YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

Re:YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad ... by kroltan on Friday June 30, 2023 @02:58PM (#36540354)

I pay for Premium.

I also run an ad blocker, with extra rules to ban content I don't want to see, such as the terrible "shorts" mind-ebola, as well as a bunch of regexes for clickbait titles and a big ban list of channels that is updated often.

SponsorBlock to remove baked-in advertisements and other misfeatures like interaction reminders.

Now I am also using the beta DeArrow extension to disarm the thumbnails/titles a little bit by replacing them with random frames from the video.

I think the hip way to say it is "I'm between jobs" currently, but when I had a stable income source I would do eventual donations to channels of my interest, which according to some creators even a single USD is way more than the average lifetime return of a single viewer due to ads/YTP.

The only reason I haven't subscribed to Nebula / CuriosityStream instead, which seems to be a much healthier platform, is precisely because they advertise it so much. Also because I do appreciate more entertainment-y videos sometimes, not just edutainment.

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Re:YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad ... by electriclove on Friday June 30, 2023 @06:39PM (#36543457)

How do you block YouTube Shorts?

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Re:YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad ... by teddyh on Friday June 30, 2023 @07:59PM (#36544380)

<https://lawrencehook.com/rys/> has a ton of options, and you can configure it to only block shorts, if you like.

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Re:YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad ... by kroltan on Friday June 30, 2023 @08:27PM (#36544669)

A couple uBO filter rules, paste it to the "My filters" tab on the settings:

    ! Nuke high contrast elements
    www.youtube.com##ytd-feed-filter-chip-bar-renderer
    www.youtube.com##yt-chip-cloud-renderer

    ! Nuke news sections and other "engagement boosting" sections of the homepage
    ! This breaks the channel page, I temporary disable the filter rules when I need to go in there. Selector can probably be refined
    www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer

    ! Nuke Shorts
    www.youtube.com##[is-slim-media]

I also have a couple fixes on https://userstyles.world/style/6382/my-youtube-fixes which you can apply using the Stylus addon, these compact the layout a bit more, lowers contrast of "calls to action" like the Subscribe or comment buttons, as well as attempts to make the Theater view actually take all of the available screen space (without being actually fullscreen).

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Re:YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad ... by jeegsy on Friday June 30, 2023 @10:20PM (#36545686)

> bunch of regexes for clickbait titles

Can you please share which ad blocker you use and how we might use regexes to do this? Sounds fascinating and I want to do that myself

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Re:YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad ... by kroltan on Saturday July 01, 2023 @12:33PM (#36551891)

Not really just regex, I called it that for brevity. uBlock Origin's cosmetic filters, in particular :has-text which does indeed support regex.

It's basically CSS selectors, but with some very powerful ones added in too.

Check the docs for details https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-f...

The particular filters I use include things like:

    ! Kills "You won't believe something useless! Some subtitle"
    youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:has-text(/you won'?t .*!( .*)?/i)

    ! Kills "100 idiotic life hacks that are definite safety hazards!"
    youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:has-text(/(\d+) (.+)s/i)

And a bunch more more specific to my interests and native language, but I hope you got the gist of it.

Also look at the sibling comment about other distraction-removals like shorts and engagement callout taming.

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