Depends. If the check is only about superficial stuff like User Agent etc then that is easy.
But they can fingerprint on all layers (tls, http, web api, js engine). To fake that all requires a lot of effort. Not all can be changed with an extension alone.
Welcome to my world of browser emulation. But then again, all depends on what they check :)
There is the third option, though - don't consume the content if the terms by which it's offered aren't acceptable.
You're getting it at someone else's expense. If you're doing that and not giving the expected value[1] in return (ad view, premium sub), then GP is right. That's virtually the definition of freeloading.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong to do so - but I think it is wrong to pretend it's something else.
[1] expected value because those are the terms under which the content is made available.
Or maybe youtube is freeloading off of an open platform that's easy to work with, has tons of users, etc because it's so open and manipulable by design?
If their ad views are so important they can develop their own native application with rootkit drm to make sure you're watching ads, etc.
IF creators want to get paid they should run sponsorships in their videos or have patreons. Which most do. No amount of morally outraged shilling is going to compel reasonable people to watch ads.
I frequently watch all the way through sponsorship segments that are entertaining and most creators vet what sponsorships they take so I also frequently use affiliate links if I am interested in a product.
If google cant afford to host youtube its odd that its been around for decades in its current form but thats their problem. Not mine.
If you ever wanted to see how stupid the "YouTube is bad for blocking ads" thought camp is, this comment is a perfect example.
"If creators wanted to get paid they should just run more ads" fucking LOL
YouTube creates the (so far) unmatched creator compensation system with YouTube Red (now Premium), and now that Premium users generate so much more money for creators than Ads, they have to increase ads to compensate. Blocking ads literally makes you the bad guy, it's hilarious how people are trying to spin this as some freedom thing.
Just say you think you're too good to pay for entertainment.
The outrage from some folks about this is shocking. I just cannot understand being so impassioned about other peoples choice to not subject themselves to tracking and brainwashing in the form of unvetted ads that you type ad hominem and something like "fucking LOL" on an HN comment.
Anyways, Ublock Origin still works great and I highly recommend it to everyone. I also highly recommend supporting the folks who make it as its a wonderful tool. Kind of like I recommend signing up for the patreon of creators you particularly enjoy ;)
Google pays creators out of the revenue they make from ads, and Google doesn’t make revenue from ads that were blocked. I think that would be fraud.
I think this is fair TBH. If you want Google to pay creators, but you also want to access YouTube for free without paying or viewing ads, something isn’t lining up.
This is why I let the ads roll. Even though it’s crumbs for the creator, if enough people do it, they do make money.
Cry me a river, Google steals from creators as well when they put ads on videos that creators explicitly chose not to monetize. I would bet that Google's revenue from this dirty trick dwarfs all the money lost from folks running ad blockers.
For the past couple months once they started popping up that request to disable ad blockers, the videos will often play for a few seconds and then just stop. This is chrome. It hasn't happened in the last week, but typically I see it more when there are updates that require chrome to restart. It seems like either an unintentional bug or a dark pattern. But punishing users that are blocking ads is the hardest sell.
I've gotten viruses from ads, and I will not allow them. Google is never going to sell me on that.
Maybe instead of slapping users, they should have had some fiscal responsibilities in the good times and not setup a complete adult daycare for their employees.
I've been seeing this behavior on brave and assumed it was a built-in feature of the browser to stop autoplay.
tbh, I don't find it obnoxious at all, if they're really doing that to try and annoy me, they've instead brought back the ability to disable autoplay, which I'm thankful for.
Then pay for youtube premium. why should google provide you a service for free, without ads? They aren't slapping users, they are offering ads or paid. Free ad-free was never a sustainable solution.
I find this entire discussion difficult, as with any other service not agreeing to the terms of sale just means you don't use it.
But online this seems to have become "Socially Acceptable Theft".
It's not like youtube access is a human right, there's a million other alternatives to entertainment online, if you can't agree to terms of one just use another?
If a business opens up in my neighborhood and offers free pizza with no strings attached I'll gladly eat that pizza.
If they change their mind and then start offering free pizza but only if I take a stack of advertisements I will take the pizza and throw the ads in the trash.
If they then start having people follow me home and harassing me for not looking at every ad, I will take the pizza and tell the harasser to fuck off and throw the ads in the trash in front of them. If they refuse to serve free pizza after that I'll just go pay for higher quality pizza elsewhere.
What I won't do is pay the harasser. It's even crazier when the harasser isn't even making the pizza, just delivering it
It is more of free pizza will arrive while you wait in line and watch ads. But now you want to jump ahead and snatch free pizza before your turn comes. In normal neighborhoods people look down upon such behavior. But nowadays such behavior seems sign of cool dudes.
Did you know you can get free food at some church gatherings? Then when they want to talk to you about their beliefs you can spit in their face, tell them where to shove it and throw their pamphlets in the garbage. You can also take as many free napkins and ketchup packets as you want from McDonalds to bring home. If the staff starts complaining you can flip them the shocker and stomp on a few ketchup packets like a real hacker so they have to clean up the floor after you leave.
