I remember there was a bug (or intended behavior?) of people getting their accounts banned for certain kinds of mundane chat messages in live streams and I'm a little spooked that the same will happen with the recent escalation in the adblocking arms race.
The passive-aggressive "I'm just a smol bean multinational media conglomerate and you've blocked ads on my page
" messages that sometimes make it through my adblocker certainly feel like a precursor to more punitive action.Sometimes I get those pop ups when I’m reading news from outlets with millionaire pundits like CNN or NBC, and I always gleefully click on “I’ll disable my adbloxker next time”
The more pathetic the message, the more gleeful I get. "Motherfucker, I am below the poverty level, and you are literally Reuters."
I take those motherfuckers out with Ublock's element picker and zapper. No more half measures.
I've never got any of those popups and I use Firefox + uBlock Origin
I have that for my laptop, and all is well, but there's no similar combo that works on my elderly tablet.
That’s part of the concern. We never even see the warnings, but they still know we’re blocking ads. Next they shrug and lock our accounts, because “but muh ad revenueee!”
I guess there's a chance but i think the backlash would be massive. People's entire lives are on google
I read a post-cyberpunk novel a few years back called Moxyland. If you evaded arrest they didn't put a warrant out. They just rescinded all your permissions and deactivated your phone. Then you either turned yourself in, or starved to death because there was no way to interact with society without your phone.
I would have said no but then Twitter started charging it's users so now I'm pretty sure literally anything is possible
Seems like it would be absolutely cutting off a limb to remedy an ingrown nail. If people have to start shopping around for alternatives it will start eroding their market dominance and user base. I'm really curious what percentage of people have installed ad blockers since they've started trying to clamp down on Youtube.
Way way more than had them before. Lots of people who didn't even know ad blockers were a thing became very aware
I remember like the better part of a decade ago my sister was putting on some slop for my nephews and I asked why she didn't have an ad blocker "Can you get in trouble for that?" "Yes. The internet gestapo will immediately kick down your door."
Did that actually go into effect yet? I only remember it being floated as a possibility. When I searched "x price" to find out how much they're charging, the results were a demonstration of how bad of a name "X" is:
- Price of US Steel (NYSE: X)
- Price of the X coin
- Coin
- US Steel
- XPRIZE, an engineering contest thing partially funded by
- Tesla Model X
- Coin
- Coin
- XPRIZE
- iPhone X
Anyway, after refining my search, it looks like requiring a paid subscription to post is being piloted in New Zealand and the Philippines.
I love how twitter had one of the best brand names, I mean it's just good in general, but it's also builtup and maxed it, fully SEO'd, everyone knows it, it's short, it's history is long, it's the level 100 legendary pokemon of brand names, but then he replaces it with a level 5 magikarp.
That's not to mention the SEO ambiguity of X (from your keyboard) or this weird other symbol 𝕏.
Probably not, but if you're really concerned the way I view YT is probably worth doing. mpv/youtube-dl (yt-dlp) while grabbing links from the browser but never actually viewing a video in it. I have a way to autoplay videos in mpv when clicked in my browser, there's also browser add-ons like ff2mpv
It's possible, but personally I never use my account when using youtube anymore. I just remember the channels I like and check if they've posted anything, and if something is age-gated, I just use youtube-dlp (yt-dlp) to rip the video without having to engage with google accounts.
Hmm. Hadn't considered it. But it is a reason to transition everything to protonmail.
Depends on how many users are actually using an adblocker. Last I saw, about 10 million users were using Ublock or adblockers in general. If we assume that reflects the real number of users, then it’s a tiny percentage of Google product users and banning them isn’t that big of a deal - unless large companies also use adblockers in which case, it’s probably easier to surrender than to keep fighting.
