I've not looked into exactly how adblockers work, but I presume they just don't allow advert content through to be rendered by the browser - they block the html/css/js from loading in the page - and that's how places like Youtube and other sites can detect one is using an adblocker.
If I were going to write an adblocker, I'd make it such that it pretends to load and play/display the adverts, meanwhile allowing the video which the user intends to watch through. The adblocker basically says somehow that "yup! I'm the browser and your advert was definitely rendered. Honest, guv'nor!"
Something like that. (I fully recognize that I may be talking out of my ass if my assumptions above are incorrect.)
They're WebKit-based and for MacOS/iOS/iPadOS only, so they don't get max points for browser diversity, and I can't run it on my Linuxes. As far as I understand, they plan to target more operating systems, and to target the most popular add-ons for other browsers.
I'm not satisfied until it supports an OS-agnostic (non-sucky, no thank you 1Password) password sync and works on Linux.
I hope they'll grow into a worthy alternative to Firefox, because Firefox is going down.
One review of alternatives here scores Waterfox at the highest, but I think I prefer if a company is behind it:
Subresource Integrity has been around for much longer & seems like a much more effective & targetted plan to combat extensions having control over embedded content.
If the fetched data doesn't match what the page says it should be, it won't work. Another pro-security feature that DNGAF about user agency.
judging by the flame fest they received on their github issues/comments section, I doubt they'll be proceeding. Then again, money talks and b.s. takes the walk every time and twice on sunday.
The standard playbook on this is: table it for 6 months, then try again as quietly as possible. Repeat until the outrage is tolerable. Works great for corporations and governments alike. Eventually people won't be outraged and will just quietly take whatever they're giving us.
How would you pretend to show the adverts in way that's undetectable? Even if you had complete control of the browser through your ad blocking extension (you don't). Youtube could trivially get around this by not sending the actual video content down to the browser until after the expected length of an the ad.
Like the ones for Spotify that would set your system volume to 1% when it detected an advert playing.
For video content an alternative would be to replace ads with a clip from the next video on your playlist/suggestions as a short "coming up next" preview.
IIRC there was a recent Android compromise that played ads under the main window, invisible to the user (except for performance and battery drain) and collecting $$$ for the company that sold the ads.
This is doable. Ten years ago it would have been hard because bandwidth was more scarce, but today the wasted bits wouldn't matter as much.
The countermeasure would be to ask you to take a quiz on the ad contents before showing you the payload video. I'd like to think they would realize this is a non-starter, but the stupidity and venality of advertisers are pretty much unbounded. Plus, modern AI will very soon be able to pass such a quiz with flying colors.
In fact this is my favorite use case for [client-resident!] AI: "Surf the web for me, deal appropriately with all the faff, and distill the relevant bits you think I'll probably want to see."
> If I were going to write an adblocker, I'd make it such that it pretends to load and play/display the adverts, meanwhile allowing the video which the user intends to watch through. The adblocker basically says somehow that "yup! I'm the browser and your advert was definitely rendered. Honest, guv'nor!"
They could delay serving the post-ad part of the video by the length of the ad. Your ad blocker could stop the ad from actually playing so you don't actually see it but your viewing would still be disrupted.
My guess is that for most people it is that disruption that annoys them more than actually seeing ads, and so this would still be effective as an inducement to subscribe.
On broadcast TV the content creators usually know when the ad breaks will occur, and they work that into their scripts. They structure their stories so that the ad breaks occur between the acts in the script. Most people are used to that and have no trouble picking up a book or magazine (in the old days) or their phone or tablet (nowadays) to pass the time during the ad.
On YouTube the ads often come right in the middle of something interesting going on in the video, which forced an abrupt context switch. So even if you don't see the ad itself the damage is done.
Your approach sounds entirely feasible, and it doesn't make sense why others haven't thought of it yet. I'm not surprised that the HN community is full of great ideas, though.
From my point of view YouTube with Adds is unbearable. And I don't feel the subscription service is offering as much value as any other streaming platform.