> If they then start having people follow me home and harassing me for not looking at every ad
YouTube isn't following you, as soon as you close the browser window it goes away. Youtube doesn't do anything to harass you when you leave, but they will try to make you watch the advertisement as long as you continue sitting there and continuing eating.
I won't mind paying if it is a fair transaction - that is I'm being charged for (paying the creators + infra costs + profit). But Google is still siphoning my data and selling it to advertisers. If these companies can do business in an ethical manner, there wouldn't be this much backlash. People know that these companies will take money from their users and still sell them out to advertisers.
Don't know about MotoGP but for F1 there are no ads if you watch the paid subscription stream. The stream on cable TV is indeed full of ads that it's worth paying for the subscription with some friends to share the cost.
now i am curious how much the slowdown is for adblockers compared to the slowdown through ads. at that rate i suspect even with buffering the adblocker version is still faster, at least at lower bandwidth.
I went through a (short) period where they were serving me ads that close together. Logged in too. Sometimes I would get one in the first 30 seconds (on top of the pre-video ads). I started to close the page immediately on getting an ad I thought was too soon and not looking at Youtube for the rest of the day. The schedule went back to being more reasonable. I have no idea if my tactic really worked personally, or whether it was just general testing that was scheduled to finish anyway.
Same experience for me. The first video I watched after my premium sub expired, I was given two preroll ads. Then, 30 seconds into the video, an ad. Finally, at the end of the 5 minute video, another ad.
It was jarring. But I’m also not sure complaining is fair. Hosting and serving video is expensive. I definitely don’t expect to receive it for free.
I don't expect it for free either. But they already get my user data. This seemed to work well for the last 20 years.
Now they want my user data AND want me to pay on top by creating such a bad user experience for the free tier that one feels like Pavlov's dog being conditioned to wait for the "skip" button to appear to get the movie rewards.
The number of ads is getting pretty bad now. I use the YouTube app for Apple TV (so no chance for an ad blocker) and it has been slowly increasing the last two years. I even get surveys asking "How is the Ad experience?" and I always answer the lowest.
I frequently get 30 seconds of unskippable ads multiple times in a video. One set at the beginning and following sets at approximately 3 minute intervals.
At least some mid-rolls are skippable but they are totally random. Like, maybe a set of 2 ads where the first is 15 second and the second is 15 seconds that is skippable after 5 seconds. The combination of length and skippable is confusing.
More annoying is the tendency to sneak a 3 minute ad in there that is skippable. So unless I am in the room and near the remote it will just play the whole thing. I've had ads that are up to 15 minutes long.
If they would offer me a sign-up deal I'd probably just get YouTube premium at this point.
I once had the whole AMD event revealing a new Ryzen generation and some GPU as an ad, like more than an hour. The fact that you can just put whatever as an ad is wild.
I had an ad that was 30 minutes or an hour long at one point, it was for a watch.
The unfortunate thing was, the ad itself was actually interesting, going into a lot of manufacturing details but I didn't have time to watch it them and there is no way to find it.
That seems to vary by video. I never log in, and some videos I found had zero or few ads, while others get an ad every few minutes. I am not sure how much of that is controlled by content creators[1] and how much of that is pushed by advertiser demands[2].
I think this underlines the misconception by YT of who the customer is.
Is it the advertiser who buys ad-space, is it the content creator who makes videos, or the viewer subscriber? Satisfying all three parties at scale is incredibly hard.
From earlier reports you can just change the user-agent header to appear as chrome and the problem goes away.
How do they keep pulling this anti-competitive bullshit? Do they not realise what they are doing, or are the fines still too low for them to take it seriously?
They got away with it so far which they see as confirmation that they can do whatever they want and that nothing or nobody will ever make a dent in their armor.
It's pretty trivial to write a yt-dlp one-liner to batch download all your subscriptions. You can even have it slice out sponsor segments using the SB API automatically. There's also projects like TubeArchivist which give a web ui to download and play youtube videos. There are also projects that provide alternative UIs for Youtube. The world is drowning in solutions to this problem, yet people keep whining and complaining about it.
It is obvious that anyone who still uses YT while complaining about these measures should quit their BS learned helplessness and take an afternoon to figure out an alternative.
No. Of these mechanisms, the ones I have personally used (yt-dlp and TubeArchivist) do not rely on signing in with an account. They could ban my account on IP association alone, but that would result in massive false positives and backlash (everyone behind a VPN would be screwed for one).
For all that is good, do not do this on an account that does anything else! Run it in the cloud, if you can on a separate IP, and stream it from there.
Step 1: Buy a VPN subscription. It's about $3/month
Step 2: Run script
I'm a lot happier to pay for VPN and hard disks than for Google's bait-and-switch games. Youtube and Google became popular based on a social contract where I gave them by content, and now that it's a near-monopoly, they're breaking that social contract. That's not illegal, but it is sleazy, and I feel dirty giving money to support sleazy.
