Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Google is an ad company. To them, a web browser is nothing more than a tool for collecting user data and delivering ads.

When you use a chromium based browser you are allowing google, an ad company, to decide what the future of web browsing should look like. And this is the result.

Firefox is the ONLY browser which is genuinely competing with google. Do you think ad and tracking blockers are going to get better or worse once they die out, and literally every major browser is running on chromium?

Use firefox and u-block origin. Enjoy a superior, ad free, browsing experience, and support the future of an open web.

No way I'll use YouTube with ads. The amount of your lifetime they waste is what I'd consider disrespectful to their users. Even if the ads were bearable, I wouldn't turn off my ad blocker on any Google site for tracking alone.

I also don't see myself subscribing to YouTube Premium, firstly because it's too expensive (stop including your music streaming service and make it cheaper maybe?), but also because YouTube is just a platform with a lot of not curated content that YouTube had no part in creating.

Let's see how the cat and mouse games between YouTube and ad blockers and alternative frontends go. If it's too much of a hassle, I'll just stop using YouTube. I don't miss Twitter, I don't miss Reddit, and I won't miss YouTube.

Report issue. You're not running an adblocker! wink

Google already has trouble with support, if they have a million lightly befuddled users who are getting blocked and "don't know why", that will be a problem for Google.

Not the main point, but this is the first time I've seen "allowlisted". Lol

...are they trying to avoid saying whitelisted because of the word "white"?

I haven't had this happen using ublock origin, but if they do figure out how to block ublock origin, adnausiem (ublock origin fork) might work. It's a fork of ublock origin that tricks the ad providers into thinking you clicked on every ad, which not only bypasses a lot of adblock detectors, it Actively costs them money by polluting their ad data with garbage.

Really not worth watching a 10 minute video that has four minutes of YouTube ads and a minute of a sponsor pitch by the creator.

FreeTube/Piped on PC

ReVanced on droid

uYou+ on 🍎 phone

SmartTubeNext on 📺

Youtube can do the fuck they want on their website

The more ad-riddled they make the platform to try and monetise users, the more they make adblocks necessary to even be usable.

I didn't use to both with adblockers. I didn't like ads, but they didn't affect me enough for me to go through any effort blocking them.

Now I use blockers everywhere, on every platform. Even for creators I like, because I know how little they actually make for ads - so how bout instead of watching 12 hours of ads so they can get 2c, I just send them a dollar or buy their merch every once in a while to not watch ads at all? Etc.

Ads could have had a place. There are ads that serve a purpose, that have minimal disruption but still give businesses a way to develop awareness for those who might want to use them.

Movie trailers (including when they stopped trailing movies and started leading them) are examples of 'acceptable ads' to me. When I purchase something from a store and they include a printed card from their sponsor. When sports teams have logos for being sponsored. A work van with the business logo parked while out on call. Etc.

But the internet's online ads? Email spam? Telemarketing? These are forms of advertising that are actively hostile, and they've become the default. So now a user that wants to be on the internet at all is best served by block all ads, including the ones that would've otherwise been reasonable.

Google will never make me feel guilty for blocking ads when they're already making their search engine unusable, too.

I'd say to you all: get used to bombshells dropping! At some point the investor pyramid scheme will go crashing down. It might be now. All those companies were on borrowed time. Until investors realised that "data" isn't valuable on its own - it's what you make of it. There needs to be a product that generates revenue. Spoiler alert, it is hard to come up with a business plan that takes plain usage data and makes the technical challenges worthwhile to squeeze money from it. I can feel it myself as data scientist. The honeymoon's over, investors want to see ROI.

I mean this cycle will probably recover in a few years when the markets recover but still - some lessons stick

Probably get shit for this, but…

I just pay for Premium.

YT has literally become my cable. I listen to music, watch movies, documentaries, stand up comedy, news, sports… and cat videos, obviously.

To me it’s just worth it to pay a bit of money each month and have the whole thing just available to me.

I feel like if you were to put a money value on all the complaining, stomping of feet and trying to side-step the ads I’ve seen over the last several years, you’d probably find it’s actually less to just pay and enjoy it.

