Crappy Design

Hey, remember when you could see more than a single line of text of an article on mobile? Me neither.

Hey motherfucker, did you know you can go AD FREE with YouTube™ premium? Look, it's P R E M I U M. and it will only cost you $9.99 a month (plus any data we choose to siphon from you, aaaaaaand you have to be subjected to our shit-ass suggestions that you will almost certainly not be interested in, because fuck you in your stupid content sucking mouth)

yeah, this is a policy OP doesn't like, not bad design

I would argue that pop-ups like this are an intentionally crappy design meant to be frustrating and get in the way. But, I understand what your saying, this is perhaps not the best suited community for this post.

Yeah, I got no issue with removing it, but it's still agrivating to see even once.

What's the reason why you think this is an asshole design? I can think of two:

• Advertisements in of itself is a blight on humanity

• They have a dominant market position and it's almost impossible to compete.

But, these two things aside?

I don't think the Fediverse can really provide an alternative to YouTube. The infrastructure required for the amount of data constantly being served and processed is prohibitly expensive.

They're slowly rolling it out to all users. It's not yet a full deployment.

Who is going to be competing for the eyeballs of people who militantly refuse to watch ads? I'd love to see YouTube have competition, but I don't think the demographic here is particularly valuable to anyone.

Yeah, I feel like this is all very cyclical.

The status quo is acceptable so people use it. It works well enough and it's practical enough that the majority of the user base sticks with a given standard, which creates momentum/inertia: the more accepted a given platform becomes the more content creators cater to it, which in turn draws and keeps more traffic.

Owners of the platform see this and monetize. It's not bad at first but eventually greed gets the better of everyone, and they keep pushing and squeezing, usually both the base and the creators, for the privilege of playing in their playground, the defacto "place to be"... without consideration of the fact that their playground only holds that status because of the very people they're squeezing.

Eventually they push it too far, and people start to jump ship as the enshittification finally tips their scales away from the status quo and makes finding an alternative the more attractive choice, even if it means giving up the positive aspects of the established platform.

Sometimes it can take a while but eventually one or more new platforms emerge as the new "place to be" and the cycle begins again.

Unfortunately, rather than learning from past mistakes and simply being less greedy and understanding that they need to find ways of generating profit that doesn't alienate their creators and viewers, instead the lesson learned seems to be 'try to find ways to trap users in your system so they can't leave'...which never is going to work.

Then I'll just make another account . . . with blackjack and hookers.

Don't care, there are billions of hours lifetime saved by adblocking.

Nobody needs to defend this tech conglomerates, let them figure it out.

It’s less about not liking ads and more that the ads are plagued with scams, spam and whatever else.

Don’t we think that they should be held accountable for the type of ads they run on there? Crypto scams, get rich quick, and mlms to name a few.

The same goes for the MSN homepage it’s fucking ridiculous.

Also, if they want to serve me ads, then stop selling my data too. If I sign up for premium they’ll still sell your data anyway.

I am not really in a place where I would want to defend billion dollar companies.

I can only speak for myself, but it’s less about the monetizing and more about the how.

The ads are intrusive and highly disrespectful of our time. Not to mention the bullcrap they’re allowed to advertise that would get videos demonetized. And the risk of malware from the ads.

I can understand things like premium. Heck if they wanted to lock HD behind premium I could understand. It costs a lot of money to run that crap so getting money for that service does make sense.

But by solving that with intrusive, annoying, possibly dangerous ads? I will block the ads. Find a better way because that ain’t it. I will sooner leave YouTube for other video sites satisfying my interests that are currently being advertised by creators on YouTube itself, than accept the crappy ads.

If you're using an ad blocker, they don't want your business anyway.

It sadly probably will. At least for the majority of users that either don't know or can't be bothered to circumvent it.