YouTube's ‘War’ on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

Jure Repinc@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 349 points –
YouTube's ‘War’ on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
404media.co

Google's anti-ad scripts are breaking browsers and privacy plugins. It could get worse because Google controls the ad market, Chrome, and the extension store.

85

You are viewing a single comment

Honestly, I think it's great: if it annoys people enough, they will move out from Chrome and install Firefox (or one of its forks) with good extensions for blocking ads on YouTube. It seems to be the only solution to break the monopoly of Google on browsers. So go Google, I believe in you!

Nah, most people are dumb, they will just continue to complain and assume there is nothing they can do.

Yeah but even dumb people when annoyed enough will listen to alternatives. Specially when this one is so damn easy. It's not like editing config files or changing partitions, it's just using another damn browser.

Youre giving them too much credit. Most will just accept fate and deal with the ads.

Actually nevermind you're right. Dumb people never had an ad blocker on in the first place :D

Also there are people who continued to use IE before it got changed to Edge.

The key is "annoyed enough". I personally know many people who have never used adblockers and don't see why they're necessary.

It keeps breaking on FF too tho

Nope it doesn't. Mine works without any modifications but I heard that it happens occasionally. There are some easy steps to set up FF to work again, should be easy to look up.

I went through the instructions with the removing other extensions and resetting things and pasting filters etc. multiple times but it kept breaking, ended up switching to FreeTube. Maybe they've got it by now but I'm going to wait until it all shakes out more, too much hassle.

Plus if you read the article, you can't tell how it works overall just because it works for you, because YouTube is treating different groups of users differently here.

I had it pop up a couple times in Firefox, but it went away when I enabled the Annoyances filter in ublock settings. The videos just work now, no problem