everything still fine here on firefox + ublock origin
Sometimes I have to reload the page when using these 2. the page will load but just have a youtube icon in the centre of the player or the spinny circle until i hit f5
Wish I could say the same.
I’m also using firefox + ublock, but Ive noticed when I’m watching shorts, I’ll occasionally get an ad that’s disguised as a short. There’s no like/dislike buttons or anything.
That’s intended. Even to premium subs youtube pushes adds which try and promote engagement. Its fucking awful.
Does get me out of the loop sometimes though, so I guess Im thankful for that.
Just block shorts alltogether, it’s a win win.
How do you block shorts entirely? I used to be able to x them away in YouTube Desktop for 30 days but I can’t find that option anymore. And can they be blocked in ReVanced as well?
I found some website that had a line of code that could be added to my adblocker to completely remove them.
Haven’t seen them since.
I think it was this: https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts
But… my doomscroll :<
Just read climate news.
BitchPeas.
If you are looking for a specific video, use DDG search, then click videos. No ad’s!
Obviously not useful if you’re just randomly browsing content.
Even more importantly, no junk “fOr YoU” or “tReNdInG” in the search.
Ads* goddammit
yes, but did you enable an adblocker? I’m just saying it will work browsing via DDG. (oh, and I’m on PC. Don’t know if this would work on a phone).
They were correcting your spelling
Ye’s
This is the best summary I could come up with:
YouTube is bringing its ad blocker fight to mobile.
In an update on Monday, YouTube writes that users accessing videos through a third-party ad blocking app may encounter buffering issues or see an error message that reads, “The following content is not available on this app.”
It also began disabling videos for users with an ad blocking extension enabled.
But now, YouTube says its policies don’t allow “third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership.” This appears to target mobile ad blockers like AdGuard, which lets you open YouTube within the ad blocking app, where you’ll get to view videos interruption-free.
“When we find an app that violates these terms, we will take appropriate action to protect our platform, creators, and viewers.”
This likely won’t come as pleasant news to all the users who watch YouTube through ad blocking apps, but it doesn’t look like YouTube is backing down in its battle against ad blockers anytime soon.
The original article contains 220 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 25%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I kind of already hoarded so many videos from youtubes last failed adblock crusade that I barely even use the real youtube anymore. Guess I’ll show my disapproval by improving my offline video caching system even more.
My search system doesn’t autosuggest results based on which videos have more boobs in the thumbnail but I’ll get over it.
“because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership”
not like Youtube rewards creators for viewership either (and then lying to the advertisers as well)
They could probably retain users simply by running ads every 10 minutes, rather than every 3 minutes.
Money/s is the more used metric. Retention is secondary or even tertiary to money/s. Behold the algorithm, great and terrible, sheathed in robes of black and grasping sickle white.
Ah, but you’re one layer off. Projected/potential money/s (in the next 1-2 quarters mainly) is what is truly king.
It doesn’t have to be a good idea, it can be a terrible one - but good sounding words in the board room are what matter
“Hey, so we’ve decided to see if we can run 10 unskippable ads back to back. Simultaneously, we’ve launched a war on ad blockers. This time it will surely work because we found out you can ignore your customers - Elon Musk has shown us the way, he only lost bots with all his innovation. We expect people to get over it in 3 months and estimate we’ll lose 4 users. Between 10x more ads and half our users off ad blockers, we project 20x ad revenue next quarter!”
-Words of a future CEO, probably
Oh but they don’t care about anything but short form content. If they could ditch supporting long form content today they would.
Nah they want lots of short form and also like 10 hour long videos that can play 200 ads in it that you forget is on in the background. They want tiktok and broadcast TV.
They really just want to show you ads.
The cold, hard steel of the sword of truth.
Such a fantastic series :) (the books, not any of the garbage adaptations)
This reply makes me so happy. The books are always better.
I think YouTubers make fractional pennies from Ads, and mostly only if its fully watched and sometimes clicked to go to the website. So if you get a 15 second ad, and skip to the content, you didn’t give the creators any money.
Also, shout out to those ads being horrible. My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign, that had body horror. 15 year old me didn’t want to smoke, nor wanted to after, but it was so disturbing that I learned how to avoid them.
Not even going into the disturbing or weird ads. One time I got an ad for a “Ching Chong Fing Fong shirt company” as a way of mocking Chinese people because their government sucks. Another time, I got a full 12 hour video by a Vietnamese couple just grilling in their backyard. No subtitles, not even sure if they were aware they enabled their videos to do that, or didn’t fully understand the process of uploading videos.
Anytime I see actual ads on the internet, not just YouTube, it just makes me go “I am perfectly justified in not seeing these weird ads.” I don’t give them any money no matter what I do, so why not have my eyes saved from bright flashing colors and scam artists?
