YouTube is now fully blocking ad blockers around the world

Some solutions:

Android
iOS
- Yattee with this guide
- (Adding Piped/Invidious website to Homescreen)
Web
- Piped
- Invidious
- ViewTube
- (Tubo)
Desktop
- FreeTube
- (Using any of the web solutions as PWAs)
TV
- Android TV
  - SmartTubeNext
- Apple TV
  - Yattee with this guide

Where is YouTube ReVanced?
- Not mentioned, on purpose 🤫
- ReVanced is definitely worth mentioning, but I'm here to tell you that GrayJay is better.
Thank you so much for sharing Yattee and the guide.
For iOS I really like Vinegar.
- Currently not working, but Firefox Focus is!
  A fix for Vinegar is on the way.
Tangential question - what is stopping youtube from restricting access to their API for 3rd party apps like Reddit did?
- SSSSSSHHHH
- Embeds, probably
Remember people start logging out for these services. Any day they could decided to start terminating accounts if this whole anti Adblocking campaign doesn’t get subscriber numbers up
Hmm Yattee keeps saying “connection error service unavailable”
MacOS also supports freetube. Been using a few months now, it’s excellent. Just clarifying in case folks see desktop and want to be sure.
Sideload uYouPlusExtra on iOS
https://github.com/arichorn/uYouPlusExtra
- I am aware of this option, but sideloading on iOS currently kinda sucks. You have to use AltStore which sometimes goes unmaintained for a few months, even when it's maintained it's kinda buggy and the Windows version almost never works for me. It's also not available for Linux. And you have to connect your phone to a computer running AltStore every 7 days, otherwise the app will stop functioning. It's just not a great solution and especially bad for less tech-savvy users.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-anti-adblock-bypa/gbghmolkliahkeekflofoaiofibligjf could help as well.
- Just use a proper ad-blocker like uBlock Origin in combination with a browser like Firefox or LibreWolf that supports proper ad-blocking extension. Fuck this Chromium garbage that deprecated MV2 because Google is scared of adblockers. Don't support Google's monopoly on browser rendering engines and use Firefox or something even better like LibreWolf.

Ya know, I've seen a lot of posts regarding Elon Musk spam in this community, and calls to "ban" them, yet every week we get gloom and doom posts like this when some new subset of the world starts seeing this shit. I'd really like to see a pinned message about the fix, which is...

Install Firefox or a derivative, and add the uBlock Origin extension.

If you visit YouTube and see the pop-up, the page isn't loading the video content, or it just seems to be acting strange, do the following:

Click on the uBlock Origin brown shield in your extensions.
Click the three little gears icon to enter the settings.
Make sure you're in the Filter lists section from the top and click the Purge all caches button below it.
Click the Update now button.
Wait until the filter update completes.
Refresh the tab(s) that YouTube is in.
Press play.

I literally have no other installed add-ons for ad blocking, anymore. Only uBlock Origin. Any time I see the message or YouTube starts acting up, I just repeat those 7 steps above for any YouTube tab that was already open, and viola, the video plays. It has simplified so many issues for me and reduced the number of adblock extensions I need to run.

I definitely plan on donating this holiday season to their team, probably the biggest share of the pie between the FOSS apps I enjoy and appreciate. Should uBlock Origin ever fail, I'll just stop going to YouTube.

Apparently you can't donate to them.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Why-don't-you-accept-donations%3F
- Weird. One way or another, they're gonna get my money!! How dare they make a great tool for free, and accept nothing for their time and contributions!! The nerve of some devs, I tell ya! /s
The element picker and disable JS button are also a life saver. Gets around so many shitty things about the modern web. The one thing I agree with from Brave (Firefox all the way though) is including uBlock by default (I just wish they gave credit).
- Yeah they really are. I use to use firefox but now I use a modafied version called librewolf. It comes with ublock by default
- Why not LibreWolf, a privacy oriented browser that ships with the real uBlock Origin? ;)
Or just live with a couple five second ads, it's not the end of the world. At the end of the day, YouTube is a business, not a charity.

Intrusive and sneaky ads like the ones on YouTube should be heavily regulated if not illegal.

