YouTube’s ad blocker crackdown now includes third-party apps

misk@sopuli.xyz to Technology@lemmy.world – 659 points –
YouTube’s ad blocker crackdown now includes third-party apps
theverge.com
323

“because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership”

not like Youtube rewards creators for viewership either (and then lying to the advertisers as well)

I think YouTubers make fractional pennies from Ads, and mostly only if its fully watched and sometimes clicked to go to the website. So if you get a 15 second ad, and skip to the content, you didn't give the creators any money.

Also, shout out to those ads being horrible. My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign, that had body horror. 15 year old me didn't want to smoke, nor wanted to after, but it was so disturbing that I learned how to avoid them.

Not even going into the disturbing or weird ads. One time I got an ad for a "Ching Chong Fing Fong shirt company" as a way of mocking Chinese people because their government sucks. Another time, I got a full 12 hour video by a Vietnamese couple just grilling in their backyard. No subtitles, not even sure if they were aware they enabled their videos to do that, or didn't fully understand the process of uploading videos.

Anytime I see actual ads on the internet, not just YouTube, it just makes me go "I am perfectly justified in not seeing these weird ads." I don't give them any money no matter what I do, so why not have my eyes saved from bright flashing colors and scam artists?

If I recall correctly, ever since videos could be called up as ads you can just pay for any video to be an ad, as long as it's on YouTube, and it doesn't have to be yours. I don't know if this has changed, but an essays channel figured out that that's the fastests way someone could target a competitor's channel. Paying to have someone else's video as an ad tanks that video ad revenue and discoverability instantly. Ad views count as views to the video and skipping an ad counts as a skip on the video which signals the algorithm to think that nobody wants or likes to see that video. Do it to enough new videos and you can entirely kill a previously profitable channel in a couple of months.

My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign

Those ads made me want to take up smoking out of spite.

Ouch. Cutting off the nose to spite the face.

That was the purpose. You see, Big Tobacco actually sponsors the anti-smoking campaigns, which does give them some creative input. They tell the writers to make them as annoying as possible.

They started messing with me on YT. When Piped began giving me errors last week, YT suddenly started behaving, but nagging me to try YT again. Google is truly evil, and dasterdly to boot .

If it hadn't been for ublock origin, I'd not be on YT this long

They could probably retain users simply by running ads every 10 minutes, rather than every 3 minutes.

Oh but they don’t care about anything but short form content. If they could ditch supporting long form content today they would.

Nah they want lots of short form and also like 10 hour long videos that can play 200 ads in it that you forget is on in the background. They want tiktok and broadcast TV.

They really just want to show you ads.

The cold, hard steel of the sword of truth.

Such a fantastic series :) (the books, not any of the garbage adaptations)

This reply makes me so happy. The books are always better.

Money/s is the more used metric. Retention is secondary or even tertiary to money/s. Behold the algorithm, great and terrible, sheathed in robes of black and grasping sickle white.

Ah, but you're one layer off. Projected/potential money/s (in the next 1-2 quarters mainly) is what is truly king.

It doesn't have to be a good idea, it can be a terrible one - but good sounding words in the board room are what matter

"Hey, so we've decided to see if we can run 10 unskippable ads back to back. Simultaneously, we've launched a war on ad blockers. This time it will surely work because we found out you can ignore your customers - Elon Musk has shown us the way, he only lost bots with all his innovation. We expect people to get over it in 3 months and estimate we'll lose 4 users. Between 10x more ads and half our users off ad blockers, we project 20x ad revenue next quarter!"

-Words of a future CEO, probably

At this point id rather see youtube die than watch ads

I was watching a long video on chromecast today and I had ads every three minutes or so. That's a two hours video. The amount of ads is disgusting.

YouTube is unwatchable without an ad blocker.

My kid would watch his videos with ads and I offered to set him up with an alternative with no ads. He said no, I like the ads. I said ok then. That was two years ago. Last week he was losing his shit because of all the ads that made it unwatchable. I set him up with the ad free alternative and I get thanked every day for it.

Youtube is tanking their own platform.

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I haven't seen an anti adblocker popup on youtube for a couple months now, I though they gave up. It looks like the uBlock developers and block list maintainers are just doing an excellent job staying ahead of whatever youtube is doing.

Revanced update fixed it on their end about two weeks ago also.

Bless the Revanced guys. They made my mobile youtube binge watches as smooth as my desktop firefox + ublock setup.

Personally, I don't think a service is in the wrong for trying to protect against ad block, especially when their revenue comes from ads. However I also don't think there's anything wrong with adblockers continuing to innovate to circumvent that. I'm rooting for Ublock Origin lol

they also fucked themselves over with the ad skill issues they've had over the years. Advertisers now find it to be more worthwhile to advertise directly with creators, though that also means they make a lot more money, so.

They kinda dug their own grave, to be honest.

