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YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

andadinosaur.com

61–70 of 781 posts

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#61

YouTube will "lose" the war, but they'll make adblocking difficult enough for a while that it might get some premium subscribers in the short term in exchange for the loss of goodwill.

If you're neither paying YouTube any money nor watching their ads, meaning you're a pure money sink, why should they care about your goodwill?

That's the price they pay for being ubiquitous. The alternative is to lose a good % of their userbase to a competitor that can make a better use of this audience.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#62
As the dev of a macOS app that breaks all the time because of external hardware, the tone of the article hits close to home. (I’m talking about https://lunar.fyi/ whose brightness control commands can be blocked by USB-C hubs, “smart” monitors, too long cables etc.)

I had to disable public GitHub issues on the app repo [1] because people seemed to fuel each other with spiteful comments and “why can’t you just!!” sentences.

The contact form still attracts many such “entitled” people and it hurts to wake up to such messages, but at least I can choose to ignore those if I can’t bring anything to the discussion. There’s no peer pressure.

These people are expecting too much from a handful of developers who are sharing a lot of free work and time that could have been spent better than hunting new IDs in URLs and updating regular expressions.

[1] https://github.com/alin23/Lunar

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#63
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it’ll be like Twitch where they tried hard for a while and then stopped because of the diminishing returns. YouTube will probably shake out everyone who doesn’t really understand tech and then find they are spending the same amount for less gains. And then the situation will stabilize again.

Where did twitch stop? Unless you do more and more custom shenanigans, uBlock origin has not blocked twitch ads for a long long time, and the ads are extremely repetitive.

You just use one script to block the ads. They used to work around that script all the time in 2021 but it has been stable for over a year now.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#64
My solution seems ethically valid: I watch the majority of YT videos on a browser with adblocks turned off, but if it's a long technical video I'm trying to learn something from, then I use a full adblock setup on a different browser because the advertising interruptions make concentration impossible.

I suppose if I was rolling in money I'd just pay for premium - though I'm sure all that data would also be fed into their user-marketing-optimization database and sold on to whoever, which I also dislike.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about ads displayed on a busstop? Should I feel guilty for looking the other way? It subsidizes public transportation afterall..

Not really a fair comparison. The equivalent to "looking the other way," on YouTube would be exactly that, looking somewhere other than the ad (opening another browser, going to the bathroom, etc.). Ad Blockers are essential painting over the bus stop ad completely, so you don't even have a chance to see it.

That's an even worse analogy, because ad blockers only block the ads for you, not for everyone else.

A better analogy is getting someone else to paint over all the ads in the free ad-supported newspaper before you read it.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#66
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am talking about free and open source products like ublock origin and not YouTube itself. Entitilement towards youtube can be debated, entitlement toward uBlock origin is just bad behaviour.

Such is my reading comprehension on Saturday lol

I hateto bring it to you but we are on sunday :)

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#67

YouTube will "lose" the war, but they'll make adblocking difficult enough for a while that it might get some premium subscribers in the short term in exchange for the loss of goodwill.

If you're neither paying YouTube any money nor watching their ads, meaning you're a pure money sink, why should they care about your goodwill?

[deleted]

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#68
post #8

Why, from first principles, should YouTube allow this? Why shouldn’t they go thermonuclear? I understand ads are annoying - I block as many as I can! - but I’ve never seen someone put together a coherent defense of the practice.

What about ads displayed on a busstop? Should I feel guilty for looking the other way? It subsidizes public transportation afterall..

No and you should also not feel guilty for ignoring the ads on a YT video. Getting a chip implanted in your brain which filters out advertisements from your vision would be closer to installing an ad blocker in your browser; and I don't know how I would feel about companies denying free service to people with such chips implanted.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#69

Apart from the Youtube stuff, the post also highlights something else, entitlement towards free services like uBlock origin. > It’s one thing to play cat and mouse with YouTube. It’s quite another to deal with a wave of angry users. > And then one of the moderators actually deleted their Reddit account. “The ID in the post wasn’t updated because my mother was hospitalized,” they said. It’s sad to see them leave becau…

If they didn't have such entitlement they wouldn't be blocking the ads in the first place.

Like those entitled tv viewers who switch the channel.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#70

Apart from the Youtube stuff, the post also highlights something else, entitlement towards free services like uBlock origin. > It’s one thing to play cat and mouse with YouTube. It’s quite another to deal with a wave of angry users. > And then one of the moderators actually deleted their Reddit account. “The ID in the post wasn’t updated because my mother was hospitalized,” they said. It’s sad to see them leave becau…

> I have seen this becoming more and more common on open source projects and totally free services, where people act as if they are entitled to something as if it is their god given right. Do you count YouTube as a "free service" (with ads) in this case? I wonder if there is an overlap with people that expect free stuff and people that use uBO on YouTube. YT does offer most users YT premium, which gives users an ad f…

I think he’s referring to the Adblock as the free service here.
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