Show HN: YouTube banned adblockers so I built an extension to skip their ads
Hi HN!
Since Youtube no longer allows AdBlockers, I built my own extension to get around their video ads. If there is an ad it temporarily manipulates the video; Mutes the volume, sets speed to 10x, and skips it if there is a button.
Chrome Webstore link: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ad-accelerator/gpbo...
770 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 389 ms ] threadAt least at work, I kept getting modals saying adblockers weren't allowed, but I never got those on firefox.
It seems to have gone away though (probably an update from ublock) even on chrome
Also, not to be a downer, but CWS and YouTube are both Google property. If your extension does well then they can coordinate to make your life hard. I experienced this personally (https://thenextweb.com/news/how-youtube-killed-an-extension-...) where there was an implication my developer key would be revoked if I didn't delist.
So is Chrome!
I have to wonder when Google will will start using the browser itself as leverage (beyond the upcoming Manifest V3 changes).
There's 3 hypotheses I have for why this is.
1. YouTube has been gradually rolling out the counter-blocking to an expanding number of randomly selected users.
2. YouTube doesn't bother blocking me because I've purchased a substantial amount of content from them. There's little benefit in discouraging me from buying more content in the future.
3. YouTube has done some analytics to figure out that I'm the kind of person who will never return if no ad blocking is allowed and doesn't trust them to keep ads out of Premium.
I don't suppose you've purchased shows or movies through YouTube?
I feel that YouTube is very deeply entrenched in a streaming architecture which makes it challenging to serve ads that are indistinguishable from primary content. All of the pushback against adblocking extensions feels like an unwinnable arms race until Manifest v3 becomes mandatory.
Contrast this with Twitch - where uBlock doesn't impact ads at all. I feel Twitch engineered their service to defeat adblock from day 1. YouTube wants to be in the same position, but doesn't seem willing or able to mirror Twitch's architecture.
Honestly though, it will come and it will be in a form of copyright infringement, or something vague like that.
Good luck. Don't build your castle on top of another castle.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But I definitely also recommend trying out frontends that support it.
I cannot imagine trying to use video while having to run a gauntlet of both YouTube ads and video sponsor segments.
[1] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.polymorphicshad...
https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/
Recently it has stopped triggering again though. I have no idea why.
Instead they spread their updates over users 0.1% at a time over an hour or so. That way if youtube stops working for that fraction of users, they can cancel and rollback the update.
Sometimes this means that you might be in that tiny fraction of users who gets a change before the devs who maintain the UBO lists, and sometimes that change is related to ads.
(It's only happened to me twice in the last 2 years)
In this case, you don't need to mess around with other extensions, you just need to wait an hour or so until those devs have seen Google's changes and they can push their own updates to reblock the new ads.
If you want it to go faster, you can go to the github issues pages for the filterlists and they have instructions for how to get uBlock Origin to generate a blob of debug info to post on github to speed up their updates.
Part of me was considering just self-hosting an alternative YT frontend. At this point I'm sorta happy with how YT slowly has decreased its usage in my life
There's plenty of losers out there who can't or won't use ad-blockers that they can make their ad money on; trying to harass the 20% of users who use ad-blockers is just an arms race they can't win.
Interestingly I just tried Chrome (Canary build) with uBO and I'm getting ads... :o
https://github.com/TheRealJoelmatic/RemoveAdblockThing
...but it seems to work ok in incognito tabs, so youtube gets even less data on me now.
[0] https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions/blob/master/f...
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/good-luck-im-behind-7-proxies
Even if we suppose that a simple hosts file could somehow block YouTube ads today, YouTube would detect that. It would not fare any better than any other ad blocker.
Back when a hosts file was able to disable YouTube ads, YouTube didn't do that.
So host-based blocking alone could be considered as just an 'emergency wheel' in case you'd had a flat, or something.
This extension does not block, but instead just fast forward the ad (playback speed at 10x - tbh, it could'be been at 100x probably!) and mutes it. So from the youtube js perspective, the ad has played and wasn't blocked.
I've not seen it since. Only side effect is videos sometimes pause right as they start. I assume because it stops the video and shows the pop up. I can just resume immediately though.
It was fine. I had no problem with it.
My guess is they don't show ads to guests before they reach a certain amount of frequent visits.
