***

Right? Firefox has been excellent for some time now, and Google has actively betrayed user's trust for at least as long. It's easy to switch and Firefox almost always has equivalent plugins and other solutions. There's very little reason not to switch.
- Mobile ad blocking without any root/jailbreak/proxy/dns was all I needed to finally push me over the edge.
This is not a chrome vs firefox issue. People using an adblocker on firefox are getting blocked just the same.
See:
source (sorry for the reddit link)
- Most often this happens because the user runs some other addon/blocker that interferes with ublock (or gets detected). It's important to test with only ublock active and see if the problem persists, and if not, to slowly enable more and more to see what is causing the issues.
- I use Firefox and also got that pop-up. Eventually I just grew tired of clicking the "X" button so I went on uBlock origin and added that stupid banner and the banner background to the blacklist.
  It's like nothing ever happened. And if shit continues to get worse, either someone comes up with a fix somehow, or I'll just find a way to run ReVanced YouTube apk on my pc or something. I don't care if I have to emulate it somehow.
  Also, on mobile GrayJay is a good alternative to ReVanced. Made by LouisRossmann's team apparently.
You have no idea? You know exactly why people download/buy the most popular thing at any time and you also know most people don't change anything unless it's broken.
"Broken" is a variable scale which heavily depends on the users in this instance
- I swear half the users here are running NixOS these days (with the other half on Arch). Redditors like Linux, but Lemmings take it to an whole new level.
Even that might be going a bit short. In the long run it's probably better to switch to piped, freetuhe, invidous, etc.
I’ve never (almost?) used chrome as main for the past 15+ years
but he’ll, the last years updates are more and more unstable. Tab and browser crashes are to be expected multiple times per week (ok browser crash maybe once per week)
Also I actually miss WebUSB, WebBluetooth (I work with embedded as a hobby and it’s very convenient) and background blur (nobody wants to allow camera blur in ff, especially linux)
- For me Firefox haven't crashed once in a year or more, even though I'm a heavy user: using it every day for multiple hours as a "tab hoarder", with quite a few addons.
  I also rarely restart it, as I don't turn off my computer completely, so the Firefox process is usually as old as the time of last system reboot.
  I think you may have ran into a rare bug, that has got persisted in your browser profile.
  You may create a new browser profile (e.g. on the about:profiles page) and set your things up there, and most likely it'll be stable.
  I think there's also a "refresh Firefox" button somewhere where average people would look for it, but I don't know where it is. But be aware that this will delete everything in Firefox, where's if you create a new profile, the new profile will start with a clean slate and you can switch back and forth between the old one if you find out you need something from there (e.g. old passwords that you haven't transferred, a specific about:config setting if you use those, addon settings, ...), or even have them open at the same time.
- About the other points.
  I see your point, personally I prefer WebUsb, WebBluetooth and such to be completely missing, so it's much less likely that a bug allows access to these to a site.
  Bluring camera background seems to me very specific to webcams, and even if chromium based browsers will do it for you, I think you are better off with running OBS and it's virtual webcam functionality, as it has been made for that purpose (video processing), and it can do much more if you want (including cropping, ways to improve video quality, or even do greenboxing). Introducing background bluring to the browser would mean more requests to add this or that effect (even if it should actually be the task of the web app), and I think it's hard to maintain even a single such effect (that does not blur everything, but only certain parts of the image) if your devs don't have extensive experience in video processing. This would be a feature that if introduced, either would break once and stay that way for quite some time, or would take significant development resources to find the problem and keep it working.
also if you are on Windows the new duck duck Go browser takes care of all this automatically

I'm still waiting for my "AdBlOcKeR bAd 😭" popup, at this point I'm actually disappointed it hasn't shown up yet.

I'm using ublock and firefox (on arch btw) if your curious
- I use the same and got the popup yesterday
- Same, but I figured out that on Plasma X11 they won't show up while on Plasma Wayland they do... (was it random?)
- In my experience the popup comes up if and only if you have any custom blocking list enabled. Default uBlock filter lists are fine
I imagine, they stretch this out over a longer period, so no shitstorm forms...
I've been binging YouTube, preparing to disengage forever...
It's been weeks now. The popup still hasn't come up
I wanted to say the same but then remembered I'm using piped for a while now lol

People keep saying this but I guess I'm on the lucky slow end of the rollout because I haven't had my adblock stop working yet.

