[meithecatte]

I've seen a lot of discussion about YouTube banning adblockers, but as a user of Firefox + uBO, I have never seen it happen for me. Perhaps the Firefox extension ecosystem makes it easier to push blocklist updates or something. Or YouTube's detection is browser-specific and they bothered with the largest first.

[cobertos]

I use Firefox and uBO and I had it trigger about 4 times now. I go and manually pull the uBO "Quick Fixes" list and still it triggers for me.

Recently it has stopped triggering again though. I have no idea why.

[spartanatreyu]

Google will make a change to its ads to get around the adblockers, but no change they make gets deployed all at once.

Instead they spread their updates over users 0.1% at a time over an hour or so. That way if youtube stops working for that fraction of users, they can cancel and rollback the update.

Sometimes this means that you might be in that tiny fraction of users who gets a change before the devs who maintain the UBO lists, and sometimes that change is related to ads.

(It's only happened to me twice in the last 2 years)

In this case, you don't need to mess around with other extensions, you just need to wait an hour or so until those devs have seen Google's changes and they can push their own updates to reblock the new ads.

If you want it to go faster, you can go to the github issues pages for the filterlists and they have instructions for how to get uBlock Origin to generate a blob of debug info to post on github to speed up their updates.

[cobertos]

Interesting, thanks for the insights. The next time I feel frustrated enough I'll have to do that.

Part of me was considering just self-hosting an alternative YT frontend. At this point I'm sorta happy with how YT slowly has decreased its usage in my life

[anticensor]

If we frustrate Google enough, though, they will try to make up for the lost revenue by deploying it all at once and miserably fail.

[shiroiuma]

They need to just give up and stop fighting the ad-blockers: they can't win, unless they try to force everyone to use a special app to watch YouTube, which obviously isn't going to fly.

There's plenty of losers out there who can't or won't use ad-blockers that they can make their ad money on; trying to harass the 20% of users who use ad-blockers is just an arms race they can't win.

[kazinator]

"Can't win" is at odds with Google's self image though.

[l33tbro]

I just clear filters and purge cache in settings. Seems to be working well so far.

[mcronce]

Yeah, I'm using uBO in both Chrome and Firefox and have yet to have them not work or get a "turn off your adblocker" nag or whatever

[spurgu]

I use uBO w/ Firefox and got the nag once, around two weeks ago (dismissable warning). Presumably an uBO update got rid of it.

Interestingly I just tried Chrome (Canary build) with uBO and I'm getting ads... :o

[kazinator]

Are you logged in to Youtube? People are saying that the YouTube anti-blocking measures are kicking in for logged-in users, but not for anonymous users.

[alg0rith]

uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock works on Firefox for Youtube even signed in

[kazinator]

Yes, there is no question about that the uBlock Origin works regardless of your YouTube session status. The question is whether YouTube's countermeasures kick in or not: nagging you to turn it off, or stop playback.

[tortuga_rayada]

Your comment is so useful that I actually created an account just to thank you for your wisdom.

[c-fe]

Im logged in and see no ads. Safari with adguard, no ads on mac or phone. Update: i do see ads on safari mobile now.

[kazinator]

The issue isn't whether you see ads or not, but whether YouTube is nagging you to turn off your ad blocking on threat of video playback being suspended after a few videos.

[andrei_says_]

It’s likely a gradual rollout. So, it will happen eventually.