Windows Phone gets revenge on YouTube from the grave by helping users bypass its ad-blocker-blocker
windowscentral.com
Windows Phone gets revenge on YouTube from the grave by helping users bypass its ad-blocker-blocker::Windows Phone to the rescue. A lot of YouTube users want to know how to get around the new annoying YouTube pop-up telling viewers to disable their ad-blocker.
This article feels like a large language model generated article.
TLDR: use a user agent switcher
Other advice: use Firefox from f Droid, or Mull and install U-Block origin. Use new pipe, or libretube to avoid ads as well
FreeTube, free open source YT client for desktop (Win, Mac, Linux). Been using it for past few days and despite being alpha, it works quite well. No data sent to YT except video requests. Subscriptions are stored locally and you can create profiles to separate subscriptions.
https://freetubeapp.io/
I love free tube. But I can't quite figure it out. It works great on two of my computers. But on one of my computers is just dog slow. No matter which setting I fiddle with. So it's definitely alpha, if it works for you it's amazing.
Only tried it on Windows 10 and I have a beast of a desktop machine (Ryzen 9 5950x, 128GB RAM and a Radeon X5600XT, built it for virtualization). Will try it on Linux later today and on my laptop.
Surprisingly, it's my most powerful machine, that has the worst video playback. With constant pauses.
I'm running free tube on Mac OS, Windows 11, Windows 10, Fedora inside of qubes.
The settings are identical, I think it's something with the local API proxy. I just check it up to the alpha stage and inconsistent environments.
I have been using too and it is awesome. Oy thing I have issue with is when playing a Playlist on full-screen it exits full screen at the end of every video so you have to click on it again to go full screen. Quite annoying on how I use it.
Seconding this, FreeTube works quite well.
Now there's grayjay as well, which is a universal media streaming client that respects your privacy.
Is that android phone only? I mean it would be cool to have it both on desktop and android tv...
I read somewhere there is talk of it coming to desktop.
You can run it under Amazon android emulator, but still has glitches regarding screen usage.
Well. Is it possible? Yes. Is it user friendly and optimized? Not really.
That's why it would be great to have native app.
Run Android Subsystem for Windows, problem solved.
Well, I know the solution exists, but it hardly counts as a desktop app. I'd prefer something native (esp. for linux).
Yea, nit the easiest/simplest approach. Something native would be better.
I already run WSA for other stuff, so it's already there, and Android apps appear just like other apps.
I've been using revanced on android and have got no problems with youtubes enshitiication anthics, it even has sponsorblock for skipping sponsor in videos, it plays in the background in a small window while i browse lemmy. Only set back might be that its a little hard to install, since you need the patcher, a manager called micro g, and a very specific version of youtube that cannot be get from the playstore and the patcing is a little more complex that it should, but its worth every second of it once its done.
Right?
Every other sentence was something about how Google wouldn't work with Microsoft.
Points were repeated ad nauseum
I just switched a few days ago from NewPipe to PipePipe. As far as I can tell it functions the same but has more features. I didn't care for LibreTube at all.
this so much. people are so allergic to firefox for some reason that they are using windows fucking phone.
The article isn't about people using a Windows phone, the article is about people setting their user agent to Windows phone, and then Google not trying to do the ad blocking on them.
I don't know what voodoo magic I've pulled. But I'm still not getting pestered by YouTube to turn off ad block and I'm still watching 5 - 10 videos a day. FF w/ uBlock Origin and piHole
Probably just A/B testing.
Possibly. Does seem a little long for that being they've been doing this for a couple weeks at least. Maybe I should try it on some of my other devices / computers.
It isn't rolled out to everybody at once.
I had those warnings and they stopped for me 2 days ago
Yea I thought I was lucky until a few days ago. Same setup as you; FF, ublock, and pihole. Started with the first message, then this morning I just got the message saying 3 video limit lol.
Thankfully, purging all caches in ublock origin makes it stop for a bit.
And the arms race is on.
Sadly, I am getting the warning even whitelisting YouTube on Ghostry. I have to turn off Ghostry altogether to do away with the warning.
FF w/uBlock Origin and + PiHole = No YouTube disable adblocking pestering here also...