If it was a bit cheaper I would may be consider it, but for my specific use case (just watch random videos and some channels) at this price is just not worth it and I will just stop using the platform.
I pay $14 a month for YouTube Premium. YouTube is my most used streaming service and I think it's completely worth it. Maybe if you don't consume a lot of YouTube it's not that valuable to you but I'd rather have YouTube over Netflix, HBO, Hulu, etc all combined.
> I'd rather have YouTube over Netflix, HBO, Hulu, etc all combined.
Had the realization recently at a family reunion that, aside from Succession, I haven't watched a full season/series of a TV/streaming show in the last few years. I actually don't know what the shows of the moment are. I almost exclusively watch YouTube in the evenings, if I'm watching anything at all.
I've been sub'd to YouTube Premium since it was called YouTube Red. Anytime I have to watch it withs ads I'm horrified. I wish I could give yearly subs out as gifts.
Horses for courses I guess, but I don't think I've ever seen anything on YouTube that I would consider paying for. I'm sure I'm in a tiny minority, but I find the relentless chasing of "fame" to be completely grotesque and a large contributor to the rise of fascism. No way I'm going to fund that.
Sorry, but this is a bad take. There's so much non-shitty attention grabbing content on YouTube that it's arguably one of the single most valuable educational tools on the planet. There's even tons of amateur <insert literally any form of content in video form> content out there. Clips of comedy skits, amateur documentaries, programming tutorials, short/mid-form animation, etc.
Sorry you seem so offended even though I pointed out that "I'm sure I'm in a tiny minority". For my personal use case, as I thought I'd already made clear, I just don't find any value in YouTube. Every time I mention that on here, someone gets extremely upset like I was talking about their mother. Of course it's "on me", I'm not going to wade through pages of people debasing themselves with stupid faces just for clicks in order to seek out better content, when I can read a book, or watch something made by professionals with a budget, or literally anything else.
It's unfair to downvote the parent. Youtube is really uneven - yes, some great stuff, but somewhat hidden in a sea of bad content. The recommendation algorithm isn't that great in my opinion, emphasizing popular and clickbaity stuff over high quality, intellectually stimulating content. While I do watch Youtube quite a bit, and like it in general, I had to invest a lot of time in finding the right subscriptions. It's quite possible that the parent got steered by Youtube itself towards the bad content they describe.
No, it’s really not. Maybe you’re thinking of Spotify whose goal is to get everyone to subscribe to premium, but YouTube’s cares much more about completely cornering their market and has no problem sustaining itself with ads. Why would they purposefully design their app to annoy the vast majority of users?
I do wonder about this quite often nowadays - is it because they're kids or because particular apps provide continuous stream of content that doesn't distinguish between ads and the content. Or is it both of these things?
Youngest generation will be the perfect customers in the nearest future, it seems. That kind about which corporations dream about now; they won't complain about privacy or ads because they're being programmed right now to consume whatever they see. And that scares me tbh.
Where else are you going to find videos to watch? Vimeo? Bing? YouTube has a dominant market position And wants you to pay for it. Their reasoning could be that if they give you enough ads that make it unbearable, you will pay just to get rid of the ads and wants you to pay for it. Their reasoning could be that if they give you enough ads that make it unbearable, you will pay just to get rid of the ads.
From a business perspective, it's completely logical.
If Musk had simply cranked up the ads to increase revenue, it would have worked / probably wouldn't have hurt the platform like all his other changes. The problem at Twitter (from a short term profit perspective) is that his changes - or rather, what he wanted to do - were not all so simple.
Have you ever tried to use the video controls on YouTube in Safari for iOS / iPadOS? Or manage a GSuite (or whatever it's called this week) account? I'd say Google are both malicious in intent, and incredibly bad at design.
I had been using Youtube exclusively from a browser with uBlock Origin and only learned about its ads persistence when we finally upgraded our ancient TV. I was in shock, the service is close to unusable with ads.
At the same time, the reality check is that ads continue to be the way to monetize the masses as no other model works at this scale of users.
