- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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I have been adblocking on YouTube for as long as I remember. Personally I think it’s unusable without an adblocker. What’s the alternative? Because I am not suddenly going to pay for a platform that keeps getting worse all the time.
When ever I see someone using YouTube without an adblocker it looks like some cheap chinese knock-off or something. As someone who sees less ads than 99% of people I’ve genuinely became a bit oversensitive to them. Podcasts are the only thing I keep paying attention to despite them having ads which even then I always skip over. Other than that every online platform I use is ad-free and I don’t watch TV or listen to radio either.
Same for me, I wish there was something like sponsorblock for podcasts.
I like to listen to podcasts in the gym and I will interrupt my set to skip sponsors and ads. The enshittification on Spotify is particularly bad as they now play ads in addition to sponsorings for premium listeners.
Yeah I don’t personally use spotify for podcasts even though I have premium aswell. Except for the occasional JRE episode I listen everything else on Podcast Republic.
Thanks for the tip, I will try that one out!
bilibili, an actual chinese knockoff has less ads
There is peertube. I’m not familiar with its limitations. Technically it is possible for someone to try and track your activity because it’s P2P.
The content is currently lacking. I’m kind of wondering what limitations are in place for each user to upload video. Can someone make a bot to start reuploading content from their favorite streamers?
And unfortunately IDK of any alternatives to YouTube. A big part of the problem is that some of my favorite creators only upload to YouTube. I don’t want to switch to an alternative and lose a large percentage of the content that I like to watch, that would be pretty shitty.
Invidious / piped.video is the way (as long as it continues to work)!
This message is displayed in the browser because Google asked your browser to do it, and your browser got the message and put it there.
When displaying ads, the end user experience is 100% client-side. You are using your screen and speakers to observe it. You can turn off your speakers and screen if you want, which will effectively “block” the ad.
But that is silly. Not only do you own your screen and speakers, but you have control of what you’re browser is doing, too (if you use a respectable browser). When HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other content is downloaded, just that happened: file downloads. After it has been downloaded, your browser then consumes it.
When it is consumed, a lot happens, but ultimately, the code in the browser displays content. Your (respectable) browser does all of this, and will change the look depending on local fonts, accessibility options, etc. With an ad block add-on, it will also remove these ads.
However, when ads are removed, the DOM is mutated with deleted or replaced content. It is possible for a website to then write ad block detection scripts to see if the ad contents have been removed or not. There are many ways to do this, and this screenshot is the result of one way of doing it.
However, enter the cat-and-mouse-chase of ad block block blocks. You can block your ads, then block the ad block block like this screenshot. These types of ad block rules are less common, but many public ones are available. Check the uBlock Origin lists in the setting page. By default, only about a third of the lists are enabled, and these extra blocks are in there.
Another avenue of determining that ads were not loaded is for the server to inspect if client-side (you) requests were made to fetch the ads. Even if this is in place, the server cannot determine if you have actually watched the ad or not. It could try to do more client-side attempts at validating that you somehow displayed it, but again, that’s client-side.
Imagine if you were sent a letter and a pamphlet in the mail. Imagine if the letter said that you could mail them back for a free sample of their product, but only if you read the pamphlet. They would have to trust that you read it, because you are reading your mail in the privacy of your own home. However, you could opt to toss the pamphlet (like an ad blocker) and never read it. It’s your mail, your home, and your choice.
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The worst case scenario is that they only serve video to logged-in users, require accounts to be verified with government-issued ID, and enforce the whole thing with the web browser DRM they just proposed.
Make no mistake: this is a war on the public’s property rights and their right not to have ads inflicted on them Clockwork Orange-style. It can get a lot worse than you think, and will unless we force the government to stop them legislatively.
Honestly I can’t fathom this concept. Youtube isn’t a right. It’s an optional service. Why aren’t we all up in arms about the 5,000 porn sites that have paywalled their services for years? IMO the response to “youtube won’t let users use the site without ads” should be “lets help peer tube be more succesful” Just as we are here rather than trying to make a law to get reddit to open up their API for free.
I don’t like youtube. But I don’t think it’s fair or viable to mandate them allow their content for free without ads. That’s a bit like mandating hotels give rooms for free. Hosting videos costs a non zero amount of money. Google intends to make more money from advertisements then they spend on hosting videos.
Honestly I can’t fathom this concept. Youtube isn’t a right.
You know what is a right? Your property right to control the operation of your computer. Google is, as we speak, trying to violate that right by colonizing it with DRM and subverting your property to serve their own ends instead of yours.
