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

[PhoBingas]

For those of you that have working YouTube apps, did you try to play a video? What version are you using, what platform, and is it logged into an account? (You can still see recommendations and channels in the broken apps.) Make sure to try to play a video... that's where it fails.

19.16.39 of RVX still works and I have the option to patch to 19.25.36 but I'm sketched out to update because everything still works so far, as of like 2 minutes ago it still plays videos just fine.

 

[ic bin þin dóm]

I haven't used YouTube in over 4 years. Happy to once again say fuck YouTube and fuck Google.

 

[Quandale Octavius Dingle]

Probably off topic to this thread, but I love that even "the worst" CEO, a greedy censorious jew with direct ties to the WEF and most powerful people in tech behind the curtain. Didn't even make the site this bad. All it took was a single jeet saying "Saar we need money." to instantly tank the sites already limited, waining usability.
I'm confident in saying that she was willing to run the site at a massive loss just to maintain control of political narrative and effective monopoly on video hosting/sharing, same as Facebook and Twitter were. But the jeet doesn't care about that as much and simply wants more googol pleh caahds. With ads becoming effectively worthless, they're forced to shovel more and more of them to users in order to get the same value they used to charge, in addition to outright defrauding customers by outsourcing ads to click farms to pump the impression numbers up. They're scraping the bottom of the barrel so hard they're getting splinters trying to claw back the 1% of people who aren't complete niggercattle and install an ad blocker, and the 0.1% of people who are at least smart enough to look up how to sideload an APK to their streaming device of choice.

 

[Fag Alert Major Fag Alert]

It’s clear YouTube is taking serious steps to crack down on adblocking apps, given the widespread 403 errors affecting SmartTube, NewPipe, NewPipeX, and FreeTubeApp users. The flood of comments on the GitHub issue shows this isn’t just a coincidence; it’s a coordinated effort to stifle these adblockers through its API.

So, what’s next? If YouTube succeeds in killing third-party adblocking apps, will you cave in and pay for YouTube Premium, or will you find another way to avoid ads? It’s a classic dilemma: support a service that’s actively working against user preferences or stick to your principles and find alternative solutions.

 

[gogeta77]

I only used smartube next to watch some Bob Ross to help me sleep. I honestly got sick of watching videos in general. Youtube is not getting a cent from me. Fuck youtube.

 

[Local Wordmason]

This is all just part of the push and pull that has been going on with ads and adblockers for like a decade. If it's a war, then it's a cold war, there are two opposing forces of roughly equal ability, the autists at google, and the autists on the upper-case-I Internet. Nothing massive is going to happen until Google pulls the nuclear option of legal action like what is going on in the emulation space at the moment. Much like MAD, they know this is a bad move because it will drive off users that use YouTube solely because the adblockers exist.

 

[Gentlebastard]

The funniest thing is that, even though I detest ads and never buy anything because of them, I wouldn't mind turning the adblockers off to support creators if YT were reasonable about it. But, every time I naïvely turn them off to check the state of things, it seems I get an ad break for every 2 or 3 minutes of actual video. If I'm getting shortish ones, lasting 15-30s, it is merely irritating; but sometimes people go crazy and put up ads that last for 5-6 minutes, and I've even seen ones that lasted over 2h.

Fuck YouTube, fuck ad agencies. If they won't give me a satisfactory experience, I'm more than glad to fuck off to BitChute or Rumble.

 

[gogeta77]

 

[PunkinMan]

I legitimately just stopped watching 90% of my feed as it was replaced with this website, as my reading retention isn't dogshit, I might be a zoomer but I dont need fucking colours, shapes and fucking keys jingled in my eyes to keep my attention.

 

[shekelshoah666]

Grayjay is having issues with playback on my tablet but RVX seems fine on my phone. Seems like the Grayjay issue is widespread and has began to pop up in the last 10 days also people are unable to download videos as well.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

Nothing massive is going to happen until Google pulls the nuclear option of legal action like what is going on in the emulation space at the moment.

What? Legal action often works on emulation because ROMs and things like console firmware are IP owned by those companies and emulator developers sometimes play fast and loose with those things.

Google has no legal right to force people to watch ads. Ad blockers are not functioning in some legal grey area.

