YouTube isn’t happy you’re using ad blockers — and it’s doing something about it::undefined

    • @Contend6248@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      True, holy shit if they wouldn’t completely bomb you with ads everywhere it might change something, but I accidentally used the official app on my smartphone and I can’t even make out content between the ads in the UI.

      Not to speak of the 50s ads for a 20s video, nah won’t ever go back to the official experience.

      It reminds me back when ad blockers came around, nobody cared for the one banner or some pictures on the site, but they ripped your arm out and cried when there were finally solutions for solving that harassment.

    • @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I’m considering giving up Youtube right now with how many times it tries to fuck up my recommendations by sneaking far right BS into my watch history. Especially you, shorts.

      • KSP Atlas
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        31 year ago

        Try using third party clients like newpipe or piped

  • Tygr
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    2431 year ago

    YouTube is WHY I have adblockers to this day. I was Ok with the ads at the beginning and end. When they started cramming 2-3 ads in the middle of a 10 minute video, that’s when I started looking for a solution.

    Their greed is why they make $0 from me many years later.

    I think it’s rich they aren’t happy with people using them when they’re the ones that made the standard viewing experience awful in the first place.

  • @fat_stig@lemmy.world
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    1201 year ago
    ! 2023-10-06 https://www.youtube.com
    www.youtube.com##tp-yt-paper-dialog.ytd-popup-container.style-scope
    

    Oh no, anyway.

    • radix
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      261 year ago

      Is this a rule for an adblock extension? What does it pick out?

      • @fat_stig@lemmy.world
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        371 year ago

        It gets rid of the nag screen so you can just watch the video. For uBlock Origin, it’s a bit crude, may affect other bits of interface, I also use the Enhancer for YouTube plug-in for Firefox which is really useful.

        • @RealFknNito@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’ll work until they get annoyed and do what Hulu and Twitch does and bake it into the player. Then we’re kinda fucked.

        • @Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          41 year ago

          I quite easily removed it with uBlock using block element, but the video is still paused.

          I guess this is a similar solution?

  • @Worstdriver@lemmy.world
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    1031 year ago

    The day I can’t get around youtube ads is the day I stop using youtube. I already refuse to use it on my mobile device or my TV, due to the ads.

      • @PeWu@lemmy.ml
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        251 year ago

        It doesn’t block it, it doesn’t even download them or even request them. There is no concept of ad in NewPipe.

          • @Stephen304@lemmy.ml
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            251 year ago

            The official newpipe isn’t on the play store because it breaks their terms of service, which makes sense considering 2 of the 3 “newpipes” on there are just completely different apps using the name and logo of newpipe. The third is actually newpipe but with loads of ads added, not sure how long it’ll last before Google nukes it.

            But yeah for newpipe just get the offical ad free and open source version from TeamNewPipe on GitHub or on F-Droid in the main repo. Or if you want newpipe with no ads and also with sponsorblock, you want to get it from polymorphicshade on GitHub or through F-Droid with the Izzyondroid repo.

            • Dizzy Devil Ducky
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              51 year ago

              On the subject of newpipe, if you also view a lot of videos on NicoNico, Japanese yt, I recommend the pipepipe fork since it allows you to play both yt videos along with videos from NicoNico without ads. Also works with BiliBili in case you like listening to Chinese vocaloid songs or other Chinese content without ads.

    • smiletolerantly
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      1 year ago

      YouTube ReVanced gets you completely adfree, configurably de-shittified Youtube with sponsorblock on your phone. (And Youtube Music ReVanced is premium YT music, for free, of course also without ads.)

      And Smarttube Next does the same thing on Android TVs, FireTV, and probably some others I haven’t used.

    • Hopps
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      51 year ago

      On Android the Firefox app allows the use of extensions including all the adblock options you would find on PC. Works great and for YouTube as well.

  • Chaotic Entropy
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    1 year ago

    Considering how prevalent scams and actively malicious content posing as ads are across ad services in general, having an ad blocker is just basic online safety at this point.

    • @realharo@lemm.ee
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      241 year ago

      I still see fake download button ads distributed via Google’s own ad infrastructure to this day. I even reported a few that were taken down.

      For all the AI prowess Google likes to brag about, why can’t they make a simple “does this look like a download button?” detector? The scams are not that clever, most of them follow one of a small number of specific patterns.

      • @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        What’s worse is when corporations try to be funny put a fake download button and the entire ad is like “Wow can’t wait to click this skip button” and they don’t realize that sometimes youtube randomly makes those unskippable so it’s just awkward dead air for 30 seconds.

      • ɐɥO
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        1 year ago

        Why would they? They would lose money if they did that

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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    751 year ago

    The thing is YouTube just can’t be nice about it. It just cannot. In times that it was adblocker resistant, they’d add more and longer and worse ads until they pissed off enough engineers who collectively declared it a crisis and built the many anti-YouTube-ad solutions we have, from alternative YouTube mirrors to the Firefox packages.