My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign
Those ads made me want to take up smoking out of spite.
That was the purpose. You see, Big Tobacco actually sponsors the anti-smoking campaigns, which does give them some creative input. They tell the writers to make them as annoying as possible.
Ouch. Cutting off the nose to spite the face.
If I recall correctly, ever since videos could be called up as ads you can just pay for any video to be an ad, as long as it’s on YouTube, and it doesn’t have to be yours. I don’t know if this has changed, but an essays channel figured out that that’s the fastests way someone could target a competitor’s channel. Paying to have someone else’s videobat an ad tanks that video ad revenue and discoverability instantly. Ad views count as views to the video and skipping an ad counts as a skip on the video which signals the algorithm to think that nobody wants or likes to see that video. Do it to enough new videos and you can entirely kill a previously profitable channel in a couple of months.
TheSpiffingBrit did video on that.
If it hadn’t been for ublock origin, I’d not be on YT this long
microG, Newpipe and brave still working like a charm…
Somewhere out there a CEO thought this was a good idea. All it seems to be doing is pushing people to other platforms (the younger gen moving over to tiktok and the older gens moving 3rd party or just offline).
While I agree, the amount of people who’d do this is negligibly small, compared to their total userbase. Obviously a bunch of people use ad blockers, but only a tiny amount of them have modified apps, followed by an even tinier amount of those people with fully custom frontends. For YT it might work out as a net positive, because the annoying blocks and reminders will just pressure people into paying for Premium.
At the end of the day, I could just stop watching youtube entirely, if this trend continues. I have nothing to gain there
Yes, been thinking I’ve just been substituting YT for * TV, and while the consumption can still be customized, it’s still a habit that can be kicked. I bet I’ll get more sleep and productivity.
- Lol autocorrect
I guess what there really winning is all those non tech-savvy people who currently have an adblocker installed because their friend helped.
Good. Let their stranglehold die.
YouTube is bringing its ad blocker fight to mobile. In an update on Monday, YouTube writes that users accessing videos through a third-party ad blocking app may encounter buffering issues or see an error message that reads, “The following content is not available on this app.”
Yea, noticed that last week. Is already fixed again in latest revanced.
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Delete microG, revanced manager, and YouTube revanced
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Download and install the new gmscore, which replaces microG: https://github.com/ReVanced/GmsCore/releases/tag/v0.3.1.4.240913
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Download and install latest version of Revanced Manager: https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-manager/releases/tag/v1.20.1
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Download and install YouTube 19.09.37 from APKmirror: https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/youtube/youtube-19-09-37-release/youtube-19-09-37-android-apk-download/
yup, noticed that revanced wasn’t working a week ago.
went into revanced manager, patched the recommended version, installed gmscore, done.
suck it youtube, i’m not paying a subscription to watch low effort vtuber edits.
Didn’t know about the update. Thanks, just did it.
Revanced will never die. Stand against the Goliath.
Vanced died. If revanced dies we’ll just get rerevanced. Ad infitum.
Vanced died because they tried to generate revenue from it and made themselves vulnerable.
Also, unlike Vanced, Revanced doesn’t distribute modded youtube apks themselves.
Oh this? It’s just a binary of assorted diffs and plugins to a yet unspecified target apk. Why yes, I will use the end product for personal, non-commercial use.
Kind of funny if you read it like that, and while it certainly doesn’t make them immortal, it at least may make them last a while longer i hope.
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We will find a way. Never give up or give in. Screw your shareholders!
If they fully manage to block applications from viewing YouTube, then I will just stop viewing YouTube entirely. And I will figure out channels to watch on Odyssey and peertube. That will also be my last Google service since that is the only one I use frequently since I deleted my Google account two years ago.
Making you leave is their point since you cost them money.
True, but if enough people leave, then creators will start leaving as well, and that is something they do not want.
Sounds great in theory, but won’t happen. The internet is too consolidated now for the majority of people to give a shit, there’s people buying YouTube Premium because of all this. Look at reddit, barely a dent in it after all the fiascos, twitter is holding on too. People don’t care.
Where will creators go to get those viewers back? TikTok?
They will go where the viewers go.
Where will you go?
Primarily peer tube and odysee.
At the scale youtube does things it doesn’t really cost them much. They actually have the servers, the bandwidth, often the power. It’s not like they get to sell a server if enough people leave. The savings probably do not even justify the effort (=cost) to unplug the server. And they still get many other benefits of having you as a user (getting to profile you, getting to push propaganda, getting to sell your information, maybe you send videos to friends who don’t use adblock, maybe you buy merch from creators making creators happier on their platform).
