1y ago

YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don't turn off your ad-blocker

www.businessinsider.com 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."

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."

Technology @kbin.social

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 @kbin.social

1y ago

YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don't turn off your ad-blocker

www.businessinsider.com /youtube-warns-worse-viewing-experience-ad-blocker-2023-11

15 20

Technology @lemmy.world

TangledHyphae @lemmy.world

1y ago

YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don't turn off your ad-blocker

www.businessinsider.com /youtube-warns-worse-viewing-experience-ad-blocker-2023-11

703 348

140 comments

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.
  
  It's optimal to them. You just don't understand Youtube's perspective of it yet. And then it's unoptimal for them when you watch with the adblocker.
  
  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.
  
  That's a way to look at, but i'l personally still be using Peertube. instead of 3rd party YouTube apps.
- 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

which is a hilarious threat because the #1 way to make my viewing experience worse would be turning off my ad blocker, lmao
- "if you don't voluntarily make your experience 10x worse, we will make it 2x worse"
- Ads have reached the level of "suboptimal viewing".

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
- SmartTube Next for watching YT on TV and LibreTube for Android.
- 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.
- 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.
- Youtube advertising is absolute trash. It's already bad enough to sit through ads when you don't even know if you want to watch the video. Their ads consist of fake Joe Rogans with tts voices advertising scams.
  
  I get some dodgy casino and gambling ads ... Before a children's program. Reported the ad multiple times, but it keeps coming back under a different name.

Get fucked, YouTube.

Loving Freetube, Newpipe, and Grayjay more and more every day!
- in the short term they work, but YouTube can cut those 3rd party apps access at any time for any reason. Use Peertube for the better long term.
  
  I thought All three of the ones I listed weren't reliant on YT APIs and instead scraped their content.
  Edit: Just confirmed both NewPipe and Freetube do not use YouTube's api. I'm not sure about GrayJay though.
- 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.

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..
  
  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.
- cheaper to just have the interns code buggy Javascript then to reencode millions of videos.
  
  This. I don't exactly know how YouTube's architecture works, but from running my own mediaserver i woild guess They don't live transcode because that takes clock cycles on a graphics card or a CPU. They transcode a couple of different bitrate files to serve up and then just serve up direct stream file transfers, thus saving electricity and clock cycles. In order to actively embed an ad in a YouTube video it would have to be done semi-permanently, Decreasing the value of live serve ads.
- They could, what can go wrong....

How could it be worse than with ads?
- 240p

How about you suck my balls accordingly, google?

Oh no, so how will I be able to tell a difference?

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.

It's official, Youtube now has people employed as product worseners.
- YouTube has human employees? I thought they were just all bots.

I can also just back out and just not watch said videos...
- Yeah be like me and just use Peertube, I don't even notice this stuff untill people complain about it haha.

Google: “Fine, I’ll turn off your adblocker myself!” rolling out Manifest v3

Way to kill your platform. Sadly there’s no big competition
- Hopefully this motivates a competitor to emerge.
  
  peertube exists
  it's in development, their new roadmap looks nice
- How does this kill their platform if there's no competition?
  
  Let them keep this shit up and you'll find out.
  Necessity is the mother of invention.

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.

I'll just leave this here.
mpv_sponsorblock
- You da real MPV

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.

Keep it up, dumbasses.
Catch the hint...the harder you try the harder we do. There's no trying from our end.

YouTube losing the war on AdBlockers, lol.

PeerTube & Odysee when?
- When the video creators you watch move to them.

Kind of shocked it took this long.
It always cost more more but the games that used clever traps were a lot more effective than just drm. Because warez groups can easily check if the game launches. Not if every enemy after mission four has infinite health and pinpoint accuracy.
Just curious if this maps to "shit, Google knows Twitter exists and figured out what we are doing" or "YouTube servers are broken"

How can they make the experience worse for people using adblock if they cant even detect it
If they can detect adblockers, why not just block everyone using one like they were doing previously?
- I wonder if it's a switch in strategy, i.e. The ad block ban popup gives clear notification to the user to update their adblock but slowing the video load speeds without giving feedback might be a more effective in slowing the arms race.

I mean... it definitely will if you turn off your ad blocker.

Until an alternative to Youtube happens, then this will continue.

Then don't use it.

About all this is doing is making me update my lists in UBO more often.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
YouTube appeared to confirm reports that people with ad-blockers installed were experiencing a multi-second delay before being able to watch a video.
The Android-based news website Android Authority reported that people who weren't using Chrome noticed the delays, citing Reddit users who said they've experienced this delay while using browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge.
"In the past week, users using ad blockers may have experienced suboptimal viewing, which included delays in loading, regardless of the browser they are using.
Users who have uninstalled their ad blockers may still experience a temporary delay in loading, and should try refreshing their browser," a YouTube spokesperson told Business Insider.
In June 2023, it began preventing users with ad blockers turned on from watching videos and reportedly experimented with pop-up warnings.
More recently, X users began complaining and sharing screenshots of YouTube pop-ups warning them to not use ad blockers.
The original article contains 403 words, the summary contains 146 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Obviously the "optimal" term vary according to the POV folks.

I've been wondering why YouTube keeps playing the same three videos that I've already watched after each new one.

I've switched to the FreeTube app on desktop and now I'm just using it without a second thought. No ads and a much faster and better YouTube with absolutely no ads.
I'm not about to pay one of the richest and morally corrupt companies in the world for YouTube.

How about stop being evil, Youtube?
Oh wait...

Oh no. God forbid you pay. Gimme free video now. It's mine!
- Don't be daft. Youtube gets to steal user data which is more valuable.
  Things were better without blood sucking greed of the world.
  
  Have a modicum of restraint and stop using the service then. 🤷‍♂️
  Y'all have massive entitlement complexes.
- Youtube has every right not to serve me the video.
  It does not have the right to interfere with what I do with it after the data reaches my machine, though.
  
  YouTube reserved the right to make your experience shitty. Deal with it if baby is too cheap to use the service when ads.
  You all have a massive entitlement complex. YT owes you nothing.
- this but unironically
- I would pay (as I pay for other services) if only I wasn't the product.
  
  👌👍
- reading through your comment history you keep repeating bullshit about ads
  
  Whatever you say. I'm not sure what you mean bullshit though.
- I would gladly pay for it. BUT
  it is owned by google
  monopoly (i am waiting when will they announce a new tier of subscription with limited ads, and increase the price of the current model)
  i wouldnt pay for extra features, i would only pay for not making my experience worse, and this is probably the biggest reason for me.
  
  Classic. I'm not going to buy it because they might change the model later.
  This entire thread is entitlement. Stop using it if it's so bad.
- Do you consider your online data to be worthless? Because google doesn't. You pay the moment you click on a video, and even more by making an account and generating watch history.
  Why does that data collection not go away if i decide to pay with cash?
  Why did they remove the cheaper ad-free only subscription tier?
  Why do they still serve various ads when you are a premium subscriber?
  The answer to all of this is that they are a greedy corporation, they must do those things. You may call it soothsaying or whatever to those of us wondering "what comes next" after this battle. But it is shown many times by all large corporations that they will keep fighting to make line go up for eternity. Regardless of if that is in your best interest. It is silly to see users defend them despite that.
  
  Or maybe the data is more valuable than $12/mo and it's subsidized by the data.
- Why the fuck would I pay for YouTube when I could just steal it?
  
  Because you're poor and rather fuck around with your time vs having a service that works great for a small fee?

140 comments