YouTube's anti-adblock rollout has finally arrived for Firefox users

I’m sure many of you are already aware that YouTube has been rolling out anti-adblock detection for Chrome users for a few weeks now.

Today, as a long time Firefox user with the fantastic uBlock Origin extension installed, I got my first anti-adblock popup on the platform. Note that this may not happen to you personally for a while, but it is inevitably coming for everyone.

Thankfully, the fine folks at uBlock Origin have already advised a simple workaround (on Reddit, yuck!) which I will duplicate in a simplified form below for your convenience. I have tested it on Firefox and it is working fine for me (so far).

PLEASE READ AND FOLLOW ALL OF THE INSTRUCTIONS IN THIS POST.

  1. Update uBO to the latest version (1.52.0+) . <== The extension itself, for technical improvements. You do this in your browser.
  2. Remove your custom config / reset to defaults. <== This means removing your custom filters (or disabling My filters) and disabling ALL additional lists you’ve enabled. It might be quicker to make a backup of your config and restore to defaults instead.
  3. Force an update of your Filter Lists. <== This is within the extension. Lists are what determine what’s blocked or not. How to update Filter lists: Click 🛡️ uBO’s icon > the ⚙ Dashboard button > the Filter lists pane > the 🕘 Purge all caches button > the 🔃 Update now button.
  4. Disable all other extensions AND your browser’s built-in blockers. <== No need to uninstall, just disable them. They might interfere with our solutions.

Make sure you follow all 4 points above. If you’re seeing the message, it’s likely due to your custom config (either additional lists or separate filters in My filters).

Restarting your browser afterwards may help too.

Once you’ve gotten rid of the issue on default settings, you can slowly start restoring your config (if you really need it). Do it gradually, to easier find out what was causing the issue in the first place. Once you find the culprit, simply skip it in your config.

If you want to use Enhancer for YouTube*, you have to* disable its adblocking*.*

May the force uBlock Origin be with you!

cows_are_underrated,
@cows_are_underrated@feddit.de avatar

Got my first popup today, but apart from it being annoying literally nothing changed. Still no ads.

doctorcrimson,

If you sign in, then they start threatening to lock video player on your account unless you disable, then they do. So I guess we’re all just gonna sign out and be lurkers now.

pizzawithdirt,

I started using Piped to get around this. I recommend you do too. Maybe a DNS ad blocker could also work.

doctorcrimson,

I don’t trust Equifax with my financial records but creators are expected to trust basement dwellers with access to their accounts? Maybe I’ll make a dummy account just for piped.

cybermass,

Thank you friend

Gorillatactics,

I better start watching all the videos I bookmarked over the years.

Nommer,

Hey Google, maybe you assholes should realize that if people are willing to jump through this many hoops to not watch ads then maybe you should realize that ads are the problem, not users. Nobody wants ads shoved down their throat so kindly go fuck yourselves. Advertising is a cancer. I’ve been trying to convince people how dangerous attention grabbing billboards are but nobody seems to care.

JiveTurkey,

Honest question. What is the consensus for how services like YouTube should be funded?

uglyduckling81,

They have a paid method in place.

YouTube Premium.

Free access you pay with ads.

All of us cheapskates have been using adblock or YouTube vanced to get the service completely free.

I’m not going to curse them for making efforts to stop us leaching their service for free.

SlippyCliff76,

The problem with this is that Alphabet already collects and sells your usage data. When you use any of Alphabet’s “free services” you are the product. What they’re doing is double dipping. Not only that, but they’re getting very intrusive with the ads.

I can remember a time not long ago when the only ads on the platform were in the form of banner ads placed in the bottom of the video and off to the side next to recommended. There were no ads in the player. If they went back to that, I would not mind disabling my ad blocker.

BaardFigur,

What are they gonna do with your user data, if they’re not gonna get to serve you any ads, though?

Not defending them in any way, fuck ads, and fuck user data collection

xenoclast,

This is very true. They sell your data to their advertising partners. That’s what it’s for.

YouTube is trying to maximize profits. Doesn’t mean we should let them.

xenoclast, (edited )

Who cares? If they can’t run a service providing what people want. They disappear. The world won’t fall apart without a website that hosts videos. We’ll move on.

In the meantime don’t let them try to get away with maximizing profit at your expense.

Your best investment at this stage is support your local software developers and pirates working against the huge megacorp that gives zero fucks about what you think.

jamon,

I get if your position is that the ads are too intrusive, but if you don’t want ads at all, you need to understand that that is not a viable solution for free services. If your position is that you feel like your use of that service should be subsidized by others, who can afford it more, I can even understand that. But they do also offer an ad free experience for a fee.

I don’t love that they’re doing this, but I do understand it.

DogMuffins,

I don’t love that they’re doing this, but I do understand it.

I’m seeing this narrative more and more: that somehow ads are good because they allow us to consume content without paying, but I strongly disagree.

Firstly, consumers pay for ads. If advertising of any kind was outlawed tomorrow (not realistic, I know) then ultimately that’s an expense that companies would not need to pay, and economic competition would result in a reduction of the cost consumers pay for those products and services.