You don't need an account for youtube. I have a Google account for gmail, and since I use Android I unavoidably have a Google account because of it, but there's no reason to use that account for youtube. In fact, there is (or, at least, there used to be) a good reason to never use a Google account for youtube: they have (or, at least, used to have) a "real name" policy for youtube, so if they for some reason decide that your real name is not your real name, you could lose access to your whole Google account, including more important services like Google Talk. Therefore, whenever I watch any video on youtube, I very carefully make sure that the browser is not logged into the Google account, and watch it anonymously.
I've had my Google play store account locked down for "fraud" (they never told me what it was) that caused all of my Google services to be stopped (googlefi, gmail, google domains, etc) and I could still always use their SSO to log in to things. I also make youtube comments with zero hesitation to harass Trump fans and am frequently suspended on youtube and it just stops me from being able to comment.
My NAS has been using yt-dlp to download various Warhammer 40k videos from youtubers for 3+ years, I'm around 10TB.
My working theory is there is no way to actually get banned from using google services permanently unless perhaps you do a charge back or something I haven't tried.
I also do everything I can to not use google services after my "fraud" lockdown. I've made longer comments about it here before in my history if you want the full story.
Yes and no. While there are ways to circumvent the issue ( including the ways you mention ), the issue itself a little more complicated than that. Some of us don't like to play cat and mouse game. At certain size, company has to realize that their decisions that attempt to extract maximum amount of dough may draw close scrutiny of regulators. And its not like Google is not in their crosshairs already.
I am definitely not going to wait for the regulators fix up YT, but rather quit watching. We already have a family premium account because my partner couldn't stand the ads. I refuse to pay them. YT music is also shit quality. I bought a new pair of headphones and thought they were defective until I listened to my own ~160 kbps opus encoded content. Yes, it's that crappy, possibly 96 kbps or below. However I still listen to it because its bundled and paid for and still sounds better than FM radio. Totally not worth even half of what they're asking for.
Here are the quality setting on YouTube Music according to Google:
Low
Uses the least storage on your device
Bitrate: 48 kbps AAC and OPUS
Normal
Default setting
Bitrate: 128 kbps AAC and OPUS
High
Higher-quality audio will use more storage on your device
Bitrate: 256 kbps AAC and OPUS
Seems like it is automatically set to normal on WiFi and Mobile Data. It also seems like there is another option for streaming labeled "Always High" which forces 256 kbps stream over bad connection.
I typically only use Youtube Music for discovery then buy albums that I like (or rip them if they're not available for purchase). I, personally, have never experienced low quality audio on YT Music.
I've checked now and mine is set to normal. But it's still shit on mobile. I have the same song encoded by yours truly from flac to opus@160 kbps and the quality difference is audible. On the desktop I fail to see any difference at the normal setting, so it might downgrade to 48 kbps over LTE.
I already have docker / docker-compose installed for development purposes, so in my case it was literally running git clone ..., then docker-compose up -d.
Considering this is about losing 5 seconds lost for every video being watched on youtube, I am pretty sure this time investment would amortize in <1 month of yt watching.
Do you show the same concern for how cheap the time is for the people spending their time bitching on reddit / HN / twitter about this issue for weeks on end?
A lot of people seem to think so, consider how they will spend hours trying to avoid paying $30 a month or whatever to get rid of the ads and support the creators.
I often post the same complaint ("What happened to all the hackers?"), but endlessly posting "Script X doesn't work with browser Y, now I'm forced to view ads, somebody do something," isn't hacking.
I think money ruins things that it touches, and the things that are made in pursuit of money, especially in today's computerized world, will be predatory and exploitative.
The Internet used to be for hobbyists, making content out of passion in addition to having actual jobs (sort of like free software).
But then they made content creation their jobs. Then the platforms got "professionalized". Now, content creators have to be professional eggshell dancers while the consumers are trapped in mind prisons where advertisers have the keys. We're now cattle in some corporate money printing machine, of which the creators are hapless contractors.
That's never what I signed up for. I didn't ask the creators to do this for money. I never opted into the game their playing (I also didn't read the EULA ;D). I also wouldn't pay money for Asmongold's 500th "IS THIS THE NEXT POGGERS MMO?" video (but I will watch it for free for like 15 seconds, then question my life choices and close it before watching some better video for free). So I don't care. As far as I'm concerned, they should go back to being hobbyists, get real jobs for their livelihood, and the Internet should be demonetized.
Money itself does not do anything. Required is a human’s ego and desire to compete, possibly to improve probabilities of landing a specific mate? Or maybe just securing certain resources?
Saying that money itself does not do anything is a truism.
Money is a tool to get people to do something that they don't want to do otherwise. That's all it is. All trade is fundamentally a person who has a thing and doesn't want to give it up giving it up in exchange for money. Labor is the same with a persons time.