In TV movies or YouTube, the actual content gets paused so that at least makes sense, it's just an interruption. But in Twitch it's like if they put ads in the middle of a football game! Imagine being interrupted for ads and back to players celebrating a goal.
Another thing Twitch does badly is to put ads on my face not even 30 seconds after joining a channel. Psychologically it feels like I haven't had time to get invested in the content, so it's not worth it to put up with the ads, and it makes me move somewhere else or close the tab.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-yo...
You need hard work on the encoder to do that (at least to segment video, because re-encoding dynamically is obviously not an option). Not profitable for Google.
I view ads as a reminder to myself that I should maybe be doing something else with my time. I would love an ad blocker that blanked my entire computer screen for the duration of any ad, it would be a great chance to breathe and stop doom scrolling.
That seems a lot simpler to do?
How fast would YT issue a C&D if someone created an app that did this for you so that you just entered in the channels you follow, and then it would just check every so often for new content?
Happy user here as well.
How unrealible NewPipe was for you?
It's not a 1-1 alternative to YT as creators have to opt in, so most (imo low effort) videos/creators won't be on there. It's fantastic for any tech/engineering/history/news though, high quality/effort vids with no bullshit.
Note: I have no vested interest in Nebula, I'm just a user that's happy to support good creators and a platform that's actively opposed to advertising.
If this counts as an ad/spam - let me know and I'll delete this comment.
Funny how the AI barons never mention how AI can empower normies against them.
Crickets man. Crickets.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38306613
Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots.
Horrifying amounts of local storage required though.
I've got severe ADHD so these types of assessments are near impossible due to the slow dialogue and forced wait time. Though most of these courses give you multiple (or unlimited) attempts, so I'll screenshot each slide + wrong answers and brute force until I'm done. At least I can get other stuff done in the meantime.
A common easy way is to just re-enable the “next” button. Even if it takes me longer than just doing legitimately, I find it more educational.
You have no expectation of privacy on company hardware, they are allowed to do anything they want to do with the signal you provide them...
In any case, what I meant is that actively lying and deceiving about whether you did the compliance training (or any other employer ordered training) can probably get you into hot water.
My manager was impressed when I scored 110%.
In some US States (e.g., California), there are requirements on how many hours of training on topic X must be done every year. So if you finish faster, they literally, legally, have to feed you more crap until the hours of training have been met.
However, the vast majority are the exact opposite. Loud music, shouting, uncomfortable sound effects, a long playtime, and to top it off, either advertising an outright scam or else a product that I have no interest in whatsoever. Sometimes I have to rip my headphones off to protect my ears. Not to mention the timing -- ads between movements in a classical symphony, or else right during a passage itself.
It's a good reminder that while I've enjoyed Youtube for many years, I also have a CD collection I can listen to instead.
Really, they should just get rid of all ads and force everyone to pay a subscription, because apparently that's what everyone wants. Oh no, wait, they want neither; people want Youtube for free without ads.
Sure, YT could make less profit and therefore serve fewer ads/lower premium price, but in order to convince them to do that, humans would actually have to work together and boycott it to send a message, and as we all know that ain't ever gonna happen.
I mean the client can then undo this, as it can any JS the page offers, but there's nothing harder about detecting playbackRate changes vs something which causes a DOM update.
Fool me once, …
The first cable-only station to do ads was USA in 1977. But since cable always carried local stations, cable always had channels where ads were run.
Until I see a report of exactly how much my monthly fee directly goes to each of my subscribed channels, I'm never going to believe that.
And again: avoiding paying the platform operators no matter the cost.
Everyone’s YouTube consumption is different. I’m not the person you directed the comment at but I realistically follow less than a handful of creators on YouTube. Subscribing to all their Patreons (not sure if all of them have it) would be quite doable.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I don't mean to be glib or dismissive I'm just writing this rather hastily! and this is a pretty well-established finding, at least in my own head, having gone over I don't know how many thousands of these cases...
Edit: but if you want to link to specific cases where you feel like there was an asymmetry, I'd be happy to take a look.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Just flagging is enough.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Note that the above architecture is modular in a way where other businesses could compete within individual components. E.g. a seed box provider, or a gateway provider, or creator services. Obviously, this is not as good for them (they'd like to force their vertical integration), but better for everyone else.
