UPDATE 2 It seems that starting today, uBlock Origin is working to combat this Youtube Block. Mine started working again! Lets all thank the devs of UBO for fighting this fight!
UPDATE So as new info comes out, I’ll be posting it here. It seems as if this Rollout Has Several Parts.
Part 1
You get a popup message over top of your video, blocking the screen:
- This is the first sign. If you see this popup AND are logged into a YouTube account, your account has been selected.
- At this stage you can likely close or block these messages with an adblocker.
Part 2
This message will change, indicating that you have 3 remaining videos to watch without ads.
Will insert photo once one has been found
- At this stage your adblocker will imminently stop working in 3 videos time.
- Personally using Firefox + uBlock Origin and tweaking filters and updates does not even fix it.
Part 3
None of the video loads now, everything looks blank.
- At this stage you must tred new ground to avoid ads. I have posted methods in the comments. If you want to bypass this end page, read down there.
End of Update
YouTube has started rolling out anti-adblock to users inside the United States, which means that they are preparing to roll this out to the entire country. Personally, I have been blocked already. I want to gauge how common this occurrence is.
https://filterlists.com/ - list of auto-updating filters, makes it very easy to add one. Make sure to use one with a good rating.
Yeah, do it. uBlock is great in terms of performance so you will feel how much faster browsing is after uninstalling the other add-ons. You can also block known scams or websites known by pirates to be unsafe. It can also block cookie popups (but I don’t care about cookies might be better at this).
I also suggest Redirector, which lets you can set up custom redirects such as
Pattern name: YT Shorts in normal player
Example URL: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ExmplVid-ID → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExmplVid-ID
Match pattern: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/*
Redirect to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$1
It is very powerful and can also replace multiple extensions. For example, it can percent-decode URLs, which enables me to prefix a URL with ar[space] in the address bar and redirect me to the archived version of that site. Just add https://web.aarchive/web/*/%s as a bookmark with keyword ar. (This trick is useful for making custom “search engines”, which would often require yet another extension.) However, this trick is not enough alone because it goes to https://web.aarchive/web/*/example.com%2Fpage and Archive.org needs a decoded URL. So notice that I used the nonsense address web.aarchive which Redirector will detect and correct using this rule:
Pattern name: archive percent-decoder
Example URL: https://web.aarchive.org/web/*/example.com%2Fpage → https://web.archive.org/web/*/example.com/page
Regex pattern: https\:\/\/web\.aarchive\.org\/web\/\*\/(.*)
Redirect to: https://web.archive.org/web/*/$1
Process match: URL Decode
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/shorts/ExmplVid-ID
https://piped.video/watch?v=ExmplVid-ID
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I don’t care about cookies has been bought out by Avast, use I still don’t care about cookies
Regarding cookie pop-ups, there’s a little known gem: https://consentomatic.au.dk/
