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Comment by geraldwhen | Hacker News Reader

There are currently multiple trivial ways for a layman to block all YouTube ads.

mostly true - but youtube has experimented with forcing a "loading state" for ad block users that was the same duration as the ads they would have watched. https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1l7b3c8/strange_lo...

And I didn't even mind. Rather watch 15s of black screen than an obnoxious ad.

Is it possible that different regions have different ad experiences? I've not seen a single ad nor hint of one in a long time using the Brave browser on both android and desktop. Primarily in Europe.

Brave blocks yt ads by default.

Clearly the original comment is from a mercenary nerd who has not heard of DNS blocking of ads.

I’ve been very involved with the DNS blocking scene- and it’s extremely easy to circumvent. I always wonder if there are some principled nerds on the architecture side purposely designing things to be easily blocked with DNS blocking. Or perhaps the mercenary nerds are just that inept. Maybe a mix. I also don’t think the numbers of users with DNS blocking are large enough for the mercenary nerds to care about. However, the math for LoE to bypass DNS blocking has certainly changed recently.

It's not. You forget the disadvantage the mercenary nerds have - they do not, and can not, trust each other. So having the same company serve ads as is serving the content can never happen because mercenaries can't resist cheating and so advertisers won't trust them (after being burned way too many times)

If we go this route, they are just going to embed the ads into the video itself. Clearly the solution is to create an alternative to Youtube. This war is not going to bode well to either side.

> just going to embed the ads into the video itself.

This has already happened, and a counter measure for this first iteration has already been developed - SponserBlock: https://smarttubenext.com/sponsorblock/

Next up, embedded floating ads over the watchable desired content.

There are also multiple ways to avoid ads without "blocking"

Ingress and egress traffic is allowed, not blocked, but requests for ads, tracking, telemetry, etc., if any, fail

If you are using a real computer or can sideload apps.

For some definition of layman, I guess.

There’s an app on the App Store that only has the purpose of YouTube without ads.

Can’t get more layman.

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