UPDATE 2 It seems that starting today, uBlock Origin is working to combat this Youtube Block. Mine started working again! Lets all thank the devs of UBO for fighting this fight!
UPDATE So as new info comes out, I'll be posting it here. It seems as if this Rollout Has Several Parts.
Part 1
You get a popup message over top of your video, blocking the screen:
- This is the first sign. If you see this popup AND are logged into a YouTube account, your account has been selected.
- At this stage you can likely close or block these messages with an adblocker.
Part 2
This message will change, indicating that you have 3 remaining videos to watch without ads.
Will insert photo once one has been found
- At this stage your adblocker will imminently stop working in 3 videos time.
- Personally using Firefox + uBlock Origin and tweaking filters and updates does not even fix it.
Part 3
None of the video loads now, everything looks blank.
- At this stage you must tred new ground to avoid ads. I have posted methods in the comments. If you want to bypass this end page, read down there.
End of Update
YouTube has started rolling out anti-adblock to users inside the United States, which means that they are preparing to roll this out to the entire country. Personally, I have been blocked already. I want to gauge how common this occurrence is.
As if video streaming will die with one site. One for-profit site, that's not remotely turning a profit. A vestigial organ of an advertising giant, burning money to build dependency and exploit it for control.
BitTorrent used to share more video than Netflix - despite a lack of money, despite a lack of ads, and despite being illegal. Content creators will be fine without this corporate facade.
I don't know what YouTube's market share is, but for videos that are not short TikTok style it's probably like 95%? And they are also in the TikTok short and twitch streaming areas now, so I think it would be a massive blow to video streaming if they went away.
BitTorrent just moves all the costs to the users, and users are typically not wanting to run their own video servers. They might work for tech people who don't mind running servers or already have a server they are running, but you have to think about the regular user that is probably 80% or more of the market. You can't expect to get big off relying on users to be the servers.
How things are now never ever means change is impossible.
BitTorrent did exactly that.
BitTorrent may have been big as in number of files, but as far as users and having content on demand it never got there. I remember waiting for days to get a single movie, not because my Internet was slow, but because the peers were slow.
When it comes to a YouTube replacement I don't think you are going to get big relying on users to be the servers. Nevermind the fact that the nature of how BitTorrent works means no company will allow their content on it legally.
And nothing's changed in all those years. Yeah? P2P technology couldn't get any better than 2004. The fact it was slow sometimes means we're boned forever.
Corporations already have streaming. I don't care if they come along. Their content might be there whether they like it or not.
Consider where we're having this conversation: is big even desirable? Has the dominance of one video platform been good for the internet? I'd say plainly fucking not, if killing ad blockers is even a feasible outcome. When YouTube was its own company there were a dozen competitors of similar size and quality. Google pouring money into one, so it could swallow everything and censor everyone and shove people toward right-wing propaganda, is not exactly ideal.
Has P2P changed much? I don't think it has really. I use private sites for that stuff now and it's great there, but the public stuff still seems pretty bad IMO.
Well if they don't want their content there, then you have the whole problem if it being illegal. Now you have to convince people to break the law, and go as far as to install a VPN or whatever so your ISP doesn't send you warnings. This isn't a great start for something to replace YouTube.
I think Big is required for a P2P YouTube style thing to work. You need lots of peers to stream content in decent quality. You need people to knowingly break laws and use VPNs. You need people to run their own media servers, you are asking a lot from people, all YouTube is asking you to do is watch some ads or buy premium.