This was annoying me in browsers so i did a bit of reading and found out that not only can I remove their ad block blocker in browser, but my TVs also support ad free YouTube. Thanks Google! Couldn’t have done it without you.
EDIT: I’m fascinated by the childishness of those who are complaining about the $10. Not only you don’t have to pay it, and not only that it’s open source, and not only the intentions are clear on why it’s not a permissive license made to fight filling average Joe with malware like always being done with NewPipe and others on Play Store, but also you can pick your poison. Would you like google to win this dumb war on ad blockers? Or would you like to support non-perfect people making FOSS apps for your benefit? I really don’t get you, guys. Pick your battles! Take the win and shut up for once!
However, almost all these guys are using the same libraries under the hood. When Google breaks one you’re probably going to break most of them leaving us all scrambling to find the next way.
I see there’s a lot of negativity around GrayJay and their licensing and I don’t disagree; but there’s a battle going on here It’s Google against the world. Having private paid entities working on this alongside the FOSS efforts is definitely not a bad thing. The fact that they’re running source available means that other people can look at what they’re doing even if they can’t use their code directly.
They can use the code directly. The license allows “review, compilation and non-commercial distribution”.
It doesn’t explicitly allow modification, but they do define “code” as “the code and any part of it and any derivative of it”, so clearly derivatives are expected.
Do you REALLY think that Google is not able to block you altogether, if they really wanted to? The have permabanned entire companies and all the personal account of employees before for a misstep of one of these employees. It’s just a matter of time.
That could be true. But if they decide to do that, they are gonna need to invest a lot, and if they success they are gonna lose a lot of viewers. Because for the mayority of the people, when you are use to ads-free, going back to ads its wonna be very difficult.
It’s pretty random whether you get the message or not. Some of my friends, including me, straight up cannot watch youtube on their website half of the time anymore, because it full blocks us. It’s not just an annoying message, videos actually just don’t play. But I only get it on some days. I think the message only pops up if you’ve been watching for more than like an hour straight. Then again, some of my friends have never seen the message. Who knows. Just more weird big tech server bullshit. Like how twitter’s api works 15% of the time (for me).
Purge cache and refresh does the trick if you have problems with the firefox+ublock combination. Or you have some other active extensions which prevents ublock from doing its thing.
Been watching for 3h straight and still no pop or problem with videos but when time eventually come I’ll try to setup UBO filter or using 3rd party frontend
I’m daily using uBlock Origin (with Firefox) on Windows, and ReVanced on Android, and have experienced zero indications that Google is at war with ad blockers. These two are fucking fantastic and highly recommended. I don’t expect it to last forever, but bravo to these devs and contributors.
I got fed up with this shit and invested a bit of time into getting a working Premium Family plan through a cheap country (Ukraine is about $4 per month). I invited my whole family (parents included) so essentially 6 people have an ad-free YouTube now for less than $1 each (per month). I assume that’s still less than what they have gotten by serving us a shit ton of ads. And I am rid of that cat and mouse game for a while.
As others said: VPN. Ukraine seems to work good currently, since the Credit Card address isn’t validated. Cheaper countries like India or Turkey now check if the CC you use is from that country. That is a bit more complicated to pull off, so that wasn’t worth it for me.
For the service they offer (the hosting basically) I am actually willing to pay quite a bit. But what they typically ask for (about €15 for a single account) that’s just not worth it, given that YouTube isn’t the producer of the content they serve. Music might be a bit more complicated thanks to the fucking idiotic way how licensing around that works. Anyway: nothing of that excuses the excessive use of ads they serve nowadays.
If you consider YouTube as garbage, then it would be a no-brainer to just stop using it, instead of complaining about ads, right? And no, I couldn’t care less. I use YT maybe twice per year. It could go offline tomorros, as far as I am concerned.
see the entitlement in the comments that seem to think YouTube should be both free of ads and free to use and that Google should subsidize it for some reason
post my copy-paste comment reiterating that YouTube is a business and not a charity
see comments from idiots that attack the commenter instead of actually trying to argue against the point or come up with any sane solution or any attempt to advance the conversation
realise people just want the labour of others for free
I’m willing to engage this discussion with you :).
I don’t believe i’m entitled to any labor for free, but i do oppose the mechanic of huge corporations starting with good & free services, and when they then become a monopoly, suddenly i’m “entitled and want labor for free and an idiot” when i don’t agree with all the enshittification, money grabbing, privacy violations, and everything else they think they can get away with.
If you start a service with a certain premise (it being free, little ads, …), and then once you’re a monopoly and want some extra money start changing all that, while making sure any competition has as little chance as possible to challenge you… yeah, good luck with that XD.
