YouTube Could Be Testing a Three-Strikes Policy For Ad Blocking - Slashdot
source link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/06/29/225253/youtube-could-be-testing-a-three-strikes-policy-for-ad-blocking
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YouTube Could Be Testing a Three-Strikes Policy For Ad Blocking
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I've said this before on SD, that YouTube is probably the ONLY service on the web that I'll pay for if I have to, because there's nothing like it out there (not for the rare stuff I watch there). But I wonder how they'll handle a NATted VPN address from France if I fire up my VPN.-
I dont think its gonna be by IP as much as its gonna be by login. Have you ever used 4k downloader? Worst case it will fetch anonymously and skip all the ads. Then watch after.
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There's no such thing as posting "anon". Your account ID is known to slashdot, and it will be known to Google if they ask. Even if this weren't the case, surely they have logged your IP address, which likely leads to you. Even if they had to ask your ISP, your ISP will turn you over in a heartbeat rather than risk having to pay statutory and compensatory damages for aiding and abetting you, or possibly being named in a lawsuit or criminal action as accessories after the fact to your crimes, if not both.
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lol. Man. I bet you're really fun at parties!
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If they start detecting and blocking ad-blockers in the browser, what makes you think yt-dlp will continue to function? I'm sure it probably will, but it's not a sure thing.
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what makes you think that a tool can't download the javascripts, download the ads, but discard them and show you the video anyway, tricking google that the ad was shown when you really bypassed it
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Exactly. If they make me go that route, then that's the route I'll go.
And if that turns out to be too much trouble or unworkable, then I guess I'll stop visiting Youtube. It's no life and death to me.
This is one battle they won't win, not with me at least.
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psst, if you use a chrome based browser, it is full of IDs, that permit that browser to access several google services... they can block that.
hint: use a non chromium based browser
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What 'rare stuff' are you talking about?
Rumble, and several other services, have been increasingly growing as YT demonetizes an increasingly large amount of content, nevermind banning it outright. There are many channels "dual homing" to try to avoid being completely deplatformed for "political" speech not approved by the regime, or simply having a channel topic which is judged "controversial".
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...surprising literally NO ONE with any brains at all. If the platform has people who can silence you, it's only a matter of time before you find which button to push, which comment to make, what snark you can... um... snark, before they DO.
For anyone who doesn't want to follow random links... the images are both screenshots from Twitter, I think; the first link is to a comment from PoliticsVideoChannel explaining that the terms of service for "Truth" "Social" prohibit statements disparaging the site's
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It's mostly rare music that I'm after; obscure 78s and 33s, mostly classical and jazz, with a lot of international music throw in there. Some of them I can probably find elsewhere, but whoever posts something elsewhere also posts it to YT, making it easy to easily find stuff.
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They can't handle it. Under GDPR you can request that they delete the data of how much you've been blocking ads. You qualify for this when you VPN from France.
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You can request all you want. Fat lot of good it'll do ya. If you're physically in the US, (which may or may not be the case, but anyway...) and they can prove you're in the US, (and they're in the US, and they are,) Europe's laws don't matter, and won't protect you. Even if you WERE in Europe, it's not like the US, or a company that can bend the US government's ears, is going to care.
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So.... YouTube is going to ban me for not watching advertisements for shitty scam products that I have zero interest in. I'm sure that will work out well for them.
As much as I enjoy watching some things on YouTube, they can bite me. I will continue to block ads until all work-arounds no longer work, and then they can just fuck off. It was fun while it lasted. -
I ended up paying because I started watching a lot of videos from my TV and the ads on the TV app were annoying as fuck.
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by Tyr07 ( 8900565 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @06:35PM (#63644754)
I expect for many people who use adblockers youtube isn't that important to them to allow ads. I expect their small test will result in them not enforcing this policy. I feel they have the right to do this but I personally am so not interested in ads, and not interested in paying for most content on youtube, and I'll get the content I want directly from content creators on patreon.
Maybe I'm wrong and people will just watch the ads but it'll go the other way.
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Theres also 4k downloader if you dont mind storing the video for a bit while you watch.
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4k downloader is probably just a wrapper for yt-dlp.
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Funny thing, my browser (Vivaldi) came with an ad-blocker that works nicely for YT and is default-on. I actually do not even know how to turn it off.
As to creators, those I like and watch regularly (not many) I support on patreon, so I do not feel guilty in any way.