So do expect it to get worse. By means of IP, the Web Integrity API, whether you've opted-in to this new "Ad topics" thing in Chrome...the future direction is to discriminate clients. You will see the ad or not see the service.
The only resistance is to just watch less or not at all.
I do understand this push, and honestly I'm surprised it took them this long.
I'd love to know how many people end up subscribing vs allowing ads vs reducing views drastically vs just never using YouTube again.
I assume this will bite me soon, and I think I'll be in the "reducing views drastically" because there's very little I watch on YouTube that I'd want to sit through any ads for.
> I do understand this push, and honestly I'm surprised it took them this long.
I'm not too surprised it took this long -- the % of viewers who are on a PC, not a phone, and technically savvy enough to install an ad blocker is relatively small, so it wasn't worth the effort.
But now, with the death of ZIRP and the demand that these tech companies which were experiencing infinite growth somehow continue to grow infinitely, they're very much in "squeeze blood from a stone" mode.
Youtube has become garbage and it was only a matter of time before Google's lack of identity infected it as well, you can now search for a video and only get shorts and other algo suggestions completely unrelated to your search.
My guess is they're going to quickly back down on that...
I tried the iphone for a year before going back to android and I just stopped using youtube there, you quickly realize how unnecessary you find it, because there is no way in hell any same person is going to endure a 30 second ad for the garbage content you find there now.
Do you actively use "Not Interested"? It helps a lot. Another hack that I have is if I like a particular topic, I click on as many related videos as possible in the bottom suggestion list in order to "guide" the algorithm, even if I won't get back to all of them. Not sure if this has any effect but it has worked out quite well for me.
It's not a binary thing. It's just a signal to algo. I think in the background it maps over what that signal means, whether you are disliking whole top-level category or a sub-category towards the leaf. I used to get NFL videos, I disliked few times, still received those videos, I disliked them again, now its gone altogether. Also the algo might have exponentially decaying memory. So your signal is not permanent. You can always watch a Mr. Beast video again and it will come back to your feed.
Not parent comentter but I even asked HN on my issue with Youtube started to ignore my "Not interested" and suggest me the videos over and over. Currently the only way to get rid of it is "Dont reccomend channel", but as soon as youtube forces ads trough adblock I just stop using it, just as I did on mobile.
I have the history and suggested content features off, I used to only rely on searching for what I wanted to watch, now it stopped working, both google search and youtube search now are trash, and search is their original product.
I know got one of two (always one or the other) execution clips (as in, a human kneeling in front of someone with a weapon, at least according to the thumb, never watched it) when scrolling to far totally benign searches (namely remixes of songs that have a lot, trying to find some I like). I did click "not interested", and after a few months it popped back again. up Couldn't find it right now, so maybe it got reported often enough, but my guess would be the "algorithm" "realized" that this video got a lot of clicks regardless of search, so why not sprinkle it into all searches, right?
And that's silly, and I claim it would be even with perfectly good intentions. It's just wasting huge amounts of energy on something that is worse, and cannot ever be good (that is, the whole algorithms second guessing people stuff). Give me "dumb" search that returns things that contain the terms in the title or description, or that are linked in the descriptions of videos that contain them. Or even find an open way (i.e. not restricted to Google, and not "the way Google likes it", but decent and simple and clean) to show videos on web pages that contain them. Page rank is not perfect and can be gamed, but it's actually feasible to make that good -- it used to be stellar compared to what we have now, now imagine what we could do with all that was learned and invented in the meantime.
Crafting searches to make pinpoint landings on what you are looking for, if it exists, is a delightful art. Remember http://www.fravia.net/ ? It's like remembering having and being able to use a screwdriver, instead of there being this fairy that you can ask for help, which sometimes shows up instantly and fastens the screw, and sometimes shows up pretending to not know what a screw is while reaching in your pocket... which is at best as good as having and being able to use a screw driver, and potentially infinitely worse. So on average, it's infinitely worse. Logic :D
And when it comes to clicking "not interested", I know that in the long run my wishes aren't respected anyway, and I've gotten so cynical about this stuff that I basically just view it as a further signal to a bad actor (if not abuser) that yes, I saw this thing, didn't just scroll by it, noticed it enough to strongly dislike it, and am now offering a futile plea to please not show me that again. I'd rather close the tab altogether.