Google has the right to serve a 403 error to anybody who refuses to pay, but they do not have the right to usurp control of people’s property to forcibly display ads. And make no mistake, it’s very much the latter that they (and all the other companies) are trying to do, as evidenced by things like this.
Do you “fathom” it now? How much clearer do I need to make it?
I’m missing here. This isn’t the sony rootkit to my knowledge. Right now we’re talking about youtube itself detecting it’s ads aren’t being shown and throwing up a page blocking the rest.
“Evidenced by” a non google service putting ads in it’s premium service? Don’t get me wrong it’s bullshit, but again a reason to not use spotify.
Really well explained. Thanks
How does YouTube know whether I’m blocking or not if it all happens at the client side?
They make a test request from the client and check it’s received on the server end and returns what they expect on the client end at a guess. Basically they try to load an ad and if they don’t see the request on the server, or the client doesn’t get the sort of data it expects, it assumes you’re ad blocking.
What if we allow the request but then just discard the response?
The client side code probably expects to see and use the data, although I could be wrong on that. Some ad block do work like that though, I think.I find just deliberately taking a 30 second break to be the easiest ad block, and it’s better for you too.
The problem for me is when I use youtube videos to fall asleep and adblocks doesn’t work.
youtube-dl is your friend.
I like how we’re going back to straight up pirateing to not get hit by ads.
I mean, if youtube premium were $5/mo I would consider it.
There are many ways. Something I’ve come up with just now:
Put a few blocks of information encoded in the video of the ad itself. Require that block of information as a key to watch the next video on Youtube. No key, no videos. Extract the key by reading the video data as it plays from the client side. Stream the ad at only half a second at a time, so it’s never fully in the clients buffer.
Theoretically an addon could block the video for 30 seconds and just slow a blank screen, but it’d be impossible to block the ad without interruptions.
Less complicated anti ad block scripts are out there. Simply serving an important piece of Javascript from a host and filename that would normally look like an ad would probably trick the adblocker into blocking it. If that bit of script takes care of making the video play and the default HTML on the page says “no adblock plz” you’re already there.
Detecting adblock isn’t hard, and preventing users with adblock isn’t either. It requires constant attention from Google programmers though, which is quite expensive.
They don’t need to catch all ad block either. They just need to catch enough people enough times that paying for their video services is more comfortable to them than running adblock or accepting ads.
Put a few blocks of information encoded in the video of the ad itself. Require that block of information as a key to watch the next video on Youtube.
Interesting. But it probably only takes less than a few seconds for a program to scan a 30s video file and extract that bit of information.
That’s why you’d need to stream the ad one second at a time so you can’t scan the full file. Whether you’re watching an ad or not, you’d be waiting for the ad to finish.
Of course this is a rather naive idea, but it just shows how one might go about accomplishing this. I’m sure Google’s programmers can come up with much better solutions.
Can you filter pick it out? Like using the eye dropper thingy?
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Reasons: “we don’t like it when you try to slightly moderate our torrents of spam”
Reasons of adware
What country are you in? I wonder if they’re rolling it out to smaller markets to see how much backlash they get.
Time to get a federated video hosting service scaled up ASAP. But who could afford the bandwidth and storage? We need a stable torrent-based streaming solution I suppose.
It really isn’t. I can get a gigabit pipe and all the storage i can cram into a 4U for a few hundred a month. That is enough to serve several dozen users. Add on a CDN and now you can serve thousands or more. I can probably find 10 or 100 gigabit offerings for not much more.
The bigger issue is copyright. A site that gains traction in the video space by ripping youtube videos would get sued into oblivion.
That looks illegal
I’m almost afraid to ask but… how?
Nevermind, it was a legal gray area in the EU for some time, but now it’s legal
Sure.
Under which law exactly? I don’t know any laws regarding adblock blockers.
Cookie walls are an illegal way to block access, but Google doesn’t have those. It even has a “reject all” button instead of the shitty list you need to go through to reject trackers on most sites.
I thought it was illegal under our EU privacy laws, but apparently it wasn’t really.
Id rather die than to use the internet without protective services.
Have you notice that lately if you’re the history feature disabled it will refuse to show suggested videos? In the past you would still get suggested videos even with the view history disabled.
Same with google maps. With no ‘web and search history’ enabled the local searches I did on my local device won’t be remembered. So every time you’d need to fill in the entire address. That’s just bullying you into accepting their tracking.
