> Besides a non-ad-free experience, the $7.99 Premium Lite subscription also removed several other cool features like the ability to download videos for offline viewing and background play, which can be quite convenient for listening to music on the app. Speaking of music, YouTube Premium Lite also does not include access to YouTube Music.
So what's the deal here? $8 for "less ads but none of the premium features"? I'd understand "no ads but none of the premium features" but even for that it would be quite expensive. Who on earth is the target group for this plan?
It's amusing how they unironically continue to do this so plainly even after dystopian shows like black mirror and others mock this tactic aggressively in their latest outings. In the past, companies would try harder to hide a highly publicized bait and switch scam if they continued to make use of it. Subscription monetization schemes have truly hit a dead end if they can't bother even hiding it anymore.
Exactly. You can’t believe how the people at YouTube are salivating at the future conversion rate from people who got Lite from their cell phone provider.
The deal here is that maintaining a free hosting service for 4k videos is not profitable, even with shitload of ads. This is hard truth that nobody wants to hear. My suggested solution is that once businesses grow beyond certain size, the government should step in and buy them out. This would allow to provide such services at a loss. Like, for example, railway in Europe. The only reason why it's even remotely usable is because it's funded from taxpayers' money. And they also started as private companies that would later become de-facto branches of the government.
Setting aside the actual ads, I feel like this Premium Lite cannot be long for the world at this point. It seems this is a common problem with corporations gradually trying to squeeze more juice out of products by increasing their complexity, until its so incoherent that people just won't engage anymore. I'm not sure any ordinary person could actually tell you what they would practically pay for Microsoft Office (I mean Office 365, Microsoft 365, no wait Copilot 365). If I open google shopping it looks like there are 10?? different types of licenses/subscriptions I could purchase labeled as either 365 or Office 2024.
Premium already suffers from the issue that you're paying to not experience something, so exactly how obnoxious the thing you're skipping is a little fuzzy. Once you start adding layers of tweaks to the definition of "some" ads, its hard to imagine people being enthusiastic to pay for it.
If you're on desktop, use ublock origin and sponsor block.
If you're on Android, use tubular (https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular). It has no ads, built-in sponsor block and allows you to download videos and play them in the background for music.
If you're on Android TV, use Smart Tube (https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube). It basically has the same features as above, but with a TV-friendly UI.
If you're on iOS, consider switching to an OS where a big corp doesn't control what software you can run.
> If you're on iOS, consider switching to an OS where a big corp doesn't control what software you can run.
Sure! I literally just picked up a new Razr 2025 last night.
Out of the box, its built in “device pulse” application sideloaded another 15 apps out of the box I never asked for, consented for, or wanted, ranging from scammy games to garbage like Tiktok and Pintrest.
I didn’t get to say “no” to those applications… sounds like a big corp controlled what software I can run. They even put the application installer into the ‘nodisable’ list so I can’t kill it, and I can’t unlock the bootloader or any of that other great stuff everyone says Androids can do.
Did you buy from Morotola or from a phone/service vender like TracPhone? I've had several Moto's in the recent past and they had a couple of light weight utilities but nothing like what you're describing. It sounds like carrier crapware.
I'm using Firefox with UBO and for quite a while now every YT video stops playing after 45 seconds with an error message. So I made a bookmarklet that opens the embed link instead, which does not error out, but some videos can't be played that way at all.
No one else seems to have that specific problem. Am I the only one with this issue?
How does Tubular compare to PipePipe (https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe). Both seem to be forks of NewPipe + SponsorBlock, but PipePipe seems like it might be a bit more active.
I have uBlock Origin on FF, just this morning it stopped working on YouTube. YouTube now tells me I am allowed for 3 videos because I'm adblocking them.
Nearly every time I see this, it's because people have other addons colliding which cause issues.
You only need uBlock origin; get rid of Ghostery, Privacy Badger, adblock for youtube or any of that other stuff. Other extensions can cause uBlock to not work correctly.
> Do NOT use uBO with any other content blocker. uBO performs as well as or better than most popular blockers. Other blockers can prevent uBO's privacy or anti-blocker-defusing features from working correctly.
