[abricq]

I really like everything related to network-wide blocking of shitty online services that are enforced on us !

On top of blocking adds (which is great), I wish there were more / easier ways to do network-wide blocking of all sorts of aggressive infinite scrolling (in my case : youtube shorts and instagram reels).

I often like to go on instagram to see posts / stories from the people I follow and I don't want to be suggested stupid videos that are especially designed to catch my attention. I know it's probably revealing a lack of strength on my side, but yeah, I often fall for watching a few of them and loosing 15 minutes of my life.

[duxup]

> that are enforced on us !

You don’t have to use them and you could pay for them.

The users of the internet have made their call and they often don’t want to pay, so someone does.

As a whole the users of the internet are not rewarding anyone for NOT showing ads. We want our content and we want if for free generally.

[_Algernon_]

The problem is that advertisement business infects everything.

For instance, I could pay for Youtube Premium to ostensibly not be shown ads, but it doesn't change the fact that all the content[^1] in the ecosystem is still produced for maximizing watch time and/or being advertisement friendly.

I could pay for news, but that doesn't change the fact that the news is written to receive clicks from the non-paying users.

Paying for things does not help escaping the second order effects of advertisement.

[^1]: To a close approximation.

[wat10000]

I don’t understand this complaint in the context of YouTube. It’s the only major streaming service with plentiful new content that isn’t clickbait, focus-grouped, lowest-common-denominator, metrics-chasing trash. I can hop on and watch hours of jets flying through the Mach loop, people playing chess, and people machining metal. If those aren’t your thing, I bet there’s plenty of stuff that is.

Sure, there’s a lot of crap. But you don’t have to watch that.

[nindalf]

> Sure, there’s a lot of crap. But you don’t have to watch that.

The way people complain, I genuinely think they don't know about this option.

For example, Mr. Beast content isn't for me. But I was also living blissfully under a rock for years without knowing who the heck he was. Now that I know about him I simply don't click on his content and therefore never see it in my feed.

"But what if I click by accident?" - glad you asked. Simply delete it from your watch history and see your recommendations improve.

[wat10000]

Either that, or “that stuff is bad” is meant to be understood as “nobody should watch it.”

[nindalf]

Which is even dumber. How immature do you have to be to think you can dictate the tastes of others.

[choo-t]

> Sure, there’s a lot of crap. But you don’t have to watch that.

But even non-crappy content will be steered toward some direction by the advertisement, most videos are made just long enough to fit whatever is the new optimum time for revenue per view. And some subject will be censored to not displease advertisers.

Some people are not doing that, but it's simply because they don't rely on YouTube revenues.

[wat10000]

The people who aren’t doing that still produce way more than 24 hours of quality content per day. And for those who do, I’ll judge them based on what they make, not how I imagine they decide what to make.

[choo-t]

So your whole argument is just cherry picking? Sure if you ignore everything wrong, you can say the system is alright.

[jnsie]

Recently I've been annoyed with Youtube Premium. I pay for an ad-free experience and do not see ads in the traditional (wait 5 seconds to skip) way, yet more and more content has inline product promotion where time is spent thanking a sponsor and pitching their product. So I'm paying not to avoid ads, but I'm still seeing paid promotion...

[fn-mote]

> I'm paying not to avoid ads, but I'm still seeing paid promotion...

It seems like you have shifted from having a problem with the platform to having a problem with the content producers. Can’t win?

[jnsie]

People all the way down...

[skyyler]

SponsorBlock works great.

https://sponsor.ajay.app/

[duxup]

> where time is spent thanking a sponsor and pitching their product

I’ve been unsubscribing from folks who do that a lot. Instant unsubscribe if the product is questionable.

I’m not going to judge their business decision, but it tea sets an odd tone when I’m watching something informative and they bust out into a “someone paid me to say this”.

[chuckadams]

It's an old-fashioned plug, and you can hit the skip button. Usually there's a banner of some sort that makes it even easier to know when the plug is done. If that's too much, then find a way to live without the show.

[ajsnigrutin]

google for "sponsorblock" extension for your browser, crowdsourced data makes it skip all the promotions, intros, "like and subscribe" and all other unneeded parts.

And when you're at it, ublock origin also skips the youtube ads.

There's also: https://freetubeapp.io/ , but it's a constant cat and mouse game with youtube, where you now have to refresh a video a few times before it starts playing (then it works fine), until they upgrade the software and then it works, until youtube changes something again.

