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jerf
aequitas
Sound like they implemented Vetinari’s clock from Discworld. That’s a waiting room clock that would slow down and speed up the seconds hand (and also the ticks and tocks) but the minute and hour hands would run on time. This was to make the waiting person extra nervous before their meeting with the patrician. He is by far my most favorite characters in the books.
rzzzt
There's also this physical clock mod that runs the mechanism a bit faster before lunchtime, then slows it down again so displayed time eventually lines up with real time: https://hackaday.com/2011/01/18/the-lunchtime-clock-gives-yo...
wizzard
Yes, on my smart TV app it's so slow and glitchy that the 5-second ad preview often plays for 10+ seconds before the "Skip Ad" button finally appears. Add to that the 5-7 seconds of black screen before the ad starts playing and the 2-3 seconds to resume my video, and it's a major annoyance during workouts and such.
SteveMoody73
On an old TV I have it can take at least 5 seconds before it starts counting down. I've just assumed it was a badly maintained app. Have 3 smart Tvs and YouTube seems to behave different on all of them. May have to look into it.
rolandog
A suspicious person would think they're billing by the actual seconds and dividing the total amount of actual seconds by the budgeted seconds in the ad to bump up the ad impressions.
But I'm not that guy.
MonkeyClub
> But I'm not that guy.
Yep, that was jerf :-P
jrootabega
I've seen it skip a second (e.g. go straight from 3 to 1) roughly as much as I've seen it do the opposite. I don't suspect foul play but I understand why someone would.
jerf
I've seen that too. Mostly I suspect foul play just because it's so damned obvious what the problem is, and there's a hack fix that's pretty easy (run the thing that updates the number every .1 seconds instead of every second). Not that the correct fixes are that hard, or that likely to have interactions with other things... on a technical level, anyhow.
If it is incompetence, it's a rather shocking amount of it in a very important part of the app that has a bajillion metrics tied to it. I can't say this is impossible. But I can't call it the most likely outcome.
Note that this particular behavior will never let you stop the ad early. It can only extend the amount of time it will play, by scheduling the thing that finally lets you in only when the current time is greater than or equal to the 5 seconds it is supposed to play. Jumping from 3 to 1 doesn't mean you skipped a second, it means the 3 wasn't moved to 2 at the correct time.
ghoomketu
People complain a lot about Youtube ads and how awful they are but as a thought experiment I once tried to imagine the amount of storage and bandwidth Youtube must need everyday to operate.
So after some basic research it looks like they need to add almost 1 petabytes of storage and I couldn't find much info on the bandwidth and servers it uses.
As much as I don't like Google for their shady business practices, I couldn't help but marvel at this feat of engineering. It's mind blowing tbh.
I mean I can still access my video with 10 views I uploaded 8 years ago.. can't do that on my HDD and they have it in 5 formats.
shantnutiwari
>People complain a lot about Youtube ads and how awful they are but as a thought experiment I once tried to imagine the amount of storage and bandwidth Youtube must need everyday to operate.
There was a post here about how Vimeo is charging people $300+/month for their videos-- and someone did the math to show thats just the hosting/bandwidth costs. For one creator.
Youtube has millions of videos-- Im surprised their costs aren't higher. Im grateful they provide this service for free at all
gonzo41
I often feel that the 90's child me would slap me across the face in disgust at how casually I take for granted the age of magic we live in now.
pc86
I distinctly remember waiting an appreciable amount of time to download a single Metallica mp3 on dialup as a middle schooler - maybe 20, 25 minutes? for a ~3 minute song - and a 2GB Linux distro took me like 30 seconds a few weeks ago.
I'm simultaneously hopeful for what we'll be doing 20, 30 years from now, but also worried that the rate of progress is slowing (because I am by definition comparing now to the very very early days of the modern internet).
cecilpl2
I used to download full video game soundtracks. It would take me all night to download a single album, and I'd have been disconnected from the internet when I woke up in the morning because my ISP wouldn't support a connection length longer than 8 hours.