Edit: especially ads louder than the average content volume, repetitive jingles designed to get stuck in your head, billboards, and ads thrown in the middle of the video you’re watching

"Loud" is unfortunately hard to quantify. There's a lot of psychoacoustics that mean that the number of decidels really doesn't tell you what's loud and what's not.
This is a great demo of how sounds can appear extremely loud without actually being physically very loud: https://youtu.be/tONF9OSUOSw?t=7m16s
Anyway the point is that it's hard to make rules about this kind of thing, because sound is subjective and there are ways to circumvent any restrictions you make.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://piped.video/tONF9OSUOSw?t=7m16s
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Sounds like you haven't watched a lot of free to air tv haha
- I can honestly say, apart from seeing it on on the background when visiting parents or similar, that I haven't watched free to air TV in maybe 15 years. Been streaming or downloading all that time.
- Free to air is heavily regulated in my country if it had a fraction of the fraudulent grifter ads Google would be shut down
- Ads in those are also regulated in civilised countries.
- Luckily all that is prosecutable by Ofcom here so it very rarely happens.
Googles ad platform is utterly full of fraudulent scams and grifters. Bring on regulations and HEAVY fines for Google making profit of fraud and crimes.

Ublock Origin on firefox still work for me no filter

It's pretty random whether you get the message or not. Some of my friends, including me, straight up cannot watch youtube on their website half of the time anymore, because it full blocks us. It's not just an annoying message, videos actually just don't play. But I only get it on some days. I think the message only pops up if you've been watching for more than like an hour straight. Then again, some of my friends have never seen the message. Who knows. Just more weird big tech server bullshit. Like how twitter's api works 15% of the time (for me).
- Purge cache and refresh does the trick if you have problems with the firefox+ublock combination. Or you have some other active extensions which prevents ublock from doing its thing.
- Been watching for 3h straight and still no pop or problem with videos but when time eventually come I'll try to setup UBO filter or using 3rd party frontend
I'm daily using uBlock Origin (with Firefox) on Windows, and ReVanced on Android, and have experienced zero indications that Google is at war with ad blockers. These two are fucking fantastic and highly recommended. I don't expect it to last forever, but bravo to these devs and contributors.
A bit unrelated, but do you know if there is a hardened firefox for linux (just like Mull for Android)?
- LibreWolf is a hardened Firefox also available on Linux.
- I use a betterfox userscript for hardening Linux Firefox
Firefox with Adblocker Ultimate working fine for me as of last night. I'll check again tonight.
- They blocked me with that combo on my PC a week ago.
Librewolf is one that might work for you

It isn't blocking my uBlock Origin on Firefox.

Yeah, all Google accomplished with this bullshit was finally getting me to switch from Chrome to Firefox as my main browser on desktop.
- Pretty much, also encouraged me to download uBlock, and now I see how many items it blocks from pages like YouTube. Spoiler: It’s a lot.
It does on mine, sometimes, so I clear cache, update uBlock, restart Firefox. In general it blocks them again
Or mine on Vivaldi. It was showing me the notice the other week, but seems to have stopped now. Either they are now time limiting youtube before the ad blocking thing comes back, or uBlock upped the ante.
- Your uBlock probably updated. uBlock has pretty much been able to successfully block YouTube's adblocker block since YouTube started blocking adblockers, so long as you kept the filters updated.

Never seen that banner or an ad. I guess it's just a matter of time though 😕

uBlock Origin is reliably blocking the blocker blocker for me at this time, though a few popups got through a couple weeks ago.
- Same, uBlock in Firefox is doing it 100% for me. Haven't even seen a youtube ad or a complaint that I should stop blocking ads.
- I feel sorry for Chrome/Chromium users who can't even use real ad-blockers because Google is scared of uBlock Origin and deprecated MV2
- Same, it's a cat and mouse battle .. lol
- Yo dawg, I heard you like blockers
- Brave is dropping the ball. It's the only mobile option.
Brave for iOS (sorry firefox gang I appreciate you guys) is working fine for me. I had some issues with both Firefox/uB and Brave on windows getting the pop-ups.
- I got the pop up a couple of times until I manually updated uBlock's filters list. After that, no issues.
- Brave is a bit sketch and the heads are kind of problematic. I would consider making the swap. Bonus points for not supporting chromium which helps google.
  I used Brave for two years, swapped over to Firefox about a year ago and couldn’t be happier. Literally nothing Brave does for me that I can’t do on Firefox. Plus no crypto spam.

No, they most certainly are not.

Shhhhh. Don't tell anyone the way.
- Be brave, tell everyone

I wish I could donate to ublock origin so badly. I never even saw the popup.

