YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers

Comments

• Nobody@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  These tech companies have underestimated their utility. They are mostly providing mindless time wasters. If you try to charge money or create inconvenience, people will look for something else to do.

  Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere. The VC grow-at-all-costs business model is fundamentally flawed. It doesn’t scale when profitability becomes a priority.

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  • Supervisor194@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere.

    My attention is all the currency YouTube will ever get from me - and it should be enough. If I post videos to YouTube (for nothing in return) and I talk to people about videos I saw on YouTube or link them to videos - then I am a net gain for Google and they should treat me as such. If anything, they should be working (nicely) to try to get me to want to pay (or view ads) and just be thankful I’m there if I don’t pay (or view ads). Instead they’ve chosen to work at ensuring everyone is so goddamn pissed off at their bullshit that they’d rather make it their full-time job to never give them another dime. Good job, Google! Smart!

    PS: Oh hi there YouTube shills, I thought I would see you here.

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    • obinice@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you. Attention is all the currency they’ll ever get from you, that’s totally cool, absolutely. I’m totally that way too. But they’ve got to make money somehow, so if you’re not the paying customer, someone else has to be.

      I’m not saying it has to be ad sales either, but if we want a world in which we can use services for free without ads, we need to come up with an alternative way for them to make money. It has to come from somewhere, and by the bucketload.

      If every user thinks like you, then it doesn’t matter how many people you talk to or share links with, you’re not a net gain on their service, you bring nothing to it.

      Why should they, or anybody, be thankful that you honour them with your presence, if you contribute nothing of value? What makes you so entitled to use somebody’s product for free with no strings attached?

      Ads suck, I’m eager for us to move past them once we figure out an alternative that keeps products in business and us receiving things for free. But we can’t deny the reality we live in right now either. Even huge companies like Google (who yes, do suck) have to make money to survive.

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    • Salvo@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I will quite happily pay a reasonable price for the privilege of avoiding ads.

      I understand why people block ads, even though they are a a free tier, even if I don’t agree with it.

      The fact that the cost of YouTube Premium almost doubled overnight is making me rethink my ethics, when my current subscription is up for renewal, I will be reassessing whether to cease watching YouTube, watch YouTube with ads or determine another way of supporting content creators.

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    • Prandom_returns@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You sound like you’d pay someone “with exposure” for their work.

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  • rubythulhu@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Youtube produces almost none of their own content, instead they rely on other humans to create that content.

    Use your ad blocker if you want, but stop treating youtubers as google employees (they’re not, they often have a much more frustrating relationship than you do) and start supporting them through other means.

    To you, those people are just helping you waste your time. if that’s your real argument here, stop wasting your fucking time and do something else more worth your precious time, or start supporting content producers directly through non-youtube methods. Or just stop fucking watching.

    Those people aren’t on youtube because they’re buying into corporate google dick-wrangling, they want to produce videos and have them get watched, and youtube is a place that hosts their videos for free AND gives them ad revenue share for hosting youtube ads.

    You aren’t some hero for adblocking youtube but still watching it. google won’t notice your small dip in their revenue, but the youtuber who made it will.

    Wanna support the people who entertain you (or, i guess, “waste your time”, if that’s what you consider entertainment to be — if all you want is to waste your time, don’t ads do the same thing for you?). Pay them directly for their content. Want to take a fake stand that supports nobody but yourself and your own inconveniences, install an ad blocker and boast on the internet about how you’re totally fucking over google and the people who create youtube content by doing so. But don’t treat yourself like some hero for doing so.

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    • joyjoy@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You could’ve stopped after the second paragraph.

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    • pastermil@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Who are you gonna defend next, the landlords?

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    • Nobody@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      If content creators provide 90% or even 60% of value to YouTube, why is Google a trillion dollar company while major content creators are fighting for scraps that fall from their table? Why are content creators who aren’t in the top tier compensated so little for what they bring to the table?

      YouTube is nothing without content. Unionize. Stand together and get paid what you’re worth.

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    • zipmethod@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Lol what an unhinged rant.

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    • NightOwl@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Thank you me for using Adblock. You are welcome me. Couldn’t have done it without me. I am my hero. Thanks me.

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    • Discotheque@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Oh please. Youtubers make their money from direct sponsors they themselves advertise in their videos, from viewer sponsor platforms like patreon and from advertising their own product or services such as merchandise etc.

