Ya know, I’ve seen a lot of posts regarding Elon Musk spam in this community, and calls to “ban” them, yet every week we get gloom and doom posts like this when some new subset of the world starts seeing this shit. I’d really like to see a pinned message about the fix, which is…
- Install Firefox or a derivative, and add the uBlock Origin extension.
If you visit YouTube and see the pop-up, the page isn’t loading the video content, or it just seems to be acting strange, do the following:
- Click on the uBlock Origin brown shield in your extensions.
- Click the three little gears icon to enter the settings.
- Make sure you’re in the Filter lists section from the top and click the Purge all caches button below it.
- Click the Update now button.
- Wait until the filter update completes.
- Refresh the tab(s) that YouTube is in.
- Press play.
I literally have no other installed add-ons for ad blocking, anymore. Only uBlock Origin. Any time I see the message or YouTube starts acting up, I just repeat those 7 steps above for any YouTube tab that was already open, and viola, the video plays. It has simplified so many issues for me and reduced the number of adblock extensions I need to run.
I definitely plan on donating this holiday season to their team, probably the biggest share of the pie between the FOSS apps I enjoy and appreciate. Should uBlock Origin ever fail, I’ll just stop going to YouTube.
Apparently you can’t donate to them.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Why-don’t-you-accept-donations%3F
Weird. One way or another, they’re gonna get my money!! How dare they make a great tool for free, and accept nothing for their time and contributions!! The nerve of some devs, I tell ya! /s
Take it to the list maintainers <3
Or do what uBO’s creator suggests: donate to the silent Chads maintaining the lists uBo depends on.
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Straight from their GitHub Readme: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/README.md#about.
The element picker and disable JS button are also a life saver. Gets around so many shitty things about the modern web. The one thing I agree with from Brave (Firefox all the way though) is including uBlock by default (I just wish they gave credit).
Yeah they really are. I use to use firefox but now I use a modafied version called librewolf. It comes with ublock by default
Why not LibreWolf, a privacy oriented browser that ships with the real uBlock Origin? ;)
And using Firefox or its derivates supports the Internet. Chromium’s near-monopoly only helps Google dictate web standards.
wdym with the rral ublock origin? 👀👀
Because Brave ships with a very limited ad blocker that is not uBlock Origin
Or just live with a couple five second ads, it’s not the end of the world. At the end of the day, YouTube is a business, not a charity.
Intrusive and sneaky ads like the ones on YouTube should be heavily regulated if not illegal.
Edit: especially ads louder than the average content volume, repetitive jingles designed to get stuck in your head, billboards, and ads thrown in the middle of the video you’re watching
“Loud” is unfortunately hard to quantify. There’s a lot of psychoacoustics that mean that the number of decidels really doesn’t tell you what’s loud and what’s not.
This is a great demo of how sounds can appear extremely loud without actually being physically very loud: https://youtu.be/tONF9OSUOSw?t=7m16s
Anyway the point is that it’s hard to make rules about this kind of thing, because sound is subjective and there are ways to circumvent any restrictions you make.
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/tONF9OSUOSw?t=7m16s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Sounds like you haven’t watched a lot of free to air tv haha
I can honestly say, apart from seeing it on on the background when visiting parents or similar, that I haven’t watched free to air TV in maybe 15 years. Been streaming or downloading all that time.
I hardly watch it either. Just found it funny all the complaints above could be applied to what free to air tv has been doing for decades.
Agree with you completely.
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Yet they still get around it through sound mixing. Any regulations against using jingles or having ads interrupt what you’re watching?
Free to air is heavily regulated in my country if it had a fraction of the fraudulent grifter ads Google would be shut down
Luckily all that is prosecutable by Ofcom here so it very rarely happens.
Googles ad platform is utterly full of fraudulent scams and grifters. Bring on regulations and HEAVY fines for Google making profit of fraud and crimes.
