I get why they want to stay anonymous but that website is no different from any other malware site - no source, no authors just some affiliate links. Putting your google credentials in an app like that is not something people should be comfortable with.
NewPipe let's you 'subscribe' to channels without giving it any credentials. You know, like how it used to be with RSS. The good way. The user empowered way.
Some time ago, the version I installed (from a regular Google search) tried to use my phone as a throwaway number. For around two months I got validation codes for PayPal, confirmation calls from crypto sites and a lot of messages from horny men who click ads on porn sites. It took me a while to piece it back together.
The only reason it didn't work is that I refused the app the permission to read text messages.
Just use it w/o logging in. I have a YT account, but I never login with Vanced. I only do so when I have something very important to add in the comment section and that happens on the desktop. You don't have to be too paranoid
There is also alternative youtube front ends that don't have ads, notably Invidious[0], and work in cases where the browser doesn't have or can't support extensions such as ad blockers. For anyone interested I run my own instance that is retro tech themed[1], and there is a public instance list with more instances[2].
YouTube Vanced is miles above NewPipe in features: https://vancedapp.com - If you frequently watch videos on Android and haven't given it a spin yet, do so.
SmartTubeNext is excellent on Fire Stick, if you can get the damn APK installed!
Yes but NewPipe is a completely from-scratch implementation and has some unique features like 3x speed or downloading videos and audio. The NewPipe UI is not as good however, so it depends on what tradeoffs you want to make.
Similar. Pi-hole, uBlock (desktop), vivaldi with adblocking (mobile, FF android has perf issues).
For the non-techie, Pi-hole isn't something I quickly recommend due to "knowing when it's the culprit", and the effort in disabling it.
I also have a simple Wireguard config (pivpn) installed as well and my mobile devices are set to always-on VPN for DNS only. Occasionally I will have to turn off the VPN to join certain public Wifi. also perhaps consider hosting your VPN on a well known port if you expect to be on restrictive networks.
Final note: Pi-hole and Pi-VPN(as a frontend to WG) can be hosted on any machine. I have them running on containers.
This is true with pihole. PiHole is one of my favorite pieces of software and true to this post opening a website off my home network can result in a horrible, ad-ridden experience. But installing PiHole seems to make a number of sites not work, or for example my devices stop updating because they can’t phone home the update server, and it’s difficult to describe to third parties how to address that. All good on my network, but it did take a little targeted whitelisting effort.
For text-heavy websites (blogs, news), I use archive.is as a "wget" [0], as it were. It is unreasonably affective at rendering most javascript-driven pages too (like twitter.com).
Are there any iOS app-based solutions for dealing with YouTube ads? The app you mentioned (YouTube++) appears to require a jailbroken iPhone. I've read that AdGuard Pro can work with mobile Safari YouTube ads, but I'm curious about an app solution. Seems like there's plenty of stuff out there for Android.
No, and this is one of the primary reasons I have an Android, and support side loading on iOS. I should be able to install whatever software I want on hardware that I own.
I use the paid version of 1Blocker, and it seems to handle YouTube ads from within Safari. I had to uninstalled the YouTube app to keep everything in-browser.
Youtube, especially, turns into a whole different experience. Ad in front of every video makes it impossible to quickly browse and sort through videos. I might watch just a few seconds and then go to the next one. When ads are enabled, the experience is so painful that I'm not likely to use Youtube this way any more. I have to watch an ad before I've made the decision if I want to watch the video.
Youtube is the reason I installed an adblocker in the first place. I don't mind watching an ad, but at some point they went from an ad every other video, to unskippable ads in-front of every video (love a 1m ad on every 10s video when I'm just browsing clips) and mid-content ads that literally just cut in and disrupt what I'm watching.
During the holidays, YouTube was showing me 2 15-second ads every single video. I stopped using the app and stuck to the browser. Then I found out about vanced from HW. I'm sorry to my followed channels but it became unbearable.
I think the other thing that pushed me to put it back on after experimenting with it off was the absolute dearth of inventory Youtube apparently thought was appropriate to show me. I watch a lot of content of various lengths in a lot of various fields but I would get the same one or two ads for days. Then I started getting the 10m+ ads that seem to be randomly OK for some reason? I don't think I could stomach another experiment.
One of the little absurdities of our modern world is having to watch an ad before you are allowed to watch an ad that you requested (movie trailers, superbowl ads that people sometimes share, that kind of thing)
Or you can install an adblocker instead which also blocks much of the surveillance. There's also sponsor block which blocks ads that even paying customers are forced to see.
Don't support these advertisers in any way. Especially Google.
I happily pay for YouTube Premium because I watch tons of niche stuff that creators are able to make a living off.
YouTube has a lot of problems, and the ads for non-Premium users are probably going too far, but I find a lot of value in consuming and supporting a wealth of high quality content on obscure topics.
