YouTube did not slow down adblock users. Adblock devs admit to problem
neowin.net
neowin.net
> {1} with the corollary "don't rule out malice"
(Note: not saying adblock devs are stupid, bugs happen).
An interesting example of how little faith people have in Google as an organisation is that so many people jumped to the worst interpretation of what was happening.
Apparently a lot of people now give zero benefit of the doubt when it comes to Google and that's a long term problem for them.
Jumping to conclusions because it validates feelings without any care to validate the facts is not.
It's not one big cut but it's a death by a thousand cuts situation, I've never owned an iphone (beyond test devices issued by work) but it's likely my next device will be an iphone and I've been Android all the way back to the HTC Droid, when people ask me for a recommendation these days for their next phone I say iphone, that's three direct sales for Apple I can account for (parents and family) and 3 lost sales for Android/Google.
If this was true, everyone would be using linux. The "techy" market is completely different from the consumer market and also much less lucrative. Google might as well allow adblockers, since the techies wouldn't click on ads anyways.
Huh...I was about to post "Droid was from Motorola" but I checked myself first, and yeah...HTC had a few models they called Droid, though they all had a suffix, ie, Droid Incredible or Droid Eris.
Personally, I'll never buy Apple just because I absolutely hate their walled garden approach to your device.
If I don't use adblock, I get served an ad by google, then a 1-3 minute sponsored segment by the creator.
I'm not paying for this.
I mean, sure, that's still a minor annoyance, but not every channel has them, and many of them put them at the end anyways.
The content discovery genuinely sucks. Being forcefed tiktok cancer content (shorts) and needing to install plugins to remove that shit from /my/ browsing experience is asinine. I just checked Blocktube, too: I have 1012 blocked channels, and the list constantly grows, because their "algorithm" is less competent than their search function somehow, and I'm constantly shown bullshit I'm not interested in. If blocktube couldn't programmatically block all videos with <1k views or <120 seconds of content, that blocklist would be at least twice as large.
So what is this delightful, friendly, relaxing experience worth to me?
Zero. $0. Nil. Nul. Null. 0. False.
I will pay them nothing and continue using their resources to the detriment of the multinational megacorp until it becomes more difficult than `yt-dlp $url`, after which I will replace their valueless time-wasting experience with something else.
Because their product (trying to recreate cable television) has no value beyond wasting my time.
And to head off the "But muh creators" argument:
I don't care. Between having to install plugins to remove ads AND being forced to constantly watched 2+minute inline sponsorship ads (which I tolerate a single time, after which they're skipped; I already know about the product and I'm not interested), I just don't care anymore. I will not be advertised to constantly. I will not comply. I haven't watched cable TV since 2006, and I'm not about to start now.
0: https://grammarist.com/spelling/disdain-or-distain/
1: The only known use of the noun distain is in the late 1500s. OED's only evidence for distain is from 1581, in the writing of Barnaby Rich, soldier and author. It is also recorded as a verb from the Middle English period (1150—1500).
People are held hostage by these platforms because they have free content you want to watch?
You have control over your choices. No one is bullying you or holding you hostage. Control your desire for free content if you feel the trade off of a 30 second ad once in while is mentally degrading.
These aren't your granddaddy's ads that were printed on the back of a newspaper or on the place mat in the diner. They are the product of invasive surveillance foisted upon the user through dark patters and deception, so I would argue the answer is a definitive "yes".
Would it _technically_ have been legal for them to do so? Probably in most jurisdictions as long as you were in public. Was it practical? No.
We are living now in the digital age where a few pieces of code can replace the guy in the hat with his notebook for fractions of a penny, except worse, because now all the corporate merchants are willingly selling my purchasing data to brokers.
It's easy in hindsight to validate when the heuristic was correct, but Hanlan's razor specifically was meant to be tongue in cheek. Understand the context behind something before you apply it to your daily life.
> An interesting example of how little faith people have in Google as an organisation
Well deserved. Google traded credibility and trust for ad money for too many years, and have left a graveyard behind them. Everything they do should be suspect.
False positives break so many websites.
I use uBlock Origin on my desktop, and uBlock Origin + PiHole on my phone, and there are only a couple websites that refuse to work, and so I just don't use those sites.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38987489
Your link is people claiming that Youtube was deliberately slowing down the site for people using adblockers. The current article claims that was not the case, and was just a poor adblock implementation.