If you watch him on Joe Rogan’s podcast he gives a full overview of how every single tiny detail down to colors, length of scene cuts, facial expressions, language, total length of videos, time of day for release, thumbnails, sound effects, music is extensively A/B tested to not only optimize for the algorithm but for hijacking people’s attention as well. That weird creepy face with the outline and uncanny smoothing aren’t by accident. Everything is intentional because he obsessively tests anything that might give him even the slightest edge in a sea of videos. The content itself barely matters.

> Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general.

My first thought is that the person has a strong grasp of their profession and they love money. A hack like that has to have a really high value/effort ratio.

A fantastic video from Matt, as usual.

Yet another data point on why nobody should be wasting a second watching Mr Beast content. Complete algorithmically optimized garbage.

I recall Mr Beast showing up in a Colin Furze video for a few minutes and Mr Beast was very clearly incapable of being a normal person. He was obviously out of place, being in full makeup and styled, and couldn't seem to be bothered to actually engage or express real interest in the subject. I think the guy has replaced his real persona with some manifestation of the YouTube algorithm. If he's not actively making money, he's just a shell.

Not the only thing he's guilty of.

MrBeast is a hack, but its worth pointing out that all "progress bars" are bad design. You could make the same complaint against most of the progress bars in MsDOS. There was never a consistency in timing so you can never really use them to gauge how much time is left.

If the only purpose is to show progress and you don’t known the total number of steps in advance, it’s better to show information about the current step and/or substep. Otherwise when your processing actually freezes, the UI would still happily show an advancing progress bar. That’s worse than even just showing a spinner animation or similar.

I've done something similar with a progress bar back in the early days. The task needed to do 10 things, so when each one completed the bar would move 10%. So the bar indicated completion in terms of things that needed to be done but not really in terms of time. It was quick and dirty and we had higher priorities but someone insisted on a "progress bar" so that was the easiest thing.

As a sometimes designer, i don’t think there’s any distinction between punishing the ad and the company. The company bought the ad, probably directed its creation, and decided what its criteria was for success. 1-star away as far as I’m concerned.

This is usually against ad network rules, so if you're willing to go out of your way a bit, you can screenshot those ads and report directly to the ad network

I'm not sure that is mostly the ad's fault. Hitting a target on a touchscreen is hard to do. This seems like it's the phone's fault first to me.

(If you're using a mouse, forget what I said. But I haven't run into an ad where the close button didn't close it... if you were able to click the close button.)

IME it's a real close button but the ad opens the thing when it closes, regardless of how it closes.

I've worked for two companies that did mobile ads, and one other that did web ads.

The web ad company was hampered by poor engineering and management that had big glory projects that were poorly conceived or too ambitious; they no longer exist.

The first mobile ad company was constrained by ethics and prioritized a better experience over earning that last fraction of a percent (though most people on the outside would disagree on principle).

The second mobile ad company had a decent API designer early, and managed to capture a specific role in advertising. That role gave them access to data that ended up being wildly useful for purposes other than it's original intention, and they've done well based on that. But they are completely mired in in-fighting, executives who only bother to come in and be seen for quarterly results, and they don't do *anything* unless someone else does it first. They don't have a functional legal department and engineers are afraid that their head will be on the block if something goes wrong, and everyone is afraid of killing the golden goose.

So no, I suspect it hasn't happened because almost nobody thought of it, and the people that did are too afraid to be a trailblazer.

And we've already seen the precursors for it. Chaining multiple short ads together to add enough value to be worth it for an in-game reward is the beginning of it. It's not a very far leap.

There is also https://text.npr.org

impressive... let's see the page source

i don't understand why more tech savvy people don't use on-device DNS blocking like with RethinkDNS

Because a few dollars here and there very quickly adds up, especially for people in poorer countries. It's also much harder to get people to spend money online. I bet if you could physically buy the suffrage for $1-5 people would be far more likely to pay for it.