Without aggressively blocking the hundred or more ads on a webpage, I honestly don't think the web would be that useful now a days
Advertising has gone absolutely bonkers and filled the web with complete trash SEO farms with 40 links to some shitty slideshow
I don't believe the web would have caught on like it did if this current condition was v1.0
I wonder how much the website designer even views their own site. It's astounding anyone would approve of this. It now represents the brand as extremely low quality
I call it a malware blocker, rather than an adblocker - here's my reasoning:
One day I was on a classifieds site[1], browsing listings, when after a few pages, I was met with a page redirect to one of those scammy support center sites (taking over the browser), advising that my computer had been infected by a virus (obviously hadn't) and I needed to call in to "Apple's Support Center" immediately. This was on Safari (the newer useless extension-neutered version), on what I considered a reputable site. I tested again to make sure it was indeed the site that produced this, and sure enough reproduced it after browsing a few pages of listings.
I advised the site that they likely had a rogue advert in rotation causing this, but as usual, the blame got put on me instead, claiming that it was probably some extension (didn't have any - they're basically useless on Safari now) or it was my ISP, blah blah blah
That's the day I decided to use a real browser ("If it doesn't run uBlock Origin, it's not a real browser"), so I switched to Firefox and installed uBO. This is also when I decided to call such utilities as uBO "malware blockers" rather than "ad blockers".
Websites can try to deflect the blame all they want[2], but in the end if visiting your website results in any attempts to compromise my computer, it's your site doing it as far as I'm concerned.
If the website industry can't regulate itself to prevent such things, then I'm going to do it myself, and I'll push back on any claims that I'm using an "ad" blocker when I'm really guarding against malware attacks.
[1] I'm loathe to name it since I don't recall which site it was specifically, but it was a classifieds-style site, with the reputation of, say, eBay-level recognition.
I get what you're saying, but I think that's actually counter-productive. To present things like uBlock as malware blockers suggests that "any ad which is not malware is fine". I think it's perfectly justifiable to guard against non-malware ads _as well as_ malware (ads or otherwise).
I think following happens. Actual click through rate on online ads is low. People don't want to pay lots of money for ads that don't increase their revenue.
Only ones willing to pay for ads are shady business. We are talking unlicensed pills, scams, crypto etc.
Eventually those dry up so they go even lower, malware authors willing to use ads as malware vectors.
I browsed once without ad blocker on some webcomic and shit I had delivered was actually malware. As in Defender was activated.
I guess what constitutes "malware" is based on what the ad is doing - if it's benign, it's an ad and I'm fine with that. If it's hostile/tracking scripts masquerading as an ad, then obviously that's a problem. I call it "malware blocking" because of multiple past experiences like I mentioned above, and the way to avoid them is with these "ad blockers" (though I guess a more generic term, like "content blocker", is perhaps more appropriate).
And I'm sure some would be quick to point out that running uBO as a "malware" blocker just happens to siphon up legitimate ads in the same bucket in the process (which is what I think is your point), and my reply to them is that the blockers typically won't block anything that comes from the same IP/domain as the site (as is explained in one of the linked articles). I think it's up to websites to run their ads in a way that doesn't trigger it to get blocked, because the detection pattern for most blockers is based on past abuse of these techniques.
I have an air filter that has 2 stages, a thin, washable filter for large dust particles and a non-reusable hepa filter that has to be replaced every 3-6 months for optimal results.
I view pihole and ublock as the washable filter. It takes care of the big stuff, prevents my computer from ever seeing most of the avenues for malware to propagate. Then my antivirus can easily mop up whatever slips through.
If it's not detecting malware, then it's not a malware blocker.
As far as I know, ad blockers work based on host name and css selectors. If there was an actual anti-malware that was so trivially bypass-able, it would be laughed out of the room. uBO blocks hosts of advertisers. AFAIK they don't distinguish between malware and non-malware, nor do they detect malware from other sources.
The people embedding the ads or even delivering them are not neccessarily malicious (in the malware sense at least). Also, as long as most people don't block ads they don't have as much incentive to counteract ad blockers. So at least for now ad blocking remains effective for both malicious and benign ad payloads.
I stopped watching network TV in the 1990s when it reached about 25% ads (i.e. 7.5 minutes of ads in a 30 minute window. May have been only 7 minutes, memory is fuzzy now).
The web was a relief. You could actually consume content and tune out the (then primitive, usually just a banner at the top) ads.
The web, specifically un-adblocked Youtube, is now at about the same point as where I quit TV. Just not worth the aggravation any more. UBlock Origin has shifted things back into favour. But will "Manifest V3" tip things back to unbearable? We'll see.
> But will "Manifest V3" tip things back to unbearable? We'll see.
Switch to Firefox now before Firefox market share dips to the level where publishers can justify not supporting it and you're stuck with only crippled adblocking forever?
This is not enough if we don't stop DRM (which Firefox also supports).
DRM essentially means: only allow access with a program that implements certain required measures to restrict user's control over their own computer. Using content decryption blobs to restrict user's access to media streams handled by their own computer — is only a beginning, Web DRM will be eventually extended to allow more restrictions, including those to make it much harder to interfere with the display of ads.
