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YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

andadinosaur.com

361–370 of 781 posts

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imagine having the ability to dislike something without characterizing it as disgusting. One could almost call it a super power.

I think empathy is a much more relevant superpower, and the lack of it can be disgusting.

Unfortunately, after all my observations of humans over the course of decades, I feel like real empathy is actually pretty rare in humans. It might be common in fictitious characters, but not in real people.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you ask? Because it would cause them more harm than benefit. They have thousands of people working on that and this is the conclusion they got so far. I never used youtube without adblock and won't ever use it. I hope they block adblocks so it become so annoying that better options start to appear again.

Better options don't magically appear. Especially in an unsustainable market: nobody wants an audience of users who don't watch ads and don't pay. Where's the money to make the better option coming from?

Google became a trillion dollar company in this "unsustainable" market. It won't work forever, that I can agree.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

YT is too big for people who hate ads to not invest a massive effort. The ad blocker endgame will be YT videos being "pre-watched" by a headless browser running in the background and the video data grabbed from there (either recorded or directly). You then watch the ad-less video in a custom frontend. If implemented correctly there's pretty much nothing YT could hope to do about this.

I'd even be cool with just blanking my screen and muting the sound when an ad is playing. Given my usual YouTube watching mindset, a brief moment to to just breath would be good for me.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think empathy is a much more relevant superpower, and the lack of it can be disgusting.

Unfortunately, after all my observations of humans over the course of decades, I feel like real empathy is actually pretty rare in humans. It might be common in fictitious characters, but not in real people.

empathy to random humans is rare, empathy to those in your immediate vicinity is not. I suspect the biggest asshole at your work probably has empathy for their family.

The fundamental issue at play here is trying to manipulate language by using the word disgusting to evoke a stronger reaction than is warranted.

At some point you're going to need a stronger word than disgusting because you've watered it down so much. Where do you go?

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way to fix it with infinite money is to have individual human curators (concierge services) for every customer. This eliminates fraud and makes a very, very easy-to-use "user interface" when the human concierges are well trained. Regardless, even if I'm wrong with "cost effective", the word still isn't "optimal".

However well trained they may be, humans are notoriously easy to manipulate and engineer around. Humans in a customer service role especially, since they are by definition expected to be helpful by default.

If they're paid enough you can select for humans with superior talents and, at least as important, training. Heck, with infinite money you could have them train for 5 or 10 years before ever having a real-case person to interact with.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not hypocritical at all. There is no "entitlement" to videos. They are free. YouTube sends them to us for free. They do so hoping we're gonna look at the ads. We're under exactly zero obligation to actually do that though. It is not at all our responsibility to make their business model work. Abusing open source developers is the true entitlement.

Psssh, you and I both know the model only works because people _do_ sometimes look at ads. If people don't, then YouTube will stop delivering videos for free. Your argument is pretty disingenuous.

So you think people watching over-the-air television are morally obligated to watch the ads and not mute them, leave the room, use a DVR to skip them, etc.?

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Create a wall of shame and let people laugh about the idiots. So simple.

It sounds good, but a lot of people just aren't mentally equipped for that: some people are fighters, some just aren't. So instead of confronting the assholes and putting up the "wall of shame" like you suggest, they'll just give up and go find another hobby that doesn't result in receiving such vile messages.

Yeah. People need to go in the line of fire a lot more. Once you are hardened, you just waltz through these bullshits like a 70 ton tank.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#368
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

YT Premium costs more than Netflix or Disney+. Quite pricey to get ad free Youtube videos and not as much content than normal streaming sites.

Especially considering that YouTube gets the content for almost free

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#369
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,…

If ads are indistinguishable from the regular video, can't people just skip past them? Afterall, regular video can be fast-forwarded / skipped.

I will tell my computer to automatically skip video that was originally marked as unskippable.

If things really escalate, I will tell my computer to blank the screen and mute the audio when an ad is playing. I will do this with a keybinding, or maybe with an AI. This will be undetectable to the server.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not hypocritical at all. There is no "entitlement" to videos. They are free. YouTube sends them to us for free. They do so hoping we're gonna look at the ads. We're under exactly zero obligation to actually do that though. It is not at all our responsibility to make their business model work. Abusing open source developers is the true entitlement.

Another true entitlement is adblock users complaining that YouTube is greedy , etcetera, now that they're actually kicking said users off their site. You (in the general sense) are certainly not responsible for making YouTube's business work, but by a similar token they are certainly not under any obligation to continue serving data to users who don't generate any revenue.

Convenient lack of mention of the content creators in these threads where people just complain about Youtube corporation.
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