It is probably still the case - some explanation video about youtube’s back end setup I watched they said every video is segmented in the servers into 2 second clips that just get sequentially recombined by the player. Somewhere they have the entire file but when it is being sent out its actually the stored clips that are sent to the requested user (they hold those in the different playback formats too (720,1080 etc) so when you switch them it doesn’t have to start re-sending from the middle of another file which saves time.
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on Mac works fine FreeTube, also super customizable with your YouTube subscriptions etc
It’s all down to timing. Youtube seem to have updated their ad-block-blocking tech several times over the last week, and each time there’s a bit of a lag before the filters get updated to block it.
If you happened to use Youtube in the window after a new filter list, and before Youtube changing their tactics, then you probably didn’t notice anything. I’ve seen the nag windows a few times, but a quick reload of uBlock Orgin’s filters soon got rid of it.
Realistically, although this is a fight Youtube should be able to win, soon enough whichever Google exec started this will get promoted, and then whoever’s left will quickly forget about trying to stop adblockers.
Just the same as almost every other Google product gets released, and then gradually slides into obscurity and then is cancelled.
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I have a Pi-Hole in the basement that does a really good job of filtering out most garbage. BB is certainly a cleaner experience. Still get ads on YouTube but they aren’t THAT annoying yet where I’m gonna pony up $$ for premium.
I find creator-sponsor ads to be worse. I don’t need a 3 minute pitch on a monthly beard lotion subscription… or VPN stuff.
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That’s where sponsorblock comes in
Also available for chromium and safari.
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Or crappy drop-shipped bluetooth earbuds that are touted as the greatest advancement in audiophilia since the moving diaphragm.
Otherwise-good content creators can too often shill shamelessly. I wish many of them would be a little more discriminating in their choice of sponsors.
I miss my pi-hole. When we switched from cable internet to AT&T fiber they force you to use their integrated modem-wireless router, and I haven’t had time to put in the technical research I would need (I’m not an IT professional, but I can follow instructions) to be able to re-insert the pi-hole inbetween.
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The big kicker is that that arrangement brought the telcos into the loop.
The internet as we know it is basically possible because people figured out how to piggyback on top of the telcos before they realized that there was something worth exploiting there.
They’ve periodically tried to claw their way back into relevance(horrors like WAP billing; obnoxious behavior like throttling OTT video in favor of their own streaming services; HTTP ‘header enrichment’ for tracking purposes); but on the list of shitty and dangerous gatekeepers Ma Bell is well up there.
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My provider (Shaw … sadly now Rogers) allows customers to have their cable modems bridged… it basically bypasses all the modem’s router functions and gives you a direct connection to the internet. Can’t say I would like running my data through provider-supplied software or somehow allow them to sniff my packets. I don’t know if the shenanigans of American cable operators would fly up North.
Took some configuring but with OpenWRT I’m very happy about the state of my home network, the only real vulnerability comes down to the idiot at the keyboard.
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I was mostly Chromium until yesterday when YouTube finally got around to AdBlockPro. I just didn’t want to deal with importing my bookmarks and tweaking Firefox for the way I tend to use my browser. That was more than enough of a push, however, so now I’m on Firefox and UBlock. (I was already using Firefox at work where my usage tends to differ a bit than at home.)
I recently borrowed one of the Chromebooks we have available at the library. I administer these things but had never really used one of them in “patron mode.” They do not have ad blockers, Privacy Badger, or anything like that installed. Wow – is that really the way most people see the internet? How can people use it like that? Even BoingBoing was … well, unusable. That was a terrible experience.
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AT&T Fiber should allow this in most markets. Depending on the router hardware the option may be called Bridge Mode, IP Passthrough, or DMZ mode.
Using a pi-hole or other DNS-based solution helps prevent ads and some forms of tracking, but it doesn’t prevent packet inspection or stop your ISP from knowing what sites you frequent. All of your traffic still passes through their network on the way to and from the public interwebs.
A whole-network VPN routed to an endpoint outside your provider’s control will fix that, but the “household approval” rate of doing so may be very low. Depending on how it’s set up and where your endpoint is some sites may not work correctly or block you entirely.
You really think AT&T is going to do the right thing for their customers and not their investors?
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Ha, that was an issue when the pi-hole was up and running; my wife would get cranky when google would serve her an ad that she wants to click on but it would be blocked. Usually that google hit would also be in a non-ad link further down the page, but… 
I just switched back to FF after a long spell on Chrome today thanks to this as well. I’d been unhappy with the way Google has been handling things for a while, but I figured it was too much trouble to switch. Today I started getting the countdown, so I tried FF and it still worked. Not only did they fail to get me to watch ads, they’ll no longer get my data from Chrome.
And honestly, if they keep this up long enough, I’ll just stop watching YouTube altogether. They want way too much for a Premium subscription and the content’s just not worth the price. Honestly, it’d probably be good for me to spend less time on there anyway.
I find it funny how all these sites see adblocking as a problem and instead of thinking ‘why do people install these and how can we make it so they don’t want to’ they jump immediately to ‘how can we stop them while still flooding their browser with our garbage’. 
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It depends on whether they have competition in that specific market, and these days that’s more than you’d think.
A good benchmark is to check if Earthlink offers fiber coverage in your area. If they do, AT&T probably isn’t going full cartoon villain in that region.
I watch way too much content on YT, and i’m not sure what the alternative would be. Watch stuff on Netflix, Hulu or other streaming services? Hard pass, not the kind of content i’m interested in. I could watch streamers on Twitch and similar places, and there are some i’m fans of that also do videos on YT as well but watching streamers is also not quiiiite what i’m interested in. In short it’s YT or nothing for me. I’ll ride the adblocker thing as long as possible and then see how things shake out i guess.
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I’m pretty much in the same boat. I’ll put up with a lot, but not ads in 2023. I don’t watch a lot of stuff on other streaming services either, and I’ve spent probably 10s of thousands of hours watching stuff on YT (I often have it running on one screen while gaming on another), but ads are so damn intrusive I just refuse to watch them. I rely heavily on YouTube for entertainment, but I also used to spend 3-6h on Twitter every day and quitting that only improved my mental health, so I’m a lot less concerned about what I’ll do if YouTube becomes unusable. I’ll find something to do.
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Tenuously helpful, but duckduckgo has no currently (apparent) video ads, so if one knows the video series enough to have a solid keyword, and duckduckgo as one’s search engine then simply use their video search “bangs”:
!v <search pattern>
for instance:
!v vivziepop
!v bigclive
!v "classics explained"
…maybe [shrug]
