youtube getting more aggressive… i’ve got firefox and ublock but this shit is still coming up
Get Firefox, install uBlock Origin, clear the filter cache, and reload the filter cache.
Worked for me and my dad
It is time to stop the Chrome plauge.
It’s currently working, but every few days youtube will tweak something, and sometime later (minutes to hours) there will be an ublock update for it.
Sometimes you have to wait a little longer, but this is the arms race.
I find it funny that a company as big as Google is loosing to little ol uBlock
It’s often far easier to attack than defend.
Google has to find and block every way, ublock just has to make a new way to bypass the blocks.
Classic mantra of cybersecurity. “We’ve up be right every time, they’ve to be right only once.”
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They’re working on a final solution to the ad blocker problem. If they’re successful in pushing their Web Environment Integrity API, there’s nothing Firefox or ublock will be able to do.
EU as the final boss battle
What about piped like solutions hostux, invidious etc? How do they work? Is it through API? Can Google block it like reddit did theirs? Also if google is so concerned about ad blockers why do they allow those extensions in their Chrome store? I thinks its going to get really tough to get Youtube for free without ads. Eventually Youtube might become something like Netflix or something.
Piped/invidious work by scrapping the video chunks directly from google and proxying them through volunteer servers. They will stop working as soon as google gets around to locking down the APIs that they are abusing, or blocks their server IPs.
I find it funny
I’m not having any fun. How dare they! With all the evil virus attacks nowadays and most of them starting through online ads, using an adblocker is a matter of security. And it is my decision, not theirs. None of their business.
Especially funny since blocking ublock is illegal in the EU
Some arms races aren’t what they appear to be: https://blog.codinghorror.com/revisiting-the-black-sunday-hack/
I might read the article later, but your thesis is right.
This isn’t a arms race, it’s also convenience race.
Is it more convenient for me to turn off ublock, or go through ublocks menus and update its filters? Do I dislike ads that much? Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. But some people will turn off their adblock of choice, even if it technically still works if you update it. Their conversion rate of viewer to ad consumer will (probably) go up.
It’s worth the read. I really only posted it because you have to respect the technical prowess involved. Also it’s kind of funny.
yep… i did. they keep coming up, somehow. very annoying.
I switched over to piped.video and no ads. Just moved my subscriptions over. Not sure how long it will last but so far it’s good
If that doesn’t work, get the youtube enhancer extension. Turn off it’s built in adblock. You’ll have a bunch of buttons on the bottom of the video, one of which is remove ads, which becomes skip ads when an ad plays. You will still get ads, but you’ll be able to instantly skip them all without setting off their adblock detector. (Ps, to get the bar in fullscreen, set it to bottom of window)
Huh I might try some ytenhancer only sessions to keep a eye on how bad eds have been getting without having to waste my time
Yet, I’ve not gotten any of these messages on Chrome + uBlock Origin so far.
They are probably hitting people in waves, in an effort to make sure this isn’t a surge, then a massive protest like the Unity situation.
But once google realizes they’ll have to burn serious money and make their product worse on the global stage to fix the problem, they’ll quit just like Microsoft, AOL, and Netscape.
But I think this campaign is just there to loosen the people who installed an ad-block, but have no idea what an ad-block is.
Which will be different from the people who know about “alternate methods,” and will easily slip the google net unnoticed.
It’s more like field testing the change than managing backlash. They go somewhat hand-in-hand, but the intention Google has is mainly to reduce false positives.
That didn’t work for me. Seems theyre still detecting it.
Updating uBlock and filters has a bigger Impact than choice of browser. You could be situated in one of the data clusters that implement new detection methods first, so the filter lists are not updated yet when they hit you with a changed detection script.
Also, if you use Enhancer for YT, disable the built-in ad blocking there. That feature triggers the pop-up as well.
I feel like all of these suggestions will have short lifespans.
There is no good replacement for YouTube currently, but ultimately a long term solution means replacing the service.
A long(er) term solution than little hacks with FF and ublock are things like piped.
My family watches several Youtube channels on the main HTPC. It had Chrome for them to use, as that is what the kids and my wife are familiar with from school/ work. Then this BS started. I use Firefox on my personal PC and have yet to have a problem.
So I dumped Chrome off of the HTPC.
It would be amusing if Chrome lost a ton of market share to Firefox and other browsers.