What made me and I imagine a large chunk of other people convert to revanced/similar apps is the super aggressive advertising, it's impossible to use youtube when you get a double ad before and after every 5 second video and get 30 second midrolls every like 3 minutes. You can't skip through a video to find the part you want to see because you'll just get an ad. It's extremely infuriating and time-consuming, it used to be where I was willing to deal with it but they fucked it up. Now I can never go back to ad-riddled YouTube, even if it has a "reasonable" amount of advertising (I am now in the belief that no amount of advertising is reasonable anymore though).

Yup. I was willing to watch one or two short ads before I watch a video, but the mid rolls and unskippable 30+second ads just made me say “well that’s enough of that”. Now I haven’t seen a YouTube ad in a long time.

Exactly. They lost their minds and went too far. Now I’ll never go back either.

Yes. Same. I was OK with banner ads. I was OK with intro ads. Started to get pissed off and annoyed at mid way ads, double ads, and unskippable ads. This is my nightmare. I hate this world and ads are a part of my pyramid of hell.

Not only monetization but also the whole sorting/ranking algorithms. Youtube is a bit better than Facebook reels and instagram due to the thumbs down button, but some people go out of their way to make nonsensical garbage because viewers will then comment, and there's no way to tell if a video is good or bad based solely on engagement. Those videos where people have some DIY hack to clean a toilet bowl and they just pour random condiments in the toilet for 3 minutes and cut the video before any conclusion, those types of videos

This is what Louis Rossman said. Youtube is completely in their right to kick people off for blocking ads. At the same time, it's also not a pissing match that's worth getting heavily invested in, because ultimately Youtube is going to lose unless they can start coercing people into installing proprietary apps which they already have for mobile devices.

This is what Louis Rossman said. Youtube is completely in their right to kick people off for blocking ads. At the same time, it's also not a pissing match that's worth getting heavily invested in, because ultimately Youtube is going to lose unless they can start coercing people into installing proprietary apps which they already have for mobile devices.

One 10-15 sec ad for an 5-10 mins video would be fair. Because if you calculate the ad shown in Cable TV it was similar I would watch them no problem. But NOOO these greedy fckrs want 3-5 ads of >15secs unskipable ads shoved down our throats. They have record profits. In a business if you are in profit then it's a good thing. But these fcks want to increase profit year by year, not stable profit for the number of users. That want infinite growth and profit from a finite source and they crazy or what? So if anyone says blocking ads on YouTube is piracy, then fck you and those greedy fckrs. They crossed the limit long time ago and they are reaping what they had sowed.

They’re publicly traded, they have to. Thats not an excuse mind you, but if you ever like a service and they go public, just understand the end users are no longer the focus.

Being publicly traded does not force companies to become greedy, immoral scum... Stop spreading this piece of misinformation

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits

PS: this goes hand in hand with the "you got to be an asshole to succeed"... You don't, the problem is that most people can't find anything else to imitate

It doesn’t force them legally, but it does effectively guide their behavior. There are a lot of things in this world we aren’t legally forced to do, but still have to do to participate in society. It’s not misinformation, it’s just the reality. It’s true that you don’t have to be an asshole to succeed, but it’s also true that you don’t have to go public to succeed either.

Not even.... If the entire point was to maximize profit for shareholders, we would see you he obscene compensation packages for C-suite execs or ridiculously luxurious perks for board members, etc

This has just been the excuse to do away with ethics and morals.... And repeating this is "the way it has to be" just makes it easier for them

Television shows are 22-24 minutes, because cable TV should show 6-8 minutes of ads every half hour. 30 second ads in blocks of 3 or 4, multiple times per show.

15 seonds ads are almost too short for a trip to the kitchen. I'm not saying they're good, but if you want to compare to cable TV, you need to remember the dark times.

Star Trek TOS episodes (1 hour show) were about 52 minutes long, with 8 minutes for commercials. By the time of TNG, episodes were down to 42 minutes. I regularly see ads every 5-6 minutes on YouTube.

Businesses never understand that it's THEIR obnoxious, sh*tty advertising that kills something profitable, and when it finally dies, it's surprised Pikachu faces all around.

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I refuse to use the official youtube app. Its so trash... I use newpipe and its amazing to just have all my favorite videos bookmarked locally in different lists.

If they take that away from me i will just stop using youtube.

Better start preparing for the coming exodus. Try Odysee, Peertube and Nebula and see what works for you. Once the enshittification hits critical mass, you’ll be ready to let go of that sinking ship.

Odysee

ewwwwww.. 99% far right garbage, zero moderation there last time I took a look.

Yeah, there’s garbage too, but I don’t subscribe to any of that. Just watch Linux and electronics tinkering videos instead.

Since the initial push, I have not even had to reset my ublock... stop using Chrome

The web should have had a Terms of Usage from start. Something like

"If you broadcast content on the internet, expect people to download it."

This. I always say this exact thing.

If you provide content for free, expect people to take it for free.

Even if you don't intend to provide it for free, if it's possible to, expect it. No different from Walmart complaining about increased theft after replacing cashiers with self checkout - tiny violins.

New pipe and inner tune still work fine.