I noticed an interesting hybrid – you get an interactive ad, if you interact with it, complete the level, engage with the ad etc. you get the close button immediately, if you idle you have to wait ~30 seconds. Feels very deplorable to me.

the word is ab-use and it means to misuse

If you don't think lying/tricking/manipulating people is abusive, then you might want to reflect on that.

abuse

noun

/əˈbyo͞os/

1. the improper use of something.

I fall asleep to YT sometimes watching speed runs when I have a hard time sleeping. When I wake up it is mostly running live streams of religious chants going in a loop. Hindu, muslim, orthodox christian. Or some strange genre of a Japanese anime girl making sounds.

I suspect that they are already doing that (or something like it) as I've seen certain content appear at specific times/days.

Why would they help you sleep and take a gamble on subliminal anything working when they can just do it when you're awake?

With YT, it might be an account-specific metric. Ie: flagged as a frequent sleeper. This would not surprise me, since they track just about every other metric possible against your account.

You can have multiple YT accounts on a single gmail acct, but I don't think that'll fool them. They know where you initially logged in from. So you will likely need multiple gmail accounts to do this kind of experiment.

I'm not sure why it would specifically be targeting "sleepers"... there are a lot of reasons why someone might not skip ads... people who are sleeping are probably the least valuable of them.

It could just as well be something super valuable -- like an unattended kiosk device playing youtube to a crowd of people.

I don't think they specifically target people who tend to go to sleep. But, having worked in the ad engineering, I can imagine they do know how often specific users skip ads and target ads based on that property.

Time is money. Ten minutes of daily YouTube ads adds up to 5 hours a month. Premium costs $14, roughly an hour's work at minimum wage. Trade one hour of labor for four hours of free time. That's 48 hours back each year for $168. It's a no brainer. Even if your wage is half of 14 dollars, you would still gain 24 hours back and it would still be worth it.

This is what a fucking store is for. They have catalogs. You could ask for one. If they think people will want something they will try to sell it and will tell you about it if you go looking.

I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled. Is this the kind of lie ad folks tell themselves so they can sleep at night?

The fix is actually fairly simple IMO, though will never be implemented. Make all ads passive, e.g. require people to explicitly ask to see them. For example, when I want to see what new video games are around, I go to review sites and forums. It's opt-in.

Making all ads only legal in bazar-like environments, banning all other forms of "forced" ad viewing, and also banning personalized ads completely, would go a very long way to fixing the issues. Hell, we can start with simply banning personalized ads, that alone would effectively destroy the surveillance economy by making it illegal to use that data for anything other than providing the service the customer purchases.

Magazines, phone books, friends, stores. You know you could go to a store (or call them on the phone!) and talk to a person. "Hello, I am trying to find a thing to help me with X."

Turns out that products that work well tend to get remembered, and ones that don't get forgotten.

If a product is really that good than people will legit recommend it. It's not a problem at all.

If you waited for an ad to solve your "legitimate problem" you didn't have a problem to begin with imho

I have never in my several decades of life seen and ad for anything and thought "I need to get that".

Part of the issue may also be that to many companies rely on selling ads as their main source of revenue and there simply isn't enough money in "good ads" to fund all the services we've come to expect to be free.

There simply isn't enough ads for soft drinks, supermarkets or cars to reasonably fund the tech industry as it currently exists. Ad funded Facebook, perfectly fine, but that's not a $200B company, not without questionable ads for gambling, scams and shitty China plastic products.

Platforms should have higher standards, accept lower profit margins and charge users if needed, rather than resort to running ads for stuff we all now is garbage.

Can you remember the last 3 times when ads showed you products that solved your problem? I cannot.

The closest experience I have had was with ads for new restaurants, of which two turned out good and one - not good. Also, twice last year, I saw trailers of new movies I wasn't aware of at the moment. However, I am sure I would later discover it via reviews or word of mouth.

And mind that it was not problem solving, just an entertainment suggestion. I can live comfortably without new restaurants, or I will eventually discover them via other channels.

Word of mouth. It is okay for a system to be inefficient, especially when the tradeoff for efficiency is a poison pill (ad tech is definitely this).