We couldn't even stream music, let alone stream video.
83
We had a second phone line for dial up internet - I remember spending three weeks downloading a copy of Age of Empires (roughly 250mb), praying it wouldn't be corrupt or a bad file. It downloaded successfully, but to my dismay it was the expansion. Took me another month to get the actual game to download, at least at that point I had the expansion as well :)
saynay
This hit me hard a bit ago. I had hiked for an hour or so to the middle of a forest, pulled out my phone and was viewing a crystal clear live stream made by a random person on the other side of the planet, in higher quality than any movie I could have seen as a child, and it was free for both of us and needed no special equipment.
edgyquant
I feel the term “no special equipment” is doing a lot of heavy lifting considering how much special equipment there is in a single smartphone.
InitialLastName
> it was free for both of us
Where did you get this free cell phone and data plan?
r00fus
We had books in the pre-internet era warning us of the corporate dystopia we potentially faced. Well, we're here. Massive benefits, but all control by massive multi-trillion dollar megacorps - easily corrupted.
It's like that scene in Spirited Away where Chihiro's parents start "pigging out".
lbriner
I do wonder whether another approach would be starting to delete old videos with not many clicks unless you pay. This would seem to reduce storage bandwidth but I suppose they still have to support the insane amount of uploads!
Another thing would be if you upload stupid crap that no-one wants to watch, you get banned or sent a nasty letter or something...I don't know, I don't work in customer retention ;-)
dylan604
>I do wonder whether another approach would be starting to delete old videos with not many clicks unless you pay
You click to view a video like this, but instead receive a message that states, please return in up to 2 hours while we fetch this content from cold storage.
It'll help ensure you don't ever need to retrieve that content, the content is technically still available, but as the host you can start to whittle down online storage needs.
Edit: Or, you can have the viewer pay for the rush to retrieve the content from cold storage with a viewer-pays model
scarface74
Storage is cheap at scale. Bandwidth isn’t.
iforgotpassword
But is it at YouTube scale? I just tried it, I can click 10 years old videos with ~10 views and it starts playing after 3 seconds. How does that work? How can you have ever video ever uploaded on hot storage? What kind of storage are they using? Flash is probably too expensive, even if it has higher density than spinning disks by today. So was that video on a spinning disk? Then it also didn't seem to have been some spun down disk, because it should have taken more than three seconds then. It just boggles my mind that every video ever uploaded to YouTube is ready to be accessed instantly. You think anything that hasn't been accessed in a few years should be tugged away on some tape somewhere and needs a minute or two to start playing
paulpauper
google and YouTube generate insane profits. they could show fewer ads and it would not impair the functionality of YouTube
ufmace
If they're really generating "insane profits", how do I invest in them and get myself a chunk of those "insane profits"?
Retric
Get a time machine. Those profits are already baked into the stock price.
pc86
Google might. But does YouTube? Should other Google properties subsidize YouTube if it doesn't generate "insane profits" by whatever metric you're using that word?
edgyquant
YouTube is the largest social media site (or at least was a couple of years ago.) Google gets a lot more value than just cash out of it, otherwise they’d have shut it down.
elzbardico
Who gets to decide what is an "insane" profit? You?
paulpauper
Re-read the post. They could afford to run fewer ads. Right now, google is optimizing for profits at the possible cost of user experience, which may hurt google long-term. It's their right to do that, but I think it's a poor idea in the long term.
BaseballPhysics
Given that Alphabet still refuses to release profit numbers for Youtube, right now, no one but Alphabet.
And given the context of this conversation is about ads, dark patterns, and more broadly, privacy, I think it's perfectly reasonable that we have that conversation.
ASalazarMX
The Market(TM)
Teever
Regulators.
And since the US seems to have abrogated those responsibilities they are falling to the EU.
qbrass
You've certainly made a case for watching ads while uploading video.
sixothree
This kind of thinking is really disappointing to me. It's the same mindset that caused so many people to migrate to GMail in the first place.