And i’ll make a predition, give it 5 years at most before game passes go through this phase. Currently all the gamers are “wow, these are such good value”, once it gives the publishers enough of an excuse to stop allowing you to buy them, watch the same fragmentation & raised prices, enshittification, possibly even advertising getting added to it once you’re stuck using such a system.
I don’t believe i’m “entitled”, but i won’t support such tactics & monopoly abuse. They came to power by pretending to be a free site to share videos on, and they’ll die that way as far as i’m concerned. Good riddance.
Thank you for calling this aspect out. I’m surprised so many people are overlooking it. I protest YouTube for the same reasons, but I’ve got one more to add.
When they merged Google Music into YouTube, the service became worse. I’d often have music streaming throughout the day over my speakers, but that broke after the merge.
Anytime I watched a video on my phone that had Content ID-recognized music in it (even in the background), they would cut the stream to my speakers because I am only allowed one stream with any music in it at all.
This isn’t the behavior when you use the ad supported service. Only the paid.
Not to mention all the proper features of Google Music that didn’t carry forward.
It’s mostly that the multi billion dollar profit organisation didn’t need to do this. Where does that money go? Even though it’s over the back of the labour and time of both the content creators and people watching.
Google is doing 60 billion dollar profit fine. Thanks. And not paying proper tax either, lol. It’s pure extraction of labour value.
Until yesterday I was blocked from youtube, despite using UBO. Today it works. I don’t know if it is random or if UBO does something. Possibly it will stop working again. In any case I started using piped (hope they don’t decide to do something with it).
UBO updates their filters when they can, as they find and fix changes.
Youtube directly responds to those patches by updating their system. Last I checked, they do this twice a day.
Any time your UBO isnt stopping youtube, you are using filters from before youtubes last update. Opening your UBO settings, clearing and updating your filters, and refreshing your browser fixes this.
The only time it doesnt is if UBO hasnt patched youtubes most recent changes. This window of time is teeeny tiny.
No problems here whatsoever, I don’t know what everybody is talking about. Remember to donate some bucks to your favorite open source adblock (or piping app), thank you.
Intrusive and sneaky ads like the ones on YouTube should be heavily regulated if not illegal.
Edit: especially ads louder than the average content volume, repetitive jingles designed to get stuck in your head, billboards, and ads thrown in the middle of the video you’re watching
I can honestly say, apart from seeing it on on the background when visiting parents or similar, that I haven’t watched free to air TV in maybe 15 years. Been streaming or downloading all that time.
“Loud” is unfortunately hard to quantify. There’s a lot of psychoacoustics that mean that the number of decidels really doesn’t tell you what’s loud and what’s not.
This is a great demo of how sounds can appear extremely loud without actually being physically very loud: youtu.be/tONF9OSUOSw?t=7m16s
Anyway the point is that it’s hard to make rules about this kind of thing, because sound is subjective and there are ways to circumvent any restrictions you make.
Googles ad platform is utterly full of fraudulent scams and grifters. Bring on regulations and HEAVY fines for Google making profit of fraud and crimes.
LibreWolf (Fork of Firefox without the crap like Pocket or Sponsored sites) is great too. It also comes preinstalled with uBlock Origin. It’s what I recommend to everyone.
LibreWolf also makes significant privacy and security improvements by applying certain settings from Arkenfox user.js and from the Tor Browser. Sure, I can debloat and harden Firefox myself, but all of that is already done on LibreWolf, so that’s what I recommend to new users, as they like to stick to the default settings.
Yeah its fair enough, but it's easier to just use FF for me, I don't care if they want some anonymous usage statistics and trying to be fully private online is a fools errand. Base FF is good enough imo.
It’s not just Mozilla telemetry that LibreWolf protects you against, it also prevents random websites from fingerprinting you and the preinstalled uBlock Origin blocks trackers and all of that shit
It’s also not that difficult to configure hardened Firefox. It takes a minute or two and there are plenty of written and video guides that’ll have even the least tech savvy people up and running quickly. The tech literacy required to reasonably protect your privacy isn’t very high anymore. The biggest hurdle is getting people to care about their privacy in the first place.
Librewolf is a wonderful project but not something I recommend very often in my personal life, if only because most people just don’t need or want that level of protection at the expense of convenience.
You can also use the Firefox profile maker which is basically lets you create a new Firefox profile with the features and hardening you want. The website: ffprofile.com
I keep forgetting that Windows doesn’t have a proper package manager. From a software architecture point of view, an application shouldn’t be responsible for updates, this should be handled by the operating system or a specific component of it, the package manager (which Windows doesn’t have, at least not by default).
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