Secondly, ads or subscription is a false dichotomy. No alternatives have been developed over the last two decades because the advertising model is the most profitable for corporations building the web.

Direct-to-content-producer funding is better for consumers and producers. Yes, no good model nor platform for this exists, because it hasn’t been developed.

Sadly, haughtily state “I do understand [youtubes revenue model]” is to have swallowed the fallacious assertion that the only possible options are ads or subscription.

PopularUsername,

What do you mean by direct-to-content-producer? I can’t find it on Google. Are you suggesting the viewers pay the content creator and the content creator pays YouTube for hosting?

Subscription is a reasonable funding method. It’s also reasonably priced. I think the bigger problem is companies that refuse to offer subscriptions, because Facebook knows no one is dumb enough to pay $15-20 a month, but that is what they make off the ads so offering the service for anything less would cause them to lose money. Merely offering the subscription shows users how much Facebook really makes off of them.

YouTube is also very generous with how much they spit revenue with creators. I don’t like that they exist as a monopoly, but at least they aren’t parasites like the other half of the web.

funkless_eck,

they mean pay the content creator directly to access their work.

If you want to watch a video it’s 25cents or a dollar or whatever and the money goes to the content maker

Ataraxia,

Who is paying to host?

DogMuffins,

I mean exactly what it sounds like? Yes - paying content producers.

Paying youtube is a very “google centric” perspective. In 2023, what is YouTube actually providing? It’s basically user discovery via their algorithm - which is just another part of the ad revenue model.

Subscription is not a reasonable funding model. The cost is excessive for most users. Low-use users subsidise high-use users. Additionally, it presumes you only want one or a few sources of content - perpetuating a monopoly or oligopoly. Micropayments to producers would allow consumers to consume the content they want.

letsgocrazy,

They didn’t say “ads are good” what a totally egregious way to misrepresent what you just read

DogMuffins,

They said ads provide a revenue model for providing content to users. I paraphrased in an appropriate vernacular. It’s not a misrepresentation at all. The comment I replied to is expounding the virtues of advertising.

Amends1782,

They could not possibly care any less , sadly

cows_are_underrated,
@cows_are_underrated@feddit.de avatar

There’s no fucking way I gonna watch a 20 seconds ad for a 10 seconds video.

stewie3128,

I pay for streaming services where I don’t want to see the ads - which is to say, every streaming service I use at any given moment. I hate ads.

If I can’t get media ad-free, to the high seas it is.

Website ads, though, can go to hell in my opinion. There’s no good way to let a tasteful amount through with negligible impact on pageload speed. I subscribe to a few newspapers, but for everything else there’s uBO.

I consider myself lucky to be able to pay my way out of the problem right now. Until I was in my early 30s, I never paid for a single piece of software or media, simply because I couldn’t afford it. I did FOSS where I could, but, still…

Now that I can afford to pay for the things I use (and frequently write the expense off to my business), I haven’t ventured into international waters for years. Hopefully, “voting with my wallet” and financially supporting the software and media I use can go some distance to preventing more draconian DRM from being imposed.

Although everyone needs to get paid for their work, I’ll never begrudge anyone pirating something because they can’t afford it. I’ve been there, and wouldn’t have been able to advance in my field without doing so.

mrmanager,
@mrmanager@lemmy.today avatar

But hey, richest company in the world need to eat ok?

/s

Fr00dyTowel,

Cheers, I haven’t encountered it yet but good to know.

Eudaimonia, (edited )
@Eudaimonia@lemmy.ml avatar

For me in Europe with Linux its thankfully still working with uBlock

I always try to use alternatives, but at least on desktop, it unfortunatelly often doesnt work right (freetube, piped)

But theres of also youtube-dl, hope at least this stays an option!

Tanya,

Grayjay for the win! Was launched last month, Louis Rossman is a blessing.

lobodon,

Decided to start using Freetube on desktop, Newpipe on mobile. It works!

0x2d,

Also try yewtu.be (Invidious instance)

ConstipatedWatson,

Apologies for my ignorance, but… What are they?

Are they front ends that strip YouTube of ads or straight different hosting websites, which will certainly incur in high costs to maintain the amount of videos posted to YouTube?

I guess I’ve also seen someone mention Piped. Is it the same thing as Newpipe (if you know)?

Thanks!

GodsKillerKirb,

NewPipe is a YouTube frontend (on android), it’s like invidious minus the “instance” part, where it basically just grabs the video directly and just plays that. With NewPipe the video still gets views on YouTube’s end, I don’t think videos watched through invidious count towards the view count on YouTube’s end.

Freetube is something that I’ve seen and/or heard of once or twice; because of that, I can’t really say what it is. It’s definitely something that is either like NewPipe or Invidious. (I have only heard about it once or twice due to being a Linux user (I use Arch BTW) and stubling upon it’s github repo.)