But they've done this before, it's just a cycle. If I have to, I'll start using a new adblocker, or entirely diffent way to access the videos, once an option becomes available shortly, inevitably. No reason to worry about this long term IMO.

Ublock released an update that allowed it to keep working on YouTube.
- When? I'm one video away from being blocked and I manually updated my ublock stuff like a week ago.
Man, I'm still waiting on Netflix to tell me my parents and I can't use the same account. They asked for an email verification code one time and that's been it.
Honestly I'm just kind of blue balled at this point. Just make me cancel already!
- Same here, but Netflix is going to increase prices again, so that might be the final straw to ditch them for me
- Spotify has been harassing me to get whatever the heck the duo crap is...literally only me uses it but I'm on the verge of cancelling from their full screen garbage
This has pissed off a lot of people, including tech youtubers that have had to turn to alternative income sources like sponsors and patreon that are working on or promoting as blockers.

After updating my uBlock lists to the latest version the popup no longer appears. Something to try out.

Chrome based browsers can get fucked.

Maybe I've found a definitive solution, because adblocking only works for a few days, until Google noticed it and put contrameasures. In Firefox install Tampermonkey and in it this script

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/477725-youtube-iframe-adblocker

In Vivaldi no need of Tampermonkey, download the link to an folder and don't delete it. Open the Extension page in developer mode and drag the script in it. Done

It is an ingenious userscript that helps persistent YouTube viewers bypass the frustrating "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube" message. It employs a clever technique of dynamically inserting an iframe player to replace the standard YouTube player. This method effectively circumvents YouTube's ad-blocker detection, allowing for an uninterrupted, ad-free viewing experience even after YouTube's standard measures have been triggered. So you can still use your adblocker without problems.

I would just caution anyone that blocking ads while logged into your Google account is probably a bad idea if you care about still watching videos there. Google will grow more desperate to show tracked ads to users.
The only ling term solution is to seek to watch YouTube e videos in a private way. Freestone is a good start. New piped and individuals look promising as well. I'm still researching a good long term solution.
- Front-ends and streaming platforms are several outsite, but Google also is blocking those, its not a solution for a long term. I was recently using FreeTube as a desktop client, but it has become unusable. I recently replaced VLC with SMPlayer, MMplayer like VLC but way better, also FOSS, this allows me to watch, among others, streaming videos from different sites, among others also from YT so far without problems. I also use an extension (FOSS) that allows me to record the audio of the active tab and save it as mp3, that is, with this it does not matter whether it is a music video from YT or from other sources and with this outside of Google's control.
  A good option is also IMDB, or better its online service, Odysee, which allows you to import subscriptions and playlists from YT, it is somewhat complicated to do, but it is guided. Odysee is not related to Google, it has a UI similar to YT and a good number of videos of all kinds, many have already moved to this platform. In my opinion it is the best direct alternative to YT.
  In any case, at least so far, this userscript works wonderfully and I think it will continue to work, since it prevents YT from discovering that you use an adblocker, not like other anti adblock killers whose script I also have in the Vivaldi blocker list, since these do block the YT detector, which naturally has already been discovered, however this script does not block the YT detector, but surrounds it by putting a "mask" over the video, with which the detector passes underneath without discovering anything.
  The risk that YT discovers it and blocks me? Yes it does anyway if I continue using an adblocker and I prefer to suck my elbow before deactivating the ad- and all the other blockers on YT and swallowing all the garbage of ads, clickbaits and the other shit that YT is full of (a single music video, blocked 12 ads and more than 20 trackers and without the Clickbait Remover, YT completely changes the thumbnails it shows, which mostly have nothing to do with the content). No, thanks
- Google's desperation to show tracked ads is but one vector in the equation which determines longterm viability for watching Youtube ad-free for free. There are also other vectors to consider like the level of obtrusion required to actually effectively adblock-block, and its related effect on the userbase. And also just the level of inconvenience presented by ads, determined by their length, skippability etc.
  The proportion of the userbase blocking ads is still relatively negligible, and this is an outcome manufactured by Google toeing the line between too obtrusive and too ineffective. Any measure I can imagine which would actually capture a significant portion of users blocking ads would also significantly skew the balance in favour of obtrusivity, which they would pay for in lost users.
  As long as many users are happy to continue being vigilant in blocking ads, IMO this balance will ensure blocking ads will remain feasible.
This is working for me, super simple to install too.

