Asukapaper

@Asukapaper

The real Asuka; the only Asuka

  • she/her

she/her, 29, low resolution brain goblin, prolonged Cinema-Media-Arts and Polisci undergrad, ongoing Gender Situation. Asuka for short, Asukapaper for long, and Jill for real

Discord ID: asukapaper (they took away the funny numbers, curses)

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Asukapaper
@Asukapaper
balketh
@balketh
balketh
@balketh

It's Important To Mention Re: Youtube And uBlock Origin

That you gotta now disable all other adblocking setups on YT for uBlock Origin to have the best chance of working. Even PrivacyBadger will interfere now. This includes turning off Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection on Youtube (the little shield icon in the address bar - click it for options. It's per-site, so just for YT, don't worry.)

UPDATED: @plumpan has linked a great chost about other, specifically off-site not-on-Youtube ways of getting around this mess if uBlock Origin meets its end on the battlefield - it's called FreeTube, it's in the linked chost above, go check it out!

I've just been running uBlock Origin (and YTEnhancer+SponsorBlock, but those are different), keeping it up-to-date, and it's been flawless so far.

If you want it to work properly and you've not got it autoupdating, you really need to follow these steps properly and fully. Yes, that does mean disabling ALL your addons, removing ANY custom filters for Youtube, and basically starting from scratch with a clean, recent copy of uBlock Origin.

Right now, Youtube is directly trying to counter uBlock Origin in some manner. @mocha has a great little backup userscript to automatically embed the video you want to watch into an iframe, which is the other, manual way to watch the video. Excellent to have as a backup.

At this point? Don't be afraid to pirate your favourite videos. Seriously. Download them if you want. Use something like YT-DLP to rip vids where possible.

It might be important, soon. Just saying.

More just a personal observation, but YT can't win this. I mean that. I don't believe I'm being naive about it, either. There's no tech or method that YT can employ, as far as I'm aware, to lock down their service without completely preventing public access, which will, invariably, kill the site.

You might think they can? But they can't. People have already (as above), and will continue to find ways to watch videos uninterrupted and ad-free, no matter the initial inconvenience. And they will automate that process so it's as if nothing changed. It's a losing war, and it's Youtube's fault for not finding other, better monetization schemes than fucking advertising. They think they're going to win by attrition and frustration, they think that throwing more and more ad-dollars at the problem will make it go away, but it's literally not possible. The moment they stop escalating the arms-race, adblockers will win. So they'll have to lock the site down COMPLETELY. Paywall it all. And that'll be the death of it.

EVEN IF they completely paywall Youtube - no free content at all, no public account-less browsing, must be logged in AND paying to see ANY content (which would be a death sentence for something the size of Youtube, FYI - it cannot self-sustain on solely the reduced percentage of paying viewers that would remain).

EVEN IF they did this, they'd still fail.

Why?

Because it only takes a scant percent of people paying for a subscription to bulk-rip the content and make it available online, elsewhere. Not enough profit for them to survive, because they will have literally shut themselves off from the public, removing any potential passive income they could have earned in good will by having ads that aren't dogshit. But no, they don't care about that. They only care about MONEY. Which is why they can fucking rot!

The process will be slower and less convenient, sure, but by this point in the process, SO MANY large creators will leave Youtube for any other option that doesn't lock out the free public, that it won't matter. Youtube will lose its position as THE main video website, and something else will eventually come along to take its place.

Keep spreading the word. Tell your friends and family to install uBlock Origin, and maybe support the devs instead of paying a YT subscription. Install it for them if they're not too tech-savvy. It can't be worse than fucking advertisements.

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in reply to @balketh's post:

balketh
@balketh

uBlock, or uBlock Origin? There's a difference, and it's important, because uBlock is not the one you want. You want uBlock Origin. But I assume it's just shorthand for uBO.

I've never had to erase my cookies and cache to remove a popup. Still haven't had one yet, either. Not exactly sure what I'm doing at this point that's working so well, and I'm really knocking on wood a lot that this doesn't become instant-karma and I get irrevocable adblocking.

But even then, I'll adapt to iframe'd auto-private-viewing methods, or completely logged-out public-watched ad-blocked custom-RSS-fed 'Youtube' instead of this shit.

They literally can't win without ruining their business in the process.

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balketh
@balketh

Ah you're all good, just checking.

