YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

[justaprogressive]

The ever-escalating game of cat-and-mouse between YouTube, ad blockers, and users has reached a point where it can no longer be ignored, with YouTube making it impossible for some users with adblockers installed to watch videos, and adblock developers and their users constantly updating their tactics to continue blocking ads on YouTube.

Over the last few months, people using ad blockers have been getting these popups from YouTube:

https://www.404media.co/content/images/size/w1000/2023/11/8bsp6n4k11xb1.webp

"Ad blockers violate YouTube's Terms of Service. It looks like you may be using an ad blocker."
YouTube has been rolling these out to different users at different times, so there hasn’t been a single day of ad-block apocalypse, instead, it’s been a constantly-evolving problem that is affecting millions of people at different times. This, as app developer Zhenyi Tan wrote in an excellent blog this week, has had the effect of confusing people, who have flooded Reddit, social media, and ad block review sites with differing information, because certain versions of certain ad blockers continue to work for some people, but not others.

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[usonian]

1. Hmmm. No discussion here. I am boycotting YT.

I am the corner case. I listen to music to help me learn to play piano.
So, I can get pieces from IMSLP (and archive.org) with creative commons licenses, mostly college orchestras and concerts at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner museum.

If you want a real brawl of a discussion, check out Hacker News.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38101629

210 comments and increasing.

uBlockOrigin is working hard to keep up, as it's a cat and mouse game going on with Google/YT adjusting often.

More on this here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38094620