This rant wasn't directed at you or your suggestion, not at all! But I just had to get it out, I hope you understand. I'm so over the whole web as a worse version of TV, where the middlemen get the vast majority of profits plus information on how to better poison you, and you get the poison.
Teach people digital literacy instead of giving them "free" assistants that very well might one day become their captors or worse, to the degree they aren't already.
I too feel like I'm at the point in my life where YT needs me more than I need it. Most of the people who "talk about stuff" on it are getting more and more demented (or super long winded while unlearning English) and I'm starting to think if it can't be put in writing, my life is probably improved if I don't hear about it in the first place.
Google's efforts to make more money will probably ruin Youtube at some point, but so far this is not my experience. Youtube is really good at suggesting new content that is in line with what you watch. I am subscribed to more than 300 channels and interesting new channels pop up regularly on my homepage still.
Given how a Google account or IP address ban or punishment on any of their services can basically annihilate your ability to use any of their services forevermore, including never being able to touch your emails or files ever again, I can see YouTube being very effective with this crackdown.
Especially since they can/do also target any of your secondary accounts, and can also hit family members depending on various backend circumstances that users can't really know about.
It is a major inconvenience for users of Google to lose access to Google services, especially if you have years and years of stuff in Gmail or drive or photos or YouTube.
Regardless of the fact that you can find some sort of replacement for any of those things individually, it would be a major stumbling block and disruption for most users to suddenly no longer have access to their email/history.
The average person does not have forwarding or mirroring of all that stuff set up. I posit that that disruption is enough of a deterrent to get users to stop using ad blocking on Google services once the consequences start being applied.
Though that reminds me, I don't quite know what happens to your chrome bookmarks and settings if Google obliterates your profile's account. I assume that merely syncing will stop working, but perhaps more might be disrupted.
This is going to lead us to a terrible place IMHO, where the ads are just encoded directly into the video stream so everything comes from the same origin making it very difficult for ad blockers by not giving them a different origin to block. Plus maybe rolling out widevine (DRM) for good measure. God I hate these races to the bottom.
The result will eventually be a mixture of trusted hardware and software, from server to client to GPU to display, that will not display the content if any of that locked down blobby chain is not perfectly as it should be.
Even the concept of "changing the channel" is something to eventually lock down in this way; don't let the users change tabs or modify the window or display state at all until trusted ad content has verifiably finished.
The saving grace is that you'll probably be able to just get up and walk away until it's done, at least for some time.
Eventually this will require smarter and smarter neural networks to decide if something is an add or not. This technological warfare might lead to a simulation of the universe. Ar we an adblocker?
> ... the ads are just encoded directly into the video stream
There has to be a reason why they haven't done that already. Perhaps they haven't worked out a reliable way to track ad impressions in the continuous stream. Perhaps they got it working but it's too resource intensive at scale.
Given the magnitude of revenue at stake, the other shoe should have dropped by now.
Twitch has a timer in the corner for when the ads will be over. Seems like it’d be pretty easy to create an adblocker that looks for that and just blanks the screen out during ads.
Well, absence of a fastforward option should then be a pretty solid indication there’s an ad running, which means… mute the audio and blank the video for a few secs
Honestly unsure what is taking them so long to try this; it’s difficult but totally possible technically, especially for YouTube. Is it because of something like the ad network can’t verify the creative separately from the hosting site?
I think the reason they don't is because the overlap between users with the general internet savvy to use an ad blocker and users who have the general internet savvy to literally never pay attention to or click on ads is pretty high. It's sort of the same problem reddit had -- There's just no way to monetize users like this other than locking the entire service behind a paywall for everyone, shutting out the much more lucrative remainder of your customer base.
