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.
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).
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.
>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.
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.
I wonder if you could build an AI using this datasource to automatically detect sponsored segments. 3.8 million segment submissions is probably enough data.
It is 'stealing' from the content creators rather than youtube. Besides, these ads are not based on surveillance capitalism but much less invasive old-school methods. Finally, there is much easier recourse against these ads. Don't watch content creators that have annoying adds. There are not many alternatives to youtube, but there are many alternatives to any given channel.
Personally I also believe that in-content ads are much less annoying. I think that is because the content-creator gets to push back on really annoying adds.
Creators are making so much money, we should not suffer poor user experience out of sympathy. Has anyone run the math as to how much these ppl make? Hint: a lot. CPMs are crazy high, in addition to product placement.
IMHO, in-video ads are worse than the usual ads, because they subversive and break the flow. When I'm watching a math video I don't want to hear about how Euler could have used a VPN.
Creators make some money, the better ones make a lot. I think creators are much more deserving of add money from their work as opposed to the platform that is hosting them. Especially because my relationship with the creators is much more voluntary than my relationship with the platform.
If numberphile starts running annoying ads, I can easily stop watching them, or manually skip them.
Which right is higher up on the hierarchy? Content creators' right to serve me adds, or my right to decide what software to run/not run on my general purpose computer. I know what I would answer to that.
You have a right to run all sorts of software that is unpleasant and generally a bad thing.
See, for example, people running game cheat software, people running DDoS attacks, or even people sending others rick-rolls or goatsee.
In other words. Just because you have a right to run software that blocks creators apps does not mean it is right (in the sense of right vs wrong) to run that software.
>"It is 'stealing' from the content creators rather than youtube."
I'm not so sure, from what I understand these creators are typically paid upfront to embed the sponsorship in the video and they are given some promocode or url to present to watchers and that's how these sponsors track engagement. I don't think they check the watch time or the skip rate.
True, skipping in-content ads wont hurt creators pocket directly. But it will indirectly. Less engagement with the ads will eventually hurt their rates. And perhaps even the existence of tools like these could hurt the income of creators in general.
Especially the second is scary. Creators being able to run these ads makes them much more independent from youtube, which I consider quite important.
I don't know the percentage of people using ad blockers but I'm sure it is very, very low. In fact, most users watch YouTube from the app, so no ad blocking.
I just hope they don't make any significant change to their API so I can still use Vanced to listen to music when I'm outside.
>In fact, most users watch YouTube from the app, so no ad blocking.
If many people used ublock on the Web, many would iuse NewPipe to enjoy the same ad free experience on mobile (Android). I don't understand why so we few people care about their attention? Is this just ignorance? Or do they willingly want their desires to be manipulated in order for creators to be paid by platforms? Me I'm just happy to tip the channels I follow and be a proud pirate.
There's a lot of idiots out there for whom installing a browser extension is akin to rocket science. In fact, they may not even be aware of what extensions are.
They do also appear to work out stuff I’m interested in… there are rare days where I’ll get a stream of promoted Kickstarter projects that actually match my interests… then it goes back to the most generic advertising and I’ll be back to slamming the skip button.
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).
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.
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
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
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.
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.
I think it only show "any random video with music" if you've liked the video and it appears to be a legitimate music video (i.e. without dialog/non-musical noises etc.). I use YtM a lot and the only questionable videos are ones that I've hit like on (beat saber being a prime example - I've learned not to like anything like that, these days).
I can't say that I have experienced the random music videos thing, but I agree it does feel like a bit of a downgrade from Google Play Music. I used the podcast part of Google Play Music a lot, since it put music and podcasts all in the same spot. Now I have had to switch to pocketcasts for that instead.
Before I get to reply to your comment, let's talk about my sponsor for today: Shady VPN!
Did you know that killer sharks are tracking your every step and move through the internet? They are stalking you, so that they can find you, kill you and eat you (and your whole family, too!) when you go to the lake the other day. That is because they track all your steps on the internet. Now you might wonder: What can I do against that? It's easy: Just join Shady VPN and choose our VPN solution. Military grade encryption will hide your location from the network sniffing sharks so they have no idea where you are. Enjoy the summer. Sharkfree!
On the topic: Same goes for me, "ad-free" YT is not really ad-free, only a little less "infested".
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.
