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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

#11

Post by MBCook »

tekla wrote: post #8

I'm happy to pay for services and a Ad free YT experience.

Same. I keep seeing the discourse recently and it’s all framed as if only two options exist:

People can use ad blockers, or Google can block them and annoy people.

There is a very good third option for people: pay for the (expensive due to bandwidth) service you’re using and you see no ads. And Google won’t block it because it’s encouraged as the solution to this exact issue.

The level of “I should get everything for free with no ads” entitlement is only getting worse.

I get the ads suck and many sites have an unreasonable level of them. But if the only two options are give everything away for free or put everything behind a paywall, the internet as everyone knows it is dead.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#12

Post by cjbgkagh »

YouTube is an addiction for me and this crackdown has been very helpful for me to break the addiction. Youtube has gotten worse since the algorithm went from rewarding short content to rewarding long content so there has been a flood of mediocre content - at least it's not facebook. Eventually I'll set up an auto-download system for the few shows I already like and am already a patreon for.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#13

Post by dieselgate »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #12

YouTube is an addiction for me and this crackdown has been very helpful for me to break the addiction. Youtube has gotten worse since the algorithm went from rewarding short content to rewarding long content so there has been a flood of mediocre content - at least it's not facebook. Eventually I'll set up an auto-download system for the few shows I already like and am already a patreon for.

There are so many ads it's pretty self-regulating for me

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#14

Post by PedroBatista »

It's amazing to me how Google is allowed to control every side of the market with no real repercussions.

I don't want to be the cynic who says Google has been paying lots of money to "the right people" in order to keep the status quo, but.. Google has been paying lots of money..

That might be a moderate huge win for Firefox.. until someone at Google makes a phone call to Mozilla's offices.

Worst case scenario it helps me consume less YT videos which would be a huge win for me.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#15

Post by Workaccount2 »

It strikes me as so odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO etc, but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust.

I guess it has to do with initial value proposition. If you hand out lemonade for free, people are going to be pissed when you start charging a dollar, regardless of how good of a deal it is. Even going so far as believing they have a right to free lemonade...

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#16

Post by ljm »

nwellinghoff wrote: post #10

I 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.

Do they not do that? I remember watching one or two videogamedunkey videos that included ads and he specifically scripted the video around when they would appear.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#17

Post by bt4u »

thanatropism wrote: post #9

YouTube 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. --- 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 happ…

[dead]

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#18

Post by duxup »

JohnMakin wrote: post #5

Honestly 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 both…

The ads are terrible. I've gotten a bunch of gross out sorta visual ads... who oked that? Also a bunch of really weird conspiracy theory type products. Like dude a hat that protects me from "brain fuzz" because it has effect on EM or something ... wtf?

Having said that it's easy to complain about how terrible they are but I don't think the ads sucking is as much an issue as that people just don't like ads... don't want to pay.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#19

Post by foobarian »

Youtube has been a fantastic demonstration of how valuable it can be to enable democratized, low-barrier-to-entry content publishing. Think of how much treasure there is on the service, with millions upon millions of hours of educational, informative, or archival content, all published and viewable for free, with incredible reliability and availability. Of course this is also fantastically expensive to build and maintain; I believe that we have been fortunate that Google's ad business was willing to subsidize it for us for so long with so little required in return. Unfortunately it appears that possibly the screws are getting turned, and there is less appetite for the subsidy.

In a better, more utopian timeline I imagine an equivalent service supported by taxpayers or nonprofit means. Just how the 1900s gave us the public library system, imagine if the 2000s give us a video platform without for-profit encumbrances - what a world it would be!

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#20

Post by redder23 »

Just know this, and it becomes somewhat clear in this article.

Adblock Plus is a SCAM! Their founder (or key person, not remember) made his money with scam "free SMS (texts)" websites and has a very shady past. They invented their "acceptable ads" that are ENABLED BY DEFAULT, were totally silent about the fact that they basically blackmailed advertisers to let them pay money to get on their whitelist and scam users into this "acceptable ads" scam BY DEFAULT and show them ads.

Acceptable ads are the WORST ads, that are the ads that flow with the text, that are not obtrusive and not as annoying and therefore the most effective ads actually for me, I would say.

Like they said, Google paid them back in the days to get on their whitelist, they were eventually forced to make their shady backroom deals public and do this shit in the open.

DO NOT USE Adblock Plus ever, even if it has a checkbox to block all ads, they operate an adblocker to make money by showing people ads, you can not make this shit up. Most disgusting scam. Use uBlock Origin. Or use Brave, but they are not up to speed with the current YT thing, but their adblocker is written in Rust I think and based/inspired by UBO. Would be interesting to know if it also suffers from this "mistake" that unloaded tabs let requests go through while UBO is loading that happens in Chrome but not in Firefox. I guess not as it's integrated at the core of the browser.

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