Keep in mind that the people you are watching get little if any money from ads. It goes to YouTube/Google, not them.
Also, online ads are a vector for malware, viruses and ransomware; not using an adblocker endangers your computer - and the fact that they neither have nor take any responsibility for endangering us, much less repay people for the damages entirely absolves viewers of any responsibility towards them IMHO. I’m not interested in paying them for abusing and endangering me.
I noticed yesterday that YouTube started sneaking in ads between different shorts that I was perusing. While I discovered I could quickly scroll past them without seeing them, it was still a nuisance. But a quick Ublock filter update resolved that problem.
Whoops, it seems to only have reduced the issue’s frequency from every 3rd short to about every 6th or 7th. Ugh.
Since this whole ad blocker thing with You Tube started, I have had only one popup to turn off my ad blocker. I closed the popup, everything has been normal. This past Monday I had what I thought was an ad popup during a video but it was an April Fools prank by the video maker.
Instead of a one-click procedure to view a video, I now have a two-click procedure. Otherwise, YT/Google waits for 30 secs or so, then plays an ad that I don’t give a shit about before the video. Wonder what YT will do next?
YouTube is still at it. They said they’d do this… now they are doing it (Chrome will block ad blockers):
For those who care, I’d recommend Firefox (there are others that will work too).
I’ll jump in (again) to say that between firefox, uBlockOrigin and a PiHole, nothing about my youtube experience has changed. This thread and some other random internet comments are the only reason I know something’s going on.
I suspect uBlockOrigin is doing the heavy lifting here.
Between this and their “AI-enhanced” search engine that’s telling people to treat appendicitis with mint tea and to leave their dog in a hot car, I’m starting to wonder if Google is trying to destroy its reputation.
Google search results have been garbage for years now. It’s just that the free alternatives are still worse.
Somehow they haven’t realized how poor the results are and think that adding AI to garbage information will make it less garbage.
Well, I’ve been on Firefox for a while now. Hopefully this latest change gives them a boost in support. They do well with limited resources but they could really use a lifeline.
In case you missed it, here is this article from April which pretty much says Google search is working exactly as bad as they intended. They’ve made trade offs between usability and “user engagement”.
The logic is something like poor search results mean people stay on Google longer which means people see more ads.
This goes back to 2019 when the person who had been in charge of Google search for 20 years was replaced with a “managerial type” whose job is to increase revenue, not provide good search results.
It will be interesting to see how browser marketshare changes in the next few months, and how the many chromium based browsers handle this.
Thanks for the link. I’ll read that later.
Has anyone used Kagi? Subscription based “premium” search. No trackers, ads, etc. I’m less interested in the privacy aspects (although that’s still important) than the quality of the results.
I don’t think there’s any fix for the problem with ad-supported search engines. Or social media or traditional media or really anything else. At this point I’m willing to pay for a higher quality service.
Since I’ve had Ublock up and running (on Opera browser) I have had no real problems. Occasionally during a video, the whole screen will go black for about a second, then white for half a second, then back to the video at about half a second before the place where the interruption started. I don’t know if this is an indication of Ublock working behind the scenes to defeat an ad, or something else, but it is a small price to pay.
Recently apparently YouTube was running a test in which I was an unwilling participant. My normal view of the YouTube home screen was three video previews across, but a few days ago the previews got bigger and there were only two across. I did a little digging and found that this was something that YouTube was trying out on various groups of users, and that some people had found ways around it with coding, but I didn’t think it was that bad, so I didn’t try to do anything. Yesterday it reverted to the old view, so I guess my test is over.
Ed Zitron is fantastic. His column (blog?) should be regular reading for anyone who wants to understand the ongoing enshittification of everything in the tech space.
From the article: " …in the process burning the Library of Alexandria to the ground so that Pichai could make more than 200 million dollars a year."
I was thinking the exact thing leading up to that paragraph, and over the last few years. Except instead of burning it down, they replaced all the books with yellow pages.
So how is Opera now a days? I used it from the earliest versions in the mid 90’s for probably 15 years and dropped it for some reason. Just looked at the wikipedia entry for it and JEEZ… if I wanted to do all that I’d just use EMACS.
Sorry, I don’t understand any of this, so I can’t really answer your question. For a very unsophisticated user such as myself, it works fine.
I’ll preface this by saying I haven’t used Google’s search on the regular since I worked with them and realized how shady they were, like… almost fifteen years ago. So I came to Kagi from “using DDG, and then Bing, logged out and in private mode” and my baseline is probably different. After using it for about a month:
Imagine that! Imagine searching for “prefabulated amulite baseplate installation guide” and not finding anything, instead of Google deciding that if I’d searched for "prefabricated amulets for basement D&D games” I’d have, like, so many more results so what if we both just pretended that’s what I wanted? YouTube now also does this, and I’m sure their internal user testing has proven this increases time spent on site by 17 seconds and leads to a 0.35% increase in ad clickthroughs so it’s not going anywhere.
Kagi feels like a philosophically different search engine. They have a shared plan, so me and my partner are paying $7 a month for it, which seems reasonable. Neither of us finished out the trial and thought “ehhh, I dunno.” My partner is more of a power user and is into the bang functionality; I haven’t tried that yet but the rest of it works fine.
its hell if you use one of the gaming consoles for YT…
But what I hate is some ads are literal half an hour infomercials …especially the televanglist like Prager U and a couple of others … or he music videos …
I can use YT on my smart TV but can’t stop ads on it and it seriously sucks so I never do.
As I mentioned upthread, depending on your smart TV, you may be able to sideload alternative apps that replicate the youtube experience but without the ads. I’ve been doing this successfully for months.
I returned from a trip last night (so I have not been on YouTube in 10 days) and went to watch a YouTube video and the video player had removed the four buttons in the lower right corner (closed captioning, resolution, etc.). If I removed a uBlock filter they came back but it also reverted to that awful new layout which I really dislike.
A bit of noodling around I found a series of new (to me at least) filter settings to add to uBlock and all is as it should be again (and no ads of course). The hard part was finding them. Adding them in is an easy cut-and-paste.