YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

I recently stopped watching youtube altogether and surprisingly haven't been missing it. And I used to watch a LOT (like hours per day) of youtube, mostly quality educational/scientific content. But ultimately you'd be surprised how much you don't need in your life. And side effect is no more ads. If someone sends me an occasional youtube video to watch, I'll take a look, but otherwise no engagement with the platform.

I'd highly recommend everyone try reducing their intake of passive entertainment like youtube and redirecting that time towards more creative or mindful pursuits.

Large parts of the world population are addicted to these platforms. It’s tobacco 2.0

Tiktok is opium 3.0, but this time it's not UK selling the drugs.

Not surprising at all. We delude ourselves into thinking we're better because our brand of slop is educational, but it's still slop.

Or just pay for it? I have my whole family on my plan. Nobody gets ads. It is a bargain.

You're right, I could probably finish my motorcycle build projects without videos. But why??

Turns out some of the best science shows are on PBS and Nebula.

What do you do with all the extra time? How do you keep from sliding back?

I install the "Undistracted" extension in all of my Brave instances. In addition to having the ability to block arbitrary URLs it has many site-specific options like blocking YouTube recommendations or the LinkedIn timeline, all of which I ruthlessly enable. You can also set it to only work on certain days and times of the week. It's immensely useful.

I also pay for Kagi which has the ability to block certain domains from results. I'd imagine that blocking Instagram, Reddit, Youtube, etc. would also prevent rabbit-holing.

i deleted my youtube accounts and switched to patreon- can still see new videos on youtube from my patreon people cause im notified but it's far more intentional and quality content

Yeah, I'm with you on this one. I pay for YT premium family, and it's basically the only subscription in 2025 that feels worth it to me. My wife watches YouTube instead of cable TV, so it's already a cheap cable bill. But you also get YouTube music! Which I'll admit is a slightly janky music app since it also kind of sits on top of YouTube videos that it decides are mostly music. But their actual music selection is good if you kinda know how to navigate the UI to the "real" music.

I’d gladly pay for YouTube or other Google services when they offer an option to not track my activity at all. For me it’s not about seeing ads just on YouTube, but being tracked all through the web and still being served inappropriate or spammy ads.

3-2-1 Contact

I’m increasing obsessed with the idea that the user—not some engagement algorithm—should be in the drivers seat. This is an interesting way to go about it…

Top tip from using only high-latency satellite internet for long periods: add a significant delay to every request to problematic sites. As soon as the dopamine loop is broken, you'll find the wait so frustrating that you won't bother.

A lot of people will spend $30 at a coffee shop in a week. Maybe $150 in one month.

I think $15 for a whole month of entertainment, tutorials, and useful content and to pay the people who create the videos is worth it.

  > when they offer an option to not track my activity

this right here, im not opposed to paying for content, but the tracking and sharing is a big concern for me too

if all i'd watch are tv shows like netflix its one thing, but yt has such broad content i'd rather not be advertised/tracked about stuff i just clicked once and never again...

If someone really likes Youtube content - sure, I guess. For me the cost isn't worth it - when I compare with other streaming services.

I got rid of the Youtube app from my Roku many months ago, and I haven't missed it. That wouldn't be the case for most other streaming apps that I still have.

I think for me - right from the day Youtube launched - I never liked the interface. It's the worst streaming interface of all the streaming services.

Wait you people have extra time?!?

Or just block the ads, let others subsidize it for me until the executive greed eventually turns the product to crap and we collectively move on to the newer options that have filled the gap. Cable used to mostly be ad free as well. Now normal TV shows are 21 minutes with 9 minutes of ads. Older TV show reruns are actually sped up with parts cut out of them. Google created a monopoly by making the product great with unobtrusive ads and now is trying to change the deal. There is absolutely already a plan in place where the number of paying premium users hits some critical number and they "test out" short ads. I am not going to reward them.

I just checked my uBlock stats inside of AdNauseum on my personal laptop. This is a machine I have not used regularly in over 2 years. Being generous I am assuming every ad blocked was static, not animated, had no sound, and required no interaction by me to skip, so just was a one second glance.