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    • wahming@monyet.cc ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The modern Internet community has an interestingly illogical take on free services. Either use them or pay for an alternative. But the average user has grown up on free services and will happily insist on having their cake and eating it too

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  • CallateCoyote@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I pay for Premium now since it includes music streaming which is convenient to use. If they raise the price too much, I’ll absolutely just go back to mp3s and deal with the ads on YouTube and just watch less content on there. $15 is about my cap before I do that.

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• mojo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  There are no better adblockers, uBlock Origin is all you need and is already updated to bypass it.

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  • calcopiritus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Unlock origin is the adblocker that people are installing. There are a lot of people with shitty adblockers out there, I guess they are switching.

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    • cm0002@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I bet all those people with shitty adblockers are also probably googling better ad/YT compatible blockers lmaoo

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• ohlaph@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  After YouTube started filling their search results with mostly shorts, I stopped using it for new stuff. It’s terrible now.

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  • Rakonat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yeah youtubes attempt at being tiktok is just awful and they don’t even have options to not have shorts show up in the feed. On top of shorts just being inferior versions of regular videos without functional controls

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    • elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      This is what gets me. Wanna show me shorts? Ok. But why the fuck am I not allowed to rewind a couple of seconds if I want to? It’s an artificial, completely useless limitation that had no place in 2023.

      So, no thanks.

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  • Whirling_Cloudburst@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I started blocking those from appearing when they first showed up. There are a number of ways to do it. The Blocktube extension is one.

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    • yerf@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      if you click ublock, select the settings cog, then in the tab that opens select ‘my filters’, you can enter the following to do the same thing: www.youtube.com##.ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scope

      Personally I avoid installing too many extentions as they are quite literally apps that auto open whenever you just want to browse the web (regardless of if you’re going to youtube, you’re computer runs a youtube specific adblock)

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    • skooks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Thank you for this

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  • Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I switched to FreeTube and now all the shorts are on a separate page I can switch over to if I feel like watching them. It’s also got SponsorBlock built in. Now I can enjoy youtube with a clean, faster interface and google isn’t tracking a damn thing. All because google for greedy and made their used experience shit.

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    • 100_kg_90_de_belin@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Google didn’t get greedy, it’s doing what it’s been doing for years. Before resorting to plunging us into Matrix-like pods, they’re trying to squeeze some more data out of users.

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    • BitsOfBeard@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I only wish PiP worked the way it does in Firefox, not in Edge/Chromium. I like to have my browser next to full height video on my ultrawide, but PiP will not go beyond 1080 pixels tall.

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  • Tattorack@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yeah, I hate how crappy search now is.

    It’ll show me a couple of videos, then shorts, then some kind of recommendation list. If I actually want to do a complete search for the thing, and only the thing, I’m looking for, I have to go to advanced options and specify I’m looking for videos. JUST videos.

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    • SolarNialamide@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I don’t even care about the shorts showing up in search results. What really irks me is that you get like 3 videos related to search results, then some random unrelated shit, 3 relevant videos, more unrelated garbage, and then the rest of the actually relevant videos. I am specifically searching for something, just show me the damn thing.

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  • nutsack@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    for real the discovery is terrible. it’s all junk and it’s a waste of my time.

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  • RoxActually@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I found an extension that gets rid of the shorts, thank god

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    • Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Also if you have enhancer it has an option to turn off the shorts bar and convert shorts to real videos.

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• Zacryon@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  There’s also the option of biting the bullet and paying for YouTube Premium.

  No. Never. I’d rather stop using YT at all than giving in to coerced user-tracking.

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  • NoRodent@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I mean, I might have considered paying for YT premium if I thought it offered some value (other than disabling ads) but I won’t sure as hell pay for anything that any company is trying to blackmail me into.

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    • Stumblinbear@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I mean you didn’t buy it before so why would you now?

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    • ArghZombies@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      But that’s the wrong way around. They don’t want you to pay, they make their money through advertising. They make far more money from advertiser’s paying to put up ads than they ever make from people paying for premium.

      Same as with Facebook now bringing in an ad-free version (in the EU anyway) - they charge higher than is reasonable so that people will opt for the ad-supported free version instead.

      It’s not that you are blackmailed into paying premium, it’s that you’re encouraged not to as a way of explicitly consenting to ads.

      Basically, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

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    • pascal@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I use it because YouTube music is included and it’s great while driving, it allows background play even with the screen off (I’m talking about mobile).

      There’s something more, but nothing that a pro user cannot already do with third tools.

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  • soggy_kitty@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    For desktop install and use “FreeTube”.