I had to resort to my own Invidious instance plus Sponsorblock.
Its looks is very much like OG Youtube and it is unusually fast: no overdone JS. You can also sync it up to Clipious on the phone and get a clean, bloat free Youtube experience without ads or slow page loads.
I started using Ncdownloader (which works on top of yt2k) extension for my Nextcloud installation, so now I just copy paste video url and get either an MP4 or mp3 in my cloud where I don't worry about ads.
I think their argument that they do this to "ensure that its content creators are compensated for their work" is not genuine given their practice to de-monetize the same content creators with no explanation or, apparently, for their political views. For example, California Insider youtube channel was demonitized and I suspect that this is because Google was unhappy with the narrative.
My domain was blocked from serving Adsense (for some a pedantic reason). Fortunate result, if I watch youtube loaded from their own embed script but hosted from my domain there are never ads!
I suggest making an extra gmail account just for YouTube, and other consumer focused Google products. I mainly use a Workspace account for personal use, and it's what I do.
That's great. Now tell all my family members that have 10+ years of YT history with their Workspaces accounts that they have to switch to a new Gmail account.
Around 2012, YT's shittiness level reached OTA TV levels and that's when I peaced out.
My rule: it's not worth using YT, TikTok, or any other corporate behemoth with your attention as their product. So if a form of media runs ads, I'm out.
There's nothing particularly defensible about YT's readily commodifiable service and indefensible business model except the power law distribution of a monopoly. YT's closest competitor/alternative was once Vimeo. The problem was their founders made a critical error of taking venture funding and, later, going public, leading to poor decisions driven by the board that gradually wrecked it.
YT is allowed by the market to be shitty because there is no viable competitor in their space. The biggest touted contenders aren't much of a threat: TikTok started as a copy of Vine, so it's unsuitable for substantive, long-form content. Instagram is TikTok plus pictures. Twitch is pigeonholed for specific uses: gamers and ear-licking models. Reddit Live isn't for persistent, on-demand content hosting. There isn't much else except tiny startups, some of which may well be better for both viewers and creators.
To be a YT competitor I'd want to use: Charge content creators and viewers a modest subscription fee so they don't have to have ads AND have engagement and monetization tools for the creators. Don't spam me with ads for viral cat videos.
Why hasn't this happened to me yet? I watch youtube videos ALL the time and I have never once been prompted to turn off ublock. The only time I see ads is on my phone.
I didn't always block ads on YouTube, but they pushed me to it. And apparently enough people for them to do this. There still isn't enough on there to make it worth subscribing for me. ~$170/year is not a small amount of money.
I've been paying since Youtube Red, and I'm almost to the point where it's not worth it anymore. The price has gotten really high, and so much of the content I watch has ads baked into it by the creator, so I still mostly have to watch ads. Youtube's aggressive demonetization of viewpoints they don't like is really leading to a bad UX and is near the tipping point for me.
I'm worried that if I block adds and get caught they will eventually sanction my other Google accounts (i.e. Gmail and Drive). I'm thinking about adding YouTube to /etc/hosts and only browsing through Tor.
Google can ban you from their services permanently for any reason.
What I did was move to my own domain. Its hosted with Apple, but that is not important, I can always move it.
I changed most places to use my domain, for the rest I set up a forward from Gmail to my own domain. Then I did a Google Checkout so I have all my mail locally.
I moved from Google search to Duck Duck go and now partially to Kagi and AI.
Gmail is very sticky, but the hardest Google services to leave was a) Android and b) Youtube. Android meant buying an iPhone and I still haven't found anything that competes with Youtube.
