Never forget that Adblock Plus is a commercial product developed by a company which you can pay to get your ads listed as "acceptable ads" which makes them pass the filtering.
Around 2010 I started playing with Adblock Plus, and provided a translation for a while.
Wladimir Palant was a friendly, responsive, and as I understand it respected developer.
There were not countless adblockers, just Adblock and Adblock Plus. Adblock was abandoned, and Adblock Plus was were the innovation and performance improvements were happening.
Adblock Plus was there in the first controversies around adblocking ethics. It 'took care' of the first lawsuit. It did a lot of good work that the later adblockers benefit from.
Personally I have never been a fan of the acceptable ads feature. But it comes from that time, and offers a middle ground in the adblocking ethics debate, and a way to finance legal troubles.
Now I have not been involved in a very long time (Using uBlock Origin and whatever filters are default), but just condemning Adblock Plus outright is a bit too quick.
I learned the other day that the developer(s ?) of uBlock origin don't even accept donation. That's a really dedicated behavior for someone owning on app installed on probably a million devices, that could make money in an instant if he wanted to.
tbh, that scares me, simply because of the potential that one day, someone will offer enough money that it can't reasonably be expected from anyone to decline that offer.
Indeed, and unlike the morally unacceptable Adblock Plus, uBlock Origin continues to work on YouTube ads, although you will have to manually update your filter lists every day or so.
I have uBlock Origin installed in Arc, and ended up getting burned by the YouTube adblocking blocking purge because each time the warning came up, I checked to see if there was a way to whitelist YT and didn't find it. Now I'm watching YT in Safari on my iPad, where the block doesn't apply.
So: anyone know how to whitelist YT in uBlock Origin in Arc?
Use invidious. You can import your subscriptions really easily. I self host my own instance on an old laptop (exposed via WireGuard to my server. I connect via local IP when at home)
i love ublock origin and have used it for years. i recently migrated to macos and was disappointed to find that ublock origin doesn’t work with safari.
what’s the best ad-blocking option for safari on macos?
I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on the Mac and it works great, but for Safari the best option I've found is AdGuard (https://adguard.com). However, it is nowhere near as effective as uBlock Origin since Safari did the Manifest V3 thing.
Is there a reliable source on being able to buy your way past the requirements? The last time I heard this story (like a decade ago), the author was asking large ad networks to pay to have their ads reviewed (and quite possible rejected), rather than him working for free when they have plenty of cash around. I don't see the problem with that
The acceptable ads program was another bluff-call, where people who had been claiming "I only object to intrusive ads. If there was a way to only allow passive and well-behaved ads I'd allow them!" got their alleged wish and then got angry about it
(Basically you need to make sure you're up to date, and you disable any overzealous filter lists or custom filters so that the anti-adblock detection doesn't get tripped.)
Or this as a good time / excuse to ditch YouTube, even if uBlockOrigin resolves it.
Additionally, I'm honestly half-scared that they'll block my account if they notice me breaking their "Terms of Service" by blocking ads. So this is also serving as a good time for me to Degoogle my online presence. Screw them, I eagerly await their demise, as they've singlehandedly ruined the web and so much more.
I pay for it but i still get inferior service compared to ublock+sponsorblock+ff combo.
I remember one year ago visiting my parents in another country and background play was disabled. The only reason to pay for me is tv&ytmusic
It looks like YouTube's dark-pattern marketing strategy (highlighting the "Allow YouTube Ads" button), is they'd rather have you enable ads than pay for premium.
They're getting too greedy with demonetising videos and still making money off of them, to the amount of ads they play; same goes for other streaming platforms.
So far on Firefox with uBlock Origin I haven't come across it.
What are you talking about? The vast majority of people would rather disable their adblocker on YouTube then subscribe and pay $15 a month... How is it a dark pattern for YouTube to suggest the most likely option?
What value do advertisers get in losing a portion of their ad spend to those who are even less likely to engage? I would be curious to see what click through rates typically look like post this change.
Afaict top of funnel ads don't need engagement, they are mostly to spread brand awareness and they influence you in ways other than immediate conversion. That seems to be what most Youtube ads are.
People who advertise with Google are used to losing a decent portion of their ad spend to bot views. People who use ad blockers are at least human.
And advertising to the guy who sees 100 adverts a day might have much higher impact than advertising to the guy who sees 1000.
