YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

> "I grew up changing the channel on TV when ads came on, and ripping adverts out of magazines before sitting down to read them."

Ultimately, this is the thing that matters. Back when I was a kid, I muted the TV or changed the channel during the ads break. Imagine if the technology had existed back then to prevent me from muting the sound or changing channels!

Imagine... just imagine if ads were broadcast directly to your brain like in Minority Report. Would people here also defend the advertisers, "you can't have stuff for free!".

Ultimately, I don't want to see ads. I'm sorry that so much of the current "freemium" web wants me to see ads, because I don't.

I pay for YouTube Premium because of several reasons, but before it I used an adblocker. I adblock the web.

When broadcast-ads-to-your-brain tech becomes real, I sure hope I'll be able to block it too.

someone seems to have weaponized the TLDR feature on the Hews app for this post with a malicious tinyurl.com/.. link

“Most of you have browsers, and most of those browsers show you advertisements, and I’m very puzzled about why. The advertisements are annoying most of the time, they slow you down, they injure the concentration that you bring to whatever task it is that you’re doing, and there’s no reason why they show you advertisements; my browser doesn’t show me any advertisements. I don’t see any ads when I read The New York Times, or go to wherever it is that you are happy going to, because my browser has Adblock in it, and that pretty much ends the story. Even in this town, many of you, indeed, I would guess, most of you are probably using the Firefox browser. That means you’re two clicks away from not having any advertising on the net anymore. All you need to do is google “Adblock Plus”, and say “I’m feeling lucky”, [Laughter] thank you very much. Now you know why my friends – and they are my friends – at the Mozilla Foundation are paid tens of millions of dollars every year by Google – basically, not to bundle Adblock Plus into the default distribution of Firefox.

But you also know why all the talk about advertising supported models on the web is just talk, and why it is that in the end, all of those models are fated not to work. Because in digital media, when you give people knowledge, you can’t force them to take advertising, because digital media are filterable – that’s the beauty of them.”

— Eben Moglen, Free and Open Software: Paradigm for a New Intellectual Commons, 2009-03-13, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbcy_ZxXLl8#t=31m51s>

I don’t find live-read ads nearly as offensive. They at least have some personal touch to them and they often vary each time (they are live, after all). I tend to listen to those in podcasts when they are truly one-off live reads (TWiT has historically done pretty well at this, for example).

What are terrible are the tone-deaf pre-packed injected ads that blare out of your speakers into your skull.

YT can mwah, my ass.

Once the ad volume readily affects page load times, or disrupts casting flow (e.g. if my attempt to listen to Brian Eno & Jon Hassell's ambient works is intruded on every 10 minutes with an earbleed level ad for Papa John's Pizza), I just download the content locally and cast it via Emby.