I used to use AdBlock Plus. I like it specifically because of the Acceptable Ads policy where it allows through ads that are unobtrusive. Because I believe in supporting sites that want to fund themselves, as long as they do it in a way that isn’t obnoxious.

But unfortunately ABP hasn’t gotten around YouTube’s new adblock-wall. So I’ve switched to uBlock Origin in the meantime. Which unfortunately doesn’t do acceptable ads. So well done Google, you’ve now forced me into a position where I’m blocking more ads than I was before. Very smart.

At risk of sounding like a broken record: “I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.”

Another extension of mine was fucking with youtube and preventing it from playing. Spent ages trying to figure out what was happening. The entire time I just kept saying “Fuck you” outloud. The only thing this adblock stuff is doing is giving me the drive to look further into it.

Honestly if they just said fuck it and added a banner ad I wouldn’t have fought this hard against it. Even one or two image ads somewhere. But this? Fuck right off. I’m not sitting through 30 seconds of ads for a 20 second video. Something that is happening way too damn often lately.

I’m at the point where there’s going to have to be a collective bargaining procedure between Google and the Youtube audience before I turn my adblocker off.

I was served the same ad for the same movie every five minutes for hours on end, such that I’m never watching another Mission Impossible movie, or another movie starring Tom Cruise, ever again. For similar reasons I wouldn’t wash with Dr. Squatch soap if it was the last left in the world. Because they bothered me too much about it.

Tell you about the last internet ad I actually responded to: I saw an ad on Reddit of all places for caffeinated chocolates. I didn’t see this ad constantly, only occasionally. It wasn’t every other line, it wasn’t even every other page. It was marked as an ad, and boiled down to a business trying to communicate to potential customers that they have a product on offer. Not to psychologically damage everyone everywhere into submission. I don’t remember the company name but they had an owl logo. The fact they didn’t beat their name into my head wins them points. Give me ads where I go “Hey what was that thing I saw again?” hours later.

I was once served an hour-long lecture on computer networking as an ad. It felt like the algorithm decided “Hey this nerd that occasionally looks up Python-MQTT tutorials, let’s serve him a networking video next” but it was served as an ad, it had a Skip Ad button in the corner. I’m not sure why that happened.

Something else that bugs me is the way they treat creators. “We’re demonitizing this video, we’re not telling you why, we don’t care if it’s fair use, we’re big and you’re small, eat a dick.” If Google doesn’t operate in good faith, then I also shall not. Which I think is the last word on the subject.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some tables to build.

This isn’t “backfiring” though. People who were already blocking ads are the only ones doing this. If there’s even a small portion of people who gave up and just started watching ads/got premium, that means YouTube won. The only way this could really be considered to have backfired is if people were stopping using YouTube entirely, which isn’t really happening.

For all the effort put into ad blockers, we could just all start supporting peertube as the “influencers” would follow. Instead we are going to war with Google who will lock out ad blockers, which will be overcome, and then they will block the new ad blockers, which will be overcome and then Google will block the latest….