YouTube is running an experiment asking some users to disable their ad blockers or pay for a premium subscription, or they will not be allowed to watch videos.
As fill-in ads are a vector for computer viruses and other malware I for one will NOT be disabling my ad blocker unless YouTube is willing to provide a lifetime subscription to something like Life Lock and make me whole for anything lost to whatever malware arrives as a part of an ad.
Where else can I watch sci-show, Linus-tech-tips, and all the other channels I subscribe to?
Just use newpipe. It’s youtube without the ads.
Doesn’t have casting support, but it allows you to download the videos. You can also listen/download to the audio of videos, without fetching the video.
I do wonder how much of an impact command line youtube downloaders have on them. I can’t imagine much since the typical user couldn’t operate it. A few years ago the RIAA tried to take yt-dl down, and did for a while, but it was deemed meritless so it’s back up.
@beatniak@blank_sl8 recently many yt-dlp User Interfaces stopped working, I couldn’t download certain videos. So maybe the cat and mouse is about to begin.
this particular cat and mouse has been going on for a long time.
Although I get the impression it’s not particularly aggressive.
There was a while there about a year ago where newpipe seemed to break every week and you had to install the next patch version from github. It’s not like newpipe had to develop some new workaround or something, just changed class names or something.
The problem with scraping is that while it’s difficult/impossible to block completely, it’s pretty easy to keep making changes to your site to disrupt scrapers. The work required by the scraper to adapt to those changes is usually way more than the work you put in to disrupt them.
So if a commercial site wants to make scraping unreliable and impractical, they almost certainly can.
As fill-in ads are a vector for computer viruses and other malware I for one will NOT be disabling my ad blocker unless YouTube is willing to provide a lifetime subscription to something like Life Lock and make me whole for anything lost to whatever malware arrives as a part of an ad.
Where else can I watch sci-show, Linus-tech-tips, and all the other channels I subscribe to?
Just use newpipe. It’s youtube without the ads. Doesn’t have casting support, but it allows you to download the videos. You can also listen/download to the audio of videos, without fetching the video.
Newpipe will probably be blocked as well if youtube is doing this. Honestly not sure why youtube hasn’t blocked yt-dlp and others already.
I do wonder how much of an impact command line youtube downloaders have on them. I can’t imagine much since the typical user couldn’t operate it. A few years ago the RIAA tried to take yt-dl down, and did for a while, but it was deemed meritless so it’s back up.
@beatniak @blank_sl8 recently many yt-dlp User Interfaces stopped working, I couldn’t download certain videos. So maybe the cat and mouse is about to begin.
this particular cat and mouse has been going on for a long time.
Although I get the impression it’s not particularly aggressive.
There was a while there about a year ago where newpipe seemed to break every week and you had to install the next patch version from github. It’s not like newpipe had to develop some new workaround or something, just changed class names or something.
It’s not easily block able as it scrapes the YouTube website. They’d have to stop having a website for that to happen.
The problem with scraping is that while it’s difficult/impossible to block completely, it’s pretty easy to keep making changes to your site to disrupt scrapers. The work required by the scraper to adapt to those changes is usually way more than the work you put in to disrupt them.
So if a commercial site wants to make scraping unreliable and impractical, they almost certainly can.