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I control my network connection. My bandwidth is not unlimited even with an unlimited account. Anything that is funneled into a computer that was not explicitly asked for is a very real additional and avoidable security risk as well as a waste of my bandwidth. I will not allow ads on my machine for any reason. Every network that I control is a whitelist based system. I spend massive amounts of time tweaking my systems so that only the things that I legitimately need can function and everything else fails by
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by caseih ( 160668 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @09:03PM (#63645158)
Fair enough, but youtube also has the right to not show you something unless you agree to watch an ad. They cannot force you to watch something you don't want to, but you cannot force them to show you something they don't want to either. Just saying.
That said, the day I cannot watch with FreeTube, NewTube, or yt-dlp is the day I stop watching youtube. Most of my channels exist in other places including Odysee, so I'm sure I'll manage. Might even suddenly get productive doing useful things instead of watching youtube.
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I'm interested to see what they do when people let the ads play, but minimize the window it's playing in, and mute the audio output, pop another window OVER the ad, OR... just get up and go take a piss while the ads are playing, just like we did for DECADES when skipping them or blocking them wasn't possible when watching TV.
My guess is that they'll install a system that will demand you input the name of the company and the product the ad you just watched (or didn't) was FOR before it lets you go on to w -
The increase in ads, unskippable ads, etc is a sign of trouble within the company and the ad industry as a whole. Historically, it's a sign that things are about to go sideways when a company starts to go "extra" in this manner.
"We need to show 2 ads because 1 is no longer enough to keep up revenue."
"We must make them a minute or more long"
"We must make those long ads unskipabble"
This is a bubble about to go pop.
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I view more YouTube than television, but I use the Brave browser to watch, even on iPhone or iPad versus native apps. I wonder if they'll consider it an ad-blocker. If they do, guess I won't be watching as much YouTube anymore.
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Maybe some people think Youtube is vital. I don't. Another place not to go.
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This might be good. I watch Youtube. I do not have to watch Youtube. I didn't watch it before and life was alright. Maybe this will free up some of my day? Let this be the first nail-in-the-coffin for social media.
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Please, force us to disable adblockers in EU...
Come on, the game's on.
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Good luck with that. I know many places adblock at the gateway for security reasons: they don't want their users clicking ads which lead who-knows-where. Anyone who wants to use youtube at work will either need to do it anonymously or through proxies, if this continues.
Maybe they shouldn't have bought a free service and tried to monetize it with both ads and a very expensive subscription model (which doesn't even exempt you from the ads).
Between the increased amount of partisan censorship on the platform over the past years, there are few reasons for me to go to youtube at all anymore.
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What? It does too exempt you from ads. And the price is very worthwhile for a family account IMO. I haven't seen a youtube ad in ages. Now some channels still do sponsorship BS directly in their videos, which isn't skipable... You know what would make youtube better? If they detected sponsorship segments and skip them for premium users.
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You never heard of sponsor block for YouTube?
It's fantastic.
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YouTube should take the same stance against creators that name a sponsor directly in the video because it completely cuts YouTube out of the revenue sharing.
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The "end game" is to use an inefficient* ad-blocker that looks like a normal web browser to the server, but replaces ads with dummy content or saves the content without ads locally.
By definition, this will be indistinguishable to the server from watching a video in a web browser.
* "inefficient" meaning the ads are actually downloaded in full.
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On youtube ads take time to play. Are you going to sit there watching a black screen while you wait for the ad to finish running in the background every time you change videos?
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I'm confident I can find something to do for the 30 seconds or so it takes for it to complete. Refill my glass, go pee, stretch, respond to an email, pet the cat, etc
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I remember a fake ad in Mad Magazine, (sorry, can't recall the issue,) that had a roller like a window shade that mounted to the top of the TV set, that would detect an ad, and unfurl itself. The depiction in the comic image showed that on the shade, was a picture of a gorgeous woman, (naked, I think, or partly,) so the viewer had something nice to look at while not watching the commercials. I vaguely recall the viewer's response being shocked and enthusiastic... I think he was crushing a beer can while g
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If it's "take time watching black screen" or "take time watching ads" give me the black screen.
Unless the ads are "Superbowl-quality" of course - that's entertainment.