Yep, but I think it was the minimum for placing midroll ads. Now it's 8 minutes, but the "sightly over 10 minutes" phenomenon is still very much alive!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do these variations only appear on the website version of YouTube? I use an ad-blocker so I haven't noticed this pattern exactly. However, one pattern I've noticed using the mobile app is that in order to disrupt the automatic habit to skip, they seem to randomise whether or not they make any specific ad skippable. It seems some ads are always skippable, some are sometimes skippable and sometimes not and some are never skippable. It doesn't always correlate to how long the ad is either. Overall this seems to result in my actually watching the ad all the way through because it takes too much effort to figure out what kind of ad it is and whether I can press the button at the right time. At least if I do nothing, I know the video I want will play eventually.
Folks are completing MSc, PhDs, submitting to cutthroat recruitment processes to architect, enable, and implement this level of malicious counterproductive sophistication. Google employees, how do you find motivation to wake up in the morning? Is it >300k USD salary and FIRE before 40? What if they told you to scam your own children for additional bonus?
lol you realize you don't have to pay the $2 million at once right. 400k is more than enough to afford a mortgage on a 2 million dollar house. they key is keeping other expenses low.
Your last question isn't even rhetorical. For almost everyone in USA's tech, it's only a matter of compensation. Should we expect anything different when even UC Berkeley's CS program doesn't have a single ethics requirement? (EECS has one, but their CS grad output is way lower)
I wish a tech crash like dot-com would happen already—in my very naive hope that the unscrupulous rat racers whose sole purpose is to perpetuate this infinite loop of SAT-level/IQ-test job recruitment + gamified promotion optimization will leave so they can ruin another industry. This is a terrible thought to have for peers, but after the past decade of nonsensical gatekeeping and unsustainable college major growth, I genuinely feel these people increasingly make everyday work life unbearable.
This is why I use uBlock Origin. I don't feel guilty if I have to put up with such asshole design. I would much rather have (even non-hideable) text ads in the bottom. Something similar to what they used a long time ago.
Likewise with many Polish entertainment/content aggregator/news websites - there are goddamn ads in the BACKGROUND of the page! Ugh!
I've honestly never noticed this. You just wait 5 seconds, see if it says "Skip ad" and then click it. I bet most users don't notice this either and it's probably not especially effective (but still worth it at Google scale).
I can't really blame Google for not wanting people to skip ads. The fact that skippable ads even exist is kind of crazy.
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.
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 -)
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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
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.
I’m not a lawyer but it looks like the law might apply to chromecast as well:
> as such recommended practice concerns the transmission of
commercial advertisements by a television broadcast station, cable
operator, or other multichannel video programming distributor. [emphasis mine]
I think it would be worth it to file a complaint. Or if anybody here on HN has done so already, I would be interested in hearing the response.
EDIT: Looking at the code (which I’m woefully under-qualified at) I see this:
> (13) the term “multichannel video programming distributor” means a person such as, but not limited to, a cable operator, a multichannel multipoint distribution service, a direct broadcast satellite service, or a television receive-only satellite program distributor, who makes available for purchase, by subscribers or customers, multiple channels of video programming;
The way around this is to use an audio compressor and push the average volume up without exceeding the content's max volume. Then the ad sounds like someone shouting in the content without violating the policy.
A related dark pattern is the purposeful muffling of hearing aid advertisements. They also generally play different audio than what the models are "saying" in order to further confuse their target market and convince them they are more hard of hearing than they really are.
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.
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.
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 $10 is worth the many hours of use I get every month from YouTube & YouTube Music too.
The pushback is because all of the shows I want to watch are still half ads. The content creators insert them, surely they have a rational reason, but I’m not interested in the economics if I pay for ad free I want ad free. I would pay quite a bit more than 10$ for this, but the option just isn’t there.
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.
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".
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Being exposed to an ad is not a dark pattern IMO. And this particular pattern is IMO pretty dang obvious if you use YouTube much at all.
Someone has to pay for YouTube ... someone has to pay for this stuff. If it is ads that's it.
I think the issue involves two parties, the sites who want revenue, and the vast majority of users who want content for free. So yeah here we are on the web where most people want everything free.
Very few people are objecting to the presence of ads, but instead the fact that Google tries to trick you into watching more ads and blame yourself for doing so.
