouTube.
It's fine if you're OK with it, but don't pretend that you're not doing that.
I’m totally cool with “screwing over” people who make their income screwing gullible people into falling for scams or buying useless, overpriced junk they don’t need. I don’t need to rationalize it for myself, I’m just trying to show some people the error in their ways, but maybe their portfolio of ad-related stocks is clouding their vision?
They’re welcome not to make videos. But if they make them and lay them out there for free alongside some garbage I have the right to ignore, don’t blame me if I do look at them and ignore the garbage, and since there’s so much of it I eventually get my machine to ignore them, not unlike wearing gloves when dealing with a messy task as to save you the time of scrubbing your hands from dirt/oil/etc.
I'm pretty anti-piracy, and I don't think ad-blocking is piracy.
Metaphors are dangerous, but, for the purposes of this specific comparison, I see piracy as breaking into a video store and taking a disc, and ad blocking as allowing some people into my house but not others.
YouTube is free to block me as a user or put its content behind a paywall if it doesn't like me doing this, but I am also free to decide what comes into my browser.
I don't think it is piracy. Most advertising supported content is made freely available to you with the expectation that you will view the advertising. That expectation is not a contract and was a decision made without your involvement. You have no obligation to perform to someone else's expectations. If the content is made freely available you are free to watch it whichever way you choose. Choosing not to view the advertising might mean they don't get paid for producing their content, but you are under no obligation in the absence of an agreement.
Piracy involves you deciding to acquire content that has not been made freely available.
> ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content
This ship sailed when adblockers first went mainstream. (One of the early developers dropped their product because they thought it was unethical.)
I think we’ve now moved to the consensus that adblocking when viewing content isn’t pirating. It’s similar. But not the same, in intent, mechanism or effect.
This is a huge escalation of an already over-stuffed term.
Equating piracy to theft was bad enough, now choosing to not view ads is also piracy, which is theft?
I try to be chill here but no, foot down, absolutely not. Blocking ads is nothing more than determing what content comes in on the wire to the computer you own, or what content is rendered in your web browser. That's it. If that means someone isn't making money when they could be, well, too bad so sad.
It's like, "if you walk past a Nike store without pausing to hear the sales pitch, you are stealing from Nike." Capitalist hellscape.
If we're going with bad analogies I have an opposite one - you're walking past the Nike store and the store has a promotion on "Watch 5 minutes of ads and get a free pair of shoes", but you instead kick the TV with the ads over, grab the shoes and run away.
Or are you going to pretend that there's no agreement between you and YouTube that you're going to watch ads in exchange for the free content?
I agree with this. There was no meeting of the minds, no contract. But, the terms in the Google account probably include something about the terms for viewing youtube videos.
The deal you make with YouTube is that you watch the ad in exchange for the video. Your argument is like “the cashier didn’t stop me from walking out of the grocery store so it’s not stealing”
I don’t make a deal when I visit a website, and especially not when I have to visit it because it became the de-facto standard when sharing video content. I just get my computer to ask for some bytes and the server happily sends them to me. If the server happened to send me some garbage in addition, I am free to make my computer ignore it.
> The deal you make with YouTube is that you watch the ad in exchange for the video.
Did I? Can you tell me where I made this deal? I navigated to YouTube.com, I don't see a contract, I don't see a place to sign or a hand to shake. Where is this bilateral agreement?
I think what you meant to say was, YouTube really very much wants me to watch their ads, and I don't care to, so I won't.
If your counter is that then YouTube will shut down, I say, oh well, I've already archived all the videos I care about, and someone else will replace them, or not, and either way life will go on.
They're not getting the payment for the video either way.
Morally I don't see how they aren't equivalent. I'm not going to stand on a high horse saying you shouldn't do either, but I don't really see how you can pretend one is less harmful to creators than the other, in terms of the basic principles involved.
Piracy involves obtaining media content for free for which you should normally pay for, as a result of someone sharing the media meant for their own personal use to the general public.
YouTube does not ask for payment, it sends the video data you want alongside some bullshit you’ll ignore and waste precious human time doing so.
Ad blocking just involves offloading the ignoring to the computer, as it should, since computers are meant to automate menial tasks.
I've tried to explain this to people repeatedly and they don't get it. They're always like "oh no the AI scraper is slamming my website it's ruining everything". Um, maybe configure your web browser to not send me data if you don't want me 'scraping' your website. It's literally your server's choice to send me data. I'm just asking from a few IPs. If you want to send data to all of them that's your server's choice.
But I think people don't get the fact that they can just request payment or only send to authenticated users from authorized IPs and so on. Instead they want to send to all IPs without payment but then get upset when I use a bunch of IPs without paying. Weird.
I'm trying to read a bunch of stuff. The entire point of a computer is to make that easy. I'm not going to repetitively click through a bunch of links when a bot can do that way faster.
And what is the surefire way to stop AI scrapers from accessing your website? If there is no way, how can this be an acceptable ask?
It already sounds like you're using several IPs to access sites, which seems like a work around to someone somewhere trying to limit the use of one IP (or just lack of desire to host and distribute the data yourself to your various hosts).
Just because you can do something doesn't mean everyone must accept and like that you are doing that thing.
The answer is right there: use authentication with cost per load, or an IP whitelist.
GP is absolutely right. If your server is just going to send me traffic when I ask I’m just going to ask and do what I want with the response.
Your server will respond fine if I click through with different IPs and it’s just a menial task to have this distribution of requests to IPs, which is what we made computers for.
Yeah, you’re right of course that no one has to like the “piracy” or “scraping” or whatever other name you’re giving to a completely normal request-response interaction between machines. They can complain. And I can say they’re silly for complaining. No one has to like anything. Heck you could hate ice cream.
"the payment for the video" as if it's a given that my ad impression is required for me to watch some video that they made available to me on their website for free.
Morally, YouTube shows the most heinous and scummy ads 24/7 on their platform and fails to take them down when reported. Gambling, AI sex games, "cure what doctors miss" ads for human use of Ivermectin - it's your moral duty to block them.
what's insane, even $1 is more than they'll get from you watching every single one of their videos. The issue is processing fees on that payment, so might as well give em a bit more.
It's wild how low the payout on ads is. Seriously, just flip people $1 every once in a while and it's more support than ads.
It's so stupid how people get all morally superior when they figure out that someone block ads.
The massive overlays of what-to-watch-next hiding most of the video much too early, ie. before the very end, of the video you were trying to watch until the end but now just ragequit and downloaded instead... are very ugly
Those are there because the content creator you’re watching decided to put them there. It’s entirely up to them whether they show up and when they show up.
I pay for YouTube Premium too (probably not much longer) but can only 'comfortably' use the site through a series of increasingly hacky extensions for Firefox. On non-web apps, there is no recourse from the UI enshittification.
The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play.
If this is the premium experience then I don't want it.
Like another poster mentioned, I use Orion on my iPad with ublock origin installed as an extension.
It’s a really great browser, only a few bugs here and there.
Wipr, Adblock Pro, Ghostery or uBlock Origin Lite. I've used all four and they perform about as well as you need them to for an adblocker. I'm currently using uBlock.
I've loved Grayjay as an alternative YouTube client. It can pull in videos from other platforms as well, and it can Cast videos! AdBlock and sponsorblock built in too.
I mean I pay for Youtube Premium because I use Youtube Music instead of Spotify.
I get a very unopinionated but effective music player that has all the music I need, and it doesn't try very hard to "upsell" itself to me unlike Spotify because to Google YouTube is the real money driver.
So to me getting no YouTube ads as well is well worth it.
for what it's worth, you could divide up your youtube premium membership cost and give that to 500 creators and they would see more revenue in their pocket than your premium watches get them.
Premium viewcount is grossly over valued by the people who pay for it, because they need to justify their sunk cost. I doubt most content creators even track it because the difference is minimal. We're talking a few bucks a month, tops.
I remember when youtube premium first came out and YT pimped this trope super hard. Then it came to light that the difference is basically nothing because most people don't pay for premium.
I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app on my Apple TV. I can’t wait to find out how they screwed this one up.
My personal long-term complaint is the length of video titles.
Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”.
Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence.
So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.
Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
There are two apps called "DeArrow" and SponsorBlock that basically everyone should be using.
DeArrow replaces thumbnails and titles with crowd sourced versions. I can't use youtube without it anymore. Usually the titles get replaced with stuff like "How to build a table" instead of "Watch the world explode as I try to make a table!!!!!!!!!!!!". Same with thumbnails. No longer are they over-saturated close up AI generated garbage images, but usually just a screenshot from the video that shows what's really going on.
The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.
For example, if you pause the video by clicking the main action button brings up an overlay that takes up almost the whole screen, so you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame. How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up. For some reason up means back and down means to open some additional UI with related videos and what not.
No other app is like this — Plex, Infuse, Apple, Netflix etc. abide by relatively sane UI controls where the action button pauses and unpauses, and up/down don't scroll between weird overlay elements.
The YouTube filled with these incredible non-unintuitive UX choices that drive me crazy. I never use it unless I have a clear idea of something I want to watch.
> you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame
You can press up on the D-pad to dismiss that overlay, if you want to see the full paused frame.
> How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up.
Maybe we have different remotes? On the latest model, you play/pause with the same button.
One issue I’ve noticed in the app is there seems to be no way to move the cursor “up” to the channel button when the video is in the last 10% of the playback bar. If you rewind it a bit, then you’re able to move the cursor up there.
Only in the last few days have Shorts appeared at the top of my home page. I fear it may be the end for me.
Google News has this same truncation problem. I thought it would be an obvious thing to, I don't know, use the `title` attribute so mouseover reveals the rest of the snews...
> Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence.
> So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.
> Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
> The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
I'm looking at youtube right now. There's a video displayed with the title "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , ..."
That "..." is the indicator that the title has been truncated. If you hover the title with your mouse, you can see the entire thing: "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , America | Why Are They Similar?"
Not far away, there's "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support...", which expands to "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support | WIRED".
Am I using Apple TV? No. Is it really true that they removed the truncation indicator?
Low _usable_ information density is one of the main things I made Control Panel for YouTube [^0] to tackle, especially in Subscriptions.
On a 1080p monitor, my unmodified Subscriptions page currently has 6 fully-visible thumbnails, consisting of 3 livestreams from people I only subscribe to for videos, 1 watched video, 1 stream VOD (which I'll never watch), and 1 unwatched video, so that's a score of 1/6. Scroll down and you start getting into more watched videos, stream VODs, the unwanted Shorts shelf, thumbnails for Upcoming videos (i.e. videos which can't be watched), and videos from people I don't even subscribe to (via YouTube's recently-added Collaborations feature).
With everything in Control Panel for YouTube enabled and a minium of 5 videos per row configured, I have 15 unwatched or partially watched (up to a configurable %) videos every time. Same thing for Home, in which other things I don't want such as Mixes and Playlists can also be hidden.
It also tends to have fixes for the other things people rightfully complain about when YouTube comes up in these threads, such as (reads down the page) blocking ads and hiding promoted content, hiding Shorts everywhere, automatically switching to the original audio for auto-dubbed videos, hiding Related videos when they appear below the video pushing comments even further down, fixing the new oversized video controls and huge videos in the Related sidebar, etc. etc.
"Enhancer For Youtube" is a firefox extension that disables much of the nonsense in Youtube's UI. I can't use youtube without it anymore. There might be a chrome version? Idk, using chrome with youtube is dumb af tho so probably don't do that.
If you disable watch history, youtube tries to "punish" you by disabling nearly the non-subscription recommendations and shorts not from your subscriptions and a number of other things.
They have also gotten more aggressive on trying to get you to sign in. I have appreciated the shitty UX changes they have made which has resulted in me using it less. It’s just filler and I need less of that in life, so thanks for chasing me away.
There are 0 videos on my YouTube homepage, just a screen asking me to turn on history. Just the way I like it. Here’s what I did:
Go into the YouTube app, settings, manage all history, under the history tab hit Delete -> delete all time.
Then go to controls (still in the manage all history dialog box under settings), under YouTube history hit Turn off. It says “pausing…” Hit Pause, and Got it.
It’s been exactly 3 months since I did that. I still watch stuff from my subscriptions and when I search for something I want to watch. There are still recommended videos when you’re watching a video but they are a lot less enticing since they are not personally targeted. I curated my subscriptions so it’s more what I would want to spend time watching instead of reaction videos for instance. My actual time watching YouTube has dropped a lot.
It's difficult to capture into words how much contempt I hold for Google and Amazon, two companies which lost their way long ago and are now actively user-hostile.
YouTube has gotten worse with every release. Endless, pointless UI changes. Sneaky resolution downgrades. When your video says "Auto 1080p" it's like 480p quality, manually choose 1080p and watch it change.
Amazon has been working overtime to make your experience worse. The latest innovation is to eliminate invoices for US customers. This wasn't a mistake, as it was rolled out gradually over a few months, with workarounds quickly plugged as users become aware of them. Oh, there still is a "view invoice" button but it's just a redirect to order summary now.
Dark patterns galore since cancelling Prime. Every checkout flow I'm hit with a minimum of two clicks where I have to decline or change something. Ordering a packet of laundry soap feels like buying a used car.
The employees that implement this stuff dare to call themselves "engineers" yet their entire energy is devoted to making their customer's lives more miserable, which they are somehow paid a disgusting amount of money to go do.
Real engineers solve problems.
These people invent new problems to then go solve, likely because they are chasing their next promotion.
There's a lot of folx who got into this business for all the wrong reasons and we're now seeing the results of that on a massive scale.
>entire energy is devoted to making their customer's lives more miserable
If these changes are not hurting user metrics are they really making their lives miserable? When you are optimizing an experience for billions of users, numbers are the only thing you can trust.
For me this change was reverted quite quickly, I think within the week. On my Apple TV at least it is back to 3 (and a quarter) videos displayed at a time.
I like to think that it was the feedback I submitted that pushed them to change it. However, it was more likely a change in viewership that would cause them to revert it back. I know my viewing habits definitely changed, I found myself spending more time looking through the thumbnails and then giving up to go watch content on other platforms.
It’s not a revert, merely A/B testing to see which version leads to more “engagement”.
They’re also testing the same on the web, half the time I get the normal sidebar, half the time I get a 300% zoomed one where I can only see like 3 video thumbnails before having to scroll (jokes on them, I don’t - but then again I block ads so I don’t count either way).
If it happens to me again, I will have to find my content elsewhere. It's not even a conscious decision, I just got genuinely fatigued from the experience.
On the bright side, maybe I'd be better off. There are probably better things I could be doing with my time.
That "feature" is so egregiously bad. I regularly consume content in three languages, and hearing the wrong language coming from my speakers is so jarring. It is a uniquely awful experience that I had never encountered before, nor even imagined.
While we’re at it can we also fire the guy who made it that we now have to click the channel’s mini thumbnail to open it, EXCEPT, when the channel is live and clicking the thumbnail takes you to the live video where you have to click the thumbnail again.
They could at least try to vaguely match the voice and maybe cadence of the original. AFAIU it's one of these things that would have been too hard ten years ago but is fairly easy now. Too computationally expensive probably.
Yeah ElevenLabs had this over a year ago where you could just upload a 30 second clip of someone's voice in another language and hear what it was like in English and it worked really well.
I agree. But for the benefit of other people struggling, I haven't found a way to disable them as a user setting, but you can at least turn them off on a per-video basis by changing the video language in the playback settings (the little gear icon).
Googlers are obviously mentally challenged by the concept that there might be anybody in the world who has learned English as a second language.
Bet the idea to force outdated TTS whose robotic droning that is the pinnacle of annoyance on every single user who speaks more than one language was worth a nice bonus.
I was playing a game with a friend and the chat was increasingly full of angry people complaining about cheaters easily obtaining very hard to get items. He asked what I thought about it....
Well, the game is clearly very important to these people, it is increasingly visible. They are clearly very emotionally engaged. I'd say things are going really well!
Youtube was once a miraculous technical website running circles around Google video. I'm told they used a secret technology called python. Eventually Google threw the towel and didn't want to compete anymore. They were basically on the ground in a pool of bodily liquids then the referee counted all the way to 1.65 billion.