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All someone needs to do is make something that inserts it's own video as an overlay so that what would normally be an ad it is instead playing another video that otherwise you couldn't be bothered to watch but has some interest to you - perhaps a news or stock overlay, seems about right for the length of an advertisement and you won't be watching paint dry.
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Personally, I queue almost everything I watch on YT through the "watch later" playlist. I presume that it would be possible for someone to write an extension that pre-fetches from videos there in a way that's indistinguishable from watching ads. Not to mention, I usually look at at least a few of the comments for every video. They could pre-fetch while I'm doing that, as well.
The next step in the arms race: Goggle could start demanding that you correctly answer a quiz on the ad content before proceeding. Th
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I'm already doing that. If I (rarely) have to watch a video on youtube, I scroll down the page to hide the ad and only the the yellow ad progress bar remains, and I do something else for as long as I can see a yellow bar.
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Haha, I'm now picturing an ad-swap program instead of adblock. With the purpose of providing 5-30 second clips of entertainment while it waits for the real ad to 'play'
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Indeed. And it is not even hard to do. And they will definitely not survive if they start to require people to solve catchpas in the middle of videos or the like.
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At their turn of the arms race, they can decide to pause videos that are not on a foreground tab.
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And how would they know they weren't the foreground tab, if the web-browser-impersonating ad-blocker lied and pretended to always be in the foreground?
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I see it as an opportunity for other platforms to gain traction and escape YT's censorship. Because those with adblocks won't put up with this nonsense.
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I have a strict zero ads policy. If I'm forced to watch ads on Youtube, I stop using Youtube.
I'm not going to let malware scumbags that constantly hack ad systems to even attempt to infect my box just so you can make $1 per year on the ads you show me.
And no, I'm not going to pay for Youtube Premium either. You make enough money selling my demographics and watching habits to the highest bidder to pay for my Youtube usage.
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I have a strict no-tracking policy - enforced from my end. Importantly, there's no selling of my behavioural data as a result.
The fact that most ads then don't get delivered is just incidental in my books. If they then choose to still deliver ads, which they don't, not based on my behaviour then I'd be okay with that.
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Quite frankly, this is going to be ridiculous. Before I let YouTube interrupt my videos every other second with yet another ridiculous bullshit ad, I just stop using it.
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I don't like it. It's clunky rolling off the tongue, and lacking any hard consonant across the first two syllables.
There's got to be something better than that.
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You're right. It's less elegant than the change from blacklist to blocklist. There's a good reason we didn't go with "denylist".
Maybe Canlist and Can'tlist would have been good.
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Well, here in Europe this is still called a "whitelist" and nobody has any problem with it. In fact I did need a second to even understand what an "allowlist" is supposed to be.
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but I will be regaining a lot of my life from watching those addictive cat videos.
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If YouTube really wants us to watch ads then it is way pass due to allow us the viewers to rate the ads and send that info back to the advertisers. No one wants bad advertising, right?
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But my god, please kick my ad blocking ass out. Neither of us will be sorry to see me go.
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You mean...whitelisted, ya potbrownie-eating woketards?
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I liked the term allowlisted, but someone pointed out in a comment above that it's clunky language. This made me think about the concept of "white" list more. White is an unfiltered combination of all the colors, right? The point of a whitelist is that you are filtering out the items you don't want, so it's not really a "white" list at all. Unless the use is to imply cleanliness and purity. If that's the case, I don't see how anyone could defend its use when paired with "black" list, which categorizes the b
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Sshh, there there. The scary whooshing sound is just history passing you by. It'll be gone soon. (That sad burning feeling is irrelevance. I'm afraid you're stuck with that.)
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> Sshh, there there. The scary whooshing sound is just history passing you by. It'll be gone soon. (That sad burning feeling is irrelevance. I'm afraid you're stuck wit
Nobody believes this stupid meme you guys started saying that your positions will inevitably win, because if anyone spends even 2 seconds thinking about your theory that moral progress will constantly advance, they'll realize that this advance implies that you will inevitably eventually be seen as the future equivalent of baby eating monst
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The tastes and demands of ree rees in the most neurotic sector of the American public are not indicative of history anything, which contrary to morons like yourself has no inherent arc.
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In other words, don't log in to watch Youtube videos.
