YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don't turn off your ad-blocker
(www.businessinsider.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 2023 00:00
https://lemmy.world/post/8582727
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 22 Nov 2023 00:00
https://lemmy.world/post/8582727
YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don’t turn off your ad-blocker::YouTube has been cracking down on people using ad blockers. Now, a spokesperson says that using ad blockers could lead to “suboptimal viewing.”
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Worse than using YouTube without an ad blocker?
.
That’s the funny thing about this threat. It implies that using YouTube the regular way is “optimal” viewing. It’s fucking shit without adblock.
Even without ads it’s shit without sponsorblock for me. Not even for the sponsor spots, but the absolutely annoying copy paste of please like, subscribe, hit the notification icon, blah blah blah blah blah.
That’s shit, but it’s still usable as I can shortcut my way around it. The ads are hot liquid swamp ass that make it unusable. I see ad, I circumvent or close tab.
Sponsor Block???
It’s optimal to them. You just don’t understand Youtube’s perspective of it yet. And then it’s unoptimal for them when you watch with the adblocker.
How to quit YT in a week?
There is absolutely zero possibility that they can find a way to make my experience on YouTube worse than my experience on YouTube without uBlock.
That’s a way to look at, but i’l personally still be using Peertube. instead of 3rd party YouTube apps.
Some of those alternative “YouTube” apps are not limited to YouTube as a backend/source of content. I don’t recall if it’s freetube, new pipe or both that allow using Peertube and YouTube from the same app, which helps bridge the gap in content / ease the transition from an end user perspective.
Newpipe supports Youtube, Peertube, media.ccc.de, Soundcloud and Bandcamp
Interesting. Thanks, I’ll definitely be checking it out.
The fact that my children know the Liberty Mutual jingle from watching YouTube at school says no.
yo what can you even do about this
This is the best summary I could come up with:
YouTube appeared to confirm reports that people with ad-blockers installed were experiencing a multi-second delay before being able to watch a video.
The Android-based news website Android Authority reported that people who weren’t using Chrome noticed the delays, citing Reddit users who said they’ve experienced this delay while using browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge.
“In the past week, users using ad blockers may have experienced suboptimal viewing, which included delays in loading, regardless of the browser they are using.
Users who have uninstalled their ad blockers may still experience a temporary delay in loading, and should try refreshing their browser,” a YouTube spokesperson told Business Insider.
In June 2023, it began preventing users with ad blockers turned on from watching videos and reportedly experimented with pop-up warnings.
More recently, X users began complaining and sharing screenshots of YouTube pop-ups warning them to not use ad blockers.
The original article contains 403 words, the summary contains 146 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Loving Freetube, Newpipe, and Grayjay more and more every day!
in the short term they work, but YouTube can cut those 3rd party apps access at any time for any reason. Use Peertube for the better long term.
I thought All three of the ones I listed weren’t reliant on YT APIs and instead scraped their content.
Edit: Just confirmed both NewPipe and Freetube do not use YouTube’s api. I’m not sure about GrayJay though.
Even the scrapping in theory could be restricted. I might be wrong there.
Possible maybe, but at that point if YT bascially becomes paywalled I will just stop using it entirely like I did with Reddit.
Tried to dive into Piped recently, but nothing would load.
I’m only surface-level competent with computers though, so I probably fucked something up… since you’ve poked around multiple options, which one(s) do you recommend as the most idiot proof?
For android, the stock newpipe from the fdroid repositories was just download and play for me. Easy and simple interface.
For Grayjay, I use the direct download .apk from their website. It’s been a little more buggy because it’s still new, but all in all quite stable. Less features right now, but does all the basics and has device casting to TV which Newpipe doesn’t.
For my PC, Freetube. I just use the Flatpak version for Linux. I’m on Nobara for my distro currently and it’s worked fine.
I gave up using Piped. It was really good when it worked but sadly most of the time it was frustrating. Takes ages to get a video going then breaks up multiple times.
From my experience, it depends on the instance. Sometimes, one instance of Piped will not work, but another will be OKish.
I can also just back out and just not watch said videos…
Yeah be like me and just use Peertube, I don’t even notice this stuff untill people complain about it haha.
PeerTube & Odysee when?
When the video creators you watch move to them.
Kind of shocked it took this long.
It always cost more more but the games that used clever traps were a lot more effective than just drm. Because warez groups can easily check if the game launches. Not if every enemy after mission four has infinite health and pinpoint accuracy.