It won’t. We are an extreme minority who really have the know-how to get around this. The majority will just give in and subscribe.
This is what happened with Netflix. Everyone thought that Netflix would lose subscribers with the crackdown on password sharing. On the contrary, they gained subscribers and is bringing even more revenue: https://www.ign.com/articles/netflix-adds-88-million-subscribers-amid-password-sharing-crackdown-hikes-prices-for-some-plans.
In other words, the general population likes to be used by companies and really don’t give a shit as long as they can watch videos.
not so much that they like to be used by companies, but that they don’t care enough to change or learn how to stop it. for most people, the idea of giving up their favorite online service because of ads or whatever other predatory anti consumer shit it implements is a little extreme.
as long as it works, the vast majority of people who are not tech-literate will just use it regardless.
Most people sell their time and personal information (including deeply personal stuff) dirt cheap.
In other words, the general population
likes to beis okay with being used by companies and really don’t give a shit as long as they can watch videos.I hate that you’re right. Not because of you, but because the situation is ridiculous.
Not quite.
If users see thry need to invest more brain power in tech than plugging a cable in and pressing the power button, they will either give up or ask tech literate folk. They are like an extreme toddler with tech.
You wouldn’t expect a toddler to write a speechNo but I would expect a toddler to learn new things.
Not all wants to learn more (sadly)
I can understand the viewpoint, learning something new requires time to be invested, time that one may want to spend on something else.
Lmao you all are so cringy. The general population sees it as a value proposition that makes sense for them.
Three persons sharing one user profile vs just paying for Netflix myself, I don’t feel used.
correct
But but cat doing funny thing, who cares about privacy??
Blocking ads on YouTube is kind of like eating meat. It can’t quite be morally justified, but I’m still guilty of it.
Currectly I’m updating uBlock 3 times a day to keep up with YouTube’s detection algorithms, so I’m obviously willing to go to great lenghts to block ads, but after it gets difficult enough, I’ll most likely just give in and get a subscribtion. It’s by far the most valuable streaming service for me, yet I’ve used it (ad)free for more than 15 years. If now is the time they say enough, then fine. It was good while it lasted. I don’t think that ads-based bussines model is the way to go anyways, so perhaps I should practice what I preach. Currenltly I’m only paying for Spotify and one podcast.
If competiton comes along that’s even one tenth as good, I’m perfectly willing to jump ship, though. Google has lost my trust.
We really are all sissies now aren’t we?
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this is an issue. whole family can use netflix etc with one payment. if you have separate youtube accounts (everyone has their own subs etc) you all need individual youtube premium accounts so you can watch ad free. it’s stupid (I’m ignoring why yt premium isn’t a good idea anyway unless you use yt music)
edit: I see there is a family plan. my bad
I use Chrome on my work laptop and Firefox on my personal computron and I either get the pop-up on both devices or not at all.
Sharing this: don’t know why this works, but my dad found refreshing the cache in UBlock makes this thing finally shut the fuck up.
It updates Ublocks filters. They are updating those as YouTube changes things. Ublock has worked flawlessly on firefox YouTube for me so far. I have not even seen the popup once.
Plus you should add Anti-adblock killer by Reek, a combination of those 2 makes the entire problem go away… for now. I would also whitelist youtube in other addons like disconnect as those can also trigger youtubes immune response.
Anti-adblock killer by Reek
That thing is unmaintained and have not been updated for over 7 years. It will do absolutely nothing.
If you have issues with YouTube: https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/about/sticky?num=2
I have to add some things though:
- Read the thread thoroughly, you may have missed a step or 2, or may have misunderstood something. There’s a lot of noise in the replies. Filter maintainers can’t always give support or keep up with the noise. Being pushy, unfriendly, or replying to the thread without doing every step will not fix the problem for you. If you have technical knowledge, consider contributing that knowledge.
- Do not add random filters, scripts, extensions from random users. If you don’t understand what you’re doing you may add something that may work against you instead of for you, or in worse cases add something malicious.
- YouTube seems to update their anti-ab script at least twice a day more or less. So just: Click 🛡️ uBO’s icon > the ⚙ Dashboard button > the Filter lists pane > the 🕘 clock icon at the end of the uBlock filters – Quick fixes list > the 🔃 Update now button. Do NOT click purge all caches and update now, that will only add more pressure to the filter hosts.
