Technology

In a fight between a corporation and a bunch of people very determined to get content for free, history shows the corporation always loses.

Ad companies can't handle the idea that people don't want to be hit with ads every 5 minutes. "Well, it's just BAD ads"... no, it's having my experience constantly interrupted.

If I can't watch YouTube without ads, I won't watch it at all.

The natural next place for people to go to once they can't block ads on YouTube's website is to go to services that exploit the API to serve free content (NewPipe, Invidious, youtube-dl, etc.). If that happens at a large scale, YouTube might shut off its API just like Reddit did and we'll end up in scenario where creators are forced to move to Peertube, and, given how costly hosting is for video streaming, it could be much worse than Reddit->Lemmy+KBin or Twitter->Mastodon. Then again, YouTube has survived enshittiffication for a long time, so we'll have to wait and see.

Maybe the general public is more compliant than I am, but my money for YouTube creators goes to them via Patreon. Google not knowing how to break even on a bandwidth- and storage-intensive property it's owned for more than a decade does not constitute an emergency I need to have any part in paying for.

If very recent history is any guide, this is exactly how you get people searching "YouTube alternatives uBlock." No one is saying there aren't enough ads on the site; the increasing malignancy of ads over the years is why people categorically reject whitelisting youtube.com, and "more ads" is not a solution to any user-facing problem.

Guess I'm getting banned then, I will never disable my adblockers, the internet (and Youtube especially) is goddamn unusable without them.

I guess 2023 is the year of enshittification.

if we don't watch their ads now because of how intrusive and poor quality they are, where's the logic leap to they get money from us if we can't block their ads? We just move on or get better at blocking, they don't actually get money in this scenario... This is the problem with tech decisions these days, the companies are completely out of touch. You can't use consumers as products and then charge them for it, and make no mistake about it you are the product.

Going this hard to fight ad blockers isn't going to work like YouTube thinks it will. The only thing it's going to do is force people to find ways to bypass it or just start using a YouTube alternative. If YouTube is serious about wanting people to use ad blockers less, they should have conducted some form of a survey to find out why people use ad blockers on YouTube and then make changes to either find some sort of a middle ground with ad block users or try to incentives users to turn off their ad blocker.

Obviously, they wouldn't do that because it would require that they listen to their users and everyone knows how much they like to listen to their users before making any kind of decision.

This just seems like another element an ad blocker could block.

There will be a script to block their recognition just as there is a ton of scripts to work about other anti-adblocks. You could always go watch a video in incognito and just dont use your account.

Ultimatively this will lead to less interaction on the platform, their ads are so penetrant that you can't even watch anything properly anymore, so more people will adblock -> get banned -> not interract anymore

I'd be fine paying Google for YouTube Premium if I could use it without being logged in. I'd take an access key for anonymous ad-free viewing for $20 a month. But Google is never going to offer that because the data-harvesting is the whole point of YouTube to them. Google is a data-slurping company with an advertising division that dabbles in video, search and phones as side hustles.

In any case, if they really do crack down on adblockers, there are always other methods of watching their videos ad-free, and if I really like a creator, I'll subscribe to their Patreon or watch them on Nebula.

I wonder if this would affect ReVanced. YouTube and google suck so bad. Also I hope people discover ReVanced because of this regardless lol but I still hope its not affected

Let them test, I will just use container(so they can't track my account). And if ad block not working, I will just not watch that video. And eventually move away from YouTube if it's annoying.

It's not just that they fight ad blockers now. I used to use an auto skipper for the ads, since I am technically okay with being served the ads (dedicated browser, deletion of cookies) and I consider 20 seconds before a video bearable.

They changed the skip button now so that my skipper stopped working. Guess what, now I'm using a blocker instead since I cannot be bothered to constantly click on the fricking screen to prevent 30 min ads from playing.

Good news to everyone! We've wanted an alternative to YouTube for a long time. Now it looks like Google that next big step in forcing alternative platforms to rise in it's place. I'm an avid user of YouTube, but not a snowball's chance in hell will I buy Premium when they are trying to shove it down my throat like that. That's a very good way to get people to NOT buy something but for some reason companies don't seem to understand.

Gabe Newell said it best: "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem." - Piracy was down and streaming subscriptions were up when Netflix first came about due to the ease/convenience of it, but piracy is seeing a return due to the mishandling and misconception of companies about how to gain profit through improved services vs increased pricing/poor performance.

The reason I bring this up is because YouTube, like many companies, thinks they're "solving" the issue of adblocking by force-feeding this kind of bullshit to the masses, but all they're doing is forcing more people to turn to alternatives instead.

I've been using ad blockers since I was on dial-up, I'm not going to stop using them now. If youtube blocks me, I will get my videos elsewhere. There's too much crap on youtube to sift through to find what you're looking for now anyways.

I pray we get a Youtube competitor too, because Google has no incentive to change. We've needed one a while.

Bad news for me, I use youtube a lot with an adblocker and it's essentially ad-free. It's going to be a bad day for me when they start cracking down. It doesn't surprise me, but it's a bummer.

still works for me with (re)vanced, so far. pirates will hopefully do their thing in the meantime to make sure nobody has to be capitalized on. google should have been broken up years ago...

I'm worried the sucsess Netflix has had forcing people to stop password sharing is emboldening companies to perform policies such as this :(

Stop showing 3-minute long k-pop music videos. Like, why is that even an ad? Do they think I am suddenly going to start listening to k-pop or something?

Also, stop showing gross medical stuff, like this is a cure for your foot fungus or look how much earwax is in this persons ear. Just the other day there was an ad about not being able to get an erection. I tried to report, it but I could not see where to do it. But it was pretty inappropriate.

I get ads on my iPhone and always skip them, so this will not really affect me, especially since I mostly use freetube on the desktop.

My senior neighbor watches YouTube a ton and uses it to listen to music on his laptop. His old laptop recently died and I helped him order a new one and put FireFox with the whole works of adguard, ublock origin, sponsorblock, etc. on it for him and its changed his life! He loves not seeing these dumb ads now!

I use vinegar on iOS, which exchanges the youtube player with a html5 play, at least in safari. No ads there

I'm sorry for youtube-addicted. On my part, I use it, maybe, twice per year, so I couldn't care less.

I wonder if this will affect Revanced users.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If the adds were bareable it would be different, but no.

On the plus side this should really help with my youtube addiction