On the other hand this enshittification is ruining their monopoly, other areas of business (if you don’t need youtube, maybe you don’t need a chromecast? If you don’t need a chromecast, would you buy pixel phone, that can only do chromecast if samsung can do hdmi? Maybe you’re done with android? And if you’re on iphone, are you still using google maps, photos, search, keep etc?) and curing people who are addicted to the platform.
The eventual consequence of enshittification is always platform death. Which would be amazing, sadly the next platform is going to repeat the cycle.
they’re going to spend $20 million in salaries playing Tom and Jerry games to try and get $7 from me that’s never coming…
And yet it still can’t figure out how to get past two adblockers at once
It’s stupid that it works, but it works
If it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.
Why would you use two adblockers?
Twice the protection
Double the security
PS: Doesn’t apply to condoms.
Twice the chances of being detected
Double the attack surface
Half the performance
It really does not work like that. If you need a second adblocker to block somethings just enable the block list of the second one in the first one.
In fact just use uBlock Origin and be done with it.
Because so far, not a single YouTube update has let them get past it. Basically, I switched adblockers but forgot to uninstall the old one, then by the time I noticed, I had also noticed that the combination somehow, for some bizarre reason, ends up confusing anti adblockers to the point of not even getting “disable adblocker” messages. It’s not something involving their blacklists either because they have the same blacklist (due to the aforementioned replacing one with another then forgetting to uninstall the older one)
Good luck Youtube, you fools.
YouTube’s argument is the same as Linus’ from LTT: if you watch a video without ads, you’re failing to comply with your side of the transaction, thus essentially pirating that content and stealing the revenue source.
Regardless if we agree or not with that statement, I’ll absolutely side with adblockers always for a deeper issue: it’s my screen, so I get the ultimate say on what content gets rendered. Quite literally. It’s my network, my cable, my screen, my graphics card, my web browser running JavaScript on my CPU - you do not, ever, get to overreach and decide what pixels show up or not. If I don’t want your obnoxious ad for an AI girlfriend to show up, there’s no moral argument to be had here.
Linus Short Sebastian is an asshole. I like his channel and even bought a water bottle, but he is an asshole nontheless. His opinions are always 5 years outdated. He used to hate reddit but now liked Reddit. Probably a contrarian too.
Cool, let’s body shame people.
I was happy with an ad at the side of the video. Then they started popping up over my video, then they started appearing before my video, then they started appearing throughout my video. Companies shot themselves in the foot with online advertising, banner ads and such weren’t much of a problem, but once ads start disrupting the content we visit a site for, then we look to block them ads. More people blocking ads is less revenue, so they make the ads more aggressive… and the cycle continues.
And on a side note, Linus can fuck off.
That and the large ad networks even on sites like YouTube and Facebook literally are advertising scams. Every time I browse shorts on either I get ads that are obvious scams of the “There’s a new $6400 monthly health credit see if you qualify.” variety. On one of Meta’s apps I got an ad that was for male enhancement that was straight up clips of uncensored hardcore porn. Not just nudity but full on PIV sex. If they can’t even do the work to properly screen their ads they can get fucked, I’m blocking all of it that I can.
Yeah I don’t mind ads if they’re relevant - I scroll through insta reels from time to time, and am always getting ads about concerts I’m interested in, restaurants I haven’t tried and sales at shops I go to.
I honestly don’t mind so much, and if it’s not relevant to me I can scroll past without having to watch.
In order to get relevant ads you have to opt in to give them your data. Do you do that?
In order to use the platform in the EU, you either opt into personalised ads or pay a monthly subscription. So yes, I’m aware they’re using my data for the ads.
Google does as well, but they don’t seem to be able to offer me even relatively relevant ads based on my interests.
Yeah, the pre-ads (unstoppable) and the massively increased loading times of the basic Youtube page makes it impossible to successfully Rickroll people
Non disruptive ads were meant to advertise.
Slightly annoying ads were meant to be seen more, since people just ignored banners by default.
Hidden ads (like an ad in an article which you really could tell it was an ad) were meant to increase the image of a company.
Disruptive ads like in YouTube or Spotify aren’t meant for advertising. They don’t really care about the advertising money, they want to force you to buy premium. The more annoying the ad is the higher the chances you pay 20€ a month for them to go away.
These days maybe, but disruptive ads started way before subscriptions became a thing.
My guy, that’s why there is DRM. Your screen are loading pixels, because they let you. Those third party apps and frontends work because they let the users have a little freedoms.
If you steal something off the mall and bring it to your home, it doesn’t make it yours. People thinking all that code, infrastructure and labour to run something on the internet should be free because they have an internet connection are entitled as the sovcit bunch. Just cringe.
