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Does uBlock Origin bypass the latest YouTube anti-adblock script?

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Re: Does uBlock Origin bypass the latest YouTube anti-adblock script?

#81
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would competition even work? How could any company succeed proving a product to a user base that doesn’t watch ads and doesn’t pay for the service? Would be like proving an alternative to cater to shoplifters.

Let's permanently dispense with this weird notion that blocking ads is theft. When you're listening to the radio, it's not theft to change the station when ads come up. When you're watching TV, it's not theft to mute the TV and get a drink when ads come up. Youtube has zero moral expectation that people will actually watch the ads it serves. They're giving a product away for free, and people are consuming it for free…

The equivalent behavior on YouTube for your analogies would be for you to mute the ad or to browse a different tab while the ad still plays. Removing the ad altogether is very different. TV and radio can’t (last time I checked) tell if you’ve muted the ad, changed the channel, or have walked away. There’s no telemetry they can access that tells them that, so there is no legal course for the ad companies to say “we’re not going to pay you for that ad” because the best the TV and radio companies can do is say “yup we ran it” and there is a guarantee that every person at a minimum had to wait the amount of time the ad takes, and many will likely just endure it. On the other hand, it’s absolutely possible to track ads getting blocked and skipped altogether, and ad companies have legal grounds to say “we won’t pay for that”.

Re: Does uBlock Origin bypass the latest YouTube anti-adblock script?

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad metaphor. No one is stealing anything from YouTube. Meanwhile a tantrum is a display of socially unacceptable behavior because you don’t like something. Very much a tantrum.

bandwidth and hosting have associated costs. unlike piracy, which is just creating copies, this is using Google’s electricity to provide you a service without giving anything in return.

It costs them even more to also serve me an ad that I will resent and refuse to click on / follow the CTA.

Re: Does uBlock Origin bypass the latest YouTube anti-adblock script?

#83
post #30

what i’m reading from these comments: we will do anything, including leaving youtube, but for sure we will not be either watching ads or paying for content.

in due time you'll be paying both for content and watch ads, as is the norm now on more and more platforms.

It's an absolute category error to think you can haggle with for profit corporations worth trillions about when they've extracted enough value from you.

You ever hear the one about the missionary who tried to negotiate with the tiger? He told the tiger he could eat most of him, but he had to stop when he got to his head

Re: Does uBlock Origin bypass the latest YouTube anti-adblock script?

#84

Youtube seems to me to be a bullshit test platform. They will work around ad blockers and continue to pile on repetitive and banal adverts that have nothing to do with the user until they reach breaking point (where people flee and seek alternatives), and then they will relax their system to show marginally less bullshit. The confusing part of this battle is the app users, who do not agree with the avalanche of adver…

I don’t know. When youtube bypassed adblockers on iOS, I found it quite natural to break that habit and stop using youtube.

I stopped watching TV 20 years ago, I have been using ad blockers as soon as they were introduced. The habit of not having to sit and watch some commercials is the most entrenched one in me. Hard to reverse a 20y habit.

Re: Does uBlock Origin bypass the latest YouTube anti-adblock script?

#85
post #30

what i’m reading from these comments: we will do anything, including leaving youtube, but for sure we will not be either watching ads or paying for content.

There's zero reason to think that people who are unwilling to sit through ads are also unwilling to pay for content. Many people pay content creators directly. They send donations. They buy merch. They even pay for useless shit like emojis just to show their support publicly. People simply want to choose which creators they support, when, and how, which is entirely their right

Should that be their right? If somebody is watching a ton of Vincent's videos, but chooses to send donations to Clara that he watches much less, is that fair?

Re: Does uBlock Origin bypass the latest YouTube anti-adblock script?

#86

Imagine valuing your time so little you waste it trying to block instead of just abstaining or using premium. When Facebook started being user hostile I stopped using it wholesale. Anti Google YouTube folks haven’t gotten the message yet. If you make 25 an hour - the bottom decile wage for software engineering - and waste more than half an hour on this a month, idk what to say. That’s a minute a day. Chop chop. By th…

Imagine valuing yourself and your money so little that you'd pay a company who is actively harassing you with unwanted attempts at manipulation to pretty please leave you alone and let you see the free content you want without interruption.

Re: Does uBlock Origin bypass the latest YouTube anti-adblock script?

#87
post #30

what i’m reading from these comments: we will do anything, including leaving youtube, but for sure we will not be either watching ads or paying for content.

I'm kind of torn. On one hand, I agree that if you use a service, paying for it so it can continue to be enjoyed by all makes sense. On the other, I'm not sure there's a tech company fighting against my interests as a regular person harder than Google is, and I don't really want to give them money out of principle. Maybe there's some hyperbole in that last sentence but hopefully my point is made at least.

Re: Does uBlock Origin bypass the latest YouTube anti-adblock script?

#88

Thanks for posting - Google needs to face serious competition and market penalties for the recent anti-user behavior. I feel that the products that matter at Google are controlled by an extremely distasteful group of people. Looting the users amassed years ago by real innovator engineers. For example, the real implied free storage in GMail has implicitly been reduced by 80%. Their failure to reduce prices and in fact…

How would competition even work? How could any company succeed proving a product to a user base that doesn’t watch ads and doesn’t pay for the service? Would be like proving an alternative to cater to shoplifters.

What you wrote is like:

"Hey fellow hackers. I am a hacker myself and I totally don't work for Google. Ads are good, mkay?"

Bruh, dunno what planet you live on and how brainwashed you have to be to think blocking ads is theft. It's like getting a fine when there are ads on the radio and you change the station, or ads on the TV and you changing the channel.

It's your device, it's the creator's content, and Youtube facilitates you seeing that content. In return, they can (and very much do) monetize your usage data, your interests, etc, and give some of that value to the creator. That should have been the relationship between creator, service and consumer. However, monetizing the trove of data they have on you is not enough for them.

What they are doing now is motivated by pure corporate greed and desire to squeeze every possible cent out of their dominant position. They can and don't care about your experience, knowing that there is hardly an alternative for you, and that, my friend, is called a monopoly. And wherever there are monopolies, users suffer. So don't sell me the idea that poor poor Google can't make ends meet and need to force feed me 100 ads during one video so they can survive. This is a monopoly saying a big "fuck you" to their users and trying to scalp them by enshittifying their service and forcing you to pay for the "premium".

Forcing you to watch content that you didn't want to and pausing the ad counter while you have clicked away is the TV equivalent of the ADs following you on every channel and not relenting until you have watched them. They have no excuse

Re: Does uBlock Origin bypass the latest YouTube anti-adblock script?

#90
post #52

A reliable way I found to confirm whether there is new anti-content blocker code released by Youtube is to visit uBlockOrigin's reddit sub[1]: If there are well over 1,000 "here now" (near top right), this confirms the anti-content blocker code has been updated. If well below 1,000 "here now", all is fine. At time of writing, it's fine. * * * [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/

This is clever and I'm definitely using it.

Website idea: a downdetector-like site that uses reddit's "here now" numbers to give insight into whether something is going on with a certain thing.

edit: Has anyone else not really been affected by the new youtube adblock policy at all? I think I have seen the warning a single time, and I use youtube all the time. I only use ublock origin and privacy badger... on chrome. Maybe that's it.

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