I didn't know they don't accept donations: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Why-don't-you-accept-donations%3F
- They make some interesting points, though.
- As asked by uBo's creator: please donate to the list maintainers instead.
  What a solid guy.

I get there's a heap of people on here who've somehow never seen these new anti-popup measures before, but they're definitely becoming more prevalent.

I switched to uBlock and purged the caches and it seems to have fixed the issue (for now anyway)

At some point I'll have to find a more permanent solution like switching browsers but right now things are working

a more permanent solution would be using an alternative front end like piped. there are a lot of public instances available
- But it's difficult to trust Piped and other 3rd parties with your login credentials. Especially for people who make a living on YouTube. Even if they themselves might be trustworthy, they can't be perfectly secure, so it becomes added vulnerability.
Use clients such as LibreTube. It works great and even allows skipping sponsored content.
purged the caches
Do this daily.
- I only had to do it once. Haven't seen the pop up since.
never seen the youtube anti-adblock stuff.
Mullvad vpn + mullvad browser + ublock origin + never logging into google....
Also freetube, also newpipe...
Maybe they don't bother trying to block vpn users?
- I use a VPN, and I saw the popup.
- from what I've read incognito mode is still unaffected, but thats just rumors online
If you have a VPN just set your location to a place they don’t run ads
I saw them, then I purged ublocks cache and updated and they have been gone ever since (also on firefox, because I switched as soon as I read the news that they would pull this stunt on all chromium browsers a year ago).

No change for me, youtube sure is trying but ublock origin keeps fighting the good fight

Gotta love those guys

Firefox + uBlock Origin here still holding strong.

LibreWolf (Fork of Firefox without the crap like Pocket or Sponsored sites) is great too. It also comes preinstalled with uBlock Origin. It's what I recommend to everyone.
- I'd rather not personally. I can just disable all that anyway.
I still haven't run into any issues with this setup.

Nooo. YouTube thinks it's fully blocking ad blockers. In reality nothing's changed.

in reality nothing’s changed
I would not say that. Nothing has changed for you and me.
The barrier for blocking them has once again raised a little bit. When you are talking about hundreds of millions of users, that leads to significant peel off. They don’t need to stop everybody, they just need to stop enough people or make it enough of a pain that “the average user” just gives up and accepts the status quo.

Yeah yt-dlp has been my strat this whole time anyway. Also Piped and Invidious get the job done when i'm too lazy to type in one short command for every video I watch.
Also, specifying format with yt-dlp is unnecessary ("-f 22") if you have ffmpeg installed iirc because it automatically selects the highest quality, thus shortening the command even further.
- You can also put "alias y=yt-dlp" in your ~/.bashrc to minimize it to "y". Or set up a keyboard shortcut to a script that executes the command with your clipboard content.
  Or do the same with "mpv" instead of "yt-dlp" to watch the video stream directly without downloading.

EU based Firefox + uBlock Origin user here. All very good :)

Canada based same, is this only happening on Chrome or something?
- Exact opposite here, no issues on chrome, blocked on Firefox.

Did someone forget to purge their uBlock caches?

Exactly. Takes five seconds.
- I'm not having YT problems but have never done this.
  Could someone explain how?

This was annoying me in browsers so i did a bit of reading and found out that not only can I remove their ad block blocker in browser, but my TVs also support ad free YouTube. Thanks Google! Couldn't have done it without you.

Can you point me to ad free tv please

No problems here whatsoever, I don't know what everybody is talking about. Remember to donate some bucks to your favorite open source adblock (or piping app), thank you.

UBlock doesn't accept donations.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Why-don't-you-accept-donations%3F
I would otherwise.

UK Firefox user here.... All good

It made an attempt for sure, a cute one at that 🤣

I was just using Chrome with ublock origin at work and didn't see jack shit.

**as best as they can
- was patchy 2 weeks ago but havnt had an issue in over a week now. we are winning so far

... yes. I know because you've told me 25 times in the last week.

And I've been using only newpipe and freetube since this all started. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

ReVanced still works fine, grayjay also works.
- Grayjay has been really nice! Enjoying it so far.

Nope. FF with UBO still works perfectly.

Ssh! Yes, me too, but don't let YouTube know that.
Oh! Yeah! I can't watch videos without tons of adverts every 15 nanoseconds!!

The ReVanced app still works just fine.

Me still haven't seen that shit, but my cousin does. Weird

Same, but I think it has to do with uBlock Origin updating. Nothing on my PC but saw it on a laptop.
A quick cookie purge and updating uBO and it was solved.

