this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023

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Windows Phone gets revenge on YouTube from the grave by helping users bypass its ad-blocker-blocker (www.windowscentral.com)

submitted 2 years ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

113 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Windows Phone gets revenge on YouTube from the grave by helping users bypass its ad-blocker-blocker::Windows Phone to the rescue. A lot of YouTube users want to know how to get around the new annoying YouTube pop-up telling viewers to disable their ad-blocker.

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[–] jet@hackertalks.com 155 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (16 children)

This article feels like a large language model generated article.

TLDR: use a user agent switcher

Other advice: use Firefox from f Droid, or Mull and install U-Block origin. Use new pipe, or libretube to avoid ads as well

[–] krigo666@lemmy.world 25 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

FreeTube, free open source YT client for desktop (Win, Mac, Linux). Been using it for past few days and despite being alpha, it works quite well. No data sent to YT except video requests. Subscriptions are stored locally and you can create profiles to separate subscriptions.

https://freetubeapp.io/

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[–] icepuncher69@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I've been using revanced on android and have got no problems with youtubes enshitiication anthics, it even has sponsorblock for skipping sponsor in videos, it plays in the background in a small window while i browse lemmy. Only set back might be that its a little hard to install, since you need the patcher, a manager called micro g, and a very specific version of youtube that cannot be get from the playstore and the patcing is a little more complex that it should, but its worth every second of it once its done.

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[–] Dultas@lemmy.world 77 points 2 years ago (16 children)

I don't know what voodoo magic I've pulled. But I'm still not getting pestered by YouTube to turn off ad block and I'm still watching 5 - 10 videos a day. FF w/ uBlock Origin and piHole

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 39 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Probably just A/B testing.

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[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 26 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It isn't rolled out to everybody at once.

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[–] sudoroot@lemmy.zip 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Yea I thought I was lucky until a few days ago. Same setup as you; FF, ublock, and pihole. Started with the first message, then this morning I just got the message saying 3 video limit lol.

Thankfully, purging all caches in ublock origin makes it stop for a bit.

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[–] iasad12@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago

Sadly, I am getting the warning even whitelisting YouTube on Ghostry. I have to turn off Ghostry altogether to do away with the warning.

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[–] TenderfootGungi@lemmy.world 36 points 2 years ago (1 children)

And Google updating this old code in 3, 2, 1

[–] Nighed@sffa.community 31 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Probably just deleting it 😂

It's a shame, the original windows.phone concept was great

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[+] penquin@lemm.ee 33 points 2 years ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

[deleted]

[–] zipfelwurster@feddit.de 28 points 2 years ago (6 children)

I doubt it, unfortunately.

Like many other online services they've saturated the market so the only way to increase profits is to extract more money from individual users.

They are also a quasi-monopoly for a reason - hosting and streaming video is resource-intensive, so I wouldn't hold my breath for a free alternative that would scale. AFAIK, piped and such are only frontends to youtube which will be killed off by ToS or through technical means.

Maybe there are free video sites that also host their videos, but as I said, since it quickly becomes very expensive, I don't see anyone being able to do that for free for long.

Unfortunately, if anyone is going to "disrupt" youtube, it is going to come from a silicon valley startup and like youtube they will only burn investor capital for a limited time - until they have saturated the market (or failed). Then they'll have to monetize as well.

My only hope is something like a torrent approach where everyone who streams also hosts. But since that is technically difficult to perfect, needs a huge user base to succeed while not promising any commercial gain for the initiating party, nobody will throw a ton of money at the problem, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

My prediction is that people will either pay for premium or see ads in the mid- to long-term.

[–] Number1SummerJam@lemmy.world 18 points 2 years ago (2 children)

We need to think about what people did before YouTube. It was already gaining traction around 2006, but before that you could still watch videos on different websites, it was just decentralized and videos were hosted on smaller pages. You might even see a website dedicated to a single video. YouTube’s incredibly convenient, but internet video can and will survive without it.

[–] zipfelwurster@feddit.de 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

I am sure other platforms / personal hosting will continue to exist in the future. They simply won't be relevant in terms of video streaming market share.

The network effect of youtube is massive. They have a huge amount of content creators and audience. That means the audience will stick around for the creators and the creators go for the biggest audience and hence the most views.

Being google, they have data centers all over the globe, provide a fast app / browser access for any OS, can cast to a TV with one click - all these equal convenience which cannot easily be beat by any individual website.

Some huge youtube brands like linus media group are trying with floatplane as their own paid video hosting service, but I'm sure their view numbers are insignificant compared to youtube even though they are the biggest players.