    We’ve seen this play out in the tech industry multiple times, and always the public wins thanks, largely to programmers who just get ticked off and spend a weekend on pizza to create a bypass.

    The executives at Alphabet know all they have to do is allow concessions to be only mildly annoying and leave them. Five minutes of commercials for fifty minutes of content? That might be fair so long as it’s pizza ads and not Jesus ministries telling us how sinful the LGBT+ are or Matt Walsh suggesting we make it illegal for some folk to vote.

    But they can’t do that. Shareholder Primacy means Alphabet must push for record profits, even if it means enshittifying all their services, including YouTube, and that means a 1/4 ad to content ratio and increasing that until it’s intolerable and ad-based profit numbers go down due to failing viewership.

    • @tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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      291 year ago

      Five minutes of commercials for fifty minutes of content?

      Yeah, and besides, that shit barely functions on TV/streaming because someone paid to have quality content created. When you’re clicking around yt and you don’t know if a video is decent or dogshit, why should you have to sit through long ads just so you can watch a minute before you decide the content sucks?

      • @SeeingWhereThisGoes@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        This is frequently brought up as a problem for twitch as well. On the rare times someone decides to check out a new streamer without many viewers they get ads before the stream and most people aren’t going to sit through that for a streamer of unknown quality so it makes it even harder for new streamers to get discovered.

    • @nephs@lemmygrad.ml
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      131 year ago

      How do you guarantee pizza ads if the jesus ministries are pushing that sweet money around, too?

      Hell, no! The world is happier without the ad industry. The Internet was run basically on pure voluntary effort, and it was great. The ads didn’t make it viable, it always was.

  • Ton
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    661 year ago

    What is even more infuriating, I’m from one of the countries that had YouTube Premium Lite available. €6,99 for adfree YouTube with none of the ‘offline’ or YouTube Music nonsense that I wouldn’t be using anyway.

    My wife and myself have been subscribed for about 6 months now, totally seeing the value of it. Literally one month after signing my mum also onto it, she gets an email telling her that her subscription will end in a month from now.

    Fuck that shit.

    YouTube Premium Lite was perfect, affordable and removed exactly the main issue with YouTube: ads. Endless stupid amounts of ads.

    I’ll go back to Firefox with any amount of extensions that block ads and block the ad-block blockers. Google would have to burn the browser market to the ground before I’ll consider subscribing again.

    • @DragonAce@lemmy.world
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      291 year ago

      Google would have to burn the browser market to the ground before I’ll consider subscribing again.

      They’re sure as fuck trying.

    • @Backfire@lemmy.world
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      241 year ago

      The irony in this? They have just announced this very subscription plan in Germany. Not even a week after axing the plan in some neighbouring countries.

    • @pewnit@lemmings.world
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      111 year ago

      To be fair, this is the most sane take I’ve seen about this from the pro adblock side. That’s actually fucked up if they killed it out of nowhere but also sounds like Google.

    • @InternetUser2012@midwest.social
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      71 year ago

      I won’t ever sub. I’ll find a different hobby/time sink. I won’t ever have to worry about it though, the high seas are always more inventive so there will always be content to watch.

    • @Petter1@lemm.ee
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      11 year ago

      I recommend going to India (VPN) in order to buy premium Together with the family option, you can get to about 1$ a month

  • @AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I’m torn because fuck ads, but also YouTube is probably the most expensive website on earth to run (just the website itself, obviously a shipping company with a website will cost more.) Video is just obscenely expensive to store and they let free accounts upload 4k and keep it private.

    I honestly don’t know the solution here because YouTube being free is amazing, but they’ve literally never made money. I think a business model like nebula is more sustainable, but it sucks for those that can’t afford it.

    (To head off any arguments, I’m pro piracy, I just can’t blame YouTube to trying to stop people)

    • Cethin
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      321 year ago

      If the ads weren’t so intrusive I wouldn’t mind nearly as much. As it is, if you don’t block them, you’re watching ads as much as you’re watching content. In-line ads would be better I think, but forcing an ad before the video is annoying as hell.

      • @AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
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        131 year ago

        True. Back in 2011 they didn’t bother me at all. I think the issue is once everyone started using ad blockers they had to start squeezing the schmucks that weren’t.

        That and they started allowing unrestricted 4k uploads. That imo is their main issue with money.

        • @MrMcGasion@lemmy.world
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          181 year ago

          I understand where the “everyone using adblockers, makes it worse for those who don’t” argument comes from, and it generally makes sense. But I also have my suspicions that the expectations of infinite growth in publicly traded companies would probably have made it happen, even if nobody used adblockers. That being said, as someone who is giving YouTube money every month to not have ads, there’s a reasonable argument that I’m enabling their bad behavior.