Some time went by and now you can just slap a <video> tag on a html document and call it a day. Your website will run similar circles around the new google video only much much faster.
The only problem is that [even] developers forgot <s>how</s> why to make HTML websites. I'm sure someone remembers the anchor tag and among those some even remember that you can put full paths inthere that point at other website that could [in theory] also have videos on them (if they knew <s>how</s> why)
If this was my homepage I would definitely add a picture of Dark Helmet.
You know who has great information density? Pornhub. If you open Pornhub on a 4K screen, you will absolutely see none of the thumbnails. I think YouTube is overdoing it, but it is really a thing of: people are either using really small screens or 1080p. 4K is still not around much.
There's an old adage that if you follow the tech that porn adopts, you'll generally be ahead the average consumer curve.
I think there's another version that if porn adopts a tech that means that the tech will work. Like, a lot of VR adoption early on was porn. By a lot, I mean most.
Not sure what this comment is getting at. Those may be the collection of sites owned by a single company, but there are still -oceans- of porn of every conceivable niche, on hundreds of thousands of sites, some still bigger than those. Whereas there’s pretty much a single, monopolized provider for mainstream video: youtube. And a porn conglomerate is the problem? GP is still correct, there’s still real competition in the space, unlike youtube.
Yes. 1080p screen density is still so popular. Looking around new laptops it's still the bulk in Windows land, including OLED and ultra high refresh rate monitors. Same for TVs.
Even on macs many are using scaling factors that render close to 1080p.
The issue really would be why YouTube can't bother managing more layouts. It still blows my mind there's only one single YouTube experience per platform, when their viewership basically span the world's population.
I don't think so? The "I Skied Down Mount Everest" is from the Red Bull channel. It may be a commercial channel, but it's not an ad, i.e. they didn't pay for placement (doesn't say "Sponsored" like the other one).
and they are often good videos (if you like watching extreme sports related things), given the partial second video this seems likely for the account who made the screenshot
but given that half a video is not a full video this still means we are at one single full video
and an AD which is deceptively pretending to be a video
I still think regulators should ban deceptive ads and require ads to to clearly different from the main content _on the first take/glance_. They way YT, Google and co handle ads is IMHO deceptive to a point its reasonable to say they try to deceive the user into clicking on the ad when they wouldn't have done so if they new it was an ad.
And "systematically deceiving a user/customer to their detriment (wasting time) and your profit" isn't just shitty but on a gray line to outright fraud.
I mean, in terms of getting your caffeine, Redbull is basically the least poison in the game. It's not even a lot of caffeine and doesn't contain a lot of the other shit that stuff like Monsters contain.
Like really, checkout the redbull ingredient list sometime. There's not much to it.
Not saying it's healthy at all. Nobody should really be drinking energy drinks, but Redbull is probably the least awful of the bunch.
Ahh, I thought this was just happening to me. I used to watch a fair bit of YT on my PS4, but a few months ago my home screen was basically empty save a few ad videos.
It was pushing me heavily to sign in; which I do _not_ want to do.
On desktop, press command/ctrl and minus to zoom out and increase the home page's density. It will make text on watch page harder to read, but with theatre mode, the video playback size should be unaffected.
I already have 0 videos on youtube home screen, some combination of not being logged in, firefox privacy settings and ad blocker causes youtube to post a passive aggressive message and a search bar. I kinda like that Ui.
Was just talking with my son about how some YouTubers who made short videos long ago started making longer and less succinct videos because they thought the algorithm favored long videos and then TikTok happens.
That's not even the main problem. Youtube is basically unwatchable with all the ads. Maybe it's just me but it often feels like it's badly broken. I found skipvids a while back. I find the videos on YT and watch them there. I don't watch yt often so that's the path of least resistance for me.
> Unfortunately the YouTube PM org’s myopia is accelerating: with this data I now project that there will be zero videos on the homescreen around May of 2026 now, up from September.
There are already zero videos if you visit with no youtube history. That seems... fine?
YouTube has become so bad that I had to resort to Tampermonkey scripts to become bearable.
First was the disgusting pink tones in the progress bar.
Then the oversized thumbnails / less videos per page.
Then the horrible over sized player controls.
And now the oversized suggestions on the side bar.
Not to mention the obnoxious amount and duration of ads.
It's getting worse and worse.
These are all symptoms that something is very wrong.
Not really related but... have anyone else noticed that suggestions on the home page became much worse recently? I'm getting a lot of unrelated videos which are often very old, like published up to 18 years ago. OTOH, videos from subscriptions are not getting suggested, I often have to check individual channels to see if they posted anything new. What's happening?
i feel like modern youtube just does not scratch the itch that youtube once scratched , it now feels like methadone replacement therapy. available viewing options have been reduced to either short form content or long form content , there is nothing between. i dont enjoy frying my brain with short form content and i dont have the attention span to watch bloviation with the express intent of stretching out video times to maximise revenue. honestly i feel like this applies to the internet as a whole , a facsimile of its former self being puppeted to achieve control. someone probably predicted this , right ?
I usually don't mind that. Sometimes I'm looking in to a new product or hobby and really do want to see a whole bunch of that content. They also provide you a feed which purely contains channels you subscribe to, though I find it much lower quality than the normal feed.
You can use ublock origin browser extension per-site CSS rules to restore an arbitrary number of rows and columns to the youtube frontpage. https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube is a good source for these if you don't know how to write them or don't want to.
Neuralink was mentioned, and it immediately made me remember the sad stories of the rhesus macaques that were used as Neuralink animal test subjects for brain implants. The quality of the work was poor and they were able to pull the implants out and then the implants got loose, causing bacterial and fungal infections and swelling and the macaques had to be euthanized. But not before banging their heads against everything, picking on the holes in their skulls and going insane as their brains got increasingly infected. Reading that kind of disgusting inhumane crap makes me ashamed of being a member of the same species.
If you want to read more the search keywords are: "Animal 20" "Neuralink"
> Animal 20 was seen "pulling on port connector which is now dislodged (no longer secured)". The next day, Animal 20 was "picking at incision and occasionally pulling on implant". Soon, infections developed. On Dec. 20, UC Davis staff found antibiotic resistant E. coli and Candida glabrata, a fungal infection, at the surgical site. They discussed a "necropsy next week", meaning they planned to euthanize Animal 20.
> maybe our mandatory NeuraLinks are coming sooner than I thought.
The founder of NeuraLink has recently proposed to deploy sentient robots to watch criminals, removing the need for incarceration. There is a lot of synergy possible here with mandatory neural links. The bot could not only watch us but also press our buttons. "Criminal", being such a flexible concept, should pose little problem to globalizing this paradigm. For one thing, it will make it possible to harvest any number of clicks necessary, so advertising becomes obsolete, and so does content.
> it will make it possible to harvest any number of clicks necessary, so advertising becomes unnecessary and obsolete
But then again, this is already possible, and has the advertising industry shit-scared, thus all the interest in blocking AI-related scrapers since they circumvent the whole “wasting human time” element.
There are lots of proposals. Recently, he retweeted a pundit who said that murderers should be hanged and that Europe achieved its level of civilization by executing 1-2% of its population for eugenic purposes:
That TVs have lower information density than desktop browsers? Like, yeah, obviously.
That if you don't sign in to YouTube and don't pay to remove the ads, that you'll get prompted to sign in and you'll see ads? That doesn't seem particularly problematic.
Sure it's mildly funny that a funny projection is true in a very contrived way, but it doesn't really stand up to any criticism. I use YouTube almost exclusively through the Apple TV app, and it's fine, I'd even say it has improved a little over the last few years. I like the low information density because I sit approximately 3m from the screen and navigate with a TV remote.
Unfortunately I don't have pictures from before this change, but you used to get 5-6 videos I believe. Now you get two (and maybe one is an ad).
The point is that I made a joke projection in my last post in April that by next May there would be only one video on the homepage, because obviously that would be ridiculous, right? Then I turned on my TV and it happened.
On my Apple TV I get 2.5 thumbnails per row and 2 rows. I honestly think that's appropriate for a TV interface and I basically like the UI. I find YouTube's Apple TV app to be the least clunky of all the carousel-of-videos apps that I use.
