2y ago

uBlock Origin VS YouTube's Anti-Adblock

I came across the stickied weekly thread at uBlock Origin's sub-Reddit. WARNING: It's a long and complicated read.

The TL;DR takeaway is thus (especially for those who use Firefox):

Click the uBlock Origin icon on Firefox's menu bar
You'll see a three-gear icon at the bottom right. Click this to open the dashboard.
Click the "Purge all caches" button at the top.
Click the "Update now" button at the top.

Note: You may have to do this several times per day since YouTube keeps changing their anti-adblock scripts. However, the diligent work, from all the volunteers at uBlock Origin, have been able to keep pace. I haven't seen any ads NOR any anti-adblock warnings in the past 48 hours.

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I've still been lucky enough to not be flagged by YouTube, was already using ublock and firefox/ watch YouTube daily

Gotta wonder how long whatever idiot executive came up with this idea is actually going to last. This is the kind of thing that gets you shitcanned whenever you ignore the CTO that tells you all it will do is piss people off, lower engagement, waste time, waste money, and never generate worthy ROI.
- We are an extreme minority who really have the know-how to get around this. The majority will just give in and subscribe.
  This is what happened with Netflix. Everyone thought that Netflix would lose subscribers with the crackdown on password sharing. On the contrary, they gained subscribers and is bringing even more revenue.
- I don't think it will piss off people enough to a point that Google will care. There will be a very small amount of techy people that will always try to circumvent this but the vast majority of people will deactivate AdBlock or buy premium.
  
  I would imagine that most people aren't on YouTube except when people send them links to videos. Once they deactivate their ad blocker to watch a three minute cat video and get four preroll ads and a couple of midrolls they'll immediately turn their ad blocker off or just never come back.
  This diminishes engagement, doing the exact opposite of what they're trying to accomplish.
  By all accounts YouTube is profitable, it's just owned by greedy cunts.

Thank you for keeping on top of this Chris. I'm having a heavy week at work and I've not kept up with what's working and what isn't so your updates have been invaluable.
When I've got some days off I'm probably going to spin up a viewtube or invidious instance on either my home server or VPS and have done with it!

@admin So that's why I kept receiving all these warning screens even though I updated already. Thanks, I will do this multiple times, I guess. Hope it works.

I haven't read the full thread stickied but am curious, are you all having this issue while logged IN to Google/YouTube account? Because since I dumped Google and no longer have one, I have not gotten any of these pop ups. I use uBlock Origin on FireFox and have not once seen this yet.
- Got this without being logged in. They are rolling this out progressively. Firefox and ublock user like you
  
  This is correct.

I have been using uBlock for a long time, but since I've pair it with PiHole in my house at least, there have been no ads, even on my TV. I highly recommend people do this for their house by getting a RaspberryPi or an old PC with Linux to sit on their network, it has some setup and learning curve, but once you deploy it, you don't have to fiddle with it, apart from updating it once a month.

Gave up and switched to Freetube.
- Omg, they have an arm Linux version. That's going right on my Chromebook tomorrow!
- Ive been unsreasonably excited by how Im able to interact with youtube in a way that is more similar to the pre algortihm days.

16 comments