I mean the client can then undo this, as it can any JS the page offers, but there's nothing harder about detecting playbackRate changes vs something which causes a DOM update.

In TV movies or YouTube, the actual content gets paused so that at least makes sense, it's just an interruption. But in Twitch it's like if they put ads in the middle of a football game! Imagine being interrupted for ads and back to players celebrating a goal.

Another thing Twitch does badly is to put ads on my face not even 30 seconds after joining a channel. Psychologically it feels like I haven't had time to get invested in the content, so it's not worth it to put up with the ads, and it makes me move somewhere else or close the tab.

My guess is they don't show ads to guests before they reach a certain amount of frequent visits.

I view ads as a reminder to myself that I should maybe be doing something else with my time. I would love an ad blocker that blanked my entire computer screen for the duration of any ad, it would be a great chance to breathe and stop doom scrolling.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-yo...

You need hard work on the encoder to do that (at least to segment video, because re-encoding dynamically is obviously not an option). Not profitable for Google.

That seems a lot simpler to do?

Funny how the AI barons never mention how AI can empower normies against them.

Crickets man. Crickets.

How fast would YT issue a C&D if someone created an app that did this for you so that you just entered in the channels you follow, and then it would just check every so often for new content?

It's not a 1-1 alternative to YT as creators have to opt in, so most (imo low effort) videos/creators won't be on there. It's fantastic for any tech/engineering/history/news though, high quality/effort vids with no bullshit.

Note: I have no vested interest in Nebula, I'm just a user that's happy to support good creators and a platform that's actively opposed to advertising.

If this counts as an ad/spam - let me know and I'll delete this comment.

Happy user here as well.

How unrealible NewPipe was for you?

Horrifying amounts of local storage required though.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38306613

In some US States (e.g., California), there are requirements on how many hours of training on topic X must be done every year. So if you finish faster, they literally, legally, have to feed you more crap until the hours of training have been met.

I've got severe ADHD so these types of assessments are near impossible due to the slow dialogue and forced wait time. Though most of these courses give you multiple (or unlimited) attempts, so I'll screenshot each slide + wrong answers and brute force until I'm done. At least I can get other stuff done in the meantime.

A common easy way is to just re-enable the “next” button. Even if it takes me longer than just doing legitimately, I find it more educational.

My manager was impressed when I scored 110%.

You have no expectation of privacy on company hardware, they are allowed to do anything they want to do with the signal you provide them...

However, the vast majority are the exact opposite. Loud music, shouting, uncomfortable sound effects, a long playtime, and to top it off, either advertising an outright scam or else a product that I have no interest in whatsoever. Sometimes I have to rip my headphones off to protect my ears. Not to mention the timing -- ads between movements in a classical symphony, or else right during a passage itself.

It's a good reminder that while I've enjoyed Youtube for many years, I also have a CD collection I can listen to instead.

It was fine. I had no problem with it.

Recently it has stopped triggering again though. I have no idea why.

Instead they spread their updates over users 0.1% at a time over an hour or so. That way if youtube stops working for that fraction of users, they can cancel and rollback the update.

Sometimes this means that you might be in that tiny fraction of users who gets a change before the devs who maintain the UBO lists, and sometimes that change is related to ads.

(It's only happened to me twice in the last 2 years)

In this case, you don't need to mess around with other extensions, you just need to wait an hour or so until those devs have seen Google's changes and they can push their own updates to reblock the new ads.

If you want it to go faster, you can go to the github issues pages for the filterlists and they have instructions for how to get uBlock Origin to generate a blob of debug info to post on github to speed up their updates.

Interestingly I just tried Chrome (Canary build) with uBO and I'm getting ads... :o

https://github.com/TheRealJoelmatic/RemoveAdblockThing

https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/

But I definitely also recommend trying out frontends that support it.

I cannot imagine trying to use video while having to run a gauntlet of both YouTube ads and video sponsor segments.

[1] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.polymorphicshad...