Compare the 1.25 video thumbnails shown on the apple tv app to the thumbnails on Steam's big picture mode (designed for people sitting on a couch far away from a tv):
I can highly recommend using YouTube through Firefox with extensions or ReVanced that try to fix these hostile and anti user decisions. Although I do sometimes wonder why I do spend so much time on a platform that hates me so much.
I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use it through the browser with adblockers. (Yes, on my phone and iPad.)
It works so well I’ve gotten at least half a dozen neighbours to do the same. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a definitive step up in UX.
Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad. Seeing a product in a youtube ad now causes me to be more likely to believe it's a ripoff.
Things like a cheap $5 fan being sold for $60 as roughly: "Super efficient A/C that will save you $100s on your electricity bill and can cool a room down in just minutes"
Revanced is the best UX for Android, can remove a lot of things as well (like shorts).
I stopped using apps like this because they were always getting broken by youtube. Obviously it's intentional sabotage but still. It felt like I had to update those apps every time I used them and sometimes there was no update at that time at all. The mobile site never breaks and you have full access to extensions if you use firefox.
I never managed to install it
it complains about youtube app being separated into parts or smth like that
That's a feature: if you can't work out which YouTube apk to patch them you'll never work out the rest of the installation process.
Its a bold strategy, Cotton, lets see if it pays off for em
It also contains more ads then you tube itself.
There's no ads on Revanced...
Yes, there are. But there is a toggle to switch them on and off.
I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use... rumble and tiktok.
I did the same, but I also added in a tamper monkey script to get rid of the picture in picture thing they force on you as part of their "core experience". I wish their ux designers and PMs were less arrogant and realized their preferences are just preferences and gave us back the ability to disable stuff like this in the app.
YouTube hasn't been working for me past two weeks with uBlock Origin. Video doesn't play.
Counterpoint: it works, you just have to wait a bit, since now the server will not actually send you the video until the mandatory (pre-skip) ad’s length has elapsed.
Which is fully in their right, I’m not complaining, it’s not like I’m any worse off (waiting on a black screen vs waiting while some bullshit ad tells me to CoNsUmE PrOduCt!!!)
I had the same problem. Updating uBlock Origin fixed it.
Have you tried "uBlock Origin Lite"? It is by the same author, Raymond Hill (gorhill). It has been working fine. I use "optimal" level for the filtering mode. (Note: I use Chromium on Linux)
I'm gonna try, thanks.
Oh shit
https://itc.ua/en/news/ublock-origin-lite-ad-blocker-has-bee...
Parent should include text not just a link.
UBlock Origin Lite pulled from the Firefox extensions after being flagged for policy violation, now only available from GitHub.
"The Firefox version of uBO Lite will cease to exist, I am dropping support because of the added burden of dealing with AMO nonsensical and hostile review process. "
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/197#issueco...
Firefox + uBlock Origin + Sponsor Block + YouTube Redux on Mac has been working well for me for quite some time.
Make sure to update and restart Firefox.
I do pay for YouTube Premium, I see no ads, and everything works pretty conveniently. What's your point, that with a bit of extra effort you can pirate content?
For me, and many people, advertising is a mental health issue. I don't enjoy those ads, they are very disturbing and jarring. It causes me anxiety and I don't like the things that those ads normalize. I don't think most people, especially americans, realize how far off the rails our society is in terms of our normalization of insane shit.
So, for health reasons, I block nearly all advertisements. It is a HUGE mental health win. There is a ton of research behind this, as well.
I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern. I'll block ads instead. I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health.
I will always happily directly support content creators. I will not watch ads.
Blocking ads is hardly "pirating" content
To be clear, this is not a value judgement. I pirate content sometimes, and I use adblockers, but ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
I realise that online ads have other implications such as tracking that, say, a blu-ray rip downloaded from a torrent doesn't have, but the reason for piracy doesn't change the fact that it is.
> you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
So it is a payment?!? Through out the last decades advertisement has not been liable under customer protection laws that regulate sales of products, and generally avoided local laws. The stated reason has been that advertisement is not a sale since the viewer is not recompensating the publisher. A product given for free is in a completely different category of law than that of a sale.
Im old enough to remember when phone companies tried the tactic of giving away mobile phones for free, but which carried a binding contract with the carrier. Courts found that to be illegal and forced companies to sell them for 1 cent since a free product can not have a binding contract, which turned the transaction into a sale. The outcome of that meant that information of the full cost must be given to the customer in no unclear terms, since we are now dealing with a sale.
Products given for free with advertisement is also exempted in EU from value added tax. The given reason (can't find the original legal source) was that viewers may watch nothing, some or all the advertisement, and that makes putting a monetary value and taxing it difficult. If you buy a subscription it can be taxed, but watching it free with adds do not. This is true for both physical and non-physical goods.
> you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
I disagree. If you were buying every advertised product and falling for every advertised scam then fair enough. But assuming you were ignoring them, there is no issue with offloading the thing you would do anyway to a computer and save everyone the time/bandwidth.
The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you, not the right to a sale. Whether they convert you is up to them, their product, their offering, etc. I think you can never buy a single product from an ad and this is still piracy.
That said, a lot of advertising is not performance/pay-per-click focused as you've described and is instead brand advertising. The point of the Coca-Cola christmas ads is not to get you to buy a coke today, it's to have a positive impression that builds over years. This sort of advertising is very hard to attribute sales to, but a good example of how you don't need to buy a product for seeing the ad to be worth something to the company.
> the right to put an advert in front of you
The advertiser may well think that's what they're buying, but what they're actually getting is the right to send my browser a URL, which they hope I will fetch and view.
I would prefer not to, so I don't.
No, piracy is defined as stealing a vendor's exclusivity by making copies and putting them up on a web site. Ad blocking is not the same as making copies and distributing.
You might as well argue that covering your ears during a TV advertisement is piracy. That's a strange definition of the word if I ever saw one.
And I have the right to pay someone to watch the ads + videos for me, and then summarize me the video minus ads. Just like I have the right to hand my ad-full newspaper to someone, have them cut out the ads and hand me back the now ad-free one.
If both of those are legal and ethical (I’d be curious what argument someone would make against this), then offloading this work to a machine should be just as ethical.
But in those cases someone is still seeing the ads. It's when no one is seeing the ads that it becomes piracy, in my opinion.
A summary is not the same as the content either, that's a fairly well tested concept (fair use, etc).
Ok, let’s switch it up a bit. I give the ad-full newspaper to someone not speaking the local language. Or an illiterate person. Or a monkey trained to be good with scissors. Is this also piracy? At what point does it become piracy? How little of an ad should someone see/understand before it counts as a “valid” ad view? A few words? A full sentence? Etc.
There's an "if a tree falls in the forest" version of "if the viewer leaves the room" at which point has a theft still been visited upon the broadcaster? The business that paid for the ad?
In a newspaper if I skip over ads with my eyes do you think I've marginalized/pirated/stolen from the business that paid for the ad? They paid for placement and not an impression. I'd argue that if YouTube presents the ad and my browser/app/whatever skips it then YouTube satisfied its obligation and that's where it ends. The advertiser, knowing full well the limitations of the access mechanism, made a choice to throw money into this version of the attention economy. It's obviously worth it to them or they wouldn't do it, or haven't made as careful of an economic decision as I would imagine I suppose.
You can rationalize this any way you want, but at the end of the day you're screwing over not a faceless corporation - but the very people who put out videos on YouTube.
It's fine if you're OK with it, but don't pretend that you're not doing that.
I’m totally cool with “screwing over” people who make their income screwing gullible people into falling for scams or buying useless, overpriced junk they don’t need. I don’t need to rationalize it for myself, I’m just trying to show some people the error in their ways, but maybe their portfolio of ad-related stocks is clouding their vision?
You're not replying directly to the last comment because it posed a hard question, and you've resorted to an emotional appeal.
> The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you
Is this the way YouTube ads work? If I don’t load the ad, is someone paying?
Also, Youtube pays out more to creators than anyone else on the web, they dwarf Patreon 10x. People who make youtube videos rely on ads to get paid.
