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Comment by Entinel | Hacker News Reader

This will inevitably be filled with people talking about adblock. Changes like this are more targeted at people who watch videos on mobile which is most people. I would venture a guess and say most people use Chrome or the Youtube app to watch videos.

And no, the large majority of people don't know Firefox on Android + uBlock Origin even exist.

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Maybe people are talking about it so other people can know that adblockers for YouTube (even on mobile) exist. I don't see anything wrong with that.

There is nothing wrong with bringing awareness to these things. I'm just making it clear that these changes are deliberately targeted at the average mobile user. Not the person who has a PiHole setup on their network and probably not at the average HN reader.

One possible problem is if ad blocking technologies spread enough, they will stop working because it becomes a problem big enough for YT & others, or at least the adfree experience becomes harder.

I can't explain how, and I don't really care, but it could become a cat & mouse game with the developers of uBlock, Newpipe and similar, and the big corp, in this case Google.

It is already, and has always been a cat & mouse game with the bigcorps.

Facebook and Twitch are at the bleeding-edge of "anti-adblock tech", and another reason why I don't use those services.

It's irrelevant for a large chunk of people, anyway. I have the standard array of adblocking stuff installed, but it's not gonna help when my "default" viewing experience for YouTube is pushing videos to a Chromecast-connected TV. If I've got 15+ minute videos in my queue, I wanna watch them on my couch.

Hook a PC up to your TV. My TV doesn't even have internet access.

Fun fact: I have an older iPhone on which the youtube app is completely useless. It's extremely slow and crashes all the time.

So I dropped it and started using Safari for my very rare mobile youtube needs. I can watch it again in fairly high quality with what seems like no ads (I use AdGuard or something along those lines).

I wouldn't say the majority is always mobile. Just checked my channel and mobile viewing is 44%, so the majority of people are still not phone users.

You can just use the Brave browser on mobile. It supports background playback too.

> It supports background playback too.

Firefox on Android also has the "Video Background Play Fix" extension that mocks the PageVisibilityAPI and FullscreenAPI to allow that too.

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