If they fully manage to block applications from viewing YouTube, then I will just stop viewing YouTube entirely. And I will figure out channels to watch on Odyssey and peertube. That will also be my last Google service since that is the only one I use frequently since I deleted my Google account two years ago.
Sounds great in theory, but won't happen. The internet is too consolidated now for the majority of people to give a shit, there's people buying YouTube Premium because of all this. Look at reddit, barely a dent in it after all the fiascos, twitter is holding on too. People don't care.
At the scale youtube does things it doesn't really cost them much. They actually have the servers, the bandwidth, often the power. It's not like they get to sell a server if enough people leave. The savings probably do not even justify the effort (=cost) to unplug the server. And they still get many other benefits of having you as a user (getting to profile you, getting to push propaganda, getting to sell your information, maybe you send videos to friends who don't use adblock, maybe you buy merch from creators making creators happier on their platform).
On the other hand this enshittification is ruining their monopoly, other areas of business (if you don't need youtube, maybe you don't need a chromecast? If you don't need a chromecast, would you buy pixel phone, that can only do chromecast if samsung can do hdmi? Maybe you're done with android? And if you're on iphone, are you still using google maps, photos, search, keep etc?) and curing people who are addicted to the platform.
The eventual consequence of enshittification is always platform death. Which would be amazing, sadly the next platform is going to repeat the cycle.
At their scale and cost optimization it's likely one of the few remaining holes to plug. I wouldn't underestimate how many people try to block YouTube ads which adds up quickly. Whatever the benefit is from allowing people to keep draining their resources, it probably doesn't outweigh benefits in the non-0% interest rate environment. Their monopoly is also nowhere near threatened and their biggest competitor could be banned in the US.
Because so far, not a single YouTube update has let them get past it. Basically, I switched adblockers but forgot to uninstall the old one, then by the time I noticed, I had also noticed that the combination somehow, for some bizarre reason, ends up confusing anti adblockers to the point of not even getting "disable adblocker" messages. It's not something involving their blacklists either because they have the same blacklist (due to the aforementioned replacing one with another then forgetting to uninstall the older one)
I have only uBlock Origin and no YouTube update has gotten past it (except the first one for a few hours), I never get "disable adblocker" messages either. Also anti adblockers are not blacklist based.
Somewhere out there a CEO thought this was a good idea. All it seems to be doing is pushing people to other platforms (the younger gen moving over to tiktok and the older gens moving 3rd party or just offline).
While I agree, the amount of people who'd do this is negligibly small, compared to their total userbase. Obviously a bunch of people use ad blockers, but only a tiny amount of them have modified apps, followed by an even tinier amount of those people with fully custom frontends. For YT it might work out as a net positive, because the annoying blocks and reminders will just pressure people into paying for Premium.
At the end of the day, I could just stop watching youtube entirely, if this trend continues. I have nothing to gain there
Yes, been thinking I've just been substituting YT for * TV, and while the consumption can still be customized, it's still a habit that can be kicked. I bet I'll get more sleep and productivity.
Several months ago, fresh off the high of following through on my resolution to leave Reddit forever, I made the same decision with YouTube. Once ublock stopped working, I'd try out peer tube, or maybe sail the seas
But ublock never stopped working. I watch more YouTube now than ever before, I got totally addicted as I binged in preparation to leave
At this point, I don't know if it'd be good for me, or send me in a desperate arms race to get my fix
YouTube is bringing its ad blocker fight to mobile. In an update on Monday, YouTube writes that users accessing videos through a third-party ad blocking app may encounter buffering issues or see an error message that reads, “The following content is not available on this app.”
Yea, noticed that last week. Is already fixed again in latest revanced.
Delete microG, revanced manager, and YouTube revanced
Oh this? It's just a binary of assorted diffs and plugins to a yet unspecified target apk. Why yes, I will use the end product for personal, non-commercial use.
It kinda comes out of the experience. There's an outstanding Github issue that notes that a specific version of YT Music is broken past a certain version. Most of the patches fail to apply and you just get the minor ones. You can use the version just before with no issues. How can you litigate against lines of code that don't even work? This is similar to the vulnerability that Yuzu gave up since they offered Patreon-exclusive updates to support a leaked BOTW:TOTK .iso. Easy to prove your intent there.
I think YouTubers make fractional pennies from Ads, and mostly only if its fully watched and sometimes clicked to go to the website. So if you get a 15 second ad, and skip to the content, you didn't give the creators any money.
