Since May, YouTube has ramped up its block of ad blockers and the company has now fully launched this policy worldwide...
  • Ænima@lemm.eeEnglish
    1276·
    2 years ago

    Ya know, I’ve seen a lot of posts regarding Elon Musk spam in this community, and calls to “ban” them, yet every week we get gloom and doom posts like this when some new subset of the world starts seeing this shit. I’d really like to see a pinned message about the fix, which is…

    1. Install Firefox or a derivative, and add the uBlock Origin extension.

    If you visit YouTube and see the pop-up, the page isn’t loading the video content, or it just seems to be acting strange, do the following:

    1. Click on the uBlock Origin brown shield in your extensions.
    2. Click the three little gears icon to enter the settings.
    3. Make sure you’re in the Filter lists section from the top and click the Purge all caches button below it.
    4. Click the Update now button.
    5. Wait until the filter update completes.
    6. Refresh the tab(s) that YouTube is in.
    7. Press play.

    I literally have no other installed add-ons for ad blocking, anymore. Only uBlock Origin. Any time I see the message or YouTube starts acting up, I just repeat those 7 steps above for any YouTube tab that was already open, and viola, the video plays. It has simplified so many issues for me and reduced the number of adblock extensions I need to run.

    I definitely plan on donating this holiday season to their team, probably the biggest share of the pie between the FOSS apps I enjoy and appreciate. Should uBlock Origin ever fail, I’ll just stop going to YouTube.

    • hydrospanner@lemmy.worldEnglish
      551·
      2 years ago

      Yeah, all Google accomplished with this bullshit was finally getting me to switch from Chrome to Firefox as my main browser on desktop.

      • Alchemy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        231·
        2 years ago

        Pretty much, also encouraged me to download uBlock, and now I see how many items it blocks from pages like YouTube. Spoiler: It’s a lot.

        • hydrospanner@lemmy.worldEnglish
          12·
          2 years ago

          Right?

          I have two tabs open…one is a site that is overtly and actively promoting products to me, with literal links to retailers where I can buy the stuff they’re promoting…the other is YouTube.

          The promotional site’s uBlock counter is at 4.

          YouTube’s is at…139.

          • Ænima@lemm.eeEnglish
            9·
            2 years ago

            Leave that YouTube tab open open for a day and see how many thousands of items uBlock has blocked.

            • SuperSpruce@lemmy.mlEnglish
              9·
              2 years ago

              I see absolutely insane numbers on Google docs, 10000+ blocked. My total per year is now over 5 million. A lot more intense than a few years ago, where it took multiple years to reach 3 million.

              • Ænima@lemm.eeEnglish
                6·
                2 years ago

                Holy shit, I have multiple tabs open and have only been using Firefox as my default browser for about 1.5 3-months (August 9th). Each YouTube tab has over 10k blocks and lifetime blocks since installation is over 4.1 million!

                Edit: found the document I made in Obsidian to plan my move from Brave to Firefox and the created data is August 9th.

              • Ænima@lemm.eeEnglish
                4·
                2 years ago

                Wow I haven’t even looked for all time blocks! I’ll have to look…

            • sweetviolentblush@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              4·
              2 years ago

              Yup, I left youtube up on my laptop all day today and this is ublocks total. It’s fucking crazy that some people don’t bother with adblockers

    • Magister@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      2 years ago

      It does on mine, sometimes, so I clear cache, update uBlock, restart Firefox. In general it blocks them again

    • MrFlamey@lemmy.worldEnglish
      93·
      2 years ago

      Or mine on Vivaldi. It was showing me the notice the other week, but seems to have stopped now. Either they are now time limiting youtube before the ad blocking thing comes back, or uBlock upped the ante.

      • Gestrid@lemmy.caEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        Your uBlock probably updated. uBlock has pretty much been able to successfully block YouTube’s adblocker block since YouTube started blocking adblockers, so long as you kept the filters updated.

    • Barack_Embalmer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Tangential question - what is stopping youtube from restricting access to their API for 3rd party apps like Reddit did?

    • DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Remember people start logging out for these services. Any day they could decided to start terminating accounts if this whole anti Adblocking campaign doesn’t get subscriber numbers up

      • Free Palestine 🇵🇸@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        I am aware of this option, but sideloading on iOS currently kinda sucks. You have to use AltStore which sometimes goes unmaintained for a few months, even when it’s maintained it’s kinda buggy and the Windows version almost never works for me. It’s also not available for Linux. And you have to connect your phone to a computer running AltStore every 7 days, otherwise the app will stop functioning. It’s just not a great solution and especially bad for less tech-savvy users.