[chgs]

YouTube has a “jump ahead” built in - at least on the phone - which skips sponsored bits

[javcasas]

You know who is the best target demographic for selling stuff? People with money.

So that's who you want to show ads to.

And do you know a proxy for "have money"? Paying for premium, when there is free.

Therefore, every time you pay for premium, all the advertisers look and say "I'd pay a lot to show ads to that guy". At some point, the premium service includes ads, because of so much potential extra revenue!

And that's why I don't pay for premium.

[sumeno]

I'll never understand why people are reluctant to pay for a monthly service because of something they might do in the future to make the service worse.

If they do that thing then just cancel! It's incredibly easy to do!

[choo-t]

Because if the service you pay for start to do what you expressively pay them not to do, your whole subscription since the beginning will feel like a waste.

Worst, your money was partially used against your interest, by financing people unilaterally altering a contract they made with you.

[sumeno]

> your whole subscription since the beginning will feel like a waste.

This is such a bizarre way of looking at something. I've canceled many subscriptions because of changes made by the company and I never felt like the time I already paid for was a waste. I got the thing I was paying for, then it changed in a way I felt like it was no longer worth paying for so I stopped. It doesn't change the time I was using it at all.

If a company taking your money and using it to make the service works is your line in the sand I've got bad news for you about how almost every single companies uses the money you pay them.

[acdha]

If your favorite restaurant changes their menu, does that make your past meals feel like a waste? It seems like a textbook economic transaction to buy when the deal is good and stop when it isn’t.

[acdha]

It’s especially weird because the one thing guaranteed to result in more ads is not paying. People spend a lot of money making content for YouTube and something has to pay for it.

[javcasas]

We already have more ads. The "promise" is that, by paying, we will get no more ads. For now.

I didn't ask for that content. I don't understand why I have to pay it.

[javcasas]

"Might" is misleading. "Will" is more realistic.

[chippiewill]

You don't pay for premium because one day maybe it'll have ads?

The mental gymnastics people employ to not pay for content with either money or ad impressions is just silly.

[carlosjobim]

> it doesn't change the fact that all the content[^1] in the ecosystem is still produced for maximizing watch time and/or being advertisement friendly.

That's just not true. There is an enormous amount of content on YouTube right now, which is made chiefly with quality in mind, by some of the most professional people in the industry. There's more than you could watch even if you watched for a thousand years.

You just have to use the like/dislike and subscribe functions, so the algorithm knows what you want.

[Jgrubb]

Every one of the streaming services that I paid extra to go ad free decided to push ads anyway.

[duxup]

And they got their subscriber still I guess….

As users of these services as a whole we reward this kinda thing and then are upset when it happens again.

I don’t like any of this situation but I also think the user’s choices incentivize it.

[rchaud]

They didn't though. Every single streaming service bar Netflix loses money. On top of that, they've all poisoned the well by creating as many subscription tiers as Dell has laptop SKUs and raising the price every 9 months so nobody knows what the service should cost.

This ensures that people start and stop subscriptions just to watch a single series, instead of sticking with a single service all year.

[friendzis]

So it appears paying entrenched IP-hoarding organizations majority of your income further incentivizing their entrenchment is not the best business practice for a middlemen

[rchaud]

The hoarding began once they decided to abandon the DVD market, paranoid about file ripping and sharing. Now TV shows are like videogames now, can't watch without an internet connection phoning home.

[AlecSchueler]

Which choice could they have made differently here? They took the "pay for it" option that you suggested and then you still blamed them for giving the company negative incentives.

[choo-t]

Paying make it worse, paying doesn't prevent ads to be forced later (e.g: Netflix, Prime, Disney+) and split people fight against ad, as the ones with enough money to avoid them will berate the other for not paying, will still providing benefits to an ad-driven company.

Never pays to avoid ad, block them or get the content by other means. It's akin to "never negotiate with terrorists" or "never pay ransom", you have to remove the incentive.

[friendzis]

I'm not that old and yet old enough to remember internets before ad-supported free content, which was just infinitely better.

[sumeno]

I've been on the internet since the mid 90s and that entire time it has relied on ad supported free content.

[Marsymars]

Yeah, my first ad blocker was "AdSubtract" in ~2000: https://paulenglish.com/intermute.html

[windexh8er]

You could pay for them or Google could choose to take a different approach that is less intrusive. The assertion here seems to put the onus on the viewer. Considering YouTube pays little to nothing comparative to its profits based on content it does not make, I think a realignment of how Google operates YouTube could be an improvement for users of the service.

