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YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

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Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#211

Post by drivebycomment »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #56
crop_rotation wrote: post #9

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…

> especially when you consider that there are only two people on the uBO team Why in the world are there only two ? That's your problem right there. How many competent devs are right here in the comment section? Why is it so difficult to get their help?

uBO readme https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/README.md makes it clear this is not for profit;

> Free. Open-source. For users by users. No donations sought.

> If you ever want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which are available to use by all for free.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#212

Post by dessant »

least wrote: post #198
dessant wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also feels awful to be called a beggar and a panhandler just because you're trying to find a balance and build a sustainable project by having a donation popup (that can be disabled) in your software. This disgusting review was sitting at the top of the review page for Search by Image on the Chrome Web Store: https://i.imgur.com/P1QU176.png This person has edited their review a couple of times in the past year whi…

> It also feels awful to be called a beggar and a panhandler just because you're trying to find a balance and build a sustainable project by having a donation popup (that can be disabled) in your software. Interrupting someone's browsing experience to ask for donations is both providing a poor user experience and is in poor taste. I think it's fine to solicit donations in the browserAction popup, the settings page or…

A donation popup is shown once a year, and only when you use the extension, it does not randomly interrupt your browsing experience. Te popup can even be disabled from the extension's options. It is similar to a donation prompt being shown when an app is opened, once a year.

That's what this person was complaining about, that they've seen a donation prompt once when they've initiated an image search with the extension.

There is no winning with some of these people, they want your time and the results of your work, they want it for free, and they want it to be neatly packaged and presented exactly the way that is most convenient for them. If you deviate even a little bit from their unreasonable expectations, you'll be promptly attacked.

Once your projects grow past a certain size, threats of physical violence also become a regular occurrence, here's a milder email I have received last year: https://i.imgur.com/LKJQq1p.png

This kind of harassment is happening every 1-2 weeks on different channels, we keep these private messages because everything has to be documented in case law enforcement needs to be involved.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#213

Post by jconnop »

d3w4s9 wrote: post #83

If YouTube provides a service that removes ads ONLY for $4.99/month, they would already have my money. However they have to bundle it with YouTube Music and other stuff into "Premium", then never mind.

Until extremely recently, they did offer exactly such a service, though only in a handful of markets (mine was one). They called it Premium Lite.

It was exactly what you want, a much lower priced subscription which just removed ads, and didn't include any other premium features. I happily paid for it.

It was discontinued this month.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#214

Post by russell_h »

blindseer wrote: post #24
CuriouslyC wrote: post #4

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.

I think YouTube will "win" this war, unfortunately. Even people that "join" individual channels cannot watch content from those channels if they use AdBlock. At some point these people are either going to buy premium or turn off the ad-blocker. It boggles my mind that engineers and managers that have kids and are working on the YouTube team think this is okay and this is what the future of the platform should look li…

> Even people that "join" individual channels cannot watch content from those channels if they use AdBlock

Is content from publishers you’ve subscribed to normally ad-free? I don’t understand the relationship between these things

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#215

Post by Tao3300 »

paulcole wrote: post #143
MostlyStable wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither side is wrong. Youtube has every right to try as hard as it can to get users to view ads. And users have every right to try as hard as they can to block those ads. I don't have a right to ad-free youtube, but I do have every right to try and control what things get sent to and viewed on my computer. If I (and people like me) are abundant enough and succesful enough, then youtube and other services will be for…

> I do have every right to try and control what things get sent to and viewed on my computer I love this sort of mental gymnastics (the passive voice is a nice addition, too). You know you can win this game quickly by not visiting YouTube again or by paying YouTube $15/month? But no, it’s much better to exert your “rights” to try and control what gets sent to your computer. Also known as what you requested (since you…

That isn't mental gymnastics.

> You know you can win this game quickly by not visiting YouTube again

Yes. You understand perfectly. YT doesn't have to enshittify much further for this to be no loss.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#216

Post by gchamonlive »

Tao3300 wrote: post #183
gchamonlive wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could apply LLMs to act as an interface with the angry crowd, rephrasing angry comments into constructive criticism and summarizing needs. In turn LLMs could be applied to synthesise development progress and answer the angry crowd. Everyone would be happy.