We had a couple effective strategies to deal with ads on network TV when I was a kid. I've found they they still work today.
1. If I was watching alone I would have a book with me. When ads came on I'd read the book until the ad break ended. Nowadays instead of a book it is usually an iPad, and instead of reading during the break I might work on a crossword puzzle in the NYT Crossword app or do some chess puzzles at lichess.com.
2. If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show. Heck, we were kids...it was hard to get us to not take about the show during the show. This also still works as an adult, with the only change being that the conversation is more sophisticated. E.g., kids might talk about how cool it was that Kirk made an improvised canon to shoot the Gorn, but adults might discuss the feasibility of actually making such a canon. (It probably isn't feasible BTW. Mythbusters tried it and could not get it to work using the resources available to Kirk).
> If I was watching alone I would have a book with me
That's shifting from the narrative of the show/film you're watching to a different activity
> If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show
It takes us about 1h20 to watch a c. 40 minute show with my wife, but that's because we pause throughout to discuss it. Haven't done linear TV since c. 2000, went through a couple of years in the early 00s with a mythtv box recording shows off air (with 30 second skip forwards/10 second skip back - If I remember commercial breaks almost entirely 6 or 8 skips forward), then sky plus, but nothing for the last 7 years other than streaming.
I have no idea why a successor to TiVo never came out. The idea of "fast forwarding" TV ads was way ahead of its time. I've got cable TV and would pay good money for a service like that. The same applies to Podcast ads: I would pay for a podcast player (like Podcast Republic) that could automatically skip ads, and say let people mark ad segments in a podcast so that others could skip them.
YouTube is still no where near as bad as commercial TV in the UK. It's when we visit relatives who still watch TV, that I get reminded how bad it is. YouTube has a couple of ads before a video and then a 10 second one every 10 minutes or so - but the ones on the TV go on and on. Probably 5 minutes of them every 20 minutes of TV.
I did so too when I realized its actually worse, its about 19 min play for 30 min 'show' & about 43 for 60mins for most popular shows (you can verify with imdb or 'otherwise'). thats on top of what we pay them monthly.
the other hard rule I have is 'no news from narrated sources' so really no need to cable tv & have cut the cord for more than a decade now.
I seem to remember maybe 5 30sec ads so must be 2.5 minutes.
I even vaguely remember this was lampshaded in Fresh Prince (?)
Uncle Phil is having a heart to heart chat with young Nicky and in the middle says something like "ok nice talk see you in around 2 1/2 minutes" which I thought was hilarious
I wanted to show a video on YouTube to a friend. He passed me his cellphone. I searched and found the video and then something very strange happened: a completely unrelated something started playing. I said "Sorry I don't know what is this. This has nothing to do with what I wanted to show you." He then explained me that was just an advertisement and the video would play soon.
People are used to abuse. My internet is very different from the internet most people use. I feel sorry for them.
One of the services I happily pay for is Youtube Premium, though I could do without also having to pay for Youtube Music at the same time. I have same experience as you, when I somehow not logged in to Youtube. It’s a surreal mess and it’s the same 5 - 10 ads, if it’s that many, on repeat. It’s unusable.
Technically I don’t use and ad block, I just run DuckDuckGo’s privacy plugin. You can show me ads, but not track me, weirdly enough it’s 98% the same result. It facinating that ad tech cannot see the difference between ads and tracking.
YouTube's ads are a colossal mistake waiting to happen. Back in the day, Google was successful because they realized advertising on the web was a problem: ads were trying too hard to grab attention, resorting to hostile tactics that basically forced people to run ad blockers. Google said "okay, what if ads were simple blocks of text that - while not as loud and screamy - got more impressions because they aren't terrible?". And over time everyone agreed with them and they made billions of dollars.
Somehow, (probably because there is no competition - yet), Google has not applied this reasoning to YouTube ads. YouTube ads are often louder than regular videos (which they could fix on their end if they cared), they are sometimes insanely long (I recently got an "ad" which was a 40 minute "free music" thing), and depending on the video they can pop pop up at terrible moments. They still haven't figured out that YouTube is loaded with exercise videos - a content category which has exploded since 2020 and where YouTube enjoys a tremendous lead on the competition. Rudely interrupting one of those is bad and brews resentment. Instead of doing that, they could plaster the entire video with unobtrusive ads and people would both look at the ads and be happy with the service.
I feel that there is a generational gap between Youtube users that correlates with whether they will pay for premium or not.
People in their late 20s and 30s who remember Youtube as a catch-all location for lo-fi homemmade videos with few ads may not feel that YT premium is worth it, particularly if they already use adblockers, and don't use it much on mobile (where adblocking isn't possible without modded APKs). This generation also remembers torrents and Limewire, before Spotify made everything super-convenient.
Those who are more familiar with 'modern Youtube' with multiple pre-roll ads, clickbait and and influencers everywhere may be more receptive to paying just to get rid of the constant ads.