You can drop YT logins completely. On desktop use Firefox Account Containers to always open YT in an isolated container and never login. On Android, just use NewPipe. Of course, you won't have personal recommendations, playlists, watch later, etc. bu in the current state of the things, it is a feature.
why do they think can decide what content you want to be downloaded through your internet connection and displayed on your devices? once the bits & bytes enter my network, you're free to do with them what you want, they have no say in what is done with that data. If it's filtered, that is not their decision to make
I don’t know that “I don’t understand why they are mad that I’m stealing from them even though I agreed to pay for the cost by watching ads” is really the argument that you are hoping for. YouTube is a business and delivering video costs a significant amount of money. If you want to use it you are agreeing to watch ads to pay for that costs or to pay for a premium plan. At least be honest with yourself about the situation, and this comes from someone he vehemently hates ads as much as the next person, but that is “the cost of admission” so to speak.
The ad vs. adblocking wars will continue to escalate closer and closer to the "analog hole". Facebook and Apple are both desperate to be the last intermediary between your senses and the world via vr/augmented reality.
They cannot stop you from skipping those ads either. You just need to buffer and skip ahead. They would need to develop a very complicated solution that would not solve the problem of people not watching the ads. Actually this would make it even easier to skip the ads.
Platforms like subscriptions not only because of money. YouTube does know a lot about users, but it can be sure that you are likely not a bot if you have an account.
This crackdown is also in preparation for moving podcasts into YouTube where ads can be injected into them more readily than in the Google Podcasts app.
I understand people who block ads on the sites where you have no option to pay to remove them, especially if they're intrusive and you get served tons of random JS and popups everywhere you click.
But here - you can pay. And if you think it's too much and doesn't reflect value it brings - well that's your choice, but its not a charity and they can (and should IMO) fight with ad blocking.
Disclaimer - I pay for YT family plan that I share with my wife and it's most useful subscription we have - YT is our main source of media consumption.
YT Premium only makes the problem worse by requiring you to log in using an account that is tied to your real world identity and was used for payment processing. You just end up giving more data points to Google to track you, cross-reference with other sources and shove more ads in other platforms, still get native ads, and Google can just add their own ads later (as it is happening step by step with streaming companies).
I used to pay for youtube premium but it would still show ads sometimes so I cancelled it. I'll never watch ads and I sure as hell won't pay to remove them and still watch them. Turns out the most consistent and easiest option is also the cheapest, so I pay nothing and never see ads.
You say you are paying for youtube because it's your main source of media consumption. While I think youtube is merely (ab)using its position as a main source of media consumption to generate wealth.
For one Youtube is currently the default way to include video somewhere, even in situations where it would be inappropriate to redirect people to a paid service. Also since youtube is the main way people find content it is hard for free and open alternatives (e.g. peertube) to become popular enough to replace it.
Sure, they may abuse it. But blocking ads doesn’t change that - sure, it reduces their revenue, but it still entrenches them in their current market dominant position, as they still get the views and market share.
YT premium starts at $20/month in Australia for a single person, that’s far more than most other streaming services and you still have to put up with advertising and clickbait from creators.
I never said it’s cheap. I said it’s useful for it being main source of media consumption for us (and I can add it’s a good value for how much we use it).
Good things don’t have to be cheap. Even more - very often they aren’t.
If only they would crack down on all the scam ads. I still get deepfake ads purporting to show Elon Musk and Martin Lewis promoting crypto and the like.
No amount of reporting by me and even reporting on by mainstream media seems to make a difference.
Stop censoring so hard, bring back the dislike button, and I'll pay.
Specifically: valid criticisms of Islam, vaccine mandates, the 2020 lockdowns, the LGBTQIA+ group, and the CCP are/were aggressively censored. I'm not really a fan of Russel Brand either, but demonetizing him without proof is also an area of concern.
I've not looked into exactly how adblockers work, but I presume they just don't allow advert content through to be rendered by the browser - they block the html/css/js from loading in the page - and that's how places like Youtube and other sites can detect one is using an adblocker.
If I were going to write an adblocker, I'd make it such that it pretends to load and play/display the adverts, meanwhile allowing the video which the user intends to watch through. The adblocker basically says somehow that "yup! I'm the browser and your advert was definitely rendered. Honest, guv'nor!"
Something like that. (I fully recognize that I may be talking out of my ass if my assumptions above are incorrect.)