I had something like this for a while as well. I think they just target subsets of adblock users since I have multiple friends with the same configuration who didn't get it. My solution was FreeTube with LibRedirect.
ads, on paid, youtube, premium, lite, what a fantastic word construct, a veritable babel of corporate policies we suffer. If we could only shove "AI generated" in front of "ads", it would be the supreme capture of the current zeitgeist. Big tech in a nutshell, if you will.
For those voicing the "yeah, well they're not a charity" sentiment:
What Google have done with YouTube is push it at a loss for long enough to kill competition. Once they're the only ones left, they get to dictate everything because there's nobody left to compete.
It's not _illegal_ (not exactly, anyway), but don't expect me to then call using the service and blocking ads "stealing".
YouTube without an adblocker is borderline unusable. I would have no problem paying for premium if they didn’t also steal your data. They can’t have both, not from me anyway.
Unhook and Channel Block also make my youtube experience much better. I did pay for Premium at one point but they kept pushing "features" that couldn't be disabled, I provided feedback, but I imagine it goes nowhere, so I stopped paying them.
I put a youtube video on the TV last week and all the adverts were deep fakes of famous people saying you can get rich with this one trick and a QR code to scan. One of the videos was a deep fake of the UK PM Keir Starmer saying thousands of people can claim an unknown benefit. How are these adverts not considered harmful?
I used this fact to get rid of my YouTube addiction.
I used to have Premium and listen to videos in the background while working, doing chores, all kinds of stuff. I realized 95% of the content I'm listenting to is garbage, and another 5% percent is good content that deserves my full attention, not just me listening to it while doing other stuff.
Stopped paying for premium, the experience is so unbearable that after a couple of days, I stopped watching YouTube.
I guess I could also just adblock, but they keep breaking every couple of weeks (gee, I wonder why), but honestly I don't mind less YT in my life.
It is baffling to me that people would pay to access it: the viewer is the product that is sold, not the youtube content. This is merely a bait. Content creator's customer's are the brands that want to be advertized.
I used to be very happy with the old Premium Lite, I didn't need YouTube Music or other features of Premium, just wanted to pay to have ads removed on all devices and it was the perfect product for that.
Then they cancelled it, got the email back in 2023 and resorted back to add-ons to block ads, stopped watching videos on devices that didn't support that, generally only watched YouTube on the computer for educational purposes.
When I saw it was back my first thought was "are you fucking kidding me?", I simply cannot comprehend Google's product strategy, at all. The "data-driven" bullshit for determining features, product tiers, etc. turns out to be just the McNamara fallacy applied to digital products, I can't see another way to explain the whiplash Google goes through in their product decisions, feels like everyone over there responsible for these decisions is only looking at insights, dashboards, etc. without ever thinking about what the hell the product is at its core.
Does it matter, if they can get your $8/month, plus some ad revenue? You don't last long in the C-suite if you're not interested in perpetual profit growth.
Look, people are greedy. YouTube evidently works and is enormously profitable. As is the rest of the copyright industry. It didn't disappear once people had the power to make their own copies. If anything the industry has become more profitable and more powerful. None of this is about survival, it's about greed. If you give people the power to take more they will take it, every single time. They might not take it at first, but they will take it eventually. It's really that simple. Stories like this are boring. We know it's coming, and will keep coming. Until we build our communities in such a way that these enormous power imbalances can't happen then there will be stories like this every day.
If you want it to stop then we need AGPL software and a decentralised internet. We are in a local optimum so it will seem worse at first before it gets better.
> If you want it to stop then we need AGPL software and a decentralised internet. We are in a local optimum so it will seem worse at first before it gets better.
But we already have a decentralized internet, it's just that most people will go for convenience rather of freedom...
Furthermore, some people here keep claiming that they are willing to pay for ad-less services, yet learned nothing from cable TV... even paid streaming services have ads...
Having shorts be treated the same as music videos makes sense due to how shorts can freely use copyrighted music unlike long form videos on the website.
It's not elitist to expect people to be able to perform a google search and a couple of clicks to install an ad blocker. This level of paternalism towards adults is insulting.
The solution is making adblockers more user-friendly, not making them illegal.