Advertisers, Malwares and Ad blockers are all to blame for the current state of the internet. We’re heading for paywalled internet and entitled basement dwellers are going to complain you miss the “old internet”
Seriously, I use adblockers but the rationale people make up for this like countless others are just plain stupid.
My guy, that’s why there is DRM. Your screen are loading pixels, because they let you.
When I ping YouTube’s server it provides me with a stream that contains an ad and a video. What I do with that stream is my problem, and if I want to chop it up it’s something I can freely decide.
Your server can send any data it wants, but it can’t decide what I do with it, are you nuts?
MY hardware and infrastructure was not free either and I and ONLY I get to decide how it is used.
Advertisers, Malwares and Ad blockers are all to blame for the current state of the internet.
So the thing that blocks the first two is equally to blame?
I remember the day I started using an Ad blocker. I used to not care at all about ads on sites, “it’s how they make money. I can live with it.” And then I encountered a banner ad that screamed “HELOOOOOOO!” every time my mouse went over it. I couldn’t download an ad blocker fast enough.
Advertisers and Malware are to blame for Ad blockers. Advertisers will get more and more annoying and intrusive until people reach the point that they won’t put up with them anymore. Seeing as the internet is one big bucket and I can’t block some ads, then I will block all ads.
Fuck that victim-blaming nonsense. The entire reason ad blockers were invented in the first place were because ads in the 90s and early 2000s were somehow even worse than they are now. You would click on a website, and pop-up ads would literally open new windows under your mouse cursor and immediately load an ad that opened another pop-up ad, and then another, and another, until you had 30 windows open and 29 of them were pop-up ads, all of them hoping to trick you into clicking on them to take you to a website laden with more and more pop-up ads. Banner ads would use bright, flashing, two-tone colors (that were likely seizure-inducing, so have fun epileptics!) to demand your attention while taking up most of your relatively tiny, low-resolution screen.
The worst offenders were the Flash-based ads. On top of all the other dirty tricks that regular ads did, they would do things like disguising themselves as games to trick you into clicking them. (“Punch the monkey and win a prize!” The prize was malware.) They would play sound and video–which were the equivalent of a jump scare back then, because of how rare audio/video was on the Internet in that day. They would exploit the poor security of Flash to try and download malware to your PC without you even interacting with them. And all this while hogging your limited dialup connection (or DSL if you were lucky), and dragging your PC to a crawl with horrible optimization. When Apple refused to support Flash on iOS way back in the day, it was a backdoor ad blocker because of how ubiquitous Flash was for advertising content at the time.
The point of all this is that advertisers have always abused the Internet, practically from day one. Firefox first became popular because it was the first browser to introduce a pop-up blocker, which was another backdoor ad blocker. Half the reason why Google became the company it did is because it started out as a deliberate break from the abuses of everyone else and gave a simple, clean interface with to-the-point, unobtrusive, text-based advertisements.
If advertisers and Google in particular had stuck to that bargain–clean, unobstrusive, simple advertisements that had no risk of malware and no interruption to user workflow, ad blockers would largely be a thing of the past. Instead, they decided to chase the profit dragon, and modern Google is no better than the very companies it originally replaced.
If something allows it then it’s morally justified. You can’t be naked intentionally and ask me to not look at same time.
TBH I’m just so fucking tired of ads overstepping, back in the day there’s be a little banner on the side of a page advertising a truck or whatever, I’m sick of seeing like, enormous length ads.
One day I had a 3 hour minecraft let’s play uploaded as an ad, you think I should have to watch all of that youtube?
And the frequency is getting crazy.
What’s worse is you have no idea how bad we’ve been propagandized to think that there is any amount of ads that is “normal.”
The first time you are traveling through a European countryside and you don’t see any billboards on the side of roads, as Americans we are flabbergasted.
It’s something that’s become so normalized here in the US that being somewhere without them feels almost like time-traveling now.
Europeans don’t even realize how crazy it is here.
You can be driving to the middle of fucking east Texas and you’ll see LITERALLY hundreds of billboards along just a 50 mile stretch, advertising everything from truck-driving scam schools to religious propaganda condemning you for presumptively not believing how God‘s going to smite you for thinking women should have a say in how to be in control of their bodies or some shit.
I will never be convinced that any amount of ad blocking, pie hole installation, DNS sanitizing, VPN protection, device, third-party applications, etc. are not me just using my ability to fight back against an insane amount of their overreach.
I fucking hate billboards man. Get them OUT.
First off, I couldn’t care less about ad blocking and I’m not here to moralise what anyone else does.
I do however think your point is somewhat undermined by the fact YouTube have an ad free option. You can legitimately make the ads disappear and YouTube have no issue with it.
