Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube. Topic is solved

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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by person45 » 2025-05-24, 04:36

hujan86 wrote:
2025-05-18, 09:11
You mentioned you installed version 1.16.6b1 which is a pre-release version released last year. Have you tried the latest version instead (1.16.6.0)?
My mistake. 1.16.6.0 is working. Thank you.

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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by moonbat » 2025-05-25, 00:19

If it's tracking that worries you, open a Youtube page and observe uBlock Origin's log and look at all the rubbish that's being blocked - long after it's finished loading, even if you pause the video, it still attempts to send tracking pings.
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by Tharthan » 2025-06-02, 01:34

suzyne wrote:
2025-05-21, 12:21
When people want endless cool content for no cost without some form of advertising (which is often why it will be offered for free) I just don't get the logic of their entitlement.
YouTube existed for years without ads.

While I fully respect a YouTuber's decision with regard to monetization of their videos, I personally remember (back when I had a YouTube account; roughly from the beginning of '07 till 2014 or so,) being somewhat disgusted when YouTube asked if I wanted to make money off of my videos. I didn't do it, and I was thoroughly disappointed at how a website that had been largely amateurish and "fun" had turned into this big money-making site that had become so brazen that it was pitching itself as the successor to television.

Why can't we just have a site where people make videos for fun and foster a sense of community and camaraderie? That's pretty much what YouTube used to be like. It was quite enjoyable to use it back then. Sure, some people would have a link in their channel description to allow people to make a PayPal donation if they wanted to, often with a message saying that if people liked their videos a lot perhaps they would consider making a small donation to help them out. But that's a whole different thing from mandatory video ads.

Maybe there should have been some sort of split between the "fun videos" and the super serious professional videos. Perhaps there should have been one site dedicated to one and one site dedicated to the other.
Moonchild wrote:
2025-05-21, 11:51
Remember, if you get something for free, YOU are the product.
i.e. don't be surprised if a service provider makes life harder for you if you're trying to not be the product and still using their service for free.
Yet for years, free sites were used by people all over with little to none of these shenanigans.

Don't get me wrong: I understand the thought behind pushing back against a sense of entitlement for free services. But at the same time, if all of this is so incredibly problematic, how did the Internet manage to flourish for many years with free sites and services galore?
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by moonbat » 2025-06-02, 02:56

Tharthan wrote:
2025-06-02, 01:34
Why can't we just have a site where people make videos for fun and foster a sense of community and camaraderie?
Those days are gone for good. Youtube started it of course but now every 'influencer' and 'content creator' is in it for the big bucks. The entire internet has gone corporate and commercial; the only people I see doing things for fun are a few Facebook meme page admins, and again because a meme takes much less effort than a video. Bear in mind now there will be tons of AI generated slop as well, in all content categories.
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by suzyne » 2025-06-02, 04:56

Tharthan wrote:
2025-06-02, 01:34
Yet for years, free sites were used by people all over with little to none of these shenanigans.

Don't get me wrong: I understand the thought behind pushing back against a sense of entitlement for free services. But at the same time, if all of this is so incredibly problematic, how did the Internet manage to flourish for many years with free sites and services galore?
I am going to assume that a site like that (or maybe a few) do exist. But who has heard of them, how many videos are there, and what kind of traffic do they attract?

I think that's part of the problem, creating (and sustaining) a site that will attract the number of views necessary for it to be known and desirable for people to post content doesn't come for free.

I suspect in the early days, (not sure when that is meant to have been?) those who were running "free sites and services galore" were either in it for the long-term and so were absorbing costs with the hope of recouping them later, or the owner was happy with a hobby to put the time, effort and money into it only for the pleasure of creating something of substance (and maybe some fame).

For that second group of website maintainers, there's nothing stopping anybody from doing that today. Why doesn't someone, with fond memories of fun without shenanigans, simply do it!

