One endgame is ad-blockers just blank the video and mute the sound in an undetectable way. Given the negative spiral that modern Internet usage often is, a moment of quiet to breathe and maybe break the cycle I would welcome.

I can see it now - YouTube puts a quick yes/no question after the ad to confirm comprehension. :)

Relevant green text: https://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png

It's the company's fault for making you want it so much.

Speaking of enshittification, whatever happened to imgur? That image does not load directly despite being a deep link. Plus it’s so low resolution the text is unreadable! I guess they are one step away from just taking down the http server altogether and just forcing everyone into their app which will connect via some proprietary protocol.

That's interesting. It loads directly for me and the quality seems fine. I have experienced the issue you're describing when attempting to direct link to Reddit images lately, though. I wonder why we're experiencing differences?

Imgur tracks which pages you've loaded and won't show you the image until you see the html. Literally what you're complaining about.

I dunno.. I open the link I posted in a private Chrome browser instance as well as Edge and in both cases it opens directly to it without showing the imgur branding around it

Ah I forgot to mention: I’m on mobile. I don’t see this phenomenon on desktop.

Please drink a verification can.

There's a bunch of hypothetical takes on this, but currently youtube already has ads that won't get away without interaction.

In particular, ads can get stacked if the user doesn't skip, and they get two or three ads where they would only have gotten one if they skipped the first. Then some of the ads will stop at the last frame (I think I saw that on mobile game ads that have a store button ? didn't pay attention so might be mistaken though) until the skip button is pressed.

I think the only question for Google is how much advertiser will pay to annoy their users and when will a user just give up and do something else (I'm with you on the moment of quiet: having ads show up is a good sign to close youtube and go do something else)

They'll force you to have your webcam and mic available to watch YouTube.

Mandatory eye-tracking.

That actually would be pretty nice. It would also help break the mindless loop of going from video to video.

The ad blocker arms race is still a victory for the companies. The average user is going to get tired of fighting the constantly changing strategies and debugging why their latest combination of extensions isn’t working today despite working yesterday. Even if they can figure it out half the time, that still means they’re watching 50% of the ads instead of 0%.

I also see many people capitulating, especially among my peers who realize that spending potentially hours every month keeping up with the latest adblocker tricks is not a good use of their time relative to the trivial amount of money they’re saving on YT premium.

The die hards will always fight this battle and don’t seem to care how much effort it takes. Some people derive a sense of satisfaction from gaming the system or “winning” against corporations. They all have their justifications, but it doesn’t matter much.

As long as it’s sufficiently annoying to deal with, the number of people fighting it and succeeding will be negligible small. The problem was when as blockers were so easy that they jumped from a small number of techie users and started catching on among the general public. Once an ad-supported company starts seeing a significant number of users evading the ads and also refusing to pay, they have to do something.

> Said differently, this is clearly an arms race.

Definitely. The next phase is an AI agent "watching" (through the "analog hole") if necessary and applying computer vision systems to detect and remove ads.

This is essentially the level that high end competitive video game cheating is reaching now too.

Plugging directly into the computer as a separate device that emulates monitor, mouse and keyboard.

I mean, isn’t this is basically a reason not to do any sort of prevention for most things?

I think I'm just biased because I built an extension a decade ago that made YouTube a better music player. It flew under the radar for a couple of years, then got popular, then I got C&D'ed and lawyered into the dirt [1][2].

It makes me sad watching people get excited about releasing their totally new, innovative YouTube extensions as if this is a welcoming space.

These extensions don't exist because they get destroyed not because it's a space ripe for innovation.

[1]https://thenextweb.com/news/how-youtube-killed-an-extension-... [2]https://imgur.com/15gaOf6

It's a reason to pile all the effort into the same tool.

But the it ignores the fact that it may be able to work just because it's small.

probably more effective than trusting ublock is to find an obscure method. ublock is too much of an easy target for google. on the flipside, something obscure is possibly harder to trust