Submitted 11 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-warns-worse-viewing-experience-ad-blocker-2023-11
YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don’t turn off your ad-blocker::YouTube has been cracking down on people using ad blockers. Now, a spokesperson says that using ad blockers could lead to “suboptimal viewing.”
which is a hilarious threat because the #1 way to make my viewing experience worse would be turning off my ad blocker, lmao
“if you don’t voluntarily make your experience 10x worse, we will make it 2x worse”
Ads have reached the level of “suboptimal viewing”.
Ive had my ad blocker turned off for a week on Youtube. Theres a preroll ad on every video and a shitload of ad break mid video and at the last 3 seconds of a video.
Its the worst viewing experience I can imagine. I cut out Twitch and even stopped all my subs when they went mandatory ad viewing. Im full on ready for third party options in the same spirit as Lemmy.
I also think they are fucking with the sound levels in the same way TV did prior to the FTC ruling. The commercials are awfully loud compared to the content.
Honestly this is what pushed me to look into alternative ways to watch YT years ago. Muting every time an ad comes on gets old quick, especially when the ad is way louder than the content
SmartTube Next for watching YT on TV and LibreTube for Android.
I just thought I would log in to Twitch just to say hi to the streamer I was in the same game with. Twitch loads, starts to play the stream with no problem. BUT when I try to login, it says Firefox is not a supported browser. It had no problem playing all the content, showing the chat, etc. - but for some reason it still says my browser is not supported and I can’t log in. I looked it up. FF it “not supported” because it has an enhanced tracking protection feature. Twitch wants to track you, and it can’t if you use Firefox. Such a petty way; this will just turn me away from Twitch even more.
S0undTV is a good app for Twitch if you have an android TV device. No ads and support for the emotes if you like having the chat up. You’ve got to login to twitch through the app though to start watching. It’s broken before and had ads play, but gets fixed within a few days. Lastly there is a delay compared to desktop. If that’ll be a deal breaker.
Why would you even subject yourself to such torture?
I think my viewing experience will be even worse if I turn off my ad blocker.
Youtube advertising is absolute trash. It’s already bad enough to sit through ads when you don’t even know if you want to watch the video. Their ads consist of fake Joe Rogans with tts voices advertising scams.
I get some dodgy casino and gambling ads … Before a children’s program. Reported the ad multiple times, but it keeps coming back under a different name.
Get fucked, YouTube.
The whole page loading delay thing is hilarious because it doesn’t tell you why it’s happening, so viewers are likely to just assume the service is becoming even more shitty.
YouTube is just messing around. They could encode ads randomly on videos if they wanted to, like podcasts.
There’s already a sponsor blocker extension, it would be trivial to add other embedded ads to it.
They would just be able to create and stream 2 or more ad-encoded versions where ads are encoded in differently positions. Then no sponsorblock could save us since it would skip the wrong segments for some people…
That’s not quite how it works. It’s crowdsourced, someone has to manually add every sponsored segment from a video into Sponsorblock. It can’t detect them on its own.
They could, what can go wrong…
How could it be worse than with ads?
240p
Oh no, so how will I be able to tell a difference?
How about you suck my balls accordingly, google?
Can’t make it worse of you don’t use it.
Youtube is past the growth phase, at this point it’s about minimising cost and maximising revenue.
If you regularly use it with adblock but decide to stop using it because of this, then youtube would have succeeded. You weren’t making them money and were costing them bandwidth, so good riddance.
If you really want to stick it to them, turn on adblock, find some long videos and play them on mute in the background at 4K/1080p60 resolution. Cost them even more bandwidth.
Even better, start randomly disliking videos or making nonsensical comments (not hateful or toxic ones, just comments that don’t make sense). Enshittify it further.
It’s not the ads. They want your data and these adblockers prevent them from doing it. Google had and continue to lie to advertisers about their ad views anyways. Simply use Firefox + adblockers or go to alternative sites that are springing up.
It’s official, Youtube now has people employed as product worseners.
YouTube has human employees? I thought they were just all bots.
Google: “Fine, I’ll turn off your adblocker myself!” rolling out Manifest v3
I’ll just leave this here.
You da real MPV
Way to kill your platform. Sadly there’s no big competition
How does this kill their platform if there’s no competition?