Or they could stop giving their service away for free, but we all know they benefit from network effects and mindshare, so they want to keep everyone there.
As long as they provide a free service that's bundled with malware, people will accept the service and just remove the malware. When you do something unethical to start, you can't be surprised that people don't play along as planned.
Point is, they chose to corner the market and be a vertically integrated platform with all the costs involved. They didn't have to. They do bad things to maintain that position. No need to shed any tears for their decision.
We don’t believe you.
I've flagged your comment for this reason.
> They assumed I was gonna pay the clerk at the grocery store.
Suppose a $14 subscription to YouTube Premium is typically split in half, $7 for the platform and $7 for content creators. If someone signs up for YouTube Premium but doesn't watch any videos at all, do creators split that $7 (in a proportion that roughly mirrors the existing amount creators were already getting paid: a bigger share of the $7 for those with a bigger share of views generally) or does the platform keep both halves?
I don't know that anyone here can say what does happen with that $7, but what should happen with it? Did creators earn it? If they earned it regardless of no plays from that user, it follows that in another universe where the Premium user only ever watched one single creator, that creator doesn't earn more of that particular $7 than they otherwise would.
Ads are supposed to incidental, you run ads and if too many people block them because they suck then congrats sucks for you. If no one sees them then sucks for you. Most people put up with TV ads when they're not even hard to skip. And for some reason IG ads are well liked. Forcing them harder I think has to make us confront what we're really doing here and what we're gaining by all this. Just pay for premium sounds nice when you don't think about it. If there's no universe where someone might actually prefer the ads if they were the same price then we're kinda admitting they have literally zero value to the viewer.
And that paints a very different picture of advertising than "the grease of the economic wheel" ya know? And clearly all advertising isn't like this, like I paid to see the Lego movie, Barbie was fantastic. I watched a YT video of a woman showing her design process for a product she's selling and it was fascinating but it was also just an ad. But if YT are there to suck just so you'll pay for it to suck less than that's not mutually beneficial trade that's extortion.
I know it's crazy but what I actually want is an ad model where I don't feel the need to make it go away and might actually enjoy. An ad model where it doesn't have to interrupt me and force itself upon my eyes because it's actually content I would watch on my own.
Like take for example Fly.io's blog. It's is some of the best advertising for the service and is definitely why I use them today. Raymond Hettenger's python YT series is a fantastic ad for his consultancy. Wendy's Twitter was/is hilarious. But its a weird dynamic because if the content is good you don't have to pay for it which seems silly because it's an ad all the same.
Absolutely. There is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing. Not a single thing.
I make it a point to recite this mantra in every single ad blocking thread I see:
Our attention is ours.
It's not theirs to sell to the highest bidder.
It's not currency to pay for services with.
It's part of our cognitive functions and it's absolutely inalienable.
They are not entitled to our attention.
Our minds are sacred ground. They do not get to violate it for profit.
They do not get to insert brands and products into our minds without our consent.
To do so is mind rape.
Advertising is therefore a form of violence.
Ad blockers are therefore legitimate self-defense against this violence.
Are you going to claim people's minds aren't sacred ground? That they're the corporation's market battle ground where they compete for brand awareness? That they're the government's blank slate to fill with propaganda at will? Ridiculous.
It's like going into a discussion about building your own custom PC from scratch and posting "Just buy it from Dell!" I mean, no shit!
Everyone obviously knows paying is an option. These articles/discussions aren't about the obvious, short, straightforward path.
There is value in reminding people that blocking ads when there is a paid ad free option is scummy behavior.
I don't care as much about Google losing money because of ad-blockers, they have plenty of money going around. The real people losing here are the ones who are creating the content. As it is they need to amass a large number of views to earn few dollars from a video. Depending on the type of content, a lot of time, money and effort goes into creating each of those videos.
i don't need to justify my actions. I know adblocking is denying revenue to the platform. i don't care.
The "just buy premium" crowd is assuming that people are rich enough to afford premium. May be they should consider how priviledged they are for having the spare money to dump on premium.
If they don't like it, they should eliminate the "free" version of the service straight up. If they send us ads, we'll delete them. Nothing they can do about it. We won't lose a second of sleep over it either.
Our attention is ours. It's not currency to pay for services with.
