this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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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."

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[–] [email protected] 236 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Worse than using YouTube without an ad blocker?

[–] [email protected] 107 points 10 months ago (3 children)

That's the funny thing about this threat. It implies that using YouTube the regular way is "optimal" viewing. It's fucking shit without adblock.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Even without ads it's shit without sponsorblock for me. Not even for the sponsor spots, but the absolutely annoying copy paste of please like, subscribe, hit the notification icon, blah blah blah blah blah.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

That's shit, but it's still usable as I can shortcut my way around it. The ads are hot liquid swamp ass that make it unusable. I see ad, I circumvent or close tab.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

It's optimal to them. You just don't understand Youtube's perspective of it yet. And then it's unoptimal for them when you watch with the adblocker.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

How to quit YT in a week?

  1. disable adblocking
  2. Suffer watching ads
  3. Get bored, because you no longer feel like watching adTube
  4. Switch to something else
[–] [email protected] 52 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There is absolutely zero possibility that they can find a way to make my experience on YouTube worse than my experience on YouTube without uBlock.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (3 children)

That's a way to look at, but i'l personally still be using Peertube. instead of 3rd party YouTube apps.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The fact that my children know the Liberty Mutual jingle from watching YouTube at school says no.

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[–] [email protected] 124 points 10 months ago (2 children)

which is a hilarious threat because the #1 way to make my viewing experience worse would be turning off my ad blocker, lmao

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago

"if you don't voluntarily make your experience 10x worse, we will make it 2x worse"

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 10 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I think my viewing experience will be even worse if I turn off my ad blocker.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Youtube advertising is absolute trash. It's already bad enough to sit through ads when you don't even know if you want to watch the video. Their ads consist of fake Joe Rogans with tts voices advertising scams.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 10 months ago

Get fucked, YouTube.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Loving Freetube, Newpipe, and Grayjay more and more every day!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (3 children)

in the short term they work, but YouTube can cut those 3rd party apps access at any time for any reason. Use Peertube for the better long term.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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?

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 10 months ago

The whole page loading delay thing is hilarious because it doesn't tell you why it's happening, so viewers are likely to just assume the service is becoming even more shitty.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago (3 children)

YouTube is just messing around. They could encode ads randomly on videos if they wanted to, like podcasts.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (10 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

cheaper to just have the interns code buggy Javascript then to reencode millions of videos.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

This. I don't exactly know how YouTube's architecture works, but from running my own mediaserver i woild guess They don't live transcode because that takes clock cycles on a graphics card or a CPU. They transcode a couple of different bitrate files to serve up and then just serve up direct stream file transfers, thus saving electricity and clock cycles. In order to actively embed an ad in a YouTube video it would have to be done semi-permanently, Decreasing the value of live serve ads.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You're correct that they're not doing live transcoding when a video is played. That's way too expensive in every regard. There are still ways to embed ads dynamically into the video without requiring live transcoding. They likely have 5-10 qualities they encode to, and segment the video into 10s segments, so a 5 minute video would be cut into 30 segments, and then each of those files encoded to multiple qualities upon upload.

That way when playing, if your Internet gets slow, the player can seamlessly downgrade to another quality. These small files concatenated together appear like one long video. Adding some ads served from the same servers as the content could be done dynamically for each request and be difficult to block without impacting the video content delivery, since you can't have uBlock Origin block the domain hosting the content.

Realistically, they probably don't do this approach because you don't know if the ad was loaded because of buffering, but never viewed, so the ad network gets less metrics and therefore the ads are less valuable. Also, I would bet the content upload and distribution team are completely separate from the ad team, so that cross collaboration is more difficult to implement.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago (1 children)

How could it be worse than with ads?

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago

How about you suck my balls accordingly, google?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago

Oh no, so how will I be able to tell a difference?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Can’t make it worse of you don’t use it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's official, Youtube now has people employed as product worseners.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Google: “Fine, I’ll turn off your adblocker myself!” *rolling out Manifest v3*

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I can also just back out and just not watch said videos...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Yeah be like me and just use Peertube, I don't even notice this stuff untill people complain about it haha.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Way to kill your platform. Sadly there’s no big competition

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (2 children)

If for some reason you can't use a full-on ad blocker, "SponsorBlock for Youtube" is another Firefox extension you can install. It doesn't block ads per se, but it will auto-skip segments of a video that have been reported as ad content. Kind of a grassroots thing, like reporting cops on Waze.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

Keep it up, dumbasses.

Catch the hint...the harder you try the harder we do. There's no trying from our end.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (3 children)

So I'm a little lazy and have to watch ads when I watch YouTube on my TV. I don't care enough to fix this.

Anyways, I don't mind the short ads. I get it, you gotta pay for your stuff somehow. What I don't get is these ads that can stretch on for 10, 15, even 150 minutes. I think I had a 3 hour ad at one point. It's insane. You should have to opt in to these ads that are longer than say 30 seconds.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

When the video creators you watch move to them.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

YouTube losing the war on AdBlockers, lol.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Kind of shocked it took this long.

It always cost more more but the games that used clever traps were a lot more effective than just drm. Because warez groups can easily check if the game launches. Not if every enemy after mission four has infinite health and pinpoint accuracy.

Just curious if this maps to "shit, Google knows Twitter exists and figured out what we are doing" or "YouTube servers are broken"

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