For now

exactly, it would be trivial to have a whitelist server side and now only ad friendly apps can access the videos. they only still work because it's worth keeping those viewers in the system for the time being.

Technically NewPipe simply parses the website and is seen as a web browser from YouTube's point of view.

That how they bypass the API's TOS, they don't use it.

Trivial? What information does this whitelist hold that can't be spoofed? It's not like apps have to tell the truth about what they are.

People do that? Just have their code go on the internet and tell lies?! This is a Christian internet!

(yes it's /s)

This is what current implementations like Revanced do. The endgame will be fullblown DRM. Until then, it will be a cat and mouse game.

exactly, it would be trivial to have a whitelist server side and now only ad friendly apps can access the videos. they only still work because it’s worth keeping those viewers in the system for the time being.

It's not trivial to make sure over the network on a device you don't control that you're talking with an app you think you are talking with. Just look how multiplayer games fail to combat cheaters and resort to kernel anticheats, and then still fail to assure the players are actually using the legit application. It's actually pretty much impossible in any open ecosystem, maybe possible on something like chromecast where you get to control almost anything (as long as someone doesn't hack it to run custom firmware, like they do with every console ever).

Not only is this impossible, it always makes the experience for your legit users worse (but hey, if they are fine with the level of ads on yt today they probably don't care if google were to mine bitcoins on their phones).

Same with revanced right now.

If they ever manage to kill it I'll simply quit YouTube and be better for it.

I'll be very sad to quit it but I will too.

I can't live without sponsorblock

It would pain me to scrub through a sponsor without being to submit it to the database.

everything still fine here on firefox + ublock origin

Wish I could say the same.

I'm also using firefox + ublock, but Ive noticed when I'm watching shorts, I'll occasionally get an ad that's disguised as a short. There's no like/dislike buttons or anything.

Just block shorts alltogether, it's a win win.

How do you block shorts entirely? I used to be able to x them away in YouTube Desktop for 30 days but I can't find that option anymore. And can they be blocked in ReVanced as well?

That's intended. Even to premium subs youtube pushes adds which try and promote engagement. Its fucking awful.

Does get me out of the loop sometimes though, so I guess Im thankful for that.

Sometimes I have to reload the page when using these 2. the page will load but just have a youtube icon in the centre of the player or the spinny circle until i hit f5

Somewhere out there a CEO thought this was a good idea. All it seems to be doing is pushing people to other platforms (the younger gen moving over to tiktok and the older gens moving 3rd party or just offline).

While I agree, the amount of people who'd do this is negligibly small, compared to their total userbase. Obviously a bunch of people use ad blockers, but only a tiny amount of them have modified apps, followed by an even tinier amount of those people with fully custom frontends. For YT it might work out as a net positive, because the annoying blocks and reminders will just pressure people into paying for Premium.

At the end of the day, I could just stop watching youtube entirely, if this trend continues. I have nothing to gain there

I guess what there really winning is all those non tech-savvy people who currently have an adblocker installed because their friend helped.

Yes, been thinking I've just been substituting YT for * TV, and while the consumption can still be customized, it's still a habit that can be kicked. I bet I'll get more sleep and productivity.

  • Lol autocorrect

Several months ago, fresh off the high of following through on my resolution to leave Reddit forever, I made the same decision with YouTube. Once ublock stopped working, I'd try out peer tube, or maybe sail the seas

But ublock never stopped working. I watch more YouTube now than ever before, I got totally addicted as I binged in preparation to leave

At this point, I don't know if it'd be good for me, or send me in a desperate arms race to get my fix

YouTube is bringing its ad blocker fight to mobile. In an update on Monday, YouTube writes that users accessing videos through a third-party ad blocking app may encounter buffering issues or see an error message that reads, “The following content is not available on this app.”

Yea, noticed that last week. Is already fixed again in latest revanced.

Revanced will never die. Stand against the Goliath.

Vanced died. If revanced dies we'll just get rerevanced. Ad infitum.

Vanced died because they tried to generate revenue from it and made themselves vulnerable.

Also, unlike Vanced, Revanced doesn't distribute modded youtube apks themselves.

Oh this? It's just a binary of assorted diffs and plugins to a yet unspecified target apk. Why yes, I will use the end product for personal, non-commercial use.

Kind of funny if you read it like that, and while it certainly doesn't make them immortal, it at least may make them last a while longer i hope.

It kinda comes out of the experience. There's an outstanding Github issue that notes that a specific version of YT Music is broken past a certain version. Most of the patches fail to apply and you just get the minor ones. You can use the version just before with no issues. How can you litigate against lines of code that don't even work? This is similar to the vulnerability that Yuzu gave up since they offered Patreon-exclusive updates to support a leaked BOTW:TOTK .iso. Easy to prove your intent there.

yup, noticed that revanced wasn't working a week ago.

went into revanced manager, patched the recommended version, installed gmscore, done.

suck it youtube, i'm not paying a subscription to watch low effort vtuber edits.

