The Ad-Free Promise I Almost Made

Sidenote. A short one about the most dangerous kind of fact: the one everybody already "knows."

Cubby plays videos through YouTube's own player. That means it can show YouTube's ads, and I cannot remove them. For a calm app made for people who can find ads genuinely distressing, that is a real tension, and I wanted to give families an honest answer about it.

The answer I was about to give: "If you want to avoid the ads, subscribe to the paid YouTube tier." It sounds obviously true. A paid tier removes ads. Everyone knows that. When I asked my AI assistant, it agreed without hesitation. I had the sentence written.

Then I did the boring thing and read the actual documentation for the specific player I use. It turns out the paid tier does not reliably remove ads in the kind of embedded, signed-out player Cubby uses. The setting I relied on is there for a privacy reason, not an ad-blocking one. The ads can still play.

So the confident, obvious, universally-agreed answer was wrong for my exact situation. If I had shipped it, I would have made a promise to caregivers that the product could not keep. They would have paid money expecting quiet, and gotten ads anyway. That is the kind of small dishonesty that quietly ends trust.

I pulled the sentence.

Here is the part worth keeping, whatever you are building: the most dangerous facts are the ones nobody bothers to check, because they feel settled. "Everyone knows" is not a source. Neither is a confident AI, and neither, frankly, was I. The only thing that actually settled it was the primary document, written by the people who built the thing.

Now I have a simple rule. Before I promise anything to a customer, I ask one question: do I actually know this, or do I just believe it because it is what everyone says? If it is the second one, I go find where it is written down before my name is attached to it.

The reward for reading the boring documentation is that you get to keep your word. That turns out to be the whole game.

I write Building in the Open about designing and shipping a real product in public, one honest week at a time.

See what I'm building → cubbyplaylist.com