wow just wow while i can’t say i didn’t see this one coming but it always amazes me where greed could lead someone
Google is an ad company. To them, a web browser is nothing more than a tool for collecting user data and delivering ads.
When you use a chromium based browser you are allowing google, an ad company, to decide what the future of web browsing should look like. And this is the result.
Firefox is the ONLY browser which is genuinely competing with google. Do you think ad and tracking blockers are going to get better or worse once they die out, and literally every major browser is running on chromium?
Use firefox and u-block origin. Enjoy a superior, ad free, browsing experience, and support the future of an open web.
It’s so encouraging to hear so many pro Firefox opinions lately. Then I remember I’m logged into the pirate instance of a federated platform and anti-corporate sentiment is probably as high as it gets.
Sadly most younger people haven’t even heard of Firefox.
Most young people are basically tech illiterate. Yeah they are fantastic with new apps and phones. But have zero idea how any of it works under the hood.
Ask them to transfer a file from a computer to a USB drive, most will not know how. They have no idea how a file system is structured or even that an app has to specifically made for different platforms… e.g. Facebook app on Apple is completely different from Facebook on Android and the two will contain different bugs and different settings.
We are almost back to default browser = internet
You’re absolutely right.
Yeah they are fantastic with new apps and phones.
I think that’s mostly because most commercial apps have fantastic ui and ux.
Most younger people have heard of it. Using what came with their computer is just easier to them though.
I agree, most of the younger people use browsers that are bundled with the operating system.
- Android = Chrome
- Windows = Edge
- Mac/iOS = Safari
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It’s my preferred mobile browser because you can install ublock origin and other privacy extensions which is pretty unique
Firefox on android is really slow. I tried using it, but now I use Vivaldi
Pros : really fast Cons : chromium based
Right? After years of feeling like the only pro-firefox person left on the planet, the pro Firefox sentiment lately is a breath of fresh air, to say the least.
Well, we are in the worst cyberpunk timeline so…
It’s my preferred mobile browser because you can install ublock origin and other privacy extensions which is pretty unique
Young people seem to proudly go along with the biggest name, which is really sad. They think there’s merit in that, conforming means acceptance.
Meanwhile, anytime I encounter a young non-conformist doing something very contrarian, it gives me some hope for the future. Because 99% of society is open-armedly embracing dystopia because the one thing they hate more than anything is the burden of independent thought and self-determinism. To intelligent freethinking individuals, seeing it play out is a waking nightmare.
Sadly, at the end of the day I prefer edge because it
has cloud voicesis slightly faster
Thank you for this.
No way I’ll use YouTube with ads. The amount of your lifetime they waste is what I’d consider disrespectful to their users. Even if the ads were bearable, I wouldn’t turn off my ad blocker on any Google site for tracking alone.
I also don’t see myself subscribing to YouTube Premium, firstly because it’s too expensive (stop including your music streaming service and make it cheaper maybe?), but also because YouTube is just a platform with a lot of not curated content that YouTube had no part in creating.
Let’s see how the cat and mouse games between YouTube and ad blockers and alternative frontends go. If it’s too much of a hassle, I’ll just stop using YouTube. I don’t miss Twitter, I don’t miss Reddit, and I won’t miss YouTube.
Not the main point, but this is the first time I’ve seen “allowlisted”. Lol
…are they trying to avoid saying whitelisted because of the word “white”?
Report issue. You’re not running an adblocker! wink
Google already has trouble with support, if they have a million lightly befuddled users who are getting blocked and “don’t know why”, that will be a problem for Google.
I haven’t had this happen using ublock origin, but if they do figure out how to block ublock origin, adnausiem (ublock origin fork) might work. It’s a fork of ublock origin that tricks the ad providers into thinking you clicked on every ad, which not only bypasses a lot of adblock detectors, it Actively costs them money by polluting their ad data with garbage.
If they really want to prevent us from watching videos without ads, they can. They know of the ad is watched or not, we can have some kind of auto-mute-during-ad but that’s it.
Question is if they will kill network effect with it.
I have already drastically reducedy yt watching because of too many sponsors… watching two minutes of sponsored material, plus two ads just to see that I don’t even wanna watch the stupid video is too much.
Not to mention those laud ads in the middle of relaxing and quiet video… few months ago one ad was starting with screaming, that’s when I said no way.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
it Actively costs them money by polluting their ad data with garbage.
Lmaoo, i’m going to install that
I’d say to you all: get used to bombshells dropping! At some point the investor pyramid scheme will go crashing down. It might be now. All those companies were on borrowed time. Until investors realised that “data” isn’t valuable on its own - it’s what you make of it. There needs to be a product that generates revenue. Spoiler alert, it is hard to come up with a business plan that takes plain usage data and makes the technical challenges worthwhile to squeeze money from it. I can feel it myself as data scientist. The honeymoon’s over, investors want to see ROI.
