1y ago

YouTube Accidentally Made Ad Blockers More Powerful

odysee.com YouTube Accidentally Made Ad Blockers More Powerful

In this video I discuss how YouTube fighting ad blockers is actually making ad blocking extensions and browsers more powerful, and how there is a long history of things like this happening on the inte...

78 comments

Everything has to be video huh? Based on the comments here, this could have been a text post with a paragraph of text.
- Alright, so I watched the video so you guys don't have to. Here's a synopsis:
  Youtube's ad blocking is going to backfire because:
  It caused people to stop using crappy ad blockers that didn't even work with youtube to switch to effective ones that do.
  Drawing attention to "good" browsers and ad blockers, increasing adoption -- including people that weren't using or aware of the existence of them in the first place
  Increased support of the people making/maintaining ad blockers. Spite driven increase in donations, subscriptions to paid ad blockers, bug reports, etc.
  Cites the Streisand effect.
  Analogy of how prohibition led to stronger drugs, stronger booze, etc. If you tell people they can't do something, they're more likely to do it and get better at doing it.
  Cites how Youtube's attempts to block ad blockers is breaking older embedded apps in smart TVs, chromecast, etc. Older or non-tech people are just more likely to stop using those rather than try to fix them -- and thus cut back on watching youtube.
  Believes Youtube's actions are an indication the internet's "free with ads" model is dying -- they're getting desperate to maintain profitability.
  
  It’s funny to me because I recently downloaded an app for my nvidia shield called smartTube which blocks ads and all that jazz. And I donated $10 to the dev. And posted to the git.
  I only did this because of the recent headlines about YouTube policies changing. I don’t mind paying for things. But I will pay someone else out of spite if you charge me too much, pester me, or take away things like that were free.
  
  🥇take my lemmy gold
- Sums up a lot of mental outlaw vids
  
  But he’s so edgy!
- You just described 99.7% of videos on the web.
  Pretty much anyone can read about 4x faster than they can speak, and that's before all the fluff that shitty presenters add.
- There is a website I discovered recently for doing text summaries of YouTube videos.
  https://www.summarize.tech
  This video was also posted on YouTube, so here you can see a summary:
  https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tBBQGkmn_0
  
  It's ironic how it injected an ad in "ad blocker" in the summary
- 'Content Creators' really need you to smash that "Like" & "Subscribe" button though!

Jesus what the hell is going on in those comments over there.
- triple parentheses
  unironic use of the word cuck
  conspiracy theory about Google being a fake company
  Welp.
  
  His comment section is pretty fucking wild.
  I really hope Louis Rossmans's fan base is less toxic. The fact that he has been on Tim Pool probably imported a lot of weirdos.
  
  "((( )))"? I thought that was a crowd saying something e.g "((( that's what she said )))". Or being a really fat dude. I remember :-))) being a smiley with a triple chin.
  ((( What does this mean to some people now? )))
- I went to odysee once and saw the Babylon Bee advertised front page. Told me all I needed to know about the platform.
  
  What's wrong with the Babylon Bee? Isn't that a site similar to The Onion?
  Edit: lol downvoted for asking a genuine question?
- So many alternatives get flooded with these crazy people
- What the hell indeed.

It's funny cuz I had an ad blocker that worked on Youtube for a while but then stopped working one day. That was 3 years ago and I was too lazy to find a better blocker. Since they started putting that pop up in EVERY video, that prompted me to finally install a working one. Good job, Youtube. Ya played yaself.
- I could deal with the 2 ads at the beginning of the video and the end but when they added ad interruptions in the middle of 5 minute videos and had ads covering the comments on every video. Yeah, screw off YouTube.
  I just sideloaded uYou and it doesn’t even know what ads are so it never loads them. I would never had bothered circumventing the ads if they were reasonable, but they aren’t. They want everyone on premium and obviously have disdain for non-premium users. Have no zero respect for that kind of business.
  
  I was OK with a couple of ads in the beginning until their system went bonkers. For days it fed me the unskippable Kingsman movie trailer every single damn video I tried to watch.
  That and my favorite Youtubers (mainly Red Letter Media) fighting Youtube which auto-inserted ads in the middle of their videos against their will, really cemented my ad blocker usage. They kept configuring their videos removing the ad placement and the ad was readded automatically. Now thankfully they are demonetized so Youtube ignores them.

tldw?
- His argument is:
  A lot of people were using poor adblockers.
  Youtube can block the bad ones but struggles with the good ones.
  People switch to the better adblockers (some of which require a subscription)
  
  Which is why you always finish your antibiotics
  
  I'm hearing first time that some of the adblockers require subscription... Like, there's ublock origin, the one and only god out there, why would you like to go somewhere else, even closed source?
  Edit: damn autocorrect
  
  I wonder how true that is for the average user
  My father disabled ublock because it didn't let him use YouTube. I sent hima tutorial on how to update the list and purge the cache but it was too much work for him

The video's comment section on its native site is... interesting.
I don't trust this guy. It feels like he's just slinging things at the wall that most people could intuit without any research. Yes, sometimes things backfire when you try to stifle them. Sometimes, however, the stifling works (otherwise dictators would have a much harder time ruling). That's just the way things go.
I'ma need some actual data to back up Youtube's anti-adblocker experiment succeeding/failing. People are so quick to jump on the 'it failed' or 'it succeeded' bandwagon but the truth is we simply don't know the result yet, and may not for a long while.
This could've been an email. This guy's delivery is sprawling and lacks conciseness.
- He'll often take a two minute point and then extend it by 10 minutes.
  He's also one of those people who acts like everyone who doesn't use Linux is a sheep. Linux is fundamentally not ready for widespread desktop use. The only way I see that changing is if a corporation decides to make their own distro and find a way to monetize it. It would also need to be pre-installed.
- I have some tech savvy friends who caved in a took a YouTube premium sub because they didn't know the fix to refresh ublock rules.
  So I think YouTube's strategy is working, even if they are not completely blocking blockers they are still converting some blockers to paying users.

There is one mistake in this Video. Ublock origin doesn't accept donations the last time checked.
- You're right: uBo doesn't accept donations out of integrity but they propose people donate to the list maintainers on which it depends instead.
  
  Can you share some details, I can not find anything about it on their github page.