Technology

I think when they were trying to push the YouTube Red streaming shows there were a few times where they put in full episodes of shows as pre-roll ads. They were skippable but an hour long TV show as a pre-roll is just obnoxious.

I'm in the same camp. I was generally fine when it was an occasional skippable pre-roll ad before some videos. But the last time I watched a video without a blocker, there were two unskippable ads at the start plus two more each at the 7 and 14 minute mark of a 20 minute video.

This hour has 22 minutes indeed.

Holy crap. I had no idea YouTube was that bad. I guess my ad blockers work better than I thought.

It's going to be a never-ending cat-and-mouse game from here, I guess. And then eventually Google will make Chrome required with their trusted platform bs.

Same. If it wasn't for my adblockers, I'd have stopped using youtube long ago.

And where will you go?

I have been enjoying Nebula. If Google manages to kill ad blockers, I will probably just go live over there.

It's a fairly straightforward cat and mouse game. The only thing that has the potential to make it complicated soon is Google's Web Environment Integrity API.

That really depends on what their goal is.

From a business perspective it's not worth fighting to eliminate 100% of ad block uses. The investment is too high. But if they can eliminate 50% or 70% or 90% of ad block uses with youtube? That could be worth the effort for them. If they can "win" for Chrome and make it a bit annoying for Firefox that would likely be enough for Google to declare it a huge success.

People willing to really dig all the way in to get a solution they desire are not the norm. Google can be OK with the 1% of us out there as long as we aren't also making it possible for another huge chunk of people to piggyback off it effortlessly.

No one can create an alternative platform. Youtube costs far far, far too much to run. This is why everyone failed. Google subsidised it for what, 15 years? Before it got any level of profitability and even then, nof really. Google derives other value from it, like feeding data into their ad profiles, but no one else needs that.

It's also clear that workarounds will stop soon as Google has installed Web drm directly into chrome

Still nothing. Firefox with ublock origin and ghostery running in parallel.

On my phone I'm using newpipe, on my tv smart tube next, so those are clean by default.

Everyone I know who has gotten it is outside of the US so far.

I've been getting it off and on the last few days, oddly only on one PC still running 10 but everything else with FF/UO is up to date. Nothing on two 11 machines so far, with all signed in on the same google account.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You will. I didn’t start getting it until three days ago.

refresh your filter cache <3

Pretty sure most YouTube videos will be hard to pirate. Big creators sure... But most others I doubt.

I have a feeling it'll probably due a great deal of harm to the idea of Anti-adblock being "actually effective". Up until now it's only really been used by a handful of News, file download, and... Mature content... sites. Places with smaller userbases and less traffic where the effort for bypassing them is lower or just not discussed due to the small size or nature of the site.

It's not really the case here though. So in one way or another this is going to fail.

I would definitely recommend people start backing up YouTube videos from older creators because I imagine that after this they'll be looking to reduce costs and that likely means purging inactive channels or channels that cost more than they make.