YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
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Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
#2Google and Cloudflare pretty much rules at least 98% of the internet. If they don't want you to see something, then you won't see it.
Welcome to this brave new world. Though to be fair, it didn't start now. But in the past years people were cheering for the random blocks and removals.
The article seems to concentrate on adblockers mostly, but it is even more interesting which news, topics and conversations (etc) reach you, and which ones are not. Google wanting you to see ads isn't too surprising. Google not wanting you to see reporting not fitting their agenda (even if you watch all ads coming with it) is much more interesting.
Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
#3One good thing that has come out of this is that I have reduced my time on YouTube to nearly zero in the past two weeks.
Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
#4[deleted]
Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
#5Honestly this wouldn't be an issue if youtube's ads weren't such a completely offensive and miserable experience.
When they first started pushing ad-free subscriptions to youtube I first noticed the ads got EXTREMELY aggressive and over time seem to not really have got better, only worse. Skip around the video too much? Ad. Skip too many in a row? Congrats, now you have a long-form unskippable ad. I haven't been bothered to measure it but you can't really watch much more than a minute of youtube without being served obnoxious ads. The user experience is terrible and it felt so much that I was being harassed into buying a subscription that I resolved to never do so. Adblockers are a logical response to such hostile behavior towards users.
Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
#6Ironically the first thing I see on this article about adblocker is a pop up
Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
#7One good thing that has come out of this is that I have reduced my time on YouTube to nearly zero in the past two weeks.
Ever since Youtube killed Vanced a few months ago, I've pretty much reduced my time on that web site to NFL Sunday Ticket. If it becomes impossible to watch that without disabling an adblocker, I'll cancel it, save about $450 or so a year and find other ways to watch the Ravens in Philly like I used to do when Sunday Ticket was exclusive to DirecTV.
Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
#8I'm happy to pay for services and a Ad free YT experience.
Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
#9YouTube may have peaked as the outstanding source of impressively high quality content on a very wide range of topics about 3-5 weeks ago; possibly with Horses' guide on surviving in a desert island. It's still so, so good.
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I remember a film of Salvador Dali talking to a cheering crowd and saying in full dictator voice "... in the future... toilet bowls will be made of gold..." (roaring crowd). That's what's happened to the internet at large.
Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
#10I think it would be better if they made the video author choose the ad points in their video rather than having it happen automatically. Maybe it gets bypassed if you move forward in the video or whatever. But its the ad just fires off in the middle of sentence or something that is crazy annoying.