> The users of the internet have made their call and they often don't want to pay, so someone does.

Just because YouTube users put up with a broken system doesn't mean it's the correct, fair, or ethical approach. Beyond that many of the views are curated via algorithms that intentionally work against the user with an end goal to hold them in a viewing state regardless of the users original intent. With that in mind users should use tools against those malpractices and not feel bad about not paying for them. If someone is intentionally trying to manipulate you, what's stopping you from doing the same?

If Google were a fair and ethical company I think treating them the same would be more in line with your response. However, they are not.

[stingraycharles]

People have voted with their wallets on YouTube that they don’t want to pay for premium, and prefer to watch ads or block them.

Ads aren’t “forced” upon YouTube users, people have the option to pay but they just don’t want to pay.

[belorn]

YouTube can always choose to package the content in a financial transaction. They have chosen not to do so, and instead they are supplying advertisement alongside the content for which the viewer may or may not watch.

They can always change it, but then there are legal consequences of making it a financial transaction.

[windward]

Paying users are too valuable not to serve ads to. Their clicks are worth more: ad-free tiers are always temporary.

Not that it matters: I pay for the bandwidth and hardware too. So I decide what it serves and runs.

[abricq]

I know that I, as a user, ultimately have 2 choices: to pay for a subscription, or the choice to not use these services.

Option (1) does not block infinite scrolling content, it only removes adds. So this is missing the point. All i want is to not see these dumb shorts videos that I genuinely give no fuck about, but that manages to catch my attention regardless.

Then sure, I can always delete my social accounts, and ultimately i might end up doing it. But let me try to explain why I think this is difficult, and also unfair.

I give 2 purposes to these social networks: First, they play a role in personal-life balance as a way to be more integrated in my group of friends / local communities. Second, they play a role as citizen of my region (in my case, France and switzerland) by being a (sorta reliable) source of information through following accounts and newspapper on them.

Initially, none of these social-networks came with this super-fast / addictive content. They only started to integrate it, in my experience, since 5 years. So it seems to me that these companies have broke the initial contract that they "sold" to us: to connect with our friends & communities and to allow us to follow a specific set of public influencers.

I guess that I am mad that we, as a society, have allowed these companies to gain such an important role in our daily lifes (social life and public life) that they can now say : we will allow you to interact with some of our friends, but you will also have to watch our stupid videos... And unfortunaltey, it's not easy at all to spin up a concurrent social networks that would be full-filling this initial contract. Probably lots of people actually like to scroll on insta Reels and youtube Shorts.

[ed312]

This is why you fundamentally cannot rely on private companies to build the "town square". This will _always_ happen because every company has a profit motive (even if its a loooong tail via SV-style funding). The problem behind the problem is people want great communities and tools, but don't way to provide any effort to build them.

[carlosjobim]

> All i want is to not see these dumb shorts videos that I genuinely give no fuck about, but that manages to catch my attention regardless.

My recommendations never shows any low quality content. All you have to do is like good stuff, dislike bad stuff, and subscribe to good channels. The algorithm works surprisingly well.

> we, as a society

There is no we and there has never been. You have to start taking responsibility for your own actions.

[merely-unlikely]

There are corners like Substack that are an exception. And at least services like YouTube and Spotify offer a paid alternative to ads. I for one would rather pay the ~$10/month than sit through ads. But we are still very much a minority of users.

[wffurr]

Delete the app, use the webpage, and use a browser that allows user scripts. I found a good one that turns an Instagram page into just an image tag so you can just see the picture: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/5014-un-instagram

[tecleandor]

For web access, in Firefox I've been using the "SocialFocus" add-on, that allows you to remove certain blocks in "social" websites (for example, blocking Shorts or comments in YT), put a color filter to make it "black and white", or even blocking the whole site. I had to access Facebook a couple times some months ago, and the quantity of trash you can filter with this add-on is astounding. This developer has also a YouTube specific add-on I haven't tested yet, named "UnTrap for YouTube" that has almost 200 different options for blocking very specific stuff there. Their add-ons in [0]

For Android there's an App called Revanced that let's you apply patches on certain commercial apps like YouTube or Twitter modifying their behavior, and for example block shorts. See the patches available for YouTube in [1]. I'm still pending to test it, but if you do, go to their official site [2], or even better, to their GitHub releases [3] as it seems like there are a good bunch of scammy sites using their name.