Ads are categorically bad, it's not just about being "fraudulent". Their stated purpose is to manipulate people to buy things - things they didn't intend to buy before, wasting their money and our planets limited resources.
Not even just buy specific products. There are massive campaigns to support whole industries which should've failed a long time ago. Every time Climate Town digs into the history of something like this https://youtu.be/NQiLly6Z1xs it makes me angry about the advertisement as a profitable business.
Dairy industry going for school kids isn't really US specific. We have the same weird stuff here in the middle of Europe. It used to be worse in the 80s, but the milk industry is still strong with ads and lobbying. I still remember noticing the contradiction as a child. "School milk" ads at the same time as my first biology teacher explained to us that cow milk isn't really a good idea. Those are the small moments where you learn, as a kid already, that the world is full of manipulation and dishonesty. One of the thausand cuts that tells you "public" society can't really be trusted.
That is a long way from the strongest possible interpretation of the comment you're replying to. What they're saying doesn't have any bearing on your thoughts - both can be true.
I assume parent is linking at googling being absolutely ass nowadays with sponsored links leading to malware. Then again that's not an adblock issue but an ad issue.
I wasn't talking about your personal case where a tiny browser is relevant, but a huge search engine isn't (this is the same mistake that led you to believe it's trivially easy), but about the "non-elitist" general public
Thats pretty much my point. Imagine politicians going "The world is insecure, we can't do anything about it, please attend a self-defense course to fix it yourself."
To paraphrase the words of the lady in the political scene: "keep your filthy hands off my computer."
I will run on my PC whatever I want and you don't dictate it I want to run adblockers or not.
I don't think anyone minds the ads. I think we all mind the tracking, data brokers, and that OUR data and OUR profile are mishandled by a bunch of greedy thugs. So yeah, cat and mouse till the end of time.
I don't know about you/others, but I prefer the thousands of books from Gutenberg (and spend my remaining years reading from the ancients) that having some bunch of a-holes trading what I like and what I won't, without my knowledge of approval.
It's the opposite, ads are what everyone sees with their own eyes and wants to remove since they interrupt consumption. All the tracking is something a small % is even aware of.
No, I mind the ads. I mind the online banner ads. I mind the ads inserted into videos from hosting platforms or from creators. I mind the ads on physical billboards. I mind the ads people wear. I want none of them.
Ads shape opinions. Why do political parties spend so much on them? Carefully curated ads can control you on subtle levels. Read the Propaganda book that another reply cited and also read Elul’s. Also read the works or experiments by B.F Skinner and then Kaheneman. You’ll notice this golden thread that ultimately culminates in “mind control” today via algorithmic shaping for content curation and advertisement. It’s why people who are terminally online are often ideological extremists and generally mentally unhealthy.
If you think ads shape opinions and everything else doesn't, you are tragically and ironically misinformed.
The only difference is that ads are explicit about it. There is no better way of subsidizing free content, clearly delimited from the content and not influencing the nature of that content unlike sponsorship blocks for example. If you take away ads all you have left is ads disguised as content + paid only content, because as I said: no one is obligated to feed anyone's black hole of content consumption for free.
Modern advertising was invented by Edward Bernays in his book 'Propaganda'. It is literally and specifically designed to manipulate beliefs and behaviour. Broadcast TV was created as content to package advertising, not the other way around. The social impact of advertising is enormous - primarily in reenforcing the helplessness and delusion of inevitably around disengaged consumer capitalism that Mark Fisher referred to as Capitalist Realism. It's pure, constant, unending manipulation - in public spaces, in private spaces embedded in in every drop of media in both explicit and disguised forms. It negates our ability to trust one another and what we see and read. It makes the worst and least democratic aspects of modernity seem eternal and unchangeable. It creates awful incentives and enforces disingenuousness. Advertising is a psychic poison.
If you can't differentiate between things like "you should hate another country" (propaganda) vs things like "you should know about this product" (ad), I don't know what to tell you.
> In the 1910s and 1920s, many ad men believed that human instincts could be targeted and harnessed – "sublimated" into the desire to purchase commodities.[44] Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, promoted the approach making him a pioneer of modern cigarette advertising
> Besides a non-ad-free experience, the $7.99 Premium Lite subscription also removed several other cool features like the ability to download videos for offline viewing and background play, which can be quite convenient for listening to music on the app. Speaking of music, YouTube Premium Lite also does not include access to YouTube Music.