Historically, yes. People in their 70s might remember that time. But language has moved on. Advertising now means manipulation. The ad market is priced for that. The rare cases of someone wanting to use advertising channels to put out actual information now have to pay a premium.

Ads should be centralised state department and run through only approved and regulated bodies at regulated sites.

I wonder if there's a middle ground, where you only have statement based, textual ads. Amusing ourselves to Death (great book btw), discusses how until the 19th century, ads were basically just information dense textual statements. The invention of slogans and jingles was the start of the slow downfall in ads.

I interned at an ad agency once, and I really enjoy creative advertising, but frankly there's just way too much advertising in this world.

The bigger problem is those fake "realistic robot dog" ads, and all the other ai-faked products.

Why YT and Google in general would want to be associated with such scammery, I do not know.

As a consumer, I am fully willing to swallow the opportunity cost of blocking advertisements. I'm not afraid of having unspent money sitting around.

You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service. Increasing the customer acquisition cost for a company to infinity doesn't make them lower their prices. It makes them go out of business because they have no customers.

Is there not always some sort "marketplace" where people see what's being offered one way or another?

I don't think we need ads for discovery, I see it more as a nefarious way to occupy space in people's conscious.

Most of the YT ads are AI rubbish. I can't imagine those fake "realistic puppy" ads generate any sales whatsoever. Same for the monocular that can zoom into a book title from a mountain range away. And nearly all the other YT and news feed ads one typically sees.

Frankly, they should be illegal. If a physical store did that in Canada, it certainly would be. I'm surprised Canada hasn't reacted to these overabundant fake-product ads.

That’s not a problem for the customers though. Capitalism twists our incentives toward prioritizing return on investment over quality of life. Especially now with the internet, I literally never need ads. I just search for the solution to the problem I’m having. No push needed (or wanted).

Exactly. I hate seeing ads when I do not want to, and I love going out and buying a furniture catalogue. The difference should be obvious.

Why would it be impossible to start a business? You would still be able to list your business in mediums where potential buyers willingly go and search for products and services. If anything, it would level the playing field, paying more for ads would not mean you getting your poorer services more visible buy paying more for ads.

The very concept of fair pricing is an advertisement. In nearly all of history the merchant would charge what they judged you could pay. but keep those noses up HN.....

If you were going to be buying it anyway why does it even matter what the price is? Why can't they just list it at the coupon price for everyone?

I actually think so, yes, the world would be better off with everything you listed happening.

When we used to pay for newspapers, the informational value of the news was a lot higher, news and news-like social media posts were not the primary tool to spread stupidity.

Yes. I'm not even sure it's a question anymore. Yes it would be a better world.

Not even because of the first order consequences of the ads, but because since there are ads, we have an entire media ecosystem based on grabbing your attention.

So that TV displays series and movies meant for people with the attention span of a goldfish. This applies to Netflix and Hollywood by the way. All of it. Even music changes for radio, meaning more ads.

Google, Youtube, etc, along with news, along with social networks, depend on ragebait, being the first to spout whatever factoid, true or false, polarization of thought and basically a good chunk of what is very evidently wrong in today's society.

I trust we could support a weather app with donations. For the rest? If I could remove either ads or cancer from this world I would sit a long time thinking about the decision, but gut feeling? Ads. The actual cost of the ad industry is enormous and incalculable, not even mentioning the actual purposes ads serve.

As for the rest, I'm very much a fan of the Bill Hicks standup bit regarding the subject.

Given that companies often spend a significant fraction of their budgets on advertising, I wonder if some products would be cheaper if advertising was banned. Sure, maybe some ad-supported services would be paywalled, but it might end up being a wash in the end.

At the very very very least, every ad-supported service should be required to offer an option to pay and see no ads. I do pay for services I use regularly when they offer it as an option to avoid ads.

Free speech does not mean you get to yell at me. In the same way, banning ads where they are shown to users without their consent would not mean violation of free speech.

ads aren't free speech, but corrupted speech

If free speech is you rolling up with a megaphone to yell promotional nonsense at me, then it's my free speech to vote for you to get banned I think.

> I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look for example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There are popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones, etc. The search space is so big and complex that it is never easy.