Just curious if this maps to “shit, Google knows Twitter exists and figured out what we are doing” or “YouTube servers are broken”
Oh no. God forbid you pay. Gimme free video now. It’s mine!
this but unironically
Youtube has every right not to serve me the video.
It does not have the right to interfere with what I do with it after the data reaches my machine, though.
YouTube reserved the right to make your experience shitty. Deal with it if baby is too cheap to use the service when ads.
You all have a massive entitlement complex. YT owes you nothing.
Considering data harvesting, they can either pay me for my private data, or I’ll watch YouTube for free without ads.
And they’ll degrade the experience. See how that works?
You free load, you get a worse experience.
4 ads in a 15-20 minute video is as degraded as things get, I’d rather stare at the wall for 5 mins.
Contrary to popular modern corporate culture, I’m not a commodity who’s sole purpose is to provide continued growth quarter over quarter to appease shareholders. Meanwhile the price of YouTube premium has actually increased on top of increased cost of living expenses.
So fuck Google, they can actually pay me for my personal browsing information, or I’ll continue to use adblockers. Hell, yt-dlp isn’t out of the question at this point in time.
So pay. I don’t see the ads. You see how that works, right?
I do pay. They use my private browsing data for free, in return I watch YouTube with no ads because I use an adblocker. I have nothing in place preventing Google from tracking my internet usage, they can even track where I travel - So they’re free to use my data while I can watch YouTube for free without four ads in a 15 minute video.
As stated, I am not some commodity that exists solely as a means for large publically traded corporations bigger than most Governments to make a killing in relation to profits because of the modern mindset that growth must be sustained quarter over quarter in order to appease shareholders.
In Sept 2023 Alphabet turned a $76.69bn profit, up 11% from the same time last year. You see how that works, right. <–Notice no question mark, that’s a statement.
What are you rambling about? If you pay, they don’t push ads.
If I use an adblocker under FF they don’t push ads either, while Google still make record profits quarter over quarter using my personal data.
If we use Spotify as an example of modern corporate culture, it’s deemed acceptable that they effectively rob artists if rightful income using a pricing structure that equates to a couple of cents in the dollar for the artist - While Spotify themselves pocket a vast proportion of profits. But if I use an adblocker on the free version of Spotify, I’m going against their terms and conditions and robbing Spotify of ‘rightful income’.
In certain countries, Spotify have actually pulled their service as a result of being told they have to overhaul their pricing structure to renumerate artists fairly if they want to provide their service in the country in question.
The hipocracy regarding modern corporate culture and service pricing is extreme. If such a perspective is good enough for the service provider, it’s good enough for me.
👌
Sure, up until it so shitty that people don’t use it anymore, then what ?
I don’t see the point of paying for a service for having the privilege to be the product of the service.
Nope, it is a fight back complex. YT try to fuck me up, I try to fuck them up.
So a fantasy story shit how yt loses all of its customer. Especially the paying ones who don’t deal with ads 👌👍. Google doesn’t give a shit if the fee loaders leave.
Fight back 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
You are bitching about slow down on a forum with a 1000 active users. You aren’t even a blip. Normal people will just pay because the service is valuable.
You are massively entitled. If you think it’s so shitty stop using it. You can’t. And yet you’ll bitch about $12 a month.
Fine, you think is a shit show story. I suppose only time will tell.
Nope, paying customers still see ads put by creator, as per YT explanation. They don’t interrupt the video but if a creator add them to the video, the paying customer still see them.
It is only a question about how much time will pass before even the paying customer start to think that he is seeing too many ads while even paying the service and have his data harvested.
This assuming that YT would will never put ads also on the premium service, which I would not be that sure in these times…
Oh well, the fact that YT it trying to fight back AdBlocker seems to refute that. If the people using adblockers are really that few, why even bother ?
If you say so…
And why I can’t stop using YT ? Let’s say that an AdBlocker is way more convenient to have then the possibility to use YT.
It is not the 12$ a month. I pay some service more because they are worth more money and I am the customer, not the product.
I simply am not that happy to pay to be the product.
Don’t be daft. Youtube gets to steal user data which is more valuable.
Things were better without blood sucking greed of the world.
Have a modicum of restraint and stop using the service then. 🤷♂️
Y’all have massive entitlement complexes.
I am certain i am no more entitled than the already-billionaires salivating at the ad infested internet.