The article you're commenting on is all about something they're doing about it.
https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/
Nothing they can do about it. We own the computer their code is running on. We decide if it runs.
However, I imagine the hard part, if it comes to that, will be determining which code is which. Imagine the UI presented in a canvas, updated by a proprietary VM. You can see server connections of course, but their purpose is opaque. Perhaps ad/non-ad content is mixed into the same response. The ad-blockers may make some breakthroughs, but Google's under no obligation to keep it as easy as it is now. I suspect they've barely begun to try.
One day someone much smarter than me will invent an AI ad blocker which will do stuff like that automatically. Just imagine it. An AI that automatically filters ads, brands and other forms of noise in real time. It'd even work on audio and video. Hell, it'd work on real life through augmented reality glasses or something. If I can imagine it, then it must be possible.
> Google's under no obligation to keep it as easy as it is now
Actually they kind of are due to accessibility laws. Everything you proposed means rolling back literally every single one of the hard won advances in web accessibility. Everything that enables assistive technology also enables bots, scripts, automated access. I bet they really hate those users because of that.
> I suspect they've barely begun to try.
Yawn. Trillion dollar copyright industry has been playing this exact same cat and mouse game with copyright infringement for literally decades now. You're telling me Google's gonna win this?
Everyone who has any respect for the word "hacker" and what it stands for better hope they give up. There's only one way for them to win and that's by owning our computers. Devices must be literally physically cryptographically unable to run software that hurts their bottom line for them to win.
That's a fine stance, just don't use youtube.
A lot of these "moral" arguments for not paying or watching the ads fall apart because they seem ignore that option entirely.
Nah. I think I'll keep using it. After all, it's free.
No, its like stepping into a discussion about how 6 flags has made it harder to jump their fence to get in and saying "just buy a ticket"
Which, by the way, is the only defensible position.
I go into a store and they offer to give me a free cupcake if I'm willing to take their branded bumper sticker and put it on my car. I say sure, take the cupcake and the bumper sticker, and toss the sticker in the trash before I reach my car. Now they're following me out to my car to make sure I put it on. Fine. I'll do it, and then once I turn the corner, I'll pull it off and toss it. And the cat and mouse game continues, which is why nobody tries the "free cupcake for a bumper sticker" business model.
This thread starts, and someone says "You could always just pay for the cupcake, or keep the bumper sticker on your car..." Wow, no shit, Sherlock! That's obvious and adds nothing to the conversation.
To extend your analogy, it’s like your favorite cafe decided to offer free cupcakes, and not for a quick promotion, but for ten years, and then after all other bakers in town gave up on cupcakes, and there was only one provider of cupcakes that was very popular because they were completely free, the cafe put bumper stickers on the table next to the cupcakes for a few years and noticed people don’t like bumper stickers, and then one day they said these cupcakes weren’t free before, you were supposed to be putting stickers on your car, and the other patrons started accusing you of grift for not having adorned the bumper sticker, despite the fact that the cupcakes had been offered for free.
I’d say there are a bunch of acceptable analogies, such as the free time-share vacation if you listen to the real-estate pitch, or almost any sweepstakes scheme, or the old 10 cds for a penny - if you subscribe to the monthly plan - thing. TV advertising is exactly what YouTube is doing, and they’re trying to exert more control over viewers than TVs ever did, because they can.
The analogy that doesn’t work is comparing YouTube to any strictly paid product, and equating it to stealing. That’s false and bogus, but I’m preaching to the choir there, you already know that. :) I don’t mind the reminders that it’s available as a paid service. I might mind if YouTube does what movies and other paid streaming services have done and start showing ads during the paid content anyway.
Of course that will never happen because these crooks are addicted to our data - and even more so if I am a paying customer.
I was using Firefox + uBlock Origin and the site would periodically stop working. Clearing cache and updating the uBO lists would fix it, but only temporarily. No idea if the situation has changed.
One alternative is pay for YT premium, but they still might target you with ads[1] which is risable. I've heard FreeTube is a thing as well.
1. https://arstechnica.com/google/2023/11/google-kills-web-inte...
There's that other bug where they disable the navigation during the ads and you have to turn the screen off and back on to the lock screen to get rid of it.
Such fortuitous defects.
Brendan Eichs Brave browser bypasses the YouTube bullshit if you want a workaround on android.