Google makes literal hundreds of billions of dollars every year. You really think I give a shit that they supposedly operate YouTube at a “loss?” - Something I might add I hugely suspect is bullshit book-cooking the likes of which we usually more often associate with Hollywood production companies looking to steal from the creatives on every project they greenlight.
I mean - I have a fucking cheap ass media server that delivers up a customized collection of videos anywhere I want at a quality higher than every other streaming platform that exists for less money per YEAR for even the cost of one of these “services” does… per MONTH.
I find the idea that any of these shit platforms should be costing anybody $170 goddamn dollars a year per service to be completely absurd.
I find it even more absurd, however, that there are actually people here of all platforms - not Facebook, not the shit stain that once was Twitter, not even the once hallowed “front page of the internet” Reddit, but the fediverse - whom will gleefully defend these stupid companies who could afford to let you watch everything they host for free just with the amount of ad revenue they rake in - let alone the data troves on me, you, your mom, your children and everyone else you know whether they use the platform or not that they gladly offer every shitmongering swindler.
What’s next?
You gonna tell me people are “thieves” for sneaking in an apple from their backyard tree, or hell, just a $0.10 bag of candy they bought from the local drugstore on the way to the theater instead of for $14.99 they are asked to fork over to the poor kid getting paid minimum wage to sweep up cumstains off the chairs at the top back row of the IMAX screen room after someone fucked their limited edition Dune 2 worm popcorn bucket?
Give me a fucking break.
Can’t believe you actually think these companies are sacrificing anything even remotely worth even considering let alone scolding others for mentioning their perfectly warranted distaste.
When YouTube Red first dropped they were putting hour-long pilot episodes of their shows as pre-roll ads. Now I notice ads on shorts are full of obvious scams related to “new monthly health credits”. Still better than getting an ad on Facebook reels that was uncensored hardcore porn.
I’m almost thinking of breaking down and buying YT premium because god, I watch a lot of youtube (I’d go so far as to say it’s my primary entertainment stream at times) but I’m already paying so fucking much for cable that I don’t even want.
Cable’s 80, Internet’s 80, somehow extra fees bring it up to nearly 200, and I can’t convince other members of my household (who watch a grand total of four fucking channels, MSNBC, Weather channel, sports, etc) that we should ditch cable, absolutely miserable.
For Android on phones and tablets look up Revanced. You have to download the YouTube .apk from somewhere like apkmirror, then use the Revanced manager to apply patches to block ads and change functionality. Then you log into your account with their own version of MicroG/gmscore. It was briefly affected by the issue in the main post but was working again in a few hours.
For Android-based smart TVs and streaming devices there’s SmartTube (SmartTubeNext). Not sure how well they’ll do if YouTube goes cat and mouse though.
And for a wider variety of devices (including Apple TV and now WebOS) there’s also Kodi which has a YouTube addon although logging in with it is kind of a pain as you need to get API keys, etc.
& finally on a desktop browser uBlock Origin alone handles all the ads pretty well, and you can optionally add Sponsorblock.
Oh. And check out some of the over the top TV services and see if there are any cheap ones that might meet your needs to replace cable. Though the way the cable companies do their bundling even that might not save you much as the net might jump up to more than $80 standalone.
Nvidia Sheild pro + smartTube Next. I see 0 ads. The app also bypasses the self promotion/hit the like and subscribe button crap as well.
I don’t care.
The social contract of this country was tossed out the window a long time ago, so I will try to get away with any personal victory against the overreach of billion dollar companies any way I easily and legally can.
If I lived in a country where representation was actually democratic, if my tax dollars went towards public healthcare rather than paying for pharmacy billionaire’s 15th yacht, and providing actual better schools for kids rather than bulletproof windows because politicians won’t pass gun reform, and public transportation that was more bullet trains and less 25 mph rickety AmTraks covered in piss and graffiti, perhaps I would feel like I should be concerned with figuring out how to best provide for those that create in the marketplace within the hostile business environments they are forced to work within the constraints of… but there is far too much more important bullshit I have to worry about to concern myself with “pirating via skipping or blocking intrusive and constant ads” when they now will pour out of every possible layer of the media experience we have available to us as consumers.
Telling me to concern myself with that puts too much responsibility on me as a consumer when we really have relatively very little power.
I will pay for anything I think is of good value and pay directly to those who make the things I love and see work put into, but I will not suffer endless ads on behalf of anyone, nor will I force anyone in my home to suffer watching endless commercials for things like kids toy products like I was thanks to the Reagan era deregulation of kids’ TV programming.
I’d agree with that logic if YouTube kept up their end of the bargain and actually vetted their ad buyers. Instead they show ads for fake stimulus scams, fake news, and blatant malware.