You are incorrect.
Source: your ass.
Source: Your own words aKtually
I would pay (as I pay for other services) if only I wasn’t the product.
👌👍
🤷♂️
I would gladly pay for it. BUT
Classic. I’m not going to buy it because they might change the model later.
This entire thread is entitlement. Stop using it if it’s so bad.
It is not ‘might’. We know they will do something like that.
Before AI went viral, how much did Giogle search improve, Youtube at all? Not at all really, but they cranked up the adverts. So now i am paying for Kagi search, I also sponsor open source projects so dont tell me that I am entitled. Youtube is the last Google product that cannot be replaced as of right now.
At the end of the day all i want is to be a customer, not a product.
I see we have a soothsayer in the comment section!
Do you consider your online data to be worthless? Because google doesn’t. You pay the moment you click on a video, and even more by making an account and generating watch history.
Why does that data collection not go away if i decide to pay with cash?
Why did they remove the cheaper ad-free only subscription tier?
Why do they still serve various ads when you are a premium subscriber?
The answer to all of this is that they are a greedy corporation, they must do those things. You may call it soothsaying or whatever to those of us wondering “what comes next” after this battle. But it is shown many times by all large corporations that they will keep fighting to make line go up for eternity. Regardless of if that is in your best interest. It is silly to see users defend them despite that.
Or maybe the data is more valuable than $12/mo and it’s subsidized by the data.
So you admit that corporations can do whatever they want to make money, but fuck customers who hate being treated like shit. You’re a hypocrite.
Not at all. Google has been fantastic to me for 8 or 9 years now. I’ve had issues but they’ve mostly resolved my issues every time. There is a reason they are so popular.
reading through your comment history you keep repeating bullshit about ads
Whatever you say. I’m not sure what you mean bullshit though.
This is what I mean
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/9770fc51-e7e6-4740-8058-51a64c48488f.png">
What about that is bullshit?
oh no, poor google!!!
So just attacks? Got chu.
Why the fuck would I pay for YouTube when I could just steal it?
Because you’re poor and rather fuck around with your time vs having a service that works great for a small fee?
stop polishing google’s sword. I hope they are paying you for this.
I’m sorry you don’t like reality 🤷♂️
The reality is that it’s a bit naive to think that paying for a service is going to stop the company from introducing ads into the paid service too. History shows they WILL do that. This will be a silly comment when subscriptions become cable 2.0
👌
The whole page loading delay thing is hilarious because it doesn’t tell you why it’s happening, so viewers are likely to just assume the service is becoming even more shitty.
Can’t make it worse of you don’t use it.
Youtube is past the growth phase, at this point it’s about minimising cost and maximising revenue.
If you regularly use it with adblock but decide to stop using it because of this, then youtube would have succeeded. You weren’t making them money and were costing them bandwidth, so good riddance.
If you really want to stick it to them, turn on adblock, find some long videos and play them on mute in the background at 4K/1080p60 resolution. Cost them even more bandwidth.
Even better, start randomly disliking videos or making nonsensical comments (not hateful or toxic ones, just comments that don’t make sense). Enshittify it further.
It’s not the ads. They want your data and these adblockers prevent them from doing it. Google had and continue to lie to advertisers about their ad views anyways. Simply use Firefox + adblockers or go to alternative sites that are springing up.
Get fucked, YouTube.
YouTube is just messing around. They could encode ads randomly on videos if they wanted to, like podcasts.
There’s already a sponsor blocker extension that skips when a sponsor is even mentioned, it would be trivial to add other embedded ads to it.
They would just be able to create and stream 2 or more ad-encoded versions where ads are encoded in differently positions. Then no sponsorblock could save us since it would skip the wrong segments for some people…
Those ads would need to be unskippable, otherwise we could just pull the timestamps that the Skip button uses and sponsorblock will be all complete again 👌
Fair point! I wasn’t thinking they would be skippable, but boy do I hope that I was wrong…
Even if they’re not natively skippable, ads have to be indicated as such by law. Whatever indication they use can be detected and used to create blockers.
Ad blocking, uh, finds a way.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5fc6cd63-827f-417e-94e8-3f41d20aebf9.webm">
Just build a database of ads. Then use some kind of image hash to compare against the displayed content.
I like your way of thinking. This isn’t even limited to image. Comparing just a short snippet of the audio from a playing ad to a db could work very well too, thinking of how quickly Shazam etc. are able to identify a song if it’s in the db.
