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Google admits it's making YouTube worse for ad block users
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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Whatever happens on my browser is client side, which is hardware and software I own. I can make what I own do what I want. It's a right.
It's like Google saying that I can't skim a magazine in my home, and that I must read the ads. Google can do what they want server-side, and I'll do what I want client-side.
They're not saying you can't have an adblocker. They're saying their software will try not to serve you their data if you do, or at least make it inconvenient.
You have a right to your computer. You do not have a right to their service.
That's exactly what I said, yeah
Me after reading the 1st comment: "OK. True. Fair." Me after reading the 2nd comment: "OK. True. Fair." Me after reading the 3rd comment: "OK. Also true. Also fair."
Me reading you:
Fourth gosh darn level of agree
I’ll never disable my PiHole or turn off ublock tho
Fair.
I wish PiHole wasn’t so absolute dogshit about DNS requests from outside the local subnet, might use it then
Permit all origins, allow all destinations. In the settings.
Tried that, it just reverts back after a few weeks :/
There was a rabbi arbitrating a dispute between neighbours. One of them complained that the other one gathers apples that fall off his apple tree and into the other neighbour's garden. "Those are my apples grown on my tree. He's stealing them!"
"You're right," says the rabbi. But the other neighbour counters.
"But the branches of the tree are above my property. If he doesn't want them to fall on my garden, he can cut off the branch. But he lets them fall into my garden making them my apples."
"You're right," says the rabbi and adjourns the diapute to be able to think about it. He's at his wit's end and tells the whole story to his wife when he gets home.
"That doesn't make sense. They can't both be right."
"You're right."
No, you don't have a right to it. If they want to they can put the entire site being a subscriber paywall. That's their call. But until they do that i will continue to access the site with my adblocked browser.
You do have a right to your computer. After content is delivered to you, you have downloaded data, and your own hardware and software acts to consume said downloaded data. After it is downloaded, even if it is in a browser in a cache, it is considered offline content. This also applies to streaming media chunks, too: once it's downloaded, you have acquired it locally.
They don't have the right to disregard my right to privacy either, yet here we are.
Well.... They do because it's their tos, no?
And as a service provider, they can choose to degrade your experience. It goes both ways.
Except they want to send you videos. The power is with you, the viewer. Without you, advertisers will have no reason for buying ads. Google can't collect your data either. Realise that you have this power. Youtube is not like electricity or clean water. We can live without it if push comes to the shove.
To be fair, what they want is to make money off of you, be it through metadata or through advertising. It's just that sending you videos happens to be the model which they use to get the metadata or advertising income.
If they wanted to make money off of me then they should have kept the Pixel Pass as a thing so I'd have a reason to have YT premium
Or make YT premium worth it
But nah, they'd rather ruin the product I was paying for, so now they get nothing. At least then I'm not paying for it to get worse
They don't want to send us videos, they want to serve us ads and annoy us into buying Youtube Premium, which someone using adblocker won't see, or need. From their point of view they would win either way - if they successfully block adblockers it either converts us into ad watchers, premium subscribers, or we fuck off and stop using their bandwidth.
It's funny because I pay for premium and have noticed a worse experience since this was revealed. They don't seem to check if a user has adblock and pays.
They definitely seem to have checks in place for it. I have Family Premium and so far no issues at all.
Edit: to clarify, not a fan of any of this. Just saying it does work for me
Weird. It's not happening to me today. Maybe it was something else.
Well, I don't pay for premium, and I use an adblocker, and I haven't had any problems. Not having a problem doesn't prove anything if they're only targeting a subset of their users...
You have no value to advertisers if they can't serve you ads. By not doing so, they'll also cut down on bandwidth costs, so it's a double positive for them.
Yep, they can send me 500s if they want to, too
Technically 400s would be more appropriate here. :)
Response codes only matter to good-faith actors
If the service degrades to far due to using ad blockers then I'll just stop watching anything on YouTube. Easy.
Okay then. That was always allowed.
Umm, ok. You were not making them any money before, when you were blocking their ads, why would they care if you left?
Because the big channels will get a significant drop in views which lowers their sponsor pay and willingness to work with them.
I think you're overestimating how many people care enough about this.
Remember when killing password sharing was gonna be the death of Netflix, and then they saw a significant increase in subscriptions and profits?
A possible answer is because the creators that have their own sponsors in their videos want the view even if you don't see the Google ads, so Google on one hand want you to watch their ads while on the other hand cannot afford to really lose you since that would reflects on the creators and then if a creator leave for another platform (a big if, I agree) Google lose all the traffic generated by said creator, both who use an adblocker and who don't use an adblocker.
Sure, like not sending you videos. 🤔
Client side DRM is coming.
They’re mostly there on Android already.
You forgot to mention it's also coming to all Chromium based browsers (i.e. Chrome, Edge, Brave, etc) as well in the form of ManifestV3
Manifest V3 doesn't really have the real client side DRM. It just has the ad-blocker breaking API changes. The real DRM will be whatever comes of the abandoned Web Environment Integrity API. (It's not really abandoned just shifted over to only Android WebView.)
That’s ok. Us nerds have been defeating DRM in its many forms for decades. This will be no different.
Not really true for video games. Plenty of popular games still with uncracked denuvo...
It's called a "User Agent" for a reason.
You can, but as a part of doing what they want serverside they can ask for some kind of proof you don't have an adblocker on the server-side, you can reverse engineer that and spoof the checks and it becomes an arms race just like we have now... You're effectively just saying the status quo is a-ok with you
I don't personally enjoy the status quo, but they're not obligated to serve me any videos if they don't want to. However, if they have given me media to consume on my devices, it's up to me to decide how I consume the media that was already delivered.