what YouTube ads
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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I double dare you!
All i read is that nobody will be watching all these ads and YouTube will have to shutdown.
Pretty much stopped using it once they decided my 20 year old account must belong to a child and demanded my ID. (Still don’t know why that happened. The account itself is over eighteen and I don’t live in the US where that policy was supposed to take effect.) This doesn’t make it any more appealing.
I remember when you just had, like, banner ads and an ad next to the video. And now you get those gross ads for AI sexbots and stuff.
And I really don’t think the latter is just because of my own search history. I’m asexual and don’t look at porn sites. I also noticed an uptick in the sex ads after YouTube decided I was a minor, so that’s pretty freaking weird.
I wish other platforms for long form video content existed.
I wonder what the breaking point is for those who don’t use adblockers.
Who still watches YT without adblocker? It must be horrible.
Someone who don't want to lose their emails... In https://lemmy.cafe/comment/15974964 it was mentioned that their entire google account got banned for 10 years over adblocking youtube. I stopped watching youtube immediately... I'm not about to watch ads, but I don't want to lose access to my 22 year old personal account... So many accounts are tied to that address, that I can't manage to move to a different service.
FML what happened to "do no evil"? Now it's "make money with the baby grinding machine for all costs"
Me on (android) TV. On PC I have ad blocker. On TV ads time is between 6 seconds and 1 minute. Sometimes ads contain AI slop. 💀
On TV I silenced them as they start and look elsewhere meanwhile... I find joy in training myself to be unable to consciously recognise at all what is ongoing till the video start
SmartTube for Android TV gives you adblock and sponsorblock
Theres also the possibility to use a VPN and log in from Albania (I think) to avoid ads altogether because they’re not legal there.
It is Albania. I will say that it's more correct to say that YouTube chooses not to send ads to Albania, rather than Albania banning it.
Albanians anti ad laws state that ads are required to be safe for children, with the platform being responsible for failure.... So Google is not spending the effort to make the ads safe.
Try ReVanced.
Youtube: "People are blocking are ads and costing us money, what should we do?!"
The People: "Police your platform and stop advertising scams, hate speech, pornography, and all the other shit."
Youtube: "I just have no idea what to do, so I guess I'll just invest millions/billions into making ads harder to block, and make the ads longer and unskippable. You know, Just make the platform almost completely unusable without adblocking"
The People: "YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO, JUST POLICE YOUR FUCKING PLATFORM ALREADY. IF YOU DID YOU WOULDNT NEED TO DO ALL THIS SHIT"
Youtube: "Oh, btw, heres another PragerU video thats 3 hours long and talks about how the black man should be grateful for the white man uplifting them via slavery, followed by a ad thats basically a woman fingering herself to advertise chinese AI girlfriends"
The People: adblocking intensifies
YouTube does police their platform, they curate it for babies and remove anything critical of the government
I love when two conflicting conspiracy theories meet online.
That's the craziest part isn't it? All of this data collection so they can build profiles of us, and then they just don't apply any of it to ads.
I don't like watching ads, but it would at least be slightly more tolerable if I got ads for things I actually wanted. On my TV I watch YT unfortunately not adblocked, an never once have I seen an ad for anything that appeal to me.
This is tinfoil hat stuff, but based on the ads I’m shown, it’s almost like they pick ones they know won’t appeal to you since they know anger drives up engagement. Google can probably guess from my search history that I’m trans and asexual, since I’ve asked questions online relating to that. And then the majority of the ads I get on YouTube are porn and anti trans things.
If they actually wanted to show ads targeted to me, first thing they would figure out is if I'm capable of buying their stupid bullshit product. I'm poor as the rat in the church, my monthly budget is literally -50€. I can't afford to buy anything, what good does it do for advertisers to let me know that they have a new phone that costs 1500€ and is 0,05mm thinner than the previous one?
They also started forcing logins on an Android tv I have yesterday when I checked the update version, thankfully there's apps like smarttube that aren't made to be garbage on purpose, which can be easy to install if you for example
Tap for spoiler
download AFTVnews downloader then use code 28544 for the stable release.
YouTube Recanced all the way. I've had YouTube premium for free.99 going on 5 years now
yeah unfortunately for me my revanced keeps becoming increasingly broken with no way to update. OnePlus rolled out their new OxygenOS update with a version of youtube newer than the revanced version and I can't downgrade it.
The true global power emerging from all of the dystopic activities, including tech and business greed, is advertising.
and they'll be unskippable
I'm sure i've heard this before, but yt-dlp skips them fine.
Yt-Dlp has been breaking recently and requiring cookies to be entered in order to work at all.
I've never seen a company quadruple dip on something before. It's like surviving enshittification and then still continuing to push for further revenues.
Error retrying ...
Rate limited, waiting 60 seconds ...
Video not found
It has been breaking a lot lately and it’s really sad. I pretty much pull all of my content off of YouTube now through yt-dlp so once that goes, im pretty much entirely YouTube free. I absolutely refuse to use it in the state it’s in now and really wish more creators would offer content on other platforms. Yt-dip is amazing and great but shouldn’t be the permanent solution.
Isn’t that what Nebula/CuriosityStream is? All my favorite YouTubers promote it, though the caveat is you have to pay but I think the money actually goes to the creators (and they put bonus content on it like a patreon).
Good thing I use the LibRedirect plugin in Firefox to redirect YouTube link to Invidious.
In addition to uBlock, of course.
I do too. Like, exactly - I use LibRedirect to make sure I never end up at youtube but only an invidious instance, and I run ublock origin religiously everywhere (even though it's thankfully not needed on invidious).
But I really do fear for invidious's future. Like right now it's totally borked because of more youtube fucking around with them. I'm sure they will get it working again soon, but there are only 3 public instances now, they're doing it just because they're cool, but it's not easy to constantly be fighting against youtube's changes, they have to pay for servers and don't get enough in donations to make up for it, so I couldn't blame those last 3 for burning out at some point, like ggtyler did. And that's even if youtube doesn't finally do something that breaks invidious for good, like how pipe is now completely broken. Sorry if I'm dooming a bit, but it does sometimes look pretty bleak.
Yeah, no.
Not even an acceptable ad. Burn this site.
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