Youtube’s Anti-adblock and uBlock Origin::Recently, YouTube has been ramping up its anti-adblock effort, and I’ve been watching this closely due to personal interest. This blog post is where I write down what I know. Some Background Here’s…
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From the article:
The uBO team members are all volunteers. They’ve gone above and beyond to meet every little request from their users. But there’s a limit to how much they can take. At some point, the constant demands become too much, and they will leave uBO for good. It’s one thing to play cat and mouse with YouTube. It’s quite another to deal with a wave of angry users.
It’s important to note that this extension is open source, and anyone can contribute. End users can contribute by writing more meaningful reports and exhibiting patience, and those who are handy can certainly contribute to uBlock Origin. Just about anyone can help in some way.
Of course, every project needs passionate leaders, which is where the maintainers play a role. They coordinate work and ensure quality. While lots of people can act as a leader, the passion of driving a project to success with unique expertise is a lot more rare. So treat your maintainers kindly!
And that is, the magic of Open Source, I swear the Internet would be shitty if open source software wasn’t a thing.
Some solutions:
- Android
- iOS
- Yattee with this guide
- (Adding Piped/Invidious website to Homescreen)
- Web
- Desktop
- FreeTube
- (Using any of the web solutions as PWAs)
- TV
- Android TV
- Apple TV
- Yattee with this guide
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So now we can root TVs. I love this timeline if my life. I’m planning on buying an LG OLED next year and I was worried about all the telemetry, ads and YouTube, but looks like I’m gonna do some me education before buying the TV. Thank you.
Rooted LG TV’s you say…
Thanks for the additions.
On Android there is also Revanced
Heck yeah! Thank you, friend.
YouTube staff underestimate the amount of effort tech savvy people will devote to remove minor annoyances. Ultimately, the core capability of YouTube is to deliver a video from its servers to your browser. Adblock tech will continue to win the cat-and-mouse game in the long run.
they also overestimate their importance to the same crowd. I mean, I use youtube a lot but as soon as I’m unable to without my adblocker in place, I’m done with the site. Already cut out several other sites that have done similar things; YouTube is big, but it’s not the only time waster in town.
Sadly this is what they want. Anyone not giving them money directly through subscription fees or indirectly through advertisers they view as dead weight and want to buck to reduce operating costs. Rather than fix their service model, they prefer to squeeze what ever money they can out of people and dump them for not being profitable enough.
Louis Rossman showed that Premium is complete garbage because saved videos require an internet connection.
Exactly, it’s just a phase of enshittification. Shortly after they close the platform down they will start ramping up the ads even more, maybe even embed them. Who knows how long it will take but it’s part of the death spiral we’ve seen many times. No idea if it’s become too big to fail though, either way, if I’m blocked it’s probably for the best regardless.
This war is not something YouTube can or in my opinion wants to win. All they want to do is make it annoying enough for non-technical people to give up and purchase premium. They know they can’t win at this game. What they can do is make these changes frequent enough and annoying enough.
Simply put, even if Google hires full time staff to keep fighting this issue, at some point not serving ads becomes cheaper. On the other side of this trench we have an opensource project backed by a mob of fed up people for whom never seeing another ad is too soon. In pure fight of numbers Google is outnumbered and outgunned.
Linux is an excellent example of community effort. It’s huge, well supported and develops at a pace other companies can only dream about and yet they have around 5-10k contributors. uBlock has 40k stars on GitHub alone. Not all contributors and/or developers, but this this ads problem is something that affects everyone and is universally hated by everyone and rest assured the more Google and others try to push ads the more people will awaken to fight back.
Plot twist, it is YouTube sending those moronic support requests.
Edit: I checked out the reddit thread and people really are moronic.
A:
I can’t access YT at all now. I just get a big, blank empty page. I’ve tried following every single step in the guide and nothing works. Before, I was able to watch videos if I opened the link in a private browser, but now even that doesn’t work. Using Firefox btw. What am I supposed to do now?