So what's the deal here? $8 for "less ads but none of the premium features"? I'd understand "no ads but none of the premium features" but even for that it would be quite expensive. Who on earth is the target group for this plan?
It's amusing how they unironically continue to do this so plainly even after dystopian shows like black mirror and others mock this tactic aggressively in their latest outings. In the past, companies would try harder to hide a highly publicized bait and switch scam if they continued to make use of it. Subscription monetization schemes have truly hit a dead end if they can't bother even hiding it anymore.
> Who on earth is the target group ...
Folks who aren't paying much attention, but are paying $8/month.
the "target" group is probably bundles of useless products from partners like "buy our useless SaaS and get a free Youtube Premium subscription!"
Exactly. You can’t believe how the people at YouTube are salivating at the future conversion rate from people who got Lite from their cell phone provider.
The deal here is that maintaining a free hosting service for 4k videos is not profitable, even with shitload of ads. This is hard truth that nobody wants to hear. My suggested solution is that once businesses grow beyond certain size, the government should step in and buy them out. This would allow to provide such services at a loss. Like, for example, railway in Europe. The only reason why it's even remotely usable is because it's funded from taxpayers' money. And they also started as private companies that would later become de-facto branches of the government.
Setting aside the actual ads, I feel like this Premium Lite cannot be long for the world at this point. It seems this is a common problem with corporations gradually trying to squeeze more juice out of products by increasing their complexity, until its so incoherent that people just won't engage anymore. I'm not sure any ordinary person could actually tell you what they would practically pay for Microsoft Office (I mean Office 365, Microsoft 365, no wait Copilot 365). If I open google shopping it looks like there are 10?? different types of licenses/subscriptions I could purchase labeled as either 365 or Office 2024.
Premium already suffers from the issue that you're paying to not experience something, so exactly how obnoxious the thing you're skipping is a little fuzzy. Once you start adding layers of tweaks to the definition of "some" ads, its hard to imagine people being enthusiastic to pay for it.
If you're on desktop, use ublock origin and sponsor block.
If you're on Android, use tubular (https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular). It has no ads, built-in sponsor block and allows you to download videos and play them in the background for music.
If you're on Android TV, use Smart Tube (https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube). It basically has the same features as above, but with a TV-friendly UI.
If you're on iOS, consider switching to an OS where a big corp doesn't control what software you can run.
Firefox (or Ironfox) with ublock origin and background play fix works great on Android too, no need to use an app.
> If you're on iOS, consider switching to an OS where a big corp doesn't control what software you can run.
There is a beta version of ublock origin lite available now on iOS [1]
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/327
> If you're on iOS, consider switching to an OS where a big corp doesn't control what software you can run.
Sure! I literally just picked up a new Razr 2025 last night.
Out of the box, its built in “device pulse” application sideloaded another 15 apps out of the box I never asked for, consented for, or wanted, ranging from scammy games to garbage like Tiktok and Pintrest.
I didn’t get to say “no” to those applications… sounds like a big corp controlled what software I can run. They even put the application installer into the ‘nodisable’ list so I can’t kill it, and I can’t unlock the bootloader or any of that other great stuff everyone says Androids can do.
What now?
Did you buy from Morotola or from a phone/service vender like TracPhone? I've had several Moto's in the recent past and they had a couple of light weight utilities but nothing like what you're describing. It sounds like carrier crapware.
It sounds like you didn't pick a phone where a big corp doesn't control what software you can run.
I'd recommend getting a Pixel and installing Graphene.
I'm using Firefox with UBO and for quite a while now every YT video stops playing after 45 seconds with an error message. So I made a bookmarklet that opens the embed link instead, which does not error out, but some videos can't be played that way at all.
No one else seems to have that specific problem. Am I the only one with this issue?
Sponsorblock has a Safari extension in the iOS app store and it works quite well. Doesn't block ads though.
