12 / OCT / 2023

Well, they did it.

They actually fucking did it.

Youtube has restricted their users from using ad blockers, and for the time being, there's nothing we can do about it. I've messed around with uBlock for the better part of an hour and still haven't found a way to bypass this screen, so I basically have to sit on my ass and wait for AdBlock Plus or uBlock Origin to find some way around it, assuming I won't have to turn to another ad blocker entirely.

Now, I know what a few of you might be thinking: "Why is it so important that you block ads? Why don't you just unblock them or pay YouTube Premium?"

To answer the last part of the question: I don't have money to give to YouTube, and even if I did I wouldn't be interested. The answer to my disintrest lies within my answer to the first part of the question...

YouTube is part Google, which is in turn part of a larger company called Alphabet. What does Alphabet do? Well, to put it simply: They're a conglomerate. This means that they own several large tech companies, most of which have "Google" as part of their names, and exist for the sole purpose of collecting all of the money that these subsidiaries earn, then put that money into expanding their businesses as much as possible.

One of the biggest sins that Google regularly commits is how it works in conjunction with advertisers to take away the people's right to privacy. "How?" you ask? Well, let's take a look into the world of personalized advertising; a concept that you, yourself, can look up right now if you don't believe me!

Personalized advertisements are just that: Advertisements that are tailored to appeal to you (or in other words, "personalized") due to your activity on the internet. Whatever websites you've visited, whatever ads you've clicked, whatever items you've bought, whatever posts you've liked on social media, and even some of the software you use or have downloaded are all saved as information that's collected to personalize the advertisements shown to you.

Who collects this information? The websites you visit. And as long as you're using Google or a website that's owned by Google *cough* YOUTUBE *cough,* this information will be collected by Google and sold to advertisers. Yes, that's right, the things you've done in the past, forgotten and remembered by you, are kept by the faceless corporations of Google, social media companies, and whomever's looking to buy. Through the use of ad blockers such as uBlock Origin, however, you can actually block most of these trackers and regain some of your privacy.

To those of you who are already web-savvy, I can see you rolling your eyes from the other side of the screen. "Yes, Geno," you say, "Thanks for pointing out the patently fucking obvious. Do you also plan on telling us about the astonishing number of fingers on the average person's hand?"

But the thing is, there's an astonishing number of people who don't know about this, and out of the people who do know, they seem to be willfully ignorant of it all. It's hard to blame them; after all, considering how omnipresent Google is, living in a way where you aren't being tracked online is really an uphill battle. And even then, it's not just Google; Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and virtually every other million-dollar tech company has been treating your personal information as a commodity to be bought and sold. Living without being tracked by these companies would be too much effort for most people.

But hey, that won't stop me from bringing it up every chance I can.

"All right, all right," Mr. Moderate says as he rises from his seat, "Maybe you're right in taking back what little privacy you can while browsing YouTube. But what about the creators? The money that those advertisements generate also go back to YouTube creators, don't they? And hey, if you pay for the Premium service, that's even better! All of the benefits, none of the ads!"

Ah, yes, forgive me for being blind to how much more privacy I gain by giving my banking information to Google! How foolish of me...

Aside from that, the money is only going to creators in a technical sense. Not only is it already being split with the revenue that advertisers are getting, but it's also going to Google, who then puts the money into YouTube, who then pays the content creators in return.

And look, I get it, you care about independant content creators - or at least I like to imagine the ones you care about are independant, but that's besides the point. If you really want to support them, do it directly. Subscribe to their Patreons or Ko-Fis or just give direct donations; whatever service puts more money in their pockets than that of the webhosts. Don't just throw your money at a faceless company and assume that they can be trusted to distribute a monthly payment of $10 to the 58 YouTubers you watched today.

But let's not be debbie downers here, yeah? After all, what kind of counter-culture would I be trying to contribute to if I just bitched about the way things are without even hinting at making things better? Let's talk about the thing I love to talk about every time I promise to leave YouTube for real this time: Alternative websites!

Odysee

Not gonna dwell on this one for too long since I've talked about it in the past, but yes: Odysee exists as an alternative to YouTube, and it's a fairly popular one at that. I mostly just use it to watch archived videos of The Bad Guys, but when Shrouded Hand's videos appeared in my YouTube feed (which stopped happening for some reason), I was always sure to go to the uncensored versions on Odysee. Solid JJ also has it, which actually kind of surprised me the first time my browser extension redirected me to the Odysee page. Of course, as I've said in the past, EmpLemon has a channel on Odysee where you can still watch his YTPs, although his Downward Diary channel isn't on there.

As far as YouTube alternatives go, you can certainly do a lot worse than this (BitChute comes to mind). The population of fringe conspiracy nuts seems to have grown as of recently, but I'm sure that's just a result of more level-headed people leaving the website behind once they saw it as less convenient than just staying on YouTube.

Either way, I'd say to give it a go.

NewPipe

I was at a family reunion in Gatlinburg over the summer, drinking vodka and playing cards with my uncles who happen to have degrees in software development. I brought up the shame of not having some sort of AdBlock equivalent on mobile, which probably came out as something like "Dude... dude, it... Man, it sucks that you can't, like, block ads on YouTube, you know, like... Like man, what if there was like an ad blocker for mobile?"

To turn 15 drunken exchanges of dialogue into a single sentence: There actually is an ad blocker for mobile YouTube, and it goes by NewPipe.

I've had it installed ever since that summer night, but never really bothered to use it until recently when I got fed up with YouTube's shit and uninstalled the mobile app in a fit of apoidic rage. In the past few days since then, I've been kicking myself for not doing so sooner.

Not only does NewPipe offer an ad-free experience to YouTube, it also offers the benefits of YouTube Premium such as playing videos in the background, as well as an ad-free experience for SoundCloud and limitless access to Bandcamp! If I'm being honest, having complete access to songs on Bandcamp leaves a bad taste in my mouth because I see that site as a good way to support independant creators. But hey, as long as it goes against your moral standards, you can always just refrain from doing it!

I'd say the only real problem with NewPipe is that you need to re-subscribe to the channels you used to watch, since there's not account integration. But honestly, I don't see that as a negative so much as I see it as a way to re-evaluate the channels you've been watching and find out which great YouTubers you've forgotten about or which shitty YouTubers still show up in your feed dispite you no longer liking their content.

Invidious

Big thanks to the boize on Agora Road for turning my attention to this one, because I was actually unaware of it. I had heard of yewtu.be before on Lainchan, but never bothered to look into it because... Well, shit, YouTube hadn't done anything crazy enough that month for me to start looking into alternatives. It was something that lingered in my mind, though, as was evident by my recognition of it on the list of Invidious hosts.

Invidious is an alternative frontend for YouTube, which basically means that it has access to every video that's currently available on YouTube. All at once. All without tracking.

This one is a lot less convenient than NewPipe or Odysee, though, because you're completely unable to have an account on it, and the lack of an algorithm (as far as I can tell) means that the "related" videos aren't guaranteed to be interesting to you. Although, that might end up being a good thing in the end considering the gigantic timesink that YouTube tends to be.

Embeds and Downloads

Of course, if all else fails, you can just do it your-fucking-self. Embedding YouTube videos onto other sites like forums actually bypasses the adblock-block and lets you watch it without trouble. Hell, why not stop there? Just go to a YouTube-to-MP4 website and keep the damn video on your computer! No ads, no frontend, no internet connection required. Just you and the video, together forever (until hardware failure).

{ END LOG }