Youtube is a perfect example of why ad blockers exist. They use ridiculous ad volumes and spy on their users for data to sell.
ive had ads longer than the video i watch and then ads when that video ends
YouTube doesn’t sell user data, the data is for targeting ads.
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the linked article doesn’t describe getting data from Google, but getting data from grindr and other apps. Grindr is notorious for this kind of thing and makes it easy to locate users…in fact its the main feature of the app so its impossible to fix.
There are different levels of privacy. Many of the issues with Google are theoretical or philosophical, but location broadcasting apps like grindr are clear and present dangers to your privacy.
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Sure and Google is not a data broker. Look at how good uses your data they are transparent about it. And your link talks about apps selling data.
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You realize Google owns YouTube, right? 😆
Google owns YouTube and the AdSense advertising network. They don’t need to sell the data to advertisers because they are the advertiser. It’s more valuable for them to just hoard that for forever and use it for ad targeting.
uBlock Origin FTW!
I love that, in a competition between a corporation worth hundreds of billions of dollars and a FOSS project, all Google managed to do was annoy uBlock Origin users for like a week. I just had to manually update the extension and restart my browser a few times.
I have been lucky, no ads, no message. Probably my region gets the updates so late uBlock has already compensated.
If the numbers ghostery and that are posting is true then overall it’s working out as intended.
Switched finally to ff. So I guess thank you google.
Make sure to turn off telemetry and adjust your browser’s DNS settings.
How and why?
Search how not hard. DNS to pick a provider you trust.
Care to share where to read up on DNS and what it does, not that tech savy when it comes to networks.
Dns is what translates urls (google.com, lemmy.world, etc) into ip addresses (207.94.56.21) which your computer can actually understand. Dns can be used to track you but a good dns can also very slightly speed up your Internet because it gets you the address to websites a bit faster. I use adguard and have Cloudflare DNS upstream from that
I’d like to elaborate a bit on why DNS can be used to track you.
Nearly all web traffic is encrypted (https), you can check by looking at the padlock next to the URL in your browser. But DNS requests aren’t encrypted by default. This means anyone, most likely your ISP our the admin of your home network, can see what domains you’re accessing. That means just google.com, lemmy.world, etc. and not lemmy.world/post/… This isn’t a huge amount of info, but it does tell anyone who’s looking approximately what you’re doing (googling something, looking at lemmy, etc.).
To fix that there are a few different ways to encrypt DNS requests, the most common of which (afaik) is DNS over HTTPS, which will encrypt DNS requests like any other web request your browser makes. I don’t know why this hasn’t been made the default yet. Firefox has a setting for DNS over HTTPS, it calls it secure DNS.
This is a good explanation.
Oh, cool thanks - did not know that, going to read up on it.
I had uBlock Origin installed since forever, are people just finding out about it?
Not really making fun of it, just genuinely curious. Are people still installing Adblock Plus? It has had an Acceptable Ads Committee for over a decade now. What were people using if not that?
I stopped using that when it stopped working. Is there a working version? I thought they got kiked off the app store for “interfering with internet data” or something.
You can’t be genuinely curious by asking a question answered in the source.
More like most people don’t have the patience to learn the difference between uBlock and UBlock Origin. Also, a lot of people just install Ad Block because they you tell them to install a ad blocker, they just install the one called AdBlock.
Haha look at these people who doesn’t know everything in the world from birth!
Tell me you misunderstood the comic without telling me.
Tell me you don’t understand sarcasm by telling me in writing.
If you want me to understand your sarcasm, maybe put a modicum of effort into communicating it :)
No, I prefer to communicate with people able to understand sarcasm in light of the context. The best I can offer is for you to block me to avoid being exposed to my ultra-high level, military grade sarcasm.
You prefer to communicate with people who assume you’re being sarcastic? That’s kinda weird. I prefer to communicate with people who take my words at face value. You’re not worth blocking.
Adblock plus was the standard for so long until maybe 5 or so years ago when they were bought out or something and they were hinting at letting some ads in. I think only the very online people switched to uBlock Origin before Adblock Plus tanked itself. That is all from hazy memory but it wouldn’t surprise me that normies got recommended Adblock Plus and used it until it didn’t work right only to seek out better options now that youtube is serving them so many ads.