There are plenty of instances where the thing you get someone to do is "evil": bribes, assassinations, creating and distributing propaganda, having people fight in unjust wars, etc.
While it is unlikely that most money is used to cause "evil" acts, it is very likely that most "evil" acts occur due to money changing hands.
> All trade is fundamentally a person who has a thing and doesn't want to give it up giving it up in exchange for money. Labor is the same with a persons time.
I disagree. What is a farmer going to do with 100 bushels of wheat? What is an oil producer going to do with 1 million gallons of oil? Trade happens (much of the time) because a person who has Thing A would rather have Thing B and is willing to give up Thing A for it. And person with Thing B would rather have Thing A and is willing to give up Thing B for it. And money is the technology that enables this exchange to happen more quickly and easily.
>While it is unlikely that most money is used to cause "evil" acts, it is very likely that most "evil" acts occur due to money changing hands.
This has nothing to do with money or trade. A bushel of wheat or barrel of oil could have changed hands instead of money. The evil act occurred because someone wanted it to occur, and it could occurred with or without a trade.
It depends on ones experience, but a script which runs yt-dl shouldn't take much time. And as a side note I'd argue that constantly counting your time as money loss may lead to neurosis. Some digital housekeeping can be pleasantly distracting from work, while also making your computer environment more comfortable.
Get a little dopamine hit everytime one remembers what a sweet deal or setup they have. Conversely, feels bad to pay for convenience on conditions one objects to. It's like when deal hunters spend undue effort to save some money on frequently used items or services that will get used for years. Does dollar equivalent in effort to save get amortized over time? Frequently, but not always. But the satisfaction of knowing you got one over the dealer keeps on paying for itself.
I've been catching low bandwidth recently, even on Android with YouTube Premium on WiFi. I have quality configured to "Higher picture quality, more bandwidth" yet still get something like 240p on a video with 1440p max resolution. They are getting user-hostile
This seems like such an inopportune time for Google to pick this fight; right when better YouTube (Tik Toc) has gotten popular.
Anyway, all of these viral video sites are concentration destroying garbage. Hopefully YouTube will choose to die on this hill, and then we can ban Tik Toc and be free of this waste.
You have to wonder why none of these big companies has figured out yet that the only things that grow without restraint are cancers. Every other entity has an upper limit to their growth and that's nothing to worry about. You've gotten as large as you'll be, congratulations, you're an adult. Now act accordingly.
I have Firefox with no premium and a lotta stuff running on Youtube when I load (ublock, Youtube Enhancer add-on, and a few Tampermonkey scripts)... it only takes a second.
Maybe they are slowing down premium users?
Please keep making it shitier to the point I consume less and less of YouTube.
These tactics are nothing new for non-Chrome users. Most of the "Oh they just didn't have Firefox in mind, no malice on Google's part" it's just bullshit at least in part.
This is just one more instance of it, and it's getting pettier and pettier..
You not watching YouTube is literally what Google wants, you're a net negative to them, so they're making your experience as miserable as possible to make sure you don't come back without money or the ability to watch an ad.
Kinda, platforms like YouTube's lifeblood are the huge amount of eye balls aka "views" so they can sell ads to companies hopeful those eye balls watch and click their ad.
Of course I'm "a free loader" but there is still some residual "value" in me.
Either way I don't care about Google, if they "win" I also would win by not wasting my time watching videos.
That's funny, I've actually been seeing this with Brave but it's limited to the first video per tab session i watch.. Then it seems to be fine. I put it down to excessive AdBlock scripts being added, but if it's related to this that's quite a scummy move.
To provide some clarity on this, it likely isn't targeting specifically non-Chrome browsers.
Disclaimer: fmr Googler, used to work on YouTube
Likely, this isn't necessarily targeting Firefox/Safari/Etc, but rather is using the UserAgent as part of a tuple with other factors. It _is_ however an anti-adblock measure meant to determine if the video is automatically getting skipped forward.
The reason on why changing your useragent "fixes" the problem, is that you're changing the tuple and the anti-adblock system won't serve the code-at-issue until it determines whether you'd be a good candidate for the experiment.
Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
Nonsense. A Google controlled browser runs plugins Google allows with privacy settings Google creates. More data and no ad blockers is worth many billions of dollars to YouTube in the long run.
They directly benefit from people thinking Firefox is slow.
If you keep breaking the site guidelines like this, we're going to have to ban you. We've already warned you once (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34557733) and you've unfortunately continued to do it repeatedly, not just in this comment but in other recent ones:
shrug. I was unnecessarily rude in two of the 5 comments, if you were just replying to those i'd understand, but i don't really understand the others (including the previous warning and the one you are replying to now), especially the one you're replying to now. I can try to be more civil but considering there are only two valid complaints out of my entire comment history, if you really want to ban me there's nothing i can do for you.
You should be banning the google employee pretending they have "no financial incentive" to shut down their competition. It's obviously inflammatory and absurd. Every company has financial incentive to impede their competition. He works at google, he knows this and is lying or propagandizing or who knows.