From Google's perspective, they want to get paid, so the more ads the better. If the advertisers, users and content creators don't like it, why would that matter to Google? The farmer doesn't care about the turkey's opinion on christmas.
For Youtube/Google it's a win-win: they can show advertisers that the ads that can't be hidden, and annoyed users will be more pressured to buy Premium to hide the ads.
Google is desperate to display ads on YouTube. YouTube videos, even of poor quality, often rank highly in Google search results. This means that Google can double its profits by displaying ads on YouTube, in addition to its search advertising revenue.
Just curious, what more can they do with WASM to prevent ad blockers? Can they prevent an extension that blacks out the ad and waits until it plays out for example?
I wonder at what point will Google start splicing ads directly into the video feed? Surely there's a way to do it without transcoding the entire file again.
Twitch already does this on the fly and it's a pain to bypass, I think the question is why Youtube hasn't started doing it yet given how effective it is.
Google is too big. All of the giant tech companies are. This behavior is a symptom of reaching across industries in search of growth.
Is there any reason a grocery store should be a movie studio?
This sucks the air out of the room for smaller companies to innovate. Search would be much better if it wasn't being shoved down our throat by a single company that controls (or buys access to) all of the panes of glass Americans use to compute.
Ok, so if Google is too big and YouTube is split away from Google... who exactly will pay for bandwidth, server and transcoder costs for all the adblocking freeloaders?
If you ever tried to host videos yourself, you'll quickly see that it costs a stupid amount of money to manage. Why would a standalone YouTube LLC. allow anyone to access it with an adblocker and without subscription?
(People seem to lose their mind on HN every time someone even tries to recommend something as ridicolous as paying for YouTube.)
Honestly, the only product that can really compete with uBlockOrigin at this point is a version of AdNauseum for Youtube -- something that registers a click on every single ad that YouTube shows until it stops showing you more ads.
There is currently no negative feedback for YouTube ads. They are free to show you ads every single minute if some manager there thinks that this will increase monetization by 1%. And no, paying for YouTube Premium isn't going to work; Amazon Prime Video was this way (I paid for it, and got ad-free shows in return), but they are now introducing "limited ads" that you will need to pay $3 extra a month for.
The only reasonable negative feedback is to have too many clicks on ads, so the advertiser stops showing you them because the person paying for ads is not getting the desired clickthrough rate.
The advertising industry likes to make up scary terms like "ad fraud" for this, but that's ridiculous -- a human can totally click an ad link and then make a decision not to engage further with the product. I do it all the time. Having an extension make that decision on my behalf would be fantastic.
This may be controversial but YouTube ads are surely ones that meet all the reasonable criteria.
They're not a surprise, you know it's an ad supported business. They're served from YouTube so it's not random companies tracking you while you use a different service. And you can get rid of them by paying for the service.
What's the proposed alternative where you contribute for the service? Just paywall the whole thing?
Probably an unpopular opinion, but I just do not want to have a "business" relationship with google. I would not mind paying for youtube, if it was a separate company. But google does not need my money, and any money the get are used to actively making the world worse (WEI, SEO spam, Search getting worse, ...).
On a separate note, there are reports of people getting their whole google account locked for payment issues, expired cards and such. There is no way to reach a human there, and I really do not want to risk loosing my account I use on my phone as well (android :/) just because some bot decides it does not like me.
Would be fine if I could just have a separate youtube account, but no, that would make tracking harder...
Aaaand there still will be ads inside the videos (sponsored segments), and product placement.
I currently pay $5/month to the Kevin Richardson channel as a member and have been a member since inception for over 4 years now. When I went to the members section of YouTube to view my members-only videos I received the blocking message and was denied access to the video player. This is in addition to other wildlife charities for which I send monthly donations directly.
I use uBlock Origin on YouTube specifically to work around many UI issues related to their recommendations and player. I will not turn it off. One example is that they will not honor my closed-caption settings on all videos so I have a filter rule to remove the call to the captions URL to eliminate them. That's one of countless issues.
They are now denying me access to a service for which I do actually pay for. I consider that to be illegal.
My proposal is simple:
* Give me an option to pay for what I use. I do not want music, 99.9% of live streams, news, or tons of the other content they try to force on me for money-making purposes.
* Make the price reasonable. The videos I watch are primarily educational lectures. This really shouldn't cost much more than the price of disk storage and network egress (both of which are cheap at scale).
