25 ms·

YouTube is now blocking ad blockers so I make ads run faster

630 points by znpy 3y ago

colesantiago 3y ago
Does YouTube work without JS? This might be one way to avoid ads as well as a network wide Pi Hole. I hate it when YouTube / Google needs to exploit everyone's data and privacy in order to make money.
- rollcat 3y ago
  Does anything at all run without JS these days? I swear all I wanted was to read a blog post, and it loaded more megabytes of JS than the text and pictures combined.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - DoingIsLearning 3y ago
    One example that comes to mind is Kagi. They makes it a design point that Kagi should work even without javascript enabled.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jamesfinlayson 3y ago
    I thought Twitter had a no Javascript version but apparently that stopped a couple of years ago.
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    I ran Noscript about 10 years ago. At first I didn't notice any difference. Then, over a period of only a year or so, things started to break. I would notice that my friends' web experience seemed remarkably different to mine. Eventually I capitulated and enabled JS again. Seeing it all happen at one rather than at a trickle over time was quite shocking. I still design web sites without JS first. In fact, I design them without even CSS. It's called progressive enhancement. Many of them have only a sprinkling of convenient but not necessary JS.
- recursive 3y ago
  Not even close.
- lagrange77 3y ago
  > Pi Hole They serve the ads from the same domain, as the site itself.
  - colesantiago 3y ago
    Surely it's possible to block the paths to the ad on the site itself.
    - mirashii 3y ago
      Not with DNS blocking, which is what the pihole is
    - kuroguro 3y ago
      Pi Hole just blocks on DNS level, I believe.
    - Salgat 3y ago
      The problem is that it will refuse to play content if it can't play the ad.
    - tiagod 3y ago
      Pihole is only intercepting DNS resolve requests. Those only resolve the domain itself. If they don't use a different domain to serve ads, then it can't be blocked that way.
  - potatopatch 3y ago
    Good thing the whole site is a bug, though I rarely end up on YT by accident since videos are marked in web etiquette. For twitter.com a filter option here on HN would be nice but a domain blocker might do.
ipsum2 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327017 same idea, but open sourced.
- rKarpinski 3y ago
  Thanks for the shoutout :) Got a pr about increasing the speed to 16x wonder if it's same person. I only set the ad speed for 10x, since it can access the skip button and do button.click() if there are longer adds. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ad-accelerator/gpboiedfklodfhngobidfjecdpmccehg?hl=en https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ad-accelerator/gpbo... I was also surprised most of the downloads are from Japan
  - talldatethrow 3y ago
    Working great for me. Thank you for making it. Only note I have is I didn't get any warning to restart the browser, but it wasn't working I believe until I did. That could cause a few people to think it doesn't work and to uninstall. (I had a few tabs open I didn't want to close which is the only reason I noticed)
    - rKarpinski 3y ago
      You're welcome, glad it helps! Thanks for sharing the issue around installing, I haven't seen that one before but I'll see if I can reproduce & fix
  - rKarpinski 3y ago
    TIL 16x is the max speed, so thats why they both chose it
dudul 3y ago
I got to say this arm race is interesting to watch. I wonder if we'll reach a point where YT asks viewers to pass a captcha at the end of an ad to prove that they watched it before getting back to their video.
- xattt 3y ago
  “Please proceed to purchase the item being advertised in order to continue watching.”
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- jfim 3y ago
  They already do a poll thing where they ask "which of the following brands have you seen ads for recently?"
  - tiagod 3y ago
    I had no idea, ublock is still doing a decent job... But I get those prompts on Waze when stopped at red lights and it's super annoying!
    - janc_ 3y ago
      Sounds like it might be illegal too...
  - kenhwang 3y ago
    I built the industry first version of that product :) Fun way to screw with Google is to pick the worst answer (haven't seen any of the products, worse impression of the brand, etc). Advertisers are starting to try to measure advertising effectiveness (did the user actually see our ad and like our product) instead of easily game-able metrics (impressions, time on screen, click through). However, we found that poor ad experiences would result in poor metrics. Advertisers really don't like it when they spend millions of dollars in advertising to get a report that says "your target demographic is less likely to consider your product now after seeing your ads".
DarkNova6 3y ago
Yep, I have been doing this for a very long time as well. Works like a charm.
charcircuit 3y ago
Or you could get youtube premium and not have to bother with a bookmarklet
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  I find it interesting that people don't tout the same logic to Windows: paying through the nose to get the enterprise version gets rid of of Microsoft's dirty widgets and spam. But somewhat paying Google is OK, paying Microsoft is no-no.
willsmith72 3y ago
The only times I've put up with ads so far is when casting to my TV. I don't mind the ad recommendations on home and after a video, but having to watch an extended ad or 2 before a video, and continuosly throughout the video, is enough for me to get off YouTube as an entertainment platform. Still useful for tutorials, but that much advertising makes the experience completely unenjoyable. Doubly so if the ad has to be "skipped" or else will run for 3 minutes, and I'm in the middle of something with hands occupied (cooking, working out...)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- thallium205 3y ago
  You can pay to turn off ads. There I saved YouTube as an entertainment platform for you.
  - willsmith72 3y ago
    im good. for entertainment SoundCloud and netflix are good enough, youtube just makes good recommendations. not worth >$100/year
  - llbeansandrice 3y ago
    It’s like $16/month which is insane
  - lp0_on_fire 3y ago
    We've seen this movie before: You can pay to turn off ads all the way up until YouTube decides to change the bargain.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    You can also install uBlock Origin. https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/ https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/
- namtab00 3y ago
Twid3 3y ago
Youtube still works as normal (no ads, no problems) for me with the latest Firefox and uBlock Origin.
- einpoklum 3y ago
  Same here (I also use EFF Privacy Badger though). Also not getting ads with Chromium and uBlock Origin. Could this be a country-specific thing?
  - 13415 3y ago
    I suspect that, too. I got two weeks of anti-ad blockers that required refreshing uBlock Origin. Then all anti-adblock messages stopped. Maybe Portugal has low priority. As far as I can see, practically no one will pay for Youtube Premium here.
- kuroguro 3y ago
  I sometimes get blocked but refreshing the ads and quickfixes lists on ublock solves it every time
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    This website will tell you if uBlock Origin bypasses YouTube Anti-Adblock. https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/ https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- underseacables 3y ago
  Since Firefox is apparently going to follow google with blocking ad blocks, do you have any thoughts of what browser you might move to next? Firefox said it will adopt Manifest V3 in the interest of cross-browser compatibility. https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/11/chrome-pushes-forward-with-plans-to-limit-ad-blockers-in-the-future/amp https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/11/chrome-pushes...
FpUser 3y ago
Does not "block blockers" for me. Hopefully stays this way or I am out of it
hbn 3y ago
I don't get why people have no problem paying for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc but are so stubborn about YouTube in particular, when myself and I know many others watch more YouTube than any streaming service. Even when ad blocking extensions work, it's only for browsers. If you're on Android you can install hacky modified apks, but YouTube breaks them every once in a while and then you're waiting for an update and having to go through some patching process again (I have to do this with YouTube Vanced to watch YouTube on the cheap Kindle Fire I use exclusively for YouTube in bed). If you're watching on a smart TV YouTube app or Apple TV or something... I assume there's options, but you're again gonna be wasting so much time on maintenance and keeping things up to date in the ad-blocking arms race, I'd rather just pay. And I don't know why anyone should expect YouTube to be infinitely ad-free and payment-free forever. All that storage and data transfer ain't free. Far from it that I'll defend Google, but I don't know what's so special about YouTube where it's the one service people use more than anything else they pay for, but they won't pay for it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- xnx 3y ago
  Even with YouTube Premium, many YouTube videos contain sponsorship messages within the video. I know they're there for reasons, but having two types of advertising does make YouTube different than Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ etc.
  - hbn 3y ago
    YouTube isn't paying for server costs with the $0 they make on ad reads that go from the sponsor directly to the creator. You can just tap right on your keyboard a few times to get past those anyway.
  - recursive 3y ago
    Netflix definitely has some "placed" products in some movies.
    - 3y ago
SeanAnderson 3y ago
I don't understand why this is any different than adblock. If this is an effective, client-side means of defeating ads, and Youtube has an effective way of defeating client-side prevention methods, then isn't this just going to be patched in the same way as adblock? Said differently, this is clearly an arms race. I have more trust in uBlock winning an arms race than any other extension. If it fails then I don't believe any other will succeed.
- Buttons840 3y ago
  One endgame is ad-blockers just blank the video and mute the sound in an undetectable way. Given the negative spiral that modern Internet usage often is, a moment of quiet to breathe and maybe break the cycle I would welcome.
  - SeanAnderson 3y ago
    I can see it now - YouTube puts a quick yes/no question after the ad to confirm comprehension. :) Relevant green text: https://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png https://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png
    - AeroNotix 3y ago
      It's the company's fault for making you want it so much.
    - yulker 3y ago
      Please drink a verification can.
    - chongli 3y ago
      Speaking of enshittification, whatever happened to imgur? That image does not load directly despite being a deep link. Plus it’s so low resolution the text is unreadable! I guess they are one step away from just taking down the http server altogether and just forcing everyone into their app which will connect via some proprietary protocol.
paulcole 3y ago
YouTube Premium is a top 5, maybe top 3 subscription service that I pay for. Others in that tier would be Amazon Prime, Apple One+, NYT Crosswords, and 1Password. Watching on every device without praying that this week’s ridiculous workaround continues to function for only like $15/month feels like a bargain.
- EGreg 3y ago
  and that's how they get you :-) Remember folks... when running away from a bear you don't have to outrun everyone, just the slowest person And similarly, to get people or organizations to pay, you just have to make it much more expensive for them at every moment to hack or fork your service than just pay you. It gets harder the bigger the organization is, but works like a charm on the long tail! If you've got an open source platform, it's a major consideration because a competitor can just fork your service and start offering it. So you have to have enough of a network effect and lock-in (e.g. ethereum nodes only taking ethereum gas as payment) that the fork is not as accepted for years, despite being faster and better (e.g. polygon). You can centralize trust (Amazon), Liquidity (exchanges) and ease-of-use through vertical integration (Apple).