I have gotten back 115+ days of my life to do things I actually want to do. 10.34 million ads. From one single machine, in just Firefox. I now have AdGuard on my network and use Tailscale to block ads on all my devices. There is no world where I ever go back to seeing ads that I can block and definitely will not be rewarding them for trying to push ads on what was a great product.

I’m starting to look at “engagement” as an anti-statistic. Like, if you’re chasing engagement, what other more meaningful thing are you ignoring? Or, the more engagement something has, the less value it has to society.

I'm barely sure that the long term strategy of YouTube is "more ads". The premium account won't be always ads free

I did the same thing with Netflix. Also, killed off my Prime subscription and quit the entirety of Amazon. Well, except for AWS, because that's going to be impossible until they accidentally all the data.

As for youtube, I just pay for ad free. If they ever start violating that they'll also be banished to the corn field.

While I strongly doubt this fully disables tracking, you can at least disable your watch history on youtube which will have the effect of the recommendation algorithm not adjusting to your preferences.

You can change it from Google account > Data & Privacy > History Settings > youtube History

If you have youtube premium + a general purpose ad blocker + disable watch history its really hard to tell if you are being tracked.

If you do decide to disable watch history, be prepared for just how terrible the median youtube interest is. All recommendations become beyond worthless.

People dont understand how world works. Management reward are tied to earning more money. As long this is true, the next year, the reward will be tied to earning even more. The more you pay, the more it will cost. And when people wont be prepared to pay more, alternative model will be invented, like adding ads to paid content. There is only one way to stop this - break it from the start and make it nonviable, don't pay.

They are trying to block ads blockers as some manager wasn't able to get reward. Or is worried he wont get it. And this means that money that can be collected from ads has peaked. Now come the "optimizations", now payable, then no longer free, later payable with ads, then they will squeeze content creators, that will move to other platforms where you will have to pay for multiple platforms where you were once watching it for free on YT.

Sounds familiar?

Made it as short as possible, but this could be wall of text, from comparing to what happened to streaming services etc. Without piracy (not advocating but it is a fact that it forced publishers into internet model) we would probably still buy content on CDs and DVDs, maybe BluRays.

Greed of infinite growth in finite system has destroyed the planet and you can bet it will destroy YT too.

You also have to account for whatever awful thing Google is likely to do with your $15.

True, I have the same feeling. It's nice to limit my time spending on yt or other passive entertainment.

I love this idea, what sort of technical methods do you have in mind for implementing it?

But it is now. And there's no contract, so it's easy to cancel if that ever changes.

Except the alternative model will be invented even when people can pay more — do both and make even MORE.

It used to be practically shameful for large companies to run ads on their websites. They had clean websites with only their content. Especially for subscribers. Now they’re all filled with ads!

This is a big misunderstanding of the business model. The price might go up, but there will always be a tier with no ads.

Everyone wants to talk about other people being greedy when justifying their own coincidental preference for not giving away money they don’t have to.

Nebula is there, it’s not free either.

Things at scale are so incredibly cheap if you take out unnatural profits.

This argument doesn't really hold.

For some of us, YouTube is part of our creative and mindful pursuits. It either drives our interests (much like reading a magazine about specialized topics would, in the past), or explains how to do something, or simply builds a community of like minded people all over the world.

I find the argument of "how much you don't need in your life" not very compelling.

On one hand, we "need" very little: health, food, shelter. On the other, a life worth living is made of everything else that is not, strictly speaking, truly needed: ideas, hobbies, passions, entertainment, projects, etc.

Hm, in my opinion there's no such thing as "YouTube content". Content, that's the blanket word I object to.

What there is is people (and companies) uploading stuff. Some useful, some entertaining, some mindless, some for me, some not for me.

I cannot say "YouTube content" is -- or is not -- for me because the notion is meaningless. Individual videos and channels are definitely for me, and are hard to find elsewhere. YouTube by itself is not a thing.

