https://invidious.io/ https://invidi.link/
Invidious is great and all but they need a complete redesign. It looks like it was design by a developer
Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”
131–140 of 168 posts
Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
YT is so egregious with its ad insertions at times It's worse than broadcast TV. I'll usually sit through an ad at the beginning and maybe the end of a video because I want to support creators. But YT just sticks them into the middle of things, frequently ruining the experience of the surrounding content. Meanwhile they promote absolute trash like Nikocado Avocado, which is my view is no different from shooting up he…
> they promote absolute trash like Nikocado Avocado I have never had one of his videos promoted to me. You may have a different filter bubble / reccomendation algorithm pushing it towards you because you watch similar content?
I personally don't, because for potentially sketchy content I watch it logged out or in a private browser. But just the fact that the guy has millions of subscribers and they monetize is his videos at all is bothersome to me. I can't see any qualitative difference between him and a fentanyl aficionado.
Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
That requires them to pre-serve you the bits for the part of the video after the ad, which they aren't going to do.
Unless they want to completely break the ability to seek in the video timeline, regardless of ad placements, that's not going to work.
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Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”
#134Related: YouTube's crackdown on ad blockers intensifies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37782171 - Oct 2023 (140 comments) YouTube is testing new “skip ads” button that makes it just a bit harder to skip - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37224622 - Aug 2023 (12 comments) YouTube is testing a three-strikes policy for ad blocking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36747367 - July 2023 (72 comments) YouT…
Incidentally, along with other strengthened paywalls, this might impact HN's own acceptance of YT videos, which may not be generally available to many HN readers.
In 2023, youtube.com was the single most frequently appearing site on HN front-page stories (based on HN's front-page archive), with 105 stories (of 10,950), about 1% of the total. (Based on my HN front-page analysis.)
Edit: Corrected above from 10% as initially written.
As previously noted, the New York Times saw front-page appearances fall to 25% of its prior level after that site's paywall strengthened in August 2019.
I'm anticipating a large number of comments addressing YT's anti-ad-blocking rather than the contents of the video itself.
Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is, in my opinion, shortsighted. It's straightforward to create ads that you can't block on the client so long as you are the server of the ads yourself, as Google is. I'm not going to detail how since I don't want anyone on HN to get any ideas and build a business of it, but I'm sure it will happen eventually. For the time being I suspect it's cheaper to keep the current tech running since it brings in enough r…
> Google search is a good example of this, ads are literally intertwined into the search results, if you take this a few steps further you have ads that you literally can't block on the client. I'm not sure about your "few steps" so this may be moot. Is there no sufficient workaround of this nature? document.querySelector('.waste-of-money')?.remove(); Google might detect that the element was removed; ad blockers use…
I think the issue here is that it might take the adblockers longer to update than it takes google. If google has a team of people doing anti adblock then I suspect it would take them less than a week or maybe even a couple days to update the app to counteract whatever the adblockers come up with. And with each iteration the adblockers have to become more creative.
Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. It's why in-stream ads were so straightforward to implement for Twitch too. Can't fast forward a live stream.
If you're willing to buffer a few minutes of video, you can work around this. Tivo is a decent example of how this has been done in the past.
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Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”
#137This is where I get conflicted with ad blockers, on the one hand most website ads are trash, on the other hand there is great content on YT and I want those creators to make enough to carry on to get to the level where they proper sponsors. But, YT is so egregious with its ad insertions at times that it drives me mad and I don’t trust the creators will get fairly compensated if I go to premium.
The creators get more money per view from a premium member than an ad-supported viewer. So not only does being a paying member give you a better experience, it puts more cash in the pocket of those you watch.
Is this how you define fair though? I tend to think more about the revenue split percentage.
Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t feel like there’s any conflict. The ad blockers want a free ride. We all know what would happen to YouTube if 100% of its users were able to block ads. It would become paid-only or go out of business. The only reason it’s tolerated by so many websites is because only a small sliver of users know how to install ad-blocking software. These are real people spending real time and money making content. On the YouT…
> It would become paid-only or go out of business. Fantastic. Then people would have to host their videos elsewhere, perhaps on PeerTube.
Who do you think would donate all the bandwidth to replace youtube? How would legal complaints and other ops costs be handled? OSS is great until the government shows up and arrests you and you can't afford lawyers.
Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I said what solution I wanted. Micropayments have been researched for 30 years. Anonymous crypto payments have been deployed for maybe 10. Yes, there are scaling issues. No, they're not that hard. The real problem is getting everybody to agree on what to use. ... and if a site directly tells me it doesn't like my ad blocker, I leave. I haven't gone to the ad-blocker-blocker level. I don't think that's unreasonable.
> ... and if a site directly tells me it doesn't like my ad blocker, I leave. I haven't gone to the ad-blocker-blocker level. You may not be aware that many such messages are themselves blocked by the default lists in ublock origin. Examples: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues?q=is%3Aissue+...
I did not know that, and I suspect that having found out is gonna make my life much less happy than it presently is.
For anybody who's interested, I just posted a question in uBlock's Reddit forum about how to stop using such ad-blocker-blocker-blocker features while still getting most of the rest of the features of the extension. https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/171rorw/optin...
Then I'll have to find out if I can survive like that...
Re: Tell HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”
#140I do not understand why people refuse to pay for other people's work, even indirectly. YouTube Premium gives creators a pretty decent cut as well, coming from someone with monetized youtube vids...
Youtube Premium is a waste of money, they bundle a crappy $11/m music service with it, for $13/m.
I'd pay $2/m, or even $4 bucks, for ad-free Youtube, but I'm not buying an additional music service.