If you see an ad, close the tab.
All these sites monitor engagement, they walk the line between maximum ads and users. If we decrease the users, they’ll decrease the ads to try and keep us.
Literally the only way they will learn. I really don’t understand how we as a society have accepted ads as a necessary evil. We all hate them, but we all also make them work. It’s horrible.
If the Google war on ad blocking meant the ad blockers accidently blocked something everyone wants its still Google fault.
Everything was fine until Google decided to change how everything works over and over again to get people to watch the awful ads they let on their platform.
Lemme try and feel sorry for my cartoonishly rich tech overlords real quick…
For those curious what “adblockers said really happened”:
[AdGuard] suggested that the issue may have been linked to popular community-maintained filter lists like EasyList and uBlock’s Quick Fixes.
A new filter rule added to EasyList on August 11, 2025 targeted telemetry requests thought to be tied to YouTube’s view attribution and analytics.
That rule remained in place until September 10, when it was temporarily disabled.
A similar change was added to uBlock’s Quick Fixes on September 10 and removed on September 17.
The number of ads I had popping up while trying to read that article isn’t discouraging me from using adblockers.
This is actually one of my favorite websites to browse on desktop through my VPN and extreme DNS blocking solution. The console just fills with blocked content and JavaScript errors, it really warms my heart.
(shrug) don’t care if it affects views, never should have had them in videos regardless.
Creators are paid based on those views, so that would matter.
I personally wouldn’t care that much if youtube went back to how it was back in the day of people sharing for the sake of sharing instead of it being filled with bunch of aspiring infomercial hosts trying to get the bag.
Have to block so many channels because they monopolize the top search results before I see videos from normal folks just uploading to upload because they thought a video would be helpful.
The only real alternatives to ads are either paying for the content, or having someone else pay for you. The latter is the case with something like PeerTube - someone else is covering the cost of the server and bandwidth without asking you for payment, and the creator doesn’t get money from you just watching the video.
Paying to access content makes a lot more sense that hoping someone willingly watches an advert on their own hardware.
An indirect, alternate could be universal basic income - which makes it easier for people to choose less profitable options.
A lot of people either don’t want to pay, or can’t pay (eg people in developing nations with very low income). I agree that UBI would help, but we’re a long way off from that being a standard thing in one country, let alone worldwide.
If it were sensibly prized I would have no issue with paying for YouTube. But seeing as they almost ask for the same as Netflix and co while not producing any content, I decided for the adblocker instead
They do not produce content, but they share 70% of revenue with the creators. You can argue that’s not enough, but it’s definitely more than Netflix et al pay their content creators.
Had what in videos?
Ads
*Goolag shooting itself on foot be like.
The dev community is just adapting to shit thrown.