* Give me a recommendations and preference system that actually work. I spend more time curating my list of videos than watching anything meaningful to my interests. At one point I was watching 2 luthiery channels and "guitar necks" came up as a category. What the ever living fuck? Related yes, but not quite the topic I really want to focus on. I would remind people that this is a multi-billion dollar company with PhDs that has changed the face of AI and hyper-scale computing as we know it.
* In general, operate like a long-running business... offer good value to your paying customers. Now that the customers are not advertisers, Google will need to rethink their sales strategies. They have not yet convinced me.
The alternative might be Google paying their fair share of taxes. I might consider supporting their product then. Ad blocking is not as severe as tax avoidance though.
I have no sympathy for the service. If it's not profitable, Google can cover it from their other revenue streams with ease.
That sounds like one of these reasons that people come up with to justify their unwillingness to pay.
Are you also boycotting every other large company that uses the tax system in a legal way that you don't agree with? I'm all for big companies paying their fair share, but I'm not blaming the company, I'm blaming the people in charge who don't close these loopholes. Same issue as with Ireland in the EU, undercutting all the other EU countries with tax rates.
One option if you want to fight back in the exact same way: Sign up for YouTube Premium through a cheaper country and pay $2/month instead of 15.
Paying for the service replicates the cable TV industry. In order to get what I want and support, I end up supporting what I don’t want and don’t want to support.
I am under ZERO obligation to watch advertising, that is the risk the industry takes. The ad industry has long ago tipped the scales in the trade of attention for content and now they resort to shaming the viewers into compliance.
Everyone supporting the adblock countermeasures are hypocrites; as if they never went to the bathroom during a TV show commercial break.
I am not responsible for sustaining Google's monetization. There is no such social contract. If their business model isn't sustainable, they should find a new one. That's their problem, not mine.
I spent years having to click "No, I do not consent to creating a Google+ profile" every time I used YouTube so I refuse to give them money on principle.
It only has to be relatively less ad laden than the free version. Whenever ads get cranked up on the “free” normal person YouTube, they’ll get cranked up on sucker pay-pig YouTube in direct proportion. If anything, they have less concern about the small fraction who (amazingly) pay them for what they’re doing.
Ads are very surprising to people who have been using ad blockers for decades. The web experience is totally different. On a side note, I stopped watching TV in the 90s and turned to "internet only" because ads were too annoying. It's weird that companies advertising with Google think people like me could potentially buy something based on ads.
They are a surprise. They’re variable length and appear at random moments. Their volume can greatly differ from the content you are watching. No thanks.
The proposed alternative is Google can continue to bankroll it. They are not hurting for money.
Workable, I suppose, though it still plays a split second of the ad while the skip happens. Perhaps a pause (or mute?), skip, then resume might be possible?
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uBlock Origin is still probably the best tool for blocking ads: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/
There were not countless adblockers, just Adblock and Adblock Plus. Adblock was abandoned, and Adblock Plus was were the innovation and performance improvements were happening.
Adblock Plus was there in the first controversies around adblocking ethics. It 'took care' of the first lawsuit. It did a lot of good work that the later adblockers benefit from.
Personally I have never been a fan of the acceptable ads feature. But it comes from that time, and offers a middle ground in the adblocking ethics debate, and a way to finance legal troubles.
Now I have not been involved in a very long time (Using uBlock Origin and whatever filters are default), but just condemning Adblock Plus outright is a bit too quick.
So: anyone know how to whitelist YT in uBlock Origin in Arc?
https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/
what’s the best ad-blocking option for safari on macos?
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1blocker-ad-blocker/id13655310...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wipr/id1320666476?mt=12
The iOS version also blocks in-app trackers (in other apps, outside of Safari) and YouTube app ads via its firewall feature.
Deleted Comment
The acceptable ads program was another bluff-call, where people who had been claiming "I only object to intrusive ads. If there was a way to only allow passive and well-behaved ads I'd allow them!" got their alleged wish and then got angry about it
https://web.archive.org/web/20220817235820/https://www.mobil... (German)
No need to wait. Just switch to uBlock Origin where this is already fixed.
Here's a guide if they still show up and you're using UBO: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/178yasm/youtu...
(Basically you need to make sure you're up to date, and you disable any overzealous filter lists or custom filters so that the anti-adblock detection doesn't get tripped.)
