YouTube's dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there's an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.

From the article: “In some ways, the current situation has spurred an arms race. YouTube has inadvertently improved ad blockers, as the new knowledge and techniques gained from innovating within the YouTube platform are also applicable to other ad and tracking systems.”

  • saigot
    4·
    1 year ago

    There’s a lot of very motivated people trying g to stop adblockers on many platforms, I’ve never seen one that works without severely limiting the user experience.

    And remember these are the most convenient and useful form of adblock. I don’t think there is anything a site could do to stop the user just throwing a black box over the ad and muting the page.

    Ultimately, no security works when the attacker has absolute control over the hardware.

    • Big P@feddit.ukEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I think the ad black box is where it will end up. A lot of people would probably not see that as much better than having an ad at that point, though. They don’t even really need to make something impenetrable, they just need to keep breaking adblock so much so that people no longer see it as reliable and adblock developers grow increasingly tired of rewriting. So far, I can only recall a handful of times where adblock has straight up stopped working on YouTube.