YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

No, I’m far more likely to just pay for the heap of content and watch/listen to the stuff I like than to pay for the Patreon of every single channel I watch and/or subscribe to. I’m at a point now where if I even slightly like a channel I’ll throw it in the subscription heap as a signal to YouTube to show me more of it. Conversely, there are two Patreons I support, one is on YouTube and the other is a webcomic.

The only reason I watch YouTube is because it’s free and ad-blockable.

But why in the world would I want to pay to support YouTube’s toxic incentives, abusive copyright takedowns, and overall rubbish treatment of small content creators?

The day Adblock stops working is the day I stop watching YouTube.

It is not just about youtube. The whole internet is bloated with ads right now, and the vast majority of them quite the opposite of discrete.

I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting. I could count the times that I have found an internet ad interesting in my lifetime using half the fingers of one hand. Personalised or not, the vast majority is useless, badly made, that just takes processing time both for the computer and my brain.

I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads. If a website says that I have to disable the adblocker to view it, and I cannot go around it, 99% of the times I do not visit it, I do not care. I pay the people I want to support directly and that's it. I use bandcamp to buy the music I like directly. I subscribe to patreon to the ones that I feel they bring value to my life. But for the occasional or ephemeral video or entertainment, I will just as easily live without, as the disruption ads cause is worse than not viewing that content.

I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites). If a website blocks this, I am not going to sacrifise my experience and I am not interested in browsing it.

> This could get really ugly given that Google controls Chrome and its extension ecosystem.

It would eventually give them the smokescreen they want to pull uBlock Origin from the chrome extension store. A while ago they basically used their weight to remove most video downloading extensions and added language to their terms of service which all but says "no youtube downloaders" and I would like to say it cost them, because it should, but most consumers are absurdly apathetic and don't care.

Adblockers are a larger group, but in the grand scheme of things I don't think it will have much impact. The Internet as a whole is a very large group and even though uBlock has a huge audience it's a drop in the bucket.

I currently have YouTube Music, and have looked into getting Premium a couple of times, because I watch enough YT content to want the ads disabled everywhere. But for some reason they won't let me. If I go to the YT Premium page, they tell me I can't do anything there, and I have to go to my account page, where of course there is nothing to do either. I suppose I could cancel my YT Music subscription and then try to sub YT Premium, but with notoriously bad customer support and a number of family members using it also, I kind of don't want to go deal with that also not working and me having to go through the hassle of getting everybody in again.

If they want to sell premium so badly, maybe they should actually let me buy it.