Yeah I pay the same. Sure I hate Google and yada yada... But if the call for money is "we will show you no ads, and your money will go to creators", and it is a realistic amount, yes I will pay it.
I run ad-blockers everywhere (and I know there are ways to block YT ads), but will still pay if you give me this reasonable option.
> One of the services I happily pay for is Youtube Premium, though I could do without also having to pay for Youtube Music at the same time.
The forced bundling with YouTube Music is the only thing that keeps me from subscribing and keeping a trigger finger on the mute button (I use YouTube primarily on AppleTV). It's not even the price so much as it's the redundancy of subscribing to both Spotify and a lackluster Spotify competitor at the same time.
The moment Google offers YouTube Premium Lite (an unbundled version they've been trialing in European markets) in the US, I'll subscribe and never look back.
Just curious, if you owned YouTube with an overhead of tens of millions of dollars per year, how would you monetize it without ads/commercials, just to even keep up with operational costs?
I'm honestly appalled by the price for YouTube Premium. It's $15/month. That's the same as HBO Max, almost twice of Disney+ and more expensive than F1TV or Showtime which come in around $10. Per month this is 50% more than Prime! Only my UltraHD Netflix plan is more expensive. This price to me is outrageous, given that Google, unlike everyone else listed here, doesn't provide any of the content and their services is known to be awful/non-existent. All they do is in essence provide the platform.
When YouTube was primarily cat videos, it made sense as an ad-supported platform. Now that it's dominated by medium-to-high-production-value content creator stars, a subscription business model would be a much better fit.
It's actually amazing that Google has let Patreon eat its lunch on this front, the latter becoming the predominant platform for direct monetization while YouTube continues playing the chump's game of seeing how much advertising they can inflict on users before they revolt.
[edit] I'm well aware of YouTube Premium, but Google's insistence on bundling it exclusively with YouTube Music greatly limits its appeal. If they offered a standalone subscription (as they are piloting in some European markets), they could probably expand their subscriber base by a significant factor.
Put another way, if Netflix were only available as part of a bundle with a cable subscription, do you imagine they'd have more or fewer subscribers than they do right now?
By building a profile of each user based on their viewing history and then when they use the search engine that I also own I would show them personalized results with sponsored links to products to buy. Plus I would be selling that information to third parties. And then I would of course also show some ads to all of the the normies that surf without an adblocker.
There was a weird movie with Justin Timberlake called "In Time" and I would use that model.
The moment a video is born, it lives until its sponsored time runs out.
If a content creator wants to leave something up and reap some internal ad-sales, or tip-generation scheme... they just have to sponsor the video with more time.
People who like it, can also sponsor it.
And sure, have some sort of "Library of Congress" feature to save videos deemed as significant...
But once the time is up... the video is gone. Exists only in memories.
Seems like a huge portion of videos are just taking up space... start pruning.
And a lot of videos... they don't matter. 40 different versions of the same old song, 20 different shots of the same sports blooper, 900 different versions of the same boring news cast. Like... none of these need to be on there taking up space / inflating the hosting bill.
If I owned YouTube with the goal of maximizing profits, and I did not have any self imposed ethical constrains, I would focus on controlling the market of hosting videos. The technology needed to operate a video hosting is widely available and been so for the last few decades, so the only way to prevent competition and keep a market dominance would be to make sure that competitors can't compete. Keep users on the platform or else the users will end up on any number of competing platforms, splintering off the user base into more and more fragments.
With a strong market dominance one can then focus on profits with minimum risk. One way to raise profits would be to impose taxes, like with streamers get donations through "youtube bits". They could go further and demand taxes when any company do things that has monetary value, like say when a company want to make a video about their products. They could do like Facebook and many dating sites and offer a service of "promoting" users above other users. One can couple access to the site to hardware products like mobile phones, or split off features to "exclusive" access users. One can down rate the speed/quality of freeloaders, pushing users to upgrade their accounts to premium accounts.
The ways to monetize a market dominant position is to many to count. The hard problem is the iron grip needed on keeping users on the platform.
With AdWords text ads at the bottom of the video. Which is something they already do. It's less intrusive than showing a thirty second commercial in the start of every video.
Also, YouTube has a data trove of metrics that interest advertisers. Why not selling those? You have a commercial page that let’s say sells clothes and you want to upload a video to target women aged 18-25. Here’s the data to show you what you need to do, and we’ll charge you $15k to give you a detailed report. Brands would go bananas for metrics like these.
I miss them. I uninstalled mine after taking on more design responsibilities. Experiencing end-user inconveniences in-context is beneficial to design work. Profiling data and emulator testing won't viscerally inspire the "hold on— this is a bridge too far" interventions Conde Nast should have cultivated.
For example, if you were making a transit app, a savvy iPhone 13 ProMax user with a top-tier data plan will see very different problems (or at least see different priorities) on their commute than your Uncle Sidney with his belt-holstered, used, Samsung Galaxy J2 running on Ting Mobile. They're both important, but in the tech world, you have to dig a lot deeper to get the Uncle Sidney perspective.