- yurishimo 3y ago
  Same. I figure that since I watch this much YouTube, it’s probably worth paying for. At the moment, the rev share seems to be _okay_ compared to other creator platforms, so I take that bit of solace as well.
- conradfr 3y ago
  That's fine but all the streaming platforms get more expensive every x months nowadays.
  - paulcole 3y ago
    Is it too expensive today? If not, sign up and then cancel when it gets too expensive. Plus at work, I get a raise every x months nowadays, too. Gotta spend it on something.
- 3y ago
krona 3y ago
Watching one ad and then clearing cookies seems to work for me. (shrug)
- AeroNotix 3y ago
  Well trained, citizen.
- Seb-C 3y ago
  Blocking cookies on YouTube worked perfectly so far for me. And on top of it I don't get forcefully logged in to it anymore (I never wanted that in the first place).
bcrl 3y ago
I just wish I could convince Google that I will never buy certain products that they force feed me ads on continuously. No, I will never buy a Chromebook, so please stop putting that ad everywhere. No, I am not going to switch to an Android phone either.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  How can you prove you are trustworthy?
- codetrotter 3y ago
  In fact, everyone should instead band together to finance development of more maximally open hardware for laptops and phones and tablets.
- genman 3y ago
  I bought my current car only because I was able to block the car maker being stupid and force me to watch their ads on Youtube. I didn't use ad-blocker before but interruptive video ads were the last straw for me.
- throwaway346434 3y ago
  We need to kick this up a notch, with automated recognition of the advertiser and either complaint letters generated to their sales team email addresses, a media regulator, or for those with physical stores, geofenced notifications on your device to remind you how intrusive the brand has been/directions to the nearest competitor's store at the tap of a button. You can absolutely advertise on an intrusive platform, but as consumers, we can aggressively boycott/make your marketing work against you.
- brookst 3y ago
  Everyone feels that way, but in a large population some percentage will be swayed. Display ads are a statistics game, not a transactional one.
  - bcrl 3y ago
    But there are oodles of other things that I would consider buying! They'd do better with random ideas for Christmas gifts for family members, which would be nice given that it is the season...
agumonkey 3y ago
And I take great pleasure to manually shift to invidious instances just out of spite.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
endisneigh 3y ago
Why don’t people just not use YouTube if they don’t like the ads? Simple. Peertube is there for those folks. People keep whining about the monopoly but won’t go to another service to help grow it. People also whine about sponsor ads, as if you have to watch those videos or those channels. Don’t consume their content if you don’t like it. At the end of the day, if you don’t want to be tracked, hate ads and hate Google the solution is simple: stop using YouTube. The anti Facebook people understand this, which is why we don’t see incessant posts about facebooks anti-Adblock on HN. The kind of people on HN who hate Facebook probably just don’t visit the site at all. Same with Reddit vs mastodon. Twitter vs threads. Quora vs ChatGPT. Anti YouTubers seem unique in their constant whining yet reluctance to stop using what they hate.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Because it's the only platform you can find on a Google search.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- calamari4065 3y ago
  >Why don’t people just not use YouTube if they don’t like the ads? Simple: the videos they want to watch don't exist elsewhere. PeerTube doesn't help you if nobody you watch publishes to it. I use PeerTube, I run my own instance. PeerTube really sucks compared to YouTube. Even with all of the enshittification and google crippling the service, the quantity, quality, and discoverability of videos on YouTube has no comparison at all anywhere. People use YouTube for the reason they use anything: there simply is no viable alterative. Whining at people to use PeerTube doesn't help. You have to convince people to publish there before anyone can use it.
- TheMode 3y ago
  Because these websites create expectation. If everyone is using YouTube, won't you be missing something by not going? If you started using the service when you felt it was great and it deteriorated since, would it really be unfair to feel a sort of betrayal? You should go tell drug addict to just stop, not that hard. Maybe also to everybody complaining about house pricing, after all our ancestors build theirs with log and dirt why would you need something else.
creativenolo 3y ago
I’m oddly OK for now with the pop up. Still would rather it to an ad. Makes me reflect on if I really want to have surfed to where I am. And I find myself moving on or seeking elsewhere. This may all change. But the friction\value trade offs are a bit ‘shrug’ for me. Maybe instant video is still novelty and waiting a few seconds to see it, isn’t so different.
russellbeattie 3y ago
I think it's odd that YouTube hasn't simply proxied the ads into the same stream to make them indistinguishable from the video. Technically the browser is pulling chunks of video from their servers, and the ad content is pulled from different servers which ad blockers restrict. If the ad chunks weren't identifiable, there would be no practical way of blocking them. It'd be like removing commercials - or those in-video sponsorship segments - from a live broadcast. It seems YouTube is creating an arms race with ad blockers and alienating users by threatening bans than simply changing the way the ads are served. Yes, there's a whole industry around bidding for, dynamically serving and tracking ads using VAST and all that, but I'm positive Google has the market power to change that.
- tentacleuno 3y ago
  > I think it's odd that YouTube hasn't simply proxied the ads into the same stream to make them indistinguishable from the video. Yeah, same -- cable TV has been doing that since god knows how long. There must be some internal engineering reason(s) behind it.
  - city41 3y ago
    One small reason is they use ads as "payment" for things. Scrubbing through a video looking for a certain spot will require you to watch an ad almost every time you stop scrubbing. They also make you watch an ad if you pause the video for too long. When you unpause it, it immediately jumps into an ad. That's on top of the mid ad breaks the video already has.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    And cable TV has had the same workaround, tivo.
- markdown 3y ago
  The cost of doing so would be magnitudes more than what they could make from ad money.
  - 3y ago
eigenvalue 3y ago
YouTube premium is one of the best value purchases I’ve made. If you subscribe to Netflix you’re probably better off canceling that and replacing it with YouTube premium. Also, you can get the family plan for not much more and share with your parents and siblings (or in-laws!)— they will be very appreciative if they watch YouTube and don’t already have premium. It’s not just for skipping ads, it also lets you download videos locally on your phone and the audio continues in the background when you switch to another phone app.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  YT premium is one of the few subscriptions I find reasonable tbh. Youtube music, no ads on youtube, my conscience is clean, and I support creators.
  - vetinari 3y ago
    > no ads on youtube Really? No ads baked-in into videos by the creators? I.e. those skipped by another add-on, sponsorblock? > and I support creators. Are you sure about that? Why do they need to put their own ads into videos then? By paying Netflix, Amazon Prime, or other streaming service, you surely would: Netflix and Amazon have to pay for the content. But Youtube? They get it for free. > my conscience is clean, But your privacy-awareness should be on alert. For YouTube premium, you have to be logged in. You can bet, that Google profiles you based on what you watch. They just don't show you the ads right on the YouTube, but surely they do elsewhere on their network. Think of it like browser equivalent of the smart tv connected to net.
    - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
      > Really? No ads baked-in into videos by the creators? I.e. those skipped by another add-on, sponsorblock? Sponsorblock, yes. > Are you sure about that? Why do they need to put their own ads into videos then? For the people who use ad-blockers. Not me specifically and youtube doesn't provide a functionality to skip certain parts on paid views. > But your privacy-awareness should be on alert. For YouTube premium, you have to be logged in. You can bet, that Google profiles you based on what you watch. They just don't show you the ads right on the YouTube, but surely they do elsewhere on their network. I use kagi (paid), and ad-blockers for everything else. I can live with google having access to my [poor] music taste and view history.
net23 3y ago
Blipvert
- NelsonMinar 3y ago
  Zik Zak: Know Future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnvJREBGy84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnvJREBGy84
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
coffeecloud 3y ago
Just pay the $15 for the ad free version? The entitlement people feel for a free service that takes hundreds of millions of dollars in compute and human hours to run boggles me. Don’t like ads? Don’t like subscription fees? Don’t like large tech companies? Great! Go to the library and check out a book.
- hobs 3y ago
  They are entitled, but just like any commercial service this will just bloat to "ad lite" and then "full ads but you can still pay for it" - cable did the exact same thing.
  - drivers99 3y ago
    When’s that? It’s been 8 years so far, so good.
  - blindhippo 3y ago
    It's already there, except the ads are baked into most content as "sponsored videos". They make it easy to skip over the ads (seriously, just fast forward 20-60 seconds depending on the video). For better or worse, the vast majority of my media consumption is youtube these days and of all the subs I pay for, it's the one I get the most value out of. I don't get the cynicism.
- saos 3y ago
  Erm No.
- jmprspret 3y ago
  Oh boo hoo.
- AndroTux 3y ago
  For me personally it’s the way they’re bullying me to pay it. For years I wanted YouTube and Twitter to introduce a paid plan with less ads. And then they did, and immediately started harassing everyone who didn’t purchase it right away with ads every few seconds. It’s just rude and I don’t like being bullied into doing something.
zerr 3y ago
Can ad publishers filter out ad blocking users as not being their target audience? Forcing someone to watch your ad most likely triggers negative connotations about your brand.
- SnorkelTan 3y ago
  I think advertising still works even on people who don’t like it and prefer that if not.
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    I know there's lots of empirical studies and literature on this I believe the rationale is even if say 90% of the viewers who wouldn't buy the product anyway are now less likely to buy the product, That's considered a zero. However if you're positively influencing the purchasing decisions on that remaining 10%, then it might be money well spent. Thus the advertising may not affect specifically you but because this is a broadcast style exposure, that doesn't matter
    - adrr 3y ago
      Everyone buys stuff from phones to food.
    - voitvoder 3y ago