When GMail was introduced, google was offering a gigabyte of storage when most providers were offering a 1/10th or less of that. Many people gladly gave up access to the contents of their email in exchange for something that seemed at the time to be technologically impressive.
As of today a few gigabytes of email storage seems fairly trivial. But we still gave up a lot to enjoy that privilege.
Trust me, in 10 years this impressive amount of data will be less impressive to you.
scarface74
And all reports are that YouTube is still barely break even…
q-big
> And all reports are that YouTube is still barely break even…
A company can often tweak business metrics to give the message that the company wants the world to believe.
scarface74
So why would a company want to “tweak” metrics showing a business unit that’s over a decade old not making any money?
akhmatova
"I marvel at this feat of engineering, but Google's shady business practices creep me out" is how I would put it.
dec0dedab0de
I think the biggest dark pattern is allowing skipable ads to be long. Sometimes over an hour. I spent some time in the hospital not too long ago, and it was physically painful for me to move enough to skip an ad. I would have been fine watching 30-60 second ads without skipping, but they just put infomercials in the middle of the video you're watching. it is outrageous.
user_7832
I once got one of those Apple events (I think the second-last hardware event) as an ad. Like, the whole 2 hours plus event, as a youtube ad. I still don't know what to make of it and cannot fathom why someone would spend money for that.
gniv
My theory is that showing those ads is a bit of a check: "Are you still there or just letting it play unattended to make money for your favorite creator?"
solarkraft
Also annoying when you're doing something else while just listening. Then again there are some videos that are interesting enough for me to watch for a few minutes, but that makes it extra terrible that you can't scrub.
On the flip side I always chuckle when a text-only (with crappy music) ad comes on.
josteink
And you never once considered going premium to remove the ads?
Surely someone must have been able to help you out with that if you couldn’t do it yourself?
The answer exists, it’s right there with buttons for clicking given to you by Google, but people here on HN so often seem so entirely blindsided and insist there’s no such thing as ad-free Youtube.
What gives? I just don't get it.
gaius_baltar
YT Premium only makes the problem worse by still allowing native ads and requiring you to log in using an account that is tied to your real world identity (for payment processing). You just end up giving more data points to Google to track and don't get rid of all ads.
scarface74
So you don’t want to see ads and you don’t want to pay not to see ads? What business model should Google use for YouTube?
But you can always use a prepaid debit card.
sophacles
Ad-free youtube doesn't get rid of "paid content" in videos. "paid content" is just ads. So if you pay for youtube premium you get rid of some ads, not all the ads.
delecti
That's clearly a different kind of thing though. Sponsored content in videos is just stuff you don't like, but it's still the video you clicked on. Youtube injected ads on top of the video is not the content you clicked on. Youtube premium unambiguously solves the problem that the top-level comment was complaining about (mid-roll ads that can be a half-hour or longer), you're just moving the goal posts.
dec0dedab0de
But I don't mind most of the ads. To be honest, I actually like quite a few of them. It's just the ones that are longer than the content I'm watching that really get to me.
signal11
> And you never once considered going premium to remove the ads?
I’m pretty much “no” on paying for a product that encourages clickbait and misinformation. This isn’t a uniform “no Google” thing, I use GCP, but paying for YouTube just seems icky.
If it can’t survive as a business (or become so ad-heavy that it’s a UX nightmare), hey maybe there’ll be new opportunities for others. Vimeo, maybe Twitter, with Musk’s new zeal for making orgs pay for Twitter?
UX nightmares always get competition. Altavista, Experts Exchange, Skype/WebEx… all faced nimbler competitors. I don’t see YouTube being an exception.
