this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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The workaround: Switch from Adblock Plus to uBlock Origin.
ABP has had random issues that break it often for years now. It's crap.
ABP has also been owned and run by a shady investment firm for the past decade.
Quit using YouTube directly and proxy your request through an Invidious instance.
Your requests are mixed in with everyone else’s, ad’s are blocked and most importantly only 1 machine touches YouTube directly and that’s the server hosting Invidious.
Unless the instance owner is a network god, they blacklist the IP address almost immediately (they see thousands of videos watched at the same time from the same IP address, trivial to detect)
Not a solution for most people, unfortunately...
Could you elaborate on why not?
Most people don't even know what Invidious is, let alone the fact that there are other video hosting sites that aren't youtube (Vimeo, for one).
Invidious is always breaking, too, and most people will stop using it when that happens.
We are talking about most people, not the absolutely tiny minority of technical users who are aware that such a thing as Invidious even exists.
You see how often growing youtubers complain about more than 85% of their viewers are not subscribed to the channel, or how just some videos have more views than their main content? The issue is that Invidious doesn't have the algorithm Youtube provides to everyone, and that not a lot of people really watch their subscribed page.
It's almost irrelevant to subscribe to a channel, the algorithm anyway pushes whatever it wants ignoring your requests
Why would you have an account in that hellhole?
Some of us made Gmail accounts long before Youtube even existed, and still rely on youtube for tutorials and other things of that nature that aren't found anywhere else.
Don't be a pretentious dick about it.
I actually don’t watch a whole lot of YouTube anymore so I can’t really comment on this here.
But isn’t this what people are trying to avoid when it comes to digital privacy? User data being used in less algorithms?
Yes. Invidious and other programs, websites and anything else are useful for these kind of things. When you go to another house and in another computer you want to see some video but not affect the watch history of the user that uses the computer mainly. Or just simply watching some video that you wouldn't normally watch.
But most people who use YouTube actively on their main computer binge-watch. Sometimes they follow creators, sometimes they follow what the algorithm recommends them for the day. Invidious does not have such algorithm, since its a proxy. So, it is really not for everyone.
Wasn't adblock plus bought by some ad agency? I thought they were long gone...
I don't know about that but they do have a program where advertisers can pay them in exchange for their ads being allowed past the block.
No uBlock on my phone. :(
On Firefox on Android you can use extensions. I've been using uBO for years on my phone.
Firefox on Android has it.
But if you're on iOS you'd better speak to Tim Apple about it, assuming he's finished noshing off Trump.
You can have it on iOS as well. Use Orion browser instead of safari and install UBO from the firefox addons store ;)
I just tried this and I get an alert that unlock isn’t fully available. Seems it can’t access web request API.
I’ll give it a spin out of curiosity. I pay for Kagi anyway. I’m very opposed to Google.
It doesn’t work properly… Orion still really falls short. I use Brave on iOS just because of Adblock and paywall bypass.
Oh, well I haven't had problems so far with Orion+UBO!
Even YouTube? The last time I tried (a couple months ago) on both mobile and desktop Orion it’s totally unusable, most of the time it just gets stuck on a black screen for 10-60 seconds where the ads should be.
As much as I hate to say it, if on iOS use Brave. You can disable the crypto shit, but it’s got the best adblocking on iOS, and paywall bypass built in.
Never. I hate Brave more than the few ads that get through on iOS with AdGuard or the recently released uBlock Origin Lite.