Yes, makes me remember when they wouldn’t allow you to save locations on the map without logging in.
How would it be suggesting videos for you if it didn’t know what you were warching? It probably still recorded your history then even if you requested that it didn’t.
Yes but they did it in the past. So… they actually always knew / recorded your history.
Seems like it’s controlled test in different countries and segments. I (Europe) get this popup in Firefox, I also use pi-hole DNS and ublock origin.
Also Europe here, using ublock and firefox, and I don’t get that popup.
Dies your PiHole block Youtube ads?
It doesn’t because it can’t the ads and videos are on the same domain now
Thanks, I thought so.
It does not. It can only block domains. Youtube ads use same domain as actual videos.
Thanks, I thought so.
Which adblocker are you using? I am using Ublock Origins, Sponsorblock, RYD and Enhancer for YouTube. I will check later if I get the same message or not.
Is this real? The post title seems to imply it’s something that might happen in the future?
look into Web Environment Integrity. This particular screenshot is probably fake, but it’s coming very soon.
No, the screenshot is real, they’ve been testing it in selected regions for a little bit
This has nothing to do with WEI. Google can do more than one shitty thing at once you know.
This has nothing to do with WEI
This has everything to do with WEI … what are you taking about?
WEI is a proposed modification to Chrome/Chromium that doesn’t even exist yet, and that would have the side effect of blocking adblockers on every site that implements WEI.
This here is an already existing change to the YouTube service that blocks adblockers on YouTube, across all browsers, Firefox included. It does not use or need WEI to do this.
Well they can block Deez nutz
The enshittification continues until profits increase!
(Btw I still haven’t seen those yet. In USA and I’m using uBlock Origin on Firefox)
Same , but not in the USA , I havent seen them yet
Browser and plugins don’t matter, this is being rolled out in waves. People are getting this on all browsers, with or without ad blockers
So this is how the internet dies? With ads, paywalls, and DRMs?
🥲
It doesn’t have to be. This could be how YouTube dies.
Websites are nothing without users. We have the power to stop using websites that pull this shit and promote new websites that don’t.
Cynically, it won’t kill youtube, either. There are no alternatives. They have a lot of leverage to shittify it.
The paradox of the internet is that people want everything:
- in one place
- free of charge
- anonymous
but don’t want everything:
- owned by one company
- supported by ads
- full of toxic assholes
And a lot of users who just doesn’t care enough to do anything drastic about it. We already saw it with reddit, and twitter to a point. The userbase on the internet is so huge now that the people actually being aware and caring about privacy and non-commercialisation are a tiny minority. Companies can easily still make a profit on the vast majority of people who will uncritically consume.
Which makes me wonder why they care enough to put development time into these anti ad block measures.
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Reddit = Text based platform. Text: 1 Character = 1 Byte
Youtube = Video based platform. Videos: [Error, Not Enough Storage]
🥲
Edit: Also, bandwidth.
Storage and bandwidth are practically free though. Only last mile bandwidth is expensive, and that is paid for by the end user.
Practically and actually are two different things.
Just because serving the video costs a fraction of a cent doesn’t mean you can round that down to zero, especially when you are serving billions of video views a day.
I did say practically free.
IRL Example: I host several videos across my various sites. I pay $99/mo for a CDN. Said CDN caches my videos and does not charge for bandwidth usage. Therefore you can technically argue that I pay $99/mo for X visitors. In actuality , the CDN caches all my content. It also provides DDOS protection, a firewall, and other advanced features. That is what I pay $99/mo for.
My cost to distribute the video is $99 + my hosting bill ($50-$200/mo depending on backend jobs) / number of views. This would be true if the video has 1 view or a billion (most of the ones I host have had “millions” of views)
The video can be 360p or 8k. CDN does not care. Mine are 4k.
Got it in the Netherlands a few days ago. With ublock origin on Firefox. So I switched to freetube with the subscriptions I actually watch.
I’ve been using free tube but lately it’s been running pretty poorly. Which insidious instance do you use?
I started having problems with freetube a few months back, as well. I switched to one of several piped instances (whichever one is working at any given time) in my browser.
I didn’t change any settings so its randomizing the instance. For now that seems to work fine.
Haven’t seen it here yet, same country, Vivaldi and uBlock.
I am also in the Netherlands using uBlock Origin and Firefox and am not getting it. So my best guess is they’re doing A/B testing and people are being randomly selected to see how they’ll respond to something like this.
