Did YouTube finally kill adblocking apps like SmartTube? - Tons of unusual 403 / forbidden errors

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If Google kills YouTube adblocking what will you do?

  • I'll stop watching YouTube entirely

    Votes: 873 62.0%
  • I'll start watching the ads again

    Votes: 50 3.5%
  • I'll watch the ads but use YouTube less frequently

    Votes: 364 25.8%
  • I'll pay for YouTube premium like a faggot

    Votes: 122 8.7%

  • Total voters
    1,409
I was on a cross country road trip recently and in a gas station men's room somewhere in Arizona, there was a screen that played ads above the urinal. Or at least, there used to be one because someone smashed it with a rock.

Advertisers are faggots of the (second) highest order and if you give them money you're a faggot too.
 
4kdownloader got broken too by whatever youtube did, but they seem to have fixed it for the time being.
 
Youtube is able to extrapolate more about a person inside of a few hours then most people know about each other their whole lives. It's truly massive (and not just Google, but Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc) and hard to really explain.
If they didn't hire street-shitting jeets to do this, it could actually be a lot more insidious. If actually smart people were doing this instead of low-IQ Dhalits, they could actually exploit this so the couple banner ads might be something even intelligent people would succumb.
 
The main thing isn't that it's "intrusive" advertising (It is, I get it, but..) - it's valuable because it's targeted advertising.

When you were growing up - the most an advertiser really knew about you was that you were likely a child watching childen's programming. And then advertisers would run ads "for kids" during those blocks and that's as close as they could manage.

Now? Your computer and everything on it are spying on you. You don't just "watch" a Youtube video (or at least most normal people don't) - google knows who you are. They know what you were searching for before you came to the video, they're reading all of your advertising cookies, they know every video you've ever watched, they have access to your gmail, your gdrive, whatever else - it's a much more complete window into you as a person

You aren't just "a maybe kid watching a kid's show" you are "<Gender>, <Exact Age>, <Near Exact Location>, <List of Hobbies and Interest>, <Shopping for X items>, <part of X, Y, Z communites>, <Strongly Likes X games>, <Political Alignment>, <mostly everything else>"

Intrusive ads are garbage - but intrusive effective, specific, and targeted ads are extremely valuable.
I get that but, big butt, who is susceptible to advertising anyways unless you're a kid? And coppa prevents advertising to children. Not to brag but I'm so immune to advertising of any sort that I can't imagine people still get influenced by them to any extent. Any time I see an advertisement, I just try to dissect how it's trying to influence people or ignore it entirely. Are there people out there who are actual spendthrifts who have to get their credit card out every time they see an ad? If so then touche.
 
YouTube Premium isnt selling well, if it was they wouldnt be trying to give it away every 5min, and
Youtube Premium isn't selling well because YouTube is a shitty service run by Indians and trannies where quality content cannot reliably be safe from arbitrary censorship. If they weren't busybody faggots with one of the worst content discovery systems on the face of the Internet, i would not mind paying a nominal monthly fee. I spend more on hosting game servers.
 
I get that but, big butt, who is susceptible to advertising anyways unless you're a kid? And coppa prevents advertising to children. Not to brag but I'm so immune to advertising of any sort that I can't imagine people still get influenced by them to any extent. Any time I see an advertisement, I just try to dissect how it's trying to influence people or ignore it entirely. Are there people out there who are actual spendthrifts who have to get their credit card out every time they see an ad? If so then touche.
It's a fair bit more insidious than that. I'd imagine that a Kiwi Farmer like yourself is firmly in the "advertisement unfriendly" bucket but most people aren't Kiwi Farmers, sadly.

Primarily the power is in selling you something you already want - it overcomes a lot of "sales resistance" if you're shown ads for something you were already going to use. Watch a lot of survival content? Here's ads for tactical gear. Watching a lot of Let's Plays/Studio Tours? Here's furniture ads. Watching a lot of 'Call of Duty' content? Here's ads for Destiny 2 and so on.

Secondly the power of targeted ads lies in what I would call the "nudge". It's not about selling you some huge scam - it's about nudging your purchasing decision. To use your deodorant example from before, you're going to buy deodorant, but maybe an ad will be the slight nudge you need to buy their deodorant. Maybe an Old Spice ad made you giggle and when you're shopping you notice it, maybe it's cheaper, maybe there's a coupon, maybe your normal brand is out - then with a nudge you're a potential Old Spice customer. It's why most "big advertised" products are relatively normal products (Mr Beast Chocolate Bars, Prime Energy Drinks, a hundred versions of 'Meal you can Cook at home easily', a hundred versions of 'Gaming Chair', video game or movie coming out soon, etc).

Ads are so cheap per person that you (generally speaking) only have to nudge 1 in 1,000 people for it to be cost effective. I'd wager that's been very easy to hit so far.