> mostly quality educational/scientific content

Probably because it wasn’t. In my experience even the stuff people consider quality on YouTube is still kinda gross engagement bait, especially things like video essays (which are an absolute plague imo)

Unfortunately, the way ads work, the people who pay to avoid ads are inevitably the ones worth advertising to. The Nash equilibrium is that every user sees ads.

They split revenues 55/45 with creators. That level of profit sharing is basically unheard of in television, film, books, etc.

Again, yea, there are monopoly concerns, but you’re going to move the goalposts to “anything scalable” being worth stealing from then good luck to you.

I’m not going to pretend I don’t use Adblock, but when sites actually enforce using it, I’m not going to pretend they’re evil for doing it.

> Or just pay for it?

So I do now, but only since I moved to a country where it doesn't cost so much. I watch maybe 6 hours absolutely tops of YouTube a month? I get charged $7/m for it, which still feels usurious, but in the UK they want almost $17/m which is firmly in "go fuck yourself" territory. I'd like them to tier pricing so casual users like me aren't paying for people who are using YouTube as their primary entertainment mechanism.

I have also greatly decreased the time I watch YT and I have not been missing it. I used to have playlists, favs, lots of channels to follow. I stopped doing all that. Occasionally I’d “watch“ something on the background while I work, but it has to be non-engaging. The truth about YT is—you don’t need it.

That sounds off to me. I would think that the people who pay to avoid ads are very likely to jump to ad blockers if the ad-free subscription ceases to exist. Not to mention that they’re going to be very unlikely to convert on advertising.

Passively consuming content is not the same as reading a magazine or a book.

Agreed that anyone can fill their own free time with whatever they want. But youtube is just junk food for the mind, packaged as stuff that interests you. It’s conveniently split to increase ad revenue, uses clickbait to drive engagement, and all the techniques developed on TV the past 80 years to keep us glued in front of the screen. Youtube and the “content” itself is designed to keep you watching.

And I say that as someone who used to mainly watch long form essays, not the trending bullshit. It’s all just distraction and opium for the masses, disguised as edutainment.

I started reading again. Which has been quite enjoyable after the initial bump of "reading is boring compared to <favourite new video content>". Also putting more time into things I know I find more rewarding. And sometimes, just doing nothing much is nice as a brain break.

Each to their own. I'm not saying youtube is all garbage useless content, definitely there are quality conversations about varying topics. The level of community probably varies between interests and for my interests, youtube was hardly a core facet of the hobby. Perhaps for you it's different.

However, I will add 2 counterpoints. Firstly, I don't think consuming a huge amount (e.g. the amount I was) of passive video content is good for your wellbeing. Second, I think it's interesting to examine why youtube must "drive" your hobby/interest to a large degree. Is there perhaps a mental trap of thinking you must be in with the crowd and the latest and greatest? What about growing your creative pursuit organically through your own journey? Just things to consider - may or may not be applicable. It was applicable for me and my photography hobby. There's tonnes of photography content out there but most of it is generic crap and I've found it more rewarding to go my own path so to speak.

My higher point was you probably don't need video entertainment in your life. Surely you would agree that just about any hobby is more holistically enriching than watching youtube? Not to mention other issues surrounding mass video content.

$17 is about £12.69 at the moment so there does not seem to be any dishonesty in the claim.

Making any profit at all on a service that hosts and streams 4K video from everyone to everyone over the Internet while also compensating the creators of that video is no mean feat.

They want 23.99€ for a family account for me. It's hard to say if it's fair or reasonable but it's too rich for me.

> No it isn't. YT Premium in the UK is £12.99.

https://www.google.com/search?q=12.99+GBP+in+USD

> It's funny how people are so dishonest on HN

seriously?

We don’t know that YouTube has become profitable yet.

YouTube provides a lot of information and learning material for hobbies. That’s what I mostly use it for, besides music, and movie reviews which save so much time compared to having to watch the movie (so do reduce time spent with video entertainment).

£12.99, which is around $17 USD, which is what the person you're replying to stated, though American defaultism kicked in and they didn't specify which dollar, but still.

