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

[HahaYes]

What I don't understand is why ads are so valuable. I have never seen a YouTube ad for a product or a service I would give any amount of money to. Who is buying what these scummy companies are selling on YouTube and are they really buying enough to justify selling the ads with such fervor? Seriously, has anybody here purchased something from a YouTube, banner, or pop-up ad? Is it boomers?

Imo it's more to do with the data they gather and associate to the account watching. Even if you interact with it (watching included) just for a second it's still adding genuine, marketable and profitable information to each account that can be used to track activity, sell to a third party, build a profile on each user etc. That's worth far more than the few bucks they make from you being served it in the first place and it's likely a big reason why they're pushing so hard against blocker chads. Personal data is extremely valuable these days given how much of it is accessible online, and how little your average user will care enough to actually try keep their activity as private as they feasibly can. Plus they're all nosy little pricks

 

[Null]

Hey, now that you’re here, how would you rank youtube’s competitors in general? Based on interface, features, streaming, uptime & reliability, allowed content & moderation, and available content?

Odysee is the most determined underdog, I think they have some heart in the game, but they have serious problems.
Rumble is extremely stable and reliable and I have zero complaints.
Tidal is excellent for music but not having access to music videos from YouTube is its one detriment.
Bing is my default search engine and I rarely have issues with it.

I actually do use Bing's Copilot sometimes to ask broad questions. Copilot was the first ChatGPT bot that does this awesome thing where it cites individual claims with where it got that information, so if you want context you can read it yourself.

Google's big up is that it's ubiquitous. It already has everything. There's no real downside to using Google. So everyone else plays at a disadvantage.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

Quick shit up the featured thread fast

So... what, notify Hogan and Android Raptor?

 

[LiquidKid]

The most amazing thing to me is how brazen they are about serving up ads even to paying customers who have supposedly paid not to see ads.

I'm old enough to recall the original sales pitch about cable television: part of the alleged benefit of cable TV service was that since you were paying for television (rather than just grabbing it from an antenna for free), you could enjoy ad-free programming because part of your monthly subscription went straight to the channels you watched.

Then, apart from premium channels (which you have to pay extra for anyway), every fucking channel provided by every cable provider turned out to have ads anyway. Right from the beginning. And everybody just kinda "forgot" about it almost immediately.

"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.). I also suspect they still do ad pre-rolls anyway (since uploaders can set that up themselves without Youtube's direct action).

It reeks of yet another service that you can pay for that yields nothing but profit for the people you're paying.

Growing up I was lucky in that my uncle worked for the local cable company at a high enough level to legally give us the premium cable channels free. I’d watch them exclusively because of the lack of ads.
Why watch Nickelodeon when Nicktoons had zero ads and seemed permanently suck in the year 2001, back when Nickelodeon was in full swing, and didn’t have any of the sitcoms?

Then they started adding ads to that service, then boomerang, which I also watched a lot of, got ads. It got so crazy that I eventually stopped watching television all together.

Tbh it’s actually surreal going back to old off air recordings and seeing a reality where television channels had zero ads outside of bumpers telling you what was gonna be airing later that night. It harkens back to a time when the content was considered strong enough to justify the cost, now the need nickel and dime everything because content sucks.

YouTube feels the same these days. There’s so many rules and restrictions that most really entertaining content is banned or demonetized, leaving to a draught of all but the worst sanitized slop, so we need a trillion ads on top of those stupid sponsor segments just to stay afloat

 

[Waff]

Hey, now that you’re here, how would you rank youtube’s competitors in general? Based on interface, features, streaming, uptime & reliability, allowed content & moderation, and available content?

I personally like Rumble above all else. Its a shame its not FOSS but you can't win all battles. With adblockers I was able to get Rumble working on a 1st gen 32 bit intel atom on ungoogled chromium and I got 720p footage performing at 60fps. Thats impressive even for playing back footage using mpv as a frontend. Still, Odysee beats all with its large ass archive of content right now...where else on the net can I get an hour long video of every time Metokur said the N word?

 

[mindlessobserver]

This isn't feature worthy.

Yeah well, like, that's just your opinion man

 

[Ed Special]

Smart TV niggers BTFO'd, imagine having to agree to a EULA to watch the telly instead of bashing together a cheap media PC from used parts or a laptop with a broken screen.

 

[Merried Senior Comic]

This isn't feature worthy.

This is feature worthy.

 

[grimacefetishist]

I see a lot of you guys in this thread are saying that you'll stop using YouTube altogether if they successfully break the Ad Blockers. But I wonder, what would you guys use instead? YouTube competitors like rumble and Story fire just cannot compete with the personalities on YouTube. Or would you guys just pick up a new hobby like cooking?

>instead
I'll do the same thing I do when youtube isn't available otherwise. I won't "replace" it with anything. YouTube shouldn't be anyone's hobby.

