Whelp, here we go again
Mmmm, gotta love that enshittification strategy every big tech company is working on right now.
Free money ended, they are trying to squeeze
Recently found this gem: https://adnauseam.io/
It’s an ad blocker that only hides ads and clicks them for you in the background, which means you waste advertiser’s money, support creators, can’t get flagged for ad blocking as easily, and they can’t build a proper profile against your ad activity since it’s all noise. Haven’t installed it yet, but this might be the push I needed.
This might be an acceptable sollution, but what happens on the other side of the ad? If something maliciously is being spreaded, the click might have to happen in an isolated form from the rest of the system or the browser.
I cannot vouch for it, but this is their explanation: https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#does-adnauseams-clicking-put-me-at-risk-for-malicious-ads-or-ransomware
Does AdNauseam’s clicking put me at risk for malicious Ads or ransomware?
Absolutely not. AdNauseam simulates clicks on Ads by issuing an AJAX request to the adserver in a background process. This request is made without opening any additional windows or pages on your computer. The text-only request is safely discarded by AdNauseam before it has a chance to execute in the browser (no DOM is constructed and no code is ever allowed to run). Further, all cookies from AdNauseam’s visits are automatically blocked before they reach the browser’s local storage.
As a software engineer, I can’t speak about their actual implementation, but I can vouch that it’s a technically sound response, as far as blocking malicious ads from executing code from your browser.
However, I don’t know what headers or parameters are being sent with the request. It’s possible that a malicious ad could still track you using that metadata, so heads up on that
The question is: How much data about me and my browser does clicking on the ads leak? I’m using libre wolf with additional hardening, including noscript, and I suspect that clicking on ads will not even register with the ad company?
What’s with every big tech company trying to destroy their userbase this year?
Interest rates hikes stopped the free money, so companies need profit.
I’d argue they don’t need $500 million when they already make $400 million, but I’m just a lowly peasant.
tl;dr: capitalism
they think they have us sufficiently cornered on centralized sites, they may be right.
Especially with video. Reddit was easy-ish to leave – I haven’t left entirely – since it’s just a link aggregator and glorified forums. That’s nothing new to the Internet. And Twitter was easy to replace with Mastodon.
But hosting video? That’s a tough one to replicate. I know there are some other platforms out there, but I can’t imagine any could really take on YouTube, due to space and bandwidth considerations.
So yeah, I think YouTube has us all by the balls. And they know it.
And what are the consequences of “strikes”? Will you delete my Google account, including my email, and also screw up my Android phone and my kids Chromebook?
It’s scary to realize that Google has me by the balls here. They can screw me in so many ways, and screw my family members as well. I’d rather have my bank credentials stolen than my email credentials, at least I can get real customer service from the bank, I can even go to a physical location and speak face-to-face with someone who can help me. Google wont give me customer support, and my email account is the closest thing to an identity I have for most businesses I interact with.
It takes a lot of work to avoid Google. Yes, there are alternatives, but in D&D terms, avoiding Google is like a -2 to all stats for your entire life, and not something we can expect the general population to do.
All this shows the need for anti-trust enforcement. The same company is controlling too much. Bust 'em up!
Moral of the story: create separate account for YouTube that has no high value services or data on it.
I’ve seen enough horror stories to know that’s not going to help. They can, and do, associate multiple accounts to same users. Be it by cookies, IP addresses, or dark magic, the end result is the same - they can upend your entire digital life if they want to. r/degoogle better hurry up and migrate to Lemmy.
I’d argue the bigger moral is that you should always own your online identity. You should buy your own domain (
@yourname.xyzor something like that) and make your email on that. So if Google bans you, you just switch email providers and keep your address.I’ve been using @fixnum.org and since a few years the alias @wim.land to do exactly this, but that’s just email.
My app purchases, photo storage, and YouTube account are all entangled in this. I could decouple from Google, but it would be very painful.
Moral of the story is: if you’re like me and still use a main account for youtube, transition away from that account starting today. Change your business emails slowly to another service.
Spend a weekend degoogling your stuff. There are alternatives for everything now. No regrets
That’s the reason I’m hesitant to use a VPN for yt Premium from a cheap country. The lingering thought of losing my Gmail and android access…
Article suggests you simply get blocked from watching additional videos. But there’s no info on how that works- is it account based? IP based? Can I wipe my YouTube cookies to bypass a block?
you don’t need them tbh
Protonmail and Tutanota are perfectly viable email alternatives, Libretube/NewPipe and Invidious can replace Youtube on Android and Freetube can replace it on your computer (and you don’t need an account for any of them), Aurora Store with an anonymous login can let you update your apps, or if you don’t want to rely on them, you can easily download the latest updates from APKMirror, and there are million open source alternatives to Play Store apps available on F-Droid.
