10mo ago

Linus Tech Tips uploaded a video showing how to block ads on Youtube. Which was removed by Youtube for community guidelines violations.

https://files.catbox.moe/a6111d.png / https://nitter.poast.org/LinusTech/status/1825956050685800834

If you go the video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsjHMzGl-VY. You will see it's gone. So Youtube being Youtube.

Here's a Odysee mirror of the video, https://odysee.com/@jopec:7/linus-tech-tips-degoogle-your-life-part-2-adfree-youtube:0.

436 comments

I don't see any mention of the YouTube adblock trick, so from the vid:
Copy YouTube URL. Paste it in Bing and search. Scroll passed Bing's sponsored bullshit and click on the thumbnail for the video you searched. It will then play, still in Bing, with no ads.
So if you're on a work or government or w/e computer that doesn't allow installing adblock extensions, there ya go. No downloads or anything, just YouTube and Bing.
 
...this is the first time I've ever had any interest in using Bing, lol.
- Scroll passed Bing's sponsored bullshit
  Ah. Still some ads then.
  
  But you’re not forced to actually wait through them like on YT - you can just scroll past.
- There's a chance duckduckgo does something similar, but sadly I can't check at the moment.
  Leaving a comment so I remember to try it later—unless anyone reading is willing to do so.
  
  It does indeed.
  
  Makes sense, it's basically just a Bing wrapper.
- Why is this lengthy process preferable to using ublock on Firefox?
  
  It isn't. But there are situations where that isn't an option, like being on a work or government computer where downloading firefox or installing an extension will get you fired. When that's the case, YouTube+Bing is a "good enough"/"better than nothing" option.

Isn't he the same person who calls adblocking piracy?
I mean I get that Youtubers have no morals and it's all about money but that seems excessively hypocritical, even for a Youtube "personality".
- Isn't he the same person who calls adblocking piracy?
  He's also got a generally nuanced opinion of piracy, in that it's justifiable in some situations. If you call it piracy and you're okay with piracy then it's not really a contradiction.
  Being willing to talk about it despite working against your interests isn't always bad depending on context.
  
  Breaking news, people on the Internet have no concept of nuance.
  
  I had the vague recollection of him having a small-business-owner-brain moment and going on about how it's theft, and it's taking money out of his pockets, or something along those lines.
  Looks like I may have been either thinking of someone else, or misinterpreted a snippet of video of him ranting about something.
  I will admit to not watching his stuff for a good number of years now, and could be totally conflating things.
  
  He directly called it bad because it hurt his revenue stream. He is ok with ad blocking as long as it isn't being done to him. That's pretty bold if you ask me. A double standard, quite the opposite of nuance. He equated it with entering a cirque due soleil show without paying a ticket, which is a false equivalence. He thinks that he is entitled to have his ads seen as a price of admittance to watching his videos. No one is entitled to have their ads watched.
- Isn't that essentially what it is? Getting something for free through certain means you wouldn't get for free otherwise? Which means no money goes to whoever owns the service you're using?
  
  Say you walk up to some person giving out free samples of food. As a condition of taking this free sample, you also must take a pamphlet of advertisements from the people who are giving you the free sample. You take your free sample, and then walk away while dropping the pamphlet in the nearest trash can. That's essentially what ad blocking is. You're simply preventing certain parts of a web page from being downloaded to your device. That's why people have issues with the "piracy" label, because nothing is being "stolen". You're just refusing to take all of it.
  
  Exactly. Getting media without paying (either in currency or in data for ads). Which they also address and talk about plex and jellyfin to consume the newly "liberated" media. I find his opinion on this quite fair.
- LTT always seemed "slimy" to me, especially after the whole mistreatment allegations ordeal
  
  Yeah, ever since all that stuff came out just before the new CEO took over, including the video/audio of the sexual harassment meeting which was treated as a total joke, I unsubscribed and stopped viewing their content. I couldn't reconcile their fun and approachable/friendly image with how they're treating staff. Moved on to watching more from other creators like Jayztwocents. Unfortunate that people keep turning out to be shitty left and right.
  
  He’s a driven-but-not-that-smart type of person from the videos I’ve seen.
  
