this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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Youtube: "People are blocking are ads and costing us money, what should we do?!"
The People: "Police your platform and stop advertising scams, hate speech, pornography, and all the other shit."
Youtube: "I just have no idea what to do, so I guess I'll just invest millions/billions into making ads harder to block, and make the ads longer and unskippable. You know, Just make the platform almost completely unusable without adblocking"
The People: "YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO, JUST POLICE YOUR FUCKING PLATFORM ALREADY. IF YOU DID YOU WOULDNT NEED TO DO ALL THIS SHIT"
Youtube: "Oh, btw, heres another PragerU video thats 3 hours long and talks about how the black man should be grateful for the white man uplifting them via slavery, followed by a ad thats basically a woman fingering herself to advertise chinese AI girlfriends"
The People: adblocking intensifies
YouTube does police their platform, they curate it for babies and remove anything critical of the government
I love when two conflicting conspiracy theories meet online.
That's the craziest part isn't it? All of this data collection so they can build profiles of us, and then they just don't apply any of it to ads.
I don't like watching ads, but it would at least be slightly more tolerable if I got ads for things I actually wanted. On my TV I watch YT unfortunately not adblocked, an never once have I seen an ad for anything that appeal to me.
This is tinfoil hat stuff, but based on the ads I’m shown, it’s almost like they pick ones they know won’t appeal to you since they know anger drives up engagement. Google can probably guess from my search history that I’m trans and asexual, since I’ve asked questions online relating to that. And then the majority of the ads I get on YouTube are porn and anti trans things.
Anger does drive up engagement, but the point of engagement farming is supposed to be so that you keep coming back to the content (YT videos, articles, whatever) and therefore it gets more exposure so that the attached ads get more exposure.
The ads themselves designed to make you angry at them doesn't seem to make sense, at least as a default practice. There's really only hyperspecific niche scenarios where the ad itself making you angry at the ad is beneficial to the people paying for it.
If they actually wanted to show ads targeted to me, first thing they would figure out is if I'm capable of buying their stupid bullshit product. I'm poor as the rat in the church, my monthly budget is literally -50€. I can't afford to buy anything, what good does it do for advertisers to let me know that they have a new phone that costs 1500€ and is 0,05mm thinner than the previous one?
No matter how rich you are, if you have seen the ad, then their job is done. They pay YouTube to show ads to as much people as possible, not to just ones who can afford buying their products.