HACKER Q&A
📣 stefanos82

"Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube" aggresively


6 days ago, I read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37793375 and thought I was doing OK with uBlock Origin.

Today I've got this message in a rather...aggressive way!

I have noticed a weird behavior for more than a week or so, but I didn't suspect they would be working on making such mechanism behave so aggressively to force me turn off my ad blocker, repeatedly.

So...are they doing me a favor to stop using YouTube that much?

Because quite frankly, all I watch is cats and goofy dogs lol!

  👤 pwg Accepted Answer ✓
Give yt-dlp a try: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

The only ads are the ones the creators insert into the videos themselves.

👤 sp332
I mean if you're not watching the ads, you're only costing them money. I'm not going to call it "theft" or anything but don't be surprised that you're unwelcome.
👤 notjtrig
Oh big time favor, time to backup our Gmail accounts the wardens of the internet gulag are getting desperate.
👤 aosaigh
The ads on YT have made videos unwatchable. I regularly get 5+ ads in the first 5 minutes of longer videos. Instead of considering paying, I’ve just stopped using YT, except for the occasional video here and there.
👤 polka_haunts_us
I'm generally pretty pro "pay for the service you're using", but, I just can't bring myself to pay for youtube. It's so...creepy. I'll be in a small Twitch chat talking about donuts or something, I go over to youtube and my recommendation has at least 1 video about donuts in it. This happened like 3 times in the span of 2 days, so I convinced the chat to artificially talk about camping, a topic I have no time for, for about 15 minutes. Lo and behold: camping videos.

Part of me can somehow still tolerate this if it's at least free, but I have no desire in a world where I'm paying for this. If it means I have to rewire my brain to go for a walk or do pushups or open a book or slam my head into a wall every time I think about going to youtube...so be it frankly.

👤 breput
FWIW, I was on the 3rd strike - after a few of the "Ad blockers aren't allowed" dialogs, I started getting an explicit "you have 3 more videos" countdown.

I deleted all of my youtube.com cookies and I don't even get the helpful warning now.

👤 the_biot
If you have an Android phone or tablet, try Newpipe. It can even import YouTube subscriptions.
👤 throwaway67743
Interestingly when the thread came up the other day I was seeing it, now I'm not, still a/b testing maybe, or stop harassing when the user just closes the window and doesn't come back
👤 chatmasta
It's not aggressive as long as it still has an "X" in the top right of the modal. I'm sure it won't be much longer before that happens...

I'm surprised they haven't started embedding ads in the m3u8 playlist like Twitch does.

👤 Probiotic6081
First they took Apollo and now this!!??