Adblock Plus and (a little) more | Hacker News Reader

Adblock Plus and (a little) more

blog.adblockplus.org

53 pointsWasserpuncher125 comments

Never forget that Adblock Plus is a commercial product developed by a company which you can pay to get your ads listed as "acceptable ads" which makes them pass the filtering.

uBlock Origin is still probably the best tool for blocking ads: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/

Around 2010 I started playing with Adblock Plus, and provided a translation for a while. Wladimir Palant was a friendly, responsive, and as I understand it respected developer.

There were not countless adblockers, just Adblock and Adblock Plus. Adblock was abandoned, and Adblock Plus was were the innovation and performance improvements were happening.

Adblock Plus was there in the first controversies around adblocking ethics. It 'took care' of the first lawsuit. It did a lot of good work that the later adblockers benefit from.

Personally I have never been a fan of the acceptable ads feature. But it comes from that time, and offers a middle ground in the adblocking ethics debate, and a way to finance legal troubles.

Now I have not been involved in a very long time (Using uBlock Origin and whatever filters are default), but just condemning Adblock Plus outright is a bit too quick.

I learned the other day that the developer(s ?) of uBlock origin don't even accept donation. That's a really dedicated behavior for someone owning on app installed on probably a million devices, that could make money in an instant if he wanted to.

True, but it's worth mentioning that supporting the filter list maintainers is encouraged.

tbh, that scares me, simply because of the potential that one day, someone will offer enough money that it can't reasonably be expected from anyone to decline that offer.

It reassures me. Because if gorhill cared about money, he would have a 100% ethical, simple way to immediately open the floodgates and make a five- to six-digit amount per year.

This suggests to me that he doesn't need nor care about having more money, and will be very hard to corrupt by offering money. How do you bribe a person that has free money with no strings attached offered to them and says "no thanks"?

Blackmail

Threaten physical harm

Well those aren't bribes, but I see what you mean.

Not to diminish the work on the browser extensions, but the majority of the value is in the filter lists. In the cat and mouse game, these lists need to be constantly updated and pruned, while also ensuring the false positives are minimally annoying to users.

My memory may be rusty, but iirc he already gave away the uBlock project (sold?) once. The new maintainer immediately started pulling shady moves so gorhill forked uBlock into uBlock Origin and has maintained it to this date (7+ years).

It was not sold. It was transferred to a the contributor of a Safari port. Only the GitHub repository though, not the extension store page. That has always remained with gorhill. So, no one's install was compromised

proof: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/tree/0797d040740de8e9f7552...

Why did origin get made then?

The name origin was used because google took it down for using the name ublock after the GitHub repo transfer

Is ubo under an open source license? If so, it would instantly fork.

GPLv3: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

Indeed, and unlike the morally unacceptable Adblock Plus, uBlock Origin continues to work on YouTube ads, although you will have to manually update your filter lists every day or so.

I have uBlock Origin installed in Arc, and ended up getting burned by the YouTube adblocking blocking purge because each time the warning came up, I checked to see if there was a way to whitelist YT and didn't find it. Now I'm watching YT in Safari on my iPad, where the block doesn't apply.

So: anyone know how to whitelist YT in uBlock Origin in Arc?

I can't give you Arc specifics, but the /r/uBlockOrigin subreddit are generally on the ball. May be worth a check!

https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/

Use invidious. You can import your subscriptions really easily. I self host my own instance on an old laptop (exposed via WireGuard to my server. I connect via local IP when at home)

I had that warning some days ago, too. It's gone now, not sure what changed in the filter lists.

I use arc with uBlock, i simple refresh the page and the warning goes away.

i love ublock origin and have used it for years. i recently migrated to macos and was disappointed to find that ublock origin doesn’t work with safari.

what’s the best ad-blocking option for safari on macos?

The first thing that came to mind was "switch to Firefox". Other than that, I have nothing to recommend.

