Ublock users who got hit by Youtube's anti-adblock effort- how's your experience been?

I started getting the dreaded anti-adblock pop-ups on Youtube when they started ramping up their efforts a month or so back, and I initially went through the whole rigamarole: First it was just the pop-up, then it was the pop-up with the timer, then the 3-video countdown finally leading to the video player being disabled outright.

Throughout all of this I did the recommended Purging All Caches -> Update Now routine on the Ublock Dashboard at least once a day to keep the pop-ups away, but when it got to the player getting blocked it didn't seem to work anymore. Since I'm on Firefox, I experimented using Containers and found that I could just log in to my YT account on a different container to keep using Youtube until that container started getting blocked.

In the past few weeks I've noticed no issues though apart from having the video player blocked once, which was fixed by purging all caches and updating and I almost forgot about the whole anti-adblock thing altogether. It does seem like YT pages are loading slightly slower than they used to though.

Are you still having issues with Ublock on Youtube or were you even affected at all?

37 comments

I don't think I've done anything and I'm still yet to see an add.
I do most of the watching on phone, so might be I just missed the transition
- Same here
- Yeah I've used newpipe on phone and invidious on desktop for a couple of years now. Nothing has happened yet.

I just updated the filters and it never happened again.
- You only had to do that once? In the initial phase I just couldn't get rid of the pop-ups for longer than one session
  
  Do you have uBlock set to auto-update filter lists? It's the first option in the filter list settings, I've had it checked and have yet to see the popup a single time.
  
  r/ublockorigin has pinned the standard guide for anti YouTube warfare. You can refer that.
  For me I just had to clear the filter cache and click update. I didn't do anything else.

I had it exactly once. I watched three videos and then used it as an excuse to just go to bed. Did exactly nothing and haven't had another pop up since *shrug"

Firefox user with auto-clear cache on closing: I didn't notice a thing. On Android I use NewPipe, didn't notice anything either.

cleared yt cache, no issue since

Firefox user in Canada here. The last few weeks ads would try to load, but nothing would play. If I refreshed the page the video played as normal.
The last few days I've had no issues at all.

Firefox gets those ads. Librewolf doesn't so i have a browser specifically for YT xD
- Also Brave allows for background playback of YouTube videos on mobile, iOS at least
  
  Pedophile browser.
- Its probably just outdated version or cache. Look into it again, should be a easy fix.

I just shrugged and decided I didn't really need to see that music video after all, so I added youtube URLs to /etc/hosts and mapped them to "0.0.0.0".

Using firefox+ublock origin. Showed up once for me but I found out that youtube enchancer also has their own ad blocker. Once I disable their ad blocker I haven't had any issues since.

Didn't get any of these popups yet, instead uBlock doesn't block ads sometimes. I have to refresh the video a couple of times before it stops showing them. It gets really annoying.
- What browser are you using?
  
  Librewolf

Did you disable enchanced tracking protection in Firefox for youtube and remove all other adblockers? Enhancer for youtube has one built in for example.

My experience can be summarized as: lol. lmao.
I'm on Chrome. I just keep uBlock updated and turned off automatic Chrome updates. I've had Privacy Badger, uBlock, and HTTPS since forever.
They can bite me.

I'm so confused on how rollout happens. Is it random? I'm in a first world country (not the USA), using Firefox and Ublock Origin and have never experienced the popups. I use YouTube daily, often watching 10+ videos a day, and have never seen an ad or the popup. I have also never done anything to update my extensions or purge the cache as you mentioned. I've just had 0 issues. On mobile, I use Newpipe (BraveNewPipe, a fork with sponsorblock) and once again, 0 issues.
- often watching 10+ bideos a day
  Oh, they don't block bideos, just videos.
  I also use firefox + ublock origin with zero issues on desktop (and on mobile too).
  
  Haha, fixed. It's interesting to see I'm not the only one.

Firefox doesn't really work anymore for me with ublock and privacy badger. I don't always get the popup but the video usually won't buffer. I'm using a different browser now for YouTube only with ublock and it works so far. Never had the timer or blocked video player though

In the initial phase, the official fix (just purge your cache and redownload the filter lists to get the latest ones) didn't work for me, but the second revision of a filter someone posted to Lemmy did. It had the side effect of making it impossible to scroll down on video pages, but it's not like the comments on Youtube are super valuable most of the time anyway.
After a week or so I deleted that one to see how the official filters were doing, and it turned out they worked great and I haven't had an issue since.

I was using Chrome and doing the usual steps once a week kept ads away for a while but about a week ago it was no use.
We use a Mac for our main TV and were using Chrome, but it was taking up a ton of space and CPU so I just deleted it. I'm using Safari for now, All ads for the first time in a decade..
My secondary computer/bedroom TV is a crappy HP with the non upgradable RAM, I use edge and ads are still blocked with Ublock origin, for now

I have a Firefox extension for creating PWAs (Progressive Web App), and had a profile setup for Youtube. The adblocker detected popup just appeared a couple weeks ago. So i just deleted the YouTube PWA profile, recreated it, and added Ublock back. Havent seen the popup or ads since.

I had pretty much the same experience you did. I did randomly find a reddit post with a ublock custom filter to avoid the whole "page not loading at all" thing. Ever since, I've had only one ubo failure that I fixed with the routine filters refresh, and dare I say youtube's actually been getting faster for me lately? I did have that slowdown, due to their thing that prevented the page from loading, but now it's almost like they've ramped down on their efforts.
Edit: I'm here to stand corrected. Fuckers are messing with any browser that's not theirs. Add the following filter to ublock if your video pages take 5 seconds to load: www.youtube.com###+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), 5000, 0.01)

I refreshed filter lists in ublock once, business as usual since then.

I experienced pretty much the same thing as you. Had to do the clear cache+update a few times. But it's been good for a few weeks as you said. I've also noticed that it can take 5-10 seconds for the video page to load. But not the biggest deal, at least I don't see fucking ads.

I don't use adblock ([thunderous booing] Yeah yeah I know.) despite that fact sometimes videos flat out won't load for no fucking reason.
Kind of reminds me of antipiracy which ends up harming normal consumers more than it does the people it's intending to target.

37 comments