I really only ever watch YouTube on my phone and because I’m an Android user, I have heard of NewPipe and been aware of it for quite a while. Invidious I know about for kind of the same reason. There’s an Android app called LibreTube that is basically a frontend for Piped. (Piped is either an alternative to Invidious or is an instance of Invidious, or just straight up uses Invidious as like a backend. Don’t entirely remember)

ConstipatedWatson,

Thanks, I’ll check them all out!

So they’re all front ends or apps, they’re not really alternative hosting services!

I have Android on my phone and MacOS on my laptop (I’ve been on Linux for several years, but I unfortunately don’t have time to work on installing it and making sure everything works. Just life changes)

rawr,

There’s a thing still works in all browsers is search video in Bing and watch without enter in YouTube site.

librechad,

Just use Invidious.

AOCapitulator, (edited )
@AOCapitulator@hexbear.net avatar

If YouTube stops my adblockers working the only thing, and I mean the ONLY thing it will mean, is I’ll never watch another YouTube video as long as I live

Fuck you google

ChuckEffingNorris,

That’s what they want. Consume ads, pay or stop using bandwidth.

I am unsure how much they care about views when so many have adblockers. It will be a useful metric when the huge majority can not block ads.

CentreForAnts,

They probably don’t care as they weren’t making money off you anyway ¯_(ツ)_/¯

danielquinn, (edited )
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

I was thinking of experimenting with a Firefox extension that upon hitting a YouTube page, it just launches yt-dlp [url] &amp;&amp; mpv [downloaded file]. Is there any interest here in that sort of thing?

bigkahuna1986, (edited )

Isn’t there an extension that automatically opens FreeTube?

Edit: I found it here addons.mozilla.org/en-US/…/freetube-redirect/ but it has low reviews and was last updated in 2018. I’m going to see if something else exists.

Nyarlathotep,

I would not want the download to commence automatically, but having a a download button on each YT page would be very convenient. Obviously I have yt-dlp installed already but if I can mash a button on the page and get a download going immediately, that saves a lot of clicks.

online,

Is there a way to pipe the download directly to a video player so it’s more like a stream so that the data is just cached and deleted afterwards?

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

Very likely. If I write this thing, I’ll provide both options.

merthyr1831,

I’m too dumb to know how it worked in the backend, but MPC-HC had some extensions back in the day that streamed YouTube videos to the client so it could interpolate frames for fake 60fps content. It even had a browser extension to launch MPC-HC with the right configs from a youtube video.

Swarfega,

I was getting the banner and eventually it just stopped me watching. Clearing the filter cache and then updating them again worked for me. It took a browser restart though.

net00,

All I need from youtube are my handful of subscriptions and my watch later, so I have moved on to invidious. I’d recommend it

Karyoplasma,

You can request to download your logged activity data and you will get a zip-file that will contain all the information you need in neatly separated files. Takes about a day for YT to package your data.

HawlSera,

Invidious?

Amends1782,

It’s a privacy respecting front end for YouTube. Same data, less google cancer. Just look it up. I’m a fan of yewtu.be its a solid public invidious instance. It’s all very similar to what piped is doing. I haven’t used YouTube proper in ages.

HawlSera,

I may have to use that if they really are going to block ad blockers, I’ve sworn off making YouTube videos ever since they hit me with a strike for promoting gang violence and criminal organizations. I didn’t know such thing but apparently they are going to retroactively consider any persons they consider too controversial to talk about on YouTube as the head of a criminal organization, and any explanation as to who they are support for them.

It simply isn’t safe to post anything on YouTube if they are going to ban you for something they retroactively decided was bad. If I post any content in a video format it’s probably going on a Federated video site

sibannac,

What about pi-hole? I’ve been thinking about setting one up, will that get my account banned?

clayt,

It doesn’t work for YouTube ads

kaotic,

I’m running it at home won’t affect YouTube as they are serving it from their own domain, and pi-hole just blocks domains.

Karyoplasma,

pihole does not block YouTube ads since they are delivered from the same DNS as the video.

TalkingCat,

Pi-hole doesn’t work for blocking youtube ads, it is the weak part of dns adblocking, since you’d have to block youtube itself

Boozilla,
@Boozilla@lemmy.world avatar

Even though pi hole doesn’t work with YouTube ads, I highly recommend trying it out. It’s a really nice “always on” layer of protection that blocks a lot of trackers and shit, and if you set it up correctly it does it for your whole home network. When people come to my house and surf the web on their phones & tablets, they’re amazed how much better the experience is without constant obnoxious ads popping up all over the pages. Pi Hole by itself is not sufficient security but it’s a nice layer to add to add to whatever else you’re using.

lastrogue, (edited )

Pi-hole doesn’t stop YouTube ads in my experience. I use it. But I layer other things on it like ublock or Brave (please don’t hate for Brave, it just works across mobile and desktop for me).

Edit: pihole is dns blocking and ublock or things like it are element blocking in the browser. They are both good at what they do. Just different about how they do it.

TableteKarcioji,

Pihole does not block YouTube adds.

daniskarma,

I think youtube ads are served by the same dns as the content, so pi hole shouldn’t block youtube ads at all.

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