  I find what happened, and their response to everything, completely unacceptable.
  But even if you forget that entirely, i decided to see if anything has changed after a year, and the quality of videos is genuinely shocking. A production studio of such scale makes videos, that your typical 14 year old would find embarrassing. The attitude towards everything, and the overwhelming fake energy, are both very repulsive
- He's right that it's piracy, he doesn't go on to say piracy is wrong, and neither would I.
  It's piracy to block ads, and piracy isn't always wrong, so who cares?
  
  I put the local football game on my tv over antenna. Oh a commercial, I guess I'll walk away to take a piss now. The swat team busts down my door. I run for my scabbard to resist but with one peg leg I'm not quick enough. The seas are rough sailing for pirates willing to skip ads mateys.
  
  It's really not. YouTube doesn't get to decide what I play on my browser, I do. I just choose to not load the ads, and I choose to skip over sponsor segments manually. I don't use sponsor block or anything automated like that, I just use a content blocker and the fast-forward buttons YouTube provides.
  At what point did I pirate anything? I asked YouTube for content, and it gave it to me. I didn't ask it for the ads, and it didn't give it to me. I fail to see where the piracy occurred.
  I'm certainly breaking their TOS, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm pirating their content.
  If I find value in a platform, I'll pay. I pay for Nebula, for example, because I've gotten a lot of value from a number of their creators and prefer to watch their content there than on YouTube. I'll occasionally buy merch from a YouTuber, and sometimes donate. But YouTube actively tracks me in ways I'm not comfortable with, so I block their trackers and their ads.
  
  Let's go to the early days of "piracy"
  You are claiming that fast forwarding the opening trailers and adverts on a rented VHS is piracy.
  
  Is it piracy if I skip the ads on the DVD I bought?
- Calling it piracy doesn't mean you think it's the worst thing in the world. I do it unless I like a service, and c'mon, it is piracy.
  
  I've literally voted for the "Pirate Party" in my country
- Isn’t he the same person who calls adblocking piracy?
  Yes. Because it is, and I do it gladly.
  
  It's really not. Piracy is sharing content you can't get legally. Blocking ads is just picking and choosing which content I allow to load on my computer. It's certainly against their TOS, but AFAIK there's nothing illegal about it, therefore not piracy.
- No, that's called nuance and honesty.
- Youtubers have no morals? What kind of idiotic generalisation is that?
  BTW, adblocking is a form piracy, that I'm completely fine with.
- Yeah, on the WAN Show.
  Also I found this, https://archive.ph/VavFc.
- Well it is compareable to piracy just like piracy is effectively stealing. I still partake in both but unlike much of my peers, I'm not lying to myself about what I'm doing.
  
  just like piracy is effectively stealing.
  IRL piracy, sure. Digital... not so much.
- But it is? Don't lie to yourself. We all do it but it's still piracy, and it's okay.
- Add blocking is piracy, but piracy is okay.
- Massive cunt is actually a massive cunt irl.

I don't care for Linus these days but respect for that.
- Yeah, I got tired of his videos half-assing the work and the failed reviews hurting small manufacturers while Linus doubled down after GN documented their failures.
  But this I can get behind.
  
  Doubled down? After being called out they slowed the upload cadence, are taking more time to make sure mistakes don't get through, and changed their production process. They also formed a volunteer team of "beta tester" viewers who see each video pre-release to catch any mistakes they didn't internally. I think they handled it well. Of course it would be better if they didn't have a problem in the first place, but I'd never call it "doubling down".

I have no longer watched their content since the scandal.
- Which one?
  
  Probably the sexual harassment one that's when I left. The billet labs stuff was bad too though.
  
  For those curious https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/linus-tech-tips-youtube-controversy-1.6940087
- I stopped because they are bro douchebags.
  
  Even Luke, who I always agreed with the most and seemed the most level-headed has talked about their hiring process and said that, if you don't have personal projects, it's highly unlikely that you'll be considered for a position in LTT.
  Supposedly it's because that shows a "lack of passion". Personally, I find that rather toxic. Like, dude, I do this for work and I also have a life. I literally do not have enough time to exercise, take care of my loved ones and also maintain personal projects.
- I’ll be that guy. I don’t understand why LTT gets so much crap from people constantly, they seem to have a very toxic community even without the scandals. But in regards to the more recent scandal, I really think a lot of those things are fixable and I’ll be watching to see if they fix them.
  As far as the sexual harassment stuff goes I can see that as a legitimate reason to stop watching. At the same time though, how should we feel with such limited and one sided information? And especially how should I feel if the problems aren’t inherent to the company and if they don’t reoccur?
  Maybe someone can help clear this up for me because I’m not that informed and I’m still giving them a chance but maybe I shouldn’t be.
  