I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on the Mac and it works great, but for Safari the best option I've found is AdGuard (https://adguard.com). However, it is nowhere near as effective as uBlock Origin since Safari did the Manifest V3 thing.

> since Safari did the Manifest V3 thing.

More accurately, Safari removed support for webRequest BlockingResponse in 2019. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

This was unrelated to Manifest V3, and in fact Safari has not deprecated Manifest V2. Manifest V3 does remove support for webRequest BlockingResponse in Chrome, but I believe not in Firefox.

I currently use 1blocker(paid version) and it seems to be working pretty well compared to Firefox with ublock. I use it both on iOS and macOS.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1blocker-ad-blocker/id13655310...

It works great, but doesn't work against YouTube's anti-adblock yet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37975189

I heard good things about Wipr (paid product) but don't use it myself on OSX.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wipr/id1320666476?mt=12

1Blocker already mentioned, but it is is absolutely fantastic.

The iOS version also blocks in-app trackers (in other apps, outside of Safari) and YouTube app ads via its firewall feature.

There's a webkit based browser called Orion that I've been trying out that supports chrome extensions. That's the closest thing I think.

Orion has issues loading uBlock Origin on new tabs, see: https://orionfeedback.org/d/718-ublock-origin-doesnt-work-so...

Why not just use Firefox? It's available on macOS.

Firefox has poor battery life on macos.

That is a thing of distant past. It runs beautifully natively on M1/M2 chips and has no noticeable difference in power consumption vs Safari.

Not the case anymore, even on pre-M1 Macs.

But then again we have to buy apple anyhow

Little Snitch, a proprietary firewall, subscribed to some ad blocking lists can block surveillance system-wide

Is there a reliable source on being able to buy your way past the requirements? The last time I heard this story (like a decade ago), the author was asking large ad networks to pay to have their ads reviewed (and quite possible rejected), rather than him working for free when they have plenty of cash around. I don't see the problem with that

The acceptable ads program was another bluff-call, where people who had been claiming "I only object to intrusive ads. If there was a way to only allow passive and well-behaved ads I'd allow them!" got their alleged wish and then got angry about it

Also don’t forget that they inserted their own affiliate codes into URLs to Amazon at some point.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220817235820/https://www.mobil... (German)

> We know how important it is for our users to browse YouTube without ads for free. And we hope to come up with a solution soon!

No need to wait. Just switch to uBlock Origin where this is already fixed.

Here's a guide if they still show up and you're using UBO: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/178yasm/youtu...

(Basically you need to make sure you're up to date, and you disable any overzealous filter lists or custom filters so that the anti-adblock detection doesn't get tripped.)

Or this as a good time / excuse to ditch YouTube, even if uBlockOrigin resolves it.

Additionally, I'm honestly half-scared that they'll block my account if they notice me breaking their "Terms of Service" by blocking ads. So this is also serving as a good time for me to Degoogle my online presence. Screw them, I eagerly await their demise, as they've singlehandedly ruined the web and so much more.

YouTube ruined the web by... Providing a free platform to host videos open to everybody? By allowing video creators to be paid?

I was referring to Google in general. Youtube is one slice of what they do. And it's also infected with the same perverse and subtle incentives when it comes to advertising.

It costs about 15 per month to watch YouTube without ads.

It's my browser running on my computer, I get the final say in how content is presented to me.

The service is running off their servers, so they get the final say in whether to present content to you at all. Don't cry foul when your account is terminated.

> Don't cry foul when your account is terminated.

I'd wager you have a higher probability of getting yourself banned if you do give them money.

And then if you do get banned you have absolutely zero recourse. "Yeah, we banned you, yeah your ban was totally double checked by a human and it was deemed correct, beep beep. The decision is final. And no, we won't tell you why we banned you."

That's assuming GP has an account.

Yeah it’s an intrusion in your private property

That still won’t do what sponsorblock does for you with ads the content creator injects vs youtube

And buying a movie on Blu Ray doesn't remove product placement

The sponsor block example would be more like if the blu ray of the tv show also shipped with your local network ads interspersed.

