Present HN: YouTube banned adblockers so I constructed an extension to skip their advertisements
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I had something similar happen. I’m fine with a blank screen and waiting 5-30sec.
I don’t want intrusive ads before during and after a 5 min video on water heater maintenance. |
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Making this work would likely mean that the CDN edge servers become much more stateful and the costs of operating that might outweigh the additional revenue.
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Wow, faststream works great for normal web players. Doesn’t seem to work on any youtube videos when using the ff extension in the store though. Gets stuck loading forever.
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Kind of unrelated, but how difficult do you think it would be to hack support for glsl shaders in a browser? I tried to look into it once, but got a bit lost in the media source side of things. My idea was to try to add glsl shaders as post processing to video streams like in mpv but without having to jump through all the hurdles of passing data to mpv.
Example of a shader I was playing with https://github.com/TianZerL/ACNetGLSL |
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That’s definitely a technique to keep in reserve if they get better at detection, but uBlock Origin currently works very well on Youtube as long as its filters are up to date.
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ublock origin folks have asked people to not run any other blocker extension alongside, those seem to trigger the anti-adblock scripts. It might be the same case for you.
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You can do the same thing with a device called a computer. You can also do that on Android with Newpipe and could do that with Vanced before Google used (likely specious) legal threats to destroy it.
There’s no good reason whatsoever to pay the Danegeld[0] to Google for their “premium” subscription that sells you the right to use basic functionality that Google arbitrarily and maliciously attempts to block. [0]: https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_danegeld.htm |
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I’m pretty sure the answer is #1. Gradual, per-account roll-outs of new “features” is very common on YouTube, and from the people I’ve talked to, the affected people seem to be fairly random.
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> CWS and YouTube are both Google property
So is Chrome! I have to wonder when Google will will start using the browser itself as leverage (beyond the upcoming Manifest V3 changes). |
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For the people saying it’s fine for them, YouTube was blocking access but only doing it for certain accounts and only after you watched more than a few videos. My personal account was affected but not my work one.
I was using Firefox + uBlock Origin and the site would periodically stop working. Clearing cache and updating the uBO lists would fix it, but only temporarily. No idea if the situation has changed. One alternative is pay for YT premium, but they still might target you with ads[1] which is risable. I’ve heard FreeTube is a thing as well. 1. https://arstechnica.com/google/2023/11/google-kills-web-inte… |
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> creators actually get paid
Until I see a report of exactly how much my monthly fee directly goes to each of my subscribed channels, I’m never going to believe that. |
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I wouldn’t believe you if you told me you’re subscribed to every Patreon of every content creator you consume the content of.
And again: avoiding paying the platform operators no matter the cost. |
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apparently it only happens with google chrome browser (what a surprise!), another reason not to use that spyware that only consumes RAM.
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