I manage a large network and ads are blocked at the edge of the network. Not using an adblocker is a security risk that is not acceptable for my company. I pay for YouTube premium because it’s in my means and I get value from the subscription but I don’t blame anyone who takes the same approach
I manage a large network and ads are blocked at the edge of the network.
You must MITM all traffic and do some magic with stripping/injecting JavaScript then? Because every time I’ve tried with pihole, its just threads and threads of people saying its not possible with DNS blocking because the ads are served from the video servers.
We also deploy a browser extension via GPO/Intune to catch those and protect endpoints when they are off net.
I actually wasn’t in favor of that but the rest of team was so after risk assessing it, we determined that trusting a vendor with the permission to rewrite webpages was less of a risk than drive-by malware or phishing/redirection from a malicious ad
They said they pay for YouTube premium so they might not have to block YouTube ads
if a content creator doesnt want people to be able to skip the ads/demonetize the content, then they should post on a platform that makes ads mandatory.
problem is that no one will watch crap on that sort of platform
TL;DR: my property rights trump Youtube’s business model.
Another argument proving that Linus Media Group is a bunch of morons
The problem is that there is that ad networks and ad placements are just bad actors in the consumer space. Not only has malware been passed time and time again with ads but also false ads to malware. When that happens suddenly the content creator/website/whatever ‘isn’t responsible’ for it. Then there’s the issue of ads being placed everywhere slowing down websites but even worse, getting in the way with auto play audio and video, videos autoscrolling over the content you’re trying to read or whatever, etc.
As a consumer, I should not and ethically do not need to worry about another’s business model. If the business model fails simply because I don’t allow something that model depends on to traverse my network then it is on them to figure it out. If the ads get in the way of the content, then I just want consume the content anyway.
Some news websites use Ad Admiral or whatever it is called and I haven’t bothered trying to bypass the adblock wall for them. I just simply consume the content elsewhere.
If ads were ever responsibly used or perhaps could be argued that there is compromise where consumers wouldn’t mind, then there’d probably be a lot less ad blocker usage. It’s like anything else. When it takes less effort to install an adblocker to have an OK experience, then ad blockers will be popular.
I was around before ad blockers were very popular and even before pop-up blockers were around. Ads kept getting worse which is why ad blockers became more popular and more sophisticated. The Internet had ads for years before ad blockers were the norm.
Yeah I wasn’t using an Adblock on YouTube when this all started. Then the ads got so intrusive it was seriously hindering content. These days I don’t watch much YouTube, but it’s with Adblock
I hear you, buddy and I would 100% agree if not for the fact that they have a paid option where you can skip all the ads.
Content creator gets paid. YouTube gets paid. You don’t get ads.
It’s not rocket surgery.
I don’t see how that’s relevant. If you want to engage in the paid YouTube subscription, go for it, it’s an entirely different thing though.
My computer requests from YouTube’s server a video, the server gives me a stream of data - I didn’t steal it, I didn’t hack it, the server provided me this because it wanted to - and this stream contains an ad and a video. What I do with this stream is only my concern, you can’t force me to watch the ad. That would be like walking in the street and somebody says you’re unethical because you didn’t look at an outdoor advertisement banner, and that you will be forced to either pay a fee or look at the ad.
But it is unethical because the ethics isn’t in the wires, it’s in the social contract.
You didn’t have a social contract with anyone on the street walking past ads. I agree with you that those are annoying and are an eye sore, etc.
But from YouTube you are getting a service for which you have not paid. The social contract is that you pay for services you consume regardless how they are presented. Whether it’s a TV show or groceries or online content doesn’t matter.
They make the content available to you publicly just as a physical storefront would. You come into the shop and start loading your basket. They even have free samples. The staff are helpful and find things for you. Then you pay before leaving. That’s the contract. It’s not different because it’s on the Internet.
I have no social contract with YouTube. The whole “if you access this site, you agree with this ToS” isn’t even legally valid here.
You know what, I actually agree with YouTube’s argument. Ad blocking is piracy. In fact, no, it’s worse than piracy. If I pirate a movie, Disney makes no money, but it costs them nothing at all. If I watch YouTube without an ad blocker, I’m depriving YouTube of its revenue source and I’m costing them money. Morally, ad blocking sits somewhere between piracy and actual theft.
The thing is? I don’t care. I ad block YouTube all the time and feel not a lick of guilt. The reason: Google brought this on themselves. I used to happily pay for YouTube Red. But they have continuously, both before and after that point, been actively hostile to the people actually producing the content they make. Their willingness to bow down to copyright trolls and complete inability to properly apply fair use. They extremely harsh policies on acceptable content, stopping people talking about sex education or mediaeval weaponry being able to reliably makes money.