Additionally, I'm honestly half-scared that they'll block my account if they notice me breaking their "Terms of Service" by blocking ads. So this is also serving as a good time for me to Degoogle my online presence. Screw them, I eagerly await their demise, as they've singlehandedly ruined the web and so much more.
They're getting too greedy with demonetising videos and still making money off of them, to the amount of ads they play; same goes for other streaming platforms.
So far on Firefox with uBlock Origin I haven't come across it.
And advertising to the guy who sees 100 adverts a day might have much higher impact than advertising to the guy who sees 1000.
From Google's perspective, they want to get paid, so the more ads the better. If the advertisers, users and content creators don't like it, why would that matter to Google? The farmer doesn't care about the turkey's opinion on christmas.
And adblockers won't work anymore.
We are loosing control over the client a little bit more everyday, and given the new generation know only locked down devices, they don't even notice.
I'm not so convinced Google cares to use YouTube to it's full potential.
Is there any reason a grocery store should be a movie studio?
This sucks the air out of the room for smaller companies to innovate. Search would be much better if it wasn't being shoved down our throat by a single company that controls (or buys access to) all of the panes of glass Americans use to compute.
If you ever tried to host videos yourself, you'll quickly see that it costs a stupid amount of money to manage. Why would a standalone YouTube LLC. allow anyone to access it with an adblocker and without subscription?
(People seem to lose their mind on HN every time someone even tries to recommend something as ridicolous as paying for YouTube.)
There is currently no negative feedback for YouTube ads. They are free to show you ads every single minute if some manager there thinks that this will increase monetization by 1%. And no, paying for YouTube Premium isn't going to work; Amazon Prime Video was this way (I paid for it, and got ad-free shows in return), but they are now introducing "limited ads" that you will need to pay $3 extra a month for.
The only reasonable negative feedback is to have too many clicks on ads, so the advertiser stops showing you them because the person paying for ads is not getting the desired clickthrough rate.
The advertising industry likes to make up scary terms like "ad fraud" for this, but that's ridiculous -- a human can totally click an ad link and then make a decision not to engage further with the product. I do it all the time. Having an extension make that decision on my behalf would be fantastic.
They're not a surprise, you know it's an ad supported business. They're served from YouTube so it's not random companies tracking you while you use a different service. And you can get rid of them by paying for the service.
What's the proposed alternative where you contribute for the service? Just paywall the whole thing?
On a separate note, there are reports of people getting their whole google account locked for payment issues, expired cards and such. There is no way to reach a human there, and I really do not want to risk loosing my account I use on my phone as well (android :/) just because some bot decides it does not like me.
Would be fine if I could just have a separate youtube account, but no, that would make tracking harder...
Aaaand there still will be ads inside the videos (sponsored segments), and product placement.
I use uBlock Origin on YouTube specifically to work around many UI issues related to their recommendations and player. I will not turn it off. One example is that they will not honor my closed-caption settings on all videos so I have a filter rule to remove the call to the captions URL to eliminate them. That's one of countless issues.
They are now denying me access to a service for which I do actually pay for. I consider that to be illegal.
My proposal is simple:
I have no sympathy for the service. If it's not profitable, Google can cover it from their other revenue streams with ease.
Are you also boycotting every other large company that uses the tax system in a legal way that you don't agree with? I'm all for big companies paying their fair share, but I'm not blaming the company, I'm blaming the people in charge who don't close these loopholes. Same issue as with Ireland in the EU, undercutting all the other EU countries with tax rates.
One option if you want to fight back in the exact same way: Sign up for YouTube Premium through a cheaper country and pay $2/month instead of 15.
I am under ZERO obligation to watch advertising, that is the risk the industry takes. The ad industry has long ago tipped the scales in the trade of attention for content and now they resort to shaming the viewers into compliance.
Everyone supporting the adblock countermeasures are hypocrites; as if they never went to the bathroom during a TV show commercial break.
Get rid of _some_ of them
It only has to be relatively less ad laden than the free version. Whenever ads get cranked up on the “free” normal person YouTube, they’ll get cranked up on sucker pay-pig YouTube in direct proportion. If anything, they have less concern about the small fraction who (amazingly) pay them for what they’re doing.
The proposed alternative is Google can continue to bankroll it. They are not hurting for money.
Ha! Try getting 10 minutes into this example and not bring surprised by a fucking pasta ad. https://
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