81–90 of 123 posts
is Google really that desperate for revenue that they need to do this shit? Comes off as desperate
I would happily pay for youtube without ads if I was confident that they wouldn't start putting ads in it anyways like always seems to happen with these services.
Not showing ads is leaving money on the table, and streaming services are like any other company, they will need continuous return on investment no matter what. They will eventually get that return by showing ads[1], shareholders will demand it.
Look at Hulu, Netflix and YouTube. They all show ads now. Netflix previously didn't show ads and now does. Hell, I can't watch a 20-minute YouTube video without watching several minutes of ads.
These services' actual clients are the entities that have million/billion dollar advertising budgets, and not individual customers who pay a paltry monthly fee. Even if services start with no/minimal ads to get their foot in the door, they will eventually have to take their advertising partners' money, and those partners will want to show ads.
[1] https://digiday.com/future-of-tv/ad-supported-streaming-serv...
Are people actually getting blocked? I saw the adblock-block popup once, and after flushing the cache and updating filters of my adblocker I haven't had any issues using yt since. Am I just in a lucky A/B group or is the detection and blockage actually that toothless?
I don't think this argument has any legs. You request a page from a web server, the server gives you back some html and some javascript, you execute the javascript which detects if you are using an adblocker. There is no tracking involved, if you believe the js you got back is spyware you can refrain from running it and you can't watch the vid. Should every website ask for your consent to serve you javascript now?
Wouldn't that depend on when YouTube starts the "three video" counter? A blanket ban on ad blockers may not violate the law, but their implementation may.
How does Youtube detect adblock anyway? Is that documented anywhere?
I guess now, Youtube expects a response back, and occasionally, the request/response is faked. So, when uBlock adjusts the request/response and says "This user watched the ads", Youtube knows the request/response was fake and there were no ads to begin with, notifying that user is using an adblocker.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't that same argument apply to cookie consent popups? Privacy shouldn't only be afforded to the more technical users.
Cookie consent popups are not mandated by the GDPR (the EU privacy law), they’re just a stupid (and often infringing) reaction to it. The GDPR disallows tracking without consent, but more in the spirit of “don’t track” than “get consent”. It also specifies that conditions should be clear, and that not granting consent (or withdrawing it) should be as simple as granting it. It even specifies that sites that request pr…
They're an entirely rational and predictable reaction to it. If you're trying to regulate bad actors, it should be utterly unsurprising when they game the easily gameable rules.
The GDPR disallows tracking without consent, but more in the spirit of “don’t track” than “get consent”.
Then it should actually ban tracking, without the loophole of "you can track as long as you get the user to click a button, also you can't offer them anything in exchange for doing so". That's just asking for all the dark patterns we've gotten.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Should every website ask for your consent to serve you javascript now? Ideally, yes.
Please don't give the EU any more ideas.
Why should companies be required to offer content to people for free?
Welll... to be fair, that's literally the only reason the platform got as big as it did, and became "the" ubiquitous video hosting platform. They fronted the cost to capture a massive audience, and now they gradually extract more and more value out of the user base they lured in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm still using uMatrix. I don't really understand why uMatrix was abandoned, its UI is miles ahead what uBlock Origin offers.
I haven't used uMatrix in years, but isn't the UI in uBlock Origin > More similar, do you know what's missing? https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...
...oh, I see, I have to first go into the settings to declare myself an able-minded human. That's quite the UX failure, hiding functionality behind an unrelated toggle at an entirely different place.
Having finally found the correct mystical incantation, I can answer your question. At first glance, that UI is incredibly confusing. Why are there two columns to the right of every domain? What's the difference between making the left column red and the right grey, versus making the right column red and the left grey? What is the significance of the +'s and -'s in the various cells? That help page doesn't explain any of it.
What's really missing: uMatrix lets me see how many resources of what type were loaded from what domain. That's very helpful when finding out what needs to be unblocked: if a site doesn't work, I progessively whitelist third-party resources until basic functionality is restored. I then remove everything from the writelist that's unused. It doesn't seem like that information is available.
Also: with UBO it doesn't seem possible to enable javascript for just one third-party host, or enable everything except javascript? If I whitelist a host in the UI, it automatically enables static resources (img, css), dynamic resources (js), cross-site data (xhr) and frames. I'm not going to write manual rules every time I want to allow everything except javascript.
This is just from a cursory examination, so maybe the functionality is there, it's just unfamiliarity with the new interface. But from what I'm seeing, neither the UI itself nor the help page make a compelling reason to make the switch.