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Comment by dmw_ng | Hacker News Reader

Is there some place with a technical writeup of what YT are doing to frustrate circumvention so effectively?

Effectively? I've been using uBlock Origin the whole time. Whatever YouTube is doing, it cannot be accurately described as "effective".

I didn't even notice that my YouTube Premium Lite subscription had been terminated for about a month, YT decided to not offer that type of subscription anymore and I'm not willing to pay more for YT Premium, uBlock Origin is working flawlessly.

I think they’re still doing split testing.

They're not doing anything effective. What does split testing have to do with it?

You might want to see my other comment, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38542185

“Can be bypassed” does not necessarily mean ineffective, when the goal is to change behavior.

Do people typically respond to the YouTube anti-blocking threat prompt by disabling their ad blocker entirely, or by enhancing their ad blocking?

I think they are just updating their measures frequently, so not really anything technical. In other words: Youtube is continuously spending a lot of money to put out new patches block the latest circumventions.

Not sure it’s a lot of money. Probably just an algorithm to generate variations of the anti Adblock code. At most, polymorphic code inspired by malware.

> At most, polymorphic code inspired by malware.

If it quacks like a duck...

Adware has always been a type of malware, even without polymorphic code or other evasion.

I actually wonder what is the balance between maybe a small team of software engineers finding way to block adblock vs generate revenue for periods when they are successful.

In the end it really is question that when they manage to block adblock do they make more money than they spend in effort.

This effort is confined to YouTube, but the return of someone uninstalling an ad blocker (the user's response could be more targeted, but some will fully uninstall) reaches Google more broadly.

I'd imagine the user would not uninstall the adblocker, just disable it for YouTube.

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