this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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I was fine with ads a couple years ago, but the number, length and frequency of them keeps ramping up. This wouldn't need to be such a struggle if they just were reasonable about it.
Me : clicks a helpful tutorial of 5 minutes. YT: here have an unskippable ad 5 seconds. Me: annoying but the creators have to make money somehow I guess. YT: and now here's your skippable ad. Me: I just want this to be over with. YT content creator: Hello guys this video is sponsored by Raycons. 10 seconds blabbering on the product, skip skip Me: closes video.
Sponsorblock might be helpful for you on some of that at least.
Sponsor lock is a godsend
Use Revanced on phone. Works like a charm.
Does anyone else kinda miss when youtube was more informal, random, less edited, and more janky? Nowadays everybody has a title card, and a two minute intro greeting, high-end camera setup, and tightly rehearsed script. It's like they all decided to just recreate the unnecessary bloat and ceremony from classical television, for the sake of "appearing professional" or something?
For example, a tutorial doesn't need to begin with a "Hey guys, it's your pal ASDFGHJKL. Have you ever got your foreskin trapped in a whatever and yada yada yada? Well today I'm gonna show you how to blah blah blah. Now let's get into the video. But first a word from our sponsor Lockheed Martin..."
What's with the "today"? I'm always watching it "today" by definition. And I wouldn't have clicked it if I wasn't in that particular predicament. Why not just immediately start showing the solution?
There is no being reasonable in a capitalist society. The only thing that matters is profit potential
It was never reasonable. Not ever.
If you're old enough to remember the original need for pop-up blockers you would know that. Just 30 screens pop-up in a cascading order filling your screen with crap. Auto play video, auto-installing toolbars (Thanks ~~Obama~~ Microsoft).
I definitely remember those days, a lot of sites were just unusable, and I hear some places like the Fandom wiki are returning to that level.
I believe there is a small amount of ads it's acceptable to live with, I do accept that content needs to be paid for somehow, but corporations can't seem to ever accept a limit for themselves. Even though YouTube is already perfectly profitable and has been for years, it continues to escalate. Not to mention the rampant data-tracking that there is all over the place that people just accept because it's invisible. Or that Google is working to weaken ad blocking and enhance tracking at a browser level.
It doesn't matter if you made 1,5 billion dollars last year. If you are not making 2 this year, you are a bad business and should declare bankruptcy.
They would never not ramp up the ads, even if youtube was the most profitable thing ever.
There is something fundamentally wrong with Capitalism. Watching the unhinged ways corporations behave pushes me further to the left every day.
This is the result of competition. When success is measured relative to others, it's forever a moving target. Under this definition of success, self improvement is equally effective as sabotaging another. And as we can see, it's not just businesses sabotaging one another. If a business can get away with sabotaging its own consumers, as it can in the case of a monopoly, a cartel, or regulatory capture, it will.
I kinda get your point, but is there even any competition when it comes to YouTube? Everybody pretty much accepts it's the only viable publicly available online video publishing platform. Who are they even competing with? Twitch and TikTok work in a completely different ways that don't really supplant it. Vimeo and Dailymotion are so small they might as well not exist. Seems like they are still keeping at it even bereft of competition.
And injected in the most halfassed points of the video. Surely they have the technology to figure out a better way to time the ads.
They definitely do and they did do that for a while, but apparently it changed.
Oh really how does it work now?
Unfortunately there's too many people that just roll over and take it at much higher levels than is reasonable. They'll stop when the normies start to walk away, and from what I can see that sits at about the Idiocracy TV scene level.
I'm just closing the window when that happens. Same as I did when ads first came to the web. There was a long gap in between where I somewhat tolerated them but mostly annhialated them with ad-blockers. The few that got through were allowed because pick your battles.
But if you're gonna get in my face and block content, I'm just gonna walk away. Get fucked. Find another way to make money. If that means no more free content, I'll pay. But I won't suffer abuse.