Same here, I have YT watch history turned off and have ads blocked through Brave (I know I know, I’m trying to find a better browser) and haven’t seen anything at all yet, on my pc or phone.
Any particular reason to not use Firefox with addons like ublock? Just curious
I just don’t trust Firefox. The Mozilla Foundation is just a front for their corporate side, the Mozilla Corporation which somehow reaps in millions in profits despite being a free browser. I read that most of their profits come from letting Google integrate search and other features into Firefox. I’m currently migrating to Librewolf for PC which has the same framework but lots more privacy functionality. For iOS, Brave collects a lot less information about you than Firefox- check the App Store pages for each browser and compare.
I don't understand your ranting about mozzila. In the wiki page you posted right there :
Where is the profit on the page? The revenue isn't profit, it's how much money they make without the costs.
Then how do you expect a browser to survive without revenue? There are 3 major browser engines on the market today :
blinkwebkit (baked up by apple, with big money too)Al of them suck up huge amount of money.
For revenue, they also have more products than Firefox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mozilla_products which also make money or not.
Blink = Chromium. WebKit is what Apple uses (and is what Blink was originally forked from).
The Mozilla Corporation is a tax entity for the Mozilla Foundation. Your bullshit detector is miscalibrated.
Why is it every time I see something about Brave it’s either singing it’s praises or demonizing it’s failures, there’s literally no in-between
By encouraging you to buy their paid services, which are now on your computer with or without your consent
https://www.androidcentral.com/apps-software/brave-browser-secretly-installing-vpn
And Google updating this old code in 3, 2, 1
Probably just deleting it 😂
It's a shame, the original windows.phone concept was great
It was great. Even if I didn't like the idea of "yet another walled garden, funded by a company known for its track record against open source software (this was during Ballmer era)", I really liked the design and how fluid the interface was. It could have become another player in the mobile market and lessen the practical duopoly. Firefox OS tried this too, but it also went under.
It was great until people were forced to buy a new phone instead of receiving updates
Oh, how they handled their phone devision was awful. The original "how would we build a new phone OS from scratch" bit was awesome though
This is a battle google will lose miserably.
I doubt it, unfortunately.
Like many other online services they've saturated the market so the only way to increase profits is to extract more money from individual users.
They are also a quasi-monopoly for a reason - hosting and streaming video is resource-intensive, so I wouldn't hold my breath for a free alternative that would scale. AFAIK, piped and such are only frontends to youtube which will be killed off by ToS or through technical means.
Maybe there are free video sites that also host their videos, but as I said, since it quickly becomes very expensive, I don't see anyone being able to do that for free for long.
Unfortunately, if anyone is going to "disrupt" youtube, it is going to come from a silicon valley startup and like youtube they will only burn investor capital for a limited time - until they have saturated the market (or failed). Then they'll have to monetize as well.
My only hope is something like a torrent approach where everyone who streams also hosts. But since that is technically difficult to perfect, needs a huge user base to succeed while not promising any commercial gain for the initiating party, nobody will throw a ton of money at the problem, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
My prediction is that people will either pay for premium or see ads in the mid- to long-term.
We need to think about what people did before YouTube. It was already gaining traction around 2006, but before that you could still watch videos on different websites, it was just decentralized and videos were hosted on smaller pages. You might even see a website dedicated to a single video. YouTube’s incredibly convenient, but internet video can and will survive without it.
I am sure other platforms / personal hosting will continue to exist in the future. They simply won't be relevant in terms of video streaming market share.
The network effect of youtube is massive. They have a huge amount of content creators and audience. That means the audience will stick around for the creators and the creators go for the biggest audience and hence the most views.
Being google, they have data centers all over the globe, provide a fast app / browser access for any OS, can cast to a TV with one click - all these equal convenience which cannot easily be beat by any individual website.
Some huge youtube brands like linus media group are trying with floatplane as their own paid video hosting service, but I'm sure their view numbers are insignificant compared to youtube even though they are the biggest players.
Nebula is pretty decent. It's like if you took all the best content off of YouTube that would also fit in well at The Discovery Channel.
Thanks for the reminder. I've been wanting to try it out.
