Google admits it's making YouTube worse for ad block users

TangledHyphae@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 1268 points –
Google admits it's making YouTube worse for ad block users
theregister.com
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They're not saying you can't have an adblocker. They're saying their software will try not to serve you their data if you do, or at least make it inconvenient.

You have a right to your computer. You do not have a right to their service.

That's exactly what I said, yeah

Me after reading the 1st comment: "OK. True. Fair." Me after reading the 2nd comment: "OK. True. Fair." Me after reading the 3rd comment: "OK. Also true. Also fair."

Me reading you:

Fourth gosh darn level of agree

I’ll never disable my PiHole or turn off ublock tho

I wish PiHole wasn’t so absolute dogshit about DNS requests from outside the local subnet, might use it then

Permit all origins, allow all destinations. In the settings.

Tried that, it just reverts back after a few weeks :/

Open an issue on the forums if it hasn’t already been fixed.

Mine doesn’t revert.

What OS/computer?

Tried it bare metal on a Pi 4 and as a VM. I have my LAN using the 10.0.0.0/8 space and I couldn’t have DNS breaking all the time

And it would set itself back?

Yep. Default is to not reply to DNS outside the subnet it's in, and it would randomly flip back to that

Open a bug report; that shouldn’t happen.

Also, think about running two DNS servers

I'm going to try ad guard today... That way I can keep my DHCP

Update: adguard does not block YouTube ads.

You can use PiHole without their DHCP.

Oh yeah? I didn't know. I thought I read on the pihole website that if you use pihole on a system on your network, you have to use static ips and cannot use DHCP.

Nope. You can use whatever DHCP server you’d like; you just have to set the pihole as your DNS server in DHCP.

There was a rabbi arbitrating a dispute between neighbours. One of them complained that the other one gathers apples that fall off his apple tree and into the other neighbour's garden. "Those are my apples grown on my tree. He's stealing them!"

"You're right," says the rabbi. But the other neighbour counters.

"But the branches of the tree are above my property. If he doesn't want them to fall on my garden, he can cut off the branch. But he lets them fall into my garden making them my apples."

"You're right," says the rabbi and adjourns the diapute to be able to think about it. He's at his wit's end and tells the whole story to his wife when he gets home.

"That doesn't make sense. They can't both be right."

"You're right."

No, you don't have a right to it. If they want to they can put the entire site being a subscriber paywall. That's their call. But until they do that i will continue to access the site with my adblocked browser.

You do have a right to your computer. After content is delivered to you, you have downloaded data, and your own hardware and software acts to consume said downloaded data. After it is downloaded, even if it is in a browser in a cache, it is considered offline content. This also applies to streaming media chunks, too: once it's downloaded, you have acquired it locally.

They don't have the right to disregard my right to privacy either, yet here we are.

But their software is just blocking based on browser. Their message to you is not "don't use an ad blocker". It's "use chrome and you won't have this problem". Theyre literally just hoping to abuse their position as a monopoly in video to try and strengthen their monopoly on browsers.

Is that why I haven't had any problems? I thought it was either Google A/B testing again or my ad blocker updating often enough to keep up, but I do have a user-agent changer installed in Firefox that's configured to tell YouTube I'm on Chrome...