I pay for it but i still get inferior service compared to ublock+sponsorblock+ff combo. I remember one year ago visiting my parents in another country and background play was disabled. The only reason to pay for me is tv&ytmusic

You can't buy YouTube Premium everywhere.

Is there any place where you can't buy it, yet you get ads?

Yes.

No thanks

You can also use Freetube on the desktop. Brew install Freetube

cheers!

It looks like YouTube's dark-pattern marketing strategy (highlighting the "Allow YouTube Ads" button), is they'd rather have you enable ads than pay for premium.

They're getting too greedy with demonetising videos and still making money off of them, to the amount of ads they play; same goes for other streaming platforms.

So far on Firefox with uBlock Origin I haven't come across it.

What are you talking about? The vast majority of people would rather disable their adblocker on YouTube then subscribe and pay $15 a month... How is it a dark pattern for YouTube to suggest the most likely option?

They're doing A/B testing - I'm on firefox + uBlock and I get the full video blocking thing

What value do advertisers get in losing a portion of their ad spend to those who are even less likely to engage? I would be curious to see what click through rates typically look like post this change.

Afaict top of funnel ads don't need engagement, they are mostly to spread brand awareness and they influence you in ways other than immediate conversion. That seems to be what most Youtube ads are.

People who advertise with Google are used to losing a decent portion of their ad spend to bot views. People who use ad blockers are at least human.

And advertising to the guy who sees 100 adverts a day might have much higher impact than advertising to the guy who sees 1000.

From Google's perspective, they want to get paid, so the more ads the better. If the advertisers, users and content creators don't like it, why would that matter to Google? The farmer doesn't care about the turkey's opinion on christmas.

For Youtube/Google it's a win-win: they can show advertisers that the ads that can't be hidden, and annoyed users will be more pressured to buy Premium to hide the ads.

Google is desperate to display ads on YouTube. YouTube videos, even of poor quality, often rank highly in Google search results. This means that Google can double its profits by displaying ads on YouTube, in addition to its search advertising revenue.

Which means eventually they will do something desperate like using WASM on the all pages or requiring DRM trusted by a TPM chip.

And adblockers won't work anymore.

We are loosing control over the client a little bit more everyday, and given the new generation know only locked down devices, they don't even notice.

Just curious, what more can they do with WASM to prevent ad blockers? Can they prevent an extension that blacks out the ad and waits until it plays out for example?

Create your own VM for execution and rendering, then make sure it runs only trusted signed code. Skip the dom and js entirely.

It's a black box, so ad blockers wouldn't be able to target anything in there without very hard reverse engineering.

We know it's possible because the community can hack the playstation and xbox. We also know it takes a lot of time and resources.

Unlike the consoles, they can just upload a new blob and suddenly, it becomes so expensive for adblock to keep up we lose it.

It will also be super expensive for google, but they can afford it.

Imagine how much better they would rank if one could search video content

I'm not so convinced Google cares to use YouTube to it's full potential.

I wonder at what point will Google start splicing ads directly into the video feed? Surely there's a way to do it without transcoding the entire file again.

Twitch already does this on the fly and it's a pain to bypass, I think the question is why Youtube hasn't started doing it yet given how effective it is.

I can't imagine that google hasn't thought about it. The sheer scale of the processing cost to do it is probably too high with as much video they serve.

Google is too big. All of the giant tech companies are. This behavior is a symptom of reaching across industries in search of growth.

Is there any reason a grocery store should be a movie studio?

This sucks the air out of the room for smaller companies to innovate. Search would be much better if it wasn't being shoved down our throat by a single company that controls (or buys access to) all of the panes of glass Americans use to compute.

Ok, so if Google is too big and YouTube is split away from Google... who exactly will pay for bandwidth, server and transcoder costs for all the adblocking freeloaders?