There's a significant aspect of scale being ignored when you talk about video sites before Youtube took off.
Not a single one of those self hosted sites had anywhere near the storage that youtube allows. Want a video from over a year or two ago? Hope you downloaded it or the creator loved it enough to leave it up. Frame rates? Resolution? What are those? I understand that tech has advanced as well, and those issues would not be as severe now, but I really doubt that a lot of channels even now would be able to keep the same lengthy back catalog of old content if they were self hosting.
I also think that there are countless channels that would never have existed if the creators had to figure out hosting their own site, setting up streaming of the video files on it, potentially managing their own comments plugins, potentially managing their own methods to keep viewers aware when new content was posted, and having to somehow spread the word of their existence without the aid of an existing platform trying to keep people viewing things for more ad impressions.
The monopoly of Youtube is a problem, the lack of easy to use and configure open alternatives is a problem... but we can't ignore the massive impact Youtube had in lowering the barrier to entry and upkeep costs of being a content maker.
There are a lot of hurdles to content creation and hosting that Youtube enables creators to completely ignore.
Also, lots of the younger generations didn't really mind the ads. After this news showed up, we had a discussion going on my company discord. Most of the older people started sharing workarounds but most of the younger people said that they've been using YouTube with ads and didn't see any problem with it.
I've seen the same. I wonder if the older you get, the more you value your time.
I remember seeing lots of ad breaks on TV when I was a kid and it didn't stop me from watching a show. Now if an ad break happens, I am reminded why I don't own a TV and turn it off.
In my case, it's less of a "value my time" and more "I'm just tired of being advertised to constantly and want a break"
I agree that the sheer quantity of resources required to host videos is hard to be able to compete, but there’s also Invidious, which is the fediverse equivalent. As with other fediverse applications, it will largely depend on the people running the instances and how much they storage they can support.
By what metric will they lose miserably? They do not care about you if you block their shit. This policy will do 3 things:
Google only gains from this.
I've been using YouTube Premium (née YouTube Red) for so long that I totally forgot that there are ads on YouTube and was surprised by all of this news popping off.
Same here except I've always used adblocker. The contrast between YouTube with adblock + sponsorblock compared to stock, cannot be overstated. The site literally becomes unuseable. It's awful.
My wife is firmly embedded with Apple products and it's always a trip when she wants to show me a Youtube video.
Controversial take around these parts but... I don't mind paying for services I use. A model where content is hosted and edited and provided for free by ads is already a bad and unsustainable model, and when most users use adblock too it just pushes companies towards ever more intrusive and unethical methods.
I have been paying for YouTube without ads since it was part of Google Play Music. I'll pay for services as long as they meet some criteria I consider fair:
If I'm paying, you don't get to also show me ads. I won't even pay for HBO for this reason. They're showing ads for their own shows, not from random advertisers, but it's still obnoxious to me
The price has to be reasonable and affordable. Netflix has passed this line now, for me, but for example Crunchyroll and YouTube Premium remain worth it for now.
It has to be convenient. News sites are inconvenient because there's a million of them and I don't plan to use one as a central portal for news. I'd rather click on a link I see from somewhere else or that a friend sends me and be able to view. I'd kill for a service where I pay a monthly fee for news sites and it just analyzes which ones I actually used and splits the money up to them accordingly.
I find the number of people saying "well I'm not going to use YouTube anymore!" hilarious. Yeah dude, that's the point, you were just a cost to them, not a profit source. I'll happily argue that capitalism is broken, that a lot of our most important services should be freely accessible, that corporations are seeking profit in increasingly unethical ways. I just don't think being a complete leech is a reasonable answer.
But you're paying for a service that uses you as a product. You are paying twice.
Maybe I guess? People keep talking about Google selling user data but that is one thing they explicitly DON'T do. User data is their competitive advantage, not their product. They sell advertising, and advertisers can be explicit in who they target. If Google sells the data, they lose the value they hold to advertisers.
So Google is almost certainly still recording what I do and what I watch. But if I'm not seeing ads related to it, am I paying twice? What makes it different from, for example, Netflix keeping track of my watch history to recommend other shows?