      I think the logic is flawed in thinking this way too. Most products have an overwhelming amount of choice. If you are not in the market for that category of product then the advertisement is not aimed at you. Even if you were annoyed by the the advertisement at that particular moment in time, if you are ever in the market for that category of product then the product will have brand recognition over its competitors and that is what is so huge and valuable. IMO it is quite like the classic example of the heuristic that there is no such thing as bad press.
      - kristopolous 3y ago
        Nah, that's long term planning and capital doesn't do that. The incentives are at short term maximization at all costs, including long term stability
keithnz 3y ago
using edge with ublock origin I haven't seen any ads. If I use chrome I get problems.
fallat 3y ago
YouTube, Google - just pull the trigger guys. Make YouTube a completely paid for platform.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bad_alloc 3y ago
  This instantly loses the main selling point: Massive audience. If they manage to get 20% of people to pay (which would be huge) they'd lose hundreds of millions of viewers still.
  - fallat 3y ago
    YouTube Shorts can remain unpaid, where you watch an ad after every short.
- jacobwilliamroy 3y ago
  There are so many people currently employed at Google whose livelihood (think mortgage payments, food, gasoline) depend on having a problem that they can work on but never solve.
iamacyborg 3y ago
If only regulatory bodies were as motivated in combating advertising’s huge data privacy issues inherent in RTB as Google are in beating down people trying to not have their data sent to hundreds of third parties without consent.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
DevKoala 3y ago
What is the stance of the people who work against the revenue generation of the services they consume? Should YouTube be a free service or what? It's only a semi-ironic question. Perhaps someone has a vision for how it all works out. Full disclosure: I work on programmatic advertising technologies.
- tehbeard 3y ago
  You're never going to capture the "will never watch ads" group. What is being destroyed by YouTube's current policy that led to this anti adblock attempt, is pushing too far with the ads. Crap quality and overstuffed. A 5 second ad on a 4 minute video? Fine. 1:30 ad, one of TWO... on same video? Fuck. That. Noise. It's the same segmentation issue as piracy, y'all get hyperfocused on the group that will NEVER play ball, and ruin the experience so much for those that would, that they "swap teams".
  - fxtentacle 3y ago
    That pretty much sums up my opinion, too. I'm happy to pay for my time and for convenience. If you violate either, that's on you. And let's be honest, losing access to most of YouTube is a rather miniscule loss.
  - wiseowise 3y ago
    6 seconds video shows 15 seconds ad, lmao.
- joenathanone 3y ago
  If the USPS was never a public service America would literally look differently. Maybe social media(including YouTube) is the modern day USPS, the primary way Americans interact/communicate with each other.
- veec_cas_tant 3y ago
  If you use YouTube a lot, paying for no ads is a no brainer. I pay for YT premium, Apple News+, NYT, Kagi, etc. If you watch just a few videos a month, the price is just not worth it and there is no per-block pricing. Same goes for paid articles - I would have liked to read a few articles from TheInformation about OpenAI but there is no way I’d buy a subscription.
mathgradthrow 3y ago
The right to block advertisements is the right to close your eyes and plug your ears. Google is trying to argue that its a violation of their terms of service to close your eyes and plug your ears. It's a violation of my person to try and detect whether I'm not paying attention to your ad.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  I find this interesting. Do you consider YouTube to just be a consumer product or does it occupy a different space in your mind?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- monkeywork 3y ago
  >The right to block advertisements is the right to close your eyes and plug your ears True >Google is trying to argue that its a violation of their terms of service to close your eyes and plug your ears. Google can have any terms of service they want - it's their service, if you don't like the terms don't use the service? > It's a violation of my person to try and detect whether I'm not paying attention to your ad. No it's not.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    > Google can have any terms of service they want - it's their service, if you don't like the terms don't use the service? Or you could, I dunno, don't agree to their terms and use their service anyways?
    - chii 3y ago
      Which is exactly why they want to implement WEI and shove that DRM system in to the browser specs so that you cannot abuse their service. It's also why it's important to fight against anti user standards.
      - 3y ago
zare_st 3y ago
I (Firefox+uBlock Origin on FreeBSD, Windows 10, Rocky, CentOS), logged in, have not encountered this yet. I also run a small channel mostly with ROIO bootlegs. The channel has never been penalized, it has a small but growing user base, and all the videos have been monetized by someone else. I also sometimes watch a video from my cellphone where the ads run. These might be the factors why I still didn't get the Youtube stick. P.S they've been monetized by companies that have no rights to monetize them whatsoever. However I have no rights over the material and if legal holders wish to battle the record companies that hogged my videos, that's great. If I have a recording of TV broadcast of singer-songwriter playing his material in a public festival, the record label that paid and released studio version of those songs has no stake in that. There can be a complex contract between broadcaster, festival and the performer, but I'm sure record company is not part of it unless it has explicitly funded the festival or the broadcast, which is a rarity, not applicable to my videos. The algorithm IDs these tracks as studio versions or as official live version which then trigger "ownership" by those record companies. So let's not pretend Youtube is some fair entity that needs to be paid fairly. They don't play fair themselves.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > So let's not pretend Youtube is some fair entity that needs to be paid fairly. They don't play fair themselves. If you want to use a service in a way that the service provider doesn't want you to, I think it's best to just say so. It's obvious there's a difference between things that are hard to figure out automatically, and deliberately not playing fair.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Fair is subjective.
  - zare_st 3y ago
    I'm using a public website the way I want to, by having control over its network requests and visual elements. If they don't like that, they have venues. One of them is paywall, the other is move to closed ecosystem with proprietary service client. Both would have huge negative impact on the business. So they need to cope with downsides on hosting their service over an open standard in an open ecosystem, where power users can and will take control of how their devices are rendering the content.
corn-dog 3y ago
Hey the creator here, was not expecting this to blow up at all. I made this I guess because of the Streisand effect, I probably never would have bothered if it weren’t for all the news about ad blockers not working. I intend this as a second line of defence against ads, where the first line would be a conventional ad blocker. After work I’m going to investigate the same technique for speeding up paid sponsor portions of the video. My background is a web dev, but I make extensions in my spare time :) I recommend making some yourself they are a fun little project. This one only took about 4 hours so I’m laughing at the interest :) If you want to see a way more awesome extension I’ve created check this out - https://mobileview.io/ https://mobileview.io/
- jraph 3y ago
  In case you don't know about it, make sure to check out SponsorBlock, which optionally, automatically skips parts you don't want to see like for example sponsors (but not only). You can use this awesome DB for what you want to do. And also Invidious. And also their combination. User of both, I'm unaffected by the recent adblocking issues on YouTube and I can still subscribe to channels, reliably. Without any Google account. (by the way, a simple regular RSS feed reader would do, since YouTube provides RSS feeds for each channel, but Invidious is a really convenient, specialized UI for this, without the notification / algorithm issues that seem to plague YouTube wrt this, but I digress) All these issues are already solved by these projects. I guess one could consider contributing to them (financially or with code for instance). The official YouTube frontend actually don't need no love, others already achieve what we want. Piped, NewPipe and FreeTube are also projects to look into (I loved NewPipe when I had a smartphone, Piped looks very good too and FreeTube looks interesting but I know less about them).
  - gustavus 3y ago
    > In case you don't know about it, make sure to check out SponsorBlock So I don't love ads but mostly because of the privacy invasion they represent, but sponsorships I have a lot less of a problem with. Oftentimes sponsorships will have at least marginal connection with what in watch (most of the time looking at you NordVPN and Raid Shadow Legends) but to me sponsorships are the happy middle ground that allows creators to get some recompense for their labors without turning everything into an adscape dystopia. Really I don't have a problem with ads on websites back in the day as long as they were somewhat tasteful, which they often were because the creator worked to integrate them into their work, but the constant user surveillance and spamming random nonsensical ads are what bugged me. I mean some channels that I frequent have even turned the sponsorships into additional entertaining content (check out Ryan George's the Adstronaut or Viva La Dirt League).
nottorp 3y ago
Hmm. You'd still have to disable uBlock Origin on youtube and thus let google track you?
quilombodigital 3y ago
Hey nice! I always wanted a subliminar ads player! Now I can just order online things without knowing why!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
completelylegit 3y ago
“then we released bears to take care of the wolves and we had too many bears so we released the tigers…”
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
monkeywork 3y ago
I submitted and got YouTube Premium. For most of my browsing, I don't mind battling with uBlock and making it work however for the rest of the family not so much, plus with premium, I can replace my Spotify subscription and also avoid ads from the YouTube app on the smart TV. There are methods (due to various regions having various prices) that one can find YTP cheaper than listed - but I'll leave that up to people to explore.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  When the masses start doing that region thing it will clearly not work anymore, youtube will make sure you’ll pay the maximum price they can get from you.
  - blibble 3y ago
    > youtube will make sure you’ll pay the maximum price they can get from you. and then they'll add ads to premium too
    - okdood64 3y ago
      and then you can cancel To me this has never been a valid reason (and there have been many) to not get Premium.
      - mentos 3y ago
        My late grandmother used to say that cable companies once made the same promise about paying for TV.
- wintermutestwin 3y ago
  I’ll gladly pay for ad free YouTube when google agrees to not track me. My data is worth way more to me and, obviously, them.
  - unshavedyak 3y ago
hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
Is anyone else hesitant to do this because they’re scared that google accounts may end up terminated as a result of violating EULA?
- alwayslikethis 3y ago
  I only watch logged out anyways. If you don't install other extensions (DF Youtube was the one I had that caused ad blocking to be detected) and stay with uBlock origin and sponsorblock, it won't be detected. It's a huge time sink anyways. I'd suspect most people would be better off without watching Youtube logged in.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  Make a new account.