And the straw that broke this camel’s back was when they changed the requirements to be in the Partner Program, locking out all the smaller creators from ever being able to make money on YouTube. I never considered myself a “creator”, but over the 5 years prior to that I occasionally uploaded stuff I was doing anyway. I had amassed almost $100 over those 5 years. Not an impressive amount, for sure, but having that taken away from me made me feel unwelcome. I don’t think I’ve uploaded anything public since, and I’ve been blocking ads on the site since then.
Even worse, not long after this change, they decided to start showing ads even on videos from non-partnered videos, so you can get ads on my videos even though I don’t see a single cent.
So fuck YouTube. Ad blocking is worse than piracy, and I say good.
Google: You’re pirating our content!
Us: Yeah, so what?
Google: You’re pirating our content!
Us: AND THE BEATINGS SHALL CONTINUE UNTIL YOU LEARN YOUR FUCKING LESSON.
My god… are you… me? Same exact shit. Created my YT account 14 years ago. Made some vids… some got some views… eventually I got a few dollars deposited like for 3 years. Probably totaled the same $100 you mentioned then boom. Shut down.
I uploaded what I think was the first tutorial on how to use Photoshop’s then-new “Content-Aware Fill” to help create panoramas, and also a tutorial about…something, I forget what, to do with the music engraving software Sibelius. They were things I was doing all the time, but there didn’t seem to be any guide on how to do it, so I thought I’d help out. And I got rewarded with a little cash and a few tens of thousands of views. Felt good.
There are much better, higher-polish videos that deal with those subjects now, I’m sure. But still, it didn’t feel good getting that ripped out from under me, and being told I was no longer welcome.
By that logic using a VCR to record television and fast-forwarding adverts is piracy.
That argument was in fact made when VCRs first came out. I don’t remember how exactly it played out but in the end the courts here in the US said that VCRs were fine.
At least a few TV service DVRs stop you from skipping ads.
Some even from forwarding at all through the actual content…
And you see digital tv providers trying to implement fast forward blockers without chasing away their customers too much
Any time I fast forward and have to wait for a commercial that interrupted my fast forwarding, it’s an immediate cancelation of the service and I’m on the phone with customer support to try and get my couple of bucks for that month back.
Fuck your shitty service, I’m grabbing my hat and sword.
The agreement isn’t that you watch the ad, but that you allow the ad to play on your device. That’s it. Whether or not you see it or hear it doesn’t matter; the “cost” for this type of content is a few moment of your device’s time, not your attention.
I mean, the argument falls short when YT (or LTT) spew literal garbage. I might have a hint of sympathy if it wasn’t a dumpster fire of decaying babies.
The few people I sub do and do yt as a monitory source, I support elsewhere. Fuck YouTube acting as a sleezy middle-man and simultaneously playing the victim.
Fuck YouTube acting as a sleezy middle-man
A sleezy middleman that happens to foot the substantial YT infrastructure bill.
They’re hurting real bad lemme tell ya. If only you understood what they’re freely extracting from you.
Nobody is forcing YT to exist, so…
I mean, the argument falls short when YT (or LTT) spew literal garbage.
The fact that you don’t like the product doesn’t really change that their expected transaction is “watch an ad to receive it”. Every argument against the idea of not watching the ads being piracy seems to be, essentially, either “the product isn’t good” or “the price is too high”, neither of which is relevant to the fact that they’ve put a “price” on it and you’re skipping the part where you “pay”.
Quality of the videos is irrelevant. Intrusiveness of the ads is irrelevant. The ads are the price, the videos are the product. You’re getting the videos without seeing the ads.
I agree that the “price” is too high, the ads are awful, and the videos are frequently bad. I will continue to block those ads as long as I am able, but I’m not going to delude myself into thinking that I’m not skipping out on the cheque, as it were, when I do so.
I might have a hint of sympathy if it wasn’t a dumpster fire of decaying babies.
Literally no one is asking you to have any sympathy. Why get so defensive when it’s pointed out that skipping ads is skipping on your side of the transaction when using an ad supported service?
I liked the service up until ~2016 and was a yt red family subscriber. Then they upped the prices, then they started pushing more ads + more frequently, then they got butthurt about third-party apps, then they raised prices again…
My “expected transaction” is to host decent-or-better content (not shovel clickbait disinformation nonsense) in a fashion that is palatable to me, and they are failing miserably on the first and are fighting to fail miserably on the second. If you go to a restaurant expecting decent food but are served actual shit, are you going to be like ‘thank you sir may I have some more’? We have been the frog in the pot of boiling water for the last 15+ years of bullshit like this, where a company makes a compelling product, then makes it shit but incrementally so ‘it’s not so bad compared to the last update’ but compared to a few years ago it’s completely garbage. And they want more money for a worse experience? Are for fucking shitting me?