How does Tubular compare to PipePipe (https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe). Both seem to be forks of NewPipe + SponsorBlock, but PipePipe seems like it might be a bit more active.
What is the first screenshot illustrating? live chat/subtitles..?
I'm not sure, to be honest. Haven't heard of PipePipe before!
Haven't heard of PipePipe before!
Yo, Dawg. I heard you like pipes in your pipes…
I don’t get ads on YouTube in my iPhone, and all it took was using the website instead of the app. What am I missing exactly?
This is what I do too. It's not as comfortable as an app, but it works and it's free, definitely good enough to watch a video.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why YT premium now has ads.
Nah, greed is.
For sure. If only people paid eh?
My empathy for the evil megacorp making slightly less profit is limited.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
I have uBlock Origin on FF, just this morning it stopped working on YouTube. YouTube now tells me I am allowed for 3 videos because I'm adblocking them.
Nearly every time I see this, it's because people have other addons colliding which cause issues.
You only need uBlock origin; get rid of Ghostery, Privacy Badger, adblock for youtube or any of that other stuff. Other extensions can cause uBlock to not work correctly.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock?tab=readme-ov-file#all-pro...
> Do NOT use uBO with any other content blocker. uBO performs as well as or better than most popular blockers. Other blockers can prevent uBO's privacy or anti-blocker-defusing features from working correctly.
I had something like this for a while as well. I think they just target subsets of adblock users since I have multiple friends with the same configuration who didn't get it. My solution was FreeTube with LibRedirect.
For the record, I don't have any other adblocker and have not for years since I actually had a clash with Privacy Badger in the past.
No, this is new.
i thought lite was removed again because it just doesnt work
It's time to switch away from Chrome, anyways.
You can't give the ad-peddlers control over your digital existence.
Firefox has gotten quite good over the years. Personally, I like Zen, which has the UX of Arc, but an open source FF base.
ads, on paid, youtube, premium, lite, what a fantastic word construct, a veritable babel of corporate policies we suffer. If we could only shove "AI generated" in front of "ads", it would be the supreme capture of the current zeitgeist. Big tech in a nutshell, if you will.
Add the usual army of bootlickers in the comments, defending those corporate interests against their own.
For those voicing the "yeah, well they're not a charity" sentiment:
What Google have done with YouTube is push it at a loss for long enough to kill competition. Once they're the only ones left, they get to dictate everything because there's nobody left to compete.
It's not _illegal_ (not exactly, anyway), but don't expect me to then call using the service and blocking ads "stealing".
Stop using adblock, they said, it's immoral, they said, just buy YouTube Premium, they said.
YouTube without an adblocker is borderline unusable. I would have no problem paying for premium if they didn’t also steal your data. They can’t have both, not from me anyway.
Unhook and Channel Block also make my youtube experience much better. I did pay for Premium at one point but they kept pushing "features" that couldn't be disabled, I provided feedback, but I imagine it goes nowhere, so I stopped paying them.
I put a youtube video on the TV last week and all the adverts were deep fakes of famous people saying you can get rich with this one trick and a QR code to scan. One of the videos was a deep fake of the UK PM Keir Starmer saying thousands of people can claim an unknown benefit. How are these adverts not considered harmful?
I used this fact to get rid of my YouTube addiction.
I used to have Premium and listen to videos in the background while working, doing chores, all kinds of stuff. I realized 95% of the content I'm listenting to is garbage, and another 5% percent is good content that deserves my full attention, not just me listening to it while doing other stuff.
Stopped paying for premium, the experience is so unbearable that after a couple of days, I stopped watching YouTube.
I guess I could also just adblock, but they keep breaking every couple of weeks (gee, I wonder why), but honestly I don't mind less YT in my life.
This cannot be stresses enough. I genuinely do not understand how people can use the free version of YouTube without an adblocker.
I love that neowin has a big popup complaining about using an ad blocker before you can read the article with a big sadface about ads.
Most youtube content is made of ads anyway.
It is baffling to me that people would pay to access it: the viewer is the product that is sold, not the youtube content. This is merely a bait. Content creator's customer's are the brands that want to be advertized.
Youtube used to have a lite premium but they removed that. Sounds very similar but shittier with similar/same price.