I don't get it, I use a variety of browsers and apps, with or without VPN. I even scrape channel RSS from the same IP and have never seen this.

You didn't state if you use an adblock extension, which is what this is all about.
- Using some sort of ad-blocking is default. I haven't seen more than the occasional ad before the filters update for more than a decade and a half.

This will definetly be a shot in the foot for Google, the beginning of YouTube's downfall

Only cloud hosting providers can provide hosting for themselves as cheaply as google. Microsoft and Amazon (except through prime video and twitch) have shown no interest in entering the fray. The downfall will only come through antitrust.
Finally some fucking space for competitors
Federation will be the only real option considering the massive storage and bandwidth requirements. Even then, once an instance starts to grow, they'll have to come up with some type of monetization strategy.
Even a low population instance will likely need many terabytes of storage.
- I don't see how federation makes economic sense for video serving/hosting. To do it economicaly you need to have local data centers with peering agreements with local ISPs and good deals for transit. Only big data companies (Google) and huge or specialized self hosts(daily motion, Facebook), can really do it.
  Reddit and Vimeo were stupid for hosting video on cloud services for that reason. Reddit wouldn't have been in such an economic crunch if they weren't burning money by serving video on the cloud.
beginning
I hope PeerTube gets better
- Please yes, it needs a lot of better.
The downfall of YouTube is creators being paid more for their work?
- They don't. In fact they get demonitised more and more easily for completely bullshit reasons. The majority of youtubers get paid through Patreon and in video sponsorship rather than from youtube itself.
- Yes, these companies work exactly like that

I’m self hosting an invidious instance and not once have I noticed any interruptions. 10/10 just use a public invidious instance and be done with it

Firefox nightly working lime a charm. I would rather download any video I want to see than using the shitty native app.

Three one minute adds was enough for me.

I have not changed anything about my browsing habits and I spend like 12 hours a day on YT, haven't yet seen this. Not very universal.

3 similar but different questions:
Where do you use YouTube (phone, pc, etc)
Where do you use YouTube (country, location)
Where do you use YouTube (browser, app, etc)
- PC (ubuntu) and Android both w/ FF & uB. Have yet to see this in Canada.
  But it does typically take Google a little while to remember that we're part of the world..
- Pc, usa, chrome
- My phone, my partner's phone, home pc, my partner's home pc, work pc, laptop, tv. Canada.

Nerds rejoice, we will never be defeated

They could put the ads in the data stream instead of implementing it client-side. But that is likely prohibitively expensive or cuts their ability to target ads.

still using revanced on android and it's fine

My original install of Vanced is still working!
- why the fuck do they call it that it makes no sense and I can never remember what its name is
  if you downvote this you're a pussy

And I just followed instructions on this page

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/19976

And it fixed it

Grayjay is the best all in all app for Android and Invidious Cross Platform. It syncs everything.

Definitely not blocking here.. but.. I have to ask. Which takes precedence, YouTube's T&C's or EU law?

Obviously, the law beats any T&C.

Love the Ficsit mug in the photo 😆

It has? 🤔

Just checked for myself and I'm not getting any popups, but perhaps it just hasn't quite hit my region yet?
- Maybe you're like me and are already blocking the popups, too.

Google chrome U block user here. Still works fine

Get off chrome go to Firefox. Seriously it will just take you days to adjust and basically every extension available on chrome is available as an add-on on Firefox. If you’re using a password manager it’s even easier, because Firefox supports every major password manager as well.
The best and easiest thing we can do to help reduce Google’s footprint that actually matters is to get off chrome. Their browser dominance gives them such an advantage. It’s really hard to quantify the damage they can and have wrought.
- is to get off chrome.
  And stil lpaying visito to its search engine, using gmail or youtube... Stop using Google's products, instead of complaining about ads.
  Firefox won't rise anymore from its 3-something%, no matter what you people do. Mozilla has been able to alienate a lot of their most loyal users.

Is it just me or is WireMin closed source?
In addition, the app contains Google tracker (This is what App Manager shows).
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this app recommended in Lemmy and I don’t understand why.
I think there are a lot of similar apps in Google Play.
Upd: I checked Damus. Contains 24 trackers. 😂
- Yeah, they haven't published the source code yet. I asked the WireMin team, and it seems they are a small team still finalizing the code. What is the App Manager called tho?

