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I've been using uBlock since shortly after it launched, and I'd rather lose access to all Google services than not have an ad blocker. I seriously question how
by flakes 3y ago
I've been using uBlock since shortly after it launched, and I'd rather lose access to all Google services than not have an ad blocker. I seriously question how people use a browser without one. Completely changes how the web feels.
- all2 3y agoThis. I've pretty much stopped using YouTube since the adblocker blocker shut me out. I figure it's a good time to kick a bad habit. :D
- TerrifiedMouse 3y agoSame. I only visit when someone links to a video or I absolutely have to to get information. Used to visit YouTube’s front page as part of my daily routine, effectively using it as a social media site - which it definitely is; it’s just that the posts are all videos, the comment section is like every other but moderated by the video poster, and the front page is completely algorithm driven.
- flakes 3y agoOne thing which seriously improves my experience is using the "Block element" feature on non-ads as well. Suggested videos, youtube shorts, banners, etc, all get blocked. Leaves the site much more lean and leaves less distracting visual clutter. I use this strategy on a lot of sites (which sadly includes stackoverflow lately).
- lkuty 3y agoYou might wanna use Unhook.
- flakes 3y agoPotentially, for now I can get away with my custom filter list :) I generally try to limit the total amount of extensions I have on my browser, to a list of tools I feel that I can trust. I apply the same mentality for dependencies in my software. Limits the surface area for supply chain attacks.
- fuzztester 3y agoHow do you use the Block element feature? I looked in the uBO menu but cannot find how to do it. Can you give an overview, please?
- flakes 3y agoWhen you right-click an element on the page (and you have uBlock installed at default settings) there should be a dialog for it at the bottom.
- bonton89 3y agoIf I right click on an item I get a block element option in the context menu. But that doesn't seem to make them persist. I usually use it to make irritating popups go away that I'm to lazy to read or that seem intentionally confusing since it is less mental load to just zap it blindly.
- fuzztester 3y agoThanks to all who replied. I will check the suggestions out.
- beej71 3y agoI'm trying Grayjay, which works great, and I've noticed one big thing: it doesn't keep showing me an endless stream of stuff to keep me on the site. It just shows my subs and a handful of suggestions. As a consequence, my time spent on the site is way down, and the time I do spend is higher quality material. But I'm with you. There's no way I'm watching an ad on YT. If they figure out how to only stream with unblockable ads, I will never visit the site again. Patreon to pay the creators.
- WithinReason 3y agoI think Grayjay is a great idea. Many creators have alternate accounts on platfroms like Odyssey (e.g. Hardware Unboxed and Veritasium), in those cases you can subscribe to the non-youtube platform. If enough people do this, it might help us move away from youtube. Of course the last step is also important for this to work (Pay the creators.)
- mopenstein 3y ago>If they figure out how to only stream with unblockable ads, I will never visit the site again That's their goal. If you're not earning them money, they don't want you. You don't exist to them and you not watching their ads/videos is no threat at all.
- p1nkpineapple 3y ago> As a consequence, my time spent on the site is way down, and the time I do spend is higher quality material. For me, I've found DeArrow (clickbait "blocker") has had exactly the same effect. I find myself no longer mindlessly scrolling through the suggested feed and am more particular about what I choose to watch.
- jenadine 3y agoI'm not seeing any YouTube adds. I'm using ublock origin with firefox and didn't do anything special. What YouTube adds are everyone talking about?
- flakes 3y agoSeems to be not hitting every user the same way. I also did not have any direct message about ad blockers, but I did notice videos not loading correctly and requiring a page refresh to work. Updating uBlock seemed to fix that issue. It was only afterwards that I heard of others having problems.
- swanee 3y agoThey have been rolling out ad-blocker detection with warning popups telling you to disable it. Mine were skippable the first few times but that lead to a final 3 warnings with the player refusing to load after. They seem to be doing a lot of A/B testing with the system currently.
- gonzo41 3y agoTurn off Ublock, reload the page, then turn it back on. Usually solves the problem for me.
- lodovic 3y agoyou can block the detection popup itself with uBlock. Seems to have done the trick for me.
- eikaramba 3y agoNo don't do that. And stop spreading misinformation. There is a thread on Reddit explaining why this is absolutely stupid and will only result in you losing access to YouTube. Or do you really think YouTubes for works like this. The biggest problem currently are people spreading those types of misinformation see https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/17j6ygs/youtube_antiadblock_and_ads_october_29_2023_mega/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/17j6ygs/youtu...