So... yes it is?

You can use YouTube with just the subscriptions list and never visit the algorithmic tab. That’s how I use it most of the time.

I used to, but I stopped recently.

1. They still serve ads. Often for Google products underneath the videos and in the feed. Content creators are also allowed to turn on contextual ads over the top of videos, as well as merchandise underneath their videos.

2. Sponsored segments are unbelievably widespread now, and can take up significant portions of the video. These are ads, and they are also permitted by YouTube.

3. YouTube has been making the service worse and worse as time goes on. I cannot turn off shorts, even though I despise them. They're all over my feed. Removing the downvote score means I cannot tell if a video is spam before clicking on it now. Ostensibly YouTube serves more video hours now, but at our expense.

4. YouTube recently raised my price 40% overnight.

There was space for reasonable prices without making their service worse. They crossed that line for me and I think for many others too.

I will never pay for an ad-supported product. As long as YouTube accepts money from advertisers, their loyalty is split between users and advertisers. And advertisers will eventually win: if YouTube Premium gains traction, advertisers will be willing to pay more for access to premium users, and YouTube can only ignore that for so long. YouTube Premium will have ads eventually--it's just a matter of time. It already happened to cable, it happened to Prime, and it will happen to every streaming service that relies on ads eventually.

The only answer is to support companies that do not receive any money from ads (i.e. Kagi). Until that exists for streaming, I'm blocking ads and not giving them a cent.

Like giving 55% of it to content creators

You would, but most people who pay are not technically savvy enough to get the right adblock, keep it up to date, etc.

Same! It has gotten a lot more expensive and even if I pay for premium, content creators show sponsored ads. I don’t know what I’m paying for.

> Or just pay for it? I have my whole family on my plan.

Thats exactly what some mobster would say to you when asking/forcing you for some money to buy protection for his etablisment.

I see that you can argue that you use a service that costs money. Yes. But the advertising is unacceptable not only because it is advertising, but also because of its content AND the way it is delivered. You can't support that.

> But youtube is just junk food for the mind, packaged as stuff that interests you

This is demonstrably false.

There's no such thing as "YouTube stuff", there's thousands of people uploading videos, some interesting to you, some not, some junk, some very in-depth, some garbage, some very thoughtful -- Sturgeon's Law applies. There are music videos, science videos, history videos, hobby videos, videos analyzing everything under the sun (e.g. the amazing Every Frame A Painting), etc.

I don't know which videos you watch, but mine aren't "junk food".

> Second, I think it's interesting to examine why youtube must "drive" your hobby/interest to a large degree. Is there perhaps a mental trap of thinking you must be in with the crowd and the latest and greatest?

No? There's the "human as a social animal" aspect, I enjoy being part of a community.

Nothing particular to YouTube here.

I imagine there are tools that will artificially slow down requests.

The lazy way would be to VPN somewhere as far away as possible and throttle your bandwidth. That would get you 250ms of round trip latency for free. In Antarctica we had up to 3000ms on a bad day. You learn to do stuff offline, build from source instead of download compiled binaries and use Kiwix. Nowadays it's less of an issue because you can ask LLMs questions and have them search for you and all you need to transfer is text. Much much easier than loading heavy websites.

This app looks fun: https://jagt.github.io/clumsy/index.html (randomly interferes with your packets)

It is not demonstrably false. You operate under the assumption that more knowledge and the more you know about things, the better. So from your point of view spending 12 hours watching philosophy essays and history videos can only be a good thing.

Well, I strongly disagree with this (widespread) premise. It is still marketing-driven consumption and another form of pervasive distraction which plagues the modern world, whether you spend 6 hours watching reality TV or essays on the conquests of Genghis Khan. What matters is how much time you spend in a stupor passively receiving useless information, to detach yourself from a reality you have no control over; the content itself is just a matter of taste.

I want to stress there is of course a difference between decompressing with a nice and well-written YouTube video after dinner and wasting your life watching memes. But it is still a form of distraction, and YouTube does its utmost to make the experience as exciting and addictive as possible, just like McDonalds.

