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Tell HN: YouTube beat uBlock Origin on Firefox
72 points by _6vhu on Sept 1, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 43 comments
When I go on YouTube, all I get is a blank page with a functioning hamburger icon, search box, and 4 placeholder icons.

When I click on the hamburger icon and go to home, videos appear on the feed. When I click on a video I get ads as if I didn't have uBlock Origin enabled.

Looks like others are facing the same issue.[0]

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1679jmx/is_anyone_else_not_able_to_load_youtube_with/




On a related note, I cannot believe how many ads YT are showing nowadays. I know the word “unuseable” is thrown around a lot but its really become that way for me. I got 5 ads in the first 3 minutes of a video yesterday. I know people say “just pay for it” but I don’t think that the alternative to not paying should be ads every minutes. My usage has gone way down recently as a result. I use an adblocker on desktop but can’t elsewhere.


I am always a bit conflicted when I see posts like theses. On one hand I also like free stuff, but on the other hand I also know running services like these costs money (and I'm not only talking about digital/IT resources).

Everyone has an idea of what they'd do, but nobody can agree on one. So, I guess the easy defaults are ads+premium, or a completely walled garden?


Just for the record, I don’t mind that there’s ads and I agree that they need to collect money somehow. I pay for lots of services and understand that platforms (and creators) need to make money. The issue I have is that it seems that YT have aggressively increased the number of ads they show now. I think you’re right: how much is too much?


I'm not conflicted because no amount of $10 subscriptions will be enough for them to survive independently without being docked to the Google mothership.

Proof: YT Premium costs $14/mo. now. Would anyone say there's been a 40% improvement in the quality of the product?


No but there’s been significant erosion of $ purchasing power


Youtube's single largest capital expense is going to be Google Cloud. They're not paying market rates for that, and in any case, GCP pricing hasn't gone up to a level where YT would need to increase pricing by 40%.

They simply do not what their profitability price point is. And they never will, as they're not independent of Google.


Imagine paying someone who doesn't even stop invading your privacy when you're paying.


It's even worse on long form pods, YT will stick in multiple ads, which themselves become long. YT is an actual joke these days, completely lame to use on Android.

If you have logged into Amazon prime recently you can see bars and bars and bars of "rent or buy or subscribe" content, to the point I hate even looking at the site.

I'm paying for Amazon prime, what happened to simply "free to me" listings based on the fact I'm paying for the subscription?

But YT is such fn garbage, I cant even put on a channel I subscribe to and have it just play the vids in that channel.

Instead it feeds me random shit not related to the channel or search.

I hate it.

It's garbage.


On Android you have NewPipe for video and ViMusic/Blackhole for audio only.

You have to install the .apk manually or from f-droid, but they work like a charm.


You also have regular Firefox + uBlock Origin that works great.


ViMusic is abandoned


I've been using it since Youtube Vanced died and it's working perfectly and I'll keep using it until it dies too.


Working on this end. Maybe A/B testing?

Never forget you can fall back to yt-dlp and mpv/vlc locally if the website stops working.

Stealing from Google is ethical. Keep it up.


> Stealing from Google is ethical. Keep it up.

Just keep in mind that you also steal from the content creator... which might be a bit lower on the ethical scale.


I've been collecting Patreons, yeah, and my finances are getting to a place where I can actually sub to all of them, because that is 100% the appropriate course of action to take. It's unfortunate that the employees of an unethical company have to suffer when that unethical company experiences consequences, but that's never been a reason to not oppose an unethical organization.


I pay for Nebula, which has many of the creators I care about. When I have enough money, I'll pay for Patreon or similar stuff. I refuse giving Google revenue/money, even if they somewhat take creators hostage.


Yes, it's become an arms race. However it seems like it's one YouTube can't win, due to some limitation in their process flow. You'd think it would be trivial, just don't send the video if the user hadn't first watched the ad, but for some unknown reason YouTube is unable to do this.

Since YouTube ultimately can't win with their current strategy, it's difficult to understand why they're bothering. Everybody running uBlock Origin clearly wants to block their ads, it's trivial to update filter lists to block them again, and those people (like me) will never, ever, pay YouTube so long as we can get the content without doing so. All they're doing is annoying people to no particular benefit.

Instead they should work out some way to do what I said earlier. But they haven't. Because they can't? Sure seems that way.


I'm surprised media companies haven't developed something akin to HDCP for attestation that a display has shown an ad to a user. Once you have private keys in display devices it seems like the obvious next step.


FF 117 on Win10 x64 with latest UBlock Origin. YouTube is still working for me. The Reddit thread you linked has some posts with things to try.


Yup. This[0] comment seemed to do the trick.

https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1679jmx/is_anyone_...


Worked for me too... much appreciated!


This fixed it, thanks!


- "Pay or not to pay?" - "G needs revenues." - "Abuse in qty of ads." Valid points but...

What about all the deleted or demonetized channels in the last 4 years? What about the increase of blocked-censured information ? Have we forgotten that, although they all (GAFA & more) were seducingly sold to the people, they are tools for mass control ?

Maybe this issue with YT ads... will bring attention to freedom of speech's erosion.

just my grain of salt.


I have also seen ads again, but when I see these discussions I always wish someone would tell us or link to the actual reason: What filter rule has been updated? What is youtube exactly doing to fight the adblocker?

If anyone knows, please link to it!


Master discussion thread on reddit /r/uBlockOrigin is here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/163cy47/youtu...

I had this issue and updating filter lists worked for me:

> Make sure uBO is running at latest versions (1.51.0+), then force update all your filter lists (click uBO icon > Dashboard button > Filter lists pane > Purge all caches > Update now)


Side note: the display of this thread is completely broken on mobile: https://ibb.co/cLJS6pX

How can I notify someone to take a look at it?


It's your machine.


Same for me, so not just their machine. Latest iOS, iPhone 14. Font sizes seem... off.


Today Android Auto pops up a notification saying "Spotify is not supported" and proceeds to fill half my car screen with a Youtube Music promo while disabling BT media controls for spotify.

This company is off the rails, they need to hard fire all the MBA-type idiots making their products shittier in misguided attempts at services revenue generation. When was the last time anyone had a good experience using this garbage?


I’ve been getting a black video but the ads audio still plays


Something weird is happening, not sure if related

I can't play certain youtube videos on Microsoft Edge; to confirm, I used inprivate mode with NO extensions enabled (not even adblock of any kind)...the webpage loads, I can hear the audio but the accompanying video does not show.

It's only certain videos and shorts, I can can click ten random videos and 8 will play normally, but two will have audio but no video.

(This is only on Edge; haven't seen this on chrome or firefox yet)

Not sure if they are testing something related to breaking adblock or something else, but something fishy is going on.


Happened to me. It was at night, listening to a podcast while I was doing some chores. An ad for a horror movie popped up while I was walking through the corridor with the lights off. You can imagine the heart attack...

I solved it by manually updating all the filters.


Just use invidious. There have been hardly any issues, if any, in the history of invidious


Upgrading to latest version of uBlock resolved for me.


I use brave on desktop and mobile and don’t get ads on youtube. Brave is actually solely used for youtube on my phone.

Maybe that will get hit soon.


Purge and reload your origin filters.


I got the same blank page for over an hour, after a while it just started working again. No ads in sight.


Make sure you are using uBlock Origin version 1.51.0. This cat-and-mouse game will never end.


I'm only getting ads on embedded youtube videos thankfully.


I'm also using uBO on FF 115 esr and it's working ok for me.


Edge with UBlock Origin is still working for me.


i was forced to watch an earlier, had to make sure ublock was still on.


Press update.




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