YouTube: Adblockers violate YouTube's terms of service | Hacker News Reader

YouTube: Adblockers violate YouTube's terms of service

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I pay for YouTube Premium in India. It's ultra cheap here.

2.16 USD per month for both YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium for a family of 6.

That comes down to 36 cents per person per month.

But I still use the Revanced app on my phone and watch YouTube on my desktop with uBlock turned on for two reasons:

1. I can't stand Shorts. 2. I don't like the clickbait-y and cringe inducing thumbnails that every creator uses now.

Pssssttttt! I have had a family subscription ever since they introduced the option in India. However, people think I'm crazy for, "something that you get for free." So, I tend to keep quiet amongst friends and I just shrug, "yeah, I just block all ads at the door of the Internet as it enters our home."

Youtube Premium is definitely worth it and economically viable to subscribe, here in India. (Similar story with Spotify.)

Update: just saw your edited comment. How do you turn off Shorts?

Doesn't cover sponsor block though

True. But you could install the Sponsorblock extension. And if you are on Android you could also use the Revanced YouTube.

I pay for YouTube Premium because my mum uses an old Android phone and Revanced YouTube doesn't work on it. Also, my sister's kids watch YouTube on TV and they start crying rather loudly whenever an ad comes on.

I use uBlock to filter out Shorts on web.

https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/143mdqv/

And I use Revanced YouTube on my phone.

How does uBlock help? Do you just block the thumbnail elements?

I use uBlock to filter out Shorts.

https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/143mdqv/

And I use a paid Firefox extension (one time payment of $1) called DeArrow to replace clickbait thumbnails and titles.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dearrow/

There's also a free alternative:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

> I pay for YouTube Premium in India.

Surely indians could find better things to spend their money on.

When India banned tiktok, I remember thinking wow, they've finally got their act together and are developing their own social media platforms. Instead, they gave up tiktok to pay for youtube garbage. A nation of 1.5 billion and they can't build up their own tech platforms. How long before they start paying for facebook accounts. India never fails to disappoint. A nation with immense potential and terrible leadership and no vision.

> Surely indians could find better things to spend their money on.

That's not for you and me to decide. Indians are perfectly capable of making their own purchasing decisions, good or bad.

> How long before they start paying for facebook accounts.

Might I remind you that WhatsApp was offered to Indians for free while the rest of the world was paying $1? There's no way Facebook would be pay to use. I hope it would be.

> India never fails to disappoint. A nation with immense potential and terrible leadership and no vision.

I am not going to comment on this as is it not relevant to the discussion.

Its questionable whether Youtube (just as any others) ToS are enforceable and just within your jurisdiction.

Youtube is free to require logins and chose to terminate accounts when violating. As long as public video playback is supported and no DRM involved, I am free to block ads and even download content from within my jurisdiction (Germany).

I will do everything I can to never use YT with ads. If they show this shit to me I am out, looking for different solutions.

And hell no, I am not supporting evil companies like Google with premium subscriptions. If I have to leave YT and only use Rumble and others video sites I will do that. So far yt-dlp is also a thing to just download and watch vids. The will never ever bully me into watching stupid ads. Creators now often have their in-video ad-reads, sponsors that I can not avoid yet.

As soon as some AI comes out that filters out ad-reads I will use them for most stuff. If I want to support creators I do in a more direct way, and I am perfectly fine with admitting that this rarely happens. I do not think most of the shit I watch is very valuable, most of it is just a giant time sucker.

I did not have any message like that, living in the EU. It's some limited roll-out. What I did have recently that videos were not starting and the time was displayed wrong and it seemed like they were loading after an ad that was not showing finished. Probably just some thing in the filter lists that needed to get fixed.

I believe you don't yet have kids. Besides the usual videos that kids like watching, there are a lot of topics in their books that I need help explaining. However, there are a lot of YouTubers explaining the topic pretty well.

I can uBlock/AdGuard them or even spend many weekends to yt-dlp the heck out of it. Or I can pay a small monthly fee while 'reducing my coffee/tea purchases', and my kids get all the videos uninterrupted. This is indeed one of the only ways for my kids to get through Hindi and Math lessons.