          Fully agree on the 4k uploads thing though, and it also seems to be hurting the bitrate of lower resolutions. Up until around 2021 I primarily watched and preferred 480p when watching on tablets and sometimes even lower on my phone, for me it was a good balance of lower data usage and acceptable image quality. They’ve cut the bitrate so much at the low end though now, that sometimes even on a small phone screen I have to watch at 720p just to keep things from looking like they were recorded off a video conference from the early 2010s. Maybe 720p just is the new 480p and it’s using a similar amount of bandwidth, but it feels like they’re chasing the “bigger number better” crowd, rather than just defaulting to a reasonable resolution, with a high enough bitrate that most people won’t feel the need to adjust it.

    • @Longpork_afficianado@lemmy.nz
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      131 year ago

      It feels like we should have solved this issue a decade ago with bittorrent.

      A website is just a frontend for a fileserver, so why are we not distributing these files across the globe, where we all volunteer a bit of storage and bandwidth to services we want to use.

      Websites really need be nothing more than indexes and trackers which serve up a list of peers who are hosting the files we want.

      • JW_
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        61 year ago

        How would the content creators get rewarded in that system? Some of the YouTube ad money goes to the channel the ad is shown on.

      • Cethin
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        51 year ago

        It’s harder to profit from that, so obviously that’s not the direction things went.

          • Cethin
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            31 year ago

            Youtube itself might not be making a profit, but I double Google as a whole isn’t by having YouTube. They keep you in their ecosystem longer, and that’s good for them regardless of if you’re watching ads.

      • @EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        Because have you ever stumbled upon dead torrents? I see this more as a backup method to relieve the load rather than the only one.

        (Wish I had a perma-online SBC to seed my torrents btw)

    • @pewnit@lemmings.world
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      101 year ago

      Another sane take. Seriously, a breath of fresh air after seeing people on both Reddit and Lemmy talking about this with the entitlement of the average r/ChoosingBeggars post

      • @rambaroo@lemmy.world
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        91 year ago

        Meh, YouTube has been profitable for years now despite all the people using adblockers. They aren’t hurting for money anymore. I pay for it but I wish they’d separate out YouTube music from the sub because YTM sucks ass.

    • @InternetUser2012@midwest.social
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      51 year ago

      So if they stop people from skipping ads and the people then stop watching altogether, what’s the difference? They’d save on some bandwidth but look less inviting to advertisers since they have less viewers.

      We need a new internet, one free from corporations.

  • @nick@midwest.social
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    581 year ago

    Too fuckin bad for YouTube. I won’t change my behavior, I’ll just not use YouTube.

    Fuck em

      • @Resolved3874@lemdro.id
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        31 year ago

        That’s amazing but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to here that anyone who did got it reversed if not just outright banned from Google. I certainly wouldn’t have tried in on my main Google account.

        • YⓄ乙
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          31 year ago

          Its still working but who knows for how long. I doubt if google will ban it.

      • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘
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        1 year ago

        What happens when google decides to fix this? What happens to the data beyond the free tier? My guess is that it’ll be deleted, and you’d be screwed if you used this as your backup solution.

        E: still a really cool hack!

        • YⓄ乙
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          71 year ago

          Bruh anyone with half a brain cell won’t use google account to store personal data. All that 30tb goes to storing 4k movies and porn lol.

    • e_mc2
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      441 year ago

      Or Revanced, or SmartTube or NewPipe etc etc. Fortunately and thanks to some great devs out there, we’re still able to give Google the big middle finger.

      • @averagedrunk@lemmy.ml
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        21 year ago

        I don’t mind tasteful, well paced ads. That said, I use New pipe and Firefox with Ublock Origin because no one seems to remember what those are.

      • @SterlingVapor@slrpnk.net
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        11 year ago

        I’ve found revanced to stop playing the video after a minute or two unless you frequently update it (which is a manual process)… I no longer listen to lectures while I run errands, because there’s now no convenient way to do it. Ads are out of the question, and finding a video I want to watch only to have it cut out as I get on the road has killed the experience for me

        I’m on Android, and open to suggestions

    • @LrdThndr@lemmy.world
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      61 year ago

      Okay. Explain something to me. I’ve tried to use piped, but it’s just so dogshit slow. Unusably so.

      What am I doing wrong?

  • @whaleross@lemmy.world
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    511 year ago

    I’ve been paying the €5 ad free subscription without other premium features for years until they announced that it will be discontinued from next month.

    So then I am going to take a new look into ad blockers.

    Good job, YouTube.

        • @JPSound@lemmy.world
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          11 year ago

          Yes, correct! I have to keep bouncing between the two. This time its indeed revanced because the last working version of vanced went down again a couple months ago. And I’m sure in 6 months or so, they’ll start blocking revanced again and by that time github should have a working version of vanced again. I kinda lose track now.