And adverts don't help determine what the best tool for your problem is. They determine which product spent the most on adverts.

So yes, adverts do not help you with decision making at all.

Open source software (mostly) don’t have ads, and that doesn’t seem to be a problem in practice. Good projects become known by word of mouth, people blogging about it, etc. If anything, it exemplifies that ads aren’t required.

> My personal preference would be a network recommendation system. I would like to know what people I know (and in my extended network) are using and like - being it restaurants, clothes or open source software. I have 90% of friends (or friends of friends) satisfied with something - maybe I should try. Of course it is not a perfect system, but seems much better than what we currently have...

I can think of a hacky solution where your friends can share their (trustpilot?) or alternative accounts username and then you can review what they are reviewing/what they are using etc.

The problem to me feels like nobody I know writes a trustpilot review unless its really bad or really good (I dont know too much about reviewing business)

I feel like someone must have built this though

Another part is how would you get your friends list? If its an open protocol like fediverse, this might have genuine value but you would still need to bootstrap your friends connecting you in fediverse and the whole process.

And oh, insta and other large big tech where your friends already are wont do this because they precisely make money from selling you to ads. It would be harmful to their literal core.

> My personal preference would be a network recommendation system.

Random question: do you have a personal site where you write about things you recommend? Because that's the solution IMO. And that's the network you're talking about: it's the web. You find enough people you trust and you see what they recommend. The issue is that in modern society 99% of the people consume and 1% are fucking influencers getting paid to promote crap.

> how you discover a new product

Buying magazines for trusted 3rd party reviews used to be way more common, far better experience than trying to sift through SEO slop these days.

> The main issue is how you discover a new product.

We live in the information age.

How did you learn about your programming languages? Ads?

I think it is largely a Marketer's fantasy that people get up in the morning with a goal of "discovering new products." I don't want to discover new products. I especially don't want to while I'm trying to do something else that I actually WANT to do. If I need a new product, I will deliberately go out and look for it. I don't need marketers doing drive-by product announcements while I'm just trying to live my life.

The question of "how do people spontaneously discover products" is invalid. It's just not something people want in their lives.

That's a great idea for a dystopian sci-fi story: you can opt out of ads, but your product choices are publicly broadcast instead.

> How would people learn about various choices?

By going to a website where they can learn about various choices.

It could be similar to ads, but with higher truth value to it.

AND most importantly, the user would view the information when THEY want to see the information, not when the marketeer wants to shove it in their face.

That's the funny part, ads would be less annoying if they were hyper-targeted, which means there was more supply of ads and worse privacy. There's been a number of times I've found useful stuff from ads, but it's rare and almost never on Youtube.

Youtube is the one site worth paying for not to see ads and sponsorblock extension skips the live reads.

All transactions include several kinds of costs. Reducing the monetary costs to zero does nothing for the other costs.

Enthusiasm for micropayments is very similar to enthusiasm for cutting the price of something from $5.001 to $5.00000001. It's a 0.02% decrease in the price! They make about as much sense as saying "hey, if I can buy 80,000 plastic ninjas for $500, I should also be able to buy one ninja for $0.007".

ads

> would a ban on selling ad space do the trick?

How would you define ad space?

> You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service

An acid test I've found surprisingly powerful is that of the founders promoting the Constitution through pamphleteering. They wrote the pamphlets themselves. The historical record is silent on whether they paid for their printing or distribution. (The papers could publish due to subscribers and paid advertising.)

If your rule would let them pamphleteer, it should be fine. If it would not, it probably needs work. I have not yet seen a definition of advertising that satisfactorily isolates this.

Autoplay keeps turning itself back on. I’ve probably turned it off a dozen times now.

The other autoplay, where it starts playing stuff while browsing. I’ve tuned this off many times too.

The massive thumbnails so I can only see 2 thumbnails on the screen, I’m not sure what the advantage is here other than better tracking what you linger on. They also get bigger on the active row, so if I see a video I might want on the 2nd cut off row, then make it my active row, the thumbnails get bigger and I can’t see it anymore. I lose context due to this all the time and it drives me nuts.

