this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Windows Phone gets revenge on YouTube from the grave by helping users bypass its ad-blocker-blocker::Windows Phone to the rescue. A lot of YouTube users want to know how to get around the new annoying YouTube pop-up telling viewers to disable their ad-blocker.

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[–] [email protected] 169 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (17 children)

This article feels like a large language model generated article.

TLDR: use a user agent switcher

Other advice: use Firefox from f Droid, or Mull and install U-Block origin. Use new pipe, or libretube to avoid ads as well

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

FreeTube, free open source YT client for desktop (Win, Mac, Linux). Been using it for past few days and despite being alpha, it works quite well. No data sent to YT except video requests. Subscriptions are stored locally and you can create profiles to separate subscriptions.

https://freetubeapp.io/

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Now there's grayjay as well, which is a universal media streaming client that respects your privacy.

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 1 year ago (17 children)

I don't know what voodoo magic I've pulled. But I'm still not getting pestered by YouTube to turn off ad block and I'm still watching 5 - 10 videos a day. FF w/ uBlock Origin and piHole

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Probably just A/B testing.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It isn't rolled out to everybody at once.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yea I thought I was lucky until a few days ago. Same setup as you; FF, ublock, and pihole. Started with the first message, then this morning I just got the message saying 3 video limit lol.

Thankfully, purging all caches in ublock origin makes it stop for a bit.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And Google updating this old code in 3, 2, 1

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Probably just deleting it 😂

It's a shame, the original windows.phone concept was great

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This is a battle google will lose miserably.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I doubt it, unfortunately.

Like many other online services they've saturated the market so the only way to increase profits is to extract more money from individual users.

They are also a quasi-monopoly for a reason - hosting and streaming video is resource-intensive, so I wouldn't hold my breath for a free alternative that would scale. AFAIK, piped and such are only frontends to youtube which will be killed off by ToS or through technical means.

Maybe there are free video sites that also host their videos, but as I said, since it quickly becomes very expensive, I don't see anyone being able to do that for free for long.

Unfortunately, if anyone is going to "disrupt" youtube, it is going to come from a silicon valley startup and like youtube they will only burn investor capital for a limited time - until they have saturated the market (or failed). Then they'll have to monetize as well.

My only hope is something like a torrent approach where everyone who streams also hosts. But since that is technically difficult to perfect, needs a huge user base to succeed while not promising any commercial gain for the initiating party, nobody will throw a ton of money at the problem, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

My prediction is that people will either pay for premium or see ads in the mid- to long-term.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We need to think about what people did before YouTube. It was already gaining traction around 2006, but before that you could still watch videos on different websites, it was just decentralized and videos were hosted on smaller pages. You might even see a website dedicated to a single video. YouTube’s incredibly convenient, but internet video can and will survive without it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I am sure other platforms / personal hosting will continue to exist in the future. They simply won't be relevant in terms of video streaming market share.

The network effect of youtube is massive. They have a huge amount of content creators and audience. That means the audience will stick around for the creators and the creators go for the biggest audience and hence the most views.

Being google, they have data centers all over the globe, provide a fast app / browser access for any OS, can cast to a TV with one click - all these equal convenience which cannot easily be beat by any individual website.

Some huge youtube brands like linus media group are trying with floatplane as their own paid video hosting service, but I'm sure their view numbers are insignificant compared to youtube even though they are the biggest players.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

By what metric will they lose miserably? They do not care about you if you block their shit. This policy will do 3 things:

  • Make a miniscule amount of people who generate no revenue stop using the platform (basically noone).
  • Make existing adblockers slightly inconvenienced for a little bit (again, google doesnt actually give a shit)
  • Make some of the less tech savy people who block ads either whitelist or premium up (this will happen and is the intended outcome).

Google only gains from this.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I've been using YouTube Premium (née YouTube Red) for so long that I totally forgot that there are ads on YouTube and was surprised by all of this news popping off.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same here except I've always used adblocker. The contrast between YouTube with adblock + sponsorblock compared to stock, cannot be overstated. The site literally becomes unuseable. It's awful.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Try grayjay... it's an AWESOME new app, open source, and supports all video networks you can think of as plugins.

It's available on: grayjay.app

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

Yes and no. Cool project but I gotta be honest I'm not a big fan of Louis Rossman / FUTO's "open source but not free " stance.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

It's open source and it's free. You're free to pay too if you want to support them. Software costs money.

What Louis is protecting against in his license is repurposing the app with malware and ads like was repeatedly done with new pipe. Pick your poison.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I just use NewPipe. Screw Google & YT.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Or GrayJay. They have the app on f-droid too. It aggregates almost every video sharing websites. YouTube, twitch, rumble, odysee etc.

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

I miss windows phone. The user interface was much cleaner and user friendly than any other phone OS I’ve seen. The only problem was it didn’t have the ecosystem of Android or iOS.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

People could build a sort of mix of youtube and torrent tech, like popcorn or stremio but for short copyright free content. I dont know how to do it.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)
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