Louis Rossman/FUTO's YouTube app, GrayJay, now supports Sponsorblock... and shames you if you use it
Seriously this was very surprising. I've been experimenting with GrayJay since it was announced and I largely think it's a pretty sweet app. I know there are concerns over how it isn't "true open source" but it's a hell of a lot more open than ReVanced. Plus, I like the general design and philosophy of the app.
I updated the YouTube backend recently and to my surprise and delight they had added support for SponsorBlock. However, when I went to enable it, it warned me "turning this on harms creators" and made me click a box before I could continue.
Bruh, you're literally an ad-blocking YouTube frontend. What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to be facilitating ad-blocking and then at the same time shame the end-user for using an extension which simply automates seeking ahead in videos. Are you seriously gonna tell me that even without Sponsorblock, if I skip ahead past the sponsored ad read in a video, that I'm "harming the creator"?
Are they even able to see when their baked in ads get skipped over?
Kinda. YouTube has stats about which times of a video are watched more proportionally for a single view. You can ironically usually use this data to see when a sponsor spot ends (to skip to it) since there will be a peak in the watch time curve.
Probably, I'm fairly certain they get told which parts of the video get skipped and which get rewatched.
Only applies on official apps and frontends with analytics. Without them it's just buffering the video.