That has had an Acceptable Ads Committee for over a decade now. I’m surprised that YouTube Ads wouldn’t have been permitted on it.
Yup, as a normie can confirm
Not everybody is.
That’s the thing, even if 95% of users currently using ad blockers block ads anyway or leave the service, YouTube still wins big.
They aren’t worried at all about alienating users from which they can’t extract ad revenue. Those on the margin that turn off ad blockers or subscribe to a paid plan are the target, not everyone else.
This doesn’t make sense because they have the monopoly on video now. By monetizing a bit they are creating a a huge demand for a competitor, risking their monopoly.
I want to believe that you are right - but don’t think you are. I wanted to switch over to rumble. But, except two, none of the creators i regularly watch are there. Fine, let’s try Odysee: geoblocking my location atm.
The only reason, why i use other platforms is Grayjay. It aggregates content from wherever you want and creates one feed. If it wasn’t for this app, i’d probably only use YT with better adblocks.
That is the extent of their monopoly right now.
I know it has a lot less content but you could try PeerTube.
Same problem, except it is even more niche. Does not really make sense as a YT stand-in. Tied into a collected feed it makes sense, which luckily is enabled by apps like Grayjay.
Having a monopoly is why it makes sense.
Who else is gonna spend billions building up a legitimate competitor in a extraordinarily expensive business where almost everyone loses money?
Part of the value of a service is the size of it’s user base, not just the size of the monetized user base. Right now, Youtube is just about the only game in town, but if half their users just Leave, even if it was the half that used effective ad blockers, the value of the site as a whole, for creators and advertisers both, is diminished.
That’s true to all extent, but the more present online folks do end up driving behaviors about regular users as well. There was a tube when even having an ad blocker at all was a “power user” thing, now everyone does it. If they fail to accommodate the people that will put energy into circumventing ads then they will just find and normalize a new work around.
It’s similar to content piracy. You will never get rid of piracy altogether, but if you make content accessible and affordable you can mitigate how common it is.
For YouTube, they need to balance how intrusive the ads are against how easy it is to get around them.
That’s exactly what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to make it harder to get around them while maintaining them more intrusive.
There are no better adblockers, uBlock Origin is all you need and is already updated to bypass it.
Unlock origin is the adblocker that people are installing. There are a lot of people with shitty adblockers out there, I guess they are switching.
who could have seen this coming
I love that all the centralized social media networks are scrambling to become shitty for profits right around the time users are realizing that they don’t need centralized servers to host their user-generated content. Users can take their content wherever they want and let these platforms die.
This 100%. Look at forums. Back in the early days, there were lots of little independent forums. Sites like Reddit took over because you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page. We gained convenience, but didn’t think too hard about what we were losing or who we were losing it to. Then along came enshittification and we are collectively realizing what we lost. Federation is of course the solution. As I see it, the only missing piece is monetization. Platforms like YouTube make it easy to monetize page views, Twitter / X is doing the same. That’s much harder in the fediverse.
Patreon for monification?
Ads suck. And honestly, if we had less content creators, they’d be fine. There are a lot of absolutely degenerates out there. Let’s cull the herd a bit and let us speak individually with our wallets.
That’s a fair point. Patreon, or whatever comes next, needs to drastically reduce friction. That by the way is why Amazon is so successful, reducing purchase friction. Right now if you have something that a million people will take for free, and you start to charge just one penny for it, your audience of a million will drop to like 12. Not because people don’t want to spend a penny, but because they don’t want to fill out a form and put in their name address credit card number expiration date security code phone number email address etc. If there was a button they could click that was like ‘instant donate 5 cents’ most people would click that a lot.
The closest thing I’ve heard to that was a crypto called basic attention token, which aimed to do just that. They are making a big mistake though in that they are only integrating with Brave browser rather than making a universal plug-in. So the idea of a universal solution is still a ways off I guess. But I think to make it zero friction it will have to be crypto based in some way.
you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page
RSS feeds have provided this experience for years. The problem is that a lot of sites stopped serving RSS feeds for their content. But sites like rss.app and openrss can be used to get RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them.