Try moving through a video when this extension is active and you can see that the advertisement is getting active for almost every possible forward / reverse time selection on the video timeline.

It is just too many blank screens and though it saves a couple of seconds in the actual advertisement watching space, it does provide an unpleasant experience of watching the black screen for a few seconds.

I can live with that (and most should be!), but wanted to record this observation so that it get's to the developer's attention for improvements (if possible!)

Hope it helps.

For longer videos Youtube will insert multiple ads during the content which you might be hitting if you search through. The extension should still trigger for those ads, but it's not as seamless an experience as the ad blockers. Is that what you're describing?

Open to feedback! Have my email in profile & listed with the extension

- alt+2 to click on Skip Ads button

- ctrl + shift + end to set video's 'seek position' at 100% (useful to skip ads when 'Skip Ads' button isn't available. This makes Youtube believe that the ad is finished playing)

0: https://github.com/varunkho/ramaplayer

But that being said, recently even Vinegar is struggling a lot when I open a YouTube video (although the developer is promptly fixing issues). The video starts playing in the background, but I can't see it, then it pauses for a few seconds and restarts.

It's crazy how terrible YouTube is making the experience on their site!

[0] https://apps.apple.com/in/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...

There is also Baking Soda, from the same author, which does the same thing but for every website except YouTube.

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/baking-soda-tube-cleaner/id160...

Using both of these (and yt-dlp) actually shows how hostile the video web is becoming!

Even if we suppose that a simple hosts file could somehow block YouTube ads today, YouTube would detect that. It would not fare any better than any other ad blocker.

Back when a hosts file was able to disable YouTube ads, YouTube didn't do that.

So host-based blocking alone could be considered as just an 'emergency wheel' in case you'd had a flat, or something.

...but it seems to work ok in incognito tabs, so youtube gets even less data on me now.

[1] https://github.com/LuanRT/YouTube.js

[2] https://github.com/Andrews54757/FastStream

[3] Chrome (also available for Firefox): https://chromewebstore.google.com/u/1/detail/faststream-vide...

Edit: fixed, works well in every test case

EDIT: It seems like Firefox has some special unsafe eval rule breaking dash.js

EDIT2: Problem was actually FF's sendMessage not toString()'ing URL objects. I've fixed it in V1.2.1 for FF (approval by mozilla pending)

EDIT3: V1.2.1 (Firefox hotfix) is available now

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/faststream/

Example of a shader I was playing with https://github.com/TianZerL/ACNetGLSL

I just found this for fsr [0] which might work for the upscaling use case.

[0] https://github.com/Hajime-san/web-fsr/tree/main/browser-exte...

To me, FastStream is just a fun hobby project, not a product. I intend to always keep it free without unnecessary bloat or spyware of any kind. So, I don't really have a desire for it to be "successful" beyond it being immediately useful to me and a couple of my friends.

This extension does not block, but instead just fast forward the ad (playback speed at 10x - tbh, it could'be been at 100x probably!) and mutes it. So from the youtube js perspective, the ad has played and wasn't blocked.

I've not seen it since. Only side effect is videos sometimes pause right as they start. I assume because it stops the video and shows the pop up. I can just resume immediately though.

[1]: https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions

As a surprised customer of YouTube premium having all ads gone across videos and music across all devices really might not be a bad deal for anyone on the fence for a family plan and all your devices.

In terms of working around ads.. There are some neat solutions that seem to work ok for YouTube on tv.. but so far the family plan seems ok.

Was anyone able tog eat off the premium plan and have no ads on their phones, computers, tvs and smart speakers?

I have heard some folks using tools like invidious but I'm not sure how well they map to multiple screens.

Being able to put the same account onto the built in youtube apps on TV's and mobile devices has been useful. No need to buy a white noise machine for kids, we just use a google mini in speaker mode only. Sure, I'd like it to be something else but premium has me on board for now.