I mean this cycle will probably recover in a few years when the markets recover but still - some lessons stick
Holy shit! Your post made me realize that we are in Dot-com bubble burst 2.0
It the exact same thing, everyone and their dog, had to have a webpage. Investers finally realized that most websites had no way of generating money, and stuff came crashing down.
Same thing is happening now!
Except everything is crashing this time because of interest rates going up and there being a recession happening globally.
Holy shit! Your post made me realize that we are in Dot-com bubble burst 2.0
It’s the exact same thing, everyone and their dog, had to have a webpage. Investors finally realized that most websites had no way of generating money, and stuff came crashing down.
Same thing is happening now!
Zines are making a comeback!
DRS GME
Really not worth watching a 10 minute video that has four minutes of YouTube ads and a minute of a sponsor pitch by the creator.
Yeha, if they are pushing this, the least they can do is lower the amount of ads.
2 ads before a video starts is just too much. Also the constant ads during the videos. Screw that.
No more YouTube for me I guess.
FreeTube/Piped on PC
ReVanced on droid
uYou+ on 🍎 phone
SmartTubeNext on 📺
Youtube can do the fuck they want on their website
The more ad-riddled they make the platform to try and monetise users, the more they make adblocks necessary to even be usable.
I didn’t use to both with adblockers. I didn’t like ads, but they didn’t affect me enough for me to go through any effort blocking them.
Now I use blockers everywhere, on every platform. Even for creators I like, because I know how little they actually make for ads - so how bout instead of watching 12 hours of ads so they can get 2c, I just send them a dollar or buy their merch every once in a while to not watch ads at all? Etc.
Ads could have had a place. There are ads that serve a purpose, that have minimal disruption but still give businesses a way to develop awareness for those who might want to use them.
Movie trailers (including when they stopped trailing movies and started leading them) are examples of ‘acceptable ads’ to me. When I purchase something from a store and they include a printed card from their sponsor. When sports teams have logos for being sponsored. A work van with the business logo parked while out on call. Etc.
But the internet’s online ads? Email spam? Telemarketing? These are forms of advertising that are actively hostile, and they’ve become the default. So now a user that wants to be on the internet at all is best served by block all ads, including the ones that would’ve otherwise been reasonable.
Google will never make me feel guilty for blocking ads when they’re already making their search engine unusable, too.
And while I’m at it, here’s the filters to add to your uBlock Origin’s MY FILTERS settings to block YT’s blocker:
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)
youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
I’ll add this the next time I’m on my computer.
Same
Blockers to block blockers. insert Xzibit meme
Thanks BTW.
Wait, surely that doesn’t work? It might block the "disable your adblocker popup but there’s no way this is all it takes for yt to continue serving videos?
It’s feasible that there are other variables that have been missed, but essentially this works. The server asks us a question, and we answer it. We just skip the bit where we provide evidence.
It’s like looking up the answers in the back of the textbook on a test. The only thing the server sees is the paper we’re handing in, it has no idea if we cheated or not.
Boring technical explanation:
For a server (in this case, YouTube) to see what a client (your computer) is doing, it has to reach out and ask it. When a request is made, the two points will ‘handshake’ to confirm that they heard the request, then when they’ve done it. It looks something like this:
- Client to server: are you prepared?
- Server to client. Yes, I am prepared. (503 if failure)
- Acknowledge. Client requests [data].
- Request received.
- (Server processes request.)
- Server to client. Are you prepared for response?
- Yes, I am prepared.
- Acknowledge. Response sent.
- Response received. Close connection.
- Connection closed.
These steps can be repeated any number of times in response to a single user mouseclick, depending on what you’re trying to do. A ‘request timeout’ error is what happens if client/server asks “are you prepared?” and it takes too long for the server/client to answer “yes, I am”, so you hang up the phone.
For the server to treat clients differently at all, it needs to contact them for feedback. For adblocking, it has to ask your client if you’re adblocking. Usually the server does this by sending the client a request to serve an ad - if your client never answers back to confirm it was loaded, then the server knows you blocked the ad. The devs can tell the server that if it doesn’t get a certain answer, to enable the punishment effects. (They’ll technically be sent anyway; they’re just hidden/disabled by default if your client handshakes the ad.)
What these scripts do is lie to the server. The server asks the client if we received the ad, we ignore the script that checks whether the ad is loaded and instead directly change the answer to claim it has. Since all the server sees is the confirmation, it doesn’t know the difference.
I just don’t get how these providers (Specifically Reddit with the API lockdown and now the stranglehold on mods, Twitter’s new login requirement, and YouTube now cracking down on adblockers) are missing the point that their sites live and die by user generated content.
I understand these sites are hugely expensive to run, but if you keep alienating those who are bringing users to your site in the first place, people will stop submitting and people will stop visiting.
Well, realistically there is a good chance that this will turn out just fine business-wise. They don’t care if they lose some engagement or if the quality goes to shit. It’s all good, as long as it makes some money.