Shorts, yes, but not just Shorts in the Recommendations, but Shorts dominating search results, where it almost doesn’t show traditional videos anymore. In the browser you can filter search results for videos vs shorts, but not on the AppleTV.

It keeps showing big banners with a demo video next to it for features Premium users can get… it’s an ad for something I’ve already signed up for. I report these as spam.

The games. I’ve never once played one, yet they are prominently displayed in my recommendations.

I think as a Premium user I should be able to choose what screen the app opens into, or what is on my home page. I’d like my watch later list, for example. Instead, it just randomly mixes some of those into the recommendations and it may or may not make it clear which ones those are.

I know there is more, and some big ones I’m missing, but those are some of the things they come to mind.

The video feed, notifications, and the whole UI are still structured to maximize engagement, instead of giving paying users better control.

"They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it"

The first part is true, the second part pretty obviously isn't. Advertizers expect to net $ from ad buys, but most advertising isn't trying to increase a consumers total spending, its trying to drive that spending towards the companies products.

To give the most obvious example, the largest category of advertising is for food and beverage products. But no one thinks that if those ads all suddenly disappeared, people would stop buying food.

>The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't

They don’t necessarily make more money from every user though.

Sure, but a lot of that is 1) just influencing what type or brand you get of products your going to buy anyways, and 2) only an average, presumably wealthier consumers are "subsidizing" poorer ones, since they have more spending to be influenced.

There was something like that in Germany called de-mail. It was official and receiving and reading a mail was considered legally binding (invoices, etc.)

It could have been great but the implementation lacked encryption and had wild security issues. So nobody used it and it was shut down

Assuming a zero sum economy, which is a pretty poor assumption.

> So for instance 'back in the day', before Google hoovered up everybody's email, what would typically happen is you would get an email address with your ISP.

Well, no, not even close. You'd get an email address from your ISP. You still do; nothing about that has changed.

Among the things that haven't changed is that you were more likely to use a free online email service, most notably Hotmail or Yahoo.

But that also bound you to your ISP in a way, because switching ISPs meant switching emails. It is better to have then separated.

or micro payments or something different which will work better.

Youtube is more like modern Cable TV though, there's huge value there for the price. I like visiting Twitter and Reddit occasionally for news, I've been using both since they launched, but I wouldn't pay for either of those. I could easily make the choice to cut that out of my life.

YT makes it easy to skip embedded ads now. They mark places where people skip past and shortcut it so you don't need to watch them.

I don't like ads either. Who does? I really don't mind unless they are hard-cut and aren't made by the creator themselves. What's your solution here? A new policy that prevents creators from doing sponsor spots? We all know what the result of that would be.

so you just dont think people making video content should make money in any way? if you hate ads that much dont watch any creators that have sponsored content. oh wait, the only way they can make videos that good is because they make money and are professionals. doh!

>these sites would rapidly become fully competent replacements

they wouldn't. For two reasons. Without the capital (that to a large extent comes from ads) nobody could run the herculean infrastructure and software behemoth that is Youtube. Maintaining that infrastructure costs money, a lot. Youtube is responsible for 15% of global internet traffic, it's hard to overstate how much capital and human expertise is required to run that operation. It's like saying we'll replace Walmart with my mom&pop shop, we'll figure the supply chain details out later

Secondly content creation has two sides, there aren't just users but also producers and it's the latter who comes first. Youtube is successful because it actually pays its creators, again in large part through ads.

Any potential competitor would have to charge significantly higher fees than most users are willing to pay to run both the business and fund content creators. No Youtube competitor has any economic model at all on how to fund the people who are supposed to entertain the audience.

How would they pay for the infrastructure required to support all those users? I can't stand ads, but when I was younger, no way would I have paid for YT Premium (though to be fair, ads are much, much worse now).

At least on youtube premium it has a feature to "Skip commonly skipped section".

>most content on YouTube these days are sponsored by the companies trying to sell you a crap.

Because YT doesn't pay shit to content creators, hence being part of creating this.

