Mobile ad blocking without any root/jailbreak/proxy/dns was all I needed to finally push me over the edge.

Most often this happens because the user runs some other addon/blocker that interferes with ublock (or gets detected). It's important to test with only ublock active and see if the problem persists, and if not, to slowly enable more and more to see what is causing the issues.

I use Firefox and also got that pop-up. Eventually I just grew tired of clicking the “X” button so I went on uBlock origin and added that stupid banner and the banner background to the blacklist.

It’s like nothing ever happened. And if shit continues to get worse, either someone comes up with a fix somehow, or I’ll just find a way to run ReVanced YouTube apk on my pc or something. I don’t care if I have to emulate it somehow.

Also, on mobile GrayJay is a good alternative to ReVanced. Made by LouisRossmann’s team apparently.

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I swear half the users here are running NixOS these days (with the other half on Arch). Redditors like Linux, but Lemmings take it to an whole new level.

For me Firefox haven't crashed once in a year or more, even though I'm a heavy user: using it every day for multiple hours as a "tab hoarder", with quite a few addons.

I also rarely restart it, as I don't turn off my computer completely, so the Firefox process is usually as old as the time of last system reboot.

I think you may have ran into a rare bug, that has got persisted in your browser profile.
You may create a new browser profile (e.g. on the about:profiles page) and set your things up there, and most likely it'll be stable.
I think there's also a "refresh Firefox" button somewhere where average people would look for it, but I don't know where it is. But be aware that this will delete everything in Firefox, where's if you create a new profile, the new profile will start with a clean slate and you can switch back and forth between the old one if you find out you need something from there (e.g. old passwords that you haven't transferred, a specific about:config setting if you use those, addon settings, …), or even have them open at the same time.

About the other points.

I see your point, personally I prefer WebUsb, WebBluetooth and such to be completely missing, so it's much less likely that a bug allows access to these to a site.

Bluring camera background seems to me very specific to webcams, and even if chromium based browsers will do it for you, I think you are better off with running OBS and it's virtual webcam functionality, as it has been made for that purpose (video processing), and it can do much more if you want (including cropping, ways to improve video quality, or even do greenboxing). Introducing background bluring to the browser would mean more requests to add this or that effect (even if it should actually be the task of the web app), and I think it's hard to maintain even a single such effect (that does not blur everything, but only certain parts of the image) if your devs don't have extensive experience in video processing. This would be a feature that if introduced, either would break once and stay that way for quite some time, or would take significant development resources to find the problem and keep it working.

I use the same and got the popup yesterday

Same, but I figured out that on Plasma X11 they won't show up while on Plasma Wayland they do… (was it random?)

In my experience the popup comes up if and only if you have any custom blocking list enabled. Default uBlock filter lists are fine

When? I’m one video away from being blocked and I manually updated my ublock stuff like a week ago.

Same here, but Netflix is going to increase prices again, so that might be the final straw to ditch them for me

Spotify has been harassing me to get whatever the heck the duo crap is…literally only me uses it but I’m on the verge of cancelling from their full screen garbage

While they can track your IP for all sorts of nefarious purposes, they can't and won't associate it to use of an ad blocker if the ad blocker has successfully blocked their ads because they, by definition, don't know that you've blocked them. If they did they would show the popup.

Yikes lol

I think a VPN will then help with this.

Because their algorithm is pretty damn good at recommending relevant stuff. For example, titanfall 2 got revived and I found a lot of small youtubers (<20k subs) making some incredibly good content through it. The secret is to click "not interested" on all the clickbait crap often enough and at some point it'll learn.

Though I do use on an android TV and block out crap like shorts altogether because google's youtube app is unusable.

I kind of like the recommendations that populate aligned with my sub interests, basically

Only thing I can think of is getting notified for new videos from youtubers you’re subscribed to and the convenience of saving the play position when you don’t finish a video

For “favorites” I just use my browsers bookmarks

They don't work over multiple devices though, unless you have an account for your browser I guess.

Like most things, it's their recommendation engine that is actually pretty good. For as much as people complain about "the algorithm", it's useful enough that it surfaces unknown people constantly for me, and suggests things that I am interested in watching (metalworking videos, welding, machining, 3d printing, godot programming, etc.) Without an account you just get… normie bullshit clickbait.

Front-ends and streaming platforms are several outsite, but Google also is blocking those, its not a solution for a long term. I was recently using FreeTube as a desktop client, but it has become unusable. I recently replaced VLC with SMPlayer, MMplayer like VLC but way better, also FOSS, this allows me to watch, among others, streaming videos from different sites, among others also from YT so far without problems. I also use an extension (FOSS) that allows me to record the audio of the active tab and save it as mp3, that is, with this it does not matter whether it is a music video from YT or from other sources and with this outside of Google’s control.

A good option is also IMDB, or better its online service, Odysee, which allows you to import subscriptions and playlists from YT, it is somewhat complicated to do, but it is guided. Odysee is not related to Google, it has a UI similar to YT and a good number of videos of all kinds, many have already moved to this platform. In my opinion it is the best direct alternative to YT.