- If there’s a mismatch between the filter fixes and YouTube’s latest fixes, just wait, watch the video logged out, or use an alternative front-end like piped, invidious, or whatever.
Anti-adblock killer
Wow I didnt know it was unmaintained, I see that now. Well something I did actually worked because Im currently not getting any warnings from youtube
Freetube has been a great alternative for me. While it still doesn’t have tabs, I just figured out earlier today that middle clicking opens the link or video to a new window.
I’ve been using free tube for about a month now and been really happy.
My only downsides are that I use it on multiple comps, and like to watch YouTube on my tv as well, and by freetubes very nature, those don’t sync subs/history etc. which is expected of course.
The other bummer for me personally is I did really like the YouTube algorithms suggestions for me, so it’s a little harder for me to find new creators now.
But all in all, minor issues for some completely free software that works well and does what it says it’ll do! Would absolutely suggest people at least give it a try!
Yeah, honestly that’s the main blocker for me. For all of the hate it gets, I had the YouTube algorithm pretty well-tuned to what I liked.
Wish there was something like freetube that would still preserve views/ suggestions.
I have had free tube very loosely recommend me some related videos, but nothing like the full feed yet.
I wonder if they could somehow make a section of like “videos that are not from your subs, but would be recommended under your subs videos” to explore other creators with similar content.
No idea if you can scrape that kinda info from YouTube without all the account stuff though.
Occasionally I’ll click over to the Trending list to see if there’s anything if interest. That mostly seems to represent what teenagers are watching but there are occasional gems in there.
Honestly, if YouTube offered a $5 adfree video plan I’d pay for it. It’s not worth $14/month in my opinion
I think these companies are starting to run into the brick wall caused by disgusting wealth inequality and the subsequent inability to spend as frivolously as needed for a healthy economy.
Also just coming to the realization that advertising on the internet has always been done atrociously (not that RL advertising is any better but at least follows some kind of structure and isn’t thrown in your face repeatedly) and that a large swath of people do not want to deal with it or interact with it.
Rather than fix something that is clearly broken, they’d rather double down, throw money at it and make it more of a problem than admit they need to reign it in and put some common sense and sanity checks on how advertising should take place online.
Its product life cycle in their eyes came to the phase of “cash cow” . They are milking what was built in past untill there’s anything left. It was same with gaming industry. It seems inevitable once company reaches certain size (not in people count sense). That’s why we need alternative to keep things good for users.
The majority of Internet ads are ableist. I have ADHD and they’re too distracting.
That’s the YouTube Premium Lite plan that they killed off less than a month ago.
Youtube would profit off of $2 a month the fact that they need to charge 14 is just greed
How did you compute that?
According to the latest reports, over 2.70 billion people worldwide use YouTube per month.
This was 2022 and there is conflicting figures, most of which are 2 billion to 2.8 billion regular users (regular use of at least once a week, most daily.) https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statistics/
Google has claimed youtube costs 5 billion a year to run back in 2019 but has never put out a solid figure or statement to the public, Entourage Marketing & Design did research in 2019 but the article seems to be down as I can’t locate the actual source. This could be inaccurate today but all information I’ve seen points to it still being single digit billions to operate year to year.
If these figures are accurate, 2USD from their claimed regular users would put them near their break even point without even considering income from advertisers or other investors and business opportunities. If they really did intend for every adult youtube user (roughly 80% of their audience) to pay them 14USD a month, that’s still over five times their operating costs alone.
Clearly, youtube is getting a lot more money from advertisers then they are from premium users, which is why they are trying to make the free to use option on their website so awful and unbearable that people will pay them directly to skip the ads (though rumblings have been going around at them finding ways to insert ads into premium user viewing experience as well.) And since the advertising side is so toxic and predatory they can tell when people are using ad blockers to avoid it, it reports back they aren’t watching ads and thus tries to prevent people from utilizing the service entirely until their participation generates money for youtube.
Fuck that shit. They’d just increase it gradually until it hit 80$. They also don’t care about the user experience playing shit ads that are some times horrific (like the recent Israel propaganda ads with war, or 1 hr + ads, or salacious ads). They also inject the ads at the worst possible spots. They should give creators that control but fuck them.
Don’t give Youtube or Google that option. This is what they want. They are ruining the internet further.
