this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
139 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37717 readers
415 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
alyaza@beehaw.org
TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org
gyrfalcon@beehaw.org
rs5th@beehaw.org
coldredlight@beehaw.org
Los@beehaw.org
SemioticStandard@beehaw.org
TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social
remington@beehaw.org
139
YouTube screwing itself with adblockers again (beehaw.org)
submitted 11 months ago by TheBaldness@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
38 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I use Firefox and uBlock Origin. Not sure what kind of experience anyone else is having with YouTube, but recently my home page has been empty because I "don't have watch history turned on". Okay, fine. I won't be able to browse suggested videos, and I'll spend less time on their platform.

Then I began to get warnings about using an adblocker. Okay, fine. I know they need to make money, so I turned off the adblocker. Now when I'm having my time wasted by ads, I have to ask myself, how bad do I really want to watch this video? Not badly enough? I close the tab and spend less time on their platform.

Finally, I began experiencing glitches when playing videos. The video stops, but the audio continues. This never happened before. Perhaps mistakenly, I attribute this to YouTube, which is owned by Google, trying to force me off Firefox and on to Chrome. That was the last straw.

Now I use YouTube to simply follow the channels I'm subscribed to. When I want to watch something, I copy the URL, paste it into YT-DLP, download the video and spend zero time on their platform at all.

To summarize; Now I'm watching zero commercials, and YouTube is streaming the entire video to me, even if I only watch a small portion of it, and they're collecting less information about my watching habits than ever before.

Nice job, YouTube. Nice job.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Zaphod@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Firefox + uBlock as well and I the only issue tha I have is that YouTube always takes a few seconds to load, before that the page is basically frozen

[–] Rangus97@beehaw.org 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You could get around the load time by spoofing your useragent to chrome on Windows

[–] Zaphod@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 11 months ago

I did try that with the extension, but unfortunately didn't work