Copy the URL, open it in a private window with ublock origin set to allowed in private windows. Can still view the video, and now they also can't attribute it to your user account.

So they lose again.

They can definitely still associate it to your household by IP though. Me and my roommates get video suggestions for things the others are interested in because of the IP tracking.
- Yikes lol
- While they can track your IP for all sorts of nefarious purposes, they can't and won't associate it to use of an ad blocker if the ad blocker has successfully blocked their ads because they, by definition, don't know that you've blocked them. If they did they would show the popup.
- I think a VPN will then help with this.

If I had any programming ability above the level of a sloth I’d make a blocker called “Muffler” that basically separated out all the adstreams and made them think they were viewed and played in real time, but invisible to the user.

Shouting into the void, and nothing to be done about it as they’d look like they were being played.

Sounds like what adnauseam is doing. It loads ads hidden and clicks on some of them but I am not sure if it does that with YouTube ads or just blocks them.
- So does this cause advertisers to lose money since their ads are being clicked but never viewed by human eyes? Because if so, I'll install ad nauseum asap
In a vice versa way, that's pi hole. The website makes ad requests to the DNS and pi hole says:
- I use pihole. Pihole does not work for sites that serve ads from the same domain, like YouTube
- Like, downloading the video files with yt-dlp and then uploading them? Or streaming, like what Piped/LibreTube do?
  I personally have my own piped server, and don't enter to youtube for anything. The only 2 things it can't do are post comments and see live streams comments. No ads, no tracking, i can do whatever i want without google's permission
Not a bad idea, but if possible, you want to skip loading the ad altogether, which is – to my understanding – what currently happens.
- This is so inherently detectable, though, I'm amazed it worked for so long and that it's still working now. Likely a consequence of offloading as much of YT onto the client side as possible, because if you're doing anything server side how hard is it to require that the ad has at least downloaded before streaming the video?
  The Spotify ripper "zotify" has an undetectable "realtime" mode that does basically what OP suggested. Instead of downloading every track as fast as possible, it pretends that it's actually streaming and listening to them. Obviously it takes a lot longer to rip a whole album, but it's a good idea.
  I think Spotify ripping isn't big enough that it's actually needed at this point, but it's good that they considered the potential for it.
There was an app that did that.
Google found it and killed it.
Piped is pretty much that.

No love for freetube? Started using it a few days ago and it's actually brilliant. Rather than contunue with the constant battle back and forth with ublock and YouTube, I've just taken the nuclear option and blown away the front end. It's amazing. Loads faster than the Web version of YouTube too.

Also invidious and also Piped, tons of options. Or say fuck you to google all together and go for odyssee or something
- Which Invidio.us instance would you recommend? I'm looking for one that's the most stable and relatively fast compared to other instances. Also, I believe it's also geography dependent because instances don't have CDNs?
- PeerTube has some pretty good lofi streams. I use it for that and not YouTube anymore.
  Nebula.tv is a good paid streaming service if you like science goodness.
  What others are there? 🤔
Yeah, I thinknthebmost important aspect of these things is that we have to start consuming video without letting Google track our activity. Whether it is Freestone or another client, this means tacking our own video preferences and searching for likewise content manually.
I am a bit worried that long term, Google will simply withold video content. Without the ability to track users, and be the definitive authority on what a view means, Google really has no reason to stream video to people for free. Eventually, Google, in their desperation will resort to more and more forceful measures to track people who watch your videos - invalidating your Google account and cutting off your access to drive, maps, and search is a possibility.
It is prudent to get off of their client and go private now. But we also have to think about replacing the backend, similar to how lemmy is replacing the reddit backend. Peertube exists, but it is a much heavier lift for self hosting. I would also want to see a client that is committed to mixing youtube videos with peertube bidoes, or other backends before it is too late.
- I'm going to Odysee, it's the best alternative to YT i know and it isn't related to Google.
- Brilliant idea for a universal front end. If the user experience is seamless so that the hosting service doesn't matter that would be such a good way to transition to freer platforms

you can also use invidious or piped

Make sure you're using the latest version of uBlockOrigin, then update all your filters. Should work just fine.

