YouTube wants me to watch a 4m30s ad for middle-aged men who want to stay healthy. I won’t watch it. Hence, it never goes away.
I suppose this makes sense… I won’t play almost any video that has an ad that doesn’t have a 5s timeout button. I even skip those, most of the time.
I download videos using Downie, youtube-dl, or yt-dlp, and I watch them offline. So, the result is that I never complete the super long ad that YouTube wants me to watch, hence, it never stops being offered. I think that’s what’s going on here.
I just wanted to run a sanity-check to see if others agree that this is why this extreme garbage is being served. It can’t be that YouTube is serving ~5m ads to lots of people on a regular basis and people let them play, right? I think people would be outraged if this was common. But I’m not sure.
Background (unnecessary info to provide context):
I live in a nearly ad-free world because I deliberately cut them out with software. Thus I don’t really have a good sense of what average people tolerate. I haven’t tolerated ads for over 20 years. That’s when I cut the cord on television and switched to pirating content, later buying from iTunes, then streaming when that became available.
I live in a bubble and was offended at the idiocy of TV ads when I’d visit family for the holidays back when the iPod was on every single ad-break (and I’m an Apple / Mac user). I been un-desensitized for so long that TV ads have seemed alien and offensive for a long time.
It has to be that I keep getting this ad because I won’t complete YouTube’s stupid challenge-quest of “watch a super long ad one time,” right? I won’t complete the challenge to confirm that it goes away, so I need others to tell me if they think I’m right that this is why I keep seeing it. If I let it play, do you think they’d serve short ads again and it would be rare for such a long ad to be served? I’m not going to do so either way. Fuck YouTube and fuck ads.
Aside: when I can no longer download videos to avoid ads, I’ll stop watching YouTube videos. Spare me your lectures on them needing monetization to pay for servers. We won’t agree for reasons beyond the scope of this question.
Thanks in advance for your feedback!
I do BRAVE + SPONSORBLOCK + UBLOCK_ORIGIN (custom filler rules for nuking shorts) + YT_DLP (for downloading all videos I care about in case they get nuked (deleted, privated, terminated, blocked in my country and such))
Why so many dislikes? Do people not like adblockers, or YT_DLP or Brave? Or all of them? I’m SOOOO confused!
I think it is because of Brave, there was some controversy about it.
I wish people told me about it instead of just mashing the downvote.
You’re doing it almost right, just gotta dump Brave
What’s the best browser to recommend to people who want to dump Brave but either can’t or won’t switch to Firefox, due to things like unoptimal behavior of sites like YouTube while playing games, for example?
The best I’ve come up with is Thorium, a de-Googled Chromium fork, optimized for speed.
What are you referring to by unoptimal behavior? I’m curious because I use Firefox and have never had issues watching YouTube videos while gaming.
Live streams will stutter badly when a game is going on, something I have experienced in Firefox but not Chrome.
And of course Chromium has billions of dollars at its disposal while Mozilla can’t even accept donations from users for Firefox so it’s not exactly surprising that the browser with worse funding and management doesn’t run as well.
Strange. I’ve never had an issue like that and Firefox has always performed just fine for me. Sorry to hear you’re having issues.
Why exactly do I need to dump Brave? Alos, some extensions I’m using and can’t get without also don’t work in non-chromium browsers, at least atm.