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.”
Worse than using YouTube without an ad blocker?
The fact that my children know the Liberty Mutual jingle from watching YouTube at school says no.
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.
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.
SmartTube Next for watching YT on TV and LibreTube for Android.
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.
I think my viewing experience will be even worse if I turn off my ad blocker.
Loving Freetube, Newpipe, and Grayjay more and more every day!
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.
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…
Ad blocking, uh, finds a way.
They could, what can go wrong…
How could it be worse than with ads?
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.
Oh no, so how will I be able to tell a difference?
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.
PeerTube & Odysee when?
When the video creators you watch move to them.
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.
YouTube losing the war on AdBlockers, lol.
About all this is doing is making me update my lists in UBO more often.
Then don’t use it.
How about stop being evil, Youtube?
Oh wait…