Oh, I definitely have experienced "The following content is not available on this app." Before, but I thought it was just a thing of my Revanced version outdated because I rarely update it... Which I'm gonna do just now 😁

I hope this doesn't bring too many issues to Smart Tube, which is where I do 99% of my YT usage (and I have yet to be bothered with any bug).

Never had any outage in SmartTube either, unless they pushed a faulty release (I'm on the beta channel), but even then they have reacted super fast with fixes.

So far I'm using NewPipe x Sponsorblock on my phone - apparently it has been discontinued & archived, but still works just fine as well. Only the comment view is broken since a couple weeks, but I really don't care about those to begin with.

Nowadays I'm using tubular which is newpipe with sponsor block and youtube dislike incorporated.

Smart Tube in TV and Tubular on phone (plus Grayjay, but but I'm not fond of their UX).

Grayjay

Yeah, it kind of sucks, and the performance on my phone is worse than NewPipe, but I haven't found anything else that combines feeds from other sources (Odysee, Nebula, etc), so I still use it.

There are also some missing features, like browsing channel playlists.

It has a ways to make it go, for sure. That UX reminds me of WinAmp way back in the day 🤣

WinAmp was awesome! I loved having it as a floating bar to control my music.

But honestly, the UX is mostly okay for me, except the settings, that really needs some cleanup. Also, rotation is completely broken.

WinAmp was awesome! I loved having it as a floating bar to control my music.

Tell me we're old without saying that we're old 🤣

And in Grayjay, I the one thing that's flawless for me is the screen rotation.

100% agree that the menus and settings need a serious overhaul.

the one thing that's flawless for me is the screen rotation

Really? So you can watch videos horizontally without the video randomly flipping to vertical and back?

I've tried messing with the settings, but it doesn't seem to do anything. See this bug report, finding that setting was a nightmare, and it didn't even do anything. If it was open source, I'd probably go make a fix, but it's not, so I guess I'll just complain about it.

And yeah, that menu sucks as well. I hope Futo hires a UX person because it could be so much nicer to use. I'm impressed at how well it works though, so that dev is doing a top notch job.

Yup, rotation just works out of the box. Tested on Graphene, Calyx and Stock Pixel Android on a Pixel 7 Pro. Also, what I love about it is that it just works (other than the eventual YouTube captcha) for every instance enabled.

Weird. Mine works a lot of the time, but then randomly flips vertical and then horizontal. I can be holding my phone super stable, and it still does it.

My phone is kinda old and crappy though (Android 11), so maybe it's less of an issue on newer phones, but I don't have this issue on any other app.

That thing is still in beta, so it stands to reason that it's not able to do everything right all the time in all devices. My suggestion is that, unless you're watching on peertube, Odysee, rumble or something like that, stick to Tubular.

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Oh good to know, I wasn't looking for alternatives as long as it still works, but that's going to be the future then. Thanks!

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In Germany, there is a law that regulates the amount and intervals of advertising for private television broadcasters: 20% or 1/5 per broadcast day may be used for advertising. Programs that are shorter than 30 minutes may have a break, otherwise there must be 20 minutes between commercial breaks - 30 minutes in the evening. Unfortunately, there are still some loopholes.

Children's programs are not allowed to have commercial breaks.

It's a shame that this law still doesn't apply to YouTube.

It's a shame that this law still doesn't apply to YouTube

If Germany is anything like Canada and other countries, applying public broadcast laws to YouTube would be a monkey's paw deal. Sure you might get tighter control over advertising, but youtube would also be forced to do things like show you x% of content made in your country/language, resulting in state mandated control of the content you see online and potentially limiting/warping international audiences for content creators, and potentially other ramifications I'm not considering.

Now if they made a law specifically for youtube and other online video platforms that dealt with advertising in that context, that would be a different story.

Sure you might get tighter control over advertising, but youtube would also be forced to do things like show you x% of content made in your country/language, resulting in state mandated control of the content you see online and potentially limiting/warping international audiences for content creators, and potentially other ramifications I'm not considering.

This is false. You can create laws restricting advertising without creating other laws forcing companies to display domestic content. The point about the Canadian government wanting YouTube to promote domestic content is irrelevant.

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Makes me miss a time where they couldn't tell if ads were actually watched or not.

Sooner or later, ad blockers should just simulate the ad being played (in the background) with the real content going in the foreground to act as if the ad was watched.

Kind of like going to the bathroom during commercials.

Then again I wish we had a real alternative to YouTube. (Don't point me to the fediverse video stuff ... that's not what I mean.) There is no real competition for a place to freely upload videos ... or on the other side find all that content. No one wants to scale enough to compete. (Very few probably could considering the amount of new content per minute).

If only there was real competition, then YouTube would have to fight over our attention/usage by lowering ad count.

No competition means worse for all.

Well, YT is literally getting petabytes uploaded to it. Every single day. Thats 1000 terabytes, and thats 1000000 gigabytes.

I bet you haven't even seen a petabyte of storage in one place (assuming you didn't go to a data center yourself). How is a small company, or even fediverse, gonna handle that? Thats absolutely insane amount of data and, without moderation or curation, it is not feasible.