WorldMaker
delecti
I signed up for Premium before the situation got as bad as it currently is. The worst ads I had seen by that point were either 5-30 second unskippable, or 15-120 second skippable. Even at that point, signing up for Premium felt like a fantastic deal. I never felt gaslight or manipulated into it, it just felt like paying an acceptable price for a very attractive set of features. It feels like you have a counterproductive set of principles if they keep you from paying a reasonable price for a good set of features. Premium also gives a much bigger chunk of money to creators, which makes the situation seem even better to me.
blindseer
The ads are genuinely one of my most frustrating experiences when using the Chromecast with Google TV. And seeing this kind of pattern makes it more likely that I’ll never sign up for premium YouTube (whatever it is called) and just use YouTube less.
Also, I swear they do this - If you click on the try YouTube premium for 14 days, once the 14 days end you are bombarded with extra ads. And ads that are usually not skippable. I also remember getting multiple 60 min ads. I don’t remember any of these ads but I do remember how frustrating my experience with YouTube was and still is. But I’m also the kind of person that is still surprised that advertising works.
If only I could use my raspberry pi to block all YouTube ads at home. My life would be immensely better.
boardwaalk
For all the kvetching about ads I see regarding YouTube, most people really could just pay Google and make it go away. I mean, I don’t like paying for things either, but it’s not worth the headache of ad blockers (which aren’t available on every device) and philosophically, I would rather the internet get away from ads everywhere and I’ll help that happen if I can.
It helps that $10 is worth the many hours of use I get every month from YouTube & YouTube Music too.
devnulll
I am a huge fan of YouTube Premium. Youtube has become the de-facto video platform in our household, having totally displaced traditional shows.
To pay $10 per month to have unlimited content w/o ads is perfect. I don't understand the pushback.
edgyquant
The pushback is because all of the shows I want to watch are still half ads. The content creators insert them, surely they have a rational reason, but I’m not interested in the economics if I pay for ad free I want ad free. I would pay quite a bit more than 10$ for this, but the option just isn’t there.
LukeShu
I have no problem paying for things. I like paying for things.
Well, I like paying for value to be delivered. I don't like paying for "stop messing with me."
The path from gratis to paid to paid-at-a-higher-tier should be "yeah, I like this, I want more of it, and I'm willing to pay for it". YouTube would have to have a lot fewer dark patterns for me to say "yeah, I want more of this".
aantix
Youtube Premium is a quality of life upgrade.
It's amazing what a difference it makes when you don't have to go through the tension of battling ads for every three minute video you'd like to watch.
You're free to consume videos at the speed for which you're thinking of ideas/questions.
edgyquant
I just run an adblocker
sophacles
Cable tv was originally ad-free because you paid for the content instead. Now you pay and get more ads than network tv instead!
Premium channels were ad-free longer, because you the content producers didn't have to share the fees based on (estimates) of how much the channel was watched.
Lots of ad-free services really mean "no ads except bumpers since you must like ads just not in the middle of the show".
Why would anyone be stupid enough to trust google to keep the "ad free" experience ad free?
frostmatthew
> Why would anyone be stupid enough to trust google to keep the "ad free" experience ad free?
One can cancel their YouTube Premium subscription at any time for any reason, including and especially if it is no longer delivering an ad-free experience. In the meantime I'm quite happy paying $10 a month (annual plan) to never see ads.
scarface74
Cable TV has never been as free. It was first a method to deliver broadcast channels to areas without a good signal and then you had the “Superstations” like TBS and WGN that also had ads.
The only channels that were ever ad free were the premium channels that are still ad free.
graftak
YouTube premium is just too expensive because they bundle it with music and you need a paid account for each user (unlike other ‘streaming/vod’ services).
For a family of two it’s either two times €6.99 or a €17.99 family account. That’s more expensive than Netflix, who besides stream their content also have to produce/lease it.
alias_neo
There are a couple of videos of some really chill music sessions posted by the artists that I used to put on every morning when my daughter was born.
I've seen the same few vids hundreds of times and I know, like I know the sky is blue and water is wet that they had no ads.
Couple years later, my son is born and that morning peace time comes for me to put on a vid or two, next thing I know, a couple of ads bang in the middle of the video. So jarring I can't explain how pissed I was, I got straight to rooting my TV and blocking ads.