I installed mine after YouTube starts to show 45 minute (yes, indeed) long ads to me, the entire pod cast session of it, AFTER I've watched the first ad but decided not to tap "Skip Ad".

If YouTube don't want to control the quality of what they are showing, then guess I'll just help them not showing it. And if doing so is a cause for a ban, then I guess just ban me :)

It is going to be an interesting waste of resources. =)

The fact is the CTR for brand aware consumers will be negatively affected by burning goodwill with peripheral viewers. Thus, while increased paid impressions will be good for Google/Alphabet short term revenue, the actual consumer sales for advertisers will show a degraded campaign performance.

It was called a contaminated lead pool if I recall. If 80% of traffic now associates a brand as a nuisance, than it will cost >12 times whatever people spent on the bad Marketing plan to attempt to "fix".

Spectacularly bad business decision, as someone is letting the dog drive =)

Subscriptions just tend to pile up and many of them sitting idle for long periods of time. I would love pay-per-view for streaming services as well, instead of having Netflix/Hulu/Disney+/Prime/etc subscriptions (as opposed to juggling between them, or choosing just one to stick with). Same with VPN that I use very sporadically, it feels stupid to pay a monthly fee for something I use maybe an hour per month on average.

I've been running my Piped instance for a while, and there are many public Piped instances available on the Web as well.

And, if you don't want the headache of running your own proxied instance or hopping between public instances, use Platypush - it wires together Piped as a backend, with yt-dlp as a local proxy/scaper, and a multitude of media plugins to allow you streaming directly the YouTube media files to any media device. Plus, thanks to yt-dlp, it doesn't only work only with YouTube, but with hundreds of other websites with closed media URLs (Facebook, TikTok, Twitter...). And then just use LibRedirect/UntrackMe to convert all of the YouTube URLs to Piped URLs - you won't send a single packet to that digital sewage, and you won't even notice any difference.

Just...stopping relying on YouTube's frontend. I've been chasing their API and FE changes for a while. I even set up a small Selenium suite to scrape video results directly from their UI. It's quite clear that they've decided to invest enough resources to embrace full war against anybody who's sick of their ads. They are in a terminal phase of enshittification - the one where they look so much after they bottom line that they don't care if they to turn their whole platform into a big billboard or shut down all of their APIs. Either I consume videos from anywhere else, or, when I have no alternatives, I use Piped. But avoid youtube.com at all costs: it's a walking digital cancer in its terminal phase.

Even paying a subscription to them to get rid of the ads wouldn't help. I'd rather direct my donations to open or non-enshittified services than supporting a dying business model.

FYI, I use adnauseum and don’t seem to get served ads on YouTube on my desktop where it is installed. I don’t choose to “block” ads on YouTube, so I guess they just aren’t serving them to adnauseum users.

A huge amount of videos on YouTube are created for their own sake, with no expectation of going viral or making money off them. PeerTube fulfills the "free video host" role while also being ad-free. I might be naive, but I believe this is how most people saw YouTube around 2012.

The "seeking to make money on YouTube" role is artificially created as a result of a massive corporation running a loss-leader for a decade, dictating what content gets popular through recommendation algorithms, and literally paying people to encourage them to produce more of the desired addicting content.

Who knows what would have happened if YouTube had not been bought out and been allowed to compete fairly with P2P technologies as they emerged.

Speaking of litigation, nobody's been sued for watching YouTube. People got sued for BitTorrent traffic all the time; up to and including dedicated settlement extortion operations (e.g. Prenda Law). This is a third role of YouTube we don't really consider: they handle all the stupid copyright stuff so that users don't have to. P2P inherently shoves all the liability[0] onto the users because you dox yourself every time you use it. Imagine, say, someone suing individual P2P users to try and shut down, say, a SSSniperWolf[1] video.

If you took YouTube away today, you'd have creators moving to Nebula or Floatplane, because there's still money in that. There really isn't money in PeerTube. Monetization is the thing that really put YouTube on the map, not free distribution.