If that ever happens then we can reopen the discussion of the morality of adblockers on youtube. In the mean time, just pay for it.

It sounds like you don't like the experience and an adblocker isn't going to change that. If you don't like youtube and you don't watch it... it's fine? Everyone is entitled to their preferences.

Specifically though:

2. Content creators shill for things, sure. Youtube doesn't stop you from fast-forwarding through these segments. These creators are real human beings that put a ton of work into bringing me content and I don't begrudge them making some money. These are the ads that work on me; I deliberately use their affiliate links. I want them to spend more time making content. Hell there are a dozen different Youtube creators I pay monthly on Patreon just because!

I don't find these sponsorships terrible and at any rate it's not Youtube's fault.

3. Yeah I would love to have a Shortblocker extension in my browser, no argument there. But I don't think the visible downvotes make any material difference. The recommendation algorithm is excellent and I don't see spam.

4. The price is still extremely reasonable compared to the value I get. Maybe it isn't for you, that's fine. But the fact is you can pay for no-ads; complaining about adblock behavior rings incredibly hollow.

Or routing it to support work for countries with profitable contracts, but questionable dedication to human rights.

The paid service would of course have to offer something else other than “no ads” if they started showing ads in it

The type of people who have already indicated that they have disposable income, and are willing to pay for a service, are more attractive to advertisers than people who are known to have opted for a worse experience for free

> Or just pay for it?

on top of all the things already mentioned like privacy issues, etc.

- you'll also still see "Branded Content" when paying Google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branded_content

- because of Googles "monopoly", they take a big % of your money, instead of you actually paying the content creators themselves.

> You're right, I could probably finish my motorcycle build projects without videos. But why??

> redirecting that time towards more creative or mindful pursuits.

> It is not demonstrably false

Yes, yes it is. I only have to find one non-junk video to invalidate your assertion, and since I've found hundreds, your assertion is false.

> You operate under the assumption that more knowledge and the more you know about things, the better. So from your point of view spending 12 hours watching philosophy essays and history videos can only be a good thing

No, I said nothing of the sort. It's very difficult to discuss anything with someone having such a difficulty engaging with the arguments as stated.

By the way, if you're going to make the claim that knowing more (or being curious about the world) is not a good pursuit in life, then... good luck with that! You won't find many people who agree.

> What matters is how much time you spend in a stupor passively receiving useless information, to detach yourself from a reality you have no control over; the content itself is just a matter of taste.

Wow. Stupor? Useless? Who are you to determine what is stupefying or useless to others? (By the way, I fixed my toilet thanks to a YouTube video teaching me how. Was this useless and stupefying?).

> But it is still a form of distraction, and YouTube does its utmost to make the experience as exciting and addictive as possible, just like McDonalds.

Everything that is not sleeping, eating and taking a dump is a form of distraction. This doesn't provide any insight.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the kind of videos you find in YouTube is what someone else arguing with you is watching. Maybe you watched junk videos, and they shaped your opinion of YouTube. Maybe you're logged off, in which case YouTube's recommendations are so random and garbage, they could give you a bad impression. I'm always logged in, and the recommendations I get are mostly relevant and good quality; I seldom get recommended meme videos or garbage.

PS: I'm sure someone once made the same argument you're making, only about books.

at this point, there's no use in implanting the goal posts into the ground, they're going to be moved again in a few seconds.

As do coffee roasters.

Yeah putting a reaction video in the same category as a video essayist/documentary is strange. In a sea of content farm videos there are still many interesting islands of thought-provoking stuff on youtube.

They are not responsible for the content, so they are not a publisher, more like the company that prints the newspapers. Imagine if NYT printers charged more if NYT decided to raise the sticker price?

Why not charge creators for the infrastructure cost?

If you use Firefox Nightly (mobile) then you can:

1. Fully block ads with uBlock Origin

2. Block in-video sponsorships with Sponsorblock

3. Block all shorts permanently with Hide Youtube-Shorts

These 3 extensions fix your issues. There is also an extension to bring back downvotes. I do not use it but I think it is widespread enough to be useful as spam detection.