- hooverd 3y ago
  Use Fastmail. It's not free, but that's okay to be because it means their business model is fundamentally different.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- carlob 3y ago
  I don't browse the web while logged in. Never trusted them with my browsing history.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
    You think their data matching capabilities wouldn’t make that link?
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
I didn’t bother with ad blockers till last year. But YouTube got so bad, they seem to force you towards premium at the moment. Minute long ads forcing me to interact on chrome cast. It’s a pain. I don’t mind paying for a good subscription but it’s gotten a bit crazy. Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Disney, prime, regular tv. You can lease a cheap car for that combined.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  There’s are alternatives to all this shitshow: consume a lot less, read books instead and dust off those torrent clients.
  - latentcall 3y ago
    This is what I’ve done. I was never “into” YouTube so don’t get the hubbub, but for movies and TV shows a good public tracker and Transmission are great. Add a cheap ereader and libgen and even better. Better than that? A cheap paperback.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    Even without pirating things, I couldn't imagine subscribing to all those things at once. The rare times a good movie comes out, my wife and I buy cheap tickets, that's it.
  - cactusplant7374 3y ago
    Soulseek is really awesome. There was one uploader with 3 petabytes but haven’t seem him online recently.
  - 10u152 3y ago
    RSS style torrent feed where i could auto download ripped episodes of my favourite YT shows would be dynamite. No waiting no buffering no ads.
    - sanswork 3y ago
      That was basically popcorn time. Don't know if it's still around.
tippytippytango 3y ago
Good on you for ensuring poor people have a way to deal with ads.
aussieguy1234 3y ago
Sounds like a modern version of "record it on VHS, then fast forward through the ads"
Lamad1234 3y ago
[dead]
MeImCounting 3y ago
The idea that "stealing" from google is somehow morally wrong is hilarious to me. Nobody owes them anything if they cant afford to host youtube then first of all its odd that its been around for so many years in the state it has, and second of all, if they cant afford to host it that their problem. Not mine.
- nmat 3y ago
  And YouTubers should make content for free?
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    They do until the algorithm thinks they are worth monetizing. Google doesn't give everyone who makes an account and uploads videos ad revenue.
    - rtkwe 3y ago
      The threshold for starting monetization isn't very high though. * 500 Subscriber * 3 'valid' uploads in the past 90 days and either of * 3k public watch hours or 3m shorts views https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/more-ways-for-creators-to-earn-on-youtube/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/more-ways-for-creators-...
      - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
        Doing any of those things without the algorithm showing your videos to people is hard though. They also require 3k watch hours in the past year so they expect you to grind for at least a year to "prove" you are worth monetizing. That or go viral somehow and bootstrap yourself (which is likely why the shorts views are so high). Obvious not impossible as people still do it but the math seems suspect to me. YouTube gets thousands of hours of video uploaded every second. I'm not sure what the ratio of monetized accounts to non-monetized accounts is, but if YouTube can run a channel "for free" for a year because they aren't monetizing it yet, it seems there's a threshold they are willing to accept to serve videos "nobody wants to see" until enough people do want to see it and they advertise on it. So the high profile creators are costing YouTube money to serve their videos and YouTube wants help paying that cost. But they only extract it from channels they know are profitable because there are a lot of eyeballs on those videos. Almost like they are promising X ad views to advertisers and want to keep that numbers game rolling. I feel like ad based spending is going to go through a correction in the next decade.
dwaite 3y ago
So you recreated Blipverts? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
wslh 3y ago
It reminds me of an article I wrote with code in 2012 about modifying the speed of YouTube in Windows using instrumentation [1]. When YouTube used Adobe Flash. [1] https://blog.nektra.com/2012/06/13/controlling-the-speed-of-youtube-flash-html5-and-desktop-videos-with-deviare-hooks/ https://blog.nektra.com/2012/06/13/controlling-the-speed-of-...
lordfrito 3y ago
I can't believe the number of people here that think YouTube has some right to access my eyes and attention. No one is forcing them to stream me free data. What I do with the data they send me is none of their business. I've never consented or given them permission to access me.
- spaceribs 3y ago
  I guess it's not disruption when we do it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rainyMammoth 3y ago
  A lot of those people work for adtechs. Once you realize that 50% of bigtech is relying almost entirely on ads, a lot of people are simply advocating for keeping their FAANG salaries by forcing us to watch debilitating ads.
zouhair 3y ago
The fact that civilization now runs on ads is insane to me. How did we get here?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tokai 3y ago
  Brewed down to one cause I would say Edward Bernays.
- rainyMammoth 3y ago
  we glorified companies like Google.
bonchicbongenre 3y ago
I can recommend this this FF extension to get fine-grained video speed control, without a 2x speed cap (which often isn't fast enough) https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed It has served me well for years and works on YT ads as well as other sites with similar players
- circuit10 3y ago
  When I tried manually changing the video element’s playbackRate the subtitles would desync
handy2000 3y ago
I encountered this approach before (I think here on HN) and had a question since then: when video ads run faster, can't YT just compare the expected time to the actual time and flag the user, show an anti-ad blocking popup, etc?
- teeray 3y ago
  That could get into clock sync issues though that would have to be carefully thought through. What happens if a user’s system clock updates during an ad roll? What about a user watching an ad on a train that passes through a time zone boundary?
  - eviks 3y ago
    These are too rare events to matter, aggregate data and if there are too many skips, start blocking
  - hedora 3y ago
    They could measure server-side, which would be more difficult to block. I’d like to see some combination of ad nauseum (play ad in an invisible/silent background to support the content creators) and auto-mirroring to bittorrent (to let the real video play while google thinks the ad is playing, and also, for anti-censorship).
    - handy2000 3y ago
      > auto-mirroring to bittorrent Oh, haven't heard of this technique before. Very cool!
imacomputertoo 3y ago
My two cents: if you're using YouTube do much that this bothers you, then just buy premium. It's well worth it in my opinion. You also get the music service. I use it instead of Spotify. I think you also get a few free movies too. No I don't work for Google.
- cactusplant7374 3y ago
  Don’t pay for the cow if you can get the milk for free.
- deanrtaylor 3y ago
  Most people would rather spend hours of their time to build a workaround. Although, even on the minimum wage of my country, four hours of work is around half a year of youtube premium. based on the average salary for a developer it's probably around three years of youtube premium. I will say, if I start to get ads on youtube premium then I'll start building workarounds but until that day, it makes sense to just pay the fee.
- MindSpunk 3y ago
  YouTube premium is $17 a month in my market. I'm not paying $17 a month to remove ads from YouTube tier content. I'd pay $2 a month tops. Netflix is $22 a month for premium and Amazon Prime is $10 a month. YouTube does not even come close to providing similar value as those services. I'm not interested in any of the other junk they force you to buy with YouTube premium, it's just bundling to inflate the cost.
  - t3rabytes 3y ago
    For me it’s about where I’m spending my time (YouTube), not so much the pure cost to make the content itself (Netflix, etc.). I spend far more time watching YouTube than anything else, background and foreground, which makes the $15 or whatever (am in the US, I don’t actually know what I pay because I’ve never questioned its value to me unlike Netflix, etc.) worth it to me. I think it’s totally fair if you don’t think it’s worth it for you though. I’m very willing to (and have!) cancel most other services (except for Max which I get for “free” from my ISP) in favor of YouTube because I find the content far more engaging and I can tailor it to my interests far better. I’ll also add that a decent chunk of my viewing is on mobile (phone or iPad) where ad blocking isn’t slightly more difficult using the YouTube native app.
drewmol 3y ago
Is anybody working on a way to mute ads? Like listen to everything and detect ads, remote control volume on the device playing them?
janmo 3y ago
I noticed that I don't get the adblocker message when I connect with a Cambodian IP, but when I use a VPN let's say in Singapore I get the message. It appears that currently Youtube Premium is not available in Cambodia. So Ad blocker + IP from Cambodia still works like a charm.
taf2 3y ago
So silly to blocks ads on YouTube . IMO YouTube has an excellent - paid ad free experience that financially makes sense both for me and content creators. Blocking ads on YouTube just seems evil …
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mwidell 3y ago
Just buy premium. Not only do you avoid ads on all your devices (tv, phone, computer), you also get background playing of yt videos on your iPhone, which is an awesome feature. Not to mention, you support the livelihoods of the creators you watch (they get 55% of that money!)
- born2discover 3y ago
  And ad a bonus, you get to be tracked everywhere for a tiny monthly fee ! Who wouldn't want that ! /S
- 63stack 3y ago
  Meanwhile, a marketing manager at Google: "We keep cranking up ads, and they keep buying premium, it's working".
kgeist 3y ago
Google has been voluntarily blocking ads here in Russia since 2022 due to the sanctions (from what I understand, so that monetization didn't translate into taxes paid to the government). I now live in a completely ads-free world for 2 years. So I wonder, if it's possible for people abroad to somehow proxy ad-related traffic through Russia so that Google itself blocked ads.
- hypertele-Xii 3y ago
  Nice try, Putin. I'm not VPN-ing my traffic through Russia :)
  - kgeist 3y ago
    The idea was to VPN only ad traffic (which would be automatically blocked anyway). Proxying video content through Russia would considerably increase latency.
    - aembleton 3y ago
      If you can determine which traffic is ad traffic; why not just block it?
      - kgeist 3y ago
        Well, I'm assuming that Youtube has some sort of a script to check if ad traffic is blocked, to detect ad blockers. Sure, you can write some extension which by-passes it, but then they can change their script a week later to do it slightly differently, to make ad blockers unusable again. Meanwhile for Russia, they have some sort of an exception, so that there can be no ad traffic at all, and you can still watch videos. And they maintain this exception themselves, so there would be no effort on our part.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  [flagged]
kurtextrem 3y ago
Am I missing something or was exactly something like this on "Show HN" the last days? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327017
613309663 3y ago
[flagged]
Blackarea 3y ago
I switched from ff to brave just because there are no ads not on yt nor anywhere else. Pretty solid browser imo
juniperplant 3y ago
Well I guess it's only about time before Google goes all in with DRM.

