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If you have a VPN with a Ukraine location, you can set it to there and purchase YouTube Premium for ~$2.70/month. That's what I just ended up doing. I use Mullvad as my vpn provider.
This is nice and all for now while YouTube allows dismissal of the warning. However, YouTube could go nuclear and just not allow any video to play at all if an ad blocker is detected. No DOM element removal will solve that. I'm not sure if that qualifies as scorched earth on YT's part, but it is an option.
This, in turn, will spawn user scripts which work around the detection. Any client-side solution will be an arms race between Google and user script/adblock devs. The only real way to prevent it is to withhold the video stream from the CDN until the client has streamed the full ad and/or bake it into the video stream. My impression is that Twitch does this for its live streams (although not VODs).
given that in-stream ads still have blocking/ignoring methods I think that if this arms race keeps going that ultimately the data (video, whatever) is going to be stuffed behind some hard authentication barrier of some sort -- and then traditional piracy methods will take over like single-user-rebroadcast/etc.
If you have a VPN with a Ukraine location, you can set it to there and purchase YouTube Premium for ~$2.70/month. That's what I just ended up doing. I use Mullvad as my vpn provider.
Paying the ad company is not a good way to get to a place where there are fewer ads.
After years of procrastinating, I'm finally gonna get around to setting up a basic homelab to run pihole. Thanks, youtube execs and bean counters, for kicking my lazy ass into gear on this!
In a way, I kinda wish that ads worked as well as youtube suggestions. If one has good enough willpower / mental health to not use youtube as a coping device, suggestions are really amazing. I've seen so many great conference talks and other videos that have O(100) views that I would have never heard about otherwise. Ads, however, still think I'm gonna overpay for aliexpress drop-shipped items, or that I need to make a basic purchase into a way of life (e.g. that cooler company that now is somehow a lifestyle brand).
Maybe it's just A/B testing, but I got the "3 strikes and no more video playback" thing, which this DOM element blocking doesn't work around it seems :( After years of procrastinating, I'm finally gonna get around to setting up a basic homelab to run pihole. Thanks, youtube execs and bean counters, for kicking my lazy ass into gear on this! In a way, I kinda wish that ads worked as well as youtube suggestions. If one…
This is nice and all for now while YouTube allows dismissal of the warning. However, YouTube could go nuclear and just not allow any video to play at all if an ad blocker is detected. No DOM element removal will solve that. I'm not sure if that qualifies as scorched earth on YT's part, but it is an option.
YouTube already does exatly this for me. If uBlock origin is active it loads the base site, but all video tiles are just grey squares and the video titles below are just grey bars.
This is nice and all for now while YouTube allows dismissal of the warning. However, YouTube could go nuclear and just not allow any video to play at all if an ad blocker is detected. No DOM element removal will solve that. I'm not sure if that qualifies as scorched earth on YT's part, but it is an option.
The best defense is to purge caches and update filter sets every day.
edit: from another comment: https://x.com/gorhill/status/1713305785659211991