I mean if it is "is using the UserAgent as part of a tuple with other factors" in a way which causes Chrome UAs to get preferential treatment, isn't that specifically targeting non-Chrome browsers?
Making Chrome the dominant browser has been a huge focus of Google since Chrome's inception. You may not know this, but Google owns YouTube.
If that's an A/B test where user agents are randomly added to either control or a test group, and you change your user agent, then you are reassigned, because you changed the user agent
To provide some clarity on this, it's not specifically coded into the system to prefer one particular browser over another, but rather, it's independent of all browsers and using the useragent as a string as part of a group.
Chrome could equally be as effected by this as any other browser.
> YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
Google has big financial incentives to punish non-Chrome user agents.
First, we've seen that Google pays a large amount of money to be the default search engine in competing browsers. A big reason for funding Chrome development is so that Google doesn't have to pay someone for the majority of its search traffic. If Google is paying out 30-40% of search ad revenue from non-Chrome browsers, that's many billions of dollars if they can get more people to use Chrome. If non-Chrome browsers are a bad experience on one of the most popular sites on the internet, that pushes people to use Chrome.
Second, Google is altering Chrome so that ad blockers won't be as effective. If they can push people to use Chrome, they'll get more ad revenue since ad blockers won't be as effective.
Google has been pushing Chrome because people using Chrome makes them billions of dollars. Maybe YouTube itself doesn't have a financial incentive, but Google definitely does.
If Chrome vanished tomorrow, Google would then face steep fees when their deals with Mozilla and Apple were up for renewal since they'd be dependent on traffic from Firefox and Safari. Instead, Google can keep paying Mozilla less and less money over time as more people use Chrome instead of Firefox.
In addition, Google is still run disorganized-bag-of-cats management style and YouTube is so indpendent from the mothership they're almost their own company.
Conspiracy is unlikely purely because Neal Mohan is empowered to tell the Chrome team to pound sand and will do so if he thinks they'd make a call that would damage YouTube's numbers.
Not to mention, if performance with YouTube is slow, there's no clue for users that Firefox is the problem. There's no banner telling you "for faster YouTube performance use Chrome". And it's extremely unlikely that your average user is going to try to compare with Chrome, or even the thought occurs to them. They probably think their ISP just got worse or something.
If this were an actual mechanism to try to get users to switch, it would be an idiotic one.
Instead of just "stop using it" (pay isn't actually an option here, people who are paying are still getting the delay), let's force them to comply with reasonable antitrust regulation under threat of fines. Or preferably, break them up, youtube shouldn't be part of google and neither should chrome.
> Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
> To provide some clarity on this, it likely isn't targeting specifically non-Chrome browsers
It's not targeting non-chrome browsers, it's just a before penalty that only applies to ... non-chrome browsers?
> Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
With Google's ongoing desire to break ad-blockers in Chrome, and make tracking a mandatory web specification via essentially monopoly browser status[1], Google has a _very_ strong financial incentive to punish non-chrome UAs - anything that pushes people to Chrome over browsers that they don't control is a win for them.
[1] let's be real: the only reason many sites work in browsers other than chrome is iOS safari, that's it
To provide some additional context and clarifying points that I see in the lower comments:
>> Regarding financial incentives:
Google is an insanely large organization, and the priorities and KPIs of one org (Chrome) largely don't impact another org (YouTube).
Additionally, YouTube is a regarded as a red-headed step-child within Google and is generally outside of the general interactions with other orgs.
That's based on years of working on that fine line.
>> Regarding Useragent Targeting:
The targeting scheme treats the useragent as a string, rather than a distinct value that the useragent is set to. Chrome is likely to hit this bug as much as any other browser vendor.
I might be a sucker but I bought YouTube Premium about a year ago and it's definitely been worth it for me. I love watching those 10-20min length YouTube videos instead of watching TV shows, so skipping the ads is really clutch and has saved me probably 24+ hours of my life lol.
There is nothing wrong with paying for a service you use.
If you are a normal techie. Ask yourself: How many hours will I spend circumventing this, then having to deal with when it breaks etc. Vs. paying the bill. For me, it was an easy call, and one I don't regret.
Also: I watch Youtube on my TV. So circumnavigating ads is not as simple as installing adblocker.
Also 2: I got rid of Spotify because of that so that's a win. (Considering the payment changes they are making now + Joe Rogan and anti-vax stuff from during the pandemic, not going back there)
The people wasting their lives trying to figure out how to not pay other people for their entertainment are the suckers, you'd think Premium was 60 bucks a month with the way some people here are talking about it.
Premium costs about 10X what ads costs in terms of how much money Google takes in from a typical viewer. Why would I give Google a 10X win when I can spend just 10 seconds updating my invasion filters to prevent hostile content from showing on my computer screen?
They'll make it login only like Facebook, Instagram and now Twitter. It's the only option that the MBAs can come up with. That will also be the end of Youtube.
