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Comment by nananana9 | Hacker News Reader

Most people don't use the internet at a whole - if you just stick to the 10 biggest apps/websites, the experience is acceptable without an adblocker.

As for YouTube, blocking their ads is basically a part-time job at this point. On the desktop it breaks once a month, on Android NewPipe stopped working recently, and soon you won't be even able to install third party clients.

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I hear this often. My experience is totally different. I've installed ublock origin and I'm using Vivaldi as my blink engine wrapper. I've never seen a YouTube ad since years. I wonder why anyone has to fight for an ad free YouTube.

They often release new "features" in a A/B fashion to a small percentage of users. It's most obvious with UI changes, where a portion of users will get a disfigured version of the site for a month, but it's probably true for their ad-blocking endeavors as well.

I wonder if they're testing the new useless cinema mode on me because I'm running an adblocker.

Is cinema mode new? Or did they change it somehow? Last I checked all it did was resize the video to take up most of the width of the browser. That was a pretty happy medium between "video for ants" and "take over my entire monitor in full screen mode"

> I wonder why anyone has to fight for an ad free YouTube.

90% of my YouTube use is on my smart TV. There's not really a straightforward way to block ads there. Used to be many years ago that a PiHole or similar would work, but they clued onto that years ago.

The straightforwards way is to give Google money to get rid of them.

Paid YouTube still shows some ads, so no, it's just a way to give Google some money.

Not ones run by YouTube.

Not sure this is correct. For example: https://vanced.to/posts/youtube-premium-shows-ads-users-conc...

There's also this email from YouTube support: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1gnaetv/paying_to_...

It reads:

> While YouTube Premium provides an ad-free experience for most content, promotional ads can sometimes appear for specific partnerships or limited-time offers. These promotions are often targeted based on various factors, including your location, viewing history, and account settings.

I have a Chromecast with Google TV, and it allows sideloading of APKs. I installed SmartTube which is a YouTube client that incorporates Adblocking and also SponsorBlock.

It periodically has issues loading videos when Google change something, but the app gets updated every time within a day.

If it's a Google TV, there's an app you can sideload called SmartTube, which doesn't play ads and has SponsorBlock built-in. I went from often using my laptop just to play videos without being interrupted constantly, to actually enjoying using the TV app.

There’s a very simply way to avoid ads on YouTube tv — pay some money.

I spend less in nominal terms, let alone inflation terms, for my tv entertainment now than I did 20 year ago, even with Disney, Netflix, bbc, Paramount and YouTube subscriptions.

SmartTube works reliably for me on the smartTV for years now

If you are using an internet-connected smart TV you already decided you don't care about ads. No one is forcing you to make that choice though.

I don't even think YouTube is anywhere near the worst advert offender. My local newspaper website is stuffed full of adverts. Between a large picture, article heading and advert, you often don't see a signle line of new content above the fold on a 1080p screen.

I do not regularly visit such sites. I do unblock websites that I return to often.

Firefox and UBlock Origin has never broken for me and works effectively.

You were just lucky, because YouTube uses A/B testing and does not roll out anti-adblock-measures to everyone simultaneously. This gives UBO some time to react.

I haven't seen any ads for years either.

I use uBlock Origin, plus I've configured my Firefox to open YouTube always in a dedicated container, that logs me out of any Google-related stuff as I never upvote or comment anyway. Browsing YouTube anonymously might have helped.

I use the same setup, on Windows Linux and Android. It will break when they decide to roll out their aggressive anti-adblock measures more widely, currently they seem to be A/B testing and turning it on and off at random.

I'm surprised they haven't gone for the "refuse to serve the video stream for 20 seconds or however long the ad would take" card yet, although it's probably a matter of time.

Consider yourself lucky. Some of their A/B tests seem to be designed to psychologically torment you with videos "buffering" for 10-60 seconds before they start playing, navigation taking 15+ seconds.

If that happens to you, this thread [1] is sometimes updated with manual workarounds that sometimes work:

    www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), *, 0.001)
    www.youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.EXPERIMENT_FLAGS.web_enable_ab_rsp_cl, false)
    www.youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.EXPERIMENT_FLAGS.ab_pl_man, false)
    ||googlevideo.com/videoplayback$xhr,3p,method=get,domain=www.youtube.com
    www.youtube.com/watch##+js(set, ytInitialData, undefined)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1jbv1xn/youtu...