It's a giant waste of space and resources, to be honest. Most videos are seen once, and the rest is mostly spam or bad quality content.

Actually the cost issues wouldn't be the storage it's self. Storage is pretty cheap, it's content delivery networks. YouTube is supported by being owned and run by one of the worlds larges content delivery networks. There's virtually no latency, videos play immediately.

Having millions (potentially billions in YouTube's case) of people accessing data at once is an immense challenge and YouTube perfected it pretty early on, that's part of why there's no competition.

Content delivery is not cheap, but not hard to do, either. I'd wager storage would be a bigger problem, because it just keeps rising. Sadly, YouTube is the one with money, and the monetization comes from people.

I can speak from experience that content delivery is harder than storage. Companies like YouTube tackle the storage issue by having tiered storage levels. Trending content is stored on SSDs, new and often viewed content is stored on harddrives with a caching system similar to optane and archived storage (essentially old videos that very rarely get views) goes on tape storage. It's really cool, and it allows massive about of storage in a small space, it's costs alot to implement but because of the tape storage they essentially have "infinite" (it's not really infinite of course but it's a problem for next decade not this decade).

Fair enough, but that's YouTube, who can afford all of it. Of course, if you have tons of money, you don't need to count pennies where counting them would just slow you down.

But take a competitor - how can a different service be viable if they lack money to have (virtually) infinite storage? Heavy moderation or monetization. Youtube kinda does the second one.

To reiterate, I am not saying you say things that are not correct.

I remember seeing a startup at one point that wanted to put mini-CDNs in people's homes. Small black boxes that would automatically be a CDN not just for your home, but the whole area. Of course, sites would have to use their CDN network, etc.

I actually thought it was a really interesting idea. Almost like federated CDNs.

Imagine if every Xfinity router has a built-in 16TB CDN: it would be an interesting way to possibly change how bandwidth works and makes it back to the DCs. Most popular stuff would be closer, faster.

God could you imagine the security risks though, having a physical risk in a network, that would be fun. Limewire on steroids.

Well break it up "lemmy wise" or more? I mean nobody can replace youtube but it would be possible having your own fishing channel for example. If it gets wildly watched you probably have to figure out some sponsorship for sure.

BTW no I haven'tseen a PB storage, but I did write visualisation and computation software for treating and seing datastructures up to PB size with hdf5.

Sooner or later, ad blockers should just simulate the ad being played (in the background) with the real content going in the foreground to act as if the ad was watched.

I wish adblockers did this, open the ad in a little silenced sandbox window. I don't see the ad, creator gets their pay

Even the advertisers don't lose out because you wouldn't have paid attention to the ad too. They might even win a little because now one doesn't have to get annoyed by the ad and deliberately not buy the thing.

Exactly, I don't overly mind the "paid advertisements" the creators do, the guys I watch that do this are extremely funny in how they do it so if I don't manually skip I get a good laugh, like the "Adstronaut"

Adnaseum is a fork of unlock that fakes viewing ads. The thing is its banned from chromes app store because google is at its core an advertising company.

Hmm, I only use chrome for my YT chan control, not watching. Watching ANYTHING is done on FF+UBO, but if adnaseum is on FF I may switch. Poor google has YET to show an ad I would be interested in, hell the tv in the 80s showed me more of interest than ads today. Thanks for the suggestion,will check it out!

No one wants to scale enough to compete.

I don't consider scale important from the perspective of making and watching good videos. People get hung up on it when citing barriers to competition with Youtube, and while it's certainly there, it only matters to Google itself (so it can continue to plausibly lie to its customers about ad impression numbers). In fact YT's offering was at its creative peak when scale was lacking.

It makes no difference to me whether a knowledgeable hobbyist has 20,000 subs or 250,000. I don't care about their "content" suitability for advertisers (that creepy term can get nuked). I certainly couldn't care less whether the algorithm promotes their work, deserving as it may be. This sort of creator operates on the assumption their viewers are intelligent, and is typically savvy enough to route around YT with alternate donation/support mechanisms. These people will continue on any platform. For them, quality is an end in itself rather than a feed-in to a metric. I would rather watch a badly filmed insightful critical appraisal of a new piece of hardware than Canadian/Black Technology Man's 8K press release rehash full of slick cuts and pointless b-roll.

Scale is the concern of middlemen.

I wonder about this. Youtube is made so that videos has to be long (10 minutes at least, or you won't get exposure, right?) so we get all those dragged out videos with long summaries.

Also you are supposed to earn money with it, which combined makes videos, IMO, often not very interesting.

Sure, I get it, everyone can't make videos all day long for free, but isn't that something that we shouldn't maybe want?

I prefer a genuine hobbyist making one video a year, than a sponsored person pushing one a day.

Which brings me to hosting and bandwidth needs, youtube needs a lot of that because of its business model, but say Lemmy communities could probably host quality videos without large hassle (especially if small servers wasn't defederated all the time).

Thoughts?