This also allows you to listen to videos with your screen turned off and gives you the option to have the video playing in a tiny screen so you can watch it while doing other things on your phone.

I think your point is great and we are on the same page. It very much is an issue of philosophy towards wellbeing. Without trying to sound too up my own ass, I think people differ on their perspectives here because they are on different points in the journey of understanding life and their wellbeing. I used to be of the opinion that limitless technology in all forms is brilliant, and no of course mobiles phones are not an issue, social media is fine, and me watching 6 hours of youtube a day is great! You could argue with me all day and my opinion wouldn't have changed because it was beyond my framework of thinking about life to have a different opinion. And then gradually, after a lot of learning about the world and myself, my framework has changed. Now I realise my opinions before were not as aligned with my own wellbeing as they could have been. I would invite everyone to take time to reflect and consider alternative ways of living which could be more beneficial for them and the world.

Your point about community is valid, we need community.

I would argue though that digital community is a tenuous definition in comparison to in-person community. I won't claim this doesn't differ person to person but for me doing a hobby with people has no comparsion to watching youtube videos about the hobby (even though I am introverted). I like to consider to myself: "is this digital interaction preventing or taking the place of an in-person interaction I could be having right now?" 6 hours of youtube a day was preventing a lot. Further I considered my own hobbies which themselves were primarily digital and may be unhelpful for finding fulfilment in social aspects of life.

> It very much is an issue of philosophy towards wellbeing.

Exactly, it is a philosophical issue, whereas the person I was replying to was debating on the grounds of “knowledge is good”. I grew up with computers, saw the spread of the Internet but lately I cannot wonder if what we as a society, as tech workers have achieved over the past 20 years to be a net negative for humanity. I very much subscribe to the thesis that the effect of any form of technology, however small, has a radical effect on society; it profoundly changes the world in ways no one can predict, and I wonder whether the common place belief that technological research and innovation, often driven by pure greed, is not at utterly reckless and destructive philosophy.

Yet this is still a fringe position. People are starting to get disillusioned, but the common opinion is that this is good, progress is good, and the solution to the ills of society is more technology, more Internet, more data and more algorithms.

Humanity doesn’t need more knowledge, nor does it need more data and more information. In fact, I would claim this hunger for data, to know more, to measure more, to be a primary cause of the ills of modern society. We have become machines, operant and dependent on information, we forgot the human and biological dimension of our lives.

> It sounds like you don't like the experience and an adblocker isn't going to change that.

It does though. It blocks the modal ads by content creators, the merchandise ads, and the feed ads for Google products. With other extensions I can skip through sponsored segments and see a downvote approximation.

> Content creators shill for things, sure. Youtube doesn't stop you from fast-forwarding through these segments. These creators are real human beings that put a ton of work into bringing me content and I don't begrudge them making some money. These are the ads that work on me; I deliberately use their affiliate links. I want them to spend more time making content. Hell there are a dozen different Youtube creators I pay monthly on Patreon just because!

My house is an ad free space and I do find these ads intolerable. I'm happy to pay for content I like, but there is no way for me to pay for this content without these ads. Indeed, YouTube Premium was sold to me as paying content creators more than ads, and I purchased it on that premise. This wasn't enough for content creators, however, and they wanted to make even more money. That's fine, but I refuse to listen to their ads, and I do not owe them my attention to watch their ads. So I use SponsorBlock.

> Yeah I would love to have a Shortblocker extension in my browser, no argument there. But I don't think the visible downvotes make any material difference. The recommendation algorithm is excellent and I don't see spam.

The downvote score makes an ENORMOUS difference to MANY people. It allows us to determine what is spam at a glance. YouTube is filled with low quality content which isn't helpful and is often harmful. YouTube does a terrible job of policing this content. Often the very worst content will trick a large number of people into clicking on it, which makes the algorithm think it's good content, and promotes it to even more people. This is great for YouTube's bottom line, but serving people DIY advice which could harm them is bad for us, the users. A high downvote ratio indicates that the content is inaccurate, harmful, or spam, and we can avoid it BEFORE we sit through the whole video.