My concern is... does this violate Google's overall terms of service and is there a risk of disabling your gmail account over it?

My advice: dump Gmail before Google dumps you.

If the answer became yes it would be the catalyst to get me to finally move off gmail. I've considered it numerous times but it's hard to kick - if it's at risk of being taken away it effectively forces my hand. Not only that, I'd move off Google completely including Android.

I think that risk is basically non existent. At worst they stop you from being able to watch videos.

Nightmare scenario. I'm so bound to Gmail it gives me cold sweats thinking about it. Honestly if they threatened that I'd cough up monthly for the premium please don't delete me package

See related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37798150

YouTube will be rolling out more aggressive Adblock detection. If you don’t like ads and desire to continue using the service, it’s time to consider paying for it.

Or, get a better adblocker.

No. Anything that blocks adblockers does not get my support. The adblocker is there for my own comfort, safety and security. Anyone who asks me to disable it is not my friend.

Virus scanners and adblockers serve a similar purpose these days, they prevent access by malicious actors. If a service asks you to disable the virus scanner, would you do that too?

If they want me to pay for content produced by 3rd parties... sure, if they're distributing that money fairly to those parties why not? But I'd still run an adblocker.

The argument "If you don’t like ads and desire to continue using the service, it’s time to consider paying for it." doesn't make sense to me. Anytime any service has asked to be paid to avoid ads? Ads got added on later on anyway.

What kind of mental gymnastics? You think you’re entitled to use a service with an adblocker instead of the service they offer supported by ads/subscription? So you just want to use a service for free?

It was free before and can be free now. What kind of mental gymnastics do you have to do to justify the greed? Ads are dangerous. You’re entitled to protect yourself.

Is google entitled to force me to view ads?

I’m entitled to view whatever data comes into my device in whatever order I desire.

Entitlements aren’t all bad. In the US, social security is an entitlement. Are you against that too?

Corporations don’t get to override human dignity because it makes them more money. When talking about humans vs corporations, I think I try to default the entitlements to the human.

You're entitled to do whatever you want with your client, but YouTube is equally entitled not to serve you content if they detect that you're using an ad blocker.

Up until they actually stop serving me that content, yeah. I've backed up more than 2tb of YouTube channels I like and I've got no intention of stopping until they cut me off.

Well, are you willing to stop using YouTube or not?

The way I see it, if everyone installs an ad blocker and nobody pays for Premium, there's nobody to pay for the hosting.

> Anytime any service has asked to be paid to avoid ads? Ads got added on later on anyway.

This was the case for live TV and sports, but that's more like a counterexample than a laundry list of ad-free subscription products. And, heck, the NFL actually added an ad-free subscription in 2009 (NFL Red Zone, "7 hours of commercial-free football").

Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, Discovery+, Paramount+, Apple TV+, Spotify, Apple Music...where is this mythical streaming service that has ads in its highest tier paid version? Can you find one?

Some providers might eventually serve ads to their premium tiers, but there isn't much precedent outside of live TV and sports, especially if you expand your view to include SaaS products (e.g., subscribing to a mobile app like MyFitnessPal to remove ads). Meanwhile, your comment suggests that every premium subscription service will eventually get ads, even though the vast majority of them offer a completely ad-free package through the present day.

I wonder if we'll end up with a piratebay style site for YouTube content if they block adblocks.

Kind of like how pirates get better quality TV shows, movies, games with drm removed, etc

Or use an alternative frontend, or download the videos first? Why would I pay for content that isn't monetised and thus the "creator" (for lack of a better word) gets nothing anyway? I'm not going to fund Google, they already get some from reading my (spam) emails.

>Or use an alternative frontend, or download the videos first?

If they're going to roll out anti-adblock code, what makes you think they won't be going after unofficial third party clients?

Already have been for a long time.

They do, and invariably fail but I'd argue trying to hide an adblocker is going to be more tricky than pretending to be android, for example.

