The Topic Of Fail

[66471611afba0icemann]

Fixed here in Aus too. No gambling commercials to be forced to sit through.

[66471611afe2fsarge945]

I didn't think gambling companies could advertise down here? Maybe on age restricted videos.

[66471611aff8dicemann]

Oh they sure can. Television is saturated with it throughout the day (1-2 ads per ad break) and YT ads is almost entirely nothing but gambling commercials.

Last year I sent a complaint to one of the TV channels about how many were being shown during the 6pm news (in the ad breaks) and how it normalizes gambling to children. Eventually got a response letter in the mail apologising, which was a surprise.

But yeah, gambling commercials are ridiculous over here. Should be banned imo. Governments been very slow to act on it also.

[66471611b010cNameless Voice]

They finally banned them here this year, but only between 05:30 and 21:00.

Crazy that they didn't ban them entirely, it all seems very predatory.

Most advertising is predatory to some extent, but at least most of the other things aren't generally as addictive or potentially life-ruining.

[66471611b03d1sarge945]

But yeah, gambling commercials are ridiculous over here. Should be banned imo. Governments been very slow to act on it also.

Can't speak for the whole country, but there's good evidence to suggest the NSW government is completely owned by the pokies lobby

[66471611b04c7icemann]

All the major sports clubs as well.

[66471611b0603icemann]

YT is now showing a popup stating that all video play will be blocked after the next 3 videos have been played. Looks their next step in their anti-ad-blocking campaign is on.

[edit]
Tested loading up another 3 videos and now all playback is blocked, with YT stating that ad-blockers are a breach of their terms of service. Lovely. Well I refuse to have to sit through endless gambling commercials just to watch a video.

However if you go incognito mode (in chrome) then that gets around it, since your not logged into an account that way.

[66471611b0b54fox]

icemann
Not yet happening on my end but I'm sure it will within a few days or weeks. I have heared others reporting it too recently. Sucks!

I hope YT gets beat over the head with it somehow but it's not very likely to become a hot topic. Pretty sure that compartmentalized rollout over many months and regions, was purposefully designed to break those waves.

Still, I sincerely believe that, in the long run, YT won't gain but actually lose something from those antics. Maybe not directly but just because people are able to skip some of the most aggressive and atrocious advertising methods (that are actually ruining the experience in many cases and are pretty disrespectful to content creators) doesn't mean this, our fraction of the audience (allegedly up to 30%) isn't profitable for them one way or the other.

What is pretty bad, is that, so far, there really isn't any promising alternative in sight, similar to the search engine situation with Google. We all knew that corporations like Alphabet, MegaCorps really, will start to strongarm us like this at some point, once we let them get this big.

I guess business was sweeter during the pandemic so they need to find a way now to make those very good times happen again, because good is not enough for the suits and shareholders.

Edit: Well, actually the stock price is pretty close to their all-time pandemic high again, so it's probably "very good is not good enough".

Uninteresting tidbit: I haven't owned an actual television device since my last one broke down in 2005 and I have gotten an internet connection with decent enough bandwith for acceptable streaming from YT and similar online sources. The most important reason for my conscious decision against buying another TV was the increasingly horrible advertising, loudly interrupting what I really wanted to see and spend my time (a ressource that only became more valuable over the years) with.

I won't go back to that and I don't see myself paying ever increasing fees for a company that tries to force me and that does live off other peoples uploads. I understand that producing shows and movies and buying licenses from distributors costs a lot of money, so I can justify paying for streaming services like Netflix a lot more.

APB asks for voluntary donations every few months and I gladly send them 15€ each time - simply because I appreciate their work and service. Would YT not be obviously profitable with the way things were so far, and have been for decades, would they not belong to a fucking mega corporation, known to collect and sell every bit of data that they can milk off their users, would they not have started to patronize users and uploaders alike with increasingly shady and manipulative tactics... I guess I would have started donating them instead, because that's my understanding of fairness. As it is, I have zero regrets and feel no obligation to support them, as a platform, at all.

[66471611b0cb1icemann]

We totally live in the cyberpunk age of mega corps, hackers stealing millions and all that. It just turned out a little different to how it was envisioned in the 80s. Pretty damn close though.

And YT can try all they like, but people will find alternatives that get around their "You must watch ads to watch our videos mandate". For example one could just download the video to their PC and just watch it that way. Just as people have found ways around copy protection ever since Commodore 64's back in the 80s (with their awesome techno screens that would go with the cracks).

[66471611b0f34fox]

We totally live in the cyberpunk age of mega corps, hackers stealing millions and all that. It just turned out a little different to how it was envisioned in the 80s. Pretty damn close though.

We really do. The 80s version had more style though. Current version sucks.

[66471611b10edJDoran]

Brave Browser (a fork of Chrome, but with better memory management) apparently has it's own built in automatic* Youtube ad supressent, and it is working fine for me. I see *no* advertisments or noticeable pauses, it just works very well. I don't know if Brave works as well in other countries (I'm in England) but I'd recommend anyone to give it a try for watching Youtube.

* I didn't have to select an option re: [X] Don't Show Ads, or install anything extra. I just downloaded Brave and installed it, and it automatically suppresses all Youtube ads. Hopefully, this won't change.

[66471611b1237fox]

I like their focus on privacy and have recently installed it on my Android phone. Works alright so far although I don't surf all that much on my phone. I doubt that it has an advantage over APB and uBlock Origin in terms of ad-blocking on desktop PCs in general and YTs newest methods specifically. If it does, please keep us posted.

Edit: Just received my first "YT will be blocked after three videos"-screen, yay! Testing yewtu.be/Invidious now.

 

[66471611b1334sarge945]

The only safe privacy respecting browser for android is bromite, which seems to also have a lot of really nice features

[66471611b1482fox]

As long as Invidious works, I would like to try using it in combination with a userscript manager extension like GreaseMonkey so that it redirects every YT-link to Individous. Maybe that way I can still get recommendations and notifications based on the subscriptions linked to my YT-account.

Any recommendations for a privacy respecting open source userscript manager in 2023? I read that GreaseMonkey is buggy and not well supported anymore, TamperMonkey is closed source and not privacy respecting.

Currently eyeing ViolentMonkey but seeing conflicting information about it. Definitely started out as privacy nightmare according to older information but has it changed since then? Are there better alternatives?

[66471611b178cToaste]

foxI use LibRedirect extention for that purposes on Firefox.

[66471611b1872fox]

That looks promising, thanks!