wow just wow while i can’t say i didn’t see this one coming but it always amazes me where greed could lead someone
Google is an ad company. To them, a web browser is nothing more than a tool for collecting user data and delivering ads.
When you use a chromium based browser you are allowing google, an ad company, to decide what the future of web browsing should look like. And this is the result.
Firefox is the ONLY browser which is genuinely competing with google. Do you think ad and tracking blockers are going to get better or worse once they die out, and literally every major browser is running on chromium?
Use firefox and u-block origin. Enjoy a superior, ad free, browsing experience, and support the future of an open web.
It’s so encouraging to hear so many pro Firefox opinions lately. Then I remember I’m logged into the pirate instance of a federated platform and anti-corporate sentiment is probably as high as it gets.
Sadly most younger people haven’t even heard of Firefox.
Most young people are basically tech illiterate. Yeah they are fantastic with new apps and phones. But have zero idea how any of it works under the hood.
Ask them to transfer a file from a computer to a USB drive, most will not know how. They have no idea how a file system is structured or even that an app has to specifically made for different platforms… e.g. Facebook app on Apple is completely different from Facebook on Android and the two will contain different bugs and different settings.
We are almost back to default browser = internet
You’re absolutely right.
Yeah they are fantastic with new apps and phones.
I think that’s mostly because most commercial apps have fantastic ui and ux.
Most younger people have heard of it. Using what came with their computer is just easier to them though.
I agree, most of the younger people use browsers that are bundled with the operating system.
- Android = Chrome
- Windows = Edge
- Mac/iOS = Safari
most of the younger people
You mean most people. Specifically anyone who isn’t a power user
Right? After years of feeling like the only pro-firefox person left on the planet, the pro Firefox sentiment lately is a breath of fresh air, to say the least.
Young people seem to proudly go along with the biggest name, which is really sad. They think there’s merit in that, conforming means acceptance.
Meanwhile, anytime I encounter a young non-conformist doing something very contrarian, it gives me some hope for the future. Because 99% of society is open-armedly embracing dystopia because the one thing they hate more than anything is the burden of independent thought and self-determinism. To intelligent freethinking individuals, seeing it play out is a waking nightmare.
It’s my preferred mobile browser because you can install ublock origin and other privacy extensions which is pretty unique
It’s my preferred mobile browser because you can install ublock origin and other privacy extensions which is pretty unique
Well, we are in the worst cyberpunk timeline so…
Sadly, at the end of the day I prefer edge because it
has cloud voicesis slightly faster
No way I’ll use YouTube with ads. The amount of your lifetime they waste is what I’d consider disrespectful to their users. Even if the ads were bearable, I wouldn’t turn off my ad blocker on any Google site for tracking alone.
I also don’t see myself subscribing to YouTube Premium, firstly because it’s too expensive (stop including your music streaming service and make it cheaper maybe?), but also because YouTube is just a platform with a lot of not curated content that YouTube had no part in creating.
Let’s see how the cat and mouse games between YouTube and ad blockers and alternative frontends go. If it’s too much of a hassle, I’ll just stop using YouTube. I don’t miss Twitter, I don’t miss Reddit, and I won’t miss YouTube.
Eh, I wound up with a YouTube premium subscription years ago when I subscribed to Google play music, way back when it was YouTube Red. I cannot imagine going without at this point. It became YouTube music at some point, and… Yeah.
Really not worth watching a 10 minute video that has four minutes of YouTube ads and a minute of a sponsor pitch by the creator.
Firefox
This. I’m pretty sure this is a result of the ad engine changes they made to chrome a few months ago. Manifest V2 is what enables uBlock Origin to be so effective iirc and they’re removing it in chrome in favor of Manifest V3.
Firefox on the other hand still supports V2.
Firefox on the other hand still supports V2.
For now, mozilla rely heavily on google for funding.
They dropped xul extensions to have extension compatibility with chrome a few years ago.
How does that work exactly?
Like they are direct competitors no? Wouldn’t Mozilla be motivated to fuck google as hard as possible?
Like they are direct competitors no?
No, Google pays Firefox to make it seem like it still has competitors and isn’t a monopoly. However, a key condition of that payment is that the default search engine in Firefox is Google. They change that, they lose most of their funding – not most of their Google funding, most of their revenue (which is nearly all Google).
Wouldn’t Mozilla be motivated to fuck google as hard as possible?
If they still existed as an actual company, sure. But, it’s not. It’s a corpse that Google animates with their huge funding to make it seem like they still have competitors. Technically, Google doesn’t own Mozilla, but in a 2012 report, 85% of their funding came from Google. So, they’re never going to do anything that risks that funding.
I was curious how people feel about Braves new Browser? I usually stick to Firefox but I’ve given it a try. It however does seem to be chromium based.
Yeah its just reskinned chromium like the rest, but it’still nowhere near as bad as chrome, edge and the other telemetry filled ones.
Support Firefox!
The more ad-riddled they make the platform to try and monetise users, the more they make adblocks necessary to even be usable.