Surely, there is somebody who has made their fortune (in any industry) who doesn't need to be into website hosting for the big bucks? Or is it actually much harder to do, and stating that the entire internet has gone corporate and commercial only partially explains the status quo?
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by Moonchild » 2025-06-02, 06:50

Tharthan wrote:
2025-06-02, 01:34
Why can't we just have a site where people make videos for fun and foster a sense of community and camaraderie? That's pretty much what YouTube used to be like.
The problem is scale.
Running a site like YouTube with its massive bandwidth and storage requirements costs money, and lots of it. When it started out, the Internet and its usership was much, much smaller, for one. Secondly, the video resolutions in use were much less, and the resolution-to-bandwidth relationship is exponential.
Could there have been an alternative solution than shoving ever more advertising down the pipe? Absolutely. But that's the way it went and that's what people accepted as a (preferred!) solution so they didn't have to pay for the service, breeding the ad-supported "free" culture we see now. The fact it became more like television is because that's what people preferred to consume.
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by moonbat » 2025-06-02, 07:05

I remember when Bitchute was started and hyped as a P2P video platform, but was found to be serving videos from their own servers only. Else there has been work on P2P video streaming within the browser though of course it wouldn't scale as well and be just as effective as torrents (i.e. only popular videos have enough peers)
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by suzyne » 2025-06-02, 07:31

It's not like ad-supported media is anything new. Television and newspapers have been doing it for decades, and plenty of people accept it. One of my favourite TV shows is Survivor and I gladly watch on a free-to-air channel and put up with the ads, instead of paying a subscription for Paramount Plus, or whatever streaming site it is currently on.

The way people gripe about online ads now, I wonder how they accomplished their media consumption before the internet? Like, did you only watch the public broadcasters, or something? And never buy newspapers, with printed ads and which you had to pay for too. (Outrageous!)
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by Thad E G » 2025-06-02, 08:14

suzyne wrote:
2025-06-02, 07:31
And never buy newspapers, with printed ads and which you had to pay for too. (Outrageous!)
As a small child, probably c.1960, I asked my editor dad how newspapers could be sold for a few pennies: "It's not sales that supports us, it's advertising."

Yes, true that it is nothing new. And, as an enthusiastic user of uBlock Origin, I guess I too needed reminding of that.

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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by Tharthan » 2025-06-04, 07:23

suzyne wrote:
2025-06-02, 07:31
It's not like ad-supported media is anything new. Television and newspapers have been doing it for decades, and plenty of people accept it.

[...]

The way people gripe about online ads now, I wonder how they accomplished their media consumption before the internet?
No one here is suggesting that ad-supported media is new.

But as I said earlier, Internet culture itself used to be relatively amateurish, and early Internet celebrities leaned that way too. People saw the Internet as something new and different. It wasn't like old media, and it wasn't going to be like old media. That's how a lot of people felt. Perhaps some would say that that was too hopeful or idealistic a notion. But the fact is that there was a thirst for something different. And there were people of goodwill trying to make that desire a reality.

Now yes, there were serious and formal business, university, and educational websites in existence. Of course there were. And, yes, the Internet was certainly used in plenty of work-related environments in a way that complemented them. But even then, it was my experience that most websites were leaner and simpler and thus didn't—for example—put nearly as much strain on one's browser as some sites today now do.

A website can have a bit of pizazz without requiring the sort of bloat that we are now encountering. The number of times that I've experienced a browser crash due to one, single website is absolutely ridiculous. It shouldn't happen.

I'm not techie, but it's obvious to me from the context that it isn't Pale Moon's fault. Those websites are just unwieldy and poorly set up, and/or they are going overboard.

And that's the problem we're having here with YouTube: it's going overboard.

There wouldn't be nearly as many complaints if YouTube simply had some banner ads and maybe a few sponsored videos suggested in one's search results. But no, YouTube instead decides to interrupt that one hamster video or a comical reading of the most ridiculous YouTube comments with an unskippable video ad from some political campaign.