The people making the content need to make a living too, as much as ads suck.

SponsorBlock works very well for skipping in-video ads.

It's a decent deal.

Comes with YouTube Music for 15$.

I probably use YouTube more than any other website, for about 10 minutes my premium subscription had expired and u rushed to throw money at Google to turn it back on.

Musicians complain about low streaming payouts, but 30 years ago I'd pay $40 ( inflation adjusted) for 15 songs and only like 3 of them.

Now I can listen to 500 or 600 unique songs a month + music that would of had to be imported for that 15$.

If I actually like an artist I'll buy an album as a keepsake.

Don't pretend that its just YouTube forcing the ads on you. The creators can choose where ads go in their videos.

It'd be great if all public ads were banned and digital ads were the only form. That way those who are savvy enough can also block the digital ones and live a completely ad-free life.

My annoyance is that regardless of how I lock ads out of my own home and devices, I will still always see ads for McSlop and Coca Cola everywhere I walk in my city.

>Google already gets an unjustified cut of the money I'm paying for the game

Brotato is free to distribute their game outside the Play Store as well, Android isn't locked down. If the cut was unjustified why would they give money away to Google for free? The reasons are actually extremely similar to the reasons ads benefit society.

And if I am not searching for Salesforce or alternatives, and an ad for Salesforce or an alternative gets pushed into my face, the ad is wrong and the advertiser is wrong.

It's infuriating, the other day I had to download an app to pay for parking. What the fuck do I need the top choice to be a competing parking app? That won't do me any good when the place I'm parking need the one I searched for and who the hell goes "oh, an exciting new parking app? I'm gonna drive around until I can find a place that uses it so I can park there!"

I can see how it's contradictory on its face, but the reality is pretty nuanced.

Large brands continue to run ads to enforce brand loyalty and keep their image fresh. For a lot of companies, dropping advertising will lead to reduced sales.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cmo/2024/12/18/why-cutting-adve...

However, as a new entrant to a consumer facing market, how is one supposed to drive new customers to try their product? Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties. So you've got to do some amount of advertising to build some kind of awareness to the product and get people to try it.

That doesn't necessarily mean unskippable video advertisements or whatever, but one should try and do some kind of marketing push to get awareness of your product up other than hoping presence on some store shelves will result in enough sales fast enough to keep your company alive.

Arguably, the advertiser is not merely a third party whose interests the service provider must consider, but rather the actual paying customer (and much more of the second party) whose interests the service provider must satisfy to make revenue. That to me puts into perspective the absurdity of this business model: the user is not the customer, the product or service itself is not the product but only a means to keep offering the actual product to the paying customer.

>what's an ad is much harder.

Not really that much harder, and would immediately cover the worst offenders. I mean we already have disclosure laws on product placements and ads.

It's unlikely ads would ever actually fund any meaningful real world product or service like public transport. The most they can fund is some crappy apps, websites and digital platforms, and most of the time they can barely do that.

It's only a matter of time before our ad-driven tech economy pops when they realise how much fraud is committed by the adtech companies, how little return these ads really give, and peoples susceptibility to ads further declines, causing them to exhaust even the most invasive and penetrative advertising techniques.

A nice idea I saw was a service where you can get a free/discounted public transport ticket for doing some squats or other exercise in front of a machine. Something like that would shift a lot of money from handling healthcare for the inactive over to providing free public transport.

Regulation is only a policeman. It doesn’t innovate.

Competitive markets do innovate. I watch YouTube live instead of Twitch (many streamers double stream) precisely because the former has skippable ads.

I’m guessing you haven’t taken even one semester of the relevant economics. Isn’t it great to be an internet commenter?

I am fine with advertising becoming less valuable. I fully appreciate there is a lot of media I take for granted due to advertising. Yet, ever since I was a small child the goal of advertising was to influence consumer behavior more than selling products or brand identity, which is extremely toxic. Once consumer gullibility wears off the dollars poured into advertising always find a way into political lobbying and policy influence campaigns, which is really just more of the same.

Funny, I would say making advertising less valuable is big win.

