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Comment by kkm | Hacker News Reader

- As pointed out in the previous comment, with DNS based blocking users often have to choose between convenience and privacy. As an example: Blocking ads on Youtube with DNS blocking is very hard, unless you block youtube* itself.

- It does not give you fine grained permission: Like, if you only want to allow a particular third-party on a specific site.

While DNS based blocking is fast but at the same time it is also difficult for an average user to surf the web anonymously using the same.

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Youtube is an interesting example, I use it less and less because of ads but can you block ads in it with anything? The problem for me is that I have several devices that do not run JS (like TV box) and do not use a browser for watching content. For this reason it is probably the only solution to block bad content on the DNS level. I like to pay for what I get (Netflix) and I reject the entire ad based surveillance capitalism as a whole.

On platforms which supports extensions it's easy to block. For platforms not supporting extensions it is really tricky and afaik, there is no solution that works all the time for YouTube.

With the increasing adoption of DoH it will be interesting to see how DNS based blocking happens for TV Box etc.

I have not checked but was mentioned that YouTube does not show ads while watching videos via chromecast. It will be interesting to check how that happens.

I pay for YouTube (via a Google music subscription) and never see YouTube ads on any device I'm logged in on.

Nice, is this the YouTube Red subscription?

It's called YouTube Premium now, but yes.

You pay + they collect all of your data (unless your explicitly disallowed some of it). I think it would be only fair if you pay and there is no data collection (by any means, no 8.8.8.8 forced use etc.)

With a combination of Pi-Hole and uBlock Origin, I never see ads on YouTube.

uBlock Origin blocks youtube ads, I haven't seen any for years.

However that doesn't solve the problem of the web player sucking. To solve that, your best option is mpv/youtube-dl.

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