 

[BoomerSperg1922]

Brave browser is still killing 100% of ads for me.

If YouTube finally kills the third-party adblocking applications, will you stop watching or will you be a fucking scab and pay for YouTube premium?

Imagine ever giving google money lmao.

 

[DickMain]

Google continues to try and shovel ads in my face, I continue to repeatedly hit 'back' and 'confirm' on the remote to restart the video and force another ad until it gives up after 10 times and stops holding my video hostage. I will not watch YT ads, and I will continue to get my small comeuppance by making Google expend some small amount of resources trying to deliver them to me. I hope the minute it takes for me to load/cancel 10 ads in a row costs more than it would ever make them back.

 

[BrunoMattei]

This isn't feature worthy.

 

[Preacher ✝]

Do you think we will reach a point where they realize that this level of aggression from advertising has a negative impact on the likelihood of a sale? Its past that point for folks like us but normies are more susceptible to advertising. Still if they keep pushing it will reach that point for everyone eventually and I dont know if they'll have the common sense to stop.

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.

Beyond all that I recall reading that YouTube is routinely operated at a financial loss because the parent company considers owning it more valuable than not and they more than make up for the loss with other revenue streams. If thats true I wonder why they are so hellbent on monetizing it when doing so presents so much risk to its future. It may not be possible to run a website like YouTube, in a way that people will continue to use it en masse, while still turning a profit.

 

['Ole Dente]

console firmware are IP owned by those companies and emulator developers sometimes play fast and loose with those things.

We have legal precedent protecting us in terms of modified firmware. Sony vs Bleem, Sony vs Connectix, Atari vs Coleco, in Atari vs Nintendo the courts ruled that reverse-engineering their software was fair use, Sega vs Accolade was a similar thing but with decompilation, it goes on and on.

Real legal action has almost never worked on emulation and developer teams. What's been happening recently has more to do with Yuzu's profit, their use of Nintendo imagery to promote their profit, presenting the emulator as a better alternative to the Switch and showing actual guides on how to fuck with Nintendo's hardware. Almost every emulator team does not do this shit for obvious reasons. Yuzu developers are notoriously autistic retards who do fucking speedballs until 3 AM and spend all day on Twitter screaming about trans people.

Legal pressure works but it's a gamble in this circumstance, because if Nintendo picks a fight with somebody with some pocket change and a nasty attitude, they will lose like every emulator case before.

 

[moocow]

Smart TV niggers BTFO'd, imagine having to agree to a EULA to watch the telly instead of bashing together a cheap media PC from used parts or a laptop with a broken screen.

Yup! Plop one of these suckers ($66 + $4 for a case) behind your TV, pop a 16GB microSD card with CoreELEC on it, plug it in, and you're GTG. Plays everything I've ever thrown at it, including 4K/60FPS high-bitrate stuff. Built-in wired ethernet, and great support for wifi dongles.

(they're great little general-purpose Linux bitty boxes too)

 

[Null]

Do you think we will reach a point where they realize that this level of aggression from advertising has a negative impact on the likelihood of a sale?

No. It is clear that from the level of aggression in marketing found across all mediums in existence, and the degradation of television from uninterrupted video segments to continuous interruptions, that the marketers have determined that annoying, intrusive, unwanted advertising is profitable. They will continue to integrate commercial advertising into absolutely everything unless people make it their fucking problem.

 

[Hans Kammler]

I acquired a cheap LGTV a couple years ago, it runs on WebOS. Took me a while but I jailbroke the TV using RootMyTV, set up wifi streaming from my computer via Moonlight/NvidiaShield for free, installed a YouTube app on the TV that has adblock built in (YouTube AdFree), hell, you can play Quake on the fucking thing too. No Firestick, no subscriptions, no ads, and it does everything I would ever need. I've had girls ask me "Why don't you just pay for Premium?" "Why don't you have Netflix?", I just laugh at them.

 

[Peristaltic Pump]

I personally like Rumble above all else. Its a shame its not FOSS but you can't win all battles. With adblockers I was able to get Rumble working on a 1st gen 32 bit intel atom on ungoogled chromium and I got 720p footage performing at 60fps. Thats impressive even for playing back footage using mpv as a frontend. Still, Odysee beats all with its large ass archive of content right now...where else on the net can I get an hour long video of every time Metokur said the N word?

Meanwhile, Dailymotion just added comments!

…please clap

 

[Weebburner]

has youtube tried reducing their cost? Maybe cut all the DEI shit and worthless position and go the twitter route and keep nothing but the engineering teams. Then all your cost can go to a few tech guys and servers.

 

[DAT DIGGA]

If YouTube finally kills the third-party adblocking applications, will you stop watching or will you be a fucking scab and pay for YouTube premium?

I will never pay for kike tube ever. The idea that I have to enable them to run ads on my fucking devices repulses me, I would rather download every video via a proxy than give than see aid. Hell, if I can avoid going to the site, I would.