One of those mythical "win win win" scenarios

Why would I an advertiser pay $1 to show an advert to someone that doesn’t have $1 to spend on my product.

If they do have a dollar to spend then why wouldn’t they spend it on what they wanted to watch in the first place rather than spend it with me, the advertiser.

I would argue that limiting the amount of unrequested product evangelism shoved into users' eyeballs is a valuable public and mental health initiative. I wish we could have seen the alternate reality where ad-revenue was not the most lucrative business model for the internet.

I don't see how less video time for people would harm innovation.

If you, like me and most people I know, hate ads, why would it be a bad thing to limit it?

What are we expecting to actually accomplish with all this platform growth thing?

If your revenue comes from parasitical strategies it's negative sum and the economy is better off without it.

> Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad budgets. This means the tech platform makes less revenue. This means the platform and the video creator both make less revenue. This means less videos get created.

this all sounds great. ideal, even.

Too many people think removing ads means they'll still continue to get content for free, they just won't have to watch ads.

At best, it's as you said, the platform and creator make less money (Youtube gives 55% of ad revenue to the creator). This would naturally lead to less content eventually.

At worst, video content becomes unsustainable without a subscription.

>Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad budgets.

Great. Once that happens, we can work on regulation to kill even more advertising.

> market distortionary

I am unsure what you are trying to say here. But if you mean to refer to "market distortion", I cannot see how that can be happening.

The reason is that these rules are supposed to be applicable universally to every company in the same way. And as such, they do not create any market distortion in one way or the other. Because everyone has to play by the same rules. Those are as fair market conditions as one can get, in my opinion.

> some might not bother

Why should that be a problem? If someone does not like the regulation in a particular jurisdiction, it is fine. No one is forcing them to operate there.

The main point is the following: If they want to operate, they have to play by the local rules. Just like everyone else.

Ad skipping should be handled at the platform level and not left to individual advertisers to control. Regulations like this make such an outcome more likely.

Mobile ads in the US are heinous. Each one has a different mechanism for skipping, the skip buttons are micro sized and impossible to tap, some of them don't even work.

Standardization should have been up to the platforms selling ads, but they haven't done it. It's past time for local authorities to step in and protect consumers from predatory behavior.

Markets are not a natural phenomenon and are themselves the result of complex social arrangements, involving coercion. So, the market is the result of "distortions" before and after various regulatory measures.

Good?

> market distortionary

So what if it is?

> makes global advertisers have to customize for the local audience

My understanding of advertising is that there is already substantial customization for local audiences.

Isn’t that presumably the point of the Vietnamese government whenever they set new requirements?

To make it harder for people who dont care about Vietnam to do business.

I would assume that the global advertisers are already having to customize for the local audience since the spoken language is Vietnamese.

Can you spell out more what’s wrong with distorting a market or customizing for local audiences?

why is it a bad thing if global advertisers have to customize? If they're global, they should have the resources. Anyhow none of our concerns

Simply put, fuck the "market" (aka: uber-rich people). The market should serve us humans, not the other way around.

Ive heard this garbage excuse since Reagan took a wrecking ball to regulations. Not making effective regulations is ALSO a market distorting thing, that encourages the absolute worst behaviors. And now with Citizens United, its $1 = 1 vote.

But no, "marrrrrkeeeeetttttt"

I personally like descriptive regulation over prescriptive regulation.

Instead of prescribing exactly what you should do, describe the outcomes you want, and let case law fill in the rest of the owl. That's the only way to prevent violations like this.

To be fair, the main disadvantage of this approach is that law is much harder to understand. You can't just read the law as it is written, you also have to familiarize yourself with all the rulings that tell you how that law should actually be interpreted.

I don't know why you feel it is irrational at all. That a perfectly rational reason to be angry about the state of ad injection

> and needing some approval.

and here shows just how bad the rot is. I would assume that buying that much "air time" to have your longer content played would come a quite a premium. I would also not be surprised if selling those premiums come with a bonus. There's a reason those paid-programming shows run with no commercials. The cost of airing it paid for all of the ad pods during that block of air time, plus extra for being special snowflake.