I just use the Vivaldi Browser and watch all my YouTube in browser. shrug

Until yesterday I was blocked from youtube, despite using UBO. Today it works. I don't know if it is random or if UBO does something. Possibly it will stop working again. In any case I started using piped (hope they don't decide to do something with it).

UBO updates their filters when they can, as they find and fix changes.
Youtube directly responds to those patches by updating their system. Last I checked, they do this twice a day.
Any time your UBO isnt stopping youtube, you are using filters from before youtubes last update. Opening your UBO settings, clearing and updating your filters, and refreshing your browser fixes this.
The only time it doesnt is if UBO hasnt patched youtubes most recent changes. This window of time is teeeny tiny.

there was an attempt

I only use Firefox for youtube and nothing else... it still just works the same as ever - the only ads I see are the ones the creators make themselves for sponsors. I only use Chromium-based browsers for anything that has nothing to do with google...

Try Sponsorblck. It can block sponsors, and a couple of other things. You can also set a skip button for specific segments and skip them if you want. Users like you can mark sponsor and other segments for others to be able to skip.

Not on my PC

I’ll just use an ad blocker-blocker

uBlock Origin has that feature built in
That is what google uses, after all they attempt to block your adblocker. You would need an ad blocker-blocker-blocker.

No issues with revanced

Same here

Haven't seen an anti-adblock message yet, and I block ads in all sorts of ways across my devices.

I haven't seen an ad on YouTube in several years. Doubt I'll ever see one.

You think they don't have spies?
I recon at least 1 of the users here relays information to them, or even IS working for them.

I'm getting the pop-up, which I can click to close and watch videos on my FF + Ublock.
- Clear you cache on UBlock Origin
- Clear you cache on UBlock Origin

I got fed up with this shit and invested a bit of time into getting a working Premium Family plan through a cheap country (Ukraine is about $4 per month). I invited my whole family (parents included) so essentially 6 people have an ad-free YouTube now for less than $1 each (per month). I assume that's still less than what they have gotten by serving us a shit ton of ads. And I am rid of that cat and mouse game for a while.

How would I go about doing the same?
- As others said: VPN. Ukraine seems to work good currently, since the Credit Card address isn't validated. Cheaper countries like India or Turkey now check if the CC you use is from that country. That is a bit more complicated to pull off, so that wasn't worth it for me.
- VPN to the country of your choice, then hit the sign up page for the service your interested in.
- I guess they made an account via VPN?
Love how Lemmy downvotes anyone who pays for anything. Such a great place for discussion! Definitely no echo chamber here.
- Should we start legitimizing garbage?
- For the service they offer (the hosting basically) I am actually willing to pay quite a bit. But what they typically ask for (about €15 for a single account) that's just not worth it, given that YouTube isn't the producer of the content they serve. Music might be a bit more complicated thanks to the fucking idiotic way how licensing around that works. Anyway: nothing of that excuses the excessive use of ads they serve nowadays.

No they don't.

Monopolistic and some shit

The entire internet nowadays is either monopolized or close to it. I miss the days of many servers hosting indie websites, as opposed to one or two companies per niche.

lol, good luck with that Google

Well uh... Whatever they're doing ain't working for me, because I'm yet to see one of these popups.

Let the blocking war commence. Beligerents are referred to as Blockheads.

Is there a fediverse alternative to youtube?

Peertube.
- Doesn't seems like it's allowing me to create an account sadly

merde ..

Scheisse
- govna

Switched to FreeTube. Problem solved.

Question. Wouldn't the catch-all solution for YT is to pair the AJAX calls for the video with a "view video key", and that key to be found out after running a deeply obviouscated javascript served with the html of the "view video" page?

They could even bundle some of the key-building-js with the ad being served.

At some point in order to "block the ad" , the ad blocker would have to run or analyze tons of JS code , making the ordeal to difficult to compute.

I think that is actually what they've already been doing for at least a decade?
Whenever you download a youtube video using something other than a js-enabled browser, then I think something like yt-dlp's jsinterp.py needs to evaluate some javascript to extract the key.
My guess is they can't afford the complication on the server side.
They could probably force the ad to be decoded by asking the client for proof. They couldn't prove that it was actually shown to the user though.
What I don't understand is why they don't block downloading the video during the period where an ad is supposed to be playing.

or at least they try to :P

not blocking ads, scripts. ctrl-shift-c

Good try Youtube 👍🏼

Do you REALLY think that Google is not able to block you altogether, if they really wanted to? The have permabanned entire companies and all the personal account of employees before for a misstep of one of these employees. It's just a matter of time.
- “If they really wanted to?”, they already tried and ublock published a filter to block it back.

