YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

Paying for YouTube has probably been the digital subscription with the single greatest return on a dozen dollars.

Content is uninterrupted without having to engage in the arms race. Music selection is great. Random movies are available.

Music selection is great. Music recommendation (and video recommendation) is utter crap. I know running something as big as youtube means there is unlikely to be a true competitor but there is sooooooooo much low-hanging fruit to do a better job.

My home page is on average 60% wasted/irrelevant.

I'm a little surprised they haven't added "AI" yet. They add some prompt "tell us what you like". I tried it the opposite "Do not show me cat videos!" and of course it was just keyword based and started showing me cat videos.

On the video front, my Japanese is pretty good. I watched one high level Japanese language video. Now my feed is full of beginner Japanese language videos. I'm pretty confident if I could ask some LLM "Don't show me beginning level Japanese videos" it could figure it out.

Same with Music. If I play any song from the 80s their shit algo will decide what I want is "hits of the 80s", not "more songs similar to the song I just played". Again, I feel like I could tell an LLM that. Play me songs by band X and songs similar to band X". "Play me songs that influenced band X" (LLM can reference interviews for that).

Same here. Netflix, Hulu, Disney plus, HBO... I've had them disabled after months of zero usage.

YouTube on the other hand...

But how is it different than those of us who access it for free? I get a popup asking me to pay once a month but that's about it. Are you just happy to throw your money away if it goes to a giant corporation?

You get rid of the ads, so it’s not exactly throwing money away.

I’d gladly pay for ad free youtube if they weren’t double dipping by stealing my data.

> Are you just happy to throw your money away if it goes to a giant corporation?

45% (which is a lot) of the money goes to the giant corporation. The other 55% gets divided up among the people whose content you watched.

I mostly watch smaller creators, so I don't mind 55% of my membership fee ending up in their pockets so they can keep making videos for me to enjoy.

I don't watch ads, the people I watch get paid because I watched. And obviously I'm not happy about the cut google takes and I would rather a higher percentage of my money go to the creators.

Agreed the algorithm is significantly flawed. I often have the experience of being interested in a one-off video, but don't watch it because I don't want to pollute the algorithm recommendations with similar stuff.

It's a premium service with premium features... ad-free, offline downloads... maybe you should look into it

Yes, one thing for me is, that Youtube is offering music (in the form of videos) which you can't get on any other platform.

> Music selection is great. Music recommendation (and video recommendation) is utter crap.

Fair point. I wonder if this is connected to the way that YouTube seems to rely more on presenting an array of suggestions than flowing linearly through a stream. In any case, I turn off autoplay and am trying to rely as much on search, follows, and curation as algorithmic recommendations, so the hit and miss quality of the recommendations doesn't bother me much personally, I could see how it might not be a great set-and-forget music replacement (for which I already have plenty of options going back into terrestrial radio origins).