I once sent a link to a news article to a friend at work. He became angry at me because the link I had sent him was to a malware-infested shit site. It wasn't, but the ads in the site I had intended to send had taken over his browser and made it indistinguishable from a malware link.
That's how showing ads on your site is abuse of the user.
Advertizement uses your brain power to process stimuli for the purpose of trying to sell you things that you do not need.
You did not ask for your brain to be stimulated like this - what you did ask for is the content that comes after ad. That's the thing you consented to.
Ads abuse your desire to watch something that you want to watch, by cramming in something that you did not want, leeching your precious time and brain-processing energy, in order to sell you something that you did not want to have in the first place.
I've started to think about it differently. I no longer use any ad blockers.
I actually want to experience the web (and its decline) the way it is, to take it all in, feel the pain and strengthen my patience in the process.
Also, when I visit a website that is truly obnoxious with its ads, I simply leave immediately and never go there. You build your own filter of bad actors, behaviors, and concrete sites. You don't need to block everyone, you simply walk away from abusers. You want to take notice of improper behavior before consciously and deliberately boycotting it.
Ads may be painful, but they are also insidious. That’s why they work. I avoid ads not because they’re painful (although most are), but because I simply don’t want to be influenced by whoever paid the most money to influence me.
No thanks for me. Advertisements if nothing else consume too much of my local compute resources for zero benefit to me. Why should I give them this free compute?
1. How long have you been doing this ?
2. What do you think of other (not just monetization) ways ads are bad as in bloating the web, privacy and security issues ?
3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads ? You give up ? Use adblock ? Continue with ads ?
1. Been doing this for a few months, using only Safari for all my browsing.
2. My big annoyance is the weight on the CPU and battery. I have this sick pleasure from opening the network tab and seeing hundreds of requests filling my machine with garbage. :)
3. I often disable JavaScript temporarily with a hotkey - in macOS, you can map this action to any combination. This works incredibly well. Once I am done with the page, I re-enable it with a single keystroke. I only wish Safari did this just for the current page and not the entire browser.
There's also 4: It's not possible to consume content and not be affected by it. How okay are you with the fact that corporate messaging is a dominant mode of influence in your life?
Not the parent, but I've been doing the same thing. For maybe a slightly different reason.
1. Since the 90s. 2. Needs to be solved by user agents. Ad blockers generally work by host name or css selector. This doesn't filter out any of the bad guys that are really trying. 3. Continue with ads I guess. This doesn't actually happen in real life as far as I can tell.
The reason I don't use an ad blocker is that I like being able to see what's going on inside of a web browser. Prevalence of ad blockers creates an incentive to do canvas rendering based on a DRM-obfuscated data blob. That's worse for everyone.
I find it intriguing that only in the digital age have we sort of decided that the creator of something doesn't get to dictate the terms of its use.
>3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads
At least for me, I assume that they created the necessary content and get to decide how it's made available. It seems like only in the digital age do we even consider "I don't like your terms so I'm taking the content anyway" an option.
It's not just ads, it's also about blocking potential security threats with third party scripts and rogue domains, especially on "adult" websites such as xxx, crypto, piracy related stuffs and what not.
In my current home it's not sanely possible to get wired Internet, so I started by just using the 40GB data allowance on my phone. This was a huge mistake. With the modern Web and being ultra-careful about my browsing, I would still chew through the whole lot in a week. It was costing me insane amounts to keep my phone online.
See the OP's article - one page can be 250MB! And my data allowance was large. Many people only have 2GB on their phones. 8 web sites and they are done for the month.
I feel similarly. My default browsing mode is Firefox with enhanced protection on, but other than that, I don't use any kind of ad-blocking. But I also pay for Spotify and YouTube Premium. Other than that, sites like HN, SO, shopping sites, etc. don't have a lot of ads anyway. On the rare occasion I find myself on a site plastered with tons of ads, I just deal with it for a short while (local news I need to read) or leave. I'm actually kind of struggling here to find a site with a lot of ads. It seems to me like despite the concerning growth of ad-tech, for the internet that I care about, ads are either optional (removable for a fee), unobtrusive (like DDG), or a signal of poor quality and I won't want to go the site anyway.
> What I would like is something like an ad blocker that only blocks the tracking and surveillance.
Aren't there lots like this? At some point Ghostery did that: It would show you static banner ads no problem; it would only be the crazy javascript advert-bidding-based-on-surveillance things that wouldn't show up.
doesnt works for me, the only places I disable my adblocker is basically financial websites & healthcare related stuff. other than that it is all off.
Another thing is, since these adblock extensions get cleartext view of all the site you visit, you really want them to be completely open sourced. So only ublock origin for me.
I have a similar perspective when dealing with cookie popups, since such a perspective is necessary for something you cannot block even if you wanted to. Those with enough annoying popup hoops just get the Back button from me.
