Technology

From the article:

The uBO team members are all volunteers. They’ve gone above and beyond to meet every little request from their users. But there’s a limit to how much they can take. At some point, the constant demands become too much, and they will leave uBO for good. It’s one thing to play cat and mouse with YouTube. It’s quite another to deal with a wave of angry users.

It's important to note that this extension is open source, and anyone can contribute. End users can contribute by writing more meaningful reports and exhibiting patience, and those who are handy can certainly contribute to uBlock Origin. Just about anyone can help in some way.

Of course, every project needs passionate leaders, which is where the maintainers play a role. They coordinate work and ensure quality. While lots of people can act as a leader, the passion of driving a project to success with unique expertise is a lot more rare. So treat your maintainers kindly!

YouTube staff underestimate the amount of effort tech savvy people will devote to remove minor annoyances. Ultimately, the core capability of YouTube is to deliver a video from its servers to your browser. Adblock tech will continue to win the cat-and-mouse game in the long run.

This war is not something YouTube can or in my opinion wants to win. All they want to do is make it annoying enough for non-technical people to give up and purchase premium. They know they can't win at this game. What they can do is make these changes frequent enough and annoying enough.

Simply put, even if Google hires full time staff to keep fighting this issue, at some point not serving ads becomes cheaper. On the other side of this trench we have an opensource project backed by a mob of fed up people for whom never seeing another ad is too soon. In pure fight of numbers Google is outnumbered and outgunned.

Linux is an excellent example of community effort. It's huge, well supported and develops at a pace other companies can only dream about and yet they have around 5-10k contributors. uBlock has 40k stars on GitHub alone. Not all contributors and/or developers, but this this ads problem is something that affects everyone and is universally hated by everyone and rest assured the more Google and others try to push ads the more people will awaken to fight back.

Plot twist, it is YouTube sending those moronic support requests.

Edit: I checked out the reddit thread and people really are moronic.

A:

I can't access YT at all now. I just get a big, blank empty page. I've tried following every single step in the guide and nothing works. Before, I was able to watch videos if I opened the link in a private browser, but now even that doesn't work. Using Firefox btw. What am I supposed to do now?

B:

I just started having this problem this morning. I realized I forgot to disable Ghostery, one I took care of that the page would load again.

A:

I ain't disabling Ghostery...

Good article. Rather than relying on uBo people should just stop using services they dislike (YouTube) and move to something else. Of course many people don't want to change what they're used to.

Yesterday was the first time videos actually stopped working for me. I updated uBlock Origin and it's been working again. YouTube can't win this race. (Unless they completely cripple their website and make it only available to logged in verified users or something.)

Best way to punish Youtube: Use a functioning ad blocker and then open dozens of tabs on auto play and mute them. Let them play perpetually.

Another way that would cause advertisers to potentially drop them or pay considerably less would be to do this without an ad blocker and then post evidence of it. With enough people doing this, advertisers won't want to pay.