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Sooo. What are your plans for surviving the YouTube ad-pocalypse? In case you don't know, YouTube seems to be cracking down on ad-blockers, steadily ramping up their level of restrictiveness over the past 4 or so months, and ramping up even faster the last 3 weeks. Adblock Plus no longer seems to work for me on Chrome, but does work on Firefox. It'll probably be different for everyone as they dial it up for more and more customers, but it'll likely keep getting more restrictive as time goes on.
I'm guessing this has to do with the same tech trend that caused the layoffs this past year. Budgets are tighter, bubbles are popping, and sources of revenue are being more exploited. But I do wonder if this particular one will work out for Google or not.
I for one plan on leaving the platform if I ever am completely unable to make it work without ads. I think there are many others who feel the same way. This may (I hope) make things worse for content creators, especially those who rely on their own sponsorships for revenue, and will drive them towards other less restrictive platforms.
It's not like I think it's immoral or wrong for Google to pull this, but it does bother me. YouTube has been around for so long, it's life a part of my life. It's my TV, it's the way I learn and become better at most things, and for many many people, it's their livelihood. My wife randomly said to me last week as I was teaching myself some drumstick fundamentals (the kind of fundamentals with deep intricacies that you can't see easily, and need an in-depth video to go into), "how did anyone ever learn anything before YouTube?" After having been around for so long, and being so ingrained, it feels weird for YouTube to suddenly switch up how it works. I'm someone who likes to skip around videos and go back and forth a lot. When ads are present on YouTube, I cannot stand how you'll skip to a section of a video, even without having watched much actual content in the video yet, and suddenly have to watch a giant string of ads. Having to watch ads like that will ruin my usage of the platform.
I also wonder if it's technically possible for YouTube to completely crack down on all ad-blockers, but I don't know enough about how their APIs work. But since so much of it it's happening client-side, I think they'd have to control the client to have complete control. This might be why youtube no longer works on Chrome when I have adblock plus, but it still works on Firefox for me.
Just pay?
If that wasn't a worse experience than using an adblock or sponsor block..
How is it worse?
Bruh. You're welcome to try it and see for yourself.
YT without additional client-side mods is nagware filth full of Tiktok shit in the form of shorts, endless sponsor sections per video, awful community posts because what a video platform needs to be is social media too, and no end of miscellaneous garbage.
I have and I have not really experienced what you describe or don't care.
Maybe this is an app/browser thing? I almost only ever used the app for the past 8 years so I've not bothered to optimise the web client, perhaps there is a large difference there?
The one thing you mention that I have seen is the shorts. But that is one recommendation second from the top of the feed which I just scroll past and I'm not bothered by again, and occasionally the shorts are of interest to me.
It's possible we have very different tolerances, or what I consider severe annoyances aren't so for you.
The YT app by default is clogged with bullshit that gets in the way of my primary use case, which is to see videos from people I'm subscribed to, as well as occasional fresh recommendations. When I open it right now, even using a patched app, the entire front page is taken up by crap I'm not interested in, like live streams, shorts, or playlists.
Further, my modified client has a ton of QOL feature that YT either never had or has deprecated, like forcing video resolution and so on.
Strange. Some of that I have literally never seen promoted, like live streams.
The one gripe i do agree with is the promoted playlists (mixes), that is completely useless to me and I would like to disable the feature. It's not a major issue, it takes a millisecond to scroll past but it is a completely unnecessary annoyance and I dont see why they wouldn't allow you to disable this.
Furthermore, I might have agreed with you more a few years ago (4+ maybe), when the recommendation algorithm was pure garbage, but as it is now I rely more on the algorithm than subscriptions anyway. First off, the rexommendqtions are pretty good and include plenty of things I wouldn't have found ok my own and it also solves the issue of creators that make different kinds of content on same channel, only some of which I'm interested in, which used to be a frequent problem for me.
I'm quite happy with the recommendations myself, I guess we simply have different thresholds for annoyance.
I still suggest you try a modded client yourself, if you're feeling conscientious you could still pay for Premium and use it too, I think you'd find that acceptable right?
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