Ublock Origin on firefox still work for me no filter
It’s pretty random whether you get the message or not. Some of my friends, including me, straight up cannot watch youtube on their website half of the time anymore, because it full blocks us. It’s not just an annoying message, videos actually just don’t play. But I only get it on some days. I think the message only pops up if you’ve been watching for more than like an hour straight. Then again, some of my friends have never seen the message. Who knows. Just more weird big tech server bullshit. Like how twitter’s api works 15% of the time (for me).
Been watching for 3h straight and still no pop or problem with videos but when time eventually come I’ll try to setup UBO filter or using 3rd party frontend
I’m daily using uBlock Origin (with Firefox) on Windows, and ReVanced on Android, and have experienced zero indications that Google is at war with ad blockers. These two are fucking fantastic and highly recommended. I don’t expect it to last forever, but bravo to these devs and contributors.
A bit unrelated, but do you know if there is a hardened firefox for linux (just like Mull for Android)?
LibreWolf is a hardened Firefox also available on Linux.
I use a betterfox userscript for hardening Linux Firefox
Will look into it, thanks!
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Firefox with Adblocker Ultimate working fine for me as of last night. I’ll check again tonight.
They blocked me with that combo on my PC a week ago.
Librewolf is one that might work for you
Never seen that banner or an ad. I guess it’s just a matter of time though 😕
uBlock Origin is reliably blocking the blocker blocker for me at this time, though a few popups got through a couple weeks ago.
Same, uBlock in Firefox is doing it 100% for me. Haven’t even seen a youtube ad or a complaint that I should stop blocking ads.
Well if you are using Firefox, you obviously life the easy life. But what about the Edge or Chrome users here? Habe some respect for those poor guys.
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Same, it’s a cat and mouse battle … lol
Yo dawg, I heard you like blockers
Brave is dropping the ball. It’s the only mobile option.
I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on Android. Isn’t there the same for iOS?
iOS web browsers are forced to use the safari/WebKit engine, so you don’t get Firefox extensions, sadly.
The main benefits of using Firefox on iOS is if you prefer it’s interface or want to sync with desktop Firefox (which is why I use it).
Hyperweb might work though.
Brave for iOS (sorry firefox gang I appreciate you guys) is working fine for me. I had some issues with both Firefox/uB and Brave on windows getting the pop-ups.
I got the pop up a couple of times until I manually updated uBlock’s filters list. After that, no issues.
I wish I could donate to ublock origin so badly. I never even saw the popup.
I didn’t know they don’t accept donations: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Why-don’t-you-accept-donations%3F
They make some interesting points, though.
As asked by uBo’s creator: please donate to the list maintainers instead.
What a solid guy.
No, they most certainly are not.
Shhhhh. Don’t tell anyone the way.
Be brave, tell everyone
I get there’s a heap of people on here who’ve somehow never seen these new anti-popup measures before, but they’re definitely becoming more prevalent.
I switched to uBlock and purged the caches and it seems to have fixed the issue (for now anyway)
At some point I’ll have to find a more permanent solution like switching browsers but right now things are working
a more permanent solution would be using an alternative front end like piped. there are a lot of public instances available
But it’s difficult to trust Piped and other 3rd parties with your login credentials. Especially for people who make a living on YouTube. Even if they themselves might be trustworthy, they can’t be perfectly secure, so it becomes added vulnerability.
wait what? piped doesn’t use your login in any way tho? you manually import subscriptions from Google checkout and you create a piped specific login for syncing that across devices. at no point will piped ever ask for your Google account
Ah, cool then.
Use clients such as LibreTube. It works great and even allows skipping sponsored content.
purged the caches
Do this daily.
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No. There are dozens of us! Dozens!
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never seen the youtube anti-adblock stuff.
Mullvad vpn + mullvad browser + ublock origin + never logging into google…
Also freetube, also newpipe…
Maybe they don’t bother trying to block vpn users?