On the other hand how is the internet supposed to function? Running and maintaining a website costs money, especially a big one like YouTube. Advertisers have been happy bankroll everything but that means ads. Without ads the next option would be paid memberships/donations. YouTube Premium isnt selling well, if it was they wouldnt be trying to give it away every 5min, and I don't see any donation links yet.
Advertisers have not been happy to bankroll everything - they're one of the major driving forces on why YouTube (and larger content creation) has struggled. They pay the way but that money comes with a list of demands (aka the crusade against porn and every "adpocalypse" that's hit every social media site) and they're going to dig deeper and deeper as the economy worsens and the companies need the ad dollars more and more.

Premium also doesn't sell because there is 0 correlation between "Money I give to the platform" and "Content I watch on the platform" and even if you wanted to spend $$$ to improve the content you care about - 99.9% of the time you're better off just subscribing to a creator/finding a patreon/tip jar, or buying something and using a promo code than just giving it to YT. It's a problem they can't solve because they don't actually produce content - they just host it.
 
I agree with @Sam Losco's Wife in the sense that I do not like the doomer headlines (:_(. ReVanced is working perfectly fine for me, Brave + Ublock have been doing their thang, idk if they patched the Twitch adblocker that I used because I barely go there anymore. And any time these things break they get patched again and again. I never got that ad injection in the video itself that got featured a while back either.
 
Youtube Premium isn't selling well because YouTube is a shitty service run by Indians and trannies where quality content cannot reliably be safe from arbitrary censorship. If they weren't busybody faggots with one of the worst content discovery systems on the face of the Internet, i would not mind paying a nominal monthly fee. I spend more on hosting game servers.
If YouTube 'Premium' was actually a premium service it would be worth a few dollars a month. Ability to download any video and save it DRM free would be all that anyone would need. But downloading or copying information being prevented is practically the number one web engineering job currently. Want to copy some text from a site? Can't because of some script. Save image? Not possible without a workaround. Save video? Hope you are incredibly technologically proficient and have lots of free time to constantly figure out how to bypass content download restrictions every few months.

Even worse is that most browser companies seem to be fine with this new heavily restricted internet if not actively accelerating it.
 
Is there a cord for new pipe or anything? It seems that's the main thing not working for me. Revanced never broke, my adblocker never broke, yt-dlp seems to be okay. Worst worst case I will write something to precache a video with yt-dlp on a virtual box, stream it via jellyfin or something to my phone, and then delete it. fuck giving Mohan a red cent
 
The existence of old TV commercials and super bowl ad complications is proof that people not only don't mind but enjoy advertisements.
The problem is that advertisements are so fucking bland and sterile in the modern era and online ads have increasingly becoming more and more degenerate. I've said this before in another thread, but I really feel bad for anyone with addictive tendencies because the ad scene is overrun with adverts that push vices. It is wild that, in Canada, you can just run commercials that tell you to gamble on your smartphone. "Hey, that thing you have in your pocket? Yeah, use it to spend your life savings!"
I don't feel that's a necessarily reasonable conclusion. Super bowl commercials are enjoyed because they're breaking up actual stretches where nothing interesting is happening in the game. In fact, from what I understand, the game itself will stop for commercial breaks. Just because they're high quality doesn't change how they're not what you actually want to see. Same goes for old TV commercials. Nostalgia or idle curiosity drives the views on those. People either didn't like them when they aired or only saw them as a charming novelty when TV was still a new thing and commercials didn't dominate their view time.

If every commercial played out like one of those fake ad bumpers in GTA games, I would still rather they not be there at all, and I think that would be the case for most everyone. Especially when I'm going to see them multiple times. Nobody would prefer watching what they want but with random interruptions over just what they came to see.
 
The problem with that is, once the data's on my computer it's none of their business what i do with it.
If they wanted to refuse me service because i refuse to watch ads, that's fine. But it's not what they're doing.
They're intentionally introducing malicious code into their website, specifically designed to interfere with the function of my browser and change or get around what it does.

You could go as far as to argue that this is a form of hacking, which the geriatrics would be real happy to hear about.
Advertising is faggy and all, but this is a pretty disingenous portrayal of the situation.

They are presenting a dom-and-javascript soup to your browser and when you use an ad blocker, your browser is rigged to selectively, incorrectly render that soup. This isn't really under dispute factually speaking. There are web standards out there; their code is working properly. (Or realistically, they're probably exploiting a shitload of goofy, underspecified or non-standard browser specific behavior. Modern web development is fucking hell. But yeah, they're not doing anything unusual code-wise.)

Now you're exactly right, that once it hits your computer, you're allowed to render it however the hell you want.

But still, likewise, it's entirely within their purview to rearrange that code they're serving in response. It's not malicious code or anything like that.

What it actually is, is faggy and bad business. It'll be the modern web version of Microsoft funding that faggot Kenneth Brown.
 