In an alternate universe without this dark pattern, there would still be ads - they would just have a consistent design that allowed you to skip the skippable ones without any thought, or alternatively longer/unskippable ads.
I think the complaint here is not exactly about the fact that you can't skip some of the ads, but that by varying the UI a bunch, users don't reliably "catch" all the skippable ads, so they watch more of them or take longer to skip them than would be the case if it was always immediately obvious what you could and couldn't skip.
The reason why Google doesn't just take a 15-second ad with a 5-second unskippable section and turn it into a 15-second unskippable ad is because people will get frustrated with Google/YouTube and leave.
The current system causes people to stay, and blame themselves for not skipping the ad - "I'm just being lazy, it's only a few extra seconds."
Yes. I read it. The presence of the ability to skip an ad or not is entirely obvious when you're on YouTube. Sometimes you can't skip an ad, that's not surprising nor dark. It is right in front of you and the result is obvious.
I pay for YouTube, but they still apply dark patterns, namely, they constantly turn auto play back on after a week or so despite me turning it off time and again.
This doesn't happen to me (browser/iOS), auto play is a setting local to where you enable it. Moving to another new player will always have auto play enabled.
One point I hate on YouTube are the clickbaits thumbnails and title. I found an extension that uses a random image of the video for the thumbnail and it's much better
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.
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.
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.
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.
In firefox type cs-] then press the right arrow 4-5 times, then alt-tab, then tab until "Skip add" is highlighted and hit space. No need for extra extensions or anything.
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.
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.
That connection was implied, but not explicit. Just wanted to make sure I was drawing the right inference. I guess my thought would be that there are plenty of ad-free business models that would allow this content without (explicit playing before and during content) ads. It’s also my experience that there are still ads with their paid service, which is why I stopped paying for it. I would happily pay for a YouTube ad-free experience.
Some other user mentioned that there “was no free lunch” but explicit ads before and during videos don’t have to be the payment for said lunch.
I continue to admit it’s a marvel of engineering. There are many videos uploaded every minute and the fact that they’re able to serve it to so many users continues to blow my mind.
Though I don’t think I have a specific standard, I’d have to think about it. “I’ll Know it When I See It” has historically been my personal standard.
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).
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.
I never had a fast or consistent enough dial-up connection to stream audio. I tried multiple times, but it never worked for me. I'd get maybe 15-30 seconds of contiguous sound, and the whole thing would fail.
I did download MP3s though. A 3mb MP3 file would usually take me approximately an hour. And I downloaded ~3,000 this way.
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 :)
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".
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.
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.
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.
"So you want regulators to decide how much of a profit corporations should have for a non essential service like smoking cigarettes?
Yes I want regulators to dictate how a behemoth corporate entity like Alphabet uses a platform like Youtube in ways that they both unduly profit from and are unacceptably detrimental to society as a whole.
Entities like Alphabet continue to grow and grow and the corrosive effects of their growth need to be checked some how. If you don't advocate for regulation than what mechanisms are you anticipating will mitigate the negative aspects of these kinds of entities?
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?
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.
I don't think the $15/TB figure is accurate. The list drives are either unavailable on Amazon, or they are external drives which would be unsuitable for a data center.
Even the Amazon comments know that's a scam (well that and unavailable to actually purchase) and there is a reason the next disk in the list is 5x the price:
> A 2T SSD for $38 sound to good to be true and of course they are a scam, don't buy they don't work
But that's not even the biggest oversight here on storage, these drives also need to be attached to something which will need to be cooled, networked, and powered in a reliable enough way the service continues operating when you have 10s of thousands of these. You'll also need to store more than exactly the amount of data since you can't just lose videos any time there is a failure.
In all it's still going to be dwarfed by encoding and bandwidth costs but that doesn't mean 15k/PB is any less an order of magnitude or two off on storage costs.
I'm really sorry I posted a price I found on a simple Google search. Let's say you're right and SSDs are actually $150/TB. Now our 1 PB is still just $150k. Not even a fraction of revenue worth worrying about.
If the question was "how much would it cost to buy 1 PB worth of consumer grade SSDs" $150k sounds like a great answer. Going on the 1 PB/day Number that's ~$55M/year for some raw disk. Add another order of magnitude for needing more than just a raw disk to store 1 PB/day, as already explained, and that's ~500M/year on storage related costs. If you're hellbent on saying this half billion/year doesn't matter because the bandwidth cost (which is not paid per connection btw) would be much larger then sure but it's still unrelated to the cost of a standalone consumer SSD.