I use a VPN, and I saw the popup.
from what I’ve read incognito mode is still unaffected, but thats just rumors online
If you have a VPN just set your location to a place they don’t run ads
Nooo. YouTube thinks it’s fully blocking ad blockers. In reality nothing’s changed.
Fully, you say?
$ yt-dlp -f 22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFEEZBmUYTM [youtube] Extracting URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFEEZBmUYTM [youtube] WFEEZBmUYTM: Downloading webpage [youtube] WFEEZBmUYTM: Downloading ios player API JSON [youtube] WFEEZBmUYTM: Downloading android player API JSON [youtube] WFEEZBmUYTM: Downloading m3u8 information [info] WFEEZBmUYTM: Downloading 1 format(s): 22 [download] Destination: Noiselund - Are You There？ [WFEEZBmUYTM].mp4 [download] 100% of 12.82MiB in 00:00:04 at 2.99MiB/sOh, guess not.
Yeah yt-dlp has been my strat this whole time anyway. Also Piped and Invidious get the job done when i’m too lazy to type in one short command for every video I watch.
Also, specifying format with yt-dlp is unnecessary (“-f 22”) if you have ffmpeg installed iirc because it automatically selects the highest quality, thus shortening the command even further.
I use -f 22 to set a lower quality actually, because most videos on youtube are needlessly larger than my 5K monitor.
Higher resolution videos actually have better bitrates on youtube. Like if you select 4k even if your monitor is just 1080p, the video will look much better.
The video stutters for me if I do that
All the more reason just to use yt-dlp. I know it takes a tiny bit of time to set up, but it’s well worth it. I’m able to download 20-minute videos that would have otherwise buffered in less than a minute. I can simultaneously queue up a bunch of videos, and watch them with zero stuttering.
You can also put “alias y=yt-dlp” in your ~/.bashrc to minimize it to “y”. Or set up a keyboard shortcut to a script that executes the command with your clipboard content.
Or do the same with “mpv” instead of “yt-dlp” to watch the video stream directly without downloading.
Firefox + uBlock Origin here still holding strong.
I still haven’t run into any issues with this setup.
EU based Firefox + uBlock Origin user here. All very good :)
Canada based same, is this only happening on Chrome or something?
No problems here whatsoever, I don’t know what everybody is talking about. Remember to donate some bucks to your favorite open source adblock (or piping app), thank you.
UBlock doesn’t accept donations.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Why-don’t-you-accept-donations%3F
I would otherwise.
Did someone forget to purge their uBlock caches?
Exactly. Takes five seconds.
I’m not having YT problems but have never done this.
Could someone explain how?
Open the uBlock Dashboard, then in the Filter Lists tab click the Purge All Caches button (then the Update now button)
For quicker syncing, you can:
Open uBlock Settings -> click Filter Lists tab -> type “quick” into search box -> click clock icon for “uBlock filters – Quick fixes” -> click “Update Now” button up top
That will only clear the cache for the fixes that actually counter the youtube countermeasures. Helpful if it takes a long time to download and refresh when all of the caches are invalidated.
This was annoying me in browsers so i did a bit of reading and found out that not only can I remove their ad block blocker in browser, but my TVs also support ad free YouTube. Thanks Google! Couldn’t have done it without you.
Can you point me to ad free tv please
SmartTube (formerly SmartTubeNext).
Any idea is there anything similar available on LG webOS?
Maybe YouTube WebOS ? It has adblock and sponsorblock supports as well. It can be installed from webos homebrew channel. Check https://www.webosbrew.org/ to get started.
This TV app is the best ! I love it !
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I guess you’re thinking of SmartTube, formerly known as SmartTubeNext?
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Do you have a LG TV? If not I can’t help you
I do, and I’d like a push in the right direction.
I got you chief: https://github.com/webosbrew/dev-manager-desktop
Cheers, will have to check this out when I get home.
No worries, happy to help troubleshoot if you need anything
I do! Whats the process?
See my other comment in this chain!