I didn’t use to both with adblockers. I didn’t like ads, but they didn’t affect me enough for me to go through any effort blocking them.
Now I use blockers everywhere, on every platform. Even for creators I like, because I know how little they actually make for ads - so how bout instead of watching 12 hours of ads so they can get 2c, I just send them a dollar or buy their merch every once in a while to not watch ads at all? Etc.
Ads could have had a place. There are ads that serve a purpose, that have minimal disruption but still give businesses a way to develop awareness for those who might want to use them.
Movie trailers (including when they stopped trailing movies and started leading them) are examples of ‘acceptable ads’ to me. When I purchase something from a store and they include a printed card from their sponsor. When sports teams have logos for being sponsored. A work van with the business logo parked while out on call. Etc.
But the internet’s online ads? Email spam? Telemarketing? These are forms of advertising that are actively hostile, and they’ve become the default. So now a user that wants to be on the internet at all is best served by block all ads, including the ones that would’ve otherwise been reasonable.
Google will never make me feel guilty for blocking ads when they’re already making their search engine unusable, too.
And while I’m at it, here’s the filters to add to your uBlock Origin’s MY FILTERS settings to block YT’s blocker:
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)
youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
Wait, surely that doesn’t work? It might block the "disable your adblocker popup but there’s no way this is all it takes for yt to continue serving videos?
It’s feasible that there are other variables that have been missed, but essentially this works. The server asks us a question, and we answer it. We just skip the bit where we provide evidence.
It’s like looking up the answers in the back of the textbook on a test. The only thing the server sees is the paper we’re handing in, it has no idea if we cheated or not.
Boring technical explanation:
For a server (in this case, YouTube) to see what a client (your computer) is doing, it has to reach out and ask it. When a request is made, the two points will ‘handshake’ to confirm that they heard the request, then when they’ve done it. It looks something like this:
- Client to server: are you prepared?
- Server to client. Yes, I am prepared. (503 if failure)
- Acknowledge. Client requests [data].
- Request received.
- (Server processes request.)
- Server to client. Are you prepared for response?
- Yes, I am prepared.
- Acknowledge. Response sent.
- Response received. Close connection.
- Connection closed.
These steps can be repeated any number of times in response to a single user mouseclick, depending on what you’re trying to do. A ‘request timeout’ error is what happens if client/server asks “are you prepared?” and it takes too long for the server/client to answer “yes, I am”, so you hang up the phone.
For the server to treat clients differently at all, it needs to contact them for feedback. For adblocking, it has to ask your client if you’re adblocking. Usually the server does this by sending the client a request to serve an ad - if your client never answers back to confirm it was loaded, then the server knows you blocked the ad. The devs can tell the server that if it doesn’t get a certain answer, to enable the punishment effects. (They’ll technically be sent anyway; they’re just hidden/disabled by default if your client handshakes the ad.)
What these scripts do is lie to the server. The server asks the client if we received the ad, we ignore the script that checks whether the ad is loaded and instead directly change the answer to claim it has. Since all the server sees is the confirmation, it doesn’t know the difference.
I haven’t had this happen using ublock origin, but if they do figure out how to block ublock origin, adnausiem (ublock origin fork) might work. It’s a fork of ublock origin that tricks the ad providers into thinking you clicked on every ad, which not only bypasses a lot of adblock detectors, it Actively costs them money by polluting their ad data with garbage.
If they really want to prevent us from watching videos without ads, they can. They know of the ad is watched or not, we can have some kind of auto-mute-during-ad but that’s it.
Question is if they will kill network effect with it.
I have already drastically reducedy yt watching because of too many sponsors… watching two minutes of sponsored material, plus two ads just to see that I don’t even wanna watch the stupid video is too much.
Not to mention those laud ads in the middle of relaxing and quiet video… few months ago one ad was starting with screaming, that’s when I said no way.
That’s why SponsorBlock is a godsend. I can’t stand all the in-video ads.
it Actively costs them money by polluting their ad data with garbage.
Lmaoo, i’m going to install that
FreeTube/Piped on PC
ReVanced on droid
uYou+ on 🍎 phone
SmartTubeNext on 📺
Youtube can do the fuck they want on their website
there’s also Newpipe x Sponsorblock on android.
add mpv+youtube-dl to thr mix and you get a full healthy dinner
yt-dlp is the successor. On droid there are several beautiful front ends for yt-dlp so you don’t need a terminal emulator
please share them with us
https://github.com/JunkFood02/Seal
This is the one I’ve been using
uYou can’t be used on non-jailbroken devices, right?
No you can. You need to choose from AltStore, TrollStore and Sideloadly depending on what works for you, then sideload the uYou+ IPA (or the IPA of any app)
Thanks, looking into AltStore now!
Can’t they block the likes of Freetube, Newpipe, Revanced?
These clients use the same set of APIs as the YouTube official client. Unlike the Twitter and Reddit clients which used APIs for 3rd-party.
Newpipe doesn’t use youtube official API. It does webpage parsing afaik
Report issue. You’re not running an adblocker! wink What’s an adblocker??
