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Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

imlefthanded.com

651–660 of 844 posts

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#651

I have a list of adblockers I use, hope it helps other people here: Desktop: - Pi-Hole (network wide adblocking) - AdGuard (device wide adblocking) Web browsers: - uBlock Origin - uMatrix (not developed anymore but still works, can also use NoScript) - SponsorBlock (blocks in-video sponsor segments, intros, outros, filler tangents, etc in YouTube) Mobile: - Firefox for Android / Kiwi Browser (both have web extension…

Similar. Pi-hole, uBlock (desktop), vivaldi with adblocking (mobile, FF android has perf issues). For the non-techie, Pi-hole isn't something I quickly recommend due to "knowing when it's the culprit", and the effort in disabling it. I also have a simple Wireguard config (pivpn) installed as well and my mobile devices are set to always-on VPN for DNS only. Occasionally I will have to turn off the VPN to join certain…

I used to run a Pihole, now I just point my router at NextDNS. Not an exact substitute but largely maintenance-free and low cost.

Still occasionally breaks something you need, but there’s no way around that as long as the web is such a mess.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#652
post #567
post #129

Youtube, especially, turns into a whole different experience. Ad in front of every video makes it impossible to quickly browse and sort through videos. I might watch just a few seconds and then go to the next one. When ads are enabled, the experience is so painful that I'm not likely to use Youtube this way any more. I have to watch an ad before I've made the decision if I want to watch the video.

Well, you can buy YouTube premium and have no ads.

I happily pay for YouTube Premium because I watch tons of niche stuff that creators are able to make a living off.

YouTube has a lot of problems, and the ads for non-Premium users are probably going too far, but I find a lot of value in consuming and supporting a wealth of high quality content on obscure topics.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#653
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube Vanced is miles above NewPipe in features: https://vancedapp.com - If you frequently watch videos on Android and haven't given it a spin yet, do so. SmartTubeNext is excellent on Fire Stick, if you can get the damn APK installed!

Also, isn't Vanced closed-source? I find the people behind it slightly sketchy.

It's YouTube reverse engineered so it seems a bit difficult to open source something like that

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, if you owned YouTube with an overhead of tens of millions of dollars per year, how would you monetize it without ads/commercials, just to even keep up with operational costs?

I'm honestly appalled by the price for YouTube Premium. It's $15/month. That's the same as HBO Max, almost twice of Disney+ and more expensive than F1TV or Showtime which come in around $10. Per month this is 50% more than Prime! Only my UltraHD Netflix plan is more expensive. This price to me is outrageous, given that Google, unlike everyone else listed here, doesn't provide any of the content and their services is…

I initially balked at the price until I realised that I probably watch 2-3x as much YouTube per month as I do Netflix, which I was already happily paying for.

It’s nice to know I’m directly supporting the channels I watch too, as I can’t feasibly sign up to dozens of Patreons.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#655
post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insane to me that people are arguing in favor of the advertisement companies simply because they pay the content creators a sliver of what they accept from the companies that use their ad platform. Here's my take. It's not "piracy" or "ethical piracy" (what the fuck?). The content creators put it out on YT with the expectation that it will get viewed. The little money they receive now is simply a bonus. It's onl…

The price of things don't have to be represented in dollar amounts. If I want to give you a free iPad for watching my 2 hour lecture, I don't expect you to put on some sunglasses and take a nap for 1 hour 55 minutes. If you do that, I don't have to give you that iPad even if you sued me for it. Piracy in general is just 'unauthorized use'[0]. YouTube requires you watch ads to use their website, so not doing that is p…

> YouTube requires you watch ads to use their website, so not doing that is piracy.

Piracy is another word for copyright infringement. Blocking ads on YouTube is not piracy because you are not violating copyright law (in any country that I'm aware of) by viewing only a portion of the content that is delivered to you. DVRs do the same thing as ad blockers for TVs, but in the U.S., the courts have ruled that DVR services do not infringe the copyrights of media companies.[1]

YouTube and other Google services don't forbid ad blocking in their terms of service.[2] If they did, there would be an uproar because Google itself includes an ad blocker in Chrome, which of course does not block any YouTube or Google ads.[3]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/business-us-cablevision-cour...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms

[3] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/7632919

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#656

I have a list of adblockers I use, hope it helps other people here: Desktop: - Pi-Hole (network wide adblocking) - AdGuard (device wide adblocking) Web browsers: - uBlock Origin - uMatrix (not developed anymore but still works, can also use NoScript) - SponsorBlock (blocks in-video sponsor segments, intros, outros, filler tangents, etc in YouTube) Mobile: - Firefox for Android / Kiwi Browser (both have web extension…

There is also alternative youtube front ends that don't have ads, notably Invidious[0], and work in cases where the browser doesn't have or can't support extensions such as ad blockers. For anyone interested I run my own instance that is retro tech themed[1], and there is a public instance list with more instances[2].

[0] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

[1] https://serenity.video

[2] https://instances.invidious.io/

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube is the reason I installed an adblocker in the first place. I don't mind watching an ad, but at some point they went from an ad every other video, to unskippable ads in-front of every video (love a 1m ad on every 10s video when I'm just browsing clips) and mid-content ads that literally just cut in and disrupt what I'm watching.

love a 1m ad on every 10s video Christmas 2020 I tried to watch midnight Mass from Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York on YouTube. (Not live; after.) SIX MINUTES of commercials at the start, and the rest of the program had TWENTY-SIX commercial breaks. I haven't watched YouTube since.

What is happening is they are pushing you to Youtube Premium.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The belief that advertisers are owed my attention is absurd. You are trying to rationalize theft through self-righteous nonsense. If you don't want the ads, don't use the site/service/content. Simple as that. Anything else is you stealing it. You don't get to decide how a site pays for the cost of running their operation. They do. If they decide ads is the way and you don't like it, don't use their site. Stealing t…

Who's stealing it? I asked for an article through the customary channels and they served it to me. Inside that article, they offered a whole set of embedded resources for me to choose to load, and I opted out of a lot of them. None of that remotely resembles theft.

You have obviously convinced yourself it is OK to steal because you think it is OK to steal, because you think it is OK to steal. Good for you.

What you never see are the jobs you might affect through your actions. You have actually convinced yourself that you are entitled to use someone else's work product without paying for it in any way. All I can say is that I hope one day someone does the same to you. Maybe then you'll understand that theft has consequences.

If you don't like advertising, stop stealing the products, services and content it supports.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#659

I have a list of adblockers I use, hope it helps other people here: Desktop: - Pi-Hole (network wide adblocking) - AdGuard (device wide adblocking) Web browsers: - uBlock Origin - uMatrix (not developed anymore but still works, can also use NoScript) - SponsorBlock (blocks in-video sponsor segments, intros, outros, filler tangents, etc in YouTube) Mobile: - Firefox for Android / Kiwi Browser (both have web extension…

If you subscribe to YT, the ads are gone, plus music.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're on Android, try out https://vancedapp.com/ - it's an "Advanced" YouTube player, but they removed the "Ad"s (get it?) Also, there's an option to enable SponsorBlock, which can automatically skip over ads, introductions, etc. that are part of the original video. Vanced and Firefox's addons are two of the main things keeping me off of iOS.

This looks neat. But how do I know this won't isnt malware itself (or will become malware in the future)

You can't. It's some closed source blob that may very well become malware, assuming it isn't already. Use NewPipe instead
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