Let them keep this shit up and you’ll find out.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Hopefully this motivates a competitor to emerge.
I can also just back out and just not watch said videos…
Yeah be like me and just use Peertube, I don’t even notice this stuff untill people complain about it haha.
Turning off your ad-blocker is like running in jail, naked. So no thanks, YT.
If for some reason you can’t use a full-on ad blocker, “SponsorBlock for Youtube” is another Firefox extension you can install. It doesn’t block ads per se, but it will auto-skip segments of a video that have been reported as ad content. Kind of a grassroots thing, like reporting cops on Waze.
Until they try to kill that too.
I don’t think Google gets any money from YouTube sponsorships directly. Not watching a sponsored segment and not clicking the affiliate link are one and the same in the eyes of the company.
Keep it up, dumbasses.
Catch the hint…the harder you try the harder we do. There’s no trying from our end.
So I’m a little lazy and have to watch ads when I watch YouTube on my TV. I don’t care enough to fix this.
Anyways, I don’t mind the short ads. I get it, you gotta pay for your stuff somehow. What I don’t get is these ads that can stretch on for 10, 15, even 150 minutes. I think I had a 3 hour ad at one point. It’s insane. You should have to opt in to these ads that are longer than say 30 seconds.
Opt in?
A Google exec should be shot for any ads longer than 30 seconds.
I was in the shower once and wanted some music. I started the YouTube app on my phone cause revanced was acting up at the time. I had to sit through an x minute ad, I’m not even sure how long. I was seeing red by the time my shower was over.
I’d hazard a guess that this old quora post that was estimating the average American loses 4.2 years of their life on ads would now result in even more time lost on ads, but let’s go with 4.2 years per person. This means that for every 20 people, there’s one person’s lifetime of ads. “A life for a life” is the only fair concept, Google. Start the culling.
I recently saved a post somewhere with a complete guide on cracked youtube on smart tv’s which wasn’t all too difficult iirc… let me know if you want me to dig it up.
Found it! github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
YouTube losing the war on AdBlockers, lol.
How can they make the experience worse for people using adblock if they cant even detect it
I wonder if it’s a switch in strategy, i.e. The ad block ban popup gives clear notification to the user to update their adblock but slowing the video load speeds without giving feedback might be a more effective in slowing the arms race.
PeerTube & Odysee when?
When the video creators you watch move to them.
I mean… it definitely will if you turn off your ad blocker.
Until an alternative to Youtube happens, then this will continue.
Odysee? Rumble? Freetube? Re-vanced?
Then don’t use it.
Kind of shocked it took this long.
It always cost more more but the games that used clever traps were a lot more effective than just drm. Because warez groups can easily check if the game launches. Not if every enemy after mission four has infinite health and pinpoint accuracy.
Just curious if this maps to “shit, Google knows Twitter exists and figured out what we are doing” or “YouTube servers are broken”
About all this is doing is making me update my lists in UBO more often.
I’ve switched to the FreeTube app on desktop and now I’m just using it without a second thought. No ads and a much faster and better YouTube with absolutely no ads.
Anorack@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Worse than using YouTube without an ad blocker?
DeathWearsANecktie@lemm.ee 11 months ago
That’s the funny thing about this threat. It implies that using YouTube the regular way is “optimal” viewing. It’s fucking shit without adblock.
NightOwl@lemmy.one 11 months ago
Even without ads it’s shit without sponsorblock for me. Not even for the sponsor spots, but the absolutely annoying copy paste of please like, subscribe, hit the notification icon, blah blah blah blah blah.
rob299@bookwormstory.social 11 months ago
It’s optimal to them. You just don’t understand Youtube’s perspective of it yet. And then it’s unoptimal for them when you watch with the adblocker.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
How to quit YT in a week?
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
There is absolutely zero possibility that they can find a way to make my experience on YouTube worse than my experience on YouTube without uBlock.
rob299@bookwormstory.social 11 months ago
That’s a way to look at, but i’l personally still be using Peertube. instead of 3rd party YouTube apps.
AbidanYre@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The fact that my children know the Liberty Mutual jingle from watching YouTube at school says no.
TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 11 months ago
yo what can you even do about this