The problem is the term quality would be used to block out certain creators. The definition would wind up being vague and/or arbitrary.

What one person thinks is quality may not be quality to someone else. In a way that's a niceness of YouTube. We can each upload what we think is good.. or bad.

Even then if a video goes big viral (which is arguably something a creator may want), the bandwidth costs could skyrocket.

Then it's like: maybe we need CDNs and more storage and boom now it's even more expensive. I just don't see fediverse video working great long term without big money to back it.

It's kinda cute how they are utterly loosing with adblocker crackdown and now they are saying they will even handle their party apps. No company will handle an open source project full of talented people pissed of by ads.

Reddit managed pretty well, let’s be real. The 3rd party app protests were essentially a speed bump that lost a tiny subsection of users that advertisers didn’t want anyways. Everyone else just migrated to the official app or website.

You can still use third party apps, they are just not in the playstore. Just like with YouTube right now

What they don't realize is people are also using those third party apps because they are offering much more customization than the stock YouTube app ever offers. I had free premium and still used Revanced because it's such a godsend. There's so much useless crap in the youtube layout.

I have premium now and use revanced. I can't stand the create button in the middle of the screen. I have no desire to make shitty videos for their platform. I would use the default app if I could just customize what buttons are on screen so I don't accidentally press one. That seems like a great accessibility feature, but I guess they don't care about some people.

I have premium and use revanced, I agree.

I just use revanced

stopped working for me yesterday :(

Are you still using the microg version? There is a new version that uses another patch. You'll have to go to Reddit for the instructions on how to install that

yeah i was using microg

Then you should switch to the new GmsCore method, fixed it for me

Does the gms version suck down battery % like microg does?

I haven't really noticed any battery drain with either to be honest

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you have to get the new microG for the newer revanced to work

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If they fully manage to block applications from viewing YouTube, then I will just stop viewing YouTube entirely. And I will figure out channels to watch on Odyssey and peertube. That will also be my last Google service since that is the only one I use frequently since I deleted my Google account two years ago.

Making you leave is their point since you cost them money.

True, but if enough people leave, then creators will start leaving as well, and that is something they do not want.

Sounds great in theory, but won't happen. The internet is too consolidated now for the majority of people to give a shit, there's people buying YouTube Premium because of all this. Look at reddit, barely a dent in it after all the fiascos, twitter is holding on too. People don't care.

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At the scale youtube does things it doesn't really cost them much. They actually have the servers, the bandwidth, often the power. It's not like they get to sell a server if enough people leave. The savings probably do not even justify the effort (=cost) to unplug the server. And they still get many other benefits of having you as a user (getting to profile you, getting to push propaganda, getting to sell your information, maybe you send videos to friends who don't use adblock, maybe you buy merch from creators making creators happier on their platform).

On the other hand this enshittification is ruining their monopoly, other areas of business (if you don't need youtube, maybe you don't need a chromecast? If you don't need a chromecast, would you buy pixel phone, that can only do chromecast if samsung can do hdmi? Maybe you're done with android? And if you're on iphone, are you still using google maps, photos, search, keep etc?) and curing people who are addicted to the platform.

The eventual consequence of enshittification is always platform death. Which would be amazing, sadly the next platform is going to repeat the cycle.

they’re going to spend $20 million in salaries playing Tom and Jerry games to try and get $7 from me that’s never coming..

At their scale and cost optimization it's likely one of the few remaining holes to plug. I wouldn't underestimate how many people try to block YouTube ads which adds up quickly. Whatever the benefit is from allowing people to keep draining their resources, it probably doesn't outweigh benefits in the non-0% interest rate environment. Their monopoly is also nowhere near threatened and their biggest competitor could be banned in the US.

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Dickheads coming to shill for YT Premium in 3.. 2..

..1!

(Read as if this was as an ad from Google) (if your familer with Rodger's Honest Ads, this was inspired by the way those are written) (if that last sentence wasn't clear...this whole post is a mockery or /s)

Buy YouTube Premium with your hard earned money so you can feel good about a few extra pennies going towards your beloved creators. We'll keep the rest of your precious money for ourselves to bring you new and exciting features you never asked for -

  • you'll get exclusive acess to the ever growing library of YouTube Originals, because we felt it necessary to take the "You" out of YouTube and sponsor our own content for you to enjoy.

  • We'll bring more pixels to you with real time 4K video streaming. Now you can enjoy one of the 6 channels that actually record in 4k in beautiful life like quality on your tiny phone, the 13 year old computer screen you rescued from your work dumpster or your smart 4K TV that doesn't have a WiFi card fast enough to get all the pixels for a buttery smooth expirence.

  • Next we'll bring you Live TV straight to your eyes from across the globe. Ditch those pesky cable bills and pay for our ever growing selection of unwilling particpents as the affordability of streaming destroys traditional cable for the low monthly cost of $57.99 for the first 3 months. As a bonus, our website doesn't bother to tell you if it includes any the other YouTube Premium features - you might just end up paying for premium twice and we have no real obligation to tell you.