 

[jertzog]

So, what’s next? If YouTube succeeds in killing third-party adblocking apps, will you cave in and pay for YouTube Premium, or will you find another way to avoid ads? It’s a classic dilemma: support a service that’s actively working against user preferences or stick to your principles and find alternative solutions.

Since jewtube is an effective monopoly, alternatives will not be slow in appearing or evading their efforts.

 

[Local Wordmason]

What? Legal action often works on emulation because ROMs and things like console firmware are IP owned by those companies and emulator developers sometimes play fast and loose with those things.

Google has no legal right to force people to watch ads. Ad blockers are not functioning in some legal grey area.

You say that like the tech industry doesn't have ways of twisting laws like copyright to fit their means. Also when uploading things you are giving YouTube a license to use your content however they please and I'm sure they can twist that fact to their advantage.

 

[ATI Escapee]

I would happily stop using an adblocker on YouTube if there were fewer and shorter ads to endure. Two ads before and after a video is ridiculous. Getting an ad that unskipped is longer than the video I'm about to watch is ridiculous. Tone down the ads and the problem is solved.

I used to watch youtube on my switch via the yt app there and got ads. Never got so fed up that I decided to conquer my laziness and try blocking them from the router itself, Id just hit the skip button or suffer through 15 seconds because the cost vs benefit was still acceptable for me. I think I quit yt on switch over a year ago because of the ad quantity, length, those 3 hour podcast things that pose as ads on a 10 min video? The spam ads, the loud ads, the mid word ads, etc just got unbearable. I cant imagine how bad it is now, I dont want to know lol. I am not even a person that hates all forms of advertising.... I do like to know about a new restaraunt in town or a useful thing I may want to purchase... and I want the people making videos to get a cut of the ad revenue. But now I fully expect any gadget ad to be shit tier shien/temu knockoff quality or a downright scam and the constant fucking attention competition with ads just blasting so frequently and obnoxiously... I just cant anymore. It is so bad. Mid sentence? More cumulative ad time than actual video? Nah

 

[TerribleUser09]

What ads?

 

[The Feline Solution]

"YouTube Premium" (or whatever it's called) promises "no ads" in exchange for a monthly fee, but I don't believe it one bit. I'm sure they don't do a damned thing about content-embedded ads (calls to action, intermissions to shill for NordVPN or whatever, etc.)

Absolutely, i've been saying right from the start that the "ad-free experience" YT Premium suppossedly offers is a sham. No chance in hell that the, what, 15 bucks per month will get any of this kind of in-video advertising to stop. I was hoping that some european law would fuck over YT from advertising YT Premium at all due to their untrue claims (AFAIK some EU law made YT Red not possible here when that was a thing, i might be wrong on this) but here we are.
As others have said, imagine paying for YT of all platforms, i'd rather take my chances with Netflix nigger slop.

 

[Evil Peter Griffin]

So how many users on Youtube use AdBlock? It cant be the majority. Zoomers and Alphas are too retarded to do anything tech related. Don't know if Boomers even use Youtube but they do they definitely don't know anything about AdBlock. Is it really worth all this time and money on something that will be cracked in like a day?

 

[Ed Special]

The amount of extra money they would make is not worth the effort. Ad block users are a minority on YouTube.

It's not about actually making more money, it's about looking like they're trying to in a world of neoshitliberal useless blood-sucking parasite investor caste-focused globohomo. The Line must go up no matter what, even if you reach market saturation, so they have to at least pretend they give a shit, and adblockers happen to be a very visible "problem" that they can pretend to give a shit about so the daddy's money ultrakikes institutional investors don't shitcan and replace them.

 

[Dyn]

What's funny is the money from you watching those ads actually goes to Google as the ads are served via their ad programs they use through Youtube rather than to YouTube directly.

That's okay, Google owns YouTube. What are you, a socialist?

 

[Autismobili Lamborghini]

Kiwis please just use this,

FreeTube - The Private YouTube Client

freetubeapp.io

FreeTube is a YouTube client for Windows (10 and later), Mac (macOS 10.15 and later), and Linux built around using YouTube more privately. You can enjoy your favorite content and creators without your habits being tracked. All of your user data is stored locally and never sent or published to the internet. FreeTube grabs data by scraping the information it needs (with either local methods or by optionally utilizing the Invidious API). With many features similar to YouTube, FreeTube has become one of the best methods to watch YouTube privately on desktop.

sincerely,
ya boy