I had this code saved and had suggested it to others before but now I didn’t take my own advice and had been struggling with those pop-ups for the past few days. I hope this solves it.
EDIT: Doesn’t work. Still got the popup despite having all other extensions disabled and uBlock on default settings
The funny thing is I wouldn’t mind watching their ads if they weren’t annoying with them. If the ads were only at the start of a video, not during, and no still image banner at the bottom I have to click X on on desktop. I don’t want to actively dismiss anything while I’m watching the video, I want to relax and watch it.
They don’t allow me to sit and enjoy the videos without babysitting them to skip after the timer, so that’s why I block their ads with absolutely no compromise anymore.
I shouldn’t have to watch any ads on an already-profitable product. Accepting less is just me lowering my standards so people richer than me can be even richer.
It’s more than that. Would you devote 1-5% of your PC resources to others while you watch a video, if you could watch a video without ads? Yes. I bet so.
We are able to easily shoulder the burdens of hosting, yet Google wants to dominate us and force us to use their hosting at the psychological cost of being their sponge for anyone’s paid information campaign. YouTube in 2016 was non-stop Trump ads. Non fucking stop.
No no we are not. How are we going to distribute all the videos. I don’t think you realize how much storage youtube takes up. Could we have something yes would it be as big and vast as youtube not even close. I mean we can’t even distribute a handful of reddits traffic without failing.
Storage is probably the easier aspect to address. Storage is cheap and decentralized storage systems have existed for decades.
The problem is bandwidth and latency. Most residential ISPs do not offer high bandwidth and low latency upstream connections, which means there’s no good way to serve the content you’re storing.
Residential fiber is becoming more common in some areas, but often those residential plans still limit upstream or specifically have terms in their acceptable use policy that forbid such activities. Here’s an example from my fiber provider, which couldn’t be clearer:
You may not use the Services to host any type of server.
It’s a little silly of course, because if you were playing a game and hosting, you’re probably hosting a server! But if I were serving videos to thousands of peers, I’m sure they would notice and take issue.
Pihole, if i understand correctly, works by blocking DNS requests and YouTube ads are not DNS based the way ads usually are. You’re stuck blocking them by uBO on each device or use Invidious.
I’ve run pihole for years. It works really well. The only problem I’ve seen is when you actually need a tracking URL to work. For example clicking a link in your emails to download a ticket for a concert. You just need to be mindful that when the browser fails to open a link it’s because of the PiHole. There’s no nice screen telling you. You just need to pop it into the whitelist to allow it although on a phone I just used to go to mobile data temporarily, click the link and then go back on WiFi.
I recently switched to using NextDNS, as it means all my DNS queries are encrypted and I still get filtering when I’m away from home. I also have three kids to manage so it allows me to set timers on their devices to block certain traffic. Good for blocking adult sites too.
At the end there will always be some way since to the user the text should be similar or the UI should be similar… So there will be always a way… But yeah it can get more complex.
The only exception is the case they implement the web integrity thing at browser level or equivalent.
But then others browsers like Firefox will gain popularity… I am okay whatever they do, I never see any ad or ad-blocker blocker and I doubt I will even see any of those.
Yup. Ad blockers work on pattern matching rules. Countering them might take some work but it’s not impossible - make the URLs that do the bad shit indistinguishable from the ones that make the video works and likewise html elements. Randomise everything, make the paths to things unpredictable. I’m sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable.
Last part is already done. Ads are delivered by the same DNS as the video, which is why DNS-based blocking methods like Pihole don’t work for YouTube video ads.
If you meant that Google will re-encode every video on their platform and insert ads like the sponsor segments, that’s not feasible. Ads ads served on a bidding basis and the advertiser who pays most, gets their ad delivered. That would be Impossible unless you keep multiple copies of the video with different ad segments.
You don’t need to re-encode the video. Look up HLS segments, which is the standard for streaming video and I assume YouTube uses it.
Each video is split into many segments, like 10 seconds long (though the duration doesn’t matter). The browser first fetches a “playlist” which is just a list of these segments. Then the video player plays each segment in order. So Google could just insert ad-segments into the video stream, and if they did it cleverly, there would be no way to determine that they were ads.
They are legally obligated to show which part of the video is an ad (and contractually obligated to have a clickable link), which always leaves ad blockers a way to correlate and remove those segments though (essentially skipping forward during the ad, then lying to the backend when asking for additional segments as if the user had skipped through the video after the ad was over).
On Twitch they managed to outplay even uBlock, because the streaming is realtime and if you skip the ad segments, there’s no data to fall back to and the backend won’t send you the regular segments until the ad break is over (from what I understand). So at best you get a waiting screen instead of an ad.
However I’m not sure if it would make (financial) sense to apply a similar strategy on YouTube, as that would require preventing buffering the video until the ads have stopped playing (and wouldn’t work at all for midroll ads since the video has already been buffered at that point). Not only would this be expensive to do in the backend, but it would likely cause disproportionate buffering on low-end connections which couldn’t start loading the video while the ad is playing.
On Twitch they managed to outplay even uBlock, because the streaming is realtime and if you skip the ad segments, there’s no data to fall back to and the backend won’t send you the regular segments until the ad break is over (from what I understand). So at best you get a waiting screen instead of an ad.
Yes, you get a “commercial break in progress” banner, but it’s not loading ads when watching through HLS.
Ads on Twitch are not nearly as bad as on YouTube tho, so I actually have an exception for Twitch ads. I usually only watch esports tournaments and they make sure there are no ad breaks during games, just between segments. And on the rare occasion that I watch a regular stream, I get an ad or two maybe once every 45 minutes, which is fair.
The ads are really annoying if you streamhop frequently, because almost every time you switch stream you have to wait 30s-1m.
I pay for Turbo now so that’s fine, but the way it’s implemented seems really stupid to me, if you are looking for a stream to watch you sometimes get ad after ad after ad which can’t possibly be good for viewer retention.
Pre-roll ads are stupid, yeah. At least give me some time to figure out if I want to watch the stream… But that a thing that’s also worse on YT since they removed dislike count. Is it another clickbaity jump-cut-ridden garbage video or is it actually information? Roll the dice to find out!
It’s pretty difficult nowadays to self-host websites when everyone and their nanny shares a single public IP address (IPv4 address exhaustion is real, everyone!) unless you purchase a hosting service.
Before social media back in the 2000’s i know quite a few personal site using home servers using them. And (google google) apparently these days cloudflare offers the service.
No, you misunderstand. You’re thinking of DHCP. The parent poster is talking about CGNAT, where hundreds or thousands of customers of an ISP may share the same public-facing IPv4 address. It’s impossible to self-host anything in this scenario, there no way around it and DDNS won’t help you.
Then purchase a hosting service. Off-shore VPSes are pretty cheap, and they take Bitcoin. Even fucking Paypal uses Bitcoin nowadays. Only hurdle in your way is you.
Good luck getting a block of IP addresses from your regional internet registry for this community ISP… IP address exhaustion is just that, no more addresses. That’s why we are sharing them.
We do have a solution and it’s called IPv6, but its deployment is still not as widespread as people would like to be. If I self-host my website on IPv6, a lot of people from Europe would still be unable to access it.
The only one who is going to be hurt by you constantly making excuses is you. No matter what hurdles you face, you have to overcome them, even if you have to build your own separate network from scratch, or you’ll never be free from the yoke of corporations and more importantly for you, you’ll never be free of the blame.
why not just use am invidious instance like i.devol.it to access such content so as to eliminate the ads, eliminate the tracking, and encourage Free Software peeps to keep up the good work?
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