    Alternatively for your android phone you can use “GrayJay”

    Never. Pay. For. YouTube. Premium

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    • S_204@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I assume you need to be rooted for Gray Jay?

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    • floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      NewPipe still works well for me on Android.

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  • Resol@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Abandoning YouTube is seriously more difficult than abandoning other “non-fediverse” general social media platforms, since it’s got so much useful content that gets straight up ruined by the company that owns the website.

    I doubt PeerTube is anything better than Vimeo, at least for now, things can improve after all.

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• Tygr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Didn’t know about SponsorBlock until all this started. So many just found out ad blocking is possible.

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  • LUHG_HANI@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Sponsor block is a different beast. Should we really be doing that to our content creators? No, definitely not. Is it them or the advertising company that suffers?

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    • gears@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The company, because the creator gets paid either way

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    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      If you weren’t planning on paying for the product, the creator won’t take any hit from you using sponsorblock. In fact, the advertiser won’t either. Nobody will be hurt by it, because it was a massive waste of your time to start with.

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    • kratoz29@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Huh, Sponsorblock is basically muting TV ads like in the old days.

      Why should I be forced to watch a sponsor almost always totally unrelated to the content I seek to watch, and that the YouTuber decided to upload?

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    • NightOwl@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      My favorite aspect of sponsorblock is blocking the incredibly repetitive ubiquitous script that every single channel copies of like, subscribe, ring the notification bell.

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    • redcalcium@lemmy.institute ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You can still use sponsorblock and configure it to not skipping sponsor segments if you want, and still enjoying the benefits of automatically skipping useless segments such as intro, outro, subscription reminders, self promotion, recaps, etc.

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    • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Whatever, either i have to manually switch forward or sponsorblock does it for me.

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    • deweydecibel@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You’re absolutely right. Sponsorblock directly harms the average people making content, it has nothing to do with Google.

      It’s gross and reveals how much of the complaining about ads has absolutely nothing to do with privacy or malware or corporate profiteering or anything like that. These people are just nakedly selfish.

      Wear those downvotes with pride. They mean you have a conscience and feel empathy.

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    • yukichigai@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The content creators get paid the exact same whether I skip the sponsor segment or not. YouTube doesn't track that, or not in a way they share with anyone else at any rate.

      In other words, it doesn't hurt the content creator in the slightest.

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  • deweydecibel@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The other person’s been downvoted pretty heavily so I’ll volunteer to accept some.

    Sponsorblock is a shitty tool for extremely selfish people that only hurts small-time content creators. You can’t argue about your data privacy, malware, corporate profits, sponsorships are literally the least invasive and most direct form of financial support the average person can get for their content without you paying them directly. There’s absolutely no higher justification for it beyond annoyance at an extremely minor inconvenience.

    You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom’s Auto Care if you could. Not every attempt at making money is evil.

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  • Blue2a2@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I only heard about AdNauseum because of this whole debacle. It blocks ads, hasn’t temporarily broken (as far as I have seen), and I set it to “click” 80% of all ads it sees.

    I have probably screwed whatever profile they built on me, cost the ad buyers money bc clicks, hurt the conversion rate for purchases to cost google money, and even possibly made money for my favorite creators and sites (depending on how they’re paid).

    Though someone lmk if I am misunderstanding something about it.

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  • XEAL@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I discovered SponsorBlock after installing Smart Tube Next on a FireTV.

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• Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I love that all the centralized social media networks are scrambling to become shitty for profits right around the time users are realizing that they don’t need centralized servers to host their user-generated content. Users can take their content wherever they want and let these platforms die.

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  • nicoweio@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m not sure if we manage to do the same for video though; hosting these costs a lot more.

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  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This 100%. Look at forums. Back in the early days, there were lots of little independent forums. Sites like Reddit took over because you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page. We gained convenience, but didn’t think too hard about what we were losing or who we were losing it to. Then along came enshittification and we are collectively realizing what we lost. Federation is of course the solution. As I see it, the only missing piece is monetization. Platforms like YouTube make it easy to monetize page views, Twitter / X is doing the same. That’s much harder in the fediverse.

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  • DashboTreeFrog@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It’s like we’re reverting to the days you would go to homestarrunner.com, illwillpress, etc to see content from people you actually wanted to see content from. Honestly looking forward to it

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• TheTimeKnife@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Youtube is a perfect example of why ad blockers exist. They use ridiculous ad volumes and spy on their users for data to sell.

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  • BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    ive had ads longer than the video i watch and then ads when that video ends

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  • corbin@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    YouTube doesn’t sell user data, the data is for targeting ads.