Reminder: you can enjoy ad-free anonymous Youtube with local subscriptions and playlists (local as in, your local computer knows which channels you subscribe to and which videos you like, but Google doesn't) using the following clients:
- Android: NewPipe [newpipe.net] - or better, NewPipe x SponsorBlock [izzysoft.de]
- Linux, Win, Mac: FreeTube [freetubeapp.io] (FreeTube features SponsorBlock out of the box)Better: those two clients have very similar interfaces and are interoperable, i.e. you can import subscriptions exported by NewPipe in FreeTube.
There ya go. You need never hit the Youtube website or use the Youtube app and suffer Google ever again.
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Nice! Currently I still know which channels I watch, but should that ever not be the case then FreeTube is probably it.
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Subscriptions aren't just to remember which channels you watch: they're also used by the client to populate the "What's new" tab - i.e. a list of all new videos from all the channels you subscribe to listed in reverse date order (i.e. latest first). You have to tell the client which channels you want it to watch for new stuff by subscribing to them.
It's a feature I couldn't live without. I really don't want to go around all the channels manually to figure out which has posted new stuff. But crucially, I onl
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Guess I should turn off my ad blocker for it to see how bad it is.
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I don't like ads, but I understand that they have to pay for content, so I don't use ad blockers, don't have any installed.
What burns me is the sites that tell me to turn off my ad blockers - which I know I don't have. When you dig just a little deeper, what they really want is to track me. I've DO have stuff installed to prevent tracking, and I'm not about to remove that stuff or turn if off. I have tried to give site feedback about this, but they won't let you to the site feedback page without allowing tracking.
They lose my eyeballs. I turn away, go somewhere else.
The other big burn is that one of the sites that has done this is "alternet.org", which should be a site that understands not wanting to be tracked - yet they, or their advertisers, are insisting on it.
By my observations, youtube isn't doing this. They serve me ads and don't trip the tracking stuff. When it lets me skip, I do. Sometimes I end up watching ads, or let them run while my eyeballs are elsewhere.
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There is an easy way to block ads and it even works on mobile and with no plugins, but I don't want to say it here in order to protect Google from blocking this avenue off, though I'm beginning to suspect they are already on to it.
It is so refreshing to know that software is still not oerfect, though reloading still has to be done from time to time whuch us a bugger.
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Watch YT with our cameras on, so that Google will make sure we do not close our eyes or leave the room when ads play.
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Honestly I would have been fine paying for YouTube premium a while ago, except that other than my cellphone and laptop I don't really want to be logging into the same account as my all important Gmail and Drive. Some devices like a smart TV using the dedicated app can be logged into with a system that I assume is generating a YouTube-only token, but there is at least one laptop I would like to be logged in with that I don't want to have access to my personal email at all.
Give me the ability to have a YouTub
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If I wanted to have ads, I'd have a TV set in the house. I don't and I don't. I'll give up an occasional YouTube visit (airplane porn!) but I'll never be without an ad blocker.
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Plus, there are other services like Odysee and Playeur that offer a lot of the same content that YouTube offers. If they get too obnoxious with the ad blocker blocking, people will start going to the other streaming sites instead.
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Yesterday I got served up static ads (no video) that could be skipped instantly with the button on Youtube. I think at least 3 pageloads in a row. (This is with Adblock Plus enabled, obviously. For people who aren't familiar, that usually means no ads.)
I've noticed they've tested the same thing on occasion, periodically, for years. But never more than 1 pageload in a row, for me. So it looks like they are ramping up the testing significantly now. They may actually be getting ready to make a change.
By the wa
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Doubling down on unskippable ads, and playing loud obnoxious ads especially ones that don't match the content of the video that the user wants to play are two things that drive people into using adblockers.
Let's say I have a playlist of soft classical music going. I don't want to hear some techno pop synth bullshit suddenly playing at full volume in the middle of the album. Nor do I want to hear an announcer in a Trump voice blathering on about "sleepy Joe" (I don't know what the ad is really for as I a
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Youtube isn't worth it.
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The big bad wolf is huffing and puffing. My house is made of bricks. I could care less. There will ALWAYS be a way to view content without the need to view the shit filled ads. If marketing companies hadn't acted like such psycho ass-hats in the past on the Internet I may not have the complete and total negative attitude I have toward them now. Pop-up, pop-under, pop-over, auto-play, etc.. You lost my eyeballs years ago. Ad-Block for the win!
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That is actually great news. I enable and ad blocker, Watch three of those stupid videos, and then they get removed from my feed forever? Sounds like a win.
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