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YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

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Re: YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

#51
Strange move, people use adblockers for a reason, 2-3 unskipable bs ads. Instead better limit quality to 480/720p. This way they'll save money for traffic. No adblocker?, Can go up to 1080p. Yt premium?, Welkome to 4k. Yt premium+?, Welcome to >8k

Re: YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

#52
post #19
post #4

YouTube premium family is best value for money for all streaming services. Just don’t waste time on adblocking, as it works reliably only on desktop. I used ublock and it was more or less cuccessfully fighting ads on desktop, but they still were present on phone (new pipe just sucks, and I moved to iPhone anyways), iPad, Xbox and tv. Premium removed all of them. Also gave downloads for offline viewing. I still use sp…

> Also gave downloads for offline viewing. I used to have those "downloads" on Youtube. There are not a real downloads because I do not have an access to the file. Also the feature tends to be misworking - from time to time one of "downloads" just stucks with eating 100% of 1 CPU core and the recipe is to remove all the "downloads". This was one of the stupidiest features I ever had, because if I need a video for off…

Downloads are working and very useful on mobile - they give you offline version on a device that you can later watch.

I click download on videos that I'm interested in morning and have something to listen to during commute without worrying about spotty connections and mobile traffic consumptions. So yes, file is downloaded to the device.

If I want to download something to have it forever, I use yt-dlp on pc.

Re: YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

#53
post #30
post #4

YouTube premium family is best value for money for all streaming services. Just don’t waste time on adblocking, as it works reliably only on desktop. I used ublock and it was more or less cuccessfully fighting ads on desktop, but they still were present on phone (new pipe just sucks, and I moved to iPhone anyways), iPad, Xbox and tv. Premium removed all of them. Also gave downloads for offline viewing. I still use sp…

> new pipe just sucks What's wrong with newpipe ?

It was crashing like all the time on stock Galaxy Note 9. Also downloads somehow were much slower than native youtube.

Re: YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

#54

I wonder if we're gonna see an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker kinda race going on here. As long as the code runs in the users' browser, there should be a way around it. Makes me wonder if they'll ever move to WASM... though I assume there's gonna be ways to block ads regardless.

im assuming there's gonna be ways to bypass y0utub3 and go straight to the videos. in the meantime g00gle continues to footgun, provide motivation and traction for exodus and competition, and a peertube-like non-exclusive for the masses.

Re: YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

#55

I wonder if we're gonna see an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker kinda race going on here. As long as the code runs in the users' browser, there should be a way around it. Makes me wonder if they'll ever move to WASM... though I assume there's gonna be ways to block ads regardless.

I'll just stop using YouTube if they make ads unblockable. The quality of content on the site has decreased dramatically as the result of of their pushing corporate media/youtube "creators" to the top of search results. It's literally not worth it to me to pay for a subscription that _might_ reduce the number of ads I see.

Re: YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

#56

I wonder if we're gonna see an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker kinda race going on here. As long as the code runs in the users' browser, there should be a way around it. Makes me wonder if they'll ever move to WASM... though I assume there's gonna be ways to block ads regardless.

I'll just stop using YouTube if they make ads unblockable. The quality of content on the site has decreased dramatically as the result of of their pushing corporate media/youtube "creators" to the top of search results. It's literally not worth it to me to pay for a subscription that _might_ reduce the number of ads I see.

This. I recently re-setup my HTPC and forgot to add the usual plugins and suddenly instead of actually being able to watch youtube stuff, there was a BS ad every few minutes. It was essentially unwatchable. But I would never pay premium for that. Sure I care about some of that content, but it's not a lot and if I had to pay for it, I'd rather pay the author directly via say Patreon than to give it to Google and the author may or may not get some of that and they constantly have to try and "be nice to the algorithm" in order to get their share of the money. I really don't care if the algorithm thinks they're worthy of being listed in people's feeds. I like their content, period.

Re: YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

#57
> “In cases when viewers feel they have been falsely flagged as using an ad blocker, they can share this feedback by clicking on the link in the prompt.”

At this point, such a statement almost feels as though it is explicitly stating that the "feedback" will be ignored. It probably won't be in aggregate but why should I expect that my individual report will be acted upon?

Re: YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

#58

I wonder if we're gonna see an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker kinda race going on here. As long as the code runs in the users' browser, there should be a way around it. Makes me wonder if they'll ever move to WASM... though I assume there's gonna be ways to block ads regardless.

there's already: new pipe, revanced, and invidious.

I could see Google trying and eventually giving up after blocking the the most obvious workarounds just like everything else they do

Re: YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

#60
This is a rather disturbing move to me, as I am a YouTube addict and adblocker user. I use NextDNS, a DNS-based service that's like your own PiHole in the cloud.

It is sometimes tricky for me to disable adblocking! There are a couple of approaches. Resetting my DNS servers to defaults is disruptive and error-prone; it's a non-starter. I find it peculiar that there is no knob on NextDNS that says "disable blocking features and act like normal DNS" even though they themselves enable such a feature if you run out of free monthly queries. You can disable a bunch of features one-by-one, but of course that affects all sites, not just the one. You can whitelist any domain you want, but that involves a cycle of testing and guessing which ones are emanating from the site you want to use.

In short, there's no straightforward way of just telling NextDNS "don't block ads while I'm on YouTube.com" and it's for that reason that I sort of miss uBlock Origin. However, YouTube does use native domains for all its ad serving, and I see them all now anyway, so I don't believe that this new policy will adversely affect my usage profile.

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