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[–] DrRatso@lemmy.ml 26 points 2 years ago (1 children)

By what metric will they lose miserably? They do not care about you if you block their shit. This policy will do 3 things:

Make a miniscule amount of people who generate no revenue stop using the platform (basically noone).
Make existing adblockers slightly inconvenienced for a little bit (again, google doesnt actually give a shit)
Make some of the less tech savy people who block ads either whitelist or premium up (this will happen and is the intended outcome).

Google only gains from this.

[–] clegko@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I've been using YouTube Premium (née YouTube Red) for so long that I totally forgot that there are ads on YouTube and was surprised by all of this news popping off.

[–] Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Same here except I've always used adblocker. The contrast between YouTube with adblock + sponsorblock compared to stock, cannot be overstated. The site literally becomes unuseable. It's awful.

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[–] psivchaz@reddthat.com 7 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Controversial take around these parts but... I don't mind paying for services I use. A model where content is hosted and edited and provided for free by ads is already a bad and unsustainable model, and when most users use adblock too it just pushes companies towards ever more intrusive and unethical methods.

I have been paying for YouTube without ads since it was part of Google Play Music. I'll pay for services as long as they meet some criteria I consider fair:

If I'm paying, you don't get to also show me ads. I won't even pay for HBO for this reason. They're showing ads for their own shows, not from random advertisers, but it's still obnoxious to me
The price has to be reasonable and affordable. Netflix has passed this line now, for me, but for example Crunchyroll and YouTube Premium remain worth it for now.
It has to be convenient. News sites are inconvenient because there's a million of them and I don't plan to use one as a central portal for news. I'd rather click on a link I see from somewhere else or that a friend sends me and be able to view. I'd kill for a service where I pay a monthly fee for news sites and it just analyzes which ones I actually used and splits the money up to them accordingly.

I find the number of people saying "well I'm not going to use YouTube anymore!" hilarious. Yeah dude, that's the point, you were just a cost to them, not a profit source. I'll happily argue that capitalism is broken, that a lot of our most important services should be freely accessible, that corporations are seeking profit in increasingly unethical ways. I just don't think being a complete leech is a reasonable answer.

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[–] Devouring@lemmy.world 24 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

Try grayjay... it's an AWESOME new app, open source, and supports all video networks you can think of as plugins.

It's available on: grayjay.app

[–] Mafflez@reddthat.com 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Does grayjay update when creators add new videos etc for YouTube? That would be the only reason i DONT use it. Though I don't see whynit wouldnt.

[–] pokemaster787@ani.social 8 points 2 years ago

Pulls directly from YouTube or whatever other source you have a plugin for. So yes it'll catch automatically when people release new videos.

[–] Robaque@feddit.it 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

Yes and no. Cool project but I gotta be honest I'm not a big fan of Louis Rossman / FUTO's "open source but not free " stance.

[–] Devouring@lemmy.world 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

It's open source and it's free. You're free to pay too if you want to support them. Software costs money.

What Louis is protecting against in his license is repurposing the app with malware and ads like was repeatedly done with new pipe. Pick your poison.

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[–] Etterra@lemmy.world 16 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I just use NewPipe. Screw Google & YT.

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[–] zerofk@lemm.ee 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I miss windows phone. The user interface was much cleaner and user friendly than any other phone OS I’ve seen. The only problem was it didn’t have the ecosystem of Android or iOS.

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[–] Kodemystic@lemmy.kodemystic.dev 10 points 2 years ago (6 children)

People could build a sort of mix of youtube and torrent tech, like popcorn or stremio but for short copyright free content. I dont know how to do it.

[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

…So PeerTube?

[–] Kodemystic@lemmy.kodemystic.dev 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

No you will still need to host Peertube on your server or VPS etc not even sure why they call it PEERtube because it's clearly not peer to peer. What I'm talking about is a decentralized peer to peer streaming tool like Stremio (uses torrents) but instead of having movies, we could have you know small/average lenght videos like youtube, and also channels and so on.

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[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is the best summary I could come up with:

There are a lot of people frustrated by YouTube's decision to force a pop-up message for viewers using an ad-blocker as seen in this Reddit post.

Microsoft itself built an excellent Windows Phone YouTube app for its era, only for it to receive an arbitrary block by Google.

An X (Twitter) user named @endermanch posted a workaround for bypassing the extremely annoying YouTube pop-up that, for now, doesn't force you to disable your ad-blocker but that could just be a matter of time.

At least for right now the method of switching to the Windows Phone user-agent seems to completely remove the YouTube pop-up and allows you to get back to glorious ad-free viewing.

At the moment it's just an inconvenience and users can click out of the pop-up to continue watching their favorite creators such as our Windows Central channel.

However, with the hubris that these content platforms must feel after Netflix was successfully able to stop password sharing and still increase subscriber numbers, I don't think it will take long for YouTube to completely block users that have an ad-blocker enabled.

The original article contains 581 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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