But both downloading and alternative frontends still work fine, I just got the message on youtube for the first time (only on desktop though, not android, firefox on both), minor inconvenience to run yt-dlp in an internet accessible folder and means I retain the content should their random behaviour make it unavailable in the future.

> They do, and invariably fail but I'd argue trying to hide an adblocker is going to be more tricky than pretending to be android, for example.

AFAIK thirdparty youtube clients are just a glorified webview. Also, if anything pretending to be android is way harder than pretending to be a browser. There's way more fingerprinting/attestation that's available on android than through javascript APIs.

I didn't say client, I said frontend (ie; invidious, which is not a webview nor a client), but the likely reason its easier to pretend to be android is they have to support older versions for a long time, once you've emulated the behaviour its difficult for them to fix that

>but the likely reason its easier to pretend to be android is they have to support older versions for a long time, once you've emulated the behaviour its difficult for them to fix that

1. Needing to support older versions is specifically why most of the client logic isn't in the app itself, it's in a javascript bundle that it receives from the server. At this point you can't pretend to be an android app making HTTP api calls. You have to either provide a fully functioning javascript execution environment, or deal with all the API changes that they throw your way through the updated javascript bundles[1].

2. Pretending to be android is harder than you think. There's tens of thousands of system APIs available that you can call, to check for inconsistencies or implementation quirks. You can even try to fingeprint/profile the hardware (eg. GPU or DSP) itself, or the java execution environment. DRMs use the same principles to bind activation tokens to a given machine, so you can't crack a game by taking one valid token and sharing it with everyone else.

[1] eg. https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/29326#issuecom...

yt-dlp stopped working for me as of today.

[download] Got error: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden. Retrying fragment 11 (1/10)...

update

I did update but it turns out the version in debian is hopelessly outdated anyway. Eventually I figured out how to install the latest version which does indeed work.

It's not just about ads though—I use uBlock to "detox" many websites by hiding certain HTML elements.

> If you don’t like ads and desire to continue using the service, it’s time to consider paying for it.

Or maybe just use something like AdNauseum that just emits a bunch of noise

> If you don’t like ads and desire to continue using the service, it’s time to consider paying for it.

Or just get better ad blockers.

I think it’s a pretty fundamental right that I choose what to do with data sent to me.

Should televisions not be able to use the mute button during ads?

That's exactly it. It's like a tv network disabling your mute button whenever you see a commercial. You can send me data but how I view it once it's on my network is my right. Just like mail.

Gl with that, I'd be soldering in a switch to the speaker wire if they tried that

If everyone just uses ad blockers, the system doesn't work. YouTube goes away tomorrow. If you go to a nice country park with an honor system tip jar you can say that it's your fundamental right to go anywhere that someone doesn't stop you but if everyone did that the park wouldn't have money for upkeep.

At a certain point this isn't the wild West anymore, and these services need to keep the lights on. I personally feel like ads are phycological warfare and find them detestable but I also recognize that means I need to support the service somehow else or I'm a net drain on the system.

A tip jar is not ads. A nice park with a tip jar might work. If it didn’t work, the park wouldnt cease to exist, but people would find a different funding model. Taxes that fund parks definitely work.

Remember that public parks are a pretty recent innovation. Imaging someone saying of private gardens in 1700 “if the king didn’t pay for a park, the park would cease to exist” as a justification for an oppressive monarchy.

YouTube will continue to exist without ads. Business models change. It may make less profit margin, but saying it will cease to exist is hysterical hyperbole.

I’d love a mixed model where I pay to watch the top 3 creators that I follow using my own money in exchange for not viewing ads on their channel. Then all the other random channels can serve me ads.

if your watch time is mostly for top 3 creators, they anyway get a big chunk of 51% of subscription price.

At that point just pay for Youtube Premium.

too complicated for ordinary users

How do I use ublock origin rules in safari browser on mac? (using safari because of battery consumption :(..)

My government manipulates the ads, recommended and related videos on Youtube for certain people.

Invidious at least has no ads, and you can get rid of the recommended and related sidebar.

Which government is this?

ads infect your consciousness should be avoided at all cost

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