That's not what I said. You've done this twice now, and I really wish you would respect the good faith principal others in this community value. I'll leave it at that.
Good faith interpretation requires a stance to build off from but so far you've made direct statements about consumer SSD prices & bandwidth billing without a stance on how it supports your conclusion then been reactionary when it was explained these statements weren't accurate or directly representative of storage costs. Beyond having already added that bandwidth costs will still dwarf storage costs even when storage costs is a large number I'm not sure what other good faith interpretations could have been made. It's not like I only attacked the consumer SSD price in bad faith and left it at that, I followed up with why even a corrected consumer SSD price would not provide an accurate estimate which was ignored to focus only on the SSD price correction.
If there is a further good faith interpretation of what you've said you'd like added to the conversation then please point it out here and lead by example. Only pointing out you think the other person should have better respected the good faith doesn't serve to help anybody understand better, in fact it goes against the principle itself.
As it stands the most solid interpretation I can come up with is still that raw SSD pricing for a consumer, even though higher than listed, can come out low enough to be less than a percentage of revenue for YouTube but this still holds no indication about storage costs actually being that low but I'm always open to stronger interpretations!
- You claimed that the numbers I referenced were based on a clear scam. The resource is in fact the first resource you will find if you google "per tb storage cost".
- You stated that I had made oversights about total cost, something I never referred to.
- You claimed without any reference that the numbers I mentioned were off by multiple orders of magnitude.
- You said I'm "hellbent on saying this half billion/year doesn't matter". I made no such statement and don't feel that way at all.
- You said I was wrong about the way peering agreements are priced between ISPs and Google, but offered no other insight other than just saying I'm wrong.
- You just called me reactionary.
Again, I think it would be beneficial if you would respect the people you're interacting with enough to at least have a more constructive discussion.
> You claimed that the numbers I referenced were based on a clear scam. The resource is in fact the first resource you will find if you google "per tb storage cost".
There are plenty of scams to be found via Googling. You will also find many fake uSD cards for low prices as well, or other products. Google is simply a search engine not an infallible filter for what is or isn't a scam. The facts about the relative pricing should carry far more weight than the position in the search results.
> You stated that I had made oversights about total cost, something I never referred to.
The lack of reference to total cost is itself the oversight being referred to so it could only be problematic if you had referred to it not the other way around.
> You claimed without any reference that the numbers I mentioned were off by multiple orders of magnitude.
I actually referenced the other numbers in your original resource for the first order of magnitude. I explained the reasoning for the second order and I accept opposing reasoning if you disagree but you haven't provided any reasoning only reaction to the idea I'd disagree.
> You said I'm "hellbent on saying this half billion/year doesn't matter". I made no such statement and don't feel that way at all.
The quote was actually "If you're hellbent..." not "You are hellbent on".
> You said I was wrong about the way peering agreements are priced between ISPs and Google, but offered no other insight other than just saying I'm wrong.
You made the claim it's based on connections not bandwidth therefore it is your burden to provide some backing why it's true not everyone else's burden to assume it's true until they can prove it's not.
That said it doesn't even require knowing their all of their peering agreements to prove, Internet Protocol (IP) is not session based. BGP peering is done to exchange IP reachability information but it knows nothing of the sessions between those IPs as session information is another level up above the internet in the network stack https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/UD...
.
Again though none of this is providing what the more accurate good faith interpretation should have been. These are simply further reactions to my given interpretation.
> You just called me reactionary.
I have and you've said multiple things to me that could be taken worse than that but it'd be counterproductive to focus on these kinds of minor things when the goal is constructive conversation so I don't feel the desire to end messages with callouts about them
>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
What costs are you using ? Because cloud costs are definitely outrageous, and definitely not what an at-scale operation like Vimeo or YouTube is paying.
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 ;-)
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
>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
At least in Germany, there does exist a movement (YouTubers Union) that demands that YouTube should pay more to the creators. YouTube, on the other hand, denies that it makes money. So the question whether YouTube does make money or not is a highly politicized one in the German area.