Also, shout out to those ads being horrible. My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign, that had body horror. 15 year old me didn't want to smoke, nor wanted to after, but it was so disturbing that I learned how to avoid them.
Not even going into the disturbing or weird ads. One time I got an ad for a "Ching Chong Fing Fong shirt company" as a way of mocking Chinese people because their government sucks. Another time, I got a full 12 hour video by a Vietnamese couple just grilling in their backyard. No subtitles, not even sure if they were aware they enabled their videos to do that, or didn't fully understand the process of uploading videos.
Anytime I see actual ads on the internet, not just YouTube, it just makes me go "I am perfectly justified in not seeing these weird ads." I don't give them any money no matter what I do, so why not have my eyes saved from bright flashing colors and scam artists?
That was the purpose. You see, Big Tobacco actually sponsors the anti-smoking campaigns, which does give them some creative input. They tell the writers to make them as annoying as possible.
They started messing with me on YT. When Piped began giving me errors last week, YT suddenly started behaving, but nagging me to try YT again. Google is truly evil, and dasterdly to boot .
If I recall correctly, ever since videos could be called up as ads you can just pay for any video to be an ad, as long as it's on YouTube, and it doesn't have to be yours. I don't know if this has changed, but an essays channel figured out that that's the fastests way someone could target a competitor's channel. Paying to have someone else's video as an ad tanks that video ad revenue and discoverability instantly. Ad views count as views to the video and skipping an ad counts as a skip on the video which signals the algorithm to think that nobody wants or likes to see that video. Do it to enough new videos and you can entirely kill a previously profitable channel in a couple of months.
Money/s is the more used metric. Retention is secondary or even tertiary to money/s. Behold the algorithm, great and terrible, sheathed in robes of black and grasping sickle white.
Ah, but you're one layer off. Projected/potential money/s (in the next 1-2 quarters mainly) is what is truly king.
It doesn't have to be a good idea, it can be a terrible one - but good sounding words in the board room are what matter
"Hey, so we've decided to see if we can run 10 unskippable ads back to back. Simultaneously, we've launched a war on ad blockers. This time it will surely work because we found out you can ignore your customers - Elon Musk has shown us the way, he only lost bots with all his innovation. We expect people to get over it in 3 months and estimate we'll lose 4 users. Between 10x more ads and half our users off ad blockers, we project 20x ad revenue next quarter!"
Nah they want lots of short form and also like 10 hour long videos that can play 200 ads in it that you forget is on in the background. They want tiktok and broadcast TV.
I kind of already hoarded so many videos from youtubes last failed adblock crusade that I barely even use the real youtube anymore. Guess I'll show my disapproval by improving my offline video caching system even more.
My search system doesn't autosuggest results based on which videos have more boobs in the thumbnail but I'll get over it.
exactly, it would be trivial to have a whitelist server side and now only ad friendly apps can access the videos. they only still work because it's worth keeping those viewers in the system for the time being.
exactly, it would be trivial to have a whitelist server side and now only ad friendly apps can access the videos. they only still work because it’s worth keeping those viewers in the system for the time being.
It's not trivial to make sure over the network on a device you don't control that you're talking with an app you think you are talking with. Just look how multiplayer games fail to combat cheaters and resort to kernel anticheats, and then still fail to assure the players are actually using the legit application. It's actually pretty much impossible in any open ecosystem, maybe possible on something like chromecast where you get to control almost anything (as long as someone doesn't hack it to run custom firmware, like they do with every console ever).
Not only is this impossible, it always makes the experience for your legit users worse (but hey, if they are fine with the level of ads on yt today they probably don't care if google were to mine bitcoins on their phones).
YouTube is bringing its ad blocker fight to mobile.
In an update on Monday, YouTube writes that users accessing videos through a third-party ad blocking app may encounter buffering issues or see an error message that reads, “The following content is not available on this app.”
It also began disabling videos for users with an ad blocking extension enabled.
But now, YouTube says its policies don’t allow “third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership.” This appears to target mobile ad blockers like AdGuard, which lets you open YouTube within the ad blocking app, where you’ll get to view videos interruption-free.
“When we find an app that violates these terms, we will take appropriate action to protect our platform, creators, and viewers.”
This likely won’t come as pleasant news to all the users who watch YouTube through ad blocking apps, but it doesn’t look like YouTube is backing down in its battle against ad blockers anytime soon.
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