Readit News
outline.com: https://outline.com/5HuFGj
Desktop:
- Pi-Hole (network wide adblocking)
- AdGuard (device wide adblocking)
Web browsers:
- uBlock Origin
- uMatrix (not developed anymore but still works, can also use NoScript)
- SponsorBlock (blocks in-video sponsor segments, intros, outros, filler tangents, etc in YouTube)
Mobile:
- Firefox for Android / Kiwi Browser (both have web extension support so you can install uBlock Origin)
- YouTube Vanced (alternate YouTube app blocks ads, also has SponsorBlock)
- NewPipe (alternate YouTube app blocks ads, also has SponsorBlock via a fork [0], different UI than main YouTube app)
- YouTube++ (for iOS, similar feature set as Vanced)
TV:
- SmartTubeNext (ad-free YouTube)
[0] https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe
I get why they want to stay anonymous but that website is no different from any other malware site - no source, no authors just some affiliate links. Putting your google credentials in an app like that is not something people should be comfortable with.
The only reason it didn't work is that I refused the app the permission to read text messages.
[0] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
[1] https://serenity.video
[2] https://instances.invidious.io/
SmartTubeNext is excellent on Fire Stick, if you can get the damn APK installed!
I find the people behind it slightly sketchy.
For the non-techie, Pi-hole isn't something I quickly recommend due to "knowing when it's the culprit", and the effort in disabling it.
I also have a simple Wireguard config (pivpn) installed as well and my mobile devices are set to always-on VPN for DNS only. Occasionally I will have to turn off the VPN to join certain public Wifi. also perhaps consider hosting your VPN on a well known port if you expect to be on restrictive networks.
Final note: Pi-hole and Pi-VPN(as a frontend to WG) can be hosted on any machine. I have them running on containers.
Still occasionally breaks something you need, but there’s no way around that as long as the web is such a mess.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3083536
Pihole doesn't work, they serve the ads on the same domain as the video content.
https://invidious.snopyta.org/feed/popular
https://rootmy.tv
Christmas 2020 I tried to watch midnight Mass from Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York on YouTube. (Not live; after.)
SIX MINUTES of commercials at the start, and the rest of the program had TWENTY-SIX commercial breaks.
I haven't watched YouTube since.
Don't support these advertisers in any way. Especially Google.
No visible dislikes.
DCMA takedowns that put the burden of proof on creators rather than destructive soulless auto-claim bots.
God help you if you lose your account.
YouTube has a lot of problems, and the ads for non-Premium users are probably going too far, but I find a lot of value in consuming and supporting a wealth of high quality content on obscure topics.
I've found that refreshing the page seems to always remove the ads.
Though I'm increasingly taking to searching through Invidious. (YouTube is somewhat more convenient thanks to the !yt DDG bang search.)
I also often play audio through mpv.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769291
Advertising has gone absolutely bonkers and filled the web with complete trash SEO farms with 40 links to some shitty slideshow
I don't believe the web would have caught on like it did if this current condition was v1.0
I wonder how much the website designer even views their own site. It's astounding anyone would approve of this. It now represents the brand as extremely low quality
One day I was on a classifieds site[1], browsing listings, when after a few pages, I was met with a page redirect to one of those scammy support center sites (taking over the browser), advising that my computer had been infected by a virus (obviously hadn't) and I needed to call in to "Apple's Support Center" immediately. This was on Safari (the newer useless extension-neutered version), on what I considered a reputable site. I tested again to make sure it was indeed the site that produced this, and sure enough reproduced it after browsing a few pages of listings.
I advised the site that they likely had a rogue advert in rotation causing this, but as usual, the blame got put on me instead, claiming that it was probably some extension (didn't have any - they're basically useless on Safari now) or it was my ISP, blah blah blah
That's the day I decided to use a real browser ("If it doesn't run uBlock Origin, it's not a real browser"), so I switched to Firefox and installed uBO. This is also when I decided to call such utilities as uBO "malware blockers" rather than "ad blockers".
Websites can try to deflect the blame all they want[2], but in the end if visiting your website results in any attempts to compromise my computer, it's your site doing it as far as I'm concerned.
If the website industry can't regulate itself to prevent such things, then I'm going to do it myself, and I'll push back on any claims that I'm using an "ad" blocker when I'm really guarding against malware attacks.
[1] I'm loathe to name it since I don't recall which site it was specifically, but it was a classifieds-style site, with the reputation of, say, eBay-level recognition.
[2] https://www.imore.com/content-blockers-bad-ads-and-what-were...
I think following happens. Actual click through rate on online ads is low. People don't want to pay lots of money for ads that don't increase their revenue.
Only ones willing to pay for ads are shady business. We are talking unlicensed pills, scams, crypto etc.
Eventually those dry up so they go even lower, malware authors willing to use ads as malware vectors.
I browsed once without ad blocker on some webcomic and shit I had delivered was actually malware. As in Defender was activated.
And I'm sure some would be quick to point out that running uBO as a "malware" blocker just happens to siphon up legitimate ads in the same bucket in the process (which is what I think is your point), and my reply to them is that the blockers typically won't block anything that comes from the same IP/domain as the site (as is explained in one of the linked articles). I think it's up to websites to run their ads in a way that doesn't trigger it to get blocked, because the detection pattern for most blockers is based on past abuse of these techniques.