That’s way too expensive. I guess regional pricing did me good because here it costs an equivalent of $3.75 (RM 17.90). That much for Premium + Music ain’t no way I’m not taking it.
Spotify costs $3.35 (RM 15.90).
I cancelled Spotify and use YouTube for music and videos now so it’s worth $14 to me. Just loaded all my Spotify playlists into YTM. Interface isn’t as good as other music apps, but it has a pretty insane catalog, especially for stuff like remixes and bootlegs
I’d pay €1 a month. Max. If only 50 million people did the same, they’d make 50 million per month. Must be more than they make now from ads…
Not to mention, ads make so much less per user. And if you started to click on most of them they will demonetize the content creator for it.
So those 14 bucks / per user is like the user was thousand people watching hundreds of videos roughly speaking.
Ublock Origin Settings - Clear Cache - Update - Refresh Youtube
Fuck You, Tube
Fuk gogol
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This arms race sucks.
It’s a matter of who gets tired quicker at this point, YouTube, ublock maintainers, or users. We’re on the losing side, and alternative front ends sound like the “we’re cornered” solution. I imagine Google won’t take long to break them as well.
the engineers won’t get tired, they are paid not to. Not to say that people shouldn’t try to evade it. This is super predatory but understandable cause of its income model.
The engineering managers will get tired of spending their budget on something that produces no return on investment. Google has no attention span for anything.
The engineering managers get directed by corporate executives to implement a feature like this. If the engineering manager resists or protests they won’t be meeting there kpi target. there are plenty of other people to fill the role.
A feature like this can get approval to be worked on, but what’s harder to defend is spending money on it every quarter when there won’t be any tangible benefit to point towards.
Google will get bored and move on to the next shiny thing to juice revenues.
depends on the lost revenue - cost of doing business/updating the code.
how is it predatory? lol
Because simply by going to the website, Google is automatically making money off of you due to how intrusively they spy on your behavior 24/7 (unless you’re in the very small minority that takes extensive effort to stay private online and on your phone). Google is showing me ads all the fucking time, and now they want to force even more ads every 5 minutes or less on YouTube videos (ads on YT now are far more intrusive and frequent than even 5 years ago). For them to say, “You either consume even more targeted ads or we’re banning you,” is some weird quasi-hostage level shit.
“But how can Google pay for YouTube if you’re blocking ads!?!?” Dude, YouTube makes hundreds of millions in PROFIT every year, they’re fine if some ads during videos are missed. Like I said, simply going to their website makes them money because they harvest data across all of their dozens of platforms and services. Don’t suck Google’s dick, they are not your friend. YouTube just has a monopoly on user created videos. If there were a viable alternative, I’d happily jump to that in a heartbeat and even pay like $5/mo for it.
I am sorry, who is forcing you to watch YouTube videos?
. If there were a viable alternative, I’d happily jump to that in a heartbeat and even pay like $5/mo for it.
Floatplane, Nebula/curiositystream, patreons of creators.
You realize how much information is on YouTube, right? We have to use it at work all the time when our safety officer does their monthly trainings, among other things. YouTube is ubiquitous to every day life, don’t act like anything even remotely compares in terms of video content.
And yes, I do use patreon for some creators but to even pretend it’s comparable to the entirety of YouTube is ridiculous. Floatplane is promising but is very new. Never heard of Nebula, guessing it is similarly new or limited.
if you have to use it at work, get your company to pay for it, and there you go, no ads
how much money do you think yt is losing to ubo, and how much does it cost for yt to keep updating the code? financially it may not be worth it.
I’m glad, uBlock Origin blocks all these adblock blockers.
It doesn’t. This is being rolled out to all users. Eventually you will have to clear cash every time you want to watch YouTube with Ublock Origin.
Good point! Clearing cache on exit is my firefox’ default setting. Do recommend!
Developer singlehandedly overthrowing corporation’s decisions is my type of shit
A reminder that if this doesn’t work, they’ll bake ads into the player like Hulu and Twitch. Can’t block those, at least in a way that gets you back to the content seemlessly.
then we’ll just do a sponsorblock type solution which skips over the ad
Only solutions I’ve seen stop the ad from appearing but not the 2 minute break it forces on you.
We are totally gonna get DVRs back, aren’t we 🤣?