Thank you. I assume this isn't available on iPhone?

> but the common opinion is that this is good, progress is good, and the solution to the ills of society is more technology, more Internet, more data and more algorithms.

This is not my position at all.

It seems to me that you need to argue extremes and strawmen in order to sustain your point of view.

I'm not arguing in favor of unchecked technology or "more of everything". That's your burden to bear, not mine.

Please do me the courtesy of actually engaging with what I'm saying, not what you believe I might be saying.

The sentence you quoted says “the common opinion”, and for some reason you think you’re being singled out. I was making a generic, societal argument with another poster.

I do not get why you disagree with such hostility, and take it personally.

It is fine to disagree, you know. It would be better to debate the opposing opinion instead of getting so defensive, but alas. This is getting tiring. Good day to you.

YouTube Premium starts at 14$ which is wildly un-representative of the price it takes to run the site.

You mention revenue sharing - but either you are a publisher and share both revenue and responsibilities with creators, or you are not a publisher.

If we for a moment imagine that they are a publisher, then they better pay their content creators a livable wage - or not sign them - and the content creators better not show ads, as I have already paid them through YouTube.

If we imagine for a second that they are merely a distribution platform, then they better not interfere with what I see with ads, or make a value judgement on my curated feed - ISPs also don't interject ads into your browsing.

I never said that they should not be able to make money. But services like YouTube tries their absolute best to both have the cake on eat it. And that is not fair.

Google just bumped the subscription cost for my 2-person household to 18,99€

I don't want to pay for 6 members. I don't want YouTube Originals. I sure as hell don't want YouTube Music. And I'd really like it if I didn't have to manually set my videos to the premium bitrate every damn time.

I'd be fine with paying 10€ for no ads + premium. But for almost 20€/month, I'm thinking of just going back to adblockers.

For 20€/month I expect them to not allow any sponsored content in my feed, including those served by the authors.

Luckily I kinda have that option with sponsorblock.

Or lowering the price at which you can buy an election outcome.

You specifically addressed me with strawmen and wild assumptions about what I believe (generally reducing them to ridiculous extremes, never a good faith debate tactic).

> You operate under the assumption that more knowledge and the more you know about things, the better. So from your point of view spending 12 hours watching philosophy essays and history videos can only be a good thing.

See? This was addressed to me, not in general.

> Exactly, it is a philosophical issue, whereas the person I was replying to was debating on the grounds of “knowledge is good”.

"The person I was replying to" is me, so again you're singling me out.

And I'm not hostile, or do you think people pointing out you're misrepresenting their opinions are "hostile"?

> It would be better to debate the opposing opinion instead of getting so defensive, but alas.

Alas, for this to work, you would need to engage with what the person you're replying to actually wrote, defend your position ("it's junk food for the mind", "it's opium"), be open to having your mind changed if the arguments are good, and avoid making unsupported assertions about my belief system or what I think about knowledge and technology.

Don't act all offended now just because I called you out.

Apologize if you made wrong assumptions, and resume the argument in good faith, and for all that's good and honest -- lose the "I know better" attitude.

Nowhere near as good as Firefox on Android. That said you can get a clunky version with Brave. It's got a block and You can use use picture in picture to throw the video in the background. It sometimes pauses if you lock the screen but if you play around, there's a kind of race condition where you hit play again at the right time and it'll work.

There's also uYouPlus if you have a way to load apps without going through the store.

Then just use a burner account with a fake name…

You vastly underestimate the practical uses of youtube. Crash course alone gets millions of people through their formal education.

This is why the price goes up.

If the LTV of a "good" user (e.g. user who buys things from ads) is X, you price the non-ad tier at X + Y. Y is the premium you pay for not wanting to see ads.

So you're right, but also wrong, in that you can extract EVEN MORE money from the user you were talking about through a non-ad tier.

Companies (Meta, Google, etc) get better at advertising -> LTV goes up -> non-ad tier goes up