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.
use a vpn and new chrome session in some low income country. this will remove most of the ads
but now what many content creators are doing nowadays is making the ads part pf the video itself, so you cannot skip it or block it. The product placement may transition seemingly in such a way as you may be listening to a video about the history of some math concept and suddenly the narrator will start talking about VPNs, and when that happens I just hit the back button. At this point the problem has gotten bad enough that I stopped watching any channels where this may happen, which is many of them now.
SponsorBlock extension is great; it cuts out the ads that are part of the video itself. It uses crowd-sourced tags. It gets nearly all of them; if a video is popular enough for the creator to bother putting ads in it then someone will submit the tags for it.
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.
I wonder how much this is still contributing to the overall problem. The content is getting views, so advertisers will still pay for ads, the algorithm will promote it more, more people will see the ads.
I think it creates a hierarchy of Internauts, ones that have the technical know-how and/or tools awareness needed to negate all the pollution and ones that don't and must suffer extra to compensate for the former. It's what I meant when I said there was a different Internet out there depending on how adept you are at "customizing" your Internet.
YouTube, like TV and any other technology infested with adds seems to me completely unusable as it is, I don't understand how people are so patient and keep using it.
I use uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock and Watch On Odysee extensions to improve it.
301 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadIs 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).
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.
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...
https://sponsor.ajay.app/
This also skips the sponsored parts of the actual videos ("this video is sponsored by skillshadow raid vpn,...")
It is 'stealing' from the content creators rather than youtube. Besides, these ads are not based on surveillance capitalism but much less invasive old-school methods. Finally, there is much easier recourse against these ads. Don't watch content creators that have annoying adds. There are not many alternatives to youtube, but there are many alternatives to any given channel.
Personally I also believe that in-content ads are much less annoying. I think that is because the content-creator gets to push back on really annoying adds.
IMHO, in-video ads are worse than the usual ads, because they subversive and break the flow. When I'm watching a math video I don't want to hear about how Euler could have used a VPN.
If numberphile starts running annoying ads, I can easily stop watching them, or manually skip them.
In other words. Just because you have a right to run software that blocks creators apps does not mean it is right (in the sense of right vs wrong) to run that software.
I'm not so sure, from what I understand these creators are typically paid upfront to embed the sponsorship in the video and they are given some promocode or url to present to watchers and that's how these sponsors track engagement. I don't think they check the watch time or the skip rate.
Especially the second is scary. Creators being able to run these ads makes them much more independent from youtube, which I consider quite important.
I don't know the percentage of people using ad blockers but I'm sure it is very, very low. In fact, most users watch YouTube from the app, so no ad blocking.
I just hope they don't make any significant change to their API so I can still use Vanced to listen to music when I'm outside.
If many people used ublock on the Web, many would iuse NewPipe to enjoy the same ad free experience on mobile (Android). I don't understand why so we few people care about their attention? Is this just ignorance? Or do they willingly want their desires to be manipulated in order for creators to be paid by platforms? Me I'm just happy to tip the channels I follow and be a proud pirate.
I want to say "subscription is the right answer" but it clearly isn't enough for some people (netflix).
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.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-l...
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.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
Did you know that killer sharks are tracking your every step and move through the internet? They are stalking you, so that they can find you, kill you and eat you (and your whole family, too!) when you go to the lake the other day. That is because they track all your steps on the internet. Now you might wonder: What can I do against that? It's easy: Just join Shady VPN and choose our VPN solution. Military grade encryption will hide your location from the network sniffing sharks so they have no idea where you are. Enjoy the summer. Sharkfree!
On the topic: Same goes for me, "ad-free" YT is not really ad-free, only a little less "infested".
[0[ https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-l...
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.
I'm always a little puzzled with how there is so much money in advertising.
I wish a tech crash like dot-com would happen already—in my very naive hope that the unscrupulous rat racers whose sole purpose is to perpetuate this infinite loop of SAT-level/IQ-test job recruitment + gamified promotion optimization will leave so they can ruin another industry. This is a terrible thought to have for peers, but after the past decade of nonsensical gatekeeping and unsustainable college major growth, I genuinely feel these people increasingly make everyday work life unbearable.
Likewise with many Polish entertainment/content aggregator/news websites - there are goddamn ads in the BACKGROUND of the page! Ugh!
Just look at this beauty: https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c0834752/436c59464448525156546b3d_f...
I can't really blame Google for not wanting people to skip ads. The fact that skippable ads even exist is kind of crazy.
More of a "dimly lit pattern" maybe.