I used to be very happy with the old Premium Lite, I didn't need YouTube Music or other features of Premium, just wanted to pay to have ads removed on all devices and it was the perfect product for that.
Then they cancelled it, got the email back in 2023 and resorted back to add-ons to block ads, stopped watching videos on devices that didn't support that, generally only watched YouTube on the computer for educational purposes.
When I saw it was back my first thought was "are you fucking kidding me?", I simply cannot comprehend Google's product strategy, at all. The "data-driven" bullshit for determining features, product tiers, etc. turns out to be just the McNamara fallacy applied to digital products, I can't see another way to explain the whiplash Google goes through in their product decisions, feels like everyone over there responsible for these decisions is only looking at insights, dashboards, etc. without ever thinking about what the hell the product is at its core.
Maybe they actually want to partition between the impressionable smartphone/smartTV users and the people who would prefer using mpv to watching ads.
That kind of thing usually kills the platform though.
Meanwhile over here in uBlock land ...
why is $8/m not enough for them to remove all ads? do they really make that much back from you?
Does it matter, if they can get your $8/month, plus some ad revenue? You don't last long in the C-suite if you're not interested in perpetual profit growth.
Cue shocked Pikachu...
Look, people are greedy. YouTube evidently works and is enormously profitable. As is the rest of the copyright industry. It didn't disappear once people had the power to make their own copies. If anything the industry has become more profitable and more powerful. None of this is about survival, it's about greed. If you give people the power to take more they will take it, every single time. They might not take it at first, but they will take it eventually. It's really that simple. Stories like this are boring. We know it's coming, and will keep coming. Until we build our communities in such a way that these enormous power imbalances can't happen then there will be stories like this every day.
If you want it to stop then we need AGPL software and a decentralised internet. We are in a local optimum so it will seem worse at first before it gets better.
> If you want it to stop then we need AGPL software and a decentralised internet. We are in a local optimum so it will seem worse at first before it gets better.
But we already have a decentralized internet, it's just that most people will go for convenience rather of freedom...
Furthermore, some people here keep claiming that they are willing to pay for ad-less services, yet learned nothing from cable TV... even paid streaming services have ads...
Having shorts be treated the same as music videos makes sense due to how shorts can freely use copyrighted music unlike long form videos on the website.
[dead]
Ads are psychological warfare.
Adblock is digital self-defence.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[flagged]
It's not elitist to expect people to be able to perform a google search and a couple of clicks to install an ad blocker. This level of paternalism towards adults is insulting.
The solution is making adblockers more user-friendly, not making them illegal.
Ads are categorically bad, it's not just about being "fraudulent". Their stated purpose is to manipulate people to buy things - things they didn't intend to buy before, wasting their money and our planets limited resources.
Not even just buy specific products. There are massive campaigns to support whole industries which should've failed a long time ago. Every time Climate Town digs into the history of something like this https://youtu.be/NQiLly6Z1xs it makes me angry about the advertisement as a profitable business.
Dairy industry going for school kids isn't really US specific. We have the same weird stuff here in the middle of Europe. It used to be worse in the 80s, but the milk industry is still strong with ads and lobbying. I still remember noticing the contradiction as a child. "School milk" ads at the same time as my first biology teacher explained to us that cow milk isn't really a good idea. Those are the small moments where you learn, as a kid already, that the world is full of manipulation and dishonesty. One of the thausand cuts that tells you "public" society can't really be trusted.
That is a long way from the strongest possible interpretation of the comment you're replying to. What they're saying doesn't have any bearing on your thoughts - both can be true.
> only a select few are capable of installing and maintaining an adblocker.
You mean the select few 31% ? https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users
There's no maintenance either.
Elitist? I beg your pardon? It is literally a couple of clicks and some fuddling with the settings.
Installing an adblocker is trivially easy. I just checked, and it took me 5 clicks total, and typing in "Ad blocker" in the addons search.
Tell that to my mom.
Be a good kid and install it for her.
Yes, especially if you ignore all the risks - does that solution you googled in 5 seconds steal your data after 5 clicks - it is easy
The risks of installing an add-on inside Firefox using their own Addon store?
What's Google got to do with that?
