• SmartTubeNext on FireTV stick, ReVanced on the phone and Firefox/uBlock origin on the PC. I’ve only seen the news about this elusive change. At this point I’m curious which ad blockers are not working and what their market share is.

      • ublock actually IS affected by this. I’ve had it multiple times, that I got blocked. However the uBlock team is extremely fast at adding better filters, and each time I had the problem it only took about an hour until it worked again (though I needed to update the filters manually, since that is normally done only once a day)

        So if you weren’t watching YT right in those one hour intervalls you wouldn’t have noticed it.

  • Chromium based browsers, (Chrome, Edge) are blocking ad blockers.
    Firefox is NOT.
    Also, Chrome is not a browser, it is an advertising tracking piece of software that surveils your every click. In the ‘olden’ days, this was called spyware. It’s a piece of software that exploits it’s users. It, like spyware, used to be bundled with all kind of other programs. Does anyone remember the line, “Also install Chrome Browser” when you installed other software?
    Have a better life, install Firefox and uBlock Origin.
    Also Fuck Brave, they are liars.

  • At this point - unless there’s a very good reason - I just don’t interact with YouTube’s site or app anymore.

    I hope YouTube pulls a Reddit, and federated video services get the same bump. Creators can plug NordVPN, Brilliant, and Wix just as well on PeerTube, and we won’t have to watch dumbass political ads anymore.

    • I don’t have experience with any of those, YouTube is still ad free for me luckily, but how plausible would a completely peer hosted video streaming service be? Like TOR based or something like that where it’s the collective of all the users hosting.

      • Realistically? Virtually impossible. Youtube handles petabytes of data daily, and just the storage capacity would burn the money of everyone but the big corporations. There simply isn’t a way to compete with a corporation that can afford to throw millions at a machine that doesn’t make profit enough to cover those massive costs.

        • You’re considering only the prospect of doing things the YouTube way, as a service owned and operated by a single entity. As my dad was known to say “there is more than one way to skin a cat.” Who knows whether that is literally true, but the metaphor has proven accurate every time someone finds a different, often better, way to do something.

        • Dope, I’ll check it out, although it might be slow growth right now, YouTube for a lot of people like me is hard to break. I’ve got years and years of saved videos, subscriptions, watch history, etc.

              • I 100% agree. Right now, people are just kind of mildly irritated. My irritation is more than mild, hence my leaving entirely.

                I’m just speculating now, but it’s possible that the Google anti-trust might result in YouTube spinning off again. If they also see that coming, they might be trying to backstop it while they still have time and resources to try things (cutting off adblockers, increasing premium fees, they already changed how rev-sharing eligibility and payouts work, etc).

                There’s a high chance that they’re going to make the wrong move and piss everyone off, or people will just stop putting up with 2 minutes of unskippable ads before, then again during, then after each video. Content will start getting pirated en masse, advertiserzers will drop (or pay less, or force even more ads to compensate, which is what already happened), and the cycle will continue and get worse until the service just collapses under it’s own weight.

                Something will take it’s place. Probably multiple things. I just hope federated services are among them. Hell, people adopted Crypto ferociously, which was extremely expensive and completely useless. Even if federated video is expensive, at least it does something.