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.
Edit: or is maybe the issue here the mere presence of ads versus them being blocked in a browser?
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.
EDIT: I'm referring to the original chromecast, not the new "Chromecast with Google TV"
There's clients for many other platforms, even traditionally locked down ones like iOS Safari etc.
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.
it's as if a frat party suddenly bombs your meditation group, trashes the place in 5 seconds, then leaves
> as such recommended practice concerns the transmission of commercial advertisements by a television broadcast station, cable operator, or other multichannel video programming distributor. [emphasis mine]
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-111publ311/html/PLA...
I think it would be worth it to file a complaint. Or if anybody here on HN has done so already, I would be interested in hearing the response.
EDIT: Looking at the code (which I’m woefully under-qualified at) I see this:
> (13) the term “multichannel video programming distributor” means a person such as, but not limited to, a cable operator, a multichannel multipoint distribution service, a direct broadcast satellite service, or a television receive-only satellite program distributor, who makes available for purchase, by subscribers or customers, multiple channels of video programming;
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/522
I don’t see how a chromecasting a youtube playlist (human curated or autogenerated) over GoogleTV, does not apply to this definition.
A related dark pattern is the purposeful muffling of hearing aid advertisements. They also generally play different audio than what the models are "saying" in order to further confuse their target market and convince them they are more hard of hearing than they really are.
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.
It helps that $10 is worth the many hours of use I get every month from YouTube & YouTube Music too.
To pay $10 per month to have unlimited content w/o ads is perfect. I don't understand the pushback.
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.
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".
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?
The only channels that were ever ad free were the premium channels that are still 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.
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.
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
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.
Yeah, the old "We want everything for free, and will complain if you spy on us or show us ads along the way"
Being exposed to an ad is not a dark pattern IMO. And this particular pattern is IMO pretty dang obvious if you use YouTube much at all.
Someone has to pay for YouTube ... someone has to pay for this stuff. If it is ads that's it.
I think the issue involves two parties, the sites who want revenue, and the vast majority of users who want content for free. So yeah here we are on the web where most people want everything free.
In an alternate universe without this dark pattern, there would still be ads - they would just have a consistent design that allowed you to skip the skippable ones without any thought, or alternatively longer/unskippable ads.
The reason why Google doesn't just take a 15-second ad with a 5-second unskippable section and turn it into a 15-second unskippable ad is because people will get frustrated with Google/YouTube and leave.
The current system causes people to stay, and blame themselves for not skipping the ad - "I'm just being lazy, it's only a few extra seconds."
That is the dark pattern.
You still seem to be missing the point OP was making though. The dark pattern isn't that you can't skip the ad.
Help me out then, what is it?
It seems to treat the channel page as a playlist now, and for playlists it always autoplays.
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.
Edit: It looks like it doesn't happen in the primary tab and I have all the other tabs disabled which would explain it.
In firefox type cs-] then press the right arrow 4-5 times, then alt-tab, then tab until "Skip add" is highlighted and hit space. No need for extra extensions or anything.
Note: this lets you skip unskipable ads too.
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.
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.
Some other user mentioned that there “was no free lunch” but explicit ads before and during videos don’t have to be the payment for said lunch.
Not sure what standard you are using for 'marvel of engineering' but to me this is truly a marvel of engineering.
[1] https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastruc...
Though I don’t think I have a specific standard, I’d have to think about it. “I’ll Know it When I See It” has historically been my personal standard.
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).
We couldn't even stream music, let alone stream video.
I did download MP3s though. A 3mb MP3 file would usually take me approximately an hour. And I downloaded ~3,000 this way.
Now a days with everything SSL it’s not really an issue. But I do remember getting bad HTTP/FTP downloads before encryption was a “thing”
It's like that scene in Spirited Away where Chihiro's parents start "pigging out".
Where did you get this free cell phone and data plan?
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.
And since the US seems to have abrogated those responsibilities they are falling to the EU.
Yes I want regulators to dictate how a behemoth corporate entity like Alphabet uses a platform like Youtube in ways that they both unduly profit from and are unacceptably detrimental to society as a whole.
Entities like Alphabet continue to grow and grow and the corrosive effects of their growth need to be checked some how. If you don't advocate for regulation than what mechanisms are you anticipating will mitigate the negative aspects of these kinds of entities?