  Check the other comment thread from the parent, there's a discussion which goes into it.
  
  I don’t understand why LTT gets so much crap from people
  Because their clowns. Literally. Their content is pure tech entertainment with constant immature humour and little substance. The way they present themselves is like a group of teenagers messing around.
  Then there's their "expertise". They don't know tech beyond a Windows "power user".
  But in regards to the more recent scandal, I really think a lot of those things are fixable and I’ll be watching to see if they fix them.
  Linus showed his true colours during the Billet Labs incident. He doubled down hard, and I'm convinced that even today Linus feels like he did nothing wrong. They have zero reputation to salvage, IMO.
- Same.
- Thanks for sharing? Why is every Lemmy single comment section filled with unrelated iamverysmart comments.
  
  Excuse me, I use Arch and Firefox with uBlock.
  
  Please kindly refer to vetting processes about what to post or not post on a community platform. Who said what?
  
  Ok linus.

Friendly reminder that pirates didn't usually stole gold. Piracy was stealing shipping goods, then selling them for profit at some port. Digital piracy is thus defined as acquiring, and then distributing for profit, media that you don't own the copyrights of. Ad blocking is categorically not piracy.
- Also, "piracy" or "copyright infringement" isn't theft in any sense.
  A key element of theft is that you deprive the rightful owner of something. You now have it and they no longer do. What makes it wrong is that the person who should have it no longer does. It's not that you have it. That's why the punishment for "mischief" where someone completely destroys something belonging to someone else is similar to the punishment for the theft of that same object.
  Copyright infringement is breaking the rule that the state imposed giving someone the exclusive right to control the copying of something. You're not depriving anyone of anything tangible when you infringe a copyright. They still have the original, they still have any copies they made, any copies they gave out or sold are still where they were. The only thing you're doing is violating the rule that gave them exclusive control. If you're depriving someone of anything, it's depriving them of the opportunity they might have had to make money from selling a copy.
  If anything, copyright infringement is more similar to trespassing than to theft. Just like copyright infringement, trespassing involves not allowing someone to control who accesses their property. If you sneak onto someone's campground property and have a bonfire party, the person loses the opportunity to rent out the campground for the bonfire, and any money they might have received for doing that. But, if you sneak in and sneak out and leave no trace, you could argue that nobody is harmed.
  
  If you sneak onto someone’s campground property and have a bonfire party
  Ah, I would say that is worse than piracy, since you deprive them of the ground for a time. A better analogy would be sneaking into the party they are having and enjoying it with them without paying for an invitation. Or sneaking into a concert.
- Closing your eyes, walking out of the room, changing the channel during the commercial break, all piracy. Hahahahahhahaha. Fuck these corporations
- It doesn't have to be for profit, but it does require distribution of content you don't have the rights to redistribute. I think it's also fine to lump in acquiring content that you don't have the rights to (i.e. it doesn't matter which end of the transaction you're part of).
  Blocking ads is merely a TOS violation, and it only applies if you actually agree to the TOS. If you don't consent to the TOS and the platform doesn't make any attempt to prevent you from using the service, then I think you have an argument that the TOS doesn't apply. I use YouTube w/o a YouTube account, so I don't consent to their TOS, but they still happily serve up content. So in my understanding, I'm not even violating any TOS because I haven't agreed to any, I'm just using their website with an add-on that blocks certain URLs. If YouTube decides to prevent me from accessing their content w/o agreeing to their TOS, then I'll probably stop watching YouTube, or maybe I'll decide to accept their TOS, idk, because it hasn't happened yet.
  That said, I do feel bad for creators not making money from me blocking YouTube's ads, so I tend to donate or buy merch on occasion, and that eases my conscience. Regardless, I'm quite sure that if YouTube tried to argue that blacking ads was somehow a copyright violation, that they'd lose.
- You're being pedantic, but I'm sure you understand the point.
  
  I'll spare you the troubles.
- Anybody who needs to be told this is either a newborn or braindead.
  
  Of you didn't watch the full video, which is fair enough, it's a point Linus makes which the comment refers to. So Linus is either newborn or braindead? I mean ok maybe. 🗿
  I'm downvoted for pointing out what Linus said in the video, why exactly?
- This is some sovereign citizen mental gymnastics.
  
