I bet YouTube is Ad-Block...Blocking you!

[TheFrugalGamer]

i do agree that this should be more simple. i think we shouldn't be relying on just one platform for video hosting, i think people should be more open to using different platforms, or even more than one platform. but its much harder to get everyone on board with that when, honestly, its a lot less convenient than using one app everyone already is incredibly familiar with. you do have to sacrifice access to most large creators if you want to switch platforms, and i feel like it's not that unreasonable to feel conflicted or uncomfortable with that.

So I don't want to get tooooo off-topic here, but I feel like a lot of this is due to the push away from RSS. If we still had popular, robust RSS readers, you could subscribe to everything everywhere, and you wouldn't have to worry about different platforms. This, of course, has the benefit of making it harder to track you and what you're doing (provided you're not using a hosted RSS product), which also explains why there's been a push away from using it.

So yeah, I'll be using youtube-dl a lot more and pushing RSS and Atom as much as I can.

[georgemoody]

I’ve seen it a couple of times, but so far my ad blocking solutions have prevented me from hitting a complete roadblock. It’s a bit hard leaving YouTube since majority of my time is spent there watching videos from my favorite content creators or stuff that I have an interest in (some of which I would consider niche, so probably not a lot of content exists of them on alt platforms). if need be though, I’ve got yt-dlp to back me up (as any archivist should).

[testtubesterone]

So I don't want to get tooooo off-topic here, but I feel like a lot of this is due to the push away from RSS. If we still had popular, robust RSS readers, you could subscribe to everything everywhere, and you wouldn't have to worry about different platforms. This, of course, has the benefit of making it harder to track you and what you're doing (provided you're not using a hosted RSS product), which also explains why there's been a push away from using it.

So yeah, I'll be using youtube-dl a lot more and pushing RSS and Atom as much as I can.

Ah, I feel like this is a great addition though!! it is relevant imo! change is generally tough for me but starting to use an RSS reader something I've been thinking about more and more recently. I think you're def right that it's a great solution to the issue of exclusivity on the web, if that makes sense

[Grimlock]

oh yeah i've had ton of issues with the anti-adblock but usually ublock devs fix it in like 6 hours to a day tops! i just keep up with their github thread on yt issues, troubleshoot, and use the watching videos as embeds trick to keep watching if my troubleshooting doesn't work.

haven't run into the adblock message in a while though so that's good. I honestly think the anti-adblock is a largely useless endeavor unless google's somehow getting a tax writeoff out of it tbh. bc the ppl who want to use adblock on yt will either A: get it working again or B: go to an alternative site that mirrors it. plus yt revanced is a thing for android users.

[BlazingCobaltX]

I mainly watch (actually listen to) YouTube through the ReVanced app, so I think I have been spared a majority of the anti-adblock messsages. The are a few instances where I want to watch something on my PC and the video is just stuck on loading. I'm not sure if this is the result of the anti-adblock but it's applied very randomly on videos.

That said, if YouTube goes too hard on the adblock I will eventually find my entertainment elsewhere, just like others have said in this thread. There's plenty of podcasts or interesting shows I could still watch. YouTube pretty much fills a background noise function for me most of the time, unless a channel I'm subscribed to uploads again. Although there is one YouTube channel I am a member of for their streams, and I would hope that those remain ad-free at least.

[Bede]

I am firmly of the belief that the reason why people are uninstalling adblockers is to install new adblockers that actually get past YouTube's bullshit. Shoutout to the folks at uBlock working their asses off to try and keep up with YouTube's bullshit.

What I think YouTube doesn't get is that a LOT of people, if you take away their adblockers, won't just watch YouTube's ads. They will just stop watching YouTube. Me, if I'm unable to use my adblock, I plan to switch to LibreTube.

The thing that pisses me off the most about this is the way that YouTube is trying to frame this as about supporting creators. If I want to support video-creators that I like, I will throw them a few bucks on Ko-Fi or Patreon. Throwing a singular dollar at a YouTuber's Patreon ONE TIME counts as the same as watching more than a THOUSAND ads on their videos. If I have 20 bucks a month that I wanna spend on supporting YouTubers I enjoy, I will distribute the $20 among my 20 favorite YouTubers every month, instead of paying for Premium. I know for a fact that, if I do that, I am doing more to support them as creators than YouTube's ads and shitty Premium ever could, without making Google the middle man.