630 points by znpy 3y ago

Does YouTube work without JS? This might be one way to avoid ads as well as a network wide Pi Hole. I hate it when YouTube / Google needs to exploit everyone's data and privacy in order to make money.

rollcat 3y ago
Does anything at all run without JS these days? I swear all I wanted was to read a blog post, and it loaded more megabytes of JS than the text and pictures combined.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- DoingIsLearning 3y ago
  One example that comes to mind is Kagi. They makes it a design point that Kagi should work even without javascript enabled.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jamesfinlayson 3y ago
  I thought Twitter had a no Javascript version but apparently that stopped a couple of years ago.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  I ran Noscript about 10 years ago. At first I didn't notice any difference. Then, over a period of only a year or so, things started to break. I would notice that my friends' web experience seemed remarkably different to mine. Eventually I capitulated and enabled JS again. Seeing it all happen at one rather than at a trickle over time was quite shocking. I still design web sites without JS first. In fact, I design them without even CSS. It's called progressive enhancement. Many of them have only a sprinkling of convenient but not necessary JS.
recursive 3y ago
Not even close.
lagrange77 3y ago
> Pi Hole They serve the ads from the same domain, as the site itself.
- colesantiago 3y ago
  Surely it's possible to block the paths to the ad on the site itself.
  - mirashii 3y ago
    Not with DNS blocking, which is what the pihole is
  - kuroguro 3y ago
    Pi Hole just blocks on DNS level, I believe.
  - Salgat 3y ago
    The problem is that it will refuse to play content if it can't play the ad.
  - tiagod 3y ago
    Pihole is only intercepting DNS resolve requests. Those only resolve the domain itself. If they don't use a different domain to serve ads, then it can't be blocked that way.
- potatopatch 3y ago
  Good thing the whole site is a bug, though I rarely end up on YT by accident since videos are marked in web etiquette. For twitter.com a filter option here on HN would be nice but a domain blocker might do.

ipsum2 3y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327017 same idea, but open sourced.

rKarpinski 3y ago
Thanks for the shoutout :) Got a pr about increasing the speed to 16x wonder if it's same person. I only set the ad speed for 10x, since it can access the skip button and do button.click() if there are longer adds. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ad-accelerator/gpboiedfklodfhngobidfjecdpmccehg?hl=en https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ad-accelerator/gpbo... I was also surprised most of the downloads are from Japan
- talldatethrow 3y ago
  Working great for me. Thank you for making it. Only note I have is I didn't get any warning to restart the browser, but it wasn't working I believe until I did. That could cause a few people to think it doesn't work and to uninstall. (I had a few tabs open I didn't want to close which is the only reason I noticed)
  - rKarpinski 3y ago
    You're welcome, glad it helps! Thanks for sharing the issue around installing, I haven't seen that one before but I'll see if I can reproduce & fix
- rKarpinski 3y ago
  TIL 16x is the max speed, so thats why they both chose it

dudul 3y ago

I got to say this arm race is interesting to watch. I wonder if we'll reach a point where YT asks viewers to pass a captcha at the end of an ad to prove that they watched it before getting back to their video.

xattt 3y ago
“Please proceed to purchase the item being advertised in order to continue watching.”
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jfim 3y ago
They already do a poll thing where they ask "which of the following brands have you seen ads for recently?"
- tiagod 3y ago
  I had no idea, ublock is still doing a decent job... But I get those prompts on Waze when stopped at red lights and it's super annoying!
  - janc_ 3y ago
    Sounds like it might be illegal too...
- kenhwang 3y ago
  I built the industry first version of that product :) Fun way to screw with Google is to pick the worst answer (haven't seen any of the products, worse impression of the brand, etc). Advertisers are starting to try to measure advertising effectiveness (did the user actually see our ad and like our product) instead of easily game-able metrics (impressions, time on screen, click through). However, we found that poor ad experiences would result in poor metrics. Advertisers really don't like it when they spend millions of dollars in advertising to get a report that says "your target demographic is less likely to consider your product now after seeing your ads".

DarkNova6 3y ago

Yep, I have been doing this for a very long time as well. Works like a charm.

charcircuit 3y ago

Or you could get youtube premium and not have to bother with a bookmarklet

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
makeitdouble 3y ago
I find it interesting that people don't tout the same logic to Windows: paying through the nose to get the enterprise version gets rid of of Microsoft's dirty widgets and spam. But somewhat paying Google is OK, paying Microsoft is no-no.

willsmith72 3y ago

The only times I've put up with ads so far is when casting to my TV. I don't mind the ad recommendations on home and after a video, but having to watch an extended ad or 2 before a video, and continuosly throughout the video, is enough for me to get off YouTube as an entertainment platform. Still useful for tutorials, but that much advertising makes the experience completely unenjoyable. Doubly so if the ad has to be "skipped" or else will run for 3 minutes, and I'm in the middle of something with hands occupied (cooking, working out...)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thallium205 3y ago
You can pay to turn off ads. There I saved YouTube as an entertainment platform for you.
- willsmith72 3y ago
  im good. for entertainment SoundCloud and netflix are good enough, youtube just makes good recommendations. not worth >$100/year
- llbeansandrice 3y ago
  It’s like $16/month which is insane
- lp0_on_fire 3y ago
  We've seen this movie before: You can pay to turn off ads all the way up until YouTube decides to change the bargain.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  You can also install uBlock Origin. https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/ https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/
namtab00 3y ago

Twid3 3y ago

Youtube still works as normal (no ads, no problems) for me with the latest Firefox and uBlock Origin.

einpoklum 3y ago
Same here (I also use EFF Privacy Badger though). Also not getting ads with Chromium and uBlock Origin. Could this be a country-specific thing?
- 13415 3y ago
  I suspect that, too. I got two weeks of anti-ad blockers that required refreshing uBlock Origin. Then all anti-adblock messages stopped. Maybe Portugal has low priority. As far as I can see, practically no one will pay for Youtube Premium here.
kuroguro 3y ago
I sometimes get blocked but refreshing the ads and quickfixes lists on ublock solves it every time
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  This website will tell you if uBlock Origin bypasses YouTube Anti-Adblock. https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/ https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
underseacables 3y ago
Since Firefox is apparently going to follow google with blocking ad blocks, do you have any thoughts of what browser you might move to next? Firefox said it will adopt Manifest V3 in the interest of cross-browser compatibility. https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/11/chrome-pushes-forward-with-plans-to-limit-ad-blockers-in-the-future/amp https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/11/chrome-pushes...

FpUser 3y ago

Does not "block blockers" for me. Hopefully stays this way or I am out of it

hbn 3y ago

I don't get why people have no problem paying for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc but are so stubborn about YouTube in particular, when myself and I know many others watch more YouTube than any streaming service. Even when ad blocking extensions work, it's only for browsers. If you're on Android you can install hacky modified apks, but YouTube breaks them every once in a while and then you're waiting for an update and having to go through some patching process again (I have to do this with YouTube Vanced to watch YouTube on the cheap Kindle Fire I use exclusively for YouTube in bed). If you're watching on a smart TV YouTube app or Apple TV or something... I assume there's options, but you're again gonna be wasting so much time on maintenance and keeping things up to date in the ad-blocking arms race, I'd rather just pay. And I don't know why anyone should expect YouTube to be infinitely ad-free and payment-free forever. All that storage and data transfer ain't free. Far from it that I'll defend Google, but I don't know what's so special about YouTube where it's the one service people use more than anything else they pay for, but they won't pay for it.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
xnx 3y ago
Even with YouTube Premium, many YouTube videos contain sponsorship messages within the video. I know they're there for reasons, but having two types of advertising does make YouTube different than Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ etc.
- hbn 3y ago
  YouTube isn't paying for server costs with the $0 they make on ad reads that go from the sponsor directly to the creator. You can just tap right on your keyboard a few times to get past those anyway.
- recursive 3y ago
  Netflix definitely has some "placed" products in some movies.
  - 3y ago

SeanAnderson 3y ago

I don't understand why this is any different than adblock. If this is an effective, client-side means of defeating ads, and Youtube has an effective way of defeating client-side prevention methods, then isn't this just going to be patched in the same way as adblock? Said differently, this is clearly an arms race. I have more trust in uBlock winning an arms race than any other extension. If it fails then I don't believe any other will succeed.

Buttons840 3y ago
One endgame is ad-blockers just blank the video and mute the sound in an undetectable way. Given the negative spiral that modern Internet usage often is, a moment of quiet to breathe and maybe break the cycle I would welcome.
- SeanAnderson 3y ago
  I can see it now - YouTube puts a quick yes/no question after the ad to confirm comprehension. :) Relevant green text: https://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png https://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png
  - AeroNotix 3y ago
    It's the company's fault for making you want it so much.
  - yulker 3y ago
    Please drink a verification can.
  - chongli 3y ago
    Speaking of enshittification, whatever happened to imgur? That image does not load directly despite being a deep link. Plus it’s so low resolution the text is unreadable! I guess they are one step away from just taking down the http server altogether and just forcing everyone into their app which will connect via some proprietary protocol.

paulcole 3y ago

YouTube Premium is a top 5, maybe top 3 subscription service that I pay for. Others in that tier would be Amazon Prime, Apple One+, NYT Crosswords, and 1Password. Watching on every device without praying that this week’s ridiculous workaround continues to function for only like $15/month feels like a bargain.