  • Finally, we've thought of the little ones with our special version of YouTube for Kids, called YouTube Kids. Here we use an advanced AI system of people who can find the report button to filter out any content we decide goes against our ever changing guidelines. We allow your children to only watch the most mind numbing, cheaply made, addicitive garbage to keep them ocupied while you do more important things than raising your child.

We know the real reason you're here is YouTube Music. Access our huge library of every song that we haven't been forced to take down because some studio decided they wanted their cut. We'll entice you to spend a few more dollars than what you pay for just YouTube Music to get ad-free YouTube videos and the revolutionary ability to play music in the background on your mobile phone. That's right, we've developed a method in which you can listen to music at the same you binge read cringy fanfiction novels at 3 in the morning. It's revolutionary.

Still not convinced, lastly we added in the amazing feature called offline viewing. This will download the videos you select to your device offline in an encrypted format so hackers can't steal them from you, allowing you to watch them anywhere, provided you have an internet connection so we can verify you downloaded the videos.

Buy YouTube Premium today, and buy it again every month, for the low price of your daughter's medium latte macchiato coffe milkshake with extra caramel, whipped cream and a cute bright red40 cherry on top.

That is just to true 😩. I never heard of Honest Ads before but these are hilarious!

Ha, glad you enjoyed it.

I've tweaked it a bit. Now featuring - improved grammar, an ending and a few more jabs at YouTube.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

Honest Ads

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

It’s actually a really great deal at the old price I’m grandfathered into and none of you can get any more.

Also if you pirate YT, Google won’t pay creators. If you watch ads, Google still won’t pay creators.

Who's pirating YouTube? I'm just blocking content I don't want to watch. :)

And if you want to support creators, but something from their store or send them a donation or something. Doing that once is probably more money than they'd ever get from ads you watch.

Luckily Piped, Invidious and others are still doing its thing.

Can anyone tell me what's up with LibreTube not playing videos recently?

It's probably due to Invidious and Piped instances getting rate limited. LibreTube uses them as the source of the videos, i think.

But what makes me wonder is that I can use Firefox to play videos from the Piped instances I use, yet not in LibreTube when I set the same instance.

Invidious and piped had issues with youtube blocking them, but the instances I use work fine again now. They even blocked my self hosted invidious instance which I use maybe once a day lol.

Speaking of, does anyone know how best to block YouTube ads on my Sony TV? It uses Android and I have the YT app on it.

Install SmartTube and use that instead of the official YouTube app.

It's even better than the real YouTube app because, unlike that, it's native.

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GrayJay works great. And it's not even limited to YouTube, there are lots of other platforms you can fill your feed with. And also, you still can get your feed directly from YouTube, so recommendations are there and channel memberships also work. You can't use YouTube likes and comments, but you can create a Polycentric identity, and like the videos or comment on it in that "decentralized" identity platform.

I still use FreeTube for desktop and no ads here :)

FreeTube, newpipe etc. simulate being a browser and extract the video that way..if YouTube would want to add ads for this thirdparty clients they would have to inject them directly into the video feed.

With the WebM-Format they use it might be possible. It's based on Matroska and there is a feature to replace or add chunks within the stream in realtime.

Okay, then in exchange can I get a UI that doesn't suck?

I hear people talking about how Youtube is not paying out like it used to. So they are playing ads to us and not paying the creators. There is a growing group of people looking at open source platforms like Odysee and PeerTube.

I hope the YouTube Kodi plugin stays working, otherwise I'll have to write a script to download all latest videos in my subscription to my home server.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


YouTube is bringing its ad blocker fight to mobile.

In an update on Monday, YouTube writes that users accessing videos through a third-party ad blocking app may encounter buffering issues or see an error message that reads, “The following content is not available on this app.”

It also began disabling videos for users with an ad blocking extension enabled.

But now, YouTube says its policies don’t allow “third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership.” This appears to target mobile ad blockers like AdGuard, which lets you open YouTube within the ad blocking app, where you’ll get to view videos interruption-free.

“When we find an app that violates these terms, we will take appropriate action to protect our platform, creators, and viewers.”

This likely won’t come as pleasant news to all the users who watch YouTube through ad blocking apps, but it doesn’t look like YouTube is backing down in its battle against ad blockers anytime soon.


The original article contains 220 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 25%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Lmao, I keep hearing about this but my Ublock Origin & Firefox keeps chugging along fine on both desktop and mobile. Eat my ass, Neal Mohan.

They need to distract the MBAs with a box of crayons to eat so the adults can make good decisions.

I don't see how they'll stop these without majorly changing the functionality of the site. Most just load the none ad portions of the video. I don't understand how they'll prevent that.

The simplest solution is to embed the ads in the video stream.

That's why we have the sponsorblock add on lol

The simplest solution is to embed the ads in the video stream.

Then people could fast forward past them.
I'd be fine with it, but advertisers won't be happy until you're forced to stand up, say "Mc Donald's", and then answer a short quiz about the ad that just played before you can continue.