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• fne8w2ah@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  uBlock Origin FTW!

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  • Lianodel@ttrpg.network ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I love that, in a competition between a corporation worth hundreds of billions of dollars against a FOSS project, all Google managed to do was annoy uBlock Origin users for like a week. I just had to manually update and restart my browser a few times.

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• andy_wijaya_med@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  And they increased the fucking price for YouTube premium.

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  • FinalRemix@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    They reduced the price!

    And forcibly added a YouTube music sub to the price…

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  • Rhapsodicjock_108@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I don’t think they did a proper cost-benefit analysis for this one. Feels like the new CEO learned of ad blockers and put down a diktat.

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• r3df0x@7.62x54r.ru ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Ublock Origin works

  Brave is ass

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• Blaster_M@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Meanwhile, Youtube engineers and uBlock Origin volunteers are in a war of attrition, updating both the website (youtube) and uBlock Origin (the ad blocker) multiple times a day every day

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  • grue@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I feel like uBlock Origin has been coming out ahead more often than not. I haven’t had to manually refresh my lists for the last few days.

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  • Chozo@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yep, it's going to be a constant game of cat-and-mouse from now on. Google isn't going to relent on this.

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  • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Reminds me of the IM wars back in the latter 90s / early 00s. At one point, briefly, AIM and Trillian were pushing updates to negate each other every few hours.

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• gapbetweenus@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Switched finally to ff. So I guess thank you google.

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  • youngGoku@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Make sure to turn off telemetry and adjust your browser’s DNS settings.

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• disconnectikacio@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Spread the word to install firefox based browser, use different frontends to block youtube ads in browser, Invidious and use piped youtube apps on android to block youtbe ads: Newpipe

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  • laverabe@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    is there a way to simply install a addon in firefox to redirect all youtube links to piped links?

    Anything that can be done to destroy youtubes monopoly is a good thing.

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• WindowsEnjoyer@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  They should fucking do an experiment - 2€/$ a month for an ad-free subscription and 3€/$ a month for higher video quality subscription. I would fucking pour my money into it.

  Oh wait, that would not solve lack of sponsorblock. I guess I am not interested then…

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• AMillionNames@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I had uBlock Origin installed since forever, are people just finding out about it?

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• silencioso@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  NewPipe in my mobile and FreeTube in my desktop. Fuck you Google

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• maquise@ttrpg.network ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Just this morning all the posts (here on Lemmy) were about how everyone was uninstalling their adblockers.

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• sagrotan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I don’t know what the whole fuzz was / is about, it’s years now that I unwillingly watched ads, anywhere. So easy, piehole, newpipe, avoid any Microsoft shit, you just have to be ready to learn a bit, it’s not rocket science. Ok, rocket science helped, but that’s not the point…

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• ElBarto@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  So today I’ve seen this article saying YouTube failed and another saying they’ve succeeded because of record uninstalls of adblockers.

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• chiliedogg@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Not everybody is.

  That’s the thing, even if 95% of users currently using ad blockers block ads anyway or leave the service, YouTube still wins big.

  They aren’t worried at all about alienating users from which they can’t extract ad revenue. Those on the margin that turn off ad blockers or subscribe to a paid plan are the target, not everyone else.

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• affiliate@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  who could have seen this coming

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• trslim@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I dont even mind ads when its like one minute for 20 minutes of footage. Pluto TV is free to use and has commercial breaks but they never really bother me because they aren’t that annoying and i get a lot of MST3K before I watch them. Youtube ad are cancer in comparison.

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• yuunikki@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Based, fuck YouTube

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• dasgoat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The race is on. Bitch.

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• mystic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  reminds me of how bugs develop into superbugs after building resistance to antibiotics

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• kamen@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  What happened to the idea of small, non-intrusive banner ads? Of course it’s not realistic to expect those on YouTube and they bring much less revenue compared to in-your-face video interstitials per impression, but I’m much more likely to whitelist those.

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• pdavis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  My ad blocker was working so well I didn’t even realize I had it installed and blocking ads on YouTube. I don’t mind watching a few ads as long as it doesn’t get out of hand.

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• Rosco@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Good, fuck those greedy bastards. yt-dlp + mpv with sponsorblock FTW, bonus for stopping using a YouTube account altogether and using RSS feeds for your subscriptions instead.

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• n0m4n@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I quit YouTube because the ads were overwhelming, and quality content is so rare.

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• JustZ@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I will never submit.

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