I view pihole and ublock as the washable filter. It takes care of the big stuff, prevents my computer from ever seeing most of the avenues for malware to propagate. Then my antivirus can easily mop up whatever slips through.
As far as I know, ad blockers work based on host name and css selectors. If there was an actual anti-malware that was so trivially bypass-able, it would be laughed out of the room. uBO blocks hosts of advertisers. AFAIK they don't distinguish between malware and non-malware, nor do they detect malware from other sources.
The web was a relief. You could actually consume content and tune out the (then primitive, usually just a banner at the top) ads.
The web, specifically un-adblocked Youtube, is now at about the same point as where I quit TV. Just not worth the aggravation any more. UBlock Origin has shifted things back into favour. But will "Manifest V3" tip things back to unbearable? We'll see.
Switch to Firefox now before Firefox market share dips to the level where publishers can justify not supporting it and you're stuck with only crippled adblocking forever?
DRM essentially means: only allow access with a program that implements certain required measures to restrict user's control over their own computer. Using content decryption blobs to restrict user's access to media streams handled by their own computer — is only a beginning, Web DRM will be eventually extended to allow more restrictions, including those to make it much harder to interfere with the display of ads.
Why in the hell would I pay £60 a month and have to watch adverts when I can just get it for free?
Why do I have to subscribe to channels I have no interest in to get the handful I do want?
It's like a baker who pads his bread with sawdust throwing a tantrum when customers start going elsewhere.
1. If I was watching alone I would have a book with me. When ads came on I'd read the book until the ad break ended. Nowadays instead of a book it is usually an iPad, and instead of reading during the break I might work on a crossword puzzle in the NYT Crossword app or do some chess puzzles at lichess.com.
2. If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show. Heck, we were kids...it was hard to get us to not take about the show during the show. This also still works as an adult, with the only change being that the conversation is more sophisticated. E.g., kids might talk about how cool it was that Kirk made an improvised canon to shoot the Gorn, but adults might discuss the feasibility of actually making such a canon. (It probably isn't feasible BTW. Mythbusters tried it and could not get it to work using the resources available to Kirk).
That's shifting from the narrative of the show/film you're watching to a different activity
> If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show
It takes us about 1h20 to watch a c. 40 minute show with my wife, but that's because we pause throughout to discuss it. Haven't done linear TV since c. 2000, went through a couple of years in the early 00s with a mythtv box recording shows off air (with 30 second skip forwards/10 second skip back - If I remember commercial breaks almost entirely 6 or 8 skips forward), then sky plus, but nothing for the last 7 years other than streaming.
the other hard rule I have is 'no news from narrated sources' so really no need to cable tv & have cut the cord for more than a decade now.
I even vaguely remember this was lampshaded in Fresh Prince (?)
Uncle Phil is having a heart to heart chat with young Nicky and in the middle says something like "ok nice talk see you in around 2 1/2 minutes" which I thought was hilarious
You're welcome.
People are used to abuse. My internet is very different from the internet most people use. I feel sorry for them.
Technically I don’t use and ad block, I just run DuckDuckGo’s privacy plugin. You can show me ads, but not track me, weirdly enough it’s 98% the same result. It facinating that ad tech cannot see the difference between ads and tracking.
Somehow, (probably because there is no competition - yet), Google has not applied this reasoning to YouTube ads. YouTube ads are often louder than regular videos (which they could fix on their end if they cared), they are sometimes insanely long (I recently got an "ad" which was a 40 minute "free music" thing), and depending on the video they can pop pop up at terrible moments. They still haven't figured out that YouTube is loaded with exercise videos - a content category which has exploded since 2020 and where YouTube enjoys a tremendous lead on the competition. Rudely interrupting one of those is bad and brews resentment. Instead of doing that, they could plaster the entire video with unobtrusive ads and people would both look at the ads and be happy with the service.
People in their late 20s and 30s who remember Youtube as a catch-all location for lo-fi homemmade videos with few ads may not feel that YT premium is worth it, particularly if they already use adblockers, and don't use it much on mobile (where adblocking isn't possible without modded APKs). This generation also remembers torrents and Limewire, before Spotify made everything super-convenient.
Those who are more familiar with 'modern Youtube' with multiple pre-roll ads, clickbait and and influencers everywhere may be more receptive to paying just to get rid of the constant ads.
I run ad-blockers everywhere (and I know there are ways to block YT ads), but will still pay if you give me this reasonable option.
The forced bundling with YouTube Music is the only thing that keeps me from subscribing and keeping a trigger finger on the mute button (I use YouTube primarily on AppleTV). It's not even the price so much as it's the redundancy of subscribing to both Spotify and a lackluster Spotify competitor at the same time.
The moment Google offers YouTube Premium Lite (an unbundled version they've been trialing in European markets) in the US, I'll subscribe and never look back.
