It's true. Having to constantly update some adblockers and ways to evade ads in youtube made me realize shitty youtube videos are not worth the effort and I barely use it nowadays.
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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Well, I for one stopped seeing YouTube videos ever since they started requiring me to Sign On because I'm using an AdBlocker and am behind a VPN.
If for some reason it's actually required that I watch it, I'll disconnect from the VPN and watch it, if not, I just move on.
In the last 6 months or so I have disconnected my VPN to watch a YouTube video maybe once, whilst I just moved on maybe hundred times or so (less and less as I increasingly I won't even click on links for YouTube).
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For many years biggest online threats were criminals and malware. Today the biggest threats are big companies, especially Google. Everyday we have to "fight" against it because it tries to steal all our data and even more.
For reference, here are the exceptions I've been using to try to make sure my viewership counts. Not sure if they're all needed and they're probably overkill, but:
@@||youtube.com/api$domain=youtube.com|google.com
@@||youtube.com/youtubei$domain=youtube.com|google.com
@@||youtube.com/ptracking$domain=youtube.com|google.com
@@||play.google.com/log$domain=youtube.com|google.com
! these are meant for checking for active internet connection (https://www.techtapto.com/what-is-gstatic-why-you-see-it-often/#Is_Gstatic_com_generate_204_a_virus)
@@||youtube.com/generate_204$domain=youtube.com|google.com
@@||google.com/generate_204$domain=youtube.com|google.com
@@||youtube.com/gen_204$domain=youtube.com|google.com
@@||google.com/gen_204$domain=youtube.com|google.com
They're not getting revenue from you either way. That's really more effort than I would want to go through for what amounts to a display bug.
Something that I've been confused about ever since people have been talking about this, is that there didn't seem to be a change of views from mobile devices. Like, I know that adblockers are less common on mobile devices because most people either don't know they are available or aren't using browsers that have/support (good) adblockers. But, was there really no noticeable change at all?
There was. Some channels even saw most of their decline from mobile/TV viewers.
That doesn't necessarily mean that wasn't also related to the adblocker issue, though. How the algorithm reacted to the dramatic change in views could have made waves that saw channels de-recommended or caused it to ignore sections of a viewer's watch history and thus the recommendations shown to them as well.
With the algorithm everything gets tied together so much that any disruption can have unpredictable effects.
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