RSS is great for content consumption. It’s a shame that many sites stopped serving it- same thing with podcasts, now everyone wants you to listen on this or that platform instead of just publishing a normal RSS feed full of MP3 files.
That said though, RSS doesn’t help for participation, it’s a one-way tech.
I guess if you have forums that put out RSS feeds you could aggregate them together for post titles, but that’s still clumsy. Lemmy does it much more elegantly.
It’s like we’re reverting to the days you would go to homestarrunner.com, illwillpress, etc to see content from people you actually wanted to see content from. Honestly looking forward to it
I will never submit.
My ad blocker was working so well I didn’t even realize I had it installed and blocking ads on YouTube. I don’t mind watching a few ads as long as it doesn’t get out of hand.
I actually used to have all ad blockers turned off for YouTube because I wanted to support all my favorite creators on there. But then YouTube took away the daily suggestions because I don’t let it track my history. So I said “fuck it” and turned all the adblockers back on.
Now I just support the creators I care to via Nebula and their various Patreons.
took away the daily suggestions because I don’t let it track my history
the funny thing is, if you go to a non logged in session, the suggestion page works fine. It was such an arbitratry grab for the user to consent to them collecting your data. I just bookmarked the subscriptions page and only go there now
I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll have to try it. It gets boring just looking at my subscriptions.
Same I had no idea what anyone was talking about.
So today I’ve seen this article saying YouTube failed and another saying they’ve succeeded because of record uninstalls of adblockers.
because of record uninstalls of adblockers
That’s how you know it’s bullshit, because every major ad blocker allows you to disable per site. There’s no need to uninstall. The claim that they’re being uninstalled was written by uneducated propagandists.
yeah like who has a few days of youtube ad blocking not work then goes "that’s it im uninstalling this ad blocker and going back to ALL THE ADS EVERYWHERE
You vastly overestimate the average user. Probably installed an ad locker cause heard from a friend or coworker. Then stops letting them watch YouTube so they uninstall. Go to a non techie and browse the web it’s insane.
I know someone who is non-technical who asked how to remove the ad blocker they had when YouTube displayed the message, as they didn’t know you could turn it off per site, so anecdotally that is something that does happen.
inb4 those uninstalls were just because they were installing better adblockers. /j
Well, it would be bad to admit that it was a failure.
Considering that, after Netflix enabled anti account sharing, they got an increase in subscriptions, I’ve lost faith in humanity, and believe YouTube will succeed in the same way
So the article.claims that Youtube’s plan backfired because uninstall rates on some AD blockers increased and a percentage of those users cited “YouTube” as the reason.
I don’t know if it’s just me but that’s a massive stretch. I would like to hear numbers from YouTube themselves before jumping to any conclusions. These companies operate on scale and usually have enough data to back these decisions. Can it go wrong, sure. Has it already backfired. Not sure.
Ublock Origin works
Brave is ass
I just wonder how much of Chome’s browser share Google is willing to lose over this.
The article mentions people moving from Chrome to Edge to try and get around this. With how ubiquitous Chromium is as an engine behind a wide range of browsers, it seems most people won’t actually move away from a browser that Google has some control over.
IMO, one of the best Chromium based browsers is Vivaldi.
- Microsoft threw in the towel on Edge HTML.
- Opera gave up on Presto (the source code for this leaked at one point in time).
- Brave was a decent choice for a while. It’s controversial now.
- Avast and Comodo AV companies have their own Chromium.
- Amazon Silk is mobile Chromium for Amazon’s devices.
- Samsung Internet is mobile Chromium for Samsung devices.
- Yandex search has a Chromium browser.
There’s more than this but these are the big names.
There’s also the option of biting the bullet and paying for YouTube Premium.
No. Never. I’d rather stop using YT at all than giving in to coerced user-tracking.
At this point, I don’t even care about the user tracking. I just don’t want to sit through unskippable ads anymore. Especially when it’s the same ad over and over again.
Well then you’re in luck, you have a lot of options for removing ads before giving money to YouTube.
For desktop install and use “FreeTube”.
Alternatively for your android phone you can use “GrayJay”
Never. Pay. For. YouTube. Premium
