I use youtube across different devices with the same account. sometimes, i even use it in multiple browser profiles or apps on the same device (with the account logged in).
the ad reminder got me. it actually stopped serving any youtube video on my laptop. so i made a new profile in firefox, logged in, and it was fine. for a couple days.
so i made a new profile, logged in, and… was foiled. but not to be deterred, i did what any reasonable person would do: i sought out one of the DOZENS of alternative frontends and used youtube’s recommendation algorithm on the main site to pull videos from the alternative frontend.
for one day.
today, on my laptop, with my old profile, never changing logins or browser settings, youtube started working again.
did we win?
I’d bet they’re A/B testing to see if it has a major impact on the amount an individual uses the site
I know that the pop up showing for some of my friends made me cancel my premium subscription. Everything else I don’t know. If they stop i will think about getting it back, but newpipe has been working pretty nice. It has the same benefits as premium and I don’t use youtube music. We’ll see, thanks to youtube for making me go looking for alternatives i guess lol.
Out of curiosity, did they have an exit questionnaire or something where anyone doing that can let them know why they cancelled?
Yeah, they show you a survey where you can pick some general reason and then there’s a comment box at the end. I seriously doubt someone real goes through that but maybe they have a bot collecting keywords or something lol.
Same, I wouldn’t have discovered FreeTube had they not fucked with my user experience. And since I can’t comment/upvote or as far as they know, subscribe to anything they’ve lost all my engagement in addition to all the meta data they were collecting on me. How many seconds did I hover over each element before clicking something google? You don’t fucking know now do you ya!?
Trueee, FreeTube in pc, NewPipe in android and you get the same experience as premium. Even more so, with FreetTube you even get sponsor block that i have no idea with what kind of black programming magic its done but it’s a plus over premium. I sound like an ad but i didn’t know that shit like that existed until I cancelled premium lol.
What if I told you there’s a fork called NewPipe+SponsorBlock on GitHub that does exactly what it sounds like?
Does Google have no issues with ad blocking as long as you pay for YouTube premium? I have premium because it’s included with my YouTube music subscription but I still use uBlock Origin in Firefox. I have never seen any requests for me to disable it while on YouTube or any other Google owned service.
I use uBlock on Firefox and never got any kind of notification either. Not a paying customer.
After I disabled all other adblocking related extensions besides uBlock, removed my custom rules and started updating the “quick fixes” filter list manually after every longer break from YouTube (+3 hours) I haven’t had the popup since. Now I even have sponsor block and return dislikes enabled too and the popup still stays away.
They caused you a major inconvinience that is enough for a % of people to turn it off, even temporally. I doubt there would ever be an ideal anti-adblock, or that they even target those who would figure it out, but swing users who can be easily pressured into surrendering. The most popular channels aren’t about tech things after all, and average session\video is probably small enough to bear ads while scrolling shorts for 10-15 minutes per sitting.
I am going to continue with the alternative frontends.
The ad reminder popup has a 1 day cool down (at least that’s what I understood) so no, I think it will come back.
I had the same thing happen on my old laptop but not on my pc, oddly enough.