Sponsorblock
That’s for ads baked into the video, not the players.
You can still cheese by both of those methods without issue.
Literally they’ll do it anyways, imput or not.
Hulu? I use ublock on hulu and have no issues.
I knew Google would get around to killing YouTube sooner or later: Looks like the slow death has begun.
Like all things Google that people like: It must die, Google will not allow it to live.
Coming to you in 2025: GoogleTube, brought to you by Alphabet!
there’s enough people mindlessly consuming content off the site via mobile or tv, or are clueless about adblockers to begin with, youtube will continue to exist and be profitable even if every adblocking user never visited the site again.
Until alternatives take off because the user experience becomes increasingly shitty. You really think Google isn’t going to ratchet up the ads over time?
YouTube ensuring it gets ad revenue is the exact opposite of killing it.
People who use ad blockers aren’t the type of people to click the ads. We’re doing a Google a service by improving conversion statistics.
While funny, this doesnt really hold water.
I’m sure using hours of 4k bandwidth while getting nothing in return is a great deal for alphabet… 🙄
Bandwidth is EXPENSIVE. If you are not clicking on the ads and not even watching the ads, every minute you use the site is costing them money. They are just optimizing costs by cutting all “leechers”.
YouTube doesn’t need “exposure” or to “convince investors of an active user base”. They don’t need to keep users that cost them money because they have enough users already. They are well into the “monetization” phase.
It’s always amusing to see people claiming to be these masters of business strategies pushing such excellent advice as “pay money to provide a service to people who supply no revenue”.
Don’t get me wrong; there absolute is a point where you can be so overly burdensome that you’re going to push legitimate customers away and ultimately hurt yourself more than you help, and YouTube absolutely does do some stupid things, but business is so much more complicated than people like to think.
They get tons of money harvesting data alone, the service isn’t free: We are the product and, on top of that, they get their content for free with the actual creators of said content getting a pittance compared to what they provide for Google.
Additionally: I have never seen a credible report that indicates ad blocking actually has any sort of significant impact on revenue. Do you happen to have any because that argument sure smells like corpo bullshit.
This pop up, did more to curb my youtube addiction than any other app.
What could come of people clicking on the “Report issue” option and sending back tons of false reports claiming that they have gotten the pop-up message despite not using an ad-blocker?
It’s Google… Chances are an automated system would go “nope it’s legit, buzz off”
i gave feedback that basically said “fuck you. fuck this. this is exactly how you generate bad will.”
It asked me to include a screenshot of the page and highlight areas of the image to draw attention to them, so I sent a screenshot similar to the one in this post and highlighted every use of the word “ads”. I also sardonically lauded false praise of the site and its advertisements in the written reply.
Maybe those Google accounts would get banned? Probably not worth it.
You can put up with that… Or you could just switch to a Piped instance and be done with it all.
Piped is great, the content goes through a proxy so there’s no interaction with YouTube servers and your account and subscriptions are also isolated.
So wait how does that work? Are you still using your YouTube account on Piped or is it something else?
No, you make an account on that piped instance.
You can of course export your yt subscriptions as a CSV file and import them into Piped, and you can also use a difference instance to host your account/data as the one you’re using to stream the content. Did I mention built-in sponsorblock support and native apps like LibreTube?
How is that “legal” though? Will it not be harassed by Google at some point to turn it down?
It’s not illegal, but maybe against YT terms of service. I’ve seen reports that google is starting to IP ban piped instances.
I’m taking it with a grain of salt anyway, as I haven’t read any first hand accounts. And it would be interesting to see if google really is banning IPs, even ones in aws/azure/linode/gcp(lol)/etc IP blocks.
I just clear the YT sites’ cookies, relog in and it disappears. I use AdNauseam and uBlock Origin and still got this.
If they weren’t so intrusive with the garbage ads (I hate publicity, over 95% of it is condescending and/or lies), I wouldn’t mind seeing an ad in the beggining, or even also an additional in the middle of a long video, but getting two unskippable ads in the beggining and one every 5 mins or less is abusive. So fuck you Google.
Going to install a local instance of Piped or Invidious.
Try tubearchivist with their browser plugin! (If you’re going to run something locally!)
Just found out about FreeTube, works great and has 2 methods to get the video. YouTube is now actively blocking my account. That’s how a service is destroyed.