They’re welcome not to make videos. But if they make them and lay them out there for free alongside some garbage I have the right to ignore, don’t blame me if I do look at them and ignore the garbage, and since there’s so much of it I eventually get my machine to ignore them, not unlike wearing gloves when dealing with a messy task as to save you the time of scrubbing your hands from dirt/oil/etc.
Ignoring the "garbage" is absolutely valid, but hiding it so that you never see it is what makes it piracy.
I'm pretty anti-piracy, and I don't think ad-blocking is piracy.
Metaphors are dangerous, but, for the purposes of this specific comparison, I see piracy as breaking into a video store and taking a disc, and ad blocking as allowing some people into my house but not others.
YouTube is free to block me as a user or put its content behind a paywall if it doesn't like me doing this, but I am also free to decide what comes into my browser.
I don't think it is piracy. Most advertising supported content is made freely available to you with the expectation that you will view the advertising. That expectation is not a contract and was a decision made without your involvement. You have no obligation to perform to someone else's expectations. If the content is made freely available you are free to watch it whichever way you choose. Choosing not to view the advertising might mean they don't get paid for producing their content, but you are under no obligation in the absence of an agreement.
Piracy involves you deciding to acquire content that has not been made freely available.
> ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content
This ship sailed when adblockers first went mainstream. (One of the early developers dropped their product because they thought it was unethical.)
I think we’ve now moved to the consensus that adblocking when viewing content isn’t pirating. It’s similar. But not the same, in intent, mechanism or effect.
Was it piracy to leave the room and make a snack during TV ads?
It's becomes piracy when you create a new distribution without ads... which you're doing with ad blockers.
https://www.tivo.com/support/how-to/how-to-use-SkipMode
A data point is TiVo who are, apparently, still around and have a 'skip ads' button on recorded content.
> but ad blocking is definitely piracy
This is a huge escalation of an already over-stuffed term.
Equating piracy to theft was bad enough, now choosing to not view ads is also piracy, which is theft?
I try to be chill here but no, foot down, absolutely not. Blocking ads is nothing more than determing what content comes in on the wire to the computer you own, or what content is rendered in your web browser. That's it. If that means someone isn't making money when they could be, well, too bad so sad.
It's like, "if you walk past a Nike store without pausing to hear the sales pitch, you are stealing from Nike." Capitalist hellscape.
If we're going with bad analogies I have an opposite one - you're walking past the Nike store and the store has a promotion on "Watch 5 minutes of ads and get a free pair of shoes", but you instead kick the TV with the ads over, grab the shoes and run away.
Or are you going to pretend that there's no agreement between you and YouTube that you're going to watch ads in exchange for the free content?
I will not be pretending that. I am _asserting_ it. I made no such agreement with YouTube. I am very confused why you think I did
I agree with this. There was no meeting of the minds, no contract. But, the terms in the Google account probably include something about the terms for viewing youtube videos.
The deal you make with YouTube is that you watch the ad in exchange for the video. Your argument is like “the cashier didn’t stop me from walking out of the grocery store so it’s not stealing”
I don’t make a deal when I visit a website, and especially not when I have to visit it because it became the de-facto standard when sharing video content. I just get my computer to ask for some bytes and the server happily sends them to me. If the server happened to send me some garbage in addition, I am free to make my computer ignore it.
You you do. Just because you don't understand contract law, doesn't mean that it doesn't apply.
This applies double, when you knowingly circumvent the agreement that "you're not aware of"
Sosumi?
Next time I’ll instead pay someone to watch the videos on my behalf and then summarize me the videos sans-ads.
Will you also sumi?
> The deal you make with YouTube is that you watch the ad in exchange for the video.
Did I? Can you tell me where I made this deal? I navigated to YouTube.com, I don't see a contract, I don't see a place to sign or a hand to shake. Where is this bilateral agreement?
I think what you meant to say was, YouTube really very much wants me to watch their ads, and I don't care to, so I won't.
If your counter is that then YouTube will shut down, I say, oh well, I've already archived all the videos I care about, and someone else will replace them, or not, and either way life will go on.
> I've already archived all the videos I care about
That's quite literally what we call piracy.
lol, no it’s not pirating.
I don't really see what the difference is.
They're not getting the payment for the video either way.
Morally I don't see how they aren't equivalent. I'm not going to stand on a high horse saying you shouldn't do either, but I don't really see how you can pretend one is less harmful to creators than the other, in terms of the basic principles involved.
Piracy involves obtaining media content for free for which you should normally pay for, as a result of someone sharing the media meant for their own personal use to the general public.
YouTube does not ask for payment, it sends the video data you want alongside some bullshit you’ll ignore and waste precious human time doing so.
Ad blocking just involves offloading the ignoring to the computer, as it should, since computers are meant to automate menial tasks.
I've tried to explain this to people repeatedly and they don't get it. They're always like "oh no the AI scraper is slamming my website it's ruining everything". Um, maybe configure your web browser to not send me data if you don't want me 'scraping' your website. It's literally your server's choice to send me data. I'm just asking from a few IPs. If you want to send data to all of them that's your server's choice.
But I think people don't get the fact that they can just request payment or only send to authenticated users from authorized IPs and so on. Instead they want to send to all IPs without payment but then get upset when I use a bunch of IPs without paying. Weird.
I'm trying to read a bunch of stuff. The entire point of a computer is to make that easy. I'm not going to repetitively click through a bunch of links when a bot can do that way faster.
And what is the surefire way to stop AI scrapers from accessing your website? If there is no way, how can this be an acceptable ask?
It already sounds like you're using several IPs to access sites, which seems like a work around to someone somewhere trying to limit the use of one IP (or just lack of desire to host and distribute the data yourself to your various hosts).
Just because you can do something doesn't mean everyone must accept and like that you are doing that thing.
The answer is right there: use authentication with cost per load, or an IP whitelist.
GP is absolutely right. If your server is just going to send me traffic when I ask I’m just going to ask and do what I want with the response.
Your server will respond fine if I click through with different IPs and it’s just a menial task to have this distribution of requests to IPs, which is what we made computers for.
Yeah, you’re right of course that no one has to like the “piracy” or “scraping” or whatever other name you’re giving to a completely normal request-response interaction between machines. They can complain. And I can say they’re silly for complaining. No one has to like anything. Heck you could hate ice cream.
> the payment for the video either way.
"the payment for the video" as if it's a given that my ad impression is required for me to watch some video that they made available to me on their website for free.
Morally, YouTube shows the most heinous and scummy ads 24/7 on their platform and fails to take them down when reported. Gambling, AI sex games, "cure what doctors miss" ads for human use of Ivermectin - it's your moral duty to block them.
its pirating content in a way that you dont generate revenue for youtuber that expect from ads
I'm not generating revenue for a lot of companies who are in the advertising business. That's not the definition of piracy. Find another word.
Most content creators have links to support them with donation or patreon.
Once a year choose 3 small youtubers (larger ones are already multi-millioners, they don't need your help) and drop them $5 each.
Now you just did 1000% of what they could get from you watching ads.
what's insane, even $1 is more than they'll get from you watching every single one of their videos. The issue is processing fees on that payment, so might as well give em a bit more.
It's wild how low the payout on ads is. Seriously, just flip people $1 every once in a while and it's more support than ads.
It's so stupid how people get all morally superior when they figure out that someone block ads.
I'm sure that trillion-dollar analytics empire is worth something even without my eyeballs consuming some shitty pre-roll.
Most of the ad revenue actually goes to the people uploading content.
But sure... they're all clearly are "trillion-dollar analytics empire"
The massive overlays of what-to-watch-next hiding most of the video much too early, ie. before the very end, of the video you were trying to watch until the end but now just ragequit and downloaded instead... are very ugly
Those are there because the content creator you’re watching decided to put them there. It’s entirely up to them whether they show up and when they show up.
And they can be hidden, so it's not exactly entirely up to them, nor should it be. If they wanted them in the video content they could put them there.
I pay for YouTube Premium too (probably not much longer) but can only 'comfortably' use the site through a series of increasingly hacky extensions for Firefox. On non-web apps, there is no recourse from the UI enshittification.
The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play.
If this is the premium experience then I don't want it.