I assume parent is linking at googling being absolutely ass nowadays with sponsored links leading to malware. Then again that's not an adblock issue but an ad issue.
I wasn't talking about your personal case where a tiny browser is relevant, but a huge search engine isn't (this is the same mistake that led you to believe it's trivially easy), but about the "non-elitist" general public
It's just as easy in Chrome.
And over 30% of the population use an ad blocker. So clearly not as hard as all that.
https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users
Well not a lot of people are good at self-defense either.
Thats pretty much my point. Imagine politicians going "The world is insecure, we can't do anything about it, please attend a self-defense course to fix it yourself."
Well... You might find this read interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_Sta...
You can always just use a browser that has one built in...
[dead]
To paraphrase the words of the lady in the political scene: "keep your filthy hands off my computer."
I will run on my PC whatever I want and you don't dictate it I want to run adblockers or not.
I don't think anyone minds the ads. I think we all mind the tracking, data brokers, and that OUR data and OUR profile are mishandled by a bunch of greedy thugs. So yeah, cat and mouse till the end of time.
I don't know about you/others, but I prefer the thousands of books from Gutenberg (and spend my remaining years reading from the ancients) that having some bunch of a-holes trading what I like and what I won't, without my knowledge of approval.
It's the opposite, ads are what everyone sees with their own eyes and wants to remove since they interrupt consumption. All the tracking is something a small % is even aware of.
No, I mind the ads. I mind the online banner ads. I mind the ads inserted into videos from hosting platforms or from creators. I mind the ads on physical billboards. I mind the ads people wear. I want none of them.
Ah no - literally everyone absolutely *DOES* mind the ads, let's get this clear. Not sure if you're trolling or not.
[flagged]
Please make your substantive points without crossing into personal attack. That only makes everything worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ads shape opinions. Why do political parties spend so much on them? Carefully curated ads can control you on subtle levels. Read the Propaganda book that another reply cited and also read Elul’s. Also read the works or experiments by B.F Skinner and then Kaheneman. You’ll notice this golden thread that ultimately culminates in “mind control” today via algorithmic shaping for content curation and advertisement. It’s why people who are terminally online are often ideological extremists and generally mentally unhealthy.
> Ads shape opinions
If you think ads shape opinions and everything else doesn't, you are tragically and ironically misinformed.
The only difference is that ads are explicit about it. There is no better way of subsidizing free content, clearly delimited from the content and not influencing the nature of that content unlike sponsorship blocks for example. If you take away ads all you have left is ads disguised as content + paid only content, because as I said: no one is obligated to feed anyone's black hole of content consumption for free.
Modern advertising was invented by Edward Bernays in his book 'Propaganda'. It is literally and specifically designed to manipulate beliefs and behaviour. Broadcast TV was created as content to package advertising, not the other way around. The social impact of advertising is enormous - primarily in reenforcing the helplessness and delusion of inevitably around disengaged consumer capitalism that Mark Fisher referred to as Capitalist Realism. It's pure, constant, unending manipulation - in public spaces, in private spaces embedded in in every drop of media in both explicit and disguised forms. It negates our ability to trust one another and what we see and read. It makes the worst and least democratic aspects of modernity seem eternal and unchangeable. It creates awful incentives and enforces disingenuousness. Advertising is a psychic poison.
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> Manipulating beliefs and behavior is propaganda.
What do you think "changing brand perception and driving purchases" is, other than a euphemism for the above?
If you can't differentiate between things like "you should hate another country" (propaganda) vs things like "you should know about this product" (ad), I don't know what to tell you.
One is nationalist propaganda, the other is capitalist propaganda. Both are propaganda.
Ads is propaganda like employment is slavery: when it suits some specific agenda.
From your own link:
> In the 1910s and 1920s, many ad men believed that human instincts could be targeted and harnessed – "sublimated" into the desire to purchase commodities.[44] Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, promoted the approach making him a pioneer of modern cigarette advertising
That's mostly pseudoscience.
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Which part are you even disagreeing with?
> had ads and belive it or not people survived.
> You know nothing about psychological warfare if you think ads
... cause everyone to die.
You know what actually I don't even know what you think you're saying.