        • Rexios@lemm.eeEnglish
          11·
          2 years ago

          You don’t have to use AltStore. I re-sign the IPA myself and install with Apple Configurator

      • Free Palestine 🇵🇸@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        131·
        2 years ago

        Just use a proper ad-blocker like uBlock Origin in combination with a browser like Firefox or LibreWolf that supports proper ad-blocking extension. Fuck this Chromium garbage that deprecated MV2 because Google is scared of adblockers. Don’t support Google’s monopoly on browser rendering engines and use Firefox or something even better like LibreWolf.

        • Square Singer@feddit.deEnglish
          02·
          2 years ago

          Did you read what the addon is about? It’s not an adblocker but is to be used in conjunction with one. All it does is circumventing the adblockerblocker. It specifically recommends being used together with uBlock.

          Btw, I use FF with uBlock. But I am not everyone, so when I stumbled across this, I thought it might be helpful for some people.

          And I found it ironic, that Googles own extension store contains an extension that circumvents the YouTube adblockerblocker.

          • Free Palestine 🇵🇸@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            5·
            2 years ago

            I know, but uBlock has built in circumvention features, and you can add custom blocking rules or filterlists to uBO without having to install an additional extension. If the addon becomes outdated, it might start interfering with uBlock Origin. It’s best not to combine uBO with any other ad-blocking addons and just use the existing mechanisms like custom rules and filterlists to extend uBO if needed. The uBO team is constantly working on ensuring that the built in circumvention mechanism works, most of the time, the only thing a user needs to do is clear the cache and update the filterlists.

            And I found it ironic, that Googles own extension store contains an extension that circumvents the YouTube adblockerblocker.

            It will probably be taken down soon lol

  • Xylight@lemdro.idEnglish
    69·
    2 years ago

    I wish I could donate to ublock origin so badly. I never even saw the popup.

  • Number1SummerJam@lemmy.worldEnglish
    635·
    2 years ago

    Intrusive and sneaky ads like the ones on YouTube should be heavily regulated if not illegal.

    Edit: especially ads louder than the average content volume, repetitive jingles designed to get stuck in your head, billboards, and ads thrown in the middle of the video you’re watching

    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
      121·
      2 years ago

      “Loud” is unfortunately hard to quantify. There’s a lot of psychoacoustics that mean that the number of decidels really doesn’t tell you what’s loud and what’s not.

      This is a great demo of how sounds can appear extremely loud without actually being physically very loud: https://youtu.be/tONF9OSUOSw?t=7m16s

      Anyway the point is that it’s hard to make rules about this kind of thing, because sound is subjective and there are ways to circumvent any restrictions you make.

      • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        I can honestly say, apart from seeing it on on the background when visiting parents or similar, that I haven’t watched free to air TV in maybe 15 years. Been streaming or downloading all that time.

      • wooki@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
        41·
        2 years ago

        Free to air is heavily regulated in my country if it had a fraction of the fraudulent grifter ads Google would be shut down

    • wooki@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      Googles ad platform is utterly full of fraudulent scams and grifters. Bring on regulations and HEAVY fines for Google making profit of fraud and crimes.

  • MeanEYE@lemmy.worldEnglish
    551·
    2 years ago

    Nooo. YouTube thinks it’s fully blocking ad blockers. In reality nothing’s changed.

    • Sunrosa@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      2 years ago

      It’s pretty random whether you get the message or not. Some of my friends, including me, straight up cannot watch youtube on their website half of the time anymore, because it full blocks us. It’s not just an annoying message, videos actually just don’t play. But I only get it on some days. I think the message only pops up if you’ve been watching for more than like an hour straight. Then again, some of my friends have never seen the message. Who knows. Just more weird big tech server bullshit. Like how twitter’s api works 15% of the time (for me).

      • yata@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        Purge cache and refresh does the trick if you have problems with the firefox+ublock combination. Or you have some other active extensions which prevents ublock from doing its thing.

      • ColdWater@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Been watching for 3h straight and still no pop or problem with videos but when time eventually come I’ll try to setup UBO filter or using 3rd party frontend

    • vvvvan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      I’m daily using uBlock Origin (with Firefox) on Windows, and ReVanced on Android, and have experienced zero indications that Google is at war with ad blockers. These two are fucking fantastic and highly recommended. I don’t expect it to last forever, but bravo to these devs and contributors.

  • Sagrotan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    461·
    2 years ago

    No problems here whatsoever, I don’t know what everybody is talking about. Remember to donate some bucks to your favorite open source adblock (or piping app), thank you.