Though, to be clear, video distribution is still hilariously expensive. Google considers YouTube to be profitable and has done so for many years, but that is almost certainly because YouTube gets to use Google's favorable peering arrangements with last-mile ISPs. These same ISPs also did all sorts of questionable things to throttle or block BitTorrent traffic back in the day, I imagine they'd come up with new attacks on PeerTube traffic today. The underlying problem is that we don't have any common-carrier regulation on ISPs, so they price traffic based on "value" - i.e. how much they can double-bill the sender of the packets - rather than the cost of that traffic.

If you want a viable YouTube competitor, you want net neutrality regulation.

[0] Ok, before you cite a Ninth Circuit opinion arguing that mere downloading still has liability or something, I'm not saying that you CAN'T EVER be sued for watching YouTube, only that you'd have to sue Google first, and they have big pockets.

[1] Notorious "reaction streamer" that doesn't actually do any reacting in her videos made up of entirely other people's YouTube uploads. Recently infamous for tracking down JacksFilms' physical location and bragging about it on Instagram.

It's estimated that there are 1 billion YouTube videos, compared to 600k videos hosted by PeerTube. Thats a 4 order of magnitude difference. Saying that PeerTube can "fill this role" is an outrageous assumption about scaling.

I am not saying that PeerTube is better and that people should be using it. I am saying that it is worse, because of the way YouTube developed and made competition impossible.

Don't conflate being unwilling to give Google money with being unwilling to give anyone money.

I want out - I want to switch to a competitor, I'll pay money to do so. But Google's anticompetitive practices have taken that option from me. They broke the system and then get mad when I refuse to work within that system; so what?

But having the size of YT means it’s very hard to lose.

Personally, I wish platforms like peertube or bitchute would be much more know. But since YT is the place where everybody is watching it naturally follows that somebody new will post the video on YT first (and only) as well.

My two cents:

1. Decentralization. I run my own PeerTube instance, with a bunch of my videos and a few viewers per day, and it requires basically zero maintenance. A RPi4 with a decent SSD is more than enough to run it, and unless you get hundreds of views per minute a decent home broadband connection is also more than enough. If you get more traffic, you can always ask people to contribute - and most of the folks on decentralized networks usually are happy to contribute. Plus, being ActivityPub compatible, from a single Mastodon or PeerTube profile, or even any RSS/Atom reader, you can follow channels on any instance. We often underestimate how easy it has become to run your own stuff if you know how to run a Docker container, and how easy it is to use syndacation and open protocols to publish to one place and broadcast to everyone. For some reason, the "you need a big centralized platform with big servers that can autoscale, big financial backing and a big surveillance adware business model in order to serve some .mp4 files" dogma is hard to kill.

2. Creators-run platforms. I've been an early supporter of Nebula and I keep contributing to them. I get all the videos that my favourite educational creators post on YouTube, plus exclusive content, without ads and without YouTube's hostile practices, for ~$3/month, and I know that the platform is run by the creators themselves, so the money goes directly to them. The success of platforms like Nebula sends a clear message to YouTube: people are happier to pay a monthly subscription to a service that only offers a curated subset of what's available on YouTube, knowing that that money goes directly to the creators, rather than watching ads every 5 minutes on YouTube and getting all of Google's privacy-invasive and developer-hostile business practices.

This is a problem in countries where uploading copyrighted and illegal material has strong legal consequences (so I'd not want to share a video before I watched it fully so I can at least can see it doesn't have any obvious illegal content)

You can alleviate the problem by browsing some "borderline" profiles/instances with Tor/VPN though, or even just disable the "Help share videos being played" setting from the profile settings.

every silicon valley startup ever has this same plan of attack, and no one bats an eye. it's kind of like a long-term bait-and-switch. that's just how these things work, apparently. sadly.

Second, the entire reason they have those insane costs is because they got rid of the competition. Doing this at smaller scales is not nearly as expensive per user.