Although what you describe seems annoying, still no ads

No ads but it's far worse than just annoying — for me. I get annoyed when a video buffers for 10 seconds due to a technical hiccup. Being made to wait for up to a minute with pretend-technical issues and mocking messages like "Why am I seeing this?" that try to convince me that they're not doing this on purpose is insulting and enraging.

I would gladly pay for an independent alternative but I will never pay for Youtube Premium on principle [1]. If these workarounds stop working I'll just use third party clients all the time, I already use SmartTube on TV.

[1] If I give you my money, I want you to respect me as a customer. Google will continue tracking me, abuse my personal information, and almost certainly re-introduce ads at some point in the future in pursuit of infinite growth. It's never going to be enough, the only winning move (with them) is not to play.

On the other hand, I'd rather sit for 10-60 seconds waiting for (fake) buffering, than sit through a 10-60 second ad.

With ads, at least you know that they will end. And when.

It doesn't stop there, it would also fake-buffer when you jumped to a different point in the video, it would be stuck in a broken transitional UI state for 10-30 seconds any time you navigated to a different page. Clearly they want people to get pissed off enough that they turn off the ad blocker, it's been getting worse over time.

>videos "buffering" for 10-60 seconds before they start playing

Thanks, that explains a lot, why i sometime have trouble with youtube, while having perfectly fine internet connection.

I've noticed a big increase in time-to-first-content over the last few years, even on ever-increasing bandwidth and decreasing latency.

I should sniff traffic to find out why, but my assumption is that it's a mix of CRL bloat and code bloat.

Hit F5, buffering gone.

Don't you think that was the first thing I tried?

Works for me.

>to be designed to psychologically torment you with videos "buffering" for 10-60

I don't mean this as an attack on you. I find it perplexing that this could be such a difficult thing. If a video isn't worth waiting 10-60 seconds for, is the video even worth watching? Consider a comparison to reading a book or watching a DVD. With the DVD you must stand up, walk to the DVD, remove the plastic wrap, turn on the DVD player place the DVD in the tray, wait for the tray to close, load the DVD, wait for the main menu to load, and finally press play to watch your movie. (potentially after navigating through settings to configure audio / subtitles / etc)

The DVD experience could obvious be _better_ (and if you don't care about picture quality you might be shocked how much more convenient a VHS tape is) but this hardly strikes me as any sort of real problem.

Youtube might actually be doing you an accidental favor here; it is the extreme reduction of friction which degrades your impulse control, and is part of what keeps you on the platform too long. By imposing an small but perceptible cost, they might actually keep from your zoning out and watching and instead intentionally watching only the videos you care the most about.

> If a video isn't worth waiting 10-60 seconds for, is the video even worth watching?

I won't know that until the video starts playing. I'm not watching a 90 minute movie here and I don't know if the video I'm about to play is the one I want. Spending a minute setting up a 90 minute movie is very different than spending a minute waiting for a video to load that I'm likely going to spend <30 seconds on.

Maybe I'm learning how to use certain software and I'm trying to find a video that demonstrates how to use a specific feature. In that case I might be clicking through 10+ videos to find the niche thing I'm looking for. If I was just vegging out on Youtube this wouldn't bother me nearly as much.

And don't forget that the time penalty doesn't only apply to the initial load, it would pause and fake-buffer every time I jumped around the video.

I have stopped ads in everywhere for YouTube and they haven't broke: Mobile revanced so far good new pipe it broke but I only use it for downloading videos. On Firefox I use ublock and it has never failed me. Then on tv I'm using smartube

This isn't really true. Firefox + uBlock origin works fine on the desktop and on mobile. You don't need to use the official YT app. (It is true thought that NewPipe is often broken).

> On the desktop it breaks once a month, on Android NewPipe stopped working recently, and soon you won't be even able to install third party clients.

yeah, I often download things via yt-dlp to watch later and I'm encountering frequent failures that I assume are related to the whack-a-mole yt has been doing for the last two years or so.

NewPipe has been working for me as of late though, and I've not updated it in some time (although my use is infrequent)

On mobile I use Youtube with Firefox and Ublock Origin never had any issue with it.

Consider using dedicated NewPipe repo in F-droid, fixes land much quicker

I hate ads and avoid them, but haven’t had to install an ad blocker yet. I only really notice them when searching for recipes, and if I had to go through that multiple times a day I probably would get an ad blocker. I do pay for YouTube to avoid ads, and don’t watch much user generated content because it’s too ad-like imo. I quit podcasts 3 years ago, because those ads made them become unlistenable just like terrestrial radio and I just can’t go back to that kind of listening experience. I started listening to audiobooks instead and don’t miss podcasts at all.

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