YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#431

Post by belltaco » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 3:37 AM UTC

garciansmith wrote: post #418

daeros wrote: post #356

While it has ultimately come up in this discussion my honest input is most of the comments I see here evaded the elephant in the room of all of it which is that Google doesn't do a good enough job of vetting the people who advertise with it, its search engines have repeatedly allowed malware to slip through the cracks leading to people being exploited and nothing stops those same malware developers from serving up ad…

While I agree to an extent, to me the larger issue is that Youtube has become the default video hosting platform with no real competition. I adblock everything but I am sympathetic to the idea that video hosting costs money. But I watch, on average, less than 1 hour of Youtube videos a month, so paying for Youtube makes no sense. Plus I have issues with privacy (part of the reason I've never created a Youtube account…

> But I watch, on average, less than 1 hour of Youtube videos a month, so paying for Youtube makes no sense

What's your issue with having to watch ads if you watch less than 1 hour of video content a month?

> I wish there was a free and open video platform that had a funding model like Wikipedia, where people could upload things that they had no intention of "monetizing"

There's a lot of content on YouTube that people upload that they have no intention of monetizing.

> I wish there was a free and open video platform that had a funding model like Wikipedia

Why don't you or someone else try starting one?

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#432

Post by alok-g » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 3:37 AM UTC

Yhippa wrote: post #53

oaththrowaway wrote: post #32

I use NewPipe on my phone, SmartTubeNext on my Android TV, and uBlock+FF inside of a container without being logged in on my laptop. I was at a friend's house yesterday and they showed me a video on YouTube. I couldn't believe how many ads there were. It was unwatchable. Not sure how people don't pay for premium or block ads. What a miserable experience.

I presume that you don't pay for Premium? And that the average user isn't interested in installing a tech cocktail on their systems?

Not OP, but I prefer to watch ads instead of subscribing to Premium, but not because I do not want to pay, rather because being logged in implies more tracking and personalization. I prefer it stateless.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#433

Post by tjpnz » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 3:37 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #430

tjpnz wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ditched Chrome after a Google ad hijacked the browser and attempted download malware onto my device. If you value your own security you absolutely should be using a browser with support for ad blocking extensions. At the same time Google must be held criminally liable for the massive amounts of fraud their ad business facilitates.

[deleted]

Chrome for Android doesn't support ad blockers. The ad was served through Double Click on a non-Google property.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#434

Post by Semaphor » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 3:37 AM UTC

yukkuri wrote: post #78

A lot of absurd moralizing here about "you're stealing by not watching ads". I keep adblock on for most sites because ads are so intrusive and often malware vectors. If advertisers want my eyes they need to not be obnoxious. I started blocking YouTube ads in particular because it kept serving me ads that were brazenly homophobic ("how gross and smelly is gay sex? Find out!") I feel no moral problem with this, if you…

> "how gross and smelly is gay sex? Find out!"

Sidebar, and I assume the ad wasn’t that way, but that does actually sound like a sarcastic pro-homosexual-sex ad ;)

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#435

Post by anonymouskimmer » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 3:38 AM UTC

xboxnolifes wrote: post #239

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But cost effectiveness makes it sound like you can fix it by throwing money at it. The point is that you cannot fix it, even with infinite money, because you will reach zero users before you reach 0 fraud.

I think part of the problem here is a mistaken interpretation on my part. I was thinking of "optimal" in terms of an ideal society in which no fraud takes place. I think the article writer was thinking of "optimal" in terms of optimizing the solution to a problem given the constraints and freedoms of current society.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#436

Post by Semaphor » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 3:42 AM UTC

tech234a wrote: post #96

ls612 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was still something stupid low like 10% of people using adblockers?

More than 10% of telemetry-enabled Firefox users worldwide use adblockers. In Poland it's 15%. In the United States, Germany, and Russia it is closer to 20%, and in France it is closer to 30% [1]. [1]: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior (see near the bottom of the page)

Germany, mostly older users. We had a manual HEAD request to our google ads script for a while where we’d log the results (successful: yes/no). 30-35% blocked ads.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#437

Post by Semaphor » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 3:42 AM UTC

hotnfresh wrote: post #147

tech234a wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than 10% of telemetry-enabled Firefox users worldwide use adblockers. In Poland it's 15%. In the United States, Germany, and Russia it is closer to 20%, and in France it is closer to 30% [1]. [1]: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior (see near the bottom of the page)

But Firefox is under 5% of browser market share (generous estimates still seem to put it under 5%—the low-side estimate is closer to 2.5%) and its users are almost-certainly far more likely than most to use ad blockers.

Not in Germany

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#438

Post by FuckButtons » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 3:42 AM UTC

fennecbutt wrote: post #345

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…

Doesn't the same apply to YouTube then? People who want to block ads are entitled imo. Those people outright refuse to pay or to simply not use the service if they don't like ads. And it enrages so many people when this is pointed out. Google made a mistake in offering free drive, gmail, Google docs, etc etc. Imagine telling someone in the 90s all the shit we get for free with a couple ads/our data being sold. People…

You say that as though there’s a viable alternative, which is precisely googles business model.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#439

Post by atleastoptimal » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 3:43 AM UTC

The big issue is, I know ads pay for Youtube, but maybe 1 times out of 100 do I see an ad that promotes positive feelings about the product being advertised. the other 99 times I am less inclined to purchase the product out of annoyance by the ad. Shouldn't the billions of dollars of recommendation research at this point reached a peak where ads are ideally appealing to the viewers they're served to? Wouldn't that maximize profits for all sides? It still feels like ads at this point are aimed deliberately to annoy me.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#440

Post by briHass » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 3:44 AM UTC

satvikpendem wrote: post #219

userbinator wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think this may be referring to DVRs of the early 2000s. They used basic logic to look for a blip (dropout) in the video signal that usually happened when a commercial break was inserted. It worked surprisingly well.

The parallels here are uncanny, because there were tons of lawsuits from networks unhappy about this, as well as lawsuits from consumers making similar arguments as seen in this thread about how advertisements are awful and they don't have any responsibility to watch them.