UPDATE 2 It seems that starting today, uBlock Origin is working to combat this Youtube Block. Mine started working again! Lets all thank the devs of UBO for fighting this fight!
UPDATE So as new info comes out, I’ll be posting it here. It seems as if this Rollout Has Several Parts.
Part 1
You get a popup message over top of your video, blocking the screen:
- This is the first sign. If you see this popup AND are logged into a YouTube account, your account has been selected.
- At this stage you can likely close or block these messages with an adblocker.
Part 2
This message will change, indicating that you have 3 remaining videos to watch without ads.
Will insert photo once one has been found
- At this stage your adblocker will imminently stop working in 3 videos time.
- Personally using Firefox + uBlock Origin and tweaking filters and updates does not even fix it.
Part 3
None of the video loads now, everything looks blank.
- At this stage you must tred new ground to avoid ads. I have posted methods in the comments. If you want to bypass this end page, read down there.
End of Update
YouTube has started rolling out anti-adblock to users inside the United States, which means that they are preparing to roll this out to the entire country. Personally, I have been blocked already. I want to gauge how common this occurrence is.
I’ll just stop using YouTube like I’ve stopped using Reddit.
I’m ready for that. When being a youtuber started looking like a job I think the site lost something.
I remember one of the early Youtube sensations was this teen chick’s vlog that turned out to be a fictional soap opera basically. Because it hadn’t occurred to anyone to do that yet.
This was BACK IN THE DAY, around the same time Boxxy became a sensation, or that one chick who just sat still in front of the camera because the Japanese liked her huge eyes.
lonelygirl15? I remember a friend telling me about that series because she wanted to share a funny video reply (Remember those?) by somebody who managed to find the same animal plushies that the girl carries around; it was a parody episode where the plushies talk about the current situation in the story and suggest that maybe the girl should drop all the teen drama stuff so they can all focus on running for their lives instead.
That’s the one, lonelygirl15. What a wild story. My internet destroyed brain immediately jumped to “Wow that was before the Youtube partner program, and it was presented as an authentic teen’s vlog at least at first…I wonder what the monetization strategy was?” And it turns out there kinda wasn’t one. They went into $50,000 worth of credit card debt to fund the series, according to Wikipedia. Like remember that episode of South Park (remember that show?) where they had the waiting room full of viral video people waiting to get their non-existent internet fame money?
Yeah, YouTube was better when it was a bunch of amateur cat videos.
There was a sweet spot when cat videos went pro. Then the spam killed it.
I’d say just smaller, less scripted content. Maybe that’s what tiktok is.
That is something you just cannot avoid with a new medium. Eventually there will always be professionalization. It just sucks that youtube now just gives us the same shit over and over instead of making it easy to find new creators, like it used to be.
Hell I think you could make a massive improvement to the site if it could realize “Hey, I’ve been suggesting the same exact video to this user 500 times in a row, and he’s never clicked it. Maybe this user likes this creator/series, but not this specific video.”