I have firefox with ublock origin, privacy badger, and a pi-hole. I haven't noticed any slowdowns. Though, last week one day youtube woldn't play videos at all for a couple of hours for me.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadBut they can fingerprint on all layers (tls, http, web api, js engine). To fake that all requires a lot of effort. Not all can be changed with an extension alone.
Welcome to my world of browser emulation. But then again, all depends on what they check :)
The other exposes you to content that's designed to hack your brain (or occasionally your computer).
If saying no thanks to both makes me scum then that's fine.
You're getting it at someone else's expense. If you're doing that and not giving the expected value[1] in return (ad view, premium sub), then GP is right. That's virtually the definition of freeloading.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong to do so - but I think it is wrong to pretend it's something else.
[1] expected value because those are the terms under which the content is made available.
I'm always amazed of how people forget that option
If their ad views are so important they can develop their own native application with rootkit drm to make sure you're watching ads, etc.
On a purely financial level, it's far more accurate to say I'm stealing from Google than from creators.
You are first and foremost stealing from them. Google has plenty of money.
I frequently watch all the way through sponsorship segments that are entertaining and most creators vet what sponsorships they take so I also frequently use affiliate links if I am interested in a product.
If google cant afford to host youtube its odd that its been around for decades in its current form but thats their problem. Not mine.
"If creators wanted to get paid they should just run more ads" fucking LOL
YouTube creates the (so far) unmatched creator compensation system with YouTube Red (now Premium), and now that Premium users generate so much more money for creators than Ads, they have to increase ads to compensate. Blocking ads literally makes you the bad guy, it's hilarious how people are trying to spin this as some freedom thing.
Just say you think you're too good to pay for entertainment.
Anyways, Ublock Origin still works great and I highly recommend it to everyone. I also highly recommend supporting the folks who make it as its a wonderful tool. Kind of like I recommend signing up for the patreon of creators you particularly enjoy ;)
I don't see how having "plenty of money" changes whether or not you can have something stolen from you...
In reality, you're stealing from both Google and the creators.
Whether you view it as justified is up to your own morals and perceptions.
I think this is fair TBH. If you want Google to pay creators, but you also want to access YouTube for free without paying or viewing ads, something isn’t lining up.
This is why I let the ads roll. Even though it’s crumbs for the creator, if enough people do it, they do make money.
Cry me a river, Google steals from creators as well when they put ads on videos that creators explicitly chose not to monetize. I would bet that Google's revenue from this dirty trick dwarfs all the money lost from folks running ad blockers.
I've gotten viruses from ads, and I will not allow them. Google is never going to sell me on that.
Maybe instead of slapping users, they should have had some fiscal responsibilities in the good times and not setup a complete adult daycare for their employees.
tbh, I don't find it obnoxious at all, if they're really doing that to try and annoy me, they've instead brought back the ability to disable autoplay, which I'm thankful for.
Then pay for youtube premium. why should google provide you a service for free, without ads? They aren't slapping users, they are offering ads or paid. Free ad-free was never a sustainable solution.
But online this seems to have become "Socially Acceptable Theft".
It's not like youtube access is a human right, there's a million other alternatives to entertainment online, if you can't agree to terms of one just use another?
If they change their mind and then start offering free pizza but only if I take a stack of advertisements I will take the pizza and throw the ads in the trash.
If they then start having people follow me home and harassing me for not looking at every ad, I will take the pizza and tell the harasser to fuck off and throw the ads in the trash in front of them. If they refuse to serve free pizza after that I'll just go pay for higher quality pizza elsewhere.
What I won't do is pay the harasser. It's even crazier when the harasser isn't even making the pizza, just delivering it
YouTube isn't following you, as soon as you close the browser window it goes away. Youtube doesn't do anything to harass you when you leave, but they will try to make you watch the advertisement as long as you continue sitting there and continuing eating.
Much lighter too, appreciate it most on my Raspi desktops.
Remarkable product-market-fit.
Although protip is to find UK streams instead of US for the same events, shorter ad breaks
It was jarring. But I’m also not sure complaining is fair. Hosting and serving video is expensive. I definitely don’t expect to receive it for free.
You know, I'm curious, I've never asked, and never actually gave it a true, real, hard thought.
You, rando internet person, is making a claim:
"they already get my user data"
So you are completely aware of what this data is?
You are completely aware of its true, real, actual value?
Maybe user data is less valuable than we all perceive?
It could explain the increase in ads.
It could explain why paying for YouTube Premium is an overall much better solution to the problem.
I imagine a future where you don't use YouTube Premium simply because you're checking something quickly somewhere where you're not logged in.
Remember, most videos are 1 time watch. Maybe YouTube should consider a pay-as-you-use system?
I frequently get 30 seconds of unskippable ads multiple times in a video. One set at the beginning and following sets at approximately 3 minute intervals.