Not OP, but I tried that a couple of times and it always works for like 2 hours and then the popup reappears. I don't have any other extensions activated which might mess with uBlocks config, any ideas what I'm doing wrong?
- You are being unlucky is what you are doing wrong. The changes on YT are not being rolled out to all users at the same time. You could just be in a location or in a part of the network where changes are applied first. Nothing you can do to change that, just wait for the filter lists to catch up. Or migrate to piped or Invidious.
  This whole "Firefox, Firefox, Firefox" chanting as if it prevents the ad block detection is ridiculous. The reason why FF users got spared for longer is because the marketshare of FF is so low, that it took longer until most of them were affected purely based on random chance.
  I use Chrome on my work laptop and FF on my PC and I either get the detection message on both or I don't get it on either device.

Just get into the routine of going to ublock origin addon each morning, clear the caches and loading all filters. Close all youtube tabs and reopen them. Those daredevils are playing anti-anti-adblock with youtube via blocklists daily now.

Ah, if it doesn't work, disable all addons, restart browser, update filters, try. If it works, enable addons one-by-one until the method suddenly fails.

Also pi-hole and similar adblocking solutions can cause this now, so you might need to remove those, add exceptions or stuff. It's tedious, but doable.

Might be time to migrate to indiviuous as my new youtube frontpage (uses youtube as video source, nothing lost) or setup my own instance of it. My TV runs smarttubenext for years now, anyway, which is way better than the original yt app.

I'm way too lazy to update filter lists every day, so I just use Redirector to redirect the watch page to Invidious.
anti-anti-adblock
Trace Buster Buster!

?
- https://mpv.io/

Google forcing ads down our throats is putting ads in classrooms.

One word. Piped.

What I've been doing is using my account for subscriptions and such and having piped open in another tab, then to watch videos, right clicking on them instead of opening them, hitting copy link, and pasting that to the piped tab to quickly open them there.
- That's a good work around. You can also right click and "open in private window" and it will work just fine.
- There are userscripts that'll open your videos in Piped for you.
- You might like the libredirect addon, then. Also, you can have an account on Piped, so your subriptions are with you on any device

Check out GrayJay it's like YouTube vanced, but it can access twitch, nebula and many other sources at the same time

Thanks mate

Just update the filters

I did the recommended stuff (resetting ublock, updating the filters and Restart). The ad popup about disabling adblock still opens up.
- If you also use "Enhancer for YouTube" try disabling its adblocker.
Yes. I updated my uBlock Origin and it seems to skip through YouTube video ads for now. But I'm sure YouTube's team is hard at work trying to overcome the new workaround. This is essentially going to be a tech arms race, lol.
- The good news is it probably costs Google 1000x in resources to come up with a solution than uBlock to get around it. Its a war they cannot truly win.

*laughs in NoScript

My mind was just blown. Turning off Javascript works, doesn't it?
- Very much so. Should also be deleting cookies after every session, and probably never logging in.
Are you able to view YouTube at all with NoScript enabled ? When I tried it out last the page itself doesn't load because everything is JS based.
- Yes, just allow ytimg and youtube and it works. Though I also have Enhancer for Youtube and Unhook installed, but I doubt those have any impact.

Why even use the offical site or app anyway?

Because I have a family subscription. YT and YT music for the whole family, means my kids are ad free and managed. I use the heck out of it and can afford it.
I don't pay for Spotify, and with the price hike Disney + is about to get the eye patch treatment.
But I really do use the heck out of YT, so for me it's worth it.
But if you don't see the value, do what you gotta do.
- Fair enough, giving money to that corporation just feels very wrong to me. But I have to be fair here, the services Google offers are actually useful.
  Not like some other mega-brands that just dick around and do fuck all
Because hosting an invidious instance isn’t free, and I like to keep the strain off. I can only monetarily support so many tech habits!
- I don't host anything myself, a local Piped instance on the Desktop and Newpipe on Android serve me splendidly
  I can only monetarily support so many tech habits!
  I really feel you on that one though
- What about FreeTube? Revanced? Grayjay? You don't need to host it yourself!

