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YouTube adds new hurdles for ad blockers, and there's currently no way around it (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 305 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (46 children)

For people who only go off headlines and comments and don't read the article, here's the important bits:

  • This only affects some users, not everyone
  • The issue is that comment sections are disabled and video descriptions claim to be empty
  • The issue goes away with a refresh, you don't need to turn off the adblocker, though you'll have to refresh every video
  • It affects all videos
  • The link to adblockers is due to everyone who is reporting the issue being a user of an adblocker, and turning it off fixing the issue permanently until it's turned on again
  • There's no specific browser or adblocker mentioned in the article
  • It affects Premium users too

edit: added "the article" after "don't read" to clarify

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  • [–] 148 points 8 months ago (29 children)

    This is why I will never get premium. You pay the motherfuckers money and still have to take it up the ass.

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  • [–] 19 points 8 months ago*

    I'll never get it because first-party ads are only a small part of the problem. Shitty rec algos, Shorts absolutely rammed the fuck down your throat, third-party ads, dislike counters, gaslighting you about the resolution, clickbait blockers, cross platform feed, etc. These are all solved with third party clients.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I’ve expressed this a few times already on Lemmy to little fanfare to say the least, but I use YouTube a lot. I use it a lot on my phone. I’d use it offline on planes. I want to pay for it. But I’m a yucky VPN user and I’m not even allowed to pay a blanket inflated price for it.

    The algorithm is still absolutely amazing for music discovery. I already have channels I automatically yank things via YT-DLG from, but like using the service normally is nice too. I don’t see ads on my computer, but I suspect they might be feeding me extra ads on the phone to compensate. Because if this is the standard ad density for phone users it is vomitingly absurd.

    Theoretically the folks you watch get paid from the fee. I don’t hate that system. I’m willing to pay, my payment is ready, I’m willing to pay 5 or 20 or however many bucks for it. But using a VPN to watch YouTube on a paid account can get your account banned. Incredible stuff. This is just about the only media subscription I can see myself using. And they’re cutting off all VPN users like that.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    For what it's worth, I used a VPN on my Premium account many times over several years and never got banned, or even a warning. I would specifically use it to watch videos that were not normally available in my region.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (11 children)

    Yeah but if you were a YouTube Premium subscriber surely you'd disable the adblocker on youtube.com so you never get this issue.

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  • [–] 31 points 8 months ago (9 children)

    Why? So they can serve you ads on top of something you're already paying money for?

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  • [–] 19 points 8 months ago (8 children)

    But... you do not get ads if you have Premium, that's the point.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago

    There have been some users reporting they get ads despite being Premium users, especially in regards to Youtube's efforts to bypass adblockers (even if they weren't using one). I always assumed that's because their measures were misidentifying the lack of ads as using an ad blocker, even if that lack was due to using premium.

    Just wanted to give an actual explanation. I'm not qualified to actually confirm or deny whether those user reports were factual or made up. But people usually consider them factual because of herd mentality.

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    You occasionally still get ads, even with premium.

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    I've had premium for a couple years now, no idea what you're talking about

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago

    I had it for more than 5 years before abandoning it. I still got ads. I'd complain and YouTube would tell me it was a rare bug, or my browser, or the phase of the moon. They'd promise it'd never happen again and it still kept happening. I suspect it was a test to see what they could get away with.

    Others in the comments have similar stories.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    I... Honestly don't even think about my adblocker enough to even think to disable certain websites in it. Generally if I like a site enough to disable ads, I'll also generally like them enough to pay them more money than they would have gotten from me turning ads off for a year

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (13 children)

    there's no point. I tried the free trial of youtube premium cause i'm on Qutebrowser and the adblocking isn't the greatest. even with Premium i'd still randomly get ads every now and then. IF i were paying for it I'd be pissed.

    Now I circumvent this by just opening all the videos in MPV.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (11 children)

    With respect, I don't believe you. I paid for Premium for half a decade and never saw a single ad. I stopped my sub and will advise people against it going forward, but your claim is highly suspect to me.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    These kinds of things are often A B testing to see what they can get away with - especially in countries like the US where consumer protection laws basically don't matter. It's kinda like when they raise subscription prices in one country but not another, but with showing some people in that country a certain amount of ads per watch time vs another group with a different amount of ads. They see how much they can get away with before people start complaining, and then what they can get away with before people start cancelling.

    I watched a video just this morning talking about how YouTube has built-in systems for similar A B testing with video thumbnails to tell creators which gets more watch time. You give it 2 thumbnails and it randomizes which one people see, and then tracks click-through rates and watch time percentages before giving you a result of which one performs better.