[Kolo]

Shockingly... no I haven't experienced any of the anti-adblock stuff. I don't even know why? I don't know what's different about my setup. The most I ever got is that a few days a week, videos pause at 1 second randomly, but I can just press play again and they're fine. Dreading the day that they work around... whatever blocks I have, though....

[anglade]

I'm getting those anti-adblock messages on my laptop T_T. To be honest, if the site catches up with me before ublock catches up with it, I think the mandated break I'll end up taking might do me some good lol. God knows I watch enough youtube already.
As an aside, I've been using the NewPipe youtube client on my (android) phone; which bypasses ads but does lose some of the functionality I like on desktop (being able to like videos, the algorithm(I know, I know, but it's great for listening to music!)).
My biggest worry though is losing access to some of the music I like; some stuff like super obscure remixes of already niche tracks or live recordings of certain concerts aren't available on spotify, so there's that.

[Memory]

No problems so far on Invidious instances. There are no ads there in the first place. Though it's a matter of time for Google to defend their precious video platform, but it looks like the Invidious developers always fought back successfully. Let's say, Invidious works in 98% of all times.

[BlazingCobaltX]

My biggest worry though is losing access to some of the music I like; some stuff like super obscure remixes of already niche tracks or live recordings of certain concerts aren't available on spotify, so there's that.

Good point actually, I should download those Not everyone uploads their stuff on multiple places.

[BananaBoots]

I've not had any problems because of the ol' faithful combo of Firefox and uBlock Origin (I also use SponsorBlock but that's not an ad-blocker per se...). The pop-up still appears for me sometimes but I heard that the uBlock staff/devs are constantly trying to outwit whatever YouTube tries so I just have to press purge all caches then update and it works just fine. Also, I actually heard that YouTube's latest... I don't know what to call it, stunt? actually led to more people downloading ad-blockers because it made them aware that they were like... a thing, I guess, which is really funny to me.

[shevek]

Something I've recently thought about is that YouTube is now mainly known for entertainment purposes, so it gets treated like that - especially by proponents of the adblocker-blocking, standing firmly on the side of ads, because "you should pay for your entertainment" and "the people creating that content for you deserve to be paid". True, but that seems reductive to me.

While I also watch creators focused on entertainment, a big advantage YouTube has always had for me was tutorials and other learning content that was put out there intentionally for free by its creators. Accessible learning, for free, is an incredible gift to society and especially disadvantaged people. Not just talking about people teaching themselves how to 3D model or code or anything else via YT to get a (better) job without student debts and more quickly, but also home repair or improvement.

We are increasingly separated from family or family friends who can be called up to help or teach us (I know I am), so we don't just naturally know how to fix a sink. I had to open up my toilet's cistern a few months ago which is integrated into the wall, so opening it up was a bit of an issue, and understanding which screw and valve did what. YouTube really helped with that. I did something similar when trying to figure out why my washing machine was leaking over a year ago.

And the thing is, so many videos like that are done by nice old people who just wanna teach something and not have a YT career and don't have monetization set up anyway, or they're put up by the manufacturers themselves, when I (or someone else installing it here) has already paid for that product and is essentially just receiving support for it (you could say that's already included in the price).
Yes, hosting and providing the service costs YT money, and entertainers deserve to be compensated. However, I would also hate if intentionally free, educational content was locked behind a paywall, or locked behind an adblocker-block-wall, or the continued path of being locked behind a "Ad 1 of 7" wall you gotta sit through.

If that's the future, many people lose access to content like that or it is becoming increasingly harder to do so, even with "just" ads before and throughout. Imagine repairing something time sensitive with that; it sucks. "Now make sure that you, under no circumstances... HELLOFRESH!". No! Reminds me of the issue of ads on a video about the Heimlich Maneuver or proper chest compression.
It is more easily discoverable on YT than on a private website or the mess that some manufacturer websites are, and there is the ease of upload and hosting for less tech inclined people who just want to tell you about the rods in your oven.
So I think the wider discussion online about YT content and monetization is often too one sided in this regard.