Google already has trouble with support, if they have a million lightly befuddled users who are getting blocked and “don’t know why”, that will be a problem for Google.
Somehow I feel like they won’t care, those reports probably go directly into the bin.
They’ll care if enough people do it. Being flooded with reports is just as time consuming
I’d say to you all: get used to bombshells dropping! At some point the investor pyramid scheme will go crashing down. It might be now. All those companies were on borrowed time. Until investors realised that “data” isn’t valuable on its own - it’s what you make of it. There needs to be a product that generates revenue. Spoiler alert, it is hard to come up with a business plan that takes plain usage data and makes the technical challenges worthwhile to squeeze money from it. I can feel it myself as data scientist. The honeymoon’s over, investors want to see ROI.
I mean this cycle will probably recover in a few years when the markets recover but still - some lessons stick
Holy shit! Your post made me realize that we are in Dot-com bubble burst 2.0
It’s the exact same thing, everyone and their dog, had to have a webpage. Investors finally realized that most websites had no way of generating money, and stuff came crashing down.
Same thing is happening now!
Zines are making a comeback!
Having to watch ads isn’t free. It costs me my time and it’s limited.
Technically you pay to use Youtube by watching adds. People sometimes forget that there are no free lunches.
As long as there are CEOs getting payed more than i could earn in my life for one year, i’m good with my free lunch.
There are, but they exist outside the market. Any company is going to want a return on its investment, and many people have even been trained to see themselves as “a business” and so operate transactionally in their personal lives, but many people don’t also. There are many people who do and give away many things with no expectation of return.
Someone smarter than me once said, “if your using a service, and it seems free, then YOU are the product being bought and sold”
I don’t think this is always true, but it usually is.
More people should try out Tubesync. It’s a tool you can host yourself that essentially uses yt-dl as a backend and lets you subscribe to channels, and it’ll download videos as they come out. Gets you away from the ads and you can archive content you like forever.
I wonder if they’ll ever make that impossible. I used to go on a couple of 6 hour drives twice a week for a long time. A lot of the drive didn’t have cell service, as it was thru a bunch of mountains. I ended up making a python script that downloaded podcast episodes to listen to, and to force my brother to watch Your Mom’s House, when he was with me on the drive.
It was surprisingly simple to do this.
They tried to yoink the youtube-dl source a year or so ago with a DMCA claim. Ultimately it was restored because archivists and historians are actually using it for archival purposes and Google would look like jerks if they pushed too hard against that. I think they hate it but aren’t in a position to come for it yet.
I’m glad that their are contemporary historians and archivists perusing YouTube so my great-great-great-great grandchildren can watch a video game review in which a grown man gets shit on by Bugs Bunny.
As a person who studied history… it’s better for future historians to have more garbage to wade through than less. Some future historian might make their PhD proving something weird about our time based on three frames in the bugs bunny poop review.
I get why you like it. But in order to use this as intended with my browsing habits, it looks like I’d need to invest in some hefty storage systems and I’m not doing that
If you’re demanding I watch ads, it’s not “free”. you’re demanding my time and probably attention.
I really think we need to stop with this idea that “Something is free” because no money is exchanged. Some stuff ARE free, there are repos on git, where you can download software, there are websites that ask for nothing. However Gmail, Youtube, reddit, and the rest are not “Free” just because they aren’t directly asking for money.
Whats up with all these online companies just deciding to be assholes this year.
Like another poster said, investors are pushing for profits. The Sillicon Valley model of throwing money at it until they figure it out is suffering with the downturn in the markets. So with the VC and investor money drying up, sites are pushing to make money to keep the lights on.
I would’t say keeping the lights on, more then trying to beat covid lvl profits.
I think this is the real thing. If online companies don’t match the extremely ridiculous and luck they had during the pandemic then they are doing “worse” even if they are doing just fine.
All of them also seem to be focused more on short term gains over long term losses (i.e. meeting quarterly goals by raising rates but driving away otherwise good customers and completely disregarding the benefit of customer loyalty.).
Companies are becoming even more greedy recently across the board and at a rapid pace. Some people would want you to believe Youtube wouldn’t generate billions of dollars as income annually for Alphabet for some reason. But the truth is the platform is extremely profitable already. Youtube simply wants even more now because competition has done the same. We’ve seen prices spiraling up and quality dropping in pretty much all sectors of the economy and this trend will continue for the forseeable future.
In short: Because they can (some are really stretching their boundaries, though)
and try to speak about this to anyone who doesnt see it you are basically labeled as conspiracy theorist or something and just dismissed.
It’s the natural path of capitalism. Squeeze just enough that you barely want to do anything. That’s literally just price meeting demand. And competition is dead so the demand is high
They were always assholes, but the end of zero interest rates is making American corporations go from boiling the frog to just smoking the frog alive.
This seems somewhat intentionally coordinated, so that the squeeze everyone into submission.
i’ve never seen this using librewolf + ublock + /etc/hosts