It's actually amazing that Google has let Patreon eat its lunch on this front, the latter becoming the predominant platform for direct monetization while YouTube continues playing the chump's game of seeing how much advertising they can inflict on users before they revolt.
[edit] I'm well aware of YouTube Premium, but Google's insistence on bundling it exclusively with YouTube Music greatly limits its appeal. If they offered a standalone subscription (as they are piloting in some European markets), they could probably expand their subscriber base by a significant factor.
Put another way, if Netflix were only available as part of a bundle with a cable subscription, do you imagine they'd have more or fewer subscribers than they do right now?
The moment a video is born, it lives until its sponsored time runs out.
If a content creator wants to leave something up and reap some internal ad-sales, or tip-generation scheme... they just have to sponsor the video with more time.
People who like it, can also sponsor it.
And sure, have some sort of "Library of Congress" feature to save videos deemed as significant...
But once the time is up... the video is gone. Exists only in memories.
Seems like a huge portion of videos are just taking up space... start pruning.
And a lot of videos... they don't matter. 40 different versions of the same old song, 20 different shots of the same sports blooper, 900 different versions of the same boring news cast. Like... none of these need to be on there taking up space / inflating the hosting bill.
With a strong market dominance one can then focus on profits with minimum risk. One way to raise profits would be to impose taxes, like with streamers get donations through "youtube bits". They could go further and demand taxes when any company do things that has monetary value, like say when a company want to make a video about their products. They could do like Facebook and many dating sites and offer a service of "promoting" users above other users. One can couple access to the site to hardware products like mobile phones, or split off features to "exclusive" access users. One can down rate the speed/quality of freeloaders, pushing users to upgrade their accounts to premium accounts.
The ways to monetize a market dominant position is to many to count. The hard problem is the iron grip needed on keeping users on the platform.
Also, YouTube has a data trove of metrics that interest advertisers. Why not selling those? You have a commercial page that let’s say sells clothes and you want to upload a video to target women aged 18-25. Here’s the data to show you what you need to do, and we’ll charge you $15k to give you a detailed report. Brands would go bananas for metrics like these.
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I'm waiting for the day when we can solve these ills of private property with technology.
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Edit: https://vancedapp.com/
For example, if you were making a transit app, a savvy iPhone 13 ProMax user with a top-tier data plan will see very different problems (or at least see different priorities) on their commute than your Uncle Sidney with his belt-holstered, used, Samsung Galaxy J2 running on Ting Mobile. They're both important, but in the tech world, you have to dig a lot deeper to get the Uncle Sidney perspective.
That's how showing ads on your site is abuse of the user.
You did not ask for your brain to be stimulated like this - what you did ask for is the content that comes after ad. That's the thing you consented to.
Ads abuse your desire to watch something that you want to watch, by cramming in something that you did not want, leeching your precious time and brain-processing energy, in order to sell you something that you did not want to have in the first place.
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Also, when I visit a website that is truly obnoxious with its ads, I simply leave immediately and never go there. You build your own filter of bad actors, behaviors, and concrete sites. You don't need to block everyone, you simply walk away from abusers. You want to take notice of improper behavior before consciously and deliberately boycotting it.
Why should they give you free content?
I have a few questions for you
1. How long have you been doing this ? 2. What do you think of other (not just monetization) ways ads are bad as in bloating the web, privacy and security issues ? 3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads ? You give up ? Use adblock ? Continue with ads ?
1. Since the 90s. 2. Needs to be solved by user agents. Ad blockers generally work by host name or css selector. This doesn't filter out any of the bad guys that are really trying. 3. Continue with ads I guess. This doesn't actually happen in real life as far as I can tell.
The reason I don't use an ad blocker is that I like being able to see what's going on inside of a web browser. Prevalence of ad blockers creates an incentive to do canvas rendering based on a DRM-obfuscated data blob. That's worse for everyone.
I find it intriguing that only in the digital age have we sort of decided that the creator of something doesn't get to dictate the terms of its use.
>3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads
At least for me, I assume that they created the necessary content and get to decide how it's made available. It seems like only in the digital age do we even consider "I don't like your terms so I'm taking the content anyway" an option.
In my current home it's not sanely possible to get wired Internet, so I started by just using the 40GB data allowance on my phone. This was a huge mistake. With the modern Web and being ultra-careful about my browsing, I would still chew through the whole lot in a week. It was costing me insane amounts to keep my phone online.
See the OP's article - one page can be 250MB! And my data allowance was large. Many people only have 2GB on their phones. 8 web sites and they are done for the month.
I'm OK with most ads. I understand why they exist.
What I would like is something like an ad blocker that only blocks the tracking and surveillance.
https://privacybadger.org/
Aren't there lots like this? At some point Ghostery did that: It would show you static banner ads no problem; it would only be the crazy javascript advert-bidding-based-on-surveillance things that wouldn't show up.
Another thing is, since these adblock extensions get cleartext view of all the site you visit, you really want them to be completely open sourced. So only ublock origin for me.