You still get the autogenerated dubs by default, the comments moved to end of the earth, and many other stuff (shorts etc.) people get pissed about.
At this point ads are just one of the annoyances amoung so many others.
It's not piracy.
I've been doing this for years, but recently they have nerfed mobile web YouTube and it's limited to 360p (at least it seems to be for me).
Which adblocker are you currently using? The arms race is getting pretty tiring...
uBlock Origin continues to work well, on both desktop and Android.
> Which adblocker are you currently using?
I’m really shooting myself in the foot right now aren’t I.
1Blocker and Wipr on mobile. Plain old Orion by Kagi on my Mac.
Thank you very much for taking that risk I just updated to this setup
Like another poster mentioned, I use Orion on my iPad with ublock origin installed as an extension. It’s a really great browser, only a few bugs here and there.
I use Brave 99% of the time just for Youtube.
Even on Safari with Apple’s braindead “content blocker” API, AdGuard manages to successfully block YouTube ads.
Not so braindead after all
What is a set and forget adblocker for the Apple ecosystem?
Wipr, Adblock Pro, Ghostery or uBlock Origin Lite. I've used all four and they perform about as well as you need them to for an adblocker. I'm currently using uBlock.
AdGuard Pro.
I've loved Grayjay as an alternative YouTube client. It can pull in videos from other platforms as well, and it can Cast videos! AdBlock and sponsorblock built in too.
I mean I pay for Youtube Premium because I use Youtube Music instead of Spotify.
I get a very unopinionated but effective music player that has all the music I need, and it doesn't try very hard to "upsell" itself to me unlike Spotify because to Google YouTube is the real money driver.
So to me getting no YouTube ads as well is well worth it.
And I pay for Premium, because each premium view is more valuable to the creators than the ad supported one.
for what it's worth, you could divide up your youtube premium membership cost and give that to 500 creators and they would see more revenue in their pocket than your premium watches get them.
Premium viewcount is grossly over valued by the people who pay for it, because they need to justify their sunk cost. I doubt most content creators even track it because the difference is minimal. We're talking a few bucks a month, tops.
I remember when youtube premium first came out and YT pimped this trope super hard. Then it came to light that the difference is basically nothing because most people don't pay for premium.
I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app on my Apple TV. I can’t wait to find out how they screwed this one up.
My personal long-term complaint is the length of video titles.
Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”.
Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence.
So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.
Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
Obnoxious.
There are two apps called "DeArrow" and SponsorBlock that basically everyone should be using.
DeArrow replaces thumbnails and titles with crowd sourced versions. I can't use youtube without it anymore. Usually the titles get replaced with stuff like "How to build a table" instead of "Watch the world explode as I try to make a table!!!!!!!!!!!!". Same with thumbnails. No longer are they over-saturated close up AI generated garbage images, but usually just a screenshot from the video that shows what's really going on.
The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.
For example, if you pause the video by clicking the main action button brings up an overlay that takes up almost the whole screen, so you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame. How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up. For some reason up means back and down means to open some additional UI with related videos and what not.
No other app is like this — Plex, Infuse, Apple, Netflix etc. abide by relatively sane UI controls where the action button pauses and unpauses, and up/down don't scroll between weird overlay elements.
The YouTube filled with these incredible non-unintuitive UX choices that drive me crazy. I never use it unless I have a clear idea of something I want to watch.
Agreed the interface is clunky.
> you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame
You can press up on the D-pad to dismiss that overlay, if you want to see the full paused frame.
> How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up.
Maybe we have different remotes? On the latest model, you play/pause with the same button.
One issue I’ve noticed in the app is there seems to be no way to move the cursor “up” to the channel button when the video is in the last 10% of the playback bar. If you rewind it a bit, then you’re able to move the cursor up there.
Only in the last few days have Shorts appeared at the top of my home page. I fear it may be the end for me.
Google News has this same truncation problem. I thought it would be an obvious thing to, I don't know, use the `title` attribute so mouseover reveals the rest of the snews...
> Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence.
> So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.
> Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
> The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
I'm looking at youtube right now. There's a video displayed with the title "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , ..."
That "..." is the indicator that the title has been truncated. If you hover the title with your mouse, you can see the entire thing: "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , America | Why Are They Similar?"
Not far away, there's "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support...", which expands to "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support | WIRED".
Am I using Apple TV? No. Is it really true that they removed the truncation indicator?
Low _usable_ information density is one of the main things I made Control Panel for YouTube [^0] to tackle, especially in Subscriptions.
On a 1080p monitor, my unmodified Subscriptions page currently has 6 fully-visible thumbnails, consisting of 3 livestreams from people I only subscribe to for videos, 1 watched video, 1 stream VOD (which I'll never watch), and 1 unwatched video, so that's a score of 1/6. Scroll down and you start getting into more watched videos, stream VODs, the unwanted Shorts shelf, thumbnails for Upcoming videos (i.e. videos which can't be watched), and videos from people I don't even subscribe to (via YouTube's recently-added Collaborations feature).
With everything in Control Panel for YouTube enabled and a minium of 5 videos per row configured, I have 15 unwatched or partially watched (up to a configurable %) videos every time. Same thing for Home, in which other things I don't want such as Mixes and Playlists can also be hidden.
It also tends to have fixes for the other things people rightfully complain about when YouTube comes up in these threads, such as (reads down the page) blocking ads and hiding promoted content, hiding Shorts everywhere, automatically switching to the original audio for auto-dubbed videos, hiding Related videos when they appear below the video pushing comments even further down, fixing the new oversized video controls and huge videos in the Related sidebar, etc. etc.
[^0] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
> On a 1080p monitor…
There’s your problem. You have normal hardware. The rich SV folks at google are probably all using 6k monitors. (only half joking)
It’s crazy you can pay for premium, which is not cheap, and you can’t disable shorts.
The number of times I clicked “show less” and it has zero effect on the number of shorts.
"Enhancer For Youtube" is a firefox extension that disables much of the nonsense in Youtube's UI. I can't use youtube without it anymore. There might be a chrome version? Idk, using chrome with youtube is dumb af tho so probably don't do that.
If you disable watch history, youtube tries to "punish" you by disabling nearly the non-subscription recommendations and shorts not from your subscriptions and a number of other things.
Worth a try.
I don't even see any shorts, unless I click the shorts tab on the web.
In the Android app it's literally just one line, which I have to scroll down to... like two pages.
What's crazy is that I can't turn them off for my children.
I complain about it to Google. They ignore it. They couldn't possibly give a shit.
I should probably complain to my congressman. Who also won't do shit even if they actually give a shit.
You could just not let your kids go on YouTube.
There's a long history of people not using it. Most people today don't use it.
I successfully kept my kids off of YouTube until their elementary school gave them Chromebooks. Then they were at least only on YouTube during class.
Shorts are up to 3 minutes long now. At this point they are just vertical videos. I fully expect the supported length to keep increasing!
Vertical videos with much shitter UI. Inability to skip ahead or turn back may be understandable for <30 second videos, but not more.
Ive installed a browser extension to remove them on the desktop.
There should absolutely be a better answer here.
Why. Why are they doing this. It’s the same with Netflix. I don’t understand. What is the metric that goes up when they show a couple giant videos.
I would presume the conversion rate for those specific three videos are much higher then if they're just three of twenty
It may reduce decision paralysis and they are hoping their recommendation is good enough.
They have also gotten more aggressive on trying to get you to sign in. I have appreciated the shitty UX changes they have made which has resulted in me using it less. It’s just filler and I need less of that in life, so thanks for chasing me away.
There are 0 videos on my YouTube homepage, just a screen asking me to turn on history. Just the way I like it. Here’s what I did:
Go into the YouTube app, settings, manage all history, under the history tab hit Delete -> delete all time.
Then go to controls (still in the manage all history dialog box under settings), under YouTube history hit Turn off. It says “pausing…” Hit Pause, and Got it.
It’s been exactly 3 months since I did that. I still watch stuff from my subscriptions and when I search for something I want to watch. There are still recommended videos when you’re watching a video but they are a lot less enticing since they are not personally targeted. I curated my subscriptions so it’s more what I would want to spend time watching instead of reaction videos for instance. My actual time watching YouTube has dropped a lot.