--

  0: https://addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/user/17777732/
  1: https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.google.android.youtube
  2: https://revanced.app/
  3: https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-manager/releases

[whywhywhywhy]

Wouldn't risk trying to extract from IG too much, I used to yt-dlp from it a lot and use scripts to extract the images because I like to archive references, nothing on a massive scale we're talking <20 times a month and I got a warning that I could lose my username if I "use automated scraping tools".

[tecleandor]

Oh! Were you using your user cookie? I use yt-dlp a couple times a month, but I think I'm always unauthenticated (although I guess they could match my IP address in their logs)

[whywhywhywhy]

I think the urls might be specific to your session in some cases. I’ve noticed some old IG posts I’ve put in bookmarking services say they’re expired.

So passing to yt-dlp would be traceable back to me in that case.

Definitely wasn’t cookies that’s what surprised me.

[tecleandor]

Ah OK, I was thinking about youtube, I re-read it and saw noticed you were talking IG. Yeah, I've noticed some IG URLs are suspicious: different from other users or opening related info that it shouldn't be there.

[prmoustache]

Why would you use an account to do that?

[whywhywhywhy]

I didn’t that’s what surprised me. I think some urls are unique to your session.

Not that it should matter I don’t think I’m the one at fault here.

[heap_perms]

AFAIK you need a username to be able to extract anything from instagram at all.

[Marsymars]

You don't, I don't have an IG account but my wife occasionally sends me links to reels that I use yt-dlp to download.

[andrepd]

It's 11 years old, I'm impressed that it even works.

[fumeux_fume]

> I know it's probably revealing a lack of strength on my side...

I think these tactics exploit our natural sense of curiosity and the aesthetics that surround it. So I don't think it's so much a lack of strength, but more of a jadedness we have build up and I think that's pretty bad. I respect the effort and creativity it takes to fight back and make the platform work for us instead of vice versa.

[mtsr]

I feel this, particularly as a parent. It's difficulty watching your kids get lost in the algorithm. We regularly discuss this with them and they agree with our perceived harm, but it's just too difficult to resist. Heck, even I get lured into (doom)scrolling every now and then.

I've setup ad-filtering using pihole, where possible, but I'd prefer not to block youtube as a whole. But I'm definitely considering that in the future, to protect my family.

[freehorse]

Imo the best thing that can work is introducing delays to the loading of videos, increasing as time goes by. Youtube introduced sth like this to me, when they were presumable trying "punishing" users with adblockers, and it worked as a charm to get me disengage from the youtube rabithole. A lot of such addiction dynamics work based on how fast getting the reward is, and these interuptions disturb this.

[rfgil]

This has worked great for me to prevent the infinite scrolling on instagram: https://www.distractionfreeapps.com/index.html

[aembleton]

I'm not going to trust that until its on F-Droid.

[arnvidr]

Hit that "For you" at the top and select the "Following" feed. Only the posts from the people you follow, no suggested posts, no ads.

[rwmj]

Until the company decides to unilaterally reenable that setting to "help you get more from their service".

[david_arcos]

That's not persistent :(

[bossyTeacher]

can't find that button

[zimpenfish]

> I often fall for watching a few of them and loosing 15 minutes of my life.

If you're on iOS, set a time limit (Settings → Screen Time → App Limits → Instagram). Doesn't stop the initial scrolling but the "you've run out of time" pop-up is a good breakpoint. You can bypass it and give yourself another 15 minutes but making that choice is also a good breakpoint / reinforcement.

[gosub100]

I wish they simply had a way to disable shorts. People have been clamoring for that option but yt ignores them because they know how addictive they are. I can't think of a more illustrative example of a conflict of interest and the contrast between the early days of computing that were driven by user demand.

[soraminazuki]

YouTube still provides RSS feeds for individual channels. Combine that with mpv's yt-dlp integration and you can avoid the official web frontend altogether.

I don't know how long it's going to last though, with the current trend of rug pulls and enshittification.

[rwmj]

Youtube have been gradually cracking down on yt-dlp by blocking IPs that download (presumably without watching the adverts, or some other method to fingerprint it). Currently it's mostly annoying as I have to rotate through IPs every few days. But I imagine it'll get worse and worse until I stop watching youtube.

[account42]

I've been using the same IP for ages and never had problems with yt-dlp as a whole - it's always just some specific videos where it won't work.

[ffsm8]

Pretty sure it's only gonna get deleted if either a) enough people use it so that a MBAs notice or b) the way it's accessing the data blocks a feature that an MBA wants

[desdenova]

Or just use a localhost invidious instance.