If you ever tried to host videos yourself, you'll quickly see that it costs a stupid amount of money to manage. Why would a standalone YouTube LLC. allow anyone to access it with an adblocker and without subscription?

(People seem to lose their mind on HN every time someone even tries to recommend something as ridicolous as paying for YouTube.)

> Ok, so if Google is too big and YouTube is split away from Google... who exactly will pay for bandwidth, server and transcoder costs for all the adblocking freeloaders?

If a "business" can only exist when artificially propped up, should it exist?

> People seem to lose their mind on HN every time someone even tries to recommend something as ridicolous as paying for YouTube.

People on HN also regularly endorse Nebula, so it isn't paying that's the problem (if we pretend HN is a monolith).

> If you ever tried to host videos yourself, you'll quickly see that it costs a stupid amount of money to manage. Why would a standalone YouTube LLC. allow anyone to access it with an adblocker and without subscription?

Why would anyone host a peertube instance?

https://instances.joinpeertube.org

Either Youtube has a viable business model (e.g. with subscriptions) or they don't. If they don't have one, that's certainly not my problem. I'll use Youtube with an ad blocker as long as it works and won't use it otherwise. It's not rocket science.

P2P. They could have implemented it years ago but instead prefer to control humanity’s video library and take on the full financial burden.

Some people don’t want to pay Google to continue to harvest their data, and they despise the parasitical corporation.

And just like how people refuse to watch ads, they'll refuse to "donate their storage, bandwidth, and battery life to Google". With everyone else on phones and laptops, P2P will never be mainstream.

An independent YouTube would figure it out.

Netflix works. Facebook works. Ad-supported video streaming works.

A standalone YouTube would remove the insane perverse incentives and double dipping that Google has wrought in their ownership of YouTube.

Honestly, the only product that can really compete with uBlockOrigin at this point is a version of AdNauseum for Youtube -- something that registers a click on every single ad that YouTube shows until it stops showing you more ads.

There is currently no negative feedback for YouTube ads. They are free to show you ads every single minute if some manager there thinks that this will increase monetization by 1%. And no, paying for YouTube Premium isn't going to work; Amazon Prime Video was this way (I paid for it, and got ad-free shows in return), but they are now introducing "limited ads" that you will need to pay $3 extra a month for.

The only reasonable negative feedback is to have too many clicks on ads, so the advertiser stops showing you them because the person paying for ads is not getting the desired clickthrough rate.

The advertising industry likes to make up scary terms like "ad fraud" for this, but that's ridiculous -- a human can totally click an ad link and then make a decision not to engage further with the product. I do it all the time. Having an extension make that decision on my behalf would be fantastic.

Interesting idea, is this the only recourse consumers have?

Adnauseam clicks aren't charged to advertisers. Google's click tracker is smarter than that.

This may be controversial but YouTube ads are surely ones that meet all the reasonable criteria.

They're not a surprise, you know it's an ad supported business. They're served from YouTube so it's not random companies tracking you while you use a different service. And you can get rid of them by paying for the service.

What's the proposed alternative where you contribute for the service? Just paywall the whole thing?

Probably an unpopular opinion, but I just do not want to have a "business" relationship with google. I would not mind paying for youtube, if it was a separate company. But google does not need my money, and any money the get are used to actively making the world worse (WEI, SEO spam, Search getting worse, ...).

On a separate note, there are reports of people getting their whole google account locked for payment issues, expired cards and such. There is no way to reach a human there, and I really do not want to risk loosing my account I use on my phone as well (android :/) just because some bot decides it does not like me.

Would be fine if I could just have a separate youtube account, but no, that would make tracking harder...

Aaaand there still will be ads inside the videos (sponsored segments), and product placement.

I wouldn't mind paying for YouTube if its subscription cost was anywhere close to reasonable.

I wouldn't mind paying for youtube if I wasn't already paying for it because they are stealing my data.

Noone is stealing anything from you, you just made this up to feel better about your freeloading.

If you gave a shit, you wouldn't use YouTube.

