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Ask HN: How to get YouTube to stop offering me a free trial of YouTube Premium?

16 points by webmaven ↗ HN
YouTube pops up an offer nearly every other day, even though I tap "No Thanks" (or "Skip Free Trial", or other permutations of "@#%!$, I Said No") every darn time. You'd think the big G would be doing something intelligent here like an exponential backoff.

I'm starting to think that the hope behind all this pestering is that I'll eventually fat-finger the wrong option, and then forget to cancel the service.

Is there any way to get whatever algorithm is targeting me to, well, stop asking? At least for a while?

22 comments

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iab
Umatrix + Adblock plus
webmaven
Many of the offers are on mobile, often mentioning the feature to keep playing in the background.
detaro
third-party clients like newpipe. I guess tough luck if you are in iOS though, but that comes with the territory then.
muzani
I just buy it to make it disappear. It has the side effect of making all the other annoying ads disappear too. They're purposely annoying you to get money, and it worked.
kevincox
This approach didn't work for me. I bought it and kept getting ads to watch their originals and other features that I had no interest in.

I paid to make all of the crap get out of my way. It didn't work, then they killed some important-to-me features so I unsubscribed and started using an ad blocker.

html5web
Delete your YouTube app, install ad blocker and use it on the browser
funkidredd
Hi mate. Wherever you can install android apk's, use https://vanced.app for the legit YouTube experience without ads. Hope this helps.
adhesive_wombat
I still get the trial nags on app start sometimes, both with Vanced and Vanced Music.

But once I get past that nag, there are no ads other than a few unskippable things occasionally inserted into the "shorts" TikTok clone.

DarthNebo
You could use element blocking on Brave or similar addons on Chrome/FF/Safari
e-clinton
Take the free trial and then cancel it
369548684892826
I did this just to make the popups stop and sadly it doesn’t work. Popups resume after the trial.
h4waii
NewPipe with SponsorBlock [0] is an open source YouTube client for Android which I can highly recommend, and hopefully you already know about uBlock and uMatrix.

0. https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe

thy77
Is new pipe or vanced better for use on android tv / nvidia shield tv?
nicbou
Use the mobile website with an ad blocker. YouTube is better in Firefox than in the app.
paulcole
If you can afford it, YouTube Premium is an incredible ad-free experience. I subscribed a couple years ago and can’t imagine ever canceling it. Plus it includes YouTube Music and if you aren’t locked into Spotify/Apple Music, you can just switch to that for your streaming music needs.
swah
I pay it and not having ads on TVs is awesome. Would pay a similar amount for an ad-free Twitter.
more_corn
Why do we tolerate products that nag forever? Nobody wants that, nobody likes that. When people behave badly we need to shun them and the things they make. There’s nothing special about YouTube. Stop using it.