EGreg 3y ago
and that's how they get you :-) Remember folks... when running away from a bear you don't have to outrun everyone, just the slowest person And similarly, to get people or organizations to pay, you just have to make it much more expensive for them at every moment to hack or fork your service than just pay you. It gets harder the bigger the organization is, but works like a charm on the long tail! If you've got an open source platform, it's a major consideration because a competitor can just fork your service and start offering it. So you have to have enough of a network effect and lock-in (e.g. ethereum nodes only taking ethereum gas as payment) that the fork is not as accepted for years, despite being faster and better (e.g. polygon). You can centralize trust (Amazon), Liquidity (exchanges) and ease-of-use through vertical integration (Apple).
yurishimo 3y ago
Same. I figure that since I watch this much YouTube, it’s probably worth paying for. At the moment, the rev share seems to be _okay_ compared to other creator platforms, so I take that bit of solace as well.
conradfr 3y ago
That's fine but all the streaming platforms get more expensive every x months nowadays.
- paulcole 3y ago
  Is it too expensive today? If not, sign up and then cancel when it gets too expensive. Plus at work, I get a raise every x months nowadays, too. Gotta spend it on something.
3y ago

krona 3y ago

Watching one ad and then clearing cookies seems to work for me. (shrug)

AeroNotix 3y ago
Well trained, citizen.
Seb-C 3y ago
Blocking cookies on YouTube worked perfectly so far for me. And on top of it I don't get forcefully logged in to it anymore (I never wanted that in the first place).

bcrl 3y ago

I just wish I could convince Google that I will never buy certain products that they force feed me ads on continuously. No, I will never buy a Chromebook, so please stop putting that ad everywhere. No, I am not going to switch to an Android phone either.

actionfromafar 3y ago
How can you prove you are trustworthy?
codetrotter 3y ago
In fact, everyone should instead band together to finance development of more maximally open hardware for laptops and phones and tablets.
genman 3y ago
I bought my current car only because I was able to block the car maker being stupid and force me to watch their ads on Youtube. I didn't use ad-blocker before but interruptive video ads were the last straw for me.
throwaway346434 3y ago
We need to kick this up a notch, with automated recognition of the advertiser and either complaint letters generated to their sales team email addresses, a media regulator, or for those with physical stores, geofenced notifications on your device to remind you how intrusive the brand has been/directions to the nearest competitor's store at the tap of a button. You can absolutely advertise on an intrusive platform, but as consumers, we can aggressively boycott/make your marketing work against you.
brookst 3y ago
Everyone feels that way, but in a large population some percentage will be swayed. Display ads are a statistics game, not a transactional one.
- bcrl 3y ago
  But there are oodles of other things that I would consider buying! They'd do better with random ideas for Christmas gifts for family members, which would be nice given that it is the season...

agumonkey 3y ago

And I take great pleasure to manually shift to invidious instances just out of spite.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

endisneigh 3y ago

Why don’t people just not use YouTube if they don’t like the ads? Simple. Peertube is there for those folks. People keep whining about the monopoly but won’t go to another service to help grow it. People also whine about sponsor ads, as if you have to watch those videos or those channels. Don’t consume their content if you don’t like it. At the end of the day, if you don’t want to be tracked, hate ads and hate Google the solution is simple: stop using YouTube. The anti Facebook people understand this, which is why we don’t see incessant posts about facebooks anti-Adblock on HN. The kind of people on HN who hate Facebook probably just don’t visit the site at all. Same with Reddit vs mastodon. Twitter vs threads. Quora vs ChatGPT. Anti YouTubers seem unique in their constant whining yet reluctance to stop using what they hate.

marcosdumay 3y ago
Because it's the only platform you can find on a Google search.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
calamari4065 3y ago
>Why don’t people just not use YouTube if they don’t like the ads? Simple: the videos they want to watch don't exist elsewhere. PeerTube doesn't help you if nobody you watch publishes to it. I use PeerTube, I run my own instance. PeerTube really sucks compared to YouTube. Even with all of the enshittification and google crippling the service, the quantity, quality, and discoverability of videos on YouTube has no comparison at all anywhere. People use YouTube for the reason they use anything: there simply is no viable alterative. Whining at people to use PeerTube doesn't help. You have to convince people to publish there before anyone can use it.
TheMode 3y ago
Because these websites create expectation. If everyone is using YouTube, won't you be missing something by not going? If you started using the service when you felt it was great and it deteriorated since, would it really be unfair to feel a sort of betrayal? You should go tell drug addict to just stop, not that hard. Maybe also to everybody complaining about house pricing, after all our ancestors build theirs with log and dirt why would you need something else.

creativenolo 3y ago

I’m oddly OK for now with the pop up. Still would rather it to an ad. Makes me reflect on if I really want to have surfed to where I am. And I find myself moving on or seeking elsewhere. This may all change. But the friction\value trade offs are a bit ‘shrug’ for me. Maybe instant video is still novelty and waiting a few seconds to see it, isn’t so different.

russellbeattie 3y ago

I think it's odd that YouTube hasn't simply proxied the ads into the same stream to make them indistinguishable from the video. Technically the browser is pulling chunks of video from their servers, and the ad content is pulled from different servers which ad blockers restrict. If the ad chunks weren't identifiable, there would be no practical way of blocking them. It'd be like removing commercials - or those in-video sponsorship segments - from a live broadcast. It seems YouTube is creating an arms race with ad blockers and alienating users by threatening bans than simply changing the way the ads are served. Yes, there's a whole industry around bidding for, dynamically serving and tracking ads using VAST and all that, but I'm positive Google has the market power to change that.

tentacleuno 3y ago
> I think it's odd that YouTube hasn't simply proxied the ads into the same stream to make them indistinguishable from the video. Yeah, same -- cable TV has been doing that since god knows how long. There must be some internal engineering reason(s) behind it.
- city41 3y ago
  One small reason is they use ads as "payment" for things. Scrubbing through a video looking for a certain spot will require you to watch an ad almost every time you stop scrubbing. They also make you watch an ad if you pause the video for too long. When you unpause it, it immediately jumps into an ad. That's on top of the mid ad breaks the video already has.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  And cable TV has had the same workaround, tivo.
markdown 3y ago
The cost of doing so would be magnitudes more than what they could make from ad money.
- 3y ago

eigenvalue 3y ago

YouTube premium is one of the best value purchases I’ve made. If you subscribe to Netflix you’re probably better off canceling that and replacing it with YouTube premium. Also, you can get the family plan for not much more and share with your parents and siblings (or in-laws!)— they will be very appreciative if they watch YouTube and don’t already have premium. It’s not just for skipping ads, it also lets you download videos locally on your phone and the audio continues in the background when you switch to another phone app.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
PartiallyTyped 3y ago
YT premium is one of the few subscriptions I find reasonable tbh. Youtube music, no ads on youtube, my conscience is clean, and I support creators.
- vetinari 3y ago
  > no ads on youtube Really? No ads baked-in into videos by the creators? I.e. those skipped by another add-on, sponsorblock? > and I support creators. Are you sure about that? Why do they need to put their own ads into videos then? By paying Netflix, Amazon Prime, or other streaming service, you surely would: Netflix and Amazon have to pay for the content. But Youtube? They get it for free. > my conscience is clean, But your privacy-awareness should be on alert. For YouTube premium, you have to be logged in. You can bet, that Google profiles you based on what you watch. They just don't show you the ads right on the YouTube, but surely they do elsewhere on their network. Think of it like browser equivalent of the smart tv connected to net.
  - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    > Really? No ads baked-in into videos by the creators? I.e. those skipped by another add-on, sponsorblock? Sponsorblock, yes. > Are you sure about that? Why do they need to put their own ads into videos then? For the people who use ad-blockers. Not me specifically and youtube doesn't provide a functionality to skip certain parts on paid views. > But your privacy-awareness should be on alert. For YouTube premium, you have to be logged in. You can bet, that Google profiles you based on what you watch. They just don't show you the ads right on the YouTube, but surely they do elsewhere on their network. I use kagi (paid), and ad-blockers for everything else. I can live with google having access to my [poor] music taste and view history.

net23 3y ago

Blipvert

NelsonMinar 3y ago
Zik Zak: Know Future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnvJREBGy84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnvJREBGy84
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

coffeecloud 3y ago

Just pay the $15 for the ad free version? The entitlement people feel for a free service that takes hundreds of millions of dollars in compute and human hours to run boggles me. Don’t like ads? Don’t like subscription fees? Don’t like large tech companies? Great! Go to the library and check out a book.

hobs 3y ago
They are entitled, but just like any commercial service this will just bloat to "ad lite" and then "full ads but you can still pay for it" - cable did the exact same thing.
- drivers99 3y ago
  When’s that? It’s been 8 years so far, so good.
- blindhippo 3y ago
  It's already there, except the ads are baked into most content as "sponsored videos". They make it easy to skip over the ads (seriously, just fast forward 20-60 seconds depending on the video). For better or worse, the vast majority of my media consumption is youtube these days and of all the subs I pay for, it's the one I get the most value out of. I don't get the cynicism.
saos 3y ago
Erm No.
jmprspret 3y ago
Oh boo hoo.
AndroTux 3y ago
For me personally it’s the way they’re bullying me to pay it. For years I wanted YouTube and Twitter to introduce a paid plan with less ads. And then they did, and immediately started harassing everyone who didn’t purchase it right away with ads every few seconds. It’s just rude and I don’t like being bullied into doing something.

zerr 3y ago

Can ad publishers filter out ad blocking users as not being their target audience? Forcing someone to watch your ad most likely triggers negative connotations about your brand.