Another executive-driven decision by people who clearly don’t use their own product (kinda impressive really when it’s YT).
I can’t help wonder if they saw an uptick in adblocking as a result of their absurd increases in ad-time recently and somehow thought this was a reasonable solution.
8-10 unskippable ads before a video? Holy shit. That’s ludicrous.
It really is hard to fathom how that got through any internal discussion.
Its not that hard to fathom when you have worked with these types of people.
All it was was a numbers meeting, no User Experience folks in the room. They said how much revenue they would increase quarter over quarter, and how much engagement it would drive. Everyone claps, the meeting ends they move forward with the next terrible design decision. Companies no longer take focus group testing seriously for anything.
Focus groups and qualitative data are so last season. It’s all Business “Intelligence” -driven bullshit nominally based on poorly defined and even more poorly understood metrics (excuse me, “KPIs”)
I rarely use YouTube, but my nephew (he’s two) was over the other day and we put on some cartoons for him that were in YouTube since my wife and I don’t have Disney plus. I couldn’t BELIEVE how many ads it showed. One five-minute merry melodies cartoon had FOUR SEPARATE ad breaks, the third and fourth of which were both 3+ minutes long if you weren’t paying attention to skip.
Wtf?! Not even shit ass normal broadcast television has that many commercials.
Feels like every year corporations rely on the naivety of youth in an attempt to push more and more egregious shit.
Exactly right they’re normalizing ads in everything. They’re indoctrinating the youth, who don’t know any better or differently, into just accepting/expecting that all content in all forms comes with ads, and you can’t watch any of it without signing in so they can track you and sell your data.
Executives don’t have to watch ads! They’re rich! I wouldn’t be surprised if they all had YT Premium or whatever it is.
Hearing how such people tend to be the very ‘whales’ that other executives rely on with mtx-driven games, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them had twice as many subscriptions as they could name.
Personally, I’d rather pay for Nebula than YouTube premium. Most of the creators I actively follow are on there anyways, and the few that aren’t (usually the ones with very long videos) I should probably just watch with ads anyways to support them.
I had a similar thought. How fair is nebula to their creators? I heard it was somehow creator owned, but other than that I have no idea how it works.
Nebula is great in comparison, and apparently video creators make even more money from Nebula views than YouTube Premium views, which is already a lot more than ad-supported views.
Nebula’s content base is small in comparison but very quickly growing and already includes most of the longer-form video creators I would want anyway (Jenny Nicholson is one notable exception, but her Patreon channel is wildly successful so I sort of doubt she feels like torpedoing that to do a whole new platform).
But frankly, if I paid what I pay for Nebula and only got Jet Lag, it would still be worth it to me.
Did all these tech companies just get together and decide to fuck us over around the same time? Seriously, what is going on with all these companies rolling out hugely unpopular new rules/changes all on one another’s heels?
The end of 0% interest means “business” no longer have access to free money. So now they want benefits, and growth but without the spending.
Also we skipped a tech bubble crash around 2008, so these corpos deaths are more than overdue.
The cicle as Doctorow says in his enshification tesis is:
1.- be good to your users, spending tons of that VC and 0% interest loan free money.
2.- be shit to your users, be good to your clients (add buyers, business that use your platform to do business)
3.- be shit to everyone. Squeeze the platform and get every last dime of value as profit.
Once you are in 3 there is no coming back. But these corporations have pulling the ladder behind them using an extra decade of dominant position to try to stop the cicle.
Someone in the Fediverse (I don’t know where and who) posted that you have to add the following filters into U-Block Origin. When done you shouldn’t see any anti-adblock-warnings :
youtube.com##+js(set,yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel,false) youtube.com##+js(set,Object.prototype.adBlocksFound,O) youtube.com##+js(set,ytplayer.config.aras.raw_player_response.adPlacements,[]) youtube.com##+js(set,Object.prototype.hasAllowedlnstreamAd,true)I might add that I haven’t experienced any anti-adblock-warnings yet, but I added these filters in advance. I might be worth a shot!
Also or just use a front-end like as Piped (https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped) or Invidious (https://github.com/iv-org/invidious)
A handy externsion of FIrefox wil automatically redirects you, see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
Thank you! I was aware of Invideous and I tried that in the past. However, Invideous-redirected videos always seemed to be slow, then disconnected or I experienced buffering. I’ll give the firefox extension for libdirect a try. I tested it and it seems to work flawlessly.
