How many Youtube employees would be assigned to frontend/adblock sabotage efforts? I'm wondering whether the law of diminishing returns will be observed, or will the company have sufficient resources to maintain the shenanigans indefinitely.
If it's the latter, Youtube can rest assured my resolve will match theirs, until the damned thing gets paywalled...
It's been kind of a long time for them to not have covered everyone. I suspect it's just user error, especially considering the source of these articles is always just "some dude on social media saying trust me bro."
Anyone who knows Nintendo's history, knows that they go super hard on litigating. Don't let the happy little mascots fool you, they're as aggressive as Disney when they think they can get away with it.
Google, on the other hand, still has some software people in their management structure.
Well they've shut down revanced for good apparently. I can't make it load videos anymore. I used to be able to just reinstall and fix it, but it can't be fixed anymore.
Those three is a solid combo to gain granualar control over tracking. Playing around with it is a good way to learn how the survilance mechanisms actually work.
To be honest Youtube has always been slow to me, especially their streams. God, their streams are an absolutely resource hog, I've never seen a chat use up so much CPU power.
The last two times there were also errors like not being able to upvote anything. Later, I found it was a global youtube issue. YouTube needs to improve to be able to serve people at its scale.
I think youtube has just started needing way more bandwidth than it used to. A few years ago, 100KB/s would load a videos page almost instantly, comments as well, and smoothly run 360p playback. Now even at 160KB/s I often spend 60+ seconds for parts of the page to even load.
That's thanks to their shitty javascript. Gosh, I hate sites doing that so much
Just let me use my browser the way it's intended to instoad of loading every shitty little html element dynamically with your shitty js doing shitty network requests dropping them like crazy
I read comments! I watch a lot of videos about self hosting services and the comments is where you find other people who have followed the video and struggled at some point. If you're lucky it's a common sticking point you're stuck on and someone in the comments has a way of fixing it.
YTmusic is the main reason I bothered to pay for premium. I was using Spotify and had a trial of 3months. The quality of recommendations was decent so chose to stick around. Adfree YouTube was another bonus.
I can tell you why I do. I watch more YT than anything else (on my TV), and don't want to watch ads, or play cat and mouse games trying to prevent them. I also listen to a lot of music, and use YT Music. I pay for the family plan, since we all listen to music, and my son and I watch a lot of YT (very different videos on YT however :) )
I get, there's a growing group of people that think everything should be free, but I'm OK paying for something I use a lot, to remove ads. There should, however be more controls for paid users, like controlling whether or not you see creator ads, shorts, etc...
I've been tempted to sign up as well so I can stream to my TV through their app. I can block anything I want through my PC but smart TV's are too locked down for my technical knowledge so I get ad's which is unacceptable
Yeah, I'm still sitting on my Roku for the time being. I keep all my other TV connections dumb so my TV and Blu Ray don't have my WiFi info. I did finally get a HDMI for my laptop to connect to the TV to watch racing on YT without ads which is an adequate backup option now. I have studio monitors on my PC that are better than the soundbar/Sub on the TV, but when friends are over the TV works better for watching stuff
I do totally get paying to support something you use a ton.
But I don't get comments like this calling blocking ads a cat and mouse game. It's always been incredibly easy to block ads on the devices I own and I rarely ever have to mess with anything after installing a single browser extension or a single app.
On my desktop/laptop--ublock origin. I would install this regardless of whether or not I care about YouTube ads because ads on websites in general can be pretty cancerous. So I would already have it on my device to begin with. Install one extension and forget about it. Very occasionally ads start coming through, but then the extension auto updates itself and I don't have to worry about it. It's effortless and I absolutely never need to mess with the settings.
On my phone--YouTube ReVanced. Just basically download I think two APK files and you're set. I've had to reinstall this a single time over the maybe decade(?) I've been using it as YouTube had some sort of breaking update or something. But having to install it again once every many years is hardly an inconvenience. Oh I guess I have had to install it again when I've gotten a new phone, but that's really not that odd or inconvenient to me either....and generally I don't get a new phone that often.
On my android TV device--SmartTube Next. It's a single APK file. Set it and forget it. I've never had to reinstall the app.
One caveat with this is that it seems harder to watch YouTube ad free (without paying for premium) on Apple devices. So if you use a lot of Apple products it also makes sense.
Ya, all you have to do is install something different on every device you own/watch YouTube on.
You also, have to be technical enough to side load, or compile revanced etc... I've heard over and over that ubo keeps having updates/changes to keep yt ads down.
I actually am technical enough to do those things, but both doing and managing these various apps across multiple devices in my house is a lot of work. Or, I can just pay for the music and TV I watch.
For the record, I also have and paid for GrayJay app on my phone and do also use it on occasion. We have used smart tube TV in the past because when my son was younger Google had shit parental controls and we couldn't allow his child account to access regular yt (restricted). I've got it side loaded on both our Nvidia shield and gtv devices. Too bad it doesn't work on android TV, or my wife/sons iPhones.
It's free with my YouTube music sub. I was grandfathered into the cheapest price from the Google play music launch. I like a lot of tech and science videos and I watch YouTube for that. Worth it to me.
This is me, too. The alternative seems to be Spotify (also going shitty) or self hosting. I miss the hell out of gpm, but ytm at least works and it comes with ad free YouTube. Not the worst deal out there
While I wouldn't put it past Google/YouTube to do something as shitty as this, I think people are far too quick to assume foul play over the much more likely possibility that the world's largest video platform occasionally shits itself.
There was a few weeks earlier this year I was getting ads on YouTube even with UBO. But it seems UBO has returned to its rightful place as winners of that arms race again.
I mean, the earlier attempts google/youtube made to block adblockers by putting up a notice to turn it off, etc., were openly stated as being tested only on some users. As expected, only some users experienced that. You're just part of the more fortunate majority that isn't an unwilling guinea pig for google's attempts to force everyone to watch ads or pay premium.
Did you have to mess around with it at some point?
I've been Firefox with uBlock Origin for a couple years and haven't ever messed around with the settings other than turning it off for a few select websites. Haven't had any of the issues other people reported with youtube.
At the very beginning of their crackdown I remember I had to update shit a few times to get rid of that 'no adblocker' screen but yeah...its been months now and youtube is perfectly normal.
At the very beginning I had to switch from ABP to uBO. I actually used ABP specifically because I wanted to allow through some non-obtrusive ads, because I think it's morally right to let companies make a profit if they're not being overly obnoxious about it, and ABP's Acceptable Ads policy is great for that. Unfortunately ABP was slower to implement something to avoid YouTube's fuckery, so I switched to uBO. Google has shot themselves in the foot because now instead of a small number of ads getting through, none do.