Quality of the content is relevant. I guarantee you aren’t going to the movies to watch something that scored a 4% on RT. Everyone wants to be like’ poor yt/alphabet, they only got 63 billion this quarter 'but if it was a real issue they’d be doing stuff like charging fees to upload content (goodbye 9 year-olds screaming about fortnite skins) or something else to curb the amount of content they host. Google knew what they were getting into when they bought yt - at least they sure as fuck should. Nobody has ever made a profitable video service afaik. There’s what, yt, vimeo, and… liveleak is dead, uh… crickets.
I’m not even pretending to skip out on the bill. I’m screaming from my table “this is fucking terrible and you should all feel awful about it” before proudly walking out.
Also I’m not asking for sympathy? I’m saying “this service has turned to shit”. Also none of my above comment, or this, is defensive; it’s being pissed off that a company is fucking people on both sides of the transaction and still complaining that they don’t get enough of a cut, while actively making their service worse for their customers and doing nothing to save it themselves. They are a sinking ship complaining that they need more help chucking buckets of water overboard, while they simultaneously poke additional holes in it.
I don’t really disagree with any of that, and it’s all a great argument in favour of just not using YouTube. Hell, it might even be a good argument in favour of using it as much as possible while blocking ads just to consume bandwidth on their dime while denying them ad revenue.
None of it really counters the idea that using it without viewing ads is skipping out on “paying” for that usage, which is the entire “argument” being presented, which you claimed falls short. The content being bad doesn’t change the fact that they expect you to view ads (or pay) to see that content, and we’re not paying.
deleted by creator
Dickheads coming to shill for YT Premium in 3… 2…
It’s actually a really great deal at the old price I’m grandfathered into and none of you can get any more.
Also if you pirate YT, Google won’t pay creators. If you watch ads, Google still won’t pay creators.
Who’s pirating YouTube? I’m just blocking content I don’t want to watch. :)
And if you want to support creators, but something from their store or send them a donation or something. Doing that once is probably more money than they’d ever get from ads you watch.
…1!
(Read as if this was as an from Google) (if your familer with Rodgers Honest Ads, this was inspired by the way those are written) (if that last sentence wasn’t clear…this whole post is a mockery or /s)
Buy YouTube Premium with your hard earned money so you can feel good about a few extra pennies going towards your beloved creators. We’ll keep the rest of your precious money for ourselves to bring you new and exiting features you never asked for -
- The ever growing library YouTube originals you’ve never heard of, because we felt it necessary to take the “You” out of YouTube and sponsor our own content for you to enjoy.
- We’ll bring more pixels to you with real time 4K video streaming. Now you can enjoy one the 6 channels that actually record in 4k in beautiful life like quality on your tiny phone, the 13 year old computer screen you got free from work or your smart 4K TV that doesn’t have a WiFi card fast enough to get all the pixels for a buttery smooth expirence.
- Next we’ll bring you Live TV straight to your eyes from across the globe. Ditch those pesky cable bills and pay for our ever growing selection of unwilling particpents as the affordability of streaming destroys traditional cable for the small monthly cost of $57.99 for the first 3 months. As a bonus, our website doesn’t bother to tell you if it includes any the other YouTube premium features - you might just end up paying for premium twice and we have no real obligation to tell you.
- Finally, we’ve thought of the little ones with our special version of YouTube for Kids, called YouTube Kids. Here we use an advanced AI system of people who can find the report button to filter out any content we decide goes against our ever changing guidelines to allow your children to only watch the most mind numbing, cheaply made, addicitive garbage to keep them ocupied while you do more important things than raising your child.
We know the real reason you’re here is YouTube Music. Access our huge library of every song that we haven’t been forced to take down because some studio decided they wanted their cut. We’ll entice you to spend a few more dollars than what you pay for just YouTube Music to get ad-free YouTube and the revolutionary ability to play music in the background on your mobile phone. That’s right, we’ve developed a method in which you can listen to music and read your texts at the same time. It’s revolutionary.
Still not convinced, lastly we added in the amazing feature called offline viewing. This will download the videos you select to your device offline in an encrypted format so hackers can’t steal them from you, allowing you to watch them anywhere, provided you have an internet connection so we can verify you downloaded the videos.
That is just to true 😩. I never heard of Honest Ads before but these are hilarious!
Lmao, I keep hearing about this but my Ublock Origin & Firefox keeps chugging along fine on both desktop and mobile. Eat my ass, Neal Mohan.