Not sure why you have to keep erasing cookies and cache. You've followed the instructions - no competing addons affecting Youtube, no custom filters in uBO.

Have you tried specifically purging and updating the 'Quick Fixes' filter category of uBO, hard-refreshing your Youtube page, and seeing if it works then?

Otherwise, keep @mocha's userscript handy - it takes a double-refresh to trigger sometimes, but it's way faster than needing to redo all your logins.

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aune
@aune

But without Youtube ads, how will I get six ads for Liberty Mutual in a row or perhaps a Spanish ad for Tide despite my default language being set to English?

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aune
@aune

Oh that sounds so much worse than my 3am ones. The last one I saw was a two hour "dog insemination kit" ad that I... Wanted to watch but also very very much did not

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plumpan
@plumpan

https://cohost.org/DeCosterMakesThings/post/3215008-sharing-because-free Poor OP has been absolutely swamped in notifications on this but there's a lot of info about using alternate ways of streaming videos from youtube without using the site. Freetube is probably the best option for most people.

I think for the majority of people that end up on cohost (very tech inclined) there's no point in trying to fight on the youtube website itself. There's solutions that avoid ads and fix many other issues with the site, like the kind of trash it will shove in your face trying to get you into a rage fueled rabbit hole or even things as simple as bad thumbnails.

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balketh
@balketh

Swamped? I wouldn't consider myself swamped until I see that (egg)bugger hit 99+, and even then, it's a blissful cicada compared to actually going viral.

It doesn't buzz my phone like an email or a Discord ping. It's just a silent number at the top of the page.

And, right now? The context makes it a thing I love to see.

It's cyberflares going up in the digital night. It's the /cries of install defiance across the datashards of the broken virtual worlds we're inheriting.

And there IS some point in trying to fight it on the site itself - it raises awareness, drains company resources, and spreads the message to those less technically inclined. Despite how it may seem, there's STILL plenty of folks on Cohost that aren't technologically savvy at all. And there's plenty that have a big enough following that informing them might spread the message further.

And that's a good thing, either way. :D

I've updated my post with your link and a note on FreeTube as well! Thank you for your efforts!

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plumpan
@plumpan

Oh sorry, that was in regards to the OP of the post I linked.

I've been on RSS + MPV for years now, so I don't have very high opinions of the website itself. Big respect for anyone that wants to try and fight things in browser because it's effort for sure.

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balketh
@balketh

Ah yeah I understand! It's also true for me, my notifs went supernova the moment DecayWTF shared my chost! XD

But it's worth it. The reach can be far broader, and help the layperson, who otherwise has to take the hit to their pocket either way - now or later, when we can instead turn it around and hit the company where it counts, in the bank accounts, and that matters, to me.

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plumpan
@plumpan

I think the biggest financial hit would be just making them serve as much data as possible, especially if they're getting hit for old videos that require spinning up a disk somewhere. I SWEAR I've had videos load so slow that they were actually spinning up on warm storage.

That being said, things that require someone to do code on their end require a HUMAN to do work, which is also important. Even if the human is being asked to Be Evil. So in that sense I'm all for making them have to patch holes from every angle.

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balketh
@balketh

While true, that's the kind of tactic that YT already has more systems against - specific, targeted efforts to serve more data to a problematic extent - I, and I swear I'm not being facetious right now, believe that's one of the Sacred Walking Ways To A D.D.O.S attack, right? Which they're much more prepared to handle than other methods.

Real, human effort is definitely something wasteable beyond just spinning up rust or NANDying about, but think of how many extra People-Hours it's costing them to deal with marketing, management, optics issues, reporting, public inquiries, support issues, and all other elements of it beyond just putting down lines of code to make the problem go away, specifically because of this adblocker issue flaring up. It's a colossal allocation of resources to a problem that has clearly spiked in difficulty since last month, for them.

The more the layperson is involved, the harder it is for them to ignore it on all the other facets of the company as well, so it's a broader, more directly shareholder-targeting idea.

Grapeshot, chainshot, hullbusters - give them everything we've got. >8D

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

using their data won't do much, CDNs exist and any organized traffic is basically a drop in the bucket compared to the possible botnet army of VMs watching YouTube without a display to get more ad money for a given creator much larger proportion of normal users who may be at least partially a botnet army of VMs watching YouTube without a display

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