The interesting part for me is that a YouTube premium trial Google had pushed on me ended just days prior.
tpoacher
the worst thing about ads in the middle of relaxing music is that they are typically loud and obnoxious, instantly destroying within milliseconds any mood/relaxation benefits accrued over the preceding few hours.
it's as if a frat party suddenly bombs your meditation group, trashes the place in 5 seconds, then leaves
alias_neo
Yep. I don't really see ads much these days, I don't watch live TV or listen to radio because I use Netflix, Prime, Disney and NOW for TV and Spotify for music, so when it happens it really drags me out of whatever peaceful or immersed state I got to.
tomjen3
Once it became possible to force people to pay attention to ads (compared to a newspaper where you can skip ahead and look at what you want) the quality went into the toilet.
It doesn't help that most of the products they advertise are terrible, overpriced or both and even their skipable ads aren't skipable until it has already destroyed the experience of the video you were watching. Premium is not an option because I don't use youtube logged in.
If it wasn't for my adblocker I wouldn't be spending so much time on youtube.
runarberg
If you are in the USA, I think it is illegal to play ads at a louder volume then the surrounding content. You can file an FCC complaint if you see that.
CraigJPerry
https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock works on an nvidia Shield via "SmartTube Next" - i don't know if you can install or sideload that on GoogleTV.
There's clients for many other platforms, even traditionally locked down ones like iOS Safari etc.
phh
FYI, several alternative youtube frontend apps are available for "Chromecast with Google TV" (which is just an Android TV device), for instance the opensource Newpipe. (Though this is piracy, and you shouldn't do piracy, because piracy hurts Google and content creators - who will gladly take donations -)
branon
Accessing a publicly-available website using your preferred frontend application (NewPipe) is absolutely NOT piracy. Consider disregarding the future advice of whoever told you this. I believe this is a dangerous and misleading line of thinking.
phh
Fun, I thought my sentence would trigger the pro-ad people, not the other side.
I don't think there is any legal definition of "piracy" (except for ships). My own definition of piracy is "accessing content without paying the official fee". Here "official fee" is the ad. Also, it can be seen as equivalent to DDoS, since you are voluntarily using Google's cloud resources while breaching their EULA.
Personally, when using newpipe, I do feel like I'm stealing unrightfully bandwidth from Google, though the price for that bandwidth is definitely not worth a tenth of the ads Google show me.
JulianWasTaken
For Android TV, there's even the even nicer https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext which integrates SponsorBlock.
NoraCodes
That is not piracy.
gadrev
But you can't "cast" from Newpipe (you'd have cast the phone's screen and play stuff in Newpipe in your phone). Which anyways is what I do when I start getting too many ads (typically I just shutdown the TV and try to time turning it back on so the ad is finishing. it's something of a mini-game).
EDIT: I'm referring to the original chromecast, not the new "Chromecast with Google TV"
tomatotomato37
If you get some type of streaming box with an open version of Android TV you can just run Newpipe on the box. The most capable one is the Nvidia shield but for just running a YouTube client there are probably cheaper ones you can get off Alibaba or similar.
JulianWasTaken
You can use the regular YouTube app from your phone purely as a remote, and cast from it to SmartTubeNext on your TV.
IE6
FWIW I just gave up and bought youtube premium and I never see ads ever again on my chromecast. Unfortunately because the domain ads are served off of is a youtube domain something like a pihole (which I am also running) doesn't help. One idea I had was to run a chromebox instead cause that allows for browser based adblock plugins but paying the monthly fee was easier (for now).
zerocrates
What's the frustration specifically? My experience on Chromecast is that they actually seem to show fewer ads there than on a browser.
Edit: or is maybe the issue here the mere presence of ads versus them being blocked in a browser?
rwc
Alternate theory: A large-scale, ongoing A/B test on what gets the perfect balance between watching ads and keeping total view time high.