B:
I just started having this problem this morning. I realized I forgot to disable Ghostery, one I took care of that the page would load again.
A:
I ain’t disabling Ghostery…
I just disabled ghostery ad-block and that seems to work. Still have ublock going.
You don’t need Ghostery if you have uBlock Origin, it only increases the chance of the two adblockers interfering with each other. It’s like those boomers who have 5 different anti viruses on their Windows PC… Just stop it!
I had to whitelist youtube in disconnect, small price to pay but it works
Good article. Rather than relying on uBo people should just stop using services they dislike (YouTube) and move to something else. Of course many people don’t want to change what they’re used to.
and move to something else
There is nothing comparable to youtube.
What ever happened to Vimeo?
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well, since the debacle I was thinking: do I really need YT? What if I don’t access it at all, will my life become miserable? Nope, because YT is not something I NEED, just something I WANT. Once we realize that, it’s easy to look elsewhere, or even find something more productive to do.
You can’t honestly say there isn’t anything comparable to YouTube. I can think of 3 of the top of my head. You just want 1-1 and that’s not possible
You mean from the technical side? Sure. Lot’s of other video hosters around. It’s just content wise were there is no comparison.
There’s ways of getting YouTube’s content without going to YouTube too no?
Yes. These are called alternative frontends. You can read this amazing Privacy Guides article to learn more about them: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/frontends/?h=fr#youtube
Not even 1:1, I’d settle for 1:50, but that’s not even remotely close to what the “alternatives” are offering. A video hosting platform is worthless without creators, and the creators aren’t moving on from YouTube.
There is no real replacement for YouTube yet.
if video creators think, there a replacement exists: peertube
In what ways do you mean? I don’t know much about the creator side of things.
However if it has something to do with less ease of use for the creators then that’s something that should be worth going through. By giving more value to other platforms then we can assume those platforms will make more and better changes for their influx of users. Similar to how people didn’t want to leave Reddit for Lemmy. There isn’t as much content and the apps and infrastructure aren’t as good. Well, Lemmy development has taken off since the Reddit migration because of the value given to the platform.
Agreed, we need more creators uploading their content both to YT as well as to other hosting sites that are less explicitly against the viewership. Google only cares about maximizing their profits, and it’s sad to have witnessed how YT has degraded over the years. It used to be a place that cared so much about the user experience and now… It’s an ad serving tool, and not much more.
Once enough big creators decide to support alternative platforms we may see a growing number of people who check out of YT for good.
The creators are making money from the ads, they probably won’t abandon ship at yt unless they stop making revenue. A lot of the creators on yt rely on the ads to be worthwhile in creating the content.
I agree, yt is getting stupid with their ads, from what I understand they are now including ads in the yt premium subscription aervice, which is supposed to be ad free mind you.
As long as greed dictates content, creators won’t abandon ship, unless they can have ads on the alternatives to make money on.
I feel like I’m living in a utopia since more of my YT usage comes from a Nvidia Shield TV with Smart Tube Next and YouTube Revanced on a phone, in a nutshell I have been unaffected by all this mess… For now.
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What do you mean exactly by that?
Yesterday was the first time videos actually stopped working for me. I updated uBlock Origin and it’s been working again. YouTube can’t win this race. (Unless they completely cripple their website and make it only available to logged in verified users or something.)
Best way to punish Youtube: Use a functioning ad blocker and then open dozens of tabs on auto play and mute them. Let them play perpetually.
Another way that would cause advertisers to potentially drop them or pay considerably less would be to do this without an ad blocker and then post evidence of it. With enough people doing this, advertisers won’t want to pay.
If the advertisers start paying less, then Google will just increase the number of ads shown to the user. And playing content on more tabs won’t even matter to them.
The issue is that they are a monopoly so they control and they can do whatever they want. The alternative is federated video services but those aren’t matured yet.
