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YouTube cracks down on ad blockers

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JSmith said:
github.com

GitHub - TheRealJoelmatic/RemoveAdblockThing: The intrusive "Ad blocker are not allowed on YouTube" message is annoying. This open-source project aims to address this issue by providing a solution to bypass YouTube's ad blocker detection

The intrusive "Ad blocker are not allowed on YouTube" message is annoying. This open-source project aims to address this issue by providing a solution to bypass YouTube's ad blocker...
github.com github.com



Ironically the video is on YT... chicken and egg here. :cool:


JSmith
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Appreciated man. Just tested and seems to work like a charm.
 
Youtube should keep the “lite” subscription. 7 euro’s is OK for ad free youtube. Premium at 12 euro is too much.
 
An alternative effective approach for the tech savvy is a Pi-hole.
In the past I've worked on the tech side of advertising and don't mind a few ads for something that is free. But I won't tolerate ads in something I've paid for, and IMO ad loads have gotten excessive to the point of making the internet virtually unusable without ad blockers.
 
mhardy6647 said:
Ironically...

"In 1906, the American inventor Lee de Forest created an amplifier [i.e., the triode] that made broadcasting possible. Of commercial radio, de Forest said: 'What have you done with my child? You have sent him out on the street in rags of ragtime to collect money from all and sundry. You have made of him a laughingstock of intelligence, surely a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere.' "
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thulle said:
Other than adblockers there's also different frontends, like

Piped

An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube frontend which is efficient by design.
piped.video piped.video

which also supports automatically skipping the sponsor-segments in videos and stuff like that. Some times the main site can be a bit overloaded, but you can switch to different instances in the preferences.

Just for fun I loaded the same video with adblockers on youtube and on piped. The amount of data transferred before even starting the video was 17 vs 4 MB. Hightly noticeable when browsing with a less then stellar connection.
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Just checked YT and Piped versions of Dominoes! (Yes I know, I really, really shouldn't!:rolleyes:)
Piped, rather fuzzy in comparison.
 
I've given up on YT in-browser. Don't care to leave comments, so FreeTube it is.
 
thulle said:
Fuzzy? At the same resolution? It should be the same video stream, piped is just a frontend, doesn't do any recoding on their own.
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I clicked on your link to open Piped thullie. full screen on this 32in, perhaps fifteen year old Panasonic TV which I use as the desktop monitor. Firefox browser, using Ubuntu.
Repeated that from YouTube proper, and it was clearer, for sure. I,ll try some further experiments. Could it make any difference by joining piped? Getting an account, so to speak?
 
while PiHole does its magic on everything else, YT is an exemption since they self-host those goddamn adds
trying uBlock myself for the last couple days, works fine for now, so did Thorium as a browser, plus some so called "user agent switchers" (and no, i didn't even try going the WinPhone8 client, but it worked well with others)

and since someone mentioned phones...give Luis Rossmann's Grayjay a try, tried it on Android and it works damn fine

since Meta a.k.a. Google make money from everything we ever typed inside their search bar and everything else they tracked us doing online, they'll never get a freaking penny from me (besides an occasional middle finger rub in the face)
 
LouB said:
I get ad blockers & I also get YT, google & whoever trying to charge for content & somehow block ad blockers. What I don't get is why people think they have some sort of "right" to watch content.
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I'm with you so far...
LouB said:
Also If you think you have any right to privacy on the internet think again.
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Here it depends on jurisdiction. In Europe people do have a legal right to privacy, even on the internet. This is why GDPR exists. On its face the business models of Google, Meta and most of the rest of the internet advertising industry are incompatible with the law in Europe (wilfully violating people's rights), but taking action on it has been slow as the Irish Data Protection Authority have been dragging their feet. Their hand has finally been forced, at least as far as Meta are concerned:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/01/eu_data_meta_networking/
I won't be holding my breath waiting for the outcome of a similar complaint against YouTube's detection scripts for ad blocking:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/26/privacy_advocate_challenges_youtube/
 
I was initially experiencing the "3 strike" thing and then YT blocked me. So I installed "SmartTube" via "Windows subsystem for android". Before, uBlock Origin didn't work but now it does work without a hick up.

If there was just a basic ad-free plan that's like $2 to $3 a month, I would pay. $13 a month for YT premium is a joke. I can get direct video downloads via TarTube (for free), Background play can easily be obtained via modified YT apps and YT music has horrible audio bitrates. In all honestly, I wouldn't mind watching ads if they were actually tuned for me and/or actually fun to watch but no, most ads are annoying especially the Tik Tok and Temu ads. YT premium does have higher video bitrates but at 1080p, not worth the extra change just for that.

The problem I have that nobody else is talking about is old sponsorship ads baked into videos. I don't like see sponsorships in videos that are years and years old. I mean at least there's tools that skip these old sponsors.
 
Audiofire said:
So you know about the NSA fun and games in the USA :)
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So yeah, we don’t need to go there with this discussion/subject. You have been here long enough to know where this will lead and how it will end. :rolleyes:
 
My ability to comment after somebody brings up politics on a thread:
dee.gif
 
DavidEdwinAston said:
I clicked on your link to open Piped thullie. full screen on this 32in, perhaps fifteen year old Panasonic TV which I use as the desktop monitor. Firefox browser, using Ubuntu.
Repeated that from YouTube proper, and it was clearer, for sure. I,ll try some further experiments. Could it make any difference by joining piped? Getting an account, so to speak?
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Ah, you're right, checking a video with 4k available the max on piped is 1080p. I have 1440p monitors and never watch fullscreen, and mostly watch technical stuff with pretty static video content, so I never noticed.

edit: registering shouldn't matter,

edit2: the preferences allows setting default resolution to up to 8K though, maybe it's youtube trying to restrict piped right now or something. I'm pretty sure I've been able to set a video to 1440p manually before.
 
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I have Adblock plus and I gave in a couple of days ago when they notified, after delaying the vids for about a week, that they would cut me off entirely. I resolved then and there to cut my YouTube use by 90 percent. Now that I surrendered I'm seeing 90 second ads to start which I sometimes opt out of, an in video ad by the maker of the video, and one or two you tube interruption ads during the video---and this is for ten minute videos.

So a giant middle finger to YouTube. Also seeing a lot of censorship. Certain words, irrespective of their context, are being bleeped out. A critique of Kill Bill, had "Kill" bleeped out, for example. So not a fan at all anymore. I can do without easily 90-95 percent of the vids, and I will.
 
I used a vpn and purchased Premium in Argentina, so I pay a lot less for it every month

Edit: I had enough when YT decided to put an ad in the middle of a 6 minute:ish music video(!)
 
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