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.
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
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.
I love free tube. But I can’t quite figure it out. It works great on two of my computers. But on one of my computers is just dog slow. No matter which setting I fiddle with. So it’s definitely alpha, if it works for you it’s amazing.
Only tried it on Windows 10 and I have a beast of a desktop machine (Ryzen 9 5950x, 128GB RAM and a Radeon X5600XT, built it for virtualization). Will try it on Linux later today and on my laptop.
Surprisingly, it’s my most powerful machine, that has the worst video playback. With constant pauses.
I’m running free tube on Mac OS, Windows 11, Windows 10, Fedora inside of qubes.
The settings are identical, I think it’s something with the local API proxy. I just check it up to the alpha stage and inconsistent environments.
Now there’s grayjay as well, which is a universal media streaming client that respects your privacy.
Is that android phone only? I mean it would be cool to have it both on desktop and android tv…
You can run it under Amazon android emulator, but still has glitches regarding screen usage.
Well. Is it possible? Yes. Is it user friendly and optimized? Not really.
That’s why it would be great to have native app.
I read somewhere there is talk of it coming to desktop.
Run Android Subsystem for Windows, problem solved.
Well, I know the solution exists, but it hardly counts as a desktop app. I’d prefer something native (esp. for linux).
Right?
Every other sentence was something about how Google wouldn’t work with Microsoft.
Points were repeated ad nauseum
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It might be great. But you’re still patching closed source binaries with dubious patches. It’s not great information security hygiene. If you’re on Android, I’d recommend new pipe as both safer and more vetted.
Please enjoy it, by all means, just be aware that it does have a different threat model
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New pipe and pipe are different projects.
https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe
But yeah I hate that invictius / piped bot. I’ve blocked The bot. It adds nothing to the conversations
Newpipe works good too. you can Downloads videos with options audio or video!
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You don’t, but for people like me, who want to save data, we download audio, especially 2 and 3 hours long and we listen all day long. Newpipe has SoundCloud too, I use it alot!
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Non-free bad. 👎
Newpipe 4 life.
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This is a battle google will lose miserably.
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.
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.
I am sure other platforms / personal hosting will continue to exist in the future. They simple 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.
Nebula is pretty decent. It’s like if you took all the best content off of YouTube that would also fit in well at The Discovery Channel.
I agree that the sheer quantity of resources required to host videos is hard to be able to compete, but there’s also Invidious, which is the fediverse equivalent. As with other fediverse applications, it will largely depend on the people running the instances and how much they storage they can support.
Also, lots of the younger generations didn’t really mind the ads. After this news showed up, we had a discussion going on my company discord. Most of the older people started sharing workarounds but most of the younger people said that they’ve been using YouTube with ads and didn’t see any problem with it.
I’ve seen the same. I wonder if the older you get, the more you value your time.
I remember seeing lots of ad breaks on TV when I was a kid and it didn’t stop me from watching a show. Now if an ad break happens, I am reminded why I don’t own a TV and turn it off.
In my case, it’s less of a “value my time” and more “I’m just tired of being advertised to constantly and want a break”
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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.
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.
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:
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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
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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.
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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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The only reason I still use YouTube is to post to lemmy and download videos so I never have to use their crappy platform
And Google updating this old code in 3, 2, 1
Probably just deleting it 😂
It’s a shame, the original windows.phone concept was great
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!
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
Probably just A/B testing.
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.
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.
You mean BitChute but not filled with fascist garbage?
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Yeah PeerTube is cool, but it has its own set of issues. 1. It’s very expensive for an individual to run an instance 2. The federation mechanism doesn’t really work 3. It’s just too fragmented to replace YouTube due to that fragmentation 4. The search is horrible, also because of the aforementioned issues. I am aware that Sepia Search exists, but it should be built in to PeerTube itself. In general, it’s not very friendly to new users. The entire UI/UX could use some improvements.
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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.
Have you tried paying for it?
It absolutely is not worth £17 a month simply for no ads.
Then stop using it 🤷♂️ That’s a personal value. I find yt+music for the family for$22 a steal.
The entitlement of you all is crazy.
Oh won’t somebody think the billion dollar company
Lololol you are directly stealing from creators. There isn’t even some thin connection. They get paid on ad views and subscriptions. You are straight up taking money from creatives.
They get paid by YouTube regardless, and YouTube makes enough from data harvesting alone.
I’m under no obligation to watch advertisements. They can try to advertise to me if they want, I can avoid it however I want. Did you ever grow up with linear TV? Did you just eventually piss yourself because it would have been unfair to the commercial broadcast company to not pay attention to the ads? You mook.
Imagine thinking content uploaded to a proprietary platform is still yours
With the amount of telemetry and trackable data they’ve collected and potentially sold, and the quality of both the service and the content being in a constant decline, I consider my malware-free access to the service to be paid for life.
Shit, considering the way they handled recent controversies, I see it as a moral obligation to hit them in the wallet.
They still show ads even when paying. So your argument is moot from the start.
No, steal from them as much as possible. Stealing from corporations is morally good.
You are stealing from creators, collateral damage I guess 🤷♂️
If you’re worried about creators, support them via their patreons or what means they determine. They aren’t making much directly from YouTube, and their support streams are more certain that way.
What if I want to pay, but also don’t want to be tracked?
So I pay for a YouTube premium account, but I still use an ad blocker and logged out YouTube and a VPN so I’m not tracked.
The problem there is that you’re giving more money to Alphabet but not giving your YouTube Premium views to the content creators. I understand not wanting to be tracked, but I feel like this is the worst scenario.
Might be the worst scenario, but nobody can know about my celebrity foot fetish. And I’m unwilling to be tracked.
As far as I’m concerned YouTube premium tracking, encouraging people to be logged into Google accounts, just like grocery stores loyalty programs. It’s a premium to encourage you to be tracked.
That’s all fair, I would just say cancel your YouTube Premium then.
Don’t use it.
I will never ever pay for youtube and I’ll never stop blocking ads. Theres always a way, and if the day comes where ad blockers actually become iniffective then thats it for me, I’ll find somewhere else. I’m already a reddit refugee since they blocked 3rd party aps and charge a subscription fee, I can’t figure out a workaround yet so I dropped reddit altogether.
Why should I pay some extortionate fee each month on Google’s monopoly? Even if I do that they’re still hoovering up all the data they can get from me.
U-block Origin on desktop, revanced/newpipe for mobile.
IMO the money is much better spent on directly supporting content creators rather than padding the coffers of a 1.75 trillion dollar anti-competitive, monopolistic, tax-dodging, privacy-destroying company like Google.
Exactly, I whack out almost GBP 20 per month to content creators I like.
Spend the money where it will make a difference!
Sure, just throw money at the corpos, but please don’t act surprised when they suddenly double the premium fee, or when they start sneaking in ads for premium users. That’s the problem with corpo greed, it just never ends, and the moment you give in to it, you lose.