If these long content "ads" are flukes, then that also shows the rot of the ad market that this isn't handled as an exception.

I think I was speaking equally to anyone else reading the thread, but also I should have pointed out that the longer you watch an ad, the more familiar you will become with accepting and expecting the product being sold. There's no way to get around the time spent. Just because the first 5 seconds have the largest proportional impact, doesn't mean the last 25s won't also have an impact.

But even if everything I said was incorrect, and you actually are immune, just like you describe... everyone else isn't, and they're being targeted as much as you are.

I see them as conflicting viewpoints because as a general rule companies do not focus on

> Long term financial interests, mostly.

It's great that you as an individual feel otherwise (I do too), but there are larger macro forces at work which compel firms to act the way they do: pursue short term growth at all costs. The counter-balance to this is either a strong regulatory environment, or a hope and prayer that a majority of companies suddenly gain a strong CEO who feels otherwise and is not obligated to satisfy shareholders who don't. Only a few such CEOs come to mind, and they're looking increasingly short for this world.

I haven't used it much, because I was dragged kicking and screaming back to iOS by family inertia (photo library and iMessage), but there is this which bills itself as the same idea:

https://play.google.com/store/pass/getstarted

> only on an XBox and never on the phone. ... I don't want the games to be accessible wherever they are.

I couldn't agree more that a carry-anywhere gaming (or worse, social-media) device is too corrosive to childhood.[1] My eldest is only 7, so unsurprisingly he doesn't have a phone, and uses an iPad. The size of it has a nice side-effect that it's impractical to carry around, so it's only used at home and in the car.

When he's older, I plan to give him a phone that can only text and call.

[1] Sure, some of us had things like Game Boy, but consider how long those batteries even lasted, how bulky and limited the devices were, how expensive games were, how there were zero ads... It's really far from the same thing. I'd be fine with him having a thing like a Game Boy.

It’s great. Zombie themed tribute to Oregon Trail.

Yeah but the gov relies on that income. £2.0-£2.5 billion

And what do you think the consequence of that new regulation will be?

But doesn't uBlock only block stuff via the browser?

I want to block ads from most apps.

And in the process kill all the possibilities the internet has empowered?

Medicine being better delivered, all the research that has been accelerated because of reducing compute and storage costs, the list is infinite.

> If the author/artist wanted it to be free, the ads wouldn't be there.

That's a logical leap. The artist can want both things.

There are two payments involved:

1. The user pays with his time/attention

2. The ad company pays the site

In most cases, the author doesn't mind getting the payments from number 2 even if you skip 1. Many, many sites explicitly point out they don't find a it a problem if you install an ad blocker.

I don't have ads on my site. I'm OK with you consuming it for free. If I put ads one day, I'll still be OK with it, because I know I'll get some money regardless. It's practically free money.

I will not miss the vast majority of sites I go to that serve ads if they all decided to shut down and/or go paid only. I should be spending a lot less time on the Internet/phone to begin with!

If a medium doesn't exist because of the lack of ads and you think it's a loss, you should have paid for it (which overall is cheaper than paying though ads).

The day I stopped giving half a fraction of a shit was the day Google served me malware in an ad. It was one of those fake "Download" buttons on a very popular open source tool. I wonder how many people have been harmed by that.

> medium you are consuming may not exist at all

I've realized that's not my problem. It's not like most of the internet is healthy anyway. It's psychologically manipulative and designed to keep you fearful, angry, spiteful, jealous, and above all, depressed.

Fuck Google. Fuck Meta. And fuck every single last person working for them.

This is sort of my line of reasoning as well.

In my own petty way. I consider this my pushback against a system that is pushing oppressive systems onto me. But really, I'm partially glad this system works and partially annoyed that this is the cost.

  > How reliable are cronjobs in termux?

  > Does they get killed if you're low on memory?

  > Perhaps you could share these scripts somewhere?

  > Personally I use Nextcloud

It likely wouldn't take much to get YouTube to just shut out Vietnam; ads there are very cheap, so they probably weren't making much money anyway.