this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 79 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

Oh I just "remove element permanently" on U-Block origin.

Make sure to remove the invisible element too that covers the whole screen. They tried that to prevent ya from just opening the video anyway.

To deactivate the scrollblock, if you experience it,just go full screen once and go back out. Which can be easily automated via a macro or literally just pressing the F key twice.

YouTube's attempts at blocking Adblockers are pathetic

[–] [email protected] 137 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This was my gut reaction as well, but dont do this, the makers of uBlock Origin warn against it! https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube/detection-faq/

Can't I just hide the pop-up with uBO's Picker?

No. Cosmetic filters don't stop the message - they just temporarily hide it from view. The anti-adblock script will continue to run in the background and will eventually block you from watching videos. Please don't use, share or recommend using any of those filters and don't report any issues when using them.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

YouTube’s attempts at blocking Adblockers are pathetic

I've long maintained that the majority of programmers working for Alphabet/Google/YouTube spent more time learning how to get the job than how to do the job well. There is a lot more to coding than "Cracking the Coding Interview."

It's not about building cool things over there. Is has not been that way for a long time. They just want the money and reputation.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know. If I were a webdev at Google I would probably be against this nonsense as much as we are here. So I'd implement the most half assed 'blocking' of ad blockers possible knowing that the moron product manager who requested it won't be able to tell.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That's a great way to advance your career by the 'genius' kid that comes up with the much better way to do it and calls you out during a meeting while showing his already-written code that does much better than your senior dev self.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I partially disagree, the average developer at google is very competent, yet, their work pipelines must be so long and complex that such talent gets somewhat diluted

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not going to faff with all that until gray jay stops working

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You know what, valid. I'm just listing the solution I used. I'll make sure to check out Grayjay too.

This is the also the reason why Google is guaranteed to fail in their efforts. If one way to bypass their crap fails, 3 others will be developed swiftly <3

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

An app that lets you watch stuff from youtube, twitch, patreon, odyssey and more while respecting your privacy and having a better UI than any other streaming app.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

It's YouTuber Louis Rossman aggregator for content with the idea that you follow the creator regardless of platform, so if they have a YouTube/twitch/odysee account you'll get all of their content in one place so if youtube bans someone for something random as they do that creator and their audience aren't affected

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have no idea but it appears to be a client side APK similar to YouTube vanced from my 5 minutes of poor research

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

btw as a general rule, you can prevent scrollblock by just doing

##body:style(overflow:auto !important)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I get the feeling that they aren't trying particularly hard.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It might be a cost benefit thing. They probably could hire a team to perfect it and be on hand round the clock playing whack a mole with every workaround that gets found, but the half measure might catch the masses and be enough to not warrant spending the extra to do that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately they are actually updating their anti adblock measures twice a day. Poorly but they still are

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, I mean they could do what streaming services do and drm encode the stream, or make the ads indistinguishable from the videos, making it impossible to block.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If the ads were added to the video stream (I assume this is what you're suggesting) they can be easily skipped by scrubbing the timeline. On the other hand, if they add metadata so the client can make them unskippable, the ad blockers will have something to work with. Classic catch 22.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is it really that easy? Why did they even bother?

They've known about ad blockers for well over decade now and their "solution" can be bypassed with inspect-element. Nice.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is, in fact, not that easy. It works to hide the warning, but once you reache the stage where they block videos, it won't help you.

The better option is to block all scripts on YouTube and only whitelist the 2 or 3 that are necessary to watch videos.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

It hasn't really mattered enough for them to spend any engineering time on it before. Zero interest rates are over, though, and money actually kind of means something now. This is just the first move in a chain of many.

A warning for anyone relying on stuff like adblockers for YouTube - it's not that hard for Google to figure out that we're doing it, simply query for which users have zero ad impressions. Google also has a certain tendency to permaban Google accounts in violation of their policies and then ignoring all appeals. If you rely on Google accounts for email, photos and the like, this might be the time to plan contingencies.

Personally I've started using Piped instead. The lack of recommendations is a bit of a bummer, but in all honesty it was kind of like the switch from Reddit to Lemmy - just had to wean myself off the digital sugar pills.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Pihole has still been working reliably as well

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Not for me 🤔 I am running PiHole and the adblock thing still shows up. Which blocklists are you using?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I've never had pihole block YouTube ads. I don't think it's capable of that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How does this work? I've been considering using a Raspberry Pi for Pihole, but I've been discouraged as it wouldn't work for YouTube anyways. How I understand it is that Pihole is DNS, which just blocks certain domains. Since Youtube ads and videos are indistinguishable from a networking POV, it won't be able to block them. Am I wrong? Is there something I have misunderstood?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

YouTube ads are distinguishable at the dns level for now at least. For the optimal setup I recommend docker-compose on a raspi with watchtower. This setup will automatically keep everything up to date but requires a little docker knowledge. Here’s some documentation:

https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pi hole does not block it at all for me.

Have you tried accessing youtube in incognito a couple of times with adblockers disabled?

Not saying it isn't true but I, and several other pihole users I know, still see the block without uBo

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Long time Pi-Hole user here. It is not effective in this regard. Someone please prove me wrong.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I don't see how it could be given that they are loading a detection script in the client.

It has nothing to do with DNS. I suspect those saying that PiHole solves it simply haven't been rolled out to yet (or are using adblockers but have forgotten)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They aren't trying right now because they're running tests. I'm assuming they're testing what does and doesn't work. They probably wanted us to find workarounds so they could patch them when they decide to actually roll out the anti-adblock feature.