I suppose that the videos I watch might inform the ads I see on search, so in that sense you could say I pay twice. But I don't use Google for search anyway so it kind of doesn't matter.
Google doesn't sell your raw personal data. They refine it and then sell it.
This is exactly the reason I use Apple News+. I get access to multiple magazines I have read forever, actual well written journalism, news briefs tailored to my wants, etc. It's very much worth the price for me.
The only reason I still use YouTube is to post to lemmy and download videos so I never have to use their crappy platform
Try grayjay... it's an AWESOME new app, open source, and supports all video networks you can think of as plugins.
It's available on: grayjay.app
Does grayjay update when creators add new videos etc for YouTube? That would be the only reason i DONT use it. Though I don't see whynit wouldnt.
Pulls directly from YouTube or whatever other source you have a plugin for. So yes it'll catch automatically when people release new videos.
Yes and no. Cool project but I gotta be honest I'm not a big fan of Louis Rossman / FUTO's "open source but not free " stance.
It's open source and it's free. You're free to pay too if you want to support them. Software costs money.
What Louis is protecting against in his license is repurposing the app with malware and ads like was repeatedly done with new pipe. Pick your poison.
No! Libertarian GPL or DIE!
::: spoiler . /s, kinda :::
I'm not sure I understand your philosophy there or you're joking. Why is GPL so important? Isn't the purpose of open-source to validate that no funny business is happening?
That is a purpose of open source.
First, I was wrong in linking libertarian with GPL, I was thinking of permissive licenses like MIT. GPL is a CopyLeft license, in that it forbids proprietization. MIT is more like, do whatever the hell you want, you just can’t sue me.
The joke should have been "Libertarian MIT License or DIE!"
I think MIT is actually a pretty rough license, because it allows someone to come along, take the open source work, add anything, or virtually nothing and then start selling it as their own while keeping any new code secret... when they got it for free. I'm mostly against that, but there are people who believe strongly in that type of license.
I'm more in favor of GPL like licenses (not prescriptively, but preferentially) because they force the work and its derivatives to be shared by the community, for the work to continue to be open source.
I mean it's not NewPipe's fault that Google Play hosts malware.
Based on what Louis Rossmann said it does seem the more restrictive licence comes from a place of good intentions:
But idk if that's also what the license actually means legally-speaking. I'm no expert but section 4 seems pretty dubious:
::: spoiler FUTO TEMPORARY LICENSE:
This license grants you the rights, and only the rights, set out below in respect of the source code provided. If you take advantage of these rights, you accept this license. If you do not accept the license, do not access the code.
Words used in the Terms of Service have the same meaning in this license. Where there is any inconsistency between this license and those Terms of Service, these terms prevail.
Section 1: Definitions
Section 2: Grant of Rights
Section 3: Limitations
Section 4: Termination, suspension and variation
Section 5: General
Last updated 7 June 2023. :::
2 million people follow that guy so 🤷♂️
So?
Sorry, who are you?
Not the moron blindly following people because of followers
Sure , whatever makes you happy
is there something wrong with having a large following?
Nope, I follow Louis as well. I love how he promotes right to repair and custom Roms. I installed custom ROM because of him and checkout my battery backup now.
that's actually impressive
#TeamLouisRossmann and #TeamFUTO represent!
Is it better than ReVanced?
Try it out and decide for yourself.
I just use NewPipe. Screw Google & YT.
or LibreTube, it looks more modern imo
Or GrayJay. They have the app on f-droid too. It aggregates almost every video sharing websites. YouTube, twitch, rumble, odysee etc.
Doesn't appear to be the case - https://search.f-droid.org/?q=grayjay&lang=en
I don't think they can be on F-Droid with the license they use.
Love GrayJay
Yeeesh!!! Google Play? They won't be on there long, lmao.
I miss windows phone. The user interface was much cleaner and user friendly than any other phone OS I’ve seen. The only problem was it didn’t have the ecosystem of Android or iOS.
Same here. I hate the standard rows of icons look on most Android launchers. Since i had to part with my Lumia 950 because off failing app support i have been using Square Home as my launcher on my Samsung S8 and now the Pixel 8.