SnorkelTan 3y ago
I think advertising still works even on people who don’t like it and prefer that if not.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  I know there's lots of empirical studies and literature on this I believe the rationale is even if say 90% of the viewers who wouldn't buy the product anyway are now less likely to buy the product, That's considered a zero. However if you're positively influencing the purchasing decisions on that remaining 10%, then it might be money well spent. Thus the advertising may not affect specifically you but because this is a broadcast style exposure, that doesn't matter
  - adrr 3y ago
    Everyone buys stuff from phones to food.
  - voitvoder 3y ago
    I think the logic is flawed in thinking this way too. Most products have an overwhelming amount of choice. If you are not in the market for that category of product then the advertisement is not aimed at you. Even if you were annoyed by the the advertisement at that particular moment in time, if you are ever in the market for that category of product then the product will have brand recognition over its competitors and that is what is so huge and valuable. IMO it is quite like the classic example of the heuristic that there is no such thing as bad press.
    - kristopolous 3y ago
      Nah, that's long term planning and capital doesn't do that. The incentives are at short term maximization at all costs, including long term stability

keithnz 3y ago

using edge with ublock origin I haven't seen any ads. If I use chrome I get problems.

fallat 3y ago

YouTube, Google - just pull the trigger guys. Make YouTube a completely paid for platform.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bad_alloc 3y ago
This instantly loses the main selling point: Massive audience. If they manage to get 20% of people to pay (which would be huge) they'd lose hundreds of millions of viewers still.
- fallat 3y ago
  YouTube Shorts can remain unpaid, where you watch an ad after every short.
jacobwilliamroy 3y ago
There are so many people currently employed at Google whose livelihood (think mortgage payments, food, gasoline) depend on having a problem that they can work on but never solve.

iamacyborg 3y ago

If only regulatory bodies were as motivated in combating advertising’s huge data privacy issues inherent in RTB as Google are in beating down people trying to not have their data sent to hundreds of third parties without consent.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

DevKoala 3y ago

What is the stance of the people who work against the revenue generation of the services they consume? Should YouTube be a free service or what? It's only a semi-ironic question. Perhaps someone has a vision for how it all works out. Full disclosure: I work on programmatic advertising technologies.

tehbeard 3y ago
You're never going to capture the "will never watch ads" group. What is being destroyed by YouTube's current policy that led to this anti adblock attempt, is pushing too far with the ads. Crap quality and overstuffed. A 5 second ad on a 4 minute video? Fine. 1:30 ad, one of TWO... on same video? Fuck. That. Noise. It's the same segmentation issue as piracy, y'all get hyperfocused on the group that will NEVER play ball, and ruin the experience so much for those that would, that they "swap teams".
- fxtentacle 3y ago
  That pretty much sums up my opinion, too. I'm happy to pay for my time and for convenience. If you violate either, that's on you. And let's be honest, losing access to most of YouTube is a rather miniscule loss.
- wiseowise 3y ago
  6 seconds video shows 15 seconds ad, lmao.
joenathanone 3y ago
If the USPS was never a public service America would literally look differently. Maybe social media(including YouTube) is the modern day USPS, the primary way Americans interact/communicate with each other.
veec_cas_tant 3y ago
If you use YouTube a lot, paying for no ads is a no brainer. I pay for YT premium, Apple News+, NYT, Kagi, etc. If you watch just a few videos a month, the price is just not worth it and there is no per-block pricing. Same goes for paid articles - I would have liked to read a few articles from TheInformation about OpenAI but there is no way I’d buy a subscription.

mathgradthrow 3y ago

The right to block advertisements is the right to close your eyes and plug your ears. Google is trying to argue that its a violation of their terms of service to close your eyes and plug your ears. It's a violation of my person to try and detect whether I'm not paying attention to your ad.

kristopolous 3y ago
I find this interesting. Do you consider YouTube to just be a consumer product or does it occupy a different space in your mind?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
monkeywork 3y ago
>The right to block advertisements is the right to close your eyes and plug your ears True >Google is trying to argue that its a violation of their terms of service to close your eyes and plug your ears. Google can have any terms of service they want - it's their service, if you don't like the terms don't use the service? > It's a violation of my person to try and detect whether I'm not paying attention to your ad. No it's not.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  > Google can have any terms of service they want - it's their service, if you don't like the terms don't use the service? Or you could, I dunno, don't agree to their terms and use their service anyways?
  - chii 3y ago
    Which is exactly why they want to implement WEI and shove that DRM system in to the browser specs so that you cannot abuse their service. It's also why it's important to fight against anti user standards.
    - 3y ago

zare_st 3y ago

I (Firefox+uBlock Origin on FreeBSD, Windows 10, Rocky, CentOS), logged in, have not encountered this yet. I also run a small channel mostly with ROIO bootlegs. The channel has never been penalized, it has a small but growing user base, and all the videos have been monetized by someone else. I also sometimes watch a video from my cellphone where the ads run. These might be the factors why I still didn't get the Youtube stick. P.S they've been monetized by companies that have no rights to monetize them whatsoever. However I have no rights over the material and if legal holders wish to battle the record companies that hogged my videos, that's great. If I have a recording of TV broadcast of singer-songwriter playing his material in a public festival, the record label that paid and released studio version of those songs has no stake in that. There can be a complex contract between broadcaster, festival and the performer, but I'm sure record company is not part of it unless it has explicitly funded the festival or the broadcast, which is a rarity, not applicable to my videos. The algorithm IDs these tracks as studio versions or as official live version which then trigger "ownership" by those record companies. So let's not pretend Youtube is some fair entity that needs to be paid fairly. They don't play fair themselves.

robertlagrant 3y ago
> So let's not pretend Youtube is some fair entity that needs to be paid fairly. They don't play fair themselves. If you want to use a service in a way that the service provider doesn't want you to, I think it's best to just say so. It's obvious there's a difference between things that are hard to figure out automatically, and deliberately not playing fair.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Fair is subjective.
- zare_st 3y ago
  I'm using a public website the way I want to, by having control over its network requests and visual elements. If they don't like that, they have venues. One of them is paywall, the other is move to closed ecosystem with proprietary service client. Both would have huge negative impact on the business. So they need to cope with downsides on hosting their service over an open standard in an open ecosystem, where power users can and will take control of how their devices are rendering the content.

corn-dog 3y ago

Hey the creator here, was not expecting this to blow up at all. I made this I guess because of the Streisand effect, I probably never would have bothered if it weren’t for all the news about ad blockers not working. I intend this as a second line of defence against ads, where the first line would be a conventional ad blocker. After work I’m going to investigate the same technique for speeding up paid sponsor portions of the video. My background is a web dev, but I make extensions in my spare time :) I recommend making some yourself they are a fun little project. This one only took about 4 hours so I’m laughing at the interest :) If you want to see a way more awesome extension I’ve created check this out - https://mobileview.io/ https://mobileview.io/

jraph 3y ago
In case you don't know about it, make sure to check out SponsorBlock, which optionally, automatically skips parts you don't want to see like for example sponsors (but not only). You can use this awesome DB for what you want to do. And also Invidious. And also their combination. User of both, I'm unaffected by the recent adblocking issues on YouTube and I can still subscribe to channels, reliably. Without any Google account. (by the way, a simple regular RSS feed reader would do, since YouTube provides RSS feeds for each channel, but Invidious is a really convenient, specialized UI for this, without the notification / algorithm issues that seem to plague YouTube wrt this, but I digress) All these issues are already solved by these projects. I guess one could consider contributing to them (financially or with code for instance). The official YouTube frontend actually don't need no love, others already achieve what we want. Piped, NewPipe and FreeTube are also projects to look into (I loved NewPipe when I had a smartphone, Piped looks very good too and FreeTube looks interesting but I know less about them).
- gustavus 3y ago
  > In case you don't know about it, make sure to check out SponsorBlock So I don't love ads but mostly because of the privacy invasion they represent, but sponsorships I have a lot less of a problem with. Oftentimes sponsorships will have at least marginal connection with what in watch (most of the time looking at you NordVPN and Raid Shadow Legends) but to me sponsorships are the happy middle ground that allows creators to get some recompense for their labors without turning everything into an adscape dystopia. Really I don't have a problem with ads on websites back in the day as long as they were somewhat tasteful, which they often were because the creator worked to integrate them into their work, but the constant user surveillance and spamming random nonsensical ads are what bugged me. I mean some channels that I frequent have even turned the sponsorships into additional entertaining content (check out Ryan George's the Adstronaut or Viva La Dirt League).

nottorp 3y ago

Hmm. You'd still have to disable uBlock Origin on youtube and thus let google track you?

quilombodigital 3y ago

Hey nice! I always wanted a subliminar ads player! Now I can just order online things without knowing why!

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

completelylegit 3y ago

“then we released bears to take care of the wolves and we had too many bears so we released the tigers…”

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

monkeywork 3y ago

I submitted and got YouTube Premium. For most of my browsing, I don't mind battling with uBlock and making it work however for the rest of the family not so much, plus with premium, I can replace my Spotify subscription and also avoid ads from the YouTube app on the smart TV. There are methods (due to various regions having various prices) that one can find YTP cheaper than listed - but I'll leave that up to people to explore.

lacrimacida 3y ago
When the masses start doing that region thing it will clearly not work anymore, youtube will make sure you’ll pay the maximum price they can get from you.
- blibble 3y ago
  > youtube will make sure you’ll pay the maximum price they can get from you. and then they'll add ads to premium too
  - okdood64 3y ago
    and then you can cancel To me this has never been a valid reason (and there have been many) to not get Premium.
    - mentos 3y ago
      My late grandmother used to say that cable companies once made the same promise about paying for TV.
wintermutestwin 3y ago
I’ll gladly pay for ad free YouTube when google agrees to not track me. My data is worth way more to me and, obviously, them.
- unshavedyak 3y ago

hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago

Is anyone else hesitant to do this because they’re scared that google accounts may end up terminated as a result of violating EULA?

alwayslikethis 3y ago
I only watch logged out anyways. If you don't install other extensions (DF Youtube was the one I had that caused ad blocking to be detected) and stay with uBlock origin and sponsorblock, it won't be detected. It's a huge time sink anyways. I'd suspect most people would be better off without watching Youtube logged in.
lacrimacida 3y ago
Make a new account.
hooverd 3y ago
Use Fastmail. It's not free, but that's okay to be because it means their business model is fundamentally different.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
carlob 3y ago
I don't browse the web while logged in. Never trusted them with my browsing history.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
  You think their data matching capabilities wouldn’t make that link?