TAKEMYMONEY
The multivariate test is trying to increase ad clicks, and the result is a poor UX. That's not exactly an alternate theory.
Is it a dark pattern? That's not the first term I'd use to describe it, but perhaps it falls under "Misdirection" mentioned at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.07032.pdf (page 12).
BitwiseFool
I don't think it is a 'perfect balance' so much as trying to maximize the number and length of advertisements that people will tolerate at this point in time. The nature of the business model is that some product manager will be tasked with getting the advertisement revenue higher at some point in the future and they will no doubt try to push the envelope. I also feel like 'total view time' is a metric that is in service to advertisements and not the primary goal itself.
Havoc
>Alternate theory: A large-scale, ongoing A/B test
Except "ongoing A/B test" isn't really a thing. The whole point of A/B is to identify and discard the worse of the two. Especially on google scale and this being applied to everyone you'd expect the data to point one way or the other really fast.
This is just straight up dark pattern.
TAKEMYMONEY
Ongoing multivariate testing is certainly a thing, especially in high volume e-commerce, and especially on ad company's advertising-related UI. You're correct, winners are chosen and rolled out (to the majority) but then new tests are created against that winner, and that's an oversimplification.
nevir
This seems so much more likely
savanaly
Agreed. Unfortunately when it comes to ads (which I also hate! I have adblockers installed, subscribe to premium services like Youtube premium when it makes sense...) HN commenters take leave of their wits and just start posting conspiracy theories, hysterical criticism, or if you're lucky balanced sensible criticism that nevertheless doesn't make sense in the context of the article and is just an instance of preaching to the choir.
noobermin
Recently, I've been with people who unlike me don't have youtube premium and I loathe the ads. I'm so happy I pay for premium so I don't have to experience this.
I want to say "subscription is the right answer" but it clearly isn't enough for some people (netflix).
kmmlng
The YouTube subscription just seems excessively expensive. I find it hard to fathom they would generate anywhere near as much revenue from me watching their ads compared to the subscription cost.
sbradford26
So I agree for just YouTube it would be excessive. But they do combo it with youtube music which makes it a slightly better deal. Also personally they have the best family plan since it allows 6 accounts total and doesn't require to be "Under the same roof" like spotify. But I agree I probably wouldn't find the full price outside of the family plan worth it.
ASalazarMX
Last time I tried YouTube music, it was an underwhelming experience. I expected it to show only official videos, but it showed any random video with music. It substituted Google Play Music, where you could have a curated library and your own uploads, with random music videos.
rocqua
I found a youtube premium-lite option.
It removes adds, but does not allow background play and a few other perks. But it only costs 6 euros.
I found it a better deal than premium so I downgraded.
hundchenkatze
This would be great, exactly what I need. But they don't seem to offer it everywhere. I get the message "This offer is not available" when I go to https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite
r00fus
I honestly would prefer a premium-lite. I don't use YT as an audio source so background tab audio is annoying (even more on mobile - stopping my phone doesn't stop the video). Really want premium-lite for family sub :D
nemacol
The main reason I don't want to pay is it cannot remove the ads the content creators put in themselves.
I could see paying if it was a totally clean experience but to pay and get rid of part/half of the ads I would see does not seem worth it to me.
martin_a
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On the topic: Same goes for me, "ad-free" YT is not really ad-free, only a little less "infested".
tux1968
Ignoring the ethical debate, the "SponsorBlock" browser plugin can help to avoid native advertising inside videos. When in use, sections marked as ads or other filler content are automatically skipped. It is crowdsourced, so you can mark up a video yourself and contribute it, if the ads haven't already been marked by someone else.
yrral
You can use sponsorblock to automatically skip a variety of creator-inserted ads and interaction reminders ("please subscribe/like" etc).