So, naturally, people use ad blockers to put a stop to such nonsense. Like person45, I've had YouTube whine to me about how ad blockers are frowned upon/objected to by Google. Occasionally, an ad will actually manage to slip through somehow, despite me using uBlock Origin.

To address Moonchild's point: if YouTube finds, say, having loads of two hour long 4K videos or whatever too costly, perhaps it should reassess whether that's the kind of content that YouTube needs in the first place. There's a lot of stuff on YouTube that's doing little apart from taking up space. I recently got an e-mail from either Vimeo or Dailymotion telling me that certain videos I have that haven't been viewed in a long while were going to be deleted if they didn't get more views in the very near future. Maybe YouTube needs to consider a policy like that at least with regard to very long and/or super high quality videos, if they haven't already.
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by moonbat » 2025-06-04, 08:29

Tharthan wrote:
2025-06-04, 07:23
I recently got an e-mail from either Vimeo or Dailymotion telling me that certain videos I have that haven't been viewed in a long while were going to be deleted if they didn't get more views in the very near future. Maybe YouTube needs to consider a policy like that at least with regard to very long and/or super high quality videos, if they haven't already.
I also don't know if they have, but seems to me it's only the recent, high production value videos with intro animations, sponsorship segments and what not that are recorded in 4k, and those do tend to have enough of a following. If anything such a rule would impact the much older and obscure videos made just for fun from the era you described :(
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by Tharthan » 2025-06-04, 08:46

moonbat wrote:
2025-06-04, 08:29
If anything such a rule would impact the much older and obscure videos made just for fun from the era you described :(
Only if they decided that 360p ~ 480p videos were too much of a hog! :lol:

Still, I get your point. But, as was noted earlier, there were alternative solutions apart from what YouTube ended up going with. The problem is that people just accepted this nonsense with little to no pushback. If there had been vocal and sustained community backlash, they might have opted to go another route.
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by moonbat » 2025-06-04, 08:50

It's always the case - the unwashed masses drag us along for the ride. The current internet where anonymity is no longer the default caters only to them, and they are the ones that made a handful of Big Tech companies control all public discourse online simply by passively moving onto these few platforms for everything.
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by Mæstro » 2025-06-04, 22:19

suzyne wrote:
2025-06-02, 07:31
It's not like ad-supported media is anything new. Television and newspapers have been doing it for decades, and plenty of people accept it.
[...]
The way people gripe about online ads now, I wonder how they accomplished their media consumption before the internet?
In the good, old days, we did not ‘consume media’.* We read the paper or watched programmes we liked. If an advert came on, I would mute the telly and read a book, or use the break as a cue to eat or wash my hands. I still keep a book with me when watching with family. When the DVR was introduced, recording in advance and skipping past adverts became feasible. Public television was always free of adverts.

*I hate this phrase. The real world is not Neopets: books do not vanish in a puff of air when read, so they are not consumed. In the economic sense, the book was consumed when I purchased it, whether I then read it or throw it into the fire. Only in the latter case is the book really consumed.
Tharthan wrote:
2025-06-04, 07:23
A website can have a bit of pizazz without requiring the sort of bloat that we are now encountering. The number of times that I've experienced a browser crash due to one, single website is absolutely ridiculous. It shouldn't happen.

I'm not techie, but it's obvious to me from the context that it isn't Pale Moon's fault. Those websites are just unwieldy and poorly set up, and/or they are going overboard.