Weird. Mine works just fine on YouTube.

Vanilla Brave blocks ads and doesn't show the blocker. Ublock & Better YouTube will cause it to trigger. Tampermonkey script prevents the blocker from appearing after disabling/enabling Ublock for a video or two.

Fuck YouTube and Google. They make enough money selling my data.

Edit: Okay I get it guys, Brave bad

Ublock doesn't trigger it. Better YouTube does. Remove it and you're golden.
Brave is commercial grade malware. How anyone can willingly install that on their system and then complain about google selling data is beyond me. At this point, Firefox is without alternatives.
- Explain?
- Ublock was triggering mine, odd that it doesn't trigger for others

👀 I see that Satisfactory coffee cup

For non-Premium users.

Google is keeping their services free for long enough, so people start believing it's supposed to be like that. At the same moment they keep paying for their music streaming, cloud storage and the rest...
- It's not free. They take your data while alsp giving you ads. A quick Google suggests they have about 280 billion in annual revenue. Which part of that is free?
Nope. Non-premium here, and my ublock still works perfectly fine.

'tis?

I guess that's why the modded YouTube app on my webOS TV stopped working today.

Can't say I've seen anything yet, just hope my ad-blocker holds steady

Google is such a douchy company now.

Incognito mode is your friend. On Firefox anyway.

No, it doesn't. I have neither seen a block, nor have I seen ads. Is that a Windows-only problem then?

I installed an invidious extension on firefox that auto redirects all youtube links. I recommend it.

Libredirect + Piped server = better youtube than youtube ever was.

Use http://grayjay.app

EDIT: I'm fascinated by the childishness of those who are complaining about the $10. Not only you don't have to pay it, and not only that it's open source, and not only the intentions are clear on why it's not a permissive license made to fight filling average Joe with malware like always being done with NewPipe and others on Play Store, but also you can pick your poison. Would you like google to win this dumb war on ad blockers? Or would you like to support non-perfect people making FOSS apps for your benefit? I really don't get you, guys. Pick your battles! Take the win and shut up for once!

I see there's a lot of negativity around GrayJay and their licensing and I don't disagree; but there's a battle going on here It's Google against the world. Having private paid entities working on this alongside the FOSS efforts is definitely not a bad thing. The fact that they're running source available means that other people can look at what they're doing even if they can't use their code directly.
- Yeah ultimately the OSS is more important to me than the F. I want FOSS ultimately but the former is massive step up from the status quo and, frankly, a more reasonable goal in my lifetime.
- They can use the code directly. The license allows "review, compilation and non-commercial distribution".
  It doesn't explicitly allow modification, but they do define "code" as "the code and any part of it and any derivative of it", so clearly derivatives are expected.
This must be the worst recommendation I've seen here
Proprietary garbage
- It is at least source available. I prefer they didn't use the license they're using but it's there right to do so.
  For mobile it's between using revanced, Grayjay or brave. At the moment I'm willing to use any one of the three that works on a given day.
...If you have Android and $10 to throw at the problem.
- Theres also NewPipe its free and open source
- For the record, payment is optional.
Absolutely good suggestion. Please check this out. Louis Rossman has a really in depth video with more information about the app on his channel

A lot of people here hate brave but so far I’ve been able to block YouTube ads with brave with no issue whatsoever.

If the platform wasn't starting to die before...

Youtube wont die anytime soon

Meanwhile here I am with a YouTube premium account that they don't charge me for

Back when YouTube red/premium came out. I was big into vulnerability/pen testing, and I used several scripts and spoofing techniques to try to get it for free. I failed and failed and failed. But then after I had given up. I decided to just watch some YouTube videos, and realized it said I had premium. And then I checked on the YouTube app, I had premium there too.

Years and years have gone by. I still have YouTube red/premium for free. They have never charged me. And I even had support transfer the YouTube red/premium to a new email at one point. Not ONE question. It says active and a price. But, I'm never charged. And the card that is on file, isn't even active anymore and hasn't been for about 2 years.

My theory is, one or several of my attempts combined with each other to get it for free. Glitched their system somehow or straight up allowed me to have it for free. But in terms of what I did. Whatever I did, I did everything again recently for my boyfriend, all the failed methods, everything again like I did for me. In the same exact order. Same error messages, same failed connection messages, same everything I went through. Didn't have hope for him, but. He goes on YouTube later that night, and has premium.