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  • [–] -1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    There's a difference between AB testing, and fraud. Charging someone a sub cost to not see ads, and then AB testing if you can get away with still showing them ads, is fraud. If they saw ads with Premium, it's a million times more likely it was an error, but I frankly just don't believe it. That's just my opinion.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Have you been paying like... literally any attention to US corpo activities lately? Fraud is not only not being punished, but actively rewarded, so long as you bend the knee to Trump, which Google has.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    You're laboring under the impression that consumer protection laws mean anything in the US. They don't. Unless it's something absolutely egregious, then maybe they might get a slap on the wrist. Maybe.

    Another perfect example is my buddy who was looking at digital watches yesterday. The same watch was $100 more expensive on Amazon than at Walmart, and Prime prices are often higher than if you don't have Prime. I've also had Amazon completely lie to me about an item being on sale, claiming that it was 50% off on a Prime day sale, and then when I went and checked it the day after it turned out that it had been more like $5 off than the several hundred they claimed the sale would've saved. They marked it up wildly just to pretend that it was on sale. And they're not the only ones to have been caught doing that. Plenty of other places have been caught doing the same thing, but since they're big companies, unless you can get a settlement from a class action suit, nobody cares.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    I didn't say it was constant. I only said every now and again on the free trial I'd get an ad. Maybe it's because I only used it with Qutebrowser. I don't know. but I know that sometimes I would get an ad on a video.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (5 children)

    my folks pay for premium, and i have to sit through constant tide or liberty mutual commercials surrounding every video when i visit. i asked why they pay for premium and they say it’s worse without it

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (4 children)

    Are you sure they don't have Premium Lite?

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (3 children)

    what tf is premium lite? and to add, why tf is premium lite?

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)

    A cheaper tier than Premium that offers fewer features. Along with this, there's still some ads.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    wow, like that’s the worst of all worlds

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    I actually think there is some value in the way YT is trying to do it versus other streamer sites. Most are not available to you at all for free, even with ads. And then you can pay, but get ads, or you can pay more to get no ads (or still get some, in the case of like Prime Video that serves ads for their own shows but don't call those ads for some reason).

    This is not a recommendation for it, to be clear.

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  • [–] 68 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    "there's currently no way around it"

    "The issue goes away with a refresh"

    lol. sounds more like a bug if it's also affecting Premium users though

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago

    Not just the premium part, but also it affecting descriptions makes me think this is some kind of bug. At least partially. There's not really any point to disabling descriptions specifically, most people don't read them anyway.

    "there's currently no way around it" "The issue goes away with a refresh"

    The way I understand it, the issue only resolves if you refresh while on the video you want to watch. Navigating to another video would unfix it again. So it's not really a real fix the way most people expect a fix to look like. They want something they can apply and then they don't have to deal with the problem anymore. Which, based on this article, only disabling your adblocker achieves.

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago (7 children)

    Imagine being a paying Premium member and still get caught by this.. That said, the YouTube comments are worth shit, so not much is lost there. The descriptions can be quite annoying when missing.

    I really should start looking into yt-dlp or something. Anybody know if that's still working fine these days?

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    “Who’s still watching in 2026”

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    One thing is certain: Your distro's repository's version of yt-dlp - even on bleeding edge distros - is likely out of date, and you'll have to find and run the appimage version from the devs.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

    You can just pass the --update flag when invoking yt-dlp. I don't think the package itself needs to be up to date in order to work reliably.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    That only works if yt-dlp was installed as a standalone binary or via pip. If it was installed from a distro repository, the self-update mechanism is intentionally disabled because the package manager controls the version. In that case --update does nothing : /

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago*

    All those issues have existed for a while now in non-Chromium based browsers; hell I get them using the app on my smart TV and that doesn't even block ads. Especially with YouTube Shorts. I don't think it has anything to do with blocking ads. It's just youtube being shit in general.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago*

    Wouldn‘t be surprised if this was an accident. Wouldn‘t be the first time something gets messed up after a Youtube update where Youtube simply changed how some things work for functionality. These things can make Adblockers act up in a weird way.

    I for example noticed last week the first video of a session starts at an automatic resolution of 360p. I have to manually change it to 1080p. Then it remembers this and keeps it for a while. I could blame Youtube for this but I bet it has something to do with the fact I‘m skipping ads and Youtube suddenly doesn‘t know anymore in what resolution the video should be served. Perhaps it‘s getting an error and thinks I have a worse connection than I do and tries it‘s best to load the video anyway.

    What I‘m trying to say is: We don‘t know why exactly Youtube acts up. Could just be a bad interaction from an update that is purely unintentional. Either way Adblocker devs will find a fix for it quickly like they always do.

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    [–] 112 points 8 months ago (8 children)

    No issues ublock and FF.

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  • [–] 36 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah uBlock Origin has worked fine through every single one of these "adblockers are broken!" articles I've seen

    I don't mind, it's still good to raise awareness about Youtube's bullshit - especially since I'm getting ads for Border Patrol, OpenAI, and the fucking Melania movie now when I do see them (when I am lazy and using my Roku TV instead of HDMI). But it hasn't been a problem for me yet.