  Damn bro you really must love corpo boots.

I bet they removed it faster than a porn video on YouTube Kids! 😲
- So not at all?
  
  Well if they did it faster, it did eventually get removed.
- Low bar
- why cant yt delete the nsfw video instead they just age restrict it

Well that's a thumbnail I'd never click on
- All of their thumbnails are unfortunately click-baity. They spoke about ut in an older video. Apparently, the click-baity images drive too much traffic for them to justify something more subtle.
  
  Oh, no I totally get it. I'm well aware I'm in the tiny minority that are put off by them. It's just the kind of illusion that once it gets broken you can no longer unsee it.
  It's the same with clickbait headlines. If it's a question, the answer is no.
  "Is this the end of Russia?"
  No.
  keeps on scrolling
- There's a Firefox plugin that replaces YT thumbnails with stills from the video. It makes browsing YT so much better.
  
  Why does this and maybe something to replace the title with just an accurate thesis statement kind of titlesounds so good to me!
- what the shit is going on with that neon ass hair
  
  They let Luke bleach it on the wan show.
  He's never done it before, and took too long so some parts are ultra blonde and others are barely different.
- Doesn't matter how good the video is if nobody clicks on it, Veritasium already made a great one about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng
- /r/punchablefaces material

don't you know, it's hate speech against corporate profits

Funny, considering in the past he's gone on big rants about how adblocking is no different from piracy, and is theft.
But then again, its Linus we're talking about, its not like he has a particularly big issue with theft anymore.
- I think he mentioned that ad-blocking is priacy, but I don't recall he said piracy is theft or piracy is inheritly unethical.
  He mentioned many time that he pirates stuff, except he would pay for them first.
- He did address this in the video
- Do you have a source? I've watched his videos for awhile but I don't remember hearing this take from him.
  
  It was in the streams with Luke. I dont remember the exact ones, I'm sorry. I can say that the last time I saw it was years ago, though, but thats because I stopped watching his content years ago.
  edit
  actually found a clip embedded in another site, i'm shocked.
  https://youtu.be/a-PH2GUy_zM
  
  It was on an episode of the WAN show a while back (I don't know which, I stopped watching a while ago). He said if you're not paying for the service or watching the Ads, it's the same as Piracy because your not paying what's owed.
  
  He talks about it in this video (the video this thread is about)
  
  No, because that isn’t Linus’s take.
  I think he’s referencing a stream once upon a time where Linus discussed the arguments around streaming and it’s impact on creators, from a creator’s perspective .
  But because he uttered something in favor of ads on his videos-which is how they got paid-he’s now considered ultra pro invasive ads by the user above, who professes to not actually watching Linus
  
  I watched this video before it was taken down. At the start of the YouTube section he says something along the lines of "I think ad block is theft, but you're going to do it, so I have a responsibility to make sure you do it safely."
- It's a little bit more nuanced than that. Yes you're denying ad revenue but it's not a bad thing.
- "These are my Principles and if you don't like them, I have others"
- Linus didn't say piracy is theft to my knowledge. He pirates a bunch of games.

Of course de-googling your life is a violation of the terms is service...

Ah so its war you want, YouTube.
- A war they will lose. They will spend everything on something a COMMUNITY will rally together to defeat. Take the L and come up with a better plan.

What happened to his hair?
- D-Brand paid him to bleach it.
  
  i don't know if this is serious or a joke

Obligatory Louis Rossmann commentary on the matter. https://youtu.be/qHwP6S_jf7g?feature=shared

…to the surprise of absolutely no one who's been paying attention. They got rid of the coalmine canary clause like a fucking decade ago.
- What the heck does complying with wiretap orders have to do with removing YouTube videos about adblockers?
  
  "Don't be evil"

Didn't he say that using adblockers in YouTube was basically piracy?
- Yes, he also said that piracy can be a personal choice, and showed how to do it.
- he did, but didn't condemn it.
- Yes, and that he does it as well.
  He is a big proponent of piracy.
- He did, and I disagree with that point. Piracy is copyright violation, ad-blocking is TOS violation. They're entirely different things.
  That said, he said he understands why people do it and didn't condemn it, and in this video shows how you can do it. I think that's laudable, I just disagree with his assertion that blocking ads is in some way piracy.
  