Haven't had this issue yet. Firefox with ublock on Linux.

They're rolling it out only for certain users.
staged rollout

I've started using Piped but oh my god the fucking buffering is ridiculous

https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/wiki/Instances using an other instance from this list works realy fine for me

And new circle between adBlocks and antiAdDlocks begins.

So there's an opportunity for anyone looking to get a chunk of Youtube's market share, in other words. 🤔

Peertube is eagerly awaiting a proper community.
Not gonna happen because of hosting costs for a library that size
It's never gonna happen. YouTube has monetization for creators on lock, and I don't think any other platform has a system even remotely as good.
- Not with that attitude anyhow

So apparently there are two phases: first, a pop-up that tells you addblocker is forbidden. But if you go long enough without caring, the the message is out instead of the video.

It is based on the account. So if you open the video in another account, it works, and it also work in a private tab (I need to double check for this one).

Piped

Why am I not having any issues blocking ads in YouTube? I use uBlock Origin and Firefox.

- That's true, I haven't been affected yet and I just assumed my ublock was doing a good enough job. But I guess it'll be my turn soon
A/B testing. I have your set up and am seeing g them.
Me too. I'm also on Google Fi still for reasons, I know there are better options. The moment they start blocking Ublock I will be cancelling my phone plan.
- Why wouldn't they offer free services for you like YouTube premium (whatever it's called) since you already buy in to their service?

libreDIRECT firefox extension and then set piped instance to piped.video , it's pret nice

any youtube link or click you do will go to the piped.video "version" instead.

Yeah, it's super nice. And if for some reason that instance is down, it has the integrated ability to ping other instances to see which ones work and how fast. There are a ton of nifty features in that one little add-on, it's pretty impressive.

After purging cache it's working for me again.

Oddly enough YouTube only seems to be ramping up its antiadbpocker campaign on their desktop version. The mobile version of the site works fine without ads.

I'm using the Piped YT frontend on Firefox with uBlock and I've not once seen any add pop up. I don't have a Google account but I added a bunch of rss-feeds to my Thunderbird, so I get a message when my favorite creators make a video. This way I'm not bothered by any stupid Google algorithm. Goes to show, YT is best consumed without an account.

I've exported my subscriptions and imported them in FreeTube. Seems to work even better since it doesn't try to hide videos in my subscription list.

Libredirect pointing to invidious/piped. Just go.

I think it's weird that I haven't ran into these ads yet

I saw the pop-up a few times but a refresh made it go away.

What has Mr. Jeremy got to do with this?

Not sure what’s going to happen with Vivaldi given that the browser is the ad blocker.

You can disable it on a per-site basis, just click on that shield icon on the left of the address field.
It can also be disabled globally from the settings.

STN Beta on my AndroidTV still seems to work fine adless, though, I usually just cast my phone youtube to that and it'll just play completely adless...

A proxied front end which works 10/10 , FOSS online and selfhostable, online with encryted server (SHA-384), very fast and lighweight, even more in Light Mode for PC with few resources. The best front end i've seen, nice UI without ads or other crap.

https://poketube.fun/app

What the hell is an encrypted server? What's special about SHA-384, where do they use it to improve privacy? Please don't bullshit people with random IT terms.
Glancing at the code, this is just another YT proxy. Ofc they have your user info, they just choose to only store aggregated data.
- Do you have anything better to contribute to solve the YT problem than what I have contributed in this thread?
  Our servers are secured with SHA-384 Signature Algorithm; meaning we cant see the videos you watching, things you search, or things you do We migth use third party services on PokeTube, but third party request on PokeTube is proxied by default. no third party can see wat the hell ru doing on PokeTube. We do this by proxying the requests via a whole diffrent server, so no third party can see you.
  Source code https://codeberg.org/ashley/poketube/
  https://poketube.fun/privacy
Is this something that surfaced only recently? Can't believe I haven't come across it already, if it's as good as you make it seem
- Yes, it's pretty new. Seen in New Apps in AlternativeTo.

I started using freetube on my computer to play around with and while it's definitely still a work in progress in some senses, it does provide a neat experience.

No ads, nor blockings or nasty popups in YT with the inbuild ad/trackerblocker of Vivaldi, but in FF with uBO and also in Vivaldi if i use uBO instead of the inbuild blocker, not so using Adblock Plus, which is somewhat strange.