In any case, at least so far, this userscript works wonderfully and I think it will continue to work, since it prevents YT from discovering that you use an adblocker, not like other anti adblock killers whose script I also have in the Vivaldi blocker list, since these do block the YT detector, which naturally has already been discovered, however this script does not block the YT detector, but surrounds it by putting a “mask” over the video, with which the detector passes underneath without discovering anything.

The risk that YT discovers it and blocks me? Yes it does anyway if I continue using an adblocker and I prefer to suck my elbow before deactivating the ad- and all the other blockers on YT and swallowing all the garbage of ads, clickbaits and the other shit that YT is full of (a single music video, blocked 12 ads and more than 20 trackers and without the Clickbait Remover, YT completely changes the thumbnails it shows, which mostly have nothing to do with the content). No, thanks

Google’s desperation to show tracked ads is but one vector in the equation which determines longterm viability for watching Youtube ad-free for free. There are also other vectors to consider like the level of obtrusion required to actually effectively adblock-block, and its related effect on the userbase. And also just the level of inconvenience presented by ads, determined by their length, skippability etc.

The proportion of the userbase blocking ads is still relatively negligible, and this is an outcome manufactured by Google toeing the line between too obtrusive and too ineffective. Any measure I can imagine which would actually capture a significant portion of users blocking ads would also significantly skew the balance in favour of obtrusivity, which they would pay for in lost users.

As long as many users are happy to continue being vigilant in blocking ads, IMO this balance will ensure blocking ads will remain feasible.

So does this cause advertisers to lose money since their ads are being clicked but never viewed by human eyes? Because if so, I’ll install ad nauseum asap

I use pihole. Pihole does not work for sites that serve ads from the same domain, like YouTube

Like, downloading the video files with yt-dlp and then uploading them? Or streaming, like what Piped/LibreTube do?

I personally have my own piped server, and don't enter to youtube for anything. The only 2 things it can't do are post comments and see live streams comments. No ads, no tracking, i can do whatever i want without google's permission

This is so inherently detectable, though, I'm amazed it worked for so long and that it's still working now. Likely a consequence of offloading as much of YT onto the client side as possible, because if you're doing anything server side how hard is it to require that the ad has at least downloaded before streaming the video?

The Spotify ripper "zotify" has an undetectable "realtime" mode that does basically what OP suggested. Instead of downloading every track as fast as possible, it pretends that it's actually streaming and listening to them. Obviously it takes a lot longer to rip a whole album, but it's a good idea.

I think Spotify ripping isn't big enough that it's actually needed at this point, but it's good that they considered the potential for it.

Which Invidio.us instance would you recommend? I’m looking for one that’s the most stable and relatively fast compared to other instances. Also, I believe it’s also geography dependent because instances don’t have CDNs?

PeerTube has some pretty good lofi streams. I use it for that and not YouTube anymore.

Nebula.tv is a good paid streaming service if you like science goodness.

What others are there? 🤔

I’m going to Odysee, it’s the best alternative to YT i know and it isn’t related to Google.

When docker get their shit together and work on freebsd? Sure

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You are being unlucky is what you are doing wrong. The changes on YT are not being rolled out to all users at the same time. You could just be in a location or in a part of the network where changes are applied first. Nothing you can do to change that, just wait for the filter lists to catch up. Or migrate to piped or Invidious.

This whole "Firefox, Firefox, Firefox" chanting as if it prevents the ad block detection is ridiculous. The reason why FF users got spared for longer is because the marketshare of FF is so low, that it took longer until most of them were affected purely based on random chance.

I use Chrome on my work laptop and FF on my PC and I either get the detection message on both or I don't get it on either device.

start using alternatives like lbry and/or peertube

Sure. But actively using YT without paying for Premium and blocking all the ads will affect them more, and if enough people do it, might actually catalyze it to go Twixxer levels of enshittification, which would be just as beneficial for growing the userbase of those alternatives with the side benefit of getting rid of one of the gatekeepers. Fediverse saw a huge growth in popularity following the recent enshittification of Reddit, after all. "Build it and they will come" has a corollary that goes "Destroy it and they'll go elsewhere" :)

It's not that creators won't upload because there are no viewers. It's because on other platforms there is no way to earn money. "Because there are no viewers" doesn't make sense, because it costs a creator literally nothing to upload a video multiple times, to more platforms, instead of only once, which would theoretically only increase their reach in total. However, creators want their viewers to watch on YouTube because that's where the money is earned.

You're part of the problem.

Dude just watch the ads so people get paid…

I don't care. Hypothetical incomes of other people are not my problem or obligation. Next you'll be saying I must eat at restaurants at least three days a week and attend all concerts and drama plays in my town because otherwise people don't get paid.

You’re not automatically entitled to free content

Correct. First I need to manually set up my tools, and then these tools get me free content automatically. But I don't care about entitlement; it's a spook. It's all down to risk-benefit. The risk of blocking youtube ads is basically nil, but I benefit by wasting less time and not having loud, imbecile and completely irrelevant audio-visual crap annoying me. I also pirate all my music, movies and shows. Because I don't care. I like free stuff. Copyright is a spook, anyway.

https://mpv.io/