Just about every shitty thing that's happened on the Internet and on Youtube in particular since around 2010-2011 from what I can testify has been done either for or off the back of advertisers.

Mass tracking, brokerage and surveillance of user data? When they started doing that, they excused it as being for personalized ads. Sites being forced to toe political correctness? Done to maintain advertising revenue. If advertising and advertisers weren't directly responsible for a shitty change, they were always the vehicle for that change.

So long as yt-dlp continues to work, I can just download videos and then delete them after watching unless it's something special. I have already archived a lot of content that I don't want to lose. As a word of advice for those archiving, pay attention to the small channels that likely only you give enough of a shit about to back up. At the end of all of this, it would be lovely to have a pool of people's archives to access and watch quality content.

As for advertisers, I would say this:

The only sin in hurting an advertiser is a lack of imagination.

Fuck ads. Fuck advertisers and fuck advertising. Mass marketing is the cancer of the West. It's fucking Talmudic how insidiously ingrained it is in media, society and culture in America. The only time I want to see ads, the only time I should see ads, is when I'm going to the market. Places like the grocery store, the supermarket, online retailers, shops, HERE IS WHERE THE ADS SHOULD BE. Not when I'm trying to watch shit on the tele. And another thing, if you need to bring in psychologists to make your shit sell better, you're either stupid or malicious. Same goes for game designers.
 
I've spent some time experimenting this past couple of hours since I haven't watched youtube in a while.
  • Tubular/NewpipeX still broken for now. Briefly reading the issue tracker they mention they're dependent on newpipe so when that's fixed, these two should be as well.
  • Newpipe is broken, but has a debug apk that may fix it. I do not wish to install it on my phone as I'm not too savvy when it comes to phone apps and security.
  • BraveNewpipe works out of the box.
  • Freetube was semi-broken but it has a new update(0.21.1) that claims to fix it. So far I haven't seen errors since installing it.
  • The official youtube app is still dogshit and I get 2 unskippable a(i)ds every video, besides Shorts. I'm not sure if that's intentional or not.
 
It's a fair bit more insidious than that. I'd imagine that a Kiwi Farmer like yourself is firmly in the "advertisement unfriendly" bucket but most people aren't Kiwi Farmers, sadly.

Primarily the power is in selling you something you already want - it overcomes a lot of "sales resistance" if you're shown ads for something you were already going to use. Watch a lot of survival content? Here's ads for tactical gear. Watching a lot of Let's Plays/Studio Tours? Here's furniture ads. Watching a lot of 'Call of Duty' content? Here's ads for Destiny 2 and so on.

Secondly the power of targeted ads lies in what I would call the "nudge". It's not about selling you some huge scam - it's about nudging your purchasing decision. To use your deodorant example from before, you're going to buy deodorant, but maybe an ad will be the slight nudge you need to buy their deodorant. Maybe an Old Spice ad made you giggle and when you're shopping you notice it, maybe it's cheaper, maybe there's a coupon, maybe your normal brand is out - then with a nudge you're a potential Old Spice customer. It's why most "big advertised" products are relatively normal products (Mr Beast Chocolate Bars, Prime Energy Drinks, a hundred versions of 'Meal you can Cook at home easily', a hundred versions of 'Gaming Chair', video game or movie coming out soon, etc).

Ads are so cheap per person that you (generally speaking) only have to nudge 1 in 1,000 people for it to be cost effective. I'd wager that's been very easy to hit so far.
Its not because Im in the advertisement unfriendly bucket necessarily but it massively helps in being a cheapskate. I try to keep personal expenses at a minimum, as close to 0 as possible and I never buy anything unless I have to, like food. Anytime something fails I tend to fix it through any way I can. That way I never fall to the nudge. Even with food, Im so used to homecooked meals that I feel physically sick when I eat anything outside unless its like gourmet. I use Tor as a substitute for a VPN and I try to pirate everything as much as I can, avoiding all of those sale and sponsorship ads. So Im like the least susceptible to advertising of any sort and Im quite puzzled as to the point of advertising, I guess its something similar to what Jim Sterling describes as "being physically unable to stop the purchase".
Tried a few different videos always 403'ed. Maybe I'm retarded and missing something vital. None were age restricted.

Asia Pacific is as specific I'll go here.
Thats a shame, I use yt-dlp for all my archival and if its fucked, then Im fucked. Id better start gathering all the metokur and manga drawing videos I want.
 
Tried a few different videos always 403'ed. Maybe I'm retarded and missing something vital. None were age restricted.

Asia Pacific is as specific I'll go here.
If you're having trouble with yt-dlp I highly recommend using JDownloader2. It has a GUI and works out of the box. Since the latest update it hasn't had any issues downloading videos and downloading 4K VP9 videos currently works. You can add a bunch of video links and it will download them all at once. You'll need to login with cookies to download age-restricted videos.
 
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