Just my opinion, of course…

I just don't get how these providers (Specifically Reddit with the API lockdown and now the stranglehold on mods, Twitter's new login requirement, and YouTube now cracking down on adblockers) are missing the point that their sites live and die by user generated content.

I understand these sites are hugely expensive to run, but if you keep alienating those who are bringing users to your site in the first place, people will stop submitting and people will stop visiting.

To everyone who is saying they use adblock and haven't seen this yet: YouTube probably rolled this out to a smaller percentage of users first. It allows them to understand how this change impacts user behaviour, e.g. how many users comply and disable their adblocker, how many more users close YouTube than usual etc. Most tech companies do this type of analysis before releasing a high impact change to all users.

Honestly I think I'll go full hoarder with YouTube archivist and find a way to stream/synchronize on my devices. I mostly use YouTube to go to sleep so there is no way I go back to videos being interrupted by loud ass ads.

Whats up with all these online companies just deciding to be assholes this year.

I'm not paying for YouTube. It's algorithm sucks, it routinely sells your personal data, and virtually none of the money you spend goes to its creators--that YouTube pretends otherwise is repulsive. How did we get in the situation where we're being asked to pay more and more for worse and worse services? I'm not gonna be a part of it.

Firefox

YouTube these days is insufferable, its why I don't bother with it too much anymore. Two pre-roll ads, then two ads after about two minutes, then two more before the end and then two more at the end. And the problem is that you can't skip through a video without getting ads. So lets say you watch 30 second and then skip, well bam, two new ads even though you only watched 30 seconds. Its so goddamn annoying and they need to lessen the amount.

what's the fediverse alternative to YouTube? seems like this is the way the 2020's are going

I get that servers, bandwidth, manpower, utilities and buildings aren't free, and with more and more people using ad blocking, all that user data they have harvested isn't worth much anymore. So I think we are going to see an increase in subscription based services, and man do I hate it.

Because You just know it's going to increase and squeeze evey last dime from their users. Because it's never enough to have their expenses covered and earn some money.. They constantly need to earn more. Just look at Netflix, declining in contents, increasing restrictions and rising price.

The way that YouTube treats their users and content creators for that matter, I'll never enter a subscription from there. Removing features, blocking people with no way of appealing and letting scammers and spammers run rampant on their platform. Yeah, no thanks.

I used to love using YouTube for music, it was great at suggesting new and exciting music. But then it was split into a separate service and they nuked the algorithm. Now I can discover music by popularity or moods, and as someone whos into EDM, hardstyle, rock, metal and heavy metal.. that's a piss poor way to find new music.

If you're demanding I watch ads, it's not "free". you're demanding my time and probably attention.

I really think we need to stop with this idea that "Something is free" because no money is exchanged. Some stuff ARE free, there are repos on git, where you can download software, there are websites that ask for nothing. However Gmail, Youtube, reddit, and the rest are not "Free" just because they aren't directly asking for money.

Peertube, Nebula, Patreon, etc. You don’t have to use YouTube.

I'll NEVER pay for youtube. I'll block the ads or stop using the site. Fuck them and fuck google. Time to start downloading your favorite channels

More people should try out Tubesync. It's a tool you can host yourself that essentially uses yt-dl as a backend and lets you subscribe to channels, and it'll download videos as they come out. Gets you away from the ads and you can archive content you like forever.

https://github.com/meeb/tubesync

Haven't seen that one on ublock origin + Firefox

NewPipe for android is still working. Much better than the official app IMO, no ads and it actually shows the videos you subscribed to.

The back and forth between YouTube and the adblock developers ought to get interesting.

I remember when someone was laughing at me when i downloaded some niche videos that i liked to rewatch from yt because that someone thought that it will be there available and forever. Remember that they wanted to paywall 4K vids at some point.

If in the future they make it completely impossible to use ad blockers I'll just stop actively using YouTube. I hope a good enough alternative comes around.

I've heard it is quite difficult to make one.