At least some mid-rolls are skippable but they are totally random. Like, maybe a set of 2 ads where the first is 15 second and the second is 15 seconds that is skippable after 5 seconds. The combination of length and skippable is confusing.
More annoying is the tendency to sneak a 3 minute ad in there that is skippable. So unless I am in the room and near the remote it will just play the whole thing. I've had ads that are up to 15 minutes long.
If they would offer me a sign-up deal I'd probably just get YouTube premium at this point.
I once had the whole AMD event revealing a new Ryzen generation and some GPU as an ad, like more than an hour. The fact that you can just put whatever as an ad is wild.
The unfortunate thing was, the ad itself was actually interesting, going into a lot of manufacturing details but I didn't have time to watch it them and there is no way to find it.
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/233723152
[2] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/12400225
How do they keep pulling this anti-competitive bullshit? Do they not realise what they are doing, or are the fines still too low for them to take it seriously?
The scary thing: they might be right.
It is obvious that anyone who still uses YT while complaining about these measures should quit their BS learned helplessness and take an afternoon to figure out an alternative.
Do you do anything to avoid that?
(I don't know what the playlist id for your Watch Later would be, and the API for listing playlists doesn't seem to work either. Fun.)
Step 2: Run script
I'm a lot happier to pay for VPN and hard disks than for Google's bait-and-switch games. Youtube and Google became popular based on a social contract where I gave them by content, and now that it's a near-monopoly, they're breaking that social contract. That's not illegal, but it is sleazy, and I feel dirty giving money to support sleazy.
Or you want to continue feeding Google via your Gmail account. Or just plain old receive email and pretend that you're not feeding Google.
You don't need an account for youtube. I have a Google account for gmail, and since I use Android I unavoidably have a Google account because of it, but there's no reason to use that account for youtube. In fact, there is (or, at least, there used to be) a good reason to never use a Google account for youtube: they have (or, at least, used to have) a "real name" policy for youtube, so if they for some reason decide that your real name is not your real name, you could lose access to your whole Google account, including more important services like Google Talk. Therefore, whenever I watch any video on youtube, I very carefully make sure that the browser is not logged into the Google account, and watch it anonymously.
My NAS has been using yt-dlp to download various Warhammer 40k videos from youtubers for 3+ years, I'm around 10TB.
My working theory is there is no way to actually get banned from using google services permanently unless perhaps you do a charge back or something I haven't tried.
I also do everything I can to not use google services after my "fraud" lockdown. I've made longer comments about it here before in my history if you want the full story.
I typically only use Youtube Music for discovery then buy albums that I like (or rip them if they're not available for purchase). I, personally, have never experienced low quality audio on YT Music.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=mneDuKb3BT8
Considering this is about losing 5 seconds lost for every video being watched on youtube, I am pretty sure this time investment would amortize in <1 month of yt watching.
Do you show the same concern for how cheap the time is for the people spending their time bitching on reddit / HN / twitter about this issue for weeks on end?
I think money ruins things that it touches, and the things that are made in pursuit of money, especially in today's computerized world, will be predatory and exploitative.
The Internet used to be for hobbyists, making content out of passion in addition to having actual jobs (sort of like free software).
But then they made content creation their jobs. Then the platforms got "professionalized". Now, content creators have to be professional eggshell dancers while the consumers are trapped in mind prisons where advertisers have the keys. We're now cattle in some corporate money printing machine, of which the creators are hapless contractors.
That's never what I signed up for. I didn't ask the creators to do this for money. I never opted into the game their playing (I also didn't read the EULA ;D). I also wouldn't pay money for Asmongold's 500th "IS THIS THE NEXT POGGERS MMO?" video (but I will watch it for free for like 15 seconds, then question my life choices and close it before watching some better video for free). So I don't care. As far as I'm concerned, they should go back to being hobbyists, get real jobs for their livelihood, and the Internet should be demonetized.
Money is a tool to get people to do something that they don't want to do otherwise. That's all it is. All trade is fundamentally a person who has a thing and doesn't want to give it up giving it up in exchange for money. Labor is the same with a persons time.
There are plenty of instances where the thing you get someone to do is "evil": bribes, assassinations, creating and distributing propaganda, having people fight in unjust wars, etc.
While it is unlikely that most money is used to cause "evil" acts, it is very likely that most "evil" acts occur due to money changing hands.
I disagree. What is a farmer going to do with 100 bushels of wheat? What is an oil producer going to do with 1 million gallons of oil? Trade happens (much of the time) because a person who has Thing A would rather have Thing B and is willing to give up Thing A for it. And person with Thing B would rather have Thing A and is willing to give up Thing B for it. And money is the technology that enables this exchange to happen more quickly and easily.
>While it is unlikely that most money is used to cause "evil" acts, it is very likely that most "evil" acts occur due to money changing hands.
This has nothing to do with money or trade. A bushel of wheat or barrel of oil could have changed hands instead of money. The evil act occurred because someone wanted it to occur, and it could occurred with or without a trade.