They could block video scrubbing at ad markers. I'm not sure how easy that is to circumvent, but it's probably harder than the current ad blockers, which just block network requests.

Anything that causes the video player to behave differently during the ad is a clear marker to ad blockers that "THERE IS AN AD HERE!"

The hardest thing to block would be just making the ad a direct part of the video, which behaves like the rest of the video. This would reduce the effectiveness of ad blockers filtering it out significantly, but then users would be able to skip ads they don't want to watch and we can't have that...

Yeah, you're probably right. Randomly distributing it would also reduce the effectiveness of things like SponsorBlock.

Yup, it would be so easy to do it in a way that is difficult for ad blockers to remove and doesn't annoy the fuck out of the users, but it would allow users to manually skip them so they're not going to do it.

But the ad blocking algorithm can notice the jump cut, (simple audio/video/meta data.) irregularities and then just jump forward to the regular video.

Those certainly are words, but how does this jump cut detection algorithm work?

Embedding an ad doesn't need to change any of the video stream information in a serious way. It's not like they're going to do something obvious like change the colorspace and encoding scheme several times just for ads, because that would provide artifacts for these types of mitigation techniques. And even if they did, how is that any different from changing the quality of the stream to continue serving video despite degraded or improved network connections? Google could decide to implement random quality changes and break this particular workaround.

Plus, if they're embedding ads into the data stream, how exactly is the metadata going to change? It's the same connection, served from the same location, over the same socket. It's not like sections of video need to have "AD" in the middle of their encoded data streams.

The "proper" solution here is to embed the ad in the stream and transfer the resulting higher with DRM protections. You can still probably get around it with add-ons like SponsorBlock, but that takes way more effort and YouTube could randomly distribute them in the video so they aren't as easy to detect.

It's totally possible and probably not that hard, so I'm grateful YouTube hasn't done it.

It's totally possible and probably not that hard

I'm guessing you never had to implement drm and caching on a large scale video cdn before.

No, but Netflix and other video services do it, so it's totally feasible. I assume most of the cdn infra YouTube already does would stay the same, the main change would be the insertion of ads (they already do video processing) and encryption (which is probably not that hard).

DRM adds such a massive amount of overhead and is an absolute bastard to implement properly. Plus, it's pretty easy to circumvent most DRM schemes when it comes to media.

LibreTube hasn't worked in a couple of weeks

Yeah so I'm not the only one! Does anybody know what's the matter?

YouTube is blocking it, the only way to fix it is to go into settings and disable the piped proxy

microG, Newpipe and brave still working like a charm..

I literally just use the Dislike Re-Adder, also used uBlock Origin and never got an Anti-AdBlock message

spoofing app signature makes revanced not work and clipious also not working so im down to just newpipe sponsorblock and yt on browser

Now? They've always been playing whack-a-mole against third party apps.

And yet it still can't figure out how to get past two adblockers at once

It's stupid that it works, but it works

Why would you use two adblockers?

Because so far, not a single YouTube update has let them get past it. Basically, I switched adblockers but forgot to uninstall the old one, then by the time I noticed, I had also noticed that the combination somehow, for some bizarre reason, ends up confusing anti adblockers to the point of not even getting "disable adblocker" messages. It's not something involving their blacklists either because they have the same blacklist (due to the aforementioned replacing one with another then forgetting to uninstall the older one)

I have only uBlock Origin and no YouTube update has gotten past it (except the first one for a few hours), I never get "disable adblocker" messages either. Also anti adblockers are not blacklist based.

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it would be amazing if they could just add a mobile ui to Smarttube (best android tv app imho) - it supports login, adblock, sponsorblock & dearrow, you can cast to it, etc. - and it's updated constantly, via a prompt in the app, no external download or play store necessary

You can use Revanced which allows to log in, adblock and sponsorblock at least. I use it everyday and it works great!

YouTube’s Youtube crackdown now includes third-party apps

Ungoogled chromium + uBlock origin + pihole and I haven't had any issues so far (Germany)

They'll fail so hard, can't wait to watch this train wrack. If YouTube is gone tomorrow this is just a little inconvincing to me. Competition will pop up for every single element. Be it gaming, music or video trailer or fan made content. YouTube is stacking so high, they haven't noticed we're ready to replace them. Not one huge new YouTube, just small parts and people create 4-10 bookmarks to get the same content.

This is the same comment that appears on every YT update for 15 years. No, it won't happen. YT is too big to fail and real competition is almost non-existent (due to various reasons). Some have tried, all have failed, unfortunately.

Also, I'm sure people would rather pay a monthly subscription than go to other plattforms.

While I agree YouTube won't die because of this, nothing is too big to fail.

I didn't mean YouTube will die, it's obviously too big at the moment. But they will lose a lot of users, quite a few old sites still exists as zombie without much relevance.

With "they'll fail" I mean the CEOs who plan this, will fail, because there are alternatives. I should've been more precise. YouTube knows that, that's why they added shorts, they are already bleeding users.

Yes. The day after I posted I'd been happily using piped for a few days, it stopped working.