The filterlists i use in the Vivaldi adblocker are

https://downloads.vivaldi.com/lists/abp/abp-filters-anti-cv-current.txt

https://downloads.vivaldi.com/easylist/easylist-current.txt

https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/fanboy-cookiemonster.txt

https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/

Vivaldi trackerblocker lists

https://downloads.vivaldi.com/ddg/tds-v2-current.json

https://downloads.vivaldi.com/easylist/easyprivacy-current.txt

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/FiltersRegistry/master/filters/filter_17_TrackParam/filter.txt

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/master/filters/resource-abuse.txt

Only extensions (related to privacy) i use are JShelter and SiteBleacher (fingerprints/scripts and sitedata, good complements to any adblocker)

Yep, using vivaldi, the popup doesnt show up nor does the player get disabled nor do I see ads. And that's with just tracker blocking enabled and ubo off, dk why but no ads so far

I had it pretty bad for several days, having to purge the cache several times but I saw no pop-ups yesterday or the day before that. Hoping that's still the case today

Is there something I am missing? I am using uBlock Origin on Firefox and Youtube works the same as always.

As with all changes at large tech companies, this change is being rolled out to a subsection of the whole userbase. As such, if you're not seeing it yet, it might be because you just haven't gotten into the rollout yet.
Or Firefox and uBlock are still managing to beat the countermeasures, who knows.
- It's how you boil a frog. They're not gonna back down off of this. They decided a long time ago to maximize profitability at the cost of service degradation.
Started on me today, but it looks like you can just remove the element that contains the message, tho

~~I last updated my uBlock yesterday and I haven't seen a popup since, I might be lucky or maybe Google has backed off for now.~~

edit: nevermind just got another one

I'm using Vivaldi with trackers and ad blocking as default with ublock origin but when yt blocked the player from playing videos, i tried disabling ublock just for yt and switched vivaldi's blocking from ads and trackers to just trackers and havent seen any ad or that popup ever since, not sure why

Firefox invidious redirect add on is where it’s at

YouTube revanced still working for me...

Anyone have a good ad blocker that works with iPad?

On iphone i use video lite, (after the 2 week free trial) there is 1 ad when opening it (if you get one thats longer than 5 sec, just restart the app), then there are no more ads. Also you can minimize it and use picture-in-picture
Not sure if its available on ipad, though
For youtube there's uYouPlus, but if you want a system wide adblocker you probably can't do more than AdGuard DNS (search online how (or if) you can set it up on an ipad)
brave browser
works on all OS, blocks all ads by default. you still get the "ad blockers arent allowed" but you can just inspect element and block the popup from showing
- Don't use Brave
  https://www.spacebar.news/p/stop-using-brave-browser
- I’m trying to bootleg hockey since I’m blacked out on paid services so I need something better than brave.

Another posibility for Vivaldi user

https://social.vivaldi.net/@Vivaldi/111266939448951370

invidious.io

I used AdGuard, but I let it disabled for YouTube and only use Enhancer for YouTube and SponsorBlock - haven't got the notification, yet. Does it work for someone else or the notification just haven't got to me, yet?

I use AdGuard on Firefox, and I've seen the pop up. So far I haven't been able to get rid of it, but I can still close it and continue watching.
I also have custom blocking lists, Privacy Badger, tampermonkey and PiHole, so it might be a problem with one of those instead of AdGuard.

Youtube only serves ads on its own website and apps. Just saying. . .

Vivaldi with uBlock Origin here. A simple refresh of the page makes the popup go away, often for the rest of the session. For me, it's YT without ads as usual. I might need to clear uBlock cache and refresh filter lists to make it work even better. There's also a Tampermonkey script for blocking the popup, but I haven't tried it yet.

As a side note, I've seen a lot of talk about boycotting Youtube. There are 3 things to consider with this:

Boycotting YT will give Google exactly what they want, getting rid of the "freeloaders" who don't pay for Premium and block ads.
Boycotting YT will hurt small creators who don't see much ad revenue (if any) anyway. Views and likes are what make small creators visible to the algorithm, if these drop off, their reach will diminish.
Boycotting YT won't affect big creators with sponsorships, healthy Patreon community, millions of subscribers and views.
Best way of defiance here is not stopping to use YT, but on the contrary, generating as much traffick to YT as possible while blocking the ads.