Creating a Google account, however, is a problem. Having to log in with that account is a problem. Having to link the account with a credit card or some other payment method is a problem. Having the account tied to my identity via a phone number, and/or the payment method, is a problem. Having the account used to track my viewing history is a problem. Having to possibly deal with a suspended/banned/compromised account, payment issues, and so on, is a problem.

Those are far too many problems to deal with, just to watch some videos.

If there was something more like dropping coins/bills in the hat of a street performer, I'd generally be willing to pay.

I've never looked into Youtube Premium until this thread but it seems to be available for 10€ a month in my location. That's a reasonable amount of money I could certainly pay if I had the option of doing so privately. I don't want to have my viewing history associated with my account, I don't want to log into my Google account and have it remember my searches.

Give me a way to pay for the service without my subsequent use being tracked and data mined, and I'd be happy to pay.

> If there was something more like dropping coins/bills in the hat of a street performer, I'd generally be willing to pay.

Some of the people producing on youtube have arrangements for this (kofi, patreon etc); there's also one built into youtube called "superchat", but of course that relies on being logged in and giving google your payment info.

Great. Good for them. What about the rest of the world, some (many) of whom can't afford a(nother) monthly subscription fee?

Are they now to be excluded from participating in popular culture, if they do not wish to be subjected to obnoxious advertising?

Youtube basically reached a de-facto status of a public library, considering it contains archival TV shows, sports matches, original music, documentaries, lessons, instructions, clips of contemporary life, and so on. While median quality is much lower, it easily rivals Wikipedia in breadth and depth.

It my opinion, it should be publicly funded, without discriminating access based on willingness (ability!) to pay or to be subjected to ads.

My sole argument is that a lot of people in tech are better off just paying for Premium because their time is worth more than using a cheat or watching/dealing with ads.

And for those who think it's not worth it, that's totally fine. I'm not arguing that you should pay or even use YouTube.

My only point is that devs should think carefully about the value of their time.

Copyright effectively gives YT an arguably illegitimate monopoly status on a lot of content which hasn't been uploaded elsewhere. Compared to, say, "modern" Usenet where files are distributed and users choose their provider.

Ads are trash and I'm somewhat willing to pay, but not on the Google terms that takes away my privacy and right to run FOSS.

YouTube server's not running on your computer.

The client is, my browser is, and the ads that I suppose they want me to watch would be displayed through my computer.

But if that's the choice you prefer to make, then the objectively more ethical thing to do is to not watch the video content either.

For some reason people have misconstrued ones responsibilities towards ones neighbors with ones responsibilities towards multi-billion dollar companies.

copying isn't theft, convincing people it is theft is tantamount to the scam that caused people to believe diamond rings were a part of marriage proposals.

It's no more unethical to refuse to play specific content on a device you own than it is to refuse to purchase a diamond ring when proposing marriage.

In reality, however, this is just a dumb justification for unethical behavior because people with ad-blockers will just investigate how to circumvent anti-adblock measures, to keep consuming content for free.

And this behavior is akin to software piracy, which ensured monopolies thrived. Just as in the 90s, when software piracy helped companies like Microsoft or Adobe to own the market, YouTube is now a monopoly thanks to people like you. Because alternatives, like Vimeo or PeerTube, can't differentiate by being ads-free.

And now, the monopoly, which ad-blockers helped create, is used as further justification for the existence of ad-blockers. Funny how that works out.

I wouldn't care, except the writing is on the wall for where this is going. In truth, ad-blocking still works simply because publishers like Google still allow it to work, by not investing in anti-adblock tech or lobbying for legislation that bans it altogether (e.g., DRM). It's either that or paywalls everywhere. And this will hurt the open web, much like how software piracy hurt general-purpose computing.

Enjoy the freeloading while it lasts.

but shush, we don't talk about the pirated ... err blood diamonds involved, ethics only becomes important when it's the public doing something they don't like.