And that's the problem we're having here with YouTube: it's going overboard.
I sometimes wonder about how this happened a dozen years ago. For a long time, I would mentally blame smartphones, but sensible mobile design antedates them. Look at this very board for example, shrinking your window to resemble a smartphone screen in portrait mode, or try the same with Wikipedia with the Monobook theme.
Occasionally, an ad will actually manage to slip through somehow, despite me using uBlock Origin.
This never happens to me. Among other things, I use RequestPolicy, which blocks all third-party requests unless whitelisted. (µBlock’s advanced mode can also do this.)
I recently got an e-mail from either Vimeo or Dailymotion telling me that certain videos I have that haven't been viewed in a long while were going to be deleted if they didn't get more views in the very near future. Maybe YouTube needs to consider a policy like that at least with regard to very long and/or super high quality videos, if they haven't already.
I strongly disagree with this, for it would cause many old, obscure films to be lost. Something posted in 2008 with a few thousand views might well have received most of its views before 2010 and very seldom be consulted today, but stumbling upon these is a true delight. As far as I know, the Internet Archive does not capture this old film. To erase these in a body would be the digital equivalent of a warehouse of nitrate film going up in smoke.
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by Moonchild » 2025-06-04, 22:24

Mæstro wrote:
2025-06-04, 22:19
I strongly disagree with this, for it would cause many old, obscure films to be lost.
Youtube never said it was supposed to be an archive! Youtube is a sharing platform, and it makes perfect sense for a sharing platform to remove content very few are interested in receiving anymore. Maybe keep that context in mind...
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by Mæstro » 2025-06-04, 22:43

Moonchild wrote:
2025-06-04, 22:24
Youtube never said it was supposed to be an archive! Youtube is a sharing platform, and it makes perfect sense for a sharing platform to remove content very few are interested in receiving anymore. Maybe keep that context in mind...
I recognise the hazard in allowing YouTube to serve as effective archive, and have always downloaded films I like, both so I may enjoy them again without using further bandwidth and to preserve them should policy shift. Even by benign neglect, YouTube has preserved a fair deal of early Web film. Some sites even shifted their own video hosting from local servers to YouTube; I could witness this happening in real time in the early 2010s. While I thought it unwise then and still think it so, custom then attains the force of law as far as YouTube and preservation are concerned. We cannot know what might interest the future. YouTube ought to preserve what it has, given the past as it has been, but one must not rely on it. Certainly, I prefer dedicated archives as substitutes.
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by suzyne » 2025-06-05, 08:33

Mæstro wrote:
2025-06-04, 22:19
suzyne wrote:
2025-06-02, 07:31
their media consumption before the internet?
*I hate this phrase.
Maybe consumption isn't the best word, but I wasn't thinking of it like something that disappears, but more as an artifact that you can take in (via eyes or ears) without it being destroyed, and additionally perhaps a bit of definition 3 below?

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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by frostknight » 2025-06-06, 02:04

I did forget to say this, but ublock origin doesn't just block ads, it also blocks some trackers too. Which is yet another reason I don't want to disable it on any websites.

I don't know what does what, so even if I wanted to enable ads, I wouldn't know which to disable and which to keep even if the ads don't do tracking.
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by Mæstro » 2025-06-06, 11:08

frostknight wrote:
2025-06-06, 02:04
I don't know what does what, so even if I wanted to enable ads, I wouldn't know which to disable and which to keep even if the ads don't do tracking.
µBlock maintains separate filters for trackers (often labelled ‘privacy’) and advertising, which you can view from the dashboard at chrome://ublock0/content/dashboard.html#3p-filters.html.
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Re: Ublock Origin Legacy doesn't work on youtube.

Unread post by moonbat » 2025-06-07, 00:37

frostknight wrote:
2025-06-06, 02:04
I don't know what does what
The panel that pops up when you click the uBO toolbar button has tooltips for all its functions. Open the logger from there, type '--' in the filter to show only blocked content, and refresh the webpage you're currently looking at to see what was blocked among scripts and trackers. Clicking on each row will show you what filterset was referenced to block it. Similarly, type '##' in the filter to see DOM elements that were hidden on the page (things like cookie notices, newsletter subscription popups and ad placeholders).

If there's still ads on a page you can use the element zapper to get rid of them for the current session, or the element picker to create a rule after selecting the annoying element. Rules you create are found on the 'My Filters' tab in uBO's preferences.
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