Nice! Im gonna throw these in. I havent had any warnings yet either but the experience of using the official YT site/app without some kind of blocker is horrendous.
I’m sure it hides the warnings, but it certainly doesn’t prevent you from being blocked…
If they want me to stop blocking ads, they will need to get rid of ads like this. I get ads like this all the time and it’s completely inappropriate.
Seems like ad targeting works
You get weird ads if you turn off targeting too
I don’t get ads like that too often, but the annoying thing for me is when the ad is 10x louder than the video itself.
There was this one add that had a gunshot sound then a really high pitched whistle.
They might have gotten in trouble as the whistle sound was eventually removed.
So if you are on android: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.polymorphicshade.newpipe (Newpipe with sponsorblock baked in)
If you are on PC: https://freetubeapp.io/ (Piped with sponsorblock baked in)
You’re welcome.
Time to use an adblock blocker blocker extension.
I think that would be NoScript.
Does youtube even work with NoScript? I would assume that google has 50 different scrips running that break the site if they aren’t allowed
Yep, it’s about to become a never ending fight
Ad blockers vs ad blocker detectors.
At least untill the lobbyist big companies lobby for laws to start suing people for using ad blockers in “violation” of their tos due to a form of “circumvention measure”
At least right now, the code is freely available due to the nature of how HTML, JavaScript and CSS works. - this nature is exactly how a government agency got caught leaking SSNs of teachers, and due to the law, couldn’t perform legal action at what they called a “hacking” attempt.
It feels like its only a matter of time before these shitty companies seek to close that law in order to start calling HTML analysis “hacking”
Twitch couldn’t beat my adblocking, it just taught me how to find and use custom scripts. Shoot your shot YT, I haven’t installed a script for your website yet but now Im gonna have too. Congrats the number of ads im gonna see from you is about to go down.
Cat and mouse game. May get me to watch a couple, but I’ll someone will have a way around it within a week.
What’s your Twitch solution? Blocking Twitch is considerably more difficult than YouTube, every solution I’ve found breaks after a month or so. Best I can get is have it display a blank screen while ads play, but I still have to wait it out, which isn’t ideal.
pixeltris on github, a search for pixeltris should get you there first result. Everything you need is on that page, including how to instal the script to ublock, im using the vid swap script and TTLOL pro. It’s not perfect but the ads are gone.
Ad blocker detection is not new, and other publishers regularly ask viewers to disable ad blockers
“everyone else is treating their customers like garbage, so they don’y hold it against us”.
Yes, we can.
I didn’t block when you had 5 second ads. I didn’t block when you had 15 second ads. I started blocking when you’d play 2+ unskippable 15 second ads back-to-back. I didn’t mind sitting through an ad when I appreciate the service you offered. Now, you’re just being greedy, and I will go to great lengths to damage your bottom line as notably as I can.
I’ll stop blocked ads when I stop using their service. Not a minute sooner.
Hot take: this sucks, but YouTube premium is legit. I wish more platforms offered a paid, ad-free way to interact. I don’t feel like figuring out a way around ads but I’m not about to start watching them. So I pay a few bucks a month.
Screw YouTube and Google. They aren’t getting a dime from me.
In that case, you wouldn’t care about this ad-block issue. The people who do care, want to watch YouTube but don’t like ads.
Why?
Feel free to peruse the plethora of reasons- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google
I’d be more willing to pay if it wasn’t $10/mo (annual cost) for a bunch of stuff I don’t care about. If they had a cheaper option that was just ad-free (maybe $5/mo?), I’d be down for that.
I also like what Kagi does with their duo plan for 2 users. Some kind of duo plan for YT premium would be nice as well, since I (and many others, I’m sure) don’t have a family of 6 people.
I don’t mind paying for services I use to avoid my data being the payment (like Kagi or Protonmail).
But I don’t like the idea of paying Google AND having my data farmed.
I don’t have any philosophical objection for paying to use a platform I enjoy, but in the case of youtube, they have been so deliberately detrimental to society in terms of platforming fascists that I feel bad about the prospect of paying them, even if much of the money is going to creators I do like who I’m actually watching
It’s simply a more honest model - you get content, they get money.
I would love to be able to pay for an ad-free experience for the various websites and services that I browse and use in a straightforward way instead of being leeched for ad-revenue
I wouldn’t doubt paying a hundred per month to have an ad-free life.
no ads on tv or sports, no billboards, no ads on buses. it would be awesome
Same. I hate google, but YouTube pays content creators better than any other platform. And I am 100% on board with any service where I pay a monthly cost instead of being inundated with ads.
Also the student version is so cheap and there is so much more content than anything really. YouTube music is awesome too.