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
jrootabega
Even setting aside the explicit ads, there's also the fact that the vast majority of YouTube content has been diluted and corrupted to be a vehicle for YouTube ads.
cpeterso
For example, I read that so many YouTube videos are stretched out to ten minutes because that's the minimum duration to get two ads on your videos.
ghaewrhaerga
Why do you just not use ublock origin?
martius
Because it only works on a browser, people also experience youtube on other devices (smart TV, chromecast, App on a non-rooted phone).
m0ngr31
NewPipe + Sponsorblock from FDroid and SmartTubeNext for Android TV
kuu
I cannot install it on my Smart TV
mritun
What is dark about the design pattern? They have an ad-free YT that anyone can pay to subscribe.
Is it considered dark because they want the users to subscribe to paid version?
I think labelling everything “dark pattern” just makes the term lose its meaning and it actually helps the real dark patterns go scot free
theginger
I thought that until I got most of the way through the article. It is a long winded explanation that eventually gets to its point that the skip button can appear in various formats making it a tiny bit slower to recognise and use. Without a reasonable explanation to why it needs to change it seems like dark pattern is fair.
svachalek
Dark patterns are basically brain hacking, hacking someone else's brain to benefit yourself. This looks like some kind of massive A/B test to eke out a small percentage margin on advertising.
I'd give it a few dark points for that but imo advertising itself is the dark lord of dark patterns: not only is it a brain hack, not only has it hacked all the way into social acceptability, but it is the darkness from which so many other dark patterns spawn and spring forth to bring revenue to their master.
shantnutiwari
> What is dark about the design pattern? They have an ad-free YT that anyone can pay to subscribe.
Yeah, the old "We want everything for free, and will complain if you spy on us or show us ads along the way"
alphakappa
Google products have been incorporating a frustrating amount of dark patterns. In gmail for example, if you load one of the smart inbox tabs, it shows the rows of unread emails at the top. Right when you attempt to click on the top row, it rearranges the rows to show a few rows of ads instead (and the ads are fairly indistinguishable from the unread emails) so you end up unintentionally opening an ad.
Now, there’s no good reason for this loading pattern - since they intend to show the ads, they could have allocated a few rows, shown a loading skeleton, and then asynchronously loaded ads and emails in their expected place. Instead they now get a ton of extra ad clicks, but I wonder how happy their advertisers are to pay for these unintended clicks.
mark_l_watson
Wait, I am curious: you see ads on GMail? I haven’t seen ads in many years. What email client do you use? web app, phone app?
tristan957
I can't recall seeing ads on the Android app, but there are definitely ads in the web client. The ads must do a very good job of disguising themselves if you haven't noticed them. I have moved most of my email to ProtonMail. So much nicer paying for that from a company that respects me rather than using a free product from a company who has no other purpose than to drive ad revenue.
travv0
I also haven't seen an ad on the Gmail web client in years. Maybe because I pay for extra storage through Google One?
Edit: It looks like it doesn't happen in the primary tab and I have all the other tabs disabled which would explain it.
sjroot
I’ve never seen ads. I believe the difference (and potential explanation as to why GP hasn’t seen any either) is that my account is through google workspace.
l33tman
The ads are in the android app if you select a "smart" tab, like the Social or Campaigns (and I pay for google one, still get those ads). Fortunately I'm never in those tabs on the mobile client.
lordgrenville
Happens in the Android app too, just not in the "Primary" tab. So annoying.
coremoff
the ads are displayed in the smart inbox tabs; if you have turned this off, you won't see ads
alphakappa
Correct. The smart inbox puts in ads. As in the YouTube example here, it's fairly unpredictable if they appear, and when they do - how they appear.
12ian34
this surprised me so much I had to read it twice before realising that it's probably because I've used uBlock since I can remember
mark_l_watson
Well, some of the ad money goes to content creators. Since my wife and I each spend more time on YouTube than we do on any of Disney, Netflicks, Amazon Prime, or Hulu we “splurge” $15/month on Google’s family plan that gets no ads and all the music and music videos we need.