App/plugin idea for the sad future right there: Shazadblock, tuneBlock Origin. Succesful ID leads to skip/mute/ragequit or whatever will kill the noise. Though, the downside of this method would be if an ad in the db uses licensed music that regular content creators use in their videos too, it will eventually lead to blocking some segments wrongly, unless the db excludes this, making it less effective at its purpose… Maybe image is better.
That’s not quite how it works. It’s crowdsourced, someone has to manually add every sponsored segment from a video into Sponsorblock. It can’t detect them on its own.
I never said it did?
cheaper to just have the interns code buggy Javascript then to reencode millions of videos.
This. I don’t exactly know how YouTube’s architecture works, but from running my own mediaserver i woild guess They don’t live transcode because that takes clock cycles on a graphics card or a CPU. They transcode a couple of different bitrate files to serve up and then just serve up direct stream file transfers, thus saving electricity and clock cycles. In order to actively embed an ad in a YouTube video it would have to be done semi-permanently, Decreasing the value of live serve ads.
You’re correct that they’re not doing live transcoding when a video is played. That’s way too expensive in every regard. There are still ways to embed ads dynamically into the video without requiring live transcoding. They likely have 5-10 qualities they encode to, and segment the video into 10s segments, so a 5 minute video would be cut into 30 segments, and then each of those files encoded to multiple qualities upon upload.
That way when playing, if your Internet gets slow, the player can seamlessly downgrade to another quality. These small files concatenated together appear like one long video. Adding some ads served from the same servers as the content could be done dynamically for each request and be difficult to block without impacting the video content delivery, since you can’t have uBlock Origin block the domain hosting the content.
Realistically, they probably don’t do this approach because you don’t know if the ad was loaded because of buffering, but never viewed, so the ad network gets less metrics and therefore the ads are less valuable. Also, I would bet the content upload and distribution team are completely separate from the ad team, so that cross collaboration is more difficult to implement.
I think there’s a simpler reason; if you embed ads as part of the video linking to a specific timestamp becomes a nightmare. One person might have no ad, another might have a 30 second ad, and a third might have 5 minutes of ad. Attempting to link to a time after the ad would give three different timestamps, and loading that timestamp could give you the clip you want or could drop you right in the middle of an ad.
To solve that issue you’d need some way for the client to determine the “true” timestamp, but then you’re also giving ad blockers a way to determine where the ad is so you’re back to square one.
They could, what can go wrong…
Obviously the “optimal” term vary according to the POV folks.
Ive had my ad blocker turned off for a week on Youtube. Theres a preroll ad on every video and a shitload of ad break mid video and at the last 3 seconds of a video.
Its the worst viewing experience I can imagine. I cut out Twitch and even stopped all my subs when they went mandatory ad viewing. Im full on ready for third party options in the same spirit as Lemmy.
S0undTV is a good app for Twitch if you have an android TV device. No ads and support for the emotes if you like having the chat up. You’ve got to login to twitch through the app though to start watching. It’s broken before and had ads play, but gets fixed within a few days. Lastly there is a delay compared to desktop. If that’ll be a deal breaker.
I also think they are fucking with the sound levels in the same way TV did prior to the FTC ruling. The commercials are awfully loud compared to the content.
Honestly this is what pushed me to look into alternative ways to watch YT years ago. Muting every time an ad comes on gets old quick, especially when the ad is way louder than the content
SmartTube Next for watching YT on TV and LibreTube for Android.
I just thought I would log in to Twitch just to say hi to the streamer I was in the same game with. Twitch loads, starts to play the stream with no problem. BUT when I try to login, it says Firefox is not a supported browser. It had no problem playing all the content, showing the chat, etc. - but for some reason it still says my browser is not supported and I can’t log in. I looked it up. FF is “not supported” because it has an enhanced tracking protection feature. Twitch wants to track you, and it can’t if you use Firefox. Such a petty way; this will just turn me away from Twitch even more.
Why would you even subject yourself to such torture?
which is a hilarious threat because the #1 way to make my viewing experience worse would be turning off my ad blocker, lmao
“if you don’t voluntarily make your experience 10x worse, we will make it 2x worse”
Ads have reached the level of “suboptimal viewing”.