- leosanchez 3y agoCan't you copy the url and open in incognito? If you are using Firefox you can open it in a container that is not logged into YouTube no ?
- all2 3y agoI did that a little. The friction is irritating and enough for me to walk away from the computer after only a few videos. It was just enough to break me from my normal veg and consooooom cycle.
- leosanchez 3y agoFair enough.
- PeterStuer 3y agoTo be fair Youtube has to make a profit somehow. Ad revenue, direct and/or through profile data collection is easy and effective but the worst businessmodel for human sanity. I like that they at least offer an alternative for the ad viewing part through Youtube premium. I don't know about the US as streaming services seem to have catalogues orders of magnitude more extensive than over here in Europe, but compared to the likes of Prime Video, Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+ and several local offerings, YT Premium is a steal in terms of value proposition. And like most here I fail to understand how anyone can stand YT with ads. You wiil seriously start to dislike the podcasts for speaking in video ads though.
- 0xedb 3y agoYouTube Premium isn't available worldwide.
- hellotheretoday 3y agoYouTube premium pricing is ridiculous. $14 a month for android and $19 a month for iOS? Get out of here How much could they possibly make from ads in a given month off a single user. Best case scenario with a user that watches YouTube like 4 hours a day 6 days a week and clicks through once every week. $4? Probably not even that. And yet somehow YouTube premium needs to be almost $230 a year for apple users? I bet they’d make way more with a lower premium tier that just removed ads and had no other premium features for like $20/year. Wouldn’t make as much obviously but I bet they’d do way more volume. I wonder if they have some dipshit mba arguing against something like this because it “makes them seem cheap” or “delegitimizes the platform against more traditional streaming networks” or some nonsense to justify charging Hulu prices for YouTube content
- chx 3y agoEspecially when you consider you could VPN to Turkey and get it for 1.15 USD a month, if you do it for five people then it's 0.46 USD per Youtube Premium account. https://www.reddit.com/r/VPN/comments/14mwf6h/how_to_enjoy_youtube_premium_for_only_115_per/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VPN/comments/14mwf6h/how_to_enjoy_y...
- 3y ago
- pests 3y agoI've gotten so much value out of YouTube over the last 15 years, I added an exception for them. Maybe YouTube isn't the bad habit, but how (metaphorical) you use it?
- d3vmax 3y agoI still use adblocker on everything else and I know YT without adblock / premium is terrible. However, YT premium is only 2-3 USD/mo in India. So, I use that to get ad-free experience on YT and also YT music is great.
- wintermutestwin 3y agoYou are now "paying" google twice - once with money and twice by giving them your data.
- benhurmarcel 3y agoYour data is worthless if they can’t use it to show you targeted ads.
- yedava 3y agoEven if you pay for Youtube, Google still shows ads in their other products (search/maps etc...). So the data is not worthless. It also gets stored forever and Google can figure out other ways to monetize it.
- globular-toast 3y agoSame. I have accidentally clicked links a few times and, interestingly, I haven't seen the anti adblock message again despite not updating the uBlock filters. For the information that only seems to be available on YouTube I use Invidious.
- Daviey 3y agoOddly, I had the soft warning first.. then 3 views until blocked warning... and now, nothing. Working like it did before. Strange. I don't feel relaxed yet, but it seems they back-off if you hold-out, for now.
- flohofwoe 3y agoIt's randomly on and off for me since a couple of weeks.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoublock works perfectly for me on Youtube. I never see ads there. Plenty of sponsored videos but no ads. I use Firefox; that might be the difference.
- ekianjo 3y agodoes not work if you are logged in
- jillesvangurp 3y agoI am logged in.
- Phelinofist 3y agoIt does, you just have to purge and then update the filter rules
- zdhgbdthdtv 3y agoYou are just being lucky. Youtube have been rolling out new adblock filtering globally for the last few weeks. See https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/31/23940583/youtube-ad-blocker-crackdown-broadening https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/31/23940583/youtube-ad-bloc...
- pcdoodle 3y agoThis works for me too having my youtube account logged in. Steps: click the U icon, click the gear, click filter list, click Purge, click Update. Ads are gone again while logged in. You might have to do it again every now and then.
