YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don’t turn off your ad-blocker::YouTube has been cracking down on people using ad blockers. Now, a spokesperson says that using ad blockers could lead to “suboptimal viewing.”
Worse than using YouTube without an ad blocker?
That’s the funny thing about this threat. It implies that using YouTube the regular way is “optimal” viewing. It’s fucking shit without adblock.
Even without ads it’s shit without sponsorblock for me. Not even for the sponsor spots, but the absolutely annoying copy paste of please like, subscribe, hit the notification icon, blah blah blah blah blah.
That’s shit, but it’s still usable as I can shortcut my way around it. The ads are hot liquid swamp ass that make it unusable. I see ad, I circumvent or close tab.
Sponsor Block???
How to quit YT in a week?
- disable adblocking
- Suffer watching ads
- Get bored, because you no longer feel like watching adTube
- Switch to something else
There is absolutely zero possibility that they can find a way to make my experience on YouTube worse than my experience on YouTube without uBlock.
The fact that my children know the Liberty Mutual jingle from watching YouTube at school says no.
yo what can you even do about this
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Ive had my ad blocker turned off for a week on Youtube. Theres a preroll ad on every video and a shitload of ad break mid video and at the last 3 seconds of a video.
Its the worst viewing experience I can imagine. I cut out Twitch and even stopped all my subs when they went mandatory ad viewing. Im full on ready for third party options in the same spirit as Lemmy.
I also think they are fucking with the sound levels in the same way TV did prior to the FTC ruling. The commercials are awfully loud compared to the content.
Honestly this is what pushed me to look into alternative ways to watch YT years ago. Muting every time an ad comes on gets old quick, especially when the ad is way louder than the content
I just thought I would log in to Twitch just to say hi to the streamer I was in the same game with. Twitch loads, starts to play the stream with no problem. BUT when I try to login, it says Firefox is not a supported browser. It had no problem playing all the content, showing the chat, etc. - but for some reason it still says my browser is not supported and I can’t log in. I looked it up. FF is “not supported” because it has an enhanced tracking protection feature. Twitch wants to track you, and it can’t if you use Firefox. Such a petty way; this will just turn me away from Twitch even more.
S0undTV is a good app for Twitch if you have an android TV device. No ads and support for the emotes if you like having the chat up. You’ve got to login to twitch through the app though to start watching. It’s broken before and had ads play, but gets fixed within a few days. Lastly there is a delay compared to desktop. If that’ll be a deal breaker.
SmartTube Next for watching YT on TV and LibreTube for Android.
Why would you even subject yourself to such torture?
I think my viewing experience will be even worse if I turn off my ad blocker.
Loving Freetube, Newpipe, and Grayjay more and more every day!
Tried to dive into Piped recently, but nothing would load.
I’m only surface-level competent with computers though, so I probably fucked something up… since you’ve poked around multiple options, which one(s) do you recommend as the most idiot proof?
For android, the stock newpipe from the fdroid repositories was just download and play for me. Easy and simple interface.
For Grayjay, I use the direct download .apk from their website. It’s been a little more buggy because it’s still new, but all in all quite stable. Less features right now, but does all the basics and has device casting to TV which Newpipe doesn’t.
For my PC, Freetube. I just use the Flatpak version for Linux. I’m on Nobara for my distro currently and it’s worked fine.
I gave up using Piped. It was really good when it worked but sadly most of the time it was frustrating. Takes ages to get a video going then breaks up multiple times.
From my experience, it depends on the instance. Sometimes, one instance of Piped will not work, but another will be OKish.
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How could it be worse than with ads?
240p
YouTube is just messing around. They could encode ads randomly on videos if they wanted to, like podcasts.
There’s already a sponsor blocker extension that skips when a sponsor is even mentioned, it would be trivial to add other embedded ads to it.
They would just be able to create and stream 2 or more ad-encoded versions where ads are encoded in differently positions. Then no sponsorblock could save us since it would skip the wrong segments for some people…
Those ads would need to be unskippable, otherwise we could just pull the timestamps that the Skip button uses and sponsorblock will be all complete again 👌
Fair point! I wasn’t thinking they would be skippable, but boy do I hope that I was wrong…
Even if they’re not natively skippable, ads have to be indicated as such by law. Whatever indication they use can be detected and used to create blockers.
Ad blocking, uh, finds a way.
Just build a database of ads. Then use some kind of image hash to compare against the displayed content.
I like your way of thinking. This isn’t even limited to image. Comparing just a short snippet of the audio from a playing ad to a db could work very well too, thinking of how quickly Shazam etc. are able to identify a song if it’s in the db.
App/plugin idea for the sad future right there: Shazadblock, tuneBlock Origin. Succesful ID leads to skip/mute/ragequit or whatever will kill the noise. Though, the downside of this method would be if an ad in the db uses licensed music that regular content creators use in their videos too, it will eventually lead to blocking some segments wrongly, unless the db excludes this, making it less effective at its purpose… Maybe image is better.
That’s not quite how it works. It’s crowdsourced, someone has to manually add every sponsored segment from a video into Sponsorblock. It can’t detect them on its own.
I never said it did?
How about you suck my balls accordingly, google?
I can also just back out and just not watch said videos…
Can’t make it worse of you don’t use it.
Youtube is past the growth phase, at this point it’s about minimising cost and maximising revenue.
If you regularly use it with adblock but decide to stop using it because of this, then youtube would have succeeded. You weren’t making them money and were costing them bandwidth, so good riddance.
If you really want to stick it to them, turn on adblock, find some long videos and play them on mute in the background at 4K/1080p60 resolution. Cost them even more bandwidth.
Even better, start randomly disliking videos or making nonsensical comments (not hateful or toxic ones, just comments that don’t make sense). Enshittify it further.
It’s not the ads. They want your data and these adblockers prevent them from doing it. Google had and continue to lie to advertisers about their ad views anyways. Simply use Firefox + adblockers or go to alternative sites that are springing up.
Oh no, so how will I be able to tell a difference?
It’s official, Youtube now has people employed as product worseners.
YouTube has human employees? I thought they were just all bots.
Turning off your ad-blocker is like running in jail, naked. So no thanks, YT.
Both Firefox + uBlock Origin saved me countless times from malicious ads since years. You should do it too.
If for some reason you can’t use a full-on ad blocker, “SponsorBlock for Youtube” is another Firefox extension you can install. It doesn’t block ads per se, but it will auto-skip segments of a video that have been reported as ad content. Kind of a grassroots thing, like reporting cops on Waze.
Until they try to kill that too.
I don’t think Google gets any money from YouTube sponsorships directly. Not watching a sponsored segment and not clicking the affiliate link are one and the same in the eyes of the company.
