This is just a lame version of BattleBots without the cool video of robots getting destroyed.
In my mind the largest issue with ads is that they take up time, not that I have to spend that time supposedly watching an ad. The ad server knows how long the ad is, and I assume it just doesn’t tell the video to progress until the allotted time is finished. Ad blockers somehow get around that timing issue though, so either the ad people somehow never thought of using that to prevent unauthorized skipping of the ads, or there’s more going on here than people realize.
I still haven’t had any problem with You Tube since my last post, and I remembered recently that the day before the warnings stopped showing up, I sent some money to AdBlockPlus in hopes that their premium version might do something. Because it didn’t work immediately I’m not sure if that’s the case, or if I just had to reload my browser, or if the techs just managed to figure something out to get around it at around the same time.
I heard on Reddit that the price of Premium is now going up significantly. Is this true or mere rumors? I’ve said before that $4 a month would be worth it to me to not have to worry about ads, and it’s not a terrible deal for YT itself because they offer it in some countries, but $25 a month would simply be ridiculous.
YouTube used to have a Premium Lite version but Google has pulled that pricing tier. Now it is only the expensive tier.
After YouTube spent two years piloting Premium Lite, a lower-cost subscription plan for ad-free video viewing in select countries, the platform is pulling the plug on the tier. In an email to customers, YouTube announced it will no longer offer Premium Lite after October 25th, 2023.
I might pay $4-5/month for no ads but $15+…no way. Ridiculous.
If it’s the same behavior as with AdBlock Plus, it only hangs on the initial ad. Just refresh and you’ll be fine. I haven’t had any issues yet. After refresh the video plays normal, I’ve yet to see any kind of warning screen about blocking ads, and there are no ads within the content I am watching.
Things seem to change from day to day. At the moment I’m not seeing many significant problems with youtube, and a ctl F5 clears the occasional hang.
But I suspect we are far from having seen the last offensive in this war!
Hmm, a data point: I’m accessing from the UK, I wonder if the behavior is different in the US?
Another one: with ublock origin 1.52.2 and Firefox 119.0 on Windows 11, I’m seeing a runaway cascade of CPU and memory usage. So I’ve disabled ublock and filed bug reports.
Going forward, we may all have to keep several adblockers in our toolkits and be prepared to switch between them as the offense/defence wars go on.
On Oct. 18 I noted that I was getting the pop-ups, then I went to the settings for Adblock and clicked “allow in incognito.” I don’t bother to use incognito anymore, and haven’t had any pop-ups since then. I’m in Canada, don’t know if that makes a difference…
Haven’t read any other posts in this thread so I don’t know if this has been said already, but uBlock is a fucking saviour. It’s constantly updating to give YouTube’s greed the finger. Fighting the good fight. I don’t think I have any concerns that uBlock will ever stop fighting, as the dev(s) are very dedicated. However, I don’t think YouTube will give up anytime soon either, as they just want a bigger monopoly on the Internet than they already do, but as long as uBlock keeps trucking, I don’t think we’ll have anything to worry about.
Ultimately, I would be fine with ads if they weren’t so damn intrusive, frequent, or straight up illegal. There’s constant ads that either push scams or are simply made to trigger you and make your day worse. Also, sometimes there can be, like, 6 ads in a less than 20 minute video. It’s so annoying and makes YouTube basically unusable for me. If ads were less frequent and actually fucking followed the Terms of Service…whatever. I would probably accept the anti-adblock crusade they’re doing. But in the state they’re in? Nah, uBlock all the way.
It’s more complicated because a video server needs to be able to pick up the videos from any point, in case the user is “scrubbing” the video–i.e. scrolling the progress bar. They may even jump back. It’s not easy to block ads.
Now, you can get around that. Hulu did back when it was free (and may still do it now–I’ve not used the paid version). Every ad break had a countdown timer it would display. If you blocked the ad, it would just default to thinking the ad should be 60 seconds long, and make you wait. (I don’t think they designed this to stop adblock, but just in case it took longer to load the ad. I think they spent the entire 60 seconds trying to load it.)
But YouTube was not designed with this in mind at all, and they have a lot of stuff they’d need to change to do this. And, honestly, the little changes they make don’t suggest to me that they’re really ready to try the big changes.
I’m all in favor of it. But at the moment, with current versions of it and Firefox, there seems to be a bad memory and CPU leakage bug. Hopefully this will be addressed soon?
I’ve been using uBlock and some nights I have no issues with YT, others it says I have to disable the adblocker and for that night, I use incognito mode.
We’ll see. Remember, this is Google: the 800 pound gorilla in the room. With bean counters leaning on them, they can throw a LOT of resources at it. And YouTube is sort of a semi-monopoly.
I don’t think we have seen the last of this…
I just got the popup again after not having seen it since one day a few weeks ago, scrambling around and updating uBlock. Maybe I need to restart my browser or reload uBlock.
I had to enable a possibly new uBlock filter called “Quick fixes” to get mine to work. Ingognito mode hasn’t been unusable yet.
Or liberally infected with malware. These anti-adblocker popups are very much akin to “Nice computer you have there, be a shame to see anything happen to it (so spring for our overpriced service)”… If you don’t use an adblocker, you really may have no other choice than to spring for the fee, else you may have to be constantly scrubbing your hard drive of crap every week or so.
This site supposedly lets you know if the latest “quick fixes,” Ublock update counters the latest YouTube script.
This extension was useful to me when Ublock was not updated and therefore I turned it off for YouTube: fadblock – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)
It lets you manually skip ads. There is a version for Chrome as well.
Yep, I keep updating the “Quick fixes” in uBlock at least once a day, to make sure I stay up to date.
I had heard about the FORBIDDEN ad blockers (man, that’s offensive!). But I’m using the new Opera on all my computers (don’t have a TV) and the built-in adblocker is still working on Youtube. I know the trick of blacklisting java on sites with paywalls, but that wouldn’t work with Youtube because it would kill everything.
I can’t tell if uBlock is winning the war or YT is being cagey. I got these popups for a day about a week or two ago, but nothing since.