[Janus]

I had some issues with this initially upon roll-out, figured out my own work-around by blocking particular elements (until that stopped working), and no subsequent issues since the uBlock step-by-step guide. Reiterating for anyone who glossed over it:

1. Open uBlock Origin settings, purge all caches
2. Run "Update all"
3. (Important) If you have additional extensions trying to block ads on Youtube - Youtube Enhancer for instance - turn that feature off
4. If you tried to bypass it earlier with custom filters (like I did), go ahead and remove those now

As a matter of course, I backup nearly every video I watch in case of an outage, been doing so since my favorite Grateful Dead tapes channel lost a lot of content... I hope lots of people are doing this, nothing is forever even on the interwebs

[dirtnap]

i've had no problem with this whatsoever, haven't seen a single advert or other unwanted element on youtube. i can offer guesses as to why but i can't be certain.

i've seen indication that at least some of youtube's tracking is cookie or cache-based, which i defeat by keeping neither of those things.

i've seen some suggest there's one or more scripts involved, and as a noscript user i'm automatically immune to those.

i've seem some say it's a/b testing and those who've watched videos unmolested are the control group. given how untrackable i am (to the point that i'm given captchas at every opportunity and sometimes have to login to a site again because i went inactive for a couple of hours) it's highly unlikely that every single time i visit youtube i'm put into the control group. it can't even be by ip because my vpn cycles ips regularly.

except, i know that some people have cookies set to never expire and their cache is large and unflushed as a norm, and they don't use noscript, so...it can't be those things?

whatever it is, i'm fine with it. my youtube use hasn't changed at all.

So I don't want to get tooooo off-topic here, but I feel like a lot of this is due to the push away from RSS. If we still had popular, robust RSS readers, you could subscribe to everything everywhere, and you wouldn't have to worry about different platforms. This, of course, has the benefit of making it harder to track you and what you're doing (provided you're not using a hosted RSS product), which also explains why there's been a push away from using it.

i remember reading a rant somewhere, possibly here, about how google extend-embrace-extinguish'd rss readers and i absolutely believe it was a deliberate act because they were a powerful, decentralised tool that made internet use both easier and less trackable and thus reduced google's profits.

honestly, i think a big part of the (relative) death of rss is that no-one really knows what it is. even when i was a user of rss i barely understood it, and that was at the height of its usefulness. the fact that finding your own browser's built-in rss reader is such a pain (if it even has one) only worsens the issue.

So yeah, I'll be using youtube-dl a lot more and pushing RSS and Atom as much as I can.

huh, it looks like youtube-dl can allegedly grab subtitles too now. i might look into that.

i've been an invidious user for years because browsing youtube's actual site is impossible for me. i can't access any page on youtube except videos. i also can't see comments or anything except the video itself on a video page (this is partly but not entirely deliberate on my part) so to me invidious is a way to search youtube, browse specific accounts, and see comments. it's also a slightly more convenient way to download videos/audio, but that's a bonus rather than my motivation for using it.

but, i need subtitles. so i still watch videos on youtube itself, rather than on invidious or through vlc or whatever, because invidious refuses to get subtitles. (it's possible. the developer just refuses to add the functionality)

so if youtube-dl can actually grab (usable) subtitles as well now, that would be great.

I understand that YouTube needs some short of income to support such a massive site,

they do, but google already has more than enough for that.

"youtube" doesn't exist as an independant entity that needs income. youtube is just a website. it's owned by google (or alphabet, if you prefer. two names, one company).

google's profits can and always have easily supported youtube's existance whilst continuing to be profits. google is just so comically, absurdly, astronomically profitable as a company that they could continue to eat the cost of running youtube ad nauseum without losing any significant amount of profit.

and they don't even have to! because youtube's ad revenue easily exceeds the cost of hosting.*

this isn't a situation where the site can't be kept up any more because the company running it cannot afford to pay for the servers.

this is a situation where the executives of google simply want more money than they already have. which is why they're being obnoxious about it instead of saying "we can't afford to keep this site up, please donate", like a lot of other sites do when they can't afford to keep going. (and if they do start saying that, i won't believe them)

*hosting videos is not the only cost for youtube to keep existing, but it is a very significant one. also, google does not directly report ad revenue or hosting costs, but even the most generous estimates of both make it clear that ad revenue should exceed hosting costs.

this has certainly been A Year for users of the big western-run websites

[Memory]

Push away from RSS? Didn't happen yet at least on Youtube! It's still working like perfect. That way you can subscribe to Youtube channels without having to log in anywhere.

Example of a Youtube channel RSS feed:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCZV9t3siNb1b9Ke2D_Kl4DA

Just replace the gibberish (channel ID) with the channel ID of your desired channel (read it from the adress bar, when looking at that specific channel). 

Hopefully the Youtube developers are still nerdy enough to keep such an efficent piece, even if RSS is not popular.

On Invidious, you might have to look out for various instances. They come and go. Some do show the comments, some don't. A couple of videos don't work either, but all in all, Invidious makes Youtube usable again (mostly).