As a user, I noticed a drastic change around that time: Much more ads. It's come to a point wherr it's so annoying that standard doomscrolling has lost its appeal and I go do other things instead (like reading HN). Maybe others have a similar experience, which could explain things somewhat.
I pay for premium so I don't know about the ads, but yeah the recommendations have taken a nose dive recently (not sure exactly when).
EDIT: Since a lot of sibling comments are talking about the price of Youtube Premium. My $0.02, I was paying £16/month for Spotify Duo for me and my girlfriend. Dropped Spotify after 15 years of paying, for £18/month Youtube Premium family which includes Youtube Music in addition to ad free Youtube. Total win.
Yeah same, when I realized you could migrate your playlists over to YouTube music that was the end of Spotify for me. The official migration tool was able to match all but two songs out of many thousands in my playlists.
I don't watch Youtube, but my young kid loves to watch screaming Minecraft morons pretend to scare themselves. I've been growing increasingly concerned by the ads he's incidentally seeing and was just yesterday looking at giving in and subscribing to a premium. There's a normal premium for $14 and a premium "lite" for $8. I'd have subscribed at $1/month, but those prices are absolutely insane.
Instead, I installed revanced on his tablet. For free.
To manage my child’s online viewing, I remove YouTube from all of his devices and instead use Pinchflat[1] to automatically download videos from a curated list of pre‑approved channels. We periodically explore YouTube together to discover new content aligned with his interests, which I then add to the list. Pinchflat retrieves new uploads within hours and automatically deletes them after a set period. The videos are stored locally and made available through Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin for remote access. This approach eliminates ads and algorithm‑driven recommendations while giving me full control over content, though it requires some setup, ongoing management, and storage capacity.
I don't have kids of my own, but I'm generally concerned about some of the advertising kids are exposed to these days (as seen through friends and family with kids). At the risk of viewing my own childhood with rose-tinted glasses, it seems much worse today. The main source of ads back then were TV and newspaper, and while neither were "perfect" at this, they both seemed to have much higher standards for what kinds of ads to allow than platforms do today.
Whenever I see my (9-year-old) nephew watching YouTube on their TV at home, I get a little horrified at some of the ads he's exposed to. But this has been normalized throughout his childhood, so it seems unremarkable to him, and his parents seem to be desensitized to it as well. I suppose some of this is bias on my part: I aggressively avoid exposing myself to advertising, using in-browser ad blocking, network-level ad-blocking, and OS-level DNS VPN-based ad-blocking on my phone. Whenever offered, I always pay for the service tier (like YouTube Premium) that removes ads. I get that this could get expensive real fast for a lot of people, and isn't feasible. (But I know a lot of people who don't even install browser ad-blockers, which is just baffling to me.)
But that's the big problem... people are being forced to choose between an uncomfortable level of financial expense, and paying for things with their attention, where that attention is being exploited with deeper and deeper psychological manipulation that has been fine-tuned over the span of decades. On the occasion I do see an ad (especially a video ad), my reaction to it is so viscerally negative that I mute audio and look away, even sometimes shutting it down entirely.
Feels like I'm in the twilight zone here. A few minutes of my pay per month for my kid to not be bombarded with bullshit ads seems like a good deal to me.
why is it required that children have access to YouTube? I'm not that old and we went long stretches with no TV in our household because we didn't have the money for it. It was fine. I'm fine. I didn't turn out normal but it was for a lot of other reasons. Read a book, kid.
$14/mo is a lot just for brainrot so you can listen to your kid shout "skibidi Ohio sigma rizz" all the time
On the other hand I had unlimited video games which boomers were certain was going to doom me, yet it was fine, and I'm fine. My kid's watch less YouTube than I played NHL 93 at their age tbh.
> $14/mo is a lot just for brainrot so you can listen to your kid shout "skibidi Ohio sigma rizz" all the time
They'll get that from school, most of them aren't watching a YouTube vid and inventing culture, they're just picking it up. Like every other generation
> There's a normal premium for $14 and a premium "lite" for $8. I'd have subscribed at $1/month, but those prices are absolutely insane
This just demonstrates how much money is in those ads and how much Youtube needs to charge to compensate for that. And advertisers wouldn't pay that much if it wasn't at least somewhat worth it, i.e., the psychological manupulation is worth at least that much w.r.t. their bottom line. The average person therefore "pays" with $14 worth of brainwashing.
You could obviously argue that $14 is just a ripoff and they don't make that much money off you. Sure you are not average and perhaps less influenced than others, but fun fact, a large majority of people believe that about themselves.
By the way, Youtube Premium still collects your data and uses it. Without that, it would need to be even more expensive.
For me I feel $5/month would be pretty reasonable. But $14 is out of control. Some of my friends however are subscribed at that price and consider it money well spent.
It's money well spent for me. It's the only "streaming service" I use. I've also heard multiple creators say that they get more out of a Premium view than an ad supported one.
I've avoided using an adblocker because, as much of a pittance as it is for content creators, I don't want to deprive them of that revenue, and I also don't want to deal with the faff of getting a working YouTube ad blocker setup.
But oh boy have the ads really slid far down the hill of enshittification in the past several months. They've gone from one ad break every ~15-20 minutes to one every ~7-10 minutes. With that, you also get an increased chance of a mid-sentence ad break (especially noticeable on older videos, where ad points have clearly been automatically retrofitted). In the past, you'd usually expect at least one of the ads to be skippable, and now, many of them seem to be fully unskippable.
To be fair, the sheer repetitiveness of the ads and their poor targeting isn't new, but it is a lot more aggravating to be shown the same completely useless ad that you saw 10 minutes ago.
(Not to mention the other enshittifications of recommendations getting even worse or the number of videos per row in search going down from 6 to 3.)
And the enshittification isn't tempting me to pay Google for a better experience; instead, it's tempting me to spend time (and perhaps coin) to other people to avoid the YouTube ads. Good job, Google.
> I've avoided using an adblocker because, as much of a pittance as it is for content creators, I don't want to deprive them of that revenue
Um what? How much they get is based on views and subscriptions, not on whether an ad was filtered or not. It also doesn't depend on whether you click skip or not.
Yup. It is now ad after ad. For me, it's long form ads too. So it would be a whole interview with some celebrity or CEO just randomly popping. Besides the Liberty Liberty nonsense, the shortest ones I am getting are whole movie trailers. It's crazy.