It's difficult to capture into words how much contempt I hold for Google and Amazon, two companies which lost their way long ago and are now actively user-hostile.
YouTube has gotten worse with every release. Endless, pointless UI changes. Sneaky resolution downgrades. When your video says "Auto 1080p" it's like 480p quality, manually choose 1080p and watch it change.
Amazon has been working overtime to make your experience worse. The latest innovation is to eliminate invoices for US customers. This wasn't a mistake, as it was rolled out gradually over a few months, with workarounds quickly plugged as users become aware of them. Oh, there still is a "view invoice" button but it's just a redirect to order summary now.
Dark patterns galore since cancelling Prime. Every checkout flow I'm hit with a minimum of two clicks where I have to decline or change something. Ordering a packet of laundry soap feels like buying a used car.
The employees that implement this stuff dare to call themselves "engineers" yet their entire energy is devoted to making their customer's lives more miserable, which they are somehow paid a disgusting amount of money to go do.
Real engineers solve problems.
These people invent new problems to then go solve, likely because they are chasing their next promotion.
There's a lot of folx who got into this business for all the wrong reasons and we're now seeing the results of that on a massive scale.
>entire energy is devoted to making their customer's lives more miserable
If these changes are not hurting user metrics are they really making their lives miserable? When you are optimizing an experience for billions of users, numbers are the only thing you can trust.
This comment feels very xenophobic.
I don't think you know what that word means.
Tell me what it means. Maybe you are right.
xenophobia is a fear of foreigners. What about their comment expresses this? because they said "folx" ? lol wtf?
For me this change was reverted quite quickly, I think within the week. On my Apple TV at least it is back to 3 (and a quarter) videos displayed at a time.
I like to think that it was the feedback I submitted that pushed them to change it. However, it was more likely a change in viewership that would cause them to revert it back. I know my viewing habits definitely changed, I found myself spending more time looking through the thumbnails and then giving up to go watch content on other platforms.
4.51.08/web_20251117_11_RC00
It’s not a revert, merely A/B testing to see which version leads to more “engagement”.
They’re also testing the same on the web, half the time I get the normal sidebar, half the time I get a 300% zoomed one where I can only see like 3 video thumbnails before having to scroll (jokes on them, I don’t - but then again I block ads so I don’t count either way).
If it happens to me again, I will have to find my content elsewhere. It's not even a conscious decision, I just got genuinely fatigued from the experience.
On the bright side, maybe I'd be better off. There are probably better things I could be doing with my time.
How do you submit feedback?
Whoever made automatic AI dubs a default and impossible to disable also needs to be fired
That "feature" is so egregiously bad. I regularly consume content in three languages, and hearing the wrong language coming from my speakers is so jarring. It is a uniquely awful experience that I had never encountered before, nor even imagined.
While we’re at it can we also fire the guy who made it that we now have to click the channel’s mini thumbnail to open it, EXCEPT, when the channel is live and clicking the thumbnail takes you to the live video where you have to click the thumbnail again.
In the meantime "YouTube No Translation" addon fixes the issue. https://youtube-no-translation.vercel.app/
They could at least try to vaguely match the voice and maybe cadence of the original. AFAIU it's one of these things that would have been too hard ten years ago but is fairly easy now. Too computationally expensive probably.
Yeah ElevenLabs had this over a year ago where you could just upload a 30 second clip of someone's voice in another language and hear what it was like in English and it worked really well.
I agree. But for the benefit of other people struggling, I haven't found a way to disable them as a user setting, but you can at least turn them off on a per-video basis by changing the video language in the playback settings (the little gear icon).
There's no little great in embedded videos or, at least, my local newspaper actively disables it.
This is not always available for some reason
Googlers are obviously mentally challenged by the concept that there might be anybody in the world who has learned English as a second language.
Bet the idea to force outdated TTS whose robotic droning that is the pinnacle of annoyance on every single user who speaks more than one language was worth a nice bonus.
ReVanced allows disabling them, and there are extensions for Browsers.
I was playing a game with a friend and the chat was increasingly full of angry people complaining about cheaters easily obtaining very hard to get items. He asked what I thought about it....
Well, the game is clearly very important to these people, it is increasingly visible. They are clearly very emotionally engaged. I'd say things are going really well!
Youtube was once a miraculous technical website running circles around Google video. I'm told they used a secret technology called python. Eventually Google threw the towel and didn't want to compete anymore. They were basically on the ground in a pool of bodily liquids then the referee counted all the way to 1.65 billion.
Some time went by and now you can just slap a <video> tag on a html document and call it a day. Your website will run similar circles around the new google video only much much faster.
The only problem is that [even] developers forgot <s>how</s> why to make HTML websites. I'm sure someone remembers the anchor tag and among those some even remember that you can put full paths inthere that point at other website that could [in theory] also have videos on them (if they knew <s>how</s> why)
If this was my homepage I would definitely add a picture of Dark Helmet.
https://www.rickmoranis.com
Looks like he also forgot <s>how</s> why.
"Whoever made automatic AI dubs a default"
well thats the thing, people is so lazy and dumb that whetever new feature is available, they didnt bother to find or turn on that shit
this is the power of "default", you cant test something is working on hyperscale if you didnt make it default like youtube does
Hold on, there is a setting to switch to original audio. Just click the cog wheel on the video.
The outrage over this seems completely overblown. Do people not see the setting to switch audio?
Is there a setting to disable it globally or has every video to be switched?
Not on web mobile frontend
The setting does not persist, not even within the same session.
Often times there is no setting to disable this
You know who has great information density? Pornhub. If you open Pornhub on a 4K screen, you will absolutely see none of the thumbnails. I think YouTube is overdoing it, but it is really a thing of: people are either using really small screens or 1080p. 4K is still not around much.
Because unlike YouTube, porn is an actually competitive industry with plenty of “tube” sites to choose from. So they have to compete on UX.
There's an old adage that if you follow the tech that porn adopts, you'll generally be ahead the average consumer curve.
I think there's another version that if porn adopts a tech that means that the tech will work. Like, a lot of VR adoption early on was porn. By a lot, I mean most.
Google "Ethical Capital Partners."
Operates:
Pornhub
RedTube
YouPorn
Brazzers
Digital Playground Men.com
Reality Kings
SpankWire
Very US centric take here. Ya know there are other countries, languages, etc out there, right?
Not sure what this comment is getting at. Those may be the collection of sites owned by a single company, but there are still -oceans- of porn of every conceivable niche, on hundreds of thousands of sites, some still bigger than those. Whereas there’s pretty much a single, monopolized provider for mainstream video: youtube. And a porn conglomerate is the problem? GP is still correct, there’s still real competition in the space, unlike youtube.
Yes. 1080p screen density is still so popular. Looking around new laptops it's still the bulk in Windows land, including OLED and ultra high refresh rate monitors. Same for TVs.
Even on macs many are using scaling factors that render close to 1080p.
The issue really would be why YouTube can't bother managing more layouts. It still blows my mind there's only one single YouTube experience per platform, when their viewership basically span the world's population.
They just need to fix search..
What's the polymarket on NO videos on the homepage AND THREE ads?
Funnily porn sites do 100x better UX than Youtube. Both on web and mobile. Probably because there is no monopoly but actual competition among them.
Yes, Manwin competes with Mindgeek competes with Aylo competes with Ethical Capital Partners.
Actually - BOTH videos in the screenshot are ads - so there are zero videos on the homescreen already
I don't think so? The "I Skied Down Mount Everest" is from the Red Bull channel. It may be a commercial channel, but it's not an ad, i.e. they didn't pay for placement (doesn't say "Sponsored" like the other one).
and they are often good videos (if you like watching extreme sports related things), given the partial second video this seems likely for the account who made the screenshot
but given that half a video is not a full video this still means we are at one single full video
and an AD which is deceptively pretending to be a video
I still think regulators should ban deceptive ads and require ads to to clearly different from the main content _on the first take/glance_. They way YT, Google and co handle ads is IMHO deceptive to a point its reasonable to say they try to deceive the user into clicking on the ad when they wouldn't have done so if they new it was an ad.