In my opinion, this sort of model should be considered anti-competitive. It has become apparent that these services operate on a model where they offer a service that is too good to be true in order to kill the competition, and then they switch to their actual profitable business plan. If you think about it, peertube is a much more sensible economical model with its federation and p2p streaming. But nobody has ever cared about it because huge tech giants offer hosting & bandwith “for free”. The evil part of youtube is not the ads, its the fact that it allowed us to bypass them long enough for the entire planet to become dependent on it.
The majority of people don’t use any form of ad block, especially on mobile so i’m not sure your argument holds there. I don’t see how Youtube wanting to monetize its users somehow will make the quality go to shit? Centralized things need to be monetized, and as much as we all would like it, a mainstream decentralized video streaming platform is not realistic given current tech.
I don’t personally see this as in the same category as what Twitter and Reddit are doing.
The only piss off for me with the Youtube ads is they used to be reasonable 5 second ads. Now they are just absurd with multiple multi-minute ads. Yes you can sometimes skip them but it is so unfriendly to the user.
Twitter and Reddit sure but youtube is not a user generated content site. youtube has big creators and they are the main reason people go to the site.
Probably get shit for this, but…
I just pay for Premium.
YT has literally become my cable. I listen to music, watch movies, documentaries, stand up comedy, news, sports… and cat videos, obviously.
To me it’s just worth it to pay a bit of money each month and have the whole thing just available to me.
I feel like if you were to put a money value on all the complaining, stomping of feet and trying to side-step the ads I’ve seen over the last several years, you’d probably find it’s actually less to just pay and enjoy it.
Just my opinion, of course…
To everyone who is saying they use adblock and haven’t seen this yet: YouTube probably rolled this out to a smaller percentage of users first. It allows them to understand how this change impacts user behaviour, e.g. how many users comply and disable their adblocker, how many more users close YouTube than usual etc. Most tech companies do this type of analysis before releasing a high impact change to all users.
I do close youtbe much quicker than I used to. I can watch one video and rhan I’m done. The next video starts with a full minte of ads and I’m out. I know there’s stuff like ReVanced, but I keep wondering wether it’s all worth it.
ReVanced is definitely worth setting up. It only takes a couple of minutes and vastly improves the experience using YouTube. I also homebrewed my LG tv to download a hacked YouTube ad free app for that which includes sponsorblock.
I have a premium subscription, but it logs you out. And then I see ads until I log in again and reload the page. I pay these people. I should never ever see an ad. And it’s enough that I’ve noticed the ads are more obnoxious than they used to be. I’m about done with it.
You’ll hear this over and over again but that’s because it’s true: Revanced is absolutely worth it. Not difficult to set up and the experience is life changing once you see YouTube without ads
Odysee is a great, decentralised alternative if you are looking to jump ship.
If you do end up sticking with youtube, ReVanced is good. Smart Tube Next is good for TVs, and firefox + ublock origin on desktop.
For iOS users Vinegar is a nice add-on for Safari that strips out all the ads etc.
If you’re demanding I watch ads, it’s not “free”. you’re demanding my time and probably attention.
I really think we need to stop with this idea that “Something is free” because no money is exchanged. Some stuff ARE free, there are repos on git, where you can download software, there are websites that ask for nothing. However Gmail, Youtube, reddit, and the rest are not “Free” just because they aren’t directly asking for money.
Honestly I think I’ll go full hoarder with YouTube archivist and find a way to stream/synchronize on my devices. I mostly use YouTube to go to sleep so there is no way I go back to videos being interrupted by loud ass ads.
i don’t want to be a buzz kill but if this train continue its course i am afraid that they gonna do something about youtube-dl
Whats up with all these online companies just deciding to be assholes this year.
Companies are becoming even more greedy recently across the board and at a rapid pace. Some people would want you to believe Youtube wouldn’t generate billions of dollars as income annually for Alphabet for some reason. But the truth is the platform is extremely profitable already. Youtube simply wants even more now because competition has done the same. We’ve seen prices spiraling up and quality dropping in pretty much all sectors of the economy and this trend will continue for the forseeable future.
In short: Because they can (some are really stretching their boundaries, though)
and try to speak about this to anyone who doesnt see it you are basically labeled as conspiracy theorist or something and just dismissed.
Like another poster said, investors are pushing for profits. The Sillicon Valley model of throwing money at it until they figure it out is suffering with the downturn in the markets. So with the VC and investor money drying up, sites are pushing to make money to keep the lights on.
I would’t say keeping the lights on, more then trying to beat covid lvl profits.
I think this is the real thing. If online companies don’t match the extremely ridiculous and luck they had during the pandemic then they are doing “worse” even if they are doing just fine.
All of them also seem to be focused more on short term gains over long term losses (i.e. meeting quarterly goals by raising rates but driving away otherwise good customers and completely disregarding the benefit of customer loyalty.).
Interest rates went up and now they need to make payments on their previously free debt.
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They were always assholes, but the end of zero interest rates is making American corporations go from boiling the frog to just smoking the frog alive.
Why is it all in July too???
