It’s too bad they don’t realize that intentionally annoying me is not a good way to convince me to spend money on their product.
uBlock has still been working for me. Occasionally I’ll have a pre-video ad sneak through, but 90% of the time it works.
I just watched an hour-long documentary, interrupted every 2-3 minutes by a repeat of a state government adv telling me that they’d changed the bail laws.
Either my state government paid for that, in chich case I’ve been ripped off by an evil mercenary media company, or else an evil mercenary media company is using that ad to drive people to subscription.
Either way, it’s an evil mercenary media company, and they get no sympathy from me.
this is pretty much what is happening to me just lately. and often the first time I click on something I get an error saying the content is not available and try again later, but reloading it works.
So possibly something that YouTube is rolling out in waves rather than all at once. I can live with it, it’s certainly better than ads, but if it becomes a new standard of YouTube behavior, I expect those smarter than me will be coming back with tweaks to defeat it.
Seems to be working out in YTs favour.
I subscribe to YouTube, and my husband subscribes to Netflix. Neither of us watches much else.
If I don’t pay anything am I subscribed to YouTube? I assume not. But I totally watch it at least as much as anything else, and there is always more to see than I have time for.
Now I am getting captchas from YT, saying it has detected ye olde “unusual activity” from my network. All I did was fast forward a few times on a video about snubbed baseball hall of famers, note. Sheesh. Since my googling of this revealed it might be malware being offered, I didn’t “solve” any of them.
YouTube is free. There are extra-cost upgrades, none of which I use, and they aren’t forced or installed without your knowledge.
I’ve been using Ghostery https://www.ghostery.com/ for a long time, and I like it. In the rare cases where an ad slips thru the filter, I can report it to Ghostery admins and they get to work on it right away.
If Chrome/Google/YouTube ever prohibits adblockers that can’t be fixed, I will discontinue using it/them. When I visit some friends’ houses, I am amazed at the numerous, continuous ads that pop up on their computers. They don’t seem to mind, perhaps because cable TV is their main entertainment, not the computer. Their TVs are often on 24/7; they think it is the normal background sound of modern living, and they just don’t hear it anymore.
Just a post to welcome our new poster who named themselves “YouTube" and so must get used to this kind of complaining post.
In the past few weeks, now every single video has a delay of a few seconds before it opens, along with YT’s little popup “Experiencing interruptions? Find out why” to further annoy. I am now sufficiently used to it that I hardly notice. Neener neener, YouTube.
I get that even without a delay, and for a long time now. and I am glad that my adblocker is working and (bonus!) it’s messed up Facebook so now I’m on there much less. I hate them so much more than youtube.
If you happen to use Firefox as your browser of choice, install FB Purity. It removes all the ads from your facebook feed, blocks posts with keywords you choose, gives you the option of removing certain types of posts altogether, reorders your feed and a few other things. It does such a good job, I don’t know how people use facebook without it. On the occasions that it’s not working, I tend to spend much less time on FB.
FB Purity has versions for most browsers, even Opera, so I recommend it for everyone.
I literally have NO ads on fb, never have had. I am on a Chromebook. it’s other things I hate about it.
Depending on what those things are, FB Purity may still be worth a look. It allows you to customize quite a few things about your FB feed and what you see. There is a whole list of things you can prevent FB from showing you, including specific types of posts (e.g. status updates, for one). There is too much to describe here. It is free, and you can always remove it if it doesn’t help you.
This assumes that there might be one or two things that you like about FB but that the negative aspects put you off. If you’re not remotely interested in anything that you can see on FB, then, well, never mind.