I get about 1-2 minutes of ads, maybe 2-3 times per 40 minutes of content. Maybe it depends on the content?
There’s also an ad-free plan.
[1] https://github.com/LuanRT/YouTube.js
[2] https://github.com/Andrews54757/FastStream
[3] Chrome (also available for Firefox): https://chromewebstore.google.com/u/1/detail/faststream-vide...
To me, FastStream is just a fun hobby project, not a product. I intend to always keep it free without unnecessary bloat or spyware of any kind. So, I don't really have a desire for it to be "successful" beyond it being immediately useful to me and a couple of my friends.
Edit: fixed, works well in every test case
EDIT: It seems like Firefox has some special unsafe eval rule breaking dash.js
EDIT2: Problem was actually FF's sendMessage not toString()'ing URL objects. I've fixed it in V1.2.1 for FF (approval by mozilla pending)
EDIT3: V1.2.1 (Firefox hotfix) is available now
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/faststream/
Example of a shader I was playing with https://github.com/TianZerL/ACNetGLSL
I just found this for fsr [0] which might work for the upscaling use case.
[0] https://github.com/Hajime-san/web-fsr/tree/main/browser-exte...
You mean "since YouTube attempted to bar adblockers, but instead entered into a war with them that it cannot win, most users of adblockers continue to watch YouTube without issues".
They already use it for paid “commercial” content on their site (like TV shows and movies, whether pay per view or in a subscription).
As a surprised customer of YouTube premium having all ads gone across videos and music across all devices really might not be a bad deal for anyone on the fence for a family plan and all your devices.
In terms of working around ads.. There are some neat solutions that seem to work ok for YouTube on tv.. but so far the family plan seems ok.
Was anyone able tog eat off the premium plan and have no ads on their phones, computers, tvs and smart speakers?
I have heard some folks using tools like invidious but I'm not sure how well they map to multiple screens.
Being able to put the same account onto the built in youtube apps on TV's and mobile devices has been useful. No need to buy a white noise machine for kids, we just use a google mini in speaker mode only. Sure, I'd like it to be something else but premium has me on board for now.
It is going to be an interesting waste of resources. =)
The fact is the CTR for brand aware consumers will be negatively affected by burning goodwill with peripheral viewers. Thus, while increased paid impressions will be good for Google/Alphabet short term revenue, the actual consumer sales for advertisers will show a degraded campaign performance.
It was called a contaminated lead pool if I recall. If 80% of traffic now associates a brand as a nuisance, than it will cost >12 times whatever people spent on the bad Marketing plan to attempt to "fix".
Spectacularly bad business decision, as someone is letting the dog drive =)
Paying to remove ads is how you get no ads.
Refusing to pay for ad-free services just tells companies that there’s no point in attempting to make a good user experience with no ads.
Somehow I suspect the ones obsessively managing ad blockers to make sure they don’t see a single ad aren’t the ones that watch 2 videos a month or less
Like, is it that hard to imagine someone using YouTube a lot and finding the premium service worth the cost?
I want to not see ads. If someone sells that product to me I am buying. If someone doesn’t offer a way to avoid ads I’m selling (like how I used to be a sports fan and now I don’t tune in ).
If I get ads in my premium subscription I can always cancel.
I think you’re simplifying customer demographics. I think that companies and advertisers know that the people willing to pay to stop ads legitimately buy fewer frivolous products. The people who don’t mind ads are the ones who can be reached. These two customer bases don’t intersect.
Edit: in the spirit of dialogue, can you describe exactly how paying a company to spy and manipulate you more with zero gurantees they won't ban you for nothing ever is smart? I just don't get the rationale here, how are you in any way better off paying (to say nothing of the relying aspect which is not discussed nearly enough) Google anything for anything? You're already literally the product in more ways than anyone could ever fathom at the baseline and then you hand them more money to be even more—product(ive)? I just don't get but I also maybe was a but invective and i apologize for that
The rationale is that it suppresses ads. And is bundled with YT Music, which I actually like and use. I've heard the arguments about ad blockers, but none of those seem to work across all the devices and networks I use.
If it works for you, works for me :) The world is my ecosystem
Edit: trebuchet aha
Can you expand on that point? Its definitely provocative and moreso amusing but you've got me hooked now