I'm paying $8.30 / month for the Family option. That's like 2 or 3 coffees. In other countries this is more expensive, but it's adjusted for local buying power.

Both you and the parent simply come up with reasons to avoid paying, getting the service for free.

No matter how you look at it, what you're doing is immoral, because if everyone did it, YouTube would be permanently paywalled and placed under DRM. You're a privileged individual that prefers to be subsidized by those that pay or that watch ads.

> That's like 2 or 3 coffees

Expensive coffee at Starbucks which I would never buy. With $10 I can buy coffee for 3 months. It’s way too expensive for me.

I also consider every form of advertising to be brainwashing. Last but not least, I watch 1 YouTube video per month, so you would have to adapt your scenario for me to be interested in a subscription.

There's nothing immoral about blocking ads. Avoiding paying taxes might be, yet Google does it anyway.

Blocking ads is morally OK only as long as that's the only way to consume that content, and as long as you're not trying to block anti-ad-block warnings.

If there's a reasonably priced subscription available (or another business model), and if the publisher doesn't want your eyeballs while you have an adblocker active, there's no argument you can make for the morality of adblocking. It's your computer, you can be selective about what you execute on it, but the publisher should also be free to reject your visit.

Blocking YouTube's adblock detection legitimizes all the changes that Google is making in Chrome, being why we can't have nice things. And it's similar to extensions designed to workaround paywalls, or software piracy. Sooner or later adblocking will become illegal.

A coffee costs 30 cents.

I currently pay $5/month to the Kevin Richardson channel as a member and have been a member since inception for over 4 years now. When I went to the members section of YouTube to view my members-only videos I received the blocking message and was denied access to the video player. This is in addition to other wildlife charities for which I send monthly donations directly.

I use uBlock Origin on YouTube specifically to work around many UI issues related to their recommendations and player. I will not turn it off. One example is that they will not honor my closed-caption settings on all videos so I have a filter rule to remove the call to the captions URL to eliminate them. That's one of countless issues.

They are now denying me access to a service for which I do actually pay for. I consider that to be illegal.

My proposal is simple:

    * Give me an option to pay for what I use.  I do not want music, 99.9% of live streams, news, or tons of the other content they try to force on me for money-making purposes.
    * Make the price reasonable.  The videos I watch are primarily educational lectures.  This really shouldn't cost much more than the price of disk storage and network egress (both of which are cheap at scale).
    * Give me a recommendations and preference system that actually work.  I spend more time curating my list of videos than watching anything meaningful to my interests.  At one point I was watching 2 luthiery channels and "guitar necks" came up as a category.  What the ever living fuck?  Related yes, but not quite the topic I really want to focus on.  I would remind people that this is a multi-billion dollar company with PhDs that has changed the face of AI and hyper-scale computing as we know it.
    * In general, operate like a long-running business... offer good value to your paying customers.  Now that the customers are not advertisers, Google will need to rethink their sales strategies.  They have not yet convinced me.

The alternative might be Google paying their fair share of taxes. I might consider supporting their product then. Ad blocking is not as severe as tax avoidance though.

I have no sympathy for the service. If it's not profitable, Google can cover it from their other revenue streams with ease.

That sounds like one of these reasons that people come up with to justify their unwillingness to pay.

Are you also boycotting every other large company that uses the tax system in a legal way that you don't agree with? I'm all for big companies paying their fair share, but I'm not blaming the company, I'm blaming the people in charge who don't close these loopholes. Same issue as with Ireland in the EU, undercutting all the other EU countries with tax rates.

One option if you want to fight back in the exact same way: Sign up for YouTube Premium through a cheaper country and pay $2/month instead of 15.

The mental contortions freeloaders do to feel better about themselves are always fascinating to watch on HackerNews.

Somehow it seems really hard for people here to be honest with themselves and admit that they really just want YT for free and someone else (Google) to shoulder the cost. And they also whant to rant at Google while they pay for their services. :)

When Google receives tax breaks from the US, it is another form of welfare “freeloading”. A tax break is indistinguishable from a handout except by name.

