Technology

Using uBO, but have noticed a slightly longer delay of a few seconds between hitting play and the video starting, but I can deal with that over being forced to watch 30s of ads.

There have been periods where one of my accounts was getting an ad-length black screen with buffering throbber (I hate that name) and, the most recent time, it was accompanied by a pop-up asking me if I'd like to find out why that was happening. Yeah. I know why that's happening, thanks.

Then that stopped happening again. Either they gave up or UBo have worked around it somehow. Never ending arms race.

I have already started finding peertube replacement channels.

Maybe people will start torrenting youtube rips if they somehow manage to kill ad blockers.

I have already started finding peertube replacement channels.

You know the people who created youtube are all part of the same OG corp/group that gave rise to the monsters who have created the hell we currently live in.

The PayPal mafia.

Thiel, musk, howry, Chen(yt), wong(reddit),Hoffman(LinkedIn)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia

The trouble with that is that there is barely any money outside of YouTube.

It's a tarpit. If they simply displayed a blocked "no vids for u" message, you'd get outraged, go complain online, look for workarounds, and eventually find a bypass. If everything still works but poorly, you get annoyed, turn off your adblocker to troubleshoot, possibly blame the adblocker for being "buggy" and keep it off. Their help page solution implies they are hoping for just that. There is no "smoking gun" blocked message to go complain online about, even though it is indeed their servers that are degrading your connection on purpose in secret. Or maybe you give up and leave their ecosystem entirely, which is no big loss for them.

The proper solution is to develop an adblock that they cannot detect is blocking ads. This may require actually downloading the ad video in background, and then lying that the video has played.

They are probably trying to find that spot where it's just slightly more annoying to block ads than leave them unblocked.

If they give you what you want, but harass you enough, you may just stop using an ad blocker to watch the video and might just forget to turn it back once you are done.

If you had to unlock your bathroom door to enter or exit, you will either put forth effort to correct the problem or you will take the lazy route and just prop the door open.

Thats a good one for 0.5x (soup store)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fNcYtcVn-8k

No, but Plex can. I'd migrate to Jellyfin if you can as Plex started paywalling some of their services.

You can block ad on tv by side loading smarttube

The problem is, nothing short of NA and EU governmental intervention will force Google to stop being such a nefarious, monopolistic, antitrust piece of shit. They're just so utterly ubiquitous for Western businesses. You cannot have a small business* and hope to be successful without partaking in either Google or Facebook/Meta's ad services. TikTok was becoming a huge threat to both those companies and look how viciously they were attacked.

The whole thing is beyond fucked, man. Kudos to you for trying to break free for your business, but I feel like you'll just be fucking yourself in the long run.

Edit in advance: I should clarify that there will of course be exceptions where a small business can be successful just fine without advertising, but for those that rely on being discovered on a larger scale versus purely local, it is essential.