Way to kill your platform. Sadly there’s no big competition
Hopefully this motivates a competitor to emerge.
peertube exists
it’s in development, their new roadmap looks nice
The difficulty isn’t in developing a platform, but in actually hosting the videos.
Videos are huge files, and Peertube instances will have to make do with pennies in donations while paying for massive amounts of storage if they actually gain a userbase.
How does this kill their platform if there’s no competition?
Let them keep this shit up and you’ll find out.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Google: “Fine, I’ll turn off your adblocker myself!” *rolling out Manifest v3*
I’ll just leave this here.
mpv_sponsorblock
You da real MPV
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/86dcf29f-2103-4e5e-9164-19f0ff41eff7.jpeg">
If for some reason you can’t use a full-on ad blocker, “SponsorBlock for Youtube” is another Firefox extension you can install. It doesn’t block ads per se, but it will auto-skip segments of a video that have been reported as ad content. Kind of a grassroots thing, like reporting cops on Waze.
Until they try to kill that too.
I don’t think Google gets any money from YouTube sponsorships directly. Not watching a sponsored segment and not clicking the affiliate link are one and the same in the eyes of the company.
Oh no, so how will I be able to tell a difference?
It’s official, Youtube now has people employed as product worseners.
YouTube has human employees? I thought they were just all bots.
How can they make the experience worse for people using adblock if they cant even detect it
If they can detect adblockers, why not just block everyone using one like they were doing previously?
I wonder if it’s a switch in strategy, i.e. The ad block ban popup gives clear notification to the user to update their adblock but slowing the video load speeds without giving feedback might be a more effective in slowing the arms race.
I’ve been wondering why YouTube keeps playing the same three videos that I’ve already watched after each new one.
Turning off your ad-blocker is like running in jail, naked. So no thanks, YT.
Both Firefox + uBlock Origin saved me countless times from malicious ads since years. You should do it too.
I think my viewing experience will be even worse if I turn off my ad blocker.
Youtube advertising is absolute trash. It’s already bad enough to sit through ads when you don’t even know if you want to watch the video. Their ads consist of fake Joe Rogans with tts voices advertising scams.
I get some dodgy casino and gambling ads … Before a children’s program. Reported the ad multiple times, but it keeps coming back under a different name.
So I’m a little lazy and have to watch ads when I watch YouTube on my TV. I don’t care enough to fix this.
Anyways, I don’t mind the short ads. I get it, you gotta pay for your stuff somehow. What I don’t get is these ads that can stretch on for 10, 15, even 150 minutes. I think I had a 3 hour ad at one point. It’s insane. You should have to opt in to these ads that are longer than say 30 seconds.
Opt in?
A Google exec should be shot for any ads longer than 30 seconds.
I was taking a shower once and wanted some music. I started the YouTube app on my phone cause revanced was acting up at the time. It starte off mildly enough, with like 2x15seconds ads, but by the time I was all shampooed one of those huge ads started playing. It didn’t stop until I finished my shower. I was seeing red by the time I got out of the shower and turned it off.
I’d hazard a guess that this old quora post that was estimating the average American loses 4.2 years of their life on ads would now result in even more time lost on ads, but let’s go with 4.2 years per person. This means that for every 20 people, there’s one person’s lifetime of ads. “A life for a life” is a fair concept, Google. Start the culling. One Google employee shot for every 20 people that use YouTube. It’s the only way to atone.
I recently saved a post somewhere with a complete guide on cracked youtube on smart tv’s which wasn’t all too difficult iirc… let me know if you want me to dig it up.
Found it! github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
How about you suck my balls accordingly, google?
Then don’t use it.
How could it be worse than with ads?
240p
Until an alternative to Youtube happens, then this will continue.
Odysee? Rumble? Freetube? Re-vanced?
YouTube losing the war on AdBlockers, lol.
How about stop being evil, Youtube?
Oh wait…
About all this is doing is making me update my lists in UBO more often.
AdNauseam works the best for blocking ads. You can get it on chromium based browsers too, but it’s kind of an involved process to do it. It’s worth it if you want to use Brave or one of the opera browsers with adblocking.
Keep it up, dumbasses.
Catch the hint…the harder you try the harder we do. There’s no trying from our end.
I’ve switched to the FreeTube app on desktop and now I’m just using it without a second thought. No ads and a much faster and better YouTube with absolutely no ads.
I’m not about to pay one of the richest and morally corrupt companies in the world for YouTube.
I mean… it definitely will if you turn off your ad blocker.