Why does it bring you great pleasure? I see this as an unfortunate outcome.

That is just the meme format. When used this way, the top part implies a sarcastic tone.

Does anyone really use youtube these days anyway? Its gone from a site where you might discover new and interesting things to a site full of clickbait trash and ads for other trash. Its gotten the point where if i see that a video i might otherwise watch is hosted on youtube, i just scroll past because I cant be bothered dealing with their site.

I'd be quite happy for it to just die off at this stage.

I use it to find content on hobbies I pursue. I have zero clickbait stuff.
- I too mostly use it at this point to follow creators, hobby stuff still lives almost exclusively on Youtube for now
well it's just that there's a lot of good content creators on there
Yes. People still use YouTube. You can tell by the fact that this post and tons like it exist.
Lol yes it's one of the largest websites on the internet. Hundreds of millions of unique users browse it a month and due to the fact that anyone can upload to it the site is LOADED with unique, insightful, creative, and informative content.
If you cant find good content on youtube it's probably more a you problem.
How am I supposed to catch max0r's next video about John videogame?
I find lots of entertainment in silly stuff, like debates about the earth being flat or not. As it turns out, the planet Earth might be an oblate spheroid. Who knew?!
Just because you don't find anything of use to you, and keep clicking the click bait so it recommends more clickbait, doesn't mean nobody else uses the site. I like to have silly shit running in the background while I work. Maybe you listen to music instead? It's not like we all have to like the same things.

I'm going to be super-mega-controversial here, and tell you all how I removed ads on YouTube:

YouTube Premium.

Yes, I realize it's not very common to pay for the services we use these days, but I watch enough YouTube that I though it'd be neat. It is. No ads, except the direct sponsors of the people I actually watch. I only wish that this would make them not also sell my data, and track the shit out me, and all that jazz. I'd like to be the customer, if you'd let me, Alphabet.

No ads, except the direct sponsors of the people I actually watch.
Nah fuck that, those are the most annoying of all the ads. Very very very rarely does a content creator actually incorporate those in the video well, it's just jarring and annoying and I won't pay money to suffer those shitty ads.
- Sponsorblock is unfortunately just as mandatory as uBlock these days. That said I won't critique video creators for doing what they need to do to get paid, my critique is leveled squarely at the system itself for making their only recourse for payment "produce propaganda for capitalists".
- The "ads" they're talking about are the ones placed directly in the video by the creators themselves. YouTube doesn't control those and no ad blocker can get rid of them. To do that you'd need a vastly more sophisticated kind of ad blocker that actually watches the video and understands the content enough to decide what part of it is a sponsored message. We may be getting close to having that kind of technology but it would take a pretty big step up from something like CharGPT.
Why let you choose one when you can be both customer and product!?
Understandably a few bucks for the hours of content I stream is justifiable, and if it were some other service I might, Im thinking on getting nebula, but google can go to hell. If they didnt want the burden of youtube they could have not bought it out, and not beat out the competition until they were the only game in town. Likewise Im salty that simple background and multitasking features are locked behind a paywall on a phone.
On top of that even the successful creators are kept afloat more by patreon and sponsor reads than they are youtubes ad services, and the algorithm and content blocker and lack of human support for creators means they regularly get screwed with age restrictions and copyright takedowns.
Im normally pretty understanding about companies needing to make a buck and be profitable and needing ads(though internet ads are non curated random scammy garbage) but I will continue to leech off of youtube until they finally block it.
I paid for premium for years. And then they fucking doubled the price.
I've been paying for a family plan for Google's music streaming service for years. It has long included YouTube premium so the six family members I have on the plan don't see YouTube ads. I guess it's good that creators get a somewhat bigger cut of money from us, but honestly if I didn't use the music streaming service, I'd be in the same boat as everyone else - desperately looking for a better way to block ads.

If everyone could stop bitching about YouTube blocking ad blockers that would be great.

you can choose not to read it
- Not really when it's all you see
removed about people removed is more annoying than normal removed.
But I'm removed about someone removed about people removed so I guess I don't have a leg to stand on here.