Even though I am a big fan of open distributed media like Mastodon (follow me at @mark_watson@mastodon.social), I like to see quality paid for services. I am looking forward to spending $2/month on Twitter if they require real-people paid accounts to get rid of the bots.
josefresco
When I found out my kids spend more time on YouTube than any other video platform I paid for YouTube Premium. They're a little older now and are shifting back to other platforms but I don't think we'll cancel our subscription anytime soon given how many complaints I see about their ad delivery.
the_snooze
I'd be a lot more willing to pay for Premium if it were strictly to get rid of ads, without any of the bundled features that don't matter to me (e.g., Music, background playback, etc.). They experimented with it in certain European markets[0], and I'm disappointed that it hasn't made its way to the US.
[0[ https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-l...
mrweasel
That not really something they inform subscripers about. You also don’t appear to be able to downgrade to the lite subscription. I truly don’t mind paying for ad free YouTube, but it’s not the music service I’d pick if it wasn’t bundled.
csunbird
I used to pay for the Youtube Premium as well, because the app is literally unusable on an Apple TV and iOS devices without it, the ads are just too much.
Unfortunately, the premium subscription does not work for the in video ads and promotions (shills) which seems to be everywhere now, so I cancelled my subscription, as I can not get the ad-free experience anymore, dropped the idea of using Youtube on devices where I can not install ublock origin.
edit: The idea is that I can not get rid of ads, even with the subscription, so the value of subscription itself is severely diminished.
thallium205
How does ublock solve the promotions you describe?
rocqua
Does Ublock also block the in-content ads?
csunbird
It doesn’t. The point is the in content/in video ads severely decrease value I see in youtube premium.
m0ngr31
Sponsorblock?
harg
I find YouTube basically unusable on any device except for my laptop with an adblocker. The ads are so intrusive and cut in at such jarring moments that it's just not worth it. It's not uncommon to have to tolerate several minutes of ads just to watch a sub-10 minute video.
dghughes
I watch a lot of YouTube on my smart TV even an old Roku but after the changes to the frequency of ads it was unbearable. It was to the point where I would mute the TV and put my hand up to block the ad from my eyes. I would also press back a few times to exit out of the ad and most times if done twice no ad plays.
Ads always cut off the first 5 seconds of the videos, and ads were popping up seconds after the initial two ads, and then ads cut in mid sentence. No thought of the content presented like a TV ad would do just stuff in as many as possible.
Eventually I gave in an paid the $10/moth. YouTube is broken and unwatchable without doing it that way at least on a smart TV or a Roku.
Larrikin
During the pandemic some product person drastically increased the number of ads and began ruining videos with ads in the middle of the videos. Music sets get screwed up and the crappy AI likes to pause jokes right before the punch line and then resume a second or two after.
At this point any video I imagine myself ever watching more than once gets downloaded with yt-dlp and automatically loaded into Plex. I had one negative experience with an artist deleting a popular video years ago, but that short term profit seeking is what pushed me to finally get everything all setup.
Now there are no ads.
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My favorite "dark pattern" plausibly disguised as a simple bug is that the countdown timer, across multiple platforms I've used YouTube on, doesn't work correctly and very easily will let the ad play for a second or two longer than you intend. It behaves as if it's supposed to count down to 0 one second at a time, but there's a recurring event that is run every second to see if the countdown timer needs to be lowered. However, it's very easy for that event to be ever so slightly delayed or advanced relative to when the timer counts down, and as a result the timer doesn't get decremented correctly. It's very easy to see if you watch the timer carefully; it almost never counts evenly like it should, and it very often skips a beat entirely. (Compare with a simple timer app, which is correctly updating every frame the display renders. This isn't that hard.)
It's very plausibly a bug that a novice dealing with time in a UI would make, and in many other circumstances I'd accept that explanation. But, a bug in such a critical piece of YouTube's functionality, with a root cause I'm pretty sure I've diagnosed just by glancing at it, surviving for years and years across multiple platforms? This isn't a bug. It's policy. At scale, those seconds add up.