If you don’t like the shit show that is YouTube - don’t use YouTube.
Data transfer is priced by connection and not by bandwidth, so that cost will not scale linearly.
https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&disk_types=e...
I think we're looking at $75/TB on the lower end.
> A 2T SSD for $38 sound to good to be true and of course they are a scam, don't buy they don't work
But that's not even the biggest oversight here on storage, these drives also need to be attached to something which will need to be cooled, networked, and powered in a reliable enough way the service continues operating when you have 10s of thousands of these. You'll also need to store more than exactly the amount of data since you can't just lose videos any time there is a failure.
In all it's still going to be dwarfed by encoding and bandwidth costs but that doesn't mean 15k/PB is any less an order of magnitude or two off on storage costs.
If there is a further good faith interpretation of what you've said you'd like added to the conversation then please point it out here and lead by example. Only pointing out you think the other person should have better respected the good faith doesn't serve to help anybody understand better, in fact it goes against the principle itself.
As it stands the most solid interpretation I can come up with is still that raw SSD pricing for a consumer, even though higher than listed, can come out low enough to be less than a percentage of revenue for YouTube but this still holds no indication about storage costs actually being that low but I'm always open to stronger interpretations!
- You claimed that the numbers I referenced were based on a clear scam. The resource is in fact the first resource you will find if you google "per tb storage cost".
- You stated that I had made oversights about total cost, something I never referred to.
- You claimed without any reference that the numbers I mentioned were off by multiple orders of magnitude.
- You said I'm "hellbent on saying this half billion/year doesn't matter". I made no such statement and don't feel that way at all.
- You said I was wrong about the way peering agreements are priced between ISPs and Google, but offered no other insight other than just saying I'm wrong.
- You just called me reactionary.
Again, I think it would be beneficial if you would respect the people you're interacting with enough to at least have a more constructive discussion.
There are plenty of scams to be found via Googling. You will also find many fake uSD cards for low prices as well, or other products. Google is simply a search engine not an infallible filter for what is or isn't a scam. The facts about the relative pricing should carry far more weight than the position in the search results.
> You stated that I had made oversights about total cost, something I never referred to.
The lack of reference to total cost is itself the oversight being referred to so it could only be problematic if you had referred to it not the other way around.
> You claimed without any reference that the numbers I mentioned were off by multiple orders of magnitude.
I actually referenced the other numbers in your original resource for the first order of magnitude. I explained the reasoning for the second order and I accept opposing reasoning if you disagree but you haven't provided any reasoning only reaction to the idea I'd disagree.
> You said I'm "hellbent on saying this half billion/year doesn't matter". I made no such statement and don't feel that way at all.
The quote was actually "If you're hellbent..." not "You are hellbent on".
> You said I was wrong about the way peering agreements are priced between ISPs and Google, but offered no other insight other than just saying I'm wrong.
You made the claim it's based on connections not bandwidth therefore it is your burden to provide some backing why it's true not everyone else's burden to assume it's true until they can prove it's not.
That said it doesn't even require knowing their all of their peering agreements to prove, Internet Protocol (IP) is not session based. BGP peering is done to exchange IP reachability information but it knows nothing of the sessions between those IPs as session information is another level up above the internet in the network stack https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/UD...
.
Again though none of this is providing what the more accurate good faith interpretation should have been. These are simply further reactions to my given interpretation.
> You just called me reactionary.
I have and you've said multiple things to me that could be taken worse than that but it'd be counterproductive to focus on these kinds of minor things when the goal is constructive conversation so I don't feel the desire to end messages with callouts about them
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
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 ;-)
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
A company can often tweak business metrics to give the message that the company wants the world to believe.
German Wikipedia on YouTubers Union: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtubers_Union
Website: https://youtubersunion.org/
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.
but now what many content creators are doing nowadays is making the ads part pf the video itself, so you cannot skip it or block it. The product placement may transition seemingly in such a way as you may be listening to a video about the history of some math concept and suddenly the narrator will start talking about VPNs, and when that happens I just hit the back button. At this point the problem has gotten bad enough that I stopped watching any channels where this may happen, which is many of them now.
1) use an adblocker
2) use a pihole
3) use sponsorblock
anything short of the first two is literally using a different internet. Marketers and Advertisers would ruin the net if we let them.
I use uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock and Watch On Odysee extensions to improve it.