About google's attack on adblockers

I've been using the Brave browser for YouTube. I don't think I've seen an ad anywhere on their site since installing and configuring it. The Brave Shields thing does a fine job.

I would be more inclined to watch ads on YouTube, if Google wasn't already making a fortune abusing everyone's information. Just my opinion. I'll leave the soapbox under the bed and let it go at that.
 


I use Vivaldi and have had no problems with youtube or adds. :)
 
bob466 wrote:

The user needs to be logged into youtube for the restriction to take place. Ghostery works fine without the login but the user doesn't get the "benefits" of the algorithm that suggests other videos, which may be quite irrelevant for some users of course.
Yeah I agree that algorithm suggestions aren't as helpful as those companies make them seem they are.
 
I use Vivaldi and have had no problems with youtube or adds. :)
I just installed this, having an automatic ad blocking capability is pretty neat, even it is a little buggy (it crashed when importing my info from chrome, and I had to tell it twice to not be like "are you sure" when i was closing it before it stopped doing it)
 
bob466 wrote:

The user needs to be logged into youtube for the restriction to take place. Ghostery works fine without the login but the user doesn't get the "benefits" of the algorithm that suggests other videos, which may be quite irrelevant for some users of course.

I never login but still got that notice only once.
m1436.gif
 
Here's a progress report on the google attack on my use of ad blockers for interested readers.

For a full week, to avoid the google blocking on firefox, I used the palemoon browser (a firefox derivative) exclusively on youtube. It has the ad blocker "Adblock Lattitude" built into it, and I left the browser in its default state not adding any other add on. It performed flawlessly with no ads appearing and everything chosen on youtube came down as expected.

After that week, which was two days ago, I revisited the youtube site with the firefox browser which included the Ghostery add-on enabled, and the google attacks did not appear any more. For the last two days now with around 6 hours a day on youtube from this computer, over a number of users, the attacks have not reappeared.

Speculatively, the experience of google's attacks nearly a week and half ago may have been just a campaign waged at that time which caught my usage of their youtube site. Or, again speculatively, I guess it's possible that google noticed that after its attacks, that this particular firefox browser no longer visited its site for a week after having been attacked, so it judged the attacks as counter-productive and withdrew the attack. Google is known for its analytics and feedback statistics. Of course I can't say anything about those matters, but it's been interesting.
 
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The only things Google have achieved are
1) making more people aware adblock exists in the first place, most people did not know or care for years.
2) pushed people outside their normal habitat to explore new options
3) engage in a never ending technological arms race with ad blockers in a battle they can never win.

So what has Google really achieved? A PR nightmare, and nothing of value.
Kind of like Stadia, but at least they refunded customers there when they shut down the service.
 
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It would be good if Adlock Latitude was available for browsers other than Palemoon !

The people over at Palemoon are obvioulsy doing something right to come up with that
 
I went on youtube today and got this...
1705986346378.png

Clicked open video and the x at the top of youtube warning and I'm watching the video.
m0111.gif
 
I'm using uBlock origin and have never experience any performance hit by google.
Also I never saw any google warnings such the one shown in @bob466 's post #29
 
Google can't win. Not really. Its small groups of Google's underpaid techs that hate their jobs vs. thousands of enthusiastic FOSS programmers.
Google will break after they crack their skull banging their head against a wall!
 
Watching youtube on Firefox...I got this...
1706146737607.png

What does this mean ?
I went to Brave and got no Ad block notices or the above...The strange thing is I have the same Ad blockers on Brave too...looks like I'll be watching youtube on Brave now.
m1212.gif
 
I did a bit of research out of interest and learned that this hysteria about youtube punishing users with performance hits if false because it all started with some bug in adblock, users of which started to complain on sites such as reddit an that's how all this started.

At least this explains why users of uBlock origin and other extensions didn't have this problem, this includes me.

But I understand that online community has fun attacking google, which is I guess OK because it sends a message to them as to what's going to happen shall they decide to punish users.
 
I did a bit of research out of interest and learned that this hysteria about youtube punishing users with performance hits if (sic) false because it all started with some bug in adblock, users of which started to complain on sites such as reddit an that's how all this started.
Alas, there was nothing false about google's attack which affected the ghostery ad blocker:
 
Alas, there was nothing false about google's attack which affected the ghostery ad blocker
The article says:

From what we know, the pop-up appears when:
  • You are logged in to YouTube.
  • You watch at least three videos
It's not performance hit as the crowds claim and I can believe this story because I don't log-in to google.

Similar pop ups appear on reddit and quora sites although these are offering to use google account to login, it's not possible to block them with element picker because link to the element is different every time so I guess that's why one can't block ad pop ups on YT.
 
CaffeineAddict wrote:
....
not performance hit
....

It's worth noting that when google blocked the browser as described in post #1, each display of text that google put on the screen was accompanied by a 5 second delay before the user was able to view the selected youtube video. There was a small disk on screen that gradually filled up for the five seconds allowing the viewer to watch the passing of time while waiting, presumably with google hoping that the user would use the time to actually read their message. Each of the three displays before denying further access to the youtube site included this "performance hit", if one can describe it as such.

Reading about google's battle with ad blockers, it's clear that google has tried a number of different approaches such as 5 second delays, simple singular warnings with no apparent consequence, multiple warnings with denial of access after a given number of warnings, displaying advertisements for approved pre-paid ad blocking, displaying blank spaces on screen between the displays of videos thus reducing the number of selectable videos on screen, and almost certainly other technical manoeuvres that I'm not familiar with yet.

Reading some of the various ad blocking community texts and posts, they are very aware of google's attack on their ad blockers at the programming level, detecting google's on-going amendments to the google software in google's anti-ad-blockers campaign sometimes multiple times a day to counter the ad blockers.

The basic problem can be conceived to be about the simple fact that the user of google's free service is the product that google sells to its advertisers, so it's trying to protect its commercial interests by maximising exposure to its advertisements. Users on the other hand in many cases prefer to have more control of what appears on their own screens. Perhaps if there was more generosity from companies who behaved in accordance with the social licence society provides them with, these sorts of conflicts could be alleviated somewhat.
 
@osprey
You convinced me.

if google takes this route I'm sure alternative platforms will flourish! or perhaps ad blocker developers fill find new methods to block these pop ups and delays.

I don't think people will accept to watch ads, I certainly wouldn't.
 


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