When wahnfrieden receives ad-free video from YouTube, it is another form of welfare "freeloading". An adblocker is indifferent from a handout except by name.

They game our tax system, we game their ad system. It works both ways.

Ad blocking is not illegal. If I can do it, as Google does with taxes, I see no reason why I shouldn't.

> Are you also boycotting every other large company that uses the tax system in a legal way that you don't agree with?

Umm, where possible why wouldn't one choose to avoid giving your money to companies that behave in ways you object to?

Voting with your wallet is always the best, my point was that most (all?) big companies will use the tax system in a way to give them the best outcome that's possible through legal means.

> most (all?) big companies will use the tax system in a way to give them the best outcome that's possible through legal means

Not every company feels the need to set up their corporate structures to revolve around Luxembourg (or whatever the regional equivalent is in your part of the globe).

Paying for the service replicates the cable TV industry. In order to get what I want and support, I end up supporting what I don’t want and don’t want to support.

I am under ZERO obligation to watch advertising, that is the risk the industry takes. The ad industry has long ago tipped the scales in the trade of attention for content and now they resort to shaming the viewers into compliance.

Everyone supporting the adblock countermeasures are hypocrites; as if they never went to the bathroom during a TV show commercial break.

I am not responsible for sustaining Google's monetization. There is no such social contract. If their business model isn't sustainable, they should find a new one. That's their problem, not mine.

You're not, and they're not responsible for delivering you video if you don't want to pay them or watch ads. I'm not sure what's contradictory here.

I think GP is just responding to your comment's premise that they have to propose any alternative, or that they have to "contribute" to YouTube in some way.

I spent years having to click "No, I do not consent to creating a Google+ profile" every time I used YouTube so I refuse to give them money on principle.

Blocking functionality, playing audio that is not kid friendly and wasting my time are all not reasonable.

> And you can get rid of them by paying for the service.

Get rid of _some_ of them

Get rid of _some_ of them for now

It only has to be relatively less ad laden than the free version. Whenever ads get cranked up on the “free” normal person YouTube, they’ll get cranked up on sucker pay-pig YouTube in direct proportion. If anything, they have less concern about the small fraction who (amazingly) pay them for what they’re doing.

Ads are very surprising to people who have been using ad blockers for decades. The web experience is totally different. On a side note, I stopped watching TV in the 90s and turned to "internet only" because ads were too annoying. It's weird that companies advertising with Google think people like me could potentially buy something based on ads.

They are a surprise. They’re variable length and appear at random moments. Their volume can greatly differ from the content you are watching. No thanks.

The proposed alternative is Google can continue to bankroll it. They are not hurting for money.

Your proposed alternative is that it's simply run at a loss? I don't think that's a particularly reasonable business proposal.

What makes you think Google is running at a loss?

He's talking about YouTube. If no one watches ads or pays for premium, how will YouTube make money?

>They're not a surprise.

Ha! Try getting 10 minutes into this example and not bring surprised by a fucking pasta ad. https://

[self-promotion] On iOS and macOS, StopTheMadness auto-skips YouTube video ads. https://underpassapp.com/news/2023-10-19.html

Use this extension on iPhone. Worth the money. Prevents sites from disabling PiP video too.

Workable, I suppose, though it still plays a split second of the ad while the skip happens. Perhaps a pause (or mute?), skip, then resume might be possible?

I get those complete blocks of youtube videos when I have any kind of adblocker.

I'm not entirely sure how they detect an ad blocker? They could reasonably terminate my entire Google account for having settings that look like an ad blocker.

Use piped.video and others to get around it, I guess? I can't afford YouTube premium, and the ads are usually offensive, sometimes inappropriate, and never something I would buy or use. Im subscribed to around 950 channels so I have all the reason to stay, but this weird invasive behavior is inappropriate and I'm not sure I care enough about the entertainment value.

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