And "systematically deceiving a user/customer to their detriment (wasting time) and your profit" isn't just shitty but on a gray line to outright fraud.
I dont particularly enjoy red bulls drinks, but their ads are often cool enough to be considered content.
It's probably the only company with ads that are more enjoyable than their product.
I used to think they were a foundation dedicated to funding extreme sports who also happened to sell an energy drink as well.
Their business is basically selling poison but creating such absurd quantities of great free entertainment that everyone forgives them.
I mean, in terms of getting your caffeine, Redbull is basically the least poison in the game. It's not even a lot of caffeine and doesn't contain a lot of the other shit that stuff like Monsters contain.
Like really, checkout the redbull ingredient list sometime. There's not much to it.
Not saying it's healthy at all. Nobody should really be drinking energy drinks, but Redbull is probably the least awful of the bunch.
Technically correct, the best kind of correct
Forget the METR curve, this is the real deviation-from-linear-forecast we need to be worried about in 2025.
Ahh, I thought this was just happening to me. I used to watch a fair bit of YT on my PS4, but a few months ago my home screen was basically empty save a few ad videos.
It was pushing me heavily to sign in; which I do _not_ want to do.
End result was I just stopped watching YT.
On desktop, press command/ctrl and minus to zoom out and increase the home page's density. It will make text on watch page harder to read, but with theatre mode, the video playback size should be unaffected.
I already have 0 videos on youtube home screen, some combination of not being logged in, firefox privacy settings and ad blocker causes youtube to post a passive aggressive message and a search bar. I kinda like that Ui.
They’re catching up with the recommendation technology China had 5 years ago.
#shorts
Was just talking with my son about how some YouTubers who made short videos long ago started making longer and less succinct videos because they thought the algorithm favored long videos and then TikTok happens.
To YouTube's credit, at least the remaining videos aren't vertical.
Not for long: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45872870
That's not even the main problem. Youtube is basically unwatchable with all the ads. Maybe it's just me but it often feels like it's badly broken. I found skipvids a while back. I find the videos on YT and watch them there. I don't watch yt often so that's the path of least resistance for me.
Satire is dead
> Unfortunately the YouTube PM org’s myopia is accelerating: with this data I now project that there will be zero videos on the homescreen around May of 2026 now, up from September.
There are already zero videos if you visit with no youtube history. That seems... fine?
YouTube has become so bad that I had to resort to Tampermonkey scripts to become bearable.
First was the disgusting pink tones in the progress bar. Then the oversized thumbnails / less videos per page. Then the horrible over sized player controls. And now the oversized suggestions on the side bar.
Not to mention the obnoxious amount and duration of ads.
It's getting worse and worse.
These are all symptoms that something is very wrong.
Not really related but... have anyone else noticed that suggestions on the home page became much worse recently? I'm getting a lot of unrelated videos which are often very old, like published up to 18 years ago. OTOH, videos from subscriptions are not getting suggested, I often have to check individual channels to see if they posted anything new. What's happening?
Use the subscriptions page for the channels you follow. I use Unhooked to make it my home page.
i feel like modern youtube just does not scratch the itch that youtube once scratched , it now feels like methadone replacement therapy. available viewing options have been reduced to either short form content or long form content , there is nothing between. i dont enjoy frying my brain with short form content and i dont have the attention span to watch bloviation with the express intent of stretching out video times to maximise revenue. honestly i feel like this applies to the internet as a whole , a facsimile of its former self being puppeted to achieve control. someone probably predicted this , right ?
also if you watch 1 single video about a topic, the next day your feed will be full of that
I usually don't mind that. Sometimes I'm looking in to a new product or hobby and really do want to see a whole bunch of that content. They also provide you a feed which purely contains channels you subscribe to, though I find it much lower quality than the normal feed.
Turning search history off on youtube about a year ago has been one of my best personal "digital life upgrades" in a while.
I did that and now it shows only polarizing videos on the right from both ends.
Oh, mine shows no recommendations at all. Just a blank home screen.
So I basically either watch my curated subscriptions or something I specifically searched for.
You can use ublock origin browser extension per-site CSS rules to restore an arbitrary number of rows and columns to the youtube frontpage. https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube is a good source for these if you don't know how to write them or don't want to.
But also, yikes.Neuralink was mentioned, and it immediately made me remember the sad stories of the rhesus macaques that were used as Neuralink animal test subjects for brain implants. The quality of the work was poor and they were able to pull the implants out and then the implants got loose, causing bacterial and fungal infections and swelling and the macaques had to be euthanized. But not before banging their heads against everything, picking on the holes in their skulls and going insane as their brains got increasingly infected. Reading that kind of disgusting inhumane crap makes me ashamed of being a member of the same species.
If you want to read more the search keywords are: "Animal 20" "Neuralink"
> Animal 20 was seen "pulling on port connector which is now dislodged (no longer secured)". The next day, Animal 20 was "picking at incision and occasionally pulling on implant". Soon, infections developed. On Dec. 20, UC Davis staff found antibiotic resistant E. coli and Candida glabrata, a fungal infection, at the surgical site. They discussed a "necropsy next week", meaning they planned to euthanize Animal 20.
Fucking cowards.
What? There's obviously 1.25 non-ad videos on the home screen, which might as well be two, so they're right on schedule! /s
> maybe our mandatory NeuraLinks are coming sooner than I thought.
The founder of NeuraLink has recently proposed to deploy sentient robots to watch criminals, removing the need for incarceration. There is a lot of synergy possible here with mandatory neural links. The bot could not only watch us but also press our buttons. "Criminal", being such a flexible concept, should pose little problem to globalizing this paradigm. For one thing, it will make it possible to harvest any number of clicks necessary, so advertising becomes obsolete, and so does content.
God, I hope I'm not a prophet.
> sentient robots to watch criminals, removing the need for incarceration
These are slap drones [1] from Banks’s The Player of Games [2].
[1] https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Slap-drone
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games
> it will make it possible to harvest any number of clicks necessary, so advertising becomes unnecessary and obsolete
But then again, this is already possible, and has the advertising industry shit-scared, thus all the interest in blocking AI-related scrapers since they circumvent the whole “wasting human time” element.
Ah yes, the Culture solution (https://groups.google.com/g/alt.books.iain-banks/c/nbW7GxRQ6...). (Always seemed rather cruel to the drone, to me.)
There are lots of proposals. Recently, he retweeted a pundit who said that murderers should be hanged and that Europe achieved its level of civilization by executing 1-2% of its population for eugenic purposes:
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1992599328897294496#m
I can see this mandatory in a country like north korea where government would gladly use this tech to control citizens from defecting etc
but after recent EU balooney request like chat control etc, I cant be so sure anymore
What's the point being made in this article?
That TVs have lower information density than desktop browsers? Like, yeah, obviously.
That if you don't sign in to YouTube and don't pay to remove the ads, that you'll get prompted to sign in and you'll see ads? That doesn't seem particularly problematic.
Sure it's mildly funny that a funny projection is true in a very contrived way, but it doesn't really stand up to any criticism. I use YouTube almost exclusively through the Apple TV app, and it's fine, I'd even say it has improved a little over the last few years. I like the low information density because I sit approximately 3m from the screen and navigate with a TV remote.
Unfortunately I don't have pictures from before this change, but you used to get 5-6 videos I believe. Now you get two (and maybe one is an ad).
The point is that I made a joke projection in my last post in April that by next May there would be only one video on the homepage, because obviously that would be ridiculous, right? Then I turned on my TV and it happened.
See the previous blog post: https://jayd.ml/2025/04/30/someone-at-youtube-needs-glasses....
On my Apple TV I get 2.5 thumbnails per row and 2 rows. I honestly think that's appropriate for a TV interface and I basically like the UI. I find YouTube's Apple TV app to be the least clunky of all the carousel-of-videos apps that I use.
> Sure it's mildly funny that a funny projection is true in a very contrived way
I think you got it -- that's the point right there, nothing more...
Compare the 1.25 video thumbnails shown on the apple tv app to the thumbnails on Steam's big picture mode (designed for people sitting on a couch far away from a tv):
1. https://emilio-gomez.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/steamos-...
2. https://preview.redd.it/new-big-picture-mode-is-finally-publ...