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Could just be because they address it rather fast.

    It could also be due to chrome limiting what uBlock can do.

    UBlock + Firefox seems like the ideal combo.

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    • [–] 75 points 8 months ago (13 children)

    uBlock Origin on Firefox with default settings and filterlists still works successfully on Youtube.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Works on my machine fails to account for A/B testing. Everytime someone says something's not working, they also mean it's not working on my machine/account.

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  • [–] -1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    uBlock origin is the same code on mine or yours machine. It does not need a graphics card, nor uses some particular instuctions of the CPU.
    On Firefox Stable on Flathub at the time of writing, with default settings and default lists, it will work as expected on Youtube.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (5 children)

    Mine isn't working flawlessly with this exact set up, but it's just forcing me to refresh the page every time I load a new video. Still no ads.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (4 children)

    Are you using other add-ons?

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (3 children)

    Nope, just uBlock. If I disable uBlock before loading the page everything works fine as well, so I'm pretty sure it's uBlock.

    But I'm on Linux (openSuse Tumbleweed) and have had some interesting "distro specific" bugs in recent months, so I'm chalking it up to "my OS + Firefox" and not "uBlock"

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)

    I am also on openSUSE Tumbleweed, but using Flatpak Firefox.
    Perhaps you can try disabling hardware acceleration in Firefox to see if it chinges anyting.

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    • [–] 60 points 8 months ago* (3 children)

    "Based on these reports, users see a message stating “Comments are turned off,” which appears across a wide range of videos"

    Seems like a win to me.

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    • [–] 165 points 8 months ago (12 children)

    I'll stop using YT before i start watching ads.

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  • [+] -15 points 8 months ago (8 children)

    I'll start paying for YT before I ever start watching ads. I won't as long as I don't have to, but the second they finally figure this out, I'm subscribing.

    It's well worth the money considering how much I use it and for how long I've used it for free. It's honestly one of the few streaming services actually worth paying for.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Does premium also block sponsors? Because if not, YouTube would still be unusable without an adblocker.

    Granted, YouTube would probably be the hardest service for me to walk away from. Even without the entertainment aspect. How-tos on car repair and building projects etc are quite valuable.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    If, when the ad read starts, you double-tap to fast forward, a little skip button will pop up which allows you to skip the sponsored section.

    With a browser addon you can skip automatically without Premium. It doesn't work with very fresh videos though, because they need time for the timestamps to get added into the database.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    I'm in agreement with this, I'm mostly a content thief, because my use is so extremely limited it simply cannot justify paying any even more than a dollar for any service.

    But when it comes to youtube, I get most of my scientific education there, all of the developments in astrophysics and sciences are there. I think I'd go bonkers without it, and yeah, I am not going to be watching no motherfucking ads.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    But when it comes to youtube, I get most of my scientific education there, all of the developments in astrophysics and sciences are there. I think I’d go bonkers without it,

    It's hard to tell on the internet; is this sarcasm?

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago

    There is a TON of educational content on YouTube. You can spend all day watching nothing but documentaries and classroom-style lectures/tutorials if you want. I would prefer to not use a Google service, but the actual content-creators include some wonderful people.

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    • [–] 51 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    For Android user I can recommend Newpipe. For the desktop I use FreeTube

    Both have occassional issues when YT rolls out their latest enshittification features, but the devs are quite responsive.

    Regardless, YT is a loosing battle, so prepare for the day when Google will win this arms race. That is why alternatives like PeerTube are important.

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    • [–] 50 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    I’ve stopped using YouTube for the most part. Cut down a lot once they broke the search function and I could no longer find what I was looking for because every result would be flooded with random shorts and other irrelevant content.

    Then, my account, which was made in either 05 or 06, got flagged as belonging to a minor and they asked me to verify my age with an ID. Why this even happened when the account itself is over 18 now, and I’m not in the US (which I thought was the only place their age verification BS was being implemented) is beyond me.

    I wish there were more options for long form video sharing, since YouTube seems to be the only viable platform for it at the moment.

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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago

    I got flagged as a minor, despite an old account. They would not accept my card that I pay for premium with as a valid card. It's valid enough to pay them the stupid fucks.

    You can do the selfie thing, except use a 4k video of someone talking to the screen and it'll probably work. I used an Evan Edinger video, scanned that and passed fairly easily. AI probably works if you can get a high fidelity image but all the free ones are well under 1080p and just don't really register.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    YT search is completely broken. It used to be that the first 3-4 videos were relevant and the rest were YT shorts or stuff you previously watched. Now, not even the first result is related to what I search for. I have to use Google in order to get the video I actually want. Even incognito in YT doesn't help much nowadays.

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