YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

1. They still serve ads. Often for Google products underneath the videos and in the feed. Content creators are also allowed to turn on contextual ads over the top of videos, as well as merchandise underneath their videos.

2. Sponsored segments are unbelievably widespread now, and can take up significant portions of the video. These are ads, and they are also permitted by YouTube.

3. YouTube has been making the service worse and worse as time goes on. I cannot turn off shorts, even though I despise them. They're all over my feed. Removing the downvote score means I cannot tell if a video is spam before clicking on it now. Ostensibly YouTube serves more video hours now, but at our expense.

4. YouTube recently raised my price 40% overnight.

There was space for reasonable prices without making their service worse. They crossed that line for me and I think for many others too.

Specifically though:

2. Content creators shill for things, sure. Youtube doesn't stop you from fast-forwarding through these segments. These creators are real human beings that put a ton of work into bringing me content and I don't begrudge them making some money. These are the ads that work on me; I deliberately use their affiliate links. I want them to spend more time making content. Hell there are a dozen different Youtube creators I pay monthly on Patreon just because!

I don't find these sponsorships terrible and at any rate it's not Youtube's fault.

3. Yeah I would love to have a Shortblocker extension in my browser, no argument there. But I don't think the visible downvotes make any material difference. The recommendation algorithm is excellent and I don't see spam.

4. The price is still extremely reasonable compared to the value I get. Maybe it isn't for you, that's fine. But the fact is you can pay for no-ads; complaining about adblock behavior rings incredibly hollow.

1. Fully block ads with uBlock Origin

2. Block in-video sponsorships with Sponsorblock

3. Block all shorts permanently with Hide Youtube-Shorts

These 3 extensions fix your issues. There is also an extension to bring back downvotes. I do not use it but I think it is widespread enough to be useful as spam detection.

This also allows you to listen to videos with your screen turned off and gives you the option to have the video playing in a tiny screen so you can watch it while doing other things on your phone.

It does though. It blocks the modal ads by content creators, the merchandise ads, and the feed ads for Google products. With other extensions I can skip through sponsored segments and see a downvote approximation.

> Content creators shill for things, sure. Youtube doesn't stop you from fast-forwarding through these segments. These creators are real human beings that put a ton of work into bringing me content and I don't begrudge them making some money. These are the ads that work on me; I deliberately use their affiliate links. I want them to spend more time making content. Hell there are a dozen different Youtube creators I pay monthly on Patreon just because!

My house is an ad free space and I do find these ads intolerable. I'm happy to pay for content I like, but there is no way for me to pay for this content without these ads. Indeed, YouTube Premium was sold to me as paying content creators more than ads, and I purchased it on that premise. This wasn't enough for content creators, however, and they wanted to make even more money. That's fine, but I refuse to listen to their ads, and I do not owe them my attention to watch their ads. So I use SponsorBlock.

> Yeah I would love to have a Shortblocker extension in my browser, no argument there. But I don't think the visible downvotes make any material difference. The recommendation algorithm is excellent and I don't see spam.

The downvote score makes an ENORMOUS difference to MANY people. It allows us to determine what is spam at a glance. YouTube is filled with low quality content which isn't helpful and is often harmful. YouTube does a terrible job of policing this content. Often the very worst content will trick a large number of people into clicking on it, which makes the algorithm think it's good content, and promotes it to even more people. This is great for YouTube's bottom line, but serving people DIY advice which could harm them is bad for us, the users. A high downvote ratio indicates that the content is inaccurate, harmful, or spam, and we can avoid it BEFORE we sit through the whole video.

There's also uYouPlus if you have a way to load apps without going through the store.