This got downvoted because two people were salty. This means, my comment literally made two people (at the time of writing) so upset that I have it and they don't. Wake up people, why do you let people you don't even know upset you? Especially when it doesn't effect you.

Oh look! This shit again. Lemmy is becoming more repetitive than 4chan

be me.
reading lemmy
see yet again that YouTube is blocking ads
see the entitlement in the comments that seem to think YouTube should be both free of ads and free to use and that Google should subsidize it for some reason
post my copy-paste comment reiterating that YouTube is a business and not a charity
see comments from idiots that attack the commenter instead of actually trying to argue against the point or come up with any sane solution or any attempt to advance the conversation
realise people just want the labour of others for free
sadface.jpg
See you again next week, fren.
- I'm willing to engage this discussion with you :).
  I don't believe i'm entitled to any labor for free, but i do oppose the mechanic of huge corporations starting with good & free services, and when they then become a monopoly, suddenly i'm "entitled and want labor for free and an idiot" when i don't agree with all the enshittification, money grabbing, privacy violations, and everything else they think they can get away with.
  If you start a service with a certain premise (it being free, little ads, ...), and then once you're a monopoly and want some extra money start changing all that, while making sure any competition has as little chance as possible to challenge you... yeah, good luck with that XD.
  And i'll make a predition, give it 5 years at most before game passes go through this phase. Currently all the gamers are "wow, these are such good value", once it gives the publishers enough of an excuse to stop allowing you to buy them, watch the same fragmentation & raised prices, enshittification, possibly even advertising getting added to it once you're stuck using such a system.
  I don't believe i'm "entitled", but i won't support such tactics & monopoly abuse. They came to power by pretending to be a free site to share videos on, and they'll die that way as far as i'm concerned. Good riddance.
- It's mostly that the multi billion dollar profit organisation didn't need to do this. Where does that money go? Even though it's over the back of the labour and time of both the content creators and people watching.
  Google is doing 60 billion dollar profit fine. Thanks. And not paying proper tax either, lol. It's pure extraction of labour value.
  Get mad at that.
- be me.
  reading lemmy
  see yet again that YouTube is blocking ads
  see your gross mischaracterization in the comments that implies everyone is entitled in defense of a corporation that uses opaque terms of service, legal loopholes, brute force spending, their veritable monopoly on the browser and ad markets and absolute monopoly on search engines, and straight up lying to the public in order to vacuum up every last drop of our data as they worsen the service they give us without any way of paying for it or supporting it other than the aforementioned vacuuming
  watch you ignore that they take said data and weaponize it against us and anyone who happens to be in front of our camera or within earshot of our mic and alter our searches in the background to favor certain brands and products as they drive us away from sites and resources we want via the enshittification of their proprietary search engine. Also see you fail to recognize the regulatory capture they've engaged in to insure no one can do to them what they've done to others for decades
  read your copy-paste comment reiterating that YouTube is a business and not a charity while ignoring that there are dozens of other ways to make money and that Alphabet/Google already has more money than god and could maybe afford to back off a bit but won't ever do it because god forbid they make one cent less than humanly possible, all while ignoring that over 25% of americans now run an adblocker for maybe a good reason, constituting the largest consumer boycott in the world, which maybe should be addressed at a fundamental level but no that's dumb let's just keep making things worse and playing cat and mouse and blaming users for operating within the boundaries of the law just like google allegedly does
  see the part of the comment that swings at strawmen instead of actually trying to have a real discussion or come up with any sane solution or any attempt to advance the conversation
  realize some people lack any imagination and are willing to just accept things as they are because "that's the way it is" in defense of an international, multi-billion dollar company that sees them as nothing more than a product to sell and is always testing to see what the floor is when it comes to the quality they'll tolerate
  sadface.jpg
- try to do meme arrows
  fail
  Jej
- Su pasta es mi pasta, I'm using that from now on
You mean people shouldn't chase that sweet, sweet fake internet score?

Also in Europe.

I'll look forward to reading this yet again next week, alongside all the entitlement in the comments section that seem to think running YouTube is free and recommending trash alternatives which have less than 1% of YouTube's content and don't even work.

See you next week!

No problems using Firefox (as always)

Such as?
- Sorry I meant to say: No problems using Firefox. :D