YouTube will be rolling out more aggressive Adblock detection. If you don’t like ads and desire to continue using the service, it’s time to consider paying for it.
No. Anything that blocks adblockers does not get my support. The adblocker is there for my own comfort, safety and security. Anyone who asks me to disable it is not my friend.
Virus scanners and adblockers serve a similar purpose these days, they prevent access by malicious actors. If a service asks you to disable the virus scanner, would you do that too?
If they want me to pay for content produced by 3rd parties... sure, if they're distributing that money fairly to those parties why not? But I'd still run an adblocker.
The argument "If you don’t like ads and desire to continue using the service, it’s time to consider paying for it." doesn't make sense to me. Anytime any service has asked to be paid to avoid ads? Ads got added on later on anyway.
Well, are you willing to stop using YouTube or not?
The way I see it, if everyone installs an ad blocker and nobody pays for Premium, there's nobody to pay for the hosting.
> Anytime any service has asked to be paid to avoid ads? Ads got added on later on anyway.
This was the case for live TV and sports, but that's more like a counterexample than a laundry list of ad-free subscription products. And, heck, the NFL actually added an ad-free subscription in 2009 (NFL Red Zone, "7 hours of commercial-free football").
Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, Discovery+, Paramount+, Apple TV+, Spotify, Apple Music...where is this mythical streaming service that has ads in its highest tier paid version? Can you find one?
Some providers might eventually serve ads to their premium tiers, but there isn't much precedent outside of live TV and sports, especially if you expand your view to include SaaS products (e.g., subscribing to a mobile app like MyFitnessPal to remove ads). Meanwhile, your comment suggests that every premium subscription service will eventually get ads, even though the vast majority of them offer a completely ad-free package through the present day.
What kind of mental gymnastics? You think you’re entitled to use a service with an adblocker instead of the service they offer supported by ads/subscription? So you just want to use a service for free?
Up until they actually stop serving me that content, yeah. I've backed up more than 2tb of YouTube channels I like and I've got no intention of stopping until they cut me off.
I’m entitled to view whatever data comes into my device in whatever order I desire.
Entitlements aren’t all bad. In the US, social security is an entitlement. Are you against that too?
Corporations don’t get to override human dignity because it makes them more money. When talking about humans vs corporations, I think I try to default the entitlements to the human.
You're entitled to do whatever you want with your client, but YouTube is equally entitled not to serve you content if they detect that you're using an ad blocker.
It was free before and can be free now. What kind of mental gymnastics do you have to do to justify the greed? Ads are dangerous. You’re entitled to protect yourself.
If everyone just uses ad blockers, the system doesn't work. YouTube goes away tomorrow. If you go to a nice country park with an honor system tip jar you can say that it's your fundamental right to go anywhere that someone doesn't stop you but if everyone did that the park wouldn't have money for upkeep.
At a certain point this isn't the wild West anymore, and these services need to keep the lights on. I personally feel like ads are phycological warfare and find them detestable but I also recognize that means I need to support the service somehow else or I'm a net drain on the system.
A tip jar is not ads. A nice park with a tip jar might work. If it didn’t work, the park wouldnt cease to exist, but people would find a different funding model. Taxes that fund parks definitely work.
Remember that public parks are a pretty recent innovation. Imaging someone saying of private gardens in 1700 “if the king didn’t pay for a park, the park would cease to exist” as a justification for an oppressive monarchy.
YouTube will continue to exist without ads. Business models change. It may make less profit margin, but saying it will cease to exist is hysterical hyperbole.
That's exactly it. It's like a tv network disabling your mute button whenever you see a commercial. You can send me data but how I view it once it's on my network is my right. Just like mail.
Or use an alternative frontend, or download the videos first? Why would I pay for content that isn't monetised and thus the "creator" (for lack of a better word) gets nothing anyway? I'm not going to fund Google, they already get some from reading my (spam) emails.
They do, and invariably fail but I'd argue trying to hide an adblocker is going to be more tricky than pretending to be android, for example.
But both downloading and alternative frontends still work fine, I just got the message on youtube for the first time (only on desktop though, not android, firefox on both), minor inconvenience to run yt-dlp in an internet accessible folder and means I retain the content should their random behaviour make it unavailable in the future.
> They do, and invariably fail but I'd argue trying to hide an adblocker is going to be more tricky than pretending to be android, for example.
AFAIK thirdparty youtube clients are just a glorified webview. Also, if anything pretending to be android is way harder than pretending to be a browser. There's way more fingerprinting/attestation that's available on android than through javascript APIs.
I didn't say client, I said frontend (ie; invidious, which is not a webview nor a client), but the likely reason its easier to pretend to be android is they have to support older versions for a long time, once you've emulated the behaviour its difficult for them to fix that
>but the likely reason its easier to pretend to be android is they have to support older versions for a long time, once you've emulated the behaviour its difficult for them to fix that
1. Needing to support older versions is specifically why most of the client logic isn't in the app itself, it's in a javascript bundle that it receives from the server. At this point you can't pretend to be an android app making HTTP api calls. You have to either provide a fully functioning javascript execution environment, or deal with all the API changes that they throw your way through the updated javascript bundles[1].
2. Pretending to be android is harder than you think. There's tens of thousands of system APIs available that you can call, to check for inconsistencies or implementation quirks. You can even try to fingeprint/profile the hardware (eg. GPU or DSP) itself, or the java execution environment. DRMs use the same principles to bind activation tokens to a given machine, so you can't crack a game by taking one valid token and sharing it with everyone else.
I did update but it turns out the version in debian is hopelessly outdated anyway. Eventually I figured out how to install the latest version which does indeed work.
YouTube will be rolling out more aggressive Adblock detection. If you don’t like ads and desire to continue using the service, it’s time to consider paying for it.