I'm pretty sure there's a launcher for Android that mimicks the look and feel of the Windows phone
People could build a sort of mix of youtube and torrent tech, like popcorn or stremio but for short copyright free content. I dont know how to do it.
…So PeerTube?
No you will still need to host Peertube on your server or VPS etc not even sure why they call it PEERtube because it's clearly not peer to peer. What I'm talking about is a decentralized peer to peer streaming tool like Stremio (uses torrents) but instead of having movies, we could have you know small/average lenght videos like youtube, and also channels and so on.
Whatever happened to zeronet? Wasn't that supposed to do that with many services as well as the whole thing in general?
I'm guessing it just never got enough users.
Edit - link https://zeronet.io
Last release was just over 4 years ago and it seems it never truly recovered after that. While there other options they are either bad (IPFS) or lack publicity to catch on (DAT/Hypercore)
Sadly it's been practically dead for a long while now.
You mean BitChute but not filled with fascist garbage?
There's the rub, isn't it? Fascists are the ones most actively seeking new platforms to move to after their removal from any other, meaning a lot of the start-up content has to be thoroughly filtered, which takes a lot of effor and resources away from growth.
Non-fascists should also just switch away from YouTube. We just need to outnumber the Nazis on alternative platforms like Odysee. BitChute is a hopeless case, but we actually have a chance on Odysee. PeerTube is great though, there are a lot instances that are free of Nazis. It has some other issues though. Sticking with YouTube definitely isn't an option.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
There are a lot of people frustrated by YouTube's decision to force a pop-up message for viewers using an ad-blocker as seen in this Reddit post.
Microsoft itself built an excellent Windows Phone YouTube app for its era, only for it to receive an arbitrary block by Google.
An X (Twitter) user named @endermanch posted a workaround for bypassing the extremely annoying YouTube pop-up that, for now, doesn't force you to disable your ad-blocker but that could just be a matter of time.
At least for right now the method of switching to the Windows Phone user-agent seems to completely remove the YouTube pop-up and allows you to get back to glorious ad-free viewing.
At the moment it's just an inconvenience and users can click out of the pop-up to continue watching their favorite creators such as our Windows Central channel.
However, with the hubris that these content platforms must feel after Netflix was successfully able to stop password sharing and still increase subscriber numbers, I don't think it will take long for YouTube to completely block users that have an ad-blocker enabled.
The original article contains 581 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Good bot
I think I had this phone lol
Just use noscript
Have you tried paying for it?
It absolutely is not worth £17 a month simply for no ads.
Then stop using it 🤷♂️ That's a personal value. I find yt+music for the family for$22 a steal.
The entitlement of you all is crazy.
Oh won’t somebody think the billion dollar company
Lololol you are directly stealing from creators. There isn't even some thin connection. They get paid on ad views and subscriptions. You are straight up taking money from creatives.
I’m under no obligation to watch advertisements. They can try to advertise to me if they want, I can avoid it however I want. Did you ever grow up with linear TV? Did you just eventually piss yourself because it would have been unfair to the commercial broadcast company to not pay attention to the ads? You mook.
You’re under no obligation to watch anything.
You are under an obligation to maximize your shareholder value as a consumer, anything against that violates the prime directive and will send bots from the matrix to simp for it. Thanks for the reminder, I don’t have to watch anything. What a revelation of information I did not know before this.
They get paid by YouTube regardless, and YouTube makes enough from data harvesting alone.
Content creators don't make as much from ads as you think. Apparently selling merch and sponsorships is where most comes from.
Who would buy stuff from a person they never heard of? How did they get popular?
Might not be brand new companies. It might be an existing company with a new product.
Imagine thinking content uploaded to a proprietary platform is still yours
What rights does yt take from the content owner?
Every single one of the content creators I watch who has said anything about ad blocking has encouraged their viewers to use ad block.
They all do in-video sponsorships and run patreons, as anyone serious about making money off video content does.
Beyond the absolutely abysmal ROI for content creators on Youtube ads, Youtube has repeatedly made sudden extreme changes to their monetization rules. They also have some of the worst support for creators when videos get arbitrarily demonetized, or when backend issues cause a creator's ad revenue to be direct deposited to someone else's account for literal years. This has lead most creators to not be able to rely on Youtube monetization as an income stream.