  The TOS are your licence to watch the copyrighted material, be it by paying a subscription or consuming ads. So if you break the TOS you're committing piracy. It's very clearly piracy, although I don't condemn it.
- I don't get how that relates to ungoogling your life but OK.
  
  No, I just find it strange coming this from him. Call it a collateral topic, these things happen in a discussion.
  
  Because his video got removed for ad blocking and/or talking about third party clients

It has been reuploaded already with a nice "re-upload" added in the thumbnail.
- I don't see it, probably it was removed again
  
  Actually, it's not on their channel. I just checked again, its on a channel called "floresdorf gaming".

There would be less talking over each other due to word definitions if the music industry had not convicted people that murder and stealing on boats was good way to describe unauthorized copying.
- German has the term raubkopieren for piracy which translated literally means theft-copying. I kind of find that term funny because somehow it makes it sound even worse than just piracy, since with pirates we at least have the pop fiction image of the pirate, and because it has a paradoxical sound to it ("how can you steal something by copying?").
- WHAT
  
  Pirating

Fucking hilarious.

How to "block" ads: Refresh the video multiple times. They will show a few different ads and then give up. It even works on console YT apps which have more ads.
I guess it affects impressions? I figured they would have fixed that, but this still works so whatever.
- It's a user retention thing: if a user is reloading a video repeatedly while they're trying to serve an ad, there's (probably) something wrong with the ad server, so the best business move is to send them to the content they came to see, unmonetized, so that they will continue to use the platform in the future where you can monetize their future visits.
- Found this on the YT app on Roku awhile back and it makes watching without browser-style ad blockers acceptable

I use brave or Firefox + uBlock. Never see any ad.

Linus Insurrection Tips.

Ironically, watching this video on Osysee results in me consuming more ads that help LTT than usual, because I don't have SponsorBlock set up for that.
- SponsorBlock does not change anything about the money they get from sponsorships. So no, that does not help them more than otherwise.
  
  YouTube creators can see the view rate for each section of the video, I'd be surprised if sponsors didn't ask for that data (if just to know the viewer retention for sponsor segments at the beginning vs end of the video)
  
  I'm pretty sure it does, they do see how many people play the segment.

Still available on Floatplane!

He should totally upload it to HornPUB
- I heard the legends of the Chinese anthem being at PornHub and took a look a while ago. It turns out that they've removed all videos from unverified users and blocked them from uploading.
  
  And they block access from a number of states due to stupid id laws

Am leaving this site soon am done with google and youtube (Yt frontends and odysee)

Invalid claim id when clicking on odyssey link
- Remove the dot at the end of the link: https://odysee.com/@jopec:7/linus-tech-tips-degoogle-your-life-part-2-adfree-youtube:0

One more reason to subscribe to float plane
- So glad DankPods has a presence on that site
  
  Are we just making up words now?
- What does it have besides Linus' videos?
- No, don't give those clowns more money.

Op the Odyssey link is broken
- Works for me, and the post was edited before your comment.
- It works for me. So I don't know what to do.
  
  I just searched linus tech tops degoogle your life part 2 odysee thx anyways

What is the official reason here for removing it?
- Its against YouTube's TOS to download content, and to block advertisements. Another lesser known, and less enforced part of the TOS also covers content instructing how to download content and block ads. I'm pretty sure that's the reason YouTube took it down at least.
  On another note, huge props to Linus for teaching how to block ads on channel and company, with a hundred mouths to feed, majorly funded by advertisments. I know he caught a lot of shit before with gamer nexus, but they deserve props for this.
- The category was "harmful or dangerous content" and reason was "violates ToS"

Yes i watched it

Oydsee:
Invalid claim ID %claim%Id%
- Seems to load fine by me? https://odysee.com/@jopec:7/linus-tech-tips-degoogle-your-life-part-2-adfree-youtube:0

I'd rather watch ads than this kid.

Hell yeah! Fuck the freeloaders
- Obvious troll is obvious
- Bait used to be believable

Reddit is curiously silent on this matter. Their SJWs are usually all over shit like this.
Wouldn't surprise me if their new deal with Google has some influence on which posts go down the drain, and which ones go to the front page.
- SJWs
  Ah yes REDDIT. The website that famously does not have any safe spaces for conservatives.

436 comments