- hackideiomat 3y agoI have been using invidious for a while and apart from having to switch instances every few months, it's been a pleasure
- alkonaut 3y agoI still don't understand how ad blocking in videos can work. I mean all it would take to force users to watch the ads is to ensure that after the ad starts streaming, you can't request any frame of the actual content until N seconds (The full ad length) later?
- brnt 3y agoUse Invidious.
- Kate0CoolLibby 3y agoA few years now since I have given up on (most) of Google's services. YouTube via Newpipe is the only exception I can think of. But if it came between choosing between uBlock and anything? I choose uBlock!
- Liquix 3y agoSame. But IMHO Google would be fine with this. They aren't in the business of giving out CPU time and bandwidth for free – your data must be catalogued and correlated and sold to keep YouTube viable. What do they gain from the 5-10% of users consuming videos but offering no salable data in return? It's a direct hit to the bottom line from a minority who would rather stop using the service than be converted to impressions. Good riddance
- TerrifiedMouse 3y agoYouTube isn’t just a video sharing site though. It’s a social media site. There is value in people participating by replying and Liking/Disliking. Frankly, banning ad-blockers feels like treating the symptoms rather than the cause. There is something wrong with your platform if people hate your ads so much that if they can’t block them they would rather not visit your site at all.
- master-lincoln 3y agoYoutube is an ad showing platform. All the other features are just there to get people to view ads. If you stop viewing ads you are of no value to Youtube.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y agoIf you participate in the social network, i.e. post comments and vote, you are creating some content. So your value isn't completely zero.
- smartusers 3y agoIt's just going to push the smart people with self respect to other platforms. YouTube will then cater to the captive ad tolerant audience that's left and the quality of the whole platform will degrade. More people will leave, the quality will drop, the number of ads will go up, etc. This will reduce the quality of video on YouTube until what you basically have now on reddit: a hot trash fire. Sure you can milk these people for a while, but eventually they'll follow the crowd elsewhere. Cable TV -> Netflix.
- soultrees 3y agoIt’s crazy. Even with an adblocker you are subjected to a crazy amount of ads or hostile design. With ads, it’s just a free for all on your attention.
- reactordev 3y agoand for your cpu. Ads are the number one killer of performance.
- squarefoot 3y agoAnd money. Metered connections do exist, and ads consume a lot of bandwidth which is not free.
- chakintosh 3y agoThe cognitive load is the worst part of ads for me. The amounts of ads that display an X to close the banner only for that X to be an actual link to another fkn ad or straight up opens a new tab. Not to mention the invisible divs spanning the entire page so wherever you click, it's gonna open a link which is most of time either porn, betting sites or aliexpress. This sh* should be illegal.
- specialist 3y agoYup. They're pollution. (There's gotta be a phrase for "cognitive load" + "pollution".) I used to love tech ads. I'd inspect every ad in BYTE, Creative Computing, etc. I'd even buy Computer Shopper, a massive catalog interrupted by some articles, just for the ads. Ads can be useful, informative, and engaging. I wouldn't mind that.
- epgui 3y agoI like the term “information pollution”.
- reactordev 3y ago
- paganel 3y agoI'm just visiting fewer websites/pages, i.e. those with no ads at all (like this forum) or those with less intrusive ones (such as old.reddit.com). As for websites like YT, I ended up just watching fewer videos (because of the ads). All in all I see it as a net positive.
- thih9 3y agoLiving without YouTube can be hard though. Almost every online tutorial, product demo, music video, or other medium and long video material gets uploaded there.
- master-lincoln 3y agothat will change once users leave. I remember times where those videos were split between Vimeo and Youtube
- NelsonMinar 3y agoMost people who work at Google use ad blockers. They agree with you that the web isn't usable without them. The hypocrisy is becoming unbearable.
- nicbou 3y agoI run a commercial website. I built it without ads of annoyances. That's just how the web looks and feels to me. Even SEO spam is dealt with with uBlocklist, so that the main offenders are gone. I forgot about Pinterest and all the Stackoverflow clones. Then I use my iPad in a pinch and remember that most people are used to a much louder, annoying web. I can't believe that people use Medium without an ad blocker. I wonder if people notice that this website is much quieter, or just enjoy it more on a subconscious level. I like to think that it's a competitive advantage.
- MattSayar 3y agoDNS-level blocking is even better!