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

I didn’t bother with ad blockers till last year. But YouTube got so bad, they seem to force you towards premium at the moment. Minute long ads forcing me to interact on chrome cast. It’s a pain. I don’t mind paying for a good subscription but it’s gotten a bit crazy. Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Disney, prime, regular tv. You can lease a cheap car for that combined.

lacrimacida 3y ago
There’s are alternatives to all this shitshow: consume a lot less, read books instead and dust off those torrent clients.
- latentcall 3y ago
  This is what I’ve done. I was never “into” YouTube so don’t get the hubbub, but for movies and TV shows a good public tracker and Transmission are great. Add a cheap ereader and libgen and even better. Better than that? A cheap paperback.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Even without pirating things, I couldn't imagine subscribing to all those things at once. The rare times a good movie comes out, my wife and I buy cheap tickets, that's it.
- cactusplant7374 3y ago
  Soulseek is really awesome. There was one uploader with 3 petabytes but haven’t seem him online recently.
- 10u152 3y ago
  RSS style torrent feed where i could auto download ripped episodes of my favourite YT shows would be dynamite. No waiting no buffering no ads.
  - sanswork 3y ago
    That was basically popcorn time. Don't know if it's still around.

tippytippytango 3y ago

Good on you for ensuring poor people have a way to deal with ads.

aussieguy1234 3y ago

Sounds like a modern version of "record it on VHS, then fast forward through the ads"

Lamad1234 3y ago

[dead]

MeImCounting 3y ago

The idea that "stealing" from google is somehow morally wrong is hilarious to me. Nobody owes them anything if they cant afford to host youtube then first of all its odd that its been around for so many years in the state it has, and second of all, if they cant afford to host it that their problem. Not mine.

nmat 3y ago
And YouTubers should make content for free?
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  They do until the algorithm thinks they are worth monetizing. Google doesn't give everyone who makes an account and uploads videos ad revenue.
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    The threshold for starting monetization isn't very high though. * 500 Subscriber * 3 'valid' uploads in the past 90 days and either of * 3k public watch hours or 3m shorts views https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/more-ways-for-creators-to-earn-on-youtube/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/more-ways-for-creators-...
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
      Doing any of those things without the algorithm showing your videos to people is hard though. They also require 3k watch hours in the past year so they expect you to grind for at least a year to "prove" you are worth monetizing. That or go viral somehow and bootstrap yourself (which is likely why the shorts views are so high). Obvious not impossible as people still do it but the math seems suspect to me. YouTube gets thousands of hours of video uploaded every second. I'm not sure what the ratio of monetized accounts to non-monetized accounts is, but if YouTube can run a channel "for free" for a year because they aren't monetizing it yet, it seems there's a threshold they are willing to accept to serve videos "nobody wants to see" until enough people do want to see it and they advertise on it. So the high profile creators are costing YouTube money to serve their videos and YouTube wants help paying that cost. But they only extract it from channels they know are profitable because there are a lot of eyeballs on those videos. Almost like they are promising X ad views to advertisers and want to keep that numbers game rolling. I feel like ad based spending is going to go through a correction in the next decade.

dwaite 3y ago

So you recreated Blipverts? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

wslh 3y ago

It reminds me of an article I wrote with code in 2012 about modifying the speed of YouTube in Windows using instrumentation [1]. When YouTube used Adobe Flash. [1] https://blog.nektra.com/2012/06/13/controlling-the-speed-of-youtube-flash-html5-and-desktop-videos-with-deviare-hooks/ https://blog.nektra.com/2012/06/13/controlling-the-speed-of-...

lordfrito 3y ago

I can't believe the number of people here that think YouTube has some right to access my eyes and attention. No one is forcing them to stream me free data. What I do with the data they send me is none of their business. I've never consented or given them permission to access me.

spaceribs 3y ago
I guess it's not disruption when we do it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rainyMammoth 3y ago
A lot of those people work for adtechs. Once you realize that 50% of bigtech is relying almost entirely on ads, a lot of people are simply advocating for keeping their FAANG salaries by forcing us to watch debilitating ads.

zouhair 3y ago

The fact that civilization now runs on ads is insane to me. How did we get here?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tokai 3y ago
Brewed down to one cause I would say Edward Bernays.
rainyMammoth 3y ago
we glorified companies like Google.

bonchicbongenre 3y ago

I can recommend this this FF extension to get fine-grained video speed control, without a 2x speed cap (which often isn't fast enough) https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed It has served me well for years and works on YT ads as well as other sites with similar players

circuit10 3y ago
When I tried manually changing the video element’s playbackRate the subtitles would desync

handy2000 3y ago

I encountered this approach before (I think here on HN) and had a question since then: when video ads run faster, can't YT just compare the expected time to the actual time and flag the user, show an anti-ad blocking popup, etc?

teeray 3y ago
That could get into clock sync issues though that would have to be carefully thought through. What happens if a user’s system clock updates during an ad roll? What about a user watching an ad on a train that passes through a time zone boundary?
- eviks 3y ago
  These are too rare events to matter, aggregate data and if there are too many skips, start blocking
- hedora 3y ago
  They could measure server-side, which would be more difficult to block. I’d like to see some combination of ad nauseum (play ad in an invisible/silent background to support the content creators) and auto-mirroring to bittorrent (to let the real video play while google thinks the ad is playing, and also, for anti-censorship).
  - handy2000 3y ago
    > auto-mirroring to bittorrent Oh, haven't heard of this technique before. Very cool!

imacomputertoo 3y ago

My two cents: if you're using YouTube do much that this bothers you, then just buy premium. It's well worth it in my opinion. You also get the music service. I use it instead of Spotify. I think you also get a few free movies too. No I don't work for Google.

cactusplant7374 3y ago
Don’t pay for the cow if you can get the milk for free.
deanrtaylor 3y ago
Most people would rather spend hours of their time to build a workaround. Although, even on the minimum wage of my country, four hours of work is around half a year of youtube premium. based on the average salary for a developer it's probably around three years of youtube premium. I will say, if I start to get ads on youtube premium then I'll start building workarounds but until that day, it makes sense to just pay the fee.
MindSpunk 3y ago
YouTube premium is $17 a month in my market. I'm not paying $17 a month to remove ads from YouTube tier content. I'd pay $2 a month tops. Netflix is $22 a month for premium and Amazon Prime is $10 a month. YouTube does not even come close to providing similar value as those services. I'm not interested in any of the other junk they force you to buy with YouTube premium, it's just bundling to inflate the cost.
- t3rabytes 3y ago
  For me it’s about where I’m spending my time (YouTube), not so much the pure cost to make the content itself (Netflix, etc.). I spend far more time watching YouTube than anything else, background and foreground, which makes the $15 or whatever (am in the US, I don’t actually know what I pay because I’ve never questioned its value to me unlike Netflix, etc.) worth it to me. I think it’s totally fair if you don’t think it’s worth it for you though. I’m very willing to (and have!) cancel most other services (except for Max which I get for “free” from my ISP) in favor of YouTube because I find the content far more engaging and I can tailor it to my interests far better. I’ll also add that a decent chunk of my viewing is on mobile (phone or iPad) where ad blocking isn’t slightly more difficult using the YouTube native app.

drewmol 3y ago

Is anybody working on a way to mute ads? Like listen to everything and detect ads, remote control volume on the device playing them?

janmo 3y ago

I noticed that I don't get the adblocker message when I connect with a Cambodian IP, but when I use a VPN let's say in Singapore I get the message. It appears that currently Youtube Premium is not available in Cambodia. So Ad blocker + IP from Cambodia still works like a charm.

taf2 3y ago

So silly to blocks ads on YouTube . IMO YouTube has an excellent - paid ad free experience that financially makes sense both for me and content creators. Blocking ads on YouTube just seems evil …

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

mwidell 3y ago

Just buy premium. Not only do you avoid ads on all your devices (tv, phone, computer), you also get background playing of yt videos on your iPhone, which is an awesome feature. Not to mention, you support the livelihoods of the creators you watch (they get 55% of that money!)

born2discover 3y ago
And ad a bonus, you get to be tracked everywhere for a tiny monthly fee ! Who wouldn't want that ! /S
63stack 3y ago
Meanwhile, a marketing manager at Google: "We keep cranking up ads, and they keep buying premium, it's working".

kgeist 3y ago

Google has been voluntarily blocking ads here in Russia since 2022 due to the sanctions (from what I understand, so that monetization didn't translate into taxes paid to the government). I now live in a completely ads-free world for 2 years. So I wonder, if it's possible for people abroad to somehow proxy ad-related traffic through Russia so that Google itself blocked ads.

hypertele-Xii 3y ago
Nice try, Putin. I'm not VPN-ing my traffic through Russia :)
- kgeist 3y ago
  The idea was to VPN only ad traffic (which would be automatically blocked anyway). Proxying video content through Russia would considerably increase latency.
  - aembleton 3y ago
    If you can determine which traffic is ad traffic; why not just block it?
    - kgeist 3y ago
      Well, I'm assuming that Youtube has some sort of a script to check if ad traffic is blocked, to detect ad blockers. Sure, you can write some extension which by-passes it, but then they can change their script a week later to do it slightly differently, to make ad blockers unusable again. Meanwhile for Russia, they have some sort of an exception, so that there can be no ad traffic at all, and you can still watch videos. And they maintain this exception themselves, so there would be no effort on our part.
ffgjgf1 3y ago
[flagged]

kurtextrem 3y ago

Am I missing something or was exactly something like this on "Show HN" the last days? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327017

613309663 3y ago

[flagged]

Blackarea 3y ago

I switched from ff to brave just because there are no ads not on yt nor anywhere else. Pretty solid browser imo

juniperplant 3y ago

Well I guess it's only about time before Google goes all in with DRM.