Here are some findings (German user) and I'd like your experience on this. Maybe it's anecdotal but I've got the feeling YouTube is really going down the drain.
- _lots of_ ads everywhere
- I got unskippable 15 second pre-roll ads on 17 second videos
- I got three pre-roll ads regularly, even on short videos and smaller channels
- I got lots of post-roll ads, too
- I've got lots of video ads where pharmaceutical companies are promoting to "talk to your doctor about the vaccine for XY" - wtf, is this even legal?
- Ads load better than the video
- In-App ads are directly from the shady/scummy section: "get rich quick"-schemes/courses, cartoonish erotic apps, phone optimizer apps, "lose 30 pounds in 30 days"-fitness apps, "free" book downloads with signup pages from hell, probably fake IPO signups, crypto investment apps... the list goes on...
- after reporting too many of those ads, I've lost the function to report any ad at all. I'm not kidding, the menu item is just gone.
- recommendations are showing me lots of videos I've watched before OR are totally unrelated to what I'm interested in
- recommendations are often filled with videos from 6 to 10 years ago
All in all YouTube seems to be a total shitshow and it feels like they don't care anything at all about the user experience.
With all those scummy ads I felt like 15 years ago on some crazy "free movie downloadz"-website but not on THE biggest video platform of the world.
Does Google/YT care so little? Have they automated and laid off everybody who could veto against all those "create your sexy arabian princess and play with her"-apps or all the "phone optimizers" who are going to do god knows what with your phone?
What's your experience on YT these days? Is it similar to mine or totally different?
I really like lots of the content, but the surroundings...
Be fair and buy Youtube Premium, or use a better Adblocker?
> Ads load better than the video
Maybe because they are shorter and there are less of them, so proxys can better cache them.
> after reporting too many of those ads, I've lost the function to report any ad at all. I'm not kidding, the menu item is just gone.
Makes sense if you are spamming the system and they considered them false flag.
> recommendations are showing me lots of videos I've watched before
Maybe you want to rewatch them or add a comment. That's not that unusual.
> OR are totally unrelated to what I'm interested in
Not YET.
> recommendations are often filled with videos from 6 to 10 years ago
Nothing wrong with old videos. There is many cool old stuff on Youtube. 6 or 10 Years is not that much. Unless you are only in gossip and news?
> All in all YouTube seems to be a total shitshow and it feels like they don't care anything at all about the user experience.
It might not be your perfect experience, but considering their size and broad audience, it's pretty hard to serve everyone equal good. And recommendations are generally a hard problem. Getting even a low number of successes is quite good.
> What's your experience on YT these days? Is it similar to mine or totally different?
I'm curious whether the ads are related to the content you watch. Maybe you are mostly watching hard to monetize videos, where only the wild ads which are not that picky with their customers are shown.
If you don't want to be the product, with YouTube you can pay to be the customer instead.
It is here in the US. This style where you're prompted to ask about a treatment for a condition (or a vaccine for a disease) without naming the drug or the manufacturer was the beginning of drug ads here. Only much later did they start being able to tell us the name, but then only if they also told us in a very fast voice about all the terrible side effect symptoms reported in trials (or after general availability). I wouldn't know if this is legal in Germany, but it's worth talking to your doctor about ;)