Some more on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363114
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363114
YouTube blames ad blockers for slow load times, not the browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363114 - Nov 2023 (220 comments)
YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858 - Nov 2023 (459 comments)
Youtube Premium. Firefox on Windows, ublock origin. Haven't tried it on the roku yet.
Anyway, all of these viral video sites are concentration destroying garbage. Hopefully YouTube will choose to die on this hill, and then we can ban Tik Toc and be free of this waste.
Is TikTok popular for long-form video content?
These tactics are nothing new for non-Chrome users. Most of the "Oh they just didn't have Firefox in mind, no malice on Google's part" it's just bullshit at least in part.
This is just one more instance of it, and it's getting pettier and pettier..
Of course I'm "a free loader" but there is still some residual "value" in me.
Either way I don't care about Google, if they "win" I also would win by not wasting my time watching videos.
In a world where people didn't share videos with others, you might be correct. This is not that world.
Disclaimer: fmr Googler, used to work on YouTube
Likely, this isn't necessarily targeting Firefox/Safari/Etc, but rather is using the UserAgent as part of a tuple with other factors. It _is_ however an anti-adblock measure meant to determine if the video is automatically getting skipped forward.
The reason on why changing your useragent "fixes" the problem, is that you're changing the tuple and the anti-adblock system won't serve the code-at-issue until it determines whether you'd be a good candidate for the experiment.
Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
Nonsense. A Google controlled browser runs plugins Google allows with privacy settings Google creates. More data and no ad blockers is worth many billions of dollars to YouTube in the long run.
They directly benefit from people thinking Firefox is slow.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38325478
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38316844
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38307667
If you want to keep posting to HN, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules. We'd appreciate it.
You should be banning the google employee pretending they have "no financial incentive" to shut down their competition. It's obviously inflammatory and absurd. Every company has financial incentive to impede their competition. He works at google, he knows this and is lying or propagandizing or who knows.
Making Chrome the dominant browser has been a huge focus of Google since Chrome's inception. You may not know this, but Google owns YouTube.
> rather it is using the User Agent
This is literally the most common method of targeting browsers.
Chrome could equally be as effected by this as any other browser.
Google has big financial incentives to punish non-Chrome user agents.
First, we've seen that Google pays a large amount of money to be the default search engine in competing browsers. A big reason for funding Chrome development is so that Google doesn't have to pay someone for the majority of its search traffic. If Google is paying out 30-40% of search ad revenue from non-Chrome browsers, that's many billions of dollars if they can get more people to use Chrome. If non-Chrome browsers are a bad experience on one of the most popular sites on the internet, that pushes people to use Chrome.
Second, Google is altering Chrome so that ad blockers won't be as effective. If they can push people to use Chrome, they'll get more ad revenue since ad blockers won't be as effective.
Google has been pushing Chrome because people using Chrome makes them billions of dollars. Maybe YouTube itself doesn't have a financial incentive, but Google definitely does.
If Chrome vanished tomorrow, Google would then face steep fees when their deals with Mozilla and Apple were up for renewal since they'd be dependent on traffic from Firefox and Safari. Instead, Google can keep paying Mozilla less and less money over time as more people use Chrome instead of Firefox.
Youtube does experiments based on user-agents. I think this is well known and if not, a former Googler just let you know.
In any case, for those who are complaining, it's their website. Either pay or stop using it?
Conspiracy is unlikely purely because Neal Mohan is empowered to tell the Chrome team to pound sand and will do so if he thinks they'd make a call that would damage YouTube's numbers.
If this were an actual mechanism to try to get users to switch, it would be an idiotic one.
Until Chrome can no longer block ads... ?
It's not targeting non-chrome browsers, it's just a before penalty that only applies to ... non-chrome browsers?
> Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
With Google's ongoing desire to break ad-blockers in Chrome, and make tracking a mandatory web specification via essentially monopoly browser status[1], Google has a _very_ strong financial incentive to punish non-chrome UAs - anything that pushes people to Chrome over browsers that they don't control is a win for them.
[1] let's be real: the only reason many sites work in browsers other than chrome is iOS safari, that's it
>> Regarding financial incentives:
Google is an insanely large organization, and the priorities and KPIs of one org (Chrome) largely don't impact another org (YouTube).
Additionally, YouTube is a regarded as a red-headed step-child within Google and is generally outside of the general interactions with other orgs.
That's based on years of working on that fine line.
>> Regarding Useragent Targeting:
The targeting scheme treats the useragent as a string, rather than a distinct value that the useragent is set to. Chrome is likely to hit this bug as much as any other browser vendor.
If you are a normal techie. Ask yourself: How many hours will I spend circumventing this, then having to deal with when it breaks etc. Vs. paying the bill. For me, it was an easy call, and one I don't regret.
Also 2: I got rid of Spotify because of that so that's a win. (Considering the payment changes they are making now + Joe Rogan and anti-vax stuff from during the pandemic, not going back there)