Up until last week I’ve had friends (who also use uBlock Origin, same country) kind of sequentially complaining for about a month about having the videos blocked. For me personally it has been working fine until then, but Friday I got the popup. Today the popup is gone however I get ads but they don’t play video, only sound.
YouTube isn’t rolling out the anti-adblock to everyone. It seems to depend on things like your account, browser, and IP address. And if you’re not logged in or you’re in a private window, you’re safe. As a result, there are a bunch of people saying, “I use XYZ and I haven’t seen an anti-adblock popup yet,” unknowingly spreading misinformation.
What I see with this is that Google might eventually lose more with this new policies than just leaving things as they were. Lets be real, if this shit show continues and they don’t drop it as it becomes increasingly difficult to watch without ads people will start looking for alternative frontends such as Piped or Invidious and that will hinder their ability to harvest data and force ads. What’s the next step Google? DRM protected media?