No. Because then angry people are rewarded for being angry, and that's not happy.

They are not angry because they are rewarded for being angry. And an answer is far for being a reward. A negative answer is still an answer.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#217

Post by xboxnolifes »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #150
kiernanmcgowan wrote: post #27

This ad block debate makes me think about patio11’s post “The optimal amount of fraud is non zero”. Essentially in trying to make a system as fraud-free as possible you make it too difficult to work with / the cost of fighting fraud is higher than the cost of the fraud. Ads vs Ad Blockers seem to be in that space, but on the cost of customer good will. Can YouTube squeeze more money from ads by doing this? Sure. Is i…

> patio11’s post “The optimal amount of fraud is non zero”. Thanks, I just skimmed this post. It seems to me that "optimal" is substituting for "cost effective". The optimal amount of fraud is always zero, it's just not cost effective given the existence of people willing to go to lengths to commit fraud. > Can YouTube squeeze more money from ads by doing this? The third option is that this would incentivize a portio…

It's not just cost effectiveness. It's about how awful you will make the user experience for real users if you tried to bring fraud truly to 0. It's essentially the security-convenience tradeoff. In terms of YouTube, it's the monetization-experience tradeoff.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#218

Post by ndriscoll »

gwd wrote: post #191
wredue wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that for YouTube to get that payment, I have to give them, and other ad networks a major view in to my whole life. Ad networks are currently scum of the earth, easily giving lawyers a good name. If ad networks were riddled with crime, invasion of privacy, and other bullshit, people would be much more willing to entertain them. Today though, they’re obnoxious AND invade your privacy AND may actually jus…

> The problem is that for YouTube to get that payment, I have to give them, and other ad networks a major view in to my whole life. Wait... does that mean, Google could offer "DoubleClick Premuim", where I pay to not see any DoubleClick ads whatsoever, anywhere on the web, but the websites I visited would still get their funding? I think I'd pay $10/mo for that.

Pay-per-view creates a perverse incentive to make SEO noise and make it more difficult to find what you want. You would be mostly paying to make your life worse. Better to just block ads, encourage and help others to block ads, and hope those sites die.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#219

Post by satvikpendem »

userbinator wrote: post #118
cj wrote: post #76

At a technical level, what prevents Google from deploying unblockable ads on YouTube? I’m honestly surprised adblockers are able to block YouTube at all. The easiest way to prevent an adblocker from blocking is to make ads and real content indistinguishable in frontend code and network requests. Tie ads and real content together in a way that if you block ads, the video also doesn’t load. Or in the case of video ads,…

Or in the case of video ads, you could stream the ad as part of the video itself instead of a separate pre roll. Back when people watched an actual "tube", ads were indeed like that. Yet VCRs could easily detect and skip over them when recording. Remember that this was before AI too, so the technology exists to counter it already. I suspect YouTube keeps the ads separate from the content because the sort of "splicing…

> Yet VCRs could easily detect and skip over them when recording

How did they do that? Is there any more information on this topic?

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#220

Post by anonymouskimmer »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #217
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> patio11’s post “The optimal amount of fraud is non zero”. Thanks, I just skimmed this post. It seems to me that "optimal" is substituting for "cost effective". The optimal amount of fraud is always zero, it's just not cost effective given the existence of people willing to go to lengths to commit fraud. > Can YouTube squeeze more money from ads by doing this? The third option is that this would incentivize a portio…

It's not just cost effectiveness. It's about how awful you will make the user experience for real users if you tried to bring fraud truly to 0. It's essentially the security-convenience tradeoff. In terms of YouTube, it's the monetization-experience tradeoff.

Yes, because the corporations are optimizing for cost effectiveness (return on sales or return on investment).

Corporations don't care what the user experience is for its own sake. They care about keeping and retaining paying users. After a point they don't bother making the user experience better, because it isn't cost effective to do so.

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