And this is why we continue to use ad blockers. The entire internet is worse without them.
Something like less than 5% of users use adblockers - and yet that’s still too many for youtube. They just can’t have a 95% revenue stream, they have to ruin what little tech credibility they had left and ruin it for that tiny 5%. I hope this only encourages more robust ad blockers.
Right! Google acting like they are losing billions a month due to adblockers when in reality it’s like .2% of their total profits and they STILL foaming at the mouth.
🖕
Exactly. Google is showing they are not innovators anymore. A good company would invent new that they would be focusing on. They’re putting so much attention here that it tells me they have nothing better to work on.
They’re going the Microsoft route. Google has been behind on all the latest tech innovations for a while. They were last to build a cloud, late building LLMs, what have they actually innovated in the last few years?
In fairness, those 5% of users probably make up a larger portion of views than their non-blocking counterparts…
Wait… never mind. Fuck fairness. Fuck Google. Fuck YouTube.
I’m guessing you’re underestimating the amount of little kids who are simply put in front of a tablet with Pepa Pig on YouTube
These tech companies have learned they can get away it. Think of how many people were password sharing on Netflix? How many people were using unofficial Reddit apps? Tiny fractions of the userbase but they never get any financial blowback from stamping them out, so they’re going to continue to do that
I put a relative’s mobile phone on NextDNS to block ads for them, and the came back a couple days later noting how weird the ad-free experience was. Thankfully they didn’t want to revert, but yeah, most people are way into advertiser Stockholm Syndrome at this point.
I think I’ve been blocking/combating internet ads for 20+ years at this point.
I use YouTube mainly on my fire stick and phone. Are there any adblockers for those that actually work? Even on PC I’ve installed ad blockers on Firefox and they don’t seem to work at all
Ublock origin should work for Firefox on PC. For your fire stick you could try Smart Tube
i miss when people who made websites genuinely wanted what’s best for their users
My wife turned off her adblocker so she could watch some videos.
Within 20 minutes I heard tobacco ads, gambling ads, alcohol ads, and some ads that sounded like outright scams.
It’s a moral imperative to use an adblocker at this point.
Are tobacco ads legal where you live? Not sure I’ve ever even seen one in my life.
They don’t have to be legal. In Finland we are getting YouTube ads for a sports betting website. That’s illegal. (Only the nationally regulated gambling monopoly can do that, and even they have massive restrictions on what kind of advertising they can run.)
In the off chance that you can report the ad to YouTube (can’t do that on TV or Android), YouTube has nuked the ad. Doesn’t matter. The ad has been submitted via bazillion different advertiser accounts.
lol, hilarious, reader mode it is then
The skip button was already too small, so of course they had to make it even smaller. YouTube’s usability on Android is already terrible enough, which is pretty spectacular considering YouTube and Android are made by the same company. The seek bar barely works. The video end screen hides the de-maximise button. Nobody at Google has heard of the concept that controls at the edge of the screen are harder to aim accurately at. Just to scratch the surface!
Pixel 7 and up got rid of the back button and made it so you can just pull from either side. I swipe “back” way too often when I miss tiny sliders. The option to use a regular set of bottom buttons makes them as ugly as possible, too, permanently taking up space in a solid white bar. Such ui shit
Nobody at Google has heard of the concept that controls at the edge of the screen are harder to aim accurately at.
Interestingly, that’s the exact opposite of how it works on non-touch interfaces. The edges are prime control areas for pointer-driven interfaces.
Slight challenge to optimise a UX for both.