Again I need to emphasize that literally every single one of the content creators I watch who has said anything at all about ad blocking has encouraged their viewers to use ad block, including against the creators' own content. Most creators want Youtube competitors to rise.
Youtube has never made a profit since its inception almost 20 years ago. Google makes money hand over fist off of the user data it collects on me and others through analytics and analysis, regardless of the ads I may or may not allow it to display to me, and clearly has found Youtube a worthwhile return on investment for it to have been allowed to continue existing for as long as it has. Google does not baby any of their platforms or systems, and they regularly shutter things that seem far better business ventures.
This crackdown is not the actions of a company scrambling to make something profitable lest that thing be put under existential threat.
I am not looking to get content for nothing. I am arguing that the price has already been paid, otherwise Youtube would have been shuttered by Google many years ago.
I understand that Youtube may not exist if every single user blocked ads. Thankfully for Google, that is so unlikely to occur as to be effectively impossible. That's also not my responsibilty to look out for.
I'd argue that any singular person believing that their individual actions could make an impact on Youtube or Google needs to find better causes to spend their time on, and should work on their ego.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
when backend issues cause a creator's ad revenue to be direct deposited to someone else's account for literal years
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
With the amount of telemetry and trackable data they've collected and potentially sold, and the quality of both the service and the content being in a constant decline, I consider my malware-free access to the service to be paid for life.
Shit, considering the way they handled recent controversies, I see it as a moral obligation to hit them in the wallet.
They still show ads even when paying. So your argument is moot from the start.
I remember ages ago when you could just have youtube background play on android. Then they removed it. And now you have to pay for it.
I'm not giving them my money, especially when you consider how much data they harvest from you to sell it on.
I pay for spotify, whilst they do use trackers and sell your data. I get a metric ton more use out of it. Youtube to me, is just background noise.
No, steal from them as much as possible. Stealing from corporations is morally good.
You are stealing from creators, collateral damage I guess 🤷♂️
If you're worried about creators, support them via their patreons or what means they determine. They aren't making much directly from YouTube, and their support streams are more certain that way.
I think the YouTube copyright and claim system will take care of that more than a couple thousand viewers can.
Sure, just throw money at the corpos, but please don't act surprised when they suddenly double the premium fee, or when they start sneaking in ads for premium users. That's the problem with corpo greed, it just never ends, and the moment you give in to it, you lose.
I will never ever pay for youtube and I'll never stop blocking ads. Theres always a way, and if the day comes where ad blockers actually become iniffective then thats it for me, I'll find somewhere else. I'm already a reddit refugee since they blocked 3rd party aps and charge a subscription fee, I can't figure out a workaround yet so I dropped reddit altogether.
What if I want to pay, but also don't want to be tracked?
So I pay for a YouTube premium account, but I still use an ad blocker and logged out YouTube and a VPN so I'm not tracked.
The problem there is that you're giving more money to Alphabet but not giving your YouTube Premium views to the content creators. I understand not wanting to be tracked, but I feel like this is the worst scenario.
Might be the worst scenario, but nobody can know about my celebrity foot fetish. And I'm unwilling to be tracked.
As far as I'm concerned YouTube premium tracking, encouraging people to be logged into Google accounts, just like grocery stores loyalty programs. It's a premium to encourage you to be tracked.
That's all fair, I would just say cancel your YouTube Premium then.
Don't use it.
Why should I pay some extortionate fee each month on Google's monopoly? Even if I do that they're still hoovering up all the data they can get from me.
U-block Origin on desktop, revanced/newpipe for mobile.
IMO the money is much better spent on directly supporting content creators rather than padding the coffers of a 1.75 trillion dollar anti-competitive, monopolistic, tax-dodging, privacy-destroying company like Google.
Exactly, I whack out almost GBP 20 per month to content creators I like.
Spend the money where it will make a difference!
Remember when streaming services boasted about ad free viewing, only to then Continue to charge you AND serve ads to you WHILE collecting and selling your personal information? These companies can smd.
Tell me, how many cups of Pumpkin Spice Latte Chai Frappucino we are not drinking then?
👌